Nearly 60 years after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, Jr., debate about who actually was responsible for the assassination continues to rage. Adding fuel to the fire is a recent new book claiming that the Soviet Union ordered Lee Harvey Oswald to assassinate Kennedy.
The book wouldn’t necessarily make waves with that allegation, except that one of its co-authors is former CIA Director James Woolsey. That alone makes the book a must-read for those interested in what really happened on that fateful day in Dallas in 1963.
In the book, Woolsey claims that Nikita Khrushchev ordered Oswald to assassinate Kennedy, but then the Soviets thought better of it and rescinded the order. Oswald, preferring to continue the plot and impress his bosses, decided to disobey the order to stand down and went ahead with his plan to kill the President.
Given the fact that others researching Kennedy’s assassination have accused the CIA of being involved, the claims made by this book certainly need to be taken with a grain of salt. You certainly couldn’t put it past the CIA to put out disinformation to deflect attention from the Agency’s own actions. And the timing of this publication is certainly suspect, coming as it is at a time when US-Russian relations are the lowest they have been in years.
Despite all that, it’s probably worth taking a look at this book and the claims it makes. With the intelligence community’s attempts to force President Trump from office, and the possibility that President Biden will soon be replaced in office by Kamala Harris due to his advancing mental incapacity, we’re probably living in an era today that is more similar to JFK’s era than any other. Perhaps we can glean something from Woolsey’s book that would allow us to help navigate the current era.
Whether Woolsey’s claims are true or false, the fact that so much debate still surrounds JFK’s assassination should serve as a reminder that something is dirty with the US government. Unlike the clarity surrounding previous Presidential assassinations, the fact that there still is no consensus surrounding responsibility for JFK’s killing reminds us that something nefarious is going on in the government, and that someone is still trying to deflect blame.
Could Woolsey’s book be an attempt by the CIA and its Establishment allies to deflect blame from the Agency and its historical misdeeds? It certainly could be, and we would do well to remember that the CIA’s metamorphosis into a shadow government controlling US politics behind the scene isn’t something that happened overnight.