10 Haunting Details Surrounding The Assassination Of John F. Kennedy

6 /10 Transfer Of Executive Authority

Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson assumed that the assassination could be part of a significant effort by the Soviets (or other enemies of the United States) to undermine the American government.

Subsequently, Johnson sought a quick transition of power. He left Dallas on Air Force One and didn’t have to wait until it landed in Washington to be sworn in.

Lyndon Johnson took an oath of office on the plane before taking off, with Kennedy’s corpse abroad. Jacqueline Kennedy stood at Johnson’s side, still wearing her blood-spattered clothes.

5 /10 Warren Commission

Despite the concern of a communist plot, President Johnson had no intention to rush into taking action against the Soviet Union or possibly Cuba.

On the other hand, the public’s suspicion of a conspiracy-laden assassination grew only more robust.

On November 29, 1963, President Johnson took the more subtle approach with creating the President’s Commission on the Assassination of President John F. Kennedy, more commonly known as the Warren Commission.

The job was a fact-finding evaluation about the assassination of President Kennedy and the death of Lee Harvey Oswald.

4 /10 Warren Report

For the evaluation, the commission revisited a lengthy FBI report, eyewitness accounts, autopsy reports, expert testimonies, physical evidence, and reenactments of the assassination.

Multiple video recordings of the motorcade around the time of the shooting were extensively analyzed.

There were closed-door hearings about the incidents as well. It took the commission about ten months of investigation before sending a report to President Johnson.

The 888-page Warren Report concluded that Oswald, who acted alone, fired three shots; two of them hit the target, and another was a miss.

3 /10 No Conspiracy

A lot of people disagreed with the findings. They argued there were at least two shooters in Dealey Plaza, and not without reason.

Some witnesses thought they had heard shots coming from a railroad yard, not from the depository building.

Despite the doubts and lingering questions from the public, Warren Commission maintained that there had been no conspiracy.

Those who opposed the report began to build their theories over the years. Many of them spawned into books and movies.

2 /10 Well-Developed Theory

One of the most lingering alternative series of events was proposed by Jim Garrison, the district attorney of New Orleans from 1962–1973.

Garrison asserted that anti-Castro elements within the CIA were the mastermind of a conspiracy to assassinate President Kennedy, involving Oswald and a fanatic group of anticommunists from New Orleans, including David Ferrie (Oswald’s colleague in a Civil Air Patrol Squadron in the 1950s), former FBI agent Guy Banister, and businessman Clay Shaw.

The district attorney brought Shaw to trial, but the defendant was found not guilty in 1969.

1 /10 Zapruder Film

Still, frames from the video recorded by Abraham Zapruder with a Bell & Howell home-movie camera became the most heavily publicized evidence of the shooting.

It was first published in November 1963, but it had not drawn much attention until 1975 when Good Night America broadcasted the video on TV.

In a segment of the video, President Kennedy’s head appeared to have jerked backward, suggesting a bullet trajectory from the front, in the opposing direction from where Oswald was in the depository building, so there probably were two shooters indeed.