-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." DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER ========== CTRL is a discussion and informational exchange list. Proselyzting propagandic screeds are not allowed. Substance—not soapboxing! 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