Fri, Nov 17th 2023
On November 22, 60 years ago, US President John F. Kennedy was shot dead on the street in Dallas. The perpetrator was a former employee of the US Navy. The FBI had been searching for traces of the perpetrator in Switzerland three years before the assassination.
The day was supposed to bring in votes, but in the end it cost him his life: Incumbent US President John Fitzgerald Kennedy visited Texas with his wife in November 1963 to boost his chances in the state in the 1964 presidential election. Texas Governor John Connally and his wife Nellie received the presidential couple at the airport in Dallas on November 22.
The two couples drove through the city in a dark blue Lincoln with the top down. Thousands of onlookers lined the streets. John F. Kennedy was a very popular president. He occasionally had the limousine stop to shake hands.
In the city center, shots were suddenly fired at a six-story red brick building, a school bookstore, at exactly 12:30 pm. A bullet pierced Kennedy’s neck and exited through his throat. Governor Connally was hit in the back by a bullet. A final shot hit Kennedy in the head, shattering his skull. The President collapsed over his wife Jackie, covered in blood.
The popular Democratic politician was only 46 years old.
Around two hours later, the police found a rifle in the school book store and realized that one of the employees was missing – Lee Harvey Oswald. Only a few hours after the assassination, Oswald was arrested in a movie theater. That same evening, he was charged with the murder of John F. Kennedy. But he was also shot dead: Two days later, during a transfer to a new prison in a police station – by bar owner Jack Ruby.
This was one of the reasons why numerous conspiracy theories surrounded the assassination for decades. Many people did not want to believe that the assassination of the most powerful man in the world could be the result of a single person. And that he was then assassinated on the spur of the moment. Was he silenced?
Or was the Mafia pulling the strings? Or was it something to do with the Cuban Missile Crisis? Perhaps it was the Soviets, the military-industrial complex or Kennedy’s successor Lyndon B. Johnson in conjunction with the CIA, organized crime and oil interest groups?
Even 50 years after Kennedy’s death, only 30 percent of respondents in a survey stated that they believed Oswald was solely responsible. The commission of inquiry appointed by Kennedy’s successor in office, Lyndon B. Johnson, initially came to the conclusion that Oswald acted alone. In 1979, however, an investigative commission of the US House of Representatives declared that Kennedy may also have been the victim of a conspiracy. Since then, various experts have been of the opinion that one or more people posed as Lee Harvey Oswald as part of such a plot.
The alleged perpetrator, Lee Harvey Oswald, was born on October 18, 1939 and was therefore 24 years old at the time of the attack. Before the assassination, he was an employee of the US Marines, where he then resigned. And he appeared to have been a defector: In October 1959, he had declared at the US embassy in Moscow that he was renouncing his US nationality.
After his departure, the US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) contacted the Swiss authorities. The FBI had learned from Oswald’s mother that her son was planning to study in Switzerland. The woman had received a letter from the school confirming her son’s admission. At the request of the FBI, the Swiss police clarified in 1960 whether Lee Harvey Oswald was attending courses at the Albert Schweitzer Private Institute in Churwalden GR.
If this was not the case, the police should investigate whether another person was impersonating Lee Harvey Oswald. However, an FBI official in Paris eventually sent a note to the FBI director. In it, he quoted the Swiss police as saying that Oswald had never presented himself at the institute. It was also unlikely that he had been registered under a different name. No one resembling the wanted person had been seen either.
Although Oswald had apparently already paid the enrollment fee of 25 dollars in June 1959, he apparently never showed up at the institute.
©Keystone/SDA
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