The Man Who Killed JFK

I was in kindergarten when President John F. Kennedy was shot. To say that the Kennedy brothers were popular was an understatement. The two hottest Halloween costumes at the class party that year, less than a month before JFK was shot, had been John and Bobby plastic masks. My first inkling that something big had happened on November 22, 1963, was when I got in the car and the mom who was driving carpool that day said nothing but only sobbed the drive home.

I heard Roger Stone do a radio interview on his book and realized I had read little to nothing on the assassination of John F. Kennedy. I didn’t go see the Oliver Stone film. I found it strange that I’ve read books on the Viet Nam War and Watergate – the other two defining political events in my growing up years – but I had never taken the time to accept or reject the Warren Commission. It’s interesting that in the back of my mind I’ve sort of known there are two self-contradictory popular beliefs that guide popular perception on the Kennedy Assassination:

1. the Warren Report is seriously flawed
2. anyone that presents an alternative view of the Warren Report is a kook

So who does Roger Stone – longtime political strategist for Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, George H. Bush, and George W. Bush – say killed JFK? Since he has a picture of President Lyndon Baines Johnson on the cover and subtitles the book, The Case Against LBJ, I’m not giving a spoiler to tell you where this book is going. (Note: Stone is equally hard on Republicans as Democrats; he is an equal opportunity sledgehammer.) 

His attack on the Warren Report – from his rejection of the “magic bullet” (the conclusion that the same bullet went completely through Kennedy’s body and then hit Texas Governor John Connelly, breaking bones), to the 50+ witnesses present that said there was gunfire from the grassy knoll and whose testimony was deemed unreliable – was all fascinating.

But what makes the book sizzle is his depiction of Johnson as a psychopath who had at least eight men murdered to protect and promote his political career. (The Box 13 incident that got him elected to the Senate in 1946 is just as surreal as the alleged murders in his wake. And if Stone’s later analysis of why Johnson double-downed on the Viet Nam War has any credibility, it is downright depressing.) Stone sets out to show how the parties that would most benefit from Kennedy’s death worked together, including the Mob, J. Edgar Hoover, a few renegades in the CIA tied to the Bay of Pigs and several failed assassination attempts on Fidel Castro, a cadre of Texas oil tycoons, and first and foremost, the man who stood the most to gain and who could organize the plot and then perform the most important function to hold it all together – controlling the evidence – namely Lyndon Baines Johnson.

How was the book? If you can get past the typos (it’s not self-published but feels like it at times) of this New York Times bestselling outlier, Stone’s writing was fine and propelled you through the pages fast enough for you to say “just one more chapter” even past lights out time. It was as or more titillating than many a political suspense thriller.

Did Stone make the case against LBJ? Like any argument based on an historical event; you have to present – and hope the readers / listeners believe – a boatload of circumstantial evidence, assembled cogently, and wrapped up neatly with a bow on top. Did I believe him? I think I can confidently say this:  Even if all Stone’s assumptions and dot connecting efforts aren’t correct, he made an overwhelming case that the Warren Commission and its report was a sham that was designed to protect powerful participants in a plot that could not be subsumed within a lone gunman theory.

Is this the best book to read if you haven’t read anything else about the Kennedy Assassination? Go back to the two popular beliefs: the Warren Report was flawed and conspiracy theorists are kooks. An author like Bill O’Reilly tries to make the case that both of those beliefs are still absolutely true – and yet that he has written a groundbreaking book. (And after reading Stone I’m finding Killing Kennedy decidedly unsatisfactory.) So why not Stone’s work? It includes the latest declassified reports. You’ll learn about the political winds of the day, the dominant view of what happened, and an alternative view that was present from the moment JFK was shot. If it doesn’t go down right, there are a myriad of more traditional primers to tackle.