We watched JFK, Oliver Stone's riveting film last night, mainly because I have started reading JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why it Matters, by James Douglass, another (and very good) case for the assassination of Kennedy by groups connected to the CIA and to the Special Ops group within the military, the group that during and after WWII assassinated foreign leader, rigged or stole elections, and overthrew governments.
Douglass's book focuses on Kennedy's turn toward struggling for peace, ending our involvement in Vietnam, and the growing menace of the CIA and the national security state. Kennedy was far from perfect but it seems certain he was turning toward nuclear disarmament with Russsia and there were enormous pressures resisting this turning, including many leading generals and the Joint Chiefs who wanted to launch a preemptive nuclear attack on Russia.
This was only the second time I have watched the film but I remember how depressed I was the first time, and that depression returned, a depression in the hopelessness that attends to learning the truth about ourselves, not only about a murdered president but also so much else.
And then Carole remarked, tomorrow's the day, and I had completely blanked on the fact that my interest in JFK had grown in November and I ordered the book and then I ordered the movie, and we watched it the day before.
Today is the anniversary of JFK's assassination.
The Tucson Daily Star is out this morning and nothing on the front page refers to this awful day, a day that should equal the death of Lincoln.
I looked up the Dallas Morning News, the newspaper that more than any helped foment hatred toward JFK, and their story on the assassination was paired with a story of a woman who got married that day, noting that "life went on" on November 22, 1963.
That day may not only mark the murder of JFK but may also mark the day of something that resembles a coup d'etat, the murder of a president who had turned toward peace by fanatics who want us to be at war, forever. I say "may" because I simply don't know but there is little doubt that the military and the CIA had long practiced the arts of the coup d'etat around the world. If they only ignored people at the fringe who werte setting things in motion for Kennedy's murder and if they denied the president the protection he ordinarily would enjoy that would be enough to add up to a coup d'etat.
One of the first things that LBJ said, when he met with the Joint Chiefs after the assassination was, "I am not going to be the president who lost Vietnam to the Communists." A lesser man, who later became much greater, gave the military industrial complex what it wanted and the concession ruined the larger man he became.
He, along with Nixon, lost Vietnam in a war we never should have fought and he lost much else besides. We Americans and democratic republic lost so much more on that day in Dallas.
I have never been much of a conspiracy theorist but it's not hard for me today to believe that a nation that has turned much of its sovereignty to a national security state and to secrecy and constant fear will never want for people who willing to step up and permanently remove anyone who stands in that path. And so I fear for Obama.
We cannot know the huge, almost impossible, pressures on President Obama to continue the war in Afghanistan, pressures that shaped his campaign by promising to do just that. I have written about the grip that the national security establishment has on our democracy, citing Garry Wills's article, "Entangled Giant" in the New York Review of Books..
I was walking into work in California at a facility of the North American Aviation Corporation, and a friend ran out and said, "One of you Texans killed the president." And I watched television all weekend. I saw Oswald shot live by Jack Ruby. My friend Ron Pogue was teaching in the Texas Valley, at McAllen I recall, and the secretary to the principal rushed into his classroom and said, "They got him"
Well, it seems certain that Texans may have played a role in this, and Louisianans, and many more in Washington, D.C. and elsewhere. One thing seems absolutely certain: we do not, and maybe never will know the whole story but I am convinced that the evidence points to a horrible conspiracy at very high levels of our government.
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