Ennyman's Territory: Why the JFK Assassination Still Intrigues and Rankles America

Saturday, November 22, 2025

Why the JFK Assassination Still Intrigues and Rankles America

More than sixty years after November 22, 1963, the assassination of John F. Kennedy remains the wound America cannot stop picking at. It is not simply that a young president was murdered in broad daylight; it is that the nation watched its own innocence die on live television and then spent the next six decades arguing about what, exactly, it saw.

The intrigue begins with the sheer improbability of the official story. A lone gunman, a misfit Marine with a mail-order rifle, fires three shots in six seconds and changes history forever. The Warren Commission assured us this was possible, yet every subsequent investigation, from the Ramsey Clark panel to the House Select Committee on Assassinations, has nibbled away at that certainty. Acoustic evidence suggested a fourth shot; the “magic bullet” still performs geometric miracles no ballistics expert can fully replicate. Doubt metastasized into a thousand theories because the evidence itself seemed to conspire against closure. (Read The Dark Side of Camelot by Seymour Hersh.)

But the deeper rankling is existential. Kennedy’s death arrived at the precise moment when postwar optimism was curdling into cynicism. Vietnam was escalating, the CIA was running rogue operations, and organized crime felt untouchable. If a president could be erased with such apparent ease, then no one was safe and nothing was sacred. The assassination could easily be labelled the original sin of modern American paranoia: the moment citizens realized their government might lie to them not out of incompetence, but by design.

What keeps the fascination alive is not the hope of solving the crime; most serious researchers now accept we never will. It is the recognition that JFK’s murder marked the fracture line between the America that believed its myths and the America that could no longer afford to. Every new document batch, every grainy Zapruder frame slowed to agony, is less about finding the killer and more about staring into the abyss of what we became when we stopped trusting the story we were told. I think here of Kurtz's stark observation in Heart of Darkness upon staring into that abyss: "The horror."

For those who lived that moment in time, every one of us remembers exactly where we were, what we saw, what we felt. It was quite similar to having you car struck by a speeding vehicle that ran a red light, leaving you dazed and confused. We were suddenly lost in a nationwide concussion.

In remembrance of that day and event, here is a collection of links to some of my past blog posts about the JFK assassination as well as the life of JFK.

Did Lee Harvey Oswald Act Alone? Here's a Fresh Analysis and Disturbing Conclusion

https://pioneerproductions.blogspot.com/2025/08/did-lee-harvey-oswald-act-alone-heres.html

Flashback Friday: Will A.I. Finally Solve the JFK Assassination?

https://pioneerproductions.blogspot.com/2024/11/flashback-friday-will-ai-finally-solve.html

Notes of Infamy: Paul Metsa's Song About the Shooting of Lee Harvey Oswald

https://pioneerproductions.blogspot.com/2023/11/notes-of-infamy-pul-metsas-song-about.html

JFK -- Murder Most Foul and the Debate Goes On

https://pioneerproductions.blogspot.com/2020/04/jfk-murder-most-foul-and-debate-goes-on.html

More Thoughts on Murder Most Foul: Most Foul Indeed

https://pioneerproductions.blogspot.com/2020/07/more-thoughts-on-murder-most-foul-most.html

JFK's Speech to the Northland Shows What Hibbing Was Like During Dylan's Youth

https://pioneerproductions.blogspot.com/2020/04/jfks-speech-to-northland-begins-by.html