I would be interested in hearing your analysis and what you think happened.
Well, I've been considering this is going to come up for a lengthy post as we get close to the 50th annivesary, but let me try to make some comments here.
I don't have an opinion as to what happened. As you learn more and more about this assassination, two things happen: you get more questions for every answer, and you realize this is so far stranger than fiction, so unbelievable in the complexity and how even basic questions simply cannot be resolved in unbelievable ways, that it's incredible.
Bottom line - one thing that helps is to not just look at 'what happened', and instead look at the amazing things you learn other than that by what you do find when learning about what we do know. For example, why Kennedy said he'd like to cut the CIA into a thousand pieces and scatter them into the wind - this from the president at the height of the cold war. You learn a lot about how our government operated and what it did that's very important history, when learning about the assasination information.
There are multiple plausible scenarios, each with challenges and questions, from the lone gunman, to the CIA, Mafia, or a combination, to a Lyndon Johnson conspiracy and more.
Let me just take a quick example. If LBJ is suggested, the first reaction is 'well, ya, he stood to gain the presidency, but come on, that's outrageous. Politicians aren't murderers much'.
If you look a bit more, you find evidence of a maniacal, abnormal lust for the presidentcy LBJ had much more consistent with such a plot, and after a heart attack that he was convinced it would be 1964 or never for him; you would find hatred and tensions between the Kennedys and Johnson, going back to his selection as VP against Bobby's violent objection, because of sexual information blackmail by Johnson; disagreement on policy such as Johnson closely embracing President Diem in Vietnam, calling him "the Winston Churchill of Southeast Asia" without permission from Kennedy, while later Kennedy's actions helped lead to Diem being assassinated; a long and close friendship between LBJ and his neighbor J. Edgar Hoover with mutual animosity to the Kennedys; and evidence of LBJ corruption over a long period, both financial and poltical, stealing his Senate seat, and actually having a hitman who killed for him to protect him. Finding these sorts of details greatly adds to the plausibility of an LBJ role - without proving it, the others are similar and even stronger.
That's why I say it's easier to help people correct mistakes than to say 'here's the answer'.
I can ask many questions that don't have good answers - but it doesn't lead to proof.
There has been an unbelievable amount of research done, and it just isn't conclusive.
For example, Oswald's defection to Russia - which technically wasn't a defection, and included his suicide attempt when denied - was it real or fake - was he going to Russia as a spy in some capacity - the US had a program to plant people like Oswald as phony defectors - or not? Every dollar and hour of his travel to and from Russia have been examined closely, with suggestion of suspicious US government assistance but not conclusive evidence. It's clear Oswald fabricated his diary - why? On and on.
And after all that, if we did have those answers - it proves nothing about the assassination either way.
Another is that I felt the background of Oswald working at the book depository - for six weeks before the assassination IIRC - might shed some light. How did that come about?
It's one thing for an assassin to use a building like that, another for him to just happen to be employed there for several weeks, before the trip and route were planned. Did the plotters just have an incredible stroke of luck? Why, they want to kill Kennedy, and just happen to have Oswald available as a shooter or patsy, and JFK just happend to be planning a trip beneath his window weeks after he starts working there. Pretty implausible for an assassination plan.
So look into how it came about - it was a suggestion from his landlord, Ruth Paine, who had befriended his wife Marina though they were separated. Hm, check that a bit more, looks like Ruth's sister had close CIA connections! A ha! Look more, even Ruth there is some suspicion about CIA connections! A ha! How clever for them to use her to befriend the Oswalds and position him there. Except look more and it seems she got the suggestion from a neighbor who looks to have no ulterior motive.
So, I'd say the circumstances of Oswald's employment are more supportive of the lone gunman theory - but inconclusive, and there are thousands of other issues.
That's the bottom line - you find the CIA and Mafia each had great motives and means to assassinate Kennedy - this was no 'out of the blue' baseless speculating. But motive and means are not 'did it'. And Oswald has all kinds of things on both sides of the theories to support either one - just take the reported attempeted assassination of General Edwin Walker months before the Kennedy assassination, which many believe was done by Oswald.
It was described by Walker that he was sitting at his desk and bent over for a paper when a shot came through the window and hit the wall, just missing him. No one was ever caught. Walker has some history with Kennedy - he was fired for forcing US troops to be subjected to radical right-wing indoctrination from the John Birch Society, and went on to fancy himself a presidential candidate IIRC.
Was that assassination attempt real? Was Oswald behind it? (I won't get into the good evidence he was). Why? Just a nut showing he was prone to assassination, or was that some sort of test from conspirators having him prove he really would carry out an assassination? We can only speculate about this important incident.
There's a reason there are hundreds of books on the issue. A couple reasons - the bad one is there is a lot of crap to make money. But there's a lot of legitimate investigation as well.
The House committee did another investigation, but cut it short and left it underfunded, a bad formula for getting to the truth. The lead investigator has taken the position that is is a 'historical fact' that the mob was behind it; Congress was prepared to say it was just Oswald until late in the investigation in which audio evidence turned up that appeared to confirm multiple shooters in specific locations, including the 6th floow window and the grassy gnoll, and Congress finally said it was a 'probable conspiracy' based on the acoustic evidence without saying who was involved in the conspiracy - and soon after the acoustic evidence itself was seriously challenged by a re-evaluation by the National Academy of Sciences. See what I mean?
I can just tell you this:
- Oswald was a wild card. He fits into a lot of theories as assassin or patsy.
- The CIA had strong motives to want to kill Kennedy, most of all because, little known to the citizens of America, Kennedy was practically at war in a lot of ways with his own security administration - from his first months in office when he was told by a unanimous Joint Chiefs of Staff and CIA the Bay of Pigs was foolproof when it was actually almost guaranteed to fail, after which he greatly reduced the influence of those groups, creating liasion betwen him and the Join Chiefs to buffer him and firing the top two officials at the CIA for their role, including the legendary Allen Dulles. On issue after issue, the CIA viewed Kennedy kind of as a threat to American National Security.
But they know who's boss, right?
Let me answer that with a couple of anecdotes.
On the CIA side, candidate Kennedy had a major foreign policy plan of working to support a more independent Africa, changing US poilcy from support for European colonies - and the CIA partnering with brutal dictators. The key person in Kennedy's plan was the president of the Congo, Patrice Lumumba, who was an advocate for African countries uniting for their independence. He was the heart of Kennedy's policy.
After Kennedy was elected, before he was unaugrated, knowing Kenneyd's plans well, Allen Dulles had forces in Africa kidnap Lumumba - and three days before Kennedy's inaugration, assassinate him. That's the level of respect they had for a president who had Kennedy's views.
Kennedy didn't get the news for a few weeks; when he did, it was caught in a photo that speaks for itself about the effect it had, worth posting here:
Also, Kennedy planned for Bobby to re-organize the intelligence agencies in 1964 - just as Kennedy had already created the DIA to improve things (see the book 'House of Cards').
Regarding the military, the US nuclear policy was a hair trigger for all out nuclear war, a policy Kennedy viewed as incredibly reckless and dangerous to mankind.
He told his Secretary of Defense, Robert McNamara, to review the plans to work on revisions to reduce the risk.
The Air Force felt they owned the plans and not let any civilians even see them. When McNamara told Curtis LeMay to let him see them, LeMay refused his boss.
McManamara had to have Kennedy send a direct order to let McNamara see the plans.
Kennedy was constantly battling the poitics with his own government, who was far more anxious for the use of force than Kennedy - in the CIA, Pentagon and White House.
There's an easy case to be made that the CIA could have viewed Kennedy as a serious security risk and threat to the nation, as Kennedy constantly rejected their adivce, allowed the Bay of Pigs to fail rather than invade, rejected an invasion or air strike in Cuba in the Cuba missile crisis in the short term, maintained back channels of communication with Kruschev where they commiserated about the hawks in their own governments pressuring them, Kennedy's seeming radical pro-peace speech in June 1963, and more.
At the time the Pentagon wanted to 'win' Vietnam, Kennedy put his foot down with a plan to withdraw by 1965 after being re-elected, and to go on record that direction by reducing the 16,000 advidors by a symbolic 1,000 already in the fall of 1963 the month before he was assassinated.
There are more controversial theories as well - that there was a campaign led by Kennedy's reportedly serious relationship with Mary Meyer to have him use LSD and to become strongly pro-peace, in ways that would greatly alarm the security establishment into viewing Kennedy as a risk to the country.
- The Mafia, Kennedy had a war on the Mafia that began before his presidency, when he sat on the anti-mafia committee as his brother Bobby, the committee's chief counsel, called in top mobsters and attacked and humiliated them publically. As Sam Giancana took the 5th, Kennedy mocked him for laughing like a little girl. In the White House, their campaign was damaging to the mob like never before.
Two things about that. One is that Bobby had one mob boss, Carlos Marcello, taken into custody and dumped in Central America. That ended up nearly costing Marcello his life, as the government down there dumped him in a Nicaraguan jungle from which he barely crawled out alive with broken ribs as I recall, swearing revenge. Amazingly, at the time Kennedy was assassinated, Bobby was at his home about to have a party in celebration of the verdict he hoped he'd get in the trial where Marcello sued him for the deportation as illegal. That verdict came in as a victory for Marcello that the deportation had in fact been illegal.
The second is credible reports that Kennedy's father had asked the Chicago mob for their help in the election in Illinois - and then the mob felt betrayed by the war on them.
One other thing - the mob and CIA had a long working history many Americans still don't know about, going back to World War II when the Americans worked with the mafia to help them pave the way for the invasion of Italy. Later, of course, the CIA worked with the mafia on the attempted assassination of Castro among other things.
One of the examples I like to give about clearing things up is the fact that just as Kennedy passed in the motorcade, a man opened a black umbrella - on a warm sunny day. Why?
Clearly the only explanation is that it was a signal for shooters, there's no sensible reason for him to do that!
Except wait - they finally tracked the man down, and found he had done it as a political protest against Kennedy. Investigations seemed to confirm his innocence.
Anyway, that's a pretty long post already and hopefully gives some sense of the lay of the land on the issue.
If you'd like to read a book on it, one pretty remarkable book is "JFK and the Unspeakable".
Facebook
Twitter