Death in Dealey Plaza

 I had just come home from my Primary School with my Mother where there had been a "bring and buy" event.  Soon afterwards we switched the television on...My Mother thought World War III was about to start...All I knew was that something awful had happened.  Apparently, President Kennedy had been shot and killed in Dallas, Texas.  Had the Russians done it?  Was it Fidel Castro?  Whoever it was, someone called Lee Harvey Oswald was arrested later that day, at first for shooting a cop called J D Tippit then later he was accused of also killing JFK.

Amazingly, two days later, Lee Harvey Oswald was himself shot and killed by some guy called Jack Ruby...On live TV no less!!!  What on earth was going on?  

The Warren Commision was created by President Johnson and tasked with finding out whether it really was just Lee Oswald who had shot President Kennedy.  They decided it was just the "patsy" as Oswald had referred to himself after being arrested on that day, although many people doubted this and even LBJ stated to Walter Cronkite off the record some years later that he thought other people were probably involved in the killing.

Fast forward to 1975...I was in a pub watching (I think) News at Ten when Abraham Zapruder's film of the motorcade in Dallas that fateful day was shown.  The horror of seeing JFK's head being literally blown off was matched  with a feeling of incredulity...Lee Harvey Oswald was supposed to have shot John Kennedy from the Texas Schoolbook Depository from behind,,,How could the President;s head move so violently backwards when the fatal shot hit him???

New theories followed thick and fast...a governmental committee in America concluded soon afterwards that President Kennedy had probably been killed as a result of a conspiracy.  Throughout the next 15 or so years, documentaries and the JFK film brought forward to me such people as Mary Moorman, Jean Hill and the Newman family who had all witnessed the assassination close by.   "Badgeman" and "Black dog man" also came into view who may or may not be real and may or may not have been behind the fence on the famous grassy knoll.  The BBC aired a documentary made in America on the fortieth anniversary in 2003 that seemed to point back to Lee Harvey Oswald being the lone assassin. The "magic" bullet really was magic!

By the time the fiftieth anniversary arrived in November 2013, I had been on Facebook for some time and had seen various groups dedicated to the assassination put forward so many theories including someone firing from the storm drain in front and others from the Daltex building behind.  For what it's worth, I find it almost impossible to believe that just one gunman killed President Kennedy based on evidence such as the Zapruder film.  I am beginning to doubt that the full and true story of that day in Dealey Plaza will ever be known to people at large.  R.I.P. John F Kennedy.