Fix the Bus

I’ve always been interested in the JFK Assassination. It’s part of my era. I was nine years old and one week to the day on 11/22/63.

The first book that I recall reading about the Kennedy Assassination was Mark Lane’s, Rush to Judgment. I was not obsessed about the assassination, nor did I have the time to be obsessed. Much of my attention was diverted to the study of medicine and my practice. This consumed much time.

Periodically, over the years, I would pick up a book or two about the assassination. I didn’t read them all, but I read or perused a lot of them. Some, like the Posner book, I threw against the wall.

A few years ago, I wrote a book about my father. I was trying to show how my father’s early death had influenced my thinking about the world. I was trying to connect my fascination with the Kennedy assassination with my fathers’ early demise. It was terrible writing. While writing this book though, I had to do much research on the Kennedy assassination.

I began with the Tippit killing because I knew so little about it. As I was studying and researching, patterns began to emerge. It became obvious to me that the Tippit killing was carefully orchestrated; it was well planned. Somebody really smart had planned this killing. The killing wasn’t done on the fly. Somebody had to think about a million and one questions that investigators might ask about the killing.

As I read more and more, I realized that the Tippit killing could not be viewed as an isolated incident from JFK’s assassination. The two were connected in the sense that what transpired in the Tippit killing had to be physically and logically connected to the JFK assassination if you were going to plot out a conspiracy. It’s much like writing a play; you need a certain amount of logic. People can’t just pop in and out for no reason at all.

As I thought about the Tippit killing, I said to myself: “I know this guy. This guy thinks like me. He has my personality, or I have his.”

I can’t remember now when I first began looking at Seymour Bolten. I knew that Bolten was a friend-colleague of George Bush, and it seemed logical to me that George Bush had some connection to the assassination. Beyond that, I knew nothing. I had no idea before I began to do research on him who he was or where he came from. I only had a hunch. As I look back on things now, I’m amazed at how fruitful my hunch was.

I understand that you the reader probably have never heard of Seymour Bolten. You probably might think he is a bit player in history. Well, he was much more than that. He was well known in CIA circles. He was well respected, and he knew all the top players, and they knew him. He was important enough to be invited to a State Dinner for Willy Brandt. If you haven’t heard of Seymour Bolten, it’s because he preferred it that way.

You might also be tempted to think that anyone could plan an assassination, and there might be some logic to that; but this was no ordinary assassination.

It requires a special person to plan an assassination of a President as such an assassination would be heavily scrutinized like no other. You wouldn’t delegate the task to a twenty year old (too inexperienced), and you wouldn’t delegate it to a sixty year old (too inflexible). No, you would hand it off to a man who had just the right amount of experience and clout, who still had the vibrancy of youth to get out there and work the streets.

You would also require a man with intelligence, someone who could think matters through like no other man. He would have to operate alone and have experience in doing so. Flashy people need not apply.

Certainly the CIA has many capable men. Seymour Bolten was one of those men. If another man planned the assassination, he would have to be Seymour Bolten’s twin brother.