My answer is direct and unequivocal: Understanding the Kennedy assassination is essential to understanding many of the crises into which our nation has been plunged, especially in foreign affairs but also with respect to out-of-control federal spending and debt. It also provides us with what we need to do to get our nation back on the right track.

Ever since the assassination, the official lie has been that Lyndon Johnson simply continued Kennedy's policies. That may have been true with respect to welfare-state programs such as Medicare and Medicaid and civil rights, but it has always been a lie with respect to foreign policy. In fact, it was Kennedy's foreign policy that ended up getting him killed.

In my new book An Encounter with Evil: The Abraham Zapruder Story, I spend two chapters on "JFK's War," a vicious war that was waged between Kennedy and the Pentagon and the CIA. Naturally, it is not a war that is taught in American public schools, for obvious reasons. If people were to discover this war, they would begin to see that the Pentagon and the CIA had much more reason to kill Kennedy than Lee Harvey Oswald, who had no motive whatsoever to kill him.

It was after the Cuban Missile Crisis that the military-intelligence establishment made the decision that Kennedy had to be replaced with Johnson, on grounds of protecting "national security." The Pentagon and the CIA were livid over how Kennedy had handled the crisis and, more important, how he had resolved it. One member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Curtis LeMay, compared Kennedy's handling of the crisis to Neville Chamberlain's appeasement of Hitler at Munich. He called Kennedy's resolution of the crisis "the biggest defeat in U.S. history."