Call me a nut (like you don't already) but I have come to believe that Joseph P. Kennedy had his own son knocked off. He would certainly have had the means; plenty of underworld contacts from his bootlegging days, and the money to pay an assassin or two. As for motive, I think he got wind of JFK's fooling around and though he did not object on principle, he was afraid of public disgrace and private blackmail. He warned JFK to keep his pants zipped while in office but JFK wouldn't. Joe felt betrayed, disrespected as father and elder statesman, and remember his motto: "don't get mad, get even." He had also figured that JFK's back (which WAS injured tripping in the nursery, wasn't it?) would limit his activities or his Addison's disease might kill him early anyway. Remember that JFK was not supposed to have become President; the Crown Prince had always been Joe Jr., who died in WWII. I think Joe Sr. got sick of Jack, and decided that it was Bobby's turn. Having JFK go down in scandal would hurt Bobby; having him go down a still-beloved martyr would help Bobby.
Now, whether Oswald and Ruby were at all involved, or whether the actual killing was handled by other gunman, I can't be sure. But I know who paid them.
I would be surprised if I am the first to suggest this; has anyone seen anything about it before?
I still would like to see the Joe Sr. angle explored more. I think it holds up and explains a lot. People who say that Joe would never have had his son killed to avoid disgrace forget that he had his daughter lobotomized and put away for the same reason. And remember, it was Joe who would have ended up paying the bills for hush money for all the Presidential girlfriends. Remember that only months before, in June 1963, the Profumo/Keeler sex scandal (see the movie) had forced the resignation of the British Defense Minister and probably helped lead to the resignation of the PM a few months later. Joe did not want to see that in the US. It would help explain why the documents have been and will be sealed so long; the Kennedies have a long reach, and can claim
they just want to "protect the family". Probably the Kennedies of the time all knew, and the documents will only be released when they are gone (and can't be prosecuted as accessories.) And if the Kennedies know, it might explain why they keep screwing their lives up. How could they go on knowing what really happened?
The big question is whether RFK was involved, or knew. He could be pretty ruthless and even act outside the law (as when he sicced the FBI on Martin Luther King.) I think he might have gone along if he had seen the assassination as necessary and inevitable, and could rationalize to himself that it would further their shared policy goals. I imagine that he felt fairly confident about becoming President himself; his father had bought the election
for JFK and had plenty left to do it for Bobby. And he was glad to be out of his brother's shadow; had JFK been reelected, it would have been harder to sell the idea of another Kennedy so soon.
Oswald's communist past still makes him the perfect red-herring patsy in this theory . those who weresupposed to be scared -- the Kennedy boys who were making the mistake of thinking themselves more important than the father who made them what they were -- knew who was responsible. the killing could not really be done privately, due to limited access to the well-guarded president (Joe couldn't just shoot him in the white house like the guy in that Gene hackman/Clint Eastwood movie) but if done in public, it had to be done surgically. hence, Dallas.
As for Rose and Jackie, I don't know. Maybe Rose knew; I doubt Jackie did or they would never have let her marry Onassis.
Actually, now that I think of it, Rose would probably have had to know, even instigated; Joe had had a stroke and wasn't doing much except waving one hand a little. Still, he could have signaled his orders if people would obey him. Maybe Rose was making a little point about infidelity to Joe, too. She was tough, and had her own connections. She could have done it.
Has anyone found any flaw in this yet? because I am starting to believe it myself. And there are those guys with Boston accents and narrow lapel suits following me all the time.
No, I am not going to talk about the rather silly question of who actually wrote the plays atrributed to one William Shakespeare. The truth is in there; the conspiracy is within one of the plays. In Hamlet, the title character is placed by his uncle, the usurping king, on a ship to England, along with Hamlet's old friends Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, who are carrying a letter to the King of Enland directing him to have Hamlet executed at once, thus saving Claudius the trouble and political heat. Hamlet gets wind of this, changes the letter to condemn R and G instead, and, when the ship just happens to be attacked by pirates, leaps off onto the pirate ship and gets away. According to what he tells his friend Horatio, the pirates brought Hamlet back to Denmark and let him go, all on a promise that he would "do a good turn for them." So Hamlet goes on to kill the King, and a popular rival for the throne, get himself killed. But it's OK; the Danes' old enemies, the Norwegians, appear, and they take over.
Now, we are supposed to believe this is all coincidence?
How did the pirates just happen to show up? Why would the pirates return Hamlet? what could he do for them? He was a killer and an exile. And how did the Norwegians know to turn up at the end? We're supposed to believe all this JUST HAPPENED?
I don't think so.
I think it is pretty obvious what has happened. Hamlet has sold out his country in order to get his revenge. Let's examine this: Hamlet asks himself, rather famously, whether he should be or not be. Now, though he does not specifically say what he has concluded, I think it is fairly obvious from his behavior. He has decided that he can only get his revenge at the expense of his own life, and has accepted this. So nothing else matters. Not the throne, not Denmark, just his revenge. Soon after, he tries to kill the King, thinking it is he behind the arras -- only to find out he has killed the King's Minister for State Security. This provokes his exile. As he heads down to the port, he sees the fleet of the Norwegians, who have been allowed free passage through Danish territorial waters and the use of Danish port facilities on their way to attack Poland. (In some movies, the Norwegians are shown as an army, but being as you can't march from Norway to Poland, they must be a fleet.) Then he sends R and G on ahead and gives a big speech. But Shakespeare covers up what he does next: he walks over to the Norwegian fleet and asks to see the guy in charge. That's Fortinbras. Who probably does not think much of Hamlet, who is a scholar (acting kinda weird lately too) rather than a warrior, and whose father killed Fortinbras' father, thus preventing the Norwegian conquest of Denmark. But Hamlet has a deal for Fortinbras. He says something like, "I have it on good intelligence that all the people in line for the Danish throne are going to be dead rather soon. If you were to show up at the right moment with your forces, the kingdom will be yours for the taking. All I need is for you to send a ship after mine to attack it and get me off and back home." Fortinbras considers and says, you've got yourself a deal.
So there never were any pirates. Just Norwegians. Hamlet was telling the truth about doing them a favor, but lying about for whom. But the Danes should regard Hamlet as a traitor who sold out his country for his personal interests.
This conspiracy has lain hidden for hundreds of years. I want it uncovered, dammit. If anything happens to me, you will know who is responsible.
Has anyone actually read Saxo Grammaticus for the real story of Amlethi? Anything in there to confirm my suspicions?
Everyone knows that one of the first things that should make you suspect treason and collusion is when everyone from a military unit gets killed -- except one. Never trust the sole survivor. This rule has been around since rules have been.
Nevertheless, some people think they can get away with this sort of thing.
You all know what I'm talking about, and who. I'm talking about Aeneas, the only survivor from the sack of Troy by the Greeks, who went on to found a city in Italy which produced the founders of Rome, who was thus claimed as an ancestor by the Romans and by the Julio-Claudian emperors in particular.
Let's look at this: a fully armed hero, well-known to the Greeks, carrying his aged father on his back, and leading his son by the hand, followed by his household, makes his way through the streets of the burning city of troy, full of Greeks burning, sacking, raping, and slaughtering whatever they can, meets up with some other survivors, outside, who build a bunch of ships and set sail. And how did they manage this? Divine protection. Oh yeah.
It is obvious that Aeneas had made some deal with the Greeks, which, amazingly, they kept, that they would let him get away in exchange for his help in taking Troy. Now, perhaps he knew Troy was doomed and could do nothing to save it. Or he was more concerned about getting to Italy, pursuing his own destiny. I don't know. But I am suspicious. Add to this that at one point during the sack he disguised himself in Greek armor. And that he was the only witness to the death of Priam. You have to wonder. And then he managed to sail all over the Mediterranean without any Greeks bothering him. And when he finally got to Italy, and the natives called on the greek hero Diomedes for help against him, the latter declined. You mean you're not suspicious?
But here is where it get really interesting. The poet Ovid was famously exiled to the Black Sea by Emperor Augustus because of "carmen et error" -- a poem and a mistake, or, by hendiadys, a mistake of a poem. My suspicion is that Ovid, in the course of his mythological researches for his "Metamorphoses" discovered the truth about Aeneas. This was bad, since Augustus' based his legitimacy mainly on having been adopted by Julius Caesar into the Julian family, which claimed descent directly from Aeneas through Aeneas' son Ascanius (aka Iulus.) Augustus could not have this sort of thing, that he was descended from a traitor, bruited about. it would be a disgrace to him and to all of Rome. So he had to get rid of Ovid and discredit him, and give his support to Vergil in his writing of a whitewash of the whole thing, the Aeneid.
I am just so glad that today, government knows it could never get away with this sort of thing.
Supposedly Odysseus spent ten years getting home from Troy. Ten years to travel a distance you could walk in a few months. Seven years with some watery tart on an island. A trip to the ends of the earth to call up spirits from the underworld. Yeah. Right.
Throughout the Iliad, it is apparent that Odysseus, being by far the cleverest of the Greeks and the best in speaking, is entrusted with every mission of a covert or espionage nature. He disguises himself to sneak into Troy, for instance. He puts together raids behind enemy lines. He devises the Horse and the disinformation plant to make the Trojans take it in. He is Homer's Wild Bill Donovan.
So I think it is quite obvious where he really was during the ten years it supposedly took him to get home: on some covert mission in whose cover-up Homer has been involved. So that's what they said when they said the poet was "blind". More like, turning a blind eye.
Now, the question is, what was he really doing? I have a theory on this too.
The fall of Troy is traditionally placed in 1186 BC; the stratum of the archaeological excavation of "Troy" that matches this date is not terribly impressive, but still. This date corresponds to a general collapse and crisis in the Eastern Mediterranean, which included destruction of Mycenaean civilization in Greece (and the start of the Dorian invasions) and four hundred years of "Dark Ages" when even writing was lost, the Exodus and invasion of Palestine by the Israelites, and attacks on Egypt and other countries by the mysterious "Peoples of the Sea". (These may have been Greeks; for instance, in the Odyssey, Menelaus reports that when he left Troy, he was driven by the winds to Egypt and not well received.) It also marked the collapse of the mighty Hittite Empire in Asia Minor. And the Hittites are really interesting.
The Hittites, besides having left the earliest written records of an Indo-European language, having fought back and forth with the Egyptians for possession of Syria and Palestine, are important in two other ways. First of all, they appear to have been in contact with their neighbors in Troy. (Look at a map. Troy is over there by the Dardanelles. The Hittites were centered near modern Ankara but spread far and wide. See how close everyone is? Well, as my high school Russian teacher used to say, they noticed this too.) In Hittite documents are names of quite a few of the places and people appearing in the Homeric poems. So we know they were interested.
The other interesting thing about the Hittites is that they had a secret technological edge on everyone. There was this dark grey metal which as far as most people of the time knew was only found in rocks that fell from the sky. It was as rare as gold and it was awfully hard to work so most peoples just used it for ceremonial stuff. They scoffed at its use the way people scoffed at the prospect of an "atomic weapon", or of a rocket that could fly, say, from Peenemunde to London. But the Hittites figured out how to make things out of it, like weapons that were harder and sharper than the bronze stuff that everyone else was using. (This being the Bronze Age.) In fact, consider this: in some traditions (though not in Homer), the warrior Achilles is invulnerable to weapons (except at his heel. which heel, I am not sure.) Paris (aka Alexander) shoots him there with a poisoned arrow and kills him. But what if this story is just a misinterpretation caused by lack of understanding? What if Achilles was simply invulnerable to BRONZE -- and since all weapons were made of bronze, people assumed this meant totally invulnerable? Perhaps he was simply so much bigger and stronger than everyone else -- no magic there -- that he could wear thicker and more complete armor than others and this made him "invulnerable." But what if the Hittites were secretly supplying the Trojans with iron weapons, the way the US secretly supplied the Afghan Mujahedeen with Stinger antiaircraft missiles, and Achilles' armor could not guard against this? (In fact, Hittite supplies probably were what allowed the Trojans to hold out for 10 years.)
Imagine how the Greeks would have felt. Their best warrior is mysteriously killed. They want to find out what kind of weapon did it and who supplied it. And then they want revenge. So they send Odysseus, of course. And he spends the next ten years tracking the weapon, and its source. And when he realizes who is involved, it's time to take the
Hittites down.
Now, no one knows what really happened to the Hittites. Earthquakes are at least partly to blame. But another reason given is raids by -- the Peoples of the Sea. Who, as I have said, may well have been Greeks, naturally expanding or fleeing the Dorian invasions.
I see Odysseus, in the prow of a long boat, bearing down on the coast of Asia Minor at night, the lights of the watchfires of some Hittite town glinting off his and his men's armor (unless they have rubbed it with soot for disguise.) Weapons check. Sheaves of arrows are slipped into quivers and clicked into place. Daggers are sharpened. "Anyone have wine? Drink it if you got it." The boat hits the sand and the men pile out into the surf, Odysseus saying, "Go, go, go..." and....
"Let's do this for Achilles."
I think that's a better story than Calypso any day.
This is my third techno-thriller idea that no one had better steal.
Copyright 1999 The Slim Odd Cavalier Productions.