The Murder of an American President

By Ted Flint

“History would be an excellent thing, if only it were true.” Leo Tolstoy

“November 22, 1963, where were you on that fateful autumn day when our nation’s 35th president was gunned down by a Marxist wannabe? The dream of Camelot shattered by an assassin’s bullet.” That is how I began a screed many years ago when I believed, as millions no doubt still do, that Lee Harvey Oswald was the lone gunman who fired the fatal shots from the Texas School Book Depository. Oswald did not kill Kennedy. Nor was he a Marxist. He was, as he described himself, a “patsy.” If you peel away the layers of the onion surrounding JFK’s murder, you will find the CIA at the center of it.

So why would the President’s own internal security apparatus want him eliminated? Long before Nixon’s détente with Brezhnev, John Kennedy desired a lasting peace with the former Soviet Union, a rapprochement with Castro in Cuba, and an end to America’s involvement in Vietnam. That’s not what the Cold Warriors of the CIA had in mind. Kennedy, having experienced the horrors of war first-hand, wanted to keep America out of overseas conflicts, especially with the looming specter of nuclear weapons threatening to bring about Armageddon.

The upper echelon of the CIA. was dominated by men who fought in World War II and who viewed communism as the greatest threat to America and to world peace. They believed Kennedy was too soft on communism, and after his 1963 speech at American University in which he urged a reexamining of our attitude toward the cold war, while strengthening the United Nations developing it into a “genuine world security system,” the young Commander in Chief sealed his fate. At one point the C.I.A. and Joint Chiefs of Staff presented a plan to Kennedy to have the U.S. launch a nuclear strike against the Soviet Union. The CIA also wanted to assassinate Castro and believed the failure of the Bay of Pigs to topple Castro would force the President into providing U.S. airpower to support the anti-Castro Cuban nationals in their doomed undertaking. When that didn’t happen, the C.I.A. went into overdrive.

Two must-read books on the Kennedy assassination are “JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why it Matters, by James Douglass and “Mary’s Mosaic: The CIA Conspiracy to Murder John F. Kennedy, Mary Pinchot Meyer and Their Vision for World Peace,” by Peter Janney. Janney’s father, Wistar Janney, was a high-level CIA operative and may have been directly involved in the cover-up of Meyer's killing. Both Kennedy and Meyer were the targets of well-planned assassinations and there is ample evidence that the C.I.A. was deeply involved in both murders and their subsequent cover-ups.

In Janney’s book, Meyer, a Washington socialite and paramour of Kennedy’s, had read the Warren Report and doubted its veracity. So, she set out to put the pieces together and find out who really killed Kennedy. She got too close to the truth and paid with her life.  Eleven months after Kennedy’s murder in Dallas, Mary Meyer was shot twice while jogging along a towpath in Georgetown. Law enforcement tried to pin the killing on an innocent black man, Ray Crump Jr., who happened to be at the wrong place at the wrong time, but Meyer was the victim of a professional hit. The CIA’s frame up effort ultimately failed. Crump was exonerated.

In 1979, after a three-year investigation by the House Select Committee on Assassinations, it was determined that a “probable conspiracy” existed in Kennedy’s assassination, thereby questioning the conclusions put forth in 1964 by the Warren Commission. Despite requests for the Justice Department to investigate further, nothing more ever came of it. As Janney points out in “Mary’s Mosaic,” “…The most sensitive, most revealing files uncovered by the House Committee were “lawfully” locked away until the year 2029.”

So why, after more than sixty years, is all this still relevant? Because the same elements are still at work in the CIA. Think of John Brennan, who headed the Agency during the first Trump Administration. Brennan recently engaged in a heated exchange with a conservative activist during which he poked the man in the chest. Brennan, you may recall, signed a letter claiming the discovery of Hunter Biden’s emails had “all the classic earmarks of a Russian disinformation operation.” We now know that there was no “Russian disinformation operation,” only the disinformation campaign put forth by Obama’s CIA and internal security forces, which included Brennan as well as the Hillary Clinton campaign.

The CIA operates, or did operate, as a rogue agency with virtually no congressional oversight, and very little oversight by the Executive Branch. Winston Churchill famously referred to the “High Cabal” that ruled the United States. Peter Janney’s take on damage the Agency has wrought is best summed in Mary’s Mosaic: “The CIA 's reign during the Cold War era has contaminated the pursuit of historical truth. While the dismantling of America’s republic didn’t begin in Dallas in 1963, that day surely marked an unprecedented acceleration of the erosion of constitutional democracy. America has never recovered.” 

After the Bay of Pigs fiasco, a frustrated Kennedy said he wanted to "splinter the CIA into a thousand pieces and scatter it into the winds.” There is enough evidence, thanks to the JFK Records Act of 1992 and the release of many declassified documents over the years, that the CIA may have gotten to him first.