‘Mother of all conspiracies’ subject of exhibit at Branson West museum

SUBMITTED BY JIM ZBICK, Faith, Family and Country Heritage Museum

     Dealey Plaza in Dallas, Texas, the site of a presidential assassination 62 years ago, remains one of the most speculated-about events in American history.    Since those fatal shots were fired against President John F. Kennedy, polls have consistently shown that a majority of Americans believe there was a conspiracy, a feeling that has spawned hundreds of books on the subject.     

A number of eyewitnesses to the assassination believed at least one of the shots came from the right front of President Kennedy in an area now known as the grassy knoll. Dr. Robert N. McClelland, a surgeon at Parkland Hospital where JFK was taken after the shooting, observed the president’s wounds first-hand and maintained until his death in 2019 that Kennedy was shot from the front.     Although many of the eyewitnesses have passed away, the belief that accused assassin Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone, firing an antiquated World War II rifle from a window perch inside the Texas School Book Depository building that day, has its share of scoffers. 

Lee Bowers was in a two-story railroad switch tower 120 yards behind the grassy knoll's picket fence. He told the Warren Commission, the government body which investigated the assassination, that he saw no one leaving the scene but testified seeing "some commotion" on the grassy knoll at the time of the assassination: "something out of the ordinary, a sort of milling around, but something occurred in this particular spot which was out of the ordinary, which attracted my eye for some reason which I could not identify.”     

The term “grassy knoll” originated with United Press International reporter Merriman Smith, who was riding in the motorcade five cars behind the president.     

A John F. Kennedy exhibit at the Faith, Family and Country Heritage Museum in Branson West, MO, includes a section of the picket fence that came from the grassy knoll. Museum director Jim Zbick obtained the post from a Colorado historian and collector of Americana who was in Dallas at the time the stockade fencing was being removed from the site.     

On November 22, 1963, the President’s day began with a breakfast in Fort Worth. Kennedy and the First Lady then took the short flight aboard Air Force One to Dallas Love Field airport where a motorcade shuttled them through downtown Dallas. Texas Gov. John Connally was seated in the front seat of the presidential limousine with his wife Nellie, who turned to the President near the end of the parade route and remarked: “You certainly can't say that the people of Dallas haven't given you a nice welcome.”      

The last words spoken by the President were in reply: “No, you certainly can’t.”     Just after turning off of Main Street and heading toward the triple underpass and freeway enroute to the president’s luncheon speech at the Dallas Trade Mart, shots rang out that changed the course of history.      

The Kennedy murder was the first of four major assassinations during the 1960s. Malcom X was cut down by a gunman in 1965, followed by the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy in 1968.    

 It was the JFK assassination, however, that historians have called the “the mother of all conspiracies.”      

Dan Rather, then an aspiring television news in Texas during the 1960s, stated that the Kennedy assassination will be discussed "a hundred years from now, a thousand years from now, in somewhat the same way as people discuss the Iliad. Different people read Homer’s description of the war and come to different conclusions, and so it shall be for Kennedy's death."      

Note: The JFK display in the Faith, Family and Country Museum is part of a permanent exhibit highlighting 20th century history. A current exhibit, which will remain in the museum until Pearl Harbor Day (Dec. 7) examines how the Holocaust of World War II was humanly possible.