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It was 60 years ago the world was left reeling when US President John F. Kennedy was assassinated as he travelled in an open top car with his wife Jackie on a trip to Dallas, Texas.
But, ever since that fateful day on November 22, 1963, exactly what happened – and why – has been hotly debated.
As we reported earlier this week, ex-Secret Service agent Paul Landis – who was walking near Kennedy’s limousine at the time – has finally broken his silence about it.
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He’s cast doubt on the ‘magic bullet’ theory behind the official verdict that gunman Lee Harvey Oswald alone killed JFK.
So, what’s the truth?
A Lone Gunman?
An official 1964 investigation into who killed the 46-year-old President, called The Warren Commission, identified 24-year-old ex-marine Oswald as Kennedy’s lone assassin.
It found that he fired three bullets from his rifle at 12.30pm, from a sixth-floor window of the Texas School Book Depository building, as JFK’s car drove through Dallas’ Dealey Plaza.
The first missed, the second was the so-called ‘magic bullet’ that hit the president in the back, exited his throat, then wounded Texas governor John Connally, shattering his wrist, lodging in his thigh.
The third shot was a fatal one to Kennedy’s head.
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Most other formal inquiries backed the ‘lone killer’ conclusion.
Having apparently fled and shot another police officer in Dallas that day, Oswald was arrested but himself gunned down by nightclub boss Jack Ruby, 53, two days later, before he could face trial.
Multiple Shooters?
Popularised by Oliver Stone’s 1991 movie JFK, starring Kevin Costner as DA Jim Garrison, many people believe there was more than one gunman involved.
Sceptics challenge the complex trajectory of the ‘magic bullet’, apparently found on wounded Connally’s stretcher.
Landis, now 88, claims he retrieved a bullet from behind JFK’s seat and put it on the president’s stretcher, reckoning it may have fallen on to Connally’s when they were side by side at the hospital.
If there was no magic bullet, was Connally hit by a different shot?
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Were more bullets fired as audio evidence suggested – or from the front, not behind – as the famous Zapruder film may suggest?
Would Oswald have had enough time to fire them in a few seconds anyway?
There were also witness reports of shots fired from a grassy knoll near the murder scene. And why did Kennedy’s brain later go missing.
A 1979 House select committee determined there was probably a conspiracy to kill JFK.
A CIA Plot?
After the shooting police arrested three apparent tramps behind the grassy knoll.
Mysteriously they were clean-shaven and well-dressed, fuelling a theory that they were actually CIA assassins.
And was a man snapped holding an umbrella on a sunny day really a protestor as claimed?
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Kennedy is said to have vowed to break up the CIA, who were left red-faced over the 1961 Bay of Pigs fiasco to oust Cuban leader Fidel Castro.
The organisation had also chosen JFK’s Dallas route, failed to inspect it properly and withheld evidence. Plus, former boss Allen Dulles, was conveniently on the Warren Commission.
Did The VP Do It?
That afternoon, as JFK’s dead body was flown back to Washington DC, vice-president Lyndon B. Johnson was sworn in as the next president, beside Jackie Kennedy still wearing a pink dress with her husband’s blood on it.
The idea that LBJ ordered Kennedy’s killing is based on the idea that he was set to be dropped from Kennedy’s re-election ticket or was conspiring with FBI chief J Edgar Hoover and business tycoons.
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A woman’s claim to have been LBJ’s mistress and to have heard him threatening Kennedy at a party, has since been slammed by experts.
A Cuban Or KGB Target?
The US had tried to assassinate revolutionary Cuban leader Fidel Castro and one theory – apparently even backed by LBJ – was he got his revenge.
Others, including an ex-CIA head, believe the Soviets were to blame. Humiliated by Kennedy over the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, this theory goes that they hired or brainwashed Oswald to carry out the assassination.
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He was a communist sympathizer who’d spent time in the USSR and married a Russian woman.
A Mafia Hit?
Some speculate that the mob killed JFK because his brother Robert, the US attorney general at the time, was targeting organised crime.
Several gangster outfits claimed involvement and ex-hitman James Files confessed he was the second gunman on the grassy knoll.
Oswald’s killer Jack Ruby, who later died in jail for the murder, is also reckoned to have had Mafia links.
A UFO Cover Up?
An extreme conspiracy theory is that JFK was killed to stop him finding out about UFOs, having been shot 10 days after allegedly sending a secret memo to the CIA demanding to know the truth.
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Something Else?
It’s also been mooted that he was terminated by the ‘military industrial complex’ or a secret VIP society called the Illuminati, worried JFK would end the lucrative Vietnam War.
There have also been theories that the limo’s driver did it or a stray bullet from Secret Service agent George Hickey was the accidental cause.
Kookiest of all are that Jackie herself somehow shot her husband or that baseball legend Joe DiMaggio had JFK’s death arranged believing the Kennedys murdered his ex-wife Marilyn Monroe in 1962.
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- JFK
- Conspiracy theories
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