by
Tim Kelly
Future
of Freedom Foundation

Robert F.
Kennedy Jr. has joined
the ranks of skeptics and “conspiracy theorists” who believe
that a lone gunman was not solely responsible for the assassination
of his uncle, President John F. Kennedy. Kennedy said his father,
Senator Robert F. Kennedy, believed the Warren Commission Report
was a “shoddy piece of craftsmanship”

“The evidence
at this point I think is very, very convincing that it was not a
lone gunman,” he said, but he did not elaborate on what he believed
may have happened.

John F. Kennedy
was assassinated on November 22, 1963, while riding in a motorcade
through Dallas.

Robert F. Kennedy,
while celebrating his victory in the California Democratic presidential
primary, was shot and killed on June 5, 1968, at a Los Angeles hotel.
He was supposedly the victim of another “lone nut.”

RFK’s assassination
and the circumstances surrounding it have spawned almost as many
conspiracy theories as his brother’s murder five years earlier.

And RFK Jr.’s
remarks, coming early in a year that will mark the 50th anniversary
of JFK’s assassination, will no doubt provide rhetorical fodder
for the legions of critics of the Warren Commission Report.

That report
concluded that the 35th president of the United States was hit from
the rear by two of three shots fired by a deranged 24-year-old former
Marine named Lee Harvey Oswald. According to the report, the first
bullet hit JFK in the back, exited through his neck, and went on
to inflict multiple injuries on Texas Governor John Connally. The
second bullet missed the presidential limousine, ricocheted off
the curb and grazed a bystander. The third bullet hit the president
in the head, killing him.

What has made
many question the Warren Commission’s credibility is the fact that
it was largely controlled by former CIA director Allen Dulles. President
Kennedy had ousted Dulles as director of the CIA in 1961, after
the failed Bay of Pigs invasion. Kennedy had also reportedly voiced
his intention “to splinter the CIA in a thousand pieces and scatter
it to the winds.”

From the moment
of its release in 1964, the Warren Report became a target of criticism,
owing largely to such difficulties as its “single-bullet theory,”
which appeared to twist the laws of physics.

As Mark Lane,
a pioneer in JFK assassination research, noted,
“The only way you can believe the Report is not to have read it.”

Another reason
to doubt the report’s conclusions is Oswald’s apparent connections
to the U.S. intelligence community, an important detail not mentioned
in the report’s 889 pages. After all, if Oswald was a low-level
intelligence agent, as a large body
of evidence suggests, is it reasonable to believe he was the
“lone-nut” assassin of Warren Commission legend?

But even if
Oswald was the gunman and was able to get off two miraculously accurate
shots, he did not have the power to withdraw the police motorcycle
escorts, or to order the Secret Service to stand down, or to alter
the testimony
of funeral-home staff who received the body. The Warren Commission
never explained these systemic breakdowns that left the president
vulnerable and the chain of evidence questionable.

And it should
also be mentioned that a U.S. House of Representatives select
committee concluded in 1978, after a two-year investigation,
that JFK was probably a victim of an elaborate conspiracy (not a
“lone nut).

Who could have
been part of such a conspiracy?

Theories abound.
Some finger the Mafia, while others blame rogue anti-Castro Cubans,
or the CIA, or the FBI, or the Pentagon, or Asian drug lords, or
eccentric Texas oil barons, or even then-vice-president Lyndon Johnson.
Others have posited scenarios involving a combination of some or
all of these groups.

The Kennedy
administration had certainly ruffled a lot of feathers in its thousand
days. Indeed, JFK’s apparent turn to peace may have been the reason
why he was gunned down.

At first glance,
JFK was an unlikely candidate for peacenik martyrdom.

In 1960, Kennedy
campaigned to the right of Richard Nixon, warning of “a missile
gap” that had left the nation vulnerable to a Russian nuclear attack.

He entered
the White House a committed cold warrior, declaring the time to
be an “hour of maximum danger” for freedom. America, he said, would
“pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any
friend, oppose any foe to assure the survival and the success of
liberty.” A primary beneficiary of the Kennedy administration was
the military-industrial complex, as spending on both conventional
and nuclear forces increased sharply from 1961 to 1963.

However, after
clashing with his Joint Chiefs over a number of issues and witnessing
the apparent treachery of the CIA regarding the Bay of Pigs invasion,
Kennedy developed a mistrust of his national-security managers.

The Cuban Missile
Crisis, which brought the United States and the Soviet Union to
the brink of nuclear war, had a profound effect on JFK, and he emerged
from it a changed man, determined to end the Cold War peacefully.

In June 1963,
JFK delivered a speech
at American University in which he called for the total abolishment
of nuclear weapons. A few months later, his administration signed
the Limited
Test Ban Treaty with the Soviets.

He also began
having private correspondences with Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev,
which enraged the CIA, and he was seeking a rapprochement with Cuba’s
dictator Fidel Castro, which further incensed the agency.

But perhaps
his National
Security Action Memorandum 263 calling for the total withdrawal
of U.S. troops from Vietnam by the end of 1965 was the final straw
for the national security state.

That order,
if implemented, would have disrupted many “national-security” operations
that had been going on in Southeast Asia since the end of the Second
World War. Interestingly, just days after JFK’s death, Lyndon Johnson
signed National Security Action Memorandum 273 reversing JFK’s withdrawal
plan. The rest, as they say, is history.

Reprinted
from The Future of Freedom Foundation.

March
4, 2013

Copyright
© 2013 Future of Freedom Foundation