Assassination of John F. Kennedy

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).

Another conspiracy theory suggests that the assassination was the work of Cuban

dictator Fidel Castro, in retaliation for the failed 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion in conjunction with President Kennedy's efforts to overthrow Castro's regime in a coupe instigated and supported covertly by the U.S. Armed Forces (Galanor, 1998). a

third conspiracy theory suggests that the CIA orchestrated the plot to assassinate the president because Kennedy had expressed his intentions to avoid further U.S.

involvement in the ongoing civil war in Vietnam and to withdraw covert forces operating in Laos since 1959 (Scott, 1996). Various versions of the conspiracy theories link the purported involvement of Giancana with Castro, Giancana with the CIA, and Oswald to one or the other, or to both. Finally, other conspiracy theories even linked then Vice

President Lyndon B. Johnson to the assassination plot, at least in terms of having been made aware of the operation in advance if not necessarily as a co-conspirator (Galanor,

1998).

Several specific individuals later emerged, providing information of their claimed involvement in the assassination conspiracy, including James Files and David Morales

(Benson, 1998). Files was linked to both the CIA after working as a former covert military operative in Laos as well as to organized crime through his association with Charles Nicoletti, a Mafia hitman operating in the Illinois area. Files specifically claimed to have been recruited by Nicoletti to act as a backup shooter positioned in the vicinity of the grassy knoll and that he fired the headshot, not Oswald (Benson, 1998).

Morales was also a CIA operative who had been involved in several high-level operations to depose foreign leaders in South America as well as in the Bay of Pigs.

According to some accounts (Benson, 1998), he may have been photographed with Oswald and he was reported to have made statements indicating that he had been involved in the assassination of both J.F.K. In 1963 and R.F.K. In 1968 at the democratic national convention in Los Angeles (Benson, 1998).

Modern Significance:

It is difficult to overstate the significance of the assassination of President John F.

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.