The Mammoth Book of Conspiracies

Obviously Castro might have been lying to HSCA, but his point is good: why give the US a 22-carat pretext to invade Cuba by assassinating its leader?

The Military-Industrial Complex

In his farewell speech to the nation, Kennedy’s predecessor Dwight Eisenhower—a former soldier and Republican, so no pinko—railed against the US arms industry: “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 must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex.”

A year later the new White House incumbent, JFK, blamed the military-industrial complex for fanning fears about the “bomber” and “missile” gaps, which pushed military spending to levels beyond those Eisenhower already thought intolerable. Kennedy’s call for cuts and stated intention of withdrawing troops from ’Nam was hardly likely to win him friends in boardrooms and messes. So, the military-industrial complex wanted him out of the White House, and a more amenable president in his place.

Since the military-industrial complex is a phenomenon or concept, not a corporeal body, it would have been incapable of pulling a trigger. That is not to say that elements of the military-industrial complex were not delighted with, and maybe even helped, the accession of Lyndon B. Johnson.

LBJ

One of the most vociferous blamers of Cuba was VP LBJ, whose oft-repeated mantra was: “Kennedy was trying to kill Castro. Castro got him first.”

A smokescreen? After all, on the basis of “who profits?” LBJ wins out as Barr McClellan noted in 2003’s Blood, Money and Power: How LBJ Killed JFK. Here Kennedy’s successor Lyndon B. Johnson, together with an accomplice, Edward Clark, planned and covered up the assassination in Dallas. LBJ certainly had a motive: aside from the intrinsic attraction of succeeding to the most important job in the world, Johnson was the subject of four major criminal investigations involving government contract violations, misappropriation of funds, money-laundering and bribery at the time of Kennedy’s murder. All these investigations were terminated upon LBJ’s assumption of the presidency. Worse, LBJ knew Malcolm “Mac” Wallace, a convicted murderer, because Wallace was the on-off boyfriend of LBJ’s sister Josefa; in 1998 JFK assassination researcher Walt Brown announced that he had identified a fingerprint in the “sniper’s nest” in the Book Depository as belonging to Wallace. Former CIA officer and Watergate agent E. Howard Hunt also implicated LBJ in a deathbed confession, along with CIA agents Bill Harvey, Cord Meyer and David Sanchez Morales; in Hunt’s confession the shooter was named Lucien Sarti and shot Kennedy from the grassy knoll.

LBJ apparently had no shortage of willing helpers. Mark North’s Act of Treason (1991) posits that LBJ was helped by FBI head J. Edgar Hoover, who was known to loathe JFK and his brother Bobby, the Attorney General.

In a taped interview with historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jackie Kennedy is reported to have put her name to the list of those who believe LBJ was behind JFK’s murder.

The Mob

The HSCA investigation also identified the Mafia as possible conspirators in the plot to assassinate Kennedy. The Mob, so the theory runs, murdered JFK in retaliation for the heat put upon them by Attorney General Robert Kennedy (who had increased by twelve times the number of mob prosecutions Eisenhower had managed). What HSCA was too discreet to mention was that the Kennedys had long been in bed with the Mob (literally in the case of JFK, who had an affair with Sam Giancana’s girlfriend Judith Campbell Exner) and had used Mafia money in the campaign to secure the White House. The Mob didn’t like the campaign against them, and even less did it like the Kennedys’ hypocrisy. Mafia bosses Carlos Marcello, Sam Giancana and Santo Trafficante Jr topped the list of HSCA gangster suspects.

In their turn, David E. Scheim in The Mafia Killed President Kennedy, and Lamar Waldron/Thom Hartmann in Legacy of Secrecy squarely accuse Marcello as being the man who whacked the president, with a little help from his friends Santos Trafficante and Johnny Roselli. Marcello, whose Mob territory embraced New Orleans and Texas, had once been hustled out of the USA by immigration agents directed by Robert Kennedy to be dumped in Guatemala. Slipping secretly back into New Orleans, he vowed revenge against the Kennedys. According to a memo quoted in the Waldron/Hartmann book by an FBI informant who met with Marcello in 1985: “Carlos Marcello discussed his intense dislike of former President John Kennedy as he often did. Unlike other such tirades against Kennedy, however, on this occasion Carlos Marcello said, referring to President Kennedy, ‘Yeah, I had the son of a bitch killed. I’m glad I did it. I’m sorry I couldn’t have done it myself.’”

HSCA, Scheim and Waldron/Hartmann all found ties between Oswald, Jack Ruby and the Marcello mob of New Orleans. Ruby, a sometime foot soldier for Capone in Chicago, was tasked with “off ng” Oswald before he could squeal. Scheim highlights telephone records showing that, as the assassination date approached, Ruby made numerous calls to relatively high Mob figures in Chicago, New Orleans and Los Angeles, as well as to two associates of Jimmy Hoffa, the Mob-friendly teamster boss. Ruby later told the FBI that the calls were made to get help in stopping rival Dallas clubs from using amateur strippers. Would the Mr Bigs of crime really trouble their unpretty heads with dime-undercutting strippers?

An argument against Mafia culpability is that the JFK assassination did not bear the hallmark of Mafia hits, which tend to be up close and personal; if the Mob did kill Kennedy then it must have hired a trained military marksman, possibly someone in or on the dissident fringes of the CIA, with whom the Mob had cooperated in attempted assassinations of Castro. Someone like Oswald. Legacy of Secrecy’s contention is that Oswald probably thought he was part of the coup plan against Castro but he was actually being set up by Marcello’s goons to be the fall guy when the hit on the president went down in Dallas. When Oswald said he was a patsy he meant it.

An added twist to the Mob theory is given by Mark North in Act of Treason, in which he claims that Marcello tipped off J. Edgar Hoover of the FBI in 1962 that the assassination was being planned. Hoover, who despised Kennedy’s civil rights agenda, intentionally sat on the information and let JFK die.

There is no shortage of other possible, within reason, culprits. The Freemasons (antipathetic to JFK’s Catholicism), Jackie Kennedy (embarrassed and ashamed by her husband’s affairs), Richard Nixon (desiring revenge for his defeat in the 1960 presidential election) and the Israelis (in anger at JFK’s use of Project Paperclip Nazi scientists in his nuclear programme and his opposition to theirs) have all had their fifteen minutes of infamy as the suspected sponsors of the hit. A remarkable number—more than thirty—hoodlums, policemen and government agents have all stepped into the limelight to claim that they pulled the trigger on 22 November 1963, and for a while the diary entry of Dallas policeman Roscoe White, in which he detailed the murder, had many convinced—until it was proven to be a forgery.