In this essay I offer some informed speculation on the assassination of John Kennedy. I have called this a new hypothesis, but in fact it is the elaboration of a hunch about the case – but an interesting hunch, I think.
I take as proven that there was a conspiracy to murder Kennedy and a wide-ranging cover-up of the facts about the case. But I am not inclined to search for a gargantuan conspiracy. American politics are profoundly conspiratorial, but the evidence suggests a jostling mass of groups, lobbies, temporary alliances, rather than the great over-arching conspiracy apparently perceived by some of those who have studied the case. Not that the idea of a meta-conspiracy isn’t attractive. Faced with a cover-up extending across the intelligence services, the mass media, and the political establishment, many of the JFK researchers made the not unreasonable assumption that it was co-ordinated, and that its purpose was the concealment of the identities of the real assassins. (In some versions the cover-up is presumed to be the work of the group which organised the assassination.)
The closest anyone has come to identifying such a meta-conspiracy is Fletcher Prouty. In his book The Secret Team (1) he described a loose alliance of individuals centred round the upper echelons of the CIA, with members elsewhere throughout the Federal bureaucracies, and with ramifications out into the media, publishing and the academic world. Prouty appears to believe, and encourages his reader to infer, that this ‘secret team’ arranged Kennedy’s death and the cover-up.
The force of Prouty’s general claims is hard to resist. He knows at first hand whereof he speaks; and some of his thesis has indeed been confirmed in the post-Watergate revelations of CIA links with the media, the Agency’s use of journalists, and the existence of ‘detailees’ – CIA agents working within the domestic US government.(2) But Prouty has no evidence for his belief that this ‘secret team’ murdered Kennedy (or has declined to offer it), and there is one major difficulty with his (and similar) suggestions: namely, why would a group with the kind of power attributed to a ‘secret team’ ever have concluded that the best (or only) way to deal with Kennedy was to shoot him down in the street? A public execution is risky and messy – its success impossible to guarantee. The string of failed attempts on de Gaulle by the OAS had demonstrated that long before 1963.
It may just come down to how one sees the world. I see conspiracy everywhere – conspiracy is normal politics. But I also see incompetence, internecine squabbling, and accident – a world in which Murphy’s Law (what can go wrong will go wrong) has near universal application. A giant conspiracy asks us to credit a solitary area of extraordinary competence amidst the raggedy muddle of the rest of human (and political) affairs. What a contrast the apparently super-efficient execution and cover-up of the Kennedy assassination makes with the farce and chaos of the CIA’s attempts to do the same to Castro. Were there no plausible alternatives to the giant conspiracy view one would have to accept it. But a view of either Oswald the ‘lone nut’ or some meta-conspiracy is false. The absence of a decent investigation, the on-going cover-up, and the murder itself can be explained without the need to posit a meta-conspiracy.
The central step is to recognise that evidence of complicity or acquiescence in the cover-up of the truth about that day in Dallas need imply neither complicity in the actual conspiracy itself nor knowledge of the truth. None of the major participants in the drama – government agencies, the mass media, the political establishment, and the Kennedy family and its political allies – are much concerned with ‘the truth’. The Kennedys had too many of their own secrets potentially at risk; the mass media are interested in making money, and in 1963 had a very cosy relationship with the intelligence agencies and would take the hint to leave things alone. 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’ – Jack Ruby’s role ensured that; and the intelligence/law enforcement agencies had to bury Oswald’s links with them. (3) All of these groups are, first and foremost, interested in politics – the acquisition and retention of power: cover-up, lies, the harassment of those seeking ‘the truth’, are among their normal activities. What happened after the assassination was routine – larger and more sensitive than usual – but routine nonetheless.
The separation of the cover-up from the assassination itself has significant consequences. For if the murder is viewed as the work of people powerful enough to affect the cover-up, then we are looking for a very powerful, and, presumably, very large group. But if it be conceded that the two things can be intelligibly separated, that the cover-up need suggest nothing more sinister than the desire to conceal something embarrassing to the status quo, to the system as a whole, then there is no particular reason to presume the actual assassination conspiracy to be large.
Nor, for example, is there any reason to interpret the ‘lone assassin’ verdict, which emerged immediately after the assassination as itself an indicator of the conspiracy at work. On the perspective I am suggesting, almost before Kennedy’s heart stopped beating the one thing which everyone involved would have agreed upon, without discussion, never mind coercion, was that a ‘lone nut’ verdict had to emerge. The ‘truth’ was not an issue: in politics the ‘truth’ is simply a tool. (4) The point about the ‘lone nut’ is that it was then, and remains (cf Hinckley) the only safe explanation for political assassination within America. ‘Disney America’ (5), the fantasy pluralist democracy described in the textbooks on the American political system, cannot accommodate planned political assassination. (6)
This very simple idea is often overlooked by those trying to establish ‘the truth’. David Lifton, to take the most striking recent example, (7) may indeed have proved that Kennedy’s body was doctored to produce wounds consistent with the ‘sniper’s nest’ in the Book Depository where Oswald worked. Lifton shows – convincingly in my view – that the Secret Service (SS), who were in charge of the corpse, had to have been a party to this. From the fact of the ‘reconstruction’ of Kennedy’s skull, Lifton then concludes (a) that the reconstruction must have been a part of the original murder plan, and (b) that the SS must therefore have been part of the murder conspiracy.
But why should we conclude this? In the first instance, is it really credible that anyone in their right minds would agree to go ahead with a plan which hinged (a) on getting undisturbed access to the corpse; (b) co-operative autopsy surgeons; and (c) a corpse that was not so badly damaged as to be beyond repair? Nor is Lifton’s second conclusion any more compelling. As soon as the ‘sniper’s nest ‘was found and its discovery announced (at about 1.30pm) its location – behind the Presidential car – meant that the ‘lone assassin’s’ shots were going to have to come from there come what may. Shots from elsewhere – e.g. in front of the car – would indicate a conspiracy, and conspiracy, I suggest, was acceptable to no-one. The six hours or so between the initial examination of the corpse at the hospital in Dallas and the beginning of the autopsy at Bethesda, is surely ample time for the SS, or their political bosses, to have decided that the autopsy was about to reveal a conspiracy which no-one wanted. The thing which intervened between Dallas and Bethesda was a political appreciation of the consequences of the event. For the SS are not stupid men. A conspiracy was dangerous because it was an unknown. (8) Which group? Right or left? The Soviets? Cubans? None of the alternatives promised anything but horrors: some promised a Cuban Missile Crisis – or worse. Did the SS have any real choice, any political alternative, but make sure the ‘best evidence’ (the corpse) fitted the existence of the ‘sniper’s nest’? For whatever else was uncertain that afternoon, the ‘sniper’s nest’ was there, a fact. And there they (the SS) were with a corpse, which would reveal the existence of a conspiracy. In the circumstances, altering the corpse or persuading the autopsy surgeons to lie (or both) were the only alternatives. Lifton deserves every possible praise for making all this clear. His book is a monumental achievement, one of the greatest pieces of detective work ever accomplished, but his conclusions can be discounted.
Having driven a plausible wedge between the murder itself and the events which followed it, it is to the murder I now turn. From the mountain of facts, factoids and speculation which has been erected these past 20 years, I want to consider four features of the case which, taken together, may constitute something like a series of stepping-stones through the morass.
The first is the form of the actual assassination itself. Kennedy was bushwhacked. People fired rifles at him – just like in a Western. And firing rifles at a head of state usually means one thing: the assassins couldn’t get close enough to do it any other way. Never mind ‘triangulation of fire’ and the rest of the speculation that’s been raised 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.
I find it difficult to believe that any of the powerful elements in the US state apparatus – the intelligence agencies, 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. (9)
No, there are only three possibilities, it seems to me, which make sense of the ambush.
- It was motivated by desperation – the job had to be done then and hang the consequences.
- It was done by people who just didn’t care about the consequences of failure.
- It was done as part of some wider plan, whose point was not just to kill JFK (and, to anticipate my argument, perhaps not even that), but also to have his death (or the attempt) happen in public. In other words: either the assassination was a crude attempt to bushwhack Kennedy; or it was something designed to look like one.
The second thread I want to examine 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’. The unavoidable conclusion is: he knew. His initial perceptions of his role seem to have been accurate. Kurtz and Summers (10) to cite merely the two latest large-scale re-examinations of the case, have demonstrated anew that Oswald was indeed the victim of a scheme to frame him as the assassin. But if this is the case – and I believe it proven – the conspirators must have included Oswald’s speedy demise in their plans. With his connections to the intelligence world 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 fully public; and threatened to talk some more when he came to court.
It seems likely that he was supposed to die ‘resisting arrest’. 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 but 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.” (11)
Again, Oswald’s reactions at the time are revealing: he shouted “I am not resisting arrest.”
Some effort and time had gone into making Oswald qua patsy appear to be a left-winger, a Castroite. (12) And given that he must have been scheduled to die immediately after the assassination, the obvious inference has to be that he was supposed to be unveiled (after his death) as a Castroite. Which indeed, is what certain people tried to do. But the plan went wrong (Murphy’s law). Oswald survived long enough to get arrested, talk of exposing the conspiracy, and Jack Ruby had to step in at the last minute to do the necessary.
More importantly for whoever organised the affair, the US government, initially the Justice Department (i.e. the FBI) had decided immediately that Oswald had to be a ‘lone nut ‘. Less than 24 hours after the shooting Hoover told Johnson that the FBI judged Oswald to have been working alone. The then Deputy Attorney General Katzenbach (one of the Kennedy allies) agreed and wanted the FBI’s initial reports released to the press to silence ‘speculations’ that there was a conspiracy. These ‘speculations’ concerned links between Oswald and Cuba. It was the fear of what anti-Castro forces within the US could do with such ‘speculations’ which was the initial specific motivation for the cover-up. (This aspect of the case gets ignored).
At this distance, none of this seems exceptional. LBJ had had precious little foreign policy experience, and the last thing he would have wished on himself was another Cuban crisis in his first days in office. The FBI, the great seekers of ‘Communist conspiracies’ may be presumed to be eager not to be revealed as having missed the big one, the only such ‘communist conspiracy’ worth a damn since the early 1950s. So bureaucratic self-protection and LBJ’s understandable reluctance to get embroiled in another Cuban hassle created the ‘lone assassin’ – if anything specific did so. It hardly matters whether or not we now believe that Johnson took the idea of a Cuban connection seriously; any more than it matters that we believe Jimmy Carter took seriously his Cuban hassle with the Brigade of Soviet troops ‘discovered’ on Cuba in 1978. For both of them, as politicians what counted was that the ‘Cuban thing’ was likely to be used against them. Politics prevailed. It usually does.
The third element I want to suggest as important is the fact that the assassination seems to have been widely known about in advance. What is striking about this is that for the most part the people who are known to have had such advance knowledge were low level ‘street people’ – a stripper, a waitress, a small-time right-winger, a minor intelligence agent. (13) The assassination conspiracy was leaky. And this suggests very strongly that we are dealing with something other than 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.
Three elements: an ambush; Oswald the ‘Castroite’ patsy; a leaky operation. Obviously the first two merge: the assassination had to look like a crude bushwhack if Oswald, in the Book Depository, was to be plausibly framed as the man firing the shots. And the hypothesis which most immediately accommodates all three is the widespread view that this was an operation by anti-Castro Cubans and (perhaps) renegade elements in American intelligence – presumably the CIA or Army intelligence.
The difficulty with this is not that it is implausible in itself but that it is only plausible if one other feature of the events in Dallas is ignored – the actions of the Secret Service. For while no-one has demonstrated that the SS were part of the conspiracy, their behaviour that day was sufficiently sloppy to raise the suspicion that they were a party to it. Fletcher Prouty, for example, with some experience of other SS operations, has suggested this. (14) My problem with this is that I find it impossible to believe that the SS were so hostile to Kennedy as to be willing to see him killed (there is no evidence on that); so venal as to have been bought off; or so stupid as to take part in such an obvious ploy. To return to what I said at the beginning about the ‘secret team’: with a co-operative Secret Service who would need to consider such a crude, risky job? And yet their actions (or lack of them) that day in Dallas look very much like those of men who are turning their heads.
The alternative hypothesis
It is 1962 and there is enormous resentment among the Cuban exiles and elements within the military/intelligence at Kennedy’s perceived aborting of the Bay of Pigs. Then there is the missile crisis. The resolution of that gives Castro a ‘hands off’ agreement – but that’s just in public: the ‘Kennedy Vendetta’ continues. (15) Everybody and their cousin is beavering away trying to screw Castro. Then, for reasons that still appear to be unknown, Kennedy begins trying to wind down the anti-Castro operations and opens a back channel to Castro via William Attwood at the UN. (16) My hunch – and that’s all it is – is that some creative individual within the intelligence community had the bright idea that one way of sticking it to Castro and aborting Kennedy’s peace feelers, would be to fake an attempt on Kennedy’s life which could be attributed to Cuba. But the scheme involved a large number of people and someone in, or close to, the plan realised that the perfect conditions were going to be created for a real hit to take place. Security would be lax: the existence of the phoney set-up would ensure that no-one would want to examine the mess: and, most of all, there is Oswald, with some minor role in the ‘phoney’, ripe for the part of patsy. (17) So into the perfect set-up steps a real assassination team. And though there isn’t a shred of real evidence to support this hypothesis, it has a number of significant features going for it.
- This scenario explains the SS ‘turn of the head’ without asking us to believe them a party to a real assassination attempt. Anticipating a piece of ‘political theatre’, they take no particular notice when the shots first ring out. (18)
- On this scenario, some of Oswald’s puzzling behaviour becomes intelligible. How did he know he was a patsy? He didn’t seem to be surprised to be in the hands of the police. Nor did he seem particularly worried. He knew something, and that knowledge seems to have reassured him that, in the long run, all would be well. Perhaps what he knew about was the phoney hit.
- The dual conspiracy enables us to put a minor gangster like Ruby alongside the SS – something which otherwise looks extremely odd.
- In this scenario the assassination team need not be anything of significance. Taking advantage of circumstances, a handful of people could have done it. Thus the kind of picture which emerged during the Garrison enquiry – a handful of mercenaries sitting around discussing how to kill Kennedy – or a hit team from organised crime (Ruby’s role suggests this, of course) cease to sound so implausible.
- Such a small group might well not have had the professional discipline to keep the plan secret – hence the gossip circulating in anti-Castro/crime network circles.
- The idea of a phoney attempt is well within the range of options that people like the CIA were considering at the time. It is certainly no more preposterous than some of the contemporaneous schemes concocted against Castro. And such a plan would explain the various CIA and military personnel found around the periphery of the assassination without asking us to believe that such bureaucracies condoned – or organised – the assassination proper. Attempts to improve CIA/military involvement have all failed. The simplest explanation for that failure is that none existed. (19)
- The twin-track idea explains the curious mixture of subtlety and naivety which characterises the episode. For while the idea of framing Oswald was quite clever, the assumption behind it, that the killing of Kennedy could be laid at Castro’s door, was extremely naïve. There was not the remotest chance of that happening. Kennedy was just another politician, but Cuba was the ally of the Soviet Union, which while in a strategically inferior position at that time, did have nuclear weapons. The Missile Crisis was still fresh in the minds of Washington’s elite. As it turned out such pressure as was generated in the aftermath of the assassination was swiftly and comprehensively squashed by the government. The scenario I am suggesting, on the other hand, does not depend upon attributing the murder of Kennedy to Cuba. At best the original plan may have had the relatively modest ambitions of putting a stop to the peace feelers.
- The twin track explains the ferocity with which the intelligence services in the US have fought to keep the lid on the case. Their actions stink of guilt. But guilt about what? An assassination or a piece of smart-ass ‘theatre’ which backfired?
- Most of all, this scenario is attractive because it hinges on accident and opportunism. I understand the attractions of the meta-conspiracy view: it has taken me 5 years to rid myself of the compulsion to view the assassination through the lens of the cover-up which followed it. But when that is done, what does the assassination look like? A crude attempt to bushwhack Kennedy and blame Castro via Oswald. And it was crude. When examined, the various bits of evidence linking Oswald to the shooting are pretty thin. In the original plan that didn’t matter: Oswald was going to be dead, and the evidence merely superficially plausible – the support for an open and shut case. Pity the poor Warren Commission, trying to put the lid on the case when the material they had to work with was never designed for such close scrutiny.
I would like to be able to hone this scenario down a little but it really isn’t possible. As it stands there are a great number of variations on the basic theme which are possible. The front-runners would seem to be:
- the anti-Castro forces within the US wanted the phoney hit to sabotage the peace movement towards Cuba:
- the US government, perhaps even with the consent of Kennedy himself, wanted the phoney hit to lay at the door of the anti-Castro forces to give themselves further justification for shutting the exiles down.
The former seems the more plausible: the latter, somehow, the more seductive, the more ironical.
Perhaps the final suggestive point should be left with the younger brother. Not known as a classicist, Robert Kennedy took to reading Greek tragedy after the assassination. As I understand it, the central theme of the Greek tragedies is the way men’s schemes have a habit of rebounding on them. Maybe RFK knew something we don’t .
Notes
- New York, 1973
- media links: e.g. Leonard Mosley, Dulles (NY 1978) p. 457
journalists: e.g. Carl Bernstein, ‘The CIA and the Media’ (Rolling Stone, 20th October 1977)
detailees: in the Pike Report, discussed by I. F. Stone in New York Review of Books 1st April 1976. - As happened at this time in the UK with Stephen Ward, who, despite working for MI5, got abandoned by them when it came to the crunch. (See Steve Dorril’s essay on Novotny in this issue.)
- Beautifully demonstrated by the wonderful Peter Dale Scott in his Crime and Coverup (Berkeley, USA, 1977). One of the most interesting examples of this is the remark by Sprague, the man who was sacked from the House Committee on Assassinations, who said somewhere (I’ve forgotten where) that the real reason the committee was set up was to demonstrate to the black caucus in Congress that they were important to Jimmy Carter. This has the ring of political reality about it. It also explains why that committee never got the resources to do a decent job.
- Jim Hougan’s expression. See the introduction to his Spooks (London, 1979)
- Or: nothing other than that perpetrated by ‘terrorists’. What I’m getting at here is: assassination planned by any of the ‘legitimate’ groups that compose the plurality.
- David Lifton, Best Evidence (London, 1981)
- It is also possible that the SS wanted to bury any signs of conspiracy because they should have prevented it – and didn’t.
- Plus, of course, JFK’s sexual promiscuity left him wide open to blackmail.
- Michael Kurtz, Crime of the Century (Harvester, Brighton, 1982: Anthony Summers Conspiracy, (London, 1980)
- Robert Sam Anson, They Killed The President (NY 1975) pp. 354/5
- Efforts based on the foundation of Oswald’s own attempts to create such a role.
- Discussed in Kurtz (see note 10 above) p. 171.
- Prouty essay in Unmasking the CIA, (ed.) Howard Frazier (NY, 1978)
- Branch and Crille, ‘The Kennedy Vendetta’ in Harpers (US)
- William Attwood, The Reds and the Blacks (London, 1967). But better is Donald Schulz, ‘Kennedy and Cuba’ (Foreign Policy, Spring 1977)
- On this track, Oswald may well have set-up the ‘sniper’s nest’ and, perhaps, even have transported a rifle to work that day in the bundle he said was curtain rods. Perhaps it was the Mauser which was apparently left at the scene but then switched.
- This may also explain why SS Agent Bolden was so keen to testify before the Warren Commission. Some reports have suggested that had he been allowed to do so, he would have said that the SS knew of the events in Dallas. Curious that none of the assassination buffs in the US have tracked Bolden down. Or have I missed that?
JFK – Information sources
There are currently 5 newsletters devoted exclusively or partly to the continuing work on the case. They are:
- Echoes of Conspiracy
Edited and produced by Paul L. Hoch, 1525 Acton Street, Berkeley, California 94702, USA. - The Continuing Enquiry
Penn Jones Jr.
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USA. - Coverups
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Harry Irwin, 32 Ravensdene Crescent, Ravenhill, Belfast, BT6 0DB, UK.
A line dropped to any of them will produce current subscription rates.
(Harry Irwin’s Newsletter has been missing for some months. But Harry wrote us that he has had some ‘personal and family troubles’ which he is now over and his newsletter will be underway again in the near future.)
There is an absolutely vast literature on the case and the best source of books etc on the subject is:
- Aries Research
PO Box 1107, Aptos, California, 95003, USA.
Ask for their mail order catalogue: it’s astonishing.