I looked at my watch. Eleven AM, November 22, 2006. Exactly 44 years ago at that time I was going to a Calculus class. I remember the day and the awful weekend that followed it all too well. My class was over at 12:15. My girlfriend had an 11:00 and 12:30. Her 12:30 was in Old Main next to the computer room. I wanted to see her before I left campus for the weekend but I got back to Old Main from my class too late and missed her. Her class would end about 1:45. I needed to do some work on the computer in the next week so I decided to do it while I waited. While we were working Mr. Gilman, one of the physics professors came in and said, “Kennedy has just been shot in Dallas.” Larry Brown – another student computer geek and I were really into something. Without looking up he said, “don’t joke about that.” I heard Mr. Gilman choke a little and we both looked up. We knew instantly from the look on his face he was not joking. The three of us headed for door. I remember us sorting out who would go first after two of us failed to go through the opening at the same time.

The only room on the upper end of the campus with a TV was the Day Women’s Room. The Day Men’s room had ping pong and card tables, no TV – so much for equality. There was a pressing reason for the TV, the girls had to watch the soap operas. The room was designated for females only, the separation by gender was very strict in that time under the iron hand of Miss Long, Dean of Women. The stories about her were wild and most were at the least near the truth, like the one that she told new female students they shouldn’t wear red dresses on dates because red excites men. One girl asked if it would be better to go on a date without the dress. We ran down the hall, about 40 yards. We stopped at the door, wanting to learn what was happening but realizing we could actually be suspended from school for entering. Mr. Gilman opened the door and told us to go in, the room was full, men, women, professors, students, staff. I saw Dr. Ben Nispel, my advisor crying. For that one awful day Miss Long’s rules were suspended. It wasn’t long till John Cameron Swazey came on and said the president was dead.

Gloom and fear were thick. Most students identified with JFK. “Who was Lyndon Johnson” was a question I asked and so did many others. As concerned as we were then, the future would prove those fears were valid. We would later find he didn’t know much about either foreign affairs or military matters but he set the strategy for Vietnam. Worse, he surrounded himself with people who were as clueless. More than a few of the men who were in that school that day would be slogging through rice paddies in a couple years while dodging VC bullets and at least a handful would not come home. But for a leg surgery in March 1963 in a couple years I would have been carrying an M-16 there or in the skies above as a Wild Weasel, the ECM. ECM is the ultimate game of chess. If you loose, your king is not in check. You don’t come back. Thankfully that day we could not see the future. What we could see was bad enough. The unknown was bad in another way. We wondered, did the commies have JFK killed? That question was not just an irrational fear. Was the rest of the government at risk? Were some of them already dead? Were some of them Quislings? This is not funny, most of us knew history. Looking back I was probably more concerned than most of my Math major friends and my friends in the history department were even more scared. I knew history better than most in Math. The shooting match called WW1 was triggered by the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand. It resulted in the trench warfare in France. But in 1963 there were nukes and delivery systems that could put them anywhere on the globe. Would someone in Washington or Moscow panic and push the button? The unknown LBJ loomed as an even bigger threat. Did he have the courage to lead? Would he panic under fire? Would he push the button out of fear? Kennedy had stood strong in the Cuban Crisis. Was nuclear war hours or minutes away? Were nukes already on the way? Was the flash of a nuke only moments away? Was the assassination of Kennedy a Case Headless – a scenario I had read of in which the attacking country killed the leader of another country to create chaos as a prelude to an attack? If it were, WW1 would have looked like a Sunday Picnic compared to what we faced. It sounds melodramatic today but then it sounded very plausible then and it still does in that situation. When Regan was shot the possibility loomed in the minds of many. If there were an attack on Bush after the new congress is seated I would suspect two groups, the Muslims and the Liberals who could seat a president in the name of Nancy Pelosi if Bush and Cheny were to die at the same time.

So we sat in that day room in a building that what was built as Old Main of what was once the Cumberland Valley State Normal School at Shippensburg, a school founded only a few years after the bloodiest war fought on American soil, only 40 miles from its bloodiest battle and hoped for the best. After a few minutes I left, wanting to see Bonnie before she left. When she came out of the classroom I told her the president was dead. She put her head on my shoulder and cried. She looked up at me and asked, “Will this mean war?” I looked at her and responded, “I don’t know.” We talked for some time and then she had to leave. We both realized that last embrace could have been the last.

I remember driving from college to work – nearly an hour drive – and listening to the radio to learn something, anything. At first there was nothing more than a rehash of the events but nothing new. Would I ever see any of my classmates again? As I neared my work the information was spotty. They now confirmed Dallas police officer J. D. Tippit was dead and Lee Harvey Oswald was in custody. I worked that evening and went home about ten. The news had nothing new. The police were discussing if Oswald had any accomplices. There were concerns that there were other shooters in the trees on the grassy knoll.

I’m not into conspiracy theories but there are concerns I had then and still have. Those Dallas policemen in Dealy Plaza were SURE there were shots from that direction. These were not rookies, they were Dallas police who had been under fire, who knew what gunshots sounded like, particularly ones aimed in your direction. Over the years I’ve read nearly every official report on the shooting and a lot of the investigative reports and even some of the fringe ones. Even Clay Shaw, a real loose cannon makes some sense when compared to the Warren Report which was a political report to get the issue off the table before the 1964 election. There are for me, forty four years later, several open issues.

I am sure the Dallas police, or at least two Dallas policemen let Ruby kill Oswald. I saw it live on TV that Sunday morning including the actual shooting. I saw one of the officers say, “If I had seen him, I would have known what he was going to do. I would not have allowed him to go down the driveway to the garage.” An officer stationed at the entrance let him in. Another officer closer in allowed him to pass. This officer’s statement never made it to the Warren Report or any of the other official reports I have seen. Even Clay Shaw didn’t explore this angle. Why did this officer say he knew? Why didn’t anyone ask.

There were three policemen who believed strongly enough that the fire came from the grassy knoll that they drew guns and headed that way. This action was discounted as sound bouncing. According to the report Dealy Plaza had an unusual audio feature that made the sounds of Oswald’s gun seem to come from the knoll. There were all kinds of “scientific” tests run to show that. If there had been buildings to bounce off at the knoll that would have been possible but there were none. Trees absorb sound. They do not reflect it. I have learned the harder you have to work to prove something, the less real evidence you have.

Warren report is not valid unless one of the bullets Oswald fires made a 90 degree turn. I have never seen or heard of a bullet make a 90 degree turn except if it hit something hard and don’t know anyone who has seen or heard of it. Without that 90 degree turn there had to be another shooter and the Warren report staff was told there wasn’t another shooter and their report wasn’t going to show there was another shooter. They decided the outcome of an investigation before the investigation. That 90 degree turn was Arlan Specter’s big contribution to the report. So much for his value.

Then there is Lady Bird Johnson. Her daddy’s money took an unknown Texan and made LBJ. He would have preferred it be his offspring but a southern belle couldn’t succeed in politics in Texas in the 50’s. Lady Bird was the ruthless strategist and the drive and money behind the horse’s rear end named LBJ. Seeing her as a ‘Macbeth’s wife’ – and see her killing the king is not beyond my reach, at least by proxy. She hated JFK. But for that young upstart Yankee (which is how she talked about JFK) her husband would have been president. More important she would have been first lady. LBJ oversaw the investigations. If there was a conspiracy, Lady Bird’s money financed it.

Johnson didn’t know the military – JFK did. As an aside, Teddy doesn’t know the military either and his stupid statements today show that. He was too young to understand what his brothers fought and paid for in WW2 and is generally too drunk to care. LBJ brought in MBA whiz kids to run the military. They understood money, not tactics. Most of them wouldn’t have recognized a grenade if one were thrown on the table in front of them. He cautiously committed troops in slow escalation and had them chewed up. The VC acclimated to the incremental increases. Soon over 100 body bags came home each week.

Would JFK handled it differently? I believe a man who took a PT boat with a plywood hull, four machine guns, four torpedoes, and a few hundred gallons of flammable aviation gasoline, sometimes alone, sometimes in groups of up to four against destroyers with 5 inch guns, cruisers with 8 inch guns and sometimes against battleships with 14 inch guns knew better. Go to Blockbuster and get a movie, “They Were Expendable” if you want to see what PT Boat life and death was like. It was made during the war and is realistic. You will get the picture of the metal of the man who is referred to as JFK. Then get “The Right Stuff.” The portrait of LBJ there when he tried to force John Glenn’s wife to do a press conference is essentially accurate. It portrays him as a horse’s rear.

I believe the execution warrant for at least half of the 60,000 men who died in Vietnam and the surrender of US forces was signed in Dallas on November 22, 1962 when JFK died. What I also know is, “we don’t really know what happened.”