By Harold Pease, Ph. D
The CIA showed total contempt of both Congress and the President by not releasing ALL documents in their possession dealing with the Kennedy Assassination November 25, 2017, even when ordered to do so by Donald Trump himself. Trump compromised by giving them an additional six months to comply.
The intensity of long-term CIA defiance says two things. One, what the CIA knows is far worse than likely imagined. Second, if they are allowed redaction for six months what else might they redact, and how would we know? If they feel this strongly about not disclosing after 54 years, we will never know from them what they do not want known. Remember from the beginning the CIA has been implicated in the assassination.
But scholars have already weighed in on the Kennedy assassination so we do not have to wait for the CIA to release their filtered documents. This is what we know.
The government’s inscription on the wall of the Texas School Book Depository reads: “On November 22, 1963, The building gained national notoriety when Lee Harvey Oswald allegedly shot and killed President John F. Kennedy from a sixth story window as the Presidential motorcade passed.” The word allegedly is an admission that the government remains uncertain, beyond doubt, that Oswald did the deed or acted alone.
Most scholars on the assassination view the Warren Commission’s review of the data with great skepticism (some with contempt) especially in light of its numerous omissions, as for example the testimony of Dr. Charles Crenshaw who placed Kennedy in the coffin at Parkland Hospital and testified years later that the neck wound had been tampered with to look like an exit rather than an entry wound. An entry wound would have proved more than a single assassin and provoked more investigation.
In 1976 The United States House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) concluded: “President John F. Kennedy was probably assassinated as a result of a conspiracy.” Congress themselves used the word conspiracy. They, like the Warren Commission, did their investigation mostly in secret. Unbelievably they too sealed their evidence for 50 years under Congressional rules.
As the years fly by and from the hundreds of new books on the subject, it is increasingly more difficult to dismiss, as an accomplice, Lyndon Baines Johnson and his CIA/FBI friends. Newer historians are not as willing to give him a free pass on the subject.
My journalist friend, Don Clark, has personally read most of the 2000 books on the subject and is a noted speaker on the assassination. He told an audience in San Francisco that while the government has not, or will not, pursue the subject private investigators have done so and we do not have to wait for the sealed records. What follows are his “must reads” on the subject:
First, get the directors cut of the motion picture JFK by Oliver Stone. Despite the profanity the “movie contains more spoken words, more script, than any film in history.”
Second, On the Trail of the Assassins by Jim Garrison (a former FBI agent) treats Oswald’s time in New Orleans and four government agents identified as “handlers” that seemed to “shadow” him.
Third, read JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters. A stunning piece of original research published in 2008, by James Douglass.
Fourth, read MARY’S MOSAIC: The CIA Conspiracy to Murder John F. Kennedy, Mary Pinchot Meyer, and Their Vision for World Peace, by Peter Janney. The work published in 2012 found that the author’s own “CIA father, was among the conspirators orchestrating the deaths of Kennedy and his friend Mary Pinchot Meyer. The latter’s death is also “in a veiled way” in the recent movie, An American Affair.
Fifth, read JFK: The CIA, Vietnam, and the Plot to Assassinate John F. Kennedy, by Air Force Colonel L. Fletcher Prouty, who served at the time of Kennedy’s death, as the key liaison between the Pentagon and the CIA.
Sixth, tying together many loose ends the following three books will help. Revealing the secret links between the most powerful law firm in Texas and the criminal rise to power of Lyndon Johnson is Blood, Money, & Power: How LBJ Killed JFK, by Barr McClellan. LBJ: Mastermind of the JFK Assassination, by Phillip Nelson. Texas in the Morning, by Lyndon Johnson’s long-time mistress, Madeline Duncan Brown “takes you to the meeting the night before the assassination. She shares the story of Lyndon Johnson coming late to the meeting, then emerging in a fury, grabbing her by the arms so hard it hurt, and swearing in a rage, ‘After tomorrow, those goddamn Kennedy’s will never embarrass me again—and that’s not a threat, that’s a promise!’”
In light of decades of intensive reading, Clark poses the question, “Was it devious, desperate Lyndon Johnson, the viper in the nest, the Brutus to Kennedy’s Caesar, had blackmailed his way onto the 1960 presidential ticket, who knew he was about to be dumped from the 1964 ticket, who knew he was about to be indicted and probably go to prison for his probable role in the Bobby Baker and Billy Sol Estes scandals, whose lifelong lust and endless scheming for the presidency would stop at nothing to get to that office, least of all murder?” Perhaps it is time to speak the unspeakable.
Dr. Harold Pease is a syndicated columnist and an expert on the United States Constitution. He has dedicated his career to studying the writings of the Founding Fathers and applying that knowledge to current events. He has taught history and political science from this perspective for over 30 years at Taft College. Newspapers have permission to publish this column. To read more of his weekly articles, please visit www.LibertyUnderFire.org.