The John Kennedy Murder and the Heart Pounding Under My Floorboards

BY ALEX CONSTANTINE

It was a dreary winter evening in 2013, shortly after midnight. I was in the midst of a radio interview, and subject at one point was the Kennedy assassination. I explained that a great deal of confusion had been sown deliberately to protect Kennedy's killers. One telltale bit of evidence was a CIA directive that laid out cover stories to feed the press. The first faux culprits to lay blame on were Soviets. If that didn't persuade the American public, plants in thee media were to point the finger at Casto. If that didn't take, blame the Mafia. Each of the cover stories had a basis in false trails conceived in advance of the murder for federal investigators and reporters to follow. The misdirection was meticulously planned, executed with military precision.

I went on to explain that once the cover stories are examined, weighted and discarded, understanding the murder of Kennedy isn't so difficult. Then came a question that has haunted me for years.

"Why was he murdered?"

It was a simple question, but I turned it over like the Big Six Wheel at Circus Circus, and it commenced to spinning, kept spinning and refused to click on the winning number. Most assassination researchers settle on a single motive; the majority caucus believes that Kennedy intended to pull out of Vietnam, and for this reason he was shot dead on a Dallas street.

But the motive was much more complicated, I knew, and when the question was put tp me, the wheel spun I had no idea where to start.

Earlier on in the interview, I'd explained that the machinery to kill Kennedy was set in motion the day he defvsmreated Nixon. So the decision to pull troops out of Southeast Asia wasn't the core motive. Like pieces on a chess board, a pawn was moved to 544 Camp Street in New Orleans, then a knight was sent to Dallas, another sacrificial pawn was handed pro-Castro leaflets to distribute on a street corner, and so on. As I say, it was all planned with military precision.

But this didn't turn the Big Six wheel in my head. I now know that I should have begun at the beginning.

John Kennedy was raised in a household where politics were discussed every evening over the dinner table. Joseph disciplined his children with this regimen. They were expected to study issues and discuss them intelligently. Joseph had had his flirtation with fascist movements before the war, but regretted it after it began. His son had been inculcated with a keen understanding of real 20th century political history.

That knowledge evolved over the years, and he took it with him when he hit the campaign trail, but only a few wealthy Democratic donors knew what he intended to do if he won the election. At a private fundraising conclave, Kennedy explained that a seditious movement, one that offered absurdly "simple solutions" to complex issues, had designs on power. He described the internal threat as a "hidden government."

Kennedy didn't mention Nixon, the Birch Society, the Dulles brothers, right-wing Senatorial stinkbugs, Big Oil, the CIA. or ultra-conservative media propagandists, but he nailed them with his profile. The far-right presented a clear present and future danger.

He intended to thwart domestic fascism. It would make no advances once he was in the White House. It was a closed meeting so the press was kept out. His speech didn't make headlines. After the election, he made good on his promise to block any significant advances pf the far-right. Sure, they had their small victories, but Kennedy went for the jugular vein.

And thereby signed his own death warrant.

Fascists are covert operators, and political assassination itself was among the challenges he took on. Mae Brussell condensed a complex, homicidal federal underground into a single paragraph:

"J. E. Hoover, the hired hands of FBI and CIA, ran the assassination teams. They have been used since World War II. JFK was attempting to end the oil-tax depletion rip-offs, to get tax money from oil companies. JFK instituted the nuclear test ban treaty, often called 'the kiss of death,' to oppose the Pentagon. JFK called off the Invasion of Cuba. He allowed Castro to live, antagonized narcotics and gambling, oil and sugar interests, formerly in Cuba. JFK asked his brother, Attorney General Robert Kennedy, to break up the CIA, the 'hidden government behind my back.' Allen Dulles was fired. Dulles, the attorney for international multinationals, was angry. JFK planned to withdraw troops from Vietnam after the 1964 elections. Nov. 24, 1963, two days after JFK’s burial, the Pentagon escalated the Vietnam war … with no known provocations, after JFK was gone. There was no chance Kennedy could survive antagonizing the CIA, oil companies, Pentagon, organized crime. He was not their man. The assassination of JFK employed people from the Texas-Southwest. It was not a Southern plot. Upstarts could not have controlled the northern CIA, FBI, Kennedy family connections. This was a more detailed, sophisticated conspiracy that was to set the pattern for future murders to take place."

The motive for the Kennedy assassination is not a simple thing to explain on a radio program between jingling commercial spiels. When the question was put to me, that Big Six Wheel spun and I didn't know how to begin. Years later, it has finally stopped -- at the Kennedy clan dinner table where John cut his political teeth.

There were multiple motives. Vietnam was one, but there were a number of others. They all boil down to the one: he waged a war against the "hidden government." Kennedy wasn't a conspiracy theorist. Joe Kennedy hammered cold political realities into his young son's head. John went on to fight in WW II, and he continued the war against fascism at home. He was an early casualty. Many others followed.

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