Salon: The Man Who Solved the Kennedy Assassination

[kskiska]

It wasn't Earl Warren -- or Oliver Stone. His name is G. Robert Blakey.

After a week of media overkill triggered by the 40th anniversary of John F. Kennedy's assassination, the American public is left as bewildered as ever by the "crime of the 20th century." ABC News took the part of the establishment media this time (a role played on past JFK anniversaries by CBS and the New York Times), reassuring us in a two-hour Thursday special report hosted by Peter Jennings that the Warren Commission got it right in 1964: Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone, case closed. But a poll released by the network itself in time for its special underscored just how unconvincing the public finds this official version: four decades after the president's murder, 68 percent of Americans stubbornly refuse to believe that Oswald was a lone assassin, and the same number think there was "an official cover-up" to hide the truth about the assassination from the public.

This deep cloud of suspicion has enabled conspiracy theories to flourish, and the wildest one this season is being advanced by none other than White House spokesman Scott McClellan's father, Barr, who worked in the late '60s for a Texas law firm that represented Lyndon Johnson. In a new book, "Blood, Money & Power," McClellan charges that LBJ conspired with his old boss, power attorney Edward Clark, and Texas oil interests to replace Kennedy through the barrel of a gun.

McClellan's allegation fits the flamboyant pattern set by the master of fevered conspiracy dreams, Oliver Stone, who is back this anniversary with a new director's cut of "JFK," his 1991 indictment of the CIA, the military-industrial complex and, yes, LBJ. Only a Hollywood moviemaker as gloriously and arrogantly wrong-headed about history as Stone could have seized upon the corrupt and supremely weird New Orleans district attorney Jim Garrison -- who brought, and spectacularly lost, the only legal case related to the assassination before a jury -- as a great American hero.

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Bobby Kennedy never got into a position to reopen the file on his brother's assassination -- as he told a crowd of California college students he would in 1968 if elected president. But one of the young federal prosecutors who had worked for him at the Justice Department -- inspired by the battle cry in Shakespeare's "Henry the Fifth," they and Bobby referred to themselves as "we band of brothers" -- would. In 1977, G. Robert Blakey, who had worked on Bobby's "Get Hoffa" team, was named chief counsel of the House Select Committee on Assassinations, the only government panel besides the Warren Commission to investigate JFK's murder. Blakey, an organized crime expert who wrote the 1970 RICO act, would go into the two-year, $6 million probe believing the committee would reach the same conclusions as the Warren Commission. He would emerge as the Warren Report's most authoritative critic and a firm believer that Kennedy had died as the result of a conspiracy, masterminded by Marcello and his Mafia ally, Santo Trafficante, the Florida godfather who had been driven out of the lucrative Havana casino business by Castro and who had been recruited in the CIA plot to kill the Cuban leader.

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http://salon.com/news/feature/2003/11/22/conspiracy/index.html