Will We Ever Know the Truth About JFK?

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President and Mrs. Kennedy disembark in Dallas.

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In a little more than two months, it will be the 50th anniversary of the assassination of John F. Kennedy here in Dallas.

It goes without saying that it was a traumatic event for this country — particularly so for this city (my grandmother always regarded it as a black eye for Dallas) — and I suppose many people have lived for years, probably decades, with a desire to know the real story of what happened that day. Perhaps they, like my grandmother, believe that whoever pulled the trigger couldn't possibly be local because, well, everybody knew that folks from Dallas wouldn't do that kind of thing — even though Dallas in general was known to be hostile to the administration.

Initially, I guess, a majority of Americans accepted the Warren Commission's conclusion that Lee Harvey Oswald was the lone gunman. That was how most Americans were raised in those days — to respect authority and accept its word on everything (the deceit of the Johnson and Nixon presidencies would go a long way toward eroding that inclination).

At the dawn of the 1960s, conformity was in fashion in America, just as it had been (and still was) in the European cultures from which many Americans' ancestors had come — and they, like all other immigrants before and since, brought their values with them.

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After the home movie that Abraham Zapruder made that day went public a few years later, suspicions rapidly grew among Americans that the Kennedy assassination had been part of some sort of conspiracy. America had been souring on the Vietnam war, and the pump was primed for conspiracy theories to flourish.

A general consensus arose that the true story had not been told, either by omission or commission, and that view gained some momentum in the mid–1970s when a special congressional committee evaluated the evidence from prominent assassinations in the 1960s — President Kennedy, his brother Bobby and Martin Luther King — and determined that it was probable that there had been more than one gunman in Dealey Plaza that day.

I guess that is the only thing that many Americans agreed on — and, I will admit, I was one of them. There is little agreement about who was responsible — some say the CIA, some say organized crime, others say Cubans, still others say right–wing extremists. Some of the more elaborate scenarios combine two or more.

I use the past tense — was — for myself not because I now believe the Warren Commission (I don't), but because I believe that, whether the Warren Commission was right or wrong, it doesn't matter now. Too much time has passed, too many material witnesses are deceased or suffering from dementia, and we will never know what the truth is.

Some people will never believe that. They will keep searching for the truth, and I do hope they find it, but I have strong doubts that anyone ever will.

Some people will insist that they already know the truth. I have dealt with such people all my life — on some subjects, I must admit, I am one of those people — and I have learned that it is usually futile to attempt to change their minds.

And who knows? They might be right — as one of my favorite journalists, H.L. Mencken, liked to say in letters to angry readers.

Perhaps Lee Harvey Oswald did shoot Kennedy. Perhaps he did act alone. I don't know. What I do know is that there have been unanswered questions from the start. Granted, some of the questions eventually received plausible answers, but it has often seemed in the Kennedy case that, whenever a single question has been answered, it has raised two new questions, and we seemed to drift farther from the truth than we were before.

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Not even the best mystery writer could invent as many red herrings and dead–end leads as there have been in this case over the years. It is alleged that many of these were the results of sloppy investigative work or human error or even coincidence.

If Oswald really did act alone, it is hard to imagine the investigation into the murder of any president being handled as sloppily — or as many coincidences occurring. There has been plenty of doubt about the number of shooters — heck, even the number of shots — in Dealey Plaza that day, and it did take the Dallas police an inexcusably long time to seal off the Texas Schoolbook Depository after the shots were fired and the consensus among witnesses was that at least some of those shots had been fired from that building.

Maybe there are simple explanations for things that appear to be so clearly sinister. I am a defender of our legal system in spite of its flaws, and I know things are not always how they seem — but, really, so many? It defies logic and common sense.

Suppose Oswald had not been killed but had lived to face trial. America's legal history is filled with cases where juries acted differently than many observers expected. How many times in your life have you heard of a verdict that was contrary to public opinion? That was one of the things I learned during my days on the police beat. You can never tell what a jury will do, but you can be sure that someone won't like it.

No one knows what a jury might have said about the case against Oswald. The closest we came was the case brought by Jim Garrison in New Orleans that was re–enacted in Oliver Stone's "JFK." That trial was only a few years after the assassination, when the trail presumably was still warm, and it resulted in an acquittal.

In 2013, it is a decidedly cold case, and I believe it will remain so.

In (almost) the words of a once–popular TV show, the truth may be out there. I just don't think that, at this stage, anyone will find it.

The Romney Report

I grew up admiring the work of the Washington Post.

The Post's investigation of the Watergate break–in and coverup inspired me to study journalism in college, work for newspapers and, ultimately, teach and advise journalism students.

But I find little to admire in Jason Horowitz's lengthy article about Mitt Romney's alleged misbehavior in high school.

To be sure, there is nothing to admire about the incident that is described in detail in Horowitz's piece. A young man was horribly — inexcusably — mistreated by a group of high school tormentors, a group of which Romney apparently was the leader.

And I feel qualified to make that assessment because I was a victim of a similar act when I was in junior high. In my case, insult was added to injury by the fact that the leader of the group had been one of my closest, most trusted friends. I don't know if Romney and the victim in 1965 were ever friends.

But what most of these cases seem to have in common is that the victim is usually perceived to be different from the attackers in some way. The only real difference, I suppose, between my attackers and the group Romney allegedly led in 1965 is Romney's group was a few years older.

But, in both cases, the acts were, as one of the participants told Horowitz, "senseless, stupid, idiotic thing[s]."

They were also the behavior of the immature — and that is something of which we all have been guilty at some time.

That isn't meant to excuse these acts. It is only meant to explain them.

Some, if not most, immature actions don't cause lasting damage. Regrettably, some do. And it is impossible to know if the victim in 1965 suffered a permanent scar. He died in 2004.

Thus, it is impossible for Romney to make amends to him.

Which brings me to my primary question: What is the point in publishing this story?

Is it to irrefutably expose the fact that what is now considered hazing and bullying went on 50 years ago as well? I thought we established that in TV shows like Happy Days and movies like "National Lampoon's Animal House."

Is it to establish that a presumptive nominee for the presidency was guilty of immature behavior in his youth? I don't really think it is a good idea to start judging presidential candidates by what they did in their teen years, do you?

Besides, Americans have been pretty lenient about that kind of stuff in the last 20 years. After all, Bill Clinton (gasp!) smoked marijuana and Barack Obama acknowledged using cocaine in their teen years. And George W. Bush struggled with alcohol (and, reportedly, other things) well beyond his teen years.

As someone who worked on the copy desk for many years, I can only conclude that the Post's editors must have figured there was some value in running this report.

But what was it?

If it could be shown that this was some kind of indicator of what turned out to be a lifelong pattern of indifference to others, that would be one thing. But evidence of such a pattern is conspicuously absent.

In fact, Horowitz's article quotes classmates of Romney's who spoke of how he matured when he met his future wife. That is not an uncommon influence. And Romney's behavior as an adult stands in stark contrast to his behavior in prep school.

This is not, after all, like 2006, when a video camera caught Virginia Sen. George Allen using an ethnic slur at a re–election campaign event, and it was established that it was representative of things he had been saying and doing for years.

Patrick Pexton, the Post's ombudsman, insists that the story "holds up to scrutiny."

I guess it did — if the objective was to blow the lid off high school hijinks.

The Mother of All Cliffhangers

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Back in January, I observed the 50th anniversary of John F. Kennedy's announcement of his candidacy for president, and I called it "The Birth of Camelot."

But that wasn't really accurate.

It probably would have been more accurate to say that, in early January of 1960, Camelot was conceived — although experts on Kennedy's life and presidency probably would tell you that the idea of that Kennedy — or any Kennedy — seeking the presidency was conceived many years earlier.

But the idea didn't bear fruit until 50 years ago today.

Well, perhaps it would be more accurate to say 50 years ago tomorrow because it wasn't until Wednesday, Nov. 9, 1960, that Kennedy was declared the winner of the closest presidential election in more than a century.

But it was 50 years ago today that the voters went to the polls.

"It was invisible, as always," wrote historian Theodore H. White of the process of democracy. "[I]t is the essence of the act that as it happens it is a mystery in which millions of people each fit one fragment of a total secret together, none of them knowing the shape of the whole."

In the end, it was closer than anyone could have expected — out of approximately 69 million votes, about 100,000 separated the two men.

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It was excruciating, for the winners as well as the losers. In his book "The Making of the President 1960," White wrote of observing Kennedy as Nixon addressed his supporters late in the evening, steadfastly refusing to concede. Kennedy, he wrote, bore an "expression showing faint distaste" at the spectacle of the "twisted, barely controlled sorrow" of Nixon's wife at his side.

That was the kind of thing the sophisticated, elegant Kennedy would never allow, White wrote.

In an election that close, it should surprise no one that there were accusations of irregularities.

I guess there will always be those who will dispute the results in some of the states — at least until the time comes when no one still living is old enough to remember that night.

My grandfather, for example, a Texas Republican at a time when that was still something of a rarity, always insisted that Kennedy "stole" the 1960 election — or, more accurately, his daddy "stole" it for him, pulling some strings in some key places.

Well, Grandpa was biased. He never cared for Kennedy's running mate, Texas Sen. Lyndon Johnson. He called him "Landslide Lyndon" — a derisive nickname hung on Johnson after an extremely narrow victory in the 1948 runoff for the Democratic Senate nomination.

There have always been rumors about that election, too.

But Johnson's victory was certified, in keeping with state law, and history tells us he served in the Senate for the next 12 years — until Kennedy chose him as his running mate, in large part, so they say, because it was believed Johnson could deliver Texas to the Democrats.

And, if that was the reason why Kennedy chose Johnson as his running mate, LBJ held up his end of the deal. The Democrats won Texas (and its 24 electoral votes) by 45,000 popular votes out of 2.3 million cast.

In his book, White protested that he didn't know the truth, that it appeared that even those closest to Kennedy did not know the truth, about Johnson's selection. At the 1960 convention, White wrote, Kennedy's advisers were under the impression, when Kennedy went to bed the night before giving his acceptance speech, that the two men at the top of his list were Stuart Symington of Missouri and Henry Jackson of Washington, senators from two other states that were expected to be evenly divided, as indeed they were.

But emphasis on electoral considerations ignored — as White did not — the fact that, weeks before the convention, Kennedy had told an interviewer that, other than himself, he thought Johnson was the man most qualified to be president.

It cannot be dismissed that Kennedy made his choice based not on what his running mate could do for him but on what his running mate could do for the country if he became president.

Many things (most of them unpleasant) have been said about the vice presidency over the years, and most of them have been true.

John Garner, Franklin Roosevelt's first vice president, famously said the vice presidency was "not worth a bucket of warm ****." Garner, who served as speaker of the House before accepting the second spot on the Democratic ticket in 1932, also said, "I gave up the second most important job in government for eight long years as Roosevelt's spare tire."

But, for Johnson, it was not an eight–year detour to the trivia books. It was a stepping stone to the presidency. He succeeded Kennedy when Kennedy was assassinated in 1963.

And, ironically, exactly five years later, on this day in 1965, journalist Dorothy Kilgallen was found dead in her apartment. To this day, it is rumored that she was murdered to prevent her from revealing what she knew about the assassination of President Kennedy.

It is one of the many enduring mysteries of the 1960s.