Reader: 50 Years on, JFK's Assassination Signifies All Who Die for Democracy

Editor's Note: Friday marks the 50th anniversary of President John F. Kennedy's assassination in Dallas.

To the Editor:

The imbalance of reporting supporting the theory that Oswald acted a a lone madman seems contrary to an objective analysis of the facts known widely today that were not at the time of the Warren Commission's investigation.

There seems to be a movement afoot to convince people that a proper investigation resulted in a sound conclusion on the matter of JFK's assassination. The concealment of information vital to knowing what happened that day continues with this latest iteration of fealty to a flawed case.

The Zapruder file, shown to the public for the first time in a 1969 courtroom, provides ample evidence that, not only did the fatal shot come from someone other than Oswald, but that powerful people kept it out of public view for years after the crime occurred. In 1975, the film was shown on national television for the first time, fostering a groundswell that led Congress to convene the Church Committee.

Congress discovered that the CIA withheld from investigators for the FBI and CIA on the case for the Warren Commission information these investigators testified they both requested, and which, had their requests been fulfilled, would have led them to expand their efforts far from the narrow focus on Oswald as the lone operator.

Subsequent acts of Congress in later administrations have sequestered from public view information in the government's custody, preventing its release until after the time when actors contemporary to the assassination will have passed on. In the interim, we seem to be in a period when old falsehoods are minted anew, as if the consciousness of a nation stripped of its democratically elected leader long ago can be laid to rest, as well.

This is no longer a story about the murder of a man 50 years dead. It is yet another chapter in our nation's struggle to increase our devotion to the cause our honored dead gave their full measure of devotion, that our nation be governed of, by, and for its people. So long as the truth is sought, this dream will not perish from the earth, and these dead shall not have died in vain.

John Kilian, Middletown, former military intelligence analyst