Conspiracy theories and official investigations into Kennedy's assassination

ASSASSINATION of JOHN F. KENNEDY

On November 22, 1963, President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas

Texas, riding in the presidential limousine with First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy, Texas

Governor John Connally and Mrs. Connally. The assassination remains one of the single most dramatic, horrific, and historically significant events ever captured on film. At the time, President Kennedy had recently returned from delivering his infamous Brandenburg

Gate speech to East Berliners and he was enjoying tremendous popularity and admiration in the United States and internationally.

Almost immediately, the police investigation of the assassination was associated with controversy as a result of many factors, including: the subsequent murder of the accused assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald by a Dallas nightclub owner who was reputed to have ties to organized crime; statements made by Oswald and records of his connections to the Communist Cuban government of Fidel Castro; apparent implausibility of various forensic theories in relation to the physical evidence; improper handling of the autopsy;

destruction of physical evidence and original documents and records; the accounts of individuals who have claimed knowledge or and/or involvement in a conspiracy to assassinate the president; and conflicting results of two official government investigations.

Various conspiracy theories suggest that Oswald was not the only shooter, or that the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) was responsible, or that the Chicago faction of the Mafia conspired with Fidel Castro to assassinate Kennedy. In 1991, movie maker Oliver

Stone produced JFK, a loosely historical drama that reignited popular interest in the suspected conspiracies; more recently, several documentaries have made more explicit claims supporting additional evidence of possible conspiracies.

Brief Summary of Official Investigations:

The Warren Commission convened shortly after the assassination and after almost a year of investigation concluded that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone as a lone assassin;

that his subsequent murder by Jack Ruby was an isolated crime; that a total of three shots were fired at the president; that one shot missed the limousine, another struck the president in the back and also caused all of the wounds suffered by Governor Connally,

and that the last shot struck Kennedy in the back of the skull; and most importantly, that there was no evidence of any foreign or domestic conspiracy in the assassination of the president (President's Commission, 1992). Those conclusions were, in large part, based on information in the investigation performed by the FBI (Scott, 1996).

A decade and a half later, Congress reinvestigated the president's assassination through the House Select Committee on Assassinations and concluded that both the FBI

investigation and the Warren Commission's inquiry were substantially flawed by virtue of several specific issues. First, the FBI never adequately investigated the possibility of a criminal conspiracy. Second, the Warren Commission had relied too heavily on the flawed FBI investigation. Third, the Commission also neglected to address the issue of conspiracies sufficiently. Finally, the ability of the Committee to fully investigate the most important inquiries into whether or not Oswald acted alone was frustrated by lack of cooperation from the CIA (Galanor, 1998). The Committee's formal findings differed dramatically from those of the Warren Commission and concluded that a total of four shots had been fired at the president, one of which was fired by a coconspirator located in the vicinity of the "grassy knoll" (Scott, 1996).

Conspiracy Theories:

One conspiracy theory suggests that assassination plot was initiated by Chicago

organized crime (Mafia) boss Sam Giancana, using foreign nationals recruited from the so-called "French Connection" heroin trade. According to that theory, Giancana had helped Joseph Kennedy (Sr.) secure the 1960 democratic presidential nomination for J.F.K. And that the assassination was a retaliation for the aggressive prosecution of organized crime by the Department of Justice under the direction of Attorney General

Robert Kennedy (Benson, 1998; Galanor, 1998).

Kennedy. In all likelihood, the President would have withdrawn U.S. Armed Forces

from Southeast Asia by the end of his (first) presidential term, which would have changed the entire course of American history for decades to follow, in terms of both domestic concerns and international and geopolitical relations. Even greater than the speculation as to what Kennedy might have accomplished in those areas is the legacy of civil rights that his work actually achieved, although its most dramatic accomplishments occurred in the decades since his death (Scott, 1996).

Needless to say, the assassination fundamentally changed the approach of the U.S.

Secret Service and is largely responsible for the great lengths to which the agency goes to protect American presidents, presidential candidates, and heads of state today (Walsh,

2003). The assassination of J.F.K. also changed the way many Americans viewed their government, because a substantial portion of the public never accepted the official results of the investigations conducted by either the FBI or the Warren Commission. In that

regard, and irrespective of the precise nature of the truth of what happened in Dallas in

1964, substantial evidence remains strongly implicating various law enforcement agencies in including the FBI, the Secret Service, and the CIA (respectively), in deliberately concealing relevant information, destroying and/or mishandling crucial evidence, and refusing to cooperate in the congressional investigations (Galanor, 1998).

Personal Beliefs:

In my personal opinion, it is difficult to come to a responsible conclusion as to the specific nature of the conspiracy to assassinate President John F. Kennedy. On the other hand, it is even more difficult to ignore the cumulative weight of all the evidence that

Oswald probably did not act alone, including but hardly limited to the conclusions of the House Select Committee on Assassinations in 1979. Granted, many the accounts of various purported eyewitnesses, co-conspirators, putative hitmen, and other ancillary figures with supposed first-hand relevant knowledge interviewed in connection with the suspicions of conspiracies suffer from inconsistencies. However, in many cases, those conflicting accounts still suggest that some form of conspiracy involving multiple entities is more likely than the conclusion reached by the Warren Commission in 1964, that Lee

Harvey Oswald acted alone.