Table of Contents

The JFK Assassination, Part I - What Happened?

The Unz Review • June 18, 2018 • 4,800 Words

The JFK Assassination, Part II - Who Did It?

The Unz Review • June 25, 2018 • 8,000 Words

RFK Jr. vs. I.F. Stone on the Kennedy Assassinations

The Unz Review • July 31, 2023 • 5,100 Words

Prof. Jeffrey Sachs and the JFK Assassination

The Unz Review • March 18, 2024 • 6,200 Words

The JFK Assassination, Part I - What Happened?

June 18, 2018 • 4,800 Words

About a decade ago, I got a Netflix subscription and was amazed that the Internet now provided immediate access to so many thousands of movies on my own computer screen. But after a week or two of heavy use and the creation of a long watch-list of prospective films I'd always wanted to see, my workload gained the upper hand, and I mostly abandoned the system.

Back then, nearly all Netflix content was licensed from the major studios and depending upon contract negotiations might annually disappear, so when I happened to browse my account again in December, I noticed that a couple of films on my selection list included warning notices saying they would no longer be available on January 1st.  One of these was Oliver Stone's famous 1991 film JFK, which had provoked quite a stir at the time, so thinking now or never, I clicked the Play button, and spent three hours that evening watching the Oscar winner.

Most of the plot seemed bizarre and outlandish to me, with the president's killing in Dallas supposedly having been organized by a cabal of militantly anti-Communist homosexuals, somehow connected with both the CIA and the mafia, but based in New Orleans.  Kevin Costner starred as a crusading District Attorney named Jim Garrison—presumably fictional—whose investigation broke the assassination conspiracy wide open before the subtle tentacles of the Deep State finally managed to squelch his prosecution; or at least that's what I vaguely remember from my single viewing.  With so many implausible elements, the film confirmed my belief in the wild imagination of Hollywood scriptwriters and also demonstrated why no one with any common sense had ever taken seriously those ridiculous �JFK conspiracy theories.�

Despite its dramatic turns, the true circumstances of President John F. Kennedy's death seemed an island of sanity by comparison.  Lee Harvey Oswald, a disgruntled young marine had defected to the USSR in 1959 and finding life behind the Iron Curtain equally unsatisfactory, returned to America a couple of years later.  Still having confused Marxist sympathies, he'd joined public protests supporting Fidel Castro's Cuba, and gradually turning toward violence, purchased a mail-order rifle.  During the presidential visit, he had fired three shots from the Dallas School Book Depository, killing JFK, and was quickly apprehended by the local police.  Soon, he too was dead, shot by an outraged Kennedy supporter named Jack Ruby.  All these sad facts were later confirmed by the Warren Commission in DC, presided over by the U.S. Chief Justice together with some of America's most respected public figures, and their voluminous report ran nearly 900 pages.

Yet although the film seemed to have affixed an enormous mass of incoherent fictional lunacy on top of that basic history—why would a murder plot in Dallas have been organized in New Orleans, five hundred miles distant?—one single detail troubled me.  Garrison is shown denouncing the �lone gunman theory� for claiming that a single bullet was responsible for seven separate wounds in President Kennedy and Texas Gov. John Connolly, seated in front of him in the limousine.  Now inventing gay CIA assassins seems pretty standard Hollywood fare, but I found it unlikely that anyone would ever insert a fictional detail so wildly implausible as that bullet's trajectory.  A week or so later, the memory popped into my head, and I googled around a bit, discovering to my total astonishment that the seven-wounds-from-one-bullet claim was totally factual, and indeed constituted an absolutely essential element of the orthodox �single gunman� framework given that Oswald had fired at most three shots.  So that was the so-called �Magic Bullet� I'd occasionally seen conspiracy-nuts ranting and raving about.  For the first time in my entire life, I started to wonder whether maybe, just maybe there actually had been some sort of conspiracy behind the most famous assassination in modern world history.

Any conspirators had surely died of old age many years or even decades earlier and I was completely preoccupied with my own work, so investigating the strange circumstances of JFK's death was hardly a high personal priority.  But the suspicions remained in the back of my mind as I diligently read my New York Times and Wall Street Journal every morning while periodically browsing less reputable websites during the afternoon and evening.  And as a result, I now began noticing little items buried here and there that I would have previously ignored or immediately dismissed, and these strengthened my newly emerging curiosity.

Among other things, occasional references reminded me that I'd previously seen my newspapers discuss a couple of newly released JFK books in rather respectful terms, which had surprised me a bit at the time.  One of them, still generating  discussion, was JFK and the Unspeakable published in 2008 by James W. Douglass, whose name meant nothing to me.  And the other, which I hadn't originally realized trafficked in any assassination conspiracies, was David Talbot's 2007 Brothers: The Hidden History of the Kennedy Years, focused on the relationship between John F. Kennedy and his younger brother Robert. Talbot's name was also somewhat familiar to me as the founder of Salon.com and a well-regarded if liberal-leaning journalist.

None of us have expertise in all areas, so sensible people must regularly delegate their judgment to credible third-parties, relying upon others to distinguish sense from nonsense.  Since my knowledge of the JFK assassination was nil, I decided that two recent books attracting newspaper coverage might be a good place to start.  So perhaps a couple of years after watching that Oliver Stone film, I cleared some time in my schedule, and spent a few days carefully reading the combined thousand pages of text.

I was stunned at what I immediately discovered.  Not only was the evidence of a �conspiracy� absolutely overwhelming, but whereas I'd always assumed that only kooks doubted the official story, I instead discovered that a long list of the most powerful people near the top of the American government and in the best position to know had been privately convinced of such a �conspiracy,� in many cases from almost the very beginning.

The Talbot book especially impressed me, being based on over 150 personal interviews and released by The Free Press, a highly reputable publisher.  Although he applied a considerable hagiographic gloss to the Kennedys, his narrative was compellingly written, with numerous gripping scenes.  But while such packaging surely helped to explain some of the favorable treatment from reviewers and how he had managed to produce a national bestseller in a seemingly long-depleted field, for me the packaging was much less important than the product itself.

To the extent that notions of a JFK conspiracy had ever crossed my mind, I'd considered the argument from silence absolutely conclusive.  Surely if there had been the slightest doubt of the �lone gunman� conclusion endorsed by the Warren Commission, Attorney-General Robert Kennedy would have launched a full investigation to avenge his slain brother.

But as Talbot so effectively demonstrates, the reality of the political situation was entirely different.  Robert Kennedy may have begun that fatal morning widely regarded as the second most powerful man in the country, but the moment his brother was dead and his bitter personal enemy Lyndon Johnson sworn in as the new president, his governmental authority almost immediately ebbed away.  Longtime FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, who had been his hostile subordinate, probably scheduled for removal in JFK's second term, immediately became contemptuous and unresponsive to his requests.  Having lost all his control over the levers of power, Robert Kennedy lacked any ability to conduct a serious investigation.

According to numerous personal interviews, he had almost immediately concluded that his brother had been struck down at the hands of an organized group, very likely including elements from within the U.S. government itself, but he could do nothing about the situation.  As he regularly confided to close associates, his hope at the age of 38 was to reach the White House himself at some future date, and with the government in his hands then uncover his brother's killers and bring them to justice.  But until that day, he could do nothing, and any unsubstantiated accusations he made would be totally disastrous both for national unity and for his own personal credibility.  So for years, he was forced to nod his head and publicly acquiesce to the official story of his brother's inexplicable assassination at the hands of a lone nut, a fairy tale publicly endorsed by nearly the entire political establishment, and this situation deeply gnawed at him.  Moreover, his own apparent acceptance of that story was often interpreted by others, not least in the media, as his wholehearted endorsement.

Although discovering Robert Kennedy's true beliefs was a crucial revelation in the Talbot book, there were many others.  At most three shots had allegedly come from Oswald's rifle, but Roy Kellerman, the Secret Service agent in the passenger seat of JFK's limousine, was sure there had been more than that, and to the end of his life always believed there had been additional shooters.  Gov. Connolly, seated in front of JFK and severely wounded in the attack, had exactly the same opinion. CIA Director John McCone was equally convinced that there had been multiple shooters.  Across the pages of Talbot's book, I learned that dozens of prominent, well-connected individuals privately expressed extreme skepticism towards the official �lone gunman theory� of the Warren Commission, although such doubts were very rarely made in public or on the record.

For a variety of complex reasons, the leading national media organs—the commanding heights of �Our American Pravda�—almost immediately endorsed the �lone gunman theory� and with some exceptions generally maintained that stance throughout the next half-century. With few prominent critics willing to publicly dispute that idea and a strong media tendency to ignore or minimize those exceptions, casual observers such as myself had generally received a severely distorted view of the situation.

If the first two dozen pages of the Talbot book completely overturned my understanding of the JFK assassination, I found the closing section almost equally shocking.  With the Vietnam War as a political millstone about his neck, President Johnson decided not to seek reelection in 1968, opening the door to a last minute entry into the Democratic race by Robert Kennedy, who overcame considerable odds to win some important primaries.  Then on June 4, 1968, he carried gigantic winner-take-all California, placing him on an easy path to the nomination and the presidency itself, at which point he would finally be in a position to fully investigate his brother's assassination.  But minutes after his victory speech, he was shot and fatally wounded, allegedly by another lone gunman, this time a disoriented Palestinian immigrant named Sirhan Sirhan, supposedly outraged over Kennedy's pro-Israel public positions, although these were no different than those expressed by most other political candidates in America.

All this was well known to me.  However, I had not known that powder burns later proved that the fatal bullet had been fired directly behind Kennedy's head from a distance of three inches or less although Sirhan was standing several feet in front of him.  Furthermore, eyewitness testimony and acoustic evidence indicated that at least twelve bullets were fired although Sirhan's revolver could hold only eight, and a combination of these factors led longtime LA Coroner Dr. Thomas Naguchi, who conducted the autopsy, to claim in his 1983 memoir that there was likely a second gunman.  Meanwhile, eyewitnesses also reported seeing a security guard with his gun drawn standing immediately behind Kennedy during the attack, and that individual happened to have a deep political hatred of the Kennedys.  The police investigators seemed uninterested in these highly suspicious elements, none of which came to light during the trial.  With two Kennedy brothers now dead, neither any surviving members of the family nor most of their allies and retainers had any desire to investigate the details of this latest assassination, and in a number of cases they soon moved overseas, abandoning the country entirely.  JFK's widow Jackie confided in friends that she was terrified for the lives of her children, and quickly married Aristotle Onassis, a Greek billionaire, whom she felt would be able to protect them.

Talbot also devotes a chapter to the late 1960s prosecution efforts of New Orleans DA Jim Garrison, which had been the central plot of the JFK film, and I was stunned to discover that the script was almost entirely based on real life events rather than Hollywood fantasy.  This even extended to its bizarre cast of assassination conspiracy suspects, mostly fanatically anti-Communist Kennedy-haters with CIA and organized crime ties, some of whom were indeed prominent members of the New Orleans gay demimonde.   Sometimes real life is far stranger than fiction.

Taken as a whole, I found Talbot's narrative quite convincing, at least with respect to demonstrating the existence of a substantial conspiracy behind the fatal event.

Others certainly had the same reaction, with the august pages of The New York Times Sunday Book Review carrying the strongly favorable reaction of presidential historian Alan Brinkley.  As the Allan Nevins Professor of History and Provost of Columbia University, Brinkley is as mainstream and respectable an academic scholar as might be imagined and he characterized Talbot as

the latest of many intelligent critics who have set out to demolish the tottering credibility of the Warren Commission and draw attention to evidence of a broad and terrible conspiracy that lay behind the assassination of John Kennedy — and perhaps the murder of Robert Kennedy as well.

The other book by Douglass, released a year later, covered much the same ground and came to roughly similar conclusions, with substantial overlap but also including major additional elements drawn from the enormous volume of extremely suspicious material unearthed over the decades by diligent JFK researchers.  Once again, the often bitter Cold War era conflict between JFK and various much harder-line elements of his government over Cuba, Russia, and Vietnam is sketched out as the likely explanation for his death.

Summarizing a half-century of conspiracy research, the Talbot and Douglass books together provide a wealth of persuasive evidence that elements of organized crime, individuals with CIA connections, and anti-Castro Cubans were probably participants in the assassination plot.  Oswald seems to have been working with various anti-Communist groups and also had significant connections to U.S. intelligence, while his purported Marxism was merely a very thin disguise.  With regard to the assassination itself, he was exactly the �patsy� he publicly claimed to be, and very likely never fired a single shot.  Meanwhile, Jack Ruby had a long history of ties to organized crime, and surely killed Oswald to shut his mouth.

Many others may have suffered a similar fate.  Conspirators daring enough to strike at the president of the United States would hardly balk at using lethal means to protect themselves from the consequences of their action, and over the years a considerable number of individuals associated with the case in one way or another came to untimely ends.

Less than a year after the assassination, JFK mistress Mary Meyer, the ex-wife of high-ranking CIA official Cord Meyer, was found shot to death in a Washington DC street-killing with no indications of attempted robbery or rape, and the case was never solved.  Immediately afterwards, CIA counterintelligence chief James Jesus Angleton was caught breaking into her home in search of her personal diary, which he later claimed to have destroyed.

Dorothy Kilgallen was a nationally-syndicated newspaper columnist and television personality, and she managed to wrangle an exclusive interview with Jack Ruby, later boasting to her friends that she would break the JFK assassination case wide open in her new book, producing the biggest scoop of her career.  Instead, she was found dead in her Upper East Side townhouse, having apparently succumbed to an overdose of alcohol and sleeping pills, with both the draft text and the notes to her Jack Ruby chapter missing.

Shortly before Jim Garrison filed his assassination charges, his top suspect David Ferrie was found dead at age 48, possibly of natural causes, though the DA suspected foul play.

During the mid-1970s, the House Select Committee on Assassinations held a series of high-profile hearings to reopen and investigate the case, and two of the witnesses called were high-ranking mafia figures Sam Giancana and Johnny Rosselli, widely suspected of having been connected with the assassination.  The former was shot to death in the basement of his home one week before he was scheduled to testify, and the body of the latter was found in an oil-drum floating in the waters off Miami after he had been subpoenaed for an additional appearance.

These were merely a few of the highest-profile individuals with a connection to the Dallas assassination whose lives were cut short in the years that followed, and although the deaths may have been purely coincidental, the full list is rather a long one.

Having read a couple of books that completely upended my settled beliefs about a central event of twentieth century history, I simply didn't know what to think.  Over the years, my own writings had put me on friendly terms with a well-connected individual whom I considered a member of the elite establishment, and whose intelligence and judgment had always seemed extremely solid.  So I decided to very gingerly raise the subject with him, and see whether he had ever doubted the �lone gunman� orthodoxy.  To my total astonishment, he explained that as far back as the early 1990s, he'd become absolutely convinced in the reality of a �JFK conspiracy� and over the years had quietly devoured a huge number of the books in that field, but had never breathed a word in public lest his credibility be ruined and his political effectiveness destroyed.

A second friend, a veteran journalist known for his remarkably courageous stands on certain controversial topics, provided almost exactly the same response to my inquiry.  For decades, he'd been almost 100% sure that JFK had died in a conspiracy, but once again had never written a word on the topic for fear that his influence would immediately collapse.

If these two individuals were even remotely representative, I began to wonder whether a considerable fraction, perhaps even a majority, of the respectable establishment had long harbored private beliefs about the JFK assassination that were absolutely contrary to the seemingly uniform verdict presented in the media.  But with every such respectable voice keeping so silent, I had never once suspected a thing.

Few other revelations in recent years have so totally overturned my understanding of the framework of reality.  Even a year or two later, I still found it very difficult to wrap my head around the concept, as I described in another note to that well-connected friend of mine:

BTW, I hate to keep harping on it, but every time I consider the implications of the JFK matter I'm just more and more astonished.

The president of the US. The heir to one of the wealthiest and most powerful families in America. His brother the top law enforcement officer in the country. Ben Bradlee, one of his closest friends, the fearless crusading editor of one of the nation's most influential media outlets. As America's first Catholic president, the sacred icon of many millions of Irish, Italian, and Hispanic families. Greatly beloved by top Hollywood people and many leading intellectuals.

His assassination ranks as one of the most shocking and dramatic events of the 20th century, inspiring hundreds of books and tens of thousands of news stories and articles, examining every conceivable detail. The argument from MSM silence always seemed absolutely conclusive to me.

From childhood, it's always been obvious to me that the MSM is completely dishonest about certain things and over the last dozen years I've become extremely suspicious about a whole range of other issues. But if you'd asked me a couple of years ago whether JFK was killed by a conspiracy, I would have said �well, anything's possible, but I'm 99% sure there's absolutely no substantial evidence pointing in that direction since the MSM would surely have headlined it a million times over.�

Was there really a First World War? Well, I've always assumed there was, but who really knows?….

Our reality is shaped by the media, but what the media presents is often determined by complex forces rather than by the factual evidence in front of their eyes.  And the lessons of the JFK assassination may provide some important insights into this situation.

A president was dead and soon afterward his supposed lone assassin suffered the same fate, producing a tidy story with a convenient endpoint.  Raising doubts or focusing on contrary evidence might open doors better kept shut, perhaps endangering national unity or even risking nuclear war if the trail seemed to lead overseas.  The highest law enforcement officer in the country was the slain president's own brother, and since he seemed to fully accept that simple framework, what responsible journalist or editor would be willing to go against it?  What American center of power or influence had any strong interest in opposing that official narrative?

Certainly there was immediate and total skepticism overseas, with few foreign leaders ever believing the story, and figures such as Nikita Khrushchev, Charles DeGaulle, and Fidel Castro all immediately concluded that a political plot had been responsible for Kennedy's elimination.  Mainstream media outlets in France and the rest of Western Europe were equally skeptical of the �lone gunman theory,� and some of the most important early criticism of U.S. government claims was produced by Thomas Burnett, an expatriate American writing for one of the largest French newsweeklies.  But in pre-Internet days, only the tiniest sliver of the American public had regular access to such foreign publications, and their impact upon domestic opinion would have been nil.

Perhaps instead of asking ourselves why the �lone gunman� story was accepted, we should instead be asking why it was ever vigorously challenged, during an era when media control was extremely centralized in establishmentarian hands.

Oddly enough, the answer may lie in the determination of a single individual named Mark Lane, a left-liberal New York City attorney and Democratic Party activist.  Although JFK assassination books eventually numbered in the thousands and the resulting conspiracy theories roiled American public life throughout the 1960s and 1970s, without his initial involvement matters might have followed a drastically different trajectory.

From the very first, Lane had been skeptical of the official story, and less than a month after the killing, The National Guardian, a small left-wing national newspaper, published his 10,000 word critique, highlighting major flaws in the �lone gunman theory.�  Although his piece had been rejected by every other national periodical, the public interest was enormous, and once the entire edition sold out, thousands of extra copies were printed in pamphlet form.  Lane even rented a theater in New York City, and for several months gave public lectures to packed audiences.

After the Warren Commission issued its completely contrary official verdict, he began working on a manuscript, and although he faced enormous obstacles in finding an American publisher, once Rush to Judgment appeared, it spent a remarkable two years on the national bestseller lists, easily reaching the #1 spot.  Such tremendous economic success naturally persuaded a host of other authors to follow suit, and an entire genre was soon established.  Lane later published A Citizens Dissent recounting his early struggles to break the total American �media blackout� against anyone contradicting the official conclusion.  Against all odds, he had succeeded in sparking a massive popular uprising sharply challenging the narrative of the establishment.

According to Talbot, �By late 1966, it was becoming impossible for the establishment media to stick with the official story� and the November 25, 1966 edition of Life Magazine, then at the absolute height of its national influence, carried the remarkable cover story �Did Oswald Act Alone?� with the conclusion that he probably did not.  The next month, The New York Times announced it was forming a special task force to investigate the assassination.  These elements were to merge with the media furor soon surrounding the Garrison investigation that began the following year, an investigation that enlisted Lane as an active participant.  However, behind the scenes a powerful media counterattack was also being launched at this same time.

In 2013 Prof. Lance deHaven-Smith, past president of the Florida Political Science Association, published Conspiracy Theory in America, a fascinating exploration of the history of the concept and the likely origins of the term itself.  He noted that during 1966 the CIA had become alarmed at the growing national skepticism of the Warren Commission findings, especially once the public began turning its suspicious eyes toward the intelligence agency itself.  Therefore, in January 1967 top CIA officials distributed a memo to all their local stations, directing them to employ their media assets and elite contacts to refute such criticism by various arguments, notably including an emphasis on Robert Kennedy's supposed endorsement of the �lone gunman� conclusion.

This memo, obtained by a later FOIA request, repeatedly used the term �conspiracy� in a highly negative sense, suggesting that �conspiracy theories� and �conspiracy theorists� be portrayed as irresponsible and irrational.  And as I wrote in 2016,

Soon afterward, there suddenly appeared statements in the media making those exact points, with some of the wording, arguments, and patterns of usage closely matching those CIA guidelines. The result was a huge spike in the pejorative use of the phrase, which spread throughout the American media, with the residual impact continuing right down to the present day.

This possible cause-and-effect relationship is supported by other evidence.  Shortly after leaving The Washington Post in 1977, famed Watergate journalist Carl Bernstein published a 25,000 word Rolling Stone cover story entitled �The CIA and the Media� revealing that during the previous quarter century over 400 American journalists had secretly carried out assignments for the CIA according to documents on file at the headquarters of that organization.  This influence project, known as �Operation Mockingbird,� had allegedly been launched near the end of the 1940s by high-ranking CIA official Frank Wisner, and included editors and publishers situated at the very top of the mainstream media hierarchy.

For whatever reason, by the time I came of age and began following the national media in the late 1970s, the JFK story had become very old news, and all the newspapers and magazines I read provided the very strong impression that the �conspiracy theories� surrounding the assassination were total nonsense, long since debunked, and only of interest to kooks on the ideological fringe.  I was certainly aware of the enormous profusion of popular conspiracy books, but I never had the slightest interest in looking at any of them.  America's political establishment and its close media allies had outlasted the popular rebellion, and the name �Mark Lane� meant almost nothing to me, except vaguely as some sort of fringe-nut, who very occasionally rated a mention in my mainstream newspapers, receiving the same sort of treatment accorded to Scientologists or UFO activists.

Oddly enough, Talbot's treatment of Lane was also rather dismissive, recognizing his crucial early role in preventing the official narrative from quickly hardening into concrete, but also emphasizing his abrasive personality, and almost entirely ignoring his important later work on the issue, perhaps because so much of it had been conducted on the political fringe.  Robert Kennedy and his close allies had similarly boycotted Lane's work from the very first, regarding him as a meddlesome gadfly, but perhaps also ashamed that he was asking the questions and doing the work that they themselves were so unwilling to undertake at the time.  Douglass's 500 page book scarcely even mentions Lane.

Reading a couple of Lane's books, I was quite impressed by the enormous role he had seemingly played in the JFK assassination story, but I also wondered how much of my impression may have been due to the exaggerations of a possible self-promoter.  Then, on May 13, 2016 I opened my New York Times and found nearly a full page obituary devoted to Lane's death at age 89, the sort of treatment these days reserved for only the highest-ranking U.S. Senators or major rap stars.  And the 1,500 words were absolutely glowing, portraying Lane as a solitary, heroic figure struggling for decades to reveal the truth of the JFK assassination conspiracy against an entire political and media establishment seeking to suppress it.

I read this as a deep apology by America's national newspaper of record. President John F. Kennedy was indeed killed by a conspiracy, and we are sorry we spent more than a half century suppressing that truth and ridiculing those who uncovered it.

The JFK Assassination, Part II – Who Did It?

June 25, 2018 • 8,000 Words

A strong dam may hold back an immense quantity of water, but once it breaks the resulting flood may sweep aside everything in its path.  I had spent nearly my entire life never doubting that a lone gunman named Lee Harvey Oswald killed President John F. Kennedy nor that a different lone gunman took the life of his younger brother Robert a few years later.  Once I came to accept that these were merely fairy tales widely disbelieved by many of the same political elites who publicly maintained them, I began considering other aspects of this important history, the most obvious being who was behind the conspiracy and what were their motives.

On these questions, the passage of a half-century and the deaths, natural or otherwise, of nearly all the contemporary witnesses drastically reduces any hope of coming to a firm conclusion.  At best, we can evaluate possibilities and plausibilities rather than high likelihoods let alone near certainties.  And given the total absence of any hard evidence, our exploration of the origins of the assassination must necessarily rely upon cautious speculation.

From such a considerable distance in time, a bird's-eye view may be a reasonable starting point, allowing us to focus on the few elements of the apparent conspiracy that seem reasonably well established.  The most basic of these is the background of the individuals who appear to have been associated with the assassination, and the recent books by David Talbot and James W. Douglass effectively summarize much of the evidence accumulated over the decades by an army of diligent assassination researchers.  Most of the apparent conspirators seem to have had strong ties to organized crime, the CIA, or various anti-Castro activist groups, with considerable overlap across these categories.  Oswald himself certainly fit this same profile although he was very likely the mere �patsy� that he claimed to be, as did Jack Ruby, the man who quickly silenced him and whose ties to the criminal underworld were long and extensive.

An unusual chain of events provided some of the strongest evidence of CIA involvement.  Victor Marchetti, a career CIA officer, had risen to become Special Assistant to the Deputy Director, a position of some importance, before resigning in 1969 over policy differences.  Although he fought a long battle with government censors over his book, The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence, he retained close ties with many former agency colleagues.

During the 1970s, the revelations of the Senate Church Committee and the House Select Committee on Assassinations had subjected the CIA to a great deal of negative public scrutiny, and there were growing suspicions of possible CIA links to JFK's assassination.  In 1978 longtime CIA Counter-intelligence chief James Angleton and a colleague provided Marchetti with an explosive leak, stating that the agency might be planning to admit a connection to the assassination, which had involved three shooters, but place the blame upon E. Howard Hunt, a former CIA officer who had become notorious during Watergate, and scapegoat him as a rogue agent, along with a few other equally tarnished colleagues.  Marchetti published the resulting story in The Spotlight, a weekly national tabloid newspaper operated by Liberty Lobby, a rightwing populist organization based in DC.  Although almost totally shunned by the mainstream media, The Spotlight was then at the peak of its influence, having almost 400,000 subscribers, as large a readership as the combined total of The New Republic, The Nation, and National Review.

Marchetti's article suggested that Hunt had actually been in Dallas during the assassination, resulting in a libel lawsuit with potential damages large enough to bankrupt the publication.  Longtime JFK assassination researcher Mark Lane became aware of the situation and volunteered his services to Liberty Lobby, hoping to use the legal proceedings, including the discovery process and subpoena power, as a means of securing additional evidence on the assassination, and after various court rulings and appeals, the case finally came to trial in 1985.

As Lane recounted in his 1991 bestseller, Plausible Denial, his strategy generally proved quite successful, not only allowing him to win the jury verdict against Hunt, but also eliciting sworn testimony from a former CIA operative of her personal involvement in the conspiracy along with the names of several other participants, though she claimed that her role had been strictly peripheral.  And although Hunt continued for decades to totally deny any connection with the assassination, near the end of his life he made a series of video-taped interviews in which he admitted that he had indeed been involved in the JFK assassination and named several of the other conspirators, while also maintaining that his own role had been merely peripheral.  Hunt's explosive death-bed confession was recounted in a major 2007 Rolling Stone article and also heavily analyzed in Talbot's books, especially his second one, but otherwise largely ignored by the media.

Many of these apparent conspirators, drawn from that same loose alliance of groups, had previously been involved in the various U.S. government-backed attempts to assassinate Castro or overthrow his Communist government, and they had developed a bitter hostility towards President Kennedy for what they considered his betrayal during the Bay of Pigs fiasco and afterward.  Therefore, there is a natural tendency to regard such animosity as the central factor behind the assassination, a perspective generally followed by Talbot, Douglass, and numerous other writers.  They conclude that Kennedy died at the hands of harder-line anti-Communists, outraged over his perceived weakness regarding Cuba, Russia, and Vietnam, sentiments that were certainly widespread within right-wing political circles at the height of the Cold War.

While this framework for the assassination is certainly possible, it is far from certain.  One may easily imagine that most of the lower-level participants in the Dallas events were driven by such considerations but that the central figures who organized the plot and set matters into motion had different motives.  So long as all the conspirators were agreed on Kennedy's elimination, there was no need for an absolute uniformity of motive.  Indeed, men who had long been involved in organized crime or clandestine intelligence operations were surely experienced in operational secrecy, and many of them may not have expected to know the identities, let alone the precise motives, of the men at the very top of the remarkable operation they were undertaking.

We must also sharply distinguish between the involvement of particular individuals and the involvement of an organization as an organization.  For example, CIA Director John McCone was a Kennedy loyalist who had been appointed to clean house a couple of years before the assassination, and he surely was innocent of his patron's death.  On the other hand, the very considerable evidence that numerous individual CIA intelligence officers and operatives participated in the action has naturally raised suspicions that some among their highest-ranking superiors were involved as well, perhaps even as the principal organizers of the conspiracy.

These reasonable speculations may have been magnified by elements of personal bias.  Many of the prominent authors who have investigated the JFK assassination in recent years have been staunch liberals, and may have allowed their ideology to cloud their judgment.  They often seek to locate the organizers of Kennedy's elimination among those rightwing figures whom they most dislike, even when the case is far from entirely plausible.

But consider the supposed motives of hard-line anti-Communists near the top of the national security hierarchy who supposedly may have organized Kennedy's elimination because he backed away from a full military solution in the Bay of Pigs and Cuban Missile Crisis incidents.  Were they really so absolutely sure that a President Johnson would be such an enormous improvement as to risk their lives and public standing to organize a full conspiracy to assassinate an American president?

A new presidential election was less than a year away, and Kennedy's shifting stance on Civil Rights seemed likely to cost him nearly all the Southern states that had provided his margin of electoral victory in 1960.  A series of public declarations or embarrassing leaks might have helped remove him from office by traditional political means, possibly replacing him with a Cold War hard-liner such as Barry Goldwater or some other Republican.  Would the militarists or business tycoons often implicated by liberal JFK researchers have really been so desperate as to not wait those extra few months and see what happened?

Based on extremely circumstantial evidence, Talbot's 2015 book The Devil's Chessboard, something of a sequel to Brothers, suggests that former longtime CIA Director Allan Dulles may have been the likely mastermind, with his motive being a mixture of his extreme Cold Warrior views and his personal anger at his 1961 dismissal from his position.

While his involvement is certainly possible, obvious questions arise.  Dulles was a seventy-year-old retiree, with a very long and distinguished career of public service and a brother who had served as Eisenhower's secretary of state.  He had just published The Craft of Intelligence, which was receiving very favorable treatment in the establishment media, and he was embarked on a major book tour.  Would he really have risked everything—including his family's reputation in the history books—to organize the murder of America's duly-elected president, an unprecedented act utterly different in nature than trying to unseat a Guatemalan leader on behalf of supposed American national interests?  Surely, using his extensive media and intelligence contacts to leak embarrassing disclosures about JFK's notorious sexual escapades during the forthcoming presidential campaign would have been be a much safer means of attempting to achieve an equivalent result.  And the same is true for J. Edgar Hoover and many of the other powerful Washington figures who hated Kennedy for similar reasons.

On the other hand, it is very easy to imagine that such individuals had some awareness of the emerging plot or may even have facilitated it or participated to a limited extent.  And once it succeeded, and their personal enemy had been replaced, they surely would have been extremely willing to assist in the cover-up and protect the reputation of the new regime, a role that Dulles may have played as the most influential member of the Warren Commission.  But such activities are different than acting as the central organizer of a presidential assassination.

Just as with the hard-line national security establishment, many organized crime leaders had grown outraged over the actions of the Kennedy Administration.  In the late 1950s, Robert Kennedy had intensely targeted the mob for prosecution as chief counsel to the Senate Labor Rackets Committee.  But during the 1960 election, family patriarch Joseph Kennedy used his own longstanding mafia connections to enlist their support for his older son's presidential campaign, and by all accounts the votes stolen by the corrupt mob-dominated political machines in Chicago and elsewhere helped put JFK in the White House, along with Robert Kennedy as his Attorney General.  Frank Sinatra, an enthusiastic Kennedy supporter, had also helped facilitate this arrangement by using his influence with skeptical mob leaders.

However, instead of repaying such crucial election support with political favors, Attorney General Robert Kennedy, perhaps unaware of any such bargain, soon unleashed an all-out war against organized crime, far more serious than anything previously mounted at the federal level, and the crime bosses regarded this as a back-stabbing betrayal by the new administration.  Once Joseph Kennedy was felled by an incapacitating stroke in late 1961, they also lost any hope that he would use his influence to enforce the deals he had struck the previous year.  FBI wiretaps reveal that mafia leader Sam Giancana decided to have Sinatra killed for his role in this failed bargain, only sparing the singer's life when he considered how much he personally loved the voice of one of the most famous Italian-Americans of the 20th century.

These organized crime leaders and some of their close associates such as Teamster boss Jimmy Hoffa certainly developed a bitter hatred toward the Kennedys, and this has naturally led some authors to point to the mafia as the likely organizers of the assassination, but I find this quite unlikely.  For many decades, American crime bosses had had a complex and varied relationship with political figures, who might sometimes be their allies and at other times their persecutors, and surely there must have been many betrayals over the years.  However, I am not aware of a single case in which any even moderately prominent political figure on the national stage was ever targeted for assassination, and it seems quite unlikely that the sole exception would be a popular president, whom they would have likely regarded as being completely out of their league.  On the other hand, if individuals who ranked high in Kennedy's own DC political sphere set in motion a plot to eliminate him, they might have found it easy to enlist the enthusiastic cooperation of various mafia leaders.

Furthermore, the strong evidence that many CIA operatives were involved in the conspiracy very much suggests that they were recruited and organized by some figure high in their own hierarchy of the intelligence or political worlds rather than the less likely possibility that they were brought in solely by leaders of the parallel domain of organized crime.  And while crime bosses might possibly have organized the assassination itself, they surely had no means of orchestrating the subsequent cover-up by the Warren Commission, nor would there have been any willingness by America's political leadership to protect mafia leaders from investigation and proper punishment for such a heinous act.

If a husband or wife is found murdered, with no obvious suspect or motive at hand, the normal response of the police is to carefully investigate the surviving spouse, and quite often this suspicion proves correct.  Similarly, if you read in your newspapers that in some obscure Third World country two bitterly hostile leaders, both having unpronounceable names, had been sharing supreme political power until one was suddenly struck down in a mysterious assassination by unknown conspirators, your thoughts would certainly move in an obvious direction.  Most Americans in the early 1960s did not perceive their own country's politics in such a light, but perhaps they were mistaken.  As a total newcomer to the enormous, hidden world of JFK conspiracy analysis, I was immediately surprised by the mere sliver of suspicion directed towards Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson, the slain leader's immediate successor and the most obvious beneficiary.

The two Talbot books and the one by Douglass, totaling some 1500 pages, devote merely a few paragraphs to any suspicions of Johnson's involvement.  Talbot's first book reports that immediately after the assassination, the vice president had expressed a frantic concern to his personal aides that a military coup might be in progress or a world war breaking out, and suggests that these few casual words demonstrate his obvious innocence, although a more cynical observer might wonder if those remarks had been uttered for exactly that reason.  Talbot's second book actually quotes an apparent low-level conspirator as claiming that Johnson had personally signed off on the plot and admits that Hunt believed the same thing, but treats such unsubstantiated accusations with considerable skepticism, before adding a single sentence acknowledging that Johnson may indeed have been a passive supporter or even an accomplice.  Douglass and Peter Dale Scott, author of the influential 1993 book Deep Politics and the Death of JFK, apparently seem never to have even entertained the possibility.

Ideological considerations are probably an important reason for such remarkable reticence.  Although liberals had grown to revile LBJ by the late 1960s for his escalation of the unpopular Vietnam War, over the decades those sentiments have faded, while warm memories of his passage of the landmark Civil Rights legislation and his creation of the Great Society programs have elevated his stature in that ideological camp.  Furthermore, such legislation had long been blockaded in Congress and only became law because of the 1964 Democratic Congressional landslide following JFK's martyrdom, and it might be difficult for liberals to admit that their fondest dreams were only realized by an act of political parricide.

Kennedy and Johnson may have been intensely hostile personal rivals, but there seem to have been few deep ideological differences between the two men, and most of the leading figures in JFK's government continued to serve under his successor, surely another source of enormous embarrassment to any ardent liberals who came to suspect that the former had been murdered by a conspiracy involving the latter.  Talbot, Douglass, and many other left-leaning advocates for an assassination conspiracy prefer to point the finger of blame towards far more congenial villains such as hard-line, anti-Communist Cold Warriors and right-wing elements, notably including top CIA officials, such as former director Allan Dulles.

An additional factor helping to explain the extreme unwillingness of Talbot, Douglass, and others to consider Johnson as an obvious suspect may be the realities of the book publishing industry. By the 2000s, JFK assassination conspiracies had long become passé and were treated with disdain in mainstream circles.  Talbot's strong reputation, his 150 original interviews, and the quality of his manuscript broke that barrier, and attracted The Free Press as his very respectable publisher, while later drawing a strongly positive review by a leading academic scholar in the New York Times Sunday Book Review and an hour long television segment broadcast on C-Span Booknotes.  But if he had devoted any space to voicing suspicions that our 35th president had been murdered by our 36th, surely the weight of that extra element of �outrageous conspiracy theory� would have ensured that his book sank without a trace.

However, if we cast off these distorting ideological blinders and the practical considerations of American publishing, the prima facie case for Johnson's involvement seems quite compelling.

Consider a very simple point.  If a president is struck down by an unknown group of conspirators, his successor would normally have had the strongest possible incentive to track them down lest he might become their next victim.  Yet Johnson did nothing, appointing the Warren Commission that covered up the entire matter, laying the blame upon an erratic �lone gunman� conveniently dead.  This would seem remarkably odd behavior for an innocent LBJ.  This conclusion does not demand that Johnson was the mastermind, nor even an active participant, but it raises a very strong suspicion that he at least had had some awareness of the plot, and enjoyed a good personal relationship with some of the principals.

A similar conclusion is supported by a converse  analysis.  If the plot succeeded and Johnson became president, the conspirators must surely have felt reasonably confident that they would be protected rather than tracked down and punished as traitors by the new president.  Even a fully successful assassination would entail enormous risks unless the organizers believed that Johnson would do exactly what he did, and the only means of ensuring this would be to sound him out about the plan, at least in some vague manner, and obtain his passive acquiesce.

Based on these considerations, it seems extremely difficult to believe that any JFK assassination conspiracy took place entirely without Johnson's foreknowledge, or that he was not a central figure in the subsequent cover-up.

But the specific details of Johnson's career and his political situation in late 1963 greatly strengthen these entirely generic arguments.  A very useful corrective to the �See No Evil� approach to Johnson from liberal JFK writers is Roger Stone's The Man Who Killed Kennedy: The Case Against LBJ, published in 2013.  Stone, a longtime Republican political operative who got his start under Richard Nixon, presents a powerful case that Johnson was the sort of individual who might easily have lent his hand to political murder, and also that he had strong reasons to do so.

Among other things, Stone gathers together an enormous wealth of persuasive information regarding Johnson's decades of extremely corrupt and criminal practices in Texas, including fairly plausible claims that these may have included several murders.  In one bizarre 1961 incident that strangely foreshadows the Warren Commission's �lone gunman� finding, a federal government inspector investigating a major Texas corruption scheme involving a close LBJ ally was found dead, shot five times in the chest and abdomen by a rifle, but the death was officially ruled a �suicide� by the local authorities, and that conclusion was reported with a straight face in the pages of the Washington Post.

Certainly one remarkable aspect of Johnson's career is that he was born dirt-poor, held low-paying government jobs throughout his entire life, yet took the oath of office as the wealthiest president in modern American history, having accumulated a personal fortune of over $100 million in present-day dollars, with the financial payoffs from his corporate benefactors having been laundered through his wife's business. This odd anomaly is so little remembered these days that a prominent political journalist expressed total disbelief when I mentioned it to him a decade ago.

Stone also effectively sketches out the very difficult political situation Johnson faced in late 1963.  He had originally entered the 1960 presidential race as one of the most powerful Democrats in the country and the obvious front-runner for his party's nomination, certainly compared to the much younger Kennedy, whom he greatly outranked in political stature and also somewhat despised.  His defeat, involving a great deal of underhanded dealings on both sides, came as a huge personal blow.  The means by which he somehow managed to get himself placed on the ticket are not entirely clear, but both Stone and Seymour Hersh in The Dark Side of Camelot strongly suggest that personal blackmail was a greater factor than geographical ticket-balancing.  In any event, Kennedy's paper-thin 1960 victory would have been far more difficult without Texas narrowly falling into the Democratic column, and election fraud there by Johnson's powerful political machine seems almost certainly to have been an important factor.

Under such circumstances, Johnson naturally expected to play a major role in the new administration, and he even issued grandiose demands for a huge political portfolio, but instead he found himself immediately sidelined and treated with complete disdain, soon becoming a forlorn figure with no authority or influence.  As time went by, the Kennedys made plans to get rid of him, and just a few days before the assassination, they were already discussing whom to place on the reelection ticket in his stead.  Much of Johnson's long record of extreme corruption both in Texas and in DC was coming to light following the fall of Bobby Baker, his key political henchman, and with strong Kennedy encouragement, Life Magazine was preparing a huge expose of his sordid and often criminal history, laying the basis for his prosecution and perhaps a lengthy prison sentence.  By mid-November 1963, Johnson seemed a desperate political figure at the absolute end of his rope, but a week later he was the president of the United States, and all those swirling scandals were suddenly forgotten.  Stone even claims that the huge block of magazine space reserved for the Johnson expose was instead filled by the JFK assassination story.

Aside from effectively documenting Johnson's sordid personal history and the looming destruction he faced at the hands of the Kennedys in late 1963, Stone also adds numerous fascinating pieces of personal testimony, which may or may not be reliable.  According to him, as his mentor Nixon was watching the scene at the Dallas police station where Jack Ruby shot Oswald, Nixon immediately turned as white as a ghost, explaining that he had personally known the gunman under his birth-name of Rubenstein.  While working on a House Committee in 1947, Nixon had been advised by a close ally and prominent mob-lawyer to hire Ruby as an investigator, being told that �he was one of Lyndon Johnson's boys.�  Stone also claims that Nixon once emphasized that although he had long sought the presidency, unlike Johnson �I wasn't willing to kill for it.�   He further reports that Vietnam Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge and numerous other prominent political figures in DC were absolutely convinced of Johnson's direct involvement in the assassination.

Stone has spent more than a half-century as a ruthless political operative, a position that provided him with unique personal access to individuals who participated in the great events of the past, but one that also carries the less than totally candid reputation of that profession, and individuals must carefully weigh these conflicting factors against each other.  Personally, I tend to credit most of the eyewitness stories he provides.  But even readers who remain entirely skeptical should find useful the large collection of secondary source references to the sordid details of LBJ's history that the book provides.

Finally, a seemingly unrelated historical incident had originally raised my own suspicions of Johnson's involvement.

Just prior to the outbreak of the Six Day War in 1967, Johnson had dispatched the U.S.S. Liberty, our most advanced intelligence-gathering ship, to remain offshore in international waters and closely monitor the military situation.  There have been published claims that he had granted Israel a green-light for its preemptive attack, but fearful of risking a nuclear confrontation with the Soviet patrons of Syria and Egypt, had strictly circumscribed the limits of the military operation, sending the Liberty to keep an eye on developments and perhaps also �to show Israel who was boss.�

Whether or not this reconstruction is correct, the Israelis soon launched an all-out attack on the nearly defenseless ship despite the large American flag it was flying, deploying attack jets and torpedo boats to sink the vessel during an assault that lasted several hours, while machine-gunning the lifeboats to ensure that there would be no survivors.  The first stage of the attack had targeted the main communications antenna, and its destruction together with heavy Israeli jamming prevented any communications with other U.S. naval forces in the region.

Despite these very difficult conditions, a member of the crew heroically managed to jerry-rig a replacement antenna during the attack, and by trying numerous different frequencies was able to evade the jamming and contact the U.S. Sixth Fleet, informing them of the desperate situation.  Yet although carrier jets were twice dispatched to rescue the Liberty and drive off the attackers, each time they were recalled, apparently upon direct orders from the highest authorities of the U.S. government.  Once the Israelis learned that word of the situation had reached other U.S. forces, they soon discontinued their attack, and the heavily-damaged Liberty eventually limped into port, with over 200 dead and wounded sailors and NSA signal operators, representing the greatest loss of American servicemen in any naval incident since World War II.

Although numerous medals were issued to the survivors, word of the incident was totally suppressed by a complete blanket of secrecy, and in an unprecedented step, even a Congressional Medal of Honor was awarded only in a private ceremony.  The survivors were also harshly threatened with immediate court martial if they discussed what had transpired with the press or anyone else.  Despite the overwhelming evidence that the attack had been intentional, a naval court of inquiry presided over by Admiral John S. McCain, Jr., father of the current senator, whitewashed the incident as a tragic accident, and a complete media blackout suppressed the facts.  The true story only began to come out years later, when James M. Ennes, Jr., a Liberty survivor, risked severe legal consequences and published Assault on the Liberty in 1979.

As it happened, NSA intercepts of Israeli communications between the attacking jets and Tel Aviv, translated from the Hebrew, fully confirmed that the attack had been entirely deliberate, and since many of the dead and wounded were NSA employees, the suppression of these facts greatly rankled their colleagues.  My old friend Bill Odom, the three-star general who ran the NSA for Ronald Reagan, later shrewdly circumvented the restrictions of his political masters by making those incriminating intercepts part of the standard curriculum of the Sigint training program required for all intelligence officers.

In 2007 an unusual set of circumstances finally broke the thirty year blackout in the mainstream media.  Real estate investor Sam Zell, a Jewish billionaire extremely devoted to Israel, had orchestrated a leveraged-buyout of the Tribune Company, parent of the Los Angeles Times and the Chicago Tribune, investing merely a sliver of his own money, with the bulk of the financing coming from the pension funds of the company he was acquiring.  Widely heralded as �the grave dancer� for his shrewd financial investments, Zell publicly boasted that the deal gave him nearly all of the upside potential of the company, while he bore relatively little of the risk.  Such an approach proved wise since the complex deal  quickly collapsed into bankruptcy, and although Zell emerged almost unscathed, the editors and journalists lost decades of their accumulated pension dollars, while massive layoffs soon devastated the newsrooms of what had been two of the country's largest and most prestigious newspapers.  Perhaps coincidentally, just as this business turmoil hit in late 2007, the Tribune ran a massive 5,500 word story on the Liberty attack, representing the first and only time such a comprehensive account of the true facts has ever appeared in the mainstream media.

By all accounts, Johnson was an individual of towering personal ego, and when I read the article, I was struck by the extent of his astonishing subservience to the Jewish state.  The influence of campaign donations and favorable media coverage seemed completely insufficient to explain his reaction to an incident that had cost the lives of so many American servicemen.   I began to wonder if Israel might have played an extraordinarily powerful political trump-card, thereby showing LBJ �who was really boss,� and once I discovered the reality of the JFK assassination conspiracy a year or two later, I suspected I knew what that trump-card might have been.  Over the years, I had become quite friendly with the late Alexander Cockburn, and the next time we had lunch I outlined my ideas.  Although he had always casually dismissed JFK conspiracy theories as total nonsense, he found my hypothesis quite intriguing.

Regardless of such speculation, the strange circumstances of the Liberty incident certainly demonstrated the exceptionally close relationship between President Johnson and the government of Israel, as well as the willingness of the mainstream media to spend decades hiding events of the most remarkable nature if they might tread on particular toes.

These important considerations should be kept in mind as we begin exploring the most explosive yet under-reported theory of the JFK assassination. Almost twenty-five years ago the late Michael Collins Piper published Final Judgment presenting a very large body of circumstantial evidence that Israel and its Mossad secret intelligence service, together with their American collaborators, probably played a central role in the conspiracy.

For decades following the 1963 assassination, virtually no suspicions had ever been directed towards Israel, and as a consequence none of the hundreds or thousands of assassination conspiracy books that appeared during the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s had hinted at any role for the Mossad, though nearly every other possible culprit, ranging from the Vatican to the Illuminati, came under scrutiny.  Kennedy had received over 80% of the Jewish vote in his 1960 election, American Jews featured very prominently in his White House, and he was greatly lionized by Jewish media figures, celebrities, and intellectuals ranging from New York City to Hollywood to the Ivy League.  Moreover, individuals with a Jewish background such as Mark Lane and Edward Epstein had been among the leading early proponents of an assassination conspiracy, with their controversial theories championed by influential Jewish cultural celebrities such as Mort Sahl and Norman Mailer.  Given that the Kennedy Administration was widely perceived as pro-Israel, there seemed no possible motive for any Mossad involvement, and bizarre, totally unsubstantiated accusations of such a monumental nature directed against the Jewish state were hardly likely to gain much traction in an overwhelmingly pro-Israel publishing industry.

However, in the early 1990s highly-regarded journalists and researchers began exposing the circumstances surrounding the development of Israel's nuclear weapons arsenal.  Seymour Hersh's 1991 book The Samson Option: Israel's Nuclear Arsenal and American Foreign Policy described the extreme efforts of the Kennedy Administration to force Israel to allow international inspections of its allegedly non-military nuclear reactor at Dimona, and thereby prevent its use in producing nuclear weapons.  Dangerous Liaisons: The Inside Story of the U.S.-Israeli Covert Relationship by Andrew and Leslie Cockburn appeared in the same year, and covered similar ground.

Although entirely hidden from public awareness at the time, the early 1960s political conflict between the American and Israeli governments over nuclear weapons development had represented a top foreign policy priority of the Kennedy Administration, which had made nuclear non-proliferation one of its central international initiatives.  It is notable that John McCone, Kennedy's choice as CIA Director, had previously served on the Atomic Energy Commission under Eisenhower, being the individual who leaked the fact that Israel was building a nuclear reactor to produce plutonium.

The pressure and financial aid threats secretly applied to Israel by the Kennedy Administration eventually became so severe that they led to the resignation of Israel's founding Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion in June 1963.  But all these efforts were almost entirely halted or reversed once Kennedy was replaced by Johnson in November of that same year.  Piper notes that Stephen Green's 1984 book Taking Sides: America's Secret Relations With a Militant Israel had previously documented that U.S. Middle East Policy completely reversed itself following Kennedy's assassination, but this important finding had attracted little attention at the time.

Skeptics of a plausible institutional basis for a JFK assassination conspiracy have often noted the extreme continuity in both foreign and domestic policies between the Kennedy and Johnson Administrations, arguing that this casts severe doubt on any such possible motive.  Although this analysis seems largely correct, America's behavior towards Israel and its nuclear weapons program stands as a very notable exception to this pattern.

An additional major area of concern for Israeli officials may have involved the efforts of the Kennedy Administration to sharply restrict the activities of pro-Israel political lobbies.  During his 1960 presidential campaign, Kennedy had met in New York City with a group of wealthy Israel advocates, led by financier Abraham Feinberg, and they had offered enormous financial support in exchange for a controlling influence in Middle Eastern policy.  Kennedy managed to fob them off with vague assurances, but he considered the incident so troubling that the next morning he sought out journalist Charles Bartlett, one of his closest friends, and expressed his outrage that American foreign policy might fall under the control of partisans of a foreign power, promising that if he became president, he would rectify that situation.  And indeed, once he had installed his brother Robert as Attorney General, the latter initiated a major legal effort to force pro-Israel groups to register themselves as foreign agents, which would have drastically reduced their power and influence.  But after JFK's death, this project was quickly abandoned, and as part of the settlement, the leading pro-Israel lobby merely agreed to reconstitute itself as AIPAC.

Final Judgment went through a number of a reprintings following its original 1994 appearance, and by the sixth edition released in 2004, had grown to over 650 pages, including numerous long appendices and over 1100 footnotes, the overwhelming majority of these referencing fully mainstream sources.  The body of the text was merely serviceable in organization and polish, reflecting the total boycott by all publishers, mainstream or alternative, but I found the contents themselves remarkable and generally quite compelling.  Despite the most extreme blackout by all media outlets, the book sold more than 40,000 copies over the years, making it something of an underground bestseller, and surely bringing it to the attention of everyone in the JFK assassination research community, though apparently almost none of them were willing to mention its existence.  I suspect these other writers realized that even any mere acknowledgement of the existence of the book, if only to ridicule or dismiss it, might prove fatal to their media and publishing career.  Piper himself died in 2015, aged 54, suffering from the health problems and heavy-drinking often associated with grim poverty, and other journalists may have been reluctant to risk that same dismal fate.

As an example of this strange situation, the bibliography of Talbot's 2007 book contains almost 140 entries, some rather obscure, but has no space for Final Judgment, nor does his very comprehensive index include any entry for �Jews� or �Israel.�  Indeed, at one point he very delicately characterizes Sen. Robert Kennedy's entirely Jewish senior staff by stating �There was not a Catholic among them.�  His 2015 sequel is equally circumspect, and although the index does contain numerous entries pertaining to Jews, all these references are in regards to World War II and the Nazis, including his discussion of the alleged Nazi ties of Allen Dulles, his principal bête noire.  Stone's book, while fearlessly convicting President Lyndon Johnson of the JFK assassination, also strangely excludes �Jews� and �Israel� from the long index and Final Judgment from the bibliography, and Douglass's book follows this same pattern.

Furthermore, the extreme concerns that the Piper Hypothesis seems to have provoked among JFK assassination researchers may explain a strange anomaly.  Although Mark Lane was himself of Jewish origins and left-wing roots, after his victory for Liberty Lobby in the Hunt libel trial, he spent many years associated with that organization in a legal capacity, and apparently became quite friendly with Piper, one of its leading writers.  According to Piper, Lane told him that Final Judgment made �a solid case� for a major Mossad role in the assassination, and he viewed the theory as fully complementary to his own focus on CIA involvement.  I suspect that concerns about these associations may explain why Lane was almost completely airbrushed out of the Douglass and 2007 Talbot books, and discussed in the second Talbot book only when his work was absolutely essential to Talbot's own analysis.  By contrast, New York Times staff writers are hardly likely to be as well versed in the lesser-known aspects of the JFK assassination research community, and being ignorant of this hidden controversy, they gave Lane the long and glowing obituary that his career fully warranted.

When weighing the possible suspects for a given crime, carefully considering their past patterns of behavior is often a helpful approach.  As discussed above, I can think of no historical example in which organized crime initiated a serious assassination attempt against any American political figure even moderately prominent on the national stage.  And despite a few suspicions here and there, the same applies to the CIA.

By contrast, the Israeli Mossad and the Zionist groups that preceded the establishment of the Jewish state seem to have had a very long track record of assassinations, including those of high-ranking political figures who might normally be regarded as inviolate.  Lord Moyne, the British Minister of State for the Middle East, was assassinated in 1944 and Count Folke Bernadotte, the UN Peace Negotiator sent to help resolve the first Arab-Israel war, suffered the same fate in September 1948. Not even an American president was entirely free of such risks, and Piper notes that the memoirs of Harry Truman's daughter Margaret reveal that Zionist militants had tried to assassinate her father using a letter laced with toxic chemicals in 1947 when they believed he was dragging his heels in supporting Israel, although that failed attempt was never made public.  The Zionist faction responsible for all of these incidents was led by Yitzhak Shamir, who later became a leader of Mossad and director of its assassination program during the 1960s, before eventually becoming Prime Minister of Israel in 1986.

If the claims in the 1990s tell-all bestsellers of Mossad defector Victor Ostrovsky can be credited, Israel even considered the assassination of President George H.W. Bush in 1992 for his threats to cut off financial aid to Israel during a conflict over West Bank settlement policies, and I have been informed that the Bush Administration took those reports quite seriously at the time.  And although I have not yet read it, the recent, widely-praised book Rise and Kill First: The Secret History of Israel's Targeted Assassinations by journalist Ronen Bergman suggests that no other country in the world may have so regularly employed assassination as a standard tool of official state policy.

There are other notable elements that tend to support the Piper Hypothesis.  Once we accept the existence of a JFK assassination conspiracy, the one individual who is virtually certain to have been a participant was Jack Ruby, and his organized crime ties were almost entirely to the huge but rarely-mentioned Jewish wing of that enterprise, presided over by Meyer Lansky, an extremely fervent supporter of Israel.  Ruby himself had particularly strong connections with Lansky lieutenant Mickey Cohen, who dominated the Los Angeles underworld and had been personally involved in gun-running to Israel prior to the 1948 war.  Indeed, according to Dallas rabbi Hillel Silverman, Ruby had privately explained his killing of Oswald by saying �I did it for the Jewish people.�

An intriguing aspect to Oliver Stone's landmark JFK film should also be mentioned.  Arnon Milchan, the wealthy Hollywood producer who backed the project, was not only an Israeli citizen, but had also reportedly played a central role in the enormous espionage project to divert American technology and materials to Israel's nuclear weapons project, the exact undertaking that the Kennedy Administration had made such efforts to block.  Milchan has even sometimes been described as �the Israeli James Bond.�  And although the film ran a full three hours in length, JFK scrupulously avoided presenting any of the details that Piper later regarded as initial clues to an Israeli dimension, instead seeming to finger America's fanatic home-grown anti-Communist movement and the Cold War leadership of the military-industrial complex as the guilty parties.

Summarizing over 300,000 words of Piper's history and analysis in just a few paragraphs is obviously an impossible undertaking, but the above discussion provides a reasonable taste of the enormous mass of circumstantial evidence mustered in favor of the Piper Hypothesis.

In many respects, JFK Assassination Studies has become its own academic discipline, and my credentials are quite limited.  I have read perhaps a dozen books in the subject, and have also tried to approach the issues with the clean slate and fresh eyes of an outsider, but any serious expert would surely have digested scores or even hundreds of the volumes in the field.  While the overall analysis of Final Judgment struck me as quite persuasive, a good fraction of the names and references were unfamiliar, and I simply do not have the background to assess their credibility, nor whether the description of the material presented is accurate.

Under normal circumstances, I would turn to the reviews or critiques produced by other authors, and after comparing them against Piper's claims, decide which argument seemed the stronger. But although Final Judgment was published a quarter-century ago, the near-absolute blanket of silence surrounding the Piper Hypothesis, especially from the more influential and credible researchers, renders this impossible.

However, Piper's inability to secure any regular publisher and the widespread efforts to smother his theory out of existence, have had an ironic consequence.  Since the book went out of print years ago, I had a relatively easy time securing the rights to include it in my collection of controversial HTML Books, and I have now done so, thereby allowing everyone on the Internet to conveniently read the entire text and decide for themselves, while easily checking the multitude of references or searching for particular words or phrases.

- Final Judgment

The Missing Link in the JFK Assassination Conspiracy

Michael Collins Piper • 2005 • 310,000 Words

This edition actually incorporates several much shorter works, originally published separately.  One of these, consisting of an extended Q&A, describes the genesis of the idea and answers numerous questions surrounding it, and for some readers might represent a better starting point.

- Default Judgment

Questions, Answers & Reflections About the Crime of the Century

Michael Collins Piper • 2005 • 48,000 Words

There are also numerous extended Piper interviews or presentations easily available on YouTube, and when I watched two or three of them a couple of years ago, I thought he effectively summarized many of his main arguments, but I cannot remember which ones they were.

The Kennedy assassination surely ranks as one of the most dramatic and heavily reported events of the twentieth century, yet the overwhelming evidence that our president died at the hands of a conspiracy rather than an eccentric �lone gunman� was almost entirely suppressed by our mainstream media during the decades that followed, with endless ridicule and opprobrium heaped on many of the stubborn truth-tellers.  Indeed, the very term �conspiracy theory� soon became a standard slur aimed against all those who sharply questioned establishmentarian narratives, and there is strong evidence that such pejorative use was deliberately promoted by government agencies concerned that so much of the American citizenry was growing skeptical of the implausible cover story presented by the Warren Commission.  But despite all these efforts, the period may mark the inflection point at which public trust in our national media began its precipitous decline.  Once an individual concludes that the media lied about something as monumental as the JFK assassination, he naturally begins to wonder what other lies may also be out there.

Although I now consider the case for an assassination conspiracy overwhelming, I think that the passage of so many decades has removed any real hope of reaching a firm conclusion about the identities of the main organizers or their motives.  Those who disagree with this negative assessment are free to continue sifting the enormous mountain of complex historical evidence and debating their conclusions with others having similar interests.

However, among the cast of major suspects, I think that the most likely participant by far was Lyndon Johnson, based on any reasonable assessment of means, motive, and opportunity, as well as the enormous role he obviously must have played in facilitating the subsequent Warren Commission cover-up.  Yet although such an obvious suspect must surely have been immediately apparent to any observer, Johnson seems to have received only a rather thin slice of the attention that books regularly directed to other, far less plausible suspects.  So the clear dishonesty of the mainstream media in avoiding any recognition of a conspiracy seems matched by a second layer of dishonesty in the alternative media, which has done its best to avoid recognizing the most likely perpetrator.

And the third layer of media dishonesty is the the most extreme of all.  A quarter century ago, Final Judgment provided an enormous mass of circumstantial evidence suggesting a major, even dominant, role for the Israeli Mossad in organizing the elimination of both our 35rd president and also his younger brother, a scenario that seems second in likelihood only to that of Johnson's involvement.  Yet Piper's hundreds of thousands of words of analysis have seemingly vanished into the ether, with very few of the major conspiracy researchers even willing to admit their awareness of a shocking book that sold over 40,000 copies, almost entirely by underground word-of-mouth.

So although committed partisans can continue endless, largely fruitless debates over �Who Killed JFK,� I think that the one firm conclusion we can draw from the remarkable history of this pivotal event of the twentieth century is that all of us have lived for many decades within the synthetic reality of �Our American Pravda.�

RFK Jr. vs. I.F. Stone on the Kennedy Assassinations

The Unz Review • July 31, 2023 • 5,100 Words

Under the right circumstances, even an unsuccessful Presidential campaign can serve as a powerful lens for focusing public attention upon issues normally avoided by the mainstream media. I think that the success or failure of Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s longshot Democratic Party primary challenge to President Joseph Biden should best be considered in such terms.

Kennedy bears the name of the most famous political family in modern American history and that legacy, together with his leadership role in criticizing our controversial Covid public health policies and his #1 Amazon best-seller in 2022, quickly established him as a serious candidate in the race.  The early polls gave him roughly 20% support, an absolutely astonishing achievement for someone who had never previously held public office, even against a relatively weak and unpopular incumbent.

During recent election cycles the Democratic Party has become quite adept at seeing off anti-establishment challengers, and virtually its entire political and media apparatus has lined up against Kennedy, whom it has heavily demonized, so he must be considered an extreme underdog.  However, even if Kennedy’s political quest doesn’t ultimately place him in the White House, he has already notched some important achievements at this very early stage.

The 60th anniversary of the assassination of Kennedy’s uncle, President John F. Kennedy, comes in just a few months, and last year Tucker Carlson’s top-rated FoxNews show ran a segment highlighting the compelling evidence that our 35th President had died at the hands of a conspiracy, probably involving elements of the CIA.

Carlson’s show had a regular live audience of 3 million and that segment attracted another 1.6 million views on Youtube, so taken together his JFK revelations probably reached more Americans than any other such account in many years, perhaps since Oliver Stone’s Oscar-winning 1991 film JFK was playing in the theaters three decades ago.  Kennedy praised Carlson’s courageous effort and his remarks were Retweeted more than 32,000 times.

That sudden burst of coverage came eight months ago and there was little if any media follow-up to Carlson’s breakthrough declaration. But as a Presidential candidate, Kennedy himself can now command considerable media attention and three weeks ago he gave a long interview to Bill Maher, describing the overwhelming evidence that a similar conspiracy had been behind the assassination of his own father, Sen. Robert F. Kennedy.

The 1968 RFK Assassination has attracted only a small fraction of the attention received by his elder brother’s death in Dallas five years earlier, and Kennedy’s interview segment drew 1.5 million views on Youtube, so it’s quite possible that more Americans have now learned the shocking facts from the candidate’s own words than had ever been aware of them.  In late 2021, Kennedy had already declared his views in a major San Francisco Chronicle opinion piece.

- Sirhan Sirhan didn’t kill my father. Gov. Newsom should set him free

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. • San Francisco Chronicle • December 8, 2021 • 1,000 Words

Soon after publishing that piece, Kennedy became the target of a wave of media vilification, yet strangely enough almost all of those insulting attacks completely avoided any mention of the strikingly conspiratorial claims he had just presented in a major newspaper.  In January 2022, I reviewed and summarized the main sources of information on that assassination, and the likely reasons for that strange media silence.

Yet although Kennedy’s legion of media critics attacked him on almost all other grounds, fair or unfair, they carefully avoided that seemingly easy means of branding him as delusional. The long AP attack that ran a week later mentioned not a word, nor did the January Counterpunch piece. As a consequence, I doubt whether more than a tiny slice of the public is aware that Kennedy is a “conspiracy theorist.”

The obvious reason for this strange media reticence was that Kennedy’s position was very solidly grounded in hard factual evidence.  In 2018 I drew upon some of the material in David Talbot’s widely-praised 2008 book Brothers to describe the strange aspects of the assassination.

If the first two dozen pages of the Talbot book completely overturned my understanding of the JFK assassination, I found the closing section almost equally shocking. With the Vietnam War as a political millstone about his neck, President Johnson decided not to seek reelection in 1968, opening the door to a last minute entry into the Democratic race by Robert Kennedy, who overcame considerable odds to win some important primaries. Then on June 4, 1968, he carried gigantic winner-take-all California, placing him on an easy path to the nomination and the presidency itself, at which point he would finally be in a position to fully investigate his brother’s assassination. But minutes after his victory speech, he was shot and fatally wounded, allegedly by another lone gunman, this time a disoriented Palestinian immigrant named Sirhan Sirhan, supposedly outraged over Kennedy’s pro-Israel public positions, although these were no different than those expressed by most other political candidates in America.

All this was well known to me. However, I had not known that powder burns later proved that the fatal bullet had been fired directly behind Kennedy’s head from a distance of three inches or less although Sirhan was standing several feet in front of him. Furthermore, eyewitness testimony and acoustic evidence indicated that at least twelve bullets were fired although Sirhan’s revolver could hold only eight, and a combination of these factors led longtime LA Coroner Dr. Thomas Naguchi, who conducted the autopsy, to claim in his 1983 memoir that there was likely a second gunman. Meanwhile, eyewitnesses also reported seeing a security guard with his gun drawn standing immediately behind Kennedy during the attack, and that individual happened to have a deep political hatred of the Kennedys. The police investigators seemed uninterested in these highly suspicious elements, none of which came to light during the trial. With two Kennedy brothers now dead, neither any surviving members of the family nor most of their allies and retainers had any desire to investigate the details of this latest assassination, and in a number of cases they soon moved overseas, abandoning the country entirely. JFK’s widow Jackie confided in friends that she was terrified for the lives of her children, and quickly married Aristotle Onassis, a Greek billionaire, whom she felt would be able to protect them.

Over the years, the 1968 Robert Kennedy assassination has attracted merely a sliver of the books and research devoted to the earlier killing of his elder brother in Dallas, and Talbot’s text spent only a few pages sketching out the strong evidence that the convicted gunman was merely an innocent dupe, manipulated by the true conspirators.  But in 2018, two additional books appeared that were entirely focused on the case.

A Lie Too Big To Fail by longtime journalist and conspiracy researcher Lisa Pease ran 500 pages and covered the events of that fatal California evening in exhaustive detail, winning the endorsements of filmmaker Oliver Stone and renowned JFK researcher James W. Douglass.  When I read it a few months ago,  I found the huge volume of material quite useful but felt that it relied too heavily upon the recollections of eyewitnesses, which can easily grow attenuated over the decades.  I was also disturbed to note that the text sometimes seemed to gradually transform reasonable suspicions into apparent certainties, eventually arguing that 3-4 different gunmen were probably firing at the presidential candidate that evening while Sirhan’s own gun had held only blanks.

At the very end, the author also veered off into building castles in the air with regard to other assassinations, arguing that Oswald probably had multiple personalities and that Jack Ruby was operating under a post-hypnotic suggestion, thinly documented claims that seriously weakened her credibility, as did her earlier suggestion that John Lennon had been killed by a government-programmed assassin in 1980 for his past criticism of the Vietnam War.  Sometimes less is better, and I think that Pease’s book would have been much stronger if it had been heavily edited and substantially pruned.  All those extraneous elements should have been left on the cutting-room floor rather than distracting from the central evidence she provided regarding the existence of an RFK assassination conspiracy and Sirhan’s likely innocence.

Meanwhile, The Assassination of Robert F. Kennedy by Tim Tate and Brad Johnson was released that same year and suffered from none of these flaws.  The two conspiracy researchers had spent some 25 years heavily involved in the case, and although their volume was only around half the length of the Pease book, it seemed a far more effective treatment of the topic, including eyewitness accounts but focused primarily upon the undeniable physical and forensic evidence while avoiding any damaging bouts of unwarranted speculation.

While working at CNN, one of the authors had originally obtained the audiotape establishing the number of shots fired, which probably constitutes the single strongest piece of evidence in the case.  The book analyzed and evaluated that crucial item in tremendous detail, and also focused upon the fatal shot, which was fired at point-blank range from behind the candidate while Sirhan, the supposed gunman, was standing several feet in front.  But since both the publisher and the lead author were British, the work seems to have received much less attention in this country, and I only discovered and read it after Kennedy cited it in his SF Chronicle column.

Unlike many other controversial American killings or terrorist attacks, the powerful evidence of a conspiracy in the case of the RFK assassination was physical and seemingly undeniable.  Wikipedia is notoriously reluctant to promote conspiratorial narratives, but in this case the striking facts are presented with only rather weak challenges.

The conclusive proof from the audio recording only came to light in 2004, but I was surprised to discover that all the other strong evidence, including the large number of unexplained bullet holes, had already been known and reported for decades.

Former Congressman Allard K. Lowenstein had been heavily involved in the 1968 election campaign, playing a major role in the effort to unseat incumbent President Lyndon Johnson.  In 1977 he published a long cover-story in the influential Saturday Review, setting forth the overwhelming evidence that a second gunman had been involved in the shooting, and my content-archiving system provides a convenient PDF copy.  So nearly all the crucial facts in the case have been known for 45 years, but were almost always ignored by our dishonest or cowardly American media.

Three years after publicly revealing that explosive information, Lowenstein himself was dead, supposedly shot at the age of 51 by a deranged lone gunman who had been a former student of his, but I have been informed that his personal friends never believed that story.

Given this massive preponderance of evidence, we can easily understand why the harsh media attacks upon Kennedy had so carefully avoided mentioning his conspiratorial beliefs regarding his father’s assassination.  Such criticism would have merely brought the issue to wider public attention, and anyone who began looking into the matter would have quickly concluded that Kennedy was probably correct while our media had spent a half-century covering up the true facts of the 1968 assassination.

The two Kennedy assassinations constituted a dramatic turning point in twentieth century American history and until about a dozen years ago, I had never questioned the official story that both killings were committed by crazed lone gunmen, fully accepting the media suggestion that only crackpots and conspiracy-cranks claimed otherwise.  According to his interviews and his writing, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. seems to have followed a somewhat similar trajectory, only discovering the truth about his own father’s death in 2016 when he had already reached his early 60s.

Although our backgrounds are very different, both of us had been taken in by the uniformly dishonest mainstream media narrative, but that successful effort to suppress the true facts of those historic events had only been achieved after a long struggle, as I explained in my original 2018 article.

Our reality is shaped by the media, but what the media presents is often determined by complex forces rather than by the factual evidence in front of their eyes.  And the lessons of the JFK assassination may provide some important insights into this situation.

A president was dead and soon afterward his supposed lone assassin suffered the same fate, producing a tidy story with a convenient endpoint.  Raising doubts or focusing on contrary evidence might open doors better kept shut, perhaps endangering national unity or even risking nuclear war if the trail seemed to lead overseas.  The highest law enforcement officer in the country was the slain president’s own brother, and since he seemed to fully accept that simple framework, what responsible journalist or editor would be willing to go against it?  What American center of power or influence had any strong interest in opposing that official narrative?

Certainly there was immediate and total skepticism overseas, with few foreign leaders ever believing the story, and figures such as Nikita Khrushchev, Charles DeGaulle, and Fidel Castro all immediately concluded that a political plot had been responsible for Kennedy’s elimination.  Mainstream media outlets in France and the rest of Western Europe were equally skeptical of the “lone gunman theory,” and some of the most important early criticism of U.S. government claims was produced by Thomas Burnett, an expatriate American writing for one of the largest French newsweeklies.  But in pre-Internet days, only the tiniest sliver of the American public had regular access to such foreign publications, and their impact upon domestic opinion would have been nil.

Perhaps instead of asking ourselves why the “lone gunman” story was accepted, we should instead be asking why it was ever vigorously challenged, during an era when media control was extremely centralized in establishmentarian hands.

Oddly enough, the answer may lie in the determination of a single individual named Mark Lane, a left-liberal New York City attorney and Democratic Party activist.  Although JFK assassination books eventually numbered in the thousands and the resulting conspiracy theories roiled American public life throughout the 1960s and 1970s, without his initial involvement matters might have followed a drastically different trajectory.

From the very first, Lane had been skeptical of the official story, and less than a month after the killing, The National Guardian, a small left-wing national newspaper, published his 10,000 word critique, highlighting major flaws in the “lone gunman theory.”  Although his piece had been rejected by every other national periodical, the public interest was enormous, and once the entire edition sold out, thousands of extra copies were printed in pamphlet form.  Lane even rented a theater in New York City, and for several months gave public lectures to packed audiences.

After the Warren Commission issued its completely contrary official verdict, he began working on a manuscript, and although he faced huge obstacles in finding an American publisher, once Rush to Judgment appeared, it spent a remarkable two years on the national bestseller lists, easily reaching the #1 spot.  Such tremendous economic success naturally persuaded a host of other authors to follow suit, and an entire genre was soon established.  Lane later published A Citizens Dissent recounting his early struggles to break the total American “media blackout” against anyone contradicting the official conclusion.  Against all odds, he had succeeded in sparking a massive popular uprising sharply challenging the narrative of the establishment.

According to Talbot, “By late 1966, it was becoming impossible for the establishment media to stick with the official story” and the November 25, 1966 edition of Life Magazine, then at the absolute height of its national influence, carried the remarkable cover story “Did Oswald Act Alone?” with the conclusion that he probably did not.  The next month, The New York Times announced it was forming a special task force to investigate the assassination.  These elements were to merge with the media furor soon surrounding the Garrison investigation that began the following year, an investigation that enlisted Lane as an active participant.  However, behind the scenes a powerful media counterattack was also being launched at this same time.

In 2013 Prof. Lance deHaven-Smith, past president of the Florida Political Science Association, published Conspiracy Theory in America, a fascinating exploration of the history of the concept and the likely origins of the term itself.  He noted that during 1966 the CIA had become alarmed at the growing national skepticism of the Warren Commission findings, especially once the public began turning its suspicious eyes toward the intelligence agency itself.  Therefore, in January 1967 top CIA officials distributed a memo to all their local stations, directing them to employ their media assets and elite contacts to refute such criticism by various arguments, notably including an emphasis on Robert Kennedy’s supposed endorsement of the “lone gunman” conclusion.

This memo, obtained by a later FOIA request, repeatedly used the term “conspiracy” in a highly negative sense, suggesting that “conspiracy theories” and “conspiracy theorists” be portrayed as irresponsible and irrational.  And as I wrote in 2016,

Soon afterward, there suddenly appeared statements in the media making those exact points, with some of the wording, arguments, and patterns of usage closely matching those CIA guidelines. The result was a huge spike in the pejorative use of the phrase, which spread throughout the American media, with the residual impact continuing right down to the present day.

This possible cause-and-effect relationship is supported by other evidence.  Shortly after leaving The Washington Post in 1977, famed Watergate journalist Carl Bernstein published a 25,000 word Rolling Stone cover story entitled “The CIA and the Media” revealing that during the previous quarter century over 400 American journalists had secretly carried out assignments for the CIA according to documents on file at the headquarters of that organization.  This influence project, known as “Operation Mockingbird,” had allegedly been launched near the end of the 1940s by high-ranking CIA official Frank Wisner, and included editors and publishers situated at the very top of the mainstream media hierarchy.

For whatever reason, by the time I came of age and began following the national media in the late 1970s, the JFK story had become old news, and all the newspapers and magazines I read provided the very strong impression that the “conspiracy theories” surrounding the assassination were total nonsense, long since debunked, and only of interest to kooks on the ideological fringe.  I was certainly aware of the enormous profusion of popular conspiracy books, but I never had the slightest interest in looking at any of them.  America’s political establishment and its close media allies had outlasted the popular rebellion, and the name “Mark Lane” meant almost nothing to me, except vaguely as some sort of fringe-nut, who very occasionally rated a mention in my mainstream newspapers, receiving the same sort of treatment accorded to Scientologists or UFO activists.

- American Pravda: The JFK Assassination, Part I � What Happened?

Ron Unz • The Unz Review • June 18, 2018 • 4,800 Words

As I discussed last year , exhaustive archival research by an experienced Intelligence professional eventually explained how the creation of a false trail for Oswald had been a crucial element of the original assassination conspiracy.

John Newman had spent twenty years in Military Intelligence and then became a professor of history at the University of Maryland. Since then, he had applied the technical skills that he had honed in his many years of government service to analyzing the bureaucratic minutia of declassified government files and using this material to produce a series of books on the hidden side of American government policies during the 1960s, including our growing involvement in Vietnam and especially the complex circumstances of the JFK Assassination. Oswald and the CIA originally appeared in 1993, but the 2008 edition included a new epilogue, summarizing some of his most important findings.

The book is a lengthy one, running over 650 pages with notes and appendices, and his exhaustively detailed analysis of the released intelligence files and their interpretation can be eye-glazingly dull at points, but his broader conclusions are not difficult to state. The profusion of internal CIA documents regarding Oswald and his movements seems completely inconsistent with any institutional plot at the Agency to kill Kennedy, but might fit very well with the hypothesis of a �rogue faction� at the CIA having played a central role in the affair.

Newman argued that Oswald was exactly the �patsy� that he claimed to be, but more importantly he drew a very sharp distinction between the small group of plotters who had actually organized the JFK assassination itself and the much larger group who carried out the subsequent cover-up, with the motives of many of those latter individuals being entirely different. As he persuasively explained in his epilogue, the conspirators had created a false intelligence trail suggesting that Oswald might have been a Soviet agent, and then used that misinformation to force our fearful government leadership into become their unwitting accomplices after the fact, compelling them to suppress all evidence of any conspiracy in Dallas�

So under Newman's convincing reconstruction, most of the powerful American officials who played such a pivotal role in concealing the conspiracy may have been acting under the best of intentions, seeking to protect our country from the risk of a devastating retaliatory war with the Soviets. And obviously these concerns would have been deliberately fanned by those among them who had been involved in the plot and created the false trail of evidence connecting Oswald with KGB assassination efforts.

The author therefore argued that creating that false trail had constituted an absolutely crucial element of the assassination plot, and by a very careful examination of the intelligence files, he concluded that longtime CIA Counter-Intelligence Chief James Angleton had been the likely culprit, thus identifying him as one of the key conspirators. This conclusion meshes perfectly with the entirely different arguments advanced by the late Michael Collins Piper in Final Judgment , his 1994 landmark work, which had also argued that Angleton was a central figure in the assassination.

There seems considerable evidence that the powerful CIA influence over our mainstream media had played an important role in the successful decades-long suppression of Kennedy assassination theories.  But I recently discovered that a prominent figure on the opposite end of the political spectrum had also greatly facilitated that unfortunate result.

Around 2001 I began a project to digitize the archives of many of America’s most important publications of the past, spending much of the next decade on this effort. Unfortunately, it proved a dismal failure; few people had any interest in reading these old periodicals, so the traffic the system attracted was merely a tiny sliver of what I had originally hoped. However, during that process I’d gradually discovered that the true history of our country over the last hundred years often sharply diverged from the narrative I’d absorbed from my classes and mainstream media coverage, so the effort prompted my American Pravda series, and my archiving system proved very useful in assisting my subsequent historical investigations.

During that project, one of the earliest periodicals I digitized was the complete 19 year collection of I.F. Stone’s Newsletter, the personal product of a famed radical journalist (no relation to the film director).

- I.F. Stone’s Weekly

January 17, 1953 – December 1971 • 19 Years, 751 Issues, 3,102pp

I’d vaguely been aware of Stone as a prominent leftist writer who lost his foothold in the regular print media during the McCarthy Era and then started his own independent newsletter, thereby anticipating the later bloggers of the Internet Era.  His successful effort allowed him to regain a considerable amount of influence in liberal and leftist circles.

Our local library organization holds a monthly book sale in Palo Alto, and earlier this year I had picked up a copy of a lengthy I.F. Stone biography for a couple of dollars, which I recently read. The author was Myra MacPherson, who had spent a quarter century at the Washington Post, and while her work often bordered on hagiography, I found it quite comprehensive.

Although his biographer strongly denied it, Stone seems to have spent most of his career as a die-hard Soviet apologist, even later publicly admitting that he had been a “fellow traveler.”  Indeed, in 2000 some of Stone’s posthumous critics used the evidence from the newly released Venona Decrypts to argue that the journalist had been an outright Soviet agent, so MacPherson devoted an entire chapter to her largely successful efforts to rebut those serious charges.

Ironically enough, the author partly defended Stone by emphasizing the one major exception to his willingness to follow the Moscow line throughout the 1940s and 1950s. During the Korean War, the Communist bloc launched a major international propaganda campaign accusing our own government of employing illegal “germ warfare” in that conflict and Stone totally rejected those charges as false and ridiculous, completely accepting our own government’s strong denials. However, in recent years a great deal of new evidence has come out, strongly suggesting that those Communist claims were very likely correct.

Starting with 5,300 charter subscribers, Stone’s newsletter had reached a figure of 20,000 by 1963 and 70,000 by 1971, his final year.  Even those quite substantial raw numbers greatly understated his influence since a considerable fraction of his readers were themselves journalists or other opinion-leaders, who deeply respected his reputation for fearless investigative journalism and were heavily influenced by his views.  Moreover, his fierce opposition to the Vietnam War, from the Tonkin Gulf Resolution onward, greatly increased his credibility as more and more Americans finally recognized that our military involvement in South-East Asia had probably been a major mistake from the very beginning, despite the strong support it had enjoyed from our slavishly subservient mainstream media.

Even after his health problems forced him to shutter the newsletter in 1971, he transferred his subscriber list to the prestigious New York Review of Books, and then began regularly producing articles for that other publication. Stone remained active and writing almost until his death in 1989 at the age of 81, and his biographer plausibly argues that by the 1970s and 1980s he had become a “icon” in left-liberal circles, much-beloved despite his prickly personality, and far more influential that his fully establishmentarian rival Walter Lippmann, whom she regularly mentioned as a contrasting foil.

In reading MacPherson’s account, I was surprised to discover that Stone had been a vehement critic of JFK assassination conspiracies, firmly embracing the “lone gunman” theory.  As she described:

Stone never wavered.  When a conspiracy buff phoned Stone in 1966 with “important evidence,” he bellowed “I don’t care about that asshole case!” and hung up.

Based upon her account, Stone apparently hated the Kennedys for their anti-Communism, even offering no eulogy at JFK’s death, and that antipathy probably helped to explain his total lack of any interest in the highly suspicious aspects of the President’s death.

When I did a search of his newsletter archives, I found only a small handful of references to the two Kennedy assassinations, most of them very short and glancing, and none of them raised any doubts about the case.  Indeed, his only substantial coverage was a very long and fierce defense of the Warren Commission and its conclusions, some 3,000 words that filled most of his October 5, 1964 newsletter.

- The Left and the Warren Commission Report (PDF)

I.F. Stone • I.F. Stone’s Weekly • October 5, 1964

He opened that account with a forceful endorsement of the Warren Commission findings:

All my adult life as a newspaperman I have been fighting, in defense of the Left and of a sane politics, against conspiracy theories of history, character assassination, guilt by association and demonology. Now I see elements of the Left using these same tactics in the controversy over the Kennedy assassination and the Warren Commission Report. I believe the Commission has done a first-rate job, on a level that does our country proud and is worthy of so tragic an event. I regard the case against Lee Harvey Oswald as the lone killer of the President as conclusive.

Stone was never one to mince words and he unleashed a blistering attack on Mark Lane, Bertrand Russell, Thomas G. Buchanan, and the other leading skeptics of the “lone gunman” theory, lacing his criticism with the harshest of insults:

…hysterical and defamatory…slander, not controversy…monstrous charges…nonsense…hysteria…Demonology…demonology…Demonology…libel or slander…libellous[sic]…as sloppy as they are wild…dishonorable…evil surmise and guilt by association…folly…rubbish…rubbish…flimsy slap-together of surmise, half-fact and whole untruth…People who believe such things belong in the booby-hatch…an insane morass of paranoid conjecture…unscrupulous or sick…ultimate lunacy…How wacky can you get?…

So while the CIA and its allies in the political establishment ensured that mainstream journalists ridiculed any Warren Committee criticism, the most influential independent leftist muckraker in America fiercely did the same.  Given this combination of pressures, it’s easy to understand why any media support for JFK conspiracy theories gradually dissipated over the next decade or more, before being partially revived by Oliver Stone’s landmark 1991 film.

Indeed, I.F. Stone’s continuing influence on the JFK Assassination may have lived on for decades after his death.  In the mid-1980s, the influential radical journalist Alexander Cockburn was himself purged from the mainstream media and soon built up his Counterpunch newsletter as a replacement venue for his writings, following the path previously blazed by Stone, whose political niche he now filled.

Like his predecessor, Cockburn was a fierce muckraker, yet when the Oscar-winning film JFK revived the conspiracy issue in the early 1990s, he strongly dissented, ridiculing the theories much as Stone had earlier done, and to the end of his life in 2012, he remained a total skeptic of such ideas.

I.F. Stone had been at the height of his radical influence when Cockburn began his career, and it seems quite plausible that the former’s harsh rejection of JFK conspiracies had played an important role in permanently shaping the views of the latter, who in turn, influenced many liberals and leftists in the media.

It would be quite ironic if sixty years of dishonest media coverage surrounding the most important assassination in modern American history could be explained by an improbable combination of efforts by shadowy CIA manipulators working in parallel with one of America’s most influential pro-Soviet apologists.

Prof. Jeffrey Sachs and the JFK Assassination

The Unz Review • March 18, 2024 • 6,200 Words

Although the November 22, 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy was surely one of the most famous events of the twentieth century, its sixtieth anniversary passed a few months ago with relatively little attention, probably overshadowed by the looming defeat of Ukraine in its war with Russia and also the enormous civilian casualties following the sudden outbreak of the Israel/Gaza conflict.  But many individuals of an older generation probably remembered that tragic date, and I think that one of them may have been Prof. Jeffrey Sachs of Columbia University.

Born in 1954, Sachs had just turned nine years old a couple of weeks before the events in Dallas threw our entire nation into mourning.  In recent months he has frequently emphasized his great admiration for our slain leader, whose speeches and public statements seemed to offer hope for world peace, a possibility soon tragically lost.

I suspect that much like myself, over the decades Sachs had always dismissed and ignored the conspiratorial theories of the JFK assassination that were so popular during the 1960s and 1970s then gradually faded away during the more optimistic 1980s.  But my eventual discovery of various other major historical anomalies finally led me to begin exploring the facts of the JFK  assassination a dozen years ago.  Perhaps a very similar process over the last couple of years has now led Sachs’ thinking to move in the same direction, propelled by his shock at discovering official cover-ups on entirely different issues.

As I wrote in late 2022:

Until just a few months ago, I doubt there were many American academics more solidly situated in the topmost ranks of our elite mainstream establishment than Prof. Jeffrey Sachs of Columbia University.

In 1983 he gained Harvard University tenure at the remarkably young age of 28, then spent the next 19 years as a professor at that august academic institution; by the early 1990s the New York Times was already hailing him as the world’s most important figure in his field. Lured to Columbia University in 2002, he has spent the last couple of decades teaching there and also directing a couple of its research organizations, most recently the Center for Sustainable Development. TIME Magazine has twice ranked him among the world’s 100 most influential individuals, and for nearly twenty years he served as Special Advisor to several Secretary-Generals of the United Nations, while publishing many hundreds of articles and op-eds on a wide variety of subjects in our most influential media outlets.

It would be difficult to construct a more illustrious and establishmentarian curriculum vitae for an international academic figure, so in 2020 he was a natural choice to serve as chairman of the Lancet‘s Covid Commission, established to investigate all aspects of the deadly worldwide pandemic.

Yet as he has subsequently explained in his interviews, over the course of the last couple of years he became increasingly suspicious that the true origins of the viral disease were being concealed. More than eighteen million people have died worldwide including over a million Americans, and rather than acquiescing in what he came to believe was an ongoing official cover-up, he broke with the establishment and made the courageous decision to bring the true facts to widespread public attention.

Although he has retained the subdued manner and careful phraseology of a mild academic, in recent months the incendiary content of his published articles and his public statements have exploded across the global landscape, reaching many millions who might otherwise never have questioned what they were so uniformly being told by all our mainstream media organs. His critics defending that orthodoxy must surely believe that he has gone dangerously rogue, and given the enormous weight of his past credibility, I suspect that the phrase “rogue elephant” has sometimes entered their thoughts.

From the earliest days of the Covid epidemic, an official narrative was promoted that the virus was natural and editors of the leading scientific journals closed their pages to any submissions that suggested otherwise. With no reputable academic papers challenging their perspective, the natural origins advocates were able to cite this silence as proof that their position represented the overwhelming scientific consensus, thereby intimidating most mainstream journalists into toeing that same line. A massive propaganda-bubble had been inflated and maintained by such administrative means.

However, as a member of the National Academy of Sciences, Prof. Sachs had publication privileges in the prestigious PNAS journal, so in May he and a co-author published an important article documenting the highly suspicious characteristics of the Covid virus and calling for further investigation. This constituted a breakthrough, becoming the first and only paper published in a major journal that presented the very strong evidence of Covid bioengineering.

Given his role as chairman of the Covid Commission, Sachs’ paper should have been treated as a bombshell, reaching the headlines of all our leading newspapers. But instead, it was almost totally ignored, as was the author’s public statements on the subject. However, the following month, Sachs attended a small Spanish thinktank gathering, whose proceedings were soon made available on Youtube. Russia’s RT eventually ran a brief item highlighting Sachs’ presentation, and a short clip of his remarks soon went super-viral, retweeted out almost 11,000 times and accumulating over a million views.

Having publicly broken ranks with the political establishment over Covid, he soon began doing the same on other important issues. During July and August he published a couple of opinion columns condemning our reckless policies towards Russia and China, with the former having already provoked a bloody and dangerous war in Ukraine and the latter periodically threatening to do the same over Taiwan.

- Ukraine Is the Latest Neocon Disaster

Jeffrey Sachs • Consortium News • July 1, 2022 • 1,300 Words

- The West’s Dangerously Simple-Minded Narrative About Russia and China

Jeffrey Sachs • Common Dreams • August 23, 2022 • 1,000 Words

A few months later, a series of massive underwater explosions severely damaged the \$30 billion Russian-German Nord Stream pipelines.  This constituted the greatest act of industrial terrorism in the history of the world, with potentially crippling long-term impact upon the energy supplies of Germany and other European countries.  Although there was enormous circumstantial evidence implicating America in those attacks, and renowned investigative journalist Seymour Hersh later revealed the exact details of the sabotage operation, the entire Western media and political establishment stubbornly pretended to see nothing, instead absurdly accusing Russia of having destroyed its own energy pipelines.

But Sachs refused to support this cover-up and he instead played an important role in breaking the media blockade:

Then a few days later, Bloomberg TV invited Sachs to share his concerns over the Ukraine war. His hosts were flabbergasted when he flatly declared that America had probably destroyed the Russian pipelines, even mentioning that top journalists had privately told him the same thing, although none of those vital facts could ever appear in their own newspapers.

As a consequence of Sachs’ candor, the interview was cut short—with Sachs “yanked off air” in the words of the hostile New York Post—but the entire segment was watched at least a couple of hundred thousand times on Youtube and the short clip of Sachs’ Nord Stream remarks soon went super-viral on Twitter, viewed more than 4 million times in one Tweet and another million times across a couple of others.

It has been extremely rare for a public figure of such high establishmentarian credentials to directly challenge such important narratives, and Sachs’ remarkable candor soon made him a very popular guest on numerous podcasts and channels.

- Jeffrey Sachs as Righteous Rogue Elephant

Ron Unz • The Unz Review • October 10, 2022 • 3,500 Words

A couple of years earlier he had also discovered that many of his long held assumptions about the Middle East conflict had been mistaken, as I discussed late last year.

Different scholars have different fields of expertise, and Sachs is an international economist, whose regions of focus have been the former Soviet Bloc countries, Latin America, and China, but apparently without much emphasis upon the Middle East. However, during the long Covid lock-downs, he expanded his knowledge of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict by reading a recently published book by Prof. Rashid Khalidi, one of his Columbia University colleagues, then joined the author for a very interesting hour-long discussion available on Youtube.

By purest chance, I stumbled across that video several months ago, not long before the region suddenly erupted in unexpected violence, and found it an excellent presentation of the important historical facts, many of them previously unknown to me, while Sachs similarly emphasized that he was forced to “unlearn” much of the history that he had casually absorbed over the years.

Perhaps partly as a consequence, he has been extremely forthright in denouncing the ongoing slaughter and starvation of Gaza’s helpless civilian population, and the remarkable unwillingness of the Biden Administration to force Israel to end its military rampage.  As he recently put it, on these matters Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu sometimes seems to act as if he were our actual president instead of the confused individual sitting in the Oval Office.

Preoccupied with our own affairs, most of us live our lives within the safe cocoon of our media-generated framework of reality and rarely question the historical narratives that we have absorbed from our earliest youth.  But once we discover that the government and its media allies have been promoting utter falsehoods on matters of great importance and shamelessly maintaining those falsehoods despite enormous evidence to the contrary, we naturally begin to question more and more additional issues.  The longstanding controversy surrounding JFK’s assassination may become one of these.

Over the last year, Sachs has become a regular weekly interview guest on Judge Andrew Napolitano’s video podcast, and one of his leading concerns has been our country’s disastrously aggressive foreign policy following the end of the Cold War.  He has frequently complained that America no longer does diplomacy, but merely overthrows governments around the world that refuse to follow its dictates, noting that academic scholars have compiled lists containing many dozens of such successful or attempted CIA coups.  Our government’s 2014 overthrow of Ukraine’s neutralist and democratically-elected government was one of the most important of these since it ultimately led to the outbreak of the war with Russia in 2022, a conflict that has cost many hundreds of thousands of lives and now threatens to draw in NATO forces, taking us to the brink of World War III.

Very sharp criticism of the CIA has become a staple of Napolitano’s daily guests, several of whom are themselves former members of that organization.   Ray McGovern spent 27 years as a CIA analyst, rising to become head of its Soviet analysis group and serving for years as the president’s morning intelligence briefer, obviously positions of considerable responsibility.  But he has been especially scathing towards the operational side of the CIA, which he believes has metastasized into a private army, routinely involved in coups and assassinations and accountable only to the president and sometimes only to itself.

These are widely acknowledged facts, and it requires only a slight logical step to connect them to the events of 1963.  All our mainstream history books emphasize that President Kennedy had become intensely critical of the CIA’s activities in the wake of the disastrous failure of its Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba, removing several of its top leaders and allegedly vowing to “splinter the CIA into a thousand pieces and scatter them to the wind.”  Under such circumstances, it hardly seems implausible that intelligence operatives who were regularly involved in killings and regime-change operations might have decided to employ those same skills domestically if they believed that their own vital interests were severely threatened.  For well over half a century, there has been very widespread speculation that CIA members were directly involved in the JFK assassination.

Although this logical step may seem a very small one, prominent and respectable public figures have been extremely reluctant to take it, and our mainstream media has for decades completely stigmatized or ignored any such “conspiracy theories.”  As a consequence of that total lack of reputable supporters, I had always casually dismissed the possibility.

But much as he had done in the case of Covid’s origins and the Nord Stream pipeline attacks, Prof. Jeffrey Sachs has now taken that bold step, possibly blowing a hole in a sixty-year cover-up.  In his Thursday interview, already viewed nearly 140,000 times, he mentioned that there seemed to be very strong evidence that elements of the CIA had been involved in the JFK assassination, which he suggested might have been “the most decisive event in modern American history.”  He even speculated that in the aftermath of that presidential killing, most or all of Kennedy’s successors in the Oval Office may have become little more than “factotums of the system,” lacking the power to fully implement independent policies.

These brief remarks would hardly have provoked surprise within conspiratorial circles or among those who have spent years or decades investigating the JFK assassination.  But I think Sachs may have become the highest-ranking mainstream figure to ever publicly voice such ideas and this may prompt others to follow his lead.

Over the last year or two, the questions surrounding the assassination of JFK had already returned to public discussion.  Although the circumstances were quite different, an earlier break in the dam had occurred in late 2022, as I noted in an article at that time:

Tucker Carlson hosts the most popular cable news show and last Thursday he aired an explosive segment in which he declared that that 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy had been the work of a conspiracy, with our own CIA heavily involved.

Carlson’s regular nightly audience is over 3 million, and more than a million have already watched the Youtube video, so these bombshell accusations regarding the events in Dallas have probably now reached more ordinary Americans than anything else on the topic in the three decades since Oliver Stone’s Oscar-winning film JFK was playing in the theaters.

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., nephew of the slain President and son of his murdered brother praised Carlson’s show as “the most courageous newscast in 60 years,” and his remarks have been Retweeted more than 22,000 times.

In recent decades, such conspiratorial beliefs on the JFK assassination have been largely confined to the Left, with Stone himself being a prime example. But Carlson is one of America’s most influential conservatives, so he may have successfully implanted these ideas among a portion of our citizenry previously unexposed to them. He also noted that widespread use of the insulting phrase “conspiracy theory” only began in the aftermath of the JFK assassination, with the CIA itself successfully marginalizing its critics by promoting that accusation in the compliant media.

Although Carlson hardly had Sachs’ academic reputation or international credibility, his discussion of the issue and Kennedy’s strong praise may have led Sachs and many others to begin questioning the official story.  Every crack in the wall may lead to the next one.

Most individuals are very reluctant to acknowledge that they have been entirely mistaken about such an important matter for nearly their entire lives, or at least that was true in my own case.  As I explained a few years ago:

Having read a couple of books that completely upended my settled beliefs about a central event of twentieth century history, I simply didn’t know what to think. Over the years, my own writings had put me on friendly terms with a well-connected individual whom I considered a member of the elite establishment, and whose intelligence and judgment had always seemed extremely solid. So I decided to very gingerly raise the subject with him, and see whether he had ever doubted the “lone gunman” orthodoxy. To my total astonishment, he explained that as far back as the early 1990s, he’d become absolutely convinced in the reality of a “JFK conspiracy” and over the years had quietly devoured a huge number of the books in that field, but had never breathed a word in public lest his credibility be ruined and his political effectiveness destroyed.

A second friend, a veteran journalist known for his remarkably courageous stands on certain controversial topics, provided almost exactly the same response to my inquiry. For decades, he’d been nearly 100% sure that JFK had died in a conspiracy, but once again had never written a word on the topic for fear that his influence would immediately collapse.

Few other revelations in recent years have so totally overturned my understanding of the framework of reality. Even a year or two later, I still found it very difficult to wrap my head around the concept, as I described in another note to that same well-connected friend of mine:

BTW, I hate to keep harping on it, but every time I consider the implications of the JFK matter I’m just more and more astonished.

The president of the US. The heir to one of the wealthiest and most powerful families in America. His brother the top law enforcement officer in the country. Ben Bradlee, one of his closest friends, the fearless crusading editor of one of the nation’s most influential media outlets. As America’s first Catholic president, the sacred icon of many millions of Irish, Italian, and Hispanic families. Greatly beloved by top Hollywood people and many leading intellectuals.

His assassination ranks as one of the most shocking and dramatic events of the 20th century, inspiring hundreds of books and tens of thousands of news stories and articles, examining every conceivable detail. The argument from MSM silence always seemed absolutely conclusive to me.

From childhood, it’s always been obvious to me that the MSM is completely dishonest about certain things and over the last dozen years I’ve become extremely suspicious about a whole range of other issues. But if you’d asked me a couple of years ago whether JFK was killed by a conspiracy, I would have said “well, anything’s possible, but I’m 99% sure there’s absolutely no substantial evidence pointing in that direction since the MSM would surely have headlined it a million times over.”

I have no idea where Sachs currently stands in his exploration of the issues that he briefly raised last week, and perhaps he has already investigated the subject in much greater depth than his words suggested.  But if not, I think I can provide some useful guideposts both to him and to any others who have now decided to seriously explore the JFK assassination for the first time.  I am a rank amateur myself, who not so many years ago was exactly in that same situation, so my own suggestions might be much more helpful than those of someone who had spent decades studying the complex details of the topic.

If a newcomer decided to read only a single book on the JFK assassination conspiracy, my first recommendation would be Brothers: The Hidden History of the Kennedy Years, published in 2007 by David Talbot, the founder of Salon and a well-regarded if liberal-leaning journalist.  I discussed some of his important material in my 2018 article:

The Talbot book especially impressed me, being based on over 150 personal interviews and released by The Free Press, a highly reputable publisher. Although he applied a considerable hagiographic gloss to the Kennedys, his narrative was compellingly written, with numerous gripping scenes. But while such packaging surely helped to explain some of the favorable treatment from reviewers and how he had managed to produce a national bestseller in a seemingly long-depleted field, for me the packaging was much less important than the product itself.

To the extent that notions of a JFK conspiracy had ever crossed my mind, I’d considered the argument from silence absolutely conclusive. Surely if there had been the slightest doubt of the “lone gunman” conclusion endorsed by the Warren Commission, Attorney-General Robert Kennedy would have launched a full investigation to avenge his slain brother.

But as Talbot so effectively demonstrates, the reality of the political situation was entirely different. Robert Kennedy may have begun that fatal morning widely regarded as the second most powerful man in the country, but the moment his brother was dead and his bitter personal enemy Lyndon Johnson sworn in as the new president, his governmental authority almost immediately ebbed away. Longtime FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, who had been his hostile subordinate, probably scheduled for removal in JFK’s second term, immediately became contemptuous and unresponsive to his requests. Having lost all his control over the levers of power, Robert Kennedy lacked any ability to conduct a serious investigation.

According to numerous personal interviews, he had almost immediately concluded that his brother had been struck down at the hands of an organized group, very likely including elements from within the U.S. government itself, but he could do nothing about the situation. As he regularly confided to close associates, his hope at the age of 38 was to reach the White House himself at some future date, and with the government in his hands then uncover his brother’s killers and bring them to justice. But until that day, he could do nothing, and any unsubstantiated accusations he made would be totally disastrous both for national unity and for his own personal credibility. So for years, he was forced to nod his head and publicly acquiesce to the official story of his brother’s inexplicable assassination at the hands of a lone nut, a fairy tale publicly endorsed by nearly the entire political establishment, and this situation deeply gnawed at him. Moreover, his own apparent acceptance of that story was often interpreted by others, not least in the media, as his wholehearted endorsement.

Although discovering Robert Kennedy’s true beliefs was a crucial revelation in the Talbot book, there were many others. At most three shots had allegedly come from Oswald’s rifle, but Roy Kellerman, the Secret Service agent in the passenger seat of JFK’s limousine, was sure there had been more than that, and to the end of his life always believed there had been additional shooters. Gov. Connolly, seated in front of JFK and severely wounded in the attack, had exactly the same opinion. CIA Director John McCone was equally convinced that there had been multiple gunmen. Across the pages of Talbot’s book, I learned that dozens of prominent, well-connected individuals privately expressed extreme skepticism towards the official “lone gunman theory” of the Warren Commission, although such doubts were very rarely made in public or on the record.

For a variety of complex reasons, the leading national media organs—the commanding heights of “Our American Pravda”—almost immediately endorsed the “lone gunman theory” and with some exceptions generally maintained that stance throughout the next half-century. With few prominent critics willing to publicly dispute that idea and a strong media tendency to ignore or minimize those exceptions, casual observers such as myself had generally received a severely distorted view of the situation.

If the first two dozen pages of the Talbot book completely overturned my understanding of the JFK assassination, I found the closing section almost equally shocking. With the Vietnam War as a political millstone about his neck, President Johnson decided not to seek reelection in 1968, opening the door to a last minute entry into the Democratic race by Robert Kennedy, who overcame considerable odds to win some important primaries. Then on June 4, 1968, he carried gigantic winner-take-all California, placing him on an easy path to the nomination and the presidency itself, at which point he would finally be in a position to fully investigate his brother’s assassination. But minutes after his victory speech, he was shot and fatally wounded, allegedly by another lone gunman, this time a disoriented Palestinian immigrant named Sirhan Sirhan, supposedly outraged over Kennedy’s pro-Israel public positions, although these were no different than those expressed by most other political candidates in America.

All this was well known to me. However, I had not known that powder burns later proved that the fatal bullet had been fired directly behind Kennedy’s head from a distance of three inches or less although Sirhan was standing several feet in front of him. Furthermore, eyewitness testimony and acoustic evidence indicated that at least twelve bullets were fired although Sirhan’s revolver could hold only eight, and a combination of these factors led longtime LA Coroner Dr. Thomas Naguchi, who conducted the autopsy, to claim in his 1983 memoir that there was likely a second gunman. Meanwhile, eyewitnesses also reported seeing a security guard with his gun drawn standing immediately behind Kennedy during the attack, and that individual happened to have a deep political hatred of the Kennedys. The police investigators seemed uninterested in these highly suspicious elements, none of which came to light during the trial. With two Kennedy brothers now dead, neither any surviving members of the family nor most of their allies and retainers had any desire to investigate the details of this latest assassination, and in a number of cases they soon moved overseas, abandoning the country entirely. JFK’s widow Jackie confided in friends that she was terrified for the lives of her children, and quickly married Aristotle Onassis, a Greek billionaire, whom she felt would be able to protect them.

Taken as a whole, I found Talbot’s narrative quite convincing, at least with respect to demonstrating the existence of a substantial conspiracy behind the fatal event.

Others certainly had the same reaction, with the influential pages of The New York Times Sunday Book Review carrying the strongly favorable reaction of presidential historian Alan Brinkley. As the Allan Nevins Professor of History and Provost of Columbia University, Brinkley is as mainstream and respectable an academic scholar as might be imagined and he characterized Talbot as

the latest of many intelligent critics who have set out to demolish the tottering credibility of the Warren Commission and draw attention to evidence of a broad and terrible conspiracy that lay behind the assassination of John Kennedy — and perhaps the murder of Robert Kennedy as well.

For those less interested in reading an entire book, I think my pair of 2018 articles serves as a useful introduction to the subject, presenting the overview of a newcomer while suggesting more than a dozen books that would provide far more detailed analysis of the issue and its particular elements.

I also believe that it’s quite important to divide all discussions of the JFK assassination into two separate categories.  The first involves efforts to determine whether the official story is correct or instead that the assassination had been the result of the conspiracy.  And if that latter conclusion is established, we must then seek to determine the likely identities of those conspirators.  Most books and articles fall primarily into one category or the other, but obviously establishing the existence of a conspiracy is that first and most important step that must be taken, and with few exceptions our mainstream journalists and academics have stubbornly refused to publicly admit that reality.

- American Pravda: The JFK Assassination, Part I � What Happened?

Ron Unz • The Unz Review • June 18, 2018 • 4,800 Words

- American Pravda: The JFK Assassination, Part II � Who Did It?

Ron Unz • The Unz Review • June 25, 2018 • 8,000 Words

If my articles might provide a brief introduction to the topic and the Talbot book a good and solid serious beginning, I’d also like to recommend a book at the opposite end of the spectrum, far more complex and especially important to those focused on the possible role of the CIA. The author exhaustively analyzed a large collection of declassified but heavily redacted CIA documents, not only confirming that involvement and working out a central element of the plot but even identifying the key CIA conspirator.

As I wrote in late 2022:

By purest chance, Carlson’s show had aired just a few days after I had finished reading an important book on the JFK assassination that someone had brought to my attention last year. Originally published almost thirty years ago, this work provided some crucial insights into how the political cover-up of the conspiracy had been arranged, a cover-up that has now endured for nearly six decades. The most powerful man in the world had been killed at the very height of America’s postwar success and prosperity, yet nearly all of America’s political elites were successfully enlisted to suppress the truth of what had happened.

John Newman had spent twenty years in Military Intelligence and afterward became a professor of history at the University of Maryland. Since then, he had applied the technical skills that he had honed in his many years of government service to analyzing the bureaucratic minutia of declassified government files and using this material to produce a series of books on the hidden side of American government policies during the 1960s, including our growing involvement in Vietnam and especially the complex circumstances of the JFK assassination. Oswald and the CIA originally appeared in 1993, but the 2008 edition included a new epilogue, summarizing some of his most important findings.

The book is a lengthy one, running over 650 pages with notes and appendices, and his exhaustively detailed analysis of the released intelligence files and their interpretation can be eye-glazingly dull at points, but his broader conclusions are not difficult to state. The profusion of internal CIA documents regarding Oswald and his movements seems completely inconsistent with any institutional plot at the Agency to kill Kennedy, but might fit very well with the hypothesis of a “rogue faction” at the CIA having played a central role in the affair.

Newman argued that Oswald was exactly the “patsy” that he claimed to be, but more importantly he drew a very sharp distinction between the small group of plotters who had actually organized the JFK assassination itself and the much larger group who carried out the subsequent cover-up, with the motives of many of those latter individuals being entirely different. As he persuasively explained in his epilogue, the conspirators had created a false intelligence trail suggesting that Oswald might have been a Soviet agent, and then used that misinformation to force our fearful government leadership into become their unwitting accomplices after the fact, compelling them to suppress all evidence of any conspiracy in Dallas.

Newman’s crucial conclusions are worth quoting at length:

It is now clear that most of the U.S. leaders and officials who participated in the national security cover-up had nothing to do with the plot that was hatched before the president’s murder. Many of them—including leading legislators and Supreme Court Chief Justice Earl Warren—were motivated by the perceived threat of a nuclear exchange with the Soviet Union. Inside the executive branch of government, many others were motivated by the desire to protect their jobs and their institutions. Their collective actions, however, were not the result of an accident; rather, they were the forced checkmate in the endgame of an ingenious plan.

The plan was designed to force official Washington to bury a radioactive story in Oswald’s files in order for America to survive. The plan worked. No matter how sloppy the performance of the shooters in Dallas was, no matter how bungled the autopsy and the handling of the evidence was, all would be trumped by the threat of WWIII and 40 million dead Americans. From the beginning, the plot was based upon the assumption that, when presented with this horrific possibility, everyone would fall into line. This assumption was correct.

…There was a darker purpose for Oswald’s visit to Mexico City. He was sent there to seek visas from the Cuban Consulate and Soviet Embassy …the objective was simply incidental contact between Oswald and the man who issued Soviet visas in Mexico City: Valery Kostikov. The value of this contact derived from what only a handful of counterintelligence officers in Washington knew: Kostikov was an important operative of the KGB assassinations in the Americas …The handler’s purpose in having both Oswald’s and Kostikov’s names mentioned was to place evidence into the CIA’s records that, on 22 November, would link KGB assassinations to the murder of President Kennedy. The activities of this impersonator are what made it possible for President Johnson to tell Senator Russell on 29 November that those investigating the case were “testifying that Khrushchev and Castro did this.” Johnson insisted that this must be prevented “from kicking us into a war that can kill forty million Americans in an hour.”

I went on to say:

So under Newman’s convincing reconstruction, most of the powerful American officials who played such a pivotal role in concealing the conspiracy may have been acting under the best of intentions, seeking to protect our country from the risk of a devastating retaliatory war with the Soviets. And obviously these concerns would have been deliberately fanned by those among them who had been involved in the plot and created the false trail of evidence connecting Oswald with KGB assassination efforts.

The author therefore argued that creating that false trail had constituted an absolutely crucial element of the assassination plot, and by a very careful examination of the intelligence files, he concluded that longtime CIA Counter-Intelligence Chief James Angleton had been the likely culprit, thus identifying him as one of the key conspirators. This conclusion meshes perfectly with the entirely different arguments advanced by the late Michael Collins Piper in Final Judgment, his 1994 landmark work, which had also argued that Angleton was a central figure in the assassination.

Although Sachs’ statements last week certainly reflected his true beliefs regarding the likely role of the CIA in the JFK assassination, I think his willingness to publicly express them was mostly due to his deep concerns over our country’s extremely reckless international behavior and the huge danger it posed to global peace.  For the past two years, America and its NATO allies have been fighting a proxy war against nuclear-armed Russia on Russia’s own border.  Such a project would have been considered unthinkable madness during the height of the old Cold War, but that policy has now become an almost universal bipartisan consensus among the West’s political and media elites.

As Sachs has correctly emphasized, the relentlessly aggressive Neocons gained control over the American foreign policy establishment more than thirty years ago, and despite their record of repeated disasters, they have successfully retained that unbroken control since then.  Indeed, the very term “Neocon” is no longer meaningful since it now includes nearly the entire Washington, DC policy establishment.

The CIA has certainly been a nefarious organization over the decades, but I think its role in these disasters has been a relatively minor and instrumental one.  Although the CIA surely helped foment the 2014 coup in Ukraine, it did so under the direction of Victoria Nuland and its other political masters.  In previous administrations, CIA analysts were coerced into providing the false intelligence used to justify our calamitous invasion of Iraq while NATO airstrikes were required to destroy the military forces of Libya and allow the overthrow of its government.  The Neocon political establishment constitutes the primary danger to our country and the world rather than the CIA, which these days functions as merely one of many Neocon appendages.

I would argue that a central asset of the Neocons has been their dominant control over the media.  Our world is ruled by the media, which functions as a force of mind-control, shaping the thoughts and beliefs of those individuals who deploy powerful physical weapons or possess vast financial resources.  Breaking that media stranglehold would probably have far greater impact than drastically curbing the power of the CIA, even if that latter goal could actually be accomplished.

But suppose enough Americans in the mainstream and among our educated political classes came to believe that President John F. Kennedy had actually died at the hands of a conspiracy involving important figures of his own government and that our media had concealed those facts from the American people for more than sixty years.  Under such circumstances, the power of today’s mainstream media might suffer a very serious blow, greatly increasing the  opening for other sources of information less under tight Neocon control.

And that might be the most important consequence of the courageous recent statements of Prof. Jeffrey Sachs regarding that infamous event of 1963.