The assassination of JF Kennedy is a Pandora’s box that should not be opened

With a bit of exaggeration, it can be said that the first group of people involved in the assassination of President John F. Kennedy (1917-1963) died shortly after him, the second during an attempt to resume the investigation in the mid-1970s. This also fundamentally defines the profile of the killers: each external Forsythian-style killer Jackal (a thriller about the assassination of French President Charles de Gaulle) can be ruled out – no professional would sign his own death warrant by accepting such a commission.

And since there were too many spies from both sides of the Iron Curtain hanging around the assassination, we can also rule out “missiles” from various terrorist cells, although they usually do not lack suicidal enthusiasm, but in Kennedy’s case it is difficult to find a motive in them. And after all, they have always been and will always be under someone’s control (see, for example, the Red Brigades from East Germany or the Islamic State financed by the Saudis). Nevertheless, a certain group of people took the action knowing that sooner or later they would pay for it. Not primitive fanaticism, but self-sacrifice in ultimate devotion to something beyond the individual? Good motive, and an even better clue.

Not even the CIA or the KGB, let alone the mafia and the Cubans

Their positive identification is impossible, so let’s try the elimination method. There is an unwritten rule in the US and Russian intelligence worlds that they do not kill each other on “home turf” (hence the attacks on Oleg Gordievsky, Sergei Skripal or Alexander Litvinenko in the UK, but none on defected Russian spies in the US). The idea that the Soviets – not only taking into account this circumstance – for any reason, in front of the eyes of the whole world, would literally execute the president of the USA in the street is a fantasy on meth. Fidel Castro? He was glad to be alive at all, the CIA tried to poison him. Right-wing Cuban emigres from Florida bungalows? An even better joke. And the Italian mafia? She was able to get hold of sending the gangster Jack Ruby to silence the alleged shooter Harvey Lee Oswald (1939-1963), pretty close, as it is done among street criminals. But killing the highest representative of your country in the crossfire of elite snipers? No comment.

However, Oswald’s trip to the Soviet Union in the same year that Kennedy announced his intention to run for president is a different story. This is how a spy legend is created about an unbalanced person inclined to the extreme left, confusingly infiltrated by exponents of the extreme right, who undergoes sniper training during his service in the marines and learns Russian in the evenings (!). As Jiří Paroubek used to say: which of you has it? The CIA can do this, for example, but the American spy service does not assassinate its president every time the election does not go according to its wishes. The Russian KGB limited itself to establishing Oswald’s whereabouts, but never interrogated him. Special restraint in the case of a soldier who had access to the US Navy’s missile launch codes… Fortunately for the world, the superpowers are secretly working together day and night, more on that in the next paragraph.

Photo of Oswald with newspaper

Real or fake? One of the mysteries is not just the placement of Oswald’s head on the torso and the related suspicious play of lights and shadows. In addition to the Italian Carcano M91/38 rifle (according to tests, it is not possible to fire it five to six times in a few seconds, as happened in Dallas), he is holding two newspapers in his hand – Daily Worker and The Militant. Why did Oswald unite ideologically irreconcilable media in this way?

Historical excursion: both papers were communist, but the first espoused the line of Stalinist Marxism, while the second followed that of Trotskyism. And since JV Stalin had his opponent LD Trotsky assassinated in Mexico, they could not be connected then or at any other time. However, the writer Norman Mailer brought an explanation in his book American Secret, where he described Oswald’s plan to unite the “progressive East and West”. That is why he allegedly traveled to the Soviet Union and even brought home his wife Marina from there. This is true if the photo is genuine. If it is false, then it is a set up contradiction leading to a dead end.

The goal of the assassination was to remove an inconvenient politician, not to start a war with the “evil” communists of the USSR. And at the same time, it was necessary to protect the “good” domestic Trotskyists (their leader, equipped with gold, went to tsarist Russia in 1917 to make a revolution in tsarist Russia precisely from the USA, his colleague VI Lenin, sponsored from elsewhere, traveled there from Germany). It is significant that the related Daily Worker did not survive the fall of the USSR, but who owns and finances the still-existing The Militant is still unknown…

“Last minute” change of convoy route

State Attorney Jim Garrison (1921-1992) conducted his own investigation into the assassination, which he summarized in a book On the trail of killers from 1988, according to which the director Oliver Stone made a film three years later JFK. Even Garrison’s efforts did not lead to the desired revelation, and in many ways he became a victim of his own inconsistency or bias. In the book, he states that there was a change in the route of the presidential motorcade from straight down Main Street to a detour to Elm Street. Allegedly with the aim of leading her in front of the assassins hidden there – and apparently at the last minute.

He argued with the plan on the front page of the Dallas Morning News (DMN) dated November 20, 1963, which, however, was created only because of information noise in the newsroom, because the day before the same newspaper reported correctly on the matter. Despite the fact that another paper there, the Dallas Times Herald, reported the intended turn on Elm Street correctly from the start. Garrison did not mention all of this, and completely misleadingly claimed that the “original” map (with a direct route across Main Street) took up five-sixths of the first page of the DMN – in fact, it was a fraction of the area he claimed.

Why didn’t anyone protect Kennedy? Leaving aside the brilliant planning and execution of the event, which was difficult to resist, the main reason was simpler. Shortly before 12:30 p.m. local time, as his black Lincoln approached Dealey Plaza, the supposedly most powerful man in the world was actually alone. With his independent policy, the reasons for which he described in the book Profiles of Courage with examples of earlier American politicians who resisted the pressures of their time, he made enemies of almost everyone.

Last but not least, his supporters. For example, the Jesuits, among his campaign staff powerfully lobbying for the election of the first Catholic US president, disappointed him with a lukewarm approach to saving South Vietnam from being absorbed by Ho Chi Minh’s communists from the north. The Jesuit iron in the fire, the dictatorial Catholic Ngo Dinh Diem, was let fall by the president. In a predominantly Buddhist country, it was only a matter of time anyway, but you won’t be happy about it. With his brother Robert Kennedy, the Secretary of Justice, he overlooked the help of Italian mobsters (Irish and Italian, Catholic allies in a sea of ​​Protestant America) who supplied him with electoral votes from the industrial unions they controlled, the AFL-CIO. On the contrary, both “ungratefuls” continued to want to prosecute them. To preserve his chances of re-election in 1964 in a predominantly white and conservative country, Kennedy began to back away from enforcing anti-segregation laws, hurting his black minority voters.

Stab enemies

By dismissing him as director of the CIA, he humiliated Allen Dulles, the founder of this American intelligence, and with his policy of American isolationism (according to the legacy of his father Joseph during World War II, who as ambassador to Great Britain gave way to Adolf Hitler) undermined the opposite efforts of Dulles’ brother John Foster, Secretary of State in the previous Eisenhower administration. The Kennedys also posed a threat to JE Hoover, the founder of the FBI counterintelligence. He narrowly escaped being recalled, because he helped the Kennedys with some information (for example, he warned them about the alleged sexy East German spy Ellen Rometsch), while others hinted at blackmail.

The American military-industrial complex was also suffocating in the post-war lack of “nutritional” conflicts, the economic rise of the USA depended mainly on the surplus arms sector from the Second World War. Quite a few senior military officers despised JF Kennedy for his meandering before direct confrontation with the Eastern Bloc during the Cuban and Berlin crises. What soldier wouldn’t want a metal for heroism during World War III, right?

Summary: alone in Dealey Plaza

Experts generally agree that neither the Warren Commission, nor others in later years, had any real interest in uncovering the killers and their motives. It didn’t really matter whether it was supposed to be exponents of the right or left political spectrum, from the domestic or foreign scene. Any real finding would work like a grenade explosion in a closed room, the reaction of the United States after Dallas 1963 would have to be very drastic and with unpredictable consequences. A terrible risk, especially in the atomic age.

And the possible monopoly of the incredibly large Kennedy clan on top positions in the state equally terrified political squires in both the Republican and Democratic parties. They did not care about the financially independent and politically largely unpredictable Irish. So, when the 35th President of the United States entered Dealey Plaza, there was no one willing or able to help him…

Anthony Summers: The Conspiracy (Papyrus 1993)

Norman Mailer: An American Secret (Mustang 1997)

Jim Garrison: On the Trail of the Assassins (Sheridan Square 1988)

Karel Kyncl: 63 days to Dallas (MNO Magazine Publishing House 1966)

Stephen Kinzer: Brothers – JF Dulles, A. Dulles and Their Secret World War (Rybka 2016)