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.

Theories

Note that some of the following people and groups have been claimed by some to have been working together and as such these different theories are not always viewed as mutually exclusive.

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• Vice President Lyndon Johnson organized, had foreknowledge or had participated in the assassination. The politically ambitious Johnson had the most to gain from Kennedy's death, as it promoted him to the presidency. President Kennedy had discussed with his closest aides (and even discussed with his personal secretary, Evelyn Lincoln) that he was thinking of dropping him as vice president before the 1964 U.S. presidential election. Richard Nixon, who was also in Dallas from November 20, 1963 until just an hour before Kennedy arrived, was quoted in the November 22, 1963 Dallas newspaper saying he also believed Kennedy would drop Johnson from the 1964 Democratic ticket because of the several high-profile political scandals (Bobby Baker and Billie Sol Estes) that were embroiling Johnson. President Kennedy was most likely seriously thinking about removing Johnson because of the fact that Johnson was the subject of four major criminal investigations involving government contract violations, misappropriation of funds, money laundering and bribery. (All four scandals "disappeared" after November 22, 1963) http://rense.com/general40/thewnk.htm Johnson biographers agree that Johnson was politically aggressive and power-hungry, and others have written that Johnson was an agent of the mafia—being blackmailed by organized crime with several of his past criminal actions.http://www.crimelibrary.com/terrorists_spies/assassins/jfk/8.html?sect=24.
• Most recently, fingerprint evidence has surfaced which appears to implicate a known associate of President Johnson, one Malcolm 'Mac' Wallace, a convicted murderer. A box on the sixth floor of the TSBD yielded a print which was later identified as a 14-point match for the FBI's copy of Wallace's prints. Under Texas law (which to this day only requires a 12-point match) at the time of the assassination, it would have been accepted by the police that Wallace was present in the TSBD on the day of the assassination. Why these fingerprints were merely referred to as 'unidentified' in the Warren Report remains unknown. The status of this apparently incriminating fingerprint evidence is, naturally, the subject of heated debate.
• The U.S. "military-industrial complex," which had been preparing for an escalation of the Vietnam War since the French withdrew from Vietnam in 1954 after France's defeat at Dien Bien Phu knew that President Kennedy had seriously discussed plans and implemented actions to gradually withdraw all U.S. military advisers from Vietnam by the beginning of 1965. At the moment that President Kennedy was killed, 1,100 U.S. troops were in the air on their way home as part of President Kennedy's initial steps of withdrawing from Vietnam.
• The CIA, or, rogue CIA agents, killed Kennedy for a number of reasons, mainly for not backing the CIA-orchestrated Bay of Pigs Invasion with air support. After the failed Cuban invasion, Kennedy fired CIA director and future Warren Commission commissioner, Allen Dulles, and vowed to his closest advisors to "break the CIA into a thousand pieces" and possibly install his brother, Robert F. Kennedy as the CIA director.
• John Kennedy and his brother Robert Kennedy (who was also assassinated in June 1968 when he ran for president) were killed by the Mafia in retaliation for their increasing crackdowns (12 times the number of prosecutions under Eisenhower) against organized crime. Documents that the Warren Commission never saw have revealed that the mafia was working very closely with the CIA on several assassination attempts of Fidel Castro known under the CIA code name Operation Mongoose. The CIA under the Kennedys approached the mafia because the CIA recognized the mutual motives of ousting Castro with the mafia's motive being the reclaiming of billions of dollars that the mafia lost from gambling, drugs, prostitution, etc. when Castro seized the mafia's gambling and narcotics trafficking assets in 1959. Teamsters Union president Jimmy Hoffa, and mobsters Carlos Marcello, Sam Giancana, Johnny Rosselli, and Santo Trafficante Jr., all of whom except for Hoffa worked with the CIA on the Castro assassination plots, top the list of the House Select Committee on Assassinations mafia suspects.http://www.crimelibrary.com/terrorists_spies/assassins/jfk/7.html. The family of Chicago mafia boss Sam Giancana claims the Kennedys double-crossed him after the mafia, via workers unions that the Illinois mafia controlled, had helped Kennedy be elected President. Jack Ruby had grown up working for mafia leader Al Capone in Chicago.http://www.crimelibrary.com/terrorists_spies/assassins/kennedy/6.html
• Angry Cuban anti-Castro exiles trained by and still working with the CIA killed Kennedy for his failure to give greater backing to the failed Bay of Pigs Invasion to overthrow Castro's Communist dictatorship
• J. Edgar Hoover did not want to retire even though he was approaching in January 1965 the then-mandatory government retirement age of 70 and would be retired by President Kennedy had Kennedy lived to be reelected. Hoover often told his aides that he deeply despised the Kennedys. Hoover may have been a gay transvestite. He lived with his longtime assistant director, Clyde Tolson and before this, with his mother until she died. If true, and if the mafia knew of Hoover's sexual preference, the mafia could have been blackmailing Hoover to secure his silence whether Hoover knew about the assassination conspirators beforehand, after, or not. This blackmail by the mafia of Hoover, like Hoover?s good friend and at the time of the assassination, next-door neighbor Lyndon Johnson, may have also extended to any investigations cover-up and guaranteed Hoover?s compliance and silence after the assassination. It is documented that before President Kennedy was elected, that Hoover rarely acknowledged even the existence of the mafia. After Kennedy became president the prosecutions of the mafia by the Robert F. Kennedy-led Justice Department (of which the FBI was/is a part of) increased elevenfold. After President Kennedy was killed, Justice Department mafia prosecutions dropped sharply, reverting to pre-Kennedy administration levels. In 1964, just days before his Warren Commission testimony, Hoover was appointed Director of the FBI "for life" by Kennedy's successor, Johnson, a decision which would have to have been, by law, reapproved by the president every year. Since Hoover's death in May 1972, the tenure of the FBI director is by law limited to a single 10-year term.
• Persons who were politically to the far right, specifically oil businessmen and their supporting bankers, many from Texas, who stood to lose billions of dollars of profits because President Kennedy wanted Congress to discontinue the hefty 27.5 percent oil depletion tax credit allowance.
• Cuban President Fidel Castro's agents killed President Kennedy in retaliation for the many times the CIA and Mafia had worked together and tried to kill Castro. In September 1963 Castro publicly warned the U.S. about American leaders not being safe if they think they could kill him. On November 221963 an agent of the CIA was assigned to kill Castro with a poison-pen weapon at their next meeting. It is notable that in 1962 the Kennedys had ordered the CIA to cease the assassination attempts against Castro. The CIA ignored the president's order, and continued with assassination training and attempts, unbeknownst to the president or Robert Kennedy. Starting in the second half of 1963 it is also documented that President Kennedy, through private back channels like French journalist Jean Daniel and CBS correspondent Lisa Howard had secretly approached Castro with overtures of a normalization in trade and diplomatic relations. In fact, Castro had been meeting with Daniel the moment Kennedy was shot. Many believe that mobster Johnny Rosselli deliberately spread the falsehood Castro was behind the assassination to draw public attention away from Mob complicity in the crime.http://www.crimelibrary.com/terrorists_spies/assassins/jfk/7.html
• The Federal Reserve (the central bank of the United States) was threatened by Kennedy's intentions concerning restoring precious-metals backing to U.S. currency and securities. http://www.john-f-kennedy.net/thefederalreserve.htm (Note that the Secret Service was created in 1865 as a anti-money-counterfeiting agency, and was until 2003 an organ of the Treasury—a direct line from the Fed to Kennedy's security. The same anti-hard-currency pro-central banking motive is suspected in the 1865 Lincoln, 1881 Garfield, and 1901 McKinley assassinations as well as the 1835 attempt on the life of Andrew Jackson who was a bitter opponent of central banking.
• The Israeli government was displeased with Kennedy for his pressure about their top-secret nuclear programhttp://www.intellex.com/~rigs/page1/jfk/jfk.htm (see Dimona and Mordechai Vanunu) and/or, the Israelis were angry over Kennedy's employment of Nazis such as Wernher von Braunhttp://www.mail-archive.com/ctrl@listserv.aol.com/msg94214.html.
• South Vietnamese President Ngo Dinh Diem found out in June 1963 during electronic surveillance of the U.S. embassy in South Vietnam that the U.S. was helping his political enemies plan a coup against Diem. Diem, whose younger brother was a heroin addict, was also profiting from massively increased exports of opiates from the Southeast Asian "golden triangle" (after the sources of Turkish opiates dried up in the wake of the 1961 French Connection arrests in New York City) to North America via the Hong Kong and U.S. organized crime syndicates. If Diem were ousted in a coup, millions of dollars of Diem's drug profits would be lost. Even though Diem was killed in a coup on November 1, 1963, the plans to assassinate Kennedy went ahead for revenge and/or because of Diem's illegal co-entanglements with the world's various organized crime syndicates and the mafia motives.
• Kennedy was killed to prevent World War III, a direct nuclear war with the Soviets. While Kennedy could be outwardly insulting and embarrassing to Soviet leaders, he was in reality perceived by Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev and other foreign leaders as too young, erratic, reckless and inexperienced to be taken too seriously. Kennedy's aggressiveness was believed by some to be the ultimate cause for the worsening of relations between the US and USSR, culminating in the Cuban Missile Crisis. The high tensions of this event led many to fear that Kennedy's rhetoric could only lead to a nuclear war against the Soviet Union. Hard-line planners had decided to take the initiative in replacing Kennedy. Another side effect of killing Kennedy was that it would demoralize Americans. This theory is highly unlikely, as KGB documents released after the fall of the Soviet Union state that the KGB's report to Russian leadership on Kennedy's death specifically accused Lyndon Johnson.
• Kennedy was killed as part of an elaborate Freemasonic ritual. http://www.hoffman-info.com/kingkill33.html
• JFK was assassinated at the direction of Aristotle Onassis and his friends in the Illuminati group. French President Charles De Gaulle supported this theory. Onassis married Kennedy's widow in 1968
• Kennedy was killed by avenging persons who plotted to defend the honor of first lady Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy, who had supposedly suffered greatly through the repeated indignity of JFK's alleged compulsive womanizing.
• In an effort to relieve the severe physical and emotional pain with which he was plagued, John F. Kennedy took the unusual step of planning the assassination himself and thus in effect indirectly committed suicide, which his Roman Catholic faith would not permit him to do directly. Earlier, in September 1963, JFK had joked to friends about making arrangements for his death.
• Kennedy's death was elaborately staged; there is no hard evidence that he was in fact killed in 1963, and the description of the body on which the autopsy was performed does not match JFK's actual body.
• Kennedy was considered to be acting under substantial influence of the Soviets; the assassination was found to be the least traumatic remedy of that situation. The theory can include many parts of the theories above.
• (From the novel The Bourne Ultimatum:) Kennedy was killed by Mafia-connected European assassins, possibly led by the infamous Venezuelan terrorist Carlos the Jackal (based on real-life terrorist Ilich Ramírez Sánchez, who was only 14 years old at the time of the assassination).
• Kennedy was killed by three French assassins linked to Corsican organized crime syndicates. This claim was made by Christian David, a petty French criminal interviewed on the documentary The Men Who Killed Kennedy, who named Lucien Sarti as one of the shooters.
• Kennedy's death was on the orders of Nikita Khrushchev, premier of the Soviet Union, who was America's nemesis during the Cold War.