Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy and CIA Director John McCone (photo credit: CIA)
Why did Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy believe that his brother President John F. Kennedy was the victim of a conspiracy, as his son recently said?
Did RFK have any evidence for his belief, asked readers of the widespread coverage of RFK Jr.’s comments?
It turns out RFK had it on good authority that two people were involved.
RFK’s conviction was based on conversations with the Director of Central Intelligence, John McCone, who had been briefed by analysts at the CIA’s National Photographic Interpretation Center (NPIC) after they reviewed a home movie of JFK being struck by gunfire.
This little-known story comes from two credible sources: Dino Brugioni, retired chief of the CIA’s photographic analysis offices, and historian Arthur Schlesinger.
The film, of course, came from the camera of dressmaker Abraham Zapruder as he watched the presidential motorcade in Dallas in which President Kennedy was struck by gunfire on November 22, 1963. Zapruder had the film developed and gave a copy to the Secret Service. That night one copy of Zapruder’s film was hand-delivered to the Grand Prairie Naval Air Station in southwest Dallas. A jet pilot flew the film to Washington D.C. where it was viewed by FBI and Secret Service officials.
At around 10 p.m. on the night of November 23, two Secret Service agents delivered a copy of Zapruder’s film to the new state-of-the-art National Photo Interpretation Center (NPIC) at the Navy Yard in Washington D.C., where Brugioni was working as duty officer. In an extended interview, Brugioni told Doug Horne, a former chief of military records for the JFK Assassination Records Review Board, what happened next:
Brugioni’s team analyzed the film and made still enlargements of select individual frames that were mounted on briefing boards. They worked on the film throughout the night. On early Sunday morning, November 24, Art Lundahl, the director of the NPIC, took the briefing boards to CIA headquarters in Langley. Lundahl was Brugioni’s mentor who had won the confidence of the White House with the CIA’s rapid analysis of aerial surveillance photos of Soviet missile installations in Cuba in October 1962.
According to Brugioni, Lundahl went to the office of CIA Director John McCone, taking along briefing notes Brugioni had prepared for him. Lundal briefed McCone on the CIA’s analysis of the blown-up frames of the Zapruder film. He returned to NPIC later Sunday morning, November 24, and thanked everyone for their efforts the previous night, telling them that the briefing of McCone had gone well.
What Lundahl told McCone in the briefing is unknown but Lundahl’s sources are not. He relied on the NPIC analysis of the original Zapruder film and the reports of the Secret Service agents who witnessed the assassination.
McCone had already spoken once with RFK about the assassination. The Attorney General had called McCone to come talk to him at his home in McLean, Virginia, on the afternoon of November 22 to ask him about his brother’s murder. McCone was surprised when RFK asked him if the CIA was involved.
Because McCone was not a career CIA man, RFK trusted him more than anybody else at the agency and pressed him for more information. Sometime in the next two weeks McCone gave his informed view. On December 9, 1963, Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., advisor to President Kennedy, met with RFK and asked him what he thought about his brother’s assassination. As Schlesinger wrote in his diary, published in 2007:
“I asked him, perhaps tactlessly about Oswald. He said there could be no serious doubt that he was guilty, but there still was argument whether he did it by himself or as a part of a larger plot, whether organized by Castro or by gangsters. He said the FBI people thought he had done it by himself, but that McCone thought there were two people involved in the shooting.” [Emphasis added] (Journals 1952-2000, p. 184).
John McCone was not just speculating. His thinking came from a highly credible source: the CIA’s leading photo analyst and his analysis of the NPIC blowups of frames of the Zapruder film, as well as Secret Service reports.
In short, RFK’s belief in that more than one person was involved in the assassination of JFK was based on the best information available to the U.S. government at the time.
Editor’s Note:
Q. What does this story have to do with the theory that the Zapruder film was altered?
A. It is a separate but related.. Doug Horne believes the Zapruder film was altered by someone after Brugioni’s team analyzed it. Before you scoff, you should know Brugioni lends credence to this theory. He says the film he viewed at NPIC on the night of November 23 was different from the famous Zapruder film that is avaiable to today. In any case, Brugioni had no doubt he saw a camera original copy and used its imagery to brief McCone. Horne believes that Brugioni is correct.
So the alteration theory should not be dismissed out of hand. JFK Facts will deal it in a separate post.
Fact check: Were RFK Jr.’s remarks about JFK evidence factually accurate?
Fascinating post. I had known that RFK talked to McCone on 11/22 but I didn’t know that McCone had subsequently talked to RFK and told him that McCone believed 2 shooters were involved. This seems like a well-sourced post. Schlesinger, of course, was a Kennedy loyalist and that lends credibility to his journal entry re: the 2 shooters. I don’t want to wade into the issue of whether the Zapruder film was altered; that’s a subject that better-informed people than I have looked at extensively. But IF the film was altered, that raises obvious questions: who would have done that and why?
The McCone comment about 2 shooters is also in Arthur Schlesinger’s “Robert Kennedy and His Times,” (1978) on p. 616.
As for the Zapruder film being altered … I don’t believe it and neither does Robert Groden, the world’s expert on the film and photography of the JFK assassination. A few frames were later removed from the Z-film, but that is about all that was done.
Dino Brugioni has some key insights on the Cuban Missile Crisis and the massive pressures that JFK was under. Dino Brugioni: “Everyone was against JFK’s position- the governors, the Congress, the military – they were all unbelievably angry at JFK for not going to war. JFK was alone in his position. My boss, Lundahl, was shocked at the verbal beating JFK was taking at those meetings.” (Dino Brugioni, 10-27-12)
Any objective viewing of the Z film leads to the two shooter conclusion. (At least two shooters.) That’s why the government and media refused to show the film for more than a decade. There’s no need for expert interpretation. The Z film is authentic. Otherwise the manipulators would have had to collect all other copies and destroy them. Is there any evidence to support this? While I’m open to anything including film alteration, this seems like a real stretch. Fetzer isn’t convincing.
The film alteration theory always begs the question: why did the forgers retain the frames that indicate gunfire from the front – Kennedy’s hands-to-the-throat reaction to his throat wound and the fatal headshot that slammed JFK backwards?
And another comment based on this quote:
“Lundahl was Brugioni’s mentor who had won the confidence of the White House with the CIA’s rapid analysis of aerial surveillance photos of Soviet missile installations in Cuba in October 1962.”
I haven’t pursued detailed research of this topic, but it has always seemed to me that the CIA waited until the missiles had been offloaded and the installations almost complete before they informed Kennedy. I suspect the CIA would have known about the missiles when they were shipped, and I suspect that U-2s would have photographed the missiles during the early stages of offloading, warehousing and transportation. This looks like another attempt to force JFK to make a command decision with his back against the wall. Am I being too hard on the CIA?
The bogus lead that Gaeton Fonzi followed up on in South Florida, who claimed to have seen Oswald & Ruby on the tarmac at the Miami airport, later took Fonzi to show him his photographic equipment he had stored away. It included a housing for an arial photographic camera. The man shared with Fonzi that he had taken arial photographs of the missiles in Cuba long before Kennedy was ever officially told about them.
I agree Bill Pierce, that if they were to tamper with the Z-film they would not have left in the evidence of a shot from the front or that it indicates there were two shooters because one could not get off the sequence of shots in the timing the Z-film indicates. The NPIC did not have the equipment to alter the film, but there are indications the Z-film spent some time at KODAK’s top secret photo shop in Rochester NY where the U2 and satellite photos were developed. As for the delay in gettng proof of Soviet missiles in Cuba, they didn’t fly the U2 every day, and JFK refused to believe the human intelligence HUMIT from anti-Castro sources because they were biased. Lundal and NPIC provided the independent proof that didn’t rely on human bias.
RFK immediately called CIA McCone on 11/22/63, asked him to come over to his house, and asked him did our guys kill JFK (meaning CIA operatives and associates).
Then in December, 1963 RFK and Jackie sent William Walton with a message to the Russians: the murder of JFK was a domestic conspiracy and the pick of LBJ as VP had been a huge mistake.
And there is this nugget:
Arthur Schlesinger:
“We tried to perpetuate the myth by convincing ourselves that we were good and that LBJ was evil. I remember one time Bobby telling me he was convinced that Lyndon was behind his brother’s death. ‘Come on Bob. Get real.’ I said. His other theory had it that Richard Nixon and Howard Hughes were somehow involved. He hated them both. ‘Nixon’s a true slimebucket,’ he said. ‘And I should have investigated Hughes years ago.’”
[C. David Heymann, "RFK," p. 365]