10 Quick Reasons to Believe There Really WAS a Conspiracy
According to press reports, the majority of Americans believe that thirty-fifth United States President John Fitzgerald Kennedy was murdered as part of some sort of conspiracy.
However, there’s always that one holdout: a colleague, friend, or other acquaintance who insists that accused assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone.
In this video, in commemoration of the 59th anniversary of JFK’s untimely death, I’ll sketch ten (10) reasons to believe that there is more to the tale than one, Communist-sympathizing “lone nut.” The aim, here, is certainly not to break new ground or to favor one particular hypothesis over another. Rather, the points to be surveyed are merely intended as candidate “opening moves,” as it were. They may be used in circumstances – such as over holiday dinners – where partisans of the “official story” ask for justification for the skeptic’s position.
The first point could well be that it’s rational in this case to be in the majority. And although there are important, burden-of-proof-style considerations that probably ought to be raised, let’s begin with the following instead.
10. Oswald was never tried – let alone convicted.
Legend has it that there is a presumption of innocence in the legal system of United States of America. At a minimum, this is supposed to mean that a person is considered to be innocent until proven guilty in a court of law.
According to the Sixth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, this is to play out via a “speedy …public trial” in front of “an impartial jury” in the relevant jurisdiction. The accused is to have the opportunity to address the evidence and testimony against him, with the help of a competent lawyer.
Of course, as now-deceased attorney Mark Lane vociferously pointed out, Lee Harvey Oswald received no such trial, was never afforded a robust legal defense, and – since he was essentially summarily executed while under the “protection” of the Dallas Police Department – never had the opportunity to confront or answer any of his accusers.
While these facts, by themselves, may not suffice to show that JFK was assassinated as part of a conspiracy, they persuade me that Oswald’s guilt was never established according to this country’s historical canons of judicial fairness.
9. The Warren Report didn’t satisfy everyone.
What about “The President’s Commission on the Assassination of President Kennedy”?
Better known as the Warren Commission, this was the body empowered to “investigate” the assassination.
As JFK’s immediate successor, Lyndon Baines Johnson would – in an impartial and sane world – surely have rated more than a passing glance as an accomplice or suspect himself.
Indeed, he would later be implicated by career CIA man, E. Howard Hunt in what has become known as Hunt’s deathbed confession.
Even setting aside the fact that Kennedy’s death catapulted Johnson into the highest office in the land, the new President’s “commission” initially resisted any attempt to allow Oswald, posthumously, to receive a fair hearing.[1]
That including an actual defense for the recently deceased defendant was (at best) an afterthought must surely cast doubt on the pretense that the Warren Commission approximated anything like a “fair trial.”
Furthermore, the commission was populated by at least one of JFK’s presumed enemies – namely, Allen Dulles.
Recall that Kennedy had fired Dulles from the über-secretive Central Intelligence Agency.
When one reflects on this fact, one can easily sympathize with then-influential columnist and television personality Dorothy Kilgallen who publicly ridiculed the Warren Commission’s Report as “laughable.”
Dorothy decided to bring her considerable investigative talents to bear on the matter. Unfortunately, on November 8, 1965, she turned up dead – in highly suspicious circumstances – before her potentially history-altering conclusions could see the light of day.
Or again, consider JFK’s brother, Robert F. “Bobby” Kennedy. According to Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., RFK believed that the supposedly exhaustive report was a “shoddy piece of craftsmanship.”
Of course, RFK was short dead in June of 1968, when was – potentially – close to being nominated as the Democratic candidate for the office of the presidency.
The story goes that Bobby’s assassination led the U.S. Secret Service to offer to safeguard high-level political candidates.
A lot of good that does, seeing that JFK ostensibly enjoyed the same “protections” when he became the fourth president to be murdered in office – by official count, anyway – and the first to be assassinated since the Secret Service began shielding the commander in chief.
8. Even Warren Commission members didn’t believe it.
As if it weren’t bad enough to have prominent members of the public rejecting the Warren Commission’s authoritative-sounding pronouncements, the word is some of its own members may not have believed it, either.
For instance, according to various documents belonging to the late Richard B. Russell, a former Democratic senator from Georgia, Russell “was troubled by the Warren Commission’s conclusion that a single bullet killed President John F. Kennedy and wounded former Texas Gov. John Connally, even though he signed the commission’s report…”.[2]
Supposedly, however, Russell had been one of three commission members who at first refused to lend their names to the final report.[3]
The others were Senator John Cooper and Congressman Hale Boggs.
Although Hale Boggs would waffle and make contradictory claims – before his own mysterious disappearance (and presumed death) in an airplane crash in late 1972…
– at one time he disclosed his “strong doubts” about magic-bullet theory.
7. The Commission’s self-doubt engenders skepticism.
When nearly half of commission members had grave misgivings about signing their own “findings,”…
…it’s not surprising that upwards of half of the American public can’t bring themselves to believe it either.
Prominent people who have, in one capacity or other, expressed some measure of disbelief, include numerous celebrities – from Kevin Costner and Tommy Lee Jones to Oliver Stone and Bruce Willis – have made no bones about their incredulity.
In the political sphere, the quirky, left-leaning “independent” former professional wrestler and ex-governor of Minnesota, Jesse Ventura is a professed doubter of the System-approved account,…
…as are occasional presidential hopefuls John Forbes Kerry and Gary Warren Hartpence.
The latter, better known as “Gary Hart,” went so far as point out the (obvious) failure of mainstream “American journalism” to do any real “follow up” on the myriad indicators of widespread treachery.
In fact, this dereliction of press responsibility is so grievous and, on its face, so inexplicable that it deserves its own treatment – which I hope to provide. For now, suffice it to say that, at least since World War II, the relationship between the media and the intelligence services has been a little, well… murky.
6. The media seems long ago to have sacrificed any semblance of objectivity.
Let’s try to make this point more vividly. Case in point, consider a then-youthful CBS news correspondent Dan Rather speaking about his viewing of the film of the assassination captured by Ukrainian-born American clothier Abraham Zapruder.[4] Rather misrepresents the result of the second shot to hit Kennedy[5] – which he calls “the third total shot” – falsely claiming that it caused the president’s “head …to move violently forward”.[6]
[play]
In fact, Kennedy’s head was savagely blown back and to the left, in the memorable phraseology of director Oliver Stone’s film, JFK.[7] [play]
You’ll note that, in 1963, the Zapruder Film was purchased by Time-Life and essentially put on ice.
It’s an interesting story – and it involves a now seldom mentioned former O.S.S. operative, army psychological-warfare mastermind, and Eisenhower speechwriter named Charles Douglas “C. D.” Jackson.
But that will have to wait. For the time being, I’ll simply note that, except for the publication of odd still frames – several of which were reproduced out of their proper sequence – Dan Rather’s claims could not readily be exposed as fabrications.
In 2022, when Zapruder’s footage is easily discovered by anyone with a web browser, widely available references such as Wikipedia casually admit that there were “inaccuracies in his [Dan Rather’s] description” of the content of the film.[8] That’s an understatement.
5. Despite the disinformation, scattered admissions are intriguing.
Rather was far from unique. And the relentless Oswald-alone agitprop continues to be pushed by soulless apparatchiks like Peter Jennings well into the 21st century. But, occasional interesting tidbits can be found.
For example, consider comments made by Lyndon Johnson to Walter Cronkite in 1969. LBJ stated that he couldn’t rule out the assassination involving “international connexions.”[9]
For some reason, Cronkite – billed as “the most trusted man in America” – was inexplicably standing by a news wire machine at around noon (Dallas time) when the JFK-assassination dispatch came thru.
4. Newsman admits the obvious: ‘there had to be a conspiracy.’
As we hope to excavate in a future video, even a partial accounting of the worrying interrelationships between major newspapers and television networks on the one hand, and the Central Intelligence Agency on the other, shows that among the worst offenders were some of the biggest names in the business: for example, CBS and the New York Times.
So, perhaps it isn’t all that surprising that this particular comment owes to a man who was a fixture of public broadcasting instead.[10]
In an interview with Diane Rehm, Jim Lehrer remarked:
“I went at my reporting or the idea that there had to be a conspiracy. The only issue was, what kind of conspiracy?”[11]
I would say that this is extraordinary. But, on the contrary, it seems to me that nothing could be more ordinary. Perhaps we should take it as an attestation of the adage (apparently falsely attributed to George Orwell) that “In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act.”[12]
3. Even a pathological liar occasionally lets the truth slip.
Former President Richard M. Nixon isn’t exactly remembered for his honestly. The only president ever forced to resign his office, he – or someone in his administration – ran an espionage and sabotage campaign against his political enemies.
This culminated in the Watergate debacle, in which a group of burglars – including several central intelligence agents such as E. Howard Hunt – were arrested trying to bug the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee.
“Coincidentally” (quote, unquote), Hunt was also likely front and center in the JFK assassination – at least according to his own alleged deathbed confession, as told to his son Saint John Hunt.
Even some possible (and famous) photographic evidence exists.
It has long been suspected that E. Howard Hunt was one of the three so-called “hobos” or “tramps” present at ground zero on November 22, 1963.
In his secret audio tapes, Nixon made repeated references to his fear that the Watergate investigations would uncover the “whole Bay of Pigs thing.” To hear Nixon’s former White House chief of staff, H. R. Haldeman, tell it, this was a code phrase for Kennedy’s assassination.
At one point, Nixon appeals for cover-up help to then-Director of Central Intelligence, Richard Helms. In his usual halted, rambling style, Nixon is heard to bring up: “The ‘who shot John?’ angle,” asking: “Is Eisenhower to blame? Is Kennedy to blame? Is Johnson to blame? Is Nixon to blame? Etc., etc. It may become, not by me, a very vigorous issue. But if it does, I need to know what is necessary to protect – frankly – the intelligence-gathering and the dirty-tricks department. And I will protect it. I have done more than my fair share of lying to protect you. And I believe it’s totally right to do it.”
So, here is the sitting U.S. President – Tricky Dick, himself – asking the head of the CIA for information on “who shot John” Kennedy. And of course, quite interestingly, Helms did not say: of course, it was Lee Harvey Oswald.
2. Some of the files are still sealed.
Which brings up another curiosity: After 59 years, some of the JFK-associated records are still off limits. This naturally brings a few questions to mind, such as: what are they still hiding?
At this point, establishment pundits typically scoff – as if the only reason to fret about secret archival information is the chimerical quest for a “smoking-gun” document. But such thoughts are wrongheaded – in two equal and opposite directions.
For one thing, the fact that some records remain hidden – even at this historical distance – displays the bad faith of certain government archivists. It’s already beyond question that there has been a cover up. That the same players still resist – or outright refuse – oversight is, frankly, insulting.
This leads to a second, and perhaps more important, point – one which moves in a diametrically different direction. Namely, it’s reasonable to think that the sealed files are an emblem of a pathological lack of volition on the part of the American people. We don’t need to wait for some smoking gun. The evidence already available is more than sufficient to show that President John F. Kennedy was murdered by conspirators – some of whom (or some of whose heirs) are yet in power. The problem isn’t sealed files; the problem is collective paralysis.
1. The government’s own most recent investigation concluded conspiracy!
As a final attestation to the fact that overwhelming evidence for conspiracy is widely available, we need look no further than the House Select Committee on Assassinations. Established in 1976, it looked into the JFK murder, among other things. It’s conclusions?
One was this: “The committee believes, on the basis of the evidence available to it, that President John F. Kennedy was probably assassinated as a result of a conspiracy.”
A second was that there is a “high probability” of a second gunman. – meaning… whatever conspiracy you favor, Lee Harvey Oswald did not act alone.
A second was that there was a “high probability” of a second gunmen – meaning, of course, that (regardless of what conspiracy you favor) Lee Harvey Oswald did not act alone.
Copyright 2023. All applicable rights reserved.
[1] It only reluctantly appointed Walter E. Craig, then head of the American Bar Association, to the task when called out on the “oversight” by the previously named Mark Lane.
[2] “Senator Russell’s Papers Show He Disagreed With Warren Report,” Rome News-Tribune, Oct. 17, 1993, p. 7A; online at <https://news.google.com/newspapers?id=bhMwAAAAIBAJ&pg=3085%2C4917493>.
[3] Charles J. Sanders and Mark S. Zaid, “Disclosure Law at Last May Help to Clarify the Facts of the Kennedy Assassination,” South Texas Law Review, vol. 34, p. 412; reproduced in Hearing Before the Legislation and National Security Subcommittee of the Committee on Government Operations, The Effectiveness of Public Law 102-526, The President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records, U.S. House of Representatives, 103rd Congress, 1st Session, Nov. 17, 1993, Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1994, p. 141; archived online at <https://books.google.com/books?id=j6Z_LOsTRi8C&pg=PA141>.
[4] “Dan Rather’s account from November 25, 1963,” HelmerReenberg (channel), YouTube, posted Jan. 28, 2010, <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kiSoxFHyjGY>.
[5] Between 2:01 and 2:17.
[6] Ibid.
[7] See “JFK Zapruder Footage: Slowed Down & Enhanced,” Wayne Robson (channel), YouTube, posted Sept. 28, 2011, <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mwy6Q9_cUwc>.
[8] <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zapruder_film>.
[9] “Lyndon Johnson interview with Walter Cronkite, September 1969,” Michael Courtenay (channel), YouTube, posted Nov 23, 2013, <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h5psrZmT0tY>. The interview excerpt, though recorded in September 1969, was originally part of a CBS Nightly News broadcast dated April 24, 1975.
[10] Tho, PBS had its share of odd characters. For instance, former White House Press Secretary – and ex-Council on Foreign Relations member – Bill Moyers deserves a careful look.
[11] Jim Lehrer, interviewed by Diane Rehm, “Jim Lehrer: ‘Top Down: A Novel Of The Kennedy Assassination’,” Diane Rehm Show, Oct. 7 2013, <https://dianerehm.org/shows/2013-10-07/jim-lehrer-top-down-novel-kennedy-assassination>. Continuing, he said: “So I checked out every one of them, as did everybody else. And it was all said and done, I came away with a conclusion after several years, after a few years that there may have been a conspiracy,” ibid.
[12] Cf. Brad Sylvester, “FACT CHECK: Did George Orwell Say, ‘Telling The Truth Is A Revolutionary Act’? We take a look,” National Interest, Jul. 29, 2019, <https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/fact-check-did-george-orwell-say-%E2%80%98telling-truth-revolutionary-act%E2%80%99-69896>.