JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters

by James W. Douglass

What Dennis David says was on Bill Pitzer’s film contradicts not only the Warren Report but also the increasingly challenged official photographs and X-rays of the autopsy, as well as the questionable testimony of Drs. Humes, Boswell, and Finck. If David is right, the Pitzer film and photographs would constitute powerful evidence of a systematic government cover-up of the gunshot wou...

government-incriminating movie and photographs of the president’s body. Bill Pitzer was shot to death on October 29, 1966. His body was discovered at 7:50 p.m. on the floor of the TV production studio of the National Naval Medical Center, Pitzer’s working area. The estimated time of his death was approximately 4:00 p.m.[583] As an FBI teletype reported early the next morning, the victim was found dead with a gunshot wound in his head and a thirty-eight caliber revolver lying close to his body.[584] Pitzer’s body was found lying face down “with the head extending under the lower rung of t...

the FBI, the Navy ruled that Bill Pitzer had committed suicide.[586] The members of his family w...

The Navy’s claim that Pitzer had an ultimately fatal affair was based on “an unsigned, undated summary report of two interviews [with an unnamed woman] conducted by unnamed NIS agents.”[590] The obscurity of the investigation, whose interviews were kept secret and inaccessible until they had been “routinely destroyed,”[591] made it impossible to scrutinize the Navy’s allegation of the character defect that presumably caused Pitzer’s suicide. If Pitzer was instead killed by government forces, the Navy was adding to that crime its assassination of his character. Bill Pitzer had been about to leave the military for a new

career, whose promise implied peril. Four days before he died, Pitzer told a colleague he was ready to submit his retirement letter to the Navy.[592]

He had confided in Dennis David that he “had some very lucrative offers from a couple of the national networks like ABC, CBS, to go to work for them.” David thought the offers were connected with Pitzer’s assassination film.[593] Joyce Pitzer, his widow, said that on the Saturday he was shot Bill had gone to his office to write a speech he was scheduled to deliver the next Wednesday at Montgomery Juni...

When Dennis David was asked why he suspected Bill Pitzer had been assassinated, he said, “I think it was because, with him retiring, they—and I don’t know who they are—were afraid that he would take these pictures that he and I had seen, these 35-millimeter [slides] and the 16-millimeter film, that he would take them [with him]. And if he went to work for a major studio, that they would use them, or he would have them aired. “That would really have blown some people out of the water, if that would have transpired.”[595]

Joyce Pitzer believed strongly her husband’s death was no suicide. However, she was pressured into silence by Navy intelligence officials who came to her home after Bill’s death. “They told me,” she said, “not to talk to anyone . . . the Navy intelligence [people] were here, and—at the house, and everything—and for twenty-five years, I did not really discuss

it.”[597] When in 1995 at the age of eighty, Mrs. Pitzer described the Navy’s pressure on her, she was still afraid that if she questioned her husband’s death, “my [Navy] compensation might be stopped.”[598]

The man to whom Joyce Pitzer revealed this fear was Retired Army Special Forces lieutenant colonel Daniel Marvin. He had phoned her with shocking news. In August 1965, Marvin told her, the CIA had asked him as an elite Special Forces officer, a Green Beret, to assassinate her husband, an assignment he then refused but that someone else apparently accepted.[599] A government plot that Bill P...

three decades later, by a man who almost participated in it. Colonel Daniel Marvin told a story that has subsequently caused him to be dismissed by skeptics, denounced and expelled by the Special Forces Association of retired soldiers, and begged by his family to retreat into silence. Yet, as a born-again Christian, Marvin has insisted on the need to repent of his covert-action past, partly by ...

attention as a classic example of the way to organize a complete program to eliminate a nation’s leader, while pointing the finger at a lone assassin. It involved also the cover-up of the assassination itself. We had considerable detail. They had a mock lay-out of the plaza and that area, and showed where the shooters were, and where the routes were to the hospital . . . “They had quite a bit of movie, film coverage—it seemed like, thinking back to that time—and some still photos of the Grassy Knoll and places like that. They told us that Oswald was not involved in the shooting at all. He was the patsy. He was the one who was set up. “We did, myself and a friend of mine, form a very distinct impression that the CIA was involved in Kennedy’s

assassination. During the coffee break, we overheard one of the CIA instructors say to the other, ‘Things really did go well in Dealey Plaza, didn’t they?’ Or something to that effect. “And that just reinforced, or really added to our suspicions. And we really felt, before the end of the training was over, that one of those instructors may have been involved himself in the assassination of John F. Kennedy.”[602]

Marvin said, as a result of his CIA primer on the Kennedy assassination, he “had to do a lot of re-thinking. And perhaps it’s the way soldiers of fortune are. I don’t know. But I just then convinced myself, as did my friend, that it somehow had to be in the best interests of the United States gov...

it?”...

“I was told,” Marvin said, “he was a Navy officer—a Lieutenant Commander William Bruce Pitzer. The agent told me that Pitzer worked at Bethesda Naval Hospital. He said nothing of a link with the JFK autopsy and I just assumed that Pitzer was one of those sorry types that went wrong and was going to sell secrets to our enemy. The job had to be done at Bethesda before the man retired from the Navy.”[607]

According to Marvin, “It was common knowledge in Mafia and CIA circles that Green Berets were tapped by the Company to terminate selected ‘targets’ in foreign countries, whereas the Mafia provided the CIA’s pool of able assassins for hits in the U.S.”[608]

The seeds of that unimaginable hope lie, first of all, in our acknowledgment of the covert origins in our history for what happened in Dallas on November 22, 1963.

Security Council directive 10/2, on June 18, 1948, “gave the highest sanction of the [U.S.] government to a broad range of covert operations”[1]—propaganda, sabotage, economic warfare, subversion of all kinds, and eventually assassinations—all seen as necessary to “win” the Cold War

against the Communists.

if uncovered the US government can plausibly disclaim any responsibility for them.”[2]

One month to the day after JFK’s assassination, Truman said he was “disturbed” because the CIA had “become an operational and at times a

policy-making arm of the Government.

What George Kennan and Harry Truman realized much too late was that, in the name of national security, they had unwittingly allowed an alien force to invade a democracy.

Khrushchev ordered the immediate withdrawal of his missiles, in return for Kennedy’s public pledge never to invade Cuba and his secret promise to withdraw U.S. missiles from Turkey—as he would in fact do.

The other, left without his peacemaking partner, would be overthrown the following year.

JFK was looking beyond the myopia of the generals and scientists on both sides of the East-West struggle. He knew merging their missile technologies in a peaceful project would defuse the Cold War. It was part of his day-to-day strategy of peace.

In Washington, Kennedy acted as if he already knew about Khrushchev’s change of heart. JFK went ahead in ordering NASA to begin work on a joint U.S.-Soviet lunar mission. On November 12, 1963, JFK issued his National Security Action Memorandum 271, ordering NASA to implement “my September 20 proposal for broader cooperation between the United States and the USSR in outer space, including cooperation in lunar landing programs.”[10]

The story of why John Kennedy died encircles the earth. Because JFK chose peace on earth at the height of the Cold War, he was executed. But because he turned toward peace, in spite of the consequences to himself, humanity is still alive and struggling. That is hopeful, especially if we understand what he went through and what he has given us as his vision.

And what a propaganda campaign has been waged to keep us Americans from understanding that story, from telling it, and from re-telling it to our children and grandchildren.

Because that’s a story whose telling can transform a nation. But when a nation is under the continuing domination of an idol, namely war, it is a story that will be covered up. When the story can liberate us from our idolatry of war, then the worshippers of the idol are going to do everything they can to keep the story from being told.

It’s unbelievable—or we’re supposed to think it is—that a president was murdered by our own government agencies because he was seeking a more stable peace than relying on nuclear weapons. It’s unspeakable. For the sake of a nation that must always be preparing for war, that

story must not be told. If it were, we might learn that peace is possible without making war. We might even learn there is a force more powerful than war. How unthinkable! But how necessary if life on earth is to continue.

[6]. As we saw from Kennedy’s secretly taped meeting with the Joint Chiefs of Staff on October 19, 1962, the chiefs were pushing him to launch a preemptive strike on the Soviet missile sites in Cuba. They also tried to create a pretext for a nuclear strike on the Soviet Union by their independent, insubordinate orders. With both sides on hair-trigger alert, the U.S. Air Force sent its bombers beyond their customary turnaround points toward the Soviet Union and test-fired an intercontinental ballistic missile, trying to provoke the Soviets to react in a way that would counter-provoke superior U.S. forces to blanket the USSR with an all-out nuclear attack. Richard