The Umbrella Man
Reconsidered - Does he provide the motive for the murder?
One of the most
interesting things seen in the Zapruder film isn’t the snap back to the left,
the blood splatter or Jackie scrambling onto the trunk after a piece of skull
but the tall, thn man who raises and closes an umbrella as the President is
shot in front of him.
As President Kennedy
rode down the Elm Street slope one of the last things he saw, before his head
was split by a bullet, was the tall thin man opening and closing a black
umbrella.
Some conspiracy
theorists speculated that he was giving a signal to gunman for them to shoot,
while others say the umbrella itself was used as a weapon, as the CIA technical
services division had devised a dart shooting umbrella that could kill.
But the speculation
ended during the summer of 1978 when the Umbrella Man came out of the woodwork,
identified himself as Louis Witt and testified before the House Select
Committee on Assassinations (HSCA), acknowledging that it wasn’t so much a
signal as it was a sign of protest.
Witt said he was
protesting the pre-World War II isolationist views of the President’s father
Joe Kennedy, who as Ambassador to the Court of Saint James, sided with
the British Prime Minister Chamberlain, whose accomidating agreement with
Hitler at a conference in Munich led to the Nazi invasions of Poland, France
and Holland and World War II.
The Umbrella Man and his
one-demonstration against the President, at the very moment of his murder, is
the subject of an amusing video interview with Joshia Thompson, the former
Philadelphia college classics professor who became a Life Magazine consultant in
its analysis of the Zapruder film of the assassination and whose book Six
Seconds in Dallas is considered a classic microscopic analysis of those six
seconds that shots rang out trough Dealey Plaza.
Thompson, whose nickname
is “Tink,” went on to become a celebrated private eye out of San Francisco, in
the Sam Spade mold, writing “Gumshoe,” a best selling chroncal of the hundreds
of interesting cases he worked on over the years.
In a casual conversation
while we were standing at the scene of the crime one anniversary weekend
Thompson talked about how exciting it was cracking crimes as a private
investigator, and as in the game of chess, it isn’t the checkmate that is
meaningful it is the moment that you realize checkmate is inevitable that
matters.
“It’s that eureka moment
when you find that missing piece to the puzzle and realize, a ha!, now it all
makes sense. That’s how they did it, and now all you have to do is assemble the
evidence and let the game play out.”
“But you know,” Thompson
soberly reflected, “that never happened with the Kennedy assassination.”
Well that moment has
arrived for me and I will soon be able to outline a basic theory that explains
what happened in those few seconds in Dealey Plaza, who did it and why, a
conspiracy theory that I believe will pan out if others will follow up on my
leads and hunches and could even identify the shooters and their sponsors to a
legal and moral certainty. And I believe that this theory, unlike all the
others, can and will be verified and generally accepted as the historical
interpretation.
The Umbrella Man gave us
the motive when he testified at a nationally televised Congressional hearing
way back in 1978, but nobody was listening.
As explained by Thompson
in the BM video and elaborated on in detail by Witt in his testimony, the black
umbrella was not a signal but a sign of protest – as the black umbrella was a
symbol of Chamberlain’s fearful acceptance of the Nazi bully, as Chamberlain’s
treaty with Hitler was a political and diplomatic defeat.
And Witt believed that
JFK would recognize the black umbrella symbol and know that he was protesting,
only his timing was a little off. As Witt testified, he couldn’t have picked a
worse time or place to protest as the president was killed directly in front of
him.
When asked who or what
inspired him to hold such a protest, Witt explained that he couldn’t remember
exactly who mentioned it but it was just office chatter in the company
cafeteria, when it was casually said that the Kennedys viewed the umbrella as a
symbol of their father’s failed pro-Nazi policies, a subject JFK wrote a book
on – “Why England Slept.”
Where do you work? – a
Congressman asked, and Witt said he worked for a Dallas insurance company just
up the street from Dealey Plaza.
Then everyone went back
to blaming the death of JFK on violent southern hatred of New England Yankee
liberals.
But it wasn’t just a few
violent southern rednecks who protested JFK, it was only Witt, who shared the
feelings of fellow office employees at the Rio Grande building were not just
insurance professionals, but also church officials and Army Intelligence
officers, who also shared the building and the Rio Grande cafeteria.
And it wasn’t just JFK’s
father whose policies Witt was protesting, it was JFK’s liberal policies
towards Communism – Cuba and the Soviet Union in particular, that particularly
irritated the southern conservatives, especially after the failed Bay of Pigs
invasion of Cuba and the peaceful diplomatic solution to the Cuban Missile
Crisis, without even mentioning the on-going back channel negotiations with
Castro that, if known to the public at the time, would have provided the motive
to violently harm him. At least that’s what Kennedy aide Arthur Slesinger said
when he learned of the details of the back channel JFK had opened with Castro
via William Atwood at the UN.
Besides the Umbrella Man
protesting Joe Kennedy’s policies in regard to Nazi Germany, the issue is also
mentioned on the White House Oval Office tapes Kennedy recorded, when during
the Cuban Missile Crisis, Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. Curtis LeMay has a
heated conversation with the President.
LeMay and the Joint
Chiefs of Staff were united in their urging the President to attack and invade
Cuba to put the Soviet missiles out of action, but JFK saw that leading to a
conventional war over Berlin that would escalate to a nuclear war quickly,
something LeMay, as former commander of the Strategic Air Command, thought
would be a good thing. Kennedy preferred a diplomatic solution and ordered a
blockade instead.
When LeMay mumbled
something, JFK asked, “What did you say?”
LeMay responded, “I said
you are in a pretty bad fix, Mister President.”
In one of the Miller
Center transcripts of the conversation it is inexplicitly determined to be
unintelligible, but to others it is quite clear when Kennedy says scornfully to
LeMay, “Well you’re in it with me.”
At one point in the
conversation LeMay says, “It’s Munich all over again,” meaning rather than
fight it out, JFK was adopting his father’s isolationist non-interventionist
policies in regards to Cuba.
It’s Munich all over
again.
Munich is the motive for
the murder, except it wasn't Joe Kennedy's duplicity at Munich so much as JFK's
back channel negotiations with Castro that was the basis for the presumed
betrayal.
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