Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire Question for the older crowd about the Kennedy assassination

Simple Coup D'état, nothing more.. nothing less.

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I agree with your dad on keeping Oswald quite.Ruby was part of the underworld at the time.

I was sitting in a Chicago high school classroom when a male student out in the hall flung our door open and with a look of shock, dread and grief on his face shrieked out over and over, "President Kennedy was just killed".

Chicago was and still is a heavily 'Democrat Machine' run city with a large population of Catholics and Irish, so needless to say JFK was extremely popular. Jack and Jackie were like celebrity rock stars of that era.

I don't recall hearing any outward expression of happiness that JFK was dead by anybody.

Not much for conspiracy theories myself, but if there truly was a conspiracy of some kind, I doubt there's any chance that the whole truth will ever be revealed to the public, regardless how much time has passed.

I'll admit, though, the .221 Fireball theory does intrigue me a bit.

I heard about it from our 8th grade English teacher, who had moved to East Texas from Mississippi. I can testify that he was not shocked or saddened when he told us! Also don't remember being let out of school for the rest of the day, but could have happened.

What I don't agree with is that details of the assassination had been covered up for over 100 years, since it has not been 100 years since it happened!

I was sitting in my 2nd grade class and remember the principle announcing it over the intercom. Our teacher burst into tears as did several of the others. One interesting thing is as 2nd grades we knew who he was and that he was the president. I wonder if that would be the case today. Anyway It was really a big deal and while I am sure that while some didn't like him for various reasons people were much more respectful and for the most part more dignified than the general population today so no there was no celebratory conversations other than maybe between the most cloistered of friends. Of course there wasn't the Internet where people easily forget themselves and revert to the conduct of adolescent junior high jerks.

Plus:

The Federal Reserve advocates, Kennedy was in the process of making it disappear.

Military/Industrial complex, Kennedy was going to pull out of Viet Nam.

The great majority of Americans were shocked and sadden by what happen on that day. My mother was in tears. Walter Cronkite was visibly shaken when he announced it on TV. Virtually everyone watched the funeral procession, horse drawn casket, boots turned backwards. The country was numbed by the assasination.

I have to agree.This country has never been the same.

One thing about it, there's sort of a whole "cottage industry" writing and publishing books about JFK and the assassination.
Gerald Posner's "Case Closed" lays out a very good argument that Oswald acted alone. But even in that book, there are many stories tying Oswald to the CIA. Even if you're inclined to believe the "Lone Nut Gunman" theory, it's pretty hard to ignore the CIA links.
It's true that when something like this happens to someone as loved as JFK, you just want to read more into it. That's to be understood.
But I still believe it was a coup.
7mm

I was in the second grade, living in a small enclave in far western, rural Kentucky. I don't recall anyone having any emotional reaction to the event. When one lives in 40253, world events happen in a galaxy far, far away. Emotion doesn't figure into it because one is only very vaguely connected to them.

We had an old Motorola television that was considered a little bit fancy for the time because it had a dial which was a series of buttons configured in a circular pattern.

To change channels, you pushed the button next to the number of the channel you wanted and it would mechanically rotate until it got there.

hmm-CLICK, hmm-CLICK, hmm-CLICK, hmm-CLICK

I barely remember the mechanical function of the dial because it quit working shortly after dad bought the TV, so we'd just grab the knob and turn it manually.

The antennae was mounted on a steel pole about 18' tall and positioned next to a window in our living room. The NBC affiliate was WPSD-TV in Paducah, Kentucky,..the ABC affiliate was WSIL-TV in Harrisburg, Illinois, the CBS affiliate was KFVS-TV in Cape Girardeau, Missouri.

WPSD always came in good. KFVS was also okay,..to pick up WSIL required the ability to be able to reach your arm out the window and finely tune the antennae by turning the pole while looking over your shoulder at the TV screen.

We all sat for several days watching the events on that old black and white Motorola,....switching between the 3 channels and adjusting the antennae pole to make sure we received the latest breaking news.

Stunned more than anything. My folks could see the man's character even though the media put up a great facade. Somehow they knew the Kennedys were power hungry, womanizing, insider whisky traders.

I believe the back flip at the CNS hit is nothing more than back arching like a brain shot gopher. IMO, the film is consistent with two shots from the back. When I was a kid, my buddy shot a doe running away and hit her in the back of the cranial vault and the brains blew out in a superior anterior direction.

Why is it that I can remember alla that chit and yet, not recall what I did on Tuesday?

The dumb ass should have had a bullet proof sedan, to avoid all this flippen debate after 50 years .Duh give us a break

I was underneath a duece and a half changing a sprag unit along with my buddy from Jacksboro Tx.

A Yankee S/Sgt with an Italian name stuck his head under the truck and asked.... seriously.." What's wrong with you people in Texas ? Somebody just shot the President in Dallas."

Kennedy was not well liked in Texas. LBJ had given JFK a good fight for the nomination. In fact, at the Dem Convention, Old Man Kennedy made a trip to Lyndon's room with a briefcase and left without it. He returned a little later with a second briefcase.

That night, LBJ released his delegates to JFK and got the VP slot to go along with the cash.

Then,that Fall, I was stationed at Camp Pendleton and dated a girl in the San Fernando Valley. Her dad was a die hard Nixon guy, and we had to listen to his taped speeches while eating supper. That Nixon /JFK election campaign was not all sweetness and light by far.

The Country finally got a Republican President after the FDR/Truman years and Nixon was the heir apparent to IKE.

So, JFK was not the loved and revered figure that emerged after his death. And giving him and Bobby a pass on Vietnam, blaming it all on LBJ is gross revisionist history. Who bought into the "Domino theory" in SEA which caused the Vietnam war? The Kennedy boys.

Who put missiles in Turkey which led to missiles in Cuba? Not the VP, Lyndon Baines Johnson.

Johnson was responsible for "The Great Society" and he deserves the blame for not leaving Vietnam, but the Kennedy boys should shoulder their share, as well.

Half the country hated JFK until he was killed. The anger and grief was because someone killed the POTUS, not because they killed JFK.

No but his brothers would have

I was in my 11th grade English class. Only the teacher cried. He was in love with JFK. Our HS, however, was very conservative.

Most of us were well aware of his bungling the Bay of Pigs invasion and how he just let the Russians build the Berlin wall.

The Russians were just harassing the US at the time and didn't expect to see the barricades standing by the end of the second day. When Kennedy pizzed down his leg and didn't do squat, the Russians had to scramble and follow through.

So, no tears there in my high school.

They claim this is the speech that got him killed.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xhZk8ronces

In north Louisiana where I grew up, about half the people said they were glad he was out of office, but hated to see him killed. The other half were glad he had been killed. I was a college sophomore at the time, and there was no widespread grief on the campus. Frankly, nobody was all that keen on LBJ, either.

Haven't read the entire thread.

I remember my mother crying after the assassination. I remember asking her why she was crying. I asked her why she was crying because I thought she was ideologically opposed to him. She tried to explain as best she could that it is not a good thing when a country can't protect it's leaders.

I don't recall anyone feeling it was a good thing for conservatives. I don't recall politics being nearly as polarized.

This event came shortly after some very frightening drama in Cuba.
Still reeling from that it seems like in the next few years other events were frightening - demonstrations, - anti-war, civil rights, 68 convention. Murders - King, another Kennedy, the Manson murders.

It just seemed like we had much less luxury of fighting among ourselves because there was other stuff to worry about.

I thought the official records would be released in 75 years.