The Man Who Killed Kennedy

  The real Oswald had credible links to both the CIA and the Mafia, but those would lead to a palpable conspiracy in a pop culture book, which does not want to follow leads. The lack of any plausible reason or evidence that Oswald was about to kill the president leaves O’Reilly with the task of filling in a book with details that lend context to Kennedy’s life. We learn about Kennedy as a father, a playboy, and a politician. We learn about his wife Jackie as a fashion idol, an interior decorator, and a jilted wife. We learn nothing about the policies and pacts that led to Kennedy’s death.

  It is baffling, but Killing Kennedy actually develops conspiratorial figures. Lyndon Johnson, whom we know had the motive, means, and opportunity to pull off the assassination, is painted as a ruthless figure by O’Reilly.

  “The loneliest man in Camelot wants to be president of the United States,” O’Reilly writes of Johnson, correctly assessing him as a desperate man sapped of power.

  “What Lyndon wants, above all else, is a return to power,” he continues. “He adores power. And he will endure anything to know that heady sensation once again. Anything.”16

  The endurance that O’Reilly refers to is not the important role that the vice president played in the conduction and coverup of the assassination; it is a speaking engagement in St. Augustine, Florida, to celebrate the founding of the nation’s oldest city. This is the power play that O’Reilly believes could help put the power back into LBJ’s hands. That is preposterous.

  O’Reilly further declaws the vice president by incorrectly assessing his demeanor abroad as an ambassador. To O’Reilly, Johnson enjoys his assignment and begins to accept his designation as vice president:

  “In Washington, his craving for authority has many in the White House referring to him as Seward, a reference to Abraham Lincoln’s power-hungry secretary of state,” writes O’Reilly. “But on the road, Johnson truly does have power. He speaks for the president, but just as often veers off message to speak his own mind, which are moments he relishes.”17

  In fact, Johnson hated the diplomatic missions. Loaded on Cutty Sark, flying from country to country, he begrudgingly accepted what little power was afforded him. He would remember his vice presidency “filled with trips … chauffeurs, men saluting, people clapping … in the end, it is nothing.”18

  O’Reilly admits that Johnson was also likely to be dropped from the ticket in ’64—and then promptly leaves this Texas-sized insult as if it would not torture Johnson to his dying breath.

  Like Caro, O’Reilly does not begin to connect the dots between Johnson’s associates and the ways they benefited or survived due to the assassination. Hoover, who had been Johnson’s neighbor and friend in Washington for decades, was able to retain his employment as director of the FBI. O’Reilly accurately described the director as a believer in the conspiracy. Of course he was—he knew the plot. O’Reilly actually seizes Hoover’s and Johnson’s roles in the assassination as an opportunity to cover up the coverup.

  “J. Edgar Hoover said ‘I want this investigation,’” O’Reilly said recently. “So, he went to LBJ, then just sworn in as president, and said, ‘There’s a conspiracy.’ Hoover was the first conspiratorialist because he wanted to control the investigation, and if there were a conspiracy to kill the president, that’s a federal crime. LBJ gave him the investigation.”19

  In fact, the investigation was brought under federal control to prevent anyone from thinking outside the government’s narrative. Hoover and Johnson both needed control over a singular investigation in order to guide the outcome. In a telephone conversation with his attorney, Abe Fortas, in the days following the assassination, Johnson questioned the legality of the Commission and attempted to give its intent a patriotic spin:

  LBJ: Let’s think along that line now. Can we do this by executive order?

  FORTAS: Yes, sir.

  LBJ: Do we infringe upon the Congress in any way in doing it? Reflect on them in any way?

  FORTAS: No, sir. I think on the contrary, you know all these editorials are saying this would be a shame to have all these investigations. I think the country will think the Congress had started acting wisely for a change.20

  O’Reilly does not bother to touch on recordings of Hoover and Johnson talking on the telephone about multiple Oswald sightings in Mexico City while they were collecting evidence to convince America that Oswald had worked alone. Even though Hoover knows there is a conspiracy, he also knows it is a part of his job to quash any mention of it.

  O’Reilly also acknowledges the connection between the Kennedys and organized crime, but passes off the Mafia’s campaign contribution pact as “rumors.” In reality, there is more substantial evidence to back up the claim of a Kennedy—Mafia pact than there is to convict Oswald as the killer.

  O’Reilly writes as if he knew that there is more to the story, that Oswald was a stooge. In his assessment of Oswald’s “friend” George de Mohrenschildt, O’Reilly pegs him as a man who “may” have CIA connections. George de Mohrenschildt was a close friend of George H. W. Bush.

  In promoting the book, O’Reilly admitted that de Mohrenschildt in fact did have CIA connections. “We couldn’t find out this man George de Mohrenschildt with CIA contacts, what he was doing with Oswald,” O’Reilly said. “Oswald as I said, loser, lowest rung. This guy [de Mohrenschildt] is an aristocratic Russian with CIA connections. Why was he around? We couldn’t really nail that down.”21

  De Mohrenschildt himself admittedly was friendly with and did freelance work for the agency.

  O’Reilly also admits to de Mohrenschildt’s helping Oswald get a job at Jaggars-Chiles-Stovall, a company that did photographic work for the US government, particularly in relation to photographs taken by U-2 spy planes. This was a topic familiar to Oswald. As a radar technician in the Marine Corps, at Atsugi Naval Air Station in Japan, Oswald was privy to many covert CIA U-2 spy missions.22

  O’Reilly also neglects to mention de Mohrenschildt’s connections to Johnson and several Texas businessmen. Again, the dots are not connected.

  Speaking in Budapest, eminent American linguist Noam Chomsky fielded questions about conspiracy theories. When his answer touched upon the energy which, over the years, has gone into finding out who had killed President Kennedy, Chomsky was dismissive.

  “Who knows and who cares,” he replied. “Plenty of people get killed all the time. Why does it matter that one of them happened to be John F. Kennedy? If there was some reason to believe there was a high-level conspiracy, it might be interesting, but the evidence against that is overwhelming. And after that, it’s just a matter of if it happened to be a jealous husband or the Mafia or someone else, what difference does it make? It’s just taking energy away from serious issues to the ones that don’t matter.”23

  Chomsky mentions overwhelming evidence against a high-level conspiracy, but supplies no evidence to back it up. He fleetingly mentions the Mafia as a potential tie to the assassination—the same Mafia that had, in fact, connected interests with the CIA and many ties to Jack Ruby, the assassin of Lee Harvey Oswald. Oswald had an extensive file, the contents of which were manipulated, maneuvered, and hidden throughout the CIA.

  Oswald, whose story almost perfectly mirrored that of suspected CIA dupe Thomas Arthur Vallee.

  It is important to ask “Why?” when looking into the Kennedy assassination. Why did John and Bobby Kennedy, after living a privileged life, raised by a father who knew how the game was played, suddenly, when power was acquired, attempt to change the game? This question leads to significant events: The firing of Dulles, the crusade against organized crime, the attempt to unseat and neutralize Hoover, the attempt to dismantle the CIA, the initiatives taken against the oil-depletion allowance, the pursuit of unseating Vice President Johnson through the multiple charges brought against him.

  Why care about a murder that happened fifty years ago? The Kennedy assassination goes hand-in-hand with the popular distrust of the government that sprung up in the late 1960s. The as
sassination of Kennedy dug the foundation of distrust; the lies that landed us in Vietnam War and the Watergate breakin cemented it.

  In order to win back the trust of the people, it is the government’s responsibility to come clean.

  When speaking about the Warren Commission, Bobby Kennedy maintained that the conclusions didn’t matter. “He said he didn’t give a damn whether there was any investigation,” Nicholas Katzenbach said. “‘What’s the difference? My brother’s dead.’ That’s what he would say to me.”24

  Bobby had handed a similar line to news producer Don Hewitt, but the notion that Kennedy didn’t care was easily dismissed.

  “I never believed that Bobby believed ‘What difference does it make?’” Hewitt said. “I’ve always believed that he knew something he didn’t want to share with me or anyone else.”25

  Bobby Kennedy was tortured. He knew that in his attempt to reform the CIA and the FBI, while attempting to disable the Mafia and Lyndon Johnson, something went terribly wrong. Because of Bobby’s crusade, his brother was shot and killed in Dallas. Because of the crusade, Bobby himself was killed five years later.

  “History is hard to know,” wrote Hunter S. Thompson, reflecting on the Sixties, “because of all the hired bullshit, but even without being sure of ‘history,’ it seems entirely reasonable to think that every now and then, the energy of a whole generation comes to a head in a long fine flash, for reasons that nobody really understands at the time—and which never explain, in retrospect, what actually happened.”26

  Comedian Mort Sahl also articulates the spirit of the Sixties. Sahl, who worked as a joke writer for John F. Kennedy and later became a Warren Commission critic, had perhaps the best forum to express his opinions: a national television show.

  “It isn’t any fun to awaken America now,” Sahl said on The Mort Sahl Show. “It’s like walking into a party—everybody’s been drunk for 175 years, and you’re getting the tab for the liquor. But we’ve gotta keep this thing going. As I always remind you … America is at stake.”27

  NOTES

  1. Crenshaw, Trauma Room One, pgs. 131–132.

  2. Ibid, pgs. 132–133.

  3. Crenshaw, Assassination Science, pg. 41.

  4. Ibid.

  5. www.youtube.com/watch?v=oqTMELBh23g.

  6. ChicagoTribune.com June 20, 1997. “Kings Son Accuses LBJ of Conspiracy.”

  7. Sample and Collom, The Men on the Sixth Floor, pg. 167.

  8. Belzer, Hit List, pg. 279.

  9. Ibid.

  10. Imus in the Morning, October 2, 2012.

  11. O’Reilly, Killing Kennedy, pg. 152.

  12. Warren Commission Testimony of Malcolm Howard Price, Jr.

  13. O’Reilly, Killing Kennedy, pg. 265.

  14. North, pg. 390.

  15. “The View,” 10-09-2012.

  16. O’Reilly, Killing Kennedy, pg. 145.

  17. Ibid, pg. 92.

  18. New Yorker, “The Transition, April 2, 2012.

  19. Imus in the Morning, October 2, 2012.

  20. Beschloss, Taking Charge, pg. 50.

  21. “The View,” 10-9-2012.

  22. Newman, Oswald and the CIA, pgs. 3–42.

  23. Noam Chomsky speaking at the Kossuth Klub, Budapest, www.youtube.com/watch?v=m7SPm-HFYLo&feature=related.

  24. Talbot, Brothers, pg. 277.

  25. Ibid, pg. 308.

  26. Thompson, Hunter S. “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas,” pg. 67.

  27. Kelin, Praise from a Future Generation, pg. 328.

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