Final Revelations - Part One
What Will We Learn with the Release of the Final JFK Files?
This November 22, we mark the sixty-first anniversary of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. Sixty-one years ago today, a sniper, perched on the upper floors of a building in Dallas, Texas, shot and killed the thirty-fifth President of the United States as he rode in an open-top limousine through the streets below. Two days later, the accused assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, was himself assassinated by a man with close ties to the American Mafia, Jack Ruby, in the basement of the Dallas Police headquarters.
We mark this occasion with the first in a series of articles examining the final revelations, the final secrets still being withheld from the American public regarding Kennedy’s murder. The newly elected President, Donald Trump, has promised throughout his campaign that he will release the final classified JFK files once he assumes office. But will he? What bombshells will they contain? Will they present a complete historical record, or will they be what the CIA terms a "limited hangout," a method of hiding a more significant truth by revealing just a little of the truth as a distraction?
We will attempt to answer these questions.
JFK
The assassination of JFK changed the course of history, and not for the better. At the time of his death, Kennedy was trying to:
1. Wind down the Cold War with a new policy of détente with the Soviet Union and Cuba. This greatly angered some of the more hawkish elements in his cabinet and the national security state. These tensions were exacerbated when Kennedy used the FBI to stop illegal raids on Cuba by anti-Castro militants in the Cuban exile community, primarily based in the South. This intervention infuriated many of the exiles.
2. Pull out of Vietnam. In 1963, Kennedy moved to extricate the United States from the increasingly bloody quagmire of Vietnam, drafting a National Security Action Memo (NSAM) 263, which ordered the first one thousand troops home before Christmas 1965, with the rest to follow soon after.
3. Defeat the American Mafia. The Kennedy brothers (with Robert F. Kennedy, serving as the Attorney General) launched the most significant crackdown on organized crime the country had ever seen. Prosecutions of leading mob families skyrocketed, and top mob bosses like Carlos Marcello of New Orleans were kidnapped by the INS and deported. Robert Kennedy even created a special group of investigators and prosecutors—called the “Get Hoffa Squad”—to go after the mafia-dominated Teamsters Union and its corrupt president, Jimmy Hoffa.
4. Bring the CIA under control. In the wake of the failed CIA-sponsored Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba in 1961, Kennedy took the radical step of firing the top echelon of the Agency (CIA Director Allen Dulles, Deputy Director General Charles Cabell, and Director of Operations Richard Bissell). Before JFK’s presidency, during the 1950s, the Agency essentially ran its own foreign policy and enjoyed complete autonomy. The CIA covertly overthrew democratically elected left-leaning governments around the world using coup d'états and assassination as their preferred tools. After the Bay of Pigs fiasco, JFK moved to reassert control over the Agency by placing its covert action activities under the direction of the Pentagon. With the release of new files in 2022, there is also reason to believe that in a second term, Kennedy would have made good on his promise to “shatter the CIA into a thousand pieces and scatter them to the wind.”
After Kennedy’s assassination in Dallas:
1. The Cold War unnecessarily continued for decades and decades more, threatening the very existence of the human race with nuclear annihilation. Even to this day, relics of the Cold War still persist, such as Cuba remaining under an economic embargo by the US.
2. Vietnam exploded. Immediately after JFK’s death, the new President, Lyndon Banes Johnson, along with the Joint Chiefs at the Pentagon, escalated US involvement in Vietnam to new heights—eventually resulting in a brutal war that would ultimately claim fifty-eight thousand American lives and three million Vietnamese lives.
3. The Mafia returned. After Kennedy’s death, prosecutions of leading Mafia figures declined by over sixty percent. It would not be until two decades later, in the 1980s, that the Mafia would finally meet defeat at the hands of the FBI and RICO laws.
4. The CIA's power was forever cemented. After JFK, business went back to normal for Langley. They regained their autonomy and led the way into the nightmare of the Vietnam War. It is no mistake that every President since Kennedy has acted subserviently to the wishes of the CIA and national security agencies. It is not a coincidence that JFK was the last President to aggressively confront the national security state and military-industrial complex—and the last to be uncontrolled and uncontrollable by them.
Looking back at what JFK was trying to achieve in the last weeks of his life versus what happened after his death, many historians have concluded that Kennedy was one of the most heroic, courageous, and outstanding presidents this country had ever seen (and this is to say nothing of JFK’s finest hour, when he and his brother, Robert F. Kennedy, saved mankind from global thermonuclear war during the Cuban Missile Crisis—a story which will be told later).
He was admired not only by many of his fellow countrymen but also by hundreds of millions worldwide, including his adversaries like the Soviet Union’s Nikita Khrushchev. He only served a thousand days in office. Those days would become known as “Camelot,” a mythical council of government, run by the Kennedy brothers and their knights of the New Frontier.
In the wake of JFK’s assassination and the subsequent cover-up, Americans grew more distrustful and cynical of their government, their institutions, and their leaders. JFK’s death precipitated a new age of lies and deceit as the Vietnam War raged, then Watergate and Richard Nixon’s resignation, then Iran-Contra, and up to the scandals of today. It is rightly said that the distrust that currently permeates Americans’ attitudes toward their officials originated with the Kennedy assassination.
The recent US presidential election perfectly reflected this point. Donald Trump’s anti-government, anti-Washington, anti-Deep State message resonated with the public and carried him to electoral victory.
Trump’s public promises to release the still-secret JFK files also undoubtedly helped him with voters.
Trump on JFK
Here is a timeline of Trump’s statements on the JFK assassination, and the classified files, since he left office in January 2021:
December 15, 2022: Tucker Carlson on Fox News claims, “We spoke to someone who had access to these still hidden CIA documents, a person who was deeply familiar with what they contained. We asked this person directly, ‘Did the CIA have a hand in the murder of John F. Kennedy, an American President?’ And here's the reply we received verbatim. Quote, ‘The answer is yes. I believe they were involved. It's a whole different country from what we thought it was. It's all fake.’" Donald Trump was most certainly Carlson’s source, as I outlined in my earlier piece, Donald Trump, the CIA, and “the whole Bay of Pigs Thing.”
December 19, 2023: Tucker Carlson releases more information about the files on his podcast. During his interview with government whistleblower David Grusch, Carlson states that “of course the CIA was in contact with [Lee Harvey] Oswald and had knowledge of the conspiracy to kill Kennedy. I’m not speculating. I talked to someone who read the documents. So they have hidden those documents to protect themselves from public scrutiny of their own illegal and immoral behavior.”
March 21, 2024: On his podcast Judging Freedom, conservative commentator and Trump confidant Judge Andrew Napolitano said when he confronted Trump about why he did not release all the JFK files as he promised, Trump replied, “Judge, if they showed you what they showed me, you wouldn’t have released it either.”
April 18, 2024: On the Joe Rogan Podcast, Tucker Carlson gives some specific details contained in the documents. Carlson tells Rogan: “ they're still classifying documents 61 years later. Both Trump and Joe Biden are in violation of my read of federal law. They’ve kept those documents secret. There’s no living person connected to the Kennedy assassination. It was a couple generations ago. There’s no one person who's whose secrets are being protected; it's an institution or maybe countries. There may have been countries involved too. I mean I don't know the answer but there's clearly something worth protecting and I know that when I spoke to someone who has seen the documents, okay, two years ago, and I got one fact out of them which is yes the CIA was involved and by CIA—CIA is a huge organization—but James Jesus Angleton the head of the operations directorate had knowledge of this, which I think is well known, but that that's the view of someone who saw the documents so I thought that was news so…”
• Angleton was head of the Counterintelligence division of the CIA
June 20, 2024: Donald Trump appears on the All-In Podcast, hosted by Silicon Vallet venture capitalists, and is asked why he did not release the JFK files when he was last President. “I actually did do it,” Trump said. “I released a lot, as you know, but when it came to the whole thing, I was hit by some people that work for me that are great people, that you would respect and they asked me not to do it. And I’m saying why. Tell me why. And they said, ‘Sir, I think it needs a little more time’.” Trump was also asked about Robert Kennedy Jr.'s assertions that the CIA was behind his uncle’s death. “This wasn’t CIA that asked me, but I think CIA was probably behind it,” Trump said. “They would’ve preferred that I not release the rest of it…[but] It’s going to be done early on. A lot of people want to see that and whatever it may say – I won’t say it, I have an idea – but whatever it is it will be very interesting for people to see and we’re going to have to learn from it.”
• Incidentally, three weeks later, Trump himself was almost assassinated at a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, in a manner very similar to Kennedy’s assassination.
August 24, 2024: Trump appears at a rally in Arizona alongside Robert Kennedy Jr. In front of JFK’s nephew, Trump promises to form a panel of experts to release the remaining assassination files. “This is a tribute in honor of Bobby,” Trump says to the cheering crowd.
October 25. 2024: Trump appears on the Joe Rogan Podcast. Rogan asks Trump about the JFK files, quoting Judge Andrew Napolitano as saying that Trump told him, “Judge, if they showed you what they showed me, you wouldn’t have released it either.” Trump tells Rogan that many "good" people asked him not to open the files, but that if "I win I'm going to open them up. I'm just going to open." Rogan asks what could have been the reason he did not open them the first time around. "Addresses, people that are still living," Trump said. "There are people that are affected, and there could be some national security reason that I don't have to necessarily know about...I think it's going to be just fine to open it. Let me put it that way. I think it's fine. It's going to be time. It's a cleansing, you know, it's really a cleansing. So I'm going to do it. I'm going to do it immediately--almost immediately--upon entering office."
Gerald Posner, author of Case Closed, a book about Lee Harvey Oswald and the assassination, said, “I think Trump has locked himself into a position where he has to release them.” Journalist Jefferson Morley, one of the leading experts on the assassination, thinks "there's going to be a conflict" with the CIA when it comes time for Trump to release the remaining files.
What will the American people learn when the remaining files are released? If they are released.
Stay tuned for the next segment in this series.