JFK (30 page)

It is relatively easy to assassinate a President; there are ways to beat the defenses. “Providing absolute protection for anyone is an impossible task,” as the Secret Service men themselves say.
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After all, on November 22, 1963, when JFK died, the Secret Service did not own a single armored automobile for the protection of the President. The FBI owned four of them; but the Secret Service had never asked for one.

The actual killing of the President is relatively simple, but shielding the gunmen and those who hired them, arranging for their safe and undetected removal from the scene, creating a “patsy” (the word used by Oswald himself before he, too, was murdered) to take the blame, and releasing a cover-story scenario in those early hectic moments and keeping it intact for the next several generations takes a cabal with the power and longevity of a great machine. The deft way it has been orchestrated reveals the skill of the plotters and indicates that those responsible included top-level government officials, plus their power-elite masters. The fact of conspiracy is revealed by the discovery of such circumstances.

More important by far, this cover story was not designed for the sole purpose of concealing the identity of the killers and their supporting team. It was designed to make possible the total takeover of the government of the United States of America and to make it possible for this cabal to control a series of Presidents from Lyndon B. Johnson to the present day. Look at the record.

What created this murderous cabal? What were the enormous conflicts that brought about the murder of a young and extremely popular President? Kennedy had just established the first plank in the platform for his reelection with his promise to bring one thousand men home from Vietnam by Christmas of 1963 and to have all Americans out of Vietnam by the end of 1965. His trip to Texas with Johnson and Connally marked the beginning of his 1964 reelection campaign. The cabal could wait no longer. The die had been cast, and the shots had to be fired in Dallas that day.

There can be only one reason powerful enough to cause the almost spontaneous coalescence of such a cabal for that single purpose. That reason was the fear of Kennedy’s all-but-certain reelection. The alternative was to take control of the power of the presidency at all costs. In raising the age-old question
“cui bono?”—
who benefits?—we must examine the nature of the fatal pressures that enveloped the days of the Kennedy administration; and we must understand how they stood in the way of other plans by other peoples in their relentless drive for world power.

The American public has been led to believe that the mystery of the President’s assassination was supposed to have been resolved by the massive investigation of the crime by those prominent members of the commission established on November 29, 1963, by the new President, Lyndon Baines Johnson, one week after the death of JFK. On that troubled day, LBJ called his trusted friend and confidant, J. Edgar Hoover, longtime director of the FBI, to the White House for a heart-to-heart discussion. LBJ and Hoover had lived across the street from one another in Washington, D.C., for nineteen years. Hoover had been a frequent visitor to the Johnson ranch on the banks of the Pedernales River in Texas. They were the type of friends who got along by necessity. They needed each other; they understood each other; they had been through fire together. They knew where many bodies were buried along the corridors of power.

On this day, LBJ sorely needed the ear and advice of his old comrade. A record of this meeting is contained in a memorandum written and signed by Hoover on the day of the meeting. As Hoover reported, Johnson asked him if he “was familiar with the proposed group he was trying to get to study my [Hoover’s] report” on the JFK murder. Hoover had responded in the negative. Johnson said he hoped the “study” could get by “just with my [Hoover‘s] file and my [Hoover’s] report.”

Then Johnson asked Hoover what he thought of the proposed members of the group. He listed the names: Allen Dulles, John McCloy, Gen. Lauris Norstad, Congressmen Hale Boggs and Gerald Ford, and Senators Richard Russell and John Sherman Cooper. “He [Johnson] would not want [Sen.] Jacob K. Javits” for reasons not explained, wrote Hoover.

President Johnson did not discuss with Hoover the name of the man he wanted to head the group, Chief Justice Earl Warren; and for some reason, General Norstad was able to remove himself from the final commission list.

Following this meeting, President Johnson, by Executive Order 11130, dated November 29, 1963, “created a commission to investigate the assassination on November 22, 1963, of John Fitzgerald Kennedy, the 35th President of the United States.”

The President directed this commission “to evaluate all facts and circumstances surrounding the assassination and the subsequent killing of the alleged assassin and to report its findings and conclusions to him.”
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Note that Johnson’s directive required this commission to do no more than “evaluate all facts” and “report its findings.” Neither of these is conclusive. The commission served to deter legal action in Texas and silenced the threat of a major congressional inquiry. From the very first day of the creation of the Warren Commission, it had before it the inference that the alleged assassin was the man Jack Ruby had killed in Dallas while the alleged killer was being moved from one jail to another. The commission may have begun its investigation with the FBI “study . . . and its files and report”; but by the time it published its own twenty-six-volume report, in September 1964, it had been carried away by the entrancing cover story designed by the power cabal. . . the same cover story that lives today.

The first thing that President Johnson ought to have done was to demand that a trial for the murder of JFK be held in Texas. The fact that a man named Lee Harvey Oswald was dead was no barrier to the legal requirement. Oswald did not kill JFK. He was the “patsy” of the cover-story scenario. It would have been utterly impossible for the Dallas police to explain what truly incriminating information they had that was of sufficient merit to warrant the arrest of that young man while he was seated in a distant theater. Certainly the members of the Warren Commission were competent enough to understand that. Instead, they were the victims of great pressure brought to bear by those orchestrating the cover-up.

Because it is apparent that enormous pressure at the highest level had been generated during those thousand days of the Kennedy era, from November 8, 1960, to November 22, 1963, it is important that the “Days of Camelot” be reviewed and analyzed.

The very word “Camelot” as a definition of the Kennedy “thousand days” needs review. During the 1962-63 period, the U.S. Army had a typical contract study named “Camelot” under way in a “think tank” group that was associated with the American University in Washington. Because of some of the Kennedy-period treatment of the army, or what the army perceived that treatment to be during the JFK-McNamara days, there were many army officials who were quite vocal about their dislike of both men and of their policies. Not surprisingly, then, this study by the members of that army-contract think tank was unfriendly to Kennedy. It used the word “Camelot” in a derogatory sense, and its title was purposely intended to be a bit of a sarcastic rebuke of the President. It certainly was not intended to praise his name and record. Interestingly, this derogatory term has now lost that meaning for most and has become a public symbol of Kennedy and the presumed style and grace of his presidency.

It all began with the romantic election. Kennedy was viewed as a virtual messiah. Such was the power of the Kennedy charisma that the wife of a famous member of the Kennedy entourage was heard to say during the intermission of a play at the old Warner Theater, shortly after the Kennedy inauguration, “Isn’t all this just marvelous? It is just like the break between B.C. and A.D.”
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By the closing days of Dwight Eisenhower’s second term as President, the giant multinational business machine that had engineered his travels from SHAPE (Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers, Europe) via the presidency of Columbia University to the presidency of the United States had learned that the ever-popular “Old Man” could be tough. Eisenhower left office on the wave of a substantial federal budget surplus and with a tip of his cap to the dangers of the military-industrial complex. As a result, these master manipulators had held billion-dollar items back from the budget of 1961-62, knowing full well that they could do better with a reliable old friend as President in 1961. They expected that new President to be Richard M. Nixon.

Nixon had always been the special friend of big business. As he likes to tell it, while he was still in the navy during World War II, he responded to a want ad in a Los Angeles newspaper that had been placed there by a moneyed group seeking a young, malleable candidate to run for Congress. With their financial help, he won that election. The remainder of his storied political life was lived under the shadow and tutelage of moneyed power centers.

What Nixon does not say is how he got into a position to take on that role in the first place. In 1941, he worked in the Office of Price Administration beside another up-and-coming young lawyer, Irving S. Shapiro. There they both learned the ways of serving big business and the value of an “anti-Communist” stance. (Shapiro, son of an expatriate Lithuanian, went on to become the Justice Department lawyer in a widely publicized trial against the eleven top leaders of the U.S. Communist Party.
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From there, he moved upward step by step in the DuPont Company, until he reached the position of chairman.) Nixon attacked Alger Hiss and Helen Gahagan Douglas viciously on his way to the House of Representatives, thence to the Senate, and the vice presidency.

Though his years of public life gave Nixon some popularity, they did not win him the presidency against John F. Kennedy in 1960. Thus, the many big-money projects deferred from the Eisenhower era were heaped upon the shoulders of President Kennedy. The greatest of these multi-billion-dollar packages, as described in previous chapters, was to be the war in Vietnam. It had been kept almost dormant during 1960, but it was ready to flare up on call.

Just before the inauguration, when President Eisenhower spoke privately to Kennedy, he informed him that his only concern in Southeast Asia would be the tiny kingdom of Laos. Military activity in Laos was already a public issue. In contrast,
Time
magazine had carried only six articles about Vietnam during 1960. Although the conflict in Vietnam had been moved along clandestinely since 1945, it was still just simmering when Kennedy came into office.

The CIA’s anti-Castro planning was expedited. Just after the election, the CIA had made its move to increase its secret Cuban project from a small, three hundred-man operation to a three thousand-man, “over-the-beach” assault. By the time of the inauguration of Kennedy, the momentum of that effort was (as CIA Director Allen Dulles and CIA Deputy Director for Plans Richard Bissell put it, as a threat to JFK) harder to contain than to just let the Cuban exiles loose in an attempt to free their country themselves. Kennedy was getting his baptism of CIA pressure.

There were even bigger budget matters bottled up in anticipation of a Nixon inauguration. For several years, the air force had wanted a new jet fighter aircraft. This dream plane was called the “Everest” fighter, after Gen. Frank Everest, its staunchest supporter. The navy needed one also. However, Eisenhower, determined to go out with a budget surplus, would not allow the awarding of any major contract that could be charged to his term. By the time of Kennedy’s inaugural, there was the promise of a $2—$4 billion air force budget item that could be used for the biggest military aircraft procurement award ever made. The entire aviation industry knew this, and pressures ran high in an attempt to win that prime contract.

Robert S. McNamara had been named to be Kennedy’s secretary of defense. A World War II air force statistician and Harvard Business School professor, he had more recently been the president of Ford Motor Company, where (as part of a group known at Harvard as the “whiz kids”) he had gone directly from his air force duties right after the war. McNamara had become president of the Ford Motor Company on November 9, 1960, the day after Kennedy’s election.

McNamara was not familiar with aircraft or with the complex system of procurement used by the military, but he had a pretty good idea of what the availability of $4 billion meant politically. He announced he would make the award after careful study.
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Before long, the contest for the jet fighter had been narrowed to the Boeing Aircraft Company and a joint proposal presented by General Dynamics and the Grumman Aircraft Company. The aircraft the military desired was called a “Tactical Fighter Experimental,” or TFX. The air force wanted an extremely unconventional aircraft, with wings that could be swept back in flight for higher speed.

Then McNamara sprang a surprise. He took some of the navy’s procurement money and added that to the total and said this would represent “more bang for the buck” because of what he called “commonality.” He believed that even though the air force and navy specifications differed widely, there ought to be enough “common” parts to lower the unit aircraft cost. By this time, the total program had been increased to 1,700 aircraft—235 of which would be for the navy—for a total initial procurement cost of $6.5 billion.

This was the largest single procurement contract ever put together in peacetime. Kennedy and his inner circle had their own ideas of what they were going to do with the disposition of that vast amount of money. They were a bold and politically savvy group. The election of November 1960 had been too close for comfort. They looked ahead to November 1964 and realized that $6.5 billion (or more) would pave a lot of streets on the road to reelection.