Charles and Cynthia Thomas with one of their children (Credit: Cynthia Thomas)
The late Charles Thomas belonged to an exclusive, unhappy and forgotten club: U.S. government officials whose efforts to honestly investigate the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in 1963 cost them their jobs and reputations.
Last week the Washington Post ran an obituary of Cynthia Thomas, the widow of Charles Thomas. It was an unusual tribute. The Post now acknowledges that there are good and solid reasons for perfectly sane people to reject the U.S. government’s implausible and widely disbelieved official theory that a “lone gunman” killed JFK for no discernible reason.
This is a welcome and overdue development, as the facts of Thomas’s tragic story attest.
A reader, Laura, takes issue with my recent post exculpating the late President Bush from involvement in the Kennedy assassination. Upon reflection, I think she makes two very good points.
George H. W. Bush, CIA director and future president
One is about the definition of evidence. Certainty is not required, it is true.
The second concerns a point I had scanted: the declassified Bush records make it clear that someone thought it important to brief George H. Bush about the Miami Cubans under investigation after JFK was killed. I should have noted this fact.
Who thought that Bush needed to know and why they thought he needed to know is an interesting and potentially important fact. I still don’t see what it tells us about the causes of the assassination but it is a salient point I should have mentioned. My conclusion was too sweeping. Thanks Laura.
This letter was released in conjunction with the celebration of the birthday of Dr. Martin Luther King, January 21, 2019. It was signed by 50 people, including members of the Kennedy and King families as well as doctors, lawyers, activists, and scholars across the political spectrum (names attached.
The Truth and Reconciliation Committee needs your help. The Committee, consisting of 60 people (including the author) are calling on Congress to re-open the investigation of the four political assassinations in the 1960s: (JFK, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King and Robert F. Kennedy.)
“The consequences still haunt our nation,” says Adam Walinsky, former speechwriter for RFK.
The Committee needs you to sign a petition telling Nancy Pelosi to act.
The joint statement calls for Congress to establish firm oversight on the release of all government documents related to the Kennedy presidency and assassination, as mandated by the JFK Records Collection Act of 1992. This public transparency law has been routinely defied by the CIA and other federal agencies. The Trump White House has allowed the CIA to continue its defiance of the law, even though the JFK Records Act called for the full release of relevant documents in 2017
Last month, the American Truth and Reconciliation Committee issued an open letter call for re-opening four of the most painful incidents in American history. Now you can now add your call to the call at the Committee’s web site: Americantruthnow.org.
A group of over 60 prominent citizens aims to convene an American Truth and Reconciliation Committee to bring out the facts of the four major assassinations that changed the course of the country and the world—those of President John F. Kennedy, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Senator Robert F. Kennedy. A multi-part action plan has been set in motion, including a petition to Congress and a pubic inquest.
“I want the truth to come out. The truth needs to come out,” Rep. Walter Jones told McClatchy’s Washington Bureau in October 2017.
When it came to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, Jones, the ten-term Republican from North Carolina who died Sunday, was as a skeptic of the official story that one man alone killed JFK for no reason.
He was a deeply religious but not in the cynical way of many on the right. As a small-government conservative he hated unjust wars and unnecessary government secrecy. In 2004, he was the first Republican in Congress to admit the invasion of Iraq was foolish disaster promoted by lies. He apologized for voting to authorize it.
On the assassination of JFK, he did not shade his opinion.
I interviewed Jones in September 2017 about the impending release of JFK files and he was adamant. “It’s time to reveal what happened,” he told me. He backed up his words with actions, introducing House Resolution 556 calling on President Trump to release all of the files, without exception.
Jones he hoped that he thought “some government agencies” would resist full disclosure and he wanted to create public pressure to support Trump in making all the files public.
“I hope you people in the press can pick up on this and make it an issue,” he said. “That’s the only way it’ll happen.”
Alas, the press didn’t pick up on the issue and Trump caved to the CIA’s demands for continuing secrecy. More than 15,000 JFK files remain secret, most of them by the CIA and FBI.
Jones saw it coming and he tried to do something about it. He failed but we honor his effort and his memory.
Wofford, who passed January 21 at the age of 94, was a lawyer and political operative close to both Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King.
What Wofford wrote in his 1980 memoir, Of Kennedy and Kings, underscores the importance of the recent open letter from MLK III, RFK Jr. and some 60 other luminaries calling for a reopening of the investigation of four most important assassinations of the 1960s.
A joint letter aimed at Congress and the general public has been signed by a list of more than 50 prominent citizens, including family members of the victims, Hollywood entertainers, legal experts, scholars and journalists. The petition–which has attracted some surprising names–is certain to provoke lively debate about one of the darkest chapters in American history. You too will have a chance to add your name to this powerful statement/
Check in with me here next Monday, January 21, Martin Luther King Day. I’m proud to be joining with lots of other people in the unveiling a major petition effort signed by more than 50 prominent American citizens. The joint statement is aimed at moving Congress to investigate deeply troubling, long-buried chapters in American history. After reading the statement, you’ll be able to join this important campaign by adding your name to the petition.
George H. W. Bush, CIA director and future president
(This post was first published on the JFK Facts blog, in different form under a different headline, in March 2013)
The theory that the late President Bush was somehow complicit in JFK’s death has often been heard in the comments section of this site. Exactly how he was involved is rarely explained.
In his new book, Dirty Tricks: Nixon, Watergate and the CIA, Shane O’Sullivan lays bare a scandalously under-covered story: the role of CIA personnel in the Watergate scandal and its aftermath.
In an excerpt for the Washington Post, O’Sullivan tells an intriguing tale about Watergate burglar Rolando Martinez, the CIA operative who was pardoned by President Reagan in 1984. Antonio Veciana, the CIA operative who says he saw Lee Harvey Oswald with David Phillips two months before JFK was killed, has an interesting role in the story.
O’Sullivan’s story doesn’t directly bear on the JFK story but it does show that Veciana was a trusted agency operative through the 1970s.
Yes, I did read Bagley’s Spy Wars. I also interviewed him. And yes, I do believe Nosenko was a true defector.
I think Bagley was wrong, for two reasons: lack of a plausible suspect and lack of damage to CIA operations.
Remember Angleton’s theory that Nosenko was a dispatched defector is inextricably bound up in the theory that Nosenko was dispatched to protect a mole already working inside the CIA as of January 1964. So the reader’s question is really two, was Nosenko a mole? And, if so, who was he protecting?
“13 days before that dark day in Dallas, Somersett elicited a chilling, police tape-recorded threat from a right-wing racist who talked of how the President would soon be shot ‘from an office building with a high-powered rifle’ and how ‘they’ll pick up somebody within hours after … just to throw the public off.’”
The Deep State is Jefferson Morley’s new blog about the influence of secret intelligence agencies worldwide. Launched in November 2018, Morley has already published his reporting about:
