Some Surprises About JFK and the Assassination


By Chris Largent

Now, there’s a lot written about this President and his assassination, there’s a popular film you can rent (Oliver Stone’s JFK), there’s a boatload of documentaries (our personal favorite being "The Men Who Killed Kennedy," because the producers interview witnesses that the Warren Commission wasn’t very interested in), and tons of material on the internet. But there are just a few things that we want to add, especially from the book written by comedian Richard Belzer, UFOS, JFK, and Elvis: Conspiracies You Don’t Have to Be Crazy to Believe—just because a couple of things surprised us and because Belzer manages to use a light touch in dealing with a heavy topic.

First, for the things that surprised us. Well, not this first bit—it didn’t surprise us; we’d heard it before. That is, of the seven members of the Warren Commission, one was ex-CIA director Allen Dulles, fired by Kennedy, so of course he’d be objective. And then Dulles’ fired assistant was the brother of the mayor of Dallas in those days, but that has to be a coincidence—right? Another member was Rockefeller-family confidant John McCloy, former U.S. high commissioner in occupied Germany, where he helped to commute the sentences of many Nazi war criminals, and anyone who can do that has to be clever, we figure.

But here’s the surprise (at least, it was for us—if all of you know this, don’t tell us): we didn’t know that member Gerald Ford (really Chevy Chase in disguise) was an FBI informant, who (illegally) leaked information about the Warren Commission to J. Edgar Hoover or that Ford championed the "single-bullet theory" in a book he wrote about Oswald. And that was the shock for us—he wrote a book?

Neither did we know that three members of the seven-member Warren Commission dissented. Kentucky’s Senator John Sherman Cooper and Georgia’s Senator Richard Russell didn’t buy the "single-bullet theory," and Senator Russell wanted a footnote put in the 26-volume report to that effect. The footnote never appeared, of course, because the Warren Commission had better things to do with its 26 volumes (check out the last two paragraphs below) and because those dissenting senators are just too annoying to be considered.

House majority leader T. Hale Boggs (journalist Cokie Roberts’ father—did you know that? we didn’t) went so far as to accuse the FBI of Gestapo-like tactics and publicly expressed doubts about the Warren Commission’s findings. He disappeared in a plane flight over Alaska—which is what he gets for expressing doubts about anything done by a committee. And how about this for a weird detail: the person who drove Boggs to the airport for that fatal flight was a young Bill Clinton (Belzer, pp. 31-32). What are the odds of that?

Finally, this two-paragraph quote from Belzer summarizes his tone (p. 34):

"The Warren Commision took seven pages of testimony from Mrs. Viola Peterson, a woman who lived near Lee Oswald and his mother Marguerite, when Lee was "a good little child" two years of age. She had not seen or heard from the Oswalds in twenty-three years. Seven pages of testimony?

"The Commission also brought in Professor Revilio Pendleton, a ballistics expert, to discuss an article he had written called ‘Marksmanship in Dallas.’ Together the Commission and Dr. Pendleton generated thirty-five (35!) pages of testimony proving—and I am not making this up—that Pendleton had absolutely no information to contribute to any aspect of the Commission investigation. And we’re all thankful for that, aren’t we?"