For over a half century, the American people have had serious reservations about the official report detailing the death of President John F. Kennedy. In fact, 61 percent believe Oswald did not act alone and have implicated a large swath of other notable figures as having potentially participated in the most infamous assassination in American history, including J. Edgar Hoover, the Israelis, the intelligence community, the Russians, the Cubans and even George H.W. Bush.
Having grown up in the Dallas-Fort Worth area, I’ve spent my entire life listening to the mad ramblings of conspiracy theorists and “historians” who swear Oswald could not have acted alone. Hell, I even buy it. I think there were shooters on the Grassy Knoll.
A recently declassified CIA report written in 2013 has shed some light on the incident. According to the report, then-CIA director John McCone, who at the time of the assassination had just recently come into the intelligence community, was at the heart of a “benign cover-up” and that he and several other CIA officials were “complicit” in keeping “incendiary” information from the Warren Commission during the inquest into President Kennedy’s assassination.
I can hear the keyboards of tin-foil hat-wearing “detectives” hammering lengthy, punctuation-challenged posts at AboveTopSecret.com at this very moment. However, this isn’t some mind-blowing revelation. This isn’t something that “the Lone Gunmen” should hack servers over. This isn’t a reason for Oliver Stone to make a sequel.
The revelation, while notable, does not provide evidence of a wide-reaching conspiracy to kill President Kennedy. It only reveals that former Director McCone had made up his mind about what had happened and may have testified to the Warren Commission in such a way that kept them from fully looking into the assassination. From Politico:
“While raising no question about the essential findings of the Warren Commission, including that Oswald was the gunman in Dallas, the 2013 report is important because it comes close to an official CIA acknowledgement — half a century after the fact — of impropriety in the agency’s dealings with the commission. The cover-up by McCone and others may have been ‘benign,’ in the report’s words, but it was a cover-up nonetheless, denying information to the commission that might have prompted a more aggressive investigation of Oswald’s potential Cuba ties.”
And that’s the important takeaway from this report, and I cannot stress enough that this isn’t a smoking gun that has blown open an elaborate conspiracy to assassinate President John F. Kennedy.
It is important, however, to understand that the CIA advanced a specific narrative to the Warren Commission that may have compromised the investigation into JFK’s assassination. If Oswald had direct ties to Cuba, that line of investigation should have been thoroughly examined, especially when relations between the United States, Cuba, and the Soviet Union were at that point central to the Cold War. As someone who believes there was at least one other shooter behind the fence at the Grassy Knoll, the Cubans would be a reasonable assumption of who those the additional shooters could be.
The JFK assassination remains a hot topic among the American people for good reason. It was a daring act, killing the most powerful man in the United States in broad daylight. We need a boogeyman beyond the one the government provided, since something so shocking simply cannot be written off as the homicidal impulses of a single guy with an agenda and radical sociopolitical ideology.
Lee Harvey Oswald just isn’t a good enough answer, I suppose.
Featured image by WikiMedia, available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial license.
