JFK: Assassination Rehearsal
Like most Americans, Nick M. Nero was less than convinced by the Warren Commission’s effort to close the case on the Kennedy assassination. But he says he was not preoccupied with questions of what the Commission may have omitted from its Report until confronted by the deathbed confession of his cousin, a U.S. Marine Corps veteran, Ben Fazzino. Fazzino told Nero about the conspiratorial life of his friend Frank Sturgis, a reputed CIA operative-Mafioso who surfaces in accounts of the Bay of Pigs, the Kennedy assassination, Watergate and even Chappaquiddick. With the outline of his cousin’s story in mind, Nero embarked on a campaign of information gathering, trying to connect the dots representing key events in American history during the 1960s and ‘70s.
The result of his labor, JFK Assassination Rehearsal (Algora Publishing), has just been published. Full disclosure: Nero is related to friends who introduced us at a time when he was working on the manuscript that evolved into Assassination Rehearsal. I wrote an essay that became the book’s forward, describing the Kennedy assassination’s role in moving conspiratorial perspectives from fringe to mainstream. The line I drew connects the dots between Dallas and “The X-Files,” the Warren Commission and the decline of confidence in authority figures and authoritative accounts. Nero’s quest resulted in what I termed a “unified field theory” among conspiracy narratives. Like a physicist looking for a model to explain the workings of the cosmos, Nero discerned strings (as well as characters) connecting the events of a turbulent era.
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Specifically, the major assassinations of the ‘60s—JFK, RFK, MLK—had much in common. Nero identifies similarities such as the almost instantaneous identification of a “patsy” to be deemed guilty of a crime that would have been hard to commit, onsite confusion over the murder weapon and the apparent suppression of inconvenient evidence. Cuba is at the root of all the conspiracies to follow, stemming from Fidel Castro’s nationalization of the holdings of United Fruit Company, a U.S. corporate behemoth that owned much of Cuba’s land and utilities. CIA Director Allen Dulles was on the board of United Fruit, as were other well-placed U.S. officials. Richard Nixon chaired the subcommittee set up under Dwight D. Eisenhower to remove Castro. Nixon chose young George H.W. Bush to head the task force planning the invasion that became the Bay of Pigs disaster. Participants in the failed scheme include future Watergate conspirators E. Howard Hunt and Fazzino’s friend, Sturgis. The CIA and Cuban exiles blamed Kennedy for bungling the execution of the invasion meant to topple Castro. In Nero’s analysis, the net was prepared and about to be cast.
JFK Assassination Rehearsal makes interesting reading but, of course, Nero’s painstaking collection of stray sources, unwanted facts and curious anomalies will never be accepted by most academic historians or the mainstream media unless validated by a full release of all government files, unredacted, relating to JFK, RFK, MLK and Watergate. The estimated date for that disclosure is never.
