The JFK assassination perspective today is a little different than it was at the time of the shooting.

When Kennedy was killed it marked the beginning of a strange time in America.

His brother would also be assassinated, and the looming Vietnam war had everyone edgy and wondering what would happen next.

A certain romance and innocence of the time was gone forever, and modern political writers often express a nostalgia for the good old days with the Kennedy years in mind.

Yet even then it wasn't perfect, and the way the investigation into the murder was handled smacks even now of the rushed heavy handedness that characterizes so many government investigations.

The JFK assassination perspective today does not agree with the Warren Commission's ruling that the assassination was the work of one man, Lee Harvey Oswald.

Conspiracy theories have proven to be so popular that T-shirts claiming 'I was the Man on the Grassy Knoll' are sardonic wardrobe must-haves for hipsters and high school students.

The JFK assassination perspective today also incorporates the views of modern cynics, who find that the arrest and subsequent death of Oswald were all just a little too neat, a little too completely tying up loose ends.

Besides, modern crime scene analysis has not been kind to the methodology used with the investigation, and subsequent re-enactments that would not have been possible at the time further illustrate the unlikelihood that the official story is the whole story, or even a real story.

Yet even as a fiction, the early reports and the Lee Harvey Oswald story have a certain fascinating charm that just doesn't seem to let modern society go.

INITIAL REPORTS OF THE SHOOTING

WATCHING AND JUDGING YEARS LATER

The JFK assassination perspective today is that the official tales have holes, gaps, and faults. Yet modern citizens are also practical enough to know that in times of extreme crisis, all sorts of oddities pop up. 9/11 theories make the more outlandish Kennedy tales seem credible, and of course there is the hunger to do interviews before everyone involved in six feet under.

Thus are the conspiracy mongers invited in and cherished. Even at their quackiest they preserve an ideal when everyone just assumed that no one would honestly want to shoot a president and that the shooting of a president would be terrible. The Anti-Bush crowd, had they been thrown back in time and made into Anti-Kennedy folks, would have certainly all been suspects.

THE TRUTH IS IRRELEVANT

Another aspect of the JFK assassination perspective today is the truth is less important. It's become a scholarly matter secondary to probing all the twists coming from the outlandish corners of the plot. It's not reality anymore--it's history.

The falling away of the immediacy of the event, and the treasuring of the happening as a major national moment are definitely lasting impression. Whether it was Oswald or Johnson who arranged the assassination, all the public cares to remember is that is was Kennedy who was there.