Kerry Has Doubts Oswald Acted Alone

Secretary of State John Kerry said on Saturday that he did not believe that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone when he shot President John F. Kennedy 50 years ago.

“To this day, I have serious doubts that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone,” Kerry, who was a college student at the time, told NBC News.

The comments make Kerry the highest-ranking public official to question the official findings of the 1963 Warren Commission report on Kennedy's death, the Daily Mail reports.

The NBC interview was part of NBC's retrospective on Kennedy's assassination on Nov. 22, 1963, at Dealey Plaza in downtown Dallas.

Texas Gov. John Connally was wounded in the shooting. Jack Ruby, a Dallas nightclub owner, killed Oswald at a police station in the city two days later.

He, too, acted alone, the Warren Commission's 889-page report concluded.

The panel, appointed by President Lyndon Johnson and chaired by Supreme Court Chief Justice Earl Warren, conducted a 10-month investigation of the Kennedy shooting.

“I certainly have doubts that he was motivated by himself," Kerry said of Oswald to NBC's Tom Brokaw. "I mean, I’m not sure if anybody else is involved.

"I won’t go down that road with respect to the grassy knoll theory and all that, but I have serious questions about whether they got to the bottom of Lee Harvey Oswald’s time and influence from Cuba and Russia,” Kerry said.

The "grassy knoll theory" was ignored by the Warren Commission.

Numerous witnesses have said that they recalled seeing smoke and smelling gunpowder near a grassy knoll along the Dallas parade route, hinting that a second shooter could have fired from a different angle, the Daily Mail reports.

The Warren Commission concluded that Oswald fired from the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository, now called the Dallas County Administration Building.

Further, it is known that Oswald defected to the Soviet Union and moved there, returning to the United States only a year before Kennedy was shot — and that he was living in a room in New Orleans rented from the Fair Play for Cuba advocacy group.

Oswald had many connections to communist sympathizers, and he visited Mexico in September 1963, two months before Kennedy's assassination, to seek a visa to go to Cuba. The application was rejected, the Daily Mail reports.

"I think he was inspired somewhere by something — and I don't know what or if or any," Kerry said in the NBC interview. "I can't pin anything down on that."

Kerry, however, rejected the idea that the CIA was behind Kennedy's assassination, long a position advanced by anti-government conspiracy theorists, the Daily Mail reports.