Fifty years ago today, Lee Harvey Oswald, acting alone, shot and killed President John F. Kennedy. That may be the “official” version of events, but a stable majority of Americans have long believed in some kind of broader conspiracy — perhaps involving the Mafia, the CIA, LBJ, the Cubans, anti-Castro Cuban exiles, or, hell, all of them. Among the skeptics: John Kerry, Chipper Jones, Bruce Willis, and a wide assortment of other notable people.
Chipper Jones:
“What a crock of crap! Oswald killed Kennedy? Seriously? Sorry, but I’m watching JFK. It’s almost laughable what they want us to believe.”
Marina Oswald Porter (Lee Harvey Oswald’s widow):
“I am now convinced that he was an FBI informant and believe that he did not kill President Kennedy.”
Kevin Costner:
“There were a lot of people with no love lost for Kennedy — the CIA, the mob. I believe there was a conspiracy …. We’ve lived with the myth of the Warren Commission (which concluded Oswald was a lone assassin) for a long time.”
Sissy Spacek:
“For so long, I wanted to believe it was Oswald and not something bigger. I still want to believe that. But Oliver [Stone]’s script shook me up. I guess we’re not as naive now as we were in the ‘60s.” (Houston Chronicle, December 20, 1991)
Tommy Lee Jones:
“I started having doubts as soon as I became aware of the findings of the Warren Commission …. It’s preposterous.” (Calgary Herald, December 24, 1991)
Robert Kennedy:
“[Kennedy] lived the rest of his life suspecting the Mafia or the Cubans were behind his brother’s death.”
Robert F. Kennedy Jr.:
“The evidence at this point I think is very, very convincing that it was not a lone gunman.”
Fidel Castro:
“I have reached the conclusion that Oswald could not have been the one who killed Kennedy.”
Richard Schweiker (former senator):
“Now I don’t know who killed cock robin, but we don’t know what happened and we do know that Oswald had intelligence connections. Everywhere you look with him, there are fingerprints of intelligence.”
Richard Belzer:
“In other words, if the Zapruder film had been aired at the time of the assassination, a mourning nation would have had the opportunity to judge the evidence, and several months later, the stunning and unambiguous failure of the Warren Commission to explain he murder.”
Jesse Ventura:
Wrote a book called They Killed Our President: 63 Reasons to Believe There Was a Conspiracy to Assassinate JFK.
Jim Lehrer:
“I went at my reporting or the idea that there had to be a conspiracy. The only issue was, what kind of conspiracy? So I checked out every one of them, as did everybody else. And it was all said and done, I came away with a conclusion after several years, after a few years that there may have been a conspiracy.”
Lyndon Baines Johnson
“I never believed that Oswald acted alone, although I can accept that he pulled the trigger.”
Bruce Willis
”They still haven’t caught the guy that killed Kennedy. I’ll get killed for saying this, but I’m pretty sure those guys are still in power, in some form. The entire government of the United States was co-opted. One guy did it? I don’t think so.” (Vanity Fair, June 2007)
Kathleeen Kennedy Townshend (JFK’s niece)
“I don’t know, I don’t know. I think [Oswald acted alone], I don’t know.”
John Kerry:
“Regarding possible conspiracies, to this day I have serious doubts that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone. I certainly have doubts that he was motivated to do that by himself. I’m not sure if anybody else was involved. I don’t go down that road, with respect to the grassy knoll theory and all of that, but I have serious questions about whether they got to the bottom of Lee Harvey Oswald.”
Oliver Stone:
“I’m amazed there is any single adult left in the USA who would not think that Lee Harvey Oswald was the one and only assassin.”
Gary Hart:
“You don’t have to be a genius to believe that they knew something about the coincidence of events – Cuba, Mafia, CIA and Kennedy – that somebody didn’t want that out in the public 12 years later.”
Richard Russell (former senator, Warren Commission member):
“I have never believed that Oswald planned that altogether by himself … [I] have doubts that he planned it all by himself. I think someone else worked with him.”
