In the very hour that President John F. Kennedy received the last rites in Dallas on the afternoon of November 22, 1963, it was fully known he’d been the victim of rifle fire from at least two assassins, a conspiracy in a coup d ‘Etat against the government of the United States. As it came to be understood by researching historians, this seizure of power was launched by elements of intelligence, military, and business interests long displeased with JFK’s initiatives to end the Cold War, for general disarmament, regulation of business, and for civil rights.
His presidency had been a steadily intensifying response to President Eisenhower’s parting warning against the military-industrial forces that had taken control of the country in the wake of World War 2.
On October 11, just six weeks before the Dallas trip, with National Security Memorandum 263 he had made known he was ending US military involvement in Vietnam. The very afternoon of Kennedy’s murder, his emissary Jean Danial was in Havana discussing normalization of relations between the United States and Cuba
Secret Service Agent Clint Hill, who leaped aboard the limousine to cover and protect the Kennedys during the attack, had seen the large exit wound in the lower back of Kennedy’s skull. Motorcycle officer Bobby Hargis, riding to the left rear of the limousine, had been spattered in the face with the blood and brain matter from that exit wound.
Every one of the forty doctors and nurses engaged in trying to save the life of the president observed his fatal wound was from the front. In a nationally publish photograph, White House Press Secretary Malcolm Kilduff pointed to his right forehead to mark the point of entry of that fatal shot.
The Warren Commission questioned 126 of the witnesses who were in Dealey Plaza that November day. 51 claimed shots came from the front, from the grassy knoll — that is, in addition to rifle fire from the building to the rear.
In the hours, weeks, and years following, the conspirators used a network they had carefully pre-established for follow-up to their crime. The Secret Service broke the chain of custody of the body by removing it from the bronze coffin during the flight to Washington. They delivered it by waiting helicopter to the Bethesda morgue more than an hour before the scheduled autopsy. Wounds were altered to conform to the plotter’s claim that all shots came from the Texas School Book Depository window.
False evidence was created, testimony revised, an Oswald impersonator had acted at the scene, and the life of a Dallas police officer was sacrificed, all with the purpose of framing for two murders Lee Harvey Oswald, a no longer useful asset of the CIA. Several means were devised to have Oswald murdered — to prevent the unraveling of the scheme at a trial. He was fatally shot while in police custody.
In order to quiet the restive country, President Johnson hastily appointed a commission to provide a report on the assassination. A very reluctant Chief Justice Earl Warren was sought to provide leadership and give the commission an appearance of authority. Questionable individuals like John McCloy and Allen Dulles were appointed by Johnson in order to maintain Oswald’s guilt. Kennedy had removed Dulles from the CIA because the director had deceived him. This plotting assassination expert and enemy of JFK was selected for a prominent role in measuring the evidence.
The 8mm film, shot by Abraham Zapruder, which illustrated the fatal shot from the front, which was both altered by the CIA and withheld from public view for more than five years.
Passage of time has allowed full confirmation of the conspiracy to emerge. Military witnesses to events threatened at the time with prison should they reveal what they experienced, have retired and spoken with historians.
Knowing how time erodes memory, the plotters classified and secreted data from investigators and the public. The President John F. Kennedy Records Collection Act of 1992 provided an immense trove of information that had helped conspirators maintain their secrets.
The National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) holds released records. These have been carefully examined and reported upon by Assassinations Records Review Board (ARRB) Chief Analyst Doug Horne. Some records remain hidden still, a government obfuscation defined as necessary to “prevent harm to military defense and intelligence operations.”
Despite fading historical memory of long ago events and a complete media and establishment attachment to the falsified report of the Warren Commission, including in textbooks and classrooms, 60 percent of Americans continue to believe a conspiracy took Kennedy’s life. What many in this majority may not fully grasp is that, while most of those who planned and carried out the 1963 coup have died, its determination of national policy remains in place.
Rather than the peaceful, cooperative relationship with the Soviet Union and a world moderated by the United Nations that President Roosevelt envisioned coming out of World War 2, we’ve had the historic and persistent intolerance of socialist thought at home or of its practice in other countries. We’ve had the very deliberate reviving of the profitable and military expansive Cold War. As foreign policy, this generates hostility from abroad, self-fulfilling the need for US military build up. Russia’s aggressive Putin is a product of such policy.
Instead of the renewed effort by President Kennedy to establish a harmonious relationship with Soviet Premier Khrushchev, begun with their cooperation to end the Cuban Missile Crisis and with the initiatives advanced after Kennedy’s American University speech, we experienced a succession of assassinations of those who continued Kennedy’s stance against extremely profitable war-making in Vietnam.
Think about it! 11,846 helicopters were consumed in that war. The profiteering of World War 2 had been spiraling forward. Eisenhower saw and warned against it; Kennedy absorbed his message and had set out to bring it to a halt.
Consider, in the light of all subsequent US history, the assessment Fidel Castro made in 1963 of his living rival in Washington, “He still has the possibility of becoming, in the eyes of history, the greatest President of the United States, the leader who may at last understand that there can be coexistence between capitalists and socialists.”
The foregoing is an excerpt from “Breaking the Silence: Revisioning The American Narrative,” a history by Charlemont resident Carl Doerner.