Other titles available in the Murder Tales series:

Murder Tales: Unsolved

Murder Tales: Unsolved, The Christmas Companion

Murder Tales: The Granny Killers

Murder Tales: The Valentine Companion

Murder Tales: They Got Away With Murder

Murder Tales: The Mummy’s Boys

Murder Tales: The Bounders

Murder Tales: The Child Killers

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Murder Tales:

The JFK Conspiracies

By

H. N. Lloyd

Content

1.        Introduction

2.       Those Who Do Nothing Are Inviting Shame: The Victims

3.       An Evitable Circumstance: The Events

4.      Commensurate With The Dignity of Their Lives: The Investigations

5.       Absolutely Corrupt: The Theories

6.       Conclusion

7.       Bibliography

Introduction

Friday the 22nd of November 1963 is a nexus point in history; a day where the momentous events lurched in a singular direction; one that was much different to that which it might otherwise have taken.   It has been speculated that if on that fateful day in Dallas three gunshots had not rung out; and three bullets not found their mark; then history would have been much different.  The Cold War may have ended sooner; the disastrous and soul destroying war in Vietnam would have been avoided; as a result a drugs pandemic could have been averted, and a nation could have kept its hopes and dreams and innocence that little while longer.

That is why the murder of President John Fitzgerald Kennedy still matters to this day.  His death still impacts on the world we live in right now, so the very fact that suspicion still lingers that there was more to the tragic events than a lone nutter; is an affront to everyone who cares about the type of world we care to live in, a world of peace; or a world of war mongering for profit and ideological folly.

In this volume of Murder Tales; I shall pose the key questions that matter to so many.  Why do doubts persist that there was more to President Kennedy's death than a lone disaffected gunman?  Why are so many willing to believe their own government played a part in their leaders slaying?  Who benefitted from the killing?  What could have motivated such a high risk; high profile action?  Ultimately what is the truth; and who should be held to account for such a terrible turning point in world history?

Those Who Do Nothing Are Inviting Shame: The Victims

President John Fitzgerald Kennedy

John Fitzgerald Kennedy, known as Jack to his friends, was born on Tuesday the 29th of May 1917, at number 83 Beal Street in Boston, Massachusetts.  He was born into a family used to opulence and privilege, his maternal grandfather, John Fitzgerald, whom Jack was named after, had been a popular mayor of Boston.  His father Joseph Patrick Kennedy; was the son of Irish-American Catholic immigrants.  Joseph Kennedy had made a fortune on the stock market, investing the money he’d made wisely into lucrative real estate deals, and then the fledgling movie studios of the early twentieth-century, owning a large stake in RKO.  Joe then invested in several distilleries, having exclusive rights to distribute Gordon's Gin in America, an investment that eventually brought him into the shadowy world of bootlegging, and which helped him to garner useful contacts in the Italian Mafia.  In 1914 ‘Big Joe’ Kennedy married the woman who would give birth to the future President of the United States of America, Rose Elizabeth Fitzgerald.  The union suited Joe, as it formalised an alliance between two of the most powerful political and financial families in Boston, his own Kennedy clan and the Fitzgerald family.  Joe Kennedy had strong political views, and had ideations of one day making it all the way to the Whitehouse, and with this keenly in mind he began to move in political circles, and become a major donor to the Democratic Party; soon becoming a major mover and shaker amongst the political classes.  Only Joe just couldn't keep his mouth shut, and he ruined any political future he may have had for himself by voicing his dodgy dim-witted views on world affairs.  In 1938 Joe Kennedy had been appointed as the American ambassador to Great Britain, a honour bestowed upon him by his friend; President Roosevelt.  At first things went swimmingly in England, Joe’s daughter, Kathleen Agnes Kennedy, married Edward William Spencer Cavendish, the 10th Duke of Devonshire.  This pleased Joe greatly, it showed how far his family had come, in just three generations the Kennedy's had gone from penniless Irish peasants, who had nearly starved to death in the Irish potato famine, to having descendants who would be true British aristocracy.  Enjoying the ambassadorial life and making important friends, Joe began to think he was invincible, and was better informed on the world political situation than anyone else, and so he started to shout his mouth off about appeasing Hitler.  Joe Kennedy even met with Herr Hitler; and he foolishly attempted to arrange peace talks between England and Germany.  Once war had been declared and blitzkrieg was about to rain down like literal fire upon England, Joe Kennedy sought an audience with Hitler again, this time to try and strong arm assurances that America wouldn't be attacked.  At the same time he started to loudly and publically advise his American political and business friends that no military or financial assistance should be given to England; whilst they attempted to fight the Nazi menace.  To add insult to injury Big Joe then began to give great propaganda to the Nazis'; by declaring that Churchill’s government meant democracy in England was 'finished'.  This was too much, pressure was put on Joe Kennedy, and he was forced to resign his Ambassadorial Commission and return to America with his tail firmly between his legs, his dreams of being America's first Catholic President in tatters.

With his own hopes and aspirations shattered, Joe Kennedy decided to pin them all upon his son.   John Fitzgerald Kennedy wasn't Joe Kennedy's first choice to be modelled into a future President, not by a long chalk.  No, it was Joseph Patrick Kennedy junior who had been picked to one day make it all the way to the Whitehouse, by fair means or foul.  Jack had escaped his father’s political dreams; as he had been a rather sickly child, constantly blighted by regular bouts of whooping cough, or chicken-pox or measles, even catching the life threatening disease scarlet fever.  Indeed during the course of his lifetime Jack Kennedy was administered the last rites by a priest on no less than four separate occasions; before he finally died such horrible circumstances in 1963.  Little Jack was also incredibly clumsy, being hospitalised through bike accidents and easily hurt in the games of touch football, which Joe Kennedy encouraged his sons to play in order to toughen them up.  It was playing such a game of football that led to Jack rupturing a disc in his spine, an accident that left him in chronic pain from that day on, with a near addiction to painkillers, and forced him to wear a painful back-brace hidden under his clothes; to mask the perceivable slouch which he found was the only position he was comfortable in.  Despite his ill health; Jack was sent away to Choate Boarding School in Connecticut.  Here he stood out as a studious if academically unremarkable child.  Unlike the other children; who might want to read the adventures of their favourite superhero in a comic; Jack had a daily subscription to The New York Times.  At this time Joe Kennedy stated categorically in a letter to his son that he was 'not expecting too much' out of his sickly son, but Jack excelled enough in his studies to gain entrance into the Ivy League Harvard University, although he was seen as at best an average student, and there was no indication of the greatness he would one day achieve, and subsequently inspire in other people.
Jack graduated from Harvard just as World War II was getting into full swing, and he followed his older brother Joe into the armed services, joining the American Navy.  Jack was given an officers Commission, the rank of Lieutenant, and command of twelve men and a patrol boat, PT-109, based in the South Pacific.  His mission was simple, to do whatever he could to stop the Japanese from shifting vital supplies around the South Pacific.  The young and dashing Lieutenant soon made a name for himself as a hero, when on Monday the 2nd of August 1943; whilst attempting to engage a Japanese Destroyer, his little patrol boat was rammed at full speed by the escaping battleship.  Two of Kennedy's men were killed instantly, and the remaining ten flailed in the waters surrounded by the burning wreckage of their vessel.  Jack had seriously injured his weak back in the collision, but despite the agonising pain that near crippled him, he managed to save one of his seriously burnt men from drowning in the shark infested waters, and led the survivors to a small deserted island; where they had to wait six days to be rescued.  He returned to a hero’s welcome and a Marine Corp Medal for Leadership and Courage.  This exploit was seen as so dramatic Joe Kennedy Senior used his movie connections to have the story turned into a propaganda coo, turning his young sons exploits into a Saturday morning matinee smash-hit, and his son into a hero for young children who were sat at home desperately fearing for the safety of their own loved ones who were off fighting the war.

Joseph Kennedy Junior had been commissioned as a Naval Aviator, and with the dawn of a new age on the horizon free of war, Joseph Kennedy Senior had begun to lay the groundwork for Joseph Junior to run for congress in 1946.  Meanwhile Jack Kennedy had considered becoming a teacher upon his demobbing from the navy, but his destiny was changed forever when Joseph Junior volunteered to take part in Operation Aphrodite.   It should have been a simple mission, all Joseph Kennedy had to do in principle was pilot a B-17 off the runway, set her on a course for Germany, before radio control would take over from the ground, and Joseph Junior would bale out of the plane before it was even over enemy territory.  The plane would be loaded with explosives, and would be flown remotely into an enemy target.  Something went drastically wrong with Joseph Juniors payload, and his explosives detonated whilst they were still over the village of Blytheburg in Suffolk, England.  Joseph Kennedy Junior was killed instantly.  Now suddenly all of Joseph Kennedy Seniors hopes and dreams were thrust onto the spare wheel of the family, John Fitzgerald Kennedy was suddenly and unexpectedly destined for greatness.

Jack took his brothers place running for the 11th Massachusetts Congressional District in 1946, and won.  Jack excelled in politics, he'd found his calling in life, he served six years in the House of Representatives, before becoming a Senator in 1952.  It was shortly after being elected to the senate that Jack met a young journalist for the Washington Times-Herald by the name of Jacqueline Bouvier.  She was twenty-four, vivacious, fiercely intelligent and stunningly attractive.  They were introduced in May 1952 by a mutual friend, journalist Charles L. Bartlett.  Jack fell head over heels in love with Jackie, and within a year they were engaged to be married.  They married on Saturday the 12th of September 1953.  Given that both the Kennedy and Bouvier families were extremely rich, the matrimonial ceremony was naturally a lavish affair, conducted by no lesser grand personage than the Arch Bishop of Boston.  The early years of the marriage were tough, Jack was diagnosed with suffering from Addison's Disease, a chronic adrenal gland complaint, wherein the sufferer does not produce enough steroid hormones, this in turn causes fatigue, light-headedness, fever, profuse perspiration, weight-loss, vomiting, diarrhoea, headaches, confusion and bafflement, slurred speech, chronic abdominal pain, joint and muscle pain, mood swings, convulsions, a craving for salt, low blood pressure which can lead to comas and death, and if the sufferer is severely injured the lack of steroids in the body can cause the unfortunate victim to go into anaphylactic shock.  In late 1954 Jack also had to undergo two belated and extremely delicate spinal operations, to repair the damage caused during the war.   During the second operation; Jack's blood pressure suddenly plummeted, and he almost didn’t make it.  In fact many expected him to die in the wake of the surgery.  Whilst recovering from his near fatal experience; he put his mind to writing about his political heroes, men who had nearly destroyed their careers for unpopular beliefs that were in the greater good, the subsequent book 'Profile In Courage' earned Jack a Pulitzer Prize.   Despite this triumph, the Kennedy's were secretly plagued by tragedy, in 1955 Jackie suffered a miscarriage, and in 1956 she tragically gave birth to a daughter named Arabella, who did not survive the traumatic delivery.  The following year the wind of change seemed to blow more positively; when Jackie gave birth to a fit and healthy daughter named Caroline, she would be the first of two children for the couple, as Jackie gave birth to a son called Jack in 1960.   In 1956; Jack Senior was given the honour of being asked to run for the office of Vice President; alongside Adlai Stevenson, Jack gave serious thought to the matter, but ever the astute political mastermind he decided that Stevenson’s chances weren’t good enough, and he didn’t want to be tarred with the brush of failure, so he stepped aside and let Estes Kefauver be Stevenson’s Vice-Presidential running mate.  Privately he told his friends that he had decided he would wait until the 1960 election; where he would secure the Democratic nomination and run for President in his own right.

Before he could run for President, Jack had to persuade his own party that he was the right man for the job.  From a short list of nine high-profile democrats, the candidates were eventually whittled down to just two, John Fitzgerald Kennedy and Senate Majority Leader, the senator for Texas, Lyndon B. Johnson.   You see Johnson assumed he was a shoe in for the Presidential nomination, he was a long standing; well established career politician, not a Johnny-Come-Lately flash in the pan like Kennedy, so Johnson arrogantly assumed that he didn't have to campaign all that much for his party’s nomination.  So whilst Johnson sat in his office in Washington ‘seeing to business’, Kennedy was out pressing the flesh, making personal appearances and assurances, getting his face and his name out there, winning people over.  Eventually the race came down to one thing, back room deals. Kennedy was aware that he was the populist choice, that he had the better chance of winning a national election than the grumpy and dour Johnson, but he had no chance of becoming the nominee if he didn't have the support of Southern State Democrats; who instinctively supported their old friend Lyndon B. Johnson, and who felt that Kennedy was just too liberal in some of his views.  Johnson challenged Kennedy to a televised debate for the Texas and Massachusetts democratic delegates who would be voting in the primary.  Kennedy roundly won the debates, and it became obvious that Johnson would find it difficult to win wider support outside of the Southern conservative bible-belt regions.  Kennedy won the first primary ballot by nearly double the vote Johnson managed to gain.  Despite this setback; Johnson was determined that he would win a second primary ballot; and attempted to cajole, threaten and scare Kennedy’s supporters to turning their support to him.  Jack was furious with Johnson and his minion, the Texas governor John Connally, for the deliberate and vicious smear campaign they had been running against the Kennedy family, but Jack was shrewd enough to know that although he and his views were unacceptable to southern voters, they hated the fact Jack was pro-civil rights for black people, if Jack had a hard liner on his ticket, then he might just squeeze enough votes out of the southern states to win the national election and become President.  So on Thursday the 14th of July 1960, the day after winning the first primary, Jack's younger brother, Robert Kennedy, went to Johnsons' hotel suite at the Los Angeles Baltimore Hotel, and Robert Kennedy offered Johnson a deal, let Jack Kennedy run for President, and Johnson could be his Vice-Presidential running mate.  Johnson went for the deal.  John Fitzgerald Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson would face off against Richard Milhouse Nixon and Henry Cabot Lodge junior; for the most powerful political position in the western world.

The 1960 Presidential race became the tightest run in American history.   Vice-President Richard Nixon, a hard hitting no nonsense popular Republican, ran on a platform of level headed experience, not wishy-washy liberal wishful thinking.  Kennedy ran with the slogans ‘Kennedy Will Get America Moving Again’, ‘We Can Do Better’; and fittingly, ‘A Time For Greatness’; it was a positive campaign; that although it did pander to those still fearing the Ruskies under the bed of the 1950's, the central message was one of hope for a new age.  Richard Nixon's dour campaign focused on Kennedy being too young and inexperienced to be President, Kennedy simply didn't have the balls to take it to the next level if the Cold War suddenly became hot.  Nixon unfortunately was undermined by his own President, Nixon had been stating from the offset how experienced he was, and how essential he had been to President's Eisenhower's administration.  Eisenhower didn't particularly like Nixon, Nixon had been a means to an end when picking a running mate back in 1956, much as Johnson had been for Jack, so when President Eisenhower was asked live on television by Charles Mohr what contributions Nixon had made to his administration, Eisenhower languidly replied, 'give me a week and I might think of one'.  The remark hit Nixon's campaign like a torpedo, and the Democrats turned the sound-bite into an alternative slogan for the Nixon campaign.  Then Nixon hit another setback, an infected knee meant he was unable to campaign for several weeks, he was unable to do what Jack was doing, travelling around the country pressing the flesh of those who mattered.  The turning point in the election was the televised debates, seventy million people tuned in, Kennedy was media savvy, he was well rested, and received the full treatment from the hair and make-up ladies in the studio.  Nixon by contrast refused any make-up, make-up was for girls; and he certainly wouldn't be wearing any to go on TV.  Nixon was also tired from his recent illness and ill prepared for some of the questions.   Under the hot and harsh unforgiving studio lights Kennedy came across as relaxed, youthful and confident, Nixon without make-up came across as looking old, ill and tired, perspiring profusely under the hot lamps of the TV studio.  In the aftermath of their TV appearance there was a marked swing in favour of the Kennedy campaign.  Jack also played a master-stroke when the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Junior was arrested on a peaceful civil rights march in Georgia.  Nixon refused to get involved in the affair, worried that the white middle class voters his ideologies appealed to would be put off if he was seen meddling in black affairs.  The Kennedy's had no such worries, Jack started to make phone calls, and within a matter of a few hours Dr. King was  a free man, Jack's actions won him the ringing endorsement of the King family, and with it the vote of virtually every African American who was eligible to vote.  Election Day came on Tuesday the 8th of November 1960, an election that many said was too close to call.   Jack gained a large lead in the early hours claiming the Boston, New York and Philadelphia electoral colleges.  Then as votes from the mid-west and south came in the tide began to turn in Nixon's favour.  As midnight struck it looked like Nixon would be elected President, then two major results came in, Texas and Chicago, Kennedy won both, automatically giving him the two hundred and seventy electoral votes he needed to have a majority in the electoral college.   A lot of Nixon's campaigners called foul, it had long been rumoured that Lyndon B. Johnson had been rigging the ballot boxes in Texas, and it was known that Joe Kennedy had connections to Chicago Mob boss Sam Giancana, who wasn't averse to helping swing elections for his friends, with his Lazarus like quality of helping the dead rise to cast their vote for his favoured candidate.  Nixon was urged to call for a recount, but he decided to be magnanimous in defeat, rather than spend millions in asking for a recount, and risk upsetting stock markets with the uncertainty the recount would undoubtedly cause, Nixon admitted defeat.  On Wednesday the 9th of November 1960, John Fitzgerald Kennedy became the President Elect of the United States of America, the 35th and youngest man to be elected to the highest office in the land.  When all was said and done President Kennedy (as we shall now call Jack) had won the election by just an incredibly dodgy 2%, an investigation later concluded that the 1960 presidential election, ‘was characterized by such gross and palpable fraud as to justify the conclusion that Nixon was deprived of victory'.

President Kennedy was sworn in on Thursday the 20th of January 1961, his inaugural speech once again rung out with the words of hope he wanted to fill the people’s hearts and minds with, ‘Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country’.  He also asked for the countries of the world to come together after what had been the most turbulent fifty years in humanities existence, in order that we could all fight together ‘the common enemies of man, tyranny, poverty, disease, and war itself’.  Straight away Kennedy showed that he was willing to make unpopular choices for the greater good of the nation, telling the people who had contributed to his election campaign that they should not expect favours in return for their support, he promptly raised taxes; a slap in the face to the millions that had been given to him by the American business elite.   Appointing his brother, Robert Kennedy, as Attorney General, together the Kennedy brothers launched a war on organised crime, effectively stabbing in the back the criminal organisations that had helped him get into the Oval Office in the first place.

There were some responsibilities President Kennedy couldn't get out of; one of the first issues was his inheritance of the loony Bay of Pigs invasion.  President Eisenhower had accepted this operation from the CIA, and had believed them when they had told him that a small invasion force of just 1297 under trained and ill-equipped Cuban refugees and criminals; could easily invade communist Cuba and overthrow Fidel Castro.  The invasion itself wouldn’t take place until Monday the 17th of April 1961, but by the time Kennedy had been inaugurated into office the CIA had already spent $13 million devising the plan, setting up a training camp in Guatemala, and arming the men with what basic arms supplies they needed.  The whole operation was doomed from the outset, the invasion force was so undisciplined men were killed during simple training exercises, and at one point there was an active rebellion amongst the men.  When the day of invasion came it was a bloodbath, the men of the invasion force had blabbed their mouths openly about the plans for invasion, so it was no secret they were coming.  In the event a lack of discipline on the way to Cuba meant that 17 men drowned before even getting there, and when the dissidents eventually stormed the beaches their loose lips ensured they faced T-34 and IS-2 tanks, SU-100 Tank Destroyer guns, B26 Bombers and T33 jets flying over the invasion site carpet bombing the invaders out of existence, not to mention an army of Castro Loyalists armed with 122mm Howitzers.  All the invaders had to defend themselves with were some second-hand World War II rifles and bayonets; borrowed from the CIA.  President Kennedy was furious, he commented bitterly in the hours after the bloody massacre, ‘How could I have been so stupid, to let them go ahead?’  The invasion had only ensured that Fidel Castro appeared stronger than ever after the resounding victory.  Reinforcing this view, world famous and iconic revolutionary, Che Guevara, sent President Kennedy a note, it read simply, ‘Thanks for Playa Girón. Before the invasion, the revolution was weak. Now it's stronger than ever’.  In the aftermath of the whole sorry debacle Allan Dulles, the Director of the CIA, attempted to pin the failure of the invasion on the new President.  Inferring that President Kennedy’s inexperience had left him floundering; and that President Kennedy was the one who had failed to order the military support that was essential for the plan to be a success.  This was a revelation to President Kennedy, who suddenly began to see the CIA as the international menace and bully that others around the world viewed the organisation as being.  In response President Kennedy declared that he was going to ‘splinter the CIA into a thousand pieces and scatter it to the winds’.  In signing the CIA's death warrant President Kennedy had made a powerful enemy.  President Kennedy's wrath was swift, within twelve months he had forced all the senior men at the CIA, including Allan Dulles, to resign, and had made it clear to those left that the organisation’s days were numbered.  The Bay of Pigs also altered President Kennedy’s view of his administration, the people around him and the manner in which he would handle international foreign policy.  From that day forward the views of his military advisers and the Joint Chiefs of Staff would matter less than in previous administrations, as President Kennedy told reporter Ben Bradlee, he would from that day on, 'avoid feeling that because they were military men their (his generals) opinions on military matters were worth a damn'.   President Kennedy was unfortunate in so much that the international situation was spiralling into the abyss when he took office, yet; I believe, the world was lucky to have such a liberal and moderate man at the helm during this tumultuous period, lest the world descended into nuclear flames.  When the Soviets began to erect the Berlin Wall in 1961, blocking free access from East to West Berlin, rather than escalating the situation and leading the world into a nuclear conflagration, an outcome Kennedy believed was highly likely, he decided to studiously ignore the clumsy sabre rattling from the Soviets, and instead focused his attention on the post-colonial situation in Africa.  You see where many commentators at the time saw this as a weakness in President Kennedy, the man himself realised that by challenging the Soviet's immediately it would simply lead to an instant heightening of animosity and aggression, but by taking the slow and steady road of diplomacy, even though it would take many years, ultimately the American's would win out in Berlin; without any further bloodshed.  Yet the Generals had advised otherwise, they had wanted Russia punished with extreme prejudice for dividing Berlin.  In fact on no less than six occasions during his administration President Kennedy’s military advisors recommended that he take the country to all out nuclear war.  If President Kennedy had not been in power the world would have faced nuclear incineration over Laos in the Spring of 1961, Cuba in April 1961, Berlin twice, in the Summer and Autumn of 1961, Cuba again in the October of 1962, and Vietnam once more in October of 1963.  The generals that surrounded him were chomping at the bit, demanding that President Kennedy flex his muscles, and show the Soviets that he was not a pushover, that he was not afraid to drop the bomb.  You see the general’s fundamentally misunderstood the Russian mentality, they believed Russia wouldn’t dare retaliate and risk total global destruction.  Yet President Kennedy believed otherwise, he rightly guessed that any acts of overt aggression on the world stage would only antagonise Russia, and they would have no compunction to use their nuclear arsenal and hang the consequences, therefore for President Kennedy, thank god, nuclear weapons were an option of last resort.

Of course the major incident of President Kennedy's administration was the Cuban Missile Crisis, thirteen days where the world came closer to nuclear annihilation than ever before or since.  The crisis arose from a slow and steady build-up of military missteps; which antagonised Soviet Russia, beginning with the USA placing missiles with a nuclear payload capable of levelling Moscow; in Turkey, missiles that were pointing directly at the Kremlin.  The Americans then lumbered into the dreadful Bay of Pigs disaster.  In response to this attempted invasion the Soviets offered to help give the Cuban's protection, the placement of a nuclear payload on Cuban soil, just ninety miles from the American coastline.  On Sunday the 14th of October 1962, a U-2 Spy-plane flying over Cuba observed and photographed the erection of nuclear missile silos.  Immediately President Kennedy's military aids advised the President that he should order an immediate invasion of Cuba; and attempt to overthrow the pro-Soviet Fidel Castro in favour of a more pro-American leader.  President Kennedy was unwilling to commit to another potentially disastrous invasion of the troublesome island, and instead ordered the US Navy to enforce a 'quarantine' of the island.  In conjunction with this Russia was to dismantle the missile silos and return any weapons they had given to Cuba back to Russia.  In response to the ultimatum Soviet Premier; Nikita Khrushchev, sent President Kennedy a blistering letter which accused the President of provoking, 'an act of aggression propelling human kind into the abyss of a world nuclear-missile war'.  President Kennedy was aware that both he and Khrushchev were expected to act in a certain way during this crisis, that both men had to appear strong and unflinching, but that this behaviour would inevitably end in disaster, so behind his military advisers backs, Kennedy began to use back channels to secretly communicate with Premier Khrushchev, to try and alleviate the Premiers fears and negate nuclear annihilation.  As these secret talks commenced, several Soviet ships attempted to rush the blockade and reach Cuba, in response the Navy were ordered to fire a warning shot across the ships bows, and if they still attempted to enter the quarantine zone then they were to be sunk.  Then America messed up, they sent more spy planes over Cuban airspace, and the Soviet officials on Cuba used their missiles to down a U-2.  This infuriated the American generals, and they pleaded with Kennedy to retaliate with the nuclear option.  Despite immense pressure; President Kennedy point blank refused to fire a nuke at Russia.  So the generals groused and complained, and bitched behind the President’s back, and muttered amongst themselves that he was too weak to be President.  President Kennedy was aware that a compromise had to be made, that America would get nowhere without offering the Soviets something in return, a quid pro quo deal was called for.  So President Kennedy astutely offered Khrushchev a ball breaker of a deal. President Kennedy would promise that America would never invade Cuba, and also agreed to remove the missiles that could level Moscow from Turkey.  In return Khrushchev would remove the missiles from Cuba.  An agonising wait for a reply ensued, but eventually level heads prevailed; and Khrushchev agreed to the massive compromise.  At 6.45 p.m. on Tuesday the 20th of November 1962, the crisis officially ended, nuclear annihilation had been averted.   Although Russia got the better deal from the peace talks, only losing a missile base it didn't yet have fully operational, and agreeing a lasting peace treaty for their friends in Cuba; publicly America was seen to have won the showdown, as the missile base in Turkey had been a closely guarded secret and was closed down away from public view.   The greatest winner over all was the people of the world, who were saved from a nuclear holocaust thanks to President Kennedy and his unwillingness to bend to the will of the generals who advised him so badly.  Even after the crisis was ended those military advisers refused to admit that they had been wrong, General Curtis LeMay described the incident as, 'the greatest defeat in our history', and tried to pursued President Kennedy to renege on the deal and invade Cuba anyway.  President Kennedy stood fast, and moved forward with ever greater confidence, persuading Khrushchev that the Kremlin and Whitehouse would be better served by having a direct line between each Premier, so that differences could be talked through before the differences became insurmountable; and mutually assured destruction became a certainty.  The Cuban Missile Crisis also served to solidify President Kennedy’s beliefs, it made him more determined than ever before to end the cold war, to stop the madness of nuclear proliferation based on political ideology; before it led to everyone’s death, in short President Kennedy’s foreign policy was to stealthily herald in a new era of peace in our time reigning supreme.

President Kennedy the peace maker was one thing, but there were other facets of the President’s personality that were a little bit more difficult to reconcile.  For one President Kennedy had, shall we call it, a complicated relationship with the Mafia, on the one hand he was indebted and roundly in bed with them, it was after all Mafia actions that enabled the President to get the crucial extra two percent of the vote he needed to win the election and become President in the first place.  Also the Mafia were key players in several CIA plots and operations around the world.  The CIA found the Mafia useful, as they could ask a friendly godfather to send some men to kill a dictator here, or a legitimate President there, and if it all went rum there would be no comeback on the American establishment; the blame could fall fairly and squarely on organised crime.  Frighteningly the same applied if the CIA decided that someone needed to die on American soil, they’d call in the Mafia and the unlucky American citizen became just another unsolved crime statistic.  President Kennedy knew of some of these operations, he even had intimate back channels via which he could get messages to the Mob bosses about these operations.  Yet despite this cosy co-operation, publically President Kennedy and his brother waged a war against the Mob; which angered them greatly.  Until the Kennedy brothers came along; organised crime had been largely ignored by law enforcement agencies, in fact FBI head J. Edgar Hoover had for decades been adamant that organised crime did not exist on American soil.  The Kennedy's changed all that, they knew organised crime existed, their father had been friends and business partner to many involved in organised crime, and the brothers were determined to put a stop to it.  Robert Kennedy had formerly served on a committee which had a purview to investigate racketeering for the Federal Bureau of Narcotics.  From this useless exercise, which achieved very little, Robert Kennedy had fortuitously walked away with a thick dossier on over eight hundred mafia connected criminals.  This dossier allowed the Kennedy’s to quickly mount over six hundred prosecutions within the first two years of Robert being appointed Attorney General; this in turn put a massive dent in the Mafia's organisation and ability to operate.  One massive coo that the Kennedy's were able to facilitate was the deportation of key mafia godfather Carlos Marcello.  Marcello was the Louisiana crime boss, and major contributor to the much feared and corrupt Teamsters Union official Jimmy Hoffa.  The operation was daring, Marcello was kidnapped, put on a plane in the dead of night, flown over Guatemala and kicked out with nothing but a parachute.  This wasn't an exactly legal action; but it made a clear statement to Marcello, he and his criminal endeavours were no longer welcome in America.  It was ultimately; like the Bureau of Narcotics hearings, a pointless exercise, for two weeks later Marcello was back in the United States, back in charge of business.  A year later the Kennedy's pulled the same stunt again; and once again within a fortnight Marcello had returned from Guatemala to the United States.  Still these actions left Marcello livid, his dignity dented, and when asked about Robert Kennedy's actions; Marcello was said to have uttered the famous repost, ‘A dog will continue to bite you if you cut off its tail, whereas if you cut off the dog's head, it will cease to cause you trouble’, from which immortal utterance countless conspiracy theories blossomed.  The Mafia were also annoyed with President Kennedy over his inaction over Cuba.  For years Cuba had been a cash-cow for the Mob, the money they made from the Casinos of Havana; made the money coming out of Las Vegas look like small change.  Yet this had all come to an abrupt stop when Fidel Castro overthrew the corrupt government of Batista, and instead installed himself as the benign dictator.  The Mob felt that Kennedy just wasn't doing enough to 'free' Cuba, not for any humanitarian reasons; but simply so they could get the casinos up and running again; and start making-up the millions they were losing in lost revenue.  Yes it was a complicated relationship, the Mafia were both friends and enemies of the Kennedy family, President Kennedy infuriated, thwarted and employed them.  He massaged their egos with one hand and slapped them in the face with the other, and it is this complex relationship which remains one of the greatest paradoxical paradigms of the whole Kennedy administration.

One of the resounding myths that have grown around President Kennedy and his administration; is that he and his cabinet saw themselves as a modern day King Arthur and his romantic Knights of the Round Table, benignly ruling in a ‘New Camelot’.  Of course not everything was perfect within the confines of the ‘New Camelot’; you see Kennedy had an addiction, that addiction was sex. President Kennedy’s one thousand days in office has become almost as famous for its 'One Thousand Nights'; because of the sheer number of affairs President Kennedy was alleged to have had.  The President suffered from satyriasis, or an uncontrollable sexual desire, what we might term in this modern era as a real and harmful sex-addiction.   Kennedy's affairs were legendary, his tastes ranged from young Whitehouse interns such as Mimi Alford, Priscilla Wear, Jill Cowen and Pamela Turnure, to Hollywood stars such as Marlene Dietrich (who was by the time of their affair a pensioner) and the world’s most desirable woman, Marilyn Monroe, whose affections and sexual favours President Kennedy shared with his brother Robert Kennedy.  Yes, Kennedy didn't mind sharing his lovers with others, he even tried at one point to seduce his father's mistress, Janet Des Rosier, but one Kennedy clansman had been enough for her bed.  Sometimes Kennedy's affairs were spare of the moment, in one famous incident he had a Secret Service Officer arrange for a Pan-Am flight attendant he had taken a fancy to; to be whisked from her flight to his hotel suite.  The Secret Service were constantly running around trying to protect Kennedy from his own sexual exploits, it was their job to keep a watchful eye on Jackie Kennedy, and to tell the President when his wife was returning to the Whitehouse, or nearing a part of the palatial building where he was getting up to his sordid shenanigans.    Not all of President Kennedy’s bedroom exploits were entirely for fun; he could be conniving with his sexual dalliances, using his affairs to further his policies and plans.  He deliberately shared one of his mistresses with Mafia boss Sam Giancana, and then used this poor woman, Judith Exner, as a go between to channel messages to the Mob.  This was in the heady days when the Kennedy administration toyed with the idea of assassinating Fidel Castro, and using the Mob as the hired guns.  President Kennedy also entered into a long term affair with the wife of a CIA operative.  Mary Pinochot Meyer was useful to President Kennedy; as her marital closeness to a CIA operative allowed President Kennedy to gather intelligence on the agency he so hated and feared, and at the same time mask his interest as simple pillow talk.  Perhaps Meyer's too used her regular sexual indiscretions to spy on the President for her husband?  It wouldn’t, after all, be the lowest trick the CIA ever sunk to.

So just how, you might ask, did these affairs remain secret?  Well there were two reasons, firstly; it was a different age of news media, when the public weren't interested in the sexual dalliances of their leaders, put simply sex didn't shift papers.  The press believed the public didn't care about Kennedy's sexual exploits, as it didn't impact on his ability to lead, as reporter Nick Bryant put it, 'being a lousy husband did not necessarily make you a lousy President'.  Secondly; President Kennedy smoozed the press, counting key and influential reporters among his closest friends, regularly having them over to stay at the Whitehouse, having them befriend both him and Jackie.  This made them reluctant to damage the ‘special’ friendship they had with President, or to upset and break the heart of the ever lovely Jackie Kennedy.   There was also the fear amongst reporters and academics that if they were to speak out about the President; and level any criticism at him; whether professionally or personally, then this could be seen as an indication of un-American activities.  The ever present shadow of the red menace still loomed large in the sixties, and any whiff of Communism lingering around a person meant professional death.  If the Kennedy administration got wind of any reporter wanting to report on the President’s sexploits then all it would take would be a whisper from one of President Kennedy's aids into the right ear; and that reporter would find themselves painted red and as a consequence unemployable.  So Kennedy was allowed to have sex indiscriminately with whomever he liked, at any time he chose, and he didn't have to worry about it turning up the next day on the front page of a tabloid shock sheet.  Indeed President Kennedy seemed to engender extreme loyalty from the women he bedded.  Out of the alleged hundreds he slept with; very few have come forward to talk about their experiences, even ones who have been ousted by others in the years following the President’s assassination, most decided to go to their graves with their secrets intact, despite offers of eye-watering amounts of cash from journalists and publishers.  I think more than anything this loyalty, this love, tells you more about the man than the actual bedroom activities he entered into.

President Kennedy's stance on Civil Rights was, like his foreign policy, Mafia relationship; and sex life, complicated.  You see, back when he had been a senator, Jack Kennedy hadn't had the best record on Civil Rights, indeed he had voted against the Civil Rights Act of 1957, the first real attempt to address the black and white divide since the American Civil War.  Yet he hadn't tried to defeat the bill for any ideological reason, in fact in his heart of hearts he agreed with the bill; and wanted it to pass through both houses smoothly, but he had voted against it for political reasons.  At the time Jack Kennedy knew that he was going to run for President in 1960, and therefore if he came across as being too strong on civil rights; he would lose the support of his southern party members.  Therefore Jack Kennedy had to appear to be staunchly anti-civil rights in order to win the Primary's and get on the Presidential ticket.  Once inaugurated, President Kennedy flipped like a light-switch, making it clear that he was pro-civil rights, that people should be allowed to vote no matter what colour, that the colour of your skin shouldn't determine where you could pee or sit on a bus or even sleep at night.  Unlike Nixon, Kennedy was not scared to openly support the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King when he was imprisoned for taking part in a simple civil rights march.  Yet during his first year in office; Kennedy dithered on civil rights, doing absolutely nothing with the smouldering political hot potato.  Oh, he was quick to counter the argument that he didn't care about civil rights; by saying that his healthcare reforms and battle for a minimum wage were civil rights issues in their own right, and that his domestic attention would be focused on these for the benefit of all American's and not just one group, but the central civil rights problem wasn't going away.  To help matters in the short term he had a drive to employ more African Americans in the civil service, this affirmative action had little effect.  As an example, by the end of this ethnic recruitment drive; the FBI employed only forty-eight black employees across the whole of the country, none of whom held a position above working in the carpool.  In response to this cavalier attitude to his orders; President Kennedy began to hit government funded bodies were it hurt, by pulling their funding.  If they didn't employ black staff, they wouldn't get money full stop.  When this economic blackmail didn't work either, he set up the Commission on Equal Employment Opportunities (CEEO) a body created with a mandate to investigate government bodies; and ensure that people of all races had equal promotional opportunities.

Kennedy's action in the James Meredith incident clearly showed that Kennedy; whilst not moving quickly; did ultimately want absolutely change.  Meredith was a black ten year veteran of the United States Air-Force, who had been refused permission to enrol in the University of Mississippi to complete a doctorate, simply because of the colour of his skin.  The university was ordered to admit Meredith, and when riots broke out when he turned up at the university campus to enrol, and two hundred state Marshall's were hospitalised in the ensuing racist chaos; Kennedy acted federally, calling in heavily armed Federal Marshall's to ensure that Meredith was allowed to bravely complete his doctorate at the university of his choosing.  Kennedy then repeated this move at other southern university campuses, sending Federal Marshall's to seats of learning and forcing them to enrol African American students at the barrel of a gun.  Yet President Kennedy also faced failure on some civil rights fronts, his Department of Urban Affairs Bill, which was designed to ensure a minimum standard of living for the 57% of African Americans who lived in 'unacceptable' housing and poverty, was roundly defeated.  This meant that these African Americans were forced to continue living in what was tantamount to squalor for the remainder of his administration.  Kennedy's actions also damaged his own standing, by the time he was murdered his support in the southern states had nearly halved; due to his being seen as a supporter of the civil rights movement, and there was a real danger that due to this he would lose his party’s nomination to run for a second term in office.  It was partly due to this situation that he ended up in Dallas on the day he died.   Despite the alienation; President Kennedy was determined to move the civil rights movement forward, on Tuesday the 11th of June 1963, President Kennedy gave his 'Civil Rights Address' to the nation.  This laid out the staunch and unequivocal stance that President Kennedy would take on civil rights from that moment on.  It was brought about by descent within his own party, the democratic Governor of Alabama, George Wallace, should have been singing from the same hymn sheet as President Kennedy, but instead he made a rabble rousing speech that promised his voters, 'segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever'.  Wallace had followed this up by refusing to allow two black students the right to study at the University of Alabama. Vivien Malone and James Hoods plight left President Kennedy furious by the sheer aggravating defiance shown by a member of his own political party.   Once again President Kennedy was force to call in the National Guard to protect two young people who only wanted the opportunity to better themselves.  So that evening, after ordering the armed soldiers to occupy the university, President Kennedy gave his legendary speech; which even today packs a powerful political punch, asking the country to examine its conscious:

‘This nation was founded by men of many nations and backgrounds, it was founded on the principle that all men are created equal, and that the rights of every man are diminished when the rights of one man are threatened... and it ought to be possible for American citizens of any colour to register and to vote in a free election without interference or fear of reprisal.  It ought to be possible, in short, for every American to enjoy the privileges of being an American without regard to his race or his colour...every American has a right to be treated as he wishes to be treated, as one would wish his children to be treated, but this is not the case. The Negro baby born in America today regardless of the section of the state in which he is born has about half as much chance of completing high school as a white baby, born in the same place on the same day, one third as much chance of completing college, one third as much chance as becoming a professional man, twice as much chance of becoming unemployed...a life expectancy which is seven years shorter...we are confronted primarily with a moral issue, it is as old as the scriptures, and is as clear as the American constitution... One hundred years of delay have passed since President Lincoln freed the slaves, yet their heirs, their grandsons are not fully free, they are not yet freed from the bonds of injustice, they are not yet freed from social and economic oppression, and this nation for all its hopes and all its boasts, will not be fully free until all its citizens are free. We preach freedom around the world, and we mean it, and we cherish our freedom here at home, but are we to say to the world, and much more importantly, to each other that this is the land of the free except for the Negroes... Now the time has come for this nation to fulfil its promise...  A great change is at hand, and our task, our obligation, is to make that revolution, that change, peaceful and constructive for all... Those who do nothing are inviting shame’.

It was in that speech that President Kennedy laid out the foundation for what was to become the Civil Rights Act of 1964, this would legally enshrine protection from discrimination in voting qualification tests, outlaw discrimination in hotels and motels and restaurants and theatres, allow the Attorney General to prosecute schools that segregated black from white pupils, and make it illegal for businesses to discriminate against black people. The Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jnr was so moved by the sincerity of President Kennedy’s address; he went on record as saying, ‘It was one of the most eloquent profound and unequivocal pleas for justice and freedom for all men ever made by any President’.  President Kennedy forced America to take those first faltering steps on the road to equality, first steps on a journey he would be unable to finish, first steps which as an unfortunate by-product led him to Dallas on Friday the 22nd of November 1963.

J. D. Tippit

J. D. (despite some claims the initials weren't an abbreviation of any particular names) Tippit was born on Thursday the 18th of September 1924, in the small town of Clarksville, in Red River County, Texas.  Clarkesville was the type of small friendly town the state of Texas has become famous for.  J. D’s father; Edgar Lee, and mother; Lizzie Mae, were farmers of a devoutly religious bent.  J. D. had a hard up bringing; in a remote farmhouse that had no mod-cons; even water had to be derived from a local well.  The farm didn't use tractors, it used horses hardily pulling behind them the cultivators and haying equipment.  The farm house was six miles from the town, sat unobtrusively at the end of a long and remote dirt track.  His siblings; Don, Wayne, Christine and Joyce, remembered an idyllic upbringing, spending hours running and playing in the fields and prairies that surrounded their home.  Occasionally J. D. would go hunting with his Uncle George Rush, he became an adept horseman and fisherman, and he was of course obligated to do his chores on the farm, such as cutting firewood and mucking out the horses, but J. D. enjoyed these trappings of a healthy country lifestyle.

J. D. was sent to Fulbright High School, where he acquired the nickname Uncle Fudge, which J. D. quite liked; and he even began to refer to himself by this peculiar nom de plume.   J. D. left school at sixteen without graduating; he believed at this time that it was his destiny to follow in his father’s footsteps; and work the land, therefore formal qualifications weren’t much use to him.  J. D. had no ideations of greatness, no desire to go out into the world and leave a mark; a small town life in the back of beyond; working in the fields he loved; would be good enough for him.   Then World War II broke out and everything changed.

Edgar Lee Tippit left the farm to do his bit; working in a munitions factory, leaving J. D. in charge of the farm.  For a young man in his teens it was a big responsibility, his hard work was now responsible for feeding the entire family, consequently the farm work stopped being fun all of a sudden; suddenly it had become a worrisome burden.  Things changed even more, when in the autumn of 1943; Lizzie Mae Tippit discovered that Edgar Lee had been having an affair, this destroyed the marriage; and Lizzie left the family farm to live with her sister in Oklahoma.  Lizzie never returned to the farmhouse.  Suddenly J. D. began to talk about how he was going to leave himself; he was going to go some place, to discontentedly chinner about how his family would miss him when he was gone.  Perhaps he was feeling under-appreciated in the midst of all the upheaval and change.  In 1944; as J .D’s best friend, Jack Christopher, signed up to take part in the final push to rid the world of the evil Nazi menace, J. D. decided that he too would put an end to his call-up deferments.  Being a farmer meant J. D. didn’t have to go to war, his work on the farm being essential to the home front.  The decision to defer his call-up played heavily upon J. D’s mind, one day after spending the day ploughing a field with a team of horses; he travelled into town, and enlisted.  He left his family and the farm behind to go to Camp Wolters and complete his basic training.  The Army top brass saw something in the plucky and determined young farmer, and he was picked to join the elite 17th Airborne Division, a division of mean paratroopers who lived by the terribly macho motto 'Thunder From Heaven'.  In January 1945; J. D. Tippit left his homeland for the first time, and travelled around the world to the war torn bloodied fields of France.  The D-Day landings had already taken place; and J. D. was part of the replacements for the soldiers who had died valiantly fighting on the advance to Berlin.   J. D. was quickly awarded the Purple Heart; one of America's highest military honours, for his bravery in battle.  He refused the honour, candidly admitting that he did not deserve the medal, as he hadn’t actually been injured in battle, he’d hurt his foot falling when under fire; and had bashed himself with his heavy machine-gun. This was typical of Tippit; he was despite his protestations quite clearly a brave and bold soldier, going on to receive the Bronze Star for his bravery in combat during Operation Varsity.  This was a daring mission that took place in March 1945; it involved dropping American paratroopers into Northern Germany; and ordering them to cross the Rhine in an attempt to tie up the German military machine as much as they could, so that in a separate prong of attack British troops could advance across Europe to Berlin.

A year after Operation Varsity, with Hitler defeated and the war ended, J. D. was demobbed from the Army.  He returned to the family farm, and he quietly forgot the terrors he had seen, and got on with the arduous task of running the farm again.  Upon his return home J. D. also rekindled a romance with his high school sweetheart, Maria Frances Gasway.  Wrapped up in the joie de vivre of life having survived the horrors of war, J. D. like many others of his generation did not wait to see how the relationship went once finding a woman he was attracted to, and the couple married on Boxing Day 1946.  Realising that a life on a remote farm with no amenities was not a life his new bride wanted, J. D. made his apologies to his family and left Clarksville for Dallas.  After living with his sister for a few months, as he looked for work, a placement in the Dearborn Stove Company meant that J. D. and Maria could secure their own little apartment.

Unfortunately the job with Sears didn't work out; and in 1949 J. D. decided to return to Red River County and return to working on the land once more.  It was whilst the couple worked on a new farm, and J. D. took extra classes in mechanics at a local community college, that their first child, Charles Allan, was born on New Year’s Day 1950.  Things changed in 1952, it had been a bad year for crops, it started with a heat wave and ended in a flood that washed away what little produce had grown.  Exasperated with events J. D.'s neighbour, Basil Robinson, Jacked in farming altogether, he moved to Dallas and became a police officer.  J. D. and Robinson stayed in touch, and Robinson told J. D. all about his exploits in the police force.  Robinson's stories intrigued J. D. and finally in June 1952; the Tippit's gave in the farming life once and for all; and moved back to Dallas; where J. D. enlisted in the local police force, becoming Patrol Officer Number 848.

J. D. was posted to the Oak Cliff sub-station; an area that would be his beat for the next eleven years.  'Officer Tippit' became well known and liked in the area, his clean cut honesty and integrity; and even heroics, began to make such an impression on the local youths; that J. D. inspired several of them to follow him into the police force, and indeed inspired a little hero-worship in their youthful imaginations, 'of all of the officers....I wanted to be like him', local youth and Tippit inspired police cadet Murray J. Jackson lamented after J. D.'s brutal murder.

As a bobby on the beat J. D. showed the valour he had displayed in his military career, on Thursday the 26th of April 1956, J. D. was stabbed in the stomach and knee with an ice pick by a man called Robert Shaver, when J .D. had attempted to resolve a domestic dispute.  The ice pick shattered in J. D.'s leg; causing part of the kneecap to be removed and switched with a metal replacement.  Just four months after returning to duty, on Sunday the 2nd of September 1956, J. D. was given a commendation for his bravery again.  He asked a man whose face he had recognised from a wanted poster to accompany him for a chat outside of a Dallas drinking den called Bar-80.  The man agreed, but as he rose from his seat, the suspect pulled a gun and pulled the trigger, luckily the gun miss-fired.  As a result of his near fatal experience J. D. received a Meretricious Service Award and a commendation for 'outstanding judgement and quick thinking'.  Just like his wartime medals, the plaudits sat uneasily with J. D. and is sensibilities, he was as far as he was concerned just a beat cop doing his job.  With the plaudits and commendations J. D. was naturally asked to take his detective exams to advance up the ranks, but J. D. wasn't interested, he told his superiors that promotion didn't interest him, he enjoyed being a beat cop, he loved the community he served, and they loved him, he was happy staying where he was.

At home the family was growing; J. D. and Marie now had a daughter called Brenda Kay and another son called Curtis Glen.  To make ends meet with his growing brood; Tippit began to moonlight off shift as a private security operative at Austin's Barbeque, a popular restaurant in Oak Cliff.  Austin’s was popular with teenagers from a variety of local schools, some of whom didn't get on, and who would often get drunk after football games, they then had a predilection for enjoying what they euphemistically called 'a rumble', and so the owners of Austin’s felt it would be prudent to hire security; rather than have their establishment smashed up every weekend.  From this job J. D. managed to obtain another extra pay-packet by taking on the role of security guard at the Steven's Park Theatre.

When interviewed, after his death, and asked how they wanted J. D. remembered the words honest, hard working and a practical joker were all mentioned.  All remembered him as a loving husband, father, and above all a good cop.

An Evitable Circumstance: The Event

‘I don’t know that any political figure in this country can be spared an assassin’s bullet if indeed there is a dedicated assassin. So I would hope that the American people would understand that the mere fact that the Secret Service failed was not a failure of desire, not a failure of dedication, not a failure of talent, but rather a failure of an evitable circumstance’ – Governor John Connally

The following events are reconstructed from the memoirs of those people who were involved in the traumatic events of those terrible days in November 1963.  They are substantiated were possible by the official reports and memos which have since been declassified and unearthed by the dogged researchers who have shined light onto the darkness of this haunting case.  Memory is a fluid and malleable thing; as a result contradictions have arisen in the narrative of the case over the past half century.   Where this has occurred I have attempted to use the source material which is seen as the most reliable, and have attempted to verify disputed facts by cross referencing between the differing accounts and supporting documentation.

Friday the 22nd of November 1963, Police Sergeant J. D. Tippit sat in his kitchen with his wife, Marie, eating the breakfast she had prepared for him; before he set off for work at the Oak Cliff Sub-Police Station.  The years of their marriage had not faded Tippit’s love for his wife, after being stabbed in the knee during an arrest some years before, he had been told to ‘go dancing’ by his physiotherapist; to aid the healing process.  Since that day the Tippit’s had regularly been found engaging in this ‘therapy’, their favourite time of the evening had been the last dance, the slow smooching number, which led to more intimate moments of healing when they returned home.  That morning Tippit eat his eggs as he read the newspaper, an angry editorial filled the first few pages, a disgruntled piece about President Kennedy’s visit to Dallas that day.  Tippit folded the paper, rose from the table and said goodbye to his kids, Charles, Brenda and Curtis, before kissing his wife goodbye at the door; and leaving for work.  It was 6.15 a.m. Tippit had no notion of how monumental that day’s events would be, how they would literally shape the history of the latter 20th century.   If he had known the tragic part he would play in these momentous events, then perhaps, just perhaps; he would have closed the door and phoned in sick.  As it was he didn’t have godly powers of precognition, and so with a kiss; he left his family and set off for work for the last time.

At 7.00 a.m. a light drizzle fell on Forth Worth, Texas, as Presidential Valet, George Thomas, gently awoke President John Fitzgerald Kennedy.  The President arose from his bed and contemplated the breakfast speech he was about to give to the Fort Worth Chamber of Commerce, in the ballroom of the Hotel Texas.  He looked out of the window of suite 805, and his eyes fell upon the large crowd of cheering individuals; who had gathered around the hotel.  They had come out to see him, despite the miserable weather, many waiting throughout the night for a President who was said to be loathed in the southern states for his liberal attitudes on civil rights; and his high taxation on oil prices.    Kennedy felt he owed something to those people who had waited whilst he had been soundly sleeping, and so against the advice of his Secret Service protectors; he decided that after showering and dressing he would go out and thank them in person.

At 7:10 a.m. back in Dallas, Russian immigrant, Marina Oswald awoke her husband, Lee Harvey Oswald, from his sleep.  Oswald had spent the night away from his bedsit, and had stayed with his estranged wife, who currently lived with her friend and confidant Ruth Paine.  Oswald hadn’t slept well the previous evening; he had restlessly tossed and turned, tormented for some reason.  Now he swore as Marina woke him and he realised that he was running late for his work at the Texas School Book Depository, in Dealey Plaza.  He didn’t bother to shower, simply pulling on his clothes in a mindless rush.  As he dressed he slipped off his wedding ring, and deliberately left his wallet on the bedside cabinet.   As Oswald left the house at 7.15 a.m. he didn’t show any sign of affection to his wife, he simply quietly picked up a package which he had hidden away, a long brown paper parcel which he slipped awkwardly under his arm.  Oswald then ran down to a neighbour’s house, one Buell Frazier, who also worked with Oswald at the Texas School Book Depository, hoping that he was not too late to catch a lift.   Frazier’s sister, Linnie Mae Randle, observed Oswald placing his package onto the backseat of Frazier’s car.   At 7.23 a.m. after finishing his breakfast Frazier began the drive to the Texas School Book Depository.  The drive was conducted in relative silence, Oswald was brooding; an activity his co-workers found he did a lot.  Frazier attempted to start a conversation; by asking Oswald what was in the package Oswald was taking to work, Oswald had replied sullenly, ‘Curtain rods’.   At 7.55 a.m. they arrived at a building that would become infamously intertwined with the day’s momentous events, the Texas School Book Depository.

By 8.01 a.m. Officer J. D. Tippit had arrived at work and was already sat in his usual vehicle, patrol car number 10.  He started the engine of his vehicle; and pulled out of the parking lot of the station; to patrol his assigned route, beat number 78, South Oak Cliff.

At 8:40 a.m.  President Kennedy emerged into the misty parking lot of the Hotel Texas, flanked by Congressman Jim Wright and Vice-President Lyndon Baines Johnson.  The crowd cheered, the waiting public had expected to catch just a fleeting glimpse of the President as he walked across the parking lot to his limousine, not for the man himself to walk up to them, to start shaking hands with them, to start talking to them.  This put the Secret Service on edge, they weren’t on their best form that rain soaked morning, against the rules they had spent the majority of the previous evening getting drunk in a bar called the ‘Cellar Door’, and picking up strippers.  The lucky ones had got at most one or two hours sleep.  Now they were tired and hung-over, or worst in some cases even still drunk.  President Kennedy was not making life easy for them this morning by breaking the cardinal rule they had attempted to teach him over his years in office, never go into a crowd.  Crowds were hard for them to police.  It was etiquette that people approached the President with their hands visible; to show they were unarmed, this rule went out of the window in a crowd.  People were touching and pulling and hugging the President, hands moving in a blur of movement.  Hands the Secret Service hoped would not be carrying a weapon.  A podium was hastily erected; and Lyndon Johnson formally introduced the President as he emerged from the unbelieving and elated gaggle of well-wishers.  It was the sort of reaction and elation usually reserved for a rock-star, not an elective representative of the people.  Yet President Kennedy had this almost messiah like quality that made even his harshest of critics almost fall in love with him when they met him in the flesh.  It was a quality that had allowed him to secretly bed one of the most desirable women in the history of the world, the recently deceased Marilyn Monroe.  Kennedy gave a short speech that was hardly audible over the screams and shouts of adulation.  He thanked the faithful, he thanked their hospitality, he left them feeling special and proud.  After soaking up their adoration, the President moved purposefully back into the Hotel Texas, and changing his now damp jacket on the way; he made his way to the Crystal Ballroom; where he was due to give another speech for the Texas Chamber of Commerce, this time in front of two thousand eager party donors.

At 9.10 a.m. President Kennedy entered the Crystal Ballroom of the hotel.  The school band of local Eastern Hill High School had been picked to play ‘Hail To The Chief’ as the President entered the room, in the event their music was drowned out by the rapturous applause; and the chanting of his name the President received as he entered the ballroom and approached the stage.  President Kennedy then stood silently on the stage and waited for the cheering to die down, as the band played on, the President made sure that the school boys got their special little moment on what was an auspicious day for them.  As the President sat down to eat some light breakfast, two five minute boiled eggs, toast with marmalade, coffee and orange juice, the Texas Boys Choir sang the haunting lament, ‘The Eyes Of Texas’, Jackie Kennedy had been held up, and so the ballroom exploded into even more applause as she entered and made her way through the room to sit next to her husband.  Then after much appreciation for the First-Lady, the President stood at the podium and began his speech.  In his speech he spoke about how Texas’s economy was largely dependent on the defence industry, dependant to the tune of 1.4 billion dollars, he commented that ‘There are more military personal on active duty in this state than in any in the nation, save one’.   It was ironic that President Kennedy should mention this; given that his administration strove so desperately for peace, taking steps to pull out of Vietnam before America became too embroiled in the deepening crisis there, secretly sending out the hand of peace to Premier Khrushchev of the Soviet Union via Pope John the XXIII, and pledging that the Central Intelligence Agency, which Kennedy saw as having become too powerful and too dangerous, be scrapped by the end of his Presidency.  Was Kennedy then being ironic as he spoke of Texas’ dependency on the mighty defence industry?  As he lauded the legalised warmongers and death dealers who lobbied and cajoled and attempted to turn his Presidency away from the path of peace he had chosen?  The President finished his speech once again by bringing it all back to his hopes for a brighter future.  ‘As I look to the future I am confident that our chances for security, our chance for peace are better than they have been in the past.  The reason is because we are stronger, and with that strength is a determination, a determination not only to maintain the peace, but to protect the vital interests of the United States’.    The room erupted into applause.  Kennedy sat, and for a telling moment the real man emerged, not the showman or politician, but the real man underneath, fumbling his way day to day through a dangerous world on the brink of mutually assured destruction, he nervously bit at the nail of his thumb for a moment, before realising his mistake and placing his hand under the table.  President Kennedy was then presented with a ten gallon hat to ‘afford him some protection’.  When the crowd began to call for the President to put the hat on, he smiled winsomely and quipped, ‘I’ll put it on in the Whitehouse on Monday, if you come on up you’ll catch me wearing it then’.  The room burst into laughter and warm applause.  What was said to Jackie Kennedy moments later, as she was presented with her present, was quite prophetic of what was to come later that day, ‘as you ride with the hounds and walk through the rattlesnakes we want you to have protection too’, before a large box containing a set of cowboy spurs was placed in her hands.

At 9.30 a.m. President Kennedy left the Crystal Ballroom; and prepared to leave the Hotel Texas and Fort Worth.   He and Jackie went back up to room 805, where the President made a phone call to Ruth Carter Johnson, the lady who had arranged for the Presidential suite to be filled with fine art and sumptuous sculptures loaned for the duration of his stay.   The President was then briefed on what lay ahead in the day’s schedule, his flight to Dallas, the motorcade, and his talk at the Dallas Trade Mart.  Presidential Aid, Marty Underwood, discreetly advised the President to call off the remainder of the tour; as he had received several reports that President Kennedy was going to be assassinated in Dallas.  These reports had started to come in some seventeen hours before from various reliable sources Underwood had in both the CIA and the FBI.  President Kennedy simply laughed Underwood’s concerns off and said, ‘Marty, you worry about me too much’.  The President then had a meeting with Texan Governor John Connally.  Although a Democrat, Connally had never liked President Kennedy.  During President Kennedy’s nomination campaign, Connally had been Secretary of State for the Navy, and he had deliberately endorsed Lyndon B. Johnson for the Democratic Presidential nomination.  Connally had further been responsible for a smear campaign against Kennedy, claiming that he was a drug addict, addicted to the painkiller cortisone, and that he would be unable to see out a full term as President because he was secretly dying of Addison’s disease.  Well, despite Governor Connally’s best efforts; Kennedy had become President, but Connally felt that the Kennedy brand had become particularly toxic in Texas, and he was loath to be associated with that toxin, and he had used several excuses to postpone the Presidential Texan tour already.  Now the President and Connally had to sit and exchange pleasantries, and pretend all was forgiven, each playing the game of politics adeptly. After his meeting with Connally, President Kennedy quickly perused a local newspaper, The Dallas Morning News, where he found an article which sarcastically welcomed him to Dallas, and asked why he was following the ‘spirit of Moscow’.  President Kennedy laughed at the article; and commented wryly, ‘we’re heading into nut country today’.

At 10.40 a.m. President Kennedy and the First Lady were led down the stairway of the hotel to an open top limousine.  The rain and mist had subsided and now a glorious sunshine had come out to accompany the motorcade on its hour long journey along Main Street, crowds lined the streets cheering triumphantly for the President, and tic-a-tape poured down from the open upper windows of the surrounding buildings.  The President smiled and waved jubilantly at receiving such a warm welcome when all around him had told him that he had been hated in Texas and would only be greeted by jeers and boos.   At 11.10 a.m. the motorcade reached Carswell Air Force Base, President Kennedy using his common touch again shook the hands of every single police officer who lined his route from the motorcade to Air Force One.   He climbed the steps to the jet, as he turned to wave at the crowd that had gathered for him, the blazing glorious sun forced him to squint as he waved his goodbyes.  The flight to Dallas would be short, it would only take twenty minutes to ferry the President to the city where he was to die.

11.39 a.m. Air Force One touched down at Love Field in Dallas.  As the doors to the Boeing 707 opened; the President was greeted by a ‘tremendous roar’ from the crowd that gave Mrs Connally gooseflesh.   President Kennedy and Jackie were thrilled.  Kennedy immediately made his way over to the well-wishers and started shaking hands; as Jackie was given a gift of flowers from her admirers, a bouquet of blood red roses.  After fifteen minutes of good public relations with the crowd; the President finally got into the 1961 Lincoln Continental.  This Presidential limousine had been fitted with a plastic bubble roof to protect the President, but President Kennedy made the decision to remove the plastic roof so that the crowd could get a good look at The First Lady, ‘the people love her, and I’m going to keep it down’, President Kennedy had told his advisor Kenny O’Donnell.  O’Donnell, Governor Connally and Jackie Kennedy all had sore misgivings about removing the ‘bubble’ roof, but the President’s word was final.  The bubble-top was not bullet proof, but it was believed that the glare from the sun reflecting on the plastic would have made aiming at the car’s occupants harder, and it may have slowed down any bullets, perhaps to a point where the unfortunate victim might have survived any shots fired.  Perhaps President Kennedy felt safe enough because he was surrounded by a seemingly robust security detail, in the motorcade was the Dallas Chief of Police, Jess Curry; and the Dallas County Sherriff, Bill Decker.  The motorcade was flanked by four police motorcycles ridden by Officers Billy Joe Martin, Bobby Hargis, James M. Chaney and Douglas L. Jackson.  These four officers had been told in no uncertain terms by the Secret Service not to overtake the Presidential limousine, no matter what was to happen.  Normally two bikers would have flanked the front of the car, two would ride alongside the car, and a further two would follow in the rear, but the Secret Service instructed the Dallas Police to drop the two motorcycles that would normally ride alongside the President’s vehicle, and for the remaining four to stay behind the limo, so that the public could get an ‘unrestricted view’ of the President.   On top of the motorcycle police; there was the usual plethora of Secret Service Officers who were, unbeknown to President Kennedy, all still hung-over and tired from the previous nights revelries.  The motorcade although initially on a schedule, was held up twice; when President Kennedy asked for the Lincoln Continental to be stopped so that he could shake hands with cheering members of the public.  He hoped that he’d made that morning that little bit more special for a group of nuns and some school children by singling them out for his personal undivided attention.   President Kennedy had been due to start delivering a speech at the Dallas Trade Mart at 12.15 p.m. but due to the delay in starting the motorcade at the airport; and the unscheduled stops to greet the crowd, the motorcade was ultimately running twenty minutes behind schedule.

At 12.25 p.m. the emergency medical team that had been placed on standby in case anything untoward happened to the motorcade, was called to Dealey Plaza, a man was having an epileptic fit in front of the Texas School Book Depository.  The paramedics assessed twenty-three year old mail-room clerk Jerry Belknap at the scene, and decided to take him in the ambulance to Parkland Memorial Hospital.  By the time the ambulance had arrived at Parkland Memorial, Belknap had recovered from the unusual episode.  He explained he did not have epilepsy; but suffered from fainting attacks after a car-crash, if he did not take his medication he blacked-out.  He informed the paramedics that he had not taken his medication that morning; as he had been so excited at the thought of seeing the President, he had forgotten.   Belknap refused any further treatment, or to even to be looked over by a doctor; and he left the hospital.  This astounded the paramedics; as the whole hospital was meant to be in lockdown due to the motorcade, the paramedics themselves had been refused permission to leave the hospital again due to this very lockdown.  Several of the paramedics connected the seizure incident to several crank calls in the weeks leading up to the President’s visit, which had all requested ambulances to go to the corner of Elm Street and Houston.  In each case when the ambulances arrived they had discovered that there were no medical emergencies.   In the wake of what was to happen several paramedics mooted the idea that perhaps someone had been secretly timing the ambulances; to see how quickly they would respond to a medical emergency in the Dealey Plaza area.  Whatever the case, the Belknap farrago meant that there would be no immediate emergency medical help for the President or any of his entourage if anything where to happen to them between Dealey Plaza and the Trade Mart.

12.29 p.m. the radios allowing communication between the cars in the motorcade, the secret service and the police, all suddenly died.  For a few moments there was slight confusion and nervousness as the security officials realised that they had lost the ability to communicate with one another.  It was later concluded that motorcycle Officer H. B. McLean’s radio microphone had become ‘stuck open’ at this juncture, blocking the official channel, and as a result their ability to broadcast.  Again; whatever the case, this peculiar incident rendered communication in the motorcade impossible for four crucial minutes.

Texas School Book Depository employee Geneva Hine was sat on the second floor of the building; finishing her lunch, to her surprise she suddenly realised that the electricity supply to the book depository had been switched off, she went to a nearby telephone and picked up the receiver, the phone was dead also.   In response Miss Hines left the lunchroom; in order to find the building supervisor, Roy Truly, and tell him about the unusual events.  On her way she tried several light-switches, and found them all to be unresponsive.

At 12.30 p.m. the motorcade was almost at its destination, only minutes away from the Trade Mart.  As the cheering and whooping crowds on the pavement became so thick, people had been forced to stand in the road, Governor Connally’s wife turned in her seat to face President Kennedy and announced, ‘Mr President, you can’t say Dallas doesn’t love you’.  Almost immediately after these sentiments had been uttered; the motorcade slowed down to make a 90 degree turn from Main Street onto Houston Street; and enter Dealey Plaza, the so-called ‘Birthplace of Dallas’.  The car then slowed to ten miles an hour to turn onto Elm Street, as it did so three shots rang out that would change the world.  Kennedy’s hands rose to his throat; and he slumped towards his wife, Jackie cried out, ‘Oh my god!  What are they doing to him?’ as suddenly the right side of the President’s head exploded with the impact of the final bullet.  Blood, bone and the President’s brain showered over the car; covering everything within range.  Jackie; in shock, clambered onto the boot of the car and grasped at a lump of the Presidents ejected brain matter.  Secret Service agent Clint Hill was the first Secret Service agent to act, he dismounted from the car immediately behind the President’s, ran to the Presidential limo and threw himself onto the back of the car; pushing Jackie Kennedy back into her seat.

James Tague had been in Dallas to have lunch with a friend, not knowing about the Presidential visit that day; he’d been caught up in a traffic jam caused by the many road closures in the area.  He abandoned his car and decided to go and see the President for himself.   He was stood in front of the motorcade, near the triple underpass, when the shots began to be fired, just after the second shot rang out Tague felt a sharp stinging on his right cheek.  His hand instinctively rose to protect his face, and as he pulled his fingers away he could feel the unmistakable wetness of fresh blood.   Tague; shocked by the horror of the assassination and his own injury, began to leave the area in a daze, when moments after the assassination he was stopped by Deputy Sherriff Buddy Walthers.   Walthers had become concerned by the sight of Tague’s bloody face.  Walthers and Tague immediately examined the area where Tague had been stood, and on the south curb of upper Main Street they discovered ‘a fresh scar’.  It was concluded much later that a bullet had missed the President, bounced off the kerb; and luckily only afforded Tague a glancing ricocheting scratch across his cheek.

Upon hearing the gunshots; Motorcycle Officer Marion Baker instinctively looked up, he immediately saw pigeons flying in fright from the alcoves and roof of the Texas School Book Depository.  To Officer Baker’s analytical mind this meant that the gunshots must have come from either the Texas School Book Depository or next door from the Dal-Tex Building.  Despite having received orders to stick with the Presidential limo no matter what, Officer Baker left the motorcade and pulled over to a stop outside of the Texas School Book Depository.  Standing from his motorcycle he removed his gun from its holster and rushed into the building.

At the same time that Marion Baker had looked up and assumed the shots had come from the Texas School Book Depository, there just happened to be twenty off duty Sherriff’s Deputies stood on the kerb near to the Texas School Book Depository.  These men had decided to watch the President’s motorcade together on their day off.  When the shots were fired, out of the twenty deputies, sixteen of them believed the shots originated from the Grassy Knoll on the north-western side of the plaza.  These sixteen officers immediately began to race towards the grassy knoll, and when they arrive in the area they discovered that several other members of the public had also discerned that the shots had originated from this area, and had likewise rushed to investigate.   Among these members of the public was NBC News reporter Robert McNeil, he had been on the press bus when the shots were fired, he had ordered the bus to stop and had run to the area where he ascertained that the shots had been fired from, the grassy knoll.  Moments later; Dallas Police Officer Joe Marshall Smith and Deputy Sherriff Seymour Weitzman joined the group on the grassy knoll, both these lawmen believed that the gunfire had come from this area.  Both Smith and Weitzman believed that they could smell gunpowder in the air.  Smith was so concerned by the smell of fresh gunpowder he drew his gun; as he attempted to climb over the stockade fence at the top of the hill; and investigate the car-park beyond.  Suddenly Smith and Weitzman were confronted by a man who appeared to be loitering in the area, the mysterious gentleman showed the officers a set of Secret Service credentials; and he was allowed to go about his business.

Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson was riding in an open top car some sixty-feet behind the Presidential limo.  He had no idea what was going on, his initial belief was that the reports echoing around Dealey Plaza were firecrackers being let off by the jubilant crowd.  Secret Service agent Rufus Youngblood suddenly seeing the Presidential limo speed off, when taken in conjunction with the three loud reports of gunfire, and Youngblood knew it was a clear indication that something was very wrong.  In response he acted immediately and selflessly, jumping from the front seat of his car and throwing himself over Vice President Johnson, and pushing him to the floor of the vehicle.  Youngblood yelled orders for the driver to speed up the Vice Presidential car and to stick with the Presidential limo.   As Youngblood realised they were racing to Parkland’s Memorial Hospital; he had one option open to him, get the Vice President inside the hospital, and find him a secure and safe location.

Officer Baker had reached the lobby of the Texas School Book Depository, he was now accompanied by building Superintendent Roy Truly, who had witnessed Baker rush into the building.  They attempted to call the elevator to the lobby, but found it to be stuck on the fifth floor; due to the strange power outage the building was suffering.   Instead they both began to hare their way up the stairs, in the second floor lunch room Officer Baker saw a man with his back to the door; walking across the room.  Baker entered the lunch room to find out just who the man was, Truly being older and less fit than Baker eventually caught up with Baker; as Baker had his gun trained on the man’s stomach.  Truly, in a panic, vouched for the man, he was a Texas School Book Depository employee called Lee Harvey Oswald.  Baker then left the lunch room to continue his search of the building.

At 12.33 p.m. Lee Harvey Oswald left the Texas School Book Depository via its main entrance.  As he exited the building his heart suddenly jumped into his mouth as a Secret Service agent firmly placed a hand around his arm to halt him.   The agent asked Oswald where he could locate a telephone, Oswald directed the agent into the Texas School Book Depository; before himself rushing off down the street.

Also at 12.33 p.m. the interference on Police Band Channel 1 came to an end, but before radio contact was re-established all those listening in heard a mysterious, chilling and simple message tapped out in Morse code, VICTORY.  Peculiarly at the precise same time that Police Band Channel 1 began to work again, all telecommunications were cut off in Washington D.C. and all communication equipment aboard Air Force One ceased to function.   As a result Washington D.C. and the staff aboard Air Force One knew that President Kennedy had been shot, but were unable to get any follow up information for over an hour, leading to panic, confusion and a heightened sense of hysteria in the corridors of power.

12.34 p.m. The radio telephone in the press car of the motorcade suddenly ceased to function.  The malfunction occurred immediately after reporter Merriman Smith had sent the first report over the wire of the President having been shot.  This temporarily left the rest of the world like Washington, knowing that President Kennedy had been shot, but confused and uninformed as to his continuing condition.

12.36 p.m. Seven blocks east from the assassination, on the corner of Commerce and Houston, Lee Harvey Oswald boarded the number 1213 bus bound for Oak Cliff.  He wasn’t on the bus long, he’d travelled only two blocks, the assassination had caused all sorts of havoc with the local traffic, and on the intersection near Lamar Street the bus came to a complete standstill.  Impatient to keep moving; Oswald got off the bus.  Again, for the moment, Oswald appeared to have the luck of the devil on his side; just minutes after he had alighted; the police boarded the bus and began to interrogate the passengers.

Also at 12.36 p.m. an alert was put out over Police Radio Band 2 by the dispatcher, stating that witness Amos L. Euins had seen the shooter in the fifth story window of the Texas School Book Depository.  Suddenly the Texas School Book Depository was swamped with police officers and Sheriff’s Deputies joining Marion Baker in his search.

Seven minutes after the President had been shot; the Presidential limo pulled up outside of the trauma unit of Parkland’s Memorial Hospital.  Secret Service agent Emory Roberts took a look at President Kennedy’s injuries for the first time, he immediately realised that the President was dead, and sad as that fact was, his number one priority now had to be to protect the President’s de-facto-replacement, Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson.  Emory detailed a group of men to form a tight circle around Johnson and to escort him into the hospital.   At the same moment Governor Connally recovered consciousness from where he had fainted into the arms of his wife in the Presidential limo.  He stood from the limo on shaking legs, but suddenly the excruciating pain from a gunshot wound he had received filled his body; and with a pained cry he collapsed onto the pavement.  He was hastily picked up by the medics, placed onto a gurney; and rushed into the hospital.  Meanwhile Jackie Kennedy was lying on the floor of the Presidential limo, her face buried into her dead husband’s chest, as she wept inconsolably.  The First Lady had to be pulled away from her husband so that he could be bundled onto a gurney, his head was hastily covered with a jacket, so that no one could see who had been so fatally wounded in the shooting, suddenly the seriousness of the President’s injuries dawned on those around him, Secret Service agent Winston Lawson commented later, ‘You could see the damage to the head, which was devastating. You could see the colour of the skin, which was grey, but not grey, really. I knew it had to be a fatal wound. I never saw the President alive again, or his body again’.   Only after the injuries had been hidden away from the eyes of a world eager for news, was the President then rushed into the hospital.  From that moment the President’s protectors were under no delusions as to what chance President Kennedy stood.  As his body was whisked away, Secret Service agent Merriman Smith approached his colleague Clint Hill. Hill was leaning on the back of the Presidential car, a look of hopelessness, anger and bitter sadness etched upon his downturned face.  ‘How badly was he hit Clint?’  Merriman asked; Clint looked up; tears beginning to form in his steely eyes, ‘He’s dead’ Clint replied in a short angry burst, before moving off like a wounded animal.

Meanwhile Vice President Johnson had been ushered into a small waiting room; where he and his wife, Lady Bird, sat waiting for news.  Secret Service agent Emory Roberts entered ashen faced, he informed Johnson that President Kennedy had been shot and that his injuries were most likely fatal.  The reason for Roberts’ lie was simple; he couldn’t inform Johnson that the President was dead until a doctor had officially declared it, no matter how obvious the deceased President’s condition had been to him.  Roberts implored Johnson to leave Parkland Memorial Hospital that very minute, to get to Air Force One and fly back to the Whitehouse.  If the assassination was the beginning of a plot to decapitate the Kennedy administration, then Johnson needed to be somewhere safe.  Not stuck in a little room in a public building; which would soon be swarming with reporters and public well-wishers.  Johnson refused to go; he would not leave the hospital until he knew for certain that President Kennedy was dead.

High up above the Pacific Ocean; six key members of the Kennedy administration were onboard a Boeing 707, flying on a diplomatic trip to Japan.  Secretary of State Dean Rusk, Treasury Secretary Douglas Dillon, Interior Secretary Stewart Udall, Labour Secretary W. W. Wirtz, Secretary of Commerce Luther Hodges, Secretary of Agriculture Orville Freeman and Whitehouse Press Secretary Pierre Salinger.  These cabinet members had been surprised when they were all ordered on this diplomatic sortie, as it was the first time in history that so many key members of the cabinet had been asked to travel together on the one flight.  Obviously if anything had happened to the plane, losing six key members of the cabinet could have crippled Kennedy’s administration, so such situations were usually avoided at all costs.  The trip had been called ‘unprecedented’ and no official reason for the trip had been given to the cabinet members assigned to go, there just seemed to be no need for the trip.  Suddenly over the teletype came the devastating news that President Kennedy had been shot.  Immediately; Secretary of State Rusk wanted to contact the Whitehouse and get more details.  Only he couldn’t, the official code book held on every Presidential plane, essential for contacting the Whitehouse, was missing.  Without this book the cabinet was cut off from the world, and news of the President’s condition.

In the Pentagon; the Defence Intelligence Agency contacted the Whitehouse to ask one simple question, with the President down, and at best seriously injured, who was now in charge of the country?  Commander Oliver Hallet and McGeorge Bundy in the Whitehouse situation room quickly mulled the question over, they knew that Vice President Johnson had a serious drink problem, and that Kennedy would not have wanted him to have any real or serious power or influence if anything were to happen to him, so Hallet and Bundy gave the Pentagon one simple answer, with the President down it was Defence Secretary George McNamara who was now running the country.

Whilst Vice President Johnson had been ensconced safely in his own room, Jackie Kennedy had been left by herself in a hospital corridor.  She was obviously in shock; she was caked in her husband’s blood, and still had small dollops of her husband’s brain hanging from a bangle that was clasped around her wrist.  In the trauma room; second year surgical resident Charles J. Carrico was the first doctor to examine President Kennedy, he discovered that the President had no pulse and no blood pressure, the President was quite clearly beyond help.  Neurosurgeon, Dr. Kemp Clarke, assessed President Kennedy’s head wound and realised that there was little of the President’s brain left for him to try and save; the President’s entire right hemisphere was missing.  Dr. Clarke’s colleague, Dr. Malcolm Perry, surmised from the President’s wounds that, ‘A bullet struck him in front as he faced the assailant’.  Dr. Charles Baxter took note of the bullet wound in the President’s throat; before it was forensically obliterated to perform a tracheotomy.  Dr. Baxter determined that the throat wound was ‘an entry wound’ made by ‘a small calibre weapon’.  Despite the hopelessness of the situation; President Kennedy was given a blood transfusion, CPR and a dose of steroids.  This was more complicated than it sounded, against Secret Service regulations Parkland Memorial Hospital had not been informed in advance what the President’s blood-type was, so they had to waste precious minutes carrying out tests to determine this simple fact.  As the doctors battled valiantly yet vainly to try and save the President, Secret Service agent Clint Hill was beginning to act rather irrationally, and in a manner that disturbed and distressed the medical professionals.  Hill was stood in the centre of the trauma room, pacing up and down in front of Kennedy’s body like a caged animal, ‘wild eyed’, waving around a primed .38 calibre pistol which was ready to fire.  Eventually Head Nurse, Doris Nelson, had enough of Hill’s threatening behaviour; she turned to Hill and snapped, ‘Whoever shot the President is not in this room!’  Clint stirred at the nurse for a moment, and for a second Nelson believed that Hill was actually about to shoot her, but instead Clint simply turned and stormed out of the room.

Outside the trauma room as Clint Hill stormed off down the corridor in his impotent anger, the man who had been driving the Presidential limousine, Robert Greer, sought out Jackie Kennedy.  Upon seeing the First Lady, Greer began to weep and babble in a breathless torrent of guilt filled angst, ‘Oh, Mrs Kennedy, oh my God! Oh my God! I didn’t mean to do it, I didn’t hear, I should have swerved the car, I couldn’t help it! Oh, Mrs Kennedy, as soon as I saw it I swerved the car. If only I’d seen it in time!’  Jackie Kennedy showed her true magnanimous and caring character, she took Greer in her arms and held him tightly, holding his head to her shoulder where he began to sob uncontrollably, her compassion; and any forgiveness that needed to be given implicit in the gesture.

Back in Dealey Plaza; the Dallas Police put out an all points bulletin stating that more men were required in the area, Dallas Police Captain William Fritz had ordered that the Texas School Book Depository was to be sealed off and no one other than law enforcement officials were to be allowed in or out of the building.   The police also put out a description of a possible suspect,  ‘An unknown white male, approximately thirty, slender build, height five feet ten inches, weight one hundred sixty-five pounds, reported to be armed with what is believed to be a .30 calibre rifle’.  The Dallas Police have never been able to fully explain the source of this rather detailed description of the shooter.

Officer J. D. Tippit responded to the call for assistance at Dealey Plaza, informing the dispatch officer that he would make his way there, but instead he found himself being ordered by the dispatcher, Murray Jackson, to proceed to central Oak Cliff and ‘stand-by for any emergencies’ in the area.  This to Tippit seemed mighty peculiar, there had been no incidents reported in Oak Cliff that day, and there was nothing outstanding that needed police attention there, nevertheless Tippit complied with the command; and headed four miles in the opposite direction to Dealey Plaza to central Oak Cliff.

By 12.47 p.m. the doctors were ready to admit defeat and declare President Kennedy dead, but Jackie Kennedy would not allow them to declare the President gone until his last rites had been read to him by a Priest.  So Father Oscar Huber from the nearest Catholic church; the Holy Trinity, was called and asked to attend Parkland Memorial Hospital.  As a result of the doctors not wanting to upset the First Lady in her earnest belief that the President should hear the last rites being read to him, they bent the rules and placed the President’s death slightly later than it should have been; at 1.00 p.m. Jackie could go on believing that President Kennedy heard the final prayers for him, and perhaps she could find some little solace in this.

12.48 p.m. Lee Harvey Oswald hired a taxicab that had been parked in front of the Greyhound Bus Station; a nexus of escape from Dallas only five blocks from Dealey Plaza.  As the driver, William Whaley, was about to drive off, an old lady attempted to flag the taxi down.  Oswald, for a man attempting to flee the scene of a high profile murder, acted peculiarly magnanimously, he opened the car door of the taxi and went to step out, informing Whaley that the old lady could have the cab instead.  The old lady, realising that the cab was already taken, refused the kind offer, and stated that she would wait for the next available cab.  Whaley drove Oswald across town to 500 North Beckley, several blocks down the road from where Oswald currently lodged.

At 12.49 p.m. a roll call of Texas School Book Depository staff was called, at this point Roy Truly realised that Lee Harvey Oswald was missing; Truly duly informed the gathering army of police officers and Sherriff’s Deputies; that Oswald was missing, and that he matched almost exactly the description of the potential shooter.

At 12.50 p.m. Robert ‘Bobby’ Fitzgerald Kennedy, the President’s younger brother, The Attorney General, and believed by many on Capitol Hill to be the second most powerful man in the country after his brother, lounged by his swimming pool eating a sandwich; at his home in Hickory Hill, Virginia.  When his telephone rang and he answered it; he found himself cursing inside, it was J. Edgar Hoover, the Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, a man that both the Kennedy brothers deeply loathed.  They tolerated Hoover because they knew him to be politically dangerous, a dirty fighter who was believed to have in his possession what amounted to blackmail files on everyone who counted in Washington.  Yet instinctively Bobby knew that something was wrong, for Bobby knew that Hoover loathed him as much as he loathed Hoover, and in the four years he’d been Attorney General, Hoover had never once placed a personal phone call to Bobby Kennedy, despite Bobby being Hoover’s boss. ‘The President’s been shot.  I think it’s serious.  I’ll call you back when I find out more’.   Hoover had made the announcement bluntly, with little care for Bobby’s personal feelings.  Bobby was stunned, his hand clamped around his mouth as Hoover simply hung up the phone and left Bobby to stagger to a nearby seat, like a physical punch had been delivered to his gut.   Bobby later told his closest friends that he believed Hoover had actually enjoyed telling him that his brother had been shot.   Shortly after, the Director of the CIA, John McCone, arrived at Bobby Kennedy’s house, and was shown up to the library.  Neither of the men knew how bad President Kennedy’s injuries were; and so a short debate arose as to whether Bobby should fly to Dallas.  As the pair had this conversation the telephone rang again.  Bobby answered the phone, as McCone looked on; the colour drained from Bobby’s face, for a moment it looked like the veneer of composure would break away and a flood of emotion would surge forward.  Instead Bobby calmly placed down the receiver, looked McCone coldly in the eyes, and uttered the terrible words in ‘the tone of a man aghast’; ‘He’s dead’.  After a few minutes silent grieving Bobby issued his first order in the absence of his brother, to lock all his brother’s papers away and let no one have any further access to them until he could vet them.

At 12.58 p.m. Lee Harvey Oswald arrived at his lodgings at 1026 North Beckley Avenue.  As Oswald rummaged around in his room, his landlady, Earlene Roberts, witnessed a police car pulling up outside the house, beep its horn once, and then drive away quickly.   The only police car officially in the area at the time was the one being driven by J. D. Tippit.   Moments after the police car had pulled away from the house, Oswald, having changed his shirt and put on a new jacket, left his lodgings once again.  Earlene Roberts then watched as Oswald made his way towards the corner of Zang and Beckley.

Back at the Texas School Book Depository, Thayer Waldo of the Fort Worth Star-Telegram reported that a rifle had been found on the roof of the building.  Indeed reporter Ernest Charles Mentesana recorded video footage of police officers standing on the fire escape leading to the roof; proudly holding aloft the rifle allegedly found on the roof of the building.  This rifle had no sling, no scope and protruded 7 to 8 inches past the stock, very different to the Mannlicher Carcano which was eventually produced in evidence as the assassin’s rifle.  Later when asked to explain this discrepancy, the Dallas Police stated that the media report and the footage must be a mistake, that there was no record of a rifle being found on the roof of the Texas School Book Depository.  The news footage, however, still stands as testimony to this mistruth.

At roughly the same time as the gun was allegedly found on the roof of the Texas School Book Depository, Marina Oswald’s friend and housemate Ruth Paine received a collect call from her husband, Michael Paine.  The couple were unaware as they spoke; that the telephone operator was still on the line listening in to their call.  Michael Paine stated that he was sure that Lee Harvey Oswald had killed the President, but that he did not feel Oswald was ‘responsible’, he then added cryptically, ‘We both know who is responsible’.  Overhearing such a conversation in the wake of the President’s shooting; the operator reported the conversation to the FBI.  Significantly this conversation took place before Lee Harvey Oswald had officially been linked to the assassination in the media.

At the Texas School Book Depository; further discoveries were being made, Deputy Sheriff Luke Mooney was on the sixth floor when he discovered a pile of boxes strangely stacked in a crude semi-circle around the window in the south-east corner, a veritable hidden nest.  Behind the boxes, on the floor in front of the window that overlooked Dealey Plaza, lay three spent shell casings, evidently ejected from a rifle.

Despite President Kennedy having now being declared legally dead, Vice-President Lyndon Johnson was still in the dark as to the President’s condition, he did not know that now, by default, he was potentially the most powerful individual in the world.  He was ignoring the advice to get back on Air Force One and fly back to Washington, Johnson wanted to know President Kennedy’s condition; and he wanted to be told by one of Kennedy’s closest advisors, a man named Kenny O’Donnell.   In the end Johnson did not get his way, it was Secret Service agent Emory Roberts who broke the news of President Kennedy’s passing to Johnson, and as a result of this ridiculous posturing on behalf of the Johnson and Kennedy camps, both of whom hated each other, Johnson did not find out that Kennedy had been declared dead for a full ten minutes after the event.  Despite this Johnson still didn’t leave the hospital, he sat like a petulant child in the waiting room, waiting for one of the Presidents grieving friends to come and tell him personally that the President had died.  Johnson saw this as O’Donnell showing some ghoulish mark of respect for his friend’s successor.  O’Donnell finally got up the nerve to go and speak to Johnson five minutes later, so officially, Johnson claimed he wasn’t informed of President Kennedy’s death until 1.15 p.m.

1.10 p.m. Officer J. D. Tippit observed a man walking east along 10th Street just past its junction with Patton Avenue; the individual matched the description of the Presidential shooter.  Tippit pulled his car up alongside the man and asked him to stop.  The man walked over to Tippit’s car and casually lent into the window of Tippit’s vehicle as he spoke to Tippit.  The man was then seen stepping away from the door as Tippet stepped out of the car.  As Tippit began to walk around the front of his patrol-car, the suspect unexpectedly pulled a revolver from his jacket; and shot Officer Tippit three times in the chest.  Tippit fell to the ground.  The killer then stepped forward, stood over the prone Tippit, and fired one more bullet into Tippit’s head, execution style, before then fleeing back toward Patton Street.   The killer had been seemingly careless; twelve people had witnessed the shooting, several of whom would later go on to positively identify Lee Harvey Oswald as the killer.  Jack Tatum stopped his car a little way down the road; after hearing the first volley of gunfire, he turned around just in time to see the killer pace over to Tippit and fire the fatal headshot, Tatum would tell the police in his witness statement, ‘Whoever shot Tippit was determined that he shouldn’t live, and he was determined to finish the job’.  After murdering Tippit; the killer began to walk towards Tatum’s car, Tatum panicked and sped away.   The closest witness to the slaying, Domingo Benavides, had been sat in his pickup truck; directly opposite the murder site.  He waited until the killer had fled before stepping out of his truck; and rushing over to Tippit’s side to help him.  There was nothing Benavides could do, Tippit was clearly dead.  Nevertheless Benavides suddenly had a flash of brilliance that under any other circumstances might have saved Tippit’s life, he entered Tippit’s patrol car, and used the police radio to call for help.  Benavides was then joined by another witness, Helen Markham.  Then the occupier of the house nearest to the killing, Frank Cimino, ran out into his driveway, Helen Markham turned to Cimino and hollered for him to call for the police.

Meanwhile the killer was racing up along Patton Street, two of the witnesses to the killing, Warren Reynolds and B. M. Patterson; had bravely given chase.  The killer dashed into the forecourt of a Texaco gas station; and began to hide behind the parked cars.  It was a stupid manoeuvre for the second the killer attempted to make a break for it he would be sure to be seen.  Then a stupid blunder saved the cop killer from immediate capture.  Police Officer C. T. Walker mistook a local man for the cop killer.  Adrian Hamby certainly had similar physical attributes to Lee Harvey Oswald, and Hamby had been seen running pell-mell into the local library, which to Walker seemed suspicious.  The library was three blocks from the Texaco garage, on East 500 Block, Walker put a call out for backup; and as a result no police cars were in the area of the Texaco garage for Reynolds or Patterson to gain the attention of and ask for help.

Back at the Texas School Book Depository, Deputy Sheriffs Roger Craig and Luke Mooney continue their search of the sixth floor of the depository, tightly wedged behind some boxes of books in the north-east corner of the building; they discovered a rifle, which they initially mis-identified as a .7.65 Mauser.  Pretty soon the story began to be leaked to the press that a second rifle had been discovered in the Texas School Book Depository.  It was further misreported that this second Mauser rifle has been discovered on the stairwell of the fifth floor.   Then reports of a third gun being found in the depository were given to the press, this time a British Enfield 303.  The press started to believe and report that someone had hidden a small arsenal of weaponry throughout the depository that day, leaving the police to fall back onto a position of official denial, only one weapon had been found, the Mauser on the sixth floor.

Back in Oak Cliff; an ambulance had arrived for Officer Tippit, this had not arrived from a local hospital, but a local funeral home.  Clayton Butler and Eddie Kinsley loaded the dead body into the back of their van and drove it off to the local Methodist Hospital; before the police had even arrived at the scene.  When Police Officer Westbrook did arrive some minutes later he found a piece of evidence that did more than anything else to incriminate Lee Harvey Oswald in the murder of J. D. Tippit, Oswald’s wallet.  It was surmised that this had fallen out of Oswald’s pocket as he was fleeing the scene.  Oswald would later protest that the wallet had been planted, as he had left his with his wife that morning.

At around 1.20 p.m. press secretary for the Presidential Dallas trip, Matthew Kilduff; approached Johnson and was the first person to call Johnson; Mr President; he asked if he could be allowed to make an official announcement about President Kennedy’s death.  Johnson refused Kilduff permission.  Johnson announced that the President’s assassination could be a communist plot to destabilise the government, and that he should leave the hospital before any announcement was made.  At 1.26 p.m. Johnson duly left Parkland Memorial Hospital with his wife; and Rufus Youngblood.

1.28 p.m. The ambulance carrying J. D. Tippit arrived at the Dallas Methodist Hospital; Officer Tippit was declared Dead on Arrival.  Unlike the President; there was no vain and valiant battle by the doctors to save his already clearly expired life.

1.30 p.m. Back at Parkland Memorial Hospital, Seth Kantor, a news reporter for the Dallas Times Herald, who had been in the motorcade press bus, met a source he had previously used for several stories, a local nightclub owner and low level thug by the name of Jack Ruby.  Ruby said to Kantor, ‘Isn’t this a terrible thing’, then he asked Kantor, ‘Should I close my place for the next three nights, do you think?’  Kantor told Ruby that the gesture would be a nice mark of respect for the President, before making his apologies and moving on to the more pressing business of attending the press conference Matthew Kilduff had just called.    Kantor entered the hospital teaching room where the worlds press waited, and a few moments later Matthew Kilduff stepped before them and informed the agitated reporters that President Kennedy was indeed dead.  Kilduff was immediately asked if Vice President Johnson had taken the Presidential oath, Kilduff announced that Johnson hadn’t yet officially been sworn in as President.  The press demanded to speak to Johnson, and Kilduff was left floundering when the press became heated at the news that Johnson had seemingly disrespectfully left the President’s side so soon after his slaying.    After the conference Kilduff took himself off from the eyes of the worlds press, and sat quietly in one of the doctor’s offices that were currently vacant, he was observed weeping, and muttering to himself, ‘Oh that man’s head, oh, his head’.

1.35 p.m. Lee Harvey Oswald was seen acting suspiciously in the entrance to Hardy’s Shoe Shop, on Jefferson Boulevard.   Store manager Johnny Brewer was convinced that Oswald was trying to avoid being seen by the police patrols that were swamping the area.  When Oswald left the shop after a circling police-patrol had passed by, Brewer followed Oswald, and observed him entering a nearby cinema called the Texas Theatre.  The cinemas cashier, Julia Postal, noticed Oswald slip into the auditorium without paying, but not before buying himself a bucket of popcorn.  Brewer had by now entered the theatre himself; and told Postal about Oswald’s strange behaviour; between them they decided to telephone the police, whereupon Julia Postal confidently told the operator without equivocation, ‘We have your man’.   By 1.45 p.m. the police were arriving at the Texas Theatre in force.  They began to quietly enter the auditorium, moving their way silently down the aisles.  Johnny Brewer unlocked and opened a door hidden behind the cinema screen, a door that led to the alleyway behind the cinema; several more police officers enter the building this way.  Brewer noted that all the police officers who entered from the alleyway already had their guns drawn.  Out of the sixteen police officers filling the cinema; it was Officer Nick McDonald who finally approached Lee Harvey Oswald.  McDonald was so bold because the arrest was personal to him; J. D. Tippit had been one of his closest friends.  McDonald allegedly pistol-whipped Oswald in his seat; and began yelling to the suspect that he had murdered his best friend.   Oswald fumbled for his pistol, he got it out of his waistband and actually squeezed the trigger, but luckily the gun misfired, and as more of the officers swamped him they managed to manhandle the pistol from his hand.  Oswald was then bundled out into the foyer of the cinema and pushed into a restroom; where the police attempted to clean the blood from the assault off of his face, before taking him to the Dallas Police Headquarters.  As Officers Hawkins, Hutson, Walker, Carroll and Hill escorted the suspect out of the cinema; Julia Postal clearly heard one of the officers refer to the man as Oswald, another officer informed Julia Postal that her suspicions were correct, the police, ‘have our man on both counts’.

At 1.50 p.m. Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson arrived back at Love Field Airport where Air Force One was waiting.  He rushed onto the plain and after having all the blinds pulled down; in case there were any lurking snipers, he immediately turned on the television news.  It became clear to Johnson and the Secret Service officers at his side that the television reporters knew more about the details of the President’s assassination than they did.  This infuriated Johnson; and it also began sending him down a paranoid road of thought, if he was going to spend the next three hours flying from Dallas to Washington; then what machinations would happen behind his back?  Would Bobby Kennedy attempt to seize power in his absence?  The Vice Presidential role was largely ceremonial.  It was in the words of one former Vice President ‘not worth a bucket of warm piss’.  No one ever expected circumstances to arise where Johnson would actually take the Presidency one day.  Now unbelievable circumstances had arisen to thrust the power onto Johnson, power that he so unbelievably wanted.   Johnson began to dwell on the fact that Bobby Kennedy, an arrogant upstart, would try and take that opportunity for greatness from him.  After all there were no hard and fast rules to the line of Presidential succession in the absence of an election.  Of course if he could take the Presidential oath quickly enough; his position would be legally binding, and there would be nothing that Bobby Kennedy or anyone else could do about it.  Johnson in response to these paranoid thoughts began to set in motion an unstoppable chain of unprecedented events.

Back at Parkland Hospital another unbelievable set of events were occurring; which would have been almost comical if they weren’t so tragic.   The President’s body had been loaded into a coffin, and the Secret Service intended to escort the President’s body and Jackie Kennedy back to Air Force One.  Dr. Earl Rose refused to release the body into their custody, an autopsy had yet to be conducted, and an argument began to brew.  Dr. Rose called a Sherriff to help back him up.  The Sheriff reiterated the central prescient legal point, telling the Secret Service that state law determined that because the President had been murdered in Texas, the autopsy had to be carried out in Texas.  The body was now technically evidence in a murder investigation, and therefore could not leave the state.  Suddenly the exchange between the Secret Service and the Sheriff began to get heated; Dr. Rose had by now also called the hospital administrator; who began to get involved, all were telling the Secret Service agents the same thing, that they could not take the President’s body, it was illegal for them to even try.  Then a local judge was called by the hospital administrator, Justice of the Peace Theron Ward arrived to wade into the escalating war of words.  Judge Ward ordered the Secret Service men to leave the body where it was, then he said the worst thing imaginable under the circumstances, he didn’t care who was in the coffin, it was ‘just another murder case’ as far as he was concerned.  This infuriated Kenny O’Donnell, enough was enough, suddenly a full on fist fight broke out between the hospital staff, the Sheriffs, the Secret Service and the young judge, fists flew, people were pushed and shoved and a Sheriff was knocked to the floor, as the Secret Service literally body snatched the President’s corpse.  As they began to rush down the corridor away from the beaten officials, a priest stepped into the path of the coffin, and began to pray over it.  As far as O’Donnell and the Secret Service were concerned this was just a another delaying tactic, trying to hold them up until police reinforcement arrived, and that’s when an unnamed Secret Service officer stupidly pulled a gun on the priest.  The stunned padre sensibly stepped aside.  All the while Jackie Kennedy stood silently by, stirring dumbfounded at the grotesque pantomime that unfolded before her.  Eventually the Secret Service men broke away from the encroaching Sherriff’s and hospital officials; and a mad dash ensued through the corridors of the hospital, with the Secret Service agents and Jackie Kennedy running hell for leather until they reached the hearse that was waiting for them outside.  They loaded up the President’s body, bundled Jackie into the back of the hearse and sped off for Love Field Airport.

On the Drive to Dallas Police Headquarters; Lee Harvey Oswald was noted as being ‘extra calm. He wasn’t a bit excited or nervous’.   He did however protest his arrest, telling the police officers, ‘I don’t know why you are treating me like this. The only thing I have done was carry a pistol into a movie’.  The officers asked Oswald why he had killed Officer Tippit, but Oswald remained tight lipped, stating cryptically, ‘you can only fry’, for killing a police officer.

At 2.00 p.m. Defence Secretary Robert McNamara was in the middle of a budget meeting in the Pentagon.  Despite the Pentagon being informed by the Whitehouse that McNamara was now the Commander In Chief, no one had had the decency to tell the man in charge of America’s defensive abilities and strategies that President Kennedy had been shot; and that the Whitehouse believed he was now in charge of the nation.  If the assassination had been a prelude to war, one of America’s key players in any strategic decision would have been totally in the dark during that crucial first hour.  McNamara was asked to leave the meeting to deal with an ‘urgent private call’, that call was from Robert Kennedy; he informed McNamara that President Kennedy was dead.  McNamara was left numb by the phone call, shocked, and by his own admission not knowing what to do, ineffectually he returned to the budget meeting to conclude its dreary business.

Shortly after 2.00 p.m. the police car carrying Lee Harvey Oswald arrived at the Dallas Police Headquarters.  Already reporters had crowded into the basement car park of the City Hall, where the police HQ was based.  Surprisingly these reporters were allowed to follow the escorting police officers up through the elevator; into the Police Headquarters; and film and photograph Oswald as he was taken down the twenty feet of corridor into the Homicide Bureau offices, where he was left to sit in a corridor waiting to be interviewed.

At the same time that Oswald was being taken into the police station to be questioned, the reporters at the Texas School Book Depository were treated to yet another rifle being discovered on the premises, this one allegedly being found on the eastern fire escape.  Once again it was different to the others that have been paraded before the press, this rifle quite clearly wasn’t bolt action like the Mannlicher Carcano, it was also a lot shorter and stockier than the Carcano allegedly used by Oswald.  Unlike the previous rifles, which the police could easily state were Oswald’s Mannlicher Carcano misidentified, this weapon could in no way be explained away in such a cavalier manner.  The official if rather implausible explanation was that the rifle belonged to a security agent who had carelessly left his weapon on a fire escape during the search of the building.

Back at Air Force One, at 2.06 p.m. Johnson’s paranoia got the better of him; and he decided to telephone Bobby Kennedy and see what he was conspiring.   It was Johnson’s plan to try and get Bobby Kennedy’s blessing for Johnson to take the oath of allegiance before Air Force One took off from Love Field Airport.  Johnson wanted to officially and legally be President before the plane had left the tarmac. Johnson began to fire questions at Bobby, who was remember; the Attorney General, and as a result the highest ranking legal authority in the country.  Just who could legally administer the oath of office?  Did certain words have to be spoken for it to be legally binding?  What did the constitution require to happen to make the swearing in of a new President legal?  Bobby was quietly enraged, it had been less than half an hour since he had found out about his brother’s death, and now he discovered that before his brother’s body was even cold; someone was looking to figuratively slip into his shoes.  Feeling that this showed that Johnson was too eager for power, and therefore probably the least suitable person to have it; Bobby tried to stall Johnson, telling him that he would have to check the facts with the Vice-Attorney General.  Once he had put down the receiver Johnson decided that he would commence with his Presidential duties, liaising with the National Security Advisor.  As Johnson spoke with the NSA, Bobby Kennedy was patched into the phone call.  Johnson would tell people later that it was during this conversation that Bobby Kennedy persuaded him that it would be in the countries best interests if Johnson were to swear the oath of allegiance whilst in Dallas, and become the thirty-sixth President of the United States of America as quickly as possible.  Bobby Kennedy vehemently denied this version of events, and insisted that it was Johnson who kept insisting that he should be sworn in as President with indecent haste.

At 2.14 p.m. as Jackie Kennedy, Kenny O’Donnell and the Secret Service agents boarded Air Force One.   Kenny O’Donnell left Jackie’s side to give her some time alone; once he was gone Johnson came out of his hiding place.  He took Jackie by the hand and gave her his condolences, then with barely a visible gearshift in the conversational tone; he informed the grieving widow that Bobby, the President’s own brother, wanted Johnson to be sworn in as soon as possible.   The very presence of Johnson on Air Force One was a shock to the Kennedy camp; they had assumed that they would have some privacy on the Presidential plane, to grieve in private for a few hours before the media glare of Washington. Now they discovered that Lyndon B. Johnson, a man the culled President’s family despised, would be sharing in that grief, and not only that, he was hassling them for the keys to the Whitehouse before Jackie Kennedy had even had time to wash her husband’s blood off her hands, literally.  It would have been easy for Johnson to make his way back to Washington by himself; after all he’d gotten to Dallas on Air Force Two.  It was therefore no hardship for him to tootle across the runway; and get on the sister plane and fly back with his own entourage, leaving the Kennedy’s for a few sacrosanct hours.   Kenny O’Donnell had missed the meeting with Johnson as he boarded, as he went straight to General Godfrey McHue, the senior military figure on Air Force One.  O’Donnell ordered McHue to get the plane off the ground; O’Donnell was still scared that the Dallas authorities would muster up the courage to order them to take the President’s body off the plane, so time was of the essence.  Captain James Swindell, the pilot of Air Force One, refused the order from McHue.  McHue was flabbergasted by the dissention, and he ran straight up to the cockpit.  Here in a heated exchange Swindell apologised to McHue, but, he informed the General, he couldn’t accept the order; as Matt Kilduff had given him explicit instruction not to leave the tarmac.  General McHue then frantically ran up and down the plane looking for the Presidential press secretary.  When General McHue found Kilduff and asked him why he’d ordered that Air Force One not take off, Kilduff dropped the bombshell that Vice-President Johnson was on board; and had ordered that he be sworn into office as President of the United States of America, on Air Force One, before the plane left the tarmac.   General McHue was now deeply confused, he was meant to be in charge of Air Force One, and no one had told him that Johnson had boarded, indeed as far as General McHue was concerned Johnson should have been on board the sister plane, Air Force Two.  McHue’s temper and loyalty to President Kennedy now boiled over, he pushed Kilduff into a corner and pointed an angry finger into the room where Kennedy’s coffin lay, and in an angry yell he hollered, ‘My President is back there in that box!’  The angry words from the General echoed through the confines of the plane, and reached the ears of Johnson.  This exchange upset Jackie Kennedy, who subsequently went to sit alone beside her husbands’ coffin.  After a few minutes; Lady Bird Johnson entered the room where Jackie sat in silent contemplation, ‘You know we never even wanted to be Vice-President’.  Lady Bird said with all the tact and decorum people had come to expect from the Johnsons, ‘and now, dear god, it’s come to this’.  She concluded.  As Lady Bird left the room Jackie Kennedy began to weep.

Meanwhile elsewhere in the shadows and baking heat of the confined plane; Johnson himself was busy sidling up to the members of the Kennedy camp and worm-tonguing into their ears that this wasn’t his doing, that it was Bobby Kennedy’s idea, that Bobby was the one who insisted that Johnson be sworn in before they left Dallas.   Then Johnson accosted Major General Chester V. Clinton and asked him if there was a photographer on board, he wanted his long awaited moment of triumph recorded forever for the history books.

At 2.20 p.m. Dr. Kemp Clarke and Dr. Malcolm Perry held a press conference at Parkland Memorial Hospital.  During this slightly comedic press conference, where the press constantly kept asking the doctors for the correct spelling of medical words, and even on several occasions to explain the meaning of none medical words, Dr. Perry eventually stated on three separate occasions that the wound in President Kennedy’s throat had been an entrance wound from a bullet.  He then went further to tell the press that the bullet ‘appeared to be coming at him’.  Dr. Clarke then explained that it was impossible to tell if the massive head wound was an entrance or exit wound as too much of the skull had been missing to make a clear judgement.

At 2.30 p.m. just two hours after the fatal shots had rang out across Dealey Plaza, Judge Sarah T.  Hughes arrived on board Air Force One to deliver the oath of office to Johnson.  Judge Hughes was an old friend of the Johnson’s, and he wanted the judge to share in his moment of bitter triumph.  As he was about to take his oath, Johnson stopped and turned to Kenny O’Donnell and said gruffly, ‘Ask Mrs Kennedy to come stand here’, Johnson hiked a thumb to his side.  O’Donnell stirred at Johnson in cold disbelief; and informed Johnson as politely as his anger would allow that he couldn’t possibly be thinking of asking a woman who had just watched her husband be gunned down in front of her face, to come and watch a man she hated take her husband’s place.  O’Donnell point blank refused to fetch Jackie Kennedy, but Johnson insisted.  He wanted Jackie to stand silently beside him as he was sworn into office as the President of the United States of America; he wanted Jackie in those photographs to give his indecently hasty grab for power the sheen of legitimacy for future generations, and Jackie complied.   She can be seen in those photographs, her face ashen, her eyes almost dead and emotionless, as she watches the proceedings, still wearing clothes soaked with her husband’s blood, still wearing the gloves saturated in her husband’s brain matter.  Yet she was gallant about this shameless political manipulation of her grief, and stated that being there stood next to Johnson in the wake of her husband’s death was ‘the least I could do’.   So at 2.38 p.m. on Friday the 22nd of November 1963; drunken, vote rigging, unpopular Lyndon B. Johnson was sworn in as the thirty-sixth President of the United States of America.

FBI Agent James Hosty was at the Dallas Field Office compiling a list of local right wing suspects who may have played a part in the President’s assassination.  Hosty’s boss, Ken Howe, called Hosty into his office and informed him that Lee Harvey Oswald had been arrested for murdering J. D. Tippit.  Hosty collapsed into a nearby chair, Hosty had been the agent assigned to investigate Oswald, as Oswald had been a failed defector, moving to Russia for two years; before coming back to America with his tail between his legs; and a new Russian bride.    Howe asked to see Oswald’s file, but Hosty’s heart sank even further when he discovered that the file on the possible murderer was missing from his filing cabinet.  A search of the entire office was ordered, and the file was eventually discovered mysteriously hidden in the mail clerk’s office.  After the files discovery Howe ordered Hosty to get to the Dallas Police Headquarters and sit in on Oswald’s interviews.

At 2.46 p.m. Air Force One left Love Field Airport bound for Washington D.C.  From the air, over a light lunch of soup and crackers, President Johnson began to organise the beginnings of his Presidency.  The new First Lady, Lady Bird Johnson, went to her husband and suggested to him that it might be the right thing to do to call President Kennedy’s mother; and give her his condolences, President Johnson agreed.   Rose Kennedy was well aware of the etiquette of the difficult situation, and what procedures were meant to happen upon the death of her son.  To spare her feelings however Johnson had made sure he was announced on the phone by the telephonist simply as Mr Johnson, and he himself introduced himself to Rose Kennedy as plain and simple Mr Johnson, but Rose Kennedy was ahead of the game, and without prompting immediately called Johnson ‘Mr President’.  Johnson informed Rose Kennedy that he and Lady Bird were, ‘grieving with you’.  Rose Kennedy; showing her skills as a supreme diplomat said, ‘I know you loved Jack, and he loved you’, yet anyone who knew anything about the two men knew they really despised each other.  Yet these words did something to President Johnson, perhaps they hit a raw nerve that had become exposed in the immediacy of President Kennedy’s death, for the hardened embattled embittered career Politician broke down into tears and had to hand the telephone over to his wife.  Johnson excused himself from his cohorts and went to one of the planes restrooms, a few minutes later General McHue found Johnson ‘hiding’ in the toilet cubical, he was audibly muttering to himself, ‘Conspiracy, conspiracy, they’re after all of us’.

2.50 p.m. At the Dallas Police Headquarters, Police Chief Jessie Curry was having a disheartening conversation with the District Attorney.  Curry had just received test results from Dr. W. E. Barnes; who had taken swabs from Oswald’s hands and right cheek, and had performed a paraffin test upon these samples.  In this test paraffin was applied to the skin, which caused skin pores to dilate and any chemical substances held in the pores, such as the nitrates from gunpowder, to ooze out.  If Oswald had fired a firearm in the last few hours, the paraffin test would tell the police.  The test proved positive for Oswald’s hands and negative for his cheek.   It looked like Oswald had fired a handgun that day, but the test seemed to indicate he hadn’t pressed a rifle to his face to look down a telescopic scope.   On top of this; the police were getting frustrated with Oswald, he wasn’t answering their questions quick enough, Chief Curry, later commented, ‘One would think Oswald had been trained in interrogation techniques, and resisting interrogation techniques’.  District Attorney William Alexander garnered the same impression as he watched Oswald being interviewed, ‘I was amazed that a person so young would have had the self-control he had. It was almost as if he had been rehearsed or programmed to meet the situation he found himself in’.  Realising that they were getting nowhere with the obstinate Oswald, Chief Curry commented to the District Attorney that, ‘We don’t have any proof that Oswald fired the rifle’. Soon after this conversation with Curry; District Attorney Henry Wade would tell the press waiting for news on the Presidential assassination in the halls of the Dallas Police Headquarters that, ‘Preliminary reports indicate that more than one person was involved in the shooting’.

At the same moment that Jessie Curry was postulating on the lack of evidence they had on Oswald, James Hosty was arriving at the Dallas Police Headquarters.  As he walked through the basement car park, Hosty saw a local officer he was acquainted with, Lieutenant Jack Revill.  Revill was stunned by what Hosty told him, so stunned it physically enraged Revill, and heated words were exchanged between the two men. After the argument, which lasted for only a few moments, Revill immediately ran up to his office and fired out a hasty memo, which was then released to the press with even more haste; before the ink had even dried on the page.  The controversial memo read:

‘Re: Lee Harvey Oswald

On November 22, 1963, at approximately 2:50 P.M., the undersigned officer met Special Agent James Hosty of the Federal Bureau of Investigation in the basement of the City Hall.

At that time Special Agent Hosty related to this officer that the Subject was a member of the Communist Party, and that he was residing in Dallas.

The Subject was arrested for the murder of Officer J. D. Tippit and is a prime suspect in the assassination of President Kennedy.

The information regarding the Subject’s affiliation with the Communist Party is the first information this officer has received from the Federal Bureau of Investigation regarding same.

Agent Hosty further stated that the Federal Bureau of Investigation was aware of the Subject and that they had information that this Subject was capable of committing the assassination of President Kennedy’.

Within minutes of Curry receiving the memo it was being sent to news agencies around the world, the FBI top brass were furious.  Ken Howe telephoned Chief Curry demanding that he withdraw the statement immediately.  Within minutes of the statement being given to the press, a retraction was issued.  Chief Curry had acted just in time to stop Lee Harvey Oswald’s name from reaching the public, for a few more minutes at least, but the genie was well and truly out of the bottle.

At 3.00 p.m. the news finally reached Air Force One that a suspect had been arrested for the murder of a Dallas Police Officer, but that the man also matched the description of a suspect seen holding a rifle in the window of the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository.  The suspects name was Lee Harvey Oswald.  Johnson was told that Lee Harvey Oswald had been a defector, living in Russia for nearly two years.  Johnson’s heart sank the moment he heard that news.  If the public became aware that a Communist agitator with Soviet sympathies was responsible for murdering the President then public pressure for him to retaliate against Russia, regardless of whether they had sanctioned the assassination or not, could become insurmountable.  Johnson immediately asked for assurances that Oswald was not a Russian spy; by the time Air Force One landed, Johnson had been given those assurances by McGeorge Bundy and Colonel Oliver Hallett.  Less than four hours after the assassination, with the investigation into the Presidents’ murder in its infancy, already the official case was being made for Oswald being a lone gunman.

At 3.10 p.m. the press were finally given permission to broadcast the suspect’s name, the name Lee Harvey Oswald was now destined to go down in infamy.  The press were very careful not to circulate any of the information that was contained in the memo they had been given by the police just twenty minutes earlier.   As a result, for the moment, none of the pressmen told their newsrooms that Oswald was a possible communist defector.  With no political ideologies for the editors in the newsrooms to pin upon Oswald, it helped the newsrooms to start putting the simple lone disaffected nutter spin on the Oswald’s story, a spin that the Whitehouse so desperately wanted disseminating.  Everything seemed to be coming together perfectly for the official explanation.

As President Johnson and his staff looked into Lee Harvey Oswald’s chequered past, Jackie Kennedy sat quietly with Kenny O’Donnell.  He poured them both a large scotch each.  Jackie Kennedy politely refused, ‘I’ve never had a Scotch in my life’, she told O’Donnell, but O’Donnell was insistent, placing the glass in her trembling hand and replying,   ‘Now is as good a time to start as any’.  This was the beginning of several hours drinking undertaken by the Kennedy Camp, a drinking session which only fuels the animosity the previous administration were feeling towards the newly inaugurated President Johnson.

At 3.54 p.m. NBC News was the first television news broadcaster to announce Lee Harvey Oswald’s name to the nation, stating categorically that he was the ‘prime suspect’ in the President’s assassination.

In his grief; Robert Kennedy hastily set out to try and find the truth behind his brother’s assassination.  He began to telephone his contacts in the intelligence services, and some less than desirable contacts he had from his numerous prosecutions of underworld kingpins.  He telephoned Julius Draznin; a nationwide renowned expert on organised crime and the corruption within the national unions.  He asked Draznin as a personal favour to squeeze all of his sources and see if there was any talk of the mafia being involved in his brother’s murder.  He contacted Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Assistant Secretary of Labour, and asked him to investigate the possibility of Jimmy Hoffa and the Teamsters Union having been involved in the assassination, possibly with the assistance and financial backing of the Secret Service.   After some difficulty Robert Kennedy also managed to track down one of the major players in the Bay of Pigs invasion, a Cuban exile by the name of Enrique ‘Harry’ Ruiz Williams.  The conversation between Williams and Robert Kennedy descended into a slanging match of angry words, and Robert stunned his friends to silence as he lost his temper and screamed down the phone at Williams, ‘One of your guys did it!’

In Dallas the small time hoodlum and strip club owner Jack Ruby had left the Parkland Memorial Hospital; and made his way to the Dallas Police Headquarters.  Somehow he got past the police guards and security cordons and began to hang around the corridors of the Murder Bureau, masquerading as a journalist, even getting himself pulled into a group photograph of the collected pressmen that one of the photographers took for posterity.   Ruby was then seen by reporter Victor Robertson, attempting to enter the office of Captain John Will Fritz.  A police officer stopped Ruby, and Robertson heard the officer say, ‘You can’t go in there Jack’.  Ruby then had a quiet word with the policeman, Robertson could not hear what was said, but whatever it was; it made the policeman laugh, Ruby then walked off down the corridor with a confident swagger.

4.35 p.m. Lee Harvey Oswald took part in the first of four police line-ups.  Helen Markham, one of the witnesses to the murder of Officer J. D. Tippit, picked Oswald out as the man she saw shooting Tippit, but with the caveat that she was not 100% certain that Oswald was the man she had seen.   All three of the line-ups carried out on the afternoon and evening of Friday the 22nd of November 1963 came in for heavy criticism from outside observers, all of the men wore considerably smarter clothes than Oswald, all of the men were considerably older than Oswald, all of the men were considerably fatter than Oswald, and one of them had a fair complexion and Blonde hair.  In the fourth line-up, held the following day, Oswald was forced to appear with two teenage boys; and a Mexican.  It was made clear to the police by all of the witnesses who took part in each of the four line-ups; that they were only picking Oswald out as he was the closest in appearance to the men they had seen, but that he was not necessarily the same man.  It then later became known that as each person standing in line during the identity parade had stood forward before the witnesses; they had given a fake name and occupation. Lee Harvey-Oswald had been instructed to give his real name and place of work.  By the time of the line-ups, especially the ones later in the evening and on Saturday the 23rd of November, Oswald’s name and the location the sniper had allegedly fired from had been widely publicised, it is unlikely that the witnesses would not have heard this news and made the connections.

At 5.58 p.m. eastern standard time, Air Force One landed at Andrews Air Force Base, Washington D.C.  Bobby Kennedy had asked that Jackie Kennedy’s disembarkation and the removal of President Kennedy’s coffin from the plane be a private affair.  President Johnson refused this request; he wanted the press to be at Andrews Air Force Base; so that he could immediately address the public and temper their fears, to show the world that a seemingly seamless transition of power from one President to the next had occurred.  To Bobby Kennedy this just seemed like another cruel slap in the face to his grieving family.   Johnson planned out the perfect photo opportunity, President Kennedy’s coffin would be quietly removed from the back of Air Force One, and then he would be filmed and photographed by the waiting press caringly escorting the grieving Jackie Kennedy down the steps onto the runway.  A fatherly figure, a figure the nation could trust to keep it safe in its darkest hour of need.  Johnson didn’t count on a furious Bobby Kennedy being stood on the tarmac; waiting for Air Force One to come to a halt.   As soon the stairway was put in place by the door; Bobby raced onto the plane.  He pushed his way using brute force past everyone who tried to stop him or hinder his progress; he even shoved President Johnson out of the way without acknowledging his presence, all in his haste to reach his sister-in-law.  Johnson was incensed by the breach of protocol, he almost blew a gasket in anger, to Johnson it didn’t matter that the Attorney-General’s brother had been murdered a few short hours before, protocol dictated that Bobby Kennedy should have stopped and paid his respects to the new President.  Bobby Kennedy rallied the Kennedy Camp around him, he had Kennedy’s coffin taken out of the plane via the back exit, then quietly escorted Jackie out the back of the plane also.  They were far enough away from the press to ignore their questions, yet close enough for the cameras to pick up Bobby tenderly holding his sister-in-laws hand in a genuine display of protective affection.  All the while President Johnson skulked in the background, getting angrier and angrier; as Bobby Kennedy robbed him of his perfect photo opportunity, robbed him of the visual statement he was trying to make to the nation, neigh the world.  As far as President Johnson was concerned Bobby Kennedy via his arrogance and petulant behaviour had just declared war on the Johnson administration.  Unable to take his immediate anger out on Bobby Kennedy, Johnson turned on Secret Service agent Rufus Youngblood, screaming at him with balled fists for stupidly leaving his hat back in the motorcade in Dallas.

At 6:19 p.m. after composing himself from his petulant and un-President like outburst of childish rage, President Johnson was left to disembark the plane with no political allies, sullenly he approached the waiting press, he was about to give his first public speech as President of the United States, a speech that had been carefully written and then rewritten for him on the flight from Dallas.  He stood before the collected microphones; and in his thick harsh Texan accent he began to drawl, ‘This is a sad time for all people.  We have suffered a loss that cannot be weighed.  For me it is a deep personal tragedy.  I know that the world shares the sorrow that Mrs Kennedy and her family bare.  I will do my best, that is all I can do, I ask for your help, and gods’.   Johnson then walked away from the microphones and cameras towards a waiting helicopter, and realised for the first time he would be taken to his new home, the Whitehouse, which for the moment he would also have to share with the family of his predecessor.

The Kennedy’s had made their way to Bethesda Naval Hospital with the body of President Kennedy.  It was Jackie’s request that the autopsy be carried out on a Naval Base; due to President Kennedy’s connection to that auspicious body of men.   General Godfrey McHue, still loyal to the Kennedy camp, had abandoned Johnson, and now sat with the Kennedy’s.  General McHue was still riled from his angry exchanges with the members of the Johnson Camp earlier that day, and McHue began to let off steam, telling Bobby Kennedy that Johnson had been rude, disrespectful and opportunistic.  All in all Johnson’s behaviour in the wake of the President’s death had been a disgrace.  Then others pitched in, like Kenny O’Donnell, angrily telling Bobby how Johnson had insisted on being sworn in before Kennedy’s body was even cold, telling everyone that it was on Bobby’s say so, that Bobby had practically ordered the impromptu inauguration.  Grousing at how he had shamefully used the grieving Jackie Kennedy as a photo opportunity, how he’d made her stand almost catatonic beside him during the whole horrible and sordid ceremony.  Then his virtual high-jacking of Air Force One; refusing to fly back to Washington on his allotted aircraft; Air Force Two. Johnson had practically shoved his disdain for President Kennedy down poor grieving Jackie’s throat.  Suddenly the Kennedy Camp all realised the lies that Johnson had told to each of them that day, how Johnson had played each single person off the other so that he manoeuvred himself with unseemly alacrity and cold calculating efficiency into the Oval Office.  ‘He’s got what he wants now. But we take it back in sixty-eight’, Kenny O’Donnell affirmed as he downed another in a long line of whiskies.   As Bobby Kennedy listened; he became angrier and angrier with each knew revelation, and in those moments his dislike for Johnson became a fervent lifelong hatred.  Hearing people repeat the events of the day, the shock began to suddenly catch-up with Jackie, and Dr. John Welsh diagnosed her with nervous exhaustion.   Realising that she was on the verge of a dangerous emotional state; Dr. Walsh decided to inject Jackie with a sedative, Visatril, to calm her down.  For some reason the shot seemed to have the opposite effect, Jackie seemed to become more alive and animated than at any time since her husband’s death.   She began recounting in graphic detail what had happened to her in Dallas, reliving again and again the dreadful moment that President Kennedy had been shot.   Seeing the strange effect the injection had on her; Dr. Walsh commented dryly, ‘I might as well have given her a shot of coca-cola’.

During the helicopter ride from Andrews Air Force Base to the Whitehouse, Johnson began to discuss his fears that Kennedy was killed as part of an international conspiracy, a possible prelude to World War Three.  Secretary of Defence James McNamara and the National Security Advisor George Bundy; both informed Johnson that there was no evidence that the President’s assassination was the first salvo in a larger darker operation.  There had been no unusual military movements, or even rumours of anything untoward happening in either Russia or Korea.  American Intelligence Assets in Berlin reported that factions on both sides of the political divide appeared as wrong footed by President Kennedy’s assassination as the American’s were.  It appeared the soviets were also worried that the finger of suspicion would be pointed at them, and that tensions would rise between the two superblocks.   Johnson’s fears allayed, a brief conversation arose as to the message it would send out if Johnson were to move straight into the Whitehouse; whilst the Kennedy family still grieved in what was technically their home.  There were arguments on both side, it would publically look better if Johnson gave the Kennedy’s some space, whereas others argued it was psychologically important for Johnson to surround and immerse himself in the trappings of supreme power straight away.  When the helicopter landed on the south lawn of the Whitehouse at 6.30 p.m. Johnson made his final decision, he did not enter the Whitehouse, instead he crossed the lawn and went to a building hidden away to the rear of the Whitehouse, the Executive Offices; the location of the Vice-Presidential suite.  As Johnson settled himself into his old office, the political machinations of Washington continued to turn even in the wake of President Kennedy’s cold blooded murder.  Hubert Humphrey, Senator for Minnesota, approached Johnson and shamelessly sounded him out about filling the void that had been left in the Vice Presidential office.   Quietly a deal was brokered, Humphreys would help Johnson during those first few turbulent weeks and months as President, help him to bust balls and tighten his grip on Capitol Hill, to help him get the Kennedy camp in line, and in return Humphrey’s would be his Vice-Presidential running mate in the 1964 elections.  Washington truly never did stop to grieve.

By 7.00 p.m. Lee Harvey Oswald had been positively identified as the shooter by four of the witnesses to Officer J. D. Tippit’s murder.  These witnesses had viewed Oswald over the course of the three separate and wholly dodgy police line-ups.  With this highly controversial evidence the police finally formally charged Oswald with the murder of J.D. Tippit.

7.30 p.m. Dr. Robert Burr Livingston, the Scientific Director for the National Institute For Health and the National Institute for Neurological Disease; was one of the first people to discover that the tracheotomy scar made to President Kennedy’s throat had obliterated a bullet wound.  Dr. Livingston had been informed by the doctors at Parkland Medical Hospital that this wound had originally quite clearly been an entrance wound to the front of the throat.  Dr. Livingstone; realising that time was short before the autopsy commenced, telephoned Bethesda Naval Base and asked to speak to whoever was going to conduct the autopsy, Dr. Livingston was put through to the office of Commander Dr. James J. Humes.  Dr. Livingstone had offices at Bethesda Naval Hospital too, and so he knew Dr. Humes well, after a brief and perfunctory catch-up, Dr. Livingston informed Dr. Humes of his discovery, that the wound had quite clearly been an entrance wound for a bullet, and therefore Dr. Humes should probe the wound completely to find the tract of the bullet and discover if any bullet fragments had been left behind for further forensic examination.  Dr. Humes suddenly excused himself from the telephone, informing Dr. Livingstone he was being urgently called away, a few moments later he returned to the telephone and informed Dr. Livingstone that he had been ordered not to continue with the conversation, ‘The FBI won’t let me’, Dr. Humes informed a flabbergasted Dr. Livingstone before hanging up the call.

At 8.00 p.m. Commander Dr. James J. Humes commenced the autopsy upon President Kennedy.  The room was crowded with both medical and none medical personnel.  Members of the Secret Service and the FBI were present to observe the proceedings, which were allegedly overseen and controlled by members of the Secret Service, directing Dr. Humes in what he should do.  All in all twenty-two medical personnel watched on, added to this five law enforcement agents; and a plethora of military top brass; had all assembled for the sombre event, it was easy to see that Dr. Humes was under close scrutiny by all concerned.  During the course of the autopsy Dr. Humes was stopped several times by agents of the intelligence services, told to abandon standard autopsy procedures, and move on to other tasks, like a good lifelong military man Dr. Humes complied with all the orders given to him by the intelligence officers who directed the procedure.  Dr. Humes reported that there was a 6 x 4mm oval bullet hole at the base of the President’s neck; ‘above the upper board of the scapula’(shoulder blade), 14cm from the right acromion process (end tip of the shoulder muscles) and 14 cm below the right mastoid process (the bone behind the ear).  Dr. Humes probed this wound with his finger but his progress in tracing the bullet was hindered by the neck strap muscle, Dr. Humes assumed the bullet was still in the body as he could not find an exit wound. It was concluded that the bullet had travelled close to the top of the right lung, due to some bruising to this area.  The autopsy then moved on to discuss the President’s head wounds.  The wound to the back of the head was described as being ‘a laceration measuring 15 x 6cm, situated to the right and slightly above the external occipital protuberance (the bone just above the soft bit at the very back of your head). In the underlying bone is a corresponding wound through the skull showing bevelling (a cone-shaped widening) of the margins of the bone when viewed from the interior of the skull’.  Further exploration and X-rays showed minute particles of the bullet like a debris field along the path of destruction the projectile had wrought.  The front right side of the President’s head, which so many people had seen so clearly being blasted away, was described as being 13 cm wide at the largest diameter, encompassing the parietal, temporal and occipital bones.  These shattered parts of the President’s skull had been recovered as three fragments, ‘roughly corresponding to the dimensions of the large defect’.  Minute particles of metal were discovered imbedded in these fragments of skull, which also showed signs of the bevelling exhibited near the bullets entry point.

The autopsy remains a contentious event to this day; even those who had witnessed it were not completely satisfied with the unorthodox methods used; or its findings.  One such person was Dr. Pierre Finck; he would eventually admit that the process was not, ‘a complete autopsy under the definition used by the American Board of Pathology’.   Shortcuts were taken, such as the tract of the alleged none fatal bullet not being traced, so as ‘not to create unnecessary mutilation of the cadaver’.  When Dr. Humes had finished, and those present silently filed out of the room with their unspoken misgivings, four unassuming men dressed in black entered the room.  These silent and respectful men were the undertaker from Gawler’s Funeral Home; they had the galling task of working as fast as they could to prepare the President’s body for his lying in state, of doing what they could with his devastating wounds to make the President look presentable, a thankless but necessary process that would take them well over four hours.

At 9.30 p.m.  The agent in charge of the FBI field office in New Orleans, Harry Maynor, was contacted by Assistant Director Alan Harden Belmont, in Washington D.C.  Belmont, in a subtle manner, countermanded Maynor’s previous orders to investigate any possible leads relating to right wing activists or Klan members; who may have been involved in President Kennedy’s assassination.  Maynor was told he should be ‘somewhat reluctant’ to interview any such suspects.  What was the reason for the severing of this possibly important line of investigation?  Well, the FBI were concerned about the ‘repercussions’ if any such interviews with any such suspects became public knowledge, especially seeing as J. Edgar Hoover had already; even at that early stage in the investigation, insinuated to the press that Lee Harvey Oswald had been a lone assassin.  Any whiff of a conspiracy would now make Hoover and the FBI look like they weren’t in full command of the facts, and as a result any conclusions the FBI ultimately arrived at would be questioned.

10.50 p.m. After hours of being held without legal representation or contact with the outside world, Lee Harvey Oswald was allowed to make his first phone call.  He did not call a lawyer as the police had been anticipating, but instead attempted to contact a long distance number in the town of Raleigh, North Carolina.  He informed the operator that he wanted to contact a Mr John Hurt at 919-834-7430 or 919-833-1253.  No one answered the calls, so Oswald was disconnected by the operator.  When this peculiarity became public knowledge researchers fell over themselves to discover just who John Hurt was.  The phone numbers in question did not belong to a John Hurt, but one of the phone numbers was associated with an unnamed man who was heavily involved in military intelligence.  When the House Select Committee on Assassinations asked Professor G. Robert Blakey to look into Oswald’s phone calls some years later, he described the unresolved matter as ‘deeply disturbing’.

11.00 p.m. Jack Ruby returned to the Dallas Police Headquarters; with a bag full of sandwiches; which he began to give out to his police friends.  In return the police let Ruby enter the press room; and stay for a press conference; in which Lee Harvey Oswald would be shown off to the press.  After Oswald had made his abortive phone calls to Raleigh, he was taken to his confrontation with the pressmen.  All the while Jack Ruby, who had no press or official police affiliations, sat just three feet away from Oswald.   At one point Ruby even interrupted the District Attorney Henry Wade, when Wade erroneously stated that Oswald was a member of the Free Cuba Committee, Ruby shouted out; ‘Henry; that’s the Fair Play for Cuba Committee’.   At the press conference; Oswald angrily stated that he had illegally been kept from legal representation, and asked for the pressmen’s help in getting him access to a lawyer.  Unbeknown to Oswald; the American Civil Liberties Union, the organisation which normally dealt with Oswald’s numerous legal matters, had already contacted the Dallas police, and had been informed that Oswald had refused legal representation, clear evidence that the police were illegally depriving Oswald of his constitutional rights.

At 1.35 a.m. on Saturday the 23rd of November 1963, Lee Harvey Oswald was awoken in his maximum security cell; on the fifth floor of the Dallas Police Headquarters.  He was taken to a small darkened office, where Judge J. P. Johnson formally charged Oswald with assassinating President John Fitzgerald Kennedy; ‘in the furtherance of an international communist conspiracy’.  In response Oswald replied, ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about’.  He once again then asked for the services of the American Civil Liberties Union lawyer.  Shortly after Oswald had been charged; the District Attorney received a phone call from ‘The Whitehouse’, someone in a very high-up position was furious that the phraseology ‘in the furtherance of an international communist conspiracy’; had been used on Oswald’s charge sheet.  They demanded that this phrase be removed at once.  The Dallas District Attorney sheepishly complied, secretly altering the paperwork.  Shortly afterwards the Dallas field office of the FBI also received a phone-call from ‘The Whitehouse’.  During the conversation; Special Agent J. Gordon Shanklin was informed of the exact contentious phraseology the District Attorney had attempted to use on Oswald’s charge sheet, as a consequence The Whitehouse ordered the FBI not to share any further information with the Dallas police regarding Lee Harvey Oswald.

At 4.35 a.m. President Kennedy’s body arrived at the Whitehouse.  Robert and Jackie Kennedy viewed the body, Jackie would later tell William Manchester, ‘It wasn’t Jack. It was like something you would see at Madame Tussaud’s’.  Close friend to the Kennedy family, William Walton, also viewed President Kennedy’s body, his reaction was stunned outrage; stammering to Bobby Kennedy after seeing the cadaver, ‘It has no resemblance to the President. It’s a wax dummy’.  Another close friend of the Kennedy’s, the so-called ‘court historian’ to President Kennedy’s ‘new Camelot’, the writer Arthur Schlesinger, said of the body, ‘It is appalling...When I came closer it looked less and less like him’.  After the viewing, Robert Kennedy took a Valium and went to the Lincoln room to rest.   Another friend of the Kennedy family who had rallied around the grieving family, investment banker Charles Spalding, could hear Robert Kennedy sob as he drifted off to sleep, ‘Why god? Oh why god? Why?’

At 6.50 a.m. President Johnson arose from a few short hours sleep, his first actions on his first full day as President were not ones of national importance, but rather small minded and petty; actions that massaged his ego more than anything else.  He ordered all of the Kennedy’s personal effects removed from the Whitehouse.  He then had President Kennedy’s portrait removed from its pride of place on the walls of the Presidential gallery, and had a gold framed painting of himself hung in its stead.

Meanwhile, the heavens had opened up above Washington; and rain poured down from the sky; like the heavens themselves were mourning the loss of President Kennedy.  At 8.30 a.m. Bobby Kennedy awoke in the Lincoln room, he quickly bathed and dressed.  Bobby sought out President Johnson, but instead found the Presidential personal secretary, Evelyn Lincoln, sat at her desk in tears.   Bobby assumed she was still mourning President Kennedy’s brutal slaying, but he soon found out there was more to it than that, President Johnson had just sacked Evelyn Lincoln, not because she’d done anything wrong, simply because she was one of Kennedy’s people.  After four years loyal and distinguished service for the previous President, she had been given just half an hour to clear her desk before her replacement was to arrive.  Bobby felt the old anger rise up in his stomach once more from the previous evening; the new President’s arrogance and inconsiderateness knew no bounds.  Bobby Kennedy swallowed his rage; and steeled himself ready for his first official meeting in the guise of Attorney General with his new President.   Bobby carefully let Johnson know what he thought, and told him that it was inconsiderate for him to be using ‘Jack’s Office’ so soon after his murder, Bobby told Johnson tactfully to clear off out of the Whitehouse until his brother had been buried.  Johnson agreed, he admitted that he had perhaps acted a little rashly.  Indeed, Johnson acted like the model of consideration.  He then went on to tell Bobby that he wanted him to stay on as Attorney General, he needed him going forward into the election the following year; and beyond into Johnson’s first full term as President.  Despite the air of affability; Johnson was in a blind panic, he took Bobby Kennedy’s warnings as the first sign that Bobby might use his position as Attorney General to legally challenge his position as President.  Johnson believed that Bobby himself had designs on the Oval Office; and the number one job.  Perhaps Bobby had realised that his brother’s death could benefit him enormously too.  Johnson was unfairly tarring Bobby with his own dirty brush, Bobby had loved his brother too much to have such selfish thoughts, and ultimately he had too much respect for the office of President to damage it by having a long drawn out and tawdry court case to oust Johnson.  Instead Bobby decided to play the long game, and over the next five years Bobby Kennedy slowly plotted, planned and positioned his pieces ready to destroy Johnson and his Presidency as effectively as if he had openly challenged him that first day.

9.20 a.m. President Johnson had his first briefing with John McCone, the Director of the CIA.  McCone informed President Johnson that the CIA had proof that in September of that year Lee Harvey Oswald had travelled to the Soviet Embassy in Mexico City; here he had liaised with a member of the consulates staff; who was also a known KGB expert on assassination.  This information alone indicated that there could have been a possible conspiracy in relation to President Kennedy’s death.  McCone warned President Johnson that if the KGB had been involved in a conspiracy to assassinate President Kennedy, and they followed previous behavioural patterns, their next move would be to eliminate Lee Harvey Oswald.  Despite this, less than an hour after President Johnson had been informed that there was a high probability that Lee Harvey Oswald was part of a Soviet conspiracy to murder President Kennedy, the State Department issued a statement which read in part, ‘There is no evidence to indicate that the USSR or any other power is implicated in the assassination’.

10.01 a.m. J. Edgar Hoover telephoned President Johnson to update him on the FBI’s investigation.  What Hoover told President Johnson wasn’t what the President wanted to hear.  In Hoovers expert opinion the evidence against Lee Harvey Oswald ‘is not very, very strong’.  After reporting this bombshell, there was fourteen minutes of conversation missing from the magnetic tape used to document all Presidential conversations.  No official explanation has ever been given for this missing portion of Hoovers report.

Shortly after 10.00 a.m. Robert Oswald visited his brother at the Dallas Police Headquarters.  Lee Harvey Oswald insisted to his brother that he did not murder either President Kennedy or Officer Tippit, Oswald was adamant, ‘I just don’t know what they’re talking about’.  Robert Oswald was only too well aware of all his brother’s faults and failings; he acutely remembered the embarrassment and shame Lee Harvey Oswald had caused their family when he had defected.  Yet despite this, and his previous wiliness to believe that his brother was guilty of the crimes he had been accused of, Robert Oswald came away from the meeting believing his brothers protestations.  The blossoming belief began to take root amongst the members of the Oswald family that Lee Harvey Oswald was innocent.

11.30 a.m. President Kennedy’s body was lying in state in the east room of the Whitehouse.  Jackie Kennedy had asked that for the first time in history; the honour guard faced the coffin so that ‘Jack’ wouldn’t feel too alone.  President Johnson and First-Lady Lady Bird Johnson were among the first mourners to enter and pay their respects.  His statesmanlike manner in front of the world’s cameras won Johnson the respect of the American public, and overnight he went from being almost universally loathed, to having one of the highest approval ratings for an American President; ever.

12.30 p.m. President Johnson met with John McCone again.  McCone highlighted to President Johnson further evidence of Lee Harvey Oswald’s dealing with foreign nationals.  These connections indicated to the CIA that Oswald was a small part of a wider international conspiracy.   As the CIA undertook this investigation into a wider conspiracy, and they began to swap documentation with the State Department, part of a sealed file on Lee Harvey Oswald that was labelled ‘SECRET’ was ‘accidently’ destroyed.  It was claimed that no one at either the State Department or the CIA could remember the content of the sealed secret file.

1.35 p.m. After his briefing with McCone, President Johnson telephoned his close friend and lawyer Edwin Weisl, a man who was soon to be appointed as the Assistant Attorney General; put in office to keep a watchful eye on Bobby Kennedy.  The telephone conversation was recorded by the Whitehouse security system; and President Johnson was heard to say in part;  ‘This assassin...may have a lot more complications than you know about...it may lay deeper than you think’.

4.00 p.m. Captain William Fritz’s heart was in his mouth as he received a personal telephone call from President Johnson, the content of the conversation was not what Captain Fritz had been expecting.  President Johnson allegedly ordered Fritz to prematurely end his investigation into President Kennedy’s murder, ‘You have your man’, President Johnson allegedly told Fritz, before abruptly hanging up the telephone.   Minutes after the telephone call from President Johnson, Captain Fritz called a press conference with the waiting reporters who still filled the corridors of the Police Headquarters.  Fritz told the waiting pressmen, radio microphones and news cameras, ‘What I can tell you is that this case is cinched. This man (Lee Harvey Oswald) killed the President. There’s no question in my mind about it. I don’t want to get into the basis. I don’t want to get into the evidence. I just want to tell you that we are convinced beyond any doubt that he did the killing’.

By 9:00 p.m. the majority of the Kennedy family had gathered in the east room of the Whitehouse.  Present was the international movie star and famed member of the ‘Rat Pack’; Peter Lawford, who was married to President Kennedy’s sister, Patricia.  Later that weekend; Lawford would reveal to his Rat Pack drinking buddies how Robert Kennedy, through tears, had told the collected members of the Kennedy clan that it was his belief that President Kennedy had been murdered as part of an international conspiracy, which had grown from secret anti-Castro operations the government had been carrying out.  Robert Kennedy stated that there was nothing he could do to get justice for his brother, the enemy was too powerful, and the Kennedy’s no longer had control of the incumbent administration.  Justice and the truth would be buried along with his brother.

At 1.15 a.m. on Sunday the 23rd of November 1963, J. Edgar Hoover telephoned Captain Will Fritz in Dallas.  Since Oswald had now been charged with both the murders of J. D. Tippit and President Kennedy, Hoover ordered Captain Fritz to hurry the transfer of Oswald from the city to the county jail.  Shortly after terminating the phone call with Captain Fritz, a member of Fritz’s team contacted Parkland Memorial Hospital and ordered them to be on standby for an emergency.  Several of the police in Dallas had already raised their concerns with Captain Fritz about the lack of security surrounding Oswald, and had discussed the possibility of how easy it would be for an assassin to kill him.  At 2.15 a.m. several anonymous phone calls were placed to the Dallas Police Headquarters, the Dallas FBI Field Office, and the local Sheriff’s Office, the anonymous caller warned that Oswald would be murdered during his transfer from the city to the county jail later that day.  The calls were all later traced to the home of Jack Ruby.  Despite the numerous warnings and direct death threats; neither Captain Fritz nor Chief of Police Curry did anything to improve security surrounding Oswald.

Despite the lateness of the hour; President Johnson was awake and shaping his lasting legacy; his latest action was to undo one of the single most important pieces of legislation President Kennedy had ever signed.  President Johnson put his signature to National Security Action Memorandum #273, with one stroke of his pen President Johnson cancelled President Kennedy’s commitment to pull out of Vietnam, and instead committed America to twelve long years of war, a war that would cost the lives of thee million people all told, both soldiers and civilians.   Johnson did this terrible action with a smile on his face; and whooping triumphantly he gave the order to a disbelieving and incredulous John McNamara to, ‘Win the war!’

10:01 a.m. J. Edgar Hoover had to give President Johnson a damning report, it was his opinion and the opinion of his experts that it was not Lee Harvey Oswald who had been photographed at the Soviet Embassy in Mexico City, or Oswald’s voice recorded on the telephoned conversations allegedly intercepted going into the embassy.  President Johnson informed Hoover that his report left him ‘confused’, the CIA was telling him for certain it was Oswald in both sets of evidence.  Hoover made the situation clearer; if it was not Oswald in the photographs and on the tapes; then it meant that someone was deliberately impersonating Oswald in order to make his activities in the months leading up to the assassination look suspicious, clear evidence of a wider conspiracy.     Hoover asked President Johnson not to tell anyone of the news he had imparted; only a few select people in the FBI knew the truth of the matter.   Hoover left the phone call with salient words of warning, ‘The case as it stands now isn’t strong enough to be able to get a conviction’.

11.00 a.m. Jack Ruby pulled up outside of the Dallas Police Headquarters, leaving his beloved dog, Sheba, in the unlocked car; he made his way into the basement car-park of the Police Headquarters.  Once in the basement he joined the throng of fifty reporters who were waiting to document Oswald’s transfer to the Federal Prison.  Many of the reporters had seen Ruby a lot over the past few days, and assumed he was from one of the local newspapers; his presence there that morning did not therefore draw any suspicions from them.

11.19 a.m. Tom Howard, a local attorney who was regularly used by Jack Ruby and other Dallas Mafiosi, entered the upper levels of Dallas City Hall; and made his way to the jail house.  He stood for a few moments and watched as Lee Harvey Oswald was placed into the elevator that would take him down to the basement car-park.  Detective H. L. McGee recognised Howard, and walked over to him, he asked if there was anything he could do for Howard.  Howard shook his head and replied, ‘That’s all I wanted to see’, before he promptly left the building again.

11.20 a.m. NBC’s news cameras rolled as Lee Harvey Oswald entered the basement car-park of the Dallas Police Headquarters; he was flanked by Detective Leavelle on his right, Detective Graves on his left, Captain Fritz and Lieutenant Swain walked in front of him, he was then followed by Detective Montgomery.   After Oswald had taken only a few short paces, Jack Ruby lunged out of the throng of reporters and shoved a .38 Colt Cobra into Oswald’s stomach.  Pulling the trigger; Oswald fell to the ground with a pained grunt; Ruby lunged forward again as if to take a headshot; but was wrestled back by the now panicked police officers.  Lee Harvey Oswald had become the first ever person to be murdered live on television.  Oswald was dragged back into the corridor from whence he had come.  With no signs of life; two of the police officers began to desperately give him artificial respiration.  Unbeknown to the two officers, two of the major arteries leading to Oswald’s heart had been severed by the bullet, so the chest compressions carried out by them to help save Oswald’s life, actually hastened his demise.

11.25 a.m. Jack Ruby had been manhandled up to the cells on the fifth floor.   There was no need for the police to ask him who he was or search for any identification, thirty-six of the police officers in the basement that morning, and four of Oswald’s five escorting officers, knew Jack Ruby personally, counted him among their friends even, he had brought them coffee and sandwiches most days, entertained them for free at his club most nights.  Emptying out his pockets they discovered that they were empty apart from a wad of banknotes totalling $2000.  He asked for a cigarette, and sat sweating profusely, shaking like a leaf, smoking heavily upon the cigarette as if gripped by a great fear.

In the Whitehouse the television had been switched on in the Oval Office; so that President Johnson could watch the coverage of President Kennedy’s funeral preparations.  President Johnson recalled later that when he saw Ruby shoot Oswald out of the corner of his eye; he believed for a moment that someone had re-tuned the television to a gangster movie.  Then to his horror he realised what had happened.  Johnson immediately stormed out of the oval office in a fit of rage, and thundered his way into the Blue Room, where Robert Kennedy sat working.  President Johnson turned on the television and Robert Kennedy watched in stunned silence as the aftermath of the murder of the man accused of assassinating his brother played out.  ‘You’ve got to do something...We’ve got to get involved. It’s giving the United States a bad name around the world!’  President Johnson raged to the numb Robert Kennedy, before thundering out of the room again; slamming the door behind him. Johnson then sat brooding impotently in the oval office, his aides and advisors too scared to approach him until his mountainous anger had passed.

Within minutes of the shooting Lee Harvey Oswald was in an ambulance being taken to Parkland Memorial Hospital.  All the way there the paramedics fought to save Oswald, continuing the disastrous artificial respiration started by the cops.  Once they had arrived at the hospital, Detective Jim Leavelle, who had travelled with Oswald in the ambulance, ordered the doctors to dig the bullet out of Oswald’s abdomen and give it to him as evidence.  This they duly did, and Leavelle had a nurse scratch her initials onto the bullet to help verify the chain of custody.  Meanwhile Oswald was rushed into surgery; where it was discovered that Ruby’s bullet had ripped through Oswald’s spleen, pancreas, liver, and the right kidney.  The damage to his internal organs was devastating.  President Johnson consumed by his furious mood telephoned Parkland Memorial Hospital.  He got the doctor who was performing the life and death surgery on Oswald on the telephone; and press-ganged him into allowing an FBI officer into the operating room.  President Johnson demanded that the doctors elicit a ‘deathbed confession’ from Oswald.

At the same time that President Johnson was haranguing the bemused and stressed surgeon, the news cameras in Washington captured Jackie Kennedy dressed in her mourning attire, with her children, on the north portico of the Whitehouse.  They watched as President Kennedy departed the Whitehouse for the last time in the funeral cortege that would lead the former President’s body on a slow and steady progression to the rotunda on Capitol Hill.

At 2.07 p.m. Lee Harvey Oswald died on the operating table at Parkland Memorial Hospital, much to President Johnson’s chagrin; Oswald never did make a deathbed confession.

Shortly after 2.15 p.m. Jack Ruby was informed of Lee Harvey Oswald’s death.  It was stated that Ruby’s demeanour changed instantly, turning from a sweating nervous wreck, a shell of a man who looked like he might be on the verge of a fatal heart-attack, to his usual confident smiling swaggering self.  One of the detectives offered Ruby another cigarette, and Ruby informed the officer that he didn’t smoke.  Suddenly Ruby began talking freely to the cops, telling them that he had entered the basement car-park via the ramp that gave cars access to the street.  The two cops who had been on duty guarding this ramp denied having seen Ruby or having granted him access to the basement.  When asked why he had murdered Oswald, Ruby replied simply, ‘I did it for you, because you guys couldn’t’.   At 3:00 p.m. Jack Ruby was taken from his cell to the Homicide Bureau; where Captain Will Fritz and FBI agent C. Ray Hall interviewed him more formally.  The interview was not properly recorded; and as a result two different minutes of the interview were drawn up, one by the Dallas police and one by the FBI.  The Dallas police’s minutes stated that Oswald was talkative; and discussed in great detail just how he had gained entry to the basement car-park via the street level ramp.  The FBI reported that Ruby did not disclose any information whatsoever; and went ‘no comment’ throughout the interview.

4:00 p.m. J. Edgar Hoover telephoned the Whitehouse and discussed Oswald’s assassination with President Johnson.  Hoover was concerned about how Oswald’s death would be perceived by the public, ‘The thing I am most concerned about...is having something issued so we can convince the public that Oswald is the real assassin’.  After the telephone conversation Hoover drafted a memo in which he bitterly noted, ‘There is nothing further on the Oswald case except that he is dead’.  Independently of this conversation between President Johnson and Hoover, the Deputy Attorney General, Nicholas deBellville Katzenbach, was filled with worry over the death of Oswald, and how no hope of a trial to finally put pay to any nagging doubts about Oswald and his guilt would play with the public, so after some thought he wrote to President Johnson suggesting a Presidential Commission, ‘of unimpeachable personnel to review and examine the evidence and to announce its conclusions...The public must be satisfied that Oswald was the assassin; that he had no confederates who are still at large; and that evidence was such that he would have been convicted at trial...Speculation about Oswald's motivation ought to be cut off...Unfortunately the facts on Oswald seem about too pat-too obvious (Marxist, Cuba, Russian wife, etc)...We need something to head off public speculation or Congressional hearings of the wrong sort’.  At first President Johnson was weary of becoming involved in a formal and politicised murder investigation, a process for which there was no legal precedent.  President Johnson telephoned Katzenbach and torpedoed his suggestion, stating that the matter should be left to the everyday legal processes, a police investigation, an FBI report submitted to the Attorney General, and a normal Court of Inquiry in Texas.  This quickly changed when President Johnson heard one simple comment on the news that sent his blood boiling again.  ABC’s Howard K. Smith stated, ‘We don’t know if Oswald really committed the crime, and perhaps we will never know’.  This infuriated the easily riled President, and so he decided there and then that, ‘some kind of report and process must take place that will convince the American public that Oswald was the actual assassin’.  So with the ink barely dry on the Katzenbach memo, and Howard K. Smith’s words ringing in President Johnson’s ears, the Warren Commission was rather impetuously conceived.

Monday the 25th of November 1963.  At 11.00 a.m. Jack Ruby was given his second formal interview, this time specifically by the FBI; and for the purposes of them to conduct a polygraph (lie detector) test.  For the first time; in this interview Ruby set out his formal defence, that the murder was a spare of the moment thing, motivated by his desire to spare Jackie Kennedy the heartache of having to return to Dallas for an inevitable and protracted trial.  The results of the polygraph test were heavily criticised, standard procedures were ignored which made falsehoods harder to determine, and the machines sensitivity was reduced to its lowest possible setting, meaning it could not pick up on the little tell tale fluctuations in blood-pressure, perspiration and heart-rate that the device was dependent upon working off.  Despite this the machine did detect a clear lie from Ruby; a whopper of a lie, when asked if he had been part of a wider conspiracy to murder President Kennedy, and Ruby answered no, the machine went wild.

Tuesday the 26th of November 1963, Jack Ruby was formally charged with the murder of Lee Harvey Oswald.  Despite the fact that he had murdered Oswald in a room full of cops, on live television, and subsequently failed a lie detector test, it had taken the police longer to charge Ruby with the murder of Oswald; than it did for the police to charge Lee Harvey Oswald for the murders of Tippit and the President, on evidence that even the director of the FBI felt wasn’t strong enough to be able to get a conviction.

On Friday the 29th of November 1963, exactly one week after the assassination of President Kennedy, and with the alleged assassin’s assassin behind bars charged with murder, President Lyndon B. Johnson officially signed Executive Order No. 11103, formally creating a Commission with a purview to evaluate all of the evidence, facts and circumstances around the deaths of President John Fitzgerald Kennedy, Officer J. D. Tippit and Lee Harvey Oswald.

Commensurate With The Dignity of Their Lives: The Investigations

The Federal Bureau of Investigation Report

The seeds that led to such wide ranging conspiracy theories surrounding the assassination of President Kennedy; were planted during the initial FBI investigation into the President’s murder.  FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover was aware of the damage such rumours and conspiracies could have to a nation’s morale, he wanted to show the world that after such devastating events that it was business as usual for America.  The last thing anyone needed were doubts hanging in the air that could be formulated into political accusations and a possible excuse for war.  On Sunday the 24th of November 1963, Hoover informed his agents that he wanted, ‘something issued so we can convince the public that Oswald was the real assassin’.  Embarrassingly the FBI already had quite the thick dossier on Oswald; thanks to his defection shenanigans, and his high profile public support for Cuban President Fidel Castro, so the job was a lot easier than it might have first appeared; the FBI report gave a precise of Oswald’s life and the events running up to the assassination, and also dealt with the fatal events of Friday the 22nd of November 1963 themselves.

Lee Harvey Oswald was born on Wednesday the 18th of October 1939, his father Robert Edward Lee Oswald had died of a heart attack two months before Oswald was born.  Oswald spent the first five years of his life in New Orleans; with his mother Frances and his brother, Robert, before Frances moved the family to Dallas, Texas, in 1944.  Oswald was a precocious child, hitting an above average IQ of 103.  Like many children with a high IQ, Oswald was withdrawn, finding it difficult to make friends, and also prone to mood swings and outbursts of anger if he didn’t get his own way.  This was a trait he carried throughout his life.   In 1952 his temper got the better of him; and he ended up striking his mother and threatening his auntie with a pocket knife.  This little outburst of temper prematurely ended a potential family move to New York, where the Oswald’s had planned to live with their Uncle John Pic and his wife. After his little performance; Oswald was assessed by a psychiatrist, who stated that Oswald lived in a vivid fantasy life where he was obsessed with the ideas of omnipotence and power.  Oswald reported to Dr. Renatus Hartogs that he fantasised that he was all powerful, that he disliked everyone, and sometimes fantasised about killing people.  All in all Dr. Hartogs diagnosed Oswald as having ‘traits of a greatly disturbed person’, he was suffering the impact of emotional isolation and a lack of affection, the product of ‘a rejection from a self-involved and conflicted mother’, which had led to him being severely detached and having a personality disturbance with schizoid features and passive aggressive tendencies.  A judge questioned whether Frances Oswald might have been indulging Oswald too much; to make up for her being emotionally distant, exacerbating Oswald’s feelings of self-importance and over inflating his already deluded ego.  For a few weeks the question of whether Oswald should be taken off Frances for his own good hung in the air like a heavy stench.  As soon as Frances Oswald heard this disturbing rumour she hightailed it back to New Orleans before the judge could make an official decision.  After that close call Frances just kept moving, by the age of seventeen Oswald had lived at twenty-two different addresses and attended twelve different schools.  This is behaviour which today any teacher is on the lookout for, as it can be a clear indicator of some physical or emotional abuse going on within the family.  Unable to find stability; Oswald also found it difficult to knuckle down and apply himself; no wonder then that he tried to find an identity that would make him standout.  At the age of fifteen Oswald declared himself a Marxist, in a capitalist country in the middle of a Cold War with a communist regime; this obvious cry for attention probably marked Oswald out as being worst than a devil worshipper.  His school friends stated that Oswald was a deeply bitter child who often commented that it was unfair that his father had died before he was born, and that he had been given a ‘raw deal out of life’.

At seventeen Oswald left high school, without graduating, and joined the Marines.  Oswald did this for two reasons, he was following in his brothers footsteps, and Oswald idolised his brother, secondly he wanted to escape his mother’s apron-strings.  Despite his previous dalliances with socialism/Marxism, Oswald was granted a security clearance to handle classified military intelligence.  He was trained to use radar; and assigned to Marine Corps Air Station El Toro, then he was posted to Naval Air Facility Atsugi in Japan, a place that was a known front for Top Secret Naval Intelligence operations.   Here Oswald learned to use firearms, his shooting wasn’t particularly spectacular, he was first recorded as a Sharpshooter, excellent for a civilian, average for a Marine, and then was downgraded to a Marksman, good for a civilian, poor for a Marine.  He wasn’t a very popular Marine, and his fellow Marine’s felt that he was ‘sloppy’ and a ‘troublemaker’, he had no friends in his unit; and was resentful of authority.  Oswald was court-marshalled and demoted after he shot himself in the elbow with a privately owned and unregistered .22 derringer.  For this offence he was reduced in rank from a Private First Class to a simple lowly Private.  He was then placed in the brig for letting his temper get the better of him and punching the Sergeant he felt was responsible for the shooting incident.  Oswald’s medical records show that he was treated for a venereal disease, but was not kicked out of the Marine Corp as would be usual, because his infection occurred, ‘in the line of duty, not due to his own misconduct’.  What Oswald could have been doing as part of his duties to get infected with a venereal disease is lost to history, but might hint at something the FBI failed address further, covert operations perhaps?   Whilst in the Marines; Oswald also took it upon himself to learn Russian, but when he took a proficiency exam in the subject he came out with just a poor rating.  Oswald was released from active duty on Friday the 11th of September 1959; he claimed that his mother couldn’t fend for herself; and that she desperately needed his help.  Oswald was given a special Hardship Discharge because of the sob story he had given his superiors.  This also meant that rather than his ties being completely severed with the Marines; he was placed on the Marines Corp reserve list.  After what transpired over the next few weeks he was taken off the reserve list; and given a full retrospective Undesirable Discharge.

Whilst in the Marines, Oswald had applied for a passport, and he received it the day before his leaving the armed forces.  He had also saved up his pay and had a nest egg of $1,600; which in today’s money would have a buying power equivalent to $12,000.  Oswald informed his family that he was going to take some time out using his savings to travel and study abroad, arranging to attend the Albert Schweitzer College in Switzerland.  On Friday the 9th of October 1959, Oswald sailed into Southampton, England, on the SS Marion Lykes.   Here he arranged for a flight to Helsinki on the same day.  At Helsinki, Oswald arranged for a tourists visa to enter Russia.  He received his tourist’s visa on Wednesday the 14th of October 1959, and the very next day he crossed over into Soviet Russia.  He then travelled by train from Vainikkala to Moscow; arriving there on Friday the 16th of October 1959.  That evening he told his tourist guide that he wished to defect.  When interviewed by the Russian officials; Oswald informed them that he had been a Marine Corp radar operator and that he had been privy to secret information that would be of interest to the Russians, he would be willing to give them this information once his Russian citizenship had been confirmed.  On Wednesday the 21st of October 1959, Oswald was informed that his application for Soviet citizenship had been refused and he would be deported that night back to America.  Oswald was crushed, later that evening Oswald slit his left wrist whilst he lay in the bath.  He was taken to a psychiatric hospital; where he needed five stitches in his wrist and he was kept under observation.  Oswald was released from the psychiatric hospital on Saturday the 31st of October 1959, upon leaving the hospital he went straight to the American embassy and spoke to Embassy Staff member Richard Snyder.  He told Snyder he wished to renounce his American citizenship.  The news reached America and became a front page headline, a former Marine and top secret Radar operator defecting.  Now the Russian’s were a canny lot, and they suddenly realised they had an excellent propaganda coo in their midst.  So on Monday the 16th of November 1959, Oswald was informed that although he was not being given full Soviet citizenship, he would be allowed to stay indefinitely in Russia as a ‘resident alien’.  He was promptly shipped off to Minsk with much pomp and circumstance; and put to work in the Gorizont Electronics plant as a lathe operator.  To keep Oswald sweet, Communist party officials arranged for him to be placed in an apartment that was relative luxury compared to his co-workers’ abodes, and for him to be given a pay grade that far outranked his menial job.  Oswald wasn’t trusted, he was placed under constant surveillance, his phone calls were tapped; and all of his closest friends were in fact KGB stooges, the genuine locals treated Oswald with nothing but contempt and fear.   Oswald began to believe that he was being treated like a fool, he had expected to come to Russia and be treated as some kind of hero; instead he felt like a forgotten and unappreciated factory worker.  He also realised that his immense pay salary was worthless, there was nowhere and nothing to spend his money on in Minsk; Russia simply didn’t have the amenities and mod-cons of a modern American city.  Oswald began to regret his rash decision to defect.  In January and February, March and May of 1961 Oswald wrote to the American Embassy asking for his passport back; and for all possible charges of treason against him to be dropped.  He then repeatedly kept writing in the subsequent months asking for updates on his request.

On Friday the 17th of March 1961, Oswald met nineteen year old Marina Nikolayevna Prusakova at a local dance.  Her step-father had been a fairly well respected KGB officer in Arkhangelsk, and at the time of meeting Oswald; Marina had been living with her uncle Ilya Prusakov, a much feared member of the secret police.  Marina had allegedly moved to Minsk to study pharmacology.  It’s fair to say that it was a whirlwind romance, for the couple met and married within six weeks, which in itself led some researchers to ask if Marina might have been put up to seducing Oswald by the KGB.  The FBI’s report barely mentions Oswald’s wife, and its seems that their investigation into her past was equally perfunctory, for if they had done a little more digging they would have discovered some very worrying facts indeed.   It seemed that Oswald was not the first defector that Marina had taken a fancy too; Robert Webster had defected to the USSR in 1959, after he had been caught in a classic KGB ‘honey-pot’ trap.   Webster had lived in Leningrad with the woman who had seduced him into defecting to Russia; and giving over his industrial secrets.  Whilst in Leningrad, Webster reported that he was approached by Marina Oswald; and that she too had tried to strike up a friendship with him.  Marina Oswald denied having ever met Webster; however she was later unable to explain why Webster’s address was written in her address book. Interestingly the Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Norman Mailer; stated as fact in his journalistic endeavour ‘Oswald Tales’ that not only was Marina a member of the KGB, but she was also involved in the type of ‘honey-pot’ schemes that entrapped Robert Webster.   Based in a hotel in Leningrad, Marina was used as what the KGB termed a ‘swallow’, an attractive young woman who seduced a target; and exploited the trust that forms between lovers; worming out the targets secrets.  Eventually this honey-pot gang dissolved when the hotel management began to believe they were just a gang of common all garden prostitutes; and chased them from the hotel.  Nevertheless after the failure of this honey-pot scheme; Marina allegedly continued to hobnob with high-up government officials and diplomats.   Whilst her connection to the KGB is not an iron clad fact, the evidence is certainly persuasive, especially when one realises that in communist Russia people were not exactly free to marry whomever they wanted.  In order to marry a foreign national, even one who wished to defect, Marina would have had to have secured permission from the KGB; further to this Petr Deryabin asserts that permission was only granted with the caveat that the potential bride became an asset of the KGB.  The CIA were certainly not convinced by Marina’s protests of innocence and portrayal as a shocked and grieving widow.  They carried out their own investigation into Marina’s background; and drew up a report that listed twenty-nine indications that she was in fact a Russian spy.  One of the CIA’s major concerns was Marina lying about her ability to speak English.  In her dealings with the FBI; and later the Warren Commission, Marina hid behind the facade of not being able to speak a word of English and requiring a translator, yet the CIA discovered a veritable mountain of evidence that Marina was quite adept at the English tongue:

1.      As far back as 1961 Marina and Oswald were sending letters to each other written in English.

2.     Robert Webster stated that when he knew Marina in Leningrad she spoke good English, although inflected with a heavy accent.

3.     Back in Russia; photographs were discovered with descriptions written on the reverse side by Marina in both Russian and English.

4.     Upon searching Marina’s apartment as part of their investigation, Dallas police uncovered a notebook owned by Marina, in which she had written notes to herself in English.

5.     Her boss; a chap called James Martin, who also subsequently became Marina’s lover, stated that Marina understood all instructions given to her in English.  She had read her contract without any difficulty, and signed it to signify her understanding; the contract had of course been written in English.  In fact when James Martin later attempted to tell the Warren Commission this, and a lot more about Marina’s dodgy background, that she herself had failed to disclose, Martin found himself suddenly interrupted by Earl Warren; who ordered the stenographer to tear up the records of Martin’s evidence.

6.     Marguerite Oswald stated that she had many conversations with her daughter-in-law after her arrival in the United States; all of these conversations had been conducted in English.

7.     Marina had spoken to staff at the Reilly Coffee Company; when Oswald had been employed there; and the staff reported that Marina spoke perfect English.

All this evidence; and the FBI never once mentioned any of these lingering doubts in their report.  They also failed to mention that Marina had told them that she had been receiving English lessons from one George Bola, who just happened to be Jack Ruby’s next door neighbour.  The CIA certainly noticed the inconsistencies, coincidences and peculiarities in her story, and they kept tabs on Marina for several years after the assassination, when Marina wanted her side of the story put to the public, the CIA made sure that one of their assets did the job, although why the CIA should want such editorial control over Marina’s life story is unknown.   Priscilla Johnson was selected to author ‘Marina and Lee’, given the fact that Johnson had previously met both Oswald and Marina; when she had worked for the American embassy in Moscow during Oswald’s defection.  Donald Jameson, the CIA’s Chief of the Soviet Russia Division comment in a memo, ‘I think that Miss Johnson can be encouraged to write pretty much the articles we want’.  Despite all these inconsistencies and clandestine shenanigans; the official FBI report into President Kennedy’s assassination happily reported that Marina was simply a shocked and grieving widow; confused and hurt by the whirlwind of events she had been caught up within.

On Saturday the 8th of July 1961, Oswald attended the American Embassy where he signed documentation confirming that he had not taken an oath of allegiance to the USSR.  He also confirmed that he had not been granted Soviet citizenship; by giving the Embassy staff his Soviet ‘stateless’ passport.  On Monday the 10th of July 1961, Oswald returned to the embassy where he completed the paperwork to regain his American passport.  On Friday the 18th of August 1961, the State Department authorised the return of Oswald’s passport.  Despite receiving his passport back in the summer of 1961, by January 1962 Oswald was still living in Russia.  It was from Russia that he wrote to the Naval Secretary; his alleged future victim John B. Connally; protesting his undesirable discharge from the Marines.  On Thursday the 15th of February 1962, Marina gave birth to the Oswald’s first child, a daughter who they called June.  On Saturday the 24th of February 1962, Oswald applied for a repatriation loan for him and his family, the request was denied.  On Wednesday the 7th of March 1962, the State Department reversed this decision; and gave Oswald $435.71; this was for the express reason of getting Oswald and his family back to the United States of America.

On Wednesday the 13th of June 1962, Lee Harvey Oswald, Marina and June docked at Hoboken, New Jersey; Oswald disembarked the SS Maasdam expecting a heroes return, press and family eagerly awaiting the return of the prodigal son.  He was greeted by nothing and no one.  Instead the young family quietly shuffled through immigration; and stated that they would be living at 7313 Davenport Street, Fort Worth, Texas, living with Robert Oswald, the brother that Oswald had once idolised.  In view of his attempted defection, Oswald was placed under immediate FBI scrutiny, he was interviewed by the FBI on Tuesday the 26th of June 1962, where he was said to be rude and curt.  He denied renouncing his American citizenship; and also denied that he had given away any state secrets.  He fervently denied that he had been turned and recruited by the Soviet Secret Service.  Ludicrously Oswald claimed that his antics in Russia and his attempted-defection had simply been an extended holiday.  He claimed that he had stayed in Russia for so long simply because the bureaucracy in getting Marina out of the country had been lengthy and complicated.

In September 1962, Oswald began to subscribe to ‘The Worker’, an east coast based Communist magazine, Oswald had previously been seen reading copies of this publication when he was in the Marines.  On Monday the 11th of March 1963; ‘The Militant’ the magazine of the Socialist Workers Party, printed a letter signed L. H. of Dallas; the FBI concluded that Oswald was the author of this letter.

When Marina Oswald was interviewed by the FBI; she informed the agents who interviewed her that President Kennedy had not been the first assassination that Oswald had attempted.  On the night of Wednesday the 10th of April 1963, Oswald had skipped a typewriting class; and had instead gone to the home of General Edwin Walker, a strident anti-Castro mouthpiece in the local Dallas media.  Outside the generals’ home; Oswald had hidden in some bushes and had fired a rifle at the general.  Oswald had thankfully missed his target, the bullet striking the window frame, and he had fled the scene.  The bullet fired at General Walker was recovered by the FBI and tested, unfortunately it was too badly mutilated and distorted for them to match it to Oswald’s firearm, however it did display some of the same ‘characteristics’ as the bullets fired from Oswald’s rifle.

By June 1963, Oswald was living in New Orleans.  He wrote to the editor of ‘The Worker’ magazine; and informed them that he had set up a New Orleans branch of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee.  He asked the magazine to send him as much literature and leaflets as they could; so that he could hand them out on the streets of New Orleans and garner support for the movement.  He subsequently wrote to Gus Hall and Benjamin Davies Jnr, respectively the General Secretary and National Secretary of the Communist Party of America, in his letters he included honorary membership cards for the New Orleans branch of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee.  At this time Oswald had took to wandering around New Orleans; wearing a sandwich board that read, ‘Hands Off Cuba!’ and, ‘Viva Fidel!’  On Friday the 9th of August 1963, Oswald had been arrested in New Orleans and charged with ‘Disturbing the Peace by Creating a Scene’.  He had been passing out leaflets in Canal Street, when three Cuban immigrants had taken umbrage with his pro-Castro stance.  Oswald had received a $10 fine for this offence.  Before his arrest; he had appeared on local radio supporting Castro, and on Friday the 26th of July 1963, Oswald had appeared on ‘Conversation Carte Blanche’ on Station WDSU.  In this radio programme; Oswald put an argument forward for ending the sanctions levelled against Cuba, and he even ventured some mild support for President Kennedy; when he stated that he did not agree with Fidel Castro when he called Kennedy ‘a ruffian and a thief’.   On Saturday the 17th of August 1963, Oswald gave a further interview, this time on television, where he identified himself as a Marxist, and advocated America being more lenient in its commercial and political dealings with Cuba.  Again in this interview Oswald did not display any hard-line politics against President Kennedy or his administration, his primary concern was, like his organisation stated; fair play for Cuba.

On Wednesday the 25th of September 1963, Marina and June Oswald left New Orleans bound for Dallas.  Lee Harvey Oswald was not with his wife and child at this time.  The FBI surmised; after viewing surveillance photographs of the Russian Embassy in Mexico City; that Oswald was in all probability travelling via bus to Mexico during this timeframe.  Oswald needed a visa to get into Mexico, and low and behold if not stood in front of Oswald in the queue as he waited to get his visa, was an off duty CIA agent; also trying to get a tourist visa for Mexico.  Agent William Gaudet somehow got a good look at the man stood quietly behind him, and was able to later confirm that this man was Lee Harvey Oswald.  How was he able to remember the unassuming Oswald months after simply being stood in front of him in a queue?  Well, Gaudet claimed that Oswald was a bit of a local character in New Orleans, and he’d seen Oswald wearing his sandwich board and handing out ‘Fair Play For Cuba’ leaflets.

The FBI tracked down a Dr. and Mrs John McFarland of Liverpool, England, who confirmed that they had befriended a man they positively identified as Oswald on a coach trip from Houston, Texas to Mexico City.  Oswald had told Dr. McFarland that he was going to go to Cuba to meet Fidel Castro.  The FBI traced Oswald to the Hotel del Comercio in Mexico City; where he was registered as staying from Friday the 27th of September 1963 until Tuesday the 1st of October 1963.  On further investigation the FBI discovered that Oswald had visited the Cuban Embassy; and attempted to get a tourist visa to Cuba.  When he was told that this would not be possible without first obtaining a Russian visa, Oswald allegedly had one of his legendary fits of temper.  Oswald subsequently went to the Russian embassy; and attempted to gain a tourist visa to enter Russia, given his previous attempted defection to Russia and then repatriation back to America; the request was obviously flatly denied.  Oswald was incensed by this; and allegedly created quite the scene; some reports even suggested Oswald brandished a gun.   The CIA also informed the FBI that they had in their possession several taped phone calls intercepted going into the Russian embassy; which held on them conversations Oswald had with embassy staff, proving that Oswald was in Mexico at this time.

Back in Dallas; Oswald began looking for work and applying for various jobs.  There seemed to be nothing in the locations of the jobs he applied for that indicated he was looking for work in a specific location, i.e. on the route of the up and coming Presidential motorcade.  On Tuesday the 15th of October 1963, Oswald applied for the job at the Texas School Book Depository; he was hired on the spot; and given instructions to start work the very next day.  Five days later, on Sunday the 20th of October 1963, Marina gave birth to the couple’s second child, Audrey Marina Rachel Oswald.  The next night Oswald for some reason attended a right wing rally, where he listened to his former attempted victim; General Walker; give one of his regular right wing rants.

On Tuesday the 29th of October 1963, FBI Agent James Hosty; the man assigned to investigate Oswald after his defection, interviewed Marina at her home, when Oswald found out about this interview he was furious, and wrote Hosty a letter denouncing the ‘harassment’ of his wife.  Hosty was unperturbed, and on Tuesday the 5th of November 1963 Hosty returned to interview Marina Oswald once again.  Oswald had instructed Marina to get Hosty’s car registration number; if he were to ‘harass’ her any further, this Marina dutifully did, and passed Hosty’s car registration number on to Oswald, what Oswald wanted the registration number for remains unclear.  On Tuesday the 12th of November 1963, Oswald personally attended his local FBI office, where he hand delivered a further communication to Hosty, allegedly warning Hosty to stay away from his wife.

Lee Harvey Oswald had been renting 1026 North Beckley Street in Dallas; under the name of O. H. Lee; he had lived there since becoming estranged from Marina on Monday the 14th of October 1963.  Every weekend he would travel to Irving, Texas, where he would meet Marina, and see his daughters.  On Thursday the 21st of November 1963, Oswald asked his colleague Buell W. Frazier for a lift to Irving a day earlier than usual; as he needed to collect some curtain rods from his ex-landlady, a Mrs Ruth Paine.  Oswald arrived that evening at 2515 West Fifth Street, and he failed to mention any curtain rods to Mrs Paine, and certainly did not take any away with him, however it was deduced that this was the point where Oswald collected the 6.5 mm Carcano Model 91/38 rifle (more commonly referred to as the Mannlicher-Carcano by most buffs) which had been left wrapped in a blanket in the garage of 2515 West Fifth Street.  Oswald had bought the Mannlicher-Carcano in March 1963; via mail order from Klein’s Sporting Goods store of Chicago. Oswald had used the name A. Hidell of PO Box 2915, Dallas, Texas, and the gun had been paid for with a thirty dollar postal order.  At the same time Oswald used the same pseudonym and postal address to purchase the .38 Special Smith and Wesson revolver, serial number V510210, from George Rose and Company Incorporated of Los Angeles, California.   Oswald once again used a thirty dollar postal order to buy this weapon.   Tests carried out by FBI handwriting experts determined that both of these postal orders had been written out by Lee Harvey Oswald.

On the morning of Friday the 22nd of November 1963, Oswald was seen entering the Texas Book Depository carrying a long package, Buel W. Frazier described it as a long sack.  When questioned about the sacks content, Oswald had told Frazier that the sack contained the curtain rods he had collected the previous evening from his former landlady.   At 12:00 p.m. Oswald asked his colleague Charles D. Givens to close the elevator door once he had reached the ground floor, so that Oswald could summon the elevator to take him to the sixth floor.  This, the FBI stated, was the last time any employee of the Texas School Book Depository saw Oswald until after the assassination.

After the assassination, at 12.32 p.m. Oswald was found in the canteen on the second floor of the Texas School Book Depository; by Warehouse Superintendent Roy S. Truly.  Shortly afterwards Mr Truly realised that Oswald was the only employee missing from the building and so informed the police.   At this time Oswald had walked the seven blocks to a bus stop.  Bus driver, Cecil J. McWatters, was able to identify Oswald as a passenger who had boarded his bus, as McWatters remembered that he had just heard the news of President Kennedy having been shot, and he had commented to Oswald, ‘I wonder where they shot the President’, to which Oswald replied, ‘They shot him in the temple’.  On the bus was one of Oswald’s former landladies, a Mrs Mary E. Bledsoe.  Mrs Bledsoe noted that Oswald’s clothing was dirty, and that he appeared ‘nervous’.  She stated that Oswald travelled only two blocks before disembarking the bus a short walk from where he had boarded.   From the bus he hired a taxi, the driver; William W. Whaley stated that he picked Oswald up from the Greyhound Bus Terminal Taxi Stand.  Whaley dropped Oswald two and three quarter miles away at the 500 block of North Beckley Street, some little distance from where Oswald was currently residing.

At 1.00 p.m. Oswald entered 1026 North Beckley Street; he went to his room where he collected his jacket and .38 Special Smith and Wesson.  Mrs Earlene Roberts, Oswald’s current Landlady, discovered the guns discarded holster in Oswald’s bedroom later that afternoon.   Oswald left 1026 North Beckley Street; and made his way 0.86 miles to 10th Street and Patton Avenue.  Here Patrol Officer J. D. Tippit pulled up alongside Oswald; and engaged him in a brief conversation before at 1:15 p.m. Oswald shot Officer Tippit with the .38 Special Smith and Wesson.   Of the thirteen witnesses to the shooting six of them were able to positively identify Oswald as the shooter.  After murdering Officer Tippit, Oswald ran west along 10th Street, turning south onto Patton Avenue; before turning west onto Jefferson Boulevard.   Oswald was then observed entering the Texas Theatre; at 231 West Jefferson Boulevard, here the cashier; Julia Postal, telephoned the police to inform them that Oswald was hiding out in the movie theatre.  At 2:00 p.m. the police entered the Texas Theatre.  They found Oswald sat in the darkened auditorium, and as they approached Oswald attempted to fire his .38 Special Smith and Wesson, but the gun misfired and the police were able to apprehend Oswald without any further bloodshed.

Back at the Texas School Book Depository, Deputy Sherriff Seymour Weitzman and Officer Gene Boone had discovered the snipers nest in the south west corner of the sixth floor.  Next to the three spent bullet casings the officers discovered some brown paper; that was similar in appearance to what witnesses saw Oswald carrying his package in that morning, however none could positively identify the paper as being the exact same pieces.  In the northwest corner of the building; Weitzman and Boone discovered the Mannlicher-Carcano rifle that had been purchased by Oswald from Klein’s Sporting Goods.  One of the casings that had been discovered in the snipers nest was found to be dented in the neck area, this was found to be a mark unique to bullets fired from Oswald’s rifle, and was caused when bullet casings were rapidly ejected from the weapon.  Fragments of bullets taken from President Kennedy and Governor Connally were tested by the FBI and were confirmed to have been fired from Oswald’s rifle.  Oswald’s right palm print was also discovered on the underside of the rifle, but this had not been found until after Oswald’s death, as it had been hidden by the fore-grip.  It was suggested that this palm-print had been left on the gun as Oswald had been assembling it.  Oswald’s palm-print was also discovered on the boxes that had been used to form the snipers nest around the window of the depository.

The police made their way to Oswald’s home; where they discovered a photograph of Oswald stood in his back garden holding some communist newspapers; and brandishing both the weapons used in his crimes.  They also discovered a membership card for the Fair Play for Cuba Committee, of which Oswald claimed to be secretary; the card had been issued under the name of Alex James Hidell.  There was also a Selective Service Card; issued under the name Lee H. Oswald.  When confronted with the photograph; Oswald claimed that the police had superimposed his head onto somebody else’s body.   Dr. M. F. Mason took samples from Oswald’s hands and right cheek; and upon testing these discovered that Oswald had traces of nitrate on his hands, consistent with his having recently discharged a firearm.

The FBI concluded its report by stating that during the course of their investigation they had interviewed over two thousand people, and that they had ‘strengthened the evidence that Oswald was the assassin’.  Oswald had acted alone, there was in the FBI’s view, ‘No sound evidence indicating that he received any financial assistance; or that any other person, group, or foreign government inspired or directed the assassination or was cognizant of his plan to assassinate President Kennedy’.   The FBI believed that Oswald had fired three shots from the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository.  They believed that the first bullet struck President Kennedy in the back, the second struck Governor Connally; and the third hit President Kennedy in the head killing him.  The report ended, ‘Further investigation has developed no proof of any prior contact or association between Oswald and his murderer, Jack Ruby’.

The FBI Report has come in for as much criticism as any other investigation that has looked into President Kennedy’s death, yet it was clearly unduly rushed and badly researched, it omitted such important facts as Oswald’s Auntie Marilyn Murret being a CIA asset, every subsequent Commission and enquiry that spoke to her needed CIA approval, before her testimony was promptly classified on every occasion.  This relation proved a direct link between the assassin of the President; and the government agency the murdered President had been trying to shut down.  The FBI either failed to uncover this connection or deliberately suppressed it in their report, either shocking incompetence or deliberate omission for dubious purposes.  Then there was Ruth Paine; the woman who lived with Marina Oswald in the months leading up to the assassination, the woman who suggested to Oswald that he might try applying for a job at the Texas School Book Depository, the woman whose house Oswald slept in the night before the assassination, the woman’s whose house Oswald allegedly hid the weapon he would later murder the President with, the woman Marina classed as one of her best friends.  The FBI failed to mention anywhere in its report that Ruth Paine’s sister worked for the CIA, and that her father was a CIA asset.   There were others as well who also had links to both the CIA and Oswald; but who were given only the briefest mention in the FBI report.   Professor George de Mohrenschildt was for all intent and purpose a simple petroleum geologist, but who’d made himself very rich via this endeavour, so rich in fact that he was friends with the multimillionaire oil magnate, CIA officer and future President of the United States, George H. W. Bush, and the family of Jackie Kennedy, the Bouvier’s.  In fact Jackie had grown up calling de Mohrenschildt ‘Uncle George’.  This man who was the friend and confidant of Presidents and their kin was also peculiarly one of Lee Harvey Oswald’s only friends.  That’s right, a man the murdered victim’s wife called ‘uncle’ was best friends with the alleged killer, and the investigators failed to mention it anywhere in their report!  De Mohrenschildt was a Russian immigrant, originally from Mozyr; in modern day Belarus, his father had been arrested during the Russian revolution for the heinous crime of being rich and successful, and the family were forced to flee to Poland.  In May 1938 de Mohrenschildt emigrated to America, where British Intelligence immediately told the FBI that de Mohrenschildt was a Nazi spy.  Yet, despite this apparent Nazi allegiance, de Mohrenschildt began to work with a man named Pierre Fraiss, a member of the Marquises; the French Resistance.  The pair began to pass valuable information onto the French government; on how much the Nazis were bidding for valuable oil contracts.  As a result of de Mohrenschildt and Fraiss work; the French were able to undercut the Nazis and get the contracts for themselves.  When America entered the Second World War, de Mohrenschildt applied to join the Office of Strategic Services; he had high hopes of attaining the position as his brother, Dimitri, worked for the CIA; and counted many of the CIA top brass amongst his close personal friends.  de Mohrenschildt had his application turned down however, Richard Helms, the CIA director himself, sent a memo blocking de Mohrenschildt’s application; stating the allegations of de Mohrenschildt being a Nazi spy as the reason for the knockback.  After the war de Mohrenschildt joined the Pantepec Oil Company, where he was moved to Venezuela for a few years idyllic living, before moving back to Texas in 1952.    In 1957 he was sent to Yugoslavia by the State Department; on a geological survey.  Here he was detained and accused of spying on military instillations by local officials, he was returned to America with his tail between his legs, and was debriefed twice by the CIA.  He then went on an extended trip around Central America and the Caribbean, de Mohrenschildt explained that this was an extended honeymoon for his fourth wife; this didn’t explain his regular reports filed with the State Department, and his furtive meetings with the American Ambassador in Costa Rica.  When he returned home; de Mohrenschildt was debriefed by J. Walter Moore, as he always was whenever he returned from one of his ‘business trips’ or ‘vacations’ abroad.  J. Walter Moore was in point of fact a CIA agent, working for the Domestic Contacts Division, clear evidence if ever there was any needed that de Mohrenschildt was a CIA asset.  In 1962 de Mohrenschildt befriended Oswald, de Mohrenschildt being an eminent Russian émigré got to hear of all Russian immigrants coming to the Dallas area, and de Mohrenschildt stated that he and his wife befriended Oswald and Marina simply to help them integrate into Dallas’s Russian immigrant community.  At the time Oswald was living in nearby Fort Worth, and it was de Mohrenschildt who advised Oswald to move to Dallas itself, he even helped Oswald secure a job at Jaggars-Chiles-Stovall, a Dallas based photography firm.  In June 1963, de Mohrenschildt moved to Haiti to take up a position surveying oil and other geologically interesting sites on the island.  Before he left Dallas in May 1963, de Mohrenschildt had been briefed by the CIA and Army Intelligence in Washington D.C. about how he could help to further connections for the intelligence services whilst in Haiti.  It was stated that at this point de Mohrenschildt had no further contact with Oswald.  So we have another CIA asset involved in the life of the former defector and Presidential assassin, and yet the FBI’s official report barely mentioned de Mohrenschildt, it dealt with him in a few short lines, and it naturally never once mentioned his connections to the CIA.

Then there was the package that Buell Frazier and Linnie Mae Randle stated they saw Oswald carrying the morning of the assassination.  There were other witnesses, most notably Frazier and Randle’s mother, Mrs Essie Mae Williams, who stated categorically that Oswald carried no such package that morning, and that her son and daughter were either mistaken or deliberately lying for some reason.  Indeed a Psychological Stress Evaluation test carried out on Frazier indicated that he was indeed deliberately lying about the package he claimed Oswald had beencarrying.  It is also telling that out of all the witnesses who saw Oswald enter the Texas School Book Depository that day, Frazier was the only one willing to testify to Oswald carrying a package into the building.  The FBI also failed to mention that the paper found in the Texas School Book Depository, thought to have been the wrapper for the rifle package, wasn’t the nice clean cut evidence it first appeared to be.  You see in the 1980’s researcher Gary Shaw; uncovered a confidential FBI memo which stated categorically that the paper which the FBI thought Oswald had taken from the Texas School Book Depository to wrap his gun in, did not have the same properties as the paper the Depository used.  The paper was of a different colour, did not emit light through it in the same manner, and reacted differently under UV light, in other words the paper did not come from the School Book Depository.  There were also none of the tell tale marks or abrasions inside the package; that the forensic team would have expected to have found if there had been a bulky and heavy rifle carried in the paper, or indeed any of the telltale oil and grease residue that a rifle should have left behind, after all the Carcano had been immerged in Cosmoline before being shipped to Klein’s Sporting Goods, to prevent it corroding in the saltwater air of the Atlantic Ocean.  The FBI tried to explain this inconvenient fact away by suggesting that the rifle might have been wrapped in a cloth, but they could find no forensic evidence of such a cloth having been inside the package, or at the scene of the shooting, or in Oswald’s belongings.  The FBI were also unable to answer why the incriminating wrapping paper was not in evidence in any of the crime scene photographs, only a crude outline of the package had been drawn onto the bare floorboards; to indicate where the package had allegedly been found.  Then the second sack turned up.  On Wednesday the 4th of December 1963, a postal worker discovered in the ‘Dead Parcel’ room of the Irving Post Office; a package addressed to a Mr Lee Oswald, 601 W. Nassaus Street, Dallas, this was an address that did not exist, so the parcel had been sent back to the sorting office.  When the package was opened it was discovered to hold an identical, if empty; sack to the one that Oswald had allegedly carried his rifle in.  Who was trying to send this to Oswald?  More interestingly, why was this being sent to Oswald when; as the FBI surmised, Oswald could just have easily have made one himself in his place of work?  Again the FBI failed to mention this conundrum in their final report.

FBI agent James Hosty was another individual brushed over in the FBI report, his dealings with Oswald were barely mentioned.  Hosty’s actions after the assassination have also brought him under suspicion by the conspiracy buffs in the half century since.  I mentioned the letters that Oswald wrote to Hosty as they are historical fact, but nowhere in the FBI report where they actually mentioned, and Hosty did not declare having received any communications off of Oswald to the Warren Commission.  When Hosty was finally caught out and questioned about the communications he had received from Oswald, and why they weren’t in Oswald’s file, Hosty stated that he had burnt the letters on his superior’s orders.  Important evidence in the assassination of a President, and a senior FBI official had ordered it burnt!   So now we only have Hosty’s word for what was in those letters, and surely his word must be looked at in a dubious light given his suspicious actions in burning this critical evidence.  After the FBI Report and the Warren Commission, Hosty was given an official reprimand for his sloppy conduct, and for the next thirty years had a rather un-startling career with the FBI.

One of the stranger elements of the case; that both the FBI and later the Warren Commission glossed over; was the peculiar route Oswald took from the scene of the assassination to the Texas Theatre.  There were of course plenty of witnesses who informed the FBI; and who later testified; that they had seen Oswald on his way from the Texas School Book Depository, but this in no way explains the peculiarity of his route.  Firstly; if Oswald had just murdered the President of the United States, then surely he should have been eager to get the hell out of dodge as quickly as he could.  Now if Oswald had wanted to escape then he was in the perfect place, he passed right by the Greyhound Bus Depot; where he could have caught a coach to anywhere in the country.  So the question has to be asked; why didn’t Oswald just get on a bus and leave town, instead of faffing around, drawing attention to himself and ultimately getting himself caught and killed?  Was it because, as some have claimed, Oswald had been ordered to go to the Texas Theatre to meet a contact?  Possibly a CIA handler; or other such dubious individual?  Researcher Jim Marrs and other assassination buffs certainly seem to think it’s a possibility.

One of the biggest criticisms laid upon the FBI report is its dealing with Lee Harvey Oswald’s alleged trip to Mexico City in the September of 1963.   The witness, CIA agent William Gaudet, raises several questions.  Gaudet claimed he knew Oswald from Oswald’s ‘Fair Play For Cuba antics’ handing out leaflets outside a local Trade Mart.  Every single one of Oswald’s ‘Fair Play For Cuba’ leaflets had been stamped with an address, 544 Camp Street, New Orleans. Gaudet didn’t feel that it was worth mentioning that at the time of his Oswald sighting; he also worked out of an office in 544 Camp Street.  Let’s turn our attention to the Embassy tapes, first of all, immediately upon hearing them, the FBI agents asked to assess their content believed that the CIA had made a mistake, they did not believe that it was Oswald speaking on the tapes at all.  They felt so strongly about this point; a memo was sent to The Whitehouse informing President Johnson that the FBI believed some terrible mistake had occurred.  Despite this the CIA was insistent that it was Oswald, and so the FBI took them at their word, since that day officialdom has obstinately insisted that it was Oswald’s voice picked up on the wiretap.  What was interesting is that in the tapes Oswald mentioned that he had previously being dealing with an official called Valeriy Kostikov. Kostikov had been working out of the Mexico embassy at the time, and he was well known to the CIA as an operative of Department 13, a codename for a cabal of saboteurs and assassins.    When others came to try and verify the voice for themselves, they found their permission blocked, and given the rather feeble excuse that the contentious tapes had been wiped.  Of course there was nothing sinister in the CIA destroying some contested evidence in the assassination of a President, no; they claimed that they routinely wiped surveillance tapes after a set period of time.  We then come to the supporting evidence of the Oswald tapes, the photographs the CIA surveillance team took of ‘Oswald’ coming in and out of the embassy.  When the FBI received the photographs they were dumbfounded and not a little confused, you see the photographs were quite clearly not of Oswald at all, the man bore some slight resemblance, but it quite clearly wasn’t the alleged Presidential assassin.  Of course the CIA wasn’t deliberately trying to mislead the FBI, no, it had been a genuine mistake, they’d accidently sent photographs of a similar man who’d been at the embassy on the same day.  When the FBI requested the correct photographs, the CIA apologised and said that they had lost them.  These disingenuous acts on behalf of the CIA; have left the conspiracy buffs and researchers questioning if Oswald ever visited Mexico at all in the September of 1963, or was it just some elaborate plot using a rubbish look alike to try and make Oswald’s connection to left-wing ideological thought appear that little bit stronger?

In 2010 TV host and conspiracy buff Jessie Ventura; tracked down Marina Oswald, now Marina Porter, she was sixty-eight and still living in Dallas with her second husband.  She refused to speak to Ventura on camera; as she feared not for her own life, but for the lives of her children.   She stated categorically that she had never worked for the KGB or any other Russian intelligence agency, or indeed any American intelligence agencies, but she did feel after soul searching over the decades that Lee Harvey Oswald was an intelligence officer working for; and being manipulated by; the CIA.  After Oswald’s death she believes the same agencies that murdered the President, manipulated her so that she believed wholeheartedly and publically supported the framing of her murdered husband; and the cover-up of the conspiracy to murder the President.  The FBI’s report into the events was the first part of her conversion into believing in her former husband’s guilt.    Of course she could offer no proof of her beliefs; it was simply her gut feeling after a lifetime of reflection.  There was one point she was keen to clear up unequivocally, she confirmed that she had indeed taken the famous photographs of Lee Harvey Oswald stood in the back yard of their home; proudly holding the rifle used to kill Kennedy, the Smith and Wesson used to kill Officer Tippit, and the left wing newspapers.  Once again her gut instinct was that someone had ordered Oswald to have those photographs taken, and he had unquestioningly obeyed that order, unaware that the photograph would one day be used by the FBI to besmirch his name.

The Warren Commission

The President’s Commission on the Assassination of President John F. Kennedy; became more popularly known as the Warren Commission, named after its chairman Chief Justice Earl Warren.  Established by President Lyndon B. Johnson, he wanted a report that would finally bring the curtain down on the long shadow his predecessor cast over him.  Seven of Capitol Hills most respected players sat on the Commission to view the evidence and rubber stamp what was already assumed to be the official conclusion; that Oswald acted alone.  Now this is one of the major criticisms levelled at the Warren Commission and its ultimate report, the Commission did exactly what every investigator or student of historical crime learns not to do on their first day, the Commission had its theory from the beginning, set out to prove it, looked for evidence that backed up their beliefs, and discarded or pooh-poohed any inconvenient evidence that did not fit in with their hypothesis.  Their hypothesis was simple; Lee Harvey Oswald was a lone nutter, acting by himself, who was then killed by the emotionally unstable Jack Ruby, murdering Oswald out of the misguided but noble sentiments of wanting to save Jackie Kennedy from the turmoil of the ensuing trial.

The Chief Justice, Earl Warren, was a well known liberal; and proponent of civil rights reform.  Many in the south had called for him to be sacked and placed on trial for his ‘communist’ sympathies.  He initially refused the position as chairman of the Commission; as he felt that it was a conflict of interest for a supreme-court judge to engage in ‘extra-judicial interests’.  President Lyndon B. Johnson; feared that if he could not get a Presidential Committee up and running, then he would have to deal with two official but opposing investigations into the assassination, one a Texas State Investigation, and a second investigation run by the Senate.  These conceivably could have come to two different conclusions; which would have placed the entire matter in utter confusion, and fuelled talk of conspiracy.  Johnson needed one Commission, coming to one final and definitive answer.  So Johnson summoned Warren to the Oval Office; where he ordered Warren to take the chair of the Commission.  He explained to Warren the delicate situation, the possibility of two opposing Commissions, and the consequences of the wrong conclusion being reached.  If people kept saying Khrushchev killed Kennedy, and the Americans were pushed to act against Khrushchev by popular public demand, then Khrushchev had the means to killed thirty-nine million people in one hour with the Soviets nuclear arsenal.  Warren realised the heavy burden being placed upon him, and accepted the chairmanship.  Giving Warren this little pep-talk, Johnson also did something rather naughty, something rather damaging to the legitimacy of the Warren Commission.  Johnson made sure Warren knew the possible consequences of coming to an undesirable conclusion, even if it was the inconvenient truth.  Of course Lee Harvey Oswald’s past didn’t help the Commission’s task of making him look like a lone assassin.  The fear was that if the American people discovered that Oswald was a Cuban or Russian agent, then it might create great public pressure to take reprisals against the country responsible for handling Oswald.  Gary Cornell, who later re-examined President Kennedy’s murder as part of the House Select Committee on Assassination, concluded that the members of the Warren Commission felt it was more important to ‘quash’ rumours that Oswald was part of a conspiracy, the uncovering of which could create tensions between America and Russia, and possibly lead to a nuclear war, than to find the real truth behind the assassination.   From its very inception then, the Warren Commission was complicit with The Whitehouse in making sure the ‘truth’ would be a whitewash.

The committee consisted of Earl Warren; Chief Justice of the United States, Richard Russell; the senator for Georgia, John Sherman Cooper; the senator for Kentucky, Hale Boggs; the House Majority Leader, Gerald Ford; House Minority Leader and himself the future President of the United States, Allan Welsh Dulles; former Director of the CIA, and John J. McCloy; the President of the World Bank.  It has been suggested that several of these people should not have had a place on the Commission; seeing as they or the organisations they represented stood to gain from the President’s death, and therefore have been incriminated or accused of being involved in the Presidents murder.  Letting them sit on the Commission therefore was akin to letting viable suspects sit on the jury of a normal murder trial.   Take for example Allan Welsh Dulles, the CIA are accused by several people of being a major player in the Presidents murder, for reasons which we will discuss later.  Dulles had been the Director of the CIA when Kennedy inherited the disastrous Bay of Pigs endeavour.  At the end of the failed invasion of Cuba; Kennedy personally blamed Dulles; and had him sacked.  So imagine being unceremoniously dumped from one of the most powerful positions in the world, after doggedly doing the job thanklessly for years.  The person who sacked you is then murdered; everyone knows you hated the victim with a passion, so are you seriously telling me that this really is the right person to be chosen to investigate the victim’s murder?  John J. McCloy’s involvement is also said to be suspect by some.  He represented the powerful forces of international banking, and there are those who believe that such forces conspired to murder President Kennedy; because of his attempts to take away power from the powerful Federal Bank.  Richard Russell has had the finger of suspicion pointed at him, as he was the chairman of the Committee on Armed Services, the legislative overseer of all American Military shenanigans.  It was well known that the military was upset with Kennedy over his plans to pull out of Vietnam, and for not fully supporting operations such as the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba.  The military are said to have been involved in any number of conspiracy theories surrounding the murder of President Kennedy, therefore having the military’s man on Capitol Hill sit on the committee investigating the Presidents death, has sat uneasily with some critics.   The fact that Lyndon B. Johnson was also tape recorded cryptically telling Russell, ‘you’re my man on that Commission’, has raised some very suspicious eyebrows as to what Lyndon B. Johnson’s real influence was over the allegedly independent committee.  President Johnson, of course, being another individual who benefited from President Kennedy’s death, and who at one time or another has been accused of being more involved in the assassination than he ever let on.

Initially the Commission was simply going to rubber stamp the FBI’s final report on the assassination, they were not going hear witnesses, they were not going view evidence, they were simply going to read the FBI’s report and put their names to it.  Then the Commission hit its first big snag, on Monday the 9th of December 1963, just seventeen days after the murder, the FBI submitted its dubious findings, and to the Commissions horror it was five volumes long.  Just like the Warren Commission had been expecting, the FBI had arrived at the conclusion that Lee Harvey Oswald was a lone nutter acting to his own warped agenda.  As the members of the Commission read the long and dull report it slowly dawned on them that not only had it been hastily written, but that it was riddled with factual errors and inconsistencies.  The Commission openly criticised it for not dealing with the actual crime, simply wallowing in the details of Oswald’s dubious past; and affiliations with communism.  John J. McCloy went on record in the Commissions minutes as stating that the FBI report left him feeling more confused as to the details of the assassination than when he began reading it.  Hale Boggs said the FBI report left him with a million unanswered questions.  Earl Warren poured scorn on the report; calling it ‘totally inconclusive’.  In short the FBI’s official report was seen as wholly unworthy of the Commission rubber stamping it.  J. Edgar Hoover was furious at the Commission’s reaction, he felt that the Warren Commission was trying to place blame for the assassination onto the FBI, that the Commission was deliberately looking for the conspiracy which would make the FBI look incompetent in its failure to uncover it.  There were even those who rumoured that the FBI might have been in on a conspiracy to kill Kennedy, well, after all J. Edgar Hoover was another person who was known to have fervently hated President Kennedy.  President Kennedy had tried to force Hoover to retire on several occasions, and there were even rumours that Hoover had been blackmailing the President with details of his numerous affairs.   Then, just a few short weeks after the President’s murder, a rumour that the FBI had been involved in the conspiracy to kill President Kennedy reached the Commissions ears.  This had its genesis on Wednesday the 22nd of January 1964, when the Commission received a telephone call from the Texan Attorney General, Waggoner Carr.  Carr informed the Commission of the stunning revelation that Lee Harvey Oswald had been an FBI informant.  The Commission hastily convened a meeting where they discussed the allegation.  They quickly realised that, if what Carr was telling them was true, then they would never again be able to quash a belief in a government conspiracy against the President.   Allen Welsh Dulles demanded that all records of the meeting be destroyed, lest the rumours become publicly known, but Earl Warren refused, he was determined that there be a degree of transparency about all the Commission’s proceedings.  Nevertheless the Commission did begin to act in secret; they held secret talks with Waggoner Carr about the rumours circulating in Dallas regarding Oswald.  After the meeting the Commission met in an executive session.  During this meeting Hale Boggs went on record in the minutes as saying, ‘We have to do everything on earth to establish the facts, one way or the other...without doing that every one of us is doing a very grave disservice’.  Allen Welsh Dulles, not surprisingly given his CIA roots, was a little more pragmatic in his approach to the whole shady situation.   He explained to the Commission members that they would never get the truth.  The FBI was like the CIA; they would rather commit perjury than reveal details of their secret operations, and admit that Oswald had been an undercover employee.  They discussed the possibility of setting up a further independent committee, with the singular purview of investigating the allegation that Oswald had been on the payroll of the FBI.  After discussing the idea in some depth, the Commission decided against any further investigation of the FBI.  Even the powerful members of the Warren Commission were scared of J. Edgar Hoover and the power he held.  It was said that if you were less than whiter than white, then J. Edgar Hoover would know your dirty little secrets.  If you displeased him, then he would use your secrets to destroy you.  Of course on Capitol Hill no one was whiter than white, and so it made J. Edgar Hoover one of the most feared and powerful men in America.   On top of this consideration, the Commission was entirely dependent on the FBI to carry out any investigative duties.  It would mean they would have to ask the FBI to investigate itself, something the Commission didn’t trust the FBI to do openly or honestly.  So the Commission quietly dropped any ideas of investigating allegations of FBI duplicity.  Yet this whole sorry debacle did show the Commission one thing, they could not simply just rubber stamp the FBI’s report, they had to carry out a longer and more detailed investigation of their own.   Paradoxically; this episode also showed that the Commission lacked the authority, credibility and power to carry out such an exhaustive and truly honest investigation to its full capability.  The Commission was already mortally compromised before it had even begun.

No more was the Commissions lack of power more obvious than in their dealings with the CIA, and how members of the Commission itself tried to sabotage their own investigations.  For years the Central Intelligence Agency had been carrying out a top secret operation known as Operation Mongoose.  This operation was a wholly unsanctioned ongoing plot to murder Fidel Castro, the pro-communism leader of Cuba.  The CIA wanting to distance themselves as much as possible from the grubby plot, sub-contracted out the mission to kill Fidel to a most unlikely source, the Mafia.  The Mafia were disaffected because Fidel had kicked them out of Cuba, where the Mafia had once held a lucrative gambling operation.  So over the next few years the Mafia attempted to kill Fidel using loony plots like poisonous wet suits, exploding cigars, flasks of airborne cancer; and some plain old fashioned snipers hidden on rooftops.  The fact that these operations were ongoing; gave Fidel Castro and Cuba a perfect motive for wanting Kennedy dead, simple self-defence and revenge, you want me dead, so I’m going to kill you first.  Yet despite this the Warren Commission was kept in the dark by the CIA about its ongoing missions to kill Fidel, and its dealings with an organised crime ring the Kennedy brothers were desperately trying to shut down.  When members of the Commission did find out about Operation Mongoose, years after they had submitted their final report, they were said to be furious that the CIA had so misled them. What made the situation all the more unbelievable was that a member of the Commission itself, Allen Welsh Dulles, knew about Operation Mongoose, in fact he had been the Director of the CIA when Operation Mongoose was conceived.  Yet Dulles kept his mouth shut, he deliberately manipulated the Commission; and the answers they would get from CIA agents.  He had CIA agents run their testimony past him, he would make them rehearse their answers to ensure they would not slip up and give too much away.  He even liaised with J. Edgar Hoover and his FBI agents; so that the evidence the employees of both agencies gave would be consistent.  It was a clear case of orchestrated subterfuge and contempt for the processes of justice that he was involved within.  The CIA were not just evasive to the Commission, they tried to be deliberately misleading.  They produced the photographs of a man entering the Russian and Cuban embassies in Mexico City, and claimed that they were photos of Oswald.  The photographs still fooled no one on the Commission, when it was pointed out that the man quite clearly wasn’t Lee Harvey Oswald, the CIA petulantly claimed that Oswald had visited the two embassies, but that the CIA agents photographic equipment had been broken at the time.  They now claimed for the first time that the wiretapped telephone calls allegedly between Oswald and the Cuban and Russian officials had been accidently erased.  What was the point of all this subterfuge?  It seemed to make no sense.  If the CIA did have something to hide they should have just kept their mouths shut; instead of drawing attention to themselves in such a silly and almost amateurish manner.  The CIA’s ham-fisted attempts to incriminate Oswald during the FBI investigation and the Warren Commission only served to reflect guilt onto the organisation itself, which in turn feeds conspiracy theories to this day.

The Commission has also been criticised for the manner in which it handled witnesses.   Witnesses stated that after testifying before the Commission; they felt they had been bullied by the FBI into giving statements that were factually inaccurate.   Other’s who witnessed events that did not fit in with the Commission’s view of the assassination, were simply not invited to give evidence at all, despite many of them asking on numerous occasions.  People such as S. M. ‘Skinny’ Holland, who was watching the President’s motorcade from a bridge at the far end of Elm Street, he had a full view of the whole of Dealey Plaza, he was certain that he saw a puff of white smoke, possibly from a fired rifle, coming from the picket fence at the back of the grassy knoll, just as the President was shot.  The Warren Commission pooh-poohed Holland’s evidence; and stated that what he actually saw was steam coming from a steam-pipe that was in the railroad close to Dealey Plaza.  Now this clearly couldn’t be the case, from where Holland had been stood the steam-pipe was at least fifteen degrees to the left of where Holland had been looking.  Lee Bowers was a railroad worker sat in a signal tower which overlooked Dealey Plaza, and therefore he had a unique view of the area behind the picket fence on the grassy knoll.  He saw two men acting suspiciously shortly before the Presidents’ murder, he too saw smoke coming from the area where the two men had been clandestinely stood.  Eyewitness Ed Hoffman confirmed this version of events.  He had been stood on the Stemmsons Freeway, two hundred yards to the west of Dealey Plaza, he saw two men stood in the railway yard behind the grassy knoll, he saw a puff of white smoke, then he watched as one of the men passed a rifle to the other, this second man dismantled the rifle, put it in a holdall and made good his escape.  Hoffman was a deaf mute, and he tried on several occasions to give a witness statement to the FBI.  Each time he did so, he felt threatened and intimidated by the FBI agents, and eventually gave up trying to give the Commission his version of events.  Joe Marshall Smith and Seymour Weitzman were both officers with the Dallas Police Department; they both believed that shots had come from the grassy knoll.  In the seconds after the assassination they both; independently of each other, ran up the grassy knoll to where Smith stated he could smell gun-smoke.  Both Smith and Weitzman were then confronted by an alleged Secret Service agent who told them to leave the area.  Gordon Arnold, a trained serving soldier, who was on leave in Dallas, believed the bullets came from the knoll, and dropped to ground as his training taught him; when fired on from behind.  After picking himself up off the ground, he ran up the grassy knoll where he witnessed Smith and Weitzman’s altercation with the alleged Secret Service agent.  Arnold subsequently gave a corroborating statement supporting Smith and Weitzman’s version of events.  The Secret Service refuted the claim; they stated that they had no one on patrol in that area, therefore the man was not a bona fide Secret Service agent.  The Warren Commission ignored the evidence of these two experienced lawmen.   Buell Wesley Frazier, Billy Lovelady and Otis Williams, were all stood directly underneath the window where Lee Harvey Oswald allegedly fired his shots, these three men all reported that the gunshots came from the grassy knoll.  Charles Brehm gave a statement to the FBI; informing them that the shots came from the front and to the side of the President, i.e. the grassy knoll.  Yet he was shocked beyond belief when in the Warren Commission’s final report his statement had been altered to say that he thought the bullets had come from behind the President, from the corner of Elm and Houston.  Arnold Rowland saw a man in sixth floor window of the Texas Schoolbook Depository holding a gun, yet he also told the FBI that shots definitely came from the grassy knoll as well.  Kenneth O’Donnell and David Powers felt pressured by the FBI into saying in their Commission testimony; that they had heard shots coming from the Texas Schoolbook Depository, when in actual fact they wanted to report them coming from the grassy knoll.  The two men felt unable to go against the FBI, and so told the Commission what the FBI told them to say.

The events that occurred in and around the Texas School Book Depository where examined by the Commission and became crucial to Oswald being portrayed as the lone gunman in their report, yet their version of the events in the Texas School Book Depository that day were wholly inaccurate.  The problems began as soon as Oswald arrived at work that morning, the Commission concluded that Oswald had taken the rifle into the School Book Depository with him on the morning of the assassination, and had hidden it somewhere on the sixth floor until it was needed.  Jack Edwin Dougherty had walked into the depository with Oswald that morning, and he made a police statement that contradicted the Commissions’ conclusion, he was adamant that Oswald was carrying no packages with him on the morning of the assassination, and he certainly would have noticed and commented if Oswald had been coming into work with something as large and bulky as a dismantled snipers rifle.  In fact the only person who did see Oswald carrying a package into the Book Depository that morning was Wesley Buell Frazier; whose testimony was disputed by his own mother.

Further problems arose when the Warren Commission concluded that at 11.55 a.m. Oswald’s co-workers on the fifth floor of the depository left Oswald alone; whilst they all went to get their lunch.  It was whilst Oswald was left alone on the fifth floor that he allegedly made his way up to the sixth and made his snipers nest out of the boxes of books in the warehouse, retrieved his rifle from its hiding place, constructed the weapon and then lay in wait to kill the President at 12.30 p.m.   The Warren Commission concluded, ‘None of the depository employees is known to have seen Oswald from 11.55 a.m. until after the shooting’.  This was simply a lie; the Commission were in possession of several witness statements from Texas School Book Depository staff which contradicted this conclusion.   The depository’s janitor, Eddie Piper, categorically stated that he had seen Oswald at midday on the ground floor of the depository, the pair had entered into a brief conversation where Oswald had told Piper that he was about to go and have his lunch, and would be in the canteen on the second floor if he was needed.  Karoline Arnold, a secretary at the Texas School Book Depository, also made a statement the day after the assassination; which confirmed Piper’s statement.  She told the FBI that between 12.15 p.m. and 12.20 p.m. she had been in the canteen on the second floor of the depository, and she clearly remembered Oswald sitting in the canteen eating his lunch.  Karoline Arnold’s statement was problematic to the Commission, because the Commission had accepted statements from witnesses outside the depository who stated that they had seen a man in the sixth floor window constructing the snipers nest, this was happening at the exact same time that Karoline Arnold was eating her lunch with Oswald.  Not only this, the motorcade was running six minutes late, yet Oswald had no way of knowing of the delay President Kennedy had caused to the motorcade with his antics.  If Oswald had been intending to kill the President, surely he should not have been sat in the canteen with Karoline Arnold, languidly eating his lunch, but up on the sixth floor waiting to take his shot.   Karoline Arnold’s witness statement could be taken as solid evidence that more than one person was involved in the assassination; and therefore that the Commission’s findings were wrong.  So instead of asking difficult questions, the Commission decided to ignore Karoline Arnold’s witness statement and refused to call her to give evidence.  Supporting Karoline Arnold’s statement; was that of Bonnie Ray Williams, he returned to the sixth floor with his lunch at around about midday, he found the sixth floor to be deserted, so he sat and ate his chicken legs and cola by himself.   He categorically stated that Oswald was not hanging around the sixth floor of the warehouse, if he was then he would have seen him.  Williams left the sixth floor again at around 12.20 p.m. whereupon he went to the fourth floor of the depository; and watched the motorcade with his co-workers Victoria Adams, Sandy Styles, Elise T. Dorman, James Jarman, Harold Norman and Dorothy May Garner.  Williams later found to his horror; that in the Warren Report the Commission had erroneously stated that he was only on the sixth floor until 12.03 p.m.

Further problems arose in the Commissions timings after the assassination, Marion L. Baker, the Dallas Motor Cycle Policeman; had perceived the assassins shots as coming from the Texas School Book Depository; and was inside the building within ten seconds of the last shot being fired.  After finding the elevator dead, he had raced up the stairs to the upper floors; at about ninety seconds after the final shot had been fired, Officer Baker raced into the second floor canteen of the Texas School Book Depository; and found Lee Harvey Oswald walking across the room to another exit.  Baker was adamant that Oswald was calm and did not appear to be sweating or out of breath, in fact he was exhibiting none of the clear indications of someone who had just assassinated a high ranking government official; and then fled frantically from the scene down five flights of stairs.   This fact was crucial as for the Commission’s version of events to work; Oswald had to allegedly race across the sixth floor of the depository to the stairwell, race down five flights of stairs to the canteen, enter the canteen unflustered by his minute and a half mad dash.  For years the conspiracy buffs argued that this was just plain wrong, it would have been physically impossible for Oswald to have made the trip in under ninety seconds, even Gary Mack; the curator of the 6th Floor Museum, a man who arguably knows the layout of the Texas School Book Depository better than anyone else, was at a loss to explain how Oswald could have done it in so little a time.  Then in 2008; TV programme Unsolved Histories; finally proved that it would have been possible for Oswald to make the journey from the sixth floor snipers window; to the second floor canteen in well under the crucial ninety seconds.  Their Oswald stand in, who was of the same weight and physical build as Oswald, did the journey in a shockingly quick forty-eight seconds, without even being out of breath or physically discombobulated.  So the Commission got these possible timings right at least, but cold water was to be poured on other elements of the Commission’s theory when it was discovered that the Commission had repressed further witness statements from Texas School Book Depository staff.  After watching the assassination from the fourth floor; Victoria Adams, Sandy Styles, Elise T. Dorman, James Jarman, Harold Norman and Dorothy May Garner; spilled out from the storeroom onto the stairwell that Oswald would have to have used to get from his snipers nest on the sixth floor to the canteen on the second.  Not one of these four witnesses saw Oswald descending these stairs, and they unquestioningly would have done, as Oswald would have been forced to jostle past them in the cramped conditions of the stairwell.  Mrs Garner reported that she had remained gathering her shocked thoughts in the stairwell of the fourth floor for several minutes after the assassination, to the point where Officer Baker passed Mrs Garner on the stairwell as he made his way up to the sixth floor.  If these statements are to be believed, and there is no reason why they shouldn’t be, then Oswald could not have made the journey from the sixth to the second floor as the Commission stated.

When the Commission did use eyewitness testimony from in and around the Depository; it seemed to become riddled with mistakes and abridgements; and unbelievable alterations.  Howard Brennan, a steamfitter who had been watching the motorcade, informed the police directly after the assassination that he had seen the sniper in the south-eastern most window of the sixth floor of the School Book Depository.  Brennan had been stood some 115 feet from the window; and described the man in some detail to the officer on the scene.  Brennan stated confidently that he definitely would recognise the assassin again if he saw him, yet later that night at a police line-up; Brennan failed to pick out Lee Harvey Oswald, he was also the only witness who refused to pick out someone who simply looked like the man he had seen.   Brennan was subsequently spoken to by the ‘feds’, according to his friend and colleague Sandy Speaker, Brennan disappeared for three weeks after the assassination and when he came back to work he was ‘a nervous wreck’ and ‘scared to death’.   During his three week disappearance; Brennan had reconsidered his identification of Oswald; and suddenly positively identified Oswald’s body as that of the man he had seen in the depository window.  The Commission excluded large parts of Brennan’s original police statement from their final report, including his original description of the killer as being taller, fatter, older and having different coloured hair to Oswald, and that after taking the killing shot the assassin appeared to be in no hurry to leave the scene.  The Commission of course couldn’t include these details from the original statement because they needed Oswald to be in a great rush after the last shot, in order for him to make it across the building; and down five flights of stairs to be in the canteen; where Officer Marion found Oswald a mere minute and a half later.

The Commission either lied or misrepresented several other facts from the depository, they stated that Oswald was the only member of staff missing in the wake of the assassination, this was a lie.  At least fifteen members of staff had wandered off out of the building in the aftermath of the shootings, some in a state of shock, all of them deeply upset.  Less than fifteen minutes after the assassination; at 12.45 p.m. the dispatch unit put out a description of a suspect that exactly matched Oswald, the police and subsequently the Commission could not explain where this description had come from, and they were forced to fall back on the old lie that it was because Oswald was the only member of staff missing from the depository, leading to his description being released as a cautionary measure.  Ochus V. Campbell, the President of the Texas School Book Depository, had been watching the motorcade from the pavement outside of the building, after the shooting Campbell made his way back into the book depository, and he subsequently told a Dallas Times Herald reporter that he had met Oswald on the ground floor; he was standing in a store cupboard filing away some sales slips, in other words Oswald was calmly getting on with his job, not frantically waiting for a chance to flee the scene.  Campbell had a brief word with Oswald about the assassination, before leaving him to get on with his work.  By the time of his official police statement two days later; Campbell had changed his story for some reason, not only did he now claim not to have seen Oswald working in the storeroom, but he claimed not to know Oswald at all.   Why?  Was it because Oswald calmly carrying on with his job in the wake of the assassination didn’t fit in with what was quickly shaping up to be the official version of events, Oswald being a panicked lone assassin desperate to flee the scene of his crime?  So desperate he would later kill a police officer in his emotionally panicked state?  All mention of Campbell and his contradictory evidence was dropped from the Warren Commission’s final report.  Then there was the evidence of Amos L. Euins; who stated that he saw a man with a rifle in the sixth floor window of the Texas Schoolbook Depository.  Euins told the police in no uncertain terms that he had seen a black man in the window holding the rifle, yet the police told the world that Euins reported seeing a white man who matched Oswald’s description that day.  When a shocked Euins, who was only fifteen-years-old at the time, was asked to sign an affidavit about what he had seen, he was not informed that in the legal document he was signing; the police had altered his statement to state he had seen a white man who looked the spit of Oswald.  Yet it was this altered statement that the Warren Commission chose to publish.   Cecil McWatters, the bus driver whom the Commission said spoke with Oswald, and who Oswald informed the President had been shot in the temple, well, his testimony had been twisted and manipulated until what truth was in it was tantamount to useless to any serious investigator.  In his original testimony; McWatters had positively identified the individual that he had this conversation with as being a ‘teenager’ who regularly rode on his bus.  This teenager was later successfully identified as Roy Milton Jones, of East Brownlee Avenue.  McWatters did not see Oswald, did not describe Oswald, did not identify Oswald, but the Commission blithely went ahead and lied, and told the world he had.

Abraham Zapruder, who caught the assassination on his famous 8mm home movie film, was just one witness who believed that shots came from the right and behind him on the grassy knoll.   All in all forty witnesses came forward to say that they at least heard a gunshot coming from the grassy knoll, yet the Warren Commission rejected every single one of these witness statements.  The Commission cited that there was no physical evidence to corroborate or uphold what these witnesses said they saw or heard, and therefore what they believed happened; simply didn’t.  Then of course the Zapruder film came along; and threatened to blow this assertion right out of the water.  The Zapruder film quite clearly showed the President’s head and body being blasted violently back as a bullet entered the President’s head, as if the offending projectile was coming from the front and to the side of the President.   This involuntary action seemed impossible for the President to have made if the bullet had entered the Presidents body from the rear; as the Commission insisted.  So how did the Commission get around this tricky little problem?  Well quite simply really, it never even mentioned the discrepancy.  No one outside of the staff at Life Magazine, and of course the members of the Warren Commission; had seen the Zapruder film when the Commission’s report was finally released, so they could easily get away with the subterfuge.  When the film did become public, several members of the Commission stated that they did not notice that President Kennedy had been flung backwards by one of the shots.  One of the sixteen attorney’s investigating the assassination on behalf of the Commission, David Slawson, flatly denied these denials of knowledge, he stated that everyone noticed the President’s reaction on the Zapruder film, that he openly asked questions to the Commission about the Presidents physical reaction to the bullet, and that ‘everyone was a little bit puzzled’ by the President’s violent reaction.  Dr. Robert McClelland, one of the doctors who tended to President Kennedy at Parkland Hospital; was one of those who were annoyed and perplexed by the Commission omitting any mention of the President possibly having been shot from the front.  In 1999 he finally went on record as saying, ‘The wounds are consistent with the bullet not having been fired, I think, from the sixth floor of the depository building, from behind the President, but from somewhere around the grassy knoll or the triple underpass, somewhere in the front...having seen that wound, I thought to myself there is no way that could have come from the sixth floor behind him’.  The Commission ignored the vital evidence from the film that could have at least raised the possibility of their being a second shooter somewhere in front of the President.  With it ignoring the existence of the film it could also ignore the doubts of the medical men who had treated the injured President.  Yet over the years further evidence indicating a frontal shooter has emerged from diverse sources.  One such researcher was Tom Wilson, who used digital photograph photometry, a process he had created, whereby he was able to peel graphical information layer by layer from photographic imagery; to see things the human eye could not perceive.  This was a process Wilson described as being akin to peeling an onion, which he claimed to have used to discover evidence of a frontal shooter.  Wilson stated that he had given evidence at several murder trials after using his process to analyse photographic evidence, and stated that his findings were so accurate and precise, if you were to pick a random person from a photograph of a crowd, then he could use his unique technique to diagnose what prescription glasses that random person needed.  Another claim made by Wilson was that he could determine what colour things would have been in real life from black and white photographs, such as skin tone and eye colour.   Using his technique; Wilson was able to create a 3D model of the injury caused to President Kennedy’s head.  This model indicated to Wilson; that the bullet entered President Kennedy’s head through the front right occipital lobe, and then exploded into two, blasting the side of President Kennedy’s head apart, and throwing his body back.   Wilson’s work so impressed the Kennedy family; that Teddy Kennedy was able to get Wilson access to the original autopsy photographs taken of President Kennedy, which were held in the National Archive.  Using the digital photograph photometry on these photographs, Wilson stated that he could prove that the autopsy shots had been taken after the body had been embalmed; and therefore were not truthful representations of the autopsy; or the body’s original wounds.

Of course, as always there were those who were sceptical about Wilson’s claims, and argued that his findings were not valid; as he failed to put them up for ‘peer review’ during the course of his lifetime.  Also some of his findings were very contentious and bordered on the bizarre; the most obvious of these being that the angle of the frontal shot; indicated to him that the frontal shooter was firing from below ground, possibly firing as the killer peeked out from a manhole cover.  Wilson was ultra-secretive with regards to how his digital process worked, and who he shared his results with.  He trusted very few people, especially those in authority, and was in the process of suing the federal government, based on what he claimed to have discovered in the autopsy photographs, when he died of a massive heart-attack.  Since then no one has had any further access to his work or results, or been allowed to verify the process he used to gain the fabulous truths he claimed to have found.  Tantalisingly; Wilson had told fellow researchers at a conference in Dallas; that all his work was carried out on cheap off the shelf software.  If people eager to prove or disprove him just paused for a second to consider what he was saying, then they could easily figure out for themselves which software he used; and how he used it, and verify his results for themselves.  As yet no one has accomplished this task, and his results remain just as tantalisingly uncorroborated, unloved and largely forgotten.  Yet Wilson was just one of a mounting army of people claiming that the Warren Commission was patently wrong; and that evidence of a frontal assassin was there to be discovered if people just had the care and the time to look.

The Zapruder film, which started this whole argument, has come in for its fair share of criticism over the years.  There are many who believe that the film is not a true representation of that day’s events, that the Zapruder film has been doctored in some way to hide or obscure the truth of what really happened.  The descent began with Dr. David Mantik, when he wrote a controversial paper that highlighted one blazing inconsistency within the film itself, Dr. Mantik claimed:

‘When the camera is stopped and then restarted it takes a finite amount of time for the motor to get up to normal speed. This, in turn, means that for a brief interval the frames will advance slower than normally. Because the frames are advancing slower, the exposure time will be longer for these frames and the images will appear lighter than usual (overexposure). At three separate occasions during the home movie sequence (supposedly on the same film as the motorcade sequence) this actually occurs, and at each occasion such overexposure is visible. However, on the one occasion when the camera apparently stops during the motorcade (just before the limousine appears) an overexposure is not visible. This inconsistency is remarkable and should normally have raised the question of whether the camera actually did stop, or whether the effect is absent because frames had been excised at this juncture’.

To support the idea of frames being removed from the film, it is interesting to note that it was standard Kodak practice to punch a processing number, after the last image, on the reverse side of the film. If this practice had been followed on the Zapruder film, then the processing numbers 0181 to 0189 should have appeared on the reverse sides of all the nine copies of the Zapruder film made. Yet surprisingly none of the remaining films seem to have been numbered.  Also the Kodak lab that allegedly processed the Zapruder film has no record of any rolls of film; that would correspond to the batches that should have included the processing of the Zapruder film.  Was this evidence of film tampering?   Someone editing things out of the home-movie that someone didn’t want the wider public to see?  The truth is even Abraham Zapruder himself didn’t know what he had filmed, he’d handed the footage directly over to Time-Life without watching the footage, in turn Time-Life handed the film over to the FBI.  If the footage had been doctored; Zapruder would have been none the wiser.  Then there is controversy over the Stemmons Freeway Sign that obscures some of the most vital frames of the film.  Dr.  John P. Costella stated in ‘The Great Zapruder Film Hoax’ that, ‘The inescapable conclusion is that the Stemmons Freeway sign as seen in the extant Zapruder, film is a fabrication. It does not represent a physically real object that was present during the assassination. Rather, it has been inserted into the film after the event’.   Dr. Costella based his conclusions on the absence of what he termed ‘pincushion distortion’.  This is an optical effect that causes objects to look pinched towards their centre, and was a common problem with tele-lensed cameras.  Dr. Costella asserted that this effect should have massively affected the Stemmons Freeway Sign; if the film had been genuine, the straight lines of the signpost should have appeared distorted near to the edge of the films frames.  Dr. Costella believed the Stemmons Freeway Sign was superimposed onto the film; as the pincushion effect was notably missing from the Stemmons Freeway Sign.

The Presidential head wound highlighted by the Zapruder film wasn’t the only controversial ballistic problem the Warren Commission faced.  One of the trickiest problems they were forced to reconcile with a single shooter theory; was the so-called ‘Magic Bullet’.  Originally the Commission was happy to say that three bullets were fired and that three bullets hit their targets, one hitting President Kennedy in the back, one hitting Governor Connally in the back, and the third and final fatal headshot.  Unfortunately Governor Connally threw a spanner in the works, when he stated under oath that Kennedy had already been shot; and was slumped over by the time Connally had turned around; and then felt himself being shot.  This meant that President Kennedy must have been shot at around frames 198 to 199 on the Zapruder film, and that Connally was therefore shot at about frame 240.  When the Commission investigators went to Dealey Plaza to view the scene of the crime and reconstruct the fateful day, low and behold if they didn’t discover it would have been impossible for Oswald to have hit anything between frames 168 and 210 of the Zapruder film; because there would have been a bloody great tree obscuring Oswald’s line of sight.  The Commission suddenly found themselves having to backtrack; and come up with a new version of events that still made it plausible for there to have been only one shooter firing from a vantage point with no clear line of fire.  So the Commission now decided that only three shots had been fired, the first bullet missing its target and bouncing off the pavement, and the third and fatal bullet hitting the President in the head, leaving the remaining second bullets to act in a rather unusual; almost nature defying manner, in order to inflict all of the remaining injuries on both President Kennedy and Governor John Connally.  To extricate themselves from the corner they’d now painted themselves into, Commission investigator Senator Arlen Specter came up with the ‘Magic Bullet’ theory.  A bullet that was capable, the Commission stated, of inflicting seven separate wounds upon both President Kennedy and Governor Connally.  The Commission theorised that the bullet entered through President Kennedy’s upper back, came out through President Kennedy’s throat, entered a curving trajectory where it paused in mid air for a second, before sharply changing direction and entering Governor Connally through his back, the bullet then travelled diagonally through the governors body to exit his lower chest on the right hand side, the bullet then entered the governors wrist on the upper side, exited his wrist again on the lower side after shattering all the bones, before making a sharp left turn; and finally embedding itself in Governor Connally’s right thigh.  Of course over the years people found this hard to believe, a bullet acting in a physics defying display of aeronautics unique in ballistic history, zigzagging, changing direction and trajectory mid shot, pausing in mid air, travelling through muscle and bone without slowing or being stopped, indeed coming through the whole incredible ballistic ballet to look pristine and unfired.  Well at least it’s assumed the ‘Magic Bullet’ came out of its magnificent aerial magic pristine, you see the bullet assumed to be the ‘Magic Bullet’ was discovered on a stretcher, assumed to have been used by Governor Connally; at Parkland Hospital, and that for me is a lot of doubt and assuming in order to reach such an incredibly contrived conclusion.

In 2004, Dale Myers; a well respected computer animator, recreated Dealey Plaza, the cavalcade, and the ‘Magic Bullet’ in order to prove the ballistic balletic theory one way or the other.  The 3D computer model Myers created; utilised a computer programme which factored in all of the real world physics and physical factors that might have come into play to influence the bullet that day in November 1963.  Myers was able to recreate a complete 360 degree view of the assassination, factoring in wind speed and direction, physical barriers such as air pressure, clothing and the density of such obstacles; including muscle and bone, everything that could conceivably have affected a bullets behaviour and trajectory that day.  Using this simulation and the real world physics it depended upon; Myers claimed to have finally proved that the Warren Commission was correct in its Magic Bullet assertion.  It all hinged on the alignment of Governor Connelly and President Kennedy at the moment of the bullets initial impact, it would be impossible for a single bullet to have done all the damage alleged if Connally had been sat directly in front of President Kennedy, however taking the original measurements of the car; Myers claimed that Connally had actually been sat not directly in front of President Kennedy but six inches to the left, and a full three inches lower than the President in what was known as ‘the jump seat’.  On top of this Meyers concluded that Governor Connally was in the middle of turning to face President Kennedy when the bullet impacted.  This meant that the Magic Bullet did not have to suddenly change trajectory mid flight, it was still travelling in a straight line as it left President Kennedy’s body and hit Governor Connally, it was his misrepresented positioning in the car, and the fact that the Governor had been turning his body, that made it look as if the bullet had changed trajectory mid flight.  Myers strengthened his theory with the hypothesis that Governor Connally had misremembered the moment he himself had been struck by the Magic Bullet. Connally believed the he had been hit at around about frame 236 on the Zapruder Film.  Myer’s argued that at around frame 230 on the Zapruder Film, Connally suddenly moved his arm up; and his jacket bunched up, Myer’s believed this was actually the moment Connally was hit by the contentious bullet, a full six frames earlier than Governor Connally originally surmised.  If this were true then the Magic Bullet no longer had to make that inconvenient split second mid air pause before hitting the governor.  All the inconsistencies had been ironed out, simply by factoring in the change of Governor Connally’s position in the car.

A single bullet fired from a rifle high up in the Texas School Book Depository could have acted in such an unusual manner as the Magic Bullet.  It wasn’t magic at all, it had always been travelling in a straight line, it was simply the Governor being sat in such an unusual position and being hit at a different time to what had originally been believed; that had made the lump of lead seem so extraordinary.  One would assume that would be the end of it, modern science and technology finally proving what had simply been a contentious theory up to that point, of course nothing is ever that simple.  Not everyone was happy with the 3D model, researcher Pat Speers went back to the original measurements of the car and argued that Myers had been wrong in his belief that Governor Connally had been sat six inches over to the left of President Kennedy.  Therefore the bullet was on the wrong trajectory when it entered the governor in the computer simulation, and couldn’t have been travelling in a straight line.  Myers admitted that the position of Connally’s seat had been erroneously moved from its proper place in his 3D model; for reasons of ‘clarity’.  The origin of this confusion was, Meyers argued, that the seat hadn’t actually been six inches over in the real car, but this is where Connally must have been sat for the single bullet theory to work.   Therefore Myers assumes that for some reason Connally had not been wholly sat on the jump seat, he had in fact only half been sitting on the seat, with half his bum hanging over the edge of the seat.  So as not to confuse viewers of the TV show the model had been commission for, Myers felt that the simplest explanation had been to just move the whole seat; rather than have to go into a silly explanation that the governor had not been sat on the seat properly.  Why was the governor sat in such an uncomfortable position?  Well, Mr Myers can’t explain why the governor would be sat with his arse hanging over his car seat.   Meyers claims he meant no deliberate subterfuge in making this change for ‘clarity’.  So we are, despite the high science involved, left in quite a quandary again, was it a case of one man’s wrong timings and predilection for unusual and uncomfortable seating positions; or conspiracy?

There were even more ballistic bamboozlers, the Commission stated that the magic bullet had entered President Kennedy’s back and exited via his throat.  Yet Commander Dr. James Humes at Bethesda Naval Base examined the bullet wound in President Kennedy’s shoulder, he examined it to the lengths of sticking his own finger into the wound and following its trajectory, this was because the doctors could not seem to see an exit wound.  Dr. Humes stated that he could quite clearly feel the end of the bullet track with his finger, and therefore the bullet that entered the President’s back did not exit via his throat, and therefore could not have gone on to enter Governor Connally.  Commander Humes level headedly explained the absence of any bullet in the wound; by stating that it was quite common for chest decompressions carried out during resuscitation to push bullets out that were lodged in the torso.  Of course the Warren Commission weren’t happy with this; it made a mockery of their Magic Bullet theory if there was no exit wound for the bullet to have left President Kennedy’s body from.  So Commander Humes had to alter his original findings.  The Commission stated that it was only after his original examination of the body; that Commander Humes discovered that the tracheotomy scar in the President’s throat had originally been a bullet wound, not before his examination as suggested by Dr. Livingstone, and Commander Humes certainly had not been told that the throat wound had been an entrance hole.  Now the Commission had the perfect excuse and explanation for Commander Humes having subsequently altered his original medical statement.  It was all to tidy up the inconsistencies made by his original medical examination, which were explained by the medical procedures carried out on the President at Parkland’s Memorial Hospital.  Now Commander Humes could suggest that the bullet that had entered the President’s back had actually exited through his throat.  None of this could explain why Commander Humes had originally been adamant that he could feel the bullet wounds termination point with the tip of his finger of course, but that could be silently glossed over in the final Warren report.  It also didn’t explain how a bullet travelling on a downward trajectory from the 6th floor window of the depository; could suddenly change course and start travelling upwards to exit through the President’s throat.  If we take the conceit that it was a single bullet that made these wounds; then wouldn’t it have made much more sense if the bullet had entered through the front via the throat, travelling downwards in an uninterrupted trajectory; and exited via the wound in the President’s back or shoulders? Of course saying such a thing would have meant that Oswald wasn’t acting alone, destroying the theory of the lone gunman the Commission was so desperately trying to prove despite the mounting evidence against it.

The Warren Commission ran into further difficulties explaining away the tricky medical evidence; when they came across the statements of Professor of neurosurgery Dr. Kemp Clark and Dr. Robert Nelson McClelland, trauma doctors who both treated the President at Parkland’s Memorial Hospital; upon the President’s admittance.  Both of these seasoned medical professionals stated that the official autopsy photographs taken at Bethesda Naval Base must have been doctored, as the massive head wound at the back of the President’s skull; which they both not only viewed but had medical diagrams drawn of, had vanished by the time the President’s body had reached Bethesda and was photographed.  The contentious autopsy photographs were withheld from the public and even from the investigating attorneys on the Commission.  Two reasons were put forward for this, firstly; that the Kennedy family did not want the American public’s last memory of their President being his dead and mutilated corpse, secondly; Earl Warren had viewed the photographs; and felt them too gruesome to be viewed by anyone else.  Now both of these points are perfectly reasonable and valid explanations for the photographs to have been withheld from the public, but to have held them back from the Commission’s own investigators was beggars’ belief.  So what was the real reason for the photographs being withheld from the Commission investigators?  Well, congressional investigator Gaeton Fonzi believes that the discrepancies between what the Parkland Memorial staff reported; and what the Bethesda medical staff reported; threw the Commission into complete confusion.  This in turn meant that the discrepancies made it impossible for the Commission to say with any definitiveness that there hadn’t been more than one shooter.  So to remove any doubt the photographs that caused the problem were simply omitted from the Warren Commission’s purview, as a result the Parkland Memorial doctors concerns over alterations to the wounds could be ignored, and the revised Bethesda autopsy, with the once missing bullet now entering through President Kennedy’s back and then exiting further up his body through his throat could be accepted no questions asked.  Paying testimony to this outrage; is the salient fact that not one of the doctors or nurses who treated President Kennedy at Parkland Memorial Hospital had their testimony included in the Warren Report.

Unfortunately this was only the tip of the iceberg when it came to the Warren Commission ignoring the tricky medical issues left dangling by the assassination.   The Commission did not in the slightest way deal with any of the criticism levelled at President Kennedy’s autopsy.  This simply was not an issue, not once did they question why a pair of doctors with no formal practice or experience in forensic pathology, who were not trained or ready to conduct an autopsy, let alone the so-called ‘autopsy of the century’, were let near the President’s body and allowed to pontificate on the reasons for his death, no matter how obvious those reasons might have been.  It was stated by staff at Bethesda; that Commander Dr. James Humes and his assistant Commander Dr. J. Thornton Boswell had never carried out an autopsy, and that their roles at Bethesda had for several years been strictly administrative, leaving them out of touch with modern medical procedures.   It was never questioned why what was left of the brain was not sectioned off; and the path of the assassin’s bullet traced through its sponge-like substance.  If the Commission had asked this important question, then the Commission would have been forced to discuss the startling fact that the President’s brain had gone missing.  That’s right; somewhere between Dallas and Bethesda what was left of President Kennedy’s grey matter had simply disappeared into thin air, yet the Commission did not question any of the Bethesda medical staff about its disappearance, or mention it in their findings.  The fact that the brain had seemingly been stolen had stunned the men whose job it was to prepare the body for autopsy.  Further evidence of this grave-robbing was hinted at in the manner in which the President’s body had arrived at Bethesda.  All witnesses who saw the body arrive at the naval base; claimed it was no longer in the ornate casket it had been taken off the plane at Andrew Air-force Base in.  It was now in a simple gun metal grey coffin, and inside the body had been sealed in a body-bag.  Where and when and why this swap occurred has never been officially acknowledged or explained.   Some have claimed that the swap happened on Air Force One; and that the body was taken off the plane on the opposite side to the empty casket, away from the glare of the news cameras.  It was then flown by helicopter to the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research; where the brain was removed to prevent the doctors who were due to carry out the autopsy from tracking the trajectory of the bullet.  Witnesses, such as Paul O’Connor, remembered not only seeing the gunmetal grey coffin, but also remembered hearing helicopters flying overhead; and landing nearby, shortly before President Kennedy’s body had been brought in to Bethesda for autopsying.  Of course there was no case to answer when allegations were raised that the autopsy had been incompetently carried out, because in October 1966 it was discovered that all samples taken from the President’s body during the autopsy had disappeared from the National Archive, this gave those involved in the autopsy plausible deniability, no one could definitively prove that the autopsy had been ineptly handled; because there was no evidence left over from the procedure to definitively prove such a case.  Everyone was a winner, except those looking for the truth.

In order for the Warren Commission to assert that Oswald killed Tippit, there had to be enough time for Oswald to walk from his lodgings to the spot where Officer Tippit was gunned down on 10th and Patton.  The journey between the two spots was a little under a mile.  The Warren Commission concluded that Oswald was last seen at the corner of Beckley and Zang at 1.03 p.m. and that the mile long journey took Oswald thirteen minutes.  With the Commission stating that the shooting took place at 1.16 p.m.  Yet this contradicted the testimony of Helen Markham; who reported that a short man with a ruddy complexion and grey trousers had shot Tippit; and that the time was only ‘a little after one’, when pressed for an exact time Miss Markham said that Officer Tippit had been murdered no later than 1.06 or 1.07 p.m. she could estimate the time so precisely as she had been rushing to catch the 1.12 p.m. bus.   This timing was confirmed by Deputy Sheriff Roger Craig; who stated that he was in the Texas School Book Depository when the news came over the police radio that a police officer had been shot.  He instinctively looked at his watch and noted the time, it was according to his timepiece 1.06 p.m.  Temple Bowley; who joined Domingo Benavides in calling for help on the police radio, also noted the time; he was adamant that he started calling for help over the police radio at 1.10 p.m.  The original Dallas Police Log, which for many years was lost, was recently discovered in the National Archives, this confirmed that the Dallas Police had logged the news of Officer Tippit’s shooting at 1.10 p.m.

Another problem for the Warren Commission; was the direction in which Oswald was walking when Officer Tippit pulled him over.  Five eye witnesses; and the official Dallas Police report into the shooting stated that Oswald was walking in a westerly direction toward Officer Tippit, when Officer Tippit called him over to his patrol car.  If the police report and the witnesses were correct then Oswald could not have taken the route that the Warren Commission stated, and could not have been at 10th and Patton in time to shoot Officer Tippit, in order for Oswald to take a route that pointed him in a westerly direction his walk would have taken him at least sixteen minutes.   This fact didn’t really concern the Commission; they simply ignored the official police report and witnesses and stated categorically that Oswald must have been walking in an easterly direction towards the Texas Theatre.

After dealing with Kennedy, Tippit and Oswald the Commission had to turn its weary attention to Oswald’s assassin, Jack Ruby.  The Commission knew that in the weeks leading up to the assassination Ruby had been making telephone calls to high ranking Mafia members, among them Barney ‘Leg Breaker’ Baker, an associate of Jimmy Hoffa and the teamsters, Dave Yarras and Lenny Patrick; two childhood friends of Ruby’s who had grown up to be two notorious mafia hit-men; based in Chicago, and Nofio Pecora; a dope dealing Mafiosi from New Orleans.  Ruby had other connections to the Mob; before opening his club in Dallas, he had been a petty criminal in Chicago, but Mob bosses Sam Giancana and Joseph Campisi had run Ruby out of town; as his underhanded deals were drawing attention to wider Mafia plots, they allegedly chose not to kill Ruby because of their close friendship; and instead installed him as a manager in one of their quieter Dallas clubs.  Yet the Commission announced to the world that this seedy strip club owner, with a dubious history of criminal endeavours, who had the personal phone numbers of some very scary and very high ranking organised crime bosses; had himself no connection with organised crime.  The Warren Commission explained that the phone calls to these drug dealers and hired killers were simply to help him settle a dispute with an ‘entertainers union’.  They accepted Ruby’s claim that he had murdered Oswald on impulse; to save Jackie Kennedy the heartbreak of having to endure a long and protracted trial in Dallas.   Of course evidence mounted that Ruby far from acting on impulse, had indeed been stalking Oswald since his arrest, waiting for an opportunity to kill him.  Ruby was caught on camera by news teams on the night of the assassination; hanging around the corridors of the Dallas Police Head Quarters.  He was also photographed masquerading as a reporter at the midnight press conference held in the Dallas Police Head Quarters.  On Saturday the 23rd of November 1963, he returned to the Dallas Police Head Quarters; and pressed friends of his in the Dallas Police Department to give him the details of Oswald’s transfer to the local state prison.  The Commission also failed to look into how Ruby got into the basement when Oswald was being transferred; Ruby claimed he had simply walked down the car-ramp into the basement.  This was blatantly a lie, two guards were on duty guarding the ramp; and they both stated that Jack Ruby did not use this route to gain access to the basement car park.  One of these patrolmen, Officer Roy Vaughn, even took part in a lie detector test where his version of events were challenged, Vaughn was adamant that he did not see Ruby that day, he did not leave his post that day, there was no feasible way Ruby could have crept past him that day.  Vaughn passed the lie detector test with flying colours.  There were also witnesses who backed up Officer Vaughn in his statement, police officers and news reporters who were interviewed on live television; just minutes after the shooting, before any amendments could be made to their stories, these men said live on TV that they had witnessed Ruby walking from the back of the car-park, and that he had jumped over a set of railings that partitioned off the car-parking areas from the elevator and corridor where Oswald had been paraded.  If Ruby had come from the back of the car-park, as was immediately stated in the aftermath of the shooting, it meant that he could only have come from one place, inside of Dallas Police Headquarters.

Now one of the attorneys for the Warren Commission did find this suspicious, Burt W. Griffin felt it mighty peculiar, why would the police just let Jack Ruby wander down into the basement via the ramp, passing two armed police officers, as was being claimed?  Griffin also felt it odd that the superior officer of the men on guard, Sergeant Patrick Dean, rather than trying to support his men in their claims that Ruby was lying, had in fact hung the two officers out to dry; and had sided with Ruby’s version of events rather too easily.  Griffin felt that Patrick Dean was lying, trying to cover up something bigger, and so he pressed Dean hard on the issue, accusing him point blank of lying about how Ruby had been able to gain access to the basement.  Rather than let Griffin continue with his investigation; and possibly get to the truth, he was inexplicably recalled back to Washington and reprimanded for following this line of investigation.  He was told in no uncertain terms that the official version of events would state that Ruby simply walked down the ramp into the basement car park, whitewashing out of the official version of events the two armed guards Ruby had to pass; and the witnesses who saw Ruby coming from inside the police station.

That was the extent to which the Warren Commission, in all its wisdom, dealt with the man who had terminated the life of the only 100% solid lead the Commission had to go on, the man who killed the shooter and destroyed any real hope of anyone ever getting to the truth of the matter. With such a facile investigation; the mystery only deepened as the years went on, in 1988 a former associate of Ruby’s, a dancer from the neighbouring Colony Club named Beverley Oliver, came forward to state that she had seen with her own eyes Jack Ruby meet with Lee Harvey Oswald at Ruby’s Carousel Club.  Oliver stated that after she had finished her set at the Colony Club, she regularly crossed the car park to the Carousel Club; where she had talked with her friend, a dancer named Jada.  She stated that one night Ruby had introduced her and Jada to a man named ‘Lee’; who she was certain was Lee Harvey Oswald.  When asked why she had not come forward in the previous twenty-five years, Miss Oliver replied, ‘I didn’t want to be just another statistic, I didn’t want to be one of these people who shot themselves in the back of the head’.  An attempt to track down Jada in order to verify this story proved useless, Jada had become one of the ‘statistics’ Beverley Oliver so feared, dying in a peculiar motorbike accident shortly after Beverly Oliver had come forward with her information; and incriminated Jada.   Of course the Warren Commission cannot be blamed for not interviewing people who did not want to talk, but bizarrely enough Janet ‘Jada’ Conforto did want to talk, and had given her own interview, speaking to TV newsman Paul Good on Monday the 25th of November 1963.  In this interview; Miss Conforto had stated categorically that Ruby did not love President Kennedy enough to want to kill his assassin out of the compassion of his heart, and in fact Ruby had actively hated Robert Kennedy for his persecution of his friends in organised crime.

Jack Ruby himself wanted to give evidence to the Warren Commission, but not from a jail cell in Dallas, where he believed his life was in danger, he wanted to be brought to Washington like all the other important witnesses, and give his evidence from the safety of Capitol Hill.  The Commission refused to accept Ruby’s demands, and as a consequence they did not hear any evidence from the assassins’ assassin.  Perhaps, ultimately, this was because they knew that Ruby would not toe the official line, that he would categorically blow all talk of a lone gunman out of the water.   Ruby himself believed this was why he was not allowed to testify, and he told reporters when asked why he had not given evidence to the Warren Commission, ‘The people who had so much to gain, who had a very ulterior motive for putting me in the position I’m in, will never let the true facts come above board’   When asked if these people were in a position of high power and authority; Ruby answered simply, ‘Yes’.

As the Commission progressed with its investigation; a couple of witnesses came forward whose evidence; not only  threatened to alter the Commission’s carefully laid out belief that Oswald was a leftist extremist, but also threatened to decimate further the credibility of the FBI’s original report into the President’s assassination.  Silvia and Annie Odio were twenty-three and seventeen year old Cuban exiles, their father had been imprisoned in Cuba for attempting to assassinate Fidel Castro in 1962, and as a result the Odio family had become heroes to the Cuban anti-Castro movement.  Silvia and Annie had escaped their family’s persecution in Cuba; and in 1963 they found themselves living in Dallas.  On the night of Wednesday the 25th of September 1963, three anti-Castro militia men came to the Odio residence, two Cubans and an American; they wanted a letter from Silvia; asking for Junta Revolucionaria Cubana (JURE) an organisation that was attempting to unite the disparate anti-Castro revolutionary groups, to release funds for an operation they had planned.  The three men stated that the family’s status as modern Cuban folk heroes would hold some sway with JURE; and would ensure they got the money they needed.   The three men gave Silvia their ‘war names’, the two Cubans were called Leopold and Angelo and the American was called Leon Oswald.  Silvia was weary of the three men, and so declined to give them a letter supporting their application for funds.   The next day Leopold phoned Silvia to try and persuade her to change her mind, and during the course of the conversation Leopold turned the conversation to Leon Oswald.  He told Silvia that Leon was an ex-marine and an excellent shot, and that he hated President Kennedy for the Bay of Pigs shambles, in fact Leon Oswald firmly believed that someone should murder President Kennedy for his betrayal of Cuba.

When Kennedy was assassinated in November 1963; both Silvia and Annie Odio positively identified Lee Harvey Oswald as the Leon Oswald who had visited their apartment those few short weeks before.   Silvia and Annie took their story to the FBI, and naturally to the Warren Commission.  Now the Warren Commission had difficulty in reconciling this story with what they were taking as the established fact; that Lee Harvey Oswald was in Mexico at the time attempting to defect back to Russia or Cuba.  Also if the Commission were to give credence to the Odio story; it damaged the credibility of the conceit that Lee Harvey Oswald was a lone nutter working on his own, not only that but in the official version of events Oswald was to be cast as a leftist nutter, not a right wing anti-Castro one.  The Commission were acutely aware of this, Warren Commission attorney David Slawson put it simply, ‘if what she recollects was true, then I cannot think of an innocent explanation for it, it would indicate very clearly a connection between Oswald and the anti-Castro Cubans’.   In August 1964; Chief Investigator Rankin wrote directly to J. Edgar Hoover regarding his concerns over the Odio story, Rankin put it in plain English, ‘It is a matter of some importance to the Commission that Mrs Odio’s allegations be either proved or disproved’.  Aware that the Odio story made the initial FBI investigation into the assassination look shoddy, and also proved that the FBI’s initial testimonies over Oswald’s movements in the run up to the assassination to either be wrong through incompetence or a deliberate lie, the FBI gave the Commission the perfect excuse to ignore the Odio’s and stick to what the FBI had been telling the Commission all along, that Oswald was a lone communist sympathiser.  The FBI told the Commission that the Odio sisters were mistaken in their identification of Oswald; and that the three men who had come to visit her seeking a letter of support were in fact known Cuban agitators called Loran Hall, Lawrence Howard and William Seymour.  Only Loran Hall was willing to testify to this.  The Commission took his testimony as fact, despite Lawrence Howard and William Seymour denying the allegation.  Loran Hall’s testimony looked even more dubious when it became known that he was one of the CIA’s main go to guys for their black-ops in Cuba.  Hall himself retracted his testimony two days after making it, but it was too late, the Commission had closed the book on the Odio incident.

With the investigation concluded, and reaching the conclusion that Lee Harvey Oswald was a lone assassin, all that needed to happen was for the members of the Commission to put their signature to the finished eight hundred and eighty-eight page document; and its twenty-six volumes of corroborating evidence.  Only there was a dissenting voice, Senator Richard Russell was not happy with the conclusion that Oswald acted alone, he felt that the impossible acrobatics of the ‘Magic Bullet’ made this conclusion unlikely, and he refused to put his name to the final report.  With Russell speaking out; other members of the Commission began to raise their concerns, John Sherman Cooper and Hale Boggs also refused to sign off on the Commission’s findings.   So in order to placate the trio of dissenters, Earl Warren arranged for the three men to be flown out to Dallas to view the assassination site, and to be walked step by step carefully through how the ‘Magic Bullet’ theory was the only workable conclusion.    Only it didn’t work, it made Russell even more stubborn, sitting in the spot where Oswald was supposed to have sat; and looking threw a telescopic scope, it made him more adamant that the Commission’s conclusions were impossible.  On Wednesday the 16th of September 1964, Russell put his concerns in writing to Warren, he would not subscribe to the ‘Magic Bullet’ theory, therefore there had to have been two gunmen carrying out the assassination.  On Friday the 18th of September 1964, the Commission met for the last time. At that meeting Russell demanded that his concerns over the ‘Magic Bullet’ and therefore there being a second gunman; be placed in writing in the final report.  Earl Warren refused, there would be no descent, no footnote questioning and confusing what would be written down in the history books.  As a compromise Warren agreed that in the report the language used to describe the ‘Magic Bullet’ would be toned down, so that instead of the report saying one bullet definitively caused all the injuries to the two men, the report would state that the evidence was simply ‘persuasive’.   This was semantics, legal jargon in order to get Russell, Boggs and Cooper to sign the final report.  Unbeknown to Russell, Warren went further in completely wiping Russell’s concerns of conspiracy from history.  The minutes of the meeting where Russell highlighted his concerns in great detail were amended to remove his voice of dissent; they now simply stated in general terms that ‘administrative matters’ had been discussed.  When Russell discovered how Earl Warren had pulled one over on him, by effectively removing his concerns from the report and the Commissions minutes; he was aghast with horror, but it was too late, the Warren Commission had already been published.  Russell was so furious it destroyed his friendship with Lyndon Johnson, and he never spoke to his friend again.  When asked years later why Russell’s dissent over the ‘Magic Bullet’ had been removed so-completely from history, even from the minutes of the Commissions meetings, Gerald Ford said that the stenographers ‘did what they were supposed to do’.   If Russell, Boggs and Sherman had stuck to their guns; then history would have to be written very differently today, because the official report would not have had the 100% seal of approval it was seen to have, the wider public would have known that eminently sensible people who had looked at the evidence were not persuaded by it.  In turn those who questioned the official version of events would not be met with sneers of derision; because that questioning started in 1964 with members of the Commission itself being unhappy with the official findings; and refusing to put their names to a possible whitewash.

Despite the obvious flaws with the report the majority of its members remained undaunted by the criticism levelled against their findings.  In 1999 Warren Commission member; and former President of the United States Gerald Ford; went on record as saying that the Commission was correct to find that there was no evidence of a conspiracy either foreign or domestic against President Kennedy, and that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone, his final word on the matter rang hollow, ‘There has not been one scintilla of credible evidence since the Commission’s findings which would undercut those two decisions’.

House Select Committee Review on Assassinations

The House Select Committee on Assassinations; was set up in the wake of the United States Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, more commonly known as the Church Committee, after its chair Senator Frank Church.  This wide ranging investigation into the FBI, CIA and NSA uncovered some frightening facts; for starters the NSA, which people previously joked had stood for No Such Agency; was finally confirmed to exist, and that all three of these agencies had been carrying out nefarious; and in some cases illegal acts over the course of many decades.  Among the crimes uncovered were the assassinations of Patrice Lumumba; the first democratically elected President of Congo, Rafael Trujillo; the sometime democratic President sometime dictator of the Dominican Republic, Ngo Dinh Diem; the first democratically elected President of South Vietnam, General Rene Schneider; the Commander in Chief of the Chilean Army, plus several botched attempts at killing Fidel Castro.   This was the 1970's, America had lost its innocence, war in Vietnam had dragged on for nearly a decade, leaving those who were conscripted to return home jaded and battle damaged, then Watergate happened, Richard Nixon became the only US President ever to resign lest he face the disgrace of impeachment.  The threat of nuclear holocaust hung heavy over the nations head every day, there was no optimism; and people no longer trusted the government.  Added to this the fact that hundreds of books had been written questioning the facts around President Kennedy's death, the Zappruder film had been released; which raised even more questions and caused an outcry, and New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison had brought a criminal case to trial; alleging a conspiracy surrounding the Presidents murder.  It seemed no one believed or trusted the lone gunman theory anymore, so the Church Committee had the mandate to open the books on the shadowy intelligence agencies that many accused of being implicit in President Kennedy’s murder; and who had done so much to take away that innocence from the nation.  The Church Committee concluded in part, ‘This report documents the failures of the US Intelligence establishment in their investigation of President Kennedy’s assassination, and their cover-up to the Warren Commission’.
When the nation found out just how many people their government had secretly murdered, people who had been in positions of power and responsibility around the world, they began to ask if it possible that these shady intelligence agencies had been operating on American soil?  Could those whose political blood had been spilt on American soil have died at the hands of the agencies that were meant to protect American citizens?  In 1976 the American senate decided that the people deserved answers to their questions, and so after a vote of 280 to 60 the senate formed the House Select Committee on Assassination (HSCA) to see if one or all of the American intelligence agencies had played any part in the assassinations of President John Fitzgerald Kennedy, civil rights leader the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jnr or the Alabama Governor George Wallace.
The HSCA, like the Warren Commission would be bipartisan; with members from both sides of the political spectrum overseeing the investigation.  Thomas N. Downing (Democrat/Virginia) Henry B. Gonzalez (Democrat/Texas) Louis Stokes (Democrat/Ohio) would act as the Committees Chairmen.  L. Richard Preyer (Democrat/North Carolina) Walter E. Fauntroy (Democrat/Columbia) Yvonne Bathwaite Burke (Democrat/California) Christopher Dodd (Democrat/Connecticut) Harold Ford (Democrat/Tennessee) Floyd Fithian (Democrat/Indiana) Robert E. Edgar (Democrat/Pennsylvania) Samuel Leeper Devine (Republican/Ohio) Stewart McKinney (Republican/Connecticut) Charles Thone (Republican/Nebraska) and Harold S. Sawyer (Republican/Michigan) all sat on the committee to review its evidence and findings.  Serving as investigator for the HSCA was G. Robert Blakey, a man who had been the driving force behind the Organised Crime Control Act, and who was seen as a renowned expert on organised crime.  The Kennedy assassination was a little personal to Blakey, he had worked under President Kennedy’s brother, Robert Kennedy, when Robert Kennedy had been Attorney General, Blakey had been an adviser on Kennedy’s fight against the Mafia.  Blakey had left his role shortly after the assassination of President Kennedy, his faith in the new administration shattered.  Yet he had still worked tirelessly to fight organised crime, drafting law which would make it easier for Judges to order wiretaps on known Mafia figures.  Appointing Blakey as the prime investigator showed that the HSCA meant business, and wasn’t going to pull its punches with any of the dubious organisations or individuals it would have to inevitably deal with.

Of course organisations whose bread and butter work is clandestine, borderline illegal; operations weren’t going to just hand the HSCA the rope to hang themselves with, and straight away they began to play dirty.  The CIA appointed a special liaison to the HSCA, someone who knew the CIA’s workings and could ‘help’ the investigators find any documents they needed; and track down any witnesses they wished to question.  The man appointed as liaison was George Joannides.  Joannides was a Greek born immigrant, the son of a prominent newspaper reporter.  He had studied law; before working briefly as a reporter himself, before moving into the diplomatic services working for the Greek Embassy.   In 1951 he was recruited by the CIA, quickly moving up the ranks to become the head of JM-WAVE, this was a covert division of the CIA; which operated from the middle of a dense wood on the outskirts of Miami, Florida.  The department ran under the cover of being Zenith Technological Enterprises, but it was in fact a top secret experimental psychological warfare division of the CIA.  JM-WAVE had been involved in several black-ops; including Operation MONGOOSE, the secret operation to create acts of subversion and sabotage in Cuba, which in turn evolved into the ongoing and increasingly ludicrous plots to assassinate Castro.  As part of this work; Joannides had to work closely with Directorio Revolucionario Estudiantil (DRE) a right wing anti-Castro and indeed anti-Kennedy movement of Cuban exiles.  This was where the conflict of interest came in for Joannides, because Lee Harvey Oswald was a known associate of DRE.  In short the HSCA was entrusting a man who may have been lying for fifteen years about Lee Harvey Oswald’s CIA links, to give the HSCA the files and the contacts he might have been trying to protect all that time.  G. Robert Blakey was furious when he found out about Joannides links to the very events the HSCA was trying to investigate, ‘I am no longer confident that the Central Intelligence Agency co-operated with the committee...I was not told of Joannides' background with the DRE, a focal point of the investigation. Had I known who he was, he would have been a witness who would have been interrogated under oath by the staff or by the committee. He would never have been acceptable as a point of contact with us to retrieve documents... That the Agency would put a material witness in as a filter between the committee and its quests for documents was a flat out breach of the understanding the committee had with the Agency that it would co-operate with the investigation’.  As a result; Blakey began to campaign for the CIA to be forced to turn over any files they held pertaining to the movement and actions of Joannides in 1963.  Both the CIA and the courts refused Blakey’s requests for this information.   In a mounting war of words Blakey accused the CIA of Obstruction Of Justice, but there was nothing he could do.  Then to add further insult to injury for Blakey, Joannides was subsequently implicated in the 1968 assassination of his friend Robert Kennedy, when a photograph turned up purportedly showing Joannides in the Ambassador Hotel; the scene of his friends murder, on the day of Robert Kennedy’s assassination.

With the proceedings already well and truly compromised; the HSCA got underway in earnest, then like the plot of a bestselling fictional thriller several key witnesses were murdered, Mob boss and CIA operative ‘Handsome’ Johnny Roselli began to testify before the HSCA; when all of a sudden he was discovered strangled, shot, his legs sawn off and his body stuffed into a barrel that was dumped in Dumbfoundling Bay, Maimi.   Charles ‘Chuckie Typewriter’ Nicoletti was executed as he waited in his car in a car park in North Lake, Illinois. The notorious Mob boss and CIA operative Sam Giancana had co-operated with the Church Committee, telling them that the Mob and the CIA were, ‘different sides of the same coin’, and he had started to tell people that he intended to tell all to the HSCA.  Giancana was under witness protection at the time of his death; due to his previous testimonials to the Church Committee, despite this on the night of Thursday the 19th of June 1975, an unidentified operative withdrew Giancana’s police protection, and later that evening Giancana was gunned down in his kitchen as he cooked his dinner.  Former President of Cuba, Carlos Prio, was called before the HSCA, but before he could testify he was found with a shotgun blast to the face, a death that, despite the impossible angle of the shot; was declared a suicide.  A HSCA investigator was actually on the way to the home of CIA operative and alleged Oswald handler George DeMorenschildt, when DeMorenschildt allegedly shot himself in the face with a shotgun as well.   People began to question not just the murders and suicides that were taking place amongst the witnesses, but also the sheer number of those due to give evidence who were dying in accidents or of ‘natural causes’.  Former FBI Agent Louis B. Nichols, J. Edgar Hoovers’ liaison to the Warren Commission; suffered a fatal heart attack just days before he was due to testify, now any rational person will say heart attacks happen, but Nichols had previously been of good health, and the incident appeared to be part of a growing pattern.  Donald Kaylor, the FBI agent who took the fingerprint samples in the Texas School Book Depository; also died of a heart attack days before he was due to testify before the HSCA.  J. M. English, the FBI Forensic Scientist who tested the rifle and pistol allegedly fired by Oswald, also suffered a fatal heart attack before he could testify.  FBI agent James Cadigan was due to give evidence based on many of the top secret document he had viewed relating to the assassination; he allegedly tripped down the stairs at his home and died.   Four former colleagues, all of whom had worked on the same high profile case, all dying within weeks of each other, all before they could give evidence before a Congressional Committee looking into that case.  Even with the deaths being ascribed to accidents and natural causes; you can see why people began to ask questions and call foul.

Ironically as the witnesses for the HSCA began to drop like flies, the HSCA itself was looking at the ‘statistically improbable’ number of people who had a connection to the Kennedy assassination, who themselves had died in dubious circumstances.  Four of Jack Ruby’s ‘showgirls’, Dealey Plaza witnesses Gary Underhill, Lee Bowers, and several witnesses involved in the ‘Rose Cheramie Affair’; had all died prematurely; and in peculiar circumstances.  In the event the Commission concluded that, ‘The available evidence does not establish anything about the nature of these deaths which would indicate that the deaths were in some manner, either direct or peripheral, caused by the assassination of President Kennedy or by any aspect of the subsequent investigation’.   This official denouncement of foul play didn’t stop many from continuing to wonder. Eminent Kennedy researcher Jim Marrs; eventually collated a list of 103 people who had died ‘convenient deaths’ before they could give evidence to the various official investigations and hearings into President Kennedy’s assassination.

The most persuasive piece of evidence of conspiracy that the HSCA uncovered was The McLain Tape; this was the dictabelt recording of Dallas Police Radio Channel 1, more specifically, that of Motorcycle Officer H. B. McLain, recorded when he left his microphone in the on position as he escorted the Presidential motorcade.  It was believed that when the sound of the rifle fire was caught by the microphone on the motorbike, it recorded it on the dictabelt as an ‘impulse pattern’.  The interesting thing was there were quite clearly four impulse patterns recorded on the McLain tape.  This suggested that four shots had been fired in Dealey Plaza that terrible day.   Bolt, Beranek and Newman Technology, the prestigious acoustic science engineers, were asked by the HSCA to examine the McLain tape. The company agreed to investigate the recording further, and Dr. James E. Barger took charge of their acoustical investigation.  Dr. Barger went back to Dealey Plaza, placed microphones all over the area, and using Oswald’s Mannlicher-Carcano rifle he fired shots from the Texas Schoolbook Depository and the grassy knoll.  After scientifically analysing the McLain recording, Dr. Barger came to the conclusion that there were indeed four shots recorded on the dictatape, and after comparing the McLain Tape to their own recording made in Dealey Plaza; they came to the conclusion that there was a 50% chance that shot number three came from the grassy knoll.  Of course Dr. James E. Barger was putting his reputation on the line; and he didn’t want to look like a fool, so he had his results crosschecked by acoustic analyst’s Mark Weiss and Ernest Aschkenasy, from Queen’s College.  When Weiss and Aschkenasy examined the McLain Tape; they concluded that not only was Dr Barger correct, but by their calculations there was a 95% probability that there had been a fourth shot fired from the grassy knoll.  Of course there was some argument over whether the McLain Tape was really what it reported to be.  Some argued that it wasn’t even the sound from Officer McLain’s microphone that had been recorded.  McLain stated that he rode with the President all the way to Parkland hospital, so the sound sirens should have been more prevalent in the recording, as too should have been the sounds of crowds cheering; and then screaming when the President was shot; McLain even argued that it sounded like the recording of a three wheeled vehicle, not a two.  Of course Officers McLain’s protestations fell on deaf ears.

One of the truly delightful things about the murky world of alternative historical research is that events can take the most unexpected turn, so it was with the McLain Tape, when in 1979 with the furore over the HSCA at its height, a pornographic magazine called ‘Gallery’ gave copies of the McLain Tape recording away free with their magazine; on a flexi-disc.  Rock drummer Steve Barber just happened to buy a copy of the porno publication (yes even rock-stars have needs) and he ended up listening to the free gift.  Barber became a little obsessed with the recording, and listened to it over and over again, using headphones to drown out ambient sound.  As he listened he began to make out the words, ‘hold everything secure’; seconds after the impulses left by the rifle fire.  Unbeknown to Barber these words had been spoken on the day of the assassination by Sheriff Bill Decker, but crucially he had not spoken them until at least a minute after the President had been shot, therefore with the words coming so quickly after the electronic impulses, researchers surmised the impulses couldn’t be the sound of rifle-fire after all.  With Barber’s discovery throwing everything up in the air again, the Justice Department paid the National Academy of Science to test the McLain Tape recording even further.  This panel agreed with Barber’s conclusions; and stated that the feedback could not have been created by rifle-fire.  Then Dr James E. Barger came back to rebut the criticism of his work, he stated that the National Academy of Science had been working from a fundamental misunderstanding of how the dictabelt recorded sound, and that when listening to the recording one was not necessarily listening to what happened on the day of the assassination in exact real time, therefore it was quite possible to hear Sherriff Decker’s words on the McLain Tape sooner than they were actually spoken on the day.  In 1996 Dr. Donald Thomas, an entomologist working in the US Department of Agriculture, carried out his own study on the McLain Tape, for the March issue of the British journal of the Forensic Science Society, Science and Justice.  He used a new modern system; to re-synchronise the differing radio channels that had been recorded onto the dictabelt, so that they were now running in the correct chronological order; with no audio overlap from differing channels putting events out of chronological sequence.  He concluded that the National Academy of Science was wrong in their analysis, and that there was actually a 96.3% certainty that the impulses heard on the McLain Tape were rifle-fire; representing not three or even four, but five separate gunshots.

In 2004 Dale Myers used his contentious 3D computer model of Dealey Plaza to pooh-pooh the McLain Tape evidence.  He gathered six pieces of footage of the assassination, from six onlookers, with six different vantage points of Dealey Plaza.  He synchronised this footage with the McLain Tape, and he followed Officer McLain’s progress in the motorcade, from a few moments before; to the moment of the assassination.  Myers came to the conclusion that Officer McLain could not have been in the correct position to have recorded the dictatape evidence as given to the HSCA, McLain, Myers argued, was simply too far away from the President when the shots began.

So the debate rages on, others have thrown their pennies worth into the argument, muddying the waters further, the McLain Tape has proven to be one of the most contentious issues in the whole Kennedy assassination affair.  For everyone willing to say that it definitely proves the existence of more than one shooter, there are others equally willing to step into the fray with a different analysis which disproves the existence of electronic impulses on the tape.  All the while the wider public becomes more and more confused as more and more technical language and peculiar techniques are used to analyse it, twisting the narrative of that fateful day with every new test.

In 1978 the HSRC finally completed its report; it came to the following startling and groundbreaking conclusions:

1.        Lee Harvey Oswald fired three shots at President Kennedy.  Oswald’s second and third shots hit the President, with the third shot being the fatal bullet.

2.       The acoustic evidence pointed to a ‘high probability’ of there being at least two gunmen.

3.       President Kennedy did not receive adequate protection from the Secret Service, FBI or CIA.  The investigation into the probability of a conspiracy being involved in the assassination was inadequate.  The FBI and Warren Commission arrived at their conclusions in good faith; but were ‘presented in a fashion that was too definitive’.

4.      Finally; that President Kennedy was probably assassinated as the result of a conspiracy, which probably involved individuals involved in organised crime and anti-Castro Cuban activities.  Crucially; the HSRA did not believe that the conspiracy involved the Soviet Russian or Cuban governments, the FBI, CIA or NSA.

Louis Stokes concluded the committee with the following salient words, ‘Never again should our society respond as it did in the aftermath of the death of these two great leaders.  We did not give these two men the type of investigation in death which was commensurate with the dignity of their lives’.

Absolutely Corrupt: The Conspiracies

‘Practically all the Cabinet members of President Kennedy's administration, along with Director J. Edgar Hoover of the FBI and Chief James Rowley of the Secret Service, whose duty it was to protect the life of the President, testified that to their knowledge there was no sign of any conspiracy. To say now that these people, as well as the Commission, suppressed, neglected to unearth, or overlooked evidence of a conspiracy would be an indictment of the entire government of the United States. It would mean the whole structure was absolutely corrupt from top to bottom, with not one person of high or low rank willing to come forward to expose the villainy’  - Earl Warren

The Mob the CIA and The Fall of Fidel Castro

In 2005, Lamar Waldron and Thomas Hartmann put a new spin on the Mob, the CIA and the Cuban Connections related to the assassination.  They came up with a grand unifying theory, which tied together all of the famed disparate elements, in their book, ‘Ultimate Sacrifice’.  Over twenty long years of research, Waldron and Hartmann uncovered secret government papers which indicated that factions within the CIA had secretly been working with the Mob; to try and take down Fidel Castro; the Mob having carried out dozens of failed assassination attempts on behalf of Uncle Sam.  Why was the Mob doing this seemingly patriotic duty?  Well, simply put; the Mob wanted Cuba back.   The Mob had secretly been running the island for years before Castro had seized power, the Mob had run the high rolling casino’s in Havana, and had run ridiculously profitable drug smuggling operations from bases on the island, all lovingly ignored by the old corrupt Cuban officials.  The good times had ended when Castro came to power; he closed down the casinos, enforced drug laws, shut down the smuggling rings and kicked the Mob off the island.

The Kennedy brother’s persecution of the Mob was seen by the Mobsters as the ultimate insult after all their patriotic work for the CIA.  Then in June 1963, Kennedy in collusion with his brother Robert; came up with a secret plan to deal with Castro on their own terms, before the crucial 1964 election campaign.  Project AMWORLD was the Kennedy’s own unique plan to stage a coup in Cuba.  It was a plan designed by the Kennedy’s to give their administration complete and plausible deniability if it all went wrong like the Bay of Pigs invasion.  If it went right, then Kennedy could claim victory in Cuba and propel his administration to a successful landslide re-election.  On Sunday the 1st of December 1963, disparate militia groups and soldiers of fortune from around the world would be brought together as a dirty, dangerous and violent invasion force that would storm the beaches of Cuba.  Bobby Kennedy was the lynchpin in the whole dastardly plot, this way his brothers Presidential fingerprints wouldn’t be anywhere near the invasion if it went wrong.  Bobby met with exiled Cuban militia men who would lead the force, and together they plotted the invasion in minute detail.  According to Lamar and Hartmann the CIA decided to ruin the plan for the Kennedy’s, by letting the Mob know that the Kennedy brothers had their own plans afoot to bring down Castro.  The Mob in turn infiltrated the plot, having six of their own men recruited into the invasion force.

At the same time as the above plotting and scheming Bobby Kennedy’s crusade against organised crime finally reached the doorstep of the most powerful Mob boss in all America, Carlos ‘The Little Man’ Marcello.  Marcello was the boss of bosses in New Orleans, twice Bobby Kennedy had Marcello deported, once Kennedy ordered Marcello to be kidnapped and literally thrown from a plane in the middle of the night, a plane that was flying over Central America.  Marcello made his way back home and was back in charge of his criminal empire within a fortnight.   Sometime later Bobby Kennedy had Marcello arrested again and deported once again to Guatemala.  Again Marcello snuck his way back across the border, and was back in charge of his criminal enterprises before a fortnight was out.  Needless to say Marcello was nonplussed by these highly unorthodox actions by the law enforcement agencies, and he turned his notorious rage towards the Kennedy’s.   Marcello wanted Bobby Kennedy to stop his persecution of him and his family business.  It is alleged that Marcello realised that if he had Bobby Kennedy murdered then things would get even more difficult for him, he’d simply anger the most powerful man in the world, Bobby’s brother, the President of the United States.  So Marcello realised that the best way to stop the dog’s tail from wagging; was to cut off the dogs head, and murder the President.

Now Marcello hit upon a glorious realisation, if he murdered Kennedy before Sunday the 1st of December 1963, it would make any open investigation of his murder impossible.  If he or his Mob associates were accused of being involved in the assassination they would simply threaten to expose the planned invasion of Cuba, and it could as a result kick start a new era of hostility between America and Cuba’s paymasters, Soviet Russia.  The last thing anyone wanted was another situation like the Cuban Missile Crisis; which had brought the world to the brink of a nuclear holocaust just a few short months before.  No, Marcello realised that his knowledge of the planned invasion gave him carte blanche to do whatever he wanted, and he would be untouchable.  So Marcello arranged for their best hit-men to murder the President, and for some unlucky fool to take the blame.  Marcello used the Mob’s connections to the CIA to discover the men who would most likely be on the governments list of suspects if the President were to be murdered.  This brought pro-Cuban solidarity agitator Lee Harvey Oswald to the Mob’s nefarious attention.

Marcello meticulously planned the assassination; the plot ending in Dallas, and Waldron and Hartmann claim that this is where Jack Ruby came into the conspiracy.  To Waldron and Hartmann; Ruby is more than just a lowly mafia soldier, he was in fact the local mafia man in charge of running the moles in the police department, and organising corruption in local law enforcement, Ruby was the Mafia’s eyes and ears in the Dallas Police Department.  Ruby had spent many long years building up connections and sources in the Dallas Police Department, and all these sources were suddenly brought into play, ready to tip Ruby off immediately if the local police got wind of the assassination plot.  Importantly, because Ruby had the ability to slip in and out of the Dallas Police Head Quarters with importunity, never being challenged or stopped, he was the man who would execute Oswald before he had the opportunity to open his mouth.

Of course not everyone agrees with this version of events.  It has been argued that Operation AMWORLD was simply a contingency plan, and not an active operation that was likely to ever be used.  Therefore; the argument goes; the Mob would not have had the power to blackmail the government with the revelation of the top secret invasion plan to the wider world.  There is no other supportive documentation to support the existence of Operation AMWORLD, other than the single mention of the operation in only one singular declassified CIA memo.  Experts who study such declassified documentation are eager to point out that many such operations and plans, which never came to fruition, are mentioned in such memos regularly.  These interdepartmental memorandum where a way for ideas to be circulated, and people would assign arbitrary dates for the potential actions to be completed by in the memos, but the memos were never meant to be taken as final instructions or commands.  They were in short the 1960’s equivalent of sending an email to your boss saying, ‘why don’t we do X by Y date, about this particular problem’, sending such an email doesn’t necessarily mean your suggestion will be taken on board by the boss.   It is also quite telling that one of Kennedy’s most trusted and closest advisors, Secretary of Defence Robert McNamara, had absolutely no knowledge of Operation AMWORLD.  If it was an active operation then it seems incredible that McNamara would have no knowledge of a plan that would have had consequences for the world political stage, and involved the actual invasion of foreign soil.

The most damning evidence against this particular plot; is that if Kennedy was planning on carrying out an invasion of Cuba; it was well within the Mob’s favour.  They would not have wanted to do anything that risked the invasion being called off.  The Mob were losing millions each day not having access to the island of Cuba.  The casinos alone the Mob use to run from Havana made Las Vegas’ returns look like ‘chump money’; as one Mafia expert put it.  Therefore it’s crazy to conceive that the Mafia would ensure that any such operation to invade Cuba would be called off, just so they could have some petty revenge on the President and his brother, who at most had only mildly inconvenienced their ongoing operations.

The Price Of Peace

Did President Kennedy have to die because he wanted the cold war to thaw?  Was the industrial military complex so threatened by President Kennedy’s finding a ‘deeper, more universal humanity’; that the nameless military minds took the decision to stage of coup d’etat?  Those are the startling ideas put forward in Jack Douglass’ seminal work ‘JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died, Why It Matters’ in my humble opinion one of the best; indeed most beautiful; books ever penned on the subject of the assassination.

President Kennedy again and again flew in the face of generally accepted wisdom of how a President should act in the face of his cold war advisors, he had refused to take his generals advice about going to war over the Cuban Missile Crisis, he had refused to step up the Bay of Pigs invasion by offering air support, he was making plans to dissolve the CIA due to its illegal foreign operations, and he was taking steps to end the Vietnam War before it had even begun, the latter being a war the CIA desperately wanted.  More than this; President Kennedy had signed the Limited Test Ban Treaty; against the advice of his military advisors; this military treaty banned the testing of nuclear weapons underground, and was seen as a deliberate attempt by President Kennedy to slow down the ever quickening arms race.  Perhaps the greatest indiscretion President Kennedy made was his ode to peace known as the American University Speech, the moment many pinpoint as when the industrial military complex realised that President Kennedy had to die.  This moving and iconic speech was where President Kennedy laid out the common goal that should be shared by Soviet Russia and America in their quest for a lasting peace, ‘For in the final analysis, our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet. We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children's futures.  And we are all mortal’.   Acts of liberal refrain such as this speech deeply upset and annoyed the military, the CIA and the arms manufacturers; who stood to lose billions from a possible end to the ceaseless war that had sprung from the ashes of World War 1 and 2.  So together these faceless ‘unspeakable’ forces came together to plot President Kennedy’s murder.  As Oliver Stone eloquently put it after reading JFK and the Unspeakable, they weren’t just killing a man; but a vision, a vision of peace.

Of course this idea of a nebulous and faceless conspiracy, where unnamed shadowy forces plotted against a secretly peace loving President has its critics. It is easy to point to numerous acts of aggression that President Kennedy authorised in the ongoing and endless Cold War, which undermine James Douglass’ central conceit of a President who wanted peace at any cost, but to do so is to misunderstand the framework in which President Kennedy was trapped.  It would have been impossible for any President to come out and point blank say that they wanted to end the cold war and have peace, this would have been political suicide, and would have ended the delicate process before it had even begun.  President Kennedy was an intelligent man, he knew he had to work stealthily, committing acts of aggression and war which perhaps his conscious might have disagreed with, making pro-war statements and promises he knew in his hearts of hearts were lies, but which ultimately worked as a cover for his derided and hated ideologies of peace.  The unspeakable is a complex theory and one there is as much proof to support as to scoff, yet in James Douglass’ tome there is a beautiful truth we should all strive to achieve, that peace isn’t a dirty word or a sinful ideology, and that sometimes we should do what we know is right; even if we are certain it will lead to our own downfall.

The Mirror Man

What if Lee Harvey Oswald wasn’t unique?  What if he was just one of a collection of similar men who had been selected and placed in key cities around America; waiting for their opportunity to kill President Kennedy?  It sounds preposterous, but that’s the tantalising suggestion hinted at by the stories of Thomas Arthur Vallee and Gilberto Policarpo Lopez.   It was former Secret Service Agent Abraham Bolden, the first black man to be given the honour of protecting the President, who brought this peculiar story to light.  In October 1963, Bolden had been dispatched to Chicago, where President Kennedy was soon to visit, here the landlady of a low rent apartment had discovered hidden in a room she had been snooping in, four high powered rifles and a map with the President’s motorcade drawn upon it.  The men who rented the room were said to be Cuban nationals, and so the Secret Service sensibly put them under surveillance.  Unfortunately one of the Cuban’s heard one of the Secret Service Agents radios squawk as he passed the agents car, the Cubans realised they had been rumbled, and they made a break for it, successfully escaping.  As a result of this bungle, Secret Service officers were allegedly ordered to lose all paperwork that pertained to the cock-up, in other words they were to make it look like the threat in Chicago had never existed in the first place.

Meanwhile the Chicago Police Department had got edgy with the Secret Service knocking around town, and so decided independently of the Secret Service, to shake down anyone on their radar who might possibly have a gripe with the President.  That’s where Thomas Arthur Vallee came in; he was a man who bore a strikingly similar psychological and social profile to Lee Harvey Oswald.  Vallee was a thirty-year old ex-marine; like Oswald, he was a trained marksman; like Oswald, he had been assessed as a having a psychiatric illness; like Oswald, he was a disaffected member of a political organisation; like Oswald, and he’d just got himself a menial job working in a high-rise building that overlooked the route of a Presidential motorcade; just like Oswald.   The Chicago Police realised that this man fitted the profile of a potential shooter down to a T, and so they looked for any old excuse they could to have Vallee pulled over; so they could search his vehicle and question him.  The police finally found their chance as Vallee committed a minor road traffic violation, they search his car, and low and behold if they didn’t discover a powerful M1 Rifle with a telescopic sight; and 2500 rounds of ammunition.

Then there was the revelation of an assassination plot in Tampa, Florida.  Once again President Kennedy had been due to give a talk in Tampa, this time at a Steel Works Union, before the talk there was due to be the obligatory long and meandering motorcade.  Luckily this motorcade went off without a hitch.  Allegedly the men involved in the prospective assassination attempt had a police mole, who informed them that the police and the FBI were onto the assassination plot, and so called the operation off.  It was not until Tuesday the 3rd of December 1963; that the CIA finally received intelligence on the alleged shooter in the Tampa plot, a man who had already fled the country.  The CIA suddenly found themselves bold over to discover that not only did the potential shooter surprisingly have links to Lee Harvey Oswald, but he was also startlingly similar in other respects to the Presidential killer.   Gilberto Policarpo Lopez was an ex-Cuban national, he was a member of the Fair Play For Cuba Committee, just like Oswald, he suffered from a neurological condition, epilepsy, which at the time, many considered to be a mental health condition similar to the psychiatric condition Oswald had been diagnosed with as a young man.  Lopez had moved his wife out of Florida in mid-1963, just as Oswald had moved Marina out of New Orleans at the same time.  Both men made trips to Mexico City in the autumn of 1963, both crossing the border at Nuevo Laredo.  Both men were arrested for having public fist fights over their pro-Castro activities in the Summer of 1963.  Both men hated President Kennedy over his treatment of Cuba.  On top of this Lopez had taken a job at the Floridan Hotel in Tampa, the tallest building on the route of the Presidential motorcade.  Hmm.

Abraham Bolden got wind of the assassination attempt in Tampa, this when put together with the assassination attempts in Chicago, and the actual assassination in Texas, and Bolden smelt conspiracy.  When Bolden tried to tell his story to the Warren Commission, he found himself being charged with bribery, and serving six years in prison.  This was despite the fact there was no solid evidence against him, and the only person to make an allegation had withdrawn their claim stating that they’d made the whole thing up out of spite.   Bolden spent the rest of his life trying to clear his good name, and feeling the terrible suspicion that he had been set-up, because his allegations of conspiracy had gotten too close to the true nub of the matter, and his lingering doubts that the Secret Service were complicit in the President’s murder also.   In the end; the Warren Commission did not even mention that the Secret Service had viable intelligence about the assassination plots in Chicago and Tampa in the weeks leading up to the President’s murder in Dallas. Bolden reached the inescapable conclusion that it was a cover-up.

The Vallee and Lopez stories gives rise to the possible conclusion that someone had been positioning men of a certain accusable disposition in places where they could either assassinate the President, or at least take the fall for such a murderous act, but just who would be responsible for this shrewd, conniving and manipulative behaviour?  Well according to some it was all part of an elaborate Mafia plan to kill the President.  In 1985 Jack Van Laningham became a convicted bank robber, serving eight years at the Texarkana Penitentiary, where he struck up an unlikely friendship with Mafia godfather Carlos Marcello, a friendship born out of the simple fact that they were both the oldest gentlemen in the clink.  Laningham was given an offer by the FBI; start to secretly pump Marcello for information, and he would walk free from his jail sentence.  Laningham agreed with alacrity, and it was arranged for him to become bunkmates with Marcello.  As soon as the men were bunked up all warm and snug; revelation after revelation began to pour in from the cell of the loose lipped Mafia godfather.  Now, I’m extremely wary of jail cell confessions from old lags, but many of Marcello and Laningham’s conversations were taped via a secret recording devise; hidden in a radio-set, however the crucial confession; where Marcello startlingly confessed to President Kennedy’s murder, just happened to go down in the prison yard, where there was no audio coverage.  Marcello allegedly told Laningham; ‘I had the little bastard killed; he was a thorn in my shoe’.  Marcello stated that Oswald had been set up in Dallas to be the shooter.  The plan was for the police to see Oswald in the sixth floor window of the depository with the rifle in hand, and for the police to then kill Oswald straight after the assassination, but the police didn’t see Oswald, and he managed to escape.  So Jack Ruby, Marcello’s man in Dallas, was picked to finish the botched job; and publically execute Oswald.  Why use Ruby?  Well, Marcello had been planning on killing Ruby anyway.  He’d just discovered that Jack Ruby has been skimming profits off of the top of the Dallas operations, stealing thousands from him over the years.  So Marcello picked Ruby to be the shooter in cold blooded retribution.

It all sounds fantastical, and for years there was no proof that Oswald had any connections to organised crime; then two revelations occurred almost simultaneously which changed this view.  Firstly it was discovered that Oswald’s uncle had been an illegal bookmaker for the Carlos Marcello outfit in New Orleans.  Then as if to back this revelation up; a photograph surfaced of a young, fifteen year old, Lee Harvey Oswald stood with David Ferrie, a close associate of Carlos Marcello, one of Marcello’s most trusted pilots for his various nefarious activates, such as drugs smuggling, and a man that Marcello used for various acts of spying and snooping in and around New Orleans.

Although a peculiar bunch, the individuals picked to be the patsy in each individual city did at first glance seem to be an inspired choice, one a foaming at the mouth militia, so paranoid he drove around with an arsenal in the back of his car, the other two flaky pro-Cuban sympathisers, guaranteed to make any investigator look for the reds hiding under the bed as those responsible for backing their murderous endeavours on the President.  The problem is when you take a closer look these patsy’s aren’t very good at all.  Vallee was under such close scrutiny that the police knew all about his cache of weapons, and arrested him before the right wing nut could do any harm with them.  If Carlos Lopez had ended up being the unlucky patsy, then surely even the briefest look at his life and medical history would show he couldn’t have been a reliable shooter.  He had no military training, having fled Cuba before he had been drafted, and the stress of shooting the President of the United States surely would have brought on one of his regular stress induced seizures.  The mafia where not amateurs bumbling around grabbing whoever they could to do jobs for them, they were always careful who they picked to be associated with, even if they were picking a patsy, they would have ensured their man had all the right credentials.

This theory might easily have been forgotten as another crazy jail cell confession, made up by a man who was desperate to get out of jail, and vaguely supported by the words of a (wrongfully) disgraced Secret Service agent.   Then, G. Robert Blakey, the man who led the HSCA investigation, gave the theory his support, it was his considered opinion that President Kennedy died at the hands of a conspiracy organised by the mafia.  All of a sudden this theory looked a hell of a lot more plausible to the buffs; and the book buying public.

The Not So French Connection

Christian David, a rather disreputable Corsican drug trafficker, linked to the Unione Corse (the French Mafia), was offered the contract to assassinate President Kennedy, whilst David was living in Marseille in the June of 1963.   At least that was the story given to investigative journalist Stephen Rivele, when he met David as he lived in exile in South America in 1981.   In return for the information he had about the assassination, David wanted America to intervene and stop his extradition to France, where he was facing a lengthy prison sentence for his activities in shifting massive amounts of heroine across international borders, and not to mention murdering French Police Officer Lieutenant Maurice Galiber.  According to David, French crime boss Antoine Guerini, had accepted a contract from Carlos Marcelo of the New Orleans Mob; and Tony Gambino of the New York Mob, to murder President Kennedy.  The Mob had finally gotten tired of the Kennedy’s constant harassment of their criminal activities and had decided to end their persecutors troublesome whining permanently.  So rather than do the hit themselves, and risk making life a hell of a lot more difficult for themselves if the assassin was caught, they did what the Mafia always did, and brought in a killer from out of town.  Except for such a large operation the killers were brought in from a little further afield.  The Unione Corse were possibly the only foreign killers who were acceptable to the Corsican Mafia, they weren’t black or Asian, which appealed to the Mafia’s vaguely racist little ideologies, they had similar moral values to the Corsican families, they could be relied upon to keep the their mouths shut if they were unlucky enough to be caught, and most importantly they were completely untraceable back to the Corsican Mob.

Christian David ultimately decided to turn the contract down, on the grounds that hitting the incumbent American President on American soil was too dangerous an affair, so Guerini turned to heroine smuggler Lucian Sarti, also known as Silvia Odio.  Sarti was known for his wild criminal gambles; and he in turn recruited Roger Bocagnani and Sauveur Pironti to carry out the assassination.  The three assassins were flown from Marseilles to Mexico City four weeks before the assassination, where they stayed in a safe-house.  Shortly before the assassination they crossed the American boarder at Brownsville, Texas, using fake Italian passports.  Once in America they met with their Chicago contacts, and were taken to Dallas.  Once again they were put in a safe-house; this was to ensure that they left no traceable records, such as hotel registrations, in their murderous wake.  Posing as Italian tourists they then spent a few days getting the lay of the land, taking photographs of Dealey Plaza.   On the day of the assassination the three men caught President Kennedy in a crossfire, Sarti firing from the grassy knoll, and his two accomplices firing from behind the President, one from the Dal-Tex Building; and one hidden somewhere at ground level.  Four shots were fired; the fist fired from behind President Kennedy, striking him in the back, the second also fired from the rear, this hit Governor Connally, the third, a dum-dum or exploding bullet was fired from the front and burst President Kennedy’s head, and the fourth shot fired from the rear, missed entirely and bounced off the sidewalk giving James Tague a glancing blow to the cheek.

After the assassination the three men packed up their tools and made their way calmly back to their safe-house.  Here they stayed for ten more days, until the heat had died down, at which point they made their way to a private airfield, where they were flown by Mob drug runner David Ferrie across the border into Canada, where they changed flights at Montreal; and took another private jet back to Marseilles.  Christian David then played his small part in the assassination, from his new home in Buenos Aires.  The assassins had been paid in pure heroine, and travelling to see him, David had happily converted the drugs for them into cold hard blood money.

This information was all subsequently confirmed by a Drug Enforcement Agency witness who now lived hidden deep within the witness protection scheme.  Michel Nicoli was an ex- Unione Corse drug trafficker who had turned undercover informant.  For years Nicoli had been secretly passing on information to the DEA, intelligence which one DEA agent said was ‘dynamite’, he was the ‘best witness’ the DEA had ever had, if Nicoli gave you information ‘you could go to the bank on it’.  Nicoli confirmed that he had the inside track on the assassination from a man who had been very close to the plot, and that all the details given to Stephen Rivele were true.

Unfortunately for Rivele, David and Nicoli’s information could be proven to be wildly inaccurate, as both Sarti and Bocagnani could prove that they were safely locked away in prison in November 1963, Sarti in Baumettes Prison in Marseilles and Bocagnani in Fort du Ha in Bordeaux.  If the two star witnesses could get such fundamental information wrong as the identity of the alleged killers, then the rest of their story could topple like a house of cards.  Several lawsuits followed Rivele’s revelations, and the original documentary the theory was proposed in, ‘The Men Who Killed Kennedy’, was banned from British Television due to its slanderous nature.  Rivele was subsequently unable to sell the rights to his book on the assassination to any publisher in America or England, and so far only a French language version of his investigation has materialised.

Mother Russia

America’s biggest enemy at the time of President Kennedy’s administration was of course Soviet Russia.  The two nations were set at loggerheads due to ideological differences that could never be resolved.  According to some, when America and Russia faced off over the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962, and Russia ‘blinked’; it was seen as a humiliation too far by the KGB, and so they resolved that President Kennedy had to die.  You see this was a time when the shadow of Josef Stalin still fell across that proud nation.  Any humiliation, no matter how small, was to be dealt with the way Uncle Joe would have dealt with it, mercilessly.  So Ivan Serov, head of the KGB, and a man we would class today as a war criminal, responsible for mass genocide committed under Stalin, turned to two of his hard-line Stalinist henchmen, Yuri Andropov and Vladimir Kryuchkov, to plot their bloody revenge.  In their infinite cruelty the KGB decided to activate a sleeper agent they had planted for just such an opportunity, and so their steely and determined eyes fell upon Lee Harvey Oswald.  You see, if this theory is to be believed, Oswald was not a patsy, but a willing assassin, who had been turned into a KGB agent upon his defection to Russia.  Whilst in Russia he had proven his loyalty to his new motherland by giving the KGB enough information to shoot down Gary Powers’ U-2 spy plane.  It was not therefore a coincidence that Oswald had married a woman whose father and uncle were both KGB operatives, it was again just another level of labyrinthine deceit.  Marina Oswald marrying and indeed conjugating with Oswald was a deep cover plot; she was in fact his onsite KGB handler, with him at all times to keep him in line once he had been transplanted back into American culture.  Once Oswald had done the dirty deed, instead of spiriting him out of America and flying him back to mother Russia like had been promised, Oswald was sent to what he believed would be a debriefing with one of his handlers.  Only the meeting at the Texas Theatre was a set up; and Oswald was arrested.  Why was Oswald betrayed?  Simple, if President Kennedy’s killer suddenly turned up living the good life in Russia, the finger of suspicion would easily have fallen upon the KGB.   So it was arranged for Jack Ruby, who was a Cuban agent, and therefore a friend of Russia, to execute Oswald.  Years later when it looked like Ruby himself was about to crack and reveal the whole conspiracy, he was quietly poisoned with a chemical compound that made his death look like a hideously aggressive; but naturally occurring cancer.

This might all sound like more mad ramblings from the wilder side of the internet, were it not for the fact that the theories two main proponents are eminently sensible men who have detailed knowledge of both how the KGB worked under the cold war regime, and counter espionage as a whole.  The first of these men is General Ion Mihai Pacepa; the highest ranking member of the Soviet bloc to defect during the Cold War, his defection caused the whole of the Romanian secret service; and all its clandestine operations; to temporarily ground to a halt.  The second researcher is Robert Holmes, a British diplomat who had an intimate knowledge of how defection and espionage worked during the Cold War, and who was versed in counter espionage techniques for his clandestine diplomatic meetings with eastern bloc contacts.  When Pacepa defected he had two main objectives, to let the CIA know that Romania was not an independent Communist state that the American’s could happily do business with, and also to tell them that President Kennedy had been murdered as part of a KGB plot.  The CIA didn’t want to make too much noise about either of these topics, because both could make them look like a bunch of inept fools.  For years the CIA had been telling the public that there was no Russian involvement in President Kennedy’s assassination, and at the same time selling secret technology to Romania on the proviso that they promised not to share the secrets with Russia.  Guess what, Romania broke their promise, and every little secret that had been shared with Romania went straight to Moscow, Pacepa could categorically prove this.  So if he was right about this embarrassing little fact, then why couldn’t he be right about President Kennedy’s assassination?  Both Pacepa and Holmes in their respected books, Pacepa’s ‘Programmed To Kill’ and Holmes’ ‘A Spy Like No Other’, are careful to point out that there is no solid proof to prove their beliefs, however they both believe that given the inconsistencies in the official narrative, their explanations are the best fit available.

The Three Tramps Theory

In the chaos after the assassination; newsmen and photographers swamped the area around Dealey Plaza.  Photographers from the Dallas Morning News, Dallas Times Herald and The Fort Worth Star-Telegraph; photographed three transients being removed from a train close to the Texas School Book Depository.   Some years after the assassination a gentleman called Richard E. Sprague, author of ‘The Taking of America’; and the leading expert in the photographic evidence relating to the assassination, passed the photographs of ‘The Three Tramps’ onto Jim Garrison; as he prepared his infamous assassination prosecution.  On Tuesday the 31st of December 1968, Garrison appeared on the Tonight Show with Johnnie Carson, where he showed the pictures to the wider public for the first time; and asked anyone who could identify any of the three men to come forward.  The genie was out of the bottle, the photographs became catnip to the assassination buffs.  They were examined and scrutinised and theory after theory became built upon the three unfortunates in the photograph.

The details were poured over in repetitive detail.   Firstly the assassination buffs could find no records of the arrest of these three hobos.  This was not just peculiar; it was damn right ludicrous, three suspicious men being arrested just minutes after the assassination of the US President, and the police kept not one written record of the arrest of these three transients?  Peculiar didn’t cover it.  No one could find out who they were, or why they had been arrested.  The buffs were also concerned about the disinterested; almost casual; manner with which the police escorted the three potential suspects.  The police officers guns were casually slung over their shoulders, or were held in a manner which would have made a quick draw impossible.  Then their clothes were picked over, weren’t the tramps shoes just a little too smart for men who had been living rough?  This when all put together screamed cover-up, and the buffs began to look for answers.  The conclusions they came to seemed quite startling, finding their answers hidden in another government conspiracy nearly a decade later.

On Saturday the 17th of June 1972, five men were arrested breaking into the Democratic National Committee Headquarters in the Watergate Complex, Washington DC.   The men were employed by the offices of the President of the United States, their job had been to photograph documents relating to the democratic parties election campaign, and to install illegal listening devices to help President Nixon get the edge over his rivals in the up and coming Presidential elections.  The burglars had been paid via a slush fund, which led directly to the President’s re-election campaign bank accounts.  Caught bang to rights, President Richard Nixon, the man Kennedy had defeated in 1960, was forced to resign from office.  Two of the men implicated in the whole sorry debacle were American Intelligence Officers by the name of Frank Sturgis and E. Howard Hunt.  Conspiracy buffs claimed that these were two of the alleged tramps caught in the infamous photographs.

The third tramp the buffs rather unbelievably claimed was a gun-for-hire hit-man by the name of Charles Harrelson, father of the famed American actor Woody Harrelson.   Harrelson, the buffs claimed, could be linked to the whole conspiracy via one of Jack Ruby’s associates, a man called Douglas Matthews, who was friends to both Ruby and Harrelson.  In 1982, whilst on the run and high on drugs; Harrelson made a lengthy confession to being the alleged second shooter that fateful day in Dallas.  He would later go on to draw maps and diagrams showing where he had hidden, and where he had fired his fatal shots from; as the Presidential car had passed along Daley Plaza.  Of course the FBI didn’t believe a word of it, and told Harrelson as much; tellingly in 2003 Harrelson himself withdrew his claims.  This hasn’t stopped the conspiracy buffs from claiming that the ‘Tall Tramp’ was Charles Harrelson.  In 1998 an anthropomorphic study of the photographs of the ‘Tall Tramp’ and contemporaneous photographs of Harrelson, came to the conclusion that there was a 90% chance that Harrelson and the ‘Tall Tramp’ were one and the same person.  A later similar study, which used updated computer technology and facial recognition software; came to the conclusion that there was a staggering 99% chance that the ‘Tall Tramp’ and Charles Harrelson were the same person.

Of course there is never any consensual harmony over any detail of the assassination.   The ‘Three Tramps’ had been named as Sturgis, Hunt and Harrelson, but of course others had to disagree.   The tramp in the foreground of the photographs had become lovingly known as ‘Frenchy’ by the buffs.  Those buffs unhappy with the suggestions of Sturgis and Hunt now suggested that ‘Frenchy’ was a man who had taken part in one of the other great political assassinations of the 1960’s.   When an early police sketch was released of a potential suspect who had been seen fleeing the scene just minutes after the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jnr, some suggested that the sketch bore a striking resemblance to ‘Frenchy’.  Could ‘Frenchy’ have been a professional political assassin?  Carrying out two of the most infamous political murders in history?  We’ll never definitively know, but I think it’s telling that the sketch bears an even more striking similarity to James Earl Ray, the man convicted of killing Dr. King.  Not ones to let a good theory die, the buffs counter attacked any criticism of the theory; by highlighting that James Earl Ray was allegedly helped in his assassination of Dr. King by a man called Raoul.  The man Raoul was never traced by the police, but Raoul was a known non de plume of Frank Sturgis, Watergate robber and possibly one of the ‘Three Tramps’.  Another name thrown into the hat for Frenchy was CIA agent David Lamar Christ[i].  Christ was one of the CIA’s first bug-men, a man at the spearhead of the new frontier of technology, who took full advantage of increasingly smaller and more precise surveillance equipment.  He was fully security cleared to take part in Project Argon and Corona, which were projects to use the latest satellite surveillance to map out Soviet territory and military instillations.  Unfortunately Christ wasn’t very good at field work.  Just like the Watergate criminals, he got himself caught in Havana; trying to steal a Chinese codebook, after he realised the diplomats he had bugged where speaking in an un-deciphered code.  He did a spell in a Cuban prison, and came out a very bitter man, feeling that the CIA had left him to hang out to dry.   Christ became of interest to conspiracy buffs when in 1977 the House Select Committee on Assassinations asked the CIA if they had any records that could confirm or deny that Christ had been in Dallas on the day that Kennedy had been assassinated.  The CIA stonewalled the request, basically saying that it would be too much work and effort for them to go back into their files to discover such information.  What they did say was interesting though, the CIA made a rare admittance, that they had given Christ travelling funds; for him to make an alleged trip to Boston just two days before the assassination of President Kennedy.  The CIA could not confirm or deny if Christ had taken this trip.

The ‘Old Tramp’ was thought for years to be Howard Hunt, but again others disagreed, one other suggestion was that the ‘Old Tramp’ was Chauncey Marvin Holt.  Now Holt was a bit of a fantasist, he was a circus performer by trade, a tightrope walker, but in 1991, as Oliver Stone’s film JFK hit the headlines, Holt confessed to Newsweek that he had been one of the men on the grassy knoll.  More specifically he had been the bogus Secret Service agent who had been scaring people away from the scene with fake ID.  Holt claimed to have secretly been in the CIA for decades, and to have juggled four identities, to have taken part in the assassination of Kennedy, and to have been the accountant for another Kennedy conspiracy favourite, Meyer Lansky.  Of course there was no evidence for any of it, just like there is little evidence for anyone else being proven to be the Three Tramps.

1992 should have sounded the death knell to the Three Tramps theories, as the police finally found their long lost paperwork; and released to the press the names of the tramps, Gus Abrahams, John F. Gedney and Harold Doyle.  None of these very traceable and real people had any connections to organised crime, the CIA or any other shadowy group or organisation that would have wanted the President dead.  They were three out of work men travelling around the country trying to find employment in order to support their families.  Gedney was tracked down, he was by then sixty-seven and had become a well respected city hall official in Melbourne, Florida.  Harold Doyle was sixty-one; he was living in Klamath Falls, Oregon, where he worked as a pool attendant.  The ‘Old Tramp’ had been seventy-six year old Gus Abrahams, he had died in 1987, but his sisters confirmed it was indeed him in the photographs of the tramps.  She regretfully informed Mary La Fontaine, the researcher who finally tracked them all down, that Gus had been an alcoholic in the 1960’s; and it was very doubtful he had even known who the President was, let alone have wanted to kill him.  Of course the positive identification of the men still doesn’t stop some of the more hardened conspiracy buffs, they simply see the identification as smoke and mirrors, trying to distract the unwary from the truth, when the truth really is the men in the photo were just tired, lonely and desperate, looking for work in the wrong place at the wrong time.

The Desecration of Officer J. D. Tippit

One of the many talents of conspiracy buffs is their ability to take any given facet of any given case and twist it so that it becomes something completely new, alluring, beguiling and fascinating.  Take Police Officer J. D. Tippit, he was the thirty-nine year old police officer; shot dead by Lee Harvey Oswald; when Tippit attempted to pull him over, due to Oswald matching the police description of the assassin that had been put out over the police wire.    Yet his tragic death has been used and twisted by others to push their particular pet theory.  The simplest of these theories, proposed by researcher Jim Marrs, is that Tippit was murdered by one of Oswald’s fellow assassination conspirators, in order to give the Dallas police ‘itchy trigger fingers’.  The conspirators believed that if they shot dead a police officer then the police would be less likely to take Oswald alive, the police would kill their patsy before he could open his mouth and incriminate anyone else.   This theory doesn’t really stand up to close scrutiny, seeing as Dallas taxi-driver William Scoggins and Dallas city resident Helen Markham, both witnessed the shooting and positively identified Oswald as Tippit’s killer.

The second conspiracy theory that largely involves Tippit does much to besmirch his name and memory.  This second theory is favoured by researcher Robert D. Morningstar and was published in his book ‘The Ultimate Secret of the JFK Assassination’.  It is a tad more complex, but I shall attempt to retell his tale as simply as possible.  Morningstar believes that J. D. Tippit was the fabled gunman on the grassy knoll, in order to understand this assertion we have to turn our attention to a Polaroid photograph taken by Mary Moorman; as President Kennedy was being assassinated.  Indeed it has been calculated that this startling image was taken just .06 seconds after the President’s head had exploded from the killing shot.  The photo was taken from a vantage point where it captured Abraham Zapruder filming the scene, and the grassy knoll itself.  For years the photograph was thought to be just another harrowing image taken that day in Dealey Plaza.  Then in 1982, Gary Mack, the curator of the Sixth Floor Museum in Dallas, noticed something in the photograph, something he couldn’t believe no one had seen before.  At the very back of the photograph, behind the picket fence and wall; on the right hand side, under the shadow of a large oak tree, there can be discerned several smudges of light.  These smudges when enlarged, Mack believed, showed someone wearing a police officer’s uniform and badge; firing a rifle, their face partially hidden by a puff of gun-smoke.  The photo of ‘Badge-Man’ was heralded as proof positive that there had been a gunman on the grassy knoll as the conspiracy buffs had always contended.  For years names were dropped into the hat left; right and centre as to who the identity of ‘Badge-Man’ just might have been.  Then Robert D. Morningstar carried out some ‘computer enhancements’ of the ‘Badge-Man’ photograph, which he believed brought out; in more detail, the image of the police officer firing the gun, and the finer details of his uniform.   From the patches of light in the photo, Morningstar began to discern smaller badges or markers on the arm of ‘Badge-Man’, and a pen top sticking out of the breast pocket of the police officers uniform.  This rang a bell in Morningstar’s head, somewhere he had seen a photograph of someone with similar badges on the arm of his uniform; and a pen sticking out of his shirts breast pocket.  Morningstar went back to other photos taken in and around Dealey Plaza that day, and he found a police officer who seemed to match the details exactly, it was one of the police officers who had been escorting the ‘Three Tramps’.  Then Morningstar seemed to reach a startling conclusion, as he studied the ‘Three Tramps’ photograph he came to believe that one of the police officers in the ‘Three Tramps’ photograph was J. D. Tippit.  Morningstar went back to his ‘computer enhanced’ version of the ‘Badge-Man’ photograph, and examined the light and shaded smudges that made up the fuzzy image, and he compared them to the man he believed was Officer Tippit in the ‘Three Tramps’ photo, he believed they were an exact match.  Officer Tippit was ‘Badge-Man’; therefore Officer Tippit was the real killer of JFK!  Morningstar claims to have uncovered two eyewitnesses who both state that they witnessed Officer Tippet standing on the grassy knoll; on the day of the assassination.  One of these eyewitnesses remains unnamed; meaning their evidence cannot be verified, the second source proves even more problematic, seeing as it is Morningstar himself, stating that he saw Tippet on the grassy knoll that November day in 1963.

Morningstar went further, claiming that after murdering the President, and playing his part in escorting the ‘Three Tramps’ to a police station, Morningstar believed Tippit had a pre-arranged meeting with another conspirator, who turned, betrayed and murdered Tippit, not only to ensure his silence, but for a far more nefarious purpose.  Used as evidence to back this assertion up is the testimony of Lee Harvey Oswald’s landlady, Mrs Gladys Johnson, who claimed that after Oswald returned to her house, after murdering the President, a police patrol car pulled up outside her home, tooted its horn, and then drove off.  This Morningstar claimed was Tippit signalling Lee Harvey Oswald to their fateful meeting, where Oswald turned on Tippet and murdered him.  Why did Oswald (or possibly some other conspirator) murder Officer Tippit, if he had been so instrumental to the conspiracy?  Well, you see Tippit held a passing resemblance to President Kennedy, and the conspirators needed a body that wasn’t so riddled with bullets, because President Kennedy of course had been shot to bits in a calculated crossfire.  Some have claimed that Tippit looked so much like President Kennedy he had been nicknamed ‘Jack’ by his fellow police officers.  Morningstar hypothesised that Tippit’s body was swapped with President Kennedy’s.  Tippet’s murderer being careful to ensure that the wounds inflicted on Officer Tippit matched what the official findings would ultimately conclude in the Warren Report, that President Kennedy had been murdered by a lone gunman firing from the 6th Floor of the Texas Schoolbook Depository.  If an autopsy had been carried out on the real President’s body, they would have discovered it was riddled with bullets fired from every angle of the crossfire, more evidence he had quite clearly been murdered as the result of a conspiracy.  So in the famous photographs of President Kennedy’s autopsy; we are not looking at the dead President, but at Officer J. D. Tippit.  Morningstar claims that several techniques have been used to put people off looking too closely at the photographs, and as a result discovering the truth.  One such technique Morningstar claims has been utilised; is a swastika being drawn in blood over some of the more messed up areas of the body.  Morningstar argues that people now associate the swastika with a deeper more unsettling evil, and so subconsciously refuse to look properly at the image of the bloodied body; in order to avoid looking at the swastika.

As evidence of this post-mortem pretence, Morningstar quotes the official timings of the day as stated by the Warren Commission; and the fact that it took an hour for Tippet’s body to travel from the scene of the crime to the city morgue.  It was in this hour that Tippet’s body was swapped for the President’s, and it explains why the Secret Service were so eager to stop the local coroner from performing their own post-mortem.  Such a post-mortem carried about by someone who was not controlled by those in on the conspiracy would easily have detected and published findings which would have proved the President had been shot by at least two gunmen.

Over the years the ‘Badge-Man’ photograph, that is so much the crux of this theory, has come under close scrutiny by experts.  Photographic experts, George Pearl and Joe Cook, used the exact same model and make of camera and Polaroid film as Mary Moorman to try and recreate her photograph.  They placed an actor where it looked like ‘Badge-Man’ would have been standing to take his shot, and they came to a startling conclusion.  If ‘Badge-Man’ had been standing where the photograph appears to show he was standing, then he would have had a perfect view of the President as the cavalcade moved up Elm Street.  It appeared to be one-nil to the buffs, but then the photograph was examined using image enhancing software by Dr. Lenny Rudin, of Cognitech Inc.  Using all his skill, de-blurring the photograph, altering the contrast and vanquishing the shadows, he was able to make the smudges of light appear exactly like, well, smudges of light.  All the computer trickery at his disposal and he was able to discern absolutely nothing from the indistinct blur that could not be described as even remotely human.  Dr. Rudin then took new photographs of the same spot himself, photographs of the same wall Badge-Man was said to be standing behind.  Knowing that the wall was five foot tall, and applying this calculation to what people said they could discern in the photograph, he calculated that if the smudges were really a person, then ‘Badge-Man’ would have to have only been 2.88 Ft tall.  Of course Dr. Rudin’s findings weren’t universally liked by some theorists, and they counter claimed that no one ever said that ‘Badge-Man’ was standing directly behind the wall.  He could in actual fact have been standing several feet away, which would have altered his perspectives in the photograph, and therefore made Dr. Rudin’s calculations wrong.  Dr. Rudin was thorough in his research, and he was able to counter the dismissal of his work, by stating that ‘Badge-Man’ would have to have been standing forty-feet away from the wall for him to have been of at least average height, and from this distance ‘Badge-Man’ would have had to have been elevated at least sixteen to twenty foot off the ground; to get a clear shot at the President.  Dr Rudin concluded that ‘Badge-Man’ was, ‘either a person stood very far away, on a very tall ladder, or it is not a person at all’

With the ‘Badge-Man’ photographs credibility finally destroyed beyond any reasonable doubt, there is no other solid evidence to prove the Morningstar theory.  What is left is dodgy eye-witness testimony and a belief that it is not Kennedy in the post-mortem pictures.  Anyone who looks at the photos of President Kennedy’s autopsy; can quite clearly see for themselves that it is indeed the murdered President lying on the slab.  Those who say he looks different from when he was alive, are invariably those who have been fortunate enough not to have seen death for themselves close up, and witnessed with their own eyes how different someone can look once that flicker of indefinable humanity has left a body.

Natural Born Gay Thrill Killers

The trial of New Orleans businessman Clay Shaw for Conspiring to Murder President Kennedy can either be seen as one lone mans determined fight to try and find justice for both the Kennedy family and the American people, or reversely, as one lone mans campaign to ruin and harass a perfectly innocent man, possibly due to his sexual orientation.  New Orleans District Attorney ‘Big’ Jim Garrison led the investigation into the activities of Clay Shaw, which became the bases of the blockbusting Olive Stone movie JFK, a cinematic endeavour that did more than anything else to turn the small gaggle of conspiracy buffs discontented mumblings into a multi-million dollar cottage industry that demanded wider and more serious attention.

It all began with a drinking session and a pistol whipping.  Guy Bannister, a former head of the New Orleans branch of the FBI, but by 1963 a shadowy private investigator with offices based in the centre of the New Orleans intelligence community, had been drinking with his buddy, fellow private investigator Jack Martin.  They had allegedly been drowning their sorrows in the wake of President Kennedy’s assassination.  Upon returning to their offices a drunken argument broke out between the two men over the offices’ telephone bill.  Martin was heard to yell, ‘What are you going to do?  Murder me like you all did Kennedy!’ At which point Bannister really lost his temper, un-holstered his .357 Magnum; and pistol whipped Martin so badly he required hospital attention.   Martin was said to be really scared in the wake of the incident, as if saying those words had let the genie out of the bottle, and the genie was particularly pissed-off and vindictive.  So to protect himself; over the next few days Martin gave interviews to the local authorities and the local newspapers, wherein he stated that Guy Bannister along with a man named David Ferrie had plotted to murder President Kennedy.  Ferrie had been hired to fly Oswald out of Dallas in the wake of the assassination, only Oswald had messed up and gotten himself caught.  The FBI interviewed David Ferrie, a rather peculiar looking man who suffered from the unfortunate affliction of alopecia-totalise; a complete lack of bodily hair.  In the absence of any facial hair he wore an awful wig, and painted eyebrows on his face which gave him the appearance of a man in constant startled surprise.  Ferrie was also a bit of a crank, he fancied himself as a chemist and expert oncologist, and kept dozens of pet mice which he experimented on in his home-spun search for a cure for cancer.  Ferrie admitted that he had been in Dallas the night before the assassination; with two young male friends, but it had only been a boring business trip; for him to scout out possible locations for an ice-rink he proposed to open in the city.  Jack Martin was also interviewed by the FBI, and he immediately showed the Feds the unreliability of his testimony; by informing them that the peculiar David Ferrie had hypnotised Lee Harvey Oswald, and had instructed him whilst under the hypnotic trance to commit the assassination.  Realising that Jack Martin was a drunken lush with a head filled with alcohol induce paranoia, the FBI left the enquiry there, releasing Ferrie with its most profuse apologies.

It wasn’t until 1966 that Big Jim Garrison became interested in the Kennedy assassination, and reopened the whole ridiculous can of worms once more.  Garrison had been investigating an alleged arms smuggling ring, possibly related to anti-Castro Cubans.  The investigation brought Garrison into contact with the still drunken private investigator Jack Martin, and with the receptive ear of the DA all to himself, Martin began telling Garrison all about the Kennedy conspiracy all over again.   The assassination had started out life as a ‘homosexual thrill killing’, a group of rich and powerful and bored closeted homosexuals deciding to murder the President simply because they could.  This group of deadly decadent gays, who allegedly held the type of bawdy sex parties that even the renowned Emperor Caligula would think were a bit excessive, included David Ferrie, Guy Bannister and an up to that point unidentified man known as Clay Bertrand.  This mysterious and unknown Clay Bertrand allegedly had links to the CIA, and so the intelligence organisation decided to jump on the gay bandwagon and help the rainbow empowered plotters along, seeing as they seemed to offer the beleaguered intelligence organisation a way back from the brink of Presidential destruction.  It all seemed ludicrous, but Garrison, despite opposition from his own department, persisted with the harassment of David Ferrie (the accused Guy Bannister was out of Garrisons vindictive reach; seeing as he had died of a heart attack back in 1964).  A year into the investigation David Ferrie died also, it was an aneurysm, but Garrison treated the quite clearly natural death as a murder, allegedly carried out at the behest of the CIA.  Garrison treated Ferrie’s death as suspicious not because of any solid medical evidence, no, but because during one of the conversations Ferrie had held with Garrison’s office, Ferrie had told one of the Assistant District Attorney’s that the Garrison investigation meant he was ‘a dead man’.

With the death of Ferrie the investigation came to a virtual standstill, there were no further avenues of investigation, seeing as they couldn’t track down the mysterious Clay Bertrand.  Then pot smoking, jive talking, jazz loving, sunglasses wearing disreputable lawyer Dean Andrews stepped into the fray.  You see whilst leafing through the monumental twenty-six volumes of supporting evidence to the Warren Commission, Garrison came across a reference to the elusive Clay Bertrand.  In the days after the assassination, New Orleans based attorney Dean Andrews had contacted the FBI; and told them that a man named Clay Bertrand had contacted him and asked him to travel to Dallas to represent the legal interests of Lee Harvey Oswald.  When questioned by the Warren Commission about this phone call; Andrews recanted his statement, and informed the Commission that the conversation with Bertrand had probably been a figment of his drugged up imagination.   Despite Andrews’ predisposition for smoking copious amounts of wacky-baccy in-between his legal depositions, Garrison jumped upon Andrews’ statement, and began to pester the beleaguered lawyer for the real identity of Clay Bertrand.  Andrews told Garrison that he had no idea, he had made it all up, there was no Clay Bertrand, but Garrison just wouldn’t let it go.  Eventually it wasn’t Andrews who put another name to Clay Bertrand, but a lowly waiter from ‘The Cosimo’, a grubby backstreet bar in the French Quarter of New Orleans. This waiter told the District Attorney that anyone who was anyone knew that when people said the name Clay Bertrand, they were really referring to the multi-millionaire owner of the New Orleans Trade Mart, Clay Shaw.   Clay Bertrand was the name Shaw went by to protect his real identity and business interests when he secretly went cruising the less than reputable bars for a gay pickup.  So, on the word of a backstreet boozer’s barkeep; respectable businessman Clay Shaw unbelievably found himself being tried for his part in a Conspiracy to Murder President John Fitzgerald Kennedy.

The trial commenced at New Orleans Parish Court on Tuesday the 29th of January 1969.  Garrison was careful what he said during the trial; and revealed only enough of his theory to incriminate Shaw, because when revealed as a whole the conspiracy sounded ludicrous.   Over the years that followed more and more of the details came out, and it became clear that Garrison’s version of the assassination ran thusly.  Clay Shaw and David Ferrie were gay lovers who had decided to murder President Kennedy simply for the fun of it.  They roped in Guy Bannister because he had the perfect patsy in his employ, a low level CIA operative by the name of Lee Harvey Oswald, who had been ‘sheep dipped’ to look like a communist, so that he could infiltrate leftwing organisations and spy upon them for the CIA.  On the day of the assassination, three assassins organised and working from a plan devised by Clay Shaw and David Ferrie, but who were possibly active agents of the CIA, caught President Kennedy in a triangular crossfire; executing him in cold blood.  After the assassination had been carried out, Oswald was fitted up with the murder, and Clay Shaw used his links to the CIA to have officialdom cover up the gay thrill killing.  Officialdom willing complied because they were all secretly glad that President Kennedy was dead due to his friendliness towards Communism, his desire to end the Vietnam War, and his attempts to shut down the CIA.  Now, by the time of the trial; Garrison had made little progress in the tying any of this together; or in tying Clay Bertrand to Clay Shaw.  Garrison had a single fingerprint card from the New Orleans police, and on this card it had been noted that Clay Shaw had told the booking officer that one of his aliases was Clay Bertrand.  It was argued by Shaw’s lawyer that these fingerprint cards had been filled in by the custody sergeant, that Shaw had not been told what was written on them, and had been so shocked at being arrested that he had not bothered to read the information the police had written on the card for him when he signed it.  To back this assertion up it was pointed out that Shaw’s place of birth was noted as New Orleans on the card, when in fact he had been born in the small town of Kentwood near the Mississippi boarder.  On top of this Clay Shaw hadn’t properly been informed of his rights, Officer Habighorst had not told Shaw that he had the right to remain silent when being booked into the police station, and did not have to volunteer any information for the booking form if he did not so wish.  In light of these facts Judge Edward Haggerty tended to believe that this fingerprint card was an obvious attempt set up Clay Shaw, put in place by either the police or the DA’s office, and so ruled the evidence as inadmissible.  In fact Judge Haggerty was scathing of Office Habighorst and the fingerprint card evidence, point blank calling Habighorst a liar.  Without the fingerprint card there was virtually no case to answer, but Garrison battled vainly on with his public-money-wasting prosecution.

A succession of invariably flaky and disreputable witnesses paraded through the court to try and help what was left of Garrison’s case along.  Perry Raymond Russo was a twenty-five year old insurance salesman for the Equitable Life Company, based in Baton Rouge.  He had come into the investigations sphere of interest after he had written to Jim Garrison and told him that he had important information on the deceased David Ferrie.   Russo claimed that in September 1963 he had attended a party at David Ferrie’s apartment, which in itself must have been uncomfortable given the alleged stink of the place from all the caged animals he regularly experimented on.  The small apartment was allegedly choked full to the gills with suspicious characters, including Clay Shaw; who Russo positively identified as being introduced to him as Clay Bertrand, and one Leon Oswald, who Russo stated he later realised was Presidential assassin Lee Harvey Oswald.  During the course of this party Russo sat and listened as in front of all the revellers, the indiscreet conspirators openly discussed their plot to kill President Kennedy, outlined the manner in which three gunmen would catch the President in a triangular crossfire in Dealey Plaza, and how each man involved would be given a cast iron alibi; and the blame shifted onto Fidel Castro.  Just how we are supposed to believe a group of men who were so indiscreet as to discuss their plans for high treason in front of a relative stranger like Russo, and then went on to get away with the conspiracy for so long; went unasked in court.  Of course Russo hadn’t remembered all these details so clearly at first when speaking to Garrison, and it came out that Garrison had been forced to aid Russo in his recall by giving him a session of hypnosis and a dose of sodium pentathol.  Another witness was Vernon William Bundy, an habitual criminal and heroin addict who at that time was in prison for parole violations.  Oh, he had also been arrested for an armed robbery, but in return for his testimony against Clay Shaw this charge was quietly and kindly dropped by Garrison.   Bundy testified that he had gone out to a quiet spot off of Lake Pontchartrain in the middle of Camp Leroy Johnson, where he could shoot-up in relative peace without being hassled by the cops.  As he sat hidden by the lakeside; two men he positively identified as Clay Shaw and Lee Harvey Oswald came within twenty feet of him, and had a brief and slightly heated conversation, before Clay Shaw eventually gave Oswald a bundle of money and they both departed the scene in separate directions.   What Garrison failed to tell the court was that Bundy had been questioned under polygraph about his evidence, what this polygraph discovered shook his testimony to its foundations; Bundy’s story was a complete pack of lies, through desperation however Garrison had chosen to use the drugged up and unreliable witness in court.  Charles Spiesel was another witness, added to the list of testifiers at the last minute, who turned out to be a complete space cadet who did more harm to Garrison’s prosecution than anyone else.  Spiesel on the face of it seemed like a reputable former accountant from New York.  He claimed that he had met David Ferrie in Lafitte’s Blacksmith Shop in the French Quarter of New Orleans, whereupon Ferrie had invited him to one of his seemingly regular parties in his pokey and stinking flat.  Here Ferrie had introduced Spiesel to a man Spiesel identified as Clay Shaw, and as the party went on and people got drunker and drunker the topic of conversation turned to President Kennedy.  Once again both men were allegedly unable to hold their water, and told Spiesel exactly how they planned to murder the President.  Unfortunately defence attorney Irvin Dymand had done his research on Mr Spiesel, and discovered that Jim Garrison had took a pure gamble on using the seemingly reputable individual.  You see Garrison had known all along that Spiesel was completely loopy, and had just kept his fingers crossed and hoped that Irvin Dymand wouldn’t discover the terrible truth, unfortunately Dymand did.   During cross-examination Dymand happily moved the conversation away from President Kennedy, and onto how Spiesel believed he had been experimented on by the American government as part of a hypnotic mind control program.  He then testified how the government regularly tried to ‘implant’ thoughts into his mind.  He then gave chapter and verse on how the New York police had regularly tortured him, and how the experience had caused his accountancy firm to collapse.  The revelation also came out that Spiesel regularly fingerprinted his daughter when she returned home from college, to make sure that the government hadn’t replaced her with an undercover spy who just looked like his daughter.  Spiesel’s credibility and testimony was completely destroyed, even if what he had been saying was the truth, no one was going to believe the word of a complete fruitcake.

The trial ended on Saturday the 1st of March 1969, the jury retired for just fifty-four minutes before returning with a rightful Not Guilty verdict for Clay Shaw, but of course the story doesn’t end with the end of the trial.  Events move, and further evidence came forward which supported Garrison’s case in some areas.  In 1979 the House Select Committee on Assassinations discovered a firm link between Lee Harvey Oswald and David Ferrie, both men had served in the same Civil Air Patrol defence unit, six witnesses came forward to testify to this, and in 1993 a photograph was discovered which actually showed the two men stood together at a barbeque.  Clay Shaw denied having any links to the CIA throughout his trial.  Yet, a firm link between Clay Shaw and the CIA was established when it was uncovered that a company called Permidex; that Shaw just happened to be a director of, was in fact a front for nefarious CIA activities in Europe.  Subsequently the former Director of the CIA, Richard Helms, admitted that Clay Shaw had been a part-time contractor and had been given a ‘five agency clearance’, meaning he could be used by any of the intelligence services and be privy to ‘Top Secret’ information.  It was all very interesting, but none of this proved Garrison’s theory; and as time went on and Garrison conducted more and more research into the assassination, the list of individuals and groups involved in the President’s death got bigger and bigger and more and more ludicrous.  By the time Garrison died in 1992 he was claiming that individuals, groups and corporations as diverse as the Democratic Party, the NBC television company, Neo-Nazis’ and NASA were involved at some stage in the President’s death and its subsequent cover-up.  It didn’t matter how mad Garrison was starting to sound, people had seen the movie JFK; which glorified his ridiculous prosecution of Clay Shaw, and for a generation Garrison’s version of events became the definitive account of President Kennedy’s murder.

Fat Cats With Oily Hands

This little theory starts with a mistress and an oil billionaire.  The billionaire was oil magnate Clint Murchison, a man who was also a powerful political mover and shaker.   He was a personal friend to J. Edgar Hoover, and in 1952 he had run a secret campaign for the FBI Director; to swing the Presidential election in favour of Dwight D. Eisenhower, by smearing his opponent Adlai Stevenson.  Murchison also had connections to the Mob, he owned the $100 a night Del Charro hotel resort, where Sam Giancana and Santo Trafficante were said to stay every year free of charge.  The mistress was Madeline Brown, President Lyndon Johnson’s secret lover for over twenty years, and allegedly the mother of Johnson’s illegitimate son. Brown was also a friend of the Murchison’s, and was attending a party at the Murchison’s palatial mansion the night before President Kennedy was assassinated.  At that party were a plethora of powerful and politically motivated hawks, Murchison himself, J. Edgar Hoover, and future Presidents Richard Nixon and Lyndon Johnson, also there was another oil billionaire called H. L. Hunt, and the future Warren Commission member, President of the World Bank, John J. McCloy.  These individuals all adjourned themselves from the party and went into a private conference room.   After their private meeting; Johnson adamantly told his mistress, ‘After tomorrow those goddamn Kennedy’s will never embarrass me again’, before adding, ‘That’s no threat, that’s a promise’.   When news of the assassination broke the following day; the staff employed at the Murchison mansion became appalled when Clint Murchison was overjoyed at the President’s death and ordered Champaign and caviar to celebrate.

So just why would a billionaire oil magnate organise the execution of a President?  Well it all boils down to money, plain and simple, dirty money.  More specifically the assassinations origins were wrapped up in a law known as the 27% Depletion Allowance.   This was a legal loophole that enshrined a massive tax-break in law for oilmen.  This complicated tax evasion scheme unique to the oil industry, when put simply, allowed oilmen to keep 27% of their profits tax free.  The allowance therefore was quite clearly a giant never ending cash-cow for the greedy oil billionaires, and President Kennedy was threatening to stop it.  You see President Kennedy was planning on dropping the oil depletion allowance to just 17%, and as a result costing oil firms billions in lost revenue.  Some were predicting that as a result of Kennedy’s oil law reforms profits for some companies could be halved.  There was also a rumour that the 17% tax break would only be an interim measure; until Kennedy could remove it completely from the statute books in his second term.  Kennedy was, put simply, meddling with wrath of god sums of money.  Guess what, as soon as President Johnson was in the oval office one of the first things he did was to reverse President Kennedy’s decision to drop the Depletion Allowance from 27 to 17%.   The oil companies were saved from, if not financial ruin, at least an unhealthy drop in their eye watering profits.

The Wicked Widow and the New World Order

The Zapruder film is one of the most famous motion picture sequences in the history of the world.   Twenty-six seconds of amateur 8mm film footage which we have all seen time and time again on documentaries and on the news, showing in brutal graphic detail the murder of a President and with him a nations hopes.  Yet those images, which many of us know so well, are also used to try and prove theories which are deeply disturbing.  There are those who claim that in those 486 frames lay secret truths which those behind the murder would sooner lay hidden forever more.  The theory that is proposed by some who believe they have found the truth hidden in the Zapruder film; follow the age old adage, where is the best place to hide something?  Why, in plain-sight of course.  Therefore where was the best place to position an assassin that day in Dallas 1963?  Well, sat right beside the President.    Of course this proves a little problematic if the only person sat alongside the President on the day he died was his wife Jackie Kennedy, unless of course, unless...unless we think the unthinkable and consider the possibility that Jackie was the assassin hidden in plain-sight.  But how could Jackie Kennedy have murdered her husband, when she was sat in plain view of hundreds of people?  Secondly why would she murder her husband?

Well; I’ll deal with the how first, seeing as the why is the more complicated matter.  The murder was allegedly committed quite simply, a small firearm hidden in the sleeve of Jackie Kennedy’s jacket.  The night before the President’s murder, Jackie Kennedy had, for some reason, spent the night in a separate hotel room to her husband; this gave her ample opportunity to discreetly hide the small firearm.  On Friday the 22nd of November 1963, as the first shot struck the President, Jackie Kennedy can be seen on the Zapruder film moving closer to her husband, but not to put her arms around him or comfort him, her hands stay firmly out of view, until the moment that the President’s head explodes.  This was when Jackie has extracted the gun from its hiding place, discreetly palmed it, and discharged the gun into her husband’s skull.  Jackie then jumps onto the bonnet of the car, where she either throws the gun away to be retrieved by one of her accomplices, or passes it to a Secret Service agent who was in cahoots with her.

Those who believe this theory state that the Zapruder film confirms their sickening suspicions; they claim that at roughly frame 315 on the Zapruder film; white smoke from a gun discharge briefly obscures Jackie Kennedy’s face.  They further claim that the Zapruder film has been altered to take out a frame which should go between frames 326 and 327. This was the point where Jackie would have disposed of the gun.  They state that between these two frames Jackie Kennedy’s arms move unnaturally quickly.  Almost jumping from one position to another, in the space of 1/18th of a second, proving a frame is missing.

Why would Jackie Kennedy have been complicit in the murder of her husband?  Well this is where things get really bizarre, and some of the wackier elements from the wider reaching world of conspiracy theories come out to play.  There is the view that by Friday the 22nd of November 1963; Jackie Kennedy’s affair with her future husband, billionaire shipping magnate Aristotle Onassis, had already begun.  In August and September of 1963 dark forces had started to gather around Jackie Kennedy, as she tried to recover from the death of her baby son, Patrick Bouvier Kennedy.  Aristotle Onassis asked Jackie if she would like to spend some time alone recuperating at one of his private retreats. Jackie had agreed, and whilst there it is alleged she was brainwashed using drugs and hypnotism into agreeing to murder her husband.  You see Onassis was part of the powerful New World Order, the shadowy conglomeration of powerful individuals, corporations and politicians who want to control the whole world for maximum profit.   The New World Order didn’t like President Kennedy because he was trying to end their war in Vietnam, which was far too profitable for the weapons manufacturers who made the guns and bullets and bombs, and aerospace developers who made the planes and helicopters used in battle.  Oh, and not forgetting the chemical companies who made agent orange, and the pharmaceutical companies who made the painkillers used to treat the wounded, and the cotton industry who made the bandages to swaddle the wounds, oh, and not to mention the health insurance companies who made a profit off of the soldiers when they came home.  War, what’s it good for? Well, it’s good for business that’s for sure, and so peace loving President Kennedy had to die.  So when Jackie was sat next to her husband in the cavalcade, at a pre-arranged time, Governor Connally turned to Jackie, and he spoke an activation code, a word or phrase which turned on Jackie Kennedy’s hypnotic programming, and she blindly and obediently murdered her husband.

Now let me just say here and now that people becoming mindless killers because of hypnotic suggestion is not as far-fetched as it may seem.  In 2011, TV presenter and ‘psychological illusionist’ Derren Brown set out to prove if such claims were real.  At the outset Mr Brown stated that he did not believe that anyone could kill under hypnosis, he firmly believed that you couldn’t make someone do something that is fundamentally against their moral code.  Nevertheless he used his knowledge of hypnotism and psychology to select from a group of one hundred ordinary people, someone he believed would be the perfect candidate for such a mind programming exercise.  Over the course of several weeks Brown used hypnotism and psychological trickery to reprogram the subjects mind, so that they became an expert marksman, despite never having fired a gun in their life before.  He programmed the ‘assassin’ to respond to certain sounds, words and patterns, so that when they came together the subject would enter into a ‘kill state’ and follow any murderous instructions he was given.  When the kill state ended the assassin would immediately forget what he had just done.  Now Derren Brown didn’t believe for a second that if asked to; the mentally reprogrammed individual would be willing to take a human life.  Undaunted and expecting failure, they took the ‘assassin’ to a theatre to watch polymath, comedian, writer, actor and all round national treasure Stephen Fry give a talk.  During the performance, the people sat around the reprogrammed ‘assassin’ played certain ringtones from their Mobile phones, wore certain patterned clothing, and said certain phrases that placed the ‘assassin’ in his hypnotic kill state.  A stooge sat behind the ‘assassin’ then whispered into his ear, ‘the target is Stephen Fry’, at which point the ‘assassin’ pulled out a gun he had been given earlier in the evening, and emptied the gun into Stephen Fry’s chest; as he stood on stage.  The ‘assassin’ then sat calmly back down in his seat, came out of his hypnotic trance and wandered why everyone was suddenly running around making such a fuss.  Now, despite this being a television spectacular; and the gun being loaded with blank bullets, and the program obviously being designed in some ways to shock, the show did finally prove it was possible to take someone with the right sort of mindset, and programme them to kill without them knowing.  So it stands to reason that the emotionally fragile Jackie Kennedy, so recently bereaved, could also have been programmed to kill.  It doesn’t mean that she was though.

Of course if you still think that the President of the United States’ wife being brainwashed by a shadowy group of multinational conspirators is a little too impossible to believe, well, so do some of the conspiracy buffs.  So, other ulterior motives have been put forward to support the theory that Jackie did it, theories that don’t hinge on her being a mind-controlled puppet.  What if she had been blackmailed into doing it by the New World Order, or the CIA; or whoever?  What if her blackmailers had told poor Jackie that if she didn’t murder her husband then her children would be murdered as well?  So faced with an impossible choice between her husband and her children, Jackie decided to sacrifice her philandering husband instead of her beloved kiddies?  Or how about her doing it purely for her love of Aristotle Onassis, because he’d asked her to do it?  Of course you still have to believe in the shadowy and ever-present New World Order here, but it is a tad more believable than hypnosis and mind control.  Or what if Jackie was secretly an undercover CIA operative, who was ordered by her CIA paymasters to murder her husband?   What if President Kennedy had simply been an undercover assignment for Jackie all along?  Or; how about Jackie colluding with the future President; the alcoholic Lyndon B. Johnson?  They were after all both extremely bitter at being removed from the loop of true political power, both simply tokens, one a political token to appease the far right of the administration, one a token wife, seen as useful only as a piece of beauty to show off to the masses.  Some have even forwarded the most unpalatable reason of all, the old anti-Semitic dogma, Jackie Kennedy was half-Jewish on her mother’s side, perhaps the whole damnable affaire was some Zionist plot, designed to get America a President who was more sympathetic to the Israeli cause?

Whatever reason you choose to believe, is there any real evidence to prove these wild theories?  Well, not really.  In fact none at all, I would even go so far as to say that there is one major factor that strongly goes against this theory.  There were hundreds of people who were present that day in Dealey Plaza, people who saw what happened with their own eyes.  Millions of people have subsequently seen the Zapruder film.  If Jackie Kennedy really had produced a gun from her sleeve, shot her husband at point blank range, and then thrown the gun away to be retrieved by an accomplice, then surely someone somewhere would have seen it, either that day, or found clearer, stronger evidence hidden in the Zapruder film, but no one did, or has. I think this theory simply much maligns the memory of a great woman who suffered two terrible tragedies in 1963, and has had those events twisted to suit the ideations of people who are desperately grasping at straws in the dark.

The Presidents

Yes, the finger of suspicion has even been pointed at the men who followed Kennedy into the West Wing.  President’s themselves have been accused of complicity in Kennedy’s assassination, these are all tales of backstabbing, corruption, self-aggrandisement, profiteering and betrayal, but unlike the normal day in the life tales of a politician; these stories contain more than their fair share of literal bloody murder:

Lyndon Baines Johnson: Johnson was the man who arguably benefitted the most from President Kennedy’s death, at least publically, he was propelled from the token office of Vice President, a largely ceremonial role where he allegedly spent most of his days drunk and bitching about his lack of influence, and his hatred of the President, to suddenly being the most powerful leader in the Western world.  Johnson was a career politician, a man adept at handling those around him and manipulating them into doing what he wanted, something he called ‘the Johnson Treatment’.  Using his southern charm, a dollop of charisma and where necessary blackmail and outright threats.  He was corrupt, open to bribery and regularly rigged elections via tampered ballot boxes and having the dead miraculously vote for him.  He had stabbed so many people in the back on his rise up the political ladder; that by the time he became President he virtually had no friends left on Capitol Hill.  The Attorney General, Bobby Kennedy, once commented that Johnson was a ‘mean bitter vicious...animal’.  Johnson undid all of Kennedy’s work once he was in office, he took America from an ‘advisory’ role in Vietnam, with all American soldier due to shortly return home, to having committed 55,000 troops to the country in a bloody and ultimately pointless war by the time he left power in 1969.  Wherever he went on the campaign trail; Johnson found himself tormented by anti-war protestors chanting the childish rhyme ‘Hey! Hey! LBJ! How Many Kids Have You Killed Today?!!’  Under Johnson’s administration drug use exploded as soldiers came back hooked on smack, and crime rates soared as they turned to nefarious activities to pay for their fix.  As a result cities like New York began to descend into hell, becoming virtual no go areas for anyone but the hardiest of residents.  This was in no small part thanks to Johnson putting a stop to Kennedy’s war against the mafia, consolidating their powers; and as a result helping to create some of the worst excesses of the country’s growing drugs problem.  Johnson also ended the plans to tear the CIA into a thousand pieces and scatter it to the wind.  Indeed when many people think of Kennedy’s time in office as being that of a lame duck Presidency, all style and no substance, this is in a large part due to Johnson undoing many of the reforms President Kennedy had set in motion.  Yet this is not to say that Johnson was a completely morally reprehensible person, lauding Conservative politics with a cruel capital C.  Many historians view Johnson as one of the great American liberal reformers.   It was Johnson who consolidated the civil rights reform started by President Kennedy, so that African Americans no longer had to sit at the back of buses, use separate toilets, or use separate water fountains, they could now dare to dream of lying on the same hotel sheets as a white man, and had greater opportunities to vote.  President Johnson introduced the Medicare system to a country that had long been scared by insurance companies into believing that a free healthcare system akin to Britain’s National Health Service; was the devils work.  Johnson ensured that the elderly and most vulnerable in society would get access to free healthcare for the first time.  Johnson also passed the Economic Opportunities Act, which started the ‘War on Poverty’, and in conjunction he introduced the Food Stamp Act, which ensured that the poorest would no longer starve.  Johnson’s tenure as President saw poverty rates drop from 17% to 11%, still a shockingly high figure for one of the world’s richest nations, but still, such a sharp drop in numbers was no small potatoes. He introduced the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, which ensured that children would no longer receive an educational standard solely based upon their family’s income.  He also dared to fly in the face of the politically powerful National Rifle Association by implementing the Gun Control Act, sensibly placing the most wide ranging restrictions on gun ownership in American history.  He is also the President to pardon more people from death row than any other.  Johnson therefore was a complex man, a great reformer who made bad decisions which cost lives, damaged the societies he wanted to help the most, and helped to strengthen the positions of the organised criminals his predecessor had fought so hard to bring to book.  A complex man, but was he complicit in murder?

Being the man with the greatest to gain by Kennedy’s death, it isn’t surprising the Lyndon B. Johnson’s name has been thrown into the hat.  Indeed in 2003 a Gallup poll discovered that 20% of Americans believed that Lyndon B. Johnson had some hand in the murder of his predecessor.   The story begins in Johnson’s native Texas, when he was involved in business with a dubious little man called Billie Sol Estes.  Estes made Johnson’s nefarious and corrupt activities look like the actions of a saint.  Estes was so corrupt in his business dealings that his daughter stated, ‘we worried about him being killed for years’.  He was a man of extreme double standards, he claimed to be a man of god, who hated profanity, who hated drinking, who believed that dancing perverted the soul.  He was a daft creationist who believed in the literal word of God and the bible, at least when it suited him.  He had shrewd, unforgiving, stirring eyes, framed by thick black rimmed glasses, he had a chubby baby like face topped with a mop of black curling hair, with large ears that jutted from his head un-forgivingly, a face that should have looked jolly or even faintly comical, but instead he managed to look steely and mean.  He was one of six children born to a poor farming family, but by the age of thirty he had turned a single sheep given to him by his father as a birthday present, into a multi-million pound business empire whereby he virtually owned his own hometown of Clyde, Texas.  By 1959 he had a business empire worth $150 million, which was mostly based on a Ponzi scheme.   Estes had sold anhydrous ammonia tanks to farmers across Texas, except the tanks didn’t exist; you see Estes had sold the tanks to the farmers as an investment.  He told the farmers that he could find companies willing to rent the tanks off of them.  So Estes took the money, and then gave them small payments back telling them it was the rent money from the none existent tanks.  He further subsidies the scheme by taking out millions of pounds worth of mortgages on the tanks, mortgages taken out at banks that were out of state, this conveniently meant that the banks could not check whether the ammonia tanks existed or not, but of course no one would ever think that multi-millionaire businessman Billie Sol Estes would be pulling a fast one.   He then began to persuade farmers across America to buy land off of him in Texas, and set up Cotton farms there, they would then lease their original farms back to Estes for $50 an acre; with an elaborately complicated contract in place; that stated in the small print that any default in mortgage payments on the cotton fields would mean Estes would take ownership of their farms.  The farmer’s first mortgage payment would be delayed for twelve months as an alleged act of goodwill, but with no cotton produced from the imaginary cotton farms at the end of the year, the farmers would naturally default on the payments and Estes would get ownership of their farms and homes.  It was a highly immoral, let alone illegal, form of land grabbing that; like his ammonia tank scheme, was allowed to go on for so long because four members of the Department of Agriculture had been bribed to look the other way.  It was during an endeavour of leasing imaginary grain silos to the government that Johnson and Estes became business partners.  This deal was highly suspicious, and it transpired that the same four members of the Department of Agriculture had received more bribes to facilitate these illegal contracts.  By 1961 Estes and Johnsons business dealings over the grain silos were being investigated by a more honest official at the Department of Agriculture.  Unfortunately the honest man from the ministry, Henry Marshall, died before he could finish his investigation, he committed suicide, by seemingly taking part in a high speed car chase, crashing his car into a tree, getting out of the car, bludgeoning himself on the back of the head, shooting himself five times in the face, then getting back into his car and gassing what little life he had left out of himself.  Yes he was quite clearly murdered, but the death was amazingly ruled a suicide by a corrupt coroner.  Then six more business associates of Estes and Lyndon Johnson’s turned up dead, George Krutilek, Ike Rogers (and his secretary), Harold Orr, Coleman Wade, John Douglas Kinser, and surprisingly his lover Josefa Johnson, Lyndon Johnson’s own sister.  They all died in peculiar or mysterious circumstances which had massive question marks hanging over them, two gassings a plane crash and two alleged household accidents.  John Douglas Kinser was shot in the back, on a golf-course; the killer was a close friend and political aid to Lyndon Johnson by the name of Malcolm Wallace.  Wallace was placed on trial for first degree murder, a trial where he was defended by Lyndon Johnson’s personal lawyer, a man named Edward Clarke, who was also known as ‘The Secret Boss of Texas’ due to the political sway and fear he held there.  It was a trial that Lyndon Johnson was said to follow extremely closely.  Wallace was found guilty of the cold blooded and seemingly motiveless murder, a capital offence in Texas, but amazingly Judge Charles O’ Betts sentenced Wallace to just a five year suspended sentence!   Years later, on the day of President Kennedy’s assassination, the police would find a latent print from a little finger on one of the cardboard boxes that comprised the snipers nest in the Texas School Book Depository.  Nathan Derby, one of the most well respected Latent Fingerprint Examiners in the United States, with thirty-five years experience working for the police and the US Army, examined the fingerprint and discovered that it belonged to of all people Johnson’s murderous aid; Malcolm Wallace.  Derby noted thirty-four points within both sets of fingerprints that matched, to put this into perspective only between twelve and twenty matches are needed to gain a conviction based on fingerprint evidence in a criminal trial.  The Dallas Police Department sent the fingerprint evidence to the FBI; so that they could mount a case against Wallace, and after eighteen months the FBI languidly announced that they disagreed with the country’s most eminent fingerprint expert, Derby was wrong, the latent fingerprint found in the Texas School Book Depository did not belong to Malcolm Wallace.  Derby was livid; he couldn’t understand what the FBI were talking about, he stated that his ‘dying declaration’ would be that the latent print found in the snipers nest belonged to Malcolm Wallace.

In the case of Josefa Johnson, the drunken, drug addled, loose lipped sister of President Johnson, it was death by an alleged cerebral haemorrhage, although this diagnoses couldn’t be proved as an autopsy wasn’t conducted, despite it being state law.   The death of George Krutilek, Billie Sol Estes’ accountant, was even more suspicious, it looked for all intent and purposes like a gassing, with a pipe leading from his car exhaust into his car, but Krutilek had absolutely no carbon monoxide in his system, he had in fact been bludgeoned on the back of the head.  Despite this clear evidence of murder, the coroner unbelievably ruled that Krutilek had died of a heart attack!

In 1963 Estes was finally convicted of 57 counts of fraud; and sentenced to fifteen years in prison.   Then in 1984, when he was up before the Grand Jury for even more fraud offences, Estes told the Grand Jury that the investigator Henry Marshall, his six business associates, his accountant, President Johnson’s sister, and President Kennedy had all been murdered on the orders of Lyndon B. Johnson, in an attempt to cover up the true extent of Johnson’s involvement in the multi-million dollar frauds they had both perpetrated.  Johnson had co-opted his former aid, ex-marine Malcolm Wallace, who Johnson had wrangled a job in the Department of Agriculture, to commit the murders.  Estes claimed that Jack Ruby was used as a middleman to recruit Lee Harvey Oswald as the patsy for the Presidents’ assassination.  Oswald was picked by Ruby because his political leanings were so dubious that anyone looking into them would be distracted from the real reason of the assassination, which was to save Lyndon B. Johnson from serving a very long prison sentence for fraud.  You see Johnson knew that the axe was about to fall, he’d heard a rumour that Kennedy knew all about the illegal silo transactions.  The Kennedy’s had found themselves a witness who was willing to testify to save his own skin; this man could prove that Johnson was corrupt and dangerous.  The witness was a high class pimp and gangster, and another of Johnsons’ dubious business associates, by the name of Bobby Baker.  Even if Johnson could silence Baker, President Kennedy would know that Johnson had been involved in his death, and President Kennedy would still drop Johnson as his Vice President candidate for the 1964 elections.  Yes, before President Kennedy’s assassination, Johnson was on borrowed time, with only months left before he was to be unceremoniously kicked out of high office for his corrupt business associations.  Johnson knew that if this happened then an investigation would surely follow and he would be finished for good.    Estes claimed that in response to this threat Johnson had micro-managed Kennedy’s trip to Dallas, selected a route that would take the motorcade through the perfect assassination spot, Dealey Plaza.   Johnson picked there because the motorcade would have to slow down as it turned a corner, which was overlooked by a high-rise building, where a sniper could easily shoot from an open window.  Estes claimed that the gunman was Malcolm Wallace, who was himself murdered in 1971, and that his murder was staged to look like a car accident.  How did Johnson get away with it all? Well, the CIA helped him to cover it all up, why did they do this?  Well; because they were just as threatened as Johnson was by President Kennedy, of course.  Kennedy remember, had threatened to disband the organisation.  In return for helping to cover up his role in the Presidential murder, Johnson promised to save the CIA once he was President.

The whole story sounds ridiculous of course, and there is little proof to prove any of it.  Then earlier this year former aid and strategy advisor to President Richard Nixon, Roger Stone, stated that he had uncovered unbelievable documentation that proved in writing that Lyndon B. Johnson instructed a young Richard Nixon to employ a young Jack Ruby onto the House of Representatives payroll in 1947, soon after this Jack Ruby moved from Chicago to Dallas.  Now Stone is yet to publish the document, or indeed the wider research he has completed since this discovery, this he has promised to do in his forthcoming book, ‘The Man Who Killed Kennedy: The Case Against LBJ’.  We should all wait with baited breath as his findings could be incendiary...

Richard Milhouse Nixon: 1959 Richard Nixon was Vice-President under Dwight D. Eisenhower, and he was responsible for ‘Operation Forty’, a CIA plot to assassinate the new Cuban leader Fidel Castro.   Operation Forty involved several people who would become world famous for other nefarious actions, E. Howard Hunt, Frank Sturgis and Gordon Liddy.   Operation Forty finally came to fruition and cumulated in the disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion, under the auspices of the recently elected President Kennedy.  Kennedy was furious when the operation failed, and he point blank refused to take another pot shot at Castro.  Infuriated at Kennedy’s pro-Cuban stance, Nixon and his Operation Forty buddies decided to assassinate Kennedy in a manner that would implicate Castro, giving them the perfect excuse they needed to mount another invasion and finish the job they had started.  The assassination operation was codenamed ‘The Big Event’.

By 1972 Nixon was the thirty-seventh President of the United States of America, and word got to him that his political enemies had stumbled upon concrete evidence of his involvement in ‘The Big Event’ and were holding it in a safe at the Watergate Hotel.  So Nixon sent his old Operation Forty/The Big Event buddies Hunt, Sturgis and Liddy to break into the Watergate complex and recover the notebooks holding the incriminating evidence of the Presidential murder plot.  The rest as they say is history.

Where did this shocking revelation about Nixon’s involvement come from?  Well it was the deathbed confession of E. Howard Hunt, recorded for posterity by his son Saint John Hunt.  It was a lovely story, but Saint John Hunt, who was hawking the tale, was unable to provide any supporting proof of the alleged conspiracy other than his father’s un-corroborated confession on a CD.  The biggest piece of historical evidence which rules against this theory being true stands out a mile, the proposed invasion of Cuba that the assassination was meant to herald never came to pass.  So either Richard Nixon completely miscalculated the situation, which I doubt, or the confession was a pack of lies.

George H. W. Bush: The Bush dynasty and their Presidential terms in office are probably the most contentious since that of Richard Nixon, so it’s not surprising that the Bush family has become embroiled on some level in the Kennedy Conspiracy.  It was the well respected investigative journalist Russ Baker who originally brought the first President Bush into the line of fire, when he began to hear dark and disturbing rumours; as he researched his biography of the Bush family, ‘Family Of Secrets’.   George H. W. Bush astoundingly claimed that he could not remember where he was or what he was doing on Friday the 22nd of November 1963, an incredible thing to say when it is a well worn adage that everyone knows where they where and what they were doing when they heard the news that President Kennedy had been assassinated.   Doing what Russ does well, research, he was able to prove unequivocally that George H. W. Bush was not only in Dallas on Friday the 22nd of November 1963, but that he was actually in Daley Plaza at the time of the assassination.  This amazing claim was later supported by the work of researcher John Hankey who uncovered photographic evidence to prove the claim, a photograph of George H. W. Bush; stood in front of the Texas School Book Depository, surrounded by police officers, talking to some suited officials.  Even more suspiciously, later that day Bush announced the death of President Kennedy at a Rotary Club dinner in Tyler, Texas.  He then promptly walked off stage and telephoned the FBI; Bush identified himself by name and stated that he was the President of the Zapata Offshore Drilling Company, and that he had information pertinent to the assassination of President Kennedy.  That’s right folks; the future President of the United States of America contacted the FBI in the hours after the assassination of the incumbent President; and told the feds that he had information regarding the President’s murder.  Startling stuff.  Bush stated that he had heard hearsay that one of his employees, a man named James Parrott, had mouthed-off about killing President Kennedy when the President was due to visit Houston, Texas.  Bush then gave his current address as the Sheraton Dallas Hotel, further proving that he was in Dallas on the day of the assassination.  Bush would have carried on denying any knowledge of being in Dallas on the day of the assassination; if John Hankey hadn’t unearthed from the forgotten vaults an FBI memo that stated plainly in black and white what Bush had said to an FBI agent over the phone that day.

More evidence began to turn up which placed Bush’s blank memory surrounding the assassination in a dubious light, researcher Joseph McBride uncovered an intriguing memo written five days after the assassination of President Kennedy, penned by FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover.  The memo concerned the FBI’s fears that anti-Castro factions might take advantage of Kennedy’s assassination; to invade and overthrow Castro, using Kennedy’s murder as a rallying call.  In the last sentence of the memo George H. W. Bush was named as the CIA liaison for any information concerning such activities.  From this memo, which was entitled ‘The Assassination of President John Fitzgerald Kennedy’ John Hankey surmised that it was indeed future President George H. W. Bush who was supervising the ‘misguided anti-Castro’ factions the memo talked about, and indeed that George H. W. Bush probably had a large hand in organising and planning the devastating Bay of Pigs foul up.    What about that phone call to the FBI?  Why did Bush do such a stupid and possibly incriminating thing?  Well Hankey and Russ believe that Bush made the phone call from the town of Tyler, Texas, as an alibi; to show the world that he wasn’t in Dallas that fateful day.  All he wanted to do was get his name down on some official documentation, which would then tell the world he hadn’t been in Dallas on the day Kennedy died, the only problem was that Bush could easily have made the short journey to the town of Tyler after the assassination; in time to make his incriminating phone call, so it was no alibi at all really.   Hankey offers a further reason for the phone call, what if something had gone wrong in Dallas, and Bush had become incriminated in the devastating events somehow, therefore the only way to give himself some room to manoeuvre was to make the hasty phone call which created a paper trail for him away from Dallas.  What could have gone so wrong for Bush in Dallas that he needed to endanger himself further by making the strange and incriminating phone call?  Well, several people on the day of the assassination stated that they felt that shots had been fired from the Dal-Tex building, a building directly opposite the book depository.  When going through the records Hankey came across a statement from an eminently respected Dallas Police Officer called Roger Craig, who stated that, ‘the arrests made in Dealey Plaza that day... (there was) one in particular by R. E. Vaughn of the Dallas Police Department.  The man Vaughn arrested was coming out of the Dal-Tex building...The only thing Vaughn knew about him was that he was an independent oil operator from Houston, Texas.  The prisoner was taken from Vaughn by Dallas Police detectives and that was the last he saw or heard of the suspect’.  Now could that independent oil operator from Houston, Texas, have been George H. W. Bush?  Was Bush arrested by a good honest copper unaware of the greater machinations of the CIA operation he was stumbling into?  Was Bush then forced to act rashly to give himself an alibi once more senior officers had extricated him from the sticky situation?

There is one other little coincidence that connects George H. W. Bush to the Kennedy conspiracy.  Bush was good friends with George de Mohrenschildt, the man widely believed to have been Lee Harvey Oswald’s CIA handler.  The friendship between the pair was lifelong and undeniable; Bush was roommates and best friends with de Mohrenschildt’s nephew whilst at school.  When George H. W. Bush became the Director of the CIA in 1976, George de Mohrenschildt’s wrote his old friend a rather peculiar letter, this read in part, ‘I tried to write, stupidly and unsuccessfully, about Lee H Oswald and must have angered a lot of people... Could you do something to remove the net around us? This will be my last request for help’.  Shortly after receiving a point blank refusal of any help from Bush, de Mohrenschildt turned to reporter Edward Jay Epstein for help, de Mohrenschildt confessed to Epstein that he had indeed been a CIA operative, and that he had been Oswald’s CIA contact.   The very next day de Mohrenschildt was found dead, a shotgun blast to the head, the coroner’s verdict was that it had been a suicide.

Of course the naysayers will say that it wasn’t George H. W. Bush in the photograph taken in Dealey Plaza, it was just someone else who looked incredibly like the future President.  They will say that the Hoover memo was talking about another George H. W. Bush who just happened to work for the same organisation as the George H. W. Bush who would later become that organisations director; and then President of the United States.  They will say that there are lots of oilmen in Texas, and it wasn’t Bush who was arrested coming out of the Dal-Tex building.   They are correct to point out these possibilities, although there is a lot to indicate that George H. W. Bush’s actions on the day of the assassination were peculiar, and his subsequent claims not to remember assassination day is odd in the extreme, especially given his peculiar actions in phoning the FBI, yet despite the memos and the paper trails and the peculiarities there is no solid evidence that could convict the former President in any court of law.

A Load of Greedy Bankers

Bankers, we blame them for a lot of woes in the modern world, after all their foolish and greedy actions brought many countries to the brink of economic collapse a few years ago; and as such the rule of law broke down for a period in many states.  It is not surprising then that in an anti-banking era; a conspiracy theory has arose which places the blame for President Kennedy's assassination fair and squarely at the feet of a cabal of ruthless and greedy bankers.  The origins of this theory stem from Executive Order 11110, a Presidential decree signed by President Kennedy on Tuesday the 4th of June 1963.  In the early 1960's the demand for silver was at an all time high, this was in no small part due to the 1961 announcement by President Kennedy halting the sale of silver by the Treasury Department, and also announcing that $4.2 billion worth of Silver Certificates would be issued instead of Federal Reserve Notes (the ordinary dollar bills Americans hold in their wallets every day).  This in turn increased the demand for silver, and the price of the precious metal thereby rapidly increased to a record level.  At this new higher price President Kennedy sold off 80% of the governments silver reserves, netting the government a tidy profit.   Now researcher Jim Marrs asserted that Executive Order 11110 served President Kennedy in a most important way, helping him to wrestle further power away from the increasingly influential Federal Reserve Bank, and giving it instead to the much more controllable Department of the Treasury.  This was all part of a long term game plan initially instigated way back in 1957 by Joseph Kennedy, a man who hated the idea of a Federal Bank and the elite and shadowy forces such an organisation profited.   In effect Marrs argues that Executive Order 11110 stripped away the Federal Reserve Banks authority to lend money to government departments, it also meant that the United States Treasury could now issue currency without having to go through the Federal Reserve, as it started to issue the 'United States Notes' instead of 'Federal Reserve Notes' as paper money.  The Federal Reserve was, despite appearances, not a government body, but in fact a conglomeration of privately owned and operated banks.  When it issued its 'Federal Reserve Notes' on behalf of the government, to the government, it did so on the proviso that it charged the government interest on the ‘loan’, just like a normal bank would.  Due to the interest imposed when the Federal Reserve Bank issued money, the government would have to ask for more money to pay off the debt created, perpetually making the Federal Reserve Bank and its bankers richer; and putting the government deeper and deeper into debt.  This system of finance effectively meant that the American Government was always in debt to the Federal Reserve Bank and its unholy cabal of banking families.  So by cutting the Federal Reserve’s power and influence, and allowing the Treasury to freely print its own money, it effectively ended the monopoly owned by the Federal Reserve, and its bankers would now be the ones losing money.  I mean why would you borrow money off someone you had to pay interest to, if you could just print the money yourself?  So with their supremacy challenged and profits about to plummet; the Federal Reserve Bankers plotted with those old bogey men the CIA to murder President Kennedy.   The day after President Kennedy was assassinated the Treasury stopped issuing 'United States Notes', and went back to the system of issuing 'Federal Reserve Notes' a situation which Jim Marrs argued has led to America being $9 Trillion in debt; simply for asking the Federal Reserve to print new money which interest then has to be paid on.

Of course Executive Order 11110 wasn't as clear cut as all that.  The issuing of the United States Notes was simply a temporary measure to replace the Silver Certificates; ultimately this move would have consolidated and made the Federal Bank even stronger.  It’s also argued that any money the Federal Bank makes is rebated back to the treasury each year, what little profit the Federal Reserve Bank does keep from charging the government interest on its services, is they say, not out of greed but a necessity for keeping the bank afloat, they do after all have to pay their workers and have some working capital.  So there was no real financial gain to be made by the shadowy bankers in the wake of President Kennedy’s death.  The debunkers of the Federal Banking Conspiracy state that those who detest the Federal Bank have also over egged the size of the national deficit they claim the Federal Bank is responsible for, and that in real terms its financial burden is only 7% of the whole national deficit.  Again this portion of the nation’s debt was created through no fault of their own, or the greed of their bankers, but through the natural running costs of operating a national Federal Bank.  It has also been stated that United States Notes were not immediately withdrawn the day after Kennedy’s murder as is popularly believed, but were being issued by the Treasury at least up until 1966, and far from President Johnson repealing Executive Order 11110 with unseemly haste after his predecessors murder, it actually lay on the statute books until President Regan repealed it twenty years later. This proves, say the debunkers; that for twenty years the treasury had every opportunity to print free money if they so wished, but simply chose not to, completely undermining the whole alleged motive for the bankers to have murdered President Kennedy.

Kennedy Vs The Ku Klux Klan

On Saturday the 9th of November 1963; a covert police operation in Miami, Florida, overheard a conversation which was intelligence gold.  Police Officer Everett Kaye, was running an undercover-operation to infiltrate the far right National State Rights Party.  Kaye listened in as his mole, William Somerset, chatted to a man who looked like everyone’s favourite white haired cuddly old grandfather.  Joseph Adams Milteer was in fact a dangerous and staunch racist from the deep-south, who had the type of scary friends most of us would move cities to avoid.  He was the leader of the National States Rights Party, and a member of the White Citizens Council of Atlanta, the Congress of Freedom (it’s funny how racists always bang on about freedom and rights when they want to curtail them for so many) and of course the perennial Ku Klux Klan.  Milteer was noted by the FBI to be one of the most vile, racist and violent men in the country, despite his grandfatherly appearance.  Milteer sat in Somerset’s third story flat; and informed a stunned and bemused Somerset that President Kennedy was going to be shot with a high power-rifle, from the window of a high rise building, at some point in the near future.  Milteer informed Somerset that his friends would get away with the assassination because in the immediate aftermath of the killing the police and the FBI would look for anyone they could blame, Milteer was confident that someone, anyone, would have to be in custody within a matter of hours to sate the public’s fears and lust for justice, allowing the true assassin to escape.

Everett Kaye rushed straight to his superiors and played them the incriminating tape.  His bosses in turn turned the tape over to the FBI and the Secret Service.  In response to what was perceived as a credible threat, the Presidential motorcade route was scrapped when President Kennedy visited Miami on Monday the 18th of November 1963, instead of taking part in a planned tic-a-tape parade; President Kennedy was flown to his speech in a helicopter, the changes were not publicised, and his visit went off without a hitch.

Bizarrely enough Joseph Milteer was in Dallas on assassination day.  We know this from two sources; firstly a photograph taken on Elm Street just as the Presidential Motorcade passed, a photograph taken just moments before the assassination.  In this image a man who bares an almighty resemblance to Milteer can be clearly seen looming from the crowd with a stupid grin upon his face.  Secondly, Joseph Milteer made a telephone call to William Somersett that terrible day, which was traced all the way back to Dallas.  During this telephone call an elated Milteer said, ‘I guess you thought I was kidding you when I said he would be killed from a window with a high-powered rifle’.  A shocked Somerset asked Milteer if he had simply been guessing as to the details of Kennedy’s murder, Milteer in response laughed; and chided Somerset with the words, ‘I don’t do any guessing’.  Given his peculiar prophecy Milteer was picked up by the FBI in the days after the assassination.   When the FBI spoke to Milteer, and listened to the conversation he had held with Somerset, they realised that Milteer’s view of what might happen in an assassination attempt had been littered with inconsistencies compared to what did actually happened in Dallas. Milteer had believed that President Kennedy had fifteen look-a-likes who stood in for him at public appearances, therefore the most ideal time and place to hit on President Kennedy was when he was on the veranda of the Whitehouse, the gunman firing from one of the high-rises across the way from 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.  Milteer had also named a likely hit-man, another right wing nut by the name of Jack Brown.  It could be proved quite easily by the FBI that Brown was not in Dallas on the day of the assassination.  So Milteer had got just as many of his predictions wrong, as he had gotten right.  After just a few short hours of questioning they let Milteer go, partly because an FBI officer had given Milteer a blatantly false alibi, saying that he was in the town of Quitman, in Georgia, at the time of the assassination.  Soon afterwards Joseph Adams Milteer died in a house fire which was described by some as being ‘mysterious’.

Murderous Masons and Conniving Catholics

As my regular readers will know I’m a sucker for my peculiar theories, the outlandish, the odd, the damn right strange.  Like all high profile murders the assassination of President Kennedy is no different from any other when attracting oddball and let’s face it, cuckoo, theories that allegedly explain its inconsistencies and contradictions.  Possibly the worst offenders of all these types of theories; are the ones that involve, or ludicrously and tenuously try to rope in; the Freemasons.  When starting to write this book, I thought to myself, ‘well at least I won’t have to deal with any Masonic twaddle’, oh how wrong I was.  For one such theory was found in a wondrous work called ‘The JFK Assassination & the Occult’.

Many believe that most occult actions are governed by an adherence to mystical numbers.  One of the most powerful of these numbers is the number three.  Three is known as the first sacred number, and the first perfect number.  The number three is prevalent in religions throughout the known world and throughout history, from Egyptology and its holy trinity of Horus, Osiris and Ra, The Father, Son and Holy Ghost of Christianity, Ahu, Raa and Maz in Zoroastrianism, the Trikaya or three bodies of Buddha in Buddhism, and The Soul of Ultimate God, The Spirit of Narayana and Body of Muthukutty in Hinduism.  The number three is even more powerful if it is combined, so the number thirty-three (33) has more power than a solitary number three.  With the mystical support of the number three seismic events that can shape the destiny of the universe can be more easily achieved.  What does any of this numberwang have to do with that fateful day in Dallas?  Well, some would have it that the number three is as woven into the lore of President Kennedy’s assassination as much as any other undisputable fact.  The city of Dallas is located just south of the thirty-third degree of latitude. President Kennedy’s motorcade had been due to pass under the ‘Triple Underpass’ and he was in sight of this landmark when he was murdered.  Dealey Plaza itself is three acres in size; and is penned within a triangular road system containing Commerce, Elm and Main streets. The whole site is near the Trinity River.  Three shots were supposedly fired, by an alleged (according to some theories) three gunmen, and of course there were ultimately three victims in the conspiracy, President Kennedy, J. D. Tippit and Lee Harvey Oswald.    Other notable links to the number three throughout the conspiracy are the facts that Lee Harvey Oswald had been in the Marines for three years.  The lone assassin story was given to the press three hours after the President’s assassination, and each of the victims had three parts to their names John Fitzgerald Kennedy, Lee Harvey Oswald and J. D. Tippit.  The number 33 can also be made by adding the 22nd day to the 11th month (just conveniently ignore the year).  It is also alleged that the Texas School Book Depository had 33 employees at the time of the assassination.

Because of this saturation of the number three throughout the case, it turned some investigators minds to the Freemasons.  How, you might ask, do the Freemasons fit into this?  Well, the number three is very important to Freemasons, the initial three degrees are the bedrock of everything the freemasons do, and the 33rd degree is Freemasonry’s highest rank, therefore every number three that cropped up in relation to the assassination was a sly nod to the fact that the assassination was sanctioned and organised by a cabal of evil 33rd Degree Freemasons.  Further evidence was the fact that Dealey Plaza was the site of Dallas’ first Masonic temple.   Earl Warren, Gerald Ford, J. Edgar Hoover and Allen Dulles were all Freemasons, and the man who appointed them to the Warren Commission, President Kennedy’s successor, President Lyndon B. Johnson was also a Freemason.  Another key player in assassination lore; whom it is alleged was a Freemason, was Abraham Zapruder; he was alleged to have been a 32nd Degree Freemason; who was raised shortly after the assassination to the 33rd Degree.  President Kennedy’s wounds are alleged to correspond to the wounds inflicted on Hiram Abiff, one of the key figures in Masonic lore, murdered by three assassins.  Abiff himself was murdered in a conspiracy, where the killers allegedly struck Abiff on the back, throat and the rear of the head, matching exactly President Kennedy’s wounds.   The famous photograph of Lee Harvey Oswald holding his leftwing newspapers and rifle; is also claimed to be further evidence of a Masonic conspiracy, as Oswald is allegedly stood in the same position as a Masonic initiate, his right foot looming out in front of him whilst his left is turned on a peculiar angle.  In Dallas, Jackie Kennedy was given a gift of red roses; this was yet another coded Freemasonic symbol, this time harking to the Freemasonic Rosicrucian Order.

Of course all the above is simple extrapolation to prove the point that there is lots of occult numerology which may point to the Freemasons having had a hand in the assassination.  It in no way explains just quite what an organisation that primarily concerns itself with charitable works and teaching its members about spiritual growth via architectural analogies; hoped to gain by offing the President of the United States? Well, the Jesuit General, Jean-Baptist Janssens, is alleged to have ordered the hit on President Kennedy, and this was then ratified by Pope Paul VI, who asked American Cardinal Spellman to organise the details of the assassination.  Spellman (allegedly a play on words, Spell-Man or Magician/Occultist) then arranged for the Freemasons to carry out the murder.  Obviously because the Freemasons have managed to infiltrate every level of high governance, everyone from the new President to the CIA and the FBI then helped to cover up the truth of the bloody deed on behalf of the Freemasons.   There were three motivations behind the murder, which also linked in to the repetition of the number three throughout the assassination.  Firstly, President Kennedy wanted to end the Vietnam War.  Secondly, he wanted to disband the CIA.  Thirdly, President Kennedy wanted to do away with the Federal Reserve Bank.  Yes, that’s right; the Freemasons did it for the same three prominent reasons shanghaied from other eminently more sensible (by these standards) theories covered elsewhere in this tome.   This explanation begs the serious question, why would the Vatican want to prolong war in Vietnam, keep the CIA running, or even care if America scrapped the Federal Reserve Bank?  Well, the theorists are strangely silent on these points, other than saying that the conspirators were playing a long game and it is difficult to know what their true motivations were.  Hmm.

Of course there are holes in this theory you could drive a double-decker bus through.  Let’s just start on the theorist’s grasp of Masonic history; to show how well they did their research.   The theorist’s are blatantly wrong when they pontificate on wounds allegedly inflicted on Hiram Abiff.  Abiff was not struck on the back, throat and head, but rather had two glancing blows to his upper torso, not his throat or back, and one blow to the front of his cranium, not the rear.  Also Lee Harvey Oswald is not stood in a Masonic pose in the famous photograph of him holding his newspaper and guns as alleged.   There is one well known image of a person dressed as a Masonic candidate, where both Oswald and the candidate hold their legs in a similar position; in both their respective photographs, but the Masonic candidate is quite clearly not partaking of any Masonic ritual when the photograph was being taken, he is not stood in a deliberate Masonic pose, he is simply meant to be displaying the Masonic regalia of initiation whilst stood in a casual pose.  The theorists who espouse these two points as fact are either genuinely mistaken as they have not taken the time to research Masonic lore properly, or they are deliberately trying to mislead their readers by shoring up what is at best very shaky coincidences into some hash of a conspiracy.  There is also the small fact that according to some researchers there is a lot of historical animosity between the Catholic Church and the Freemasons.   The Catholic Church outlawed Freemasonry, made being a member of its group heresy.  Many Freemasons were tortured and burnt at the stake for being a member of its illustrious conclaves.  The outrages performed against Freemasonry by the Catholic Church, and the animosity it created within the charitable organisation; are cited as the number one major reason for the Freemasons becoming secretive in the first place.  Without the catholic churches interventions and persecutions Freemasonry would never have had to have gone underground.  Why then an organisation such as Freemasonry, with such a tumultuous history with Catholicism, would suddenly start taking orders from the Pope is beggar’s belief.    As for Dealey Plaza being the site of the first Masonic Temple in Dallas, well, it was also the site of the first Post Office, so you can see from this that it no more means that a group of Freemasons murdered President Kennedy, than it does that a group of disaffected postal workers did.

No, this entire theory is hokum, I always stand by the adage that if it wouldn’t stand up in court, then you haven’t got a case to answer.  If you put this nebulous and preposterous theory before a jury it wouldn’t just not stand up; it would be laughed right out of the courthouse.

The Israeli Connection

Did the Israeli Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion become so frustrated with President Kennedy’s attempts to thwart his dreams of Israel becoming a nuclear power; that he conspired with President Kennedy’s enemies to murder him?  Was this decision spurred on by Mr Ben-Gurion’s belief that President Kennedy came from a family of anti-Semites, and that President Kennedy’s desire to block Israelis attempts to develop nuclear weapons stemmed from this anti-Semitism?  Well that is the unbelievable theory put forward by Michael Collins Piper in his book ‘Final Judgement’.

It was the Jim Garrison investigation into the activities of Clay Shaw that first led Piper to the Israeli connection.  Garrison had uncovered that Clay Shaw was on the board of directors of a company called Permindex; a little bit more research into this company revealed that one of its major shareholders was Banque De Credit International, an organisation based in Geneva.  This company in turn had been founded by an individual called Tibor Rosenbaum, a key financier of Mossad in those early years of the Israeli state.  Further research suggested that Banque De Credit International regularly laundered money for the ‘Mobsters accountant’ Meyer Lansky, one of the key players in the Cuban Casino business and major lobbyist in wanting Cuba ‘liberated’ so it could be put back under Mob rule.  Permindex had further dubious connections to others who were allegedly involved in the various conspiracies against President Kennedy.   Permindex owned a subsidiary company called Centro Mondiale Commerciale, a company that was a known front for CIA operations in Italy and France.  So it seemed telling that the Chairman of Permindex, a company that had links to the CIA, Meyer Lanskey, and the Mob, just also happened to be another key financier of Israel in the early years of its existence, one Louis M. Bloomfield.

President Kennedy was against Israel gaining nuclear capabilities for eminently sensible reasons; given the state of the world stage during the early 1960’s.  It was a time of turbulence in Israel and Palestine, were strike and counter strike and invasion and counter-invasion happened regularly.  Kennedy felt that allowing Israel to develop nuclear bombs would only lead to growing tensions in the Arab regions, and that by ensuring that they did not have a nuclear option it would force Israel to take a more ‘moderate’ approach to its diplomatic troubles.  Indeed the CIA in a confidential memo to President Kennedy in March 1963 stated that if given the opportunity to develop nuclear weapons Israel would, ‘seek to exploit the psychological advantages of its nuclear capability to intimidate the Arabs... It would probably feel freer than it does now to take vigorous retaliatory action... And it would probably make propaganda underlining the impotence of the principal Arab governments in the face of Israeli power, and would thereby seek to compound Arab frustrations and to promote disunity in the Arab world’.  Further concerns were that if given nukes; Israel would use them to force America’s hand in supporting policies that were not necessarily in America’s favour.    The CIA feared that this in turn would destabilise the Middle East as a whole, causing ‘acts of violence directed against the real or presumed friends and accessories of Israel...charges of US complicity in the Israeli achievement would be widely made and widely believed in the Arab world. The anti-US sentiments implicit in certain Arab nationalist doctrines would be strengthened. US influence with the Arabs...would be drastically reduced’.  The greatest fear was the escalation of destructive capability this would cause in the Middle East, that Israel developing nuclear weapons would be the first step toward a mutually assured destruction in the area, ‘Nasser (President of the United Arab Republic) would contemplate, and might embark upon, a nuclear weapons program of his own... Nasser might claim to have nonnuclear weapons of mass destruction, chemical or biological, and might even make an effort to develop some capability along these lines’.   There was even concern that if Israel developed nuclear weapons it would further the seemingly indomitable spread of Communism, as the Arab nations turned to Soviet Russia for protection, ‘It is conceivable that the Soviets might place nuclear weapons on Arab territory, retaining them under Soviet control. This might involve no more than a few bombs which could be dropped by Egyptian aircraft... Or, it might go so far as the establishment of missile bases, with an extensive Soviet military presence... the Soviets would substantially enhance their influence and position throughout the Middle East, and perhaps find the basis for a firmer Bloc-Arab alignment against the West than they have so far been able to achieve’.  Such a chilling report, highlighting such dire consequences would have put President Kennedy dead against any Israeli development of nuclear capabilities, and so it was that President Kennedy used his considerable influence to block the Israeli nuclear program.

In ‘Final Judgement’, Piper claimed that President Kennedy’s stance in refusing to allow Israel the chance to develop nuclear weapons commenced a ‘secret war’ between the two nations, that only ended when President Kennedy was assassinated, and President Johnson immediately dropped his predecessor’s resistance to Israel developing a nuclear option.   So a cabal of powerful forces came together against President Kennedy, Mossad, the CIA and the Mob.  The plan they developed was simple, Mossad would foot the bill, The Mob would do the hit, the CIA would do the clean up, and they would all get what they wanted out of President Kennedy’s death.  The CIA would be saved from destruction and would no longer live under the threat of being torn into a thousand pieces and scattered to the wind, the Mob would no longer be persecuted by the unfaithful Kennedy clan, and Israel would get its nuclear bomb.

Other than the possible connections the alleged conspirators had to an obscure company and its subsidiaries, the only proof of such a wild conspiracy was the word of Mordechai Vanunu, a former Israeli nuclear technician who had spent eighteen years in prison for selling Israeli nuclear secrets to the British press.  Despite only being nine at the time of President Kennedy’s assassination, Vanunu stated to the Al-Hayat newspaper that there were ‘near-certain indications’ that Israel had been involved in the assassination.  Despite this resounding endorsement of the theory, the odds against a conspiracy of this nature working would be astronomical.  For starters ensuring the silence of all those involved after the event would be a monumental task, especially considering the incredibly flaky nature of some of those allegedly involved.  One of the alleged key conspirators, Meyer Lanskey, was eventually caught by the FBI thanks to the bugging of his home and office, and during this period he was proven to be a character unable to keep his mouth shut, and not boast and blab about all his ventures and criminal activities to boost his criminal standing.  A man like him would surely have told someone about his participation in something as big as a Presidential murder.  Further evidence that disproves this theory are the declassified documents and memos; which revealed that the CIA were just as scared by the thought of Israel getting nuclear weapons as President Kennedy was.  It would be highly unlikely given the CIA’s stance just eight months before the assassination, that they would go on to conspire to create just such a dreaded inevitability.  Sadly when it was released, and Final Judgement was met with almost universally scathing reviews, Piper’s supporters ungraciously fell upon the old anti-Semitic rejoinder, that he had been smeared and his work unfairly discredited by a media that is controlled by Jewish influences.

President Kennedy and the Men From Mars

Is it possible that President Kennedy was getting too close to discovering the best kept secret America had at the time of his murder?  That he was on the verge of uncovering the existence of extra-terrestrial life on earth?  During the 1950’s and 60’s America’s love affair with the UFO phenomena was at its height.  It had all began in 1947, when Roswell Airbase in New Mexico sent out a press release stating it had in its possession the remains of a downed ‘flying saucer’.  This became worldwide headline grabbing news; before a retraction of the statement was made less than twenty-four hours later, and the story was put about that the captured flying saucer had simply been a weather balloon that had been misidentified.  Yet this incident spawned a love affair with the subject that still infatuates people to this day.  For a while the American government took the ‘threat’ of UFO’s seriously.  Instead of the derision the subject is officially met with today, the CIA launched Project Bluebook, a secret operation to catalogue; and if they possibly could explain, any previously unexplained aerial phenomenal.  The great fear was that flying saucers and UFO sighting might have been incidents involving prototype soviet spy ships that posed a clear and present danger to American airspace.  On Tuesday the 12th of November 1963, just ten days before his murder, President Kennedy made an official request to the CIA for access to all relevant information the CIA had on UFO phenomena; which affected ‘National Security’.  President Kennedy wanted the CIA to arrange ‘a program of data sharing with NASA’, in order to help NASA’s Mission Directors clearly define their ‘defensive responsibilities’.  Researcher, Timothy Cooper, claimed that he was leaked a memo that the CIA had tried to burn, in which the Director of the CIA stated ‘Lancer’ the CIA’s codename for President Kennedy, ‘has made some inquiries regarding our activities, which we cannot allow... Please submit your views no later than October. Your action to this matter is critical to the continuance of the group’.  It is argued therefore; that the CIA’s response to President Kennedy’s request for the UFO files was to murder him whilst he was visiting Dallas.

To claim that President Kennedy was assassinated to stop him discovering the truth about how much America really knew about extra-terrestrial life and technology is to misunderstand what President Kennedy was actually asking for in his original memo to the CIA.   At the time President Kennedy was exploring the possibility of a unique and groundbreaking program of co-operation with the Soviet government, in order for America to work with the Soviets in the space race.  Rather than America spending billions trying to send a man to the moon, President Kennedy dared to consider sharing the cost with the Russians, a joint endeavour that could stir the hopes and spirits of both nations; without the endeavour being sullied by embittered national pride.  However it transpired that America weren’t the only ones being troubled by UFO’s.   Russia’s secret service had been worried by the phenomena too, and Kennedy wanted information which he could show to the Russians; to prove that the UFO’s were not America’s doing, America were not technologically more advanced in the space race than the Russians were, and his request for co-operation in the space race wasn’t simply a cover for an extended spying mission.  Kennedy was also concerned after the Cuban Missile Crisis that the Russian’s might mistake a UFO for an act of American aggression, and that it might trigger a nuclear holocaust.  President Kennedy was not in the least bit interested about finding out if the intelligence services had little green men hidden away somewhere, or if they had downed alien technology they were secretly trying to retro-engineer.  No, all President Kennedy wanted was information he could use to help prevent a nuclear war.  His request was no were near serious enough for anyone to want him dead for simply asking.  If the intelligence services did have such information hidden away, then they could have happily have kept it hidden, all President Kennedy wanted and needed to be given was information freely available to him via Project Bluebook, which would have proven to the Russians that America was being plagued by the strange areal phenomena too.

Conclusion

In recent years there has been a backlash against the conspiracy buffs and their theories; cumulating in three major studies into the assassination concluding that Oswald acted alone; and that Jack Ruby reacted out of his insurmountable grief.  Gerald Posner, Vincent Bugliosi and Martin Fido believe any explanation other than the lone gunman hypothesis is just too fantastical.  What do I think?  I honestly came to this piece as a believer in the official lone gunman theory.  I was persuaded away from talk of conspiracy by the respective works of Messrs Posner, Bugliosi and Fido.  Carrying out my own research my perspective changed.  For my liking there are far too many inconsistencies and contradictions in the official narrative, too many assumptions and perversion of facts.  Now as I have stated many times before; anyone can point to the numerous holes and contradictions in a work as detailed as the Warren Commission; without it necessarily meaning that its conclusion as a whole are invalid; but when facts have been deliberately changed and misrepresented to support a pre-determined conclusion; then in my opinion the entire work is compromised.

After thoughtful and careful consideration of the facts I believe that Oswald acted as part of conspiracy involving the Mafia; who wanted a more pro-war President; a President who would hopefully wage war against Cuba.  After the Presidential murder; fear of public pressure pushing America towards a Third World War with Soviet Russia; who appeared the likely paymasters of the accused gunman; given Oswald's history of defection and Marxism, caused the American government and Intelligence Agencies to enter into a benign; knee jerk cover-up of the facts.  This was all to stop a potential Third World War from happening; and once the government started down that road; even when they realised Oswald wasn’t part of a Soviet plot; there was no turning back.  As a result; over the decades that followed the inconsistencies in the case were discovered; the conspiracy detected; and more and more sinister motivations attributed as to the reasons for the cover-up.  Why might you ask were the Mafia never brought to book if they were involved in President Kennedy's murder?  I think the likeliest answer to this is that the American government still hoped one day to oust Fidel Castro; and they would have been concerned that public knowledge of President Kennedy being murdered to hasten this war; could have made any prospective military engagement over Cuba publically unpopular as a result.  Added to this the fact that the Mafia were heavily in bed with the CIA; it could have given the CIA real fears that they would be falsely incriminating themselves in the eyes of the public; or indeed that the Mafia could blackmail them over the cover-up.  There will of course be numerous people who disagree with this conclusion.  I'm aware that it’s not perfect; but in a case where there is such conflicting evidence; and a half century of deceit muddying the waters of truth; a best fit solution; I believe; is all we can hope for.

All we can do for certain is remember a President who wasn't perfect; who only got to power threw fraudulent means; but who wanted to change the world for the better; a President who saved the world from nuclear holocaust on numerous occasions, and who; if given the chance, could have saved a nation a decade of war and bloodshed.  In the end all we can hope for is that such a flawed and noble person will come forward again when they are needed, and that when he (or she) does; next time around their contribution to world history is recognised by all; and their thanks for that contribution won't simply be a bullet from a snipers rifle.

Selected Bibliography

Below are just some of the books and websites that helped in the research of this volume of Murder Tales.   The assassination of President Kennedy has inspired more writers to put pen to paper than virtually any other crime; so this list is in no way definitive and I would urge everyone to shop around and see what you can find.

Case Close – Gerald Posner – Anchor Books-1994

Crossfire – Jim Marrs –Basic Books – 1993

False Witness – Patricia Lambert – M. Evans & Company – 1999

Reclaiming History – Vincent Bugliosi – W. W. Norton & Company – 2007

On The Trail Of The Assassins – Jim Garrison – Penguin - 1992

Ultimate Sacrifice – Thom Hartman and Lamar Waldron – Constable - 2013

The Warren Commission Report – St Martin Griffin – 1992

Who’s Who In The JFK Assassination: An A to Z Encyclopedia – Michael Benson – Citadel - 2003

www.youtube.com

[i] In some books and on some internet sites, David Lamar Christ is identified by his alias, Daniel Carswell.