The Circumstantial Case: Motive, Means, and Opportunity
From
Whitewash, the first critical book on the Warren Report, through numerous Freedom of Information (FOIA) lawsuits, to
Never Again!, his last published work, Harold Weisberg worked tirelessly to lift the veil of secrecy and deceit from the investigation of the assassination of President Kennedy. Based on the government's own evidence, he demonstrated beyond question that the accused assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, did not kill President Kennedy. In his final years, Weisberg focused on making a record for history, producing over two dozen unpublished manuscripts on the subject. Among these was
Waketh the Watchman?: The Military and the JFK Assassination. In this book, Weisberg for the first time speculates on the question of who might have been responsible for the president's murder. On the basis of key questions that would be asked in any serious criminal investigation--Who had the motive? Who had the means? Who had the opportunity?--Weisberg presents a fact-based, well-reasoned, circumstantial case implicating the upper echelon of our military, who vehemently opposed JFK's principled opposition to their belligerent approach to Castro's Cuba, the Soviet Union, and Vietnam. That the American people have not been told the truth of how and why their president was killed, Weisberg attributes not only to our government, the military, and intelligence agencies, but also to the mainstream media and the academic community, which have been largely complicit in the whitewashing of the JFK assassination.
Co-editors Dennis MacDonald and Gerald Ginocchio, who knew Harold Weisberg and his work, obtained a rough draft of
Waketh the Watchman? in the late 1990s shortly before Weisberg's death in 2002. They recently decided it was well past time that an effort be made to put this important work in publishable form so that it could reach a wider audience.
Dennis W. MacDonald is professor emeritus of sociology at Saint Anselm College in Manchester, NH. He received his PhD in sociology from the University of New Hampshire. He has studied, taught, and written on social philosophy, human ecology, global sociology, and social problems. He was an undergraduate student in 1971 when he first met Harold Weisberg after having invited him to speak at a symposium on the Kennedy and King assassinations at the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point. His interest in the Kennedy assassination continued in the form of several courses and a number of papers, among them, "Criminal Investigation--Dallas Style: Police Handling of Evidence in the JFK Assassination" and "The JFK Assassination and the Failure of Institutions: The Sociological Significance of a Major Historical Event."
Gerald A. Ginocchio is professor emeritus of sociology at Wofford College in Spartanburg, SC. He received his PhD in sociology from the University of New Hampshire. He has studied, taught, and written on sociological theory, criminology, race and ethnic relations, and social problems. Over his thirty-five-year teaching career, he has taught several special topics courses on the JFK assassination, given a number of interviews to local media, and presented public lectures on the assassination, including a talk on "The JFK Autopsy and Assassination Investigation" in 2019 at St. Francis Hospital in Greenville, SC. He is coauthor of "The JFK Assassination and the Failure of Institutions: The Sociological Significance of a Major Historical Event."
