Sixty years ago, a dull school afternoon was stirred by the news: President John F. Kennedy had been assassinated. We were in the third grade of school, the children of that time were better informed, although the media was elementary, but Kennedy was special. The first Catholic President of the Union, the youngest in history and good-looking, was married to a beautiful woman. Their children ran around the White House. This idyllic image covered the president’s poor health and his shameful sex life. His leadership was solidified when he bent the hand of Soviet dictator Nikita Khrushchev, in the nuclear pulse of missiles in Cuba. He sent the Peace Corps to the Third World, visited several countries in Latin America, continued to escalate the war in Vietnam, which began to become an open war, and under his command the United States took important steps in the space race. The trend of economic growth was maintained with the correct tax measures. He was a skilled and charismatic politician, an opportunist, with a good eye for coups de effect. The Kennedys projected brilliant glamor into the previously gray lives of American politicians. On the penultimate Thursday in November 1963, when he was visiting Dallas, one of three bullets fired at him shattered his skull and shattered his dream of the so-called “Kingdom of Camelot.”

It turns out that the man, wanted for the murder of the policeman, shot the president from the school book store. He was former Marine Lee Harvey Oswald, born into a dysfunctional home, his time in school and the military punctuated by violent incidents and a troubled relationship with guns. Like many failures in the world, he declared himself a communist, although his ideological formation was chaotic. After leaving the navy he went to live in the Soviet Union and married a Belarusian woman. He did not adapt to true communism and returned to his country. A few months later he tried to return to the Russian Empire, even traveling to Mexico to apply for a visa to Cuba. Two days after the assassination, a dark ruffian killed him as he was being taken out of custody at the police station.

The investigations established that Oswald was a classic “lone wolf” who, in his psychotic delirium, aggravated by Marxist ideology, acted alone in the crime. Much has been made of the possibility that there may have been another shooter, but there is no conclusive evidence to support this possibility. There is talk of a “conspiracy” without anyone being able to mention with evidence the persons or entities behind the murder. Some say the mafia, others say the CIA or the FBI itself, not forgetting the almost personal accusations against Khrushchev or Fidel Castro. The version of the sole author without complicity is far more proven than all the proposed alternatives. But, as in many similar situations, the “conspiracy theory” remains persistent, to the extent that it is believed by the majority of the North American population. Why do so many people have the morbid tendency to always think “they are hiding something from me?” (OR)