Texas institutions to remember JFK killing

UNIVERSITY PARK, Texas, Nov. 22 (UPI) -- A historian says Texas institutions should use the upcoming 50th anniversary of President John F. Kennedy's assassination to put conspiracy theories to rest.

Southern Methodist University, the George W. Bush Presidential Center and the Sixth Floor Museum in Dallas announced plans Wednesday for a series of events during the coming year, The Dallas Morning News reported. James Hollifield, a political scientist at SMU and a member of the planning committee, said there will almost certainly be a program on the Warren Commission, which concluded that Kennedy was killed by a single assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald.

Kennedy was shot Nov. 22, 1963, as his motorcade drove through Dealey Plaza in Dallas and pronounced dead soon after at Parkland Hospital. Oswald was arrested the same day, and then was shot to death by Jack Ruby two days later as police were transferring him to the county jail.

Conspiracy theorists have suggested Oswald was innocent -- or a patsy -- blaming, variously the Mafia, Cuban President Fidel Castro, the U.S. military and Vice President Lyndon Johnson.

The series at SMU, which is in the Dallas area, begins on Presidents' Day in 2013 and ends a year later. The city of Dallas plans a ceremony Nov. 22, 2014, the 50th anniversary, its first since the assassination.

Historian Robert Dallek of Stanford University, who has written biographies of both Kennedy and Johnson, believes the SMU series should examine the Warren Commission report.

"The city of Dallas would be well served by accepting and supporting the proposition that Oswald was the only killer," Dallek said. "If there really was a conspiracy, it would have been found out."