Reclaiming History
Page 265
H. L. Hunt
Morris Jaffe
Walter Jenkins
Lyndon Johnson
Mr. Jones (fictitious name)
Clarence Jones
Clifford Jones
Sam Kail
Roy Kellerman
Nikita Khrushchev
Jules Ricco Kimble
Pat Kirkwood
Fred Korth
Jake Kosloff
Valeriy Kostikov
Larry LaBorde
Edward Lansdale
Meyer Lansky
Richard Lauchli
Jack Lawrence
Yves Leandez
James Melvin Liggett
Gilberto Policarpo Lopez
Grayston Lynch
Quinton Pino Machado
General John Magruder
Robert Maheu
George Mandel (aka Giorgio Mantello)
Amos Manor
Carlos Marcello
Layton Martens
Jack Martin
John Martino
Rolando Masferrer
John McCloy
John McCone
Carl McIntire
Robert McKeown
Mike McLaney
Gordon McLendon
Jim McMahon
L. J. McWillie
Major General John B. Medaris
L. D. Miller
Joseph Milteer
William Monteleone
David Sanchez Morales
Clint Murchison
Ferenc Nagy
Madame Nhu
Richard Nixon
Gordon Novel
Dr. Alton Ochsner
Ken O’Donnell
Harry Olsen
Aristotle Onassis
Marina Oswald
Michael Paine
Ruth Paine
Kim Philby
David Atlee Phillips
Robert “Tosh” Plumlee
Luis Posada
James W. Powell
Jack Puterbaugh
Carlos Quiroga
Paul Raigorodsky
William Reily
Sid Richardson
William Robertson
Charles Rogers
Alexander Rorke
Johnny Roselli
Eugene Rostow
John Rousselot
James Rowley
Jack Ruby
Ruth Ann (last name unknown)
Mike Ryan
Emilio Santana
Felipe Vidal Santiago
Saul (last name unknown)
Aldo Vera Seraphine
Theodore Shackley
Clay Shaw
Walter Sheridan
Charles Siragusa
“Slim”
Mr. Smith (fictitious name)
Sergio Arcacha Smith
Carlos Prío Socarrás
Jean René Souetre
Arlen Specter
Lew Sterrett
Adlai Stevenson
Frank Sturgis (Frank Fiorini)
William Sullivan
Kerry Thornley
J. D. Tippit
Santo Trafficante
“Troit”
Tammi True
Igor Vagonov
Adolf Vermont Jr.
Wernher Von Braun
Igor Voshinin
Henry Wade
General Edwin Walker
Brock Wall
George Wallace
Harry Weatherford
Ed Weisl
Mitch WerBell
Lieutenant Colonel George Whitmeyer
General Charles Willoughby
Edwin Wilson
Louie Witt
Mr. X (fictitious name)
Abraham Zapruder
The following is a partial list of assassins—that is, those whom one or more conspiracy theorists have actually named and identified as having fired a weapon at Kennedy in Dealey Plaza (or as being part of the assassination group) from locations including the second and sixth floors of the Book Depository Building, the Dal-Tex Building, the County Records Building, the grassy knoll, the railroad overpass, the area around the pergola, the presidential limousine itself, a manhole on Elm Street, and a storm drain near the north end of the Triple Underpass.* Other conspiracy theorists have named some of these people as only being a member of the conspiracy to kill Kennedy, not an assassin. Apparently, so many people wanted to kill Kennedy that they had to draw straws to get the best firing positions, and from the main assassination location they must have been standing shoulder to shoulder. At least we haven’t reached the situation, yet, where they are perched on top of each other’s shoulders. But the century is still young.
Gus Abrams
Felix Alderisio
Black Dog Man
Roger Bocognani
Orlando Bosch
Eugene Hale Brading
Edgar Eugene Bradley
T. Casey Brennan
Morgan Brown
Richard Cain (Ricardo Scalzetti)
“Carlos”
Daniel Carswell
Cliff Carter
Fred Lee Chrisman
Patrick T. Dean
Eladio del Valle
Harold Doyle
John Ernst
Loy Factor
David Ferrie
James Files
Desmond FitzGerald
Franklin Folley (Frank Sinatra’s drummer)
Clyde Foust
Richard Gaines
Herminio Diaz Garcia
John Gedney
Charles Givens
Manuel García Gonzales
William Greer
Jack Grimson
Al Groat
Loran Hall
Charles Harrelson
Jim Hart
Gerald Patrick Hemming
George Hickey (accidentally shot Kennedy)
Jim Hicks
Chauncey Holt
E. Howard Hunt
Harold Isaacs
Lyndon Johnson*
“Junior”
Roy Kellerman
Klu Klux Klan (two unidentified members)
Pedro Luis Diaz Lanz
Jack Lawrence
“Lebanon”
John Mertz
Michael Victor Mertz
Joseph Milteer
David Sanchez Morales
Charles Nicolleti
Lee Harvey Oswald
Lenny Patrick
Robert Lee Perrin
Sauveur Pironti
James Powell
“Raul”
George Reese
Manuel Rivera
Charles Rogers
Alexander Rorke
Johnny Roselli
Jack Ruby
Miguel Saez
Guillermo Novo Sampol
Ignacio Novo Sampol
Emilio Santana
Lucien Sarti
Saul (#1) (Accuser: Hugh McDonald)
Saul (#2) (Accuser: Ricky White)
William Seymour
Jean René Souetre
Frank Sturgis
J. D. Tippit
Malcolm Wallace
Harry Weatherford
Roscoe White
Louie Witt
Dave Yaras
“Zed” (code name)
With at least eighty-two gunmen shooting at Kennedy in Dealey Plaza that day, it’s remarkable that Kennedy’s body was sufficiently intact to make it to the autopsy table.
To reemphasize, the above three lists are only partial. And they don’t even include those involved in the cover-up of the conspiracy to kill Kennedy, which virtually all buffs say the entire Warren Commission was guilty of. The alleged cover-up participants also include, among a great many others, the HSCA staff, Marina Oswald, the three autopsy surgeons, and “the remainder of the [federal] government” that was not behind the assassination (per New Orleans DA Jim Garrison). Indeed, conspiracy theorist E. Martin Schotz says the president’s own brother, Robert F. Kennedy, kn
owingly participated in the cover-up.
One would think that at least five people (Jackie Kennedy, Governor Connally and his wife, Nellie, William Greer, the Secret Service driver of the presidential limousine, and Roy Kellerman, the Secret Service passenger in the front seat) might forever be immune from being accused, by the terminally wacky buffs, of being involved in the conspiracy to murder Kennedy, if for no other reason than that they themselves were in the line of fire. But not so fast say the conspiracy buffs, unwilling to concede by exemption any Homo sapiens who were alive and breathing on November 22, 1963. Conspiracy theorist James H. Fetzer has removed Greer, who was directly within the line of fire for both shots that hit Kennedy, from the line-of-fire defense, claiming that Greer, as a part of the conspiracy, deliberately stopped the limousine after the first shot to make Kennedy an easier target for the remaining shots. So apparently Greer, per Fetzer, decided to place his own life on the line to see that Kennedy was killed. And two young buffs from Canada also removed Greer as well as his partner, Kellerman, from the line-of-fire defense by actually contending that Greer himself turned around and shot Kennedy, Kellerman holding the steering wheel while his partner did the deed. In fact, a Tulsa citizen, serving as his own lawyer, went so far as to file a lawsuit on September 30, 1996, asking the court to find Greer and Kellerman guilty of murdering Kennedy.16
That leaves three other passengers in the presidential limousine. Surely at least they have to be immune from the pointed finger, right? Well, not all of them. A few weeks after the assassination, Governor Connally’s wife, Nellie, wrote an account of the assassination on a yellow pad. Thirty years later, Newsweek published excerpts from the account. One excerpt refers to Nellie’s visit to her husband’s bedside in the recovery room at Parkland Hospital. “He asked me about the President,” she wrote, and when she told him the president was dead, his reply was, “I knew.”17 Conspiracy theorist and author Walt Brown writes, “Those two words [“I knew”] will probably—and perhaps should—generate two conspiracy books.”18 In other words, there’s at least a chance that Connally was so intent on joining in the conspiracy to murder Kennedy that, like Greer, he was even willing to risk his own life. In fact, conspiracy theorist Harrison E. Livingstone, in his book The Radical Right and the Murder of John F. Kennedy, informs his readers that “those in the know in Texas believe that Connally was part of the planning for the assassination.”19
I don’t know about Nellie, but it’s probably just a matter of time before some nutty buff removes Jackie’s Oleg Cassini pillbox hat and tries to put the conspiracy hat on her. I mean, she wasn’t quite as much in the line of fire as Connally and Greer were. And God knows, with JFK’s flagrant womanizing, she certainly had a motive. Indeed, how long do we have to wait for some deranged conspiracy theorist to write an article or book stating that President Kennedy was in very ill health, that he had been told he didn’t have too long to live,* and that he, yes he, was a party to the conspiracy to have himself murdered?† The motive? Polls showed his popularity was in decline and he viewed his murder as a good career move. And we know that Kennedy’s popularity did, in fact, rise dramatically as a result of his death on November 22, 1963.
But all of the above assumes that John F. Kennedy was actually killed on November 22,1963. And we don’t know this. Indeed, conspiracy theorist George Thomson, a swimming-pool engineer, is convinced that twenty-two shots were fired in Dealey Plaza, and five people were killed, but not JFK. Officer Tippit was impersonating JFK in the presidential limousine and it was he who was killed. Kennedy escaped and was seen a year later in New York reveling at a private birthday party for author Truman Capote.20 Who am I to say that George Thomson is wrong?
A verbal exchange on September 17, 1977, at a “Critics Conference” in Washington, D.C., in which G. Robert Blakey, chief counsel for the HSCA, met with nine prominent Warren Commission critics and conspiracy theorists from around the country, captured the essence of the conspiracy movement. When Blakey noted that “nobody has ever suggested that the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service” was involved in the assassination, conspiracy theorist Kathy Kinsella spoke up. “Give us time,” she said.21
Lincoln-Kennedy Coincidences
I am including this brief section in my book for two reasons. One, the coincidences between Lincoln’s and Kennedy’s lives and deaths are so incredible that one can’t help but shake one’s head in wonderment and fascination. But that alone would not justify their inclusion in the book. What does is the fact that in the world of the conspiracy theorists, there is no such thing as a coincidence. Events and circumstances never fortuitously happen and by mere chance relate to each other. They are actually manifestations and evidence of two or more people acting in concert toward a mutual, sinister goal.
The remarkable Lincoln-Kennedy coincidences, several of them first noticed and published three days after Kennedy’s death by Dayton, Ohio, artist and Lincoln scholar Lloyd Ostendorf, follow:
Lincoln was elected president in 1860, Kennedy in 1960.
Both Lincoln and Kennedy were elected president after each had unsuccessfully sought to get the vice presidential nomination of their party—Lincoln in 1856, Kennedy in 1956.
Both Lincoln and Kennedy had served in the U.S. House of Representatives—Lincoln elected in 1846, Kennedy in 1946.
The man Lincoln defeated to become president, Stephen Douglas, was born in 1813. The man Kennedy defeated to become president, Richard Nixon, was born in 1913.
Both Lincoln and Kennedy, while in their thirties, married a pretty, sophisticated twenty-four-year-old brunette who spoke French fluently.
Both Lincoln and Kennedy had sons who died during their presidency—Lincoln’s son William dying at the age of eleven, Kennedy’s son Patrick dying two days after his birth.
Both Lincoln and Kennedy, far more than any presidents before them, sought equality for blacks as an inalienable right required by a decent and just nation. And both of their dramatic efforts failed during their lives, the seeds only bearing fruit shortly after their deaths, in Lincoln’s case with the abolition of slavery by the Thirteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution on December 18, 1865,* in Kennedy’s case with the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
Kennedy’s secretary was named Lincoln.†
Both Lincoln and Kennedy were murdered on a Friday.
Both were shot once in the head.
Both were seated at the time they were shot.
Both were shot from behind, in the back of their head.
Both were shot by assassins who were to their right rear.‡
Both Lincoln’s and Kennedy’s wives were seated next to them at the time they were shot.§
Each wife, after her husband was shot in the head, cradled his head in her lap.
Both Lincoln and Kennedy were in the presence of another couple, and in each case the man was also wounded by the assassin (Connally by gunshot, Major Henry R. Rathbone when Booth stabbed him as Rathbone lunged at Booth after Booth shot Lincoln).
Lincoln was shot in Ford’s theater. Kennedy was shot in a Lincoln limousine (manufactured by Ford Motor Company).
Though both Lincoln and Kennedy were shot in the head, which normally causes immediate death, neither died instantly, and feverish efforts to resuscitate them were made by several physicians, both presidents responding with an increased though weak pulse before expiring.
On the day Lincoln was killed, he told an aide that he knew there were those who wanted him dead. “If it is to be done,” he said, “it is impossible to prevent it.” On the day of Kennedy’s murder, he said in his Fort Worth hotel room to Jackie and an aide how easy it would be for someone to shoot him from a “high building with a high powered rifle, and there’s nothing anybody could do.”
Unlike 99 percent of the population, both presidential assassins, John Wilkes Booth and Lee Harvey Oswald, were known by their three names.*
Both Booth and Oswald were shot and killed before they were b
rought to trial.
Both Booth and Oswald were killed by one shot from a revolver.
Both Lincoln’s and Kennedy’s successors were named Johnson.
Lincoln’s successor, Andrew Johnson, was born in 1808, and Kennedy’s successor, Lyndon Johnson, in 1908.
Both Andrew Johnson and Lyndon Johnson were southern Democrats.
Both Andrew Johnson and Lyndon Johnson had served as United States senators.
The names Lincoln and Kennedy each contain seven letters.
The names John Wilkes Booth and Lee Harvey Oswald each contain fifteen letters.
The names Andrew Johnson and Lyndon Johnson each contain thirteen letters.
I can only hope the above list will help conspiracy theorists realize that coincidences that seem to defy mathematical probabilities do happen in life. That’s why there is a name for them, why they are called co incidences. In fact, they are so common that we sometimes loosely suggest the phenomenon when no real coincidence exists. “Of all the gin joints, in all the towns, in all the world, she walks into mine,” Humphrey Bogart says in the movie Casablanca about his lover, Ingrid Bergman.
Epilogue
For most Americans, interest in the Kennedy assassination has held firm for going on half a century, our nation unwilling to bury Kennedy or his legacy of inspiring a generation—his youthful image, vigor, and promise seemingly frozen in time.1 This is why the pain of his loss lives on. Most believe that interest in the assassination and its perceived mysteries will endure for centuries to come.
Come rain or come shine, in cold or hot weather, people from all over the nation and the world (about two million annually) make their pilgrimage to Dealey Plaza, designated a National Historical Landmark district in October of 1993. Alone, or in twos or threes or more, they whisper and point and stand at or near the two Xs on Elm Street that mark the spots where Kennedy was struck down by two bullets. Repaving the street has only momentarily obliterated the Xs. Within days, assassination buffs or hawkers (who peddle pamphlets, CDs, books, and various other items on the assassination, usually on weekends) have repainted them.2*
The site where Kennedy’s assassin was himself gunned down by Ruby, the underground garage in City Hall, is presently closed to the public. But the city fathers, in an effort to revitalize what is now a declining part of downtown Dallas, are expected to open it to the public as a tourist attraction, along with Oswald’s jail cell on the fifth floor of the old Police and Courts Building (part of City Hall) in 2007. The Dallas Police Department moved out of the now mostly vacant building to new headquarters in 2003. The city administration had moved out of City Hall in 1978.3