November 22, 1963

Forty-five years ago today President John F. Kennedy was murdered in Dallas.

What happened that Friday afternoon? Over 450 books have been written on the events of that day and those leading up to it. The bottom line is: we don’t know for sure, nor can we ever be certain of everything (or anything). Witness’s memories are notoriously unreliable; most of the primary participants are dead; evidence has been lost; investigations, particularly those of an immediate and on-the-scene nature, were botched; and there were countless conspiracies to cover personal and institutional behinds, so to speak. Chances are one hundred percent positive we will never know the full truth.

For many, many years I was convinced that something fishy went down that day in Dealey Plaza. I mean, there was just too much of an abundance of weirdness. To mention just a few items: Oswald’s silencing/murder by Jack Ruby; the fact that no written transcripts were produced from Oswald’s extensive interrogations; the limousine Kennedy was murdered in was flown back to Washington and cleaned and washed down; Kennedy’s body was illegally brought to Bethesda Naval Hospital for an autopsy done by doctors who were not forensic specialists at the behest of nameless military personnel; the whole "magic bullet" nonsense; Oswald’s crazy past (including a defection to the Soviet Union and nonchalant return a year or two later); the possibility of doctored photos of Oswald with the assassination weapon, the Mannlicher-Carcano rifle; the difficulty of a moving, receding target for someone of alleged poor marksmanship abilities; a man holding an open umbrella in mild, clear weather as the motorcade passes by; a third of the witnesses swearing shots were fired from the grassy knoll; strange hobos arrested but let go without any records of their identities or questioning kept; various ballistical and witness anomalies concerning Oswald and the murder of Officer Tippit approximately a half-hour after Kennedy is killed; the misplacement of the President’s brain (vital in determining bullet trajectories).

And that’s just to name a few off the top of my head.

Oliver Stone’s movie JFK really pulled me in and made me desirous to read up on the subject. The more I read, though, the more I realized that Stone was being somewhat hysterical, histrionic, and exaggerative. But there were definite, legitimate anomalies to the case. Books could be written about any one of those aforementioned weirdities and have. Add to it the fact that Kennedy had so many enemies, so many people and factions that wanted him dead or out of the way, and were in the capable position to do so if they truly wanted to do. The CIA, the Mafia, the Cubans, right-wing societies and wealthy individuals, members of his own political party. Heck, I even read a book where it was heavily insinuated that Richard Nixon may have played a role. But someone had to pull the trigger, be it Oswald, Oswald and others, or others with Oswald framed, and this points to where it all hinged for me.

The Zapruder film.

That was what convinced me. Frame 313, the head shot, the kill shot. I’ve seen it a hundred times, and it sickens each and every time. Kennedy’s still struggling with the throat wound, hands about his neck, leaning over towards his wife, when he’s hit. The front of the head explodes; bone fires straight up in the air; blood and brain matter in a pink mist fires up and backwards as the limousine accelerates.

It seemed certain and doubtless to me that a bullet was fired directly from Kennedy’s right and front, the area of the stone wall, the fence at the trainyards, and the grassy knoll. That implied a conspiracy, for there had to be at least two shooters.

But then I saw a special on television last week which proved to my satisfaction that what the eye sees, in this case, is not necessarily true.

The History Channel showed a documentary recently (last week - I forgot the name of the show and a quick search of their website was fruitless), where, to the greatest extent possible, the exact physical situations of the assassination were duplicated. The weapon, the bullets, the angles, the wind velocity, the limousine. A hi-tech company developed plastic skulls which replicated flesh, bone, and brain matter in terms of density and mass and other physical variables. Such skulls were placed upon metallic "spinal cords" and set in proper positions within the limousine. The marksman fired, and the results were analyzed, then compared with the Zapruder film.

The physicist Luis Alvarez, I believe, proposed that the explosion we see in frame 313 of the film is indeed the result of a rear-entry head wound. He bases his claim on the fluid dynamics, for lack of a better term, of brain matter when a bullet enters the skull. What we see in the explosion is not so much a bullet entering (though that is exactly what it appears to be via common sense) but the high-speed ejection of brain matter via Newton’s third law.

The tests from the documentary seem to prove this out.

I also read a book on the incident written by Mark Fuhrman, A Simple Act of Murder. Let’s leave the entirety of OJ out of this for this post. Fuhrman’s angle is to simply reconstruct the crime based only – ONLY – on the physical, provable evidence, as if he was presenting this to a judge. Slowly, he builds up a case, step by step, from the micro to the macro, finally focusing on Lee Harvey Oswald as the culprit. Fuhrman discredits the whole "magic bullet" slight-of-hand manufactured by a young Arlen Specter and reorders the sequence of the bullets fired and places much attention on a strange indentation in the front top center of the limousine’s front windshield. Still, it proves the implausibility of a grassy knoll shooter, and, by extension, a conspiracy.

The documentary and this book have made me come around full tilt, I suppose. But I’m still willing to be convinced otherwise, and relish tales of macabre conspiratorial goings-on. Odds that JFK was killed from the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository: 97%. Odds that Lee Harvey Oswald was the shooter: 87%. Odds that there was a conspiracy: hmmmmmm. How about … 25%? Yeah, I know, something about the numbers just doesn’t add up. But I still say to you, documentary and Fuhrman book notwithstanding, something about November 22, 1963 doesn’t add up, either.