President John F Kennedy was murdered by enemies within his own government in a ‘political’ hit, according to his long-time personal secretary.
The shocking conclusion was found in a previously unpublished document written by Evelyn Lincoln, who was JFK’s White House gatekeeper, and was sitting in the third car of his motorcade when he was shot.
Jefferson Morley, editor of JFK Facts, and a renowned expert on the assassination, said because Lincoln was so close to Kennedy her thinking may well have reflected how the president would have viewed his own assassination.
He told the Daily Mail: ‘She was a very loyal person. She had turned her mind and her work to him, she served him. And so, yes, I think this thinking does reflect how he would think about this event himself.
‘She wrote this at the end of her life and never published it, it’s not quite clear why, so I think it’s valuable testimony from somebody who was very close to JFK.’
Lincoln died in 1995, aged 85, and is buried in Arlington Cemetery. During her lifetime, she never revealed her true opinion of what lay behind her boss’s death in Dallas, Texas on November 22, 1963.
But in an 11-page addendum to an unpublished memoir, she laid out in detail the reasons why she believed Lee Harvey Oswald was not acting alone.
Instead, she concluded that JFK was the victim of a complex conspiracy planned by elements within the US government.
She wrote: ‘From the catbird seat that I had during my 12 years as John F. Kennedy’s Personal Secretary I would have to say that, in my opinion, President Kennedy’s death in Dallas, Texas, was a deliberate professional political murder, planned by a group in government who wanted him removed from office.’
Evelyn Lincoln was JFK’s personal secretary for 12 years, including throughout his time at the White House. From her ‘catbird seat’ she concluded he was the victim of a ‘deliberate professional political murder, planned by a group in government’
President John F. Kennedy smiles at the crowd that had gathered along the presidential motorcade route in Dallas, Texas, on November 22, 1963
Lincoln was the daughter of a congressman who volunteered to work for JFK in his first US Senate campaign in the early 1950s, becoming his personal secretary.
Between then and his assassination, in the days long before cellphones, she was his conduit to the rest of the world.
She had the Secret Service codename ‘Willow’.
‘He (President Kennedy) insisted that I know exactly where he was and with whom at all times,’ she wrote. ‘I became the one link to whom everyone turned, the family, the friends, the important people, if they wanted to talk to him or leave messages for him.
‘It, therefore, became very important that I know his whereabouts. I always had the telephone number where he could be reached, and he had a telephone number in case he wanted to call me.’
Their secret chats included Kennedy musing about replacing Vice President Lyndon Johnson as his running mate in the 1964 election.
Lincoln later wrote two memoirs which did not contain her view on the assassination.
A third – titled ‘I Was There’ – was never published and contains the addendum.
In it, she wrote that she would ‘try to answer, to the best of my knowledge’ the question ‘Who conspired to assassinate President Kennedy?’
She wrote that the details had ‘smoldered in my mind all of these years.’
Evelyn Lincoln looks on as President Kennedy signs a document in the Oval Office
Evelyn Lincoln, JFK’s secretary, rejected the conclusion of the Warren Commission, that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone. Oswald claimed he was a ‘patsy’
Lincoln went through the various factions with a grudge against Kennedy, including far-right groups, organized crime, ‘Texans who hated him,’ Teamsters boss Jimmy Hoffa, FBI boss J Edgar Hoover, the Ku Klux Klan, anti-civil rights organizations, and communists.
She also discussed Madame Nhu, the de facto First Lady of South Vietnam, who in November 1963 was ‘traveling all over the United States charging that the President was turning his back on Viet Nam.’
She wrote: ‘It is ironic, I feel, that so many of these factions, who felt so strongly against the President, had their people in or around Dallas at the time of the assassination.
‘Any one of these factions, I reasoned, could have hired a hit man. I have heard that they come dime a dozen. Likewise, the atmosphere in Dallas at the time was filled with hatred and suspicion. The time was ripe to pull this off.’
Her own feeling, having been at the center of the storm, brought her to the conclusion that the motivation for killing Kennedy may have been his refusal to back an invasion of Cuba.
‘The underlying current that ran through all the Mob activity was their inability to regain their massive operations in Cuba after Castro had overthrown the Batista regime,’ she wrote.
‘The Mob and extreme right-wing elements, with the assistance of the CIA, together with the Cuban exiles were constantly conspiring to overthrow Castro.’
President John F. Kennedy gives directions to his secretary Evelyn Lincoln
A Cuban airliner is pictured ablaze during the failed Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961
Jacqueline and Caroline Kennedy, wife and daughter of President Kennedy, kneel at his coffin
She detailed how the Eisenhower Administration, and especially Richard Nixon a ‘rabid communist hater,’ went along with the Bay of Pigs plan, which was then passed along to Kennedy, who approved it.’
The Bay of Pigs invasion went ahead but Kennedy canceled an air strike and it failed, leading to allegations from opponents that he had betrayed the Cuban-exile invasion force, known as Brigade 2506.
‘The President, when it became apparent that the plan would fail, unless there was American military intervention, called the operation off,’ Lincoln wrote.
‘He antagonized the Cuban exiles and the CIA by his refusal to go along with the plan, and the CIA was likewise infuriated when the President said he would like to blow the CIA to pieces because of their mishandling of the plan.
‘Thus a linkage grew between the Mob, the CIA and right-wing extremists over what they felt was the President’s moderation toward Castro, his civil rights proposals, his drive for peace and the Kennedys’ crusade against organized crime.’
She added: ‘Therefore, it is logical to conjecture that these elements could have formed a conspiracy to assassinate the President.’
President John F Kennedy’s secretary wrote that he was the victim of a ‘deliberate professional political murder, planned by a group in government who wanted him removed from office’
Eveleyn Lincoln wrote that there was a ‘linkage grew between the Mob, the CIA and right-wing extremists over what they felt was the President’s moderation toward (Fidel) Castro’
Lincoln also noted a ‘strange alliance between Nixon, the Cuban exile forces, and ‘members of the CIA who participated in the Bay or Pigs.’
She wrote: ‘It is strange that many of these CIA members were later involved with Nixon’s break in of the Watergate office…and also worked in the Nixon administration in other “dirty tricks” operations.’
She also noted that Vice President Johnson, realizing that he might be dropped from the ticket in 1964, left Washington at the end of October to go back to his ranch in Texas to ‘await the President’s visit – over three weeks ahead – and Many or his associates went with him.’
She laid out how J. Edgar Hoover, who ‘loathed (JFK’s brother) Robert F Kennedy as much as he did Dr Martin Luther King, kept voluminous personal files’ on the president, including ‘rumors, hearsay, trivia and potentially embarrassing information.’
‘Lyndon Johnson had access to Hoover’s secret files and many a rumor was started by them,’ she wrote.
She also noted that Johnson initially ‘maintained that there had been a conspiracy’ but then ‘hurriedly set the wheels in motion to build a case against Lee Harvey Oswald as being the lone assassin.’
Lincoln wrote: ‘There is definitely an intertwining of people and factions in much of the opposition and efforts to “stop” or destroy the President.’
Morley, of JFK Facts, said Lincoln was ‘discreet’ and that gave her more credibility.
‘This is somebody who knew his (JFK’s) world, she lived in his world, and so her testimony is important, and it’s also something that she was not trying to exploit in her lifetime,’ he said.
Lyndon Johnson being sworn in as President by Judge Sarah Hughes aboard Air Force One after assassination of President John F. Kennedy,
A news crew tries to capture the assassination of President John F Kennedy while a couple and their toddler get down
‘She’s in the room, she sees the men going in and going out, she knows the body language. She doesn’t literally know what’s going on, but because she lives in that world and is so trusted by him, her intuitions and her observations, I think carry a lot of weight.’
He added: ‘Her thinking reflected his. She was influenced by his thinking. So yes, in some sense, we can say this is his way of thinking.
‘This was not her first choice of things to talk about. But because people were so interested in what she had to say about it, she finally came forward and said it.’
