Sixty years ago today, a Communist murdered the president of the United States. Sixty years ago later today, other Communists started to think about how they could fool the people of the United States that someone other than a Communist murdered the president of the United States.
By Dec. 1, just nine days after John F. Kennedy’s assassination, the Communist Party of Illinois had already released “Who Really Killed Pres. Kennedy?” It claimed that “only the Ultra-Right and the Southern Racists” benefitted from the assassination. “Dallas is a stronghold of the Ultra-Right” and “the John Birch Society,” the Communists reasoned.
READ MORE: JFK 60 Years Later
The mimeographed flyer asked of Lee Harvey Oswald, “Who really was he? An adventurer who was made the ‘fall guy’ by higher ups? A dupe? Or an innocent victim? What is the truth?”
Quid est veritas?
“On 12/16/63, an informal discussion was held in at CP headquarters, NYC, and Irving Potash participated,” an FBI memo released 54 years after the assassination stated. “It was stated that Mark Lane, former New York State Assemblyman, has prepared a brief that will knock holes ‘in proof that [Lee] Oswald was guilty.’ George Morris said the prime thing to do was to prove he [Oswald] was not a Marxist. Potash said ‘The New Republic’ has an investigator trying to prove he [Oswald] was linked to the ultra-right.”
A few smart right-wingers, though not privy to such meetings, immediately intuited the Left’s long game.
M. Stanton Evans lamented the drive to “turn tragedy to ideological uses” in the Dec. 10, 1963, issue of the National Review Bulletin. “The President of the United States is assassinated by a Marxist,” he marveled. “That Marxist is himself murdered by an idolator of the President and his predecessor, Franklin Roosevelt. American liberalism surveys this monstrous scenario and concludes—that it is the fault of ‘the Radical Right.’”
Stefan Possony worried about the Communists shifting blame to the FBI and anti-communist groups.
“This is not the first time in U.S. history that the political background of a Presidential assassination was obfuscated,” the academic once on the Gestapo’s most-wanted list wrote William F. Buckley Jr. “The present operation is beginning to have initial successes—if we do not set forth a factual interpretation, we shall one day rue this omission.”
The facts, if not the fantasy, certainly led one to damming interpretations.
Lee Harvey Oswald, of course, had defected to the Soviet Union and taken a Russan bride. He volunteered for the anti-Kennedy Fair Play for Cuba Committee. He shot at Gen. Edwin Walker, a right-wing Democrat associated with the John Birch Society, in a failed assassination attempt in April 1963. He wrote to leading American Communists Gus Hall, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, and Arnold Johnson and received advice in responses from Johnson, jailed the previous decade for violating the Smith Act. The material the party sent to Oswald included the anti-JFK screed “The Ultra-Right, Kennedy, and the Role of the Progressives for Peoples Unity Against Big Business Reaction and the War Danger.” In the months leading up to the assassination, Oswald contacted the Russan embassy in Mexico City about a return to the Soviet Union. Once captured, the assassin requested John Abt, a one-time Soviet agent and longtime defense counsel to Communists, as his lawyer.
Possony, like Jeremiah, issued unheeded warnings. The Left’s conspiracy theories so wildly succeeded in muddying the waters that not only did they convince many brainless conservatives, but an emboldened Left subsequently blamed the American Right as a matter of routine for atrocities committed by criminals as far removed from conservatism as Oswald.
Who killed Malcolm X, all those people at Jonestown, and the constituents of Gabby Giffords in that supermarket parking lot? Always and everywhere the culprit is whoever best serves the Left’s agenda — not black Muslims but law enforcement, not Communists who used the Bible as toilet paper but “a power-hungry fascist” (Walter Cronkite) or a man “preaching a blend of fundamentalist Christianity and social activism” (New York Times), not a vacant-eyed weirdo only incidentally described by a classmate as “left wing, quite liberal” but one almost certainly inspired by Sarah Palin placing a target over congressional districts many months earlier.
We shall one day rue this omission, indeed.
The Kennedy assassination inevitably inspires what-might-have-been parlor games. The counterfactual history worth pondering wonders what might have been if self-serving conspiracy theories ran into a reality check.