Dear friends and readers,
As everyone it seems across the world knows on November 22, 1963 John F. Kennedy was shot dead while passing in an open car by the Texas Book Depository Building in Dealey Plaza in Dallas, Texas, and every bit of evidence we have shows that the probability is at least 1 or 2 of the shots came from the super-marksman, Lee Harvey Oswald.
The usual way this is discussed in the US — which I participated in with a friend at the Kennedy Center yesterday — is an exchange of “where were you?” and “what were you doing” when you heard. It testifies to how electrifying the news was, how it sped throughout the US by media and word of mouth, and how memorable the moment and then the entire weekend to follow was. Last night a woman sitting at the next table told us where she was while in Indonesia: an ambassador’s daughter. The news came by phone. The man next to her, an older man, joked “I was not born then.”
Well I was: I was 17 and a legal secretary in the FAA, working in an office in the Federal Aviation Airport at what was then Idlewild Airport (now JFK) and realized suddenly that the office I was in had emptied out. Usually a hum and buzz of people surrounded me as I typed letters. I got up and walked to the door, and asked, “what happening” (or words to this effect), and was told “President Kennedy’s been shot!” Or some such words. And then quickly afterward: “he’s dead, he was dead on arrival at the hospital.”
Yes a great shock, and gradually details unfolded about where he was, and something of how it happened. Soon afterward the gov’t seemed to shut down — or no work was done — and I know I went home in the afternoon. I remember that I saw Jack Ruby kill Oswald on the Sunday: I caught the live coverage on NBC. People appeared glued to their TVs watching news and as the technology at the time was less censurable quickly, there was a lot of spontaneity among reporters and involved people. This continued through the war in Vietnam and occasionally one would see real (unrehearsed, unperformative, revealing) events — startling because much we see on TV is pre-planned, canned, and serves the establishment point of view. I remember I cried watching the funeral on Monday — as it seemed most citizens in the US did.
Today we have the Internet to try to get past the censorship and a lot more information comes out steadily. Wikileaks and other Whistleblowers since 9/11/2001, another of these global village events where people ask and can tell each other where they were and what they heard and experienced when they were told the World Trade Center crashed down and the Pentagon was seriously damaged, and thousands and thousands killed or maimed.
What can be said about this event? my blog is partly a response to what I’ve seen on the media these past few days: We see photos of the young healthy looking Kennedy looking inspirational in the sun; his then young and (we are told) beautiful wife in her pink suit with the deep red roses and we are told things that “the world changed after this or was somehow deeply different than it would have been,” with the implication we as a people lost out on something. Or individuals intone on how ever after they know how fragile any order is. We see photos of Oswald where he looks dark in face, beat up, sullen, but willing to shout out replies at reporters. We are told he was nuts, abused his wife, went to Russia, he is heard saying he’s a Marxist.
The documentaries (Frontline and others) show the viewer that the stories told and the way they are told have not changed one iota. The question still being asked was, Did Oswald act alone? And still the answer comes back, the evidence is inconclusive, or at best, there was another gun shooting (from the famous grassy knoll). FWIW, this seems to me if not a side issue, a misleading way to talk about the incident.
What we saw for a couple of days on major media — and this is key — was the squalid backdrops of the way people gain and manipulate power. We saw the this elegant god-like well-educated, super-well connected rich young man was connected to a thug who had led a deprived and disconnected life, self-educated, often broke, wandering about the world, married to a Russian woman who probably needed a husband emotionally and financially but chose badly. We see the lack of a line between crooks (Mafia) and supposedly legitimate people who do what they please without flouting laws (because they made laws which make it legal to keep their activities secret); between people who run state wars and semi-thugs who manage coups with the aid of military groups funded by groups of power who are at the head of what’s called states. larger issues, the connection between local monopolies on violence (even if private as between individuals and followers) and guerilla wars. How certain groups are allowed to function by the US gov’t (anti-Castro Cubans, Walker’s fanatical abusive bands) and others not (Oswald was harassed when he returned from the US but when it was seen he was not part of any powerful group, not prepossessing, a powerless thug, let alone).
Both men were people interacting with squalor: both were interacting with the anti-Castro cubans, and these people seethed against Kennedy as not keeping his promises to overthrow Castro, and murder as many people as it took to turn Cuba back into a capitalist run colony of an imperial power. They were equally angry at Oswald as a recorded scene on the street tells us when Oswald after having visited them and told them he would work for them was discovered to have connections to communists. Remember the asinine Bay of Pigs which indirectly led Kennedy to take the US to the brink of nuclear war?
Both were connected to the Mafia. It seems that Oswald did know local petty criminals, among these Jack Ruby, who murdered Oswald and whose motives have been obscured and are not reported on. John Kennedy’s brother, Robert Kennedy, as Attorney General of the US, had deported or tried to deport permanently an important leader of the Mafia. This man vowed to kill John Kennedy or have him killed. Kennedy had had an affair with Marilyn Monroe who was connected to other sectors (let’s say) of this amorphous group of people.
Both were military people, trained by the military. Kennedy’s behavior over the torpedo boat sometimes presented as heroism (sometimes as daredevil and not centrally helpful) is matched by Oswald who became the sharp-shooter he was because of the US military. Oswald had no trouble (as he would not today) buying the superb rifle he used. The term for Oswald would be a dangerous man. It was known that he stalked a deep reactionary type, another war-hero, A Major General Edwin Walker who was a fanatic right-wing activist, and it’s now openly stated that Oswald shot him – in the arm, in the hands.
Nothing was changed because Kennedy died. He had had very little effect on social policy, was a military imperialist; he had ratcheted up Vietnam; he had acted on the Cuban missile crisis in such a way as to bring us the bring of nuclear war. His rhetoric was made little sense: ask not what your country can do for you but what you can do for your country is a flowery phrase whose implications are anti-social contract; the peace corps has become an elitist group run by coteries. Johnson made changes that mattered: Medicare, the Voting Rights act. The second has now been undermined by the supreme court and the Republicans in congress have done everything they can to limit, de-fund, throw wrenches in medicare. Johnson’s war on poverty was effective for as long as it lasted. I know it helped my daughter to go to a program for learning disabled children here in Alexandria (cut and destroyed in the later 1980s).
It’s true some of these were supposedly on Kennedy’s agenda, but today we hear of good things on Obama’s agenda which never come to pass. Obama’s Affordable Health Care Act is shown to be a sham because no fundamental change has been made; the insurance companies are still in charge and cheating and extorting and the average citizen still a “patsy” (to use one of Oswald’s charming words).
The third day the curtain had gone down and we were back to theater. Gore Vidal has written brilliantly in an essay called “The Empress of the West” about the uses his cousin, Jacqueline, made of the assassination. No one cared if a forensic autopsy was done on the Friday and Saturday; but the preparations for that spectacle were begun by Sunday. She showed her power and influence that Monday.
Remember at the time most people had at most 3-4 TV stations. There was no Internet. I could not write this blog and allow it to reach anyone who has a computer and world wide web browser. It’s not that the curtain was not lifted a lot before and since. But you had to go to trouble to find non-mainstream commentary. People no longer do. Since the curtain has been lifted repeatedly and as far as the Kennedy-Oswald incident is concerned the most important the kind of information secured by wikileaks.
The rifle Oswald used: 6.5 Carcano Carbine
What questions ought we to ask? Why was Oswald not investigated and arrested at the time he attempted to kill Walker? He was found and arrested so swiftly on 11/22. What goes on in US culture that then and now makes these violent reactionary groups important for people in power and people seeking power?
Useless, unanswerable (and therefore wrong) questions continue to be asked. Contexts then and their equivalents now that we should be looking at are avoided. As far as the mainstream media is concerned, the lessons wikileaks has delivered and continues to deliver are not ackknowledged much less applied. Were we to have had a version of wikileaks in 1963 far more about the groups Kennedy and Oswald were involved with would be known, the right questions asked, with perhaps useful answers.
Ellen
Ellen And Jim Have A Blog, Two 
What we learned is how little trust to have in institutions (governmental, financial, educational, medical and journalistic). I have found the so-called pundits to be shallow, ill-informed and mendacious. I trust more the artists, who show me more about how to view events. Yesterday I watched a British mini-series, Hidden, which, although not about the Kennedy assassination, gave a picture of the intersection between high and low.
The great change probably occurred with the assassination of RFK.
John Ryland
A friend: it is hard to imagine Kennedy having some radical or even liberal agenda up his sleeve. What did he do? He does remind me of Obama, or vice versa.
In response to John,
I don’t think anything was learned by the RFK assassination. Something was seen in the MLK but people who would advertise the truth have not been able even to name the groups responsible (equivalent to the anti-Casto cubans, the Mafia, and the others who Oswald drifted through and Kennedy connected himself with) or have been afraid to do so.
Wikileaks is the one organization which has told the truth and some of it since it affected the CIA and now with the advent of Edward Snowden, so many people and individuals who won’t stand for it (Angela Merkel, her equivalent woman president in Venezuela, the gov’t of Indonesia) what the realities are has hit the mainstream media. But it is not explained and for many US people unless you explain something and then re-explain it, the message does not come through.
Richard Crossman is (by the way) someone who wrote three volumes of his time in office inside a labor gov’t and he did reveal just the sort of thing wikileaks does, only very politely and not always naming names. We have the 3 volumes. Jim read them.
Moral lesson: when you play with fire, expect to get burnt.
The other day WBAI, our local Pacifica station, re-broadcast a lengthy analysis it aired years ago of JFK’s assassination. Its main point was that Kennedy was intent on ending the Cold War, something Khrushchev was also interested in.
It seems clear enough that Oswald was, at most, the fall guy set up by some secret CIA group. His immediate murder by Jack Ruby, his having been tailed during the previous months by the CIA, his going into the Soviet embassy in Mexico City to announce he was going to kill Kennedy, his apparent lack of motive, plus a lot of contradictions the Pacifica program laid out (e.g., regarding ballistics, logistics, etc) make it next-to-impossible to believe the Warren Commission report (most of which has been withheld from us all these years).
The war in Vietnam began in earnest in the months after LBJ took office. In June 1964 the entirely phony Gulf of Tonkin incident happened.
Bob
Very interesting, Bob. From what I remember (I was 17 and in some ways naive but I did pay attention) Kennedy was a Cold War warrior. He did involve himself with dangerous types; at the time it seemed clear that his death was connected to the anti-Castro Cubans, but Ruby’s intervention suggests another group was involved (Mafia, local thugs). Setting someone up as a fall guy is a common ploy: so a fall guy was sent to kill MLK. I can believe almost anything of the CIA.
What is clear is the Warren Commission was not intended to go into what happened; Johnson did not want whatever it was coming out. I was irritated into writing the blog by a couple of programs on mainstream so-called liberal-tending media (PBS), one of which brought us right back to Oswald acted alone, with heroic images of Kennedy in the sun.
Vietnam is a complicated history.
FWIW, my father gave money to WBAI to the tune of $200 a month for many years. We used to listen to it faithfully when I lived with him. My father would ironically say how they respected him, how it was rare for him to be addressed in quite their tones as Mr Garbus, and how people would get on the phone. What was touching to me even then was they invited him to come down to the NYC studios time and again, and they would be delighted to show him around, but he never would. He was too shy, had a very heavy NYC accent and wore a flat cap so he didn’t think he’d impress them … Sad: a repeating bitter quarrel between my parents was their honeymoon had been provided by a communist organization, a camp in Connecticut. They had been happy but in later years it became a bone of ugly contention (he maintained he hadn’t known who owned the place). The McCarthy era went after even very minor gov’t clerk
Now I watch Amy Goodman (used to be on Pacifica) on her daily podcast, DemocracyNow.org, and donate to her (not so much money).
Ellen
A friend: I think Rob is right; the key is the Mexico City meeting. I don’t think it was in the Soviet Union’s interest to eliminate Kennedy. It might have been in the interest of the CIA.
Perhaps it occurred to Oswald — whom we’re told supposedly “liked” the President — how difficult it would be to shoot another human being whose face is visible, as compared to shooting in the back the “symbol” of US officialdom he so despised. Later, it was obvious the arrangement of boxes in the Sniper’s Nest best accommodated firing down Elm Street, indicating Oswald had discarded any plans to shoot the President on Houston.