John Fitzgerald Kennedy (1917-1963) was the 35th President of the United States of America (1961-1063)
He was born on May 29, 1917, in Brookline, Massachusetts, into a wealthy, politically ambitious Irish-Catholic family — the Kennedys. His father, Joseph P. Kennedy, served as U.S. ambassador to the United Kingdom and was a highly influential (and controversial) figure in American business and politics. JFK was the second of nine siblings, several of whom also had prominent political careers, including Robert Kennedy and Ted Kennedy.
He studied at Harvard and served in the Navy during World War II, where he became known for helping save his crew by swimming several miles to share after asinking of his torpedo boat PT-109 by a Japanese destroyer.
He began his political career in 1947 as a congressman from Massachusetts and later became a senator in 1953. That same year, he married Jacqueline Bouvier.
In 1960, at 43, he won the presidential election against Richard Nixon in a tightly contested race marked by the first televised debates in history. He became the youngest person ever elected president.
His term was marked by events of enormous significance:
He carried a failed invasion of Cuba in Bahía de Cochinos (“Bay of Pigs”) in 1961, inherited from the previous administration, and carried out by CIA-baced Cuban exiles that tried to overthrow Fidel Castro.
Also, he faced the Cuban Missile Crisis (1962), the most dangerous moment of the Cold War, when the U.S. and the Soviet Union came to the brink of nuclear conflict after Soviet missiles were discovered in Cuba. Kennedy’s handling of this crisis is considered one of his greatest diplomatic achievements.
He strongly pushed the space race, pledging to land a man on the Moon before the decade’s end, which was fulfilled with the Apollo 11 in 1969.
He increasingly and firmly supported the African American civil rights movement, introducing legislation that, after his death, became the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
He also increased the U.S. military presence in Vietnam, laying the groundwork for what would later become a much larger war under his successors.
On November 22, 1963, Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, Texas, while riding in an open motorcade through the city streets.
The Warren Commission identified Lee Harvey Oswald as the sole gunman. He was an ex-Marine and leftist who had been living in the USRSS and symphatized with Cuba.
Oswald was shot down on 24th November by mafious Jack Ruby while being transferred between jail facilities.
Next President, Lyndon B. Johnson, established the President’s Commission on the Assassination of President Kennedy by executive order on 29th Nobember 1963. It was chaired by Earl Warren, the Chief Justice of the United States. That’s why it’s usually called “Warren Commission”.
Ruby was convicted of murder in 1964, though the conviction was later overturned on appeal, and died of cancer in 1967 while awaiting for a retrial.
The Commission spent about 10 months investigating, reviewing FBI and CIA reports, forensic evidence, and witness testimony. In September 1964, it concluded that Lee Harvey Oswald and Jack Ruby acted alone, first firing three shots from the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository.
The report became the official U.S. government position, but it was controversial almost from the start. Critics pointed to issues like the “single bullet theory” (the idea that one bullet caused multiple wounds in both Kennedy and Texas Governor John Connally), the limited access some investigators had to full evidence, and the CIA’s and FBI’s withholding of certain information from the Commission itself, which only came to light decades later.
This controversy led to the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA), a second official investigation in the late 1976, which concluded there was likely a conspiracy, though it did not identify who else might have been involved, and its scientific basis (an acoustic analysis of a police recording) was later challenged and largely discredited.
Convened in 1976 amid renewed public distrust (fueled partly by the Watergate scandal and revelations of CIA/FBI misconduct in other areas),
The HSCA also re-investigated the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. (Selma)
Its most striking conclusion: Kennedy was “probably assassinated as a result of a conspiracy,” based on acoustic evidence from a police dictabelt recording that seemed to indicate a fourth shot fired from the grassy knoll area, in addition to Oswald’s shots from the depository. However, the Committee could not identify the other gunman or determine the nature of any conspiracy, and it did not rule out Oswald as a shooter.
This acoustic evidence was later heavily challenged. A 1982 National Academy of Sciences panel concluded the recording in question was likely made after the shooting occurred, or from a location where it couldn’t have captured the actual gunfire, undermining the scientific basis for the HSCA’s conspiracy finding.
Despite this, the HSCA’s conclusion has never been formally withdrawn, leaving an odd situation where the U.S. government’s most recent official investigation still technically favors a conspiracy, based on evidence that’s now widely considered unreliable.
The Commission concluded that a single bullet passed through Kennedy’s neck and then went on to cause multiple wounds in Texas Governor John Connally, who was seated in front of him in the limousine: hitting his back, exiting his chest, shattering his wrist, and lodging in his thigh.
The Commission had determined only three shots were fired total, and the timing of the shots based on the Zapruder film (an amateur home movie that captured the assassination) didn’t leave enough time for separate bullets to cause each wound if Oswald was the only shooter using a bolt-action rifle.
Critics found this hard to accept given the seemingly improbable trajectory required (the bullet would have had to change direction multiple times to hit all the points it did). Supporters, including later forensic analyses, argued the trajectory was actually consistent with the men’s seating positions and body angles at the moment of impact.
Given the gaps and inconsistencies across investigations, a wide range of theories emerged over the decades: organized crime from mafia, the CIA, the Cuban or Soviet government, and multiple shooters.
his flight and the killing of Officer Tippit — is hard to explain away. The single bullet theory, which strikes people as far-fetched on first hearing, holds up better than it sounds once you actually look at the seating geometry and trajectory analysis; it’s counterintuitive, not implausible.
Where I think skepticism is genuinely earned is not “did Oswald shoot Kennedy” but “do we have the full story.” The CIA and FBI withheld material from the Warren Commission itself — including CIA plots to assassinate Castro that the Commission never knew about, which is a strange thing to hide from investigators trying to understand a president’s murder. That’s not a conspiracy theory, it’s a matter of record. Agencies with something to protect gave a commission looking into a presidential assassination less than the full picture, and that fact alone justifies distrust of any claim of the “case closed” variety.
As for a broader conspiracy — a second shooter, mob or CIA orchestration — I don’t find the evidence persuasive. The acoustic evidence behind the HSCA’s “probable conspiracy” finding has been pretty thoroughly discredited. Decades of investigation, congressional hearings, and document declassifications haven’t produced a smoking gun for any alternative theory, which is itself informative given how much scrutiny this event has received and how hard it would be to keep a real conspiracy airtight for 60+ years.
So, roughly: Oswald acted as the shooter, the government’s institutional secrecy and dishonesty around the investigation was real and damaging to public trust, and those two things aren’t in tension — the cover-up-adjacent behavior was more about protecting agencies from embarrassment than covering up a broader plot.
That’s where I land, though I’d hold it as “best current read of the evidence” rather than certainty — plenty of serious researchers disagree with parts of it, and the files still being withheld mean the picture isn’t fully complete even today.
It’s worth noting that despite decades of investigation, no conspiracy theory has produced conclusive physical evidence. Most professional historians and forensic experts still broadly support the core Warren Commission finding — that Oswald fired the fatal shots — while acknowledging legitimate criticisms of how thoroughly the Commission investigated other angles, and the extent to which agencies like the CIA withheld information.
In 2017 and again in 2022, additional files were declassified under laws requiring the release of assassination-related records, though most researchers agree nothing in them has fundamentally overturned the established narrative — while some files remain redacted or withheld even now.