Most of those in the JFK assassination research community believe that a primary reason for the assassination was Kennedy's reluctance to back a U.S. coup against Fidel Castro. Certainly, the number of anti-Castro Cuban figures around Lee Harvey Oswald, Davie Ferrie, and others at the ground level logically suggests that.

But as I have pointed out many times, to what is usually the total silence of my fellow researchers, if this was indeed a major motive for the assassination, then what changes resulted? LBJ never even mentioned Cuba during his presidency, and neither did anyone else in the political world. Cuba died as an American political issue along with JFK in Dealey Plaza. There was no second Bay of Pigs, this time with air cover. The CIA stopped trying to kill Castro. Neither Johnson nor Nixon ever even suggested trying to overthrow Castro. What about Reagan, great anti-commie that he was? Castro was still in power during the 1980s. What did Reagan do about that?

Decades of researching these subjects, starting with the JFK assassination, have taught me that motives are sometimes hard to discern in these matters. This is not because the motives are unclear, but because those seemingly investigating them create distractions. They send us in the wrong direction. This is what magicians do. Get you looking the other way. The entire Cuban connection to the JFK assassination, in my view, is one of these smokescreens. It bears repeating; if you assassinate Kennedy because he wanted rapprochement with Castro, then an invasion or coup in Cuba should logically come afterwards. It never did. So the conspirators failed, if that was their goal.

Vietnam was another issue, and there the policy did change. JFK's newly implemented withdrawal process, as delineated in National Security Action Memorandum 263, called for all U.S. advisors (there were no actual troops under JFK) to be out by 1965.