American Conspiracies - Jesse Ventura [3]
Anyhow, I wasn’t told the reason and was simply left to ponder how come our Constitution is being violated. Let’s say it gave me pause. I’ve seen it firsthand. And that’s another reason why I am writing this book, because I believe it’s vital to our democracy to see the hidden pattern that’s been undermining this country for most of my lifetime. The Bush Administration, which made lying into an “art form” that took us into the Iraq War, was in a way the logical extension of all the cover-ups, crimes, and conspiracies that preceded it.
Researching this book has been fascinating, but I wouldn’t call it fun. When you look back on how the power brokers have deceived us over the years, it gets pretty damned depressing. Maybe that’s why so many people prefer to remain in denial. The way I look at it, though, is that old truism from the Bible: “You shall know the truth, and the truth shall set you free.” Until we come clean about our recent history, there’s no way to move forward and return to the representative democracy that our forefathers intended America to be.
We’ll start by looking back at the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. If you’re like me, you certainly know the name of John Wilkes Booth—just like we do Lee Harvey Oswald (ever wonder why lone assassins always have middle names set down, too? Maybe so we’ll get them firmly implanted in our minds?). But how many of us were taught that Booth had eight known coconspirators, and that it’s never been resolved as to whether he may have been involved with someone in Lincoln’s own circle?
Then we’ll cut to the 1930s, when Franklin D. Roosevelt got elected in the midst of the Great Depression. That’s when a cabal of wealthy industrialists using a veterans’ front group embarked on a plot to get rid of FDR and institute a fascist-style regime in this country. They’d probably have succeeded, except they chose the wrong man to lead the way: Major General Smedley Butler, a true American hero who’d twice been awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor. Butler blew the whistle to Congress, which held hearings that exposed the whole scheme. And guess who was among the conspirators, along with J.P. Morgan, DuPont, and other titans of finance? None other than Prescott Bush, grandfather of George W. and father of George H.W. Prescott, also happened to be a business partner and American banker for a German steel and coal baron who funded Hitler’s rise to power!
I’m going to devote several chapters to the assassinations of the 1960s, because in my view the truth has been covered up about all of them. We’ll start with the one I’ve studied the longest, and that’s the conspiracy that took President Kennedy’s life on November 22, 1963. I believe our country has never been the same since that terrible day, which established a precedent for treachery in our contemporary political life that we’re still living with.
I don’t believe you can ever form an opinion and say: this is absolutely what happened. That’s one of the reasons the perpetrators succeed, because when the most powerful entity in the world is doing the covering up, it becomes extremely difficult to know that you can ever lay the truth completely bare. I think I probably read a scenario that’s true, but there might be several others as provocative and just as well true. Or they might all be intertwined into one. The criticism of Oliver Stone’s film JFK (which I’ve watched many times) is that he just threw all the mud at the wall to see which part sticks. Well, he had to. He was putting it all out there and letting