I borrowed the title of this article from myself. In my book Hidden History, that’s what I named the chapter on the JFK assassination. So it’s not plagiarism. I think it’s accurate. Of all the topics broached by the alt media and the conspiracy crowd, none are as big and all encompassing as the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.
I became a Kennedy fan boy at a young age. I read all the books I could on John F. Kennedy. A Thousand Days. My Twelve Years with John F. Kennedy, by his loyal secretary Evelyn Lincoln, who was the first Kennedy insider to express doubts about the official story of the assassination. And I was deeply influenced by Johnny, We Hardly Knew Ye, by his close aides Kenneth O’Donnell and David Powers. While not a conspiracy book, its first hand account of the events in Dallas painted a very revealing and negative picture of Lyndon B. Johnson. There was a clear inference, in between the lines, that someone other than Lee Harvey Oswald had murdered Kennedy. And then I happened to read an excerpt from George O’Toole’s new book The Assassination Tapes, which was published in Penthouse magazine. Yes, I used to buy Penthouse. And Playboy. But I honestly did read the articles.
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Penthouse especially published some thought provoking articles on deep politics then, in the mid to late 1970s. From that point on, I was hooked. My mother bought me a copy of Robert Sam Anson’s They’ve Killed the President and Mark Lane’s Rush to Judgment. Anson was an early day “neocon,” or what I call a neo believer in conspiracy, not to be confused with the Zionists who run our corrupt government. Lane quickly became my hero. I eagerly joined the local chapter of his national lobbying group, The Citizens Committee of Inquiry. I became the head of that chapter. Not as impressive as it sounds, as myself and another teenager were the only official members. Although we did attract people to a library symposium. I slapped a “Who Killed JFK?” bumper sticker on my 1970 Datsun 510 sedan, to advertise my skepticism to the world. Meeting Mark Lane in late 1976 was one the most thrilling moments of my life.
I recounted what happened at Lane’s Washington, D.C. office that day, in Hidden History. I’ll provide a teaser here. It involved a long distance phone call from Hollywood, from then red hot comedian Freddie Prinze, who was the star of the sitcom Chico and the Man. Let’s just say that when Prinze supposedly killed himself a few months later, it really opened my eyes. Thanks to my official researcher card from The Citizens Committee of Inquiry, I was given a personal tour of the National Archives, which included a private screening of the Zapruder film, where I could freeze it wherever I wanted and watch frame by frame. They also brought out JFK’s bloody clothing, the ridiculous Mannlicher Carcano rifle, and let me hold the “magic bullet” in my hand. I felt like a big shot, especially considering I had just dropped out of community college for the first time.
The House Select Committee on Assassinations, which we presumably helped to create with our meager lobbying efforts, wound up supporting all the impossible claims of the Warren Commission, including the single-bullet theory. Needless to say, as a young, card carrying member of the ACLU, it was all very disillusioning. I realized that the liberal Democrats weren’t the good guys. After all, they didn’t seem to care who had killed their supposed idol and martyr, John F. Kennedy. It was at that point that I read None Dare Call it Conspiracy, by Gary Allen, and started realizing there were some pretty interesting conspiracies on the far Right. Even though I scoured the yearly list of CFR members, provided by the John Birch Society, and enjoyed James Tucker’s accounts of infiltrating the Bilderberg meeting in the Spotlight, I never lost my interest in the JFK assassination. Or my affection for the Kennedys. It remains my wheelhouse issue, and the one I always come back to.
About five years later, I was able to meet another of my heroes, indefatigable researcher Harold Weisberg, author of the Whitewash series and other books on the JFK assassination. I picked him up in Washington, D.C., where he was battling in court over some Freedom of Information request, as he did every day for years, and drove him back to his Frederick, Maryland home. He invited me in for dinner. He was just as grumpy as his reputation. Kind of a precursor to the black pilled alt media people, he didn’t trust anyone, and balked at giving other researchers credit. He liked the fact that I knew pretty much about big band music, as he played some of his favorite records for me. It was disappointing, but hardly surprising, when his bitterness caused him to try to sabotage Oliver Stone’s JFK by leaking an advance copy of the script to Mockingbird Media asset George Lardner of The Washington Post.
To my astonishment, my county’s adult education program actually allowed me to teach a course on the JFK assassination for five years or so. Initially, the class was on the assassination itself, and I put together what I thought was a convincing PowerPoint presentation, that demonstrated how the official version of events was a monumental lie. As I’ve noted before, in each of my classes, there always seemed to be a lone nutter, and it frustrated me beyond belief that I was unable to persuade them of the truth with my presentation. Now, there wasn’t much interest in the class, and half the time it was cancelled because not enough people signed up for it. They did charge what I thought was an exorbitant amount, so that certainly didn’t help. Then they switched me to teaching a course on Oliver Stone’s film, where I just screened JFK and stopped the film at various points to insert my comments. Talk about easy money.
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COVID killed off that JFK class, and I’ve never heard back from them about starting it up again. It would have been more rewarding with a large group, but as time goes on, interest in the subject is bound to wane. Far more people today weren’t alive on November 22, 1963 than were. JFK is a video sound byte to them. A shock of thick hair with a distinct Boston accent. And their impressions of him are undoubtedly impacted by the nonstop negative media coverage, ever since Judith Campbell Exner donned those oversized sunglasses and held her first press conference. During which, by the way, she never mentioned the Mafia. So now, to many people, JFK is just an insatiable adulterer, who was too sick to be president anyway, and shockingly reckless. He probably caused his own death. Or at least he deserved it in some way. Read my books for all the slanderous comments about him from “liberals.”
People often ask me, “so who killed JFK?” And my answer always is, “not Lee Harvey Oswald.” Sure, we can reasonably suspect that the same forces who covered up the crime- the FBI, the CIA, LBJ, the Warren Commission- were involved in the conspiracy. I think it’s logical to assume that top level Pentagon officials, maybe some Big Oil names, and perhaps an Israeli or two were part of the plot. The crime of the twentieth century has never been honestly investigated. The Warren Commission failed to call many crucial witnesses, and the witnesses were never questioned properly. Think Kevin Costner as Jim Garrison proclaiming, “Ask the question!” A lot of us were doing that, as we waded through those 26 volumes of mostly meaningless material. You can see the attorneys attempting to pad the record. I provided some glaring examples of their “incompetence” in Hidden History.
