“The truth of the world is exhausting.”

November 22, 2023 1:24 AM

Shortly after noon on November 22, 1963, President John F. Kennedy was assassinated as he rode in a motorcade through Dealey Plaza in downtown Dallas, Texas.
posted by chavenet (64 comments total)

The other day I saw a photo of John F. Kennedy at a 1963 White House thanksgiving celebration, pardoning a turkey that had a sign around its neck which said “Good Eating, Mr. President!”

“That’s clearly not real,” I thought, given that in 1963 Thanksgiving was in the week after JFK was shot, and that furthermore it was the elder Bush who started the tradition of issuing a presidential pardon to a turkey before Thanksgiving.

Au contraire, it turns out. On November 19th, at a White House ceremony where he was being presented with a turkey by the National Turkey Federation, President Kennedy spontanousely decided to spare the turkey, which his predecessors hadn’t done, and none of his successors did either.

Which just goes to show, as was beautifully explored in Errol Morris’ six-minute documentary about the “umbrella man” conspiracy theory, sometimes a highly dubious, clearly wacky thing, turns out to be true, even when it's close proximity to a moment of historical tragedy.
posted by Kattullus at 2:30 AM on November 22, 2023 [24 favorites]

Obligatory plug for Parkland, an excerpt from Vincent Bugliosi's study of the assassination that is a gripping, minute-by-minute recounting of the assassination and its aftermath. Chilling reading, and the movie was surprisingly good too.

I think Marina Oswald (Lee's widow) and Clint Hill (the Secret Service agent who jumped onto the back of the limo to grab Jackie Kennedy) must be the only surviving people with close ties to the JFK assassination now.
posted by fortitude25 at 3:24 AM on November 22, 2023 [4 favorites]

Wezley Buell Frazier, the coworker who got Lee Harvey Oswald his job at the Book Depository, and drove him to work 60 years ago, is still alive, I believe. He'd be about eighty.
posted by Kattullus at 3:47 AM on November 22, 2023 [2 favorites]

Also Paul Landis, another of the JFK secret service patrol, the guy who palmed a bullet and just wrote a book
posted by chavenet at 4:17 AM on November 22, 2023 [1 favorite]

Thanks for sharing that Umbrella Man link, Kattullus, it's a great mini-doc and I loved watching it.
posted by Shepherd at 4:34 AM on November 22, 2023 [3 favorites]

Max Miller (Tasting History) recreates JFK's last meal
posted by Faint of Butt at 4:36 AM on November 22, 2023 [4 favorites]

Rob Reiner has a new podcast in which he claims to blow the lid off of the whole thing (pardon the pun). Judging by the episode that I listened to, it smacks of...well...Rob Reiner as Marty Dibirgi in "Spinal Tap". His primary source seems to be an out of print book by a whackadoo freelancer named Dick Russell, whose few other credits include a bunch of conspiracy books written with Jesse "The Body" Ventura, and a glowing autobiography of RFK Jr, so...uh...make of that what you will.
posted by Optamystic at 4:51 AM on November 22, 2023 [3 favorites]

So Big Turkey is behind the assassination?
posted by MtDewd at 5:15 AM on November 22, 2023 [4 favorites]

I helped edit a JFK conspiracy book years ago, and while there are some holes (ahem) in the official story, the absence of evidence creates an environment where EVERYTHING is crucial evidence which then makes every possible theory equally plausible and equally outlandish. With documents still being withheld, it's difficult to believe there wasn't some kind of cover up, even if it was only culpability of incompetence in protecting the president.
posted by rikschell at 5:25 AM on November 22, 2023 [19 favorites]

autobiography of RFK

"Biography", obviously.
posted by Optamystic at 5:27 AM on November 22, 2023 [1 favorite]

i believe the doctrine of the old church of the subgenius was that literally every theory about the jfk assassination was true, and that dealy plaza was on that day a hellstorm of bullets, of lazers from alien saucers, of communists and fbi goons mixing it up hand to hand, of grenades hucked by cryptids, of nazis emerging from the hollow earth with the lance of longinus in tow, with lone gunmen on every knoll for miles around, every window filled with lees harveys oswald acting in a superposition of alone and organized, and then above it all the cackling holographic head of lbj, filliing the whole sky with boasts about both his victory over kennedy and also about his unimaginably gargantuan hog.

needless to say this all stopped seeming quite so funny after the allegations of cannibalism were confirmed.
posted by bombastic lowercase pronouncements at 5:57 AM on November 22, 2023 [38 favorites]

The Umbrella Man's story reminded me of jscalzi's famous observation about the failure mode of 'clever' being 'asshole'.

I get that umbrellas are associated with Chamberlain and that there's context for someone to be protesting against Kennedy by waving an umbrella at him, but in hindsight it just seems like such a dumb and obtuse thing for a single guy along the parade route to be doing that, so of course that's what he was doing.

Conspiracy theories always underestimate how weird and self-posessed we all are and how often it leads people to do bizarre things that only they can explain.
posted by RonButNotStupid at 6:14 AM on November 22, 2023 [12 favorites]

To understand Trump, understand Roger Stone.

In 2016, with Ted Cruz as a Trump opponent, Stone spread the rumor that Ted Cruz's father killed JFK.

Roger Stone wrote a book which implicated (2016 opponent) Jeb Bush's father, George Bush, Sr. in the assassination of JFK.

Roger Stone wrote another book, this one about the (2016 opponent) Clinton crime family which implicated the Clintons in the murder of JFK. In this case, JFK, Jr. and the downing of his plane.

Trump has given testimonial (and blurbs) for Stone's books. Part of Trump's brain believes this crap. It is his justification for being so evil. (The Clinton crime family is one of his frequent memes.)
posted by dances_with_sneetches at 6:29 AM on November 22, 2023 [9 favorites]

quoting myself from a little over a decade ago ...

a thought about word use here. It seems to me there's a kind of continuum worth considering.

impossible
unlikely
possible
plausible
probable
verifiable

with no doubt more words that could be added. For the record, I'm at most arguing for the plausibility of a JFK conspiracy, but more likely something between possible and plausible.

to me at the time, the weird thing about that thread was how much the general consensus seemed to be that Oswald did in fact act alone. Which said more to me about the state of the zeitgeist than the veracity of the "Official Story" on JFK's demise.

From the most favourited comment in that thread:

conspiracy theorists are created by two motivators:

1. The allure of being a superior intelligence who isn't fooled like the idiot masses and knows the real truth.

2. Believing in a world where someone, even a bad someone, is in charge is far less terrifying than accepting the undirected chaos of reality where things happen for no reason at all. Any of us can suffer and die at any moment and it's comforting to think that there's some Grand Purpose behind it all.

So for me, less a convincing argument against conspiracy, more a compelling evocation of "cabal fatigue" ... or something like that.
posted by philip-random at 6:29 AM on November 22, 2023 [6 favorites]

Beware of any "conspiracy theory" that relies on a level of competence that our government has never possessed and never will.
posted by tommasz at 6:31 AM on November 22, 2023 [16 favorites]

Beware of any "conspiracy theory" that relies on a level of competence that our government has never possessed and never will.

I heard that phrased once as:
How do you know the CIA wasn’t behind the JFK assassination?
It worked.
posted by Abehammerb Lincoln at 6:41 AM on November 22, 2023 [27 favorites]

Johnny Harris has today released his findings Why People Think The Government Killed JFK [30m] tl;dr: The Government could have released 5 million documents as appendices to the Warren Commission without derailing their LHO = lone-shooter conclusion; but chose not to do so . . . starting the collapse of trust in The Government.

On 22 Nov 1963, 4700mi ENE of Dallas, 9½ y.o. me had just gone to bed but was re-woken with the news that President Kennedy had been shot. I started to internalize 3 letter acronyms TLA the next day JFK LBJ CIA FBI . . . RFK MLK.
posted by BobTheScientist at 6:49 AM on November 22, 2023 [3 favorites]

Is the Kennedy assassination really all that weird and unexplained? We live in an age where stochastic terrorism creates lots of "lone wolves" that are ready and willing to attack. And when an attack happens, guess who spreads conspiracies about how these lone wolves weren't acting alone? The same groups behind the stochastic terrorism because it's in their interest to obscure the link between their rhetoric and violence it inspires.
posted by RonButNotStupid at 6:54 AM on November 22, 2023 [15 favorites]

Louie Steven Witt did a lot of work showing me the power of absurdity and how badly we need meaning.
posted by MonsieurPEB at 7:27 AM on November 22, 2023 [2 favorites]

JFK LBJ CIA FBI . . . RFK MLK

LBJ IRT USA LSD
posted by The Bellman at 7:43 AM on November 22, 2023 [3 favorites]

JFK JFC KFC
posted by MonsieurPEB at 7:46 AM on November 22, 2023 [3 favorites]

Clint Hill (the Secret Service agent who jumped onto the back of the limo to grab Jackie Kennedy) has a good book about his time in the Secret Service. Actually it looks like he has three books.
posted by freakazoid at 8:13 AM on November 22, 2023 [1 favorite]

for whatever it's worth my theory is that the footage has been doctored and that the entire cold war, which was not between the united states and the u.s.s.r. — everything you think you know about that was shot on a soundstage — but instead was between the united states and a multi-trillion-ton undersea monster named lomlor, who by using its own data from the bikini atoll tests combined with secret plans swiped from the united states military by fellow-traveling marine biologists had by the early 1960s rolled out a full nuclear arsenal that nearly matched what the united states held at the time.

lomlor's vast rectangular-pupiled eye had been on kennedy since the start, of course, but after the confrontation between the united states navy and one of lomlor's primary auxillary neuron/tentacle clusters that happened off the coast of cuba in 1962 its efforts to deal with the young upstart were redoubled. the absurd claims by the united states government about the president having been killed by a lone gunman rather than by a huge muscular besuckered tentacle that stretched out hundreds of miles from the gulf of mexico and that upon reaching dallas had wrapped its tip around kennedy's head in one smooth motion and then squeezed thereby causing that famously hatless head to pop up tens of feet into the air before coming back to earth somewhat behind and to the left of kennedy's lifeless body were driven by the understandable desire to avoid the mass panic that could ensue if americans in the heartland were to realize that they were just as exposed to the lomlorian menace as were the inhabitants of the great coastal cities
posted by bombastic lowercase pronouncements at 8:27 AM on November 22, 2023 [8 favorites]

the absence of evidence creates an environment where EVERYTHING is crucial evidence which then makes every possible theory equally plausible and equally outlandish.

Naw, some theories should be rejected as not plausible and far more outlandish than, say, what X22 or The Dark Journalist have made claims about. (One of their versions is covering up the space aliens. Some days dark journalist claims it also covers up free energy and Nixon hid the equation in the white house and Trump became president to recover the hidden formula.)

That outlandish claim was made by the now dead Micheal Protzman who was known as Negative 48. He was the leader of the JFK/JFK Jr had faked their deaths and were gonna show up together and fix America.

How outlandish - just 2 men are gonna fix America.
posted by rough ashlar at 8:31 AM on November 22, 2023 [1 favorite]

if you would, please, imagine that where i said "kennedy's lifeless body" that i had instead said "the now-former president's lifeless body." it's funnier that way.

thx!
posted by bombastic lowercase pronouncements at 8:37 AM on November 22, 2023 [2 favorites]

Americans love conspiracies. I am not saying that there was one nor am I saying that there was not. However many witnesses in the trial went missing.
posted by DJZouke at 9:01 AM on November 22, 2023 [2 favorites]

MetaFilter: needless to say this all stopped seeming quite so funny after the allegations of cannibalism were confirmed.

i appreciate the thoroughness of the post it's the title quote that got me.
posted by ZaphodB at 9:08 AM on November 22, 2023 [3 favorites]

what's the point of writing these things, you say, why, lowercase bombastic pronouncements, do you participate in this way, and then i remind you that i carve all my most-favorited comments into clay tablets which i subsequently bake and bury and well this is all to say that if you want to really screw with the archaeologists of the future you know what to do
posted by bombastic lowercase pronouncements at 9:09 AM on November 22, 2023 [4 favorites]

bombastic lowercase pronouncements are you related to Chuck Tingle?
posted by supermedusa at 9:28 AM on November 22, 2023 [4 favorites]

no but i'm a very close personal friend of thomas pynchon
posted by bombastic lowercase pronouncements at 9:31 AM on November 22, 2023 [7 favorites]

well, certainly, some kind of baking is involved
posted by pyramid termite at 9:34 AM on November 22, 2023 [4 favorites]

A few points:

- There is this previous thread, which is still open.

- WRT the few surviving witnesses, this National Geographic documentary has interviews with most of the ones listed above, although not Marina Oswald (who AFAIK is no longer going by that name). I was going to do a FanFare thread about it, and if someone else wants to, that's fine. I wanted to share something that Buell Frazier, Oswald's coworker who drove him to work that morning, said that's about the saddest thing I've ever heard anyone say: that the young man who drove Oswald to work that morning never came back.

- Kind of side-eyeing Paul Landis deciding, after sixty years, to reveal that he moved a crucial piece of evidence. I mean, it's not impossible, but dude, what the hell.

- I think that the Popular Mechanics link above is a pretty good summary of the conspiracy theories and why they arose and are still somewhat popular.

- I've also started reading Gerald Posner's Case Closed, and it seems to be pretty good about debunking the prevailing conspiracy theories and specifics within them, including the idea that Oswald was a bad shot (the records of his Marine training say that he was a pretty good shot) and that the rifle was of poor quality (it wasn't), and how the most popular conspiracy theories tend to ignore Oswald's attempt on Edwin Walker's life previously, since that would argue against the Oswald-as-patsy argument. I haven't gotten to the assassination itself yet--Posner is very thorough--but so far it seems solid.
posted by Halloween Jack at 9:38 AM on November 22, 2023 [7 favorites]

There's a great passage in the relevant Caro biography about Lyndon Johnson locked in a room while the assassination is sorted out. Caro imagines what Johnson was thinking. Then someone unlocks the door and LBJ emerges, full of plans and raring to go.
posted by doctornemo at 9:39 AM on November 22, 2023 [3 favorites]

I'm about to board a flight to Dallas on my way to another city (four airports, three flights and time zones, two countries today). What a weird day to fly through Dallas, which is always a yucky airport. Hopefully today won't be even worse than usual given the date.
posted by wicked_sassy at 9:55 AM on November 22, 2023 [2 favorites]

Paul Krassner's The Parts They Left Out Of The Kennedy Book remains timelessly irreverent.
posted by delfin at 10:05 AM on November 22, 2023 [3 favorites]

Bill Sienkiewicz 'Coup D'Etat' JFK Assassination trading cards make as much sense as anything. They're a bunch of random clues with not much follow-up.
posted by ovvl at 10:57 AM on November 22, 2023 [2 favorites]

Did anyone ever digitize and distribute the full Warren Commission report, the 30 volume one? (I forget what it's called.) I had my eye on a set for sale in the mid to late 90's that was going for ~$330.
I continue to be grateful that my early adulthood fascination with all things JFK/LHO happened pre-internet.

After many years of obsessive "research" (reading books from the library or purchased at Waldenbooks at the mall) I came to believe the lone gunman theory. In some ways it's an uplifting tale of the power of the individual. In other ways it's another sad story of a very broken person rattling around in their own life looking for truth/beauty/meaning, that ends in pain and violence.

I hope LHO's ex-wife and kids have found peace.
posted by ButteryMales at 11:02 AM on November 22, 2023 [1 favorite]

Did anyone ever digitize and distribute the full Warren Commission report, the 30 volume one?

Looks like it's all online here.
posted by Gerald Bostock at 11:32 AM on November 22, 2023 [2 favorites]

all sorts of information here at
The President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection

Congress enacted the President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act of 1992. The Act mandated that all assassination-related material be housed in a single collection in the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA). The resulting Collection consists of more than 5 million pages of assassination-related records, photographs, motion pictures, sound recordings and artifacts (approximately 2,000 cubic feet of records). Most of the records are open for research.

Another link here for Warren commission report 26 volumes

--
Some real strange stuff at the first link.
Mainly recently released 08/24/2023 CIA documents;
stuff like;
MESSAGE: RE ASSASIN OF MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR.
SUSPECT KING ASSASSIN, ERIC STARVO GALT, AKA:
CABLE RE SOURCE REPORT ON BLACK PANTHER PARTY MEMBERS IN FRANCE
SUBJECT: AMERICANS ATTENDING THE WORLD PEACE COUNCIL (WPC) CONFERENCE
SUBJECT HAS BEEN RECRUITED BY THE HABANA STATION AT THE RATE OF $300. PER MONTH EFFECTIVE 1 JUNE 1960.
posted by yyz at 11:50 AM on November 22, 2023 [2 favorites]

"Khrushchev reminds me of the tiger hunter who has picked a place on the wall to hang the tiger's skin long before he has caught the tiger. This tiger has other ideas."

-JFK
posted by clavdivs at 12:32 PM on November 22, 2023 [3 favorites]

for those who want some musical accompaniment for this thread, this song might do well by you
posted by bombastic lowercase pronouncements at 12:35 PM on November 22, 2023 [2 favorites]

How my father and grandmother met Marina Oswald.

"I’m just like everybody else, and I’ve had more than enough."
–Marina Oswald
posted by clavdivs at 12:59 PM on November 22, 2023 [3 favorites]

A portrait I did some 17 years ago of Oswald from a long running series that I post from time to time on this baleful anniversary.
I was born roughly 14 months after the assassination and even though I'm Canadian the event seems to linger for years afterwards in the culture at large in Canada as well.
Lee, Ballpoint pen and acrylic on paper, 24 by 18 inches, 2006
posted by Phlegmco(tm) at 1:19 PM on November 22, 2023 [4 favorites]

this song yt might do well by you

or if you want something you can take to the clubs:

Human League - Seconds
posted by philip-random at 1:32 PM on November 22, 2023 [2 favorites]

On 22 Nov 1963, 4700mi ENE of Dallas, 9½ y.o. me had just gone to bed but was re-woken with the news that President Kennedy had been shot.

At 12:30 PM local time.
posted by y2karl at 1:46 PM on November 22, 2023 [3 favorites]

Seconds is so on point phillip-random. Love the song, despite how horrible it is...
posted by Windopaene at 2:07 PM on November 22, 2023 [2 favorites]

An all-time Onion classic:

KENNEDY SLAIN BY CIA, MAFIA, CASTRO, LBJ, TEAMSTERS, FREEMASONS; President Shot 129 Times from 43 Different Angles
posted by non canadian guy at 2:44 PM on November 22, 2023 [3 favorites]

or if you want something you can take to the clubs:

There's also Reverence by Jesus & Mary Chain. It's irreverent.
posted by ovvl at 3:11 PM on November 22, 2023 [2 favorites]

I have a weird family connection...my uncle John was "good friends" with David Ferry. There's a picture of them with Oswald while they were in the Louisiana civil air patrol.
posted by pepcorn at 3:21 PM on November 22, 2023 [4 favorites]

pepcorn, this picture, I'm guessing.
posted by Halloween Jack at 4:11 PM on November 22, 2023 [2 favorites]

I'm scared to ask how this is popcofn related
posted by DeepSeaHaggis at 4:11 PM on November 22, 2023 [3 favorites]

I was 10 months old when this happened.

But I feel like the echos have come back to me my whole life.

What could America have been. Heady times, (sorry awkward, didn't mean it that way), but it felt like we had a chance to do good. Not so much of late. This event ruined everything.

EDIT: Regardless of any conspiracy theories
posted by Windopaene at 4:37 PM on November 22, 2023 [3 favorites]

The definitive musical summary of the assassination was Steinski and The Mass Media's The Motorcade Sped On
Heeeeeere's Johnny!
posted by thatwhichfalls at 4:57 PM on November 22, 2023 [1 favorite]

WRT musical versions of the event: "11 MPH (Abe Zapp Ruder Version)" by Was (Not Was).
posted by Halloween Jack at 6:06 PM on November 22, 2023 [1 favorite]

After RFK, MLK, the attempts on Ford and Reagan
It's hard to believe what a shock it was.
It really stunned people.

Assassinating the president was not even a federal crime in 1963,
That's how unthinkable it was.
Oswald would have been charged under Texas murder statutes.
Which resulted in massive squables between all the law enforcement agencies.
City, State, FBI, secret service etc
The autopsy should have been performed in Dallas
But there was no way the feds were going to allow that.
nothing sinister, just prefered to have the military do it
.
It happened in the afternoon at a time when newspapers were a real thing.
And yes they held the presses, and also put out an extra edition

Here's a link to the Toronto Star Nov 22
which shows just a headline with a few sentences , followed by the extra night edition
posted by yyz at 7:05 PM on November 22, 2023 [3 favorites]

My wife and I went a few years ago to the museum that's now in the Texas School Book Depository and it was fantastic.
posted by neuron at 7:23 PM on November 22, 2023 [1 favorite]

I am about two dozen episodes into JFK: The Enduring Secret. It's a very deep dive but seems quite fair. As said above, there are so many holes in the official story that I can't wrap my head around a possible conspiracy being dismissed out of hand, not to say more.


1. The allure of being a superior intelligence who isn't fooled like the idiot masses and knows the real truth.

2. Believing in a world where someone, even a bad someone, is in charge is far less terrifying than accepting the undirected chaos of reality where things happen for no reason at all. Any of us can suffer and die at any moment and it's comforting to think that there's some Grand Purpose behind it all.

There is a lot of truth to number one, I think, but number two is backward: to believe in a JFK assassination conspiracy is to confront what that would mean about the actual US government and that is anything but comforting.
posted by blue shadows at 8:16 PM on November 22, 2023 [2 favorites]

If anyone is interested, Dealy plaza is still there, with an X on the street where his motorcade was shot, and plenty of people trying to convince you of their theory. It quite an interesting place on a nice day.
posted by LizBoBiz at 8:58 PM on November 22, 2023 [2 favorites]

On 22 Nov 1963, 4700mi ENE of Dallas, 9½ y.o. me had just gone to bed but was re-woken with the news that President Kennedy had been shot.

At 12:30 PM local time.

4700 mi ENE placed BobTheScientist presumably in GMT, and given the speed of communication 60 years ago he had a pretty standard 9 year old bedtime. Here's the BBC's own recounting of how the message went out to the British people 60 years ago.
posted by St. Oops at 11:52 PM on November 22, 2023 [2 favorites]

"There is no group of people this large in the world that can keep a secret. I find it comforting. It's how I know for sure the government isn't covering up aliens in New Mexico."
posted by dry white toast at 10:45 AM on November 24, 2023 [1 favorite]

Conspiracy theories. We used to call them rumors. They don't deserve to be called theories.

11/22/63/

I was still in basic training at Ford Ord, California. On that day, my training battalion, about a thousand newly-minted little green monsters, marched to a football field on post, where we broke up into platoons for another session of bayonet training. Bayonet training is sort of like football practice--very aerobic, requiring constant focus.

We drilled in such techniques as how to use your bare hands to disarm an opponent who attacks you with a bayonet on the end of his rifle. It's simple; you just take his rifle away from him and kill him with it. We also learned how to use our rifles as a combination spear and club. We learned the fencing-type moves used to engage an opponent while avoiding getting stabbed or bashed: parry and trust. Don't let your mind wander.

The more aggressive you are, the better your chance of prevailing in a bayonet fight. We practiced on each other and armatures with a swinging arm that we had to parry before we stuck the center of mass with our bayonet--these allowed us to penetrate something solid enough that you had to put your foot on it to get the bayonet out. Other armatures were designed to let us practice the various ways we could use rifles as clubs: vertical butt stroke, horizontal butt stroke, butt smash. Good times for a dumb kid just out of high school, not yet old enough to vote or drink booze.

Occasionally, one of the drill instructors would yell into my ear: "What's the spirit of the bayonet?!" The only acceptable response was "To Kill!!!" If I neglected to put enough verbal exclamation marks after my answer, I would be allowed to do twenty pushups while screaming those words on every count. Our weapons then were the hefty M-14, not that little plastic thing I used a couple of years later when I went to war. For a few brief hours, I thought I might do okay in a bayonet fight. I rethought that idea a bit later in my military career.

So....that day.

Our battalion commander called the training session to a sudden halt. We were marched back to our battalion street, a distance of about two miles. Marching troops always sang cadence to and from training. Not that day. The only sounds from the platoon sergeants were to post the road guards when we came to an intersection. At the battalion area, we were peeled off by company and then ordered to stay in our barracks. Without knowing why, the gravity of those moments settled on us. The best we could do was mug and shrug.

After about an hour, our platoon sergeant, SFC Denneman, entered the barracks and ordered the upstairs squads to come down downstairs. Sergeant Denneman informed us that our President had been shot in Dallas. Then he told us to stay in the barracks. He said that part twice then left.

The rumor mill started slowly and ran through several permutations before our platoon decided that we would soon be doing bayonet drills with Soviet troops. It never occurred to any of us that an American would kill our President. It had to be a Russian.

I had turned 18 only a week before.
posted by mule98J at 2:42 PM on November 24, 2023 [9 favorites]

From Halloween Jack's Popular Mechanics link:

It's been suggested by some conspiracy theorists that Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson was behind JFK's assassination. This fringe theory was rooted in the idea that Johnson feared Kennedy would drop him from the ticket in 1964, and that Kennedy intended to de-escalate a war in Vietnam ... from which Johnson was personally profiting.

I was 11 1/2, and delivered the [Harrisburg, PA] Evening News. The papers I got to deliver that afternoon had already been printed before news came from Dallas. The headline that night was something to the effect that Kennedy was probably going to drop Johnson from the ticket. That was a weird thing to deliver.
posted by MtDewd at 1:25 PM on November 25, 2023 [1 favorite]

4700 mi ENE placed BobTheScientist presumably in GMT, and given the speed of communication 60 years ago he had a pretty standard 9 year old bedtime.

Point taken, my bad.
posted by y2karl at 10:28 PM on November 25, 2023 [1 favorite]

The Finnish intelligence service has released its documents concerning Lee Harvey Oswald’s short stay in Helsinki on his way to Moscow in 1959. There are no bombshells in there, but it’s kinda interesting. Short excerpt:

On the night of October 10, 1959, a young man identified as Lee Harvey Oswald arrived at Hotel Torni in Helsinki.

Hailing from the United States, he checked into room 309, claiming a five-day stay. However, after just two nights, Oswald changed hotels, moving to the Klaus Kurki Hotel, where he stayed for an additional three nights.

posted by Kattullus at 11:56 AM on December 9, 2023