As JFK Theories Linger, Assassination Buffs Dig for Gold in New Files

It’s a beautiful blue-sky afternoon at Dealey Plaza, which is bad news for Mark A. Oakes.Four days a week, Oakes hauls folding tables and easels covered in newspaper clippings and historic photographs to the grassy knoll. The centerpiece is a DVD player with portable speakers, cued up to a TV news report featuring footage of the presidential motorcade traveling through Dealey Plaza on Nov. 22, 1963.The film, which Oakes helped make public in 1995, shows what some believe are bursts of gunfire coming from the grassy knoll, but it’s hard to see on his small screen if the sun is shining. If tourists can’t see the screen, they won’t see the minuscule flashes on the half-century-old film. A literal smoking gun, says Oakes.Experts agree that similar theories will live on, even with the release of new federal documents about the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. Those documents don’t shed much light on the dozens of theories about the assassination itself, but they raise more questions about what the government knew, when it knew it and what was on the assassin’s mind in late 1963.For decades, Oakes’ tables and clipped documents have been part of the Dealey Plaza experience. Tourists from all over the world visit Dallas to see where Kennedy was killed, and to swap theories about who really pulled the trigger.  Continue reading...