Opinion: The JFK Assassination Was A Conspiracy

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Over 60 years after President John Fitzgerald Kennedy (JFK) was assassinated in Dallas, a November 2023 Gallup Poll showed that 65% of the public still believes there was a conspiracy. Why do the CIA and other government agencies still insist on withholding documents and redacting others? President Trump released only some of the withheld documents in 2017 and President Biden released only some of the others, but they were required by the JFK Records Act to release them all.

In February newly elected President Trump signed an Executive Order providing  “Declassification of Records Concerning the Assassinations of President John F. Kennedy, Senator Robert F. Kennedy, and the Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King Jr.” Hopefully, this order and the Congresswoman Luna committee will fill in many of the remaining gaps in the record.

So why does this issue still matter? In addition to the 65% who believe in a conspiracy, according to an April 2024 poll by Pew Research, Americans’ trust in government has gone from 80% to 20% in the last 60 years due to a variety of things especially the JFK assassination and the Vietnam war, which are very much connected. Finally, the defense department, or the “national security state” as it is often called, failed its seventh consecutive annual audit of its $824 billion budget.

Here are just a few facts to support a conspiracy.

• Former President Lyndon Johnson said in 1973 and prior that the “assassination…had been part of a conspiracy…. I have never believed Oswald acted alone”.
• Former President Richard Nixon said, “The Warren Commission (WC) report is the greatest fraud perpetuated on the American people.”
• The WC based its narrative on CE399, the so-called “magic bullet” which they allege entered JFK’s back, exited his neck and then caused a variety of wounds to Governor Connally. The FBI, to its credit, never bought that story and neither did a myriad of experts who tried to replicate the shot and end up with a pristine bullet found on a young boy’s stretcher at Parkland Hospital. Just last year, Secret Service agent Paul Landis says he himself found the bullet in the limo’s back seat and placed it on JFK’s gurney.
• Of the WC’s seven members, three did not subscribe to the single bullet theory including Russell, Cooper and Boggs.
• The scene of the crime, the limo, was partially scrubbed of evidence at Parkland Hospital and then finally scrubbed on November 25 in DC as reported by Doug Horne of the ARRB in his book, Inside the Assassination Records Review Board.
• Most of the witnesses in Dealey Plaza in Dallas testified that they heard shots from the Grassy Knoll in front of the limo according to Harold Feldman, author of 51 Witnesses: The Grassy Knoll. This included more than a dozen police officers.
• In Josiah Thompson’s book, Last Second in Dallas, he related that 20 of the 22 Parkland doctors and nurses interviewed said they saw an entry wound in the neck, not an exit wound, and Dr. McClelland, among others, personally told us that JFK’s brains were leaking on the floor from a massive exit wound in the back of the head.
• The two people who took and developed “official” photos at JFK’s autopsy, John Stringer and Saundra Spencer, both testified that the photos submitted to the WC were not the ones they took or developed.
• The WC report was debunked by several Congressional committees in the 1970s including by Senator Schweiker who said, “I think the WC has in fact collapsed like a house of cards….and is one of the biggest coverups in the history of our country. “
• The House Select Committee on Assassinations criticized the intelligence agencies. Robert Blakey, Chief Counsel for the HSAC said, “The CIA lied to the WC. It lied to the ARRB. It lied to the HSCA.” Nevertheless, the HSCA concluded that the evidence “…established a high probability that two gunmen fired at President John F. Kennedy.”
• LHO was well known to both the CIA and FBI, which both had extensive files on him as reported by John Newman, author of Oswald and the CIA, and an essay, Oswald, the CIA and Mexico City. The WC was never told about this coverup, nor did it investigate it.

The above facts are merely the tip of the iceberg, and for those who still believe that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone, ask yourself why there is a coverup, which by definition means there is a conspiracy,  with records having been redacted and withheld for over 60 years. Then ask yourself whether Lee Harvey Oswald could have been the one to carry out the coverup. Once you answer these questions, you’ll see the conspiracy and who had to be behind it.

Dennis McCuistion is a former banker, professor, and host of the McCuistion television program on KERA in Dallas. Dory Wiley is President/CEO of Commerce Street Holdings, LLC, and a lifelong JFK assassination researcher.