First Published: Columbia Daily Spectator, Volume CVIII, Number 54, 16 December 1963.
Transcription, Editing and Markup: Paul Saba
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Fred Jerome, editor of Progressive Labor magazine, stated in a speech here Thursday night that Lee Harvey Oswald did not assassinate President John F. Kennedy. Mr. Jerome offered as specific evidence the picture sequence of the assassination published in the November 29 edition of Life magazine. He stated that the first bullet fired into the Presidential limousine entered the President’s throat from the front. But, he said, the Life pictures clearly show that the President’s back was turned to the Dallas School Book Depository, the building from which Oswald allegedly shot the President. Mr. Jerome also declared that the second bullet, which entered Texas Governor John Connally’s chest from the rear, also could not have been fired from the Depository, because the Life pictures indicate that the Governor was facing the building at the time. In connection with Oswald’s leftist leanings, the speaker stated that “assassination is not a Marxist technique. It just replaces bad people with worse ones.” Mr. Jerome made these statements at the end of a speech entitled “Violence in America.” In his talk, presented by the Progressive Labor Club, the speaker alleged that violence was an everyday part of American life, just as much as in any other country of the world. The assassination of the President, he asserted, was not a “freak occurrence,” but rather part of “a long series of willful acts of violence characteristic of American society.” In a well-documented account, Mr. Jerome expanded this thesis, leading to the central point of his speech: that the state is directly responsible for the existence of this violence. He stated that “the state intervenes to halt violence only when it is in the interest of its politico-military ruling apparatus to do so.”