JFK Fact-Check: Ted Yacucci on William Harvey and Howard Hunt

Two plausible suspects and several corrections

Ted Yacucci is a prolific commentator on the JFK assassination on YouTube with 34,000-plus followers. I find his deftly edited presentations both forceful and informative. I like that he often prefaces his point with “in my opinion,” indicating his openness to other interpretations.

He also makes some mistakes, which do not necessarily refute his broader conclusions, but do deserve clarification for his followers and all students of the JFK assassination story.

In his latest video, Yacucci identifies William K. Harvey and E. Howard Hunt as the organizers of the Dealey Plaza ambush. I would say that might be true, but it is not proven.

These two CIA officers, known for their hostility to JFK, certainly qualify as plausible suspects in the president’s death in the view of many JFK researchers.

Harvey’s admiring biographer Bayard Stockton took seriously allegations of Harvey’s possible involvement (though in the end rejected them).

As for Hunt’s so-called “deathbed confession” about a JFK conspiracy, the inconvenient truth is that he wasn’t on his deathbed and he didn’t confess much. Hunt did, however, make some remarks to his son seeming to implicate himself in what he called “The Big Event” (though Hunt, on other occasions, denied, with equal conviction, that there was a JFK conspiracy).

Yacucci is certainly correct that the CIA was out of control in 1963, and that no one was more out of control than Harvey, chief of the ZRRIFLE assassination program.