It is now largely forgotten, or airbrushed from history, but Castro played a large role in the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy. In the discussions surrounding Castro’s death, it is worth recalling this far-reaching episode in U.S. history.

On the morning after the assassination, The New York Times ran a banner headline across the front page: “KENNEDY IS KILLED BY SNIPER AS HE RIDES IN CAR IN DALLAS; JOHNSON SWORN IN ON PLANE.” In the middle column the editors ran a signed article by a reporter on the scene about Lee Harvey Oswald, the suspect arrested for the crime. The headline read “Leftist Accused,” with the subtitle “Figure in Pro-Castro Group is Charged.” Oswald, according to the article, had defected to the Soviet Union in 1959 and returned to the Dallas area in 1962. Since returning to the United States, he had been active in a pro-Castro organization in New Orleans called Fair Play for Cuba. Several fellow employees placed Oswald on the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository where police found the rifle used in the assassination, while witnesses on the street reported seeing a gunman firing from an upper-floor window in that building.

Oswald fled before police could seal off the building, but he was arrested 45 minutes after the assassination in another section of the city after a policeman was gunned down on the street. Witnesses to that crime directed police to a nearby movie theater where Oswald was arrested still carrying the pistol used to kill the policeman. Within hours local police identified the rifle used in the assassination as belonging to Oswald and ballistics tests confirmed that the bullets that killed President Kennedy were fired from his weapon. The hard evidence, as related by the reporter in Dallas, pointed strongly to Oswald as the assassin with his motives linked somehow to Castro, the Soviet Union, and the Cold War.

These facts as they circulated from Dallas sent shock waves across the world, suggesting that Castro or perhaps Soviet leaders were behind the assassination of an American president. Indeed, a spokesman for the District Attorney’s office in Dallas soon asserted that President Kennedy had been assassinated as part of a communist conspiracy. It did not require much political sophistication to understand the explosive implications of this news.

It was to be expected then that prominent public officials and journalists would look for ways to deflect attention away from Oswald’s possible ideological motives and toward other possible causes of the crime. In the same issue of the New York Times, adjacent to the report from Dallas, readers found an unusual opinion article penned by James Reston, the Washington bureau chief of the Times and at that time the dean of national political journalists. The article was titled, “Why America Weeps: Kennedy Victim of Violent Streak He Sought to Curb in Nation.” Reston wrote:

America wept tonight, not alone for its dead young President, but for itself. The grief was general, for somehow the worst in the nation had prevailed over the best. The indictment extended beyond the assassin, for something in the nation itself, some strain of madness and violence, had destroyed the highest symbol of law and order.

Reston seemed to be searching for an explanation for the assassination that reached beyond the assassin and his possible motives. “The irony of the President’s death,” he continued, “is that his short Administration was devoted almost entirely to various attempts to curb this very streak of violence in the American character.” Reston went on to observe that “from the beginning to the end of his Administration he was trying to tamp down the violence of extremists on the Right.” Reston suggested that violent tendencies emanating from the radical right were somehow responsible for the death of the president.

Two narratives of the assassination were thus juxtaposed on the front page of The New York Times on the day after the event. One was based upon the facts, which pointed to Oswald as the assassin and to the Cold War as the general context in which the event should be understood. The other was a political narrative, entirely divorced from the facts, that pointed to “extremists on the Right” and a national culture of violence as the culprits in the assassination. Both interpretations could not be correct. Attentive readers might well have wondered which one would prevail in the days ahead as investigators sifted through the facts. If so, they did not have to wait very long for an answer.

Upon hearing that President Kennedy had died, Chief Justice Earl Warren, soon to head the official commission…

Read the entire piece here at RealClearPolitics

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James Piereson is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and president of the William E. Simon Foundation.

This article is republished with permission from our friends at the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research.