The JFK assassination may never be solved completely. Too much time has passed and too many witnesses are dead. But there is also far too much evidence of a conspiracy to ever conclude decisively that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone in killing President Kennedy.

Thanks to the 50th anniversary of the assassination, which took place in Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963, there has been a resurgence of interest that has led to a spate of books and television shows re-examining the evidence against Oswald, a 24-year-old former Marine who had defected to Russia in 1959 and then returned to the United States with a Russian bride three years later.

The sheer volume of that evidence probably far surpasses the magnitude of any other investigation conducted on any other single event in human history. And the analysis that followed has probably only been eclipsed by studies on either the crucifixion or resurrection of Jesus Christ.

A tiny portion of that evidence and some related theories are described in the McClatchy-Tribune graphic that is linked at the bottom of this column, but that sampling of information represents a mere grain of sand against the ocean of evidence so far accumulated.

The daunting task of sorting through so much evidence means that all JFK assassination buffs such as myself share a certain brotherhood, no matter which side of the conspiracy divide you fall on. If you know what the Moorman photo is, what Dave Ferrie’s library card signifies, and who Silvia Odio met on Sept. 25, 1963, you probably have spent many a sleepless night poring over Warren Commission exhibits and CIA reports that were declassified years later.

Ultimately, however, it doesn’t seem to be the evidence that persuades most people whether or not to believe in a conspiracy, but rather their own predisposition. Vincent Bugliosi, the prosecutor who put Charles Manson in prison, recently produced a 1,600-plus page book that methodically sorts through the evidence and concludes that Lee Harvey Oswald was the lone assassin just as the Warren Commission declared in 1964.

But essentially what Bugliosi and other Warren Report supporters such as Bill O’Reilly do is prove that you can make a compelling case that Oswald acted alone. Where that argument falls apart, however, is when you consider the possibility that Oswald was telling the truth when he shouted to reporters on the night of the assassination, “I’m just a patsy.”

Notice that he did not say, “I am being framed,” which would imply that the police were building a false case against him, but rather that he was a “patsy,” someone who was being cultivated all along to look like the killer so that when the crime was committed there would be layers of evidence in place that would implicate him.

By looking at the evidence against Oswald through that lens — analyzing it from the point of view of whether it could have been created through manipulation as easily as through actual guilt — it rapidly becomes clear that certainty is impossible. Obviously, if Oswald were being set up as a patsy for “the crime of the century,” someone would have gone to a lot of trouble to make sure the evidence pointed toward him, so finding compelling indications of Oswald’s guilt would be expected under either scenario — killer or patsy.

Moreover, if Oswald were indeed a patsy, the evidence would not have to stand up to cross-examination in a court of law if the accused assassin were himself murdered quickly, as happened with Lee Oswald just two days after Kennedy was mowed down in Dealey Plaza.

I’m not going to try to review all that evidence here, just making the case for an open mind. Lots of the evidence against Lee Harvey Oswald makes perfect sense when viewed through the prism of a high-level conspiracy intended to cut down the president without drawing attention to the conspirators.

Who those conspirators might have been, I will leave to your imagination. But suffice it to say that E. Howard Hunt, the legendary Watergate burglar who was actively involved in the disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion as a CIA operative, made a deathbed confession of his role in the assassination and named the names of others involved. Remember that after the Bay of Pigs, Kennedy had pledged to “splinter the CIA into a thousand pieces,” and had earned the wrath of his spy agency as well as the Cuban exiles for what they saw as his betrayal of their cause. That’s certainly compelling evidence.

Other witnesses have also stepped forward to detail the involvement of Mafia bosses such as Carlos Marcello, Sam Giancana, and Johnny Rosselli, who also played a role in CIA assassination plots against Castro at the same time when JFK and his brother Bobby Kennedy were waging a war against the mobsters and their henchmen such as union boss Jimmy Hoffa. The connections of both Lee Harvey Oswald and his killer Jack Ruby to the Mafia make it impossible to dismiss mob involvement in the assassination as well.

These days, one theory that seems to be gaining credence is the unlikely possibility that Kennedy’s vice president and successor, Lyndon Baines Johnson, spearheaded the assassination partly out of pure cold-hearted love of power, partly as revenge for the way the Kennedys had diminished him from his days as Senate majority leader, and partly because he was facing indictment on a least two fronts from investigations into several of his Texas cronies.

While it is hard to contemplate either LBJ or the CIA actually taking part in such a Machiavellian scheme, there is plenty of evidence to indict both.

But perhaps the best justification for such a scenario comes not from any witness or police report, but from history and literature.

Go back 2,000 years to 44 B.C. when Julius Caesar was assassinated by his friends and colleagues in the Roman Senate, and you will discover that everything which seems impossible when said about John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson is a matter of record when applied to Julius Caesar and Marcus Junius Brutus.

Brutus and his co-conspirator Gaius Cassius Longinus led a conspiracy of Roman senators who called themselves “Liberators,” and started that liberation with the murder of their friend Julius Caesar.

Power does strange things to people. It did strange things to Caesar, who had perhaps grown arrogant thanks to his tremendous power and popularity, and it did strange things to Brutus and Cassius, who chafed at playing second fiddle to the great man.

Shakespeare had his theory of why Caesar was killed, and presented it in his “Tragedy of Julius Caesar,” but it was just one of many theories, which are still debated today. How much less certain are we about the Kennedy assassination, with its millions of pages of evidence, thousands of witnesses and motion-picture record in the form of the Zapruder film?

The only thing we can say for sure is that like the murder of Caesar, the death of JFK will still be the subject of debate 2,000 years from now.

Frank Miele is the managing editor of the Daily Inter Lake in Kalispell, Montana.