This post may be too graphic for some–fair warning:
DN featured Oliver Stone speaking on John F. Kennedy’s murder. (Stone is also doing a piece on Martin Luther King, Jr.)
In addition. REELZ is running a documentary on it, too. They put forth the theory that it was actually an FBI agent George Hickey that fatally shot Kennedy. He supposedly stood up in the car with the safety off and the car lurched, causing him to lose his balance. I believe they said 12-15 witnesses had seen an agent with a rifle in a car behind the president. Stone, however, places the fatal shot coming from the front of President Kennedy’s car. Stone served in Vietnam and bases that on what he witnessed in the war–a shot came from the front, which is why Kennedy’s head bounces back from the force of it. Stone brings up the inability of the FBI and others to replicate the bullets. CBS also did a piece on it and also could not replicate three rapid fire shots from that type of weapon.
Stone also brings up another important point: Kennedy had fired Allen Dulles. I was unaware of that–and then he was the head of the Warren Commission?? Good Grief no wonder the investigation was so warped. Hmmm…
The REELZ documentary makes the point that the WWII rifle used by Oswald was a full metal jacket– a bullet that would make a clean pass through a person’s body. However, the bullet that killed the president was a different bullet that exploded upon impact–it is designed to cause as much damage as possible. They noted several fragments in Kennedy’s brain.
The interference by the Secret Service, CIA, as well as other agencies is a red flag. The physician who was to perform the autopsy in Dallas insisted that the body stay there until it was performed, but the Secret Service would not allow it. The physician protested that this was state law– in order to protect the chain of control (I think that’s the right term). They basically told him they were in charge and he best get out of the way. So they took the body and when the autopsy was performed in D.C., they were contaminating the area with wall-to-wall agents and interfering with the physical evidence and the autopsy itself. Red flags all over the place.
Stone brought up some great points when asked if Kennedy was a warmonger–he was instead an advocate of Peace. He didn’t feel the need to bomb the hell out of another country to prove himself being “tough on war” or that the U.S. was superior in weaponry. He makes the case that Kennedy, had he lived, would have stopped the Cold War. While Stone is speaking about that, I think of the much ballyhooed Reagan by the conservatives and how Reagan stopped the Cold war. Pfft. The Soviet Union was impoverished and could not continue the arms race. Reagan was a war hawk. He wasn’t into Peace. He thought of anyone seeking peace as a Commie Hippie. I can only wonder at the number of people whom have been turned away from seeking peace just so they wouldn’t be called a Commie. I know that I wouldn’t want to be labeled a Communist (or terrorist). (Same with environmentalists –those that would support it but don’t publicly because of fear of being labeled troublemakers?) People don’t realize that those names are thrown out to do exactly that–make something out to be the opposite of what it is so that people will find it distasteful. When Martin Luther King, Jr. started speaking out against the Vietnam War, and advocating for the poor, he, too, was labeled a Communist.
(Side note–It’s tough to see the footage of Walter Cronkite announces President Kennedy’s death. Still brings tears.)
The question that needs to be asked is: who stood to gain from it?? Follow the money…and those deadset against Kennedy’s seeking peace instead of war…
Here is an account by Carl Oglesby in the book “From Camelot to Kent State” — a good book on the personal history accounts of the 60s:
I was ten years older than the SDS kids. I was running the technical publications dept. at Bendix Aerospace Systems Division of the Bendix Corporation in Ann Arbor: per defense work, rockets and missiles and electronic subsystems, some moon stuff, some supersecret Vietnam stuff.
[…]
The reaction to the Kennedy assassination really blasted me loose. I was at work, of course, like most everybody else. It was Friday, a half hour or forty-five minutes or so after the guy was announced dead, I wondered down to the personnel office to talk to my pal, the personnel manager, Tony, and I said, “Tony, we should take the flag down.”
He didn’t want to do it. He said, “Well, when we get word. When we’re told by corporate headquarters to put the flag at half-staff.” And we got into a big argument in the hallway about that, about whether or not we needed to hear from corporate headquarters about putting the flag down. Did the flag belong to corporate headquarters? Was that what that was about? That Bendix owned the flag? Did it own the country? Big fight.
Then I went up to Mahogany row, a couple of floors up, to check out with some guys I knew up there, who I thought would be more reasonable, and in this one office they had the Scotch out. The ripple of excitement, the thrill that ran through the Bendix Systems Division when the word came of Kennedy’s death, and with it the implicit word that now we got Johnson. It was like—I don’t know how to describe it. It was almost a physical tremor.
Before, there was gloom, because for one thing Kennedy had canceled out a big contract we had. We were building something called the Eagle missile that was supposed to go on a certain airplane. Well, the airplane didn’t exist, and it wasn’t going to exist, either. So Kennedy logically figured out why build the missile? But this didn’t seem reasonable to “corporate headquarters.” which was real pissed at having lost the Eagle missile system. Well, that was the mood people were in.
The next minute Kennedy gets popped. A minute after that, the Scotch is out, because the contracts are coming back. And they did! By God, they did. I couldn’t shrug that off.
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Eagle 