Most people still don’t think that Lee Harvey Oswald was the “lone nut” assassin of President John F. Kennedy.
In an October 2023 Gallup poll, 65% of adults in the United States don’t believe it. Six years before in a poll commissioned by the FiveThirtyEight website, 76% of Black adults didn’t buy it either.
Why should they? Even the commission chaired by U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice Earl Warren couldn’t find a motive for Oswald killing JFK on Nov. 22, 1963, in Dallas.
Two days later, Dallas police allowed Oswald to be killed in the basement of their own headquarters. The most important witness in U.S. history was silenced forever by the sleazy strip club operator Jack Ruby.
As soon as Oswald was murdered on live TV, it confirmed for many that Kennedy was killed by a conspiracy.
The Warren Commission set up by the new president — Lyndon B. Johnson, aka LBJ — didn’t erase their doubts. Its job wasn’t to find the truth but to conduct a cover-up.
None of the seven commission members were women and/or persons of color. Nor was the labor movement represented.
The segregationist Georgia Senator Richard Russell — LBJ’s pal, who fought civil rights bills and killed anti-lynching legislation — was appointed instead.
Other members, beside Warren, were future President Gerald Ford and John McCloy, former Chair of the Chase Manhattan Bank (now JP Morgan Chase with $3.9 trillion in assets). Also chosen were Kentucky Senator John Cooper and Louisiana Representative Hale Boggs.
The member who attended the most commission meetings was former CIA Director Allen Dulles. The war criminal oversaw bloody coups that overthrew democratically elected governments in both Guatemala and Iran.
Why was Dulles, who hated Kennedy, even appointed to investigate his death? JFK fired the spymaster following the failed attempted invasion of Cuba at the Bay of Pigs (Playa Girón).
Kennedy also dismissed Dulles’ No. 2, CIA Deputy Director Charles Cabell, whose brother Earle Cabell was ever-so-conveniently mayor of Dallas.
Kennedy was lured to Dallas, which was then a center of the ultra right. JFK’s picture was featured on “wanted for treason” posters that were distributed there.
More than one shooter
The latest assault on the Warren Commission’s credibility is the newly released film, “JFK: What The Doctors Saw.” It features the physicians who treated the dying president at Parkland Hospital in Dallas.
These doctors said there was an entrance wound in Kennedy’s neck. That means there had to be a shooter to the front of JFK’s limousine in addition to an assassin firing from behind.
Two shooters means a conspiracy. Even defenders of the Warren Report can’t claim there were two “lone nuts” operating independently of each other.
Dr. Robert McClelland, one of the physicians in the film, said the back of Kennedy’s head was blown out by the exiting bullet. This fact was covered up in the autopsy overseen by top military brass at the Bethesda Naval Hospital (now the Walter Reed National Medical Center).
Dr. David Mantik and Dr. Michael Chesser, who studied the x-rays from the autopsy, called them fraudulent.
The Warren Report claimed Oswald fired from the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository, where he worked. Yet many eyewitnesses reported shots fired from the “grassy knoll” instead. Bystanders and police ran up this knoll, west of the book depository, immediately after Kennedy was shot.
The famous home movie taken by Abraham Zapruder clearly shows Kennedy being propelled back and to the left. This is consistent with a shot fired from the front, not from the book depository. So does the testimony of witnesses who saw a bullet hole in the windshield of Kennedy’s limousine.
The Zapruder film gives six seconds for three shots to have been fired. Using the bolt action rifle that was supposedly used, it has been virtually impossible for skilled sharpshooters to repeat the alleged feat.
Television reporter Robert MacNeil and other witnesses heard two shots fired very close together, probably too close to have been fired from the same rifle.
The late Milton Neidenberg described the skepticism of his co-workers immediately after the assassination. Neidenberg, a communist union activist who died in 2018, was employed at Bethlehem Steel’s Lackawanna works just outside Buffalo, New York.
None of the steelworkers who were hunters believed that Oswald could have killed Kennedy with the Mannlicher-Carcano rifle that was alleged to be the murder weapon.
The patsy
And what about President Kennedy’s supposed killer, Lee Harvey Oswald? He said, “I didn’t kill anybody,” and proclaimed himself a “patsy.” That’s strange behavior for a political assassin.
Police claim that no notes or a tape recording were made from their interrogations of Oswald.
Was it even possible for Oswald to have fired the three shots that the Warren Report claimed he did? A paraffin test applied to Oswald’s face after he was arrested came back negative, which ruled him out from firing a rifle.
One of the shots missed Kennedy completely and hit a curb, causing a small cut on James Tague’s cheek from concrete fragments. Another shot supposedly struck Kennedy’s head.
That left a single bullet that allegedly hit President Kennedy and then zigzaggedly struck Texas Gov. John Connally’s chest, wrist and thigh.
Connally, who survived, always denied he was hit by the same bullet. Former Allegheny County, Pennsylvania, coroner Cyril Wecht calls it the “magic bullet” that couldn’t have done the damage to both Kennedy and Connally.
Oswald was also accused of killing Dallas police officer J.D. Tippit. Two witnesses, Acquilla Clemons and Frank Wright, saw two shooters.
Oswald was very likely an informant for either the FBI, CIA or both. “Everywhere you look with him, there are fingerprints of intelligence,” said former U.S. Sen. Richard Schweiker.
Oswald’s earlier “defection” to the Soviet Union was phony. His attempt to set up a “Fair Play for Cuba Committee” in New Orleans was like that of a provocateur. These actions were meant to “sheep dip” Oswald, in order to make him look like a leftist and possible Soviet agent.
Instead of trying to escape, Oswald was arrested at a movie theater, a common daytime rendezvous for agents. In his wallet — one of several wallets that allegedly belonged to Oswald — was a dollar bill cut in half. That’s commonly used in spy craft to find a contact, who will produce the other half.
Oswald was the fall guy — or as he put it, “the patsy”— that had to be eliminated.
Who’s coup?
The key to assassinating President Kennedy was stripping away his protection. French President Charles de Gaulle knew that.
He himself had been the target of attempted assassInations. One of the first books to allege a conspiracy — “Farewell America” by “James Hepburn,” a pseudonym — was published by French intelligence.
Half of the Dallas cops belonged to the Ku Klux Klan. Retired detective James Leavelle told Joseph McBride that he regarded JFK’s assassination as “no different than a south Dallas [n-word] killing.” (“Into the Nightmare: My Search for the Killers of President John F. Kennedy and Officer J. D. Tippit” by Joseph McBride.) Leavelle had been handcuffed to the about-to-be-shot Oswald.
There wasn’t even a Secret Service agent riding on the back of Kennedy’s limousine when the president was shot. Half of Kennedy’s cabinet were halfway across the Pacific Ocean. JFK’s autopsy was a cover-up.
Only the U.S. military’s Joint Chiefs of Staff had the power to do this, with the assistance of the Dallas power structure. The clean-up work of eliminating witnesses, like Oswald, could be contracted out to organized crime and counter-revolutionary Cuban exiles.
Thirteen months before Kennedy was shot down, the Cuban missile crisis terrified the world. The Joint Chiefs wanted to invade Cuba.
A nuclear war with the Soviet Union could have been the result. Kennedy didn’t want to take a gamble and agreed to end the crisis instead.
Dallas gave generals like Air Force Chief of Staff Curtis LeMay another chance. LeMay despised Kennedy. He later ran as the fascist George Wallace’s running mate in the 1968 presidential election.
The Soviet Union was then facing a U.S. arsenal of 3,400 nuclear bombs and 185 nuclear missiles. The Pentagon wanted to use them to “wipe out communism” forever.
But this second half of the coup didn’t gel. Much of the ruling class didn’t trust their fallout shelters. Oswald’s survival for 48 hours also dampened things.
LBJ’s consolation prize for the Pentagon was a big escalation of the U.S. war against Vietnam, which had already been going on under both Eisenhower and Kennedy. Within two years after JFK’s murder, U.S. forces in Vietnam increased 11 times to reach 184,000 GIs.
Johnson also invaded the Dominican Republic in April 1965. This bloody crime was considered by the military-industrial complex a “successful” Bay of Pigs.
Only the people can force the truth to be told about JFK’s assassination.
