Jacob G. Hornberger |
The official story of the Kennedy assassination is that he was killed by a former U.S. Marine, lone-nut, communist assassin named Lee Harvey Oswald.
The big problem, however, is that the official story has never comported with much of the circumstantial evidence in the case nor with common sense, reason, and logic. That’s why no one has ever been able to come up with a credible motive for Oswald to kill Kennedy.
As I pointed out in Part 1, by the time he was assassinated Kennedy was ending the Cold War against the communist world and had announced his intention for America to live in peace, friendship, and mutual coexistence with the Soviet Union, especially Russia, Cuba, and the rest of the communist world.
If Oswald had, in fact, been a genuine communist, that would have made him ecstatic. Why kill Kennedy knowing that he would be replaced by Johnson, who vehemently disagreed with JFK’s change of direction and, instead, was on the same page as the Pentagon and the CIA?
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Indeed, it wasn’t communists who hated Kennedy for what he was doing. It was instead the U.S. national-security establishment, which believed that Kennedy’s actions constituted a grave threat to national security.
The problem is that all too many Americans find it too frightening to go down that road. While they now accept the U.S. regime-change operations in Iran, Guatemala, Cuba, Chile, Congo
In 1947, the federal government had been converted from a limited-government republic into a national-security state. The reason? To combat communists, communism, and the Soviet Union, especially Russia.
In the late 1940s, the U.S. government prosecuted officials in the U.S. Communist Party for belonging to an organization that embraced communist literature, literature that called for the violent overthrow of capitalism. The Smith Act prosecutions were big-time news in the 1940s and early 1950s. There is no way that any American would have been unaware of them.
And then there was the Korean War in the early 1950s, where the U.S. government intervened in a foreign civil war, without even the semblance of the congressional declaration of war required by the U.S. Constitution. In that “police action,” as U.S. officials called it, U.S. forces killed and injured millions of North Koreans, not only by carpet-bombing the entire country, including rural villages but also by illegally using germ warfare. The rationale? The same rationale that would be relied on later to justify the massive killing of people in Vietnam’s civil war — that they were all nothing but “Commies, Reds, and gooks.”
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Today the Korean War is known as the Forgotten War. But it wasn’t forgotten back in the mid-1950s. Everyone knew about it. And everyone knew that the U.S. Marine Corps had killed a lot of “Commies, Reds, and gooks” during the conflict.
Oswald was studying socialism and communism as a teenager. That was during the 1950s. By the time he was studying communism and socialism, the U.S. national-security establishment’s anti-communist crusade had been in full swing for years. The crusade was already part of the national psyche, especially given the Korean War and the persecution and criminal prosecution of suspected communists.
It’s the only thesis by which all the pieces of circumstantial evidence fall into place in the Kennedy assassination
The obvious question arises: Why would a genuine communist want to join to join an organization — the U.S. Marine Corps — that had just killed and injured millions of communists in Korea? Why would he join a government that was persecuting, prosecuting, and jailing communists here in the United States? Why would he join an organization by which he could be ordered to go anywhere in the world on a moment’s notice and kill more “Commies, Reds, and gooks,” such as Vietnam, Laos, or Berlin? Does that make any sense at all?
So, how does one explain this conundrum? How does one explain why Oswald, a supposed communist, joined the Marine Corps, an organization devoted to killing communists?
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There is an easy explanation — one, however, that is not consistent with the official story.
In the 1950s, there was a famous television series called I Led Three Lives, which is based on a book of the same name by a man named Herbert Philbrick. The series revolved around an American man who posed as a communist but who was actually an FBI agent. The man’s job was to infiltrate communist cells that were supposedly operating here in the United States and secretly report their activities to the FBI.
It’s worth watching a couple of episodes of I Led Three Lives just to get a sense of what life was like here in the United States during the Cold War and the anti-communist crusade. You can access them on YouTube by searching for “I Led Three Lives.” The commies were supposedly everywhere — the State Department, the Army, Hollywood, the public schools, and other walks of life. The Russians were coming! They were coming to get us, take over the federal government, and turn America entirely Red.
Equally important, the manual demonstrates that the CIA was also specializing in how to keep people from discovering its role in state-sponsored assassinations
Needless to say, the star of I Led Three Lives was portrayed as a heroic, courageous, and patriotic American. Risking his life every day at the hands of the communists, who might suddenly discover his secret identity, he was fighting to protect Americans from a communist takeover, fighting to keep America “free.”
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For any teenage boy in the 1950s who had come to the realization that becoming Clark Kent and Superboy was beyond his reach, it was different with I Led Three Lives. Any American boy could grow up to become a G-Man and devote his life to ferreting out communists, prosecuting them, and jailing them, as U.S. officials were doing with members of the U.S. Communist Party in the 1940s and 1950s.
As a PBS documentary entitled Who Was Lee Harvey Oswald? pointed out, I Led Three Lives was Lee Harvey Oswald’s favorite TV Show as a teenager. Now things make sense. Since this was his favorite television show, the teenage Oswald would naturally have begun fantasizing growing up to be the hero of the show — a secret G-man who falsely portrayed himself as a communist in order to find and destroy the countless communist cells that were supposedly spreading across America.
The teenage Oswald would have realized that the job would necessarily involve learning everything he could about communism and socialism. After all, as you can see in the television series, any G-man who was falsely portraying himself as a communist to other communists would have to play his role convincingly. He would have to know communism as well as his enemies and be able to convince them that he too was a committed communist. To do that would require extensive study of communism and socialism.
Now it makes sense why Oswald would join the Marines, just as his older brother had. His joining the Marines demonstrated that like his hero in I Led Three Lives, Oswald hated communists as much as any other Marine. Moreover, he must have known that the Marines were where he would stand a good chance at being recruited to work for the FBI and maybe even the CIA.
It’s also why we still have people like Larry Sabato and Philip Shenon trying to come up with some motive for Oswald more than 50 years after the assassination.
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In fact, take a look at the website of the CIA. See if it doesn’t point out the CIA looks to the U.S. military as a prime source for recruiting new agents. Clearly, the U.S. Marine Corps would rank near the top. Semper Fidelis!
Soon after the Warren Commission got established, the chairman, Earl Warren, called a top-secret meeting of the committee. Its purpose? To address information that Warren had received that Lee Harvey Oswald, the accused assassin of President Kennedy, was in actuality an intelligence agent, one who had been secretly working for the FBI and maybe even the CIA.
It would certainly explain how Oswald learned to be fluent in Russian while he was in the military.
It would also explain why he was never abused, insulted, prosecuted, or thrown out of the military for proclaiming he was a Marxist Marine while he was still on active duty, even though U.S. officials were carrying out their anti-communist crusade against suspected communists all across America, including within the U.S. military.
It would explain why the military discharged him early so that he could travel to Russia where he would supposedly defect.
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It would explain why the FBI and the CIA never indicted him or even summoned him to appear before a federal grand jury after he returned to the United States after supposedly attempting to defect to the Soviet Union.
How does one explain this conundrum? How does one explain why Oswald, a supposed communist, joined the Marine Corps, an organization devoted to killing communists?
It would explain how Oswald got a job with a company in New Orleans that was owned by a right-wing, anti-communist businessman.
It would explain why Oswald printed the address of a former FBI agent as the return address on a pro-Cuba pamphlet he was distributing in New Orleans.
It would explain what Oswald was behaving like a communist in New Orleans, with nary a peep from U.S. officials.
It would explain why the person standing in line next to Oswald when he was in New Orleans getting a visa to travel to Mexico was a CIA agent.
It would explain Oswald’s trip to Mexico City prior to JFK’s assassination.
It would explain how Oswald got a job in a photography business in Dallas that developed highly classified documents for the U.S. government.
It would explain why Oswald was seen in the company of a CIA agent in Dallas.
After he was arrested, Oswald proclaimed his innocence and claimed that he was being framed for the assassination of the president. Many people have never given that possibility any consideration. The automatic assumption has been that Oswald was guilty because the pat evidence pointed toward guilt, evidence that was entirely consistent with a good frame-up. Thus, the only question over the years has been: Did Oswald act alone or in a conspiracy with others?
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The problem is that when the question is framed like that, it leads to nothing but contradictions, inconsistencies, anomalies, mysteries, and conundrums that cause people to throw their hands up in despair. It’s also why we still have people like Larry Sabato and Philip Shenon trying to come up with some motive for Oswald more than 50 years after the assassination.
Today the Korean War is known as the Forgotten War. But it wasn’t forgotten back in the mid-1950s
Many people simply cannot accept the possibility or probability that Oswald was telling the truth — that he was, in fact, innocent and was being framed by the very people who actually did have a motive for assassinating the president — the same motive that drove them to target Mossadegh, Arbenz, Castro, Allende, and others for regime-change operations. They simply cannot accept that that an agency that specialized in protecting “national security” through assassination and cover-up in other parts of the world would actually do its job here in the United States when circumstances supposedly required it.
As I detail in my ebook The Kennedy Autopsy, there was clearly a cover-up involving the autopsy of the president. Today there is no reasonable question about that, especially given the extensive information in Douglas Horne’s five-volume book Inside the Assassination Records Review Board.
For example, when the ARRB summoned former Navy photography official Saundra Spencer to testify in the 1990s, she said that the autopsy photographs in the official record were not the ones she developed on a top-secret, classified basis on the weekend of the assassination.
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The ones she developed, she testified, had a big hole in the back of Kennedy’s head, which connoted an exit wound, which implied a shot fired from the front. Her sworn testimony confirmed the statements of the Dallas physicians who confirmed that there was a huge exit-sized wound in the back of Kennedy’s head. Yet, the official photographs in the records show the back on Kennedy’s head to be intact.
Spencer’s testimony stands today. It was never contradicted by the Pentagon or the CIA. That means that the official autopsy photographs in the Kennedy case are fraudulent, which necessarily means that there was a cover-up. The question naturally arises: Who would they be covering up for on the very night of the assassination?
In 1953, in the run-up to the Guatemala regime-change operation, the CIA published a top-secret assassination manual that demonstrates that the agency had begun specializing in assassination early on. Equally important, the manual demonstrates that the CIA was also specializing in how to keep people from discovering its role in state-sponsored assassinations.
In that “police action,” as U.S. officials called it, U.S. forces killed and injured millions of North Koreans, not only by carpet-bombing the entire country, including rural villages but also by illegally using germ warfare
By the time the 1960s rolled around, the Pentagon and the CIA were teaching Latin American military dictatorships that in the case of covert state-sponsored assassinations, a good strategy would be to blame the assassination on a communist. I wonder why they were so convinced that the blame-a-communist strategy would be successful in keeping people from discovering that a political assassination was state-sponsored.
Read more: Figuring out the Kennedy assassination part 1
Was Oswald, in fact, an U.S. intelligence agent whose secret portrayal as a communist was used to frame him for assassinating the president? As I show in my ebook Regime Change: The JFK Assassination, that’s the only thesis by which all the mysteries, anomalies, inconsistencies, and contradictions disappear. It’s the only thesis by which all the pieces of circumstantial evidence fall into place in the Kennedy assassination.
The problem is that all too many Americans find it too frightening to go down that road. While they now accept the U.S. regime-change operations in Iran, Guatemala, Cuba, Chile, Congo, and others, which took place before, during, and after the Kennedy assassination, unfortunately they still cannot bring themselves to see that the assassination of President Kennedy is as much a part of our nation’s national-security heritage as those other regime-change operations are.
Jacob G. Hornberger is founder and president of The Future of Freedom Foundation. He was a trial attorney for twelve years in Texas. He also was an adjunct professor at the University of Dallas, where he taught law and economics. In 1987, Mr. Hornberger left the practice of law to become director of programs at the Foundation for Economic Education. This article was first published in The Future of Freedom Foundation and is republished here with permission. The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Global Village Space’s editorial policy.