Notes on the Assassination of John F. Kennedy 50 Years Later
by Bert Sacks
We can learn the essential facts of the killing of President Kennedy in Dallas from just two sources. The first source is the book JFK and the Unspeakable: why he died and why it matters by Jim Douglass. The second is the November 25, 2013, issue of Time magazine. Yes, Time magazine!
It’s not that Time intended to inform us of what actually happened 50 years ago in their commemorative issue “The Moment that Changed America.” The blurb on the cover gives away their intention: “Inside — The Conspiracy Industry.” This, despite the disclaimer in the article, “I don’t mean to belittle the passion of the Kennedy investigators when I say their search has become an industry …” [Much!]
The magazine, a bastion of the establishment’s viewpoint on events, devotes eight pages to a story titled “Broken Trust: Fifty years after JFK’s assassination, conspiracy theories still haunt the national psyche. Will the case ever be closed?” It follows with another three pages of a sketch of a man called “The Debunker: One Man Fights the Skeptics” (implying here is a heroic figure who dares to challenge the entire conspiracy industry to which, sadly, in Time’s view, 60% to 80% of Americans have succumbed).
Within the “Debunker” article is a half-page photo of Kennedy’s bloody shirt with this caption: “The Shirt: A bullet hit Kennedy in the back about six inches from the top of his collar. The shirt now sits in the National Archives. Note the monogram on the left sleeve.” In the previous long article, Kennedy’s wounds are described: “At Parkland Memorial Hospital, doctors found the President still breathing reflexively and rushed to open a passage in his windpipe that obscured the bullet wound in his throat.”
If Time magazine wanted to rebut seriously any conspiracy, it had to deal with this “magic bullet.”
Viewers who watched the Oliver Stone movie JFK will remember the dramatic ending courtroom scene. That’s when attorney Jim Garrison challenges the government’s story that Lee Harvey Oswald did all the killing with just three bullets. The fatal shot hit JFK in the head; another missed, hitting the street. That left one bullet. According to Time, fired from a downward trajectory it hit Kennedy in the back “about six inches from the top of his collar” (page 51). Also according to Time, it exited through Kennedy’s throat (page 46). Then that same bullet, traveled upward, waited in mid-air for over a second, turned around again, and descended to wound Governor Connally in the back, hand, and leg.
Bullets do not do that. Therefore there were more than three shots. Therefore there was a conspiracy.
This is the simplest evidence I can think of to disprove the Warren Commission’s conclusion that Lee Oswald was the lone assassin. The Commission had to know – as Time has to know – that a bullet fired from above, entering six inches below the shoulder cannot exit through the throat. That leaves the question, Why did the Warren Commission – followed by Time magazine – ignore this obvious fact?
To answer this question one should best turn to the book JFK and the Unspeakable.
If there was a conspiracy, might Oswald still have been involved? Who was Lee Harvey Oswald?
According to the Warren Commission Report, Oswald went to the American Embassy in Moscow in 1959 to renounce his U.S. citizenship, saying “my allegiance is to the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.” He also said that “he would make known to [the Soviets] all information concerning the Marine Corps and his specialty therein.” That was as radar operator at Atsugi Air Force Base in Japan, where the CIA’s top secret U-2 spy planes took off to overfly the Soviet Union and China. At Atsugi’s radar control room, Oswald had a “crypto” clearance, higher than a “top secret” clearance. (page 37)
(See pages in JFK and the Unspeakable for details and meticulous endnotes – four endnotes just here.)
So far this defection would seem to be in line with the Commission and media characterization of Oswald as a pro-Soviet disaffected young man. But when Oswald returns to the U.S. – after 2-1/2 years as a highly publicized defector to the Soviet Union – he is given a loan by the State Department and helped to resettle in Fort Worth, Texas, where he is assisted by intelligence asset George de Mohrenschildt at the instigation of Dallas CIA agent J. Walton Moore. (page xxii)
Most remarkably, he is not threatened with any legal proceedings at all for the secret information he told U.S. Consul Richard E. Snyder at the Moscow Embassy that he intended to give to the Soviets. Snyder – a “former” CIA employee who “resigned” to enter the U.S. foreign service – was the “sole officer handling the Oswald case” and treated “Oswald as a privileged visitor to the Moscow Embassy” according to Joan Hallett, a receptionist at the embassy. (page 403, endnote 156)
To believe that Oswald was the lone assassin of JFK, one must believe that a bullet can behave in the way the “magic bullet” was supposed to. To believe that Oswald was a pro-Soviet Marxist, one must believe that a former U.S. Marine, with higher than top-secret security clearance, can defect to the Soviet Union to divulge intelligence secrets and not return to any legal consequences whatsoever.
The “magic bullet” was obviously an impossible fiction created to maintain the story of a lone gunman. Lee Harvey Oswald was obviously a U.S. intelligence asset sent to the Soviet Union as a false defector.
There are, of course, many more pieces of evidence to document the conspiracy that the large majority of Americans believe occurred in the assassination of JFK in Dallas. But until a serious rebuttal to these two points is offered, I believe a majority of Americans will continue to have a “broken trust.” That is what Time magazine titled their lead story of the assassination. It is a broken trust in our government officials (as in the Warren Commission) and in our media (as in Time‘s recent coverage).
Some might ask, Why does it matter? That was all 50 years ago. But was it really?
It is a serious issue when the public continues to lose trust in what our public figures and our mass media say. And just as significant, what our public figures and mass media often fail to say at all.
In the issue I’ve dealt with extensively, Madeleine Albright, Thomas Friedman, and Kenneth Pollack all blame Saddam Hussein for deaths of Iraqi children. They say he’s responsible because he refused to be coerced. Albright, et al, said he had to disarm (which he had) but failed to say the U.S. also required he be overthrown before we’d end UN sanctions. Either way it’s wrong to coerce by causing kids’ deaths.
But to bring the issue of broken trust and “the unspeakable” even more up to date, there is another impossible fiction we are told to believe. Namely we are asked to believe that a 47-story steel-framed skyscraper can collapse from regular office fires – something that has never happened before or since.
Yet that’s what our government tells us happened to World Trade Center Building 7, at 5:20 in the afternoon of September 11th, 2001. If you have never heard of WTC 7, that is not surprising. But over 2,000 architects and engineers have – and don’t believe the government story – and have joined in a call for an independent investigation of the collapse of all three buildings in lower Manhattan on 9/11.
See tinyurl.com/EdAsnerOnPBS to watch the collapse of WTC 7. See ae911truth.org for more details. And see tinyurl.com/AliceWalkerOn911 to read Alice Walker’s poem calling 9/11 a “humongous lie.” As the Vietnam War followed Kennedy’s assassination, so the War on Terror followed September 11th.
On November 28, 1961, President Kennedy officiated at the dedication of the new CIA headquarters in Langley. At the conclusion of the ceremony, a curtain was drawn back to reveal a Bible verse chiseled in granite, still today on the entrance: “And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.”
We should take this CIA quote very seriously. The converse is also true: If others can keep us from knowing the truth – either with false stories or simply with confusion and fear – we will not be free.