Who really killed JFK…and why?
If you know this, then you’ll understand what’s going on in the world today
The plot to kill President John F. Kennedy originated at the highest level of the federal government, in the national security apparatus, by ideologues with an international agenda and the ability to cover their tracks. The who is not as important as the why. And that’s because those forces are still active in the world today with a power-hungry agenda that accounts for the deep division in American politics and society, the return to Cold War level antagonisms, the concentration of more and more wealth at the top, the investment of resources in armaments, and the careless degradation of the planet and its livable environment.
I do have a very tenuous connection to the case. A few years after his assassination one of my female magazine students at Brooklyn College authored an article on the assassination in the School of General Studies student magazine, Nocturne. A few years after publication a call came to my personal phone from an unknown woman inquiring about the article. She wanted to know where the student got the information. I replied that she had merely summarized various articles and news reports on the event. She was an ordinary student. Fast forward almost 60 years, and I decided to check her name on one of those identity search web sites. Turns out that someone with her name and with the right age living in New York City is on a government watch list.
I don’t know too many Americans who believe that Kennedy was killed by a lone amateur gunman using an unreliable rifle from a long distance. At the time, we tended to dismiss conspiracy theories because it seemed impossible that the Warren Commission, with its blue ribbon participants, could have been involved. And if they were covering anything up, it was because they feared the political upheaval that would otherwise ensue.
The germ of my sudden interest and insight stems from a discussion I had a few months ago with my brother who likes to watch old “What’s My Line?” telecasts and his comment that Dorothy Kilgallen, famed national columnist working out of New York, was most clever in guessing the occupations of participants.
I remembered reading an article long ago about her death. It was ruled natural, but all the evidence pointed to murder. And the New York police closed the investigation too quickly. She was a best selling author and had gained recent fame covering the trial of Jack Ruby who had murdered Lee Harvey Oswald, JFK‘s killer. Based on private interviews, she was writing a book about Ruby and the assassination at the time of her death. Neither the manuscript nor her notes were ever found. This is one for Oliver Stone.
Here’s the Kilgallen piece of the puzzle: https://history.howstuffworks.com/historical-figures/dorothy-kilgallen.htm
Investigative journalists operate a lot like scientists. They just don’t pore over random facts until a story emerges. That’s called “fishing,” or in modern parlance “phishing.” Usually they start with a theory of the case based on known facts and see if it is confirmed by newly discovered facts or leads to unexplained holes in the information or avenues of inquiry not pursued. I will be presenting my theory of the case based on common sense and public knowledge, but at my advanced age the corroborating will need to fall to someone else.
The mystery at the center of the JFK assassination has always been Jack Ruby, a mob-connected bar owner in Dallas whose establishment was frequented by many local police. It was this familiarity that enabled Ruby to enter unchallenged into Dallas police headquarters carrying a gun. And while police were moving Oswald from one area to another, Ruby emerged firing his pistol and delivering a fatal shot to Oswald’s abdomen. The lone gunman was thus silenced and no one could challenge the eventual and unlikely conclusions about how Oswald pulled it off.
The Ruby connection makes sense when one considers that the Chicago mafia was orchestrating a “revenge killing” because JFK betrayed them after they had delivered enough illegal votes to win Illinois and the election for JFK in 1960. The deal was struck between Mayor Daly (proxy for the mob) and JFK’s father, Ambassador Joseph P. Kennedy, whose wealth came from bootlegging during the prohibition era. The mob had expected the Kennedy administration to lighten up on aggressive investigations and to not interfere with their gambling and drug activities in pre-Castro Cuba. U.S. Attorney General Bobby Kennedy was not aware of this understanding.
J. Edgar Hoover, head of the FBI, also had no use for the Kennedys, but he was not a murderous sort. His schtick was collecting “dirty dossiers” on public figures and people in power. The mob, which had supported the FBI plots to kill Fidel Castro, now needed FBI help to find a politically motivated dupe who would deflect suspicion from them. The FBI reached into its surveillance pool to find the quixotic Lee Harvey Oswald. Ruby represented mob interests on the ground to orchestrate the event. He was the connection that enabled police to race to the open window after Oswald had a head start.
How was it that Ruby could do what he did so openly and brazenly? It seems to me that he was under life-threatening pressure to get the job done probably after an earlier failure. The police didn’t intimidate him as much as his mob bosses, but he knew the fix was in - that mob money would provide the best legal defense and even buy off some of the police witnesses. No one counted on the TV camera being there.
After Oswald fired, the police moved quickly and conveniently to the exact spot from which he fired, likely passing him as he descended the stairs. With advance knowledge, Ruby was waiting for him downstairs with orders to kill Oswald before the police could grab him. He failed and had to follow Oswald on his escape route, shooting the one policeman who was closing in. Witnesses to that killing describe a shooter not resembling Oswald. Ruby had to take cover, again failing to eliminate Oswald. Hence the police headquarters.
It took federal involvement to set up Oswald as a “patsy,” as he claimed, while the mob organized the “sure thing,” the marksmen firing from the grassy knoll. The federal use of the mob for cover hints at a broader more ominous reason for JFK’s killing. The CIA had a powerful agenda for US world hegemony, and JFK, burned over the failed invasion of Communist Cuba, was now morally committed to detente and justice. He had been signaling an end to US intervention in Vietnam.
The murder of JFK introduced a policy of eliminating liberal national and world leaders who could oppose Allen and John Foster Dulles, the brotherly masterminds behind the plot to undo FDR’s vision of world peace through multinational cooperation. So down went RFK, Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, and many foreign leaders you can read about here:
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/may/05/cia-long-history-kill-leaders-around-the-world-north-korea
In 1976, President Gerald Ford issued the executive order forbidding any future CIA assassinations.
Unraveling the JFK mystery is important because the forces that precipitated it are still active in the world, determined to succeed even if it means pulling down American democracy. In the end the responsibility lies with the one percenters (Republicans and Democrats) who are heavily invested in American Exceptionalism, diplomacy through military force, and the accumulation of wealth through the profitable defense industry. Following the money trail, the looting of taxpayers is done by transferring US revenues through the IMF and World Bank to client states who return the laundered money to the military industrial complex that Eisenhower warned about.
This is what journalist/historian Cynthia Chung tells us about these times:
Today’s world is shaped by a tension caused by two opposing paradigms pulling humanity into two directions. Where one is unipolar and premised around an organizing principle of “Might makes Right”, the other is multi-polar and shaped by a principle of “Win-Win Cooperation”. Where one is imperial-defining “value” around the material extraction of land and labor (or outright theft via usury, war and speculation), the other defines value around the creative powers of human thought driven by long-term projects that harmonize individual profit with the General Welfare. Where one is shaped by the words of Tony Blair and Kissinger who called for a “post-Westphalian era” of R2P humanitarian interventions into nation states, the other is premised on the defense of national sovereignty as enshrined in the Westphalian Treaty.
The following lecture will delve into the importance of the Treaty:
https://cdn.substack.com/image/youtube/w_550,c_limit/l_youtube_play_qyqt8q,w_120/R5cqHvGCuZo
In summary: The FBI, fronting for the Chicago mob, deceived communist Lee Harvey Oswald into believing he was commiting a “patriotic” act in assassinating the anti-communist president, knowing full well that it was an impossible shot but visible enough to be a decoy for the actual shooters. The mafia assigned Dallas underling Jack Ruby to silence Oswald. Ruby missed opportunities to kill Oswald, and so fearful of his bosses, but confident in their ability to defend him, risked shooting Oswald in police custody, feigning derangement over JFK’s demise. Upon his conviction, Ruby felt let down and abandoned by his bosses, so he started to unload his story to national columnist Dorothy Kilgallen who was later murdered by mafia or CIA hit men.
The inclusion of The National Security establishment on the Warren Commission enabled much of the key evidence to be obfuscated so as to steer the Committee to its erroneous conclusion. Though they didn’t pull the trigger, John Foster Dulles and his brother Allen, are probably guilty of conspiracy to commit murder.
The center of the Power Cabal was moved by Kissinger from the CIA to the White House under the National Security Council. Both the CIA and the FBI have become compliant enablers. Their motivating idea is to maintain US imperial dominance at all costs. They cannot succeed without the acquiescence of the people whose only defense is the democratic process. Democracy cannot thrive in a chaotic world. Chaos requires endless wars, manufactured enemies, secret support of terrorists, open support of dictators, assassinations, color revolutions and distrust of science and education.
So how does following the trail of JFK’s assassination into the present day help? Probably not at all. Intransigent divisions among the citizenry and the anti-social behavior of pandemic resisters leave little hope. There is no formula for turning hate into love.
POSTSCRIPT: Any one who has followed the recent civil disruptions in Kazakhstan now fully understands what the US has been doing in Afghanistan all these years. The objective was always to create disorder in Central Asia that would spill over into Russia and China. The legitimate civil protests were hijacked by well armed and trained sleeper cells embedded in the country. These were mercenary Islamists (Taliban?) working on behalf of American policy objectives. These cells are poised within all the Central Asian nations ready to pounce at the behest of the West. There are long dark days ahead.