The Assassination of Innocence

I have often talked to my wife about Jackie Kennedy. Not only the horror of the actual moments of the assassination, and the turmoil that followed that day; not only the devastating grief she suffered at the death of her beloved spouse; but the fact that she had to live with the knowledge that the murder was carried out by a group of individuals both inside and outside of the government, and that they got away with it.

Last November 22nd commemorated the 50th anniversary of the assassination of the 35th President of the United States, John Fitzgerald Kennedy. In that regard, I just finished reading They Killed Our President, by Governor Jesse Ventura, and investigative journalists, Dick Russell and David Wayne.

This book was like preaching to the choir. I have always been satisfied in my mind that the assassination was a conspiracy. 

An assassination, when you strip away the political component, is essentially a murder, and the investigation that follows is treated as such. Forensic evidence is collected and analyzed, witnesses are debriefed, suspects are interrogated, documents are examined.

The plain fact is that the government's official conclusions as codified in the twenty-six volume  Warren Commission Report, do not fit the facts.

Before I go further, at the beginning of his book, Governor Ventura states that before he goes further, there's something that must be said:

The word "conspiracy" has been much-maligned and that has apparently been very intentional. When you watch mainstream media, look very closely at how they ridicule that particular word. It's only a word, but the mere mention of it now stirs up childish controversy rather than intelligent inquiry. The organized semantic ridicule of "conspiracy buffs" who "come out of the woodwork" with their "kooky theories" is a transparent effort at the marginalization of unwelcome critical thinking. 

The basis of Mr. Ventura's contention that the assassination was indeed a "conspiracy" is summed up in the subtitle of the book - 63 Reasons To Believe There Was A Conspiracy To Assassinate JFK. If you wish to review all 63 reasons, including source references, footnotes, links to youtube videos, extensive attributions, and addresses for documentation available on the Internet, read the book.

There are a few key points, however, that I do wish to mention, but before I do, please consider the following definition of the word "conspiracy": "a secret plan by two or more persons to do something unlawful or harmful." That's all it takes for the word "conspiracy" to accurately and correctly apply.

All of the issues I am about to delineate, clearly support the "conspiracy theory," although they have been contested for over fifty years, and continue to be so today. To me, the "debunking" of the conspiracy theory by so-called scholars and government officials, fits the definition of a "conspiracy" in and of itself.

The basic arguments on each side can be summed up thusly.

Either Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone for unspecified reasons, holed up on the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository, and using a cheap bolt-action Italian rifle, fired three times, down and from the rear, missing on his first shot, then reacquiring a moving target and unleashing the kill shot that vaporized the President's brain.

Or else there was at least one other person involved, and that would make it a conspiracy.

The infamous Zapruder film is available on youtube as raw footage, enhanced footage, and enhanced frame by frame. If you care to watch it, all versions show the same thing - the President slumping forward and Jackie turning towards her husband, then the President being jerked upright as a pink mist blows out the back of his head.

Medical testimony from doctors, nurses and Secret Service agents at Dallas' Parkland Hospital trauma center, described the wound in grisly detail:

Secret Service Special Agent Clint Hill: The right rear portion of his head was missing. It was lying in the rear seat of the car. His brain was exposed. Mrs. Kennedy was completely covered with blood.

Nurse Diana Bowron: There was a gaping wound in the back of his head. It was gone. Gone. There was nothing there. Just a big gaping hole. The wound was so large I could put my whole fist into it. There was no damage to the front of his face.

Nurse Pat Hutton: A doctor asked me to place a pressure dressing on the head wound. This was of no use, however, because of the massive opening on the back of the head.

Doctor Ronald Jones: There was a large defect in the back side of the head as the President lay on the cart with what appeared to be some brain hanging out of this wound.

Doctor Kemp Clark: I then examined the wound in the back of the President's head. This was a large, gaping wound in the right posterior part, with cerebral and cerebellar tissue being damaged and exposed.

The only wound to the front of the President's head was a small, smooth hole in his upper right forehead at the hairline. The attending physicians also noted an "entry wound" in the President's throat, indicating that at least two shots were fired from in front. The first thing you learn in CSI 101 is the difference between an entry wound and an exit wound, an entry wound being small and clean, and an exit wound being large and messy.

To truly understand the assassination, it is essential to have at least a rudimentary grasp of the context of the times. Kennedy had just weathered not one, but two incidents that brought the planet to the very brink of nuclear annihilation -  the "Bay of Pigs" Invasion, and the Cuban Missile Crisis.

The Bay of Pigs Invasion was a failed military invasion of Cuba undertaken by the CIA-sponsored Cuban counter-revolutionary paramilitary group, Brigade 2506. On 17 April 1961, Brigade 2506 intended to overthrow the left wing government. Launched from Guatemala, the invading force was defeated within three days by the Cuban armed forces, under the direct command of Prime Minister Fidel Castro.

The Cuban Missile Crisis was a thirteen day standoff between the United States and the Soviet Union, with total nuclear war hanging in the balance. On 14 October 1962, A U-2 spy plane confirmed that nuclear missile silos were being built in Cuba. Kennedy's military advisers recommended an attack on Cuba, but Kennedy opted for a military blockade of the island instead. Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev said that the blockade "constituted an act of aggression propelling human kind into the abyss of a world nuclear-missile war."

Confounded by their generals, Kennedy and Khrushchev entered into tense  back channel negotiations to attempt to resolve the crisis. Meanwhile, however, several Soviet ships tried to run the blockade, and a U-2 spy plane was shot down by Cuban anti-aircraft batteries, actions that could have resulted in immediate retaliation from the US military.

The confrontation ended on October 28, 1962, when the President and the Soviet Premier reached an agreement. The Soviets would dismantle their offensive weapons in Cuba in exchange for a US public declaration never to invade Cuba. The blockade was recalled.

After these two incidents, Kennedy felt he now had a good enough working relationship with the Soviet Premier that a test ban treaty and disarmament talks could succeed. This put him at great odds with the Pentagon and the Joint Chiefs, as well as their counterparts in the Military-Industrial complex.

Kennedy was also planning a change to the tax code that would eliminate the "oil depletion allowance" - a gigantic tax break for the oil and gas industry. In his thesis, "Texas Oil Men," John Simkin notes:

Just before John F. Kennedy was assassinated he upset people like Clint Murchison and H.L. Hunt when he talked about plans to submit to Congress a tax reform plan designed to produce about $185,000,000 in additional revenues by changes in the favorable tax treatment until then accorded the gas-oil industry.

As if all this weren't enough, JFK's brother Robert, in his capacity as Attorney General, was waging war on the Mafia. Ventura writes:

Under his directorship, for the first time in history, the Department of Justice launched a serious offensive against organized crime, using every legal device in the book (and a few that weren't) to get them off the streets and limit their abilities to conduct what had been "business as usual."

In the Introduction, Governor Ventura tells us that he has "decided to break with convention" and begin the book with his conclusions, to wit that "John F. Kennedy was murdered by a conspiracy involving disgruntled CIA agents, anti-Castro Cubans, and members of the Mafia."

The rest of the book is devoted to presenting his proofs and arguments.

One refrain that Governor Ventura makes throughout the book, is a quote by Colonel L. Fletcher Prouty, the Air Force liaison to the CIA for covert operations, who says, "When you look for a conspiracy, look for the violation of Standard Operating Procedures."

Let's start with that.

During the year 1963, the Secret Service became aware of three separate threats to the President's life - in Chicago, Miami and Tampa. In each case, heightened security precautions were implemented. The Secret Service was also aware that a threat against the President existed in Dallas. The Secret Service advance team secured the planned route that the presidential motorcade would travel.

Against established protocol, four days before the President's arrival, orders were given for the route to be changed. The new route would lead through Dealey Plaza, an area that could not be secured in time; and also against procedures, the new route would require the motorcade to navigate a turn of more than ninety degrees. Then to make matters worse, the new route was published in the newspapers.

The rules concerning the configuration of a presidential motorcade are clearly laid out: two police motorcycles, followed by a Secret Service lead car; then nine police motorcycles bracketing the presidential limousine in a wedge formation with one motorcycle riding point, a motorcycle to the right and left of the front of the presidential limousine, a motorcycle on both sides of the limousine itself, and two motorcycles each to the right and left of the rear of the car; then the presidential limousine is closely followed by a Secret Service tail car. Additionally, the back of the presidential limousine is equipped with a riding platform for two Secret Service agents.

However, as soon as Air Force One touched down at Dallas' Love Field airport, orders were issued to break procedure and reconfigure the motorcade. The new formation called for five police motorcycles to lead the parade with the Secret Service lead car just behind; a wide gap would be allowed to develop between the lead car and the presidential limousine which would be flanked by only two police motorcycles to the rear of the president's car. The Secret Service tail car lagged far behind. Then in a move that did not sit well with President Kennedy's personal Secret Service detail, the two agents were ordered off the riding platform of the presidential limousine and repositioned to the running boards of the tail car.

This formation essentially left the President and First Lady completely vulnerable, or as Mr. Ventura puts it, "that made President Kennedy a sitting duck."

After the assassination, Secret Service shift supervisors and other officials actually tried to blame President Kennedy himself for the change in orders, but the Secret Service charter by law states that no one, not even the president, can overrule the Secret Service on matters of security.

Okay, now take a deep breath, we're about to take a look at the white elephant in the room. And that white elephant is a five-foot nine-inch, one-hundred and thirty-five pound man named Lee Harvey Oswald.


From the very first page, Ventura challenges us to act as jurors, while he creates reasonable doubt, playing the part of Oswald's defender - truly the devil's advocate. In this review, I have only scratched the surface of all the information that Ventura lays before us. By the same token, Ventura only scratches the surface of all the information out there.

If you have ten years to spend, you can go online and read everything there is on Lee Oswald. The bulk of Ventura's book is devoted to outlining Oswald's movements, associations, ties to the CIA as an operative, his dealings with pro and anti-Castro groups, and even his friendship with none other than one Jack Ruby.

Colonel C. William Bishop, the highest-ranking military intelligence officer assigned to the CIA's assassination squad, Executive Action, said, "I'll tell you one damn thing. Whoever set up that poor little son of a bitch did a first-class job."

In a nutshell (or lone-nutshell if you wish), Lee Harvey Oswald could NOT have acted alone. Despite the findings of the Warren Commission, you can't make it work. Everything is wrong. The forensic evidence does not place him in the "sniper's nest" on the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository. The ballistics show that the type of bullet fired from Oswald's supposed rifle could not have been the bullet that obliterated Kennedy's brain.

Oswald supposedly walked out of the School Book building, after stopping at the lunchroom on the second floor where he was seen by witnesses, including police officers, calmly drinking a bottle of Coca Cola that he purchased from a vending machine. He then made his way across town where he encountered and killed Dallas Police Officer J.D. Tippit, and then strolled into a nearby movie theater.

When arrested at the theater, Oswald did in fact have a gun. Officer Tippit was shot with an automatic. Oswald was carrying a revolver. When witnesses to Officer Tippit's murder were shown a picture of Oswald, they stated that he was not the assailant.

Less than thirty-six hours into the case,  officials told the press that, "the city police, working with the Secret Service and the Federal Bureau of Investigation  had the case against Oswald 'cinched'."

Governor Ventura goes to great lengths to show the world of "smoke and mirrors" in which Oswald moved. Again, I'm not going to get into that here. What I will mention though, is what happened two days later when Oswald was being transferred from Dallas Police Headquarters to the County Jail.

Surrounded by law enforcement officials (who Ventura points out, were all dressed in black or blue suits, except for the sheriff that Oswald was handcuffed to, who stood taller than the men around him and was wearing a white suit, including a white Stetson), a short man, neatly dressed in a dark suit and fedora, stepped from the crowd and fired a .38 Colt Cobra revolver into Oswald's abdomen. And all live on national television.

A jury found Jack Ruby, the owner of several low-rent nightclubs and strip joints in Dallas, guilty of murdering Oswald, and Ruby was sentenced to death. Ruby appealed his conviction and was granted a new trial. As the date for his new trial was being set, Ruby became ill and died in jail.

After the murder of Oswald, questions were raised as to how Ruby gained access to the basement of Police Headquarters. It was discovered that again, contrary to established routines, access doors were left unlocked and guards were ordered away from their posts. Assertions that Ruby regularly provided police officers with "girls" from his establishments went unanswered.

While doing research for this piece, I ran across the actual story from the New York Times, dated Nov. 24, 1963, the day that Ruby shot Oswald. The headline read:

President's Assassin Is Shot to Death in Corridor of Jail by a Citizen of Dallas

By GLADWIN HILL

I love old archival material, so it was amazing to read the report from the day it happened. One paragraph that caught my eye said, "The original plan had been for the sheriff to assume custody of Oswald at the city jail and handle the transfer. Late last night, for unspecified reasons, it was decided that the city police would move the prisoner."

I also find it very telling, that two days after the assassination, Oswald was the "President's Assassin" and Ruby was "a Citizen of Dallas," to the press (and everyone else). 

The Warren Commission determined that he too acted alone.

Then again, flying in the face of established procedures, just moments after hastily being sworn in as President on that fateful day, Lyndon B. Johnson secretly ordered the presidential limousine, the actual scene of the crime, as it were, and possibly the single most important piece of evidence, to be transported to a Ford facility in Detroit, where the car was stripped down to the frame.

George Whitaker, a senior manager at the Ford Motor Company's Rouge plant in Detroit, Michigan stated that after reporting to work on Monday, November 25th, he discovered the JFK limousine, a unique, one-of-a-kind item that he unequivocally identified, in the Rouge plant's B building, with the interior stripped out and in the process of being replaced, and with the windshield removed. He was then contacted by the Vice President of the division for which he worked and directed to report to the glass plant lab, immediately. After knocking on the locked door, which he found most unusual, he was let in by two of his subordinates and discovered that they were in possession of the windshield that had been removed from the JFK limousine.

Both the windshield and the interior of the car were never seen again.

Ventura details at length, the controversy surrounding the witnesses in the JFK/Officer Tippit murders. Testimony that rebuffed the "lone gunman" scenario was changed or omitted in the Warren Commission Report, to the point that it was often referred to as the "Warren Omission Report."

Other witnesses disappeared under mysterious circumstances, just days before being scheduled to testify before Congressional committees. And still others "committed suicide," such as one man who shot himself in the head, with investigators determining that the gun was fired from three feet away (and no gun shot residue was found on his hands); another who shot himself in the face with a shotgun; and a woman who drove herself into a bridge abutment (even after witnesses swore that they had seen another vehicle force her off the road).

A witness to the Tippit shooting was subjected to threats and harassment. Warren Reynolds, owner of a Dallas car dealership, "witnessed the shooting of Officer Tippit, and even gave chase to the man who escaped. He stated that the man was not Oswald, and he refused to be browbeaten into changing his testimony that it may have been a man looking like Oswald. Reynolds was shot in the head with a rifle on January 23, 1964, but miraculously he survived. Blatant intimidation continued and his ten year old daughter was almost kidnapped, but the abduction attempt failed. Trespassers began nosing around outside his home at night. Finally, Reynolds had become a nervous wreck and told the FBI he had changed his mind and would identify Oswald as the shooter. The harassment suddenly halted."

There is also the odd case of army cryptographer Eugene Dinkin. Dinkin was based in France in 1963. In early November, he intercepted secret military codes that appeared to be specific to a plot to kill President Kennedy. The coded messages pointed to an attempt on the President's life to take place on November 22nd, and that would be blamed on a "Communist" or a "Negro." He sent the information by special registered mail to Attorney General, Robert Kennedy.

Unable to gain the attention of his commanding officers, and not hearing back from the AG, Dinkin went AWOL, risking his career and his liberty, to visit the U.S. embassy in Bonn, Germany.

On November 13th, Dinkin was "hospitalized" in a closed psychiatric ward and on December 5th, after the assassination, he was transported to Walter Reed Army Hospital, where he was forced to undergo "therapy," which consisted of strong drugs, psychological reconditioning, and threats of electroshock therapy. Left with no other option to regain his freedom, Dinkin accepted the diagnosis of the army psychiatrists, and was given a medical discharge from the army.

Republican Senator Arlen Specter, who later gained national notoriety during the Clarence Thomas confirmation hearings, was a lawyer working for the Warren Commission. It was he who put forward the theory of the "magic bullet."

According to the single-bullet theory, a three-centimeter long copper-jacketed lead-core 6.5-millimeter rifle bullet fired from the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository passed through President Kennedy’s neck and Governor Connally’s chest and wrist and embedded itself in the Governor’s thigh. If so, this bullet traversed 15 layers of clothing, 7 layers of skin, and approximately 15 inches of tissue, struck a necktie knot, removed 4 inches of rib, and shattered a radius bone. The bullet was found on a gurney in the corridor at Parkland Memorial Hospital. Its copper jacket was completely intact, and the supposed bullet fired by Oswald bore no traces of blood or other tissues, not even in the microscopic grooves of the projectile.

In support of his magic bullet theory, as attorney for the Warren Commission, Mr. Specter asked the following question of a doctor who was testifying before the committee:

Permit me to add some fact which I shall ask you to assume as being true for purposes of having you express an opinion. First of all, assume that the President was struck by a 6.5mm copper-jacketed bullet from a rifle having a muzzle velocity of approximately 2,000 feet per second at a time when the President was approximately 160 to 250 feet from the weapon, with the President being struck from the rear at a downward angle of approximately 45 degrees, being struck in the upper right posterior thorax just above the upper border of the scapula 14 centimeters from the tip of the right acromion process and 14 centimeters below the tip of the right mastoid process. Assume further that the missile passed through the body of the President striking no bones, traversing the neck and sliding between the muscles in the posterior aspect of the President's body through a fascia channel without violating the pleural cavity, but bruising only the apex of the right pleural cavity and bruising the most apical portion of the right lung, then causing a hemotoma to the right of the larynx, and creating a jagged wound in the trachea, then exiting precisely at the point where you observe the puncture wound to exist.

Even a top-flight surgeon, familiar with legal proceedings, would have to answer, "Um, can you repeat the question?"

Governor Ventura also calls on the carpet the mainstream media that purported the "lone gunman" explanation as the only truth from the first reports out of Dallas to the present day. Ventura maintains that media companies have long been in bed with the CIA. He quotes investigative journalist Carl Bernstein, of Watergate fame:

The history of the CIA's involvement with the American press continues to be shrouded by an official policy of obfuscation and deception. Among the executives who lent their cooperation to the Agency were William Paley of the Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS), Henry Luce of Time Inc., Arthur Sulzberger of the New York Times, Barry Bingham of the Louisville Courier-Journal, and James Copley of the Copley News Service. Other organizations which cooperated with the CIA included the American Broadcasting Company (ABC), the National Broadcasting Company (NBC), the Associated Press (AP), United Press International (UPI), Reuters, Hearst Newspapers, Scripps-Howard, Newsweek magazine, the Mutual Broadcasting System, the Miami Herald, the Saturday Evening Post, and the New York Herald-Tribune.

Or as my wife would say, "AP, UP, every pea in the pod."

Ventura states: "Many Americans still insist or persist in believing that we have a free press, while getting most of their news from state-controlled television, under the misconception that reporters are meant to serve the public. Reporters are paid employees and serve the media owners, who usually cower when challenged by advertisers or major government figures."

Ventura quotes independent journalist Robert Parry, on his experience working in mainstream media (AP, Newsweek), "The people who succeeded and did well were those who didn't stand up, who didn't write the big stories, who looked the other way when history was happening in front of them, and went along with the deception of the American people."

Ventura then quotes author Mary Louise from her book Operation Mockingbird, "Until the 1980's, media systems were generally domestically owned, regulated, and national in scope. However, pressure from the IMF, World Bank, and U.S. government to deregulate and privatize the media, communication, and new technology resulted in a global commercial media system dominated by a small number of super-powerful transnational media corporations working to advance the cause of global markets and the CIA agenda."

The Free Press summed it up nicely - "Massive corporations dominate the U.S. media landscape. Through a history of mergers and acquisitions, these companies have concentrated their control over what we see, hear, and read. In many cases, these companies are vertically integrated, controlling everything from initial production to final distribution."

Robert Hennelly & Jerry Policoff, in their article, JFK: How the Media Assassinated the Real Story, assert that, "if the assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy was one of the darkest tragedies in the Republic's history, the reporting of it has remained one of the worst travesties of the American media."

Researcher William Kelly notes that "we know that records have been intentionally destroyed, some gone totally missing and others are being wrongfully withheld," and the National Archives and Records Administration estimates that 50,000 records still remain classified.

After all is said and done, you may ask, "So what?" Ancient history. Water under the bridge. Business as usual. But I'll tell you "so what." Presidents are human beings. They have wives and children that they love. Their post-presidential opportunities are unlimited. They look forward to active retirement with their grandchildren about them. Do you think for one second that the message sent by President Kennedy's murder, whether it was part of the original intention or not, doesn't hang over the head of every man who takes the oath of office?

The reason that Jesse Ventura takes this matter so seriously, is not only because a great man was assassinated, that a husband and father was murdered, and that the perpetrators were never brought to justice, but that the powers involved have so corrupted our world. The media is compromised, the arms merchants slaughter the human race, and our political process has been bought and paid for by corporations that go far beyond mere greed.

In his Conclusion, Venture brings in a quote from President Dwight D. Eisenhower:

Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, and the hopes of its children. This is not a way of life at all in any true sense.

In today's court of public opinion, just uttering the phrase "grassy knoll" gets you sent to sit in the corner wearing your tinfoil dunce cap. "Grassy knoll" conjurs up images of a little picnic area, but in fact, the grassy knoll was a large swath rising up to a triple-overpass that the motorcade would have traveled under, and at the top of the embankment was a railroad yard, tailor made for staging the assassination. Many of the people who were there that day, clearly heard shots coming from that direction, and many, including law enforcement personnel and Secret Service agents, even ran towards that area to assist in apprehending the shooter and cutting off his escape.

I've read all of Ventura's books and I enjoy them very much. He's outspoken and opinionated, and he backs up those opinions with ironclad innuendo and incontrovertible hearsay. His writing style is in your face, and instead of drawing the reader along with softly spoken words, he pins you to the mat and shouts in your ear. He's no Shakespeare, but he doesn't need to be because we already have one.

In They Killed Our President, he tackles a subject very close to his heart, and it shows. Does this book lay to rest, once and for all, the matter of the assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy? Of course not, but such is the soul of conspiracy.

The honor of the final quote falls rightfully to Jack Kennedy himself:

I am talking about genuine peace, the kind of peace that makes life on earth worth living, the kind that enables men and nations to grow and to hope and to build a better life for their children - not merely peace for Americans but peace for all men and women - not merely peace in our time, but peace for all time.

Ventura is an ex-Special Forces grunt, professional wrestler, actor, mayor, governor, radio and television host, author, and presidential hopeful. And he accomplished all of this with the strength of his take no prisoners personality.

He gets my vote.