On November 22, 1963, Dr. Malcolm Perry was on duty at Parkland Memorial Hospital in Dallas, when John Fitzgerald Kennedy appeared surrounded by bodyguards on a stretcher. There wasn’t much to do. The injuries caused by a sniper’s shots in Dealey Square were very serious and the President of the United States ended up dying in his arms. By far, according to what he himself said, that was the worst moment of his professional life, because the whole country was on top of him.
However, the nightmare did not end there. Perry did not run from the spotlight or take the days off that were due to him. He also did not exchange guards with his colleagues to get away from that pressure. He continued working tirelessly, without imagining that, 48 hours later, the alleged perpetrator of the shots would be admitted to the ER: Lee Harvey Oswald. He arrived unconscious, in an ambulance. He had just been shot by a small Chicago mobster named Jack Ruby, as a sign of revenge for his assassination… or so he said. The fact is that it thus closed the possibility of finding out if it was really Oswald who killed the president or not.
With the death of Kennedy, Oswald and Ruby -the latter died four years later in strange circumstances-, one of the greatest mysteries in the history of the 20th century arose. Possibly the one that has generated the greatest number of conspiracy theories along with the 9/11 attacks. And it is that the errors in the investigation and the shadows that surrounded the intelligence agencies fertilized the ground. Since then, the controversy has been fueled year after year with all kinds of books, movies, and documentaries. Could a reclusive and unstable ex-Marine who sympathized with communism kill the president of the most powerful country in the world in a single outburst?
From the first moment everything was strange. Arnold van de Laar recounts in ‘The Art of the Scalpel’ (Salamander, 2022), that Dr. Paul Peters, a colleague of Malcolm Perry, later recalled seeing three men in the operating room, in green surgical suits, who clearly They were not part of the medical team: «Although Oswald was intubated and could not respond, and also had been unconscious for some time, dying, and that he had three surgeons operating on his belly, those men did not stop shouting in his ear: ‘Was it you? Was you?'”.
Kennedy, during the autopsy
the first questions
Why were these strangers so insistent on asking a patient who was already half dead? Did they want to get a confession anyway? Didn’t they have enough evidence of the crime, despite the fact that the entire United States had already condemned it? In fact, when the ambulance arrived with Oswald, the crowd gathered in front of the Capitol began to cheer as soon as they heard the news on the transistors. They had just assassinated the man everyone said was the assassin of their president and they were happy.
Yet when Oswald was arrested an hour after the assassination near Dealey Square, he kept saying, “I didn’t kill President Kennedy! I have not killed anyone! I don’t know anything about that.” “He died without saying a word,” Dallas District Attorney Henry Wade added on November 24, also unable to obtain a deathbed confession from him. “In front of me, Oswald flatly refused to confess to his participation in the assassination of Kennedy,” Wade said, adding: “They have died with him.”
The Warren Commission had been created a year earlier to investigate the Kennedy assassination. He examined 3,154 pieces of evidence and reviewed the statements of 552 witnesses selected from among 26,550 interviewed by the FBI. At first, after months of work, he concluded that Oswald had acted alone. In 1979, however, the House Select Committee on Assassinations considered that there might be a conspiracy surrounding his assassination. This conspiracy had been presented before in some theories as surprising as these ten that we present below.
Ten Theories About the Kennedy Assassination
—First: defends that the driver knew that Kennedy would be killed by a sniper and, even, that it was this one who finished him off.
—Second: points out that Oswald was nothing more than a political decoy, according to the testimony of the then general director of the FBI, John Edgar Hoover, who had already denounced before the assassination that an impostor was using Oswald’s personal data. It must not be forgotten that the ex-marine had been under surveillance by the Government for a long time.
—Third: considered the possibility that there had been more than one sniper. A fact that was publicly denounced by the widow of John Connally, the then governor of Texas, who was also wounded on November 22, 1963. She justified her theory by the fact that her husband had been hit by a different bullet than the one he killed Kennedy. Despite this, at first, the politician publicly asked that the conclusions of the Warren Commission be supported and that conspiracy theories be ignored, but later changed his mind and questioned the theory of the single bullet of the President. In 1982, his then-partner Doug Thompson revealed that he himself had asked Connally if he was convinced that Oswald had fired the gun that killed Kennedy. His response was: “Absolutely not. I don’t believe for a second the conclusions of the Warren Commission.” Asked why he hadn’t talked about this, he added: “Because I love this country and we needed to close that episode as soon as possible. I will never speak publicly about what I believe.”
—Quarter: This hypothesis is even more unusual and suggests that a policeman named JD Tippit, who physically resembles the President, was assassinated that same day to impersonate Kennedy in the autopsy and that the autopsy obtained very different conclusions, with the aim of confusing to the researchers.
—Quinta: It is one of the theories that gave the most talk and was put on the table by Jackie Kennedy herself, the president’s widow, who even insinuated that her husband’s assassination had been commissioned by his successor, Lyndon B. Johnson, at that time Vice President of the Government. Her objective would have been to prevent him from being tried for four cases that he had pending with the Justice: violation of government contracts, prevarication, money laundering and bribery. Curiously, the investigations into this hypothesis were closed when Johnson ascended to the Presidency.
—Friday: It is the work of an engineer from Ceuta who, a decade ago, published a scientific investigation entitled ‘Rescue in JFK’s time’. Francisco Javier Carretero López used the data from the Warren Commission, the statements of the medical staff at Parkland Hospital and the autopsy photographs, as well as the analysis of the shots received by Governor Connally, to conclude that “there was no shot that hit at President Kennedy from the shooting point attributed to Lee Harvey Oswald, since he was, as he himself specified, not on the sixth floor of the Texas School Book, but in the cafeteria on the second floor of the same building». «These scientific results are irrefutable, since the two wounds exposed by the Commission were caused to President Kennedy by shots from the front and not from behind. […]. Now, my only wish is to meet with Oswald’s daughters to let them know the result so that they can say, from now on, with pride, that their father told the truth when he said that he had not shot anyone and that he was a scapegoat,” he added.
—Seventh: in 1992, Oliver Stone assured that the assassination was the work of the CIA and the US secret services, which used the mafia and Oswald as a scapegoat. “Since then, we cannot believe in our leaders,” said the film director during the presentation of his film ‘JFK’, starring Kevin Costner and Tommy Lee Jones.
—Eighth: This theory even splashes Israel and defends that the Tel Aviv government was not happy with the pressure exerted by Kennedy against the secret nuclear program that he was developing, on the one hand, and the sympathies that the president showed towards the Arabs, for another.
—Novena: points to the photograph that was found of Oswald, in the backyard of his house, carrying a holstered pistol and holding a rifle in one hand and Marxist newspapers in the other. This image was particularly damning, assuring that it was the same weapon that was used to assassinate the president. At the time of his arrest, the defendant denounced that it was false and, for years, it was argued that the lighting and the shadows were incompatible, that his facial features were also incompatible with respect to other portraits of him, that the size of the rifle did not correspond with the known length of that type of shotgun and that the ex-marine’s posture was physically impossible because he appeared unbalanced.
—From above: He defends that Ruby killed Oswald so that it would not be known who the true mastermind of the crime was. The mobster was tried and sentenced to the electric chair in March 1964, but the verdict was overturned by the Texas Supreme Court ordering a new trial. However, days before the second hearing was to be held, it was learned that he suffered from widespread lung cancer that nobody knew about until then. A few weeks later, he died suddenly from a blood clot in his lungs, although forensics never confirmed whether it was caused by the tumor.