As some are aware, JFK is a hobby of mine.
He was assassinated 50 years ago this year.
That topic is a large one. As someone who has looked at the issue for decades, I have a small JFK library with well over 100 books just on the assassination, let me say I can't say a lot for sure who did it. But I think different threads might not be a bad idea on different issues - this one is about motives for people to have done it, which is useful history even if they didn't do it (and clearly not everyone with a motive did).
- Lee Harvey Oswald
I won't say a lot there, because it's awfully hard to speculate about a person and it's incredibly complicated. He has a very, very odd history - including joining the marines and working at a secure base on the then-secret U-2 project at the height of the cold war while praising Marxism and learning Russian. There is clear evidence of motive for, motive against, everything in between, and evidence of interests setting him up (for example a letter sent to the Soviets appearing 'from Oswald' to be a forgery trying to implicate them).
Some questions can be answered, but motive here isn't that useful IMO to discuss.
- CIA
Americans today really don't understand how out of control the CIA was at the time.
A few anecdotes will shed light.
Patrice Lumamba was an African leader with ambitions for a united Africa. JFK wanted to end the centuries-old support for brutal colonies there and to move the US cold war policy from backing horrible right-wing dictators who would support US interests to one of supporting more real independence for third world nations. He planned for Lumamba to be the center of his policy.
After he was elected, the CIA new of his plans and was not a fan - and had Lumumba assassinated three days before Kennedy was inagurated. I'd call that treasonous.
Soon after Kennedy was inaugurated, Kennedy inherited a plan from Eisenhower to support a Cuban exile invasion of Cuba. Kennedy drew a hard line against US military involvement for such an invasion. The CIA at the time was more in favor of just that, and didn't see the need to let a President get in the way; so they launched a plan to get Kennedy's approval for the invasion by promising it was a guaranteed success, while knowing it would need US intervention and planning for Kennedy to be forced to change rather than let it fail.
Of course, Kennedy didn't change and get the US involved in the invasion - whatever the rest of the issues, Kennedy knew that would very likely lead to the USSR taking action in the highly vulnerable Berlin crisis, which would likely lead to nuclear war - and he ended up firing the legendary head of the CIA Allen Dulless (done as a resignation) and his #2 man, the head of covert planning, Dick Bissill (directly fired).
It's little known history that the Cuban exile leaders in the Bay of Pigs forces secretly conspired with thier CIA handlers that if Kennedy cancelled the invasion, they would pretend to have overpowered the handlers and tie them up, and launch the invasion anyway.
Tensions between Kennedy and the CIA ran high. To get more control over the intelligence operations in both the Pentagon - where each branch had its own office that competed to make the information serve their own branch - and the CIA, Kennedy created the Defense Intelligence Agency, run as he wanted.
There's a famous quote where JFK said he'd like to cut the CIA into a thousand pieces and scatter them to the wind. He had plans to do that early in his second term, having Bobby lead a re-design of the intelligence agencies that would address problems going back for many years - problems that led President Truman, who had created the CIA, to write an editorial saying it was out of control and needed to have its covert actions taken away, published a month after JFK was assassinated.
JFK was someone who could be seen as getting more radically pro-peace. His closest lover he wasn't married to, Mary Meyers, represented a group of wives of Washington leaders who felt they could invlufence the men to support peace, and Kennedy liked what he was hearing, even as he grew to a level of trust with Kruschev where they confided in each other how difficult all the hawks and milirary leaders under them were to deal with.
The CIA could easily have come to see JFK as a 'security threat' to the nation with his political directon, his secret communications for peace with the USSR, his indiscretions, his animosity towards their agency at a time they felt they were in the right to do everything from run around planning assassinations and terrorism, to testing things like LSD on thousands of American without their knowing - including spraying a French village - to assassinating their own lead scientist who began to question that program and Operation Artichoke, which he'd designed, a program for highly damaging interrogation tecniques used to turture many prisoners to death and much more.
The CIA could eaily have had motive primarily under that 'national security' angle where 'they knew best' how to protect the country (this is a time where it's plausibly believable that it was a security establishment conspiracy to cause the Gary Powers plane crash that prevented the planned Eisenhower-USSR peace summit).
(The woman I mentioned Kennedy was close to was herself murdered months after Kennedy, with evidence suggesting a CIA murder).
Obviously the CIA is also very complicated to discuss, but there is a motive.
- Organized Crime
We all know the mafia doesn't like being betrayed.
Joe Kennedy, as one of the wealthiest men in America, the owner of the largest commercial real estate in Chicago and many other interests, had some contact with the then-very powerful mafia, and there is evidence suggesting that he asked them to help John Kennedy get elected (something with which John Kennedy, who with his brother Robert had been fighting hard against the mafia in the Senate, was not involved). The mafia appears to have agreed, expecting they could neutralize the anti-mafia warriors this way.
It didn't go that way for the mafia. The Kennedys launched a massive war on the mafia, by far the largest in US history.
For just one example, one of the most powerful mob bosses in the country was Carlos Marcello. Marcello had been convicted of murder as an alien, and ordered deported years before - an order mysteriously never carried out. As part of the legal proceedings to help himself he'd declared himself a citizen of a Latin American country. But he did have to visit a federal building every 90 days and sign in a book as a result.
One of the things Bobby Kennedy did just after becoming Attorney General was to arrange for the next time Marcello came in to sign the book, with his lawyer, the two of them were seized by waiting marshalls, driven to a waiting plane at the airport with no time to talk to anyone or get belongings, and flown to that Latin American country and dumped out.
This eventually led to Marcello being dumped in the middle of Nicaraguan wilderness by that country which almost killed him trying to crawl to civilization. He was rather angry.
The whole mob was facing destruction from the Kennedy way - Bobby was not shy about having agents tail mob bosses and intentionally be very harrassing and disruptive. Bobby had an almost insane shared hatred with Jimmy Hoffa - who Bobby eventually got imprisoned before the mob bought him a pardon from Nixon - who was mob linked.
This at a time the CIA had a working relationship with the mafia, since WWII when the US military coordinated with the mafia to help with the invasion of Italy, including the attempted assassination of Fidel Castro who had kicked the mafia out of their own paradise in Cuba. A main figure in the middle of the relationship was Johnny Roselli, who was killed mob-style with a circle of shots around his mouth meaning 'do not talk' the day before he was scheduled to testify to the Congressional hearing about what he knew about the Kennedy assassination. There was an enormous motive for the mafia to protect their operations and repay the betrayal.
- The Russians
This is really not a credible motive - as Kennedy and Kruschev had become closer working for peace and were cooperating on various efforts, many secret. Kruschev did have a militaristic group of hardliners in the military and KGB, but they were not in a position to orchestrate an assassination behind Kruschev's back. There is, however, evidence of attempts to frame the USSR as involved by some in the US.
- Cuba
Fidel Castro had been invaded by Kennedy. There had been dozens of assassination attempt by the CIA, and Castro knew it.
Castro was pretty crazy at the time against the US. He'd been blocked diplomatically, and his country greatly impoverished by the economic sanctions from Kennedy. During the Cuban Missile Crisis, Castro sent a letter to Kruschev saying the US should be attacked in a first strike with the weapons, even though the US would then destroy Cuba in a nuclear attack; Castro said it was a worthiwhile sacrifice, terrifying Kruschev, who then excluded Castro from any involvement in the planning with the missiles.
Castro said just two months before Kennedy's assassination that foreign leaders should beware when trying to assassinate others, that it doesn't turn back on them.
Castro had a network with the Cubans in the US who had thorougly infiltrated the exiles and were involved with the Cubans working on assassination for the CIA.
The exiles themselves in some cases had a hatred for Kennedy over the Bay of Pigs, where some felt betrayed by the US - the CIA had some big promises - and blamed Kennedy.
So, it's hard to say there wasn't a big motive for Castro; LBJ later said he thought Castro had been behind the assassination.
The day Kennedy was assassinated, Bobby called one of his friends who was a leader of the exiles and screamed at him that 'you people did this', suspecting Cubans/CIA.
However, on the other hand, Kruschev had advised Castro to trust Kennedy later and work on peace; Kennedy was pursuing improved relations secretly with Castro, and had sent his personal representative who was discussing a plan for that who was meeting with Castro when news of the assassination came, with Castro responding correctly that that ended any hope for the peace project.
- LBJ
LBJ was an incredibly ambitious politician. He wanted to be president, a lot. He had a history of doing wrong from finance to politics. There is evidence he ahd used murder as a tool.
LBJ had resentment about Kennedy - but hatred of Bobby. Perhaps Bobby and John's biggest disagreement had been when Bobby had assured Kennedy backers LBJ would not be the pick for VP - and then John did it for political calculations. Bobby was furious, confronted John, and then went to LBJ to tell him he wanted him to withdraw. LBJ refused.
LBJ had a heart attack and felt there was a good chance he would not get to run in 1968 - and even if he did there was competition likely including Bobby. LBJ was also close to J. Edgar Hoover, who had dirt on JFK going back to JFK's world war II days when he had an affair with a Nazi spy the FBI had to deal with.
LBJ's criminal dealings had him in trouble - and Bobby was working to get an investigation to the point where it could force Johnson off the ticket in 1964, something which ended when LBJ became president.
JFK sent LBJ on a trip to Vietnam, where without authorization he very highly praised the leader of South Vietnam and became very close to him. LBJ called Diem "the Winston Churchill of Southeast Asia" and was in favor of US intervention, like most of the government, while JFK was not. Then Diem was assassinated with US complicity and a complicated role for JFK.
It's plausible these factors combined to a pretty strong motive for LBJ's involvement.
- Nixon
I don't see any active role for Nixon - but there is evidence of awareness.
It's a bit mysterious how Nixon was in Dallas at the time of the assassination, but lied about it later. But that's not that important. Much more telling is evidence from Nixon's own loyal Chief of Staff, H. R. Haldeman. Haldemen wrote in his diary that at the height of the Watergate coverup, when Nixon wanted to use whatever power he could to get the CIA to use national security reasons to tell the FBI not to investigate, Nixon had a message sent to the head of the CIA: 'Tell him that he had better do this, or it could open up the whole Bay of Pigs can of worms'. The important thing to know about that is that Haldeman explained that Nixon used code phrases, and Bay of Pigs was his code phrase for the JFK assassination. Of all the things Nixon could use for leverage to pressure the CIA, he picked that one, the JFK assassination. Haldemann went on to say that when the message was delivered, the CIA Director flew in to a rage, which was very uncharacteristic.
We know Nixon was highly unscrupulous about a lot of things - such as the recent discussion of his treasonaously sabotaging the Vietnam peace talks to help him in the 1967 election, how own election corruption, ties to organized crime and more. There's suggestion he may have had information about the assassination.
Or, maybe it was some other coverup related to the assassination - the CIA's use of the same Cubans Nixon used in Watergate and other matters. But Nixon had a crazy paranoia about the Kennedys. He had phony documents he pretended to find in the White House falsifying JFK's history. He had Edward Kennedy under survellance. He was upset about losing to Kennedy in 1960.
Again, even if Oswald acter alone, there's a lot to learn about the history by looking at the people with motives.
In this thread, I'd rather stick more to the motive discussion about people than theories of the assassination, which would derail it.
He was assassinated 50 years ago this year.
That topic is a large one. As someone who has looked at the issue for decades, I have a small JFK library with well over 100 books just on the assassination, let me say I can't say a lot for sure who did it. But I think different threads might not be a bad idea on different issues - this one is about motives for people to have done it, which is useful history even if they didn't do it (and clearly not everyone with a motive did).
- Lee Harvey Oswald
I won't say a lot there, because it's awfully hard to speculate about a person and it's incredibly complicated. He has a very, very odd history - including joining the marines and working at a secure base on the then-secret U-2 project at the height of the cold war while praising Marxism and learning Russian. There is clear evidence of motive for, motive against, everything in between, and evidence of interests setting him up (for example a letter sent to the Soviets appearing 'from Oswald' to be a forgery trying to implicate them).
Some questions can be answered, but motive here isn't that useful IMO to discuss.
- CIA
Americans today really don't understand how out of control the CIA was at the time.
A few anecdotes will shed light.
Patrice Lumamba was an African leader with ambitions for a united Africa. JFK wanted to end the centuries-old support for brutal colonies there and to move the US cold war policy from backing horrible right-wing dictators who would support US interests to one of supporting more real independence for third world nations. He planned for Lumamba to be the center of his policy.
After he was elected, the CIA new of his plans and was not a fan - and had Lumumba assassinated three days before Kennedy was inagurated. I'd call that treasonous.
Soon after Kennedy was inaugurated, Kennedy inherited a plan from Eisenhower to support a Cuban exile invasion of Cuba. Kennedy drew a hard line against US military involvement for such an invasion. The CIA at the time was more in favor of just that, and didn't see the need to let a President get in the way; so they launched a plan to get Kennedy's approval for the invasion by promising it was a guaranteed success, while knowing it would need US intervention and planning for Kennedy to be forced to change rather than let it fail.
Of course, Kennedy didn't change and get the US involved in the invasion - whatever the rest of the issues, Kennedy knew that would very likely lead to the USSR taking action in the highly vulnerable Berlin crisis, which would likely lead to nuclear war - and he ended up firing the legendary head of the CIA Allen Dulless (done as a resignation) and his #2 man, the head of covert planning, Dick Bissill (directly fired).
It's little known history that the Cuban exile leaders in the Bay of Pigs forces secretly conspired with thier CIA handlers that if Kennedy cancelled the invasion, they would pretend to have overpowered the handlers and tie them up, and launch the invasion anyway.
Tensions between Kennedy and the CIA ran high. To get more control over the intelligence operations in both the Pentagon - where each branch had its own office that competed to make the information serve their own branch - and the CIA, Kennedy created the Defense Intelligence Agency, run as he wanted.
There's a famous quote where JFK said he'd like to cut the CIA into a thousand pieces and scatter them to the wind. He had plans to do that early in his second term, having Bobby lead a re-design of the intelligence agencies that would address problems going back for many years - problems that led President Truman, who had created the CIA, to write an editorial saying it was out of control and needed to have its covert actions taken away, published a month after JFK was assassinated.
JFK was someone who could be seen as getting more radically pro-peace. His closest lover he wasn't married to, Mary Meyers, represented a group of wives of Washington leaders who felt they could invlufence the men to support peace, and Kennedy liked what he was hearing, even as he grew to a level of trust with Kruschev where they confided in each other how difficult all the hawks and milirary leaders under them were to deal with.
The CIA could easily have come to see JFK as a 'security threat' to the nation with his political directon, his secret communications for peace with the USSR, his indiscretions, his animosity towards their agency at a time they felt they were in the right to do everything from run around planning assassinations and terrorism, to testing things like LSD on thousands of American without their knowing - including spraying a French village - to assassinating their own lead scientist who began to question that program and Operation Artichoke, which he'd designed, a program for highly damaging interrogation tecniques used to turture many prisoners to death and much more.
The CIA could eaily have had motive primarily under that 'national security' angle where 'they knew best' how to protect the country (this is a time where it's plausibly believable that it was a security establishment conspiracy to cause the Gary Powers plane crash that prevented the planned Eisenhower-USSR peace summit).
(The woman I mentioned Kennedy was close to was herself murdered months after Kennedy, with evidence suggesting a CIA murder).
Obviously the CIA is also very complicated to discuss, but there is a motive.
- Organized Crime
We all know the mafia doesn't like being betrayed.
Joe Kennedy, as one of the wealthiest men in America, the owner of the largest commercial real estate in Chicago and many other interests, had some contact with the then-very powerful mafia, and there is evidence suggesting that he asked them to help John Kennedy get elected (something with which John Kennedy, who with his brother Robert had been fighting hard against the mafia in the Senate, was not involved). The mafia appears to have agreed, expecting they could neutralize the anti-mafia warriors this way.
It didn't go that way for the mafia. The Kennedys launched a massive war on the mafia, by far the largest in US history.
For just one example, one of the most powerful mob bosses in the country was Carlos Marcello. Marcello had been convicted of murder as an alien, and ordered deported years before - an order mysteriously never carried out. As part of the legal proceedings to help himself he'd declared himself a citizen of a Latin American country. But he did have to visit a federal building every 90 days and sign in a book as a result.
One of the things Bobby Kennedy did just after becoming Attorney General was to arrange for the next time Marcello came in to sign the book, with his lawyer, the two of them were seized by waiting marshalls, driven to a waiting plane at the airport with no time to talk to anyone or get belongings, and flown to that Latin American country and dumped out.
This eventually led to Marcello being dumped in the middle of Nicaraguan wilderness by that country which almost killed him trying to crawl to civilization. He was rather angry.
The whole mob was facing destruction from the Kennedy way - Bobby was not shy about having agents tail mob bosses and intentionally be very harrassing and disruptive. Bobby had an almost insane shared hatred with Jimmy Hoffa - who Bobby eventually got imprisoned before the mob bought him a pardon from Nixon - who was mob linked.
This at a time the CIA had a working relationship with the mafia, since WWII when the US military coordinated with the mafia to help with the invasion of Italy, including the attempted assassination of Fidel Castro who had kicked the mafia out of their own paradise in Cuba. A main figure in the middle of the relationship was Johnny Roselli, who was killed mob-style with a circle of shots around his mouth meaning 'do not talk' the day before he was scheduled to testify to the Congressional hearing about what he knew about the Kennedy assassination. There was an enormous motive for the mafia to protect their operations and repay the betrayal.
- The Russians
This is really not a credible motive - as Kennedy and Kruschev had become closer working for peace and were cooperating on various efforts, many secret. Kruschev did have a militaristic group of hardliners in the military and KGB, but they were not in a position to orchestrate an assassination behind Kruschev's back. There is, however, evidence of attempts to frame the USSR as involved by some in the US.
- Cuba
Fidel Castro had been invaded by Kennedy. There had been dozens of assassination attempt by the CIA, and Castro knew it.
Castro was pretty crazy at the time against the US. He'd been blocked diplomatically, and his country greatly impoverished by the economic sanctions from Kennedy. During the Cuban Missile Crisis, Castro sent a letter to Kruschev saying the US should be attacked in a first strike with the weapons, even though the US would then destroy Cuba in a nuclear attack; Castro said it was a worthiwhile sacrifice, terrifying Kruschev, who then excluded Castro from any involvement in the planning with the missiles.
Castro said just two months before Kennedy's assassination that foreign leaders should beware when trying to assassinate others, that it doesn't turn back on them.
Castro had a network with the Cubans in the US who had thorougly infiltrated the exiles and were involved with the Cubans working on assassination for the CIA.
The exiles themselves in some cases had a hatred for Kennedy over the Bay of Pigs, where some felt betrayed by the US - the CIA had some big promises - and blamed Kennedy.
So, it's hard to say there wasn't a big motive for Castro; LBJ later said he thought Castro had been behind the assassination.
The day Kennedy was assassinated, Bobby called one of his friends who was a leader of the exiles and screamed at him that 'you people did this', suspecting Cubans/CIA.
However, on the other hand, Kruschev had advised Castro to trust Kennedy later and work on peace; Kennedy was pursuing improved relations secretly with Castro, and had sent his personal representative who was discussing a plan for that who was meeting with Castro when news of the assassination came, with Castro responding correctly that that ended any hope for the peace project.
- LBJ
LBJ was an incredibly ambitious politician. He wanted to be president, a lot. He had a history of doing wrong from finance to politics. There is evidence he ahd used murder as a tool.
LBJ had resentment about Kennedy - but hatred of Bobby. Perhaps Bobby and John's biggest disagreement had been when Bobby had assured Kennedy backers LBJ would not be the pick for VP - and then John did it for political calculations. Bobby was furious, confronted John, and then went to LBJ to tell him he wanted him to withdraw. LBJ refused.
LBJ had a heart attack and felt there was a good chance he would not get to run in 1968 - and even if he did there was competition likely including Bobby. LBJ was also close to J. Edgar Hoover, who had dirt on JFK going back to JFK's world war II days when he had an affair with a Nazi spy the FBI had to deal with.
LBJ's criminal dealings had him in trouble - and Bobby was working to get an investigation to the point where it could force Johnson off the ticket in 1964, something which ended when LBJ became president.
JFK sent LBJ on a trip to Vietnam, where without authorization he very highly praised the leader of South Vietnam and became very close to him. LBJ called Diem "the Winston Churchill of Southeast Asia" and was in favor of US intervention, like most of the government, while JFK was not. Then Diem was assassinated with US complicity and a complicated role for JFK.
It's plausible these factors combined to a pretty strong motive for LBJ's involvement.
- Nixon
I don't see any active role for Nixon - but there is evidence of awareness.
It's a bit mysterious how Nixon was in Dallas at the time of the assassination, but lied about it later. But that's not that important. Much more telling is evidence from Nixon's own loyal Chief of Staff, H. R. Haldeman. Haldemen wrote in his diary that at the height of the Watergate coverup, when Nixon wanted to use whatever power he could to get the CIA to use national security reasons to tell the FBI not to investigate, Nixon had a message sent to the head of the CIA: 'Tell him that he had better do this, or it could open up the whole Bay of Pigs can of worms'. The important thing to know about that is that Haldeman explained that Nixon used code phrases, and Bay of Pigs was his code phrase for the JFK assassination. Of all the things Nixon could use for leverage to pressure the CIA, he picked that one, the JFK assassination. Haldemann went on to say that when the message was delivered, the CIA Director flew in to a rage, which was very uncharacteristic.
We know Nixon was highly unscrupulous about a lot of things - such as the recent discussion of his treasonaously sabotaging the Vietnam peace talks to help him in the 1967 election, how own election corruption, ties to organized crime and more. There's suggestion he may have had information about the assassination.
Or, maybe it was some other coverup related to the assassination - the CIA's use of the same Cubans Nixon used in Watergate and other matters. But Nixon had a crazy paranoia about the Kennedys. He had phony documents he pretended to find in the White House falsifying JFK's history. He had Edward Kennedy under survellance. He was upset about losing to Kennedy in 1960.
Again, even if Oswald acter alone, there's a lot to learn about the history by looking at the people with motives.
In this thread, I'd rather stick more to the motive discussion about people than theories of the assassination, which would derail it.
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