by Ron Unz, The Unz Review:
Tucker Carlson and RFK Jr. on the JFK Assassination
Tucker Carlson hosts the most popular cable news show and last Thursday he aired an explosive segment in which he declared that that 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy had been the work of a conspiracy, with our own CIA heavily involved.
TRUTH LIVES on at https://sgtreport.tv/
Carlson’s regular nightly audience is over 3 million, and more than a million have already watched the Youtube video, so these bombshell accusations regarding the events in Dallas have probably now reached more ordinary Americans than anything else on the topic in the three decades since Oliver Stone’s Oscar-winning film JFK was playing in the theaters.
Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., nephew of the slain President and son of his murdered brother praised Carlson’s show as “the most courageous newscast in 60 years,” and his remarks have been Retweeted more than 22,000 times.
The most courageous newscast in 60 years. The CIA’s murder of my uncle was a successful coup d’état from which our democracy has never recovered. @TuckerCarlson https://t.co/qJ1sUdhe4t
— Robert F. Kennedy Jr (@RobertKennedyJr) December 17, 2022
Kennedy is a prominent public figure and best-selling author, with the strongest possible personal standing on the murder of his uncle. But I suspect that if Elon Musk hadn’t bought Twitter, that Tweet would have been immediately shadow-banned, disappearing with scarcely a trace.
In recent decades, such conspiratorial beliefs on the JFK assassination have been largely confined to the Left, with Stone himself being a prime example. But Carlson is one of America’s most influential conservatives, so he may have successfully implanted these ideas among a portion of our citizenry previously unexposed to them. He also noted that widespread use of the insulting phrase “conspiracy theory” only began in the aftermath of the JFK assassination, with the CIA itself successfully marginalizing its critics by promoting that accusation in the compliant media.
Indeed, as a consequence of those decades of skewed and dishonest media coverage, I had spent most of my entire life assuming that such “conspiracy theories” were total nonsense and had never taken them seriously. But about a dozen years ago, I stumbled across some surprising facts and later began a serious investigation, eventually leading me to publish several articles summarizing my remarkable conclusions:
- American Pravda: How the CIA Invented “Conspiracy Theories”
Ron Unz • The Unz Review • September 5, 2016 • 2,600 Words - American Pravda: The JFK Assassination, Part I – What Happened?
Ron Unz • The Unz Review • June 18, 2018 • 4,800 Words - American Pravda: The JFK Assassination, Part II – Who Did It?
Ron Unz • The Unz Review • June 25, 2018 • 8,000 Words - American Pravda: Anne Frank, Sirhan Sirhan, and AIDS
Ron Unz • The Unz Review • January 31, 2022 • 3,600 Words
Manipulating the JFK Assassination Cover-Up
By purest chance, Carlson’s show had aired just a few days after I had finished reading an important book on the JFK assassination that someone had brought to my attention last year. Originally published almost thirty years ago, this work provided some crucial insights into how the political cover-up of the conspiracy had been arranged, a cover-up that has now successfully endured for nearly six decades. The most powerful man in the world had been killed at the very height of America’s postwar success and prosperity, yet nearly all of America’s political elites were successfully enlisted to suppress the truth of what had happened.
John Newman had spent twenty years in Military Intelligence and then became a professor of history at the University of Maryland. Since then, he had applied the technical skills that he had honed in his many years of government service to analyzing the bureaucratic minutia of declassified government files and using this material to produce a series of books on the hidden side of American government policies during the 1960s, including our growing involvement in Vietnam and especially the complex circumstances of the JFK Assassination. Oswald and the CIA originally appeared in 1993, but the 2008 edition included a new epilogue, summarizing some of his most important findings.
The book is a lengthy one, running over 650 pages with notes and appendices, and his exhaustively detailed analysis of the released intelligence files and their interpretation can be eye-glazingly dull at points, but his broader conclusions are not difficult to state. The profusion of internal CIA documents regarding Oswald and his movements seems completely inconsistent with any institutional plot at the Agency to kill Kennedy, but might fit very well with the hypothesis of a “rogue faction” at the CIA having played a central role in the affair.
Newman argued that Oswald was exactly the “patsy” that he claimed to be, but more importantly he drew a very sharp distinction between the small group of plotters who had actually organized the JFK assassination itself and the much larger group who carried out the subsequent cover-up, with the motives of many of those latter individuals being entirely different. As he persuasively explained in his epilogue, the conspirators had created a false intelligence trail suggesting that Oswald might have been a Soviet agent, and then used that misinformation to force our fearful government leadership into become their unwitting accomplices after the fact, compelling them to suppress all evidence of any conspiracy in Dallas:
It is now clear that most of the U.S. leaders and officials who participated in the national security cover-up had nothing to do with the plot that was hatched before the president’s murder. Many of them—including leading legislators and Supreme Court Chief Justice Earl Warren—were motivated by the perceived threat of a nuclear exchange with the Soviet Union. Inside the executive branch of government, many others were motivated by the desire to protect their jobs and their institutions. Their collective actions, however, were not the result of an accident; rather, they were the forced checkmate in the endgame of an ingenious plan.
The plan was designed to force official Washington to bury a radioactive story in Oswald’s files in order for America to survive. The plan worked. No matter how sloppy the performance of the shooters in Dallas was, no matter how bungled the autopsy and the handling of the evidence was, all would be trumped by the threat of WWIII and 40 million dead Americans. From the beginning, the plot was based upon the assumption that, when presented with this horrific possibility, everyone would fall into line. This assumption was correct.
…There was a darker purpose for Oswald’s visit to Mexico City. He was sent there to seek visas from the Cuban Consulate and Soviet Embassy…the objective was simply incidental contact between Oswald and the man who issued Soviet visas in Mexico City: Valery Kostikov. The value of this contact derived from what only a handful of counterintelligence officers in Washington knew: Kostikov was an important operative of the KGB assassinations in the Americas…The handler’s purpose in having both Oswald’s and Kostikov’s names mentioned was to place evidence into the CIA’s records that, on 22 November, would link KGB assassinations to the murder of President Kennedy. The activities of this impersonator are what made it possible for President Johnson to tell Senator Russell on 29 November that those investigating the case were “testifying that Khrushchev and Castro did this.” Johnson insisted that this must be prevented “from kicking us into a war that can kill forty million Americans in an hour.”
So under Newman’s convincing reconstruction, most of the powerful American officials who played such a pivotal role in concealing the conspiracy may have been acting under the best of intentions, seeking to protect our country from the risk of a devastating retaliatory war with the Soviets. And obviously these concerns would have been deliberately fanned by those among them who had been involved in the plot and created the false trail of evidence connecting Oswald with KGB assassination efforts.
The author therefore argued that creating that false trail had constituted an absolutely crucial element of the assassination plot, and by a very careful examination of the intelligence files, he concluded that longtime CIA Counter-Intelligence Chief James Angleton had been the likely culprit, thus identifying him as one of the key conspirators. This conclusion meshes perfectly with the entirely different arguments advanced by the late Michael Collins Piper in Final Judgment, his 1994 landmark work, which had also argued that Angleton was a central figure in the assassination.
Next year marks the 60th anniversary of the JFK assassination. Angleton, guilty or not, died in 1987, and all the other individuals involved have surely been dead for many years, even many decades. Newman’s important book was published almost 30 years ago, and today the issue that he so effectively analyzed hardly seems of urgent importance.
But once we recognize that for nearly six decades our government and our media had successfully concealed the reality of JFK’s assassination, we must necessarily turn a skeptical eye to more recent events. If the President of the United States—the most powerful man in the world—could be struck down in public by a conspiracy involving rogue elements of his own government, and that truth then kept hidden from the American people for generations, other important matters may have followed a similar pattern.
Over the last few years, I have carefully investigated quite a number of these, and my American Pravda series has been the result, now including many dozens of individual articles and totaling nearly a half-million words.
