The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination Read Free

consultant Dr. Douglas Brinkley, Dr. David Kaiser of the Naval War College, Dr. Gerald McKnight, Dr. David Wrone, and Dr. Michael Kurtz—have publicly expressed their belief that the historical evidence for a conspiracy in JFK’s murder is conclusive. Yet much of the US news media still reports on this topic as if only one official government committee, the Warren Commission, ever looked into JFK’s murder, and there has been only one “official” verdict: that a single assassin—depicted at the time and ever since as a “lone nut”—killed JFK. For the “lone nut” thesis to work, a bullet found in almost pristine condition had to have caused two wounds to JFK while also shattering Texas governor John Connally’s rib and wrist bones. The following chapter debunks this “single bullet theory,” long derided by its critics as the “magic bullet theory,” and shows how anyone can easily demonstrate the physical impossibility of the single bullet theory for him- or herself.
    In reality, over the course of three decades, a half dozen government committees—including the House Select Committee and most recently, in the 1990s, the JFK Assassination Records Review Board, appointed by President Clinton—investigated JFK’s murder. Among the 4.5 million pages of government records the Review Board released during the 1990s was the uncensored FBI file with Carlos Marcello’s clear, direct confession to JFK’s murder, which I first uncovered at the National Archives in 2006. Several years earlier, I had helped high-level Review Board staff identify crucial JFK records that had not been released.
    The news media rarely report that Robert F. Kennedy himself, along with numerous government officials who were associates ofRFK and JFK, voiced the belief that President Kennedy was killed as a result of a conspiracy. Robert Kennedy told aide Richard Goodwin that he thought “that mob guy in New Orleans”—Marcello—was behind his brother’s death, as Goodwin confirmed to me. RFK learned about Marcello’s role because he directed several trusted aides to conduct small, secret investigations into his brother’s murder for him. RFK’s investigators included the head of the Justice Department’s “Get Hoffa Squad,” Walter Sheridan, and his press secretary, Frank Mankiewicz. Both concluded that a conspiracy had killed JFK.
    Other well-documented believers in an assassination conspiracy included President Lyndon Johnson, CIA Director John McCone, JFK’s personal physician Admiral George Burkley (the only doctor with JFK’s body at both Parkland Hospital and his autopsy at Bethesda Naval Hospital), JFK’s press secretary Pierre Salinger, and JFK aides Ted Sorensen, Arthur Schlesinger Jr., and Harris Wofford. Also expressing belief in a conspiracy were LBJ aides Joseph A. Califano Jr. and Alexander Haig, plus numerous Justice Department Mafia prosecutors for RFK, including Ronald Goldfarb and Robert Blakey—the last also authored the RICO Act, used in prosecuting organized crime, and directed the House Select Committee’s investigation. According to Vanity Fair , even Dallas Police Chief Jesse Curry “believed two gunmen were involved,” while Kennedy aide Arthur Schlesinger Jr. wrote that CIA Director John McCone told Robert Kennedy he “thought there were two people involved in the shooting.”
    JFK’s two closest aides, Dave Powers and Kenneth O’Donnell, actually witnessed two shots from the grassy knoll, from their perfect vantage point in the limousine directly behind JFK’s. (One of the Secret Service agents in their limo testified that he also thought that JFK’s fatal head shot came from the grassy knoll.) Powers andO’Donnell both confirmed the grassy knoll shots to House Speaker Tip O’Neill, as O’Neill described in his 1987 autobiography, Man of the House . Later, in an exclusive interview with my research collaborator Thom Hartmann, Powers detailed how he was pressured to change his Warren