By Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr.

July 17, 2024

The attempt to assassinate Donald Trump and his heroic response to it are uppermost in our minds. We don’t yet know the details of who was involved in the attempt on his life, though I suspect that the “lone gunman” theory will turn out to be false. But the sad event offers us a chance to reflect on something that we do know, and that may well be relevant to the attempt on the former—and we trust soon to be next—president’s life: The CIA has been involved in numerous assassination plots since its inception.

One of these plots is especially important in current circumstances. The CIA is implicated in the assassination of President Kennedy in November 1963. Jacob Hornberger has done a great deal of research on this topic and here is what he says. “Why would the CIA snuff out the life of President Kennedy? Because Kennedy was determined to snuff out the life of the CIA, which the CIA, not surprisingly, considered would be a grave threat to ‘national security.’ Kennedy also was determined to move America in a direction different from that of the Pentagon, the CIA, and the NSA, which they considered would result in a communist takeover of the United States. Worst of all, Kennedy was saying good things about Russia and establishing friendly and normal relations with both Russia and Cuba. In the eyes of the national-security establishment, what Kennedy was doing was not only cowardly incompetence that would result in a communist takeover of the United States, it also consisted of treason. We all know what happens to traitors. Corsi Ph.D., Jerome R. Best

Thus, this was a war to the finish. If Kennedy lives, the CIA is put down, America makes friends with Russia and Cuba, and America’s militarist direction comes to an end. If Kennedy dies, the CIA survives and prospers, the never-ending hostility toward Russia and Cuba continues, and America’s militarist direction proceeds indefinitely. The die was cast, but Kennedy obviously proved to be no match for the overwhelming power of the national-security establishment.” See this.

For the same reasons, the CIA killed President Kennedy’s brother, Robert Kennedy. After Lyndon Johnson withdrew from the presidential race in 1968, Kennedy was the odds-on favorite to become the next president. He blamed the CIA for his brother’s death and was determined to bring the agency to heel. For that reason, the CIA had to kill him. David Talbot, the author of Brothers, a book about President Kennedy and his brother Robert Kennedy, gives a vivid account: “As I write in my book Brothers, Robert Kennedy, who served as his brother’s attorney general and knew more about the dark side of American power than any other official of his day, was the first JFK conspiracy theorist. Journalist Jack Newfield, a close friend of RFK, told me: ‘With that amazing computer brain of his, he put it all together on the afternoon of November 22,’ the day in 1963 that President Kennedy was assassinated. Bobby Kennedy figured out that his brother was killed by CIA plotters, using members of the criminal underworld and Cuban exiles. As I reveal in Brothers, RFK planned to reopen the investigation into his brother’s murder if he had been elected president in 1968.