The following are excerpts from Jacob Hornberger’s newest book, Regime Change: The JFK Assassination, which has just been launched on Amazon.com ($4.99). Click here to purchase it.
Introduction
According to a Gallup poll conducted 50 years after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, the vast majority of the American people disbelieve the conclusions reached by the Warren Commission. There are so many theories about the assassination, however, that it’s difficult to make sense of it all. The materials on the assassination are so enormously voluminous that it’s virtually impossible to even know where to start. Who has the time to delve into the controversy and figure it out? And what difference does it make anyway?
If all that describes the way you feel about the Kennedy assassination, then this book is for you. It is a primer for understanding the assassination of John Kennedy, and it provides the only paradigm in which all the pieces of the puzzle of the Kennedy assassination fall into place and make sense.
The thesis of this book is a simple one: On November 22, 1963, the U.S. national-security establishment violently removed John Kennedy from the presidency through assassination. This particular regime-change operation occurred within the context of other regime-change operations conducted by the U.S. national-security state during the Cold War, such as those in Iran in 1953, Guatemala in 1954, Cuba in the 1960s, and Chile in 1973.
What was the reason for the Kennedy regime-change operation? The reason was the same as it was for all the other Cold War regime-change operations: “national security.” At the height of the Cold War, the national-security establishment concluded that Kennedy, owing primarily to his beliefs and policies on the Soviet Union, Cuba, communism, and the Cold War, constituted a grave threat to national security. If Kennedy were not removed from office, national-security officials believed, it was a virtual certainty that the United States would lose the Cold War and fall to the communists.
The case against the national-security establishment in the assassination of President Kennedy rests primarily on circumstantial evidence, much of which was kept secret after the assassination and did not come to light until many years and even many decades later.
Within a few months of becoming president, Kennedy had gone to war against the U.S. military establishment and the CIA, the two principal elements of the national-security state, over the future direction of America. It was an ideological war and a political war, one involving the highest stakes, including the security of the United States and the future direction of the country. It was a war that would increase in intensity with each year of the Kennedy administration. It was a war that ended on November 22, 1963, when the president was killed by his enemies in the national-security establishment. We are still living with the consequences of that regime-change operation, along with its longtime, ongoing cover-up.
This book explains how the assassination was accomplished, why it was carried out, the manner in which it was covered up, and the political context in which it took place. It will show why the Kennedy assassination continues to serve as an open sore on the American body politic and why the assassination, cover-up, and aftermath still matter today. It will also explain what we need to do to remedy what happened more than 50 years ago.
Finally, for those who wish to continue their study of this transformative event in U.S. history, I have added, at the end of this book, a list of over one hundred online articles (with links) that relate to the Kennedy assassination or to the national-security state.
Chapter 1
The Assassination
On Friday, November 22, 1963, President John F. Kennedy was gunned down in broad daylight in Dallas, Texas. The president had been riding in an open-air limousine as part of a motorcade that was proceeding through downtown Dallas. Accompanying Kennedy in the limousine was his wife, Jacqueline, and Texas Gov. John Connally, and his wife, Nellie.
At 12: 30 p.m., as the motorcade was proceeding down Elm Street in Dealey Plaza, shots rang out. Some witnesses heard shots fired from the right-front of Kennedy’s limousine, specifically from an area that became known as the “grassy knoll.” Other witnesses heard shots fired from Kennedy’s rear, specifically from a building named the Texas School Book Depository. (Also, a few witnesses thought shots from the rear had come from the Dal-Tex building, across the street from, and behind, the Texas School Book Depository.) Both Kennedy and Connally were hit in the attack.
Soon after the shots were fired, law-enforcement personnel entered the book depository, where they found a rifle and three spent bullet cartridges on the sixth floor. The rifle would later be traced to a mail order supposedly placed under an alias by 24-year-old Lee Harvey Oswald, who was an employee of the book depository.
A little more than an hour after the assassination, Dallas law-enforcement personnel took Oswald into custody inside a Dallas movie theater. Initially, he was charged with killing a Dallas police officer, J.D. Tippitt, who had been murdered in the vicinity of Oswald’s neighborhood approximately 45 minutes after Kennedy was shot. Many hours later, Oswald would also be charged with murdering Kennedy.
Oswald was a former U.S. Marine as well as a self-avowed communist. He had defected to the Soviet Union in 1959. After abandoning his foreign adventure and returning to the United States in 1962, he and his Russian-born wife, Marina, settled in Dallas. Even though Oswald’s defection was known to U.S. authorities, they never made any attempt to detain him or even question him after his return.
In the spring of 1963, the Oswalds moved to New Orleans, where Lee engaged in pro-communist and pro-Cuba activity. In late September and early October 1963, Oswald travelled to Mexico City where he is reported to have visited both the Cuban and Soviet embassies, in an attempt to obtain permission to return to the Soviet Union, via Cuba.
After he was taken into custody following the assassination, Oswald denied having killed either Kennedy or Tippitt and referred to himself as a “patsy.”
After Kennedy and Connally were shot, the limousine, which was being driven by a Secret Service agent, rushed to Dallas’s Parkland Memorial Hospital. After desperate attempts to save his life, doctors officially declared Kennedy dead at 1 p.m. CST. Although Connally was severely wounded, the surgeons were able to save him.
The treating physicians and other medical personnel at Parkland consistently stated they observed two major wounds on Kennedy’s body: a large “blowout” wound in the right-rear of his head, about the size of a baseball, which was presumed to be an exit wound; and a small, bullet-sized apparent entrance wound near the midline of his throat, just above his shirt collar and just below his larynx. Both these wounds implied that the fatal shots had been fired from Kennedy’s front.
Once Kennedy was declared dead, Vice-President Lyndon Johnson headed to Dallas Love Field, where he boarded Air Force One and waited for a federal judge to arrive to administer the oath of office. At the same time, aides began removing seats from the rear of the plane to make room for the casket that carried Kennedy’s body.
After Kennedy was declared dead, the Dallas County Medical Examiner, Dr. Earl Rose, attempted to conduct an autopsy on his body, which was required under Texas law. However, a team of Secret Service agents refused to permit an autopsy to be conducted in Texas, and after an ugly, public confrontation with Dr. Rose, they forced their way out of the hospital with Kennedy’s casket. The heavy, ornate, bronze casket was transported to Love Field, where it was loaded onto Air Force One, which then proceeded to Andrews Air Force Base in Maryland.
From Andrews Air Force Base, Kennedy’s body was secretly transported to the morgue at the Bethesda Naval Hospital in Maryland inside a cheap aluminum shipping casket rather than the heavy, ornate, bronze casket into which it had been placed in Dallas. Interestingly enough, about an hour and a half later, Kennedy’s body was delivered to the morgue a second time, this time back inside the Dallas casket, and immediately following this second delivery, an official autopsy was conducted by three military pathologists. The official conclusion of the autopsy was that Kennedy’s head wound and throat wound were both caused by shots fired from behind. We will examine the mysterious handling of Kennedy’s body and the autopsy conclusions in Chapter 5.
Two days later, Lee Harvey Oswald himself was gunned down while in the custody of the Dallas Police Department. His killer was a man named Jack Ruby, who was connected to the Mafia.
On November 29, 1963, Lyndon Johnson established the President’s Commission on the Assassination of President John F. Kennedy. Its mission was to investigate and explain the assassination to the American people. Selected to chair the commission was Earl Warren, the Chief Justice of the United States.
In September 1964, the commission’s report — called the Warren Report — was released to the public. The report concluded that Kennedy was assassinated by Oswald, that Oswald was firing from the president’s rear, that there were no other shooters, and that there was no conspiracy.
Prior to the 50th anniversary of the Kennedy assassination in 2013, a Gallup poll revealed that the vast majority of the American people do not believe the conclusions reached by the Warren Commission.
Chapter 2
Lee Harvey Oswald
The notion that Lee Harvey Oswald was a lone nut and a little man who sought glory and fame by killing one of the most popular presidents in U.S. history has never made any sense. After all, if Oswald’s aim was to seek glory and fame for killing President Kennedy, why would he deny that he did it? Why would he say, “I’m just a patsy”? Wouldn’t he instead have wanted to bask in the limelight of his accomplishment?
On the basis of circumstantial evidence, there is no reasonable possibility that Oswald was the crazed communist sympathizer that we have all been taught that he was. Instead, it is a virtual certainty that he was an agent or asset of Navy intelligence, the CIA, the FBI, or some other U.S. intelligence agency, who was trained to pose as a communist in order to infiltrate communist entities and help to destroy them.
How many genuine communists do you know who have joined the Marine Corps or have become communists while serving in the Marine Corps? How long would a genuine communist have lasted in the Marine Corps at the very height of the Cold War, when the U.S. government was doing everything it could to destroy the lives of any American who was a communist, who had communist sympathies, or who had ever been a member of the Communist Party?
Think about all the people who were criminally prosecuted and sent to jail by U.S. officials in the 1950s for being communists. Recall the forced deportations from the United States of immigrants who had expressed sympathy for communism. Reflect on the secret FBI files on suspected communists, including Martin Luther King and other members of the civil-rights movement. Consider all the people from various walks of life whose lives were ruined by U.S. officials owing to some connection to communism in their past. Indeed, recall U.S. Senator Joseph McCarthy’s efforts to ferret out communists within the U.S. government, including those serving in the U.S. military.
Yet, here was U.S. Marine Lee Harvey Oswald openly proclaiming while he was on active duty in the late 1950s that he was a communist, and no U.S. military official or FBI agent laid a hand on him. How likely is it that the U.S. Marine Corps would totally ignore a genuine self-avowed communist within its midst at the very height of the Cold War and the U.S. anti-communist crusade? Does that comport with common sense?
During his time in the Marines, Oswald was stationed at Atsugi Air Force Base in Japan, where the CIA’s top-secret U-2 spy plane was based. That was the aircraft that was piloted by CIA pilot Francis Gary Powers when it was shot down over the Soviet Union in 1960. When he was stationed at Atsugi, Oswald, the supposed communist, held a top-secret security clearance that had been granted to him by U.S. military officials. Does it make any sense that U.S. military officials would have permitted a self-avowed communist to have a top-secret security clearance, especially at the Air Force base on which the most secretive plane in U.S. history was based?
While he was serving in the Marines, Oswald became fluent in the Russian language. How does a person, especially one who has never been to college, teach himself a complex language such as Russian, especially when he is working eight hours a day at his regular job? Even if he studies grammar books at night, how does he become proficient in speaking a foreign language if he isn’t regularly practicing conversational skills with someone else?
Isn’t it much more likely that during his time in the Marine Corps, Oswald attended one of the U.S. military’s language schools, where he was assigned a tutor who assisted him in gaining a good grasp of the structure of the Russian language and, more important, in achieving basic conversational skills?
That brings us to the only paradigm or hypothesis that makes any sense: U.S. Marine Lee Harvey Oswald was recruited by U.S. intelligence to serve as an American intelligence agent, an agent whose secret cover would be a communist, a cover that would enable him to infiltrate the Soviet Union and report back on internal conditions within that Cold War enemy and, later, U.S. organizations that were perceived to be communist sympathizers.
If one instead accepts the official version of events, as reflected in the Warren Report, Oswald can be described as a Cold War miracle story. After all, here was a former U.S. Marine traveling to the U.S. national-security state’s avowed Cold War enemy, the Soviet Union, and sauntering into the U.S. Embassy, where he openly announced his intention to defect to the Soviet Union. Even worse, Oswald openly declared his intention to disclose everything he knew about what he learned in the military, including the classified radar secrets that he had acquired while serving as a radar operator within the U-2 sphere of operations at Atsugi.
How could a person bring greater shame to the Marine Corps, whose motto is “semper fidelis” — “always faithful” — than that? Indeed, wouldn’t you think that such conduct would rank among the biggest threats to national security during the Cold War, especially since it might induce other Marines and other U.S. military personnel to follow suit? Why would they let Oswald or any other U.S serviceman get away with that?
Yet, while U.S. officials had prosecuted, convicted, and punished people such as Julius and Ethel Rosenberg for giving classified secrets to the Soviets and even people who were guilty of nothing more than having had connections to communism or to some communist organization, they never laid a hand on Oswald after he returned to the United States in 1962. Why not? Why did the FBI, CIA, Justice Department, and U.S. military fail to arrest, indict, prosecute, and convict this supposed communist and traitor after his return to the United States?
Think about how U.S. officials treated John Walker Lindh, the so-called American Taliban who was captured in Afghanistan during the 2001 U.S. invasion of that country. They disrobed him, tied him up, tortured and abused him, humiliated him, prosecuted and convicted him, and sent him to jail for a very long time. They called him a bad and shameful American. That’s how we would expect U.S. officials to react to an American who they believe has betrayed his country. Indeed, that’s why no one was surprised at the U.S. national-security state’s hostile reaction toward Edward Snowden, the man who disclosed the NSA’s secret surveillance scheme to the world.
It was entirely different with Oswald. They not only let him back into the United States after he announced that he was retracting his defection to the Soviet Union and wanting to return home to the United States, U.S. officials actually helped fund the travel expenses of this supposed communist traitor and his Russian-born wife.
It’s worth mentioning that the Soviets shot down the U-2 spy plane piloted by CIA pilot Francis Gary Powers six months after Oswald entered the Soviet Union. Did Oswald provide the necessary information that enabled the Soviets to shoot down a U-2 for the first time ever, an event that led to the cancellation of a top-level summit between President Dwight Eisenhower and Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev that was intended to reduce Cold War tensions? We don’t know because U.S. officials, for some reason, weren’t concerned enough about it to even subpoena Oswald to appear before a federal grand jury and give testimony under oath of what he had told the Soviets.
As part of its Cold War activities during the 1950s and 1960s, the FBI was infiltrating communist and leftist organizations here within the United States for the purpose of destroying them. To accomplish that, U.S. officials were sending covert agents into the Communist Party and other organizations that were viewed as subversive. In order for those agents to convince the people in those organizations that they were genuine communists, they had to be well trained to act like good communists. Otherwise, they would have been quickly detected as government agents and evicted from the organization.
Recall Oswald’s time in New Orleans, a period in which he made quite a public display of being a communist, something that he had not done in Dallas, where he moved immediately upon returning from the Soviet Union. During his time in New Orleans in the spring and summer of 1963, he did everything he could to advertise his communist credentials. One of the ways he did that was by distributing pamphlets promoting the Fair Play for Cuba Committee, a nationwide organization that sympathized with the Cuban Revolution and that called for an end to the U.S. embargo against Cuba….
To continue reading Chapter 2 and the rest of Regime Change: The JFK Assassination, click here.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Introduction
Chapter 1: The Assassination
Chapter 2: Lee Harvey Oswald
Chapter 3: The Patsy
Chapter 4: World War III
Chapter 5: The Autopsy
Chapter 6: Secrecy
Chapter 7: National Security
Chapter 8: Regime Change
Chapter 9: John F. Kennedy
Chapter 10: Conclusion
More Books
Appendix A: Timeline
Appendix B: Online Articles
About the Author
Click here to purchase Regime Change: The JFK Assassination by Jacob Hornberger.
