Who killed JFK?

Hardly surprisingly the 50^th anniversary of the Kennedy slaying has been manna for  the conspiracy theorists. For 25 years between1975 and 2000 no less than 80% of Americans did not believe that there was a lone killer. Even now, 60% are of the same view.

 

He is being lauded as the greatest President of modern times, but the plain truth is that these days he would have had no chance of even getting the nomination because his personal life would not have stood the intense scrutiny meted out by the media.

 

He was a perfect example of satyriasis. He was permanently priapic. He was catholic in his tastes with women; film stars like Marilyn, showgirls, Swedish air-hostesses. They were all good for a session of horizontal jogging with POTUS. It makes one wonder whether his back-trouble was entirely due to a war-time injury.

 

All this was no secret, but the media was much more deferential in those days.

 

Then there was Joe Kennedy’s connections with the Mob, which allegedly played a key-role in stitching-up Nixon.

 

But a conspiracy?

 

Lee Harvey Oswald certainly pulled the trigger, although there is a daft theory that he missed and JFK was accidently shot by his bodyguard attempting to return fire.

 

Oswald was a misfit. He was taught to shoot straight in the Marines, but at the end of his service he took himself off, in the middle of the Cold War, to Russia. Not a good career move. He got low-grade manual factory work, and acquired a Russian wife. When he returned to the US, it is reasonable to assume that he was on the radar of both the FBI and the CIA. He was shot dead, despite being surrounded by armed cops, before he could be properly interrogated. His killer, Jack Ruby, was a Chicago low-life who was suffering from terminal cancer.

 

If there was a conspiracy, who were the prime suspects?

 

The Mob must be high on the list. Allegedly, Joe had been mixed up with them for years. It is claimed that they turned on the Kennedys when Robert Kennedy began to turn up the heat on organised crime.

 

Allan Dulles, the head of the CIA, is said to have had extreme animus against JFK, who had fired him – unsurprisingly because Dulles, who had a taste for the coup d’état as a way of projecting American power, was the architect of the Bay of Pigs fiasco. Many eyebrows were raised when he was appointed to the Warren Commission

 

Finally, we come to LBJ.

 

Apparently, the two men loathed each other. JFK totally side-lined LBJ as VP, giving him an office and nothing to do. If JFK had been re-elected LBJ’s political career would have been over. The Kennedy circle treated LBJ with contempt as a Texan hick with no manners and crude behaviour. And JFK took the credit for civil rights reforms when the real architect was LBJ.

 

So, conspiracy or cock-up?

 

Many writers have made big money out of propagating the conspiracy theory, and there is no sign of it going away.

 

But for now it’s just that – a theory.