Gary Mack, JFK assassination museum mastermind, dead at 68
Jul 15, 2015, 4:18 PM
DALLAS (AP) — Gary Mack, a former television news producer whose interest in the death of President John F. Kennedy helped launch a museum at the warehouse where Kennedy’s assassin opened fire, died Wednesday. He was 68.
Mack died after a prolonged illness, according to a statement issued by the Sixth Floor Museum at Dealey Plaza. The Dallas museum’s statement did not provide additional details about his death.
Mack was an announcer, camera operator and news producer for KXAS-TV in Fort Worth and Dallas from 1981 to 1993. Privately, he was a student of Kennedy’s assassination, developing a reputation as a leading expert.
Mack served as a consultant in planning “John F. Kennedy and the Memory of a Nation,” the exhibit that opened the Sixth Floor Museum in 1989. The museum is in the former Texas School Book Depository, and its sixth floor is the vantage point from which Lee Harvey Oswald shot at Kennedy as the president’s motorcade made its way through Dealey Plaza on Nov. 22, 1963.
Mack joined the museum staff in 1994 as an archivist and was named curator in 2000, becoming a name and face familiar to Kennedy history buffs. He also became the voice of the museum, providing the recorded narrations to exhibits and self-guided tours.
“I doubt if anybody anywhere knew more details about all aspects of the JFK assassination and aftermath than Gary,” author Hugh Aynesworth, a frequent writer on the assassination, told The Dallas Morning News.
Mack had long professed at least the suspicion that Oswald did not act alone in the assassination. Yet he was active in debunking many conspiracy theories, and even those confirmed in the belief that Oswald was a lone actor revered Mack’s expertise.
“He was always a remarkable source of information about the case and a wise guide who helped me avoid the many investigative pitfalls and black holes of JFK’s murder,” Gerald Posner, author of the book “Case Closed,” in which he concluded Oswald acted alone, told The Morning News.
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This story has been corrected to show Mack’s age was 68, not 69.
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