This video (embedded below) shows the 1959 AMC Rambler1 Cross Country Custom station wagon (License No. 711-TQC) being searched by myself and friends at 3304-A Robinson Avenue, Austin, Texas. Shown with me are former Dallas Police Reserve Officer John Fraser “Jay” Harrison, and Alex Troup (architect friend of Stephen Bright). Not shown is Stephen Bright, who videotaped the search, and who lived in the house where the car was kept for five years.

The car was parked in Stephen’s driveway, since Juan Garcia and I bought it from Lucilla Lopez Wing, the widow of University of Texas Professor George Gordon Wing.

On March 27, 1992, a few days after the sale, we transfered its title from Wing to Ronan Lynch, a friend of Juan’s and a UT foreign student from Edinburgh, Scotland, in an attempt to keep our identities and its location secret.

We documented its contents in this video on November 12, 1994. Jay had moved his live-in van (not shown) to that driveway shortly after he and I met on September 1, 1994. Jay lived there until Stephen got engaged in 1997.

For my complete report on our investigation, see my monogragh, “Possible Discovery of an Automobile Used in the JFK Conspiracy,” in my book, The Deep State in the Heart of Texas. It can also still be read in its first online publication in Fair Play Magazine. The forward I wrote for that edition as an abstract is annotated, illustated, and published as my essay, “Bartholomew Versus the Wheel.” For a brief overview and personal back story of its discovery, see my essay, “Roger & Me.”

This video can also be viewed on YouTube.

ENDNOTE

“Auschwitz is only sleeping.”

—Ceija Stojka, Holocaust survivor

Author’s note (June 21, 2026): Since 2020, I’ve written two essays for each presidential election, a preview with an overview of developments since the last election, followed by a post-election review. This year, given the chaos of Trump’s second term, a worst-case scenario is no longer unthinkable. Not only might there not be a 2028 “election,” there might not even be a midterm “election.” In addition, so much has happened already it makes a brief four-year overview impossible. Hence, this interim report. I have already given my criticism of Trump’s “release” of JFK-assassination files in my ad hoc essay, Non-disclosure Days. What follows are related consequences of ignoring the simple path to resolution: officially declaring Kennedy’s murder a conspiracy.

What was once a more patient, decades-long, right-wing plan, moderated by covert-fascist intellectuals like William F. Buckley Jr.,1 became by 2024 an action I call the “Trump Putsch” (a.k.a., Project 2025). The problem for the JFK-coup faction is that it is too much too fast. As symbolized by the desecration of The Kennedy Center. Trump knew the long-range fascist plan, but he and his MAGA faction are loose cannons. They made it too obvious. If not stopped, they could set the plan back by decades. “When your enemy is making a mistake, never interrupt him.” That seems to be the maxim MAGA’s enemies, left, right, foreign and domestic, have been acting on. The Putsch, in order to survive the surge of opposition that it ignited, can no longer wait to cancel the 2028 election, which was Trump’s expressed desire. They are forced to rig or cancel the midterms. To do that, they have to release the rest of their flying monkeys before the first votes are cast.

There have been some U.S. elections that seem strange to modern Americans. (See for example the election of George Washington.) But canceling an election has never been done in the U.S., not even during the Civil War. It is extremely difficult to cancel a U.S. election. But thinking it’s impossible is normalcy bias. Safeguards are in place. But so are newer secret “Continuity of Government” measures. It takes something extraordinary. Regime changes in Venezuela and Iran were just the beginning. Cuba has already been declared part of a next wave. So, too, may be the current controlled UFO disclosure, which could involve a hoaxed invasion once reportedly codenamed Project Blue Beam.

My overarching thesis since 2016 has been that Trump is a monster created by the JFK-coup faction to keep the JFK files hidden despite the law mandating their 2017 release. (“...every election since Kennedy’s has been about denying the truth of his death. None more desperately than the last three.”) Trump got out of control and had to be stopped. Attemps to stop him failed. He’s the classic Frankenstein monster.

The countercoup leaders who rose in opposition were Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Tulsi Gabbard, and Ameryllis Fox Kennedy. It is yet to be seen whether their dangerous, deep political power gambit will prevail. My analysis of their successes and failures is the focus of this essay.

I pointed to a second track to power, opened in June 2018 by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. in response to Hillary Clinton’s “Track I” failure. By publicly accusing the CIA of killing his father and uncle, Kennedy made this “Track II” a direct attack on the assassinocracy. In 2019, Tulsi Gabbard allowed herself to be photographed in public with James Douglass’ book, “JFK and the Unspeakable.” By doing so, she became the first candidate to test Track II, albeit too cautiously.

In response, Hillary Clinton doubled down on the indirect approach (Track I). In October 2019, Hillary called Gabbard “the favorite of the Russians,” saying they were “grooming her to be the third-party candidate.” Gabbard responded, “This is not about Russia,” explaining, “This smear campaign is coming from people like Hillary Clinton and her proxies, the foreign policy establishment, the military-industrial complex, who obviously feel threatened by my message and by my campaign because they know that they can’t control me.”

In 2020, long-time Clinton-Kennedy friend, Chris Dodd, headed Biden’s VP selection committee. Late in the VP-selection process, despite Kamala Harris being on Biden’s VP shortlist, Dodd publicly opposed her as having “no remorse” for her anti-Biden debate attacks. Harris was the obvious CIA/Deep-State choice, used to misdirect the media from a Clinton choice.

In January 2021, with Biden’s choice of Cass Sunstein for DHS and his wife Samantha Power for USAID, it became clear there would be no lawful JFK file release by Biden. Mr. and Mrs. Sunstein are the focal point of the anti-Hillary, anti-JFK-file-release faction of the deep state. Sunstein co-authored the 2008 paper with Adrian Vermeule, “Conspiracy Theories,” recommending draconian lawfare, which went beyond CIA Document 1035-960, a secret memo written in 1967. Upon becoming president, Biden continued to criminally withhold and redact the JFK files.

In 2024, Kennedy suspended his independent presidential campaign and negotiated an expedient political merger with Donald Trump’s campaign. Kennedy did not openly explain the real reason for the merger. But it was apparent from the thin cover story he promoted: end the power of the CIA over the American people and make America healthy again. Trump told him, “I want you to be on my transition team.” Kennedy said, “I think it would be good if Tulsi Gabbard were on it too because she’s aligned with me on many of these issues. I don’t want to be alone on that team.”

After Trump prevailed over Kamala Harris, Kennedy recommended Ameryllis Fox Kennedy for CIA Director and Gabbard for Director of National Intelligence (DNI) to oversee the release of the assassination files. Gabbard’s appointment succeeded. Fox Kennedy ended up as Deputy Director of National Intelligence instead. (In retrospect, that missed DCI appointment was likely a fatal flaw.)

This trio, along with their closest countercoup consultant, attorney Daniel Sheehan, then seemed to be in position to assault CIA resistance to the planned release of the remaining classified JFK assassination files. I called this politically expedient alliance with Trump the First Triumvirate after the one in ancient Rome.

I noted that Ceasar’s informal triumvirate had become a historic synonym for unintended consequences. The First Triumvirate formed about 60 BCE in political chaos when Senate conservatives dominated and blocked reforms. Caesar, Pompey, and Crassus united to bypass those obstacles and pursue individual ambitions. Their alliance succeeded at first but collapsed after Crassus’ death in 53 BCE. A final confrontation between Caesar and Pompey ended with Ceasar’s victory and Pompey’s assassination.

Now, in 2026, a different analogy was becoming apparent — the Fabian strategy, a Roman military idea that was long known by Ceasar’s time. It focused on endurance and resource management over immediate victory. The approach was named after General Fabius Maximus, who used it against Hannibal in the Second Punic War.

The Fabian strategy is often mistaken for merely a retreat. Criticism from commanders who prefer decisive battles causes internal conflict. That happened when George Washington used it in the Revolutionary War, particularly after defeats like the Battle of Long Island. Sam Houston faced similar conflict when he used the strategy in 1836, after Santa Ana defeated and massacred Texans at the battles of Goliad and the Alamo. Houston marched eastward with Santa Ana in pursuit massacring civilians. Survivors fled, many joining Houston’s march. Texans named Houston’s Fabian strategy the “Runaway Scrape.”

That appeared to be the new strategy of this countercoup trio against the ghost warriors of the Dallas deep event. To see it in perspective, we must skip to when it began to emerge from the shadows in the second year of Trump’s second term.

On January 31, 2026, Tulsi Gabbard appeared at ‍the FBI ballot warehouse raid on an election facility in Fulton County, Georgia, amidst political and media criticism of her direct involvement in an apparent domestic matter. “National security experts” warned that Gabbard and the ODNI had overstepped their authority. The subtext of reporting on the raid’s purpose was speculation that it was Trump’s attempt to discredit the 2020 election as a pretext for canceling the 2028 election.

Despite the media frenzie over the raid, PBS Washington Week delayed its story until the last few minutes of the broadcast. The unusually delayed report was revealing in other ways, too. Especially noticeable was their on-air nervousness while doubling down on the ridiculous mainstream spin: “shocked, shocked” that the head of U.S. intelligence would get involved in a domestic matter.

Tom Llamas, in an interview shown on the February 4, 2026 NBC Nightly News broadcast, asked Trump why Tulsi Gabbard was at the Fulton County raid. Trump immediately answered, “I don’t know.” Gabbard had already officially said she was there at Trump’s request. Who could better monitor that raid, so Trump probably thought, than the apparently successful raider of the lost JFK files? (More on that below.) Llamas let the contradiction pass. The real answer was, therefore, being hidden.

Senator Mark Warner immediately became the designated deep-state nemesis of Gabbard regarding the Fulton County raid. Warner is one of The Gang of Eight, a group of eight U.S. congressional leaders who are briefed on classified intelligence matters by the executive branch. The deep-political reality of Warner’s role is buried in his Wikipedia entry:

Warner’s protection of Stefan Halper is revealing. Here is the deep-political reality of Halper from Wikipedia:

Just two months before the Fulton County raid, a handful of major media picked up the Thanksgiving-week Reuters story about Gabbard’s stealth raid of CIA files on the JFK assassination and MKULTRA the previous April. MSN, Yahoo, and Newsweek, along with some minor domestic media, echoed the Reuters report. Reporter Kelsy Bauer reporting for a single, very obscure outlet, Next Gen Business, had the story on April 10, 2025, right when it happened.

Unlike Gabbard’s ballot warehouse raid, her CIA raid was very under the radar. A too-short mention was even buried in a joint press release by Gabbard and RFK Jr., dated April 18, 2025, the day of the RFK file release: “In the course of searching FBI and CIA warehouses for records not previously turned over to The National Archives, an additional 50,000 pages of RFK assassination files were discovered.” Contrast that to the wall-to-wall coverage of the Georgia ballot warehouse raid of January 2026.

Not to be neglected in these events is the strange case of Joe Kent. Trump nominated Kent as director of the National Counterterrorism Center. His confirmation hearing was April 9, 2025. He was a former CIA agent, a Trump loyalist, and a close advisor to DNI Gabbard. In a December 2, 2025 story on the heels of the oddly belated Reuters report of Gabbard’s JFK-files raid, RadarOnline’s Aaron Johnson reported that “Joe Kent...was poking around into the murder” of Charlie Kirk, “poring over FBI files to track down leads to...foreign or domestic actors....”

The influential Kirk, co-founder of the extreme-right Turning Point USA, was assassinated at a September 10 outdoor rally in Utah by a clearly evident conspiracy blamed on an allegedly antifascist patsy. Extreme-right activist Laura Loomer deleted a July 13 tweet accusing Kirk of disloyalty to Trump by criticizing military action against Iran and forcefully demanding the immediate release of all Jeffrey Epstein files. Kirk had crossed the deep-state line further by making equally forceful demands for full transparency of the JFK assassination conspiracy.

Joe Kent resigned March 17, 2026, allegedly opposing the U.S. role in the Iran war. The Wall Street Journal reported that Kent had been removed from the team that produced the President’s Daily Brief in his final months. As Gabbard’s chief of staff in May 2025, Kent had been at the center of an intelligence scandal that threatened Gabbard politically. He recommended she order the National Intelligence Council, an elite internal think tank, to redo their assessment that a gang was linked to the Venezuelan government as a pretext for ICE deportations using the Alien Enemies Act. While going after an elite deep-state think tank is a good thing, it is dangerous. Kent’s background as a spy suggests he knew better and set Gabbard up. His trap backfired, and he was forced to resign.

After watching Jimmy Dore’s interview of Whitney Webb giving her assessment of Kent and reading Kent’s Wikipedia bio, I think Webb’s instincts are correct. Kent is a special forces commando assigned to a political grooming mission. His political recipe is best described as sheep dip put through a blender and thrown against multiple non-stick, rotating walls. A dip custom made for 2020s assassinocracy chaos. Whatever happens with U.S. election politics, Kent will be the shapeshifting polygonal peg forced into whatever hole remains.

Those dramatic, underreported or forgotten events completed a timeline leading to Gabbard’s and Ameryllis Fox Kennedy’s sudden resignations in May:

Gabbard’s first reported replacement as acting DNI and successor was Aaron Lukas. He and his wife are CIA/Cato-Institute, putting them, like Mr. and Mrs. Cass Sunstein, in the anti-JFK-file-release faction of the deep state.

A pattern was developing. Aaron Lukas, like Mark Warner, the designated deep-state nemesis of Gabbard over the Fulton County raid, was a strong supporter of arresting Julian Assange. Lukas served as an intelligence aide to Richard Grenell, the acting director of national intelligence, in 2020. In 2018, Grenell played a key role in the arrest of Assange.

Politically, Gabbard’s and Fox Kennedy’s resignations freed them from responsibility for more regime changes, starting with Cuba. Plus, the timing was exactly one year before the first 2028 primary campaign launches. If their exit was a strategic retreat after losing the CIA-ODNI JFK-files battle, it was perfectly timed to regroup for future battles.

Nonetheless, there were parting shots from both sides.

On June 2, 2026, Trump nominated Federal Housing Finance Agency Director Bill Pulte to replace Gabbard. Pulte’s appointment was controversial. Democratic critics, including Mark Warner, questioned his qualifications and politicization of his office. Pulte had used his access to mortgage records to attempt prosecution of top Trump opponents. Some Republicans were also skeptical. Pulte’s appointment was temporary and required Senate confirmation to continue.

There soon followed another sign that the FBI/CIA warehouse raid was a lost battle. On June 7, 2026, in a New York Times hatchet job, Sheryl Gay Stolberg reported that RFK Jr. “appears disengaged on Health Department matters,” and “has demonstrated little interest in” managing his department. The same day, Steve Benen’s negative spin for MSNOW contained this revealing ad hominem: “RFK Jr. is an activist and an advocate for his discredited conspiracy theories. Of course he’s disengaged as a secretary, preferring instead to focus his energies on his pet causes.”

RFK Jr. effectively rebutted the Times’ hit piece in a June 10 post on X. The Daily Beast’s Ewan Palmer retaliated the next day, calling Kennedy’s post a “melt down,” a “screed,” and a “tirade.”

The same day, June 11, Trump nominated former SEC chairman Jay Clayton as permanent director of national intelligence. Clayton was the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, a position he had held since 2025. The appointment came only hours after the House failed to extend Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) in reaction to Bill Pulte’s appointment.

Recall that Gabbard’s nemesis, Senator Mark Warner, had voted against the 2020 Lee-Leahy FISA amendment seeking to end Section 702’s disregard for civil liberties. FISA Section 702 governs programmatic surveillance — automated systems and algorithms that continuously monitor large populations or targeted groups using facial recognition, AI, networked cameras, and more exotic secret technologies. Warner’s opposition to Gabbard had now threatened his pet FISA surveillance powers altogether. He told CBS Face the Nation moderator Margaret Brennan, “If Trump had nominated Jay Clayton a week ago, we wouldn’t have gone dark.”

The very next day, June 12, outgoing Director Gabbard released declassified intelligence showing that the U.S. government funded over 120 biological laboratories in over 30 countries, including Ukraine. That funding had been forcefully denied by the U.S. in 2022 when it was cited as being among U.S. provocations for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. A Pentagon fact sheet dated June 9, 2022, was widely cited saying that Ukraine “has no nuclear, chemical, or biological weapons programs.”

Like Pulte, Clayton had almost no national security experience and was seen as deeply loyal to Trump, notably supporting Trump’s election-fraud conspiracy theories. As U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, Clayton played a key role in the indictment of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, which led to the U.S. kidnapping Maduro. All of which indicated a likely continued ODNI interest in Trump’s seized Fulton County ballots.

Then, just hours before Clayton’s scheduled confirmation hearing, June 17, Trump put his DNI nomination on hold, claiming to delay it indefinitely until he could get Clayton’s replacement as U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York approved. Trump said that he would keep Bill Pulte on as acting DNI, which continued his standoff with Congress on FISA. The move was also reported as a ploy to force Congress to pass the voter ID bill that currently lacked enough votes. Restrictive voter ID laws, like off-year redistricting, polling place closures, voter roll purges, and intimidation, are age-old voter suppression tactics to reduce turnout. Those tactics, along with dark money and, more recently, dark exotic technologies, are how modern elections are covertly rigged (assuming there is another election).

Who is and is not a suitable political candidate is a question for an election in a democracy, not in an assassinocracy. Watching the quaint support and opposition for the spectrum of candidates from Talarico to Trump is like watching an audience at a magic show for kids. The U.S. deep state will indeed interfere in the coming national elections. It has historically interfered with a great many elections globally. It is actually very normal (reprehensible but normal).

The deep state braced for Gabbard’s final official act. Her final bow came nearly two weeks before her official resignation date. The day before Junteenth, the U.S.’s newest federal holiday, Gabbard posted her parting shot on X:

“Today, on my final day as Director of National Intelligence, I’m releasing never-before-seen communications and documents exposing how Dr Fauci provided millions in US taxpayer dollars to fund dangerous gain-of-function research at the Wuhan lab, worked with politicised elements within the Intelligence Community to suppress the truth about his actions and hide the virus’ lab-leak origins, and lied to Congress while under oath in 2024. It’s time you know the truth.”

Gabbard may have retreated but not without major skirmishes. The three major U.S. broadcast news networks, ABC, NBC, and CBS failed to report it. Notably, Gabbard also failed to take on the most important, and simplest, official task. She did not take the most important action required of any office holder to end the biggest of big lies and change everything: officially making the simple declaration that Kennedy’s murder is a conspiracy. The 62-year reign of the unspeakable JFK-coup faction, therefore, survives. What kind of leverage kept that official statement from being uttered by RFK Jr., Tulsi Gabbard, Ameryllis Fox Kennedy, or any other official in power? Who will stop the reign?

Conspiracy theories are caused by conspiracies. Yet, the spies of the so-called U.S. Intelligence Community don’t call themselves conspiracy theorists anymore. Not since 1967, when the CIA weaponized the term against conspiracy realists via its secret memo 1035-960. Yet that is who they are and what they have always been.

Twelve years before the first U.S. presidential election of 1788-89, a group of conspiracy theorists were assembled in New York “For the express purpose of enquiring into, detecting, and defeating all conspiracies which may be formed in this State against the liberties of America.” General Washington compelled the formation of the group in writing on March 24, 1776: “There is one evil I dread, and that is, their spies. I could wish, therefore, the most attentive watch be kept...I wish a dozen or more of honest, sensible, and diligent men, were employed...to question, cross-question, etc., all such persons as are unknown, and cannot give an account of themselves in a straight and satisfactory line.”

It is now the 250th anniversary of the Committee for Detecting and Defeating Conspiracies, the first organization under the Articles of Confederation created for counterintelligence. Its operations started June 5, 1776, although the New York Provincial Congress did not formally establish the CDDC until September 21, after the Declaration of Independence and after New York fell to the British. Headed by John Jay, the CDDC operated to collect intelligence, apprehend British spies and couriers, and examine suspected British sympathizers. It was created as a “secret service” with the power to arrest, convict, grant bail, parole, imprison, or deport. It heard over 500 cases of disloyalty and subversion. A company of militia was under the CDDC’s command.

One of the early successes of these conspiracy theorists was the detection and defeat of a conspiracy to assassinate George Washington.

So if you are looking for something to celebrate in these dark times about America’s Semiquincentennial, take note of the fact that these brave, patriotic conspiracy theorists of 1776 operated for their first month, June 5 to July 2 (Lee Resolution), unofficially and against their own government (the British) which was conspiring against them. Much like our modern-day JFK-countercoup faction.

Or, you can just forget the whole thing and go back to the urgent coverage of “ReflectingPoolGate.” Good luck with that.

ENDNOTE

Chronology: John Bowden Connally Jr.

(02/27/1917 - 06/15/1993)

1930s

● Floresville High School, 1932 to 1935

● University of Texas, 1935 to 1939

● Student Body President

● Met LBJ, who helped him get a job in the UT library, 1936. Met Idanell “Nellie” Brill via D.H. Byrd, 1937.

● Worked on LBJ campaign for Congress, 1937. Brown & Root was the principal source of campaign funds after Johnson’s initial run for Congress in 1937.

● Jack Halfen, a Dallas gangster associated with Pretty Boy Floyd, Bonnie Parker, and Clyde Barrow, organized the rackets in Houston by the late 1930s. Carlos Marcello funds went through Halfen to the campaigns of Houston Congressman Albert Thomas and LBJ.

● LBJ Congressional Staff, 1939 to 1941.

1940s

● Married Nellie, 1940

● April 1941- Brown & Root gave massive sums of cash for Johnson’s first run for the U.S. Senate, a special election, which resulted in putting LBJ against frontrunner, Governor W. Lee “Pappy” O’Daniel, in a 1-on-1 runoff election. With 96 percent of the runoff ballots counted, Johnson held a 5,000-vote lead. Election officials asked JBC if they should report the vote tallies. He told them to report the votes. That told O’Daniel’s political allies among the South and East Texas party bosses to know the exact number of fake votes needed for O’Daniel to win. JBC blamed himself.

● U.S. Navy, 1941 to 1946

● Aide to James Forrestal

● Eisenhower’s staff planning the North African campaign.

● Pacific Theater - USS Essex - USS Bennington

● Worked in LBJ’s radio station KTBC in Austin and began practicing law in the Alvin Wirtz law firm, 1945. The firm of Powell, Wirtz, and Rauhut serviced the legal affairs of the Brown and Root construction company, a major financial supporter of LBJ.

● Founder of KVET, 1946, and president until 1949.

● Ran LBJ’s 1948 Senate campaign, winning the rigged runoff with 200 fake ballots. A TV reporter investigating it was killed in 1949, and his assassin was found hanged in his cell after offering to reveal the location of the missing fake ballots.

● Key aide to Senator LBJ, 1949.

1950s

● Connally sided with Texas corporate power throughout his career. He supported Brown and Root against unionization in the 1950s.

● Main law clients - Fort Worth oil tycoons Sid W. Richardson and Perry Bass, Richardson’s nephew/partner. One of Richardson’s favorite spots was the Hotel Del Charro near the racetrack called the Del Mar Turf Club, which he owned with Clint Murchison. Murchison had built the Hotel Del Charro, and it was his place outside of Texas where he met with friends and clients and political contacts, largely oil business but including J. Edgar Hoover and organized crime bosses. Whenever he was visiting Del Charro, Richardson was the boss. Whenever JBC, his lawyer and confidante, was flown in to Del Charro on Richardson’s private plane, they moved out whoever was in the room next door to Richardson and JBC got the room instead.

● Part of the failed plot to make former Democrat Texan Robert B. Anderson Eisenhower’s VP, 1956. Anderson, who was a close confidante of Eisenhower, Sid Richardson, and JBC, became treasury secretary instead.

● Named co-executor of Richardson’s estate, 1959.

1960s

■ 1960

Mac Wallace was seen at least three times at LBJ primary campaign functions, always accompanied by Cliff Carter, according to Lucianne Goldberg, who worked in the campaign press office. (Bill Adler, “The Killing of Henry Marshall,” The Texas Observer, Nov. 7, 1986, p. 18, col. 3.)

■ 1961

● Mac Wallace worked at Ling-Temco-Vaught in Garland Mar. 1952 to Feb. 1961. It was in Jan. 1961, claimed Billie Sol Estes, that Wallace, Billie Sol, Cliff Carter, and Lyndon Johnson met at Johnson's house in Washington to discuss killing Henry Marshall.

● CIA ship Rex’s sophisticated Collins electronics were installed while Ken BeLieu was Assistant Navy Secretary for Installations and Logistics under Connally.

■ 1962

● Dec. ’62 to Jan. ’63 the trip was under consideration by Johnson and Connally; nearly a year; no earlier than November of ’62. “Maybe.” JBC said JFK would not just decide on his own to visit Texas. Except he did a two-day visit for his “We choose to go to the Moon” speech at Rice University, Sept. 12, 1962.

■ 1963

● What initially prompted JFK to begin planning a Texas trip? It’s publicly available but buried. Rep. Albert Thomas of North Houston and its suburbs was the catalyst. JFK probably would have gone to Texas in ’63 but he decided definitely to go — to go to Houston on November 21st ’63 solely because Representative Albert Thomas wanted him to go. Kenny O’Donnell testified to the WC that, quote, “An invitation to the President had been received from Thomas or his committee.” And he said, “Oh, wait a minute, not the congressman himself.” What does he mean by that? He continued, “and the President was very fond of Congressman Thomas and I knew he would want to go if at all possible. I would think that the invitation to the Thomas dinner probably had more to do with setting the actual definite dates of November 21st and 22nd to visit Texas than anything else.”

● Larry O’Brien further testified that JFK was earlier interested in visiting Texas but the Thomas invitation was — sort of fell into line. It presented an opportunity to make the Texas trip definite at that time. JFK was particularly fond of Thomas. He had a close working relationship with him in Congress. In O’Brien’s opinion, the trip would not have been undertaken at all except for the dinner for the powerful Congressman Albert Thomas of Houston. O’Brien was interviewed about the trip planning by Ralph Martin (“A Hero for Our Time,” 1983). Asked why JFK went to Texas, “Mr. O’Brien, why did John F. Kennedy go to Texas?” O’Brien answered, “Jack Kennedy would not have gone to Texas except that Al Thomas loved him.” He said the very same thing to William Manchester.

● Secrecy - the entire Texas trip was marked by secrecy, withheld information, unexplained shifting of dates and times, which were, in fact, set disinformation. The Secret Service, the White House staff, and the public were not informed about the details of the trip until just weeks before it occurred. The reason for that is that Connally had absolute control over the information on the whole trip, on Dallas, on the luncheon site and on the motorcade. In effect, only LBJ, JFK and Connally — and LBJ frequently got wrong information — knew the details of the trip. And even LBJ was either misinformed or not given important data.

● John Newman reported, Howard Burris revealed, “Johnson knew — was sure [in 1963] — he was going to be dropped from the ticket.” (The Deep State in the Heart of Texas, p. 170, n.136. Transcript: John Newman with Gus Russo, p. 33)

● The official Texas trip pseudo-histories tell 3 lies: JFK’s major reason for coming to Texas was either to (1) unite a (2) disunited Texas Democratic Party or to (3) bolster his own weakened political standing in Texas. All three support the big lie that Texas was very important, really crucial to JFK’s reelection.

● Counter-revisionist non-assassination books, domestic policy, foreign policy, memoirs, etc. by political historians, political scientists, and historians, show a whole other Kennedy out there that we’re not given information about. Books like “Promises Kept” by Irving Bernstein, 1991.

● The polls showed him running ahead of Goldwater, and it looked as though he might be well on his way to a big presidential and congressional victory.

● “He was supremely confident of his own reelection. The religious problem, which had cost him four or five percentage points in 1960, now seemed dead. The national polls showed him exceptionally popular, easily defeating any possible Republican candidate.”

● Equally important, they indicated that the country was moving quietly but firmly leftward. And the public strongly favored his activist agenda, including civil rights — except in the South.

● EVICA: “The liberals believed they were within only a few months of smashing the Johnson-Connally, Washington-Austin axis. They did not want the controversy resolved except at the election booth. In ’63 JFK was neither in trouble politically...nor did he perceive himself to be in trouble, as a number of revisionist historians, the Warren Commission, and the House Select Committee on Assassinations would have us believe.”

● Connally was in trouble. The Houston Chronicle published (11/22) a skewed poll that showed Kennedy-Johnson popularity was trailing Goldwater 48-to-52 percent—it was within the margin of error and no undecideds. Skewed to support editorial saying Connally’s political future was threatened:

(1) Conservative Connally Democrats could lose control of the Texas Democratic Party and the crucial primary contest between — against the new liberal coalition. A strong possibility.

(2) The conservative Connally Democrats would then be unable to control the Texas state Democratic convention.

(3) That now liberal state Democratic convention, predictably, would decline to endorse LBJ for the vice presidency and certainly ignore him for a senatorial slot.

(4) JFK would say, “Hey,” and dump LBJ.

● Connally needed JFK because Connally needed LBJ. LBJ had to stay on that vice presidential ticket. And if he stayed on the vice presidential ticket, then they controlled the state convention and Connally is safe. Without Johnson on the vice presidential ticket Connally’s plans for his own future in Texas and possibly the national stage would be in shambles.

● When the House Select Committee on Assassinations had a chance to get at the truth, it chose the least reliable witness — that sounds right doesn’t it? — the least reliable witness to the trip to Texas, opening its public hearings with his suspect testimony: John Connally of Texas.

JANUARY

● JBC sworn in as 39th Governor of Texas - in office 01/15/1963 to 09/21/1969. He remained an unofficial advisor of Brown and Root while he was governor.

● 58th Texas Legislature 1/20 to 5/24 (120 days).

APRIL

● Adele Edisen, a postdoctoral student at LSU, meets Jose Rivera, a former faculty member at Loyola University in New Orleans, at a biomedical conference in Atlantic City, NJ. They agree to meet up later in D.C.

4/22 - 23

● Adele Edisen, while in D.C., was told by Jose Rivera that one Lee Harvey Oswald was going to be involved in an assassination of John F. Kennedy. Rivera also mentioned the Carousel Club in Dallas. “Colonel” Rivera in Washington D.C. knew Lee Harvey Oswald’s New Orleans phone number at Jesse Garner’s 4905-7 Magazine Street apartment house on April 23, when Oswald himself didn’t know where he would be living until May 9.

4/23

● JFK had apparently agreed to visit Houston for 11/21 Albert Thomas Dinner because LBJ anounced at press conference at The Dallas Times Herald (DTH): JFK visit Texas later in the year- gave general schedule including Dallas luncheon; LBJ also told 2,000 business and civic leaders, Crystal Ball Room, Baker Hotel: “At least wait until next November before you shoot him down.” (DTH, 4/24, p. 22, cited in Penn Jones, Forgive My Grief IV, 1976, pp. 1-2.)

4/25

● Announcement in the DTH: JFK to visit Dallas in November. Houston and Dallas to be visited either on the 21st or on the 22nd. (21st was already the Houston dinner). The local Houston committee organizing and controlling the Thomas dinner was its chairman, Jack Valenti. A JBC associate, Valenti became an associate of LBJ after JBC’s political prospects declined. Valenti jumped ship and became an instant LBJ supporter with 12 other major Connally people. In the White House, in ’63 and ’64, many people called them “The Texas Gang.” Through Valenti, all of the Connally anti-Kennedy forces had influence on Albert Thomas’s supporters—mainly Jack Halfen of Houston, a man close to Albert Thomas in the 1950s who had close links to all the suspected groups in the JFK murder conspiracy. Albert Thomas was closely linked, therefore, in the 1950s, with Jack Halfen, a syndicate payoff and bagman who worked with Houston gamblers Carlos Marcello and other syndicate leaders, influential Texas political figures, and munitions smugglers supporting Fidel Castro in the late 1950s, including Jack Ruby and CIA connected agents. And the ceremonial dinner in Houston on the evening of November 2lst ’63 for Albert Thomas, the political ally of John F. Kennedy, was the irresistible reason for JFK coming to Texas and finally to Dallas.

MAY

● Adele Edisen, after attempting to call LHO in New Orleans at Rivera’s request, contacted the Secret Service about Jose Rivera’s comments. Thinking she wouldn’t be believed, Edison dropped the matter until 2 days after the assassination, when she told the Secret Service and FBI about Rivera.

JUNE

6/5

● Connally, and LBJ met in El Paso and agreed that the President should make a one-day whirlwind trip to Dallas and three other Texas cities in late November. Initially, the proposed trip involved no motorcades because there was no time. This meeting is persistently called secret; media silence runs through the whole story; confirmed an original plan for a visit of one day (“Connally: The Adventures of Big Bad John,” 1974 Charles R. Ashman, source: Connally himself); August 27th was rejected before June 5th (deposition buried in the 26 volumes). They knew JFK’s commitments prevented him from a trip any sooner than 11/21, the fixed date of the Houston Thomas dinner. According to JBC only, Jun.-Oct. was marked by trip planning. He testified that he and LBJ met intermittently (news to LBJ) to discuss “objectives and the format of the trip” — no documentary evidence whatsoever.

SEPTEMBER

9/13

● DTH front page, Bob Hollingsworth, Washington correspondent, learned from unnamed source that a one-day trip with a breakfast speech in Dallas, a luncheon in Fort Worth, an afternoon coffee in San Antonio, a dinner in Houston was scheduled. (Disinfo throughout the record: floating time vs. set time; built-in contradiction; intentional murkyness. “It’s all conditional, and it’s final.”)

9/13 - 24

● It’s crucial for Connally to win his argument for a two-day visit, a very intense period. JBC uses that fatigue factor to provoke JFK into accepting the idea of a fixed Dallas motorcade. JFK’s people say we’ve got to reach the people. Connally says, “Well I’m sorry, the only way you reach the people is in a motorcade. And in a one-day trip you can’t have a motorcade.” Remember, Connally is in charge of all the details. They went with a two-day trip and they fixed the motorcade on the 22nd.

● Remember this: between Sept. 13th and 24th, JBC established a two-day trip with a Dallas motorcade.

9/26

● DMN: “Kennedy to visit Texas, November 21st, 22nd.” “Dallas included.” “reported from Jackson Hole, Wyoming” where JFK was then on a visit. “White House sources from Jackson Hole, Wyoming told the Dallas News exclusively Wednesday night that President Kennedy will visit Texas November 21st.” So between the 13th and the 24th, it goes from a 1-day trip to a 2-day trip. Strangely,* it’s now an unnamed White House source in Wyoming that establishes a 2-day trip. Who sent the stories out of Jackson Hole, Wyoming? Why did one Dallas newspaper, The Dallas Morning News, have what it called an exclusive on these Jackson Hole announcements?

*EVICA: “White House or presidential announcements are usually sent out to all the press associations and news services and given to the White House correspondents in Washington. Why, in this instance, were announcements sent from Jackson Hole, and why were they sent exclusively just to one paper in Dallas?”

● Before Oct. 1963, the Texas trip dates were set, according to the HSCA. But they recognized that Connally wasn’t telling them the truth, and they acknowledged it. Connally told them that the trip was not fixed before late October. But they buried it in Vol. 11, pp. 510 and 511. And what they buried was this: “Connally did acknowledge (to the House Select Committee on Assassinations) that he must have known prior to October that November 21st and 22nd were in fact the selected dates for the Texas visit.”

● Throughout this trip-history is the fact that once you get someone to admit it, the dates are fixed, not fluid. But Connally continues to insist they are fluid. Got it? So, that major contradiction, that disinfo, is always working. Even in the book “Lone Star Rising,” you can see that Reston had not read the whole record, so he allowed Connally to tell his lies. Reston, by the way, was skeptical of a lot of Connally’s story, but he should have been skeptical of most of it.

OCTOBER

10/2

● Connally met with the power structure in Dallas.

EVICA: “It’s incredible the people that he met...” Including “The chairman of the Dallas Citizens’ Council...which had controlled Dallas politics for forty years, the president of the Chamber of Commerce, the head of the Mercantile Bank the oldest bank in Dallas, and all the executives, the chief executives from the two Dallas newspapers. You know, power to the people.” All anti-Kennedy.

10/3

● Connally in D.C. met with Texas Democrats.

EVICA: “He's extraordinarily nervous. He is right on the edge of breaking, and Gonzalez gives him hell because Connally betrays that what he thinks is necessary is to get monied people to support the Democratic Party. And Gonzalez says, ‘Stick it in your ear...The people are more important.’ That’s a marvelous...confrontation. It’s not been covered very much...Connally got general Texas trip planning authority at that meeting on October 3rd. More to the point, I know that what he got was his Dallas planning authority. Verified.”

10/4

● Connally met with JFK and claimed he urged him [not] to come to Texas. Connally lied.* As of Apr. 23rd and again on Sept. 13th, and again, on September 26th — the trip is already set. Connally knew prior to October that JFK would be in Texas on November 21st and 22nd, Connally could not have urged JFK to come to Texas [or not to come].

*EVICA: “Connally says, ‘I went on October [4th] and urged the President not to come to Texas.’ I’ve got a direct quote — he lied.”

● If Connally’s urging could not have been about coming [or not coming], what was it? JFK told Mrs. Lincoln, after the meeting, Connally was “very anxious” to have JFK visit Texas, and that although LBJ wanted JFK in Texas, his top concern was not being dropped from the ticket.

● In a memoir, Evelyn Lincoln wrote, “After I left, I remember what Mr. Kennedy said.” And she quotes him: “He sure seemed anxious for me to come to Texas. He attracts some people, you know. Money people who would never vote for me. But I have many supporters down there who are bitterly opposed to him. I think in the long run, it would be more advantageous to him than for me that I go to Texas. And the one thing I noticed above everything else was his concern about Lyndon being on the ticket.”

● Connally claimed Kennedy tentatively set the second half of November as the trip time.

EVICA: “Connally’s version of this...meeting ...placed this JFK trip decision far too late — that’s part of the fluidity — since both the November dates...are...already set. Connally testifies, therefore, [that] he met with JFK in the Oval Office and he said JFK demands multiple fund-raising meetings. None of that is, apparently, true.” In Vol. 4 of the Warren Commission Hearings: JBC testified that JFK wanted no more than one fundraising dinner and that he was in agreement with that.)

10/5

● NYT: “Some doubt had been raised at the Connally-JFK meeting about JFK coming to Dallas.” Their source was John Connally.

EVICA: “Connally probably argued for a scheduled November 22nd ’63 noontime Dallas motorcade from Love Field to the luncheon speech site...all the evidence suggests...that’s his intention now: to focus on that...as part of the argument.”

10/16

● Oswald went to the TSBD. This placement date was not too late. Conspiracy deniers argue it was, especially those arguing only for an opportunistic assassination. (The Texas trip was announced 4/23—5 months before TSBD. Dallas was announced no later than 9/26—20 days before LHO placement. But even using the very lastest date, 10/5—the date Connally’s control of the trip was confirmed—that latest date still gives the conspirators 10 days, plenty of time to place LHO at the TSBD.)

10/29

● JBC and Jerry Bruno met at the Forty Acres Club in Austin. Connally was at the head of a long conference table. All around him on either side of the table were his aides. Everybody was wearing boots. Bruno says, “I wasn’t wearing boots. All around him were his aides. They brought in lunch. They brought a juicy steak to Connally, a sandwich for me. You know what they’re trying to tell you with a move like that.” Bruno described Connally as “unhinged,” at one point, “Leaping out of his chair, the Governor strode to a telephone, picked it up, and in a loud voice demanded, ‘Get me the White House.’ We waited. ‘Get me Kenny O’Donnell.’” When O’Donnell apparently came on the line, Connally went over the entire itinerary, reading the whole thing from the sheet with him in a loud stage voice. Obviously, for Bruno’s benefit. [After] four or five minutes on the phone Connally said, “Fine. Fine. I’ll get back to you.” [He] put the phone down, got back and said, “It’s all confirmed. This is the itinerary. This is what we want JFK to do.” But O’Donnell, he had not confirmed the Connally schedule at all. Connally had, in fact, faked the O’Donnell call.

10/30

● Bruno flew to Dallas to look at the Trade Mart and objects to it immediately on security grounds. He found the Women’s Building at Fair Park perfect for the attendance JFK wanted, the anti-Connally liberal populist coalition that Connally feared and hated. But the Connally-dominated hosts urged the showy Trade Mart.* Connally biographer Charles Ashman was one of the first to grasp the significance in the early ’70s, writing: “That’s it. Connally, if he gets his luncheon site choice, he will control the direction of the motorcade and where it goes from Love Field to the site...Connally insisted on the Trade Mart that made it virtually certain that the motorcade would proceed down Elm Street, [to] approach the Stemmons Freeway since Elm was the main Civic Center entrance to the freeway.”

*Founded in 1957 by real estate developer Trammell Crow, who was described as the “largest landlord in the United States” by Forbes magazine. His son is right-wing activist Harlan Crow, who gave the gifts and vacations to Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas and his wife that made news in 2023 due to Thomas’s not reporting them on financial disclosure forms.

NOVEMBER

11/3

● Bruno showed photos he took of the Trade Mart to Behn, in charge of Texas trip security. Behn looked at them and said, “We’re never going to go there,” and rejected the Trade Mart at least when he spoke to Bruno in Bruno’s presence.

11/4

● Kenny O’Donnell, special assistant to the president, discussed the itinerary with S.S. Agent Gerald A. Behn. Behn met with Bruno and Kenny O’Donnell apparently to go over security measures.

● Forrest Sorrels in Dallas and Winston Lawson still in Washington become responsible for the Dallas trip. Sorrels in Dallas receives a call from White House Detail head of the Secret Service Behn. Sorrels testifies that Behn told him — We have only two sites. (We know what the names of the sites are. We know that the motorcade depends upon the luncheon site. We know that Behn has disallowed the Trade Mart on security grounds.) And Sorrels testifies that: “Behn called me and said JFK would probably visit Dallas about November 21st, and there are a couple of buildings that have been suggested as sites.” The Warren Commission accepted that. And then the HSCA didn’t ask him, “Didn’t you say this? Isn’t that untrue?” They just let it go by. Also, the Warren Commission and the House Select Committee are both clear about Lawson receiving two calls, the first from Behn, and the second call, according to the HSCA, from Floyd Boring with further information. There are no details about that second call. Evica thought his reported Boring call may be extremely significant since it may be Bruno’s direction to the Secret Service to choose the Women’s Building. Behn said he transmitted that call. Bruno said it never got through. He doesn’t know how or why. But it may be that the second call without details in the record is indeed Bruno’s direction to the Secret Service to choose the Women’s Building—the so-called “lost call.” Sorrels indicated that Behn had given him more information, unspecified, about the Trade Mart. Sounds like it might be that call, but nobody follows up because nobody has done a contextual, chronological analysis on the HSCA. Or, as Evica said, maybe they don’t want to.

11/5

● Following the meetings with Bruno and O’Donnell, Behn announced that he favored the Women’s Building. This statement by G. Robert Blakey and Gary Cornwall, Deputy Chief Counsel, and another HSCA aide is suspiciously worded: “No public record of a Behn announcement is available.” The only documentation given for Bruno is Bruno’s HSCA deposition and Bruno’s contemporaneous notes. “Bruno stated that O’Donnell personally confirmed this version of the course of events.” Evica found buried on page 517 of HSCA’s 11th volume, in an appendix, an important admission made by Behn to Bruno: Bruno stated in his House Select Committee deposition that Behn disclosed to Bruno that Behn “implicitly, having ultimate power to decide where to send the motorcade, chose the Women’s Building on November 5th.”

● When Bruno attempted to end Connally’s control of the route is when Connally sent LBJ aide Bill Moyers down to be the new advance man in Austin.

Evica: “Bill Moyers would be one of the people I would call and immunize. Bill Moyers is, according to Bruno’s sources, the man who was sent down to adjudicate the luncheon site and motorcade. If that’s so, Bill Moyers has a great deal of information that he’s not talked about. When he gave his deposition (they never called him as a witness under oath), he suddenly could not remember anything. And I’d have to say that’s extraordinarily suspicious. I also feel that coming from a conservative, if not reactionary, background, supported by all oil millionaire money as he was, that Bill Moyers may have since then felt extraordinarily guilty. He’s the one that’s responsible for publishing the motorcade route. And he worked through [the] Austin Secret Service office with Secret Service Officer William Paine. And Bill Moyers has characterized William Paine as the Secret Service man in charge of the Texas trip, specifically the Dallas itinerary. I think I know what that’s about, because if he’s speaking for Connally that means — you may say it’s the Secret Service in Austin or in Dallas; and you may say that the White House has made the decision, but in fact it is Connally. Because Bruno says, ‘We got word back from Dallas that the Secret Service had approved the Trade Mart.’ And that information is coming from John Connally.”

11/12

● Secret Service agents Sorrels and Lawson arrived in Dallas. Jack Puterbaugh, who was assigned to be Bruno’s S.S. advance man is there too.

11/13

● Sorrels, Lawson, and Puterbaugh, without seeing the Women’s Building, except to have been driven there by a key Trade Mart supporter, choose the Trade Mart. They met with many Dallas power brokers close to John Connally to discuss the program (according to Sam Bloom of the host committee), brought together by Robert Cullum, acting subcommittee chairperson for the host committee. No one supporting the Women’s Building is recorded as having been at the meeting, only Connally supported, Connally dominated Trade Mart people. They made the decision.

● The trip planning system broke down. Salinger didn’t get to go, Kilduff went. Bruno’s not there, Salinger’s not there. Puterbaugh is under enormous pressure. He got very upset with them. The moment he arrived, they maneuvered him out of the system so that Lawson and Sorrels could choose the Trade Mart. He’s Jerry Bruno’s advance man for Dallas. He had absolutely no power whatsoever.

11/14

● They tested a proposed route from the airport to the Trade Mart and the speed to be taken by the motorcade. It is a lie that they looked over security factors. There were no security factors looked over. This ride was to time the ride from Love Field to the Trade Mart. They established it at 45 minutes. That’s all they were interested in.

11/15

● The final motorcade route through Dealey Plaza in downtown Dallas was selected. Who chose the actual route from Love Field through Dealey Plaza? Dallas Police Chief Jesse Curry said, “We left the parade route up to the local Dallas host committee. They chose the route.”

11/17 - 18

● Elizabeth Harris argues, so she says, “practically against the entire Connally group,” for publication of the route. “We’ve got to get the people out. This is a people’s motorcade. Please, let’s have it come out.” And they say no.

EVICA: “She’s Moyers’ advance person. That’s very scary. She was very close to Moyers. She was operating with the Austin Secret Service office with Bill Moyers and with the people choosing the motorcade route. So, I would immunize Elizabeth Harris because it seems to me that we’re very close to discovering how they manipulated it. Because on that same day in Washington, the Washington correspondents around Salinger — they finally know that the President’s going — and they say, “Where’s he going?” He tells them the cities. And they say, “Then give us the routes.” And he says, “No, we’re giving out no routes whatsoever. They will not be published,” the same day that Elizabeth Harris in Dallas is arguing for the Austin Connally office, as the assigned representative of Bill Moyers, to publish the route. On the same day, therefore, they decide in Dallas to publish, and in Washington, they refuse to give the routes out because the Secret Service said it was dangerous. Alright? You can hear, right through the publication of the motorcade routes, that disinformation set of contradictions.”

11/18

● All the questions that have been raised about the selection of the Plaza’s twisting turns are wrong-headed. No selection was necessary. But Blakey kept raising them.

11/19

● Lawson sent in his preliminary report on the Dallas trip. All that was necessary was that neither Lawson nor Sorrels raise an objection. They did not.

● Jesse Curry was a police chief who was not made chief by seniority. He was elected. He was beholden to the Dallas Council and the whole operation.

● Only Sorrels, a Dallasite, was left to raise a single objection about the insecurity of Dealey Plaza’s norman legal access to the Stemmons Freeway. He did not. Secret Service men should have chosen against the normal legal turns.

● Warren Commission counsel were well aware of the serious problem of justifying the lack of decision to bypass the deadly plaza turns.

● Samuel A. Stern, assistant counsel, asked Sorrels, “Why didn’t you route the motorcade on Main Street under the triple overpass and onto the freeway instead of going to Houston and Elm?” Sorrels: “...there is a section built up to prevent cars from cutting in from Main Street to get over to Elm Street there. And if a person would try that, they would have to either hurdle this built up place there, this island you might call it...”

● But, as Evica pointed out, the concrete riser was similar to a speed bump and was illegally driven over in ’63 every day by Dallas drivers to get onto the Stemmons Expressway from Main Street.

● Craig Zirbel (The Texas Connection, 1992): “This routine crossover practice would ... have been extremely safe for the motorcade, especially without any other traffic in the area.” They did not stop traffic. Cars came through. There was a train going through.

● There were two close points at 17 yards and 34 yards just past the underpass where you can cross over and go right up on Stemmons Freeway. Now, just as then. The WC was quite worried about this fact. There are photos of this whole area buried in the WC exhibits. James Hepburn (“Farewell America,” 1968, 2002) wrote that the WC declared that a sign located on this built up area — it’s gone now — instructed Main Street traffic not to make any turns; that is, such a turn would be normally illegal and would be dangerous, that is, if there was traffic coming.

● Blakey also knew. He stated, “Sorrels told the Warren Commission he selected...” No one selects those turns, They’re just there legally. Saying Sorrels selected the turns blames Sorrels to distract from Connally. It was, in fact, the most direct legal normal route to the Trade Mart, but of course, a president might be able to bypass those.

● According to Blakey, Assistant Police Chief George L. Lumpkin had been consulted by the Secret Service: “George? What do you think about security planning for the motorcade if we take Industrial Boulevard?” Lumpkin raised important non-security objections to Industrial Boulevard: “You know there are winos and the scenery is not very nice.” And with those non-security objections in mind, according to Lumpkin, the route on Industrial Boulevard directly through Main Street and to the Trade Mart was rejected by the Secret Service. That’s HSCA page 522, Vol. 11. Though Blakey apparently took Lumpkin’s word, no other documentation exists for this continuing concern for the aesthetics of motorcades versus the security of the president of the United States. Lumpkin also added another reason not to take Industrial Boulevard. It’s presented by Blakey with a straight face. I quote, “There would have been no crowds on Industrial Boulevard,” unquote, Lumpkin deposed. Of course there would have been no crowds on Industrial Boulevard. The motorcade, as a people’s event, ended at Dealey Plaza, as planned.

● WC Counsel Liebeler was one of the three or four counsel on the Warren Commission who Evica believed were quite well aware they could have done an alternative, and they knew that the Secret Service passively accepted the legal turns.

“Liebeler: As far as you know, there was then no reason why the motorcade couldn’t have gone straight down Main Street and gone to Stemmons Freeway headed for the Trade Mart?”

Good policeman Smith: “As far as I know, there was no reason. No reason at all.”

EVICA: Except that the forces that impelled Connally and his associates to demand their choice of the luncheon site and therefore their motorcade route, taking the twisting legal turns in deadly Dealey Plaza had scheduled John F, Kennedy to die on Elm Street in Dallas, Texas. Remember who set it up. John Connally and his associates got very early control of the entire Texas trip. They got very early control of the Dallas itinerary. They got control of the luncheon site, which determined the motorcade route. And that motorcade route from Love Field to the Trade Mart had to go through Dealey Plaza. Accepting passively, those turns meant you put John F. Kennedy under the guns.

■ 1966

August

8/1

Following the University of Texas Tower shootings by Charles Whitman, a “blue ribbon” commission was set up by Governor Connally to end legitimate inquiry about Whitman’s mental state and his visits to Waco — home of MKULTRA at Baylor University — as well as other fingerprints of intelligence. Issued only two years after the Warren Report, the “Texas Governor’s Fact-Finding Committee Report on the Charles J. Whitman Catastrophe” created a Mandela Effect that still exists: belief in Whitman’s nonexistent brain tumor.

■ 1967

APRIL

4/01

New Orleans DA Jim Garrison telegraphed a warrant to Dallas for the arrest of Sergio Arcacha Smith, a CIA-trained, anti-Castro Cuban exile, who had been identified as a JFK conspirator by accomplice Rose Cheremie and witness Mac Manual, a bar manager. Smith was arrested in Dallas and released on bond. Garrison sent Connally extradition papers, which Connally refused to sign. After 90 days, Smith was released from the bond. (James DiEugenio, Destiny Betrayed, second edition, p. 182)

■ 1969

FEBRUARY

2/19

Halliburton Company, the parent company of Brown and Root, rewarded Connally, announcing his election to the board of directors. He remained an unofficial advisor of Brown and Root while he was a governor. (After Halliburton acquired Dresser Industries, KBR was created in 1998 when M.W. Kellogg merged with Halliburton’s construction subsidiary, Brown & Root, to form Kellogg Brown & Root.)

The big lie is the apex predator of deception. Plausibility is not required. Big lies eat facts for breakfast, logic for lunch, reason for dinner, and truth for desert.

It’s been a year since the JFK file release. It’s been nearly a year since the RFK and MLK file releases. Yet, those conspiracies and others are still officially ignored.

The self-evident, obvious conspiracy explanations have still not been made official. The Warren Report is still the official lie. Sirhan is still falsely imprisoned. The pseudo-debates go on. Official foreign and domestic assassinations, war crimes and other conspiracies continue with impunity. The fallout worsens. Nothing has changed. China, Russia, Cuba and other foreign governments know all of this, of course, and use it to leverage the U.S. These are the consequences of not resolving this assassinocracy.

None of this is a surprise to those who know a simple truth: It’s not about the files. It’s about the lies.

Who killed JFK? In fact, though more minutia can be discovered, down to the Planck scale if you want, we know the answer. We have always known.

Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy knew the moment he got the news. On the evening of the assassination, he called Enrique (Harry) Ruiz-Williams, a Bay of Pigs veteran and his closest contact among the Cuban exiles, and said, “One of your guys did it.” RFK then sent Kennedy family friend William Walton to tell trusted Soviet diplomat Georgi Bolshakov that the Kennedy family believed it was a large political conspiracy.

Gary Underhill also knew. He had known and worked with the conspirators on CIA Operation AM/WORLD. James DiEugenio, in his book, Destiny Betrayed, wrote:

“On that evening of November 22, 1963, Gary Underhill was a deeply troubled man. What he had learned, and the fact that they knew he had learned it, were too much for him. He had to escape. Once he was out of Washington, he could regain his equilibrium. Then he would decide what to do. He had friends in New York he could talk to without fear of the word getting back to Washington.” Underhill left Washington Saturday. Late that evening at the home of friends in New Jersey, Robert and Charlene Fitzsimmons, he told Charlene: “I couldn’t believe they’d got away with it, but they did. They tried it in Cuba, but they couldn't get away with it. After the Bay of Pigs. But Kennedy wouldn’t let them get away with it. He was about to blow the whistle on them…The country is too dangerous for me now. They’ve gone mad. They’re drug runners and gun runners. They get the intelligence and come back and tell the government how to run the country. And they’re lying. And those idiots are listening to it. Kennedy gave them some time after the Bay of Pigs. ‘We’ll give them a chance to save face,’ he said. The CIA is under enough pressure already.”

He further told Charlene Fitsimmons: “This country is too dangerous for me. I’ve got to get on a boat. Oswald is a patsy. They set him up. It’s too much. The bastards have done something outrageous. They’ve killed the president! I’ve been listening and hearing things. I couldn’t believe they’d get away with it, but they did. They’ve gone mad! They’re a bunch of drug runners and gun runners - a real violence group. I know who they are. That’s the problem. They know I know. That’s why I’m here.” (pp. 98-99)

Yet, the resolution is simple. Officially declare the crime. When the conspiracy is declared, the conspirators will appear. If there is no crime, there are no criminals, and if there are no criminals, there is no criminal justice.

Many different judicial actions become necessary and unavoidable when the crime is declared, like charges of obstruction of justice, charges of aiding and abetting, and judicial discovery, including exhumations. But, no crime, no criminals, no judicial action.

In other words, strike the deep state’s Achilles heel, its big lie that Oswald acted alone. If someone, anyone in power, a district attorney, a mayor, an attorney general, a governor, a member of Congress, an executive officer, a judge, or a justice declares the crime a conspiracy, the lie ends. It’s that simple.

The only Texas attorney general to reopen the JFK assassination case (a Texas crime) was Jim Mattox. Mattox had a lifelong interested in the assassination because his mother had worked for Joe Campisi and witnessed Jack Ruby with Lee Harvey Oswald at Campisi’s restaurant.

When Mattox reopened the case, he was quoted telling his mother’s story to the Austin American-Statesman and to Texas Monthly. This was happening when the Oliver Stone film, JFK, was in the works on the heels of the Ricky White headlines.

It was part of Earl Golz’s reporting at the Statesman. One of Golz’s stories from August 1990 read:

“RUBY, OSWALD MEETING

“In another curious twist to the case, Mattox said late Monday he is interested in pursing the White story because he was once told by his mother, a waitress at Campisi’s Egyptian Restaurant in Dallas, that Ruby frequented the restaurant and that she thought she saw Ruby and Oswald eating dinner there together once.

“‘The restaurant owner, the late Joe Campisi, testified before the House Select Committee on Assassinations in 1978 that he didn’t see Oswald in his eatery,’ Mattox said.

“Mattox said he believes he has jurisdiction in the case, and he would interview White and his associates ‘to see what they’ve got and let them explain it to me.’

“‘The key to the thing, of course, is, if the FBI acknowledges seeing the diary,’ Mattox said. ‘The only thing to do is to get a look at the diary or acknowledgment (by the FBI) that it existed.’

“‘This is not a solution to the John Kennedy case,’ Fensterwald said after Ricky White told his story. ‘It’s information we think is important, and we think it’s true. Even if what is said here today checks out, the case is not solved. We still don’t know who planned it and paid for it and basically what the shooting was about. The best we can hope for is to get out of this an idea of who the actual assassins were.’

“It may be difficult for Mattox or anybody else to do much with the case without the Roscoe White diary, which disappeared in 1988. The leather bound journal talked about the assassination and the aftermath, said Ricky White, adding that he and his mother read it.

“Roscoe White died of injuries sustained in an explosive fire in 1971. His widow, Geneva, is critically ill and, according to family members, unable to be interviewed.”

United Press International further reported on Friday, August 10, 1990:

JFK center officials ask Mattox to investigate new assasination theory

AUSTIN, Texas (UPI) — Officials with John F. Kennedy assassination research centers Tuesday asked Attorney General Jim Mattox to investigate a new theory that a Dallas police officer killed the president.

The JFK experts who sponsored a news conference Monday for Ricky Don White, a Midland oil equipment salesman who claims his father was involved in the shooting, met with Mattox for much of the afternoon Tuesday.

“Mattox met with them for about three hours. He asked a lot questions. They went over evidence. They discussed evidence,” Mattox spokesman Ron Dusek said.

Mattox told them that he would review the information that they brought to him. They said that they would provide him with some additional information.

Mattox made no commitment, but said that he was interested and would take very close look at the information and then make a decision on whether to pursue it further.

J. Gary Shaw with the JFK Assassination Information Center in Dallas and Bernard Fensterwald, president of the Assassination Archives and Research Center in Washington, took White’s evidence to Mattox in hopes of obtaining a state review into the evidence White claims implicates the CIA in the assassination.

White claims his father, a former Dallas police officer, was one of three U.S. intelligence operatives who killed Kennedy on Nov. 22, 1963, as he traveled in a motorcade through downtown Dallas.

White, 29, also said that evidence his late father, Roscoe Anthony White, left behind indicated that presumed Kennedy assassin Lee Harvey Oswald never fired a shot. Instead, he said, Oswald was set up to take the blame for the assassination as part of a plot that included the man who killed Oswald on Nov. 24, 1963, Jack Ruby.

Mattox declined to seek a third term to run for the Democratic nomination for governor, which he lost in a runoff to Ann Richards. The next attorney general, Dan Morales, inherited his investigation in January 1991. As the spotlight faded from the Stone film, Morales pulled the attorneys off the case one by one to pursue other cases, including his lawsuits against big tobacco.

Had Jim Mattox simply declared the conspiracy, Dan Morales would not have been able to shut down the state’s judicial action so quietly. That lesson still applies today and to every non-disclosure day to come.

“Orwell’s 1984 explained that ‘the special function of certain Newspeak words … was not so much to express meanings as to destroy them.’” —Norman Solomon, “Orwellian Logic 101—A Few Simple Lessons,” FAIR, August 27, 1998

“It was quite simple. All that was needed was an unending series of victories over your own memory. ‘Reality control’, they called it: in Newspeak, ‘doublethink’.” —George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-four, Chpt. 3

“DOUBLETHINK means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them.” —George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-four, Chpt. 9

Brad Meltzer refuses to see the obvious conspiracy that murdered President Kennedy in 1963.1 Yet in 2024, he wrote a book with Josh Mensch titled The JFK Conspiracy: The Secret Plot to Kill Kennedy—and Why It Failed. The book is about a different event: the failed 1960 attempt by the lone, would-be “human bomb,” retired U.S. postal worker Richard Pavlick. Meltzer’s “conspiracy” in his book’s title refers to that lone attempt.

Let me repeat that. Brad Meltzer called an attempted murder plot by a lone individual a conspiracy. And he did that after co-writing an entire book about it. He imagines that the framed patsy, Lee Harvey Oswald, was a lone assassin, and that the actual lone would-be assassin, Richard Pavlick, was a conspirator—a conspirator who acted alone. None of that would make sense even if Pavlick had suffered from multiple personalities. He was found legally insane, but not with dissociative identity disorder.

Brad Meltzer’s view of conspiracies, as expressed on his book’s press tour, is that they are mirrors of our fears. The JFK conspirators, he said, are whoever we fear most at the time: the Communists in the Cold-War ‘60s, the U.S. in the Watergate ‘70s, the Mafia in the Godfather ‘80s. That, of course, is psychobabble nonsense.2 It at least reveals that Meltzer knows the basic, legal requirement of multiple conspirators. He never says, for example, a cannibal serial killer in the Hannibal-Lecter ‘90s. Keep that in mind.

Meltzer is calling us conspiracy nuts, by the way. He is trying to resurrect the old, debunked, gaslighting, elitist big lie of mass public mental retardation. The problem of President Kennedy’s murder is not with the psychology of the American people. The problem is with the evidence. The evidence is incongruous. Controversy and cognitive dissonance surround the subject because of 1) the reasonable conspiracy explanation, and 2) the continuing history of unreasonable dispute of that explanation.

Meltzer is an experienced writer of fiction, speculative nonfiction and superhero comics. He is a pop-historian with a seat on the board of directors of the National Archives Foundation. He is educated (JD, Columbia Law and Law Review). He knows how to use dictionaries and encyclopedias. He knows a conspiracy by definition involves two or more people. He also knows that an oxymoron is a figure of speech in which two words with opposing meanings are used together intentionally for rhetorical effect. But there is no indication Meltzer’s rhetorical intent was oxymoronic. Which might make it simply moronic.

I coined the term “conspiracy denier” in my 1996 essay, titled “Dial P for Perjury,”3 as a label for those in the loud minority who tell lies about the conspiracy that killed Kennedy and who call those who do not lie about it, “conspiracy theorists.” Brad Meltzer is one of those. But we might need a new word to describe what Meltzer and Mensch have done in this book, probably for the first time, with the word “conspiracy.”

Is this some strange new kind of mass aphasia, like a linguistic form of congenital red–green color blindness, where someone struggles to tell one color from the other? Red and green are opposites on the color wheel. Not likely. Perhaps this calls for a more personal type of nomenclature.

“Conspiracy mensch” does not work in this context. A mensch is a person of integrity and honor worthy of being admired and emulated. We might call such a person a “conspiracy meltzer.” It is an occupational surname derived from the German word maltz (malt), which is germinated barley. A meltzer (maltster) is a brewer who uses malt. Such an egregious error would be expected from someone drinking a large quantity of malt liquor.

But is that what is going on here? No. Such a mirror-universe fantasy of opposits belongs in the Bizarro World of Superman comics. Twenty years earlier, Meltzer, an expert on Superman, wrote the miniseries, Identity Crisis, which is considered one of DC Comics’ best. So he would know exactly what I mean.

If it was a mistake, it is even more unbelievable. Meltzer’s publisher, Flatiron Books, on its website, describes itself as “a division of Macmillan, founded in 2014 with a simple philosophy: publish a relatively small number of titles so that each book could be supported by an extraordinary amount of editorial attention, marketing, and publicity.” The company lists a staff of 19 experienced editors/proof-readers dedicated to that task.

Shortly after college graduation, I worked in the art department of The University of Texas Press. I learned how every word of every book is professionally scrutinized dozens of times in dozens of ways by multiple proofreaders, including non-human proofreading software, from manuscript to pre-press galley proofs to final press proof, including book cover and page-design layouts, and every piece of marketing and publicity. A mistake resulting in a title that describes the opposite of what the book is about simply does not happen.

So what is this about? At minimum, it is a non sequitur, and a cynical ploy to sell books in the tradition of misleading and variant comic book covers unrelated to the story.4 But this book does something worse. Beyond the title, neither the word nor the concept of conspiracy appear in the book. That is like publishing a Where’s Waldo? book with no Waldo. Cynical yes, but minimalism does not fully explain this for a couple of reasons. First, The JFK Conspiracy is no comic book. Second, Occam’s razor fails when applied to tactics based on defeating exactly that kind of reasoning with layer upon layer of propaganda, misdirection, cryptography, and obfuscation.

This is something darker and more deeply political. Serious, honest students of Kennedy’s murder know that history does not lie, but historians do. The word “conspiracy” has been under sinister assault ever since Kennedy’s death.5 This attempt by Meltzer and Mensch is an order of magnitude beyond that. It is an attempt to strip the word of any logic. A word that can mean its opposite can mean anything, and thus mean nothing. It is “political language,” to use Orwell’s term. If actual lone-nut Pavlick means fictional conspiracy, then actual conspiracy can mean fictional lone-nut Oswald. The fantasy becomes the reality and vice versa. The conspiracy disappears, leaving only Oswald.

As a deep political agenda, such blatant Orwellian wordplay would seem to be gratuitous overkill that could backfire. Certainly, no one else has gone to this extreme before. It rings more of desperation. Yet, based on the media coverage of Meltzer’s book tour, he appears to have gotten away with it. The quisling news media was happily aiding and abetting him. Which brings me to the root of Meltzer’s motive.

Seen from a clandestine perspective it begins to make sense. Plausibility is never required for a classic big lie, only repetition and audacity. As a coded message hidden in plain sight (a steganograph) the book’s title actually fits. It does not refer to an imaginary Pavlick conspiracy at all. It is an encoder-to-decoder signal that Meltzer is part of a largely still unknown propaganda conspiracy against JFK, a grand, public bamboozle that is “In Front of Your Nose,” to use Orwell’s title.6

Meltzer knows such codes because he described one that Secret Service Agent Clint Hill used to expedite screening of personal mail to Jackie Kennedy. He told Jackie to have family and friends address the letters to him. “‘It will be so clandestine,’ Jackie says, seeming to like the idea.” (p. 180)

Meltzer’s real purpose follows a long tradition of deception known as “The Posthumous Assassination of John F. Kennedy.” That is the title of James DiEugenio’s groudbreaking 1997 essay that first exposed that sordid—and still ongoing—affair.7

The purpose of that deceit is to destroy, by weaponized character assassination, any surviving positive perceptions of President Kennedy’s legacy, including by extension his family, his ancestors, and his descendants. Established subtleties include even the liberal use of the name, “Camelot,” creating the myth of an un-American royalty, dynasty, and spoiled elite.

The sanitized origin story of Kennedy’s “Camelot” is a favorite focus of Meltzer’s in this book. He dredged up, with an air of discovery, Theodore White’s old tale that it was Jackie’s doing (again, blaming the victim). Instead, it was White’s employer, the infamous Life magazine’s (read CIA’s) doing.8

Note Meltzer’s description of Jackie as “so obsessed with” the lyrics from Camelot’s score. (p. 248) That is another favorite attack by conspiracy deniers. Is Yo Yo Ma called obsessed with the cello? Was Einstein called obsessed with physics? Are Olympians called obsessed with medals? No. Obsession is a clinical term misused to call someone crazy.

Such usage of Camelot is meant to spin Kennedy’s death as fortuitous, deserved or at least inconsequential, and declare that “there’ll never be another Camelot again.” (p. 247) The idea being to prevent the public from completely understanding how drastically the U.S. government changed after the assassination. Which became alarmingly critical after Watergate from the viewpoint of the posthumous assassins. Another quisling-media phrase planted in the public’s mind is the so-called “Kennedy family curse,” which hides a lot of crimes against them that are anything but sorcery.

These tactics have not yet fully succeeded, fortunately, despite the herculean effort and damage done by their perpetrators. But it has created lascivious folklore rivaling Chaucer, Mandela effects, urban legends, and big lies so deeply ingrained in the public mind that most people, even the highly educated, accept them as thoroughly documented, unchallenged fact.

Meltzer’s bibliography is the first clue for this explanation. He cites such fool’s gold as The Kennedy Detail by Gerald Blaine and Lisa McCubbin, Reclaiming History by Vincent Bugliosi, The Kennedys by Peter Collier and David Horowitz, An Unfinished Life by Robert Dallek, Bobby and Jackie by C. David Heymann, Mrs. Kennedy and Me by Clint Hill and Lisa McCubbin, and Case Closed by Gerald Posner. The best clue for this explanation is found in Meltzer's acknowledgments: “Additional thanks to…my pal Farris Rookstool, who has answered my questions for decades now.” I wrote an essay devoted solely to exposing the misdeeds of nefarious Farris.9

These sources are just a handful of the worst conspirators behind Kennedy’s posthumous assassination. Learning about President Kennedy and his death from them is like learning about Superman from Lex Luthor, about Batman from the Joker, or about the Justice League of America from the Secret Society of Super Villains.

Note that Lisa McCubbin appears twice. We learned a few things about her in 2023, when Clint Hill’s Secret Service partner published his own made-up memoir of big lies. I wrote in my essay about it:

Secret Service Agent Paul Landis in his book, The Final Witness, claimed to have found an intact bullet on the back seat of the car where Kennedy was shot, sneaked it into Emergency Room One, and secretly put it on Kennedy’s stretcher. Landis’ revelation is one of many versions of the Warren Commission’s biggest lie, the single-bullet fantasy. …Russell Baker’s news site, WhoWhatWhy, reported two previous tellings of Landis’ bullet discovery, one in 1983, and another in 2010. In both, Landis reported it was a fragment, not an intact bullet, that he found on top of the back seat. He turned it over to someone rather than putting it on Kennedy’s stretcher. When reminded of his prior stories, Landis claimed he was misquoted by the Associated Press in the 1983 story. But that did not keep him from repeating it for the 2010 publication of a book by his former Secret Service partner, Clint Hill. Landis claimed he lied on purpose the second time, because he did not trust Hill’s coauthor and new wife, journalist Lisa McCubbin.10

You will not find Landis or his book in Meltzer’s bibliography. If he had included Landis, it would have undermined Meltzer’s self-image as a true believer of the lies that Oswald shot Kennedy or acted alone.11 Landis’ nonsense is about trying to save the single-bullet fantasy based on details in the Warren Commission testimony of Governor Connally’s surgeons. His surgeons said they never removed the two-millimeter bullet fragment from his leg. Thus the alleged 6.5-millimeter bullet found on a stretcher would have had to bounce off after widening the surface of Connally’s two-millimeter entry wound to its observed one-centimeter size. So Landis’ “confession” is an ad hoc cleanup operation designed to plug that hole (so to speak) in the debunked single-bullet lie. He provided an updated alibi, six decades late, for an alleged intact bullet that was never in Connally to begin with but nonetheless appeared on a stretcher in the ER hallway.

Neither will you find Vince Palamara in Meltzer’s bibliography, the foremost expert on the Secret Service regarding the Kennedy assassination conspiracy. If Meltzer had included Palamara, it would have undermined Meltzer’s false portrait of Kennedy as reckless and dismissive of his Secret Service detail. Such portraits are canon in the lies of Kennedy’s posthumous assassins. This lie’s purpose is to spin his death as his own fault. About the Blaine-McCubbin book cited by Meltzer, which had its own cover and flap lies, Palamara wrote:

Things only get worse once one gets to the inside flap jacket: Blaine writes that JFK “banned agents from his car”, which is patently false—as Winston Lawson, the lead advance agent for the fateful Dallas trip, wrote to me in a letter dated 1/12/04: “I do not know of any standing orders for the agents to stay off the back of the car. After all, foot holds and handholds were built into that particular vehicle... it never came to my attention as such. I am certain agents were on the back on certain occasions.” For his part, ATSAIC (Shift Leader) Art Godfrey told me on May 30, 1996, regarding the notion that JFK ordered the agents not to do certain things which included removing themselves from the rear of the limousine: “That’s a bunch of baloney; that’s not true. He never ordered us to do anything. He was a very nice man ... cooperative.” Godfrey reiterated this on June 7, 1996. In a letter dated November 24, 1997, Godfrey stated the following: “All I can speak for is myself. When I was working [with] President Kennedy he never ask[ed] me to have my shift leave the limo when we [were] working it,” thus confirming what he had also told the author telephonically on two prior occasions. As we shall see, Blaine makes much ado about this issue... for obvious reasons (Thou Protest Too Much).12

I could go on and on—and on. But I could do no better than to give George Orwell the last word:

There is no use in multiplying examples. The point is that we are all capable of believing things which we know to be untrue, and then, when we are finally proved wrong, impudently twisting the facts so as to show that we were right. Intellectually, it is possible to carry on this process for an indefinite time: the only check on it is that sooner or later a false belief bumps up against solid reality, usually on a battlefield.13

Author’s note (March 5, 2025): Full disclosure — I know Brad Meltzer personally, though casually. I met him on the press tour for his first book, The Tenth Justice, and have most of his books. When he stopped in Dallas for The JFK Conspiracy, he autographed a copy to me. He wrote, “Seek hope!” Hope is a necessary emotion, but it is an expression of powerlessness. In that spirit, for as long as Brad is a conspiracy denier, I return the sentiment.

END NOTES

Too many do not know the basics of the assassinations of the 1960s. Too many who know tend to normalize, compartmentalize, and pretend to legitimize them. That is why most of us took any part of Trump’s “elections” seriously.

In fact, every election since Kennedy’s has been about denying the truth of his death. None more desperately than the last three presidential elections. Keeping those files secret was the driving force behind how we got Trump to begin with. It is not a democracy. It is an assassinocracy. It is the non-disclosure faction vs. the disclosure faction. To understand what is happening now, we have to know those opposing factions and how their strategies have evolved since the all-important 2016 election.

I have written six essays explaining it. They do not have to be read in order. They refer back to each other. This is a link index to them.

There is a sense that dominoes are about to fall. Will it start with the release of the illegally withheld JFK files? Or will deep events intervene to deny reality again? Deep political forces are engaged in both sides of this battle. Its outlines are vague, but not invisible. These are the causes and effects I have seen taking shape.

The Deep Political Realities of the 2016 U.S. General Election

2020: The Deep Political Realities

2020: High Crimes, Deep Politics

2024: RFK Jr.'s Deep Political Gambit

2024: RFK Jr. & The First Triumvirate

2026: Midterm Ex Machina - Tulsi Gabbard’s Ghost War: An Interim Threat & Battle Damage Assessment

Come, come, the cause. If arguing make us sweat, 
The proof of it will turn to redder drops. 
Look, I draw a sword against conspirators; 
—Gaius Octavius 

(William Shakespere, Julius Ceasar, Act 5, Scene 1, Lines 52-54.)

The reality of Trump’s conviction in New York on 34 felony counts is that he was guilty before becoming president — which should have negated his oath of office and nullified his presidency. (Extrajudicial opinions of the conviction are immaterial. The verdict stands.)

When that did not happen, it exposed as fiction the time honored principle that the United States is a country of laws, not of men. As legal scholar Bruno Leoni noted (Freedom and the Law, 1961), the concept from Roman law to English common law to U.S. law was that, “nobody is so powerful in his society as to be in a position to identify his own will with the law of the land.” With Trump’s conviction, followed by his reelection, it is the rule of law that was negated.

And here we are, “stranger in a strange land.”

The corrupt U.S. media called the 2024 election a “red shift.” It was a shift, but not a red one. The purpose of the lie was to reassert the two-party bifurcation fallacy of U.S. politics.1 Another purpose was to reassert the lie that Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., was not a serious political force. The opposite is the deep-political reality of the 2024 election.2

Instead, Trump’s election was due to shifting alliances of political enemies, more like ancient Rome’s informal alliance between Caesar, Pompey, and Crassus, known by its misleading, modern name, “The First Triumvirate.” Nothing else fully explains the historic electoral flipping of women and ethnic minorities in Democratic strongholds like South Texas.

Trump’s plan, as usual, was to wangle votes any way he could. Trump is a deep-political Frankenstein’s monster created in 2016 for a specific purpose. He got out of control and had to be destroyed politically.3 That is why Kamala Harris was endorsed by deep-political Frankenstein doctors like former Vice President Dick Cheney, Congress Member Liz Cheney, Jimmy McCain, a son of former Arizona senator and 2008 Republican presidential nominee John McCain, and many more. Kennedy and Tulsi Gabbard, both of whom became the first Democrats to openly campaign against deep politics,4 were censored, sued, and sacked by the corrupt Democratic Party. Serious commitment to their own goals forced Kennedy and Gabbard into the political necessity of joining an untrustworthy Trump to defeat their mutual opposition.

The underlying theme of the 2024 election was the question of why the race was tied and not a landslide. Many asked. Few had real answers. When we talked about the election, we used the rhetoric we’ve been taught. It caused us to ignore the reality that we are not a democracy, we are an assassinocracy.

For decades, presidential elections have not been about the names on the ballot (the myth of democracy). They have been about two things: the decline of trust in government and the decline of journalism—without a public understanding of either. We can’t have one without the other. The Pew Research Center poll, “Public Trust in Government: 1958-2024,” shows why.5

The sharp reversal in trust began with one event—the release of the big lie that is the Warren Report.6 The brief rises in trust since then, which never recovered above the abysmal Watergate levels, are due to that inability to know. Rumor replaced fact. Belief replaced knowledge. Our latent longing to know fostered our stress and infighting.

Robert Kennedy, Jr.’s election strategy was always about one thing, and one thing only—maintaining a path to victory. When the path was obstructed by Democratic Party subterfuge, he was forced to change course and become an independent candidate. His campaign’s stated goal then became forcing a contingent election by pulling enough votes from both major parties to prevent an Electoral College victory. Despite extreme attempts by the opposition to deny his ballot access, Kennedy came historically close to achieving the seemingly impossible: getting on every state ballot. Then, two major events forced another change.

The assassination attempt on Trump, followed by Kamala Harris replacing President Biden as the Democratic Party’s candidate necessitated a bold, surprising move by Kennedy. He suspended his independent campaign and successfully negotiated a political merger with Donald Trump’s campaign.

The merger was not what it appeared to be. It was not a full, faithful endorsement by Kennedy of a second Trump presidency. Neither did Kennedy end his campaign and drop out of the race, as many believed due to the corrupt news media narrative. He purposely kept his name on 40 state ballots and removed himself from the swing state ballots (those that would allow removal) so as not to be labeled a spoiler. Kennedy also asked his supporters not to vote for him, which many ignored.

The merger was instead a strategic adjustment to maintain Kennedy’s path to a contingent election victory. Which, again, depended on no one winning the Electoral College. There was also the obvious, built-in backup plan of riding Trump’s coat tails to whatever limited power Kennedy could get.

Kennedy’s strategy had been working by keeping the Biden-Trump polls tied within the margin of error. Harris’ candidacy then became an X factor that arguably threatened to break the tie. Regardless of whether the Harris threat was real, the result was clear. Kennedy’s move kept the polls tied within the margin of error. The closer the election, the closer the polls became, and the more difficult it became to cherrypick polls that marginally favored either side.

Even with a polling bias for Harris, the final, adjusted, averaged polls could no longer fully hide the unspeakable: the Kennedy Cohort raised Trump’s numbers. As the chances of a contingent election became mathematically unlikely (though still nonzero), Kennedy defaulted to the built-in backup plan as the reason for the merger:

“You guys know what Project 2025 is? Here’s what Trump said. I didn’t even ask him about that, but he said to me, ‘They’re trying to pin me with Project 2025. I never even heard of Project 2025.’ And he said, ‘That was written by a right-wing [a**hole].’ And he said, … ‘There are left-wing [a**holes] … it was a right-wing [a**hole] that wrote that.’ That was his quote. …in 2016, in 2020, I fought everything he did. He appointed … an oil industry lobbyist, Ryan Zinke, to run the interior department, a coal industry lobbyist to run the EPA, a pharmaceutical industry lobbyist to run the Health and Human Services, a telecom lobbyist to run the Federal Communications Commission and so on. And, these were all the people who were taking those agencies and turning them predatory against the American public. I was suing them, and I was fighting him, publicly criticizing him. He said to me when we met, he said the last time I came into office in 2016, I had no idea how to govern. And he said, ‘You know we didn't even expect to win.’ ... He said they [his appointments] were a bunch of bad people, and he said we’re not going to do that this time. ... He wants his legacy to be the president who ended the wars ... brought the money home to rebuild the middle class ... ended the censorship ... ended the power of the CIA over the American people and who made America healthy again. ... Then people said to me, ‘You shouldn’t trust him because he lies about everything. ... He’ll say anything, and then he’ll do what he wants.’ ... But as soon as I did that endorsement, he started keeping his word on everything. He said to me, ‘I want you to be on my transition team.’ And I asked him, I said, ‘I think it would be good if Tulsi Gabbard were on it too because she’s aligned with me on many of these issues. I don’t want to be alone on that team.’ The transition team is the team that chooses those 14,000 people, that chooses the policies for his administration. He asked me to be on it. I didn’t tell him I wanted to be on it. And he has kept his word on that. We are on that team, and we are working on those appointments now. We’re providing them lists, etcetera. It’s no guarantee it’s going to happen, but everything he’s told me he’s kept his word.”7

Kennedy has every reason for caution. The great irony is that the event necessitating the merger was the July 13th Trump assassination attempt. My detailed analysis of that event is for another essay. But a few brief aspects apply here.

There was no injury at all to Trump. A fake wound and the immediate removal of his shoes are earmarks of a setup for a real shot that missed. His body language also supports a Hollywood stunt. His head doesn’t flinch. Has anyone ever sneaked up and flicked your ear? Did you flinch? The great conman was being conned.

Shoes, fist, and “fight” are odd priorities after being shot. Men’s dress shoes don’t just fall off. Removing them is a typical immobilizer. Real bullets were shot at him. The apparent plan was to set Trump up with a stunt, then really kill him—a deadly bait-and-switch. They missed. It happens. The wild shots were like the Reagan attempt. The setup was like John Connally in the JFK target car.8 From the conspirators’ perspective, it was what Coach Darrell Royal said, quoting Coach Woody Hayes: “There are three things that can happen when you throw a pass, and two of them are bad.”

After personally examining Trump’s alleged ear injury, New York Magazine reporter Olivia Nuzzi wrote, “The particular spot that he identified with his tap was pristine.”9 Joe Rogan noted the same noninjury in his three-hour interview of Trump in Austin, Texas on October 25, 2024.

The deafening official silence that has followed the bizzare attempt is on purpose, of course. The key question is: Who benefits from attacking Trump in a way that appears to throw the Secret Service under the bus? Real plots can be hidden well when the scapegoat is an apparently incompetent Secret Service.

The deep-state ticket in 2020 and 2024 was Biden-Harris and then Harris-Walz, not Trump. Trump was always just a 2016 necessity to be tolerated and discarded.10 Biden could not have realistically beaten anybody else, and neither could Harris. A successful attack on Trump would have ended RFK’s plan to throw the election to the House, his only real chance of becoming president in 2025.

Whether or not a proper deep-state-sanctioned candidate replaced Trump, the election would likely no longer be a clear tossup. But with Trump still alive, RFK’s plan was still viable and likely to work. The failed attempt on Trump then became a backup plan, a Dinkin-type psyset setting up a real takedown of RFK. Kennedy remains the real threat to the real deep state. They could even still blame it on Iran for a perfect Reichstag Fire.

RFK posted a long statement on X (Twitter) the morning of August 10, 2024. Buried in it is this paragraph that shows he knew what was going on:

“The dark and elaborately refined arts of partisan politics deployed to end my campaign (the documented censorship and shadowbanning; the out-in-the-open, anti-democratic, and well-funded attempts to keep me off ballots through expensive, complex, time-consuming legal challenges; the thwarting of debate access; the withholding of secret service protection; the paid staged protests; the sundry campaigns of defamation and scandalmongering) are the logical reactions of a threatened — and very unwell — status quo.”

The successes of The First Triumvirate of Caesar, Pompey, and Crassus were temporary. It may have started as an amicitia (friendship) but it led to a civil war which caused disruption, then the collapse of the republic, followed by Ceasar’s temporary then permanent dictatorship, and his assassination by a conspiracy led by Gaius Cassius Longinus on the Ides of March in 44 BCE. The First Triumvirate of Rome is now a metaphor for unintended consequences.

Nonetheless, after years of defensive pessimism, I am cautiously optimistic. RFK, Jr. achieved what most considered impossible. No one has ever run for president on a platform of openly accusing the CIA of killing President John F. Kennedy and his brother Senator Robert F. Kennedy, certainly not a Kennedy. Now the Senator’s son has finished a historically groundbreaking election and seemingly succeeded in achieving unprecedented access to the White House’s biggest secrets. It is the first time a known enemy of the conspiracy has done this since his father’s assassination in 1968.

Two days after the election, researcher Tim Fattig asked in a post on X (Twitter), “With the election (finally) behind us, do you really expect to see a significant change in our access to the remaining withheld #jfkassassination records, or (at least) an improvement in the review process for these records?”

My posted answer was, “I expect the first significant attempt at change. I see it as the primary purpose of the RFK-Gabbard ‘First Triumvirate’ with Trump.”

END NOTES:

“You can hang the truth on a wall for everyone to see, and no one will give much of a damn.” —Mark Lombardi

Wall on Left-side of Door (not diagramed):

First Column:

A. “Millôr enfim, um eseritor sem rótulo!” (Millor finally, a writer without a label!) (hand-drawn text). Note: Probable illustrated text by Brazilian cartoonist, humorist and playwright, Millôr Fernandes.

B. “E como dizia aquele supremo modelo de integridade: ‘A corrucao e tao grande que tem gente se corrompendo ate por 20 000 cruzeiros! Po, por 20 000 cruzeiros eu nao vendia nem a minha mae!” (And as that supreme model of integrity said: ‘Corruption is so great that there are people who are corrupt for even 20,000 cruzeiros! Well, for 20,000 cruzeiros I wouldn’t even sell my mother!’) (text).

C. “Whatever happened to childhood?” (text)

D. “Adviser’s wife learns to smile through sacrifice” (text).

E. “Was Orwell Right?” (text).

F. Grades posted for ten students by Social Security number, for Fall semester, 1990.

G. Grades posted for two students by Social Security number, for Fall semester, 1990.

Second Column:

A. “il est interdit d interdire” (he is forbidden to forbid) (text).

B. “Ancient Order of Hybernians” (text). Note: The AOH is an Irish Catholic fraternal organization. It was founded on May 4, 1836, in New York City. It became a conclave for Irish American political activity. John F. Kennedy joined the AOH in 1947.

C. “Department of Spanish and Portugues / GEORGE WING / Associate Professor / Office Hours: Tue - Th 8-2” (text).

D. “304” (office number)

E. “Cómo leer en bicicleta” (How to read on a bicycle); (text on graphic showing man riding a special stunt bicycle with a frame raising the rider high above the ground. Bicycle and rider appear to be pasted over the image of a circular mobius maze. The illustration suggests the bicyclist is riding around the circular maze.)

Door Montage:

1. World Wildlife Fund logo (Panda w/text “WWF”). Note: WWF was cofounded on April 29, 1961, by a group that included Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands, a member of the Nazi Party and SS during WWII who worked as an executive secretary of IG Farben; Eugenicist Julian Huxley, who supported refugee Nazi scientists and defended eugenics with the euphemistic qualifiers “humanist” and “scientific”; and Godfrey A. Rockefeller, Sr., a helicopter aviation pioneer, chief pilot for Bell Helicopter, and schoolmate/friend of George H.W. Bush. WWF has been funded by individuals, corporations, and government sources such as the World Bank, DFID, and USAID.

2. “The Humanist in the Bathtub” (text).

3. “Save the Dolphins/Greenpeace” (text) (two dolphins swimming - drawing).

4. “Smoker’s Advocate” (text).

5. “Greenpeace” (w/abstract shapes).

6. “For Pot Smokers Only” (“POT” is handwritten).

7. “Organize to Protect Smokers’ Rights” (w/illegible handwriting).

8. “Feliz Año Velho” [Spanish translation: Happy New Year] (text).

9. Red flowers (photo).

10. (unidentified)

11. (unidentified)

12. (unidentified)

13. (unidentified)

14. “Caligula” (photo of profile relief coin used to illustrate poster of the movie of the same name). Note: “(12-41 A.D.), nickname (meaning ‘little boots’) of Roman Emperor Gaius Caesar, 37-41 AD. He was insanely cruel and despotic and believed he was a god. He reputedly planned to make his horse a consul. His demands that his statue be erected in Jerusalem’s temple almost precipitated a revolt in Palestine. He was assassinated by a tribune of his guard.” (“The New American Desk Encyclopedia” [NY: Signet, 1984] p. 198.) “A cruel and insane ruler of the Roman Empire in the first century; one of the twelve Caesars. In order to humiliate the senators of Rome, he appointed his horse to the senate.” (E.D. Hirsch, Jr., “The Dictionary of Cultural Literacy” [Boston, Mass.: Houghton Mifflin, 1988] p. 192.)

15. Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. (?) (photo). Note: he married Joan Crawford on 6/3/29 when he was 19 years old.

16. Leo Tolstoy or George Bernard Shaw (photo showing full figure).

17. Leon Trotsky (?) (photo).

18. Photo of painting by Remington or Russell (unidentified).

19. (illegible text).

20. Ramon Mercader (?) (photo of head at young age). Note: Trotsky’s assassin.

21. (illegible text).

22. George Bernard Shaw (?) (photo). Note: he helped found the Fabian Society and in 1883 he wrote “Caesar & Cleopatra.” The cover of one of Wing’s “Esquire” backseat magazines illustrated Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor in the movie “Cleopatra.”

23. Illustration of Elizabeth Taylor in the movie “Cleopatra.”

24. “Robert Taylor/Greta Garbo” (movie ad for “Camille”). Notes on 1936 film “Camille”: Novel & play by Alexandre Dumas Fils; cast: Marguerite Gautier - Garbo, Armand - Taylor, Monsieur Draval - Lionel Barrymore, Nichette - Elizabeth Allen, Nanine - Jessie Ralph, Baron d Varville - Henry Daniell, Olympe - Lenore Ulric, Prudence - Laura Hope Crews, Gaston - Rex O’Malley; setting: Paris, 1847; copyright 1936, renewed 1963 MGM, Inc.; TV version: 1984; plot: Marguerite and Armand find true love until Monsieur Duval convinces Marguerite that their relationship will hurt Armand. She leaves Armand and marries Baron de Varville for his money. Armand wounds the Baron in a duel for Marguerite’s honor and must leave France. He returns in Time to learn that Marguerite, now gravely ill, still loves him just before dying in his arms.

25. (unidentified) [same as #74].

26. (unidentified).

27. Martin Luther King, Jr. (photo w/illegible text).

28. (unidentified).

29. Anton Chekhov (?) (photo).

30. Shakespeare caricature by Al Herschfeld.

31. “U.S.A. The Big Money” (text).

32. Lyndon Baines Johnson (photo of face).

33. “Prelude to War” (text).

34. Rita Hayworth (face from famous pin-up photo).

35. John Huston, film director (photo).

36. Franklin Delano Roosevelt (photo smoking cigarette).

37. (unidentified).

38. (unidentified).

39. (unidentified).

40. Ingred Bergman and Humphrey Bogart in “Casablanca.”

41. Manuel Artime (?) [compare to Widen, “Bay of Pigs,” photo section p. 9].

42. Apollo spacecraft command and service modules (photo).

43. (illegible text).

44. (unidentified).

45. Linda Lovelace (photo). Note: star of 1972 movie: “Deepthroat.”

46. (unidentified).

47. Albert Einstien (photo of Princeton sculpture of head by Robert Berks - plaster, 1953).

48. Robert Fitzgerald Kennedy, Sr. (photo of head).

49. Martin Luther King, Jr. (photo of head).

50. Orchestra Rehersal, (a.k.a., Prova d'Orchestra), US poster, 1978.

51. Virginia Woolf (photo by George Charles Beresford, July 1902).

52. (unidentified).

53. Maria Callas (photo of face) Note: she had and affair w/Aristotle Onassis, died 9/16/77.

54. “You are what you read.” (text).

55. (unidentified)

56. (unidentified)

57. “Chimneys,” National Geograghic, 1979 (photo by Cotton Coulson of chimney sweep balancing between chimneys in Bandon, Oregon)

58. (unidentified)

59. Louis Armstrong (photo of head - singing)

60. (unidentified)

61. (unidentified)

62. Ingrid Bergman (?) (photo) Note: from “Joan of Arc,” 1948

63. George Gordon Wing (?) (photo - young)

64. Danny Kay (photo)

65. Goldie Hawn (photo)

66. Pablo Neruda (?) (photo) Note: aided escape of David Siqueros, attempted assassin of Trotsky.

67. (unidentified)

68. “Wing it.” (text)

69. Drawing of the Beatles from “Yellow Submarine” Note: in the 1972 film “The Assassination of Trotsky” staring Richard Burton, Trotsky is quoted after the first attempted assassination as saying, “Steel door, shutters on the windows, new bulkheads, they won't get in so easily next time. We live in a submarine; My faithful periscope Natasha [Mrs. Trotsky].”

70. Cartoon derived from famous cartoon by German cartoonist George Grosz in which he attacks pre-war German Society (pig-man & prostitute, see Jung, “Man and His Symbols,” p. 283).

71. (unidentified)

72. “I think, therefore I love” (text)

73. (unidentified)

74. (?) [same as #25]

75. Natalie Wood (photo) Note: she died mysteriously while on a boat with her husband, actor Robert Wagner, and actor Christopher Walken.

76. Joseph Conrad (Photogragh by Alfred A. Knopf)

77. (unidentified)

78. Liz Taylor (?) (photo)

79. John Wayne (photo)

80. Marilyn Monroe (photo) Note: death ruled suicide, but false rumors persist that she was murdered and that RFK and JFK were involved.

81. (unidentified)

82. (unidentified)

83. (unidentified)

84. (unidentified)

85. (unidentified)

86. (unidentified)

87. Joseph Conrad (?)

88. (unidentified)

89. Shotgun shell (actual shell attached to door window)

90. (unidentified)

91. Pablo Neruda (?) (photo)

92. (unidentified)

93. (unidentified)

94. (unidentified)

95. (unidentified)

96. (unidentified)

97. Louis Armstrong (?) (photo)

98. (unidentified)

99. (unidentified)

100. (unidentified)

101. (unidentified)

102. (unidentified)

103. Natasha Kinski (photo from movie “Tess”) Notes on 1979 film “Tess”: Stars Nastassia Kinski; Roman Polanski's adaption of Thomas Hardy’s “Tess of the D’Urbervilles,” about an intelligent, sensitive, poor girl driven to murder and death by hanging by a concatenation of events and circumstances so bitterly ironic that it is considered one of Hardy's darkest novels.

104. Jody Foster (photo - young) Note: she was the focus of John Hinkley’s obsession at the time of his shooting at Ronald Reagan.

105. (unidentified)

106. (unidentified)

107. Princess Dianna (photo of face)

108. “How to take a nude picture of yourself” (text)

109. (unidentified)

110. (unidentified)

111. Eugene O’Neill (Photograph by Nickolas Muray, Nickolas Muray Photo Archives, Eugene O’Neill Foundation)

112. Edward Sorel cartoon of protest marchers carrying signs that read: “Americans for a closed society. My children have a right not to know. Let it all hang in.”

113. Anton Chekhov (?) (photo)

114. (unidentified)

115. Pablo Picasso, 1905, Lady with a Fan (Femme à l'éventail), oil on canvas, 100.3 x 81 cm, The National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC.

116. Sigmund Freud (photo of face)

117. “Sexercises” (text)

118. Richard Nixon (photo of face - laughing)

119. “Why is this man laughing?” (text) Note: See my essay, “Why is This Man Laughing? Richard Nixon’s and Lyndon Johnson’s Big, Dark Secret (an appended, annotated excerpt from my book, The Deep State in the Heart of Texas)” bartholoviews.substack.com

120. “Encore Rag” (sheet music cover)

121. “Dia de los Muertos” (Day of the Dead)

122. (illegible text)

123. Sammy Davis, Jr. (?) (photo)

124. Louis Armstrong (?) (photo)

125. Lee Marvin (photo of head - from Western movie, possibly “Paint Your Wagon”) Note: “Paint Your Wagon (1969) C-166m. D: Joshua Logan. Lee Marvin, Clint Eastwood, Jean Seberg, Harve Presnell, Ray Walston, Tom Ligon, Alan Dexter. Splashy, expensive musical from Lerner-Loewe play about gold-rush days in No-Name City [ref. to No Name Key?], California, where prospectors Marvin and Eastwood share one wife (Seberg) whom they bought at auction. Pure entertainment; witty, often risque script (by Paddy Chayefsky!). Presnell outshines cast of nonsingers with ‘They Call the Wind Maria.’ Beware of shorter prints.” (Leonard Maltin, Leonard Maltin’s TV Movies and Video Guide 1989 Edition (NY: New American Library, 1988), p. 795.)

126. (unidentified)

127. Stevie Wonder (?) (photo)

128. (illegible text)

129. “Como Suicidarse Sin Maestro” [“The Master of Suicide”] (text) Note: a second line in parenthesis is illegible.

130. “It’s the law / We do not sell tobacco products to persons under 18” (text)

131. “Cursos de Detetive” (Detective Courses) “Com Diploma e Credencial” (With Diploma and Credential) pessodoras psiodicos (psychopathic people [handwritten in pencil]) “Impresso no Pasciente Mundo dos Detetives” (?) (Printed in Patient World of Detectives) “Por Correspondencia e Com Aulas Ao Vivo” (By Correspondence and With Live Classes) “Profissão do Momento e do Futuro” (Profession of the Moment and the Future) (illegible text) “…de Investigações” (of Investigations) (illegible contact information in Sao Paulo) Note: Print advertisement for Detective school in Sao Paulo, Brazil.

132. “A four-letter word: work” (text)

133. “PAIN” (text)

134. American Automobile Association logo: “Protected by AAA”

135. “Specialist in Women and other diseases” (text)

136. “STOP” (graphic of traffic sign)

Note: Wing’s image montage item nos. 131—136 combine to create a transposed-word-effect sequence telling the knowing (specialist) observer (detective) to stop and pay attention (stop sign) to Paine (PAIN) women associated with a protected automobile (AAA) and work that is dirty or unpleasant (four-letter word), all regarded as abnormal and harmful (other diseases). The decoded message refers to investigating multiple Ruth Paines and their role in Oswald’s employment at the Texas School Book Depository (commonly known by the “four-letter word” TSBD) and a Rambler station wagon insured by Professor Wing, matching an identical getaway car seen leaving Dealey Plaza after the JFK assassination.2

137. (illegible text)

138. (illegible text)

Privates sleep where the rain pours down! 
Generals have a bed in town!  
Hayfoot, strawfoot never knows
Whether his gun is loaded or not!  
Load again and if she blows ...  
Dead and buried, and soon forgot!*

Despite claims of prima facie evidence in the murder of John F. Kennedy, the basic issue remains, in any real sense, unresolved. Decades after the publication of the Warren Report, the pseudo-debate over whether or not a conspiracy killed President Kennedy continues. Most people, in their day-to-day affairs, despite what they may believe, act as if the case is closed.

Journalist Robert Sam Anson once noted that “The lack of positive evidence of conspiracy surely hampers an investigation of John Kennedy’s death; it need not deter it. Oftentimes negative information is almost as important. Thus, each bit of conscious disinformation that was put out after the assassination should be followed to its source. All attempts to deflect the original investigators from the truth should be rigorously followed up.” University of California, Berkeley, Professor Peter Dale Scott further noted that such deflections “...should be closely examined, for in this case damage control (as well as truth) is evidence: a clue to what relevant truths are being concealed.... Just as we believe the defendant who pleads guilty more readily than the one who pleads innocent, so we will pay more attention to the official record when it raises questions about its own reliability.”

In 1993, former Warren Commission Assistant Counsel Burt W. Griffin stated that rejecting the single bullet theory — a belief that one bullet caused seven wounds in two men despite its timing, flight path, points of entry and exit, and resulting condition— requires the assumption that ballistics evidence went undiscovered or was suppressed. Griffin, by then Judge Griffin, was correct. He also admitted that he and other Warren Commission staff members did not believe that the Dallas Police, the FBI, the Secret Service, or the CIA, did a thorough job in investigating the crime.1

There are actually several conflicting single bullet theories, a good reason, among many, to reject them.2 Rejecting them means there was more than one shooter. It also means there are problems with the ballistics evidence. This paper endeavors to end assumptions about the suppression of that evidence. Notwithstanding the failure of the single bullet theories, and actually precluding them, we argue that the existence of a conspiracy is sufficiently proved by exposing two unreliable claims of the Warren Commission; by exhausting all conceivable innocent explanations for those claims; by arguing that they were instead “damage control” attempts to deflect honest inquiry; and by calling into question long-accepted theories about the alleged murder weapon and its alleged misidentification.

We demonstrate how the planting of specific evidence — a part of the weapon — was based on an error. The perpetrators quickly realized the mistake but not soon enough to correct it or hide it. All they could do was deflect attention from it. It was an error so obvious that it would have exposed, within hours of Lee Harvey Oswald’s arrest, the conspiracy to frame him. In fact, the error has never been hidden, just confused. We therefore show that damage control was the motive for the unanticipated, but criminally necessary and deliberate, prolonged misidentification of the weapon.

Failing that proof, we further argue that there is only one other explanation for the weapon-related facts: traditional interpretations that a second reported murder weapon was deliberately replaced with one that could be traced to Oswald. If either argument is correct — both establishing planted and suppressed ballistics evidence — we will have sufficiently proven conspiracy.3

From the beginning, there has been no reason to deny the conspiracy. Four of the seven Warren Commissioners — the majority — including the Commission’s chairman, Chief Justice Earl Warren, expressed doubts about the Commission's conclusions within a decade of their report. They were joined by a fifth Commissioner in 1978, when John J. McCloy told the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA), that “I no longer feel we had no credible evidence or reliable evidence in regard to a conspiracy....” Lyndon Johnson never believed the report he commissioned. The official policy of the FBI is that the case is not closed, a policy begun by J. Edgar Hoover himself.4 And those were the people who had supposedly found the truth.

By any standard of historiography, the lone-assassin scenario must be considered a minority opinion which is contrary to the known evidence. Yet that is not enough for a vocal minority of conspiracy deniers. Even the HSCA would go only as far as declaring a probable conspiracy. What is needed is simple evidence of conspiracy that is true, valid and sufficient at first impression. What is needed is a “smoking gun.”

In a letter that remained classified until January 1993, Walt W. Rostow, advisor to Presidents Kennedy and Johnson, voiced his fear of such evidence to Secretary of State Dean Rusk in the days just before the Warren Report was made public. His main concerns were that “Overseas the report should do something to dilute the conspiracy theory of President Kennedy’s assassination,” that “The report does, however, blow the fact that Oswald saw a named KGB agent at the Soviet Embassy in Mexico City”; that “the major task for ourselves and the USIA will be to prevent the discussion and debate in the U.S. from projecting an image of excessive domestic disarray” and that because “As the debate unfolds, issues will arise — almost certainly some issues we have not now anticipated...We must be a united government in this matter.”5

By the thirtieth anniversary, government unity could not have been less evident. During a 1992 campaign appearance with Bill Clinton in McKeesport, Pennsylvania, then-vice presidential candidate Albert Gore said he believed that President Kennedy was killed by a conspiracy of unknown origin and that all federal files should be opened to the public.6 President Clinton, when asked at a thirtieth anniversary press conference whether he thought Kennedy was killed by a single assassin and whether he was satisfied with his own security arrangements, replied: “I’m satisfied with the finding that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone. I am also very satisfied with the work done by the Secret Service in my behalf.”7 A good answer loaded with priorities perhaps, but that divided White House illustrated better than anything that, as a country, when it comes to resolving the murder of our thirty-fifth president, believe what we might, we know no more now than we did in the waning weeks of 1963.

Author’s note (Aug. 20, 2024): For further analysis of the Clinton White House and the JFK assassination’s influence on later elections, see my essay, “The Deep Political Realities of the 2016 U.S. General Election,” and its sequels for 2020 and 2024.

For decades, researchers have sought the elusive “smoking gun” — a simple, indisputable fact that proves conspiracy in the murder of John F. Kennedy. It has been apparent since our ballistic findings that such a search may be redundant.8 This discovery is not based on new evidence. As is often the case in quests for definitive answers, it was right under our noses the whole time. It had lain dormant in the Warren Report for three decades as one of Rostow’s feared “issues we have not now anticipated.” Obscure and riddled with disinformation, yes, but not impossible to see.9…

This analysis does not entirely exculpate Lee Harvey Oswald. Nor does it conclusively indict other individuals. But if this analysis is correct, it does conclusively prove conspiracy. And it serves to remind us that, in this time of new evidence produced through technology and file declassification, nothing is wrong with the old evidence. A hard question we must ask — and answer for our children — is why it took us so long. That delay caused great damage they will have to undo.

In our search for a smoking gun, we missed the real prima facie evidence — the gun that didn’t smoke. Let us begin again.

* Merrick F. McCarthy, excerpt, “Four Voices from Shiloh,” published in Albert Dillahunty, Shiloh National Military Park, Tennessee: National Park Service Historical Handbook Series No. 10 (National Park Service Historic Handbook. Washington D.C., 1955)

ENDNOTES:

Author’s note (Aug. 15, 2024): In 1997, assassination researcher and author John Kelin asked me to write an abstract summarizing the indications of my Rambler monograph as a forward to its first online appearance in Kelin's Fair Play Magazine. I present it here for the first time with images and annotation. The text is unchanged. The title of this edition mimics the classic 1964 Warner Bros. animated short, Bartholomew Versus the Wheel1 (for both obvious and metaphorical reasons). The cartoon is based on the idiom, “the dog that caught the car,” and tells how catching cars caused a dog named Bartholomew to see the world differently. This abstract summarizes the story arc of a strange car I caught 25 years later — a car that changed my own world view.

Forward

This foreword is a proposition for those familiar with my monograph, Possible Discovery of an Automobile Used in the JFK Conspiracy,2 and a prognosticative prologue for those who are not. While based on the facts presented in the monograph, facts in its subsequent updates, and facts from research not included here, this is an interpretation of those facts, meant only as a simplified supposition, to be used as a rough guide through the complex material that follows.

In the 1930s, two anti-communist guerrillas, James Burnham and George Lyman Paine, went undercover as communists, infiltrated the leadership of the American Trotskyist movement — the world’s largest Trotskyist organization — and helped tear it apart. In 1940, their mission ended with the assassination of Leon Trotsky in Mexico City.

One of the two anti-communist guerrillas, James Burnham, went on to teach the newly formed CIA about covert operations. He also went on to teach philosophy at Yale and recruit CIA agents from among his students.

In 1950, Burnham recruited a Yale student, William F. Buckley, Jr., and introduced him to CIA agent E. Howard Hunt.3 Hunt was a favorite of CIA Director Allen Dulles. Buckley’s father also knew the Dulles family, having shared foreign-policy adventures in Mexico with Dulles’ uncle, Robert Lansing, when Lansing was President Wilson’s secretary of state.

Buckley, as Hunt’s advance man, went to Mexico City to recruit informants for the CIA’s soon-to-be Mexico City station. There, Buckley met and recruited a 28-year-old Spanish student from Philadelphia, George Gordon Wing, as an informant among the left-wing student groups at Mexico City College. Hunt arrived soon thereafter and arranged for Wing’s CIA payment, which was disguised as a student grant.4 Wing was an older student because his studies had been interrupted by World War II. He served as a Naval aviation bomb-sight technician, fire controlman and ordnance specialist.

In 1952, Wing continued his Spanish studies at the University of California at Berkeley. Upon earning his Ph.D. in Spanish in 1961, Wing joined his former boss, Hunt, in Little Havana, Miami. From there, he trained with the CIA’s Operation Forty assassins on No Name Key, in preparation for the Bay of Pigs invasion.

In the fall of 1962, Wing followed in James Burnham’s footsteps and became a professor and CIA recruiter, but at the University of Texas at Austin.5 UT’s past leaders had served in Wilson’s cabinet with Allen Dulles’ uncle, Robert Lansing. UT was also the alma mater of Lansing’s friend, William F. Buckley, Sr.

Wing’s association with the Dulles family became closer when John Foster Dulles’ son, Jack, came to know him personally as a fellow professor in Latin American studies at UT. Professor Wing was thus in a perfect position to be useful to the plotters of President Kennedy’s assassination. In fact, Wing’s last name appears on the manifest of the same flight which brought the Oswalds from New York to Texas in 1962.6

In early April, 1963, the date for Kennedy’s trip to Texas was set for November 21st. The occasion was an appreciation dinner in Houston for Kennedy’s friend, Texas Congressman Albert Thomas. On April 23rd, Lyndon Johnson made a cryptic statement at a press conference in Dallas that included a phrase about reporters figuratively shooting Kennedy during his Texas trip.7 The next day, April 24th, Marina Oswald moved into the home of her friend Ruth Hyde Paine.

That same day, Lee Harvey Oswald departed for New Orleans, arriving on April 25th. On April 26th, George Wing acquired a used Rambler station wagon from C.B. Smith Motors, an Austin, Texas dealership owned by C.B. Smith, a life-long student of Latin America, and one of Lyndon Johnson’s closest friends. The sales manager was Smith’s son, C.B. Smith, Jr. The salesman, R.L. Lewis, died under unusual circumstances seven weeks after Kennedy’s assassination.

The senior Smith’s mentor, Texas historian Walter Prescott Webb, was an intimate friend of those planning Albert Thomas’ dinner. Webb died suddenly in late April, 1963, in a one-car accident near Austin.

Although Wing was a lowly associate professor whose first semester — fall, 1962 — was typically overburdened by the least desirable assignments and responsibilities, he was allowed to take a leave of absence for the entire fall semester of 1963. It was the only extended absence of his academic career. He later continued to teach without interruption, even after a heart attack in 1971.8

That fall, Ruth Hyde Paine helped arrange Oswald’s employment at the Texas School Book Depository. Another employee in the same building was Fronia Smith, the ex-wife of C.B. Smith, Sr. and the mother of C.B. Smith, Jr.9

Wing’s whereabouts and activities during that semester are unknown, but a Rambler station wagon identical to his was photographed in the parking lot of the Texas School Book Depository, within ten minutes of the shooting on November 22, 1963.10

And a Rambler station wagon, whose description fits Wing’s car, was used to covertly extract guerrillas from Dealey Plaza immediately after they succeeded in killing John F. Kennedy.11

Lee Harvey Oswald told his police interrogators that the Rambler station wagon in which he was seen leaving Dealey Plaza, “belongs to Mrs. Paine.” He was referring to either Ruth Hyde Paine or Ruth Forbes Paine, the daughter-in-law and the ex-wife, respectively, of George Lyman Paine — James Burnham’s partner in the destruction of Trotskyism. Ruth Forbes Paine was also a long-time friend of Mary Bancroft, Allen Dulles’ wartime lover and his chief contact with one of the leaders of the plot to assassinate Adolf Hitler.12

Photographs, taken by White House photographer Cecil Stoughton of Vice-President Johnson taking the oath of office aboard Air Force One at Love Field, show President Johnson and Congressman Thomas winking and smiling at each other immediately after the grim ceremony. The original negative to that photo is the only one missing from that series of 13 exposures.

Hard to believe? Read on.

Richard Bartholomew, April 20, 1997

END NOTES:

“The alternate domination of one faction over another, sharpened by the spirit of revenge, natural to party dissension, which in different ages and countries has perpetrated the most horrid enormities, is itself a frightful despotism. But this leads at length to a more formal and permanent despotism. The disorders and miseries, which result, gradually incline the minds of men to seek security and repose in the absolute power of an individual; and sooner or later the chief of some prevailing faction, more able or more fortunate than his competitors, turns this disposition to the purposes of his own elevation, on the ruins of Public Liberty.” —George Washington, Farewell Address, 1796

When the Beatles played in Dallas, Texas, on September 18, 1964, a reporter asked John Lennon about his political identity. She cited a review of Lennon’s new book, In His Own Write, in which the critic characterized Lennon as an anarchist. “Would you say you are an anarchist?” she asked. Lennon shot back, “I don’t even know what it means!”1 That is the wisest answer to questions about political labels.

Political identity is one of the oldest wedges dividing U.S. citizens against each other. It is used to confuse and control. It is used to keep voters distracted from and ignorant about deep politics. Each new deep political event is a result of Americans not realizing they were lied to about previous events, all the way back to the American Revolution, itself a war conspiracy by the French against the British.2

Political parties are not mentioned in the U.S. Constitution. Candidates are not required to be members of a party to run for office. U.S. political parties began as factions. Parties formed, lived, and died as their factions, fortunes, and voting blocks changed with historical events. Their overriding pursuit is power. 

Take Texas political history for example. If you look only at parties, the state was Democratic and became Republican. But the state’s majority voters were always reactionary. As Democrats sought power nationally by pursuing labor and civil rights after the Civil War and the Progressive Era, they alienated their traditional southern reactionary faction. Those alienated voters switched to a Republican Party that had lost blacks and other progressives permanently during the Great Depression.3

It was the right-wingers of both parties who gave us presidential term limits to avoid another domestically progressive president like Franklin D. Roosevelt. The Kennedy brothers became a real threat to term limits, so they were removed in other ways. The most extreme right-wing crimes against democracy were used to stop them.

By November 1963, the progressive faction of the Texas Democratic Party, led by Senator Ralph Yarborough, was riding a wave of popularity on President Kennedy’s coat tails. Vice President Lyndon Johnson, Yarborough’s nemesis-in-chief, was about to be dumped from the ticket. Johnson and his longtime partner in crime, Texas Governor John Connally, were on their way to political ruin and likely prison due to the imminent exposure of their corrupt dealings with conman Billy Sol Estes and others. Kennedy was on his way to an easy victory over likely 1964 Republican candidate, Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater.4

When Kennedy was murdered, the true Democratic Party of Texas was murdered too. The forces that killed the Kennedys figured out that term limits do not matter when you control the elections. Right-wing Texas politicians figured that out long ago. Even if a leftist accidentally wins, like Governor Ann Richards did, they just cheat them out of a second term. That’s how Governor George W. Bush won.

Halfway into Bush’s second presidential term, Texas columnist Molly Ivins figured out that the state’s right-wing political crimes had become its chief export. “Naturally, in Texas, National Laboratory for Bad Government, we do it all first and worst,” she wrote.

A single pair of two-year terms had been the voluntary limit for Texas governors for generations — until right-wing Democrat incumbent Allan Shivers ran again in 1954 and became the first to serve three consecutive terms. In my book, I wrote about the suspicious way by which Shivers became the only lieutenant governor in Texas history to attain the governor’s office by the death of his predecessor, Governor Beauford Jester.

In 1975, the state constitution was amended, changing the number of years per term to four. Then ultra right-winger Bill Clements, the first openly Republican governor since Reconstruction, became the longest-serving governor with two terms (1978-1982, then 1986-1990). Republican Governor Rick Perry was the first with a third term after two consecutive four-year terms (2002-2006 and 2006-2010). Decades of underhanded, right-wing election control stuck Texas with Perry for almost 14 years.

Politics is about power, as George Orwell wrote in his essay, “Second Thoughts on James Burnham.”

“Burnham does not deny that ‘good’ motives may operate in private life, but he maintains that politics consists of the struggle for power, and nothing else. All historical changes finally boil down to the replacement of one ruling class by another. All talk about democracy, liberty, equality, fraternity, all revolutionary movements, all visions of Utopia, or ‘the classless society’, or ‘the Kingdom of Heaven on earth’, are humbug (not necessarily conscious humbug) covering the ambitions of some new class which is elbowing its way into power. ...Power can sometimes be won or maintained without violence, but never without fraud, because it is necessary to make use of the masses, and the masses would not co-operate if they knew that they were simply serving the purposes of a minority.”5

There is a long history of politically expedient, extreme right-wing twisting of the definitions of “democracy” and “republic.” The intent is to demonize the Democratic Party, and by extension liberalism and progressiveness.

The first U.S. political party was Thomas Jefferson’s liberal, pro-labor Democratic-Republican Party, founded in 1791 to counteract the elitist, monarchical, pro-central-bank Federalists. Jefferson’s party split into two factions in 1828. The liberal faction became the Democratic Party based on Jacksonian democracy. The elitist, banker faction called themselves the National Republicans, which later changed to the Whig Party, and eventually the Republican Party. 

The name “Republicans” was arguably chosen to trick voters into thinking they were voting for the other, more popular liberal party, because “Democratic-Republican” had been commonly shortened to “Republican.” It was President Jefferson’s own slang term for his party. When voters caught on and the right-wingers needed more dirty tricks to get votes, “Whig” was chosen to echo the American Whigs of 1776, who fought for independence, because “Whig” had been the label of choice for people who opposed tyranny.

Here is how the anti-slavery Republican Party of 1854 became the party of racists: https://www.theroot.com/how-the-republican-party-became-the-party-of-racism-1827779221

Here are the factual definitions:

Democracy

http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/democracy

Republic

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/republic

The U.S. was founded as a democratic republic, with “republic” used in the “federal republic” sense only, as seen in this list of the world’s republics: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_republics, and this list of countries by system of government: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_system_of_government.

In making the distinction between a republic and a democracy, the latter list says, “This is a list of sovereign states by constitutionally defined de jure system of government. This list does not measure degree of democracy, political corruption, or state capacity of governments.”

The heading “Presidential republic,” notes that the, “Head of government (president) is popularly elected and independent of the legislature." The list includes democratic and non-democratic states.

Moreover, under the heading “Former one-party states,” states in which political power is by law concentrated within a single political party, eighteen countries were republics.

The United States is supposed to be a constitutional republic and a representative democracy (i.e., majority rule is tempered by minority rights protected by law). The head of state and other officials of a constitutional republic are representatives of the citizens and govern according to constitutional law that limits their power. Representative democracy, as opposed to direct democracy, is a type of democracy founded on the principle of elected people representing the citizens. 

Since U.S. citizens have no constitutional right to vote,6 rerepresentative democracy exists in principle only. That is unfortunate because democracy is the only idea protecting our human rights and liberties. The pervasive, wrongheaded twisting of these definitions for the purpose of marginalizing “democracy” and glorifying “republic” supports the view that the United States has become a de facto right-wing authoritarian state.

Certainly, two parties in lockstep on all matters of foreign policy, military adventurism, and black-budget madness are a de facto single-party. At best, a two-party state is the least democratic, not the most. Two-parties are only one removed from non-democratic countries like China, Cuba, and North Korea.

While more parties mean better democracy, the wisdom of George Washington is ultimately the right answer. Zero is most. Imagine a twist ending where you’re asked about a political label, and you shout, “I don’t even know what it means!”

END NOTES

Charles Joseph Whitman was the Marine veteran who became known as the “Texas Tower Sniper” on August 1, 1966, when he went to the 28th-floor clock tower observation deck of the University of Texas Main Building and fired at random people for 96 minutes, killing and wounding dozens before he was shot dead, allegedly by Austin law enforcement. The mass murder was officially deemed an open and shut case caused by an alleged brain tumor.

The key to the Whitman case is the “blue ribbon” commission set up by Governor John B. Connally to end legitimate inquiry about Whitman’s mental state and his visits to a psychiatrist schooled at Baylor University in Waco and The University of Texas — cover institutions for MKUltra — as well as other fingerprints of intelligence.

Issued only two years after the Warren Report on the assassination of President Kennedy and wounding of Governor Connally, the “Texas Governor’s Fact-Finding Committee Report on the Charles J. Whitman Catastrophe” created a Mandela Effect that still exists: belief in Whitman’s nonexistent brain tumor.

The Single Tumor Theory:

David Eagleman gives the neurobiology behind it in episode two of his documentary, The Brain (23:00-26:30). Ironically, he exposes one mistaken narrative of his own by implying that Charles Whitman’s alleged tumor is what caused him to commit his mass murder, contrary to all the pathological evidence.

Whitman’s Disappearing Brain:

To understand the false narrative of the tumor, the place to start is the ongoing mystery of Whitman’s missing brain — a winding trail from the autopsy pathologist to the University of Texas to San Antonio.

The San Antonio Connection:

The Connally Commission’s Big Lie:

Whitman’s Fingerprints of Intelligence:

Conclusion:

There were only ever two theories about President Kennedy’s assassination:

1. Oswald alone, or

2. conspiracy.

Which is it? We know. We know who killed Kennedy—conspirators.

There is only one conspiracy theory, the one to which the Warren Report referred. That one conspiracy was always known. See the Warren Report, Chapter VI - Investigation of Possible Conspiracy, Conclusion, p. 374. They admitted having evidence of the conspiracy. They just lied about it.

The deception started as glib value judgments like “no credible evidence” and “no meaningful evidence” of “a conspiracy” (emphasis added). After that rhetorical origin, the lie evolved into parsing the Warren Commission’s conspiracy theory and calling its different segments different theories. The parsing trick is essential to the conspirators’ propaganda. By using the plural, “theories,” they created the illusion that a simple truth is instead doubtful, a confusing, impenetrable labyrinth. Thinking about the conspiracy became toxic.

Conspiracy deniers’ requirement of evidence identifying the shooters in order to prove conspiracy is another propaganda trick. We have always known Jack Ruby shot Lee Harvey Oswald and Ruby’s conspiratorial connections. Yet it has made no difference to those same deniers.

Avoiding the question, “Who killed Kennedy?” makes it unanswerable. When someone says, “I don’t know,” it is the propaganda working. It is the gateway to “we don’t know,” and that is the gateway to “we’ll never know.” By cancelling the rational conspiracy explatation, the act of transmogrifying the theory into many theories becomes a form of totalitarian rhetoric called a Thought-terminating Cliché.

The short answer to who the conspirators are is, basically, the same ones who were trying to kill Fidel Castro. It is the same variety of groups with the same leaders and hierarchy. That CIA-led plot is mainstream history ever since the Church Committee reports in 1975-1976.

Nobody parses the CIA-led plot to kill Castro. Nobody talks about that single political-military-industrial-organized-crime-intelligence-media conspiracy as if it were multiple theories. Because they cannot. It is official—period. Resolving the JFK assassination is as simple as making that same plot (which President Nixon called, “the Bay of Pigs thing”) official.

Until then, liars are going to lie. Plausibility is not required. The only requirement is repetition—official repetition. The real labyrinth is the network of rabbit holes (i.e., a warren) invented to deny the conspiracy and frame Lee Harvey Oswald. First-generation Warren Commission critic Vincent J. Salandria, called it a “false mystery.”

Meet the New Liars - Same as the Old Liars

Just in time for the 60th anniversary of the assassination, Secret Service Agent Paul Landis in his book, The Final Witness, claimed to have found an intact bullet on the back seat of the car where Kennedy was shot, sneaked it into Emergency Room One, and secretly put it on Kennedy’s stretcher. Landis’ revelation is one of many versions of the Warren Commission’s biggest lie, the single-bullet fantasy.2

The spin of the articles about Landis in The New York Times3 and Vanity Fair4 was that the bullet Landis allegedly found is Commission Exhibit 399, the infamous “magic bullet” allegedly fired from the alleged murder weapon.

How do we know it is not? No bullet could be fired at Kennedy from that gun. The official explanations by the Warren Commission and the House Select Committee of the gun’s found condition precluded it: “…the ballistic evidence ended up with a bent ammunition clip that was not needed at all, and which renders the rifle useless as the murder weapon.”5

We did not need Paul Landis to tell us the Warren Commission’s single-bullet fantasy is its biggest lie. We did not need this latest version of his story about finding the bullet to know it never had a legal chain of custody. Speculation has long held that while at Parkland Hospital, it fell out of the shallow back wound the autopsy doctors later probed at Bethesda Naval Hospital. That wound was mentioned in a report by FBI agents James Sibert and Francis O’Neill, who observed the autopsy.

Landis’ story is nonsense. To craft it, he collaborated with Lewis Merletti, a former director of the Secret Service, and James Robenalt, a lawyer who “has deeply researched the assassination and helped Mr. Landis process his memories.” Robenalt is also partnered with John Dean on a Watergate Continuing Legal Education course.

Landis’ admission of “finding” CE399 also raised the question of his planting that evidence. The honest medical explanation says the bullet that caused JFK’s shallow back wound could not have fallen out. Renowned forensic pathologist Dr. Cyril Wecht explained that bullets in wounds like that get more embedded, not less, as the tissues swell and encase them. Even if the bullet had managed to come out of the wound, it would have then had to exit the hole it made in Kennedy’s shirt, and then exit the hole it made in Kennedy’s coat, all of which would have to remain perfectly aligned (“in those hectic moments”).

Landis put himself in legal jeopardy. At minimum, he admitted to tampering with evidence, obstruction of justice by evidence tampering, and dereliction of duty. Withholding evidence relevant to a legal proceeding is considered spoliation of evidence.

Those real legal issues have been officially ignored. That is a clue something strange is going on. This was more likely the opening propaganda shot for the 60th anniversary. It is an attempted controlled disclosure based on false-theory disinformation.

Peter Baker wrote in The New York Times, “As it turns out, if his recollections are correct, the much-discussed ‘magic bullet’ may not have been so magic after all.”

Not so. Landis’ legerdemain makes CE399 more magic. Not only did it impossibly slip out of Kennedy’s shallow back wound, it impossibly “lodged in the back of the seat behind where Kennedy was sitting.” Note the shallow piping between the seat cushions in the following picture.

Vanity Fair published Landis’ story the same day as The New York Times. It was by Robenalt, the lawyer who partnered with John Dean. He was more specific about the “improbable” location of the bullet on the seat.

In his book, Paul Landis now says that when Jackie Kennedy stood up to enter Parkland, he looked over and saw that a bullet was improbably sitting on top of the rear seat of the limo, right around the spot where the limo’s detachable roof, which had been removed that day, would have otherwise been affixed to the trunk. Also, amid the blood and gore, Landis remembers, were two bullet fragments on the back seat, next to where Jackie had been sitting.6

Russell Baker’s news site, WhoWhatWhy, reported two previous tellings of Landis’ bullet discovery, one in 1983, and another in 2010. In both, Landis reported it was a fragment, not an intact bullet, that he found on top of the back seat. He turned it over to someone rather than putting it on Kennedy’s stretcher. When reminded of his prior stories, Landis claimed he was misquoted by the Associated Press in the 1983 story. But that did not keep him from repeating it for the 2010 publication of a book by his former Secret Service partner, Clint Hill. Landis claimed he lied on purpose the second time, because he did not trust Hill’s coauthor and new wife, journalist Lisa McCubbin.7

Then there is a bizarre third previous telling of Landis’ story. Secret Service Agent Sam Kinney’s next-door neighbor, Gary Loucks, revealed it in 2013. Loucks told the same story as Landis, except it was Kinney, not Landis, who claimed to find the bullet and moved it to the stretcher.8

On CNN, Jefferson Morley and Farris Rookstool9 partnered to frame this non-debate distraction perfectly. Morley’s view was that Landis’ account compounds the credibility problems of the single-bullet theory, that it is an open question, that a better explanation is needed, and it points out the mistake of keeping the files secret. Rookstool took the position that Landis’ allegations are wrong, suspicious, imply dereliction of duty, and his locations of the bullet are questionable and change nothing.

Rookstool is a conspiracy denier and Warren Commission apologist. Morley is a critic of Rookstool and his ilk. They are the go-to, corporate-media commentator opposites on this topic. Yet, on Paul Landis’ tall tale, they are both correct. The false-conspiracy/false-mystery pseudo debate had begun.

One potential danger of Landis’ false story is that it gives the conspirators incentive to rationalize another fake inquiry, resulting in more possible misdeeds such as exhuming Governor Connally’s body to retrieve and falsify the fragments in it. Because those fragments also allegedly came from CE399.

After all, it will not matter if they admit to a second shooter if it is a second patsy. A false conspiracy could extend the false mystery for at least another 50 years.10

It is folly for us to dig and beg for scraps of truth for another 50 years. We do not need to examine every rock on a mountain to know it is a mountain. When we end the official propaganda of denial of these crimes, we will also end any corrupt justification for hiding their details. As long as the Warren Commission Report is the official lie, there is no massive, official criminality. Stopping that one Big Lie forces everything to change.

ENDNOTES:

Midnight Writer News - Jun-Jul, 2018:

Episode #070

http://midnightwriternews.com/mwn-episode-070-richard-bartholomew-and-the-gordian-knot/

Episode #073

https://midnightwriternews.com/mwn-episode-073-richard-bartholomew-and-the-fight-against-the-deep-state/

Episode#075

https://midnightwriternews.com/mwn-episode-075-richard-bartholomew-the-rambler-and-the-mac-wallace-fingerprints/

(JHarrison/fingerprints: 39:15-1:18:30; JMellen/fingerprints: 1:18:30-1:48:46, blind study: 1:34:00-1:42:00)

Metaphysical Connection/Fedora Chronicles - Nov 17, 2018:

Episode #096

http://metaphysicalpodcast.com/MC-095-deep-state-JFK.html

Opperman Report - Apr 13, 2019:

https://www.podchaser.com/podcasts/the-opperman-report-191214/episodes/the-deep-state-in-the-heart-of-79577580

William Ramsey Investigates - Nov 21, 2022

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-deep-state-in-the-heart-of-texas-the/id1388815042?i=1000587025893

Video:

Out of the Blank - Jul-Aug, 2022:

Episode #1150

Episode #1160

Episode #1180

Episode #1186

(civil trial: 137:49-141:19)

Out of the Blank - Feb-Dec, 2023:

Episode #1346

(UFO sightings: 25:40-56:05)

Episode #1424

Episode #1454

Episode #1497

Episode #1527

Episode #1565

Out of the Blank - Mar-Oct, 2024:

Episode #1594

Episode #1670

Episode #1716

https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLcP--DojqDR3lxz64W0-kr7rfF9fJOEJ-&feature=shared

Dealey Plaza UK - Sep 21, 2024

https://youtu.be/iRu5vWWYzHk?feature=shared

Out of the Blank - Feb 13, 2025:

Episode #1754

YouTube:

https://youtu.be/Lmnctisab4I?feature=shared

Spotify:

https://open.spotify.com/episode/2rl047geqJ2F7FwRNP3fUH?si=_2kIKU1TSROxU3_6lfRCJQ

Out of the Blank - June 23, 2025:

Episode #1788

YouTube:

https://youtu.be/Ihwxtzu0iTE?feature=shared

Spotify:

https://open.spotify.com/episode/6N2HsJAvBeqwT08WB8vzxI?si=nhDfNa5US1qYsY0-rnffl

InnerViews - June 27, 2025

Episode #652

InnerViews - March 27, 2026

Episode #784

LaughtearsSalon #38 Mae Brussell Salon - May 29, 2026

— Alan Swann (Peter O’Toole, paraphrasing Edmund Gwenn), “My Favorite Year” (1982 comedy film).

“We’ll never laugh again,” said journalist Mary McGrory in her grief on the day of President Kennedy’s funeral. Kennedy aide Daniel Patrick Moynihan replied, “Heavens, Mary, we’ll laugh again. It’s just that we’ll never be young again.”1

I don’t remember when I laughed again after mourning JFK’s death. Probably within a week. Certainly by my birthday weeks later when The Beatles arrived. That didn’t make it better. Far from it. I was coping. I didn’t realize until decades later how much the trauma had affected me. When asked what I wanted to be when I grow up, I had added “secret service agent” to my earlier list of artist, fireman, astronaut, cowboy, and superhero. I eventually became an editorial cartoonist. Satire and humor became more necessary, not less.

Since President Kennedy’s murder, our defacto assassinocracy has been the electoral elephant in the room.2 When Robert Kennedy announced his run for president in 1968, the fear was palpable. Martin Luther King, Jr., was soon killed by a conspiracy. Two months later, RFK was gunned down by conspirators. When Robert Kennedy, Jr., entered the 2024 race for president, the assassinocracy was still not openly talked about. Only after he requested Secret Service protection, and was refused, did a limited public discussion begin.3

A week after the refusal, the New York Times ran an opinion piece by guest columnist Annie Kelly on the divisive effect of false-theory disinformation by inauthentic “conspiracy theorists” on authentic conspiracy abolitionists.4

Before we had even spoken over Zoom, Mr. [Stephen Miles] Lewis sent me a 2022 Medium article written by Rani Baker that he said summed up a lot of his feelings about the topic. It was titled “So When, Exactly, Did Conspiracy Culture Stop Being Fun?” It was a question he said he had been struggling with too. …

For him and many of the others we spoke to, the paranormal and the parapolitical had been their passion and their home for their entire adult lives, places where they had found friends, ideas and ways of theorizing about the world that fascinated and excited them. They were used to their interest in these topics making them outsiders. Now they found themselves living with one foot in and one foot out of the current conspiracy scene, which had become increasingly popular, ubiquitous and dangerous. As they saw it, it wasn’t that they had rejected conspiracy culture; conspiracy culture was leaving them behind.5

Ms. Kelly’s approach was more about the sociological aspects than the political. Still, she missed a critical point about “conspiracy culture.” It is only those who embrace and enjoy the culture who feel most alienated by its weaponization. They are the victims targeted by that weapon. You can’t ask when it stopped being fun if you never considered it fun. At conspiracy conferences, I adopted a demeanor appropriate to a funeral. A little laughter was therapeutic. A lot crossed boundaries.

There is much sociology regarding the use of “fun” and satire as a mental/physical defense mechanism. That kind of humor is necessary for coping with the assassinocracy. Examples include editorial cartoons,

stand-up comics like George Carlin,

Bill Hicks,

https://youtu.be/u0UlesTjkPc?feature=shared

Dick Gregory,

and Mort Sahl,

even animated cartoons like Chuck Jones’ animated short, “Cheese Chasers,” a brilliant commentary on cognitive dissonance.

But comic relief can go too far. Finding the right balance is hard. Improper laughter as a faux pas was the hilarious premise of the acclaimed Mary Tyler Moore Show episode, “Chuckles Bites the Dust,” in which an embarrassed Mary couldn’t stop giggling at a coworker’s funeral.

I've seen conspiracy conferences that went too far. At one conference, attendees were addicted to minutia, interspersed with gleeful joking and bawdy cursing. It’s the former that compels the latter.

It’s a vicious cycle. Mastery of the evidence leads to more mastery of the evidence. Investigators reinvestigate their investigations. Details become more detailed. In everyday law enforcement, investigations end. The evidence goes to trial. The trial leads to resolution and closure. But that doesn’t happen with deep political conspiracies. The investigation is stuck in an endless loop.

Fletcher Prouty explained the dynamics of this aspect of the conspiracy in a 1990 letter to Jim Garrison.

“The whole story of the POWER of the Cover-up comes down to a few points,” wrote Prouty. “There has never been a Grand Jury and trial in Texas. Without a trial there can be nothing. Without a trial it does no good for researchers to dig up data. It has no place to go and what the researchers reveal just helps make the cover-up tighter, or they eliminate that evidence and the researcher.”6

When the conference attendees’ adrenaline rush finally fizzled, they close the conference talking about how our purpose is to pass our knowledge to the next generation. Just as the previous generation passed theirs to us.

That summed up the problem well. Don’t end the lies and resolve the assassination conspiracies, just keep proving them over and over using new toys. Pass the fun minutia-additction game to another generation so they can have fun passing it to the next. Keep the broken down merry-go-round spinning. Stay in the comfort zone of grabbing the cheap brass rings. Nurture the same old false sense of security and accomplishment the conspirators designed for us — with no end in sight.

Except that, for the comfortable, the comfort zone is becoming a discomfort. It’s tragic. It’s looney tunes. Cue the comic relief. Coyote and Road Runner anyone?

https://youtu.be/3Qz1GMpOtUY?feature=shared

ENDNOTES:

In “Daffy Duck Hunt,” a 1949 Warner Bros. Looney Tunes cartoon, directed by Robert McKimson, Daffy Duck’s fake hysteria about glacial collapse makes a good parody of today’s fear-based narrative.

Climate deniers who believe there is no global warming because it is snowing are quite ignorant. Moreover, a typical 70-year lifespan means nothing in the global warming issue — less than nothing. Narratives that use those arguments and timelines are downright daffy. Those, along with delay tactics posing as solutions, are allowed to endure as polarizing, narrow pseudo-arguments by corrupt political forces who want to control us like an Iditarod sled dog.

Early in his presidency, John F. Kennedy got a letter warning him of a newly realized global danger, man-made climate change, making him the first president to face the challenge. Every president after Kennedy was given increasingly dire warnings. History shows Kennedy’s successors did little to protect us, or nothing at all.1

Honest accounts of Kennedy’s life and politics, specifically his response to corporate greed indicate that, had he not been assassinated, climate change policy might have turned out better.2 Nearly six decades later, his nephew, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., put the loss of JFK’s leadership in perspective.

“All of the modeling for climate change” points to future “storms on steroids, droughts, famine, the disappearance of the ice caps, the disappearance of the glaciers on every continent, and that there’s going to be major disruptions, not just to humanity, but ultimately, to civilization.” …

“Right now, we have a market that is governed by rules that were written by the carbon incumbents to reward the dirtiest, filthiest, most poisonous, most toxic, most war-mongering fields from hell, rather than the cheap, clean, green, wholesome, and patriotic fields from heaven. We need to rationalize our marketplace so that it does the things that market is supposed to do, which is to create a society that we’re all proud of and that will sustain our children.”3

In 2023, RFK, Jr., an environmental lawyer, activist, and educator, became the only presidential candidate since his uncle’s death to speak both openly and truthfully against JFK’s enemies and in support of the kind of political and economic solutions that angered his uncle’s and father’s assassins.4

A war on carbon is not going to solve the problem if we don’t have a habitat left at the end. My approach to energy is using free markets and not top-down control. We can recover what we had, but we just have to stay out of fear because that is the weapon of tyrants.5

At this late date, status quo climate change efforts will cause “major disruptions, not just to humanity, but ultimately, to civilization.” Which means the decades of damage done by the deep political conspirators who killed the Kennedys must be understood in greater perspective — that of deep time.

We are actually still in the ice age (a.k.a. Quaternary glaciation) that began about 2.58 million years ago during the late Pliocene. Ice ages alternate between glacial periods (colder and more ice) and interglacial periods (warmer and less ice). “The Earth is currently in an interglacial, and the last glacial period ended about 11,700 years ago. All that remains of the continental ice sheets are the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets, and smaller glaciers such as on Baffin Island.”6 If it was not an ice age, there would be no ice at all, even at high elevations.

So our carbon increase is accelerating the current interglacial period. The Earth has been in this interglacial period, known as the Holocene, for more than 11,000 years. The previous interglacial lasted 28,000 years. Scientists once thought that orbital forcing predicted the next glacial period beginning in around 50,000 years, even without human-made global warming. Later science at best doubled that timeline, and at worst extended it exponentially.

“The amount of anthropogenic greenhouse gases emitted into Earth’s oceans and atmosphere is predicted to delay the next glacial period by between 100,000 and 500,000 years, which otherwise would begin in around 50,000 years.”7

So, barring new technological and political solutions, we will suffer from the current acceleration of the Holocene interglacial for millennia, even if we take steps to stop it now. Our climate change will be a few hundred thousand years of man-made suffering, not 28,000-year interglacials or million-plus-year ice ages. That worst-case scenario means bad news for many generations, but not necessarily all.

Our species of human has been around for at least 35,000 years, all human species for about six-million years. The previous ice age, or Karoo Ice Age, occurred from 360–260 million years ago. So humans evolved for 3.4 million years before experiencing ice and snow. Our species appeared during an interglacial period, and has thrived during the current interglacial.

In evolutionary terms, that means we have genes, long unexpressed, that can re-express themselves quickly enough for survival. This Holocene interglacial of this Pliocene-Quaternary glaciation will probably seem as bad as a non-ice age due to the current positive feedback from increased atmospheric CO2. It will likely result in a negative feedback and a delayed glacial period a few hundred thousand years from now as long as it does not become a runaway greenhouse like the one that explains Venus’ atmosphere.8

Before anyone realized it was a problem, Kennedy’s predecessor identified the actual cause of man-made climate change, along with its common-sense solution. President Eisenhower, in his iconic farewell address, did not expose the military-industrial complex. He actually endorsed its necessity and existence, which he helped father. What he warned against was the “disastrous rise of misplaced power” by not keeping it under the control of statesmanship and democratic principles. His warning included a second entity, whose now forgotten name he also coined, the “scientific-technological elite.” He warned against it becoming corrupted by reliance on funding by the government, and thereby capturing public policy. Those parts of Eisenhower’s speech were voiced in spirit by Kennedy in his own speeches, and acted upon by him. John and Robert Kennedy took Eisenhower’s warnings to heart and that got them killed. In the post-RFK assassinocracy, those who dare to heed Eisenhower’s warning, like RFK, Jr., must negotiate a different and more dangerous path to power.

ENDNOTES:

Farris Lova Rookstool III is the Bizzaro Ferris Bueller.

In John Hughs’ iconic 1986 film, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, Ferris is a laid-back, cool, charming, computer savvy, high school student. (“Oh, he’s very popular.... The sportos, the motorheads, geeks, sluts, bloods, waistoids, dweebies, dickheads — they all adore him. They think he’s a righteous dude.”)

Ferris Bueller is anti-authoritarian. He uses his creativity to defy the mind-numbing, censored, bowdlerized history taught by school authorities. (“I do have a test today. ... It’s on European socialism. I mean, really, what’s the point? I’m not European. I don’t plan on being European. So who cares if they’re socialists? They could be fascist anarchists. It still doesn’t change the fact that I don’t own a car.”)

He takes his days off by faking illnesses to skip school. (“How could I possibly be expected to handle school on a day like this?”) Those days are spent exploring freedom, fun, and culture with friends while ducking his bamboozled school principal and family members.

Farris L. Rookstool III is the nefarious opposite of Ferris Bueller. He is one of “The Real Conspiracy Nuts.”1 Now a self-employed marketing and public relations consultant (i.e., professional prevaricator), he was for 11 years (1984-1995) the FBI’s “expert” on the assassination of President Kennedy (i.e., the FBI’s conspiracy-denying fantasy version). Farris describes himself on LinkedIn.com, “as their primary resource on the JFK Task Force and spent over nine years reading more than 500,000 pages of classified investigative reports concerning the assassination.” He further promotes himself as “the world’s leading expert on the assassination….”

Was Farris a “one-man task force,” as superspy Matt Helm was promoted in the 1960s novels and movies? How did Rookstool read all those pages? What was his daily routine? To read 500,000 pages in 11 years, you have to read 45,454 and a half pages a year. That’s over 3.7K pages a month. That’s a daily reading of over 126 pages, over 15-pages an hour in a normal workday. That’s about four minutes per page. Nonstop. Seven days a week. For 11 years. FBI documents are not light reading like Matt Helm spy novels.

Fortunately, in 2017, Dallas Observer reporter Stephen Young gave us a less hyperbolized glimpse of Farris’ former job.

Whenever someone in the bureau needed access to the redacted information, he or she called Rookstool in Dallas, where an unredacted copy of the records was kept, and he read the information on a secure telephone. Because of all the time he spent working with the Kennedy file, he says, there’s a good chance he’s already read whatever will be released Thursday.2

There’s a “good chance” he read “whatever.” That’s not the same as actually reading and comprehending all of it, as Farris usually spins it. The good news is, Farris had time for a day off. But, that doesn’t mean he took a rest.

There are more reality checks of Farris’ FBI job description.

In a strange but true example of Rookstool’s lofty, so-called expertise, one of the classified files reportedly handled by his task force was released in 2017 thanks to the JFK Assassination Records Review Act. Dated three weeks before Martin Luther King, Jr.’s assassination, the document “alleges that [King] had a string of affairs and other ‘sexual aberrations’, as well as links to the Communist Party.”

Mr. Kennedy is not referenced in the file and it is not clear why it was kept secret for almost 50 years.

There is no evidence that any of the claims in the report were verified.

Its cover shows it was assessed in 1994 by an FBI task force on the JFK assassination, which concluded none of the document should be released.

Many of the allegations contained in the paper appear to be reports of private conversations between others, or hearsay reported third-hand.3

The allegation that MLK was a seditious conspirator was itself a wacky, baseless conspiracy theory. Researcher and author Joseph E. Green’s assessment is more honest: “Especially at the time, newspapers and the FBI said that he was a Communist plant and that Russia was paying Martin Luther King. Which is a conspiracy theory in itself. Right? If you say that Russians have sponsored Martin Luther King’s rise to power, that is a conspiracy theory — maybe true, maybe false, without any evidence — but it is a conspiracy theory. So it tells you that that’s an acceptable conspiracy theory to have in the ‘60s about Martin Luther King.”4

Four years before it was released, and nine years after it was assessed by Rookstool’s task force, Joseph Green summarized that FBI document’s historical context in his essay, “The MLK 10-Point Program.”

1. The MLK that is sold to the public was not the MLK of 1968.

2. MLK had clear, well-defined enemies within the government.

3. Dr. King was set up to go to the site of his assassination by the FBI.

   

4. This is one of the most famous photographs in the world. See the guy crouching over King’s body? At the time, he was an undercover police agent and an informant for the FBI. He later joined the CIA.

5. James Earl Ray was a patsy.

6. Much like the JFK case, there are enormous problems with the ballistics evidence, the rifle, and the angle of the shot.

7. The resources required to both finance and supply the materials Ray used in his travels after the shooting imply government agency.

8. Ray didn’t get a fair trial.

9. The FBI had a guy they wanted to write the book on the King assassination. He did write it—the author’s name is Gerold Frank.

10. A civil trial found that Lloyd Jowers and “other government forces” conspired to kill Dr. King, not James Earl Ray.5

Unsurprisingly, Green’s historical context clarifies why Rookstool’s task force kept this fake conspiracy secret — to continue the FBI’s complicity in the real conspiracy behind Dr. King’s murder.

Withholding evidence relevant to a legal proceeding is considered spoliation of evidence. Rookstool’s FBI task force was aware of its withholding of this document before, during, and after the 1999 conspiracy verdict in King’s murder. The same evidentiary rules apply to all of the 500,000 pages of classified JFK files Rookstool “read.” Keeping criminal evidence secret to hide one’s complicity is not “national security,” the umbrella term used to justify gratuitous secrecy. It is obstruction of justice by evidence tampering.

Farris is authoritarian. He works to protect the lies of official historians — the lies with which schools indoctrinate their students. Farris uses an old psychological trick well known to the FBI and the Warren Commission. It is a logical fallacy known as appeal to authority, or argument from authority, based on the Asch effect. (“There is no other person, to date who has read all 500,000 pages of classified material. There is no other historian out there who was invited by Caroline Kennedy and John Jr. to go through all their material. There is no other historian who broadcast live from Dealey Plaza during the 50th, which I was fortunate to do for ABC News.”6) Farris’ not so subtle message is: don’t do your own thinking, just trust expert Farris, the GOAT. In the 1950s, the psychology experiments of Solomon Asch showed people tend to agree with assertions of perceived authority figures even though they know the assertions are wrong.

When he was young, Farris Rookstool might have seemed to be a bit more like Ferris Bueller. (“I never really understood what a Historian did in Junior High and High School [sic]. Having a history teacher, they were always kind of the nerdy type of teachers that you just didn’t know what they would do outside of the classroom.”7) Young Rookstool seemed brave enough even to defy authority:

… I started out believing in a big conspiracy … I had read all these conspiracy books and the Garrison Investigation [sic], Mark Lane’s book, Rush to Judgment, and Forgive My Grief, by Penn Jones and Sylvia Meagher’s book that she wrote on the assassination, Accessories, After the Fact, and Harold Weisberg’s trilogy of books that he wrote on the assassination. So all these works, the original, I call them the “early thinkers”, the early critics, I started subscribing to their theories. And, I started believing that perhaps, there was a conspiracy. And I can still remember my parents saying that to me, ‘Oh, good God, don’t tell anyone that you’re reading all this JFK stuff because people are getting killed and witnesses are dying off. … They’re disappearing!’ So, I would read at nighttime, under the sheets with a flashlight, in my bedroom. I’d read these books and various literature and again, I started subscribing to some of the conspiracies.”8

But any early, supposed similarity to Ferris Bueller did not last long. After high school Farris studied to be a medical illustrator/photographer. In a 2014 radio interview, he talked about his role in the 1981 exhumation of Oswald.

And, I worked my first significant job, that I had — I was a medical artist and medical photographer at what is now know as the University of Texas, Southwestern Medical School. At that time, it was called UT Health Science Center at Dallas. And I worked with all the doctors that treated President Kennedy. And then subsequently, I was on the exhumation team as the medical photographer for digging up Lee Harvey Oswald that occurred in October, the 4th, 1981.9

As the medical photographer at Oswald’s exhumation, Farris saw and photographed evidence of conspiracy. I described that evidence in my essay, “The Imitation Game”:

The pathologists assigned to the case officially identified the body as Oswald’s. However, the funeral director who originally buried the body insisted it could not be the same since the one he buried clearly showed a craniotomy, which had been done during autopsy, and the exhumed skull showed no craniotomy. Also, the pathologists used dental records to identify the corps, but ignored the fact that Oswald had lost a front tooth in a fight in high school (there is a photo of him in class with a gap-tooth smile, and many classmates remember the fight and the missing tooth). The exhumed skull had a full set of natural front teeth.10

The “world’s leading expert on the assassination” should know that photographs of “Oswald’s” exhumed corps are evidence of conspiracy.11 Staying quiet about that evidence makes him complicit.

Farris did not just read the conspiracy books. He comes off as an ambitious buff, an eager fan boy, the lamest kind of student of murder. He collects souvenirs and memorabilia of the assassination. He collected signed copies of books about it. Nearly halfway into his “expert” tenure at the FBI, he phoned leading Warren Commission critic Harold Weisberg and wrote fan letters to him asking to purchase his books.12

In those letters, Farris revealed he was a close friend of Mary Ferrell and her husband, Buck. Mary was a magnet to JFK assassination students and investigators because of her legendary collection of JFK assassination files, publications, and her card-catalog database, most of which was put online by the Mary Ferrell Foundation after her 2004 death. Why Farris, who is reading the classified FBI files, convinced by them that Oswald acted alone, would be doting on “conspiracy theorists” like Ferrell and Weisberg seems bizzare — unless he had darker secrets. Ferrell’s early public image as a serious, honest chronicler of the assassination began to suffer by the early 1990s when private stories of her hidden agenda began to leak.

Author Harrison Livingstone, one of the first to publicly expose Mary Ferrell as an agent provocateur, also had some of the earliest doubts about Farris.

I personally felt that Farris Rookstool had a certain amount of good will and a somewhat open mind for evidence in the case, but it was impossible to deal with him due to the immense damage already done by both sides. Even worse was the fact that Mary Ferrell seemed to attempt to manipulate the FBI for her own purposes, chief among them to get other researchers into trouble, never mind the fact that she was pushing a great deal of false evidence on this nation….13

Author Joseph McBride, who does not mention Rookstool, had his own revealing encounters with Farris’ BFF around the same time.

My dealings with Mary Ferrell in 1985-86 were what made me aware of her duplicity. I first called her to ask her confidential advice about a previously unknown FBI document I had found that seriously undermined the Warren Commission’s lone gunman theory, and she betrayed my trust (see Chapter 15). After being thus alerted to her dishonest modus operandi, I began delving into her dubious background and concluded that after the assassination she set up shop with the backing of the federal government to serve as a clearing house and watchdog in Dallas, doling out favors while actually going about her main business of keeping tabs on what researchers were doing and selectively, subtly feeding them disinformation. As a result of her clever application of spycraft and her faux-motherly act, many researchers naively regarded her as a guru with a disinterested dedication to the truth. When I called her again in 1992 to request an in-person interview about her background and involvement in the case, she pressed me hard to find out what aspects of the assassination I was researching, and when I carefully gave her only general answers, saying that my areas of interest included the roles played by researchers, she refused to meet with me and said she didn’t want to be interviewed about her own background. [Dallas Tippit researcher Greg] Lowrey said, “Mary stays in the shadows. Her agenda is subtle and devious: ‘What are you going to do with it?’” Penn Jones gave me some good advice: “Stay away from her.”14

Having been mentored by her, it seems nefarious Farris became the new fallacious Farrell.

Larry Howard, the late co-director of the JFK Assassination Information Center in Dallas (AIC), was another magnet to JFK assassination students and investigators, but as a true conspiracy realist. Howard did groundbreaking research, and personally knew many researchers, authors, and witnesses quite well. When Oliver Stone was filming JFK, he hired Howard as one of his main technical consultants. Dr. Grover B. Proctor, Jr., an historian, former university dean, and true expert on the assassination, interviewed Larry Howard about the advice he gave to Oliver Stone.15

“The internecine warfare that has erupted among Warren Commission critics does not surprise Howard, though he finds himself in the middle of it. ‘I told Oliver before we started this film, your problem is not going to be with the CIA or the FBI; it’s going to be with the other researchers. And sure enough it was.’”16

Howard knew what he was talking about, and he knew Ferrell and Rookstool. Before being hired by Stone, Howard confessed some trepidation about a developing investigation by him and his AIC. “One, the story needs to be investigated more to make sure everything we have here is true, and two, we’re scared to death.”17

Larry Howard confessed to me personally, in 1993, fear for his life just before having the two “strokes” that killed him.

Farris worked with other deceivers at Dallas’ Sixth Floor Museum which, from its inception in 1989, has been dedicated to denying the conspiracy: “Paid and volunteer assassination researchers included G. Robert Blakey, former chief counsel and staff director of the House Select Committee on Assassinations; volunteers Jim Moore, Farris Rookstool, and Carl Henry; ...”18

Notable among these Sixth Floor Museum conspiracy deniers was Charles Briggs Sr. When Briggs died, researchers reading his obituary discovered his double-dealing background:

As a long term gatekeeper of CIA records, Briggs’ career extended far beyond his actual service years. Upon retirement he became an “annuitant”, an officially retired CIA officer still on the payroll and available for assignments. We don’t have a listing of all those assignments — yet — but we do know he was called back to work on documents being released under the JFK Records Act and in response the work of the Assassinations Records Review Board in the 1990s.

Briggs’ obituary also lists another very interesting project — serving as “liaison for creation of the Sixth Floor Museum in Dallas, Texas, dedicated to the JFK Assassination.” Understanding that particular assignment has also proved to be quite educational — but that’s a story in itself.19

Farris was collaborating, at least indirectly, with a CIA officer on publicly spinning conspiracy-denial fantasies, and gatekeeping assassination records. That is just about everything you need to know about Rookstool’s real agenda. It was the now infamous, 1967 “CIA Dispatch #1035-960" that first pushed the label “conspiracy theorist” to its secret, mass-media assets as the go-to smear attack against anyone who challenged the govenment’s official narrative.20

To offset appearances, Farris spins himself publicly as an accidental JFK buff. (“And it was something that I never, in my wildest dreams would have imagined me spending my entire adult life talking about. … you take a Historian, a Law Enforcement Investigative Analyst, Medical Illustrator/Medical Photographer [sic] and then you also take someone who was around to be able to know the principal characters — the doctors, the witnesses, et cetera and all that just neatly made me who I am today.”) So said the guy who read all the conspiracy books at night under the sheets with a flashlight in bed, wrote fan letters to the authors, and collected signed copies. He further undermined his pretense of detachment when he explained how he got the job of reading the classified FBI files: “And, it’s like anything. If you show too much interest in something, you get assigned the case.” [emphasis added]21

Farris also pretends it was happenstance that he found himself working with the Parkland doctors and talking to them about Kennedy’s wounds which (implausibly) changed his mind about the conspiracy.

There was a doctor, who I worked with; he’s now deceased, named Charlie Baxter. Charlie is the one who came forward to all the doctors at Southwestern and he said, “Ok, guys, let’s get our stories straight, what occurred. We’ll write our narratives. Let’s do all this, but let’s make an agreement that we’re not going to get into that slippery slope by conducting interviews. So, let’s not talk about this any further.” It wasn’t based on a sinister position. It was based on the fact, that he wanted a cohesive medical report that is — his description of it was, that would, “stand the test of time” — to say, “We only had this patient in here for this period of time. This is all we can say, based on what we were able to treat the President, and anything outside the scope of Trauma Room One and Two is really subject to speculation and innuendo, and all that. And, we can’t as a teaching hospital and medical school in training medical professionals, we can’t get into those realms of possibilities and this and that.”

So again, Charlie’s initial intent was good, but people have twisted that to believe that maybe, they were coached or in fact maybe, they were told by government people that this is what the official line should be about the bullets and how they entered and et cetera.22

The only twisting going on here is by Farris. His twist is not the dance craze done by Ferris Bueller. But it is a craze.

Dr. Baxter’s “let’s agree on a narrative and a code of silence” is the exemplification of conspiracy. Farris’ “good intention” rationalization does the trick only if none of the doctors talked, — and some did.23 As explained by Mr. McBride:

The Parkland doctors’ reports on November 22 about shots from the front were quickly buried after the initial reports in the media. The original recordings of the press conference held by Doctors Malcolm Perry and Kemp Clark at Parkland Hospital at 3:16 P.M. that Friday have been missing for many years; they reportedly were seized by the Secret Service. The official transcript prepared by White House stenographer Wayne Hawks was also said for many years to be missing, but it has since surfaced in the Lyndon B. Johnson Presidential Library and Museum. Although Dr. Perry later suggested to the Warren Commission, after considerable pressure had been applied to him by the government, that he “misunderstood” questions about the throat wound in the “bedlam” of the press conference, he showed no doubt at the press conference that it was a wound of entrance, making that point repeatedly….24

It was through the official handling of the whole matter that, “they were told by government people that this is what the official line should be....”

A code of silence is the only way to preserve the false, official narrative of Kennedy’s wounds. Even Kennedy’s personal physician kept quiet about his own role at Parkland Hospital. The conspiracy is that obvious, as former Warren Commission Assistant Counsel Arlen Specter found out when he ran for president in 1995.25

In support of another official lie, Farris was asked by the Dallas Historical Society to write the text for the plaque to be placed at the Oak Cliff site of the murder of Dallas Police Officer J.D. Tippit. So, of course, the marker falsely accuses Oswald of shooting and killing Tippit. Thankfully, we have the serious, honest, extensive analysis of Joseph McBride, who concluded:

While it is frustrating that we can never be entirely certain about all the facts of the Tippit killing, as is the case with many other poorly investigated and vigorously obfuscated aspects of the events that weekend in Dallas, many facts about both the Kennedy and Tippit killings that contradict the official version of events have long been known. And now, after an effort involving many years of research on the scene of the crime and in various archives, I have been able, with the help of many concerned citizens, both witnesses and researchers, to piece together a more complete picture than has ever been assembled before, one that suggests that the murder of Officer Tippit was something more than chance and misfortune. Like the assassination itself, the Tippit killing, and the officer’s futile pursuit of Oswald that preceded it, was not a meaningless, random encounter that demonstrates the absurd chaos of history and, as such, can easily be dismissed, but it was instead an important part of a calculated plan to overthrow the United States government, to end our relatively young nation’s experiment with democracy. And that plan worked.26

In a hubristic homage to the proverb, “no honor among theives,” Farris even co-opted the work of a fellow conspiracy denier, Dale K. Myers, to make a splash on a local, 50th anniversary TV news special. (“There is no other historian who broadcast live from Dealey Plaza during the 50th, which I was fortunate to do for ABC News.”) The work concerned the authenticity of an alleged wallet of Oswald’s found at the Tippit murder scene, complete with cards identifying Oswald by his alias, Alek James Hidel. Farris claimed the wallet was authentic, and anointed himself as the first who did the work to figure that out. Myers had spent many years studying the wallet and proved it was not Oswald’s. He wrote about his proof in his book, which Myers said Farris read just weeks before doing the special. Myers fired back on his blog: “Anyone with a brain knows that if Oswald’s wallet had been found at the Tippit murder scene it would have been printed in every newspaper and broadcast on every radio and television station in America before the end of the day, Friday, November 22, 1963.”27

Farris can’t fool all of the people all of the time, not even in the quisling news media. To their credit, the editors at Vanity Fair magazine were having none of his preoccupations in 2008. Their gut reaction to Farris nailed him:

On the heels of our April story on Jack Worthington—the Canada-based banker who believes he could be the illegitimate son of John F. Kennedy (“A Claim to Camelot”)—four readers have approached Vanity Fair to disclose that they harbor similar suspicions about themselves. …

Strangest of all is the claim by Texas P.R. man Farris Rookstool III, who asserts that not only did he spend years as an F.B.I. expert examining the J.F.K.-assassination files (which turns out to be true) but, quite coincidentally, he also dated Worthington’s sister Nancy in the 1990s (which she confirms).

Rather than follow up on “P.R. man” Rookstool’s JFK-related love life, Vanity Fair made a quick exit stage left: “All of which is a way of saying that for the time being we’re Kennedy Conspiracy’d out, thank you.”28

There is method even to this particular letter-to-the-editor madness. Farris helps promote one of the biggest lies about, and distractions from the conspiracy reality of JFK’s assassination: the ingrained, stubbornly persistent, salacious, urban legend that JFK had extramarital affairs.29

As can be seen in an October 2022 broadcast interview by WTVJ-TV, NBC 6 South Florida, Farris repeats many rhetorical ploys used for decades30 to set the media agenda for conspiracy denial and distraction:

• nothing to see in the withheld files;

• if there was, it would have been destroyed;

• nothing is going to change;

• nobody will read them anyway.

He advances the fallacy that only by reading every secret file can anybody know anything — and Farris is the only one who has read them all. (“Yeah, right. Dry that one out, you can fertilize the lawn.”) You don’t need to examine every rock on a mountain to know it’s a mountain. Perhaps the most sophisticated (literally sophist) of his ruses is his emphasis on motive. It is a clever one because motives have nothing to do with conspiracy. They are essential only to a lone gunman, and as even Farris points out, Oswald had none. Motives are poor conspiracy evidence because, by definition, conspiracies have multiple motives. Playing the motive-guessing game gives us a false sense of accomplishment. If you focus on them, you are distracted from the real proof — physical evidence and connections.31 Once the conspiracy is the official truth, and the conspirators are publicly known, their many motives will become apparent.

Farris Rookstool III uses his authoritarian deception to produce the mind-numbing, bowdlerized history that is taught in school and repeated by mass media authorities. The biggest Bizzarro World difference between nefarious Farris and hilarious Ferris is that the former fakes wellness, and never takes a day off from his ailments: conspiracy denial, disinformation, propaganda, and trickery.

First-generation critic Maggie Field said, “Until we can get to the bottom of the Kennedy assassination, this country is going to remain a sick country. No matter what we do. Because we cannot live with that crime. We just can’t. The threat is too great. There are forces in this country who have gotten away with this thing, and will strike again. And not any one of us is safe.”32

According to clues in the film, the calendar date of Ferris Bueller’s day off was discovered to be June 5, 1985, about a year before the movie’s release, June 11, 1986.33 June 5 is also the day of the assassination of President Kennedy’s brother, Senator Robert F. Kennedy, Sr., by a conspiracy in 1968.34 Let’s take that day off. Let’s call it “Farris Rookstool’s Day Off,” a day to go on strike in protest of the metaphorical Rookstools of the world. Isn’t it time Farris Rookstool had a day off — so a sick world can begin to heal? (“Anyone? Anyone?”)

ENDNOTES:

1

See my essay, “The Real Conspiracy Nuts,” bartholoviews.substack.com

Bartholoviews

The Real Conspiracy Nuts

Certainly anyone who has the power to make you believe absurdities has the power to make you commit injustices.—Voltaire, Questions sur les miracles “If both the past and the external world exist only in the mind, and if the mind itself is controllable—what then…

Read more

4 years ago · Richard Bartholomew

10

Richard Bartholomew, “The Imitation Game,” bartholoviews.substack.com

Bartholoviews

The Imitation Game

"Everyone will know who I am now." —Lee Harvey Oswald, spoken during his interrogation in disapointment that his cover was blown, November 22, 1963, according to Deputy Sheriff Roger Craig. “I’m just a patsy.” —Lee Harvey Oswald, spoken at a press conference at Dallas Police headquarters the night of his arrest, November 22, 1963, as a suspect in the as…

Read more

3 years ago · 2 likes · Richard Bartholomew

25

See my essays, “Certain Death: Dr. Burkley’s Big, Dark Secret,” and “True Believers: Tom Snyder Talks to Arlen Specter,” bartholoviews.substack.com

Bartholoviews

Certain Death

The late arrival at Parkland Hospital of Admiral George G. Burkley, the President’s personal physician, prevented Kennedy from receiving emergency steroids. That neglect assured that Kennedy would die even if his wounds had been less severe. Official and authoritative lies about these facts may appear to be for the purpose of protecting Burkley’s career…

Read more

3 years ago · Richard Bartholomew

Bartholoviews

True Believers: Tom Snyder Talks to Arlen Specter

Author’s note (Feb. 27, 2023): Arlen Specter (1930-2012), the Warren Commission legal assistant, and later senator from Pennsylvania, is infamous for his fabrication of what became known as the “Single Bullet Theory” (a baseless fantasy, not a theory…

Read more

4 years ago · Richard Bartholomew

30

See my essay, “True Believers Part 2: Conspiracy-Denial Bigotry in Mass Media,” bartholoviews.substack.com

Bartholoviews

True Believers Part 2: Conspiracy-Denial Bigotry in Mass Media

Author's note: Two years after writing “True Believers: Tom Snyder Talks to Arlen Specter,” I took another close look at the media’s aiding and abetting the government’s big lies. I have learned that I could study this totalitarian behavior at any given period and get the same results. As social media has matured, so has public savviness of official gas…

Read more

4 years ago · Richard Bartholomew

31

Nik Zecevic, “Former FBI Analyst Weighs In On JFK Assassination Records,” WTVJ/NBC (channel 6) South Florida, October 24, 2022. Accessed May 9, 2023. https://www.lx.com/community/former-fbi-analyst-weighs-in-on-jfk-assassination-records/58980/;

See my essay, “The Danger of Using Motive as Evidence of Conspiracy,” bartholoviews.substack.com

Bartholoviews

The Danger of Using Motive as Evidence of Conspiracy

Author’s note (Feb. 2023): Too many students of the Kennedy assassination conspiracy have a bad habit of naming conspirators based on the presence or absence of motive. It keeps those who could otherwise help resolve the crime entangled in a counterproductive pseudo-debate. In this excerpt, I gave an example of naming a suspected conspirator without rel…

Read more

4 years ago · Richard Bartholomew

34

See my essay, “2024: RFK Jr.’s Deep Political Gambit,” bartholoviews.substack.com

Bartholoviews

2024: RFK Jr.'s Deep Political Gambit

“Until we can get to the bottom of the Kennedy assassination, this country is going to remain a sick country. No matter what we do. Because we cannot live with that crime. We just can’t. The threat is too great. There are forces in this country who have gotten away with this thing, and will strike again. And not any one of us is safe…

Read more

3 years ago · 1 like · Richard Bartholomew

“The rules are simple: they lie to us, we know they’re lying, they know we know they’re lying, but they keep lying to us, and we keep pretending to believe them.” —Elena Gorokhova, A Mountain of Crumbs, 2010

When President Kennedy was assassinated, everyone knew intuitively it was a conspiracy. Even without the details, we knew it was a conspiracy. It was never a mystery. First-generation Warren Commission critic, Vincent J. Salandria, called it a “false mystery.”1

Then came the mix of truth and lies. It is like a mountain of loose pieces mixed from different jigsaw puzzles. They represent information, misinformation, disinformation, and missing pieces representing withheld information. It takes time and effort to sort through the pieces. The conspirators sneak more false pieces into the mix as the puzzle takes shape. Long ago, the partially assembled segments quickly confirmed the obvious — conspiracy.

Those unattentive to the assembly, the majority, remain distracted. The conspirators2 reinforce their distraction with flattery and rewards of favored status. Those who keep removing and replacing the same pieces are afforded neutral status and encouraged to keep up the “good work.” The conspirators punish the attentive assemblers, who see the obvious conspiracy picture, with insult, smear, vilification, shame, and worse. They wear their punishment as a badge of honor. Their comfort zone is working to find and fit more extraneous pieces. Their effort is counerproductive and it gives them a false sense of accomplishment.

The assembled picture shows something else important that is ignored by nearly everyone: the question, “What now?” The question nobody seems to ask is, “What do we do now?”

Extending the jigsaw puzzle model, the conspirators watch the assembly to learn which connecting pieces to remove from the mix, so as to further impead the progress. They also watch attempts by the attentive assemblers to focus the distracted majority with debates, petitions, mock trials, books, conferences, films, and file releases. L. Fletcher Prouty explained the dynamics of this game in a 1990 letter to Jim Garrison.

“The whole story of the POWER of the Cover-up comes down to a few points,” wrote Prouty. “There has never been a Grand Jury and trial in Texas. Without a trial there can be nothing. Without a trial it does no good for researchers to dig up data. It has no place to go and what the researchers reveal just helps make the cover-up tighter, or they eliminate that evidence and the researcher.”3

As with any problem, the first and most neglected option is to do nothing. In the case of official assassination conspiracies, however, that has been the default, whether by choice (denial, avoidance, fear) or not (ignorance, gaslighting, counterproductive effort).

So, what can we do now? We can start the endgame. In the chess model, the endgame is the final set of moves to victory against an opponent. It was dramatized in the climax of the film, Searching for Bobby Fisher. In this 10-minute YouTube clip, the endgame begins at minute mark 4:30. 

At minute 5:30 we hear the line, “Don’t move until you see it.” It means there is a sure path to victory that can be seen in advance. Making any other move becomes a waste of time, and puts the victory at risk. That is where we stand at present with resolving the JFK assassination. The problem we face is that few know the chess game is even happening, and fewer still know how to analyze the board position.

In my “Gordian Knot” essay, I wrote:

Any previously unknown evidence that surfaces could of course be added to the endgame. But the purpose is to devise a strategy that could have been used at any time since the assassination, and still can be by using the proof we have. The idea is to stop playing the conspirators’ game of trying to untie their Gordian knot, and force a resolution. Theirs is a waiting game designed not to end but just to wait; for one more book, one more scrap of evidence, one more declassified file, one more film, one more conference, one more online forum; one more debate, one more mock trial, ad infinitum.4

The central idea of the endgame is to stop waiting.

Waiting and wasting time and effort is the central idea behind King Gordias’ knot. The King had no intention of giving up his power so he designed a game that could not be won. It only reinforced feelings of unworthyness in its players. In a modern-day version, Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry updated the game as an unwinnable battle simulation for Starfleet Academy cadets. He called it The Kobayashi Maru.5

I said in the “Gordian Knot” what I want to see happen: “We need a new paradigm, like a think tank, to replace the status quo of a precarious, loose, ragtag public resistance which, seen from outside our bubble, is a total half-century failure.”6

What’s in the remaining files? Shoe sizes. Once you have the shoe size of every conspirator, what then?
“Shoe size” is my metaphore for the gratuitous search for every last shred of conspiracy evidence. We do not need anything in the remaining files for the endgame. We don’t need to examine every rock on a mountain to know it’s a mountain.

As President Kennedy said in his “Address to Irish Parliament” (June 28, 1963): “The problems of the world cannot possibly be solved by skeptics or cynics whose horizons are limited by the obvious realities. We need men who can dream of things that never were.”

I wrote in the “The Gordian Knot”:

[The] first of all the books proving the conspiracy shows our folly in thinking that yet another book will change anything. We have always known the truth and it has not set us free. Our messianic fixation on the power of books to end the coup continues to be our worst delusion. That is the Gordian knot tied by the conspirators to distract us.

The one thing we have never had is an endgame....

We cannot change the conspirators, nor can we reach an imaginary critical mass through public education, but we can change ourselves — and we must if we want to stop playing their Gordian knot games. 

As Lennon and McCartney wrote, “You tell me it’s the institution/ Well you know, you’d better free your mind instead.” Because freeing our minds is the one true revolutionary act.

Only then will we weaponize the law and the truth and, as Charles Drago put it, “Return the goddamn fire in Dealey Plaza!”7

The Warren Report was an act of terror, a classic Big Lie. Its lies were torn apart before it was written. It is a fairytale.8 The liars want us to keep searching for Cinderella. That is the game they designed. The prince’s slipper fitting was gratuitous, like the shoe sizes in the files. You do not dance all night at a royal ball with the love of your life — love at first sight — and fail to recognize her afterward.

We can stop playing these games and stop the lies now, any time we want. How? As long as the Warren Commission Report is the official lie, there is no massive, official criminality. Stopping that one Big Lie forces everything to change.

Acclaimed researcher of deep politics, the late John Judge recognized the need for an endgame when he pursued citizen-petitioned grand juries along with other legislative and judicial efforts. Panning for gold dust in the files will never stop. It will continue with or without an endgame. We pretend, however, that it is the endgame. Belief in books and file releases as the primary agent of change is a comfort zone, a wrongheaded belief and habit we must break. (“You’d better free your mind instead.”)

The half-century-plus failure of files and books to make a difference is cold hard history. Those who do not understand that history are doomed to repeat it. Those who understand it are doomed to watch it repeat — unless we take the responsibility that comes with our hard-earned knowledge. The public majority know the conspiracy only intuitively and will never reach a critical mass at a scholarly level of knowledge until the lies stop. Many, perhaps most, will not be properly educated even after the lies stop. What they will do is accept conspiracy because it will be “authorized.” As the Navajo saying goes, “You can’t wake a person who is pretending to be asleep.”

It is folly for us to dig and beg for scraps of truth for another fifty years. When we end the official propaganda of denial of these crimes, we will also end any corrupt justification for hiding their details. Critical mass will not come from shouting louder, as the boy did in “The Emperor’s New Clothes.” It will come from putting the truth on public, legal record. It was not the end of denial by the king’s subjects that changed everything. It was the king’s own acceptance that he was naked. Let us now force that acceptance.

People recognize the ring of truth. It is the appeal of editorial cartoons. John Judge said in a November 1994 speech in Dallas that he always read the cartoons because it was the only place in the newspaper he could find any truth. My own cartoons have been popular.9 It is the stigma of deep politics that kept even my friends and family from reading my writing. Being widely read has been new in my experience.

I realized that in this era of new media, books maintain power. The medium really is the message. So I embrace it in those terms. At the same time, I wrote in my book that books will not make a difference. Individually and personally, yes. But they have not stopped the official lies. Nor will they. The endgame is about finding what will. (“Don’t move until you see it.”)

We all have an equal right to our opinions, but opinions themselves are not equal. Informed opinions are better. Opinion journalism is not an oxymoron. It is a time-honored profession that includes editorial cartooning. Fox News and other mass news media are neither journalism nor opinion. Any news organization that has lied, and still lies, about the assassinocracy is propaganda.

We cannot know all details of a conspiracy, by definition, but the conspirators and their accessories do know, and we know more than enough to get all the details from them.

If you want a democracy, you have to resolve the Kennedy assassination. We do not need to prove who authorized it. Knowing that it was authorized is enough. We have seen examples of deep political secret histories, from the 1971 Vietnam War Pentagon Papers to the 2023 Russo-Ukranian War Pentagon Papers, and some in-between. It would be impossible for the conspirators to lie to us and keep us ignorant for generations if they were not truthful and knowledgeable among themselves. We have long had enough proof of the conspiracy and conspirators. What we do not yet have is the power to force the usurpers of our government to give us the details of their conspiracy. We must use the proof we already have to force full disclosure. The remaining facts and details will flow freely after.

An effective endgame requires a strategy that will stop the conspirators’ ability to lie. The chess term for one such strategy is zugzwang, a forced board position in which one’s opponent must make only an unwanted move that worsens their position. If we find all the correct moves in advance and play them flawlessly to the end, the deep state cannot stop us. Forcing official acceptance of the truth is the purpose of endgame strategy. It is the opposite of pursuing an impossible critical-mass of public consensus. Official acceptance must be forced, just as the official non-conspiracy policy has long forced us to accept the conspirators’ lies. As Thurgood Marshall used the law as a weapon for civil rights, we must use it to return the fire in Dealey Plaza. We can call the effort OZ, Operation Zugzwang.

ENDNOTES:

2

Richard Bartholomew, “The Real Conspiracy Nuts,” Garrison: The Journal of History and Deep Politics, Issue 004, Jan. 2020, pp. 8-14.) bartholoviews.substack.com

Bartholoviews

The Real Conspiracy Nuts

Certainly anyone who has the power to make you believe absurdities has the power to make you commit injustices.—Voltaire, Questions sur les miracles “If both the past and the external world exist only in the mind, and if the mind itself is controllable—what then…

Read more

4 years ago · Richard Bartholomew

4

Richard Bartholomew, “The Gordian Knot: Why 54 Years of Revelations Have Failed to Make a Difference,” The Deep State in the Heart of Texas: The Texas Connections to the Kennedy Assassination. San Antonio, Tx: Say Something Real Press, 2018, pp. 370-374; bartholoviews.substack.com

Bartholoviews

The Gordian Knot: Why 54 Years of Revelations Have Failed to Make a Difference

We all know that the ancient legend of the Gordian knot represents a no-win situation, a seemingly intractable obstacle. In the legend, it was a strand of many knots tied by King Gordius, the father of future King Midas, designed as an intricate puzzle which, if solved, would transfer his power to whomever solved it. After a great many failed attempts t…

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4 years ago · Richard Bartholomew

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. filed papers with the Federal Election Commission April 5, 2023, to enter the 2024 Democratic Party presidential primaries. He will officially announce his candidacy April 19th in Boston. It is a unique and historic moment in U.S. politics. You will not hear the corrupt mass media characterize it that way. That would require speaking what is for them the unspeakable: since the murders of Kennedy’s uncle and father, our defacto government has been an assassinocracy.

The assassinocracy is what created the lies voters believe. It is what has prevented candidates from addressing the deep political issues of our time. The takeover was secured with the assassinations of Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. and Senator Robert F. Kennedy, the last political leaders who directly addressed them. The assassinocracy is the thing to understand, and the thing to stop if you want a legitimate election. As John Judge taught us, we won’t have a democracy until we resolve the Kennedy assassination.2

In another essay on the assassinocracy, I raised the question, “How does one become a post-RFK president?” Hillary Clinton used a failed “infiltrator” strategy in 2016. In response to Clinton’s loss, RFK, in 2018, floated a second strategy in his book, American Values: Lessons I Learned from My Family. One that had not been tried openly by a major candidate. By accusing the CIA of killing his father and uncle, Robert Kennedy, Jr., made this “Track II” a direct attack on the assassinocracy.3

No one has ever run for president on a platform of openly accusing the CIA of killing President Kennedy and his brother Robert, certainly not a Kennedy. Now Bobby’s son is running for president. It is the first time a known enemy of the conspiracy has done this since his father ran in 1968.

On March 25th of that year, Bobby Kennedy spoke to a crowd of students at San Fernando Valley State College in Northridge, California. When the inevitable question came, Kennedy told them he had seen everything in the archived JFK assassination files, and they would be opened “at the appropriate time” — meaning, “when Bobby became president.”4

“The following month, Kennedy again spoke revealingly about his future investigation plans, this time with a small group of campaign aides in his room at San Francisco’s Fairmont Hotel. It was late in the evening on April 19, and Kennedy had just returned from a raucous appearance at the University of San Francisco, where a small group of antiwar radicals had charged at him, trying to hit him as he got out of his limousine. When he tried to deliver his speech, they shouted him down, screaming “Victory for the Viet Cong” and calling him a “fascist pig.” Decompressing in his hotel room later, Kennedy was in a particularly voluble mood, wanting to talk about the chaotic state of the nation and his plans to restore the country’s sanity if he reached the White House. Emboldened by Kennedy’s expansive mood, one of his aides mustered the courage to ask him about his brother’s assassination. Richard Lubic, a campaign media consultant who was in the room, later made notes on what Kennedy replied: ‘Subject to me getting elected, I would like to reopen the Warren Commission.’”5

We know RFK, Jr., knows the risk more than anyone.6 He is running anyway. Is he simply fighting for a Capraesque lost cause, or battling a quixotic impossible dream? More likely, he has learned a lesson his father and uncles did not. One none of his elected family members have learned, nor his extended political family (the Clintons, Bernie Sanders, Dennis Kucinich, et al.). It is a lesson that has been hiding in plain sight. That makes him worth watching — closely. There are strategic lessons for us all in analyzing what happens.

That lesson was passed early-on from first-generation assassination researcher Raymond Marcus to Bobby Kennedy, through his press secretary, Frank Mankiewicz.

All along Marcus had been contacting influential public figures and trying to interest them in the Kennedy case. In late May 1967, nearly two years after first writing Robert F. Kennedy, he tried contacting him again to urge him to contact Jim Garrison and see for himself whether the district attorney was on to something important.

He succeeded in reaching RFK’s press secretary, Frank Mankiewicz, who remembered the packet of material Marcus had earlier sent. “Our minds are open on the case,” Mankiewicz told him, and invited Marcus to meet with him in Senator Kennedy’s Washington office. The senator would not be there himself, but Mankiewicz assured Marcus he would bring his views, and his appraisal of those views, to RFK’s attention. …

When the meeting ended, Mankiewicz invited Marcus to come to his home to show his material to another Kennedy aide, Adam Walinsky. … Afterward Mankiewicz and Walinsky drove Marcus to National Airport. Along the way, Marcus observed that if Senator Kennedy entertained any doubts about the Warren Report, it was important that he go public with them. Walinsky replied, “What good will it do the country for Robert Kennedy to stand up and say, ‘I don't believe the Warren Report’?”

Just over a year later Marcus was watching televised coverage of RFK’s victory in the California presidential primary when Senator Kennedy was assassinated. “Walinsky’s words flashed through my mind,” Marcus recalled, “followed immediately by the thought that he might not have been shot.”7

The conspirators8 have long been desperate and afraid. Their Gordian knot is unraveling. They have never had to deal with a candidate, nor a Kennedy, who knew the facts of the conspiracy and managed to “go public with them.” They have resorted to assassinating his character. The mass media reports of RFK, Jr.’s candidacy have never failed to call him an “anti-vaxxer” — a desperate lie.

Robert Kennedy, an attorney, author and environmental activist, said in a statement: “I am not anti-vaccine. I want safe vaccines with robust safety testing.” He is chairman of the board of Children’s Health Defense. Its website ties the increase in chronic childhood conditions such as asthma, autism and diabetes to a range of factors, including environmental toxins, pesticides and vaccines.9

The corrupt media attacks naturally included their old CIA smear tactic, the Thought-terminating Cliché, “conspiracy theorist.” As I wrote, “The use of the term ‘conspiracy theorist’ as vilification, as a smear, as character assassination is now ubiquitous. Therein lies the most dangerous, Machiavellian propaganda of our time.”10

That is expected from corrupt news media. RFK, Jr., is not just a Kennedy running for president. He is the son and nephew of two of the country’s most important assassinated leaders. The forces behind the conspiracy that killed JFK, MLK, and RFK still exist, and they attack what they fear most. That fear can be also used against them. RFK, Jr., is the first major candidate to try. Can he succeed?

RFK assassination researcher and author Lisa Pease gave this personal impression of RFK, Jr., in her 2018 book, A Lie Too Big to Fail:

Of all the members of the Kennedy family, Bobby has long been the truest heir to the legacy of his father and his uncle John. Bobby is an attorney, an environmental activist, and the co-founder and President of Waterkeeper Alliance. I was impressed with Bobby before I met him. But I was even more impressed after discussing the case with him and seeing how quickly his mind worked, how easily he grasped concepts that others had shown trouble understanding. In turn, he taught me about some legal aspects of this case, as well as how to make perfect corn on the cob! I will be forever grateful to our mutual friend, author David Talbot, for connecting us.11

There is one more thing I wish to note at this opening stage of the 2024 presidential campaign. You may have already caught it if you were reading carefully. When candidates hold a campaign event, they often choose the date and place for their personal, political, or historical symbolism. That is most certainly the case when launching a campaign for president. Choosing Boston as the place is no surprise for a Kennedy.

But why launch on April 19th, on a Wednesday? After all, it is on or near some of the most horrific, impolitical anniversaries: the Boston Marathon bombing, the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig disaster, the Columbine High School massacre, the Oklahoma City bombing, the conflagration of the Waco Branch Davidian compound, the Bay of Pigs Invasion, the start of the Spanish-American War, Adolf Hitler’s birth. Those would seem to negatively eclipse even the shared anniversaries of more heroic struggles: the American Revolution and Siege of Boston, the Battle of San Jacinto, the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, and the Apollo 16 moon landing.

What then would make April 19th so politically significant to the son and nephew of America’s conspiratorially martered leaders — a crime that has been aided and abetted to this day, and for which justice continues to be obstructed? As quoted above, it is the date in 1968 that presidential candidate Bobby Kennedy made clear, with presidential powers, “I would like to reopen the Warren Commission.”

ENDNOTES:

2

Richard Bartholomew, “2020: The Deep Political Realities,” Garrison: The Journal of History and Deep Politics, Issue 001, Jan.-Feb. 2019, pp. 12-18. bartholoviews.substack.com

Bartholoviews

2020: The Deep Political Realities

“MUCH WAS DECIDED BEFORE YOU WERE BORN” —Jenny Holzer, Truisms, 1977–1979 Reactions to the essay at the end of my book, The Deep State in the Heart of Texas, titled “The Deep Political Realities of the 2016 U.S. General Election,” have given me insight into the cognitive biases held by its readers and the way we tend to take politics at face value based …

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4 years ago · Richard Bartholomew

3

Richard Bartholomew, “2020: High crimes, Deep Politics,” Garrison: The Journal of History and Deep Politics, Issue 005, Aug. 2020, pp. 10-16. bartholoviews.substack.com

Bartholoviews

2020: High Crimes, Deep Politics

In my essay, “The Deep Political Realities of the 2016 U.S. General Election,” I argued that it mattered who was president during the 2017 JFK file-release deadline. The JFK Act was the defining, yet unspeakable aspect of that election. President Trump continues to criminally withhold and redact those files. That crime supports my argument that Hillary …

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4 years ago · Richard Bartholomew

8

Richard Bartholomew, “The Real Conspiracy Nuts,” Garrison: The Journal of History and Deep Politics, Issue 004, Jan. 2020, pp. 8-14.) bartholoviews.substack.com

Bartholoviews

The Real Conspiracy Nuts

Certainly anyone who has the power to make you believe absurdities has the power to make you commit injustices.—Voltaire, Questions sur les miracles “If both the past and the external world exist only in the mind, and if the mind itself is controllable—what then…

Read more

4 years ago · Richard Bartholomew

“I was … motivated by a civic duty to report a suspicious automobile, which I spotted in 1989 … fitting the description of a getaway car seen by several JFK assassination witnesses leaving Dealey Plaza in my hometown of Dallas. My police chief, Jesse Curry, went on TV the week of the assassination and asked all citizens to report anything suspicious. So I did … 30 years later.”1

Belief & Knowledge

To paraphrase the opening of Jim Marrs’ book, Crossfire: the Plot that Killed Kennedy, don’t trust this article. In fact, when it comes to the assassination of President Kennedy, don’t trust any one source or even the basic evidence and testimony. Belief and trust are part of the problem. Just because we believe there is a conspiracy, that doesn’t mean there is one. And just because we don’t believe in conspiracies, that doesn’t mean they don’t exist.

There are those who say belief in conspiracy is at best irresponsible, and at worst insane (or paranoid, a word they may misuse to mean the same thing). There are those who say believing Oswald acted alone is at best naive, and at worst criminally insane (or part of the cover-up, which may mean the same thing).

The first thing we can be certain of is that one of those two beliefs (conspiracy or no conspiracy) is the truth. The assassination did happen. It happened only one way [quantum physics aside] and it happened that way only once. The second thing we can be certain of is that some of those who are telling us these things as fact are Iying. They are Iying to us, and they are Iying about us. Some of these liars are our teachers; some of them are our bosses; some of them are our city council representatives; some of them are our House and Senate representatives; and some of them are our country’s vice presidents and presidents. Every day for 30-plus years, these liars have been making decisions that affect us.2

For Hitler and the Nazis, lying was a matter of policy. They knew that if they lied often enough, a certain percentage of their lies would be believed. And if one big lie were told often enough, much of the population would eventually come to believe it. That was the Nazi theory of propaganda — a theory I might add, very familiar to two members of the Warren Commission: Allen Dulles and John J. McCloy. So we have to know who the liars are. The only way to do that is to judge them by the facts — not the other way around.3

Aside from knowing who is Iying to us, why should we care about who killed the 35th president of our country? The answer to that question is the same as the reason we should care about history. That reason was expressed well by David McCullough, author of the recent best-selling biography of Harry S. Truman. In a speech he gave at the National Archives in 1993. The reason we should care, he said, is because,

Always, always, one thing leads to another. That is fundamentally, irrevocably, one of the most obvious and most important lessons of history. One thing leads to another. It is why it is so important to understand the chronology of events, or the chronology of a life.

It’s also true as a lesson of history that nothing happens in a vacuum — nothing. Nor does anything have to have happened the way it happened. We are often taught history in such a fashion as if everything happened on a track from the moment events began until the present day. And never ever was that so.

Events, individual lives, the course of national destiny can go off in any number of directions at any point along the way, and for all kinds of unexpected and surprising reasons. The people who are involved in the event at the time don’t know how it’s going to come out anymore than we do right now.4

McCullough went on to say, “We cannot have the arrogance of looking down on them because they didn’t know how it was going to come out or because they didn’t know what we know now.”

But, as important as it is to know these things, when it comes to the assassination of President Kennedy — believe what we might — as a country, we don’t know the chronology of events. We don’t know which events and individuals, or even whether events and individuals significantly changed the course of our national destiny. We don’t know what the unexpected and surprising reasons are. As a country, we know no more now than we did in 1963. It was sometime in the eighties that history books started to reflect this uncertainty, repeating the Warren Commission findings while at the same time calling Oswald the alleged lone assassin. It was just a couple of years ago that the respected Pelican History of the United States began saying that Kennedy was killed as the result of a conspiracy. If nothing else, the debate that began with the filming of Oliver Stone’s JFK, and which continues today, reveals the country’s historical dilemma.

Study & Action

Six years, five months, and over a hundred books ago, I asked myself a question. How much is it possible to learn about the assassination of John F. Kennedy? The 25th anniversary was looming and I knew from past experience, having been interested in the mystery since that day in Dallas, there would be the inevitable barrage of information, misinformation, and disinformation from the advertising-entertainment-news media. This time, I was determined to put what I would hear and see in the next nine weeks into one of those three categories.

I started reading and re-reading everything I could. My only rule was to read something every day about the assassination. The 25th anniversary came and went, and the only thing I knew for sure was that, despite my casual study of the case for most of those years, I still had misconceptions about it, and I still had huge gaps in my knowledge of it.

In the past, I had always been able to develop informed opinions about the things I studied: art, dinosaurs, plate tectonics, extraterrestnal life, whether or not to wear a seat belt, or whatever. In some cases, after studying a subject, when my personal opinion was not the accepted view, it eventually became so. In those instances, I felt I had developed what Ernest Hemingway called, “a built-in, shockproof crap detector.”5 It made me confident enough in my ability to educate myself (which is the goal of a formal education) to attempt to develop an opinion about the Kennedy assassination. One with which I could feel secure. I stuck to my rule and read something about it every day.

After the first few books, I became more confused. After ten books, I began to get a feel for the subject. A learning curve had started to kick in. The more I learned, the more I was able to learn. I started catching authors in mistakes and, in a few cases, outright lies. I learned that, though there are disagreements about specific details, there are facts (usually ignored by the media) which are undisputed among honest students of both the assassination and the two major federal investigations of it. I learned that — despite all the loose talk about theories — among the honest students whose works I’ve read, there are no theores in the derogatory sense — only a determined effort to account for the facts by considering all of the evidence.

As I was learning these facts, I increasingly felt the need to do something other than read — I was learning that knowledge compels action. But I knew that I was not yet knowledgeable enough to start investigating the loose ends myself. I thought, at most, I would resolve my own personal questions about the assassination and watch events develop from an informed perspective. Two years went by before I contacted another researcher and offered to help. But before that — nine months into my daily reading program — something happened that eventually took me beyond both reading and assisting in research. I didn’t know it at the time, but I had stumbled upon potential new evidence in the case.

Insignificance & Relevance

By May 1989, I was familiar enough with the story of a getaway car seen in Dealey Plaza (a story that was dismissed by the Warren Commission) to take more than a passing glance at an old Rambler station wagon parked on the UT campus among the late model Hondas and Toyotas.

It was anachronistic. But it interested me because it was the same make and model as the getaway car I had been reading about. I wasn’t crazy enough to think it was actually that car. I was just glad to have a mental picture of a Rambler station wagon from that era. I had never really seen one. There were, however, some strange things about it that made me wonder whether or not its owner also knew the story about the Dealey Plaza getaway car and its role in the assassination.

Ten minutes after President Kennedy was shot, Marvin Robinson, Helen Forrest, and Dallas Deputy Sheriff Roger Craig, independently of each other, reportedly saw two men leaving Dealey Plaza in a light-colored Rambler station wagon. One of them entered the car on Elm Street after running from the direction of the Texas School Book Depository (TSBD). Craig and Forrest described this man as being identical to Lee Harvey Oswald. A few minutes before this incident, Richard Randolph Carr saw two of three men, who had come from behind the TSBD, enter what was apparently the same Rambler parked next to the building on Houston Street. He saw the third man enter the car seconds later on Record Street, one block east, and two blocks south of the TSBD.6

The Warren Commission had Marvin Robinson’s and Roger Craig’s reports of November 23, 1963. lt also had Craig’s statement to the FBI from the day before, as well as Carr’s statements to the FBI and Craig’s testimony. The Commission, however, apparently never knew about Mrs. Forrest, and did not publish Robinson’s statement.7 It chose not to believe that Craig took part in Oswald’s interrogation or that Craig identified Oswald as the man who entered the station wagon. Dallas Police Captian Wiil Fritz, Oswald’s interrogator, denied to the Commission that Craig was present. Fritz thus never had to deal with Craig’s allegation that Oswald admitted to Fritz that he had indeed left Dealey Plaza in a station wagon belonging to a woman named Mrs. Paine.8

Despite the Marvin Robinson statement that corroborated Roger Craig and which the Commission had, and despite other corroborating evidence such as newspaper photographs showing Craig’s presence on Elm Street, and FBI reports of him in the interrogation room with Fritz during Oswald’s questioning. The Commission chose to believe the contradictory and unsupported testmony of taxi driver William Whaley.9 Whaley told the Warren Commission about two witnesses who saw Oswald enter his cab. But there is no indication that the Commission ever attempted to locate, through the simple process of examining the cab company’s records, the only two people who could corroborate Whaley.”10

With the Warren Commission’s attempt to hide Marvin Robsnson’s statement, the death of William Whaley in 1965, and the 1975 death of Roger Craig after his many failed attempts to make his story public, the truth about this alleged getaway car has eluded the few who have tried to seek it.11

The House Select Committee on Assassinations (House Committee) apparently attempted but failed. It reported, “Robinson did not testify before the Warren Commission, and he has not been located by the committee.” Despite this attempt, however, the House Committee, like the Warren Commission, avoided the entire matter in its report, choosing instead to repeat the Commission’s conclusion that “shortly after the assassination, Oswald boarded a bus, but when the bus got caught in a traffic jam, he disembarked and took a taxicab to his rooming house.” In this, as in many other areas of its investigation, the House Committee had it both ways by concluding that “The Warren Commission failed to investigate adequately the possibility of a conspiracy to assassinate the President.” Thus leading to the conclusion — voiced in 1980 by authors DeLloyd J. Guth and David R. Wrone — “after careful study of the House Committee Final Report, that this most recent official version does not satisfy the need for a thorough inquiry into what happened that day in Dallas.”12

Hypothetically, if the getaway car continued to exist for the past 30 years, given the muddied trails, suspicious deaths, and failed investigations, any persons who secretly knew of the car’s role in the assassination and also knew that it still existed, could safely assume it would never be identified. If one such person decided to reveal the car’s secrets, however, how would he do it? Could he do it without being silenced himself? Could he do it in a way that would survive his own death?

Steganograghy & Detection

It was six years ago, on May 29, 1989, that I saw the Rambler station wagon on the campus of the University of Texas at Austin (UT) which fit the description of this getaway car reportedly seen by Craig, Robinson, Forrest, and Carr on November 22, 1963."13 A cursory examination of the car has revealed apparent associations between it and persons whose lives were intertwined with Lyndon Johnson’s political machinery, the military-industrial-intelligence complex in the U.S., right-wing politics, and Latin American politics.

Connections between odd characteristics of the car itsef and information found elsewhere on the UT campus could be interpreted as a trail of clues in the form of coded messages14 connecting this Rambler, its owner at the time, and its previous owner to the JFK assassination. These clues appear to have been deliberately planted due to specific interrelationships in their content and the encoding technique used. They were in the form of specific pages torn out of UT library books on the assassination related topics. Finding them was a direct result of my daily reading program. It started in the summer of 1989 when I discovered the mutilation of UT’s only library copy of Anthony Summers’ 1980 book, Conspiracy. I was determined to find what was written on those missing pages. What I discovered in those and in missing pages in other books were stories about people not only connected to each other and to Lee Harvey Oswald but, as I came to discover, to the strange things about the UT Rambler, and to individuals at the University of Texas itself.

The Rambler was found bearing a 1964 Mexico Federal Turista window sticker and displaying at least two magazines published in 1963 on its rear seat. They remained in that location unmoved and untouched for at least two years. The car was owned by a Spanish professor, which he bought from a very close friend of Lyndon Johnson in April 1963. The used car lot’s sales manager who signed the car’s warranty died of a heart attack after feeling a sharp pain in his back while sitting in a dark movie theater. He died only seven weeks after the assassination. Although all of this made it only a minor curiosity, it became increasingly intriguing with subsequent study.

Physical, anecdotal, and documentary evidence has revealed a mosaic of relationships extending from the car’s owners to individuals who have been, and are currently subjects of interest to researchers of the conspiratorial aspects of the assassination of President Kennedy.15 As researcher Dennis Ford wrote in the November 1992 issue of The Third Decade, the leading journal of Kennedy assassination research, “Discovering the fate of the Rambler will go a long way toward solving this case.... Whoever took or drove the car that afternoon was obviously a conspirator.”16

In 1993, I wrote about all of this in a research paper that reports on my findings and proposes a more in-depth investigation. In June 1993, I presented the paper at a regional conference on Kennedy assassination research. It was well received. Dennis Ford called it a potential breakthrough. In the paper, I argue that the UT Rambler represents a possible unique opportunity to determine the fate of this alleged getaway car by investigating new leads, current clues, and fresh trails: an opportunity that should not be overlooked. I also named lots of names, including local people both living and dead; people with current and past involvement in the administration, and faculty of the University of Texas at Austin. While I have no intention of implicating innocent people in the assassination of President Kennedy, these names cannot be avoided. They are an intimate part of these circumstances that compel further investigation.17 In writing this paper I presumed, as advised by the United States Constitution, that every person referred to therein is innocent. But I also presumed that, as advised by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, “The more outre ́ and grotesque an incident is, the more carefully it deserves to be examined....”18

Skepticism & Denial

Many researchers of the JFK assassination eventually pass a difficult psychological threshold. When confronted with the first evidence of conspiracy, most rational people have no doubt responded, “So what?” The circumstantial evidence I write about is far from immune from such skepticism. The threshold is different for each person because it is defined by individual tolerance for the number of times they can say “so what” before skepticism becomes denial. Denial is perfectly understandable because the alternative leads to frightening speculation about the meaning of events in the recent history of the United States.

One of the researchers who made some of these discoveries has been valuable in the role of the devil’s advocate. His arguments become circular, however, when he insists that because no hard evidence has been found, none should be sought. “Pursue the UT connections,” he said, “and leave George Wing and his Rambler out of it.” But if nothing else, the evidence presented here, stemming directly from Wing’s outré and grotesque station wagon, is a map possibly leading to several “smoking guns.”

I’ve made a sincere effort to avoid direct claims of involvement by the individuals named in any conspiracy to assassinate President Kennedy. The implications, however, are unavoidable. Taken in the context of the research of others over the past thirty years, this evidence can be viewed as part of a substantive circumstanual case that begins to define the conspiracy.

If the UT Rambler was used by the conspirators in the JFK assassination, then it was in Mexico in 1964, ended up back in the United States as some sort of souvenir, and stayed near a circle of friends that included Lyndon Johnson, his close advisor Walt Rostow, UT adjunct professor Jack Dulles, former UT president and chancellor Harry Ransom, Lyndon Johnson’s friend, C.B. Smith, and two professors of Spanish and Portuguese at the University of Texas at Austin.

According to the rule of falsifiability, if this car was not involved in the assassination, the evidence will prove the claim (that it was involved) false. If the claim is true, the evidence will not disprove it. So far, none of the evidence disproves that this station wagon was the car seen by Roger Craig, Marvin Robinson, Helen Forrest, Richard Carr, and others.19

Neither does it disprove the Rambler was the one known to Oswald as the car that took him from Dealey Plaza. On the contrary, in the last year, information about the car’s longest owner, the late Dr. George Gordon Wing, has revealed astonishing potential links between him and CIA veterans such as E. Howard Hunt, Tom Braden, and Cord Meyer. Those men, in turn, have strong links to either the assassination or to the Oswalds’ mysterous friends Ruth and Michael Paine. Wing received a student grant while studying in Mexico City in 1950. That money appears to have come from a known CIA conduit helping to recruit anti-communists to infiltrate Mexico’s student organizations. The search for evidence continues. Help in that search is now coming from many individuals.

Tragedy & Hope

Perhaps this partcular car had nothing to do with the assassination. Perhaps like the back seat magazines and the missing pages, it too was just a sign or a signal, something that would attract the attention of someone knowledgeable about the JFK assassination, something which would help put the other clues into perspective and lead to previously unseen relationships in the mosaic of the Kennedy assassination.

If that is the case, then perhaps the whole thing is an elaborate hoax. If so, no such hoax originated with me or others whose research contributed to these findings. It cannot as yet be conclusively ruled out, though, that such a hoax originated with the car’s owner or someone who knew him. Those of us who have made these findings, with the exception of those wishing anonymity, are willing to verify the truthfulness of all statements we have made.

Maybe this is just an amazing coincidence. Whether real, coincidence, or hoax, the evidence of the UT Rambler is similar to and predates the evidence of Ricky White, which was first made public in August 1990, concerning his father Roscoe White’s role in the assassination. By the time White’s story broke in the August 5, 1990 Austin American-Statesman, I had already discovered the Rambler, the magazines, and the first of the missing pages. In fact it was the similarities between the story of the Rambler and the story of Roscoe White — the idea of leaving artifacts, clues, and documents where they could be found — that led to my curosity to start the first hard research into the Rambler in November 1990.

In the search for truth about the Kennedy assassination, rife as it is with disinformation in the accepted areas of learning, we cannot be blinded to the possibility that the truth can still be found or that it may be in some rather unorthodox places. I understand the damage that continues to be done by those who introduce red herrings, intentionally or not, into the investigation of President Kennedy’s murder.

As a group, those of us who have been investigating this Rambler decided in January 1993 that the public release of our findings would help in the search for the truth more than hurt it. After nearly four years of justifiable caution, we felt that at least some of what we had found pointed in the direction of what had actually happened to President Kennedy. In the months that followed, leading up to the presentation of our paper (at the Second Research Conference of The Third Decade in June 1993) and after, that decision was reinforced by subsequent findings. Whether real, coincidence, or hoax, the Rambler has led to a new look at those with well-known roles in the story of the assassination like Marina Oswald’s friend Ruth Paine; former CIA director Allen Dulles; organized crime figure Eugene Hale Brading: former president Lyndon Johnson; and Oswald’s CIA friend George de Mohrenschildt. It has led to a new look at those with lesser known roles like CIA and Mafia associate John Martino; former LBJ aide Howard Burris; Dallas oilman D. Harold Byrd; former spies Mary Bancroft and Edward G. Lansdale; former presidents George Bush, Richard Nixon; and former LBJ advisor Walt Rostow. And it has led to a first look at those with as yet unknown possible roles, like former UT president Harry Huntt Ransom; the car’s Late owner, UT Spanish professor George Gordon Wing; and the man he bought at from on April 26, 1963, Cecil Bernard Smith.

To quote Dr. Wing himself, from an article he wrote in 1962, in which he examines, “...a brilliant analysis [by Carlos Fuentes] of Moby Dick in terms of its profound meanings...”

...Fuentes gives us a Melville who is not only a subverter of the established order but also a prophet whose prognostications gain validity in our own time. Melville could not accept the idea of the United States held by his fellow countrymen — God’s chosen people, a nation that had never experienced defeat and felt itself heir to the future. Melville had a vision, Fuentes says, of the excesses to which all of these certainties could lead: to the imposition of false ends and private fetishes; to the sacrifice of the collective good on the alter of an abstract freedom of the individual, to the simplistic division of history into a Manichean struggle between the good — the United States — and the evil — those who oppose the United States, to manifest destiny, to “the lonely crowd,” inorganic atomism; to the confusion between private opinion and general truth; to the radical lack of comprehension of the truth of others whenever it does not correspond to the particular vision of things held by a North American: as a consequence, the truth of others is suspect and must be destroyed. Indeed, Fuentes concludes, in our time, Captain Ahab still lives, and his name is MacArthur and Dulles, Joe McCarthy and Johnson, the white whale is in Cuba, in China, in Vietnam, in Santo Domingo, in a film, in a book....20

Dr. Wing ends this same article with a statement which can be applied to other aspects of his life — a statement which may one day prove to be very revealing about what had once been viewed as his eccentricities: “In this essay, I have of necessity treated a complex subject in a somewhat fragmentary and incomplete fashion. Nevertheless, I hope to have awakened some interest in pursuing further any of the topics I have deliberately left truncated.”

(Revised and amended from the original, print-only publication, “Roger and Me,” The Assassination Chronicles, Vol. 1, Issue 2, June 1995, pp. 35-38, and Issue 3, September 1995, pp. 45-49.)

ENDNOTES:

1

Richard Bartholomew, “My Small World of JFK Conspiracy,” The Deep State in the Heart of Texas: The Texas Connections to the Kennedy Assassination. San Antonio, Tx: Say Something Real Press, 2018, pp. 22-23, also posted at bartholoviews.substack.com.

Bartholoviews

My Small World of JFK Conspiracy

I know about vivid memory of JFK assassination-related scenes. I lived in Mesquite on 11/22/63, less than 13 miles from Dealey Plaza. I was born in South Oak Cliff in early 1956, not far from 1026 North Beckley, where Oswald later lived, and 3126 Harlandale, a CIA safehouse used for “Operation 40” assassins at the time of the JFK assassination. Warren C…

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4 years ago · Richard Bartholomew

2

See “True Believers Part 2: Conspiracy-Denial Bigotry in Mass Media,” bartholoviews.substack.com.

Bartholoviews

True Believers Part 2: Conspiracy-Denial Bigotry in Mass Media

Author's note: Two years after writing “True Believers: Tom Snyder Talks to Arlen Specter,” I took another close look at the media’s aiding and abetting the government’s big lies. I have learned that I could study this totalitarian behavior at any given period and get the same results. As social media has matured, so has public savviness of official gas…

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4 years ago · Richard Bartholomew

3

See “The Real Conspiracy Nuts,” bartholoviews.substack.com.

Bartholoviews

The Real Conspiracy Nuts

Certainly anyone who has the power to make you believe absurdities has the power to make you commit injustices.—Voltaire, Questions sur les miracles “If both the past and the external world exist only in the mind, and if the mind itself is controllable—what then…

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4 years ago · Richard Bartholomew

10

Kurtz, Crime of the Century, op. cit., pp. 132-33; Robert Groden with Harrison Livingstone, High Treason, (NY: Conservatory Press, 1989) p. 162. (Author's note, April 10, 2023: Like the evidence of the Rambler getaway, there is much about the bus and cab getaways that the Commission avoided. For good reason: the evidence would have established the presence of an Oswald impersonator. See “The Imitation Game,” bartholoviews.substack.com.)

Bartholoviews

The Imitation Game

"Everyone will know who I am now." —Lee Harvey Oswald, spoken during his interrogation in disapointment that his cover was blown, November 22, 1963, according to Deputy Sheriff Roger Craig. “I’m just a patsy.” —Lee Harvey Oswald, spoken at a press conference at Dallas Police headquarters the night of his arrest, November 22, 1963, as a suspect in the as…

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3 years ago · 2 likes · Richard Bartholomew

17

See "The Lies of Texas," bartholoviews.substack.com

Bartholoviews

The Lies of Texas

“What Starts Here Changes the World.” —University of Texas motto since 2004 The University of Texas at Austin is in the heart of Texas. Its alma mater is “The Eyes of Texas.” Its mascot is the Texas Longhorn, an official symbol of the state. Its catch phrase is “Hook ’em Horns.” The UT Longhorns are among the biggest brands in college athletics. UT boast…

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4 years ago · Richard Bartholomew