“The greatest and grandest of all conspiracy theories is the Kennedy assassination conspiracy theory.”
John C. McAdams
“Speculation about Oswald’s motivation ought to be cut off, and we should have some basis for rebutting thought that this was a Communist conspiracy or (as the Iron Curtain press is saying) a right-wing conspiracy to blame it on the Communists … The public must be satisfied that Oswald was the assassin; that he did not have confederates who are still at large; and that the evidence was such that he would have been convicted at trial.”
Nicholas Katzenbach
U.S. Deputy Attorney General[1]
“If there were a conspiracy to cover up the truth about the assassination, it would have to involve the Chief Justice, the Republican, Democratic, and non-party members of the commission, the FBI, the CIA, the Secret Service, the distinguished doctors of the armed services—and the White House—a conspiracy so multiple and complex that it would have fallen of its own weight.”
Roscoe Drummond
Syndicated columnist
Next week marks the 60th anniversary of one of the seminal events of our post-World War II world: the tragic shooting death of 46-year-old President John F. Kennedy at Dealey Plaza in Dallas, Texas, on November 22, 1963, at 12:30 p.m. CST. Not only is the event important in its own right, it remains one of the most controversial occurrences in modern U.S. history. Beyond the initial trauma of the event, in many respects, the assassination marks a true American (and global), perceptual turning point—the beginning of massive popular distrust in government-orchestrated narratives. Or, as Peter Ling observes, the assassination “becomes seen as this moment when the hopefulness of the 60s starts to falter.”[2]
Certainly, the assassination of the first television President was one of the first traumatic events to unfold in real time in the age of mass media. The repercussions continue to be felt. As one article puts it: “The assassination of JFK was probably the genesis of the post-truth, fake-news, ‘don’t trust the experts,’ ‘do your own research’ brand of media skepticism and alternative information ecosystems.”[3]
Moreover, it remains the mother of all conspiracy theories.
Consider this. The number of books written about the Kennedy assassination has been estimated between 1,000 and 2,000, with 95 percent of these titles “pro-conspiracy and anti-Warren Commission.”[4] Public opinion polls consistently demonstrate that most Americans believe in Kennedy assassination theories, ranging from 62 percent believing that others were involved in a late 1963 poll, to 75 percent of respondents in a 2003 Gallup Poll who did not believe that Oswald acted alone. Former Los Angeles District Attorney Vincent Bugliosi, for example, estimates that a total of 42 groups, 82 assassins, and 214 people since JFK’s death have been accused, at one time or another, in various conspiracy scenarios.[5] Even today, 60 years after the event, Kennedy assassination enthusiasts and “buffs” can be divided into those belonging to the ”conspiracy theorists” camp and, on the other hand, those in the “debunkers” camp.[6]
Among the numerous potential conspirators spawned by JFK’s assassination include: the CIA, the Mafia, Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson, Cuban Prime Minister Fidel Castro, anti-Castro Cuban groups, the FBI, Israel’s Mossad, the KGB, the Secret Service, a group of wealthy New Orleans businessmen, and wealthy Texas oilmen. One of the most interesting theories I have encountered over the years makes its appearance as a consistent thread woven through several novels by one of my favorite contemporary espionage writers (and former intelligence agent) Charles McCarry (1930-2019). In McCarry’s novels the main character—Paul Christopher—discovered that the Kennedy assassination was linked to the assassination of South Vietnam’s president Ngo Dinh Diem during a CIA-orchestrated coup on November 2, 1963 (less than three weeks before JFK was shot).
Each of these conspiracy theories could be the subjects of separate missives on their own, not to mention the long string of untimely deaths of individuals involved with some aspect of the event.
“H-m-m.”
I was a sophomore in high school when Kennedy was assassinated. I vividly remember the scenes of the shooting, played over-and-over again, on the nightly news. The open limousine, the young President’s head exploding, Jackie Kennedy’s reaction, Texas Governor Connelly wounded and secret service agents desperately crawling on top of the vehicle to protect the bodies. Those visual details are permanently etched in my memory. Then there was an eerie death watch as the press corps gathered outside nearby Parkland Hospital, followed by Walter Cronkite’s somber death announcement. Stranger still was the scene outside the same hospital, two days later, where Lee Harvey Oswald died of a gunshot wound.
It was a different world back then. No Cold War. No cellphones, no personal computers, no color television, no social media, news anchors more concerned about presenting facts than spinning political narrative.
Even as a naïve teenager, I sensed that the world had changed.
Forever.
Two days after the assassination itself, I was home from school for Thanksgiving Break. We had gathered for a holiday meal at my Aunt Martha’s house (my dad’s sister). She had a television set with a much larger picture screen than at our house. The others were in the kitchen getting ready to eat. In typical teenage fashion, I slouched on the living room sofa. I was by myself. On the television I was watching live coverage of Oswald’s morning arraignment (for the murder of Dallas Police Officer J.D. Tippit). On the screen, there was a thin and seemingly confused Oswald led by a police escort through the police building basement toward an armored car that was to whisk Oswald to a nearby county jail. Suddenly, amazingly—on live TV—a person emerged from the crowd of reporters, broke through the protective police picket line, and shot Oswald in the abdomen at point blank range.
I couldn’t believe my own eyes.
“Mom, dad, come here quick,” I shouted to the others in the kitchen, “you won’t believe what just happened!”
In the melee that followed, police arrested Jack Leon Ruby (1911-1967), born Jacob Leon Rubenstein in Chicago, who was a local nightclub owner with connections to the criminal underground and, apparently, a personality well-known to the Dallas Police. It was Ruby’s murder of Oswald, just as the interrogations of Oswald were beginning, that triggered Washington’s elites to act to get ahead of potential conspiracy theories.
In this vein, one week after JFK’s assassination—and following the controversial shooting of Oswald by Ruby—President Lyndon B. Johnson signed Executive Order 11130 to investigate the assassination, subsequently approved by a congressional joint resolution. The unofficial name of the Commission—the Warren Commission—takes the name of its chairman, Chief Justice Earl Warren. The 888-page final report was delivered to President Johnson on September 24, 1964, and made public three days later. The report concluded that JFK was assassinated by Lee Harvey Oswald and that Oswald acted alone. It also concluded that Jack Ruby acted alone when he killed Oswald two days later.
The Committee consisted of the following men: Earl Warren (1891-1974), Chief Justice; Richard Russell Jr. (1897-1971) an influential senator from Georgia; John Sherman Cooper (1901-1991) an influential Republican Party senator from Kentucky; Hale Boggs (1914-1972) a Democratic Party Representative from Louisiana and New Orleans native (Boggs was the youngest member of the Warren Commission and reportedly disagreed with the lone shooter and magic bullet conclusions—the disappearance of his aircraft on an Alaskan fund-raising trip has elicited the interest of conspiracy theorists); Gerald Ford (1913-2006) a GOP Representative from Michigan and later 38th President; Allen Dulles (1893-1969) former head of the CIA who was fired by JFK after the Bay of Pigs fiasco in April 1961; and John J. McCloy (1895-1989) former President of the World Bank. In the Commission’s final session, Senator Richard Russell led a group of three members who disputed the single bullet theory and reportedly wanted to write a separate dissent, but Chairman Warren insisted on a unanimous final report (Russell was shocked to find that the session had not been transcribed and the brief set of session minutes omitted any mention of the disagreement).[7]
In 1975, in the aftermath of Watergate and in the wake of widespread accusations of illegal activities by the FBI, CIA and IRS, the Church Committee was created. Among its other activities, the Committee questioned 50 witnesses about the JFK assassination, focusing particularly on the Cuban connection and reported CIA attempts to assassinate Fidel Castro. The Church Committee found that the Warren Commission’s findings were flawed but upheld the finding that Oswald had acted alone.
The Committee’s activities opened a floodgate—the Zapruder Film appeared on public television for the first time (it had been stored by Life Magazine). And in June 1976, Senator Richard Schweiker made a television appearance: “The JFK assassination investigation was snuffed out before it even began … the fatal mistake the Warren Commission made was not to use its own investigators, but instead to rely on the CIA and FBI personnel, which played directly into the hands of senior intelligence.”[8]
In 1978, the House Selected Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) convened, concluding that Oswald assassinated Kennedy, probably as the result of a conspiracy. The Committee’s conclusions, however, have been criticized because of the reliance on disputed acoustic evidence. In addition, the HSCA’s final report faulted the Warren Commission in several areas including providing an inaccurate presentation of all the evidence available or a true reflection of the Commission’s work, “particularly on the issue of possible conspiracy in the assassination.”
Of course, for both conspiracy advocates and debunkers alike, the central figure in the Kennedy assassination passion play is the shadowy figure of Lee Harvey Oswald (1939-1963). To the former group, Oswald was a scapegoat patsy “set up” (and subsequently murdered) by outside actors; to the debunkers he is a troubled but skilled lone shooter, with long-buried personal motives, who shot the youngest president in America’s history from the sixth-floor window of the Texas School Book Depository (TSBD) as JFK traveled by motorcade through Dealey Plaza below.
Historical research over the years—aided by the recent release of a batch of formerly classified government documents—has helped us shape a character portrait of Oswald without shedding much additional light on his motive. Oswald led a troubled life as a student during his early years, enlisted as a teenager in the U.S. Marine Corps (1956-1959, court-martialed twice and busted down to private), defected to the Soviet Union in October 1959 (lived in Minsk, married a Russian woman,[9] and had a child), and returned to the United States with his wife in June 1962, eventually settling in Dallas, Texas, where their second daughter was born.
Whether you are a conspiracy buff or a debunker, the final months of Oswald’s life is a real headscratcher. He originally settled in Dallas, where his mother and brother lived, and—as was his pattern—failed to hold down a job and floated in-and-out of the local Russian émigré community. Then in late April 1963, he flew to New Orleans (where he is joined by his wife a month later). Again, he had trouble holding a job being fired after two months. In the Big Easy, according to subsequent conspiratorial accounts,[10] Oswald was hired by an FBI informant to infiltrate a pro-Castro Cuban organization and was sucked into the murky world of Cuban refugee politics. In late September 1963, Oswald boarded a bus from Houston to Mexico City and tells others on the bus that he is going to Cuba. At this point things really get weird: he applies for a transit visa at the Cuban consulate saying he wanted to visit Cuba on his way to the Soviet Union and spent several days trying to accomplish that goal, an effort that apparently included heated exchanges with Cuban officials and impassioned pleas to KGB officers.
A frustrated Oswald returned to Dallas in early October and was informed by his wife’s friend about a job opening at the Texas School Book Depository and was hired in mid-October, taking a minimum wage job. During the week he stayed in a Dallas rooming house and spent weekends with his wife and family at her friend’s house in Irving, Texas. Then follows the sequence of events we are now all too familiar with: the assassination, Oswald walks out the front door, takes a bus to his rooming house, changes clothes and grabs his pistol, encounters Dallas patrolman J.D. Tippit and shoots him, and finally flees to a local movie house where he is arrested.
One of the more interesting strands in the various conspiracy theories involves Oswald’s abilities—or lack thereof—as a marksman and the weapons he used. In March 1963, using the alias "A. Hidell,” Oswald made a mail-order purchase of a secondhand 6.5 mm caliber Mannlicher-Carcano rifle with telescopic sight for $29.95; at the same time, he purchased a .38 Smith & Wesson Model 10 revolver from a different company. In one of the many bizarre events that crowd the edges of the Kennedy assassination story, on April 10, 1963, Oswald attempted to kill retired U.S. Major General Edwin Walker[11] using the Carcano to shoot through a window at less than 100 feet away. Oswald’s murder bullet hit the window frame and Walker’s only injuries were bullet fragments to his forearm. The incident raises two questions in my mind: first, what would have happened in history if Oswald would have hit his target and was subsequently arrested for this act, and secondly, how can it be that—using the same rifle some seven months later—the same Oswald who missed a target from 100 feet was able to execute a perfect kill shot, firing three bullets in rapid succession with a bolt action rifle, on a moving target (using an awkward rifle) from a distance at least twice as far-away, using a hastily assembled shooting stand on the sixth floor of the TSBD?
Conspiracy theorists claim that subsequent attempts to recreate Oswald’s feat that midday, using the same weapon and scope, using expert military marksman and snipers, reportedly have all failed.[12]
When I was in graduate school at Texas Christian University, I encountered a group of students who were true Kennedy assassination buffs. I accompanied them to nearby Dallas one Saturday, and we spent the day at the building which was formerly the TSBD (there is now a museum and exhibit there), strolled the grounds of the so-called “Grassy Knoll” and Dealey Plaza, and talked about various conspiracy theories. As I recall, none of them belonged to the debunkers school.
Since then, I have thought about that fateful day in Dallas, now 60 years ago, off-and-on, several times. Many others involved in researching the assassination become obsessed with one angle or another of the story. Over the years I have tried to look at the topic from afar without being swallowed up by it.
Nevertheless, the assassination itself remains a historical event without closure. That’s one reason for my continuing fascination with the topic. This week, for example, my interest was again rekindled by a very interesting article appearing in the “Intelligencer” section of New York magazine. The gist of the article concerns the life-long quest of journalist and researcher Jefferson Morley to investigate the Kennedy assassination with a particular slant on associated CIA activities.[13]
At the present time, the declassification of Kennedy assassination government documents under the so-called JFK Records Act,[14] has taken much longer than expected: President Donald Trump twice extended the original 2017 deadline and in 2021, President Biden extended the deadline and did so again in 2022. By one estimate, at least 320,000 assassination-related documents have been released, but some 4,000 remain withheld or heavily redacted, the majority belonging to the CIA.[15]
So, in my feeble attempt to close the loop, if Kennedy’s murder was a conspiracy, if Oswald was set up as a scapegoat, if the Warren Commission and others were duped or complicit, then—in my mind—two important questions remain: who or what group was responsible? And why? One of the more interesting explanations, at least in my view, was the one put forward by Vincent Salandria, an early and articulate critic of the Warren Commission. In his words, as he pondered the event over a dozen years later:
“Don’t you think that the men who killed Kennedy had the means to do it in the most sophisticated and subtle way? They chose not to. Instead, they picked a shooting gallery that was Dealey Plaza, and did it in the most barbarous and openly arrogant way. The cover story was transparent and designed not to hold, to fall apart at the slightest scrutiny. The forces that killed Kennedy wanted the message clear: We are in control and no one—not the President nor Congress nor any elected official—no one can do anything about it. It was a message to the people that their government was powerless, and the people eventually got the message. Consider what has happened since the Kennedy assassination. People see government today as unresponsive to their needs. Yet the budget and power of the military and intelligence establishments have increased tremendously.”[16]
That was his assessment over four decades ago.
What do you think now?
[1] Katzenbach played a. key role in pushing for the Warren Commission following a conversation with FBI Director. J. Edgar Hoover who told him, shortly after Oswald’s death, something must be done to convince the public that Oswald was the real assassin. For his part, President Lyndon Baines Johnson was afraid that efforts to blame the Soviet Union’s Nikita Khrushchev or Cuba’s Fidel Castro for the assassination could lead to a war where 40 million Americans “could die within an hour.” Both parts of the quote are from Katzenbach’s memo to President Johnson’s aide, Bill Moyers, dated Nov. 25, 1963. [2] Ling’s quote is contained in Clare Thorpe, “The assassination of JFK: One of the US’s biggest mysteries,” BBC, Sep. 15, 2023. [3] Steve Rose, “’It splintered our sense of reality’: how JFK’s assassination spawned 60 years of conspiracy theories,” the guardian.com/us-news, Oct. 26, 2023. [4] These figures are taken from an excellent Wikipedia article on the topic. [5] “One JFK conspiracy theory that could be true,” CNN, Nov. 18, 2013. [6] This dichotomy belongs to author David Ktajicek. [7] Mary Ferrel Foundation, “The Warren Commission,” maryferrell.org, Mar. 4, 2023. [8] Ibid. [9] Oswald met Marina Prusakova, a 19-year-old pharmacology student, in March 1961. They were married six weeks later. Marina would later testify against her husband at the Warren Commission, remarried, and became an American citizen. Subsequently, she came to believe that her former husband was innocent. In 1981, Marina had Oswald’s body exhumed to refute a claim that a look-alike Russian Soviet agent was buried in place of Oswald. At last report, Marina was living a quiet, secluded life in Rockwall, Texas. [10] The most celebrated conspiracy theory involves New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison who claimed Oswald lived at the time near the law offices of Guy Banister, a former FBI agent, and was recruited to infiltrate pro-Castro Cuban organizations. Oswald, in Garrison’s view, became part of an assassination plot concocted by local businessmen including Clay Shaw. In March 1967, Shaw was arrested and charged with conspiring to assassinate JFK, with the help of Oswald, David Ferrie, and others including elements of the CIA. Shaw’s trial began in January 1969, and he was subsequently acquitted by the jury. Garrison went on to write three books which became the basis for Oliver Stone’s movie JFK in which Garrison was played by Kevin Costner. [11] To say Walker is a controversial character in his own right is an understatement. He was an outspoken anti-Communist, segregationist, and member of the John Birch Society, who had been previously relieved of his command in West Germany for distributing right-wing literature to his troops. He was later arrested for opposing racial integration at the University of Mississippi and temporarily held in a mental institution. [12] Among many others, see an article by a former sniper trainer who cites several problems with the lone shooter and “magic bullet” theory, including: limitations of the Carcano Model 91/38, designed in the 1800’s, as a sniper weapon; the failure to subsequently replicate Oswald’s shooting feat (in 1967, CBS reportedly hired 11 professional marksmen to replicate Oswald’s deed without success, and several unsuccessful attempts by one of the Vietnam era’s most skilled snipers to reconstruct the assassination shot at Quantico, Virginia); eyewitness accounts of Oswald’s poor shooting performance as a Marine; the number of shots heard by witnesses; the probability of multiple shooters; and the coordinating activities of the so-called “umbrella man.” Joseph A. Laydon Jr., “What is the most compelling evidence that Oswald was not the only shooter?” quora.com (n.d.) [13] Scott Sayare, “The Secrets of the JFK Assassination Archive,” New York Magazine,(Intelligencer section), Nov. 13, 2023. [14] The President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act of 1992, or the JFK Records Act, is a public law passed by Congress effective October 26, 1992. The Act directed the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) to establish a collection of records consisting of copies of all U.S. government records relating to the 1963 JFK assassination and housed in the NARA Archives II building in College Park, Maryland. Many observers claim that the Act was prompted by Oliver Stone’s popular film JFK (1991), which popularized a version of the assassination that featured government agents from the FBI, CIA and military. Of particular contention have been records of deceased CIA agent George Joannides (the CIA neglected to tell the Warren Commission about Joannides’s role with an anti-Castro group linked to Oswald) or to the U.S. House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) for which Joannides served as CIA’s liaison. [15] Sayare, “The Secrets. [16] Quote is contained in Charlie Janney’s “Why did Jack Ruby kill Lee Harvey Oswald?” quora.com, (n.d.).
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