07-09-2009, 08:40 PM
...for three pieces from Lords, a British version of Playboy, from the summer of 1969. Among them is a rare – only? – appearance in the UK from Joachim Joesten; a little-known Eric Norden; and an anonymous pseudo-editorial which repeats that canard that Kennedy removed Diem the better to cut a deal with Hanoi :
The aforementioned pseudo-editorial:
And finally Joesten, given the sort of intro more normally associated with a poison-pen letter:
Quote:Lords, Summer 1969, pp.46-48, 50.
High Noon in Dallas
Quote:“The police were in on the job. Either they ordered it to be done, or else they allowed it to be done…they got hold of this Communist who really wasn’t one…just the man they needed for the accusation…to set off an anti-communist witch-hunt to divert attention…A trial! That would have been unthinkable. Everyone would have talked. So the police got hold of an informer, someone they could do what they liked with. And this character kills the false assassin on the pretext of defending Kennedy’s murder” – Charles de Gaulle.
This was how the General interpreted the assassination of President Kennedy after his return from the funeral in December 1963. Nine months later the Warren Commission decided that the General was wrong and reported that two madmen had acted alone in Dallas, the first killing Kennedy, the second Oswald. The official investigation was then considered finished. But private investigations suggest a different version of events: “a case”, according to District Attorney Jim Garrison, “that already makes Dr. No and Goldfinger look like auditors’ reports.”
Today more Americans agree with the General than with the Warren Commission. The murders of Bobby Kennedy, Martin Luther King and other liberal leaders give rise to the fear that conspirators continue to strike. In this Lords investigation ERIC NORDEN sums up the views of those who can no longer accept the official story.
By Eric Norden
At 11.40 a.m., Friday, 22 November 1963, John Fitzgerald Kennedy, 35th President of the United States, landed at Love Field, Dallas, Texas. At 12.30 p.m., as the Presidential motorcade crossed the intersection of Houston and Elm Streets, shots rent the air, and bullets tore through the President’s body, shattering his brain. At 1.00 p.m., doctors at Parkland Hospital pronounced him dead. At 2.35 p.m. Dallas authorities announced the arrest of Lee Harvey Oswald, ex-Marine and avowed Marxist who had defected to the U.S.S.R. in 1959 and since his return to the United States had proclaimed himself an avid follower of Fidel Castro. At 2.38 p.m., Judge Sarah Hughes of Dallas District Court swore in Lyndon Baines Johnson as 36th President.
On Sunday, 24 November as Lee Harvey Oswald was frog-marched through the corridors of Dallas police headquarters shouting “I’m a patsy! I didn’t kill anyone!” nightclub proprietor Jack Ruby lunged forward, shoved the barrel of a .38 revolver into the alleged assassin’s stomach and sent a single bullet ripping through Oswald’s spleen, pancreas, aorta, liver and kidneys, Oswald died in the same Parkland Hospital where John Kennedy had died 48 hours before.
On Monday, 25 November the hoofbeats of a riderless horse echoed along Pennsylvania Avenue and across the world.
But it had not ended. It had only begun.
As the aftermath of the assassination the United States experienced a profound moral and political trauma. “Our credentials as a civilized people,” commented syndicated columnist Richard Starnes, “stand suspect before the world.” At home, dark rumours of a well-orchestrated conspiracy were rife, compounded by the circumstances of the alleged assassin’s death at the hands of Jack Ruby, a shady character with links to both organized crime and the Dallas police force.
The international communist propaganda apparatus, predictably eager to undermine America’s world position, seized on the assassination as a Cold War weapon. A typical TASS dispatch charged that “All circumstances of President Kennedy’s tragic death allow one to assume that this murder was planned and carried out by the ultra right-wing, fascist and racist circles, by those who cannot stomach any step aimed at the easing of international tensions and the improvement of Soviet-American relations.” Even in those Western nations most staunchly allied to Washington, many echoed the view that Kennedy’s assassination was a plot, probably carried out by extreme right-wing and segregationist elements. No less a personage than Charles de Gaulle shared these lurid suspicions, according to his biographer, Jean-Raymond Tournoux (editor of Paris Match), who quotes him as saying: “It looks like a cowboy and Indian story, but it’s really only an OAS story. The police are in cahoots with the ultras. In this case, the ultras are represented by the Ku Klux Klan, the John Birch Society and all those secret extreme rightist associations.
“They got hold of this communist who wasn’t really one, a nullity, a fanatic. He was just the man they needed – ideal for the accusation. A fable was created to make people believe that this man had acted out of fanaticism and love for communism. It was designed to set off an anti-communist witch hunt to divert attention…A trial! That would have been unthinkable. Everybody would have talked. So the police get hold of an informer, someone they could do what they liked with. And this character kills the false assassin on the pretext of defending Kennedy’s memory.”
Concluded de Gaulle: “America is becoming less and less a stable country, one that cannot be relied on. It is returning to its old demons.”
To reassure the world, as well as a stunned and disbelieving public at home, that the United States was indeed a stable country, and that the assassination was not part of a broader political conspiracy, President Johnson set up a federal commission under the chairmanship of Supreme Court Justice Earl Warren “to ascertain, evaluate and report on the facts of the assassination…and to satisfy itself that the truth is known as far as it can be discovered and to report its finding and conclusion to the American people and to the world.”
From the beginning, however, it was clear that the Commission had accepted Oswald’s sole guilt as its starting point, and was attempting to confirm how and why – rather than if – he killed the President. As one Commission member, John McCloy, stated bluntly at the outset of the hearings, “Our function is to convince the world that America is not a banana republic where governments can be changed by assassination.” In short, the Commission had a tranquillizing rather than investigative function, though, even if it had initiated a searching probe of the case, the results would have been questionable, inasmuch as it was set up with no independent investigative staff of its own, but was dependent on the F.B.I., the C.I.A., the Dallas police and the Secret Service – all of which were involved, by omission or commission, in the events of 22 November.
So it was no surprise when the report was released on 7 September 1964 with the conclusion that there was “no credible evidence that Lee Harvey Oswald was part of a conspiracy.” Most Americans breathed a sigh of relief and even sceptical Europeans were impressed by the sheer size of the Report.
The Report was so enormous that only a handful bothered to study it. Those who did, however, gradually found it to raise as many questions as it answered. A barrage of critical books and magazine articles showed the Commission’s methods were superficial and challenged its essential conclusions. The Warren Report, so impressive at a distance, was found to be riddled with distortions, omissions, half-truths and outright inaccuracies, and public-opinion polls throughout 1967 and 1968 showed that by then some 70 to 80 per cent of the American people had, in the words of pollster Louis Harris, “deep and abiding doubts about the official explanation of the assassination of John F. Kennedy.”
In the original story Oswald shot Kennedy from the sixth floor of the Book Depository, ran down the stairs, was seen having a drink, jumped on the bus, transferred to a taxi, went back home, collected a jacket, rushed down the streets, shot patrolman Tippit and ran into a cinema. That was the essential outline, with the added colour that Oswald had eaten a chicken leg while waiting for his moment. Supporting evidence was given to the effect that Oswald was an expert marksman, that he had bought a deadly accurate rifle, that he was a communist sympathizer, that he had previously attempted to assassinate General Walker, and that he had only had the Depository job six weeks –just time enough to plan the assassination.
Investigations, not by the police, but by lawyers, journalists, and other interested outsiders, revealed a different story. There was no proof that Oswald was even on the sixth floor, no proof that he had brought in his Mannlicher-Carcano that day, no proof that bullet from his gun hit the President or Connally. There was no proof that Oswald took the described route by bus and taxi as both drivers failed to identify him. There was no proof that Oswald killed Tippit. He was allegedly seen waiting at a bus-stop to go in the opposite direction after he had left his house. The witness to the Tippit killing variously reported seeing two men, neither of whom looked like Oswald.
There was no proof that Oswald was a communist fanatic. To the contrary, several allegations were made that he was on the payroll of both the F.B.I. and the C.I.A. Event he chicken leg had been eaten by another employee. There was also the mystery to be solved of who put out the police call for Oswald only 15 minutes after the assassination when, in theory, no one was yet suspected. And the further mystery of the police car that was said to have stopped outside Oswald’s home in the few minutes he was there, hooted twice, and moved on.
The Oswald of the early press stories was a tormented, pro-communist fanatic acting on his own. The Oswald that came into focus after less cursory investigation was a different man – a suspected intelligence agent who defected to the Soviet Union on instructions of the C.I.A., and on his return served in a minor capacity both the C.I.A. and the F.B.I. There are files in the National Archives which cannot be opened until 2038, entitled Oswald’s access to information about the U-2, Official CIA dossier on Oswald, and Activity of Oswald in Mexico. One file not there was headed Oswald in Russia which the Warren Commission asked to see but were informed by the C.I.A. that it had unfortunately been destroyed while being photocopied. When was this? Curiously, 23 November 1963 – in the afternoon.
What was in the file was perhaps the information on Oswald’s activities in Texas. According to Allan Sweatt of the Dallas Sheriff’s office, Oswald was paid $200 a month by the F.B.I. and his number was S172. When the Warren Commission heard of Oswald’s connection with officialdom, J. Lee Rankin, its General Counsel, informed them that “we have a dirty rumour that is very bad for the Commission…very damaging to the agencies that are involved in it, and it must be wiped out insofar as possible to do so by the Commission.” So they accepted the denials by the F.B.I. and C.I.A. that they had ever heard of Oswald and never investigated it.
After the investigations of Mark Lane and others, even those who accepted that Oswald may have helped to kill Kennedy, found it hard to swallow the Tippit story. Not only did the first description of the killer as a tall man, 5ft 11ins with wavy black hair and carrying a .32 automatic pistol hardly tally with the diminutive Oswald, but the Commission put the time of the murder as 1.15 p.m., presumably as it was impossible for Oswald to arrive there earlier. Contrary evidence, which the Commission ignored by not calling him, is that T.F. Bowley looked at his watch after he saw the killing and swears that Tippit was already dead by 1.10 p.m. Of course the watch may have been incorrect, but why no investigation? Why not check with Mr. & Mrs. Wright, who saw the killing, telephoned for an ambulance and phoned the police? They also were not called.
This kind of sloveliness characterized most aspects of the Commission’s story. Perhaps it was true, as journalists and investigators were continually told in Dallas in 1964, that no one dare talk. By a mixture of blackmail, threats, beatings-up, deaths, and promises those who could give key evidence against the official theory were quietened, and the myth was sanctified by Earl Warren and his part-time, powerless Commission.
So thoroughly discredited has the Warren Commission become in America now that not even those few who still believe that Oswald killed the President alone, will rely on its report for substantiation.
And yet basic questions remain unanswered. If Oswald did not assassinate President Kennedy, then who did? And why? As Commission member Allen Dulles, former C.I.A. chief, recently challenged the critics: “If they have found another assassin, let them name names and produce evidence.”
Until now, this has still not been done. Earlier this year New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison charged Clay Shaw with conspiracy to assassinate the President, but the jury gave Shaw the benefit of the doubt. Garrison, a character who fails to inspire confidence in the uncommitted, has nevertheless reindicted Shaw on a perjury charge and has nine others on charges relating to the assassination.
Not that over the years there haven’t been a host of other suggestions. Jack Ruby wrote: “I walked into a trap the moment I walked down the ramp Sunday morning…They alone had planned the killing, by ‘they’ I mean Johnson and others.”
Still others lay the responsibility on the White Russian community in Dallas, a group of Texas oil millionaires, the Mafia, the C.I.A., the “military-industrial complex,” and Moscow.
The multiplicity of views and theories without proof provides believers in the Warren Report with grounds for scorn. “Why search for a different explanation,” they ask, “when there is a simple, easy one already on offer?” There are three answers. First, even assuming that President Kennedy was killed by Oswald acting alone, who in turn was killed by Ruby acting alone, then why, in the name of justice, was the whole thing treated like a bad joke and given even less investigation than a simple, small-town murder? One student of the assassination has listed 347 important questions left unanswered. Why were key-witnesses like Pierce Allman and Sandra Styles never called? Allman talked with Oswald outside the Depository after the shooting, while Styles ran down the stairs of the Depository and met neither Oswald, supposedly running down then, nor the policeman, Baker, supposedly running up?
Second, why was so much evidence destroyed – or at least unavailable? – like the all-important police interview with Oswald after his arrest. Third, why was the scene of crime so quickly altered when every detective magazine reader knows it should be left untouched? What happened to the tree in the Plaza that was cut down? Where did the signpost, said to be marked by a bullet, disappear to? Who filled in the manhole in the road by Kennedy’s car from where one witness said she saw a man shoot the President?
Other fundamental questions are still unanswered. Why choose a route that was an assassin’s dream, with at least five positions to shoot from? Why is nothing clear about the Tippit shooting – the time, the number of killers, their movements, why Tippit was there in the first place? Why did the Commission state that Tippit and Oswald had never met, when they were seen in the same restaurant two days before?
There may be simple or acceptable explanations for these and the other hundreds of questions but why, then, in a democracy, was justice not seen to be done?
Everything about the official theory defies probability. Lloyds have estimated the chances of 15 or more close witnesses dying of natural causes within three years as one hundred million trillion to one. In the Kennedy case the toll is approaching 40. Even discounting 50 per cent of these as irrelevant – which critics of the Warren Report deny – the laws of probability seem to have been far exceeded. And the methods of death are interesting – karate chops, hanging in police cells, head split with a hatchet, body hacked with a kitchen knife, run over, suicide by shooting behind left ear though right-handed, and so on. A selection of the dead appears on a later page which makes it perhaps less surprising that none of the murderer’s names nave yet been given.
A final reason for questioning the official version is relevant to the whole world. If there was a conspiracy, may there not be a link between the murders of Jack Kennedy, Bobby Kennedy, Martin Luther King and others? Is there an assassination bureau, a group of people who will stop at nothing to get what they want, and who are still at large? According to the Warren Commission the Kennedy assassination was a coup de folie. But to the unbelievers it was a coup d’etat.
The conclusion of Garrison, the Committee to Investigate Assassinations and a number of others is that the shots fired in Dallas were merely the opening salvo in a take-over campaign of the United States by fanatic right-wing elements within and outside the government. “We are fighting for the soul of the United States,” one prominent critic confided to LORDS. “If we don’t expose the assassins and break their grip we’ll all be living in a Praetorian era of assassination and counter-assassination, and we’ll find ourselves in a country where bullets, not ballots, decide political issues. If the bastards get away with it, they’re just as capable of starting a third world war as shooting a President down in the street because they disagree with his policies.”
The critics may be unduly apocalyptic in their analysis, or simply wrong in their facts. But their case deserves to be considered – especially as it is shared, though generally in private, by many liberal figures in high places.
Despite evidence from investigators like Mark Lane and Epstein, indicating that shots were fired at Kennedy from in front as well as from behind, and that there was, at least in legal terms, a conspiracy, there has been no move by the United States government to reopen the investigation. The Clay Shaw trial in New Orleans earlier this year hinted at difficulties facing any investigation – even by a District Attorney like Garrison. His office claims that more than half of their key witnesses were restrained from giving evidence in court by government or police pressure. Key files on the assassination have been locked away until 2038 and consequently denied to investigators. When Clay Shaw was acquitted, the press in general saw his acquittal as a vindication of the Warren Report. Very few newspapers published the trial’s evidence showing that Kennedy was indeed fired on form several directions.
In their efforts to have the investigation of Kennedy’s murder reopened, most critics have concentrated on the actual facts of the assassination, attempting to answer the questions how and by whom? What is perhaps more important now is the basic question Why? It might just be that among the list of those who benefited could be the real assassins.
BOOKS FOR FURTHER READING:
Rush to Judgement by Mark Lane (Bodley Head, 42s and Penguin paperback, 8s 6d). Whitewash – the report on the Warren Report by Harold Weisberg (Mayflower-Dell 5s). Inquest by Edward Jay Epstein (Hutchinson 30s). The Garrison Inquiry and How Kennedy was killed Joachim Joesten (Peter Dawnay in association with Tandem Books). The Warren Report (Bantam 7s 6d). Six Seconds in Dallas by Josiah Thompson (available in USA only). The Assassination of President Kennedy, Jackdaw Special distributed by Cape.
The aforementioned pseudo-editorial:
Quote:Lords, Summer 1969, pp.51 & 95
The Reasons Why
When John Fitzgerald Kennedy was inaugurated as 35th President of the United States, his foreign and domestic policy hardly constituted a dramatic break with his predecessors in the White House. At home, Kennedy initiated a programme of tepid liberalism which belied the ringing New Frontier rhetoric of his gifted speechwriters, and abroad his foreign policy differed in few major respects from that of John Foster Dulles. A brilliant but inherently cautious politician, Kennedy initially seemed to feel ill at ease in the international arena, and trusted the major policy-making decisions to professional Cold Warriors. These were men committed to an international chessboard starkly divided between the legions of good, as championed by Washington, and the hordes of absolute evil, as exemplified by Moscow and Peking.
In the Bay of Pigs debacle which first cast the seeds of doubt in Kennedy’s mind about the good judgement of his principal foreign policy advisers and the ability of the Central Intelligence Agency to evaluate accurately the decisions crucial to U.S. foreign policy. In the wake of the abortive invasion of Cuba, Kennedy privately told friends he would like “to splinter the C.I.A. in 1,000 pieces and scatter it to the winds” – but, bowing to the realities of the Washington balance of power, he was content for the time being merely to sack its director, Allen Dulles, and the principal architects of the Bay of Pigs fiasco. (Ironically, Dulles would later be a member of the Warren Commission investigating Kennedy's death, and the first CIA head Kennedy lopped off was that of General Pierre Cabell, Chief of Planning for the Bay of Pigs operation – and brother of Earl Cabell, Mayor of Dallas at the time Kennedy was assassinated.)
The Bay of Pigs did not, however, generate a basic re-evaluation of America’s Cold War stance, and for the next 18 months the Kennedy Administration adhered to its view of the United States as the stern but righteous policeman of the world. But with the 1962 Congressional elections approaching, Kennedy was particularly vulnerable to the charge of being “soft on Castro” – and when in early October, CIA U-2 reconnaissance planes detected Soviet missiles with nuclear delivery capability on the island, he felt he had no choice but to take drastic action.
The Cuban missile crisis ended in near-total victory for the United States, Khrushchev’s 11th-hour capitulation and pledge to withdraw his missiles from Cuba was hailed across the world as one of America’s greatest victories of the Cold War. But, as Kennedy confided sombrely to personal friends and journalistic confidants, it was a sour victory. He determined that never again would a decision of his, whether of omission or commission, propel the world to the brink of nuclear Armageddon.
From that point on there was a subtle but distinct change in US foreign policy. Secret agreements, details of which have still not been revealed, were signed with Khrushchev stipulating that the US would never invade Cuba in return for a Soviet pledge not to reintroduce missiles and to mute the tempo of subversive activities in other Latin American republics. Instructions were dispatched to US diplomatic missions around the globe that “peaceful co-existence” was no mere slogan but the official foreign policy of the United States.
Finally in the spring of 1963 Kennedy made the decision to replace the obdurate Vietnamese dictator Ngo Dinh Diem with a military junta more receptive to negotiations and an eventual coalition government with the Communists – a decision which led to the subsequent replacement of US Ambassador Frederick Nolting by Henry Cabot Lodge and the sacking of the pro-Diem CIA station chief. The US organized and financed the military coup that overthrew and assassinated Diem and his brother on All Hallows’ Eve 1963 – to the open fury and dismay of the CIA, which told journalists “off the record” that by betraying Diem we were selling Vietnam down the river to the Communists. (They needn’t have worried – within three weeks Kennedy was dead in Dallas and the Johnson Administration, reverting to a hard-line policy in Vietnam, in turn organized a coup to overthrow the pro-peace junta of General Minh, which had replaced Diem and made tentative overtures to the Vietcong.)
Kennedy gave his most forceful expression to the new US foreign policy in an address at the American University in Washington, D.C., on 10 June 1963, where he movingly outlined his hopes for a peaceful future:
“Both the United States and its allies, and the Soviet Union and its allies, have a mutually deep interest in a just and genuine peace and in halting the arms race. Agreements to this end are in the interests of the Soviet Union as well as ours…So let us not be blind to our differences, but let us also direct attention to our common interests and the means by which these differences can be resolved. And if we cannot end our differences, at least we can help make the world safe for diversity. For, in the final analysis, our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet. We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children’s future. And we are all mortal.”
The official Soviet newspaper Izvestia reported: “For the first time in the 20 years of the Cold War a President of the United States has come out publicly for the need of a basic re-evaluation of Soviet-American relations and recognised the need for peaceful co-existence.” Soviet authorities also made the full text of Kennedy’s speech available to the public, a rare sign of official approval.
Analysing the international reaction to Kennedy’s speech, Max Frankel wrote in The New York Times, “There was a new threat of international peace in the air this week, the kind of threat that leaves the sophisticates smirking and the rest of us dumfounded.”
No one was more dumfounded than the leaders of the anti-Castro exile underground in the United States – for they knew that Kennedy was not only initiating warmer relationships with the Soviet bloc, but paving the way for a détente with Communist China as well. Aware that Cuban-American hostility had twice precipitated major international crises, Kennedy was determined to finally normalize relations between the two countries. After a tentative peace signal from Cuban Premier Fidel Castro, the President chose US Ambassador to Guinea William Attwood, a trusted friend, as intermediary between Washington and Havana. James Wechsler, former editor of the New York Post and a close friend of the Kennedy family, has written that “In his final days on earth John F. Kennedy was actively and inquisitively responding to overtures from Fidel Castro for a détente with the United States…”
By November 22 1963, the day of the assassination, the negotiations had reached the stage where US television broadcaster Lisa Howard, acting as an intermediary for the President, was making final arrangements for a top-secret meeting in Mexico between Che Guevara and Robert Kennedy. A few days later Cuban Ambassador Carlos Lechunga was instructed by Castro to begin “formal discussions” with the United States. Ambassador Attwood writes in his book: “I informed [Johnson aide McGeorge] Bundy and later was told that the Cuban exercise would be put on ice for a while – which it was and where it has been ever since.”
A peace plan that went on ice with the body of the President who formulated it – was there a connection? Critics of the Warren Report believe there was, and contend that when John Kennedy initiated peace overtures with the Soviet bloc in general, and Cuba in particular, he also signed his own death warrant.
There is no doubt that the Cuban exile community seethed with fanatic anti-Kennedy sentiment throughout 1963. The most prominent Cuban exile leader, Dr. Jose Miro Cardona, president of the Cuban Revolutionary Council (a coalition of exile groups organised by the CIA at the time of the Bay of Pigs invasion), resigned in the spring of 1963 with a vitriolic onslaught on President Kennedy.
The more fanatical exiles then pledged themselves to fight to the death against Castro, with or without American support – and, if necessary, to violently resist curtailment of their para-military activities by Washington.
One training ground for such activities was a site north of Lake Ponchartrain where, according to New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison, “the CIA was training a mixed bag of Minutemen, Cuban exiles and other anti-Castro adventurers for a foray into Cuba and an assassination attempt on Fidel Castro. David Ferrie…was deeply involved in this effort. The CIA itself did not take the new Kennedy détente too seriously until the late summer of 1963, because it continued its financing and training of anti-Castro adventurers. There was, in fact, a triangulation of CIA-supported anti-Castro activity between Dallas, where Jack Ruby was involved in collecting guns and ammunition for the underground, and Miami and New Orleans, where most of the training was going on. But then, Kennedy began to crack down on CIA operations against Cuba. As a result, on 31 July 1963, the FBI raided the headquarters of the group of Cuban exiles and Minutemen training north of Lake Ponchartrain and confiscated their guns and ammunition – despite the fact that the operation had the sanction of the CIA.”
It is the contention of Garrison and the other independent investigators of the Kennedy assassination that by reneging on his earlier promises to “liberate” Cuba and clamping down on exile activities Kennedy was marked for revenge by a handful of bitter and desperate men within the exiles’ ranks. But these Cuban fanatics, they believe, were only the triggermen of the plot, human guns loaded and aimed by more powerful and sophisticated forces, including lower-echelon elements of the CIA who believed that Kennedy’s new policy of peaceful co-existence was undermining the vital security interests of the nation. The Cuban exiles were convenient tools because they were totally dependent on the CIA for funds and because their ideological hatred of Kennedy ensured their silence after the assassination and ruled out costly blackmail attempts.
On 19 November 1963, a leading right-wing Cuban exile leader, Sergio Carbo, addressed a militant Cuban exile audience and, after an anti-Kennedy tirade, assured his listeners: “I believe that a coming serious event will oblige Washington to change its policy of peaceful co-existence.” Coming as it did only three days before the President’s murder, this was a remarkable prophecy. Was it clairvoyance? Or complicity? In any case, Kennedy’s policy of détente died with him. As the New York Post commented shortly after Lyndon Johnson’s accession to the Presidency, “Mr. Johnson has never believed that the fundamental issues which divide Russia and the democratic nations can be settled by negotiation.”
The investigations of many Warren Report critics have led them to one ineluctable conclusion: John Kennedy’s assassination was a profoundly political act, designed less to liquidate an individual than to change the policies he espoused and implemented. Jim Garrison sums up the conclusions of all the leading American investigators of the assassination when he concludes:
“President Kennedy was killed for one reason: because he was working for a reconciliation with the USSR and Castro’s Cuba. His assassins were a group of fanatic anti-Communists with a fusion of interests in preventing Kennedy from achieving peaceful relations with the Communist world. On the operative level of the conspiracy, you find anti-Castro Cuban exiles who believed sincerely that Kennedy had sold them out to the Communists. On a higher, control level you find a number of people of ultra-right-wing persuasion – not conservatives, mind you, but people who could be described as neo-Nazi…Both of these groups had a vital stake in changing US foreign policy – ideological on the part of the para-military rightists and both ideological and personal with the anti-Castro exiles, many of whom felt they would never see their homes again if Kennedy’s policy of détente was allowed to succeed.”
Of one thing there can be no doubt: the foreign and domestic policies of the United States have changed radically since 22 November 1963. The critics of the Warren Commission have provided a persuasive motive for the assassination, but understanding why Kennedy was killed is but one element of the equation. If justice is ever to be done – and the United States ever returned to the course which John Kennedy died setting for it – then the final question must be answered: who killed Kennedy? Where are the assassins now? Who is protecting them?
Can they be exposed before they strike again? It is the answer to these questions that powerful forces in Washington and Texas have worked for six years to suppress. Possibly no private investigations will ever find the evidence necessary to accuse those considered to be the real assassins. A complete reopening of the case and a change of climate in Washington is needed that will ensure co-operation throughout all government organisations. It was hardly to be expected that President Johnson would pave the way for those wishing to disprove the Report of the Commission that he set up. It is perhaps Utopian to hope that Richard Nixon will wish to reopen old sores, but if public pressure is strong enough we may yet see a breakthrough.
And finally Joesten, given the sort of intro more normally associated with a poison-pen letter:
Quote:Lords, Summer 1969, pp.100-101
J’Accuse
By Joachim Joesten, interviewed by Paul Tabori
Quote:Protagonist of the theory that the murderers of Kennedy are still walking free is the German-born American author Joachim Joesten. He is obsessed with the assassination, and wrote his first book from Dallas in the early days of December 1963. Since then he has written eight books with titles like Oswald: assassin or fall guy?, How Kennedy was killed, and The dark side of Lyndon Baines Johnson. Instead of concentrating on the weaknesses of the Warren Report he is more concerned to elaborate his conspiracy thesis, which he believes could be proved if District Attorney Garrison ever succeeds in bringing various witnesses to court. His opponents accuse him of indiscriminately using anything suspicious to support his case. Reviewing his book in the Sunday Times, Cyril Connolly found him “in a perpetual state of indignation.” Joesten confesses he came close to losing his mind at least twice as the ramifications of the conspiracy seemed to keep widening. His books provoke doubts but are short on answering questions with hard proof. LORDS finds it impossible to endorse his case on the evidence he offers, but a summary of his views is necessary to an understanding of the controversy. The following extracts from his books, and a special LORDS interview with Paul Tabori, outline his sensational charges.
The conspiracy to kill President Kennedy sprang from a consensus of Texas political figures, big business men, and right-wing extremists, with the C.I.A. at all levels as the connecting and cementing link. It was ordered and paid for by a handful of oil-rich psychotic millionaires, with elements of the Dallas police force deeply involved, and the help of some members of the Dallas White Russian community.
As early as 1964 I openly accused the then Dallas chief of police, Jess Curry, of complicity in the slaying of the President. I also accused his chief of homicide, J. Will Fritz, of being directly implicated in the Kennedy murder.
I also firmly believe that one or more of the President’s personal Secret Servicemen were involved in the conspiracy, as I see no other explanation for their failure to react at the sound of the first shot. It is a matter of undisputed record that nine of the Secret Servicemen who were supposed to guard Kennedy on his motorcade were out drinking the night before, some of them staying at the bar of the Fort Worth Press Club until three in the morning. This was a flagrant breach of discipline. Whether they were simply suffering from a hang-over, or had been doped I don’t know, but the fact is that the only people in a position to help the President seemed stunned. What makes their behaviour even more questionable is that, four days before, the Miami police had been told of a plot to assassinate Kennedy during his visit there and had immediately cancelled the motorcade. The report of the proposed assassination was forwarded to the Secret Service which made no attempt to take extra precautions in Dallas despite the fact that even Governor Connally attempted to dissuade Kennedy from going because of the hostile feelings towards him.
For a long time I have believed that patrolman Tippit rather than Oswald may have been the man who fired at the President’s motorcade from the 6th-floor window of the Book Depository. It has always seemed strange to me that, even though Tippit was turned into a national hero to whose widow the American people sent over $600,000, only one photograph of Tippit was ever issued to the press. Why was this? Perhaps the answer is that Oswald and Tippit’s faces looked similar, except that Tippit’s face is heavier and 10 years older. The description of the man in the Depository window given by the principal eye-witness, Howard L. Brennan, does not fit Oswald. Brennan (whose evidence is the key to the Oswald case) described the man as in his early 30s, possibly 5ft 10ins…160-170lbs. Oswald was 24 and weighed 136lbs, but this description fits Tippit.
Facts also undisclosed about Tippit at his time of death were that he was an old pal of Jack Ruby, consistently in and out of the Carousel Club, and, a week before the assassination, had there met Ruby, Bernard Weissman (author of the despicable “Welcome Kennedy” advertisement in the Dallas Morning News) and an unnamed third man. Tippit, I am satisfied, was up to his neck in the conspiracy. A member of the John Birch Society, an excellent marksman and a friend of Ruby’s, he was probably silenced for his part in the conspiracy.
Few can have had a greater desire to see Kennedy out of the way than Haroldson Lafayette Hunt. As the boss of the Hunt Oil Company his annual income is about 30 million dollars a year on which he pays little income tax because of the depletion allowance. By 1963 the oil industry’s most powerful defenders in Congress, Sam Rayburn and Senator Robert S. Kerr, had died and their third man, Lyndon Johnson, was powerless in the Vice-Presidency. Kennedy was tired of the oil magnates receiving so many benefits and proposed a new law which would take out $185 million. At the same time an investigation began into Hunt’s propaganda organization called Life Line Foundation Inc. Through this Hunt puts over his right-wing views while insisting on tax-exempt status as a charity. This too was to have been stopped by Kennedy at the end of the year. But both these charges, like so many other Kennedy proposals, were quietly dropped by Johnson. I know of no evidence directly connecting Hunt with the assassination conspiracy. It is just unfortunate that it happened in his city where he is said to control everything.
It has always been my firm belief that the original plan to kill Kennedy was hatched in 1960, but the specific murder plot seems to have begun about 3 September 1963 when - according to District Attorney Garrison – a meeting took place between Clay Shaw, Jack Ruby, David Ferrie, and Lee Harvey Oswald at the Jack Tar Capital House, a Baton Rouge hotel. The second meeting took place about a fortnight later and, according to eye-witness Perry Russo, it was held at Ferrie’s apartment attended by Shaw, a man who called himself Leon Oswald, and two Cubans.
The two interesting points here are the absence of Lee Harvey Oswald and Jack Ruby. There is a great deal of evidence that one of the conspirators impersonated Oswald before the assassination in order to create the impression of an unstable and suspicious character whom people would remember. There were undoubtedly two Oswalds, as I have shown in my book Oswald: the Truth, and the conspirators were following an old tradition of setting up a fall guy. Oswald was certainly involved in some way but I am convinced that he killed neither Kennedy nor Tippit, as he persistently claimed. This second Oswald has never been named by other investigators but I believe that it was Larry Crayford, Ruby’s barman at the Carousel. After the assassination, he disappeared and has not been heard of since.
Ruby, on the other hand, may have thought he was in a plot to kill Governor Connally. My reading of the evidence is that Ruby served his gangster bosses as efficiently as he served the C.I.A. and, knowing that Connally was a hindrance to the criminal element, was happy to remove him, but not Kennedy.
But the actual assassination was left, I believe, in the capable hands of David Ferrie. He was the executive mind of Operation Overkill in the Dealey Plaza in Dallas on 23 November 1963.
Because a sniper has the opportunity of shooting but once before being seen and then having to make his getaway, an operation like this would require at least three gunmen. In fact I believe that David Ferrie stationed no less than five and possibly six gunmen at different points around the Plaza, and a further squad of three men who would complete the execution while the first squad were concealing themselves and their weapons. For this to work perfectly the assassins would have to keep in touch by radio. At his famous press conference Jim Garrison showed reporters a photograph in which a bystander, a few yards ahead of the Presidential car, is holding an open black umbrella above his head although the sky was a beautiful, cloudless blue. Garrison pointed at this and said: “There, gentlemen, is the murder weapon.” What better way to hide a walky-talky aerial than with an umbrella?
Now where were the assassins standing? Two F.B.I. agents, Sibert and O’Neil, attending the Kennedy autopsy reported that the bullet entered the body at an angle of between 40 and 60 degrees. There is only one point from which this bullet could have been fired – from the top of the clock on the roof of the Book Depository. The second assassin fired from directly behind Zapruder, an amateur movie enthusiast, who made the only film of the assassination. The evidence for this is the dark spot on the back of the road sign in frame 207 suggesting that a bullet had either gone through or bounced off it. We shall never be able to check this, as the sign was removed that day and its whereabouts never detected.
The third assassin was perhaps in the tree on the far side of Elm Street. In frames 211 and 212 of Zapruder’s film we can see a shape that could be that of a man sitting on a branch, and a bullet mark was found by F.B.I. agents in the wall directly in line after the assassination. I wonder why?
The fourth sniper fired from a window in the Dal-Tex building. His bullet also missed and struck a kerb on the south side of Main Street. The fifth sniper was hidden behind the stone wall that runs down from the end of the arcade. Garrison claims that he has a photograph showing this man and his accomplice, whose job was presumably to pick up ejected cartridges. The sixth sniper was on top of the records building, as is clearly shown by Josiah Thompson in his book Six Seconds in Dallas. It was his bullet, I believe, that hit Governor Connally.
Thus, so far, two shots have missed, two hit Kennedy, one Connally and the sixth bullet is not accounted for. It was now time for the second team of assassins. One shot comes from the Book Depository where a sniper was seen by Howard Brennan. A second from the picket fence and again Garrison claims to have photographs showing three men behind the fence. The third was fired through the grating of a manhole in the road near Kennedy’s car. The witness of this is Miss Lillian Costellano who saw a man crouching there.
From the first to the ninth shot was a matter of five or six seconds. The first five shots were fired simultaneously, the sixth shot which hit Connally was a fraction later and the last three shots were again simultaneous. I know no evidence among 190 witnesses which does not fit in with this plan. For the Warren Report to be believed, Oswald had to fire his three shots in the space of 5.6 seconds with almost exactly even spacing between the shots. And yet of the 190 witnesses questioned only 13 described them as evenly spaced. It is very difficult to in any confined space to say where a sound comes from and how many there are. But it is interesting that a witness, J.C. Price, standing on the roof of the Terminal Annex Building, far enough from the source of the shots to distinguish them more clearly, stated that he heard six shots, a volley of five and, five seconds later, the sixth.
To sum up, the statements of Garrison leave me in no doubt that President Kennedy was killed by C.I.A. agents on behalf of Lyndon B. Johnson, with the Dallas police helping to set up the ambush, with the Secret Service looking the other way, and with the F.B.I. covering up. That is the hideous truth about the assassination.