The Assassination of President Kennedy – Part 9

All of the independent researchers who have investigated the Kennedy assassination and been ridiculed by proponents of the official version, which holds Lee Harvey Oswald solely responsible for the crime, can take comfort in the fact that they are in good company.

During the Warren Commission’s investigation, Senator Richard Russell became increasingly skeptical of the process, particularly regarding the so-called “magic bullet.” The theory was crucial to the Commission’s conclusion that the assassination was the work of a lone gunman, because a fourth bullet would have proven that there had to be at least one additional shooter.

Russell at times conducted his own investigation, assisted by a retired Army intelligence colonel named Philip Corso, who had previously served on Eisenhower’s National Security Council.

Corso concluded that Oswald had been sent to Russia as part of a false-defector program run by the Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI), that the shots fired at Kennedy had not come from the Mannlicher-Carcano rifle that was found, and that there was another Oswald.

According to Corso, the conclusion was that Kennedy’s assassination was a project carried out by rogue CIA agents and anti-Castro Cubans.

Richard Russell held a similar view but stated that he would never be able to convince the other members of the Warren Commission to believe it.1

Nevertheless, Russell chose to sign the report, reportedly because he did not want to embarrass Johnson.

When recordings of telephone conversations between Johnson and Russell from the 1960s were released on April 15, 1994, it finally became clear that both men considered the “magic bullet” theory to be implausible.

A frustrated Russell said during one of the conversations:

“That damn Warren Commission has sunk me … I just got worn out fighting over that damn report … They tried to prove that the same bullet that hit Kennedy first then hit Connally and went through him and through his hand and leg and everything else …”2

Johnson replied:

“Well, what difference does it make which bullet hit Connally?”

“Well, it doesn’t make much difference, but they said that … the Commission believes that the same bullet that hit Kennedy struck Connally. Well, I don’t believe that!”3

To which Johnson quickly responded:

“Well, I don’t believe that either!”4

This shows that neither Russell nor Johnson believed the Warren Commission’s claim that a lone assassin killed Kennedy, which means that both of them acknowledged a conspiracy.

Russell also admitted several years after the assassination:

“I never believed that Lee Harvey Oswald murdered President Kennedy without at least some encouragement from others … I believe that someone else worked with him in the planning.”5

In addition, Arthur Schlesinger reported that Marvin Watson, who served as White House Chief of Staff from 1963 to 1968, said that Lyndon Johnson believed the CIA was involved in the Kennedy assassination.6

The “single-bullet theory,” or as it is often called, the “magic bullet theory,” held that a bullet that struck Kennedy in the back from above at an angle was somehow pushed upward several centimeters without damaging any internal organs and then continued out through his throat. After supposedly remaining in the air for a moment, it then veered to the right and entered Governor Connally’s back, puncturing a lung and shattering a rib before continuing through his right hand and then turning downward into his left thigh.

A nearly intact bullet was later found on a hospital stretcher, and the Commission concluded that it was the same bullet that had passed through both Kennedy’s and Connally’s bodies.

The Warren Commission discussed reports that Oswald had been an agent for both the CIA and the FBI. Texas District Attorney Waggoner Carr and prosecutor Henry Wade told the Warren Commission that Oswald was an FBI informant and was paid $200 per month.

In early June 1971, Lyndon Johnson attended a lunch in the private dining room at the Johnson Library together with, among others, his former speechwriter Leo Janos. Six months after Johnson’s death, Janos revealed in the article “The Last Days of The President” in The Atlantic Monthly that Johnson had stated during that lunch that he was convinced Kennedy’s assassination had been part of a conspiracy and that he had never believed Oswald acted alone.7

Johnson’s associate Marvin Watson confirmed this in an interview, stating that Johnson “was convinced there was a plot connected with the assassination” and that the CIA had something to do with it. This was also reflected in an FBI memorandum.8

The first person to begin conducting an independent investigation into President Kennedy’s assassination was his own brother, Robert.

Just two days after the assassination, he secretly sent an associate to Mexico to investigate Oswald’s alleged activities there, and he also traveled there personally in October 1964.

Among the first to reveal Bobby’s private investigation was the newspaper Washington Observer, which reported in a 1972 newsletter that the Kennedy family themselves suspected CIA involvement.

Bobby had called attorney Julius Draznin in Chicago, who had long cooperated with the FBI against organized crime, and asked him to find out what was being said in Chicago’s underworld regarding the assassination and whether there was any connection to Dallas.

After a few days, Draznin reported that the Mafia had nothing to do with the assassination.

Bobby then sent his associate Walter Sheridan to Dallas to determine whether the Mafia was behind the murder, but Sheridan likewise concluded that this was not the case.

Bobby is even said to have asked Assistant Secretary of Labor Daniel Patrick Moynihan to investigate whether the Mafia’s man within the labor movement, Jimmy Hoffa, was involved, but Moynihan reportedly informed him that organized crime had nothing to do with the assassination.

In a television interview on The Charlie Rose Show in January 2012, RFK Jr. confirmed his father’s suspicions of a conspiracy behind JFK’s assassination and stated that several other family members shared similar doubts. He also revealed that his father considered the Warren Commission’s report to be “a shoddy piece of craftsmanship.”9

Regarding the way journalists have treated people who speak of a conspiracy, RFK Jr. said that “the reflexive reaction from the news media has been to marginalize or dismiss these people.”10

He also commented on James Douglass’s bestselling book JFK and the Unspeakable, stating:

“What Douglass has done is distill all of that (the information about the assassination), put it into a very well-documented book, and come to his own conclusions. I don’t know whether it’s right or not, but a great deal of the evidence, at least at this point, is very compelling—it was not a lone gunman.”11

Chris Matthews, a well-known television host in the United States, has argued that the reason so many “liberals” refuse to accept Lee Harvey Oswald as Kennedy’s sole assassin is that they suffer from an emotional deficiency consisting of an inability to accept that a nobody can kill someone important.

Matthews argued that this is largely due to Shakespeare and to Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of Sherlock Holmes.

This is because Matthews believes that their literature has conditioned people always to expect a great evil force or group behind the murder of a good man.

“In other words,” said Doug Horne of the AARB (who investigated assassination records in the 1990s), “what Chris Matthews is saying to the American people is that we haven’t grown up enough to accept the truth.”12

The fact that the mass media have not only contributed to making people distrust conspiracies in general, but have also influenced them to think in certain ways on specific issues or to accept fabrications such as Saddam’s alleged weapons of mass destruction, seems to have completely escaped Matthews.

There are many other examples.

In the 1950s, for example, then-CBS president Richard Stanton believed that surveys in which people reported their own radio-listening habits were unreliable. He therefore had a recording microphone developed that could be installed in radio receivers to determine at what times of day and for how long people listened to the radio.13

Stanton was not only the head of CBS; he was also chairman of the RAND Corporation and of the Executive Committee of Radio Free Europe, both of which were aligned with the CIA.14 He was also a close friend of Lyndon Johnson.

Roger Feinman, a former CBS employee, later revealed that CBS had been highly active in the media’s effort to suppress inconvenient facts about the assassination.

CBS produced three television specials in support of the Warren Commission, all at critical moments. The first was made in 1964 when the Warren Report was released, the second in 1967 to counter Jim Garrison’s investigation of the Kennedy assassination, and the third in 1975 when the Church Committee began exposing crimes committed by the CIA and FBI.

Feinman began writing internal memoranda to expose the methods CBS had used in producing the 1967 television special, arguing that they had clearly violated journalistic rules and standards.

As a CBS employee, Feinman had access both to individuals involved in the production of the program and to the documents used during its creation.

The series producer, Le Midgley, had initially intended to present viewers with the discrepancies pointed out by critics of the Warren Report, followed by a scientific debate between members of the Commission and several prominent critics.

However, Feinman showed that Midgley had yielded to pressure from higher authorities to make the program biased against Jim Garrison rather than objective.

Warren Commission member Hale Boggs, who like Russell and Cooper never truly believed in the magic-bullet theory, began speaking in 1971 about the Warren Report being false and about J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI having helped conceal the truth.

A member of Boggs’s staff stated that Boggs always returned to one particular point regarding the Kennedy assassination:

“Hoover lied his eyes out to the Commission—about Oswald, about Ruby, about their friends, the bullets, the rifle, everything.”14

On April 5, 1971, Boggs delivered a speech in Congress in which he accused the FBI of wiretapping and blackmailing members of Congress. Boggs compared Hoover’s methods to those of the Soviet Union and Hitler’s Gestapo and called for his resignation.15

The speech caused a sensation, and The Washington Post wrote that “the Louisiana Democrat’s speech was the harshest criticism of Hoover ever heard in the House.”

It was the first attack on Hoover from a member of the House leadership.16

The following day, Nixon called Gerald Ford, after which the two competed in discrediting Boggs.

“He’s crazy,” said Ford, while Nixon, somewhat ironically, claimed that the FBI had not wiretapped a congressman since 1924 and wondered whether Boggs was mentally unstable.17

The following year, Boggs was suddenly killed in a plane crash in Alaska, and the aircraft was never found.

In 1992, the Washington-based newspaper Roll Call obtained through the Freedom of Information Act two FBI telexes showing that a person who worked with advanced electronic surveillance equipment had contacted the FBI and claimed to know where the plane was located.

The man had also provided them with a detailed description and coordinates indicating where they should search.

A second telex, sent two days later, stated that the FBI had checked the source and found him credible.

The man worked for a company whose technical equipment was more advanced than most available at the time.18

Despite this, the information apparently was not used to locate the aircraft, because the FBI subsequently dismissed the information as not credible.

When Boggs’s family learned of the matter, they requested the aerial photographs that had been taken of the area.

They were then informed that the entire archive of photographs had suddenly been destroyed,19 something that further fueled suspicions that powerful interests wanted to silence Boggs because he was on the verge of making additional revelations.

Michael Delavante, The Assassination of President Kennedy – Part 9

Also read part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4, part 5, part 6, part 7 and part 8

Sources:

1. Dick Russell ”On The Trail of The JFK-Assassins”,Skyhorse Publishing 2008, (sidan 126-27)
2. The Athens Observer, p. 1A (December 8, 1994). ”JFK killer not alone, UGA professor says”, Donald E. Wilkes, Jr, Professor of Law.

3. The Athens Observer, p. 1A (December 8, 1994). ”JFK killer not alone, UGA professor says”, Donald E. Wilkes, Jr, Professor of Law.

4. The Athens Observer, p. 1A (December 8, 1994). ”JFK killer not alone, UGA professor says”, Donald E. Wilkes, Jr, Professor of Law.

5 Gerald McKnight, Breach of Trust:How the Warren Commission Failed the Nation and Why,University Press of Kansas, 2005, (sidan 297)

6. Washington Post, December 13, 1977. Se även: Arthur Schlesinger jr, Robert Keendy and Hist Times, Hougton Mifflin, 2002, (sidan 616) Samt: Michael Howard Holzman, ”James Jesus Angleton, the CIA, and the Craft of Counterintelligence”, University of Massachusetts Press, 2008, (sidan 194)

7. The Atlantic Monthly; July 1973; The Last Days of the President; Volume 232, No. 1; (sid. 35-41)

8. Washington Post, 12/13/77, (sidan 10) Se även Michael Parenti, Dirty Truths, City Lights Books, 1996, (sidan 180)

9. Robert Kennedy suspected conspiracy behind John Kennedy’s killing’
   January 12, 2013, http://www.indianexpress.com/news/robert-kennedy-suspected-conspiracy-behind-john-kennedys-killing/1058436/
10. ‘Robert Kennedy suspected conspiracy behind John Kennedy’s killing’
    January 12, 2013, http://www.indianexpress.com/news/robert-kennedy-suspected-conspiracy-behind-john-kennedys-killing/1058436/
11. ‘Robert Kennedy suspected conspiracy behind John Kennedy’s killing’
    January 12, 2013, http://www.indianexpress.com/news/robert-kennedy-suspected-conspiracy-behind-john-kennedys-killing/1058436/

12. Chris Matthews of MSNBC Still ”Doesn’t Get It”—WHY? Dough Horne, Inside The AARB, November 22nd, 2011.

13. Timothy Richard Glander ” Origins of Mass Communications Research During the American Cold War: Educational Effects and Contemporary Implications (Sociocultural, Political and Historical Studies in Education)” Routledge (2000) (sidan 83-84)

14. Timothy Richard Glander ” Origins of Mass Communications Research During the American Cold War: Educational Effects and Contemporary Implications (Sociocultural, Political and Historical Studies in Education)” Routledge (2000) (sidan 84)

15. Russ Kick, ”Abuse Your Illusions: The Disinformation Guide to Media Mirages and Establishment Lies”, DISINFORMATION COMPANY LTD (2003) (sidan 98) Se även: Craig I. Zirbel, ”LBJ JFK: The Final Chapter on the Assassination of John F. Kennedy/Collector’s Edition”, The Final Chapter, L.L.C.; 1st edition (2010) (sidan 213)

16. Russ Kick, ”Abuse Your Illusions: The Disinformation Guide to Media Mirages and Establishment Lies”, DISINFORMATION COMPANY LTD (2003) (sidan 98)

17. Committee to Investigate Assassinations, Bernard Fensterwald, Michael Ewing, ”Assassination of JFK: Coincidence or Conspiracy”, Kensington Pub. Corp., 1977.  (sid 100)

18. Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford .White House Telephone. Tuesday, April 6, 1971 – 9:59am – 10:06am. Presidential Recordings Programs. http://whitehousetapes.net/transcript/nixon/042-009
19. Philip L. Rife, ”Was It Murder?: Surprising Facts About 22 Famous Deaths”, (sidan 89) Se även Hale Boggs. http://www.check-six.com/lib/Famous_Missing/Boggs.htm