The Day in Dealey

Yesterday was the 45^th anniversary of the assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy, our 35^th president of the United States of America. I am a bit of a conspiracy buff, so like many Americans I am somehow drawn to the events that lead up to and immediately followed that fateful event. However, unlike most conspiracy followers, I am also a skeptic, and I require a certain amount of due diligence and logic to be applied to any theory before it gets off of the ground.

There is a huge cottage industry that stems from the assassination because of the mystique and perceived mystery surrounding the events on that day 45 years ago. Several major motion pictures have been made including: JFK, Parallax View, Ruby, and Winter Kills. There are more documentaries that I can even begin to list. Hundreds of books have been written, each with a different angle on that day in Dealey Plaza. Titles like Six Seconds in Dallas, Assassination Science, Legacy of Secrecy, Falsely Accused, High Treason and the like all tout a different angle on the event. I have read many of them. You can even take an assassination bus tour of downtown Dallas. I’m not sure what would prompt someone to take a bus tour of Dallas regardless of who was shot there, but I’d love to go on one just to check out the knuckleheads that shelled out the dough. I’d be willing to bet that there would be a higher proportion of people wearing Packers and Vikings gear than anywhere else in Texas. Just a guess. I find it interesting that the plaza hasn’t changed at all in the past 45 years. You can’t say that about too many other urban centers. It’s almost as though it has been frozen in time - a weird kind of time capsule to commemorate a shockingly public murder.

I have watched the well known and publicized Zapruder film frame by frame. I have also seen the lesser known Paschall, Nix, Bronson, Bell, Hughes, Couch, Martin, and Daniel films. I’ve read the Warren Commission Report and the evidence that the Commission collected to back it up…nearly every page of it. It sucks, by the way. I certainly wouldn’t recommend it to your book club - unless your book club is filled with masochistic insomniacs that have read all of the nonsense that Oprah thinks is necessary. The best I can say about the evidence behind the document is that it is woefully inadequate. I mean, although the Commission did provide in its report a dental chart made for Jack Ruby's mother 25 years before the assassination as well as a detailed physical analysis of three of Lee Harvey Oswald's pubic hairs, the X-Rays from the president’s autopsy weren’t included. Bit of an oversight there, don’t you think? None-the-less the report stands as the official government view.

Names like Lee Harvey Oswald, Jack Ruby, Jim Garret, Fidel Castro, Sam Giancana, Clay Bertrand, Oliver Stone, and even Marilyn Monroe have become part of the American JFK assassination lexicon, and it seems like everybody “knows” exactly what happened that day. Literally scores of differing theories abound pointing the finger at everyone from the CIA to the FBI to the KGB to Frank Sinatra. Oswald can be tied to all of the groups listed above in some way or another. He was a marine rifleman (arguably the best marksmen in the world) and worked as a radar operator for spy planes. Then he defected to the Soviet Union and married the niece of a KGB colonel. Then he came back to the US and started stumping for communist Cuba, working out of building he shared with an ex-FBI agent who was trying to overthrow Castro. He was an obsessive Sinatra fan, and it was later found out that he was wearing a pear of Frank’s underwear when he shot the president. O.K. that’s not true, but you can begin see what a tangled web of social connections the man had in his short and complicated life.

Some of my favorite theories on the assassination don’t involve Oswald at all. One theory claims that JFK was terminally ill with some disease so he put a hit out on himself. Seems reasonable. Why not get yourself whacked in a grossly public manner and traumatize the world rather than getting old? Oh, right, because it’s stupid. Another theory claims that bacteria have infested the brains of inner-city business moguls due to global warming, and JFK was an environmentalist. So in their own self-interest the microbes contracted the assassination through their businessmen hosts. Not impossible, I guess, but then again I have about the same probability of getting struck by lightning and a meteor at the same time as I was getting eaten by a shark that had the same birthday as me. Yet another theory posits that JFK wasn’t assassinated at all. His stand-in was murdered so he could rule the country from behind the scenes. Sucks to be the stand-in. I guess if you ignore all of the evidence this one isn’t too bad, since the president did use a stand in to model for the famous JFK 50¢ piece.

Of all of the theories and books supporting them that I have come across the one that sticks with me is the one that I find the most compelling at least on the surface. This idea was put forward by Howard Donahue, a ballistics expert that was called in to test weather a single marksman could make the shots that Oswald did accurately in the time allotted. The idea was put to paper by Bonar Menninger in the book Mortal Error. Maybe I just like the theory because his name is Bonar…heh, heh. Through exhaustive ballistics research and re-enactments, Donahue concluded that Oswald could indeed have fired the shots that killed the president, but that the head wound wasn’t consistent with the type of ammo that Oswald used. So there must have been another gun that fired frangible rounds in Dealey Plaza that day, which means another shooter. Who carried a weapon that fired disintegrating rounds? The bodyguards. The presidential bodyguards were located in the vehicle directly behind the president. Donahue claims that in the panic caused by Oswald’s shots hitting the president, the motorcade lurched, which threw one of the bodyguards off balance causing him to accidentally discharge one shot from his high-powered rifle loaded with frangible ammo into the president’s head. And you think you’ve had a bad day at work! This theory requires no conspiracy other than the understandable government cover-up for a horrible accident, and it follows Occam's razor which states that the simplest solution to a problem is usually the correct solution.

However, as Marcello Truzzi said, “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof.” None of the above theories can say that they can prove anything one way or another. After all of these years have passed, after all of the books, movies, and volumes of evidence have been amassed, only two things related to the assassination are known as fact: JFK was shot and killed in Dallas on November 22^nd 1963, and Lee Harvey Oswald was killed by Jack Ruby two days later. With the passage of time the trail of evidence gets thinner and thinner. Everybody loves a mystery, and, I believe that regardless of the plausibility of anyone’s pet theory, the truth behind this mystery will never be able to be fleshed out of all of the information that has been gathered and the emotional baggage that has been accumulated over the past 45 years. So grab your divining rods and develop your own conspiracy. It will have just as must merit as all of the rest.