Fifty Years Later, The Assassination Of John F. Kennedy Still Raises Questions About Who Killed Him And How Different The World Might Be Had He Lived On

A Reflection and Commentary by Doug Draper

One of Woody Allen’s earlier films – I think it was Manhattan – someone asks him if he had any projects on the go at the moment.

“Yes,” he replied. “I’m working on a non-fiction version of the Warren Commission Report.” 

U.S. President John F. Kennedy and his wife Jackie arrive in Dallas, Texas on that fateful day of November 22nd, 1963

The Warren Commission Report, as I’m sure many of you know, was named after Earl Warren, who was chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court into the 1960s, and details a government-ordered investigation into the circumstances surrounding the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, which occurred while he was riding in a motorcade in Dallas, Texas, 50 years ago this Friday, November 22^nd.

If you were born in the early to mid-1950s, as I was, or earlier than that, chances are you remember exactly where you were and who you were with when you learned that Kennedy was shot and killed on that fall day in 1963. I will never forget the stricken look on the face of the teacher who came into the class shortly after noon hour, at the school I attended in Welland, Ontario, that Kennedy was gunned down and to go home and be with our families.

It might seem strange now for younger Canadians to believe that there could be that kind of emotion for the death of an American president, but Kennedy was very well liked in Canada by almost everyone but then Canadian prime minister John Diefenbaker, who disliked Kennedy about as much as Kennedy disliked himOne of the legendary stories about these two leaders unfolds from a meeting they both attended where the Organization of America States was discussed. At the end of the meeting, Kennedy reportedly left some of his own hand-written notes on the table and Diefenbaker took the liberty of pocketing them. It later got out that a possible reference in the scrawled notes to the OAB was interpreted by Diefenbaker to mean that Kennedy had written down that he was an S.O.B. When Kennedy was asked at his next news conference if he referred to Diefenbaker as an S.O.B., he replied that he couldn’t have because he “didn’t know he was one at the time.” 

Despite stories like this and repeated accusations that Kennedy favoured then-Liberal leader Lester B. Pearson to replace Diefenbaker as prime minister, a majority of Canadians seemed as swept up in Kennedy’s  charisma and promise of a “new frontier” as so many of their American neighbours were at the time. 

But enough of that. If you are still with me let’s get back to the Woody Allen line about the Warren Report. 

I have never been big on conspiracy theories. But to this day, I am one of those that has always had a hard time believing that one  guy named Lee Harvey Oswald did all the shooting from the sixth floor of what was known then as the ‘Texas School Book Depository’ overlooking an intertwining of streets on Dealey Plaza. 

Just go to the physics of it all, with the whole firing of three or more shots that wounded Kennedy and then-Texas governor John Connally, then the final shot that literally blew half the brains of the president out of the back of his skull. All apparently from an Oswald with average scores as a shooter when he was in the military and with a bolt action rifle that was ranked as one of the poorer guns produced for use during the Second World War. 

Then, of course, one looks at the now iconic Zapruder film, shot by a guy named Abraham Zapruder, who was standing with his back to something else that is iconic – a place called the “grassy knoll” in Dealey Plaza. You look at the film over and over again, and there is the final fatal shot to the president’s head, driving him back in his seat, as if it had come from the front rather than behind, where Oswald was apparently nested in the Book Depository Building. And indeed, even Zaprurder, along with a number of others, initially told police they heard the final shot come from somewhere up on that knoll, which would have ruled Oswald out as the lone assassin had the Warren Commission taken that testimony more seriously.

Lee Harvey Oswald, identifed by Dallas police and, later, the Warren Commissionas the lone gunman in the assassination of President Kennedy.

But Warren Commission didn’t. It wanted to wrap this horrible murder case involving a president up as soon as possible, as it did within a period of about eleven months with the release of its report in 1964, inspiring independent lawyer Mark Lane’s best-selling book ‘Rush To Judgment’ and numerous other conspiracy books since. 

There are those who say that those of us who believe there was a conspiracy to assassinate president simply do not want to accept the possibility that a nobody like Oswald could have killed such a dynamic person in our history at the time. They argue that it makes more sense for some of us to believe that Kennedy’s killing was orchestrated by some syndicate and not a random act of some disgruntled individual with a cheap, mail-ordered gun.

There may be something to that. And there may be something to those who say that if there was a second gunman, aiming his heater from behind a fence on the grassy knoll, then why wouldn’t we know that by know. After all, they argue, if any two or more people were involved in this assassination, surely someone involved would have sung like a canary by now

But that seems terribly niave. If Oswald was meant to be the patsy, as he claimed he was before his life was snuffed out by another shady character within two days of the Kennedy shooting, and a professional shooter for an organized crime syndicate pulled off the fatal headshot from behind the fence, why would that person or anyone involved in contracting him speak out. 

There are books full of organized crime killings where those contracted to do “the hit” have never been identified, and most of them, including whoever downed Jimmy Hoffa, probably never will be. They live and work by a code of secrecy most of the rest of us may never understand. They do what they do for business, and it is none of our business. 

I’ve sometimes thought that if there was any such thing as a time machine and I could go back on it just once, I would like to be hiding somewhere near Oswald’s sniper nest, on the sixth floor of that Book Depository minutes before the shooting began, to find out, once and for all if he did the shooting, and to possibly tackle him down, if it was him, before he took that final fatal shot. 

Whoever killed Kennedy at Dealey Plaza on that fateful November day, many of those who were old enough to be following politics at the time forever wonder how much different the 1960s and the rest of our future, up to now, may have been had Kennedy a chance to serve a second term. 

Would the U.S. involvement in the war in Vietnam escalated to the point where it sapped resources for education, health and other programs, not only in the U.S., but around the world where Kennedy had launched a wonderful volunteer organization for young people called the Peace Corp.? Would there ever have been a President Richard Nixon who disgraced himself and the country in the Watergate scandal?

How much more advanced would the country and world be around civil rights and protecting our environment?

Those and so many other questions continue to haunt  – 50 years after the death of a president who came in as a “Cold Warier” but was rapidly turning too civil rights and more peaceful options for dealing with global conflict before his death.

Those questions and others continue to haunt me, 50 years later.

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