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Back in 2019 a prominent public figure—whose name is widely known—came to Palo Alto to have a private dinner with me. Apparently he’d become aware of my controversial writings the previous year on the JFK Assassination and in the wake of the Jeffrey Epstein revelations, he’d concluded I was probably correct that Israel and its Mossad had likely been heavily responsible for the death of our 35th president. As we discussed the issue that evening, I endorsed elements of his reasoning and explained that the Mossad had also played the central role in the 9/11 Attacks, something that greatly surprised him since he’d apparently never looked into those matters.
But although I emphasized that there was very strong evidence implicating the Mossad in the 1963 events in Dallas, a possibility still only whispered about in most JFK Assassination circles, I felt that that the strongest evidence of all implicated President Lyndon B. Johnson, Kennedy’s own immediate successor and the most obvious beneficiary of the crime.
The continuing near-total silence surrounding the probable role of Mossad is hardly surprising given the momentous geopolitical consequences if such a belief in Israeli guilt became widespread among Americans. Recent months have demonstrated the staggering political and media power of the Israel Lobby and there would surely be very severe repercussions for anyone who leveled such incendiary charges against the Jewish State.
By contrast, LBJ has long since passed into history, dying more than 50 years ago in 1973, and nearly all of his committed partisans have also long since departed the scene, often decades ago. For most Americans today, Johnson is probably just a name in the history books, a political figure more like a McKinley or a Coolidge rather than someone who arouses any fierce present-day emotions. So the near-total unwillingness to consider the very strong evidence of his guilt in the death of his predecessor must be due to other factors.
Although America has had many conspiratorial controversies over the last one hundred years, I think that the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy has received more attention than any other.
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Perhaps a thousand or more books have been published on that topic, the vast majority of them challenging the official narrative, and many of those works have become bestsellers, sometimes even reaching the #1 spot on the national lists. Oliver Stone is regarded as one of our greatest directors and his star-studded 1991 film JFK devoted more than three hours to presenting the story of that alleged conspiracy, winning an Oscar and drawing huge audiences. Across the last three decades, his gripping drama has surely been seen by many tens of millions in this country and around the world. Years earlier when our House Select Committee on Assassinations issued its 1978 final report, that official document proclaimed that Lee Harvey Oswald had not acted alone, thereby declaring that our 35th president had died at the hands of a conspiracy.
Despite all of this, the establishment media blockade against such theories has remained in place for more than six decades.
Tucker Carlson was the most popular host in the history of cable during late 2022 when he declared to his millions of viewers that JFK had indeed died in a conspiracy heavily involving elements of the CIA, a presentation that Robert F. Kennedy Jr. immediately praised as the most courageous newscast in 60 years. But despite Carlson’s stellar ratings, he was purged by FoxNews a few months later, with many suspecting that his JFK segment had been an important contributing factor.
There are numerous historical controversies today that are harshly stigmatized as “conspiratorial” by the media, but I can think of no other example that has been so widely promoted across mainstream channels of information while also receiving an official government endorsement. So although adherence to a JFK Assassination plot is regularly pilloried as the stereotypical example of “conspiratorial” thinking, it is unique in having received such major distribution and authoritative endorsements.
Yet oddly enough, until just a dozen years ago, I never suspected that any such serious historical controversy even existed, having spent my entire life completely ignorant of the issue.
I’d obviously known that JFK had been assassinated and also that some people claimed a conspiracy had been responsible. But I’d always regarded those latter individuals as merely cranks and crackpots lacking any evidence for their strange beliefs, fringe activists similar to those obsessed with UFOs or Scientology or ESP, and I’d never paid the least attention to them.
The reason for such decades of my total unawareness was the mainstream media cocoon in which I existed, one that only provided very limited or distorted facts, while always seeming to snicker at such conspiratorial beliefs and their deluded advocates. I’d always known that the media was dishonest about certain matters, but I had never imagined that such dishonesty extended to those fatal 1963 events in Dallas, which I had always assumed were too important to have long remained hidden.
Others have probably been far less naive over the years, though they cautiously remained silent. A couple of months ago I was having a cup of coffee with a mainstream academic friend of mine who was quite aware of the many “conspiratorial” articles I had published in recent years and he casually remarked that he’d always been extremely skeptical of the official JFK Assassination story. One of his secondary school textbooks had included the famous photo of Oswald being shot by Jack Ruby in a Dallas police station, and even as a high school student he’d concluded that the killing of the supposed presidential assassin soon after his capture and under the very noses of the local police seemed obvious evidence of a plot. By contrast, I’d probably just gullibly nodded my head when I came across such facts in my schoolbooks and then merely turned the page to the next subject.
Shrewd observers have emphasized that people are much more likely to fall for big lies than smaller ones, and this was certainly part of the reason that I’d never questioned the official JFK narrative. The early 1960s marked the High Noon of the American Century, as our national power and prosperity seemed to reach a peak, with no major domestic storm clouds on the horizon. JFK had become the youngest President in our history and with his attractive young wife Jackie, they were almost a movie star couple compared to the dowdy Eisenhowers, while greatly benefitting from the powerful new medium of television and the colorful spreads they received in influential photograph-laden weeklies such as Life Magazine. The violent death of an American President seemed almost unimaginable at that time, with the last such case having been when an anarchist had slain William McKinley in 1901, more than sixty years earlier at the very dawn of the twentieth century. When I later came of age, I’d always vaguely regarded the Kennedys as America’s own royal family, so it seemed unthinkable to me that the entire American media could have long concealed the fact that his death had been the result of a conspiracy.
Once I discovered that the universally-portrayed reality of Saddam Hussein’s Iraqi WMDs had merely been a media hoax, I became much more suspicious of other matters, and the growth of the Internet had made me aware of many conspiratorial claims, whose reality I gradually began to suspect. But the possibility of an actual JFK Assassination plot was not one of these, and that became among the last of the major modern conspiracies that I eventually concluded might be true.
Even when I finally moved in that direction, I found it difficult to accept such a possibility. After stumbling across some anomalous facts that raised my suspicions, I carefully read Brothers by David Talbot and JFK and the Unspeakable by James Douglass, which provided a great wealth of persuasive evidence. But I still found it difficult to absorb the possibility that such an enormous historical fact had remained hidden in plain sight throughout my entire life.
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