JFK Assassination Trivia
* “I didn’t shoot anybody, no sir … I’m just a patsy.” —Lee Harvey Oswald, who was just 24 years old at the time of the JFK assassination
* “… we might have ridden into an ambush.” —JFK aide David Powers
* “… [I]t is the most bizarre conspiracy in the history of the world. It’ll come out at a future date.” —Jack Ruby
* It was not a federal felony to assassinate a United States president until after JFK was murdered.
* “I know there is a terrible conspiracy going on in the world right now … The world has the right to hear the truth.” —Jack Ruby
* “I now fully realize that only the powers of the Presidency will reveal the secrets of my brother’s death.” —Robert Kennedy, June 3, 1968, two days before he was assassinated
* Richard Nixon flew out of Dallas the morning of November 22, 1963; he later denied being there, making him perhaps the only American who did not remember where he was on that fateful day.
* Oswald purchased the alleged murder weapon, an Italian-made Mannlicher-Carcano rifle, through the mail for $21.45.
* “A week before Dallas some woman got within two feet of JFK and took his picture. ‘She may have assassinated the President,’ an official stated flatly … If I were a politician in danger of assassination and someone got within two feet of me I’d fire every bodyguard in my entourage and borrow some guns from de Gaulle. Nobody ever got within two feet of Le General. And I’d stay the hell out of Dallas on November 22.” —William S. Burroughs, A Report from the Bunker, 1981
* In October of 1963, Jack Ruby and Lee Harvey Oswald were spotted together at Ruby’s strip club, The Carousel.
* “We have not been told the truth about Oswald.” —Hale Boggs, Warren Commission member
* At the conclusion of JFK’s autopsy at Bethesda Naval Hospital in Maryland, the presiding surgeon destroyed his notes as well as the first draft of the autopsy report.
* An armed Ruby attended a midnight press conference at Dallas Police Headquarters on November 23, 1963.
* On the day of the assassination, Governor Connally’s jacket was sent to the dry cleaners, completely destroying its value as evidence.
* The publisher of Life magazine bought the Zapruder film and promptly locked the film away from the public’s view. A copy of the film wasn’t aired nationally until 1975.
* The so-called “magic bullet,” the hero of the “single-bullet theory,” was found lying on a stretcher at Parkland Memorial Hospital.
* Fellow Marines gave Oswald the nickname “SHITBIRD” since he was a terrible shot and couldn’t qualify with his rifle.
* “My God, they are going to kill us all.” —Gov. John Connally
* In 1964, President Lyndon Johnson signed Executive Order No. 11652, which stipulated that assassination evidence be locked up in the National Archives until the year 2039.
* An inventory of JFK assassination evidence in 1966 revealed that the president’s brain and skull fragments were missing from the National Archives.
* The first reports from the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository indicated that a 7.5 German Mauser was found; by the final report, the murder weapon had morphed into a 6.5 Mannlicher Carcano.
* Secret Service agents were ordered to wash the President’s car out while it was still parked at Parkland Memorial Hospital.
* Just minutes after the shooting, Oswald was observed in the Depository’s second-floor lunchroom, casually drinking a Coke.
* According to a CIA document released in 1977, French assassin Jean Soutre was in Dallas on November 22, 1963. Soutre, or a man claiming to be him, was detained by U.S. authorities and deported within 48 hours of the assassination.
* “We said that the Commission found no evidence of conspiracy, foreign or domestic. Those words were very carefully drafted.” —Warren Commission member Gerald Ford
* “We don’t have any proof that Oswald fired the rifle. No one has been able to put him in that building with a gun in his hand.” —Dallas Police Chief Jesse Curry, quoted by United Press International, November 5, 1969
* The only witness to the Tippit shooting, Aquilla Clemmons, claimed she saw two men involved in the shooting. None of her two descriptions matched Oswald and she was never called to testify before the Warren Commission.
* “Well, it’s all over now.” —Oswald, after being arrested in the Texas Theater
