Friday marked the fifty-year anniversary of the assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy, and many do not agree with the official record that Lee Harvey Oswald had been the lone gunman who killed the 35th President of the United States on November 22, 1963, USA Today reported.
Kennedy was assassinated while riding in an open car in a motorcade at Dealey Plaza in Dallas, Texas.
A new monument was unveiled in Dallas during a ceremony on Friday. The inscription on the monument featured the final paragraph of the speech Kennedy intended to deliver at the Dallas Trade Mart on the day he was killed, Los Angeles Times reported.
"Kennedy was devoted to the Great Man theory of history. As he spoke about Churchill, Stalin and Napoleon, 'his eyes shone with a particular glitter, and it was quite clear that he thought in terms of great men and what they were able to do, not at all of impersonal forces,' observed the British historian Isaiah Berlin.
"Most, including myself, and especially the Kennedy family, would rather not dwell on the events that transpired on Nov. 22 and that ensuing weekend," said Connecticut Rep. John Larson. It is better to focus "on the president's birth, and celebrate his heroic service," Larson added.
Conspiracy theories surrounding his death, however, continue unabated.
Some have said that the CIA may have played a role. "They were upset about the changes being made within the agency after the filed Bay of Pigs Invasion. [They] also did not want Kennedy to discharge CIA agents for disagreeing with him. Other theories pin the assassination on a rogue cell of the CIA or an agency contract killer gone rogue," USA Today, in a story about the conspiracy theory of Kennedy's murder, reported.
There is a conspiracy that the mob may have had a hand in his death. The mafia were surely angry with the president's brother, Robert Kennedy who worked as an attorney general. RFK had passionately sought to crack down on organized crime in the U.S.
"We've since learned as Americans that the government lies, extensively," filmmaker Oliver Stone said on CNN in recent days. "Suddenly the trust in government has receded considerably."
"I look back to the hard evidence of the case, the real evidence, the evidence admissible in court, and all of that points to Oswald acting alone," said John R. Tunheim, who is now a federal judge. Tunheim served as the chairman of the Assassination Records Review Board.
"People just don't want to believe that a 24-year-old misfit that has had really an awful life, who has these pro-communist tendencies, difficulty navigating life, could publicly assassinate the leader of the free world," Tunheim said, speaking of Lee Harvey Oswald.
"That is still an astonishing fact to people. They want to believe that maybe there was something."
"Most Americans had an emotional response to John F. Kennedy. Either they loved him, admired his youthful vigor, and enjoyed his great wit; or they hated him, thought his father had stolen the presidential election for him, and distrusted him because he was the first Catholic to claim the presidency. In either case, those emotions became tangled up in the story of his death," wrote Forbes magazine.
Perhaps JFK's legacy was encapsulated in his June, 1963 speech at American University:
"The most important topic on earth: world peace. The kind of peace that makes life on earth worth living, the kind that enables men and nations to grow and to hope and to build a better life for their children -- not merely peace for Americans but peace for all men and women -- not merely peace in our time but peace for all time," Kennedy said.
A few weeks afterward, the United States and USSR signed a Limited Nuclear Test Ban Treaty.
