Like many of my generation (I was about to turn 12 at the time), I have been haunted by the JFK assassination ever since the day it happened, November 22, 1963. It was the crime of my lifetime, or was until recently. Now it's more of a contest.
To those younger readers for whom this has always been a simple fact of American history, it's hard to convey how traumatic this event was for the American public, how absolutely shocking it was to our entire society. Some cheered it of course, which is still hard to fathom (but then we've always had 'conservatives'). Our cultural narrative at that time was that we were the good guys who had just saved Europe's bacon and defeated evil in the form of Hitler and the Nazis, and we were rebuilding the world in a selfless way for the benefit of all mankind.
We somehow mistook the end of the war, the Geneva Accords, the founding of the UN, etc for progress. We thought evil was done for. We had a vibrant, young new president who gave many people new hope - and we were headed for the moon. We had made the world a better place, or so went the cultural narrative (which of course ignored the outrageous racism, homophobia, misogyny, the drug war, the struggle for civil rights and social justice, the budding war in Vietnam, the tragic domination of the Military Industrial Complex, the out-of-control CIA, FBI, NSA, etc).
The American people, the majority at least, were deluded but hopeful, and feeling good about themselves. November 22, 1963 shattered the illusion. We would never again be that naïve.
What the Warren Commission Didn’t Know
A member of the panel that investigated JFK’s death now worries he was a victim of a “massive cover-up.”
SNIP
Half a century after the Warren Commission concluded there was no conspiracy in John F. Kennedy’s assassination, the commission’s chief conspiracy hunter believes the investigation was the victim of a “massive cover-up” to hide evidence that might have shown that Lee Harvey Oswald was in fact part of a conspiracy. In new, exclusive material published today in the paperback edition of a bestselling history of the investigation, retired law professor David Slawson tells how he came to the conclusion, on the basis of long-secret documents and witness statements, that the commission might have gotten it wrong.
SNIP
Slawson’s most startling conclusion: He now believes that other people probably knew about Oswald’s plans to kill the president and encouraged him, raising the possibility that there was a conspiracy in Kennedy’s death—at least according to the common legal definition of the word conspiracy, which requires simply that at least two people plot to do wrongdoing. “I now know that Oswald was almost certainly not a lone wolf,” Slawson says.
Read more:
The article goes on to explain that Slawson does not subscribe to any of the better known conspiracy theories that have popped up over the years. What he suspects is that during Oswald's trip to Mexico prior to the assassination, he met with both Mexican and Cuban parties who may have encouraged (but not necessarily plotted with) him to kill the President. He further suspects that the CIA knew of these meetings and purposely withheld evidence of same from the Warren Commission. This suggests that the CIA knew of Oswald's plan to kill JFK and did nothing to stop it. Nothing would surprise me less.
I wonder if we will ever demand the truth. I wonder if we will ever tire of the crimes of the CIA and move to shut it down. Who's going to sponsor that bill, yo?
Feinstein? Where you at?
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In an anonymous man-on-the-street interview regarding the revelation that the CIA snookered the Warren Commission, some random guy said, “The American people and the entire world deserve to know the truth of what really happened in that case – just as in any other case. What actually happens is what matters. The public and posterity deserve the truth. History has to be an open book - and a truthful one. We need to be done with lying to ourselves, with history as PR, with proven liars as trusted authority. Bullshit is not what history is about. We can't have the historical record buried under a mile of bullshit. That makes a mockery of the very notion of history. We shouldn't allow it. We all know the dishonest character of the assholes in charge. You wouldn't accept a personal check from them, why in the world should we let them write our history? When we hear that something is 'classified' or 'secret' we should all be asking ourselves, WTF are these guys hiding?”
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Whatevs, anonymous, random guy on the street. What does he know? Phhhhht.
We are 4chan. We love cats.
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This still makes me cry.
I like the more seasoned version too:
Such sadness.