‘Deep State’ Killed JFK According to Longtime Secretary

President John F. Kennedy’s longtime personal secretary spent years sitting just steps away from one of the most powerful men in America.

And after Kennedy was murdered in Dallas, Evelyn Lincoln came to a conclusion dramatically different from the official story.

She believed her boss had been the victim of a carefully planned political assassination involving people inside the U.S. government.

Lincoln, who served as Kennedy’s personal secretary for roughly 12 years, laid out her suspicions in an unpublished memoir called “I Was There,” written years after the assassination.

Her assessment was unmistakable.

Lincoln described Kennedy’s Nov. 22, 1963, killing as a “deliberate professional political murder” that she believed had been planned by people within government who wanted him removed from office.

That was Lincoln’s opinion, not a proven finding.

But her account has received renewed attention as Americans continue digging through the enormous archive of government records connected to Kennedy’s death.

President Donald Trump ordered additional JFK assassination records declassified in January 2025, declaring that continued secrecy surrounding the case was no longer in the public interest.

Two months later, the National Archives released more than 80,000 pages of previously classified material.

The broader JFK assassination collection now includes millions of pages of government documents, photographs, recordings and other material accumulated during more than six decades of investigations.

Lincoln’s own suspicions offer a remarkable glimpse into what someone inside Kennedy’s inner circle believed happened.

She did not claim in her unpublished memoir that she knew precisely who ordered the killing.

Instead, she described a president who had accumulated an extraordinary collection of powerful enemies.

“I do not point a finger at any one of the individuals or factions,” Lincoln cautioned.

But she believed the number of groups with reasons to oppose Kennedy was impossible to ignore.

Some of those conflicts began even before he entered the White House.

Kennedy was the first Catholic elected president of the United States, and his religion generated bitter opposition during the 1960 campaign.

Lincoln specifically pointed to anti-Catholic forces including the Ku Klux Klan, noting that religious hostility had previously played a role in national Democratic politics.

Kennedy then entered office at one of the most volatile moments in modern American history.

His administration became deeply involved in the civil-rights battle tearing through the South.

The federal government intervened to protect Freedom Riders and enforce court-ordered integration while Kennedy increasingly embraced federal civil-rights legislation.

Those policies placed him directly at odds with segregationists and extremist organizations.

But Lincoln believed Kennedy’s list of enemies extended much further.

One of the most powerful figures she discussed was FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover.

Hoover had led the FBI for decades and accumulated enormous institutional power in Washington.

His relationship with Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy was often contentious, and the FBI’s aggressive surveillance campaign against civil-rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. later became one of the most infamous chapters in the bureau’s history.

Lincoln questioned whether those tensions were significant when examining Kennedy’s death.

Then there was organized crime.

Robert Kennedy had made prosecuting organized crime one of his priorities as attorney general.

Among the administration’s most prominent adversaries was Teamsters boss Jimmy Hoffa, who had already become a major target of Robert Kennedy during Senate investigations.

Lincoln considered Hoffa and organized-crime figures among those who potentially had reasons to resent the Kennedy administration.

Her suspicions also extended to another secretive and powerful institution: the CIA.

Kennedy’s relationship with the agency had deteriorated dramatically following the failed Bay of Pigs invasion in Cuba in 1961.

The operation attempted to overthrow Fidel Castro using CIA-backed Cuban exiles but collapsed after Kennedy refused to provide the level of direct U.S. military intervention some participants expected.

The disaster created intense bitterness among certain Cuban exiles and damaged Kennedy’s relationship with senior intelligence officials.

Kennedy subsequently forced CIA Director Allen Dulles and other senior officials out of the agency.

Organized crime had its own reasons for despising Castro.

Before the Cuban revolution, American mob figures had extensive gambling and business interests in Havana. Those interests largely disappeared after Castro took power.

Meanwhile, the CIA secretly worked with organized-crime figures on plots aimed at killing Castro — activities that were not publicly known when Kennedy himself was assassinated.

To Lincoln, that tangled relationship among intelligence operatives, anti-Castro exiles and organized crime demanded scrutiny.

She wrote of a developing connection among “the Mob, the CIA and right-wing extremists.”

None of that proves those groups participated in Kennedy’s assassination.

In fact, later government investigators said they did not find evidence establishing that the CIA, FBI or organized crime as institutions had ordered Kennedy’s murder.

But official investigations themselves produced conflicting conclusions about whether a wider conspiracy existed.

The Warren Commission, created shortly after Kennedy’s death, concluded in 1964 that Lee Harvey Oswald fired the shots that killed Kennedy and that investigators had found no evidence he was part of a conspiracy.

More than a decade later, Congress took another look.

The House Select Committee on Assassinations concluded in 1979 that Oswald fired the shots that struck Kennedy but also said the president was “probably assassinated as a result of a conspiracy.”

The committee could not identify another gunman or determine the scope of such a conspiracy.

It also criticized the original investigation.

The committee said the FBI had failed to adequately investigate the possibility of conspiracy and that the CIA had been deficient in collecting and sharing information.

It concluded that the Warren Commission had acted in good faith but had not received all relevant information possessed by government agencies.

One major piece of evidence behind the House committee’s conspiracy conclusion later came under serious criticism.

The committee had relied heavily on an acoustic recording it believed indicated another gunman.

A National Research Council scientific panel subsequently concluded that the recording did not provide reliable evidence of a second shooter.

That continuing disagreement is one reason Kennedy’s assassination has remained one of America’s most debated historical events.

Lincoln had suspicions about Lyndon B. Johnson as well.

She had previously claimed Kennedy told her shortly before the Dallas trip that he was considering replacing Johnson on the Democratic ticket in the 1964 election.

Johnson was facing political problems connected to the Bobby Baker scandal, and Lincoln later questioned several circumstances surrounding the vice president and his associates.

Her suspicions became considerably more explicit near the end of her life.

In an October 1994 letter, Lincoln wrote that she believed a conspiracy had existed.

She then identified five parties she personally suspected: Lyndon Johnson, J. Edgar Hoover, the Mafia, the CIA and Cubans in Florida.

Again, Lincoln offered her opinion rather than documentary proof tying those individuals or groups to the assassination.

But the identity of the person making the allegation makes the document historically striking.

Lincoln was not an outside conspiracy theorist studying Kennedy decades later.

She had spent years inside Kennedy’s political operation and White House.

She controlled access to the president, kept his schedules and correspondence, sat near his office and observed many of the personal and political battles surrounding his presidency.

Lincoln also focused on Kennedy’s foreign-policy conflicts.

She wondered whether his administration’s shifting policies toward Vietnam and his attempts to reduce Cold War tensions following the Cuban Missile Crisis had created still more enemies.

Kennedy had delivered a major peace address at American University in June 1963 calling for a different approach to relations with the Soviet Union.

At the same time, his administration was wrestling with America’s expanding involvement in Vietnam.

All of it contributed to Lincoln’s belief that Kennedy had accumulated enemies across government, organized crime, extremist political movements and foreign-policy circles.

She also pointed to what she believed was the remarkable convergence of hostile factions in Dallas.

Kennedy entered Texas knowing that political tensions were running high.

He was assassinated while traveling through Dealey Plaza in an open limousine shortly after 12:30 p.m. on Nov. 22, 1963.

Oswald was arrested later that day.

Americans would never hear his full account in court.

Two days after Kennedy was killed, nightclub owner Jack Ruby shot Oswald dead inside the basement of Dallas police headquarters as television cameras broadcast the transfer live across the country.

That extraordinary sequence of events helped fuel questions that have persisted ever since.

The Warren Commission said investigators found no evidence that Ruby and Oswald were part of a conspiracy.

But the later congressional investigation concluded that earlier government inquiries had treated the conspiracy question too definitively and had failed to pursue some important areas adequately.

For Lincoln, the unanswered questions never went away.

She died in 1995 still believing Kennedy’s death involved more than one disgruntled gunman.

Her private writings cannot settle one of the most fiercely disputed questions in American history.

They do, however, show something remarkable.

One of the people who knew John F. Kennedy’s political world better than almost anyone else never accepted the simplest explanation for his murder.

From what Lincoln called her “catbird seat” beside Kennedy, she saw a president surrounded by powerful enemies.

And after considering those enemies for decades, she reached a disturbing conclusion of her own.

Kennedy’s assassination, she believed, was political — and at least some of the people responsible came from inside the government he led.