These are wonderful questions but one finds it difficult to answer so many at once.
Let me take on just this one:
What do you remember of JFK being assassinated? Who do you believe killed JFK? Was it just Lee Harvey Oswald or was there a bigger conspiracy going on?
Driving home from my graduate assistant teaching job in Philadelphia I heard the news of Kennedy's assassination. Basically, although the car I drove kept moving and I kept breathing, everything else stopped. And it didn't start again. No matter how one perceives JFK, he overall did bring hope and idealism following the blank Eisenhower years. All that hope, intelligence, ability with language and much more just stopped totally dead that Friday. Some of it has still not re-emerged.
It doesn't matter who exactly killed him but white Southern U.S. culture taught many to think they had the right to assassinate anyone who disagreed with their upbringing. Whether or not more than one person, a conspiracy, occurred almost doesn't matter. The conspiracy is allowing the racist culture of the time to prevail.
A bit on #8: Charles Kuralt's Sunday Morning program outdid all the news programs.
Hopefully you will receive many answers to your elergant questions.