At 1:45 p. m. on November 22nd, 1963, Harry Truman was reading the Kansas City Star in his private library in Independence, Missouri, when the phone rang. A Secret Service agent told him that President John F.
Kennedy had been shot in Dallas. Truman, gripping the receiver until his knuckles whitened, asked only whether Kennedy was alive. The agent could not confirm. Truman hung up and turned on the television.
For thirty-eight minutes, he watched Walter Cronkite assemble fragments of information. When Cronkite announced Kennedy’s death at 2:38 p. m. , Truman’s wife Bess found him standing motionless before the screen.
He turned to her and said, “They’ve killed him. ”
That phrase would haunt historians for decades. Who did Truman mean by “they”? His public statement hours later praised Kennedy as a good man and an able president.
But privately, Truman told his daughter Margaret something that would have shattered public confidence in the government. Harry Truman, the only living former president who had also suddenly inherited the presidency himself, knew something about Kennedy’s death that he could not say publicly. Truman and Kennedy had never been allies. At the 1960 Democratic Convention, Truman had publicly opposed Kennedy’s nomination, calling him inexperienced, unprepared, and controlled by his father’s money.
He supported Lyndon Johnson instead. When Kennedy won the nomination anyway, Truman refused to campaign for him until October, and Kennedy never forgave the betrayal. After winning the presidency, Kennedy excluded Truman from major policy discussions, inviting Eisenhower to consult on foreign affairs while ignoring Truman entirely. Their relationship was professional ice wrapped in political courtesy.
Kennedy represented everything Truman despised about modern politics: inherited wealth, Ivy League arrogance, and media manipulation over substance. But what Kennedy did not know was that the CIA had been running assassination programs since 1947. Truman had not simply inherited the presidency in 1945; he had created the CIA in 1947. By 1963, he believed his creation had become a monster that threatened American democracy.
The assassination was about to prove him right. When Truman received confirmation of Kennedy’s death, he did not call Lyndon Johnson. He did not call the Secret Service. He called Clark Clifford, his former White House counsel and the man who had helped draft the National Security Act that created the CIA.
Truman asked Clifford one question: “Did we do this? ” Clifford understood immediately that Truman was not asking whether Americans did this, but whether the CIA did this. Clifford told Truman he did not know, but promised to find out. For the next six hours, Truman watched coverage without speaking.
Bess brought him dinner. He did not touch it. At 8:00 p. m.
, CBS requested statements from all living former presidents. Eisenhower issued one immediately, praising Kennedy’s service. Truman drafted his response by hand. It took him forty-five minutes to write three sentences.
Released at 9:15 p. m. , the statement was notable for what it did not say. There was no mention of Kennedy’s vision for America, no praise for his leadership during the Cuban Missile Crisis, no reference to the New Frontier.
Just three bland sentences that could have described any competent administrator. Compare that to Eisenhower’s emotional tribute praising Kennedy’s courage and wisdom. Truman’s private comments told a different story. That evening, Truman’s aide William Hill visited the House to discuss funeral arrangements.
Truman told Hill something that would not surface in archives until 1995: “That good-for-nothing fellow Oswald didn’t act alone. Someone put him up to it. ” When Hill asked what evidence he had, Truman responded with cold certainty. “I don’t need evidence.
I know how these operations work. I authorized the first ones. ” Hill left that conversation convinced Truman knew something about Kennedy’s assassination that he would never say publicly. Declassified documents from 2003 revealed that Hill reported this conversation to the FBI within forty-eight hours.
Truman understood what most Americans did not. The CIA had been running assassination programs since 1947. Truman had authorized covert operations in 1948 to counter Soviet espionage, and by 1952 those operations included plans to eliminate foreign leaders. He had left office believing the CIA was contained and accountable.
By 1963, he knew the CIA had attempted to assassinate Fidel Castro at least eight times. The failed Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961 was a CIA operation that Kennedy approved but did not control. When it failed, Kennedy threatened to splinter the CIA into a thousand pieces. Truman recognized Kennedy’s mistake immediately.
You do not threaten intelligence agencies publicly and expect to survive politically. Kennedy had declared war on the CIA without understanding that he was surrounded by agents who reported directly to directors who answered to no one. Truman had created that structure. He knew its vulnerabilities.
On November 22nd, 1963, he watched those vulnerabilities destroy a president. The day after the assassination, Truman boarded a plane to Washington for the funeral, traveling alone. On the flight, he sat next to David Lawrence, a journalist and former Pennsylvania governor who later recorded their conversation in his private journal, unsealed in 1988. Truman told Lawrence that Kennedy died because he forgot the first rule of presidential power: never let the permanent government think you will destroy them.
When Lawrence asked what he meant by permanent government, Truman’s response was chilling. The intelligence services, the military contractors, and the bureaucrats who outlast elections run the country. Presidents just decide how fast. When Lawrence pressed him about whether he believed the CIA killed Kennedy, Truman did not answer directly.
Instead, he said, “I believe Lee Harvey Oswald fired the shots. I don’t believe he’s the only one who wanted Kennedy dead. ”
At the White House, Lyndon Johnson called Truman, panicked, asking how to stabilize the government, reassure allies, and prevent Soviet opportunism during the transition. Truman listened for twenty minutes without interrupting.
His advice shaped Johnson’s first hundred days: don’t change anything immediately, keep Kennedy’s cabinet, keep his policies, show continuity. When Johnson asked about the investigation into Kennedy’s death, Truman’s response was ice cold. Let the FBI handle it. Stay away from intelligence agencies.
They’ll leak whatever damages you. On November 25th, at Kennedy’s funeral at St. Matthew’s Cathedral, Truman sat between Eisenhower and Douglas MacArthur. Afterward, they rode together to Arlington National Cemetery.
In the limousine, MacArthur asked Truman directly whether he thought Oswald acted alone. Truman paused, then said: “I think Oswald was exactly what the CIA needed—a communist sympathizer with Soviet connections who could be blamed without triggering World War II. ” Eisenhower exploded, calling the speculation dangerous and irresponsible. Truman responded with barely concealed contempt: “You ran the CIA for eight years, Ike.
You know what they’re capable of better than anyone. ” Eisenhower went silent. Historians who accessed Eisenhower’s private diaries in 1998 found an entry from November 26th: “Truman suspects CIA involvement. I pray he’s wrong.
”
After the burial, Truman attended a private reception at the White House. Jackie Kennedy thanked him for coming. Truman told her something recorded in Secret Service logs: “Your husband died serving his country. Make sure history remembers that no matter what else they say about how he died.
” When Jackie asked what he meant, Truman did not answer. He kissed her hand and left. Exactly one month after the assassination, on December 22nd, 1963, the Washington Post published an op-ed on page A11 that detonated like a bomb in intelligence circles. The headline read “Limit CIA Role to Intelligence.
” The author was Harry S. Truman. CIA director John McCone read the op-ed and immediately called Truman’s home. Truman refused the call.
McCone tried again the next day. Truman’s secretary told McCone he had nothing to add beyond what he published. McCone then ordered CIA historians to draft a rebuttal claiming Truman never wrote the op-ed, that his name was used without permission. The denial fell apart within forty-eight hours when the Washington Post produced Truman’s original handwritten draft.
Truman confirmed to reporters that he wrote every word, adding one sentence newspapers buried on inside pages: “I published this now because recent events have shown the danger of uncontrolled intelligence operations. ”
Declassified documents from 1995 later revealed that Truman had drafted the op-ed on November 28th, six days after the assassination. He showed it to Clark Clifford and asked whether publishing it would damage Johnson’s presidency. Clifford advised against it, warning it would trigger investigations that could paralyze the government.
Truman ignored him and sent it to the Post on December 2nd. The Post sat on the piece for three weeks, and editors consulted Johnson’s staff. Johnson told them to publish. He wanted political cover for any investigation that might implicate intelligence agencies.
The op-ed gave him that cover. The Warren Commission released its report in September 1964, concluding that Oswald acted alone, with no CIA involvement and no conspiracy. Truman read the report and told friends it was garbage designed to prevent panic. When his aide Richard Lawrence visited him in Independence, Truman said the commission was “protecting the institution at the expense of truth.
That’s what governments do when the truth threatens stability. ” When asked whether he had evidence the commission lied, he replied, “I have 18 years of experience watching intelligence agencies lie to protect themselves. That’s all the evidence I need. ”
Truman made one final public statement about Kennedy’s death in 1965, telling a biographer, “I believe the official explanation because the alternative is too dangerous to accept.
” His off-the-record notes, donated to the Truman Library in 1992, revealed one more thing: “If Americans knew what their intelligence agencies do in their name, they’d demand those agencies be abolished. Sometimes ignorance preserves democracy better than truth. ”
In 1967, Truman’s daughter Margaret asked him one final time whether he thought the Warren Commission told the truth. His answer, recorded in her unpublished diary, was haunting: “I think they told the truth that needed to be told.
Whether it’s the truth that happened, I’ll never know. ”
Harry Truman died on December 26th, 1972, at age 88. In his final years, he never recanted his December 1963 criticism of the CIA. He never endorsed the Warren report.
He never stopped believing Kennedy’s death involved more than one disturbed gunman. But he never provided evidence for his suspicion. Historians who accessed CIA files under the JFK Records Act in the 1990s discovered that the agency maintained a file on Truman’s op-ed titled “Truman Attack on Agency,” containing forty-seven documents spanning 1963 to 1970. Every public statement Truman made about intelligence operations after Kennedy’s death was cataloged, analyzed, and marked for rebuttal.
The agency Truman created was monitoring him as a threat to the end of his life.