JFK 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)

June 6, 2007 updated Jan. 25, 2010

E. Howard Hunt

Howard St. John Hunt, the son of super-spook E. Howard Hunt is now peddling a story that his father rejected an offer to take part in plot by rogue CIA agents to kill President Kennedy. Isn't it about time a congressional committee finds out what the CIA's role was in the assassination?

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.

Most notorious for directing Nixon's Watergate burglary, Hunt died at 88 in January, 2007, in Miami. But Hunt's son – Howard St. John (known as "St. John") Hunt of Eureka, Calif., – is now peddling a story that his dad rejected an offer to take part in plot by rogue CIA agents to kill President Kennedy.

March 8, 2009

Rose Cherami

A dope courier for Jack Ruby informed a Louisiana State Police lieutenant and numerous hospital personnel of the planned assassination of President John F. Kennedy two days before he was gunned down in Dallas.

by Don Fulsom

One of the most fascinating and underreported stories in the JFK assassination mystery deals with the Jack Ruby dope courier who accurately predicted the President's murder.

Two days before John F. Kennedy was killed in Dealey Plaza, 34-year-old Rose Cherami (sometimes spelled Cheramie)—a hooker, junkie, drug-runner and ex-stripper at Jack Ruby's Carousel Club in Dallas—was on a Florida-to-Texas heroin run for Ruby.

In rural Louisiana, a violent drunken argument with her two Ruby-connected male traveling companions broke out both inside and outside a seedy roadside tavern/house of prostitution. The argument continued during the next leg of their ride. Rose was tossed out of the gangsters' vehicle and then run over by another car near Eunice, La.

On the way to a nearby hospital, the cut and bruised Cheramie told Louisiana State Police Lt. Francis Fruge that her pending business in Dallas included picking up cash (for the eight kilos of heroin she'd been assigned to purchase in Houston). She said her fellow travelers were out to kill President Kennedy. At the hospital, she told doctors, nurses and others JFK would soon be murdered in Dallas.

October 15, 2003 (updated 03/22/09)

Richard M. Nixon press conference releasing the transcripts
of the White House tapes, 04/29/1974.

Nixon's ties to the assassination of President Kennedy run deep, from his association with Jack Ruby, his ties to Jimmy Hoffa and the Mafia, and his connection to CIA operative E. Howard Hunt. On a tape recorded in Nixon's White House office in 1972 he told two top aides that the Warren Commission Report pulled off "the greatest hoax that has ever been perpetuated." No one knew that better than he did.

by Don Fulsom

Seared into the memories of all Americans who lived through the assassination of President John F. Kennedy is exactly where they were on November 22, 1963. Yet private citizen Richard Nixon, who — believe it or not — was in Dallas, could not recall this fact in a post-assassination interview with the FBI.

The interview dealt with an apparently false claim by Marina Oswald that her husband —alleged Kennedy assassin Lee Harvey Oswald — had targeted Nixon for death during an earlier trip to Dallas. A Feb. 28, 1964 FBI report on the interview said Nixon "advised that the only time he was in Dallas, Texas, during 1963 was two days prior to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy."

While Nixon eventually came clean regarding his whereabouts on that fateful day, he seemed touchy whenever the matter was raised. For example, in a 1992 interview with CNN's Larry King, Nixon interjected he was in Dallas "In the morning!" when King cited the presumed geographical coincidence. Nixon left Dallas on a flight to New York several hours before Kennedy's noontime arrival at Love Field.

April 5, 2009

Mary Pinchot Meyer

In the two years leading up to the assassination of President Kennedy, Mary Pinchot Meyer visited JFK about 30 times in the White House. Within a year of the assassination, the former mistress would be gunned down execution style on a Georgetown towpath.

by Don Fulsom

Less than a year after President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, his favorite Washington mistress—Mary Pinchot Meyer—was shot dead, execution-style, just a short distance from her home in the safest part of D.C.'s safest neighborhood.

Meyer was a stunning blonde and a free-spirited Georgetown artist. A pre-hippie hippie, she was a smart Vassar grad, a former reporter for United Press, a socialist/pacifist, and a sexual adventurer who also experimented with mind-altering drugs.

The CIA had been able to keep close tabs on Mary's nearly two-year affair with President Kennedy—partly because the spy agency, it was later revealed, had been bugging her home and telephones ever since her late-'50s divorce from Cord Meyer, a top CIA official.

August 19, 2009

Ellen Rometsch  

The most potentially damaging woman in the President’s stable of beautiful sex partners was Ellen Rometsch, a 27-year-old pricey Washington hooker and Elizabeth Taylor look-alike. Born in what had become East Germany, Rometsch was also a suspected spy.  If exposed, the Kennedy-Rometsch affair could have become a major national security issue.  For a steep price, J. Edgar Hoover kept the lid on it.

by Don Fulsom

Had the American public known in 1963 what they know now about John F. Kennedy’s scores of sexual escapades, would he have been able to survive in office?  Though he was charismatic and capable, probably not.  Particularly if it were known that one of the President’s girl friends was—as is now reputed—a White House intern.  And even more especially, if it were known that one of his bedmates were a prostitute and a reputed Soviet Bloc spy.

The intern, Mimi Beardsley Alford, then 19 and now 66, is penning a memoir—Once Upon a Secret—that claims she had an affair with President Kennedy from June 1962 to November 1963.

With several other White House staffers as always-willing sex partners, the President never had far to go for a fling.  Aside from Mimi, there were: Pamela Turnure, Jackie Kennedy’s appointments secretary; White House press aide Priscilla Weiss, code named “Fiddle” by the Secret Service; and press aide Jill Cowan, code named “Faddle.”  Jack frequently romped with Fiddle and Faddle—as a nude threesome—in the White House swimming pool.