Throughout history there have been many different assassination attempts on the life of the President of the United States. Some attempts have been successful and others go unnoticed. But when a President of the United States is assassinated and a commission is set up to investigate the assassination, why are they not looking at the other attempts on the President’s life. President Kennedy was the victim of several different assassination attempts, including one that was one month after his election. However, there was an attempt that the government never wanted the public to hear about. To no surprise it was also excluded from the final Warren Commission report delivered to President Johnson. It is important to learn about the back story of how this information got out and who leaked the information. The story titled “JFK Secret Service Guard Stepped Up” was published on October 5th, 1961 in newspapers throughout the country by syndicated columnists Robert S. Allen and Paul Scott. These two men would write about the in and outs of politics in Washington D.C. The accuracy of their stories would go unmatched for years because of the sources that these two men would use.

Their articles were becoming so accurate that Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy ordered a wiretap at the homes of these two men. Because the information they were writing about was so classified he wanted to know who was giving them the information. The operation which fell under Project Mockingbird, in which it was discovered that the conversations that these two writers were having was with several key members inside the government. Some of these sources included 12 Senators, 6 members of Congress, staff member at the White House, Assistant Attorney General, and a member of the Vice President’s office. This also does not include the several well placed individuals the report mentions as sources for these two writers. A CIA memo that was released in 2007 describes how the Attorney General wanted this wiretap and the results of the wiretap. I have included a link to the memo at the end of this article.

So know that we know that the sources of the two writers are of value, then we can look at their articles with full confidence that they are speaking the truth. Back to the article about the failed assassination attempt on President Kennedy, this occurred sometime in late Sept. 1961 and the article was written in early October. In the article it states that before the President was getting ready to board Marine One ( Presidential Helicopter) the secret service noticed a .22 caliber bullet hole in the seat in which the President normally occupies. The secret service was trying to figure out if their was a ” mysterious sniper” according to the article. As of the printing of the article no arrests were made and they were trying to determine where the bullet came from. How can a piece of information like this go unnoticed by the Warren Commission? I know how, they never wanted to look further into the events that lead up to the assassination and only wanted to fuel their own fire. But an attempt like this should have been looked at more closely. This attempt could have been done from someone on the inside and the finding of the investigation covered up. I tried looking up more about this assassination attempt and was unable to find anything else about it. The writers of this story never go back to it in later years and it is pretty much off the radar. Considering that JFK was assassinated by a sniper, this kind of information could have helped the Warren Commission out. This story is just one of many that are out their to find, if we spend the time looking for them. The writers of this article would spend the rest of their lives under the assumption that they were being watched and finally in 1981 Robert S. Allen took his own life. Paul Scott would go on to live a long life, but not without worrying about the government watching him and his family. The people that knew too much and were trying to tell us the stories inside of Washington D.C, somehow found themselves in a situation they could not get out of, and along the line they were finding out information they should not have known in the first place.

Sources:

Shapira, I. (2013, March 2). Long ago wire tap inspires a battle with the cia for more information. Washington Post. Retrieved from http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/long-ago-wiretap-inspires-a-battle-with-the-cia-for-more-information/2013/03/02/8ebaa924-77b0-11e2-aa12-e6cf1d31106b_story.html

Project Mockingbird- http://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/607427/cia-report-on-project-mockingbird.pdf

Flickr- https://www.flickr.com/photos/giarc80/11003895165/in/set-72157637958103875