by H. N. Lloyd
The trial ended on Saturday the 1st of March 1969, the jury retired for just fifty-four minutes before returning with a rightful Not Guilty verdict for Clay Shaw, but of course the story doesn’t end with the end of the trial. Events move, and further evidence came forward which supported Garrison’s case in some areas. In 1979 the House Select Committee on Assassinations discovered a firm link between Lee Harvey Oswald and David Ferrie, both men had served in the same Civil Air Patrol defence unit, six witnesses came forward to testify to this, and in 1993 a photograph was discovered which actually showed the two men stood together at a barbeque. Clay Shaw denied having any links to the CIA throughout his trial. Yet, a firm link between Clay Shaw and the CIA was established when it was uncovered that a company called Permidex; that Shaw just happened to be a director of, was in fact a front for nefarious CIA activities in Europe. Subsequently the former Director of the CIA, Richard Helms, admitted that Clay Shaw had been a part-time contractor and had been given a ‘five agency clearance’, meaning he could be used by any of the intelligence services and be privy to ‘Top Secret’ information. It was all very interesting, but none of this proved Garrison’s theory; and as time went on and Garrison conducted more and more research into the assassination, the list of individuals and groups involved in the President’s death got bigger and bigger and more and more ludicrous. By the time Garrison died in 1992 he was claiming that individuals, groups and corporations as diverse as the Democratic Party, the NBC television company, Neo-Nazis’ and NASA were involved at some stage in the President’s death and its subsequent cover-up. It didn’t matter how mad Garrison was starting to sound, people had seen the movie JFK; which glorified his ridiculous prosecution of Clay Shaw, and for a generation Garrison’s version of events became the definitive account of President Kennedy’s murder.
Fat Cats With Oily Hands
This little theory starts with a mistress and an oil billionaire. The billionaire was oil magnate Clint Murchison, a man who was also a powerful political mover and shaker. He was a personal friend to J. Edgar Hoover, and in 1952 he had run a secret campaign for the FBI Director; to swing the Presidential election in favour of Dwight D. Eisenhower, by smearing his opponent Adlai Stevenson. Murchison also had connections to the Mob, he owned the $100 a night Del Charro hotel resort, where Sam Giancana and Santo Trafficante were said to stay every year free of charge. The mistress was Madeline Brown, President Lyndon Johnson’s secret lover for over twenty years, and allegedly the mother of Johnson’s illegitimate son. Brown was also a friend of the Murchison’s, and was attending a party at the Murchison’s palatial mansion the night before President Kennedy was assassinated. At that party were a plethora of powerful and politically motivated hawks, Murchison himself, J. Edgar Hoover, and future Presidents Richard Nixon and Lyndon Johnson, also there was another oil billionaire called H. L. Hunt, and the future Warren Commission member, President of the World Bank, John J. McCloy. These individuals all adjourned themselves from the party and went into a private conference room. After their private meeting; Johnson adamantly told his mistress, ‘After tomorrow those goddamn Kennedy’s will never embarrass me again’, before adding, ‘That’s no threat, that’s a promise’. When news of the assassination broke the following day; the staff employed at the Murchison mansion became appalled when Clint Murchison was overjoyed at the President’s death and ordered Champaign and caviar to celebrate.
So just why would a billionaire oil magnate organise the execution of a President? Well it all boils down to money, plain and simple, dirty money. More specifically the assassinations origins were wrapped up in a law known as the 27% Depletion Allowance. This was a legal loophole that enshrined a massive tax-break in law for oilmen. This complicated tax evasion scheme unique to the oil industry, when put simply, allowed oilmen to keep 27% of their profits tax free. The allowance therefore was quite clearly a giant never ending cash-cow for the greedy oil billionaires, and President Kennedy was threatening to stop it. You see President Kennedy was planning on dropping the oil depletion allowance to just 17%, and as a result costing oil firms billions in lost revenue. Some were predicting that as a result of Kennedy’s oil law reforms profits for some companies could be halved. There was also a rumour that the 17% tax break would only be an interim measure; until Kennedy could remove it completely from the statute books in his second term. Kennedy was, put simply, meddling with wrath of god sums of money. Guess what, as soon as President Johnson was in the oval office one of the first things he did was to reverse President Kennedy’s decision to drop the Depletion Allowance from 27 to 17%. The oil companies were saved from, if not financial ruin, at least an unhealthy drop in their eye watering profits.
The Wicked Widow and the New World Order
The Zapruder film is one of the most famous motion picture sequences in the history of the world. Twenty-six seconds of amateur 8mm film footage which we have all seen time and time again on documentaries and on the news, showing in brutal graphic detail the murder of a President and with him a nations hopes. Yet those images, which many of us know so well, are also used to try and prove theories which are deeply disturbing. There are those who claim that in those 486 frames lay secret truths which those behind the murder would sooner lay hidden forever more. The theory that is proposed by some who believe they have found the truth hidden in the Zapruder film; follow the age old adage, where is the best place to hide something? Why, in plain-sight of course. Therefore where was the best place to position an assassin that day in Dallas 1963? Well, sat right beside the President. Of course this proves a little problematic if the only person sat alongside the President on the day he died was his wife Jackie Kennedy, unless of course, unless...unless we think the unthinkable and consider the possibility that Jackie was the assassin hidden in plain-sight. But how could Jackie Kennedy have murdered her husband, when she was sat in plain view of hundreds of people? Secondly why would she murder her husband?
Well; I’ll deal with the how first, seeing as the why is the more complicated matter. The murder was allegedly committed quite simply, a small firearm hidden in the sleeve of Jackie Kennedy’s jacket. The night before the President’s murder, Jackie Kennedy had, for some reason, spent the night in a separate hotel room to her husband; this gave her ample opportunity to discreetly hide the small firearm. On Friday the 22nd of November 1963, as the first shot struck the President, Jackie Kennedy can be seen on the Zapruder film moving closer to her husband, but not to put her arms around him or comfort him, her hands stay firmly out of view, until the moment that the President’s head explodes. This was when Jackie has extracted the gun from its hiding place, discreetly palmed it, and discharged the gun into her husband’s skull. Jackie then jumps onto the bonnet of the car, where she either throws the gun away to be retrieved by one of her accomplices, or passes it to a Secret Service agent who was in cahoots with her.
Those who believe this theory state that the Zapruder film confirms their sickening suspicions; they claim that at roughly frame 315 on the Zapruder film; white smoke from a gun discharge briefly obscures Jackie Kennedy’s face. They further claim that the Zapruder film has been altered to take out a frame which should go between frames 326 and 327. This was the point where Jackie would have disposed of the gun. They state that between these two frames Jackie Kennedy’s arms move unnaturally quickly. Almost jumping from one position to another, in the space of 1/18th of a second, proving a frame is missing.
Why would Jackie Kennedy have been complicit in the murder of her husband? Well this is where things get really bizarre, and some of the wackier elements from the wider reaching world of conspiracy theories come out to play. There is the view that by Friday the 22nd of November 1963; Jackie Kennedy’s affair with her future husband, billionaire shipping magnate Aristotle Onassis, had already begun. In August and September of 1963 dark forces had started to gather around Jackie Kennedy, as she tried to recover from the death of her baby son, Patrick Bouvier Kennedy. Aristotle Onassis ask
ed Jackie if she would like to spend some time alone recuperating at one of his private retreats. Jackie had agreed, and whilst there it is alleged she was brainwashed using drugs and hypnotism into agreeing to murder her husband. You see Onassis was part of the powerful New World Order, the shadowy conglomeration of powerful individuals, corporations and politicians who want to control the whole world for maximum profit. The New World Order didn’t like President Kennedy because he was trying to end their war in Vietnam, which was far too profitable for the weapons manufacturers who made the guns and bullets and bombs, and aerospace developers who made the planes and helicopters used in battle. Oh, and not forgetting the chemical companies who made agent orange, and the pharmaceutical companies who made the painkillers used to treat the wounded, and the cotton industry who made the bandages to swaddle the wounds, oh, and not to mention the health insurance companies who made a profit off of the soldiers when they came home. War, what’s it good for? Well, it’s good for business that’s for sure, and so peace loving President Kennedy had to die. So when Jackie was sat next to her husband in the cavalcade, at a pre-arranged time, Governor Connally turned to Jackie, and he spoke an activation code, a word or phrase which turned on Jackie Kennedy’s hypnotic programming, and she blindly and obediently murdered her husband.
Now let me just say here and now that people becoming mindless killers because of hypnotic suggestion is not as far-fetched as it may seem. In 2011, TV presenter and ‘psychological illusionist’ Derren Brown set out to prove if such claims were real. At the outset Mr Brown stated that he did not believe that anyone could kill under hypnosis, he firmly believed that you couldn’t make someone do something that is fundamentally against their moral code. Nevertheless he used his knowledge of hypnotism and psychology to select from a group of one hundred ordinary people, someone he believed would be the perfect candidate for such a mind programming exercise. Over the course of several weeks Brown used hypnotism and psychological trickery to reprogram the subjects mind, so that they became an expert marksman, despite never having fired a gun in their life before. He programmed the ‘assassin’ to respond to certain sounds, words and patterns, so that when they came together the subject would enter into a ‘kill state’ and follow any murderous instructions he was given. When the kill state ended the assassin would immediately forget what he had just done. Now Derren Brown didn’t believe for a second that if asked to; the mentally reprogrammed individual would be willing to take a human life. Undaunted and expecting failure, they took the ‘assassin’ to a theatre to watch polymath, comedian, writer, actor and all round national treasure Stephen Fry give a talk. During the performance, the people sat around the reprogrammed ‘assassin’ played certain ringtones from their Mobile phones, wore certain patterned clothing, and said certain phrases that placed the ‘assassin’ in his hypnotic kill state. A stooge sat behind the ‘assassin’ then whispered into his ear, ‘the target is Stephen Fry’, at which point the ‘assassin’ pulled out a gun he had been given earlier in the evening, and emptied the gun into Stephen Fry’s chest; as he stood on stage. The ‘assassin’ then sat calmly back down in his seat, came out of his hypnotic trance and wandered why everyone was suddenly running around making such a fuss. Now, despite this being a television spectacular; and the gun being loaded with blank bullets, and the program obviously being designed in some ways to shock, the show did finally prove it was possible to take someone with the right sort of mindset, and programme them to kill without them knowing. So it stands to reason that the emotionally fragile Jackie Kennedy, so recently bereaved, could also have been programmed to kill. It doesn’t mean that she was though.
Of course if you still think that the President of the United States’ wife being brainwashed by a shadowy group of multinational conspirators is a little too impossible to believe, well, so do some of the conspiracy buffs. So, other ulterior motives have been put forward to support the theory that Jackie did it, theories that don’t hinge on her being a mind-controlled puppet. What if she had been blackmailed into doing it by the New World Order, or the CIA; or whoever? What if her blackmailers had told poor Jackie that if she didn’t murder her husband then her children would be murdered as well? So faced with an impossible choice between her husband and her children, Jackie decided to sacrifice her philandering husband instead of her beloved kiddies? Or how about her doing it purely for her love of Aristotle Onassis, because he’d asked her to do it? Of course you still have to believe in the shadowy and ever-present New World Order here, but it is a tad more believable than hypnosis and mind control. Or what if Jackie was secretly an undercover CIA operative, who was ordered by her CIA paymasters to murder her husband? What if President Kennedy had simply been an undercover assignment for Jackie all along? Or; how about Jackie colluding with the future President; the alcoholic Lyndon B. Johnson? They were after all both extremely bitter at being removed from the loop of true political power, both simply tokens, one a political token to appease the far right of the administration, one a token wife, seen as useful only as a piece of beauty to show off to the masses. Some have even forwarded the most unpalatable reason of all, the old anti-Semitic dogma, Jackie Kennedy was half-Jewish on her mother’s side, perhaps the whole damnable affaire was some Zionist plot, designed to get America a President who was more sympathetic to the Israeli cause?
Whatever reason you choose to believe, is there any real evidence to prove these wild theories? Well, not really. In fact none at all, I would even go so far as to say that there is one major factor that strongly goes against this theory. There were hundreds of people who were present that day in Dealey Plaza, people who saw what happened with their own eyes. Millions of people have subsequently seen the Zapruder film. If Jackie Kennedy really had produced a gun from her sleeve, shot her husband at point blank range, and then thrown the gun away to be retrieved by an accomplice, then surely someone somewhere would have seen it, either that day, or found clearer, stronger evidence hidden in the Zapruder film, but no one did, or has. I think this theory simply much maligns the memory of a great woman who suffered two terrible tragedies in 1963, and has had those events twisted to suit the ideations of people who are desperately grasping at straws in the dark.
The Presidents
Yes, the finger of suspicion has even been pointed at the men who followed Kennedy into the West Wing. President’s themselves have been accused of complicity in Kennedy’s assassination, these are all tales of backstabbing, corruption, self-aggrandisement, profiteering and betrayal, but unlike the normal day in the life tales of a politician; these stories contain more than their fair share of literal bloody murder:
Lyndon Baines Johnson: Johnson was the man who arguably benefitted the most from President Kennedy’s death, at least publically, he was propelled from the token office of Vice President, a largely ceremonial role where he allegedly spent most of his days drunk and bitching about his lack of influence, and his hatred of the President, to suddenly being the most powerful leader in the Western world. Johnson was a career politician, a man adept at handling those around him and manipulating them into doing what he wanted, something he called ‘the Johnson Treatment’. Using his southern charm, a dollop of charisma and where necessary blackmail and outright threats. He was corrupt, open to bribery and regularly rigged elections via tampered ballot boxes and having the dead miraculously vote for him. He had stabbed so many people in the back on his rise up the political ladder; that by the time he became President he virtually had no friends left on Capitol Hill. The Attorney General, Bobby Kennedy, once commented that Johnson was a ‘mean bitter vicious...animal’. Johnson undid all of Kennedy’s work once he was in office, he took America from an ‘advisory’ role in Vietnam, with all American soldier due to shortly return home, to having committed 55,000 troops to the country in a bloody and ultimately pointless war by the time he left power in 1969. Wherever he went on the campaign trail; Johnson found himself tormented by anti-war protestors chanting the childish rhyme ‘H
ey! Hey! LBJ! How Many Kids Have You Killed Today?!!’ Under Johnson’s administration drug use exploded as soldiers came back hooked on smack, and crime rates soared as they turned to nefarious activities to pay for their fix. As a result cities like New York began to descend into hell, becoming virtual no go areas for anyone but the hardiest of residents. This was in no small part thanks to Johnson putting a stop to Kennedy’s war against the mafia, consolidating their powers; and as a result helping to create some of the worst excesses of the country’s growing drugs problem. Johnson also ended the plans to tear the CIA into a thousand pieces and scatter it to the wind. Indeed when many people think of Kennedy’s time in office as being that of a lame duck Presidency, all style and no substance, this is in a large part due to Johnson undoing many of the reforms President Kennedy had set in motion. Yet this is not to say that Johnson was a completely morally reprehensible person, lauding Conservative politics with a cruel capital C. Many historians view Johnson as one of the great American liberal reformers. It was Johnson who consolidated the civil rights reform started by President Kennedy, so that African Americans no longer had to sit at the back of buses, use separate toilets, or use separate water fountains, they could now dare to dream of lying on the same hotel sheets as a white man, and had greater opportunities to vote. President Johnson introduced the Medicare system to a country that had long been scared by insurance companies into believing that a free healthcare system akin to Britain’s National Health Service; was the devils work. Johnson ensured that the elderly and most vulnerable in society would get access to free healthcare for the first time. Johnson also passed the Economic Opportunities Act, which started the ‘War on Poverty’, and in conjunction he introduced the Food Stamp Act, which ensured that the poorest would no longer starve. Johnson’s tenure as President saw poverty rates drop from 17% to 11%, still a shockingly high figure for one of the world’s richest nations, but still, such a sharp drop in numbers was no small potatoes. He introduced the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, which ensured that children would no longer receive an educational standard solely based upon their family’s income. He also dared to fly in the face of the politically powerful National Rifle Association by implementing the Gun Control Act, sensibly placing the most wide ranging restrictions on gun ownership in American history. He is also the President to pardon more people from death row than any other. Johnson therefore was a complex man, a great reformer who made bad decisions which cost lives, damaged the societies he wanted to help the most, and helped to strengthen the positions of the organised criminals his predecessor had fought so hard to bring to book. A complex man, but was he complicit in murder?