on the Assassination of President Kennedy but better known by the name of its chairman, Supreme Court Chief Justice Earl Warren. The commission was created by Lyndon Johnson on November 29, 1963, to investigate John F. Kennedy’s death and concluded just under a year later that Lee Harvey Oswald planned and carried out the shooting with no outside assistance. One of the commission’s lawyers, Arlen Specter, the future senator from Pennsylvania, is credited with the commission’s most controversial finding, the “magic bullet” theory, which postulated that the second of the three bullets Lee Harvey Oswald fired from the sixth floor Book Depository window was responsible for all of the wounds to both President Kennedy and Governor Connolly save for Kennedy’s head trauma.
2. The Monroe Doctrine. One of the defining concepts of U.S. foreign policy, the Monroe Doctrine declared that any attempts by European powers to colonize or exert undue influence in the New World would be viewed as acts of aggression toward the United States. A logical (if equally self-aggrandizing) corollary to Manifest Destiny, the Monroe Doctrine was largely symbolic when it was first articulated, but as the United States became a world economic and military power, the doctrine came to be seen as one of the cornerstones of American strength. While Europe and Asia squabbled over slivers of territory and resources, the United States was free to concentrate on growing the largest economy the world had ever seen. Eventually, as military and transport technology shrank the world, the doctrine was more and more frequently put to the test. Among other things, it was
3. Sam “Momo” Giancana. The leader of the so-called Chicago Outfit from 1957. Rumors about his influence on American politics abound, from the disputed claim that he gave Chicago to Jack Kennedy in the 1960 election, thus securing him Illinois’ Electoral College votes as well as the presidency, to the much more solid allegation that he was paid large amounts of money by CIA to assassinate Fidel Castro. Despite all of this (or perhaps because of it), Giancana was also one of Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy’s biggest targets during his relentless prosecution of organized crime in the early sixties. Giancana, feeling that quid pro quo had been violated, articulated on numerous occasions his desire to kill the elder Kennedy in order to get rid of the younger: the reasoning went that if you killed Bobby Kennedy, then his crusade against organized crime would become a kind of holy quest on the part of both his older brother and the American people; but if you killed Jack, then LBJ would end up in the Oval Office. Johnson’s dislike of the Kennedys was well known, and it was assumed that once he became president, Bobby would be relieved of his post—which is, in fact, what happened. In 1975, Giancana was scheduled to testify to a Senate committee about connections between organized crime and the Kennedy assassination when someone broke into his home and shot him seven times in the head.
4. J. Edgar Hoover. The founding director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Hoover held the post for more than forty years, until he died in office in 1972. When Hoover took over the Bureau, it had about 650 employees; by the time he died, it had more than 7,000. Hoover’s reputation as a vigilant crime fighter and anti-Communist was tainted by a host of rumors and allegations, including the claim that he was a homosexual, had African American ancestry, and kept secret files on a wide variety of American politicians, businessmen, and celebrities in order to ensure that he stayed in power. When he died, thousands of pages of his files were shredded by his secretary, Helen Gandy, before the truth or falsehood of the latter claim could be substantiated.
5. The Myth of Orpheus. Orpheus is well-known today as the singer who journeyed to hell to recover his dead wife, only to lose her at the last minute when he turned to look at her. Equally important in the ancient world, however, was what Orpheus did afterward: as the only mortal to have seen hell, Orpheus became the object of a potent “mystery cult” that claimed special knowledge about what happened to the human soul after the body died, and ways to secure advantages in the afterlife. Orphic legends have persisted and have been intermittently attractive to various spiritual and philosophical groups, including many of the so-called gurus of the sixties, that believe salvation is attained not through grace but through revelation.
6. Timothy Leary. The high priest of not just of LSD but of the entire counterculture, Timothy Leary was once referred to as “the most dangerous man in America” by none other than Richard Nixon. His effect on American youth and popular culture was so profound that it’s almost impossible to believe now, let alone quantify. “Turn on, tune in, drop out” became the mantra of a generation, but behind the “Free to Be You and Me” attitude was a rigorous intellectual and scientific mind, one that believed LSD, far from simply offering psychedelic hallucinations for an eight- or ten-hour period, might permanently and profoundly alter brain function, unlocking heretofore unknown mental abilities in the same way that steroids permanently altered the human physiognomy a generation later. While Leary’s antiestablishment views drew flak from law enforcement agencies and political figures, eventually landing him in jail, his ideas about LSD drew attention from a different segment of American government, namely the CIA. While no one has ever definitively proved that CIA funded any of Leary’s LSD experiments at Harvard or the Millbrook, New York, colony he founded in 1963, the rumors have never quite faded away, either.
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9. Millbrook, New York. A small town on the Hudson River, Millbrook became famous in the 1960s as the site of Timothy Leary’s Castalia colony, which was dedicated to exploring the uses of psychedelic drugs.
10. James Jesus Angleton. The head of counterintelligence at the CIA, “Mother” was famous for seeing double agents everywhere—save for in one of his oldest and closest friends, Kim Philby. Although Angleton’s suspicions verged on the paranoiac, it is clear that double and sleeper agents were and continue to be a major tactic of international espionage, as attested by the recent discovery of a Russian spy ring operating up and down the East Coast.
11. Kim Philby. Perhaps the most famous double agent of all time, Philby worked for the Soviet Union for more than thirty years, during which time his activities as an agent of England’s MI-6 earned him the OBE. When “Stanley” was finally unmasked in 1963, the intelligence community on both sides of the Atlantic was rocked, and a never-ending hunt for double and sleeper agents was launched that continues to this day.
12. Billy Hitchcock. The owner of the mansion housing Timothy Leary’s Millbrook colony. One of the heirs to the Mellon Bank fortune, Hitchcock’s motives have been variously attributed to altruism, spiritual curiosity, capitalism (he was said to believe that LSD could be “the new tobacco”), to a never-proven belief that Hitchcock was in the employ of the CIA.
13. Jack Ruby. The man who shot Lee Harvey Oswald to save Jackie the trauma of a trial is almost as mysterious as the assassin he murdered. His ties to organized crime, including Sam Giancana, have been well documented, but whether Giancana put him up to the shooting is unknown. At one point, he claimed Oswald was the gunman of a conspiracy to assassinate President Kennedy, and he also claimed that he was framed to kill Oswald; he also claimed he was injected with the cancer cells that claimed his life in 1967. Shortly before he died, however, he recanted everything, and claimed he had acted alone.
14. Lee Harvey Oswald. Few lives in history have been more documented than Lee Harvey Oswald’s, yet few are as shrouded in mystery. An avowed Communist from early childhood, he also joined the U.S. Marines a few days before his seventeenth birthday—where, despite the fact that he read the
