by Professor Revilo P. Oliver
a transcript of his speech of the same title, originally published in the Community Lecture Series Bulletin (Mount Zion, Illinois, March, 1964)
I HAVE BEEN asked, ladies and gentlemen, to comment briefly on my statement that the current attack on me did not in the least astonish me and was by no means the first of its kind, although more intense than those that preceded it. It is always embarrassing to talk about oneself, and I certainly should not do so, if what I have to say could be regarded as a claim to having had any unusual powers of perception or analysis. On the contrary, my point is that I have done nothing that could not have been done by any reasonably intelligent person who took the trouble to ascertain the facts and to think logically about them.
When I left Washington in 1945, I knew positively, from the thousands of bits of evidence that had come before me in the course of my secret work there, that the agents of the International Communist Conspiracy had penetrated almost every agency of the federal government and exercised a partial or complete control over many or even most of them. I made, however, a very serious miscalculation, which I will candidly confess to you: I assumed that the terrible facts would inevitably come to light in a few years; that the American people would inevitably discover how they had been manipulated with systematic lies and deceit to serve their most deadly enemies; that a wave of indignation, such as had never been seen before, would sweep the country and that trans-Atlantic steamers would be crowded with vermin fleeing the wrath of an aroused and angry nation. I therefore returned confidently to the philological studies that are the chief pleasure of my life, and which I was determined never again to interrupt. When that great American patriot, Senator Joseph McCarthy, began his investigation of treason in the federal government, including the armed forces, I said to myself, “This is it — this is the beginning of the disclosure that I expected, and it comes at about the time at which I expected it.” So I relaxed even more, and gave myself entirely to the studies and research in which, believe me, I find the deepest personal satisfaction.
I was not astonished when our domestic vermin began their frenzied campaign of character-assassination in an effort to halt Senator McCarthy’s investigators, although I was a little astonished to find that their control of press and radio was much greater than I had estimated. I felt confident that Senator McCarthy had been right in 1952, when, after his famous speech in Wheeling, West Virginia, he conversed with a close friend of mine, who was then a member of one of our most important intelligence agencies. My friend warned the Senator that an all-out attack on him was impending and that he would eventually be ruined, but Senator McCarthy merely shook his head and said, “No, the American people will never let me down.”
I was in Europe during the climactic year of the attack on Senator McCarthy but I was confident that that vicious campaign would fail and serve only to expose the criminals who instigated and directed it.
It was not until the vermin succeeded in silencing that great American that I became really alarmed. And even then I hesitated for a time, selfishly reluctant to divert effort from the studies that mean so much to me, and even telling myself that a Professor of the Classics could do all that should be required of him by simply keeping alive the traditions of intellectual integrity on which Western civilization depends. It was some time before I saw clearly that it is the duty of every American to defend his nation and his liberty to the utmost of his ability, and that duty cannot be evaded by a plea that he is too busy to perform it or that he would prefer to do something else.
Every informed American knows that, as J. Edgar Hoover has repeatedly warned us, “WE ARE AT WAR with the Communists, and the sooner each red-blooded American realizes that, the better.” That war is not the less real because it is conducted against us by stealthy subversion, systematic deceit, and covert treason. I firmly believe that no American has a right to sit idly by and watch the gradual capture of our nation by the incredibly cunning and bestial enemies of mankind. You — and I mean you, each American in this audience, and I am sure that the majority of this audience is American — cannot shirk that duty because you think loyalty to your country may be bad for your business or because you don’t want to be spat on by our enemies and their contemptible little hirelings. Or if you do shirk, you will, unless you drug yourself, be haunted by the ghosts of all the young Americans who are now rotting in their graves in Europe and Asia, and who gave their lives gladly because they thought that they were dying for their country.
It was with such consideration in mind that I finally decided to speak, and I did so with a full awareness of the risks that I was taking. In my first public speech on the subject of the Communist Conspiracy, given in October, 1957, before a district meeting of the Daughters of the American Revolution, I pointed out, for the record, that I well knew that I was making myself a target for the spitting-squads that try to terrorize every American who attempts to expose effectively the International Conspiracy’s gradual conquest of the United States.
There was no merit in making such a prediction. It was simply stating a fact known to everyone who has observed Communist methods. That fact was, I think, stated as clearly as possible by the editors of National Review in their issue for 19 April 1958:
“It is an established law of our epoch that any individual who begins to get public attention for ideas that run firmly and specifically counter to Soviet policy objectives will become the target for a massive campaign of defamation that will go on until he is politically — and often physically — silent, such campaigns originating in the secret chambers of the Communist apparatus, are commonly triggered by the words of an open or concealed Communist agent. They are carried on for the most part, however, not by the Communists themselves but by the massive exertions of the slavish Liberal left.“In our own nation as in all nations the honor roll of victims is long and varied: Charles Lindbergh, Pat McCarran, Jan Valtin, Robert Vogeler, William C. Bullitt, Joseph McCarthy, Louis Budenz, Arthur Coleman, George Stratemeyer, Whittaker Chambers, Martin Dies, Douglas MacArthur, William Jenner and a hundred and one others.”
Of course, subsequent to the publication of that editorial, National Review encountered a series of financial crises and now finds it expedient to laugh at the “conspiratorial theory” which its Board of Editors unanimously held in 1958. If that sudden about-face suggests to you anything concerning the hidden mechanism of subtle control of even supposedly conservative opinion in the United States, you are free to draw your own conclusions.
As I pointed out in 1957, I was then too obscure to be attacked at once, and aside from some sporadic harassment, no major attack was made on me until the spring of 1959.
As we all know, in January, 1959, the island of Cuba was captured, largely through the use of American resources, by the International Communist Conspiracy whose branch manager in Cuba was a disgusting creature named Fidel Castro. Now at that time, everyone who took the trouble to inform himself knew that Castro was a Communist agent. The evidence that was then available was so great that it takes me fifty minutes to summarize it in the speech that I have given in many cities as part of the “Our Council Speaks” program of the John Birch Society. I accordingly began in February, 1959 to tell Americans the obvious truth. I quote from the speech which I gave in March, 1959, before a convention of the Daughters of the American Revolution in Chicago:
“Although Castro thinks it worthwhile to say now that he is not himself a member of the Communist Party, he and his principal assistant, including his brother, have long been notorious Communists, and no reasonable person even slightly acquainted with Latin-American affairs could ever have doubted that the Castro revolt was a Communist operation intended primarily to secure bases for the many Russian submarines which are constantly patrolling our Atlantic Coast, and to permit the establishment of rocket bases within one hundred miles of American soil.”
I then pointed out that the methods by which the nest of traitors in our State Department installed Castro in power in Cuba duplicated in all essentials the methods by which the same nest of traitors had handed China over to the Soviet a few years before. And since we had seen the same pattern repeated over and over again in every defeat that the American people have suffered at the hands of the Washington-Moscow Axis, developments in Cuba could be predicted with absolute certainty. In the case of Cuba, as in that of China, Americans were having squirted in their faces the same old hogwash about the “pooah,” the “need for social reform, ” and “agrarian reformers. ” And so I said five years ago:
“If the American people can be hypnotized by this concerted campaign in the press and over the radio, the situation in Cuba should be properly ‘stabilized’ in about two years. Then you will witness another act in the farce. You will recall that when the Communists were firmly established in China, our ‘experts’ blandly told us: ‘Oops! We said they was agrarian reformers, but we was mistaken. They’s Communists after all. Ha-ha-ha!’“Now as soon as the Russians have built their submarine bases and set up the equipment to launch ballistic missiles from Cuba, our State Department, you may be certain, will te11 us: ‘Oops! We were mistaken about Castro. But now that launching sites for atomic missiles have been set up within one hundred miles of the United States, war is unthinkable, ain’t it?’”
Of course, no one would now question the accuracy of the statements that I made five years ago, but at the time, since the Conspiracy needed to keep Americans quiet until the needed bases had been built in Cuba, our domestic enemies set their puke-machines in motion, though not quite on the national scale recently employed. But even so, I was spattered with a good deal of their spittle. And there was quite a campaign to induce the University of Illinois to get rid of that nasty professor who was so mentally diseased that he thought that sweet Fidel Castro, the “George Washington of Cuba,” was a Communist! And they went on puking and spitting, and the local accomplices of the late Oswald in the Communist-operated organization called “Fair Play for Cuba” did their best to lie to the American people, until sweet Fidel himself went on the radio and told everyone that he had been a Bolshevik since adolescence. That, of course, shut the vermin up, and the puke-campaign subsided into minor forms of sporadic harrassment.
I knew, of course, that the puke-machines would be started again as soon as the Conspiracy deemed it expedient. That they would operate on a much larger scale was a certainty after 5 December 1960, when the Kremlin issued orders to the depraved beasts that are its open and secret agents in the United States. These orders assigned to them as their most important task the destruction or intimidation of all Americans willing to defend their country from internal subversion. For a statement and analysis of those orders, see the authoritative pamphlet entitled “The New Drive Against the Anti-Communist Program” published by the Senate Subcommittee on Internal Security, containing the text of a hearing held by that Subcommittee on 11 July, 1961. This is available from the Government Printing Office in Washington for 25 cents although I hear that political pressures will soon be used to prevent further distribution of it.
If you will read that pamphlet carefully, you will understand that whenever you hear someone screeching about “right-wing extremists,” or “Birchers” or “radical right fascists,” or “racists,” unless he is a mere parrot repeating sounds he does not understand, you are listening either to one of your domestic enemies or to a hireling who will do anything for a fast buck or to one of those self- styled “intellectuals” whose empty heads make such perfect echo-chambers for Bolshevik propaganda.
The principal target of the barrage of purulent pus that is spewed on all anti-Communists is the John Birch Society, which has sent our hidden enemies into a frenzy because its members, the finest Americans in our country, have simply refused to be intimidated by either public screeching against them as a body or by the clandestine attempt to ruin them as individuals through unspeakably vicious and vile attempts to undermine their businesses or their professional standing. Many members of the Council and other members of the Society who have spoken publicly have suffered losses far greater than anything thus far inflicted on me, but no one of them, I am proud to say, has even wavered in his duty as an American. That, of course, is why we promise our members, many of whom are vulnerable to the stealthy reprisals of the vast Conspiracy that their names will not be disclosed unless they themselves wish it. And, as you know, the vermin use that elementary precaution as a pretext for calling us a “secret society.”
I could give you a thousand instances of the vicious terrorism now going on in the United States, though concealed, so far as possible, from the public. Let me give you but one instance. I have here in my hand a letter from the president of one of the oldest and most respected manufacturing corporations in the state of Arkansas. He says that a local radio station had a program of the kind that is usual in many parts of the country. The man who was in charge of the program called on the telephone various listeners and asked for their opinion on some questions of the day. During the week that ended March 1, there was a question about the John Birch Society, and the announcer telephoned some listener who was either a member or knew something about it. That man described honestly and fairly the purposes and methods of the John Birch Society, and the announcer permitted that statement to go out over the air. The next day his program was permanently cancelled and the announcer was taken off the air. Whether he will be able to obtain another job, I do not know.
You will now see why concerted puking throughout the country for which my most recent articles in American Opinion afforded a pretext did not in the least astonish me. It was predictable with almost mathematical accuracy, just as it is predictable that it will be renewed with equal fury in the near future, unless the International Communist Conspiracy decided that it would be simpler to murder me, preferably in a faked accident.
Of the techniques employed in this campaign, let me give you one small example. Our national press services have become a little cautious since the Associated Press lied about the conduct of General Walker at the time that Kennedy’s goons were terrorizing the citizens of Oxford, Mississippi, and it now faces suits for criminal libel totalling, I understand, $23,000,000. So here is what United Press International reported concerning my article. I read from a despatch printed in the Louisville Courier-Journal on 12 February, but reproduced in newspapers throughout the country, including, no doubt, your local papers.
“The Oliver article — ” (notice they can’t even write English) — “the Oliver article said Oswald… was arrested as a suspect in the shooting of former Maj. Gen. Edwin A. Walker, but was released ‘through the personal intervention of Robert F, Kennedy.’ The article offered no confirmation of Oswald’s arrest in the Walker shooting.”
Now here is what I really said on the first page of the first part of my article, “Marxmanship in Dallas”:
“… According to a story that has been neither confirmed nor denied officially at the time that I write, Oswald was arrested as a suspect, but was released through the personal intervention of Robert F. Kennedy, etc….”
I even indicate the source for this story: as published in THE COUNCILOR for Dec. 20, 1963, Shreveport, Louisiana.
Did you notice the clever distortion? We have some really ingenious rats scuttling about in the sewers of American journalism.
The report, which I quoted with all due notice to my readers that I had not been able to verify it, had not been denied at the time that I wrote, and as a matter of fact, it has not yet been denied, except by vague implication. And that implication was put forth in the very despatch from United Press International from which I read a moment ago, which goes on to quote a “Justice Department spokesman” — unidentified in any way — as saying that “the authorities” — unspecified and unidentified, and hence anything from the police in Dallas or the police in New Orleans to the F. B. I. or some clerks in the Justice Department — knew nothing about Oswald’s attempted assassination of General Walker “until after the death of President Kennedy.”
I do not suggest that the report, which I quoted with such reservations when I wrote in December, is true, but I confess that I should be much happier if, instead of an anonymous spokesman and a vague reference to unidentified authorities, we had Bobby Kennedy explicitly denying that report concerning his own activities. In fact, one wonders why Bobby himself not only remains silent but has refused an invitation to speak after me on a lecture series and to refute, if he can, anything that I have said.
Now, ladies and gentlemen, if we come to my article in American Opinion, I again find myself in the embarrassing position of seeming to say “I told you so!” So let me remind you that there is nothing in the article for which I can take personal credit: there are only facts, which anyone could have ascertained, and deductions from those facts, which any reasonable person could have drawn. In the first installment of my article, in the February issue of American Opinion, I drew two principal conclusions, which, of course, the vermin did their best to conceal (with their venomous vomit.) I call your attention to the fact that both of those conclusions, which I drew by deduction from the evidence when I wrote during Christmas, have already been confirmed, the one conclusively, the other by evidence of a very high degree of probability.
The first dealt with the so-called Warren Commission. The Communist Party, two days after the assassination, officially demanded the appointment of Earl Warren as the head of an “Extraordinary Commission” — and I am quite sure that the Communist Party was well aware of the interesting detail that the words “Extraordinary Commission” are an exact English translation of the title first given to the Soviet Secret Police when that gang of professional torturers and murderers was organized in 1917 immediately after the capture of Russia by the International Communist Conspiracy. Of course, that is just one of the criminals’ little jokes. Well, five days later, in response to the Communists’ demands — unless, of course, the whole thing had been arranged long in advance — such a commission was appointed, headed by Earl Warren.
It required no penetration at all to see that the function of that unconstitutional and illegal commission would be to cover up the crime which the Communists had committed in Dallas. But when I wrote in December, I did not anticipate that the notorious Earl Warren would fully confirm my conclusions on 4 February, when he told the Associated Press and other newsmen that the testimony taken by the Commission would not be made public “in your lifetime.” The breathtaking audacity of that announcement proves that Earl Warren feels for the American people the same contempt that his friend, Khrushchev, expressed when he, commenting on his tour of the United States at the invitation of President Eisenhower, said, once home in his own realm: “The Americans — you spit in their faces and they think it’s dew.”
In that article, I considered various explanations of the assassination of President Kennedy by the Communist, Oswald, and after weighing the evidence, I came to the conclusion that the most probable explanation was that the assassination had been carried out on orders from the headquarters of the International Communist Conspiracy as part of a carefully planned strategy of assault on the American people.
I wrote, of course, in December. I now quote from a syndicated newspaper column, entitled “Washington Pipeline” by John Henshaw, and published in various newspapers on or about the third of March:
WASHINGTON, D. C. — The reason behind Chief Justice Earl Warren’s blunt statement — after hearing testimony by Mrs. Marina Oswald, widow of Lee Harvey Oswald — that important parts of his special commission’s findings would not be revealed “in our lifetime,” is that evidence indicates that the assassination of President Kennedy was engineered in Moscow and wittingly or unwittingly financed by U.S. government funds.
You will notice that Mr. Henshaw speaks positively — there is no “it is said” or “it is rumored” in his column. He evidently feels confident that his sources of information told him accurately what went on in the hearings that Warren is so desperately trying to keep secret from the American people. And I think Mr. Henshaw is right, because I hear substantially the same thing from my own sources, which, I am sure, are quite different from his.
Let us turn now, ladies and gentlemen, to a few details concerning the assassination itself. I shall not repeat the basic facts — which no one has questioned — that are stated in the opening pages of the sixteen-page first part of my article in the February issue of American Opinion, which, after all, is in print and available to anyone who will take the trouble to read it. I shall therefore first call your attention to one corroborative detail, which I omitted from that article for sheer lack of space. It is, however, a very significant detail, and I believe that, if you will think about it for a moment, it will suffice to suggest why such desperate efforts are being made to prevent an inquiry by responsible and loyal Americans into the facts surrounding the assassination of the late Mr. Kennedy.
As we all know — for it is a matter of public record — the young Communist punk, Oswald, went to Dallas for the specific purpose of assassinating Kennedy. Forty- five days before the assassination, he tried to obtain a job in a printing establishment which overlooked the route that was followed by the presidential procession in Dallas on 22 November. Oswald failed to obtain a position in the printing establishment because the manager made inquiries about him and learned of his notorious Communist record. Accordingly, on 15 October, Oswald, through the intercession of some wealthy patrons who come from the vicinity of New York City, obtained his job in the next best site for the planned assassination of the president, the Texas Book Depository.
Now note the significance of that fact: forty-five days before the assassination, Oswald knew that Kennedy was going to visit Dallas. In other words, he knew that long before Kennedy himself did, if there is any truth whatsoever in the stories that were given to the press from the White House. Kennedy’s itinerary, according to the official stories, was in doubt until shortly before the visit. There is an excellent newsletter called Counterattack published by former members of the F.B.I. It costs twenty-four dollars a year, but it is worth it, because you can obtain from it information that never appears in the press. In their issue of 20 December, these former members of the F.B.I. positively reported that only a few days before the assassination Kennedy’s itinerary was still so uncertain that a very wealthy leftist in Dallas named Marcus urged that Dallas be omitted from the itinerary, but was overruled by the notorious Adlai Stevenson, who, as you will remember, had a few weeks before provoked an incident in Dallas to create the impression that Dallas was a “right-wing” city.
Now there are only two logical explanations of the fact that the Communist agent chose Dallas for the assassination: either (1) he had, forty-five days in advance, secret information from some source in or close to the White House that Kennedy really would visit Dallas, or (2) he had assurance from such a source that if he succeeded in establishing himself in Dallas, the President would be persuaded to visit that city. Surely those are the only explanations, unless you wish to stretch the long arm of coincidence to the breaking point.
But there is much more than that. Oswald not only knew that Kennedy would visit Dallas; he knew the precise route that Kennedy would follow through the streets of Dallas. That no one could have guessed without precise advance information.
If you have ever visited Dallas, and particularly if you have ever gone from the airport to the center of that large city, you will remember that there were literally dozens of routes that the procession could have followed. And if you will glance at the published map of the route that the procession did follow, you will see that there was no apparent reason why those streets were chosen in preference to many others.
But there is much more than that. Have you noticed the really amazing deflection of the route that the procession followed? I have used aerial photographs, but the situation is shown with sufficient clarity in the photograph published in the Dallas Times Herald on 23 November and perhaps in a few other newspapers.
Now observe closely. The pattern of streets approximates a 30-degree-60-degree triangle. Here is Main Street — in a big city, Dallas, it is, of course, no longer the main street, but it is an important thoroughfare — one of many that the procession could have followed. It is the street that runs on the right-hand side of this triangle. So far, so good. The obvious thing, surely, is for the procession to continue down Main Street and through the famous underpass that is at the bottom of our triangle, where it is to turn and go to the hall where Kennedy was to speak. And that, indeed, is the route shown on the map that was published in the Dallas Morning News on the morning of the President’s arrival.
But there is another detail. Over here, at the left upper corner of our triangle, is the Texas Book Depository where Oswald is waiting with his rifle — and, according to some good evidence, a fellow assassin not yet identified. Had the procession continued down Main Street, the President would have been within rifle range, but for much of the distance he would have been masked by intervening structures, and for the intervals where he would not have been so protected, Oswald would have had to hit a target moving rapidly at right angles to his line of fire. Every man here who has done any hunting, or has fired at distant moving targets, knows what that means. Not even the best marksman with the best telescopic sight can be sure of hitting such a target at long range.
So what happened? The procession, instead of continuing down Main Street, turned to the left on my diagram and went down Houston Street to the corner on which the Book Depository was located. Then it turned and went down Elm, the hypotenuse of the triangle, to get back to Main Street and its original route. The effect of this was to make the President move in a straight line that almost coincided with Oswald’s line of fire as he stood in the window of the Book Depository. As every hunter well knows, the easiest of all targets to hit is one that is moving away from you along a straight line at a constant speed. In this case, young Oswald scored a bull’s eye.
Obviously, it was this peculiar detour around the triangle — one for which there is no apparent reason — unless, perchance, someone wanted Kennedy to see the city jail — which made the assassination possible. And that suggests to me the suspicion — not the certainty, mind you, but the suspicion — that the detour was arranged for Oswald’s convenience. What does it suggest to you?
At all events, Oswald must have had some assurance that the procession was going to follow — or would be made to follow — that route, and he must have had that assurance at least thirty-eight days before the assassination — in other words, long before Kennedy himself knew that he was going to be in Dallas at all.
The number of persons who could have given Oswald that assurance must be small. They must be persons in a very high position either in the White House or possibly in Dallas.
Obviously, if it were ascertained who insisted that that odd route be followed, that person would have to provide some explanation. But the question has not even been asked. We are supposed not even to wonder about it. If we even state the known facts, we will be spat at and told that we American swine have no right to think about such things.
Here is another detail: As we all know, after the assassination Oswald left the Book Depository undetected, went home, changed clothes, and then started out for an unknown destination. On the way, he was for some reason stopped by a courageous and loyal policeman, Officer Tippit, whom Oswald, in a moment of blind panic, shot to death. Officer Tippit, of whose background I have learned a great deal, was a young man not unlike most of the members of police forces throughout the country — the men to whom you citizens seldom give a thought, although they, usually underpaid, are the men who will protect you, with their lives, if necessary, from the lawlessness and violence that the International Communist Conspiracy is constantly striving to incite, on racial or other pretexts. Officer Tippit is dead, so we shall never know precisely what instinct or surmise led him, while he was driving along in his automobile, to stop the disguised Oswald, who happened to be passing on the sidewalk, for questioning. Whatever his reason, we know that he was right. In all this sorry business, Officer Tippit is one real hero. He did give his life in the performance of his duty. And I ask you to remember him — with a prayer, if such be your inclination and faith.
Only a Dallas paper and the Councilor, so far as I know, published a map of the route along which Oswald was walking when he was stopped by Officer Tippit. Oswald was walking the few blocks from the room that he had hired under an alias directly toward the apartment of Jakob Rubenstein, alias Ruby, who later killed him. And Rubenstein’s apartment is the only reasonable objective that lay along that path. That path would not have led Oswald to a bus station, railroad terminal, car rental agency, airport limousine service, or any other objective that might reasonably be sought by a man intending to escape from town. If Oswald was not headed for Rubenstein’s apartment, then he was merely strolling along the streets of Dallas to enjoy the afternoon breeze, if any. Does that seem likely to you?
There are many evidences of a close association between Oswald and Rubenstein. Some of these appeared in the press in Dallas and possibly in a few newspapers outside that city. A professional entertainer, Bill Crowe, who said that he was a mnemonic expert whose business was to remember faces, stated positively that he had seen Oswald in Rubenstein’s honky-tonk night club in Dallas nine days before the assassination. The owner or manager of a motor court in Waco, Texas, reported that Oswald and Rubenstein had shared a cabin on or about 27 October. I am informed from Dallas that the producer of a local television program called “Open End” stated on his broadcast on the afternoon of Sunday, 24 November, that he had with his own eyes seen Rubenstein, alias Jack Ruby, behind the Texas Book Depository a few minutes after Kennedy was shot, in other words only a minute or two before or after Oswald made his escape from the back of that building. There is other evidence that has not yet been printed. I am informed by a very reliable source that evidence which has been given to the F.B.I. but which I have been asked not to disclose, proves an association between Oswald, Rubenstein, and a mysterious and wealthy immigrant who operates under an alias in a part of the nation that is far distant from Dallas. I am informed by another reliable source that absolutely incontrovertible evidence of close association between Oswald and Rubenstein OUTSIDE the United States is now available, and will be disclosed at the proper time. Please note that the two last items I have told you are part of what has been told me by sources which I believe to be entirely reliable, but which I cannot personally guarantee, because I obviously was not there myself. I have indicated to you candidly the necessary qualifications of those statements, and I ask you to remember this if some “Liberal” liepaper accuses me tomorrow of having made “unsubstantiated allegations.”
In the meantime, who is the Jack Rubenstein who executed Oswald before he could talk? He is, of course, the Jack Rubenstein who operated night-clubs and, according to rumor, less legitimate businesses in Dallas under the alias of Jack Ruby. He is admittedly the Jack Rubenstein who has a record as a petty hoodlum in Chicago. He is admittedly the Jack Rubenstein who, like Oswald, must have some close connection with Fidel Castro, since he paid a clandestine visit to Havana in December, 1962, and January, 1963, where he was the guest of one Solomon Praskin, a long-time supporter and intimate of Castro who for many years before the latter came to power operated a “novelty” shop and tourist-trap on the Prado in Havana across from the Seville Hotel, and who still holds forth in the same location as a cover for his other activities. That, by the way, was not Rubenstein’s first visit to the Communist base in Cuba; according to the Dallas Morning News, he is known to have visited Castro-land in 1959, about nine months after the Soviet annexed Cuba.
But, beyond all that, is the Jack Rubenstein in Dallas the Jack Rubenstein who was a known Communist agent thirty years ago? More specifically is he the Jack Rubenstein who, as a young man, was on the Executive Board of the Young Communist League when that gang was most active in recruiting dolts and young criminals on college campuses throughout the country?
That is a point that it should be easy to determine. I do not pretend, ladies and gentlemen, to be an expert on the detailed workings of the Communist Conspiracy in the United States, and I certainly do not have the elaborate files that the real experts whom I know have been accumulating for the past forty years. But when I was asked for suggestions by a quasi-official source not long after the murder, I was able to name, on the basis of my little acquaintance with the records, two living witnesses who could make a personal identification. I added that one of those witnesses was a notorious Communist-fronter, who would certainly commit perjury if he thought that he could get away with it, but that the other was a man of whom I had some personal knowledge and who, I was sure, would tell the truth. So far as is publicly known, the witnesses whom I suggested have not been consulted. There is another obvious way of getting at the truth: if the Jack Rubenstein of the Young Communist League is not the Jack Rubenstein in Dallas, he is either still active in Conspiratorial circles in the United States or has fled to escape interrogation or is dead. In any event, it should be possible either to locate him without much effort or to
ascertain what has become of him. The F.B.I. has probably done that, but, as you know, the Warren Commission to Conceal Communist Crimes has forbidden publication of the F.B.I.’s report. So we still have no positive information — and Warren undoubtedly is determined to see to it that we never get any.
All that we can do, therefore, at the present time is reason from the record, as does former Congressman Dies in his article in the March issue of American Opinion, to which I refer you for details. I think that you have a right to know, but I warn you that if you ask such inconvenient questions, you will be spat on by experts.
I am in touch with very responsible friends and observers in Dallas, and I am assured that the city is seething with rumors and indignation as the local Communist network and their stooges try frantically to cover up inconvenient facts. I am going to mention two reports, telling you the extent and nature of my information and specifically warning you that I have not been able to verify either story from independent sources for which I can vouch.
Here is a very curious sequence of events reported to me from Dallas and also mentioned, in substantially the same terms, in a newspaper column by Bob Considine which, I understand, was published in some newspapers on 23 February, 1964.
As we all know, after Oswald murdered Officer Tippit, he ran through a parking lot and a back alley. The first indication of the route that he had taken reached the Dallas police from a garage and car lot about a block from the murder. A young mechanic in that garage named Warren Reynolds, twenty-eight years old, told his acquaintances that it was he who had seen the suspicious character dodging among the cars and that it was he who first put the Dallas police on Oswald’s trail. Early in February, when young Reynolds was working alone in the garage late at night on a rush job, a gunman shot him through the head. The gunman was seen running away and a description of him was obtained. The police picked up a known Communist agitator who answered the description, but released him when a woman provided him with an alibi. The woman who provided the alibi was — note this — a strip-tease performer in Jack Rubenstein’s honky-tonk night club. Some weeks later she again came to the notice of the police when she was drunk and disorderly and engaged in a public brawl. She was accordingly put in a cell for the night and was to be questioned the next morning when she had sobered up. The next morning she was found hanged in her cell. I have said “the next morning,” because that is what my source in Dallas told me. Mr. Considine in his column implied that the girl spent several days in her cell before her death. I am not sure which is right.
Now here is a story that I did not mention in my article because I had not been able to obtain verification that I could regard as certain:
The methods of the Secret Service that protects the President are well known. The agents of that organization try to check every manhole in the streets and every window in every building along the route of a Presidential procession, and they try to make that check just before the procession passes. That, of course, is an enormous job, and the Secret 5ervice can only do the best that it can with its available staff. The Secret Service surely would not have overlooked so obvious a location as the Book Depository after they knew that the procession was going to pass right under its windows. But the very odd thing is that we have had no official statement as to what kind of check, if any, was made by the Secret Service. That, I think, is curious. It was even more curious that there was an announcement from Washington that if Secret Service agents were called as witnesses in an investigation in Texas, they might be ordered not to testify.
Some of you may remember that shortly after the assassination of Kennedy it was reported on the radio that a Secret Service man had been killed. Then nothing more was heard of that story. In Dallas it was rumored, however, that the body of a Secret Service man had been found in the Texas Book Depository hidden behind book cartons near the place where Oswald had hidden his rifle. It further reported that responsible persons had seen the body carried from the Depository, and that it was taken to the Parkland Hospital, where the Secret Service man was pronounced dead on arrival. That story did not appear in the press, and has been printed, so far as I know, only in a newsletter whose general accuracy I cannot definitely evaluate.
The story is widely known and believed in Dallas, but I have not been able to obtain conclusive confirmation. The nearest that I could come to that was to locate a very responsible citizen who says that he was told by a member of the staff at the Book Depository that that man had seen with his own eyes the body of a Secret Service agent as it was removed from the building. This man further reports, however, that two days later his informant came to him in a state of great perturbation, asked him to say nothing about the story, and said that if he were questioned, he would deny having said anything of the sort. The man was obviously frightened, and returned on three subsequent occasions to insist that his name be kept out of the affair.
Now obviously that story cannot be accepted as a fact from which one can reason to definite conclusions. At most, it suggests the imperative need for a legitimate inquiry into the facts surrounding the death of the President. We Americans have a right to know, and if we are fit to live as free men, we shall not accept Earl Warren’s grinning statement to the press, made after the publication of my article, that he was going to see to it that people of our generation never learned all the facts.
We need to know, and we need to know NOW, because this is a matter that vitally affects our national security — vitally affects your chances and mine of being alive a few years from now. As I have indicated in my article, the only deduction that can reasonably be drawn from the known facts is that the Communist agent, Oswald, carried out the assassination, as Congressman Dies has said, on orders from his superiors in the Conspiracy, and that he must have had the cooperation of highly placed confederates. The frantic efforts to cover up the facts merely serve to confirm our deductions.
Ladies and gentlemen, the International Communist Conspiracy’s assassination of Kennedy is but one of the thousands of data that the vermin are desperately trying to cover up until they can take the United States beyond the point of no return and gain, through the pending “Civil Rights” legislation and many similar forms of subversion, such powers over you that resistance will be hopeless when you at last see the dreadful truth.
Here is but one of a thousand recent events that I could mention. I pick this one because you may find it suggestive and because you will never have heard of it, unless you read one of the very few newspapers in the country that had the courage to print the story. Two years ago, Lieutenant Colonel Goleniewski of the Soviet Secret police, an officer so important in that organization that he had his own airplane, defected and escaped to the West. Since that time, he has vainly sought an opportunity to tell his story to a Congressional committee, but was prevented by our Central Intelligence Agency from doing so. At last, thanks to Congressman Feighan of Ohio, he had an opportunity to tell informally part of what he knew, and this was reported in the New York Journal-American in a series of articles published from 2 March to 5 March 1964. Lieutenant Colonel Goleniewski, although, of course, he knew only a part of the Communist operation, was able to identify nineteen of his fellow officers in the Soviet Secret Police who now hold high positions in our State Department and in our Central Intelligence Agency. Goleniewski did not, of course, know what the Central Intelligence Agency does with the billions of dollars of your money that it is given each year, but he did know what happened to one little nest egg of $1,200,000 which was sent to the C.I.A.’s office in Vienna, Austria. One-third was given directly to the Soviet Secret Police, one-third was given to the Communist Party in Italy, and one-third was sent back to the United States to finance the American Communist Party.
Do you wonder why you are losing your country?
Ladies and gentlemen, I have done, and I shall continue to do, my duty as an American citizen. The question is what you Americans will do for yourselves. I can only warn you that your time is running out. The question before you is whether you and your children will regret that they were born.