Introduction

AUTHOR’S NOTE: There are many video clips I will be referring to, which will convey some fascinating information. To make it easier for you to WATCH ALONG AS YOU READ, I’ve put all the links online at “Jesse Ventura—The Official Facebook Page”: facebook.com/OfficialJesseVentura.

This case has so much blatant evidence that totally blows the doors off the official version of the tragedy that took place fifty years ago in Dallas that it’s ridiculous. I’ve listed 63 solid reasons in this book which— from a standpoint of criminal law—is 62 more than I really need to prove reasonable doubt. One solid point is all it takes to convince a jury; and you’re about to see dozens of them. This proves a conspiracy to assassinate the 35th President of the United States—period.

That’s really how I looked at this case—like an attorney taking it to court. And I can tell you straight up that there is no way they would convict my client in this case; with the knowledge and the witness testimony that now exists, Lee Harvey Oswald would have been found innocent of doing this crime.

In fact, since Bill O’Reilly apparently thinks he knows so much about the JFK assassination, I’d like to publicly challenge him to answer my 63 points. Or—if Mr. O’Reilly is “too busy” to come up with so many responses—how about a public debate? Let’s do it. Let’s set it up! I’ll be there, Bill.

This book even comes with a guarantee. I don’t just say it was a conspiracy— I show the evidence, and far beyond any reasonable standards of proof. I guarantee you that there is more than sufficient evidence and that, after examining it, any reasonable person will be convinced of that fact.

I’ve also decided to break with convention and begin this book with some conclusions because I know that’s what people want and—especially in this case—truly deserve. So bear in mind that proof for these conclusions resides in the pages that follow.

John F. Kennedy was murdered by a conspiracy involving disgruntled CIA agents, anti-Castro Cubans, and members of the Mafia, all of whom were extremely angry at what they viewed as Kennedy’s appeasement policies toward Communist Cuba and the Soviet Union. President Kennedy sought peace and was viewed by these groups as a cowardly traitor by not giving in to their overwhelming call for war. Those groups—it should be clearly noted— are precisely the same groups that Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy concluded were responsible for his brother’s death, after conducting his own private investigation.¹

Please note, by the way, that these are not just my opinions or conclusions:

•  The U.S. House of Representatives investigated the assassination and concluded that JFK “was probably assassinated as the result of a conspiracy.”²

•  Robert Kennedy and First Lady Jackie Kennedy sent word to Moscow via special envoy right after the assassination that JFK was killed by “a large political conspiracy” and that he was “the victim of a right-wing conspiracy . . . by domestic opponents.”³

•  The head of the U.S. Secret Service confirmed that on the evening of the assassination he briefed Robert Kennedy that his brother had been killed by three to four shooters and that the Secret Service believed that JFK was the “victim of a powerful organization.”⁴

•  Senior members of the United States Senate who investigated the case concluded that the CIA and FBI played troubling roles in the JFK assassination cover-up, that “the fingerprints of intelligence” were all over Lee Harvey Oswald, and that the “accused assassin was the product of a fake defector program run by the CIA.”⁵

•  Senator Richard Schweiker concluded that “the CIA was involved in the murder of the president.”⁶

And if you haven’t heard about the above facts from your mainstream media source of news, I would submit that right now you should be asking yourself, why not?

The political imperatives at the time of the assassination were obvious to all concerned. “The point was to stabilize the country after the assassination—let’s get on with the ship of state. . . . It would become clear that if one wanted to remain a member in good standing in Washington political and social circles, it was wise not to say anything intemperate about the assassination.”⁷ So, quite predictably, officials supported the official government version.

To make matters worse, mainstream media immediately backed up the official government version, even if it took a reporter like Dan Rather lying about the backward movement of President Kennedy’s body after the shots. He told a national TV audience that the fatal shot drove his head “violently forward” even though the film footage that Mr. Rather was referring to had shown exactly the opposite to be the case.⁸ Mainstream media continues their endorsement of the original official version by their overwhelmingly ardent support of books that support that version—like Reclaiming History and Case Closed—and their tendency to dismissively label as “conspiracy theories” any scholarly-researched efforts that point out the numerous inconsistencies in the government’s case.

Members of the U.S. military were also involved in the conspiracy, specifically in feeding false information on Lee Harvey Oswald, the “patsy” who was set up to take the blame for the President’s assassination.⁹ Their purpose was to instigate an invasion of Cuba, their arch enemy since it had gone communist under Castro, and to militarily engage communism openly in Vietnam and around the world—even including our nuclear-armed superpower enemy of that era, the Soviet Union—in stark contrast to President Kennedy’s clearly enunciated policy shift toward détente with our enemies.¹⁰

Kennedy’s shifting policies toward peaceful solutions completely alienated the Military-Industrial Complex from Kennedy. JFK was at war with his own national security structure, and no one knew that fact more clearly than he and his trusted inner circle who have documented those facts in the historical record.¹¹

If you want to get a real feel for what Jack Kennedy was up against, watch three movies that vividly portray it:

The Manchurian Candidate, a book that President Kennedy helped get made into a film because it documented the dangers about brainwashing, right-wing extremists, and the real possibility that they could be combined to assassinate a president; Dr. Strangelove, in which the character of the crazy nuclear-warhungry general was actually based on General Curtis LeMay, the Chief of Staff for the U.S. Air Force who was in charge of the nation’s huge fleet of bombers armed with nuclear weapons at the time and was savagely anti-Kennedy in meetings of the National Security Council; and Seven Days In May, a film about a military takeover of the government that was made because President Kennedy convinced Hollywood producers that if it was made it might actually prevent a coup from taking place. And to give you an idea of how important it was to him to get that last film made, JFK told his Hollywood friends that he and his family would even abandon the White House whenever they needed to film there.¹²

The opinion of General Tommy Power—the man who assisted and then followed General LeMay as chief of our Strategic Air Command—provides us with a glowing example of the men who were “advising” President Kennedy:

Restraint? Why are you so concerned with saving their lives? The whole idea is to kill the bastards. Look. At the end of the war, if there are two Americans and one Russian, we win!¹³

So the Military-Industrial Complex was clearly at war with President Kennedy over the direction of U.S. foreign policy.¹⁴ In his farewell address to the nation just prior to President Kennedy taking office, President Dwight D. Eisenhower warned the nation of the rising and threatening power of the vast U.S. war machine which he called the “Military-Industrial Complex.” Eisenhower stated that it was a serious threat to our Democracy and sorely needed addressing. His warning was straight and bold—and bear in mind that he was speaking not only as the Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces, but as a highly successful five-star General in the U.S. Army during World War II and the Supreme Commander of Allied Forces in Europe. He was no stranger to war or why wars should be fought.

In his farewell address, he defined the new problem that was facing us; not the foreign enemy, but our totally new domestic enemy:

Our military organization today bears little relation to that known by any of my predecessors in peacetime, or indeed by the fighting men of World War II or Korea.

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 Statehouse, 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.¹⁵

And then he got very specific and dramatic about the extreme gravity of our situation:

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.¹⁶

That threat became readily apparent to President Kennedy as he battled his own national security structure at every step of the way. In every crisis, JFK had to fight his own CIA and Joint Chiefs of Staff to avoid an all-out state of war.

He first had to fight over the Cuban “Bay of Pigs” invasion, then the Berlin Crisis of 1961, then the Cuban Missile Crisis, his efforts at a nuclear test ban treaty and drastic arms reductions, and finally his efforts at détente with Cuba, Vietnam, and the entire Soviet Bloc. By 1963, he had so alienated the militarycorporate war machine that he—quite rightly—was in actual fear of a coup openly taking place against his Administration or of being murdered. Robert Kennedy and others shared and voiced those same fears.¹⁷

But even though the Cold War has now been over for two decades, military spending has actually increased. Some is clearly necessary for our defense. However, especially since we lack an enemy anywhere even near us militarily, some military spending seems utterly ridiculous. Here’s an example of the cost of one project of the Pentagon for a new airplane called the F-35 Lightning II. Originally budgeted at $178 billion for a fleet of these new fighter jets, costs ballooned—by 2011—to a new estimate of $325 billion.¹⁸ And, as usual, they’ll certainly cost a lot more than that by the time they’re actually airborne. Would you like to know how necessary that plane is, as a component of our nation’s security? Here’s how The New York Times put it:

The F-35 is simply not needed. Only one American fighter plane has been shot down by an enemy aircraft in nearly forty years. Our fighter aircraft are already a full generation ahead of nearly everybody else’s. Off-boresight targeting technologies [which are what the Pentagon says makes the F-35 special] can be adapted to existing aircraft, giving them an enduring edge.¹⁹

So, in a word: unnecessary. And that’s just one example of dozens where taxpayer money is spiraling down the Pentagon’s golden drains. In the meantime, we really could have used $325 billion to assist our declining education system and repair our nation’s failing infrastructure.

But over a period of time, that military-corporate complex—which evidently now runs this country—has whittled away at our status quo, changing our national priorities. Issues like our health and our education have, to a large extent, lost out in that battle; bullets and bombs have won.

It wasn’t always that way. During the Cuban Missile Crisis, President Kennedy overruled the military masters who actually—even openly—sought a nuclear exchange with the Soviets. Kennedy stopped them. It was extremely difficult to rein them in, but his Administration succeeded in that effort. So the Pentagon did not have that same dominating influence over the Kennedy Administration.

Peace really did have a chance; a long, long time ago.

That all seemed to change right at the time of the death of John F. Kennedy. President Eisenhower warned us about the real powers that needed standing up to. President Kennedy stood up to those Powers That Be; and was murdered.

That’s why his death is so important: Because that’s when everything changed.

That’s why it still matters, even today.

Jesse Ventura

Autumn, 2013

¹ Talbot, David, Brothers: The Hidden History of the Kennedy Years (Free Press: 2007), xiii, 6, 8–12, 21, 278–279, 323–331.

² United States House of Representatives, “Report of the Select Committee on Assassinations, U.S. House of Representatives, Ninety-fifth Congress, second session” 1979: archives.gov/research/jfk/select-committee-report/

³ Fursenko, Aleksandr & Naftali, Timothy, “One Hell of a Gamble”: Khrushchev, Castro & Kennedy, 1958—1964: The Secret History of the Cuban Missile Crisis (W.W. Norton: 1998) 344–345.

⁴ Talbot, Brothers, 14; Hepburn, James (Hervé Lamarr), Farewell America: The Plot to Kill JFK (Frontier: 1968), 301.

⁵ Talbot, Brothers, 377—382.

⁶ Ibid, 383.

⁷ Ibid, 290.

⁸ Ventura, Jesse & Russell, Dick, American Conspiracies: Lies, Lies, and More Dirty Lies that the Government Tells Us (Skyhorse Publishing: 2010), 38.

⁹ Scott, Peter Dale, Deep Politics and the Death of JFK (University of California Press: 1996), 258.

¹⁰ Douglass, James, JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters (Touchstone: 2008); Scott, Deep Politics; James P. Hosty Jr. & Thomas Hosty, Assignment Oswald: From the FBI agent assigned to investigate Lee Harvey Oswald prior to the JFK assassination (Arcade Publishing: 1997).

¹¹ Talbot, Brothers, 41, 44, 50–53, 64–71, 95, 103, 106–108, 146, 163–174, 189, 207–212, 217–230, 253–254.

¹² Ibid, 148—151: curtislemay.tripod.com/

¹³ Kaplan, Fred, The Wizards of Armageddon (Stanford University Press: 1991), 246, emphasis in original.

¹⁴ Talbot, Brothers, 41, 44, 50–53, 64–71, 95, 103, 106–108, 146, 163–174, 189, 207–212, 217–230, 253–254.

¹⁵ President Dwight D. Eisenhower, “Presidential Address to the Nation,” January 17, 1961: npr.org/2011/01/17/132942244/ikes-warning-of-military-expansion-50-years-later

¹⁶ Ibid.

¹⁷ Talbot, Brothers, 41, 44, 50–53, 64–71, 95, 103, 106–108, 146, 163–174, 189, 207–212, 217–230, 253–254.

¹⁸ Arquilla, John & Fogelson-Lubliner, “The Pentagon’s Biggest Boondoggles,” March 13, 2001, The New York Times: nytimes.com/imagepages/2011/03/13/opinionj/13opchartimg.html

¹⁹ Ibid.