November 22, 1963

Those of us of a certain age can tell you, for a certainty, exactly where we were 51 years ago today. That date is burnt into our souls the same way that December 7, 1941 was for our parents, and September 11, 2001 is to our children.

Much has been made of the JFK assassination over the years. JFK Conspiracy Theory has gone from a cottage industry with the publication of Who Killed Kennedy? by Thomas Buchanan in early 1964 (the first "conspiracy theory" book) to the lucrative field it is today, with every possible scenario, from the military-industrial complex to the Mafia to the CIA to the South Vietnamese (as retribution for the killing of Ngo Dinh Diem, just three weeks earlier!) to the French.

And yet we are no closer to solving the case than we were in November 1963. Most serious critics of the Warren Report believe that Lee Harvey Oswald did not act alone. From that basic premise it spirals out into the Oswald-Was-A-Patsy to Oswald-Was-An-Active-Communist-Agent and everything in between.

I've read extensively in the case, examined all of the evidence I could get my hands on, and I have yet to formulate a "unified field" theory of the assassination. No matter which scenario you follow, too many loose ends are left hanging.

I once heard it described this way (and I can't remember the source or I would credit him): At Judgment Day, when all will be revealed, the Big Question of Who Killed JFK? will be answered. Some nondescript guy in the back will say, "It was me. I did it."
And all of the assassination researchers will turn around to look at him, and then turn to each other and ask, "Who the fuck is that guy?"

November 22, 1963. That was 51 years ago today, and people of that "certain age" have crept up in years, to the point where now the person you are asking pretty much has to be older than 55 -- and that's stretching it a bit. But go ahead and ask anyone you know over 60. The only people who didn't know where they were that day were, of all people, Richard Nixon, George H. W. Bush and Howard Hunt.

Make of that what you will...