Kennedy’s Death and American Fascism

Until I listened to Rob Reiner’s podcast, Who Killed JFK?, I believed that Lee Harvey Oswald shot Kennedy acting alone, that he was a twisted and violent man who happened to find himself, by pure chance, working in a building overlooking the president’s motorcade route, and that he couldn’t help taking advantage of the circumstances to make his mark on the world. Since no one had come forward, and conspirators will always include at least one person who cannot keep the secret, I thought that Oswald was confirmed as the lone gunman.

 

I am now convinced that Lee Harvey Oswald did not shoot Kennedy, but that he was just what he said he was, “a patsy,” someone carefully and meticulously set up by the perpetrators to take the blame for a crime. The podcast provided compelling evidence of the multifaceted pressure that was applied to the authors of the assassination forensic report so that it would support the single-gunman-from-the-rear theory. It also carefully demonstrates the thoroughgoing tunnel vision of the Warren Commission in carefully excluding any evidence that might have undermined the Oswald-as-lone-shooter theory. Reiner’s podcast changed my mind about the assassination of John F. Kennedy, and it provoked certain thoughts about those dark days in 1963 and how they are related to the dark days we are passing through now.

 

Two sets of facts establish the falsity of the official story.

 

First set of facts: Oswald’s whereabouts. On November 22, 1963, Oswald was seen drinking a Coke in a booth in the cafeteria on the second floor of the Texas School Book Depository at 12:25 p.m.; Kennedy was shot shortly after 12:30 p.m.; Oswald was seen again in the same cafeteria location drinking a Coke at 12:32 p.m. The unlikely possibility that he had sprung up, run to the sixth floor, shot Kennedy, cleaned and hid his rifle, and then had run back down to the booth to resume drinking his Coke, all in ninety seconds, is eliminated by the testimony of a coworker who heard the shots and ran down the stairs with two other coworkers at the same time without seeing or hearing anyone in the stairwell (the only one in the building).

 

Second set of facts: his job. Oswald worked at a job in the Texas School Book Depository that was found for him on September 26, 1963, the day after the upcoming visit by President Kennedy and the motorcade route were announced in the Dallas newspapers. The job was found for him by one Ruth Paine, who had already helped him in other ways and had befriended his wife, and who had extensive relationships with the CIA. His job in that building was vital to the carefully constructed story that he was the lone gunman and responsible for the president’s death. “Pure chance” had nothing to do with it.

 

Reiner shows that assassination experts in the CIA organized four assassins who were arrayed around Dealey Plaza on that day. He describes the individuals, groups, and entities that hated JFK, and points to his growing isolation within the government as a result of his efforts to forge peaceful relations with both Castro’s Cuba and the Soviet Union. The organizers of the assassination viewed those efforts as treasonous.

 

There were two secret government programs at that time—one to assassinate foreign leaders, and the other to cause a catastrophic “false flag” event in the US meant to provoke a war with Cuba—which are seen as forming the ideological and logistical bases for the plan to kill Kennedy. Reiner gives a narrative of the plan to assassinate Kennedy that includes the names of the likely planners and the names of the four assassins situated around Dealey Plaza.

 

Indirectly, we are given to see how the plan, which in view of its criminal nature may be called a conspiracy, worked. It shows how the CIA over many years as part of its regular activities cultivated individuals likely to be of use to it (both Oswald and Ruth Paine were such individuals, as was the man who later killed Oswald, Jack Ruby). Many people involved in the plan knew only their part of it and possibly did not know its ultimate purpose. Furthermore, in the years since, eighteen individuals were killed or died mysteriously shortly before they were scheduled to testify on what they knew about the assassination. Clearly, insiders who knew anything about the plan had to have been aware of the penalty for revealing it. These deaths show the CIA to be operating here as a criminal, mob-like organization.

 

The mass of facts regarding motives, means, and logistical experience, as well as the sheer presence of so many people with a connection to the CIA in Dallas on that day and its longstanding, intimate connections with so many of the principals, convinced me that this narrative, or one very much like it, must be true.

 

After my shock and rage subsided a bit, my first thought was that this act, the murder of an American president by members of the US government, has elements of a fascist coup about it. The men who planned the murder obviously had contempt for the Constitution and the electoral process by which Kennedy had become president. We know from public statements of the CIA planners that they were right-wing “hardliners,” who regarded the danger posed to the United States by the Soviet Union as apocalyptic and existential. Finally, the act itself shows that they thought that the proper response to their political disagreement with Kennedy over how to treat the nation’s adversaries was to murder him. Contempt for democratic rule, seeing dangers to the nation as existential, and solving political problems with violence—these are some of the essential elements of fascism.

 

The planners themselves stayed in the shadows. They did not proclaim a new constitution. They did not publicly exalt their violence as evidence of their greatness. But they achieved what was evidently a major political objective: Kennedy’s peace initiatives were abandoned. We have often heard the question posed in our times: Could the US become a fascist country? The CIA is seen here to already have been acting like a fascist mini-state within the US government.

 

The darkness of November 22, 1963, speaks to the darkness of our moment. Specifically, two similarities leap to mind concerning the connection of the CIA planners to Donald Trump and his party. They share a contempt for the Constitution: the CIA planners voided the result of the 1960 election; Trump and his supporters tried their very best to void the result of the 2020 election. They share an apocalyptic view of their importance in meeting an implacable evil so dangerous that all means are justified to combat it: the CIA planners thought that the USSR posed an existential threat to the US such that any relaxation of tensions amounted to treasonous surrender; the Republican party has arrived at the position that if he is not elected in November, the forces of evil present in the Democratic Party will overwhelm and destroy the United States.

 

We will never know what American history would have been like if Kennedy had lived. He was evolving from cold warrior to peacemaker. In June, 1963, he gave his “Peace Speech” in which he proclaimed the need to find a way to use diplomacy to live with the Soviet Union and with Castro’s Cuba, even if we disagreed with their systems. He didn’t see a role for American troops in Vietnam. He wanted the US to live in peace with adversary nations and not in an eternal, righteous enmity.

 

In November, 1963, Kennedy was popular and seemed headed for a large reelection mandate in 1964.

 

His murder and the intense cover-up that began the moment of the assassination and that continues to this day (the CIA still refuses to release more than five thousand related documents) introduced a disconnect between many Americans and their government that must be seen as one of the foundations of Trump’s political success.

 

Think of the blows to Americans’ trust in their government that were unleashed by the assassination. The Warren Commission report asserted a series of lies, in part by citing a fictitious forensic report. The Vietnam War, which Kennedy was intending to end, generated so many lies that Daniel Ellsberg released the Pentagon Papers in response to them. The necessity of parts of the government to involve large other parts of the government in the lies required to maintain the cover-up set American politics on the path of doubt and cynicism regarding American democratic institutions, which must be seen as reaching its apotheosis with the political career of Donald Trump.

 

The CIA planners, we can now see, did hideous damage to the United States. They killed the lawfully elected president, they tainted legitimate governmental authority with the necessity to promulgate lie after lie, and they made a long, pointless war inevitable.

 

No one knows whom the American people will elect as president on November 5, 2024. If Donald Trump is elected, in view of his open promotion of autocracy, his election will be able to be seen as the final rending of the fabric of the people’s trust in democratic government that arguably began with the assassination and the cover-up. If Trump is defeated by such a margin as to represent a wholesale repudiation, then perhaps documents like the Rob Reiner podcast and those of other voices might help to generate a national outcry for an honest, thorough governmental inquiry into the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. Such an inquiry could go some distance toward restoring trust in the ability of the US government to speak, and of the American people to bear, the truth.