Kennedy assassination theories

A number of theories exist with regard to the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Often called conspiracy theories, these are usually scenarios involving powerful individuals and/or groups at the time who theoretically had the means, motive and opportunity to plan and execute the John F. Kennedy assassination in Dallas, Texas on November 22, 1963.

Johnson, Vietnam, and World War III

One of the combined-theories for the assassination of Kennedy was that it served to replace a young, reckless, and disregarded Kennedy with a mature and forceful Johnson. Johnson, who may or may not have had a role, would likely (or would have been known to) pursue the strategy of escalating the conflict in Vietnam, and the defense industry profits derived from the war, to the maximum.

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The assassination itself was orchestrated by various intelligence officials, who recruited sympathetic figures from criminal organizations to do the act itself. According to the theory, Johnson was either thought of as better suited than Kennedy, was blackmailed because he was being investigated for criminal complicity in four major investigations, and/or Johnson was simply part of the plan itself. The degrees to which Johnson had acted out of personal greed or perceived necessity are speculative. At some point, it was decided that Kennedy should be replaced, and a patsy pro-Communist, "lone nut" assassin would both distance Johnson from the assassination, and to set the public agenda again toward "fighting communism."

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It is interesting that Johnson had also used the potential threat of at least 40 million people being killed in a global thermonuclear war when he persuaded Supreme Court Chief Justice Earl Warren to head the Warren Commission. (Warren, initially, did not want to head the commission, believing that his doing so would be unconstitutional.) Author Peter Dale Scott has theorized (with a great deal of supporting documentation) that the patently absurd nuclear war fear was planted by the CIA as bait to force Johnson and the Warren Commission into accepting the less controversial but, in Scott's view, the equally absurd conclusion that Lee Harvey Oswald had acted alone in shooting Kennedy.

Related Topics:
Earl Warren - Peter Dale Scott - Lee Harvey Oswald

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The Cold War was by far the most urgent issue, and the young Kennedy was perceived as being both reckless and unauthoritative in the eyes of the Soviets. Because of these factors, many had feared that Kennedy would inevitably draw the US closer to an all-out war with the USSR; the Bay of Pigs and the Cuban Missile Crisis, despite having "ended successfully" were in fact complete failures in the view of many in security planning and intelligence. The general US plan (which Kennedy had originally supported) included the inflammation of the existing Vietnam conflict (hoping to be a pressure valve for tensions with the USSR), but it had not yet been put fully into motion.

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Central to the "strategy" was the portrayal of the conflict as one between a Communist North and an "anti-Communist" South, when instead it was civil war within the South between an ethnic minority in power, and a peasant majority that was open-minded to the North's communist land reform policies. The U.S. and the minority Vietnamese government would "purge" the country of its majority political dissidents. In March 1968, less than five years after Kennedy's assassination, even the once hardline Johnson had begun to concede that the cruel and futile realities of the Vietnam War could not be reconciled with its claimed "anti-Communist" intent, and he declined to run for a second term.

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Kennedy's first years in office confirmed to critics that he was not capable of projecting the seriousness required to effectively confront Soviet expansion. He had also begun to understand that escalation of conflict in Vietnam would lead to mass-scale human slaughter without any clear strategic benefit and had started to recall U.S. military advisers, reversing his stand on a plan which he had previously supported. Johnson, unlike Kennedy, would assiduously pursue the Indochina proxy war strategy, immediately resending recalled troops back to Vietnam, and continuing in the policy of escalation. Four days after Kennedy's assassination, Johnson increased US advisory involvement in Vietnam, and less then a year later, in August 1964 secretly ordered the fabrication of the Gulf of Tonkin incident as a way to publicize the war to Americans as an aggression by the North. In fact, Johnson (who, during his tenure as US Senate Majority Leader in the 1950s had been nicknamed "The Senator From The Pentagon" because of his close links to the defense and aerospace industry} was believed to have said to members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff shortly before Kennedy's death, "Once I get the presidency I'll get you the war you want." This quick and radical change in US policy is a key issue that confirms for many Johnson's key role in Kennedy's death.

Related Topics:
Soviet expansion - 1964 - Gulf of Tonkin incident - Joint Chiefs of Staff

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