MW Question 1– Thanks for taking time for this interview, but I want to be upfront with you: I’m going to challenge your views on the vaccine by pointing out what-I-think are the glaring flaws in your logic.

In your latest article Obesity and the End of the Vaxxing Debate, you disparage the group you call “anti-vaxxers” while—at the same time—you defend the very ideas that form the cornerstone of their beliefs. Let me explain. You openly admit that there is some basis to anti-vaxxer “fears of the Covid vaccines”. You also acknowledge that “The vaccines” use “an entirely new mRNA technology, in which the body’s own cellular machinery is actually hijacked to produce portions of the Covid spike-protein, and new medical innovations sometimes have negative consequences.” Following these admissions, you quickly move on to your own assumption “that the risks of the Covid vaccine were considerably lower than the risks of serious Covid illness.”

That’s fine; you made your own decision based on your grasp of the information available. But, here’s the thing: Your analysis actually supports the anti-vaxxer position. You have actually made our case for us.

When you admit that these injections are an entirely new and insufficiently tested technology that “hijacks” the “body’s own cellular machinery” forcing it to produce the spike protein”; you are, in fact, adopting the core position of the anti-vaxx movement. This is it. This is what we oppose. Do you see that?

And, what you are saying (surprisingly) is that that point of view “hardly seem unreasonable”. In other words, you accept that the central tenets of the anti-vax movement are reasonable. But that’s not all you say. You go on to say in the next paragraph: “the vaccines were rushed into production and release, circumventing the long process of clinical trials that would otherwise have been required.”

This is another stunning admission. Once again, you are making the anti-vax case and then (only later) quibbling about issues that are clearly debatable among reasonably well-informed people. But on the central issues; you are admitting that anti-vaxx views are reasonable.

One gets the feeling that your issue with the antivaxx people has less to do with their core beliefs than it does with the fact that we tend to be resolutely inflexible in our views, a point that I would agree with 100%.

So here’s my question to you: Do you think your article is consistently pro-vaxx or can you see where readers might think you are sending a mixed-message?

Ron Unz: Sure, I started my article by deliberately emphasizing that many of the fundamental concerns of the anti-vaxxers seemed perfectly reasonable to me, namely that a radical new medical technology rushed into widespread release without extensive testing might be a very dangerous thing.

That’s why I wouldn’t really say that I necessarily “disparage” all the anti-vaxxers in my article. However, I do think that the evidence that has come out over the last couple of years indicates that they were probably wrong and that their fears proved to be greatly exaggerated.

Meanwhile, some of the more extreme anti-vaxxers are still claiming that millions or even many hundreds of millions of people will soon be dead from vaxxing. There doesn’t seem to be any evidence for such wild claims and I think that the apparent refusal of more moderate anti-vaxxers to publicly criticize such doubtful “allies” seriously damages their own credibility.

For example, some commenter on my article cited a certain anti-vaxxer calling herself “Prof. Dolores Cahill, Ph.D” who flatly stated:

“Everyone who has had an mRNA injection dies within 3 to 5 years, even if they’ve only had one injection!”

I suppose what she’s claiming is possible, but I tend to doubt it, so I’d certainly “disparage” someone like that.

MW Question 2– I want to go back to an observation you made in the beginning of your article. You said: “The vaccines” use “an entirely new mRNA technology, in which the body’s own cellular machinery is actually hijacked to produce portions of the Covid spike-protein, and new medical innovations sometimes have negative consequences.”

This is really the crux of the matter, isn’t it? Unfortunately, the point has been so belabored that most people are just tired of talking about it. But it’s an important point, all the same, so let me see if I can frame it a little differently. Let’s say you have a head cold that is getting worse. So, you go to the doctor to get a perscription. But—to your surprise—the doctor tells you:

“I don’t have any medicine that will make you better, but I do have a pill that will rewire your immune system so it produces the medication you need to improve.”

So—all of a sudden—you are given the option of returning home with no medicine at all or taking an experimental chemical that will (in your words) hijack “the body’s own cellular machinery… to produce portions of the Covid spike-protein.”

Explain to me how this is different than the decision we were all asked to make when the combined medical, state and media establishments all decided that everyone needed to get jabbed with their experimental injection?

Ron Unz: Sure, there are obvious dangers in using a new medical technology such as mRNA vaccines.

In fact, the government of China has refused to approve the general use of mRNA vaccines for exactly those sorts of reasons. Western media outlets claim that mRNA vaccines are more effective against Covid than the traditional vaccines China is using, but the Chinese government is taking a very cautious approach and I certainly can’t blame them.

There’s another important related point I didn’t bother including in this article, but I’ve mentioned in some previous ones. I thought there were some very suspicious aspects to the massive establishment media campaigns against using HCQ and IVM as possible Covid treatments. Whether those compounds are effective or not I can’t really say, but the immediate, coordinated attacks against them raised all sorts of dark suspicions in my mind.

Under normal circumstances, the Covid vaccines would have needed to undergo lengthy clinical trials before they were approved for widespread use, but those requirements were waived under the emergency provisions that no other possible medical treatments existed. So HCQ and IVM had to be declared worthless and banned for Covid use in order to allow the controversial vaxxing campaign to go forward without testing. Maybe the medical criticism was warranted, but a cynical observer would naturally have some doubts.

The problem is that everything in life has risks and we must weigh them against each other. I don’t have any medical expertise and it seemed clear that Covid was a dangerous illness, while there was also considerable uncertainly about the mRNA vaccines, so I waited a few months to see if any major problems developed. By early June 2021, the AMA reported that roughly 96% of all the medical doctors they polled had already been fully vaxxed. Since doctors know more about balancing those risks than I do, a few weeks later I went ahead and got myself vaccinated.

Over the last couple of years, our alternative media website has been flooded by a vast number of zealous anti-vaxxers, promoting their fears of the Covid vaccines with tremendous energy and commitment.

On its face, such concerns with the Covid vaccination drive hardly seem unreasonable. The vaccines used in most Western countries have been based upon an entirely new mRNA technology, in which the body’s own cellular machinery is actually hijacked to produce portions of the Covid spike-protein, and new medical innovations sometimes have negative consequences. The lockdowns originally implemented to control the Covid epidemic proved highly unpopular and increasingly unworkable, so the vaccines were rushed into production and release, circumventing the long process of clinical trials that would otherwise have been required.

It’s hardly surprising that many people would be unnerved by the widespread use of a radical new medical technology introduced without sufficient testing.

But I don’t have any background in medicine or microbiology, and it seemed that the overwhelming majority of medical professionals believed that the risks of the Covid vaccine were considerably lower than the risks of serious Covid illness. So after waiting a few months, I got myself vaccinated in mid-2021. Neither I nor anyone I knew had any ill effects from the shots, and I soon stopped paying much attention to the issue.

Meanwhile, the alarms raised by some of the louder anti-vaxxers became more and more extreme, sometimes predicting that the vaccinations would kill millions or even many hundreds of millions. Quite a lot of the anti-vaxxers on this lightly moderated website also began cluttering up unrelated articles with their fervent anti-vaxxing comments, which greatly irritated me.

Although I wasn’t much interested in the issue, I decided that the anti-vaxxers sounded like a bunch of total crack-pots and said so in an interview, immediately provoking an avalanche of overwhelmingly hostile responses, which eventually totaled more than 850,000 words.

• Are the Opponents of the Covid Injections “Anti-Vaxx Crackpots”?
  Mike Whitney Interview with Ron Unz
  The Unz Review • August 1, 2021 • 9,000 Words • 1,681 Comments

Since then, every six months or so, I’ve published another column on the vaxxing controversy, pointing to the increasingly strong indications that anti-vaxxing concerns had been hugely exaggerated and there was very little evidence the vaccines were causing any significant numbers of deaths. Each time, my remarks have aroused another huge wave of extremely angry responses from militant anti-vaxxers:

• Covid Deaths and Vaxxing Deaths
  The Unz Review • January 17, 2022 • 2,800 Words • 1,409 Comments
• Vaxxing Conspiracies and 700,000 Rumble Views
  The Unz Review • July 18, 2022 • 2,800 Words • 941 Comments
• Vaxxing Deaths or Covid Deaths?
  The Unz Review • January 2, 2023 • 3,300 Words • 1,036 Comments

In my latest article published last week, I noted that most anti-vaxxers have claimed that Covid vaccinations had produced a large wave of fatal heart attacks and strokes. However, although American deaths from those causes have indeed risen quite substantially from 2019, nearly all of that increase occurred in 2020, before the Covid vaccination drive began, while the numbers remained almost unchanged in 2021 and 2022. This suggested that the rise was caused by the Covid infections of 2020 rather than the vaccines later deployed to control them, and scientific studies have already demonstrated that even mild Covid infections lead to a greatly increased future risk of heart attacks and strokes. And if the massive amount of vaxxing and boosting that began early in 2021 had almost no impact upon such mortality totals, it seemed unlikely that they have been causing very many deaths.

I had summarized my findings in a few simple points:

1. Vaxxing only began on December 14, 2020, so it would have had almost no public health impact during that year.
2. Except for homicides and accidents, nearly all the major changes in American death rates occurred in 2020, so these must have been due to Covid.
3. Except for homicides and accidents, non-Covid death rates showed almost no change in 2021 and 2022, so the vaccines probably had no impact one way or the other.

After publishing that piece, I had planned to once again set aside the topic for another half-year or so, then review six additional months of data that I expected would further strengthen my original conclusions. However, some additional information was soon brought to my attention that seemed to finally settle the vaxxing controversy once and for all.

First, a very level-headed commenter from Iceland calling himself “Niceland” noted that except for the elderly, his own country’s population had experienced no noticeable increase in deaths during the last couple of years, despite the very heavy vaxxing regime it had followed. He then checked, and discovered that the same was true of Denmark and a couple of other nearby European countries. Since the overwhelming majority of the populations were vaxxed, and those younger than about 65 showed no significant excess mortality, it seemed unlikely that vaxxing had caused any substantial number of deaths.

Around the same time, someone else brought to my attention a very useful website affiliated with UC Berkeley and the Max Planck Institute that provides a very easy means of displaying decades of excess mortality statistics for dozens of countries. These mortality results presented can be stratified by gender and various age-groups, and the reference years used to calculate the “excess” can also be selected.

• The Human Mortality Database – Short-Term Mortality Fluctuations

So I decided to repeat Niceland’s analysis for all the countries available. I focused upon total deaths for working-age individuals age 15-64, used the average mortality rates for the years 2015-2019 as the reference, and examined the totals for the years 2020, 2021, and 2022.

Until the last couple of years, I doubt whether I’d ever spent even ten minutes thinking about vaccination issues, and probably a large majority of ordinary Americans fell into the same category. I’d had a few rounds of shots as a young child, supplemented by boosters every ten or fifteen years and an annual flu shot. I had no idea whether any of them worked, but except for having a sore arm for a day or so, none of them had produced any ill effects for me, nor for anyone I knew.

Everything changed in 2020, as the sudden Covid epidemic led our government to heavily promote a massive vaccination drive based upon a new mRNA technology. This quickly caused the once-obscure anti-vaxxing movement to grow enormously in size and visibility, suddenly moving to the center of political life. For a period of a year or more, the less mainstream portions of the Internet, including our own website, were awash with the outpourings of a vast number of fearful vaccine-skeptics, with the debate only subsiding after the February outbreak of the Russia-Ukraine war diverted public attention toward an entirely different issue.

From the beginning I was extremely doubtful of all these anti-vaccine arguments and I presented my contrary views in a lengthy interview with Mike Whitney. Together with a couple of follow-up columns, it provoked some 4,600 comments totaling 850,000 words, the overwhelming majority of those responses being intensely hostile to my position:

• Are the Opponents of the Covid Injections “Anti-Vaxx Crackpots”?
  Mike Whitney Interview with Ron Unz
  The Unz Review • August 1, 2021 • 9,000 Words • 1,681 Comments

As more and more public health data came in, my skepticism of the anti-vaccination position hardened, and in January of last year I published an article summarizing it, followed by an additional article six months later

• Covid Deaths and Vaxxing Deaths
  The Unz Review • January 17, 2022 • 2,800 Words • 1,409 Comments
• Vaxxing Conspiracies and 700,000 Rumble Views
  The Unz Review • July 18, 2022 • 2,800 Words • 941 Comments

Although I certainly regard myself as a member of the anti-anti-vaxxer camp, I think my views on the issue are actually quite moderate, as I spelled out in a couple of early paragraphs in those two articles:

Anti-vaxxers come in a wide variety of different types, and I’d be the first to acknowledge that some of their arguments seem perfectly reasonable. The Covid vaccines were rushed into production without the usual lengthy testing period and the most popular versions used in the West rely upon an innovative new mRNA technology, so it seems quite plausible that the negative side effects have been far greater than from our annual flu shots. Billions around the world have now been vaccinated for Covid, and I would hardly be surprised if many, many tens of thousands have died as a consequence. But such losses would represent merely a tiny sliver of the 15 or 20 million killed by the disease itself, and if the medical experts are correct and vaxxing greatly reduces the risk of severe illness, the cost-benefit ratio is tremendously positive, at least for individuals who are middle-aged or older.

Mandatory vaccination efforts enforced by serious legal or employment sanctions are the explosive flashpoint of the anti-vaxxer movement, but these never made any sense to me. The vaccines appear ineffective in preventing infection or transmission, and their main benefit is to greatly reduce the risk of serious illness or death. So the vaccinated have little to fear from those who reject the needle, while the latter can make an informed—or perhaps emotional—choice in weighing the risks of a relatively untested vaccine against those of severe Covid illness. Given the extreme paranoia of a considerable slice of anti-vaxxers, heavy governmental pressure may even be proving counter-productive.

For years, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. had been one of the most prominent public figures in the anti-vaxxing movement, and I was very pleasantly surprised to discover that the positions he had taken in his massive #1 Amazon best-seller were equally moderate on the other side, as I had earlier noted in my strongly favorable review of his important book:

Surprisingly enough, and very contrary to my expectations, Kennedy’s stated position on vaccines seemed rather mild, quite different from the wild fear-mongering so regularly encountered on the Internet. He claimed that many vaccines weren’t properly tested, often had harmful side-effects, and were promoted mostly due to the profiteering of greedy pharmaceutical corporations and their subverted governmental regulators, accusations far more moderate—and far more plausible—than I had assumed he would make. While it’s not at all uncommon for wild-eyed anti-vaxxers to warn of millions—or even billions!—of deaths due to the current Covid vaccination drive, I didn’t see any such egregious claims in the carefully-documented chapters of this book…

Unlike some of his more extreme supporters, Kennedy seemed to fully admit that Covid is a dangerous disease, but correctly emphasized its extreme age-skew. He pointed out that the vaccines have proven far less effective than originally predicted, and he noted that they were rushed into widespread release without sufficient testing, which may eventually lead to major future health problems. The legal fig-leaf that allowed the normal regime of patient trials to be set aside was the claim that no other medical treatment existed, and this probably explains the widespread attacks on the use of IVM. Moreover, the vaccination of children or the youthful seems very misguided given mildness of the illness for those age-cohorts.

• American Pravda: Vaxxing, Anthony Fauci, and AIDS
  The Unz Review • December 6, 2021 • 6,100 Words

It’s now been nearly six months since I last reviewed the Covid vaccination controversy, so I decided to revisit the topic, partly prompted by a new book I had recently received on the issue, published under the auspices of Kennedy’s Children’s Health Defense organization.

ORDER IT NOW

The title was “Cause Unknown” and the author was Edward Dowd, a highly-successful former Wall Street fund manager who had become a vocal public critic of the Covid vaccines in 2021. Although only released in mid-December and priced at a hefty $34.99, the book has already become quite successful, currently ranked #274 across all of Amazon’s millions of selections, while also having touched the #1 spot in the specific categories of virology, immunity, and vaccinations.

The 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy possibly ranks as the single most famous event of the twentieth century.

For nearly sixty years, there have been widespread suspicions that he died at the hands of a conspiracy, as did his brother Robert a few years later. Although these “conspiracy theories” have been ignored or dismissed by nearly our entire mainstream media, they have inspired hundreds or thousands of books and films along with countless articles, and have been widely believed by large portions of the American public. The resulting loss of faith in our major institutions has been dramatic, leading to today’s intense popular skepticism on so many other issues, whether justified or unjustified.

Our government has still never released all of its official records on the death of our 35th President, but after almost six decades that monumental cover-up may finally be starting to collapse.

Tucker Carlson has the most popular cable news show, and late last week he aired an explosive segment in which he declared that the JFK assassination had been the work of a conspiracy, with our own CIA heavily involved. His nightly broadcast audience is over 3 million and just one copy of his Youtube video has already been watched 1.4 million times. So these shocking claims from a major media outlet have now reached many millions of ordinary Americans, probably more than anything else on this topic in the thirty years since Oliver Stone’s Oscar-winning film JFK was playing in the theaters.

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. is a prominent public figure and best-selling author, nephew of the slain President and son of his murdered brother. He praised Carlson’s show as “the most courageous newscast in 60 years,” and declared: “The CIA’s murder of my uncle was a successful coup d’etat from which our democracy has never recovered.”

The most courageous newscast in 60 years. The CIA’s murder of my uncle was a successful coup d'état from which our democracy has never recovered. @TuckerCarlson https://t.co/qJ1sUdhe4t

— Robert F. Kennedy Jr (@RobertKennedyJr) December 17, 2022

These incendiary remarks were Retweeted more than 33,000 times with over 5 million views. So perhaps after more than two generations, the propaganda-bubble created by the dishonest 1964 Warren Commission may finally be starting to collapse.

As a consequence, my own past writings on the subject have received a burst of renewed attention:

• American Pravda: The JFK Assassination, Part I – What Happened?
  Ron Unz • The Unz Review • June 18, 2018 • 4,800 Words
• American Pravda: The JFK Assassination, Part II – Who Did It?
  Ron Unz • The Unz Review • June 25, 2018 • 8,000 Words
• American Pravda: Anne Frank, Sirhan Sirhan, and AIDS
  Ron Unz • The Unz Review • January 31, 2022 • 3,600 Words
• American Pravda: How the CIA Invented “Conspiracy Theories”
  Ron Unz • The Unz Review • September 5, 2016 • 2,600 Words

Until a dozen years ago, I had never questioned the official narrative of the Kennedy assassination, and almost none of my own work on this topic has been original. I merely read the existing books and articles and drew my own conclusions, then published those findings.

But by purest coincidence, another massive cover-up may also now be collapsing, on a topic that has been my central focus for the last couple of years.

The global Covid epidemic has been one of the most important world events of the last hundred years, probably only rivaled by the two world wars and the Great Depression. More than 18 million people have already died, including over a million Americans, and the daily lives of many billions have been enormously disrupted.

Beginning in April 2020, I have published a long series of articles arguing that there is strong perhaps overwhelming evidence that the Covid outbreak was the result of an American biowarfare attack against China (and Iran).

But given the tremendous importance of the issue, I’ve been very disappointed that so few others anywhere on the Internet have come forward to raise similar suspicions or even merely to mention my own controversial analysis. Since the early days of 2020, there has been an enormous amount of discussion on almost all other aspects of the global pandemic and its consequences, yet only an infinitesimal sliver has touched upon the apparent evidence of American foreknowledge and plausible culpability. However, that may finally be starting to change.

Earlier this month, the Daily Sceptic, a British webzine often focused on Covid-related issues, published an excellent article by editor Will Jones that independently raised some of the same issues, particularly focusing upon the secret DIA report produced in November 2019 that seemingly implied foreknowledge of the Wuhan outbreak.

• How Did U.S. Intelligence Spot the Virus in Wuhan Weeks Before China?
  Will Jones • The Daily Sceptic • December 12, 2022 • 3,200 Words

This piece was later republished by the Infowars and Brownstone Institute websites, bringing it to much wider attention, including my own. Meanwhile, Toby Young, the prominent British public intellectual who had founded the webzine, Tweeted it out to his 240,000 followers:

How suspicious should we be that US intelligence analysts picked up on what they deemed a dangerous novel virus in China at a time when there's no evidence China had picked up on it or was concerned? https://t.co/ogbdIoCFPm

— Toby Young (@toadmeister) December 21, 2022

The Brownstone institute has also been very heavily focused on Covid issues, and its editor Jeffrey Tucker soon published a somewhat related article noting the extremely suspicious timing of America’s 2019 Crimson Contagion simulation. That eight month federal/state exercise had been run by Robert Kadlec, our country’s chief biowarfare advocate, and was aimed at preparing ourselves against infection from any dangerous respiratory virus that might hypothetically arise in China, with the effort concluding just before the Covid virus suddenly appeared in Wuhan.

• What Is Crimson Contagion?
  Jeffrey A. Tucker • The Brownstone Institute • December 22, 2022 • 1,300 Words

The author declared it “the most intriguing element” he’d ever encountered in his years of writing about Covid and repeatedly Tweeted it out to his 137,000 followers, while it was also republished on the Daily Sceptic website.

In three years of writing on this topic, this article covers the most intriguing element I've yet found. https://t.co/nVn3eiAaZD

— Jeffrey A Tucker (@jeffreyatucker) December 22, 2022

Tucker Carlson and RFK Jr. on the JFK Assassination

Tucker Carlson hosts the most popular cable news show and last Thursday he aired an explosive segment in which he declared that that 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy had been the work of a conspiracy, with our own CIA heavily involved.

Carlson’s regular nightly audience is over 3 million, and more than a million have already watched the Youtube video, so these bombshell accusations regarding the events in Dallas have probably now reached more ordinary Americans than anything else on the topic in the three decades since Oliver Stone’s Oscar-winning film JFK was playing in the theaters.

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., nephew of the slain President and son of his murdered brother praised Carlson’s show as “the most courageous newscast in 60 years,” and his remarks have been Retweeted more than 22,000 times.

The most courageous newscast in 60 years. The CIA’s murder of my uncle was a successful coup d'état from which our democracy has never recovered. @TuckerCarlson https://t.co/qJ1sUdhe4t

— Robert F. Kennedy Jr (@RobertKennedyJr) December 17, 2022

Kennedy is a prominent public figure and best-selling author, with the strongest possible personal standing on the murder of his uncle. But I suspect that if Elon Musk hadn’t bought Twitter, that Tweet would have been immediately shadow-banned, disappearing with scarcely a trace.

In recent decades, such conspiratorial beliefs on the JFK assassination have been largely confined to the Left, with Stone himself being a prime example. But Carlson is one of America’s most influential conservatives, so he may have successfully implanted these ideas among a portion of our citizenry previously unexposed to them. He also noted that widespread use of the insulting phrase “conspiracy theory” only began in the aftermath of the JFK assassination, with the CIA itself successfully marginalizing its critics by promoting that accusation in the compliant media.

Indeed, as a consequence of those decades of skewed and dishonest media coverage, I had spent most of my entire life assuming that such “conspiracy theories” were total nonsense and had never taken them seriously. But about a dozen years ago, I stumbled across some surprising facts and later began a serious investigation, eventually leading me to publish several articles summarizing my remarkable conclusions:

• American Pravda: How the CIA Invented “Conspiracy Theories”
  Ron Unz • The Unz Review • September 5, 2016 • 2,600 Words
• American Pravda: The JFK Assassination, Part I – What Happened?
  Ron Unz • The Unz Review • June 18, 2018 • 4,800 Words
• American Pravda: The JFK Assassination, Part II – Who Did It?
  Ron Unz • The Unz Review • June 25, 2018 • 8,000 Words
• American Pravda: Anne Frank, Sirhan Sirhan, and AIDS
  Ron Unz • The Unz Review • January 31, 2022 • 3,600 Words

Manipulating the JFK Assassination Cover-Up

By purest chance, Carlson’s show had aired just a few days after I had finished reading an important book on the JFK assassination that someone had brought to my attention last year. Originally published almost thirty years ago, this work provided some crucial insights into how the political cover-up of the conspiracy had been arranged, a cover-up that has now successfully endured for nearly six decades. The most powerful man in the world had been killed at the very height of America’s postwar success and prosperity, yet nearly all of America’s political elites were successfully enlisted to suppress the truth of what had happened.

ORDER IT NOW

John Newman had spent twenty years in Military Intelligence and then became a professor of history at the University of Maryland. Since then, he had applied the technical skills that he had honed in his many years of government service to analyzing the bureaucratic minutia of declassified government files and using this material to produce a series of books on the hidden side of American government policies during the 1960s, including our growing involvement in Vietnam and especially the complex circumstances of the JFK Assassination. Oswald and the CIA originally appeared in 1993, but the 2008 edition included a new epilogue, summarizing some of his most important findings.

The book is a lengthy one, running over 650 pages with notes and appendices, and his exhaustively detailed analysis of the released intelligence files and their interpretation can be eye-glazingly dull at points, but his broader conclusions are not difficult to state. The profusion of internal CIA documents regarding Oswald and his movements seems completely inconsistent with any institutional plot at the Agency to kill Kennedy, but might fit very well with the hypothesis of a “rogue faction” at the CIA having played a central role in the affair.

Newman argued that Oswald was exactly the “patsy” that he claimed to be, but more importantly he drew a very sharp distinction between the small group of plotters who had actually organized the JFK assassination itself and the much larger group who carried out the subsequent cover-up, with the motives of many of those latter individuals being entirely different. As he persuasively explained in his epilogue, the conspirators had created a false intelligence trail suggesting that Oswald might have been a Soviet agent, and then used that misinformation to force our fearful government leadership into become their unwitting accomplices after the fact, compelling them to suppress all evidence of any conspiracy in Dallas:

It is now clear that most of the U.S. leaders and officials who participated in the national security cover-up had nothing to do with the plot that was hatched before the president’s murder. Many of them—including leading legislators and Supreme Court Chief Justice Earl Warren—were motivated by the perceived threat of a nuclear exchange with the Soviet Union. Inside the executive branch of government, many others were motivated by the desire to protect their jobs and their institutions. Their collective actions, however, were not the result of an accident; rather, they were the forced checkmate in the endgame of an ingenious plan.

The plan was designed to force official Washington to bury a radioactive story in Oswald’s files in order for America to survive. The plan worked. No matter how sloppy the performance of the shooters in Dallas was, no matter how bungled the autopsy and the handling of the evidence was, all would be trumped by the threat of WWIII and 40 million dead Americans. From the beginning, the plot was based upon the assumption that, when presented with this horrific possibility, everyone would fall into line. This assumption was correct.