The Assassination of President Kennedy
Executive Order 11110, the Warren Commission, and the permanent security state
President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas on November 22, 1963. The Warren Commission concluded that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone. Subsequent official reviews and a 1979 House Select Committee finding of a probable conspiracy have not altered the institutional narrative that the event was the work of a single gunman.
Segment 01 / 02
Executive Order 11110 and Monetary Authority
What were we conditioned to believe?
That Kennedy’s assassination was unrelated to any policy conflict with the Federal Reserve or the national-security apparatus and that Executive Order 11110 was a minor administrative adjustment concerning silver certificates.
What is the actual truth?
Executive Order 11110, signed June 4, 1963, delegated to the Secretary of the Treasury the authority to issue silver certificates against silver bullion and silver dollars in the Treasury. The order did not abolish the Federal Reserve; it created a parallel mechanism for the issuance of United States Notes.
At the time of the assassination, approximately four billion dollars in silver certificates had been printed under the authority. The notes were subsequently withdrawn from circulation. The Treasury’s silver certificate program was already in the process of being phased out before the order; the order itself accelerated a limited issuance rather than inaugurating a new monetary regime.
The Warren Commission did not investigate the possible connection between the order and the assassination. The Commission’s mandate and its reliance on the FBI and CIA for investigative work have been criticized by later official and unofficial reviewers.
Why?
Any president who successfully asserted an independent capacity to issue currency outside the Federal Reserve system would have demonstrated that the central bank’s monopoly was a political choice rather than a technical necessity. The demonstration would have been available to every subsequent administration. The removal of the president who signed the order, followed by the quiet retirement of the notes, restored the appearance of inevitability to the existing monetary architecture.
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The Post-Dallas Order
What were we conditioned to believe?
That the institutions of American government continued to operate under the same constitutional and legal constraints after the assassination as before.
What is the actual truth?
Within days of the assassination, Lyndon Johnson reversed several Kennedy administration policies on Vietnam, on relations with the Soviet Union, and on domestic spending priorities. The reversal was presented as continuity.
The national-security state expanded its domestic surveillance and counter-intelligence authorities in the years immediately following Dallas. The Church Committee and subsequent inquiries documented programs that originated or accelerated in that period.
Every subsequent president has operated inside the institutional framework established after 1963. No president has successfully challenged the core prerogatives of the intelligence community, the permanent military budget, or the Federal Reserve’s independence.
Why?
The assassination established, for anyone paying attention inside the government, that the removal of a sitting president was both possible and survivable for the state. The official lone-gunman finding removed the need for any institutional reckoning. The result was a permanent adjustment in the relative power of the elected executive and the permanent bureaucracies. Subsequent presidents have understood the boundary conditions.