JFK 50 | narcissism

Reconsidering the Assassination of JFK – 60+ Years On

MRP - 9/29/24

In the history of the United States, there have been eight confirmed instances of direct attempts on the lives of sitting presidents - four successful and four failed. In all but one, the attack was made at close range with a handgun. In all but one, the identity of the attacker was never in doubt. In all but one, the favored suspect never tried to conceal or to deny guilt. The exception in all instances was the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in 1963.

INTRODUCTION

What follows is a brief description of my own journey with regard to the Kennedy assassination, followed by a quick overview the shooting itself which outlines a basic case for the existence of a conspiracy, and then a lengthy discussion of the context of the crime and of my current thinking as to what might have actually happened, and why, in Dallas on November 22, 1963.

My primary purpose in writing this is self-serving - it is principally an effort to organize my own thoughts on the subject. While I would be delighted if any of what follows convinces someone of the validity of my opinions, or even to begin reading up on the case themselves, it is not my main goal.

Nothing here is the result of original research. Rather, it represents an amalgam of what I consider to be the most salient work of others. It contains no notes. With few exceptions, I don’t reference other authors in the body of the piece and I don’t always take the time to provide a full recitation of precisely why I’ve come to one conclusion or another. However, at the conclusion I do include a list of what I consider the most important works on the crime as a general reference. These are the sources which have most prominently shaped my current views.

BACKGROUND

My Interest

As I entered college in 1986, the one thing I could tell you about the Kennedy assassination was that I had once watched an episode of ‘In Search Of’ in which Leonard Nimoy discussed how some witnesses claimed to have seen things which did not comport with the official story that Lee Harvey Oswald alone had killed the President. As a roughly 10-year-old kid, it sounded intriguing – alarming, even – but it was quickly forgotten and I went back to my baseball cards.

During my sophomore year, my friend John mentioned he was writing a paper on the event, and he said in passing that one of the autopsy doctors probed the President’s back wound with his little finger and could feel its end, meaning the bullet could not have gone all the way through and on into Governor Connally as the official history requires. That really piqued my interest, and I decided to head to the university's library to see what could be had on the assassination.

Within weeks I had read through all the books they had on the subject. Luckily for me, we were coming up on the 25th anniversary of the killing and a spate of new books was hitting store shelves, so those were my next stops. Within a short number of months, I had read more books on the assassination than I had probably read in total in my life to that point. In those days, I wasn’t very discriminating in what I chose to read on the subject. In addition to what were by then the standards – including Reasonable Doubt by Henry Hurt, Conspiracy by Anthony Summers, Whitewash by Harold Weisberg, etc. – I also consumed some of the more dubious works on the crime. I tore into books like Weberman and Canfield’s Coup d’Etat in America, which identified the infamous tramps arrested near Dealey Plaza as none other than Watergate conspirators Howard Hunt and Frank Sturgis (Hunt and Sturgis warrant close examination in connection with the event, but they certainly weren’t the tramps) and Robert Morrow’s Betrayal, in which the author claims to have been a CIA officer with knowledge of the assassination, and to have purchased the Mannlicher-Carcano rifle allegedly used in the crime. No matter how outlandish the book was, I had to read it.

In covering the anniversary in 1988, the media’s attention flew from one angle to the next – the mafia, the Cubans, the CIA and so forth – but they never abandoned their essential boosterism of the official story.

Media Misconduct

Since 1963 the media has displayed a casual dismissiveness of testimony which tended to undermine the lone-gunman conclusion of the Warren Commission, and has misrepresented facts in order to bolster it. Two examples spring to mind.

In the immediate wake of the killing, long before the Commission weighed in on the matter, there was much public discussion of the fact that the doctors at Parkland Hospital found what was uniformly identified as a wound of entry at the base of the President’s throat. This didn’t jive with the story, already taking root, that the President had been shot by a single culprit firing from the rear. Where’d that frontal throat wound come from?

In their December 3, 1963 edition, the publishers of LIFE magazine sought to ease the public’s confusion. At this time, the film made by Abraham Zapruder of the murder was still in the custody of Time-Life and it was probably assumed it would never be shown publicly.

In order to explain the incongruity presented by a rearward shooter and a frontal wound, Life explained that the film showed the President turning far to his right to wave at the crowd – far enough to expose the front of his throat to the sniper’s alleged location.

Well, this was simply a bald-faced lie. The Zapruder film shows nothing of the kind. The President sat facing forward throughout the whole shooting. Did the author of the piece actually watch the film? Was he told the film showed this movement? We don’t know the origin of this lie, but Time-Life has never addressed it.

At the time of the 25th anniversary, I watched a somber episode of ‘NOVA’ narrated by Walter Cronkite, which purported to lay bare all the lies put forth through the years by even the most thoughtful critics. In one memorable scene, Cronkite narrated the story of Darrell Tomlinson, the Parkland Hospital orderly who discovered what became known as the “magic bullet” lying on a gurney in a hallway in the hospital. Tomlinson always insisted that he found the slug on a gurney having nothing to do with either President Kennedy or Texas Governor John Connally, from whom the bullet allegedly exited. Now, if the bullet were found in a place not connected to the shooting, it would greatly undermine the narrative that it played a key role in the crime. In his classic voice, and with great authority, Cronkite explained away this inconsistency by noting “[the Warren Commission] concluded [Tomlinson] was mistaken”. They did, and Walter Cronkite was apparently OK with it (recent claims by retired Secret Service agency Paul Landis that he discovered the slug on the top of the back seat of the President's car would, if true, destroy the "magic bullet" theory outright).

Media reaction to the JFK killing since 1963 has ranged from such bald-faced lies to such simple, condescending dismissals. Why? I think it probably has something to do with the fact that the media went hard into the tank for the official story from the beginning. There is a long history in the U.S. of certain media companies and some specific reporters enjoying close, even improper relationships with government officials and this was certainly true in 1963. They would sometimes craft their narratives in such a manner so as to suit the aims of these friends. In doing so, I think they almost always sincerely believed they were acting in the national interest (more on this in the closing section of this paper). If it were shown today that the official story was not true it would be an indictment of the institution of the media and of how they conducted themselves then and over the course of intervening years.

So, the 25th anniversary came and went.

Then, in rapid succession, came Oliver Stone and Gerald Posner.

Heavyweights

In 1991 director Oliver Stone set his sights on the assassination in his film 'JFK'. While the film was a very good piece of cinema, its treatment of the assassination, in my opinion, was something else. Stone condensed 28 years of research, theories and speculation into a 2 ½ hour movie. In so doing, he mixed the serious with the spurious and produced a fever swamp of paranoia. His naked hero worship of Kennedy, and his casting of him in the martyr’s role, betrayed a personal bias which often undermined the film’s narrative.

While many film critics admired 'JFK' as cinema, many reviews of the film’s content by the public intelligentsia were quite hostile. It was savaged by the general media, political figures and other commentators. Stone was accused of distorting history, of teaching falsehoods to the impressionable, of besmirching the reputations of individuals and institutions. He was described as reckless and careless, more interested in his own ego than in history. There was a palpable anger towards this film that to this day I have never seen with regard to any other movie. Stone’s hijacking of history, it seemed, cried out for revenge. Enter Gerald Posner.

When Case Closed, Gerald Posner’s book about the assassination, debuted in 1994 it was the media’s dream come true – here was a glossy, good-looking, seemingly well-argued tome which, according to its audacious title, purported to settle the matter of the Kennedy assassination for all time. Posner’s position was that Oswald, acting alone, had murdered JFK. Case Closed became a finalist for the 1994 Pulitzer Prize in History, was the subject of a double issue of U.S. News and World Report, and was featured on news programs like ‘20/20’, ‘CBS News Special Reports’, and ‘Frontline’. This is what the establishment needed – a cathartic, nearly orgasmic celebration of ‘the truth’. I remember catching an interview with Posner on, I believe, ‘The Today Show’ shortly after the book’s release. Posner was asked whether he was worried that people might accuse him of just trying to grab 15 minutes of fame and a few bucks with his book. Posner, in a moment of either extreme naïveté or reckless untruthfulness, responded by saying that had he really wanted to make some money or garner attention, he would have written a book claiming to have solved the case in favor of conspiracy. Well, that’s nice. However, even Posner had to have known that what the media was looking for in the wake of 'JFK', and what they would reward with their uncritical praise, was a seemingly serious work pinning the blame right back on Oswald where they had placed it three decades earlier. His ticket to fame and fortune was, as he surely knew, such a book which respectable journalists and the establishment could embrace. Those other kinds of books he spoke about, from the serious to the farcical, never garnered any appreciable attention or financial reward for their authors.

I read Posner’s book. At least, I tried to. I made it perhaps half-way through but stopped when I realized that most of what I’d read was merely a dissertation on how Oswald was the precise sort of odd, flawed character we could all feel comfortable blaming for this horrific event. That’s all well and good. Maybe he was even the Devil himself. But, unless Posner could put him in the 6th floor window of the southeast corner of the Texas School Book Depository at precisely 12:30 PM on November 22nd, 1963, none of that mattered. I believed then and know now that neither Posner nor any anyone else could credibly do so.

Interregnum

After muddling through half or so of Posner’s book, I quickly picked up John Newman’s 1995 book, Oswald and the CIA. Newman was a professor at the University of Maryland, an ex-U.S. Army officer and former National Security Agency executive. His book was based solely upon CIA records pertaining to Oswald’s activities from the time he defected to the Soviet Union in 1959 through the assassination. He pointed out inconsistencies, strange coincidences and inexplicable omissions in these records. The topic was fascinating, but its very nature made for difficult reading. Finally, after making it perhaps half-way through, I put the book down out of sheer frustration with the arcane language of CIA record keeping.

Then, I put the assassination away for a while.

Over the years, I began to wonder whether I could have been mistaken in my conviction that there had been a conspiracy behind the assassination.

I decided to use the 50th anniversary of the crime in 2013 as an opportunity to begin a reexamination of the case – and to see whether, perhaps, I had been too quick to dismiss the lone gunman scenario.

Reconsideration

When I decided to look at the assassination again, I first needed to decide which sources to use. I knew I wanted to go back to Newman’s Oswald and the CIA, which had been updated since I first abandoned it almost 20 years before. Beyond that, I scanned the book stores and Amazon to look through the various titles available. I was far more selective in my choices than I had been in earlier years, and after several weeks of looking, I settled on some promising-looking titles and got to reading.

After digesting a good number of books, and after reviewing other general information from a variety of sources, many of which contained older information only recently declassified and released, I came to what seemed to me the inescapable conclusion that Kennedy’s death had been the result of a conspiracy.

Of greatest importance as I came to this realization was information made available because of the work of the Assassination Records Review Board. The ARRB was created in the wake of public indignation after Stone’s film made it clear the government still possessed mountains of classified materials pertinent to the case which it was withholding. Over the 20 or so years from about 1995 to 2015, thousands of pages of classified information were declassified and made available to the public. As a result, we know so much more now about the government’s relationship with Lee Harvey Oswald prior to the assassination, its actions before and following the crime, and its conduct with regard to the case ever since. Most important for my own thinking was the revelation of the existence of Operation Northwoods, which I discuss later and which, I think, is critical to understanding what occurred in Dallas.

Over the next decade, I continued to read, to think and to play out various scenarios over and over in my mind. What follows is my best explanation for what actually happened, how it happened, and why.

THE CASE FOR CONSPIRACY

Why even entertain the notion of a conspiracy if Oswald’s role as a lone gunman is plausibly supported by the evidence? I think many people hit that wall when confronting the case and go no farther, but this gets it wrong.

Simply put, there is no evidence that Oswald killed the President.

If he had, it seems highly likely there would be some evidence, somewhere, of it. And after more than 60 years, surely at least a greater certainty would have coalesced around this conclusion, rendering it stronger with the passage of time. But this has not happened. The basis for believing in Oswald’s guilt, such as it is, remains completely unchanged from the day the Warren Report was published in 1964. However, the cause to believe there is a much larger truth to be found has grown with every item of new information which has come out.

Since 1964, all we’ve seen emerge are new details which expand the universe of likely scenarios and suspects and which draw our attention further and further away from the official version of events.

Oswald’s Means

Oswald allegedly owned a rifle and a pistol – if so, he had the means to kill the President. However, based upon this logic, I would estimate that more than 80% of the residents of the greater Dallas-Ft. Worth area also had such means. So, we need to look closely at his potential motives and opportunity.

Oswald’s Motive

Even if Oswald had indeed been a committed Marxist, a trait often used to support the case for his guilt, how many other thousands of persons in the United States at that same time could have been described in a similar manner? Whether, and to what extent, Oswald was ‘anti-American’ tells us nothing as to whether he had any desire to murder the President. What was it that prompted this particular young man to take that specific step against Kennedy? What was his motive to commit this crime? Despite the work of Posner and others to paint Oswald as anti-social, hateful of capitalism and desirous of making himself into a “great” man, no reason has yet been articulated as to why he would have chosen to act out in this way. Some have used his alleged shooting attack on a noted right-wing ex-military officer and alleged incidents of domestic abuse to establish a propensity for violence in Oswald’s make-up. However, even a propensity for violence, if it existed, does not amount to motive. Further, if the descriptions of Oswald as an avowed Marxist, hateful of the capitalist system, and looking for a way to make himself seem “heroic” are true, why his subsequent denials? The history of actual and attempted assassinations, here and abroad, tend to show that culprits generally are proud of their actions and wish to take credit for them. Not so here. From the outset following his arrest, all he did was to deny involvement and claim he was “just a patsy”.

In short, there is no known reason to believe Oswald wanted to kill Kennedy - we don’t even know of any disparaging remarks he ever made against him (some contemporaries reported that he actually liked the President, and enjoyed reading Profiles in Courage). Be all this as it may, because one can never predict the actions of another, we must also consider whether he had the opportunity to commit the crime.

Oswald’s Opportunity

The question of his opportunity goes beyond whether he worked in a building along the motorcade route (he did) and whether he had had access to the alleged ‘sniper’s nest’ from which the shots were allegedly fired (he did). The question about opportunity is a question about whether Oswald, from what we know of his movements, could have been in a position to take the shots from the southeast corner window of the TSBD at 12:30 PM on November 22, 1963.

Assuming Oswald truly was planning on shooting at the President that day, it only makes sense that he would have carefully planned his movements to ensure he would not miss his chance for such a grand, historical gesture.

The President’s motorcade was scheduled to pass the TSBD at about 12:25. Along its route from Love Field, it picked up a delay of about 5 minutes, meaning it actually passed the TSBD at 12:30. As late as about 12:15, witnesses place Oswald on the first floor of the building (there is even reason to speculate he might have been watching the motorcade pass from the building’s front steps). As late as about 12:25, by which time an assassin would have anticipated the arrival of the motorcade, a TSBD employee finished his lunch near the southeast corner of the 6th floor, and departed to join co-workers who were watching the motorcade from windows on the 5th floor. It is important to note that the 6th floor was an open space, marked by support columns and boxes of books stacked in relatively orderly rows. A person moving across the space would likely have been visible to any other person on the floor. This employee saw no sign of Oswald or of anyone else as he made his way down.

Immediately after the shots had ended in Dealey Plaza, Dallas motorcycle patrolman Marion Baker hopped off his bike, entered the TSBD, and began moving through the building, guided by its superintendent, Roy Truly. Baker and Truly encountered a relaxed Oswald in a second-floor lunch area, drinking a Coke. Each reported Oswald appeared calm and un-phased. Truly verified that Oswald worked in the building, and he and Baker moved on. Could Oswald have made it from the assassin’s window to the location where Baker and Truly confronted him in as little as 90 seconds? Reenactments have shown it is possible. But is it likely?

When the assassination occurred, both service elevators with access to the 6th floor were stopped on a lower level. Therefore, Oswald’s only route downstairs would be the staircase located in the opposite (northwest) corner of the building. Following the final shot, he would have had to head in that direction, hide his rifle where it was found by police during their search (it was hidden, not dropped), and proceed to the stairs. He would need to descend at a rapid rate, exit on the second floor, and enter the lunch room to be seen there by Baker and Truly.

Barry Ernest’s The Girl on the Stairs, tells the story of the author’s decades-long quest to locate an employee of the TSBD who would have been in a prime position to see Oswald as he hurried down the steps, yet told the Warren Commission she saw no one. Elizabeth Adams was herself descending these back stairs from the 4th floor within a minute of the final shots ringing out. Her testimony, which has been consistent since 1963, places her in a position where she would have been expected to encounter anyone coming down the stairs from the 6th floor in the moments immediately following the assassination. Yet she saw no one. The wooden stairs’ old and rickety condition had the effect of amplifying the noise of anyone going up or down. Yet Adams didn’t hear anyone’s footfalls save her own.

Moreover, the stair case was not fully self-contained – at each landing one had to enter the floor through a doorway leading from the stairs, round a corner and reenter the staircase through another doorway. It was not possible to use the stairs without being seen by someone working or moving about on a given floor in that area.

The bottom line is that there is no physical evidence or witness testimony which suggests that Oswald was anywhere near the 6th floor at the time of the shooting. There is witness testimony which would indicate he very likely was not on the 6th floor at all during the critical minutes around 12:30. In other words, it is doubtful Oswald had the opportunity to kill the President. I believe he never left the area of the first and second floors during this time, and hence that he couldn’t have taken the shots credited to him by the Warren Commission.

Before moving on to address the Zapruder film, there are two aspects of the shooting as it relates to the TSBD which are worth noting:

As shown in the movie 'JFK', any assassin in the corner window overlooking Dealey Plaza should have chosen to shoot straight out along Houston Street – after turning from Main and before turning onto Elm, the President’s car drove slowly for a full city block directly at the window. A gunman would have been able to aim carefully at a target moving slowly straight at him. A missed first shot could be compensated for because the car would have been closer when a second shot was attempted. Why wait until the car made a hairpin turn onto Elm? This was the end of the motorcade route and after making the turn, the car would begin to move away from a gunman in the window and begin accelerating to merge onto the Stemmons Freeway. Furthermore, after making the turn an assassin's view of the car would have been obscured behind the branched of an oak tree. 'JFK' suggested the purpose of waiting was to ensure the President was caught in a cross-fire between 2 or 3 gunmen. There is merit to this idea.

Three shell casings were discovered grouped on the floor by the window. Why three? The Warren Commission concluded that Oswald took three shots. Let’s walk through them – BANG (cycle the bolt, eject the first cartridge)…BANG (cycle the bolt, eject the second cartridge)…BANG. In a lone assassin scenario, at this point the gunman would have seen the President’s head explode in his scope, eliminating any need for a fourth shot. However, the shooter apparently cycled the bolt again, ejecting the third cartridge. Furthermore, the fact that all three were lying close together suggests it was ejected from roughly the same position the shooter was in for the first two shots. That a shooter would have taken the time to do this, when his mind surely would have immediately turned to escape after he knew he had scored a kill shot is odd.

The Zapruder Film

The single bullet theory was created because the Warren Commission had 3 alleged shots from Oswald's rifle to work with, but one definitely struck a curbstone near bystander James Tague, causing bits of bullet and/or concrete to graze his cheek. With that, they were down to 2 shots to explain all of Kennedy's and Connolly's wounds. The most important thing to understand about the theory, then, is that it wasn’t created as a logical conclusion after all the evidence was reviewed. It was created solely because the Commission needed to explain how 2 bullets could have done all the bodily harm done that day. And yes – as is mentioned in 'JFK, it was invented by a Warren Commission junior counsel by the name of Arlen Spector, who would go on to serve Pennsylvania in the U.S. Senate for many years.

As it happened, there were several persons in Dealey Plaza recording home movies that day, but none produced as complete a record of the assassination as did Abraham Zapruder. Had he not decided to use his Bell and Howell 8mm motion picture camera that day, it is very likely that the Warren Commission’s conclusions would have convinced many more people than they did. The Zapruder film is something the assassins never counted on.

The official line is that one shot from Oswald’s rifle missed and hit a curb stone, slightly injuring James Tague. Then, a second bullet from Oswald’s rifle passed through Kennedy’s neck, and proceeded to cause the Governor’s wounds. Finally, a third bullet struck the President in the rear of the head causing the fatal wound. However, the Zapruder film shows that the single bullet theory is false, and that the President was hit by at least two bullets from the front.

As the President’s car emerges from behind a street sign, he is obviously in distress. His arms, bent in at the elbows, are elevated parallel to his shoulders, and his hands appear to be clutching at his throat. At this moment, the Governor shows no signs of distress. The President, by then, had to have been struck one or two seconds before, but Governor Connally is still appears to be unhit. Within a second after the President emerges from behind the sign, Connally’s right shoulder drops sharply and he turns to his right. The Warren Commission claimed that this represents the Governor's delayed reaction to being hit by the bullet which had just passed through the President. I find two issues with this conclusion. The first is that immediately after making this motion, Connolly turns full in his seat to stare back at the President for a moment looking, again, unhit. If he in fact was still unhit, then he wasn't struck by the same bullet as the President. The second is the idea of a delayed reaction. In a pitched combat situation, where adrenaline is pumping, a person can indeed have a such a delayed reaction to getting shot. Conversely, in a more sedate moment, a person could display a delayed reaction if shot through a fleshy part of the body where little kinetic energy is transferred from the bullet to the individual. Let’s look at what happened to the Governor.

A bullet entered Governor Connally’s back, below the right shoulder blade, just by his armpit. It transited his chest, penetrating his lung, and smashed into his right fifth rib. A combination of bullet and bone fragments exited the Governor’s chest in the area of his right nipple, leaving a sucking chest wound 5cm in diameter. The Governor was also struck in his right wrist. The thick part at the base of his radius bone was shattered into several pieces. Bullet fragments also embedded in his thigh. The Governor’s wounds were life-threatening, and painful in the extreme. Even if, mentally, he was somehow able to display a delayed reaction, the sheer physical force of the bullet’s impact would have moved his body beyond his ability to control. There is no way that he could remain sitting upright, displaying no sign of discomfort when, in order for there to have been a single assassin, he had to have already been so grievously wounded.

Many people have tried to pinpoint precisely when the Governor is hit by looking at the film. Some point to what looks like the Governor’s cheeks puffing out as air is forced from his lung when it is punctured by the bullet; some claim to see a frame of the film in which it appears the Governor’s right lapel is briefly lifted off his suit coat, indicative, they say, of the bullet passing through. I watched the film an uncounted number of times over the years, trying mightily to determine when the Governor is hit. I had no real answer to that question. But, when viewing the film again recently when writing this, I began to notice something. After the Governor looked backward at the President, he began to turn back towards the front. He made it perhaps half-way, when his wife began to pull him into her lap. As he leans into her (to his left), his back is exposed to a rearward shot, and he is suddenly and forcibly thrust forward and onto his stomach. At this moment, the film clearly shows a spreading red stain on the back of his suit coat. I believe the Governor received his wounds very late in the shooting, when his body is forced forward and down. This is his only movement in the film which is suggestive of the kind of body-blow he must have received from the bullet that struck his back.

As to the President’s head wound, I believe there were two head shots in rapid succession, one from the rear, one from the front. When the President’s head is first hit, it is pushed slightly down and to the front. As it does so, a large flap of bone and scalp peels off on the right side of this head, over the right ear, and flops open like a door forward. This was accompanied by a forward ejection of cranial material which reached as far as the car’s hood. A split second later, the President’s entire upper body is driven dramatically and forcibly to the left and the rear. At this moment, you can see his head deform briefly – it seems to elongate slightly, almost like a football, as force is transmitted from front to rear and as multiple fractures extend through his skull giving it a grim elasticity. There was an explosive expulsion of bone and brain matter rearward. The motorcycle police officers riding just off the left rear quarter of his car were hit violently by debris from the President’s wound; so violently in fact that one of them thought he himself had been hit by a bullet. Clint Hill, the secret service agent who iconically scrambled onto the rear deck of the President’s car, found blood, bone and tissue on his suit, his face and in his hair when he got to Parkland Hospital. The only cause for this rearward explosion of matter could be a frontal head shot. Some have suggested the President’s sudden rearward movement was due to William Greer, the driver of the car, suddenly hitting the gas. However, none of the car’s other occupants display such a reaction. In fact, Greer did not finally accelerate until after the head shots, when Hill was beginning to climb onto the rear deck of the car. The Zapruder film and another home-movie taken that day show Hill’s legs scrambling to keep up with the sudden increase in speed.

Conspiracy

The lack of any reasonable motive or opportunity for the alleged assassin and the presence of at least one frontal shot makes it plain that there is a strong case for conspiracy.

Other topics – the murder of Dallas Police Officer J.D. Tippit, Jack Ruby’s murder of Oswald, and so forth – are certainly important and worthy of analysis in their own right, but are irrelevant to the immediate point of the shooting that took place in Dealey Plaza and therefore to the question of whether the President was killed as the result of a conspiracy.

Once a case for conspiracy is established, the questions of who carried it out and why follow naturally. After considering them for a long time, decades in fact, I’ve come to a point where I am finally able to articulate what I hope are cogent answers to those questions.

UNCHECKED POWER

Throughout the 1950s, the Central Intelligence Agency acted as this country’s de facto foreign policy, covert action and paramilitary agency. Unlike the CIA of today, it enjoyed near complete autonomy to carry out any particular activities which its leadership thought aided U.S. interests around the globe. Its actions were a reflection of the world views of the men who presided over it, none more than those of Allen Dulles, the agency’s director from 1953 through late 1961. The paternalistic Dulles was the very image of American eastern patrician elites. With his brother John Foster Dulles ensconced as Secretary of State for much of this period, American foreign policy and covert intelligence activities were carried out through the prism of their notions of what was best for the U.S. They were aided in this by men, often of similar backgrounds, for whom the CIA at this point was less a Federal agency than a gentlemen’s club whose chessboard was the world - James Angleton, Cord Meyer, Richard Bissell, William Colby, Dick Helms, Frank Wisner and Tom Karamessines were only a few. They were able to play their games because a largely compliant Executive and congress offered little in the way of meaningful direction or oversight, and a servile media provided only minimal public accountability.

For more than a decade, Dulles and this clique ruled the CIA.

Under Dulles, the CIA focused its activities on fighting the spread of international communism, wherever they saw or imagined it, and on protecting the financial interests of some of America’s largest, most influential businesses overseas. For Dulles and his associates, it was not sufficient that foreign governments remain non-aligned (that is, allied neither with America and the West or with the Soviet Union and the communist world). In order to stay in their good graces, all fealty had to be clearly to the United States.

Very quickly, the Agency found itself an actor on the world stage in pursuit of these goals:

In 1953, in support of our British allies, the CIA orchestrated a coup which overthrew Iran’s popular Prime Minister, Mohammed Mossadegh. Mossadegh’s greatest offense was that he was seeking to nationalize Iran’s petroleum industry, threatening the profits of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company – today’s BP. CIA-trained operatives waged a propaganda war from inside Iran and incited violence against the government. Rioting in the country began, and eventually forces supportive of Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlevi defeated those defending the Mossadegh. The Shah was given rule, oil profits were protected, and the CIA used its media influence in the United States and elsewhere to color the event as a home-grown revolt by citizens against a communist-leaning regime. The revolution of 1979 and the issues the U.S. has had with Iran down to the present day are traceable to this action.

In 1954, the CIA created a coup against democratically-elected Guatemalan President Jacobo Arbenz. Arbenz was instituting land reforms which included nationalization of the county’s fruit fields. United Fruit, an American company which owned 400,000 acres in Guatemala, was particularly threatened. The coup against Arbenz was a bloody affair, and its conclusion inaugurated decades of brutal military dictatorship in the country, albeit under a government friendly to the United States and our financial interests.

In 1958, Indonesian rebels opposed to the communist-leaning Sukarno government received arms, funding and other covert aid from the CIA to assist them in their revolution. That all stopped when a CIA pilot was shot down over the country (shades of Eugene Hasenfus 28 years later). Thereafter CIA involvement ended, and President Kennedy later invited Sukarno to Washington and provided Indonesia with billions of dollars in civilian and military aid as recompense.

In January of 1961, the CIA facilitated the murder of Patrice Lumumba, first elected president of the newly-independent nation of the Congo, after the left-leaning Lumumba requested assistance from the USSR in suppressing anti-government, secessionist activities brought about because of his policies which dis-favored the interests of Western powers.

Under Dulles’ leadership, the CIA developed both an appetite and the skills needed for covert operations designed to overthrow governments, incite insurrections and assassinate foreign leaders. Where the interests of the United States were concerned (however defined by the ruling elite at the Agency), no sin was too grave. In fact, no sin was a sin at all.

When, in 1959, the regime of Fulgencio Batista in Havana fell to a revolution led by Fidel Castro, the stage was set for a series of events which culminated at a three-street confluence in Dallas known as Dealey Plaza on November 22, 1963.

Cuba

Castro’s seizure of power, his subsequent embrace of communism and the Soviet Union and his ejection of American business and gambling interests from Cuba, threw the CIA into overdrive. It is hard, today, to comprehend the level of obsession, paranoia and sheer opportunistic adventurism which Castro’s Cuba created in America’s halls of power.

Under the Eisenhower administration, the Agency developed plans for what would become known as the Bay of Pigs Invasion. When he was briefed on the pending action, President-Elect Kennedy gave his consent to continue planning. To carry out the beach landings, the CIA recruited and trained hundreds of mercenaries, mostly Cubans whose families had been forced to flee after Castro’s take-over. They trained these people in Panama, Guatemala and in Florida. E. Howard Hunt, later of Watergate fame, was a key organizer of this effort in Florida.

Launched on April 16, 1961, the invasion failed miserably due to a host of missteps, miscalculations and misassumptions on the part of the CIA. For his part, Kennedy refused to provide overt American air cover to the men on the beaches. To his mind, as long as the invasion could be defended as an action undertaken by Cuban exiles, that was one thing. Open use of American military power would have been quite another. The CIA carried forth with the operation believing, as Dulles later wrote, that when push came to shove Kennedy would be forced to provide the air cover lest the mission fail.

The CIA, and in particular their army of invaders, believed they had been betrayed by Kennedy, a feeling which was specifically and intentionally stoked by Richard Bissell, the senior Agency official who played a leading role in the planning the operation. For the invaders, it was a personal thing. His actions, they felt, led to the imprisonment, torture and deaths of many of their comrades. For the leadership of the CIA, they felt the young and naïve President did not possess the belly for confronting America’s enemies.

Kennedy believed he had been deceived by CIA leadership. He had been led to believe the invasion would be a cake-walk – successful beach landings followed by a rapturous uprising in support of Castro’s overthrow by the oppressed masses living on the island.

In his anger at the Agency, Kennedy fired Dulles, Bissell and deputy director General Charles Cabell late in 1961. In the wake of the firings, Cabell is alleged to have openly called Kennedy a traitor to the United States.

In parallel with the fall-out over the failed invasion, the USSR had escalated its actions in Berlin, culminating with the division of the city by the Berlin Wall in November of 1961. Kennedy was excoriated by many for his failure to prevent the Soviets from taking this action. To some, it demonstrated another failure on his part to defend the world from the encroaching threat of international communism.

In the wake of the failure of the Bay of Pigs Invasion, the Kennedy Administration authorized the CIA to initiate Operation Mongoose. Mongoose would be a wide-ranging endeavor to develop ways to weaken or topple the Castro regime through propaganda, sabotage, and assassination attempts on Castro himself. Many of the survivors of the Bay of Pigs participated in Mongoose. Training was carried out by the CIA and affiliated parties in the bayous around New Orleans and the everglades in southern Florida. As part of the program, the CIA made active use of the abilities of American mafiosi such as John Roselli (an acquaintance of Jack Ruby), who were desperate to re-establish their lucrative gambling endeavors.

Around the same time, General Lyman Lemnitzer, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, sought approval from the administration for Operation Northwoods. Northwoods’ existence was only declassified in 1997, and it is one of the more stunning proposals to come out of this era. Northwoods aimed to create justification for American military action against Cuba by blaming Cuba for terrorist acts. Among the plan’s proposals: false-flag attacks at the U.S. Naval base at Guantanamo Bay; the destruction of a U.S. ship with the blame placed on Cuba (specifically referenced as a “remember the Maine” type of action); sinking rafts of Cuban refugees headed for the U.S.; fostering attempts on the lives of Cuban refugees already in the United States, “even to the extent of wounding”; harassment of U.S. civilian air traffic by “MIG or MIG-type aircraft” flown by American pilots, and faking the shoot-down of a chartered U.S. civilian flight. The administration declined this proposal in early 1962, and Lemnitzer was denied another term as Chairman.

In October of 1962, it became known that the Soviet Union had undertaken to place offensive nuclear weapons in Cuba. What transpired thereafter has become known by history as the Cuban Missile Crisis. At its height, there was a showdown between Soviet and U.S. Naval forces in the Atlantic as the U.S. attempted to keep Soviet missile supplies from reaching Cuba. The world came quite close to nuclear war. In the end, the Soviets backed down. Kennedy agreed to remove some obsolete missiles from Turkey, and made a qualified pledged not to to invade Cuba.

In response to the peaceful resolution of the crisis, some in the CIA at the operational level, and their well-trained assets in Florida and Louisiana, saw yet another example of personal betrayal and national dishonor in Kennedy’s actions. General Curtis Lemay, Air Force Chief of Staff, had desperately wanted to use the Crisis as a pretext for bombing Cuba. He believed the U.S. was capable of winning the nuclear war with the Soviet Union which such an action might provoke, and he termed Kennedy’s solution to the Crisis “the greatest defeat in our history”.

As bad as these moves were, it is likely a line was crossed in the eyes of some in the summer of 1963 when efforts to establish back-channel communications between the White House and Havana for the purpose of attempting to find a way for the two governments to peacefully co-exist began. They were undertaken in secrecy, but they entailed telephone calls between intermediaries in each country. All U.S.-based calls to Cuba were monitored by the NSA at the time, so it is highly probable that senior U.S. intelligence officials learned of the plans.

Whether Kennedy was right or wrong in any of these decisions he took isn’t relevant. What matters is that with each move, certain parties – the same parties – were personally, professionally and patriotically aggrieved.

In any other country, the suggestion that this set of events could have led to an internal coup would be taken as a matter of course. Within the U.S., that very thought is so foreign to our way of thinking that it is dismissed out of hand more often than not as a paranoid fantasy. But, men who controlled much of the country’s military and intelligence power loathed the President, and truly feared that the course he was taking, whether due to malevolence or incompetence, would be the ruination of the country. What’s more, they likely foresaw his re-election in 1964. In such a situation, men like these could have considered it their patriotic duty, however unpalatable, to do something about it.

THE CRIME

Beginning with the failure at the Bay of Pigs, continuing through the peaceful conclusion of the missile crisis, and culminating in his plans to try to normalize relations between the U.S. and Castro’s government, resentment and fear built among many in the intelligence and military communities as to President Kennedy’s intentions with regard to communism in general and Castro in particular. Men trained by the CIA to reclaim their homeland had seen their comrades betrayed and killed, and had reason, in their minds, to lay the blame at the feet of the President.

By 1963, there existed an increasingly frustrated group of intelligence operatives who had seen promises they’d made to their assets broken by their commander-in-chief. In the Bayous and in south Florida, there were hundreds of CIA-trained and -equipped soldiers and adventurers with no battles to fight, but with a clear idea of who their enemy was.

Though officially separated from the CIA since 1961, Allen Dulles continued to offer counsel to his former colleagues and others from his Georgetown home as if he had never left. Surely, he possessed more influence over the Agency in absentia than John McCone, who had replaced him, possessed as the nominal Director.

I believe that Dulles or someone who inhabited his world (Lemnitzer? LeMay? Bissell?) felt pressed by current events to develop the most daring episode of the Cold War yet – a Northwoods-like event with the President of the United States as its target; a “close encounter” with an assassin’s bullet, which could be blamed on an agent of Castro. Surely then Kennedy would realize the folly of tolerating Castro any longer. Even were he to continue to demur from any action, the American public and lawmakers, filled with righteous anger, would settle for nothing less than full retaliation.

Once a decision was made to take this action, the next questions were obvious – where, when and by whom?

A trip to Texas was initially proposed among Kennedy, Vice-President Johnson and Governor Connally in June of 1963. The trip to Dallas was first announced publicly in September, and the motorcade route was announced on November 18.

Could it be done in Dallas? The mayor at the time was Earle Cabell, who happened to be the brother of General Charles Cabell, relieved of his duties at the CIA by Kennedy in the wake of the Bay of Pigs disaster. Cabell’s father and grandfather had also served as mayors of Dallas. The family’s grip on the city, and in particular on its police force, was great.

In 1963, Dallas was only a few decades removed from being a cowboy town (some would have argued it still was). The influence of the John Birch Society and the KKK were still heavy in the area, with a number of police officers and other officials being dues-paying members of one or the other, and there were many nativists and others who were not fond of the Kennedy administration for a variety of reasons. Should the plan be to carry out the job in Dallas, it was probably safely assumed that the city presented an environment which could be controlled.

Who could shoulder the blame for the job?

Oswald

Lee Harvey Oswald’s father died two months before he was born in New Orleans in 1939. He, his older brother Robert and their mother Marguerite lived a somewhat itinerant life during his formative years, moving from New Orleans, to Dallas, to New York City and back to New Orleans. There, as a teenager, he was a cadet member of the Civil Air Patrol, where he at least briefly came under the tutelage of David Ferrie, who himself has long been considered a suspicious character in JFK assassination lore.

Oswald’s mother was a troubled woman, and his childhood was anything but serene. He encountered disciplinary issues in school and likely suffered from some form of dyslexia. He enlisted in the marines in 1956. With an MOS of Aviation Electronics Operator, he departed for the U.S. Airbase at Atsugi Japan in the summer of 1957.

In Atsugi, his duties involved tracking top secret U2 flights over the Soviet Union. It was at Atsugi where he likely first came to the attention of American intelligence. After being propositioned by an attractive local prostitute at a club popular with American service men, he reported the encounter to a senior officer who, Oswald told some of his fellow marines, expressed an interest in involving him in intelligence work. Shortly after, a medical record appears in Oswald’s service record documenting his affliction by a venereal disease, but oddly noting it was “not due to [his] own irresponsibility”, but rather that it was contracted “in the line of duty”.

In September of 1959, claiming his mother required medical care, he received a hardship discharge. Not two months later, he showed up at the American Embassy in Moscow and stated he intended to renounce his U.S. citizenship and provide the Soviets with whatever information he could regarding his work with the Marines. Specifically, he noted, this included his knowledge of the U2 program. Oswald stayed in the Soviet Union long enough to marry a Soviet woman by the name of Marina and have his first child, a baby girl named June. In 1962 the family managed to leave the USSR and return to the states.

So, at the height of the Cold War, a young Marine who had been privy to details of one the Government’s most classified projects defects to the USSR, making it plain he planned to tell the Soviets everything he knew, including classified information, regarding the U2. He marries a Soviet woman, has a child with her, and then decides he’s not so enthralled with life in the Workers’ Paradise after all. He comes back home, traveling in part on a $430 loan he received from the U.S. State Department, and as far as is known to this day, is never arrested, charged or in any manner inconvenienced as a result of his conduct.

There is a lot about Oswald’s Soviet sojourn which has yet to be explained – how he financed his travel from the U.S., how he knew to enter the country via Finland, the scripted nature of his speech at the embassy, and so forth. Author John Newman postulates that his defection was a ‘dangle’ – an attempt by the CIA’s counterintelligence chief, James Angleton, to discover the identity of a Soviet mole he was certain was hard at work within the Agency. Angleton’s hunt for this mole would go on for years, ultimately destroying his career and damaging the Agency tremendously.

Oswald resided in the Dallas area from the time of the family’s return from the USSR in 1962 until he, alone, moved to New Orleans. In his roughly 6 months there, he conspicuously engaged in public pro-Castro activities while at the same time associating with numerous zealously anti-Castro characters, including David Ferrie and Guy Banister. These men were simultaneously engaged in activities supporting Operation Mongoose in camps located on the north shore of Lake Pontchartrain.

In late September of 1963, Oswald allegedly made a trip to Mexico City shortly after moving back to Texas from Louisiana. More than six decades later, nothing about this trip, his activities there or even whether it was truly him who made the trip is clear. American and Mexican officials have told conflicting stories about this trip ever since it occurred. We know that witnesses reported sightings of Oswald in and around Dallas while he was supposedly in Mexico, and we know for certain at least some of his alleged interactions with officials in Mexico were carried out by others. What is clear is that Oswald or someone impersonating him visited the Cuban consulate and the Soviet Embassy, causing scenes, expressing intent to travel to Cuba and the USSR, and generally working to enhance his communist and pro-Castro bona fides.

Based upon his research, Newman assesses the evidence and offers his hypothesis that from the time of his defection until his death, Oswald was being run as a CIA asset and possible FBI informant. His defection, his activities in New Orleans and the activities in Mexico City attributed to him fit a pattern of someone being used by a counterintelligence operation. Did any of this have anything to do with a plot to assassinate the President? Almost certainly not. Oswald was simply one of what was undoubtedly a number of individuals being used at that time, as needed, by the CIA in this way.

Oswald’s involvement with the Kennedy assassination probably began in October of 1963 by which time, whether he actually visited Mexico or not, he definitely was back in Dallas. However, he likely didn’t know it then, and probably didn’t realize it until after it was too late.

Things Come Together

I believe that plans were put in action for an operation to occur in Dallas almost as soon as the trip was publicly announced in September. Even though the motorcade route was not announced until the 18th, it is useful to recall the connection of Dallas mayor Earle Cabell to the CIA. For “national security purposes” the route could have been easily manipulated to afford the best chance for success of any event being planned.

Once it was decided that Dallas was the location, the planners needed to locate a suitable scape-goat. Oswald’s activities in New Orleans, coupled with his known defection and alleged trip to Mexico City would do to sufficiently established his bona fides as an America-hating communist. His time in New Orleans in particular likely made him a known commodity to persons now planning for the event. Enough facts existed around the fringes of Lee Harvey Oswald’s life that it wouldn’t take very much manipulation to convincingly portray him as acting on behalf of Cuba after the fact.

Oswald’s services were likely requested of his handler(s) for some innocuous purpose. It is possible the request was made of James Angleton directly, or more likely of a man like David Atlee Phillips, the CIA’s chief of operations for the Western Hemisphere at that time. In any event, no one asked permission to use Oswald in the sort of action being planned. This is something that anti-conspiracy folks overlook - they often confuse the large number of people who would have had to play some role in facilitating the event with people who would have “known” about the plot, making it extremely unlikely for such a secret to be kept. However, very few people would have known about the plot itself. Many others would have been asked for assistance on innocent-sounding activities. For example, General Charles Cabell might had told his brother Earle that they expected some Cubans might try something when the President was in Dallas, and that as a matter of national security he might need his assistance, and that of his police force, after the fact.

In any event, the plotters had knowledge of Oswald, and knew he lived in the area. In October of 1963, Oswald obtained his position as an order filler at the Texas School Book Depository, an event which likely helped to solidify the route the motorcade would take.

Someone likely approached Oswald in late October. They would have identified the person through whom they received permission to contact him. They would have said they needed his assistance in some sort of operation with little more likely said.

Northwoods Redux

I don’t believe what happened began as an actual assassination plot. The instigators wanted a “close call” which would goad the President into taking a more bellicose stance against Cuba.

For more than a decade, these people had played games with people and governments around the globe. The world, it seemed, was theirs to manipulate, and they had decided they needed the President of the United States to grow up and realize how the world worked.

Operationally, the job of arranging the event and establishing a suitable patsy fell to the same sort of crew that they’d employed before in numerous actions against Castro and elsewhere.

This time, Frankenstein’s monster turned on its creator.

By this time, the CIA no longer possessed the sort of control they may have once held over their network of assets working on Cuban matters. By 1963 these operatives were often already operating outside of ‘official’ channels, and they had even begun to question the commitment of their CIA masters to the cause of ridding Cuba of Castro.

These people, the folks to whom operational responsibility for the event was given, were mercenaries, less genteelly heeled than their masters in business suits with Ivy League ties. Whatever their dissatisfaction with their CIA handlers, their disgust with the president was even deeper, and far more personal.

Now, they were being asked to arrange a mock assassination attempt against this hated, treacherous man. They were being given the means with which to so – money, access, weapons, etc.

I think that at some time in the weeks leading to November 22, the operational folks decided to change the nature of the operation and actually kill the president.

The Event

On that Friday morning, Oswald was likely told to go about his business as usual, to not leave the TSBD building for any reason, and to await further instruction.

The shoot teams would have scouted their locations early in the morning. It is likely that they had some form of official ID, and even possibly the uniforms of police officers, to ward off curious people at least for the few critical minutes before and after the event.

I believe that one team was behind the picket fence on the Grassy Knoll (I’ve stood there myself – it’s an eerie feeling, and it is obviously a good place from which to shoot at someone riding towards you down Elm Street), another was in one of the buildings behind the motorcade route which would have also afforded a view down Elm Street (it is possible to draw a straight line from windows in the Dal-Tex building to the curbstone hit by a bullet, which runs through the President’s location at the time of the first shots). A third was most likely in the TSBD.

Over a period of perhaps 7 seconds, a fusillade of shots was fired at the President. There were at least 6 (JFK throat, JFK back, curbstone, Connolly, and 2 JFK headshots). We will likely never know the exact amount and, ultimately, it’s not a critical point.

Once the shooting stopped, the shooters immediately began to make their escape. Oswald, ignorant of the event, was buying a coke in the lunch room.

I believe that when confronted by Truly and Baker, Oswald first realized what had happened (Truly told him at that time the President had been shot). He probably also began to think he needed to get out of there.

Oswald’s activities between the time he departed the TSBD at around 12:35 and when he was arrested in the Texas Theater at about 1:55 are not known for sure and open to debate. The only thing we can say with relative certainty is that he entered his rooming house on North Beckley at about 1:00, as observed by his landlady who was there at the time. According to her testimony, he departed three or four minutes later, after retrieving a jacket and, possibly, a pistol.

I believe it is probable that Oswald did not murder Dallas patrolman J.D. Tippit. Was Tippit’s murder even connected to the assassination? We can’t know for sure. What is clear is that in the last 20 or so minutes of his life, Officer Tippit was racing around the Oak Cliff section of Dallas appearing to observers to be looking for someone or something. Was it Oswald he was looking for? We will likely never know for sure.

There is speculation the theater was a pre-arranged meeting place for Oswald and a handler. Was he to be provided safe passage out of the city? Was he to be eliminated? We don’t know. What we know is that once he was arrested, the final act of his strange, unknowable life began.

During the relatively brief period he was in custody, Oswald steadfastly denied any involvement in the murder of the President. He claimed, famously, “I’m just a patsy”. Out of character, history shows us, for a true assassin.

On November 24th, as JFK’s funeral was playing out in Washington, Lee Harvey Oswald was murdered on live television, while in police custody, by Jack Ruby. Ruby was an associate of several prominent Mafia figures, had been involved in gun-running and other illegal activities involving Cuba for years, and was a well-known personality to a large segment of the Dallas PD. His stated reason for killing Oswald, that he did it to spare Jacqueline Kennedy the ordeal of attending a trial, was concocted by his attorney. Witness observations of Ruby, his words and his actions from Friday through Sunday paint a clear picture of a man confronted by a significant burden.

CONCLUSION

I believe President John F. Kennedy was murdered as the result of a covert operation gone awry, the precise kind of operation approved by the Joint Chiefs of Staff as Operation Northwoods, but rejected by the President. He was targeted in order to finally convince him to take a firm stand against Castro; those who conceived the action would have said his actions or lack thereof, past and potential, posed a grave threat to the security of the nation. He died because the individuals tasked with carrying out the crime had a deep personal hatred for him and knew they had their masters over a barrel.

I don’t think the event was conceived as an actual assassination, but rather a ‘close call’ meant to force Kennedy into military action against Cuba. It was given life by a group of high-level intelligence and military officials including, potentially, Allen Dulles, Richard Helms, Lyman Lemnitzer, Curtis Lemay, Richard Bissell, or others. From them, responsibility for putting it into action would have passed to mid-level officials in the field, people like William Harvey, the CIA’s assassinations chief with a “purple” hatred of the Kennedys and George Joannides, who in 1963 was chief of the Agency’s psychological warfare section based out of their JM/WAVE station in Miami.

The job of actually carrying out the action was given to the usual suspects - Cuban exiles and American soldiers of fortune whom the CIA and the military had been training to conduct paramilitary operations against Cuba and other targets for years.

The identity of these individuals is a riddle that may never be solved. Potential participants include Frank Sturgis, Gerry Patrick Hemming, Herminio Diaz Garcia, Eugenio Martinez, David Sanchez Morales, David Ferrie and others. Whoever they were they all came from that nether region of covert operatives living between the CIA and the Cuban exile community. Trained in deadly skills, they were looking for a fight and had personal, professional and patriotic reasons to want JFK eliminated.

The plan was changed from a ‘close call’ to an actual killing either by those mid-level officials, or by the operatives in charged of carrying it out. I do not believe that those in the most senior position knew of, or desired, a true assassination. Why is this? Because in the event, they were given exactly what Northwoods was designed to provide – an incident which could be portrayed as an action against this country by a rabidly anti-American Castroite in the service of Cuba, and which could be used to justify an invasion of that country and, at long last, the removal of Castro himself. How did they respond to this gift? By running in the opposite direction. In the days, weeks and months which followed, these authorities downplayed Oswald’s alleged bona fides as such a character and created the myth of the ‘lone nut’. They saw that as the much easier path to go down, and one with less chance of exposing their role in the event.

Even before the echoes of gunfire died down in Dealey Plaza, those in Washington who conceived the operation understood they had been double-crossed, and were likely horrified at the thought that one of their plans could have gone so spectacularly wrong. Within hours of the event, those who chose to kill probably sent communications to those who only wanted to warn. One might imagine that these communications indicated that, in a dozen random safe deposit boxes in a dozen random banks scattered around the globe was evidence in the form of recorded conversations, receipts, etc. of the complicity of the power elite and that it was in everyone’s interest not to come after the men who double-crossed them.

President Johnson probably learned quickly what had happened. He hastily established an investigative body and goaded Chief Justice Earl Warren to lead it, telling him that if rumors of Cuban involvement were not squelched, it could mean 40 million dead Americans in World War III. A memo dated November 25th from Deputy Attorney General Nick Katzenbach to LBJ aid Bill Moyers summed up the purpose of the Warren Commission by stating the public had to be convinced “Oswald was the assassin, that he did not have confederates who are still at large, and that the evidence is such that he would have been convicted at trial.” So, the Commission’s mission, from the outset, was to sell the story of the lone gunman to the American people. The fact that Allen Dulles was appointed to serve on the body said as much. No doubt, Commission members and Commission counsel were given to believe that the national security depended upon their arriving at the ‘correct’ conclusions. Many Commission members and affiliated persons later expressed extreme skepticism for and dissention from their own conclusions.

In all of the cover-up that followed the assassination, I believe that good people did what they thought they needed to do to protect the United States. With actions large and small, most thought they were helping to hide a phantom connection to Cuba which they feared would bring war. Arlen Spector likely devised the single-bullet theory for such reasons.

Much later, both Presidents Trump and Biden acted to subvert the good work done by the ARRB, discussed above. While we have learned so much about the event under the auspices of the JFK Assassination Records Act, more still awaits declassification and release, yet each of our most recent presidents have yielded to advice of their advisors and have refused to do so. I don’t believe either man was shown something he felt was too controversial to release. I think each was advised that the remaining classified information, while having nothing to do with wild conspiracy theories, would nevertheless betray cover identities, divulge sources and methods or jeopardize foreign relations.

While I vehemently disagree with their decisions, and with the actions of the intelligence and military authorities who continue to obfuscate, I understand their motives.

Secrets aren't being guarded today for the same reasons as in the years and perhaps decades which followed the assassination. There are no intelligence officials any longer who care a damn about the reputations of Allen Dulles or Richard Helms, or about the reputation even of their own institutions' now-ancient history. Today, secrets are being kept for other, perhaps more understandable reasons.

Here, in America, that ‘Shining City on a Hill’, a coup occurred which was conceived by some of the most powerful men in Government. This is the sort of thing which happens in Banana Republics or in corrupt Communist regimes. America is different, special. To permit knowledge of this would lay bare the fact that, on at least one day in 1963, America showed herself to be no better than any other nation, her system of government and her halls of power no less susceptible to the same base motivations which have been present in every nation which has ever existed.

How could we admit this to ourselves, let alone the world? When is the right time for it? When would the country be prepared for it? Would it be in the wake of national mourning for a slain President? During a war which tore at the fabric of the nation? During a scandal which forced a president from power? During Congressional hearings which exposed massive illegalities committed by the law enforcement and intelligence communities? During a national malaise when hope in the future was waning? During a period of resurgence while Americans’ confidence in their nation and its future was finally growing again? In the wake of terrorist attacks which changed the world? During a period where our domestic political and social conversations are more divisive than ever?

There has never been, nor will there ever be a ‘good’ time to reveal this truth, but it must be revealed. History demands it, and so should we.

People have asked whether the assassination, after 60 years, even matters any more. If the official story is true it doesn’t, at least not any more than any other important events of that time. But if the official story is a lie, even a well-intended one meant to protect this country, then it matters very much. As Americans, we deserve closure, and the children and grandchildren of John Fitzgerald Kennedy, Lee Harvey Oswald and J.D. Tippit deserve to know what actually happened to those they loved and lost.

EPILOGUE

I was recently re-watching newsreel footage of a makeshift press conference held the night of Oswald’s arrest at which time he was made available to reporters for questions. He is asked whether he killed the President. He said he didn’t and that no one had even yet raised that issue with him. Another reporter then puts it to him – he was being charged with the assassination. Upon hearing this, his face changes - his lips purse, his eyes roll and he gives an expression of frustration and exasperation. I think that moment is when he first understood the true nature of what it was he was mixed up in. I think in that moment, this confused, complicated young man realized he was being set up. That young man, who from the time he entered his nation’s service did nothing but what he was told to do by people he assumed were patriots, deserves vindication. He was no hero, but he certainly wasn’t a villain either.

A FINAL THOUGHT

On June 23rd, 1972, President Nixon and his chief of staff, H.R. Haldeman, were discussing how the White House should handle the spreading Watergate scandal. The Watergate break-in had been carried out by men including Frank Sturgis, Eugenio Martinez and Bernard Barker, all of who worked in the stew of anti-Castro covert operations in the early 1960s. E. Howard Hunt, formerly of the CIA, was by the early 1970s on the White House staff, and managed the activities of these ‘plumbers’ (so-called because they were employed to fix ‘leaks’). At several points in the taped conversation, Nixon tells Haldeman to explain to Richard Helms, then the director of the CIA, that looking too deeply into Hunt and these other characters would “open up” the “whole Bay of Pigs thing”. In his memoirs, Haldeman gave his opinion that Nixon used the “Bay of Pigs thing” as a euphemism for the Kennedy assassination.

Haldeman delivered this message to Helms, who in 1963 had been the CIA’s Deputy Director for Plans, the position which oversaw all agency covert operations. Helms’ response shocked Haldeman – he yelled that the Bay of Pigs had nothing to do with the current situation; John Ehrlichman, who was present, recalled Helms reacted “like a scalded cat”.

When he was Eisenhower’s Vice-President, Nixon played a part in helping to coordinate the multi-agency effort to plan the invasion on behalf of the White House. If Haldeman’s interpretation of Nixon’s reference is correct, it suggests not only that Nixon had knowledge of the true nature of the assassination, but that both he and Helms understood that the seeds of the crime were indeed planted in the failure of that undertaking.