Murder, Motives and the Magic Bullet
FRIDAY, November 22, 1963. It was a day on which the world froze with shock. Such was the jolt that an entire generation still remembers where they were and what they were doing when they heard the news of the slaying of John Fitzgerald Kennedy, the 35th president of the United States, in Dallas. It seemed as though an era had ended, an era that had only just begun.
To this day, more than 2,000 books have been written about the assassination and a few seconds of film shot by local Dallas dressmaker Abraham Zapruder has become the most scrutinised home movie of all time. Even today it is submitted to state-of-the-art computer enhancement techniques.
As the years rolled by and history took its course through the traumas of the Vietnam war, Watergate, and the assassinations of Martin Luther King and JFK's younger brother Robert Kennedy, the theories abounded. First it was the lone assassin Lee Harvey Oswald versus the conspiracy. Then it became: which conspiracy? Two new books have been published about the JFK assassination. Through painstaking investigations, both introduce new information to a case 30 years old tomorrow, and yet make completely different conclusions.
Former White House employee Robert J. Groden's The Killing of a President published by Bloomsbury, features unreleased autopsy photographs of the president's body and Jacqueline Kennedy's harrowing account of the murder of her husband.
'Her testimony damaged the Federal Government's single assassin theory, so they buried it all these years,' Groden told the American Globe magazine. He turned 18 on the day Kennedy was assassinated and the emotions he felt moved him to become a student ofthe crime. Sensing a cover-up, he set out to put the record straight. His study of the Zapruder film convinced Congressmen in 1975 to form the US House Select Committee on Assassinations.
In 1979, in the last official statement on the shooting, the committee stated that it believed 'on the evidence available, that President John F. Kennedy was probably assassinated as a result of a conspiracy'.