Where Were You When JFK Was Assassinated?

[Warph]

Where were you when JFK was assassinated?

I was at Chaumont Air Force Base France when we got the orders to go on "full alert".... I was due to get out of the Air Force in a few weeks and back to DC to finish my last two years of school at Georgetown.  After I heard the news of JFK's death and going on alert, all I could think of at the time was finishing school was a thing of the past and my butt was going to wind up taking on the Russian Bear.  Believe me, we were all scared.  We didn't know what to expect.  Thank God cooler heads prevailed....Warph





New perspective needed on Kennedy assassination
By E. J. Gibbons
Today marks the 46th anniversary of that horrible day in 1963 when President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, Texas. It was a watershed event in American history and it occurred during a time of extreme international tensions in the middle of the Cold War. Many have speculated that, had he lived, Kennedy would not have escalated the war in Vietnam, as did his successor, Lyndon Johnson. That act of decisiveness alone would have drastically altered the U.S. political and historical landscape of the following four-plus decades.

Almost immediately after the events of November 1963, people began speculating and writing that the assassination must have been the result of a conspiracy, and it is easy to understand why. The Kennedy assassination certainly lends itself to conspiracy. And really, how could someone not believe in a conspiracy when faced with the backgrounds of characters such as Lee Harvey Oswald, the president's assassin, and Jack Ruby, the Dallas nightclub owner, who, two days later, shot and killed Oswald on live national television?

Majority of Americans doubt

Today, it is estimated that 70 percent of the American public believe Oswald did not act alone and that Ruby was covering up his crime.

Let's face it, Oswald was an ex-Marine who had defected to the Soviet Union for three years and, regrettably, returned to the United States in June 1962, a year and a half before he shot the president. He was also a dedicated, self-avowed Trotskyite Marxist, an ardent supporter of Fidel Castro's Cuban revolution, who met with Soviet and Cuban agents in his failed attempt to defect to Cuba less than two months before the assassination. Sound like a conspiracy?

As for Ruby, who could not believe Ruby was part of a cover-up to silence Oswald? Ruby was a bulldog and had a rough-and-tumble upbringing and background in union politics in Chicago that included ties to many figures in the mob, and had traveled to Cuba and socialized with and entertained many mob figures during his time in Dallas.

However, the entire backgrounds of Oswald and Ruby, not just their intriguing parts, need to be understood and put in context in order to know what happened that week in Dallas. Plus some serious omissions and criminal acts on the part of the FBI, under Director J. Edgar Hoover in Dallas. In fact, had the FBI been honest about its relationship with Oswald and Ruby, the American public would not have believed in a conspiracy at all, even though the FBI would have faced incredible public condemnation.

As we approach the 50th anniversary of the assassination in four years, I believe it is time to begin a new conversation and take a different look at the events surrounding Kennedy's death.

Take, for example, Oswald's visit to the FBI offices in downtown Dallas 10 days before he assassinated the president. This visit has to be put in perspective. On that day at lunchtime, Oswald left his job at the Texas School Book Depository on Nov. 12, 1963, walked a block south on Houston and then headed east for a few blocks down to 1114 Commerce St., which, at the time, was known as the Sante Fe Building. He took the elevator up to the 12th floor where the main offices of the FBI were located and asked to see one of its agents, James Hosty Jr., who was in charge of Oswald's open FBI case file.

When told that Agent Hosty was at lunch, Oswald left an angry handwritten note with the receptionist addressed to Agent Hosty, which I believe he signed, and then left and walked back to his menial job at the depository. The note was later flushed down an FBI toilet by Agent Hosty on the day of Oswald's death to protect his (Hosty's) and the FBI's reputation.

Destroying that evidence of Oswald's visit was a criminal act. What did the note say? It probably said something to the effect:

Agent Hosty,

Stop harassing my wife. If you want to speak with me, then speak to me to my face. If you do not stop your harassment, I will be forced to take action against the FBI.

— Lee Oswald


If Oswald's note had been saved and made part of the public record, regardless of Oswald's death, the public would have, I believe, drawn much different conclusions about the assassination.

FBI didn't tell whole story

As for Ruby, had the FBI made it known that Ruby had been one of its informants (as well as a Dallas police informant) and (I believe) had probably visited its offices — the same offices that Oswald visited — on the afternoon before he shot and killed Oswald, Ruby's role in that week's events would have also been interpreted differently.

But, again, the FBI's credibility was on the line. How could it possibly reveal that both Oswald and Ruby had come to them in the day(s) before they committed their acts? Ruby's police and FBI informant status was not revealed until 13 years after the events, in 1975.

I have great respect for the efforts of those who still insist that Kennedy's death must have been the result of an elaborate conspiracy. Who can blame them? And I have the greatest respect for the men and women of the FBI. But, by being more concerned about its credibility and reputation, the FBI, under the watchful eye of Director Hoover, who had sole investigative responsibility to the Warren Commission and its 888-page report, made it impossible to believe the assassination was anything other than a conspiracy.

All the facts were simply not laid out on the table. The real question about Oswald and Ruby that should have been asked is: What did the FBI know about these two men and when did it know it, before and after the assassination?

It's time to look at the 1963 assassination with a new perspective. The great tragic irony of Kennedy's death is that the United States allowed a disgruntled defector, a man who hated his country and had renounced his U.S. citizenship while in the Soviet Union, back into the United States, while, 15 months later, Cuba, a Marxist dictatorship worshiped by that same man, had the good sense to turn him away.

— E. J. Gibbons lives in Ventura and is the author of "Seven Days in November, 1963: The Kennedy Assassination," due out in December by iUniverse.

[frawin]

Warph, a good post and very interesting. I was Quail Hunting when Kennedy was assassanated.

[Jo McDonald]

We had moved back to Howard from Pittsburg.  My parents still lived there - I  had gone there to visit them, and was just walking in the door when it was announced over Channel 7 KOAMTV,  We were shocked , saddened and scared.

[W. Gray]

I was in my dorm room getting ready to go to class. My table radio was off but I could hear a lot of other radios in the halls going with narrators talking but I never paid any attention. This was back in the days when daytime radio was all music so I knew something was happening—but I was running late.

I left the dorm using my umbrella as it was raining and students were scurrying back and forth as though nothing was happening—a lot of people just had not received word. I got almost to class when I saw a guy with a tiny transistor radio placed next to his ear and I asked what was going on. He told me Kennedy had been shot. The first thought I had was that the communists had struck.

When I got to class, the professor tried to carry on with his teachings but it soon became apparent everyone was preoccupied with what had happened.

[twirldoggy]

I was in the main library at Kansas University studying for my first exam in anthropology class.   A librarian came into the quiet  room and announced that the president had been shot and was dead.   I went to the auditorium where the exam was to take place at 1:20 PM and many students were crying and upset over the death of JFK.   The exam went on, but later all classes were canceled.   ( I was 17 at that time.)

[larryJ]

I was attending school in Greeley, CO., and was leaving class to go home for lunch.  One of the girls from our marching band was coming towards me in the hall and was crying.  I asked her what the problem was and she told me Kennedy had been shot.  I lived three blocks from the school in a private home and ran all the way there.  My landlord had the news on the TV and all of us who lived there were glued to the TV as the news unfolded.  I was home in time to hear that he had died from the gunshot wounds.  I skipped the rest of my classes that day so I could stay home and watch the news.  The landlord was a man in his 50's and I remember him sitting there in shock and then crying.  It was a terrible time.

Larryj

[Judy Harder]

I was in our apartment in Topeka, with a little boy in diapers not a year old and a baby due in February. I was 21.

I remember I was ironing and watching tv.....maybe even the motorcade of Kennedy and after the shock of
watching it happen (on tv) I called Mom and told her and we both stayed glued to the set for the next week or so.

Not only Mom, but whole family and world. I think that was when I lost my naivety(sp) and the world did become a
reality. Up till then I just knew we all would live "Happy ever after" NOT!!.

[Dee Gee]

I was living in Pittsburg, selling bakery items on a residential route for Manor Bread. When I stopped at a customer house they told me about Kennedy being shot as I when on through my route that day each and every customer filled me in with more details and all of them were very worried and upset.

[frawin]

I was working at the First National Bank, there in Howard, and gone home for lunch.  My lunch hour was 1 Hr. and 15 Min. and I watched just as long as I dared, and ran all the way back to the bank, so I wouldn't be late.  As customers came in, they kept us updated.  The rest of the weekend, was spent glued to the TV watching the events unfold.  Saw Jack Ruby shoot Lee Harvey Oswald.  That was a sad time in America, as I was young then and was just getting interested in politics, even though I couldn't vote yet.
Myrna

[Diane Amberg]

I was between classes at UD and had gone to Rhodes Drug store on Main St. at the edge of campus.The pharmacist always had a radio on at the rear of the store and the news of the shooting broke in. We all hung out there listening to what followed. I went around the corner to where my next class was to be and told the prof. what I had heard. Right there, at the top of the UD Green, is a row of male dorms and there is a flag there just off Main St. One of the boys went running to the flag and lowered it to half staff. As the word spread, hundreds of students streamed back to their dorms. Some went home, many called home. We sat for hours glued to the TV watching like zombies, horrified yet fascinated, wondering if we would be bombed, knowing we were a part of a terrible history being made.That TV wouldn't be turned off again for many days. Anytime day or night that lounge had a cluster of people holding hands, supporting each other, sobbing quietly watching the endless lines of people at the rotunda saying good bye. We saw Jackie and the kids several times as they came to pray at the casket. A good many people from my dorm went to stand in line and a lot more went to Washington for the march to Arlington. Black Jack the riderless horse is embedded in my mind, as is that sad drum cadence that seemed to go on forever. We all knew that it was one of those defining times that many years later would arise time and time again....where were you when?.... And here we are.