The JFK Assassination: Your Theories Please

Okay I spent all of yesterday remembering two tragedies–one cruel and profound, one trivial and yet still hurtful: the JFK assassination and the 1968 Harvard Yale Game now immortalized in a film . I still can’t understand–or get over–either.

it seems I’ve spent a lifetime immersed in the former. Ever since as a high-school kid I heard Mark Lane lecture–I know much discredited. Then at Yale I had a philosophy professor who represented the respectable side of dissent–Josiah Thompson, who authored Six Seconds in Dallas as well as a brilliant work on Kirkegaard The Golden Labyrinth.

For two decades I was a conspiracy believer, then I came to believe that Oswald fired alone, although he may not have acted alone. That is, he may have been aided or encouraged by others. I thought the real unsolved mystery was Oswald’s motive.

I didn’t rule out the lone psychopath theory, but for a long time I leaned toward the Mob hit (or Mob plus Cuban exile hit) theory, which seemed almost over determined. Then recently I came to suspect the DGI, Cuban intelligence, in revenge for the assassintation plots that JFK and his brother were endlessly generating against Castro with the help of the CIA. (I never really took the CIA too seriously because they were so incredibly incompetent at EVERYTHING). Once I published (in Time magazine the name of the man Jim Garrison claimed fired the fatal shot, but I didn’t believe it for a moment, I think it was a name he just pulled out of his….hat. (a real person an employee of Jack Ruby’s strip club who, I made clear I believed was totally innocent) . And I still think Garrison didn’t know what he was talking about, but may have been right about the New Orleans connection.

Now the two massive books by Lamar Waldron and Thom Hartmann, most recently Legacy of Secrecy have me going back to the Mob hit theory although I just don’t buy their unnecessary post-assassination cover-up theory which involves a supposed coup against Castro. Like that was more shameful than the murder of a president. But they’ve done a service by digging up the deepest, darkest, most disturbing archival evidence to support their Mob hit theory.

Anyway, I’m interested: what do people think, those of you who still think about it? Some may say, who cares we’ll never know, it’s old news, but I’m not satisfied with that. Historical truth means a lot to me. At one point LBJ said nuclear war was at stake. I want to know if there was someone behind Oswald and why. It’s more important than how Yale could allow Harvard to score two touchdowns (and two two-point conversions) in 42 seconds–though I still can’t reconcile myself to that either.