John F. Kennedy

On Friday November 22, 1963, the thirty-fifth President of the United States of America, John F. Kennedy was assassinated as he rode down Elm Street in downtown Dallas Texas. To this day, the questions as to whom did it, why did they do it, and how did they do it? are still unanswered. Then there is the question as to if it was a cover up. I personally believe that there was definitely a cover up because I don't think that Lee Harvey Oswald could have shot that many bullets in that short of a time period with the gun that was found on the sixth floor of the School Book Depository. In this essay, I will tell you my opinion of what happened on that day and what is wrong with certain parts of the Warren Commission Report.

The Warren Commission consisting of "various outstanding citizens" was created to determine, evaluate and tell all of the facts relating to the assassination. The Commission was to examine the evidence found and developed by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and to further any investigation, as it deems necessary. In just a few days, the Warren Commission had decided that it was definitely Lee Harvey Oswald that had shot the President. It wasn't until a few years later that Dallas Police Chief Jesse Curry said to a newsman, "We don't have any proof that Oswald fired the rifle, and never did. Nobody's yet been able to put him in that building with a gun in his hand."

At no time did the Warren Commission seem to consider that Oswald was innocent until proven guilty, the right to legal representation, or the right to cross-examine witnesses. I believe that there is no way that Oswald was the lone assassin because nobody saw Oswald on the sixth floor of the Schoolbook Depository after 11:55 on November 22. Roy Truly and a police officer by the name of M.L. Baker saw Oswald on the second floor. I just don't see how it is possible for any person to first hide a gun on the opposite corner of the sixth floor, run down four floors of stairs passing a woman by the name of Victoria Adams, and end up on the second floor "calm and collected" in a 90 second time period. The Warren Commission claimed that Oswald fired three shots in 5.6 seconds from the sixth floor window: the first shot was the 'magic bullet' which made a total of seven wounds on JFK and Connally, which was found later at Parkland Memorial Hospital in almost perfect condition, th!

e second shot missed JFK and hit a bystander that was near the overpass, and the third was the fatal head shot. According to the Warren Commission if Oswald was the lone assassin then the third shot would have come from behind, however his head was pushed backwards and to the left. This means the bullet must of come from somewhere in more in the front of Kennedy like the grassy Knoll. Many witnesses claimed to have heard shots from there. The accounts from the witnesses that heard those shots were no where to be found in the Warren Commission Report.

Now that we have established that it was not Lee Harvey Oswald, lets look at who would have wanted Kennedy dead and why. John F. Kennedy and the CIA had very much hatred for each other from the day the Bay of Pigs disaster until the day he was assassinated. Some of the reasons JFK didn't like the CIA were because the CIA ignored his orders to stop working with the Mafia, and the deputy director of the CIA, Richard Helms, approved plans to kill Castro long after President Kennedy had ordered a halt to the covert campaign against Castro. In addition, the CIA continued other concealed operations without informing the President or John McCone (the CIA director then). An important link between the CIA and the assassination was CIA man David Atlee Phillips was seen with Oswald a few months before the shooting. In 1954, Phillips worked with E. Howard Hunt and others to overthrow the Arbenz government in Guatemala. A man by the name of Gaeton Fonzi believes that "David Atlee Phillips played a key role in the conspiracy to assassinate President Kennedy." Phillips was in charge of the CIA's Cuban operations in Mexico City at the time of the assassination, so it would have been fairly easy for him to frame Oswald, and it is quite possible, if not probable, that he was involved in the phony Oswald visits to the Cuban embassy. Another former CIA agent who has come