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By Root 539 0

Plaza. I walked the picket fence where a second gunman most likely was firing from. I took my time. I walked out on the street, looked at the decline of the road. Then I went into the Texas School Book Depository, where Gary Mack—curator of the Sixth Floor Museum at the time—met my party. The actual supposed sniper’s nest on the sixth floor is sealed off. But you can go to the next window, which would seem to be an easier shot, because you’re eight feet closer to where the motorcade passed and at basically the same angle. When you look out, you see a massive Texas oak tree. I turned to Mack and said, “Clearly, forty years ago, this tree was much smaller.” He said, “No, this is maintained by the federal government as a National Monument, so it’s trimmed to be kept as close to authentic as can reasonably be done.” Even if the tree had been several feet smaller in 1963, I didn’t see how three shots could have cleared its branches and still lined up right on the presidential motorcade. Besides, Oswald had seven seconds to get three rounds off. He was using a bolt action weapon—with which he’s going to miss the first shot and somehow hit with the next two?

After my book-signing was finished, we headed out to the airport. At the time, I was smoking cigars, so they found me a restricted area outside where I could light up. It was a beautiful day in Dallas. We were all laughing and making small talk. As it came time for me to put out my cigar and board the plane, the police officer who’d been our guide all day took me off to the side.

He said, “Be very careful, governor. You are a high-profile person who might say things that certain people don’t want said.”

Well, if Oswald was indeed the lone assassin, and was the “lone nut” that they told us he was, how could my making comments about this forty years later affect anybody? In hindsight, I wish I had canceled the flight and gone to the policeman’s home that night. I wanted to ask him, “Why are you warning me about this? What do you base it on?” I had the distinct feeling from him, however, that he didn’t want to be asked.

Jack Tunheim was a Minnesota federal judge who, after Oliver Stone’s JFK film came out, was put in charge (by President Clinton) of reviewing the still-classified assassination archives for potential release. As governor, I figured I ought to have access to Tunheim. So we had dinner together one evening at the home of another federal judge. We were joined by Kathleen Blatz, who was then chief justice of the Minnesota Supreme Court. The topic of the evening was Kennedy.

Tunheim told me, in essence, that everything had now been revealed, unless it referred to a CIA undercover operative who was still alive and whose life could be put in danger. He told me that, in following up on the intelligence side, he’d encountered some of the shadiest characters that he’d ever come across. The judge told me I had great knowledge of the case, and that I was on the right track.

Well, why does it end there? This is a homicide, and there’s no statute of limitations on murder. The Warren Commission is meaningless, because it was merely an investigation supposedly done to bring everything into the light of day, and it doesn’t stand up as a court case. Why is it that so many allude to more people being involved with Oswald, but prefer to let the sleeping dog lie?

On the fortieth anniversary of the assassination on November 22, 2003, I decided to go to Dallas to pay my respects. I’d left office the previous January. I was the only elected official who spoke in Dealey Plaza that day. No one else even bothered to show up. Does our government still have a collective guilty conscience when it comes to John F. Kennedy?

Teaching at Harvard in 2004, I decided to focus my next-to-last class on the Kennedy assassination. I knew that was a gutsy move to make at the Kennedy School of Government. I hadn’t wanted to try it too soon because, if Harvard objected, I didn’t want to go through a big fight. Anyway, I got away with it. My guest speaker was David Fetzer, a University of Minnesota