JFK Assassination

updated 09/19/09

Despite a 1990s law mandating the release of all JFK assassination-related documents, an estimated one million such CIA records have yet to be declassified. Some of the most critical pertain to CIA agent George Joannides (a.k.a. Walter Newby) who violated the CIA’s pledge that no CIA operational officer from the time of the JFK assassination would work with U.S. House investigators.

by Don Fulsom

November 25, 2005

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

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.

October 16, 2006

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

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.

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

by Don Fulsom

January 9, 2008

Former President Gerald Ford in 2004

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.

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).

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.

June 6, 2007
updated 1/25/09

by Don Fulsom

Was a key Richard Nixon cohort in past and future covert intelligence operations – then-CIA agent E. Howard Hunt – in Dallas the day President Kennedy was killed in 1963? During a 1985 libel trial brought by Hunt against Spotlight – a newsletter owned by rightwing Liberty Lobby – for publishing an article in August of 1978 written by former CIA agent Victor Marchetti entitled "CIA to Admit Hunt Involvement in Kennedy Slaying," CIA operative Marita Lorenz swore she saw Hunt in Dallas the night before the assassination; Hunt co-worker Walter Kuzmuk at the CIA said he could not recall having seen Hunt between November 18th and sometime in December of 1963; and Joseph Trento, a reporter for the Wilmington News & Journal, insisted he had once seen an internal CIA memo that said, "Someday we will have to explain Hunt's presence in Dallas on November 22, 1963." Hunt, by the way, lost the case.