JFK 50 | narcissism

Reconsidering the Assassination of JFK – Nearly 60 Years On

MRP - 10/5/21

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 attacker never tried to conceal or to deny guilt. The exception in all instances was the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in 1963. I don’t make this point to suggest it supports or undercuts the official conclusion that a lone gunman, specifically Lee Harvey Oswald, murdered the President. I merely offer it as an interesting historic curiosity.

My Obsession

I can’t remember now just how or why it happened, but while I was in college, I became obsessed with the Kennedy assassination. Perhaps it was related to the coming of the 25th anniversary of the killing in 1988, which was during my junior year. Whatever the cause, I began devouring anything I could get my hands on about the crime. 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) 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 have it.

The anniversary in 1988 brought forth a wealth of new books on the subject. Some were sober and thought-provoking; some were pure nonsense. Media attention flew from one angle to the next – the mafia, the Cubans, the CIA and so forth. When drawing their conclusions, however, the media displayed the same sort of casual dismissiveness towards, and misrepresentation of, serious critics’ opinions as they had shown since 1963. Two examples spring to mind.

Media Misconduct

In the immediate wake of the killing, long before the Warren 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 lone gunman 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. The film made by Abraham Zapruder of the murder was still in the custody of Time-Life; as far as we know, only they, the Secret Service, possibly the FBI, and Zapruder himself had ever watched it. Most probably thought the film 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 lie. The Zapruder film shows no such movement. The President sat facing almost perfectly straight ahead 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.

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, an institution very proud of its history and reputation, went into the tank for the official story from the beginning. In the early 1960s, American media companies still enjoyed close, even improper relationships with government, industrial and other officials. As we shall see later on in this piece, they sometimes crafted the narratives they fed the public to suit the aims of these friends, almost always sincerely believing they were acting in the national interest as they were doing so. Even though today these sorts of relationships have largely ended, if it were shown that the official story was not true it would nevertheless still 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 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 choice to tell the story through the lens of New Orleans D.A. Jim Garrison’s late ‘60s investigation of the case was problematic – Garrison’s investigation was beset with troubles, many of his own making, and was widely viewed with derision. While I believe that in pursuing people like David Ferrie, Guy Banister and Oswald’s other New Orleans connections Garrison did begin to pull back the corner of something potentially significant, the overreach he ultimately exhibited must make one approach him with caution, and not make him into a hero as Stone’s movie tried to do. Stone’s naked hero worship of Kennedy, and his casting of him in the martyr’s role, further undermined the film’s credibility.

While many critics admired JFK as a movie, most reviews of the film’s content were unfavorable. After its release something interesting happened – 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 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 own somewhat 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 Today 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 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.

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 lone, odd, squirrely and flawed character we could all feel comfortable blaming this horrific event on. 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 reexamine the case – and to see whether, perhaps, I had been too quick to dismiss the lone-gunman position.

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 Donald Byron Thomas’ Hear No Evil, which provides a detailed overview of all aspects of the case and Barry Ernest’s The Girl on the Stairs, a thoughtful examination of one witness’s overlooked, yet consistent testimony which seriously undercuts a key component of the Warren Commission’s findings.

After digesting these works, and reviewing other general information from a variety of sources, my conviction from years ago that Kennedy’s death was the result of a conspiracy has solidified to the point where I consider it to be historical fact. Much of what follows was written subsequent to my review of the case in 2013, but some additions, clarifications and new perspectives have been added after taking another look at the status of the story in 2021. I have done no original research and with few exceptions, I offer no specific citations in what follows. At the conclusion of this piece, I do list a number of titles which contributed information this piece and which helped form the basis for my own conclusions.

The Case for Conspiracy

Admittedly, asserting there was a conspiracy is an easier task than claiming Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone. To make the case against Oswald, all the available evidence (means, motive, opportunity, physical evidence, witness testimony, etc.) must line up in support of the conclusion that it was he and he alone, to the exclusion of all other individuals, who committed the act. To make the case for conspiracy (without, for the moment, ascribing guilt), you only have to poke one hole, somewhere, in the case against Oswald.

If Kennedy truly had been killed by Oswald, firing alone from the TSBD, and then Oswald had fled the scene, murdered a Dallas police officer, and was subsequently murdered himself by Jack Ruby, I have to believe there would be some definitive evidence, somewhere, of this – after nearly 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 evidence offered to support Oswald’s sole guilt remains largely unchanged since 1963, whereas the cause to believe he either did not act alone, or was in fact not involved in the act of the assassination at all, has grown and expanded.

Oswald’s Motive:

Even if Oswald was indeed a committed Marxist, enamored with the lure of the workers’ paradise as brought to life in the Soviet Union and in the growing dictatorship of Fidel Castro to the south, 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 misfit 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, there still seems to be no definitive or even remotely suggestive reason 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 supposed 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 the culprits are proud of their actions and wish to take credit for them. Not so here.

I don’t believe there is any reason to think Oswald wanted to kill Kennedy (we know of no threats or even disparaging remarks he ever made against him). In fact, Kennedy’s true detractors were on the right – he abandoned the Bay of Pigs invaders, he “lost” East Berlin, he made a qualified pledge to not invade Cuba to resolve the Cuban Missile Crisis, he was making secret overtures to Castro’s government and there was evidence he would back America away from large-scale involvement in Vietnam. It was practically a Marxist’s dream come true.

Oswald had no identifiable motive to kill Kennedy – it’s as simple as that.

Oswald’s Means:

Oswald owned a rifle and a pistol – he therefore had the means to kill the President. However, based upon this logic so did well over half the population of Texas. So, his available means really aren’t anything on which to base an argument.

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. I don’t believe he could.

The President’s motorcade was scheduled to pass the TSBD at about 12:25. Somewhere 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. As late as 12:25, by which time an assassin would have anticipated the arrival of the motorcade, a TSBD employee finished his lunch in the area of the southeast corner window 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 neat 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?

Given that both elevators with access to the 6th floor were stuck when the assassination occurred, Oswald, both the Warren Commission and its critics agree, would have been forced to descend via the stairs at the rear of the floor. Following the final shot, he would have had to hurry to the location on the 6th floor where a rifle was found by police during their search, deposit the rifle (it was hidden, not dropped), and head for 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 a lower 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.

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. Does this mean he wasn’t potentially part of a larger conspiracy? No. It merely means he couldn’t have taken the shots credited to him by the Warren Commission.

Before moving on to address the Zapruder film, there are three elements of the shooting as it relates to the TSBD which, though not indicative of Oswald’s innocence or guilt, have always puzzled me:

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 would be expected to begin accelerating to merge onto the Stemmons Freeway. Furthermore, after making the turn the car moved out of view briefly behind 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. Though I have issues with the film, this is a credible suggestion.

Three shell casings from Oswald’s Mannlicher rifle 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 1 (cycle the bolt, eject the first cartridge)…BANG 2 (cycle the bolt, eject the second cartridge)…BANG 3. In a lone assassin scenario, at this point the gunman would have seen the President’s head explode in their scope, eliminating any need for a fourth shot. However, Oswald apparently cycled the bolt again, ejecting the third cartridge. Furthermore, the fact that all three were lying close together suggests he ejected it from roughly the same position he was in for the first two shots. That he 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.

A conclusion that Lee Harvey Oswald was not the TSBD gunman admittedly creates a difficult question – who was? In all the witness testimony, there is no credible mention of any strange or unknown people in the TSBD that day. However, it seems likely that there was a gunman there that day – witnesses below the 6th floor reported hearing shots originating above their heads, and several witnesses in Dealey Plaza stated that they saw someone with a gun in the window. At a minimum, someone had to plant those shells. This continues to be a perplexing question.

The Zapruder Film

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. There certainly would have been no need to concoct the single bullet theory, and there would no compelling evidence of a frontal bullet strike to the President’s head. The Zapruder film is something the assassins never counted on.

The single bullet theory was created because the Zapruder film showed the President and Governor Connally reacting to shots too closely together to have been fired consecutively by Oswald’s rifle. And that’s really the most important thing to understand about it – it wasn’t created as a logical conclusion after all the evidence was reviewed, it was created to explain how the Zapruder film could show what it shows, and how Oswald still could have been the lone assassin.

The official line is that one shot from Oswald’s rifle missed and hit a curb stone, sending fragments of concrete or the bullet into the cheek of a bystander, James Tague. Both the Warren Commission and its critics agree on that point. The Warren Commission goes on to contend that a second bullet from Oswald’s rifle passed through Kennedy’s neck, and proceeded to cause the Governor’s wounds (the single bullet). Then, a third bullet struck the President in the rear of the head causing the fatal wound. The two most critical things the film shows, however, are that the single bullet theory is false, and that the President was hit by at least one bullet 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 unhit. Within a second after the President emerges from behind the sign, Connally’s right shoulder drops sharply and he turns to his right. Some have suggested this is indicative of a bullet strike. But immediately after this motion, he turns full in his seat to stare back at the President for a moment looking, again, unhit. If he still was unhit, the single bullet theory is false and there had to have been at least two shooters. Supporters of the single bullet theory contend that the Governor’s reaction to getting shot is merely delayed by a couple seconds. Now, 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 body. But, let’s look at what actually 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 shear 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 if 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 Clint 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 interesting 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.

First, however, some history is required.

Unchecked Power

Throughout the 1950s, the Central Intelligence Agency acted as a de facto foreign policy agency. Unlike the CIA of today, its actions were dictated by the personal desires of its leaders, and none more so than those of Allen Dulles, the agency’s director for more than a decade, from its founding in the late 1940s into the 1960s. 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 world view and in service to what they thought best for the country. A largely compliant President Eisenhower and congress offered little in the way of meaningful direction or oversight, and a servile media provided only minimal public accountability.

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 (at this point interchangeable with the agency itself), 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, the CIA, in support of our British allies, 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 ousted Prime Minister spent 3 years in prison and then lived under house arrest until his death in the 1960s. 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. Every single problem the United States and the West has had with Iran since 1953 is 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.

Each of these actions, and others, were carried out with the Machiavellian Dulles’s full, personal support.

Under his leadership, the CIA had developed both an appetite and the skills needed for covert operations designed to overthrow governments, incite insurrection 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.

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.

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 landings, the CIA recruited and trained hundreds of mercenaries, mostly Cubans whose families had been forced to flee Cuba 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 an all-purpose 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 would work for Mongoose. Training in paramilitary activities and propaganda was carried out by the CIA 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.

At the same time as Mongoose was in full-swing, 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 build public support 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” (emphasis mine); 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, and Lemnitzer was denied another term as Chairman. Even though it never got off the drawing board, the preliminary planning and feasibility studies that had to have occurred no doubt involved discussions with some of the people who would have played a role in its implementation if approved; particularly, the usual cast of characters in the military, at CIA and roaming the swamps of the U.S. south looking for a war to fight.

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 try to invade Cuba again.

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 a nuclear war with the Soviet Union, 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 some 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, perhaps unpalatable and even wicked, but their duty nonetheless to do something about it.

But what could be done?

A Plot is Laid

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 embittered group of intelligence operatives who have seen promises they’ve 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 retained more influence over the Agency than John McCone, who had replaced him. Surely, he recalled the plans for Operation Northwoods.

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 Cold War skullduggery yet – to stage a Northwoods-like event at the expense of the President; 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 goad him into it.

I do not believe the men who conceived this idea intended for it to be an actual assassination – more on that later.

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, 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, with the mayor being Cabell’s brother, it was probably safely assumed that the city presented an environment which could be controlled.

Who could shoulder the blame for the job?

Oswald

At this time, anyone who has taken the time to actually read this would be well-served to read Newman’s Oswald and the CIA, particularly its 2008 epilogue, The Plot to Murder President Kennedy. Newman, as sober an assassination writer as you’re apt to find, makes a very convincing case that, from at least the time of his defection to the Soviet Union, Oswald was a known commodity to the CIA. Oswald went to the American Embassy on Moscow in 1959, at age 19, 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, this included his time spent at the U.S. Air Base in Atsugi, Japan, where he was assigned duties tracking the flights of U2 spy planes over the USSR. 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 June of 1962 the family managed to leave the USSR and return to the states. Because of his activities, he was a person of interest to the FBI for the rest of his life (though perhaps as an informant rather than a target of investigation), but other than that he faced no adverse consequences as a result of his decisions. 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 (who’s uncle was KGB, no less), 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 treasonous conduct.

After living in Ft. Worth, TX for a time, Oswald moved to New Orleans, where he conspicuously engages in pro-Castro leafleting and other activities. He also strikes up acquaintances with some of New Orleans’ most vocal anti-Castro activists, including, most likely, David Ferrie and Guy Banister, two men engaged in support of Operation Mongoose operations on the north shore of Lake Ponchartrain.

In late September of 1963, Oswald allegedly made a trip to Mexico City. Nothing about this trip or his activities there is clear. Newman’s book does an excellent job of highlighting the conflicting stories told by Mexican and American officials with regard to it. Oswald or, most certainly, someone impersonating him, visited the Cuban consulate and the Soviet Embassy, and generally worked to enhance his 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 an occasional informant and asset by someone in James Jesus Angleton’s Counterintelligence Office. His defection, his activities in New Orleans and his possible sojourn to Mexico City (or of someone impersonating him) can be read as fitting 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? No. 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 when he returned to Dallas in October of 1963. 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 this 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 easily manipulated to afford the best chance for success of the Northwoods-style event being planned.

Once it was decided that Dallas was the location, the planners needed to locate a suitable scape-goat. In Operation Northwoods, actions were to be pinned on pro-Castro agents. Oswald’s activities in New Orleans, coupled with his known defection and alleged trip to Mexico City in which he allegedly visited the Soviet embassy, would have sufficiently established his bona fides as an America-hating communist. His time in New Orleans and his activities as a CIA informant probably made Oswald a known commodity to persons now planning the assassination.

They likely sought out permission to utilize Oswald for some innocuous operation. 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, relatively few people would have known about the plot itself. Others, both from within the plotters’ world and not, would have been asked for assistance for anonymous or 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 of the sort he was used to performing by that time. Nothing more.

We’re Not in Northwoods any Longer

As I’ve said, 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 Unite States to grow up and realize how the world worked. Though they’d committed many sins, it doesn’t strike me that sanctioning the assassination of the President was something they’d be willing to do just yet. I suspect that even for them, that was a line they weren’t ready to cross. Perhaps I’m just naïve, and I can’t articulate it any better, but it’s just the way I feel about it.

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.

The people to whom operational responsibility was given were mercenaries and soldiers of fortune, less genteelly heeled than their masters in business suits with Ivy league ties. As we already discussed their disgust with the president was deeper even than that held by their bosses.

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 sometime 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 to ward off curious people, at least for a short while.

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 (the Dallas County Records Building or the Dal-Tex Building), and that a third was either in the TSBD or in the other of the two buildings behind the route.

Over a period of perhaps 7 seconds, a fusillade of shots was fired at the President. I don’t have a set opinion on the number or the order 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.

Chapter 14 of Thomas’ Hear No Evil provides a fascinating reconstruction of Oswald’s movements between the assassination and when he was arrested sitting in the Texas Theater. Briefly, Thomas suggests Oswald was on his way to a pre-arranged meeting with the shooters, but began to have second thoughts about his safety. He stopped by his rooming house to grab his pistol. It is probable Oswald murdered Dallas police officer Tippit, but the exact circumstances of this event remain much in doubt.

Was Oswald to be provided an escape? Was he to be eliminated or turned over to the police? I don’t know. However, judging from the events of the next few days, Oswald was likely destined to die as the primary suspect in any event.

On November 24th, as JFK’s funeral was playing out in Washington, Lee Harvey Oswald was murdered, while in police custody, by Jack Ruby. Ruby was, at a minimum, an associate of several prominent Mafia figures including John Roselli who was a valued partner of the CIA in their anti-Castro actions. He was also a well-known personality to a large segment of the Dallas PD.

I believe that, whether it was by design or not, once Oswald was arrested it was determined that he was too dangerous a witness against those who had carried out the plot. Some have speculated that to eliminate Oswald, favors were called in and the mob offered up Jack Ruby as the killer. I tend to think, however, that it was Ruby’s connections to the Dallas PD that got him roped in. Someone on the inside, whether involved in the plot or knowledgeable of it only after the event, interceded to make sure, possibly for “national security” reasons, that Oswald would not live to stand trial or even to speak with too many reporters.

General Charles Cabell could easily have called his brother and told him that Oswald shot the President as part of a Cuban plot. If it got out that Cuba was involved, it could mean World War III. He could have asked his brother to protect the nation and see to it that Oswald was taken care of. Earle could have reached out to his police force to make it happen. If Oswald had died of “unknown” causes while in police custody, or was killed by police while “trying to escape”, it would have appeared too obvious. The police sought out Ruby, probably waving the flag to full effect. Ruby probably thought his good relationship with the force would mean a light sentence if any at all. Well, he was wrong. He died of natural causes while still in custody for Oswald’s murder in 1967, insisting until his death he had important information about the crime to tell authorities but feared for his life as long as he remained in Texas.

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.

The action against him was set in motion by persons affiliated with U.S. intelligence – Allen Dulles, Richard Helms, Lyman Lemnitzer, Curtis Lemay, Richard Bissell, or others. However deeply he was or was not involved in hatching the plan, Dulles’ counsel and his approval were certainly sought. The task of carrying out the plan was given to the usual suspects - the Cuban exiles and American soldiers of fortune the CIA and the military had been training to conduct paramilitary operations against Cuba and possibly other targets. It is likely that very few people outside the plotters themselves had any foreknowledge of the action.

The identity of the men who designed the operation on the ground and carried it out is a riddle that may never be solved. There are a number of individuals who have been suggested over the years as having been involved. They include E. Howard Hunt, Frank Sturgis, Gerry Patrick Hemming, 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 propaganda, sabotage and shooting skills, they were looking for a fight and had personal, professional and patriotic reasons to want JFK eliminated.

I believe that 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 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. The communications likely 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.

The fact that the assassination of the President by a ‘known’ supporter and possible agent of Castro did not lead to military action against Cuba and that those who conceived the plan now moved to quickly convince the world it was the act of a lone gunman with no ties to anyone and no accomplices are to me strong signs that his death wasn’t part of the original plan.

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.

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. I believe many did so to hide a phantom connection to Cuba which they feared would bring war. Most, no doubt, did not understand the assassination as a domestic act.

What happened in Dallas on November 22, 1963 was, I believe, a product of our country’s own covert operations establishment, which began ousting foreign leaders in the 1950s and progressed to other, even less-savory activities, after its eyes turned to Cuba in the early 1960s.

Although immaterial as far as demonstrating his guilt or innocence, I recently was re-watching the newsreel footage of Oswald being paraded before reporters following his arrest. He is asked a question about the President’s murder, and says something about knowing only that he’s been accused of murdering a policeman. A reporter then puts it to him bluntly – he was being accused of killing the President. Oswald’s look upon hearing this fascinates me – his eyes roll and his lips purse. The look is more one of frustration or exasperation, not of revealed guilt. To me, his expression says “well, that wasn’t supposed to happen”, or “that wasn’t what I was told would happen”. Again, this means nothing in terms of assessing innocence or guilt. But watch it yourself – it just seems odd.

Epilogue

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.

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 the seeds of the crime were indeed planted in the failure of that undertaking.