It was a day that changed America, and even the world. On November 22, 1963, U.S. President John F. Kennedy waved to the Dallas crowd from his Lincoln convertible. At 12:30 p.m., under the bright sun, a noise that sounded like a firecracker rang out. JFK holds his neck. Texas Governor John Connaly also appears hurt. A few seconds later, another bullet pierces the American president’s skull. Jackie Kennedy crawls on the trunk of the Lincoln, a Secret Service agent protects her with his body. At 1:33 p.m., the White House announced that the 35th President of the United States had died thirty minutes earlier. The world is in shock: the young American president has been assassinated.
» Attention, the video below shows the moment when JFK is killed
In the process, Lee Harvey Oswald, a 24-year-old former marine who had attempted to defect to the USSR four years earlier, was arrested. During his interrogation, he proclaimed his innocence and claimed to be a “pigeon”. Indicted for the murder of Kennedy, Oswald was killed two days later during his transfer to prison by the owner of a nightclub, Jack Ruby, who claimed to have wanted to “avenge” JFK. The following year, the Warren Commission, charged by President Lyndon Johnson with investigating the circumstances of the assassination of John F. Kennedy, delivered its verdict: “There is no evidence that Oswalt was part of ‘a domestic or foreign conspiracy’.
Case closed ? Far from there. Sixty years later, the death of John F. Kennedy fuels conspiracy theories more than ever: according to a Gallup poll, two out of three Americans are convinced that JFK was the victim of a conspiracy, and the declassification of secret documents in recent years has not cleared up the gray areas. For the American journalist Philip Shenonwho spent twenty years New York Times and wrote the book Anatomy of an Assassination: The Secret History of JFK’s Death (Presses de la cite, 2013), of which a new edition was published this year, oWe will probably “never” know the whole truth.
Paul Landis, a Secret Service agent, claims in a new book* that he found a bullet in the back of the limousine and left it on a hospital bed. Does his version change the situation regarding the potential presence of a second shooter?
When this bullet is found on a bed at Parkland Hospital in Dallas [l’établissement où a été transféré JFK après les coups de feu] there is a lot of confusion and questions: Did it come from Governor Connally’s body or Kennedy’s? How did she get there? Landis is an honorable man present that day. But he has delivered several versions over the yearsbornare, and I am nots pas certain that all the facts he puts forward are clear. In his book today, he claims he found the bullet in the back seat of the limousine, put it in his pocket and then left it on a hospital bed.
His testimony is being treated by some as a revelation that calls into question what we know about the assassination and about a single shooter, but I don’t think that is the case. It’s a ball that we knew existed from the beginning [qui a été tirée par le fusil d’Oswald, selon les analyses balistiques]. Landis’ version may simply explain how she ended up in the hospital.
Why is Lee Harvey Oswald’s trip to Mexico, two months before killing Kennedy, crucial?
Oswald is a self-proclaimed Marxist, who has publicly expressed support for the Castro revolution. After his failed defection to the USSR a few years earlier, he said [à sa femme soviétique] Marina that he will surrender at the Cuban and Soviet embassies in Mexico (see box) to obtain a visa allowing him to defect to Cuba. We come out of the Bay of Pigs [l’invasion ratée de l’île par des exilés cubains soutenus par Washington] and of the missile crisis. The CIA has these embassies under surveillance with cameras, their phones are tapped.
According to a letter (declassified) from 1964 FBI, at the Cuban Embassy, Lee Harvey Oswald allegedly said out loud “I’m going to kill Kennedy” . In Mexicoalways
Lee Harvey Oswald’s application for a visa to Cuba, filed at the Mexico embassy on September 27, 1963, was rejected. -Sipa/AP However, after the assassination, the CIA claimed that its elements the most recent
on Oswald date from May 1962, a year before. For what ? After the assassination, the CIA made contradictory statements about what it knew and when. The agency has a huge problem: It was aggressively monitoring the one who would become Kennedy’s assassin until the last weeks before his act.
The CIA and FBI knew Oswald was dangerous. They feared he was a foreign agent. After the assassination, the CIA was so afraid of being held accountable that it covered up what it knew. The CIA and FBI hid the fact that they could have saved Kennedy’s life. They sold the version that Oswald was a lone wolf who could never be stopped. When in truth, if the CIA and FBI had acted on their information, the attack could have been foiled.
The agency then did everything to downplay the importance of Mexico City to the Warren Commission. If the commission had had all the elements, it would undoubtedly have sent investigators to Mexico. Today it’s too late, most of the witnesses are dead.
The day the American president was killed, the United States was working to assassinate Castro Do conspiracy theories start right away
after the assassination? [avec des doutes exprimés par de Gaulle]Yes. From the start, many Americans found it difficult to accept the idea that a 24-year-old misfit could have single-handedly eliminated the most powerful man in the world with a rifle ordered by the Post Office. Theories about a conspiracy of shadowy men in Washington, Moscow or Havana are multiplying rapidly, in the United States but also in France
Lee Harvey Oswald at the Dallas police station on November 23, 1963. – AP/SIPA There is a certain logic behind all these theories. We say that
it’s the mafia because the Kennedy administration declared war on organized crime. Or CIA agents who couldn’t stomach the Bay of Pigs fiasco. But I haven’t seen any credible evidence to prove this. If there is a conspiracy, it revolves around Mexico: if foreign agents heard Lee Harvey Oswald threaten to kill Kennedy, could they have encouraged or even assisted him?
We know today that on the day of Kennedy’s assassination, the CIA provided a poisoned pen in Paris to a Cuban charged with assassinating Castro. The day the American president was killed, the United States was working to assassinate Castro. It’s almost ironic.
What did the Kennedy assassination represent in American history? The assassination is seen as a turning point in American and world history, the moment when America lost its innocence, when the population began to look to the future with concern. There is Kennedy, then the Vietnam War, Watergate,Iran- Contra…
With JFK, Americans began to believe that they could not trust their government to tell them the truth.
Hundreds of thousands of documents have been declassified since 1992. Are there still many that have not been made public?
Presidents have the ultimate authority to declassify documents. In 2017, Donald Trump gave in to pressure from the CIA and FBI not to declassify around 15,000. Most have since been made public, but last year Joe Biden agreed to continue protecting around 2,000 documents in the name of national security. Most are linked to the CIA and Mexico.
Do you think that all light will one day be shed on the Kennedy assassination?
Never. We will live with conspiracy theories about JFK for centuries to come. And the reality is that even if documents explosive enough to alarm Washington bureaucrats once existed, they were likely destroyed a long time ago.