The JFK Assassination Theories: Where Logic, Fact, and Fantasy Intermingles.
As students of history, we are taught to think, study, and work in a scholarly manner. When studying a person or a major event, we are taught to make assertions based on hard, factual information, and stay away from making assertions based purely on speculation, here-say, or opinion. But in certain realms of history this is ignored, and imaginations run wild. Fantasy is made into logic and fact, fact and logic discredited as fantasy, and eventually the story is so twisted that the real logic and facts are soon lost. Such is the case with the study of the November 22, 1963 John F. Kennedy assassination. Only in the United States could the assassination of a political figure spawn a whole industry all its own dedicated to "finding out the truth." Using the word industry is not an overstatement: thousands of articles and essays, dozens of movies and documentaries, hundreds of books, thousands of websites, and even university classes based on the event and the facts and happenings surrounding it. Imagine the amount of time and money invested in the study of the assassination; the technology used to prove and disprove theories. This can make one's head spin in circles (not back, and to the left). Unfortunately, the scope of this paper is not to discern fact from fiction and come to a positive "whodunnit"? That would take too much time, and involve too many resources, neither of which this student has. The aim of this paper is to detail some of the most common theories and what they entail. Before this can be done though, I think it is important to try and explain why there is so much dissent among scholars, government officials, and citizens about what truly happened that day in Dallas, and why the conspiracy topic still remains hot today.
William Manchester, author of Death of a President, in a 1993 letter to the New York Times wrote:.