American Conspiracies: Lies, Lies, and More Dirty Lies That the Government Tells Us by Jesse Ventura, Dick Russell

good lead and then somebody’d call me off and send me out to California on another story or something. We never really detached anyone for this. We weren’t really serious.”
    Life magazine also took a fresh look at the case. “Did Oswald Act Alone? A Matter of Reasonable Doubt,” an article in the November 26, 1966 issue was headlined. A reexamination of the Zapruder film, the magazine said, had reached the conclusion that the single-bullet theory didn’t hold up and a new investigation was called for. This was to be the first of a series of articles but, in January 1967, editor Richard Billings says he was informed that “It is not Life ’s function to investigate the Kennedy assassination.” That was the last time they’d challenge the Warren Commission’s findings. Billings resigned from the magazine and took a job with a newspaper in St. Petersburg, Florida. In 1967, led by Dan Rather, CBS News did a four-part study that again upheld the Warren Report . Warren Commission member John McCloy was the network’s behind-the-scenes advisor.
    Another decade went by before the Bernstein piece in Rolling Stone showed just how strongly these news organizations were all tied to the CIA. “By far the most valuable of these associations, according to CIA officials, have been with the New York Times , CBS and Time Inc.,” Bernstein wrote. “Over the years, the [CBS] network provided cover for CIA employees, including at least one well-known foreign correspondent and several stringers; it supplied outtakes of newsfilm to the CIA.... A high-level CIA official with a prodigious memory says that the New York Times provided cover for about ten CIA operatives between 1950 and 1966.”
    Bernstein’s article began by describing how Joseph Alsop, a leading syndicated columnist, had gone to the Philippines in 1953 to cover an election, at the CIA’s request. It would be Alsop, transcripts of President Johnson’s taped telephone conversations later revealed, who first urged LBJ to form the Warren Commission to answer any unresolved doubts about the assassination. “Alsop is one of more than 400 American journalists who in the past twenty-five years have secretly carried out assignments for the Central Intelligence Agency, according to documents on file at CIA headquarters,” Bernstein wrote. “Journalists provided a full range of clandestine services—from simple intelligence-gathering to serving as go-betweens with spies in Communist countries.”
    The article went on: “James Angleton, who was recently removed as the Agency’s head of counterintelligence operations, ran a completely independent group of journalist-operatives who performed sensitive and frequently dangerous missions; little is known about this group for the simple reason that Angleton deliberately kept only the vaguest of files.”
    Among the CIA’s most valuable relationships in the 1960s, Bernstein continued, was a Miami News reporter who covered Latin America named Hal Hendrix. He regularly provided information about individuals within Miami’s Cuban exile community. He was the conduit through which the CIA passed word to then-Senator Kenneth Keating that the Soviets were putting missiles in Cuba in 1962, and got awarded the Pulitzer Prize for his coverage of the Missile Crisis. On the afternoon of the assassination, another reporter, Seth Kantor, has said that Hendrix provided him considerable yet-unrevealed information about Oswald’s history—including his supposed defection to Russia and his activities with the Fair Play for Cuba Committee. The setup seems to have been “on,” and it involved the media.
    The cover-up still does. After the House Assassinations Committee concluded late in 1978 that the president “was probably assassinated as a result of a conspiracy,” the New York Times buried the story—“Experts Say That