During my research into the JFK case for my book The Mad Bishops, I purchased Thomas G. Buchanan’s Who Killed Kennedy?, a controversial work published within a year of the president’s assassination. Prior to its release, CIA’s Richard Helms caught wind of it. Helms wrote in a memo to director John McCone:
“Buchanan’s thesis is that the assassination of President Kennedy was the product of a rightest plot in the United States. He alleges in his articles that the slain Dallas policeman, Tippett (sic) was part of the plot against President Kennedy.”
The French newspaper L’Express first published Buchanan’s work in serialized form; L’Express sent Buchanan to cover the trial of Jack Ruby in early 1964. Who Killed Kennedy? was first published by Secker & Warburg in London in May of ‘64.
And so it was with great excitement when I received a copy of the first printing. But a surprise was further waiting for me when I opened the cover. Written on the front endsheets was the following note:
Ex Libris:
Dr. D.G. Watkins
375 W. Main St.
Arcade, New York
Purchased by:
Miss Patricia Roche
in Edinburgh, Scotland
July 1964
To The Reader:
Although the author draws what I feel are some invalid conclusions for the motives behind the Kennedy murder, nevertheless, I feel his statement of facts concerning the invalidity of a single assassin theory to be conclusive beyond doubt.
The following salient facts are undeniable:
1. The first shot entered J.F.K.’s body from the front just above the knot of his neck tie.
2. The windshield of the limosine (sic) had a bullet hole in it.
3. A bolt action rifle can’t be fired as rapidly as the Warren Commission claimed.
4. Gov. Connally of Texas was facing the rear of the auto when struck in the back by a bullet.
These leading facts cause me to believe, as does the author, that some of the shots were fired from the railroad bridge in front of the auto.
Lee Oswald was undeniably a plotter but not the sole assassin. Our U.S. propagandists have played down the racial implications of the time and brainwashed the citizenry with the theory that a demented marxist killed for no reason. I believe John Kennedy died because southern U.S. whites were fuming with hate over his integration policies. I will be long gone when history proves that Gov. Ross Barnett of Mississippi and Gov. George Wallace of Alabama aided and abetted the assassins.
Donald G. Watkins
Arcade, New York
Sept 5, 1964
On the back endsheet, Dr. Watkins added some concluding remarks two months later on November 24, 1964, two days after the first anniversary of the assassination:
The Warren Commission report is an insult to the reasoning ability of every intelligent person who lives in the U.S. today. I feel if the true facts of J.F.K.’s political execution had been known prior to the election of 1964, that Lyndon Johnson would have been defeated and the U.S. would be torn by a sectional conflict not unlike that which occurred in 1861–65.
Freedom of the Press in the U.S. of this time of 1963–1964 is a figure of speech. No news media has the courage to list the facts in this book.
DGW
11–24–64
Dr. Watkins was a dentist in Arcade, New York, forty miles southeast of Buffalo. He and his wife, Helen, had four children. Dr. Watkins died on July 26, 1973. He was 46. Their eldest son, Don, tells me Dr. Watkins left private dentistry to work with indigenous peoples in remote Humboldt and Del Norte counties of Northern California. Don also remarked Dr. Watkins was obsessed with the assassination — and like father, like son, Don also suspects a “well-developed plot and not the work of a lone assassin.”
The prescient observations so soon after the 1963 event show Dr. Watkins to be an objective and committed American citizen interested in the pursuit of truth — that he was only 36 at the time of these notations further indicate the seriousness in which he took not only the actual shooting but the subsequent government response. Based on the short notes he felt compelled enough to write in the book he would likely be appalled that the country has not yet acknowledged the “racial implications” that hover over the president’s murder even sixty years later.
Only until such a truth is in fact acknowledged and dealt with — not through mob violence but by an open exchange of ideas — will we possibly be ready to see JFK’s death for what it was: a violent rebuke to anyone threatening the Southern sanctity of segregation, lost cause that it was.