NINETEEN
BY NOVEMBER 1963, the Kennedy administration had begun to weave subtle changes into the fabric of American life and politics. John F. Kennedy, the first Roman Catholic U.S. President, had been elected to office in November 1960 over the incumbent vice president, Richard M. Nixon, by the narrowest margin in history. As his third year in office drew to a close, Kennedy sensed that his popularity had increased and that his chances for reelection in 1964 were good.
He had not left the possibility of his reelection to fate. From the beginning of his presidency, he had poured billions of Defense Department contract dollars into a savvy plan that benefited the voting districts of the country that were most important to him. He was skillfully changing the method of assigning military contracts, much to the alarm of the powerful arms industry.
By 1963, Kennedy was telling confidants what some of his actions would be following his reelection. One of his memorable statements was that he planned to splinter the CIA into a thousand pieces and scatter it to the winds. Another was that he would end American military participation in the conflict in Indochina.
He was pragmatic enough to know that once he was reelected, he could do things more effectively than he could with the uncertainties of the election process ahead of him. He sensed the nation’s growing discontent with the undercover warfare in Indochina. He saw this discontent as part of a pattern of rebellion against the Cold War. Furthermore, as the son of the former American ambassador to the Court of St. James’s in London, President Kennedy’s interests and instincts were always slanted more toward Europe than to the lands of the Pacific Basin. This, too, created friction among the strong and growing “Pacific Rim” interests of the financial and industrial world.
Kennedy understood the will of the people. He was building an administration designed to respond to that will. Not since the days of Franklin D. Roosevelt had a President so moved a nation—and the world, for his popularity didn’t end at the shores of the Atlantic and the Pacific. He was recognized, admired, and loved as few leaders have been. However, as his popularity increased and as his reforms began to take root and grow, other forces came into play. Powerful interest groups began to join in a cabal against the young American President.
On November 22, 1963, less than a year before his probable reelection to four more years as President, John F. Kennedy was struck down. From all indications, he was killed by a team of gunmen hired as part of a detailed plot to terminate the Kennedy political initiatives—which had the appearance of establishing a political dynasty—and to direct the powers of the presidency back into Cold War activities and into the hands of more amenable “leaders.” There can be no doubts: The Kennedy murder was the result of a coup d’état brought about by a professional team equally skilled in the field of “cover story” and deception activities as it was in murder. We may recall that Lyndon Johnson said, in 1973, “We had been operating a damned Murder Inc. in the Caribbean” (or, as they call them in the CIA, “Mechanics”).
What were the circumstances that led to such drastic action?
Kennedy’s plans for reelection were based in large measure on the allocation of billions of Defense Department dollars available in the Tactical Fighter Experimental (TFX) construction program. This money was going to states and counties that had had the closest balloting during the 1960 election. The $6.5 billion TFX budget made it the largest government contract ever put together in peacetime.
In the process of divvying up the funds, Kennedy had made it clear to the gnomes of the military-industrial complex that he was in control and that they were not. This raised the pressure for the ultimate confrontation between the President and a cabal of extremely powerful financial and industrial groups.
During the Kennedy years, people within the government and their close associates in academia and industry discussed frequently and quite seriously many of the major questions phrased by Leonard Lewin in Report From Iron Mountain. I had been assigned to the Office of the Secretary of Defense before the Kennedy election and was there when the McNamara team of “Whiz Kids” arrived. Never before had so many brilliant young civilians with so many Ph.D.s worked in that office. It was out of the mouths of this group that I heard so frequently and precisely the ideas that Lewin recounts in his “novel.” A brief sampling will show these words’ power on the thinking of that era:
Lasting peace, while not theoretically impossible, is probably unattainable; even if it could be achieved it would most certainly not be in the best interests of a stable society to achieve it.
War fills certain functions essential to the stability of our society; until other ways of filling them are developed, the war system must be maintained—and improved in effectiveness.
War is virtually synonymous with nationhood. The elimination of war implies the inevitable elimination of national sovereignty and the traditional nation-state.
The organization of a society for the possibility of war is its principal political stabilizer. . . . The basic authority of a modern state over its people resides in its war powers.
There is no hard evidence that this political philosophy was that of President Kennedy or of senior members of his administration. Indeed, the Kennedy administration had already undertaken several courses of action that showed a clear intention to slow the forward thrust of the Cold War. One of these, of course, was spelled out in NSAM #263, which announced plans for the Vietnamization of the war in Indochina and the scheduled, early withdrawal of all American personnel.
It appeared to many that the process of accommodation that Khrushchev had initiated with Eisenhower, which had failed because of the U-2 affair, had actually begun to take root with President Kennedy. There were other major shifts in direction attributable to President Kennedy as his administration matured in office. The U.S. space program was an example.
As early as May 25, 1961, Kennedy had made a speech stating that a goal of this country was to land a man on the moon “before the decade is out.” He had declared that one of the objectives of Project Apollo was to beat the Russians. He was talking about a plan that had been conceived during the last years of the Eisenhower administration to orbit satellites and to “beat the Russians in the space race.” A 1958 study by the Rand Corporation had forecast that the United States would land a man on the moon.
In 1958, NASA employed nine thousand people; in 1963 that number reached thirty thousand. Project Apollo was projected to cost $40 billion. Then, in a surprising turnabout, President Kennedy appeared before the United Nations on September 20, 1963, and offered to call off the moon race in favor of cooperation in space exploration with the Soviets.
News of this offer was received with horror in certain powerful circles. Clare Booth Luce, wife of Henry Luce (founder of the Time-Life Corporation) and herself highly influential in the Republican party, called this “a major New Frontier1 political blunder and economic Frankenstein. ”
With Kennedy’s announcement that he was getting Americans out of Vietnam, he confirmed that he was moving away from the pattern of Cold War confrontation in favor of detente. He asked Congress to cut the defense budget. Major programs were being phased out. As a result, pressure from several fronts began to build against the young President. The pressure came from those most affected by cuts in the military budget, in the NASA space program, and in the enormous potential cost—and profit—of the Vietnam War.
Kennedy’s plans would mean an end to the warfare in Indochina, which the United States had been supporting for nearly two decades. This would mean the end to some very big business plans, as the following anecdote will illustrate.
It was reported in an earlier chapter that the First National Bank of Boston had sent William F. Thompson, a vice president, to my office in the Pentagon in 1959, presumably after discussions with CIA officials, to explore “the future of the utilization of the helicopter in [clandestine] military operations” that had been taking place in Indochina up to 1959.
A client of that bank was Textron Inc. The bank had suggested to Textron officials that the acquisition of the near-bankrupt Bell Aircraft Company, and particularly its helicopter division, might be a good move. What the bank and Textron needed to determine was the extent of use of helicopters by the military and by the CIA then and the potential for their future in Indochina.
Both parties were satisfied with the information they acquired from the Pentagon and from other sources in Washington. In due time the acquisition took place, and on October 13, 1963, news media in South Vietnam reported that an elite paramilitary force had made its first helicopter strike against the Vietcong from “Huey” Bell-Textron helicopters. It was also reported in an earlier chapter that more than five thousand helicopters were ultimately destroyed in Indochina and that billions of dollars were spent on helicopter purchases for those lost and their replacements.
Continuing the warfare in Vietnam, in other words, was of vital importance to these particular powerful financial and manufacturing groups. And helicopters, of course, were but one part of the $220 billion cost of U.S. participation in that conflict. Most of the $220 billion, in fact, was spent after 1963; only $2—$3 billion had been spent on direct U.S. military activities in Vietnam in all of the years since World War II up to and including 1963. Had Kennedy lived, it would not have gone much higher than that.
It is often difficult to retrace episodes in history and to locate an incident that became crucial to subsequent events. Here, however, we have a rare opportunity.
The success of the deal between the First National Bank of Boston, Textron, and Bell hinged on the escalation of the war in Indochina. A key man in this plan was Walter Dornberger, chief of the German Rocket Center at Peenemünde, Germany, during World War II and later an official with the Bell Aircraft Company. Dornberger’s associate and protégé from Peenemünde, Wernher von Braun, who had been instrumental in the development of the army’s Pershing and Jupiter rocket systems, became a central figure in NASA’s plans for the race to the moon. Such connections among skilled technicians can be of great importance within the military-industrial complex, as they generally lead to bigger budgets for all related programs.
Kennedy had announced a reduced military budget, the end of American participation in Indochina, and a major change in the race to the moon. It takes no special wisdom or inside knowledge to understand that certain vested interests considered the Kennedy proposal to defuse Vietnam and these other major budget items to be extremely dangerous to their own plans.
The pressure brought to bear upon Kennedy was intense, but some sort of major event was needed that would stir emotions and trigger action. It is very likely that the death of President Ngo Dinh Diem of Vietnam and his brother, Ngo Dinh Nhu, on November 1, 1963, in Saigon was one of those events. There were at least eight or nine more that, in retrospect, indicate that a plot against Kennedy had begun to unfold.
For example, in an unprecedented action, almost the entire Kennedy cabinet traveled to Honolulu for that conference on November 20, 1963, with Henry Cabot Lodge, then ambassador to Saigon.
Meanwhile, President Kennedy and Vice President Lyndon Johnson had left Washington for a goodwill visit to Texas. On November 21, the President and his party spent the night in Fort Worth, a city that had given him a particularly warm welcome because it was a major recipient of TFX aircraft contract funds and was scheduled to get the multi-billion-dollar Bell helicopter business.
Both of these trips were highly unusual. The Honolulu trip removed most of the Kennedy inner circle—a cabinet quorum—from Washington. To then extend such an absence with a trip to Tokyo by virtually the entire group would have been hard to justify on any grounds, at any time.
At the same time, the swing through Texas by the President and vice president directly violated a long-standing Secret Service taboo on events that brought both men together in public appearances.
Whatever the answers to these apparent mysteries, it is an unavoidable conclusion that the master scenario of the planned coup d’état had been set in motion, at the highest levels, well before the President set out for Texas. On the morning of November 22, the presidential party made the short flight from Fort Worth to Love Field, Dallas, and debarked from Air Force One for a rousing parade through the city.
As the presidential motorcade began its procession through the streets of Dallas, we note that many things which ought to have been done, as matters of standard security procedure, were not done. These omissions show the hand of the plotters and the undeniable fact that they were operating among the highest levels of government in order to have access to the channels necessary to arrange such things covertly.
Some of these omissions were simple things that are done normally without fail. All windows in buildings overlooking a presidential motorcade route must be closed and observers positioned to see that they remain closed. They will have radios, and those placed on roofs will be armed in case gunmen do appear in the windows. All sewer covers along the streets are supposed to be welded to preclude the sewer’s use as a gunman’s lair. People with umbrellas, coats over their arms, and other items that could conceal a weapon are watched. The list is long, but it is sensible and routine.
These things were not done that day in Dallas.
By 1963, the Secret Service had many decades of experience in the task of protecting presidents. There were ironclad procedures and policies that had been established ever since the Secret Service was given protection of the President and his family as its main responsibility by Congress following the assassination of President William McKinley in 1901.
Because the Secret Service is a relatively small organization, it customarily calls upon local police, the local sheriff’s office, state police, the National Guard, and the regular military establishment for assistance as necessary. There is even a special course, called “Protection,” for personnel of selected military units to familiarize them with this responsibility. In this day of high technology, it has become a profession of great precision and expertise.
In a bureaucracy, it is more difficult to arrange for some office not to perform its duties than to let it do them. Such duties are automatic and built into the system. Therefore, when a unit does not perform its duties in accordance with custom and regulations, it is a signal that something highly unusual has occurred. In the case of the killing of President Kennedy, certain key people had been told they would not be needed in Dallas. Some were told not to do certain things, while others were simply left out altogether.
It is not always easy to obtain positive proof of a conspiracy, even when many facts point to its existence. The power of the conspirators may be such that they can squelch usual legal procedures. Thus, the public, if it is to know the truth, must discover what happened from details and circumstantial material supporting the case. Then, from whatever valid evidence becomes available, the public can eventually determine the nature of the conspiracy and the identity of those behind it.
More than 120 years ago, Special Judge Advocate John A. Bingham observed:
A conspiracy is rarely, if ever, proved by positive testimony. Unless one of the original conspirators betrays his companions and gives evidence against them, their guilt can be proved only by circumstantial evidence. It is said by some writers on evidence that such circumstances are stronger than positive proof. A witness swearing positively may misrepresent the facts or swear falsely, but the circumstances cannot lie.2
In something as routine as the providing of protection for the President during a parade through a major U.S. city such as Dallas, the presence of variations in the routine can reveal the existence and the skill of the plotters. Let us review certain facts concerning the events surrounding President Kennedy’s death.
The Warren Report contains testimony by Forest Sorrels of the Secret Service. Sorrels said that he and a Mr. Lawson of the Dallas Police Department selected “the best route . . . to take him [the President] to the Trade Mart from Love Field.” This is a legitimate task. But was the route Sorrels chose truly the “best route” from a security standpoint? Why was that specific route chosen?
The route chosen by Sorrels and the Dallas police involved a ninetydegree turn from Main Street to Houston Street and an even sharper turn from Houston to Elm Street. These turns required that the President’s car be brought to a very slow speed in a part of town where high buildings dominated the route, making it an extremely dangerous area. Yet, Sorrels told the Warren Commission, this “was the most direct route from there and the most rapid route to the Trade Mart.”
What Sorrels did not say was that such sharp turns and high buildings made the route unsafe. Why did he and the police accept that hazardous route, especially when it was in clear violation of security regulations?
President Kennedy was shot on Elm Street just after his car made that slow turn from Houston. Many have considered this to be a crucial piece of evidence that there was a plot to murder the President. It is considered crucial because the route was selected by the Secret Service, contrary to policy, and because this obvious discrepancy has been ignored by the Warren Report and all other investigations since then. The conclusion that has been made is that it was part of the plot devised by the murderers; they had to create an ideal ambush site, and the Elm Street corner was it. Furthermore, no matter what route was selected for the presidential motorcade, the Secret Service and its trained military augmentation should have provided airtight protection all the way. This they did not even attempt to do, and this serious omission tends to provide strong evidence of the work of the conspirators. Someone, on the inside, was able to call off these normal precautions.
According to the Secret Service’s own guidelines, when a presidential motorcade can be kept moving at forty miles an hour or faster (in most locales), it is not necessary to provide additional protection along the way. However, when the motorcade must travel at slower speeds, it is essential that there be protection personnel on the ground, in buildings, and on top of buildings in order to provide needed surveillance. These personnel would have discovered, for instance, that before the shooting many windows in the Texas Schoolbook Depository Building were open, as on-the-spot photos revealed.
So few of the routine things were done in Dallas. Incredibly, there were no Secret Service men or other protection personnel at all in the area of the Elm Street slowdown zone. How did this happen? It is documented that Secret Service men in Fort Worth were told they would not be needed in Dallas.
The commander of an army unit, specially trained in protection and based in nearby San Antonio, Texas, had been told he and his men would not be needed in Dallas. “Another army unit will cover that city,” the commander was told.
I have worked with military presidential protection units. I called a member of that army unit later. I was told that the commander “had offered the services of his unit for protection duties for the entire trip through Texas,” that he was “point-blank and categorically refused by the Secret Service,” and that “there were hot words between the agencies. ”
I was told that this army unit, the 316th Field Detachment of the 112th Military Intelligence Group at Fort Sam Houston in the Fourth Army Area, “had records on Lee Harvey Oswald, before November 22.” It “knew Dallas was dangerous,” the commander told my associate in explaining why he had offered his services, despite a call to “stand down.” Like an old dog, he’ll do his tricks without further instructions. Telling him “not to do his old tricks” would be futile.
This leaves an important question: Why was the assistance of this skilled and experienced unit ‘point-blank refused’? Who knew ahead of time that it would not be wanted in Dallas?
There were no Secret Service men on the roofs of any buildings in the area. There had been no precautions taken to see that all windows overlooking the parade route in this slowdown zone had been closed. The man alleged to have killed the President is said to have fired three shots from an open window on the sixth floor of the building directly above the sharp turn at the corner of Houston and Elm streets.
The availability of that “gunman’s lair,” if it was occupied at all, violated basic rules of protection. It overlooked the spot where the car would slow down. The building had many open windows at that time. No Secret Service men were covering that big building, and no Secret Service men were on the roofs of adjacent buildings to observe it or other such lairs. And no military units were in Dallas for that duty.
Why did the Secret Service men do everything wrong or omit doing things that were customary and were required for protection? Had they actually been told they were not needed? If so, who had the power and know-how to tell the Secret Service such a thing? Obviously, that authority had to have come from a very high level.
The official scenario of the President’s murder is patently absurd, for many reasons. The Warren Commission was required to base its entire story on a script that said there was only one gunman, that this gunman fired three shots from a single-shot Italian rifle from a corner, sixth-floor window, and that only these three shots were fired. The FBI and the Secret Service told the same story. They both reported three shots, fired by a single gunman, from the same rifle.
There are twenty-six volumes of the Warren Report. Most of that report is obfuscation and irrelevant data. If there was more than one gunman, if any shots were fired from any other location, or if there were more than three single shots, the entire house of cards fabricated by the Warren Commission and its allies, such as the FBI, the Secret Service, the armed forces, and the Dallas Police Department, among others, collapses.
It follows, then, that if the report is proven wrong on any of these key points, there must clearly be a conspiracy involving perpetrators of a master plan not only to do away with the President and to take control of the government of the United States but also to maintain the most elaborate cover-up of the century. Since all of this information is on the record, let’s examine some key elements of the Warren Commission scenario.
The alleged lair of the gunman was six floors above the turn that the President’s car made onto Elm Street. Unforeseeably, a Dallas resident named Abraham Zapruder had stationed himself on a low stone structure to take color movies of the President’s motorcade. He was a little higher than ground level and to the right front of the Texas School Book Depository building. Because of Zapruder’s eyewitness film, it is possible to mark precisely the location of the President’s car at the time of the first shot and to time the intervals between the shots.
Even at a slow speed and a moderate distance, a rifleman must follow the target and lead it to compensate for movement. From the distance and height of the sixth-floor window, it would not have been an impossible shot—had it not been for the foliage of a large tree that stood between the gunman’s lair and the President’s car, as shown in the spot news photos, such as the one taken by Altgens, a professional news cameraman.
The frame speed of Zapruder’s camera is known. The film captured the rotation of the tires and the movement past the spaced white lines in Elm Street. These items make it possible to ascertain with precision where the President was and to determine that he was concealed by that big tree at the time of the first shot. No marksman could have followed that moving target through the foliage and fired three shots in quick succession and have two of them hit his target with precision. To think that is possible is preposterous.
Moreover, an experienced gunman—a former marine, we’ll say—would not have selected a place where he had to peer through a tree if he was planning to shoot the President of the United States.
In an attempt to prove that the gunman had been able to shoot the President through the tree, the FBI had a camera mounted in the sixth-floor window and aimed it through a telescopic sight. The bureau arranged for an automobile with four passengers to move slowly down Elm Street while the camera took pictures, ostensibly to show what the gunman saw. In these photographs, it is possible to see the cross hairs of the telescopic sight zeroed in on the back of the target victim from that window and through the tree.
The FBI did not mention that this was a trick of photography. A telescopic lens may be focused on a distant target and will appear to see “through” intervening obstructions, such as leaves. In the same way, the eye can focus on a distant target through a screen door; it sees the distant target and doesn’t notice the screen. But although this can be done by the human eye and by means of a cameraman’s trick shot, it cannot be done by a rifleman peering through branches and leaves, as any hunter can tell you. It’s the bullet, not the lens, that has to crash through the branches and leaves; such obstructions knock it off its course.
This simple bit of FBI skullduggery with the tree, the telescopic lens, and the camera is a classic example of how a real crime can be hidden by a skillful cover-up. As this becomes obvious, we wonder who, at what high level of the administration, had the power to engage the FBI in such a plot and its cover-up. This is the heart of the matter as we dig further into the Kennedy assassination.
A memorandum by FBI director J. Edgar Hoover on November 29, 1963, cites a discussion he had on that date with President Johnson. (A copy of this memorandum is held by the author.) Hoover wrote:
The President then indicated our conclusions are:
1. He [Oswald] is the one who did it;
2. After the President was hit, Governor Connally was hit;
3. The President would have been hit three times except for the fact that Governor Connally turned after the first shot and was hit by the second. . . .
In summary, the President and the director of the FBI had concluded that Kennedy was hit once and Connally twice. That is a total of three bullets. As we know, the Warren Commission Report states that one bullet that went through the President’s body also hit Connally and that another bullet hit the President’s head and killed him. And the report recognizes that one bullet missed both men and hit a bystander. This also is a total of three bullets and requires all the trickery of the “magic” bullet scheme.
If we think about this for a moment, we realize the importance of the Johnson-Hoover conversation. President Johnson was stating his conclusion only one week after the murder. He had been two cars behind President Kennedy. He heard those shots, and his account that day completely contradicted what would later become the official scenario.
This important memorandum begins with a recapitulation of a conversation between Hoover and Johnson in which they discussed the selection of the men to be asked to serve on the Warren Commission. As quoted by Hoover, Johnson himself disproved the Warren Report’s “three-bullet” finding.
Hoover wrote, “I stated that our ballistics experts were able to prove the shots were fired by this gun; that the President was hit by the first and third bullets and the second hit the governor; that there were three shots. . . .” (Note that in the above “three-bullet” scheme, Hoover wrote, “ . . . indicated our conclusions” was that two bullets hit Connally and only one hit the President.)
That simple statement, by itself, throws out the validity of the Warren Report. It does not account for the “near-miss” bullet that hit a curb and injured a bystander named James Tague, as will be described below. That was an undeniable fourth shot. Furthermore, ample evidence proves beyond the slightest doubt that neither the Warren Report nor even this Hoover memorandum was correct. The stories are equally invalid. Both were contrived.
The Warren Commission murder scenario states that three shots were fired. Any change in that number destroys the commission’s entire case. Yet the most cursory of analyses of this “three-bullet” contrivance does ruin the case. There had to have been more than three shots and more than one gunman.
One bullet hit the President in the back. (This can be established, beyond doubt, by the fact that both Kennedy’s suitcoat and shirt have holes in the back below the right shoulder blade.) Without going into the autopsy details, we will simply accept that as bullet number one. One bullet hit the President in the head, shattering his skull. Gov. John Connally of Texas, who was sitting in the car on a jump seat just in front of the President, said it had the effect of “covering the car with brain matter.” That is bullet number two. One bullet missed and has been acknowledged by the Warren Commission as a clear miss. That is bullet number three.
Unfortunately, the members of the Warren Commission were confronted with the fact that at least one bullet hit Governor Connally. There was no fourth bullet, or so they said. The commission members bulldozed their way through this dilemma by ramming bullet number one (which hit Kennedy in the back) through the President, out a small aperture in his throat area, through the air (in a circuitous path), and into the governor’s back, crashing through a rib, out into the air, crashing through the governor’s wrist, out into that clear Texas air again, and then back into the governor’s thigh, where to this day a few small fragments remain.
As if the flight of this “magic” bullet were not fantasy enough, the Warren Commission asserted that someone found this much-traveled projectile lying on a stretcher in Parkland Memorial Hospital, where Kennedy and Connally had been taken. The Warren Commission published photographs of that bullet, and the bullet itself may be seen “live” in the National Archives. Miraculously, the magic bullet is unscathed, except for a slight mark where someone cut away a tiny bit for identification purposes. This historic specimen, moreover, shows no evidence of missing those bits that John Connally still carries with him in his injured thigh.
The story of bullet number one’s magic flight is preposterous. But it is valuable for illustrating how certain the perpetrators of this crime were of sufficient power to arrange for the murder of the President, for the extensive cover-up, and for the abject reduction of the chief justice to the role of puppet for purposes of issuing the cover-up report. Even more unnerving has been their ability to foist such a story on the American public for nearly thirty years and to make it stick by having every President since Kennedy vouch for it. This alone is a definition of the location of and the magnitude of that anonymous power center.
The magic-bullet scenario has survived more than a generation of attacks, investigations, and doubt. It remains the official story, a story that very few, if any, government officials and major news media representatives contest. Examples such as these prove that this crime was committed not only to kill the President but to take over the powers of the government. The cabal knew that whatever it contrived as the explanation for the crime could never be contested. This murder has never been tried in a Texas court, as law requires.
The Secret Service, the FBI, and the Warren Commission had to admit that one of the three bullets fired by their “lone gunman” missed. This admission was forced upon them by the fact that James Tague, a bystander, was struck on the cheek by a fragment of the bullet or by a bit of the granite curbstone struck by that errant round. In either case, Tague was photographed with blood running down his cheek by an alert news cameramen. He also photographed the curbstone where Tague stood that day, and those photographs show the bullet strike on the stone.
This left the Warren Commission with only two bullets to account for the injuries to Kennedy and Connally cited above. They were further constrained by the “fact” that someone had “found” only three shell cases at the scene of the alleged gunman’s lair. Once all of these bits of evidence, real and contrived, had become public, the commission had to weave its story accordingly. It handled the Tague item rather casually. The members of the Warren Commission agreed that Tague had been struck by a fragment and that Tague’s injury was the result of a “near miss.” It said nothing about where Tague was standing.
Most readers of the Warren Report assume that Tague was standing close to where the President’s car passed on Elm Street. They think it was an actual near miss and that the path of the bullet could not have been far from the others that were fired. The readers assume that if the commission was going to credit this gunman with the uncanny ability to shoot through the foliage of a tree and hit a moving target with two out of three shots, then he must have been good enough to have a very “near” miss with the wasted shot. That was not the case, however, and therein lies another key factor in the ingenious plot to kill the President.
Tague was standing on a curb on Main Street, not Elm Street. He was more than one full block away from the President’s car. Let’s draw a line from the point of impact on that curbstone back to a position within a circle with an eighteen-inch diameter around the President’s head and shoulders. If we project that line back to some firing point, we have placed that gunman in a window on the second floor of the Dal-Tex building, behind the President’s car.
On the other hand, if we draw a line from that same point of contact with the curbstone back to the alleged lone gunman’s lair on the sixth floor of the Book Depository building, we discover that the bullet would have traveled about twenty-two feet above the President’s car and as much as thirty-three feet to its right. Obviously, this bullet is hardly a “near” miss. The path of the Tague bullet reveals that the true location of at least one gunman at Dealey Plaza was in a second-floor window of the Dal-Tex building. In this location he would have had a logical field of fire from the rear of the car, with no intervening tree. The caliber of a professional “mechanic” or hit man is such that he would select only the best position. That Dal-Tex window is an ideal sniper’s location.
It is noteworthy that on Saturday, November 23, 1963, the curbstone with the mark of the bullet strike on it was removed and replaced. Oswald, the supposed lone gunman, was then in custody. Who benefited by removing this evidence? The answer begins to be clear: those who wanted to maintain the scenario of a lone gunman. Yet the idea of a sixth-floor location of a lone assassin is absurd. The final, fatal, and shattering shot—as clearly and starkly revealed by the Zapruder film—came from ground level and from a position in the direction of the grassy knoll that gave the gunman a close-in, clear shot at Kennedy’s head. The fact that brain matter was splattered backward, over the trunk of the car, onto the motorcycle policeman riding to the left and rear of the car, and even as far as onto the grass to the left and rear of the car, fortifies the conclusion that the shot came from the right, from in front of the car, and from ground level.
What happened to the Zapruder film provides further insight into how the wily plotters arranged their cover-up. That night, November 22, 1963, a Life magazine official negotiated with Zapruder for the rights to the film in his camera. Later, when a series of still photographs was printed to show the tremendous impact of that bullet on the President’s head, someone had cleverly reversed their sequence to make it appear that the head had been thrust forward, not backward.
Not long after the publication of that series of pictures, a researcher, Harold Weisberg, noted that these crucial moving picture photos had been reversed and did not match the sequence of the actual movie strip film. This was truly astonishing.
This meant that, somehow, someone had either caused the FBI to change the sequence or had caused Life magazine to arrange the pictures in an order to make it appear that the President’s head had been struck from the rear—from the direction of the lone gunman’s sixth-floor lair, and not from the front, where the actual killer had been.
This crafty reversal of the photographic sequence reveals that the case was carefully monitored by skilled agents who could control certain key activities of the bureaucracy (the military and Secret Service), the Warren Commission (including its staff assistants), and the news media, which have remained under this control since that date.
But perhaps the most incredible aspect in this plot to murder the President, to take over control of the administration of the U.S. government, and to cover up any related actions for as long as necessary, is the ability of the conspirators to reach as far as the chief justice of the United States in order to lend credence to the cover-up scenario.
Nothing reveals the extent of this control more than the following words from a January 27, 1964, meeting of the newly created Warren Commission. The members were discussing the problems they foresaw in having to deal with the Secret Service, the FBI, and the state of Texas, where the murder trial should have taken place.
John McCloy, a member of the commission, said of one such problem, “I can see the difficulty with that [differences between the Secret Service account and the report from the FBI], but on the other hand, I have a feeling we are so dependent upon them [the FBI and the Secret Service] for our facts.”
J. Lee Rankin, the commission’s general counsel, said, “Part of our difficulty in regard to it [the murder] is that they [the FBI and the Secret Service] have no problem. They have decided that it is Oswald who committed the assassination. They have decided that no one else was involved. They have decided.”
Sen. Richard B. Russell then said, “They have tried the case and reached a verdict on every aspect.”
Congressman Hale Boggs agreed: “You have put your finger on it.”
With reference to the thousands of “further inquiries” the commission would have to make, Rankin said he assumed the response from the FBI and Secret Service would be “Why do you want all that? It is clear.”
As you will recall, in the Hoover memorandum of November 29, 1963, the new President, Lyndon Johnson, said the murderer was Oswald. Hoover concurred and stated there were three shots. Those two men had decided. Setting up the Warren Commission after that was itself a mere gesture. The Warren Commission did not investigate what had happened; it merely took prepackaged, precooked data and published its prescribed report, as it had been ordered to do.
Going back to the meeting of the Warren Commission on January 27, Senator Russell gave his view of the probable response from the FBI and the Secret Service: “You have our statement. What else do you need?”
McCloy then offered his version of what the FBI and the Secret Service would say: “We know who killed Cock Robin.”
Those statements illustrate the troubled climate under which the members of the Warren Commission operated.
The commission was created by executive order on November 29, 1963, the same day Hoover and Johnson met to discuss how the investigation would be handled. A first get-together of the commission took place on December 5, 1963. Official hearings began on February 3, 1964. The commission received a five-volume report from the FBI on December 9, 1963, and another report from the Secret Service on December 20, 1963.
Of particular interest is the fact that during the November 29 meeting between President Johnson and J. Edgar Hoover, Johnson told his good friend and longtime neighbor that, in Hoover’s words, “he wanted to get by just with my [Hoover’s] file and my report.”
An important result of the announcement of the formation of the Warren Commission was the derailing of a planned independent congressional investigation of the assassination. Johnson told Hoover on November 29 that he wanted to “tell the House and Senate not to go ahead with the investigation.”
Waggoner Carr, the Texas attorney general, and Preston Smith, the lieutenant governor of Texas, were two of Johnson’s first visitors after he became President. The visit occurred on November 24. It would be interesting to know whether they decided then not to hold a trial for the murder of Kennedy, even though it was committed in Texas. It should be noted that at almost the exact time Johnson, Carr, and Smith were conferring in the White House, Jack Ruby (Rubenstein) shot Lee Harvey Oswald at Dallas Police Department headquarters, a murder shown on nationwide TV.
According to Hoover, in the November 29, 1963, memorandum, the Dallas “chief of police admits he moved Oswald in the morning as a convenience and at the request of motion picture [television] people who wanted daylight.”
Only essential police and the TV crews were permitted at headquarters—yet somehow Jack Ruby gained entrance. Hoover’s words in the memorandum about this tense scene are important:
[Ruby] . . . knew all of the police officers in the white-light district . . . that is how I think he got into police headquarters. I said [to Johnson] if they [police] ever made any move, the pictures did not show it, even when they saw him [Ruby] approach and he got right up to Oswald’s stomach; that neither officer on either side made any effort to grab Rubenstein—not until after the pistol was fired.
This is no place to examine all of the evidence available of this skillfully managed killing of a President, but it may be clear from the examples provided here that the Warren Commission’s “findings” would be more accurately labeled a “contrived scenario.”
If we have come to the conclusion that Lee Harvey Oswald was made the “patsy” for the murder of the President, we must consider again the atmosphere under which the men on the Warren Commission operated. They had been selected and appointed by the President, after a discussion with FBI director J. Edgar Hoover.
During that discussion, as related in Hoover’s November 29, 1963, memorandum, Johnson stated, “I [Hoover] was more than head of the FBI—I was his brother and personal friend . . . he did want to have my thoughts on the matter to advocate as his own opinion.”
The commission members were appointed immediately following this Johnson-Hoover conversation—the very same day, as a matter of fact. It was said that they had a clear charter to investigate and to solve this terrible crime. The commission was authorized by Congress to use subpoena powers. The members, all listed here, were experienced in the pathways of supergovernment:
Chief Justice Earl Warren; former Director of Central Intelligence Allen Dulles; Congressman (later President) Gerald R. Ford; Congressman Hale Boggs (who later mysteriously disappeared in a light-plane crash in Alaska); Sen. Richard B. Russell; Sen. John Sherman Cooper; John J. McCloy, former president of the World Bank.
As a note of interest:
1. It was Allen Dulles who overlooked President Eisenhower’s express orders not to involve Americans in Vietnam, with the creation of the Saigon Military Mission (1954).
2. Allen Dulles was in charge of the CIA’s U-2 spy plane operations and of the flight that crash-landed in the Soviet Union on May 1, 1960, causing the disruption of the Paris Summit Conference. Eisenhower had specifically ordered all overflights of Communist territory to be grounded before and during that period.
3. The Bay of Pigs operation was planned under Dulles’s leadership, and his failure to be “on duty” that day may have been a contributing factor in its failure (April 18, 1961).
4. Dulles was a member of the Cuban Study Group that reviewed that ill-fated operation (1961).
5. Dulles was a member of the Warren Commission (1964).
If any men, in or out of public life, could have solved this murder, these seven men should have been able to do so. But they did not. In blunt language, as we have said throughout this work, they didn’t even try. Why not? What power structure was so strong that it could emasculate a presidential commission?
A presidential commission is not a court of law, and its processes are not a reasonable substitute for a court. The Warren Commission was given subpoena power, but for some reason it did not use the time-honored adversarial process of cross-examination. The fact that Walter E. Craig, president of the American Bar Association, had been asked to attend the hearings and to “advise the commission whether in his opinion the proceedings conformed to the basic principles of American justice” and that he was “given the opportunity to cross-examine witnesses” had little, if any, bearing on the course and outcome of the commission’s work. Craig never took advantage of this opportunity to cross-examine witnesses.
The commission never really considered the possibility that anyone other than Oswald, by himself, had committed the crime.
The President was murdered in Dallas, Texas. By law, the crime of murder must be tried in the state where it is committed. It remains to be tried today. There is no statute of limitations on the crime of murder.
Why hasn’t the case been tried? Oswald is dead, but that does not preclude a trial. He is as innocent of that crime as anyone else until a court of law has found him guilty. Given the available evidence, no court could convict him. These experienced men on the Warren Commission, particularly the chief justice of the United States, had to have known that. The least they could have done was to order that a trial be held in Texas.
Why did Texas authorities permit the removal of Kennedy’s body from Texas? Why did they not hold an official autopsy? Why did Dr. James Humes, the man who did an autopsy at Parkland Memorial Hospital in Dallas, burn his original notes? The answers to these questions, and to so many others like them, are, unfortunately, quite obvious. Anyone who came in touch with this case became shrouded under the cloak of secrecy that has covered it for decades. Even now, countless thousands of records are locked away.
At this point many of us ask, “Who are the people who set up this crime? Who shot the President, and who has been able to maintain the cover-up for three decades?”
To these questions, there are at least two responses, each on a different yet complementary level. First, “Who?” We shall never know. Throughout history, there is adequate evidence to accept the existence of an almost mythical and certainly anonymous power elite. Buckminster Fuller does his best to describe it; Winston Churchill used the term “High Cabal”; Dr. Joseph Needham, of Cambridge University and a great China scholar, wrote that the Chinese recognize the existence of a power elite that they refer to as “the Gentry.” In the case of the Kennedy murder, there has been no way to pierce its cloak of anonymity, because neither the government of the state of Texas nor the federal government will take positive legal action.
Second, “Who fired the shots and who covered up the crime?” Lyndon Johnson came as close as anyone has when he said that “we had been operating a damn Murder Inc.” These are the skilled professionals. We shall never discover who they are. The “cover story” is another thing. It has been a masterpiece, all the way from the Lee Harvey Oswald role to statements made by high officials today. One thing we must understand is that the cover story has its band of actors. Many of these actors came from the Cuban exile groups in Miami and New Orleans and were prepared in the huge Operation Mongoose infrastructure that was established ostensibly to eliminate Fidel Castro. Any who are alive today are shielded by the mantle of the cabal.
The entire plot may be likened to a play, a great tragedy. There are the authors. They created the plot, the scenario, the time, the characters, and the script. Then there are the actors who carried out the scenario as mercenaries. In this case they would have been a band of skilled men who do such things regularly on a worldwide basis for money and protection. In the ultimate sense, they are expendable.
There are colonies of such experts that are maintained by certain governments, or by select instrumentalities of governments, and by other powers. They are used for such activities regularly.
Who can command the absolute power sufficient to create such a scenario, and who can put it into operation? The following items will serve to illustrate the extent of the power these people wield.
The murder of President Kennedy and its accompanying pageantry was witnessed, on film, TV, radio, and in print, by hundreds of millions around the world. David Lawrence, writing in the New York Herald Tribune on November 26, 1963, observed, “Thanks to the inventions of man, instantaneous communication throughout the world has been made possible. No such wide coverage on the same day, simultaneously with the occurrence of a news event, has been achieved in the past.”
This was true, of course, with respect to the communications capability, but was the information that traveled around the world the truth of legitimate news, or was it more like a mixture of real news items and orchestrated propaganda that had been prepared and written even before the crime took place?
For those of us who just happened to be in far-off Christchurch, New Zealand, for example, the Kennedy assassination took place at seventhirty on the morning of Saturday, November 23, 1963.
As soon as possible, the Christchurch Star hit the streets with an “Extra” edition. One-quarter of the front page was devoted to a picture of President Kennedy. The remainder of the page was, for the most part, dedicated to the assassination story, from various sources. Who were those sources, and how could so much intimate and detailed biographic information about Oswald have been obtained instantaneously? The answer is that it wasn’t obtained “instantaneously.” It had to have been prepared before the crime, and like everything else, prepackaged by the secret cabal.
This “instant” news, available so quickly and completely in far-off New Zealand, is a most important detail of the murder plan. This newspaper ran an “Extra” edition that was on the streets before noon in Christchurch. It ran news items filed by experienced on-the-spot reporters in Dallas, who reported that the President was hit with a “burst of gunfire.” A few lines below, it said, “Three bursts of gunfire, apparently from automatic weapons,” were heard.
Another reporter quoted Sen. Ralph Yarborough, who had been riding in the procession, as saying, “ . . . at least two shots came from our right rear.” As confirmed by photographs made at that time, the “right rear” of Senator Yarborough’s position could not have been the alleged lone gunman’s lair six floors above.
NBC-TV reported that the police took possession of “a British .303-inch rifle . . . with a telescopic sight.” That was not the Italian rifle of the Warren Report.
Another account in this same newspaper stated that “the getaway car was seized in Fort Worth, Texas.” Whose getaway car? Oswald never left Dallas.
This type of sudden, quite random reporting is most important, because one can usually find the truth of what occurred in these early news reports. Later, the “news” will be doctored and coordinated and will bear little resemblance to the original, more factual accounts.
Experienced reporters travel in the presidential party. They know gunfire when they hear it, and they reported “bursts” of gunfire. They reported “automatic weapons.” They reported what they heard and saw. They did not yet have propaganda handouts.
Neither the FBI nor the Secret Service reported such action. Since automatic weapons were never found, it becomes apparent that the reporters on the scene had heard simultaneous gunfire from several skilled “mechanics” or professional killers and that this gunfire had sounded like “bursts” of “automatic weapons.”
This reference to “three bursts of gunfire” and “apparently from automatic weapons” that I read first on the front page of the Christchurch Star provides a most important clue. It shows how on-the-spot news coverage creates real facts that are much different from the preprepared cover story, and the after-the-fact Report of the Warren Commission.
Another factor is important. On-the-spot news coverage benefits from that “instantenous communications throughout the world... simultaneously with the occurrence of a news event” that David Lawrence mentioned in the New York Herald Tribune.
During early on-the-spot news bulletins CBS made use of these same words: “Three bursts of automatic gunfire, apparently from automatic weapons, were fired at President Kennedy’s motorcade in downtown Dallas.” These same lines were repeated in subsequent CBS bulletins of that date.
Another point can be made from this bulletin. Although the gunmen may have used “automatic” weapons, it is more likely that what the reporters heard that day was the well-coordinated fire from at least three gunmen in different locations, and that they fired at least three times each.
This is an old firing-squad and professional hit-man ploy. It serves to remove the certain responsibility from each gunner as a psychological cleanser. If three men are to fire, they all know that two guns are loaded and one gun is firing blanks. The gunmen do not know who had the bullets, or who had the blanks. Each man can choose to believe that he did not kill the victim; and each man can swear an oath that he was not the killer.
It is relevant to note that these on-the-spot bulletins did not contain the previously written “Lee Harvey Oswald” data that had been fed to the world press and that I read in New Zealand.
Nowhere does the Warren Report mention the precision control of several guns, yet it is hard to discount the first, eyewitness reports from experienced men.
On the other hand, almost one-quarter of that front page in Christchurch was taken up with detailed news items about Lee Harvey Oswald. An excellent photograph of Oswald in a business suit and tie was run on page 3. This odd photograph appeared in no other files.
At the time this edition of the Star went to press, the police of Dallas had just taken a young man into custody and had charged him with the death of a Dallas policeman named J. D. Tippit. They had not accused Oswald of the murder of the President and did not charge him with that crime until early the next morning. Yet a long article put on the wires by the British United Press and America’s Associated Press had been assembled out of nowhere, even before Oswald had been charged with the crime. It was pure propaganda. Where did those wire services get it?
Nowadays, Oswald is a household name throughout the world, but in Dallas at 12:30 P.M. on November 22, 1963, he was a nondescript twenty-four year-old ex-marine who was unknown to almost everyone. There is no way one can believe that these press agencies had in their files, ready and on call, all of the detailed information that was so quickly poured out in those first hours after the assassination.
In the long account in the Christchurch Star about Lee Harvey Oswald—which included that fine studio portrait in business suit, white shirt, and tie—these press services provided, and the Star published, some very interesting information.
According to the account, Lee Harvey Oswald:
“defected to the Soviet Union in 1959”
“returned to the United States in 1962”
“has a [Russian] wife and child”
“worked in a factory in Minsk”
“went to the USSR following discharge from the Marine Corps”
“became disillusioned with life there [in the USSR]”
“Soviet authorities had given him permission to return with his wife and child”
“had been chairman of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee”
. . . and much more.
The statement by David Lawrence of the Herald Tribune that “instantaneous communications throughout the world has been made possible” is true. It is possible to send news around the world “instantaneously.” But what of the content of that news? Can information on some young unknown be collected and collated “instantaneously”?
By what process could the wire services have acquired, collated, evaluated, written, and then transmitted all that material about an unknown young man named Lee Harvey Oswald within the first moments following that tragic and “unexpected” event—even before the police had charged him? How could they have justified the collation of such news until after the police had charged him with the crime?
There can be but one answer: Those in charge of the murder had prepared the patsy and all of that intimate information beforehand.
Strangely, the FBI, the Secret Service, the Warren Commission, and the Dallas police force instantly declared Oswald to be the killer. They never considered any other possibilities. The evidence was never examined. In newspapers around the world, even as far away as Christchurch, New Zealand, the headlines blared that Oswald was the President’s murderer.
If one believes the information in the wire-service article, is it possible also to believe that Lee Harvey Oswald, alone, was the murderer of President John F. Kennedy?
That is such a powerful question that one wonders why it hasn’t been asked more often by those who have recourse to excellent sources, tenacious investigators, and wide experience—the moguls of the media themselves. How can the press of the world have lived with this fantasy it inherited from clandestine propaganda sources before Kennedy’s body was cold? How has this story been contained for more than twenty-eight long years? We must wonder what has happened to our once-free press.
We must also wonder at the chilling effect this assassination has had on succeeding presidents.
Lyndon Johnson was riding in a car behind President Kennedy in the Dealey Plaza motorcade. Johnson was seared by that event. During his November 29, 1963, conversation with J. Edgar Hoover, Johnson asked, “How many shots were fired” and “Were any fired at me?” We may be sure that he thought during his years as President about those shots that went right over his head. As any soldier can tell you, such an experience provides an excellent education.
We have noted in an earlier chapter that, despite frequent denials, Richard Nixon was in Dallas during those fateful moments, attending a meeting with executives of the Pepsi-Cola Company. According to the general counsel of that company, Nixon and the others in the room knelt in a brief prayer when they heard of Kennedy’s death. Despite this, there were many news stories in which Nixon denied that he was in Dallas at the time of the assassination. Why did Nixon tell so many different, false stories about his whereabouts at that time—all placing himself outside Dallas?
Although Nixon may not have heard those guns of Dallas, there can be no question that they were never far from his mind, especially during the hectic years of his own presidency. Some people say Nixon became paranoid. That would be understandable.
Gerald Ford, who became President after Nixon left office, was a member of the Warren Commission. He attended more of its meetings than any other member. He knows the details of the murder of Kennedy well. Add to that his own experience when an assassin fired at him while he was President. He, too, knows the sound of bullets and understands their lesson.
President Reagan was not in Dallas and was not a member of the Warren Commission, but he was a member of the Rockefeller Commission that studied CIA activities in the United States. He learned about allegations concerning the assassination of President Kennedy and of the CIA’s role in foreign assassination attempts as a member of that commission. Then, on the steps of the Washington Hilton in 1981, he, too; was felled by an assassin’s gun. On that day, if not before, he learned how the game is played.
Four days after Kennedy’s death, on November 26, President Lyndon B. Johnson met with his new presidential team, most of whom had served with JFK. Only four days after the assassination in Dallas, LBJ listened to a briefing on warfare in Indochina, which had been the subject on the agenda of the November 20 conference in Hawaii. This briefing and the agenda formulated at the November 20 conference in Honolulu, before President Kennedy’s death, marked a major turning point in the Vietnam War.
Whereas Kennedy had ordered, in NSAM #263 of October 11, 1963, the return of the bulk of American personnel by the end of 1965, the November 20 agenda and the November 26 briefing moved in direct opposition to Kennedy’s intentions and paved the way for the enormous escalation that took place after his death. President Johnson’s NSAM #288 of March 1964 completed the full turnabout.
On March 8, 1965, U.S. Marines landed on the shores of Vietnam at Da Nang. Before long, there were 550,000 American troops in Vietnam. Fifty-eight thousand U.S. soldiers would die there. Before that “no-win” conflict would end, more than $220 billion would be poured into the coffers of the war makers.
It had been evident that great pressures were building against President Kennedy. The Kennedy administration, especially with the near certainty that the President would be reelected, was diametrically opposed to many of the great power centers of our society. He had to go. The government had to be put in the hands of more pliable “leaders.”
A nation with the strength and determination to rise and demand an investigation into the death of President Kennedy—as well as the deaths of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King—will have the strength to survive and prosper.
Does America have that strength? I believe it does. More than any other country, America represents the cause of freedom, for all of mankind. For that reason, for ourselves and for others, it is vitally important that the truth of the events in Dallas on November 22, 1963, be told.