On the 22nd, the 60th anniversary of the assassination of President Kennedy was commemorated in the city of Dallas, Texas. Despite the time that has passed and the fact that logically the group of people who remember what they were doing and where they were when they heard the tragic news is logically becoming smaller, this assassination continues to periodically gain relevance, if only because there is still documentation classified as secret by Washington.
For once, I will commit the mortal sin in journalism of writing in the first person singular, a sin, in any case, deserving of some indulgence considering that this chronicler's first article on the assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy appeared in the pages from La Vanguardia in November 1973, ten years after the terrible event. And then, as now, I maintained and continue to maintain the conviction that the official thesis on the assassination – the so-called Warren report – is riddled with errors, falsehoods and contradictions. Having said this, I would quickly add that any of the numerous conspiracy theories supported by dozens of authors – including the totum revolutum of the famous Oliver Stone film, JFK – fail to explain either the how or the why of what happened in the Dealey Square in Dallas that fateful morning.
It would be presumptuous or downright ridiculous to try to summarize in a few paragraphs the gaps in the official thesis, which maintains that a single shooter, Lee Harvey Oswald, fired the two shots with an old and unreliable rifle that caused the practically instantaneous death of the president. However, two or three buttons will suffice as a significant sample.
Firstly, dozens of witnesses claimed to have heard gunshots or witnessed suspicious attitudes coming from a grassy mound in front and to the right of the presidential motorcade, therefore outside the school book warehouse building from whose sixth floor he allegedly carried out the attack. Oswald the shots that caused the death of the president.
Secondly, there is the testimony of what was probably the best placed witness at the crime scene, that of Governor John Connally, sitting directly in front of Kennedy in the presidential car. Connally maintained until the end of his days that the bullet that initially hit the president's neck was not the same as the one that caused serious wounds to his chest, hand and thigh, therefore invalidating the so-called theory of magic bullet on which the official thesis was based.
But the most devastating contradiction lies in what the doctors who treated the president at the Dallas hospital considered and what the doctors who wrote the autopsy that afternoon wrote later wrote. While the former described at least one entry bullet hole compatible with a shot coming from a place located in front and to the right of the procession, the latter certified that all the shots hit the back of the head and trunk of the person. president, thus crediting Oswald's sole authorship. Who do we listen to? Common sense favors Dallas doctors.
My personal impression is that, with the world in the midst of a cold war and having been on the brink of nuclear conflagration just a year earlier in the so-called Cuban missile crisis, the authorities in Washington simply did not want to investigate thoroughly. After all, they already had an ideal scapegoat, Oswald, summarily silenced in the basement of the Dallas police station just 48 hours after the assassination. The bad thing is that this not wanting to know sparked a wave of mistrust and a proliferation of absurd conspiracy theories that sixty years later still persist. That meant, in many ways, the end of innocence.
