EDITORIAL

You Should Know: The ‘Mystery of Who Killed JFK’ Is No Mystery

by Paul Gallagher

[Print version of this editorial]

Dec. 16—Following the bombshell effect of Oliver Stone’s 1991 film JFK, popular pressure led to the passage the following July of the President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act of 1992. It “Direct[ed] the National Archives and Records Administration to establish a collection of records to be known as the President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection … [which] shall consist of copies of all Government records relating to the assassination of President Kennedy, which shall be transmitted to the National Archives.” Stone, in his own Congressional testimony, had cited multiple national surveys showing that more than 70% of Americans did not believe the “Lee Harvey Oswald lone assassination” dictate of the 1963 Presidential Commission.

Since the 1992 Act, with many partial declassifications and releases and otherwise delays of the Congressional mandate by President after President, a common account has appeared in countless media: “No smoking gun” in the documents released; investigators are disappointed by the delays; perhaps the truth will never be known. In other words: “There won’t be anything to see here; move on.”

But Oliver Stone’s new film, the streaming video release, JFK Revisited: Through the Looking Glass, makes clear that the fundamental question of the killing of the President has been answered: Who sponsored the killing, and why? And most important for Americans to understand: No President since Kennedy—as Stone has emphasized in interviews about the film—has opposed the intelligence agencies and the military-industrial complex on America’s policies toward the rest of the world as Kennedy did.

A Stunning Visual ‘March of Facts’

In fact, numerous books about the assassination conspiracy have been published since the turn of this century, whose authors have indeed been able to use even the partial document releases under the 1992 Act to demonstrate conclusively that the CIA and FBI orchestrated the murder of President Kennedy. Moreover they have gathered sufficient evidence that the CIA, under the global regime-change-addict Allen Dulles, had fought JFK bitterly over the Congo, Cuba and the Bay of Pigs fiasco, Vietnam, and other world affairs, before finally taking part in organizing multiple, redundant plans to eliminate him.

The great service Stone performs in his new film is to present this documentary evidence visually, judiciously, and in a very moving dramatic order, so that its truth emerges from all the very complex details of the conspiracy. His film consists largely of his interviews with authors who have published studies of the assassination, the Presidential Commission, the Congressional Select Committee which later re-investigated, and the Assassination Records Review Board created by the 1992 Act. Throughout, he shows their documentation in videos, in print, in graphic photographs, in their interviews of principals and witnesses at every level.

EIR has no intention here of reviewing, even in summary, these hours of exhaustive detail. Alert and reasoning viewers of Stone’s film will be convinced. The crucial issue is what happened to the United States as a result of this successful conspiracy. The onset of both the loss of trust in government, and the growing, more general cultural pessimism of Americans, have been discussed for decades.

But the rest of the world has suffered more from it. All remaining traces of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s anti-colonial “Good Neighbor” policy toward developing nations disappeared, when those who wanted to return to it were assassinated one after another during the 1960s. The specter that followed John Kennedy’s casket down Pennsylvania Avenue on Nov. 25, 1963 was that of war, violent overthrow, poverty and disease, destroying American soldiers’, but far more foreign civilians’ and migrants’ lives, and draining the vitals of what was once the American System of scientific, technological and economic progress for all.

But you should know: The “mystery” of who killed the President, has been solved.