Last Sunday, I watched a valuable special that just debuted on the National Geographic Channel — The Lost JFK Tapes: The Assassination. It's two hours of videotape, film and some audio from 11/22/63, including footage they say has never been broadcast. Unlike most documentaries about the tragedy, it is not (a) an attempt to prove some scenario of how John F. Kennedy was murdered or (b) a self-congratulatory treatise on what a great job the press did of rising to the challenge of covering the events of that world-changing day.
For some reason, they are not rerunning this today or all month or anything. They ran it twice on Sunday evening, along with a special I haven't watched yet that falls into category (a) as it offers digitally-enhanced imagery from the Zapruder film.
Having read and heard so much about the assassination, I'm drawn like a moth to this kind of thing. I'm not sure why. It's not like any new revelations are likely at this date. Still, it is history.
For a few years in the late sixties/early seventies, I was way too interested in that case and who "really" dunnit. I read books. I attended a few lectures. I even went to one seminar of assassophiles, every one of whom had at least one firm, inarguable explanation of some well-peopled conspiracy that had offed JFK. Some of them had several mutually-exclusive theories and the firm conviction that all were correct.
In that hall there must have been a hundred different explanations of how Kennedy was killed. Everyone was adamant theirs was The Answer, though they respected everyone else's as long as it wasn't that Lee Harvey Oswald, acting alone, fired the fatal bullet. That was the only one that was off the table, afforded not the slightest consideration by people who seemed willing to consider anything else. If you'd said, "I think rabid penguins ran in and bit Kennedy while bats that Vivian Vance had outfitted with laser beams took care of Governor Connally," everyone there would have said, "In our search for the truth, we can't rule anything out." But one guy with a rifle was science-fiction…and all it proved was that you were among the mindless masses who'd brainlessly accept whatever "those in power" wanted the sheep to believe.
I eventually came to believe that that one guy with the rifle was the most likely explanation…and that the "Conspiracy Buffs" were too invested in conspiracies to ever admit the solution had been right there before their eyes all along. But I also came to believe it was one of those topics that you should never waste your time or energy debating with anyone else. Don't write me to tell me that in 1974, your cousin remembered having been there that day and spotting zombies on the grassy knoll with assault weapons. Not interested. If you do want to hear the case for Oswald the Lone Nut, go read Vincent Bugliosi's book, Reclaiming History: The Assassination of President John F. Kennedy. And don't let its 1,648 pages intimidate you. If you skip over all the parts where Bugliosi explains how smart he is, it's about 300. And the whole thing is a lot more manageable, as some books are, on Kindle.
I'll try and alert you if I see the National Geographic Channel special turning up again. It was a pretty good portrait of Dallas at the time and of how everyone reacted to that world-altering tragedy. The news media did grow up a little that day and so did we all…not always for the better.