“A little incident in Mexico City”
In 2005 the NYT reported that the Miller Center of Public Affairs at the University of Virginia was transcribing all the available recorded conversations of American Presidents. The transcripts themselves are going to be slightly sanitized to remove what are now regarded as offensive words. But you can listen to the recordings themselves at the Presidential tapes site.
Some of the most fascinating tapes are of Lyndon Johnson. However one might regard him, LBJ was a ‘colorful’ character and his attempts to cajole Democratic Senator Richard Russell into serving on Warren Commission showcase Johnson’s political style to great effect. Johnson used flattery, appeals to patriotism and menace to get Russell to serve on the Commission, in that order. The conversation is fascinating for what it suggests rather than says outright. Even the threats were delivered with great finesse. Johnson mentions how coerced the Chief Justice of the United States into serving on the Commission by mentioning a report that J. Edgar Hoover had about a “a little incident in Mexico City”. Whatever it was the incident in question had a great deal of persuasive power. Nothing more needed to be added. Russell and Johnson shared a great deal of insider information and a common understanding of the rules and communicated in a shorthand that we plebeians even with the assistance of hindsight can only dimly understand. So without much more ado, let’s eavesdrop on LBJ.
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But how much of shared ‘insider’ dope is really true? The problem with secret knowledge is that there are very few ways of collaterally determining its validity or existence. Was there a “missile gap” in the early 1960s? For many years American policymakers, including many in the Clinton Administration, believed that Saddam Hussein had an active WMD program. Did it exist? More recently some intelligence agencies believed that Iran had halted work on its bomb program. Did it? And with regard to that “little incident in Mexico City”, how much of it really happened? “It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.”
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Even after all these years, you can feel the love and respect these two men had for the Chief Justice.
Somehow I doubt that President Barry had to give such a virtuoso performance in order to win over Alan Simpson.
I have suspected LBJ’s complicity in the November ’63 events from the very moment they happened. In regicide, one always looks first to the beneficiary. He had both the motive and, in conjunction with JFK’s first presidential trip into Texas, the means to execute the deed. As subsequent president, LBJ also had the means to control the cover-up. He created the Warren Commission! While not complicit, the members were more than likely dedicated to stability over truth. Do you think that they would/could initiate an investigation of the sitting president?
Listen to both Russell’s direct and Warrens implied reluctance to serve, not as an inconvienience to them, but as being dedicated Americans asked to accomplish a very distasteful but necessary service required to stabilize our county. Why else would they be reluctant to accept such an honor?
These tapes of LBJ and Richard Russell are a real find. It isn’t only “what you know for sure that just ain’t so” it is what there is to know that you do not know is out there or even what you know is out there but you are uncertain where. Knowledge may be created or located. We need our search functions. Once we have the search function working we have to worry about the integrity of how it operates. The people at the University of Virginia who will bowdlerize LBJ to spare the children of the future knowledge of his crudities are doing us no favor. The people at Google or the Wiki who pervert the data base to change the past in order to shape the future are like the agents of Minitrue in Nineteen Eighty-Four who poison the well of knowledge.
Was LBJ sincere in his claim that his motivation was to avoid a nuclear war that could lead to Orwell’s dystopia? Russell may have had his own “little incident in Mexico City” or he might have believed that everyone did but be as unaware as any of us as to where to find the facts. Was the report itself accurate or was it, as this implies, pre-written by Hoover to be rubber stamped by pre-selected trained seals? If LBJ was perverting the course of justice to avoid a nuclear holocaust was he right to do so? Did the Warren Commission exculpate communist intervention and empower future subversion?
Perhaps the facts are as the Commission presented them. Perhaps the back and forth between LBJ and Russell mean no more than that Russell despised Earl Warren and this was how men of power dealt with each other.
Terry,
Russell abhored the notion of serving with Warren.
He was not alone in his opinion:
President Eisenhower is said to have remarked that nominating Warren for the Chief Justice seat was
“the biggest damned-fool mistake I ever made.”
To conservatives, the Warren Court converted constitutional law into ordinary politics.
I spent several years of my life studying the JFK assassination. I have read dozens of book, and I think the best of them is Gus Russo’s Live By The Sword: The Secret War Against Castro and the Death of JFK. The book’s thesis might be summarized as that the US Government’s top leadership thought that the Cuban Government organized the assassination as a retribution for the many CIA attempts to assassinate Fidel Castro. Subsequently, much of the key evidence that might reveal that background to the public was covered up in the investigation.
After the movie JFK came out, there was one final declassification of US Government documents about the assassination. A couple of the documents released for the first time on that occasion revealed some of the Cuban connections in Mexico City. As I recall, the documents reported that Lee Harvey Oswald met with some Mexican woman who worked for Cuban intelligence. I would have to look up the details.
That last declassification of documents also revealed the names of the three tramps who were arrested on the nearby railroad tracks right after the assassination. None of the tramps was involved in the assassination, but one of them was detained in a cell next to Oswald’s cell. This tramp said that while they were cell neighbors he saw Oswald identify Jack Ruby to the police — i.e. before Oswald was murdered by Ruby. This new evidence was developed by Ray and Mary La Fontaine in their book Oswald Talked: The New Evidence in the JFK Assassination. The theme might be summarized as that Ruby and Oswald both were involved in a secret organization that was removing weapons from US Army armories and smuggling them to various Cuban factions.
There was a lot more stuff going on at that time than anyone back home had any idea about. Hell, the minor ones were guys with mistresses. There was a lot worse than that happening, and Hoover had a record of damn near all of it. He was the ONE man in Washington NO ONE would mess with. He had something on almost everyone, and those he didn’t have something on directly he could get to indirectly through loved ones.
That said, I always thought the Kennedy hit had to have been done with the assistance and blessing of the CIA. They were the people with the most reason to be angry at Kennedy.
In the world they lived and worked in back then, people in the shadows had to be willing to accept a verbal promise as worth risking your life on. Dulles and the CIA promised those Cubans who went ashore at the Bay of Pigs they would get air and naval backup from the U.S. The Cubans landing on those beaches bet their lives that Dulles would make good on his word.
If America had, the Cuban invaders probably would have brought Castro down. When Kennedy reneged, lots of them died there and the rest got to make the intimate acquaintance of one of the worst hellholes in the Western Hemisphere, the Isle of Pines. The CIA had its honor and reputation dragged through the mud by Kennedy in a way that not only hurt them very badly professionally but personally.
There is some other stuff I could go into but won’t since it’s now all a matter of public record anyway. However, I think the men at CIA after the Bay of Pigs truly believed Kennedy was a traitor in addition to being a spoiled libertine drug abuser. I think they were neck deep in the plot to take him out. The reason why it stayed a secret is that all the people who actually set it up and covered the back trail saw themselves as honorable men who were serving their country by removing its greatest danger. Being honorable men, they took their secrets with them to the grave.
Wasn’t kennedy the last president to actually issue currency from the treasury? Was this action an end run around the federal reserve bank?
I did some quick searches and found a couple of items of recent research about Oswald in Mexico. Both items involve Winston Scott, the CIA Chief of Station in Mexico City during the period the encompassed the assassination.
At
jfkfiles.blogspot.com/2009/08/dallas-cuba-connection-2009-update.html
Gus Russo writes that soon after the assassination, Scott told Martin Underwood, the White House’s advance man who organized JFK’s trip to Dallas, that the CIA’s post-assassination investigation in Mexico developed a serious focus on Fabian Escalante, an assassin who worked for Cuban Intelligence. The CIA had some information that there had been an indirect contact between Oswald and Escalante, through some intermediary (the Mexican woman I mentioned in comment #5?).
And at
http://hnn.us/articles/49179.html
Jefferson Morley describes his new book, Our Man in Mexico City: Winston Scott and the Hidden History of the CIA, which argues that the CIA’s Mexico station was well aware of Oswald’s activities in Mexico City but that this information was subjected to unusually extreme restrictions, perhaps by the CIA’s counter-intelligence unit, soon after Oswald left Mexico City. Even Scott, the Chief of Station, was denied access to this intelligence. Later the CIA claimed that Oswald’s visit to Mexico City was essentially ignored until after the assassination. Scott thought there was a cover-up of the super-secret unit’s special interest in Oswald. The book says also that Scott had tape recordings of Oswald’s telephone conversations with the Soviet and Cuban embassies and that Scott kept these recordings in his home safe and that after Scott died, the CIA seized Scott’s safe and the tapes disappeared forever.
This is slightly off-topic, but I recently read a new (2009) book titled Bobby and Jackie: A Love Story, written by C. David Heymann. He is a journalist who has won three Pulitzer prizes and who is an expert about the Kennedy family, having written also the books American Legacy: The Story of John and Caroline Kennedy; RFK: A Candid Biograhy of Robert F. Kennedy; and A Woman Named Jackie: An Intimate Biography of Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis.
The book Bobby and Jackie provides an amazing amount of information about the sexual relationship between Robert and Jacqueline Kennedy during the period between the assassination of John Kennedy in 1963 and the assassination of Robert Kennedy in 1968. Heymann has read everything and interviewed everybody related to that relationship and has assembled dozens of puzzle pieces and organized them into a quite clear picture.
While Jackie was having her sexual relationship with Bobby, she was having another sexual relationship with Aristotle Onassis, and both men were well informed (by Jackie herself, among other sources) about the other relationship.
In 2004 another writer, Peter Evans published a book, Nemesis, which argued that the assassination of Robert Kennedy was financed by Aristotle Onassis, who had hated RFK for many years and who was infuriated ultimately by RFK’s affair with Jackie. The RFK assassination was subjected to a US Government cover-up too.
I don’t consider myself a serious JFK conspiracy buff, although I read a few books years ago. If there was a conspiracy, I’ve often thought that the Mafia was involved.
Off the top of my head, without looking anything up, I recall that Sam Giancana supported JFK in his Presidential bid. At the time, before the election, RFK was working as a counsel for Senate investigations into the mob. Perhaps Giancana was hoping to gain influence with the Kennedy family and get the dogs called off.
After his election, JFK made his brother Attorney General. I believe this is known as a “double cross”.
The Mexican woman I mentioned in my comment #5 was Sylvia Duran. Basic information about her role in the matter is at
http://www.maryferrell.org/wiki/index.php/Sylvia_Duran%27s_Interrogation
Ah, that perennial favorite, the JFK assassination.
I don’t see the Soviets picking someone like Oswald to do the deed. But he might hold an attraction to Che Guevara. Oswald spent time in the Soviet Union. Provoking a nuclear war between the USA and the USSR (which Che found a disappointment during the Cuban Missile Crisis) would have been regarded by Che as a revolutionary success for “the third world.” He may have also had his own channels to set the plot in motion (Che was active in Leftist circles in Mexico City). And setting up “drug for arms” swaps with the mob isn’t out of the question for him. Would he have told the Castro brothers about any encouragement he was giving Oswald? By this time, they had something to lose (a very large plantation called “Cuba”) and may have squashed it. Che had no hope of running Cuba, but may have seen himself running all of Latin America if certain impediments to the “revolution” were removed — chief among them the USA.
Within a few years he was in revolutionary exile and, it is easy to believe, marked for death by the Castro brothers. Is it possible that one leftist Icon (Che) assassinated another (JFK) and was outed by a third (Castro) to two of the Left’s anti-Icons, LBJ and CIA — who may have wanted the dead end well and truly dead? Does such a speculation require proof?
Mac: The reason why it stayed a secret is that all the people who actually set it up and covered the back trail saw themselves as honorable men who were serving their country by removing its greatest danger. Being honorable men, they took their secrets with them to the grave.
The hallmark of the Grand Conspiracy Theory is that the very lack of evidence for the thing is turned around and presented as the best evidence that the theory is true. It thrives in gaps, just like the God hypothesis. Richard Hoagland had a great run with that one image from the 1976 Viking Orbiter that he claimed showed a kind of Mount Rushmore on Mars, and for twenty-two years, follow-on probes to Mars experienced a string of failures that Hoagland claimed were caused by government sabotage to prevent the public from learning about the existence of extraterrestrials.
One might ask why NASA kept building and sending these probes in the first place, but his answer was that they wanted to keep the taxpayer-funded gravy train rolling, just never getting to the next station is all. There’s always a neat, tidy explanation for everything. Of course, the whole thing came tumbling down when a European probe (outside of the NASA “conspiracy”) showed a detailed three-dimensional view of the area and closed the gap. Never mind!
And the same thing happens with Oswald. Pay no attention to his ties to Cuba and the USSR, which were reason enough for him to want to take out the President. And no way Ruby was a patriotic American who was pissed that Oswald killed the President, he was a nightclub owner, aren’t all nightclub owners beholden to the Mob? And so it goes.
The events of November 22, 1963 are a great shared narrative among Baby Boomers, but already they are outnumbered by people who weren’t even born at that time, and now the whole thing triggers a collective yawn. Nobody cares if “honorable men” killed JFK because he caused the spectacular failure of the CIA at the Bay of Pigs and are taking the true story to the grave so they don’t tarnish the image of the CIA. Especially now after the spectacular failure of the CIA on 9-11.
Teresita:
But there really IS a face on Mars!
oh, I misread that as Hoover having had a little affair in Mexico City …
The tapes are interesting because they show, in part, how politics works. It’s a network of favors granted, chips cashed in, promises made and catastrophes averted. It’s the saga of people staying just one step ahead of their pasts, the story of actors dealing with “situations” as they understand them, but not necessarily as they really are.
There’s this idea that someone “knows the truth” about an event; that some custodian of the secret flame exists because a definite body of esoteric knowledge exists; that at any rate there’s some giant Federal government warehouse where alien artifacts and the Ark of the Covenant are stored.
Yet perhaps just as no one completely understands why the Battle of Midway unfolded as it did no one person understands the events of November, 1963. Where multiple actors are working independently and ignorant of each other their actions cross paths and what happens is never completely understood, even by the actual participants. Perhaps especially not by them. You might call this the Rashomon theory of history, where it is possible for different people to remember completely different versions of the same event. While looking up the Rashomon reference, I saw this:
and recalled how I sat in class listening to Professor Allison try to explain what happened that strange October of the missile crisis. I thought that Essence of Decision was a frustrating book because it suggested there was no “right answer”. It is astonishing to realize that the world might have gone to nuclear war in that long ago day simply due to a comedy of errors. That sounds like an astonishing idea and yet many serious historians argue that is just how the Great War of 1914-1918 happened.
Is there a “real story” we are not allowed to know? Was Essence of Decision part of a cover story too? That way madness lies. Maybe we have to admit that there are some things we do know and perhaps, can never know. The truth may be “out there” but lost. Or perhaps it was never found.
The tapes are interesting because they show, in part, how politics works.
Then perhaps. Probably not today.
LBJ could play with individuals, he could depend on parties.
Today, thanks to mass media, everything is out in public, every politician is a demagogue, nothing is behind closed doors, nobody can take responsibility, even the very *idea* of responsibility is considered on the one hand either personal “arrogance” or else historical inevitability. There is no room for initiative or debate.
Nice to see ol’ LBJ again, but wow is that stuff dated.
Lyndon Johnson for all of his arm twisting ability and knowledge of how to use “power” was one of the worst presidents ever in this country. He advanced the Roosevelts (both Teddy and Franklin) agenda of secular progressive socialism in this country and we suffer mightly from its and his effects today.
I believe the Kennedy assisination was a mob hit to payback the Kennedy family for its double cross after they elected JFK via the West Virginia primary and Illinis. The Warren Commission was LBJ’s attempt to keep the lid on the nonpolitical world finding out how corrupt the Dem. party was with its Mob ties and election corruption. If those ties had been revealed every election for years would have been called into question and the Dem. control of the country shaken to its roots.
And by the way the Dem. party is still CORRUPT. ACORN and SEIU anyone!
There is a famous series of pictures of LBJ, as a Senator, talking to someone in a hallway. It begins with a warm handshake, proceeds to a glare, and ends with LBJ angrily towering over a cowering man, looking not unlike the T-Rex versus the lawyer on the toilet in the film Jurassic Park.
When I was at the Pentagon we had an incident I won’t describe, – an American satellite launch, a Russian missile test, and people speculating and then getting the same story from other channels and thinking it was confirmation for the very rumors they generated – but suffice to say that when we finally put all the pieces together someone summed it up as “This sounds like a Tom Clancy novel!” The fact that on the same day the US and Russia were signing the START treaty made it all the more ironic. I wonder if they ever noticed that we changed DEFCON on the same day we signed that treaty? If so, I am sure they never figured out why.
I really dont believe that there is any such thing as a real secret. I have secrets. We have information.
If LBJ had had anything to do with it (he was capable), somebody would have gotten even with the old bastard. From the Agency for VietNam. From anywhere else for an infinitude of reasons.
Any of the other domestic sources, likely not because somebody would have ratted out the plot for whatever reason.
An offshore scheme? Any evidence would have been closely held and more probably indirect, with disclosure more costly to a very few individuals sources or methods than the worth of it.
After 47 years, its now a matter of historical curiosity unless Castro was behind it, but the only comparative case to that is Eichmann, and America hasnt the needed vengeance gene.
Mob hit? CIA? People don’t want to acknowledge the truth — that a loner nutcase (who previously had shot at, barely missing, a Texas hard-right militia leader) could kill a President.
Well, he did. The shot was Oswalds, easily made with his accurate bolt rifle, in daylight. Because security around JFK was a joke, and guys like Oswald have a long history of assassinations and attempts: John Wilkes Booth, Charles Guiteau, Leon Czogolz, Guiseppe Zangara (FDR), Mark David Chapman (John Lennon), John Hinckley Jr (Reagan), Lynette Squeaky Fromme, and Sarah Jane Moore (Ford), and the guy who tried to shoot Andrew Jackson (but had a misfire and resulted in Jackson nearly beating him to death with his cane — at age 72).
What would be shocking would be a deviation from this pattern. I.E. lax security by glad-handing Presidents, leading to lone nutcases who want to be famous by killing a President. Or a Beatle.
Americans don’t like to believe that their vote can be nullified by a lone whacko assassins bullet, but it is so and has been so for most of this nations history. Three popular Presidents before JFK were assassinated, by such lunatics. Three others narrowly escaped a fate like that. The only non-lone whacko attempt was the Puerto Rican terrorists who shot it out with the TWO! guards/bodyguards for Truman at Blair House.
I think people want explanations that validate their logical construct of how the world works and in relying on those explanations they find some ease and some confidence that they are not totally lost in a world they do not understand. That is what passes for truth.
I think sometimes about the stories my parents kept to themselves to their death and beyond. I think that “being men of honor” would be only one reason among many that the truth is intentionally hidden. I imagine that people also keep to themselves the things they find embarrassing and frustrating failures, and horrible mistakes.
What seems true to me, is not so much that truth is relative in the Rashomon sense, but that it is additive, like an integration. Finding out what it “all adds up to” is a in many situations a hairy piece of math and when parts go missing, forever, a problem with no certain solution.
Most JFK assassination books and movies can generally be categorized as “Desperately Seeking Nixon.”
Herb@20:
I disagree. There are secrets held by people who take oaths seriously. However, it is like the moldy, old joke told in a John Wayne voice:
“He told me to shoot first and ask questions later. I was going to ask him why, but I had to shoot him first.”
Having visited Dealy Square and examined the “Grassy Knoll” I can only assume that if anyone was hiding behind it I have to believe that there was indeed a conspiracy and everyone in the square was in on it or everyone in the square was blind and deaf.
It looks like the Pakis with and/or without US intel are rolling up the Taliban & AQ leadership
This suggests that the ISI has done a 180. OR AQ has killed one too many of their operatives & their families. Or as the article suggests the pakis don’t want to be left out of peace overtures.
If the level and quality of arrests continue there won’t be much left of either AQ or Taliban leadership.
And if the the operation in Marjah is successful–then the taliban/AQ leadership won’t have any money to work with either. So no one will be much interested in taking their place.
Between Teresita’s comment @13 and Wretchard’s @16 there is much to consider. I agree with them both, but even so, there is enough here to keep me considering for the rest of the weekend.
And I haven’t even finished reading the comments.
Count me among those who was not even born when JFK was assassinated. The event itself therefore doesn’t hold any personal memories or special interest for me, but I did grow up in the fallout and the craziness of the 1970s. My first political memory is watching Nixon announce his resignation. Yeehaw, what a way to start your consciousness of American citizenship. (OTOH, Dad made damn sure I knew all the lyrics to the Marine Corps Hymn by age six, so SOMEONE was looking out for me.)
I read an article a year or two back … can’t find it now after just a quick search, but I’m sure it’s still out there on the Internet … that JFK’s assassination had a tremendously bigger impact on the country than did 9/11, in terms of changing attitudes and quite likely the course of American history. It struck me as rather pathetic and frustrating that the slaughter of 3,000 people, almost all civilians, on our own soil, by a foreign enemy — which would could be the worst & deadliest domestic incident of foreign warfare in the history of the country, I believe — could or would become just a speed bump on the highway of contemporary American politics. You would think that if any event would dramatically change people, attitudes & the course of politics, it would be THAT. But no. What does it say about us, as a nation, that such an infernal obscenity seems to have barely registered?
I do need to clarify that last question. I say “seems to” because I figure there are a lot of people like me for whom this was THE historic event of their lifetime (so far, at any rate – egad), and it continues to sit in our gut like Roy Hobbs’ old bullethead wound, a festering pain that won’t go away. This despite the concerted media effort to airbrush the whole thing down to the level of a sad but minor annoyance. The thing is, I haven’t forgotten. And there’s this silent ticker inside me that’s taking names. Keeping accounts. It may not be terribly Christian of me but there it is. I’m unable to forget, and nothing ever really keeps the fury in its grave. The cold, cold thing comes out of the pit when I think about it too much.
If there are Vietnam vets who have lived with this for 40-odd years now, I don’t know how you do it, guys.
Mort Sahl’s comedy routine was to substitute the Warren Commission report for his usual folded up newspaper. He’d then read a random page out loud.
LBJ rubbed out, or had rubbed out, Robert Kennedy, and MLK. How? I do not know. But a possibility? You think only the IRS can scare the pants off of you? LBJ, in 1968, was that angry! Furious. And, motivated. But nobody took notes.
Anyone who believes Oswald acted alone, also never saw Oswald being shot while in the basement, in police custody.
As to believing Oswald acted alone? No way. Nor do I believe he had a model rifle from the Star Ship Enterprise.
Yes, you can fake the news. And, yes, you can “flood the zone.” Amounts to bupkis.
#26 Charles, the reason for the Pakis change might be related to the attached story about the rape and murder of women and children by the Taliban leaders.
http://bigjournalism.com/category/taliban/
Ruby is usually thought of as the key that there was a conspiriacy.
But what kind of deep plotters would’ve counted on Ruby to [1] assassinate Oswald successfully and [2] keep quiet in prison?
IOW, if Oswald was privey to such dangerous info that he needed to be killed, then weren’t the puppetmasters taking HUGE gambles?
IOW, both the JFK AND the Oswald murders were results of a single plot, which then left Ruby marinating in prison, for over three years, subject to state of the art interrogation, including waterboarding and sodium pentothol?
Such gamblers as to send an Oswald type into a tremendously fluid operation armed with traceable info that required his killing?
They counted on being able to kill him in such an haphazard way (Ruby rushed him in a crowd of cops and got off a shot in the confusion) despite having the skill to have done everything else –iclusing the vast coverup –with such precision?
Then the same people who needed Oswald silenced let Ruby live for over three years in prison?
It’s easy to say ‘yes’ to all this on the theory of excellent cut-outs and red-herrings at every stage. Except Ruby –if he was ‘sent’ –he must’ve been paid somehow, positively or negatively (as in a threat), and whoever paid him must’ve also been able to control whatever he said or didn’t say –as well as the disposition of said utterances and/or non-utterances –while in prison.
And how would Ruby have known that he wasn’t set-up to get shot right there, as soon as he’d shot Oswald?
“Is there a “real story” we are not allowed to know? Was Essence of Decision part of a cover story too? That way madness lies. Maybe we have to admit that there are some things we do know and perhaps, can never know. The truth may be “out there” but lost. Or perhaps it was never found.”
Or maybe there is no actual “truth” to be found – but perhaps that way lies a different kind of madness, one that we fear more than any other. We all want to believe the famous logo of the X-Files, “The Truth is Out There.” What if it isn’t? I put to you that such a thought is so terrifying that we will go to any lengths intellectually to avoid even asking it.
I believe that the central reason for our desperate fascination with conspiracy stories and complex explanations is that we are terrified of admitting that our entire world can be turned upside down, indeed even destroyed, by the casual, incoherent actions of a single defective person. What reality, what meaning can we ever believe in if all of it can be shattered by something so weak, so ephemereal? The great destructive acts in our lives need meaning behind them, because to face the fact that they may have no meaning at all is to have to confront whether or not our own lives have meaning.
Internally, we can’t help but equate our own strength, or the strength of something we love like our country, with the strength of our enemies. Something as horrible, as devastating as JFK’s assassination *had* to be the result of the great, nefarious forces arrayed against him – how could that much damage have been caused by a single defective person? How could all of history have been changed by next to nothing? If we admit to the possibility of that, and then note that there are approx. 6 billion people on this planet today, we must accept that there are at least 6 billion insane and unpredictable possible ways for our world to be turned upside down *every* *single* *day*. Our minds reel at that number – if our reality is built on such shifting sand, such gossamer threads, what can be trusted? What can be believed in? So we tell ourselves such terrible things are NOT random, such things are NOT the darkly comedic blunderings of fools, but that they are enterpises of great pith and moment, and that these catastrophes are crucial plot points in the longstanding story of Good and Evil, vital elements in the Passion Play of our lives.
And yet, no matter how we may try to deny it, we never can know when that drunken driver will fall asleep, veer across the center line, and end our personal worlds in an instant. We have a need to tell ourselves that our lives won’t end without reason, without sense – and yet we know all too well, deep in our hearts, that they can, and in fact we see it around us every day. The only way I know of to face this conundrum is humility – there but for the grace of God go I. Outside of that I see no honest answer that we as humans can divine.
When Caroline Kennedy suggested that the Obama team should consider riding the wave of the Kennedy Camelot myth, I knew immediately that the carefully orchestrated and choreographed campaign of imagery and iconography (described so well by Alexis) was under assault by a naive relic of old worlds lost and tarnished and out of place on the neon stage of modern theater.
To remind the American people of the euphoria – and, yes, hope and optimism – that accompanied the election of JFK and the almost immediate deflation as he stumbled into history would be nothing but a modern Kiss of Death to the Obama campaign. I continue to be impressed that they circumnavigated their way around this potentially lethal marketing obstacle.
In my bigger picture view, none of the Kennedy boys were able to rise above the insidious and pernicious influence of Old Joe. Jack had the best chance, but his date with history truncated the legacy.
To even think of associating the remarkable marketing effort that helped put Obama into office with the tragic-sad Camelot theater of the Kennedy family was borderline or maybe fully stupid.
I remember from Teddy White’s biography his very discrete description of Jackie’s emotional trauma which seemed dominated by her obsession with the disruption of the Camelot vision. One of those rare precursor events that should have prepared us for the modern world – poignant, sad, tragic, and pathetically naive.
28. Bogie Wheel
“The thing is, I haven’t forgotten. And there’s this silent ticker inside me that’s taking names. Keeping accounts.”
The WTC attack was the symptom of the two greatest threats to civilization, Bogie. And those two threats remain extant. That is Jihad and the corruption of (and by) the Left.
You need to keep accounts and to make a move when it becomes possible to do so and to remain alert. It’s the eternal vigilance thing.
The white man’s burden
(and the burden of any other civilized, intelligent liberty loving being).
Charles McCarry’s spy novel “The Tears of Autumn” decribes an entirely different reason for Kennedy’s assassination. I always wondered if he thought it might not be fiction.
It’s a haunting book, and full of wonderful little vignettes of that administration’s arrogance and betrayal.
Sometimes, all you need to know is that John Wilkes Booth had a broken ankle that was re-set by Dr. Mudd. Who goes to prison. After, Booth was shot in the barn. By Federal agents. How come he got shot? Wouldn’t he have provided links?
Ditto, why was Oswald killed? Dubai police chief was not in charge at that time, solving crimes like Sherlock.
This book (http://www.amazon.com/Shot-Philip-Kerr/dp/067104141X/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1266794490&sr=8-2) is about 100 pages too long but supports the Castro theory with a twist.
Why was Oswald killed?
Because Ruby was distraught and impetuous and thought he would be hailed as a hero.
Did Israel Just Acquire a Strategic Bombing Capability?
via Instapundit: http://www.commentarymagazine.com/blogs/index.php/pollak/242001
Programmer said:
Including oaths to the Constitution. Knowledge of such a heinous crime against the Republic would cause loyal servants to it to turn on their Grandma. Some things Are Not Done. No leaks, no conspiracy. Cigarette Smoking Man is an X-Files character.
However. An offshore plot might be concealed from lack of hard proof or the loss of a vital asset or assets. Payback in that regard could be a bitch.
Right after Ruby shot Oswald, he declared to the police why he shot Oswald — “To show the world that the Jews have guts.” A key issue in the subsequent trial of Ruby was whether that statement should be allowed in the testimony.
The JFK assassination occurred only 18 years after the end of World War Two. Ruby’s parents had immigrated from Poland, and Ruby grew up speaking Yiddish in a Jewish neighborhood in Chicago. All his relatives who remained in Poland were murdered during the Holocaust.
Ruby thought that the JFK assassination would be blamed on Jewish-Americans, and so there might be a Holocaust in the USA.
Ruby thought the JFK assassination might be blamed on Jewish-Americans because he himself, a Jewish-American, had been associated with Oswald in smuggling guns to Cubans. Ruby did not know that Oswald would assassinate President Kennedy, but after the assassination he feared that he — and by extension all other Jewish-Americans — would be blamed because of that association, and so he murdered Oswald in order “to show the world that the Jews had guts” enough to execute Oswald.
Ruby did not foreseen that the US Government would cover up the releationship between Oswald and Ruby and many other assocations. If he had foreseen that development, then he might have refrained from murdering Oswald.
Can’t Santos Trafficante and Carlos Marcello get a little love? And what about the mystery tramp E. Howard Hunt on the grassy knoll? And “I shouted out who killed the Kennedys, when after all it was you and me” I spent some serious hours of drug induced paranoia in the early ’70′s trying to get to the bottom of what happened in Dallas. I even read the Yankee/ Cowboy thesis of SDS’er Carl Ogilvie and now you tell me there’s no there there.
sirius_sir @ 40: Did Israel Just Acquire a Strategic Bombing Capability?
via Instapundit: http://www.commentarymagazine.com/blogs/index.php/pollak/242001
No. 2000 pound payload. Turboprop. Not very stealthy. Not a “fleet” either, just a new model of an older UAV. Not clear it even carries external missiles. Reaper class. Not really sure what the point is.
You want a 737 UAV, start with a 737.
Josh, I’ll leave it to the Israeli Air Force to reveal the point, when and where-ever. Those boys seem to know what they’re about. Personally, I wouldn’t presume to say.
A gray November day in 1963…me a freshman in high school…Delavan, Wisconsin. The principal came on the intercom in the mid afternoon and announced that “the President has been shot”. Shortly after that the school buses pulled up early and we all went home in various stages of shock. Watching NBC the next day with my 80 year old grandmother we watched Ruby shoot Oswald live on national TV…Grandma cried…kind of a memorable event. I’m with Whiskey …single assassin theory…Marine Corp trained sharp shooter with a mail order Italian bolt action carbine perched perfectly in the Mail Depository Bldg with a clear shot at the motorcade…hard to miss Kennedy’s head and shoulders…Boom, Splat, Boom…Lee Harvey was the killer no doubt. Johnson was a patriot first and a politician second. Why would he kill Kennedy? For power ?
31. Richard:
Yeah I saw that story. The amazing part of that story was that the guy was peddling the videos to pashtuns for profit. might have been ok by the locals if the rape victims were russians or chinese or indian or iranian or even tribes from the northern alliance or golden if american but in any case –anybody but pashtun afghans.
something was really not right about that perp.
So yeah that would play in it. But I’m not sure how that would turn the ISI against the Taliban–except byo creating an anti taliban among the pashtuns themselves who would open up another front against the Taliban and seek redress from the ISI.
I’m from Dallas, where the Kennedy Assassination is big deal, for obvious reasons, so I’ve heard every possible theory growing up. I even had Michael Eddowes over to my house and he really had me going that a Soviet spy was buried in Oswald’s grave. We actually dug Oswald up, to the distress of his widow, and found that Oswald was indeed buried in the grave as advertised.
Then I saw a demonstration where a man with the same type of Italian carbine placed up in a tower the same height as the Book Depository did shoot a moving target the size of JFK’s head at the range of Oswald’s shot and hit it three times within the same time frame that Oswald used. It could be done, after all, by a lone marksman with that rifle at that distance and in that space of time.
Case closed.
But they still showed Oliver Stone’s JFK in the high schools, in the history classes, with full-up approved teaching notes and sessions where students were encouraged to let it all out and express how they really felt about all the dark forces lining up to doom the shining knight of Camelot. In those discussions I wonder how the truth fared, the one that happens to coincide with the Warren Report?
My gut says Cuba had Oswald do it, be it Che and/or Fidel, as revenge for various assassination attempts.Georgie Ann Geyer wrote about that once.
Now that most of the people who were involved AS WELL AS the children of the principals – victims and beneficiaries alike – are DEAD DEAD DEAD, I can at last reveal who arranged the assassination of JFK.
Back in 1992, Bonar Menninger wrote a book entitled “Mortal Error”. It tells the (true) story of a marksman who was hired by a television company to see if he could repeat the shot Oswald took from the Texas Book Depository — he could, no problem.
But the marksman became concerned about inconsistencies in the physical evidence. Long story short — Kennedy was hit twice, but by two different types of bullet. The first was the WWII full metal jacket type fired by Oswald’s Italian rifle. The second was from a then brand-new AR-15 that hit Kennedy in the back of the head & disintegrated. The Secret Service in the car behind had the the new AR-15. There are photos.
The information in this book leads me to speculate there was a cover up. Johnston and others decided that it would be too damaging to tell the US public that the President had accidentally been shot by a Secret Service agent who picked up an AR-15 from the floor of his open car and was turning round to face the firing from behind. The loose ends have supported decades worth of accusations of conspiracy. Well, there was a conspiracy — a bureaucratic conspiracy not to admit something embarrassing.
They say that Johnston himself would never allow the Secret Service to drive behind his car. As for Menninger’s book — I found it in a pile of remaindered books in Walmart, ignored by media and public.
49/Gringo: +1
I was in college in CA that November day, and remember the story trickling into the food service hall where I was having an early lunch. We were stunned, but nowhere near as much as when the WTC was hit on 9/11. I was also a scoutmaster and had a camping trip scheduled for that weekend. I phoned the parents and asked if they wanted me to cancel the trip, and they all said “go on your camping trip.” So I and a handful of boys were camped in the CA desert, away from TV, when Ruby shot Oswald. I saw the tapes of the event, but missed the live broadcast.
I tell all this to put Bogey Wheels question into context (@ #28) — was this as momentous as 9/11? I would say not.
And as someone who was there as history unfolded, I never went for the conspiracy theory. Later, when I had occasion to work closely with CIA officers, I came to regard them with great respect and never could believe anyone in that organization would participate in such a coverup. That was before I saw what some employees of that agency were willing to do to GWBush, but even having seen that I cannot believe the CIA assassinated JFK and maintained that secret. F
Who else?
Jackie!
Kinuachdrach, I had not heard that explanation before but it certainly sounds possible. It’s never been much of a secret that Huey Long was never shot by Carl Weiss – he was killed by ricocheting shots from his own bodyguards who cut loose with two .45 caliber tommyguns in a small marble hallway. I’ve been there, the pockmarks still cover that hallway and are mute testimony to just how many bullets were let loose in there. Weiss only had a .32 caliber handgun, but no .32 caliber bullets were ever found in Long, or anywhere in that hallway, for that matter.
So if it happened once, it could certainly have happened twice.
This business of sanitizing the transcripts for the sake of contemporary notions of offensiveness is a disservice to history – one of the hallmarks of contemporary academic leftism is a tendency to regard its own parochial thinking as universal truth when in fact notions of what constitutes “offensive” language are as fickle and mercurial as women’s fashions
@28 bogie wheel
I remember exactly where I was when hearing the news that Kennedy had been killed – and it was shocking, make no mistake – but the hagiography that’s grown up around the Kennedys in the ensuing years is more show business than history – the article that claimed the Kennedy assassination had a greater affect on the country than 9/11 is just just the MSM looking out for its own interests – let’s face it, the Kennedy/Camelot myth has been a reliable cash cow for decades and they’ve obviously nailed their colors to the mast as far as more recent events are concerned. So basically they’re saying it was more influential because for forty years they’ve been banging the drum about how influential it was, and by the same token they’ve been downplaying 9/11 ever since it happened for whatever nasty or obtuse reasons of their own. Whatever they may say, history will give its verdict in due time, and no doubt 9/11 will loom larger in the end. (For that matter, so will the MSM’s response – or more accurately, lack of it – to the Muslim furor over the Danish cartoons.)
wws: Believe no tommyguns with the Kingfish. His bodyguards all carried 1911s Some in 45ACP,
others in 38 Super. Surgeons recovered on round from the later. It was an unobserved 45 lodged against his kidney that caused his demise. I daresay the 38 hit directly and the 45 was a richochet that actually penetrated only because it hit the existing entrance wound.
And, my Aunt Mabry’s former suitor had left that 32 in his car.
Cowboy #48: Most telling to me were the three earwitnesses uncovered by GErald Posner. Oswald was on floor 6, they were right under him on floor 5. They all heard:
BANG (click click) BANG (click click) BANG (click click). Rifle was found with three empties nearby, round in chamber. There were definitely three shots fired from the Oswald perch.
RWE: Did I ever tell you about the 100 millimeter guns that threatened DaNang by not being there? Inebriated NVA commander shot off his mouth, and half of I Corps played “gossip”.
Bogie Wheel: Only person in recent years to excite unwanted VN emotions in me was that libelous s.o.b. Kerry. Other yammerheads I laugh at. BTW: JFK assassination was but a speed bump. So were all others EXCEPT the first one, Lincoln. Lincoln, Sherman and Grant had a plan to avoid Reconstruction. Booth changed all that.
BTW: The Confederate Secret Service could have killed Lincoln anytime they wanted to. They knew better than that. They did have a desperation plan to kidnap him and hold him hostage. (Booth and some of the others were on the outer fringes of all that.) Along came Appamattox and the CSS prudently stood down. Wannabes led by Booth concocted the assassination on their own.
Kinuachdrach: A 55 grain hyper-velocity 223
does LOTS more to a human skull than was done to JFKs. His death wound is more commensurate with a heavy-for-its caliber FJRN than with anything else. Ditto for the fact that John Connally survived a sucking chest wound that is normally fatal with any kind of spitzer, let alone expanding, bullet. The first shot
remains a bit of a mystery but little doubt it was a hit somewhere in soft tissue.
My own conclusion about the Warren Commission? LBJ convened it to cover up, not the assassination, but all the dirty linen that would come to light. That way he could keep it to himself and call in markers at will. J. Edgar Hoover was his eager accomplice in all this.
And it was the FBI that had the biggest single thing to hide. Since Marina Oswald was the daughter of a KGB Colonel, and since Oswald himself kept contracting KGB?GRU personnel, Hoover was convinced that Oswald was the contact point for one or more “illegals” (spies that sneak into the country rather than using legal cover.) Therefore, the FBI considered Oswald an “asset”. When he relocated from New Orleans to Dallas, the Fibbies pointedly failed to inform the Secret Service of his new whereabouts. Therefore, he was not surveyed and profiled when the fatal trip to Texas was made. This in spite of his being on the “A” list of people to watch.
Had the Texas Rangers been consulted, they could have cleared up the crime scene in short order. The Johnson-Hoover Axis of Conniving knew this and took steps to prevent same from happening. Which bound those two
into silence about each other forever because if either one of them talked they were both destroyed.
Some grand conspiracy? No, just the normal amount of juvenile self-serving. We got lucky. As somebody else noted, Some Fool Thing In Dal;las did not have the consequences of Some Fool Thing In the Balkans.
marycl #56: Best example I know of abouth your “cash cow” was a book in the late 1980s that took the typical yarn but substituted “David Ben-Gurion” and “Mossad” for the usual suspects. Shook some loot from those who will believe anything so long as Jews and/or Israel are accused.
A lighter note: An Irishman immigrated to New York. Every day he would stop in one bar, order two glasses of Guninness, hold one in one hand and the other in the other, clink them together, and proceed to drink alternating portions from each until they were both empty.
When asked why, he explained that he was toasting his only brother who was very ill in Ireland. Then he stopped the ritual and started having but one (larger) mug per day.
The bartender inquired if his brother had passed. “Oh no! He has made a splendid recovery. This is his glass. Me? Sure and I have given up Guinness for Lent.”
MF/54 is right –it was Jackie Mason. I heard it from the bartender.
Oh Great Guru Larsen-san: Whitehr the stock market. Ponder and pontificate whilst I grab a nightcap.
OK Dave, it’s my only Irish joke – pardon me if you’ve heard it before
This American goes to Ireland on vacation, and after a week of seeing all the usual tourist stuff he decides he wants to see the real Ireland. So he finds a little pub and buys a round or two for the boys and naturally enough this leads to some conversation. Things are going along fine and one of the boys asks him “So what would your name be?”
The Yank answers, “My name is Cohen.”
“Cohen…Cohen? What sort of a name is that then?”
“…It’s a Jewish name…”
“Well of course it is, man, what I’m asking, is are you a Protestant Jew or a Catholic Jew?”
Dave, five tactical elements:
1) in the short cycle, the Dip 2 sellers are long gone –so ‘up’
2) but there’s a lot of profit since March 09 –so ‘down’
3) Earnings and markets are trying to tone –so ‘up’
4) Big taxes coming Q1-2011, stimulating ‘hot house’ 2010? –so ‘down’
5) Communist Admin Irresistable Force running headling into Tea Party Immoveable Object –so ‘draw’?
Now simply weight the elements per your personal preference, then do the ‘rithemetic, and …you’ve got the ANSER! (note, the answer is having to make do with ‘no w’)
Well, Mr. Larsen, I suppose W had one thing in its favour; it was better than H. That isn’t much of a recommendation, though.
That “little incident” was information linking Oswald and the Cuban embassy in a plot to kill JFK. But it was soon learned that the informant, whom the FBI had polygraphed, was not telling the truth. The informant turned out to be an intelligence agent for the Somoza Government of Nicaragua. So did the CIA put Somoza up to this, in order to pin the blame on Castro and force LBJ into a retaliatory invasion of Cuba? That appears to be the case. Although the FBI was committed to a lone assassin conclusion, in order to protect its own reputation, the CIA had a different agenda. Prior to the polygraph, CIA officer David Phillips, himself an expert in disinformation, cabled headquarters in support of the informant’s credibility.
I believe the cables were disingenuous, and that HQ was complicit in this duplicity. (In early October, Phillips had spent a week in Washington, immediately after someone identifying himself as “Oswald” contacted the Soviet embassy in Mexico City. If Phillips was alarmed by the “Oswald” presence at that time, he and HQ were soon on the same page.) But here’s where it gets even more interesting. E. Howard Hunt was reportedly (or so Dorothy Hunt supposedly told G. Gordon Liddy in 1972) a close friend of Anastasio Somoza. Hunt was also a friend of Phillips, dating from their work together in Guatemala in 1954. It appears that Hunt’s fingerprints are on the disinformation “incident.”
If we can believe H.R. Haldeman (and I think we can), Nixon himself believed Hunt — of whom Nixon told Haldeman: “You open that scab, there’s a hell of a lot” — was involved in the JFK assassination. Three days after the break-in, Nixon was hoping to get Richard Helms to advise the FBI to back off its Watergate investigation in Mexico City on the grounds that it was interfering with a CIA operation. Haldeman and Ehrlichman were to meet that day (June 20, 1972) with Helms and his deputy General Vernon Walters, and Nixon advised Haldeman to tell Helms that “this could open up the whole Bay of Pigs thing.” Nixon repeated this instruction to Haldeman, who did as he was told. Helms’ response (according to Haldeman): “Turmoil in the room.” Helms gripped the arms of his chair and shouted: “This has nothing to do with the Bay of Pigs. I have no concern about the Bay of Pigs.” Haldeman calmed him down, and later surmised (in his memoirs) that “Bay of Pigs” was a code word for the JFK assassination.
The assassination mystery has many twists and turns. For example, a close friend of Phillips in Dallas was also friendly with Ruby. That friend was, in turn, close to the Murchisons of Dallas. Somoza and Clint Murchison Sr. shared a (mob- and intelligence-connected) Washington lobbyist. And, of course, Murchison was a longtime supporter of Lyndon Johnson.
These tapes have been public knowledge for years and are discussed in numerous books on the JFK assassination. Here’s the story behind the story. At the time it was believed that Oswald had travelled to Mexico City where he was in contact with the Soviet and Cuban Embassies. The CIA provided Hoover with tapes of telephone conversations supposedly made by Oswald to these two Embassies. The FBI determined that the voice on the tapes was not Oswald’s but that of an imposter. The very next day after the assassination Hoover told LBJ about this unsettling discovery on the tapes. Even though LBJ knew right from the begining that the tapes were probably fraudulent he went forward as if they were authentic.
There is no longer any question that there was an Oswald imposter operating in Mexico City and that it was this imposter who was conducting all the transations with the Embassies. The real Oswald may or may not have been in Mexicao City as well but it doesn’t matter. The only thing that matters is that it was not the real Oswald on the tapes. This whole episode was part of an intricate pre-assassination plan to build a false narrative about Oswald depicting him as a dangerous unstable communist sympathizer.
“Sometimes, all you need to know is that John Wilkes Booth had a broken ankle that was re-set by Dr. Mudd. Who goes to prison. After, Booth was shot in the barn. By Federal agents. How come he got shot? Wouldn’t he have provided links?”
Maybe I have been looking at the wrong material, but I thought Booth was killed by a regular US army trooper in a barn in Virginia.
PS: I should have said – Booth was shot at from oultside the barn.
wretchard/16
You might call this the Rashomon theory of history, where it is possible for different people to remember completely different versions of the same event.
Karel Čapek used this device in his trilogy Hordubal, Meteor, Ordinary Life. I think that it was the first time it has been used. Admittedly, Rashomon is shorter a label, but giving credit where credit is due.
Mob hit? CIA? People don’t want to acknowledge the truth — that a loner nutcase (who previously had shot at, barely missing, a Texas hard-right militia leader) could kill a President.
Agreed. Question for all the conspiracists here: What “conspiracy” did John Hinkley belong to?
Historically, there had been one succesful conspiracy-directed assassination of an American president: the Lincoln assassination, led by John Wilkes Booth. Oswald was a conspiracy of one.
“I believe the Kennedy assisination was a mob hit to payback the Kennedy family for its double cross after they elected JFK via the West Virginia primary and Illinis. The Warren Commission was LBJ’s attempt to keep the lid on the nonpolitical world finding out how corrupt the Dem. party was with its Mob ties and election corruption. If those ties had been revealed every election for years would have been called into question and the Dem. control of the country shaken to its roots.”
What I find interesting is that Oswald was an out and out commie, who had once defected to the USSR, was married to a Russian woman, already tried to assassinate a general, and was a member of the “Fair Play for Cuba Committee”. In addition, on JFK’s orders numerous assassination attempts had been made on Castro. But somehow, the investigation seemed to lead in every direction EXCEPT back toward Castro. IMHO, I think, not only was Castro behind it (and possibly the Soviet Bloc – The Missile Crisis was a humiliating step down for the USSR), but they knew he was behind it. Of course to admit that publicly would have required that Johnson do something publicly. And that would have angered the left wing of his own party, while empowering the GOP. So Oswald was conveniently silenced, his left wing past was “forgotten”, and all we’ve ever heard about, for the past 46 years, is “right wing conspiracies”. Supposedly over Civil Rights and Vietnam. So the “right wing” was supposed to have wanted to get rid of a Cold warrior like JFK – who didn’t really care about Civil Rights – in favor of an FDR style handout Dem like Johnson?
#71 Mike:
While I’m still certain that Oswald acted on his own, I think your “conspiracy theory” has more weight and plausibility than others. Oswald was most definitely a left-winger, even a commie, and was indeed a vociferous supporter of Cuba (there is newsreel footage of him being interviewed on the street in New Orleans during a Fair Play for Cuba rally he organized).
2. Terry Magrath: “I have suspected LBJ’s complicity in the November ‘63 events from the very moment they happened.”
I could have added dozens of stupid examples from this thread. Crazy thinking about the JFK assassination plagues the left. Nice to see it surfacing in PJM, which is crazy about almost everything else.
30. Carol Herman:
Anyone who believes Oswald acted alone, also never saw Oswald being shot while in the basement, in police custody.
I saw that, live, and I saw the replays numerous times. I believe Oswald acted alone. What did I miss? Enlighten me please.
I will also ask the following question again: what conspiracy did John Hinkley belong to, or Sirhan Sirhan? The Secret Society of Loser Chipmunks? The Masonic Killer Munchkins of Alpha Centauri? I’m always amazed at how people cannot conceive of a single individual in a place like America being able to carry out something like this. Yes, it is possible for a lone, obsessed, desperate individual to assassinate a President or presidential candidate. Oswald was more skilled and resourceful than Hinkley or Sirhan, and was therefore able to put together a more ambitious effort. It was Oswald’s intent, according to his own brother, to become a political assassin — Kennedy was his one successful effort. He also got caught very quickly, which makes little sense if he was part of a conspiracy that should have provided him with the resources to evade capture much longer. And stop it with the Jack Ruby stuff, OK? He was a strip joint owner with issues of his own. In 1963 security measures were much less comprehensive than they are today, so Ruby slipping into police HQ with a handgun was no great feat, nor was it a great feat for Oswald to get himself into the Book Depository building.
MG/71; skipping aside the Lone Gunman and trying to look at conspiracies on their ‘internal logic’ merit, imho your scenario would have been too unstable for the puppetmasters of your story –as is, just the clear connections you’ve mentioned was a fair bet to lead to some major Pearl Harbor style American people’s fury toward them. It would have seemed to Kruschev and Castro a sure bet to be their downfall if anything had gotten out to tag onto the bad-enough-already public knowledge. Plus what leader wants to start an assassination tit-for-tat?
And the old “it looks so much like us that they’ll think it couldn’t BE us” is too thin for the event, imho.
Even more important –and mirroring your skeptical So the “right wing” was supposed to have wanted to get rid of a Cold warrior like JFK –if JFK was known to be ready to bail on Vietnam –handing international communism a huge psych boost –and USSR and its allies a major strategic territory-taking victory in SE Asia –would the commie bosses have taken him out before he made that exit from the war? Naw, if your enemy is doing what you want him to do, you don’t interrupt him.
But –it is said by the Oracles of ConSpiritor –that there was another ancient battle going on, one where JFK, by his June 1963 signing of Executive Order 11110, had entered the ancient contest in a very fundamental way, putting powerful moneyed interests in the world in existential danger:
Searching combos of the various terms in the story –various combos of terms such as jfk, silver certificate, free masons, vatican, federal reserve, knight’s templar, Rothschild, swiss banks, and so forth, one sees that EO 11110 could be seen as akin to the Papal Bull issued by the Pope on November 22, 1307 –an order to sieze the assets of certain anti-Vaticans–and so, on the anniversary of the Papal Bull, November 22 1963 the Templars –now known as the Masons or Free Masons got even.
So the conceit is that this battle goes all the way back to the Knight’s Templar vs Vatican split –that is the King o France & the Pope vs the Templars whose chieftan as well as many others they tortured and burned to death, signal dates being the arrest order by the King on Friday 13th, 1307 and the seize-assets order by the Pope on November 22, 1307.
So, as history more or less reports, bands of Templars escaping this attempted extermination still holding the wealth of King Solomon’s Temple (which they had hauled off during the Crusades) became the Masons of Scotland and the Bankers of Switzerland –the highly defensible Alpine redoubt where under the Templar flag –identical to today’s Swiss flag –the Templar & Solomonic ‘lost treasure’ founded the Swiss banking business –and in time, in the “New World” across the Atlantic Sea, the Federal Reserve Bank of the United States of America.
The Federal Reserve said by the believers of a Masonic conspiracy to have been so threatened by EO 11110, by which Catholic JFK (doing the Vatican’s bidding?) had –four months before the next November 22 –declared war on the Federal Reserve, by which the initial printing run of five billion dollars of greenback “U.S. Banknote” silver-certificates (as opposed to Federal Reserve Notes) had only just been printed and distributed (only to be ‘reabsorbed’ –taken out of circulation –a few months later, by order of a mid-rank Treasury official).
Anyhoo, all stuff of the so-called Masonic Conspiracy –supposedly anti-Vatican, anti-Papist Christians and Jewish schismatics led by the Rothschilds and the Swiss and USA mega banks –hosts and patrons and guests of today’s annual gathering of glitterati and commerce titans at the (Maurice Strong founded) World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. Associates and clients of the same institutions that own and operate the Federal Reserve.
To paraphrase Col. Ollie North, “Now THERE’s a conspiracy story that needs tellin’!”
So, anyhoo, maybe the ‘pro-Vatican Italian mob is off the hook, along with the Commies up there in the first paragraph? So, two down ? and –how many to go?
I haven’t seen mentioned yet the theory put forward by Ion Pacepa, former head of Romania’s security service:
http://www.amazon.com/Programmed-Kill-Harvey-Kennedy-Assassination/product-reviews/1566637619/ref=cm_cr_dp_all_helpful?ie=UTF8&coliid=&showViewpoints=1&colid=&sortBy=bySubmissionDateDescending
There are some good customer reviews of Pacepa’s book, including one by Michael Ledeen. Pacepa believes that not only was Oswald a “true believer” Communist, but also a trained Soviet assassin. I haven’t read this book, but apparently Pacepa thinks it is quite likely that Oswald was trained for a hit on Kennedy, that the Soviets got cold feet and called it off, but that Oswald went ahead against orders. FWIW, I don’t find some of the usual theories, Mafia, CIA, second shooter/bullets, etc., consistent with the evidence.
One of the interesting aspects of Kennedy’s death was The Spin which started almost immediately. He was shot by a Communist, yet somehow it was the dark forces of the Evil Right that were behind the whole thing. Liberals seemingly will believe anything.
Arranged Suicide, plain and simple. Made to look like murder so Jackie could collect the life insurance.
Castro botched the job by failing to kill Oswald before he gave interviews claiming he was framed, hence the Cuban embargo all these years.
Where does Marilyn fit in?
Owen #76: Have not read Pacepa on this but have read him on other things. His is pretty plausible.
AND if fits right in with what happened in the Pentagon right after it was known JFK was dead.
Joint Chiefs huddled and wondered what to do and finally called in the “Officer of the Day”
a Brigadier General name of Paul Tibbets.
Tibbets said to call an all-out Intelligence Alert. Keep it up for a couple of days. They did. Lots and lots of chatter of course, both electronic and from HUMINT as well. None of this was commensurate with any ComBloc Oplan. A whole bunch of it was about
reassuring America that “WE DIDN’T DO IT SO PLEASE,PLEASE DON’T NUKE US!” And a few choice tidbits pointed in the general direction of somebody who would not take no for an answer. Rather like the Booth crowd when CSS told them to stand down.
It was all Bushes fault!
All this conspiracy stuff is beside the point of this tape. As Wretchard tried to say, the story here is about how politics and government are played at the highest levels.
AS you listen, keep in mind that in the Senate, Russell was LBJ’s mentor and sponsor, even when LBJ was Majority Leader, Russell’s was the older more rspected voice. This phone call, less than a week after LBJ became President, drove home for the first time who was now really in charge… how the relationship had changed.
I wonder if Barack Obama has had a similar role-reversal conversation with Rich Daley.
Marty, I can’t help thinking of the movie “Dave” in which Kevin Kline plays a sweet guy who heads a temp agency and has a side gig mimicking the pres for kiddle’s birthday parties. Pres has a stroke, and the Secret Service comes to whisk him off to play the Chief Exec till he recovers or dies.
FRank Langella plays the president’s white house chief of staff, who intends to rule in the president’s stead, but the sweet impostor decides to force the issue so he can do right as he sees it.
Fun movie. Sigourney Weaver is highly engaging as the 1st lady.
(Maybe o pull rank on daley, but I spect he bow and scrape somethin fierce before soros.)
MF@ 82:
Definitive story along those lines was written by Robert A Heinlein, back in the Fifties: “Double Star”. You may well be familiar with it.
And, to all, a good night.
Dave/79; if word got out that the “Officer of the Day”
was a Brigadier General name of Paul Tibbets, betcha there was a little extra ‘oomph’ in the ‘we didn’t do it!’
Orson Bean:
“When I go, I want to go like my dear old grandfather:
Quietly, in his sleep, not screaming,
like the passengers in his car.”
Doug @ 85
LOL!!!
MF @ 82
As if Soros was the King of Saudi or Emperor of Japan, or something?
It is astonishing to realize that the world might have gone to nuclear war in that long ago day simply due to a comedy of errors. That sounds like an astonishing idea and yet many serious historians argue that is just how the Great War of 1914-1918 happened.
Hubris is a big player in politics, IMO.
As to the Roshomon reference, I miss Samurai Saturday morning on IFC.