There has never been a shortage of theories/opinions of what is the truth. Come to some conclusion on your own and you'll find plenty of company, no matter how implausible or outlandish. In fact, there are no implausibles for this one.
No one at our Thanksgiving table tomorrow other than my wife and myself were alive to remember it first hand, each of us in different high schools, dismissed when the news hit the principal's office that Friday afternoon.
Only 17% of the US population in 2020 is over 65, meaning about 83% of today's population wasn't alive in the United States on November 22, 1963. No adult that my wife and I remember alive on that day is still alive. The ranks are thinning.
When I was a kid in the '50s it was news when the oldest Civil War veteran had passed away. Veterans Day parades might have once had vets from the Spanish-American War and WW I. Not any more. There is no one alive who was alive when President McKinley was killed in Buffalo in 1901.
The only piece I find in today's papers about the anniversary is an Op-Ed piece by a former FBI agent in today's Wall Street Journal. The headline is a doozy: How to Botch an Assassination Investigation.
There's is nothing in retired agent Thomas J. Baker's piece I didn't know already know, other than that in 1963 there was no law on the federal books for killing a president. Oh boy. Think about that one.
Mr. Baker lays out the Gordian Knot of jurisdictional disputes that enveloped the case immediately after the president was pronounced dead.
No one had the lead in the investigation. Who's in charge? The FBI, the Secret Service, The Dallas police or the sheriff's office?
I remember video of some law enforcement officer walking through the crowded basement of the Dallas police headquarters proudly holding aloft with two hands Oswald's rifle, as if Sitting Bull had just been disarmed. It was not this country's shining hour.
Mr. Baker writes that after the assassination Congress passed a 1965 law—Title 18 U.S. Code 175—that made assaulting the president a federal crime. Mr. Baker recalls being in charge at the FBI when President Reagan was shot in 1981 by John Hinckley and how different the investigation flowed from there.
There was no jurisdictional gray area. The FBI was in charge, and Hinckley was whisked away and placed under Marine guard at Quantico, Virginia. He was not approached by a disgruntled night club owner in a basement garage of a police headquarters carrying a pistol, annoyed because his president had been killed.
The above photo, which is in color in today's WSJ's digital edition, is jarring for me. It was a bright sunny day, the president was waving, Jacqueline was beside him in what became the famous pink suit with the pill box hat that probably moments after this still photo was shot found herself covered in her husband's blood with pieces of his skull blown off.
Mr. Baker's piece is really about the contrast between the handling of the JFK aftermath and the Ronald Reagan aftermath.
The JFK assassination theories will never goo away, no matter what the Warren Commission report wrote. I'm keeping my own thoughts about who was behind the events of 11/22 to myself, or at least not publicly stating them. Way too many others have, and there are enough of them that would agree with me, and may more that wouldn't. So what's the use of adding to the pile?
A few years ago I went to my high school reunion, Class of 1966, and there wasn't one of us who didn't ask the other if they were in school that day. My own personal journey between the JFK assassination and the attempt on Ronald Reagan has been a progression from a high school letting its students out early in the afternoon, with no explanation, to 1981 when my boss came over to my desk and in a stunned voice said that president Reagan had been shot.
History is made every day. Sometimes you're there for it.
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