ASAC: Come in! Agent: Sir! Have you heard? ASAC: About the president? Yes, I heard he died after being shot. It's been all over the news. Agent: I'd like to volunteer to go down to Dallas to start investigating the assassination!
The agent stands at attention looking straight ahead, over the head of his boss.
ASAC: Could you close the door? Agent: Uhm... Yes, of course! ASAC: Thank you! Now, I have a few questions...
The agent in charge frowns and looks around the office.
ASAC: Could you tell me what leads you will investigate in Dallas and what you will uncover? Agent: ... No, sir. I mean, I can tell you that we would start checking the physical evidence and work our way out from this suspect named Oswald, but where the investigation would go from there is something that we will have to figure out along the way. That's how things always work. ASAC: Mmm... Let me put it slightly differently, can you tell me right here and now that your investigation won't under any circumstances investigate employees of the US federal government? Agent: No, that would be precisely the sort of thing that we can only answer after the fact.
The agent in charge smiles.
ASAC: Ah, but that's just the thing! You would have to give that guarantee to be part of this investigation.
The young agent looks confused.
ASAC: Look, this just happened a few hours ago and I haven't heard word one from the top brass about this, but I can tell you what you should expect. No one in a position of authority is going to let an investigation of the murder of the president of the United States so much as imply that the military or the CIA was involved. Agent: Do you really think they are?! ASAC: That's not the point. The questions will be asked - whether it be born of a genuine suspicion or a wish to embarrass the government - and it will be the responsibility of investigators to categorically rule out any such connection. The Cuban missile crisis last year almost set the world on fire! Do you think the Soviet Union would allow there to be so much as a sliver of indication that the military is trying to take control? Agent: ... ASAC: The US can't afford to spend six months with half the government eyeing the other half under suspicion of arranging a coup d'état. I hope someone will investigate this assassination properly and... deal with whoever was behind it. But the FBI won't be doing that work. Our job will at most be to rubber-stamp a finished product that someone higher up the food-chain thinks is geo-politically acceptable. Do you want that job? Did you come in here to volunteer signing whatever whitewash the "powers that be" decides on? Agent: No. ASAC: I didn't think so. You want to do what I want to do, you want to investigate properly no matter where the investigation goes. But that's not on the cards. So please... Go back to work. Keep doing what your're doing and keep your nose out of this. Agent: I see. I appreciate that you cleared this up. ASAC: Politics is always a part of what we do, but it doesn't usually override the mandate congress has given us or the laws of this land. Here? It will.
The agent nods at his boss and turns to leave. He stops before he reaches the door.
Agent: Boss? Can I ask you one more thing? ASAC: Sure. Agent: What if they catch Oswald? Alive, I mean. He might point fingers every which way. Won't someone have to investigate those leads at that point? ASAC: Uhm... I hadn't thought of that. Let's put it like this: if Oswald is arrested and he makes accusations against the military or some big-shot politicians... We're never going to hear about it. If there are ever transcripts of his testimony made public they will be very innocuous and Oswald will not challenge them. Perhaps because he won't be able to challenge those records. I'll bet you a steak dinner! Agent: I understand.
The point of this scene comes from a thought-experiment: why did the FBI, the Dallas Police and the Warren commission investigate the assassination of John F. Kennedy so poorly? The quality ranges from “Not super-interested in hearing new things” in the case of the Warren commission to “Oliver and Hardy” in the case of the Dallas Police. It’s not entirely unreasonable to draw the conclusion that it was a massive cover-up to hide some deeper conspiracy. But my argument here is that no one doing any kind of official investigation was willing to ask certain questions simply because those questions were too dangerous, independently of the answer.
Simiarly you are unlikely to ever hear the head of the SEC or FDIC call for an investigation into whether the largest bank in America has falsified their records to hide insolvancy. That would crash the economy in about thirty minutes. So it’s just not done. It’s the sort of thing that is handled behind the curtain and if things are really bad the government announces the problem at the same time as their bail-out to keep the country from falling apart.
That the cover-up wasn’t done because of some specific knowledge of who was involved doesn’t make the cover-up any less of a cover-up. It’s just that we can’t necessarily draw the conclusion that the FBI knew that the CIA was involved in the assassination. It all had to point squarely at one guy and maybe some punks that guy knew. No links to his time in the military. No questions how he defected to the Soviet union and got help coming back to the US after two years instead of being investigated for treason. It was just one guy. The FBI probably started typing up that stuff the same day as the assassination.
Personally I think the ham-fisted investigations of the JFK assassination actually serves as something of an argument against it being a properly organized hit involving the CIA and the DoD. “The only suspect in the killing of the US President was just shot dead while in police custody, having been questioned without a lawyer present for two days leaving all statements inadmissable in a future court proceeding against him.”
In the movie JFK(which I recommend watching but which should also be taken with a grain of salt) the protagonist asks something along the lines of:
If you heard Premier Chrustchev was shot dead while being driven through Moscow, and that the only suspect was a capitalist who spent two years living in the US, would you take that a face value? When the only suspect is shot and killed while in police custody, do you not sense that something might be off? When law enforcement concludes almost immediately that there was one shooter and absolutely no one else was involved, do you consider that to be reasonable?
As competently as the assassination was performed, so the cover-up was incompetently performed. I assume Oswald was meant to be killed in a shoot-out with the police but that didn’t quite work. Seems like it would have been worth the effort to do that job properly. It was a mess when Oswald was captured alive. Now he had to meet an untimely end in police custody and in the meantime his statements created a big headache. His words “I am a patsy!” were caught on a TV news camera and is to JFK assassination conspiracy theories what the phrase “Let there be light!” is to the bible. Whoever was involved knew how to shoot really well and not get caught but to line up all the puzzle-pieces to make a nice believable story about a jackass named Oswald – who couldn’t do anything right – killing the president all by himself? Not so much.