The Audacious Mendacity 1963
The flagrant brazenness of the assassination of JFK is often overlooked.
In 1956 I attended my first baseball game. At Ebbets Field in Brooklyn. And I fell in love with baseball and the Brooklyn Dodgers.
Then life taught me its first lesson - the following year the Brooklyn Dodgers moved to Los Angeles. How could they? My heart was broken. And so at 10 years of age I suddenly looked at the world a little differently.
A few years later life taught me (and everyone else) my next lesson. After enduring monthly civil defense siren testing (the siren was across the street from my childhood home), after practicing how to protect myself (under my classroom desk) from Russia’s atomic bomb, after the Cuban missile crisis – things finally started to look like we were on a more positive path. JFK was president, elegant Jackie was a role model and the White House had a family with young children just like the rest of America. Life was good.
You see, John F. Kennedy was much more than just another president. He and Jackie and Caroline and John-John were the American ideal. Young, smart, witty, elegant, brave, wholesome (at the time), brave, resolute, accessible - he had it all. It was a time in the aftermath of WWII (only 18 years before) and the Korean war (10 years before) and the Cold War ongoing threateningly. And now with emerging military skirmishing in SE Asia, we looked to JFK to deliver hope, peace, civil rights and prosperity. He stood up to Khrushchev and forced the Soviet Union to stand down 1962’s Cuban missile crisis. Our Camelot. Even the media loved him.
We were still in the heyday of the newspaper. My dad would bring home 3 dailies (each 10 cents) every night – that was where we got our news. TV was still mainly for watching Maverick, Leave It to Beaver and Davey Crockett. But it was also the beginning of an emerging new era of television news. Live news was something new.
In late November 1963 we were looking forward to the weekend preceding the coming 4-day Thanksgiving break. As we walked into 7th period U.S. History class on Friday, November 22 we learned that something had happened in Dallas to President Kennedy. Shots fired in Dallas! JFK has been wounded. JFK has died in a Dallas hospital. All that in one silent 7th period class.
And so over the next few days the entire country – the whole world in fact - watched in shock. It is no exaggeration to state that as a nation – everything stopped. Stopped dead. You had to be around then to understand.
For four days we watched the national nightmare unfold - trying to understand what had happened and what was happening right before our own eyes. Seeing our heartbroken First Lady gracefully and sadly endure the ceremony attached to death of her husband. Seeing the Kennedy children. Lee Harvey Oswald. Jack Ruby. The Rotunda. The cortege. The funeral. The JFK assassination and funeral ceremonies scarred the national conscience in a very raw way.
Once again I (along with every other young person) looked at the world a little differently - this time as a 16 year old. Our trust in institutions was shaken. What can we really believe in anymore? How could this have happened? How could a sharpshooter be that accurate? Why weren’t better precautions taken? Who the hell is LBJ?
Over the years I read many books about the Kennedys and the assassination. “The Lone Gunman” and the “magic bullet” story slowly came under scrutiny. The Warren Commission appointed by LBJ three days after the burial produced its 888 page report 10 months later. It concluded Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone. It also concluded that Jack Ruby (Oswald’s killer) acted alone.
The five person Warren Commission included Allen W. Dulles, head of the CIA from 1952 to 1961 when he was fired by JFK for his role in the Cuba Bay of Pigs debacle. Also on the panel was GA Senator Richard B. Russell, an opponent of civil rights. Another appointee was John McCloy. McCloy (along with William Donovan) created the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) during WWII. OSS was the predecessor agency that eventually became the CIA in 1947.
Gerald Ford, another member of the panel, was surreptitiously keeping the FBI abreast of the Warren Commission findings.
Hale Boggs – another Warren Commission member – is said the have had doubts about the single bullet theory. In April 1971 he attacked the FBI and J. Edgar Hoover in a House speech. In October 1972 Boggs and 3 others disappeared in Alaska while passengers in a Cessna. The Cessna was required to carry an emergency locator transmitter. After 39 days the search was discontinued – the plane and passengers were never found. NTSB states no emergency transmitter signal was heard during the search although the pilot’s portable emergency transmitter was later found on another plane in Fairbanks.
Like many who remember that weekend in November 1963 the question of “Who killed Kennedy” still ruminates in my mind. My spiritual self-talk always includes that when I get to Heaven some of my first questions will be “Who killed JFK? And why?”
The Kennedy Assassination papers were to be released per 1992 Congressional order but allowed postponement of the release of certain records if public disclosure would cause "identifiable harm" to military, intelligence, law enforcement or foreign operations.
Mounting evidence indicates the Kennedy hit was an inside job. It makes me sick to my stomach. That the audacity of some in our own government planned and pulled off a violent coup in broad daylight on a beautiful clear blue-sky day in Dallas 60 years ago is still shocking even now. That they put their own ambitious interests above the shock it perpetrated on an entire nation – what kind of people would do such a thing? That trust in our institutions was sacrificed for what? For job security?
Perhaps it’s a lesson in humanity’s king-of-the-mountain mentality. Good people only proceed so far up the hierarchy. The higher one goes up the nastier it gets. The mendacious will likely proceed all the way. And good people – denied the truth about how things really work – will be relegated to believing lies.
In 1963 the plot and those involved were held close within a small group deep within the bureaucracy. But people are people, knowledge is power and people talk. Over the years the whispers broadened until the general story leaked out as innuendo, but the specifics continue to be closely held. The CIA is protected. Even today. Why?
The chasm that exists today between the illuminati within the Beltway and those it considers rubes outside of it widens with the increasing propensity of the Beltway to keep secrets, the FOIA drip-drip-drip and the swamp rats who increasingly show contempt and disdain for commoners.
And that’s the sad part. For if the political arm had the fortitude in 1992 to force the spooks to come clean our government wouldn’t be in the hands of unelected political gangsters and thugs today.