I have been reading about the JFK assassination since my grandmother gave me her copies of Look magazine which published excerpts from William Manchester’s “Death of a President.”
I still have the magazines. They probably stayed in my closet until I was old enough to read them!
So my knowledge base has evolved since then with every new investigation, document release and witness who have spoken up that researchers have used for a reexamination of the case over the years.
Seeds of Conspiracy
Straight upfront, I am with the majority of Americans who believe there was a conspiracy, of some sort.
The books below tell the unfolding story that has been uncovered over the years. Each one offers a snapshot in time of the available information known at the time.
Journalist and researcher Bill Kelly’s blog,
“JFKCounterCoup.blogspot.com”
is a real-time treasure trove of posts that he has written based upon the most recent research findings.
He and other researchers have focused on the CIA’s plans to assassinate Fidel Castro as the basis of the their beliefs that the JFK assassination is tied to those efforts.
My own views have been shaped by reading Bill Kelly’s research over the years.
He and others who have spent time pouring through the document dumps since the JFK Act of 1992 that mandated releases of all Assassination files, have crystallized a believable scenario based upon the known evidence.
So, after all of these years, the following narrative outlines my thoughts on what I think happened in the assassination and why based upon my personal journey of following the case and reading the books I recommend at the end.
NOTE: I am not addressing any of the many elements that have long been disputed in this case. Namely ballistics evidence, Zapruder film controversy, discrepancies between Dallas doctors and the autopsy, photo and x-Ray interpretation and any areas that delve into multiple Oswald’s.
Also, there are many more layers to the assassination than what I am covering here.
Oswald’s involvement with right-wing, anti-Castro elements in New Orleans in the summer of 1963, parallel his interaction with Carlos Bringuier and the DRE.
New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison actually indicted New Orleans businessman Clay Shaw for a conspiracy to assassinate President Kennedy in 1967.
Garrison attempted to link Shaw to the same right-wing, anti-Castro folks Oswald had interacted with in New Orleans.
Also, individuals above the operational folks mentioned here are not included.
As we have seen with the refusal to release documents, the C.I.A. are experts at plausible deniability.
Although, individual names are hard to nail down, you can connect the dots by identifying names of individuals responsible and the people who they reported to up the food chain.
So with that said, I’m just presenting my view on what I think happened and why based upon what I have read in the public domain.
Cuba
Keep in mind this was at the height of Cold War tensions.
The United States and the Soviet Union were in the middle of a nuclear arms race.
Fidel Castro had risen from the mountains to spread revolution and an overthrow of the pro-U.S. Batista regime.
Castro nationalized the mob-run casinos and threw their owners in jail.
Soon afterwards the CIA-backed Bay of Pigs invasion was repelled by Castro’s army and approximately 1,200 prisoners were held captive.
President John F. Kennedy was publicly embarrassed just four months into office.
His CIA advisors and military commanders had told him this would be an easy victory without U.S. involvement being known.
Although, documents later disclosed the operation had a low probability of success without additional U.S. intervention.
Something the C.I.A. leaders knew full well and in fact we’re counting on Kennedy’s much needed additional U.S. support.
However, when they asked for direct U.S. air cover after the initial invasion was crushed, JFK refused.
The invading force was crushed by Castro’s forces and approximately 1,200 commandos were taken prisoner.
Castro took to the airwaves and publicly embarrassed the U.S. for their involvement.
After initial denials, President Kennedy soon came forward with a U.S. apology and full acceptance of responsibility.
The new president responded by firing his CIA Director Allen Dulles and his Deputy Charles Cabell, who was responsible for the operational aspects of the invasion.
He also threatened to splinter the CIA into one thousand pieces and scatter them to the wind.
Soon after his revolution, Castro turned Communist and sought a partnership with the Soviet Union.
In October of 1962, surveillance flights over Cuba discovered Soviet nuclear missiles and sites in Cuba.
A diplomatic stalemate occurred with neither side budging which resulted in a U.S. led Naval blockade of Cuba.
Thankfully, cooler heads prevailed. The Soviets recalled their ships to Cuba and the U.S. agreed to give up missiles based in Turkey in exchange for the removal of Cuban missiles.
But the removal of the Russian nuclear missiles from Cuba did not stop the CIA from its attempts to assassinate Fidel Castro and overthrow his regime, as we shall see.
My premise for the assassination is that individuals involved in the CIA plans to overthrow Castro and assassinate him were turned from their original objective to assassinate Fidel Castro to assassinate JFK.
Supporters believe this was a covert-intelligence operation that through its operational planning and secrecy was designed to never be revealed and would place blame on an unwitting “patsy’ to take the blame.
The million dollar question is which agency or group was responsible for this sleight of hand?
Was the assassination carried off by rogue individuals associated with these plans versus an agency-sponsored event?
Or was another group (foreign or domestic) with knowledge of the plan responsible for executing the assassination in hopes of blaming it on the original authors or Cuba?
Mob boss Johnny Roselli himself, one of the originators of the CIA/Mafia plots against Castro, surmised to U.S. investigators that perhaps Castro had used information from his own agents he had infiltrated into the anti-Castro community to turn those same resources to Dallas.
Congressional investigators were nonplussed with Roselli’s attempt to throw the blame against Castro and felt he was not telling all he knew about the plans.
A main storyline in the assassination research community today believes that Roselli is not alone in his attempts to blame Castro. Many believe that similar efforts are just smokescreens to divert attention from the real conspirators.
In fact, several books on the subject surrounding the 50th anniversary in 2013 were by former CIA officials who blamed Castro for the assassination.
The other school of thought is why would Castro attempt such a risky venture that was sure to blow back on his nascent regime. Common sense says he wouldn’t risk such an action.
Besides, as we shall see, President Kennedy had just begun a secret diplomatic outreach to Castro to initiate a peace between the two countries.
A stronger case in my opinion, is the original motive by the anti-Castro exile group which was ostensibly, to stop the president’s plans to reach a rapprochement with Castro (which were secretly underway at the time of the assassination) and his peace initiatives toward the Soviet Union.
President Kennedy had already signed the Limited Test Ban Treaty along with Great Britain and the Soviet Union on August 5, 1963 (that went into effect on October 10, 1963) which banned nuclear weapons testing in the atmosphere, in outer space and under water.
And, the President had recently outlined his vision for world peace in his “Peace Speech” delivered at American University in the summer of 1963.
And around the same time, President Kennedy had begun secret outreaches to Castro in hopes of seeking peace between the countries.
William Atwood, a former Ambassador to New Guinea, engaged in secret talks with Cuban government officials.
Atwood was scheduled to brief President Kennedy on his progress upon the presidents’ return from Dallas.
“If the CIA did find out what we were doing [talks toward normalizing relations with Cuba], this would have trickled down to the lower echelon of activists, and Cuban exiles, and the more gung-ho CIA people who had been involved since the Bay of Pigs….
I can understand why they would have reacted so violently. This was the end of their dreams of returning to Cuba, and they might have been impelled to take violent action. Such as assassinating the President.”
— Former U.S. diplomat at the UN William Attwood, quoted in Anthony Summers’ Not in Your Lifetime.
Attwood was selected by President Kennedy to explore a rapprochement with Castro in the fall of 1963.
So, if the anti-Castro exile community was paying attention, and they were, these events would send shockwaves through their community that the U.S. was not only moving toward an appeasement with the Castro regime if not a full out peace with the Soviet Union.
Keep in mind these individuals were violently opposed to Castro. Many were survivors of the Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961 and were beside themselves for their defeat that many attributed to President Kennedy not providing U.S. air cover after its initial attack.
They were a mixture of anti-Castro Cubans and right-wing military commandos trained by the CIA in covert operations and assassinations.
The thought of U.S. making peace inroads with Fidel Castro was the last straw and they believed they had to take measures into their own hands immediately.
Members of Operation 40 pose for photo in the Congo on November 22, 1964, the one-year anniversary of the JFK Assassination. The black umbrella is symbolic of the air cover JFK refused to provide to the Bay of Pigs invasion.
Operation 40
Of the various CIA plans involving Castro and Cuba that have been uncovered over the years (ZR/RIFLE, OPERATION MONGOOSE, OPERATION NORTHWOODS, etc.), Operation 40, a CIA plan to overthrow and assassinate Fidel Castro, is the one plan that most closely ties back to what actually happened in Dealey Plaza.
We know about the operation from files released under the JFK Act of 1992 that detail employees of the top secret National Photographic Interpretation Center who shared their knowledge of such a plan with investigators while they worked at the top secret CIA JM/WAVE United States covert operations and intelligence gathering station in Miami, Florida.
Operationally the teams were split into 3-man assassination squads under the code name PATHFINDER. The plan was to infiltrate these men into Cuba and kill Castro.
One such operation involved shooting Castro while he travelled in an open jeep with high-powered rifles from the hillsides overlooking his resort retreat Xanadu (the former Dupont mansion) located on Varadero Beach.
Members of organized crime were also involved.
The CIA had previously recruited mob lieutenant Johnny Roselli through the bequest of former FBI agent and CIA asset Robert Maheu.
Roselli turned to Chicago mob boss Sam Giancana for help. Interestingly, it was Giancana’s Chicago outfit who influenced votes in the Windy City toward JFK in the 1960 presidential election that helped put Kennedy in office.
Both Roselli and Giancana would see untimely deaths.
Giancana was murdered in his Chicago home in 1975 just five days before his planned testimony regarding his involvement the CIA/Mafia plots before the Senate Church Committee which was investigating CIA and intelligence agency abuses in the 1960’s and 1970’s following Watergate.
And, Roselli’s body was found in a oil drum in Dumfoundling Bay in Miami shortly before his second round of questioning before the Church Committee, in 1976.
Roselli had made the mistake of talking too much including to columnist/reporter Jack Anderson.
It was Anderson who quoted Roselli as saying Jack Ruby was “one of our boys.”
The CIA Castro assassination plots underway at the time were never disclosed during the Warren Commission despite former CIA chief Allen Dulles serving on the commission.
Only later in the 1970’s during the congressional investigations and later document releases have they been uncovered and verified.
If you believe these folks had the means, motive and opportunity to assassinate the President to change the course of U.S. foreign policy, then this is an area of focus.
For the record, the Warren Commission could never produce a motive for Lee Harvey Oswald’s alleged murder of John F. Kennedy.
CIA Handlers
The resulting cover up was a joint effort by the CIA and FBI to cover their tracks and association with Lee Harvey Oswald.
Although most of this section covers the CIA and its efforts surrounding Lee Harvey Oswald, it was the FBI who obstructed justice by destroying evidence linking it to Oswald.
Agent James Hosty had been tracking Oswald’s movements in Fort Worth and Dallas after his return from the Soviet Union.
He had visited Oswald’s landlady Ruth Paine at her residence in Irving, Texas asking about Oswald’s whereabouts.
Oswald learned of Hosty’s actions and appeared at the FBI offices in Dallas to see Hosty.
Oswald left a note with a secretary when he discovered Hosty was out of the office.
It was this note that Hosty had kept in his desk drawer that his supervising officer told him to destroy after the assassination.
As John Newman covers in his book “Oswald and the CIA”, Lee Harvey Oswald had been surrounded by intelligence assets and informers upon his return to the U.S.
Although Newman doesn’t come right out and say it, it is likely based upon the evidence that Oswald had been inserted into the Soviet Union in 1959 as part of the CIA’s “false defector” program.
He was one of a dozen or so individuals, including Army Military Intelligence officers, who were used for this purpose.
Ostensibly, they were tracking the KGB’s response to how they reacted to these U.S. defectors who had U.S. military information.
And what military information did Oswald possess that would’ve been of interest to the Russians?
Well for starters, Oswald was fresh off a stint in the U.S. Marines that saw him working at the CIA’s top secret U-2 spy plane base in Atsugi, Japan.
The U-2 was so secret that the Russians were unaware that the U.S. had an operational spy plane that could fly to the altitude of the U-2 spy planes.
Hard to shoot down a spy plane over your territory if you never thought to look that high.
But once Oswald defected, it only took five months before the Russians shot down an American U-2 spy plane over Russia on May 1.
And the pilot, Francis Gary Powers was captured and put on trial. Powers would serve almost two years in a Russian jail before he was released in a prisoner exchange of Russian spies with the United States.
After initially denying the spy plane mission was undertaken by the U.S. but rather a NASA weather plane that had gone off course, President Eisenhower would be embarrassed when the Russians trotted out Powers and remains of the crashed plane including spy cameras and photographs of Russian military installations for the entire world to see.
Shortly after President Kennedy was elected, Eisenhower would make his infamous “military industrial complex” speech warning of the risks associated with such a mentality.
Coincidence or did the Russians have foreknowledge?
We may never know.
But we do know Oswald possessed that information.
Would the U.S risk Oswald passing on that sensitive information to the Russians just to solidly Oswald’s defector status?
Sound crazy?
Well, there was a contingent of U.S. officials who were itching to enter a nuclear exchange with the Soviet Union.
President Kennedy was stunned when members of his Joint Chief of Staffs would later recommend just such a plan.
After hearing the military chiefs rationale for a first strike nuclear attack and the resulting Russian and American civilian casualties as acceptable collateral damage, the President remarked, “And we call ourselves the human race”.
And, the U-2 incident did disrupt the Four Nation Summit planned for two weeks later in Paris.
President Eisenhower had hoped to continue the goodwill established at Camp David previously with Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev.
However, under intense pressure from Soviet military hardliners, Khrushchev left the summit after one day and cancelled his previous invitation to President Eisenhower to visit the Soviet Union.
Instead of pursuing plans for peace, the U-2 incident saw increased tension between the two super powers, a rise in Cold War rhetoric and an acceleration of the arms race effectively ending any hopes for future negotiations.
I would say that outcome was mission accomplished for U.S. military hardliners who didn’t want any positive movement for good relations between the U.S. and the Soviet Union.
Once returned to the United States in 1962, Oswald was seen in the company of right-wing anti-communist folks with intelligence connections such as George de Mohrenschildt, who was born in Russia.
His older brother Dimitri was a staunch anti-communist and member of the OSS and one of the founders of the CIA’s Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty.
George de Mohrenschildt graduated with a Masters Degree in Petroleum Geology from the University of Texas.
His contacts included top CIA officials such as J. Walton Moore, head of the Dallas CIA office, and oil men such as
Clint Murchison among others.
Former CIA director Richard Helms even wrote a memo alleging de Mohrenschildt was a “Nazi espionage agent.”
Settling in Dallas in 1951, de Mohrenschildt went to work for Clint Murchison’s oil company as a petroleum geologist.
Soon, he found himself at the center of White Russian emigre’ society in Dallas.
He was a member of the prestigious Petroleum Club and the World Affairs Council.
Author Edward Jay Epstein, who interviewed de Mohrenschildt the day he supposedly committed suicide in Florida, wrote that de Mohrenschildt told him that he was asked by the CIA’s J. Walton Moore to find out about Oswald’s time in the Soviet Union.
In this capacity, de Mohrenschildt served as an asset to the agency by essentially debriefing Oswald in an unofficial capacity.
There is no official record or acknowledgment by the CIA that they ever interviewed Oswald upon his return from Russia.
Later, de Mohrenschildt introduced Marina and Lee Harvey Oswald to Ruth Paine.
Ruth Paine met the Oswalds on February 22, 1963 at a party hosted by friend Everett Glover. The Oswalds’ attendance was arranged by George de Mohrenshildt.
Ruth Paine invited Marina Oswald and her young daughter to live with her in her home in Irving, Texas in April of 1963.
Lee Harvey Oswald had moved to New Orleans and would return to Dallas in October of 1963 where he would rent a boarding room in Dallas.
He stored his possessions in the Paine garage.
Ruth Paine is the one who got Lee Harvey Oswald the job in the Texas School Book Depository.
After moving to New Orleans to live with her husband, it was Ruth Paine who drove Marina Oswald and her daughter to the Crescent City originally, Marina would return to live with Ruth Paine from September through the assassination.
Ruth Paine drove Marina and her daughter back to Texas.
Ruth Paine and her husband Michael Paine both were involved with Marina and Lee Harvey Oswald in 1963.
Michael Paine worked at Bell Helicopter in Fort Worth.
His stepfather Arthur M. Young, invented the Bell helicopter. His mother was Ruth Forbes Paine and father George Lyman Paine, Jr.
Ruth Forbes Paine was a close friend of Mary Bancroft, an OSS agent and at times a mistress of CIA director Allen Dulles.
Ruth Paine was originally from Pennsylvania and her sister was listed as an employee of the CIA in a local directory in 1961.
Ruth visited and stayed with her sister in September of 1963 just prior to her driving to New Orleans to return Marina Oswald to Texas.
Her father Wiliam Avery Hyde was an insurance agent who went to work for the USAID (United States Agency for International Development), which was and is a well known cover for CIA personnel.
After the assassination on November 22, 1963 at 1 p.m., according to telephone records, an hour before Lee Harvey Oswald was arrested, Michael Paine called his wife at home collect from his office.
A telephone operator who connected the call remained on the line.
The operator told the FBI later that Michael Paine told his wife,
“I feel sure Lee Harvey Oswald killed the president but do not feel Oswald was responsible.”
Ruth Paine responded,
“We both know who was responsible.”
Both Paines were questioned about this call by Warren Commission attorney Wesley J. Liebeler.
However, due to some incredibly sloppy questioning, Liebeler said the call took place on Saturday, November 23 and both Paine’s feigned recollection.
George de Mohrenschildt and the Paine’s would be considered “handlers” in intelligence parlance.
Each come in and out of Lee Harvey Oswald’s life from the time de Mohrenshildt befriended Oswald on behalf of J. Walton Moore and right up to and after the assassination where Marina and her daughters lived in the Paine household.
Marina and Marguerite Oswald, Lee Harvey Oswalds’ mother, both lived with Ruth Paine shortly following the assassination before the Secret Service moved Marina to a secret hotel in Arlington for security reasons.
And, among other items in her possession including the assassination rifle although both Paine’s claim they never actually saw it, Ruth Paine would turnover incriminating evidence to the Dallas police that linked Oswald to the General Edwin Walker shooting in April of 1963.
The case had previous been unsolved.
The Warren Commission used this attempt to show evidence that Oswald had a previous predisposition for violence.
It was after the Walker shooting that de Mohrenschildt would disappear from Oswald’s life and embark on a trip to Haiti.
Perhaps his job was done?
Afterall, he had befriended Oswald, most likely debriefed him on his defection to Russia for the CIA and then passed him off to the Paine’s.
As for Ruth and Michael Paine?
Most likely they served as handlers over the Oswald’s for two purposes:
1) To provide a home for Marina and her baby daughter and later newborn daughter so Lee Harvey Oswald could be free to engage in his secret espionage efforts elsewhere in Dallas, New Orleans and Mexico City;
and
2) To provide a base for Oswald to store his personal belongings whose contents would later be used to incriminate him in the JFK Assassination.
In this scenario the Paine’s could be seen as domestic contact agents involved with an intelligence agency furthering Oswald’s activities on behalf of said agency.
As for Marina Oswald?
She later told investigators that on the days following the assassination she was told by her Secret Service handlers to stay away from Ruth Paine.
When the reporters asked why she replied,
“They said she was in the CIA.”
Marina and Ruth Paine would never speak again.
Coverup
The FBI and CIA cover up was joined by the military autopsy at Bethesda followed by the Warren Commission.
Many documents have been released about the autopsy.
David Lifton’s book “Best Evidence” documents the facts behind the autopsy in detail which are too many to cover here.
Whether that conspiracy was benign to put the wraps on a military-style assassination they weren’t quite sure who pulled it off (and it very well may have been one of the anti-Castro Cuban exiles the CIA had trained to kill Fidel Castro) or a witting plan from the beginning may never be determined.
As Anthony Summers wrote in “Not In Your Lifetime,” Earl Warren, former Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court and head of the Warren Commission, was once asked at the beginning of the investigations’ work if all the investigations information would be made public.
He replied,
“Yes, there will come a time. But it might not be in your lifetime. I am not referring to anything especially, but there may be some things that would involve security. This would be preserved but not made public.”
Summers explained that Warren was thinking of alleged assassin Oswald’s visits to the Soviet Union and Mexico, he explained later, and there may indeed have been national security ramifications at that time.
Back to John Newman.
He covers Oswald’s defection to Russia and his return to the U.S.
He presents a clear case that Oswald entered and left Russia fairly easily without much U.S. intelligence attention.
The FBI did visit with him twice after his return and a recalcitrant and angry Oswald didn’t offer much information.
On the other hand, the CIA did not interview Oswald.
Interestingly, John Newman uncovers that the CIA did not even open a standard 201 file on Oswald until after he had been in the Soviet Union for over one year.
And, Newman reports that after Oswald visited the Soviet and Cuban embassies in Mexico City in late September of 1963, and met with Soviet Vice Consul Valeriy Kostikov, believed to be an officer of the Soviet 13th Department known to handle executive action including assassination, this information was not shared with the FBI.
Incredibly, Lee Harvey Oswald’s name wasn’t even on the Secret Service or Dallas Police list of dangerous individuals that deserved special attention before the president visited Dallas.
The FBI also removed Oswald’s name from a watch list of subversives leading up to the assassination.
Why?
Newman couldn’t make any more definitive determinations about Oswald’s CIA files because many of them had been classified and not released to the public.
In fact, over 58 years later, despite the passage of the JFK Act of 1992 which brought an avalanche of material on the JFK assassination into the public domain, many Army Intelligence and Secret Service records have been destroyed.
There are questions about the whereabouts of some Naval Intelligence material and the National Archives previously stated that less than 1% of the total of some five million pages would not be made public until 2017 the 25-year deadline issued by the JFK Act of 1992 for document release (which has come and gone without these files being released although President Trump extended the deadline to October of 2021.)
And, it is known that over 1,100 documents have been withheld to this day by the CIA as “national security classified.” Some of these documents involve George Joannides’ and his work with the DRE in 1963 prior to the assassination. Ironically, it was Joannides who was called out of retirement to serve as liaison between the House Select Committee on Assassinations investigation and the CIA during their request for agency files.
However, it is clear that one group that could have been responsible for killing JFK, were determined to blame it on Lee Harvey Oswald to initiate a U.S. military response against Cuba and/or the Soviet Union.
The evidence shows that Oswald had been sheep-dipped by intelligence agencies to act as a communist sympathizer to establish his bona fides as a communist agent.
New Orleans
At the same time Oswald was spreading his communist associations, he was seen working with anti-Castro groups out of the office of Guy Banister in New Orleans.
His actions in New Orleans interacting with Carlos Brinquier and the DRE (Directorio Revolucionario Estudiantil) were done to bring attention to Oswald and his one-man Fair Play for Cuba Committee and establish his legend as an agent provocateur.
And his effort worked.
Oswald was arrested by the New Orleans police for his scuffle with Bringuier and his DRE associates.
The scuffle started when the group saw Oswald passing out pro-Castro leaflets.
Oswald had previously approached Bringuier at his store and appeared to be sympathetic to the DRE’s goals.
Oswald would be questioned by an FBI agent in jail and was soon released.
His arrest was captured with a photo in the New Orleans Times Picayune.
And, he later went on local radio and debated anti-Castro DRE members.
The DRE was funded by the CIA under a CIA program named AMSPELL which was run by CIA agent George Joannides, the Chief of the Psychological Warfare Branch at the JM/WAVE station in Miami.
The money supported DRE activities in many cities, including New Orleans, and non-financial support, reviewing military plans and briefing the DRE on managing press relations.
Interestingly, the DRE launched a publicity campaign the day after the assassination asserting Lee Harvey Oswald had been acting on behalf of the Cuban government.
In fact, they distributed flyers with photos of both Oswald and Fidel Castro, documents outlining Oswald’s communist ties and other propaganda.
The group also held a press conference where they pressed their case.
The DRE later said their goal was to create public pressure for a U.S. attack on Cuba.
End Game
Thankfully they failed in that regard.
President Lyndon Johnson effectively ended the many congressional and Texas investigations being discussed by ordering the Warren Commission report just days after the assassination.
The report placed the blame squarely on Oswald as a “lone nut” who had no accomplices.
Remember, it was President Johnson who squashed Dallas Assistant District Attorney Bill Alexander from pushing forward with his recommendation to charge Oswald with “furthering an international communist conspiracy” in the early hours following the assassination.
Johnson had calls made to Texas Attorney General J. Waggoner Carr who immediately called Dallas District Attorney Henry Wade who ended Alexander’s pursuit of Oswald under the guise of any international communist conspirators.
Soon after, the Dallas police, District Attorney and FBI all fell in line behind the “lone nut” Oswald versus any international conspiracy.
Dallas Chief of Police Jesse Curry, Dallas Police Captain of Homicide Will Fritzand Dallas District Attorney Henry Wade all made incriminating statements soon after Oswald’s arrest that basically said they had “got their man” and the case was closed.
And it was Johnson who privately persuaded Supreme Court Chief Justice Earl Warren to reluctantly take over the role of head of the Warren Commission.
Johnson told Warren that any efforts to pursue Oswald and his communist ties being responsible for the assassination could result in the death of 40 million innocent Americans in an ensuing nuclear exchange that Johnson feared might erupt.
According to the research community, this action by President Johnson ended Phase One of the assassination which was to blame Castro and cause a U.S. military retaliation and began Phase Two or the “Lone Nut Theory” that Oswald did it and did it alone.
As for Oswald he told the world he was just “a patsy” in the assassination story and unfortunately he was killed by Jack Ruby on Sunday, November 24 in the Dallas police headquarters basement before he could be afforded a public trial.
For many Americans, the killing of Oswald by Ruby on live national television from the Dallas police headquarters created a lingering doubt about the assassination that served notice that something wrong was afoot in the JFK assassination that required a silencing of the accused assassin.
That doubt still lingers today for a majority of American citizens.
Whether or not Lee Harvey Oswald was the “lone nut” assassin as claimed by the Warren Commission or an unwitting intelligence asset, who was manipulated by rogue agents operating alone or within a compartment of an agency who turned the CIA’s own assassins sent to kill Fidel Castro on JFK in Dallas and blame Oswald as the killer, may never be known.
However, if everything was as straight forward as the Warren Commission said then ask yourself these questions:
Why did the CIA and FBI go to great lengths to cover up their involvement with or knowledge of Lee Harvey Oswald?
Why did the CIA not tell the Warren Commission about the CIA/Mafia plots to assassinate Fidel Castro?
Why did the CIA keep hidden their involvement with the DRE and interaction with Oswald in New Orleans in 1963?
Why after all these years is the CIA still obstructing the release of 1,100+ files regarding the JFK Assassination from the American public?
The national security excuse seems stale at this point.
I feel it’s time to release all the files and see what they are still hiding.
Maybe the Warren Commission did get it right.
Or maybe there is more to the story.
Either way we deserve to know the truth.
So with that background, please see the following book recommendations and happy reading!
Book Recommendations
The Warren Commission Report. 1964.
“The Death of a President.” William Manchester. 1967.
“Rush to Judgment”. Mark Lane. 1966.
“The Secret Team: The CIA and Its Allies In Control of the United States and The World”. L. Fletcher Prouty. 1973.
“Conspiracy”. Anthony Summers. 1980.
“Best Evidence. Disguise and Deception in the Assassination of John F. Kennedy”.David Lifton. 1980.
“Reasonable Doubt. An Investigation Into The Assassination of John F. Kennedy”.Henry Hurt. 1986.
“On the Trail of the Assassins: My Investigation and Prosecution of the Murder of President Kennedy”. Jim Garrison. 1988.
“No More Silence”. Larry Sneed. 1988.
“Plausible Denial: Was the CIA Involved in the Assassination of JFK?”. Mark Lane. 1992.
“The Man Who Knew Too Much.: Hired to Kill Oswald and Prevent the Assassination of JFK, Richard Case Nagell Is”. Dick Russell. 1992.
“Crossfire: The Plot That Killed Kennedy.” Jim Marrs. 1993.
“The Last Investigation”. Gaeton Fonzi. 1993.
“Oswald and The CIA”. John Newman. 1995.
“Real Answers. JFK Assassination. The True Story Told by Gary Cornwell, Deputy Chief Counsel for the U.S. House of Representatives Select Committee on Assassinations.” 1998.
“Brothers. The Hidden History of the Kennedy Years”. David Talbot. 2007.
“JFK and The Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters”. James Douglas. 2008.
“Mary’s Mosaic. The CIA Conspiracy to Murder John F. Kennedy, Mary Pinchot Meyer and Their Vision for World Peace” Peter Lanney. 2012.
“Not In Your Lifetime. The Defining Book on the JFK Assassination. Fifty Years On. Weighing the Evidence”. Anthony Summers. 2013.
“The Devil’s Chessboard. Allen Dulles, the CIA and the Rise of America’s Secret Government”. David Talbot. 2015
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