The Best JFK Book You’ve Never Heard Of

“Hatred has infested the South like a disease.”

— Juanita Jackson Mitchell, NAACP official

True, the grassy knoll needs no introduction. Certainly not after sixty years. What more can really be said about November 22, 1963 and the murder of President Kennedy? The case was seemingly closed when Jack Ruby silenced the president’s accused assassin, Lee Oswald, less than 48 hours later. And the reputation of a whole cottage industry of JFK conspiracy theories precedes itself.

Can anything, then, still be learned about that shocking incident that, conspiracy or not, detoured the United States into dark territory shrouded in scandals, corruptions, wars and violence?

There is.

It can be found in General Walker and the Murder of President Kennedy by Jeffrey Caufield, M.D. (Moreland Press, 2015). At nearly 1,000 pages the work has been overlooked in the mainstream, let alone the assassination research community, mainly both for enormous length (there are over 3900 endnotes) and because it eschews the popular conspiracy notion — championed by such high-profilers as Oliver Stone and Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. — that the assassination was a rogue effort of the CIA. Rather, Caufield offers an entirely different perspective, one both startling and yet entirely reasonable, logical and compelling, so much so that it effectively undermines the military-industrial complex idea espoused by Stone’s JFK, which derived most of its material from former New Orleans DA Jim Garrison’s 1988 book, On the Trail of the Assassins.

I first ordered General Walker and the Murder of President Kennedy through my county’s inter-library loan system. I had pored and delved over as many of the JFK books I could find — my local bookstore’s section on the subject is aptly called “Grassy Knoll” — and I recall staring at the massive text placed on the counter. I wasn’t prepared for what amounted to an academic detailing of the relationships and intrigue that led to November 22, 1963. Eventually purchasing my own copy, which soon became coffee-stained, underlined, dog-eared, and book-ended with scribblings from my toddlers, I was in possession of one of the best books I had read on the assassination.

Even in early 2023, two years after January 6, I underestimated the prominence and longevity and capability of the radical right. Then I read the book. Caufield argued a more convincing, logical, and ultimately more disturbing reality than the various theories on who killed Kennedy: that the assassination was the result of America’s deep-seated problem as a country. Hate.

A thread was emerging out of the vast amount of material, a trail littered with white supremacy, race, religion, and a particular idea of how and what America should look like. Everything that has shamed the greatness of America. Hidden, in a tactic worthy of Guy Banister himself, under the guise of the Cold War’s strawman, Communism. There is therefore much irony when Jackie Kennedy lamented, “He didn’t even have the satisfaction of being killed for civil rights…It had to be some silly Communist.”

Seen in this context, the JFK assassination becomes far more relevant and urgent. The United States continues to be plagued by racial discord. The very survival of the republic is at stake.

When I was able to connect with Caufield personally — it took some effort, as he has no social media presence whatsoever — we both found similarities to November 22 and January 6. The thing to do now was to make that thread visible for Americans today, that the assassination did not occur in some silo by a lone gunman with no agenda but mayhem. I had the opportunity to feature Caufield in my short documentary on David Ferrie and his ties to Christian nationalism. That film, simply titled David Ferrie, will have its premiere at the American Documentary Film and Animation Festival in March 2024.

But how did Caufield come to a conclusion so opposite to the findings of so many assassination researchers?

“[T]wo years after [Jim] Garrison’s death,” Caufield writes in the Introduction, “I had the good fortune to join other researchers in New Orleans to obtain and copy Garrison’s personal investigative files, courtesy of his son Lyon Garrison — thus beginning a twenty-year path of intense research, investigation and discovery, among other things.”

He continues:

“What quickly became evident in 1994 while digging through Garrison’s files — most of which had rarely been seen before — was that the vast majority of the documents in no way supported his well-publicized, still-popular claims that U.S. intelligence operatives were behind the murder of President Kennedy. Rather, they suggested that the people behind the president’s alleged assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, were southern segregationists and radicals tied to the Citizens’ Council, the John Birch Society, and related extremist groups.”

Familiar as I was with Garrison’s case, having read On the Trail of the Assassins and devouring Stone’s JFK, this was astonishing. Why had Garrison not pursued this angle? Would it have brought him, as it did Caufield, into the purview of Major General Edwin A. Walker, the Dallas resident, accused insurrectionist, failed gubernatorial candidate, and darling of the radical right?

Indeed, Caufield argues three different ways to view “the Jim Garrison Case.” First, the Clay Shaw case. That, of course, is the focus in Stone’s JFK. The second was Garrison’s public proclamations “that U.S. government intelligence was responsible for the assassination because of Kennedy’s desire to break away from the established Cold War policies.”. These include ONI, FBI, Secret Service, NASA, and, of course, CIA. JFK conflated both of these versions into its narrative — Clay Shaw’s trial, and Garrison’s belief in a military-industrial complex conspiracy (synthesized by Donald Sutherland’s character, Mr. X).

There is a third version, “as divulged in the actual New Orleans district attorney’s investigative files, which are not widely available to the public.” Caufield goes on:

“Those files reveal practically no evidence of a U.S. government conspiracy in the assassination. Instead, the files are rife with evidence of a far-right-wing operation involving Lee Harvey Oswald and a New Orleans hardcore underground consisting of members of the Citizens’ Council, Klan, John Birch Society, National States’ Rights Party, American Nazi Party, and Minutemen. Garrison, in spite of his publicly pronounced CIA allegations, fittingly and correctly — at least early on — referred to the conspirators as ‘master-racist authors of the assassination.’”

And while Caufield does not get into too much of the assassinations of MLK or RFK, seeing those two killings as completing the triangle of hate crimes against national leaders lobbying for an integrated society, only reinforces Caufield’s thesis.

That the people of the United States continue to be haunted by “the Southern way of life” is, ultimately, the living proof of why the president was ambushed in Dealey Plaza sixty years ago. How different might have the last sixty years played out if the radical right was hunted down for its actions?

Mayor of Baltimore Theodore McKeldin’s first reaction to JFK’s killing was this:

“This is the worst calamity that has befallen the South since the assassination of Lincoln. In both cases a man named Johnson succeeded to the Presidency — Andrew Johnson in the case of Lincoln, and now Lyndon Johnson, which adds to the bitter cup of the South. Police will certainly pick up the assassin, but that is no sign that they will get the real murderers — the men who have been stirring up the malignant hatred that has finally built up into this final explosion.”

After the president’s death, General Walker himself claimed, “There will be considerable changes, even if they are not immediately apparent.”

Sixty years on, Walker was uncannily accurate.