The JFK Assassination

I've been writing blogs for more than three years now, and I have written about the John F. Kennedy assassination every year on the anniversary of that terrible event.

Tomorrow will be its 47th anniversary, and most of the people who were in Kennedy's entourage in Dallas on that day are gone now.

When I was growing up, I often wondered if the mystery of who actually pulled the trigger — or who arranged for the assassination to take place — ever would be solved.

But as the years have gone by, I have become less convinced that that will ever happen.

I still believe there was a conspiracy, and I could recite my reasons for believing that, but I also believe that solving the mystery no longer matters.

As it approaches the half–century mark, the Kennedy assassination is the Great American Mystery. It has become a cottage industry of sorts, and solving the mystery would eliminate the goose that laid the golden egg.

Go into any bookstore. You will find shelves devoted to the Kennedy assassination. Look online. You will find site after site dedicated to someone's theory, no matter how outlandish it may be, of what really happened on Nov. 22, 1963.

Folks in Dallas long ago learned there was money to be made from the Kennedy assassination, even many years after the fact. Oliver Stone came here to make his film "JFK" 20 years ago, and many people in the area made money from the cast and crew, providing food and lodging.

Long before that time, the Texas School Book Depository — which the Warren Commission told America was the place where Lee Harvey Oswald fired all the bullets at the Kennedy motorcade — was transformed into a museum that primarily exists to promote the Warren Commission's version of what happened.

A few blocks away, a museum dedicated to alternative theories opened its doors.

But it's been years since anything resembling a serious investigation into the events of Nov. 22, 1963, was undertaken.

And today, on the eve of the 47th anniversary, the only thing related to it in the Dallas Morning News is an article that reports that the man who came across Officer J.D. Tippit's body and reported to the police that he had been shot will be publicly honored tomorrow for his actions.

The man's daughter told the Morning News that her father never spoke about that day in the years that followed. "Maybe this will finally be the end of it," the man told the Morning News' reporter.

Well ...

Ironically, the man once worked for Jack Ruby, the Dallas nightclub owner who killed Oswald.

Everything connected with this case seems to go in circles.