Former National Enquirer Head Admits False Oswald-Cruz Story Was ‘Created’
Publisher David Pecker testifies at Trump trial.
A 2016 National Enquirer story linking Texas Sen. Ted Cruz’s father to Lee Harvey Oswald and the Kennedy assassination was “created,” the tabloid’s former publisher admitted in court Tuesday.
David Pecker, testifying in the trial of former President Donald Trump, who faces charges related to hush money payments to adult film star Stormy Daniels, acknowledged that the Oswald-Cruz falsehood was part of a larger National Enquirer effort to smear Cruz and other Trump opponents in the 2016 Republican presidential primary.
Pecker also said the newspaper engaged in some photographic chicanery for the Oswald-Cruz story, which focused on a photo taken in New Orleans in August 1963 that showed a man apparently assisting Oswald distribute pro-Fidel Castro literature to passersby.
“We mashed the photos and the different picture with Lee Harvey Oswald. And mashed the two together. And that’s how that story was prepared — created I would say,” Pecker testified, according to NBC News.
The tabloid simply declared, with no apparent evidence, that the person next to Oswald was Cruz.
‘The Whole Thing is Ridiculous’
When the story first appeared in May 2016, Trump used it as yet another political cudgel against Cruz, referring to it repeatedly, if rather obliquely and disjointedly.
“His father was with Lee Harvey Oswald prior to Oswald's being — you know, shot. I mean, the whole thing is ridiculous,” Trump said on Fox News.
Similarly, on “Good Morning America,” Trump said, “I think they didn't deny it. I don't think anybody denied it. No, I don't know what it was exactly, but it was a major story in a major publication, and it was picked up by many other publications."
He went on to say “You can't knock the National Enquirer. … It's brought many, many things to light, not all of them pleasant,” the Washington Post reported.
‘The Master Conspiracy Theory of them All’
For the legacy press, Trump’s embrace of the Cruz-Oswald story was more proof that the New York real estate tycoon was an unhinged conspiracy theorist unfit for office.
The New Yorker’s resident polymath, and lone-assassin adherent, Adam Gopnik declared in his opening paragraph on the affair:
“It is no surprise that, by feverishly indulging conspiracy theories of many kinds, Donald Trump would end up reintroducing America to the master conspiracy theory of them all, the first of the modern kind, and still the biggest and strangest: the one surrounding the assassination of J.F.K.”
While admitting there was some evidence the senior Cruz was in New Orleans at the time, Gopnik concluded there was scant proof that he was the man in the photo with Oswald. (JFK Facts editor Jefferson Morley, who is quoted in the piece, agreed.)
Vox published a story at the time entitled, “We shouldn't have to explain that Ted Cruz's dad didn't kill JFK, but here goes, I guess,” which goes to some length explaining the circumstances surrounding Oswald’s handing out leaflets in New Orleans.
Similarly, the Washington Post’s Philip Bump wrote a thoughtful background piece on the story. In so doing, Bump came out as a Kennedy assassination buff:
“I am a Kennedy assassination buff; I own the Warren Commission report and books arguing one side or the other of the conspiracy controversy. (For the record, I think Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone.)”
(In their articles, both Gopnik and Bump cite official narrative defenders Gerald Posner and the late Vincent Bugliosi.)
In the end, the man next to Oswald remained unidentified.
Taking the Big Easy way out
The notion that Cruz’s father — who by 1963 was in fact virulently anti-Castro — helped Oswald pass out pro-Castro leaflets on the street in New Orleans in August 1963, just three months before JFK was killed, seemed on its face to be easy to dismiss.
However, while the story on the whole perhaps deserved all the incredulity and arrows heaped upon it, its outrageousness also allowed the press to sidestep very real and equally inexplicable interactions that took place between Oswald and other, CIA-financed anti-Castro Cubans based in that city at the time.
As Oswald passed out his Fair Play For Cuba Committee literature on Aug. 9, 1963, he was confronted by and got into a scuffle with members of a Cuban anti-Castro student group (the Cuban Student Directorate, DRE, which was being underwritten by the CIA to the tune of $51,000 a month), including its New Orleans chapter leader Carlos Bringuier.
Inexplicably, just days before, Oswald had gone to Bringuier to offer his services as a former Marine to go after Castro — hence Bringuier and his associates’ supposed anger at the suddenly pro-Castro Oswald on the street that day.
Indeed, in the aftermath of President Kennedy’s murder, the CIA destroyed any and all records of its New Orleans office and assets’ interactions with the man charged with the assassination.
Hunter Leake, deputy chief of the agency’s New Orleans office in 1963, told historian Michael Kurtz in the 1980s “in a quite definitive manner, that Oswald indeed performed chores for the CIA during his five months in New Orleans” in 1963. Leake was ordered by Langley to destroy the New Orleans records.
(JFK Facts recently produced a podcast discussing these events.)
And, in true tabloid style, the DRE, with the green light from its CIA handler George Joannides, on Nov. 23, 1963, published what proved to be the first “conspiracy theory” in the aftermath of the assassination of John F. Kennedy: Oswald did it, in league with Castro.
Imagine that.
Why does it remind me of KGB* "active measures" disinfo ops?
*Today's SVR and FSB
As a special investigator for Jim Garrison, DA of New Orleans, I was there when we went over the arrest record of Lee Harvey Oswald on August 9, 1963. He was arrested with Miguel M. Cruz, age 18 and two others. Not Raphael Cruz (Ted’s father. I’ll send you my copy of the arrest record which will be in my book. — Steve Jaffe, DA investigator Orleans Parish 1967-1968.