We lost not only a beloved young president (JFK) on November 22, 1963, but also our national idealism. We lost faith in the government. It never came back and will never return.
As I watched TV coverage of my bleeding “friend,” Lee Harvey Oswald, being taken into the Dallas Police Station, the rifle bullets fired at the president’s motorcade changed my life. When the Secret Service arrived at my door the morning after the assassination, they were looking for someone who had been designated as a “known associate” of the alleged JFK killer.
My relationship with Lee and Marina Oswald began in June 1962. On November 22, 1962, I last saw them as they hurried to catch the Fort Worth-Dallas bus. A year later, from November 24 to November 28, my father interpreted for Marina as the Secret Service investigated her knowledge of a conspiracy.
As America mourned JFK, the Warren Commission launched its investigation into the cause of his death. On March 31, 1964, I testified before the commission. The commission was not going to waste any time. If the assassination was the result of a conspiracy, we needed to know very soon.
The Warren Commission (chaired by Chief Justice Earl Warren) decided, after hundreds of thousands of documents of evidence and physical evidence, that a troubled young man (Oswald) killed the US president and acted alone.
When it was released on September 24, 1964, the public largely accepted its conclusion, but more than a half-century later, 60% of people had changed their minds in favor of a conspiracy. The debate surrounding the commission’s “sole gunman” decision has not subsided with the passage of time.
Expect a flood of new data, theories, and even new witnesses to add to the nearly 1,500 books previously written on the subject on the 60th anniversary. Approximately 90% of these articles endorse conspiracy theories, the majority of which portray Oswald as a “patsy” guided by deeper and evil forces.
Also, don’t expect any surprises from the release of the other 14,000 JFK-related documents by the National Archives. The releases in June and August (2023) are mostly made up of previously redacted data that has little to do with the assassination but does discuss CIA operations around the world.
As a result, the Warren report created a lasting legacy of distrust in government. At the half-century mark, a stunning fifth of conspiracy theorists attributed JFK’s killing to “the government” (including the CIA). Many people now feel that the government was either involved in several other conspiracies—that 9/11 was staged by the government—or that we lied about Iraq’s WMD to justify an invasion.
JFK’s Death Mystery
Each new hypothesis, no matter how far-fetched (space alien bodies, UN black helicopters, the CIA transporting AIDS into the ghetto), gets devotees. Conspiracies are a lucrative business, much more so than the “Oswald did it solo” myth.
From the start, the Warren report was playing a losing battle against the profoundly ingrained assumption that an individual or entity is in charge. Some argue that a New World Order, or “deep state,” has complete control over everything. History-changing events, such as a president’s assassination, cannot be random or coincidental.
According to this rational thought, the complex series of events that led Oswald to the sixth story of the Texas Schoolbook Plaza Building on November 22, 1963, had to be planned and carried out by powerful clandestine forces. “Little men” like Oswald do not produce history on their own, but they can sit in the back row and go unnoticed.
After the assassination, the conspiracy gate almost immediately opened. There were plenty of potential suspects and opportunists to go around, among the USSR, Cuba, the mafia, Dallas right-wingers, the CIA, and oil interests. According to one scenario, which may have originated in the Kremlin, my father, Pete, shifted culpability to Oswald by purposefully mistranslating Marina. I’ve been accused of having 50 secret meetings with the prospective assassin to arrange some wicked deed about which I know nothing.
As a frequent visitor to the Oswalds’ Mercedes Street duplex, I gathered firsthand observations of this newly married couple, including their baby June asleep in an open suitcase, wife Marina creating the door for me with a black eye, husband Lee refusing his wife acquiring English or her becoming to know other Russians, his rage when questioned on his Marxist beliefs in our house, and his verbally assaulting Marina in a terrifying temper fit.
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