Thoughts Beyond the Novel CoCC.8–JFK Assassination

President Biden on Thursday, December15, 2022, officially unsealed over 13,000 records on the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, but they are primarily from the U.S. National Archive. It appears that some of the records from the CIA and the FBI have been released while there are many others still under review before a decision is made to release them to the public as required under a 1992 law. The President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act of 1992 (aka the JFK Records Act) directs the National Archives and Records Administration to establish a collection of records to be known as the President JFK Assassination Records Collection. It stated that the collection shall consist of copies of all U.S. government records relating to the 1963 assassination of JFK, including any materials created or made available for use by, obtained by, or otherwise came into the possession of any state or local law enforcement office that provided support or assistance or performed work in connection with a federal inquiry into the assassination. We will have to wait until May or June of 2023 to learn anything more.

Although one of the protagonists in Choir of Cloistered Canaries speaks of that infamous day as she walked the sidewalk with her parents on November 22, 1963, she remembers a person in a car driving by shouting repeatedly, “Kennedy has been assassinated!” Most folks who were alive then tend to remember where they were when this tragedy became part of U.S. history. This event moved the author, somewhat autobiographically in this instance in 1969, she got a private tour of the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository building on the corner of Elm Street and North Houston Street in Dallas.

A memory of a memory can often be faulty as she held that Lee Harvey Oswald did not assassinate JFK, for the angle from the window was impossible. She was half right. The shot from the Texas School Book Depository braised President Kennedy’s neck and hit Texas Governor John Connally’s right shoulder. Oswald’s rifle bullet was not the fatal shot that killed President Kennedy and injured Governor Connally. One of two or three shots came from the Grassy Knoll that proved to be the fatal shot that blasted Kennedy’s brain tissue while also seriously injuring Connally. Connally recalled there was blood and brain tissue in the vehicle. “One bullet caused Kenney’s first wound and then an entirely separate shot struck me,” he insisted. He had suffered a punctured lung, a bullet lodged in his leg among other injuries. He was adamantly against the single-bullet theory. You would think he would know.

See video below.

The angle of the third shot blew off the back of Kennedy’s skull, and a photo of First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy, reaching out to collect parts of his brain and of his skull as shown in the adjacent photo. The vehicle had just reached the Grassy Knoll when Kennedy’s body pushed backward before he slumped to where the First Lady sat. Contrary to much speculation, the assassin remains at large if he still lives.

One thing the author recalls is that, when the custodian of the Texas School Book Depository building gave her the tour, he stated that the U.S. Government had all the school books for the Texas school system stored there removed. It had been cleaned spic-and-spandy. It was a stark, white space that covered the entire sixth floor. She said, “I don’t think a germ could have been found there. It was antiseptic. There was only the far left window that still stood.” She had worked for one of the publishing companies leasing there. Later it became known as The Sixth Floor Museum at Dealey Plaza.

There are some interesting points—some old and one new—about who could have been behind the assassination. One could venture that there was a collective interest in stopping some of Kennedy’s costly policies for the Establishment of a dominant elite that controls a polity of continued support of military spending by a government. It can be traced back to a certain clandestine agent of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency. Who was he? Why? We can only speculate, but a photograph is worth a thousand words.

NBC News reported on December 15, 2022, that there are thousands of documents that remain largely hidden. Of interest to this blog are “44 that relate to a shadowy CIA agent named George Joannides and a covert Cuban-related program he ran that came into contact with Lee Harvey Oswald less than four months before Kennedy was shot.” But so did the operative George H.W. Bush who used his former petroleum production business, Zapata, as a cover. He, too, was associated with anti-Castro Cubans affiliated with the CIA. In fact, declassified CIA records reveal that Joannides obstructed two official JFK investigations by not disclosing what he knew about contacts between his Cuban agents and Kennedy’s accused killer. That was it. He may have been set up as the patsy to take the fall for a very clandestine operative, who later became CIA Director, shown in the adjacent photograph. His mannerism supports who the person is in this adjacent photo, A mannerism is hard to hide over the years. In fact, the statue in front of his library shows him with his right hand in his trousers’ pocket. Bush was a lefty and often kept it free while his right hand was pocketed.

Three years ago there was information on George H.W. Bush on Wikipedia, which has been deleted. But one passage from that information was captured in this historical novel, Choir of Cultured Canaries “..when the FBI asked Bush if he was a CIA operative in 1963. He answered as if he denied being one while at the same time not denying that he was. One has to say he knew not to lie to the FBI.” According to JFKFacts.org, “there is no evidence that Joannides was involved in a plot to kill the President. As recipient of the agency’s Career Intelligence Medal in 1981, he was not a “rogue officer”.

When President Kennedy took office, it was the height of the Cold War, and there was an increase in spending on both nuclear and conventional forces, including the increase of advisors in Vietnam from 400 to 16,000! Very early in his Administration, Kennedy wanted to turn away from warfare to more domestic programs and the space program. His new visionary mission was his New Frontier, a progressivism that seeks to advance the human condition through social re form based on purported advancements in science, technology, economic development, and social organization. Sounds familiar? It was contrary, however, to the paradigm of the Military-Industrial-Congressional Complex vested to influence public policy to improve relationships between the military and defense industry (e.g., the fossil fuel and chemical industries) that supplies the military.

In summary, because these are complex issues, somethings are certain. It reminds me of the film, The Gentlemen, in which the protagonists and their enablers ensure that the cover-up is completely carried out. It also reminds me of John le Carre’s famous line in The Russia House (film based on Carré’s novel of the same name): “The gray suits are keeping the arms race going.”