The conspiracist
BY MIKE MILIARD | January 11, 2007
Gay-rights crusader Paul Kuntzler turns a sharp mind for detail to the JFK assassination
http://thephoenix.com/Boston/news/31507-conspiracist/?page=1
“Assassination-conspiracy theorist” is a relatively recent addition to Paul Kuntzler’s résumé. For much longer, he has been one of Washington, DC’s most prominent gay firebrands. Over the phone following a lunch meeting near his Capitol Hill–area office, he pinpoints the important moments of his activist career as if flipping through a mental calendar.
“On the first Tuesday in April, 1962, I was elected to the Mattachine Society executive board,” he says, referring to the oldest homophile group in America. “On Saturday, April 17, 1965, I was a participant in the world’s first demonstration for gay civil rights in front of the White House. In January of 1966, the Gertrude Stein Democratic Club” — the still-extant mouthpiece for lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender Democrats in DC — “was founded in my living room.”
In March of 1971, Kuntzler managed the congressional campaign of Mattachine president Franklin E. Kameny — the first openly gay candidate running for Congress — who was seeking a non-voting seat representing the District of Columbia. In April of that year, he helped found another equal-rights group, DC’s Gay & Lesbian Activists Alliance (GLAA), the US’s oldest continuously active gay and lesbian civil-rights organization.
Kuntzler, 65, has near-total recall of the momentous dates in his life. (Within three minutes of meeting him at his office, he’s told me the date and day of the week of his birth, and the Grosse Pointe, Michigan, hospital in which he was born. Later, navigating the wide avenues around Capitol Hill, he tells me that he first arrived in DC two days after his 20th birthday, on Thursday, December 28, 1961. And that he met Stephen Brent Miller, his late partner of 42 years, “on Friday, March 28, 1962, at 11 o’clock pm.”)
But in recent years, Paul Kuntzler has been fixated on another point in time: 12:30 pm, November 22, 1963 — the moment President John F. Kennedy was mortally wounded by gunshot in Dallas, Texas. For the past year and half, the long-time gay-rights activist has been waging a one-man, self-financed campaign to publicize what he believes was a conspiracy to assassinate Kennedy, as well as the media’s complicity in covering it up.
In a four-page letter sent last April to Washington Post chairman Donald E. Graham — and subsequently reprinted in its entirety as a four-page ad, purchased for $4000, in the LGBT weekly the Washington Blade — Kuntzler laid out his sweeping, Byzantine theory.
“President John Fitzgerald Kennedy,” he contends, “was murdered by Vice President Lyndon Baines Johnson in a widespread, incredibly complex and brilliantly planned conspiracy that involved the Federal Bureau of Investigations directed by J. Edgar Hoover, the Central Intelligence Agency directed by David Atlee Phillips, the Secret Service, the United States Navy, General Curtis LeMay of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the Ford Motor Company, the Dallas Police including Dallas mayor Earle Cabell, big oil of Texas, the Texas political establishment, the mafia, and the anti-Castro Cubans.”
Since May 2005, in a ceaseless flurry of typed letters, scrawled faxes, printed e-mails, and underlined photocopies sent not just to Graham but to New York Times publisher Arthur O. Sulzberger Jr., Kuntzler has lobbied to get his theory some ink in the country’s two most important newspapers. His crusade so far has been met, perhaps predictably, with almost deafening silence.
Still, he continues his quest. It’s the “morally correct thing to do. I always wanted to make a contribution,” he says.
When asked why he cares so keenly about this issue, why he’s devoted so much time and money to something most people just shrug away with a rueful frown, his normally even-keeled voice rises considerably. “Because it changed the course of history. The last 43 years! There would have been no Vietnam war, where 57,000 Americans died and 300,000 were injured, including my brother. Two million Vietnamese. Nixon wouldn’t have been president. There wouldn’t have been any Bushes. There wouldn’t have been an Iraq War. It’s a matter of integrity. I think the American people, once they learn the truth, will take a big broom and clean house.”
Birth of an obsession
Paul Kuntzler became president of Miller Reporting Co. in 2004. Founded in 1960, and bought in 1980 by Kuntzler’s late partner, Stephen Miller, it is one of the largest court-reporting and transcription services in the world, stenotyping congressional testimony and the proceedings of other high-profile federal agencies.
In 1998, the company transcribed the records of the Assassination Records Review Board, which served as a dragnet for the gathering and release of government records concerning the JFK assassination. It was Kuntzler’s work on this project that, in part, turned what had been a subject of keen curiosity into a near obsession.
And it’s on Miller Reporting letterhead that Kuntzler writes most of his letters to the editors and publishers at the New York Times and the Washington Post. (According to a July article in the Washington Times, Kuntzler racked up nearly $25,000 on his corporate credit card in relation to a Kennedy-assassination roundtable that he sponsored this spring at the famous Willard Hotel, in Washington.)
Two days after I began reporting this story, I received a large box weighing 10 or 12 pounds, mailed from Kuntzler’s office. In it was a folder the size of a small phone book, stuffed with his correspondence with the brass at the Times and the Post. There was a copy of Jim Marrs’s hefty tome Crossfire: The Plot That Killed Kennedy, a primary source for Oliver Stone’s film JFK; a dog-eared and marked-up copy of Dr. Charles Crenshaw’sJFK: A Conspiracy of Silence (Crenshaw, an emergency-room doctor at Parkland Memorial Hospital, treated President Kennedy’s wounds); and Gerald Posner’s anti-conspiracy work Case Closed: Lee Harvey Oswald and the Assassination of JFK.
There were also six VHS volumes of The Men Who Killed Kennedy, an incendiary British documentary series that began airing on A&E in 1988; a DVD of fresh footage from Dallas’s WFAA-TV, called JFK: The Story Behind the Story; and some crumbling, yellowing newspapers, one of them the November 23, 1963 issue of the New York Times, screaming: KENNEDY IS KILLED BY SNIPER AS HE RIDES IN CAR IN DALLAS; JOHNSON SWORN IN ON PLANE.
The package contained another issue of the Times, this one dated November 25, 1963, the day after Jack Ruby pumped Lee Harvey Oswald’s stomach with a hot .38 slug. PRESIDENT’S ASSASSIN IS SHOT TO DEATH IN CORRIDOR OF JAIL BY A CITIZEN OF DALLAS: KENNEDY ADMIRER FIRES ONE BULLET, the headline reads. President’s assassin. Not “alleged” assassin, or “accused” assassin. Less than 72 hours after John F. Kennedy was killed, the Times was already sure of its man. Maybe Kuntzler is on to something when he accuses the Gray Lady of whitewashing the truth.
November 22, 1963
“When I was a boy, I was interested in President Lincoln’s assassination. I actually staged a production at Saint Joan of Arc grade school,” says Kuntzler, who looks a little like LSD guru Timothy Leary, but has a taste for finely tailored suits and a delicate, patrician manner. “I built the set, and played John Wilkes Booth. I was interested in why he was shot,” he continues over lunch at his favorite restaurant on Washington, DC’s 8th Street.
He never imagined the same thing could happen to John F. Kennedy, the handsome and charismatic senator for whom he’d campaigned as a teenager in Michigan, the candidate whose “big, very strong hand” he shook at the Detroit Metropolitan Airport in 1960. (“The back of my head appeared in the Detroit News the next day,” Kuntzler says with wry pride.)
Kuntzler first came to Washington, on January 18, 1961, on the Baltimore & Ohio train. He was bound for Kennedy’s presidential inauguration.
Eleven months later — “on Thursday, December 28, 1961” — he would move to Washington, DC. “We lived then in an age of innocence,” Kuntzler says of the closing months in 1963. War and depression notwithstanding, America had spent the previous three decades under great or near-great presidents — Roosevelt, Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy — who were decent men. There was a fundamental belief that the American government was essentially good.
“It was inconceivable to anybody that there would be a conspiracy to murder a president of the United States.”
So it was an existential shock for Kuntzler to walk into his office at Structural Clay Products Institute after lunch on a Friday in 1963 to see his co-workers crowded around a large black-and-white TV, to see Walter Cronkite take off his glasses and announce gravely that President Kennedy had died.
He cried, of course. And on Sunday, when the casket lay in state in the Capitol Rotunda, he lined up with hundreds of thousands of others at 10 pm, in near-freezing temperatures, and finally paid his respects at 7 am. “It was like a death in the family,” Kuntzler says. It took me a year to get over it.”
Like the rest of the country, Kuntzler also watched in deadened silence as the peripheral dramas unfolded on TV in the days after. “I saw Oswald on television,” he says. “I didn’t see him get shot, live on NBC, but I saw when he said, ‘I’m just a patsy.’ But it never crossed my mind that the government wasn’t telling the American people the truth.”
The sum of all theories
Reading about the Kennedy assassination is like sliding down a rabbit hole, or wandering drunk through a hall of mirrors. Everywhere you turn, there’s another face in a rogue’s gallery of con-men and G-men, small-time hoods and heads of federal agencies, oil men and mob guys, Communists and anti-Communists. There’s so much evidence, so many potential players, so many pieces to the puzzle, and so many ways they could all fit together.
The assassination, Kuntzler says now, “is the pivotal event of my life.” But it wasn’t until 1991, when a friend sent him a video documentary on the conspiracy theory, that he began studying it in earnest. He bought Crossfire, by assassination theorist Jim Marr. And the first set of The Men Who Killed Kennedy. He spent the next four years buried in evidence. Finally, he says, “I came to two conclusions: Lee Harvey Oswald killed no one — neither Dallas police officer Jefferson Davis Tippit nor President John Fitzgerald Kennedy. And that the government had restructured evidence to bring it in line with their version of events.”
Anyone who’s been schooled in Kennedy conspiracy theories is familiar with their common touchstones. The clumsy, bolt-action Mannlicher-Carcano rifle Oswald allegedly used to fire three shots in six seconds. The Grassy Knoll. The “Umbrella Man.” The “Babushka Lady.” The three tramps. “Back, and to the left.”
Kuntzler knew about these too. And, like many Americans (about 70 percent, according to several polls), he harbored deep suspicions that they could be plausibly woven together into an account of conspiracy, of whatever size or scope. Still, he says, “I hadn’t crossed the line to understand.”
In his 20s, Kuntzler had supported seemingly populist Texas Democrat Lyndon Johnson. He campaigned for him in 1964, heading into the Deep South with stacks of “LBJ for the USA” stickers. Nearly 40 years later, a friend gave Kuntzler a copy of Robert Caro’s Master of the Senate, the third of a proposed four-volume biography of this very complex politician.
“One third of the way through, I realized that Lyndon Johnson was responsible for the assassination,” Kuntzler says plainly. “I learned that he was utterly corrupt. He was always on the take. That he had an overpowering ambition for being president, and he would stop at nothing.”
Later, Kuntzler tracked down Barr McClellan’s book Blood, Money & Power: How L.B.J. Killed J.F.K. in an Atlanta bookstore, which confirmed his suspicions. The scales dropped from his eyes. The disparate parts of the assassination synthesized into a coherent whole, each actor’s role and motive crystal clear.
• LBJ helped put the plot into motion and was apprised of its workings. He “was largely a bystander, but he was a beneficiary.”
• J. Edgar Hoover threw in his hat because of Kennedy’s plans to oust him as FBI chief.
• The CIA brass was incensed by Kennedy’s plan to scale back the agency to the size envisioned by Harry Truman.
• The Texas oil industry was furious about Kennedy’s desire to reduce the lucrative oil-depletion allowance.
• The Mafia, who’d helped JFK win the 1960 election, was apoplectic at his brother Robert’s redoubled efforts to smash organized crime as attorney general.
• Cuban exiles, still smarting from the Bay of Pigs disaster and being sold out to defuse the Cuban Missile Crisis, were also mad.
That’s not all, says Kuntzler.
• Dallas mayor Earle Cabell, whose Brother, Charles, was forced by Kenned to resign as deputy CIA director after the Bay of Pigs, signed off on the last-minute change in the parade route that would bring Kennedy directly into the line of fire.
• The upper echelon of the Secret Service was aware of what was going down, and some rank-and-file agents were told to stand down just before the motorcade entered Dealey Plaza.
• The Ford Motor Company secretly patched up the limousine, so as to erase evidence of bullets fired from the front.
• And Air Force chief of staff Curtis LeMay, who clashed with Kennedy during the Cuban Missile Crisis, was reportedly seen smiling and smoking a cigar at the slain president’s hasty autopsy — held at Maryland’s Bethesda Naval Hospital, where documents suggest two different brains may have been examined.
Hovering over it all, the theory goes, was the specter of war in Southeast Asia. “Eisenhower warned against the dangers of the military-industrial complex,” Kuntzler says. “War means money. Then and now. The whole military complex was involved. They wanted the war in Vietnam. Kennedy had signed the document, in October of 1963; he was going to pull about 14,000 advisors out.”
Lee Harvey Oswald was indeed a patsy, Kuntzler alleges, drawn into the plot as a fall guy. What’s more, he was an FBI and CIA employee ($200 a month) who tried to warn bureau superior James Hosty of the plot 10 days before the assassination. Kuntzler also swears by Dr. Charles Crenshaw’s assertion that newly sworn-in president Lyndon B. Johnson called the operating room of Parkland Hospital after Oswald was mortally wounded, demanding a deathbed confession be extracted from him.
Kuntzler says he was also surprised to learn of the purported roles of gays in the Kennedy assassination. “In the summer of ’63,” he says, “the people who were involved in setting up Oswald — Clay Shaw, David Ferrie — were homosexuals.” The two of them, some have alleged, were CIA-connected anti-Communists who knew Oswald through the agency and set him up as the perfect dupe.
Years ago, it never would have occurred to Kuntzler that the Kennedy assassination could have taken shape, in part, in the low light of French Quarter gay bars. In the 1960s, he says, it would have been “inconceivable that a group of homosexuals would be involved in the murder of a president of the United States.” Yet these two worlds intersected in a number of ways. “After the assassination, naval intelligence was always picking up gay people, looking for people who might be working in government,” he explains. “In July of ’65, they picked up Stephen [Miller, who worked as a stenographer on Capitol Hill]. But I later came to realize that what they were really doing was looking for people who might have an insight into the Kennedy assassination. They were afraid.”
As Kuntzler finishes laying out the particulars of this many-faceted plot, my head is spinning. I’ve never believed Oswald acted alone, but this is rather astounding. Maybe Lyndon Johnson was ruthless, corrupt, and power mad, I suggest. But there’s a world of difference between stuffing a few ballot boxes and helming such a complex and far-reaching coup d’état. Never mind that, as Kuntzler alleges, “there are still people in government today who were involved in the murder — and lots of people who were involved in the cover-up.” It’s a lot to swallow.
“Yes,” he says. “I know.”
Deaf ears
Kuntzler not only wrote to Arthur O. Sulzberger Jr. (who never wrote back and declined to comment for this piece). He also wrote more than once to Times public editor Byron Calame. Calame acknowledges that he “[doesn’t] remember very much” about their written correspondence, but recalls that Kuntzler’s “original contact with me was by phone and was very secretive, very demanding of secrecy.”
No question, the tone of some of Kuntzler’s letters has a certain cloak-and-dagger ring. While sailing from Southampton to New York, he sent a fax to a Washington Post editor on Cunard Line stationery: “As we agreed, I will call you from the Queen Mary 2 at 9:59 am.” In the attached letter, he writes, “I arrived home from Rio de Janeiro on United Airlines early Sunday morning. I could fly to New York as early as next Monday or Tuesday, January 30 or 31, for discussions. You would have a much better understanding of me if we met in person. . . . P.S. It is now 5 a.m.”
Kuntzler is adamant that Gerald Posner’s book, the anti-conspiracy Case Closed — which drew some of its material from Posner’s sources inside the CIA — is an agency con job on the American people. And, he says, the New York Times, which “heaped extravagant praise on Posner’s book” but “discredited Oliver Stone’s film [JFK] before it was even released to the public” — is guilty by association. Posner has also written an occasional article for the Times.
“It is my theory that [the Times and the Post] are directing conspiracies of silence,” Kuntzler says. The Times knows the truth, but, even 43 years removed, is “scared to death” of the American people learning the true facts about the assassination. Once Kuntzler finally “understood the full comprehensive truth” about the conspiracy, he knew he was duty bound to sound the alarm. “My company reported the Assassination Records Review Board. “I was willing to put this on my own company stationery and sign my name to it,” he says. “It’s the biggest story of our lifetime.”
I ask Kuntzler how he thinks his quest will end. Will the New York
Times and/orWashington Post ever come clean and splash the long-hoped-for revelations on the front page?
It doesn’t matter anymore. “Aren’t you publishing the story? Your newspaper is highly respected. I think what you’re doing is an extraordinary thing. When you publish this, it will break open like a volcano. The whole history of the last 43 years changed with this, Michael. And finally someone in the media is going to publish this.”
Kuntzler says that after he FedExed that first letter to a Times exec in 2005, he tossed and turned all night, drenched in sweat, “because of the consequences for my life.” He got an unlisted number. He suspects the CIA was in attendance at his press conference. In the wake of the Kennedy assassination, “they murdered people. I would have been murdered myself if I had done this 35 years ago.”
I tell him I hope the CIA has more pressing issues on its hands these days. “I had tremendous opposition to this,” he says, “family, friends, people I know trying to prevent me from doing this. But I’ve decided to accept the consequences, whatever they may be.”
In the end, says Paul Kuntzler, this work had to be done. “Back in the 1960s when I was involved in gay rights, I realized if I didn’t do something, there was nobody else to do it. And I realized if I never did this, it would never happen.”
Community Pioneers
Creators of Washington, DC's Gay Community
PAUL KUNTZLER (2007)
http://www.rainbowhistory.org/kuntzler.htm
ACTIVIST PAUL KUNTZLER BUYS JFK ASSASSINATION COVERAGE
http://www.maryferrell.org/wiki/index.php/News_Archive_-_Aug_2007
Aug 3, 2007: Paul Kuntzler, owner of the Miller Reporting Company, has taken out a two-page ad about the JFK assassination in the New York Times. The ad reproduces a July 27 letter he wrote to the Washington Post, concerning "conclusive evidence that there was a government-wide conspiracy resulting in the murder of President John Fitzgerald Kennedy in Dallas." The letter goes on to name LBJ, the FBI, Gen. Curtis LeMay, and many others as participants in the conspiracy, and mixes factual revelations with a variety of theorizing about the case. Kuntzler had published the letter in June 2006 in the Washington Blade, and had a month prior to that hosted an event in Washington DC featuring assassination experts.
MILLER REPORTING COMPANY, INC.
STEPHEN BRENT MILLER
FOUNDING PRESIDENT, 1980-2004
PAUL KUNTZLER, PRESIDENT
COURT REPORTERS
TRANSCRIBERS
Established 1960
735 8th Street, SE
Washington, DC 20003
July 27, 2007
Mr. Donald E. Graham
Chairman of the Board
The Washington Post
1515 15Th Street, N.W.
Washington, D.C. 20071
Dear Mr. Graham:
As you know, I wrote to you on April 4, 2006 about the conclusive evidence that there was a government-wide conspiracy resulting in the murder of President John Fitzgerald Kennedy in Dallas, Texas on Friday, November 22, 1963. You thanked me on April 7, 2006 for sending you my letter about the Kennedy assassination and told me that you would pass on the material to Leonard Downie Jr., The Post’s Executive Editor.
My communications with the The Post began on January 12, 2006 when Milton Coleman, The Post’s Deputy Managing Editor arranged for me to meet with Michelle Garcia, Post reporter. During my meeting I gave Ms.Garcia various materials related to the assassination, including the two censored videos, The Men Who Killed Kennedy, The Final Chapter, Volumes 1 and 2.
Subsequently, I began having conversations with The Washington Post’s New York bureau. On March 30, 2006, I had a meeting in the New York office on West 57th Street.
But later, The Washington Post after repeated requests had never returned the Kennedy assassination material. I then had to ask my Washington attorney, Roy Kaufmann of Jackson & Campbell, P.C. to write to The Post requesting the return of my property. After repeated requests, I then had to retain the services of John J. Janiec, an attorney with offices in The Empire State Building. It was not until Mr. Janiec filed summons against The Washington Post in the Supreme Court of the State of New York did The Post finally relent and returned most of my property during November 2006.
But The Post has still not returned the important video, The Man Who Killed Kennedy, The Final Chapter, Volume 1.
The Post’s actions are symptomatic of how the American newsmedia has worked to keep the truth from the public about the most atrocious crime in U.S. history.
With a few exceptions such as journalists Helen Thomas and Robert McNeil, the media—both individually and collectively --- have safeguarded the government’s false version of what happened on that terrible day in November 1963.
Indeed, David Talbot in his new book, Brothers, wrote that in 1965 “the press was rushing to close the case on the assassination of President Kennedy.”
The media, including The New York Times, allowed themselves to be infiltrated by the CIA. Talbot reported that “the CIA alone had over four hundred American journalists on its payroll.”
The best example is Gerald Posner. His 1993 book, Case Closed, was written for an elite audience, primarily journalists, predisposed to believe the government’s false version of events. In my opinion, Posner’s book is full of inaccuracies. Random House editor Robert Loomis solicited Posner to write this book with the promise of full CIA cooperation.
President John Fitzgerald Kennedy was murdered by Vice President Lyndon Baines Johnson in a widespread, incredibly complex and brilliantly planned conspiracy that involved the Federal Bureau of Investigations directed by J. Edgar Hoover, the CIA directed by David Atlee Phillips, the Secret Service, elements of the United States Air Force, including General Curtis LeMay of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the United States Army, the United States Navy, Henry R. Luce’s LIFE Magazine, the Ford Motor Company, the Dallas Police, including Dallas Mayor Earle Cabel, big Oil of Midland, Texas, the Texas political establishment, the mafia, the anti – Castro Cubans, Southern racists, including retired General Edwin Walker, and others. President Richard M. Nixon was also involved.
Miller Reporting Company did the reporting for the Assassination Records Review Board. Congress created the John F. Kennedy Records Act in 1992 that created a five-civilian member board entrusted with the responsibility to review and declassify documents held by the CIA, FBI, Secret Service, etc. President Bill Clinton made the appointments to the board.
On Monday, November 9, 1998, the National Archives released to the public all the working files of the Assassination Records Review Board and its staff covering the recently completed 4-year effort of that independent Federal agency to find and release government records related to the Kennedy assassination. Among the internal records released that day was a 32-page research paper, written by AARB’s Chief Analyst for Military Records, which provide compelling evidence that there were two different brain specimens examined following the autopsy on the body of JFK—President Kennedy’s brain, as was expected, and a fraudulent, substituted brain specimen at a later date—and that the brain photographs in the National Archives today in the so-called “autopsy collection” are not images of President Kennedy’s brain, but are images of someone else’s. All photographic records of President Kennedy’s brain have disappeared, since its pattern of damage was consistent with being shot from the front; the images of the substituted specimen show damage generally consistent with the official version of what happened of being shot from above and behind.
The final shot that killed President Kennedy came from the front from an assassin in the storm sewer to the right of the limousine, entered his right temple and exited from the back causing a massive hole in the back of Kennedy’s head. The assassin used an explosive bullet that flattens out and doesn’t leave a trace. This explains the massive hole in the back of Kennedy’s head. The small hole in the right temple was covered up, and in the forged photographs, a soft-matte insert was put in its place to cover up the massive hole in the back of his head.
The reasons why President Kennedy was murdered were varied: First of all, as President Dwight Eisenhower warned about at the end of his administration was the military-industrial complex. On October 11, 1963 Kennedy issued White House Directive NSAM 263. Kennedy planned to withdraw 1,000 military advisors from Vietnam by the end of 1963 and the balance of 15,000 military advisers would be withdrawn by late 1965. There would have been no Vietnam War.
Secondly, Kennedy planned to get rid of J. Edgar Hoover in his second term. He also planned to scale back the CIA to the manner that President Harry Truman envisioned the agency: as an intelligence agency---not one that sponsors wars and assassinations.
It was also known that Kennedy thought that the oil depletion allowance was too generous. He planned to lower it thus angering the oil people. The anti-Castro Cubans were enraged because of Kennedy’s refusal to invade Cuba. Southern racists were bitter because Kennedy supported civil rights. The mafia were out to destroy Kennedy because John and Robert Kennedy had targeted the mafia.
Then there was Vice President Lyndon Johnson who was exceedingly corrupt, possessed an overpowering ambition to be president, and would stop at nothing to obtain his goal.
Robert A. Caro, the renowned biographer of Lyndon Johnson has already published three of his four volumes of The Years of Lyndon Johnson. Caro published this paragraph in the introduction to his first volume, The Path to Power. The introduction is called “Patterns.”
The dark thread was still present after college. It would be present throughout his life. The Path to Power, the first of three volumes that will constitute The Years of Lyndon Johnson, ends in 1941, when Johnson is only thirty-two years old. But by 1941, the first major stage of his life is over. A young man—desperately poor, possessed of an education mediocre at best, from one of the most isolated and backward areas of the United States--- has attained the national power he craved. He has won not only a seat in Congress but influence that reaches far beyond his district’s borders. And by 1941, also, the major patterns of his life are established and clear. In attaining this influence, he has displayed a genius for discerning a path to power, an utter ruthlessness in destroying obstacles in that path, and a seemingly bottomless capacity for deceit, deception and betrayal in moving along it. In every election in which he ran---only in college, but thereafter—he displayed a willingness to do whatever was necessary to win: a willingness so complete that even in the generous terms of political morality, it amounted to amorality.
After Lee Harvey Oswald was shot, President Lyndon Baines Johnson called Parkland Hospital. Phyllis Barlett, Chief Telephone Operator for Parkland Hospital remembers the call: “The call came in and said “hold the line for the President,” and for a second I was still thinking Kennedy, and I didn’t... I was kind of taken aback for a minute and a few seconds. It was just a matter of a second, that’s when he came on in a loud voice and said: “This is Lyndon Johnson. Connect me to the accused assassin’s doctor.” It sounded the same as it had been on newcasts when I would hear him speak.”
Ms. Barlett then put the President through to an office adjoining the operating room, where Dr. Charles Crenshaw was urgently called to answer the phone. He recalls: “I picked up the phone and it was there that I heard this voice like thunder that stated: “This is President Lyndon B. Johnson.” And he asked: “How is the accused assassin doing?” I was so startled the only thing that I could say was: “He is holding his own. He has lost a lot of blood.” He said: “Would you take a message to the chief operating surgeon?” It was more of an order than a question. “There is a man in the room, I would like for him to take a deathbed confession.” And all of a sudden the phone went off. I returned to the operating room, I tapped Dr. Shires on the shoulder, he looked at me like “What are you talking about?” Everyone was working feverishly in the operating room trying to correct the wounds there. I said: “Guess who I have been talking to? The President of the United States called and he wants that man over there to take a deathbed confession.” And Shires looked at me like I was crazy. And we both realized that Lee Harvey Oswald, had he survived, would not have been able to give any testimony until two or three days after the procedure. But still in all, the President had called and I did relay the message.”
The Assassination Records Review Board obtained a 14-page document from the Russians on March 6, 1995. The document was once a top-secret KGB intelligence report. On page 9 of the report is this statement:
“On September 16, 1965, this same source reported that the KGB residence in New York City received instructions from KGB headquarters in Moscow to develop all possible information concerning President Lyndon B. Johnson’s character, background, personal friends, and family and from which quarters he derives his support in his position as President of the United States. Our source added that “now” the KBG was in possession of data purporting to indicate President Johnson was responsible for the assassination of the late President John F. Kennedy.”
Turning now to President Richard M. Nixon. Nixon authorized the break-in at the Watergate Complex during the night of June 16-17, 1972 because Nixon was fearful that National Chairman Larry O’Brien might have documents in his files indicating that Nixon was involved in the Kennedy murder—he was. Richard Nixon had been at the party of Clint Murchison’s, the Dallas oil billionaire, and he had gone into the private meeting with J. Edgar Hoover, LBJ, Edward Clark, Johnson’s attorney (and the secret boss of Texas) in the early morning hours of Friday, November 22, 1963, about eleven hours before President Kennedy was murdered.
On page 21 Ira David Wood III wrote in his chronology in Murder in Dealey Plaza (edited by James H. Fetzer) the following:
“Later that morning, Nixon flew out of Dallas Love Field at 9:05 a.m. on American Airlines Flight 82. He was then legal counsel for Pepsi-Cola and was allegedly in Dallas to attend a company meeting.
CIA agent Russell Bintliff will tell The Washington Star in 1976 that Pepsi-Cola had set up a bottling plant in Laos in the early 1960’s... One of the immediate consequences of the JFK assassination will be the escalation of American involvement in Vietnam, in theory providing the alleged Pepsi-Cola plant with a great deal more business”.
LIFE Magazine played a major role in The Conspiracy beginning with the photograph of President Kennedy’s limousine. LIFE cropped the photograph on page 23 of the November 29, 1963 issue so that the bullet hole in the left windshield is not visible.
In this same issue (written during Saturday and Sunday, November 23 and 24, 1963) Thomas Thompson wrote a long story about Lee Harvey Oswald which may have deceived the American people:
Thompson wrote the following:
“But slowly, methodically, the police were building their case. (They were not.) ---connecting Oswald with the mail-order purchase of a rifle like the one that fired the bullet (Oswald never owned a rifle.) placing him on the scene with a long parcel the size and shape of a rifle (It wasn’t. The package was only two-thirds that size and contained curtain rods.) comparing his palm-marks with the one found on the murder weapon.” This is Thompson’s most appalling lie. The FBI flew the cheap Italian carbine rifle to Washington and then flew it back to Dallas. On Monday morning, November 25, agents took the rifle to the Dallas funeral home where Oswald’s dead body was. Paul Grudie, the funeral home director, reported that agents asked to have the preparation room to themselves. Afterwards, Grudie had to clean the ink from Oswald’s dead hand. The FBI then announced that they had found Oswald’s palm print on the rifle!
In the subsequent issue, December 6, 1963, Thompson continued his lies. In the February 21, 1964 issue, LIFE magazine published on its front cover the fraudulent photograph showing Oswald’s head superimposed on someone else’s body holding the cheap Italian carbine rifle.
Regarding the Ford Motor Company’s involvement, Henry Ford II and LBJ were friends. The Secret Service secretly flew Kennedy’s limousine to Detroit’s Willow Run Airport on Sunday, November 24, 1963 and took it to the Ford River Rouge Plant. On Monday morning, November 25, the windshield with its hole was stripped from the car and replaced with a new windshield. The limousine was then secretly flown back to Washington and returned to the White House garage. Detailed information about the Ford Motor Company’s involvement can be found in The Men Who Killed Kennedy, The Final Chapter, Volume 1, as well as from numerous other sources.
Evidence of the Secret Service’s involvement in The Conspiracy is clearly demonstrated in the film of Kennedy’s motorcade at Dallas Love Field. Secret Service Agent, Emory P. Roberts, in the limousine in front of Kennedy’s car, waves away the Secret Service agent Henry J. Rybka from Kennedy’s limousine. Rybka throws up his arms in astonishment with the implied message: “This is not what I was trained to do!”
David Talbot writes about LBJ’s distrust of the Secret Service: “Just honestly, Mike,” LBJ told Senate Majority Leader Mike Mansfield in a September 1964 phone conversation recorded by the president’s Oval Office taping system,--“ and I wouldn’t have this repeated this to anyone—my judgment is that they’re more likely to get me killed than they are to protect me.”
In the opening and lead story by journalist Tom Wicker in the Saturday, November 23, 1963 edition of The New York Times is conclusive evidence of The Conspiracy. On page 2 Wicker reports Acting White House Press Secretary Malcolm Kilduff’s press conference at Parkland Hospital at 1:30 p.m. (Central Standard Time). Kilduff said: “President John F. Kennedy died at approximately one o’clock Central Standard Time here in Dallas. He died of a gunshot to the brain, Dr. Burkley told me.” (Burkley was Kennedy’s personal physician) “It was a simple matter at the time of a bullet right through the head.” (Kilduff raised his right arm and used his right index finger to point to the entrance wound in the right temple.)
In the second column on page 2, Wicker wrote this: “Later in the afternoon, Dr. Malcolm Perry, an attending surgeon, and Dr. Kemp Clark, Chief of neurosurgery at Parkland Hospital gave more details: Mr. Kennedy was hit by a bullet in the throat, just below the Adam’s apple, they said. This wound had the appearance of a bullet’s entry.
Mr. Kennedy also had a massive, gaping wound in the back and one on the side of the head. However, the doctors said it was impossible to determine immediately, whether the wounds had been caused by one bullet or two.”
Oliver Stone’s film, JFK, which is about 98% accurate, shows a superb frame-by-frame analysis of the Zapruder film showing the six shots. Two of the eight assassins were in the lower part of the Dal-Tex Building. Another two assassins were on the sixth floor of the Texas Book Depository Building. One of the assassins was Malcolm Wallace. His finger print was found on one of the boxes in the sniper’s nest. Another assassin was on the fourth or fifth floor of the Texas Book Depository Building.
The CIA had the mafia hire three killers from Marseilles, France. Two of those killers were behind the picket fence on the grassy knoll. The third assassin was in the storm sewer to the right of the limousine. The first shot came from an assassin on the left side of the Stemmons Freeway, crashed through the front windshield and hit Kennedy in the neck. The second shot came from behind from an assassin in the Dal-Tex Building and hit Kennedy in the back. The third shot came from behind from the fourth or fifth floor of the Texas Book Depository Building and hit Governor John Connolly. The fourth shot came from an assassin in the Dal-Tex Building and flew over the motorcade and hit cement. A concrete fragment hit by-stander James T. Tague in the cheek. The fifth shot came from an assassin in the Texas Book Depository Building and hit Kennedy in the side of the head. And the sixth and final shot came from the assassin in the storm sewer; hit Kennedy in the right temple, blasting out from the back of his head killing the President.
Both the Warren Commission and the House Select Committee on Assassinations were cover-ups. Allen W. Dulles was an active member of The Conspiracy as well as the cover-up. Gerald Ford was a forceful member of the cover-up and acted as an FBI informant regarding some of the secret proceedings of the Warren Commission. Senator Richard Russell privately knew that the Warren Commission’s findings were absurd, but Congressman Hale Boggs had his papers eviscerated by the FBI and he was murdered by the CIA, as were dozens of others during the 1960’s and 1970’s in the ongoing effort to cover-up The Conspiracy.
Connie Kritzberg was a reporter for the Dallas Times Herald. She conducted a telephone interview a couple of hours after Kennedy’s death with the two principal doctors among the 16 doctors who attended Kennedy at Parkland Hospital. Both doctors, as did all 14 other doctors and four nurses reported that he was shot twice from the front, first in the neck and finally in the right temple.
Kritzberg talked to Dr.Williams Kemp Clark, head of neurosurgery, and Dr. Malcolm Perry. She asked the two doctors how many wounds there were in Kennedy’s body. Dr. Clark told Kritzberg that he was working on the gaping hole in the head, and Dr. Perry said he was working on the entrance wound in the neck. Kritzberg said that Dr. Perry said three times that “there was an entrance wound from the front.”
Connie Kritzberg then said she wrote “a simple story, only about 12 inches long, titled “Neck Wound Brings Death” and turned it in.”
The next morning, Saturday, November 23, Kitzberg found that the story she filed had been changed. She found in the story “an unprofessional sentence” in the third paragraph. It said, “A doctor admitted that it was possible there was only one wound.”
“I was very upset,” Kritzberg said. “I called the city desk and talked one of the assistant city editors. I asked him ‘Who changed my story?’ Kritzberg said. “He knew immediately what I meant,” She asked him, “ Who put in that sentence?” The assistant city editor said, “The FBI.”
Arlen Specter, now Senator Specter, who was a lawyer on the Warren Commission, invented the single bullet theory known as the “magic bullet.” Kenneth O’Donnell, JFK’s special assistant, recalls Specter’s effort at another deception:
“I distinctly remember that when Johnson and I talked at the hospital there was no mention of which of the two planes he should use. Nor was there any mention that he was considering waiting for Jackie and the President’s casket to be on the same plane with him before he left Dallas. Later as a lawyer for the Warren Commission, Arlen Specter, pointed out to me that according to Johnson’s testimony, I had told him to board Air Force One, Specter asked me, to my amazement, if I would change my testimony so that it would agree with the President’s. Was I under oath?’ I asked Specter, as, of course, I was. Certainly I wouldn’t change anything I said under oath.”
President George Herbert Walker Bush, as a former director of the CIA, continues to this day to be intensely involved in the cover-up of the murder of President John Fitzgerald Kennedy. President Bush strenuously opposed passage of the J.F.K. Records Act and refused to make the appointments to the five civilian-member board. The appointments had to wait until Bill Clinton became President. Indeed, at the funeral for President Gerald Ford on January 2, 2007, Bush falsely charged that Lee Harvey Oswald killed Kennedy.
There are many reasons why the Kennedys remained quiet all these years. David Talbot wrote in Brothers that Robert Kennedy in 1965 told an old family friend: “If the American people knew the truth about Dallas, there would be blood in the streets.” Robert Kennedy was also concerned about his own personal safety. He also shared a sense of guilt about his brother’s death. Kennedy set up in his office an operation to assassinate Castro, but the government took over that operation to kill his brother. RFK also intended to break open the case once he became president, but he was assassinated on June 5, 1968.
Lee Harvey Oswald was working for the FBI at the time of the assassination making $200 a month. He was also working for the CIA. On or about Tuesday, November 12, 1963, Oswald delivered a note to his FBI supervisor, James P. Hosty, Jr., warning him that the assassination was about to take place. Hosty sent out a wire on November 17, 1963 to all FBI Offices. The wire read: “Bureau has determined that a militant revolutionary group may attempt to assassinate President Kennedy in his proposed trip to Dallas, Texas, November 22, Nineteen Sixty-Three.” After the assassination, all the wires were destroyed except the one in the New Orleans Office. The Warren commission, whose members were appointed by LBJ, held an emergency, executive session on Saturday morning, January 22, 1964 to discuss Oswald’s FBI number and FBI salary. While the two assassins on the sixth floor of the Texas Book Depository Building were shooting the president, Oswald was in the second floor lunch room. He briefly stepped out on the steps of the Texas Book Depository Building and was photographed. Oswald was already in the Texas Theater before Officer Jefferson Davis Tippitt was killed.
In a very real sense, Lee Harvey Oswald was an American hero. At great personal danger to himself, Oswald entered into The Conspiracy in an effort to prevent President Kennedy’s murder. Jack Ruby who was a member of The Conspiracy then murdered him. Oswald was then made a villain and the self-serving and deceptive American news media has perpetuated this lie for now for than 43 years.
In Brothers Benjamin Bradlee, Executive Editor of The Washington Post acknowledged to David Talbot that he didn’t do more to investigate the assassination because he was concerned that further reporting might harm his career.
Sincerely,
Paul Kuntzler
President
For more information write to:
619 G Street, S.W.
Washington, DC 20024
Or call 202-484-0330
