-Caveat Lector-
"... in 1947 Ruby, then called Jacob Rubenstein, had
been an informant for a crusading anti-Communist senator
named Richard Nixon ..."
http://www.conspire.com/jfkcc.html
Where Were You When They Had the Coup?
Excerpted from
"Conspiracies, Cover-Ups and Crimes"
by Jonathan Vankin
Copyright (c) 1991 by Jonathan Vankin
"There is no doubt now that there was a conspiracy, yet most
of us are not very angry about it. The conspiracy to kill the
president of the United States was also a conspiracy against the
democratic system -- and thus a conspiracy against you. I think
you should get very angry about that."
--Gaeton Fonzi, Investigator,
House Select Committee on Assassinations
The assassination of President John F. Kennedy happened 32
years ago, which is not a very long time when you think about the
breadth of history. But is there any other single event that has
been the subject of such voluminous writing, research and
contemplation in the first three decades after it happened? There
are hundreds of Kennedy assassination books. New ones come out
every year. Add on magazine articles, television programs and
radio talk shows and the words expended over the JFK
assassination must number in the multimillions.
Most are dedicated to the proposition that there was a
conspiracy involved. To summarize all the evidence and arguments,
obviously, is beyond the each of human endurance. Suffice to say
that suspicion has been stirring since the moment Kennedy's head
snapped backward from the impact of a bullet that hit him from
the front.
On the famous Zapruder film, an eight-millimeter home movie
of the assassination taken by a Dallas businessman, you quite
clearly see Kennedy's head lurch violently backward at the
precise moment that a geyser of blood and brains erupts from the
right side of his head.
The Warren Commission insisted that Kennedy had been struck
only from behind. The anomaly fascinated UCLA graduate
engineering student David Lifton. Laws of physics require that an
object struck from in front be propelled backward. Lifton
couldn't accept that these laws of the universe were suspended at
the moment a bullet struck Kennedy's head.
That single observation altered Lifton's life. He devoted
the next 15 years to scarping through the assassination's medical
evidence. By the time he was a finished, and his work culminated
in the bestseller "Best Evidence," the backward head snap was the
least of the peculiarities Lifton had uncovered. His conclusion
that Kennedy's body was shanghaied once it arrived from Dallas at
Bethesda Naval Hospital, then medically altered to eliminate
evidence of shots from in front, is still one of the most debated
hypotheses of the JFK conspiracy theory. But no one has yet been
able to refute fully Lifton's findings.
Who was on the Warren Commission, the government body that
scripted the tale of Lee Harvey Oswald, "lone nut"? Lyndon
Johnson appointed the Warren Commission to quell national
trepidation. "Out of the nation's need for facts, the Warren
Commission was born," Johnson earnestly stated. The commission
was headed by United States chief Justice Earl warren. It also
included former CIA director Allen Dulles. Dulles had been
removed from his CIA fiefdom in 1961 -- by Kennedy.
Gerald Ford was also on the commission. Ford later became an
unelected president of the United States when Richard Nixon
resigned and handed him the job. Nixon had appointed Ford to fill
the slot vacated by the disgraced Spiro Agnew.
Ford pardoned Nixon unconditionally for any crimes he had
committed in connection with Watergate, even though Nixon had
never been charged with any crimes.
The pardon insured that he never would be.
Nixon, who had been narrowly defeated by Kennedy in the 1960
presidential election, had been in Dallas up until the day
Kennedy arrived, as corporate lawyer for Pepsi at bottlers'
convention. While in town he garnered much ink after a few death
threats, but, in true macho Republican style, he refused to add
any new bodyguards to his entourage.
One researcher I've interviewed, Trowbridge Ford, believes
Nixon's bravado was a setup, goading the self-consciously virile
Kennedy into eschewing simple security measures while riding
through Dallas. The ploy also diverted the attention of the
Secret service.
"I think he knew the president was going to be
assassinated," says Trowbridge Ford. He also believes that
Nixon's worried references to "the Bay of Pigs thing," sprinkled
throughout the Watergate "smoking gun" tape are euphemistic
references to Dallas, an hypothesis shared by Nixon's close
advisor H.R. Haldeman.
Quoth Ford, "You can't say 'Dallas' because if you say
'Dallas' people are going to say 'My God! Dallas!' So you say,
'The Bay of Pigs thing--that's a consequence of the Bay of Pigs
thing.'"
Did Gerald Ford become president as a political payback for
keeping "the Bay of Pigs thing" under wraps?
Trowbridge Ford (no relation to the president -- that is,
none that I know of) is far from the only researcher to draw a
line from the Bay of Pigs fiasco in 1961 to the Kennedy
assassination in 1963 to Watergate in 1972.
In November 1973, while Nixon was still in the White House,
University of California at Berkeley Professor Peter Dale Scott
published an article, "from Dallas to Watergate: The Longest
Cover-Up," in muckraking "Ramparts" magazine.
"I believe that a full exposure of the Watergate conspiracy
will help us to understand what happened in Dallas and also to
understand the covert forces which later mired America in a
covert war in Southeast Asia," Scott wrote. "[W]hat links the
scandal of Watergate to the assassination in Dallas is the
increasingly ominous symbiosis between U.S. intelligence networks
and the forces of organized crime."
It is, Scott wrote, "no coincidence" that most of
Watergate's shadow players dwell in the same "conspiratorial
world" that led to the Bay of pigs, the Castro assassination
plots involving CIA-mob teamwork, the gun-and-drug running
syndicates formed in pre-revolutionary Cuba (later transplanted
to Miami) and the Kennedy assassination cover-up.
Richard Nixon, topping that roster, instigated the Bay of
pigs plan in the Eisenhower administration. Through his friend
Bebe Rebozo, who laundered illegal contributions to Nixon from
(among others) Howard Hughes, Nixon is linked to international
narcotics and gambling operations. Rebozo's business associate
"Big Al" Polizzi, named in 1964 congressional hearings as "one of
the most influential figures of the underworld in the United
States," is one link. Miami's Keyes Realty Company, which bought
land for mob bosses, Cuban government officials and Nixon, is
another. Nixon's curious cooperation with the mob-infested
Teamsters Union and his pardon of Teamster boss Jimmy Hoffa are
other crime connections.
While Nixon was in Dallas working for Pepsi, he may have met
with right-wing oilman Clint Murchison. Of course, he also may
NOT have, but either way, Texan oil magnate Murchison was part
of an elite circle of Lone Star power that included H.L.
hunt--who once tried to finance a death squad to assassinate
leftist activists and who paid for publication of the book
"Khruschev Killed Kennedy." JFK's veep Lyndon Johnson and his
death-car companion John Connally can also be counted among Texas
power brokers of the time.
Murchison was a close political and personal friend of J.
Edgar Hoover. The legendary lawman made regular visits to
Murchison's estate. Murchison was also tied to the Teamsters,
into whose pension fund he was allowed to dip, and to underworld
financial kingpin Meyer Lansky. Murchison's direct tie to the
Kennedy assassination cover-up is his company, great Southwest.
The company's lawyers took on a curious client following the
assassination: Marina Oswald, Soviet wife of Lee Harvey Oswald.
They even housed her in a hotel owned by Great Southwest. The
House Select Committee on Assassinations found it probable that
Marina's Murchison-connected lawyer scripted her Warren
Commission testimony.
One of Marina's most important pieces of testimony was her
allegation that Oswald was the unknown gunman in an attempted
shooting of John Birch Society-connected General Edwin A. Walker
in Dallas a few months before the JFK assassination. The Warren
Commission used her "revelation" as key evidence to reestablish
Oswald's deranged motives.
What the Commission could not explain was how Oswald's near
miss on Walker, supposedly Marina's secret, was reported in the
German neo-Nazi rag "Deutsche National-Zeitung und Soldaten
Zeitung" just one week after the assassination. The paper had
phoned walker the day after Kennedy was killed. From him, or
from other sources, the German "journalists" heard not only that
Oswald uncorked the pot shot, but that he was arrested for it --
along with Jack Ruby!
Unable to fathom that twisted tale the Warren Commission
wrote it off as "fabrication."
Odd as it may seem for a German ultraright propaganda sheet
to ring up a retired American general right after the
assassination of a U.S. president, for that paper there was
nothing unusual about it. Its editor, Gerhard Frey, was a friend
of Walker's through circles of the American and international
right. They even shared the status of "journalist." Walker was
military editor of the "American Mercury," a Birchesque paper, in
1963.
H.L. Hunt, a big Nixon bankroller, tried persuading Nixon to
tab Gerald Ford as his running mated in 1968. Earl Cabell, the
mayor of Dallas when Kennedy was killed, was another player in
the Texas oligarchy. Cabell's brother Charles was deputy director
of the CIA until he was fired. By Kennedy.
CIA adventurers E. Howard Hunt (no relation to H.L.), Frank
Sturgis and "the Cubans" of Watergate break-in fame had proven
connections to both the Bay of Pigs and the Watergate scandal.
Oddly enough, one of the Cubans was a vice president of Keyes
Realty.
Not by coincidence, these creatures also lurk around the
Kennedy assassination. Sturgis, a member of the CIA-Mafia
Kill-Castro clique, fed disinformation to a Miami journalist
right a after the assassination. His false tip led to news
stories that Fidel Castro had ordered the Kennedy hit. Hunt
recruited Cubans for the Bay of Pigs invasion. He was a CIA agent
in Mexico City, according to findings of reporter Tad Szulc, when
Lee Harvey Oswald or someone calling himself that name made a
scene at the Cuban embassy there. Hunt may also have been in
Dallas on November 22, 1963. One of the three distinguished-
looking "tramps" photographed "under arrest" after the
assassination looks uncannily like Hunt.
Hunt for his part strongly denies being in Dallas OR Mexico.
The tramps were never booked. their names remain unknown.
despite being arrested, photographs show that they were not
handcuffs nor restrained in any way by the arresting officers.
As for assassination theorist Trowbridge Ford, he was forced
into "early retirement" from Holy Cross. the school saw him as
"that Kennedy nut, the asshole of the faculty," he says. He
believes that his retirement came at the behest of Holy Cross
trustee Edward Bennet Williams. A well-placed (to say the least)
Washington lawyer, now deceased, Williams represented clients as
diverse as the Washington Post when it broke the Watergate story,
and CIA chief Richard Helms, one of Watergate's cover-up artists.
Ford developed most of his theories combing through "the
public record." For observers closer to the crime, forced
retirement is a fate they would have welcomed.
Since the mid-1960s, researchers have been enthralled by the
"suspicious deaths" theory. More than one hundred witnesses to,
alleged participants in or investigators of the assassination
supposedly died "suspiciously." Some are more "suspicious" than
others, but here's a sampling:
The majority of eyewitnesses that day heard shots from in
front of the president (the "grassy knoll"). Some saw possible
assassins, none matching Oswald's description. Lee Bowers, Jr.
was in a railroad control tower overlooking Dealey Plaza, where
Kennedy was shot. He saw two men standing behind the fence on the
grassy knoll before and immediately after the shooting. He saw a
car driving around back there, its driver speaking on what looked
like a two-way radio. Bowers died in a one-car accident three
years later.
James Worrell told the Warren Commission he heard the
"fourth shot." (Oswald was supposed to have fired just three) and
saw a man in a dark coat run from the Texas School Book
Depository. Worrell was killed by a car while riding a motorcycle
in 1966. Richard Carr corroborated Worrell's testimony. He didn't
die, but survived a stabbing and an attempted car bombing (three
sticks of dynamite didn't explode).
The list goes on and on. Not all of the people on the list
were eyewitnesses. Some were suspected of involvement in a higher
level of the conspiracy -- George DeMohrenschildt, for example.
He was a White Russian emigre with intelligence connections who
took Oswald as his protoge. It was an odd relationship
considering that Oswald was supposed to be a Marxist who had
returned from defection to the Soviet Union. DeMohrenschildt died
of a gunshot wound, presumably self-inflicted, the same day a
congressional investigator located him.
Congressman Hale Boggs was a member of the Warren
Commission. He had his doubts about elements of the commission's
conclusions, the "single bullet theory" especially. He also had
information on the FBI's surveillance of Warren Report critics,
which prompted him to accuse the bureau of "gestapo tactics."
Flying over Alaska he was on a plane that simply vanished.
The witness most conspicuously dead is Lee Harvey Oswald
himself, shot by low-level mobster Jack Ruby. A prodigious
hustler, Ruby had his own busload of bizarre connections in crime
and government. Trowbridge Ford discovered a document showing
that in 1947 Ruby, then called Jacob Rubenstein, had been an
informant for a crusading anti-Communist senator named Richard
Nixon.
During a break in his trial Ruby sighed, "The world will
never know the true facts of what occurred."
He did offer to tell his story to the Warren Commission if
the government would transfer him to Washington DC, out of harm's
way. the commission refused. Instead, Gerald Ford traveled to
Ruby's Dallas jail, and heard nothing but babble.
Ruby died of cancer in 1967. The cancer, he contended, had
been administered to him by injection.
For months leading up his assassination, oil companies and
other big corporate interests had been lobbying Kennedy to step
up, not cut back, the Vietnam effort. In May, Socony Mobil
lobbyist William Henderson presented a paper at a conference
sponsored in part by the Asia Society. The president of the Asia
Society was John D. Rockefeller III. the Rockefeller family was
the leading oil family in America and owned much of the stick in
Socony Mobil. Henderson's paper called for a "final commitment"
to Vietnam. Socony Mobil made over half its profits from
operations in the Far East.
According to Jim Garrison, the oil-banking-military cabal
creates dreadfully real structures to enforce its will. He noted
that his chief suspect, Clay Shaw, was a director of Permindex
(short for Permanent Industrial Exhibits), an enigmatic Swedish
company set up, it claimed, for the promotion of international
industrial exchange. Garrison saw a darker purpose.
"Nomenclature of an Assassination Cabal," a manuscript that
circulates among conspiracy researchers, takes Garrison's
scenario to its extremes, combing Garrison's findings with
underpublicized Warren Commission evidence and all kinds of
corporate documentation from Switzerland, codifying the Permindex
conspiracy legend.
Permindex, the book argues, is actually a private
assassination bureau. It works in cooperation with a top secret
department of the FBI called Division Five. Among the numerous
and illustrious financiers of Permindex are Clint Murchison and
H.L. Hunt.
Regardless of Garrison's credence (even his critics admit he
turned up salient facts), or the scholarly standards of
underground Xeroxes such as "Nomenclature," there are too many
facts that don't add up. Too much weirdness engulfs the Kennedy
assassination -- and evident attempts to cover up who really did
it.
There are motives galore. CIA cold warriors and anti-Castro
Cubans had a grudge against Kennedy for backstabbing them on the
Nixon-sponsored Bay of Pigs invasion. The CIA had an extra beef:
Kennedy had grown appalled at its outrageous conduct. He vowed to
smash the CIA's power and started by firing Allen Dulles.
The Mafia had its own vendetta against Kennedy for letting
his brother carry out the vigorous, almost fanatical prosecutions
that J. Edgar Hoover had shunned. In fact, Hoover had prominent
friends with underworld ties, though he publicly denied that the
Mafia was real. Chicago crime boss Sam Giancana had reason to
feel slighted. His vote-rigging probably meant Kennedy's margin
of victory in the razor-close 1960 election.
Oilmen such a s Murchison and H.L. Hunt had a grievance of
their own with Kennedy. they were ultraright ideologues who
despised the president, but they had an even more compelling
motive. the oil depletion allowance let them multiply their
wealth to unthinkable dimensions. Kennedy had promised to strip
that allowance.
J. Edgar Hoover bore a disdain for the Kennedys that is well
known. their unwillingness to control their sexual escapades
provided Hoover with copious stuffing for his file cabinets. At
the same time, Hoover maintained an alliance with Interpol, the
international police organization commandeered by Nazis in 1938
and according to some investigators, still infiltrated by
elements of the Third Reich.
We know what the military-industrial complex gained from
Kennedy's death. the Vietnam war, Lyndon Johnson's and Richard
Nixon's gift to history. Johnson and Nixon received a modest
little perk of their own from the assassination: the presidency
of the United States.
Johnson plunged into the presidency as soon as Kennedy was
certified dead. Nixon was big oil's candidate, a friend of the
FBI and a fellow traveler with organized crime. It took a second
Kennedy assassination --Robert in 1968, who probably would have
beaten Nixon in the election that year-- to secure the White House
for him.
In the words of L.B.J.'s former press secretary, Bill
Moyers, commenting on the CIA's affair with the Mafia, "Once we
decide that anything goes, anything can come home to haunt us."
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