[Sample B: Approval/Signature Sheet] - George Mason University

een withheld from the Warren Commission, and presumably former CIA director Allen
Dulles did not tell his fellow members what he knew about the plots. These revelations
were a boon to conspiracy theorists because it brought together the elements of a plot that
could have been aimed at President Kennedy instead of Castro. The theorists argued that
organized crime was angry at being asked to assist the Kennedy administration, while
Attorney General Robert Kennedy and the Justice Department launched a crackdown on
the mafia. CIA operatives and anti-Castro Cubans, angry over the Bay of Pigs fiasco and
Kennedy’s apparent efforts to rein-in anti-Castro covert operations, were other possible
elements of this alleged plot.
As congressional investigations, historians, and journalists uncovered more details
of what investigative journalist Seymour Hersh called “The Dark Side of Camelot,”
defenders of the Warren Commission sought to incorporate this material in understanding
Oswald while maintaining he acted alone in assassinating Kennedy. Hersh recounted the
CIA plots to kill foreign leaders, including Cuban leader Fidel Castro, alleged collusion
between Kennedy’s political operation and organized crime, and the president’s many
alleged extramarital affairs, including with Judith Campbell Exner, who was also the
mistress of Chicago mafia chieftain Sam Giancana. Kennedy allegedly used his lover as
a courier to pass money and messages between the administration and the mob. 212
Several of the Warren Commission’s defenders came up with a new theory: Lee Harvey
212
Seymour M. Hersh, The Dark Side of Camelot, (New York: Little, Brown, and
Company, 1997). Hersh claimed that the Bobby Kennedy and others close to the slain
president sought to cover-up many of these potential scandals after the assassination, but
the journalist accepted the official verdict that Oswald was the lone assassin.
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