What the New JFK Documents Reveal

By Thomas Neuburger

If you’re looking for an introduction to the just-released JFK material, there’s a good discussion (above) on Breaking Points by Jefferson Morley, a bona fide expert. It's worth listening all the way through.

Morley’s Substack site is here (much of it’s paid-only). His YouTube channel is here.

Two General Points

He starts with two general comments that I think are important (transcript edited for clarity and concision; emphasis mine below)

Why This Matters

• Why does it matter who killed JFK? “Because when JFK was killed and there was no accountability, the American Empire took a turn. Kennedy was trying to steer the ship one way, and when Kennedy was killed and there was no accountability, the ship was steered another way.

“And we never had a course correction after that, because the faction that avoided accountability with Kennedy's murder and avoided responsibility for it — they had impunity, and they could dominate all the policy debates that followed. And also because they had the secrecy apparat, the apparatus of secrecy around them.”

About ‘Smoking Guns’

• “People want a smoking gun; I say ‘Don't look for a smoking gun, look for a fact pattern. Don't push the string of a theory, look for a fact pattern and let the fact pattern tell you what's really going on here.’

Disclosures

A few selected disclosures to pique your interest:

• “After 60 years with this very significant disclosure that we got last week, the story of what happened in 1963 is becoming clearer. Two documents came out that I think are really important, and they kind of set the stage for what we're going to learn and what we have learned.”

The two documents mentioned are 1) a memo written by Arthur Schlesinger to JFK in June, 1961 warning that the CIA was undermining his presidency, and 2) a set of documents involving James Angleton, the CIA’s chief of counter-intelligence and the “dominant counterintelligence figure in the non-communist world.”

The Schlesinger Memo

Of the Schlesinger memo, Morley says:

• “A whole page of this document had been secret for 62 years. This is a very significant chapter [in the history] because … Kennedy is furious after the Bay of Pigs. He felt that the CIA was trying to impose their foreign policy on him, and he said ‘How could I have been so dumb?’ And he raged … there's a quote that you'll see all the time, ‘I want to split the CIA into a thousand pieces and scatter it to the winds.’ […]

“But when Kennedy calmed down, he said, ‘Well, what can I do?’ and Arthur Schlesinger, a liberal adviser, said, ‘Well, what you could do is, you could reorganize the CIA.’ And he writes a long memo — ‘if you want to do that, Mr. President, here's how you do it, and here's why you do it.’

“And this page that was kept secret for 60 years really tells the why of what Kennedy wanted to do. Now ultimately Kennedy didn't do it, [it’s] a big job to reorganize the CIA, [and] he had other priorities. He decided not to do it, but this is an insight into his thinking, and it's an insight into his thinking that the CIA didn't want anybody to know about.”

The Schlesinger memo is here.

The CIA’s Five-Year Surveillance of Lee Harvey Oswald

Regarding Angleton’s surveillance of Oswald, Morley says this:

• “Lee Harvey Oswald was not a lone nut. He was a known quantity to a small group of CIA Counter-Intelligence officers for four years between November 1959 and November 1963. We now have all of the information that the CIA had on Oswald — 42 documents, 180 pages of material.

“He was followed from beginning to end. There was no point in those four years, or very few points in those four years, where top people in the CIA did not have Lee Harvey Oswald's home address. And the guy's moving all the time. He goes to Moscow, to Minsk, he comes back to Fort Worth, he moves to New Orleans, he comes back to Dallas, he goes to Mexico, he comes back to Dallas [and] every step of the way, top people in the CIA knew about it.”

• “There were two FBI reports on Oswald, everything he had been doing recently — gotten arrested, he'd gone to Mexico City, he'd come back, two FBI reports saying Oswald’s in Dallas — they [the reports] land on [James] Angleton desk on November 14th and 15th, 1963. Never been explained.”

The interview also contains a story about assassination attempts made against Charles de Gaulle that De Gaulle thought the CIA was responsible for.

Stay tuned. This subject is back on the national radar.