"Any concerted plan that placed Lee Harvey Oswald in the gunner's seat," wrote Norman Mailer in "Oswald's Tale: An American Mystery," "would have had to have been built on the calculation that he would miss." Yet Mailer, whose research took him back to the city of Minsk, where Oswald had lived under constant KGB surveillance while in the Soviet Union, said he believed Oswald was likely to have been the perpetrator.
The void left by John F. Kennedy's death has been partially filled over the past five decades by an unending stream of theories concerning the seemingly bizarre circumstances of his murder. Loose ends and inexplicable phenomena are everywhere. Conspiracy buffs are quick to latch on to the botched security preparations by the Secret Service and FBI and the hasty cleanup of the presidential limousine and destruction of other key forensic evidence after the shooting.
Bonar Menninger's 1992 book, "Mortal Error," claims that JFK was shot by Secret Service agent George Hickey Jr., who while riding in "Queen Mary," the follow-up car, fumbled his AR-15 rifle in response to hearing shots and accidentally discharged it, hitting and killing the president. That, proponents of this theory argue, explains why the government was "complicit" in the coverup.