In death as in life, John Connally could not escape the echoes of gunfire 30 years ago in Dealey Plaza.
As the former Texas governor lay in state in Austin this summer, researchers were demanding bullet fragments from his body. They insisted tests would prove President John F. Kennedy's slaying was the result of a conspiracy."It's an appalling attempt to capitalize on Governor Connally's death to gain publicity for worn-out theories," said Julian Read, a Connally confidant.
The attempt failed. The fragments from the horror of November 1963 were buried with Connally. But the theories were not.
Indeed, they have never been more pronounced than today, as a generation of Americans born after the assassination reaches adulthood.
It is almost as if the trauma of Kennedy's death and the memory of his Camelot cannot compete with the clamor about conspiracy.
The question these three decades later, it seems, is not "Who was JFK?"
It is "Who killed JFK?"
The sky was overcast that Friday morning, but the autumn sun melted away the chill and the cloud cover as Air Force One made the short hop from Fort Worth to Dallas Love Field.
It was Nov. 22, 1963.
At the urging of local politicians, Kennedy ordered the reflective glass shield atop the presidential limousine removed.
"We can't have you hiding from the people," one official complained.
And, after all, politics had brought the president to Texas, a pivotal and worrisome state in his 1964 re-election plans.
Huge, enthusiastic crowds greeted the motorcade. Kennedy, his wife Jackie at his side, smiled and waved from the back seat. Up front, John and Nellie Connally beamed at the Texas welcome.
Just before 12:30 p.m., the motorcade slipped out of the glass and steel canyons of downtown and zigzagged toward Elm Street and a drab, seven-story brick building.
Moments before the limousine reached the Texas School Book Depository, Nellie Connally turned to Kennedy. And in one of the ironies of history, she said, "No one can say Dallas doesn't love and respect you, Mr. President."
"You sure can't," he replied.
The first shot sounded like a firecracker. The second and third shots were unmistakably gunfire.
In 1964, the Warren Commission concluded that three shots were fired on the motorcade, all from the depository building's sixth floor and all by Lee Harvey Oswald.
Soon, however, the first wave of conspiracy buffs were arguing over how many shots were fired, from where and by whom. The grassy knoll next to the book warehouse would become, as one writer called it, "an elevation on the American landscape as prominent as Mount Rushmore."
Significantly, no one reported seeing a second gunman that day, and virtually everyone reported hearing no more than three shots.
Even so, the Warren Report came under attack almost immediately, and a zealous district attorney in New Orleans launched an investigation that eventually resulted in the only criminal trial connected to the bloodshed in Dallas.
Jim Garrison prosecuted businessman Clay Shaw on conspiracy charges in a trial that included 34 days of testimony and less than an hour of jury deliberations. After the acquittal, Garrison arrested Shaw for perjury, but the courts dismissed the case, branding it outrageous and inexcusable persecution.
Thirty years later, surveys show that more than eight out of 10 Americans do not accept the basic conclusion that Oswald, a lifetime misfit, was the lone assassin.
Yet, as so many reject the commission's finding, the Kennedy family itself accepts it.
The slain president's brother, Sen. Edward Kennedy, has refused to debate conspiracy theorists or comment on their contentions, but he complained recently when informed a new book would contain autopsy photographs and enhanced pictures of the shooting from the Zapruder film.
"This is the ultimate and most heartbreaking exploitation of President Kennedy," he said, "and it deeply saddens me."
At the heart of most conspiracy arguments is whether the same bullet - the so-called Magic Bullet - could have passed through Kennedy's upper back and caused the wounds suffered by Connally.
The two were struck almost at the same instant. If the same bullet could not have wounded both men, there had to have been a second bullet - and therefore a second gunman.
A new book by lawyer-journalist Gerald Posner offers a case for the single-bullet theory that adheres to the government's basic conclusion.
While relentlessly denounced by conspiracy buffs, Posner's "Case Closed" has reaped mainstream acclaim.
Posner explains how medical expertise combined with computerized re-enactments, special enhancements of the Zapruder film and new bullet-impact tests prove the single-bullet theory. Accordingly, Oswald's first shot missed, the second hit both Kennedy and Connally and the third indisputably was the fatal Kennedy head shot.
"This case has indeed been closed by Mr. Posner's work," said presidential biographer Stephen Ambrose, a one-time single-bullet skeptic. "His chapter on the single bullet is a tour de force, absolutely brilliant, absolutely convincing."
But so many, still, refuse to believe. Partly, it's because Kennedy's death was such a consuming event; partly, it's because in subsequent years - during Vietnam, throughout the Watergate scandal, at so many other junctures - the government lied.
Under pressure from researchers, journalists and Congress, the federal government released some 900,000 Kennedy-related documents in August, the largest single disclosure ever. National archivists assembled the "Kennedy collection" from such sources as the CIA, the House Select Committee on Assassinations and the Warren Commission.
In addition, the city of Dallas opened its long-secret files on the assassination at the behest of a city councilman.
In both cases, the stacks of material contained intriguing gems of trivia but no bombshells.
But it's not just in the airless warren of government files that the fascination with the events of Nov. 22, 1963, continues.
The 1990 feature film "JFK," which ingrained the Zapruder images on a new generation, had a cinematic subplot for everyone - and was nominated for a Best Picture Academy Award.
As expected, a new flurry of books and television specials appeared for this year's 30th anniversary. Among the offerings were the NBC movie "Fatal Deception," Marina Oswald's story, and a PBS "Frontline" project devoted to her husband.
A favorite tour stop in Dallas now is The Sixth Floor, a museum located, appropriately, in the Texas School Book Depository.
The Dallas County Historical Foundation overrode the city's collective sense of shame and opened the exhibit in 1989.
It was an instant hit, and already has attracted more than 1.5 million
visitors - many drawn to the eerie sniper's nest in the sixth floor's southeast corner.
And the JFK Assassination Information Center remains open in Dallas as a commercial, conspiracy-flavored repository of information and services.
Two years ago, the center co-sponsored an assassination symposium. With evangelistic fervor, speakers and panelists swapped conspiracy theories and cursed the government, the media and the Warren Commission.
It was such fun that it has become an annual affair.
Hundreds of conspiracy buffs and JFK researchers are back in town this week for the third such meeting, sharing their "individual pieces of the puzzle."
Privately distressed over the invasive proliferation of theories and disturbed by profiteering, members of the Kennedy family have remained largely away from the conspiracy spotlight.
Instead, they focus on the slain president's confidence, optimism and inspiration, his contributions to the space program, the Peace Corps and civil rights, his courage during the Cuban missile crisis.
President Clinton, flanked by Kennedy kin, spoke of the slain president in such words while helping dedicate the remodeled JFK Library last month in Boston.
"The 21st century can be our century if we approach it with the vigor, the determination, the wisdom and the sheer confidence and joy of life that John Kennedy brought to America in 1960," Clinton said.
The library contains a new section on the assassination, but the museum clearly is aimed at memorializing Kennedy's life and not the tragic way he died.
"Of all he did, my brother would take the highest pride in the legions of young Americans he inspired and whose lives he touched and changed," Edward Kennedy said through an aide.
More than anything else, the senator said, President Kennedy gave the nation a revival of spirit:
"He brought us a belief that we were equal to any challenge, that the greatest challenge of all was to be faithful to our best ideals - and with courage he led us in a time where one false step could have doomed the world itself."
Recalling the president's inaugural phrase about the torch being passed, his brother said, "The truth was, he relit the torch for a whole new generation and more."