JFK assassinated - again

It looks like Tom Hanks is producing a mini-series for HBO based on Vincent Bugliosi's exhaustive take on the JFK assassination titled "Reclaiming History." It's supposed to air by 2013.

Bugliosi, he of "Helter Skelter" and Charles Manson fame, concludes in his 1,648-page monster that the Warren Commission got it right and all the conspiracy theorists got it wrong. Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone in killing the president on Nov. 22, 1963, from the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository in Dallas.

Well, not to sound like Woody Allen in "Annie Hall" where he ruminates about the assassination to avoid sleeping with Carol Kane, I'll wade into this mess as quickly as possible.

Like millions of Americans, I always doubted that Oswald acted alone. That was years before Oliver Stone's movie "JFK" that the right-wingnuts believe is to blame for the vast majority of Americans not believing that Oswald acted alone.

All anyone has to do is read the Warren Report, or try to, read many books, both pro and con, as I've done, and actually visit Dealey Plaza where it all came down. Been there, done that.

I have not read Bugliosi's account, but I have read a number of reviews and excerpts from the book. I've watched lengthy interviews of Bugliosi on the assassination.

He hasn't convinced me, and he won't convince most Americans. After nearly 50 years, the assassination is as fishy as ever.

It was quite convenient that Oswald was murdered two days after the assassination by Jack Ruby, a man with mob ties, carrying out what looked like a mob hit in front of his buddies on the police force and watched live by millions of Americans.

Ruby's act merely created suspicion that will never go away. The evidence, though, shows that Oswald could not have acted alone.

For the "magic bullet" theory to hold, that one bullet traveled through Kennedy and through various parts of Gov. John Connally's body and came out virtually unscathed, than what about the second bullet that blew off much of Kennedy's head? It seemed to fragment into a million untraceable pieces. This shows two different types of bullets hit Kennedy, which points to two guns fired by two different people.

The only sharpshooter to duplicate Oswald's feat on a CBS News re-creation of the assassination in the mid-1960s was ballistics expert Howard Donahue. He was asked by True magazine to write a piece about the assassination and so went about studying it. He never got to the article. He fully believed that Oswald acted alone, but the more he read, the more he doubted this was possible. His ballistics argument is persuasive in Bonar Menninger's "Mortal Error." (I interviewed Donahue in the early 1990s when the book came out.)

I don't necessarily buy Donahue's argument that a Secret Service agent's AR-15 accidentally discharged in the vehicle behind Kennedy's limo and the bullet struck and killed Kennedy.

Still, his study of the ballistics shows two different types of bullets were used, hence two guns and two gunmen. Case closed.

Okay, not closed.

I'm in the camp that says it was a CIA/mob hit. The mob knows how to cover up its crimes. Does anyone know what happened to Jimmy Hoffa?

But, sad to say, one of the signature events of the 20th Century no longer matters. Kennedy is still dead. The men who did it, got away with murder. And that's the way it is.

Let's all hope the same fate doesn't befall our current president. Like Kennedy, Obama is hated passionately by millions. And some of them are armed and dangerous.