MICKEY IN
THE NEWS:
Man takes JFK
death personal
Anger fueled 6 trips to Dallas, witness interviews
By John Luciew
Patriot-News
Like everyone else who lived through the tragedy 30 years ago today,
Michael "Mickey" Paoletta vividly remembers the day President
John F. Kennedy was shot and killed in Dallas.
Paoletta, a resident of Upper Allen Twp., was 17 years old
then and a junior at Sharon High School in western
Pennsylvania. He was sitting in English class on Nov.
22, 1963, when the school principal's voice came over
the public address system with the grim news.
The first president who had touched his imagination was dead.
"I was really proud of Kennedy," he said. "With Jackie and the
two kids, he was what America was all about."
First came the sadness, as he and the rest of America watched the somber
funeral proceedings unfold on television.
Later, anger set in. And then, questions: What really happened in Dallas
that day? Who was involved? Why? Where would the country be had Kennedy
lived?
Paoletta, a self-employed businessman, has spent much of the last 30
years searching for answers.
It started as a hobby and turned into a passion. He has purchased more
than 50 books on the assassination and has put in thousands of
hours reading and researching the shooting,
He has made six trips to Dallas, visiting all the landmarks made famous
by the killing of a president: the Texas School Book Depository, from
which the Warren Commission report says Lee Harvey Oswald fired the
fatal shots; the grassy knoll and Dealey Plaza, where Kennedy was killed;
and the Texas Theater, where Oswald was captured.
Paoletta has even searched out and interviewed witnesses to the assassination,
including Jean Hill, the nearest spectator when Kennedy was hit
by the fatal shot. She was the woman in the red coat who appears
in photographs of the assassination scene.
While getting that close to history was thrilling for Paoletta,
it also had its eerie moments.
"It felt strange," he said, recounting his first visit
to Dealey Plaza in 1971. "You could almost feel something
bad had happened there. You could almost sense it."
Three decades later, Paoletta still takes Kennedy's killing very
personally. He views it as a violation of his and every American's
constitutional rights. He says an elected president was deposed
by plotters in a coup d'etat.
As much as the Kennedy assassination signaled an end of the country's
innocence, it lifted Paoletta's own naivety. He calls the Warren
Commission Report, which says Oswald acted alone, a sham. He can't
believe he once believed it.
"I swallowed it hook, line and sinker," he said. "I
believed our government would never lie to us."
That changed when he started reading about the assassination a few
years after it took place.
"The more I read, the more I started to wonder, 'My God, what's going on?
It doesn't make any sense,' "he said.
Since then, Paoletta has sifted through dozens of theories about the
killing, including those involving the Mafia, the CIA, the FBI, Cuba,
and even Kennedy's vice president, Lyndon B. Johnson.
Paoletta also dwells on what might have been if Kennedy had lived and
won a second term. He feels strongly that the president would have
pulled out of Vietnam.
"The Vietnam War probably would not have happened beyond 1965," he
said.
That thought often eats at him. Perhaps, he surmises, Kennedy's death
also sealed the fate of his close friend and cousin, who was killed
in Vietnam in 1967.
Despite all his research, Paoletta realizes he may never know the answers
to the questions that nag at him. With each fact he uncovers, there
are more questions.
"It gets deeper and deeper and deeper," he said. "There's a lot
that has yet to be explored."
He plans to go on, clinging to one last ideal from those heady days
of Camelot.
"Everyone deserves to know the truth," Paoletta said.
"We have to know the truth. If everyone stands up and demands
the truth, then they have to tell us."