The Assassination of JFK

The assassination of President John F. Kennedy in Dallas, Texas, on Nov. 22, 1963, obviously is the biggest, most important, and highly publicized murder in American history. Indeed, it has been said that more words have been written about it than any other single, one-day event in world history.

The reason was not just because a president of the United States, the most powerful man on earth, had been murdered. Other presidents have also been killed. It was because of who this president was. John F. Kennedy was special in many ways.

For starters, Kennedy, the Choate- and Harvard-educated son of privilege and wealth, ignored the wishes of his father and a medical condition that could easily have exempted him from combat and became a World War II hero. Kennedy historian Richard Reeves writes that JFK had a “range of illnesses” that commenced as a child. “He could never have passed a real military physical examination, so he used the riches and influence of his father, Joseph P. Kennedy, to become a naval officer. The old man persuaded his friends in the military to accept a certificate of good health, a false one, from a family doctor. JFK’s executive officer, Leonard Thom, wrote home that Kennedy was the only man in the Navy who faked good health.” After seeing extensive combat in the Japanese theater, not long after midnight on Aug. 2, 1943, in the Solomon Islands in the South Pacific, the 25-year-old Navy lieutenant personally rescued one of the crew members of the patrol torpedo boat (PT 109) he commanded when it was cut in half and sunk by the Japanese destroyer Amagiri. Kennedy swam four hours to the nearest island, towing the man by attaching a strap from the man’s life jacket to his teeth. In a typical example of Kennedy’s well-known laconic wit, when he was once asked how he became a war hero, he responded with his famous understated smile, “It was involuntary. They sank my boat.”

Kennedy was also one of the most attractive and naturally charismatic public figures the nation has ever seen. Nellie Connally — whose husband, Texas Governor John Connally, was in the  presidential limousine and was shot, along with Kennedy, on the day of the assassination, and was himself a dynamic, charismatic man — said, “I thought I knew what charisma was before I met John Kennedy.” People spoke of JFK’s “irresistible charm,” it was well-known he was not vindictive toward his political opponents, and unlike his brother Bobby, he had few, if any, bitter enemies. Except for segregationists, the militant right, and some in big business, from what I have read people liked John F. Kennedy. As Look magazine observed, “Even his political opponents liked and respected him.”

Kennedy’s grip on the nation’s imagination continues to this very day, his assassination having elevated him into almost a mythical, larger-than-life figure. At the core of it all was the “hope” he held out for a better future. Hearst White House correspondent Helen Thomas, who has covered the White House since 1960, almost half a century, said that Kennedy’s assassination was “a transforming moment for America because we lost hope. Every president who succeeded Kennedy — they all had good points and bad points — but the legacy of hope died with him. We never had that sense again that we were moving forward, that we could do things.” Years earlier, New York Times columnist James Reston wrote similarly that “what was killed in Dallas was not only the president but the promise. The heart of the Kennedy legend is what might have been. All this is apparent in the faces of the people who come daily to his grave on the Arlington hill.”

While the notion of hope is abstract, what is not is JFK’s legacy of rekindling the belief that public service is a noble calling. It is beyond dispute that Kennedy, the first president born in the 20th century, inspired the young of his generation by his youthful vigor and the bold, fresh initiatives of his New Frontier, such as his Peace Corps, civil rights bills, and pledge to put a man on the moon. Idealism was in the air, and the nation’s capital had never seen such an invasion of young people who wanted to change the world for the better. The most accurate indicator of Kennedy’s popularity among the nation’s youth at the time is a 2003 Gallup poll of people of various age groups as to whom they regarded as our greatest president. In the 50- to 64-year age group, those that were young during Kennedy’s presidency, Kennedy ranked No. 1 among all presidents. Among all age groups he ranked No. 2, behind only Lincoln.

When the Warren Commission came out with its report in 1964, a national poll showed that only a minority of Americans, 31.6 percent, rejected the conclusion of the commission that Oswald acted alone. But through their torrent of books, radio and TV talk shows, movies, college lectures, etc., over the years the shrill voice of the conspiracy theorists finally penetrated the consciousness of the American people, and they have actually succeeded in discrediting the Warren Commission Report, and in convincing the overwhelming majority of Americans that Oswald was either a part of a high-level conspiracy, or was just a patsy who was framed by some exotic and elaborate group of conspirators ranging from anti-Castro Cuban exiles to organized crime working in league with U.S. intelligence. The latest Gallup poll in 2003 showed that an incredible 75 percent of the American people reject the findings of the Warren Commission and believe there was a conspiracy in the assassination. Only 19 percent believe that Oswald acted alone.

This is remarkable since the evidence could hardly be more conclusive that Lee Harvey Oswald killed Kennedy and acted alone. And major review after major review of my book, Reclaiming History, agrees with what I have just said. Just one among many: the Los Angeles Times said Reclaiming History was “conclusive. From this point forward, no reasonable person can argue that Lee Harvey Oswald was innocent. No sane person can take seriously that Kennedy was killed by the CIA, Castro, the Mob, the Soviets, etc. Reclaiming History may finally move these accusations beyond civilized debate.”

Why has this belief about Kennedy’s assassination persisted? Apart from the fact that human beings naturally find mysteries and conspiracies more interesting than open-and-shut cases, the allegation of conspiracy is mostly all that the American people have heard about the case through the years (the conspiracy theorists have almost completely dominated the debate). To paraphrase Joseph Goebbels, the propaganda minister of Hitler’s Third Reich, if you push something at someone long enough, eventually they’re going to start buying it, particularly if they’re not exposed to a contrary view. But it’s more than that.

A few other reasons: Many people instinctively want to believe in a high-level conspiracy in the Kennedy assassination because, in a strange way, the belief that powerful forces killed Kennedy because he was taking the nation in a direction antithetical to their interests gives more meaning to his life and death -- certainly more than the belief that a lone nut killed him for no reason other than dementia. Abraham Lincoln scholar Reed Turner says, “Somehow it is more satisfying to believe that a president died as the victim of a cause than at the hands of a deranged gunman.” Even the president’s wife, Jackie, was moved to say that her husband “didn’t even have the satisfaction of being killed for civil rights. It had to be some silly little Communist. It robs his death of meaning.” In the unconscious desire of many to make a secular saint out of the fallen president, the notion of martyrdom was inevitable. But a martyr is not one who dies at the hands of a deranged nonentity. Only powerful forces, as indicated, will do.