Nov. 22 marks the 61st anniversary of the assassination of the 35th president of the United States.
In his inauguration speech in 1961, John F. Kennedy famously said “Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country.” He also asked the countries of the world to fight the “common enemies of man: tyranny, poverty, disease, and war itself.”
During his presidency, Kennedy created the Peace Corps, set the goal of walking on the moon by the end of the 1960s (which ultimately happened), navigated America through the Cuban missile crisis, wanted to limit the United States’ involvement in Vietnam and began initiatives on Medicare and civil rights.
Because he was only 46 when he was killed, he lives in our imagination as a perennially young man full of promise.
Rob Reiner has said the Kennedy assassination in Dallas is America’s greatest unsolved murder mystery. The filmmaker created a 10-part podcast Who Killed JFK, which claims that four people were the shooters, not one of whom is Lee Harvey Oswald. A presidential commission chaired by Chief Justice Earl Warren concluded in 1964 that Oswald was the lone gunman.
The most complete movie footage of the assassination was filmed by Abraham Zapruder, a Ukrainian-born clothing manufacturer and Kennedy admirer who recorded 26.6 seconds of the president’s motorcade on his Bell & Howell home-movie camera.
Jack Ruby (born Jacob Rubenstein), a Dallas nightclub owner, shot and killed Oswald on live television in the basement of the Dallas Police Headquarters. As a result, Oswald never had the opportunity to defend himself against the charges of killing the president.
This fact, the contents of the Zapruder film, and new information that keeps being revealed, have led to the controversy which swirls to this day. Many say that Americans’ distrust of government took hold with the Kennedy assassination and the fact that the Warren Report did not explain to everyone’s satisfaction what happened in Dallas on that day.
Any observer of this saga might reasonably conclude that distrust of any government—whether in the United States, Canada or Israel—continues to be warranted.
