What did the assassin/s gain from killing JFK?

[wuushew]

I am serious Robert Kennedy remained the Attorney General, Lyndon Johnson enacted civil rights and domestic programs and the war in Vietnam proceded in predictable Kennedy fashsion thanks to whiz kids like Robert McNamara

Was the killing of JFK the least effective murder in the history of politics? Let us look at some comparisons. Lincoln = huge effect on the nature of reconstruction, McKinnley = Teddy the trust buster Rooselvet taking over.

Did the communists,mobsters,republicans,democrats..etc really think things changed to a degree acceptable to them? If so their world view splits very fine hairs.

[tom_paine]

1. The point was to get rid of the most charismatic Democratic leaders

The ones who were trying to finish what FDR started.

As the Wellstone assassination showed, as the Carnahan assassination showed, even if the efefcts are delayed, the striking down of strong, charismatic leaders has long-term benefits, particularly, as in in the case of the Kednnedys, King, and Wellstone, if they are irreplaceable remarkable men of courage and principle along with their charisma and their keystone position (such as Carnahan was about to obtain).

As Edward the Longshanks said in "Braveheart", "They're sheep! Easily dispersed if we strike the shepherd!"

Though that is a line from the movie, is there any doubt that historical Royal Thought has often followed those draconian, Maciavellian lines.

And it's funny how the Busheviks, inheritors of Royal, the first Kings of Amerika in 225 years, think just the same...

For instance, in the case of the Wellstone and Carnahan assassinations, the results almost came too quickly for the Busheviks, making their own self-interest stick out like a sore thumb...

Number of Democratic Senators falling from the sky: 2

Number of Senatorial Seats the Busheviks hold a Senate Majority by: 2

Cui bono?

[better2know]

47. Oil depletion allowance

JFK supposedly wanted to end a tax break for oil pumpers that actually gives them tax credits for not having oil after they pumped it and sold it.

This is such a ridiculous concept that I have trouble explaining it, but it definitely made him some enemies among domestic oil producers.

-b2k

[dbt]

2. Maybe the gains were not immediate

Perhaps they were not fully realized until "Mr. George Bush of the CIA" (who can't recall being in Dallas that day) had time to work his way up through the ranks to head of that agency, then to Vice President, then to President and then, after an unplanned vacation, to his current status as Dark Puppet Master of the BFEE.

:tinfoilhat:
dbt

[Sick of Bullshit]

32. Kind of interesting, dontcha think,

that Jerry Ford, who became president through a sheer stroke of dumb luck, had been a member of the Warren Whitewash Commission, and his choice to head the CIA was none other than GHWB.

[Jacobin]

3. RFK was going after the Mob big time

The mob helped get JFK elected in Chicago.

Payback for "ingratitude", and don't forget the Bay of Pigs and the mob losing all their casinos in Cuba. They thought they might get their island back.

[Minstrel Boy]

4. "I will smash the CIA into a thousand pieces and scatter it to the winds."

Kennedy said that.

His death ensured the entrenchment of the military-industrial-intelligence complex.

To us, it looks like the status quo was preserved after his death. But that was the very point of it.

[Melinda]

6. Absolutely. Harriman-Bush-Bush-Bush

Military-industrial-intelligence complex assasinations all around. I wonder what Sirhan Sirhan is up to these days............

[RandomKoolzip]

5. Well, one of the most persuasive theories I've heard

Involves the procuring of Anti-Castro cuban exiles for dirty work under the aegis of certain "rogue" branches of the CIA. Antonio Veciana, leader of a Cuban dissident group called Alpha 66, was recruited by CIA operative named Maurice Bishop (aka David Atlee Phillips) to gather a group of like-minded Cuban exiles together to enact terrorist-like strkies against the Castro regime, against Pro-Castro elements in Miami, and generally act as the CIA's "revenge" squad.

The motivation behind the JFK hit, supposedly, was revenge for Kennedy abandoning efforts to topple Castro at the Bay of Pigs invasion. At the last minute, Kennedy cut off funding and moral support to the CIA, resulting in the slaughter of many of its undercover operatives and "legworkers". Seems entirely plausible to me, given the CIA track record of intervening in countries inwhich they were not wanted, and consistent with the CIA's methods in Chile, Guatemala, etc.

Suposedly, the funding for these projects came from Big Oil, specifically from HL Hunt, who of course was friends with Nixon and who helped fellow Texan LBJ in his political goals, and who was one of JFK's sworn enemies. After JFK was killed, of course, LBJ became prez, followed by Nixon, who then pursued a right wing agenda, reversing JFK's planned pullout from Vietnam, and getting himself and Kissinger rich off the profits. So as you can see, there were definitley gains made by those who could have orchestrated the killing. Of course, this is all just a theory....

Read "The Last Investigation" by Gaeton Fonzi. Absolutely the best book on the JFK assassination, by a guy who served on the HSCA committe in the late seventies.

[NewYorkerfromMass]

7. Vietnam course was the whole thing- LBJ and the Texas M/I comlpex

Hey, LBJ may not have participated in any conspiracy but what a convenient turn of events JFK's death represented as far as the goals of military industrial copmplex went.

[Media_Lies_Daily]

8. JFK was taking the first steps to get the U.S. out of Vietnam...

...shortly before he was killed. JFK signed NSAM 263 on October 11, 1963, which authorized the withdrawal of 1000 tropps before the end of 1963:

NSAM 263
<http://www.jfklancer.com/NSAM263.html>

On November 26, 1963, four days after JFK was assassinated, LBJ signed NSAM 273 which clearly escalated U.S. involvement in Vietnam:

NSAM 273
<http://www.jfklancer.com/NSAM273.html>

If you want to pin the escalation of U.S. efforts in Vietnam on anyone, pin it on LBJ. Two of the major corporate recepients of Defense contracts during the Vietnam era resided in Texas...Bell Helicopter and General Dynamics (jet aircraft).

I personally believe that the country would have been much better off if 58,000 Americans had not died in Vietnam. I also believe that Vietnam would have been much better off had we not directly and/or indirectly caused the deaths of millions of Vietnamese.

As to Civil Rights, LBJ pushed through JFK's plan because he saw political gain in doing so. it also masked the very high proportion of blacks in the Vietnam War.

Additionally, a message was sent by the rightwing powers behind the very public execution of JFK in Dallas. The message basically told people at all levels who was really in charge of the policies of the country. Anyone who got in the way, including a sitting President, was expendable. JFK had thwarted the rightwingers in Cuba, Laos, Cambodia, and other areas around the world, and he was about to do it again in Vietnam. For the next 10-20 years a flood of southern Democrats switched to the GOP, John Connally being one of them.

RFK did not stay long as the Attorney General...he left office shortly after the election of 1964. After the assassination of his brother, RFK found himself increasingly more isolated. He and LBJ had never gotten along, just as he and J. Edgar Hoover had never gotten along. On the other hand, LBJ and Hoover were good friends and bypassed RFK at every opportunity.

[DerekG]

17. Give LBJ some credit...

He is a mass murderer (and I will never forgive him), but he genuinely wanted to end poverty and racism in this country. HE was the inheritor of FDR's legacy.

In comparison, JFK was not the humanist some make him out to be. He rarely stuck his neck out for the impoverished; likewise, he played the part of reluctant emancipator until the events of Birmingham in 1963.

[WilliamPitt]

9. Think long-term

Vietnam was massively profitable. That, and they avoided having John, Bobby, MLK, Malcom and Medgar become elder statesmen for the progressives well into the 1980s, and maybe 1990s. Imagine the 70s with John and Bobby and MLK and Malcolm and Medgar still in the mix. Would the 80s even happen the way they did?

[Minstrel Boy]

12. The Pentagon was thinking long term

John Judge's mother worked for 25 years in the Personnel Office of the US Army, Deputy Chief of Staff, directly under the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Her job was to project overall national draft figures for five years in advance for the national selective service call, to within one hundred people in accuracy:

"Before Kennedy's death, she knew from those figures and projections that the Pentagon was planning on troop withdrawal from Vietnam. In late November, she knew Kennedy was pulling out of Vietnam based on her projected figures. I asked her, after she had been retired, when did they tell her that they would escalate in Vietnam? The Pentagon told her in late November of 1963, the Monday following the assassination. She couldn't believe the figures. She took them back to the Joint Chiefs of Staff for query—what must have been the first civilian protest of the war. She said, 'This couldn't be right.' The Joint Chiefs said to 'use those figures!' The figures on November 25, 1963, were that the war would last for ten years, and the casualties would be about 57,000, and 'to figure that in.'"
http://home.pacbell.net/butlerc/Conspiracy/conspiracy.html

Also from Judge:

Not all "conspiracies" are created equal. The government did kill JFK, and they lied about it. That does not mean there was never a Holocaust, or that the world is run by the Illuminati. The blindness of Chomsky and the other left structuralists is that they make the class out to be monolithic and without mechanisms to carry out its will. They fear that if you think there was any reason to kill a president then you don't understand how capitalism works, and that you will be filled with false hope about the Kennedy clan, who were only more of the same old ruling class. They can't let themselves think JFK could really have intended to pull out of the Vietnam war, since he went along with legacy left him by Nixon and the 40 committee, which included the Bay of Pigs operation already on the books.

But when JFK saw the CIA and the Cubans in action he refused to be pushed into sending American troops into Cuba. When the Joint Chiefs were ready and raring to go into full scale nuclear war with the USSR during the missile crisis, JFK was almost the only level head in the room who refused. And he WAS pulling out of Vietnam. He had given the orders and forced the Joint Chiefs to project that withdrawal by the end of 1964 during the month of April, 1963.

The Joint Chiefs reversed him 180 degrees plus on the Monday following his assassination, projecting instead a 10-year war with 57,000 dead that freaked out my mother enough to take it back up to the Chiefs and question it, the first civilian protest to the war in Vietnam by their highest paid woman manpower analyst.
http://www.ratical.org/ratville/JFK/JohnJudge/notAllCequal.html

[kwolf68]

18. Great point

Many progressives from that era said that after Bobby's murder they just "gave us" and went to sleep...

Only to wake 15 years later in the midst of a right wing revolution that continues unabated to this day.

[Gman]

10. When Clinton won in '96, I was convinced the RW would kill him

I just didn't see any way they wouldn't. I talked about it for a year and told people to expect it. Some people thought I was a little screwy, and not without good reason, this issue not withstanding. But...

History will record that instead of killing Clinton, they impeached him. They just didn't use a gun. I consider myself right on the money on this one.

[diamond14]

24. Clinton was almost killed several times...the front of the

White House was shot up with an automatic weapon by an ex-soldier from Colorado Springs, Colorado....no one was hurt, the peppered room was not in use at the time of the shooting...

some guy flew an airplane right up Pennsylvania Avenue and slammed it into the front of the White House...crashed a little short of doing significant damage....

Clinton still did not block off public tours of the White House, which bush* did immediately upon seizing office....

there were a few other close calls...but those are the two most famous attempts...

[Minstrel Boy]

34. a reputed assassination plot against Clinton in '92

called "Operation Mount Rushmore":

http://www.copi.com/articles/bc_assn.html

[Judi Lynn]

33. Gman, I thought the same thing, too

Right up until he was hopelessly compromised. They started their hate campaign before he was even elected.

Nothing approaches right-wing hatred in intensity.

[sangh0]

11. They got LBJ

Take a look at bankrolled LBJ. It's the same crowd that bankrolls Bush*, sans the Saudis.

[PaDUer]

26. The day JFK was assassinated...

he told his personal secretary to remove Johnson's name from the ballot..lot of interesting things went on behind the scene.

[ripplingwater]

13. On CSPAN now

There was this program recently from whom, CBS? And today (right now, 4:15PM PST) is a C-SPAN rerun from Thursday's "Media coverage of JFK Assassination". And of course there is no discussion AT ALL of the controversies as to "who really did it" or "how many shooters".

Why, with everything else that's going on, has this suddenly become the focus of the media? To distract people? Did other news recently come out that the media are now countering? What's up here?

[Classical_Liberal]

14. Well most of the conspiracy theorist think he was going

to get us out of Viet Nam. I would like to see more than deep throat evidence of this however.

[Silverhair]

38. JFK was a hawk.

He campained on the missle gap claiming the Soviets had more missles than we did. (They didn't.)
Inaugral address - We will go anywhere, bear any burden, pay any price in the fight against communism.
Increased Military Spending.
Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba.
Cuban Missle Crisis.
JFK stepped up our involvement in Vietnam.
Yes he mad a few peace sounding speeches, but his record was SOLID HAWK. He was far far from the peace now candidate that conspiracy theorists like to make him out as.

[birdman]

41. A new JFK had to be invented to fit the conspiracy theories

the real one is of no use to them.

The grassy knoll was covered with strawberries

[preciousdove]

43. He WAS going to pull out of Nam

In 1966 I decided to do an essay "What would have happened if Kennedy had not been killed?". It was 25% of a half hear grade. Using our suburban school library. I can remember the horrible sickening feeling when I had checked and double checked what I was seeing in the news magazines and newspapers and felt like I had been mind raped to realize that fact and that Kennedy was killed for that and other reforms he was making. It took me until Clinton took office to begin to hope again that the myth of America might become the reality. But we all know what happened so that is why I am here and spending my time working with people who want that too. The alternative is just too horrible.

[Silverhair]

45. Your opinion does not constitute proof.

He volunteered in WWII.
He was a genuine war hero, risking his own life to save his crew, and inspiring them to do what they had to do to live.
He campaigned as a super hawk.
His presidental actions were as a super hawk.
He was confrontational with the communists.
You will understand that with JFK's record, it will take some extreme proof to convince me that he suddenly became a peacenik. I helped in the local JKF office in 1960, and remember his presidency well. I idolized him, and I don't remember a single bit of him being a peace candidate.

[Minstrel Boy]

46. I don't think anyone is calling Kennedy a "peacenik"

I think the record demonstrates he was a realist.

He saw the Cold War as wasteful and perilous and, by the summer of 1963, was talking of detente.

He considered that Americans making war in Vietnam was a futile exercise and decided to extricate his country from it.

Please refer to the lengthy Gailbrath article on Kennedy's exit strategy for Vietnam, which is based largely on recently declassified documents. This isn't all in our heads, you know.

http://bostonreview.net/BR28.5/galbraith.html

[Eloriel]

15. IMO there were many reasons, not just one

Or, you could roll all the reasons up into one: He was dangerous to TPTB.

There's a wonderful book on-line, Farewell America. Read it.

Eloriel

[Minstrel Boy]

16. Interesting remarks here from Mort Sahl in March 1968.

They really speak to our day.

I've thought for sometime that many of these chickens coming home to roost in America were released on November 22, 1963.

...

"We have to decide. Once the neo-fascists became bold enough to slay the President on the street, they showed their hand. They showed how arrogant they had become. Now it's a question of symptom. That crime was a national symptom. If we can turn our back on that, we will pay a terrible price. That will be the end of this democracy. As a matter of fact, it's been dying since Kennedy's death. We have to cleanse our soul. It's much the same as the French when they regained their national honor, not by framing Dreyfus, but by admitting that they did.

"The minute I made a decision for America and decided to park everything else and go ahead, I suddenly was unemployable, and by an awful lot of people you'd call liberal. I want to make it very clear. The people on the right are not large enough to be an army, but they have an army of indifferent men, men indifferent to terror. The road to fascism is paved with liberal bricks. While our job to give the young people time enough to become radicals, the job of the liberals is to castrate them before they can get to the radical side, before they can save America, in effect. It's wholly incredible to me. If I gave you the names of people in show business who are attempting to supress me, they all qualify as wild-eyed left-wing thinkers, in the popular mind."

And from Jim Garrison:

"Fascism will come to America in the name of national security."

http://www.maebrussell.com/Mort%20Sahl/Mort%20Sahl%20-%20Argo.html

[David Zephyr]

19. They Got The Escalation of the Vietnam War and the Reversing of NSAM 263

NATIONAL SECURITY ACTION MEMORANDUM NO. 263
TO:

Secretary of State
Secretary of Defense
Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff

SUBJECT: South Vietnam

At a meeting on October 5, 1963, the President considered the recommendations contained in the report of Secretary McNamara and General Taylor on their mission to South Vietnam.
The President approved the military recommendations contained in Section I B (1 -3) of the report, but directed that no formal announcement be made of the implementation of plans to withdraw 1,000 U.S. military personnel by the end of 1963.

After discussion of the remaining recommendations of the report, the President approved the instruction to Ambassador Lodge which is set forth in State Department telegram No. 534 to Saigon.

McGeorge Bundy

Copy furnished: Director of Central Intelligence
Administrator, Agency for International Development 11/21/63

DRAFT

TOP SECRET

[birdman]

39. This document is irrelevent

There is no way Kennedy was getting out of Vietnam. The
document makes a vague reference to a troop withdrawal that
almost certainly wouldn't have happened. An accompanying document
from Bundy says that they HOPED to be able to leave Vietnam by
1965 if things were going well (which, of course they didn't).

The so-called reversal of NSAM 263 was NSAM 273 which really represents
no policy change and was drafted while Kennedy was still alive.

Everything in Kennedys career indicates that he was quite hawkish
on foreign policy. It was Kennedys people who sold the escalation
to Johnson. The Peacenik JFK was a complete invention of conspiracy
nutters.

You can still like Kennedy for his eloquence and vision without trying
to make him into something he was not. He was a hawk and he was a very reluctant supporter of civil rights. In the context of the time he was a liberal but not in the context of these times.

[David Zephyr]

40. Was Kennedy a "Hawk" During the Missile Crisis?

When our Generals were pushing him to war?

[birdman]

42. Yes he was

Maybe he wasn't as hawkish as the Generals but then
not many people were.

Kennedy, now there was a man with essence, Mandrake.

[Minstrel Boy]

44. JK Galbraith: "JFK ordered a complete withdrawal from Vietnam"

Galbraith makes a lengthy case here for Kennedy's intention to effect a total withdraw:

John F. Kennedy had formally decided to withdraw from Vietnam, whether we were winning or not. Robert McNamara, who did not believe we were winning, supported this decision.10 The first stage of withdrawal had been ordered. The final date, two years later, had been specified. These decisions were taken, and even placed, in an oblique and carefully limited way, before the public.

...

Kennedy’s decision to withdraw from Vietnam was, as Jones writes, “unconditional, for he approved a calendar of events that did not necessitate a victory.” It was also part of a larger strategy, of a sequence that included the Laos and Berlin settlements in 1961, the non-invasion of Cuba in 1962, the Test Ban Treaty in 1963. Kennedy subordinated the timing of these events to politics: he was quite prepared to leave soldiers in harm’s way until after his own reelection. His larger goal after that was to settle the Cold War, without either victory or defeat—a strategic vision laid out in JFK’s commencement speech at American University on June 10, 1963.

http://bostonreview.net/BR28.5/galbraith.html

[theriverburns]

20. Oil. Also. Again.

I read somewhere that Jack was going to kill some very lucrative loopholes that let oil companies write off and get tax credits for wells that were running dry. Or those that had never ever produced. These would have taxed guys like Bush and Cheney and Rockefeller the same way most businesses get taxed. They weren't about to allow that.

[Minstrel Boy]

23. Kennedy had powerful enemies to spare

He called for an end to the Cold War in June of 1963, which threatened the Pentagon. Through Bobby, he was pursuing organized crime. He was threatening the tax writeoffs of the oil rich, such as Texans H.L. Hunt and Clint Murcheson, both close to Hoover. He said in October he would "scatter the CIA to the four winds." He was reaching out to normalize relations with Cuba, and the Cuban ex-pats already had a serious grudge over his failure to support the Bay of Pigs.

[Classical_Liberal]

27. The CIA angle?

How do you account for the Shrub/Cheny Oil juntas hostility to this organization?

[Minstrel Boy]

31. The CIA's not a monolith, it's a labyrinth,

and it has it's own interests.

Plus, it's 40 years later.

[jsw_81]

21. Fame

Lee Oswald was a bitter little man with no real education, a shitty job and no future. By killing Kennedy, he ensured his place in the history books until the end of time. People will still know his name 500 years from now.

[Minstrel Boy]

25. If it's that simple

why did he deny it, instead of embrace it?

[jsw_81]

35. Lying is part of the game criminals play

And remember, Oswald was mentally ill. He had attempted suicide several times.

[Minstrel Boy]

37. I can remember only one

"suicide attempt," that soon after his arrival in the Soviet Union. Authorities were suspicious of his motives for claiming political asylum, and had denied it to him. It doesn't seem a genuine suicide attempt, but rather an attempt to remain in the USSR.

"His Russian medical records, available for the first time, show he had made only a superficial cut. The authorities, nonetheless, were impressed by the display -- even though they knew it not to be genuine -- and granted him permission to remain in the USSR on
a temporary basis."
http://www.acorn.net/jfkplace/03/JA/DR/.dr07.html

[Classical_Liberal]

28. It was a columbine massacre?

I am not sure about that. The people of the 1960s weren't so invested in celebrity status as they are presently. I am always leary of ascribing contemporary motivations to people who lived in the past. The idea that Oswald was simply a dogmatic Solviet sympathizer is more credible.

[wuushew]

30. His life wasn't complete shit

didn't he have a young Russian wife?

[starroute]

22. Texas ultra-right-wing politics and oil both factor in

Whatever else may have been going down, it was far from a coincidence that the assassination took place in Texas. Texas was home to a large number of the most extreme right-wing figures of the 50's and early 60's, people like H.L. Hunt. Texas was also home to oil interests -- often the same people -- who were no friends to Kennedy. (As I recall, there had been serious struggles over oil depletion allowances during his administration.)

Our country today has a foreign policy based on oil and domestic policies rooted in McCarthyism. It's possible that this would be the case even if Kennedy had lived -- but his removal certainly made both outcomes more likely.

[Arwennick]

29. Revenge

Carlos Marcello vowed the Kennedy clan would pay for his deportation in 58'.Santos Trafficante told everyone in 1961 that the Kennedys were living on borrowed time.
Lee Harvey Oswald's step father was a bookie for the Corollo's(NO's oldest mafia family) in No,La.
Sirhan Sirhan was a horse groom at a mob owned stable at Santa Anita Racetrack.

come on people,it doesn't take a rocket science to figure it all out.

Jack Ruby was part of the Louisiana Mob in Dallas.He did his job well.

LBJ and JEHoover knew all of this and buried it because they were all for seeing the Kennedys gone.

Martin Luther King was assasinated as a return favor by the mob to the FBI for the Warren Report.

Goggle Carlos Marcello and become enlightened on the background of the kennedy hits.

Read "Big Daddy in the Big Easy" chapters 11-15 it will give you all the answers that the Feds would not.

[Solomon]

36. There is a war between the Northeast financial center, and the

southwest military-industrial-oil complex. That's why New York was hit - (they hate New York) It's why the Kennedy's were killed. The Northeast has ruled the country since its founding, but now ...

More was gained by that assasination than we will ever comprehend.