Nov 22, 2023 By Karen Mansfield 6 min read

Nov. 22, 2023, marks 60 years since President John F. Kennedy was shot and killed as his motorcade wound through Dealey Plaza in Downtown Dallas, Texas.

“Everybody who was of age … knows where they were when they first heard about the assassination of President Kennedy,” said Dick Jewell, an attorney and former president of Grove City College who has studied and lectured on Kennedy’s death for years.

Jewell was a freshman at Grove City College and vividly recalls the moment he found out the president had been shot. He had been in a reading room in the library that was filled with students.

“I was studying, and a little while later I looked up, I didn’t hear any noise whatsoever, it was absolutely quiet. I thought, something’s different here. I get up, all I had to do was go three feet back, turn around the corner. I looked and the entire reading room was empty, no students there where 50 or 70 students had been,” he recalled. “I got to the one lady I could find there at the checkout desk there and I said, ‘Where did everybody go?’ And she said, ‘Oh, you haven’t heard. President Kennedy has been shot and assassinated.'”

During his senior year at Grove City, Jewell wrote a review of the Warren Commission report for a class, and he’s been interested in Kennedy’s assassination – the fourth presidential assassination in history – ever since.

All these years later, he concurs with the Warren Commission’s report: that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone that day, and that Oswald’s murder two days later by Jack Ruby was not part of a conspiracy.

“I generally have come out and said the Warren Commission, I think, got most of it right,'” said Jewell, who was the Nov. 18 speaker for the Bethel Park Historical Society’s lecture series.

Jewell noted the volume of information the Warren Commission had access to, including 525 witness interviews and depositions and 25,000 pages of FBI interviews.

About 98% of assassination-related documents were released to the public in 2018 by the National Archives, Jewell said.

“No smoking guns in that investigation,” he said.

Late Pennsylvania Sen. Arlen Specter, who served as assistant counsel on the Warren Commission, and Jewell, who was Specter’s chief fundraiser for two of his election cycles, had several conversations about Kennedy’s murder.

Jewell agrees with the 888-page report’s conclusion that Oswald fired three shots from the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository – the first shot missed, the second caught the president in the throat, and the final shot struck Kennedy in the head.

Jewell said one thing the report didn’t find was a motive.

“They couldn’t find a motive,” he said, but he believes Oswald, who suffered an unhappy childhood after his father died two months before he was born, had been “radicalized” and was interested in communism because “he hated America so much and his life in America.”

Oswald, he said, lived in 19 places and changed schools several times before he dropped out to join the U.S. Marine Corps. He defected to the Soviet Union and got married there. In 1962, Oswald and his wife, Marina, and their baby daughter, returned to Fort Worth, Texas, in June 1962, where he worked a series of jobs, from which he got fired.

He spent a short time in New Orleans and Mexico, and returned home, where he got a job at the depository two days before Kennedy was scheduled to visit.

On April 10, 1963, before he left for New Orleans and Mexico, Oswald allegedly fired into the home of prominent ultra-right wing Army veteran Edwin Walker. The bullet missed, but later was linked to Oswald’s ammunition.

“That was his first foray into shooting,” said Jewell.

Jewell also concludes that Ruby’s Nov. 24 confrontation with Oswald, who he shot in the basement of the Dallas police station, was a chance encounter.

Ruby, who also had a difficult upbringing and had been arrested nine times in the prior 10 years, “took the shooting of Mr. Kennedy very hard and he kept talking about how hard it must be on the missus and the kids. He kept talking about it,” Jewell said.

Oswald was set to be transferred to the county jail at 10 a.m., but the trip was delayed, in part to get a sweater for him to wear. Ruby, who had run an errand at Western Union, walked a half block to the police station, where press and others were milling around at about 11:20 a.m. – more than an hour after Oswald was scheduled to leave, and pulled out a revolver.

Jewell was walking by a store window after work and glanced at a black-and-white television in the corner and saw Oswald get shot.

“Yes, we’d have been better off for sure if Oswald had lived long enough,” said Jewell.

But he said he’s concluded from studying the case that no one asked Dallas dressmaker Abraham Zapruder – who stood atop a concrete abutment about 9 feet off the ground at the grassy knoll, and shot a 26-second movie of the assassination from Dealey Plaza – or his assistant, Marilyn Sitzman, about claims of a second gunman there. Zapruder could not have missed someone firing a rifle from close by.

“You couldn’t have missed somebody firing a rifle, because you’re looking right down into it,” he said. “They took (Sitzman’s) deposition. If she’d seen that, she would have said something. She said nothing.”

Jewell said Kennedy’s assassination impacted access that citizens had to political figures.

He recalled heading downtown in 1962 with his twin brother, Paul, when Kennedy visited the area in support of U.S. Rep. Thomas Morgan, of Washington County.

The pair heard Kennedy would be leaving his Pittsburgh hotel at 10 a.m., and would be in an open motorcade as he traveled south to Washington.

“We went out and walked with the president to the car,” said Jewell, noting they were close enough to touch the president.

But two years later, after Kennedy was killed, Jewell was in New York City when Lyndon B. Johnson was visiting the city.

“They shut off Park Avenue back about three blocks. Where he was to get out of his car, about three hours before, there were about 150 New York policemen, literally arm to arm that formed a cordon that he’d walk through to go up into the back entrance on Park Avenue into the Waldorf,” said Jewell. “That was the difference.”