It’s impossible to know for sure whether the Warren Commission Report was correct, or whether the House Select Committee on Assassinations was correct. We’ll never know precisely what happened 50 years ago today in Dallas, conspiracy or not, as President Kennedy’s motorcade traveled down Elm Street toward the triple underpass.
That said, there’s nothing wrong with speculating — with having a hunch about how and why it happened; whether the plot might’ve been one lone nut or many conspirators working in tandem. But anyone who says they know for sure should be greeted with incredulity.
In his book, titled Kennedy, Ted Sorensen, speechwriter and special counsel to President Kennedy, wrote, “I must ask to be excused from repeating the details of that tragedy. How and why it happened are of little consequence compared to what it stopped.”
Too often in these past 50 years, our all-too-human impulse is to pursue the murder mystery. The “how and why” almost always takes precedent over “what it stopped.”
Nevertheless, like so many others, I spent time looking into the details of the assassination. Eventually, I thought I had attained a modest sense of what happened. I thought maybe that it was the Mafia seeking to regain a financial stake in Cuba, and so, fueled by a sense of pre-RICO invincibility, it targeted President Kennedy who stood in the way of liberating the island from Fidel Castro and returning it back to the unfettered cash geyser it had been under the Batista regime. Oswald, who had almost certainly been recruited into the anti-Castro movement, had been sent to the Soviet Union as a defector purely for show to make it appear as if he was a communist in order to later infiltrate Cuba and become part of the arsenal of assassination possibilities against Castro. Instead, the plot against Castro was redeployed to target the chief executive of the United States.
Whatever… [CONTINUE READING]