Will we ever really know?
I'm talking about the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.
I was young, but I do remember it. November 22, 1963. I was four years old. Yes, young. The event was so big that a kid of that age was even affected by it.
I grew up in Paris, Texas. Only a few hours from Dallas where the President was killed. Maybe that has something to do with why I remember it so well. I recall how my parents reacted. I even remember seeing Walter Cronkite tear up when he announced Kennedy was dead.
I'm writing about this now because a new batch of previously secret Kennedy assassination documents has been released.
The Daily Beast reports that Lee Harvey Oswald met with the KGB before the assassination. That's probably the biggest news out of this latest dump of documents.
There's a new Oliver Stone documentary out about the Kennedy Assassination. It's called "JFK Revisited: Through the Looking Glass."
In it, Stone looks at earlier declassified files related to the Kennedy assassination. It's a follow up of sorts to his film "JFK." He questions, among other things, if Oswald acted alone. He disputes the Warren Commission report in many ways. The Warren Commission investigated the Kennedy assassination.
Oliver Stone makes a good case. Here's the thing. I've spent my life believing Lee Harvey Oswald was a really good shot and did it on his own. I no longer believe that.
There's a story relating to the Kennedy Assassination that I will never forget. My dad owned a pharmacy in Paris, Texas. On the morning of the assassination, two men came into my dad's store and sat at the soda fountain. No one knew them. They wore hats and drank coffee. The server heard one of them saying how much he hated JFK. The other said, "He won't make it out of Dallas alive."
The server didn't think much about it. Then, President Kennedy was shot and killed. She told my dad about those strange men in his store and what they said. As he told the story, he told the server to "never tell anyone you heard that."
My dad died years ago. I wish I had pressed him on why he said that to her. Why not report it? I think because everyone was scared. I don't think that even back then that everyone believed Oswald did it alone.
So many conspiracy theories. Was it the mafia? The Russians? An inside job? Those theories continue all these years later.
I hope that someday we will get the full story. I do believe it's out there. In those still unreleased documents. All these years later, we wonder. What really happened that day in 1963?
Fiddling while burning
Getting on a plane