With the 50th anniversary of JFK's assassination this week, Talking Points Memo has revived its "TPM Book Club" by publishing several excerpts from a new book by Larry Sabato [a respected and "award-winning academic"]: The Kennedy Half Century: The Presidency, Assassination, And Lasting Legacy Of John F. Kennedy ~ this is the first of 3 excerpts published so far ~ for me, all 3 excerpts ask intriguing questions ~ I'll watch for others as well ~ FTR, while I am not a conspiracy theorist by nature, I've never believed the whole truth surrounding JFK's assassination has ever been released to the public ~ Sooz

Book Club: Was JFK's Assassination Inevitable?
Larry J. Sabato – November 18, 2013, 10:06 AM EST15739

John F. Kennedy's assassination might have been almost inevitable. It didn't have to happen on Nov. 22, 1963, but given a host of factors, JFK was unlikely to have made it out of his presidency alive.

Almost no one disputes that the security surrounding President Kennedy was thin on Nov. 22, as it usually was. The leader of the free world, the most powerful person on the globe, was guarded by twenty-eight Secret Service agents in Dallas, only twelve of whom were actually in the motorcade.

Just a few of JFK's agents were close enough to the open car in which he was riding to do him any good in case of attack, yet he was passing an estimated 200,000 people from Love Field to Dealey Plaza -- most swarming just a few feet away on crowded streets, others gathered with a view of him from open windows in buildings. It had been no different in Fort Worth that morning, when he spoke to hundreds of unscreened people outside his hotel, or in other stops on the Texas trip, or at many dozens of other events, at home and abroad, during his presidency.

Kennedy certainly understood his frightening degree of exposure, and thought a good bit about the possibility of assassination. Kennedy was fatalistic about it but he also had a false sense of invulnerability, perhaps relying on history's odds. His White House predecessors had taken their chances and, since William McKinley in 1901, all had survived -- though assassins had tried to kill both Roosevelts, Herbert Hoover and Harry Truman. And for the Texas trip, JFK preferred to avoid criticism that he was anxious about his reception in a place perceived as opposed to him.

Kennedy came to power just as inexorable forces in American life were colliding in a way certain to produce social upheaval during his term. Foremost was the civil rights movement. The dream of equality for African-Americans could no longer be deferred, yet the clash with deeply rooted traditions of segregation, especially in the South, guaranteed considerable violence. Just as in the 1860s, the shedding of blood was a precondition for racial justice. An army of racists could have been gunning for JFK after civil rights legislation passed.

The Cold War had generated deep fears of Communism, especially on the right. Any attempt at compromise to decrease tensions between East and West was viewed by millions as betrayal. The leaflets distributed in Dallas for Kennedy's visit that bore his photo and the caption WANTED FOR TREASON were just a hint of what might have come. Kennedy had made lasting enemies among an intransigent community of anti-Castro exiles who never forgave him for the Bay of Pigs. Names from this group constantly appear on lists of possible additional Kennedy assassins.

It wasn't just the Cubans. By 1963 many pro-defense hawks eyed Kennedy with great suspicion, dismayed by what they regarded as Kennedy's "weak" responses in Berlin and Cuba, and his desire to negotiate with the Soviet Union. Rabble-rousers such as retired General Edwin Walker (Oswald's first assassination target) had thousands of extremist followers whose animus toward Kennedy was visceral. They could have grown to menacing proportions had JFK deescalated the Vietnam conflict in his second term.

Add it all together: JFK's lengthy list of enemies, racial turmoil greater than the nation had seen since the Civil War, social upheaval that unsettled millions, the clash between the anticommunist right wing and those willing to negotiate with the Reds, and most of all, a shockingly casual approach to presidential security based on utterly false assumptions. This toxic combination of trends and events made Kennedy a terribly vulnerable target for murder.

JFK was a marked man. If Lee Harvey Oswald had never been born, if the Texas trip had never been scheduled, John F. Kennedy would still have faced great peril every day of his presidency. Given all the factors threatening JFK's safety, even without Dallas, Kennedy would have been very lucky to have survived to January 20, 1969.

http://talkingpointsmemo.com/cafe/was-jfk-s-assassination-inevitable

Here's the second excerpt ~ personally, I either never knew or have since forgotten some of the factoids here ~ and I admit the distance of 50 years likely affects my own perceptions ~ Sooz

In Kennedy Assassination, Dallas Unfairly Blamed
Larry J. Sabato – November 19, 2013, 6:00 AM EST

This essay first appeared in Sunday's Dallas Morning News.

Mere moments after Jack Ruby shot Lee Harvey Oswald, and two days after Oswald fired the shots that killed President John F. Kennedy, the professional football team from the city where the president was murdered took the field in Cleveland.

Back then, the Dallas Cowboys were not "America's Team" -- rather, they were a sad-sack franchise in the midst of a string of unsuccessful seasons after their founding in 1960. Added to the burdens of playing losing football was a far greater one that day on the shores of Lake Erie: representing Dallas, which stood accused of being an accomplice in the death of a president.

It is stunning that the National Football League actually played football just 48 hours after the assassination. Commissioner Pete Rozelle ordered the games to go on because, at the time, he believed that that was the way the slain president would have wanted it. Rozelle later came to realize he had erred, and it's notable that the NFL, when faced with the calamity of Sept. 11 nearly four decades later, canceled its games scheduled for five days after that tragedy. So the Cowboys went to Cleveland and lost in front of a hostile, eerily quiet crowd; announcers were instructed to refer to the team only as the Cowboys, dropping the Dallas.

In the days and years after Nov. 22, 1963, anti-Dallas sentiment was rampant across the country. I saw it myself growing up in Norfolk, Va., and attending Catholic school there, where Dallas was cursed and condemned in the strongest terms. The president, who was visiting Dallas in part to help repair a breach between liberals and conservatives in the Texas Democratic Party, seemed to see a danger in visiting Dallas: "We're heading into nut country today," Kennedy told his wife, Jackie. After the assassination, nurses at Parkland Hospital asked the first lady if she wanted help getting cleaned up. "Absolutely not," she said. "I want the world to see what Dallas has done to my husband."

The murder of JFK was not the first, nor sadly the last, major American assassination. But it remains the only one where the location of the killing received outsize blame for what happened. That Abraham Lincoln was killed in Washington, or William McKinley in Buffalo, or Martin Luther King Jr. in Memphis are merely minor details in the stories of those assassinations. Among all the places where important Americans were murdered over the history of the nation, Dallas stands alone in the dock, convicted in many people's minds as having created the conditions that bred a monstrous act.

It was -- and is -- totally unfair.

As I point out in my book, The Kennedy Half Century, Dallas really was no more dangerous than any other city. In fact, Kennedy could have been -- and almost was -- assassinated in many other places. For instance, right before the 1960 election, two men with guns were arrested in separate incidents on their way to see JFK speak at Chicago Stadium; police later concluded that they did not intend to harm Kennedy, although the fact that they were able to get close to JFK with concealed weapons was an ignored warning of how vulnerable the soon-to-be-president was.

A genuine plot unfolded in Palm Beach, FL, in December 1960, when a disturbed 73-year-old man, Richard Pavlick, carefully planned an attack on Kennedy. Despite being known to the Secret Service, Pavlick was positioned to drive a car filled with explosives into Kennedy's car, but the sight of Jackie with JFK gave him pause -- he wanted to kill the president-elect, not his wife. Pavlick got near the president at least two other times before finally being apprehended.

Plots were uncovered in Miami, Chicago and other locations during JFK's presidency. He and his family had made many enemies, from organized crime to anti-Castro Cubans, and the '60s were proving to be a time of great social and political turmoil -- a breeding ground of festering resentments among some groups and individuals.

These potential threats usually had nothing to do with the places where they occurred and, depending on which theory you embrace, either one or a few people were responsible for the assassination -- and the likelihood is that none of them had any long-standing ties to Dallas. (Lee Harvey Oswald was a native of New Orleans who had lived in several places before moving to Dallas.)

After 50 years, we see the nuanced truth more clearly. Yes, there were obvious signs of hostility directed toward Kennedy in Dallas -- the nasty newspaper editorials and advertisements, the signs at Love Field reading "Yankee Go Home" and "You're a Traitor." But there were many positive signs, too, and about 200,000 people turned out to cheer the president and first lady. Jackie Kennedy, whose fears about the trip were sadly proven correct, had asked her primary Secret Service agent about whether it was safe to travel there, and he replied that Dallas was probably no more dangerous than anyplace else.

In that, he was probably correct. Dallas did have a disturbing cadre of right-wing fanatics who hated African-Americans, the United Nations and most of the 20th century -- possibly parts of the 19th as well. Some of them were influential leaders in government, the press and finance. But it wasn't so different in much of the rest of the South, including my own city of Norfolk, where all public schools had been shuttered just a few years earlier in "Massive Resistance" to desegregation. Plenty of people and places with sin were casting stones at Dallas in 1963 and for years thereafter.

It's also important to remember that Oswald was not a deranged right-winger. Rather, he was a card-carrying Communist who had defected for a time to the Soviet Union and tried to kill a right-wing segregationist general, Edwin Walker, before he shot Kennedy. Oswald had even once told his wife he was going to target former Vice President Richard Nixon. Murder was on his mind, and at least until JFK, his evil intent focused on conservatives.

In a larger sense, the insufficient security for presidents back in the early 1960s arguably made JFK's assassination almost inevitable. Twelve Secret Service agents accompanied Kennedy in the Dallas motorcade, none clustered around his limousine, while he passed dozens of open windows in tall buildings and massive unscreened crowds that practically enveloped him on occasion. This was standard operating procedure; my research team has compiled photos and film of JFK at home and abroad on dozens of occasions that were much like in Dallas; in quite a few cases, Kennedy stands up in the limo for extended periods, making his body an even easier target. And amazingly, unlike FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, who had an armored automobile, the president's car was not bulletproof. Also unlike Hoover, Kennedy wanted crowds to see him clearly and closely. The political rule of the day was that people were less likely to vote against an officeholder they had "met" personally.

While the Secret Service liked to point to its perfect record in protecting presidents since its creation after the McKinley assassination in 1901, only through luck did credible assassination attempts against Presidents Herbert Hoover, Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman all fail, not to mention a failed assassination attempt against former President Theodore Roosevelt when he was running on the Bull Moose ticket in 1912 (an assassin shot him, but a copy of a speech in Roosevelt's pocket helped slow the bullet, which was never removed from his body).

It's not unreasonable to say that, despite some elite hostility toward Kennedy in Dallas, the assassination occurring in Big D was as random as being struck by lightning. As we have come to realize more fully in our time, every community harbors disturbed or deeply angry individuals who can do unspeakable things when given the right stimulus and opportunity.

On Nov. 22, Dallas will memorialize President Kennedy's death, and many will inevitably be reminded of the animus directed toward the city in the aftermath of the assassination. But Dallas bears no particular blame for the assassination, and it needs no absolution. Time, plus the massive growth of the area into a metropolitan behemoth with glittering jewels in the arts and sciences -- not to mention a football team that came a long way from its humble start in the early 1960s -- has helped to replace the awful memory of a terrible day a half-century ago. The Sixth Floor Museum, located in the former Texas School Book Depository, which once hid the sniper's nest, has contributed immensely to the public's understanding of the assassination.

Let's hope the upcoming memorial ceremony in Dallas, while controversial because of lingering disagreement about the assassination's facts, will be a dignified, fitting salute to a president who left us too young and with too much undone. And while never forgetting the manner of his death, we should strive on Nov. 22 and all days to appreciate the legacy of John Fitzgerald Kennedy's life. It is JFK's words and deeds, and not the bullets of Dealey Plaza, that should echo through the ages in Dallas and around the world.

http://talkingpointsmemo.com/cafe/in-kennedy-assassination-dallas-unfairly-blamed

Here's the 3d excerpt ~ I love Sabato's writing and the way he interweaves both then-current and more current reactions and events ~ Sooz

George W. Bush: Back to the Republican Kennedys
Larry J. Sabato – November 20, 2013, 6:00 AM EST

A freakishly close vote in Florida set the stage for one of the most contested elections ever. Once the November vote was counted, Vice President Al Gore, the Democratic nominee, led Republican nominee George W. Bush, the Texas governor and son of President George H. W. Bush, by 540,000 votes in the national tally (out of 105 million cast). But in the all-important electoral vote, Gore had 267, three short of victory, Bush had 246, and the decisive 25 electoral votes were the Sunshine State's -- where Bush and Gore were virtually tied. It took a hotly disputed recount and ultimately a divisive Supreme Court decision in Bush v. Gore to resolve the matter. Democrats viewed the Court ruling as partisan, with the five most conservative justices siding with Bush against the four more liberal justices' preference for Gore, but in the end, Bush was declared the winner by an astonishingly tiny 537 votes in Florida -- 2,912,790 for Bush to 2,912,253 for Gore. This gave Bush a final electoral count of 271 votes, one more than the minimal majority needed for election.

Thus, the offspring of president number 41 became president number 43, a Bush restoration after just eight years. Compare this to the twenty-four years that separated the two chief executives from the Adams family, John Adams who left office in 1801 and John Quincy Adams who entered the White House (after losing the popular vote) in 1825. Both of the Adamses served only one term, but George W. Bush would get two. The dozen years of Bush White House occupancy compares to less than three for the Kennedy family. The Bush family also accumulated eight years in the vice presidency (the senior Bush), fourteen years in the governorships of Texas and Florida (George W. and Jeb), ten years in the Senate (grandfather Prescott of Connecticut), and four years in the House (Bush senior). The Kennedys have had no governorships, but three senators (John, Robert, and Edward) plus scattered House service by several family members and a lieutenant governorship (Kathleen Kennedy Townsend, Bobby's daughter, in Maryland).

There is no real comparison: The more successful family dynasty by far, at least to this point, has the surname of Bush. No one would have guessed this in the 1960s, and it is one of history's sleight of hand tricks. Demography has played as much a part as destiny. In population, wealth, and influence, the Sunbelt has come to dominate the Frostbelt, and thus has the Texas house of Bush outstripped the Massachusetts line of Kennedys. Patriarch Joseph Kennedy's dreams of a long period of Kennedy dominance were dashed by war (Joe Jr.), bullet (Jack and Bobby), scandal (Teddy), and accident (John Jr.). Younger generations of Kennedys, including new congressman Joseph Kennedy III of Massachusetts, may try to even the score, though the Bushes have potential competitors, too, such as Jeb's politically active son George P. Bush -- and Jeb Bush himself.

Yet, fifty years on, the short Kennedy presidency is far more admired by the public than either of the Bush tenures, and the iconic legacy of JFK's short White House stay greatly overshadows three full terms of the Bush family. George W. Bush was superficially a good deal like John F. Kennedy. Both had famous and powerful fathers, came from well-heeled, privileged backgrounds, had Ivy League educations, were elected president in squeakers, and saw foreign policy dominate their terms. Yet even Bush jokes frequently about his lack of eloquence and frequent malapropisms. Jack and Jackie Kennedy were the life of the party and led the nation culturally from the White House. Though gracious hosts, George and Laura Bush were famous for going to bed by 9:30 p.m. whenever possible. It may well be that Bush's serious, sober personal style was preferable to JFK's wild living for governance. Still, the public's imagination is rarely captured by bland temperance.

Concerning his presidential agenda and the Kennedys, George W. Bush was more like Ronald Reagan than his father. The second Bush was a determined tax-cutter, unlike his dad, who had famously violated his campaign pledge, "Read my lips, no new taxes," by raising taxes during his term. In seeking across-the-board cuts as part of his early legislative program, Bush copied Reagan in citing JFK before Congress and on the stump. The tax cuts were needed, said Bush, "to, in President Kennedy's words, 'get this country moving again.'" In his most significant early achievement--but one with damaging consequences for the burgeoning national debt -- Bush won $1.35 trillion in tax cuts, which he supplemented with still more tax breaks in both 2002 and 2003.

Other than tax cuts, the closest parallel in the Bush presidency to JFK's was a militarily assertive foreign policy. Just as with Kennedy at the Bay of Pigs, the Bush administration was not prepared for its first-year crisis, the terrorist attacks on September 11. But in the aftermath of failure, both administrations were transformed; they reevaluated and recalibrated to prepare for the crises to come. In Bush's case, the decision to strike back in Afghanistan (and later, much more controversially, in Iraq) as well as the actions taken to protect air travel and the homeland defined his White House years. Kennedy and all Cold War presidents were able to use the clear and present danger of a well-defined threat (the Soviet menace) to marshal public opinion and congressional support for their goals. While it came at a high price, terrorism in the twenty-first century returned purpose and clarity to American politics -- and restored a natural enemy -- that had been lacking since the fall of the Soviet empire. The "axis of evil" (Iran, Iraq, and North Korea, along with terrorism generally) enabled Bush to focus his energies on enemies that unified Americans, at least temporarily. Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein became Bush's Fidel Castro and Nikita Khrushchev.

In the view of many, though, this led to the kinds of excesses in the name of national security that had emerged during the Cold War era. The powers of the National Security Agency were broadened to permit eavesdropping on U.S. citizens and foreign nationals domestically, and the FBI's powers were expanded in a wide-ranging new antiterrorism law, the PATRIOT Act. The "imperial presidency" of JFK's era was back, and civil liberties were restrained to meet the threat posed by another "ism" -- terrorism this time rather than Communism. President Bush insisted that his national security reforms did not trample civil liberties in a manner reminiscent of the Cold War, and in his memoir, Decision Points, he specifically cited the excesses under the Kennedy administration: "Before I approved the Terrorist Surveillance Program, I wanted to ensure there were safeguards to prevent abuses. I had no desire to turn the NSA into an Orwellian Big Brother. I knew that the Kennedy brothers had teamed up with J. Edgar Hoover to listen illegally to the conversations of innocent people, including Martin Luther King Jr. Lyndon Johnson had continued the practice. I thought that was a sad chapter in our history, and I wasn't going to repeat it."

Bush was not so publicly critical of the Kennedys while in office, and certainly not in the opening stages of his administration. To the contrary, he believed his success in securing one of his major goals, an education law called No Child Left Behind, depended heavily on Senator Ted Kennedy. As governor of Texas, Bush had also skillfully wooed powerful Democrats such as Texas House Speaker Pete Laney and Lieutenant Governor Bob Bullock, so he had confidence his technique of bipartisan camaraderie might work in Washington.

For the first film screening in the new Bush White House, the president and Mrs. Bush chose Thirteen Days, a movie about JFK's handling of the Cuban Missile Crisis. The guest of honor was Ted Kennedy, and he brought much of the family with him. The occasion was to prove the power of what President Bush's press secretary, Ari Fleischer, called "the amazing soft power of a kindly invite." As Fleischer pointed out, Bush recognized "there were two Ted Kennedys. There was the Ted Kennedy that . . . could take to the floor of the Senate and give the most impassioned, powerful speech anyone has ever heard and he will fight you tooth and nail. The other Ted Kennedy was the one who will reach a compromise with you and reach across the aisle. Both Kennedys existed on any given day . . . Bush knew if he could get the compromising Kennedy to be with him, chances were very good that his legislation was going to make it through the Senate. Kennedy was that type of old bull."

At the time, Bush insisted his gestures of friendship for Senator Kennedy had no connection to legislative deal making, but the ex-president's memoirs noted, "The movie hadn't been my only purpose for inviting Ted. He was the ranking Democrat on the Senate committee that drafted education legislation. He had sent signals that he was interested in my school reform proposal . . . " That night Bush told Kennedy he wanted to be known as "the education president" and emphasized, "I don't know about you, but I like to surprise people. Let's show them Washington can still get things done." The next morning, a note from Kennedy to Bush arrived, reading in part, "Like you, I have every intention of getting things done . . . We will have a difference or two along the way, but I look forward to some important Rose Garden signings."

That same year, while No Child Left Behind was still being negotiated in Congress, President Bush marked the seventy-sixth anniversary of the birth of Robert Kennedy by dedicating the main Justice Department building on Constitution Avenue in Washington to RFK. Before an assemblage of Kennedys and surviving New Frontiersmen, Bush hailed the special relationship between JFK and RFK: "No man ever had a more faithful brother." Asked by a reporter whether the renaming was an attempt to curry favor with Ted Kennedy, Bush laughed and replied, "I'm not quite that devious." But he was. By year's end, Bush signed into law No Child Left Behind, accompanied by praise from the Massachusetts senator: "President Bush was there every step of the way."

The Bush-Kennedy infatuation did not last, and could not. The ideological demands of their very different political parties tore apart the relationship, with Kennedy campaigning for Democrats in 2002, opposing Bush's conservative Supreme Court picks, and clashing repeatedly with the administration over the Iraq War. Still, George W. Bush had learned a lesson his predecessors had also absorbed. When trying to influence public opinion or make congressional deals stick, the Kennedys, past and present, were good allies to have.

Even Bush's vice president, Dick Cheney, who was not a man much given to open sentiment, realized the emotional effect a Kennedy appearance could generate. In September 1963 President Kennedy appeared at the University of Wyoming in Laramie, and Cheney was there to see JFK ride in an open motorcade a couple of months before Dallas. "He had inspired us all," Cheney later wrote, "and at a time when I was trying to put my life back together, I was particularly grateful for the sense of elevated possibilities he described." Kennedy footprints have been found here and there in the Bush White House years even as the Bushes gave Republicans the opportunity to tout their own dynastic family to rival the Democratic royals. For much of the Bush presidency, JFK had been in eclipse, rarely mentioned and seemingly becoming a distant memory for most Americans. And then something -- or someone -- unexpected happened in 2008, reviving the Kennedy image and promise. His name, of course, was Barack Obama.

http://talkingpointsmemo.com/cafe/george-w-bush-back-to-the-republican-kennedys

Here is the short Sabato bio that TPM is publishing following each excerpt:


Sooz

I'm not sure whether this is the last excerpt in the series or an additional opinion from Larry Sabato ~ but it is definitely worth the read ~ I ordered the book after reading/posting the excerpts above ~ for me, the subject is even more fascinating given the 50-year perspective ~ Sooz

Book Club: Why The Study Of The JFK Assassination Will Continue -- And Should
Larry J. Sabato – November 22, 2013, 5:58 AM EST

Fifty years ago this November, something happened that became a "flashbulb moment" for every American alive at the time and old enough to remember anything. The indelible photographic images -- a fixture in books, movies, and television but also recounted in minute personal detail by millions who recall precisely where they were and what they were doing when they heard about President Kennedy's assassination -- have been passed on to succeeding generations.

The youngest elected President at the height of his powers was gunned down on the street of a major city, his head exploded by firepower in full view of his wife, and eventually the nation, to the horror of the entire civilized world.

The importance of that awful day in Dallas cannot seriously be disputed, but few agree on the roots of the day itself.

Humility is the most under-appreciated virtue, and the one least applied to the study of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. Everyone has a theory -- so many theories, some more credible than others.

Many researchers and authors appear absolutely convinced that they have the absolute truth. But I have a different view: No one -- no matter how intelligent or learned -- knows for sure all that happened, and why it happened, on November 22, 1963.

• The murder of Lee Harvey Oswald guaranteed it.

• The mistakes made by the Warren Commission compounded it.

• The lies and misleading statements made by high officials and important agencies of government further assured it.

• The deaths of the vast majority of those connected to November 22 over the past five decades makes it even more difficult to declare the case closed. The trail, once hot with possible directions for investigation, has long since cooled to room temperature.

• The continuing refusal to release promptly the many thousands of pages of documents relating to the case -- fifty years on, when it is hard to believe that America's security interests would be damaged -- also makes it impossible to reach fully reliable conclusions.

There is only one prediction I can make with certainty: A hundred years from now, there will still be books written and TV documentaries proposing theories while sifting evidence about the Kennedy assassination. In fact, this will probably extend beyond the life of books and television as we know them. If you doubt that, then you should count up the number of new Lincoln-related assassination materials that have appeared in recent years -- almost a century and a half after the murder at Ford's Theater.

Contrary to my prediction, some say it is time, past time, to let President Kennedy's assassination recede into history. Continued investigation just stirs up bad memories, reopens old wounds, and stokes cynicism about the government. What's done is done, they insist, and we have so many pressing challenges to attend to in the 21st century.

I believe these arguments are wrong, and those making them, however well-intentioned, have ignored or insufficiently appreciated other factors.

There are at least [several] solid reasons why we should continue to study the Kennedy assassination:

1) It is unsolved, at least to the satisfaction of most Americans. Our new national survey in The Kennedy Half Century shows that about three-quarters of the public do not accept the conclusion of the Warren Commission: that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone. Doubt extends across the partisan and demographic spectrum.

2) Advances in criminology, ballistics, and other fields could potentially produce additional information about President Kennedy's murder. For example, in preparing the book, we commissioned the most technologically advanced study ever done of the police Dictabelts and Gray Audographs from November 22, 1963 -- which allegedly recorded the sounds of that day in Dallas because of a stuck microphone on a policeman's motorcycle. What is now clear, for the first time, is that prior studies of the Dictabelts have been wrong in whole or in part, that no gunshots were ever recorded -- not three, not four, not ten. The Dictabelt study shows that new technologies applied to old evidence may yield additional findings in the future.

3) The whole story is not known. It isn't just the unreleased documents. There probably are photos, films, diaries, and other revealing information we have not yet seen. I would bet some of these are resting undisturbed in attics, file cabinets, and cupboards around Dallas and elsewhere.

4) The Kennedy assassination is not dusty history. It is one of the prime cautionary tales in all of American history. The murder tells us what can happen when myths are embraced as reality. For example, some around Kennedy, including family, staff, and the hierarchy of the Secret Service, were lulled into a false sense of security because JFK had been so lucky and survived so much in his life. Luck can run out, as it tends to do eventually when a President with many enemies is sent parading through cities in an open car that is neither bullet-proof nor closed. How many times after November 22nd did people say, "I didn't think this could happen in America." This shows an inadequate understanding of history. Leave aside the presidential assassinations and attempts in the 19th century. Just since the Secret Service was assigned presidential protection duties in the early 20th century after McKinley was killed, there had been violent attacks or well-planned schemes against Theodore Roosevelt, Herbert Hoover, Franklin Roosevelt, and Harry Truman -- and an untold number we still do not know about. A large measure of luck saved those four presidents. Yet the thin blue line was still very thin for JFK, not just in Dallas but throughout his Presidency.

5) Similarly, when government agencies or high officials are found to be lying or misleading the public that pays their salaries, they need to be held accountable. Democracy demands as much. Truth -- even discovered late -- is a preventative, a kind of fair warning to posterity.

You can probably think of other reasons why younger generations of citizens and scholars should want to study one of the seminal events of the twentieth century. Everyone knows George Santanaya's maxim, "Those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it," which sadly applies in the case of November 22nd. Personally, I prefer what the Roman philosopher, Marcus Tullius Cicero, had to say: "Whoever is ignorant of the past remains forever a child." Simplistic, child-like naivete has led the United States into many disasters in our 237 years since the Revolution. Whatever the motive, grab the torch from those who have come before, and light the way out of the darkness of ignorance.

http://talkingpointsmemo.com/cafe/why-the-study-of-the-jfk-assassination-will-continue-and-should

Make everything public and there won't be any doubts.

i have serious doubts about the lone gunman theory.

I was once watching some video from that time and there was one thing I found odd. This was after Oswald had been arrested and before he was shot.

He claimed he didn't shoot JFK. That seems strange to me since. I thought those that commit these types of acts not only take credit but want to be known for doing what they think is a courageous and important thing. When Booth shot Lincoln, he thought he'd be praised as a hero.

Am I wrong about that? Do some assassins claim innocence?

i think it is extremely rare. in fact, i can't think of another high profile incident where this was the case.