Updated: Friday, November 22 2013, 06:04 PM EST
Memories of 1963, come back to life for so many Americans today. 50 years ago, JFK was assassinated.
In Waynesville, at the place where those who pass rest in peace, one grave at Green Hill cemetery is a reminder of the turmoil.
“We have a little bit of the JFK assassination right here in our back yard,” says Steve Fogg of Panther Creek.
Bill Greer was a World War II veteran who eventually worked with the secret service. He’s the late Secret Service driver who was behind the wheel when JFK was shot and killed.
Greer retired and eventually moved to Waynesville. Glenn Stewart says he heard stories of Greer playing golf at the country club.
“And I was surprised to find out about that, that led to an interest in finding out where he’s buried here in Waynesville,” says Glenn Stewart of Balsam.
Glenn was told that Greer rarely spoke of the assassination.
“When it was brought up, he was close-mouthed,” Stewart recalls. “He didn’t want to cause controversy I’m sure. ”
News 13 spoke to JFK expert Vince Palamara via Skype about Greer.
“There’s a lot of people that believe he’s responsible indirectly for the assassination. If he hits the gas and obeys an order, history would have been different,” Palamara tells News 13. “He had a lot of guilt about what happened in Dallas.”
Greer died of cancer in 1985, but speculation and conspiracy theories live on. Theories that Palamara believes bothered the family.
“His son was forthcoming about his dad,” Palamara says. “Not thrilled about the notion out there that he had something to do with it. I could read between the lines, I could tell something bothered his father, judging by how defensive his son was about it.”
Five decades after that turbulent and tragic chapter, many replay the horror in their minds.
“And my thought is this is going to go on forever til the end of time,” Palamara predicts.
Today, many imagine what people like Bill Greer, took to the grave.
“I’m sure it haunted him,” Fogg says. “Being where he was, when he was.”
Vincent Palamara was born in Pittsburgh and graduated from Duquesne University with a degree in Sociology.
Although not even born when President John F. Kennedy was assassinated, Vince brings fresh eyes to an old case. In fact, Vince would go on to study the largely overlooked actions - and inactions - of the United States Secret Service in unprecedented detail, as well as achieving a world's record in the process, having interviewed and corresponded with over 80 former agents (the House Select Committee on Assassinations had the old record of 46 with a 6 million dollar budget and subpoena power from Congress), not to mention many surviving family members, White House aides, and even quite a few Parkland and Bethesda medical witnesses for a corresponding project. The result was Survivor's Guilt: The Secret Service & The Failure To Protect President Kennedy.
Vince is also the author of the books JFK: From Parkland To Bethesda, The Not-So-Secret Service, Who's Who in the Secret Service, and Honest Answers about the Murder of President John F. Kennedy: A New Look at the JFK Assassination.
All told, Vince has been favorably mentioned in over 140 JFK and Secret Service related books to date (including two whole chapters in Murder in Dealey Plaza, The Secret Service: The Hidden History Of An Enigmatic Agency by Philip Melanson, and the Final Report of the Assassination Records Review Board, among many others), often at length, in the bibliographies, and in the Secret Service - and even medical evidence - areas of these works.
Vince has appeared on the History Channel's THE MEN WHO KILLED KENNEDY (VHS and DVD), C-SPAN, Newsmax TV, A COUP IN CAMELOT (DVD/BLU RAY), KING KILL '63, THE MAN BEHIND THE SUIT (DVD), National Geographic's JFK: THE FINAL HOURS (including on DVD), PCN, BPTV, local cable access television, YouTube, radio, newspapers, print journals, at national conferences, and all over the internet. Also, Vince's original research materials, or copies of said materials, are stored in the National Archives (by request under Deed Of Gift by the ARRB), the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library, Harvard University, the Assassination Archives and Research Center, and the Dallas Public Library.
Vince Palamara has become known (as he was dubbed by the History Channel in 2003) "the Secret Service expert." As former JFK Secret Service agent Joe Paolella proclaimed: "You seem to know a lot about the Secret Service, maybe even more than I do!" Agent Dan Emmett calls Vince a Secret Service expert in his new book.
Vince Palamara 