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October
30
2017

The Kennedy Assassination
Paul Craig Roberts

Dear Readers, some of you are pushing me to continue with the Las Vegas shooting story while others are asking to know what to make of the release of files pertaining to President Kennedy’s assassination. I appreciate that you are interested and are unsatisfied with official explanations.

My answer is that we already know, thanks to exhaustively researched books such as James W. Douglass’ JFK and the Unspeakable (Simon & Schuster, 2008), far more than is in the released files. 

My answer is also that it doesn’t matter what we know or what the facts are, the official story will never be changed. For example, we know as an absolute indisputable fact that Israel intentionally attacked the USS Liberty inflicting enormous casualties on US Navy personnel, and the US government continues the coverup that it was all a mistake despite unequivocal statements to the contrary by the Moorer Commission, led by Admiral Tom Moorer, former Chief of Naval Operations and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. 

My answer also is that time is better spent in trying to prevent conspiracies in the making, such as the endless stream of lies and accusations against Russia that are turning a friendly country into an enemy and renewing the risk of nuclear armageddon. Indeed, the biggest conspiracy theory of the present time is the one issuing from the military/security complex, the Democratic National Committee, and the presstitute media that Russia in collusion with Donald Trump hacked the US presidential election. 

The Russian government knows that this is a lie, and when they see a lie repeated endlessly now for one year without a shred of evidence to support it, the Russian government naturally concludes that Washington is preparing the American people for war. I cannot imagine a more reckless and irresponsible policy than destroying Russia’s trust in Washington’s intentions. As Putin said, the main lesson life has taught him is that “if a fight is unavoidable, strike first.”

If you really want to know who killed President Kennedy and why, read JFK and the Unspeakable. Yes, there are other carefully researched books that you can read.

Douglass concludes that Kennedy was murdered because he turned to peace. He was going to work with Khrushchev to end the Cold War. He refused the CIA US air cover for the Bay of Pigs invasion. He rejected the Joint Chiefs’ Operation Northwoods, a plan to conduct false flag attacks on Americans that would be blamed on Castro to justify regime change. He refused to reappoint General Lyman Lemnitzer as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs. He told US Marine commandant General David Shoup that he was taking the US out of Vietnam. He said after his reelection he was going to “break the CIA into 1,000 pieces.” All of this threatened the power and profit of the military/security complex and convinced military/security elements that he was soft on communism and a threat to US national security.

The film of the motorcade taken by Zapruder shows that the bullet that killed Kennedy hit him from the front, blowing out the back of his head. You can see Kennedy’s wife Jackie reaching from the back seat onto the trunk of the limo to recover the back of his head. Other tourist films show moments before the shot the Secret Service agents being ordered off of the presidential limo so that a clear shot at Kennedy is possible. The film shows one Secret Service agent protesting the order.

The medical “evidence” that Kennedy was hit from behind was falsified by medical doctors under orders. Navy medical corpsmen who helped the Navy doctors with the autopsy testified that they were dismayed by orders from Admiral Calvin Galloway to ignore entry wounds from the front. One of the corpsmen testified “all at once I understood that my country was not much better than a third world country. From that point on in time, I have had no trust, no respect for the government.”

Dr Charles Crenshaw, one of the doctors forced to lie, later broke his silence with a book and was rewarded with a fierce media campaign to discredit him. 

Lt. Commander William Pitzer, director of the Audio-Visual Department of the Bethesda Naval Hospital, filmed the autopsy. The film clearly showed the entry wound from the front. Pitzer was found shot to death on the floor of the production studio of the National Naval Medical Center. It was ruled a suicide, as always.

J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI knew that Oswald, who Douglass believes was on the payroll of both the CIA and FBI, was sent to Cuba by the CIA in order to establish the story for the patsy role Oswald was unaware was being prepared for him. However, Hoover, along with LBJ, Earl Warren and the members of the Warren Commission understood that it was impossible to tell the American people that their president has been assassinated by the US military and US security agencies. At a dicey time of the Cold War, clearly it would have been reckless to destroy Americans’ trust in their own government.

Finian Cunningham presents a summary of much of the accumulated evidence. All experts long ago concluded that the Warren Commission report is a coverup. https://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2017/10/28/jfk-files-cover-up-continues-president-assassination.html 

I am not an expert. I have not spent 30 years or longer, as has Douglass, investigating, interviewing witnesses, tracking down unexplained deaths of witnesses, and piecing together the available voluminous information. if you want to know what happened, put down your smart phones, close your video screens, and read Douglass’ or a similar book.

Hon. Paul Craig Roberts is the John M. Olin Fellow at the Institute for Political Economy, Senior Research Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and Research Fellow at the Independent Institute. A former editor and columnist for The Wall Street Journal and columnist for Business Week and the Scripps Howard News Service, he is a nationally syndicated columnist for Creators Syndicate in Los Angeles and a columnist for Investor's Business Daily. In 1992 he received the Warren Brookes Award for Excellence in Journalism. In 1993 the Forbes Media Guide ranked him as one of the top seven journalists.

He was Distinguished Fellow at the Cato Institute from 1993 to 1996. From 1982 through 1993, he held the William E. Simon Chair in Political Economy at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. During 1981-82 he served as Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy. President Reagan and Treasury Secretary Regan credited him with a major role in the Economic Recovery Tax Act of 1981, and he was awarded the Treasury Department's Meritorious Service Award for "his outstanding contributions to the formulation of United States economic policy." From 1975 to 1978, Dr. Roberts served on the congressional staff where he drafted the Kemp-Roth bill and played a leading role in developing bipartisan support for a supply-side economic policy.

In 1987 the French government recognized him as "the artisan of a renewal in economic science and policy after half a century of state interventionism" and inducted him into the Legion of Honor.

Dr. Roberts' latest books are The Tyranny of Good Intentions, co-authored with IPE Fellow Lawrence Stratton, and published by Prima Publishing in May 2000, and Chile: Two Visions - The Allende-Pinochet Era, co-authored with IPE Fellow Karen Araujo, and published in Spanish by Universidad Nacional Andres Bello in Santiago, Chile, in November 2000. The Capitalist Revolution in Latin America, co-authored with IPE Fellow Karen LaFollette Araujo, was published by Oxford University Press in 1997. A Spanish language edition was published by Oxford in 1999. The New Colorline: How Quotas and Privilege Destroy Democracy, co-authored with Lawrence Stratton, was published by Regnery in 1995. A paperback edition was published in 1997. Meltdown: Inside the Soviet Economy, co-authored with Karen LaFollette, was published by the Cato Institute in 1990. Harvard University Press published his book, The Supply-Side Revolution, in 1984. Widely reviewed and favorably received, the book was praised by Forbes as "a timely masterpiece that will have real impact on economic thinking in the years ahead." Dr. Roberts is the author of Alienation and the Soviet Economy, published in 1971 and republished in 1990. He is the author of Marx's Theory of Exchange, Alienation and Crisis, published in 1973 and republished in 1983. A Spanish language edition was published in 1974.

Dr. Roberts has held numerous academic appointments. He has contributed chapters to numerous books and has published many articles in journals of scholarship, including the Journal of Political Economy, Oxford Economic Papers, Journal of Law and Economics, Studies in Banking and Finance, Journal of Monetary Economics, Public Finance Quarterly, Public Choice, Classica et Mediaevalia, Ethics, Slavic Review, Soviet Studies, Rivista de Political Economica, and Zeitschrift fur Wirtschafspolitik. He has entries in the McGraw-Hill Encyclopedia of Economics and the New Palgrave Dictionary of Money and Finance. He has contributed to Commentary, The Public Interest, The National Interest, Harper's, the New York Times, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, Fortune, London Times, The Financial Times, TLS, The Spectator, Il Sole 24 Ore, Le Figaro, Liberation, and the Nihon Keizai Shimbun. He has testified before committees of Congress on 30 occasions.

Dr. Roberts was educated at the Georgia Institute of Technology (B.S.), the University of Virginia (Ph.D.), the University of California at Berkeley and Oxford University where he was a member of Merton College.

He is listed in Who's Who in America, Who's Who in the World, The Dictionary of International Biography, Outstanding People of the Twentieth Century, and 1000 Leaders of World Influence. His latest book, HOW THE ECONOMY WAS LOST, has just been published by CounterPunch/AK Press. He can be reached at: [email protected]

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