Essential JFK Assassination Trivia, Volume 2
This old photo clearly shows Lee Harvey Oswald on stage and singing the blues with lead guitarist Jack Ruby at Ruby's nightclub sometime before the assassination of President Kennedy. The Warren Commission made no mention of this musical connection between the assassin and the assassin's killer.
"In the mountains of truth you will never climb in vain: either you will get up higher today or you will exercise your strength so as to be able to get up higher tomorrow." —Friedrich Nietzsche
"...and it wasn't Oswald that did [the Tippet shooting] - of course you know it was Jack Ruby...[Oswald] was supposed to meet with J.D. Tippet and have their 'breakfast of infamy' [at the Steak and Egg Kitchen]. Yeah, the waitresses went on record, in the Warren Report, as saying that Oswald didn't like his eggs and used bad language." —JFK Buff, Slacker, 1991
"We shouldn't have killed John. We should've killed Bobby." —Santos Trafficante Jr., 1987
"We took care of Kennedy...The hit in Dallas was just like any other operation we'd worked on in the past." —Sam Giancana to his brother
"Someone ought to kill that son-of-a-bitch." —Carlos Marcello, referring to Bobby Kennedy
"He's going to be hit. Mark my words, this man Kennedy is in trouble, and he will get what is coming to him." —Santos Trafficante to FBI informant Jose Aleman Jr., 1962
"[Jimmy] Hoffa had been thinking out loud, weighing the merits of two separate murder plans aimed at Robert Kennedy. The first plan, the one Hoffa was then leaning toward, involved firebombing Hickory Hill, Robert Kennedy's Virginia estate...The second plan was apparently a backup scheme...Kennedy would be shot to death from a distance away; a single gunman would be enlisted to carry it out - someone without any traceable connection to Hoffa and the Teamsters; a high-powered rifle with a telescopic sight would be the assassination weapon." —Dan Moldea, The Hoffa Wars
"I thought they would get one of us...I thought it would be me." —Bobby Kennedy to his aide Ed Guthman
"Bobby Kennedy's just another lawyer now." —Jimmy Hoffa, November 24, 1963
"There is solid evidence...that Hoffa, Marcello, and Trafficante - three of the most important targets for criminal prosecution by the Kennedy Administration - had discussions with their subordinates about murdering President Kennedy. Associates of Hoffa, Trafficante, and Marcello were in direct contact with Jack Ruby, the Dallas nightclub owner who killed the 'lone assassin' of the President. Although members of the Warren Commission, which investigated President Kennedy's assassination, has knowledge of much of this information at the time of their inquiry, they chose not to follow it up." —House Assassination Committee Report, 1979
"It doesn't make any sense. He drove past the book depository and the police said conclusively that it was an exit wound. So how is it possible for Oswald to have fired from two angles at once? It doesn't make sense...I'll tell you this! He was not marksman enough to hit a moving target at that range. But...if there was a second assassin...it...That's it!...If they recovered the shells from that rifle..." —Alvy Singer (Woody Allen), Annie Hall
"If anybody really wants to shoot the President of the United States, it's not a difficult job - all one has to do [is] get [in] a high building someday, with a telescopic rifle, and there would be nothing anybody could do to defend against such an attempt." —JFK to special assistant Kenneth O'Donnell, morning of November 22
"Oswald was following the pattern of behavior in which he had been tutored by person or persons unknown...that he had been in contact with others before or during his Marine Corps tour who had guided him and encouraged him in his actions." —John A. McVickar, Assistant Counsel, U.S. Embassy, Moscow, 1959
"U.S. Government personnel plotted to kill Castro from 1960 to 1965. American underworld figures and Cubans hostile to Castro were used in those plots and were provided encouragement and material support by the U.S." —Church Committee Report, 1975
"I don't think some agencies were candid with us. I never thought the Dallas police were telling us the entire truth. Neither was the FBI." —Burt W. Griffin, Warren Commission co-counsel, Rolling Stone, April 24, 1975
"I will smash the CIA into a thousand pieces." —JFK after Bay of Pigs fiasco
On the morning of November 22, Dallas County Sheriff Bill Decker instructed his deputies to take no part in the security of JFK's motorcade.
"In a finding that could affect thousands of criminal cases, the National Academy of Sciences has concluded that some techniques the FBI has used for decades to match bullets to crimes are flawed or imprecise...The study specifically urges the bureau's chemists to stop a practice known as data chaining that chemists have used in the past to match bullets to a crime...The FBI has been the prime practitioner of lead bullet comparisons in the United States, and has used it for decades, dating to around the time of President Kennedy's assassination 40 years ago. A database of lead test results kept by the agency had more than 13,000 samples in the late 1990s." —Associated Press, Nov. 21, 2003
"When a piece of Clyde's head is blown away by a bullet [in Bonnie and Clyde], [Director Arthur] Penn wanted it to remind audiences of the Kennedy assassination." —Peter Biskind, Easy Riders, Raging Bulls
"The Warren Commission! What the hell do they know? Did they learn anything you couldn't read in the papers the next day?" —Jack Ruby, letter quoted in Argosy magazine, Sept. 1967
"...[A]lthough the Warren Commission exhaustively sifted through the testimony of hundreds of witnesses, the only conclusion reached was that Oswald acted alone for vague political reasons." —Jay Robert Nash, Bloodletters and Badmen
"...[T]he inventors of our history are forever fetched by that lone mad killer, eaten up with resentment and envy, the two principal American emotions, if our chroniclers are to be believed. Yet the gunning down in public view with wife to one side and all the panoply of state fore and aft is pure Palermo sendoff. Some years ago, the head of the Italian national police, General dalla Chiesa, was similarly killed - at the center of a cortege of police as he drove triumphantly down the main street of Palermo shortly after taking command of the 'war' against the Sicilian Mafia." —Gore Vidal, "Hersh's JFK," The Last Empire: Essays 1992-2000
"[Carlos] Marcello had no visible means of support. Despite an extensive arrest record, a New Orleans crime commission report that he was a multimillionaire and a major Mafia don, and Fifth Amendment appearances before congressional committees investigating crime, Marcello claimed to be a $1,600-a-month tomato salesman." —Ronald Goldfarb, Perfect Villians, Imperfect Heroes
"What's wrong with the syndicate? Two or three of us get together on some deal and everybody says it's a bad thing. But those businessmen do it all the time and nobody squawks." —Sam Giancana
Oswald's wife, Marina, was the niece of a KGB colonel.
"[Dennis] Hopper was pitching Rafelson McClure's play The Queen, which featured the principals of the Lyndon Johnson administration - Johnson, McGeorge Bundy, Dean Rusk, and Robert McNamara - in white, off-the-shoulder beaded gowns, eating lobster and planning the assassination of JFK." —Peter Biskind, Easy Riders, Raging Bulls
Victor Marchetti, former Executive Assistant to the Deputy Director of the CIA - "The more I have learned, the more concerned I have become that the government was involved in the assassination of President John F. Kennedy." (April 1975, True magazine)
Jack Ruby: "I do not want to die. But I am not insane. I was framed to kill Oswald." (to psychiatrist Werner Teuter, quoted in London Sunday Times, August 25, 1974)
SOURCES:
- The Big Book of Conspiracies, Doug Moench, Paradox Press, 1995
- Bloodletters and Badmen: A Narrative Encyclopedia of American Criminals from the Pilgrims to the Present, Jay Robert Nash, M. Evans and Company, 1973
- Conspiracies, Cover-Ups and Crimes, Jonathan Vankin, Dell Publishing, 1992
- Coup d'Etat in America, Michael Canfield and Alan J. Weberman, The Third Press, 1975
- Crossfire, Jim Marrs, Carroll & Graf Publishers, 1988
- Forgive My Grief, Penn Jones, Midlothian Mirro, 1966
- The Killing of a President, Robert J. Groden, Penguin Books, 1993
- Mafia Kingfish: Carlos Marcello and the Assassination of John F. Kennedy, John H. Davis, Signet, 1989
- Mob Lawyer, Frank Ragano, Scribners, 1994
- Oswald's Tale: An American Mystery, Norman Mailer, Random House, 1995
- Perfect Villians, Imperfect Heroes: Robert F. Kennedy's War Against Organized Crime, Ronald Goldfarb, Capital Books, Inc., 1995
- Report of the Select Committee on Assassinations, U.S. House of Representatives, 1979
- The Secret Team, Fletcher L. Prouty, Prentice-Hall, 1973
- The Texas Connection: The Assassination of John F. Kennedy, Craig I. Zirbel, The Texas Connection Company Publishers, 1991
