48 years ago today, at 12.30 pm on the 22nd November 1963, John F. Kennedy, the 35th President of the United States of America, was assassinated as his motorcade drove through Dallas, Texas.
Today, nearly half a century later, we're still unsure as to who pulled the trigger. Sure, the Warren ommission found that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone to shoot JFK and Jack Ruby acted alone to kill Lee Harvey Oswald but, as the years have passed, more and more conspiracy theories and potential cover-ups leave us with a situation where it is thought 80% of Americans believe that there was more to it than a lone gunman shooting their President.
Will we ever know the truth? It seems very unlikely now. Most of the main players are now long gone and all the theories seem inconclusive at best and some, well, just crackpot.
What is worth contemplating is what sort of world we might have now had Kennedy lived.
He would, quite likely, have won the 1964 Presidential election, defeating Nixon who might not have ever become President. It's possible that the fall of communism in Eastern Europe might have been sooner than the late 80s/early 90s. If no Nixon, then, possibly, no Reagan and the arms race that threatened the future of the whole world.
Kennedy had his faults as a human being, as do we all, but there is no denying news an inspirational figure, perhaps on a scale not seen until Barrack Obama's election to the White House. Had JFK lived on November 22nd 1963 the is no doubt the world would be a very different place today in 2011.
No comments:
Post a Comment