President John F. Kennedy’s longtime personal secretary believed his assassination was not simply the act of Lee Harvey Oswald, but a carefully planned political killing involving people inside the U.S. government who wanted Kennedy removed from office, according to an unpublished memoir that has drawn renewed attention more than six decades after the assassination.

Evelyn Lincoln, who worked alongside Kennedy for 12 years and was among the people with the closest day-to-day access to him, laid out her suspicions in an 11-page addendum to an unpublished memoir titled “I Was There,” written during the 1980s and preserved in the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library.

Her assessment was strikingly direct. Lincoln described Kennedy’s death in Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963, as a “deliberate professional political murder” and wrote that she believed it had been planned by people within the government who wanted the president out of office.

The manuscript received relatively little attention when it became publicly available through the Kennedy Library, but Kennedy assassination researchers have recently brought Lincoln’s writings back into public view. Her conclusions are particularly notable because of her extraordinary proximity to Kennedy throughout his political career, from his Senate years through his presidency.

Lincoln did not claim that she knew who ordered the assassination, nor did she definitively accuse any single person or organization of carrying it out. Instead, she compiled a lengthy list of powerful people and factions that she believed had developed reasons to oppose Kennedy and could potentially have wanted him dead.

“I do not point a finger at any one of the individuals or factions,” Lincoln cautioned, saying instead that the coincidences surrounding Kennedy’s enemies “puzzle me.”

Lincoln believed Kennedy had acquired enemies even before entering the White House because of his religion.

“He was a Catholic. That gave him a built-in opposition right from the start,” Lincoln wrote.

She pointed specifically to the Ku Klux Klan and other anti-Catholic forces, noting that similar opposition had been mobilized against Democratic presidential candidate Al Smith in 1928. Those forces, she wrote, later “tried hard to defeat” Kennedy when he ran for president in 1960.

Once Kennedy became president, however, Lincoln believed the number and power of his enemies increased dramatically.

One major source of hostility, she wrote, was the Kennedy administration’s civil-rights agenda. The administration sent federal protection for Freedom Riders and intervened in battles over school integration in Mississippi and Alabama, putting Kennedy directly at odds with the KKK, segregationists and other organizations bitterly opposed to the civil-rights movement.

Lincoln also focused on longtime FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover and his contentious relationships with members of the Kennedy administration.

Hoover intensely opposed civil-rights leader Martin Luther King Jr., Lincoln wrote, and “did everything possible to destroy him.”

She also pointed to Hoover’s famously difficult relationship with Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, who as the president’s brother wielded enormous influence inside the administration and exercised authority over the FBI through the Justice Department.

Lincoln’s list of potential Kennedy enemies extended much further. She examined Teamsters leader Jimmy Hoffa, organized crime, anti-Castro Cuban exiles, elements of the CIA, extreme right-wing organizations, the John Birch Society, communists, opponents of the civil-rights movement and “Texans who hated him.”

Hoffa, she believed, had a particularly strong reason to despise the Kennedy administration. Robert Kennedy had pursued Hoffa and organized crime while serving as chief counsel to the Senate Rackets Committee and continued that campaign after becoming attorney general.

Lincoln wrote that “If any member of organized crime” wanted to hire an assassin, Hoffa “would certainly” have possessed a motive.

Much of Lincoln’s analysis centered on the tangled relationships among the CIA, organized crime, Cuban exiles and militant anti-Communist groups following Fidel Castro’s takeover of Cuba.

The disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion in April 1961 was particularly important to her thinking. Kennedy refused to commit U.S. military forces to rescue the CIA-backed Cuban exile invasion after it began collapsing, infuriating some Cuban exiles and leaving bitter resentment among people connected to the operation.

Organized crime had its own reason for wanting Castro removed. Mafia figures had enjoyed lucrative gambling and other operations in pre-Castro Cuba, only to lose them after Castro seized power.

Lincoln believed those overlapping interests helped create a dangerous convergence among groups that otherwise might not have been natural allies.

“A linkage grew between the Mob, the CIA and right-wing extremists,” Lincoln concluded, connecting their hostility to Kennedy’s policies toward Castro, civil rights, peace and his administration’s campaign against organized crime.

Lincoln also examined what she considered a “strange alliance” involving Richard Nixon, Cuban exile figures and people associated with the CIA and the Bay of Pigs operation. She noted that some individuals associated with those circles would later emerge again in connection with Watergate and political “dirty tricks.”

Her list even extended overseas. Lincoln pointed to Madame Nhu, the outspoken sister-in-law of South Vietnamese President Ngo Dinh Diem.

Diem and his brother Ngo Dinh Nhu were killed during a South Vietnamese military coup in November 1963, just weeks before Kennedy’s assassination. Madame Nhu subsequently lashed out at Kennedy and called him a “murderer,” according to Lincoln’s account.

Lincoln additionally wondered whether Kennedy’s policies concerning Vietnam had created enemies inside the national-security establishment. She noted indications that Kennedy was considering reducing American involvement there, while Defense Secretary Robert McNamara had discussed reductions in U.S. forces and, shortly before Kennedy’s trip to Dallas, prospective cuts in defense spending.

Kennedy’s broader pursuit of reduced Cold War tensions following the Cuban Missile Crisis also figured into Lincoln’s thinking about why powerful interests might have turned against him.

Perhaps the most politically explosive portion of Lincoln’s account concerned Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson, who became president immediately after Kennedy’s assassination.

Lincoln had previously written that Kennedy told her shortly before the Dallas trip that he was considering dropping Johnson from the Democratic presidential ticket when he sought reelection in 1964.

Johnson at the time was politically vulnerable because of the Bobby Baker scandal and other controversies surrounding people in his political orbit.

In her unpublished account, Lincoln noted that Johnson had returned to his Texas ranch several weeks before Kennedy’s visit and that associates were with him there. She also wrote about Johnson’s relationship with Hoover and his access to information contained in the FBI director’s secret files.

Lincoln further claimed that Johnson “initially maintained that there had been a conspiracy” following Kennedy’s assassination before the government “hurriedly set the wheels in motion to build a case against Lee Harvey Oswald as being the lone assassin.”

Lincoln’s suspicions about Johnson and several other powerful figures became even more explicit toward the end of her life. In a 1994 letter, she identified five parties she personally believed had been involved in a conspiracy: Johnson, Hoover, the Mafia, the CIA and anti-Castro Cubans in Florida.

That letter did not provide evidence establishing that those parties participated in Kennedy’s assassination, and Lincoln’s unpublished memoir itself was more guarded. There, she emphasized that she was identifying potential motives and troubling connections rather than claiming to possess proof identifying the killers.

She was particularly struck by the presence of so many people and groups hostile to Kennedy in Texas when the president traveled to Dallas.

“It is ironic,” she wrote, that so many hostile factions “had their people in or around Dallas” when Kennedy arrived.

She cited organized crime figures, members of the John Birch Society and hostile Texans among those whose presence or connections she considered noteworthy.

“Any one of these factions,” Lincoln reasoned, could have hired a killer.

Ultimately, however, Lincoln believed the relationships among the various groups were more significant than any individual suspect viewed in isolation.

“There is definitely an intertwining of people and factions,” Lincoln wrote, in the efforts to “stop” or destroy Kennedy.

Lincoln’s suspicions remain just that — her conclusions and theories, rather than proof overturning the official findings regarding Kennedy’s assassination. The Warren Commission concluded in 1964 that Oswald acted alone in shooting Kennedy from the Texas School Book Depository and that it found no evidence that either Oswald or Jack Ruby was part of a conspiracy.

A later congressional investigation reached a different conclusion on the broader question. The House Select Committee on Assassinations concluded in 1979 that Kennedy was probably killed as the result of a conspiracy, although it did not identify the other conspirators and said it found no evidence implicating the Soviet or Cuban governments, organized crime as an organization, the CIA, FBI or Secret Service as institutions.

{Matzav.com}