John F. Kennedy Assassination Conspiracy Theories - Other Published Theories

Other Published Theories

• Appointment in Dallas (1975) by Hugh McDonald suggests that Oswald was lured into a plot that he was told was a staged fake attempt to kill JFK to embarrass the Secret Service and to alert the government of the necessity for beefed-up Secret Service security. Oswald’s role was to shoot at the motorcade but deliberately miss the target. The plotters then killed JFK themselves and framed Oswald for the crime. McDonald claims that, after being told the "truth" about JFK's death by CIA agent Herman Kimsey in 1964, he spent years trying to locate a man known as “Saul.” Saul was supposedly the unidentified man who was photographed exiting the Russian embassy in Mexico City in September 1963, whose photos were subsequently sent to the FBI in Dallas on the morning of November 22, 1963 (before the assassination), and mislabelled "Lee Harvey Oswald". McDonald claims to have finally tracked Saul down in London in 1972 at which time Saul revealed the details of the plot to him.

• Reasonable Doubt (1985) by Henry Hurt, who writes about his Warren Commission doubts. Mr. Hurt pins the plot on professional crook Robert Easterling, along with Texas oilmen and the supposed Ferrie/Shaw alliance. ISBN 0-03-004059-0.

• Behold a Pale Horse (1991) by William Cooper alleges that Kennedy was shot by the Presidential limousine's driver, Secret Service agent William Greer. In the Zapruder film, Greer can be seen turning to his right and looking backwards just before speeding away from Dealey Plaza. This theory has come under severe criticism from others in the research community. ISBN 0-929385-22-5.

• Mark North's Act of Treason: The Role of J. Edgar Hoover in the assassination of President Kennedy, (1991) implicates the FBI Director. North documents that Hoover was aware of threats against Kennedy by organized crime before 1963, and suggests that he failed to take proper action to prevent the assassination. North also charges Hoover with failure to work adequately to uncover the truth behind Kennedy's murder. ISBN 0-88184-877-8.

• Mortal Error: The Shot That Killed JFK (1992) by Bonar Menninger (ISBN 0-312-08074-3) alleges that while Oswald did attempt to assassinate JFK and did succeed in wounding him, the fatal shot was accidentally fired by Secret Service agent George Hickey, who was riding in the Secret Service follow-up car directly behind the Presidential Limousine. The theory alleges that after the first two shots were fired the motorcade sped up while Hickey was attempting to respond to Oswald's shots and he lost his balance and accidentally pulled the trigger of his AR-15 and shot JFK. Hickey's testimony says otherwise: "At the end of the last report (shot) I reached to the bottom of the car and picked up the AR 15 rifle, cocked and loaded it, and turned to the rear." (italics added). George Hickey sued Menninger in April 1995 for what he had written in Mortal Error. The case was dismissed as its statute of limitations had run out.

• Who Shot JFK? : A Guide to the Major Conspiracy Theories (1993) by Bob Callahan and Mark Zingarelli explores some of the more obscure theories regarding JFK's murder, such as "The Coca-Cola Theory." According this theory, suggested by the editor of an organic gardening magazine, Oswald killed JFK due to mental impairment stemming from an addiction to refined sugar, as evidenced by his need for his favorite beverage immediately after the assassination. ISBN 0-671-79494-9.

• Passport to Assassination (1993) by Oleg M. Nechiporenko, the Soviet consular official (and highly placed KGB officer) who met with Oswald in Mexico City in 1963. He was afforded the unique opportunity to interview Oswald about his goals including his genuine desire for a Cuban visa. His conclusions were (1) that Oswald killed Kennedy due to extreme feelings of inadequacy versus his wife’s professed admiration for JFK, and (2) that the KGB never sought intelligence information from Oswald during his time in the USSR as they did not trust his motivations. ISBN 1-55972-210-X.

• Norman Mailer's Oswald's Tale: An American Mystery (1995) concludes that Oswald was guilty, but holds that the evidence may point to a second gunman on the grassy knoll, who, purely by coincidence, was attempting to kill JFK at the same time as Oswald. "If there was indeed another shot, it was not necessarily fired by a conspirator of Oswald's. Such a gun could have belonged to another lone killer or to a conspirator working for some other group altogether." ISBN 0-679-42535-7.

• The Kennedy Mutiny (2002) by Will Fritz (not the same as police captain J. Will Fritz), claims that the assassination plot was orchestrated by General Edwin Walker, and that he framed Oswald for the crime. ISBN 0-9721635-0-6.

• JFK: The Second Plot (2002) by Matthew Smith explores the strange case of Roscoe White. In 1990, Roscoe's son Ricky made public a claim that his father, who had been a Dallas police officer in 1963, was involved in killing the president. Roscoe's widow Geneva also claimed that before her husband's death in 1971 he left a diary in which he claims he was one of the marksmen who shot the President, and that he also killed Officer J. D. Tippit. ISBN 1-84018-501-5.

• David Wrone's The Zapruder Film (2003) concludes that the shot that killed JFK came from in front of the limousine, and that JFK's throat and back wounds were caused by an in-and-through shot originating from the grassy knoll. Three shots were fired from three different angles, none of them from Lee Harvey Oswald's window at the Texas School Book Depository. Wrone is a professor of history (emeritus) at the University of Wisconsin–Stevens Point. ISBN 0-7006-1291-2.

• The Gemstone File: A Memoir (2006), by Stephanie Caruana, posits that Oswald was part of a 28-man assassination team which included three U.S. Mafia hitmen (Jimmy Fratianno, John Roselli, and Eugene Brading). Oswald's role was to shoot John Connally. Bruce Roberts, author of the Gemstone File papers, claimed that the JFK assassination scenario was modeled after a supposed attempted assassination of President F.D. Roosevelt. Roosevelt was riding in an open car with Mayor Anton Cermak of Chicago. Cermak was shot and killed by Giuseppe Zangara. In Dallas, JFK was the real target, and Connally was a secondary target. The JFK assassination is only a small part of the Gemstone File's account. ISBN 1-4120-6137-7.

• Joseph P. Farrell's LBJ and the Conspiracy to Kill Kennedy (2011) attempts to show multiple interests had reasons to remove President Kennedy: The military, CIA, NASA, anti-Castro factions, Hoover's FBI and others. He concludes that the person that allowed all of these groups to form a "coalescence of interests" was Vice President Lyndon Johnson. ISBN 978-1-935487-18-0

• A Sentence of Death (2012) by Robert Shows takes an historical look at the Kennedy assassination. The book explains how an FBI investigation in 1978 found that, "the facts suggest that President John F. Kennedy was killed as the direct result of a conspiracy.” ASIN: B0088HY8H8.