Gary Hart Ponders Unanswered JFK Questions

Former Sen. Gary Hart (D-CO).

Tomorrow marks the 50th anniversary of the assassination of Democratic President John F. Kennedy in Dallas, Texas. The news this week has been full of stories recalling the assassination, its impact on American politics, and questions that remain unanswered to this today. Apropos, here's an interview of former Sen. Gary Hart of Colorado published in the Huffington Post yesterday. Hart was a member of one of the committees set up in the 1970s to revisit questions from the 1963 assassination, questions that remained unanswered after the Warren Commission's report in 1964.

According to Sen. Hart, they're still very much unanswered:

Hart served on the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence Agencies, known as the Church committee, after chairman Frank Church. He recalled that while the committee was investigating the connection between the assassination, the Mafia and plots against Cuban President Fidel Castro, two of the three main figures involved were also killed.

"It's amazing to me that American journalism never followed up on that story very much, because if you found out who killed those two guys, you might have some really interesting information on your hands," Hart, who served as a Democratic senator from Colorado for two terms, told HuffPost in a recent interview…

The deaths of [Johnny] Roselli and [Sam] Giancana in 1975 and 1976 occurred amid the Church committee's ongoing investigations surrounding Kennedy's assassination. That coincidence, Hart said, was suspicious enough to warrant press attention, and he was surprised that the press didn't jump on the story.

"I was always amazed in that particular instance of the CIA-Mafia connection and the Cuban connection 12 years — coming up 12 years — after Kennedy was killed that somebody didn't go after that story," he said. "New York Times, Washington Post; anybody. And they didn't. They reported the deaths and that was it, and the strange quirky coincidence, you know, but nothing more."

…Hart tried to uncover the truth about the Kennedy assassination and the "big unanswered questions." He said he worked with fellow Church committee member and former Sen. Richard Schweiker (R-Penn.), but ultimately ran out of resources and leads. During an ill-fated presidential bid in the 1980s, Hart vowed he'd reopen the Kennedy investigation if elected. In retrospect, he said it "was probably a stupid thing to do," citing death threats he received. [Pols emphasis]

Fascinating reading for sure. Although much information about the JFK assassination has been released to the public, many thousands of pages of documents and other evidence remains classified. Perhaps the whole story of what happened on November 22nd, 1963 will be known in our lifetimes–or, like Jim Garrison portrayed by Kevin Costner warned in the movie JFK, maybe our children's. Until then, it will remain the subject of speculation; some baseless, and some fueled by legitimately unanswered questions like those posed by Sen. Hart.

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