Dakota Beacon

With all that has been said this past week on the 50^th anniversary of the assassination of President John Kennedy, numerous unsubstantiated “facts” have been thrown about.  We’ve heard Rush Limbaugh, who is usually right, squandering his credibility in order to put down leftists by accusing them of trying to debunk the Warren Commission.  That would place Rush on the side of that body.  Why on earth would someone of Rush Limbaugh’s stature feel the need to gild the lily in this way?  Just in order to put down the leftists among us he was willing to sign on to the impossible “magic bullet” story.  Shame on you, Rush. 

One thing any reasonable person desirous of finding the truth would reject would be conclusions without evidence to support them and ridiculous, pasted-together “theories” to patch over the Mt. Everest-size gaps in logic and facts.  One needn’t be a “leftist” or “socialist” in order to dispute a pathetic story which must certainly have been concocted in order to protect the guilty.  Come, now, Mr. Limbaugh.  Don’t get me wrong.   I am one of Rush’s earliest and most loyal fans; that is why a breach in common sense and logic is so offensive coming from that quarter.

We’ve all seen the Oliver Stone picture, and we can draw what conclusions we wish from that.  It was at the least, a compelling tale.  Many of us had read Jim Garrison’s accounts – largely a series of unanswered questions which could not be satisfied by the Warren Commission Report nor could that report explain the bizarre efforts taken to discredit Garrison and defame and silence him.  If the Warren Commission were right, and Garrison wrong, why not let him talk?  Why discourage debate?  There is no legitimate reason to stifle discussion.

I practically grew up arguing with my dad over this.  I blamed sinister government-or sinister elements in  government for this, based on the indisputable facts of the mishandling by the Secret Service of both the President’s visit and the evidence after the crime was committed, strange last-minute rerouting of the motorcade to take it into a dangerous area, information to which Oswald should not have had access.  Although tempting, explaining this by some Castro/Moscow cabal didn’t quite cover these matters.  My dad, though, had a simpler explanation.  He held that it was nothing more than a Mafia hit.  I guess I was still naïve about the pervasiveness of the Mob in American government.

Over the decades I puzzled about this.  Then one day I read a biography of Sam Giancanna, the Chicago Capo, penned by his nephew and namesake.  This was fascinating on many levels, as Giancanna (2) had access to some deep, dark secrets.  For clarity, I will refer to the mob boss as “Giancanna” and his biographer as SG. 

The roots of this tragic event, according to this account, were far back in the Kennedy family history.  Joseph Kennedy had long enjoyed a profitable relationship with various members of the underground.  His days of rum running and bootlegging during Prohibition was the common thread.  His reliance on protection brought him into contact and custom with bosses in Chicago.

Kennedy had as a personal goal the grooming of his sons for the highest office in the land.  Young Joe had died in World War II, but he had three more.  John F. Kennedy, the next son, became a U.S. Senator and he was on his way.  Joseph Kennedy wanted this VERY much.  Some of us are old enough to remember the election of 1960.  Richard Nixon looked like the winner, but wait . . . Cook County in Chicago was not yet in.  We waited for long hours and finally we had a “winner” – JFK pulled ahead in Cook County and won.  The count was hair’s breadth close.  We all thought Nixon would call for a recount.   Many were bitterly disappointed that he did not do so.  He probably knew better.

Upon his election, Kennedy appointed his brother, Robert, to the post of U.S. Attorney General.  Robert decided that he would use his position to wipe out organized crime.  What a nasty turn of events this must have seemed to men like Sam Giancanna!  After pulling the necessary strings to ensure a Kennedy victory, the big payoff was a war on organized crime!  Incensed, he called Joseph Kennedy in on the carpet.  Kennedy was to call off this war and to prevent the deportation of Havana mobster Santos Trafficante.

The next scene must be reconstructed – one admits to not being the fly on the wall – but it has been referenced as a huge blow-up between the patriarch laying down the law to his son and a rebellious son in white-hot fury to learn that his father had been involved with and “owed” the underworld.  In any case, Robert for once defied his father.  He would continue to batter the mob and he would continue to attack J. Edgar Hoover for running interference.  You may recall that Hoover denied the very existence of the Mafia on American soil.

The rest is history.  Now, I can’t vouch for all of this.  I read it in Giancanna’s biography and I’ve read other theories in other books, but this one, despite my resistance over a long time, finally convinced me because it answered most of the greatest puzzles.  I began to understand what my dad was already aware of – namely, that the mob influences our government and its agencies in many subtle and not-so-subtle ways.

Sure, Oswald was a handy patsy.  One could point to his Soviet connections and his mysterious past.  Look at the other possibilities, though.  Could Oswald have been sent back to America scot free with his Soviet wife because the Soviets wanted to get her into the United States?  It was usually much more difficult to get Soviet spies into America.  Oswald was given a job with Guy Bannister in New Orleans, where he became involved with the Cuban counter-revolution activities.  Surely Marina could have sent information back on this – a matter of the utmost interest and importance to the Eisenhower-era Soviets.  This could have been merely parallel to the assassination plot.

Then you have a Secret Service allowing a rerouting of the motorcade which exposed the President to much greater hazard.  We have Oswald himself seen in another place when he was supposedly aiming from the Book Depository window – on a different floor nowhere near that site.   The Secret Service also commandeered the body and whisked it off, in violation of normal procedure, to Washington for a closely “supervised” post-mortem.  The details of this leave gaping holes in logic, as they do in proper handling as well.  The president’s brain was lost and is still missing.  The bullet that was produced bore no signs of the physical stress of the impossible journey it took through two men’s bodies and back.  The limousine, itself a crime scene, was completely washed and disinfected by the Secret Service prior to the autopsy.  Does this sound right to you?  It got by the Warren Commission.   What about the fake Secret Servicemen the Dallas police interviewed on the Grassy Knoll?  Their credentials looked just right to the law enforcement personnel - and yet, all real Secret Servicemen were accounted for elsewhere –in the Warren Commission Report itself!  Another question I’ve never really heard aired is this, and it’s bothered me from the first time I saw it in 1963:  Why, when bullets were flying around, in the chaos of Dealy Plaza, would Jackie have tried desperately to escape over the trunk of the car?  Anyone would think she’d have naturally tried to get Jack and herself down and out of the hail of bullets, on the floor of the car, not out in the open on the trunk!  She obviously felt the attack was coming from the front.  I have heard that the actual fatal shot was fired from the front seat.  If this doesn’t smack of a mob hit, what would?  Much like Giancanna’s own assassination by a “friend” as he was preparing an omelet at home! 

And then, wasn’t it convenient for everyone when mobster Jack Ruby showed up in the police station corridor and fatally shot Oswald, thereby obviating a damaging trial?  There is much more, but if you apply the Mafia theory, none of it clashes. 

Back then we were somewhat more trusting of our government.  Today this would never have flown.  We have learned.  But the subsequent murder of Robert Kennedy could have been related to this very easily.  If the mob didn’t want RFK as Attorney General, they could hardly have wanted him as President, especially with the JFK assassination on their resume.  Or it could have been related to Moscow and the Six-Day War, as Dr. Paul Kengor and President Ronald Reagan believed. 

The one thing we must not do is try to manipulate history so as to get a result that is comfortable for us today.  Even if we’d like it to be Communists or Cubans, Free or Communist, or Syrians or whomever, we need to let the facts we can discover tell us their story.  I admire Rush Limbaugh – he’s right far more than he’s wrong.  But it is wrong and irresponsible to latch onto a spurious document like the Warren Commission Report in order to add unneeded weight to the argument against “leftists”.  There is plenty wrong with them.  We don’t need to invent things.  And when we do, we only succeed in discrediting ourselves when we are telling the truth.