The assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy, the 35th American President, took place on Friday November 22, 1963 in Dallas, Texas at 12:30 pm local time. Kennedy was mortally wounded as he and his wife, Jacqueline, drove down Elm Street in an open car.
The shots that killed Kennedy and wounded Connelly were believed to have been fired from the sixth floor of the school textbook warehouse. Three spent cartridges were found there. Kennedy's killer, according to authorities, was Lee Harvey Oswald, who served in the warehouse. He was able to slip out of the school sewer building. Half an hour later, he shot from a revolver the patrol officer Tippot, who was trying to detain him, and after another 50 minutes he was arrested in a nearby cinema.
November 24 - When Oswald was being questioned at the Dallas Police Department, he was shot and killed by Jack Ruby, a former nightclub owner. Ruby explained his actions with a desire to save Jacqueline Kennedy from additional painful experiences when she should have been present during Oswald's interrogations at the trial.
The assassination of Kennedy, and then his assassin, took place in front of many people, a large crowd that stood along the route of the presidential motorcade, millions of television viewers who watched Ruby's shot. And nevertheless, these murders turned out to be surrounded by an impenetrable veil of secrecy, all the more thick, since the question is constantly being debated: was there something hidden from the prying eyes in this bloody drama played out in front of the public?
The circumstances of the Kennedy assassination were described in more than two thousand books, in numerous newspaper and magazine articles in all languages of the world, and were the subject of television programs and films. The Russian reader is partly familiar with this mass of works about the events of November 22, 1963 (although it should be noted that the Soviet media at one time assigned the main place to the presentation of extreme, "extremist" versions, now documentary refuted and no longer taken into account in historiography).
Therefore, it will be possible for us here, absolutely without pretending to reveal the secrets of the conspiracy, if such a conspiracy actually existed, to focus all attention on the subject of our main interest - the emergence and development of different versions of the Dallas murders.
Warren Special Commission
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By order of Kennedy's successor, Lyndon Johnson, a special commission was formed to investigate the circumstances of Kennedy's assassination, headed by Chief Justice Warren. It included members of both houses of Congress, the director of the CIA and other authority figures. The commission, which worked for the entire first half of 1964, was able to interview 489 witnesses. The result of her activities was reflected in an 800-page report and published at the same time 26 volumes of protocols of interrogation of witnesses.
And yet, these results were met with hostility by many critics, who pointed to numerous blunders, to the commission's apparent desire to ignore important testimonies, even those reflected in its own materials, if they did not fit in with a biased conclusion about the murderer. alone.
The work of the commission clearly showed the desire to complete the work by the summer of 1964, when the presidential campaign began to gain momentum. (The Democratic nominee was Lyndon Johnson.) But critics went further, asking whether the mistakes and omissions of the investigators, the ignorance of important evidence and the one-sided conclusions in the final report of the commission lurked a desire to ward off the real organizers of the murder.
Was this goal, deliberately or unknowingly, pursued by the commission, which put forward a version of the lone killer that Oswald fired three times from a rifle with a telescopic sight purchased shortly before November 22 (he could no longer have enough time to reload the rifle to continue shooting at a rapidly moving away car).
For the sake of substantiating this statement, the testimonies of witnesses who heard shots not only from behind - from the warehouse, but also in front of the presidential car were not taken into account. In order to defend its version, the Warren Commission put forward the theory of the "miracle bullet". It was decided that the witnesses had mistakenly interpreted the echo of the first three shots as continuing to fire on the president's limousine.
The first bullet flew past the president's car, the second hit Kennedy, the third hit the already mortally wounded president again, then hit Connelly in the back and pierced his right wrist through the chest, injured his thigh, and it was she who was found on a stretcher in the hospital where they were the victims of the assassination attempt were delivered. To abandon the "miracle bullet" theory meant to admit that there were more than three shots and, as a result, more than one shooter.
1966 - New York attorney Mark Lane released the major Hasty Conviction, criticizing the Warren Commission's findings. Its total circulation in various publications exceeded one million copies. ED Epstein in the book “Inquiry. The Warren Commission and the Establishment of Truth (New York, 1966) cites the statements of the members of the Warren Commission interviewed by him, proving that they too had doubts about the correctness of their conclusions. The conclusion was that the commission was looking for "political", convenient for those in power, and not factual truth.
Possible errors of witnesses who recognized the suspected killer at the same time in different cities were turned into a theory of the existence of a double in the book of Professor Richard Popkin "The Second Oswald" (New York, 1967). Most of the first wave of critics tried to refute the conclusions of the Warren Commission, without putting forward their own versions of the Kennedy assassination. Although there were voices announcing that President Lyndon Johnson himself stood behind the assassins (after all, he benefited most from the president's death, which enabled him to become the owner of the White House) or literally randomly named "Wall Street tycoons."
"Critical" literature quickly became a lucrative branch of the book and magazine industry. And the subsequent events that took place during the presidencies of Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon increased the distrust of the official versions of the event as hiding important secrets and aiming to save high-ranking officials from well-deserved punishment.
Who killed Kennedy - Lee Harvey Oswald or..?
The first versions were formed on the basis of the answer to the question, Who killed Kennedy? Critics argued that Lee Oswald, against whom there was only circumstantial evidence, became the scapegoat because he was very suitable for the role of a front figure designed to hide the real killers and their masterminds (as he himself insisted after his arrest).
Marine Oswald, according to the testimony of almost everyone who knew him in the military, was a lousy marksman. His fellow Marine Sherman Cooley said in 1977: “If I had to choose the person to shoot me, I would choose Oswald. I saw him shoot, and in no way could he learn to shoot so well as to do what he is accused of. Even the Warren Commission stated that three hits in 5.5 seconds required intensive preparation. Where could Oswald manage to train so unnoticed by others?
While on military service in Japan, Oswald worked as an operator at a secret American naval base. September 1959 - He retired from the army under the pretext of having to look after his mother. By this time, as a result of diligent studies, he could speak Russian quite fluently.
After retiring, Oswald emigrated to the USSR. The Soviet authorities gave him a job in Minsk, where he married a Russian girl. When Oswald decided to return to his homeland, the State Department provided money for the trip. 1962 May - Oswald returned to America with his wife and little daughter. For some time he worked in New Orleans, and later moved to Dallas, where on October 15, 1963 he went to work as a school collector. There was a month and a week before Kennedy's assassination.
In New Orleans, Oswald created an organization with the goal of uniting supporters of renouncing hostility to the communist regime of Fidel Castro that was established in Cuba. At the same time, as it turned out later, Oswald maintained contacts with people who were sharply hostile against Castro and for the American armed intervention against Cuba.
Shortly before November 22, 1963, Oswald may have traveled to Mexico, where he visited the Soviet and Cuban consulates, demanding in a defiant tone the issuance of an exit visa. But was it Oswald? Consular officials after the assassination attempt, when photos of the killer filled the TV screen and newspaper strips, reported that they remembered Oswald's name, but did not recognize the person who introduced himself under this name in the published photos.
But there were plenty of people who claimed to have seen Oswald alone or accompanied by certain characters who were suspected of being involved in organizing the murder. American lawyer M. Eddaus published the book "The Oswald Dossier" in 1977 in New York, in which he argued that the former Marine did not return from the USSR, that a Soviet intelligence officer arrived in his place, who killed Kennedy.
The Warren Commission concealed the substitution to avoid World War III. Let's say, but what about the fact that the fingerprints of Oswald - a Marine and Oswald - an employee of a school collector in Dallas match? This happened as a result of the second substitution. Soviet agents fabricated the fingerprints of a man killed at the Dallas City Police Department to match Oswald's in the military archives. Eddaus promoted all this nonsense with such zeal that he achieved the exhumation of Oswald's body in 1981. New research has confirmed that this is the corpse of a former Marine. But even later, skeptics remained, asserting about the substitution of data, etc.
But, putting this nonsense aside, one should not forget that no one saw that it was Oswald who pulled the trigger on an Italian rifle, which he had ordered a few days before November 22 and which had his fingerprints on it. Three spent cartridges were found on the sixth floor of a school textbook warehouse, but where is the guarantee that they were not deliberately planted in order to knock the investigation off the right track? The Warren Commission determined that Oswald was in the building when the shots rang out. But was he on the sixth floor, where, according to eyewitnesses, the shots were fired? (Incidentally, the fact that shots rang out from this floor also cannot be considered a firmly established fact.)
The accounts of those who saw Oswald after the shots are contradictory. The secretary of the school sewer saw him almost immediately after the noise from the gunshots, when she was on the second floor in the cafeteria. The Warren Commission thought the secretary was wrong. Oswald himself stated after his arrest that he was having breakfast in the cafeteria at that time. Oswald was met about a minute and a half after the shots were fired by police officer M. L. Baker who burst into the sewer and the warehouse manager R. S. Truly, who had undertaken to accompany him to the sixth floor.
On the second floor, they ran into Oswald, who was carrying a bottle of Coca-Cola he had just bought. He walked slowly towards them and answered the feverishly asked questions to such an extent calmly that Baker and Truly did not suspect him of the murderer. The question arises: how did Oswald manage to descend from the sixth floor to the second? On the stairs? But the only witness who was on the stairs assured that he did not see anyone who would go down after the shots. And the elevators did not reach the second floor from above.
If these readings are accurate, Oswald could not have been on the sixth floor at the time of the murder. He left the building, he said, to change for his upcoming cinema visit. Before leaving, he talked calmly and politely with the secretary. He got home and changed, taking his revolver with him. About a mile from Oswald's house, Police Officer Tippot was killed by four bullets. Witnesses later identified Oswald as the killer, but they did it with difficulty. Other eyewitnesses even said that they saw two murderers …
Recommended for viewing: John F. Kennedy. Live Murder
E. Chernyak