Closing the book on the JFK murder and on his family too

President Donald Trump is being attacked for ordering release of all documents in the assassinations of President John F. Kennedy, and others. But his descendants

By Ray Hanania

FREE/Politics JFK RFK MLK/Friday Jan. 24, 2025

The assassination of President John F. Kennedy on Nov. 22, 1963 was not only a shocking national tragedy but it was an individual trauma for every American at the time.

I was only 9 years old at the time and it impacted me and every other child my age. The schools embedded the shock on us by suspending all classes and bringing every student into the auditorium when the principal and school administrators, many crying, announced that this day was a “national tragedy.”

Worse, it was unexplained. No one knew what happened immediately and speculation was like wildfire. One initial fear at the time included real concerns that this may have been the result of a pre-emptive attack against the United States by the Soviet Union, the Communist nation threatening us with nuclear conflict.

As the funeral and investigation played out, more public questions were raised than were answered. The man identified as the assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, had been assassinated two days later on Nov. 24 by Jack Leon Ruby, a Dallas nightclub owner who had ties to both the Dallas Police and Dallas organized crime.

President John F. Kennedy, courtesy of Wikipedia

The funeral was even more painful as unanswered questions about the murder continued to linger. But it would take years for the public to fully understand the conflicts that challenged the judgment of the Warren Commission which sought to close the case without detailed explanation that Oswald was the only killer and that he did so without assistance from other conspirators.

But American politics was contentious in the 1960s and many believed that the Warren Commission was protecting many others who might have been involved in the assassination, including: the corrupt FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, who hated the Kennedys and kept a secret file on their “sexual” indiscretions; the CIA which viewed Kennedy as “weak”; Vice President Lyndon Baines Johnson who despised the Kennedys because of their disdain for him; the leaders of organized crime who believed Kennedy betrayed them after they helped elect him president by stealing votes in Chicago; the generals and the military industrial complex that were concerned because JFK wanted to extricate the U.S. from the Vietnam War; and, the foreign threats from Cuba’s dictator Fidel Castro over the Bay of Pigs invasion, and the worsening relations with Soviet Union and Communist Party leader, Nikita Khruschev.

And yet, in the face of all these material and political threats of the LBJ controlled Dallas-police, the Hoover FBI, the members of the Warren Commission who were all controlled by powerful military lobbies, and the real international tensions, the Warren Commission wanted the American people to believe their word that an idiot named Oswald could pull off the assassination of the Leader of the Free World by himself, and then be silenced by a mob-connected Ruby who was convicted of murdering Oswald but was diagnosed with Cancer during his appeal, dying in 1967.

To reinforce skepticism about the Warren Commission's conclusions, thre majority of the documents of the investigation were sealed and withheld from public scrutiny. The majority of those documents were sealed for more than 60 years, many believed, to outlast the lives of the majority of Americans who were alive when Kennedy was killed, and thereby eliminate the push for complete exposure.

Many Americans did not believe the Warren Commission's conclusion that Oswald was the sole assassin and that he did it without support from other powerful factions like those mentioned above. Less than a decade after the murder, Hollywood produced several movies that directly challenged the foundation of the Warren Commission’s conclusion on the Kenedy Assassination.

The first was Executive Action in 1973 starring Burt Lancaster, a film that conveyed the American public’s belief that a cabal of powerful forces and Texas oil magnates and lobbies plotted the Kennedy assassination.

The next in 1974, a more powerful film, is The Parallax View which starred Warren Beatty. The movie's premise was that nearly a dozen witnesses at the scene of the assassination of a fictional presidential candidate were being murdered to protect the people behind the assassination. But the patsy in the movie wasn’t a former military goof like Oswald, but a journalist working for a major West Coast newspaper.

Both Executive Action and The Parallax View were only movies. But those movies pandered to the growing and compelling public sentiment that they had been lied to by the Warren Commission, the FBI, LBJ, and the CIA. The public could not answer with what little they were given the question, was Oswald a patsy and part of a larger conspiracy?

Dozens of books have been written about the assassination and movies were made that all challenged the lone gunman theory.

And yet after all these years, hundreds of thousands of documents from the investigation have remained sealed by the government, more than six decades later.

Why? What are they hiding? What is being hidden? What are Americans, those few who survived and remain alive, not being told?

If there was no conspiracy, why weren’t all of the documents released and made public decades ago so that the JFK Assassination generation could better understand what really happened? Instead, sealing the bulk of the records and only releasing some little by little over the years has only fueled public concern.

There is no doubt in my mind that the powers behind the Warren Commission were intent on ensuring that those who were alive when Kennedy was assassinated would not be alive themselves when all of the facts were released.

Why? For what purpose? Other than to hide facts and conclusions that might embarrass important powers who survived Kennedy’s murder. Or were complicit in Kennedy’s murder.

The mishandling of the JFK Assassination has done more to fuel generations of suspicions and unanswered conspiracies. And while the generation that lived through the JFK assassination, and several more including of his brother Robert F. Kennedy and the killing of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., — both hated and spied on by the FBI’s corrupt director, Hoover — have died, their concerns have been passed along to their children.

My father never believed Oswald was the killer and neither do I. Generations since have been left to wonder in a world where dark forces manipulate facts and events whether the JFK assassination was even important.

President Trump’s decision to release all of the JFK investigation documents to the public is a major step in helping those who survived the JFK generation understand the truth and cut through all of the spin not just from he conspiracy theorists but from those nutjobs who have challenged the conspiracy theories with just as much insanity.

Of course, the reaction from the Kennedy family members who are left, like that of JFK’s grandson Jack Schlossberg, has been swayed more by today’s hate-driven polarization politics than a real desire to know the assassination truth. Today’s Kennedys are not like the Kennedys of the 1960s who inspired people to great heights. They are more mudslingers who pander to political favor. Schlossberg, who has been described as “creepy” conduct, attacked Trump for releasing the documents, instead of welcoming what would be a final full disclosure 61 years later.

The Kennedy clan is also angry at the late RFK’s son, Robert F. Kennedy, a conservative who has supported Republican Trump. It’s all a reflection of today’s corrupt politics than the purity of a desire to know the truth.

Who was really involved in the JFK assassination? Now we might be able to have a real assessment based on factual information from the totality of the investigation, rather than one skewered by protecting important political people and movements.

Watch the Video Podcast “Two Guys on Politics” where hosts Ray Hanania and former Congressman Bill Lipinski discuss this issue. Click this link to go to YouTube or watch it using the widget below: