As Dr. Crenshaw later explained, after coming forward in 1992: "I believe there was a common denominator in our silence -- a fearful perception that to come forward with what we believed to be the medical truth would be asking for trouble"I was as afraid of the men in suits as I was of the men who had assassinated the President"I reasoned that anyone who would go so far as to eliminate the President of the United States would surely not hesitate to kill a doctor."
After the doctors declared the president dead, the Secret Service took possession of the body. Dallas Coroner Earl Rose attempted to stop them, citing Texas law requiring him to perform the autopsy, but the Secret Service insisted on taking the body and Naval Commander James Humes was placed in charge of the autopsy team at Bethesda Hospital. One of his assistants, Lt. Col. Pierre Finck, testified that the autopsy was performed "in strict obedience to military commands" and was viewed by several members of the national security agencies.
A young hospital corpsman who also assisted, James Jenkins, confirmed the autopsy doctors obeyed military commands, including orders not to probe the throat wound. "They could control Humes, Boswell, and Finck because they were military"I think they were controlled. So were we. We were all military, we could be controlled. And if we weren't controlled, we could be punished and that kept us away from the public.
"I was 19 or 20 years old, and all at once I understood that my country was not much better than a third world country. From that point on in time, I have had no trust, no respect for the government."
Even J. Edgar Hoover seemed dismayed when he uncovered evidence that the FBI was being manipulated to cover up the truth of the assassination and commented to an associate: "Everyone thinks I'm so powerful, but when it comes to the CIA, there's nothing I can do."
According to Lyndon Johnson's taped conversations, the morning after the assassination he received two telephone briefings, first from CIA director John McCone and then from Hoover. What Hoover told Johnson implicated deception by the CIA in terms of what McCone had just told him with respect to a key aspect of the assassination. Apparently, Hoover decided to let the new president draw his own conclusions and make his own decisions about the situation.
In terms of a suspected whitewash by the Warren Commission, it is worth noting that Allen Dulles headed up the Commission. Yes, that Allen Dulles -- the cowboy head of the CIA that Kennedy had booted out.
The further one gets into the evidence, the more difficult it is to deny that the military and CIA's dirty fingerprints seem to be all over the place.
As a source of comparison to another "authoritative" book about the assassination that came after the 1992 Records Act, I read Ultimate Sacrifice: John and Robert Kennedy, the Plan for a Coup in Cuba, and the Murder of JFK by Lamar Waldron and Thom Hartmann, which was published a few years before this book. It utilizes some of the same documentation to make the case of the same players' involvement in JFK's assassination: the CIA, elements of the military, Cuban exiles and the Mafia who all had an axe to grind with both Kennedy brothers, with the latter two parties working frequently with the CIA in its Cold War machinations, including projects involving assassinations, gun running and coup attempts. However, Waldron and Hartmann believe that the Mafia was the driving force behind the assassination and used the CIA and other government agencies to cover up the assassination due to their not wanting to reveal their latest Castro assassination plan known as the C-day Plan set for December 1, 1963, which they claim the Kennedys had approved. But this contradicts information in Douglass's book that Kennedy, as he told journalist Tad Szulc in late 1961, was "under great pressure from the Intelligence Community to have Castro killed, but that he himself violently opposed [political assassinations] on the grounds that for moral reasons the United States should never be party to political assassinations."
There is also evidence that Kennedy worked behind the scenes in an unsuccessful attempt to save South Vietnamese President Diem and his brother from the assassination that the U.S. intelligence apparatus, along with rogue ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge (an appointment his brother Robert warned against and the president later regretted), had set in motion without his authorization. When a telegram arrived in the middle of a White House meeting informing Kennedy that Diem and his brother had been murdered, though it was publicly called a suicide, General Maxwell Taylor described his reaction as follows: "Kennedy leaped to his feet and rushed from the room with a look of shock and dismay on his face which I had never seen before. He had always insisted that Diem must never suffer more than exile and had been led to believe or had persuaded himself that a change in government could be carried out without bloodshed." Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. concurred, "[Kennedy was] somber and shaken."
It simply doesn't make sense that a president who had such a visceral aversion to assassination would approve the C-Day Plan, especially when he had emissaries working behind the scenes to get Castro to negotiate a peace deal and with no reason to suspect that Castro would not ultimately be receptive.
It also strains credulity that the Mafia was powerful enough to manipulate the intelligence and national security apparatus of the United States to do its bidding -- a case of the tail wagging the dog. It is much more logical to assume that the relationship the Mafia had to the intelligence community in connection with JFK's assassination was essentially the same as its past relationship in various projects -- one of subordinate participation due to common interests, usually of a financial or strategic nature.
In my estimation, Douglass makes the best case of the two hefty books I've read and the documentaries I've watched, about which parties were likely responsible for John Kennedy's assassination in terms of motive, means and opportunity.
I will close with the words of Nikita Khrushchev's son, Sergei, on the implications of Kennedy being cut down in the autumn of 1963: "I am convinced that if history had allowed them another six years, they would have brought the cold war to a close before the end of the 1960's. I say this with good reason, because in 1963 my father made an official announcement to a session of the USSR Defense Council that he intended to sharply reduce Soviet armed forces from 2.5 million men to half a million and to stop the production of tanks and other offensive weapons.
He thought that 200 to 300 intercontinental nuclear missiles made an attack on the Soviet Union impossible, while the money freed up by reducing the size of the army would be put to better use in agriculture and housing construction.
But fate decreed otherwise, and the window of opportunity, barely cracked open, closed at once. In 1963 President Kennedy was killed, and a year later, my father was removed from power. The cold war continued for another quarter of a century."
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