2023-11-22 15:01:00
MONDE – What do we know about the assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy, sixty years later? Little, if anything, new, except that this event, which caused a shock throughout the world, still gives rise to many controversies and questions. The countless investigations, the declassification by the federal government a few years ago of numerous archives as well as the thousands of works devoted to the affair have not changed anything: many questions have still not been answered. And there are many who tirelessly question themselves, investigating to try to provide new elements or asking for the reopening of the investigation.
November 22, 1963. John Kennedy, Democratic President of the United States since 1960, prepares for his re-election. For his electoral tour in Texas, a Republican state, he decided to go to Dallas, a bastion of the Republican right. The presidential motorcade passes through the city and John Kennedy is cheered by the crowd. Nellie Connally, wife of Texas Governor John Connally, who accompanies the presidential couple, then points out to the head of state that he “can no longer say that Dallas doesn’t love him”.
At 12:30 p.m., President Kennedy’s vehicle left Main Street, turned right onto Houston Street and then left onto Elm Street, decelerating past a school book store near Dealey Plaza. Three shots are fired. The 35th President of the United States, seated in the back of the convertible alongside his wife Jacqueline “Jackie” Kennedy, is assassinated. He was the youngest person in the history of the country to enter the White House. He is the youngest to die, at the age of 46.
The commissions follow one another but the mystery becomes darker
His death was officially announced about an hour later. Shortly after, an individual was arrested. This is Lee Harvey Oswald, an employee of the school book depository and presented, until today, as the only shooter and the only assassin of John Kennedy. The 23-year-old’s sniper rifle is found on the fifth floor of his workplace and Dallas police consider him the main suspect, with close ties to the Soviet Union, where he had visited a few years ago, and who is a communist, or at least he presents himself as such…
Was he really a sniper? Was he planning to reveal more details about the circumstances of the president’s assassination? We will never know: Oswald is assassinated, in turn, by a certain Jack Ruby, cabaret owner, two days later in the very premises of the Dallas police. Jack Ruby, who claimed to have shot Lee Oswald at point-blank range to “avenge” Jackie Kennedy, was found guilty of premeditated murder in March 1964 and sentenced to the electric chair, but died of cancer in 1966.
Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson takes the oath of office on the way home, aboard Air Force One, alongside Jack Kennedy’s widow, whose dress is stained with her husband’s blood. A week later, Johnson appointed a federal commission of inquiry into the assassination and named Earl Warren, then Chief Justice of the United States, as chairman. The Warren Commission delivered its results a year later in a report of almost 900 pages. His conclusions: Lee Oswald did indeed act alone. Three shots were fired: the first bullet missed the convertible and the other two hit the president in the neck and head. Regarding the assassination of the “sniper”, the commission affirms that Jack Ruby also acted alone and did not know his victim.
The elements of the report remained classified for several decades and the investigation did not convince the Americans. Jurists mention omissions and contradictions, particularly on the trajectory of the bullets (and in particular a bullet that we would describe as magical, its trajectory being an offense to common sense). It was first a New Orleans prosecutor, Jim Garrison, who relaunched the investigation by broadcasting a video from a witness, Abraham Zapruder showing the president’s backward movement after the shot hit his head. According to the Warren Commission, remember, Lee Harvey Oswald’s shot was fired from behind.
Another commission was established in 1975. This one, called “Church” after a senator from Idaho, highlighted the shortcomings of the investigations carried out by government intelligence agencies, particularly the FBI and the CIA. Frank Church’s efforts led to the installation, by Congress, of the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA), shortly after the resignation of Richard Nixon following the Watergate scandal.
The official version of the “sniper” compromised?
The HSCA ended up confirming certain conclusions of the Warren Commission, but not without criticizing it: if we look at the Zapruder images, there is no doubt that John Kennedy is projected forward and that his backward movement which follows appears as a “neuromuscular spasm”. The commission adds, for its part, that Jack Ruby was linked to the mafia and that the assassination of the head of state was the result of a conspiracy. The HSCA opens a third breach to the hypotheses by recalling the historical context (Cold War and tensions between the USA, the Soviet Union and Cuba).
Throughout the investigations and commissions, the list of possible sponsors of the assassination of John Kennedy is mentioned: the Chicago mafia, opponents of Fidel Castro who criticized the president for the calming of relations after the failure of the operation of the Bay of Pigs and the missile crisis, or the CIA or oil tycoons. Some put forward the theory that the intelligence agency poorly digested the failure of the Bay of Pigs while others attribute links to it with the military-industrial complex, favorable to the commitment of the American army in Vietnam, that John Kennedy questioned.
Declassification of documents linked to the assassination does not participate in unraveling the mystery. The White House released thousands of new archives in 2017in 2021 then in 2022. Each time, other documents remain blocked, at the request of the CIA and the FBI. Although 97% of the five million pages of the JFK assassination file are publicly available, the declassified documents do not definitively resolve the question of whether Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone.
This does not discourage Americans, including those close to the assassinated president, from carrying out their investigations. According to FranceInfo, investigators, considered the best in the United States, met from November 15 to 17 to examine the theories previously put forward. Their conclusions: Lee Oswald was not a “sniper.”
This year, it is a witness, and not the least, who gives himself up. Paul Landis, a former secret service agent and present on the scene as a bodyguard, published a book this year in which he discusses the discovery of another bullet in the presidential vehicle. “I just hope that we will reopen the investigation and that the evidence that I have just provided will help with that”he told FranceInfo.
As for Robert Francis Kennedy Jr., nephew of John Kennedy and son of Robert Francis Kennedy, who was assassinated in 1968 in Los Angeles (when he had every chance of winning the Democratic nomination for the presidential election), has always claimed that the CIA was behind the murder of his father and uncle, accusing the government for setting up the Waren Commission to cover up the murder.
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