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The Umbrella Man, the Sins of the Father, and the Kennedy Curse

By Laurent Guyénot • Unz Review • November 22, 2019

I first heard of the so-called “Umbrella Man” from a commenter to my unz.com article “Did Israel Kill the Kennedys?” (thanks again). It is one of the most puzzling pieces in the JFK assassination file. An intriguing introduction to it is this short interview of Josiah Thompson filmed by Errol Morris for the New York Times, on the 48^th anniversary of his death:

Or view on Vimeo.

This film is interesting because, besides presenting the facts accurately, it illustrates the kind of “cognitive dissonance” they can produce, leading reasonable people to believe an implausible but harmless and comforting explanation, rather than a more logical but deeply disturbing one. In that case, it seems that normally programmed brains will reject vigorously, as unspeakable and therefore unthinkable on the conscious level, the notion that John Kennedy’s assassination can possibly have anything to do with his father’s appeasement policy in 1938, despite the fact that that notion has been deeply ingrained in our subconscious mind through the twin Jewish mythemes of “The Sins of the Father” and “The Kennedy Curse”, as illustrated by those two books:

The “sins of the father” is a not-so-subtle reference to Exodus 20:5:

“I, Yahweh, am a jealous God, punishing the children for the sin of the parents to the third and fourth generation of those who hate me.”

Chief among Joe Kennedy’s sins was, of course, that “he was a documented anti-Semite and an appeaser of Adolf Hitler” (publisher’s presentation of Kessler’s book).

The “Kennedy Curse” is a quasi kabalistic attempt to explain how the Kennedys were “on a fatal collision course with reality” because they “made the fatal mistake of thinking of themselves as divine.” By implication, their assassinations are to be blamed on their “self-defeating behavior” (publisher’s presentation of Klein’s book).

Taken together, those twin hasbara refrains evoke a notion of divine punishment. JFK and RFK were punished for the sins of their Jew-hating, Nazi-loving father. Mind you, it was Yahweh who took vengeance, not Israel!

The Umbrella Man fits so perfectly in this mythic narrative! The problem is that myths are not supposed to incarnate themselves so patently in physical reality. The implications are here too disturbing: for no reasonable man can believe that Yahweh supernaturally inspired Louie Steven Witt his “bad joke” (as he called it when interviewed by the special House Select Committee on Assassinations in 1978). Then who inspired it?

Such a question is off-limit for Josiah Thompson’s mind. So he simply decided not to see anything “sinister” in the weird fact that he relates. He not only takes Witt’s explanation at face value (“this is just wacky enough, it has to be true!” in other words, credo quia absurdum), but assumes that the strange behavior of the Umbrella Man and JFK’s assassination are unrelated, and happened precisely at the same time and at the same spot by pure quantum physics coincidence.

By setting his mind on that explanation, Thompson obviously feels relieved not to have to get into “conspiracy theories”, because “everybody else got into the conspiracy theories,” and he is above the crowd. I find it hard to explain that this is the same Josiah Thompson who published in 1967 a book titled Six Seconds in Dallas: a micro-study of the Kennedy assassination proving that three gunmen murdered the President, for which he studied the Zapruder film and interviewed eyewitnesses in order to come up with a plausible line of fire, and the conclusion of a conspiracy and government cover-up. What happened to Josiah in between?

Russ Baker has posted on his website WhoWhatWhy a couple of articles in reaction to Thompson’s NYT interview: here and here. Contrary to Thompson, he finds Witt’s explanation literally unbelievable, and opts for the theory of the “signal man”: the Umbrella Man was “signaling the shooters, perhaps that JFK had been hit, perhaps that he still seemed to be alive, perhaps to keep shooting.” That theory, adopted by film director Oliver Stone for his 1991 movie JFK, is of course far more credible than the theory of the fléchette-shooting umbrella that Thompson chose to mention to his own satisfaction. But I must say I find it not entirely convincing. I cannot conceive that professional snipers would need such a conspicuous accomplice, standing almost in their line of fire (in the case of those shooting from the Grassy Knoll).

I also find no reason to doubt, as Baker does, that Witt was the real Umbrella Man. Witt was identified by neighbors and local newsmen before he came forward to the HSCA, and the photos of him on Dealey Plaza seem to match.

Baker borrows from John Simkin of Spartacus Educational the opinion that the umbrella was never the symbol of Chamberlain anyway, and so that Witt’s explanation makes no sense. Baker is wrong on that point, apparently. The umbrella was so much the iconic trademark of Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain that cartoonist David Low of the London Evening Standard, not only systematically drew him with his umbrella, but even drew him as an umbrella!

Chamberlain, who became a reviled symbol of appeasement (his biography bears the significant title, More Than Munich: The Forgotten Legacy of Neville Chamberlain) was the archetypal Umbrella Man.

According to Edward Miller,

“Umbrella protests first began in England after Chamberlain arrived home from the [Munich] conference carrying his trademark accessory. Wherever Chamberlain traveled, the opposition party in Britain protested his appeasement at Munich by displaying umbrellas.”[1]

Louie Steven Witt declares in his testimony to the HSCA that he had heard that “some members of the Kennedy family” had once been offended in an airport by people brandishing umbrellas. I haven’t found any confirmation that Joseph Kennedy or any other Kennedy had been heckled by open umbrellas as a “silent protest” against their objectionable lack of love for the Jews, but I find it plausible that “the umbrella was a sore spot to the Kennedys,” as Witt put it in his HSCA testimony. So John Kennedy being heckled with Chamberlain’s umbrella at the same time as being assassinated under Ben-Gurion’s order does strike me as both plausible and significant, as a sort of cryptic signature by the Zionist-Irgun mafia.

In my view, summarized here, John Kennedy was assassinated by Israel for three major reasons:

Dimona: President Kennedy, who had made nuclear disarmament his grand mission on the international level, and was on the way to achieve it with Khrushchev (as shown by James Douglass in JFK and the Unspeakable), was determined to stop Israel developing its own nuclear bomb. According to Colonel Muammar Gaddafi’s interpretation, it was to plunge into the Israeli deep state and supervise Kennedy’s assassination that Ben-Gurion resigned in July 1963 before receiving Kennedy’s ultimatum letter demanding inspections of Dimona.

American Zionist Council: John Kennedy and his Attorney General Bobby Kennedy had infuriated Zionist leaders by supporting an investigation led by Senator William Fulbright (whom Kennedy had been prevented to name as Secretary of State) aimed at registering the American Zionist Council as a “foreign agent” subject to the obligations defined by the Foreign Agents Registration Act of 1938, which would have rendered its lobbying division, the AIPAC, near powerless. On October 11, 1963, the AZC received a formal demand from RFK’s office to register within 72 hours (details here).

Nasser: Kennedy unequivocally supported Arab nationalism in 1957 as a senator,[2] reversed Eisenhower’s foreign polity in a pro-Nasser way (as documented by Philip Muehlenbeck, Betting on the Africans: John F. Kennedy’s Courting of African Nationalist Leaders, Oxford UP, 2012), and committed the U.S. to support U.N. Resolution 194 for the right of return of Palestinian refugees. That was a major threat to Zionist interests, who had bet on making Nasser an enemy of the United States.

To these reasons for assassinating Kennedy, we must add the opposite reasons for putting Johnson instead in the Oval Office, for Johnson buried both the Dimona and the AZC proceedings, and cut U.S. support for Nasser’s in order to boost support to Israel. In 1967, he would commit high treason against his own country by allowing and covering-up Israel’s failed false-flag attack on the USS Liberty. No wonder Israel loved Johnson as much as they hated Kennedy.

In the Zionists’ view, JFK’s anti-Israel policies (discreet or secret) were part of a more general “Kennedy problem” that went back to his father’s attempt to prevent WWII by supporting Chamberlain’s appeasement with Hitler rather than Churchill’s appeasement with Stalin. According to German documents declassified in 1949, the German Ambassador in London, Herbert von Dirksen, after meeting U.S. ambassador Joseph P. Kennedy in 1938, wrote that he “understood our Jewish policy completely,” and was “Germany’s best friend” in London.[3] When Roosevelt entered the war, Joseph Kennedy resigned, and later complained privately that, “the Jews have won the war.”[4] According to biographer David Nasaw, Joseph was not an anti-Semite in the racial sense, but rather someone who believed in a Jewish conspiracy to push the United States into an unnecessary war with Germany (Nasaw insists he was mistaken, because “Jewish influence on American foreign influence was negligible, its influence on the State Department nonexistent”).[5]

Zionists had reasons to fear that Joseph Kennedy did “inject some poisonous drops of anti-Semitism in the minds of his children, including his son John’s” (as printed in September 1960 by the Herut, Menachem Begin’s political party).[6] In 1940, John had published a book titled Why England Slept, adapted from his Harvard thesis which was, as the title alluded, a response to Churchill’s 1938 book While England Slept, and a veiled support for his father’s pro-appeasement views. In his Pulitzer prize-winning book Profiles in Courage (1956), Kennedy had declared his admiration for Senator Robert Taft, who by calling the Nuremberg trials a shameful parody of justice had sacrificed his political career, including his chances for the presidency, rather than build it on hypocrisy. Although Zionists probably didn’t know it until recently, in 1945, JFK had written the following in his diary, as quoted here by Abigail Abrams:

“You can easily understand how that within a few years Hitler will emerge from the hatred that surrounds him now as one of the most significant figures who ever lived. He had boundless ambition for his country which rendered him a menace to the peace of the world, but he had a mystery about him in the way he lived and in the manner of his death that will live and grow after him. He had in him the stuff of which legends are made.”[7]

Joseph Jr., Joseph Sr., and John Kennedy in 1938

The Kennedys were a family of strong traditions and strong convictions. They had to be destroyed, politically as had Charles Lindbergh (1902-1974), and if necessary physically, before they extirpate America from Zionists’ clutches.

Dallas was an Israeli coup, ordered from Tel Aviv with Johnson’s support, and supervised by the local B’nai B’rith under the cover of the Dallas Citizens Council, who was sponsoring Kennedy’s visit, and of whom Abraham Zapruder himself was a member (watch his satisfaction when interviewed two hours after JFK’s assassination in the History Channel documentary JFK – 3 Shots That Changed America , at 43:34).

When trying to make sense of Dallas’ Umbrella Man, we are faced with a dilemma: should we believe Witt’s explanation of his strange behavior (as does Josiah Thompson), or should we consider him an accomplice to the assassination (as does Russ Baker)? Only in the framework of the Israeli theory pioneered by Michael Collins Piper is it possible to surmount the dilemma.

Let’s recap what we know for certain. Fact number 1: on the sunny day of November 22, 1963, one man was standing on the President’s motorcade route with an open umbrella, at the precise moment and place when JFK was shot. To assume that the Umbrella Man’s strange behavior and JFK’s assassination are unrelated is unreasonable. The coincidence is just too improbable.

Fact number 2: In 1978, Louie Steven Witt claimed in front of the HSCA that he was the Umbrella Man and explained that he wanted to heckle JFK about his father’s policy of appeasement of Hitler in 1938.

Although Thompson and Baker disagree about everything else, they agree that there can be no connection between John Kennedy’s assassination and Joseph Kennedy’s appeasement policy. That is where they are both wrong.

Was Louie Steven Witt a Zionist agent, a sayan? Not necessarily. Operations like the JFK assassination are planned on a strict need-to-know basis: no one knows more than he needs to know. Witt declared to the HSCA that he belonged to no organization whatsoever. He summarized his motivation for his “bad joke” in these words:

“In a coffee break conversation someone had mentioned that the umbrella was a sore spot with the Kennedy family. Being a conservative-type fellow, I sort of placed him in the liberal camp and I was just going to kind of do a little heckling.”

What would be interesting to know is: who inspired Witt during his coffee break? Did the coffee break take place in the office of Witt’s Jewish boss, director of the Rio Grande National Life insurance Co. in Dallas? Did Witt have insurmountable debts, like Jacob Rubenstein, aka Jack Ruby? Russ Baker mentions that the company wrote a lot of insurance for the military and was located in the same building that housed the local office of the highly negligent Secret Service.

Mr Witt, would you kindly come forward again and answer a few questions?

Notes

[1] Edward H. Miller, “Umbrella Man”, November 22, 2013, on The Historical Society, on

[2] “Remarks of Senator John F. Kennedy, ‘The New Dimensions of American Foreign Policy’,” University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, November 1, 1957”; Arthur Schlesinger, A Thousand Days: John Kennedy in the White House (1965), Mariner Books, 2002, p. 554.

[3] Edward Renehan Jr., “Joseph Kennedy and the Jews”, History News Network; Kellen Perry, – “The Dark Side Of Joe Kennedy Sr.” allthatsinteresting.com, April 17, 2017.

[4] Quoted in Herbert Druks, John F. Kennedy and Israel, Praeger Security International, 2005, p. 10

[5] David Nasaw, The Patriarch: The Remarkable Life and Turbulent Times of Joseph P. Kennedy, Penguin, 2015, p. 509.

[6] Alan Hart, Zionism: The Real Enemy of the Jews, vol. 2: David Becomes Goliath, Clarity Press, 2013, p. 252.

[7] Abigail Abrams, “Auction of Rare Diary Highlights What John F. Kennedy Really Thought About Hitler,” Time, March 23, 2017, on

Laurent Guyénot is the author of JFK-9/11: 50 years of Deep State , Progressive Press, 2014, and From Yahweh to Zion: Jealous God, Chosen People, Promised Land … Clash of Civilizations, 2018. (or $30 shipping included from Sifting and Winnowing, POB 221, Lone Rock, WI 53556).

November 22, 2019 - Posted by aletho | Deception, Timeless or most popular | JFK Assassination, United States, Zionism