Conspiracy Around JFK’s Death

By: Sam Capelli

Now that Donald Trump has signed an executive order to release the remaining John F. Kennedy (JFK) Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) files, the dynamics of a potential conspiracy around the former president’s assassination has resurfaced in the media, and the conspiracy around  the assassination being that it was led by the U.S. government. But before people choose a side, it’s best that we look at the entire timeline of the killing. 

On November 22, 1963, president John F. Kennedy was making an appearance in Dallas, Texas, in an attempt to “smooth over frictions in the Democratic party.” As the motorcade reached Elm Street at approximately 12:00 p.m., three shots were fired from the Texas School Book Depository Building. The first shot blows past the motorcade, the second shot hits John Kennedy in the back of the neck/upper back, and the final fatal shot hits Kenney in the back of the head. The president’s motorcade speeds away to Parkland Memorial Hospital, and the president dies at 1:00 p.m. central time zone. 

James W. Douglas writes, “Two critical questions converge at Kennedy’s assassination. The first is: Why did his assassin risk exposure and a shameful downfall by covertly murdering a beloved president? The second is: Why was John Kennedy prepared to give his life for peace, when he saw death coming?” In assessing the formation of John Kennedy’s character, biographers have all zeroed in on his upbringing as a rich young man in a dysfunctional marriage. Those closest to him knew he was a reckless playboy his entire life, under the influence of a “domineering, womanizing father and an emotionally distant, strictly Catholic mother.” 

What made Kennedy’s reckless life complete was the Angel of Death constantly reaching down at him from his youth until his death. Kennedy always seemed to be sick or in pain. Two years before the bombing of Hiroshima, Kennedy was a PT boat commander in the South Pacific. On the night of August 1-2, 1943, Kennedy was at the wheel of his boat heading near the Solomon Islands. At some point, a Japanese ship emerged from the darkness and struck Kennedy’s boat. That night and all through the next, Kennedy swam for hours and hours in an attempt to save all of his crew members. Kennedy at the time, had already had serious back problems from his days playing football for Harvard. Infact, Kennedy was rejected from the Army because of his bad back. This crash near the Solomon Islands only made things worse. Kenedy’s back led to his discharge from the Navy shortly after. 

After returning home, John Kennedy’s father, Joseph Kennedy, practically forced John to enter the political field. Joseph Kennedy always wanted his oldest son, Joseph Kennedy Jr, to enter the field, but tragically, the older brother of JFK died in WWII. This caused Kennedy to reflect on the nearness of his own death. Kenedy’s illness and pain would eventually become lifelong discipline. After JFK’s assassination, Robert Kennedy wrote of his brother: “At least one half of the days that he spent on Earth were days of intense physical pain.” He had scarlet fever when he was young, and practically “every conceivable illness in between.” James Douglas writes: “When we were growing up together we used to laugh about the great risk a mosquito took in Jack Kennedy-with his blood, the mosquito was sure to die. He was in Chelsea Naval Hospital for an extended period of time after the war, had a major and painful operation on his back in 1955, campaigned on crutches in 1958. In 1951 on a trip we took around the world he became ill. We flew to the military hospital in Okinawa and he had a temperature of over 106 degrees. They didn’t think he would live. But during all this time, I never heard him complain. I never heard him say anything that would indicate that he felt God had dealt with him unjustly.”

After his back injury and the death of his brother, Kennedy was inspired to enter politics to not only please his father, but to also make sure another war would never come. Kennedy announced his campaign for Congress on April 22, 1946 in Boston, Massachusetts. Kennedy was elected to the House of Representatives in 1947, and would later run for president in 1960. 

As he first took office in 1961, John Kennedy was informed by the CIA about a plan to overthrow the Cuban government and leader Fidel Castro. In 1959, the government was overthrown during the Cuban Revolution and established communist rule under Castro. This was a major problem for the United States since Cuba is one of their neighboring countries. After WWII, the U.S. and Europe were in an agreement that the next world superpower would be the rise of communism. So the U.S. and many European countries made it their goal to prevent the spread of it. The Eisenhower administration gave the go on the Bay of Pigs Invasion. The plan was to take 1,400 Cuban exiles who were anti-Castro, and place them at the Bay of Pigs on Cuba’s southern coast. The U.S. would then send an airstrike on Castro’s aircrafts and force Castro’s forces to collapse. What ended up happening was 1,200 of the 1,400 exiles were captured, and around 100 were killed. The failure was a massive embarrassment for Kennedy and the U.S. government. After the invasion failed, Kennedy publicly took responsibility but privately blamed the CIA and military advisors for presenting him with a flawed plan. He was reportedly furious about the intelligence failures and later said, “They put me in a box,” suggesting he felt pressured into approving a plan he was not fully comfortable with. In the aftermath, Kennedy forced CIA Director Allan Dulles and two top officials, Richard Bissell, and Charles Cabell, to resign. He also began shifting more covert operations control to the Pentagon, reducing the CIA’s influence in military planning.

Kennedy later told people that the Bay of Pigs Invasion was a trap.The older men around him thought he'd be drawn into sending troops into Cuba. Kennedy said: “They were sure I’d give in to them.” He then added, “They couldn’t believe a new president like me wouldn’t panic. They had me figured out all wrong.” JFK did not trust any of the older men around him, especially CIA director Allan Dulles. Before his death, Dulles even admitted in an interview that the plan was always to have Kennedy send in troops rather than fail. In the end, JFK gave Cuba 53 million dollars in exchange for the prisoners Castro had taken. Then there was Vietnam. 

The U.S. had been active in Vietnam for many years. In 1954, vice president, Richard Nixon said that if the French withdrew, the U.S. might have to take risk by sending their own troops. To help the spread of Communism in SouthEast Asia, Kennedy sent 11,000 military advisors to Vietnam by 1962. Kennedy would soon start thinking differently about Vietnam. John Kennedy was under much pressure to send actual combat troops to Vietnam. Revealed in the Pentagon Papers, Kennedy was quoted saying he was willing to send advisors and let the CIA “do what they needed to do,” but he was against sending troops who were capable of “independent combat.” Daniel Ellsburg, the military advisor specialist behind the Pentagon Papers had always been unsure about JFK’s stance on Vietnam. It didn’t make sense: sending in more men, yet being reluctant to send combat troops. So he asked John Kennedy’s brother, Robert Kennedy in 1967. RFK told Ellsburg that his brother had rejected the “urgent advice” of every one of his top military officials, which was to send in troops. Ellsburg recorded this conversation and claimed RFK had said “Because we already were there in 1951. We saw what was happening to the French. We saw it. My brother was determined to never let that happen to us.” John Kennedy was even considering a full withdrawal from Vietnam. His actual words were, “But I can’t do that until 1965 when I’m reelected.” If he tried before, he might be criticized by the conservatives and lose their vote. 

In declassified documents in 2005-2006, letters between John Kennedy and the Soviet premiere, Nikita Khruschev, were discovered. The two had talked about how they respected each other and in the end, both wanted the same things. They wanted peace, and they didn’t want to blow the whole world up. They might have sounded like they were on good terms in those letters, but that didn’t stop the Cuban Missile Crisis. After the U.S. had deployed ballistic missiles in Turkey, the Soviet Union deployed them in Cuba. This is what is considered the closest the world ever came to nuclear war. Eventually, JFK removed the missiles in Turkey, and Khruschev removed them from Cuba. John Kennedy told a historian, Arthur Myer Schlisinger Jr, “The military are mad. They wanted me to do this.” The military got even madder when JFK made his commencement address at the American University in Washington. This speech is what many believe got John Kennedy murdered; that this was the last straw. 

On June 10, 1963, JFK started his speech by telling the graduating class that he wanted to focus on one topic: peace. Kennedy famously stated, “What kind of peace do we seek? Not a Pax Americana enforced on the world by American weapons of war. Not the peace of the grave or the security of the slave. I am talking about genuine peace, the kind of peace that makes life on Earth worth living, the kind that enables men and nations to grow and to hope and to build a better life for their children.” This was “music to the ears” of many Americans, but not what the military wanted to hear. With all of these talks about peace and disarmament, John Kennedy basically put a target on the back of his head. In October later that year, Kennedy ordered the withdrawal of 1,000 troops from Vietnam, and the target on his head got much bigger. Kennedy was quoted saying that “The major part of the U.S. military task in Vietnam can be completed by 1965.” 

The CIA was out of control, which is why Kennedy said a now famous quote: “I will splinter the CIA into a thousand pieces and scatter it to the winds.” Kennedy also said this about an agency that hired mafia assassins to take out politicians. The agency also thought that a CIA assassination must be made to look like it was committed by a “fanatic.” The manual belonging to the agency said “Politics, religion, and revenge are about the only feasible motives for death. Although it is intended that the assassin dies in the act.” Funny enough, this is exactly what happened. 

On October 31, 1957, a man named Lee Harvey Oswald arrived at the American Embassy in Moscow, and met the consul, Richard Schneider. Oswald (who had been discharged from the U.S. Marine Corp) told Schneider that he wanted to renounce his U.S. citizenship. He then handed Schneider a letter saying “My allegiance is to the Soviet Socialist Republic.” Soviet officials who were present were led to believe that Oswald might know something of “special interest.” Oswald said he would make known all the information about the Marine Corp, and the specialty he was in. But what did Oswald know? Wasn’t he just an ordinary guy? Many people believe Oswald was a nobody in the Marine Corp, but his job as a radar operator in Japan was not a nobody’s job. This is also where the U.S.’s secret U-2 spy planes would take off from. This base was run by Richard Bissell, who had a close relationship with CIA director Allan Dulles, both who I mentioned earlier. It’s also important to know that Oswald had crypto clearance at the base, which was the highest clearance a person could get there. 

Marine Corp Lieutenant John Donovan was Oswald’s officer at another base where Oswald also had access to top secret information. What’s incredibly strange is that when the Warren Commision interviewed Oswald’s involvement in JFK’s death, they asked not one thing about Oswald’s time in the Marine Corp when he worked closely with U-2 spy planes. When Donovan was asked about that years later by a writer, he told the writer that he actually asked the Warren Commission investigators “Don’t you want to know anything about the U-2?” They replied “We asked you exactly what we wanted to know from you.” It’s also strange that six months after Lee Harvey Oswald defected, the first ever U-2 plane was shot down by the Soviets. Even stranger, Oswald returned to the U.S. a year later, and the CIA let him back into the country despite knowing about his possible involvement in the U-2 attack. They gave him a passport and a loan just one day after he arrived. The CIA then staged 40 American men to defect from the U.S. because of their “capitalist ways,” in hope that the Soviet Union would pick these men up and turn them into spies, thus becoming a double agent. Many people believe this is what Oswald was actually doing. Oswald’s own roommate in the U.S. told writers that Oswald was anti-communism, and he actually thought that Oswald was on an intelligence operation in Russia. 

This begs the question: How could Oswald move around with no surveillance? And How could the CIA not know or seem to care that Oswald was living right where John F. Kennedy would eventually pass by? A man named Jim Douglas, who worked for the CIA told the San Francisco Chronicle in 1978 “Oswald was recruited from the military for the express purpose of becoming a double agent assigned to the USSR. More than once, I was told something like “so-and-so was working on the Oswald project. “ He added “One of the reasons given for the necessity to do away with Oswald was the difficulty they had with him when he returned. Apparently, he knew the Russians were on to him from the start, and this made him very angry.”

Now comes what is thought to be the most important witness in the JFK assassination, Richard Nagell. Nagell got himself arrested in 1963 after shooting two shots in a national bank. He said he had purportedly gotten himself arrested because “I’d rather be arrested than commit murder and treason.” Nagell had two jobs: The first being tasked with covering up the true nature of CIA objectives. His other job was being a double agent for the KGB, and one of his tasks was spying on Lee Harvey Oswald. Nagell said that the KGB knew about the assassination plot before it even happened. He said “If anyone wanted to stop the assassination, it was the KGB.” This is likely because the USSR was aware that John Kennedy was the only man in the U.S. government who wanted to make peace with the Soviet Union. Nagell then claimed that the KGB told him to kill Oswald, or at least convince him that he was being set up to become the CIA’s scapegoat. Nagell believed that he would be discovered in the assassination which is why he had himself arrested. Because there was no hard evidence around this, Nagell was never taken seriously, but in 1995, the AARB told Nagell that they would take him seriously if he gave them every piece of evidence he had. The letter saying this was sent to him on November 1, 1995, which was the day Nagell was found dead in his bathroom. 

The other part to the conspiracy theory is the idea of there being a second shooter when John Kennedy was assassinated. To me, this is completely false. If Oswald didn’t shoot Kennedy, how were there three bullet shillings found next to his own rifle in his place of work. And if he was innocent, why did Oswald murder a police officer after he left the building? The three shots were seen coming from the building Oswald worked in, and when police immediately after the shots were fired asked for a list of everyone who worked on that floor, the only person who was missing was Lee Harvey Oswald. 

The idea that the second shooter was in front of John Kennedy is also false. Many believe that the direction and movement of the fatal head shot would mean that the bullet would have come from in front of Kennedy, but that isn’t true. What people don’t seem to understand is that when Kennedy was hit in the head, his entire brain and skull basically exploded. If a person’s head exploded, it would go in any direction. The other piece of information here is that it doesn’t even matter if there was a second shooter because Kennedy would’ve been paralyzed the rest of his life (if he survived). As I stated at the beginning of this, Kennedy had a terrible back from his days on the Harvard football team, and his time in the Navy. Kennedy constantly wore a back brace and was wearing it during the assassination. Kennedy had to sit upright in the car, which is something he wouldn’t have been able to do for hours on end without his brace. After the second shot hit Kennedy, he wasn’t able to duck down or move around which is why the opportunity to even get hit a third time was possible. In fact, James Douglas writes in his book about the assassination, “I don’t care if it’s horse piss, it makes me feel good.” John Kennedy said this to RFK after he told his brother he should stop taking needles for his back pain. 

We also know Kennedy was paralyzed after the second shot because of the way his arms flew up. Many claim he did it because he felt the bullet leave his throat, but really, this is something that happens when a person becomes paralyzed. We see this in professional football when players get knocked unconscious. When it happens, their arms and fingers fly up and bend in peculiar ways. 

To say that John F. Kennedy wasn’t killed by the CIA would be false. There is more evidence than not that his own government took him out because they were scared of his relationship with the Soviet Union, and Kennedy’s desire for world peace. I can only imagine that the soon to be released files really won’t have anything worth finding when they are released in the coming weeks. Since Oswald was killed right after the assassination, it’s unlikely that U.S. citizens will ever find the truth or the “smoking gun,” but if you ask me, I would say it’s more likely than not that John F. Kennedy was assassinated by his own government.