That was my problem for years in making sense of the various conspiracy theories surrounding the murder. The details of what happened and how were always pretty clear and pretty undeniable. The mystery that left it all hard to swallow was the "why". The theories always presume some kind of evil cabal who wanted to destroy Camelot, and none of it ever really made any sense.
The light came on for me a few years ago, ironically after reading an aricle in George magazine. Ironic, because they published the story of the Tibetan freedom fighters, and what happened to them. It was disgusting.
I had read bits and pieces for years about them, and about the embittered CIA men whose handiwork had gone for nothing, but had never read the details until that article. The details have since been written elsewhere as well.
The army was killed to the last man, of course, with phone calls to the White House going unanswered.
About the same time I read of the wife of a CIA man who was a Kennedy mistress, who was murdered while jogging, not that that's a big issue...
Anyway, after reading the George article, a light went on in my head. I thought also about the very bitter CIA officers whose men were betrayed and killed at the Bay of Pigs, and it just hit me. What would you do? The evil cabal defending the Federal Reserve System never made sense, the evil cabal wanting to make big bucks in Viet Nam never made sense, but a coup to remove a rogue president makes perfect sense to me. This was the height of the Cold War, and it was very a deadly serious time. People weren't fooling around.
In any other country in the world, it is understood that if the president goes beyond the pale, at some point a panel of military officers will remove him. He can go quietly into exile, or he can go the hard way, but he goes.
There is no tradition of military defense of civilian institutions in our country, so exile is not an option. That leaves the hard way.
The thought you expressed that it would be hard to keep something like this secret, I have considered, and finally dismissed. The fact is that it isn't secret at all. All of the facts in the case are known. Everyone knows them. And everyone knows that if they draw the logical conclusions based on what they know, we all agree to consider them a kook. So everyone knows, but knows in silence. The case is unsolvable because we have in effect agreed that it is unsolvable. There is an interesting study in mass psychology there for anyone who wants to dig into it.
Something similar occurred when Clinton was caught taking money from Chinese intelligence. Everyone knows, everyone has agreed not to know. [The events surrounding the JFK episode were sufficiently traumatizing that no one in the security services was going to move against Clinton, or perhaps he had enough allies there to protect him from forceable removal.]
There was, of course, a long list of people who died in the few months after JFK's death, and the people who were directly complicit took their story to the grave. But it really isn't a secret what happened, just the who and why. They have, as you said, been content to let him be lionized by his biographers. It is this lionization that makes the crime inexplicable. If he was who his biographers said he was, why would anyone take him from us? But he wasn't, and the decision to remove him was probably shared out among several, including Johnson and Earl Warren. Hoover. And the "shadow warrior" chiefs.
The 40th anniversary of the Dallas Event is bound to bring new interest, and new revelations.
For one thing, the spread of technology was not counted upon.
The Voice Stress Analyser was not in private hands...Oswald apparantly gave truthful answers to press questions when he said he was a "patsy."
Also, computers were still in air conditioned rooms...the rudimentary PC's were almost 20 years away. Dotto Photoshop and Forensic Software. What does that have to do with anything???
Try a scan of the "official" autopsy Photographs...and shade the "mortician's wax" additions...Kennedy's face is made up of most of it.
Look, I'm not an assination buff...just someone who watches the History Channel. Every few years they run "The Men who Killed Kennedy", and each time they seem to add another volume of evidence.
And, of course, The New York Slimes as always ignores it, or goes ballistic, as when "X-Files" summarizes the informed opinion in a Dream Sequence between two characters in a Sci Fi episode.
Most murder victims are not killed because they are good.
And any reasonable homicide investigation begins with, "who wanted to kill him", which usually leads directly to the dark side of the victim.
I wrote this in 1994:
Most of the researchers theories of which I am aware about the motive for the crime can be summarized as: "JFK was killed because he was good" (insert your preferred goodness here: Getting us out of Vietnam, opposing the Federal Reserve, wanting peace with Cuba/USSR, prosecuting the Mafia, etc). Of course, there was obvious government participation in the immediate aftermath of the crime, and also probably in the crime itself, AND the participants have kept their secret for 34 years.
This requires that you believe that many actors had motive not just to do the crime, and not just to cover it up, but to sustain the coverup for a generation. Now, I find it implausible that so many people would be able to sustain such an incredible effort for so long UNLESS THEY BELIEVED THAT THEY WERE DOING THE RIGHT THING. The person who cracks this crime will be famous and also have material rewards. There is a major incentive to tell the truth now, and none to lie, unless there is an underground story or legend WHICH REMAINS PERSUASIVE TODAY about why the coverup should continue.
When a normal person is killed unexpectedly, the search for a motive begins not with the victim's good points, but with the passions and behaviors which might have brought another person to commit homicide. This search for a motive often reveals new and unanticipated facts about the victim. Such facts about JFK may be available now, or may appear in future books and papers.
It is my own view that JFK was caught in a vortex of his own making, of aggressive anti-Communism, secret operations involving extralegal and extraconstitutional use of force, and his personal life. These were his passions: (Pay any price, bear any burden, Green Berets, covert ops, compulsive sexual behavior, undermine the institutions by numerous back-channel connections to lower-echelon types not afraid to take chances, etc.) If you were, say, Hoover, and you wanted him dead, how easy it would have been to make up a story (and how much easier if the story were true) for Allen Dulles, or others, that JFK had been sexually compromised (or pick another vice of your choice) by a Russian agent, and that the secret deal not to invade Cuba was the result. An impeachment trial, so the story would go, would leave the country weak and defenseless at a time when almost everyone, not just a few nuts, thought the reds were scaling the walls (Cuba, Berlin, Laos, duck and cover in my fifth grade class, etc). In order to save the nation the agony of a treason trial in the Senate, why not let a few good men take care of the problem in a way which will leave a dead hero.
The virtue of this scenario is that it provides the remaining actors who are still alive just as much reason to keep quiet today as in 1963.
Your theory is not so far fetched as most. We came very close to it in the 1930's with FDR.