Dakota Beacon

It used to be a sort of game question among people of my age and older - “Where were you when Kennedy was killed?”  It was one of those frozen-in-time moments seared into everyone’s mind.  I was home from school for lunch.  I remember that.  You probably remember where you were too.  I also remember distinctly where I was when Lee Harvey Oswald, his accused assassin, was murdered.  It’s probably the only one-on-one murder I have ever witnessed in real time.  As Oswald was being led, obviously anxious, down the hallway, a gunman wearing a hat, if I remember correctly, shot him and he doubled over and we all know the rest.  Or do we?

John Delayne Williams knows most of the rest.  John has spent much of his free time since the event seeking the truth of what happened on that fateful late autumn day in Dallas.  After the shooting and a somewhat boring (to me, anyway) set of hearings - the hearings wherein the “magic bullet” theory first emerged - it drifted into the past as Lyndon Johnson’s administration revved up to full speed and into overdrive, churning out bills and constitutional amendments that were to change the character of the nation, and the horrors of the Vietnam war were beamed into our living rooms at 6:00 and 10:00 pm.  The Sixties went into full swing.  The Beatles toured America, war protests proliferated, some turning to violence.  John Fitzgerald Kennedy and his photogenic “perfect” family began to fade in the cacophony of the times, as if in a golden haze of long ago, like a sepia print in a scrapbook.

And then, we all began to hear rumblings when New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison began to investigate following a tip that one David Ferrie, a man known to Garrison, had “information” about the assassination.  Suddenly people found themselves glued to their televisions, fascinated by the strange and sinister-sounding bits and clues into the mysterious and quickly tamped-down “official” investigation - i.e., the Warren Commission hearings.

As a teen I devoured Garrison’s book, On the Trail of the Assassins, and found my own curiosity engaged, especially as I learned more about the effort put into thwarting Garrison, smearing him, setting him up for various scandals, playing keep-away with key evidence, avoiding his questions.  The more of this I heard, the more intrigued I became and the more curious I was to learn more.  I followed Garrison’s book with other books on the subject, each espousing a different theory, each supplying some shred of evidence I hadn’t heard before - one of the more interesting was Sam Giancana’s book about his famous uncle, Sam Giancana.  But none revealed much about some of the key figures.

Lee Harvey Oswald, the eye of the hurricane, the man we saw shot and killed before our eyes, has remained an enigma - at once the central figure in the century’s most momentous murder and the most baffling of its cast of characters.  Was he a weird loner? Was he really a bad shot?  Was he fluent in Russian?  How did he come to defect, marry a Russian woman and return - with her - to America?  What did he have to do with the Ochsner Clinic in New Orleans?  What was the Fair Play for Cuba organization?  Who was the woman he fell in love with who also knew too much?  Did he really know Jack Ruby, his own killer?  What made Oswald tick?  And above all - did he do it?  And why did the Warren Commission refuse to allow an attorney to represent him posthumously in a search for the truth?

The other central character in these events was Lyndon Baines Johnson himself - Kennedy’s contentious Vice President, so distinctly unlike him in every respect, a textbook example of “balancing a ticket”.  What part, if any, did Johnson play in the plot?  When did he know?  What did he know?  Why was the autopsy so screwed up?  Did the Secret Service really just take the president’s body against the law, to Washington?  These and many other questions are finally answered in Williams’ amazingly detailed research, presented in Lee Harvey Oswald, Lyndon Johnson and the JFK Assasination.  

Willaims adds an interesting epilogue - an account of the events which followed from or flowed from the death of John Kennedy, the administration of Lyndon Johnson and some key events, the truth of which remain veiled in doubts - the assasination of Martin Luther King, Jr., of Robert Kennedy, the prosecution of the horrific Vietnam war.  Through it all, Williams manages to maintain an objective perspective, leaving it mostly to the reader to reach his own conclusions about those questions which remain in doubt.  He observes, at the end, that “. . . to keep these things hidden, more crimes and more miscarriages of justice continue to be committed by government actors.”

If, like me, you have an insatiable curiosity about what really happened and an acute appetite for truth, you may enjoy Williams’ meticulously researched book as much as I did.  If you are not satisfied that you know the real story, get a copy of Lee Harvey Oswald, Lyndon Johnson and the JFK Assasination.

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