American Conspiracies - Jesse Ventura [58]
Soon Nixon was out of there. He’d been cutting deals in politics his whole life, with a closet full of skeletons. Over the next couple years, a portion of the CIA’s “family jewels” saw the light of day. As they did, Rosselli, Artime, Giancana, Jimmy Hoffa, George de Mohrenschildt and more took whatever they knew about the assassination of JFK to their graves. McCord got out of prison, moved to Colorado, and refused all requests for interviews.
As for Hunt, the man who spooked everybody, he died in January 2007 at the age of 88. His son, Howard St. John Hunt, then came forward with the story that his father had rejected an offer by rogue CIA agents to participate in the Kennedy assassination. Specifically, Hunt had named LBJ as the conspiracy’s chief organizer. CIA conspirators supposedly included David Phillips, Cord Meyer, Bill Harvey, David Morales, and fellow Watergate burglar Frank Sturgis. All dead and gone, of course. The younger Hunt remembered his mother informing him on November 22, 1963, that Howard was on a “business trip” to Dallas that day. Before he died, Hunt allegedly told his son there was a “French gunman” firing from the grassy knoll.28
So did Howard Hunt come clean with a deathbed confession? Or was he blowing smoke till the end, continuing to spin a web of disinformation that foisted blame onto others? No mention of Helms. Or his pal Artime. Or his Watergate coconspirator, McCord. I’m not one to give E. Howard Hunt the last word. This much I do know: Whatever hidden knowledge he was carrying, it scared the crap out of both Nixon and the CIA.
Who took down whom in the end? I’m placing my bet that Nixon was set up to take the fall, because he was meddling too much in the CIA’s business. Nixon’s well-known penchant for paranoia may, in this instance, have gotten the better of him. He had shady dealings with so many people, from Howard Hughes to mobsters, it’s hard to sort out which particular secrets he was trying to protect. But what I’ve tried to show, through the chronology of Watergate, is that there was a whole lot more to the story. This chapter exposes the underbelly of “payback” within the government: I’ve got something on you, so you should know better than to push too far into places I don’t want you to go.
In order to climb the ladder of the two political parties in our current system, you have to condone their corruption. I believe most people, when they initially start in politics, are good people. They come into the system wanting to do their job, to change things. But the longer you stay in the system, the more corrupt you become. The two parties to me are today no different than joining the Hell’s Angels: Once an Angel, always an Angel. That’s what holds true for Democrats or Republicans—unless you separate from them and join a third party movement, knowing that you’ve broken away and beaten the addiction.
WHAT SHOULD WE DO NOW?
In an open-minded society, alternatives to the accepted version of events need room to be voiced, without being dismissed out-of-hand as fantasy. This is the lesson of Watergate for our time, where President Nixon may have been more a victim than an orchestrator. This story also leaves us to consider that there’s more than one way to take down a president, a precedent that surfaced again with the impeachment proceedings against President Clinton.
CHAPTER EIGHT
THE JONESTOWN MASSACRE
THE INCIDENT: At Jonestown in Guyana on November 18, 1978, more than 900 people (most of them Americans) committed mass suicide by drinking a “Kool-Aid” laced with cyanide. This followed the murder of Congressman Leo Ryan, who had come to investigate rumors about Jonestown.
THE OFFICIAL WORD: Cult leader Jim Jones gave the orders, and his “brainwashed” followers did what he asked. Jones then shot himself.
MY TAKE: The first on-scene investigator determined that the majority of the people at Jonestown were murdered. Jones had longstanding ties to the CIA, and may have been involved in mass “mind control” experimentation.
“Research