New Clarity on JFK's Assassination and Israel
Rather than spin a conspiracy theory, Monika Wiesak constructs a riveting chronology of U.S.-Israeli tensions in 1963
Of all the JFK researchers sifting the assassination-related files made public in recent years, few are more assiduous than Monika Wiesak and fewer still more perceptive.
She’s not an influencer. I have only spoken with her on the phone a couple of times, but I can confirm, she’s not an AI bot. She’s an IT professional whose self-published slender book, “America’s Last President,” explicates the words and the deeds that distinguish President John F. Kennedy from all ten men who followed him in the White House.
In conversation with renowned economist Jeffrey Sachs, Wiesak depicted JFK as “a young, audacious visionary who dared to challenge the status quo and redefine the course of history.” As Jim DiEugenio noted on Kennedys and King, “America’s Last President” is “among the most important JFK books in recent years” because of its elevated historical perspective.
Few are more qualified than Wiesak to address the question, What does the historical record of JFK’s assassination tell us about the possible role of Israel?
In an important new essay on Substack, JFK: Myth vs. Reality, Wiesak answers the question by focusing on the personal relationship of counterintelligence chief James Angleton to Israel’s intelligence hierarchy and on President Kennedy’s policy conflict with Israeli Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion over nuclear non-proliferation.
Wiesak wisely skips the furious online exchanges of the subject. She’s not one for the ALL CAPS RANT. She doesn’t hashtag #Zionism. She doesn’t weigh in on Gaza or Iran. She doesn’t talk about Israel, pro or con. She’s not concerned with the heresies of Tucker Carlson, Hasan Piker, and Rep. Anna Paulina Luna, much less the wisdom of Gerald Posner and Michael Smerconish. There is exactly one mention of the Mossad.
Rather than chew the cud of conspiracy theory, Wiesak constructs a useful chronology of U.S.-Israeli relations in 1963. For her methodological care, she is sure to be libeled as a “conspiracy theorist” by the usual CIA-friendly pundits who talk about JFK theories as a way of avoiding discussion of JFK facts, especially those facts that have come to light in recent years — especially those facts suppressed because they involved Israel and U.S. national security.
Her treatment of U.S.-Israeli relations in the Kennedy years is more detailed than the account I gave in “The Ghost,” my biography of Angleton published in 2017 (which gained credibility when the CIA’s in-house historian hastened to attack it on a pro-CIA blog).
Thanks to the release of Angleton’s long suppressed Senate testimony in 1975 and other new records, Wiesak can better explain how and why the conflict between JFK and Prime Minister Ben-Gurion is central to the assassination story.
Wiesak emphasizes that she is neither offering a theory nor purporting to solve the crime. She is merely pointing out an evident pattern that requires explanation.
Skeptics often demand documented proof, as if such crimes are actually recorded on paper. But what we do have is a clear pattern, via both the timeline and the players involved. And solving crimes, at the end of the day, is about pattern recognition. No one gives you the answer on a silver platter. I do strongly agree, however, that maintaining skepticism toward all potential hypotheses about the crime is essential.
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Research into JFK’s assassination should be driven not by the need to be right, but by the pursuit of justice for him.
I unpack the complex history of CIA and Zionism here.
Wiesak pursues justice for JFK here.