Assassinations

November 25, 2005

Ruby shooting Oswald (Sunday, November 24)
– Warren Commission Exhibit #2636

Contrary to the claims of conspiracy writers, Jack Ruby died telling the truth. There is no credible evidence he was part of a conspiracy. Ruby murdered Oswald for personal reasons – he wanted to show that ''Jews had guts''; he felt emotionally distraught about the Kennedys, and he wanted to fulfil his life long dream of becoming a real hero.

by Mel Ayton

In March of 1964, 52-year-old Jack Ruby was found guilty of the murder of John F. Kennedy's assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, and sentenced to die.

For 32 months, since the time he shot Oswald, Ruby had been locked in a windowless cell on the Dallas County Jail's corridor 6-M. A ''suicide watch'' guard looked in on him around the clock – a single exposed light bulb glared over his bed. Several times Ruby would make attempts on his own life.

Ruby could not tell night from day. He read every newspaper he could lay his hands on, eagerly sifting them for his name. He read dozens of books, including Perry Mason novels and the Warren Report, played cards with his guards, did physical exercises – and seemed out of his mind most of the time, according to jail staff.

Ruby was clearly tipping over the edge in his psychosis and paranoia. He rammed his head against the plaster walls and raved over and over about the suffering Jews who were being killed as revenge for his crime. Near the end, Ruby screamed that his prison guards were piping mustard gas into his cell. Later, when his doctors discovered that he was suffering from brain tumors and adenocarcinoma – a cancer that had spread swiftly through most of the cavities, ducts and glands of his body, Ruby accused them of injecting him with the disease – a medical impossibility.

October 16, 2006

President Kennedy and Jackie arriving at Love Field,
Dallas, Texas, November 22, 1963. Photo courtesy NARA.

New Orleans godfather Carlos Marcello – with Jimmy Hoffa as his bagman – funded Richard Nixon's 1960 presidential bid with $500,000 in cash stuffed in a suitcase. Later Marcello – known as the Big Daddy of the Big Easy – would be named a key conspirator in President Kennedy's assassination.

by Don Fulsom

At the start of the 1920s, marijuana use in America was concentrated in New Orleans – and its intoxicating vapors were mainly inhaled by migrant workers from Mexico, by blacks, and by a growing number of "low-class" whites. Sailors and immigrants from the Caribbean brought this "new" (Its known uses go back to 7,000 B.C.) drug into major southern U.S. ports – above all into the Crescent City.

Along with jazz, pot traveled north to Chicago, and then east to Harlem – where it soon became an indispensable part of the music scene, even entering the language of the black hits of the day (Louis Armstrong's "Muggles," Cab Calloway's "That Funny Reefer Man" and Fats Waller's "Viper's Drag").

A squat but muscular fireplug of a man, rising New Orleans mobster Carlos Marcello was perfectly placed to make boatloads of money from illegal marijuana shipped into his territory. In 1938, though, Marcello sold 23 pounds of pot to an undercover agent. Convicted and sentenced to one year in the Atlanta Federal Penitentiary, Marcello was also fined more than $75,000. Using his political influence, that particular "Reefer Man" was able to get the fine reduced to just $400. And he was out of prison in nine months. With Louisiana Mafia boss Sam Carolla pulling the strings, Gov. O.K. Allen – a former stooge of assassinated Sen. Huey Long – provided the leniency. Legend has it that Marcello eventually had a tailor sew a foot-long pocket into the left leg of his trousers, "which he would stuff with cash as he made his rounds through (Jefferson) Parish paying off the police one by one."

From pot dealing, police-and politician-corrupting street thug, Marcello graduated to godfather of New Orleans (and Dallas), governing a vast and violent criminal empire that brought in an estimated $2 billion-a-year. He succeeded Sam Carolla, who was deported to Sicily in 1947. Marcello quickly became a generous financial supporter of Richard Nixon; and, eventually, a suspect in the murder of Nixon's nemesis: President John F. Kennedy.

Nov. 11. 2006 Updated March 12, 2007

Members of the Warren Commission present their report on the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.  L-R: John McCloy, J. Lee Rankin (General Counsel), Senator Richard Russell, Representative Gerald Ford, Chief Justice Earl Warren, President Lyndon B. Johnson, Allen Dulles, Senator John Sherman Cooper, and Representative Hale Boggs. Credit: LBJ Library photo by Cecil Stoughton

Warren Commission member Congressman Gerald Ford pressed the panel to change its description of the bullet wound in President Kennedy's back and place it higher to make "the magic bullet" theory plausible, enabling the Warren Commission to conclude that Lee Harvey Oswald was the lone gunman. Ford was J. Edgar Hoover's informant on the commission and did the FBI director's bidding to squelch the investigation from naming other assassins. When a Dallas County deputy constable heard shots coming from the nearby grassy knoll, he rushed there to find veteran CIA asset Bernard Barker, posing as a Secret Service agent. No Secret Service agents had been assigned to cover the grassy knoll and all accompanied President Kennedy to the hospital.

by Don Fulsom

At approximately 12:30 p.m. on Nov. 22 1963, in Dallas's downtown Dealey Plaza, a large and friendly crowd lined the street, cheering and waving excitedly at the approaching presidential motorcade. Riding in the third car – an oversized Lincoln with its Plexiglas "bubble" top removed – were President John F. Kennedy and his wife, Jackie, and Texas Gov. John Connally and his wife, Nellie. As the limousine carrying the Connallys and the Kennedys wound its way through the hospitable crowds, Nellie Connally turned to President Kennedy, who was seated behind her, and said, "Mr. President, you can't say Dallas doesn't love you." Then the shots rang out.

Today, more than four decades later, the details on specifically how and by whom President Kennedy was assassinated are still open to question.

According to the report of the Warren Commission, released in September 1964 after a full year investigation, one single shooter – Lee Harvey Oswald – killed Kennedy and wounded Gov. Connally by firing three bullets from the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository.

January 9, 2008

Former US President Gerald Ford in 2004

In a foreword to a new edition of the Warren Commission Report, the late president states that the CIA destroyed or kept from investigators critical secrets connected to the assassination of President Kennedy.

by Don Fulsom

In his final public words, former President Gerald R. Ford said the CIA destroyed or kept from investigators critical secrets connected to the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy. The stunning admission by Ford—a member of the Warren Commission that investigated the JFK assassination—is contained in the foreword to a new edition of the commission's report, A Presidential Legacy and The Warren Commission. Ford died in late 2006 at the age of 93.

In the new book, Ford said the commission's probe put "certain classified and potentially damaging operations in danger of being exposed." The CIA's reaction, he added, "was to hide or destroy some information, which can easily be misinterpreted as collusion in JFK's assassination."

October 1, 2008

Left to Right: cover of Richard Condon's 1959 novel (1960 Signet edtion); poster from the original film (1962); poster from film remake (2004).

The assassins of the Kennedy brothers acted in cold blood, not under mind control.

by Mel Ayton

To coincide with the 40th anniversary of Senator Robert F. Kennedy's assassination this year, conspiracists have once again raised the possibility that RFK's assassin, Sirhan Sirhan, had been hypnotized to murder Senator Kennedy. And other writers have used the RFK assassination anniversary as a vehicle to promote their Lee Harvey Oswald "Mind Control" theories.

In a 2007 documentary RFK Must Die and a recent National Geographic Channel documentary, CIA - Secret Experiments (2008), a number of conspiracy advocates alleged Sirhan was a Manchurian Candidate-type assassin –an unwitting tool of faceless conspirators in the CIA and the military-industrial complex. The conspiracy writers say the same conspirators who were responsible for JFK's death had plotted RFK's murder to stop him from enquiring into the death of his brother when he became president. (1)

May 27, 2004

Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated
on the first anniversary of the Six-Day War in 1968.

Sirhan Sirhan assassinated Robert Kennedy on the first anniversary of the Six-Day War "willfully, premeditatively, with 20 years of malice aforethought." He also assassinated modern U.S. history.

by Denise Noe

Sirhan Sirhan did not set out with any grand plan to change U.S. history. He simply wanted to kill Robert F. Kennedy in revenge for Kennedy's support of Israel. As it turned out, Sirhan's assassination of Robert F. Kennedy -- on June 5, 1968, the first anniversary of the Six Day War -- would do more to alter the flow of U.S. history than even the assassination of President John Kennedy accomplished four years earlier. Although both assassinations would have profound and untold impact for decades to come, Sirhan's killing of Robert Kennedy would lead in a matter of months to the election of Richard Nixon as president, the escalation of the Vietnam War and eventually to the national nightmare of Watergate.

Kennedy, who was gunned down within minutes of winning the California Democratic presidential primary, would have gone on to win the Democratic presidential nomination and would, with little doubt, have soundly defeated Nixon in the general election in November. It is impossible to know what Kennedy would have accomplished as president, only that the next four to eight years and beyond would have unraveled in a far different manner.

Sirhan did not just assassinate Robert Kennedy. He assassinated modern U.S. history.

September 6, 2005

Sirhan Sirhan in a 1998 mug shot
from the California Department of Corrections at Corcoran Prison.

From the beginning, both Sirhan's lawyers and the U.S. media sought to portray the assassination of Robert Kennedy as the act of a deranged individual bent on seeking fame and notoriety. But Sirhan was a political assassin. He murdered Kennedy to advance the cause of the Palestinians.

by Mel Ayton

For nearly 40 years conspiracy advocates have built their arguments not only around the controversies surrounding the ballistics evidence and the scene of the crime but the oft-repeated cry that the assassin had no real motive for his act. Yet there is a mountain of evidence to prove the contrary.

From the time he was a child Sirhan had been indoctrinated in ideologies that are at the center of his murderous act. Sirhan's hatred had its roots in the milieu in which he was raised and the education he received. Later, as a young adult, Sirhan sought meaning to his increasingly hopeless life by embracing anti-Semitism, anti-Americanism and Palestinian nationalism.

As a child Sirhan had been taught by Arab teachers who instilled in him the principles of the Palestinian cause. They promoted the cause of Palestinian nationalism and made constant references to the great Arab warrior, Saladin, who had expelled the foreign crusaders from Jerusalem. Teachers would attempt to inspire their young students to fight for Palestinian rights.