Fifty years ago today I was seated in my high school German class when a student from “the office” entered the room, beckoning Herr Boyden. Upon receiving the message, Mr. Boyden then turned solemnly to us students to make an announcement. “President Kennedy has been killed.” What?
We were all of 16 or 17, this class of Guten Tags and other gutturals, too young to appreciate the fact and implications of Camelot struck down under a Texas sun. The weekend was filled with quiet grief and somberness all around, as we watched the televised scenes of Jackie, John-John, Caroline, horses, canons, soldiers, and the casket. Abruptly in the midst, we were taken to the Dallas police station to witness live the shooting of the alleged lone assassin by a man named ‘Ruby.’ Violence atop violence.
I always had my doubts that Oswald acted alone or was even part of the events on November 22, 1963. My former colleague, a PhD in physics, said that it was impossible for the fatal shot to have come from the rear, he having tested the lethality of bullets for the U.S. Army at the Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland. Oliver Stone’s JFK amplified my suspicions, and Fidel Castro recently conversed with The Atlantic‘s Jeffrey Goldberg:
I asked Fidel why he thought Oswald could not have acted alone. He proceeded to tell the table a long and discursive story about an experiment he staged, after the assassination, to see if it were possible for a sniper to shoot Kennedy in the manner the assassination was alleged to have happened. “We had trained our people in the mountains during the war”—the Cuban revolution—“on these kind of telescopic sights. So we knew about this kind of shooting. We tried to recreate the circumstances of this shooting, but it wasn’t possible for one man to do. The news I had received is that one man killed Kennedy in his car with a rifle, but I deducted that this story was manufactured to fool people.”
He said his suspicions grew especially pronounced after Oswald was killed. “There was the story of Jack Ruby, who was said to be so moved by the death of Kennedy that he decided to shoot Oswald on his own. That was just unbelievable to us.”
I then asked Castro to tell us what he believes actually happened. I brought up the name of his friend, Oliver Stone, who suggested that it was the CIA and a group of anti-Castro Cubans (I used the term “anti-you Cubans” to describe these forces aligned against Castro) that plotted the assassination.
“Quite possibly,” he said. “This is quite possibly so. There were people in the American government who thought Kennedy was a traitor because he didn’t invade Cuba when he had the chance, when they were asking him. He was never forgiven for that.”
So that’s what you think might have happened?
“No doubt about it,” Fidel answered.
Whether or not Kennedy fell victim to Oswald or an elaborate conspiracy, whose participants have managed to keep quiet all these years, I share Chomsky’s misgivings about his legacy. He was as much a cold warrior as Nixon and LBJ and would likely have escalated U.S. involvement in Southeast Asia.
But we’ll never know, and JFK’s untimely death shook a nation and shattered what little innocence it may have had.
UPDATE (November 24, 2013):
Well, I slightly fudged on my age. I was 16 when Kennedy was killed. But the song says “When I was seventeen,” and not “sixteen.” Forgive me.
Also, I watched Nova‘s piece on using modern forensic science to answer key questions about the assassination, including whether or not a single gunman using the gun implicated in the shooting could have pulled this off. The conclusions:
- the shots were fired from the School Book Depository Building with the rifle Oswald acquired online
- the fatal shot came from the rear using the same rifle; it did not come from the front.
It’s the second conclusion that intrigued me most, given my former colleague’s opinion. A group of forensic pathologists and firearms experts, after reviewing the archival evidence, including x-rays and photographs of Kennedy’s skull, opined that the bullet entered from the rear producing extreme pressures within the cranial cavity that exploded the top and upper front of the president’s head. Fractures of the skull were consistent with rear entry. As for Kennedy’s head moving back and to the left, this could be explained again by the forces pushing outward from the skull interior and against Kennedy’s upper spine, creating a rearward jerk of the torso and head.
Nevertheless, if Oswald was the lone assassin, he pulled off a truly remarkable feat, given the type of rifle, the motorcade’s moving away from the building as the shots were fired, the partially obscuring trees, and the incredible accuracy required within a very short time frame.
Oswald himself claimed that he was a “patsy,” suggesting that he was being used by others. Jack Ruby’s gun made sure that Oswald would talk no more.