On Friday, November 22 1963, President John F. Kennedy was gunned down in Dealey Plaza in Dallas, Texas. Lee Harvey Oswald was quickly identified as the assassin, but 2 days later he in turn was murdered by Dallas nightclub owner Jack Ruby. The Warren Commission was hastily recruited to sift through the facts and it eventually came to the conclusion that Oswald acted alone, as did Ruby, yet unanswered questions proliferated and Ruby's apparent "silencing" of Oswald led to numerous conspiracy theories and a virtual library of books. Next came New Orleans district attorney Jim Garrison, who put a prominent businessman on trial for JFK's murder, giving the public a new culprit. The House Select Committee on Assassinations reopened the case in 1976 and came to a different conclusion than had the Warren Commission, giving a louder voice to conspiracy buffs, whose suspicions were further bolstered by special programs like the British television mini-series The Men Who Killed Kennedy" and finally by Oliver Stone's movie JFK, which pointed fingers everywhere and remains the public's main source of "information" on the greatest unsolved American crime of modern times. Much more recently there was even a special program asserting that a Secret Service agent in the motorcade may have accidentally(?) killed the President. Will we ever know for sure?

Joe was my best friend in high school. We were like brothers, shared many of the same classes, played on the school football team, worked on math homework together, played chess and double dated. The main difference between us was that everything came easy to Joe. He was a natural athlete, gifted chessman and math student and seemed to breeze through everything he ever tried. I, on the other hand, had to work--at everything. Our difference in natural abilities never created a rift between us or jealousy on my part, as I've always tried to learn from others and I definitely learned from Joe.

"Do you remember where you were when John F. Kennedy was shot?" they used to ask. Joe and I were in my high school civics class when it happened and I still remember kids crying as the news spread around the school. When the name Lee Harvey Oswald became part of the American lexicon, everyone asked the same question: "did Oswald act alone?" I didn't know what to think and there was only the Warren Commission to believe, but as time went on Joe and just about everybody we knew suspected a conspiracy. I, on the other hand, was initially satisfied with the Commission's report, but listening to Joe and all the assassination lore that was building up soon had me leaning toward conspiracies myself. Joe and I even did a presentation on the assassination for our civics class several months after the fact. We showed slides of Dealey Plaza, we quoted from the numerous magazine articles we found and rather than coming to conclusions, we asked questions. "You see here?" asked Joe, as he used a pointer to show various spots in the plaza. "This is Houston Street, and it offers a perfect shot from Oswald's sniper's window, so why did he wait till Kennedy's car turned the corner onto Elm Street and was going under trees full of leaves before getting off his first shot? Was he waiting until other snipers on Elm Street could get off shots at the same time as his? Why didn't police and Secret Service agents go through the Book Depository Building and every other building nearby before the motorcade came through? Why was the President being driven in an open convertible? And here's something we just learned: Lee Harvey Oswald was an ex-Marine who held security clearances, defected to the Soviet Union and then came back to the U.S. three years later. Why wasn't he arrested as a traitor? Who was protecting him? And who did he work for in Russia? Was it the KGB? Did he come back here still working for them? Were they behind the assassination of our president? Or could it have been the CIA? Kennedy threatened to smash them into a thousand pieces, you know. They were behind the whole Bay of Pigs fiasco, making Kennedy look bad when he refused to support their invasion of Cuba. Kennedy and the CIA hated each other--think about that!" The class left everyone talking among themselves, asking the same questions we did. The teacher thanked us heartily for our presentation.

Joe wanted answers, so he started reading the assassination-related books that came out one after another, like candies from a Pez dispenser: Rush to Judgement, Six Seconds in Dallas, and later on many more. I, on the other hand, relied on his input and what I saw on the TV news or the occasional magazine article for information. There seemed to be a conspiracy to suit every taste, but a mob hit seemed most likely to both of us. We were afraid to imagine the Soviets did it, as we'd come close enough to nuclear war during the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 and no one wanted to face that scenario again.

Joe tried to make the facts clear to me: "Look, the magic bullet theory--that's the key to the whole thing. Governor Connally was sitting directly in front of JFK, right? That means a bullet coming from above and to the right couldn't have hit both men, because that would have required the bullet to turn right after hitting Kennedy, and bullets go straight, so another shooter had to be involved. Oswald missed with his first shot--we know that much and his second bullet would have gone through Kennedy's body and then had to stop in mid-air and turn right to hit Connally. That's how they know there was a conspiracy. One bullet couldn't do that! Could it?" Like just about everyone else who ever pondered the question, I didn't have an answer.

JFK began to recede into memory as we finished high school. Joe and I both went to George Mason University in Virginia and though we weren't roommates we might as well have been; we shared the same dormitory building and hung out together as we had in high school, we were in the same fraternity and even our girlfriends became close because of our friendship. In 1967 we read about New Orleans district attorney Jim Garrison, who put New Orleans businessman Clay Shaw on trial for JFK's murder and strongly implied the CIA was involved. We were excited and thought we'd finally get some answers, but Shaw was acquitted, the F.B.I was forced to release the bizarre characters implicated in their investigation with an apology and that was that. It seems the only reason Shaw was implicated was that Oswald had handed out leaflets with the address "544 Camp Street" stamped on them, the address of an associate of Shaw's. Oswald never rented an office at this location and no doubt only used that address to make his leaflets (for the Fair Play for Cuba Committee) look "official." Joe had wanted to travel to New Orleans to catch the last couple days of Shaw's trial and even bring our girlfriends with us, but our plans fell apart, Joe ended up transferring to M.I.T. and all our questions and suspicions remained just that. Not long after he transferred, I called him and arranged a visit to M.I.T. with my girlfriend Julie. He'd just started dating his future wife and the four of us would tour the school then go out for dinner. Julie and I met Joe and Kim at the edge of the campus then proceeded to walk around. It wasn't exactly what I expected; two quadrangles with imposing buildings, the rest like any other part of busy downtown Cambridge. Maybe I expected a University of Maryland at College Park, with its huge grassy expanses and far-flung Georgian-architecture lecture halls, or maybe a Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore; red-brick-with-white-marble buildings grouped in enclaves and bordered by walkways and exotic trees, with quadrangles between and around the buildings--a place so big and attractive it's used in movies to stand in for Harvard and other campuses.

Over dinner I tried to keep our conversation centered around common topics like pop music, the classes we were taking, our plans for the future, things like that because I hadn't heard anything new about the JFK case in a while and didn't want to drag the girls into a one of those never-ending arguments about a case that just wouldn't go away and seemingly couldn't be solved. My efforts were in vain.as Joe butted in.

"You keeping up with our favorite case?" asked Joe, looking directly at me.

Julie looked at me like "Here we go again." I winced as subtly as I could, so as not to offend Joe.

"Everybody's heard of the pristine bullet, right?" asked Joe.

We all nodded.

"How could a bullet go through two men and come out pristine," he said, looking like the cat who just ate the canary, like he'd just discovered something nobody else had thought of.

Nobody said anything, which obviously annoyed him. "You guys have no opinion? Hah? Or maybe you just don't care who killed our President."

The three of us looked uncomfortable as Joe's gaze shifted around the table.

He wouldn't let it go: "Hah? … Hah?"

I felt I had to say something. "I think we just haven't heard anything new about it, Joe, so nobody knows what to say. As far as the pristine bullet … I've never seen a picture of it. Has anybody?"

That seemed to stop Joe is his tracks and the discussion ended there. Julie and I stayed in a nearby motel that night and we went back to Virginia the next day without seeing Joe or Kim.

The next few years went by uneventfully. I graduated and got a job as junior editor at a magazine. Joe breezed through M.I.T. the way he had everything else in his life; he earned a B.S. and then a master's in political science and had finished his doctoral dissertation when the Joe Marshall express was unexpectedly derailed. His advisor refused to accept his dissertation without giving what Joe considered a satisfactory explanation. Joe assumed the advisor was jealous of him and his outstanding work and he registered a formal protest, but fighting a tenured professor and department head is a losing battle in the academic world. He never got his doctorate, left M.I.T. and found a job teaching in a community college, which he seemed to enjoy. He married Kim and within a year they had a young son, but he still spent his off-hours pursuing the Kennedy case, though there had been little to pursue for years except the occasional magazine article or book, which he devoured like a sponge absorbing a small spill of water. We stayed in touch with phone calls and occasional visits over the years but we weren't as close as before. I was starting my second career as a high school English teacher in 1976 when I got a call from him.

No sooner had I said "Hello" when he chimed in with "This time there's official verification, buddy--the House Select Committee on Assassinations found that a conspiracy was not only possible but likely. A police motorcycle in JFK's motorcade had a microphone that picked up the sounds from Dealey Plaza and broadcast them back to police headquarters, where they got recorded. They picked up the sounds of gunshots, buddy."

"Is that what they picked up?" said I, trying to sound keenly interested, even though I hadn't really followed assassination lore in a while. I did, however watch the news on TV and had heard about the House Select Committee hearings. "I heard the recording has nothing but static on it."

"Aha!" pounced Joe. "These acoustics expert guys analyzed the recording and say their equipment picked up the sound of a fourth gunshot--a fourth gunshot!"

Once again, I tried to sound interested "Fourth gunshot, eh?" was my brilliant rejoinder.

Joe continued: "That spells conspiracy! Just verifies what the public thinks anyway."

Eventually the House Committee's "evidence" was discredited, though we never got the full story why and the investigation faded into obscurity. I remember thinking to myself back then "Almost fifteen years after the assassination and no real proof of anything." I became glum at the prospect that no answer was ever going to be found and had gradually given up on conspiracy theories and was left with the conclusion that Oswald had acted alone. Not surprisingly, another rash of books gushed forth, due to the House Committee's investigation, inconclusive though it had been.

As a high school teacher, I discussed the case with my classes, who seemed very interested for people who were tots when JFK was president. The students were nearly unanimous in their belief in a conspiracy of some sort and many seemed to have "fun" wading through the various possibilities: the mafia, the Russian government, the CIA and so forth. At least it kept them interested, but I was afraid we'd lost the meaning of the crime and its impact on our country. Hopes of a solution to the case had dimmed over the years, as the public gradually seemed to lose interest. Over time Julie and I had a son and I started a third career as a free-lance writer. As my son grew up, he would ask about my bookcase full of JFK lore and I gave him tidbits of information I thought he could handle.

In early 1988 Joe suffered what must have been the second great tragedy of his life--the first being when he had his doctoral dissertation rejected--when a car accident badly damaged his legs, making it difficult for him to walk and putting him on crutches. Nearly a year of physical therapy restored much of his mobility and he was just using a cane by late in the year. There were only two of us in my home now, for my marriage hadn't survived the 1980's. At first Julie got custody but then she got sick and Bobby came to live with me. I felt having him around may have saved me, for I wasn't ready to get married again and couldn't bear to live alone. One night Joe called and invited me and Bobby to come and visit. We arrived on a Friday night late in October and the subject of JFK was given new life for us as Joe turned on the TV for a special program called The Men Who Killed Kennedy. This show looked at several of the conspiracy theories that abounded at the time and we watched fascinated as one "eye witness" after another claimed to have seen suspicious characters running from the grassy knoll, muzzle flashes and puffs of smoke on said knoll and a man dressed as a railroad employee, who, they said, disassembled a rifle right after the shooting, put it in some sort of tool box and walked away along the railroad tracks. Another such witness said he was a soldier and was standing on the knoll in uniform when he heard gunfire close behind him and a bullet, in effect "whistling past his ear." Joe was elated, for at last people "in the know" were coming forward after years of staying undercover, no doubt for fear of retaliation from the conspirators. Indeed, the show presented an alarming story about the unusual number of deaths of witnesses or others in a position to know the truth. I suddenly understood why many hadn't come forward before.

The following evening we watched the second episode of The Men Who Killed Kennedy and waded through the welter of conspiracy theories once again, as bells tolled in the background at the end. This special turned Bobby into a dedicated conspiracy buff like Joe. Bobby favored the mob theory, while I, as usual, wasn't sure who to blame. By now Joe was feeling well enough for a trip to Dealey Plaza for the 25th anniversary of the assassination and he suggested our two families go together. I told him I'd have to think about it, but not long after Bobby and I left Joe's we'd decided to go and I called Joe immediately after we got home.

"This is Heaven, God speaking," was how he answered the phone.

I offered "Say buddy," my usual greeting.

"Don't want what you're selling, and besides, I don't talk to bums," was his response, as we both laughed.

"Bobby and I decided to take you up on your offer. We want to go to Dealey Plaza. The trip will do us all good."

"You're right, buddy--it will."

We agreed to make travel arrangements the following week.

Bobby was outside when I spoke to Joe and when he came in I said "I just called Joe."

"What did you call him?"

I told him we were going to Dallas and he seemed elated.

We all arranged for a 3-day trip for the five of us. We'd be leaving on a Thursday night so we could be there at noon on Friday for the anniversary of the assassination and so Bobby would only miss one day of school, something his principal didn't seem to mind at all, once I explained the purpose of the trip. The principal even extorted a promise from me to have Bobby speak to several classes about the trip and what he'd learned about JFK's assassination.

The morning of November 22, 1988 we walked down Dealey Plaza on the 25th anniversary of the assassination. There were chills going up and down my spine and Bobby said he could feel a sort of presence there, almost like a spirit that wouldn't let go of this important place. We walked around the plaza and tried to visit the infamous sniper's nest where Lee Oswald fired the fatal shots but as soon as we entered the Schoolbook Depository Building, we were told the top two floors were empty, so we left and continued our tour of the plaza, including the knoll, concrete barricade, the wooden fence beside it and the concrete stoop atop which Abraham Zapruder stood as he shot his famous 8-millimeter movie of the motorcade and the assassination.

Joe pondered the spot and said "Imagine, the assassination of a U.S. President in broad daylight, in front of thousands of people, yet without that home movie camera we still would have no idea what really happened here," a sentiment that would soon be echoed in a movie about the assassination and its aftermath. Finally, the hour of noon approached and we planted ourselves on the grassy knoll, along with what Bill Kurtis, who hosted The Men Who Killed Kennedy program called "a somewhat macabre little crowd." Such a group meets there every year to commemorate the fallen president's death and there were more of them here for the anniversary. We joined in a quiet prayer and bowed our heads for a few moments of silence as we tried to relive in our minds what had transpired there twenty-five years earlier, to the exact moment. It truly felt like a funeral, even a religious experience and afterwards we quietly and somberly exchanged words with others who'd come to honor JFK's memory.

I thought our trip to Dallas was the ultimate experience for a confirmed conspiracy buff, but my smugness was upended by the release of Oliver Stone's JFK in 1991. Joe and Kim came to visit and view the first matinee performance with Bobby and I at the Uptown Theatre in Washington, D.C. We noted the TV reporters outside, who asked people leaving the theatre who they thought killed President Kennedy. Having been "informed" by the Investigative Reports special, we were both tempted to blurt out the name of the Corsican for-hire killer named in The Men Who Killed Kennedy, but the reporters never asked us. Nevertheless, people were talking about JFK again and long after the Warren Commission and the House Select Committee made their reports, the public had a third and far more accusatory explanation for the murder. This time the entire government had a hand in it, as JFK cast aspersions on the intelligence agencies, JFK's Vice President Lyndon Baines Johnson, the military, the anti-Castro Cubans and seemed to implicate the mob and nearly every government agency and private individual who couldn't prove they were elsewhere at the time of the assassination. Bobby loved the movie's "explanation" and conspiracy theories seemed to be as thick in the air as flies in a cow pasture in July. The Men Who Killed Kennedy had turned me once again into something of a conspiracy buff, but Oliver Stone's movie hardened my convictions and turned me into a dedicated one. Soon after watching the movie, I was buttonholing people and peppering them with questions and statements like "Do you know what we have here?" and "It's more than twenty-five years later and we still don't have an answer!" Joe was still a conspiracy buff, but his accident seemed to have slowed him down a bit and the fire was out of him, so to speak. I guess I took over where he left off as the JFK assassination fanatic.

The thing about JFK conspiracy theories is that there's one for everybody, like a big menu where you pick your favorite dish and it's served up to order. One theory The Men Who Killed Kennedy harped on and which was rehashed by the movie JFK, says New Orleans mob boss Carlos Marcello, deported by JFK's Attorney General Bobby Kennedy, decided to pay Bobby back by eliminating his brother, the President. If you like your theories tinged with Cuban communism then you can believe that anti-Castro Cuban exiles and American patriots who supported them killed Kennedy for letting them down at the Bay of Pigs when he refused to give them the logistical and financial support they needed for what they hoped would be a successful invasion of Cuba. Then there's the Soviet conspiracy: apparently President Lyndon Johnson was so paranoid of finding the U.S.S.R. involved that he even put a sort of lid on the Warren Commission, asking them to hurry up with its report and not to peer too deeply into that dark possibility, one Johnson feared could lead us into World War III. Then there's the theory about the Corsicans, which came from a French prisoner in a U.S. prison, who desperately wanted to be sent home to France and who sensed a tremendous appetite on the part of U.S. officials for information related to the JFK assassination, so he supplied the name of a Corsican killer-for-hire, who, he claimed, was recruited by the afore-mentioned Carlos Marcello to punish the Kennedys by killing the President.

If you like your conspiracies far-fetched then there's one that either the North or South Vietnamese government had JFK killed and the best of all is the one about shipping magnate Aristotle Onassis having the job done so he could marry JFK's wife Jackie. Perhaps my favorite scuttlebutt is contained in books by two Baltimore authors, who purported that during JFK's term as President the United States was secretly being run by a cadre of Senators, high-ranking military officers and wealthy industrialists, making the rest of the government, including the President, the Congress and the Supreme Court, superfluous. Of course, such speculation didn't invalidate the real conspiracy, the one that actually killed the president, according to such authors. Indeed, as I watched The Men Who Killed Kennedy again, I had to fight back a tear as bells tolled in the background and the "dean of JFK conspiracy researchers," Harold Weisberg, solemnly declared that on that awful day in Dallas "the system failed at all levels."

Several more years went by and nothing much happened in my life, except that Bobby was growing rapidly, I was still writing for a living and I was still a conspiracy buff.

One evening I picked up On the Trail of the Assassins and others like it in my "assassination book case" and noted that none of these books had ever shown any real evidence of anything but their author's imaginations. They relied instead on supposition, rumor and like Jim Garrison, they relied on the unsubstantiated tales of "key witnesses" who seemed to give a whole new meaning to the word "flake." It occurred to me that since my younger days I'd never even considered if Lee Harvey Oswald was the lone assassin. I had simply taken other people's word for it that there had to be a conspiracy, but was there? I leafed through my books for a couple of hours and when I was done Bobby was already in bed. He turned in early and I guessed he didn't want to disturb me by saying "Good night" on an evening when I'd been so upset by my lousy dinner date that I'd totally ignored him. I looked in the kitchen and noticed a box on the table, one Bobby had brought in with the mail. I tore it open and inside was a book about the JFK case, one I hadn't seen before. It was sent by an old friend I hadn't talked to in a while.

"Just what I need, another one of these things," I thought as I picked it up and started to throw it in the trash. Before I could, however, a note slipped out of the box.

It read "Hey ol' buddy--read this and you'll never buy another conspiracy book or video. Joe. By the way, it's called 'Case Closed' for a good reason."

"A little pretentious of him" I thought, followed by "How's he know what I'm going to buy?" I decided to hold up on ditching the book and instead carried it to my easy chair. I started reading and before I knew it I'd pored through over 200 pages on the sad story of Lee Harvey Oswald: the disturbed 12-year-old the authorities wanted to put away in New York; the U.S. Marine who proved to be an ace with a bolt-action rifle and who studied Russian to the point where his fellow Marines called him "Ivan;" the self-described political assassin who tried to kill retired general Edwin Walker with the rifle he later used at Dealey Plaza; the political anarchist and malcontent who rejected capitalism, then Russian communism and more recently tried to emigrate to Cuba and "true Marxism;" the loner who couldn't get along with his own wife and child; the assassin and fugitive who murdered Dallas police officer J.D. Tippet with a revolver soon after he killed JFK. After all these years I finally understood why Oswald made the perfect assassin, why no one would trust an unstable nut like him to be part of a conspiracy (or anything else, for that matter) and why the shooting of JFK was simply a crime of opportunity, as Kennedy's planners had fatefully routed the president in an open convertible right in front of the building where Oswald worked. The government had made it easy for Oswald; no one in the secret service, the FBI or the local police bothered to check any of the buildings or open windows in Dealey Plaza either before or during the time the motorcade went by.

I kept reading and the book delved into another strange life, that of Jack Ruby, another wack job who beat people up with his fists, typically carried a loaded gun and who actually thought killing Oswald made him a hero. As for Ruby being part of a mob-planned conspiracy to silence Oswald, that turned out to be another absurdity, for an acquaintance from Ruby's early days in Chicago revealed that the mob would have nothing to do with a "meshuggah" and blabber-mouth who "wasn't playing with a full deck" and who couldn't keep his mouth shut about anything, including mafia doings. As with Oswald, Ruby's crime seems to be one of opportunity rather than planning, as he had ample opportunity to shoot Oswald that weekend in the Dallas police station, where they were in close proximity several times. Interestingly, Ruby spent considerable time at the Western Union office on Sunday morning just before shooting Oswald, something no one who was planning an assassination would do. In fact, if Oswald hadn't asked for a change of clothes he would have been in the armored car and away before Ruby even got there. It seems likely that Ruby wasn't planning to kill Oswald at all and only when Oswald walked toward him with a perceived smirk on his face did Ruby "lose it," pull out his gun and fire. Ruby dearly loved his Dachshund Sheba and he took the dog with him to the Western Union office and left her in the car when he made his fateful walk down the ramp and into the basement of the police station where he shot Oswald. It makes no sense that a man who was planning a killing would bring his prized dog along, make no provision for her and simply leave her in the car, knowing he'd be arrested on the spot and wouldn't return.

I looked up at the clock; it was after 3:00 AM and I wasn't even tired, so I kept reading. Next in line for debunking was Jim Garrison, who wasn't quite the hero the movie JFK made him out to be. Dismissed from the National Guard for what doctors called a "severe and disabling psychoneurosis," he made a career of bringing sensational but baseless cases to court. As D.A. in New Orleans he attacked in turn the nightclub owners, the police and even the judges of New Orleans without ever a conviction. As for the magnificent courtroom speech Kevin Costner delivered so eloquently in JFK, Garrison never gave that speech, which was the product of the movie's screenwriter. Apparently, Garrison had a desperate need to be important and to be the center of attention. It occurred to me that was also Oswald's problem, though he expressed his need very differently. As for Garrison's indictment of the unfortunate Clay Shaw, the entire case was built around the stories of a well-known liar. Anyone who knew Garrison must have anticipated the inevitable result of the Shaw trial: once again no conviction because once again the case was baseless.

As for the "Corsican Connection," the book explained that all the supposed French killers were either in the French army or in prison when JFK was killed. The French prisoner in the American jail alluded to earlier was simply trying to secure his release from prison, so he made up a more-or-less plausible-sounding story about mobster Carlos Marcello hiring French killers to shoot Kennedy. This prisoner was encouraged to create such a story because he knew U.S. officials were desperate for any "information" relevant to a JFK assassination conspiracy, bogus or not. Next in the line of fire were authors of the "standard texts" on the case, all of whom, apparently were taken in by various spurious sources and unreliable "witnesses." Said authors proceeded to build conspiracy theories and write entire books based around the fanciful tales they were told or fabricated themselves. Many of the writers seemed to resemble Jim Garrison in this regard.

As I read "Case Closed" through the night, I couldn't put this book down and I pictured the author as a sharpshooter of the Old West, using his Colt-45 to knock down the busts of established JFK assassination authors, questionable witnesses and bogus experts of every stripe. His aim was deadly and I wished his book had been available twenty-five years earlier. Finally, I got to the most fascinating part, labeled "Appendix A." This is where the so-called "pristine bullet," from Oswald's second shot, the one that went through JFK's neck and then into Texas Governor John Connally, is shown to be not pristine at all but severely flattened. Next, Oswald's rifle and its capabilities were examined, along with all the bullets and their trajectories. The true positions of Kennedy and Governor Connally in their limousine were shown to be very different from what conspiracy theories had always posited, making a "magic bullet" unnecessary, as it was a straight shot from Oswald's sniper's perch to JFK's upper back and then into Governor Connally. Every event of the assassination was matched frame-by-frame with the famous 8-millimeter film of the motorcade taken by Abraham Zapruder. Lastly, all those "Mystery deaths" of supposed witnesses were taken up in Appendix B and shown to be ordinary deaths, not part of a vast conspiracy to silence anyone who "knew something." As I sat there, I recalled the Bible quote from John 8:32--"And the truth shall set you free."

When I finally put the book down and looked at the clock it was 6:30 in the morning and it was the first time I'd stayed up all night reading in my life. Everything I'd been told about the JFK case had been debunked in one night and I felt like I'd just been released from thirty years of misinformation, paranoia and the money-grubbing greed of all those who sought to make a buck off the shooting of a President. Hell, the previous year I'd even met Jean Hill, the more-or-less-famous "lady in the red raincoat" from JFK's motorcade--without her red raincoat--in a Baltimore mall, where she came to hawk her latest book. It suggested that President-to-be Lyndon Johnson was bent over in his limousine at Dealey Plaza, ducking the fusillade of bullets he expected to start at any second. This was Hill's version of Kevin Costner's "coup d'état, with Lyndon Johnson waiting in the wings" remarks from his courtroom speech in the movie "JFK." To my chagrin, I'd bought Jean Hill's book, which turned out to be yet another collection of supposition and imagination, with nothing to back it up.

"The truth is out there," she'd told me straight-faced, as I looked her in the eye and handed over my money.

I've had to ask myself many times: "Why do so many people insist there was a conspiracy to kill JFK, when there's never been a shred of proof?" It was the mob, they insist, forgetting that mobsters have been ratting on each other and their parent organization, the Mafia, for ages and yet not a one of them has ever come forward with any useful or believable information that organized crime had anything to do with JFK's death. No U.S. government agency, foreign government, private individual (other than Oswald) or other entity has ever been credibly tied to the assassination, so why do people believe what they do? I firmly believe what some of the videos and books tell us, that people just don't want to accept the fact that a loser with a gun is all it takes to kill someone, even the President of the United States. They need a balance: The powerful President of a great nation vs. a vast and powerful organization, or if you will permit me, the example used in the Beyond Conspiracy program, the Holocaust: the greatest crime, committed by the greatest criminals--the Nazis. People just don't want to hear that a "wretched waif" like Oswald could do so much harm all by himself.

Years after reading the above-mentioned book I was watching the History Channel when a special program on the assassination came on. This wasn't another conspiracy-oriented The Men Who Killed Kennedy, but its polar opposite and it was called The Kennedy Assassination:--Beyond Conspiracy and showed how Officer H.B. McLain's motorcycle (whose microphone transmitted the sounds from Dealey Plaza back to police headquarters) was nowhere near the key location specified by the House Select Committee on Assassinations in 1976, completely invalidating its acoustics "evidence" and its conclusions about a conspiracy. In other words, more JFK lore had just been shown to be total bunk. The video shows with computer animations the exact positions of Kennedy and Connally from every possible angle and matches every movement they made with the Zapruder film, which makes it apparent that Oswald had a full 8.6 seconds (or even longer) to get off his 3 shots--no problem for a skilled ex-Marine, trained to be a marksman with a bolt-action rifle. That begs a key question: Was Oswald really such an able shooter? The video shows the score cards from Oswald's target practice when he was a U.S. Marine. During rapid-fire shooting sessions he scored 48 out of a possible 50 points one day and 49 out of 50 the next day at a target 200 yards away with an open-sight, bolt-action rifle like the one he used at Dealey Plaza. Apparently, he wasn't just very good, he was consistent. By the way, the exact distance from his sniper's nest to JFK's car when the fatal shot was made was only 88 yards and he had a magnifying scope sight on his rifle for the assassination, something he didn't have as a marine. The standard claim that conspiracy buffs make that Oswald "couldn't shoot" is belied by the records. Furthermore, recent examinations of the case place the first shot much earlier than previously imagined, meaning he likely had over 11 seconds to get off his 3 shots.

It seems odd that revealing information on the JFK case seems to come at 10-year intervals. Case Closed came out in 1993, "…Beyond Conspiracy" came out in 2003 and when 2013 rolled around guess what happened? A new theory about the assassination! How did you guess? This new one isn't a conspiracy, though. In fact, it harkens back to the lone gunman theory, but this time the shooting was an accident. In 2013 a TV special called JFK: The Smoking Gun aired on TV and presents Secret Service agent James Hickey, riding in the car immediately behind the presidential limousine, who purportedly picked up the loaded AR15 assault rifle at his feet immediately after the shooting started, intending to return fire. Instead the President's car briefly stopped (a fact still being debated today) and then accelerated, along with the secret service car, apparently jolting agent Hickey, whose itchy trigger finger got off the accidental shot that hit the President in the back of the head. The video tells us the trajectory of Hickey's alleged bullet fits the President's head wounds much better than a shot coming from above and to the right, as Oswald's bullets did. How about that fourth shot, coming from Hickey's gun? Does that mean that Oswald never got off that famous third shot? If there were four shots wouldn't that have been widely reported?

So, what are we to make of this latest bit of assassination lore? Could it have happened? I'm in no position to say it couldn't, but there doesn't seem to be a shred of proof, only the anecdotal evidence of witnesses who say they smelled the smoke from Hickey's AR15 and so on. My patience with the entire matter has about reached an end after all these years and if any more information or speculation comes out about the case I will try to listen with an open mind, but I won't let myself get all jacked-up about it. I've put in my time, paid my dues, done my duty as a patriot, so to speak and wish future JFK assassination researchers well. After all these years I can't imagine this case ever being "solved" for certain.

I'm getting to be an "old man" now and it's going on 60 years since JFK was murdered. I'm still doing free-lance as well as technical writing and I've branched out to write for local newspapers and even a couple of national magazines. I've remarried, Bobby has his own little boy and his wife's got a "bun in the oven." He lives nearby, we're very close and I'm really glad I spent so much time with him when he was growing up. That's something my own father never had time for, or maybe just never cared to do. It only recently dawned on me that could be why I sort of "adopted" JFK when he was President and felt such a loss when he was gone. I must have seen him as a sort of substitute father, however remote, as I barely knew my own. That seems to be a common symptom today--people latched onto Princess Diana, JFK Jr. and other celebrities, who become a surrogate family, distant people they never knew. Maybe that's why millions doted on a TV sitcom in the 1990's, about five gen-x-ers (gen-y-ers?) whose only apparent "family" is themselves. Hey, who needs a family when you've got "Friends?" As for me, I'm glad I've got a real family and I don't need a surrogate anymore. I'll never forget the night I stayed up reading Case Closed by Gerald Posner and if I ever meet him, I'd like to shake his hand; he allowed me to finally put JFK to rest in my own mind, after so many years of believing the paranoia of those who prefer chasing ghosts on the grassy knoll to the facts. Now that I think I finally know the truth, and as the Bible pointed out so long ago, somehow knowing it I feel free.

Oh, one more thing; no doubt you're wondering about Joe. He's OK, we talk once in a while and his family came to visit us a while back. He's even more disinterested in the JFK case than I am now. We're like two flames which burned brightly then blew out. Maybe not quite like the "eternal flame" at JFK's grave but nevertheless we burned for awhile.

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Doug Dawson has written for the U.S. Defense Department and for car and trade magazines and has had his short stories published by Academy of the Heart & Mind, Ariel Chart, Aphelion Webzine, Literary Yard, Scars Publications, The Scarlet Leaf Review and many others and are included in the print anthologies The Devil’s Doorknob II and Potato Soup Journal’s 'Best Stories of 2022'. His book Route 66 – the TV Series, the Highway and the Corvette will be published by BearManor Media in 2024.