Posted on 11/17/2013 1:06:31 PM PST by smoothsailing
Via pretty much everyone in my Twitter feed, I ran across a remarkably silly piece in the New York Times this morning about “Dallas’ Role in Kennedy’s Murder.” It’s peppered with a sort of liberal self-loathing—James McAuley is taking to the newspaper of record to slag his ancestors and demonstrate to his peers that he is not like them no siree bob! as much as grapple with Dallas’ “role” in the assassination—as well as the typical liberal notion that Dallas served as a special cauldron of hate, the toxic brew of which contributed to Kennedy’s killing.
It’s telling that the only time the word “communist” is used in McAuley’s piece is in this sentence:
Those “men of Dallas” — men like my grandfather, oil men and corporate executives, self-made but self-segregated in a white-collar enclave in a decidedly blue-collar state — often loathed the federal government at least as much as, if not more than, they did the Soviet Union or Communist China.
The name “Lee Harvey Oswald” goes entirely unmentioned. As does the name “General Edwin Walker,” an arch-conservative Oswald tried to murder. As does the phrase “Russian defector,” which is what Oswald was. No no. The fact that Kennedy was killed by a communist is not worth mentioning at all; rather, McAuley chooses to pronounce that the people of Dallas hated Kennedy even more than they did “the Soviet Union or Communist China.”
The kind of cognitive dissonance it takes to write something so remarkably foolish long ago lost the power to surprise. James Piereson, in his remarkably smart book Camelot and the Cultural Revolution: How the Assassination of John F. Kennedy Shattered American Liberalism, laid out the myriad ways in which the left has been trying to cope with the killing these last 50 years. Wrote Piereson:
President Kennedy’s assassination stalled the advance of twentieth-century liberalism, then the nation’s reigning public philosophy and, in the opinion of historians at the time, our only genuine public philosophy. It did this in several ways: first, by undermining the confidence of liberals in the future; and second, by changing their perspective from one of possibility and practical reform to one of grief, loss, and frustrated hopes. It also compromised their faith in the nation because many concluded, against all factual evidence, that in some way the nation itself was responsible for President Kennedy’s death. A confident, practical, and forward-looking philosophy, with a heritage of genuine accomplishment, was thus turned into a pessimistic doctrine—and one with a decidedly negative view of American society and its institutions.
McAuley, of course, is just the latest in a long line of writers at the Grey Lady to deflect blame for Kennedy’s murder from the left and try and pin it on the right. Indeed, immediately following the assassination, James Reston penned a remarkably ugly and stupid piece entitled “Why America Weeps: Kennedy Victim of Violent Streak He Sought to Curb in Nation.” Wrote Reston,
The indictment extended beyond the assassin, for something in the nation itself, some strain of madness and violence, had destroyed the highest symbol of law and order. … From the beginning to the end of his administration, he was trying to tamp down the violence of the extremists from the right.
Liberals were so perturbed by the fact that a man of the left had killed Kennedy that they simply waved away the inconvenient truth like so much smoke. It wasn’t left wing ideology that killed our dear prince but the meanies on the right who created a culture in which something so senseless could happen.
You see this attitude not just in news reports but popular culture as well. In his book about a man who goes back in time to stop the Kennedy assassination, 11/22/63, Stephen King compared the city of Dallas to the fictional city of Derry, which some of you will remember as the hate-filled pit that served as the home of the child-eating Pennywise in It. Here’s the protagonist of 11/22/63, deciding that he will move out of Dallas until closer to the assassination:
I could move out from beneath the suffocating shadow I felt over [Dallas]. I could find a place that was smaller and less daunting, a place that didn’t feel so filled with hate and violence. In broad daylight I could tell myself I was imagining those things, but not in the ditch of the morning. There were undoubtedly good people in Dallas, thousands upon thousands of them, the great majority, but that underchord was there, and sometimes it broke out. As it had outside the Desert Rose. Bevvie-from-the-levee had said that In Derry I think the bad times are over. I wasn’t convinced about Derry, and I felt the same way about Dallas, even with its worst day still over three years away.
Simply put, the Kennedy assassination drove the left kind of batty. And it obviously hasn’t stopped doing so 50 years later.
Much of that comes from the fact that Kennedy was scheduled to meet with his military and intelligence leads the next day to determine America’s direction in Vietnam. One of the options that was on the table was a unilateral withdraw of all advisers from Vietnam. Whether this would have happened or not is anyone’s guess.
You mention LBJ in that post, he was awarded even a higher medal than JFK, for “heroism”.
JFK was awarded the Navy equivalent of the Army’s “Soldier’s Medal”, while Lt. Commander LBJ was awarded a Silver Star.
JFK’s brother and Attorney General, Bobby Kennedy, says JFK was not going to pull out and abandon his entry into the war.
For those men, Kennedy was a veritable enemy of the state, which is why a group of them would commission and circulate “Wanted for Treason” pamphlets before the president’s arrival and fund the presciently black-rimmed “Welcome Mr. Kennedy” advertisement that ran in The Dallas Morning News on the morning of Nov. 22. It’s no surprise that four separate confidants warned the president not to come to Dallas: an incident was well within the realm of imagination.
... The wives of these men — socialites and homemakers, Junior Leaguers and ex-debutantes — were no different; in fact, they were possibly even more extreme.
What has all of this have to do with the price of corn? Oswald wasn't part of this crowd. What would these Dallas-bashers say if Oswald had traveled to Berkeley, Greenwich Village, Georgetown or Hyannis Port to kill the president?
That ignorant little twit wasn’t even born yet, he got his information from Doris Kearns Goodwin, he worked as her assistant.
"He led his men through waters dark,
Rocky reefs and hungry sharks.
He braved the enemy's bayonets,
A .38 hung around his neck..."
--from PT-109 by Jimmy Dean
Who might have been asleep, or not on watch, or doing something else, would have been the responsibility of the commander of the PT boat.
A court-martial might have uncovered the facts.
Kennedy was killed by the communist commie Oswald.
Whether he had any help from Castro I don’t know. But whether that is true or not, the right had absolutely NOTHING to do with it!!!! And Dallas had nothing to do with it, either.
That is despite all the garbage that the left has thrown out—from November 1963 to the present—to try to “prove” otherwise!
I’ll have to check it all out later.
2nd that. It would compound the disaster that is the Obama Presidency.
In addition to what was made public by the Warren Commission , the House Assassinations Committee, and other means, the JFK Assassination Records Collection Act of 1992 resulted in the release of about five million pages of documents. They are available for review at the National Archives and Records Administration in Maryland and have been mined by researchers, with key documents posted online.
An administrative review board though agreed to withhold about 1,100 records, each comprising from 1 to 20 pages. These records -- tens of thousands of pages -- are considered to contain information about confidential sources or methods or to have national security implications.
The Act further requires that all records have to be released by 2017 -- unless the agencies involved petition for them to remain classified. My guess is that some will be released and some withheld, with ongoing Freedom of Information Act litigation perhaps causing the release of more documents at irregular intervals.
One set of documents in litigation now is the service record of CIA officer George Joanides. In 1963, he was the CIA's liaison with an anti-Castro Cuban exile group known as DRE, which the Agency was supporting with payments of $50,000 a month.
Although formally based in the CIA's JMWAVE office in Miami, in 1963, Joannides was living in New Orleans, which had a spurt of anti-Castro activity by the DRE. Part of that included a street confrontation with Oswald and a prior effort by him to join the organization.
Notably, years later, Joannides turned up as the CIA's liaison with the House Assassinations Committee -- and falsely denying that the CIA had anything to do with DRE or Oswald. Joannides is now dead, but George Blakely, the House Committee's former staff director, regards the deception by Joannides and the CIA as so significant that he called for the assassination investigation to be reopened.
I think that Oswald was a sincere defector to the USSR and not a CIA plant because he had genuinely pro-Communist views and was too psychologically unstable -- and plain stupid -- to be a reliable agent. The more likely scenario is that the CIA contacted and sought to debrief Oswald after his return, perhaps requesting that he would let them know of any overtures from the Soviets or Cubans or even paying him a stipend.
In any event, although Oswald was on the CIA's radar, by the summer of 1963, he seems to have wanted to go back to the USSR or to go to Cuba, and that may have provided the motive for him to shoot Kennedy as proof of his communist bona fides. Maybe Oswald was also manipulated and used in a larger assassination conspiracy organized around him. Or perhaps he was a patsy who never even fired at Kennedy.
I think that a definitive resolution is possible -- although we may not live long enough to see it.
If Oswald was the assassin and acted alone, then what was his plan after the assassination? His best move likely would have been to surrender at the scene and declare that shooting Kennedy was a revolutionary act on behalf of the oppressed. He could then angle to get exchanged one day in a Cold War spy swap, with Cuba his destination of preference.
It is hard though to discern in Oswald's movements that grim day in Dallas any plan of escape other than to leave the immediate scene. It is not at all clear how Oswald expected to then get to Cuba. His movements and actions instead suggest a sense of panic as if things did not go as expected. Did Oswald extemporize because he was betrayed and stranded by one or more supposed confederates?
There is also the enduring mystery of an apparent Oswald imitator in Mexico City during his visit there. This strongly suggests conspiracy, at least by the CIA to use Oswald as a lure to draw interest from Cuban intelligence. Plausibly, there was a parallel assassination conspiracy that used and set up Oswald to take the fall.
It’s important to remember that Oswald was a 10th grade drop out, a bad student, and while not stupid exactly he was not real bright either. At the age of 10, he scored 103 on an IQ test. Several years later he did better, managing a 118 after being admitted to Youth House in New York. However he was antisocial, an under achiever, disruptive and withdrawn. At 14 he was diagnosed with “personality pattern disturbance.” He was hardly the type anyone would want as a confederate in murder or espionage. Likely he had no real plan of escape. It is noteworthy that he was the ONLY employee of the Texas Schoolbook Depository that left early that day, and did so on his own initiative, without telling anyone he was leaving.
Furthermore when traffic jammed he ditched the bus he was in and hailed a cab. This was unusual for Oswald because he was such a miser. He was desperate to get home. He had the cabbie drive PAST his residence, an obvious attempt to make sure the coast was clear before walking the three blocks BACK to the boardinghouse. There he grabbed a gun and a jacket to hide it in. Thus his desperation to get there. He knew the cops would be after him.
Oswald was the classic example of the “lone nut.” Nuts don’t reason things out. He was smug and uncooperative with the police. In his nutty mind he may have thought the Castro regime would somehow bail him out. Who knows what he was thinking when planning to shoot the President.
If there was a conspiracy, it probably included finishing off Oswald before he could be fully interrogated. And, of course, that is what happened, courtesy of -- no, I am not making this up -- a strip club owner with mob ties who is said to have been moved by Jackie Kennedy's grief. Officially, we are assured, one lone nut assassin was thus killed by another lone nut assassin.
I suggest that for conspirators, Oswald's oddball personality, his record as a defector, and open communist sympathies would have helped make him useful as a disposable gunman or as a patsy, whichever he was.
In the context of the Cold War, Oswald's background and his visits to the Cuban and Soviet embassies in Mexico raised ominous possibilities and a risk of nuclear war that precluded responsible officials in the US government from pursuing evidence of a conspiracy.
From time to time, to intimates, LBJ whispered that his view of the assassination was that Kennedy tried to get Castro, but that Castro got him first. Bobby Kennedy, who thought LBJ had been the prime mover of the assassination, would have recognized LBJ's remarks as a double barreled threat that going public with claims of a conspiracy would have raised both a risk of war and a threat to tarnish JFK's reputation by revealing his murder plots against Castro.
Within days of the assassination, Bobby Kennedy sent word to the Soviets that he knew the assassination to be the result of a domestic conspiracy. Bobby also explained to close allies that he could not address leads that indicated that there had been a conspiracy behind his brother's assassination unless he first became President and had the power to pursue those involved. Other things happened first though and it was not to be.
Just to make clear, I am not a Kennedy admirer. He was reckless and compromised by a squalid personal life, dependence on methamphetamine, and solicitation of cash bribes. His liaison with an East German spy and secret dealings with the Soviets during the Cuban missile crisis raised serious questions about his trustworthiness.
Kennedy is our most over-rated President, but he deserves credit for his personal charm, genuine love for the country, and a surprisingly innovative and daring tax cut that helped spur a boom and set an example for Reagan and the GOP to follow.
“Why didn’t Oswald take his revolver with him to the Texas School Book Depository that day?”
Because he took the rifle. One gun was enough to worry about hiding.
“And what was his larger plan for escape? “
Maybe he didn’t have one. That is possible.
“...even nuts plan ahead.”
Do they? Did Chapman plan to escape when he shot Reagan?
“If there was a conspiracy...”
If, that largest of words that adds little to the debate. If there was a conspiracy, the fact that binoculars were left behind when the Titanic left port becomes ominous. If there was a conspiracy, the fact that the engineer’s warning not to launch in freezing weather was ignored before the Challenger exploded looks ominous. If there was a conspiracy, the fact that the FBI failed to follow up on leads that Middle Eastern students were not interested in landing or takeoff instructions at flight school before 9/11 look ominous.
There simply isn’t any evidence of any conspiracy. No letters, no notes, no records of phone calls, no forensics at the scene. There is, however, a ton of evidence that points squarely at Oswald.
He was at the scene of the crime. Witnesses on the fifth floor heard a bolt action rifle being worked, and the ping of shell casing hitting the floor above them. A young boy saw the gun pointing out the sixth floor window. He fled the scene after the killing, the only one working there who did.
His landlady saw him rush in shortly after the killing and go into his room before leaving shorty thereafter. A short time later a dozen witnesses saw him kill Officer Tippet.
The bullets in both killings matched his weapons. There was a record of him mail ordering the rifle. The rifle was missing from the garage where it had been stored. Oswald carried a paper bag capable of holding the disassembled rifle to work the day of the shooting. His prints were on the rifle and on boxes forming the “sniper’s nest on the sixth floor.
The forensics of the victims clearly point to shots fired from the School Book Depository. Connelly’s wounds alone supports the “magic bullet” theory because the entry wound, in the back, was oblong, showing the bullet was tumbling before it hit him, after passing through Kennedy. There is NO possibility of post-mortem manipulation of Connelly’s body. He lived many years after the crime and showed the mark off to others.
Prior to killing JFK, he confessed to his wife that he had tried to kill General Walker. Also before the assassination, his wife admitted to taking the photos of him holding the rifle.
A mountain points to Oswald. Not a crumb to anyone else.
Assuming that Oswald was a lone assassin, the best explanation is that Oswald forgot to bring his revolver that morning -- but that does not explain his apparent lack of a plan for escape after Kennedy was shot. Maybe he intended to surrender at the scene, but in the moment, decided to flee instead.
Or, whatever Oswald was involved in, the shooting of Kennedy was not what he signed up for. Perhaps Oswald was on his way to the Texas Theater as a designated meeting place but wanted his revolver first. The shooting of Tippit on the way was most likely an impulsive act driven by a sense of panic.
Chapman was diagnosed by defense experts as psychotic and claimed to draw inspiration from the book Catcher in the Rye. In contrast, Oswald was not mentally ill even if his belief in Communism made him what is commonly called a nut, meaning someone who overvalues his ideas and goes too far in acting on them. And comparing Oswald to Chapman as you do gets back to my point that if things went as planned, Oswald could have surrendered at the scene as Chapman did.
As for conspiracies, the world in awash in them because humans are social creatures who commonly seek out and find collaborators for large tasks. Most conspiracies though do not go beyond talk and minor gestures, many of the balance miscarry in application or get exposed, and of course, not everything that may seem to be a conspiracy really is or the true dimensions of the conspiracy are not recognized.
For now, the evidence for a conspiracy in the Kennedy assassination is suggestive but elusive as to definitive proof for or against. In great part this is because the FBI investigation and the Warren Commission avoided diligently looking for and pursuing evidence of a conspiracy.
The later House Special Committee investigation was handicapped not just by the passage of time but also by political infighting, CIA obstruction, and the deaths of key witnesses. For example, George de Mohrenschildt, an Oswald friend with suspected CIA ties, killed himself the day he was to talk with investigators, and the Mafia figures Sam Giancana and Johnny Roselli were murdered shortly before investigators were to speak with them.
Notably, the CIA falsely denied to the House Committee that David Atlee Phillips used the cover name "Maurice Bishop" and also lied about its support for the anti-Castro exile group DRE. A few years ago, a Washington Post reporter pursuing FOIA litigation was able to depose a CIA officer who described Oswald as being of intense interest before the assassination at the highest levels of the the CIA's counterintelligence unit.
At the very least, even for those who adamantly believe Oswald was a lone gunman, the historical record of who Oswald was is deficient in that we do not know how Oswald was viewed by the CIA before the assassination and if the ongoing spy game in some manner spurred him to action or was responsible for a lapse in Presidential security.
The most innocent explanation for the CIA's obstruction -- a conspiracy of sorts -- is that it wanted to avoid the institutional damage that it would suffer if the details were revealed about how closely they were monitoring Oswald. Plausibly, the CIA may have let Oswald elude adequate attention as a risk to Kennedy's safety despite knowing in advance through de Mohrenschildt or Phillips or others that Oswald had bought a rifle, had shot at Edwin Walker, and was prone to and capable of another violent act.
If the CIA did not warn the FBI and Secret Service when a Presidential motorcade planned to go past the building where Oswald worked, they would be suspected of complicity in the assassination. The CIA's defense would be to argue, no, really, we are honest patriots but we simply bungled and let Kennedy get killed even though we could have stopped it. Would you want to try making such a defense on behalf of your agency, or would you stonewall investigators?
Moreover, as the deaths of Giancana and Roselli suggest, the Mafia may also have done some housecleaning rather than risk letting secrets out about the Kennedy assassination. Perhaps Oswald and Ruby -- both of whom had mob ties -- were part of a Mafia conspiracy to kill Kennedy. Oswald, the Commie nut case, would have been especially useful to divert attention from the Mafia. Or maybe Giancana and Roselli were killed because of their role in the CIA's plots against Castro -- or for entirely unrelated reasons.
With the historical record incomplete, there is reason to suspect the CIA or a rouge element affiliated with it had a role in killing Kennedy. Nor can LBJ be excluded as a conspirator, in conjunction with the Mafia and CIA affiliated figures and financed by Texas oil interests.
Notably, CIA Director Richard Helms called in a close friend and ally within the agency and appointed him to internally investigate the Agency's handling of Oswald. Yet the man was removed as soon as he started probing in sensitive areas in earnest. His replacement generated a report that is seen as a whitewash. Helms seems to learned what the CIA's role as to Oswald was and calculated that the agency could not bear being made public.
Those who privately suspected or knew that there was a conspiracy in the Kennedy assassination include LBJ, Richard Nixon, Bobby Kennedy and Jackie Kennedy, Peter Lawford, E. Howard Hunt, John Mitchell, Henry Cabot Lodge, most members of the Warren Commission, and both Soviet and French intelligence.
I think that eventually, there will be a definitive resolution of the Kennedy assassination, probably long after we are gone and historians get access to documents that are currently classified or otherwise withheld from public view. Until then, as interesting the subject as it is -- we dare not overvalue our ideas about it!
Did Gravilo Princip have an escape plan?
Yes, he did. He attempted suicide with a cyanide pill.
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