1. The Cover-up
Sen. Richard Schweiker (R-PA) was a member of the 1975 Church Committee tasked with reviewing U.S. intelligence activity. He and Sen. Gary Hart (D-CO) headed a subcommittee looking into the role of the intelligence agencies in the JFK assassination. In 1976. on CBS's Face the Nation, he had this to say about the Warren Commission:
I think the [Warren] report, to those who have studied it closely, has collapsed like a house of cards... the fatal mistake the Warren Commission made was not to use its own investigators, but instead to rely on the CIA and FBI personnel, which played directly into the hands of senior intelligence officials who directed the cover-up.
The cover-up referred to by Schweiker was clearly at work in the emergency room of the Parkland Hospital where Kennedy was taken immediately after being shot. We have videos of the recollections of two of the doctors present in the operating room-Drs. Robert McClelland and Charles Crenshaw. Both saw a massive wound in the back of Kennedy's head. It looked to them like an exit wound, suggesting that at least one bullet had hit his head from the front. They say their impression was shared by many of the doctors present. Their opinion contradicted the conclusion of the Warren Commission that JFK was killed by a lone assassin (Oswald) firing from an upper window of the Texas Book Depository behind the Kennedy limousine.
Earl Rose, forensic pathologist, professor of medicine, and Dallas County medical examiner was in his office across from the trauma room when Kennedy's body was being wheeled out on a gurney. He told the Secret Service agents that Texas law required him to perform a post-mortem examination prior to the removal of the body. They physically blocked him. According to Dr. McClelland (19 minutes into the video), one agent "picked him up and set him against the wall." Then they took the body from the hospital to the airport from which it was immediately flown to Bethesda Naval Hospital in Maryland. Only then was an autopsy performed, overseen by military brass, FBI and Secret Service agents.
Just before the procedure began, one of the three military doctors conducting the autopsy, Commander James J. Humes M.D., got a telephone call from one of the nation's most distinguished brain scientists. Robert B. Livingston M.D. was Scientific Director of both the NIH Mental Health Institute and the Neurological Diseases and Blindness Institute as well as Director of the Laboratory of Neurobiology since 1956. In 1965 he founded the world's first multi-disciplinary Department of Neurosciences at UCSD.
Livingston told Humes that the small circular wound observed by the Parkland doctors in Kennedy's front neck "had to be a wound of entrance and that if it were a wound of exit, it would almost certainly be widely blown out." (This meant that the bullet could not have come from Oswald.) There was a brief interruption in the call, after which Humes came back on and said: "The FBI will not let me talk any further." Livingston said he was dismayed "over the abrupt termination of my conversation with Dr. Humes, through the intervention of the FBI. I wondered aloud why they would want to interfere with a discussion between physicians." He concluded that the autopsy was "under explicit non-medical control."
One of the nine persons LBJ appointed to the Warren Commission was former CIA Director Allen Dulles. The absurdity of this appointment should have been enough to remove all credibility from the commission. Johnson knew that Kennedy and Dulles had been enemies. Kennedy had fired Dulles after the disastrous 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba by CIA-trained exiles. David Talbot, in his brilliant book The Devil's Chessboard (2015), explains that the invasion was doomed from the start because the plan had leaked to newspapers and, according to internal CIA documents, recent Cuban defense preparations had rendered the plan inoperable. Dulles persisted because he was confident that Kennedy would have to rescue the overwhelmed invaders with American forces, thereby going to war with Cuba.
When Kennedy refused to do so, it was a crushing blow to Dulles's reputation. Kennedy was furious at Dulles for having assured him the invasion would succeed, and for attempting to trap him into a war he didn't want, one that could have become a confrontation with the USSR (Cuba's ally). In the two years between the Bay of Pigs and the Kennedy assassination, Kennedy and Dulles waged a publicity war over who was to blame for the embarrassing failure.
According to Talbot, Dulles continued to play a major role in the CIA after his dismissal. LBJ knew all about this. Appointing this seasoned liar and instigator of violent regime changes to the Warren Commission proves that Johnson wasn't looking for unvarnished truth. As Talbot explains, Dulles got his prote'ge', J. L. Rankin, appointed as chief counsel for the commission, and made sure the investigators focused narrowly on Oswald: "He deftly maneuvered to keep the investigation on what he considered the proper track. He showered Rankin with memos, passing along investigative tips and offering guidance on commission strategy." The commission never got to see the extensive documentary evidence of the CIA's connection to Oswald for years before 1963.
2. The Coup
Kennedy's relationship with the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) was one of mutual disrespect. They thought he was a weakling for deciding not to order the military to rescue the exile force at the Bay of Pigs. As presidential historian Robert Dallek said in a 2013 article in The Atlantic: "In the White House, [Kennedy] fought--and defeated--his most determined military foes, just across the Potomac: the members of the Pentagon's Joint Chiefs of Staff." The defeat was short-lived.
To appreciate what Kennedy was up against, consider the recommendation he received from the JCS and the CIA at a National Security Council meeting on July 20, 1961. Talbot quotes James Bamford's account in Body of Secrets (2002):
The plan called for innocent people to be shot on American streets; for boats carrying refugees fleeing Cuba to be sunk on the high seas; for a wave of violent terrorism to be launched in Washington, D.C., Miami, and elsewhere. People would be framed for bombings they did not commit; planes would be hijacked. Using phony evidence, all of it would be blamed on Castro....
This plan was codenamed Operation Northwoods. It would almost certainly have precipitated a nuclear war with the USSR. Kennedy rejected it.
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