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Friday, September 20, 2013

The World in 1963: THE ROAD TO FASCISM BEGAN ON JFK’S DEATH

 

 


At home with the Kennedys: JFK with his three-year-old daughter Caroline in Massachusetts after winning the Democratic nomination in July

At home with the Kennedys: JFK with his three-year-old daughter Caroline in Massachusetts after winning the Democratic nomination in July

Wincing: Candidate Kennedy is sprayed with confetti as his motorcade drives through Illinois in the run-up to the election

Wincing: Candidate Kennedy is sprayed with confetti as his motorcade drives through Illinois in the run-up to the election

Politics of change: JFK took power when America was on the cusp of the 1960s and faced huge cultural, social and economic upheaval

Politics of change: JFK took power when America was on the cusp of the 1960s and faced huge cultural, social and economic upheaval.

THE ROAD TO FASCISM BEGAN ON JFK’S DEATH IN 1963

 

”I tell you that a whole new form of government is going to take over the country and I know I won’t live to see you another time.”–Jack Ruby

Jack Ruby, the man who shot accused assassin of President John F. Kennedy Lee Harvey Oswald, said in his interview with the Warren Commission (the investigative team appointed by the federal government to probe the Kennedy assassination) on June 7th, 1964:“Everything pertaining to what’s happening has never come to the surface. The world will never know the true facts of what occurred or my motives. The people that had so much to gain and had such an ulterior motive for putting me in the position I’m in will never let the true facts come above board to the world. Gentlemen, I want to tell you the truth, but I cannot tell it here. If you want a fair shake out of me you have to take me to Washington. I tell you that a whole new form of government is going to take over the country and I know I won’t live to see you another time.”

Nearly half a century later, these words continue to haunt the United States and continue to raise questions. Were they simply the musings of a grief-stricken raving lunatic, or were they the words of a man ready to blow the whistle that was following orders and not there by happenstance? The words themselves, especially his quote regarding ‘a new form of government’ still to this day sounds a little far out there. But when really thinking about it and analyzing other similar quotes from the time and looking at U.S. politics and policy, both foreign and domestic, since that time, one can see that Jack Ruby’s testimony to the Warren Commission may not have been ‘out there’ at all. A strong case can be made that he actually knew a great deal more than history has led us to believe and that he was trying to genuinely warn this country about the events that had just transpired and what they were going to mean to the future of this nation.

Were there any other notable contemporaries in the late 1950s and early 1960s in America saying similar things to what Jack Ruby said in his interview with the Warren Commission? Surprisingly there actually were.

In 1960, President Dwight Eisenhower gave an eloquent address to the nation which included the following statement: “Until the latest of our world conflicts, the United States had no armaments industry. American makers of plowshares could, with time and as required, make swords as well. But now we can no longer risk emergency improvisation of national defense; we have been compelled to create a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions. Added to this, three and a half million men and women are directly engaged in the defense establishment. We annually spend on military security more than the net income of all United States corporations.

This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence — economic, political, even spiritual — is felt in every city, every State house, every office of the Federal government. We recognize the imperative need for this development. Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources and livelihood are all involved; so is the very structure of our society.

 

In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.
We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.”

In April of 1961, President John Kennedy said in a speech to the American Newspaper Publishers Association: “For we are opposed around the world by a monolithic and ruthless conspiracy that relies primarily on covert means for expanding its sphere of influence–on infiltration instead of invasion, on subversion instead of elections, on intimidation instead of free choice, on guerrillas by night instead of armies by day. It is a system which has conscripted vast human and material resources into the building of a tightly knit, highly efficient machine that combines military, diplomatic, intelligence, economic, scientific and political operations.

Its preparations are concealed, not published. Its mistakes are buried, not headlined. Its dissenters are silenced, not praised. No expenditure is questioned, no rumor is printed, no secret is revealed. It conducts the Cold War; in short, with a war-time discipline no democracy would ever hope or wish to match. The very word “secrecy” is repugnant in a free and open society; and we are as a people inherently and historically opposed to secret societies, to secret oaths and secret proceedings. We decided long ago that the dangers of excessive and unwarranted concealment of pertinent facts far outweighed the dangers which are cited to justify it. Even today, there is little value in opposing the threat of a closed society by imitating its arbitrary restrictions. Even today, there is little value in insuring the survival of our nation if our traditions do not survive with it. And there is very grave danger that an announced need for increased security will be seized upon those anxious to expand its meaning to the very limits of official censorship and concealment. That I do not intend to permit to the extent that it is in my control. And no official of my Administration, whether his rank is high or low, civilian or military, should interpret my words here tonight as an excuse to censor the news, to stifle dissent, to cover up our mistakes or to withhold from the press and the public the facts they deserve to know.”

On December 21st, 1963, former president Harry Truman said in The Washington Post: “For some time I have been disturbed by the way the CIA (Central Intelligence Agency) has been diverted from its original assignment. It has become an operational and at time a policy-making arm of the government. I never had any thought that when I set up the CIA that it would be injected into peacetime cloak-and-dagger operations.”

Something is wrong in Washington.

These are all very alarming statements uttered from a few guys who are more ‘in the know’ than your average John Q. Citizen. Their statements aren’t as black and white as that of Jack Ruby, but reading them, hearing them, and objectively interpreting them can lead one to believe there was something very wrong in Washington, DC during this time. So the questions remain. Were all of these people trying to warn us and tell us something? Or, is it also possible that these are just four misinterpreted statements from four different people about four different things? Depending on whom one asks, there is a wide range of answers from people. Some have even gone as far as making up speeches by John Kennedy such as the hoaxed Columbia University speech in 1963, as well as the ‘enslaving’ quote uttered supposedly seven days before his assassination in Dallas, TX, all to support their answers to these questions. (Sorry to disappoint all of you Illuminati believers out there, but John Kennedy simply never said those things) The essential reality is this:1) There were some groundbreaking things happening in the political structure of the United States after World War II; 2) The economic, foreign policy decisions, and attitude toward the Soviet Union of John Kennedy were incomprehensible to some people; 3) The United States dramatically changed its policies after the assassination of John Kennedy. All of these are still evident today in 2013.

President Franklin Roosevelt, or as modern day conservatives like to call him, Satan himself, did some pretty good things other than guiding our country through World War II. The New Deal was a series of government-sponsored programs to not only ensure that the Great Depression didn’t repeat itself, but also establish social programs in the United States, such as the Social Security Act and the Works Progress Administration Act, to help build a middle class. As part of the New Deal, The Glass-Steagall Act, a term often applied to the entire Banking Act of 1933, prohibited deposit banks from merging or behaving as a securities bank (separating the gamblers from the rest of the world). Combine the New Deal with the virtual obliteration of America’s manufacturing competition worldwide (Germany and Japan in ruins) after World War II, and the United States created the greatest economy the world had ever seen that would sustain itself for the next six decades. President Kennedy even began to print money that wasn’t debt-based, cutting the Federal Reserve out of the loop. When was the last time we saw money that said “United States Note” at the top and not “Federal Reserve Note?” The answer: 1963.

By backpedaling on agreements and relations between Roosevelt and Stalin toward the end of World War II, President Truman unnecessarily escalated what would become the Cold War. President Eisenhower at times followed the same precedent after the death of Stalin in 1953 when Nikita Khrushchev came to power in the Soviet Union. It was the peace-minded relationship and empathy between Kennedy and Khrushchev in the early 1960s that began to correct the course after the Cuban Missile Crisis in October of 1962. Both of these men understood the similarities of each country’s place in the world and began dialog that was geared toward cooperation in space exploration and scaling down production and placement of nuclear weapons. Both men understood what it was going to take for both countries to exist under their own separate ideals and flourish on their own with a sense of their own respective security. John Kennedy recognized the enormous sacrifice made by the Soviet Union to defeat the Nazi regime in Germany. The Soviet Union truly did bear the greatest burden and suffered exponentially the greatest loss of life during the Second World War. John Kennedy said that “war will exist until that distant day when the conscientious objector enjoys the same reputation and prestige that the warrior does today.”

Did the United States change?

So did the United States change after 1963 like Jack Ruby said it would? Was anything different? A case could be made for a ‘yes’ answer to those questions. Post World War II, the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union escalated due to NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization). NATO was formed in 1949 as an inter-governmental military alliance that began a system of collective defense where its members agreed to mutual defense in response to a military attack by a non-member government. The Soviet Union was primarily concerned with protecting its western borders with the rest of Europe. The United States, time and time again in the 1950s, attempted to expand NATO participating countries in Europe, particularly in Eastern Europe, by adding Greece, Turkey, and West Germany. The Soviet Union saw this as a threat to their western borders and feared for their security. American nuclear weapons in Turkey led to Soviet retaliation by placing nuclear weapons in Cuba, culminating in the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962, which was the closest the world has ever come to nuclear war. (The Cuban Missile Crisis transpired in October of 1962 when American spy planes over Cuba photographed Soviet offensive nuclear weapons 90 miles from U.S. soil; with more on the way by ship.) Kennedy and Krushchev, although not completely trusting each other 100%, began communicating and trying to work together after that time.

Conservative America saw this as John Kennedy being a communist appeaser and showing signs of surrender and weakness. Furthermore, by the early 1960s, the U.S. had deployed increasing numbers of troops to South Vietnam (also known at the time as French Indochina) to assist the French, because there was a fear of communism spreading to that area. Kennedy further exacerbated populace fears of his communist sympathies by putting a plan in place to progressively and completely withdraw American troops from Vietnam In October of 1963 (a month before his death) known as National Security Act Memorandum 263 (NSAM 263), an executive order intended to extract 1,000 U.S. troops by the end of 1963 and all of them by 1965. In complete contradiction to Kennedy’s executive order, on November 26th, 1963 (the day after the burial of John F. Kennedy), President Lyndon Johnson reversed NSAM 263. Instead of pulling out of Vietnam, American involvement escalated. The Gulf of Tonkin Incident, a false flag terror attack that never actually happened, gave President Johnson the push he needed to launch an all-out Congress-sponsored American declaration of war on North Vietnam. (In all fairness to President Johnson, great accomplishments such as the Civil Rights Act and Medicare came from his Presidency.)

False-flag terror attacks have been used throughout history to push political agendas and gain power from ancient Rome (when Emperor Nero burned down the city so he could roast Christians), to Nazi Germany (the burning down of the Reichstag which catapulted Hitler to power), to the United States of America (the Gulf of Tonkin incident which led to an official declaration of war in Vietnam).

The dissent amongst the population of the American people toward the war in Vietnam was unprecedented. Public figures that rocked the boat and/or disturbed the ‘political machine’ were coincidentally found murdered. 1968 Presidential candidate Robert Francis Kennedy, who was critical of the Vietnam War, was assassinated under peculiar circumstances in the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles, CA during his campaign. Civil Rights leader and peace activist Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., was assassinated in Memphis, TN under an even stranger set of circumstances. (The inner workings of those events are a different story for a different time.) If there were any rock-solid proof rather than circumstantial evidence and coincidences regarding those two cases, they could go a long way to back up Jack Ruby’s story. However, without hard data and physical evidence regarding these two assassinations as well as the named assassins (Sirhan Sirhan and James Earl Ray) it would be unfair to categorize these two events as anything other than examples of the level of humanity at some of its most extreme, the social and political turmoil of the late 1960s, and the great loss to the world without these two men in it.

Nixon and his “dirty tricks”

Contrary to popular belief, the Presidency of Richard M. Nixon wasn’t the disaster of the millennium. Along with Vietnam, which Nixon escalated almost to ‘madman’ lengths, healthcare was a major issue. A universal health care plan was proposed and shot down. A lesser mandate was passed which included a private health insurance mandate for employers and the federalization of Medicaid for the poor with dependent children. (Sound familiar?) Nixon also broke through the barrier for a relationship with China. This one event also put a lot of pressure on the Soviet Union to continue a road to peace with the United States. The pressure came from the fear of an alliance between the United States and China and culminated in the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty between the United States and Soviet Union in 1972 which limited the use of anti-ballistic missile systems used in defending areas against missile-delivered nuclear weapons. (The United States pulled out of this treaty in 2002 concerned by its own security after 9/11).

Nixon played dirty politics, yet accomplished a great deal. With the radicalization of the modern Republican Party over the past 15 years, Richard Nixon would be seen as a left-wing radical from today’s conservative standards. His resignation, which was his only choice if we wanted to protect his White House recordings (including the 18-minute gap after the Bay of Pigs invasion of 1961 under President Kennedy was being discussed), left the American people’s confidence in the federal government in shambles.

The Nixon, Ford, and Carter Presidencies don’t seem much like what Jack Ruby had said. It didn’t seem like a new form of government had taken over the United States with a coup d’etat. It appeared to be more like a young country struggling with its position as the newly elected superpower of the world after World War II.

The New Style of the 1980s

It is not until the 1980s and after, with the massive stockpiling of arms, dismantling of the New Deal, and manipulation of foreign governments through assassination, insurgency support, and cold hard cash that one can begin to clearly see the direction of the supposed ‘new form of government’ that Jack Ruby spoke of in 1964. It was always there before the 1980s, but just harder to see. 2002’s Bowling for Columbine summarized U.S. involvement in government throughout the world after WW II very succinctly:

1953: The U.S. overthrows Prime Minister Mossadeq of Iran and installs the Shah as Dictator
1954: The U.S. overthrows democratically-elected President Arbenz of Guatamala while killing over 200,000 civilians.
1963: The U.S. backs the assassination of South Vietnamese President Diem paving the way for the killing of 4 million civilians in Southeast Asia from 1963 to 1975
1973: The U.S. stages a coup in Chile. Democratically-elected President Salvador Allende was assassinated. Augusto Pinochet was installed as Dictator. 5,000 Chileans were murdered.
1977: The U.S. backs military rulers of El Salvador. 70,000 Salvadorans were killed along with 4 American nuns.
1980: The U.S. trains Osama Bin Laden and his men to fight the Soviets in Afghanistan bankrolled by 3 billion dollars from the CIA.
1981: The Reagan Administration trains and funds contras (Nicaraguan rebels) 30,000 Nicaraguans die.
1982: The U.S. provides billions of dollars in aid to Saddam Hussein for weapons to fight the Iranians.
1983: The White House secretly gives Iranians the weapons to fight the Iraqis they are also funding.
1989: CIA agent Manuel Noriega (also serving as President of Panama) disobeys orders from Washington leading to an American invasion to remove him. There were 3,000 Panamanian civilian casualties.
1990: Iraq invades Kuwait with weapons provided from the United States.
1991: The U.S. enters Iraq and President Bush reinstates the dictator of Kuwait.
1998: President Clinton orders the bombing of a supposed weapons factory in the Sudan. The factory, as it turns out, was making aspirin.
2000: The U.S. gives Taliban-ruled Afghanistan 245 million dollars in aid.
2001: Osama Bin Laden purportedly uses his expert CIA training to murder 3,000 U.S. citizens on American soil.

Try coupling this with unraveling the regulations on the financial industry put in place by President Roosevelt and the New Deal: it’s devastatingly scary. What exactly happened in the financial industry from the 1980s and up? Here’s a condensed summary in layman’s terms rather than language Wall Street doesn’t want us to understand:

The Reagan administration loosened the chains on financial regulations set forth after the Great Depression. It was an unprecedented ‘credit revolution’ and predatory lending for (and to) the middle class soared. Can’t pay for it? Don’t worry; just put it on this credit card. Own a house and need some money? Take out a second mortgage. It’s quick and easy.

The argument can be made that the 1980s saw a massive economic up-swing for Wall Street and the banking industry, not because of Reaganomics and supply-side economics, but simply because there was a tremendous influx of middle-class Americans buying things they could never afford to pay back. Debt equals money.

The de-regulation of the 1990s

De-regulation of the financial industry continued in the 1990s during the Clinton administration. Mentioned earlier, the Glass-Steagall Act in 1933 separated securities firms from commercial banks in order to protect the deposits from consumers. It wasn’t foolproof. The Federal Reserve offered an alternate interpretation of Glass-Steagall in 1998, which allowed securities banks and deposit banks to operate as one entity, thereby allowing Citibank and Salomon Smith Barney to merge. We now had one of America’s largest securities firms and largest banks in the same basket. It is like giving a compulsive gambler a truckload of extra cash and turning him loose at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas. Because of this loophole that the Federal Reserve created, Clinton in turn declared that Glass-Steagall was no longer relevant. 1999’s Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act repealed the Glass-Steagall Act, and the rash of corporate banking mergers began. If financial regulations were pants, this act just invited bankers to a nudist colony.

As the 1990s turned into the 2000s and the George W. Bush presidency, the same pattern continued. In 2003, ‘regulations’ were issued that simply exempted banks from state laws against predatory lending. All state laws in that regard were then nullified and the banks were free to engage. In 2004, the Securities Exchange Commission (SEC) eliminated the net capital rule, which required that brokers limit their debt-to-net capital ratio to 12 to 1, which means that for every dollar that they earned, they could invest $12. This repeal meant little to smaller banks who not only did not merge with investment banks but also did not participate in gambling with their customers’ money. However, there were five investment banks that qualified for the newly loosened restrictions of 40 to 1; these were Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers, Merrill Lynch, Goldman Sachs, and Morgan Stanley. Later, in 2007, the SEC eliminated the uptick rule, which essentially made it hard for speculators (or gamblers) to push down the price of a stock after betting it would fall. Eliminating the uptick rule gave a green light to stock manipulation. Gordon Gekko would have been proud.

The economic disaster that occurred in 2008 has been so over-complicated that most Americans still can’t understand what transpired. It, in fact, was very simple high stakes gambling that went horribly wrong. Aaron Sorkin’s script for Too Big to Fail explained it perfectly:

“Wall Street started bundling home loans together, mortgaged backed securities, and selling slices of these bundles to investors. They were making big money, so they started pushing the lenders and saying; come on, we need more loans. The lenders were already giving loans to those with good credit, but they needed more. So, they started going bottom-feeding. Before, you needed a credit score of 620 and a down payment of 20 percent to buy a home. Now they will settle for a 500 score and no money down. The regular home buyer on the street assumes the experts know what they are doing. If the bank is willing to loan me the money, then I must be able to afford it. So he reaches for that American dream and he buys that house. At the same time, banks knew that securities based on shit mortgages were risky. So to control that risk, the banks started buying insurance. So if a mortgage defaults, the insurance company pays (which is called a default swap, i.e. credit default swap). The banks insure their potential losses so they can move the risk off of their books so they can invest more and in turn make more money. One insurance firm was willing to take on an incredible amount of risk – AIG. Why? Fees. Hundreds of millions in fees alone. AIG figures the housing market would keep going up and up, but then the unexpected happens. Housing prices suddenly go down. Johnny Homebuyer’s teaser rate on his mortgage runs out, payments go up, and he defaults. Mortgage backed securities tank and AIG has to pay off the swaps. All of them. Worldwide. At the same time. AIG can’t pay, they go under. Every bank they insure books massive losses – on the same day. Then they all go under. It all comes down.”

Fourteen Signs of Fascism

What does all this mean? Yes, the United States has made some bad financial decisions and some bad foreign policy decisions since the late 1950s and early 1960s. Still feels like the same government, doesn’t it? We have a Congress, a Senate, a President, and a Supreme Court. You know, the same system of checks and balances that those guys like Washington, Franklin, Adams, and Jefferson had a part in putting together. We are still a democracy aren’t we? We still have a free market that drives capitalism, don’t we? If so, then what changed? What was Jack Ruby talking about? Look closer. Look at the characteristics of our government and its policies from 1960 to the present day. Look at those characteristics beside Dr. Lawrence Britt’s Fourteen Defining Characteristics of Fascism (after he studied Hitler’s Germany, Mussolini’s Italy, and Franco’s Spain) and re-answer that question. They are as follows:

1. Powerful and Continuing Nationalism - Fascist regimes tend to make constant use of patriotic mottos, slogans, symbols, songs, and other paraphernalia. Flags are seen everywhere, as are flag symbols on clothing and in public displays.

2. Disdain for the Recognition of Human Rights - Because of fear of enemies and the need for security, the people in fascist regimes are persuaded that human rights can be ignored in certain cases because of “need.” The people tend to look the other way or even approve of torture, summary executions, assassinations, long incarcerations of prisoners, etc.
3. Identification of Enemies/Scapegoats as a Unifying Cause - The people are rallied into a unifying patriotic frenzy over the need to eliminate a perceived common threat or foe: racial, ethnic or religious minorities; liberals; communists; socialists, terrorists, etc.
4. Supremacy of the Military - Even when there are widespread domestic problems, the military is given a disproportionate amount of government funding, and the domestic agenda is neglected. Soldiers and military service are glamorized.
5. Rampant Sexism - The governments of fascist nations tend to be almost exclusively male-dominated. Under fascist regimes, traditional gender roles are made more rigid. Divorce, abortion and homosexuality are suppressed and the state is represented as the ultimate guardian of the family institution.
6. Controlled Mass Media - Sometimes the media is directly controlled by the government, but in other cases, the media is indirectly controlled by government regulation, or sympathetic media spokespeople and executives. Censorship, especially in war time, is very common.
7. Obsession with National Security - Fear is used as a motivational tool by the government over the masses.
8. Religion and Government are Intertwined - Governments in fascist nations tend to use the most common religion in the nation as a tool to manipulate public opinion. Religious rhetoric and terminology is common from government leaders, even when the major tenets of the religion are diametrically opposed to the government’s policies or actions.
9. Corporate Power is Protected - The industrial and business aristocracy of a fascist nation often are the ones who put the government leaders into power, creating a mutually beneficial business/government relationship and power elite.
10. Labor Power is Suppressed - Because the organizing power of labor is the only real threat to a fascist government, labor unions are either eliminated entirely, or are severely suppressed.
11. Disdain for Intellectuals and the Arts - Fascist nations tend to promote and tolerate open hostility to higher education, and academia. It is not uncommon for professors and other academics to be censored or even arrested. Free expression in the arts and letters is openly attacked.
12. Obsession with Crime and Punishment - Under fascist regimes, the police are given almost limitless power to enforce laws. The people are often willing to overlook police abuses and even forego civil liberties in the name of patriotism. There is often a national police force with virtually unlimited power in fascist nations.
13. Rampant Cronyism and Corruption - Fascist regimes almost always are governed by groups of friends and associates who appoint each other to government positions and use governmental power and authority to protect their friends from accountability. It is not uncommon in fascist regimes for national resources and even treasures to be appropriated or even outright stolen by government leaders.
14. Fraudulent Elections - Sometimes elections in fascist nations are a complete sham. Other times elections are manipulated by smear campaigns against or even assassination of opposition candidates, use of legislation to control voting numbers or political district boundaries, and manipulation of the media. Fascist nations also typically use their judiciaries to manipulate or control elections.

Looking at those 14 characteristics of Fascism, can we look at ourselves in America and see any of these things happening? Just to name a few examples, the Patriot Act (losing the 4th Amendment), freedom fries, ‘Either you’re with us or you’re with the terrorists,’ military spending to astronomical amounts to the point where half of which could still create the most amazing military the world has ever seen, Guantanamo Bay, corporations as people, the disdain for science and facts, breaking up worker’s unions, ‘liberal’ Hollywood, the 2000 election recount, having the world’s largest inmate population per capita, controlling women’s bodies, a corporate and special interest controlled press, cronyism (only supported friends or party ideas just because they are the party’s ideas), foreign policy based on God’s will and speaking to God rather than rational thought, etc. The list of examples could go on for days.

What has become of America?

Have we in America become what the Greatest Generation gave their lives to stop in the Second World War? Or is our nation’s behavior, both in terms of policy and economics, merely coincidence? There is no way to know 100% if our nation’s path was done inadvertently to ensure our nation’s security or whether our course as a nation changed to a ‘new form of government taking over’ as Jack Ruby said way back almost a half a century ago.

Some questions may never be answered. Was Jack Ruby a man who knew of a plot to quietly overthrow the United States government and disguise it as an assassination by a lone Marxist Texan who is such a good shot because he was a Marine? Or was Jack Ruby in 1964 sitting in jail trying to say something to cover his ass because he murdered a man on national television? Only Jack Ruby could have answered that question for us. Whether coincidence or not, what he said holds a lot of weight still in the present day. If what he said is true, then who is pulling the strings? The banks, the corporations, the Bilderburg Group, Mickey Mouse? One thing is quite clear if what Ruby said is true. The President of the United States is never the one in charge. He only looks like he is.

In current times, posing the Jack Ruby scenario against every political or social argument in America makes things very interesting. Social media has given everyone in America to voice their opinions no matter how uneducated, under-informed, or ignorant they may be. If what Jack Ruby said is true, all of the arguments we hear every single day, whether it be about guns, drugs, sexual orientation, war, political ideology, gender equality, government budgets, economic issues, or the media itself is absolutely irrelevant. All of those arguments have to use the U.S. Constitution and the Bill of Rights as a cornerstone of the fundamental rights and privileges of being an American citizen. However, if the United States as we know it (and the Constitution knows it) was overthrown via a coup d’état in 1963, then everything that everyone wastes their time arguing over and debating to the point of suicide and revolutionary thoughts every single day is a moot point. They are all protesting the wrong government and wrong set of rules. If one can approach the happenings of every day’s news with the understanding that a ‘new form of government’ took over years ago, then one can slowly begin to make sense of why the U.S. government does the things it does and shows no regard to the documents and values on which this country was built. Political parties could just be distraction and disguise that this shadow government needs to keep the people entertained and not thinking about what is actually happening behind the curtain. We have no way of knowing if it’s true, but it’s a perfect plan if it is. Just look at how worked up Americans get over an election, which in the long run is essentially meaningless in regards to modern U.S. policy. The election’s (and candidate’s) only impact is the perception and statement it sends to the rest of the world’s citizens and their nations.

Despite the fact that the United States most certainly displays every characteristic of a Fascist state, it has something else that other Fascists nations in the past didn’t have. Americans.

There is a case to be made that American Exceptionalism is genuinely a psychological disorder (just look at that guy with the ‘Romney” face tattoo in 2012). American Exceptionalism is also something else. Our nation was built on backbreaking work by those that could and by the creativity and innovation of those who were told they can’t. It’s that spirit within everyone that makes the United States an experiment in freedom, hope, and opportunity that will be studied by scholars thousands of years ahead of all of us. It’s that spark of knowing that we can do better and be better than the past that sustains our nation’s people. The United States hasn’t always done everything right the first time, but it has always found its way when it has become lost. That’s what makes this country special. That’s what makes us special as Americans: the ability to do just that. As John Kennedy said, “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.”


Tragedy: JFK and his brother Robert (far left), who served as Attorney-General and close adviser in the president's Cabinet, was also assassinated in 1968

Tragedy: JFK and his brother Robert (far left), who served as Attorney-General and close adviser in the president's Cabinet, was also assassinated in 1968

On November 8, 1960, John F. Kennedy was elected president of the United States, defeating Richard Nixon in one of the closest national elections of the 20th century. At 43, Kennedy was (and remains) the youngest person elected to the office, and it was largely this quality in the man and his family — an engaging, youthful dynamism — that so captured the imagination of millions across the country and, ultimately, across the world.

As Kennedy and his team ran a heady, propulsive campaign unlike any America had seen.

 

IN THE DARK: AMERICA'S DESCENT INTO A POLICE STATE

Top US officials are reported to have been selling US nuclear weapons secrets around the world as part of a spy ring which includes members of Congress from both parties.  These and other accusations are broadly substantiated, but only by the American Conservative and newspapers around the world, including significant revelations about a 9/11 coverup.  How can this be done in a "free country?"

Massive penetration of, not only Congress, but the Pentagon and State Department are outlined in detail, naming those involved and how it was done.  Foreign intelligence agencies from Israel, Turkey and Pakistan, regularly accessed highly classified information and sold it around the world, even to terrorist organizations.

If 9/11 was a terrorist attack, inside job or planned to drag the US into an endless war in the Middle East for some other purpose, the information needed to plan the attacks was sold or given away by high ranking Americans who were under investigation by the FBI until 2001.

That investigation was ended by the Bush Administration and buried using States Secret Privilege, leading to the biggest espionage disaster in American history. This doctrine, since 2001, has been used to end nearly every aspect of accountability in our government.  Any information can be withheld from Congessional investigations, such as with the 9/11 Commission and any whistleblower can be silenced, even those reporting threats to national security, as with Sibel Edmonds.

"John Ashcroft’s Justice Department confirmed Edmonds’s veracity in a backhanded way by twice invoking the dubious State Secrets Privilege so she could not tell what she knows. The ACLU has called her “the most gagged person in the history of the United States of America.”"

Since 2001 and continuing thru with President Obama, a regime of suppression and disinformation has taken over in Washington, totally unaccountable to Congress or the people.  With the destruction of any ability for a people to make an informed decision through state secrecy laws without oversight and limit, there can be no democratic rule.

What are the basic mechanisms to overthrow a democracy?

If you control three institutions, you control a nation.  First is the press.  If you can manipulate the news, suppressing stories, stopping investigations and protecting "flawed" individuals while making the public look under their beds for imaginary enemies, your power is almost unlimited.

Second is government itself.  If you can control government by putting the real power in the hands of a few committee chairmen or key "deal makers" and can flood the system with dirty money, there will be no real investigations, only coverups and no real laws, only raids on the public treasury by the powerful while crumbs are passed out to others.

Third is public opinion.  Turning an intelligent electorate into a howling mob requires an endless series of both outlandish conspiracies and real threats, the truth behind all being misdirected through a concerted effort to divide a populace and keep them at each other, even to the brink of civil war, all to protect the economic cabal growing fat off "terror war" and "deregulation," a buzzword for massive theft.

When former FBI translator, Sibel Edmonds, reported that Osama bin Laden was an active US asset up to the second the planes hit the twin towers on 9/11, she was put under Patriot Act gag orders by Attorney General John Ashcroft that lasted for years.  Now that she is speaking, laying out facts supported by key FBI and CIA experts, nothing is hitting our papers.  How bad are the facts being kept from us?

"The 2008 Sunday Times series detailed Edmonds’ allegations that Bush’s Under Secretary of State Grossman — the third-highest ranking official in the State Department, after Colin Powell and Richard Armitage — worked closely with both the Turks and Israel in obtaining and selling U.S. nuclear weapons technology on the worldwide black market, and that he had even tipped off Turkish diplomatic colleagues about the true identify of then-covert CIA operative Valerie Plame-Wilson’s front company, Brewster Jennings, several years before the operation was named publicly by columnist Robert Novak"

While we were pretending to use our Patriot Acts to defend America through torturing suspects to get the truth, we are learning that much more of that coerced testimony may have been gathered to support a wide coverup of government crimes, many at the highest level.  Our questions regarding Edmonds and the extent of what her charges mean are several:

  1. How can an FBI investigation of this scope be ended so quickly without any information reaching the public?  We have come to believe that everything is leaked?  How is such control maintained?

  2. When a story like this is broken, why is there no followup investigation by the FBI, Congress or any attempt by investigative reporters, outside a few, to tell the American people the truth?

  3. Why has President Obama kept the same repressive and illegal policies in place that were used by the Bush administration?

We are well beyond conspiracy theory.  With the ability of our government to silence this story, which undermines the official versions of nearly everything from 9/11 to the most basic aspects of our national security, can any version of anything, investigated or not, commissions or not, ever be taken as more than part of the real conspiracy behind the conspiracies?

We have long accepted that our government was for sale to the highest bidder and that our press sold its soul after 9/11 for the privilege of being fed lies and continual access to more of the same.  Anyone breaking with the crowd was cut off, denied access and pushed out.

A government operating in secret is, in itself, a conspiracy.  Everyone working to stifle open government, end challenges to government power and continue down this path is a part of this conspiracy.  They are working against, not only the idea of democracy, but against the lives of everyone living in America.  This has left Americans subject to war for profit, rigged elections, economic slavery at the hands of financial pirates and the Obama administrations willingness to continue Bush era policies to impoverish working Americans.

The saddest part of this is the willingness of millions of Americans to join in to silence any movement for a free government.  Under the guise of patriotism, extremist groups, funded and organized, sometimes publicly, sometimes secretly, by special interest and supported by massive press organizations, some under foreign control,

Groups clamoring for "freedom," sometimes armed, are working feverishly on behalf of war profiteers, foreign spy agencies and criminal elements in our power elite.  Why is suppressing the truth about 9/11 a way of making us free?  Why is challenging the oil and defense cartels considered fascism?

The real goal is power, economic power.  Stealing oil, running drugs and looting our defense budget is only part of it.  With continual talk about conspiracies, Zionists, Socialists and endless cabals running a secret government, the real power, the multinational corporations and banking consortiums that control the Federal Reserve system, set oil and commodity prices, manipulate currencies set the course of human history, all unseen, have been around for decades.

Governments come and go, elections, real or rigged, assassinations, coups, none of it means much.  Even the most secure democracy can be taken down by a handful of dedicated men, be they terrorists, spies or foreign agents.  9/11 proved that.

If only the intelligent can see and understand the danger, then the real cabal attacks the intelligent as "liberal" and "weak."

If the patriotic and brave become a danger, send them to war or give them an imaginary enemy, fill the news with warnings and alerts.

If an investigation starts, channel it into a pet "paid off" Congressman or two and feed it lies.  Lying is now an honorable part of our national secuity effort.

If someone stands up, what happens?  With Edmonds, John Ashcroft issued executive orders to have her silenced.  Others are called "truthers" as a way of discrediting them.  How have we sunk to the point where asking for the truth can discredit someone?

If a story threatens to break, debunkers, agents of the cabal, jump on it immediately.  They come in two flavors:

  1. Debunkers present wild and implausible explanations attacking eye witness testimony, science and even video evidence using sarcasm and backed by powerful organizations.  Debunkers need prove nothing, only claim, with no accountability, that they have "debunked."

  2. Debunkers also join any investigation but lead it to the "Twilight Zone."  Every legitimate story is dumped on the door of "Zionists" or space aliens by this type of debunker.  They take plausible attacks on government lies and poison them with insane speculation in order to discredit anyone asking for a legitimate investigation.

Today, as usual, America is divided and moving toward a period of domestic discord and even home grow terrorism.  Our military forces have become a prime recruiting ground for the corporate cabal.  Every group that is easily influenced and easily misinformed, military, police, gun owners or those in isolated rural areas, are subject to wild stories of race war, imaginary Communist takeovers or worldwide Jewish conspriacies.

Whatever is blown up, a nuclear plant, a famous bridge or monument, the result will be the same:

  • More oppressive laws

  • More defense spending

  • More taxes or more debt

  • More dead American soldiers

  • More high prices for gas

  • More and more pundits on TV crying about socialism

It doesn’t take a genius to understand any of this.  We love watching movies and TV shows about government conspiracies idential to the one we really seem to have.  Where is the line?  How much has to be lies before we have become the thing we fear most of all, a police state?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

50 Years Ago: The World in 1963

A half century ago, much of the news in the United States was dominated by the actions of civil rights activists and those who opposed them. Our role in Vietnam was steadily growing, along with the costs of that involvement. It was the year Beatlemania began, and the year President John F. Kennedy visited West Berlin and delivered his famous "Ich bin ein Berliner" speech. Push-button telephones were introduced, 1st class postage cost 5 cents, and the population of the world was 3.2 billion, less than half of what it is today. The final months of 1963 were punctuated by one of the most tragic events in American history, the assassination of President Kennedy in Dallas, Texas. Let me take you 50 years into the past now, for a look at the world as it was in 1963.

 

Civil rights leader Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. waves to supporters on the Mall in Washington, D.C. during the "March on Washington," on August 28, 1963. King said the march was "the greatest demonstration of freedom in the history of the United States." (AFP/AFP/Getty Images)

A Helmeted U.S. Helicopter Crewchief watches ground movements of Vietnamese troops from above during a strike against Viet Cong Guerrillas in the Mekong Delta Area, on January 2, 1963. The communist Viet Cong claimed victory in the continuing struggle in Vietnam after they shot down five U.S. helicopters. An American officer was killed and three other American servicemen were injured in the action. By 1963, nearly 16,000 American military personnel were deployed in South Vietnam. (AP Photo)

 

French Singer Yves Montand performs at a fund-raising evening of entertainment in Washington, D.C., to celebrate the second anniversary of President John F. Kennedy's inauguration, on January 18, 1963. (AP Photo) Also the screaming sixties.

 

4

Ronny Howard, center, who plays Opie on "The Andy Griffith Show," is joined by his real-life father Rance Howard and little brother Clint in an episode of the show, marking the first time that all three Howards had worked in a TV show together, in 1963. (AP Photo) #

5

A motorist's view of a street in Baghdad, Iraq, on February 12, 1963, where tanks stand by to prevent further outbreaks of fighting which followed a military coup and overthrow of Premier Abdel Karim Kassem's five-year-old regime by elements of the Ba'ath Party.(AP Photo/Jim Pringle) #

6

The use of small, portable TV sets in the U.S. had not quite caught on in 1963, but in Japan, where they were first developed, viewers were hooked on the miniaturized video machine. Owners of the sets, such as this patient in a Tokyo hospital, took them with them wherever they went. (AP Photo/Hideyuki Mihashi)

7

Napalm air strikes raise clouds of smoke into gray monsoon skies as houseboats glide down the Perfume River toward Hue in Vietnam, on February 28, 1963, where the battle for control of the old Imperial City has ended with a Communist defeat. Firebombs were directed against a village on the outskirts of Hue. (AP Photo) #

8

Sixty five drivers run for their cars at start of International 12-hour endurance race at Sebring, Florida, on March 23, 1963.(AP Photo/James P.Kerlin) #

9

President John F. Kennedy and First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy ride in a parade in Washington, D.C., on March 27, 1963.(National Archive/Newsmakers) #

10

Powered sledges break a trail through Maine's primitive Allagash Forest, on March 5, 1963. Twenty men, led by an expert on Arctic equipment, made an extended trip through the forest to test equipment. Robert Faylor, director of the Arctic Institute of North America, led the group. The sledges, called Polaris vehicles, are powered with engines about the size of an outboard motor and travel up to 8 or 10 miles an hour, depending on snow conditions. (AP Photo/Dan Grossi) #

11

After the eruption of Mount Agung in Bali, on March 26, 1963, most of the cabins have been destroyed in this village. On March 17, the volcano erupted, sending debris into the air and generating massive pyroclastic flows. These flows devastated numerous villages, killing approximately 1,500 people. (AP Photo) #

12

Diane Sawyer, 17, America's Junior Miss of 1963, takes a few snapshots of New York's skyline on March 18, 1963. (AP Photo) #

13

Admiral Richard Byrd's "Little America III" station, built in Antarctic in 1940, was spotted by a Navy icebreaker sticking out of the side of this floating iceberg in the Antarctic's Ross Sea, on March 13, 1963. The old outpost was buried beneath 25 feet of snow, 300 miles away from its original location. A helicopter pilot flew in close and reported cans and supplies still stacked neatly on shelves.(AP Photo/Official U.S. Navy Photo) #

14

Riders read their morning newspapers on New York's subway en route to work, on April 1, 1963 after the end of the city's 114-day newspaper strike. (AP Photo/Jacob Harris) #

15

Black college student Dorothy Bell, 19, of Birmingham, Alabama, waits at a downtown Birmingham lunch counter for service that never came, April 4, 1963. She was later arrested with 20 others in sit-in attempts. (AP Photo) #

16

Rev. Ralph Abernathy, left, and Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., are removed by a policeman as they led a line of demonstrators into the business section of Birmingham, Alabama, on April 12, 1963. (AP Photo) #

17

Bluebird, the 5,000 horsepower car in which Donald Campbell hopes to break the world land speed record, pictured during its first run, with Campbell at the controls, during preliminary tests on the specially prepared track at Lake Eyre, South Australia on May 2, 1963. Torrential rains flooded the lake, postponing his run until the following year, when he set a record of 403.10 mph (648.73 km/h). (AP Photo/HO) #

18

The launch of the Mercury Atlas 9 rocket with astronaut Gordon Cooper on board from Launch Pad 14 at Cape Canaveral, Florida, on May 5, 1963. Mercury Atlas 9 was the final manned space mission of the U.S. Mercury program, successfully completing 22 Earth orbits before splashing down in the Pacific Ocean. (NASA) #

19

A 17-year-old civil rights demonstrator, defying an anti-parade ordinance in Birmingham, Alabama, is attacked by a police dog on May 3, 1963. On the afternoon of May 4, 1963, during a meeting at the White House with members of a political group, President Kennedy discussed this photo, which had appeared on the front page of that day's New York Times. (AP Photo/Bill Hudson) #

20

A young black woman, soaked by a fireman's hose as an anti-segregation march is broken up by police, in Birmingham, Alabama, on May 8, 1963. In the background is a police riot wagon. (AP Photo) #

21

French explorer and oceanographer Jacques-Yves Cousteau near his "diving saucer" during an undersea exploration in the Red Sea, in June of 1963. Together with Jean Mollard, he created the SP-350, a two-man submarine that could reach a depth of 350 m below the ocean's surface.(OFF/AFP/Getty Images) #

22

A cheering crowd, estimated by police at more than a quarter of a million, fills the area beneath the podium at West Berlin's City Hall, where U.S. President John F. Kennedy stands. His address to the City Hall crowd was one of the highlights of his career. (AP Photo) #

23

A picketer in front of a Gadsden, Alabama, drugstore turns to answer a heckler during a demonstration, on June 10, 1963. About two dozen black youths picketed several stores and two theaters. There were no arrests and no violence. (AP Photo) #

24

26-year-old Valentina Tereshkova, who became the first woman to travel in space, as seen in a television transmission from her spacecraft, Vostok 6, on June 16, 1963. (AP photo/Tass) #

25

Attorney General Robert Kennedy uses a bullhorn to address black demonstrators at the Justice Department, on June 14, 1963. The demonstrators marched to the White House, then to the District Building, and wound up at the Justice Department. (AP Photo/stf) #

26

Thich Quang Duc, a Buddhist monk, burns himself to death on a Saigon street to protest alleged persecution of Buddhists by the South Vietnamese government, on June 11, 1963. (AP Photo/Malcolm Browne) #

27

Alabama's governor George Wallace (left) faces General Henry Graham, in Tuscaloosa, at the University of Alabama, on June 12, 1963. Wallace blocked the enrollment of two African-American students, Vivian Malone and James Hood. Despite an order of the federal court, Governor George Wallace appointed himself the temporary University registrar and stood in the doorway of the administration building to prevent the students from registering. In response, President Kennedy federalized the Alabama National Guard. One hundred guardsman escorted the students to campus and their commander, General Henry Graham, ordered George Wallace to "step aside." Thus were the students registered. Kennedy addressed the public in a June 11 speech that cleared his position on civil rights. The bill that he submitted to Congress was ultimately passed as the Civil Rights Act of 1964. (OFF/AFP/Getty Images) #

28

Mourners file past the open casket of slain civil rights activist Medgar Evers in Jackson, Mississippi, on June 15, 1963. On June 12, Evers was shot and killed outside his home by by Byron De La Beckwith, a member of the White Citizens' Council. (AP Photo/stf) #

29

Dr. Michael Debakey installs an artificial pump to assist a patient's damaged heart in Houston, on July 19, 1963. (AFP/Getty Images) #

30

Allison Turaj, 25, of Washington, D.C., blood running down her cheek, was cut over her right eye by a thrown rock in a mass demonstration at a privately owned, segregated amusement park in suburban Woodlawn in Baltimore, on July 7, 1963. (AP Photo) #

31

Robert Fahsenfeldt, owner of a segregated lunchroom in the racially tense Eastern Shore community of Cambridge, Maryland, douses a white integrationist with water, on July 8, 1963. The integrationist, Edward Dickerson, was among three white and eight African American protesters who knelt on the sidewalk in front of the restaurant to sing freedom songs. A raw egg, which Fahsenfeldt had broken over Dickerson's head moments earlier, still is visible on the back of Dickerson's head. The protesters were later arrested. (AP Photo/William A. Smith) #

32

Firefighters turn their hoses full force on civil rights demonstrators in Birmingham, Alabama, on July 15, 1963. (AP Photo/Bill Hudson) #

33

Mrs. Gloria Richardson, head of the Cambridge Nonviolent Action Committee, pushes a National Guardsman's bayonet aside as she moves among a crowd of African Americans to convince them to disperse, in Cambridge, Maryland, on July 21, 1963. (AP Photo) #

34

Chicago police move in to knock down a burning cross in front of a home, after an African-American family moved into a previously all white neighborhood, on the 6th consecutive night of disturbances, on August 3, 1963. (Library of Congress) #

35

The statue of Abraham Lincoln is illuminated during a civil rights rally, on August 28, 1963 in Washington, D.C.(National Archive/Newsmakers) #

36

Folk singers Joan Baez and Bob Dylan perform during a civil rights rally on August 28, 1963 in Washington D.C.(Rowland Scherman/National Archive/Newsmakers) #

37

White students in Birmingham, Alabama, drag an African American effigy past West End High School, on September 12, 1963. Two African American girls attended the desegregated school and a majority of the white students were staying away from classes. Police stopped this car in a segregationist caravan in front of the school to caution them about fast driving and blowing auto horns in front of a school.(AP Photo) #

38

A civil defense worker and firemen walk through debris from an explosion which struck the 16th street Baptist Church, killing four girls and injuring 22 others, in Birmingham, Alabama, on September 15, 1963. The open doorway at right is where the girls are believed to have died. The horrific attack rallied public support to the cause of civil rights. Four men, members a Ku Klux Klan group, were responsible for planting a box of dynamite under the steps of the church. Three of the four were eventually tried and convicted. (AP Photo) #

39

One trooper sprawls in the flooded swamp as other Vietnamese Government Soldiers walk through the water after landing from U.S. army Helicopters near CA Mau Peninsula in South Vietnam on September 15, 1963. The Soldiers were landed to pursue communist Viet Cong Guerrillas who had attacked a Vietnamese outpost. (AP Photo/Horst Faas) #

40

A young Swedish fan hugs George Harrison as The Beatles play at a pop festival in Stockholm, Sweden, on October 26, 1963. Paul McCartney, left, sings with Harrison. (AP Photo)

49

Picture released on December 2, 1963 of the formation of Surtsey, a new volcanic island off the southern coast of Iceland forged from volcanic eruptions. (AFP/Getty Images) #

50

New York's Verrazano-Narrows Bridge, linking Brooklyn to Staten Island, under construction, on December 4, 1963. The bridge, with a span of 4,260 feet, opened to traffic on November 21, 1964. (AP Photo/Museum of the City of New York)

41

President John F. Kennedy greets a crowd at a political rally in Fort Worth, Texas in this November 22, 1963 photo by White House photographer Cecil Stoughton. (Reuters/JFK Library/The White House/Cecil Stoughton) #

42

At 12:30 pm, just seconds after President John F. Kennedy and Texas Governor John Connally were shot in Dallas, Texas, the limousine carrying mortally wounded president races toward the hospital, on November 22, 1963. With secret service agent Clinton Hill riding on the back of the car, Mrs. John Connally, wife of the Texas governor, bends over her wounded husband, and Mrs. Kennedy leans over the president.(AP Photo/Justin Newman) #

43

Lee Harvey Oswald sits in police custody shortly after being arrested for the assassination President John F. Kennedy, and the murder of Dallas police officer J. D. Tippit, in Dallas, Texas, on November 22, 1963. (AP Photo) #

44

Flanked by Jacqueline Kennedy (right) and his wife Lady Bird Johnson (2nd left), U.S Vice President Lyndon Johnson is administered the oath of office by Federal Judge Sarah Hughes, as he assumed the presidency of the United States, on November 22, 1963, following the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in Dallas (Cecil Stoughton/AFP/Getty Images) #

45

Lee Harvey Oswald, accused assassin of President John F. Kennedy, is placed on a stretcher after moments after being shot in the stomach in Dallas, Texas, on November 24, 1963. Nightclub owner Jack Ruby shot and killed Oswald as the prisoner was being transferred through the underground garage of Dallas police headquarters. (AP Photo)

46

Jackie Kennedy kisses the casket of her late husband, President John F. Kennedy while her daughter Caroline touches it in rotunda of U.S> Capitol, on November 24, 1963. (AP Photo) #

47

With the illuminated U.S. Capitol in the background, mourners form an endless line which lasted through the night, to pay their respects to the slain President John F. Kennedy, in Washington, D.C., on November 24, 1963. (AP Photo) #

48

Three-year-old John F. Kennedy Jr. salutes his father's casket in Washington in this November 25, 1963 photo, three days after the president was assassinated in Dallas. Widow Jacqueline Kennedy, center, and daughter Caroline Kennedy are accompanied by the late president's brothers Senator Edward Kennedy, left, and Attorney General Robert Kennedy. (AP Photo) #

 

 

 

 

 

Captured Blog: Past Inaugurations
U.S. President-elect John F. Kennedy, wearing his high hat, and his wife, Jacqueline Kennedy, are shown as they leave their Georgetown resident for the inauguration day ceremonies in Washington, D.C., Jan. 20, 1961. Kennedy will be sworn in as the 35th President of the United States. (AP Photo) # Captured Blog: Past Inaugurations

Captured Blog: Past Inaugurations

In this Jan. 20, 1961 black-and-white file photo, the crowd in Capitol Plaza gather to witness the inauguration of John F. Kennedy as President of the United States. (AP Photo) #

This was the view of front row seats in the inaugural stand before the administration of Democrat John F. Kennedy took over from that of Republican President Dwight Eisenhower. From left: Mrs. Lyndon B. Johnson, wife of new vice-president; Mrs. John F. Kennedy, wife of president-elect; Eisenhower; John F. Kennedy, who took oath as president a few minutes later. Lyndon B. Johnson, the new vice president. At right is Richard Nixon who was Kennedy's opponent in the election. (AP Photo) #

 

Captured Blog: Past Inaugurations

U.S. President John F. Kennedy delivers his inaugural address after taking the oath of office at Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C. on Jan. 20, 1961. Kennedy said, "We shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, to assure the survival and success of liberty." Kennedy was sworn in as the 35th president of the United States. (AP Photo)

 

 

 

The Death of Joe Jr.

 

Golden couple: Jacqueline Kennedy told the photographer later that this picture of herself and her husband in Washington in 1961 was her favorite because it was so affectionate

Golden couple: Jacqueline Kennedy told the photographer later that this picture of herself and her husband in Washington in 1961 was her favorite because it was so affectionate

Time out: JFK plays with his son John before boarding a flight on Marine One flanked by members of the Secret Service

Time out: JFK plays with his son John before boarding a flight on Marine One flanked by members of the Secret Service

One picture, taken in an open-top car during a Tunisian state visit to Washington in 1961, shows JFK affectionately brushing hair from his wife Jacqueline's eyes.

Only two years after theses images were taken, President Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, Texas on November 22, 1963.

Capturing Camelot, by renowned biographer Kitty Kelley, uses the work of late photographer and her mentor Stanley Tretick, who left the valuable shots to her after his death in 1999.

After following Kennedy throughout his presidential campaign, Tretick was given more access to the White House, allowing him to capture the family shots.

The photographer's pictures of JFK playing with his children became some of best known of the Kennedy era.

In mourning: Jacqueline Kennedy, backed by Nantucket Sound in 1964, following her husband's assassination

In mourning: Jacqueline Kennedy, backed by Nantucket Sound in 1964, following her husband's assassination

All the president's men: JFK takes the Kennedy, Shriver, Smith and Lawford children for a ride on his golf cart at the family's compound in Hyannis Port

All the president's men: JFK takes the Kennedy, Shriver, Smith and Lawford children for a ride on his golf cart at the family's compound in Hyannis Port

Iconic: JFK and his son John Jr stroll along the White House portico shortly after he was inaugurated as President

Iconic: JFK and his son John Jr stroll along the White House portico shortly after he was inaugurated as President

 


 

 

'I'm convinced a second gunman was involved in killing my uncle': Robert Kennedy speaks out about JFK's assassination 50 years ago

  • RFK was speaking at an event in Dallas to mark the start of a year of events commemorating the 50th anniversary of JFK's death
  • Also said his father believed the Warren Commission report was a 'shoddy piece of craftsmanship'
  • Sister Rory also spoke out about life as a Kennedy
  • A ceremony will be held in Dallas in November on the 50th anniversary of JFK's assassination

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is convinced that a lone gunman wasn't solely responsible for the assassination of his uncle, President John F. Kennedy, and said his father believed the Warren Commission report was a 'shoddy piece of craftsmanship.'

Kennedy and his sister, Rory, spoke about their family Friday night while being interviewed in front of an audience by Charlie Rose at the Winspear Opera House in Dallas. The event comes as a year of observances begins for the 50th anniversary of the president's death.

Their uncle was killed on Nov. 22, 1963, while riding in a motorcade through Dallas. Five years later, their father was assassinated in a Los Angeles hotel while celebrating his win in the California Democratic presidential primary.

Robert Kennedy told an audience in Dallas on Friday night that he believes more than one gunman was involved in the assassination of JFK 50 years ago

Robert Kennedy told an audience in Dallas on Friday night that he believes more than one gunman was involved in the assassination of JFK 50 years ago

smiles

Fateful Ride: President John F. Kennedy, First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy, and Texas Governor John Connally ride in a motorcade in Dallas, Texas, on November 22, 1963

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said his father spent a year trying to come to grips with his brother's death, reading the work of Greek philosophers, Catholic scholars, Henry David Thoreau, poets and others 'trying to figure out kind of the existential implications of why a just God would allow injustice to happen of the magnitude he was seeing.'

He said his father thought the Warren Commission, which concluded Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone in killing the president, was a 'shoddy piece of craftsmanship.'

He said that he, too, questioned the report.

'The evidence at this point I think is very, very convincing that it was not a lone gunman,' he said, but he didn't say what he believed may have happened.

Rose asked if he believed his father, the U.S. attorney general at the time of his brother's death, felt 'some sense of guilt because he thought there might have been a link between his very aggressive efforts against organized crime.'

Rory Kennedy, left, looks on as journalist Charlie Rose makes opening comments as during an event in Dallas on Friday that marks the start of a year of events to commemorate the 50th anniversary of JFK's death

Rory Kennedy, left, looks on as journalist Charlie Rose makes opening comments during an event in Dallas on Friday to mark the start of a year of events commemorating the 50th anniversary of JFK's death

gunner

Lone gunman?: Robert Kennedy has said that he doesn't believe that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone

Kennedy replied: 'I think that's true. He talked about that. He publicly supported the Warren Commission report but privately he was dismissive of it.'

He said his father had investigators do research into the assassination and found that phone records of Oswald and nightclub owner Jack Ruby, who killed Oswald two days after the president's assassination, 'were like an inventory' of mafia leaders the government had been investigating.

He said his father, later elected U.S. senator in New York, was 'fairly convinced' that others were involved.

The attorney and well-known environmentalist also told the audience light-hearted stories Friday about memories of his uncle. As a young child with an interest in the environment, he said, he made an appointment with his uncle to speak with him in the Oval Office about pollution.

The real thing: President Kennedy smiles in the sun as he rides from the Dallas airport into the city with his wife and Texas Governor John Connally in a photo taken moments before he was shot

President Kennedy smiles in the sun as he rides from the Dallas airport into the city with his wife and Texas Governor John Connally in a photo taken moments before he was shot

ar

President Kennedy and Jacqueline Kennedy shake hands with dignitaries on that fateful day in Dallas, Texas

He'd even caught a salamander to present to the president, which unfortunately died before the meeting.

'He kept saying to me, "It doesn't look well,'" he recalled.

Rory Kennedy, a documentary filmmaker whose recent film 'Ethel' looks at the life of her mother, also focused on the happier memories. She said she and her siblings grew up in a culture where it was important to give back.

'In all of the tragedy and challenge, when you try to make sense of it and understand it, it's very difficult to fully make sense of it,' she said.

'But I do feel that in everything that I've experienced that has been difficult and that has been hard and that has been loss, that I've gained something in it.'

gun

Evidence: Investigators carrying rifle found in the Texas Book Depository that was used to assassinate President Kennedy

solemn

Solemn: Robert Kennedy Snr. escorts Jackie Kennedy from the U.S. Capitol Building, along with her children John and Caroline, after a ceremony for JFK

'We were kind of lucky because we lost our members of our family when they were involved in a great endeavor,' her brother added. 'And that endeavor is to make this country live up to her ideals.'

The city of Dallas will mark the 50th anniversary of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy later this year  with a ceremony featuring the tolling of church bells, a moment of silence and readings by Pulitzer Prize-winning historian David McCullough from the president's speeches.

'I think what we want to do is focus on the life and legacy and leadership of President Kennedy,' Dallas Mayor Mike Rawlings said. 'The tone is going to be serious, simple, respectful, and it's going to be about his life.'

The commemoration on November 22, 2013, will take place in Dealey Plaza, where Kennedy's motorcade through downtown Dallas was passing as shots rang out. It will be free and open to the public.

dealey

Dealey Plaza, Dallas: The city will marking the 50th anniversary of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy with a series of events this year

swear

Swearing: Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson is sworn in to the office of the Presidency aboard Air Force One

'Lee Oswald was a hero': Former girlfriend of JFK's assassin insists her boyfriend was an innocent intelligence officer

  • Author Judyth Vary Baker writes in new tell-all book that former lover Oswald was framed
  • Also calls him a 'hero'
  • Baker met Oswald when she was 19, doing cancer research in New Orleans as a means to bring down Cuban President Fidel Castro
  • Dozens of conspiracy theories remain over Kennedy's assassination on Nov. 22, 1963

dsafsdaSgt Joshua Michael, 34, saved his wife of 15 years, Daylyn, just moments before train crash

There are a seemingly unlimited amount of conspiracy theories as to what happened on the cool November morning in Dallas nearly 50 years ago.

The former girlfriend of Lee Harvey Oswald, the man who is widely accepted as President John F. Kennedy’s killer, is adding to the list.

In a new explosive memoir, Judyth Vary Baker argues that Oswald could not have murdered the 35th President of the United States in Dealy Plaza.

Oswald

Girlfriend: In her new book, Me and Lee, Judyth Vary Baker claims that Oswald was framed for the assassination of JFK

Vary Baker

Revealed: Besides knowing Lee Harvey Oswald intimately, Vary Baker said she was working on a secret government project to give Fidel Castro lung cancer

‘Lee Oswald was a hero,’ Ms Baker began, speaking at an Oregon bookstore earlier this week. ‘I’m here to tell you that when you find out who did it, you will understand more about who took over our country and why we are in the position we are in today,’ according to KVAL News.

The author, who lives abroad due to what she claims are safety concerns, is going on a limited tour this month and onto December to promote her book ‘Me & Lee: How I Came To Know, Love, And Lose Lee Harvey Oswald.’She will also make several other appearances via Skype. Ms Baker was a whiz-kid, carrying out complicated cancer research in New Orleans in the early 1960s at the age of 19. ‘I was assigned to make cancer more deadly,’ she told KVAL. ‘Can you imagine?’ She said that she met Oswald in 1963 during this internship working under Dr Alton Ochsner, the former president of the American Cancer Society and they became involved.

Kennedy

Tragic end: Jacqueline Kennedy rests her head on husband John F. Kennedy's shoulder, after his arrival into New York to campaign, three years before his assassination in Dallas

'I was his lover,' she remembered, while not elaborating on their trysts. 'I loved him and he loved me and I believe that with all my heart.'

Oswald, she explained, was also part of the Ochsner project.

According to her book, the cancer research helmed by Dr Ochsner was tied to efforts to bring down Cuba’s then-president Fidel Castro through biological means, injecting the guerrilla leader with a fast-spreading cancer and making it nearly impossible to trace back to the U.S.

Oswald also told Ms Baker of the Kennedy assassination plot from conversations they had up to two days before November 23, 1963.

In her 600-page book, Ms Baker argues that her then-boyfriend was a deeply undercover intelligence agent who was actually trying to prevent Kennedy from being killed.

She said that Oswald was framed for the murder, which she said he could not have committed from his sniper post at the Texas Book Depository.

Oswald

Mystery: Oswald's girlfriend claims he was ordered to kill Kennedy but that he refused to go through with it

Ruby

Assassinated: Lee Harvey Oswald was himself killer by Jack Ruby during a television press conference at Dallas police headquarters

She told KVAL: ‘We have a lot of information that Kennedy was shot from the front,’ noting that the book depository was behind Kennedy’s motorcade.

Ms Baker said that there was a conspiracy against Oswald from the beginning. ‘They arrest him, they say he’s from Russia.’

Now approaching her golden years, Ms Baker said the last words she ever heard Oswald say to her were on phone call when he ended with: ‘I love you, Judyth.’

That was two days before Oswald himself was shot dead outside of Dallas’ police headquarters.

The assassination of President Kennedy has been the springboard of countless conspiracies, including ones that there were multiple gunmen, witnesses were intimidated, and that evidence had been both tampered with and fabricated.

Oswald Oswald

Young love: Baker said Oswald confided in her about a plot to kill Kennedy as 'pillow talk' and says the last words he ever said to her were 'I love you'

Johnson

Sworn: President Lyndon B. Johnson took the oath of office aboard Air Force One after the assassination of JFK with Jacqueline Kennedy at his side

JR

Junior: JFK Jr. created an iconic image as he saluted his father's passing coffin

Timeline of that fateful day: Events surrounding JFK's assassination and LBJ's ascension to the presidency

NOVEMBER 22, 1963

12.29 p.m. Central Standard Time: The presidential motorcade turns onto Dealey Plaza in Dallas. The open-top limousine has a driver and security guard in the front row, Texas governor John Connally and wife Nellie Connally in the middle row, and President John F Kennedy and wife Jacqueline in the back row.

12.30 p.m.: Witnesses testified that three shots were fired. The famous video recording of the event filmed by onlooker Abraham Zapruder shows that first Kennedy clutches his chest and seems to gasp before another shot hits his head. Governor Connally is also hit.

Mrs Kennedy immediately begins climbing towards the back of the vehicle, apparently in an effort to grab part of the President's skull, which flew back after he was shot. The Connallys reported that Mrs Kennedy said 'I've got his brains in my hand!'

12.33 p.m.: Shooter Lee Harvey Oswald exits the Texas School Book Depository, where he fired the shots from a sixth floor window.

12.38 p.m.: The presidential limo arrives at Parkland Hospital.

1 p.m.: President Kennedy is pronounced dead. A Catholic priest had been found and he performed his last rites. Doctors said that while they tried extremely hard to save his life, the wounds were too great by the time he arrived in the hospital. 'We never had any hope of saving his life,' said Dr. Malcolm Perry.

1.15 p.m.: Oswald shoots and kills police officer J.D. Tippit while he is on the run.

1.33 p.m.: White House press secretary Malcolm Kilduff entered the area of the hospital where the press had gathered and made a brief statement confirming the President's death, as caused by a gunshot wound to the brain.

1.50 p.m.: Oswald is arrested inside the Texas Theater movie house where he went in an effort to evade capture.

2.00 p.m.: President Kennedy's body was brought to Air Force One.

2.38 p.m.: Lyndon Baines Johnson was sworn in as the country's 36th president on board Air Force One, standing next to Mrs Kennedy who continued to wear the blood-stained pink skirt suit that she had on earlier.

3.01 p.m.: FBI director J. Edgar Hoover writes a memo saying that the President's killer had been captured.

6 p.m.: Eastern Standard Time: The plane arrives at Andrews Air Force Base in Washington. President Kennedy's casket and Mrs Kennedy leave first before President Johnson makes a brief statement on the tarmac. 'This is a sad time for all people....I will do my best; that is all I can do. I ask for your help and God's,' he said.

7.05 p.m Central Standard Time.: Oswald is charged with the murder of Officer Tippit.

11.26 p.m.: Oswald is charged with the murder of President Kennedy.

Two days later, November 24, 1963

11:21 a.m.: Television cameras catch nightclub owner Jack Ruby shoot Oswald in the basement of the Dallas Police headquarters.

Before going along with the plan so eagerly touted by Allen Dulles, Kennedy had established the pre-condition that under no circumstances whatsoever would there be direct intervention by US military forces against Cuba. On the one hand, Dulles had assured Kennedy that the news of the invasion would trigger an insurrection which would sweep Castro and his regime away. On the other, Kennedy had to be concerned about provoking a global thermonuclear confrontation with the USSR, in the eventuality that N.S. Khrushchev decided to respond to a US Cuban gambit by, for example, cutting off US access to Berlin.

Hints of the covert presence of George Bush are scattered here and there around the Bay of Pigs invasion. According to some accounts, the code name for the Bay of Pigs was Operation Pluto. 4 But Bay of Pigs veteran Howard Hunt scornfully denies that this was the code name used by JM/WAVE personnel; Hunt writes: “So perhaps the Pentagon referred to the Brigade invasion as PLUTO. CIA did not.” 5 But Hunt does not tell us what the CIA code name was, and the contents of Hunt’s Watergate era White House safe, which might have told us the answer, were of course “deep-sixed” by FBI Director Patrick Gray. One code name frequently used by CIA Miami Station personnel appears to have been “Don Eduardo,” roughly the Spanish equivalent of “Mr. Edward” or perhaps “Mr. Ed.” 6

According to reliable sources and published accounts, the CIA code name for the Bay of Pigs invasion was Operation Zapata, and the plan was so referred to by Richard Bissell of the CIA, one of the plan’s promoters, in a briefing to President Kennedy in the Cabinet Room on March 29, 1961. 7 Does Operation Zapata have anything to do with Zapata Offshore? The run-of-the-mill Bushman might respond that Emiliano Zapata, after all, had been a public figure in his own right, and the subject of a recent Hollywood movies starring Marlon Brando. As J. Hugh Liedtke had observed, he was the classic figure for the revolutionary-cum-bandit. A more knowledgeable Bushman might argue that the main landing beach, the Playa Giron, is located south of the city of Cienfuegos on the Zapata Peninula, on the south coast of Cuba.

Then there is the question of the Brigade 2506 landing fleet, which was composed of five older freighters bought or chartered from the Garcia Steamship Lines, bearing the names of Houston, Rio Esondido, Caribe, Atlantic, and Lake Charles. In addition to these vessels, which were outfitted as transport ships, there were two somewhat better armed fire support ships, the Blagar and the Barbara. (In some sources Barbara J.) 8 The Barbara was originally an LCI (Landing Craft Infantry) of earlier vintage. Our attention is attracted at once to the Barbara and the Houston, in the first case because we have seen George Bush’s habit of naming his combat aircraft after his wife, and, in the second case, because Bush was at this time a resident, booster, and Republican activist of Houston, Texas. But of course, the appearance of names like “Zapata,” Barbara, and Houston can by itself only arouse suspicion, and proves nothing. After the ignominious defeat of the Bay of Pigs invasion, there was great animosity against Kennedy among the survivors of Brigade 2506, some of whom eventually made their way back to Miami after being released from Castro’s prisoner of war camps. There was also great animosity against Kennedy on the part of the JM/WAVE personnel.

During the early 1950′s, E. Howard Hunt had been the CIA station chief in Mexico City. As David Atlee Phillips (another embittered JM/WAVE veteran) tells us in his autobiographical account, The Night Watch, Howard Hunt had been the immediate superior of a young CIA recruit named William F. Buckley, the Yale graduate and Skull and Bones member who later founded the National Review. In his autobiographical account written during the days of the Watergate scandal, Hunt includes the following tirade about the Bay of Pigs.

During the days after the Bay of Pigs debacle, Kennedy was deeply suspicious of the intelligence community and of proposals for military escalation in general, including in places like South Vietnam. Kennedy sought to procure an outside, expert opinion on military matters. For this he turned to the former commander in chief of the Southwest Pacific Theatre during World War II, General Douglas MacArthur. Almost ten years ago, a reliable source shared with one of the authors an account of a meeting between Kennedy and MacArthur in which the veteran general warned the young president that there were elements inside the US government who emphatically did not share his patriotic motives, and who were seeking to destroy his administration from within. MacArthur’s warned that the forces bent on destroying Kennedy were centered in the Wall Street financial community and its various tentacles in the intelligence community.

It is a matter of public record that Kennedy met with MacArthur in the latter part of April, 1961, after the Bay of Pigs. According to Kennedy aide Theodore Sorenson, MacArthur told Kennedy, “The chickens are coming home to roost, and you happen to have just moved into the chicken house.” 10 At the same meeting, according to Sorenson, MacArthur “warned [Kennedy] against the committment of American foot soldiers on the Asian mainland, and the President never forgot this advice.” 11 This point is grudgingly confirmed by Arthur M. Schlesinger, a Kennedy aide who had a vested interest in vilifying MacArthur, who wrote that “MacArthur expressed his old view that anyone wanting to commit American ground forces to the mainland [of Asia] should have his head examined.” 12 MacArthur restated this advice during a second meeting with Kennedy when the General returned from his last trip to the Far East in July, 1961.

Kennedy valued MacArthur’s professional military opinion highly, and used it to keep at arms length those advisers who were arguing for escalation in Laos, Vietnam, and elsewhere. He repeatedly invited those who proposed to send land forces to Asia to convince MacArthur that this would as good idea. If they could convince MacArthur, then he, Kennedy, might also go along. At this time, the group proposing escalation in Vietnam (as well as preparing the assassination of President Diem) had a heavy Brown Brothers, Harriman/Skull and Bones overtone: the hawks of 1961-63 were Harriman, McGeorge Bundy, William Bundy, Henry Cabot Lodge, and some key London oligarchs and theoreticians of counterinsurgency wars. And of course, George Bush during these years was calling for escalation in Vietnam and challenging Kennedy to “muster the courage” to try a second invasion of Cuba. In the meantime, the JM/WAVE-Miami station complex was growing rapidly to become the largest of Langley’s many satellites. Its center was at the former Richmond Naval Air Station south of Miami, which had been a base for antisubmarine blimps during World War II. During the years after the failure of the Bay of Pigs, this complex had as many as 3,000 Cuban agents and subagents, with a small army of case officers to direct and look after each one. According to one account, there were at least 55 dummy corporations to provide employment, cover, and commercial disguise for all these operatives. There were detective bureaus, gun stores, real estate brokerages, boat repair shops, and party boats for fishing and other entertainments. There was the clandestine Radio Swan, later renamed Radio Americas. There were fleets of specially modified boats based at Homestead Marina, and at other marinas throughout the Florida Keys. Agents were assigned to the University of Miami and other educational institutions.

The establishment press has consistently backed the Warren Commission conclusion for over 49 years, but 75% of the American public do not believe their media and their government.  Why?  I believe that many Americans have done enough reading and research to sense the deception and to understand that the government has been unable to make a convincing case against Oswald.  For many others, the Zapgruder film clearly shows a shot from the front, and no amount of propaganda can change that. For still others, the condition (not to mention the alleged trajectory) of Commission exhibit 399---the Magic Bullet---confirms the falsity of the Warren Commission. Each piece of evidence against Oswald is in dispute, including the rifle itself, the shells, the fingerprints, the incriminating photographs, and especially the autopsy. Not only is there no single piece of evidence not in dispute that would convict Oswald, the totality of the evidence presents a much different and ominous picture.

Researcher Peter Dale Scott termed what followed after the Kennedy assassination as series of "deep political events".   First Martin Luther King was killed after coming out in opposition to the Vietnam War. Then JFK's brother Robert F Kennedy was killed on the night it became clear he was likely to run successfully for President himself, and thus be in a position to investigate his brother's murder and end the Vietnam War. After that came Watergate, Iran Contra, the October Surprise, the Oklahoma city bombing, and the possible assassination of Paul Wellstone. Then came another event as traumatic for a new generation and for our country as the Kennedy assassination, the attacks of 9/11/2001.  These events are related by the underlying theme of preventing peace, justifying the enormous military budget, and expanding the Empire.

America will continue to be ruled by the Military-Industrial Complex, supported by a shadow government of Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), the National Security Administration (NSA), and other similar spy agencies as long as its citizens can be propagandized into believing the official versions of these events. The President and other elected officials know to work within the framework established by the military and surveillance state. Acceptance of the myth leads to acceptance of the death, destruction, and unnecessary wars for Empire that follow.

But a dedicated and relentless group of researchers has exposed the Kennedy assassination to be the work of our secret government. We must use the 50th anniversary to reinforce the fact that we cannot trust our government, and have not had reason to trust it since that horrible day in Dallas on Nov 22, 1963. 

 

President's wife: Mrs Kennedy in her husband's office at the old Senate building in Washington D.C., 1959

President's wife: Mrs Kennedy in her husband's office at the old Senate building in Washington D.C., 1959

There was a grittier side to their outwardly perfect lifestyle, however.

JFK reportedly had numerous affairs with pretty young girls at the White House, and his wife responded by having several affairs of her own.

In 1963, the couple's third child, Patrick Bouvier Kennedy was born, but he developed a lung problem and died two days later.

While still recovering from this loss, another tragedy shocked the world. On November 22, 1963, the President and his wife were in Dallas, Texas. As their car drove slowly past cheering crowds, shots rang out.

President Kennedy was killed and Mrs Kennedy became a widow at the age of 34.

Looking pensively through an aeroplane window, laughing with his three-year-old daughter Caroline and leaping from the back of an open-top car, the man who would become America's second-youngest president showed off the star quality combined with down-to-earth charm that beat rival Richard Nixon.

The race for the White House in 1960 was tough, with voters focused on how to rebuild the economy following the Second World War, the Cuban crisis and the Space Race.

Leap of faith: John F Kennedy on the campaign trail in 1960, jumping from an open-top car in New York

Leap of faith: John F Kennedy on the campaign trail in 1960, jumping from an open-top car in New York

American dream: JFK, alone on his private plane, fought one of the closest campaigns in American history against Richard Nixon

American dream: JFK, alone on his private plane, fought one of the closest campaigns in American history against Richard Nixon

One of most explosive under-reported stories of the last 50 years is the deathbed confession of E. Howard Hunt, who was personal assistant to Allen Dulles, head of the CIA at the time, to knowledge that Lee Harvey Oswald did not act alone and that he, Hunt, had been personally involved in the assassination. Hunt said in his written confession that the assassination was code-named "the Big Event."
It changed the course of history. Secretary of Defense
Robert McNamara confirmed that JFK was going to withdraw from Vietnam, thus clipping the wings of the military-industrial complex and saving 58,000 American lives. JFK also said that he would “splinter the CIA in a thousand pieces and scatter it to the winds.” No new awakening or restoration of the republic can take place without first confronting the truth about JFK.
Also little known, but well-detailed in Russ Baker's book
"Family of Secrets: The Bush Dynasty, America's Invisible Government, and the Hidden History of the Last Fifty Years," is the strong connection between Lee Harvey Oswald and George HW Bush (the senior Bush.) George de Mohrenschildt was a Bush family friend and a roommate of Bush's nephew at Andover prep school. De Mohrenschildt was also Lee Harvey Oswald's main handler and closest friend in the States. This connection has been completely ignored by scholars of the assassination.
It is well-known now that Bush was
in Dallas on the day of the assassination, but lied about it.
The Wikipedia entry on George de Mohrenschildt begins:

George de Mohrenschildt (April 17, 1911 – March 29, 1977) was a petroleum geologist and professor who befriended Lee Harvey Oswald in the summer of 1962 and maintained that friendship until Oswald's death, two days after the assassination of U.S. President John F. Kennedy. He was acquainted with the Bush family, including George H. W. Bush, with whose nephew, Edward G. Hooker, he had been roommates at Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts.[1]

On September 5, 1976, De Mohrenschildt wrote a letter to the Director of the Central Intelligence Agency, George H. W. Bush asking for his assistance in "removing a net" of surveillance from around him. The letter said:

"You will excuse this hand-written letter. Maybe you will be able to bring a solution to the hopeless situation I find myself in. My wife and I find ourselves surrounded by some vigilantes; our phone bugged; and we are being followed everywhere. Either FBI is involved in this or they do not want to accept my complaints. We are driven to insanity by the situation. I have been behaving like a damn fool ever since my daughter Nadya died from [cystic fibrosis] over three years ago. I tried to write, stupidly and unsuccessfully, about Lee H Oswald and must have angered a lot of people — I do not know. But to punish an elderly man like myself and my highly nervous and sick wife is really too much. Could you do something to remove the net around us? This will be my last request for help and I will not annoy you any more. Good luck in your important job. Thank you so much.[43][44]"

Bush answered in a letter that he could not help. Soon after that De Mohrenschildt apparently killed himself. Richardson Preyer, then chairman of the House Select Committee on Assassinations, said: "He was a crucial witness."
E. Howard Hunt went on to be a key player in Watergate, as a member of the Nixon administration, and ran many controversial CIA operations such as the coup against Arbenz, a democratically-elected president, in Guatemala.
Hunt's Wikipedia entry says about the confession:

He said the codename the conspirators gave for the operation was "The Big Event," and that Vice- President Lyndon B. Johnson ordered the assassination and assigned Cord Meyer to implement the details.

Further evidence of the official story being false is Secret Service agent Clint Hill's unbelievable explanation for the Secret Service "stand-down," when agents were called off the presidential limo in Dealy Plaza just as it entered the most vulnerable part of the route, a hairpin turn where it would be forced to slow to 5-10 MPH. Hill said to Mike Wallace on 60 Minutes that in the crucial moment of a paramilitary detail, the agent "went to lunch."
Secret Service Stand-Down
Hunt testifies before Watergate Committee


http://www.saintjohnhunt.com/testament.html
Rare interview with E. Howard Hunt
LBJ Mistress Madeleine Duncan Brown, on LBJ telling her on day before assassination "after tomorrow..they will never embarrass me again"

JFK Speech, summer before assassination, "Peace for All Time"
Allen Dulles, the CIA Director, was fired by Kennedy in 1961.
He was appointed as one of the Commissioners of the Warren Commission by Lyndon Johnson.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allen_Welsh_Dulles
Update 12/29
Rolling Stone Magazine on Howard Hunt's Death Bed Confession
http://www.rollingstone.com/search?q=Howard+Hunt&x=0&y=0

The Last Confessions of E. Howard Hunt

Rolling Stone | April 5th Edition (2007)
ERIK HEDEGAARD

He was the ultimate keeper of secrets, lurking in the shadows of American history. He toppled banana republics, planned the Bay of Pigs invasion and led the Watergate break-in. Now he would reveal what he'd always kept hidden: who killed JFK

>> Who assassinated JFK? The conversation continues in our politics blog, National Affairs Daily .

O nce, when the old spymaster thought he was dying, his eldest son came to visit him at his home in Miami. The scourges recently had been constant and terrible: lupus, pneumonia, cancers of the jaw and prostate, gangrene, the amputation of his left leg. It was like something was eating him up. Long past were his years of heroic service to the country. In the CIA, he'd helped mastermind the violent removal of a duly elected leftist president in Guatemala and assisted in subterfuges that led to the murder of Che Guevara. But no longer could you see in him the suave, pipe-smoking, cocktail-party-loving clandestine operative whose Cold War exploits he himself had, almost obsessively, turned into novels, one of which, East of Farewell , the New York Times once called "the best sea story" of World War II. Diminished too were the old bad memories, of the Bay of Pigs debacle that derailed his CIA career for good, of the Watergate Hotel fiasco, of his first wife's death, of thirty-three months in U.S. prisons -- of, in fact, a furious lifetime mainly of failure, disappointment and pain. But his firstborn son -- he named him St. John; Saint, for short -- was by his side now. And he still had a secret or two left to share before it was all over.

They were in the living room, him in his wheelchair, watching Fox News at full volume, because his hearing had failed too. After a while, he had St. John wheel him into his bedroom and hoist him onto his bed. It smelled foul in there; he was incontinent; a few bottles of urine under the bed needed to be emptied; but he was beyond caring. He asked St. John to get him a diet root beer, a pad of paper and a pen.

Saint had come to Miami from Eureka, California, borrowing money to fly because he was broke. Though clean now, he had been a meth addict for twenty years, a meth dealer for ten of those years and a source of frustration and anger to his father for much of his life. There were a couple of days back in 1972, after the Watergate job, when the boy, then eighteen, had risen to the occasion. The two of them, father and son, had wiped fingerprints off a bunch of spy gear, and Saint had helped in other ways, too. But as a man, he had two felony convictions to his name, and they were for drugs. The old spymaster was a convicted felon too, of course. But that was different. He was E. Howard Hunt, a true American patriot, and he had earned his while serving his country. That the country repaid him with almost three years in prison was something he could never understand, if only because the orders that got him in such trouble came right from the top; as he once said, "I had always assumed, working for the CIA for so many years, that anything the White House wanted done was the law of the land."

Years had gone by when he and St. John hardly spoke. But then St. John came to him wanting to know if he had any information about the assassination of President Kennedy. Despite almost universal skepticism, his father had always maintained that he didn't. He swore to this during two government investigations. "I didn't have anything to do with the assassination, didn't know anything about it," he said during one of them. "I did my time for Watergate. I shouldn't have to do additional time and suffer additional losses for something I had nothing to do with."

But now, in August 2003, propped up in his sickbed, paper on his lap, pen in hand and son sitting next to him, he began to write down the names of men who had indeed participated in a plot to kill the president. He had lied during those two federal investigations. He knew something after all. He told St. John about his own involvement, too. It was explosive stuff, with the potential to reconfigure the JFK-assassination-theory landscape. And then he got better and went on to live for four more years.

T hey sure don't make White House bad guys the way they used to. Today you've got flabby-faced half-men like Karl Rove, with weakling names like "Scooter" Libby, blandly hacking their way through the constraints of the U.S. Constitution, while back then, in addition to Hunt, you had out-and-out thugs like G. Gordon Liddy, his Watergate co-conspirator and Nixon's dirty-tricks chief, who would hold his own hand over an open flame to prove what a real tough guy he was. It all seems a little nutty now, but in 1972 it was serious business. These guys meant to take the powers of the presidency and run amok. Hunt, an ex-CIA man who loved operating in the shadows and joined Nixon's Special Investigations Unit (a.k.a. "the Plumbers") as a $100-a-day consultant in 1971, specialized in political sabotage. Among his first assignments: forging cables linking the Kennedy administration to the assassination of South Vietnam's president. After that, he began sniffing around Ted Kennedy's dirty laundry, to see what he could dig up there. Being a former CIA man, he had no problem contemplating the use of firebombs and once thought about slathering LSD on the steering wheel of an unfriendly newspaperman's car, hoping it would leach into his skin and cause a fatal accident. But of all his various plots and subterfuges, in the end, only one of them mattered: the failed burglary at the Watergate Hotel, in Washington, D.C., in the spring of 1972.

The way it happened, Hunt enlisted some Cuban pals from his old Bay of Pigs days to fly up from Miami and bug the Democratic National Committee headquarters, which was located inside the Watergate. Also on the team were a couple of shady ex-government operators named James McCord and Frank Sturgis. The first attempt ended when the outfit's lock picker realized he'd brought the wrong tools. The next time, however, with Hunt stationed in a Howard Johnson's hotel room across the way, communicating with the burglars by walkie-talkie, the team gained entry into the office. Unfortunately, on the way into the building, they'd taped open an exit door to allow their escape, and when a night watchman found it, he called the cops. The burglars were arrested on the spot. One of them had E. Howard's phone number, at the White House, no less, in his address book. Following this lead, police arrested Hunt and charged him with burglary, conspiracy and wiretapping. Abandoned by his bosses at the White House, he soon began trying to extort money from them to help pay his mounting bills, as well as those of his fellow burglars, the deal being that if the White House paid, all those arrested would plead guilty and maintain silence about the extent of the White House's involvement.

That December, his wife, Dorothy, carrying $10,000 in $100 bills, was killed in a plane crash, foul play suspected but never proved. Two years later, impeachment imminent, Nixon resigned his presidency. And in 1973, E. Howard Hunt, the man who had unwittingly set all these events in motion, pleaded guilty and ultimately spent thirty-three months in prison. "I cannot escape feeling," he said at the time, "that the country I have served for my entire life and which directed me to carry out the Watergate entry is punishing me for doing the very things it trained and directed me to do."

After his release, Hunt moved to Miami, where he remarried, had two more children and spent three decades living a quiet, unexceptional life, steadfastly refusing to talk about Watergate, much less the Kennedy assassination. His connection to the JFK assassination came about almost serendipitously, when in 1974 a researcher stumbled across a photo of three tramps standing in Dallas' Dealey Plaza. It was taken on November 22nd, 1963, the day of Kennedy's shooting, and one of the tramps looked pretty much like E. Howard. In early inquiries, official and otherwise, he always denied any involvement. In later years, he'd offer a curt "No comment." And then, earlier this year, at the age of eighty-eight, he died -- though not before writing an autobiography, American Spy: My Secret History in the CIA, Watergate & Beyond , published last month. Not surprisingly, those things he wrote down about JFK's death and gave to his eldest son don't make an appearance in the book, at least not in any definitive way. E. Howard had apparently decided to take them to the grave. But St. John still has the memo -- "It has all this stuff in it," he says, "the chain of command, names, people, places, dates. He wrote it out to me directly, in his own handwriting, starting with the initials 'LBJ' " -- and he's decided it's time his father's last secrets finally see some light, for better or for worse.

O ut in eureka, a few days before his father's death, St. John is driving through town in a beat-up mottled-brown '88 Cutlass Sierra. He is fifty-two. His hair is dark, worn long, and despite his decades as a drug addict, he's still looking good. He has a Wiccan girlfriend named Mona. He's also an accomplished and soulful guitar player, leaning heavily toward Eric Clapton; he can often be found playing in local haunts during open-mike nights and is working on putting a band together, perhaps to be called Saint John and the Sinners or, though less likely, the Konspirators. He's got a good sense of humor and a large sentimental streak. The last time he saw his father, in Miami, was a week ago.

"I sat by his bedside holding his hand for about ten hours the first day," St. John says somberly. "He hadn't been out of bed in ten weeks, had pneumonia twenty-seven times in the last sixteen months. He's such a tough old motherfucker, that guy. But he had all this fluid in his lungs, a death rattle, and I thought, 'Any minute now, this is it, his last breath, I'm looking at it right here.' A couple of times my stepmom, Laura, would say, 'Howard, who is this?' He'd look at me and her, and he didn't have a clue. Other times, he would quietly say, 'St. John.' He said he loved me and was grateful I was there."

At the moment, Saint doesn't have a job; his felonies have gotten in the way. He has to borrow money to put gas in his Cutlass. Beach chairs substitute for furniture in the tiny apartment where, until recently, he lived with an ex-girlfriend, herself a reformed meth addict, and two kids, one hers, one theirs. "I would've loved to have lived a normal life," he says. "I'm happy with who I am. I don't have any regrets. But all the shit that happened, the whole thing, it really spun me over."

And not only him but his siblings, too -- a brother, David, who has had his own problems with drugs, and two older sisters, Kevan and Lisa, who still hold their father responsible for the tragedy of their mom's death. Dorothy Hunt was staunchly loyal to her husband and, after his arrest, helped him with his plans to blackmail the White House. On December 8th, 1972, carrying $10,000 in what's regarded as extorted hush money and, some say, evidence that could have gotten Nixon impeached, she boarded United Airlines Flight 553 from Washington to Chicago. The plane crashed, killing forty-three people onboard, including Dorothy. The official explanation was pilot error, but St. John doesn't believe it. He thinks that the Nixon White House wanted to both get rid of his mother and send a message to his father. Nonetheless, he says he tries not to place blame.

"She got on that plane willingly and lovingly, because that's the kind of woman she was," he says. "They had lots of marital problems, but when it came down to it, she had his back, and she could hang in there with the big dogs. She was really pissed at Nixon, Liddy, all those guys, and she was saying, 'We're not going to let them hang you out to dry. We're going to get them. Those motherfuckers are going to pay.' So I've never held what happened against him. I had bitterness and resentment, but I always knew he did what he had to do given the circumstances."

And at times, he even seems to think of his dad with pride: "Did you hear that the character that Tom Cruise plays in the Mission: Impossible movies is named after him? Instead of Everette Hunt, they named him Ethan Hunt. I know he's been portrayed as kind of an inept, third-rate burglar, but burglary wasn't really his bag. My dad was a really good spy, maybe a great spy."

But then he starts talking about what it was like growing up the eldest son of Everette Howard Hunt, and a different picture emerges. "He loved the glamorous life, cocktail parties, nightclubbing, flirting, all that," Saint says. "He was unfaithful to my mom, but she stayed with him. He was a swinger. He thought of himself as a cool dude, suave, sophisticated, intellectual. He was Mr. Smooth. A man of danger. He was perfect for the CIA. He never felt guilt about anything."

I n the early days of the cold war, the CIA's mandate was simple: to contain the spread of communism by whatever means necessary; it was tacitly given permission to go about its dirty business unfettered by oversight of any kind. For much of the Cold War, it was answerable to no one. And if you were lucky enough to become one of its agents, you had every right to consider yourself a member of an elite corps, a big swinging all-American dick like no other.

The middle-class son of a Hamburg, New York, attorney, E. Howard Hunt graduated from Brown University in 1940 with a bachelor's in English, joined the Navy during World War II, served in the North Atlantic on the destroyer Mayo , slipped and fell, took a medical discharge and wound up in China working under "Wild" Bill Donovan in the newly formed Office of Strategic Services. When the OSS was transformed into the CIA, Hunt jumped onboard. He loved action as much as he hated communism, and he soon began operating with a level of arrogance entirely typical of the CIA. He was instrumental, for instance, in planning the 1954 coup in Guatemala that overthrew the left-leaning, democratically elected president, Jacobo Arbenz, and ushered in forty years of military repression, which ultimately cost 200,000 Guatemalans their lives. Years later, when asked about the 200,000 deaths, E. Howard said, "Deaths? What deaths?" Like Saint says, he never felt guilt about anything: "He was a complete self-centered WASP who saw himself as this blue blood from upstate New York. 'I'm better than anybody because I'm white, Protestant and went to Brown, and since I'm in the CIA, I can do anything I want.' Jew, nigger, Polack, wop -- he used all those racial epithets. He was an elitist. He hated everybody."

In the early Fifties, his father could often be seen cruising around in a white Cadillac convertible; he loved that car. He also loved his cigars and his wine and his country clubs and being waited on by servants and having his children looked after by nannies. He was full of himself and full of the romantic, swashbuckling, freewheeling importance of his government mission. He had quite an imagination, too. When he wasn't off saving the world from Reds, he spent much of his time in front of a typewriter, hacking out espionage novels, some eighty in all, with titles such as The Violent Ones ("They killed by day, they loved by night") and I Came to Kill ("They wanted a tyrant liquidated, and cash could hire him to do it").

Wherever E. Howard was stationed -- he'd pop up Zelig-like in hot spots from Japan to Uruguay to Spain -- he and his family lived lavishly and well, all presumably to lend credence to his cover job as a high-ranking embassy official. One estate was as large as a city block, and one dining table as long as a telephone pole, with the parents sitting at distant opposite ends. Sadly, he treated his children the way he and the CIA treated the rest of the world. They were supposed to bend to his will and otherwise be invisible. God forbid during a meal one of them should speak or rattle a dish.

"Whenever I made a sound, he looked at me with those hateful, steely eyes of his, a look of utter contempt and disgust, like he could kill," St. John says. "He was a mean-spirited person and an extremely cruel father. I was his firstborn son, and I was born with a clubfoot and had to have operations. I suffered from petit-mal seizures. I was dyslexic and developed a stutter. For the superspy not to have a superson was the ultimate disappointment, like, 'Here's my idiot son with the clubfoot and glasses. Can we keep him in the closet, Dorothy?' "

Later, E. Howard moved the family to the last home it would ever occupy as a family, in Potomac, Maryland. It was called Witches Island. It was a rambling affair, with a horse paddock, a chicken coop, the Cold War bonus of a bomb shelter, and a fishing pond across the way. E. Howard wanted Saint to attend a top-flight prep school and one night took him to a dinner at St. Andrew's School, to try and get his son enrolled. In the middle of the meal, Saint leaned over to his dad and whispered, "Papa, I have to go to the bathroom." His father glared at him. Pretty soon Saint was banging his knees together under the table. "Sit still," his father hissed. Saint said, "Papa, I really have to go."

"I ended up pissing in my pants at the dinner," Saint says. "Can you imagine how humiliating that was? Unbelievable." He didn't get into St. Andrew's. He ended up settling for a lower-tier boarding school called St. James, near Hagerstown, Maryland. His second year there, in 1970, after being repeatedly molested by a teacher, he broke down and told his mother what was going on. She told his father. And rumor had it that E. Howard came up to St. James with a carload of guns to make the teacher disappear. "He was really, really pissed off," says Saint. "He wanted to kill." In any case, at the school, neither the teacher nor St. John was ever seen again.

That same year, his father retired from the CIA after being relegated to the backwaters for his role in the Bay of Pigs. He went to work as a writer for a PR firm. He was bored and missed the hands-on action of the CIA.The following year, however, his lawyer pal Chuck Colson, who was special counsel to Nixon, called him up with an invitation to join the president's Special Investigations Unit as a kind of dirty-tricks consultant. He signed on. He really thought he was going places.

A round the time of st. john's Miami visit in 2003 to talk to his ailing father about JFK, certain other people were also trying to get things out of E. Howard, including the actor Kevin Costner, who had played a JFK-assassination-obsessed DA in the Oliver Stone film JFK and had become somewhat obsessed himself. Costner said that he could arrange for E. Howard to make $5 million for telling the truth about what happened in Dallas. Unbeknown to St. John, however, Costner had already met with E. Howard once. That meeting didn't go very well. When Costner arrived at the house, he didn't ease into the subject. "So who killed Kennedy?" he blurted out. "I mean, who did shoot JFK, Mr. Hunt?"

E. Howard's mouth fell open, and he looked at his wife. "What did he say?"

"Howard," Laura said, "he wants to know who shot JFK."

And that ended that meeting, with E. Howard grumbling to himself about Costner, "What a numskull."

But then St. John got involved, and he knew better how to handle the situation. For one thing, he knew that his stepmother wanted to forget about the past. She didn't want to hear about Watergate or Kennedy. In fact, E. Howard swore to Laura that he knew nothing about JFK's assassination; it was one of her preconditions for marriage. Consequently, she and her sons often found themselves in conflict with St. John.

"Why can't you go back to California and leave well enough alone?" they asked him. "How can you do this? How dare you do this? He's in the last years of his life."

But Saint's attitude was, "This has nothing to do with you. This stuff is of historical significance and needs to come out, and if you're worried that it'll make him out to be a liar, everybody knows he's a liar already. Is this going to ruin the Hunt name? The Hunt name is already filled with ruination."

So when Saint arrived in Miami to talk to his dad, the two men spent a lot of time waiting for Laura to leave the house. Saint painted the living room and built a wheelchair ramp. In the mornings, he cooked breakfast. In the afternoons, he plopped a fishing hat on E. Howard's head and wheeled him around the neighborhood. They drank coffee together. And watched lots of Fox News. And when Laura finally left, they talked.

Afterward, another meeting was arranged with Costner, this time in Los Angeles, where the actor had fifty assassination-related questions all ready to go. (The actor declined comment for this article.) Though the $5 million figure was still floating around, all Costner wanted to pay E. Howard at this point was $100 a day for his time. There would be no advance. St. John called Costner.

"That's your offer? A hundred dollars? That's an insult. You're a cheapskate."

"Nobody calls me a cheapskate," said Costner. "What do you think I'm going to do, just hand over $5 million?"

"No. But the flight alone could kill him. He's deaf as a brick. He's pissing in a bag. He's got one leg. You want him to fly to Los Angeles and for $100 a day? Wow! What are we going to do with all that money?!"

"I can't talk to you anymore, St. John," Costner said. And that was the end of that, for good. It looked like what E. Howard had to say would never get out.

O ne evening in Eureka, over a barbecue meal, St. John explains how he first came to suspect that his father might somehow be involved in the Kennedy assassination. "Around 1975, I was in a phone booth in Maryland somewhere, when I saw a poster on a telephone pole about who killed JFK, and it had a picture of the three tramps. I saw that picture and I fucking -- like a cartoon character, my jaw dropped, my eyes popped out of my head, and smoke came out of my ears. It looks like my dad. There's nobody that has all those same facial features. People say it's not him. He's said it's not him. But I'm his son, and I've got a gut feeling."

He chews his sandwich. "And then, like an epiphany, I remember '63, and my dad being gone, and my mom telling me that he was on a business trip to Dallas. I've tried to convince myself that's some kind of false memory, that I'm just nuts, that it's something I heard years later. But, I mean, his alibi for that day is that he was at home with his family. I remember I was in the fifth grade. We were at recess. I was playing on the merry-go-round. We were called in and told to go home, because the president had been killed. And I remember going home. But I don't remember my dad being there. I have no recollection of him being there. And then he has this whole thing about shopping for Chinese food with my mother that day, so that they could cook a meal together." His father testified to this, in court, on more than one occasion, saying that he and his wife often cooked meals together.

St. John pauses and leans forward. "Well," he says, "I can tell you that's just the biggest load of crap in the fucking world. He was always looking at things like he was writing a novel; everything had to be just so glamorous and so exciting. He couldn't even be bothered with his children. That's not glamorous. James Bond doesn't have children. So my dad in the kitchen? Chopping vegetables with his wife? I'm so sorry, but that would never happen. Ever. That fucker never did jack-squat like that. Ever."

N ot that it was all bad back then, in Potomac, at Witches Island. E. Howard played the trumpet, and his son was into music too, so sometimes the pair went down to Blues Alley, in Georgetown, to hear jazz. Back home, E. Howard would slap Benny Goodman's monster swing-jazz song "Sing, Sing, Sing" on the turntable, and the two would listen to it endlessly. And then, sometimes, during the stomping Harry James horn solo, E. Howard would jump to his feet, snapping his fingers like some cool cat, pull back his shirt sleeves, lick his lips and play the air trumpet for all he was worth. It was great stuff, and St. John loved it. "I would sit there in awe," he says. But the best was yet to come.

It was well past midnight on June 18th, 1972. Saint, eighteen years old, was asleep in his basement bedroom, surrounded by his Beatles and Playboy pinup posters, when he heard someone shouting, "You gotta wake up! You gotta wake up!"

When he opened his eyes, Saint saw his father as he'd never seen him before. E. Howard was dressed in his usual coat and tie, but everything was akimbo. He was a sweaty, disheveled mess. Saint didn't know what to think or what was going on.

"I don't need you to ask a lot of questions," his father said. "I need you to get your clothes on and come upstairs."

He disappeared into the darkness. Saint changed out of his pajamas. Upstairs, he found his father in the master bedroom, laboring over a big green suitcase jumble-filled with microphones, walkie-talkies, cameras, tripods, cords, wires, lots of weird stuff. His father started giving him instructions. Saint went to the kitchen and returned with Windex, paper towels and some rubber dishwashing gloves. Then, in silence, the two of them began wiping fingerprints off all the junk in the suitcase. After that, they loaded everything into E. Howard's Pontiac Firebird and drove over to a lock on the C&O Canal. E. Howard heaved the suitcase into the water, and it gurgled out of sight.

They didn't speak on the way home. St. John still didn't know what was going on. All he knew was that his dad had needed his help, and he'd given it, successfully.

The next day, dressed in one of his prep-school blazers, he drove to a Riggs Bank in Georgetown and met his father inside the safety-deposit-box cage. His father turned him around, lifted his blazer and shoved about $100,000 in cash down the back of his pants. The boy made it home without picking up a tail. Then his father had him get rid of a typewriter. Saint put the typewriter in a bag, hoofed it across the Witches Island property onto the neighboring spread and tossed it into the pond where he and his brother David used to go fishing.

"Don't ever tell anybody you've done these things," his father said later. "I could get in trouble. You could get in trouble. I'm sorry to have to put you in this position, but I really am grateful for your help."

"Of course, Papa," Saint said.

Everything he had done, he'd done because his father and his gang of pals had botched the break-in at the Watergate Hotel. Soon his mother would be killed in a plane crash, and his father would be sent to jail, and Nixon would resign, and his own life would fracture in unimaginable ways. But right now, standing there with his father and hearing those words of praise, he was the happiest he'd ever been.

Y ears later, when saint started trying to get his father to tell what he knew about JFK, he came to believe the information would be valuable. He both needed money and thought he was owed money, for what he'd been through. Also, like many a conspiracy nut before him, he was more than a little obsessed.

"After seeing that poster of the three tramps," he says, "I read two dozen books on the JFK assassination, and the more I read, the more I was unsure about what happened. I had all these questions and uncertainties. I mean, I was trying to sort out things that had touched me in a big way."

Touched him and turned him upside down, especially the death of his mother. He had been particularly close to her. She was part Native American and had sewed him a buckskin shirt that he used to wear like a badge of honor, along with a pair of moccasins. At the same time, Saint feels that he never got to know her. She told him that during World War II, she'd tracked Nazi money for the U.S. Treasury Department, and Saint believes that early in her marriage to his father, she may have been in the CIA herself, "a contract agent, not officially listed." But he isn't sure about any of it, really.

"In our family, everything was sort of like a mini-CIA," he says. "Nothing was ever talked about, so we grew up with all of these walls, walls around my father, walls around my mother, walls around us kids, to protect and insulate us. You grow up not knowing what really happened. Like, who was my mom, for Christ's sake? Was she a CIA agent? What was her life really like?" The one thing he does know is that when she died, so in large part did the Hunt family.

Once his father went to prison, Saint moved to Wisconsin, where he worked in a potato-processing plant and spent the rest of his time dropping acid. In 1975, he moved to the Oakland, California, area, started snorting coke and for five years drove a bakery truck. He was in a band and hoped to become a rock star, though touring alongside Buddy Guy was about the biggest thing that ever happened. Then he gave up coke and took up meth and a while later started dealing meth. Twenty years flew by. He had wild sexual escapades; he shacked up with two sisters -- "nymphs," he calls them. But mainly his life, like his father's, was a rolling series of misfortunes. He received insurance money after his mom died, and bought a house; a week later, it burned down in some drug-related fiasco. His brother David followed a similar path; leaving boarding school, he hooked up with Saint, and together they set about snorting and dealing away the years.

Finally, in 2001, on the heels of two drug busts, Saint decided to go straight. With his ex-girlfriend, their daughter and her son, he stayed in a series of shelters, then took them to live in Eureka, several hours north of Oakland. He's since earned a certificate in hotel management, but jobs don't last. And the questions and uncertainties about his father continue to circulate in his head.

"In some ways we turned out similarly," he says. "He was a spy, into secrets and covert activity. I became a drug dealer. What has to be more covert and secret than that? It's the same mind-set. We were just on opposite sides of the -- well, actually, in our case, I guess we weren't even on opposite sides of the law, were we?" T hat time in miami, with saint by his bed and disease eating away at him and him thinking he's six months away from death, E. Howard finally put pen to paper and started writing. Saint had been working toward this moment for a long while, and now it was going to happen. He got his father an A&W diet root beer, then sat down in the old man's wheelchair and waited.

E. Howard scribbled the initials "LBJ," standing for Kennedy's ambitious vice president, Lyndon Johnson. Under "LBJ," connected by a line, he wrote the name Cord Meyer. Meyer was a CIA agent whose wife had an affair with JFK; later she was murdered, a case that's never been solved. Next his father connected to Meyer's name the name Bill Harvey, another CIA agent; also connected to Meyer's name was the name David Morales, yet another CIA man and a well-known, particularly vicious black-op specialist. And then his father connected to Morales' name, with a line, the framed words "French Gunman Grassy Knoll."

So there it was, according to E. Howard Hunt. LBJ had Kennedy killed. It had long been speculated upon. But now E. Howard was saying that's the way it was. And that Lee Harvey Oswald wasn't the only shooter in Dallas. There was also, on the grassy knoll, a French gunman, presumably the Corsican Mafia assassin Lucien Sarti, who has figured prominently in other assassination theories.

"By the time he handed me the paper, I was in a state of shock," Saint says. "His whole life, to me and everybody else, he'd always professed to not know anything about any of it. But I knew this had to be the truth. If my dad was going to make anything up, he would have made something up about the Mafia, or Castro, or Khrushchev. He didn't like Johnson. But you don't falsely implicate your own country, for Christ's sake. My father is old-school, a dyed-in-the-wool patriot, and that's the last thing he would do."

Later that week, E. Howard also gave Saint two sheets of paper that contained a fuller narrative. It starts out with LBJ again, connecting him to Cord Meyer, then goes on: "Cord Meyer discusses a plot with [David Atlee] Phillips who brings in Wm. Harvey and Antonio Veciana. He meets with Oswald in Mexico City. . . . Then Veciana meets w/ Frank Sturgis in Miami and enlists David Morales in anticipation of killing JFK there. But LBJ changes itinerary to Dallas, citing personal reasons."

David Atlee Phillips, the CIA's Cuban operations chief in Miami at the time of JFK's death, knew E. Howard from the Guatemala-coup days. Veciana is a member of the Cuban exile community. Sturgis, like Saint's father, is supposed to have been one of the three tramps photographed in Dealey Plaza. Sturgis was also one of the Watergate plotters, and he is a man whom E. Howard, under oath, has repeatedly sworn to have not met until Watergate, so to Saint the mention of his name was big news.

In the next few paragraphs, E. Howard goes on to describe the extent of his own involvement. It revolves around a meeting he claims he attended, in 1963, with Morales and Sturgis. It takes place in a Miami hotel room. Here's what happens:

Morales leaves the room, at which point Sturgis makes reference to a "Big Event" and asks E. Howard, "Are you with us?"

E. Howard asks Sturgis what he's talking about.

Sturgis says, "Killing JFK."

E. Howard, "incredulous," says to Sturgis, "You seem to have everything you need. Why do you need me?" In the handwritten narrative, Sturgis' response is unclear, though what E. Howard says to Sturgis next isn't: He says he won't "get involved in anything involving Bill Harvey, who is an alcoholic psycho."

After that, the meeting ends. E. Howard goes back to his "normal" life and "like the rest of the country . . . is stunned by JFK's death and realizes how lucky he is not to have had a direct role."

After reading what his father had written, St. John was stunned too. His father had not only implicated LBJ, he'd also, with a few swift marks of a pen, put the lie to almost everything he'd sworn to, under oath, about his knowledge of the assassination. Saint had a million more questions. But his father was exhausted and needed to sleep, and then Saint had to leave town without finishing their talk, though a few weeks later he did receive in the mail a tape recording from his dad. E. Howard's voice on the cassette is weak and grasping, and he sometimes wanders down unrelated pathways. But he essentially remakes the same points he made in his handwritten narrative.

Shortly thereafter, Laura found out what had been going on, and with the help of E. Howard's attorney put an end to it. St. John and his father were kept apart. When they did see each other, they were never left alone. And they never got a chance to finish what they'd started. Instead, the old man set about writing his autobiography and turned his back on his son. He wrote him a letter in which he said that Saint's life had been nothing but "meaningless, self-serving instant gratification," that he had never amounted to anything and never would. He asked for his JFK memos back, and Saint returned them, though not before making copies.

There is no way to confirm Hunt's allegations -- all but one of the co-conspirators he named are long gone. St. John, for his part, believes his father. E. Howard was lucid when he made his confession. He was taking no serious medications, and he and his son were finally on good terms. If anything, St. John believes, his father was holding out on him, the old spy keeping a few secrets in reserve, just in case.

"Actually, there were probably dozens of plots to kill Kennedy, because everybody hated Kennedy but the public," Saint says. "The question is, which one of them worked? My dad has always said, 'Thank God one of them worked.' I think he knows a lot more than he told me. He claimed he backed out of the plot only so he could disclaim actual involvement. In a way, I feel like he only opened another can of worms." He takes a deep breath. "At a certain point, I'm just going to have to let it go."

O ut in Eureka, Saint has been reading an advance copy of E. Howard's autobiography, American Spy . In it, his father looks at LBJ as only one possible person behind the JFK killing, and then only in the most halfhearted, couched-and-cloaked way. He brings up various other possibilities, too, then debunks each of them.

But of all the shadings and omissions in the book, the only one that truly upsets St. John has to do with the happiest moment in his life, that time in 1972, on the night of the Watergate burglary, when he helped his father dispose of the spy gear, then ran money for him and ditched the typewriter.

The way it unfolds in the book, St. John doesn't do anything for his dad. And it's E. Howard himself who dumps the typewriter.

"That's a complete lie," Saint says, almost shouting. "A total fabrication. I did that. I mean, he never took me aside and thanked me in any kind of deep emotional way. But I'm the one who helped him that night. Me! And he's robbing me of it. Why?"

Like so many other things, he will never know why, because the next day, on January 23rd, in the morning, in Miami, the old spymaster dies.

Later in the day, Saint started reading a few of the obituaries.

One starts off, "Sleazebag E. Howard Hunt is finally dead."

"Oh, God," Saint says and goes looking for how The New York Times handled his father's death. The obit reads, "Mr. Hunt was intelligent, erudite, suave and loyal to his friends. But the record shows that he mishandled many of the tasks he received from the CIA and the White House. He was 'totally self-absorbed, totally amoral and a danger to himself and anybody around him. . . .' "

"Wow," Saint says. "I don't know if I can read these things. I mean, that is one brutal obituary."

But the Times is right, of course. E. Howard was a danger to anybody around him, and any list of those in danger would always have to include, right at the top, his firstborn son, St. John.

GHW Bush was intimately involved in drugs running and money laundering from his days as CIA Director.
It is not known how or why Noriega upset the American authorities. He was an integral part of the CIA's drug trafficking and money laundering operation from South and Central America.
He must of done something. He was replaced in a coup by GWH Bush.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_invasion_of_Panama
A brief history of the post WW2 drugs trade
http://ian56.blogspot.co.uk/2012/11/a-brief-history-of-post-ww2-drugs-trade.html
Prescott Bush (Pappy's father) was a Nazi collaborator and was convicted under the Trading with the Enemy Act in 1942.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2004/sep/25/usa.secondworldwar
How did the son of of a Nazi collaborator ever get to be CIA Director or Vice President let alone President?
Updates 12/30
The History of the Bush Family
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hkojpgNZD9I
George Bush the Unauthorised Biography
http://tarpley.net/online-books/george-bush-the-unauthorized-biography/

 

 

kennedy

More than 650 items belonging to former President Kennedy are set to be auctioned. The lot comes from the personal collection of a confidante, David Powers, who served alongside Kennedy during his entire political career. It includes, clothing, letters, photographs and gifts. Powers worked with the president from 1946 until his assassination in

Artistic study: The Kennedys: Photographs by Mark Shaw is available now

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A rare photograph of Ethel Kennedy, left, Jackie Kennedy and the president from 1954, before he was in the White House.

A rare photograph of Ethel Kennedy, left, Jackie Kennedy and the president from 1954, before he was in the White House.

Here's Kennedy and wife Jackie on vacation in 1955 in Palm Beach.

Here's Kennedy and wife Jackie on vacation in 1955 in Palm Beach.

Collection of pictures from Kennedy's bachelor party from Sept. 1953.

Collection of pictures from Kennedy's bachelor party from Sept. 1953.'To be auctioned are the personal items he chose to keep close to himself throughout his lifetime. Powers’ collection encompasses years of history with the Kennedy Family and his White House years,' says the auctioneers' website.

A birthday card signed by John F. Kennedy Jr. as just a toddler, this highly sentimental item is expected to be sold for as much as $5,000.

A birthday card signed by John F. Kennedy Jr. as just a toddler, this highly sentimental item is expected to be sold for as much as $5,000.

Collection of Kennedy family members enjoying time at their Hyannis Port home.

Collection of Kennedy family members enjoying time at their Hyannis Port home.

 

Here's the pen used by the president to sign the Interdiction of the Delivery of Offensive Weapons to Cuba in October 1962 during the Cuban Missile Crisis. It is estimated to be sold for between $5,000 and $10,000.

Here's the pen used by the president to sign the Interdiction of the Delivery of Offensive Weapons to Cuba in October 1962 during the Cuban Missile Crisis. It is estimated to be sold for between $5,000 and $10,000.

Pictures of Jack, Jackie and Teddy campaigning for Jack in 1958 for re-election to the US Senate.

Pictures of Jack, Jackie and Teddy campaigning for Jack in 1958 for re-election to the US Senate.

Caroline Kennedy's baptism in December 1957.

Caroline Kennedy's baptism in December 1957.

The president and first lady enjoy an evening out on the town in January 1961, less than a week after Kennedy took office.

The president and first lady enjoy an evening out on the town in January 1961, less than a week after Kennedy took office.

A presidential flag with the seal of office is expected to get as much as $10,000 next month.

A presidential flag with the seal of office is expected to get as much as $10,000 next month.

Picture of Kennedy, then a senator, meeting former President Harry Truman. It is signed, 'To Hon. John F. Kennedy with kindest regards from his good friend, Harry S. Truman, 12-2-59.' It is expected to fetch between $1,000 and $2,000.

Picture of Kennedy, then a senator, meeting former President Harry Truman. It is signed, 'To Hon. John F. Kennedy with kindest regards from his good friend, Harry S. Truman, 12-2-59.' It is expected to fetch between $1,000 and $2,000.

Picture of Robert Kennedy, left, and John Kennedy during Senate hearings in 1957 into improper labor activities.

Picture of Robert Kennedy, left, and John Kennedy during Senate hearings in 1957 into improper labor activities.

 

Rare cigarette light from Kennedy's trip to Mexico in June 1962. It is valued at $300.

Rare cigarette light from Kennedy's trip to Mexico in June 1962. It is valued at $300.

Unforgettable: Jackie shows off her inimitable style while holidaying in Ravello, Italy

Unforgettable: Jackie shows off her inimitable style while holidaying in Ravello, Italy

Height of sophistication: The couple relish a beautiful day in the garden, while Shaw captures them in their most unguarded moments

Height of sophistication: The couple relish a beautiful day in the garden, while Shaw captures them in their most unguarded moments

 

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navy

Kennedy, left, in 1946 while the picture on the right is him in his naval uniform in 1943. The collection will be on display at the Amesbury, Massachusetts auction house from February 9 through the 16th.

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jacket

Here are two pieces of clothing that will be sold. Kennedy's 'Air Force One' bomber jacket, left, is size 44 and from 1962. It is expected to fetch between $20,000 and $40,000. On the right is Powers' vintage jacket with the seal of the presidency on the right chest. It is monogrammed with Kennedy and Powers' initials. It is expected to be sold for between $1,000 and $2,000.

 

  • John F. Kennedy and Jackie's most memorable moments were captured by friend and photographer Mark Shaw, from Life magazine
  • Pictures show couple holidaying in Hyannis Port, Mass and Ravello, Italy
  • Combination of glamorous scenes and peaceful family moments
  • Half of photos in new book have never been seen before

A collection of fascinating private and public photos of the Kennedys have been revealed in a book and exhibition exploring the legacy of one of the most famous couples of all time.

The images - half of which have never been seen before - were captured by Life magazine's Mark Shaw, who was both the unofficial photographer for John F. Kennedy and wife Jackie, as well as a close friend and confidant.

Shaw's beautiful shots encapsulate the vibrant life of the pair, who are seen in a variety of situations, dazzling on the campaign trail or sharing a warm family moment with their daughter on holiday.

Love story: John F. Kennedy campaigning to become president, with stylish and cultured wife Jackie by his side

Love story: John F. Kennedy campaigning to become president, with stylish and cultured wife Jackie by his side

Special access: More than half of Shaw's photos have never been seen before and his work was treasured by the Kennedy family

Special access: More than half of Shaw's photos have never been seen before and his work was treasured by the Kennedy family

Rich and famous: The fashionable couple pose in formal outfits for this charming official portrait

Rich and famous: The fashionable couple pose in formal outfits for this charming official portrait. Shaw met the charismatic Massachusetts senator and his elegant wife in 1959, six years after their marriage, when he photographed them for Life magazine. He developed a close friendship with the glamorous, all-American couple, allowing him extraordinary and informal access to the family. Over the following four years, Shaw captured the couple and their children Caroline and John Fitzgerald Kennedy Jr at their most relaxed. They are pictured in Nantucket, Hyannis Port, Mass., Mrs Kennedy's family home in Merrywood, Virginia and on the Amalfi Coast of Italy.

American dream: The couple relax in Massachusetts fishing village Hyannis Port with first child Caroline

American dream: The couple relax in Massachusetts fishing village Hyannis Port with first child Caroline. He also photographed the couple as they shone in public, with stylish Jackie supporting her husband on the campaign trail and at his star-studded inauguration gala. On November 8, 1960, JFK beat Republican Richard M. Nixon in a very close race to become the 35th president of the United States, with his graceful wife standing by his side. She made the White House into a home, creating a kindergarten and working to restore and preserve the historical building while Shaw photographed the family's unique daily life. By now a fashion icon, she hosted glittering events and travelled the world gaining admiration for her elegance and goodwill.

Jacqueline Kennedy and daughter Caroline at Hyannis Port 1959

Jacqueline Kennedy at Georgetown 1959

New images: Mrs Kennedy with daughter Caroline at Hyannis Port in 1959 and later that year in Georgetown

Effortless grace: The attractive and powerful couple look at ease as they take a moment away from the strain of their heavy responsibilities

Effortless grace: The attractive and powerful couple look at ease as they take a moment away from the strain of their heavy responsibilities

Long-lasting relationship: Shaw met the charismatic young Massachusetts senator and his elegant wife in 1959 when he photographed them for Life magazine

Long-lasting relationship: Shaw met the charismatic young Massachusetts senator and his elegant wife in 1959 when he photographed them for Life magazine. Kennedy fought hard across all 50 states with his vice-presidential candidate Lyndon Johnson, shaking hands and wooing voters with passionate campaign speeches. Compared the high security surrounding presidential nominees today at times he often appears to stand alone at the center of clamoring crowds. The effect that 43-year-old war hero Kennedy had on female voters was well-documented. As it was reported in the last edition of Life Magazine before Americans went to the polls: 'The blissful fog of feminine adoration surrounding Jack Kennedy - the great phenomenon of the 1960 campaign - grew even thicker in the last days of his tour.' At the time of her husband's run for the White House, Jacqueline Kennedy was just 31 years old but quickly enthralled the American public with her beauty and poise. The Kennedy image proved one of the secrets to the success of his campaign. A turning point in the race came when the candidates went head to head in the first televised presidential debate in history.

Queen of Camelot: Jacqueline Kennedy, 31, looks regal in opera gloves as she watches her husband sworn in as President on January 20, 1961

Queen of Camelot: Jacqueline Kennedy, 31, looks regal in opera gloves as she watches her husband sworn in as President on January 20, 1961

Luck be a lady: Many political commentators noted the effect that the youthful and heroic JFK had on his female voters - young and old

Luck be a lady: Many political commentators noted the effect that the youthful and heroic JFK had on his female voters - young and old. While Kennedy appeared relaxed and at home in front of the camera, Richard Nixon seemed uncomfortable and out of touch. Still the last legs of the race were closely run - Kennedy beat Nixon to the White House with 49.7 per cent of the vote to Nixon's 49.5 per cent. John F Kennedy became the 35th President at noon on January 20, 1961. He led the country until he was tragically assassinated while driving through Dallas in November 1963, collapsing in the back of his car, into his wife’s blood-splattered arms.

 

 

Rock music has embodied and served as the vehicle for cultural and social movements, leading to major sub-cultures including mods and rockers in the UK and the "hippie" counterculture that spread out from San Francisco in the US in the 1960s. Similarly, 1970s punk culture spawned the visually distinctive goth and emo subcultures. Inheriting the folk tradition of the protest song, rock music has been associated with political activism as well as changes in social attitudes to race, sex and drug use, and is often seen as an expression of youth revolt against adult consumerism and conformity.


Captured: John Lennon

President Kennedy opposed the industrial military complex and the "Federal" Reserve System. In 1963, it cost him his life. On June 4, 1963, a little known attempt was made to strip the Federal Reserve Bank of its power to loan money to the government at interest. On that day President John F. Kennedy signed Executive Order No. 11110 that returned to the U.S. government the power to issue currency, without going through the Federal Reserve. Mr. Kennedy's order gave the Treasury the power "to issue silver certificates against any silver bullion, silver, or standard silver dollars in the Treasury." This meant that for every ounce of silver in the U.S. Treasury's vault, the government could introduce new money into circulation. In all, Kennedy brought nearly $4.3 billion in U.S. notes into circulation. The ramifications of this bill are enormous.Soon after President Kennedy's assassination, President Johnson debased the coinage by removing ALL the silver from the silver coins.

Dr. Martin Luther King, leads a crowd of 125,000 Vietnam War protesters in front of the United Nations in New York on April 15, 1967, as he voices a repeated demand to Stop the bombing. The largest anti-war demonstration in history was held when 250,000 people marched from the Capitol to the Washington Monument, once again, showing the unity of youth. This was the speech that marked MLK for asassination. We could reflect the vision of this speech to the present wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Wars that displaced the poor(AP Photo) All we are asking is give peace a chance, was chanted throughout protests, and anti-war demonstrations. Timothy Leary's famous phrase, Tune in, turn on, and drop out! America's youth was changing rapidly. Never before had the younger generation been so outspoken. 50,000 flower children and hippies traveled to San Francisco for the Summer of Love, with the Beatles' hit song, Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band as their light in the dark. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JOO8-Jp-xsg

Martin Luther King Jr (left) and Robert F Kennedy (right) When the late, Robert F. Kennedy, signed the J. Edgar Hoover/FBI document unknowingly granting his consent as attorney general, for the agency to spy on, harass and terrorize the late, great Martin Luther King Jr., he was essentially signing the civil rights leader's death warrant. The FBI even sent King a suicide note, urging him to kill himself. The FBI/DOJ's violation of King's rights went on for years, to the day he was murdered. FBI agents, scholars and analysts, have since come forward claiming there was an FBI conspiracy to kill King, with the assassination executed by a commissioned killer.

 

 

Captured: John Lennon Captured: John Lennon

  The decade saw the Vietnam War, the gradual relaxation in the social structures governing morals, took a step further as millions of woman tossed out their bras. The hippies sought to depart from materialism by creating what came to be known as the anti-fashion and counter culture movement. The Sixties was a decade of Liberation and Revolution, a time of personal journeys and fiery protests. It transcended all national borders and changed the world. People, young and old, united in opposition to the existing dictates of society. Poignant was the death of JFK. The Beatles were a pick up happy energy then. Finishing ChE and dreams to go to America made a big difference of what I want to be later on. Against that was the temptations of an open society, unlike that of the country I left behind.

The reasons behind American opposition to the Vietnam War fall into the following main categories: opposition to the draft; moral, legal, and pragmatic arguments against U.S. intervention; reaction to the media portrayal of the devastation in Southeast Asia.

Boys in the band: George Harrison, John Lennon, Ringo Starr and Paul McCartney are seen in this 1964 photo during their first American tour

Boys in the band: George Harrison, John Lennon, Ringo Starr and Paul McCartney are seen in this 1964 photo during

 

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