I owned the rifle that shot JFK

Sydneysider: A personal journey

They say everyone of my generation remembers where they were when they heard US President John F Kennedy had been assassinated. I certainly do. I’d just turned 15 and I’d gone down to the corner store near Flemington Station to get an ice cream or something. When I arrived home, I walked into the back garden. Mum and dad were there and mum was weeping. I was shocked, and dad said that JFK had been assassinated and they were very worried it might lead to war.

A lot of ordinary folk all over the world had invested a lot of hope in JFK. In a world busting with so much promise, they were looking for a way out of the threat of catastrophic nuclear conflict.

Sensible people of my parents’ generation were horrified by the prospect of atomic bombs being exchanged between the West and a nation that had been a critical ally in the terrible conflict in which they’d so recently fought.

Both my parents had served in World War II. Politically, my mother was at heart an English conservative from the would-be landed gentry, although she’d been friendly with a young English poet who’d died fighting for the Republic in the Spanish Civil War. My father was an ALP-voting draughtsman. Their view about communism had been nuanced by their experience of the Depression and the war. They were acutely conscious that the war had fundamentally been won on the Russian-German front; that the rest was pretty much a sideshow. My father, who’d flown for the RAAF in Europe, spoke highly of the French Communist Party-led resistance group. None of the other French were worth much, he used to say. Both my parents said that they’d voted against Prime Minister Menzies’ Communist Party Dissolution Bill in the 1951 referendum.

In the couple of years before the Kennedy assassination, danger had been averted twice – firstly in April ‘61 when the US-backed right-wing Cuban exiles launched the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba with the aim of overthrowing the left-wing Castro government. Castro’s mob routed their CIA-trained opponents in spite of a lot of embedded US army officers and covert air and naval support. The invasion, and the stationing of US missiles in Italy and Turkey, led to the Soviet Union installing nuclear missiles in Cuba, which triggered, in October ‘62, the Cuban missile crisis. Disaster was warded off by a part-public, part-secret deal in which everybody backed down, but that deal sealed Kennedy’s fate as far as the CIA was concerned.

As a young teenager, I was preoccupied by the prospect of thermonuclear war. I remember illustrations in the papers showing the zones of destruction to be expected if a Russian A-Bomb fell on the CBD. In Strathfield we’d be in the second-worst affected ring of devastation and radiation. But what if the bomb, by accident or design, fell a bit further west? It was head-for-the-hills time. I assembled my own little survival kit which I kept in a tin box, carefully sealed with electricians’ tape.

The prevailing fear of what might happen during the Cuban crisis was wonderfully satirised in Bob Ellis’ semi-autobiographical 1992 film, The Nostradamus Kid, in which the Ellis character, played by Noah Taylor, is so spooked by imminent disaster that he gets his rich girlfriend to drive him up to the Blue Mountains, just in case.

So when JFK was assassinated on November 22, 1963, apparently by an ex-US Marine who’d apparently defected to the USSR and then apparently re-defected to the US, the fear was abroad that this might finally be the End of Civilization.

The world held its collective breath until the Warren Commission found that Lee Harvey Oswald was just a lone nut job.

I can’t recall ever wondering whether the official Warren Commission line on the killing was correct until one day in 1967 when my prospective father-in-law, Les Hando, gave me the rifle that shot JFK.

It was not, you understand, the actual Italian army Model 1891 6.5mm Mannlicher-Carcano that supposedly took the president’s life, but one of maybe three million similar rifles issued to Italian troops between 1891 and the end of World War II. Les had fought in the Australian army in North Africa and had smuggled it back as a souvenir.

Mine was the short-barrelled carbine model of the Mannlicher-Carcano issued to Italian artillery troops rather than the version supposedly wielded by Oswald, but in all other respects it was the same.

When I held the Mannlicher-Carcano in my hands and worked the bolt I was appalled. In the school cadets I’d been thoroughly trained on the British Lee-Enfield .303, a rugged, beautifully-built bolt action rifle of the same generation. By comparison, the Italian rifle really was a crude, even eccentric, piece of work that inspired no confidence. I felt, immediately, that nobody using it could have pulled off the feat of rapid firing and marksmanship attributed to Lee Harvey Oswald. Doubts set in and I gradually became aware of the new wave of research and critical scholarship surrounding the events of November 22, 1963.