[LISTEN] American Chronicles Episode 3 – John F. Kennedy Assassination

JOHN F. KENNEDY ASSASSINATION
© 2015 John C. Merino

On November 22, 1963 I was twelve years old, seated in Mr. Uri’s Mechanical Drawing class at Niagara Falls New York’s North Junior High School, when my concentration…hand drawing arrow heads on graph paper….was broken by the squelch of the school’s PA system.

Ed O’Connor, the vice principal, instructed us to return to our home rooms where distribution of the first Ten Week report card would take place. It was three hours before the expected end of the normal school day.

In that home room we were told that President John F. Kennedy had been shot in Dallas, Texas. No more than that. We were dismissed and told to go straight home.

That Friday afternoon, my mother, kid brother Marc and I sat in front of the television set listening to the reports from Walter Cronkite, waiting for a final word on the president’s fate, quietly struck by the horror…though it would be several years before I completely understood just how horrible it was.

In the decades since, I have read and absorbed literally hundreds of books, on line articles, films, and radio broadcasts, held conversations with historians and poets and garbage men, taking notes all the while in hopes that somewhere in the morass of information both true and speculative, lay the answer to the question…..

Who killed John F. Kennedy and why?

It poses what I have concluded, are the 100 unanswered questions, which if answered, would bring us closer to knowing the truth.

There are individuals still alive, I conjecture, who were part of the mix that day.

Self serving justifications and that simple commission of their perfect crime are the hallmark of their covert rationale.

The act destroyed not only a man and his family but a generation of young people wide eyed and blushing in the robust America built by our fathers in post World War II.

We were left in disbelief and that disbelief resonates in Americans to this day.

Over the course of the American Studies series, I’ll return to the JFK Assassination every few weeks, posing questions.

Let me begin with this:

Were their two Lee Harvey Oswald’s? John Anderson, a retired Texas Architect spent a full decade researching the question and among the 900 pages of his book (Harvey and Lee) are fully documented medical, school and military records showing two persons using the same name and in different places at the same time.

Mr. Anderson defines “Harvey” as a Slavic immigrant fluent in Russian, and the man murdered by Jack Ruby. Lee is the real Oswald. He concludes that their identities were merged in the late 50’s through the use of Marine Corp records……………but the duplicate records not lost or destroyed………from grade school through military service paint a different picture.

Let me run down just some of the discrepancies’ Mr. Anderson found.

These are just a few of the hundreds of documented discrepancies indicating two Lee Harvey Oswalds. For more on this topic, check out “Harvey and Lee” by John Anderson. Excerpts are available on the world wide web.

I’m John Merino and this is American Chronicles.

ABOUT: American Chronicles is a bi-weekly locally produced feature on WRFA written and produced by retired Gebbie Foundation CEO, John C. Merino. Currently, John is an Adjunct Professor of Micro-Economics, Organizational Management, and 20th Century World History at Mercyhurst University. American Chronicles airs twice monthly, Friday mornings at 7:15 and Friday Afternoons at 4:35. American Chronicles features original stories (partly fact and partly fiction), commentary on local, state , national, world conditions and more.