Fake News in the Age of Assassins: Why the Political Killings of the 1960s Still Matter
(updated on September 6, 2023)
Study of the Assassinations of the 1960s: A Portal into the History of Capitalism, 1794 ~
Assassination
research, “conspiracy theory” and a review of Oliver Stone’s JFK
“Only the small secrets need to be protected. The large ones are kept secret by public incredulity.” – Marshall McLuhan
____________________________________________________________________
Michael
Parenti, The
JFK Assassination and the Gangster Nature of the State, Berkley, California, November 22,
1993, 47:15~
Archbishop Romero of El Salvador
was a member of the Salvadoran aristocracy… the minute he … made some critical
remarks and about the war, some favorable remarks about the poor, he was
assassinated. I doubt, if he hadn’t been assassinated, that Salvadoran history
would have been much different. Does this mean that solidarity groups in this
country and El Salvador should not have tried to make his murder an issue that
revealed the homicidal gangster nature of the Salvadoran state? Instead of
seizing the opportunity, some left writers condescendingly ascribe a host of
mass psychology motivations and emotional needs to those of us who are
concerned about the JFK assassination. They psychologize about our illusions of
false dreams, our longings for messiahs and father figures, our inability to
face unpleasant realities the way they can. They deliver patronizing admissions
about our conspiracy captivation and Camelot yearnings. They urge us not to
escape into fantasy. They are the cognoscenti who guide us and out-left us on
the JFK assassination, a subject about which they don’t know a goddamn thing
and whose significance they will never be able and have not been able to grasp.
I have a different name for our interests. It is not JFK worship. It’s not
Camelot yearnings, as the left critics would say. It’s not big evils and
conspiracy titillation, as the mainstream media would say. Our interest is born
of democratic struggle, a desire to know what is going on, a desire to have
rulers who are worthy of our name and the name of democracy.[1]
____________________________________________________________________
Part 1
When Donald Trump became
president of the United States, many Americans asked with fevered gasps whether
the country is on the verge of
fascism or heading toward
totalitarianism. Is democracy dying? Has the Republic failed? The irony is that
such questions have been asked at every pivotal point in the country’s
history—during the destruction of the original inhabitants of the land, during
the Civil War, and at the end of the 19th century when the US occupied the
Hawaiian Kingdom and waged wars overseas and became an empire. These questions
arose again during WWI when military necessity crushed free speech, deported
immigrants, and put dissenters in jail, later when the atom bombs were dropped
on Japan, and when Nazi and Japanese war criminals were rehabilitated and used
to fight against the Soviet Union. And the questions were raised most
emphatically during the half decade of assassinations from1963-1968 during the
presidency of Lyndon Johnson: JFK, Malcolm X, MLK and RFK. It is strange that
Americans have this capacity to perpetually feel that totalitarianism is a
threat just over the horizon but not yet upon them. They are incapable of
recognizing the state of inverted totalitarianism that has already taken hold.[2] This essay, updated November 2021, looks back at the assassination of JFK and also reviews
the lasting impact of Oliver Stone’s film JFK,
released in 1991.
Some people who were
deeply affected by the assassination of President Kennedy say that every autumn
reminds them of the strange days of the Cuban Missile Crisis in October 1962
and the assassination in November 1963. The assassination date falls close to
American Thanksgiving, a time when we could all give thanks to John F. Kennedy
who, alone among all his advisors—even his brother Robert, thought it would be
best not to invade Cuba and possibly start a nuclear war. We also have to
forgive him for his role in escalating that danger in the first place.[3] The autumn season is when we reap what we have sown. It is also
the time of Armistice Day, Halloween, All Saints Day, and the Day of the Dead.
It’s only natural that in this twilight season before winter we should think less
about Black Friday Sales and more about mortality and the dark deeds of the
Black Friday that occurred on November 22, 1963.
After 1962, there were
other close encounters with nuclear war in other autumns. Exactly twenty years
after the Kennedy assassination, a series of events in the autumn of 1983
reminded the world about the threat of nuclear war that had not been felt so keenly
since 1962—a threat that was and still is always present. On September 26,
1983, three weeks after the Soviet military had shot down Korean Air Lines
Flight 007, Stanislav Petrov, duty officer at a Soviet early-warning system
noted the system reported six incoming missiles from the United States. He
correctly judged the report to be a false alarm and is credited with having
prevented a retaliatory nuclear attack—assuming officers up the chain of
command wouldn’t have come to the same conclusion. In November that year, the
NATO war drills called Able Archer had an unprecedented level of realism that
was noticed by Soviet military leaders. In response, they readied their nuclear
forces and placed air units in East Germany and Poland on alert. On November 20,
1983, the fictional film The Day After
depicted apocalyptic nuclear war for an audience of 100 million American
television viewers. Much later, in 2018, the US government announced it would
withdraw from the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty (INF) that was
signed in 1987, which prompted General Vladimir Shamanov, head of the Russian
lower house of parliament’s defense committee, to say Russia’s response might
be the reactivation of Russian military facilities in Cuba, if Cuba agreed.[4] What could possibly go wrong?
It was my own studies of
nuclear history that led me back to thinking about the JFK assassination and
the experience of watching Oliver Stone’s JFK in 1991. My interest was
also renewed when I got a chance to visit Dealey Plaza in 2013 and spoke with a
couple people on the street who were selling pamphlets that countered the
official version one can find in the 6th floor museum in the schoolbook
depository. These people were out there every day selling their pamphlets to
the tourists and ready to tell stories about the time they were extras on the
set of JFK.
The film left a strong
impression on me in 1991, but after a while it seemed like a hopeless rabbit
hole to go down. There were too many obsessives there, and there were more
important things happening in the present. It would be foolish to spend much
time debating the arcane details of the various theories about the
assassination because while that might seem like the pursuit of justice, it
also involves “playing their game.” The perpetrators of the assassination have
been gaslighting “conspiracy buffs” for almost sixty years now with
misdirection and misinformation. You can’t prove the obvious to someone who is
determined to deny the obvious, and the case will never be solved with “smoking
gun” evidence. We are left with witness statements and a few late-life and
deathbed confessions of CIA agents, but most of the perpetrators kept their omerta
and died with their secrets long ago. The snipers would have been low-level,
unconnected professionals hired for the job, most likely foreigners who
disappeared forever—not the types to suffer later from pangs of conscience. But
if they did, who would believe their confessions anyway?
It’s obvious that Oswald
was a patsy, so why get obsessed about the details? Nonetheless, as Michael Parenti said, it is important to study the JFK
assassination for what it reveals about the nature of the gangster state. I
read several books about the development of nuclear arsenals during the 20th
century and eventually came to the same point as the veteran anti-nuclear
activist James Douglass. One has to look into the JFK assassination, and the
other assassinations of the 1960s, to understand the nature of the evil we are
dealing with.
____________________________________________________________________
Jim Douglass, author of JFK
and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters[5]
Jim Douglass was a
prominent nuclear disarmament activist for decades before he turned his
attention to the assassination of JFK and published one of the most thoroughly
researched and powerful accounts of the JFK presidency and the assassination.
He was interviewed on TalkingstickTV in early 2000, commenting on the significance of the assassinations of John
Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, Martin Luther King and Malcolm X:
[They] allow us to see what’s happening today in a way that is
more profound than anything else I’ve found. How does it [the MLK
assassination] relate to John Kennedy’s assassination, or Robert Kennedy’s, and
then eventually Malcolm X’s as well? And I found the same patterns in all four
of them, but especially the same patterns in us, and I’m talking about myself
personally. I’m talking about a collective reality, the way we see things in
this country, and I began to realize there’s an extraordinary denial in us as a
people when it comes to dealing with the question of systemic evil within our
system, right here, in much more profound ways than anybody on the left, for
example, is going to acknowledge any more than any of the rest of us is going
to acknowledge. When it comes to the Central Intelligence Agency being involved
in assassinations abroad, many people will acknowledge that. When it comes to
them doing exactly the same thing in this country, that’s another thing. We
don’t want to deal with that. So I think it’s a key to seeing [George Orwell’s]
1984 in action in 2000.
____________________________________________________________________
The year 2023 marks
sixty years since the Kennedy assassination, and thirty-two years since the
release of the film JFK. The film recounts the events leading to the
assassination, the murder of the president, and the one occasion when the
assassination was examined in a court of law. It explains the crime through the
non-fiction story of the former New Orleans district attorney Jim Garrison
(Kevin Costner) who, three years after the crime, began to “wake up” and
realize he could build a case around people in New Orleans whom he believed had
conspired with Lee Harvey Oswald (Gary Oldman) (the sole perpetrator, according
to the official government line) in the year before the assassination.
 |
| Kevin Costner as Jim Garrison in the courtroom scene of JFK |
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The Stones on the JFK assassination:
Oliver Stone: A conspiracy involving the CIA, the Pentagon, the FBI, the Secret Service, Cuban exiles, the Mafia, the oil industry, and the military industrial complex killed JFK and participated in the coverup of the crime.
Roger
Stone: Same as above, with an added emphasis on the complicity of President Lyndon
Johnson.
Rolling
Stones: I shouted out, “Who killed the Kennedys?” when after all it was you and
me.
____________________________________________________________________
At one point in the
film, Garrison seems to know he will lose his case, but assures his staff that
even if that is so, the effort will have been worthwhile. They were bringing
the assassination to light in a court of law, taking an early step in exposing
the crime and the coverup that followed it. In fact, it is hard to see how
Garrison could have got a conviction and proven definitively that Clay Shaw
conspired with Lee Harvey Oswald to kill the president. He tried to show that
Clay Shaw had links to the CIA. He brought forth witnesses who said they had
seen Shaw and Oswald together talking angrily with Cuban exiles about JFK and
vague plans to kill him, but he was not likely to get plea bargains or
confessions, or any evidence of Shaw paying assassins or giving logistical
support to an assassination plot. Garrison must have known that he was writing
history—speaking to the future by pulling the first strings in a very tangled
knot. He was laying the ground for future investigations by using the fear of
perjury charges to get sworn testimonies on the record. The best he could do
was to get testimony that linked Oswald to Shaw and Shaw to the CIA, then that
would be the first step for other investigations. If the trial had established
that Shaw had links to both the CIA and Oswald, that could have led to other
trials in which Shaw would be subpoenaed to testify against others. But such
compelled witnesses had a tendency to suddenly be suicided or killed in car
crashes on deserted highways. For a glimpse into the mind of the real Garrison
in 1969—not the characterization of him created by Stone and Costner—see the
long-lost interview with him republished in 2019 on the website Kennedys and
King.[8]
The film was criticized
for taking many creative liberties with reality, but with the passage of time
its virtues and accomplishments have become more apparent. It provided a
compelling history lesson for the large segment of the population that doesn’t usually
dive deep into history. Like the trial itself, it created a forum for a renewed
public discourse about the assassination.
Through monologues
dropped into the dramatic narrative, the film delivered what are, effectively,
two long history lectures to audiences who were expecting to be entertained in
the usual way, and this is the greatest and most original achievement of the film.
Writers of dramas have always said their mission is to instruct and delight,
but few Hollywood directors would dare to ask audiences to absorb so much
instruction. One lecture is given in the form of a twenty-minute monologue by
Mr. X, a
fictionalized character resembling Fletcher Prouty, a high-ranking intelligence
officer who resigned and became a critic of the intelligence establishment. He
authored JFK: The CIA, Vietnam, and the Plot to Assassinate John F. Kennedy.[9] The other lecture comes during Jim Garrison’s thirty-three-minute
climactic monologue during the trial of Clay Shaw. I call these lectures
because in their substance that is what they are, but they are placed into the
drama in a way that makes them flow seamlessly with the narrative.
Shaw was acquitted, but
in 1979, after his death, Richard Helms, Director of Covert Operations in 1963
(Director of Central Intelligence 1966 to1973), admitted under oath to the US
Senate’s Church Committee that Clay Shaw had worked for the CIA. This statement
vindicated Garrison and showed that Shaw had committed perjury when he said
during the trial that he had never had any association with the CIA.
____________________________________________________________________
Thucydides,
Richard Crawley (translator), The History of the Peloponnesian War
(Athens, 431 BC), CHAPTER XXV Oligarchical Coup d’Etat at Athens (Excerpt)
Meanwhile [the conspirators’] cry
in public was that… not more than five thousand should share in the government,
and those such as were most able to serve the state in person and in purse. But
this was a mere catchword for the multitude, as the authors of the revolution
were really to govern… they discussed nothing that was not approved of by the
conspirators, who both supplied the speakers and reviewed in advance what they
were to say. Fear, and the sight of the numbers of the conspirators, closed the
mouths of the rest; or if any ventured to rise in opposition, he was presently
put to death in some convenient way, and there was neither search for the
murderers nor justice to be had against them if suspected; but the people
remained motionless, being so thoroughly cowed that men thought themselves
lucky to escape violence, even when they held their tongues… it was impossible
for anyone to open his grief to a neighbor and to concert measures to defend
himself, as he would have had to speak either to one whom he did not know, or
whom he knew but did not trust. Indeed, all the popular party approached each
other with suspicion, each thinking his neighbor concerned in what was going
on, the conspirators having in their ranks persons whom no one could ever have
believed capable of joining an oligarchy; and these it was who made the many so
suspicious, and so helped to procure impunity for the few, by confirming the
commons in their mistrust of one another.
____________________________________________________________________
Part 2
On the left of the
American political spectrum there are generally two views about why Kennedy was
assassinated. Some say his intent in 1963 to end the Cold War and seek peace
with the communist world was the reason he was targeted. This view says that he
became a different man after the missile crisis and wanted to drastically alter
the course of the Cold War. He sought détente with Khrushchev and wanted to
reform the CIA, end American involvement in Vietnam and reconcile with Cuba. He
also intended to stop Israel form developing a nuclear arsenal. In Indonesia,
where the CIA had been carrying out a destabilization project for many years,
JFK wanted to help Sukarno stay in power and provide developmental aid. Inside
the US, he wanted to advance civil rights and eradicate the pervasive influence
of organized crime on American institutions. In June 1963, he made his famous
speech at American University (published in Pravda but not in the
American press) which seemed to indicate this new direction was sincere and
radical. Many believe these are the reasons he was assassinated by enemies
within the national security state.
The other view,
criticized by Michael Parenti in the citation above, holds that this talk of a
new direction was just talk, the elegant speechifying that Kennedy and other
presidents tailor according to what an audience wants to hear. In 2009, we
heard President Obama give a speech about ridding the world of nuclear weapons,
and he won the Nobel Peace Prize soon afterward. Yet during his time as
president, he approved the one-trillion-dollar plan to renew the US nuclear
arsenal, and he made no progress on disarmament. If he had died shortly after
his speech, like Kennedy, his early speeches might be held up endlessly as
evidence that he was the last great hope for world peace.
In Kennedy’s case, his
aspirational speeches frightened his domestic enemies into plotting against
him. He had not converted to Marxist-Leninist ideology, but his agenda was
still too much for the enormous financial interests that were threatened. He
was still anti-communist, but not anti-communist enough for extremists and weapons
makers who feared defense budget cuts and peaceful co-existence with
ideological foes. Kennedy never got a chance to act on his plan to end the Cold
War, so we will never know what he might have tried to accomplish or could have
actually accomplished. His greatest achievements were avoiding nuclear war in
October 1962 and the Limited Nuclear Test Ban Treaty of 1963 that halted
atmospheric nuclear tests. It is doubtful whether Richard Nixon or Lyndon
Johnson would have been able to peacefully resolve the Cuban Missile Crisis or
been interested in pursuing full ratification of the test ban treaty.
Aside from these achievements, however, it is likely that in order
to be re-elected in 1964, JFK would have spoken little about a transformative
agenda. Just talking about it
behind the scenes as a goal to pursue after re-election made him too much of a
threat to tolerate. The historical controversy about JFK’s true intentions exists
because he had to state conflicting messages. He had to say one thing publicly
to get re-elected while also saying, to more private audiences, that hardline
anti-communism was leading to a catastrophe.
Monika
Wiesak’s book America’s Last President, provides a thorough and
persuasive discussion of JFK’s progressive agenda on several fronts—his
confrontations with the CIA and Wall Street, his policies on Israel, Berlin, South
America, Cuba, Southeast Asia, and Africa, and his plans to further disarmament
and civil rights protections. She
reminds her readers that JFK was unique as a president for his knowledge of
economics, history, and the challenges faced by the de-colonizing world. He was
engaged in shaping policies to a degree that surprised and alarmed the
bureaucracies that were accustomed to telling presidents what to do. In her
conclusion she writes:
He tried to create a fairer
society, he tried to raise the living standards of the many, and he tried to create
opportunity for all. He respected self-determination and abhorred imperialism.
He was, in every imaginable way, the president of the people. His presidency
was one of those rare shining moments in history when the common man was
actually represented in the halls of power. He sought peace as a human right
and was murdered in the most inhuman way. The consequences of his murder
reverberate throughout our society today. There are the direct consequences
that likely would have been avoided: the Vietnam War, the slaughter in
Indonesia, the 1967 Six-Day War in the Middle East, the military dictatorship
in Congo, and the growing national security state at home.[10]
Perhaps the most famous critique of Kennedy as the
lost peacemaker is Noam Chomsky’s Rethinking Camelot, written in 1993 as
a response to Oliver Stone’s film. Chomsky contended that Kennedy only
talked peace from a position of strength which he thought he had gained from
“staring down” Khrushchev during the missile crisis:
As for the internal record, it reveals only JFK’s advocacy of
withdrawal after victory [in Vietnam] is secure, and exhortations to everyone
to “focus on winning the war.” It reveals further that the failure of the
Diem-Nhu regime to show sufficient enthusiasm for that task was a factor in the
effort of JFK and his advisers to overthrow it, only enhanced by the Diem-Nhu
gestures towards political settlement and the increasingly insistent calls for
US withdrawal. These were regarded as a dangerous threat, not an opportunity to
carry out the alleged intent to withdraw… It seems more than coincidental that
fascination with tales of intrigue about Camelot lost reached their peak in
1992 just as discontent with all institutions reached historic peaks, along
with a general sense of powerlessness and gloom about the future, and the
traditional one-party, two-faction candidate-producing mechanism was challenged
by a billionaire with a dubious past, a “blank slate” on which one’s favorite
dreams could be inscribed. The audiences differ, but the JFK-Perot movements
share a millenarian cast, reminiscent of the cargo cults of South Sea islanders
who await the return of the great ships with their bounty. These developments
tell us a good bit about the state of American culture at a time of general
malaise, unfocused anger and discontent, and effective dissolution of the means
for the public to become engaged in a constructive way in determining their
fate.[11]
As for the prospect that Kennedy’s “third way” Alliance for Progress offered much of an alternative to developing countries, Chomsky cites Stephen Rabe to make the point that in spite of the lofty rhetoric, Kennedy’s softer, kinder, less anti-communist Third World development plan was accompanied by an increase in support for repressive anti-communist regimes in Latin America:
Through its recognition policy, internal security initiatives, and
military and economic aid programs, the [Kennedy] Administration demonstrably
bolstered regimes and groups that were undemocratic, conservative, and
frequently repressive. The short-term security that anti-Communist elites could
provide was purchased at the expense of long-term political and social
democracy.[12]
Christopher Hitchens, back in the days before he supported such aggression as the US invasion of Iraq in 2003, agreed with Chomsky that Kennedy was far from being a “Camelot” figure. In the early 1990s when the “Kennedy as lost savior” theory was in full swing, thanks in part to Oliver Stone’s film, Christopher Hitchens commented wryly:
[The film JFK]
opens with Eisenhower saying America should beware of the military industrial
complex, but it fails to say that Kennedy ran against Eisenhower and Nixon from
the right, accusing them of selling the country to the Russians, accusing them
of giving Cuba away, inventing a missile gap that wasn’t there, and moving into
Vietnam… [The film said] the country lost its innocence by losing this man
[Kennedy]… A country that had been through Hiroshima and McCarthyism hadn’t any
innocence to lose… like everyone else in my generation, I can remember exactly
where I was standing on the fateful day when John Fitzgerald Kennedy nearly
killed me because I can remember the Cuba crisis and I can remember him, so far
from hating nuclear war and nuclear weapons, being prepared to risk nuclear war
for a quarrel with Cuba that he was conducting by means of a hit team,
originally, employing the Mafia to try and kill Castro.[13]
This theme was taken up later by Seymour Hersh in 1998 in his
harsh critique The Dark Side of Camelot
which covered mostly Kennedy’s reckless behavior with women that compromised
national security, left him open to blackmail, and would have ruined his
political career, if the fawning press had stopped turning a blind eye to his
behavior.[14] Like Hitchens, Hersh
was also critical of the film JFK for overlooking Kennedy’s
connections to organized crime. Hersh alleged that Joseph Kennedy had called on
the organized crime figure Sam Giancana to help his son get elected, thus they
expected to be left alone if JFK were elected. Instead, Robert Kennedy became
attorney general and aggressively prosecuted the Teamsters and organized crime.
The motives of organized crime for killing JFK are thus explained
as an attempt primarily to eliminate RFK. If they killed only RFK, JFK would still
be there to prosecute them. If they killed JFK instead, RFK would also be out
of power, and that is exactly what happened. Two birds with one stone. Another
theory states that two Kennedys were murdered because there was a possibility
that the family would become an invincible dynasty of one Kennedy brother after
another (followed by their children) being elected president for eight years at
a time. The danger was not that one president might end the Cold War during his
time in power but that a progressive agenda might be entrenched over several
decades.
No member of the Kennedy clan has spoken as frankly and critically
as Robert F. Kennedy Junior about the involvement of the security state in the
assassinations of the 1960s. He addressed Hersh’s allegation in his book American
Values, pointing out that it didn’t stand up to logic. He stated that the
story about connections to organized crime was largely a contrivance of Sam
Halpern, a CIA official who “took on the career-long task of tarring the
Kennedy name.” He asks:
Is it possible that my
father—his brother’s control-every-detail campaign manager—would authorize his
father to conspire with a fanatically vindictive villain [Giancana] to commit a
federal crime and fix a national election, having himself only a few months
earlier, not only picked a fight with this murderous gangster but also
humiliated him on national TV? … Is it possible that my grandfather, with his
abiding sense of propriety, would have gone behind the back of his two sons to
negotiate a reckless scheme with their sworn enemy—a caper that would have
brought down the entire campaign if Giancana chose to expose it?”[15]
James DiEugenio had more to say about Seymour Hersh’s sloppy work
on the Kennedys when Hersh was back in the limelight with his reporting on the
destruction of Nord Stream pipeline in September 2022.[16] In the case of The
Dark Side of Camelot, he details how Hersh relied on numerous unreliable
witnesses who turned out to be persons only loosely connected to events. They
had fabricated tales to sell to a press that was eager in the 1990s to peddle
salacious gossip about the Kennedy brothers. The book was thoroughly
discredited soon after its publication. DiEugenio faults Hersh for having never
admitted to getting burned by his sources or to his eagerness to go with a
source that confirmed his biases. One might think that in 2023, the Biden
administration would want to use DiEugenio’s report to discredit Hersh, but
then no one in the Washington establishment wants Americans to look at the
research on the assassinations of the 1960s that can be found on Kennedys
and King, the website where the article is published.
Stone and Garrison
addressed the question of the involvement of organized crime in the
assassination. In the film JFK when Jim Garrison is shown rejecting the
notion that the assassination could have been only a Mafia hit, he
states:
I don’t doubt their involvement at a low level. Could the mob
change the parade route? Or eliminate the protection for the President? Could
the mob send Oswald to Russia and get him back? Get the FBl, the CIA and the
Dallas Police to mess up the investigation? Get the Warren Commission appointed
to cover it up? Wreck the autopsy? Influence the national media to go to sleep?
Since when has the mob used anything but 38’s for hits up close? The mob
wouldn’t have the guts or the power for something of this magnitude. Assassins
need payrolls, schedules, times, orders. This was a military-style ambush
(02:11:30~).
Nonetheless, critics of the Kennedy legend are correct to point
out that JFK was a little too
hagiographic and sentimental, conveniently overlooking the side of Kennedy that
was not so different from presidents who came before and after him. Yet one can
still be outraged by the assassination conspiracy without having to hold onto
the idealized vision of a “lost king.” One need not even like JFK to be
outraged by his murder. The assassination removed the head of state chosen by
the American people.
____________________________________________________________________
Sex Scandals and the Tabloid Press
in the 1990s
Scandal reporting about the Kennedy
brothers reached its peak, curiously, after the film JFK was released in
1991. Reports appeared in the tabloid press in these years after both men were
dead and could not respond to allegations. Some of the tales were spread by
unreliable sources motivated by the desire for money and attention. It is also
likely that as time passed and fewer people accepted the findings of the Warren
Report, elements within government agencies found it useful feed these tabloids
in order to carry out the posthumous second assassination of the Kennedys; that
is, to knock the halo off their heads. It was a new way to muddy the waters and
pile absurd conspiracy theories on top of sound conspiracy theories. Whatever
truth there is to the allegations, if the Kennedy brothers had really had all
the affairs and done the dirty deeds attributed to them, they would have had no
time to sustain their political careers, perform their job duties or spend time
with their families. And JFK apparently did it all, apparently, with a bad back
and Addison’s disease. It’s also doubtful that such excesses could have been
hidden from the media and not used successfully by political rivals at the
time, regardless of what people say about things being different then.
Nonetheless, there is a great deal of corroboration in the accounts of persons
close to the Kennedy men saying they were indeed notorious for reckless sexual
behavior that limited their effectiveness in politics. However, much of the
“tabloid stuff” is obviously wild exaggeration—distracting, wild conspiracy
theory that serves to discredit all attempts to discover what really happened
in the political assassinations of the 1960s. Some dwell on the “dark side of
Camelot,” while others (particularly the Kennedy family) gloss it over, making
an equal effort to create unnecessary halos over the Kennedy brothers’ heads.
See James DiEugenio’s lengthy essay, The
Posthumous Assassination of JFK,
for more on this topic.[17]
____________________________________________________________________
In Stone’s documentary film and book The Untold History of
the United States, co-authored with historian Peter Kuznick, the assessment
of John Kennedy is more balanced than it is in the 1991 film. The authors note
the numerous domestic enemies Kennedy had made, but do not focus much on who
killed him or why. They simply state that the killers and their motives may
never be known. They also cite many of the contradictory statements made by
Kennedy, before and after the October 1962 crisis, as he discussed his foreign
policy, plans for Vietnam, and strategy for re-election. These suggest Kennedy
never gave up his personal belief that communism had to be challenged, and that
he would not sacrifice political survival by giving up the anti-communist
crusade—a stance which shifted blame to American voters. They note that he told
journalist Charles Bartlett:
We don’t have a prayer of staying in Vietnam. We don’t have a
prayer of prevailing there. Those people hate us. They are going to throw our
tails out of there at almost any point. But I can’t give up a piece of
territory like that to the Communists and then get the American people to
re-elect me.[18]
They go on to add:
In July 1963, [Kennedy] told a news conference that “for us to
withdraw from that effort would mean a collapse not only of South Vietnam but
Southeast Asia.” The fact that when he did discuss withdrawal, he made it
contingent upon being able to depart victoriously, also fed the belief that he
had no intention of changing course.[19]
Much of the confusion on this matter could be a result of people
equating Kennedy’s progressive agenda with a decision to stop fighting
communism. In 1963, Kennedy and Khrushchev sought ways to avoid a repeat of the
tensions that occurred during the 1962 missile crisis, but this does not mean
Kennedy would have stood aside while Latin America, newly independent African
nations, Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam, Indonesia, and The Philippines chose
socialism, or even a non-aligned form of economic nationalism that threatened
the interests of American corporations. Nonetheless, I have to conclude, after
having read the literature listed in the notes below over several years, that
Parenti was right and Chomsky was wrong on this matter. Kennedy was indeed
attempting what we can call in retrospect an American glasnost. He was
threatening to move the world in a direction that terrified the establishment,
even though he was not very radical and publicly he was saying every
conventional thing he needed to say to get re-elected. Privately and very quietly,
he was pushing a bolder agenda. The CIA knew about his backchannel “secret”
talks with Castro and Khrushchev, assisted by the “uppity” female television
journalist Lisa Howard, who would be “suicided” in 1965. Banks, oil companies,
steel makers, the Teamsters, the automobile manufacturers, racial
segregationists, and organized crime could not allow any drift in this
direction. If Kennedy still seemed to be maintaining the usual American foreign
policy, one must keep in mind that he was operating in a system with many
checks and balances on his power, some of them constitutional, others not. The
mighty ship of state is a massive oil tanker guided by corporate interests, and
it cannot be easily steered to a new course. Throughout his presidency, Kennedy
navigated by making contradictory statements about his plans. Some days he was
the visionary peacemaker, but the next day he would speak about the need to
maintain the standard cold war policy.
The assassination stands as the crime of the century, as far as
Americans should be concerned. It was the event that shattered illusions of
American superior virtue on the world stage, and it illustrated what Lenin
called “the trusts” would do to eliminate any threat to their power. They have
done it every time they felt threatened in all the years of bourgeois democracy
since the defeat of the Jacobins in 1794 (admittedly, an arbitrary cutoff
point, but a significant turning point from feudalism to capitalism). The
coverup led to what the common man and woman, on both the right and left, now
call “fake news” in the establishment media. The credibility of corporate media
is gone. The official explanation put forth in the Warren Commission, supported
still by The New York Times and The Washington Post, was just too
ludicrous for most of the American public to swallow. There have been many
subsequent state crimes against democracy since 1963, so the JFK assassination
can be studied as an iteration of similar coups going back to ancient
civilization, or the mother of all state crimes in the modern era.[20]
Part 3
Many critics of the film
JFK objected to the dramatic license it took with portraying the facts,
but it was, after all, entertainment, not an academic study with pages of
endnotes to support its hundreds of claims—though it was based on such academic
research. Oliver Stone and other staff, and some of the cast, did enormous
amounts of research. Yet they had to tell the story through actors playing the
roles of real people involved in the investigation conducted by Jim Garrison.
The dialogue had to be made up, and certain creative freedom had to be taken in
creating dramatic tension among the characters and in creating composite
characters. There are valid objections to raise about bending the truth of
these people’s lives to fit the story into a three-hour film, but this should
not take anything away from the great merit of the film.
The historian Grover
Proctor wrote in his review of the film:
In “fictionalizing” the story, Stone has collapsed long, laborious
facts, witness lists, and theories into one speech or one character, a
time-honored device dating to Shakespeare and beyond. Kevin Bacon plays New
Orleans low-life Willie O’Keefe, a fictional character, but one whose words and
actions are an accurate composite of testimony collected from several
witnesses… what Stone has chosen to do is not to make a biography of DA (later
Louisiana 4th Circuit Court of Appeal Judge) Jim Garrison, but to create in
Costner’s character a mythological Everyman of the various critics and
researchers throughout the years. When viewed that way, the myth comes round
full circle, and Stone can be seen to have painted a crystal clear, if
impressionistic, view of twenty-eight years in the lives of the researchers…
And lest anyone forget, Stone has graphically and accurately portrayed most of
the really significant conundrums faced by believers in the “lone nut” theory…
On the other more symbolic or metaphorical level, Stone has fashioned a full
view of the motivations, fears, triumphs, and despair of those who dared to
question the official version. Following the Costner/Garrison character through
his epiphany mirrors exactly the collective experiences of the critics through
the years. Admittedly, not all of them are the saints of pure heart and
unblemished motivation that Stone writes and Costner portrays. But the
development, from initial doubt through startling revelation, on to emboldened
crusader, all the while traversing periods of doubt, fear, paranoia,
frustration, and triumph, is one with which all the critics can identify.[21]
JFK reminded the older
generation, and told a new generation, about an extraordinary period in world
history, and it challenged people once again to wake up and stop denying the
uncomfortable truth about the erosion of democracy everywhere, not only in the United
States. In 2016, after having written a book about the CIA,[22] journalist David Talbot
re-assessed his original criticism of the film by saying it should be
appreciated for the “emotional truth” that it told.[23] As Roger Ebert put it
in 1991 in a rare positive review published in a major American newspaper:
The achievement of the film is not that it answers the mystery of
the Kennedy assassination, because it does not, or even that it vindicates
Garrison, who is seen here as a man often whistling in the dark. Its
achievement is that it tries to marshal the anger which ever since 1963 has
been gnawing away on some dark shelf of the national psyche.[24]
A curious thing about JFK is that it failed to
receive other positive reviews in the establishment media. The smear campaign
against it was so obvious that it re-affirmed public perceptions of a CIA-led
cover-up, with the CIA narrative being fed to its reliable assets in the mass
media before the film’s release. Despite all the attempts to smear the film, it
was favored with awards and financial success.
____________________________________________________________________
Michael Parenti, “The JFK Assassination: Defending the
Gangster State,” Dirty Truths (City Lights Publishing,1996, 2001)
Ignoring this 80 percent
of the literature, publications like the New
York Times and Washington Post
have listed the various theories about the JFK assassination as follows: (a)
lone assassin, (b) mafia, (c) Cubans/Soviets, and (d) the “Oliver Stone movie
theory.” In other words, they ignore the existence of a vast literature from
which the movie is derived and ascribe the critical theme presented within the
film solely to the imagination of a filmmaker. The mainstream press would have
us believe that the notion of a state-sponsored assassination conspiracy and
cover-up came out of a movie—when actually the movie was based on a rich and
revealing investigative literature.
____________________________________________________________________
An additional motivation for the assassination was put forward
quite well by the comedian Bill Hicks in the early 1990s. He admitted being
obsessed about the assassination because it was the pivotal moment that
revealed to Americans that they were now living under a totalitarian form of
government, and he was amazed that so many people wanted to forget about it and
stay asleep. His theory:
I love talking about the Kennedy assassination... You can actually
go to the 6th floor of the schoolbook depository. It’s a museum called The
Assassination Museum, I think, named that after the assassination. I
can’t be too sure of the chronology here, but anyway, they have the window set
up to look exactly like it did on that day, and it’s really accurate because
Oswald’s not in it! Painstaking accuracy. It’s true. It’s called the Sniper’s
Nest. It’s glassed in. It’s got the boxes sitting there. You can’t actually get
to the window itself, and the reason they did that, of course, is they didn’t
want thousands of American tourists there each year going, “No fucking way! I
can’t even see the road...”
(See video clip here).
There’s a handful of people who actually run everything. That’s
true. It’s provable. I’m not a conspiracy nut. It’s provable—a handful, a very
small elite running these corporations, which include the mainstream media. I
had this feeling that whoever is elected president, like Clinton was, no matter
what your promises on the campaign trail were, when you win, you go into this
smoky room with the twelve industrialists, capitalists… who got you in there,
and you’re in this smoky room and this little film screen comes down and a big
guy with a cigar says, “Roll the film.” And it’s a shot of the Kennedy
assassination from an angle you’ve never seen before that looks suspiciously
off the grassy knoll. And the screen goes up, and the lights come up, and they
say to the new president, “Any questions?” (See the video clip here) [25]
This joke speaks to one of the key objectives of political
assassination. Just as in nuclear madman theory, a demonstrated willingness to
engage in violence is meant to deter. There was no modern example of a
deterring assassination for Kennedy to look back on, which explains why he was
not more careful and more ruthless in dealing with those who threatened his
power. If he rode in that open car, he must have thought assassination just
wasn’t possible. Instead of just firing Allen Dulles, head of the CIA, he
should have followed up by prosecuting him for his crimes. Instead, in
retirement, Dulles was able to meet at his home with a constant stream of loyal
agents. This deterrence theory also explains why assassinations stopped after
the 1960s. The deterrent was in place. Assassinations stopped, just like
atmospheric nuclear testing was never re-started by the US, UK, and the USSR
because it was too risky even to those in power and was no longer necessary to
prove that the bombs worked. Every president since then has had the
assassination in the back of his mind. As Jim Garrison says in the film:
The assassination reduced the president to a transient official.
His job is to speak as often as possible of the nation’s desire for peace while
he acts as a business agent in the Congress for the military and their
contractors.
Perhaps in the mid-21st century, when the Kennedy assassination is
as remote as the Lincoln assassination was to Kennedy, there will be another
reminder about who is in charge, but as Senator Gary Hart pointed out, “There
are other ways to assassinate a leader these days. You can assassinate his
character.”[26] Hart experienced such
assassination personally. Perhaps the CIA just realized there were too many
hassles involved in what the mob calls “wet work.” Furthermore, in the 1980s,
covert operations went overt when the US government invested heavily in “democracy
promotion” through the National Endowment for Democracy and other agencies that
funneled money to foreign countries through layers of NGOs, publishers, and
research foundations.[27] The emphasis now is on
propagandizing both the international and domestic population.
Domestic political assassinations may be passé, but this is not to
say that they ever stopped in foreign countries, or didn’t find different
low-profile domestic targets, and this leads finally to what is so disturbing
about Americans who cry over their lost paragon of virtue, their shattered
democracy. As in many books and public discussions of the assassination, in the
film JFK many of the characters
express their shock that an elected president could be assassinated here, in America! and they cry over this
tragic assault on their democracy. But there is much less outrage about Arbenz
in Guatemala, Mossadegh in Iran, or Lumumba in Congo, all overthrown and/or
assassinated by the US before Kennedy became president.
In the film, Garrison concluded that a coup d’état had taken place in the United States, but the film, and
many writers and scholars on the assassinations of the 1960s, portray this as
something shocking and unbelievable, not as something that should have been
viewed as the chickens coming home to roost (as Malcolm X said at the time)—the
natural result of having run “black ops” in foreign lands for so long. In the
film, Mr. X, the deep state source who quit after the assassination, mentions
the CIA’s rehabilitation of Nazis after WWII, foreign coups, and black
operations, but he expresses no regret about having worked on these projects.
It was only the Kennedy assassination that prompted him to resign, and likewise
only the Kennedy assassination that caused many Americans to feel that
something very tragic had happened to their
country. JFK makes a reference to the suffering inflicted abroad in the
final scroll that comes after the last scene with the mention of “Two
million Asian lives lost” in Southeast Asia.
After the 1960s, the wars, coups, and assassinations continued
elsewhere. When the film JFK was
released, Gorbachev was still hanging on to power in the USSR. He resigned and
folded up the Soviet Union on December 25th, 1991. The first Gulf War had
occurred earlier that year, after President Bush had declared the new unipolar
world order. Bill Clinton became president in January 1993 and oversaw the
covert American takeover of Central Africa in pursuit of control of Congolese
resources and strategic control of Africa. Two presidents, Juvénal Habyarimana
of Rwanda and Cyprien Ntaryamira of Burundi, were assassinated by the
American-backed Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) on April 6, 1994. Contrary to the
accepted narrative of the time, it is becoming more accepted and understood
that the mass killings of 1994 did not occur because of an American failure to
act. They occurred because of American actions—the decision that the
French-backed Rwandan government needed to be eliminated by supporting an
invasion by the Uganda-based RPF.[28]
Finally, one interesting question that arises from everything that
has been published on the assassination is why the shocking allegations are
allowed to be exposed at all. If the conspirators were capable of such a
diabolical cover-up, why could they not cover up everything and intimidate or
eliminate everyone who would shine light on the crime? If the situation is
really as grim as Jim Garrison said it was, how could a film like JFK be unleashed on a mass audience
without causing a fear that the masses would rise up and overthrow the security
state? Some even say that that Stone’s version contained a lot of diversionary
information (a “limited hangout,” in CIA lingo) that the CIA was actually happy
to have in circulation. Francis Conolly asserts this in his film and book JFK
to 911 Everything is a Rich Man’s Trick, and states as an example that
Stone and most researchers miss the fact that the fatal head shot was fired
from a sewer drain in the curb and not from the grassy knoll. Furthermore,
while Stone’s film goes into great detail about the strange autopsy of JFK,
Conolly adds something else that was missing in the film JFK: the even
stranger story concerning the autopsy of J.D. Tippit, the Dallas police officer
allegedly shot by Oswald. Conolly contends that Tippit was a JFK lookalike who
was killed in case a body double was needed (and it was needed) to replace JFK
in the autopsy.[29]
A certain amount of openness allows for the growth of a confusing
and wild array of disinformation and conspiracy theory that sensible and busy
people avoid, which thereby advances the idea that interest in the
assassinations of the 1960s is a concern only for “conspiracy whackos.” The CIA
can pour its own distracting and confusing tales into this mix and all the
while America still seems to be a land of free speech. The lack of obvious
suppression is re-assuring to the public. Sometimes the best cover-up is no
cover-up—the “hiding in plain sight” strategy. People like Oliver Stone can
then be submitted to coordinated attacks to discredit their work and create
perpetual doubt about it. They can also be associated with truly delusional
conspiracy theories to discredit them further. The CIA invented and spread the
term “conspiracy theorist” in the mid-1960s precisely to deal with the mounting
criticism of the Warren Report. This CIA invention is still proving useful, for
example, to discredit anyone who has a dissenting view on the worldwide
coordinated reaction to the corona virus pandemic.
One important factor is that in some cases the famous critics have
too much light on them to be eliminated, and they were not directly involved in
the assassination as witnesses or accessories to the crime. Their statements
are not likely to become testimony in a trial. Jim Marrs, in his book Crossfire,
noted a long list of non-famous people who were a threat, people who were
“loose ends” that needed to be dealt with after the assassination. The list
included eighteen “convenient deaths” of material witnesses, and eighty-two
“early deaths” and “strange deaths” that consisted of gangsters, soldiers, FBI
and CIA agents, police officers, journalists and passersby who just happened to
witness something—all of them people who could bring incriminating evidence to
a court or a congressional investigation. These people died by violence,
accident, suspicious suicides, or apparent natural causes, many of them well
before the average age of life expectancy. Judgment about what amounts to
unlikely or meaningful coincidence is a matter of subjective interpretation,
but what makes many of these deaths significant is that at the time of death,
these people were about to testify or publish information regarding the
assassinations.[30] It is the timing that
is the statistical improbability.
Curiously, many male researchers and journalists who took on the
CIA, such as Oliver Stone, survived, but some female colleagues who pursued the
same lines of inquiry did not. Dorothy Kilgallen (1913-1965), Lisa Howard
(1930-1965) (two high-profile television journalists in the early 1960s) [31] and Mary Meyer (1920-1964) (ex-wife of
high-ranking CIA officer Cord Meyer and JFK’s lover during his presidency) all
died suspicious deaths in the prime of their lives. The first two died of
suicidal poisonings because, don’t you know, tough, successful, and tenacious
female journalists just have a tendency to suddenly—as soon as they are a
threat to power—become despondent and suicidal for the first time in their
lives. Mary Meyer was shot in daylight while walking through a Washington park
shortly after she started to speak out about the flaws in the Warren Report.[32]
There were many men in the list of “early deaths” compiled by Jim
Marrs, but perhaps women were more likely to be killed because the people they
threatened could not fight them out in the open as they would fight men. These
women had high moral authority and were popular with a mass audience. A
gentleman could not “drag women through the mud,” ridicule them as conspiracy
nuts, or make them targets of character assassination, but quietly committing
murder was always a possibility for “honorable men,” in the sense used by
Shakespeare in Julius Caesar. Another such case that comes to mind is
the death of Karen Silkwood, though in her case, the issue was the nuclear
weapons industry rather than the Kennedy assassination.
Related to the question above is the question of why an
assassination plot that had so many risks of exposure still went ahead. The
conspirators must have known there would be too many witnesses hearing the
gunshots from multiple directions, too high a chance of amateur photographers
filming the event, too high a chance of missing the shot or killing the wrong
target, too much audacity in expecting people to accept the “magic bullet” and
“lone nut” explanations. What were they thinking? They could have killed him
out of public view, in a way that might have even seemed like natural causes.
Yes, but then there would be no way to shift suspicion away from government
insiders onto a “lonely, unknown drifter.” The preference was to do an
execution in public in order to mess with the public mind. To what must have
been their own surprise, the killers learned that their outrageous lie had no
serious consequences, even after they had missed the first few shots and been
forced to sell the magic bullet theory and hide the Zapruder film from the
American public. No matter how contrived their explanations became, there were
still journalists and politicians of high standing who were willing to support
the “lone gunman” explanation.[33] It was a great mass
psychology experiment that provided valuable lessons about and valuable
benefits of mass psychological control. The gaslighting works. Most
people don’t want to believe what happened right in front of their eyes. The
cognitive dissonance was too much. Citizens and skeptics inside the media and
the political establishment were powerless to change the situation. The shadow
government can let books and films expose the crime, and the assassins can
stare back in smug silence saying, “So what?” The destruction of the Nord
Stream pipeline in the present age is an example of a similar phenomenon. The
audacity of the crime is unprecedented, yet the perpetrators maintain their
stony silence. Everyone knows who did but no one calls for justice.
____________________________________________________________________
In a speech given in
2016, journalist David Talbot related the substance of his interviews with Gary
Hart, one of the senators on the Church Committee that investigated the CIA in
the 1970s:
One of the most
aggressive investigators on the Church Committee was Senator Gary Hart… Hart
said, “The whole atmosphere down there in South Florida was so yeasty. I don’t
think Helms [head of the CIA] or anybody had control of the thing.” … Hart,
based on his participation on the Church Committee, as a member of Congress
with access, [said], “There was a conspiracy of rabid anti-Castro elements,
security state, and mafia figures all intermingled. There were people
clandestinely meeting people, the Mafia connections, the friendships between
the Mafia and CIA agents, and this crazy Cuban exile community. There were more
and more layers, and it was honeycombed with bizarre people. I don’t think
anybody knew everything that was going on, and I think the Kennedys were racing
to keep up with it all.” … Hart too concluded that Kennedy was likely killed by
a conspiracy involving some feverish cabal from the swamps of anti-Castro
zealotry. When he ran for president in 1984, Hart says whenever he was asked
about the assassination, “My consistent response was, based on my Church
Committee experience, there are sufficient doubts to justify re-opening the
files of the CIA, particularly in its relationship to the Mafia.”[34]
____________________________________________________________________
“I
don’t know why I come here, knowing as I do what you really think of me, what I
really think of you. For the innermost decision that we cannot but obey, for
what’s left of our religion, I lift my voice and pray: may the lights in The
Land of Plenty shine on the truth someday.” - Leonard Cohen, The Land of Plenty
(2001)
Further Reading
1. Were Cuba and Vietnam
distractions from the real motive for the assassination? Was the CIA more
concerned about whether Kennedy might let Indonesia “go red”? See The CIA’s Involvement in Indonesia
and the Assassinations of JFK and Dag Hammarskjold.
2. How Stalin dealt with and survived an assassination crisis and power struggles within his own government. Did he have some survival instincts that Kennedy lacked? Read about Stalin’s handling of the Kirov assassination. Does the American system need something more drastic than just early retirement for CIA officials who challenge presidential authority?
Appendix
Information about the John F. Kennedy assassination
conveyed in Oliver Stone’s JFK. As expressed by Michael Parenti in the quote
above, this information is not the product of the fevered imagination of a
Hollywood script writer. It is based on the cited works by Jim Marrs and Jim
Garrison (notes 6 and 7 below), as well as on the research done by Oliver Stone
and his staff.
1.
The
Warren Commission, the official government word on the assassination, claimed
that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone. The film explained the numerous reasons
this claim was impossible to believe.
2.
Fifty-one
witnesses in Dealey Plaza said they heard shots from a second location, behind
the white picket fence on the “grassy knoll.”
3.
The
parade route was diverted from its most logical route along Main Street. Instead,
it turned right onto Houston Street then left onto Elm Street, where the
president was shot.
4.
Army
and Secret Service Security were told to stand down that day.
5.
Security
presence in Dealey Plaza was unusually light.
6.
Normally,
a sniper in a window would have been spotted by Secret Service snipers.
7.
Dallas
officials and some police officers were known to be virulently opposed to
Kennedy.
8.
Oswald
was alleged to have used an Italian rifle that would have been a poor choice
for the job.
9.
Oswald
was known to have poor skills as a sniper.
10.
Oswald
couldn’t have fired all the shots that were heard within the timeframe
established by the Zapruder film.
11.
Oswald’s
line of sight was blocked by a Texas live oak tree, which doesn’t lose its
foliage until long after November.
12.
Oswald
had a better line of sight when the motorcade turned onto Houston Street, but
Kennedy was not killed until the motorcade had turned the next corner onto Elm
Street.
13.
By
waiting to shoot until after the motorcade made this final turn, Kennedy was in
the line of sight of shooters in three positions. He was triangulated in the
so-called “turkey shoot.”
14.
The
Zapruder film clearly showed a shot hitting Kennedy’s head from his front right
side, consistent with a shot from the grassy knoll.
15.
The
Warren Commission accounted for all seven wounds on Kennedy and Connally by
positing a “magic bullet” that changed direction several times.
16.
Witnesses
reported encountering Secret Service Agents in and around Dealey Plaza after
the killing, but official records say none were present.
17.
A
witness in the lot behind the grassy knoll saw several suspicious people coming
and going from the lot in the hour before the murder. He later died in
suspicious circumstances.
18.
The
CIA destroyed files on Oswald after the assassination.
19.
Oswald
had had a strange career in which he was taught Russian during his military
service, then he effortlessly defected to the USSR, then effortlessly returned
with a Russian wife, after which time he worked with anti-Castro,
anti-communist groups in New Orleans. Sometimes he posed as a pro-Castro
activist, seemingly to spy on pro-Castro groups or to foster an identity as a
communist.
20.
Oswald
may not have known for what purpose his reputation as a communist was being
developed. After the assassination, witnesses gave reports of Oswald being in
Dallas and Mexico. These imposters deliberately identified themselves as
Oswald, allegedly to create an reputation of him being a communist with ties to
Castro and a hatred for Kennedy. These imposters performed angry outbursts that
witnesses would remember. He was being set up as a patsy.
21.
Mafia
figures were likely involved, but it would have been impossible for them to
carry out such a complex operation and the cover-up afterwards.
22.
The
operation was layered to deceive most of the participants or keep them in the
dark about the overall objective. The “five bullets, one blank” strategy of a
firing squad was implemented. No one would be responsible.
23.
Kennedy’s
body was quickly removed from Dallas. Under Texas law, the autopsy should have
been done by the Dallas coroner. The autopsy was done badly at a military base
in Bethesda, Maryland, supervised by generals and admirals. The doctor
performing the autopsy was instructed not to fully examine the wounds and to
burn his notes afterwards.
24.
The
Zapruder film was the unexpected element that the conspirators could not
counter effectively.
25.
The
public was not allowed to see the Zapruder for many years.
26.
The
president’s limousine and Connally’s suit were both cleaned before being
examined by forensic experts.
27.
Two
days after the assassination, Jack Ruby, a nightclub owner with Mafia
connections, was given access to Dallas Police Headquarters in order to shoot
Oswald.
28.
If
the leader of the Soviet Union had allegedly been killed by a “lone nut
gunman,” and that suspect had been killed two days later, would anyone in the
United States believe that a coup d’etat
had not taken place?
29.
The
Warren Commission was viewed as fiction within the CIA.
30.
Allen
Dulles was fired by Kennedy but ended up as a leading figure on the Warren
Commission.
31.
Kennedy
told General Lemnitzer, chairman of the Joint Chiefs that the Joint Chiefs
would be wholly responsible for all covert paramilitary action in peacetime.
This would have ended the reign of the CIA, but the policy was never
successfully implemented.
32.
A
fictitious character, Mr. X, is a retired officer from an unidentified security
agency. He is said to have been based on the veteran intelligence operative and
author Fletcher Prouty. He refused to testify for Garrison, but he encouraged
him to pursue his investigation because he must finish what he has started. Mr.
X assured him he would not be killed because he was too high-profile, with too
much light shining on him.
33.
Mr.
X tells Garrison he was diverted to another mission just before the
assassination, in order to keep him from his duties that involved protecting
the president while he was traveling.
34.
On
the day of the assassination, the entire federal cabinet was in Asia.
35.
A
combat division was returning to the US, possibly to manage internal security
if social order broke down.
36.
Telephones
were down in Washington for an hour after the assassination.
37.
A
large volume of information about Oswald was available to foreign and domestic
media immediately after his arrest. His guilt was announced before any
investigation had begun.
38.
It
was common for the CIA to operate front businesses and have contacts with local
businessmen like Clay Shaw.
39.
Garrison
accused President Johnson of being an accessory
after the crime, and benefitting from it, alluding to the possibility that
President Johnson had foreknowledge or was a conspirator.[35]
40.
The
film mentioned the billions of dollars gained by the defense industry because
of the war fought in Southeast Asia for the next ten years.
41.
Garrison
referred to the fact that there had been numerous political murders disguised
as heart attacks, suicides, cancers, drug overdoses, and plane and car crashes.
42.
English
poet John Harington is quoted: “Treason doth never prosper. What’s the reason?
For if it prosper, none dare call it treason.”
43.
There
was a notable divergence between public opinion and official views held by
government and media companies.
44.
In
spite of government and media attempts to destroy Garrison’s reputation, he had
popular support. He was re-elected in 1978 and he was given financial support
from thousands of small donors, and many witnesses took great risks to come
forward and testify.
45.
The
American constitution was written with government in mind as the biggest threat
to guard against.
46.
The
jury did not rule out the possibility of a conspiracy, but they found there was
not enough evidence to show that Shaw was a part of a conspiracy.
47.
Clay
Shaw died in 1974 of lung cancer. No autopsy was allowed.
48.
In
1979, Richard Helms, Director of Covert Operations in 1963, admitted under oath
that Clay Shaw had worked for the CIA, which confirmed that Clay Shaw had
committed perjury during his trial.
49.
A
Congressional Investigation from 1976-1979 found a “probable conspiracy” in the
assassination of John F. Kennedy and recommended the Justice Department
investigate further. As of 1991, the Justice Department had taken no action on
this recommendation.
50.
The
files of the House Select Committee on Assassinations are locked away until the
year 2029.
51. As a result of the film JFK, in 1992 Congress passed legislation to appoint a panel to review all files and determine which ones would be made available to the American public.
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Notes
[1] Michael Parenti, The
JFK Assassination and the Gangster Nature of the State, Berkely, California, November
22,1993, 47:15~. See also Michael Parenti’s book Dirty Truths (City
Lights Publishers, 1996, 2001) for a printed version of this lecture.
[2] Chris Hedges, “Sheldon Wolin and
Inverted Totalitarianism,” Truthdig,
November 2, 2015.
[3]
Benjamin Schwarz, “The Real Cuban Missile Crisis,” The Atlantic,
January/February, 2013.
[4] Tyler Durden, “Russia Eyeing
Military Base In Cuba As US Prepares To Leave Nuclear Missile Deal,” Zerohedge, October 31, 2018.
[5] James W. Douglass, JFK and the
Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters (Orbis Books,
2008).
[6] Jim Garrison, On the Trail of the Assassins: My
Investigation and Prosecution of the Murder of President Kennedy (Sheridan
Square, 1988).
[7] Jim Marrs, Crossfire: The Plot that Killed Kennedy (Basic
Books, 1989, 2013).
[8] “Garrison
Interview, ‘Some Unauthorized Comments on the State of the Union’ (May 27,
1969),”
Kennedys and King, August 6, 2019.
[9] Fletcher Prouty, JFK: The CIA, Vietnam, and the Plot to
Assassinate John F. Kennedy (Carol Publishing Group, 1996).
[10] Monika Wiesak, America’s
Last President: What the World Lost When It Lost John F. Kennedy (2022),
284.
[11] Noam Chomsky, Rethinking Camelot: JFK, the Vietnam
War, and U.S. Political Culture (South End Press, 1993).
[12] Stephen Rabe in Thomas G. Paterson, Kennedy’s Quest
for Victory: American Foreign Policy, 1961-1963 (Oxford University
Press, 1989).
[13] “The
Late Show,” BBC2 (date not given,
probably 1991-92, near the time of the release of the film JFK).
[14] Seymour Hersh, Dark Side of Camelot (Back Bay Books, 1997).
[15] Robert F. Kennedy
Jr., American Values: Lessons Learned from My Family (Harper Perennial,
2018), 148-149.
[16] James DiEugenio,
“Sy Hersh Falls on
His Face Again, and Again, and Again,” Kennedys and King, March 12,
2023.
[17] James DiEugenio,
“The Posthumous
Assassination of John F. Kennedy,” Kennedys and King, December 15,
1997.
[18] Peter Kuznick and Oliver Stone, The Untold History of
the United States (Ebury Publishing, 2012), 315.
[19] Ibid, 316.
[20] Lance
DeHaven-Smith, Conspiracy Theory in America (University
of Texas Press, 2013). This author coined the term “state crimes against
democracy” to refer to all the occasions when the justice system failed to
investigate and prosecute government officials who had violated the law and the
constitution in order to commit crimes or cover them up after exposure.
[21] Grover B. Proctor, “Oliver
Stone’s JFK: A Historical Analysis,” 1991.
[22] David Talbot, The Devil’s Chessboard: Allen Dulles, The CIA and the Rise
of America’s Secret Government (William Collins, 2016).
[23] David Talbot, “Insiders’
Report on the Warren Report,”
Assassination and Archives Research
Center Symposium, September 2016, broadcast originally on CSPAN.
[24] Roger Ebert, “JFK” (review), rogerebert.com, December 20, 1991.
Originally published in The Chicago
Sun-Times.
[25] Bill
Hicks, Rant in E-Minor
(Rykodisc,1997), from shows performed in 1992-93 (1:02:40~). The entire album
or the segments cited here may be available on YouTube. Like Jack Ruby, Bill
Hicks died of a sudden onset of aggressive cancer, in his case at the young age
of 32.
[26] David Talbot, at
27:40 in the video (note 19).
[27] Sean Gervasi, “How the US Caused
the Breakup of the Soviet Union,” Global
Research, November 24, 2017, based on a lecture delivered in 1992.
[28] Christopher
Black, “Top Secret: Rwanda
War Crimes Cover-Up,”
New Eastern Outlook, October 22,
2018.
[29] Francis Richard
Conolly, JFK to 911 Everything is a Rich
Man’s Trick (Trine Day LLC, 2018, 2021). The book version
came after the success of the film
version on YouTube. The film was repeatedly removed
from YouTube channels, but it has been downloaded and uploaded many times by
enthusiasts of the film and thus has reached an audience of millions. Conolly
may be correct about everything he asserts, but he has dodged the old truism
that remarkable claims require remarkable evidence. His work is compelling and
insightful, but he did not do what every history undergraduate must do to get a
passing grade: he provided no endnotes or precise citations that researchers
could use to evaluate the sources of his astounding claims. He doesn’t tell us
in-text what his primary sources are. Other historians would want to know if
there is corroboration by reliable sources for some of the very original claims
he makes. There is a bibliography that lists 18 authors and 33 books, nine of
them books by Joachim Joesten, so those may be the source for most of his
spectacular assertions (i.e. Mao Zedong was put in power by capitalists in
order to create a necessary communist enemy), but this author is not mentioned
in-text. It is strange that Conolly does not follow standard referencing
practices yet writes of his work not being taken seriously.
[30] Jim Marrs, 529-537.
[31] Mark Lane, Last Word: My Indictment of the CIA in the Murder of JFK
(Skyhorse, 2021), 28-30, 36-41. Mark Lane notes that Dorothy Kilgallen was in
possession of explosive evidence she obtained at the trial of Jack Ruby, and
she was determined to bring it to light soon. One might accept her death as
accidental if her autopsy showed traces of alcohol and one type of
barbiturate, but three types were found in her blood in addition to
traces of quinine, a substance which would have covered the bitter taste of the
poisons. Lisa Howard had interviewed Castro for ABC News while JFK
was still alive. She was also working for JFK as a back-channel facilitator of
normalized relations. She was part of JFK’s attempt to go around the CIA and
hawks in other sectors of the government. She continued to work on this issue
during the Johnson presidency and quit her job in journalism to work for
Senator Eugene McCarthy. According to Lane, the CIA regarded her work
advocating for peaceful relations with Cuba as an obstacle to the government’s
objectives. She died from an overdose of sedatives like Dorothy Kilgallen. In
her case she died while struggling to walk to a pharmacy to get treatment for
whatever poison was in her.
[32] Peter Janney, Mary’s Mosaic: The CIA Conspiracy to Murder JFK, Mary
Pinchot-Meyer and their Vision for World Peace (Skyhorse, 2013, 2016). See
the author’s review of the book here.
[33] Philip Shenon, “A Cruel and Shocking Act: The Secret History of the
Kennedy Assassination.” Sarah Lawrence College, February 7, 2015.
The speaker in this video discusses his book of the same title (Abacus,
2012). He is a former New York Times correspondent who says in the video
he was able to retire from the New York Times after writing this best-
seller about the Kennedy assassination. He is an example of the sort of highly
placed, sophisticated intellectual who is willing to do the CIA’s bidding by
perpetuating the Warren Commission conclusion that Oswald acted alone. It must
be just a coincidence that his career as an author started to pay so well
(after writing one of hundreds of books about the JFK assassination) that he
could quit the New York Times. There could not have been a coordinated
effort to make sure this book had eighteen favorable editorial reviews by
mainstream journals listed on Amazon under the Kindle edition of the book.
Amazon, beneficiary of a $600 million CIA contract, practically gives away this
641-page book for $4.92 as a Kindle book (discounted from $22). Amazon really
wants you to read it. The author tells us that the Warren Commission—consisting
of men of the highest legal training and government experience, and the CIA—the
most effective intelligence agency in the world—were just a bunch of clumsy bad
cops who couldn’t shoot straight (except on 1963/11/22). They worked under time
limits with so much pressure. They were busy men with other duties. Gosh
darnit, how were they supposed to know that there were CIA files showing Oswald
was in Mexico City in September 1963, visiting the Cuban and Soviet embassies and
announcing plans to kill JFK? Shenon claims it was just a big bureaucratic
oversight that caused them to miss this detail. However, he ignores the fact
that David Atlee Phillips, one of the top people in the CIA at the time,
admitted in a university lecture in the 1970s (contradicting his testimony to
Congress) that the CIA never had any evidence that Oswald was in Mexico City.
Because it was an Oswald imposter who was seen there, identifying himself as
Oswald and advertising his Soviet connections and intent to kill JFK, it is
clear that he was an imposter sent there in order to set Oswald up as the
patsy. After the assassination, President Johnson warned the Warren Commission
to not pursue the Soviet connection because he claimed it could enrage the
world and start WWIII. As a result, the CIA had to bury the contrived Mexico
City story and the whole attempt to link Oswald to foreign powers, and the
Warren Commission backed off also. Mark Lane, in Final Word (pages
223-235, note 27, $14.09 for the paperback on Amazon, no Kindle version
available, only one editorial review listed by Library Journal Xpress Review),
describes all of this as well as the FBI files that he discovered that
indicated that the FBI agents who interviewed Oswald after his arrest also
heard the voice recordings of the Oswald imposter in Mexico City. They noted
that the voices were definitely not the same. In spite of all this information
being available for three decades, Shenon stated in the video lecture his firm
belief that the real Oswald did go to Mexico City in September 1963, that while
there he loudly expressed intent to kill JFK, and that he was the lone
assassin. The CIA before the assassination, and the Warren Commission after the
assassination, just screwed up and missed the Mexico City stuff. To come to
such a conclusion requires deliberate neglect of a mountain of contradictory
evidence about Oswald’s career and Oswald’s familiars in the FBI, the CIA, the
military, and organized crime.
[35] See Roger Stone’s
The Man Who Killed Kennedy: The Case
Against LBJ (Skyhorse Publishing, 2013) for the more incendiary argument
that President Johnson had the motive, means, and opportunity (which are not in
themselves evidence of guilt) to participate in the conspiracy to kill JFK.
Stone argues that LBJ blackmailed his way into the vice presidency in 1960 but
was sure to be dumped in 1964 to face prosecution for corruption during his
time as a senator. Roger Stone claims that one of the JFK assassins was Mac
Wallace, a person Johnson used for dirty work in Texas during his long
political career. This book relies on various witness statements to claim that
JKF chose Johnson as vice president because he succumbed to Johnson’s blackmail
over his sexual indiscretions. For this reason, the book is likely to be
ignored by those who prefer to study the assassination without looking at the
skeletons in the Kennedy family closet. It portrays Johnson as lecherous and
vulgar, and sufficiently resentful and malicious to be involved in the
assassination and the coverup afterwards. Like Seymour Hersh’s book on JFK, it
relies on some dubious witness interviews that were dismissed by critics. Nonetheless,
it is a welcome alternative to the hagiographies made about the Johnson
presidency (i.e., Rob Reiner’s 2016 biopic LBJ) that gloss over the
Vietnam War and the well-documented coarseness, philandering, and corruption of
Lyndon Johnson. See a 48-minute interview with the author: LBJ and the
Killing of JFK with Roger Stone (LipTV, November 24, 2013).
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