JFK blown away, what else do I gotta say?

As an end of term treat and to tie in with our work on the Cuban Missile Crisis, we started watching Oscar winning Oliver Stone film 'JFK' in class today.

The story is so compelling that I sat down on my own after school, in my freezing classroom to finish watching the film. #MrRawlingsissad

Click here for the link to the film...

Next year, incredibly, will mark the 50th anniversary of John Fitzgerald Kennedy's assassination. Kennedy was shot two or three times (depending on who you believe) at 12:30pm Central Standard Time on 22 November 1963 in Dallas, Texas. The final shot hit Kennedy in the head and, almost certainly, killed him on the spot.

Kennedy parades through Dallas, just moments before the fatal shots.

Lee Harvey Oswald, an employee of the Texas School Book Depository that overlooked the parade route, was arrested and charged with the assassination of the President. Two days later, before he could be tried, Oswald was murdered as he was led away from Dallas Police Station. This second assassin, Jack Ruby, was given a death sentence, but died of cancer in 1967 before a date for the sentence could be confirmed.

Oswald consistently claimed he had been set up. To this day, conspiracy theories abound, all aiming to explain JFK's untimely death.

So just who did kill Kennedy? See a breakdown of the conspiracy theories after the jump...


The Cuban Theory:
This explanation has been offered by columnist Jack Anderson, among others. It has two variants:

1. The fashionable revisionist version tells us that Kennedy was killed by right-wing Cuban exiles in America who felt that the President had sold them out. Kennedy's refusal to allow U.S. forces to participate in the exile army's Bay of Pigs invasion, which was instigated and financed by the CIA, left the exiles easy meat for Castro's air force. Thousands of the emigres were killed or imprisoned by the Castro regime, and those escaping or left in America were quite upset. Also, in the aftermath of the Cuban missile crisis it was widely believed Kennedy guaranteed the Russians that Cuba would be left unmolested in return for a withdrawal of Soviet missiles from the island.
2. The more common theory is that Fidel Castro had Kennedy murdered in reprisal for numerous attempts on his own life by the Mafia and Cuban counterrevolutionaries, both of whom were acting at the behest of Kennedy's CIA The Bay of Pigs and Cuban missile crisis only strengthened Castro's belief that he was in a kill-or-be-killed situation.

The KGB:
Also known as the Reader's Digest Theory, this theory is most favored by right-wing conspiracy theorists. A man called Leon Trotsky Oswald, thought to be the same 'Lee Harvey Oswald' spent two years in Russia, married a K.G.B. colonel's niece, and came back to put an end to the President of the United States. How could Soviet intelligence not have had a hand in the killing? Obviously Oswald was a K.G.B. agent, sent to do what he could for the cause, and when it became necessary for Kennedy to die, Oswald served his purpose.
The question mark for this theory is motive. Kennedy had embarrassed the Soviets in the big Cuban showdown the year before, but their geopolitical situation was, if anything, stronger in 1963 than in the previous year. Kennedy had removed missiles aimed at Russia from the Turkish border as a concession, and also had taken a hands-off posture toward Cuba.

The CIA:
This  is the theory put forward by Oliver Stone's 1991 film - 'JFK'. It is a conspiracy theorists dream, like faking the moon landing, as it designates absolute control to a paranoid, malevolent inside power. The story goes that the CIA decided to do away with Kennedy for three reasons.

1. First, because he had conceded Cuba to the communists. This made him a communist sympathiser.
2. Secondly, that they were concerned that Kennedy would allow the same to happen with Vietnam.
3. Thirdly, as a response to the wave of firings made by Kennedy in the wake of the Bay of Pigs fiasco. Starting with then CIA Director Allen Dulles. A man who served on the Warren Commission - the group assigned to investigate Kennedy's assassination.

These three are just scraping the surface of the conspiracies out there. A quick Google search will turn out hundreds of different theories, each with a plethora of seemingly concrete evidence to back them up.

http://www.stayfreemagazine.org/4/jfk.htm

The best of which are surely: the 'Zero Game' conspiracy. It is a bizarre coincidence that (with the exception of Ronald Reagan) every President since 1840 elected in a year ending in zero has died in office. And the 'Anti-Greens' conspiracy, which suggests that Kennedy was assassinated as a result of a hippy plot to lower the world's CO2 omissions.

Of course the odd thing about the JFK assassination is that his brother, Robert, was assassinated 5 years later in Los Angeles, California.