A couple of years ago I had the pleasure of editing an article written by the investigative reporter Jefferson Morley for playboy.com that had to do with strange CIA connections to the assassination of John F. Kennedy, which happened, of course, 47 years ago today. I enjoyed working with Jeff; he was a patient, meticulous sifter of the numberless loose ends that have attached themselves to that fateful event. Today Jeff has an excellent piece on theatlantic.com which succinctly debunks five significant myths of the assassination. His findings:
The belief that secret plotters killed Kennedy was first made popular by Oliver Stone’s 1992 movie, JFK.
False. Popular belief in a conspiracy was widespread within a week of Kennedy’s murder. Between November 25 and 29, 1963, University of Chicago pollsters asked more than 1,000 Americans whom they thought was responsible for the president’s death. . . .62 percent of respondents said they believed that more than one person was involved in the assassination. Only 24 percent thought Oswald had acted alone. Another poll taken in Dallas during the same week found 66 percent of respondents believing that there had been a plot.
All serious historians believe that Lee Harvey Oswald shot President Kennedy, alone and unaided.
Since 2000, five tenured academic historians have published books on JFK’s assassination. Four of the five concluded that a conspiracy was behind the 35th president’s murder. David Kaiser of the Naval War College, author of The Road to Dallas: The Assassination of John F. Kennedy (2008), concluded that Kennedy was killed in plot involving disgruntled CIA operatives and organized crime figures. Michael Kurtz of Southeastern Louisiana University came to the same conclusion in his 2006 book, The JFK Assassination Debates: Lone Gunman Versus Conspiracy. In Breach of Trust: How the Warren Commission Failed the Nation and Why (2005), Gerald McKnight of Hood College suggested that a high-level plot involving senior U.S. intelligence officials was probably responsible for the president’s death. In his 2003 book about photographic evidence, The Zapruder Film: Reframing JFK’s Assassination, David Wrone of the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point argued that the famous amateur film footage of the assassination proves that Kennedy was hit by gunfire from two different directions. Wrone did not advocate a theory of who was responsible.
No one high-up in the U.S. government ever thought there was a conspiracy behind JFK’s murder.
In fact, many senior U.S. officials concluded that there had been a plot but rarely talked about it openly. Kennedy’s successor, Lyndon Johnson told many people that he did not believe the lone-gunman explanation. The president’s brother Robert and widow Jacqueline also believed that he had been killed by domestic political enemies. Senators Richard Russell of Georgia and Russell Long of Louisiana both rejected official accounts of the assassination. Other skeptics include Joseph Califano, the Secretary of Army in 1963; H.R. Haldeman, the chief of staff to President Richard Nixon; Col. L. Fletcher Prouty, chief of Pentagon special operations in 1963; and Winston Scott, chief of the CIA’s station in Mexico City. Scott concluded in an unpublished memoir that Oswald had, indeed, been just a patsy.
Former Los Angeles County prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi refuted all JFK conspiracy theories in Reclaiming History.
In the course of 1,600 pages Bugliosi effectively refuted many unfounded conspiracy scenarios and reasserted the lone gunman conclusions of the Warren Commission. But he has never engaged the extensive scholarship of Commission skeptics such as journalist David Talbot, historian Kaiser, historian John Newman, or biographer Anthony Summers, or analyzed the innovative research of attorney William Simpich.
All the CIA’s records related to the Kennedy assassination have been made public.
In a sworn affidavit, Delores Nelson, the CIA’s chief information officer, stated that the Agency has approximately 1,100 assassination-related documents that it plans to keep under wraps until 2017, if not longer. These files — containing more than 2,000 pages of material — cannot be made public for reasons, Nelson says, of national security. In other words, somewhere in the Washington metropolitan area there is a collection of CIA documents related to JFK’s murder that, if collated, would stand about ten inches tall.
As Jeff writes, “That’s not a conspiracy theory or a myth. It’s a fact.” I suppose I know where he’s going to be seven years from now. I’m looking forward to hearing what he’s learned.