By the early 1970s, growing public suspicion surrounding high-profile assassinations reached a boiling point-prompting action from figures on Capitol Hill and beyond. One of the most vocal was Bernard Fensterwald Jr., a former Senate counsel and intelligence investigator, who co-founded the Committee to Investigate Assassinations in 1969.
The Committee made bold assertions: They believed the murders of JFK, RFK, and MLK were linked.
And worse-they accused the U.S. government of covering it all up.
🧩 A Pattern of Conspiracy
Fensterwald’s organization united a wide cast of characters:
- Jim Garrison, the New Orleans DA who pursued JFK conspiracy theories
- Mark Lane, author of Rush to Judgment, critical of the Warren Commission
- Mort Sahl, a prominent political comedian
Together, they painted a picture of interconnected political violence, alleging:
"The assassinations were part of a broader conspiracy,"
and "…the government actively concealed key evidence."
They claimed this wasn’t about one lone shooter-but about institutional silence and systematic evasion.
đź“š Publishing and Provocation
In a 1969 interview, Fensterwald alleged that the CIA itself was behind the publication of Farewell America-a book filled with explosive claims about the Kennedy assassination.
Published abroad under a pseudonym to avoid U.S. libel laws, the book accused prominent American figures of complicity in the plot and claimed JFK was killed by professional assassins aided by the Dallas police.
This, Fensterwald believed, was part of the information war over who controlled the narrative.
🕵️‍♀️ MLK Case Involvement
Fensterwald didn’t just investigate, he acted.
In 1971, he became legal counsel to James Earl Ray, the convicted assassin of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. This move intensified suspicions that King’s murder, like Kennedy’s, involved deeper elements than publicly acknowledged.
He even visited CIA headquarters to examine assassination-related photographic evidence that had been included in the Warren Commission’s original files.
🧠From Senate Lawyer to Public Dissident
Fensterwald had once served as:
- Counsel for multiple U.S. Senate subcommittees
- A foreign policy advisor to Senator Estes Kefauver
- A lawyer investigating illegal surveillance operations
But by the 1970s, he had become a loud and persistent critic of the very institutions he once served.
His Committee ran ads in radical publications like Quicksilver Times, asking citizens to come forward with evidence of CIA wrongdoing-particularly anything connected to assassinations.
