On the 60th Anniversary of the JFK Assassination, Here's a Short List of the Biggest Unanswered Questions

I can't speak the rest of the country, but if you were raised in the Boston area by Irish Catholic parents who adored John F. Kennedy, you associate the date November 22 with his assassination. When I was a kid, every year local TV would show a JFK documentary called Years of Lightning, Day of Drums, and my mom would watch it without fail. And remind me that my late father never trusted any politician ever until JFK. Maybe because they were both saw combat for the US Navy during WWII. But the reason she said he gave her was, "there's just something about that guy." Fair enough. 

And when it comes to the assassination, I've spent most of my adult life as a believer that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone. Owing largely to a seemingly well researched book I read in the '90s called "Case Closed" by Gerald Posner, and a PBS special that used computer graphics to reenact the scene at Dealey Plaza that indicated there were three shots, and they were all fired from the window at the School Book Depository where Oswald's sniper rifle was found. Essentially these sources pointed to the fact the Warren Commission got some facts and details wrong (like Texas Governor John Connally's exact position in the limo), but ultimately reached the correct conclusion. 

But one of the great signs of a healthy mind is to be able to challenge your own beliefs, and accept new ones in the face of convincing evidence. And further research has led me to the conclusion that the majority of Americans have: That there was, in fact, a conspiracy. Perhaps a vast one. That included multiple gunmen and coverups by investigators at all levels of government. That research has consisted not only of Oliver Stone's four-part docuseries, but the podcast Solving JFK and new one, hosted by Rob Reiner, who has correctly termed this the biggest unsolved case in the history of the United States:

 Not to mention one of the leading candidates for President of the United States, who makes no bones about the fact he thinks the CIA - who'll be answerable to him if he somehow ever wins - is completely responsible for murdering his uncle in broad daylight in front of the entire world:

That's just one aspect of how wild this story remains, even six decades later.

I can't hope to do justice to the depth and breadth of the facts that do not add up in the official narrative the country has been given over the last 60 years in a single post. Volumes have been written and terabytes of digital media have covered it, and will continue to be. So instead, I'll rely on the best friend of the lazy blogger: The List. 

In this case, the biggest, most important unanswered questions. Any combination of which have fueled the conspiracy theorists since shortly after the shots stopped echoing in Dallas:

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How was the "Magic Bullet" so pristine?

The Warren Commission concluded that a single shot went through JFK's neck, out his rib cage, went through Connally's wrist, and embedded in his thigh. But for all that entering and exiting the human body and shattering of bones, the bullet that was found on a stretcher at Parkland Hospital was completely intact. Not a dent or a scratch on it. The ballistic tests fired into animal bones showed denting if not shattering of the same kind of round fired by the same rifle. And the shot that hit Connally left fragments in his thigh that remained there for the rest of his life. In fact, his wife refused requests to remove them after he died. Regardless there were no fragments missing from the round that supposedly bumper carred its way through both men's bodies. 

Why was Connally's account ignored?

The Governor testified that in no uncertain terms, he heard the first shot that hit Kennedy, turned to look at him, said "My God, they are going to kill us all!" and felt another bullet hit him. Followed by the fatal shot to JFK's head. He never wavered from that version. And you'd think that's a detail he'd have remembered, given that he was collateral damage in the killing of the President. But the Warren Commission declared he was mistaken.

How could the second and third shots have been fired so close together? 

Almost without exception, and confirmed by the Zapruder Film, there was a 3-4 second gap between the first and second shot. The second and third came in rapid succession. Less than one second apart. The murder weapon was a bolt action rifle. Meaning each round had to be cleared from the chamber and reloaded. Boom. Click click. Boom. The only logical explanation is that there was another gun, fired at almost exactly the same time. And it delivered the kill shot. 

How could a shot from behind produce "Back and to the left"? 

If Oswald was just some random nobody, why did the Feds have an extensive file on him?

Part of the case as I used to believe it was that Oswald was a nobody. Just some crazed nutjob who just happened to have gotten a job at a place that later overlooked a presidential motorcade and took his shot. And that was the official narrative. But it turns out that not only did the FBI have a file on him, there is actual footage of him handing out pro-Cuba pamphlets in New Orleans at a time when tensions were high between the two countries and there was a faction of the federal government frustrated that Kennedy wasn't doing enough to topple the Castro regime. Why? How was that video worth taking, except to establish this rando as a pro-Communist sympathizer. And that's without going down the rabbit hole of how the address on the pamphlets were the same as an office connected to the US government.

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Why was Oswald questioned without a lawyer present? 

Today or in 1963, you wouldn't question a suspect in a fender bender without offering them the chance to speak to an attorney. Not if you want to get a conviction, that is. Not only did Dallas police grill Oswald over the span of a day, they allegedly didn't even transcribe the interview. Then paraded him before the press, while he was still in custody. A suspicious person might conclude they knew he was never going to go to trial. And that, as they were transporting him, Jack Ruby would walk right into the police station with a gun and see to that.

Why was the JFK in the  autopsy photos completely different than the JFK everyone in the hospital saw?

At least 40 medical professionals, including doctors and nurses with extensive experience with gun shot wounds all described seeing the back of the president's head blown almost completely off. A good quarter of the right side of his skull missing, which is consistent with an exit wound. This was confirmed by two FBI agents who were on the scene in order to file reports directly to J. Edgar Hoover. The Parkland staff also reported his lower brain coming out of the opening, and an entrance wound in his trachea, which would explain the exit wound in the back and indicate he was shot from the front. But the autopsy photos (which I won't post here because they're horrible and that JFK clip of the Zapruder film was enough for one blog) showed his skull completely intact and with a full head of hair. Almost as if those pictures were not a fair and accurate depiction of what his corpse looked like. 

And finally: 

Why did the FBI commit a credible witness to an insane asylum? 

I'll give all the credit to the Solving JFK podcast for educating me on this little subplot. A couple of days before the shooting, a local man named Ralph Lee Yates claimed to have picked up a hitchhiker who asked to be dropped off at the School Book Depository. He was carrying something long and thin wrapped in brown paper and said they were curtain rods. Making small talk, the hitchhiker mentioned the Kennedy's visit and asked Yates in he thought someone could assassinate him if they were shooting from a tall building. A weird question, but whatever. After dropping him off, Yates mentioned his odd encounter to someone. Then when Oswald was on the news days later, he realized he looked just like the guy he'd picked up, and altered the authorities. Just a citizen trying to do his part. 

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The problem with Yates' story is that it couldn't have been Oswald. He was at work at that time on that day. Eyewitnesses and his time card confirmed that fact. But the guy he drove to work that day looked just like Oswald. Who, not concidentally, also carried a brown paper package into the Depository and also claimed they were curtain rods. And here's what Yates got for doing his duty as a good American:

Quora - The FBI was stuck with two too many curtain rod stories, and preferred their own that the real Oswald brought the rifle to work with him on the day of the assassination. This framed Oswald, while Yates led to a conspiracy, something that the FBI wanted to avoid.

On Jan. 2, 1964 J Edgar Hoover sent a teletype marked “URGENT” to Dallas Special Agent in Charge J. Gordon Shanklin concerning Ralph Leon Yates. Hoover noted that the FBI had been unsuccessful in their previous investigation to discredit Yates’ story by not finding that he had been at his workplace at the time of the hitchhiking incident. Hoover ordered the Dallas FBI office to “reinterview Yates with polygraph,” what most people know as a “lie detector.” …

The FBI decided to up their ante to discredit Yates and told his wife Dorothy who had accompanied her husband to the FBI, that Mr. Yates needed to go immediately to Woodlawn Hospital, Dallas’ medical establishment for the mental ill. As Dorothy was to explain the reason the FBI gave for ordering such a drastic procedure, “They told me that he was telling the truth [according to the polygraph machine], but that basically he had convinced himself that he was telling the truth.” … 

[H]e was sent back to Woodlawn, where he would spend most of the 11 years he lived, drugged up. Ralph Yates would die at the early age of 35, always believing that he was part of the cause of JFK’s assassination, helping to deliver the rifle that assassinated the President.

Ralph Lee Yates was a family man with a wife and five kids who had never been in trouble with the law. But he died in a mental institution where he was sent against his will. For the crime of passing lie detector tests ordered by Hoover. Because the Feds argued he must be insane to believe a thing they didn't think was true. 

Did all this happen to silence a man whose account might make people believe an Oswald lookalike was sent to Dallas to kill JFK and frame Oswald for it? No one can prove it. But it makes sense. And put this altogether and you've got the all the essential ingredients that makes a crazy theory a legitimate conspiracy.  

Besides, if the government wasn't still trying to cover something up, they'd have released the files by now. It's been 60 years and will no doubt be 60 more. As Michael Corleone put it less than 10 years after the assassination, "If anything in this life is certain, if history has taught us anything, it is that you can kill anyone."