American Conspiracies - Jesse Ventura [1]
I guess my questioning of the “official” line goes back to my school days, being taught that we had to fight in Vietnam to stop the domino effect of Communism. That’s what I learned in school, but my father—who was a World War II vet—took the exact opposite position at the dinner table. He said that was a load of crap, that the Vietnam War was all about somebody making big money off it. At first I thought my dad was crazy, because I could not believe they would lie to me in school. I fought with him over it, and he’d keep doing his best to debunk what I was saying.
When I, in turn, went into the service and learned a whole lot more about Vietnam, I had the good fortune to come home and tell my father that he was right. Especially growing up in the Midwest, you never even contemplate that your government might not be telling the truth. You don’t realize until you get much older that government is nothing but people—and people lie, especially where money and power are concerned.
The next prong in the fork was, when I got out of the navy and went to junior college one year, Mark Lane came to give a talk and I happened to hear him that night. That was the first time I ever paid attention to someone saying that what they told us about President Kennedy’s assassination might not be true. I’d been in junior high school when JFK was shot, and I remember the announcement over the loudspeakers and being sent back to our homerooms and then school was dismissed. Like most everybody else, I saw Jack Ruby shoot Lee Harvey Oswald on TV, but I never questioned the Warren Commission’s report that this disaffected ex-Marine had acted alone.
After hearing Mark Lane that year, I was at the height of my wrestling career during the 1978 congressional hearings into the assassination and didn’t really start delving into any of this until wrestling changed in the mid-1980s. All of a sudden, I was no longer driving to towns, but flying. Sitting on airplanes all the time becomes extremely boring, so I started reading. Besides Mark Lane’s Plausible Denial, I remember Jim Marrs’s Crossfire and then a whole bunch of other books. When I’d see anything about the Kennedy assassination in the bookstores, I’d buy it.
So as I got older and started looking back at the Sixties, where every assassin was supposedly a “lone nut,” I began thinking how could that be? These nuts who never told anybody anything or planned with anyone else, but just felt the need to go out and commit murders of prominent individuals—John and Robert Kennedy, Martin Luther King and Malcolm X. The odds of that, I figured, simply defied all logic.
It made me wonder who’s really running the show. Especially when you look at things they now admit never happened, like the Gulf of Tonkin incident that drew us into the Vietnam War. These things, as portrayed by our government and media, seem to be smaller segments of a bigger picture. It almost seems like a game of chess sometimes, where you don’t understand the significance of one move until maybe a decade or two later and start to see the results of how things turned out differently.
You can bet that during my four years as the independent governor of Minnesota (1999 to 2003), I was shielded from plenty of information, because they figured this guy will come and go. At the same time, I had some personal experiences that would tend to make a sane public servant start looking over his shoulder. (As William Burroughs once said, “Paranoia is having all the facts.”)
The first inkling that certain people inside the