Introduction
This, as some of Lobster‘s older readers will recognise, is a re-write of the essay I wrote on the JFK thing in Lobster 2, published on the 20th anniversary of the assassination in November 1983. This rewrite was written for the first issue of Casablanca, but it failed to appear.
In JFK the Costner/Garrison character goes to Washington and meets a source, “Mr X’ (based on former USAF Colonel L. Fletcher Prouty), who tells him that the way to investigate the assassination is to ask who benefited from it? (cui bono?), and who had the power to cover it up? Since 1963 many of the assassination researchers have followed this advice. For many it is practically axiomatic that complicity in the cover-up following JFK’s shooting implies complicity in, or knowledge of, the murder conspiracy. From the cover-up the trail can be followed back to the crime. But practically the entire U.S. establishment took part in the cover-up: national and local government agencies, the mass media, the political system, and the Kennedy family and its political allies — all played a part in foisting the Warren Commission report onto the U.S. public. Each had good reasons for welcoming a cover-up which had nothing to do with the assassination per se.
The Kennedys had too many of their own secrets at risk. In 1963 the knowledge of John Kennedy’s sexual promiscuity was still largely an insider’s secret — as was the family’s various links to the mafia, from Joe Kennedy’s bootlegging days to the mob’s assistance in the election of 1960. A decent investigation might have revealed both, destroying any chance the other brothers had of succeeding John as President. The mass media are interested primarily in making money, and in 1963 many sections of it still had secret relationships with the CIA established in the early years of the Cold War and would follow the Agency’s “no conspiracy’ line. (On which see the CIA memo reprinted in this issue.) The political establishment, especially the Democrats with their long history of links to organised crime, had nothing to gain from the enthusiastic “pursuit of the truth’. (This applied spectacularly to LBJ, one of the most corrupt politicians in history.) In 1963 the American public had no idea of the intimate relationship between organised crime and the funding of political parties, and Jack Ruby’s mafia presence ensured the silence of the Washington political establishment.
As for the various intelligence and law enforcement agencies, first and foremost they had to bury their links with Oswald. The FBI had to conceal the fact that they knew of Oswald but had not kept tabs on him; or, worse, that he was working for them in the phoney Fair Play for Cuba Committee branch he was running. The CIA had to conceal their prior use of Oswald in their phoney defector programme; and his activities with the anti-Castro Cubans in New Orleans led directly back to Operation Mongoose, the CIA’s then secret war on Cuba based in Miami.
All these parties are, first and foremost, interested in politics — the acquisition and retention of power. Cover-up, lies, the harassment of those seeking “the truth’ — the things which Oliver Stone’s Garrison character finds so shocking in the movie — are among the normal activities of those engaged in American politics. The real Jim Garrison, the elected District Attorney of New Orleans, the politician Jim Garrison, knew this perfectly well. The cover-up after the assassination was routine American politics, an illustration of the basic rule of the American political game: don’t let the rubes in on the scam. Covering-up a Presidential assassination was larger and more sensitive than usual, but was routine nonetheless.
The separation of the cover-up from the assassination has significant consequences. If the murder is viewed as the work of people powerful enough to enforce the cover-up, then we are looking for a very powerful, and, presumably, very large group. And we cannot be looking for the mafia, who had the capacity to do the shooting but not the cover-up. But if the cover-up is nothing more than the sum of a lot of autonomous parts, the actual assassination conspiracy need not be large — and could be the mafia.
The Cui bono? (who benefits?) question suggested by “Mr X’ to “Garrison’ also fails to illuminate — for essentially the same reasons. Many groups in the political game benefited from JFK’s death. LBJ, for example, inherited the Presidency and was able to halt a number of Congressional enquiries into domestic scandals in which he or his associates were implicated. The CIA, the anti-Castro Cubans, the FBI, the military-industrial complex — almost everybody else in Washington benefited from Kennedy’s death. Under Johnson there were no hesitations about the war in Vietnam, no prissy anxieties about democracy in Latin America. The American tax-payer would be milked to fund the arms corporations; the Generals of Brazil, Argentina et al could begin planning coups confident of U.S. approval. Nor were there many tears in the Democratic Party itself. For the Kennedys, with their own sources of money, and a trio of photogenic brothers, were a threat to the powers-that-be within the party and to other Democratic Presidential aspirants.
Neither “Who organised the cover-up?’ nor “Who benefited from the assassination?’ tells us anything specific about the assassination conspiracy. We are left with the murder itself. From the mountain of facts, factoids and speculation which had been erected these past 30 years, four features of the case take us close to the heart of things.
The first is the form of the assassination. Kennedy was bushwacked; people fired rifles at him. Long-range shooting is intrinsically unreliable and generally means that the assassins can’t get close enough to do it any other way. (Assuming that the intention was to kill; it might just have been to fire at Kennedy; the death a bonus.) This was true, for example, of some of the many attempts by the OAS (Secret Army Organisation) to kill De Gaulle in this period. But it is difficult to believe that any of the powerful elements in the U.S. state apparatus — the intelligence agencies or the Pentagon, for example — would have felt it necessary to ambush Kennedy if they just wanted to get rid of him or change some of his policies. For such agencies there are always better, less public ways of persuading people to resign, permanently if necessary. Planes can crash, cars run off the road, boats sink, and so on. For all the talk — in the Stone movie, for example — of “triangulation of cross- fire’ and the rest of the speculation to try and convince us that this was some kind of masterful operation, it wasn’t. This was a high-risk operation which almost failed. Only one killing shot was on target: at least three others missed. In other words, either the assassination was a crude attempt to bushwack Kennedy, or it was something designed to look like one.
The second important element is the fact that the assassination was widely known about in advance, and by low level “street people’ — a stripper, a waitress, a small-time right-winger and a minor intelligence agent. The assassination conspiracy was leaky. This suggests that we are not dealing with a professional job by the intelligence services or the Pentagon. It is hard to imagine the pros holding anything more closely than the assassination of a President.
The third element is the role of Oswald. After his arrest he had no doubts about his part in it: “I’m just the patsy’, he said, very striking and very specific. He didn’t say they’d got the wrong man, or make great protestations of innocence: just “I’m the patsy’. He was right. It is now proven beyond a reasonable doubt that Oswald was indeed the victim of a scheme to frame him as a pro-Castro assassin. This has two clear consequences. First, it explains why Kennedy was bushwacked — and by rifle-fire and not machine-guns. The shooting had to be roughly consistent with Oswald’s having done it. Secondly, the original plan must have included Oswald’s immediate demise. With his connections to the intelligence world — FBI and CIA — and the anti-Castro underground, he had to die. Alive he would have talked — did talk, in fact, though what he said has never been made public, and would presumably have talked some more when he came to court.
It seems likely that he was supposed to die “resisting arrest’ in the traditional manner. When the Dallas police grabbed him in the Texas Theatre a gun was heard to misfire. The Warren Report put this down to Oswald’s gun despite the fact that an FBI weapons expert “found nothing to indicate that this [Oswald’s] weapon’s firing pin had struck the primer of any of these cartridges.’ Again, Oswald’s reactions at the time are revealing. After the gun mis-fired he began shouting “I am not resisting arrest, I am not resisting arrest’ to the other people in the cinema. A police mis-fire and Oswald’s quick wits saved his life in the Texas Theatre.
Jack Ruby is the fourth element. Ruby didn’t just appear out of the blue and shoot Oswald in the basement of the Dallas police station. He had been following the events rather closely. He followed Kennedy’s body to the Parkland Hospital: the Dallas journalist Seth Kantor, who knew Ruby well, spoke to him there. (The Warren Commission had to ignore this.) At the hospital somebody planted the so-called “magic bullet’ on the stretcher on which Governor John Connally had been brought in. (The bullet was planted to link the rifle in the “sniper’s nest’ to the shooting.) As Warren and his committee could not encompass a conspiracy, they had to treat this bullet as if it had fired at Connally, and eventually were forced to the ludicrous pretence that this pristine bullet had passed through 2 human bodies, shattering bones and tearing flesh en route. Ruby is an obvious candidate for the role as the supplier of the “magic bullet’. (Stone shows Ruby planting the bullet in JFK, but does it so quickly as to be almost subliminal.) Ruby then returned to the Dallas police headquarters and attended the first press conference addressed by District Attorney Henry Wade. When Wade named Oswald as part of an anti-Castro group, Ruby, at the back of the room, corrected him, telling the assembled journalists that Oswald was in the pro- Castro Fair Play for Cuba Committee. Why would a Mafia hoodlum and club owner know this? If Ruby was not a part of the conspiracy, tasked to help frame Oswald, what was he doing that day?
At this distance, what does the assassination look like? Kennedy is bushwacked, but the murder of Oswald, the patsy, goes wrong. Some crude attempts are made to attribute the assassination to Castro’s Cuba, using Oswald’s fake Fair Play For Cuba Committee as “evidence’. Oswald is in custody, talking his head off to the Dallas Police, but nobody’s taking notes of this interrogation. Along comes Ruby the local gangster and pay- off man between the mob and the Dallas Police. He’s been stage-managing the framing of Oswald, and because he has virtually unique civilian access to the Dallas Police, it falls to him to solve everybody’s problem by removing Oswald. Even then he almost blows it, grotesquely over-playing his role and claiming he shot Oswald to save Jackie Kennedy’s feelings! (How did the American media and political establishment get that one to play?)
It was all sloppy, and it almost went disastrously wrong. The evidence linking Oswald to the shooting was very thin; he would certainly have been acquitted had it come to trial. But in the original plan that didn’t matter. Oswald was going to be dead, and the evidence had to be merely superficially plausible. As it was, it was barely even that. A so convenient photographic montage of Oswald posed with revolutionary newspaper and rifle; “magic bullet’ fired from the cheapest, least reliable mail-order rifle in America, which nearly kills two people and emerges unscratched; an impossible shot — and so on. This tacky kit had been designed merely as the set dressing for an open and shut case: dead President, dead assassin. Pity the poor old Warren Commission, trying to put the lid on the case with such utterly naff props.
A murder and a cover-up, yes; but not the gargantuan conspiracy suspected by some of the assassination researchers. Conspiracy is normal politics, but the reality is a jostling mass of groups, lobbies, bureaucracies and temporary alliances, rather than a great over-arching conspiracy. There is also incompetence and accident, a world in which Murphy’s Law (what can go wrong will go wrong) has near universal application.
It looks like the Mafia, and it always did, really. It’s just that we were all fascinated by the cover-up and wanted it to be the CIA that did the dirty deed, or the Pentagon, or the military-industrial complex — the U.S. state in some form. We thought the “Mafia did it’ story was the final fall-back position of the cover-up. But there is no evidence of the CIA in the assassination itself. The Mafia had the motive and the means. Some Mafia leaders were talking of killing Kennedy into the FBI’s wire-taps in the months before the hit. Jack Ruby was Mafia: and blowing somebody away and letting some square john take the rap is just the Mafia’s style.