Death in Dallas

Roger Riendeau

Examining the evidence of the murder of a president

Fifty years after he was assassinated, interest in the killing of the American president John F. Kennedy in Dallas on November 22, 1963 remains a burning obsession for many. The Kennedys were the closest American’s had to a royal family. The young and charismatic president seemed to usher in an optimistic new age. Kennedy’s assassination brought this story to a crashing and tragic end. Yet it is his death and the circumstances around it that continues to grip generations of all ages.

The official story of Kennedy’s death, as told in the Warren Commission report, says the president was killed by a single gunman, Lee Harvey Oswald, and that he acted alone. Few have ever accepted this explanation. According to a 2003 ABC News poll, 70 per cent of Americans don’t buy the official story, believing instead Kennedy’s assassination was part of a plot— perhaps perpetrated by the CIA, the Cubans, the Russians or rival politicians or a combination of the above.

Among those who cast doubt upon the official explanation is Roger Riendeau. Riendeau teaches a course on the Kennedy assassination and the nature of evidence at the University of Toronto’s Innis College. He lives in Wellington and is president of the Wellington branch of the Royal Canadian Legion.

Riendeau was a student in a Grade 8 classroom the day Kennedy’s motorcade made its way through Dealey Plaza toward the Dallas Trade Mart where the president was scheduled to speak at lunch. Suddenly, three shots rang out. One shot, according to the Warren report, hit the president in the head, one missed entirely and one bullet from a single sniper entered Kennedy’s upper back, damaged his spinal vertabra and the top of his right lung, exiting through his throat. The same bullet then hit Texas Governor John Connally in the back, through his ribs and out his chest. It only came to rest after it had passed through the governor’s arm and at last lodged in his thigh.

Riendeau says this just isn’t possible— that this explanation defies laws of physics, and accepted understanding of anatomy and ballistics.

“It is hugely preposterous,” said Riendeau of the Warren report. “There was a desperate lack of critical thinking and an inability to understand the evidence that was before them. We’ve had 50 years of ignoring the evidence.”

He goes further, suggesting evidence was fabricated or manipulated, particularly aspects of the autopsy of the president’s body Riendeau isn’t a conspiracy theorist—there is a goodly sized industry in peddling various notions of who may have been behind the assassination of the president. That doesn’t interest him. He is focused almost exclusively on the evidence. And the evidence, as he sees it, points in a different direction than the official Warren report.

He began using the JFK assassination as a case study in a course he was teaching on evidentiary analysis. The course proved popular and evolved into a full-on examination of the failings of the Warren report.

“I simply present the evidence that we have and ask them to follow it—to see where it leads them,” explains Riendeau.

Beyond the problems with the single bullet theory, Riendeau points to stark contradictions between what doctors observed about Kennedy’s body at the Dallas hospital and what autopsy doctors reported at Bethesda Naval Hospital later that same day. Adding to the mystery, the only physician present at both the Dallas hospital and the Bethesda hospital was never called to testify before the Warren commission. This was odd because Admiral George Burkley, Kennedy’s personal physician, rode in the Dallas motorcade, was present at Parkland Hospital, rode Air Force One to Washington with the body, and was present at the autopsy.

When asked if he agreed with the conclusions of the Warren report—Burkley declined to comment. Riendeau believes we remain fascinated by Kennedy’s death 50 years later because it is a compelling murder mystery—with vast amounts of information and evidence upon which to chew. Each new generation also brings more sophisticated technology to the investigation of the crime—offering to peel back some of the layers that some believe mask the truth.

It is the sheer implausibility of the evidentiary trail that drives Riendeau’s interest after all these decades, and how it shapes our view of the governing classes. This is because the inevitable implications arising from such conclusions mean that government officials, at some level, had to have been part of a conspiracy. That such officials would have played a role in the assassination of the president defies belief among some, and fuels the imaginations of others. No matter which way we lean, the murder of Kennedy forever changed the way we view government.

Riendeau is giving a talk at the Legion in Wellington on the death of John F. Kennedy on November 28. He will present, as part of his talk, a pristine version of the film taken by Abraham Zapruder that sunny day in Dallas half a century ago this month.