New COPA project

[Peter Lemkin]

John and others,

I feel compelled to add my thoughts here because I have spent 46 years and three months at this date thinking and reading about President Kennedy's assassination in trying to figure out WHY. On November 22 this year, the 46th year after his death, it will be 46 years and 7 months for me.

If it would be of any help to you and others on this Forum, I can summarize my thinking on the matter and give a few references which I have found most useful. I have read almost all of the books written on this subject because of my special interest in the matter. You see, I almost died in April of 1963 at the hands of Jose Rivera, one of John Kennedy's murderers, and therefore, I had to understand why and how it happened.

If we can accept that the Past is Prologue, then we can start some thirty years before John Kennedy's assassination. To me, the conspiracy to overthrow our government which occurred then in 1933-1934 was the crucial key to understanding the Kennedy assassination because all the elements necessary, all the means, and all the forces, and the people were essentially the same, but in slightly different garbs and of a different generation.

This was the plot to seize the White House, sweep the newly elected president, Franklin D. Roosevelt, out of power and replace him with a dictator patterned very much like Benito Mussolini of Italy who had made the Italian King, Victor Emmanuel, leave his throne and proclaimed himself to be "Il Duce" and leader of Italy in 1922. The American plotters were bankers, industrialists, stockbrokers, newspaper publishers, and even two members of the Democratic Party, Al Smith and John Davis. They were to use a force of 500,000 World War I veterans of the American Legion to march on Washington to demand that Roosevelt step down from his position and accept a Marine General, Smedley Darlington Butler, as his "helper".

The U.S. Army at that time was maybe about the fifth of that size and widely distributed in foreign countries and scarcely within the United States. Fortunately, General Butler played along until he had met the main plotters and then he went to the Secret Service and to President Roosevelt. The MacCormack-Dickstein Congressional Committee held hearings and these were recorded in the Congressional records. Their most powerful witness was General Butler, who went on radio later to criticize the ensuing cover-up and lack of thorough prosecution of the conspirators. Nothing was ever referred to of this plot in subsequent history textbooks. Only a few academic historians of the period mentioned it and passed it off as a weird incident without any real significance. However, two newspaper journalists, John Spivak and John French, managed to dig up more information than was reported in the mainstream press at the time, and published their findings about the people on Wall Street behind the plot. Spivak's articles may be found on the Internet. In 1973, Jules Archer published his very vivid account of the plot in his book, The Plot to Seize the White House. It quickly went out of print, but has been revised in a new edition in paperback, available from Amazon.com. I urge everyone to read it. It reveals the types of forces in operation against a democratic form of government.

This is my paradigm for the Kennedy assassination. Then, I seriously refer to the following books concerned with the Kennedy assassination. Two of them were written by a sociologist, Dr. Donald Gibson. His first book, Battling Wall Street, discusses the presidency and actions taken by John Kennedy which made enemies for himself amongst the industrialists and oil producers of Wall Street. His second book, the revised version of which is titled The Kennedy Assassination Cover-Up Revisited, discusses the aftermath of the assassination and how the Warren Commission was manipulated to ignore evidence contrary to the preconceived conclusion of the patsy Lee Harvey Oswald's guilt. Gibson renamed the Warren Commission the McCloy-Dulles Commission because of the blatant actions of these two members of the group in controlling the witnesses and their testimony.

Then if we add James Douglass' wonderful book, JFK and the Unspeakable; John Newman's Oswald and the CIA; and Richard Maloney's JFK: Ordeal in Africa, we can begin to see who the forces were thar were so threatened by John Kennedy's ideas of peace, democratic principles, monetary and international policies that he had to be eliminated, and it had to be done in such a way that every successive president would be afraid to cross the line laid down by these powerful folks.

Adele

Great post Adele and good thoughts and references! Let's hope you find closure and justice in your lifetime - and mine!