Jun 08, 2006  |  By: LOU CHIBBARO J  | COMMENTS     

A D.C. gay activist who co-founded the Gay & Lesbian Activists Alliance and the Gertrude Stein Democratic Club in the 1970s has raised eyebrows by launching a self-financed campaign to promote his theory that U.S. government agencies were involved in a conspiracy to assassinate President John F. Kennedy in 1963.

Paul Kuntzler, president of the Miller Reporter Co., a transcription and court reporting firm that provides services for Congress and executive branch agencies, merged his gay activism with his Kennedy assassination efforts this week by purchasing four, full-page advertisements, on pages 37-40 in this week’s Washington Blade, to publicize his beliefs about the assassination.

“This is a story bigger than Watergate and bigger than the September 11 terrorist attacks,” Kuntzler said.

The ad consists of the text of an April 4, 2006, letter Kuntzler wrote to Donald Graham, publisher of the Washington Post. In the letter, Kuntzler outlines his belief that President Lyndon Johnson, former FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, the CIA, the Secret Service, and top U.S. military leaders participated in a conspiracy to kill Kennedy.

Most of these assertions have been published before in books, articles, and television and film documentaries, including filmmaker Oliver Stone’s controversial film, JFK.

Surviving members of the Johnson administration have denounced as outrageous and unsubstantiated such claims that Johnson and U.S. government agencies were involved in the assassination.

Others who have studied the assassination have raised doubts about the findings of the Warren Commission, the official U.S. government account of the assassination, which found that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone in assassinating Kennedy on Nov. 22, 1963 in Dallas. But no prominent historian or author has backed claims that Johnson or government agencies played a role in the assassination.

A call for action

Saying he has read more than a dozen books on the subject, Kuntzler said his aim is to convince the media, especially the Washington Post and the New York Times, to fully report the “true facts” about the assassination. He said a full disclosure of the facts, which he believes have been concealed by the government, would shock the nation and shake the political foundation of the U.S. political system.

“The American people deserve to get a full and complete account of what actually happened,” Kuntzler said. “What happened on Nov. 22, 1963, was an attack against our democracy. I truly believe there is nothing more important than to get to the bottom of this.”

A native of Michigan, Kuntzler said he first became involved in politics in 1960, at age 19, when he became a volunteer for the Kennedy presidential campaign in his home state.

He moved to D.C. a few years later and became a member of the Mattachine Society of Washington, the city’s first gay political group founded by veteran D.C. gay activist Frank Kameny.

Kuntzler and his now deceased domestic partner, Steven Miller, are among the handful of gay activists captured in photographs with Kameny as they formed a picket line in front of the White House in the early 1960s.

Miller, a professional stenographer and court reporter, went on to buy the court reporting company he worked for, which became Miller Reporting. Under Miller’s leadership, the firm grew to become one of the nation’s most prominent transcription companies, with the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and several committees of the U.S. Senate and House among its clients.

Kuntzler inherited the company when Miller died in 2004. He has since used Miller Reporting letterhead to correspond with newspaper editors and reporters to promote his beliefs on the Kennedy assassination.

Earlier this year, Kuntzler startled some gay activist colleagues when he rented the ballroom at the city’s posh Willard Hotel and paid to fly in a half dozen authors and writers specializing in JFK assassination conspiracy theories for a panel discussion.

Kuntzler arranged for sophisticated audio-visual equipment to project the famous Zapruder 8-mm home movie, which recorded the assassination, on a large screen above the panelists. The film was shown repeatedly for more than an hour as the panelists discussed their views on the assassination.

Kuntzler distributed at the panel session a compendium of his correspondence with editors and reporters at the Post and New York Times, along with copies of newspaper articles on the assassination.

But so far, his efforts have generated only a single, small article in U.S. News & World Report. The Post and New York Times have not published stories on the Kennedy assassination since Kuntzler began contacting them about the subject.

The Times did not respond to a request for comment. The Post declined to comment.