Again the pressure to back off from the Double Eagles. “Just tell me what you need to, Dwight. I came here because of you, and I’m ready to listen.”
“It’s not easy to condense twenty years of investigation into an hour, but I’ll try, for both our sakes. First, I want to dispense with the existing conspiracy theories. To do that, you must stop thinking of the word ‘conspiracy’ as meaning a large number of people. Large conspiracies usually fail, and when they do succeed, they never stay secret for long.”
“Agreed.”
“Second, I want to explain a principle that a colleague of mine calls ‘Stone’s Razor.’ It’s a way we deal with coincidence.”
“All right.”
“Nearly every JFK conspiracy theory depends upon one critical and unacceptable coincidence: President Kennedy’s motorcade passing beneath the building where Lee Harvey Oswald worked. Oswald got that job randomly, through the friend of a friend of his wife, and only thirty-seven days before the assassination. Kennedy’s motorcade route was chosen by the Secret Service only seven days before the assassination.”
“And it wasn’t made public until three days prior,” Kaiser clarifies, “after being printed in the Dallas Times Herald on Tuesday, November nineteenth.”
“The point,” Stone continues, “is that Oswald getting the Book Depository job and the choice of motorcade route were causally unrelated. That’s been proved as conclusively as any fact in history. No one could have placed Oswald in that job in that building with the intent to kill JFK, because no one knew at the time he got the job what the motorcade route would be. Consequently, any conspiracy involving Lee Harvey Oswald that depends upon inspiration or planning prior to November fifteenth is de facto impossible.”
“Which is all of them, right?”
“Except Oliver Stone’s. Since he claimed that everyone from the CIA to the military-industrial complex was in it together—right up to LBJ—Oliver was claiming that they could have controlled the motorcade route and put Kennedy in Oswald’s sights.”
“Yeah, well . . . let’s come back to planet Earth.”
“How about halfway back?” Dwight says with a smile. “If I asked you to list the main conspiracy suspects in the assassination, you’d probably give the same ones most Americans would.”
The usual suspects, I think, recalling Kaiser’s list from last night outside City Hall. “The CIA, Cuban exiles, Castro, the Russians, the Mafia, and the military-industrial complex?”
“Right. And while the House Select Committee cleared the CIA, the Cubans—both pro-and anti-Castro—and the Mafia as organized groups in 1979, it did not rule out the possibility that individual members of those entities had carried out the hit in Dallas.”
“And your Working Group?”
“We picked up where the Select Committee left off. Let’s dispense with the CIA first. Most top-level agency people were relieved or even happy to hear JFK was dead, but they had no reason to kill him. Kennedy had never made good on his threat to splinter the agency in a million pieces, beyond firing Richard Bissell and Allen Dulles. Nor did the agency need to cover its attempts to assassinate Fidel Castro, as is often proposed. Both Kennedy brothers had been partners with the CIA in that effort since taking office. Robert Kennedy had personally signed off on Operation Mongoose, so the Kennedys stood to lose even more than the agency did by exposure. That whole theory is nonsensical.”
“Who else can you eliminate?”
“I won’t waste thirty seconds of breath on the ‘military-industrial complex.’ Contrary to popular belief, John Kennedy was no liberal saint, but a dedicated cold warrior. Therefore, defense corporations had no reason to kill him. That theory also violates the large-conspiracy rule. They never could have kept it secret.”
“And as for the Russians,” Kaiser offers, “by assassinating a sitting president, they would have risked global thermonuclear war. There’s zero chance they did that.”
“What about the Russians sending Oswald to do it?”
“Less than zero,” Stone declares, becoming more animated by the give-and-take of discussion. “Oswald had a neon paper trail behind him that led straight to Moscow. Besides, because of his defection to Russia, the KGB knew better than anyone how unstable Lee was.”
Stone uses Oswald’s first name as easily as a man who knew him all his short life. “And Castro?”
This time Stone’s answer is slow in coming. “That’s another kettle of fish. Castro knew that the CIA and the Mafia had been trying to kill him, and he had intel reports that those attempts had been sanctioned by the Kennedy brothers. In early ’63, Castro actually said publicly that elected officials who engaged in those types of activities could become targets of such activities themselves. In the very year of Kennedy’s assassination, he’d threatened to retaliate in kind.”
“Well, did he?”
“There’s no evidence that he did. Oswald probably hoped that killing JFK would make him a hero in Havana, and thus facilitate his entry to the country. But that’s all.”
Stone’s eyes and voice betray emotion when he speaks of Oswald and Castro, and I sense that we’re nearing the crux of his theory. “What’s the rest of it, Dwight?”
“Let’s cross off the Cuban exiles first, the men betrayed at the Bay of Pigs. They were shot to pieces on the beach or imprisoned because Kennedy wouldn’t send air support. A lot of them wanted to punish him for that, and they had the training and weapons needed to pull off Dealey Plaza. However, our considered opinion is that none did. Do I need to go into detail as to why?”
“No. So, where does that leave us?”
“La Cosa Nostra,” says Kaiser.
Stone nods. “From the Mafia, the Select Committee singled out Carlos Marcello, Santo Trafficante, Sam Giancana, Johnny Roselli, and Jimmy Hoffa as serious suspects. It recommended that all be investigated further, but I’m sorry to say that no law enforcement agency ever officially fulfilled that charge, including the Bureau.”