Counter-Currents
Lee Harvey Oswald holding the rifle he would use to assassinate JFK and the pistol he would use to murder Dallas policeman J. D. Tippit. He is holding two Communist publications called The Militant and The Worker.[1]
American culture is still spinning wildly from the assassination of US President John Fitzgerald Kennedy in Dallas on November 22, 1963 by a self-radicalized antifa gunman acting alone. American liberals and Leftist sympathizers in particular have had a tough time dealing with the murder. Kennedy’s widow later remarked that “[JFK] didn’t even have the satisfaction of being killed for civil rights. It had to be some silly little Communist.”
Jacqueline Kennedy’s remarks perfectly sum up the snobbery and inability to read data that is essential to the mentality of JFK’s political base. Jacqueline Kennedy could have rightly pointed out that Kennedy died fighting Communism in the same way he’d valiantly lived fighting Communism. However, Kennedy’s rank-and-file supporters included a hardened core of anti-anti-Communists who believed that the threat of Communism was being exaggerated and reflexively refused to support conservative ideas as they were being developed in places like Dallas, Texas in the early 1960s. Anti-anti-Communism was primarily motivated by snobbery rather than a genuine analysis of facts.
The second before the first bullet struck JFK.
Kennedy died before his presidency’s problems became clear. He’d won in 1960 through election fraud in Texas and Illinois. His reckless sexual escapades that undoubtedly clouded his judgment were never reported at the time by a sympathetic press. And his policies in Vietnam guaranteed a larger war, and that conflict would consume his successor.
You can buy Greg Johnson’s The Year America Died here.
Kennedy also tepidly supported “civil rights” during his lifetime. After he died in a spectacular way, sub-Saharan activists and white liberal virtue-signalers were able to develop a useful narrative out of Kennedy’s tepid support to frame “civil rights” as a martyr’s cause. The resulting 1964 Civil Rights Act became an illicit second constitution, and sub-Saharans were empowered by it to riot and commit crimes on a vast scale.
Understanding the Kennedy assassination is important because it shows the problems with the center-Left political in the American establishment before and after the killing. At the time of the assassination, mainstream American culture was extremely liberal, and liberal establishment activists were pushing for policies that would lead to disaster. These people had a difficult time identifying looming dangers.
The probable bad outcomes of these policies were realized and resisted within Kennedy’s own Democratic Party in 1963. Indeed, Kennedy was in Dallas to address the tension over “civil rights” and the other matters. How those matters would have been resolved had Kennedy survived his trip to Dallas is anyone’s guess.
The mainstream media’s coverage of Kennedy’s assassination showed its liberal and Leftist bias, and the ongoing generalized mistrust of the media began that day. Kennedy’s assassination also turned Leftists into conspiracy theorists, and these theories helped poison the national discourse.
Quakers, Quakers everywhere
The 1960s were a decade shaped by the Quakers. At every critical point in the 1960s there is an ordinary Quaker in a prominent position, and this includes the Kennedy assassination. This isn’t The Protocols of the Elders of Pendle Hill, but is rather related to three important factors regarding the Quakers: Quakers were politically ascendant in the mid-twentieth century; they tend to be liberal, and the 1960s was a liberal time; and there are many people connected to the Quakers in some form or fashion going back to America’s colonial founding.
Quakerism is one of America’s founding Anglo folkways, and is a form of extreme Protestantism that was developed in Northern England in the early seventeenth century. Quaker theology is similar to that of the Pietists and other Protestant sects in the German-speaking parts of Europe, as well that of the Moravians in Bohemia.
The Quakers settled in large numbers in the Delaware Valley in the seventeenth century. Lord William Penn, Pennsylvania’s proprietor, also recruited German Pietists and Moravians from Europe to help develop the colony. This extended German/Quaker group made a big impact on the culture of the American Midwest. Quakers and Moravians were also recruited to settle in North Carolina in the eighteenth century.
The Chapel at the Eisenhower Presidential Library and Museum in Abilene, Kansas is an example of the influence of Quaker and German Pietist theology upon architecture. The chapel contains no specific Christian imagery. Instead of being a “church” or a “meeting house,” it is called a “Place of Meditation.” While this chapel appears to represent the religious beliefs of all mankind, it is really a specific reflection of the culture of the American Midlands which begin in the Quaker Galilee in the Delaware River Valley.
The roots of the Quakers’ remarkable involvement in American society’s turning points started with two earlier events: the domestic political battles over Communism in the United States at the end of the 1940s, and the election of the Pietist Dwight Eisenhower to the presidency, along with his Quaker running mate, Richard Nixon, in 1952. Eisenhower had run on his war record in Europe and cruised to victory. Nixon’s meteoric rise started in 1948, when he was on the House Un-American Activities Committee. This organization investigated Soviet spy rings within the US government.
Quaker shortcomings, liberal shortcomings
The Quaker branch of Christendom is a loose cannon when it comes to theology and politics. Quakers are usually pacifists, follow their “inner light,” and promote broad social tolerance. However, following one’s “inner light” ultimately means a person can believe whatever they want to believe. Promoting broad social tolerance works until one is tolerating a group that is seeking absolute power or dealing with unrepentant criminals. And Quakerism and other pacifist sects have another problem: Their followers often have a tough time recognizing danger.
President Eisenhower, for example, enacted a program called Atoms for Peace. The idea was to give friendly nations nuclear technology so that they could generate cheap energy that would in turn reduce the chance for war through some force of spiritual alchemy. This type of thinking comes right out of Quaker theology and contains plenty of blindness to obvious danger. Not only did the Atoms for Peace program eventually give India and Pakistan nuclear weapons, but it also led to Israel becoming a nuclear power. Iran itself acquired technology that was left over from the program and could potentially create a bomb as well. And in1956, the Eisenhower administration gave information on nuclear energy to the Iraqi government, leading to further chaos in the region for decades.
The Atoms for Peace program was developed under the assumption that if Americans shared advanced nuclear technology, other nations would use that technology for peaceful purposes. In fact, it gave various nations the foundation to build their own nuclear weapons.
Quakers didn’t view the constellation of Jewish advisors surrounding Kennedy as a problem, nor did they see Jewish pressure to open America’s gates to hordes of non-white immigrants in the early 1960s as the threat it would become. They likewise failed to see the pressure building in the North’s sub-Saharan ghettos. Many Quakers supported bussing and other “civil rights” measures despite the obvious harm it brought to whites.
Quakers shaping the events of the 1960s
Kennedy won — by fraud — in 1960, but the fact that the Pietist Eisenhower and Quaker Nixon had dominated the national scene for nearly a decade meant that Quakers elsewhere were empowered. It is remarkable how many were involved in key moments of the 1960s.
Whittaker Chambers, a Quaker, was a Soviet spy for a time, but he became disillusioned with Communism and ended his career as an anti-Communist fighter.
The Cold War politics of the 1960s were definitively shaped by a three-way battle between three Quakers. In 1948, then-Congressman Nixon, Whittaker Chambers, and former US State Department official Alger Hiss faced off in Congressional hearings regarding Soviet infiltration of the US government. Nixon was looking to rid the government of Communists, and Chambers was an editor at Time Magazine who had been an active Communist as well as involved in espionage. Chambers said he had worked with Hiss in his capacity as a Communist spy to pass information to the Soviets. Hiss was not proven to be a Soviet agent in the hearings, but Hiss was later convicted of perjury.
Scholars still debate whether Hiss had really been a spy or not. US intelligence had deciphered some Soviet codes, and when these intercepts were made public after the end of the Cold War, it certainly appeared that Hiss had, in fact, been working for the Soviets.
Throughout this three-way Quaker shootout, Hiss received plenty of support from anti-anti-Communists in the Democratic Party, the American establishment, and the mainstream media. While Nixon and Chambers were dedicated anti-Communists, many of their fellow Quakers, such as Alger Hiss, either sympathized with Communism or endorsed liberal policies which the Communists also supported.
Other Quakers shaped the 1960s as well. On November 2, 1965, Quaker Norman Morrison set himself on fire and burned himself to death under Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara’s office. He was one of the first Vietnam War protestors, and his act of self-immolation raised awareness of the situation in Southeast Asia among the American public. It is notable that he did this before American troops had actually engaged with the North Vietnamese Army directly in the Battle of Ia Drang.
Likewise, the most respectable and serious defendant in the Chicago Seven trial following rioting at the Democratic Convention in Chicago in 1968 was David Dellinger. Though not strictly a Quaker, his religious education and pacifist ideology was very much in keeping with the Quaker worldview.
The top folk singer of the 1960s, Joan Baez, was a Quaker.
Quakers were so influential in the 1960s that US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger met with a delegation of Quakers in 1969, where he promised that America would withdraw from the Vietnam conflict. The last American combat troops left the country in 1973, although the war continued until 1975. The Vietnam War was the first conflict America clearly lost after integration in the US military began in 1948.
A kindly Quaker and a self-radicalized antifa gunman
Another Quaker who influenced history was Ruth Paine. She allowed Lee Harvey Oswald and his Russian wife, Marina, to live in her house in the weeks prior to the assassination. The Oswalds were having financial difficulties in 1963, and Paine wanted Marina to help her learn Russian. Unbeknownst to Ruth Paine and her husband, Lee Oswald was hiding the rifle he would use to kill Kennedy in her house. Ruth didn’t recognize just how dangerous Oswald was until after the assassination. She later said she had disliked Oswald, but instead of exploring why her gut instincts may have been be correct, she sought to understand Oswald on his own terms.
Ruth Paine was a liberal Quaker living in Dallas. She supported racial integration and was interested in learning Russian, which is how she met Marina. She pulled strings to get Oswald a job at the Texas School Book Depository, from where he carried out the assassination.
Oswald was a dangerous man indeed. His childhood had been unhappy. His father had died before he was born, and his mother made a series of poor choices that led to Oswald being sent to many different schools. As a child he was involved in low-grade violence and was considered a bully by peers.
At some point Oswald discovered radical Leftist literature. Through it, he familiarized himself with the anarchist idea of using violence and assassinations to further political aims, euphemistically called the propaganda of the deed. He was already sympathetic to Communism prior to enlisting in the United States Marine Corps in 1956, although his service was unsuccessful by any measure except one: He became a very good shot.
In 1959 Oswald defected to the Soviet Union. His defection was rejected, but after a suicide attempt in a Moscow hotel room, he was given an apartment and a job in Minsk, where he met and married Marina. In 1961, Oswald, Marina, and their newborn baby returned to the US and settled in Dallas, Texas. Oswald found work, but failed to keep a steady job. He quarreled with Marina and physically abused her.
Oswald first decided to assassinate Edwin Walker, a military officer and Right-wing activist, and purchased a rifle to do so in March 1963. On April 10, 1963, Oswald left a note with instructions to Marina about what to do in the event of his death or arrest and then took a bus to Walker’s residence. His shot missed Walker by an inch, and only because of poor luck: Oswald fired through a window, and the pane deflected the bullet just enough to spare his target. He returned home undetected, also by bus, with his rifle hidden in his coat. Oswald was so deft in his attempt on Walker that he was never even investigated as a suspect. Oswald had the right stuff to be a formidable Left-wing assassin.
Oswald soon went to New Orleans to found a pro-Castro organization called the Fair Play for Cuba Committee. He was arrested after he got in a fight while handing out pro-Castro leaflets to anti-Communist Cubans on August 9, 1963.
His organization was a disappointment. It only ever had one member: himself. Nevertheless, Oswald was interviewed by the local media, where he said, “I am a Marxist, but not a Marxist-Leninist.” This indicated that he was familiar with the factions and nuances of far-Left ideology. Oswald was a dedicated Leftist, indeed.
Lee Harvey Oswald being interviewed by local media in New Orleans.
In late September 1963, Oswald travelled to Mexico City by bus to acquire a visa to travel to Cuba. The Cubans wouldn’t give him a visa without Soviet approval, so he shuffled between embassies until he was thrown out of both. Ironically, the two Communist nations recognized that he was dangerous.
Oswald then returned to Dallas, where Ruth Paine used her connections to get him a job at the Texas School Book Depository. The stars had finally aligned for Oswald. While he had been in Mexico, President Kennedy decided to make an official visit to Dallas. His motorcade route was published only a few days prior to his trip, and it just happened to pass by Oswald’s work site. Oswald therefore had just enough time to plan the assassination and the experience to pull it off.
Vice President Lyndon Johnson and Texas Senator Ralph Yarborough were the leaders of two separate and hostile factions within the Democratic Party. In 1963, LBJ still represented the conservative wing, while Senator Yarborough openly supported “civil rights.” Kennedy used all his considerable charm to get the two men to ride in the same car in the November 22 motorcade.
One of the reasons why so many conspiracy theories have been formulated around the Kennedy assassination is that it was difficult to establish Oswald’s motive for it. The passage of time has clarified matters, however. Kennedy needed to win Texas in 1964, but the Democratic Party was locked in an internal struggle, mostly over “civil rights,” though big egos no doubt played a part as well. Two Democratic notables were on opposite sides of the issue. The first was Governor John Connally, who had a conservative view on segregation and other matters, and the other was Texas Senator Ralph Yarborough, a liberal. Yarborough and Vice President Lyndon Johnson were also at odds. Kennedy thus had to force his VP and the Senator to ride together in the motorcade.
Kennedy needed to patch things up between Yarborough and the others in order to have a chance at reelection. Kennedy had won Texas by voter fraud in 1960, and he would have understood that disputes between elite politicians within his own party would make pulling it off a second time difficult, since support from local political elites is critical when altering vote counts. Additionally, Kennedy needed to test the waters with ordinary voters and “own the Right” in Texas. Dallas had become extremely Right-wing by 1963.
Fortune brought Kennedy into rifle range of Oswald. Oswald had continued to hone his shooting skills by dry-firing his rifle, which was a military-grade bolt-action rifle. The self-radicalized Leftist knew how to shoot, and Kennedy didn’t stand a chance.
The media
The Kennedy assassination occurred just after television had developed to the point where it was possible to broadcast events live from coast to coast. Reporting a major event like an assassination had never been done before, however, so there was not a sophisticated news-gathering, reporting, and broadcasting apparatus in place yet.
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Reporting on the assassination happened on the fly. Television broadcasters had to move their cameras into the newsrooms, and at the time it took 20 minutes to warm up a camera. Reporters broadcasting nationally from New York had difficulty making contact with reporters in Dallas and Washington, DC. Reporters smoked while on the air and called in their reports with from ordinary phones.
When watching the recordings of the reports on the assassination as it was happening, one can see that there was clearly confusion and misinformation from the outset. Reporters initially claimed that a Secret Service agent had been killed. The shooter’s location was also misidentified. While the infamous grassy knoll was mentioned, the most common mistake at the time was the claim that the shooter had fired from the second-floor window of the Book Depository rather than the sixth.
The mainstream media did not appear to be as biased at that time as they do nowadays. The word “appear” is key: There was on-air speculation about “hate groups” being behind the murder. Politically-correct buzzwords about hate were already in the vernacular in 1963. Much was also made of a protest against the United Nations that had been held in Dallas the previous month where then-ambassador to the UN Adlai Stevenson had been struck with a sign by a Dallas housewife.
Besides associating the Stevenson incident to the Kennedy assassination, the media fabricated several other stories as well: Dan Rather claimed that Dallas schoolchildren had cheered when they received word that Kennedy had been shot. The local CBS station chief was so angry that he kicked Rather out of the building afterwards. The affiliate later had to run a correction. For his part, Walter Cronkite falsely claimed that Kennedy’s political rival, Barry Goldwater, had said “no comment” when asked about the assassination.
Perhaps no media figure warped the narrative more than James Reston of the New York Times, however. On the night of the assassination, he wrote:
America wept tonight, not alone for its dead young president, but for itself. The grief was general, for somehow the worst in the nation had prevailed over the best. The indictment extended beyond the assassin, for something in the nation itself, some strain of madness and violence, had destroyed the highest symbol of law and order.
The real killer was a lone antifa gunman who was wildly out of step with the rest of American culture and then destroyed the highest symbol of law and order. The strain of madness and violence to which Oswald had dedicated his life originated in the French Revolution’s bloodshed. Had Oswald not been killed by Jack Ruby, a hothead also acting alone, he would likely have used the trial as a platform to propagate his Leftist views.
The liberals and the Left after Oswald
The fact that the assassin turned out to be a dedicated Marxist was a tremendous blow to liberals and Leftists everywhere. They really wanted to blame the Right in Dallas for the shooting. The conspiracy theories which sprung up afterwards were the result of cognitive dissonance resulting from the fact that Kennedy was killed by a Communist loser. The fact that Supreme Court Chief Justice Earl Warren, whose court had handed down the disastrous Brown v. Board (1954) decision legalizing racial integration, headed up the investigation into the assassination didn’t help matters, either. Putting the chief integrator in charge of such an investigation was bound to create more doubters than believers.
If one looks at the conspiracy theories in this light, the reason they became so pervasive becomes clear. Jim Garrison, the New Orleans District Attorney, framed an ordinary citizen named Clay Shaw for the assassination to absolve the Left of the murder. Garrison also wanted to clear Kennedy’s name of the disastrous results of the policies he initiated in Vietnam and elsewhere. By claiming Kennedy was killed by a shadowy group of conspirators consisting of homosexuals, the CIA, the US military, anti-Castro Cubans, the mafia, and others all because he didn’t really want to go to war in Vietnam is a convenient way out of admitting that Vietnam was, in fact, Mr. Kennedy’s war.
President Kennedy’s policies in Vietnam led to massive American involvement later.
The Kennedy assassination unsettled the Democratic Party. Fair-minded liberals such as the Quaker Ruth Paine recognized that Kennedy was killed by a lone gunman who believed in Leftist Ideology, but less fair-minded liberals went down a rabbit hole of untruths. In the early 1960s, liberals believed the Right was a bunch of paranoids, but by the end of the decade, they were looking under every rock for conspirators.
There are genuine conspiracies, of course; the Kennedy assassination simply wasn’t one of them. The ultimate conspiracy in today’s society is “civil rights” and racial integration.
* * *
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Note
[1] Conspiracy theorists who claim this photograph is faked are misreading the data. Oswald was a dedicated Marxist looking to carry out “the propaganda of the deed.”
18 comments
Interesting article. I was watching the TV coverage when Jack Ruby killed Lee Harvey Oswald. It was stunning. I was still in a daze after the assassination two days previous.
I’ve never felt totally convinced. When I visited Dallas in the late nineties and went to the site, the very window, where Oswald shot from, it looked like an easy shot—like if I were standing on my roof and shooting at someone in my driveway. But the whole sequence of events was too far out.
This one guy, by the age of 24, had served a hitch in the Marines, got out and defected to the Soviet Union, married and had two children, repatriated to the US, became a one-man lobby for Cuba, attempted to assassinate a right wing retired general, developed a murderous hatred of left liberal JFK, got a job at a location that had a window where he could set up a steady rest of book boxes unobserved by the other employees, and that just happened to be at the perfect place where a presidential motorcade would slow down for a ridiculously awkward turn someday, when he would kill the president with three shots, one of which might have dissolved into the ether, and then himself was gunned down by a rummy character who was able to force his way through a platoon of Dallas cops and shove a gun right into his abdomen.
Yeah, I’m not buying the lone nut theory either, regardless of what a globalist shitlib queef JFK was.
Great article.
I’m a firm proponent of the lone Antifa creep theory. But it wasn’t always so.
About the mid-1970s, probably due to special Congressional hearings, beginning with the Frank Church Committee, the TV stations started broadcasting the Zapruder Film, which was the first time (i.e., March 6, 1975) that most people had ever actually seen it.
Life magazine was quick to publish color stills from the Zapruder film in 1963, but seeing it in real time or slow motion was a new level of surreal.
The Zapruder film appears to show that the third and final shot, the one that blew out the President’s brains, threw his head to the rear.
Yet Oswald was firing above and from the rear. Was the Warren Commission Report a rush to judgement? More on that later…
Abe Zapruder was an elderly Dallas Jew who thought that Jack Kennedy was the most righteous Gentile to come down the pike since Cyrus the Great. Local nightclub owner Jacob Rubenstein ─ known as Jack Ruby ─ thought so too. Arrested suspect Lee Harvey Oswald came across as incredibly smug on TV.
Zapruder had gone to Dealey Plaza to film the VIP motorcade with his home movie camera that day; the route had been published in advance and nobody in the area had their stuff searched for weapons or explosives by police or the Secret Service. You probably would have had to be openly carrying a main battle rifle to have gotten any attention from law enforcement. One parade protestor, later dubbed the Umbrella Man, carried just such a (harmless) prop symbolizing Neville Chamberlain and appeasement ─ which in retrospect seems weird since it happened to be the day that the President was shot. Some people actually watched the parade from open windows.
Kennedy had been comparatively poor at getting his race-mixing agenda through Congress and was reviled in most of the South. He was kicking off his 1964 reelection in lukewarm Texas with his native Vice President and the Governor and hoped to build increasing steam in friendlier territory until the election came on the next November. When the man-from-Camelot was gunned down, Liberal journalists were quick to opine that “Hate Killed Kennedy.”
The FBI had it figured out fairly quickly, i.e., that in shooting the President twice nobody had taken a shot at the Vice President, and the Governor (who survived) was collateral damage. A misfit employee of the Texas School Book Depository had fled the scene and proceeded to fatally gun down patrolman J.D. Tippit with his .38 caliber revolver for questioning him. The suspect was an ex-Marine with a dodgy Leftist pedigree and was now in custody. There wasn’t any real evidence so far of a grand conspiracy with hostile foreign governments (Johnson’s Cold War fear).
The Warren Commission Report was quick to get a few things wrong and there were some mistakes by omission, but I think it holds up very well.
What JFK filmmaker Oliver Stone calls a Magic Bullet didn’t do anything magical in flight at all but penetrate ─ which is what heavy military bullets are supposed to do. After going through Kennedy’s shoulder and neck area the bullet went through Gov. Connally from his back and out of his chest, then hitting him in the right wrist and then his left thigh, tearing a hole in his pant leg and getting lodged somewhere in the fabric. What Kevin Costner calls a “pristine” bullet was found in the stretcher at the hospital.
https://youtu.be/Th-s3dbboJQ
Contrary to the diagram in the Warren Report, Gov. Connally was not sitting directly in front of JFK but a little to the side and lower on a folding jump seat.
The Magic Bullet path is indeed actually taking a straight line backwards to the 6th floor window above. Yes, it’s keyholing as it enters Connally’s back and hits a rib, deforming slightly, but that is hardly magic nor pristine.
TV investigative reporters from the 1970s have long implied that the best sharpshooters could not make that shot ─ but I would frankly be disappointed with any soldier or Marine who could not make a head shot at less than 100 meters with three tries.
I’m no Private Pyle, but in Army Basic Training I hit most of the pop-up targets at 300 meters on the head with iron sights.
Oswald’s 1st shot probably hit a tree sapling or the traffic light fixture as the motorcade was gliding by and was deflected. James Tague, standing below the triple overpass downrange was hit on the cheek by a piece of concrete or fragments from the ricochet. It drew blood, but in the excitement he did not even notice at first.
The 2nd shot, the Magic Bullet, we have already discussed. Some enthusiasts, obviously with very little ballistics experience, call the bullet found with Connally at the hospital “pristine,” but it was nothing of the sort. In the Zapruder film, Jack is seen clutching his throat as the motorcade emerges into our view from behind the road sign after the 2nd shot. Not commonly known is that Jack was wearing a stiff orthopedic back brace; otherwise he might have actually fallen forward or to the side.
The 3rd bullet or kill-shot glanced JFK at the top right of his skull and broke open a bone plate which flopped over on the right side of his head, still attached only by a flap of skin at the bottom. When this bullet hits, the lights switch out and JFK finally collapses. He does not fall backwards or get thrown backwards by the shot. The limo is starting to accelerate, however.
When viewing the Zapruder film on TV, especially in slow motion, the video shows the moment when the final shot hits and it appears that JFK’s head is launched backwards. This is an optical or cinematical illusion which has launched a thousand ships.
Around the time that Oliver Stone’s 1991 film JFK was in production or being hyped, media sources were raw-feeding the Zapruder film unencrypted via satellite. Since I was employed as a Broadcast Engineer at a TV station at this time, I made a copy on 1 inch Ampex reel-to-reel videotape. I was able to therefore view the film frame-by-frame in very high resolution.
Kennedy’s head is not thrown back at all; he just goes instant “rag doll” at shot no. 3.
Today, you can check this out yourself as even better quality images of the Zapruder film are available on YouTube and elsewhere. You need to look closely at each frame in succession.
Btw, good luck finding the issue of Life magazine that has the Zapruder film “money shots.” I think that regardless of what Library you visit, souvenir hunters will have already torn out the pages. And, no, it wasn’t men-in-black that did this.
Never underestimate the importance of being in the right place at the right time. Sometimes History just happens that way. Before my office was exiled to a bunker near the roar of jets at the airport, I could look out from a 4th floor window to a collegial garden where Presidents like Bush, Clinton, and Obama each spoke to the throngs in the public square below. The Secret Service walked the halls before the event and said hello to me, but nobody actually looked for rocket launchers inside my desk.
If you can find them in old book stores, Dealey Plaza is featured in encyclopedias printed in the 1950s, long before JFK was an item in Dallas. Public events frequently do happen in plazas like this ─ and Oswald had been warned of the parade by media buzz in plenty of time to bring his rifle and revolver to work that day.
All of this seems implausible only in retrospect. I accidently almost bumped into Nancy Reagan at a 1980 campaign rally once. Our eyes locked for an intense moment as she gauged how nutty I was and whether or not to release the hounds. Shortly after that, some weirdo was tackled by about fifty cops for rushing the stage with “a letter for Governor Reagan.”
If John Hinckley’s 1981 shots had actually killed President Reagan, this would no doubt have been a Bush-Bilderberger CIA plot. Journalists Mark Lane and Michael Collins Piper would have been right on it, LOL.
🙂
I met Mark Lane (he gave me a copy of Rush to Judgment) and I knew Mike Piper. They didn’t just conjure up “JFK conspiracy theories” at will.
If you want to see the original Warren Report LIFE issue from 1964, with Zapruder frames on the cover, the issue is online here. https://bit.ly/3XrOIWf
LIFE did more Zapruder frames years later.
Thanks for the link to the Life issue. I have seen it before of course but it just transported me to better times ─ although I don’t miss the cigarette culture. I just finished mandatory CRT training in the 21st century and would love to go back and buy that 1965 Pontiac in the ads. I started school in Las Vegas in 1966 and it was “Whitopia” even there, so I can remember what it was like outside of Watts or Harlem in those days. Not many could see the danger coming besides George Lincoln Rockwell.
I liked Piper’s book on the Mel Mermelstein lawsuit against the Institute for Historical Review, and I was friends with Ted O’Keefe. I am even mentioned in Mr. O’Keefe’s 2002 “whistleblower letter” when he was fired as editor of the Journal of Historical Review, and Weber shut it down.
I was also a Spotlight subscriber and it made a big impression on me over forty years ago because they ran articles on Holocaust Revisionism and the IHR. There is a place for tabloid journalism, I guess, but it doesn’t make the best historiography, which demands more rigorous epistemology.
I remember Willis Carto’s attorney Mark Lane, though I never met him. His book does not hold up in my opinion. The Dealey crime scene is not that hard to figure out ballistically, and his assertions are simply wrong. Lane is described as a Libertarian, a Civil Rights activist, and an anti-Zionist Jew. I assume that he did good work for Willis Carto, and I always thought that Mr. Carto did good work, but I never knew either one.
My good friend, the late Holocaust Revisionist Fritz Berg had been on the IHR Board of Policy (or whatever) at one time and vehemently thought that Mr. Carto was a crook over the handling of the Edison estate donation, but I can’t speak for that and was never convinced.
I supported Director Mark Weber in the big 1990s IHR split that ousted Carto, but that was mainly because Berg and Prof. Arthur Butz did. Later Mr. Weber cancelled the Journal of Historical Review and I still can’t understand that. Anyway, although Revisionism itself is absolutely not a Movement, per se ─ Truth is inescapable and upstream of ideology or politics ─ I do think that Libertarians are the bane of a White Nationalist movement (possibly even controlled-opposition).
As much as I miss and admire Mr. Berg, he did have some Libertarian blind spots. One of these is related in that he liked and admired Jack Kennedy to the point of devotion ─ and in spite of Berg no longer being a Catholic believer himself.
I will admit that the Kennedys could have been much worse. RFK undoubtedly would have been a better McCarthy legal assistant than Roy Cohn, but not by much. And LBJ was far worse than JFK, but there is a clear pedigree from Joe K. to our own Joe B.
Anyway, Massachusetts pol Tip O’Neill (mentored by Joe K.) strongly believed that Jack Kennedy just didn’t have the Congressional chops to get his Civil Rights package through the Solid South, but Texan LBJ did.
Johnson capitalized on an opportunity presented by lone Antifa weirdo Lee Harvey Oswald ─ but that does not mean that he (nor anyone else) actually had anything to do with it.
There is no need to overthink Jack Ruby either. I have done lots of live shots at TV events like this before there was such a thing as satellite uplinks (or the Internet). The police garage where they were moving Oswald would have been a media circus with engineers stringing cables and whatnot, and lots of unfamiliar faces.
Jack Ruby would have been known to many beat cops who patrolled the downtown nightclub cruise and he at least would have fit in. Ruby was dressed decently by modern standards (and not a broccoli-headed Wall Street Journal “reporter” hoping for a Rosa Parks moment in Phoenix).
Ruby was also conceal-carrying a .38 because he had just delivered a wad of Burlesque show cash to the bank earlier to wire it off. Jack Ruby was an unstable man in the early stages of terminal cancer and he may have been a homosexual. He was certainly a dodgy Jew, one who probably thought that Oswald was a trashy Goy who had just killed his President and deserved to die ─ and then Ruby saw him in person during the televised prisoner transfer and acted in the moment.
There is no need to belabor it. Even good people do not always behave the most rationally.
🙂
Thank you for the extensive reply. Fritz Berg was a friend of mine. We once visited William Gayley Simpson and his wife with an eye to setting up a writers’ retreat on one of their rural properties in the Catskills. I was last in touch with Fritz in 2015, telling him tactfully his website was unbearable and suggesting he should pay me a little to redo it. No hope of that, alas; he’d been very well-heeled in the 1980s and made canny derivatives moves (e.g., sold stock options when the market tanked, Oct. 1987)…but not no more.
BTW Fritz was never Catholic, to my knowledge, though his mother had been, at least nominally, and he had a brief flurry of interest when she passed on in ’86.
I knew the people on both sides of the IHR fracas, and was good friends with Bill and Karen Hulsy. I’ve sung my hosannas about WAC here and elsewhere, and never supposed he was a plaster saint. (I last saw the Cartos in 2015 as well.) Willis was shrewd and played his game close to the vest, mainly because he was older and wiser than the rest of us, and understood operational security. He was also a very tolerant and goodhearted man who gave a modest living to people on both coasts who who were otherwise unemployable. He even kept a sort of boarding-house on Capitol Hill where some of the Spotlight staffers lived (“Harrison Horne,” “Alec de Montmorency” among others). He didn’t care if you were queer or Jewish or nonwhite or manic-depressive or a drunkie, just so long as you did useful work. This unchurched man was never an Elmer Gantry huckster or any kind of snake-oil salesman, just a frank and practical-minded Hoosier.
The 1993 Costa Mesa “coup” and its lawsuits were ill-advised and mismanaged. They turned upon the simplistic notion that the shell corporation which “owned” the IHR was the true legatee of the Jean Edison Farrel millions, and therefore all one had to do was go visit some old duffers on the LSF board and persuade them to vote Willis out. (I recall driving out to El Cajon in late 1992 and sitting around while this retired SDSU professor, an ostensible member of the LSF board, was waiting for his pizza dough to rise.) I’m still friendly with surviving principals, so I won’t comment further on this naïvete, except to note that an underlying motive for the “coup” was that Willis thought holocaustery was done to death, and it was time to move on to other areas of historical investigation (hence The Barnes Review). I believe one of Ted’s “exhibit” letters from 2002 describes this motive as Willis’s desire to turn the JHR into an “explicitly racialist journal.”
As to the JFK assassination theories, I believe they are analogous to holocaustery. They sap a lot of energy better spent on other things, even when pointing out the obvious. There is no doubt in my mind that Lyndon Johnson called the shots. He was thoroughly amoral and ruthless, and this was his last and only chance for the White House. Jackie knew this intuitively and so did Bobby. LBJ knew Jack Kennedy was going to die soon (how exactly frail Jack survived from 1933 to 1963 can only be explained by divine sanction; although Max Jacobson’s shots of methedrine, B-12, and testosterone must have helped him toward the end), so this was a good rationalization for LBJ’s accomplices. There are at least two books by on-the-scene veterans who point the finger at LBJ, as well as books attributed to Roger Stone and others, cribbing other books and secondary sources. LBJ did it. Case Closed.
Thanks for the discussion, Margot. That is very interesting information. I always liked the Barnes Review, and think the acrimony with the IHR was unnecessary.
When Mr. Berg moved to Phoenix and I started doing modest book reviews for the JHR, I had questions about the Carto affair, so Fritz wanted me to get in touch with an elderly guy from the Legion of the Survival for Freedom (LSF) for details, whom he vouched for. I have forgotten his name at the moment, and he is probably dead now, but he was an attorney and an ex-Army officer, if I remember correctly, from the Sierra Vista area not too far from us. I had done a lot of Army training at Ft. Huachuca there so I thought we would get along, but he wasn’t very nice to me. In the LSF guy’s defense, Fritz had a way of annoying people with e-mail Spam, so to him I was probably just more baggage from that.
Fritz wasn’t afraid to provide unflinching Peer Review for Revisionist “Popes” if he felt they got something wrong. Ted O’Keefe told me once that “Fritz brooks little disagreement,” and that was very true, although I was never shy of providing peer review for his work and found quite a few important things of note.
Fritz needed a strong (yet technically competent) editor, and Germar Rudolf was able to do this for awhile, but in the end Germar did not want to admit that Faurisson had written most of the Leuchter Report and that Leuchter was either incompetent himself or plagiarized. Fritz missed that Germar had already published a “Critical Edition” of the LR. Now that Fritz is dead, Germar has finally made that simple admission about the authorship last year on the Jim Rizoli podcast which is worth watching.
This would have saved a lot of bad blood between them when Fritz was dying and brooking even less disagreement. Without a strong and competent editor Fritz’s last book was a disaster. It did not live up to his talents and just resembles an Internet rant. I knew better than to try to get involved with it. I have rarely found that Amazon self-published works are any good, and they have banned Revisionist books now anyway.
Regarding Fritz’s website… Yes, I agree. A few months before he died he asked me to back it up as it would crash as soon as he quit paying the bill. I did so and still have a working URL of it on the dark web if anybody wants it. The problem is that the software changed and Fritz was not able to maintain it properly for a couple of years before that, so the website is an unredeemable basket case and he probably would not want me changing anything either. I would just be guessing what the broken links originally were. Plus, I’m a lot harder Right than he was in any case. I have never been a Libertarian other than a free-speech advocate, and I certainly never admired any of the Kennedys, including the patriarch, Joe.
Fritz and I were atheists and we had distrust of Christianity in common. He was an ex-Catholic and I am an ex-Mormon (or the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, as they now prefer to be called, especially if it is implied that they are not Christians). Fritz wanted to believe in something metaphysical and just could not. How do you base something on made-up dieties? Fritz’s devoutly-Catholic mother (to her credit) had to pull him out of the Catholic school where the nuns were vicious and mean. And in New York just after the war, the Jews really picked on Krauts, and the Catholics gleefully went along with it.
Not being German, and from a later generation, the blood-libel aspect of the Holocaust does not bother me that much. I have always been willing to have rational discussions about mythical Nazi homicidal gaschambers with Jews and anyone over at RODOH or CODOH but they don’t usually reciprocate. I was banned over at Michael Shermer’s Skeptics forum for quoting Napoleon, and I’m semi-banned at TRS. I am willing to discuss, but I call it like I see it.
Fritz’s wife, who I am close friends with, was raised a Lutheran and her father was an elderly minor Nazi official who was brutally tortured by the British. We were with Fritz before he died in the hospice and I will state unequivocally that he was not a Jew in case anybody wants to know. I have never heard of an un-circumcised Jew, LOL.
Anyway, Fritz treated me like the son he never had, and I respect his opinions, but I was never convinced that Willis Carto did anything wrong other than to rub people the wrong way.
With respect to Holocaust Revisionism itself, the subject may have been “done to death” for the purposes of tabloid reporting ─ how far can you really go in that direction with Human Soap & Lampshades, electric floors, diesel engines, the bear and the eagle, Kremawurst, etc. ─ but the Revisionist historiography was just getting started.
When Weber closed down the Journal of Historical Review about ten years after the Carto split and fired editor Ted O’Keefe, the later accused the IHR of selling their mailing list to the ADL. I have forgotten the details and wasn’t an insider. In any case, to Mr. Weber’s great credit, he has kept the archive of the JHR available Online.
Germar Rudolf and Mr. O’Keefe started publishing a Revisionist journal for a while after the JHR discontinued, but when Rudolf was extradited back to the Fatherland and imprisoned there from 2005-2009, his journal immediately folded and Mr. O’Keefe retired and probably just wants to be left alone.
In general, you can criticize Israel (lightly) for muh (brown) Palestinians, but if you cross into actual non-Kosher territory like the Big-H, there will be no redemption nor bags of ZOG cash for you and your outfit. Mattogno and Rudolf have been dynamos in publishing serious Revisionist scholarship, dozens of volumes.
One problem that Fritz never understood as a Holocaust Revisionist was why the Holocaust could never be debunked ─ people must either be stupid or malevolent or both. He reasoned that some sort of new and sexy Madison Avenue approach was needed. He erroneously thought that the house of cards would finally topple over one fine day once you exposed the one key fact or truth.
Revisionist Jürgen Graf used the Biblical metaphor of the Holocaust as “a giant with feet of iron and clay.” That is a better analogy but for the Jews the Holocaust is like the Book of Mormon “Tree of Life.”
In any case, you are not likely to undo superstition easily ─ but careful scholarship towards the truth will go a long way. Two sides may never be reconcilable but honest dialog counters old lies and calumny.
In reality, the Big-H is a massive and leaky ark made of lead and hot-air, which is kept afloat with billions and billions of dollars worth of modern mass-media propaganda and even legislation. Even without Denial or “Hate” laws, only skilled amateurs will be able to do any real Revisionist scholarship because Western universities (not just the academics) are now completely run by Communists (for lack of a better term). And they are expressly dedicated to “undoing Whiteness,” or Hate as others might call it. The science of the Climate has already become more about the politics of “White Privilege” than anything like the Scientific Method or rational public policy.
Anyway, scoped bolt-action rifles are generally preferred for military snipers, although there are exceptions. Oswald fired at ranges less than you sight the rifle in for at the range (100 meters usually). Easy Peasy. And you normally have to sight or calibrate the scope again after the rifle has been disassembled for transport, so I suspect that he actually used the Carcano’s ergonomic iron sights instead of the sketchly-mounted scope ─ possibly after the first miss at Dealey Plaza, or maybe due to missing Gen. Walker’s head by an inch (although a slight breeze will do that at even short ranges). I don’t recall the source now, but the scope on Oswald’s recovered rifle supposedly had an issue that has been much ballyhooed.
Since the Assault Weapon canard has basically fallen flat ─ the one thing besides cutting multinational corporate or rich people’s taxes that the GOP can competently legislate ─ I have been waiting for a new gun-control argument to be floated from the marbled halls that calls for banning scoped bolt-action rifles, ubiquitously used by rural hunters, as “the weapon of choice for White dissident snipers.”
Stephen Paddock in the 2017 Las Vegas massacre (which killed 60) was shooting at the extreme end of the “maximum effective range” of an AR-15 and only relied upon indirect fire. Somebody better skilled than he ─ who perhaps had some actual military training ─ could have done a lot better massacre (fortunately not the case). World War I-era bolt-action rifles like the Carcano typically had adjustable iron sight ranges out to 1000 meters for just such types of fire “aimed” from parapets in the general direction of the enemy’s trenches.
Today, just having pepper spray is enough to get you shot by Antifa, who may not even be prosecuted. I am sure that if Kyle Rittenhouse had not missed the Black “Jump-Kick Man,” he would be sitting in jail with a long sentence today (in spite of it being self-defense). It’s infuriating, and I certainly don’t have all the answers.
🙂
Gee, an awful lot to unpack here. Like many (most?) readers, I do not believe the lone-nut theory, and do indeed believe that Oswald was, in his words, “a patsy.” The Warren Commission report is a whitewash paper that laboriously expands upon Oswald’s upbringing and ostensible conversion to Soviet Marxism, but does not provide any plausible motive or explanation for how and why Lee Harvey Oswald was able to kill the President from a great distance with his mail-order Italian bolt-action rifle. Or why Jack Ruby just happened to be on hand to murder Oswald point-blank at the Dallas County Jail.
Further, the probable involvement of CIA officers and assets is denied by omission. Ruth Paine had CIA connections through her husband and family, but her testimony was mainly used by the Warren Commission to frame Oswald. Pace the above description of Clay Shaw, he was no innocent falsely accused by Jim Garrison. Shaw was, or at least had been, a CIA asset. The CIA chief historian admitted as much in a 1992 memo: “These records do reveal, however, that Clay Shaw was a highly paid CIA contract source until 1956.” “Thus,” concludes one critic, “by the CIA’s own admission, it turns out that Clay Shaw wasn’t the sweet, innocent man that lone-nut theorists in the Kennedy assassination have long portrayed him to be. At the very least, he was a perjurer and a liar, which, of course, taints his entire testimony at his trial.”
This paragraph is funny, I suppose inadvertently:
In late September 1963, Oswald travelled to Mexico City by bus to acquire a visa to travel to Cuba. The Cubans wouldn’t give him a visa without Soviet approval, so he shuffled between embassies until he was thrown out of both. Ironically, the two Communist nations recognized that he was dangerous.
Well now. Obviously the Soviets knew who Lee Harvey Oswald was, and at least suspected he was a CIA asset. What skullduggery would he get up to in Cuba? Even if Oswald was no spy, just a troublemaking kook, he was a headache and a menace. So…no visa for you today, Mister Oswald!
As to the character of Jack Kennedy, the key fact is that he really had little interest in domestic affairs. His focus, going back at least to his years in London and at Harvard, had always been on international relations. His perceived liberalism after 1956 was mainly a strategy to make himself palatable to the Adlai Stevenson Democrats, thereby becoming a nominee who could be (barely) electable as President. As Congressman and Senator from Massachusetts he had been considered a conservative Democrat, unwilling to denounce family friend Joe McCarthy or make cooing noises to the Civil Rights hustlers. When he aimed at the White House he needed to establish his liberal, albeit loudly anti-Communist, foreign-policy credentials. Thus we find him in 1957 denouncing the French suppression of Algerian terrorists: a “safe” anti-colonial position to take, as it sounded high-minded while having little or no relevance to most Americans. But in making home-front policy he was basically interested in being non-divisive. He might say a nice word or two about Martin Luther King (the March on Washington happened late in his presidency), but he would never have pushed for the 1964 Civil Rights legislation. He saw how Ike got burned by the Brown decision and Little Rock, and wanted no part of that.
But now we come to the meat of the article, the Quaker business. I went to a Quaker school when I was little, and was struck by the fact that there isn’t much praying in a Quaker environment, but there’s a great deal of chatter about acting kind and being high-minded. Quakerism is one of those sects that lost its raison d’etre a long time ago. That mainly consisted of being a counterpoint to Anglicanism and Catholicism. Not exactly a compelling principle in an early America where there’s no Established Church. And as they had no real theology (what are the tenets of Quakerism, exactly?) they became a kind of ethical-culture cult, with a focus on social activism in the here-and-now. Very similar to what happened to Unitarianism—began as a sub-sect of a Puritan denomination (Congregationalism), then progressively lost belief in the Trinity, and even God, finally splitting off into a cult of bien-pensant Dale Carnegies, very concerned with virtue-signaling and acting nice and influencing people. So these religions-without-religion naturally gravitated to things like Abolitionism in the early 19th century, and “peace activism” and nuclear freezes in the 20th. Their self-righteous belief in themselves and their chosen causes made it possible for them to do the oddest things without pangs of conscience. Consider Alger Hiss and his wife Priscilla, justifying their Communism, and their unrelenting lies about it. Or the pathetic story of Hiss and Chambers’s friend Noel Field (q.v.), and his family. Or this Ruth Paine person in the article, acting as patron to the dubious and unsavory Oswalds, and then helping the Warren Commission stitch up their story that Oswald shot JFK all by his little self. Like Alger Hiss, she gets to the end of a long life without ever coming clean about her involvement in the CIA/Oswald nexus.
Of course this tendency toward deceit doesn’t characterize all self-identified Quakers (Richard Nixon? Late-life convert Whittaker Chambers?) but Quaker goodthink does seem to enable it. In Guy Fawkes’s day, the Protestant faction accused Catholics of something similar: they would feel entitled to lie and “prevaricate” because they were doing God’s work, and thus were acting morally.
Assassination is a fairly nutty thing to do under any circumstances. One should not expect entirely rational motives.
“was able to kill the President from a great distance with his mail-order Italian bolt-action rifle”
On just this one point, believe me, go to Dallas and see for yourself, it was neither at a great distance nor a difficult shot, more like fish in a barrel. And Oswald might even have trained on a bolt-action rifle in the Marines in the late fifties. In any case, the bolt action has nothing to do with accuracy.
M1 Garand or Carbine in those days. Semiautomatic.
Feasibility isn’t the point. Oswald just didn’t do it. The assassination was staged, planned well in advance, with Oswald being coached to leave little breadcrumbs of history behind him, e.g. the preposterous story of him trying to kill Edwin Walker, his one-man pro-Cuba activism, the tilted-Oswald-and-rifle photos, his very public attempt to get a Cuban visa in Mexico City, his connections to Ruth Paine and her merry band from Spookland…
I’m not going to change your mind, I’m just giving my POV.
MARXMANSHIP IN DALLAS, by Professor Revilo P. Oliver, written in 1964, however the article is still worth reading.
I find it puzzling that there are still people around who believe Oswald did it.
If you read the Warren Report when it came out, and paid half a mind to the controversies afterward, including the documents released 1978-1992, then it’s perfectly clear in your mind that JFK’s shooting was the result of a “conspiracy,” as the House subcommittee stated. From there you go on to easily connect LBJ, Allen Dulles, E. Howard Hunt, Ruth Paine, etc. etc.
If you just have a foggy notion of what went on, and believe that Oswald was a lone nut and excellent marksman, and that Oliver Stone and Jim Garrison were fantasists, then you’ll go with that, and stay out of trouble.
What do you think about the Michael Collins Piper “Final Judgment” thesis?
Never read it but I know the broad thesis. I see it’s available via Unz. Involvement of the Mossad in the assassinations of JFK and RFK is a piquant notion, but there’s the question of motive. The main person who stood to benefit from the JFK assassination was Lyndon Johnson, who was never getting into the White House otherwise. He had a 20-year history of criminal activity, from vote fraud to murder of his own sister, and he wouldn’t have balked at setting up a presidential killing. Particularly not if he had helping hands in the Pearl Street mafia, the CIA, and—okay—maybe even Mossad cutouts as well.
The JFK motive according to Piper is his opposition to Israel’s secret nuclear programme, the RFK motive is that he would have re-opened the JFK case if he had become president. He finds a quite neat way to integrate LBJ into this scheme.
https://www.unz.com/article/jfk-and-americas-destiny-betrayed/
New piece by Guyénot dropped.
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