JFK Assassination: A Deeper Insight

The assassination of President Kennedy marked a turning point in the history of America.  Some say that’s when we lost our innocence. 

John Kennedy was the first US president born in the 20th century.  He was the youngest elected president (43) in the nation’s history.  His wife Jackie was the second youngest first lady.  They represented a new generation as the first TV era first family.  (Rob and Laura Petry on the Dick Van Dyke Show reflected the Kennedy style).  

With WWII and the Korean War behind us, the country was looking forward to a bright, prosperous future as advances in technology gave us the airline and space industries along with a booming economy.  To have JFK’s presidency end in such a tragic manner was devastating.  It was like we lost a member of our family in the prime of life.  The only thing in my lifetime that compares to it was 9/11.  

I was six years old in 1963.  On November 22 I was in Miss Carlisle’s class at Fain Elementary in Wichita Falls, Texas where I grew up.  Our principal Miss Clark announced over the PA system that there had been an assassination attempt in Dallas.  We asked Miss Carlisle what assassination meant and she explained to us that somebody had tried to kill the president.  

Shortly after that we got the news that the president was dead.  When the moms came to pick up the kids at school, there was a lot of crying, hugging and grieving on display.  At that age I had never seen grownups acting this way, and it was hard for me to process the implications of the tragedy.  

People were glued to their TV sets trying to find out who was behind the shooting.  Was it the Russians?  Castro?  Were we going to have another world war?  After all, the Cuban missile crisis had just happened a year earlier putting us on the brink of war with the Soviets, so this was still fresh on the minds of most Americans.  

We soon learned the name of the alleged assassin – Lee Harvey Oswald.  He apparently was just some loser who worked in a building along the motorcade route and happened to get a few shots off without being spotted by the Secret Service.  We were assured that there was no foreign power or conspiracy involved.  It was just a lone nut with a cheap rifle.

Two days later as Oswald was being transferred from the Dallas police station to the county jail where he would be “more secure”, another lone nut named Jack Ruby stepped up to Oswald and fired a bullet into his stomach.  Oswald was rushed to Parkland Hospital, the same hospital that tried in vain to save JFK’s life two days earlier.  Less than two hours later Oswald was dead. 

Two years after JFK was released an investigative journalist named Gerald Posner wrote a book entitled “Case Closed” where he laid out his case that Oswald was the lone assassin and Ruby acted alone on impulse in shooting Oswald.  In 2007 a Los Angeles deputy district attorney named Vince Bugliosi, who had successfully prosecuted Charles Manson for the murder of Sharon Tate, also wrote a book presenting his case against Oswald as the lone gunman.  Listening to them persuaded me that the conspiracy theories were probably bunk and Oswald probably acted alone.  But over the past 5-10 years I have done a ton of reading and watched about a hundred YouTube videos on the JFK assassination, and I am now firmly back in the conspiracy camp. 

To me it all boils down to the rifle, the gunshots, and the Zapruder film.  Oswald’s rifle was a bolt-action rifle that takes over two seconds to reload, aim, and fire.  The Zapruder film shows that the shots were fired in a 6-8 second time-span, so it was have been extremely difficult to fire four shots with any degree of accuracy.  In fact, three shots would have been a challenge.  But even if you could accomplish that, Governor John Connally was also shot and by his testimony he turned around to his right after hearing a gunshot and when he didn’t see anything he started to turn to his left when he was struck.  The Warren Commission concluded that Kennedy and Connally were struck by the same bullet (this is known as the single bullet theory), but the Zapruder film shows Kennedy reacting to being hit while Connally was turning around to his right.  There was over one second between Kennedy’s reaction and Connally’s reaction, and of course bullets move too fast to allow for that much of a lag in reaction time.  Clearly they were struck by different bullets from different rifles, which means that there was a conspiracy.

Once you accept the fact that there was a conspiracy, you have to try to determine who was involved and why.  But there are so many conspiracy theories out there to choose from that it’s like going to Baskin-Robbins.  There are so many flavors; it’s hard to decide.  But the most popular theories include the CIA, the Mafia, and Cuban exiles.  It’s my view that all of them were involved to one extent or another.  

In 1975 the Church Committee (named after committee chairman Senator Frank Church of Idaho) investigated allegations of abuse from the CIA, the FBI, the NSA, and the IRS.  They discovered that there was a CIA mind control experimentation program called MKUltra that used electroshock, hypnosis, and sensory deprivation to control subjects.  But that’s another subject for another article.  They also discovered a collection of documents called the Family Jewels, which revealed that the CIA had sought to assassinate foreign leaders, including Fidel Castro.  In that plan the CIA had used members of the Mafia.

We’re conditioned as Americans to think of the CIA as the good guys being a national security organization, and the Mafia as the bad guys being a criminal organization, but in reality the CIA has often been a criminal organization too as the Church Committee revealed.  With that in mind, it’s not out of the question to think that maybe the CIA and the Mafia could work together to assassinate our own president.  But in order to believe that, you have to establish a strong motive.  I mean, killing the president is a very serious matter.  There’s a lot of risk involved.  There’s a lot of people involved.  There’s a lot of information to control to cover things up and maintain the lone gunman narrative.  So if the CIA and the Mafia were to attempt such a thing, they would need good reasons to justify it.  So let’s do a bit of review.

• The CIA

Before JFK was elected President Eisenhower authorized the overthrow of Fidel Castro, the new communist leader of Cuba.  It was planned to take place in October of 1960, in part because removing Castro would help Vice President Richard Nixon in his upcoming election against Kennedy.  The plan was postponed when Kennedy was briefed on the invasion plan by CIA director Allen Dulles, and used that information to co-opt Nixon’s policy in the debate.  Once in office, Kennedy was approached by Dulles about the plan and authorized its training and support of Cuban exiles who would conduct the invasion, but insisted that no US forces would be used so as to avoid a confrontation with the Soviet Union.  Dulles assured Kennedy that the Cuban people would join in the uprising once the invasion was underway, and no US forces or air cover would be necessary.

When the invasion began things turned out quite different from what Kennedy had been led to believe, and the CIA informed him that air cover was needed to support the invading troops.  Kennedy refused, reminding them of his prior stipulation that no US forces would be involved.  Apparently Dulles was under the impression that once the need for air cover was apparent the young, inexperienced president would give in, but that wasn’t the case.  In the end the invasion was a disaster and 100 Cuban exiles were slaughtered by Castro’s forces.  As the political fallout took its toll on Kennedy, he fired Dulles for misleading him about the situation.  

Dulles had been the CIA director for eight years, and his dismissal didn’t sit too well with the agency.  Nor did the fact that Castro was allowed to remain in power, which was seen as a national security threat.  Kennedy was seen as soft on communism, and his talk of peace was seen as reminiscent of the appeasement of Hitler shown by his father Joseph Kennedy and Neville Chamberlain prior to our joining WWII.  

At the same time Dulles’ conduct and the recklessness of the CIA in promoting war and doing the bidding of the military industrial complex didn’t go over well with Kennedy.  He was quoted as saying that he would like to “splinter the CIA into a thousand pieces and scatter them to the winds.”  This mutual contempt grew over the next year leading up to the time of the assassination, and that laid the foundation for what many believe was the impetus for the CIA’s involvement in Kennedy’s murder.

In the Washington Post on December 22, 1963 former president Harry Truman wrote “For some time I have been disturbed by the way the CIA has been diverted from its original assignment,” … “It has become an operational and at times a policy-making arm of the Government. This has led to trouble and may have compounded our difficulties in several explosive areas.”

• The Mafia

When Castro overthrew Batista as the leader of Cuba he shut down the casinos and ran off the Mafia who had managed them, costing them countless millions of dollars.  The Mob wanted Castro gone so that they could resume their Cuban operation.  So from that standpoint they shared a common goal with the CIA.  Additionally, Kennedy’s brother Robert was the attorney general and was leading a crackdown on organized crime.  John Kennedy had made a name for himself in the senate in the late ‘50s when with Bobby’s assistance he led an investigation into racketeering in the U.S. Senate’s Select Committee on Improper Activities in Labor and Management (aka The Senate Rackets Committee), focusing on Teamster’s Union president Jimmy Hoffa’s association with the Mafia. 

1. Marcello

Now as attorney general, Bobby had Carlos Marcello – the leader of the New Orleans crime syndicate – essentially kidnapped and dumped in Guatemala even though he had never lived there.  (He was born in Tunisia to Sicilian parents who illegally emigrated to the US a year later.)  They used his fake Guatemalan passport as justification for deporting him there.  Two months later Marcello was back in the US with a vengeance.    He let it be known that he wanted Bobby Kennedy gone, but as he put it “if you want to kill a dog, you don’t cut off the tail – you cut off the head.”  He meant that killing Bobby Kennedy wouldn’t work because his brother would still be president and he would use the full weight of law enforcement and the DOJ to come after the Mob.  By killing President Kennedy they could neutralize both John and Bobby.

2. Giancana

In 1975 the Church Committee discovered that Judith Exner (aka Judith Campbell) had been romantically involved with both Giancana and Kennedy, and that during the 1960 presidential election she took messages from Giancana to Kennedy. Exner later claimed these messages concerned the plans to murder Fidel Castro. Kennedy apparently was using her as a courier to carry sealed envelopes to Giancana. She said that he told her they contained “intelligence material” concerning the plot to kill Castro.  Giancana was ordered to appear before Church’s committee but before he could do so he was murdered in his own home; shot in the head six times.

3. Trafficante

Santo Trafficante was the head of the Miami crime network, covering Florida and pre-Castro Cuba.  In 1976 a Cuban exile and FBI informant named Jose Aleman told The Washington Post that in September of 1962 Trafficante complained about the Kennedys and their “attacks” on Jimmy Hoffa.  According to Aleman, when he told Trafficante that President Kennedy would likely be re-elected, Trafficante replied, “No, Jose, he is going to be hit.”

4. Roselli

John (or “Johnny”) Roselli was a member of the Chicago mob who was recruited by the CIA to aid in the assassination of Fidel Castro.  His background in Hollywood and Las Vegas provided him with a lot of contacts in the movie industry.  One of those contacts was Robert Maheu, who worked for Howard Hughes.  The Family Jewels documents showed that in September 1960, the CIA recruited Maheu to approach Roselli on behalf of corporate interests that wanted Castro dead due to lost gambling revenues.  Roselli then introduced Maheu to Giancana and Trafficante, who tried unsuccessfully to have people place poison in Castro’s food.  Further assasination attempts were canceled after the Bay of Pigs fiasco.  Roselli was called before the House Select Committee on Assassinations in April of 1976 to discuss the Kennedy assassination.  When he was recalled three months later he wasn’t available.  Seems he was scheduled to play golf one day and never showed.  His body was discovered ten days later floating in Dumbfoundling Bay in Miami. 

So we can see how both the CIA and the Mafia had a strong motive to remove Castro from power.  The CIA’s motive was the perceived national security concerns of having a Soviet ally 90 miles away from the coast of Florida, and the Mafia’s motive was to resume their gambling revenues from their casinos in Cuba.  And both the CIA and the Mafia had the element of revenge in removing Kennedy from office.  

5. Cubans

In addition to the CIA and the Mafia, plenty of Cuban exiles living in the US wanted Castro gone because they wanted their country back, free from the reins of a communist dictator.  They preferred the Cuba of Socarrás, or even Batista to that of Castro.  They were enraged at Kennedy’s unwillingness to provide air cover for the Cubans in the Bay of Pigs invasion, and they viewed him as soft on communism at a time when the West needed a strong leader for democracy and free enterprise.

• Oswald

So how did Oswald become a part of this?  He didn’t seem to have any connection to the Mafia, people who knew him said that he showed no animosity toward Kennedy, and he seems like an unlikely candidate for a CIA agent given his instability and relative poverty.  Well, in order to understand how a guy like Oswald got mixed up in all of this, you have to learn a bit about his background.  The first book I read on Oswald was written by his older brother Robert, a book called “Lee: A Portrait of Lee Harvey Oswald”.  Robert always maintained his belief that Lee was guilty of killing Kennedy and Officer Tippit, and that he acted alone.  His book was written in such a way as to give you a glimpse into their childhood and some theoretical reasons behind his actions.  

While I disagree with Robert Oswald’s conclusions, I think he provides us with some valuable information about his younger brother’s short life.  Lee was always fascination with fantasy and espionage, and his favorite TV show as a teenager was “I Led Three Lives” about a man who worked as an advertising executive by day and as a double agent on the side.  This has led some conspiracy theorists to conclude that Oswald was a double agent, but I think he was only a double agent in his head. 

The next book I read was “Marina and Lee” by Priscilla Johnson McMillan, who had the unique experience of meeting both John Kennedy and Lee Harvey Oswald.  She worked for Kennedy while he was in the senate, and after learning Russian she worked as a journalist in Russia and as a translator at the American embassy in Moscow, where she met Oswald when he was trying to defect in 1959.  After the assassination she befriended Oswald’s Russian wife Marina and told her story.  Marina said that Lee was abusive, and increasingly bent on violence.  He tried to shoot the right-wing segregationist General Edwin Walker but missed.  He wanted to shoot Richard Nixon when he came to Dallas, but Marina threatened to report him for shooting at Walker if he tried anything with Nixon.  Lee seemed fixated with his bolt-action rifle, practicing his reload moves over and over until he could do it as quickly as possible, which makes you think that he was preparing for an event where multiple shots would be required.  

I then watched a PBS documentary called “Who Was Lee Harvey Oswald?” in which a friend named Michael Paine said that Oswald felt that our capitalist system needed to be overthrown, and that “There was no doubt in my mind that he believed violence was the only effective tool. He didn’t want to mess around with trying to change the system”, and “He wanted to be an active guerrilla in the effort to bring about a new world order.”  His wife Ruth said “He lives in this fantasy about being a great man.”  

The observations of Robert Oswald, Marina Oswald, Michael Paine and Ruth Paine provide a portrait of Lee Harvey Oswald as a man obsessed with espionage and living in a fantasy world where he’s somebody important, while growing increasingly violent.  So the idea of some conspiracy theorists that Oswald was just a patriotic marine who took on the role of a double agent for the CIA, and merely pretended to be a Marxist is not supported by the accounts of the people closest to him.  But he was by their accounts well-suited to become the fall guy in an assassination conspiracy.   

Even though Oswald seemed to have no problem with JFK, the FBI reported that he threatened to kill Kennedy while attempting to obtain a visa to Cuba in Mexico City.  When he got frustrated with the red tape in the application process, Oswald reportedly blurted out that he would prove his value to Castro’s revolution by killing JFK.  Upon hearing that, certain Cubans began encouraging him to do that, even offering to expedite his emigration to Cuba in reward.  (This all came out thirty years ago when classified documents were made public revealing that Castro was aware of Oswald’s offer and was monitoring events on the day of the assassination.)

It’s my belief that the intelligence community was monitoring communications between Oswald and said Cubans, and when they learned of Oswald’s intent they arranged for one or two professional assassins unknown to Oswald to contribute from other locations in Dealey Plaza, leaving Oswald as the fall guy even though they fired the fatal shots.  (My belief is that Oswald fired three times with two shots missing everybody and one striking Connally.)  When Oswald’s ride/passage out of the country failed to materialize, he realized that he had been set up and in desperation hailed a cab to take him to his boarding house where he grabbed a pistol and put on a jacket before taking off on foot – hardly a well thought-out escape plan for a man who had just managed to assassinate the leader of the free world.

This is all just my opinion of course.  Some of the details might be wrong.  Maybe anti-Castro Cubans working for the CIA were in communication with Oswald instead.  Or maybe it was both pro-Castro and anti-Castro Cubans.  It seems like the CIA, the Mob, Castro, LBJ, the Cubans, the military leaders, segregationists and God only knows who else wanted Kennedy out of the picture.  But to me the evidence points primarily to the Mob and the CIA working in tandem.     

The orchestrators of the conspiracy likely anticipated that Oswald would end up being killed right there in Dealey Plaza or when the police caught up with him.  Instead he was taken into custody, and was talking with the press.  That would explain why he was suddenly silenced two days later by Jack Ruby, a Dallas nightclub owner with ties to the Mob. 

The movie Executive Action presented the motive for assassination more as racism, wanting to retain a ruling elite white class while Oliver Stone’s JFK made it more about the military industrial complex wanting to go to war in Vietnam.  But from my years of examining the evidence, I have concluded that this was basically just a Mob hit, facilitated by the CIA with the aid of Cubans who pushed Oswald toward doing the deed.  Michael Franzese is a former mobster who came to faith in Jesus thirty years ago.  He claims that the Mob was behind the JFK assassination.  Carlos Marcello admitted to having Kennedy killed during an FBI sting operation in 1986.  Added to the revelations from the Church Committee, I’m confident that this is basically how it went down. 

• The Spiritual Implications

When I was a student at Rhema, Kenneth Hagin was teaching one day on John 16:13 where Jesus said that the Holy Spirit would show us things to come.  He said that the night when Kennedy was announced as the winner of the 1960 presidential election he saw a quick vision of Kennedy falling over.  He couldn’t tell if he had a heart attack or if he’d been shot.  All he knew was that he died.  He turned to the people in the room with him and said “he won’t survive his first term”.  

In 1963, shortly before the assassination Brother Hagin was speaking at a church in New Mexico and he shared a vision of impending judgment coming upon America.  I believe that Kennedy’s assassination triggered a chain of events that threatened to destroy the country.  The Vietnam War escalated, leaving 58,000 US troops dead, 150,000 wounded, and over 20,000 disabled.  War protests spread to college campuses like Kent State in Ohio where four students were killed after being fired upon by National Guard troops.  Dr. King and Bobby Kennedy were assassinated.  The Watergate scandal led to Nixon’s resignation.  The economy was in a shambles due to mismanagement and political upheaval.  From 1964-1982 the DOW chart was essentially flat.  Inflation rates caused the prime rate to skyrocket to over 20%.  Sexual promiscuity and the rise in drug abuse led to a stark increase in sexually transmitted diseases and HIV/AIDS.

So often when watching TV shows from the pre-assassination era like Ozzie & Harriet, Father Knows Best, Leave It to Beaver, or The Dick Van Dyke Show, we envision that as a more wholesome, moral period where people saluted the flag, said their prayers, and obeyed the law.  In reality, America was rotten to the core.  The Klan was burning church buildings and lynching black people.  Jim Crow laws denied constitutional rights to people who were born as US citizens.  The Supreme Court banned school prayer in 1962.  The Mafia was running a good percentage of the nation’s commerce, and rubbing people out who interfered.  The CIA was removing democratically elected heads of state and propping up anti-communist despots in their place.  

John and Bobby Kennedy were both notorious womanizers.  LBJ was a crook with his own alleged personal hit-man Malcolm Wallace.  FBI director J. Edgar Hoover was a bisexual.  Rock Hudson, one of the leading men in Hollywood, was a homosexual.  The government conducted unethical tests on unwitting African American men in the Tuskegee Experiment to study the effects of syphilis.  And the Dallas Police Department was corrupt, with most of the men on the force frequenting clubs like the Carousel Club owned by Jack Ruby.  The family entertainment of American TV was basically the spiritual equivalent of putting lipstick on a pig.

At the same time a move of God had begun in 1959 known as the Charismatic movement, as denominational pastors began to speak in tongues, pray for the sick, and operate in spiritual gifts.  David Wilkerson began preaching to drug addicts and gang members in inner cities, which launched a global ministry called Teen Challenge.  People were horrified by the prospects of nuclear war and Armageddon and began to seek God, which led to the Jesus Movement of the late-60s to the mid-70s.  So despite the consequences of America’s sins, the grace of God was manifested across the land as people saw the futility of man’s ways in defiance of God’s Truth.  As the Bible says, where sin abounds grace abounds even more. (Rom. 5:20) 

Which leads me to a final thought.  2,000 years ago there was a different assassination.  The King of the Jews was crucified as an insurrectionist when the Jewish people were stirred up by their leaders to demand his death.  And there was a conspiracy theory then, too.  After Jesus rose from the dead a rumor spread that Jesus’ disciples stole his body.  That makes no sense of course, because most of them were put to death for preaching His resurrection rather than recanting.  If we draw any conclusion from the murder of JFK, it should be that man is sinful, and that the only cure for sin is the new life that comes through faith in the risen Lord.

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