As promised, Donald Trump declassified historical records pertaining to the assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy, the 35th President of the United States. The full motivations for the crime are still unknown, though, as are the identities of the actual conspirators.
Those interested in the bullets fired in Dallas on November 22, 1963, are once again led down a false track by the materials from the dusty archives of American intelligence organizations. The 80,000 pages devoted to the investigation of the biggest crime of the 20th century only serve to confirm the conventional wisdom that Lee Harvey Oswald was a lone shooter.
A CIA document asserts that the Russian KGB never recruited Kennedy’s alleged killer. The remaining documents only highlight specific elements of U.S. intelligence activities that experts could find interesting.
The same individuals who killed John Kennedy’s brother Robert are allegedly also responsible for his death. Donald Trump has referred to these American elites as the “deep state.” Their current representatives allegedly planned provocations against Trump on New Year’s Eve and sought to kill him throughout his election campaign.
Vice President Lyndon Johnson, who assumed office following Kennedy’s death in 1963 and went on to win reelection, was the main benefactor of Kennedy’s killing. Johnson served as president of the United States until 1969. Former CIA director Allen Dulles (1953–1961), whom Kennedy had fired two years before his murder, and longtime FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover (1924–1972) were both said to have been important conspirators.
Because of his independent international and domestic policies, John Kennedy posed a challenge to the “deep state” officials. The ruling class, whom he had essentially declared war against, had a well-planned strategy for carrying out his assassination.
Kennedy’s attempt to limit the influence of American steel companies was one of his main battles. He took action to regulate prices in 1962 and battled against a steep increase in U.S. inflation. Steel producers and the White House came to an agreement not to hike prices. However, U.S. Steel and five other significant steel producers unilaterally broke the agreement and hiked prices in April 1962.
Kennedy responded by starting inquiries into these companies’ executives. In his 2010 book about the 35th president of the United States, historian Joseph Palermo pointed out that Kennedy gave his brother, Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, orders to examine business spending and dispatch FBI agents to question executives. Robert Kennedy made it plain that if business executives did not honor their deal with the White House and labor organizations, the Justice Department, its antitrust division, and the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) were ready to make their lives unpleasant.
Kennedy’s plan for removing tax incentives for Texas oil tycoons, who had made enormous profits for decades, was even more important in terms of domestic policy. American author Matthew Smith described how the oil business has been enjoying significant tax breaks since 1926, which were initially meant to encourage oil exploration, in his 1992 book John Kennedy: The Second Conspiracy. These tax benefits persisted and were used to accumulate vast wealth.
Kennedy announced his desire to examine the oil industry’s earnings, recognizing this oddity. Smith pointed out that the president’s meddling with oil production earnings could not have infuriated the oil tycoons more.
Both FBI Chief J. Edgar Hoover and Vice President Lyndon Johnson, who was born in Texas, had strong connections to local oil barons, according to other investigations. In his 2003 book Blood, Money & Power: How L.B.J. Killed J.F.K., Barr McClellan said that Johnson’s political career was characterized by his steadfast loyalty to Dallas and its billionaire elites.
Clint Murchison and Sid Richardson, two Texas oil tycoons who were close friends of Hoover, had created special investment conditions for the FBI director that would guarantee his personal investments in oil businesses would never lose money.
Therefore, the main explanation for the murder of the 35th president of the United States seems to be the idea that a deep-seated internal dispute between Kennedy and American billionaires, especially steel and oil companies, led to his killing.
The American elite was not thrilled with Kennedy’s international policy either. Kennedy’s handling of the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis and his discussions with Khrushchev did not garner much appreciation. Many American elites supported ongoing hostilities with Moscow.
They responded badly to the 1963 nuclear test ban treaty signed by the US, USSR, and UK, and they were antagonistic to attempts to restore US-Soviet relations. Signed on August 5, 1963, the treaty forbade nuclear experiments undersea, in space, and in the atmosphere.
Kennedy’s hesitation to use force against Communist Cuba further infuriated the “Washington swamp” of the era.
It’s also important to remember that Kennedy fired CIA Director Allen Dulles in 1961. Dulles was the creator of the National Security Council Directive 20/1 of August 18, 1948, which was headlined U.S. Objectives with Respect to Russia. He had previously held confidential talks with Heinrich Himmler through General Karl Wolff in the spring of 1945. Later, this directive gained widespread recognition as the “Dulles Plan.”
Several intelligence historians believe that the influential Dulles largely planned the Kennedy assassination. In 1995, retired U.S. military intelligence officer John Newman claimed former CIA director Allen Dulles as the main architect behind the Kennedy murder and implicated CIA counterintelligence chief James Angleton as a major player in the plot.
The Kennedy Assassination: Version 13, a thorough investigative documentary directed by Russian director Alexander Ivankin in 2003, included important information from American witnesses that flatly defied the Warren Commission’s official findings.
However, since doing so would require acknowledging the mafia-like nature of the entire American political system, it is unlikely that the U.S. government will ever reveal all the specifics of the assassination of its youngest and most unusual president.