The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination

Conspiracy theories make for the greatest alternate history fiction.  I always loved (and have re-read several times, James Elroy’s amphetamine-driven American Underworld Trilogy: American Tabloid (Alfred Knopf, 1995); The Cold Six Thousand (Alfred A. Knopf, 2001); Blood’s A Rover (Alfred A. Knopf, 2009) for a Kennedy-assassination theory and have found the books of Lamar Waldron much in keeping with Ellroy’s vision.  Waldron is a writer and historian who, like Ellroy in his trilogy, is trying t

Conspiracy theories make for the greatest alternate history fiction.  I always loved (and have re-read several times, James Elroy’s amphetamine-driven American Underworld Trilogy: American Tabloid (Alfred Knopf, 1995); The Cold Six Thousand (Alfred A. Knopf, 2001); Blood’s A Rover (Alfred A. Knopf, 2009) for a Kennedy-assassination theory and have found the books of Lamar Waldron much in keeping with Ellroy’s vision.  Waldron is a writer and historian who, like Ellroy in his trilogy, is trying the discover the grand unification theory between the 1960s’ three epochal killings, that of JFK, Robert Kennedy, and Martin Luther King.  Waldron does best in the JFK assassination, while fraying by the time of the latter two murders.  Where Ellroy’s story ends a the beginning of Watergate, Waldron gives us his present The Hidden History of the JFK Assissination (Counterpoint, 2013) and the earlier Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Counterpoint, 2012); and Legacy of Secrecy: The Long Shadow of the JFK Assassination (Counterpoint, 2008), carrying the thread of conspiracy through 1975.

In reading the various conspiracy theories of the Kennedy assassination, I was struck by the insular one-sidedness of some of these theories, a characteristic that made them implausible alone.  However, take a couple tacitly-related covert efforts, allowing them to rub against one another and something plausable and complex emerges as a workable theory or one hell of a great story.

In this case, consider three groups colliding during an especially stressful time:

Add to this the stressful circumstances: 

The Mafia in the personages of NOLA boss Carlos Marcello, Tampa boss Santos Trafficante, and Chicago boss Sam Giancana all lost money in Cuba after the coup.  All three hated the Kennedys for having ing sold them out after an election where Giancana ostensibly delivered Kennedy his victory (with the added irony that it was through illegial activity that Joseph Kennedy amassed his fortune).  Regarding Cuba, the island represented a cash cow that the Mafia hoped to again exploit after the removal of Castro.

The CIA took it in the rear when the Bay of Pigs occurred, incurring the wrath of John Kennedy who was intent on dismantling the organization, which he and is brother began to do with the firing of then Director Allen Dulles.  The CIA already had several operations underway to try and remove or assassinate Castro (covert and overt within the agency).

The CIA and the Mafia cooperated in efforts to assassination Castro.  The Kennedy’s had their own plans to remove Castro and replace him with a ruling junta that ran in competition with the CIA/Mafia plots.  The intermingling of the CIA and Mafia brought about the collection of a rogue’s gallery of characters to be employed in the Castro assassination.  The Mafia (Marcello and Trafficante) saw the opportunity to use this same covert infrastructure to plan the assassination of John Kennedy in an effort to curtail his brother’s continuing investigation of organized crime (this included his investigations of Jimmy Hoffa).

Waldron distills things to the conjecture that Carlo Marcello, Santos Trafficante, and Johnny Rosselli (Don associated with Sam Giancana and Jimmy Hoffa) were responsible for the almost year-long plan to assassinate Kennedy.  The three employed parts of their own and John and Robert Kennedy’s plan to overthrow/assassinate Fidel Castro.  Using the Kennedy’s plan for a secret coup, the three arranged Kennedy’s murder in such a way that forced Robert Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, J. Edgar Hoover, and Richard Helms to withhold information not only from the publix and the press, but from each other and their own investigators.  Their goal was that the secret coup not be revealed, thereby preventing possible nuclear confrontation with the Soviet Union and to protect assets within Cuba.

It was revealed that there were two attempts on Kennedy’s life prior to Dallas:  November 2 in Chicago (cancelled) and November 18 in Tampa were attempted.  Assassin teams were set up in both locations.  Dallas proved to be the last opportunity before the Kennedy brothers launched their coup attempt in Cuba, scheduled for early December.  The Mafia and CIA did not want this to occur because their own covert efforts in Cuba stood to be uncovered.

That is the short story.  That you had many of the same cast of characters appearing in history from before the Bay of Pigs until after Watergate is notable because “there is no coincidence in crime.”  Personally, I agree with Vincent Buglosi (a Warren Report Supporter) that any of the conspiracy theories floated violate the principle of Occam’s Razor, being the simplest explaination is the correct one.  That said.  I do not believe the Oswald was capable of engineering this assassination by himself.  The book spends a good deal of time linking Oswald with the CIA as early as 1959.  Waldron relies on many documents released in the past few years for his conjectures.  Whether any of this is true is hard to say...but it does make on hell of a story.  Waldron is a very readable writer who buries his suppositions deeply among the facts that he states.  Sometime the path from “A” to ”B” is short and, sometimes not.