JFK’s assassination: fifty years
The assassination of JFK has been fading slowly from memory, becoming ever more the stuff of legend because no one under fifty personally remembers anything about it, and everyone over fifty has probably said almost all there is to say (much of it false) over and over and over again.
But the anniversary is here nevertheless, and in remembrance of the occasion I’m re-posting this contemporaneous description of the immediate aftermath of the assassination. It was written by John Updike and appeared originally in The New Yorker. For me, it conjures up the jumbled surreal quality of the horror and the riveting fascination of the non-stop television coverage (something quite new in our experience) very well:
It was as if we slept from Friday to Monday and dreamed an oppressive, unsearchably significant dream, which, we discovered on awaking, millions of others had dreamed also. Furniture, family, the streets, and the sky dissolved, only the dream on television was real. The faces of the world’s great mingled with the faces of landladies who happened to house an unhappy ex-Marine; cathedrals alternated with warehouses; temples of government with suburban garages; anonymous men tugged at a casket in a glaring airport; a murder was committed before our eyes; a Dallas strip-tease artist drawled amiably of her employer’s quick temper; the heads of state of the Western world strode down a sunlit street like a grim village rabble; and Jacqueline Kennedy became Persephone, the Queen of Hades and the beautiful bride of grief. All human possibilities, of magnificence and courage, of meanness and confusion, seemed to find an image in this long montage, and a stack of cardboard boxes in Dallas, a tawdry movie house, a tiny rented room where some shaving cream still clung to the underside of a washbasin, a row of parking meters that had witnessed a panicked flight all acquired the opaque and dreadful importance that innocent objects acquire in nightmares.
I’ve written before about my rejection of Kennedy assassination conspiracy theories, and the reasons I came to that conclusion (here and here). I’ll repeat a quote from Vincent Bugliosi that I featured in one of those posts:
It is remarkable that conspiracy theorists can believe that groups like the CIA, military-industrial complex, and FBI would murder the president, but cannot accept the likelihood, even the possibility, that a nut like Oswald would flip out and commit the act, despite the fact that there is a ton of evidence that Oswald killed Kennedy, and not an ounce showing that any of these groups had anything to do with the assassination.
It is further remarkable that these conspiracy theorists aren’t troubled in the least by their inability to present any evidence that Oswald was set up and framed. For them, the mere belief or speculation that he was is a more-than-adequate substitute for evidence. More importantly, there is a simple fact of life that Warren Commission critics and conspiracy theorists either don’t realize or fail to take into consideration, something I learned from my experience as a prosecutor; namely, that in the real world – you know, the world in which when I talk you can hear me, there will be a dawn tomorrow, et cetera – you cannot be innocent and yet still have a prodigious amount of highly incriminating evidence against you”¦
”¦[T]he evidence against Oswald is so great that you could throw 80% of it out the window and there would still be more than enough to prove his guilt beyond all reasonable doubt”¦
The Warren Commission critics and conspiracy theorists display an astonishing inability to see the vast forest of evidence proving Oswald’s guilt because of their penchant for obsessing over the branches, even the individual branches. And, because virtually all of them have no background in criminal investigation, they look at each leaf (piece of evidence) by itself, hardly ever in relation to, and in the context of, all the other evidence.
And to bring us up to date, the NY Times was ready for this week’s anniversary by pretending that righties in Dallas were somehow responsible for killing Kennedy because they “willed” it. Vulcan mind-meld, anyone?
It’s never been easy for the left to admit that a Communist killed JFK. So, as the event recedes into the ever-more-distant background, why not recycle the tired old tried-and-untrue narrative that it was the fault of the right? The mechanism this time was a NY Times op-ed by James McAuley, entitled “The City With a Death Wish in Its Eye: Dallas’s Role in Kennedy’s Murder.” It begins:
For 50 years, Dallas has done its best to avoid coming to terms with the one event that made it famous: the assassination of John F. Kennedy on Nov. 22, 1963. That’s because, for the self-styled “Big D,” grappling with the assassination means reckoning with its own legacy as the “city of hate,” the city that willed the death of the president.
How about a rewrite? If I were the editor of the paper, I might say:
For 50 years, the left has done its best to avoid coming to terms with the one event that made it famous: the assassination of John F. Kennedy on Nov. 22, 1963. That’s because, for the self-styled “progressives,” grappling with the assassination means reckoning with its own legacy as the “people of hate,” the group that wills the death of anyone they don’t agree with.
McAuley seems to be working out some Dallas family demons of his own in the article (you have to read the whole thing to see what I’m talking about). But the “Wanted” posters in Dallas that day fifty years ago that McAuley mentions (put out, by the way, by General Edwin Walker’s group) were mild compared to what the left would generate forty-odd years later on a daily basis against George W. Bush, and the famous ad in the Dallas paper that day was likewise a relatively ordinary series of questions highly critical of his policy, its black border only taking on an especially ominous significance afterward.
It’s hard to believe the Dallas right was an inspiration for the actual killer, the Communist Lee Harvey Oswald, who in another strange coincidence had tried unsuccessfully to assassinate Walker himself just a few months before Oswald’s successful attack on Kennedy. As for the influence of Dallas on Oswald, he had only lived there (or in nearby Fort Worth) for the years from first to sixth grade, spending the bulk of his youth in New Orleans, with a two-year stay in New York (the Bronx, to be specific) and then back to New Orleans: “By the age of 17, he had resided at 22 different locations and attended 12 different schools.”
Oswald had dropped out of school and joined the Marines, then defected to the USSR and lived there for nearly three years. He came back to Dallas because he had family there, attempted to kill General Walker about ten months later, almost immediately moved back to New Orleans for about five months, and then tried to get to Cuba through Mexico, and only returned to Dallas in early October 1963. He got the Texas School Book Depository job in mid-October, and started living in a Texas rooming house during the week and visiting his wife (who was living with friends in nearby Irving) on weekends.
A little over a month later, Kennedy visited Dallas—the motorcade route having been published in the newspaper just a few days earlier—and the rest, as they say, is history. But it’s hard to see Oswald as a product of Dallas in any meaningful way, much less of the right in Dallas.
Of course, none of this matters to the Times and writers like McAuley. They have their own bones to pick and their own fish to fry and their own use to make of the 50th anniversary of the assassination.
Besides the many attempts to assassinate Castro, the Kennedy administration was complicit in the murders of Trujillo, Lumumba, Diem, and perhaps others that I’ve now forgotten. What goes around, comes around; as you sow, so shall you reap.
Wait! Warren Commission? Oswald? Grassy knolls? Man with umbrella? I thought we’d gotten past all the silly theories and arrived at the most likely – a woman scorned.
Had JFK attended the 100th anniversary of Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address instead of heading to Dallas on a political fence mending trip, he wouldn’t have been in Dallas that fateful day.
The Civil rights issues were beginning to make news headlines (Birmingham, AL) and Civil rights legislation in the House of Reps was being stonewalled by the Southern Democrats (the Segregationists) , so Kennedy ‘thought’ he needed to shore up and mend some fences in the South, and Texas was a toss up state. I suppose one could blame the Southern Democrats for that fateful trip more so than any other factor.
Actually, it was Sarah Palin and those surveyor-marker “targets” on an electoral map that produced the atmosphere of hatred that ultimately killed John Kennedy.
(We *do* believe in reverse-time travel, don’t we?)
From what I can see, the JFK assassination is of a piece with many of the key events of the last several decades–events like Kent State, the drowning of Mary Jo Kopechne, the precise timetable of JFK’s movements and actions that night and morning, and the reasons why there were no official consequences for his actions/inactions, the bombing of the Murtagh building, the Waco massacre, and many more–in that we have never gotten anywhere near to all of the facts, and those “facts’ we do supposedly have are nebulous, not very definitive or reliable.
In other words, it seems to me that–given the information that has been suppressed and that sometimes dribbles out–bit by bit–over the years, given the, seemingly, deliberately created fog, the disinformation that makes seeing each one of these events clearly almost impossible, given the mutable and shifting nature of our “information”–determining what really happened, “who dun it” and why is an almost impossible task.
First of all who, really, was JFK; an inspiring and effective President or a seriously ill, ineffective, and bumbling leader whose compulsion for sex ruled his every day? Was Lee Harvey Oswald just a confused and disaffected man who just happened to flee the U.S. for the U.S.S.R or, as Ion Mihai Pacepa (the highest ranking defector from the old U.S.S.R.) asserts in his new book, was Oswald a KGB agent on a mission? Did one of the troops at Kent State fire the shot that initiated all the gunfire or, as recent research indicates, were the first few shots fired by one of the students? Why did the government create the bloodbath that was Waco, and why did this horrific massacre of civilians just quickly sink out of sight, with no one in the government ever prosecuted for the killing–by gunshot and incineration–of 76 men, women, and not a few children? What about the persistent rumors of Middle Eastern involvement in the bombing of the Murtagh building, and why was Timothy McVeigh, the supposed only bomber, hustled so quickly off to execution? Who was really responsible for the Anthrax attacks and why were the 9/11 bombers–despite some evidence pointing to their possible involvement–ruled out as suspects so early on in an investigation that never really went anywhere?
It’s looking more and more like we cannot trust the officially accepted stories about just exactly what happened to be anywhere near true, complete and accurate, and that we have to view all such consensus, “official” explanations, and “what everybody knows” with the greatest suspicion.
Obama’s endlessly repeated, obvious, public, and consequential lies may just be the “tipping point” that gets people to start reexamining their pictures of “official reality,” and starting to ask a lot of questions about all sorts of “official explanations” for events that they thought they had a good picture of, because someone in authority painted that picture for them.
Sorry–it should have been “…the precise movements of Teddy Kennedy that night and morning…
Wolla:
Also, it was the Murrah Building. Apart from that, good comment. I would add TWA Flight 800 to your list. I think there are excellent reasons to believe in Muslim terrorist involvement in both that and the OKC bombing.
Also, why exactly are both parties hell-bent on throwing our borders wide open to the entire Third World? There was no better opportunity than 9/11 to lock the border down tight and carefully scrutinize who we’re letting in, yet this was not done. Instead, we got the TSA treating each and every American citizen as a potential terrorist. Why?
I’m at the point where I consider our own federal government to be a greater threat to my liberty than any foreign enemy. They are drunk with power and completely beyond any Constitutional restraint.
I used to be a mild JFK conspiracy buff. I read a few books years ago, but I was never obsessed with it. I haven’t read Bugliosi’s book, but I’m more willing to believe that Oswald acted alone now than I used to be.
That said, conspiracies really do happen, and they’ve been commonplace throughout history. Three big ones I can name off the top of my head are Julius Caesar, Abraham Lincoln, and Archduke Franz Ferdinand. The “lone nut” seems to be peculiar to our era.
Also, why exactly are both parties hell-bent on throwing our borders wide open to the entire Third World?
In France and Britain, they invite Muslims in in order to use the votes and manpower to break local domestic resistance. Of course, enclaves start popping up and other problems with Islam results. But so long as it is only the peasants suffering from Sharia, the political class can ignore it.
The Democrats are probably going to use a version of the slave soldier institution the Ottoman Empire utilized. A second or third class tier system where lack of internal birthrates and cannonfodder are subsidized by external sources of non educated manpower. If the Left cannot create enough poor and underclass in the US to wipe out the middle class, they will merely invite in foreigners to do the same job. They probably believe that later on, they’ll find someone else to clean up the mess when their slave soldiers rebel.
One thing I find interesting this year is the return of the “Dallas: City of Hate” meme. I was only five at the time of the assassination, so there is not much that I remember directly, but I picked up on the anti-Dallas sentiment a few years later from reading old magazines and newspapers.
I don’t remember that being brought up during subsequent anniversaries, until now. Interesting.
That’s the day the ’50s ended.
I was a 19-year old freshman at a small college in Washington. The president had made a political swing through the northwest in late September and had spoken to a convocation of our university and our crosstown rivals, The University of Puget Sound, on the 27th of that month. (At Cheney Stadium!!) Gorgeous day. He looked great and was showing a fair amount of gray in the hair. We didn’t think of him as “young” as he was our parents’ age and had been, like most of our Dads, in The War…Less than 2-months later…I remember everything about that day. The 60s began on November 22, 1963.
The “lone nut” seems to be peculiar to our era.
I suppose that probably has to do with guns. A modern assassin may think he can take a shot and escape in the confusion, while in ancient times, he would have had to stab his target with a knife or sword, and would have almost certainly have been killed by bodyguards. Even a nut will tend to balk at what is effectively a suicide mission.
Oh, this is good.
Hat tip Ace. Keep scrolling down.
Generally speaking, a warrior good enough to bypass elite bodyguards or defeat all of them and kill the target, must have a very strong desire to live and survive to have achieved that kind of skill level.
Generally speaking, that kind of desire conflicts with trying to assassinate leaders of organizations. Whereas revenge is a sufficient motive to motivate such behavior, but revenge is not a desire to live and thus often burns out sooner or later.
I am definitely with you on this Neo. If for my own little reasons. A full review of Oswald leaves little doubt in my mind that he was capable and interested. His employment, if random, simply was just that, but provided simple, ample, opportunity.
As for the rest? My guess is the theory is written and perpetuated by people who don’t want to believe their own would kill, well, their own! That is what it comes down to, as to the conspiracy theory.
Who knows how much the assassination of two Kennedys has opened the revision of both the lives of those assassinated and cover for those who remain among a fawning media.
I would dare say Skakel’s release for a new trial was timed to show that Kennedys can still get away with murder. And the timing seems, to me, unmistakable.
Up until a few years ago, I had heard about WACO but I never knew until I investigated it myself, the exact casualties and how they broke down.
I’m sure that for older events, they have either wiped out the clues or there was no internet there to catalog the information.
First…Lee did go to school at Arlington Heights High School and he espousing Marxism even then. Mostly to be different and to get attention. He even tried to get on the football team and was told no only to throw a fit in front of the team. Shortly thereafter he dropped out of school and joined the marines where his mouth and attitude got him into constant trouble. He was only a mediocre marksman…by no means good enough to assassinate JFK from that distance in a moving vehicle…and without a spotter. He washed out of the marines then decided…with much publicized fanfare…that he was going to Russia to write a book about life in Russia. He failed at that and came back to Dallas. This time there wasn’t the media there to greet him. Those who actually knew Lee will say that they do believe that he was telling the truth that he was a patsy…because if he did do it he would’ve boasted about the one thing that he succeeded at doing.
LBJ on the other hand makes all presidents good or bad look like saints. My grandfather worked for General Dynamics and swore that LBJ had something to do with JFK and Oswalds death as all of a sudden lucrative defense contracts to GD and Bell were fast tracked to approval. Guess who held majority stocks in these companies? Texas political power players including Lady Bird Johnson. Hmmmmm…sounds like motive to me…..
Conspiracy or not… This is what my family knew and believed.
KGiles:
Conspiracy theorists such as yourself neither listen to argument nor acknowledge facts, but I am putting this very short summary of Bugliosi’s points out there for others who might be reading:
In addition Oswald was only at Arlington Heights for a couple of weeks before he dropped out.
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