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Originally Posted November 2013
Almost as soon as the shots rang out in Dealey Plaza in November 1963, questions began to emerge about what really happened. Did Oswald act alone? Was he a patsy in a government conspiracy? Was there a second shooter (or more) on the grassy knoll? Was the mob involved?
In the hopes of putting those questions to rest, new President Lyndon B. Johnson appointed a commission into determining the answers to some of those questions. Ten months after the Kennedy Assassination, the Warren Commission (named for chairman Chief Justice Earl Warren) presented its findings, an 889-page document, to Johnson stating that Lee Harvey Oswald had acted alone in killing Kennedy, and Jack Ruby, in turn, had acted alone in killing Oswald two days after the assassination.
While the U.S. government may have officially accepted the findings of the Warren Commission, that did little to stop the conspiracy theories and belief by many that there was more to the story. Those theories continue to abound to this day. It didn’t help that many of those interviewed by the Warren Commission claimed their testimony had been altered. The Warren Commission also introduced “the Single Bullet Theory” that hit President Kennedy and Texas Governor John Connally several times, changed course in mid-air and was later found with less damage than such a bullet would have suffered.
Over the years, the Warren Commission, far from putting the issues surrounding the assassination to rest, has been pointed to as evidence that the government was in on the conspiracy and that the Warren Commission was part of the cover-up.
Most recently, I’ve been reading Jesse Ventura’s book “They Killed Our President” which discusses 63 pieces of evidence that Ventura has compiled that point to a conspiracy behind Kennedy’s killing. While conspiracy theorists like Ventura and director Oliver Stone are dismissed as crazy when they discuss their ideas about what really happened in Dallas, there are some very compelling arguments to be made.
But what really struck me when I was reading Ventura’s book is that, at one point, he states that the Warren Commission started with their conclusion: that Oswald acted alone and then worked backwards from there, molding the evidence to fit that conclusion.
I agree with Jesse. I’ll even go so far as to say that President Johnson may have sat the members of the Warren Commission down initially and said, “I need a document that supports this conclusion.”
But while many, both in 1964 and up to and including 2013 (now 2021), may shout “Yeah! Because Johnson and the U.S. government was in on it! They needed the Warren Commission to help cover their tracks!” I’ve come to believe, at least for the purposes of this blog, that perhaps the Warren Commission’s “working backwards” routine may have had a slightly less nefarious reason behind it.
One of the things that Ventura reveals in his book, something I hadn’t heard before, was that shortly after Oswald’s arrest, U.S. fighter jets were scrambled against Cuba, but were called back before they could carry out an air strike.
As anyone who has read up on Oswald knows that he was involved with a pro-Castro group “Fair Play for Cuba Committee” that was sympathetic to the small Communist country. It has also become well-known that he defected to the Soviet Union and lived there for a short while. (He stated that to reporters shortly after he was arrested in the aftermath of the Kennedy Assassination.) Many believe his involvement in the “Fair Play for Cuba Committee” and, indeed, his “defection” to the Soviet Union were all part of the conspiracy, a way to concoct a story to feed to the American people that it wasn’t the U.S. government who shot Kennedy, it was a Communist sympathizer. Point the blame on the Russians. Point it at the Cubans. If there was a government conspiracy to pin Kennedy’s assassination on the Soviets or Cuba, why didn’t the U.S. go to war?
If more recent history is any indication, blaming a foreign power on an attack on America is a dangerous thing. I remember on the afternoon of September 11th, they were interviewing people in New York and Washington about the morning’s attacks. They talked to one distraught young woman who, I think was speaking for all Americans when she vowed that America would have its revenge on those involved. The world, as a whole, would soon learn of Osama Bin Laden and the Taliban. The desire for revenge for the attacks of September 11, 2001, would be motivation for American invasions of Afghanistan and, later, Iraq and an occupation of those two countries that lasted for a decade.
But as costly as the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq were, they paled in comparison to the destruction and cost of human lives that a war with the Soviets or the Cubans (which would have ultimately drawn in the Soviets) would have cost, not just the United States but the world as a whole. But if the Warren Commission had returned with a verdict that Lee Harvey Oswald was a Russian operative on a mission from the Soviet Union to kill President Kennedy or a Cuban-backed assassin out for revenge for the Bay of Pigs invasion, the American people would have gone nuts, demanding revenge up to an including a nuclear strike on Russia and an invasion of Cuba.
And while faith in government deteriorated throughout the 60s with the escalation of the War in Vietnam and into the 70s with Watergate, can you imagine the outrage that would have directed towards President Johnson and the U.S. government if they had backed down? As much as people protested the war and civil rights in the 60s, that could have been minimal compared to the protests that would have served as fallout from a conceived lack of revenge over a foreign power carrying out an assassination of the President.
And so that’s where the Warren Commission came in: to give the American people an answer they could live with. No matter what the real story was (the mob killed Kennedy or the government wanted to replace the president with someone who would take a harder line against Communism), it was better to have the average American believe that Lee Harvey Oswald was “a lone nut” with Marxist-Leninist leanings who was upset at Kennedy’s treatment of Cuba.
Even in this scenario, there’s still a sinister side to the Warren Commission’s findings: by providing tenuous ties between Oswald and the dreaded Communists, it still gave the U.S. that threat it needed to allow for the military industrial complex to be built up. One can certainly argue that the American people never completely swallowed the Kool-Aid that the Warren Commission was serving, but perhaps the US government (no matter what involvement they had in the assassination) was fine with that. As long as they had gotten the American people to believe that no outside forces were at play, they believed they could defect any theories that pointed inwards. In the long run, the doubt of a suspicious people was most likely better than the demand for revenge of an angry people.
*****
This is, in no way, a declaration that I believe there was no conspiracy in the death of President John F. Kennedy. In reading books like Jim Garrison’s On the Trail of the Assassins and Jesse Ventura’s They Killed Our President, there is too much evidence that Lee Harvey Oswald couldn’t have acted alone. Honestly, I believe that Oswald was a U.S. operative set up to be the fall guy for a government conspiracy (possibly with mob involvement – as they were only too glad to help take down the brother of Attorney General Robert Kennedy) in order to take out a president thought to be soft on communism.
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