Are You One Of The Tiny Minority Of Americans Still Taken In By The JFK Assassination Lies?

On November 22, 1963 I was just a kid but I remember thinking, when I was walking down the staircase of my school and heard that President Kennedy had been shot in Dallas, that the right-wing hate-mongers and racists had killed the president. In 5 days it will be 50 days since that first impression popped into my brain. It's never going away, no matter how many and how elaborate and how determined the lies the ruling elites put out about how he was assassinated. Recently Secretary of State John Kerry told NBC that "To this day, I have serious doubts that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone." According to recent polling only 24% of Americans accept the "official" version that Oswald was acting alone.

Wednesday Bill and Hillary Clinton will accompany President and Michelle Obama at a wreath-laying ceremony at Arlington National Cemetery. Living on twitter and following right-wing Republicans like Bryan Fischer and Texas congressman and Oklahoma bombing conspirator Steve Stockman, it's amazing to me that neither Clinton nor Obama was been murdered.

Friday, The Guardian, remarking on John Kerry's suspicions about who was behind the murder, speculated that the list includes the CIA and the Mafia, always the most logical suspects. And there are more and more books being published on the topic, over a thousand since the assassination. Here are 3 books The Guardian synopsied with very different conclusions:

1. The Mob did it

• The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination, by Lamar Waldron (Counterpoint)

Thesis: Godfathers Carlos Marcello and Santo Trafficante took out the president to neutralise his anti-mafia crusade. They framed Oswald and his supposed Cuban puppet-masters, a ruse which deceived LBJ and, to this day, Kerry.

"They got away with it because they planted the evidence against Castro," said Waldron. A cover-up endures. "We know the FBI had Marcello's confession in 1985 and basically suppressed it." A Warner Brothers film due out next year, based on this and a previous book co-authored by Waldron, will star Leonardo DiCaprio and Robert De Niro. "We hope the movie will bring attention to the fact hundreds of (government) files haven't been released."

2. The CIA did it

• CIA Rogues and the Killing of the Kennedys: How and Why US Agents Conspired to Assassinate JFK and RFK, by Patrick Nolan (Skyhorse)

Thesis: Top spooks Richard Helms and James Jesus Angleto hired mafia hitmen to murder Kennedy to derail his planned disengagement from Vietnam and rapprochement with Cuba and the Soviet Union. "Their motive was power, self-preservation."

Nolan cites research by "world-famous forensic scientist Dr Henry Lee," who writes the book's foreword, to argue there was more than one gunman. Nolan's website says he "utilizes the mosaic method of intelligence, analyzing each piece that is obtained and determining its relationship to other pieces to arrive at the solution."

3. Lyndon Johnson did it

• The Man Who Killed Kennedy: The case against LBJ, by Roger Stone (Skyhorse)

Thesis: The vice-president orchestrated an elaborate plot involving elements in the mob, CIA, White House and Cuban exile community to eliminate his boss. The motive: JFK planned to dump LBJ from the ticket in 1964, leaving him exposed to corruption probes.

The Texan Johnson's control over Dallas police facilitated the cover-up of evidence such as a fingerprint in the book depository's sniper's nest which matched his personal hitman, Mac Wallace. The truth, says Stone's Amazon entry, was hiding in plain sight all this time. "LBJ was not just shooting his way into the White House, he was avoiding political ruin and prosecution and jail for corruption at the hands of the Kennedy's (sic)."

I'm not reading any of these books. I am reading Dallas 1963 by Bill Minutaglio and Steven Davis-- which we first discussed in October in terms of unhinged Dallas area radical Pete Sessions (R-TX). Yesterday, the Seattle Times reprised a review of the book by Steve Weinberg that first ran November 16. Weinberg suspects that none of the slew of new books related to the assassination will achieve a fresher approach, or be presented as skillfully, as Dallas 1963.

The four-year narrative does not attempt to answer definitively whether Lee Harvey Oswald killed the president without assistance. (Oswald does not make his first appearance in the narrative until page 178. The focus is not on him until the book reaches the year 1963.)

Instead, longtime Texas scholar/journalists Minutaglio and Davis set out to explain why the city of Dallas in 1963 was the mostly likely place in the world for a fatal shot to be aimed at Kennedy, and why in the aftermath it was the most likely place in the world for the suspected assassin to be murdered by unhinged nightclub owner Jack Ruby.

Avid followers of previous Kennedy assassination books will probably recall that multiple presidential advisers and Dallas civic leaders begged the president to stay away from the city during November 1963. Those prescient individuals understood how Kennedy haters from various political groupings had coalesced. The lineup of Kennedy haters as assembled by the authors is impressive and fascinating. The first among equals is Gen. Edwin A. Walker, a high-ranking U.S. military officer who died in 1993. His military bearing, his penchant for violence and his widely disseminated hateful political views in combination managed to exude an undeniable charisma.

Additional Kennedy haters with power among the Dallas elite include U.S. congressman Bruce Alger, Dallas mayor Earl Cabell, Baptist minister W.A. Criswell, newspaper publisher Ted Dealey and billionaire oil tycoon H.L. Hunt. Minutaglio and Davis draw masterful word portraits of each man, as the characters show up for a few pages, disappear and then reappear.

Occasionally, Dallas leaders emerge who might be called heroic, as they labored to diminish the hatred of the powerful elite against not only the president, but also against minorities and low-income residents. The most unlikely semi-hero is Stanley Marcus, the wealthy owner of the Neiman Marcus department store. Because of his wealth and high-end clientele, Marcus had a voice among the Dallas elite. On the other hand, because of his Jewish heritage, Marcus was considered a fringe member of the power structure. He understood that defending Kennedy and promoting civil rights in general would cause many of the department store’s wealthiest customers to take their business elsewhere. So, naturally, Marcus felt conflicted. His portrayal by the authors is memorable and might lead readers (including me) to learn more about Marcus. He died in 2002.

Near the book’s opening, the authors state what came together in Dallas during the early 1960s was “unlike anything in the history of the country-- a handful of people in a seemingly staid city begin to set the stage for one of the greatest tragedies” the United States has experienced. “Marooned in an outpost of super-patriotism, their first, cautionary discussions begin to morph into a cacophony of anger.” The zenith of the cacophony turned out to be a rifle shot aimed at the Kennedy motorcade.

Let's hope a similar introduction referencing Bryan Fischer and Rep. Steve Stockman in a similar context. But I wouldn't discount the possibility.