illiam Robert Blacker was as far to one extreme on the human W social behavior scale as Casey Ray Peterson was on the other.
He’d never expected to live much past thirty. As far as he was concerned, he was already living bonus years.
Tall and rangy, dishwater blond hair, a long, narrow face with close-set eyes. Associates knew him as Billy Bob, BB, or Blacky.
Born in south Texas, with the Mexican border conveniently close, he’d gotten in on the ground floor of the drug smuggling business there, along with a cousin and an uncle, both of whom disappeared mysteriously about the time BB dropped out of school, at age fifteen. He took over and expanded the operation, and gained a rep as one not to cross.
BB ran his empire and salted away money for fifteen years, but his early successes had made him overconfident. He made mistakes that led to a choice: face a lengthy prison sentence, or disappear. He chose the latter.
In the early 1960s, it was still possible for a person on the run to stage a successful escape by simply joining the Army. The Army would whisk the enlistee off to parts unknown and withhold his whereabouts, be it from irate fathers of knocked up teenaged girls, or even from legitimate law enforcement personnel. That was true if one used one’s own name, expecting to return someday after things had blown over. If one used someone else’s name, well, one 33
Billy Bob Blacker left south Texas, and a clean-cut, respecta-ble-looking William P. Walker appeared in southern Georgia, using a legitimate birth certificate bearing the same name. Anyone cross-referencing that birth certificate with death records would have found that William P. Walker had died shortly after birth.
Eighteen months later, Billy Walker found himself in Vietnam, assigned to the supply field. Gifted as he was in supply chain economics, he’d caught on quickly. Near the end of his enlistment, he re-upped for another three years, including one more year in Nam.
He was just having too much fun to quit, and re-upping came with bonus pay and thirty days leave, both of which fit in nicely with his plans. On October 25, 1963, BB boarded a military transport back to the U.S, barely able to suppress a grin every time he thought of the two-foot wide, three-foot high, six-foot long shipping box tucked away in the cargo hold.
He knew they’d close this gravy train down someday. Right now, however, it was still possible for a clever guy like him to stash fifty pounds of high-grade Southeast Asia hashish inside his personal crate, the one allowed anyone returning from an overseas assignment.
By once more taking over and expanding the operation of another, BB now owned most of the military drug distribution chain for the entire province of Quang Tri, the northernmost Province of South Vietnam. He’d left his empire in the capable hands of proté-gés for thirty days, but he was eager to get back to Nam, where he could oversee things, hands-on kind of guy that he was.
If BB had been like most men, he would not even have considered putting himself in such a precarious position as to land in the USA as a wanted man in the state of Texas, with no place to call home, and in possession of fifty pounds of a controlled substance.
BB was not like most men. It took only three weeks to line up buy-ers for his product and investments for the cash. On November 20, finished with his work, he took a well-earned break. Reclining on the balcony of an expensive high-rise hotel on Mustang Island, 34
Texas, he gazed eastward at the clear blue Gulf waters, and reviewed his accomplishments as he drank ice cold Coronas from a bucket at his feet.
After he’d sold his product, he’d found time to pay a little visit to the county prosecutor who had forced him to abandon his empire and leave his home state. He had to admit the move had been a good one for him, and he was happy as a pig in slop with the results, but it was on principle he held the grudge. Now he’d repaid that grudge.
Life was grand.
The thought occurred that he should drive up to Dallas tomorrow, spend a day or two at the clubs there before he headed back to the west coast to catch his transport back to Nam, on the 24th. Once the thought occurred to him, he couldn’t shake it, and he made his decision. He’d finish this bucket, and maybe one more, and then get himself to Dallas tomorrow, November 21.
He arrived in Dallas late in the afternoon, spent eight hours or so clubbing, and checked into a hotel around midnight. He found the previous morning’s newspaper in a dresser drawer and read a front-page article about Kennedy’s parade the next day. It was only a few miles from his hotel. He decided he just had to see it.
BB didn’t wonder why he had developed a sudden interest in the president. His experience rewarded quick decisions with no looking back. Once he decided to do something, it was best to just do it and move on. He’d gain nothing by dwelling on the reason for a decision already made. So, he didn’t wonder why he checked out early, took a cab downtown, and had it drop him off several blocks north of Elm Street. He didn’t wonder why he stopped to pick up a 3-foot length of iron pipe he found behind a warehouse, either.
Bell, Casey, and BB, three parts of the four, marching to a cadence they did not understand, but each determined to do his or her own part in the drama about to unfold in the parking lot behind the book building on Elm Street in Dallas. The fourth part…
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Chapter 7 Reasons he fourth part is John Fitzgerald Kennedy. Grandchild of four T Irish immigrants to America, born in 1917, JFK was the second eldest of nine children. He was tall and handsome, with an un-ruly mop of hair that gave him a perpetual boyish look. Elected in 1960, the 35th President of the United States, he was often described as the most charismatic of presidents, even by many of those who opposed him, his politics, or efforts. The reasons he was in Dallas on November 22, 1963, were many.
The early years of Kennedy’s first term were turbulent years in the USA, owing in large part to the mess, political and military, in far-off Vietnam. Throughout those early years JFK had walked a fine line between his commitment to the ideal of a democratic Vietnam, and sending American fighting troops into the fray. He believed Vietnam represented an important stand in the worldwide struggle for influence between Communism and Democracy, as evidenced by this quote from a speech as a Senator in 1956:
“Vietnam represents the cornerstone… of the Free World… in Southeast Asia, the keystone to the arch… the finger in the dike.”
In another statement from the early 1960s he told citizens that the U.S. must “bear the burden… of helping freedom defend itself,”
in Vietnam.
However, Kennedy made it clear, in other speeches, that he had 36
done his homework regarding the complex history of Vietnam. The dispute between the North and South traced back through centuries of invasions by Mongols, several Chinese dynasties, and even the French in the late 1800s.
Kennedy was convinced of the moral correctness of keeping American troops out of the war, but he saw no path to avoidance of the war itself. Someone, it seemed to him, would have to fight the fight in beleaguered, far off Vietnam. The political complexities and contentious ambitions in play were far too numerous to resolve without a fight, to wit:
France sought to regain its colonial control of Vietnam after the upheaval of WWII; Ho Chi Minh sought to expel the French—and did, in 1954—and reunite his country under mainline Communist rule; China sought a Maoist Communist nation on its southern border; the USSR sought to expand its influence beyond the gains it acquired in WWII; the U.S. sought to keep Vietnam partitioned; the 1954 Geneva agreement called for a 1956 election that would likely have resulted in a Vietnam reunited under communist rule; southern-born, northern-backed Viet Cong fought to overthrow the south from within; the powerful, organized crime syndicate Bình Xuyên controlled Saigon and the National Police and undermined the South Vietnamese government; majority Buddhists claimed dis-crimination by South Vietnam’s self-appointed Catholic President, Ngo Diem, and peaceful Buddhist demonstrations were met with violence and arrests; Diem refused to dismiss from positions of authority his brother, Nhu, who was widely viewed as a demonizing influence on the Diem administration.
By summer of 1963, accumulating reports of human rights violations by Diem’s administration prompted some in the CIA and U.S. State Department to consider proposals from South Vietnamese generals for a military coup d’état in Saigon. Late in 1963, while Kennedy and his military and diplomatic advisors discussed making a last-ditch effort to convince Diem to moderate his policy and remove his brother from his administration, the Vietnamese generals staged their coup. When, the next day, November 2, the generals 37
murdered Diem and Nhu, Kennedy felt the world had lost any chance it ever had of avoiding the conflict.
JFK could not deny the role he had played in that coup. He had met Ngo Diem, and liked him. The U.S. had supported Diem and the government he formed in the south in 1955. Even though he became more dictatorial over time, Diem opposed Communism.
That was important in the view of Westerners concerned that Communism could spread uncontrolled if the free world did not show a willingness to take extreme measures to stop it.
When Kennedy had won the White House in 1960, the cold war with Russia was at its peak. He inherited a post-WWII infrastructure of military, CIA, legislators and industries, most, if not all of whom were committed to the doctrine that military confrontation with the USSR was inevitable. Given the number of high-ranking advisors pushing for it, it is likely that, had any other person occupied the White House at this time in history, the United States of America would have launched a preemptive nuclear strike on the Soviet Union sometime in 1963. So intense was the pressure, JFK even feared his military might overthrow him and seize power. Kennedy’s CIA and military were in open revolt against him for staying out of Laos and not invading Cuba. They all wanted a massive deployment of U.S. troops to Vietnam. They committed numerous acts of insubordination aimed at escalating the conflict there. In the summer of 1963, public sentiment was two to one in favor of U.S. involvement in Vietnam.
JFK sent two high profile fact-finding missions to Vietnam in 1962, one led by Lyndon Johnson, in May, and the other by General Maxwell Taylor, in October. The question: how to best deploy US
fighting troops in a manner that would end the conflict quickly, and with the least loss of U.S. lives. That answer never revealed itself to JFK, so he remained on the fence, neither backing down from his belief that the free world needed to win Vietnam, nor committing to the use of US fighting troops in an action whose end he could only envision as another sad chapter in the long history of conflict in 38
Southeast Asia, and indeed, the world.
On September 2, 1963, in a televised interview, Kennedy told Americans he did not want to get the U.S. involved in a war in Vietnam. By this date, he had also told a few trusted aids and confidants that he would begin withdrawing from Vietnam if he won reelection in November 1964, and he hoped to complete it by the end of 1965.
From the beginning of his administration, JFK’s brother, Attorney General Bobby Kennedy, and Vice President Lyndon Johnson, had both lobbied JFK to visit Lyndon’s home state of Texas. The Texas trip became more certain in April 1963, when JFK decided he would attend a congratulatory dinner planned that fall, on November 21, to honor Congressman Albert Thomas (D), of Texas.
Thomas was head of the House Appropriations Committee. He had cancer, and had planned to retire, putting his seat up for grabs. Then he changed his mind, decided to stick around for the good of the party, so they wanted to throw him a little shindig, just to say thanks and all.
Bobby worried that all the activities planned for the Texas trip centered too much on party big shots. He wanted JFK to get out more and be seen amongst the people. He wanted at least one public appearance. That’s why there was a parade in Dallas on Nov 22; three weeks after Diem’s murder in Saigon.
It’s worth mentioning that the plastic bubble was removed from the presidential limo that day. No one knows who ordered it. Some say it was JFK himself. It wasn’t bulletproof anyway.
In summation, the reasons JFK had to die, for Earth-based conspirators, were many and varied. For cosmic purveyors of chaos, the madness already present on Earth was just too easily exploited, an opportunity too rich to turn down.
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