An introduction for beginners

American Assassinations (Part I): Crazy Lone Killers

John Kennedy was assassinated nine years before I was born. As a child, I would hear people discuss the case, melodramatically pausing when the subject of conspiracy arose. Because JFK was killed before I was born (and because I was a kid) I didn't have any preconceived notions. The idea of conspiracy, to me, was entirely probable. But because it happened so long ago, I didn't have any interest in it.


I was in 3rd grade at Hesperia Elementary when Mrs. Graff told us President Reagan had been shot. This woman, who obviously remembered where she was when Kennedy was killed, brought into the classroom a television and made us watch some boring news report about Reagan. I remember thinking to myself, "Presidents get shot. And when they do, you're supposed to remember where you were when it happens. That's what all the grownups have do with Kennedy."


In March 11, 1985 I was in 8th grade at Reeths Puffer Junior High. Our history teacher, Mr. Plymale, was boring us with some current events. It seems the USSR has elected a new premier: Mikhail Gorbachev.


I raised my hand and said, "Haven't the Russians gone through a lot of leaders lately?" I seemed to recall Chernenko was premier for only a year (February 1984 to March 1985). And his predecessor, Andropov, was premier for little more than a year (November 1982 to February 1984). In fact, Gorbachev was the fourth Soviet leader since 1982. The official story from the Kremlin was that these men died of natural causes. This seemed awfully suspicious to me. Perhaps the Russians were up to no good...?


1991, Oliver Stone released his landmark film, JFK. I was an adult by this time but the subject of a conspiracy in the JFK case still was not appealing to me. So I passed on this film.


In 1995, I broke down and rented JFK. The movie blew me away. My interest in the case was piqued. I'm not an expert. There are people who have dedicated their lives to studying the case. But I'm more learned on the subject than most. What follows are some facts that I find unusual.

I began my research on the JFK case by reading the official report: the Warren Commission Report. There is a wealth of information in this book. It is definitely the starting point of any serious investigation into Kennedy's murder.The Warren Commission Report has a chapter in it about previous Presidential assassinations. I found this particularly interesting. I knew McKinley and Garfield were killed. And everyone knows Lincoln was shot. But I had no idea Teddy Roosevelt was shot (but not killed). There were rumors that an attempt on Grover Cleveland's life. In the 1880's and 1890's there was no federal police force. When Cleveland had to travel to Colorado, the only police force with federal jurisdiction was the Department of Treasury's secret service. The Secret Service had federal jurisdiction to apprehend counterfeiters. Grover Cleveland set the precedence to use the Secret Service as a body guard detail.


For me, the most important fact in whether there was a conspiracy to kill Kennedy was the fact that his brother Robert was killed while running for President. If there was a conspiracy to kill JFK, then it stands to reason there was a conspiracy to kill RFK. I didn't know anything about Robert Kennedy except that he was shot. The murder of both brothers struck me as odd: the murder of RFK would have to be negotiated in order to resolve whether JFK was killed in a conspiracy. The next book I read was on the RFK assassination.


The Assassination of RFK: Conspiracy and Cover Up by William Turner and Jonn Christian was an interesting read. The authors have decent credentials (Turner is an FBI retiree and Christian is a former California congressman) but they exaggerate their evidence in some areas. Despite this, they make a breakthrough.


The book is about a televangelist named Jerry Owen. Owen is suing a public access television station for defamation. It seems the television station heard about Owens's connection to Sirhan Sirhan, Robert Kennedy's assassin. Owen was approached by Sirhan to be his getaway driver. A few years later, the television station found out about it and canceled his TV ministry. He sued.
Owens had a rather devout following. He decided to call a couple of his parishioner as character witnesses. Turner and Christian had discovered one of these witnesses, Gail Aikens, was the full-blooded sister of Arthur Bremer, the man who shot George Wallace. This seemed odd to me but I let it go. George Wallace was not on my radar at the time and I had never heard of Bremer before. The connection between Sirhan's potential getaway driver and Wallace's would-be assassin was a footnote in my investigation, nothing more.


A few years went by and I had thought about it some more. At first, I thought it was odd that the official story for both JFK and RFK was they were each murdered by a lone gunman with no political motivations. Two brothers were killed: one a President killed in 1963, the other running for President, killed in 1968. Both killed by lone gunmen. Both lone gunmen were crazy--they had no political motivations. In 1985, when I was in 8th grade, I thought it was suspicious when the official story from the USSR was that Brezhnev, Andropov and Chernenko all died of natural causes in little over two years. In the U.S. we have two members of the same family murdered in a five year period by different lone gunmen who have no political motivations. I found this difficult to swallow. The "lone gunman who's nuts" explanation is possible. But is it really likely to strike the same family twice?


Then I recalled the Reagan assassination attempt. Wasn't John Hinckley crazy? I read a book about it called The President Has Been Shot by Herbert Abrams. The official story was (and is) that John Hinckley Jr. was crazy. Like Lee Harvey Oswald and Sirhan Sirhan, Hinckley was looking for notoriety. This really struck me as odd. Three different lone gunmen? No conspiracy? No political motivations? This is a difficult pill to swallow. Then I remembered the passage in Turner and Christian's book about Bremer.


1963: President John Kennedy is killed by Lee Harvey Oswald. Oswald is the lone gunman. He had no political motivations in shooting Kennedy. Oswald was killed two days later
1968: Robert Kennedy, who is running for President, is killed by Sirhan Bishara Sirhan. Sirhan is the lone gunman. He has no political motivations in shooting Kennedy. Sirhan is in prison.
1972: George Wallace, who is running for President, is shot and paralyzed by Arthur Bremer. Bremer is the lone gunman. He has no political motivations in shooting Wallace. Bremer was sent to a mental hospital.
1981: President Ronald Reagan is shot by John Hinckley Jr. Hinckley is the lone gunman. He has no political motivations in shooting Reagan. Hinckley was sent to a mental hospital.

Now it seems there were four different lone gunmen who shot our leaders. And they do so without political reasons. In a typical murder investigation, the police try to deduce motive. It is my understanding motive is the overwhelming factor in police solving crimes. But when Presidents or would-be Presidents are involved, it seems there are no motivations…
So I went back further in history. This pattern of "lone gunmen shooting Presidents and doing so without political motives" has reared its ugly head three other times! Seven men who were President (or running for President) have been shot by lone gunmen who were crazy. The only official conspiracy in the murder of a President is that of Abraham Lincoln. Every other assassination or attempted assassination has been by crazy lone gunmen. Only John Wilkes Booth had co-conspirators. And only John Wilkes Booth wanted his victim dead for political reasons.


James Garfield was shot July 2, 1881 by Charles Guiteau. Not only was Guiteau crazy but his case was one of the first insanity defenses in US history. The jury didn't buy the insanity and Guiteau was executed.


William McKinley was shot on September 6, 1901 by Leon Czolgosz, an anarchist. Despite Czolgosz's affiliation with anarchism, the official explanation is that Leon Czolgosz was crazy. He was later executed.


Teddy Roosevelt was shot October 13, 1912 by John F. Schrank. Schrank dreamed President McKinley told him Teddy Roosevelt, not Czolgosz, was McKinley's assassin. Schrank shot Teddy Roosevelt. Roosevelt survived. Schrank was sent to a mental hospital.


Eight times our Presidents or would-be Presidents have been shot. And seven times there was no conspiracy. And the seven times there was no conspiracy, the assassin was not motivated by politics—he was crazy. It has taken me some time to wrap my brain around this. It seems to me that if there was a conspiracy to kill JFK, then why not a conspiracy to kill Garfield? McKinley? Roosevelt? The same modus operandi is evident in all seven cases.



American Assassinations Part II: The Strange Biography of the Assassins

We now know the official stories of the seven assassinations are quite similar. But what about the assassins themselves?

Lee Harvey Oswald was a U.S. Marine who was a radar operator stationed at a U.S. naval base in Japan. In 1959, as a Marine, he was openly Marxist. This is quite unusual. In Hollywood, actors and directors were being blackballed for leftist affiliation. And Oswald was a U.S. Marine who was openly Marxist! Then he defected to the U.S.S.R. He married a Russian woman. Gary Powers, a U2 pilot, was shot down over Soviet airspace. Powers wrote a book implying Oswald told the Russians where the U2 jets were patrolling. Oswald moved back to the US in 1962 with his Russian wife and daughter. He struggled to hold down a job and support his family. The Oswalds moved to Dallas in September of 1963. In November, Oswald shot Kennedy.

Leon Czolgosz was the son of Polish immigrants. He was a factory worker but was unemployed at the time of the McKinley assassination. Czolgosz moved to Buffalo, New York on August 31, 1901. He shot McKinley on September 6th.

Sirhan Bishara Sirhan was born in Palestine to Jordanian immigrants. The Sirhans move to California when he was young. He struggled to hold down a job. He worked part time at a horse track when he killed Robert Kennedy.

John Hinckley Jr. was a college dropout. Despite this fact, he had the means to travel across the country to stalk Jimmy Carter for several weeks before finally shooting Ronald Reagan.

Charles Guiteau was a college dropout also. He also tried his hand at theology and politics but was unsuccessful. Guiteau said it was the will of God that he be given the ambassadorship to France. Garfield, who never met Guiteau, obviously assigned someone more qualified to the consulate in Paris. Guiteau stalked Garfield for weeks before killing him.

John Flammang Schrank was a Bavarian immigrant. He spent several years as a drifter before receiving his vision from the ghost of President McKinley. He drifted to Milwaukee in time to shoot Teddy Roosevelt.

Arthur Herman Bremer barely graduated from high school. He also struggled to keep his job as a busboy. He quit his job and drifted for a few months. He stalked Nixon during the time before shooting Wallace.

Of the seven assassins, two were immigrants (Bavaria and Palestine). One was a defector (to the U.S.S.R.) All of them struggled to hold down jobs. Despite their inability to hold down gainful employment, all of them except Sirhan traveled the country extensively in the weeks leading up to the assassinations.
If we are to believe the official stories, there were no conspiracies involved in any of these assassinations. The security surrounding the Presidents is robust enough to prevent conspiracy-based assassinations which are politically motivated. But if you are a college dropout who struggles to hold down a job, somehow you slip through the cracks and are able to shoot the President.