Colonel John Hughes-Wilson - JFK--An American Coup: The Truth Behind the Kennedy Assassination

T he assassination of John Kennedy was a world-shattering event.

The world was a very different place in 1963 and the idea that the President of the United States could be gunned down in broad daylight was almost unbelievable. In America men and women wept openly in the streets for their dead leader. But the police and the FBI seemed to be in control and so the murder of the assassin soon afterwards seemed at the time no more than natural justice. The Warren Commissions report explained what had happened. Vietnam, the Beatles, rioting on the streets and the whole roaring tide of the 1960s soon made the Kennedy story fade to a distant memory, and then one of those curious benchmarks of history as a day everyone could remember where they were.

But events soon began to unpick the original version of events. It turned out that official report was little more than a crude government whitewash designed to hide the real truth. Even American presidents admitted as much. President Nixon memorably confessed in private that The Warren Report was the biggest hoax ever perpetrated on the American public. It began to emerge that maybe Lee Harvey Oswald, the original lone nut gunman, may not have acted on his own; others were involved, too. That meant no lone gunman, but a conspiracy.

However, dark theories of conspiracy are nowadays beneath the dignity of serious metropolitan intellectuals and bien pensants. The conspiracies behind the stories of Julius Caesar, Mary Queen of Scots, the French and American Revolutions and the July bomb plot to kill Hitler are accepted as part of the historical record but, for some strange reason, never a conspiracy to murder John F. Kennedy. This dismissive and prejudiced attitude to facts as they emerge only serves to help those who want to suppress the truth for their own dark reasons.

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The sheer weight of evidence and the minutiae surrounding the murder of President Kennedy has been trawled over sometimes with great effort by many dedicated individuals over half a century. They have done an immense amount of research and their theories are fascinating, if often conflicting. However, the big question has always been, what does it all mean? It is as if all the pieces of a giant jigsaw have been laid on the table but no one seems to have assembled the puzzle into a coherent picture.

This book attempts to put that jigsaw together and to answer the big question: who really shot JFK? And, more important still, exactly why was he shot?

In the Kennedy case this is not easy. Someone has been laying a smokescreen of disinformation; a lot of smokescreens in fact, and over a long period of time. False evidence and false documents have been planted and every new research discovery has been swiftly greeted by what looks suspiciously like a rapid rebuttal unit hard at work behind the scenes. The result is that it is sometimes hard to separate fact from myth, and truth from fiction, in a wilderness of mirrors and deliberate diversions, worthy of a stage illusion. But one thing has become clear over the years: there was some secret agenda behind the assassination of John F. Kennedy, and someone has gone to great lengths to cover it up.
We can however take comfort from the reaction of President Charles de Gaulle of France. When he was told about the official American explanation of the assassination, he roared with laughter, Vous me blaguez! [Youre kidding me!] Cowboys and Indians in Texas?!

At some time in the future, when a new US President considers it safe for the million documents on the Kennedy assassination still squirreled away in the Archives to be declassified and shown to the taxpayers who actually paid for them, we may learn even more of the hidden stories behind what was rightly called The Crime of the Century by the American media.

Until then my money is on the independent judgement of Jack Kennedys cynical but very well-informed contemporary, President de Gaulle. Someone has been trying to kid a lot of people for a very long time.

We need to get at the truth.