It’s the 60th anniversary of JFK’s assassination
Conspiracy theories continue to be popular. Regular readers of this blog know I believe Oswald did it alone, and I see the evidence as completely overwhelming that this is so.
Rather than write something new, I draw your attention to some previous efforts of mine: this, this, this, and this.
[NOTE: If you follow the links to the Bugliosi book, I highly recommend pages 1444 to 1459 for people who are into the idea that Oswald may have done it but that he did it for some agency or entity such as the CIA or FBI or Mafia or Castro whatever it is you think that entity might be.]
I’m with you Neo. Oswald did it by himself. As I mentioned the other day I saw Ruby shoot Oswald on live TV.
What were Oswald’s motives? I don’t think we will ever know.
I cannot get my head around Jack Ruby shooting Oswald.
I find it incomprehensible that Ruby, a small time Chicago thug with ties to organized crime in Chicago and then in Dallas where he ran a strip joint, shot Oswald because he, Ruby , was pissed off that Oswald shot Kennedy.
I simply do not buy this.
Why should Ruby give a shite about Kennedy or that anybody shot Kennedy?
Somebody wanted Oswald dead, and for whatever reason, that task was assigned to Ruby. As to who wanted Oswald dead, who that is a mystery.
And let’s not forget, IIRC, that there are still documents under seal by the Federal Govt. dealing with this topic.
So 70 years !!!! after the event, there are still documents that have not been released.
This alone should raise all sorts of red flags; there are things that our govt. simply do not want the citizenry to know.
Why not??
It’s obvious Kennedy was shot by Aldous Huxley and C S Lewis.
I blame UFOs, the ultimate “somebody wanted.”
Oswalds uncle was a low level bookie connected to marcello
Dark skies had that twist it was the grays
@JohnTyler
Neither can I, but I cannot get my head around a lot of things people do. For instance it boggles the mind that the WWI German Admiralty ordered its High Seas Fleet to sail out to destruction in 1918, even if I can logically understand some of the possible explanations for it (such as preventing the ships from being seized by the victorious Western Allies after the war for possible future use against them without having to go through the humiliating and degrading process of scuttling them in port and thus implicitly admitting that they were a waste and the war was lost). Did none of them think that this might not end well, or that dangerously disturbed sailors seething at port with the heaviest guns in the Reich might decide that if they were going to die anyway they might as well die fighting the people sending them to their deaths?
For me that is much less explicable than Jack Ruby’s killing of Oswald. But nobody seriously doubts that the German Admiralty did indeed order that, and we have the records.
Likewise with the KCIA leadership’s half-successful coup against their former benefactor the Presidential Dictator of South Korea, which has a sort of similar mystique in Korea to the JFK assassination over here but is subject to much less doubt about basics like who did what, where and is more on why, and which was described as too well thought out to be entirely spontaneous but too half-baked and stupid to be entirely premeditated.
For one, the Kennedys were on fairly close terms with the Chicago Machine of the Daley Dynasty and by extension the Chicago Mob. Joe Kennedy’s finger pulling and the like probably gave JFK the undeserved win over Nixon through voter fraud, so this wasn’t “merely” a US President being murdered to him, or a US Icon (which let’s admit it JFK absolutely was), but a moderately close political ally. He was also someone Ruby apparently idolized on a personal level.
Secondly: Let’s not forget how traumatic and shaping this event was, even to those who weren’t terribly fond of JFK or who voted against him. One reason I vocally objected to people wishing Obama would meet an Oswald was because I viewed any assassination of a sitting US President to be a dire omen and a tragedy due to what it says about American failures, and the mixture of the shock of the assassination, its political aftershocks (both real such as elevating the deeply corrupt and unpopular LBJ to office, and illusionary such as the idea JFK would’ve kept us out of Vietnam), the unparalleled immediacy from the live footage and news reporting on hand, and the relatively anonymous and conspiracy friendly way it was done with a sniper attack (most assassinations in the modern age have been by pistol or bomb) all made this incredibly impactful. What testimony we do have is that the news hit Ruby personally like a gut punch and moved to tears and rage.
And I find that eminently believable, because I know plenty of normal people whose accounts are that they suffered a similar reaction.
Thirdly: Maybe Ruby realized people like him or Dallas natives would be smeared if there was no resolution, especially if the killer turned out to be a “Right Wing Extremist” Or Segregationist operating in the Climate of Hatred, and felt the need or desire to expunge that with Blood? This is getting deep into the guessing reeds, but A: We’re already in said reeds, and B: It’s worth considering.
Fourthly: I’m not surprised at all that Ruby would have wanted to kill Oswald or whoever else murdered Kennedy (or was so much as fingered as having done so). I’m not a violent, petty thug with mafia connections like Ruby was, and I’D want to kill whoever did it, in much the same way I had a burning, hateful rage when I saw 9/11 even when I was very young or the Boston Marathon Bombing and to a much lesser extent Biden’s perfidy in pulling out of Afghanistan.
I’ve boycotted several artists for life because of their assassination fetishery about Dubya Bush back in the early 2000s, and while my opinion of W. Bush has cooled vastly (to say the understatement) I am not going to forgive the likes of Garth Ennis or the like for shilling for terrorists.
Because while JFK may have been a sleazy, adulterous limo liberal with a corrupt, authoritarian father and a history of padding out his resume and unseemly ties to corrupt figures like the Daley Machine, that doesn’t mean he deserved to be killed. Especially not by some Communist wifebeater scumbag (like Oswald historically was), a Klanner, or some Eric Harris style terrorist trying to get their five minutes of fame. The fact that this scumbag doubled down by also murdering a policeman* would just make that worse.
Now I probably wouldn’t have been moved to try and kill Oswald PERSONALLY, like Ruby was. But I also am a teetotaler straight edge (meaning I’m not under chemical influence like most of humanity, which would lower inhibitions and make it much more likely to do it), I don’t have a history of petty crime to fall back on meaning I have a habit of living a violent existence, and so on.
But I do have the means to carry it out, especially if I’m not concerned about being caught or killed myself. What I’d lack is opportunity.
And if I can envision myself in that similarity, I also know a whole bunch of other people were in a similar boat, most of whom weren’t crooks like Ruby and most of whom almost certainly wouldn’t have actually acted on their desires (in part motivated by the much more Death Penalty Happy state of American jurisprudence in the 1960s, in both the Federal Level and the Great State of Texas).
But it is easy to believe some – and when we’re talking on this level that’s a LOT of people – would have.
This isn’t surprising. Lots of people wanted Oswald dead, even before his murders and especially after. Again, I’D want the son of a bitch dead had I been alive at the time.
The main disagreements would have been on the manner by which his death would come, such as who would do the deed, what level of legality would be involved, and how slow or quick it would be.
That needs to be kept in mind when discussing Oswald’s murder and who if anyone was involved beyond Ruby.
I don’t see any real reason to believe Ruby was assigned it, or even that such an assignment was necessary. Ruby was already motivated to view “Jack” favorably, both due to political and economic reasons (since the Kennedys were kinda sorta allies of the Chicago Machine, and Ruby himself came from the bread and butter of their constituents) and also personal ones. He also probably was shocked and horrified by the sudden murder like most people are, and like many people born later still are, let alone those who lived through it.
He was also a petty crook with Mafia ties and a history of some violence with ready access to alcohol and a gun. A recipe for a stable, calm, even-headed, pacifist this was not, and moreover anybody connected or savvy enough to be in a position to give orders to Ruby would have been able to notice this and realize it was beneficial.
The issue I see isn’t determining “who wanted Oswald dead” so much as
A: Who DIDN’T.
B: Who was in a position to act through Jack Ruby in the situation there.
C: If such a connection was necessary.
D: How it could have come about.
For my own personal belief, in case they did not come through, I believe Ruby acted alone or close to alone. He was emotionally distraught and violently angry at the murder of an international idol and political ally (however distant), was in the position there, and had means, motive, and opportunity as well as a temperamental dispossession towards it.
But on the off chance he not only didn’t act alone or indeed received “orders”, my gut feeling would be the Chicago Criminal Outfit and/or the Daley Machine, who would have been aggravated by the murder of their patron and frenemy, felt the interest in retaliation, and quickly reached out to see what contacts or assets they had in the Dallas Area who were able to respond to such orders, were capable of doing the killing, and were expendable enough that the bigwigs in Chicago need not worry too much about their being caught or killed in the attempt. If we want to compound on this by presuming the orders didn’t come from the Chicago Swamp but from someone else (KGB/CIA/FBI/John Birch Society/What Have You) then they could likely achieve similar results by merely pretending (convincingly that is) to be speaking on behalf of Chicago to Ruby.
Ruby fits that particular casting call to a T, and moreover I believe would have been a *willing*, enthused recipient of such orders and more than motivated to carry out the hypothetical vengeance of his masters both for reputation and his own reasons, to the point where again I frankly don’t really think he needed “orders” to explain why he made the fatal run on Oswald.
This doesn’t surprise me. We quite literally have documents under seal from before WWI and WWII, which are decades older and sometimes over a century.
That does not inspire confidence or trust, but the Federal Government is a secretive, plotting creature that does not give up its secrets easily and it hides things for all kinds of reasons, most of which are not directly tied to it being the prep. Some of course are, like MKULTRA and Northwoods. But some are meant to conceal the actions of allies or employees (for instance, Benny Morris was not the only spy in the CPUSA and the “agency” had a long track record with the Panamanian Quasi-Juche nutjobs culminating in Noriega), to cover up screwups by their members (of which there is no shortage), and for political benefit that isn’t always for the government (For instance, the way the Deep State played footsy with reports about Saddam’s WMD and terrorist connections in order to discredit Bush and most conservatives in general, in spite of what we can assess from other sources indicating they were – while nowhere near enough to fit the Blofeld Doomsday Portrayal suggested by a lot of the pre-2003 “Intelligence” – more than damning enough to vindicate the decision for war).
It’s also worth noting that some witnesses or others might request to keep their documents under seal for fear of retaliation by – say – Cuban Intelligence or fanatical JFK Truthers who might try and file lawsuit against them for “smears” or worse, try violence.
TL:DR, It’s not very surprising there are still files under secrecy about the JFK assassination like there are for most major events in American history, many going back well before the JFK Assassinations. They are grounds for suspicion, but not exactly proof.
And in this case I believe Occam’s Razor is clarifying. Even if we have reason to believe Ruby did not act alone or was receiving orders from someone or something, the fact that he seems to have been emotionally, murderously distraught to begin with and thus in a mindset to be receptive to such hypothetical orders or to try and act independently is telling enough for me.
Why would a government want you to know more than they want? Especially since it likely features a lot more information on government skullduggery and above all failures to do their jobs?? Leavened with the fear of retaliation against witnesses (in a way the FBI, CIA, etc. WOULDN’T find desirable for a change)?
I’m not entirely opposed to the idea that Oswald and Ruby had broader connections to their killings than themselves, but I do think that any theory of the murder that leans too heavily on said connections to explain them is deeply flawed. Oswald was an abusive, violent Communist fanatic and loner who was ostracized even by most American communists and looked at leerily by most of the government, and who apparently only succeeded at being a gifted sniper.
Ruby was an expendable, moderately competent foot soldier or associate for the Chicago Machine with a history of petty crime and who had risen as far as he was likely to do, with an acclimatization for violence and criminality, a ready access to weapons and alcohol, and apparently an unhealthy parasocial idealization of JFK or rather the image of JFK portrayed by the Camelot Machine and a pliant, corrupt media, and who was thus primed to be even more badly affected by his murder than the layperson Joe and Jane Sixpack American (Who I note were badly affected by this as it was).
This Thanksgiving, 70 years after JFK was shot, I want to thank you for the clarity of vision you have shared with your readership over the years I have been visiting with you and them. My gratitude is immense. You all have preserved my sanity in a world gone berserk.
I have read many books about the incident in Dallas that certainly changed the direction of contemporary history. I recommend everyone read David Talbot’s
“The Devil’s Chessboard.” At last, a book that actually makes sense.
@MR:hear and now
I already have.
And my opinion is vastly different.
Talbot’s a fucking dishonest idiot with a rather radical left wing, isolationist axe to grind and Devil’s Chessboard is rather unoriginal, trite, and badly analyzed material that’s not only part of a well defined type of Dulles Demonology, but extremely derivative at that.
I stopped taking the book seriously well before the actual JFK murders because my main area of focus and expertise (in as much as the matter covered) is on the World Wars and early Cold War from the 1940s-1950s, and I already could tell much like Kinzer’s “The Brothers” and Blum’s “Killing Hope” it’s hopeless trash. Moreover, it’s incredibly outdated even by the standards of its niche, such as reiterating many of the “Good Uncle Ho” cliche myths that were common even a quarter century ago but which either were never very credible to begin with (it’s like people have never read the OSS reports on Ho filed by the rest of the OSS team and instead only by the Head, whose own team members believed had become dangerously deluded about Ho’s true nature) and other attempts to undermine any attempt to gives the Dulleses any credit while giving them heaps of blame that either is overstated (for instance, they were utterly ineffectual in convincing Eisenhower to act against Arbenez on behalf of either themselves or United Fruit Co, as shown by how Eisenhower chose to act mostly independently and this resulted in two disjointed and almost entirely non-communicating operations, one headed by the CIA and one by United Fruit, the latter of which went down in flames but the former of which succeeded after some missteps) or wrong (such as the idea that Ho was ever our friend or could be reasonably persuaded as such by the time of WWII).
Of particular note I found was the downright disgusting and disgraceful attempt to blame the Dulles brothers for the torture, death, and murder of many “Little Mice” refugees or family seekers in Eastern Europe by Stalin’s Soviet Union and their allies in spite of how the true nature of the Soviet Union and its leadership being painfully evident for decades and well covered elsewhere, including during the early Iron Curtain period and the Great Terror. We also have how this dovetailed with (often understandable but downright violent) anti-German racism that often turned genocidal, with the devastation or outright destruction of centuries old German diaspora communities from Serbia to the Baltics through murder and forced deportation, where the Soviets had to balance between egging on their local proxies and trying to rein them in when some of them got so bloody-minded even Stalin viewed it as an inconvenience.
If someone is willing to try and downplay the crimes of Stalin, Bierut, and co in order to beat the Dulles Bad gong harder in spite of the abundant evidence, I have no reason to trust them on other matters. Especially not on controversial and hard to prove matters.
I view Talbot as a despicable liar and a pseudo-intellectual pedophile who at best regurgitates other sources and more typically is a serial liar and dishonest fabulist.
And again, I have to understate: I am not a Kennedy Scholar or a Dallas Obsessive. I do not know the minutae of the 1960s as well as I do what came before. I do however know the Dulles brothers and their earlier eras far, Far better than most because those are the eras I specialize in and I’ve spent a lot of time getting into their headspaces and those of other players at the time, and consuming or re-enacting in that era.
And it’s also important because there’s far, Far less serious dispute about things such as Stalin’s genocidal purge of – say – the Poles of “the Kresy” or the Germans of Eastern Europe and the motives for such than there is for way who did what during the JFK assassination and its aftermath. Moreover, there’s a lot more evidence and sources available in English regarding it than there is about – say – the Arbenez dictatorship in Guatemala or Mossadegh’s attempted pseudo-constitutional autogolpa (both of which have figures who in English mostly consist of left wing hagiographies about how they were aspiring democrats unfairly victimized by the CIA, while the Spanish, Iranian, Russian, and German language sources – to the limited extent I can access them – are much, MUCH less flattering and more caustic about both men and how they (mis)ruled).
If someone’s going to try and lie to me about basics of the Dulles Brothers in WWI, WWII, or the Early Cold War when it’s incredibly obvious that’s a lie, they’re probably going to pull similar stuff elsewhere.
MR: It’s the 60th anniversary of the JFK assassination, not the 70th.The thing that has always interested me about all this, is that actor Woody Harrelson’s father Charles claimed to have been on the grassy knoll when the shooting took place. He later admitted that he lied about that, but was in Dallas that day.
The portrait talbot paints of dulles going back to world war 2 and the interwar period is damning actually going back to when he let lenin get away. The operation sunrise and consequences from that
I find it incomprehensible that Ruby, a small time Chicago thug with ties to organized crime in Chicago and then in Dallas where he ran a strip joint, shot Oswald because he, Ruby , was pissed off that Oswald shot Kennedy.
==
He relocated to Dallas shortly after the war. His ‘ties to organized crime’ were a consequence of being in a line of business often hit up by those running protection rackets and often employing performers organized by union locals run by sketchy characters. He was known as an impetuous man given to intense emotional spikes and was willing and able to act as his own bouncer in establishments he owned.
==
He’d happened upon the prisoner transfer in the course of a mundane errand (buying money orders). His dog was waiting for him out in the car.
The one thing that still bothers me that i hope someone can explain with more knowledge from the Zapuder film: it’s the back of Kennedy’s head that explodes. From all that I have seen, the entrance of a bullet to the head is usually a clean hole and the exit is when the head blows apart. So every time I see that film I have to think the kill shot came from the front.
“I cannot get my head around Jack Ruby shooting Oswald.
I find it incomprehensible that Ruby, a small time Chicago thug with ties to organized crime in Chicago and then in Dallas where he ran a strip joint, shot Oswald because he, Ruby , was pissed off that Oswald shot Kennedy.
I simply do not buy this.
Why should Ruby give a shite about Kennedy or that anybody shot Kennedy?”
While I tend to agree with Neo on this topic , Ruby is a loose end.As a kid when reading about him ,he was described as a “nightclub owner” . That made me think of Ricky Ricardo’s Tropicana , only later in my teen years did I realize it was the Soprano’s Bada Bing.
That being said , I have yet to find a plausible reason for a conspiracy. Eecutive Action had big business leaders killing him. never bought that.
Stone feels it was a government conspiracy because JFK wanted yo pull out of Nam.
What BullShiite. He had the only viable South Vietnamese leader killed two weeks before his assassination. JFK broke South Vietnam , Had he lived he would have bought it.
@Miguel cervantes
Of course it is, because Talbot has his agenda and is not going to let anything get in its way, facts and counterarguments be damned.
For the record I actually have a jaundiced view of the Dulles brothers and view the evidence as is to be quite damning, but it’s nowhere near as bad as the Dulles/Kinzer/etc “view” is. Especially since none of them really ask why the Dulles Brothers were kept around so well in spite of the vast changes in personnel and policy, as well as how even they can’t argue they had a wall of blackmail like J Edgar Hoover did (and J Edgar in many ways reminds me of them, and particularly the hatchet approaches).
If you believe that. Which i don’t, and I’ve studied Lenin and the early Bolshevik party (especially Lenin’s exile in Switzerland), the Third German High Command that ruled Germany and occupied Europe with an iron fist in WWI, early US spying (indeed, I actually got paid a bit for directing an independent author to it), and the process by which the Germans and various anti-Republican Dissidents like Lenin negotiated and financed the Sealed Train.
And simply put, I believe the story’s a load of credulous crap. Indeed, it bears uncanny resemblance to the later “Good Uncle Ho” myth of the “One Letter to Truman” that the CIA supposedly stopped (in spite of this happening at THE EXACT MOMENT when neither the CIA or the OSS existed). Just about the only thing it has going for it is that it (supposedly) comes from Allen Dulles himself (more on the issues with that later) and was repeated by a relatively sympathetic source (Grouse).
For starters, we’re overly reliant on Grouse’s account of Allen Dulles’s supposed contact and on Dulles himself. The problem comes when you realize that
A: Lenin during this time was intensely private and did not come out to contact in general, especially not with most non-aligned Swiss government officials, let alone Allied ones (who he correctly identified as the greatest threats to his personal security and his greatest ideology). He mostly worked through intermediaries and rarely even answered the telephone.
B: Lenin was a veteran of the Russian Underground at a time when to survive meant you had to be either lucky or cunning (especially given the high ranked Tsarist double agents), and he knew basic tradecraft quite well, which reinforced A and meant he usually handled everything from media publications (remember, Lenin saw himself as a Professional Revolutionary first, a JOURNALIST in the mold of Marx and Engels Second, and most else distantly in the mirror) through intermediaries, handoffs, and so on.
So not only is it rather unlikely he would approach Dulles or the US Embassy in Switzerland for any purposes, him not being able to do so would be no great effect since he could delegate negotiations to his trusted lieutenants complete with sealed orders (which is the main way he operated in negotiations with Ludendorff, Hindenburg, and the rest of the Central Powers leadership or at least their delegates). Sure this would not have the OOMPH of a face to face meeting with Ulyanov himself (which is itself grounds for suspicion of the account) and allow slightly less grounds for flexibility in negotiations due to Lenin’s stooges needing to get back in touch with their Comrade for orders and allowances, but it’d also be much more reliable, safer for both sides, and generally more fitting.
ESPECIALLY since Lenin would be almost or totally incommunicado during his voyage on the Sealed Train (as it turned out it was more the former, since the Sealed Train was not so sealed) and so would need to rely upon his subordinates and peers to handle stuff like this, as we know he did with the likes of Stalin and Parvus.
C: There’s also the limited sourcing. Last I checked we don’t have records of this not just from the Bolsheviks (who would either want to emphasize it to play up their persecution complex and the idea that the West’s hostility was the cause of the Cold War, or to downplay it and destroy the evidence much like they did for most of the Sealed Train incident), but also the US Government itself, the Swiss, the Austrians or Hungarians (who supposedly employed one of the people Allen Dulles was sleeping with and which was mentioned and who we’d expect to see evidence of), and so on. So it’s basically relying on Grouse to get the records right. And while to be fair Grouse is not quite the pseudo-intellectual leftist hatchet job hack that Kinzer and Talbot are (if anything he leans too far into the other direction) he was inclined to a very indulgent take on Allen’s Claims.
D: There’s the X factor. The fact that the story is uncannily dramatic. A face to face encounter with the future dictator of Russia – the Glorious Revolutionary – and the American Master Spy and future doyen of Foreign Policy! The chance to change historrryyy! Oh what could have happened!!!
Except not only is there not much reason beyond the Grouse/Dulles account to believe this actually happened due to how it doesn’t line up with evidence from other sources and contradicts much of what we know of Lenin’s MO and the like, but even IF it were true we have little reason to believe it would have changed history much at all even if this WERE true.
As Kinzer quoting Grouse supposedly quoting Dulles says, “Here the first chance – if in fact it was a chance – to start talking to the Communist leaders was lost.” Allie later admitted.”
Firstly: No, that’s not true. The Bolsheviks were a small organization but they were far reaching and had contacts across the Atlantic, so if Lenin truly wished to get in contact with the West he could have phoned up Trotsky in North America or a host of other agents to make simultaneous approaches to almost every US embassy or consulate in Western and Southern Europe or North America. Likewise the US could as well.
Secondly: Even if it is true, what would the realistic outcomes of such a meeting have been? Because somehow I highly doubt “Lenin leads us on with insincere promises that he is not hostile to the West and while wants to leave the war and create a Socialist Utopia wishes for continued cooperation in certain avenues and Pls Give Food Aid.” or the more uncharacteristically honest “Lenin tells us to go F-k ourselves and prepare to die in the Revolutionary Convulsions to come” would greatly change history, because Lenin’s personality was already so set in stone he was unlikely to change much based on US response.
So pretty much the only thing that holds confirmably true here is that Dulles was in Switzerland, was a horndog, and was acting as a Spy. And oh yeah that Lenin was in Switzerland until it wasn’t.
Everything else smells to high heaven as either provably false or suspicious as heck, and I’m not surprised this fable was reiterated by both Talbot and Kinzer uncritically.
Grouse to his credit notes that the story was a favorite of the brothers, including Allen, and also (alone among Kinzer and Talbot, probably because he’s the only relatively honest scholar and historian of the three) anticipated that
Which is putting it mildly.
Before putting up some of the easier, lower hanging objections to shoot down, such as that.
So in other words, Lenin and his common law wife and co-conspirator were in Bern at the time for unknown reasons, but Lenin’s schedule was NOT in fact free at the relevant time due to Lenin’s approach to how he took writing polemics.
I know Grouse says the opposite, but I actually have researched Lenin and how importantly he viewed pamphleteering and agitprop.
So Grouse concludes
That’s literally the best Grouse can come up with in defense of this, which is still head and shoulders above what Talbot, Kinzer, and their ilk can muster. That “it does not strain credibility” that it MIGHT have happened.
Well, history’s evolved since Grouse worked, and we now know Lenin far better than ever. And we know that frankly it DOES strain credibility, because Lenin concluded the US would be an enemy very early on (arguably before this) and while he was interested in obtaining what benefits he could arrange from diplomacy, he wanted to do this from a position of strength and also recognized that as an anti-war agitator loosely affiliated with the Germans and dedicated to destroying the world as both the Western Allies and Central Powers understood it, he would be at risk if he positioned himself.
And in any case, “Does not strain credibility” is a far, FAR, FAR leap from “Yeah bro it happened.”
My rough judgement, subject to future evidence, is that this was probably a yarn spun up by Allen himself. Why he decided to do so for a story that makes him look bad is beyond me, but it certainly didn’t stop him from enjoying retelling it time and again. Moreover, it is the closest match we have to the evidence of what we know of Lenin’s movements and MOs, how he dealt with foreign powers and representatives of his movement, and what we can discern from other parties such as the Soviet, Austrian, German, and Swiss Archives.
Moreover, it’s telling that while Grouse at least anticipates the potential suspicion by people like me and outlines possible supporting evidence and reasons to believe, Kinzer and Talbot do not and simply repeat the story as fact. Probably not for the reasons either Dulles or Grouse wished, but as we’ve seen it is far, Far from the only thing.
Sunrise was a boondoggle – and unlike the “What if Lenin?” account VERY well documented – and I make no great defense of it. It certainly pushes water on Allen’s judgement (much like his supposed fondness for the Lenin fable does, whether or not it was true.)
(Though I note that it further undercuts the idea by dint of how far from brushing off an important contact, it shows Allen went too far in trying to do so, and while those inclined to believe the Lenin account might argue – and with some reason – that the situation was different since Wolff was one of the chief leaders of the Axis in Northern Italy and Allen Dulles was older and might have changed, it doesn’t jive too well with what we know of Allen’s sociable nature in Switzerland and his multiple liaisons, both official and euphemistic – at the time).
One doesn’t have to believe the Dulles Brothers were saints and as good as Sliced Bread to recognize when one is being sold a pack of goods, and for Talbot, Kinzer, and co this is particularly acute because they are prepared to happily use hearsay and Communist propaganda (which seems to be a recurring theme for JFK truthers like Garrison).
…it’s the back of Kennedy’s head that explodes.
physicsguy:
It’s the right mid-to-front part of his head which explodes and becomes a large flap of skin, bone and brain hanging off the side of his head. There was a small entry wound in the back of his head.
–“The Zapruder Film – JFK (6/7) Movie CLIP (1991) HD” [Cued to head shot]
https://youtu.be/2nmGS8rVuIM?t=218
@physicsguy
That’s actually pretty common and based in physics, albeit somewhat counterintuitive and it happens a lot. Not quite universally, but usually. The entrance wound of a bullet tends to be smaller and neater than the exit.
https://www.physicsforums.com/threads/why-is-exit-wound-in-a-rifle-gun-shot-injury-bigger-than-entry-wound.694102/
https://www.bevfitchett.us/gunshot-wounds/entrance-versus-exit-wounds-entrance-wounds.html
You can also, if you are so inclined, find a number of images online of real gunshot wounds (many fatal) showing this effect, including to the head. Some of them are truly gruesome, and so I will not link here, but you can see it. Likewise on filmed suicides such as Budd Dwyer and Christine Chubbuck.
It seems counterintuitive due to the amount of force on the bullet going in compared to it going out, and it seems even moreso due to the level of mystique about the JFK assassination, but you can see it on many cases where there’s really no mystique or doubt there. It also helps that the bullet is now exerting its admittedly diminished force on a lot of relatively squishy stuff and often “Blowing them out.” Quite literally. That’s especially true of headshots to the front of the skull exiting by the cranium.
Wow, Turtler!
As for me, Earl Rose, a pathologist at the U. of Iowa, now deceased, implied to me that there was some hanky-panky in the autopsy report, of which he was a contributor, when I was a resident there in the 1980s. Some things never die.
And it’s somewhat fascinating to me how fascinated others are, to which Hillary might reply, “What difference, at this point, does it make?”
@avi
I agree, but that doesn’t trouble me as much because Ruby was a loose cannon, and so one of the people who do tend to make themselves loose ends. Violent, impulsive, emotional, and probably either drunk off his gourd from distress or suffering from the aftereffects of having very recently been drunk off his gourd (again, hardly atypical reactions to news of the murder even for people way more stable and noncriminal than he).
At a maximum I figure he was a willing vessel for some conspiracy to kill Oswald, happy to carry it out for his own reasons. But more likely I believe he did it himself, maybe with informal prodding.
This seems absurd for the amount of mystique as well as the convenience, but it jives much with what we know of historical assassinations. A good example of this is the murder of Roi Henri IV of France, who while massively popular among the commoners and much of the aristocracy was passionately hated by several and was the target of concentrated attempts to rub him out by the superpowers of the Age, the Habsburg Crowns of Austria and Spain, as well as by the remnants so called “Catholic League” in France, and they as well as garden variety adherents had tried to do it several times.
However, the dude who actually succeeded, Francois Ravaillac, seems not to have been connected to any of the above more than casually, and murdered the King because he believed his conversion was insincere due to his perceived laxity at converting the Hugenots and his war with Spain supposedly foretelling a war on the Pope.
Not only is this reading really, REALLY at odds with what we and the more learned, cynical and worldly (if still quite devout) members of the Habsburg Chanceries and the Holy League indicated (since while Pope Paul V was something of a hardliner who tried to retrench Catholic orthodoxy and moved to sever connections with many of those like the Venetians who were deemed unlikely, also was trying to lessen dependency on the Habsburgs and received Henri IV’s conversion to Catholicism gladly), but if anything his lack of contact with the more formal and established enemies likely helped him because they let him get closer to and even inside the King’s entourage without being detected.
Sometimes eccentric loose cannons or bit players make history, and there is this excellent quote a friend gave me, supposedly from a play: “Even Pawns can make moves of their own.” Which I think touches on Neo’s conclusion that while weak, feeble, and vile the nature of the Afghan pullout debacle was largely the result of Biden’s will.
Thank you all for supporting my 60 year conviction that it was the Chicago thugs who did Kennedy and Ruby! They are the same who have been taking over pieces and parts of this country ever since, i.e. election machines.
I believe Oswald did it, mostly alone.
But lots of gov’t folk had various fingers in his activities and other illegal activities.
Lots of big names are not squeaky clean innocent.
Reminds me of how many detectives in murder investigations find out that many of the people involved are highly suspicious because they lie, some, because they aren’t guilty of the murder but they are guilty of other stuff.
I’m very bothered that the full Warren Commission report hasn’t been released.
It would help to know who was how dirty.
It was the beginning of new, distrust the authorities era. And the gov’t didn’t deserve as much trust as was often given. But other governments really were often worse.
@Anne
For the record, I don’t. I in particular don’t see them whacking Kennedy, since he was a(n admittedly lukewarm) ally of theirs. I can see them using their contacts with Ruby to have him whack Oswald in return as kind of a revenge killing, but I can also see that not being the case and Ruby acting on his own.
I certainly believe Oswald acted alone as a Communist fanatic and violent, egotistical nutjob,.
They’ve been doing it well before that, and arguably the likes of Obama and co make Daley and the old Chicago Mobs look positively benevolent.
@Tom Grey
Largely agreed.
@Bill K
Not sure if that is a good wow or a bad wow, but glad it was at least interesting.
I’m not sure what to make of it, or if there is anything to. I can’t rule it out, but I’d also be curious about what kind of hanky-panky was involved. And moreover: Why?
Most I can figure would be some attempt to change out the bullet, but beyond that it’s not like they would fake cause of death.
Indeed. And what’s worse is that more and more regarding the JFK assassination I find myself subconsciously seeing that point of view. Which is not good, no matter how understandable it is.
I was always certain that Oswald acted alone but after what has happened since March 2020 I’m not so sure anymore. My trust in all kinds of institutions have been irreparably damaged. So I’m open to the possibility that Oswald had some co-conspirators of some sort, but I have no answers.
I was in medical school and the weekend after the assassination was the opening of pheasant season so that was what I was doing. I actually heard Ruby shoot Oswald on the radio. The Jack Ruby thing is the hardest to understand but maybe he was just a small time tough guy who wanted to be famous.
@Marisa
That’s one of the worst aspects of this. And to be honest our institutions have already had rot about them. JFK only got into office because of voter fraud by the Chicago Machine, for instance. The question is usually “how much”?
@Mike K
My sympathies. And yeah, I do think fame was part of it, but I would guess probably less than sheer rage and disappointment. He apparently all but worshipped JFK, and was already noted to have a violent temper and fondness for alcohol. I would guess fame was a secondary concern. He certainly wanted to attract more business to his bar, but the risks he made make me believe he was comfortable with dying (or just didn’t think much of this).
Sunrise gehlen org general wolf other particularities although army had paperclip operation bloodstone et al
@ Bill K > “What difference, at this point, does it make?”
None to the realities of who hated whom and killed them in 1960, which we may never know, but a lot to display the frame of mind that allows people to argue for decades over the meaning of the evidence that is all we have available, despite knowing that there are documents still sealed which might change their opinions.
It’s the same world-view that allows ignorant dupes to run around in anti-Israel protests because they won’t even look at the evidence that is available; to them it might just as well be sealed.
At least Bill & Hillary are clear of one political murder.
Was only a toddler at time, and never got so interested into the conspiracy aspects but have read articles and videos some to at least think it was a lone gunman and it was Oswald. Now getting him murdered certainly opens up a whole nother can of worms so who knows?
@Miguel cervantes
And almost every major power in WWII and some that were only dubiously so such as France and the Netherlands had their own attempts to recruit former Nazis or other WWII German and Axis members. That puts the Dulles brothers firmly in step with their time even in areas where their influence was limited (as it obviously was with the French) and especially with their Soviet rival frenemy cum enemy. But the likes of Talbot and Kinzer do not like outlining this because it would mean spreading blame and awareness from their preferred narrative.
Turtler, even I’m not sure whether that was a good or bad Wow. More a reaction that you are really invested in the question! Someone a few weeks earlier after encountering scroll after scroll of comment said, “I’m not here to read a book.” I laughed at that. 🙂
It seems the shorter the comment, the more likely others read and respond. Sometimes I’d like to say a lot more but then I try to stifle myself. Not always successful. But if it works for you, who am I to play the leftist and interfere with free speech? 🙂
We think a lot less of the CIA than people did in 1963, so it’s understandable that conspiracy theories abound. But I also think a lot less of politicians than people did then, or than I did in more recent times, so I have a hard time believing in the saintly JFK that so many theories are based on. I doubt that Kennedy was preparing a major change in policy that would have provoked an assassination. That doesn’t exclude the possibility that the Mafia or Cuba or rogue government agents might have wanted JFK dead, but to me nothing is as convincing as the “Oswald did it” theory.
Re: JFK head shot
Turtler:
I’m not sure what scenario you are addressing. The head shot was consistent with a small entry wound in the back of the head and a very large exit wound on the right front of the head.
–“The Zapruder Film – JFK (6/7) Movie CLIP (1991) HD” [Cued to head shot]
https://youtu.be/2nmGS8rVuIM?t=218
The controversy, the “back and to the left” business, was that JFK’s head abruptly snapped backward and towards the Book Depository which was counter to one’s intuition that a shot from the back would push the head forward.
I’ve never been an assassination conspiracy buff, I’ve assumed that Oliver Stone-like massive conspiracies that involved everyone up to Boy Scouts were impossible simply because people can’t keep secrets for long. However …. here’s a detail that, while known back then, has recently emerged as genuinely intriguing question mark. I’m sorry, but as something that’s been Intriguing me for a long time, I’ve just got to lay it on you:
How did Lee Harvey Oswald become fluent in Russian? Yes, he was fluent, nor just fluent, but *very* fluent, and evidently was so not long after he first stepped onto Russian soil as a supposed defector. Moreover, he spoke Russian with a distinct Polish accent, according to people who knew him here and in Russia. Martina his wife said that when she first met him, she took him for a native. Now there is such a thing called “language immersion”, by which a person living in a foreign language-speaking country starts picking up pedestrian but necessary phrases like “I’ll have a cup of coffee with cream, thank you”, or “Can you direct me to the nearest grocery store?” But Oswald’s language skills evidently transcended that by a country mile. And Oswald lived in Russia for only a little over two years. This leaves us with two possibilities: either Oswald had a near-preternatural self-taught talent for picking up a foreign language in which, according to witnesses, he was able to express a full range of concepts, or he was taught Russian, instructed.
Thing is, there’s no record anywhere of Oswald having been taught Russian, and believe me, his educational record has been scoured to atoms. But unless we’re talking about the preternatural Oswald here, he had to have been taught, and it must have an intensive instruction. Where? He never graduated high school, and he enlisted in the Marines at age 17. Three years later at age 20, Oswald defected. If he was instructed, it was during those three years in the Marine Corp. We all know about his record on the rifle range, but obviously there’s nada about his being taught Russian. If he was taught and it was highly classified, this suggests that Oswald was in Military Intelligence, perhaps being prepped for a mission like, oh say, becoming a double agent, an American agent posing as a Russian spy for the purposes of feeding the Soviet Union false information.
Of course this is not to refute that Oswald really was the socially awkward misfit that a lot of people described him as being. A socially awkward misfit, however, is not necessarily a low-IQ incompetent. In fact, such a person might be easily influenced, which in some circumstances would be an asset for “controllers”. In any case, the fact that Oswald spoke fluent Russian, was able to defect, marry a Russian woman, then engineer a repatriating for himself, all before he was 23, doesn’t really square with the official portrait of him as being a withdrawn, incompetent non-entity. None of this is evidence that Oswald was part of a conspiracy of course, but for me it’s an anomaly that’s lingered in my mind.
And noting Neo’s banner of another leader, “The Last Lion” about Winston Churchill, what do you all make of him?
On the one hand, he clearly had virtues of both physical courage (Boer War, WWI) and moral courage (the hard sell in WWII of “nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat”)
On the other, I gave up reading his “The Second World War” halfway through the first volume because he seemed too arrogant and dismissive of others who disagreed, similar to a lot of statists and leftists.
In some similarity to Trump, I didn’t care for the personality but liked the decisions.
Re: Oswald / Russian language
Will M:
Pulling down the mammoth Bugliosi tome …
While Oswald was in Japan doing a boring military job, he devoted his spare time to reading Russian newspapers with a Russian-English dictionary.
He took a Russian language proficiency exam. He scored poorly, but the test was for native speakers and graduates from the rigorous language programs. That he scored poorly was not half bad against such competition. Clearly Oswald had taught himself some Russian.
Obsession goes a long way with language learning. Personally I don’t think Oswald was as dumb as some suggest.
I was in the sixth grade and our class was listening to the parade on the radio. I don’t actually remember hearing the shot, or what the commentators said, but I will never forget the look on our teacher’s face. We were all very subdued for the rest of the day, and that event was an important feature in my high school and college studies.
After seeing my and other kids who were about that age when they saw the 1986 Challenger explosion on TV in their classrooms, I’m very glad we only had sound.
As to what difference, at this point, it makes: I was a teaching assistant in graduate school in the mid-seventies (MA in Political Science, as it happens) and one day another TA came into our office looking very pale and disturbed. She told me that she had opened the day’s discussion with a rather standard question for that undergraduate class’s subject:
“Where were you when Kennedy was shot?”
After a short, awkward silence, one of the students said, “Ms. Smith, we were in kindergarten.”
That was only 13 years later.
It had made no impact in their lives.
@ Aesop > “It’s the same world-view that allows ignorant dupes to run around in anti-Israel protests because they won’t even look at the evidence that is available; to them it might just as well be sealed.”
Case in point from a link miguel posted on the hostage thread:
https://www.ynetnews.com/article/b1y7ylhet
“Spanish minister supports Hamas, denies October 7 massacre —
Spanish Prime Minister Sánchez appoints Sira Rego as minister for youth and children, despite her justification of Hamas attack and denial of atrocities”
She is only denying that Hamas “is responsible” (oppressed-victim privilege, donchaknow), and not that some people did something.
Still, it’s a view out of touch with any reality.
@huxley
I was responding more to physicsguy, and inaccurately (because it had been a hot moment) followed their idea that the shot was the other way around. Sorry for the issue.
One of the more clever “theories” is Oswald was the lone gunman but the fatal shot was an accidental discharge by the SS guy seen climbing on the back of one of the limos while holding a new M-16 by the pistol grip with his finger on the trigger and that is the reason for the autopsy shenanigans. I rather like that one. It has the virtue of being different. Sort of like Huey Long getting shot by his own security team.
@Will M
They’re not really impossible (at least in most cases) they’re just REALLY REALLY impractical and so usually not the case. Which often is basically the same thing.
As huxley said, it’s probably a bit of both, but mostly the latter as well as the fact that he wasn’t, in fact, “very very fluent”, as someone who worked in Russia themselves and while being there even less time than he was and being less fluent was able to express a fair few concepts and the like.
For starters, Oswald’s communist leanings apparently went back a bit, and outside of German, Russian was the lingua franca of that at the time. Secondly, like huxley pointed out he had opportunity and time to teach himself, so self-instruction (likely with a bit of help from others). Moreover, he wasn’t “very fluent” except by comparison to low standing monolingual schlubbs like myself. As huxley said, his “poor” score isn’t as damning as it sounds but it does indicate a lack of savant level talent or the truly formal schooling. It wouldn’t surprise me if he touched up with Poles or Soviet handlers to help learn the language further, and it’s worth noting that Polish is one of the West Slavic languages that’s gotten the most Germanic and Romance influences there, so it’s not too surprising an English speaking foreigner would sound a bit like that anyway on top of whatever explicitly Polish influence they’d get (like from an instructor, which is a significant reason why vast amounts of Europe speak English with a British accent).
He probably wasn’t stupid as in low IQ or outright malformed in the head, but he was no shining genius of rational thought and also was apparently listless and not very good at applying himself, or rather applying what he applied himself to in any consistent or beneficial way (hence his significant investment into marksmanship and learning Russian and piloting without doing too much useful). It sort of reminds me of Cleckley’s discussion of Alcibiades as a psychopath, and what I know of Oswald kind of reminds me of a “Dollar Bin Alcibiades”, a man who was much more functional than the average psychopath but who was not THAT functional, with a fair bit of intelligence and focus and some talent but little way of applying it systematically, and a temper mixed with impulse control.
A socially misfit person doesn’t have to be a low IQ incompetent, but one doesn’t have to be low IQ in order to be incompetent. After all, Carter was a nuclear physicist and we know how that went. Moreover, temper, impulse control problems, and whatnot will generally make one seem much dumber than they really are, in much the same way that much of what we perceive as intelligence comes from measured speaking and demeanor.
My gut feeling is he really wasn’t formally taught (with some possible partial exceptions in the USSR) but taught himself, and achieved a middling level of proficiency, much better than I ever did and enough to be conversant and decently literate in the language, but far from fleunt.
Bill K, that was me. I think it was mostly directed at the long missives on UFO’s. Having said that, I read all of Turtler (well mostly because he has such broad knowledge of people and events that I just could not keep up).
With all the comments, I have not changed my mind. Oswald did it alone. Ruby, who it seems was in the parking garage on an some errand, would have had to known when Oswald was being move.
There are two issues I am aware of that are problematic with the situation.
1 — When Oswald defected to the USSR, he went hunting with some of his co-workers. He was using a shotgun and could not hit a thing, according to them. Not being able to hit anything with a shotgun is a remarkably bad shot.
Then he comes back from the USSR and makes shots a marksman would find difficult.
2 — As others have noted, the “money” shot was his third shot, not his first. That’s pretty improbable, even ignoring the “magic” trajectory.
One of my own favorite explanations is that it was an accidental misfire by Kennedy’s Secret Service detail which did the job. This explains a number of things — First off, why a cover up in general. Second off, why it was so effective (hard to keep secrets — especially when they’re THAT big!) and Third, why it has been so successful in the long run — no “deathbed confessions”, no “final expression of remorse”, etc.
So the actual event wasn’t a conspiracy, only the Ass-saving coverup after the fact.
}}} After all, Carter was a nuclear physicist and we know how that went.
No, Carter was a Nuclear TECH on a submarine. Hardly a “physicist”. Not sure of the skill levels needed for that position, but they don’t need to be all that high. It’s much more of bottom-tier engineer position than anything requiring a deep understanding of the field.
No, Carter was a Nuclear TECH on a submarine. Hardly a “physicist”. Not sure of the skill levels needed for that position, but they don’t need to be all that high.
Yes, think Homer Simpson working at the nuclear plant.
Then there were the “three tramps” picked up by the police at the scene. Two of the tramps resembled Watergate burglers E. Howard Hunt and Frank Sturgis.
Nothing to see here folks; move along, move along.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_tramps
A review of the book by Roger Stone “The Man who Killed Kennedy: The Case Against LBJ” on Amazon by Larry G Johnson: “One valuable feature of this book is the way the author draws from and consolidates prior conspiracy books claiming LBJ was a major player, If not the prime instigator, in the plot to kill JFK. Another plus is Stone’s personal conversations about the assassination with contemporary figures, such as Richard Nixon, with whom the author spent many hours following Nixon’s departure from office (Stone at one time had worked as a young man on Nixon’s presidential campaigns).”
“Among what I would call the “bombshells” in the book are the following:
1. Richard Nixon was among many millions who saw on TV Lee Harvey Oswald killed by Jack Ruby. His response to an aide at that moment was, “I know that guy.” The aide did not ask whom Nixon recognized since he worked in an environment where you only spoke to Nixon when spoken to. Years later, after he was out of office, Nixon is quoted as having said to the author that he recognized the shooter as Jack Ruby, someone he knew back in the day when Nixon was a congressman on the House Un-American Activities Committee and Lyndon Johnson had asked that Jack Ruby be hired to act as LBJ’s informant on what was going on. Nixon referred to Ruby as “Johnson’s guy.” The fact that LBJ had known Jack Ruby for a long time and Ruby had worked for him previously in a clandestine manner adds a lot of credence to the book’s conclusion that LBJ had a part in Kennedy’s death and the cover-up of the facts following the assassination.
2. JFK’s motorcade route through Dallas was not published in the Dallas newspapers until the morning of November 22, 1963. Given that Oswald had to travel from Irving, Texas to Dallas to get to work, he would not have had access to what was published in the newspapers until after he got to work, at the earliest, about three hours before the assassination. The actual motorcade route was not established until November 18, 1963, so nobody, including the Secret Service, had any knowledge before then about where the route would actually be. It seems logical to conclude that someone with inside knowledge passed the route on to Oswald, assuming he was the shooter.
3. I was unaware that there was another fingerprint found on the sixth floor of the Texas Book Depository that was identified as being from the pinky finger of a Mac Wallace. This was the same Mac Wallace for whom LBJ spent an inordinate amount of time and effort in getting a suspended sentence (ultimately expunged) for a conviction of first-degree murder in Texas. The author links Wallace to a number of other subsequent murders that benefited LBJ at critical times in his career.
4. I was unaware that there was a soldier on leave in Dallas that day, Gordon Arnold, who happened to be standing near the fence at the back end of the grassy knoll. He had just completed basic training which included having to deal with live ammunition and was filming the motorcade passing by. He is clear and convincing on YouTube in describing how he felt a bullet pass behind and near his left ear at the time of the third and fatal shot to Kennedy’s head. He was not asked to testify before the Warren Commission, even though someone impersonating a CIA officer demanded and confiscated Arnold’s film when the record shows there were no CIA or Secret Service personnel at Dealey Plaza immediately following the assassination. It is also notable that the critical frames of the Zapruder film were suppressed for so many years by the FBI until the public finally got to see in 1977 the massive damage done to Kennedy from the one frontal shot and how his head was propelled backwards, something Arnold probably also caught on film.
5. I was unaware that just seconds prior to the first shots ringing out on Elm Street, LBJ ducked down so far into the back seat of his limousine following the Secret Service car that followed Kennedy’s car, that in a photograph taken at that moment he is not even visible in the back seat next to Lady Bird.
6. The book does a credible job of showing how the Warren commission was a hurried whitewash of facts so that the desired result of the lone shooter would be established.
7. Also credible are the accounts of people who worked at or frequented Jack Ruby’s strip club who recall that on more than one occasion they saw Ruby and Oswald altogether. The author also points out that after Ruby left the Texas Book Depository he had traveled by bus and was walking in a direction very near Ruby’s apartment when he had the encounter with Officer Tippit. Stone suggests from this fact that it could have been Oswald’s plan to link up with Ruby. Stone leaves unexplained how anybody other than Oswald could have killed Officer Tippit, or why Oswald would have done that if he was not one of the shooters.
8. The book points out the sad irony of Frank Sinatra being the person who probably put into motion the players and events that led to Kennedy’s assassination. Sinatra was a friend of Chicago mob boss Sam Giancana, and through Giancana Chicago was delivered to Kennedy and thus the election in 1960. In 1961 Joe Kennedy suffered a stroke and could no longer talk, and his sons John and Bobby did not honor the promises their father had made to the mob for the money and votes they got in order to win the election. Instead of going easy on the mob, Bobby Kennedy mounted an aggressive campaign to destroy them. Giancana suffered a huge loss of face with the rest of the Mafia for having been suckered by Sinatra. Giancana even went so far as to put out a hit on Sinatra. Giancana later withdrew the contract on Sinatra only because he didn’t want to be responsible for killing such a talented singer.
One thing that comes through in all the conspiracy theories is that there was a rich collection of powerful people all of whom would have been glad to see Kennedy dead. I think it is not improbable that there could’ve been more than one conspiracy afoot at the time of Kennedy’s assassination and that they may or may not have known of one another until they literally bumped into each other on November 22, 1863. Of course, after taking big factual stretches to support improbable theories on things like the trajectory of the bullets and their number, and coming up with shaky explanations for the sound recording of the shots recorded on one of the Dallas police officer’s Dictabelt tape, it is possible, though I think remote, that Oswald was the lone shooter. I think it is reasonable that a large number of Americans, myself included, simply don’t accept that. With so many powerful people with strong motives, and the way the autopsy was botched and other evidence contaminated or lost, and the follow-up investigation clearly manipulated, it is hard to think otherwise.
Stone could have, and in my mind should have left LBJ’s culpability at around the level of his knowing what was going to happen without necessarily having to have orchestrated or initiated the plot itself. There simply is no evidence to show that LBJ was the one who hatched and directed the assassination. There is, however, plenty of evidence that he was involved in the cover-up. Stone makes a strong circumstantial case in that direction, but I think he undercuts his own credibility by making some major leaps of faith that LBJ masterminded the assassination.
So much surrounding the Kennedy assassination is one big Rohrschach test. People tend to see what they want to see. The controversy over LBJ’s role in JFK’s death will certainly never go away. It is a legacy LBJ probably richly deserves regardless of his degree of participation in the plot. He certainly was a major mastermind in the cover-up.”
Here’s Roger Stone on the podcast Valuetainment:
“Richard Nixon Told Me” – Roger Stone Reveals Who Really Killed JFK
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lbr41gF09zs
According to Stone, a lot of people wanted to see President Kennedy dead.
Here’s Roger Stone speaking at a book signing, aired on CSPAN in 2014:
Roger Stone “The Man Who Killed Kennedy: The Case Against LBJ”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JIUW8yvbe6Y
No wonder the MSM and Washington have cast Stone as a crazy right-winger. It certainly sounds plausible.
See, MY problem is that I found “The Man Who Knew Too Much” in the remainder bin, decided to buy it and actually read it….
(Well, one of my problems….)
And then there’s the doctors (at Parkland and Bethesda)….
There’s no doubt there’s a coverup (or three) somewhere along the line.
The question is, WHAT is it that’s being covered up?
– – – – – – –
Heh, three different shooters, all with different motives, none of whom knew each other, on the same day in the same place.
Agatha Christie, anyone?
Do think now, and these last few years cements that thought, that cover-up is the go to immediately by government as soon as something happens not planned.
For instance the Barky Chef drowning
Related (with some interesting details), from Paul Gregory, who knew the Oswalds in Texas.
https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/jfk-assassination-60-years-later-we-know-truth-about-real-killer
Turtler: “in particular don’t see them whacking Kennedy, since he was a(n admittedly lukewarm) ally of theirs [ie mob]”
What about Bobby Kennedy’s investigation of the Mafia? I pretty much agree that probably Oswald acted alone, but I think that *if* it was a conspiracy the most likely suspect by far is the Mafia for that reason, they had a smoking-gun motive. Plus centuries of experience whacking people and cleaning up afterwards. It also ties in Ruby (nightclubs are a Mafia-adjacent business) and possibly even the assassination of RFK.
By contrast I see no motive for the CIA. LBJ, a domestic pork-barrel-and-graft politician with little feel for foreign policy left in place nearly all of Kennedy’s Ivy League national security brain trust – Rusk, McNamara, Rostow, Bundy etc – who turned out to be not so brainy. But he dumped RFK soon after taking over. In the 1960s leftists blamed the CIA to deflect from the fact Oswald was a communist or at least sympathizer. Now people on the right are projecting backward from their understandable anger at recent CIA shenanigans with Russiagate etc.
Put me in the camp of “there is more to the story” notwithstanding Bugliosi’s tome. My father died with Francis Gary Powers, the U2 pilot that survived being shot down on a spy mission in 1960, a grave embarassment to then-President Eisenhower and a problem for our CIA. In 1977, the helicopter Powers was piloting ran out of gas. Despite the fact that they were over an open field (helicopters can land without gas), they crashed and died. He was a recent hire at NBC and was slated for a future interview regarding the past. In 1959, Oswald who was a Radar operator who defected to Russia was in that country at the time of the incident. Though very young, I remember the Cold War. I can picture the air raid sirens and remember the drop drills in elementary school. But I am to believe that our government allowed Oswald, with military experience, to come back from “defection” with a Russian wife no less, and this following the Powers’ debacle. OK. And I will have to agree to disagree with Turtler with regard to the Dulles Brothers and author Stephen Kinzer. The only Kinzer book I’ve read is Poisoner in Chief and admittedly it was a game-changer for me regarding our country. Instead of lighting a match to the research garnered by Unit 731 and the Nazis, Dulles protected the big players and built on it. So fast forward to 2020 and the use of SARS-CoV-2, very effective in upending the Republic. It’s only in the last month I thought how amazing it is that my husband nearly died of this bio-weapon, created in a lab, funded by our government with our tax dollars, compliments of the current crop of elites President Eisenhower warned us of in his Farewell Address. The 2 most important men in my life, collateral damage of the bigger picture.–Excerpt:
“But threats, new in kind or degree, constantly arise. I mention two only.
A vital element in keeping the peace is our military establishment. Our arms must be mighty, ready for instant action, so that no potential aggressor may be tempted to risk his own destruction.
Our military organization today bears little relation to that known by any of my predecessors in peace time, or indeed by the fighting men of World War II or Korea.
Until the latest of our world conflicts, the United States had no armaments industry. American makers of plowshares could, with time and as required, make swords as well. But now we can no longer risk emergency improvisation of national defense; we have been compelled to create a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions. Added to this, three and a half million men and women are directly engaged in the defense establishment. We annually spend on military security more than the net income of all United State corporations.
This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence-economic, political, even spiritual-is felt in every city, every state house, every office of the Federal government. We recognize the imperative need for this development. Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources and livelihood are all involved; so is the very structure of our society.
In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.
We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.
Akin to, and largely responsible for the sweeping changes in our industrial-military posture, has been the technological revolution during recent decades.
In this revolution, research has become central; it also becomes more formalized, complex, and costly. A steadily increasing share is conducted for, by, or at the direction of, the Federal government.
Today, the solitary inventor, tinkering in his shop, has been over shadowed by task forces of scientists in laboratories and testing fields. In the same fashion, the free university, historically the fountainhead of free ideas and scientific discovery, has experienced a revolution in the conduct of research. Partly because of the huge costs involved, a government contract becomes virtually a substitute for intellectual curiosity. For every old blackboard there are now hundreds of new electronic computers.
The prospect of domination of the nation’s scholars by Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money is ever present and is gravely to be regarded.
Yet, in holding scientific research and discovery in respect, as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite.
It is the task of statesmanship to mold, to balance, and to integrate these and other forces, new and old, within the principles of our democratic system-ever aiming toward the supreme goals of our free society.”
As to marksmanship. I visited the site. It would have been an easy shot for any trained Infantryman. The jarheads insist, Every man a rifleman, and put in range time to make it so.
But there is no bird shooting, no shotguns against flying clays.
The only shotguns I saw in the Army were for riot control and even had bayonet fittings. So Oswald’ s “missing” had better be against a barn door or it’s meaningless.
JFK only got into office because of voter fraud by the Chicago Machine, for instance.
==
Not true. He had more than enough electoral votes absent Illinois’.
The one thing that still bothers me that i hope someone can explain with more knowledge from the Zapuder film: it’s the back of Kennedy’s head that explodes. From all that I have seen, the entrance of a bullet to the head is usually a clean hole and the exit is when the head blows apart. So every time I see that film I have to think the kill shot came from the front.
==
It didn’t, and Cyril Wecht admits it did not. The bullet weakened the structural integrity of the skull and the kinetic energy was transferred to surrounding tissue, which blew out the right side of the skull. Photographs of the body taken at Parkland Hospital show no frontal entry wound.
Ruby was an expendable, moderately competent foot soldier or associate for the Chicago Machine
==
He lived in Dallas. He made a modest living running seedy nightclubs. Never married, no children, loved his dog. Had a spinster gal. Didn’t have much formal schooling (common in his cohort). His mother was a serious head case, and that distorted and disfigured the upbringing of the Rubenstein children. (IIRC, the father wasn’t a Bing Crosby character, either). For the most part, he was throughout his life self-employed or in partnership with his brothers in some odd business venture. (At one point, the three were their own little Milton Bradley operation producing board games for sale).
“Among what I would call the “bombshells” in the book are the following:
==
Buy my bridge.
Most Texans old enough to know who Kennedy even was believe that LBJ was involved in the shooting. The big oil men were more than eager to see the last of Kennedy and his threat to the oil depletion allowance. Johnson’s long-time mistress and mother of his alleged son was sure that LBJ was at the center. Texans are gun shooters. Many at the time ordered one of those rifles and tried to get off three shots in the necessary time, and failed. Mac Wallace’s fingerprints (LBJ’s hit man)were found on one of the boxes in the “hide” alleged to have been used by Oswald.
I have a friend who was writing a novel set around the assassination who believed, last I spoke to her about the matter, that it was Oswald, alone. Nevertheless, among us, hers is a minority opinion. My mother was going to vote for Kennedy in 1960, until he nominated LBJ for Veep. Nope, that rips it. Anyone Associated with LBJ had to be a crook. It was just common knowledge in these parts. Election integrity? Surely you jest! “Box 13” was the punch line of so many jokes.
The crookedness of the Democrats, meaning the crookedness of the Johnson’s, is a big reason that Texas is now, for now, at least, Republican. “They aren’t Johnsons” is reason enough to vote for any candidate. Sorry that this has run a bit long and rather discursively, but it is Thanksgiving Day, and I must attend to some pies.
It’s a side issue, but there is nothing whatsoever puzzling about the idea of sailing the Imperial High Seas Fleet to its death in 1918. One simply has to recognized the, now extinct, code of honor of the aristocratic officer class, which could often be suicidal in its effect. The same occurred in 1898 at Santiago; the Spanish officers knew they were doomed, but wished merely to show they could die honorably.
WWI did a lot to end this. But it was real. It is a common, running theme through the British Navy’s history. And the French.
Bob Baer’s investigations brought some interesting details to the mix, one accoustic tests couldn’t replicate the sound of another shooter, two Oswalds itinerary derived from his ticket stub, before he encountered officer tippit, he was headed in another direction from the Theatre, where exactly is left unclear,
Kennedy was pretty naive about how power worked, both brothers, the test ban treaty the notion you could dismantle the intelligence juggernaut that the company had become, what he was thinking about Vietnam, of course the same advisors steered us in the maelstrom of Vietnam
I’ve mentioned before, that I went to school with the son of Antonio Veciana, who had along with Menoyo co founded Alpha 66, from the remnants of the Escambray Front, who held off Castro’s forces, for four years, much like Bandera had done against Soviet troops, a decade earlier, I found he was kind of a jerk, then again I didn’t know his father had gone up river on a narcotics charge, that may or may not have deserved, Veciana is said to have seen Oswald with the mysterious Maurice Bishop, who may have been David Attlee Phillips, Company propaganda chief,
Not true. He had more than enough electoral votes absent Illinois’.
Correct, but there were also allegations of fraud in Texas. Flipping those two states would have given Nixon the election.
Really sad that
Oswald wasn’t using one of those long range “sniper” shotguns or even the everday always hit whatever in the general direction home defense shotguns. Nope, most people accept that he used a rifle and fired three times.
If you have not yet read Bugliosi’s book, “Oswald and Kennedy,” you cannot have an account of the facts surrounding Kennedy’s assassination and Oswald’s death.
The conspiracy theories rest entirely on speculation. This is understandable, because many people did not/do not want to believe that a 24-year-old pipsqueak with a mail-order rifle could take out the leader of the Free World. So, out of fear, they made up alternate explanations.
With regard to the bullets that killed Kennedy and injured Connally, those who have hunted animals know that bullets can have unpredictable results on interaction with flesh and bone. High impacts can make for explosive reactions. Trajectories will vary.
The famous “magic bullet” (hyped by Oliver Stone) is explained by simply noting that the seats in the Lincoln were not arranged in a straight line. Bugliosi illustrates this.
Seriously, read the book if you haven’t. Using the sworn testimony of those who knew them, it goes a long way to explain Oswald’s bizarre history and Ruby’s hotheadedness.
@Eeyore
Doesn’t work that well. Certainly the ideas of military valor and aristocratic chivalry could be daring to the point of suicidal, especially when meshed together, and the navies of the time seem particularly to have been prone to this, but that had to be tempered by the fact that most nations were not the Royal Navy, that the sailors and ships were valuable resources that were to be spent but not wasted.
These might be true at Santiago, but it doesn’t change the fact that Spain was a world spanning empire that had colonies that wouldn’t be lost in the peace treaty and had to be defended. Moreso, the decision at Santiago was that the Spanish fleet would break out of the blockade to avoid being surrendered or destroyed. The knowledge was that the fleet would not win a battle and likely be destroyed (and it was) but it was a choice between that and being lost.
Moreover, Cervera’s contemporary in the Philippines Montojo scuttled his remaining warships after battle in Manila Bay, and that was hardly atypical, as the fate of the Russian Pacific Squadron’s Port Arthur fleet shows and as even the ultimately victorious French and British did from time to time to provide more Naval Infantry for use on land.
So while it outwardly seems to explain it by itself, in practice it doesn’t. It was doubtless one reason for it, but a scuttling in port or some limited sortie to maintain honor were also possible, as was relocating to the Baltic.
@FOAF
To put it simply, it doesn’t fit with the MO for the American Mafia. Even in Southern Italy the Mafia and its cousins in Calabria and the adjacent regions – while quite brutal especially to police – generally steered clear from direct confrontation with the higher echelons of the State or make a history of killing its leaders. This changed to some degree with the Mafia WR after WWII when the Sicilian Mafia decided to declare war on the Italian Government and was much more willing to go after the upper echelons of the Italian Government in the South, but even then
A: they rarely considered going after the President or Prime Minister or major party leaders.
And
B: They largely did it alone, without support from their cousins/frenemies in places like Calabria, who chose to avoid conflict with the government even if it meant accepting diminished activity and who as a result came out of the Mafia Wars far stronger.
The American Mafia were much more timid than even that, with fairly strict opposition to whacking law enforcement and government officials due to it being deemed more trouble than it was worse. Bugsy Siegel got killed by his former allies because he was so insistent about killing Thomas Dewey. I don’t see them authorizing the killing of a POTUS, especially not JFK after the Cuban Missile Crisis.
Moreover, they were not likely to get in good with Oswald in the first place since the American Mafia by and large did not like Reds or Pinkos, and while not totally adverse to business arrangements with them were more used to whacking them. Maybe they could have approached him as fellow communists? But I find that less likely on the whole.
Moreover from my understanding RFK was not as effective at going after organized crime as the Camelot legends make, and if merely going after them was a major reason I’d expect them to have gone after J Edgar Hoover after Appahlachin, especially due to Hoover breaking their tenuous nonaggression pact. But they did not.
Agreed with your analysis regarding the CIA though.
I figured Kennedy was as likely to kill Johnson as Johnson was to kill Kennedy, but there’s a lot about Mac Wallace that didn’t make it into his Wikipedia entry. Johnson was indeed capable of horrible things, and Mac Wallace was apparently involved in some of them. The fingerprint in the Book Depository, however, isn’t Mac Wallace’s. More here.
Looking back, it’s surprising that all the conspiracy theories came to the surface without being immediately slapped down again with the “without evidence” label.
AD – “Not true. He had more than enough electoral votes absent Illinois’.
The “stolen election” theories re 1960 include Texas that also had a close margin though not quite as close as IL. With memories of “landslide Lyndon” …
Turtler – very reasonable response to my conjecture. As I said I also believe Oswald did it alone. Unlike the others though the Mafia theory has less of the aroma of political projection that so overwhelm the others. The bottom line is that whatever soft spots there may be in the Oswald alone scenario, no one has ever come up with a remotely convincing evidence-based alternative.
“I’d expect them to have gone after J Edgar Hoover after Appahlachin”
Well Hoover may have known how to protect himself better than Kennedy did …
The “stolen election” theories re 1960 include Texas that also had a close margin though not quite as close as IL. With memories of “landslide Lyndon” …
==
The Johnson campaign stole 202 votes to win the Texas Democratic primary for U.S. Senate in 1948. His operatives would have had to steal > 46,000 votes 12 years later.
@OBloodyHell
Shotguns are harder to manage than one thinks, and they require a very different shooting style than many rifles like those that’d be around during Oswald’s time. I’d also be curious about what exactly they were hunting, because it is one thing to hit man sized targets on the ground – even moving ones – like what Marines are trained to do (and I was as a military re-enactor) to hitting aerial ones.!
Not really. With snipers and other marksmen you often find it is either the first shot that is the most accurate (due to the ideal conditions of relative calmness, surprise, the ability to line things up just so), or something like the second to sixth, as people instinctively begin adjusting their aim, “walking” the shot closer by using the previous results to learn, and so forth.
This also has happened a bunch of times in recorded history. One of Morgan’s Riflemen (supposedly Tim Murphy) was assigned to hunt British officers during the Saratoga Campaign and is reported to have been tasked with killing Brigadier General Simon Fraser of the British Army during the climax of the fighting at Bemis Heights, and in spite of all the Riflemen under Morgan being distinguished for their skill and Murphy and most of the others attributed with the kill usually being deemed exceptional, it apparently took something like 3-4 shots to get one that hit and even that one was “merely” a mortal wound rather than the kind of money shot.
To be fair this is very much anecdotal and coming to us from “I was told by a guy….” Sourcing, but the fact that it wasn’t deemed suspicious or “pretty improbable” says something. And while some might plead technological change from the Kentucky Rifle to the Carcano, the fact remains that we have similar assessments from modern snipers, who also often have to correct their shots or team up to make sure that they can fire multiple at a single target in case the calculations for one are off, such as with some of White Feather’s kills.
It’s also worth noting that I come to this from an unusual angle. While I am an American, i am also an avid history nut and wargamer as well as a former re-enactor, and I have used the Carcano family on a casual level and studied the records of their military use far more avidly, especially in the wars of the 19th and early/mid 20th century. The M91/38 Carcano is not the best gun ever made or even the best of its generation, but it is a solidly reliable death dealer that an amateur marksman like myself can get good results with, let alone someone with a degree of military rifle training as Oswald undeniably had. It is not particularly beginner friendly for a number of reasons in comparison to say the Lee-Enfield or the 1903 Springfield family (and this is also a problem because rate of fire is slower meaning you cannot spit bullets out at quite the rate) but it is also not a hugely complicated machine that you require super secret gorilla warfare training to get good at.
That’s a nice theory and novel for the lack of malice, but I don’t see it. The basic premise makes a lot of sense, and indeed we now know that during the Ustasha murder of Yugoslav King and Dictator Alexander I Karadordevic, the murderer killed the King and was falsely assumed to have killed French FM Louis Barthou until a do over of the scene revealed Barthou was actually killed by friendly fire from French police trying to take down the tango. So it is definitely possible in premise.
The big issue I see is simply that the power of the shot and its trajectory really do not fit with what we know the secret service in the motorcade were carrying, which was overwhelmingly pistols and a few SMGs. So a Secret Service Agent trying to acquire the target and shooting Kennedy would have produced very different bullet impacts to the ones we see, start with probably lacking the force for the definitive “Boom” blast that took off a good portion of his front face and also likely coming from the other way.
These things would also be fairly easy to prove and hard to cover up in autopsy, which is one of the ways Barthou’s cause of death was established.
Touché, and mea culpa. Thanks to you and Jimmy for the correction. As for the skill requirement, I’ll do some diving and check with my contacts specializing in the navy about it.
@Sharon W
Fair, and to each their own. I can believe there is more to the story, but I’m not sure how much more. I also think the evidence doesn’t really warrant too much drastic conjecturing.
My sympathies to both of you, and indeed the U2 Plane was a fiasco. But helicopter crashes often turn fatal, even in seemingly controllable situations. I can’t rule out sabotage or murder, but I also won’t rule them in.
You’d be surprised. One of the great and most damning issues with US intelligence, especially before the rise of Angleton and the Golitsyn Coup, was how lax much of the West’s intelligence assets were in dealing with communist penetration. Oswald’s story certainly wasn’t common and makes me suspect at least some mid to low level strings were pulled, but it most certainly was not unheard of given the rather large American diaspora in the USSR up to the 1940s and especially the 1950s due to things like the Great Depression, and the ineffectual observation of the Lincoln Battalion and other Comintern Front org’s members.
That doesn’t jive well with the often apocalyptic tensions of the era or pop culture, but it does seem borne out. And Oswald would not even be the worst offender, as Armand Hammer attests.
I haven’t read Poisoner in Chief, so I will have to withhold judgement on the matter, especially since Sidney Gottlieb is a darkly fascinating character I need to research more on.
However, i HAVE read many of Kinzer’s other works, such as The Brothers, All the Shah’s Men, Reset: Iran, Turkey, and America’s Future, Bitter Fruit, and the True Flag as well as some editorials.
And I stand by my assessment that Kinzer’s a dishonest, far left wing fabulist and idiot. Which really shouldn’t be surprising given the amount of water he carries for Islamist and Communist regimes, as well as close parsing of his real or alleged sources (as I pointed out where he does not even give the caveats or reasoning that Grouse did while stealing his work, instead positing Allen Dulles’s yarn as unvarnished, undisputed fact). In particular, he is REMARKABLY uncurious about sources that do not fit his agenda in general, and particularly non-English speaking ones such as those out of the Iranian Diaspora, the Congo, and the Spanish Speaking World, which undercut his windmill tilling against the Dulles Brothers and “Cold Warriors” in general by pointing out that men like Mossadegh, Arbenez, and Lumumba were by no means the innocent lambs they are often portrayed in American left wing historiography, and that talking more with Marxist-Leninist or Islamist apocalyptics is not likely to help us more.
Moreover, my exposure to his drek and the circles he travels in has done more than enough to dissuade me from desiring to read more of his writing, since if someone is willing to lie, mislead, and leaven the deck on matters I know about I don’t have much reason to believe his word on matters I don’t know about. Especially since – as I pointed out regarding the differences between his work and Grouse’s – he generally does a much sloppier, more hackneyed regurgitation of better work.
That doesn’t mean he is wrong about EVERYTHING, and MKULTA in particular is a good example of why we trust the US Government far too much. But it doesn’t mean should start believing it.
I agree the Dulleses were way too chummy with many of the worst war criminals of WWII, and the aforementioned discussion of Operation Sunrise shows this, and in general I find it disgraceful that the Soviets (though by no means the anti-Fascist stalwarts they portrayed themselves as and happy to recruit useful Axis war criminals) often were much fairer and more even handed in their trialing of the Axis than we were. In particular, the lack of punishment for Italian War Criminals gals me, since we really didn’t have any good reason to keep military chiefs and Fascist diehards like Graziani and Roatta around because while Ishii should have been hanged you could at least argue his scientific knowledge and skeleton-burial-maps would give us a scientific advantage, while Graziani and Roatta offered nothing except brutal reputations and military doctrine that was flawed back in the 1930s.
But as for “lighting a match to the research garnered” by the war criminals though, WHY? It wouldn’t do anything to bring the murdered back to life, or to save the mortally infected. Scientific knowledge is still useful, regardless of how it was gained. The issue I have was how undiscerning we were in who we protected.
But that has to be mapped out against the backdrop of expecting an imminent WW3 with the Soviet Union, which people like the Brothers Dulles, Churchill, and Patton (for whatever their other flaws) correctly identified as a threat and that we now know Stalin was working towards and believed would be ready within a few years by the time of his death, long after he had crushed and persecuted the legitimate governments of Eastern/Central Europe and murdered several of our war time allies like the Poles.
Indeed, and my sympathies there. Whatever our differences, I am glad your husband is alive. And it was a mistake to allow the Elites to do this nonsense.
Agreed, and it is one way we have gotten out of control, and why naive belief in our government was never a really good thing, it just seemed like it. And I fear things will get worse before they get better, IF they do get better.
@Art Deco
The Chicago Machine was most powerful in Illinois, but it was far from the only place it operated, and it had an incestuous alliance with many of the major Dem powerbrokers in Texas and in some neighboring states like Michigan.
@Michael
I haven’t heard the same record from most of my Texas friends of that age, but I can believe it.
She at least claimed to be so, though as the reference by Abraxas points out she had ample reason to engage in sour grapes and isn’t the most reliable.
https://jfkfacts.org/new-look-lbj-joan-mellen-debunks-mac-wallace-myth/
https://jfkfacts.org/crowdsourcing-madeleine-brown-debunked/
It also doesn’t make a huge amount of sense given the testimony we have from others and the basic chronology that JFK’s death came at QUITE the inopportune moment for LBJ and he was shocked. If he was the mastermind or at least a central player in the assassination I’d expect a lot more pieces in place before.
To which I would say “Yeah, No shit, you just bought the gun and expect you’ll achieve those results so easily?”
The fact is that plenty of them did get off the results, as have many others. I myself was capable of getting off that many shots with the M91/38 Carcano in even the compressed time Ollie Stone loves, though my practice has atrophied.
Which is where a wider pool of experience helps.
The Carcano didn’t come out of the blue. It was Italy’s main military rifle all the way from 1891 to the end of WWII when it was replaced by first the Garand and SMLE and then by various Assault Rifles. In this it saw fighting in both world wars and a host of minor ones, producing absolutely gigantic amounts of testing data and battlefield reports.
The M91/38 is not the best rifle of its generation, but it is a solid performer that you absolutely can fire that fast with. Doing so accurately and especially at the targets Oswald (or “whoever the shooter was”) did so takes practice and the shooter clearly wasn’t perfect due to their misses, but it is hardly an unapproachable secret technique worthy only of Simo Hayha.
Yeah no, turns out that fishing analysis of partial prints out to incompetent quacks results in bad conclusions, as Abraxas pointed out.
Which is a fair point, and I will definitely not claim the Johnsons were saints or not crooks. They absolutely were, and while I have a mostly dim view of JFK I believe LBJ’s Presidency and political career were outright catastrophic. I also think this points to the problems with corruption and proven dishonesty like what LBJ and the Swamp traffic in: It justifiably arouses hatred and distrust, and makes people look around for explanations, whether or not they are true.
No worries, and happy Thanksgiving.
@Brian E
Stone didn’t do his homework nearly as much. For starters, while LBJ was a POS and so were his henchmen, the partial fingerprint wasn’t from Mac Wallace.
Secondly, it starts running into the aforementioned problems of WTF the Mob would have chosen to
A: Assassinate not just a high ranking politician but THE POTUS after literal decades of culture and tradition dictating avoidance of direct conflict with the Government.
B: Choose to employ a Communist sympathizer for it.
It also is pretty laughable that we’re supposed to believe Sinatra was the connection between an experienced operator like Joe Kennedy Sr and the Chicago Mafia, especially when you remember that the driving force that delivered Chicago and Illinois (and a fair bit else) to the Kennedys was NOT the Mafia but Daley’s political machine in Chicago, through which the Mob approached to get deals.
And I could go on.
In the end, I have a certain affection for Roger Stone and even Tricky Dick Nixon, and can certainly sympathize with the nakedly politicized persecution of both, but neither are spotless or the most reliable of accounts, and maybe trusting the guy who has Nixon tattooed to his back and a long history of floating provably false news about his opponents without double checking isn’t the wisest.
@SHIREHOME Thank you kindly, I am honored. Though I certainly am not infallible, as Jimmy and OBloodyHell pointed out.
In re the three paragraphs of brilliantly lucid prose at
miguel cervantes on November 23, 2023 at 8:55 am said:
Who are you, and what have you done with the real Miguel cervantes?
😉
A new entry in the Conspiracy Sweepstakes.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12785325/Rob-reiner-proof-jfk-killed-four-shooters.html
URLs are such fun. No, JFK didn’t kill 4 shooters, they killed him.
Maybe.
Considering the source, I’m more than a little skeptical; on the other hand, The National Enquirer (!!) legitimately broke the news about John Edward’s mistress and ended his political career.
We’re already living in the Twilight Zone, where even Reiner could be right.
As I said before (twice :)) I believe Oswald did it alone. His shooting by Ruby though means that conspiracy theories will always hover over the assassination of JFK. I have heard that Pat Moynihan, the last honest Democrat, foretold this on the Saturday that weekend between the two shootings. Supposedly he was sent to Dallas and, appalled by the lax security of the Dallas PD, remarked “If Oswald gets shot we’ll never hear the end of the conspiracy theories.” It has become a political and historical Rohrshach test.
60 years later, and the video still shows
“Back and to the Left”, “Back and to the Left”, “Back and to the Left”…
A thousand years hence, it will still show “Back and to the Left”.
For the sake of sanity, get over it. Let it go.
Banned Lizard:
See this.
And read this.
See also this.
Dang that Ultra Maga Trump!
the nakedly politicized persecution of both
==
Mr. Nixon’s activities between November 1971 and May of 1973 might or might not have merited a criminal conviction and, yes, we have reason to believe that Barack Obama got away with worse. That having been said, we know he lied publicly and repeatedly about what his aides had been up to, that he approved of efforts to sluice cash to some of his operatives to persuade them to keep quiet, that his campaign director knew full well what the general-counsel of the Committee to Re-elect the President was up to, and that the secretary to his chief of staff did also. Mr. Liddy and his staff committed actual crimes. (There were people sent to prison who did not belong there, among the Donald Segretti and (one might argue) Charles Colson and people subject to prosecutorial abuse (Maurice Stans)).
60 years later, and the video still shows
==
Gunshot wounds have front spatter (voluminous) and back spatter (not voluminous). The people hit with voluminous spatter were the Connollys. The man hit with some liquid mist was a motorcycle cop behind the limousine.
@Art Deco
Indeed, which is why I bring it up. Nixon is hardly the most trustworthy of beings, and he was not even particularly conservative. So relying on he said she said from him for years later strikes me as a bad idea, especially when Stone couldn’t or wouldn’t vet the other claims. The fact that Roger Stone still openly Simps for him strikes me as an example of bad judgement in a rather remarkable life, but in any case I am not inclined to defend Nixon on this even if he was doing stuff comparable to what FDR, JFK, and LBJ did and which is dwarfed by the current regime.
Meathead is spectacularly wrong
neo:
Facts and physics be damned, they trust Oliver Stone, and will forever.
you could argue with nixon’s economic policy, his China policy, his adopting of EPA and affirmative action, but the ‘wisemen’ don’t really have questions about that, it was putting the lantern light on Hiss, and their blind spot, Malley is a rough analog of same,
I’ve resented Oliver Stone going back to Scarface, yes it was a Brian DePalma product, but it was designed to malign my paisans, a quarter century of success and they made this lowly sicario, emblematic, the people behind the 4th season of Wiseguy did a similar thing with the great Maximilian Schell, this was less known, they had another scribe who should have known better,
Since I read Penny Lernoux among others I understand it was an oblique reference to the the World Finance Corporation and Hernandez Cartaya,
and he was not even particularly conservative.
==
For Nixon, issues were fungible. To the extent he had commitments, he favored the Rockefeller wing over the Reagan wing. Same deal with Agnew. What made them ‘conservative’ is that they weren’t impressed with youth culture of various sorts. Agnew was particularly articulate on this point. Their children underlined the point by not subscribing to anything which would have been considered odd prior to 1964, though James Rand Agnew’s personal issues sometimes intruded.
Milk subsidies seems to be near beer to what we see today, with multiple instances of kompromat from Kazakh Chinese Ukrainian and Russia sources,
Neo et al, Neo’s first link is very well done. Thanks to Neo for her diligence in searching out sources.
What is important is that the relevant frames in the film mask what actually happened. Recall that those cameras generally ran at 20frames/sec, 0.05sec which is an eternity in terms of bullet flight times. Frame 312 shows from a reference line from frame 311 that JFK’s head is snapped forward from the impact of the bullet from behind. Frame 313 shows the beginning of the exit sequence. What is important is answering my question from a day or so ago, is the analysis of the energy. The reference goes through some extensive calculations, but the bottom line is that the energy of the bullet first creates a conical shaped segment of bone which breaks from the skull and follows the bullet’s path. That combined energy of the bullet and the bone cone then exits out the front of the skull in an explosive manner; starting a frame 313. the subsequent couple of frames show the explosive exit and to conserve momentum the president’s head necessarily moves back and left.
Fortunately, forensic examination of the brain will conclusively settle the trajectory question.
If it can be found…
Fortunately, forensic examination of the brain will conclusively settle the trajectory question.
==
The brain was buried 60 years ago. And the question of the direction of the shot is conclusively settled.
on the 25th anniversary of the assasination A&E before it was clogged with reality show spores, worse than mynocks did a whole series of segments with bill kurtis, one of the most curious was about the Corsican gunmen supposed, of course the lead witness, Christian David, was in prison on the day in question, another roger bocogni (sic) was serving with the French navy, these details came from Posner,
the slapstick element, was the supposed mute man, who apparently saw the gunman on the grassy knoll, that was a two Rather’s level of inanity,
lol.
Time doesn’t exist for conspiracy advocates, nor does “conclusively settled.”
One of the things that has always puzzled me is the idea that the “mob” would be in the business of assassinating a politician at long range. It’s not how they operated. They always killed people up close. They had little if any familiarity with rifles.
Second, they have never been as organized as some novels and movies suggest. Mostly they’re local operators. They don’t have a roster of long range killers because they never do that.
Conspiracy theorists have long claimed that “everyone” in Dealey Plaza heard more than three shots, and heard them coming from different locations. As Bugliosi pointed out, virtually everyone there agreed there were three, and that they came from the depository.
I saw the same thing from conspiracy folks after 9/11. They claim one guy said the plane hitting the Pentagon was like a cruise missile. They leave off the preceding part where the guy says, “I saw the plane hit the building.” They ignore the thousands of people who saw an airliner hit the building.
When you visit one of their lectures and call them on the lies, they change the subject. Next time there’s an audience, they’re back to the original lies.
The discussion here has been calm and rational. People disagreed. But I read through a discussion on a Hollywood gossip site. Holy cow, compared to the discussion there, everyone here was utterly calm, rational and reasonable.
I think there were some coincidences in the shootings of Kennedy/Connally and Oswald. Change any small detail and it doesn’t happen. As an example, if the motorcade stays on Main street (instead of turning right onto Houston, then left onto Elm) then Oswald’s shot is much more difficult and distant. He might not even take the shot. But the turns happened, and the third and fatal shot was almost perfectly lined up for Oswald.
As for Ruby, It looks very much like he found himself near the jail, a place he knew, because he was sending money to a dancer. He walks down the ramp into the basement garage, and there’s Oswald right there, between two cops. Impulsive Jack pulls his gun and walks up and shoots from close range.
But if the Dallas PD moves Oswald earlier or later, if the door to the ramp is closed, if they back up the car close to the exit so Oswald is in the car by the time Ruby can shoot him, well, Oswald survives the day, and possibly survives to today.
Gordon Scott:
And of course Oswald had been working at the Book Depository for about 5 weeks. We know how he got the idea for the job; through a friend of the family, Ruth Paine, who had a friend who worked there. And the route for Kennedy wasn’t decided on till close to the day of the event. Just those facts alone argue against anyone having recruited Oswald for the assassination.
But there’s SO much more that implicates Oswald and Oswald alone.
Agreed, Neo. Oswald alone.
One of the interesting details I learned from watching the interviews with the Parkland doctors is that when Kennedy was wheeled into the treatment room, none of the doctors realized he had a head wound. They worked to stabilize him and treat the neck wound.
It wasn’t until one of them moved behind his head as he lay that that doctor saw the massive wound. He told the others, and to a man they knew it was hopeless.
A couple of minutes later Jackie walked in and handed a large piece of the skull to one of the doctors. She’d had it in her hands since in the first few seconds after the head shot, she had climbed onto the trunk lid to retrieve it.
I’m not touching the “who killed JFK” issue with a 10 foot pole, but, as a data point, shooting at a bird with a shotgun is only tangentially related to firing a rifle at a ground target. I’m a terrible wing shot – my typical trap score is 4 or 5 birds out of 25- but I qualified “Expert” with an M-14 in basic, and I have a nice set of antlers taken at slightly over 300 yards (with a 9x scope, of course).
Buddha
I qualified Expert with the 14, the 16, and whatever else they were scoring on. Might have been the M60. The rest of the battalion weapons we “familiarized”.
Was pretty quick with a major deflection change on the 81, impressed the instructors.
Loved the Ma Deuce.
That was over fifty years ago. Drilled a nice set of holes in a silhouette with a Glock a couple of years ago. Pulled up and right a bit, mostly in the head.
Never fired a shotgun at anything, much less flying clays.
So, as I say, unless the item Oswald missed with the shotgun was a stationary barn door, the report is meaningless. Except as a false datum.
The brain was buried 60 years ago…
Art Deco:
Cite? Perhaps it was buried, but I don’t believe you know.
According to Bugliosi, the brain was inventoried into a footlocker with other materials, but when the footlocker was later opened, the brain was gone.
–Bugliosi, “Reclaiming History” pp.431,432
It is assumed that RFK obtained the brain, but there is no official accounting.
This is what I dislike about your comments — flat contradictions of previous commenters without cites or even argument. I often find your claims incorrect or misleading or questionable.
No matter where one stands on the JFK assassination, Bugliosi is an invaluable resource.
I once had six feet of assassination books. I donated most to the San Francisco Library when I moved. If I ever regret that choice, I find I can flip to Bugliosi’s index and find whatever detail I recall summarized and assessed.
If you can do better than Bugliosi’s conclusions, be my guest. But if you want to know the cutting-edge on just about any aspect of the assassination, it’s Bugliosi all the way.
Bugliosi’s “Reclaming History” is truly a monument to one man’s obsession to refute nearly the entire world.
This is what I dislike about your comments — flat contradictions of previous commenters without cites or even argument. I often find your claims incorrect or misleading or questionable.
==
Boo hoo.
Art Deco:
Yep. No defense of your indefensible statement. Just an emotional noise.
Useless.
huxley:
I also am in awe of Bugliosi’s achievement in that book. He allowed it to be put online for free because he wanted as many people as possible to have access to it. And yet it seems that a great many people would much rather cling to JFK assassination conspiracy theories than read it.
Bugliosi started it in the deeps of his post 2000 derangemenf and this was before the internet had wide reach so he had to do first hand research something say stephen rivele the one behind the corsican shooters tale didnt or wouldnt care to do
Except when Art Deco writes very long and detailed responses to coments. Neither are saints or entirely unemotional at times.
No fighting in the war room, of course posner didnt have access to everything like the joannides file the operative surveilling the expats in new orleans
Neo, I followed one of your links to the paper on head wound ballistics and effects. I knew Luis Alvarez had done some work on this, but he didn’t have access to the digitized Zapruder film. Holy cow, is this exhaustive and conclusive. The author shows the head wound had to come from a rifle in the direction of the Depository. If there was a shot from the grassy knoll, it passed through without doing any more damage because there is zero physical evidence in Kennedy’s skull.
The author doesn’t mock Garrison’s “back, and to the left” mantra. He shows that before Kennedy moved backward, he moved forward in two stages. The digitized Zapruder frames show this happening. Perhaps Garrison couldn’t see it on his copy, or he didn’t think it was important.
The “back and to the left” movement was so obvious because it involved Kennedy’s whole torso. This is a biological reaction, not energy transfer from a bullet. It was the president’s last physical movement, as he went limp at the end of it.
The other thing I found out was that the fatal bullet struck, blew out the side of the head, and flew out of the camera frame between frame 212 and 213 of the film. It seems absurd. After all, there is only 5/100ths of a second between when the shutter opens on 212 and when it opens on 213. But the bullet moved 105 feet in that instant.
As has been frequently said, by Aubrey it is neither fitting nor just that a giant should be brought low by a croissant. Um. Loss ant. Not very nice ant with references to urine.
See MLK.
There MUST,be more to it.
@Banned Lizard
The trajectory “question” is conclusively settled by the Zapruder Film, and particularly the ultraslow frame by frame analysis that shows the head gets pushed forward by the fatal shot. From there you can draw the trajectory.
“…American Officials ncouraged or Were Privy to Coup Plots Whk 4 Resulted in the Deaths of Trujillo, Diem, and Schneider__..
– 256 4. The Plots Occurred in a Cold War Atmosphere Perceived to be of Crisis Proportions————————————
256 5. American Officials Had Exaggerated Notions About Their Ability to Control the Actions of Coup Leaders ————
256 6. CIA Officials Made Use of Known Underworld Figures in Assassination Efforts__”
The report does say the underworld/criminal assassins were “European”, but no doubt there were connections between Mafia figures in the US and Italy.
Summary paper of the 1975 report:
ALLEGED ASSASSINATION PLOTS INVOLVING FOREIGN LEADERS
https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/docs/CIA-RDP83-01042R000200090002-0.pdf
Assassination was only removed as a destabilizing tool by the CIA in 1975 by Gerald Ford.
It might be fair to call the JFK assassination the most “Extraordinary Series of Unfortunate Coincidences”.
I linked to a secret report written in 1975 released in the 2000’s detailing how the use of assassination by our government was used/attempted/considered by the CIA. Leaving aside the destabilization/coups by the CIA around the world using techniques short of assassination, sticking our noses into foreign affairs, all in the name of “Democracy” is pretty grim.
One of the reasons I suspect a more coordinated effort to remove Kennedy from office by non-voting methods assumes that if the government is willing to fess up to assassination of foreign leaders as regular policy, what is likely to be included in the secrets still to be released from the Warren Commission?
It would be reasonable to suspect the details are pretty damning.
Now if the report fingered the mafia/Sicilian mob as the culprits I think the country would survive. So it leads me to the conclusion it involves the CIA or LBJ– which doesn’t mean the actual details of the assassination couldn’t have been carried out by the mob.
There is a theory that Oswald was just a patsy. Lots of unanswered questions since Oswald was immediately removed from answering any of those questions.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_STRBD2_SX0&t=4237s
The Innocence of Lee Harvey Oswald
There is a theory that Oswald was just a patsy.
==
There is no theory and only the most preliminary hypothesis. The people who push this cannot be bothered with inductive reasoning.
The Innocence of Lee Harvey Oswald
==
Yeah. You see, the plotters maintain a register of ‘patsies’ in cities all over the country. They don’t have motercades only in Dallas. They have multiple picked out in each city, to have one in the place when a preferred target is in town. They update these registers frequently. Oswald had over the previous six months lived in two different cities, had three different addresses, and had two different employers. He’d been hired by the Book Depository five weeks before the assassination. The route for the motorcade had been finalized and announced just days before. On 22 November, they burgled Ruth Paine’s home, stole his rifle, infiltrated the book depository, and placed it (along with some spent cartridges) on the 6th floor in front of a window overlooking the motorcade route. They then leave the building un-noticed.
==
Quite fortunate that Oswald happened to carpool to work that day with a package full of ‘curtain rods’. Also quite fortunate that Oswald, alone of the roster of men reporting to his foreman, left the building that afternoon. Pretty fortunate as well that the body double the plotters employed managed to locate a Dallas police officer to murder while Oswald was loafing in the Texas Theater nearby, minding his own business. Also fortunate that Oswald had been some place shooting at targets with the handgun police found on him, which produced that embarrassing paraffin test result.
Here’s an interview with Dallas Police Officer Jim Leavelle on the 50th anniversary of the assassination. Leavelle investigated the Tippit murder. He was also the officer handcuffed to Oswald when Ruby shot him.
A couple of points that raises eyebrows. If you see a picture of the lineup, it’s pretty obvious that Oswald would be identified. As to the .38 casings found– Oswald was arrested with a revolver. Why would he empty it at the scene? There was also alledgedly a casing from an automatic– which makes sense, but there is nothing that ties him to owning an automatic.
Was Oswald being framed by the DPD? At that time in history, it wouldn’t be particularly surprising.
Living History with James “Jim” Leavelle
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R99EvAveiuU
One of the interesting comments Bugliosi made in his book was that, assuming an ordinary victim, he could have convicted Oswald in a two or three day trial. Also, would the members or staff of the Warren Commission risk their reputations by participating in a conspiracy? They were pretty much all lawyers, and lawyers know better than anyone how people talk.
Art Deco,
It probably wouldn’t satisfy everyone, or even conclusively settle the issue, but releasing the remaining documents from the Warren Commission should lay to rest the lingering doubts that the government has/had something to hide.
Was the Warren Commission a sloppy investigation? Would releasing the complete report just confirm that it was incomplete, that some avenues weren’t investigated? Likely.
Many conservatives are skeptical about the 9/11 commission report, given that members of the commission served in the Clinton administration that failed to identify/address the looming threat.
Like OJ and voter fraud, convicting Oswald beyond a reasonable doubt from the evidence would be tough. You may think he’s guilty as hell, but Johnnie Cochran got OJ off and we all know he was guilty as well.
I would say the best that can be done is to look at the evidence– much of it contradicted by witnesses and evidence and make a judgement as to which is the most plausible.
As Richard Aubrey so humorously stated, “neither fitting nor just that a giant should be brought low by a croissant.”
Must be twue, saw it on the Interwebs.
Now applying standards of justice from the 1990s to 2023 to a counterfactual hypothetical trial in 1963/1964 is an interesting type of reasoning.
Takes all kinds to keep a conspiracy “theory” alive.
Brian E:
Please read the Bugliosi book.
The evidence exists not only to prove Oswald guilty beyond a reasonable doubt, but beyond any doubt. There is no evidence for anything else.
But most JFK conspiracy theorists would not be convinced by anything.
Neo, serious & curious: is this post the winner, to date, of the longest comment section?
It’s breathtaking to me the depth of knowledge & experience this lovely group of people have.
And on many topics, but history seems a forte!
I value the discussions, & my eye openings on multiple issues.
Grateful for all.
https://cubanstudiesinstitute.us/principal/president-johnson-fidel-castro-got-kennedy-first/
Marlene:
Not even close. I’ve had some posts with over 200 comments, and many with over 100. Can’t recall which ones, though.
Neo, did you read Bugliosi’s book The Betrayal of America: How the Supreme Court Undermined the Constitution and Chose Our President?
If so, did you find it balanced or persuasive?
Miguel cervantes, if the article you linked to were true, given the climate at the time, it’s hard to believe that the 101st airborne wouldn’t have landed in Havana and escorted Castro on the path to his maker.
@Brian E
This is what we call a fallacy of conflation.
Let’s start with what your own damn headline says.
Note the key phrasing: ENCOURAGED or “Were Privy To.”
You immediately take this to mean the CIA ordered or carried out those hits themselves, since your summary of it morphs into:
The problem is that that isn’t what “privy to” or “encouraged” means. It CAN be, but it isn’t necessary, and even the Church Report that you cite notes that “Encouraged” or “was Privy To” can be as little as being “privy to the knowledge that such a plot was happening and doing nothing or very little to stop it”, in a similar way to the fact that Australian Intelligence was aware of Indonesian military plans to murder Australian journalists in Timor but kept quiet in order to maintain practices.
Much of the examples you specifically cite fill this out. Indeed, even in cases where the US government clearly went further (such as ordering the murder of Lumumba) it didn’t even have the chance to because other actors (namely Lumumba’s anti-centralist Congolese rivals and the Belgians) got to him before we did. Ditto Schneider and Allende, where the CIA knew about plans against Schneider within the context of Chilean military planning but was ambivalent about them and was cautiously in favor of capturing him to get him out of the way but apparently opposed murdering him (because they believed that while his apoliticism was a liability dealing with Allende’s creeping dictatorship and paramilitary operations, it would be an asset after Allende was removed and some kind of order had to be restored).
The Chilean military cliques that were responsible either thought differently (after all, Schneider was their superior, political rival, and an obstacle to further advancement) or screwed up the grab and wound up killing him. Which distressed Kissinger etc. al. and even many others opposing Allende because – and this tends to get overlooked – it created a bloody vacancy at the head of the Chilean military chain of command that Allende was legally allowed to fill with one of his loyalists, which he promptly did with an almost lifelong friend and hatchet man who most believed would go along with Allende’s plans to consolidate power and cripple both the Congress and Constitution.
This tends to get overlooked in hindsight because said friend was Pinochet, who famously decided to ask himself why he should only serve as the strong arm of someone else’s dictatorship and did a 180 to coup Allende. But at the time it was a very unpleasant shock, including in DC, because it looked like it’d give Allende the excuse to appoint a violent, unethical loyalist in charge of the military and to declare a state of siege. All of which tends to get either downplayed or ignored utterly by those that like yelling “The CIA did it” without actually asking themselves how or why the CIA would do “it.”
Trujillo as best as I can tell was a case of the US knowing of the plotters were going to act and giving a tacit thumbs up but almost no actual support. Honestly I’d argue we should have done more since while he was an “our son of a bitch” he was a toxic monster that by the time of his death was a humanitarian nightmare as well as diplomatic and PR liability. However, the US was not actually well informed about the process of the plot, which is one reason why it was slow to react to the assassination and failed to support the plotters in the crucial hours and days after Trujillo’s killing, and mostly waded in weeks later to help stabilize the situation and prevent the rest of the Trujillo clan from maintaining the old system.
That alone should be a heavy indication against the Mastermind CIA interpretation.
The case where the evidence is strongest (outside of Fidel Castro, who is another case where the assassination would’ve been a public interest homicide) is Diem. While the plot again originated within the echelons of the South Vietnamese military, JFK and the CIA were much better informed, worked in fairly close tandem with the plotters, and ultimately gave approval for the process (even if not all of the methodologies or incompetent processes). This is also I’d argue the case where the choice was mistaken, because while still no saint Diem was a much better man than anybody on the list save Schenider and also a more pragmatic dictator who was making inroads towards undermining Communist influence in the South.
So what lessons can we take from the report, in hindsight?
Firstly: In absolutely none of these did the CIA act alone. Indeed, in the case of Schneider it’s an open question on how much the CIA even acted, since the plot and the methodology were obviously not their desire, and Lumumba was clearly killed by a mostly-independent plan with indirect ties to the CIA but not much in the way of active planning (probably in part because the Belgians, Katangans, and Federalist Congolese were worried about it being leaked).
Secondly: In every case, the results were at best sub-optimal for the US, except maybe the ouster of Allende. With Schneider the preference by much of US officialdom was that he was held incommunicado as a prisoner rather than killed, but because they had rather indirect influence and scant control on the Chilean actors on the stage in country, that isn’t what happened. With Trujillo the US wanted him gone but again did not have good up to date contact with the plotters and as a result acted too late to support or even save them, though they did hurt the regime’s attempt at consolidation. Lumumba was a case of “Not us this time” with the CIA being too slow on the draw.
Diem is the one case where the US and CIA (and JFK, which runs counter to the usual portrayal this narrative has of the two being intractable enemies) got pretty much exactly what they wanted…. and that turned out to be hurtful to them and US interests.
Thirdly: Organized crime such as the Sicilian and American Mafias played vanishingly little role in any of these identified plans, especially those that tied into successful assassinations. This should not be a surprise; the American Mafia has not been in the business of political assassinations frequently and neither has its more violent Sicilian cousin, and the relatively few times the Sicilian Mafia has changed that MO (from the 1920s to 1943 after Mussolini violently spurned them, and in the Mafia Wars of the 1970s-1990s) it was both local against the Italian Government, and generally held to be notable failures that led to their Calabrian cousins and others eating their lunches.
Fourthly: In all of these examples given in the 1975 report the CIA is portrayed as fairly loyal and in league with the US Executive’s broad agenda as a whole, even if not there. Which is the direct opposite of both this theory and the common CIA v. JFK narrative.
So conclusions?
Well, for starters the CIA and the US Government are -for all of their many failures and the risk of overstatement – still very powerful and very dangerous. While I’ve made a good deal of the many ways the CIA failed in these cases or played second fiddle to local actors that are nowhere near as sexy or sensationalist to give credit to but who generally had much better means, motive, opportunity, and knowledge, most intelligence agencies would struggle to maintain all of these contacts. It also shows it was prepared to consider a broad range of unsavory solutions, whether directly or indirectly. In some of those cases such as Trujillo and Castro I would heartily support those solutions as the lesser evil to allowing said people to continue stealing oxygen, but the sword that can cut those who I hate can also cut me.
But it also shows that this is not Day of the Condor. The CIA was often blindsided by events and people with far less power than it but greater access. It failed to plan a great many things, either literally because it didn’t actually plan the assassinations listed, or indirectly because it approved of some plans but not how they went or their aftereffects. You often find a corrupt and corruptible, outpaced, overblown spy shop that doesn’t know how to use its power either for the American good or even for its own interests, and which as a result routinely blundered or got shown up.
No, no it wouldn’t be. For starters, the Sarajevo Murders of 1914 has it beat hands down.
To be fair, many people choose to embellish this further by arguing that Gavrilo Princip had given up the attempt for lost and was going to eat a sandwich for lunch when the car just so happened to pass. This was an urban legend (for starters, sandwiches REALLY WERE NOT common Serbian or Bosnian cuisine at the time) and it seems pretty clear this was a fallback position for the plotters.
But that doesn’t change the fact that even stripped of that false embellishment, it’s basically a century earlier, Slavic version of Four Lions in which a bunch of (to put it none too generously) terminal loses in every sense of the word who failed to succeed in basically anything self-radicalized and went on a half-baked assassination plan minimally supported by their Terrorist Mastermind puppeteer, Dimitrijevic/”Apis”, who expected them to fail miserably but decided that them dying futilely was no problem for him, and whose cockamanie plan failed, only to succeed.
And that’s not even the most bizarre or coincidental series of events in history.
The problem is that it’s not 1975 anymore and a lot of the given information has been obsoleted.or there.
Again, this doesn’t make too much sense for the reasons I’ve mentioned, especially given what I mentioned.
For starters, a successful hit on Kennedy by the CIA would indicate things going Much, MUCH smoother than they do in the examples cited, especially given what we know of them now. It would also raise plenty of questions on who did this, why, and specifically they they decided to resort to assassination.
For all of the CIA’s many crimes and follies and blunders, the report DOES show they considered a broad range of strategies and tactics against their targets rather than just killing them.
So is the plan was to screw JFK out of office without relying on the ballot box, why not oh…. Leak information about his drug habits (at a time in the 1960s when the US public still regarded Reefer Madness as a documentary), his extramarital affairs (admittedly not exactly THAT shocking in the grand scheme of American politics or politics in general given the records of his predecessors, but which would hurt the Picturesque American Catholic Family image), or corruption?
All of which are strategies the CIA used either accurately or inaccurately in many of its foreign operations, and which would have been more reliably damaging to the Kennedy Camp than merely shooting “Jack”.
And that’s BEFORE we get into the question of how the hell they would get Lee Harvey Oswald in particular to be involved in this. Which is why many of the “CIA Dunnit” theorists have moved on to argue that Oswald was framed, but I think Bugliosi- for whatever his other shortcomings – has pretty thoroughly nuked THAT from orbit.
Only if you can provide reasonable grounds to suspect this sort of operation was there.
Again, that doesn’t make much sense given the MO of the American or even Sicilian Mobs. Even during the times when the Sicilian Mob was in a state of war against the Italian Government it didn’t make a point of trying to whack the leaders of the Italian Government (with their preference being going after magistrates, police, soldiers, informants, and their friends and families). And again the American Mafia was even less bloodthirsty than that.
While this might not have been so clear at the time given the lack of knowledge at the time (with the Kefauver Committee being abut a decade old and far fewer pentiti and confessions then than we have now), but it’s pretty clear now that it doesn’t make sense.
Which again doesn’t make much sense for the reasons I’ve mentioned on almost any level. Especially how the CIA was engaged in its own paralysis at the time, LBJ was caught flatfooted by the murder, the American Mafia isn’t in the “Kill US Presidents” business, and the evidence fingers Oswald quite damningly.
He probably wasn’t interested in answering from the start, given his conduct during captivity, but the forensic evidence and some other reconstruction does a pretty good job. Bugliosi nukes this case from orbit in the case of Oswald’s guilt, and it fits much much more than the idea of LBJ/the CIA/the Feds/the Mafia. Unlike them, Oswald actually fits the profile for wannabe or successful POTUS assassins, and while (obviously) strikingly successful his actions were not overwhelmingly or unrealistically so.
Which is unfortunate given the problems of 1960s lineups, but hardly unusual.
My understanding he was likely target shooting, which would fit with his hobbies.
No idea, I’ll need to double check. But in any case, it is Dallas so the automatic casing might have a similar issue.
Nah, he almost certainly was not, as Bugliosi pointed out. It also doesn’t fit that well with the MO for Presidential Assassination investigations, since hunting for scapegoats is not only counterproductive but also runs the risk of letting the killer and any co-conspirators* either get away or carry out further attacks (and considering how Lincoln’s murder was part of a wider Confederate/Pro-Confederate conspiracy to basically decapitate the Union Government at the hour of victory but all of Booth’s co-conspirators were fuckups, this isn’t some kind of novel thought).
Should but probably can’t. We have had access to film footage showing the fatal shot to JFK came from behind in the direction of the Book Depository ever since the Zapruder Film was released, ditto the seat layout for the car that destroys the “Magic Bullet” strawman. But people still believe it.
Johnnie Cochran had the benefit of prosecutorial screwups and above all a hideously biased jury.
Indeed, but I don’t think that helps your argument.
Brian E:
I have dealt with that in previous posts and comments. If you read the linked threads and comments, you’ll probably find lots of discussion about that and other issues.
The short answer is that the subject matter of that book was not in Bugliosi’s wheelhouse at all. His area of knowledge is criminal law. Plus, the JFK book was something like ten years in the making – exhaustive research.
Read it. It proves its case beyond a doubt.
Neo,
Wow, that’s a committed group.
In a good way.
Turtler
You are mixing and mashing different years. Schneider was killed in 1970. His replacement was Carlos Prats, who resigned three years later, on August 23,1973. Allende appointed Pinochet as Prats’s replacement, not as Schneider’s replacement. You are correct that most believed that Pinochet was a nonentity who would continue the “constitutionalist” path of Prats. I have not seen any indication that Pinochet was ever a friend of Allende.
John Baron’s book Operation Solo: The FBI’s Man in the Kremlin tells the story of Morris Childs, ex-CPUSA operative who spent 27 years as an FBI agent who acted as a bagman carrying funds from Moscow to the CPUSA. Among the useful intelligence finds of Childs is a report on the reaction of the higher-ups to the JFK assassination.
The Russians didn’t know that Childs spoke Russian, which enabled him to hear both what the Russians told him and what they wanted him to hear. He had picked Russian up from his immigrant parents and also from “secret agent” school in Moscow circa 1930, where he had made friends with Mikhail Suslov, for decades the “grey eminence” behind the scenes in Moscow.
Though those who have read Red Star Rogue, with Suslov’s alleged acts in the book, would be skeptical about Politburo awareness of all that the KGB did.
@Gringo
For some reason blockquotes seem to hate me today.
Turtler
If you can document Pinochet and Allende knowing each other from Lota (not Lola) please do so. Pinochet did spend some time circa 1947 in Lota with the coal miners, so it is possible that Allende met Pinochet. Marc Cooper, author of Pinochet and Me, a Chilean anti-Memoir worked as a translator for Allende. He relates meeting a nephew of Pinochet, when Pinochet was a mere general. In a small country like Chile, it is quite possible that Allende and Pinochet met up in the Lota -Concepcion area decades before.
From Pinochet’s Dia Decisivo: He is discussing his reaction to Allende’s election on September 4, 1970.
My translation:
If Allende confused Augusto Pinochet with another General Pinochet, it doesn’t appear they knew each other that well. (Pisagua: Captain Pinochet was the head of the internment camp at Pisagua set up for Communists in 1948. Ley Maldita and all that.)
That’s the best information I can come up with regarding how well Pinochet and Allende knew each other before 1970. However, it is possible that Pinochet is not telling the truth.
https://archive.org/details/pinochet-augusto-el-dia-decisivo
Like OJ and voter fraud, convicting Oswald beyond a reasonable doubt from the evidence would be tough.
==
In your imagination only. Of course, you might just get a jury who fancied Oswald was just the unluckiest man alive.
Interesting conference in 2017 about the dissent of Senator Richard Russell to the Warren Commission and how it was suppressed in the report. Two other members of the WC also had reservations about the report. Russell felt the commission was not given all the information available by the FBI and CIA.
One of the senator’s former aides, when questioned by an audience member about Russell’s knowing about the two assassination attempts on Castro by the CIA might have influenced his dissent about the WC report.
Also included was a couple of telephone calls between LBJ and Russell. Russell did not want to be on the commission– mostly because he hated Warren. LBJ told him he was going to be on the commission.
It’s not dwelt with in any detail, but Russell probably thought there was involvement by Cuba and possibly that Oswald didn’t act alone.
Russell’s position was the report was fine as far as it went and the commission wasn’t given all the facts. Russell also disagreed on the single bullet theory.
A Rush to Judgment?: The Warren Commission and the Dissent of Richard Russell
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nVvadm3oojY
also a telephone call between LBJ and Hoover about the formation of a commission.
“…this presidential commission which we think will be very bad and put it right in the white house; we can’t be checking up on every shoe-scrape in the country, but they’ve (Justice lawyer) gone to the Post now and the post is calling up and saying they’re gonna run an editorial if we don’t do things…” – President Lyndon Baines Johnson
LBJ and J. Edgar Hoover, 11/25/1963. 10:30A.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WXWb33GSCiE
Brian E:
Read the book.
Evidence beyond a doubt.
In 1967, Mark Lane, author of Rush to Judgement and Wesley Liebeler, a Warren Commission lawyer, debated the Warren Commission report in 1967 at UCLA. Audio only.
Lane worked for JFK’s campaign. By 1967 people were becoming increasingly skeptical of the Warren Commission report.
Mark Lane & Wesley Liebeler debating at UCLA 1/25/1967
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=faDAGY71jPc
Neo, it’s 1,600 pages! Almost as long as Turtler’s comments.
Isn’t there a Cliff’s notes version?
I’ll see if my library has a copy.
Brian E:
The length is somewhat misleading. Most of the gist of it is in the first 500 pages, which are so riveting I couldn’t put it down (I had it in book form from the library, and believe me, it was heavy). Now it’s online; you can find it here. There is also an audio version. The rest of the book is a takedown of every single conspiracy theory and partial theory, one by one. That part is more of a reference guide.