(brought forward from another JFK post)
I see an underlying rationale to the death of JFK which may be very important to a conspiracy theory.
1) JFK, among his other medical problems, had Addison’s disease, a life threatening illness.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Addison%27s_disease
2) At the time, the only known treatment for the disease was massive doses of cortisone.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cortisone
3) At that time, it was *incorrectly* believed that massive doses of cortisone would make a person clinically, even violently paranoid. In 1956, there had even been a movie made, (described on IMDB as “terrifying”), starring James Mason, called “Bigger than Life”, in which a schoolteacher is driven violently mad by taking cortisone.
http://us.imdb.com/title/tt0049010/
4) Finally, at that time, JFK had the unilateral authority to *initiate* nuclear war with Russia.
Put these items together, and the *reason* for JFK to die becomes very clear.
The only other question that would definitively explain why he was assassinated would be if someone had asked him to resign for health reasons, and he refused.
I don’t know if anyone approached him in this way, but I think if they did, and he did refuse, he may have signed his own death warrant.
In such a circumstance, the authority to kill the President would have most certainly been given to LBJ, as his Vice President.
So I ask you, fellow Freepers, *if* the President of the United States is believed to be going violently insane, *and* he refuses to resign, is in *not* reasonable to assume that he will be involuntarily removed from office?
If the alternative is global thermonuclear war?
Sure it is. The problem with the hypothesis is that the President of the United States could not go violently insane, or be believed by large numbers of high-ranking government officials, to be going violently insane (whether true or not) without that belief leaking out to many thousands of people, if not millions. This is especially true in JFK's case, where practically every second of his presidency, and of his last few months in particular, has been pored over by untold numbers of researchers looking for a more satisfying explanation to his assassination than "That kook Oswald did it."
Even if "They" managed to keep such beliefs about violent insanity swept under the rug in the early '60s (extremely improbable, IMHO, but potentially not utterly impossible like it would be today), there's no way it would have stayed hidden after November 1963.
The president can be removed from office by the VP and a majority of the Cabinet. That, of course, would be a huge international embarrassment — whether that’s enough reason to arrange an assassination instead is an exercise I leave to the reader.
Popocatapetl
If the Adminstration could keep Jack’s sexual pecidilloes a secret then how did they keep his inasnity a secret?
Or for that matter the Assassin’s conspiracy?
As have been proven time and time again, nobody can keep a secret, especially a juicey one.