It is hard to believe it has been sixty years since President John Fitzgerald Kennedy was brutally murdered. It’s also hard to believe I have gray hair and collect Social Security. 😒

I read several biographies and always had an interest in the man. He was smart, good-looking, witty, and eventually (but not initially in his presidency) wise. He was flawed, very flawed. JFK was a serial womanizer and his dishonesty regarding his health was necessary, but sadly deceptive.

My mother had a crush on him, and my father’s boss had a large black and white portrait photograph of the man in their company’s office. We had a few books in the house, but there was one called The Torch is Passed which I still have and treasure. I often flipped through the commemorative yet tasteful tribute to his death and the aftermath. I would later discover more graphic works on his assassination. I pursued one once in a bookstore in Ludington, Michigan, and flipped pages discovering autopsy photos, in color. I dropped the book on the ground and walked outside for air as I felt weak.

I seem to recall watching any historical documentaries on the assassination. When I taught American History, I showed them in my classroom. My second principal shared that he bought a bootleg copy of the infamous Zapruder film in the 1960s for an undisclosed (read substantial) amount that may have led to his divorce. So many images are ingrained in my consciousness, one of the most heartbreaking is when the unflappable Walter Cronkite paused, briefly removed his glasses, and then announced the President’s death. He had interviewed him just weeks before.

Conspiracy theories sprang up almost immediately, and books began appearing within a few years. At one time there were over a hundred, and I am sure that number has been greatly bypassed today. Remember, the earth is flat and man never made it to the moon. 🙄

In 1989, I was driving home from a graduate class at night and learned of a book titled Mafia Kingfish which theorized that JFK was shot by people hired by New Orleans crime boss Carlos Marcello. My brain then was more gullible, naive, and less skeptical. I stayed up late listening to the broadcast and didn’t sleep well that night. Soon, I bought the book and contemplated.

There is one overarching theme of ALL of the theories. There was no way Oswald did it. It was the CIA, Cuba, the Mafia, the USSR, and even Vice-President Lyndon Johnson. I am not joking. I slipped down that rabbit hole, crawled out, and have peaked back in now and then. I discovered the identity of a possible gunman, a Frenchman named Lucien Sarti, a Frederick Forsythe-like Day of the Jackal-type shooter who conveniently died in 1972.

Hundreds wanted to solve it. Videos were made, marksmen recreated the shot, it almost got to the point of pathetically funny if it wasn’t so damned tragic, violent, and for the rest of us sad. Every forensic scientist offered an opinion. You literally could read this piece, stop, and spend the rest of your life studying all the data that is out there. More will be offered during your studies.

My deduction is that little shithead did it. We don’t want to admit it and give him the credit. Why do I conclude from this?

His mother was nuts, stone crazy. She created this monster. He was pathologically starved for fame. He was trained as a marksman in the Marines, and did you know Kennedy’s car was ONLY going ten miles an hour? The shot was not as hard as you may think, even with a cheap mail-order rifle.

Oswald was only twenty-four when he did this. Most of the principals would be much older. Has anyone, on their death bed, anywhere, said “This is what happened?” I know, I was involved. Here is the evidence. No. He did it. We want it to be something more complicated, than a loser.

RIP JFK