By now, if you still believe Lee Harvey Oswald did it, you’re probably as much of a patsy as he said he was. Here’s the late Jackie Kennedy Onassis’s theory as to who conspired against her late husband, the president of the United States:
Jackie Onassis believed that Lyndon B Johnson and a cabal of Texas tycoons were involved in the assassination of her husband John F Kennedy, ‘explosive’ recordings are set to reveal.
The secret tapes will show that the former first lady felt that her husband’s successor was at the heart of the plot to murder him.
She became convinced that the then vice president, along with businessmen in the South, had orchestrated the Dallas shooting, with gunman Lee Harvey Oswald – long claimed to have been a lone assassin – merely part of a much larger conspiracy.
Texas-born Mr Johnson, who served as the state’s governor and senator, completed Mr Kennedy’s term and went on to be elected president in his own right.
The tapes were recorded with leading historian Arthur Schlesinger Jnr within months of the assassination on November 22, 1963, and had been sealed in a vault at the Kennedy Library in Boston.
The then Mrs Kennedy, who went on to marry Greek shipping tycoon Aristotle Onassis, had ordered that they should not be released until 50 years after her death, with some reports suggesting she feared that her revelations might make her family targets for revenge.
Jackie’s not the only one who thought so. Here’s an episode from the banned series by Nigel Turner, The Men Who Killed Kennedy:
The notes at YouTube are interesting, to say the least:
The Men Who Killed Kennedy is a video documentary series by Nigel Turner that originally aired in 1988 in England with two one-hour segments about the John F. Kennedy assassination. The United States corporation, Arts & Entertainment Company, purchased the rights to the original two segments. Three one-hour segments were added in 1991. A sixth segment was added in 1995. Finally, three additional hourly segments were added by the History Channel in November 2003. The ninth segment, titled “The Guilty Men”, directly implicated Lyndon B. Johnson. Within days, Johnson’s widow, Lady Bird Johnson, more of his surviving associates, ex-President Jimmy Carter, and the lone, living Warren Commission commissioner and ex-President Gerald R. Ford immediately complained to the History Channel. They subsequently threatened legal action against Arts & Entertainment Company, owner of the History Channel. “The Guilty Men” segment was completely withdrawn by the History Channel. Also during the series, French prisoner Christian David named Lucien Sarti as one of three French criminals hired to carry out the assassination of Kennedy, when he was interviewed by author Anthony Summers. This claim is one of the most strongly investigated theories presented on the show.
I was able to purchase the original series, of six episodes, spanning from 1988 to 1991. In it, the Corsican mafia assassin, Lucien Sarti, who was shot dead in 1972 in Mexico City, is revealed as being one of at least three hired guns who set up a “crossfire” along the motorcade route. (The description above contains an error: The author who interviewed Christian David, the imprisoned mafioso who named Sarti, is not Anthony Summers, but Steve Revelle.) As well, Lee Harvey Oswald is definitively cleared by witnesses on the scene, including at least one Dallas motorcycle cop, as an assassin (and proven to be, as he said, a patsy). This DVD set still available, but when I got it, it was not that easy to find. I suspect it is easier to get in the US than in Canada!
The video above is from the later three, which are unavailable for purchase now. It’s not hard to see why; the claims this video makes, and the complaints they sparked, make it abundantly clear that something was not kosher with “Lyin’ Lyndon”. At the very least, he appears to have known what was going on, and though he was in a position to stop it, he did not. It appears that he had something on his conscience. Could that have been the reason for the well-paid psychiatrist who looked after him in the few years he lived after his last presidential term ended? And could Jackie Kennedy have been right when she pointed the finger at him?