Two shooters?: JFK assassination details drawing nigh
Ever since President Donald Trump signed an executive order Jan. 23, which will open all the classified fed files related to the assassinations of JFK, RFK, and MLK, a small bit of info has already come to light, courtesy of Florida Rep. Anna Paulina Luna, who also now serves as the head of the new Task Force on the Declassification of Federal Secrets. Luna’s group has been tasked with exposing “federal secrets” Oh, boy. According to Luna, she believes two shooters were involved in the assassination.
During a Capitol Hill press conference two weeks ago, the congresswoman said, “Based on what I’ve been seeing so far, the initial hearing that was actually held here in Congress was actually faulty in the single-bullet theory. I believe there were two shooters.”
Which is what many people have been saying for the past 61+ years, based on various suppositions and beliefs, the Zapruder film, Oswald’s murder by mobbed-up nightclub, strip club owner Jack Ruby, who would die from cancer in 1967.
The fact that our own federal government has kept the investigations into all three assassinations away from public light has just fueled more speculation that something sinister was at work behind the murders of all three men.
Despite Haight-Ashbury, the flower children, the sexual revolution, the 1960s wasn’t a fun decade if you include Viet Nam, the three assassinations (JFK in ’63, and both RFK and MLK in 1968), and the Manson-fueled slaughter at the home of Sharon Tate.
It didn’t take long for people to realize that the 1960s wasn’t the 1950s.
Isn't that what most people have believed after seeing the Zapruder film? In it, the first shot that hits Kennedy appears to throw his head back, indicating that the bullet came from in front of him, not from behind.
Yet forever, the official government stance has always been that. As well with the lone shooter.
John Fitzgerald Kennedy, Here one minute, gone the next. Didn’t seem quite possible at the time.
A Friday murder
One can spend their entire life investigating the JFK assassination and still only come up with circumstantial evidence to support any particular claim with regard to who was behind it.
Not everyone feels that way, of course. Some amateur sleuths are convinced they know who did it.
Hopefully, unveiling all the secret government files on the assassination(s) will bear fruit and finally reveal the truth, or at least give Americans the idea that there was no cover-up. Or prove that there was. Already, Rep. Luna has seen something in the JFK files, or else she probably wouldn’t have already revealed that she believes two shooters were involved.
People who have spent years investigating the Dallas assassination are an odd mix.
There’s an MD, for example, Donald W. Miller, Jr. – donaldmiller.com – who’s a pretty interesting guy. He’s a cardiac surgeon who was once colleagues with several physicians who worked on Kennedy when he arrived at Dallas’ Parkland Hospital that gruesome Friday with the back half of his skull blown away. They were George Burkley, JFK’s personal physician, and Dr. Malcolm Perry, the Texas surgeon who performed a tracheotomy on Kennedy after he was shot. Miller believes the assassination was the work of a government conspiracy.
Miller started studying the assassination in 1967, 57+ years ago, after he read Six Seconds in Dallas: a micro-study of the Kennedy Assassination by Josiah Thompson. The book reportedly proves that there were at least two shooters, possibly three, who took part in the assassination.
In a recent essay titled Reflections on the Assassination of President John F. Kennedy, 50 years later, Miller writes: “President Kennedy was killed in a bloody palace coup. Like with Caesar and his Senators, it was a regime change. In this case, it was one engineered by officials in the U.S. National-Security State. JFK threatened its interests by committing the cardinal sin of not trying to win the Cold War and, instead, sought peace with Nikita Khrushchev and Fidel Castro, the state’s top enemies. It is still not known for sure who decided that Kennedy was a threat to national security and had to go and be replaced with a president who would do their bidding, escalate the war in Vietnam and stop talking to Khrushchev and Castro. The CIA most likely planned the assassination, with help from the FBI and the Secret Service. And the fact that they got away with it has given us an NSA (National Security Agency) that now watches and listens to everything that all of us do.”
What, though, was the possible reason for any sort of palace coup?
According to Miller, based on his essay, it was basically because JFK was a peacenik. And for the people who make money off war, peace is never a good thing. Quite the contrary.
More fodder for conspiracy theorists who say it was a palace coup that killed Kennedy – On Oct. 11, JFK issued a memorandum titled National Security Action Memorandum 263, which called for 1,000 U.S. military troops to come home from Viet Nam by the end of December 1963. At the time, we had 16,000 troops in Nam. Kennedy also announced his intentions to pull out all military troops from Nam by 1965. Six weeks after the Oct. 11 memo, he was shot dead.
Since then, people have argued, Kennedy wasn’t really going to pull troops out of Nam unless the Vietnamese could prove themselves up to the task of fighting the communists on their own. But it is odd that in September 1963, Kennedy overcame Senate opposition and got a nuclear test ban treaty with the Russians passed. Giving credence to the argument that he was more interested in peace than he was war.
Strange occurrences
Another strange occurrence about this whole chapter in American history – Kennedy fired CIA Director Allen Dulles for the Bay of Pigs fiasco. And yet, Dulles was part of the Warren Commission that investigated the JFK assassination?
If you get a chance, visit Miller’s website donaldmiller.com and read his entire essay that includes pretty strong evidence of a cover-up by the Warren Commission and government agents in general.
By the way, you remember that famous photo of Jacqueline Kennedy climbing up out of her seat to get on the back trunk of the limo? People first thought she was reaching toward Secret Service Agent Clint Hill to help him climb aboard. She later said that she was simply trying to collect parts of JFK’s skull that had been shot off, indicating a shot fired from the front of the limo, not the back.
A new book came out in 2010 titled JFK and the Unspeakable: Why he died and why it matters. The author is James Douglass. Another excellent study that suggests, some say prove, that an inside conspiracy was to blame for Kennedy’s murder.
Still, there are Americans who believe that their government would never be capable of such a thing. To kill a president, with the backing from some in the FBI, the CIA, the Secret Service, the Pentagon? Surely not. Surely, America never fell into the hands of a palace coup for the benefit of a few select players. Then again. How much money was made off the Viet Nam War and the Cold War by a few select players, some ask?
The Newspaper Ad
The day before JFK and Jacqueline arrived in Texas, a handbill was already being passed around on the streets, claiming that the president was wanted for treason.
According to the handbill, his treasonous acts were related to the charge that he was going soft on communism.
The day Kennedy arrived in Dallas, the Dallas Morning News published a full-page ad that mirrored the handbill – the president is basically a commie lover and in league with many of them.
After seeing it, disgusted, Jackie Kennedy said to her husband, “Can you imagine a paper doing a thing like that?”
Jack said, half-joking, taking it in stride: “Oh, you know, we're heading into nut country today.”
Still, after a morning speech in Ft. Worth to the local chamber of commerce, the Kennedys flew to Love Field, hopped in the limo with no roof, no protection except his Secret Service agents, and headed toward downtown.
What really happened after that, and was Oswald really the lone assassin?
Hopefully, we’ll soon find out.