Howard Baker: What do you know about the Kennedy assassination?
Richard Nixon: You don’t want to know.
Senator Baker related this conversation with Richard Nixon to renowned CBS news producer Don Hewitt. As Hewitt said after learning Nixon’s response, “That frosted me.” In an interview he gave to Vicki Daitch for the Kennedy Library, Hewitt went on to make the following statement:
“For reasons I never understood, none of those guys, Salinger, Bobby (Kennedy), Kenney O' Donnell, Dave Powers, Steve Smith would never, ever talk about the assassination. Did they know something?”
And this is typical of the people close to the heart of the tragedy. They either do not talk or else make vague or cryptic statements. Nixon easily went along with the Warren Commission’s end game as he did with Larry King in 2001, but with Senator Baker he goes enigmatic. The insiders keep the good stuff to themselves. When Hewitt asked Robert Kennedy about the assassination his only reply was, “What difference does it make? It won’t bring him back.” However, behind the scenes, Bobby was very interested in finding out the truth. He should be since he knew Oswald’s name years before the assassination. To his closest associates he was a believer in conspiracy regarding the death of his brother.
The closest that Don Hewitt came was in a conversation with Kennedy speechwriter Ted Sorensen. Sorensen admitted to Hewitt that he would not be surprised that if in the future, it became known that Oswald had accomplices which, in his words, “…would lend some badly needed rhyme and reason to an act of insanity that up to now has had neither.” Apparently, even the President's speechwriter was conflicted.
The failure of the Fourth Estate to investigate the death of John F. Kennedy is a vast study in itself. It’s one of the great mysteries of the case. The media then, as now, is largely owned by corporations and the corporations are so integrated with the government that it is hard to tell where one begins and the other ends. Secondly, and no less is important, is the CIA’s controlling media influence via Operation Mockingbird. Former CIA Director William Colby stated in front of Congress that, "The CIA owns anyone of significance at all major media outlets." Who in the press talks of this today or even denies it? And so they will never give us the truth.
Notice the talk lately of possibly bailing out the major media? Might as well, as they own it and have for years.
No wonder they hate us independent bloggers. We investigate areas where they cannot and I’m sure a large number of us are not owned by any three-letter agencies. I’m not as well as a host of others. We are not going to be like Dan Rather, who at the time was a local reporter in Dallas, who reported seeing an advanced copy of the Zapruder film. He said it was apparent that president Kennedy was shot from the back because he body was sent forward. When the film is finally shown to the public in 1975 on Geraldo Rivera’s show, just the opposite is seen. Watch the clip and you can hear the audience collectively gasp. Rather lied but the Deep State reworded him when he took over Walter Cronkite as anchor to the CBS nightly news. They always take care of their own.
Sources: Oral History Interview with DON HEWITT, October 8, 2002, New York, NY. By Vicki Daitch for the John F. Kennedy Library; Larry King Live Weekend: A Look Back at President Richard Nixon Aired February 5, 2001 - 9:00 p.m. ET; Talbot, Brothers