The Home of Steven Barnes
Author, Teacher, Screenwriter


Tuesday, February 14, 2006

My favorite Conspiracies: Kennedy


Lest anyone get the impression that I think I’m sane in a world filled with crazies, I thought I’d trot out some of my favorite insanity.  These would be ideas that run around and around in my head, and never quite resolve themselves.  They have varying levels of evidence attached to them.  None of them make it fully past the logic test, but none of them will go away, either.

Today’s conspiracy:
John F. Kennedy.  The 60’s were a pretty hideous time for the Left.  John, Bobby, Martin, Malcolm…it makes you wonder if the Right has the only accurate aim in the country.  Yuck.  And just as it would be pure paranoia to insist that all of these were conspiracies, it is almost as naïve to think it impossible for none of them to have been…shall we say, helped along by the powers that be?

For various reasons, John Kennedy strikes me as being the most likely conspiracy.  The reasoning is this: there are simply too many people who might have wanted him dead.  From Mafiosi upset that the unions had helped elect him, only to be pursued by his Attorney General  brother Bobby, to Pro-Fidel Cubans and Anti-Fidel Cubans and CIA honchos, ALL pissed off over the Bay of Pigs, to the Military Industrial Complex and anti-communists upset about his proposed withdrawal from Vietnam…to Southerners upset at the attention he was starting to give the Civil Rights movement…to anti-Catholics (I remember the venomous propaganda at the time, although I was only about 10 years old during the elections.  He’d turn the country over to the Pope!) this is one man with lots of powerful enemies.  And if only a tiny fraction of human beings are murderous bastards, you know what? There were enough murderous bastards among all the groups listed who had the will, the position, the money, the power, and the training to set up a patsy named Oswald to take the fall.

I’ve heard a story, from a source I trust, that at an important sniper school within the American intelligence/Military community, the Kennedy assassination is used as a text-book example of a three-man sniper hit.  Truth? Fiction?  I don’t know…but this one won’t quite go away.  Your thoughts?

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