Wednesday marked the 60th anniversary of the assassination of John F. Kennedy, the 35th and youngest elected President. The events of that infamous day in Dallas still haunt. Especially so for those who were there, such as Clint Hill, assigned to Jacqueline Kennedy’s Secret Service detail.
“We didn’t protect the President of the United States like we were supposed to…” said Hill, famously photographed climbing on to the back of the President’s limousine after the shots rang out.
Whether it was blowback for regime change as part of an “obsession of the Kennedy brothers with Cuba, and the disbursement of millions of dollars of CIA funds on raids by Cuban exiles” or mob revenge after attorney General Robert F. Kennedy zealously targeted the mafia or merely the crazed workings of a known Communist-sympathizer, no one can really be sure. (RELATED: FORMER REP. JASON LEWIS: Mike Johnson’s Ascendance To The Speakership Signals A Departure From The Status Quo)
Forensically, as author Gerald Posner has so eloquently pointed out, it was Case Closed against assassin Lee Harvey Oswald—whose fingerprints, motives and erratic nature would have been enough to convict him in most any court. Vincent Bugliosi, who would later prosecute Charles Manson, delivered the coup de grace in his magnum opus, Reclaiming History—including, but hardly limited to the following:
- Eyewitness testimony from Hill and many others along the parade route immediately located the source of the gunfire as coming from the Texas Book Depository. Several say they saw the weapon.
- The New Orleans-based cabal, as alleged by Jim Garrison and made popular in JFK, Oliver Stone’s movie, failed to convincingly connect the dots with the seamier side of David Ferrie and Clay Shaw’s Big Easy.
- The chilling Zapruder film’s ‘magic bullet’ wasn’t ‘magical’ at all, considering the way the President and Governor John Connally were situated in the make-shift jump seat when the second shot was fired.
- Jack Ruby, a well-known Kennedy aficionado, would have never been at the police station in time to shoot Oswald had the suspect been moved at the scheduled time. Only delays unknown to Ruby put him in proximity after a trip to Western Union.
- The Assassination Records Review Board released statements from autopsy doctors who said they had destroyed records from the procedure in order to hide the precarious state of JFK’s health, e.g., he had no traces of adrenal glands from Addison’s Disease.
Even then, what remained from the bungled autopsy was sloppy. Though every pathologist identified only one wound, surgeons wrongly located the entrance of the fatal shot at the base of the skull, not 10 centimeters higher, thus giving rise to theories about a second gunman on the ‘grassy knoll’ in Dealey Plaza.
Yet, despite it all, the passage of time has only added more questions. While I still believe Oswald was the lone gunman, it doesn’t answer why he did it? Or perhaps who put him up to it? Thanks to Ruby, we may never know.
But in light of the recent revelations of ‘deep state’ machinations, a full and complete release of all unredacted records concerning the assassination of a sitting U. S. President in broad daylight is warranted now more than ever. Unfortunately, the Biden administration has balked—still keeping the lid on the most ‘sensitive’ of state secrets.
After six decades, this (like the proliferation of ‘classified documents’ in general) exceeds any legitimate ‘national security’ interest and is more likely being used to prevent anything that, at the least, would prove decidedly embarrassing and thus weaken a ‘swamp’s’ power grab.
RFK, Jr., as I write in a previous edition of Jason’s Newsletter, thinks it’s worse, far worse—saying his father’s “first instinct” was that the CIA had something to do with the death of his Uncle.
To say the agency was intimately involved in the Bay of Pigs fiasco would be an understatement. That hardly means the CIA, still relatively new at the time, had a direct hand in Dallas. But what did it know about Castro and/or the mafia’s attempt to get back at JFK? What did it learn from the FBI’s open file on Oswald’s activities with the Fair Play for Cuba committee?
I have no way of knowing. And no, as a practical matter, members of Congress do not have access to all classified or redacted documents that the executive branch routinely withholds.
It is, however, somewhat ironic that one author has President Richard Nixon (JFK’s foe in 1960) pressuring his CIA Director Richard Helms into revealing the ‘who shot John’ angle as possible ‘deep state’ inoculation for Watergate.
It didn’t happen. What did was FBI informant ‘deep throat’ spilling the beans over the White House attempt to have the agency close the lid ‘on a third rate burglary’…or was it over a weary President Nixon’s threat to expose what only he would know in his position about Dallas?
Corrupt intelligence officials like John Brennan and James Clapper are making it difficult to dismiss anything out of hand. How long have partisan intel chiefs been abusing their power by discrediting things like Hunter Biden laptops, falsely alleging they’re ‘Russian disinformation’?
Now comes the latest 103-page interim staff report from the House Judiciary Committee Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government showing disturbing communications between the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), in particular their Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), and the State Department’s Global Engagement Center (GEC) working with Stanford University on forming a “disinformation” group known as the Election Integrity Partnership (EIP) ahead the 2020 contest.
Indeed, to anyone with a pulse, let alone an open mind, nothing much of anything the ‘deep state’ might conjure up seems very far fetched anymore.
Though JFK campaigned on a ‘new frontier,’ there is little doubt he shared Eisenhower’s concern over a burgeoning ‘military industrial complex,’ as evidenced by his feuds with General Curtis Lemay over weapons systems and nuclear first strike capabilities.
Kennedy and his ‘whiz kid’ Defense Secretary, Robert MacNamara, actually preferred covert operations to expensive B-70 Valkyrie bombers as more nimble countermeasures to the Communist threat. Even after the Bay of Pigs, the administration continued with numerous clandestine schemes, including Operation Mongoose to finish the job of overthrowing Castro in Cuba.
JFK was no dove and in one of his final television interviews with Walter Cronkite in September of 1963, he said of Vietnam: “I don’t agree with those who say we should withdraw. That would be a great mistake.”
But Kennedy did think the CIA had misled, even betrayed, him at the Bay of Pigs and started to view it with increasing skepticism—notwithstanding his own costly indecision in the matter. Moreover, his 1963 ‘peace speech’ at American University (after the Cuban Missile Crisis) may have “signaled change” amid a growing concern in what seemed to be a race to nuclear war. (RELATED: SEN. ERIC SCHMITT: It’s Time To Dismantle The Deep State)
My own view of that terrible day in Dallas hasn’t changed much from Oswald as the shooter, as far as that goes. What has changed is my openness to consider far more given what we now know about a rogue ‘deep state’ and the dogged refusal to release all of the assassination records.
60 years later, what the hell are they hiding?
Former Congressman Jason Lewis is the author of Party Animal, The Truth About President Trump, Power Politics and the Partisan Press. He also writes at jasonlewis.substack.com.
This article was originally published on the author’s Substack page, which can be viewed here.
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