So who killed John Kennedy?
"The usual suspects are so numerous that whatever group you want to have a grudge against, you can pick your case based on the Kennedy assassination," says John McAdams, the Marquette professor. "Anything is possible to believe if you are willing to take the most unreliable evidence or most unreliable inferences and run with them."
Here is a short list of suspects and theories.
Lee Harvey Oswald, Lone Gunman
The best argument for the Warren Commission's controversial conclusion may be the serendipity through which Oswald landed a job at the Texas School Book Depository weeks before the murder—a second-hand referral. Simmering with anger about Cuba, Oswald learned that Kennedy's motorcade route would pass by his building. He secreted a rifle into the building, took a place at a sixth-floor window and fired the shots that killed the president and injured Gov. Connally, believers say.
Second Unidentified Assassin on the Grassy Knoll
The notion of a second assassin or an assassination team at Dealey Plaza has been fomented over the years by suspicious shadows, gunman-like silhouettes and puffs of smoke that turn up in moving and still pictures shot by witnesses on the day of the Kennedy murder. These photographic hieroglyphs have been deciphered since the day after the shooting, and figures such as "Black Dog Man" and "Umbrella Man" are totems among both doubters and believers. Oliver Stone used the mysterious Umbrella Man in "J.F.K." to signal the assassination team by pumping his umbrella up and down. The film left out one fact: the Umbrella Man had long ago been identified, questioned and cleared of having any part in the assassination.
The Cubans
The simplest Cuba theory is that Fidel Castro ordered Kennedy murdered because Kennedy had tried to have him murdered. In a variation, exiled Cubans who were angered at Kennedy's failure in the Bay of Pigs invasion arranged to have him killed. And in a second version of that variation, the same right-wing Cubans ordered the murder because Kennedy had resolved the Cuban missile crisis by promising the Soviets that he would keep his hands off Castro. Oswald served as a foil to the Cubans, and Ruby's job was to silence him.
The Kennedy-for-Castro postulate had a marquee believer: Lyndon Johnson. Six months before he died, Johnson told a journalist, "I never believed that Oswald acted alone, although I can accept that he pulled the trigger." He said he believed Castro ordered the retaliatory murder.
The Cuban conspiracy theories gained weight because Oswald adored Castro and had tried to travel to Cuba not long before the assassination, and because Jack Ruby had visited the island nation in 1959. Mere coincidences, say the lone-gunman believers. Impossible coincidences, say the doubters.
The KGB
Under this theory, Soviet agents—again, using Oswald as a foil—killed Kennedy because the president had embarrassed Premier Nikita Khrushchev in the missile crisis "staredown." Debunkers dismiss this scheme since Kennedy had promised a hands-off-Cuba policy and had made other concessions that cast Khrushchev as a clever negotiator, not a failure. Conspiracy theorists happily note that Oswald had lived in the Soviet Union during a defection dalliance, spoke a little Russian and was obsessed with Russian literature and music.
LBJ
Lyndon Johnson is a seminal figure in any number of the conspiracy theories. As noted, he believed Oswald was a puppet for Castro. New Orleans DA Jim Garrison also fingered Johnson as a marionette pulling strings behind Garrison's personal conspiracy theory. He played a role in the KGB conspiracy theory, as well, by ordering the Warren Commission to "leave that stone unturned," according to adherents, when it learned of a Soviet connection to the murder.
In newly released telephone recordings made during his presidency, Johnson sounded flummoxed and frustrated as various aides, politicians and newsmen briefed him on conspiracy theories about the assassination. But the subject regularly came up in the Oval Office.
In a 1967 conversation with Attorney General Ramsey Clark, Johnson referred to the CIA's covert efforts to kill Castro.
He said, "It's incredible. I don't believe there's a thing in the world to it, and I don't think we oughta seriously consider it. But I think you oughta know about it."
Which proved, above all else, that even the president might not know everything the government is doing.
The Mafia
The Mafia liked Kennedy's religion but hated his politics.
The president and his brother, Attorney General Robert Kennedy, had pushed for probes of union racketeering, angering Teamsters boss Jimmy Hoffa. His appeasement deal with Nikita Khrushchev to keep U.S. hands off Cuba under Castro also stuck in the craw of the mob, which had financial interests in Havana's casinos, which were popular with Americans before the revolution. And then there was the bizarre plot arranged by the CIA to use Mafia hitmen to whack Castro. Some believe the Mafia got angry when the Kennedys became impatient and called off the mob goons. Lastly, there may have been a complicated romantic entanglement since mobster Sam Giancana and Jack Kennedy reportedly shared the same mistress.
Whatever a doubter's mob conspiracy theory of choice, Oswald served as a Mafia foil, and Jack Ruby, the Dallas nightclub owner who was on friendly terms with organized crime, was the wing man in the cover-up.
The FBI
J. Edgar Hoover had been kept informed of the whereabouts and activities of Lee Oswald. The agency knew he had subscribed to Commie publications, was active in the pro-Castro Fair Play for Cuba Committee and had traveled to Mexico in a failed attempt to gain access to Cuba. An FBI agent spoke with an Oswald acquaintance just two weeks before the assassination, and Oswald had written to the Soviet Embassy in Washington to complain of FBI harassment.
Why such interest in a small fry Red, doubters ask. Believers reply that the FBI had a remarkable ability to track a wide breadth of suspected "enemies" during the Cold War era, and Hoover took a personal interest in a mind-boggling number of those cases.
The Garrison/Stone Theory
Jim Garrison's wildcat theory of the JFK assassination was a mishmash of international and political intrigue. He fingered virulent anti-Communist, anti-Castro zealots in the Central Intelligence Agency for plotting the murder because the president was soft on Reds—as witnessed by his appeasement of Khrushchev during the Cuban missile crisis. The same zealots were soured that Kennedy was mulling a retreat from Vietnam.
Garrison, who enjoyed the limelight, asserted that Oswald had never fired a shot. He condemned the Warren Commission's lone-gunman conclusion as "totally false." He appeared on the "Tonight" show to discuss with Johnny Carson his allegations about an assassination team, shadowy figures on the Grassy Knoll, photographic evidence, and connivances involving Dallas police, the FBI, CIA, Secret Service and wealthy Texans.
But his showcase, the 1969 conspiracy trial of New Orleans businessman Clay Shaw, was a laugher, with bizarre testimony from oddball witnesses. A jury acquitted Shaw in less than an hour.
Nonetheless, some credit Garrison and the film "J.F.K." for prompting Congress in 1992 to release nearly a million previously secret Government documents regarding Kennedy's death.
The Government Super-Conspiracy
In this variation on Garrison/Stone, elements within the CIA wanted Kennedy punished for ordering a series of firings after the CIA's Bay of Pigs debacle. The CIA crew recruited trained assassins (Cubans, Mafia, Soviet spies, et al), then propped up Oswald to take the fall. The Secret Service and Dallas police were in on the planning, and the local cops helped trick Ruby into shooting Oswald. The killers were later killed, chopped to bits and buried in Mexico.
The truth was either (a) hidden from the law enforcement agency bosses or (b) revealed to the bosses, who hid the information from investigators to save a collapse of the entire American military-industrial complex.
Oswald and Other Undetermined Assassins
After a two-year investigation, the House Select Committee on Assassinations in 1979 concluded that a second gunman also fired at Kennedy, based upon "acoustical scientific evidence." The members wrote, "The committee believes, on the basis of the evidence available to it, that President John F. Kennedy was probably assassinated as a result of a conspiracy. The committee is unable to identify the other gunman or the extent of the conspiracy."
However, it rejected as suspects "on the basis of the evidence available" the Soviet government, the Cuban government and anti-Castro Cuban exiles. It added that it could not preclude "individual members" of anti-Castro groups or the mob from involvement. And it flatly exonerated the Secret Service, the FBI and CIA.
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THE SEARCH GOES ON:
Those obsessed with the Kennedy assassination tend to focus more on small clues. For conspiracy theorists, "solving" the case by identifying the perpetrators seems less likely than resolving some question about a piece of evidence.
Last fall, some of the leading figures among both doubters and believers gathered in Pittsburgh for a conference that marked the 40th anniversary of the event.
The Cyril Wecht Institute of Forensic Science and Law, associated with the Duquesne University School of Law, offered a national symposium with a full panel of scholars, scientists, and principals involved. The Crime Library's Katherine Ramsland attended and filed the following report:
As thousands of mourners gathered to observe the 'X' on the road in Dallas where Kennedy was first struck down, and as Kennedy family members gathered at his graveside eternal flame in Arlington, Va., nearly 1,300 traveled the Duquesne auditorium to consider evidence for and against a conspiracy or cover-up.
In late 1963, about 52% of Americans believed that there had been more than one shooter. In 2003, that number stood at 75%, despite the efforts on the part of several government-sponsored committees to put the controversy to rest. In 1988, the Justice Department closed the investigation, stating it found no evidence of a conspiracy. To conspiracy theorists, that may only mean that the Justice Department is part of the cover-up.
From the opening evening through the three full days of presentations, the Pittsburgh program offered panels of writers with opposing views, pathologists and others with conflicting evidence, and legal experts offering rigorous debate.
Dr. Cyril Wecht started the program with a rousing call for truth, revelation, and accuracy in reporting. The 1960s-era media, he pointed out, was dramatically different from the media today, which would cover every minute aspect of the incident. In those days, Wecht charged, reporters and editors tended to accept what they were told.
Because of that, numerous young reporters in 1963 who obligingly described the lone-gunman scenario offered by government officials made their careers. In a shameful show of capitulation, they failed to get facts when they were fresh, and due to their lack of journalistic aggression, much has been lost that will never be recovered.
After Wecht spoke, a panel of often-contradictory authors presented their positions. It was clear that only a few speakers represented the government's rendition of the story, as spelled out in the 1964 Warren Commission's findings.
On this author's panel, which included such notables as Anthony Summers and Walt Brown, debate was potent, and several speakers took pot shots taken at one panelist, Zachary Sklar, the "JFK" screenwriter.
Sklar, nervous at first, grew bolder when asserting that his screenplay was far more accurate than critics allowed. Yet even as he assured the audience that 80% of James Garrison's moving speech was taken from court documents, news anchor Peter Jennings was closing an ABC special program that night with the words, "Jim Garrison never made this speech."
Sklar insisted that the show's researchers had never even bothered to check.
Which version is true? Sklar invited audience members to go to court records to see for themselves, but how many media researchers would actually do that? How many ordinary people would?
In other words, how often have undocumented rumors and unchecked information been passed from one source to another, like the child's game of telephone, which at the end delivers output quite different from the original input? It could be difficult to discover whose documentation is credible, especially if those who passed on faulty information have had an agenda, such as a book to sell or a job — even a career — to maintain.
Such was the tenor of the conference: Each person who offered a presentation came prepared with those facts that supported his or her position and sometimes ignored or dismissed facts that did not. Skull fracture marks, recorded noises, crime simulations, and charts with complicated measurements were all presented from one hour to the next.
By the end of each day, it was difficult to know what to think. While each presenter did require time to lay out complex ideas, it might have been more effective to offer the key pieces of evidence and have two opposing theorists offer their explanations. That way, the audience could have considered the separate lines of reasoning side by side, rather than trying to recall earlier assertions that conflicted with present ones. It was difficult to keep track.
The second day began with a presentation of the evidentiary value of the famous Zapruder film, hailed at the conference as the single most important piece of evidence in the investigation.
He discussed the manner in which Zapruder had handled the film after the incident and dismissed ideas that government conspirators could have grabbed it before he sold it to Life magazine and somehow corrupted the footage to accord with the official theory.
Aside from technical impossibilities and the fact that the government did not then have the means to copy or corrupt the film in a way that would go undetected, the patriotic character of Zapruder and his family impeded such a theory. He had copied the film for the Secret Service and turned it over to Life.
The staff there laid it out, frame by frame, to process slides. Wrone says that slide No. 190 indicates that a bullet was fired from one side prior to the bullet that hit Kennedy in the neck, but it missed. In frame No. 224, the shot went through Kennedy. At the same time, the lapel flap on Connally's jacket lifts, which "single bullet" theorists claim proves that same bullet went through Connally's body.
However, it did not go through his lapel, but lower down through the body of the jacket. Wrone concluded that the inference based on the lapel movement, which could just as easily have lifted in a breeze, is incorrect. That seemed final, but he did not allow for the possibility that the flap could have moved in response to a bullet piercing the jacket below it. Wrone also contradicted later medical testimony by showing that the film frame of Kennedy lying against his wife indicates that a bullet struck the side of his head and not the back.
Eyewitness reports were discredited by several speakers, who described research in memory interference or showed how witnesses had contradicted themselves or changed their stories to align with official reports. Yet just because memory researchers have shown the existence of memory interference does not prove that these witnesses suffered from it, and none of the experts who made this claim took that final important step. They merely raised doubts.
Speaker Josiah Thompson, a philosophy-professor-turned-private-investigator and author of Six Seconds in Dallas, said his report about the provenance of the bullet that was supposedly removed from Connally's stretcher was a parable of the entire case.
"You pull any single thread, any single fact," he said, "and you're soon besieged with a tangle of subsidiary questions."
He had attempted to learn just where the bullet, labeled Commission Exhibit 399, had been over the years and who had examined it. The stories from those who had handled it, however, including nurses, contradicted the possibility of ever learning its actual chain of custody—or whether CE 399 was indeed the bullet that had gone through Kennedy and into Connally. (This was later contradicted by another speaker who claimed that ballistics tests indicated that the bullet found on the stretcher was fired from Oswald's rifle.)
Donald Thomas, an acoustic evidence specialist, said that the three-shot scenario did not add up. He presented evidence from sonar calculations and recordings from police motorcycle officers that in fact five separate shots had been fired. He said that committees who have studied this have known about the five separate gunshot noises recorded on the tape, but that they had dismissed one as a "false positive," based on the fact that a single gun could not have fired two shots in such fast succession.
Thomas found this conclusion to be illogical, since it could just as easily be evidence to support two shooters involved. In 1977, forensic pathologist Michael Baden, who supported the findings of the Warren Commission, was put in charge of the forensic pathology investigation for the Congressional Select Committee on Assassinations. He recruited eight other esteemed medical examiners. They found a "forensic disaster."
Baden contended that if the autopsy procedure had been done correctly, the many conspiracy theories would never have gotten off the ground. Yet as it turned out, Commander James Humes, the pathologist who performed the autopsy, had never worked on a gunshot wound.
He'd also been instructed not to perform a complete autopsy, but only to find the bullet, which was believed to be still lodged in the body. In his subsequent reports, his medical descriptions were nonexistent as he referred interested parties to the photos, which were unclear. Humes didn't even turn Kennedy over to look at the wound in the back of his neck, or call the hospital in Dallas to learn that a tracheotomy had been performed, which went through the exit wound in the throat. He erroneously assumed the bullet had fallen out the same hole it had entered.
He also failed to shave the head wound to see it clearly, and photographed it through hair. After only two hours, he prepared the body for embalming and then burned his notes, recreating them later from memory. Baden's team looked at crime scene and autopsy photographs, Kennedy's clothing, autopsy reports, and X-rays.
It soon was clear that the examining pathologists had not known the difference between an exit and entrance wound. The team, with one exception, concluded that two bullets had struck Kennedy, and one of them had pierced him and wounded Connally.
The dissenting voice on this team was Dr. Wecht, the coroner of Allegheny County, who raised the alarm that something was amiss. He found that the "single-bullet theory" did not add up in terms of trajectory, weight and condition when found.
"The trajectory," he said in a newspaper interview, "is a roller-coaster ride of vertical and horizontal movements and gyrations that obviously bullets in flight do not make. The bullet's weight was just over 1.5% less than a store-bought bullet, despite fragments having been left in Governor Connally's chest, right wrist, and left thigh."
He also found the pristine and unmarked condition of the bullet to be highly unlikely after having made impact through skin, muscle, and bone. And he believed that the president's head movement, as shown in the Zapruder film, was incompatible with a shot coming from behind. He thought the president had been struck twice in a synchronized fashion, from the rear and the right front side.
Indeed, in a 1972 story in The New York Times, Wecht had already raised the alarm about the missing brain and several missing X-rays and photos from the National Archives. "You put all these things together," he says, "and you can better appreciate why there is so much continuing controversy today." He believes that we will learn the truth one day, but perhaps not in his lifetime.
Senator Arlen Specter was also present to describe his part in the investigation after Kennedy died. He was junior counsel to the Warren Commission in 1964 and it was he who authored the "single bullet" theory. He spoke about interrogating Jack Ruby and offered insight into the man's unstable character, but he did not acknowledge a direct challenge from Mark Lane, one of the early conspiracy theorists with his Rush to Judgment, who alleged that Specter had mishandled a witness and tried to blackmail her into changing her story
Several authors who resist the conspiracy theories have offered the analysis that those who seek a dramatic and wide-reaching scenario simply cannot accept that a nobody like Oswald could take out a man of such international stature. Yet such a remark ignores the credibility and work of many of the scientists and scholars.
All the way from Ireland, Anthony Summers, author of Not in Your Lifetime, pleaded, "Don't shrug off inconvenient facts with bland generalities or dismiss scholars as lunatics."
Most of the people invited to speak have devoted years to the assassination and deserve respect at least for the important questions they have raised.
One could only leave this conference aware that much remains to be done, many of the facts are still unclear, and there seems to be no good reason why the government refuses to disclose all of the documents.