“If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.”
Sun Tzu, The Art of War
It is no secret we are a country in peril. What can be done ahead of the November presidential election? Can we learn anything from a sixty-year-old murder of a 46-year-old New England Irish Catholic?
Perhaps it is time at last to emerge from the quagmire of conspiracy theories leading to nowhere — namely, that the CIA killed President Kennedy — in order to see clearly the sinister, hateful motivations that have permeated throughout American history, shaped our American discourse, and like raging rapids have lurched us headlong into the very constitutional and democratic crisis that now confronts us.
As I have written elsewhere, the quasi-religious ritual that was January 6, in which a horde of bemused patriots took a “tour” of the U.S. Capitol Building, did not manifest in the wake of the 2020 election, nor was its Christian nationalism borne only when its savior descended his gilded escalator in 2015. Our inability to identify the decades-old telltale signs of the radical right has brought us right to this very predicament.
Paul Trejo’s website, CIA Did Not Kill JFK, created with Jason Ward in 2017, puts it this way: by fixating on the CIA as the culprits in the assassination, the conspiracy theory “is bad for America. It feeds the MAGA agenda. It feeds the Q-Anon agenda.” Rather, it distracts one down a dead-end alley. Such a theory, that the CIA killed the president, has obscured Americans from the real danger at hand.
In this way, things take on far more frightening urgency: Could it be that the very ideology that harbors an autocratic who has “joked” he will become a dictator (for a day) is rooted in the fascist milieu that so abhorred the Kennedy administration it felt motivated enough to plot the murder of the commander-in-chief?
For Trejo, all roads lead to the godfather of the radical right, General Edwin Walker (1909–1993). Admittedly, not until I canvassed the JFK assassination research community did I learn of Walker’s name and reputation. It is a curious community, by the way, one seemingly dominated by CIA-did-it voices. And woe to you if you don’t subscribe to that particular theory. But if my Jesuit-background taught me anything — funny enough, the same Jesuit education David Ferrie received in the 1930s — it’s to question everything, to recognize there are two sides to every story.
Or as the only Jesuit pope to date, Pope Francis, might say: to not be too rigid. In his foreword to the House Committee’s January 6 Report, Ari Melber writes, “A competent investigation follows leads, sources, and facts. It adapts to new information, rather than sticking to an initial perception formed before new evidence, witnesses, and facts are gathered and tested.”
This mentality, then, led to a broad-based approach to trying to piece the puzzle of November 22, 1963 together. In leaving no stone unturned, hard-right radicals kept popping up. And not just names of individuals, but evidence of their treasonous actions and plottings.
Paul Trejo devoured the papers of General Walker in a graduate study at UT Austin under noted historian H.W. Brands. The result of his research is a three-part ebook, A Brief History of Ex-General Edwin Walker (2012). Furthermore, Trejo co-authored with Harry Dean the followup to Dean’s 1990 work, Crosstrails, in 2013–2014: Harry Dean’s Confessions: I Might Have Killed JFK.
Dean is a controversial figure in the research community. He’s been roundly derided and criticized for his testimony. To a select few, like Trejo, Harry Dean is one of the last surviving witnesses to the conspiracy in the framing of Lee Harvey Oswald. According to Dean, the highest levels of the John Birch Society, which included Dallas resident ex-General Walker, conspired to position Oswald as the patsy in the assassination of the president. Dean heard Walker himself mention Oswald’s name in this regard. Dean and three others — Guy Gabaldon, Loran Hall, and Lawrence Howard — were commissioned under the orders of Walker to manage Oswald in the final weeks leading up to November 22. At the time, Dean was an FBI informant. He mentioned all of this to the FBI, who according to Dean, told him to forget it.
The entirety of Dean’s story is worth the read, a story that has been dismissed as fanciful fiction — such literature abounds in the JFK assassination catalog as it is. But the problem is that Dean’s story advocates such an unpopular theory as the radical right engineering the hit on the president with General Walker as the mastermind. (Only later will Dean come to learn about the crew in New Orleans under Guy Banister, their association with Oswald, and their ties to General Walker.) The theory is an inconvenience to Dean’s conspiracy theory detractors. The notion stops one cold: a hate group killed Kennedy? On the other hand, there’s something mysterious that tickles the American mind when thinking about covert operations by the CIA or contracts by the Mafia. But when it comes to the radical right, in which fascists, Nazis, Klansmen and Minutemen comprise the cast of characters, there is nothing “fun” about this milieu, no romanticized escapism with which we identify like a Jason Bourne or Don Corleone. It hits too close to home, and we know it. Which makes Dean a wrench in the accepted narrative.
And as Dean states in his Confessions, the real culprits were hiding in plain sight, if the government and the Warren Commission really wanted to go down that road. There are many red herrings in this regard, two being that it was General Walker himself whom Lee Oswald supposedly attempted to assassinate on April 10, 1963, and Jack Ruby’s jittery testimony before Chief Justice Earl Warren himself in June 1964, a passage worth quoting in full:
MR. RUBY: There is an organization here, Chief Justice Warren, if it takes my life at this moment to say it, and [Sheriff] Bill Decker said be a man and say it, there is a John Birch Society right now in activity, and Edwin Walker is one of the top men of the organization — take it for what it is worth, Chief Justice Warren.
Unfortunately for me, for me giving the people the opportunity to get in power, because of the act I committed, has put a lot of people in jeopardy with their lives.
Don’t register with you does it?
CHIEF JUSTICE WARREN: No, I don’t understand that.
The serious seeker wanting to better understand Ruby’s thought process must explore what Ruby chose to do in his final hours of freedom before gunning down Lee Oswald on live television. With the breadcrumbs Ruby left behind, he seemed acutely aware that members of the John Birch Society clearly had something to do with the president’s murder.
Paul Trejo is not alone in suspecting the far right of Dallas. As early as 1964, Thomas G. Buchanan in Who Killed Kennedy? questioned the official narrative of Oswald as a lone Communist gunman, and wondered if the extreme right who loathed the administration’s integration policy might have been compelled enough to carry out the assassination.
And as I have also written elsewhere, there is Jeffrey Caufield’s monumental 2015 tome, General Walker and the Murder of President Kennedy. While Harry Dean’s perspective is that Walker targeted Oswald as the fall guy for JFK’s murder after learning Oswald tried to kill him in April 1963, Caufield shows the greater context: the breadth of the radical right, the major players, how Banister and crew fit into the picture, how Oswald fit into the picture, and how much hate was directed towards John F. Kennedy by “patriots” who believed in “America First.”
Recent scholarship has explored the love affair with the American ultra right of the 20th century with fascism: Hitler’s American Friends: The Third Reich’s Supporters in the United States by Bradley W. Hart (2018), Hitler in Los Angeles: How Jews Foiled Nazi Plots Against Hollywood and America by Steven J. Ross (2018), The Minutemen by Greg Donahue (2019), Gangsters vs. Nazis by Michael Benson (2022), and Prequel: An American Fight Against Fascism by Rachel Maddow (2023). These works provide the framework and detail the motivations of many of the actors who later appear in Caufield’s exhaustive study of the radical right funneled down to the actions in Dealey Plaza on November 22. (These works stand on the shoulders of Charles Higham’s 1985 work, American Swastika.)
If anything, the far-right’s penchant for things fascist is disturbing enough. That it was this cabal that likely was behind the murder of the president is chilling in its own right. That it continues to manipulate the American public and its political system so much so it very well may propel a wholly unfit figure back into the White House this November is simply mind boggling.
