Readers Guide To JFK Assassination: Justice Integrity Project

To help researchers of President John F. Kennedy’s 1963 assassination and its current implications, the Justice Integrity Project began publishing a Reader’s Guide in 2013 to coincide with the shooting’s 50th anniversary.

Some of the first columns, particularly No. 17 below, cataloged with scant comment significant materials of diverse viewpoints. Other columns provided analysis and interpretation.

Shown here below those columns are analysis by author and retired diplomat and university professor Peter Dale Scott and San Francisco attorney Bill Simpich. Each is affiliated with the start-up research group CAPA, Citizens Against Political Assassinations, as is Justice Integrity Project editor Andrew Kreig.

These are ongoing research efforts that welcome reader inputs. Corrections, suggestions or other comments are very welcome. Similar initiatives are planned to help illuminate other major assassinations and attempted assassinations of great controversy and historical importance.

In the meantime, the specifics of President Kennedy’s life, death and legacy hold a rare fascination for the public, partly as a Rosetta Stone to today’s current events.

The topics are the subject of more than two thousand books in whole or part. More than three million pages of relevant government have been declassified thanks to countless researchers. Public opinion polls for decades have revealed a rare if not unique disconnect whereby between 60 and more than 75 percent of the public typically state that they do not believe the 1964 report by the blue-ribbon Warren Commission.

At right is a Justice Integrity Project photo showing Dealey Plaza, where President Kennedy was killed on Nov. 22, 1963. The Texas Book Depository Building where accused assassin Lee Harvey Oswald worked is behind the row of trees. The car in the center lane is near the location of the president’ limo at the time of the fatal shot.

Many witnesses reported hearing shooting from the so-called “Grassy Knoll” at the photo’s left. Not visible is a waist-high picket fence obscured by the road sign at the far left.

Many researchers but not the Warren Commission have argued that at least one shooter hid behind the picket fence and escaped via the near-empty railroad yard behind the fence. The “X” painted on the highway marks the approximate spot where Kennedy was hit by the fatal shot. JFK researcher, author and photo expert Robert J. Groden repeatedly repaints the spot, to the dismay of Dallas authorities, as a reminder of continuing citizen concern. Groden, hired as a photo technician to work in the 1960s on the then-suppressed amateur video shot of the killing photographer by Abraham Zapruder from the Grassy Knoll, played a role in delivering a pirated copy to ABC-TV for its first public showing in 1975.

The materials below derive from the efforts of others, including countless other concerned citizens who compiled records and in some cases challenged conventional wisdom, often at risk to their reputations and careers and with scant possibility of any reward except in hope of helping solve an enduring civic mystery.