Former President Harry S. Truman, the only living ex-president who had himself been thrust into office by sudden death, went to his grave in 1972 convinced that Lee Harvey Oswald did not act alone in the assassination of President John F. Kennedy — and that the intelligence apparatus he created in 1947 may have played a role in the killing, according to newly surfaced accounts of his private conversations, declassified documents, and unpublished diaries.
Truman died on December 26, 1972, at age 88 in Independence, Missouri, without ever publicly accusing the Central Intelligence Agency of involvement in the November 22, 1963, assassination. But the record he left behind — a bombshell op-ed, private warnings to aides, and cryptic remarks to his family — tells a far darker story than his bland public statement of mourning that November evening.
The former president learned of the shooting at 1:45 p. m. Central Time while reading the Kansas City Star in his private library.
A Secret Service agent delivered the news by telephone. Truman asked one question: “Is he alive?” The agent could not confirm.
Truman hung up and turned on the television.
For 38 minutes he watched Walter Cronkite deliver fragments of information. When Cronkite announced at 2:38 p. m.
that Kennedy was dead, Bess Truman found her husband standing motionless before the screen. He turned to her and said, “They’ve killed him.” Not “he’s dead.”
Not “what a tragedy.” They’ve killed him.
That single pronoun would haunt historians for six decades. Within hours, Truman called Clark Clifford, his former White House counsel and the man who helped draft the National Security Act that created the CIA in 1947. According to accounts of the call, Truman asked one question: “Did we do this?”
Clifford understood immediately that Truman was not asking whether Americans had done it. He was asking whether the CIA had.
Clifford told Truman he did not know, but promised to find out. Truman hung up and returned to the television. For the next six hours he 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 an emotional tribute praising Kennedy’s courage and wisdom. Truman drafted his by hand, taking 45 minutes to write three sentences. Released to the press at 9:15 p.
m. , it read: “I was shocked and hurt when I heard of President Kennedy’s death. He was a good man, an able president, and he did a good job.
Mrs. Truman and I extend our sympathy to Mrs. Kennedy and the children.”
The statement is notable for what it omits. 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.
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,” Truman said.
“Someone put him up to it.” Hill asked what evidence Truman had. The former president responded with cold certainty: “I don’t need evidence.
I know how these operations work. I authorized the first ones.”
Declassified documents from 2003 revealed that Hill reported this conversation to the FBI within 48 hours. The bureau took no public action.
What Truman understood, according to the historical record, was that the CIA had been running assassination programs since 1947. He had authorized covert operations in 1948 to counter Soviet espionage. By 1952, those operations included plans to eliminate foreign leaders.
Truman left office believing the agency was contained and accountable. By 1963, he knew the CIA had attempted to assassinate Fidel Castro at least eight times.
The 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 read about that threat in the newspapers and recognized Kennedy’s mistake immediately.
You do not threaten intelligence agencies publicly and expect to survive politically.
On November 23, the day after the assassination, Truman boarded a plane to Washington for the funeral. He traveled alone; Bess stayed in Missouri at age 78, unable to handle the stress of public mourning. On the flight, Truman sat next to David Lawrence, a journalist and former Pennsylvania governor.
Lawrence later recorded their conversation in a private journal that was unsealed in 1988.
Truman told Lawrence something astonishing. “Kennedy died because he forgot the first rule of presidential power,” he said. “Never let the permanent government think you’ll destroy them.”
Lawrence asked what Truman meant by “permanent government.” Truman’s response was chilling: “The intelligence services, the military contractors, the bureaucrats who outlast elections. They run the country.
Presidents just decide how fast.”
When Lawrence pressed Truman on whether he believed the CIA killed Kennedy, Truman did not answer directly. “I believe Lee Harvey Oswald fired the shots,” he said. “I don’t believe he’s the only one who wanted Kennedy dead.”
That distinction would define conspiracy theories for the next 60 years: Oswald pulled the trigger, but someone else pulled Oswald’s strings.
At Blair House that afternoon, President Lyndon Johnson called Truman at 4:30 p. m. Johnson was panicked, asking how to stabilize the government, reassure allies, and prevent Soviet opportunism during the transition.
Truman listened for 20 minutes without interrupting. When Johnson finished, Truman delivered advice that would shape the new president’s first 100 days: “Don’t change anything immediately. Keep Kennedy’s cabinet.
Keep his policies. Show continuity. The country needs to believe the presidency survived even if the president didn’t.”
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.” That conversation revealed Truman’s deepest fear — not that Kennedy was killed by foreign enemies, but that he was killed by domestic intelligence operations that had grown beyond presidential control.
On November 25, at Kennedy’s funeral at St. Matthew’s Cathedral, Truman sat between Eisenhower and Douglas MacArthur, the only three people in the cathedral who had commanded wartime operations. They did not speak during the service.
Afterward, riding together to Arlington National Cemetery, MacArthur broke the silence and asked Truman directly whether he thought Oswald acted alone.
Truman paused for a long moment. “I think Oswald was exactly what the CIA needed,” he said. “A communist sympathizer with Soviet connections who could be blamed without triggering World War III.”
Eisenhower exploded, calling such 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. The limousine reached Arlington. They exited without speaking again.
Historians who accessed Eisenhower’s private diaries in 1998 found an entry from November 26, 1963: “Truman suspects CIA involvement. I pray he’s wrong.”
After the burial, Truman attended a private reception at the White House and stayed exactly 30 minutes. Jackie Kennedy thanked him for coming. Truman told her something witnesses 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.” Jackie asked what he meant. Truman did not answer.
He kissed her hand and left.
But Truman was not finished. On December 22, 1963, exactly one month after the assassination, 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.
The timing was not coincidental. CIA Director John McCone read the op-ed and immediately called Truman’s home in Missouri. Truman refused the call.
McCone tried again the next day. Truman instructed his secretary to tell McCone he had nothing to add beyond what he had published.
McCone then did something revealing. He ordered CIA historians to draft a rebuttal claiming Truman never wrote the op-ed and that his name had been used without permission. The denial fell apart within 48 hours.
The Washington Post produced Truman’s original handwritten draft. Truman confirmed to reporters he had written every word. He added one sentence that newspapers buried on inside pages: “I published this now because recent events have shown the danger of uncontrolled intelligence operations.”
Recent events. Kennedy’s assassination had happened 30 days earlier.
Declassified documents from 1995 revealed that Truman drafted the op-ed on November 28, six days after the assassination. He showed it to Clark Clifford and asked whether publishing it would damage Johnson’s presidency. Clifford advised against publication, warning it would trigger investigations that could paralyze the government.
Truman ignored him and sent it to the Post on December 2. The Post sat on the piece for three weeks, with editors debating whether publishing a former president’s attack on the CIA one month after Kennedy’s death would appear inflammatory. They consulted Johnson’s staff.
Johnson told them to publish. He wanted political cover for any investigation that might implicate intelligence agencies.
That calculation was stark: Johnson used Truman’s credibility to create distance between the presidency and the CIA. If investigations discovered agency involvement in Kennedy’s death, Johnson could claim he had inherited a rogue operation he did not control. Truman was providing political insurance for the new president while settling his own score with the agency he had created.
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.” He never said this publicly, but his December 1963 op-ed remains the permanent record of his suspicion.
By 1964, Truman’s health was declining. He was 80 years old and largely withdrawn from public life, but he continued monitoring news about the assassination. When the Warren Report was published, Truman’s aide Richard Lawrence visited him in Independence.
Lawrence later told historians that Truman said something remarkable about the report’s conclusions: “They’re protecting the institution at the expense of truth. That’s what governments do when the truth threatens stability.”
Lawrence asked whether Truman had evidence the Warren Commission lied. Truman’s response: “I have 18 years of experience watching intelligence agencies lie to protect themselves. That’s all the evidence I need.”
In 1965, journalist Merle Miller interviewed Truman for a biography and asked him directly whether he believed Oswald acted alone. Truman’s response was carefully worded: “I believe the official explanation because the alternative is too dangerous to accept.” When Miller pressed him on what alternative he meant, Truman ended the interview.
That segment did not appear in the published biography. Miller’s notes, donated to the Truman Library in 1992, reveal Truman said one more thing off the record: “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.”
By 1966, Truman stopped discussing Kennedy’s death entirely. His last conversation about the assassination came with his daughter Margaret in 1967. She asked him one final time whether he thought the Warren Commission had told the truth.
Truman’s answer, recorded in Margaret’s unpublished diary, is haunting: “I think they told the truth that needed to be told. Whether it’s the truth that happened, I’ll never know.”
Historians who accessed CIA files under the JFK Records Act in the 1990s discovered something revealing. The CIA maintained a file on Truman’s December 1963 op-ed titled “Truman Attack on Agency.” The file contains 47 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 that Truman created was monitoring him as a threat.
The surveillance state Truman built to defeat Soviet communism had turned its tools on the former president who questioned whether it had killed his successor. The CIA never directly confronted Truman. They simply watched him until he died.
Truman’s December 1963 op-ed remains the most controversial thing he ever published. CIA historians claim he was misinformed about agency operations. Conspiracy theorists cite it as proof the CIA killed Kennedy.
The truth is probably simpler: Truman genuinely feared he had created an unaccountable power center that threatened democratic governance. Whether the CIA killed Kennedy became less important to Truman than the fact that it could 𝓀𝒾𝓁𝓁 Kennedy.
The agency had the capability, the motive, and the operational security to assassinate a president and frame a patsy. Whether it actually did so mattered less than the constitutional crisis created by that possibility.
Truman’s response reveals a fundamental truth about presidential power. Presidents are temporary. Intelligence agencies are permanent.
Presidents serve four to eight years. Intelligence directors serve across administrations. Presidents face voters.
Intelligence operations face no accountability. Truman understood that imbalance created systemic vulnerability. Kennedy’s death 𝓮𝔁𝓹𝓸𝓼𝓮𝓭 it.
A president who threatened to dismantle the CIA was killed. His replacement immediately backed away from that threat.
The lesson was obvious to anyone paying attention: challenge the permanent government and the permanent government removes you. Truman saw that lesson and tried to warn Americans through his op-ed. But Americans were not ready to hear it.
The Warren Commission’s reassuring lies were more comforting than Truman’s disturbing truth. Better to believe Oswald acted alone than to accept that American intelligence agencies murdered presidents who threatened their power.
Truman died knowing his warning had been ignored. The most revealing aspect of his response was not what he said publicly. It was what he refused to say.
He never explicitly accused the CIA of killing Kennedy. He never provided evidence for his suspicion. He never testified before the Warren Commission despite being the only living former president who understood how intelligence operations worked.
That silence was strategic. Truman believed accusing the CIA publicly without proof would trigger a constitutional crisis worse than Kennedy’s death itself. So he settled for publishing one op-ed that implied what he could not prove.
He created a historical record of his suspicion without forcing a confrontation that could destroy the government.
In the end, Harry Truman’s response to Kennedy’s assassination revealed more about Truman than about Kennedy. It showed a man who understood institutional power better than any of his successors. A man who recognized he had created a monster in 1947 that killed its creator’s successor in 1963.
A man who died believing American democracy’s greatest threat was not foreign enemies, but domestic intelligence agencies.
The man who created the CIA died believing it had killed a president. The man who suddenly inherited the presidency died suspecting his successor had inherited a government riddled with assassins. The man who saved democracy by defeating fascism and communism died fearing democracy’s internal enemies were more dangerous than foreign ones.
Harry S. Truman took those fears to his grave, leaving behind only a single op-ed, a handful of private conversations, and a warning that America chose not to hear.