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 In his final years, Weisberg focused on making a record for history, producing over two dozen unpublished manuscripts on the subject.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.