November 22, 1963 – Everybody who is alive now remembers this date as the day we lost Camelot. Our innocence became hardline and we started questioning our government. How could such a thing happen? Who was involved? Who do we blame?

My wife and I had recently come back home from the Panama Canal Zone. We lived there from 1961 through November 1963. We hardly knew JFK because we didn’t have access to a TV while in Panama. So we didn’t get to know all the details of the Kennedy family. All we saw were in magazines and the Stars and Stripes newspaper.

Coming back to San Antonio was a great occasion and we barely got to see all the family when we had to leave by bus to Ft. Lewis, Washington. We were due to report on the 23^nd of November. When we got there, we stayed overnight at a friend’s quarters on post. This was when we found out about the assassination.

There were a number of theories and we even had movies made from those theories. Was Lyndon Johnson involved? Did the Mafia or Castro’s henchman conspire to kill Kennedy? What was the reason? Was it revenge or just a random act. We could go on and examine every bit of evidence presented to us by those who claim to know all the details.

The Warren commission was brought in by Lyndon Johnson, who preceded Kennedy as president to investigate the assassination. After finishing their investigation, they concluded that Oswald was the lone sniper who was later killed by Jack Ruby.

All the people who had some knowledge of the assassination were interviewed by the commission including the person who filmed the incident. A brief paragraph in the report showed that the secret service agents who were the Kennedy detail were interviewed one by one and they chose to leave out some details due to their job of protecting the president.

A fascinating book, written by members of the Kennedy detail came out recently which tells the story of the assassination. This is a tell all book written by Gerald Blaine, himself a secret agent who claims to wait 50 years to write the book.

All those years those agents had to live with the heartbreak and tragedy of losing the president. This happened on their watch. They saw the human side of that incident. Those details were left out of the Warren Commission Report. Some of those agents resigned or retired afterward and some were kept on as protective duty and others placed on desk duty. Either way, they kept those details secret and were not able to divulge what they saw and their actions before, during and after the assassination.

For me, the book ends my curiosity about the assassination. Who else but the people who were close to the president could know every crucial fact about the incident. It’s a revealing chapter that most Americans who blame the Secret Service should know.

The book is “The Kennedy Detail”