About This Website

The Purpose of this Website

The assassination of President Kennedy is a fascinating and complex whodunnit. It is a crime that remains unsolved, at least in the sense that none of the many proposed solutions is entirely free from reasonable objections.

Despite being perhaps the most famous political assassination of all time, its treatment at the hands of journalists and scholars is a disgrace: it has been consistently misrepresented by the former, and largely ignored by the latter. Although commercial publishers have always shown an interest, they tend to prefer sensationalism over sober analysis. Consequently, much of the published work on the subject:

• is poorly argued;
• deals with marginal issues;
• and is inadequately referenced.

The articles on this website are an attempt to deal with the central questions in a relatively scholarly manner. Particular effort has been made to include links wherever possible to the vast number of primary sources that are now available online.

JFK Assassination Evidence Online

Thanks to the work of the people behind the Mary Ferrell Foundation website, the History Matters website, and the Assassination Archives and Research Center website, a large proportion of the unclassified primary evidence in the JFK assassination is now available to anyone with an internet connection. This should help to raise the general level of online discussion, as well as providing a barrier to the type of uninformed and misleading works in print that have infested the subject for decades.

This website also includes a selection of official documents, complete with introductions. All of these documents have been available online for some time, mostly as PNG images of scans. Because images are (or at least used to be) invisible to search engines, many of these online versions have been difficult for researchers to track down. The documents are presented here in valid HTML, accessible both to search engines and human visitors.

One More JFK Assassination Website

There may well be hundreds of websites that deal with the JFK assassination in one form or another. Why go to the trouble and expense of creating one more?

After all, the main questions were settled long ago. Enough is known about Lee Oswald’s career and the pivotal event that preceded the assassination, Oswald’s impersonation in Mexico City, to understand the frantic activity in Washington that culminated in the establishment of the Warren Commission.

Much of the original case against Oswald had collapsed by about 1967, after the publication of the earliest critical books. It is now taken seriously by few people other than newspaper and television pundits, for many of whom, sadly, Oswald’s guilt is like a religious dogma. These days, watching someone trying to plug all the holes in the single-bullet theory is like watching a creationist trying to explain away the fossil record.

This website does not claim to contain any earth-shattering revelations about the assassination. Almost all of the evidence and arguments presented here have already been made public elsewhere, and will be familiar to specialists.

Nevertheless, this website is perhaps the first to put forward a concise account of the JFK assassination, supported by evidence, in a form that is accessible to those who genuinely want to find out the story behind the most infamous public murder of a president, insofar as that story is known.

The JFK Assassination and Professional Historians

The media’s weak treatment of the JFK assassination over the years has been partly a consequence of the assassination’s neglect by career-minded professional historians, most of whom treat the matter as though it were an unfortunate accident, no more worth discussing than if Kennedy had died in a car crash or been struck by lightning.

The reason for that neglect is obvious. Modern history does not function within an ideological vacuum; there are certain criticisms that can be made of earlier or foreign forms of authority that cannot easily be made of a historian’s own, current, nation-state institutions. The Kennedy assassination is one subject that cannot be covered adequately without criticising the performance of certain governmental and media institutions.

It is good to know that critical coverage of the assassination is becoming more acceptable within academic circles. Professional historians such as Gerald McKnight, David Wrone, and John Newman have produced valuable scholarly work. Criticisms of the media coverage have been produced by, among others, Ross Ralston and Barbie Zelizer.

Information for Students

Students occasionally get in touch, asking for information so that they may cite this website in their essays and dissertations.

The Date of the Website

The website was created in 2011. Many of the articles now on the website have been added since then. The latest revamp of the underlying code took place in 2025.

Citing This Website

A good deal of this website’s text has turned up elsewhere online, such as in blog and forum posts. Readers are encouraged to quote this website’s text, on three conditions:

• You do not change the text in a way that distorts its meaning.
• You do not claim the text as your own.
• You make it clear that the text originated on this website. A link to the relevant page on this website would be welcome. It is only polite to acknowledge your sources!

Citing an Author

Some of the articles on this website are attributed to named authors; others are not. There are sometimes good reasons why an author prefers to be named. Two common reasons are vanity and, if the author has a book to sell or a career to establish, the need to create a brand name. There are also good reasons why an author prefers not to be named, as well as other good reasons why an author ought not to be named.

In the case of works such as many of the articles on this website, which attempt to treat evidence objectively and which permit relevant evidence to be checked, two factors outweigh all others: the argument that is made, and the strength of the evidence that supports the argument. In such cases, the identity of the author adds nothing to the credibility of the argument, and may actually serve to obscure the argument.

If an author is reporting relevant personal experience, his or her identity provides part of the evidence to support the argument. If not, his or her identity is an irrelevant distraction, albeit one that may be justified in certain circumstances.

Some educational institutions insist that a name be attributed to every cited source. This insistence is muddle-headed, and ought to be opposed. If you need to cite a name, and one is not given, please feel free to make one up, perhaps by borrowing one of the more colourfully named characters in the assassination story, such as Bardwell D. Odum or Aloysius J. Habighorst.

Web Design Credits

This website was designed, coded in valid HTML and CSS, and optimised for search engines by Lab 99 Web Design.

Visitors using up-to-date browser software will see the headings and navigation menus rendered in a narrow web font named, appropriately, Oswald. The font was designed by Vernon Adams.

The images of flags on the book page are available at http://365icon.com/icon-styles/ethnic/classic2/.