For Jesse Ventura, the professional wrestler turned independent politician, John F. Kennedy was the greatest president in modern US history — and the proof lies in his 1963 assassination.
“They wouldn’t even let him do one term. That’s what showed his greatness,” said Ventura, the former governor of Minnesota and author of the new book, “They Killed Our President.”
Ventura believes that Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas probably because he sought to make peace with the Soviet Union and challenge the military-industrial complex following the CIA’s botched Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba.
“I believe he had more enemies within his own government than with the Russians and all of them combined,” Ventura told AFP. “Imagine how the world would have been different if Jack Kennedy had lived, with no Vietnam War and the Cold War ended in ‘65. What a great world I bet we would have had today.”
An official commission headed by Chief Justice Earl Warren concluded that gunman Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone, and historians debate the legacy of the still popular president, who sent military advisers to Vietnam.
But alternative theories on Kennedy’s death remain rife ahead of the 50th anniversary of his assassination on Nov. 22. A Gallup poll in 2003 found that a mere 19 percent of Americans believed that a sole individual was behind the murder, with more than one-third agreeing with theories that the mafia or the CIA killed him because he threatened their interests.
Much of the suspicion revolves around how Oswald, a former defector to the Soviet Union with a troubled life, could have single-handedly killed one of the world’s most powerful people by firing from the top of the Texas School Book Depository. Oswald’s chance to speak publicly ended two days later, when he himself was fatally shot by a club owner Jack Ruby.
In works on Kennedy’s assassination — a search under “JFK conspiracy” on online bookstore Amazon found nearly 800 books — authors have questioned whether another gunman opened fire from the now infamous “grassy knoll” in front of the motorcade. A 1979 report by a congressional committee said that acoustic evidence pointed to a second gunman, although subsequent studies have challenged the assertion.
A home movie filmed by eye witness Abraham Zapruder has offered ample fodder for alternative views, with some theorists alleging that “the Umbrella Man” — who opened an umbrella despite the sunshine — was sending a signal.
One of the most prominent alternative theories of the assassination came in Oliver Stone’s 1991 film “JFK” which suggests a cover-up and involvement by Kennedy’s successor Lyndon Johnson. Stone said he wanted to create a “counter-myth” through the movie, which contributed to a decision by Congress to release more records on the shooting.
Some of the first major challenges to the official narrative came not from the United States but from Europe where philosophers Bertrand Russell and Jean-Paul Sartre backed a committee in 1964 to challenge the Warren Commission, arguing that it was made up of Washington insiders who would have an interest in concealing any evidence of official involvement.
On the other side of the political spectrum, one early critic in the United States was Revilo P. Oliver, an academic close to far-right causes, who argued that Kennedy was a Soviet puppet who was killed because he had become a liability for Moscow.
In an influential essay written shortly after Kennedy’s assassination, historian Richard Hofstadter described conspiracy theories as part of “the paranoid style of American politics,” although he said that similar dynamics existed in Europe.
The paranoid person sees not just fleeting events but feels powerless against a “gigantic conspiracy” that is perceived as driving history and threatening an entire way of life, he wrote.
While the Kennedy assassination remains among the most contested events in US history, a slew of authors have also challenged the official narrative over traumatic events including the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks and the 1865 assassination of President Abraham Lincoln.
50 years on, no end to questions on JFK’s death
50 years on, no end to questions on JFK’s death
Filipinos master disaster readiness, one roll of the dice at a time
- In a library in the Philippines, a dice rattles on the surface of a board before coming to a stop, putting one of its players straight into the path of a powerful typhoon
MANILA: In a library in the Philippines, a dice rattles on the surface of a board before coming to a stop, putting one of its players straight into the path of a powerful typhoon.
The teenagers huddled around the table leap into action, shouting instructions and acting out the correct strategies for just one of the potential catastrophes laid out in the board game called Master of Disaster.
With fewer than half of Filipinos estimated to have undertaken disaster drills or to own a first-aid kit, the game aims to boost lagging preparedness in a country ranked the most disaster-prone on earth for four years running.
“(It) features disasters we’ve been experiencing in real life for the past few months and years,” 17-year-old Ansherina Agasen told AFP, noting that flooding routinely upends life in her hometown of Valenzuela, north of Manila.
Sitting in the arc of intense seismic activity called the “Pacific Ring of Fire,” the Philippines endures daily earthquakes and is hit by an average of 20 typhoons each year.
In November, back-to-back typhoons drove flooding that killed nearly 300 people in the archipelago nation, while a 6.9-magnitude quake in late September toppled buildings and killed 79 people around the city of Cebu.
“We realized that a lot of loss of lives and destruction of property could have been avoided if people knew about basic concepts related to disaster preparedness,” Francis Macatulad, one of the game’s developers, told AFP of its inception.
The Asia Society for Social Improvement and Sustainable Transformation (ASSIST), where Macatulad heads business development, first dreamt up the game in 2013, after Super Typhoon Haiyan ravaged the central Philippines and left thousands dead.
Launched six years later, Master of Disaster has been updated this year to address more events exacerbated by human-driven climate change, such as landslides, drought and heatwaves.
More than 10,000 editions of the game, aimed at players as young as nine years old, have been distributed across the archipelago nation.
“The youth are very essential in creating this disaster resiliency mindset,” Macatulad said.
‘Keeps on getting worse’
While the Philippines has introduced disaster readiness training into its K-12 curriculum, Master of Disaster is providing a jolt of innovation, Bianca Canlas of the Department of Science and Technology (DOST) told AFP.
“It’s important that it’s tactile, something that can be touched and can be seen by the eyes of the youth so they can have engagement with each other,” she said of the game.
Players roll a dice to move their pawns across the board, with each landing spot corresponding to cards containing questions or instructions to act out disaster-specific responses.
When a player is unable to fulfil a task, another can “save” them and receive a “hero token” — tallied at the end to determine a winner.
At least 27,500 deaths and economic losses of $35 billion have been attributed to extreme weather events in the past two decades, according to the 2026 Climate Risk Index.
“It just keeps on getting worse,” Canlas said, noting the lives lost in recent months.
The government is now determining if it will throw its weight behind the distribution of the game, with the sessions in Valenzuela City serving as a pilot to assess whether players find it engaging and informative.
While conceding the evidence was so far anecdotal, ASSIST’s Macatulad said he believed the game was bringing a “significant” improvement in its players’ disaster preparedness knowledge.
“Disaster is not picky. It affects from north to south. So we would like to expand this further,” Macatulad said, adding that poor communities “most vulnerable to the effects of climate change” were the priority.
“Disasters can happen to anyone,” Agasen, the teen, told AFP as the game broke up.
“As a young person, I can share the knowledge I’ve gained... with my classmates at school, with people at home, and those I’ll meet in the future.”
