It’s still maybe the biggest set of questions in American history…
Did Lee Harvey Oswald really shoot JFK? Did he act alone? And was he really a communist, or was the whole thing a cover story?
Here’s what we really know about what happened – and why the questions still haven’t been definitively answered over 50 years later.
There’s a reason over 60% of Americans believe that the official story about the JFK assassination isn’t totally true.
It’s because the story’s so bizarre, so wrapped up with missing information and still-classified files. We still don’t know everything about what happened on November the 22nd, 1963 – despite President Trump trying to get all the files opened.
You know the official story: on a visit to Dallas, President Kennedy and his company drove through Dealey Plaza, until the President was shot by Lee Harvey Oswald, who later killed a police officer before being taken in, interrogated, denying everything, and was then shot by Jack Ruby.
The thing is, the second you start looking into any part of that, the story becomes a little stranger, especially when it comes to Oswald’s life story.
Famously, Oswald always claimed to be a communist… even when volunteering for the Korean War.
The fact is, for most people, claiming that would get you a one-way ticket to rejection… why would the army want to take in communists for a war against communists? Instead of rejection, he got a special security clearance.
Immediately after the war, he tried to defect to the Soviets, who didn’t want him… they assumed he was a spy. Even after he convinced them, they kept a close watch on him, wanting to make sure nothing unusual was going on.
After a couple of years, he got bored, demanding to return to America. That’s where the story gets really weird.
If you saw a lifelong communist wanting to come back into the country all of a sudden, you’d probably do the same thing the Soviets did… keep him under watch if you let him in at all.
Instead, they let him do whatever he wanted… mess around for a couple of years, try to kill a general, run over to the Cuban embassy in Mexico, threaten the FBI, join any number of closely monitored political groups… and then kill the President.
It just doesn’t make sense as a story… if you even tried a couple of things on that list, you’d be arrested in seconds, especially in the 60s.
There’s a very good reason everyone (even in some of his pro-Cuban groups) involved thought Oswald was a spy for someone, be it the Soviets, America, or the Mafia.
Whatever the real facts were, there’s no way to ever know the whole truth – thanks to Jack Ruby, a guy with a similarly bizarre life story.
Drug-addled and mob-connected, Ruby claimed to have shot Oswald to save “Mrs. Kennedy the discomfiture of coming back to trial”…
Another obviously ridiculous claim. Has anyone ever really acted like that?
Ruby went on to make any number of claims, from confessing to being part of an overall anti-Kennedy conspiracy to claiming that he’d just been acting the whole time…
Like I said at the start, there’s a reason the facts still aren’t really known… none of them make much sense at all.
Whether JFK was killed by a lone lunatic, a dedicated communist, a mafia conspiracy or something else all together, we may never know…
The one thing we can really hope for is that President Trump’s upcoming release of the final JFK files reveals at least a little more of the truth.
