On November 22 1963, President John F. Kennedy was driving in his motorcade through the Dealey Plaza in Dallas. He was with his wife, Jackie, Texas Governor John Conally and Conally’s wife. All of a sudden shots filled the air as the 35th president of the United States was shot and later pronounced dead.
I have a particular interest in JFK, specifically his assasination. This goes back to my mom and I watching a movie together. This movie, titled JFK, follows an investigation of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy led by New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison, played by Kevin Costner. Garrison begins to doubt the official claim on the murder. Throughout the movie he finds evidence of a greater conspiracy behind Kennedy’s death. This movie was fascinating and really drove my passion towards the subject. It turns out there are various possibilities for who was responsible for JFK’s death. Some believe the findings of the official investigation by the Warren Commission; some say that it was the government who was responsible; others theorize that there was another gunman aside from the alleged killer, Lee Harvey Oswald. According to a Gallup poll from October 2023, 65 percent of Americans think that Kennedy’s assasination involved a conspiracy
The official claim of the Warren Commission, the President’s Commission on the Assassination of President Kennedy, was that Lee Harvey Oswald shot JFK from a sixth floor window of the Texas School Book Depository. The Warren Commission said that Oswald acted alone, concluding that the governments of the Soviet Union, , Cuba, and the U.S. were not involved in the assasination. Although the Warren Commission stated that “scientific acoustical evidence establishes a high probability that two gunmen fired at President John F. Kennedy,” they also confirmed that “other scientific evidence… negates some specific conspiracy allegations.” The investigation closed on the stand that the president was assassinated by Lee Harvey Oswald, acting alone. Even though the case was closed, theories still circulated in people’s minds.
One theory that has been explored the most is the possibility of another gunman. Over the past 60 years, research has zeroed in on the type of gun that Lee Harvey Oswald used. Creator Jeb Clark has a YouTube channel focused on different guns. He posted a video of him using the same exact type of gun used by Lee Harvey Oswald. In this video he cocks the gun, aims, and fires. He takes five seconds to reload and another 9 seconds to shoot for the second time. Witness testimonies recall hearing two shots bunched together and then a third, fatal, shot. (Clark’s simulation puts into doubt the conclusion that it could be a single gynman).
Another piece that supports the theory that there were multiple shooters is the infamous grassy knoll. The grassy knoll was in front and to the right of the president when he was fatally shot. Witness Sam Holland, a signal supervisor for the Union Terminal Company who watched the motorcade from the top of an underpass, recounted seeing the president “slumped over.” But then Holland looked towards the arcade and trees and saw a puff of smoke. He solidified that the puff of smoke he saw “definitely came from behind the arcade [situated behind the grassy knoll] through the trees.” This would confirm that a second shot had been fired from a different location than the first.
Another famous piece of the JFK assasination is the “single bullet theory.” This was an official explanation clarifying how it would be possible that three shots were fired. The first bullet fired at Kennedy reportedly missed, but the second was what some call “magic.” The theory states that the bullet entered Kennedy’s upper back, exiting just under his Adam’s apple. The bullet then struck Governor Connally, entering on the right side of his back. The bullet then traveled downward through the right side of his chest, exiting below his right nipple. This bullet then passed through his right wrist and entered his left thigh, where it embedded. Knott Laboratory simulated the shooting of Kennedy with a “digital twin” to see if the bullet lined up. According to WHSV, “They then took the infamous Zapruder film that has the clearest video of when John F. Kennedy was shot and matched it to their point cloud. Everything was matching up perfectly until the Texas governor was shot too, reportedly by the bullet that went through the president first.” This is what people call the magic bullet.
According to Stanley Stoll, CEO of Knott Laboratory, the investigation shows that the wounds don’t align with one bullet. “Governor Connally, his wound is sitting 6-10 inches toward the outside of the vehicle….You have to slide Governor Connally to the inside of the vehicle; you have to slide him to the left to get that alignment.” In the same report from WHSV they interviewed Sammy “The Bull” Gravano, a government informant for the mafia, who said, “I know what it is to kill someone… You don’t bounce and come [backwards]. When you bounce and come [backwards] you got hit in the front with a bullet.”
Fifty years after the assasination of JFK, this event remains a defining moment in American history. Various theories remain about the assasination of JFK, and many facts are still unknown. People still research this event and the conspiracies that surround it. Will we ever really know the truth about the assasination? Only time will tell.
