Its been 50 years and you can still hear the shots.
One
Two
Three
And Americas 35th President was dead, shot right in front of his wife and a smattering of Texans on a section of a motorcade route that even the local police didnt think was going to merit much effort to control.
Even if you werent born yet (and I wasnt), you still feel the horror, the outrage. One minute, John F. Kennedy is waving to the crowd, smiling on a day when the skies had cleared and he was just on his way from one speaking engagement to the next.
Then the shots, the screams, the panic – all captured on a not-quite-focused film shot by a local garment merchant. The countrys First Lady climbs onto the cars trunk, ostensibly to recover a piece of her husbands skull.
Its been 50 years and its still all too much to bear, just the thought of it.
The Kennedy Assassination is an American tragedy, the turning point in 20th century American history. We were never quite the same afterwards. We were lost and rudderless, mired in war and cynicism, missing our innocence and knowing we, as a country, would never be the same again.
Why?
Because some aggravated, whiny little failure of a man with a chip on his shoulder and a rifle in his hands took the life of the most powerful man in the world.
How does that even make sense?
Fifty years later, the answer is still the same: the world is sometimes a senseless place. We have tried for years to craft the perfect conspiracy theory – the CIA did it, the Mafia did it, Castro did it. The list of suspects seemed endless, each theory more and more outrageous. But somehow, it made us collectively feel better. We could assuage our grief by making this murder a political fiasco, the work of many individuals – carefully crafted and carried out.
Its much more comforting to buy the conspiracy theories than it is to face the truth. That truth: that one crazy man, desperate for attention, could take as rifle into his place of employment and then use it to shoot the President of the United States. Lee Harvey Oswald, with the same addled, narcissistic personality that has spurred assassins from Booth to Sirhan to Hinckley to Chapman. And like Booth, Oswald shot a leader, in a crowded public place, as he sat next to his wife. Both were foiled by their own slipshod escape plans.
And both died to secure their place in history. Just a couple of crazy men, buoyed by serendipity and their own so-crazy-it-might-just-work plans.
Fifty years later, no one has come forward with any first-hand evidence of a conspiracy. Could it be everyone involved has made it through a half-century without saying a word? Could it be that the planets best investigative journalists, investigators and modern technology have not been able to band together to for once and for all solve this mystery?
Could it be because this mystery is no mystery at all?
If we believe Oswald acted alone to kill John Kennedy, how can we believe anyone is safe? How can we feel safe? How can we ever believe it wont happen again?
It did happen again and again, and again, and again.
Fifty years later, the world is still a scary place.
