Dr. John M. Newman: Conspiracies Around the JFK Assassination

Few events in American political history are more mysterious and controversial than the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. In this interview, The New American senior editor Veronika Kyrylenko interviews Dr. John M. Newman about the assassination. Dr. Newman is a rare breed of historian who meticulously examined and reexamined historical evidence concerning the complexity of the power hierarchy in the United States, numerous international and domestic events of the Cold War, and covert spy wars that led to the tragedy on November 22, 1963.Show more

Here is the transcript of the video interview:

The New American: Hello, everyone watching and listening. Welcome to this exclusive interview featuring the esteemed historian and author, Dr. John Newman. Dr. Newman’s extensive expertise and meticulous examination of historical records have shed light on intricate aspects of the John F Kennedy assassination, challenging conventional narratives, and encouraging a deeper exploration of the circumstances surrounding that fateful day in November of 1963.

Dr. Newman is a retired U.S. Army intelligence officer and is currently an adjunct professor of political science at James Madison University with expertise in Far Eastern Studies, Christian Theology and Comparative Religions. Dr. Newman, it’s a privilege to speak with you today. Thanks so much for being here.

Dr. John Newman: Thank you very much for inviting me.

TNA: Doctor, your extensive three-decade-long investigation into the JFK case has established you as a globally renowned expert in this field. How did this journey start for you? How did you first get drawn into the Kennedy assassination research, and why did you feel it was so important to get to the bottom of it?

Dr. John Newman: The way it started, I was at the time working for the director of the National Security Agency, General William Odom, I worked for him every day. And wherever he went, I went. And so, we were down in the Carolinas one day with his slides and everything to make a presentation to a Navy unit down there.

And on the way home, he was reading his New York Times. And he put it down and he said, ‘John, what’s your dissertation going to be at George Washington?’ And I said, ‘Oh, it’s going to be the accession of the Mao Zedong.’ I know a lot about that. I had two already, two degrees on China and so on.

And so, he looked at me and he said, ‘Oh, come on, John, you can do better than that. You know too much about that.’ You’re supposed to be breaking new ground or overturning orthodoxy, and then why don’t you just show some mettle and do something like that? So, I didn’t know what to say for a minute.

And anyway, after a while, I said, ‘Look, okay, General Odom, if I told you that President Kennedy was pulling out of Vietnam at the time he was murdered, what would you think about that?’ And he thought for a minute, and he said…

TNA: I’m sorry, what was the year of your conversation?

Dr. John Newman: Well, this was 1988. Yeah, I know. It’s a year to late 1984, ‘83, ‘84. You know, that’s when we were talking and I was in the military until 1994. I still had a way to go. But that’s what he told me. I and I told him, ‘What would you think of that?’ And he said, ‘You know what? That would be a great dissertation if you could make a good case.’ And then he went back to his newspaper. That was it. So, when we landed at Fort Meade that night […], I called my dissertation director at George Washington, Dr. Richard Thanos, “Dick, I’m going to change the topic to my dissertation. He said, ‘What?’ I said, JFK in Vietnam. And he said, ‘I thought you’d never ask.’ And that was the way it started. So, I took all the time.

TNA: Why is it he reacted like that? Why was he surprised?

Dr. John Newman: He knew that I was interested in it, and he knew that nobody had ever taken it on before. And so, he’s he had a lot of faith in me. And so, he wanted to see the first flight that was going to happen over this, because he was aware, as I was, what the academics had been saying up to that point. And I took all the time available that they give you. Five years if you want to, if you want to take it that long to do all your research for that. Just a dissertation. I’d done all my comps and everything, so I did that and at the end I came up with this thing and by this time Stone was doing his movie, […] JFK.

He already had an idea that that Vietnam was something Kennedy wouldn’t have done. And my dissertation director had a friend who was his agent down in Dallas, Texas. In a bar, he met a woman and they got to talking to each other and he asked her what she was doing. She said, ‘Well, I work for Oliver Stone. I’m his chief of research.’ And then the guy said, ‘Oh, really? That’s very interesting. You know, I know somebody who’s working on Vietnam for his dissertation.’ And she said, ‘Well, that’s what Oliver Stone thinks.’ And that’s how I got the phone call from Oliver Stone. And I flew out to California, and we made a deal, and the movie was made.

Eight scenes came from my book and were put into the movie. I helped direct them and so my wife was so afraid to go out to… There was a big show, you know, the first of the premiere. And she wouldn’t go. And I had a huge, a big spread. They gave me money to entertain people and all that.

But she was scared to death. Anyway, we got through that fight and then came the suppression.

TNA: Tell me about. Tell me more about it. So, you first wrote a dissertation and then you wrote a book and then eight chapters of this book were used in the JFK movie shot by Oliver Stone. What was the central idea of your book? What were the key findings of your dissertation?

Dr. John Newman: It was eight scenes, not eight shots, but it was that Kennedy was pulling out of Vietnam. He had already ordered the withdrawal to start taking place, but it was secret at first. It wasn’t until the last minute that he actually put it out there. So that was what it was about. And I guess that answers your question… Okay. So, what happens at that point is…

No, but I should have also mentioned that my book was passed for pre-publication review by the Army, which is what we’re supposed to be. The National Security Agency has no jurisdiction over the pre-publication review or not. And they came back and said, ‘Fine, it’s good.’ Well, then the NSA called me — I guess the general counsel called me — and she said, ‘Your book is classified. You can’t publish it.’ I said, ‘What are you talking about?’ — ‘What’s classified is I don’t know.’ I said, ‘When are you going to know?’ She said, ‘I don’t know that either.’ And so, then Stone said some people out to see me who had worked with the Kennedy family for a while and things like that. And so, they tried to keep me from being too scared, you know, because I was only a year and a half away from getting my pension and was facing losing my security clearances and my pension, everything down the drain, which is everything for my family, for the rest of our lives.

And eventually I decided to stand up and do it. My parents were afraid. My wife was afraid. But I realized that if I didn’t do it, I would just be like everybody else going along with the job. And so, I did. I stuck it out. And during the morning after the premiere, there was a big, what they call a well, where all the press comes from all over the world.

And there’s about nine people that sit at a table. I was one of the only advisers that was asked to be there with all the actors and screenplay writers. So, you have a table of 12 people, and every 15-20 minutes they switch. You stay there. So, you get all the press, international press and everything. And so that morning, right before the press junket, I got a call at 4:00 in the morning to wake me up.

That would be 7:00 [Eastern Time] at a time. And I was still half asleep, and I picked up the phone and the guy says, ‘Is this Major Norman?’ I said, ‘Yeah, who is this?’ Is he said, ‘This is the NSA. You’re clear to go. Have a nice day.’ After, you know, shaking my head and waking up, I did have a nice day after that, but that was just the beginning. So, we got over that part of it. But then the book company [tried to] suppress it for two years. You know, the Galbraith family got my rights back. It’s a long story but if you want to read about it, it’s in the end.

TNA: But what was so controversial about your book that it got such treatment?

Dr. John Newman: Because we had absolute proof that President Kennedy had ordered the withdrawal from Vietnam. He was. Yeah. And that would that change history if he until he died. And then when he died, and they went to Vietnam.

TNA: So, would you please explain it?

Dr. John Newman: Well, he if he had not been assassinated, there would have been no Vietnam War. And the Vietnam War cost East and West all the trade, the routes, to get all the equipment and weapons over there for that war. The Russians had a one-track railroad line going all the way from Novosibirsk, all the way to Kamchatka and so it consumed resources and time. And yeah, it was a huge war for a long time.

And by the time it was over with the United States, which was supreme in terms of its foreign currency reserves and all kinds of things, was just about on par with Japan and Germany, which had been the enemies in World War Two. That’s how bad it was. […] Kennedy was supposed to get elected. They thought Nixon was going to get elected. He changed history because they would have gone to war instantly. And so, for four years, actually, no, even for three years, Kennedy did all kinds of things for poor people and Social Security and all these good things. But he was too scared to bring in new people in CIA and the Pentagon. He didn’t do it. He was afraid to do that.

TNA: Yes. Let’s talk about this historical context of the early 1960s in America, which was marked with serious challenges and threats on the one hand and with achievements and optimism for the future on the other. What are the key facts that are important to know about the domestic and international climate during the Kennedy presidency?

Dr. John Newman: Well, by that time it had already escalated because of something that happened back in 1956. After World War Two, the United States and the Soviet Union and their orbit — so, the Soviet Union had Eastern Europe and the United States were supported by France and Great Britain and so on. So, you had East versus West and these two camps. That worked for a while.

The Americans thought that the Russians were going to take the entire continent and go all the way to the Atlantic Ocean. But they were crazy. That wasn’t true. Stalin had too much on his plate, just a whole lot of Eastern Europe. And that never happened. So, but it was a cold War, with what Churchill called the Iron Curtain.

So, it wasn’t like we weren’t fighting each other. We weren’t using bombs and bullets because they were nuclear. That’s the problem. So, nobody really wants to blow up the whole planet except for the Chiefs. They didn’t realize what Oppenheimer and Einstein knew, which is if they had gotten what they asked for, there wouldn’t be an Earth left today.

That’s how crazy these generals were. They weren’t astrophysicists. They didn’t know these things. So, it was a really scary decade afterwards because in 1956, there was a war started. It wasn’t a Cold War. The Cold War turned into a hot war. And it involved three countries: Israel, Great Britain and France, wanting to go in and conquer in Egypt and take Gaza and the Suez Canal.

And so that was a problem. And Eisenhower refused to participate in it. We I’ve got to cut short and move ahead. There’s a lot of details. I could tell you, [but] that would take time. But anyway, that was the beginning of a really hot war. And the thing that started made it even worse because Eisenhower wanted to find out whether the Soviets were going to participate or not.

And he had a new toy that the CIA may call the U-2. It’s a spy plane that flies at 80,000 feet. Now, Khrushchev knew that he had a mole in the United States, in the CIA, a high level mole — so high that he had the technical details of the U-2 and he wanted to shoot those planes down because he was in a narrow battle, still going with the people he had bested barely after four years of this big battle to claim the mantle of Joseph Stalin.

And so, he wanted to shoot them down. And so, he knew that this guy all the way over in Washington had those tech details. So, he forced three top KGB guys to go over there to Washington and find this guy and talk to him. And that’s a whole another story because of how that happens that James McCord is involved in the Watergate. And he’s the guy who had to bring somebody back from Moscow, an American, because they needed an American to find safe houses. They didn’t have an American to find safe houses in Washington. Guess what if those three guys would look like Russians looking for safe houses. And the FBI would see them very easily. And it was a hell of a story. They were called the Three Musketeers, these three guys that came in. And they were so good in these movie theaters that they could never catch them. Anyway, that’s a nice story, but it’s not the most important part of what’s going on here. It launched this huge fight between the KGB and the CIA at that point, and it was a battle, a real battle, and we lost in the end.

But along the way, it’s important to note that we had another guy whose name was Pyotr Popov. He defected to us in 1952. He was a GRU officer of the Soviet military intelligence, and he was insanely crazy guy because he took insane risks to give his CIA officer all this really important stuff on nuclear weapons and everything else that he could find.

The KGB knew that they were going to arrest him, but they were giving him time. For one thing, the political battle was still going on over the succession of Stalin during those years. And the other thing is they needed to make sure that when they did arrest him, it wouldn’t uncover the moles that they used to get that information.

And we’re talking about Berlin and Vienna. Those are where the GRU teams go — the military intelligence teams — because they’re at the place where East meets West. And it’s easy to cross over in nature. Spies are your moles, whether it’s Berlin or Vienna, as opposed to other stations around the world. And so that’s where people had been.

And he [Popov is] at the very end of his working for the CIA. They [the CIA] saw that he was being recalled to Moscow and he would be executed. And his case officer asked him. He said, ‘Look, you can come to the United States, but you got to come now.’ And [Popov] said, ‘I know, but my wife and kids are back there [in the Soviet Union].’

That was another thing. He had a mistress on the side, too. And that mistress was a Czechoslovakian woman who, when the politics turned, also ratted him out. So, there was just so many reasons why he wasn’t going to survive. And he decided to go home. And he did. And he got executed. But the last thing he told his case Officer George Walter, was, ‘Oh, by the way, there is a KGB mole high echelon in the CIA that has attacked details of the U-2.’

That is when they found out. He overheard the GRU [the Main Intelligence Directorate of the Soviet Union], they talked about those years earlier. [Popov] never opened his mouth in all the good things he told the CIA. He kept that to himself because he… I don’t know why, but he did. But the last minute, that’s old news. In April 1958, when he told that to Keith Walter [Chair of the CIA’s Research Council] before he went back to Moscow.

But the fact that he told Keith Walter, that is where [Lee Harvey] Oswald comes in, because what he has done is just now inform the CIA about this high echelon mole with the U-2 specifications.

TNA: How did Oswald enter the picture in the first place?

Dr. John Newman: You have to let me go get us there first […] So at that time that Keith Walter learned from Popov about this mole, Americans did not know there was a KGB mole in the highest echelons of the CIA and the Security officers, they didn’t know.

But because Popov told Keith Walter that his boss is in the Soviet Russia division, he tells his boss, which is [James Jesus] Angleton, who’s head of counterintelligence and Angleton, goes and tells [the CIA’s Office of Security’s] Bruce Solie, ‘Who is the mole?’ Angleton does not know he [Solie] is a mole and he always tells everything he knows to Solie. So now Solie — he is the mole [of the KGB].

I’m the one who discovered who he was in this book, Volume four, which is why it’s causing lots of aches and pains everywhere, because it changes everything that we thought we knew about the upper echelons of the CIA. It turns out that the function of a mole hunt in the CIA is done in the Office of Security, not the counterintelligence staff where Angleton was.

We all thought that the mole hunt was going to be Angleton’s role. No, we were all wrong on that. So, in the Office of Security, which is the only place they can’t be investigated, because they investigate everybody else, is a nice place to have the moles. Right? So, there are six staff, one of which is called the Security Research Staff.

Research is the key word. And within the security research staff, there is a branch called the research branch. That’s where Solie works. What does that branch do? It has a responsibility for all defectors, all false defectors, all moles and the personnel records of everybody in the CIA. You might as well be the head of the CIA with all that information.

Okay. So now he knows of what Walter learned and passed back to him. He [Solie] knows he’s the mole. Of course, he knows he’s the mole! But he now knows it has to be a mole hunt. He gets to run the mole hunt and it has to be around this U-2 thing because that’s what started the whole shebang way back in 56. Now we’re in 58, when he finds out, ‘I’ve got to do a mole hunt.’ And so, what he does, he says, ‘Well, he [the mole] is over there” — he tells Angleton, that it’s over there in the Soviet Russia division. That’s where the mole is.

TNA: And what happened then?

Dr. John Newman: Well, after the first year, nobody found the mole over there. After five years, nobody found the mole over there. After 20 years, it was still no mole over there. And Angleton was dutifully, still thinking that the mole was over there because Solie told him the mole was over there. Angleton ends up not being this really brilliant guy we all thought he was.

He was a daddy’s guy. He needed somebody to validate what he thought. So, it’s like fly fishing. Spy fishing’s like fly fishing. If you catch the lure, the fish doesn’t snap at it, you throw another one and another one. So, the fish likes it. You got to tell the fish something it likes. You got to tell somebody what he likes. So spy fishing is like fly fishing.

And he had all that, and it was Kim Philby first. We don’t have time to [make] mistakes, but Kim Philby was a mole in the end in MI6, going all the way back to the forties. And at that time Angleton was with him in London and in it Philby learned everything from Angleton there.

So, the whole time, everything Angleton knew was going through Philby, to Moscow Center. And then later on, it shifts over to his replacement. Philby ended up having to run to Moscow at one point and Angleton ends up talking to Bruce Solie. As he designs the plan, what he needs to do is to have an ironclad control over what everybody knows in the CIA, that he can tell Moscow Center.

Now, the way he does that — he can arrange, he has the power to arrange everything – so, he wants to plop what we would call a U-2 fly paper in Moscow. And have it both go in the newspapers a little bit, too. So, it’s a big deal. And what that cause is immediately — probably in the space of two weeks — there’s over 100 [ …] cables. They go from the state Department Security, Navy (because Oswald’s a marine) and the FBI, that’s how many. And they all go from these three other organizations to the CIA. Well, what Solie did before Oswald showed up was to get all of the Records Integration Division and the Office of Mail Logistics inside the CIA and say, every other government document about the Oswald trip over there [to the Soviet Union] and defection goes to my desk alone.

So, nobody knew except for Bruce Solie. Everything that was being said and talked about in the CIA, about Oswald’s trip over there. So, Oswald really… it really didn’t matter how much he knew about the U-2 as he did, he was he did work on the U-2 in Japan, which is why he was chosen. But they sent him over.

They [the CIA] called him a useful idiot. They thought he was useful because his favorite TV show was “I Led Three Lives.” So, he liked to play spy and he would play one side or the other side. He didn’t care. It was a big deal for him, and he didn’t realize over the years that he was digging his own grave.

But anyway, Oswald went over there, and it worked. And so, eventually, he was recruited. Most people don’t know that yet. It’s in chapter three of my new book. I found it laying wide open with no redactions all these years in those 6 million pieces of paper that the JFK Records Act called. Anyway. Oswald, he stays there for a while and he’s interrogated by a lot of people in Minsk, in the KGB higher school of counterintelligence.

And so, we have all that stuff now we know and there’s more things that happened that aren’t necessary to go through right now. But that is how Oswald was sent and why he was. That has nothing to do with the Oswald that was murdered after he allegedly murdered JFK. That’s a whole another story, [that happened] years later. But you have to understand who Oswald was and why he was sent there.

And that blew up into this huge… it was part of this huge thing that began in 1956. And even though there was a war, it was limited because Moscow didn’t go in, and Eisenhower didn’t go in. And so, the British were really mad that the United States would join that. But it was a good thing. A five-star general, he didn’t want to do more imperialist [things], take this and take that.

And so that’s the story, that balloon this thing up and it required other things to happen. That’s another element of this conversation of what happens in 61 and 62 when they decide… See, there are other defectors coming over now, [Anatoliy] Golitsyn is one, and some others, and all this stuff ends up very badly because Pete Bagley and the guys that were our best counterintelligence people were bested by Solie.

He ended up [to be] so powerful in the end, and he’s in the security office. But Richard Helms, who was the head of the CIA… The infighting was so bad between Solie and these other guys who were trying to tell the truth about what was going on, but nothing was getting done.

And so, this director of Central Intelligence gave Solie all the power and signed a memo about it. And years later, the House Select Committee was investigating the assassinations. They got a piece, they got a copy of that paper, and they said, ‘Why? Do you believe this, that you signed?’ And he said, ‘No.’ And so they didn’t know what to say because that’s a lie. You’re signing something that you know is untrue? And he said, ‘That’s right.’ – ‘Why did you do it?’ — ‘Well, because nothing was getting done.’ And it seemed like this side had more power. And so, he gave Solie the Soviet Russia division. They had power. He was still where he was in the security office, but he was running the Soviet Russia division and everything going on over the counterintelligence staff.

And that was just after we’ve lost Paris’ intelligence folks. [..] Now, because Solie triumphed over there, everything goes to Moscow center all the way up to, you know, the fall of the Soviet Union, the entire gamut of Western spy services was an extension of the KGB.

TNA: Well, this is shocking to hear!

Dr. John Newman: It is! That’s why I’m telling you. [It’s in Volume 4 of the book series on the JFK assassination]. And we’re still all reeling with this stuff.

TNA: And it has been ongoing for… how long?

Dr. John Newman: it’s still going.

TNA: It’s still ongoing?

Dr. John Newman: Yes.

TNA: Even though the KGB does not exist anymore?

Dr. John Newman: Yes. Well, the penetrations are going, but I’m talking about what’s in that book I wrote. It’s going because I sat on it for a year and a half. And so, I just couldn’t sit on it any longer. So, we put it out. But we had leads we hadn’t followed. Like, who took that guy over Dallas Smith back to do all the, the movie theater things.

TNA: And it’s all based on the historical evidence and the documents that you have.

Dr. John Newman: We have all the documents. It was James McCord who did that. It was part of his job was to be in Eastern Europe. And so, […] he was also a mole. And he and Solie had flown together as bombardiers over Germany in World War Two, and that’s when they were first recruited. But anyway, it’s at the end there.

Next thing I find when I’m looking what I did not publish the digital edition yet. I’ve only done the softcover. I usually do them both, but I purposely did not do the digital version because I knew we hadn’t followed up leads that were still hanging out there. I just thought, maybe if I put it out at that time, other people would get involved and, you know, big army would come together to do this [research].But everybody’s scared to talk about this stuff. Nobody will do it. Anyway. I’m doing it with the addition. I’m going to put it out in January.

And the leads are… Not only did the McCord take this guy back, who had to find, you know, do the scouting around for the KGB on that trip, Oswald had to go to the Soviet Union.

So, all these planned in the end get a quickie entry and everybody’s wondered about that all this time. Well, it turns out, you know, he [Oswald] goes and tells his mother he gets a compassionate discharge from the Marines. Because his mother is sick. So, they actually let him out early. He goes to see his mother for about an hour, goes straight to the boat, gets on a boat and goes to Lahav in France and goes there over to Southampton and then from Southampton he goes over to Germany. And then eventually they the entry point. Guess who’s there at each one of those steps? And I have his footprints. I have his travel records. McCord. McCord helps guide Oswald over there to the Soviet Union. So, you know, this is something that will make your head spin if you’ve been writing books and not getting this stuff and not at the notion who Angleton was and thinking all this and that, it’s you have to let go and nobody wants to let go.

You know, the JFK research community is fraught with people who don’t do research. They call themselves researchers, but they read each other’s books and it’s like something going around in a circle and it doesn’t go anywhere. 6 million pieces of paper were released in 2017, 2018 out of the JFK Records Act. Most people don’t have the time to spend looking at that.

I’ve spent 30 years doing it, and so I can’t say I’ve read every single one of those 6 million pages, but probably more than half of them.

TNA: And what led Oswald to allegedly carry out the assassination of President Kennedy?

Dr. John Newman: Well, that’s another story. Remember I told you that there was a briefing…We haven’t even gone into the sequences. We should [go over] what I have for you that I’m going to show at Duquesne University next month. It’s the 60th anniversary of the Kennedy assassination, and they’ve got a big thing going up there. And so, they’ve invited me to be the first presenter on the political side of things. And so, I haven’t done an update on what I think happened in the Kennedy assassination itself, and I’m getting ready to do that. So, today’s a warmup if we can spend a little time?

TNA: Yes, of course.

Dr. John Newman: [The sequence is:] Armageddon, military coup with CIA support. So it’s the military, but there are some CIA support from some rogue elements inside of the CIA.

TNA: What are these elements? And what was their agenda?

Dr. John Newman: Well, first of all, you’ve got people in the security office who are not Solie who are doing their own thing. You’ve got people who were working with Allen Dulles and his proteges or a few of those people in different places in the CIA. So, it’s really about who your mentor is more than like which branch you work in.

So, Allen Dulles was a very powerful man and his brother [John Foster Dulles] was head of the State Department. And during World War Two and after, or especially during World War Two, they were working with Wall Street firms to provide Hitler with 80 percent or 60 percent of all of his iron, a ton of money, while American soldiers were being killed on the battlefield.

And it was covered up. It was really hard to cover up because it was so much going on at a high level. […] But anyway, that’s who ends up in power. Dulles ends up in power. And so, Dulles is the guy who allows Angleton to be his counterintelligence chief under one condition.

He told Angleton, ‘You can’t investigate me.’

TNA: Makes sense!

Dr. John Newman: Yeah. So, it’s crazy (laughing). But anyway, the point is that there are people who were in the CIA who were present at the meeting in 1961…

I should go through this list first, rather than say something. I’ll have to come back to it. Here are the sequences. I have five sequences that explain generally from a 20,000-feet-high altitude, low resolution, the way that that the Kennedy assassination was arranged and how it had done.

And it’s just nothing to do with Dealey Plaza [in Dulles, Texas] per se, other than the fact that a military people were shooting in there, there weren’t some of these other people that they thought.

Okay, first sequence. April 1961, the Bay of Pigs. The Bay of Pigs was not a stand-alone operation. The Joint Chiefs of Staff wanted also to go into Laos. This was two countries, not one. And the Bay of Pigs failure caused Kennedy not to go into Laos because they were they were happening at the same time. And that’s what he would do. He [Kennedy] would say… He showed a bunch of these memos that he got from the Joint Chiefs and he was shaking about as well, ‘Thank God for the Bay of Pigs because [] we would be in Laos right now.’ They [the military] wanted him to use nuclear. They wanted to use nuclear weapons in the south. And so, this was the first time they wanted to start Armageddon. And if that’s what it would be, because we didn’t have enough ground forces to win a campaign in Cuba or in Laos.

So why are the Joint Chiefs asking Kennedy to go into both of those places when it’s impossible to win? That’s a very, very difficult question, but it’s a very easy answer because they’re going to use nuclear weapons. They didn’t need ground forces. They were just going to blow the bogie out of USSR, China, Cuba and any other communist states in the world.

TNA: Were they not afraid of the retaliation?

Dr. John Newman: There’s not going to be one because … that’s coming. That’s coming. They knew something about the balance of nuclear power. They knew when it would actually be the best time. And that was the fall of 1963. Guess who dies in the fall of 1963? Okay. So anyway, the first sequence, the first time they tried to get Armageddon started under Kennedy was during the April 6: Laos and the Bay of Pigs.

The second sequence is the same year, the second half of the year, July through December. And in July there’s a crazy SIOP brief for President Kennedy by a small part of the National Security Council called the NATO Evaluation Subcommittee. Anyway, they briefed him for the next year, which at that time would have been 62, but they didn’t brief the South for 62.

Now what is a SIOP, s-i-o-p? What does it stand for? Single Integrated Operational Plan for nuclear warfare. So, I prefer to say SIOP (laughing), as there’s a lot to memorize. But anyway, that’s what it is. And so, every year, it started with Eisenhower, there’s a briefing saying how the Soviet Union and the United States faired against each other in a nuclear war. Okay? And it just so happens that by the time Kennedy comes in, Khrushchev had been bluffing the whole time about his ICBMs. He didn’t have any. And so all of a sudden… Basically, in between the election and his actual inauguration, Kennedy finds out, ‘Oh, my gosh, we’ve got all these weapons, tons and tons of these weapons. They don’t have any.’ So, what they told Kennedy during that briefing was, ‘Look, we think we have a good chance to do this in the fall of 1963. It will be the moment at which we have the mostest and they have the leastest.’ And when you compare them, nuclear balance of power, and that’s what the time we do an all-out, complete spasmodic surprise attack on the communist countries.

And Kennedy gets up, looks at them, shakes his head and says, ‘And we call ourselves the human race.’ And walks out. He’s not going for it.

TNA: They didn’t like it, did they?

Dr. John Newman: Oh, no, no. He did not like it. They didn’t like that, either. But they didn’t like him after the Bay of Pigs because he wouldn’t go in. right, tricking him in the Bay of Pigs. You know, they promised him that he wouldn’t have to go in with combat troops because he said so. He wasn’t going to do it no matter what happened.

They said, fine, no problem. They were sure he would change his mind once those Cuban exiles were getting butchered on the beachhead. Kennedy said, no, this is on you guys. But publicly, he took the blame for it, but they hated each other. That’s the beginning of the motive for getting rid of this guy because he would not play ball with these guys and they think he’s just pipsqueak, [and they] make fun of him. He had a little PT boat, during World War Two. He could go around it. They don’t have any respect for him at all.

Anyway, moving down through the sequences. So, July and December. The other part of that second sequence is the Berlin crisis, which starts that summer and comes to a head in December.

And here’s the Joint Chiefs and they got a new special SIOP all waiting for him to start that. So, you’ve got Checkpoint Charlie, you’ve got the tanks, you’ve got Soviet tanks and American tanks pointing at each other with their guns, with the engines running. They’re ready to fire and start World War Three.

And Kennedy had it all figured out. He had something better. He was going to show the world how much we had. And he did that a couple of days before that standoff at Checkpoint Charlie, and it was huge. I mean, he sent his third number three guy in the Pentagon to do a big briefing that also the Pentagon released to the world to show how many nuclear weapons we had, all the ICBMs and all of our aircraft carriers and all these things.

And a lot of them had multiple independently targetable warheads. And the poor Russians didn’t have anything. And Khrushchev was embarrassed, you know, because he, and so were the military over there, because this was a big shock. Everybody thought that the Soviets were in the lead. And all of a sudden… So Kennedy turned the tables on them and it stopped the second time they asked for Armageddon, which was over Berlin.

The third sequence comes in the first half of the next year. In 1962, two operations, called Mongoose and Northwoods. Basically, we don’t need at this point to talk about names, who it is. But it involves the Joint Chiefs of Staff. And what they wanted to do was to say, ‘Okay, so now I get it. I get it. You didn’t want to do it in Cuba because they were a little country, and they hadn’t done anything. How about if we do a pretext, what we’re going to do is, you know, shoot down a couple of planes or a plane going over the Gulf down there and all the any Cubans and dinghies that are trying to escape, we will kill them. And then we’ll shoot some people in Miami and do the same thing in Washington, D.C., and blame it all on Fidel Castro so that the American people will be willing to go to war. In fact, they will demand it. So, if we give you a pretext, how about that?’ And he looks at the [General Lyman] Lemnitzer, and tells him to take hike, and that’s the end of that.

And Lemnitzer is actually released from that position. […] So that is the third time that they put Armageddon on the table, Operation Northwoods, just before the Cuban Missile Crisis, and I could talk about that for another ten or 15 minutes. But time is precious here.

So, the fourth sequence happens in the summer of 1963. Now what starts it all is a complete crazy thing. The Buddhist are burning themselves in the streets, dousing themselves with gasoline and lighting themselves. And the political bottom fell out of Vietnam. And Kennedy also was dealing with something that … it appears to me that that he suspected he wasn’t going to live.

He had not been doing things that he wanted to do for a very long time, like civil rights, because they put him in there. Martin Luther King was one of the reasons why he got elected in the first place. Anyway, at this point, he thinks if he doesn’t say what he really believes, nobody will ever know. So, what he does is to — after the Buddhist crisis — is to accelerate his secret plan to withdrawal from Vietnam. We were supposed to be starting in 64 and then a little bit and then everybody out after 65, after the new election.

So, he wanted to wait until he was reelected because he felt if he did these things, including the pull out of Vietnam, he would lose most of all of the Southern Democratic votes, which that time were the bulk of where the votes were for the Democrats. Okay. So, that’s why he was not going to do anything till he got reelected.

But now he realizes time is running out. And if he did think that, he was right, he only had three months to live. And so, he accelerates the withdrawal plan to a thousand out, right now, in 1963. Kept it secret for a little while, but not long. By October 3, he put it in the National Security Action memorandum, and it was made public.

And then that really drove the Joint Chiefs crazy mad because that was now out in the newspapers. What else he did, he went and gave a commencement speech to American University. Nobody saw the text and didn’t know what he was going to say. And he got up there and he made a special appeal to Khrushchev and the Soviet Union for detente. Right now. Just put him down. If you want to fight this, we’ll fight. But let’s get it over with. He even offered to let the Soviet Union participate in the American space race. You know how the general felt about that one. Not very good. So anyway, he’s going to accelerate the withdrawal from Vietnam.

He does this thing that just goes all over the world, this detente, and Khrushchev doesn’t go for it. So, he’s rebuffed. But the third thing he does is he admits that he’s done nothing on civil rights and he’s apologizing for that. And he says on TV, it’s a long thing. And the very next night he does, he goes after the civil rights thing and says, you know, we’ve messed up. African-Americans are no better off now than they were in emancipation. And he told about all the things that were happening to them, etc., that had happened to him during his presidency. They tried the freedom rides and all those things […] So anyway, he does all these things in the after the Buddhist crisis just blows up into this big thing.

And that’s the end. Now […] withdrawal from Vietnam comes out. He has six weeks left in his life and during that time is the fifth sequence, and here’s what happens. That crazy plan we call, that crazy SIOPs in 1961, that said the fall of 63 is the right time, is still in play. Because it is fall of 63. And we do have this big advantage. That’s number one.

Number two, the Oswald, his Castro activities in the United States. Once he comes back from the Soviet Union, he starts wearing a placard, Viva Fidel, and walking around Dallas, and then he goes to New Orleans. And all summer long he’s baiting the anti-Castro guys after having offered them money and stuff.

And so, they’re getting into fights. And he gets all over the news down there. And Hoover, the FBI director, doesn’t know what’s going on. He’s not involved in this stuff, but he smells a rat, and he doesn’t like it. So, he starts sending big memos all the way to the top of the CIA, where they get into the CIA. They don’t go everywhere. They only go to a few special places. So, what actually happens inside the CIA? That’s very important for the motorcade the Kennedy is going to be on a few weeks later, is that nobody knows that he is even back. They still think the last thing they’ve got in his 201 file is that he’s still in in the Soviet Union.

And the last thing in his file was dated May, 62. And we have the documents, we have the front of the documents, the surrounding split, and the House Select Committee was not allowed to see this stuff. But we got our hands on it through the JFK Records Act. And everybody who sees these messages coming from other government agencies has to sign and date.

So, we know who saw this stuff. And it was just a few people that were able to see what was going on. Mostly they were in counterintelligence and a few people over there and the FBI, but not Hoover himself. And so, the next thing is, this is we’re talking about the FBI. They’d had espionage […] You couldn’t look at anything about Oswald. You couldn’t put anything in the file unless you got permission from the espionage division of the FBI. Now, at this time, when Oswald goes to Mexico City to try and go back to the Soviet Union again, second time through Cuba, somebody turns off the red lights in the FBI now. So, when it comes to the Secret Service, looking at, are there any threats to the people on this motorcade, the FBI is not flashing the red lights. […] And so you have all this suppression of stuff of knowledge so that the cover up will work. This is where the CIA is able to do this because the CIA is helping people in this, to suppress the story about what Oswald had been doing ever since he got back from the Soviet Union.

And so, the final thing, of course, is that during those six weeks, General Maxwell Taylor, who had started off supposedly as a friend, to come help John Kennedy, to look at what happened with the Bay of Pigs, he was brought in for that out of retirement and he worked his way into the administration of John Kennedy on a lot of things until he started doing things that were bad, like on Vietnam.

And Kennedy said, okay, well, you’re fired from that. But he let him stay on because he’d already worked his way into the family, into the Kennedy family. The second child of Bobby Kennedy was named Maxwell. Maxwell Taylor. And then that guy named his son Maxwell. So, Taylor got to stay in, although he had been disciplined a couple of times.

But by the time we get to the Cuban Missile Crisis in the fall of 62, he becomes the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. That’s the job he really wanted, and he got it. And so now we fast forward to the last six weeks and guess what he does? What he does is to gut Kennedy’s withdrawal plan secretly behind [the Secretary of Defense Robert] McNamara’s back.

So Kennedy and McNamara have no idea that’s been gutted. Not only that. It’s been replaced with plan 34 which is American full intervention in Vietnam in those six weeks. That’s what’s going on. And they have a meeting on the 20th of November because the Dien Brothers were killed along the way on the 1st of November.

TNA: Which brothers? I’m sorry, would you repeat that, please?

Dr. John Newman: Diem brothers, President [Ngo Dinh] Diem of South Vietnam, because he wasn’t doing anything to help. In fact, they were just doing terrible things to the Buddhist the whole time. That’s one of the reasons why Buddhists went crazy that summer, but that never stopped. And so, they got assassinated. Kennedy did not want them assassinated. He wanted them to be let go out of the country somewhere. But anyway, they were killed on the 1st of November. And that required a new meeting of McNamara, who was Kennedy’s point man on all what was happening in Vietnam. And so, because the Vietnamese leadership would’ve been assassinated, they needed to do a new meeting to figure out if policy should change or not.

And that was scheduled in Honolulu for 20th November 1963. And so that’s when Taylor eventually told the truth about the number of forces, the battlefield forces that the Vietcong had. I forgot to put that sequence in there, too. But what happened in 62 was Kennedy decided on no combat troops. But he put more advisers in with more equipment.

And so, they made a new leadership position instead of it being the military advisory group, it was called the Military Systems Command Vietnam. And Taylor’s protege was put in there. Harkins Taylor’s protege was put in as the chief. And so, the first six weeks of 1962, McNamara was so upset by different numbers of Vietcong forces, he ordered everybody pulled out of their offices around the world that knew anything about order of battle in Vietnam.

And they all showed up. They had to leave their houses immediately. They were put on aircraft and flown over there. And for six weeks they went over all 44 provinces in South Vietnam, and they had about 80,000 Vietcong, and in the way of doctrine and counterinsurgency, and it was counterinsurgency that was going on in South Vietnam, any 10 to 1 ratio, you’re going to survive.

For every eight Vietcong, you got to have five-four, protecting all the railhead heads, all the cities and all these things that have nothing to do with warfare but to stop the insurgents, show up in and go away. That’s not that they’re not on the battlefield. And so half insurgency, half of the force is in static defense.

The other half, the other five guys, it takes at least, they say, 6 to 1 in the attack, or you’re going to lose, because the defense, as it has, is inherently safer than the offence, especially in terrain that they had down there. You couldn’t have armored tanks and things going around very many places. And so, what happened was they found out that Kennedy’s plan for advisors only wasn’t going to work.

It was stillborn. And they knew that if they told him the truth right back then in the spring of 62, that […] he would have just pulled out then. In order to keep him in the game, they lied, and they made up this huge false thing. And I found out about it […] I got all the documents declassified. And so that was a big deal, JFK in Vietnam. And that book, it was another thing that they didn’t want to publish it because it showed that that Kennedy was lied to over and over again to keep him from pulling out of Vietnam. So now that we are at the end of this story, only then does Taylor tell the truth about the Viet Cong order battle.

Two days before Kennedy’s murder, Kennedy is… It’s already too late. And so, 48 hours later, he’s in a casket in Capitol Rotunda and they’re telling [Lyndon] Johnson, we were wrong about Viet Cong, they had tons of them. And we need to send in combat troops.

TNA: So, Kennedy was surrounded by a very complicated net of conspiracy within his intelligence and military establishments.

Dr. John Newman: Not just one conspiracy, five of them. At the same time in those six weeks. It’s not just one thing. It’s everything that’s going on.

TNA: But you said he suspected… He was, well, he was at such odds with this, what we now call, the deep state, that he decided to [go public with his plans].

Dr. John Newman: Well, it’s really obvious that he was scared in the beginning. He should have… When he came in, he should have done what everybody else does, put his own people in the Pentagon and the CIA. He didn’t do that. He let them stay. And when it came time to fire them all after the Bay of Pigs, he didn’t do that except […] one at a time. So, he didn’t want anybody to know he was cleaning the house because he didn’t want to upset the Joint Chiefs. And everything he did was like that. And when Lemnitzer had to leave, he was the chairman of the Joint Chiefs until Taylor took over in the summer of 62, when Lemnitzer had to leave, Kennedy pins of medal on him.

And we have a picture of that. And Lemnitzer is looking at him, giving him the worst scary stare, you’ve ever seen in your life. And Kennedy is […] scared of him, and for a good reason, for good reason. They did kill him in the end.

TNA: So, the Warren Commission tasked with investigating the Kennedy assassination concluded that Lee Harvey Oswald, who himself, by the way, got killed the next day after he assassinated Kennedy, had acted alone and that there was no conspiracy, either domestic or international involved…

Dr. John Newman: You have to understand why that happened and how that happened…

TNA: Yes, this is where I’m going, but please go ahead.

Dr. John Newman: That’s very simple. They told Earl Warren, who is the chief justice… You see, this is crazy. Because now, right now, President Johnson decides he wants to have an investigation. He’s an executive branch guy. He’s an executive. You don’t use somebody from the Justice Department as an executive. So what happens? There’s a problem. He has to recuse himself. He didn’t want to do it.

He turned him down. He turned down Bobby Kennedy two or three times. And then then what happened? What changed his mind was a little story about Mexico City. And I mentioned that only briefly earlier. But anyway, there were two… Look, the CIA helped put the cover up together, which had to be put together, as I said, beforehand. You can’t kill the president and then decide how to cover it up.

That won’t work. So, the cover up was done beforehand. The documents were taken out of there, and they were hidden so that the people that had to make plans and communicate, especially like with the motorcade and other things like that, didn’t know what was going on. So, they had two stories that they told, the people who were behind this whole thing, two stories that they told.

One was for the public, and that was that Oswald was alone, that he acted all alone. That’s not what they said at the secret level. Everybody at the secret level and all those organizations, the FBI, CIA, everyone was told another story. They were told that that Lee Harvey Oswald did kill Kennedy, but he did it with the KGB and Castro.

TNA: But was it true?

Dr. John Newman: No, it wasn’t. But you know who was very scared? Moscow was really, really scared because they had used Oswald. They had recruited him, and they were afraid the next thing they were going to see was nuclear bombs. And that’s the first thing that Castro said when he saw the news. He said, they’re going to come after us. And which is what they wanted to do. Because they were hoping that the Tonkin Gulf false flag operations, where they were saying that the Vietnamese boats came and shot up our guys, that didn’t happen.

That was another pretext to start the war again. Anyway, I guess the point here is that Earl Warren was told that if he didn’t go along with the facade for the public, that because Oswald was working with Castro in the KGB, 40 million Americans were going to die. You have to lie; you have to do it.

And later on… It’s very interesting. Earl Warren, LBJ said, […] cried and gave in and decided he would go along with it because he didn’t want all those Americans to die. Now, that was a story we know about because we have a tape recording of it, of him talking to […] a Southern senator, Sam Rayburn. It’s one of the top senators.

Anyway, he has to do that. But he doesn’t want to. He doesn’t want to do it, but he does it. And later on, he actually tells the story himself. Earl Warren goes on WETA television, that’s right here in Washington, DC, and tells the same story that what LBJ told him was going to be nuclear war if he didn’t do what he was told. But he didn’t say he cried. So, he left that piece out. But it’s there. We have, in his own words, you can hear the glass of scotch tinkling, because LBJ was drunk […], drinking all day long. He died of alcoholism later on. But anyway, that’s what happened. There were two stories, not one.

The top-secret story was that Castro and the KGB did it, and they used Oswald. So, this was a World War Three thing. This was an Armageddon thing that they were hoping did start after Kennedy’s death. Kennedy got killed, Khrushchev was purged. And it was a very, very volatile time. And the only reason that number four time, the fourth time they tried to get Armageddon… Guess who stopped it? LBJ! His ego was big enough. […] He’s not a figure. [He thinks,] I haven’t been elected in my own right yet. So, you made everybody wait. When he was waiting for the election results, he was overheard by Stanley Karnow, who wrote big books on Vietnam.

He was in the hallway [outside of] in the Oval Office. And there was LBJ saying to his Joint Chiefs, ‘Just get me elected and you can have your F-in war.’

TNA: And so they did.

Dr. John Newman: And so, you had to wait. It wasn’t until his inauguration, which was in February, that he gave the go ahead to go into Vietnam, which he started in April. But by then, the Soviet Union had too many ICBMs. And so, it was over, that imbalance that had been there all those times. The chiefs tried not once, not twice that four times — they tried to start Armageddon. And in the end, LBJ is the one who stops it. And for other reasons, too, because he wanted, he knew it was coming.

He didn’t know much about it. They wouldn’t tell him anything because he was drunk all the time and he would leak everything […] Anyway, that’s the large story here. And it is all of the things we could have talked about.

TNA: What are your thoughts regarding the possibility of the complete truth about the Kennedy assassination being revealed? Do you believe that the Americans will ultimately learn who was responsible for this event?

Dr. John Newman: Well, they tried to stop me from doing JFK and Vietnam when I wrote volume four, all this stuff on YouTube, Facebook, all the social media things I said and everything everybody else said about my book was taken down instantly. My computer was crashed. We were fortunate to get a high-tech guy in the Dell. He said, ‘Is there anything on there you need?’ I said, ‘No.’ Fortunately, I keep everything off. I don’t put it on the hard drive because I’ve been through this before. And he said, ‘Then take your computer back to the factory settings now, or you will not have it.’ And it took me a long while to get a lot of stuff back. And then the other thing that happened, and this is all in the space of 24 hours, Kindle, Amazon, refused to publish my book, and the excuse they used was because I was publishing Bruce Solie’s travel records. And they said, Well, those travel records are a little bit hard to read. They’re not. They’re not. That was a mistake that they made. So, I said, fine, I said, okay. I gave them a new copy of my book. That information was in an appendix. It was in the first appendix. So, I took it out, but I left the appendix there and said, I’ve been instructed that I cannot put this stuff in here. Seven pages. And then I then I started going on social media and stuff. And I started publishing pictures of those travel records, and they’re crisp, they’re clear, they’re ineligible at all.

TNA: How about the possibility of the official investigation? Because, well, you see, of course, your work is very well documented. It’s very impactful. But at the same time, it’s an unofficial investigation. And this is why all these people in the media and politicians would say, oh, well, yes, of course, John Newman, we respect him. He’s a great historian and he knows what he’s doing, and everything that he says may be accurate, but it’s just a theory.

Dr. John Newman: Wait a minute. Wait a minute. There’s a difference between theory and facts. Okay? So, for a long time, what the Kennedy withdrawal from Vietnam, I called a hypothesis. And so, I always use that term. But we have something that is used in law and used in when you are making something for astrophysics or for chemistry, you’re making mistakes.

You have a hypothesis that something might work, might be the best thing here or whatever. But how do we know when it’s a fact? Well, the only way we can really be sure is you can’t rely on anything, especially in the Cold War, with all these spy services, which the first thing they do is lie. And so here is the methodology: independent attestation.

The first thing is, is actually provenance. Where does this come from? You need to know that. Now, that doesn’t mean it’s true or false. That’s just where did it come from? Number two, is it authentic? And again, that doesn’t mean that it’s true or false either, but it’s closer, if it’s authentic, is probably closer to being true than to be false.

But the third thing comes, when you have two independent sources that don’t even know each other, giving you exactly the same answer. Now, the last chapter of my book is called The Evidentiary Hierarchy. The Evidentiary Hierarchy of with respect to the hypothesis that Solie was the mole. And instead of having just two independent sources on every piece of that, that pyramid that eventually read five levels had to treat four or five or six independent sources giving me the same stuff.

It’s not it’s not a theory. This is just the fact that I’m reporting. You can make up your own mind. And I tell my readers, make up your own mind. Go look at the evidence, and you decide. Maybe it’s just a theory to you, but if that’s the case, then you’re not reading or you’re you don’t believe any of those things.

You think they’re all false or something. So this over. This part is over.

TNA: Okay. But the official investigation? JFK’s nephew, Robert Kennedy Jr, who you worked with and whom you know personally, he is pledging an official investigation into his uncle’s death. Do you think he will, if he is ever elected, will be allowed to learn the truth about what happened on November 22nd, 1963?

Dr. John Newman: He has the power to do that because he would be the apex of the political hierarchy. Well, I can tell you that Democrats, like all of them, have failed to do this. They’re scared. And they and they in the end, think they have too many other things they want to do for poor people or whatever it is that that are all good things that they want to do.

And they figure if they pull this off, you know, the CIA and the powers that be, it’s not just the CIA. There are the people much bigger than the CIA. And they’re behind, you know, who gets elected and who doesn’t get elected and all those kinds of things. So, I think that Bobby, I love him to death. We worked together for years. But I think if he doesn’t get it now, he will get it in [2028]. I’ll be 78 at that time, but they’ll be sorry this time. And I think that if it turns out that he’s going to throw the election to Donald Trump, that he’ll probably throw his support back to the Democrats.

And one way or another, people are going to be sad that he didn’t win, if he doesn’t win this time, I don’t think that he will. I think the chances are better than not that he won’t because there’s just too many people who got their minds made up about this. But there’s no way… if he doesn’t win now, there’s no way that anyone but him will be the Democratic candidate in 2028.

There’s nobody to compete with him. Biden won’t be there. Nobody is going to be [there], somebody else new. And it’ll be hands down Bobby. Okay, and after that time, there’s also a lot of things that are going on demographically that, you know, white people are not as numerous as they used to be as a percentage of the population. And all these attempts to stop black people from voting and things like that are not going very well. So, I think in the long run, I think Bobby is good. I’ve looked at him.

TNA: Do you think black people don’t vote for conservative parties?

Dr. John Newman: They do, but not very many of them.

TNA: Well, the tide is turning, I think. Well, you know, more black people have voted for Trump than they did for Biden in the last elections. The previous elections.

Dr. John Newman: It could be. It could be. I’m not worried about that point. I’m worried about what they were doing. Like no sun, you can’t do anything on Sunday. You can’t drink water or stuff in the lines and all this kind of stuff and all the other things. But I don’t want to get at politics.

TNA: Oh, no, of course not. But you mentioned something very interesting, John. You said that there are more powerful people than just the establishment of the CIA and the DOD. And you said that they decide who gets elected. In this regard, does it even matter if we have elections anymore?

Dr. John Newman: Well, that’s a problem, isn’t it? And one of the reasons is, is this classification of stuff, because when our Republic was founded, it was founded upon the principle of an informed citizenry. Now, if we can find out what the president did the last four years, how do we know what to vote for? So that went away a long time ago when this national security state came into play.

And it’s been that way ever since. And so, it’s really about your mentors and mentees across lines. It’s not this institution or that institution. The way things work, if you understand the way I have grown up in it, people like the military move from one institution the next in three or four years and then the next assignment.

So, they work in all these places. Civilians tend to stay in the same. So, the military is interesting because they’re not beholden to any particular institution. And clearly […] there are some good, really good generals. But, you know, a lot of them don’t rise to be at the top of the heap.

And we have some really good people in the CIA, really good people that do the right thing. But [here’s] the problem. These people that I’m talking about [are not in a] particular institution. [They don’t have] their support for each other. So they’re […] fluid. For example, the richest families and the richest multinational corporations and the people who are on top of all these things — that’s constantly changing.

So, at any one point in time, you really have to know a hell of a lot inside of all these things before you can tell me this is the group here that’s going to decide the next election. And I’m busy enough doing what I’m doing. I’ll leave that to other people to try and figure all that stuff out.

But I just want to… I realized, when I started working [on] the case again, I did for awhile and I quit. Spent six years [for] vacation, studying, mysticism and things like that. And then my wife and a friend asked me, they said, You should go, you should come back [to the JFK case]. And I said, wait a minute, You didn’t like it when I spent too much time on this.

And I said, Look, if I do this, it’s not going to be a book. I don’t care whether it’s one book or a hundred books till it’s over. And when I so I like going into a restaurant and seeing what’s on the table and taking the tablecloth and jerking it off the table with all the plates and silverware and everything else and starting all over again, which I did in 2010.

And I’ve done that twice since I’ve gone back and recalibrated things. Two times since then. But I’m at peace now, even though I’m extremely busy. I used to do yoga with all these [14 James Madison teams,] all the athletic teams. And I had my own business, 60 sessions a week. It was all I did. And so, I quit doing that because it wasn’t the right thing.

I still teach yoga, I still do some private stuff. But I realized that what I believe is that the universe has something for me t

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