Who killed John F. Kennedy?

Encyclopedia of Opinion

Question: Who killed John F. Kennedy?
Position‹2 of 5›: The CIA killed JFK
Argument1 of 3›: The CIA disagreed with JFK

The CIA disagreed with Kennedy's politics prior to his assassination.

The argument

During his presidency, John F. Kennedy had numerous disagreements with the CIA. Their conflicting opinions for military operations could have led to the government assassinating the president. The case advanced here is built on motive and opportunity rather than on direct evidence of the act, and it proceeds by identifying a pattern of conflict and then asking who stood to gain from its removal. Kennedy and the CIA both blamed each other for the disastrous results of the Bay of Pigs invasion that occurred in 1961. Supposedly, after the operation JFK made personal changes that upset other CIA members. On this reading the failure did not end in mutual recrimination alone; it restructured the relationship, moving people out of positions they had expected to keep and leaving within the agency a body of officers who attributed the loss of those positions directly to the president. The growing resentment could have led to a plot to assassinate Kennedy. In addition, JFK disagreed with the CIA's plan to assassinate Fidel Castro and didn't want to allow the operation. This is another possible motive for the CIA to kill Kennedy, and it is offered as evidence that the friction was continuous rather than confined to a single episode: the president is presented as repeatedly blocking operations the agency regarded as necessary, so that the disagreement was structural and unlikely to resolve while he remained in office. The former head of the CIA, Allen Dulles, was on the Warren Commission so had influence over what was included in the report. This is the final link in the chain as proponents assemble it. The claim is not that the commission's findings were shown to be false, but that the body producing them included a figure with a direct interest in their conclusions, so on this account its account cannot serve as independent confirmation that the agency was uninvolved.

Premises

[P1]JFK and the CIA had serious disagreements over operations like the Bay of Pigs invasion and the plan to assassinate Fidel Castro. [P2] These conflicts, along with personnel changes JFK made, created strong motive and resentment within the CIA against the president. [P3] Former CIA head Allen Dulles sat on the Warren Commission, giving the CIA influence to shape the official account of the assassination. [C] Therefore, the CIA had both the motive and the means to kill JFK, making it likely they were responsible.

Counter-arguments

Just because President Kennedy and the CIA had disagreeing opinions on military operations does not mean that the government would assassinate the president. Planning and performing that complex of an operation would have been near impossible to keep secret from Kennedy. The aftermath of the assassination was messy and was not beneficial enough to to the CIA to have been planned by them.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P3] These things are not enough to form a believable motive.