Kennedy Conspiracy Theories Go Mainstream … 50 Years After Assassination

The CIA and FBI Hid Information from the Warren Commission - Preface: Some “conspiracy theories” are true, and some are false. Each must be judged on its own merits.

● A solid majority of Americans have always believed that John F. Kennedy’s assassination involved a conspiracy. But now that view is starting to be discussed by mainstream power players. Current Secretary of State John Kerry said recently: "To this day, I have serious doubts that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone. I certainly have doubts that he was motivated by himself."
● Watergate reporter Bob Woodward long ago became a mainstream, establishment journalist. But Woodward – and long-time CBS news anchor Bob Schieffer – agree that the CIA and FBI refused to give information to the Warren Commission, and so that Commission was in the dark as to what might actually have happened.
● And CBS News reports: It has long been known that the Warren Commission, the blue ribbon panel of public officials appointed by former President Lyndon Johnson to investigate the assassination of former President John F. Kennedy, was flawed in ways that led to generations of conspiracy theories about what happened on Nov. 22, 1963. A forthcoming book from former New York Times reporter Philip Shenon digs into exactly what the commission got wrong, both by intentional concealment, or, in Shenon’s view, extensive attempts by both the CIA and FBI to withhold just how much they knew about Kennedy assassin Lee Harvey Oswald in the weeks and months before he killed the president.
● “In many ways, this book is an account of my discovery of how much of the truth about the Kennedy assassination has still not been told, and how much of the evidence about the president’s murder was covered up or destroyed – shredded, incinerated, or erased – before it could reach the commission,” Shenon writes in the prologue to A Cruel and Shocking Act: The Secret History of the Kennedy Assassination, which draws its title from the first sentence of the commission’s report. “Senior officials at both the CIA and the FBI hid information from the panel, apparently in hopes of concealing just how much they had known about Lee Harvey Oswald and the threat that he posed.” In fact – as the Washington Post reports – official investigators have long said there was a conspiracy and a cover up.