(Ken Silva, Headline USA) From the Soviet Union and Cuba to former President Lyndon Johnson and the mafia, researchers are still debating exactly who or what was behind the assassination of President John F. Kennedy exactly 60 years later.
However, a confluence of evidence has accumulated over the decades that implicates a key player often overlooked: former President George H.W. Bush, who has largely been memorialized by mainstream media as a mild-mannered public official with a strong moral compass.
The research about Bush’s ties to the Kennedy assassination has largely been spearheaded by investigative journalist Russ Baker, who wrote a history on the Bush family titled Family of Secrets: The Bush Dynasty, America’s Invisible Government and the Hidden History of the Last Fifty Years.
Where Was Bush on Nov. 22?
One of the reasons Baker investigated Bush’s involvement in the JFK plot was because Bush bizarrely never gave a good account for his whereabouts on Nov. 22, 1963. Throughout his career, Bush would tell media who asked him that he was “somewhere in Texas” on that fateful day.
“George H. W. Bush may be one of the few Americans of his generation who cannot recall exactly where he was when John F. Kennedy was shot,” Baker wrote of the situation.
“At the time Bush was the thirty-nine-year-old chairman of the Harris County (Houston) Republican Party and an outspoken critic of the president. He was also actively campaigning for a seat in the U.S. Senate at exactly the time Kennedy was assassinated right in Bush’s own state.”
But Bush’s fuzzy memory aside, it turned out that he was right where Kennedy was shot, in Dallas, the day before—and likely the morning of—the assassination, according to Baker.
“On the evening of November 21, 1963, Poppy Bush spoke to a gathering of the American Association of Oil Drilling Contractors (AAODC) at the Sheraton Hotel in Dallas,” Baker wrote in Family of Secrets.
“It is also likely that both Zeppa and the Bushes actually spent the night in Dallas—and that they were in Dallas the next morning: the day that Kennedy was assassinated.”
Why Did Bush Call the FBI?
Along with the suspicious timing, it turned out that Bush called the FBI on the day of the assassination to identify a possible suspect: then-GOP activist James Parrott.
The FBI investigated Parrott and quickly cleared him of any involvement—so why would Bush implicate him? Baker thinks Bush called the FBI that afternoon to establish an alibi that he was in Tyler, Texas.
“Bush called in a pointless tip about an innocent fellow to an FBI agent whom he knew, and whom he knew could be counted on to file a report on this tip—out of what may have been hundreds of calls, some of them not even worthy of documenting,” Baker wrote.
“And, after a cursory investigation, the tip was confirmed as useless. But the call itself was hardly without value. It established for the record, if anyone asked, that Poppy Bush was not in Dallas when Kennedy was shot.”
Once CIA, Always CIA
Then, there’s Bush’s supposedly short career in the CIA. According to mainstream accounts, Bush was made CIA director for one year in the 1970s to help clean up and restore trust in the agency in the wake of the Watergate scandal and the revelations from the Church Committee.
But Bush was likely a deep-cover CIA asset since the 1950s, according to Baker and others.
Citing a CIA memo discovered by JFK researcher Jerry Shinley, Baker made the case that Bush’s oil company, Zapata Oil, was actually a CIA front group.
To top it off, a Nov. 29, 1963, memo from then-FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover—unearthed by a reporter in the 1980s—directly stated that “George Bush of the Central Intelligence Agency” was involved in a briefing of the bureau’s investigation into the assassination.
“[We have been] advised that the Department of State feels some misguided anti-Castro group might capitalize on the present situation and undertake an unauthorized raid against Cuba, believing that the assassination of President John F. Kennedy might herald a change in U.S. policy… [Our] sources know of no [such] plans,” Hoover wrote in the memo.
“The substance of the foregoing information was orally furnished to Mr. George Bush of the Central Intelligence Agency and Captain William Edwards of the Defense Intelligence Agency.”
In a rare public statement from the CIA, the agency claimed in the late 80s that the George Bush mentioned in Hoover’s memo was actually a George William Bush, who had worked in 1963 on the night shift at the Langley, Virginia, headquarters.
The CIA claimed at the time that it couldn’t locate this other, mystery Bush, but he was eventually tracked down by a nonprofit group seeking records on Bush’s past . When asked about being a part of a JFK assassination briefing, this other Bush categorically denied any knowledge of such an event.
“I do not recognize the contents of the memorandum as information furnished to me orally or otherwise during the time I was at the CIA,” he said in a sworn depiction related to the non-profit group’s Freedom of Information Act lawsuit.
“In fact, during my time at the CIA, I did not receive any oral communications from any government agency of any nature whatsoever. I did not receive any information relating to the Kennedy assassination during my time at the CIA from the FBI. Based on the above, it is my conclusion that I am not the Mr. George Bush of the Central Intelligence Agency referred to in the memorandum.”
With the elder Bush having died in November 2018, he likely took his involvement in the nefarious JFK plot to the grave. Commenting in the wake of Bush’s death at the time, Baker lamented that mainstream media continues to whitewash his background.
“Bush, who died November 30 at age 94, is being remembered with nostalgia as emblematic of a supposedly more civil and genteel era, when US leaders put country first,” Baker wrote at the time. “But George H.W. Bush and his associates had a profound effect in shaping a power equation — mostly in ways they sought to obscure — that protected and advanced their interests.”
Ken Silva is a staff writer at Headline USA. Follow him at twitter.com/jd_cashless.
