Who Killed Kennedy?
Kennedy was assassinated on November 22, 1963, in Dallas, Texas, at 12:30 p.m. One hour later, Lee Harvey Oswald was apprehended. The same day, Americans heard on television: “The assassin of President Kennedy is an admitted Marxist who spent three years in Russia trying to renounce his US citizenship.” “After changing his mind and returning to the United States last year, Oswald became a sympathizer of the Cuban prime minister, Fidel Castro.”404 But quickly Oswald’s Soviet and Cuban connections were forgotten and he was presented to the public as the sole assassin. The FBI confirmed it, and after a mock investigation by a presidential commission, this became official truth. Assuming this theory is a lie (as about 75 percent of Americans today believe), and that Oswald was in fact “just a patsy” as he publicly claimed, the quest for the real culprits must logically start by investigating the man who shot Oswald to death at point-blank range two days later, while Oswald was being transferred from the Dallas Police station (where he had been interrogated for two days while no one made a recording or took notes) to the Dallas County jail. Oswald’s assassin is known as Jack Ruby, but few people know that his real name was Jacob Leon Rubenstein, that he was the son of Jewish Polish immigrants, and that, asked by the Warren Commission how he had been allowed into the Police Station, he claimed he had been translating for Israeli reporters. (Ruby spoke Yiddish, but what Israeli reporter in the US could possibly need a Yiddish translator?)
Ruby was a member of the Jewish underworld, and a friend of Los Angeles gangster Mickey Cohen, whom he had known and idolized since 1946. Cohen was the successor of the famed Benjamin Siegelbaum, a.k.a. Bugsy Siegel, one of the bosses of Murder Incorporated. Cohen was infatuated with the Zionist cause, to which he had been introduced by Hollywood script writer Ben Hecht, as he explained in his memoirs: “Now I got so engrossed with Israel that I actually pushed aside a lot of my activities and done nothing but what was involved with this Irgun war.” What kept him so busy, he goes on to explain, was stealing surplus weapons coming back from Europe after WWII and sending them to the Irgun.405 Like Ben Hecht, Mickey Cohen was in contact with Menachem Begin, the former Irgun chief, with whom he even “spent a lot of time,” according to Gary Wean, former detective sergeant for the Los Angeles Police Department. (Incidentally, Wean claims that Cohen, who specialized in sexually compromising Hollywood stars for the purpose of blackmail, was responsible for pushing Marilyn Monroe into Kennedy’s bed.)406 The major godfather to whom Cohen was accountable was Meyer Suchowljansky, known as Lansky, himself a dedicated Zionist and a generous donor to the Anti-Defamation League. (His granddaughter Mira Lansky Boland would become an ADL official.) So there is a direct line connecting Jack Ruby, via Mickey Cohen, to the Israeli terrorist ring, and in particular to Menachem Begin, a specialist in false flag terror. We also know that Ruby phoned Al Gruber, a Mickey Cohen associate, just after Oswald’s arrest; no doubt he received then “an offer he couldn’t refuse,” as they say in the underworld.407 As Gail Raven, a former girlfriend of Ruby and nightclub dancer in his Carousel Club, once said: “He had no choice. […] Jack had bosses, just like everyone else.”408 To top it all, Ruby’s defense lawyer William Kunstler wrote in his memoirs that Ruby told him he had killed Oswald “for the Jews,” and Ruby’s rabbi Hillel Silverman received the same confession when visiting Ruby in jail.409 According to a declassified US State Department document, Israeli Foreign Minister Golda Meir reacted to the news that Ruby had just killed Oswald with this sentence: “Ruby is alive, Oy vaaboy if we get caught!”410
Jack Ruby was also linked to Lyndon Johnson. Former Nixon operative Roger Stone said in an interview with The Daily Caller, that in November 1963, upon seeing Ruby on television, “Nixon said, ‘The damn thing is, I knew this Jack Ruby. Murray [Chotiner] brought him to me in 1947, said he was one of ‘Johnson’s boys’ and that LBJ wanted us to hire him as an informant to the [House Un-American Activities] Committee. We did.’ I think Nixon immediately recognized that LBJ was using one his operatives to do ‘clean up’ work on the murder of John Kennedy.”411 That Ruby acted on Johnson’s orders is a likely explanation of Ruby’s odd statements to the Warren Commission: “If you don’t take me back to Washington tonight to give me a chance to prove to the President that I am not guilty, then you will see the most tragic thing that will ever happen.” Ruby made himself clearer: “There will be a certain tragic occurrence happening if you don’t take my testimony and somehow vindicate me so my people don’t suffer because of what I have done.” He feared that his act would be used “to create some falsehood about some of the Jewish faith,” but added that “maybe something can be saved […], if our President, Lyndon Johnson, knew the truth from me.”412 Ruby seems to have wanted to send through the Commission a message to Johnson, or rather a warning that he might spill the beans about Israel’s involvement if Johnson did not intervene in his favor. We get the impression that Ruby expected Johnson to pardon him—just as in 1952 Johnson had managed, through corruption of the judge and threats to the jury, to keep his personal hitman Mac Wallace out of jail, with only a five-year suspended sentence, despite his conviction for first-degree murder, which is normally a sure ticket to death row in Texas.413 Ruby’s sense of betrayal would explain why in 1965, sentenced to life in prison, Ruby implicitly accused Johnson of Kennedy’s murder in a press conference: “If [Adlai Stevenson] was Vice-President there would never have been an assassination of our beloved President Kennedy.”414
Ruby’s statement to the Warren Commission was leaked to journalist Dorothy Kilgallen and published in the New York Journal American, August 18–20, 1964. Kilgallen also interviewed Jack Ruby and boasted afterwards of being about to “break the real story” and publish “the biggest scoop of the century” in a book titled Murder One. The book was never published: Kilgallen was found dead of an overdose of barbiturates and alcohol on November 8, 1965.415 As for Ruby, he died from a rapidly spreading cancer in 1967.
Kennedy’s death propelled Johnson to become head of state and, in the atmosphere of national crisis thus created, enabled him to bully both justice and the press while achieving his life’s ambition. Many Americans immediately suspected Johnson’s involvement in the assassination, especially after the publication in 1964 of a book by James Evetts Haley, A Texan Looks at Lyndon, which portrayed Johnson as deeply corrupt. According to his biographer Robert Caro, Johnson was a man thirsting “for power in its most naked form, for power not to improve the lives of others, but to manipulate and dominate them, to bend them to his will […], a hunger so fierce and consuming that no consideration of morality or ethics, no cost to himself—or to anyone else—could stand before it.”416 Throughout the years, a considerable amount of evidence has accumulated indicating that Johnson, alongside complicit Texas authorities, masterminded Kennedy’s assassination. This thesis is highly convincing.417
Complicity among high-ranking Navy officers is also certain. President Kennedy was pronounced dead at Parkland Hospital in Dallas, but his body was literally stolen at gunpoint from the appointed coroner, Earl Rose, and the autopsy was performed at Bethesda Naval Hospital in Washington by an inexperienced military doctor (James Humes), flanked by senior officers and federal agents. The autopsy report stated that the fatal bullet had entered the back of the skull, contradicting testimony of twenty-one members of the Dallas hospital staff who saw two entry bullet-wounds on the front of Kennedy’s body. Dr. Charles Crenshaw, for example, divulged in 1992: “From the damage I saw, there was no doubt in my mind that the bullet had entered his head through the front”—an account that exonerates Oswald, who was behind the president at the time of the shooting.418
Navy involvement links directly to Johnson, who had many shady business partners there. The Navy secretary appointed by Kennedy in January 1961 was Texan John Connally, who had obtained that position at the insistence of Johnson. When Connally resigned eleven months later to run for the Texas governorship, Johnson convinced Ken
nedy to name another of his Texan friends, Fred Korth. Connally and Korth were both closely associated with the Texas-based company General Dynamics, which was close to bankruptcy in 1961. Korth, who had been president of GD’s main bank, Continental National Bank, was forced to resign in November 1963, weeks before the Dallas coup, after the Justice Department implicated him in a fraud involving a $7 billion contract for the construction of 1,700 TFX military aircraft by General Dynamics (the biggest arms contract ever at this time). Johnson’s personal secretary, Bobby Baker (“my strong right arm,” as he liked to call him), was charged in the same case, and one of Baker’s associates, Don Reynolds, was testifying against him on November 22 before the Senate Rules Committee. He attested to having seen Baker with a suitcase containing $100,000 in kickbacks intended for Johnson, and further claimed to have been offered bribes for his silence.419
Because of this mounting scandal and other suspicions of corruption, Kennedy was determined to change vice-presidents for his upcoming reelection campaign, as part of “making government service an honorable career,” as he had confided to his longtime personal secretary Evelyn Lincoln.420 While in Dallas the day before the president’s visit for the Soda Bottlers’ Convention (as business attorney for Pepsi-Cola), Nixon publicized the rumor of Johnson’s removal, as the Dallas Morning News reported on November 22: “Nixon Predicts JFK May Drop Johnson.” Instead, Johnson became president that very day.
From the moment he became president while Kennedy’s body was still warm, Johnson used all the weight of his newly acquired authority to kill the investigation and impose the necessity of selling to the public the “lone gunman” theory. In order to do that, he didn’t try to convince people around him that this was the truth; rather, he claimed it was a matter of national security. Instead of playing down the importance of evidence linking Oswald to the USSR and communist Cuba, he dramatized its highly explosive nature, capable of igniting a new world war—a nuclear one. Hours after Oswald was arrested, Johnson insisted that all federal and state bodies quickly deny any rumor of foreign conspiracy and assert that Oswald had acted alone. Dallas District Attorney Henry Wade, Texas Attorney General Waggoner Carr, and Police Chief Jesse Curry all received phone calls from Johnson’s aide Cliff Carter (Johnson’s flunky ever since he had helped him steal his first Senate election in 1948), issued directly from Air Force One and then the White House. According to Wade, “[Carter] said that President Johnson felt any word of a conspiracy—some plot by foreign nations—to kill President Kennedy would shake our nation to its foundations. […] Washington’s word to me was that it would hurt foreign relations if I alleged conspiracy, whether I could prove it or not. I was just to charge Oswald with plain murder and go for the death penalty. Johnson had Cliff Carter call me three or four times that weekend.”
Johnson continued to raise the specter of nuclear war to silence the “rumors” of a communist conspiracy: “40 million American lives hung in the balance,” he kept repeating.421 Johnson used the same argument to direct the hand of the members of the Warren Commission formed on November 29 to appease public suspicion of a government cover-up. “We’ve got to be taking this out of the arena where they’re testifying that Khrushchev and Castro did this and did that and check us into a war that can kill 40 million Americans in an hour,” he explained to Senator Richard Russell in a telephone conversation on November 29, persuading him to join the commission.422
The man who played the key role in fabricating the government lie purveyed by the commission was Arlen Specter, the inventor of what came to be called the “magic bullet” theory: a single bullet supposed to have caused seven wounds to Kennedy and John Connally, who was sitting in front of him in the limousine, and later found in pristine condition on a gurney in Parkland Memorial Hospital in Dallas. Specter was still defending his theory in his 2000 autobiography entitled, with an ironic touch of chutzpah, Passion for Truth. At his death in 2012, Specter, the son of Russian Jewish immigrants, was officially mourned by the Israeli government as “an unswerving defender of the Jewish State,” and by AIPAC, as “a leading architect of the congressional bond between our country and Israel.”423
Many other Israeli sayanim can be identified in the story. (Sayanim is a term for Mossad assistants recruited from the Jewish Diaspora to help with operations outside Israel.) JFK’s trip to Dallas, being officially non-political, was sponsored by a powerful business group known as the Dallas Citizens Council, dominated by Julius Schepps, “a wholesale liquor distributor, member of every synagogue in town, and de facto leader of the Jewish community,” as described by Bryan Edward Stone in The Chosen Folks: Jews on the Frontiers of Texas.424 As Stone makes clear (after Natalie Ornish in Pioneer Jewish Texans, 1989425), wealthy Jews were highly influential in Texas, contrary to the popular image. Among other influential figures was advertising executive and PR man Sam Bloom, who chaired the “host committee” inviting Kennedy. According to former British intelligence officer Colonel John Hughes-Wilson, it was Bloom who “suggested that the police make Oswald accessible to the press. He also suggested—against the explicit advice of the local FBI—that they move the alleged assassin from the Dallas police station to the Dallas County Jail in order to give the newsmen a good story and pictures. Dallas FBI agent James Hosty always believed that Bloom and Ruby were in cahoots; when the police later searched Ruby’s home, they found a slip of paper with Bloom’s name, address and telephone number on it.”426
The Hijacked Conspiracy
I cannot, in the scope of this chapter, tackle all the questions raised by Kennedy’s assassination, nor mention all the hypotheses explored for fifty years.427 What must be clarified here is Oswald’s precise role in the plot. The real nature of his communist connections is unclear and probably ambivalent. Many testimonies from close friends and relatives indicate that Oswald had sincere sympathies for Marxism and for Castro’s regime in Cuba, but there is also evidence that, on his return from the USSR in June 1962, he was hired by the FBI for undercover work in communist circles. It ultimately makes little difference; what is clear is that Oswald’s communist connections were carefully monitored and recorded—for example, he was twice filmed handing out leaflets for the pro-Castro Fair Play for Cuba Committee in New Orleans—in order to be used on November 22, 1963, as his motive for shooting the president.
This raises the hypothesis that the assassination of Kennedy was designed as a false flag attack, meant to provide a false pretense for invading Cuba and overthrowing Castro, but that Johnson thwarted the second part of the plan. This is the thesis put forward by the majority of Kennedy conspiracy theorists, or at least by the most visible ones, such as James Douglass in JFK and the Unspeakable (2008): Kennedy, they say, fell victim to a plot by the anti-communist far-right in the military-intelligence complex with accomplices in the community of Cuban exiles. James Douglass and like-minded researchers do indeed demonstrate convincingly that Kennedy was in conflict with the old guard of the CIA and the Pentagon, since he had spoiled the Bay of Pigs operation (April 1961) by refusing to involve US military units. Worse, he had negotiated a peaceful outcome to the Cuban Missile Crisis with Nikita Khrushchev (October 1962) by pledging to dismantle the American missiles in Turkey in exchange for the withdrawal of Soviet missiles in Cuba.
Some of those researchers never attempt to explain why, if the Dallas shooting was staged as a pretense for invading Cuba, that invasion never took place. Those who address the question, like James Douglass, credit Johnson with preventing the invasion. Johnson, we are led to understand, had nothing to do with the assassination plot, and thwarted the plotters’ ultimate aim to start World War III. This is to ignore the huge amount of evidence gathered against Johnson for fifty years. It also begs another question: if Johnson resisted the hawks’ pressure to invade Cuba, why did he escalate the Vietnam War? In late 1963, Kennedy had decided to evacuate all US military personnel in Vietnam (who amounted to only 15,000 “military advisors”). On No
vember 11, he signed directive NSAM-263 for the removal of “1,000 U.S. military personnel by the end of 1963,” in anticipation for withdrawing “by the end of 1965 […] the bulk of U.S. personnel.”428 On November 21, the day before his fatal visit to Texas, he expressed his resolution to his assistant press secretary Malcolm Kilduff, after reading a report on the latest casualties: “After I come back from Texas, that’s going to change. There’s no reason for us to lose another man over there. Vietnam is not worth another American life.”429
On November 26, the day after Kennedy’s funeral, Johnson buried the NSAM-263 directive and replaced it with another, NSAM-273, which required the military to develop a plan “for the United States to begin carrying the war north,” including “different levels of possible increased activity,” and “military operations up to a line up to 50 kilometers inside Laos”—which violated the 1962 Geneva Accords on the neutrality of Laos.430 Johnson’s decision regarding Vietnam was a clear betrayal of Kennedy’s earlier policy, and the amazing expediency of his change of policy suggests premeditation. It has also been discovered that, in the weeks preceding the Kennedy assassination, Johnson and his business partners had invested heavily in the aircraft manufacturer Ling-Temco-Vought (LTV), founded by a close acquaintance of Johnson, James Ling, and headquartered in Dallas. In January 1964, LTV was to become one of the Pentagon’s biggest arms suppliers for the Vietnam War.431
From Yahweh to Zion Page 32