Has everything been said about the November 22, 1963 assassination of the 35th U.S. President, John F. Kennedy? As the last trove of government documents are released by the National Archives in the U.S. in batches — under pressure from the FBI and the CIA, President Donald Trump held back publication of additional papers — one wonders whether this will lead to renewed interest in the killing, and more conspiracy theories and books. Already, there’s talk of spies, a call to a British newspaper that something big was about to break minutes before the killing, Kremlin suspicion of a Lyndon Johnson hand, and more about the mafia. The assassination, as Kennedy rode in an open-topped limousine through Dealey Plaza in Dallas, Texas, has already inspired much slew of literature, fact and fiction. Lee Harvey Oswald was charged with the killing — and was shot dead on November 24 by businessman Jack Ruby who was said to have connections with the mob. In September 1964, the Warren Commission report, which was the official report on the assassination of President Kennedy, was published, saying Oswald and Ruby had acted on their own. Many were sceptical of this official line, and in 1967 a Louisiana lawyer, Jim Garrison, made startling claims that Oswald was not the shooter, articulating his theory in three books, including On the Trail of the Assassins . This was one of the sources for Oliver Stone’s film, JFK . Anthony Summers’ 1980 book Conspiracy cast doubts on the Warren commission findings too.
In 1964, Jackie Kennedy commissioned journalist William Manchester to write a book “which would be bound in black and put away on dark library shelves”. But before The Death of a President was published in 1967, Manchester had a bitter row with the Kennedys over the content and the intimate details he had included about their life as First Couple.
The story has been mined in fiction as well, most notably by Norman Mailer ( Oswald’s Tale: An American Mystery , 1995) and Don DeLillo. At the end of his 1988 novel, Libra , DeLillo writes, in a disclaimer of sorts, “This is a work of imagination”. It is a radical telling of the six seconds in Dallas that changed the course of American history that offers an alternative view: what if the assassination was a CIA conspiracy and Oswald, the chief suspect in the shooting, had been made the scapegoat? “Any novel about a major unresolved event would aspire to fill some of the blank spaces... To do this I’ve altered and embellished reality,” says DeLillo.
