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Blame for the president’s death has been laid at the feet of organized crime, the Soviet Union, Cuba, the CIA, Lyndon Johnson, and a shadow right-wing government. Discussion of the assassination has consumed countless books, articles, news stories, lectures, documentaries, and films.  The original government investigation conducted by the Warren Commission in 1963 and 1964 produced a twenty-six-volume report.  Many have dedicated their lives to tearing its conclusions that Oswald acted alone and was not part of a larger group into small pieces of confetti. 

Investigators and theorists on the assassination run the gamut from tin hat wearing conspiracy kooks to respected professionals in the scientific, legal, and political/historical fields.  Armchair detectives to real-life, modern-day Sherlock Holmesian investigative brains.   Cyril Wecht is both a doctor and a lawyer.  He served as a coroner and county commissioner in Pittsburgh.  I grew up hearing or reading his name almost daily.  He has reportedly conducted 17,000 autopsies and consulted on 30,000 post-mortems, and been involved in many high-profile cases such as the deaths of Elvis Presley and JonBenet Ramsey and the Manson murders. 

He is passionate about his belief that John F. Kennedy’s assassination was a government coup, that there were multiple shooters, and the plot was the handiwork of super-spies who knew how to keep a secret.  Wecht has spent decades giving lectures to groups large and small.  During these presentations, he uses audience members to play the parts of Kennedy and Connally to demonstrate how the single bullet would have had to change course twice in mid-air to accomplish what it is credited with.  I attended a seminar ten years ago where he was the keynote speaker and recently watched a recording of a talk he gave at the Texas School Book Depository Museum in 2017.  His expertise, passion, and ability to capture an audience not only create doubt about the single bullet theory but leave some people ready to launch a crusade to hunt down and squeeze the truth out of these super-spies.

I've consumed a couple of shelves of books on the assassination.  I’ve also read articles, news stories, portions of the government reports and watched too many documentaries, archived television news reports, and “fact-based” films.  I wasn't entirely convinced Kennedy died at the hands of a sinister cabal and Oswald had company pulling triggers that day in Texas, but I was close.  Until I stood in Dealey plaza and then looked out the windows of the upper floors of the depository and realized at that distance and angle, I could have done it.  I've shot and killed running deer with a high-powered rifle at a longer distance, and I'll never be mistaken for any sort of marksman.  After that, it wasn't too hard to conclude that even though it's unlikely a bullet can remain in such good condition after traveling through two bodies, it's not impossible.  And just because Dr. Wecht has a professional resume nearly as long as the Warren Commission report doesn't mean his bullet is magic, and the explanations of the projectile's path from professionals with less experience under their investigations belt aren't correct.

For me, the hardest part about swallowing the sour pill that Lee Harvey Oswald planned and executed the attack alone is that it’s nearly infallible to think that a man so prominent and influential as Kennedy can be taken down by someone like Oswald, whose own life before that day was so invisible and inconsequential.  In a 1967 broadcast, CBS news correspondent Eric Sevareid made a thoughtful observation about what he called "the sheer incongruity of the affair," of the assassination.

“All that power and majesty wiped out in an instant by one skinny weak chinned little character.  It was like believing that the Queen Mary had sunk without a trace because of a log floating somewhere in the Atlantic.”

But just like a single bullet traveling on an improbable journey, it’s hard to believe a single “weak chinned” man could have killed the president.  But it’s not impossible.

One may be the loneliest number, but sometimes one is enough.