This week the world commemorates the 60th anniversary of the brutal murder of US President John F. Kennedy on November 22, 1963 in Dallas, Texas. For many people of my generation the first Kennedy assassination marked the Jungian wound that has brought Americans through a trek marked by trauma and paranoia -- more like a bully's gauntlet than a Hero's Journey. So far, no golden ball of truth has burst upon the scene. But we're getting there.
I was seven and in second grade when JFK was shot and remember certain details of the public response (shock and awe), and recall a childhood spent as an avid conspiracy theorist (we all were) with Senator Frank Church's committee eventually vindicating our anxiety by concluding, in 1975 and in opposition to the Warren Commission's conclusion that lone gunman Lee Harvey Oswald did it, that the murder was, in fact, in all likelihood 'a vast right-wing conspiracy.' Followed by a cover-up by the government. (An account of this drama is soberly described in Pulitzer Prize-winner James Risen's latest book, The Last Honest Man: The CIA, the FBI, the Mafia, and the Kennedys and One Senator's Fight to Save Democracy. See my review.)
The JFK assassination represents the Birth of the Not-Cool, an era of sax driven dirges at honking high registers that bewailed the death of the American Dream. The murder is the mother of all conspiracy theories that identified and implicated a shadow government operating with an agenda dramatically different from the transparency required for a representative Republic. American writers and private investigators of all ilks duly noted how similar in attitude and attainment Kennedy's killing was to the brazen anti-Democratic murders of other national leaders -- Congo's first prime minister, Patrice Lumumba; Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo; president Sukarno of Indonesia; and president Ngo Dinh Diem of South Vietnam. Coups became normalized, often taking the place of political pressure to oust popular leaders, such as with Mohammad Mosaddegh of Iran in 1953 and with Chile's Salvador Allende in 1973. In Oliver Stone's epic film, JFK, his character Jim Garrison, the New Orleans district attorney, boldly and depressingly asserts that the JFK assassination represented a coup d'etat.
Many of us read about how president LBJ once unzipped and pulled out his pecker when a reporter in a private meeting asked why America was continuing to fight in Vietnam if it knew it was going to lose, and said: "This is why." This was disconcerting. Under Dick Nixon's regime any lingering doubts about secondary agendas calling the shots in government dissolved on May 4, 1970 when National Guardsmen at Kent State University opened fire on some students, killing four and wounding nine. The reformed and repentant former RAND Corp war planner Daniel Ellsberg, said in The Doomsday Machine, his last memoir before he died, that Nixon and his henchman Henry Kissinger were out to get him, not for his leaking of the Pentagon Papers but because of his knowledge of Nixon and Kissinger's plan to nuke North Vietnam into kaput-ulation. Ellsberg reports that he feared for his life, Kissinger designating him "the most dangerous man in America who must be stopped at all costs." (They brought in ex-FBI agent G. Gordon Liddy, so "at all costs" was clearly a relative term. Liddy not only offered to take out Ellsberg, but kidnap Yippies and dissenters and have them delivered to a Mexican black site for execution.)
Today's generation has no idea. Generation Zzz? Please. No idea and the shadows know it. Fortunately for the secret rulers of American Empire, 9/11 came along and gave the new kids their own Pearl Harbor to theory conspire over. The f*ckers attempted to install Henry Kissinger as the head of 9/11 Commission to cover everything with his glissy realpolitik. But enough dissenters were left over from the 60s to force Kissinger and his German accent out of town before things got ugly. Was it an Inside Job? This old worrier, like Noam Chomsky, has no idea. But the net effect of the event was that the totalitarian picture that Frank Church painted in 1975 -- "there would be no place to hide" -- was ratcheted tight and suddenly the US government, and many of its contracted social media corporations, knew everything about everybody connected by Internet on the planet. As a bonus, the coiners of 9-1-1 saw that the terrorist attack would be reinforced, Pavlov-ring-your-bells style, every time an American dialed emergency services, 9-1-1.
Who Killed co*k Robin? is still a live question.
Since the evil events of November 22-24, 1963 (JFK and Oswald shot) countless books and films have been produced that serve to wring the hands and ache in anxiety, hoping against hope, that baddies didn't come home to roost like Malcolm X said they had. Because we had no chance to fight back. It wouldn't be like Will Smith punching that alien in the snot locker in Independence Day (We Fight Back, unh-huh). Americans with their hotdog hopes implicitly seem to know that tyranny is afoot. America started out with telling their fellow Brits back home to go f*ck themselves over taxation without representation. Today, Americans have the Tea Party (blesses himself) and about 450,000,000 guns available for minuteman action. "The U.S. has more guns than people, and its civilian population has a larger firearm arsenal than all the world's militaries combined," according to Statista. Americans are rattled.
Many books and many films. I started out in childhood with a reading of Mark Lane's Rush to Judgment. I watched the film version last night, a documentary that provides interviews with key witnesses, many of whom were not invited to testify before the Warren Commission because, Lane implies, they would have provided testimony that would have contradicted the prefabricated findings of the panel. Lane's book and film still hold up and were the inspiration and factual basis for later works like Oliver Stone's JFK, JFK: One Day in America (2023), Cold Case JFK (2013), Lee Harvey Oswald: 48 Hours to Live (2013), and my favorite, Executive Action (1973), which is co-written by Mark Lane and posits a Military-Industrial Complex (MIC) conspiracy. Corporations are calling the shots, so to speak. Just like Ike warned us against in 1961.
But the best work on the JFK assassination comes with a new Substack newsletter, JFK Facts, with Jefferson Morley. He is essentially a curator and analyst for the continuing release to the public of declassified JFK documents. I interviewed him last year about his work. At his site he writes that the site provides "the latest information about the ongoing declassification of JFK records and the latest findings of the best JFK researchers." Morley has been relentless in his pursuit of the Biden administration's attempts to renege on his administration's promises to release the remaining secret documents that Congress mandated release from The National Archives and Records Administration (NARA). Morley's most intriguing declassification revelation in the last several months is that the CIA was keeping tabs on Oswald, as many fols had long thought.
Morley has picked up a team of reporters for JFK Facts over the last couple of years, including
The Best (and Worst) JFK Assassination Documentaries.
You can sign up to listen to the JFK Facts podcast with hosts Jeff Morley and Larry Schnapf, including their recent useful summary podcast, The State of the Case in 2023.
