Who killed JFK? The case that can never be closed

The case is still not closed, the fog surrounding the tragedy still thick

The president was in Texas for political reasons. In-fighting within the state Democrat Party found Kennedy and Vice-President Lyndon B Johnson adopting a united front to stymie this bleeding wound, caused by a conflict between two key Texan Democrats – Governor John Connally and Senator Ralph Yarborough. The Democrats' hold on Texas was flimsy and fragile. Kennedy, despite having the Texan Johnson as his running mate, had taken the state by fewer than 50,000 votes in the 1960 presidential election. "If the governor and the senator didn't agree to a truce soon," observed William Manchester, author of the seminal The Death Of A President, "the national ticket wouldn't stand a chance there next fall. No party writes off 25 electoral votes, so both Kennedy and Johnson were going down to patch things up. They had to make a major production of the trip." In the end, it became a major production of an assassination.

Kennedy knew the risk. Dallas had a reputation for political violence, and the previous month, Arkansas senator J William Fulbright had directly advised Kennedy to remove it from his five-city Texas visit. "Dallas is a very dangerous place," he warned. "I wouldn't go there. Don't you go."

Fulbright wasn’t the only one to feel this way. When the Secret Service had driven the motorcade route four days earlier, local operative Forrest V Sorrels realised the high-rise architecture of downtown Dallas rendered those in the motorcade “sitting ducks”. Some 20,000 windows overlooked the route, 20,000 potential sniper perches that even the best efforts of the intelligence community couldn’t completely defend against.

Kennedy's popularity in the city was exceedingly low

Kennedy's popularity in the city was exceedingly low. The local paper, the Dallas Morning News, was particularly vicious when it came to stirring political discontent and extremism. Its proprietor, Ted Dealey, had already addressed Kennedy at the White House a couple of years before in words of the barest candour. Dealey told the president what was required at that time was "a man on horseback to lead this nation, and many people in Texas and the Southwest think you are riding Caroline's tricycle". The implication was far from disguised. Texas saw JFK as a soft-touch East Coaster, the family man, the liberal, keen to thaw the ice of the Cold War.

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Even if, when waking up in a Fort Worth hotel room on the last morning of his life, Kennedy didn't believe he was entering a cauldron of distrust and hate, page 14 of that day's Dallas Morning News told him otherwise. It was a full-page advertisement, its headline ironically welcoming the president to Dallas before asking a dozen questions of him, including one that suggested he was in collusion with the Vietnamese Communist Party. "We DEMAND answers to these questions," it read.

After the 13-minute flight from Fort Worth to Dallas, Kennedy and his wife Jackie assumed their seats in the Lincoln Continental convertible that would take them on a circuitous route through the city before a lunch engagement at the Dallas Trade Mart. Sat in front of them were Governor Connally and his wife Nellie. The rain of that morning had disappeared and the sky was now a perfect blue. Had the inclement conditions continued, the Lincoln’s roof would have been in position, quite possibly averting the tragedy to come.

As the motorcade made its way into the city, the response of the citizens of Dallas seemed warmer than expected to an under-fire president. Not that Kennedy, the decorated war veteran, was allowing himself to get rattled by any danger. At the junction of Lemmon Avenue and Lomo Alto Drive, he ordered the car be stopped, then got out and casually greeted some schoolchildren. By the time the motorcade reached Main Street, the downtown crowds started to seriously thicken.

• Read more | An eye-witness account of the assassination of JFK

Main Street took the procession on an arrow-straight course through the heart of the downtown area, before the cars at the front of the 17-vehicle procession turned right onto Houston Street and then negotiated a sharp, 120o corner onto Elm Street. At this point, as it made the tight turn in front of the Texas School Book Depository, the motorcade reduced its speed to little more than walking pace.

Conspiracy theorists later pounced on this slight detour as being deliberately manufactured so as to bring the motorcade within shooting distance, but it was actually out of necessity. Had they continued on Main Street, a traffic island would have blocked their passage up onto the highway and towards the Trade Mart for that lunch reception.

Now out of the canyon of skyscrapers and into the sunshine, the motorcade was greeted by much sparser crowds, onlookers dotting the open, grassy areas of Dealey Plaza. Then, on the stroke of 12.30pm, came the first bang, thought by most bystanders to be one of the motorcade’s vehicles backfiring. But it was a rifle shot. It missed, ricocheting away from the president after hitting a tree. The second bullet found its mark, passing through Kennedy’s neck and windpipe, then exiting his throat, after which it wounded Governor Connally. It caused Kennedy to lurch forward, his hand on his throat. Then came the third bullet, a devastating shot that caused immense head trauma.

Panic stations

The reaction was instant. The crowd hit the ground as if levelled by a sudden wind, while Secret Service agents rallied to the president’s car. One – Clint Hill – leapt onto the Lincoln’s boot as it accelerated away. Jackie Kennedy climbed out of her seat and towards the back of the car, either to assist Hill or to retrieve a portion of her husband’s skull. Two cars back, Vice-President Johnson’s own security detail instantly covered the second-in-command. Meanwhile, the president’s Lincoln was speeding off towards the highway. Six minutes later, it arrived at Parkland Memorial Hospital. Had he been a mere civilian, Kennedy would have been declared dead on arrival.

The manhunt was on and it wasn’t long before an employee of the Texas School Book Depository was the chief suspect. The building’s sixth floor had been undergoing refurbishment, meaning its piles of boxes had been shifted to one end, offering the perfect hiding place for a rifle-toting, would-be assassin. His name was Lee Harvey Oswald.

The search for Oswald didn’t last long. Forty-five minutes after the assassination, a Dallas police officer was shot dead three miles south of Dealey Plaza. His supposed killer, a man fitting Oswald’s description, had then disappeared into a local cinema, where he was quickly apprehended. With the country and the world plunged into deep shock, the speedy arrest of the supposed assassin brought some kind of lukewarm comfort.

Back at Parkland, a struggle ensued concerning the president’s body. The Secret Service wanted it swiftly returned to Washington, while the local authorities were insisting the post-mortem be carried out in Dallas. Washington won that particular battle and Kennedy’s body was transported back to Love Field, where it was loaded onto Air Force One. Also on board were Jackie Kennedy, her pink suit heavily stained by the blood of her husband, and Vice-President Johnson who, before take-off, was sworn in as the 36th president of the United States.

Too convenient?

In Oswald, the authorities firmly believed they had their man, a loose cannon with Marxist sympathies and a sharpshooting record from his time in the military. It was a convenient outcome – the lone gunman with erratic tendencies. “He hadn’t the ideals of a cat,” one commentator later noted.

However, it proved to be a false denouement. Another would occur two days after the assassination when, while being transferred to the county jail, Oswald was fatally shot by a local nightclub owner called Jack Ruby in the underground car park of Dallas police headquarters. Having already declared to the media that he was the fall guy for something bigger – “I’m just a patsy,” he claimed – Oswald would take the truth of the assassination to the grave.

The report was crystal-clear: Oswald had operated alone

A week after Kennedy’s death, the newly installed Johnson ordered the establishment of the President’s Commission of the Assassination of President Kennedy to investigate the full circumstances of the killing. Led by chief justice Earl Warren (and subsequently known as the Warren Commission), it produced its findings ten months later in an 888-page report. Its conclusion was crystal-clear: Oswald was the only gunman and had operated alone. Similarly, his murder by Ruby was another individual act.

For some, the Warren Report was deeply unsatisfactory, a mere rubberstamping of the authorities’ initial analysis. Over the 55 years since, each and every second of the assassination has been studied in the deepest forensic detail; the writer Mark Lawson once quipped that it was “a torrent of commentary equalled only by biblical scholarship”. Accordingly, a range of theories has subsequently been presented, debated, debunked and reaffirmed. In 1975, a major piece of evidence was broadcast on network television, one that remains the cornerstone of many conspiracy theories surrounding the assassination. On that day in November 1963, a local man named Abraham Zapruder used his cine-camera to film the motorcade as it made its progress through Dealey Plaza. His footage, and specifically frame 313, showed the headshot that had killed the president. The impact knocked Kennedy backwards, suggesting the shot had come from the front, not from behind – that is, there was a strong possibility that it wasn’t fired from the Book Depository, which was already in the rear-view mirror of the presidential car.

Theories about the location of a possible second gunman abounded. On the day itself, many bystanders had rushed up the grassy knoll to where Zapruder had been standing, believing the shots to have come from that area. Another theory was that a sniper had taken position on the railroad bridge the motorcade was about to pass under. Some even believed that a second shooter could have been staked out inside one of Elm Street’s storm drains.

No one could credit the tragedy to a single assassin

The public disquiet about the Zapruder footage led to the commissioning, in 1976, of the House Select Committee on Assassinations to look into the killings of both Kennedy and Martin Luther King. Its findings, presented three years later, concluded that although Oswald was the man whose shots ended the president’s life, there was a high probability of a second gunman and thus of a conspiracy.

Was there a second shooter?

The most cogent and convincing conspiracy theory put forward is arguably the one advanced by Jim Garrison in On the Trail of the Assassins. First published in 1988, the book reignited the smouldering debate around the assassination, calmly dismissing the findings of the Warren Commission. These flames were further fanned by the book being the basis of the 1991 Oliver Stone film JFK, in which Garrison, the dogged New Orleans district attorney seeking the clarity of truth, was played by Hollywood star du jour Kevin Costner.

Garrison was no idle speculator. In 1966, on the grounds that Oswald had been a resident of New Orleans a few months before the assassination, he launched a deep-reaching probe into the events leading up to that fateful day in Dallas. The investigation plotted a convincing case that the US intelligence community had orchestrated the killing in order to bring an end to Kennedy’s thawing of the Cold War. Garrison even (unsuccessfully) prosecuted Clay Shaw – the founder of the International Trade Mart in New Orleans and later revealed to be a CIA operative – on charges of conspiracy to assassinate the president.

Garrison had grown increasingly dissatisfied with the Warren Report’s conclusions. “Saddened and outraged,” he wrote, “Americans wanted an answer. And we got one.” The verdict had been a straightforward, reassuring one – even if others would become sceptical of it. “Most Americans readily accepted the government’s contention that the assassination was a random act of violence. A lonely, young man, his mind steeped in Marxist ideology, apparently frustrated at his inability to do anything well, had crouched at a warehouse window and – in six seconds of world-class shooting – destroyed the president of the United States.”

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Contradictions and inconsistencies

Garrison and his sharp-witted team unpicked a tangle of dealings and relationships between the CIA, the FBI, local politicians and underworld elements along the Gulf Coast. It appeared that a covert cabal had been established, one united by the issue of Cuba; anticommunists wanted the US to overthrow Castro, while local gangsters were eager to reassert their pre-revolution business interests on the island. Kennedy’s failed Bay Of Pigs invasion in 1961 had not reassured either group. In Oswald, the erratic Marxist, they had their ideal patsy.

As a notable prosecutor, Garrison applied his calm, methodical legal mind to the case, compellingly pinpointing the contradictions and inconsistencies that underpinned the 26 volumes of the Warren Report. “I had expected to find a thorough and professional investigation. I found nothing of the sort.” The evidence utilised by the Warren Commission appeared to have been very selective; for instance, many credible witnesses ignored. “The number of promising leads that were never followed up offended my prosecutorial sensibility,” sighed Garrison.

The book and film were major shapers of public opinion towards a conspiracy that was forged at the highest levels of the US establishment. Certainly, those who still have faith in the lone gunman theory are in a distinct minority.

“No one could credit the tragedy to a single assassin,” William Manchester wrote back in 1967. “The president was always described as a victim of ‘them’, never of ‘him’. The crime seemed too vast to be attributed to a single criminal. Ford’s Theatre was remembered as the building in which one man shot [Abraham] Lincoln, but Dallas became the city where ‘they’ killed Kennedy.”

More than half a century later, the identity of ‘them’ remains unknown, quite possibly forever. This is a case that will almost certainly never be closed.

Nige Tassell is a freelance journalist specialising in history

This article was first published in the March 2018 edition of BBC History Revealed