Tuesday Reads: 11/22/63

Today is the 48th anniversary of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. Every year reams of material about media that long ago day are produced by the media. But even though a congressional investigation determined that a conspiracy was behind the murder of JFK, the media narrative never changes: most writers claim that Oswald was the only person involved.

In my opinion, if Oswald killed Kennedy, he could not have done it alone. If you watch the videos of the assassination, it’s very clear that bullets hit Kennedy from both back and front. Witnesses reported hearing three shots. Witnesses at the scene ran toward the “grassy knoll,” the direction from which shots came. I think Oswald was a patsy, as he himself claimed after his arrest. A great deal of evidence has been released over the years, and a number of books have been published that clearly demonstrate that powerful forces wanted JFK dead. But the media continues to defend the “lone gunman” theory, because if the truth were publicly acknowledged, they would have to admit that there was in fact a coup in the U.S. 48 years ago today.

I don’t know who was really behind the assassination of course, but I suspect rogue elements in the CIA, the FBI, and possibly the military. Obviously we will never know for sure, because the cover-up began immediately after the murder–in Dallas, where doctors saw wounds that were apparently tampered with before the official autopsy took place at Bethesda Naval Hospital–at which federal agents refused to allow the President brother Bobby to attend, according to David Talbot’s book Brothers: The Secret History of the Kennedy Years.

Talbot also wrote that neither Bobby Kennedy nor Jackie Kennedy ever believed that Oswald had killed JFK. Bobby immediately suspected the CIA, which Jack Kennedy had vowed to “splinter…into a thousand pieces and scatter to the winds.” Bobby also suspected that Lyndon Johnson was involved.

One of RFK’s goals in running for President was to reopen the investigation into the JFK assassination. But we all know what happened to Bobby.

Richard Nixon was obsessed with finding out what happened to JFK, and he once “joked” about LBJ being involved.

All I know is that Johnson didn’t want anyone looking too closely at what had happened. He wanted the “investigation” to be wrapped up very quickly. President Johnson

immediately set up a commission to “ascertain, evaluate and report upon the facts relating to the assassination of the late President John F. Kennedy.” Johnson asked Warren if he would be willing to head the commission. Warren refused but it was later revealed that Johnson blackmailed him into accepting the post. In a telephone conversation with Richard B. Russell Johnson claimed: ” Warren told me he wouldn’t do it under any circumstances… I called him and ordered him down here and told me no twice and I just pulled out what Hoover told me about a little incident in Mexico City… And he started crying and said, well I won’t turn you down… I’ll do whatever you say.”

Not a very auspicious beginning for a thorough, unbiased investigation.

I’m by no means an expert on the assassination literature, although I’ve read several recent scholarly books about it in recent years. For anyone who is interested, I recommend reading some of what Joseph Cannon has written on the subject over the years.

What I think is that on that day in November 48 years ago there was essentially a coup, and after that Presidents knew that if they really tried to take on the CIA, they might end up dead like John and Bobby Kennedy did. The longer I live and the more I see what has happened to our government, the more strongly I believe this.

I do not by any means consider Jack Kennedy to be a “great President.” His time in office was far too short to permit a real evaluation. I honestly don’t care about Kennedy’s sex life or about his relationship with his wife Jackie. I don’t believe either Jack or Jackie was a saint or a villain. I think they were flawed human beings. But I do know that when they were in the White House, there was a sense of hope in the country. There was a feeling of a new beginning, of new possibilities. And I know that those feelings died with Jack Kennedy on 11/22/63.

Kennedy had signed an order to remove the American advisers from Vietnam, but Johnson immediately reversed the order. He plunged the country into a bitter bloody war. He also did some good things. He managed to get Congress to pass some of the legislation that Kennedy had championed like the Civil Rights Bill and Medicare. But Vietnam brought LBJ down and then we got Nixon, Ford, Carter, and Reagan, and Bush I. We had a bit of a respite with Clinton, but Bush II managed to wreak as much or more destruction as Reagan had. How would things be different today if Kennedy had lived? We’ll never know, of course; but the country has sure gone to hell since he died.

There will be hundreds of articles about JFK’s death published. I’ll link to just a few that I’ve read recently.

Famed horror writer Stephen King has written a fantasy novel in which a man travels back in time to a few years before the assassination in order to try to stop Oswald and save JFK and America (King is convinced that Oswald acted alone).

On one end is 2011. An unpopular diner has finally been bought out by L. L. Bean. The diner — and the time portal inside it — may last a few more weeks in the footprint of a burned textile mill.

On the other end is America under Eisenhower. The mill churns out white smoke. “Vertigo” is showing at the outdoor movie theater — on its first run. The Kennebec Fruit Company isn’t a curio for tourists; it sells oranges. And John Kennedy, the young senator from Massachusetts, is still alive.

The rules of the rabbit hole into the past are outlined in the first pages of the novel. Al Templeton, the owner of the diner, explains them to Jake Epping, an English teacher at the local high school. Walk to the back of the pantry. Mind the 60-watt bulb overhead. Expect the smell of sulfur. And keep walking until you feel your foot fall.

Suddenly you’re back on Sept. 9, 1958. It’s 11:58 a.m. There are, Al says, only two conditions. One, it’s not a one-way trip. It doesn’t have to be. But when you return, no matter how long you’ve stayed in the past — two days, five years, whatever — only two minutes have gone by in the present. Two, each time you go back to the past, there is a reset. Like a Magic Slate. It’s 11:58 a.m., and everything you did on your previous trip has been erased.

I haven’t read the novel, but Frank Rich has, and he’s written a lengthy article in New York Magazine in which he argues that Kennedy faced a barrage of right-wing hatred similar to that directed at President Obama in 2011.

At the two-year mark of February 1963, the Times Washington bureau chief James Reston lamented that the “exuberant optimism of the first few months of the Kennedy administration” had given way “to doubt and drift” in a Washington nearing “the point of paralysis.” The president, Reston wrote, was “a moderate confronted by radical facts,” among them “a whopping budget deficit and an alarming army of the unemployed.” Kennedy was in “trouble both with the conservatives who think he has gone too far and the liberals who think he has not gone far enough.”

Unlike Obama, JFK enjoyed consistently high poll numbers, still hovering near a 60 percent approval rating in November 1963. But that fall, both Newsweek and Look speculated he could lose his bid for reelection in 1964. The hatred he aroused, while from a minority of voters, was heated and ominous. On Sunday, November 24, 1963, the Times was packed with elegiac coverage of the leader who had been slain that Friday. But the No. 1 book on the nonfiction best-seller list, as it had been for weeks, was JFK: The Man & the Myth, by Victor Lasky, a newspaperman who would years later enjoy a second vogue on the right as a die-hard Nixon defender after Watergate. Lasky’s thick slash-and-burn Kennedy book, which even questioned his World War II heroism as the skipper of PT-109, was a precursor of the Swift Boat hatchet job on John Kerry.

Rich writes of Stephen King’s novel:

But another controversy from the assassination—one that has never received remotely the attention generated by the endless “grassy knoll” and “second gunmen” debates—is forcefully revived by King: the role played in Oswald’s psyche by the torrid atmosphere of political rage in Dallas, where both Lady Bird Johnson and Adlai Stevenson had been spat upon by mobs of demonstrators in notorious incidents before Kennedy’s fateful 1963 trip. As the time-traveling Epping gets settled in that past, he describes an inferno of seething citizens, anti-Semitic graffiti on Jewish storefronts, and angry billboards demanding the impeachment of Supreme Court Chief Justice Earl Warren and equating racial integration with communism. That last one, King’s protagonist observes, “had been paid for by something called The Tea Party Society.”

That “Tea Party Society” is the novelist’s own mischievous invention, but the rest of his description is accurate. King’s touchstone is The Death of a President, by William Manchester, a meticulous biographer and historian who was chosen by Jacqueline Kennedy to write the authorized account of the assassination. Manchester received cooperation from almost every conceivable party, the Warren Commission included, but after the Kennedy camp read the manuscript and objected to the disparaging treatment of Lyndon Johnson, as well as some (G-rated) domestic details about the First Couple, Mrs. Kennedy filed a quixotic injunction to halt publication. Her brief, failed effort only enhanced the book’s blockbuster appeal; soon after its release in 1967, The Death of a President became arguably more prominent than the Bible in middle-class American households. In his afterword to 11/22/63, King says he was “deeply impressed—and moved, and shaken” when rereading it. It’s hard to disagree. But what also struck me in a rereading was Manchester’s stern rejection of one major Warren Commission finding. Though he was onboard for its conclusion that Oswald was the lone assassin, he did not buy its verdict that there was “no evidence” of any connection between Oswald’s crime and Dallas’s “general atmosphere of hate.”

Manchester is uncharacteristically contentious about this point. He writes that “individual commissioners had strong reservations” about exonerating Dallas but decided to hedge rather than stir up any controversy that might detract from the report’s “widest possible acceptance.” While Manchester adds that “obviously, it is impossible to define the exact relationship between an individual and his environment,” he strongly rejected the universal description of Oswald as “a loner.” No man, he writes, is quarantined from his time and place. Dallas was toxic. The atmosphere was “something unrelated to conventional politics—a stridency, a disease of the spirit, a shrill, hysterical note suggestive of a deeply troubled society.”

The ultra-right wing hasn’t really changed all that much–but today the haters are mainstream, treated by the media as “moderates.” In JFK’s day they were in the John Birch Society and the Ku Klux Klan; today they control the Republican Party.

Here’s an interesting piece by Edward Lane of Wichita Falls, TX: Who Really Killed President John F. Kennedy?

Although many eyewitnesses said they thought the gunfire came from a grassy knoll in front of the President’s automobile, the Warren Commission determined the shots came from the Texas School Book Depository Building behind Kennedy. The Commission also said a lone gunman fired all the shots.

The Warren Commission, headed by Chief Justice Earl Warren, in 1964 ordered that much of its records be sealed for 75 years until 2039.

Why all the secrecy if, in fact, the government wanted the American people to be confident that they were getting the truth?

Although many eyewitnesses said they thought the gunfire came from a grassy knoll in front of the President’s automobile, the Warren Commission determined the shots came from the Texas School Book Depository Building behind Kennedy. The Commission also said a lone gunman fired all the shots.

The Warren Commission, headed by Chief Justice Earl Warren, in 1964 ordered that much of its records be sealed for 75 years until 2039.

One Wichita Falls man today speculated as to why there was need for secrecy until the year 2039.

He said he was puzzled by the need to keep the public in the dark for so long.

“Evidently they want to wait until everybody is dead before they release those records. Who are they protecting?” he asked, as he thought about one of the darkest days in American history.

Most of the sealed records belong to the CIA and will automatically become public in 2017.

And why are “long lost tapes” related to the assassination still turning up?

The tape is titled “Radio Traffic involving AF-1 in flight from Dallas, Texas to Andrews AFB on November 22, 1963.”

It consists of in-flight radio calls between the aircraft, the White House Situation Room, Andrews Air Force Base, and a plane that was carrying Kennedy press secretary Pierre Salinger and six Cabinet members from Hawaii to Tokyo when the president was assassinated.

Many Americans are unaware that there was an attempt to assassinate JFK by a New Hampshire man only a month before he was murdered in Dallas. A week later there was another foiled attempt in Chicago. Neither involved Lee Harvey Oswald.

This post is getting way too long, so I’ll end there. What’s on your reading and blogging list today?