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Ireland's political and cultural magazine
A
S we approach the th anni-
versary of the killing of John F
Kennedy on November, a
new movie puts forward a the-
ory that only a small minority will accept.
‘Parkland’, a Tom Hanks production, sug-
gests that JFK was killed by
communist-sympathiser
and crack shot, Lee Harvey
Oswald, acting alone. The
director, Robert Landesman,
believes there was very little
proof to suggest a conspiracy
behind the murder, an opin-
ion that puts him at odds with
% of Americans. They do
not believe the assassina-
tion happened the way the
establishment tells them it
did. Admittedly, polls about
American beliefs on evolution
and global warming puzzle the
rest of the world. According
to Vincent Bugliosi in ,
over a thousand books have
been written about the assas-
sination with % of them
“pro-conspiracy and anti-War-
ren Commission”.
For the elite, ‘conspiracy’
‘theory’ has often implied
an oxymoron, like ‘jumbo
shrimp’.
Kennedy was no angel,
but his baby steps towards a
more peaceful and progres-
sive America at home and
abroad alarmed the mili-
tary-industrial complex that
Eisenhower had warned about,
and made Kennedy an object
of intense anger in the establishment. He
had made enough enemies to send assassi-
nation researchers off in all directions, for
a generation.
Oswald himself of course claimed to be a
patsy (scapegoat) but was killed by a Mafia
gangster while in police custody, before his
claim could be tested. The first Gallup polls
after the killing indicated % of people
believed that there had been a conspiracy
to murder the president. Many Americans
consistently believed that the Mafia or the
CIA or both were key agents
in the murder.
The official investiga-
tion, known as the Warren
Commission, reported
in that Oswald had
acted alone, but public opin-
ion remained divided, with
Gallup’s poll finding
% still believing the assas-
sination was organised by a
conspiracy.
Declassified documents
show that the CIA, noting
the public belief that the
agency itself may have been
involved, began a campaign
to suggest that versions chal-
lenging the official story came
from “conspiracy nuts”. The
downplaying of the conspir-
acy theory has been one of
the CIA’s greatest successes.
Indeed the downplaying is
the second conspiracy.
In , the Senate
Church Committee inves-
tigation into the country’s
intelligence services made
public for the first time
attempts to overthrow foreign
governments and to assas-
sinate foreign leaders. The
committee found that more
than journalists were
working for the CIA, giving the agency an
excellent platform from which to discredit
the conspiracy stories.
The Church Committee was followed
in by the House Select Committee
on Assassinations, which took evidence
for two years and issued a report in
concluding that Kennedy was indeed likely
to have been killed as a result of a conspir-
acy. Several well-regarded books appeared
during the s and s that filled in
further details on the killing, including Jim
Marr’s Crossfire and Anthony Summer’s
Conspiracy
The biggest JFK outing in recent popular
culture was Oliver Stone’s film ‘JFK’,
which verntilated several conspiracy theo-
ries and was widely attacked in the America
media before the film was even released,
although the film was a popular success.
A great body of evidence, research and
conspiracy grew over the years and there’s
wide consensus now among conspiracy the-
orists that the hit was conceived by the East
Coast oligarchs, masterminded by James
Jesus Angleton of the CIA, and executed by
Sam Giancaca’s mafia hitmen along with
Cuban-American operatives.
In the most recent Gallup polls, in ,
the figures actually believing the official lone
gunman version are at an historic low of
%. So, Parkland will be pushing a contro-
versial and unusual theory of the murder. You
could even call it a conspiracy theory.
A conspiracy Americans
always believed
Oswald was, or at least may have been, a patsy for the CIA and Mafia.
Fifty
years
today
JFK ASSASSINATION INTERNATIONAL
Talking about
Kennedy,
people come
up to me: “Bill,
quit talking
about Kennedy,
man. Let it go.
It’s a long time
ago, just forget
about it”.
And I’m like,
alright, then
don’t bring up
Jesus to me. As
long as we’re
talking shelf
life here
Bill Hicks
“
