History Commons^™

The Cia And The Jfk Assassination, Pt. 2, Donald E. Wilkes Jr.

Popular Media

In the 1970s several Congressional investigations discovered there had been a disturbing pattern of misconduct by the CIA in regard to the Warren Commission’s investigation of the JFK assassination. The Agency had engaged in a cover-up by suppressing information it should have disclosed to the Commission, and in still other ways it had impeded the Commission’s investigation.

CIA documents subsequently released under the Freedom of Information Act or the 1992 JFK Assassination Records Act expand our awareness of the Agency’s misconduct.

The Cia And The Jfk Assassination, Pt. 1, Donald E. Wilkes Jr.

Popular Media

At the time President Kennedy was gunned down, the CIA could not possibly have been unfamiliar with the alleged assassin, ex-Marine Lee Harvey Oswald. Unless it was comatose, Oswald must have been a person of interest to the Agency long before the assassination. In 1957–58, Oswald had been stationed as a radar operator at the Atsugi Naval Air Base in Japan, where there was a major CIA station and from which the Agency’s U2 spy planes flew high-altitude missions over the Soviet Union; in 1959, the CIA knew, Oswald had defected to the Soviet Union, announced he had secrets to …

What If Abraham Lincoln Had Lived?, Allen C. Guelzo

Civil War Era Studies Faculty Publications

The lead .41-calibre bullet with which John Wilkes Booth shot President Abraham Lincoln on the night of April 14, 1865, was the most lethal gunshot in American history. Only five days earlier, the main field army of the Southern Confederacy had surrendered at Appomattox Court House, and the four dreary years of civil war were yielding to a spring of national rebirth. But by then, the man to whom everyone looked for guidance in reconstructing the nation was dead. [excerpt]