I am not a conspiracy theorist.... most of the time.

Growing up in the 1960's I saw a lot of changes in our country and culture many of them not for the better I might add. Having reached voting age in the early 1970's I watched the Watergate scandal unfold on television and in the newspapers culminating with the only resignation of a president in the history of our nation. One of the sad after effects of Watergate was the public and even more so the press began to see a conspiracy behind every news story and developed an automatic distrust of anything that the government had to say. When you combine this with the fact that anyone associated with the news media, even the gofers that brought the coffee and doughnuts, thought they could become the next “Woodward & Bernstein” if only they could “crack” the conspiracy caused problems that exist to this day. Since I'm writing a blog entry and not a book I won't try to list them all here.

I have always looked at the many stories some of which have become a part of our culture with somewhat of a jaded eye. In most cases I think they either don't warrant all of the attention they get and could care less if there is really anything to the theories either way they work out. Others I think may have some seeds of truth in them but are blown so far out of proportion as to deny any real reasonable thought.

Having said that I have to admit there is one such story that has not only has captured my attention for most of my life but in which I do feel that there is a real conspiracy involved that withholds the entire truth of the matter from us. I have my own ideas on why the truth is being withheld but again I'm not attempting to write a book here so I will reserve those for another time.

Yesterday when I picked up the Tribune Review to browse while having breakfast a news item immediately caught my attention. Like many people my age I can tell you exactly where I was and what I was doing the moment that I heard that President Kennedy had been shot. Like wise I can also give you a very vivid description of where I was and who I was with when I learned that the shots fired at the president in Dallas that day had indeed been fatal. It will be much the same for my children and those of this generation when they tell their children where they were, who they were with and what they were doing on the morning of September 11th 2001.

In the years that followed I read and watched and listened to all of the swirl of information that surrounded the assignation and drew my own conclusions. About the only thing I haven't done is read the Warren Commission Report from cover to cover mostly because I think it would be a waist of my time. Having read parts of it and listened to analysts discuss and debate the report in its entirety I feel it is only good as a reference for those searching for the truth behind the matter.

Much of that report relies on the fact that all of the non fatal wounds suffered by Kennedy and then Governor John Connally were caused by one shot fired by Lee Harvey Oswald. The so called “single bullet theory” too which I have never subscribed. Well it turns out now that the research that was done in 1976 for a report commissioned by congress in response wide spread disbelief by the public of the Warren Commission was based on faulty science. You can follow this LINK for comments by Cyril Wecht on the story. Mr Wecht and I don't see eye to eye on many topics but this is not one of them.

As I said above, I am not generally a conspiracy theorist, but there is no way you can convenience me that Lee Harvey Oswald was the loan shooter in the Kennedy assignation. I'm not even sure that Oswald even pulled a trigger that fateful day in Dallas. There are far to many unanswered questions and far to many explanations that follow neither form nor logic. I'm not sure that the actual facts will ever come to light in my life time. There are still unanswered questions about the assignation of President Lincon over a century ago. Still I cling to hope that someday the truth will be told.