We will probably never know who killed John Kennedy as he rode through Dallas in November of 1963. No one saw the gunman pull the trigger. Those who would have been the major players in an assassination conspiracy at the time are all dead. I was nine years old at the time of the assassination. It has haunted me all my life, especially because my mother was one of the first conspiracy theorists who read article after article about the oddities surrounding the murder. The generally accepted wisdom believed by the majority of the populace at the time was that Oswald was the killer. We believed our government and we believed our media pundits who told us the simple story of a single fanatical gunman. "I'm a patsy", Oswald said on national television, rolling his eyes in disgust. Before he had a chance to tell his story, he was dead. The CIA, the Russians or Cubans and the Italian mob all have been the accused in one or another hypothetical scenario. The author Gerald Posner almost won a Pulitzer prize for his book Case Closed laying all the blame on Oswald. I read this book and found it convincing although, I could not at the time contest or verify any of his evidence. The House Select Committee on Assassinations also blamed Oswald, but, declared that there was a high probability of a conspiracy. For some people, the case will never truly be declared closed. But what does it matter? It was a long time ago, no one is left to punish, never mind be found guilty. Yes, we would like to know the truth, but we also have lives to live and things to do. What does the truth matter, especially if we can never really know? If it was a conspiracy from within the government, it was a coup d'etat, something which has been commonplace throughout history but which is not supposed to happen in America. The murder of rival leaders has been the rule not the exception since the dawn of time. If it was a coup d'etat, it de-legitimizes our government and even our country itself. That would matter.
One of the best historical biographies I have read was Robert Caro's story of Robert Moses in The Power Broker. I found it so good that when he began his series on Lyndon Johnson I read every volume as they were published. Caro claims that in all his research he encountered no credible evidence that Johnson was involved in the assassination of JFK, although, even in his extensive notes, there is no indication that he was looking for such evidence. However, it was while reading the first volume, Path to Power in 1983, that I became convinced that Johnson and his financial and political backers engineered Kennedy's death.
Most of the lines of evidence for this crime have been so muddled that little will be known for sure. Conspiracy theorists will say there are layers and layers of evidence, all of it in dispute. But other than circumstantial or controversial evidence, there are some witnesses. Billy Sol Estes, Johnson's business associate in Texas and convicted con man testified to a grand jury in 1983 that Johnson was behind the assassination. Johnson's mistress claims in an interview that the day before the murder Johnson told her, "after today those sons of bitches, (the Kennedys), will never humiliate me again." The interview with her is on YouTube. Jack Ruby, in a recorded interview, states that if Adlai Stevenson had been Vice President there never would have been an assassination. Johnson had the personal, political and financial motivation and he had the means at hand to orchestrate and cover up the assassination. He wanted to be president, it was his life's ambition and his backers were powerful people in Texas who stood to make and did make millions of dollars in a Johnson presidency. Johnson's biggest financial backer, Brown and Root, a construction company now known as Halliburton, was granted enormous contracts to build facilities during the Vietnam War.
For me, this is the version of events that finally puts all the pieces together, it is the one that makes the most sense and seems the most likely once the blinders are off about the fallibility of our system. It makes sense too that Johnson could never have his bitter political enemy Robert Kennedy in the presidency where he was very likely to have found out the truth.
