Who's Being Naive, Vince?

I have no doubt, none, that John F. Kennedy was murdered by his own national security state, a state (or significant parts of it) which -- because he was moving to end the Cold War and set America on a different sort of historical journey: politically, culturally, and morally -- saw the man as a traitor. So the fetid, life-hating, sex-hating scum -- let's picture them as this summer's Town Hall missing-links, only with lots and lots of power -- arranged to have his head blown off. At this point in our evaluation of the crime, the Warrenistas and the reality-based community both have a Mount Everest of facts and "factoids" to support their theory (any theory): because of how much time has passed, because of the mind-numbing amount of information available, because of how each and every piece of evidence in the case has been politicized (is it just a coincidence that almost all Warren-supporters -- on the left we have Chomsky and punk Alex Cockburn, on the right we have... well everyone -- hate JFK?), because of serious new information continually being released -- we must choose. We must choose our narrative and any narrative at this point must leave out many things. For me, the atmosphere of early-1960s Cold War provides a much more logical generator of the crime than does psychobabble about Krazy Kommie Oswald doing the deed, simply because God/Marx/Marina's period caused Jack Kennedy to drive by Oswald's open window.

 

Vince Bugliosi disagrees and this 3,000 page monument to True Believing in Official Fairy Tales is the result. Unlike 90% of Reclaiming History wags, I've actually read all 1,700 text pages, 1,000 pages of endnotes (just print them out from the CD based on what chapter you're in -- great endnotes!), hundreds of source-note pages, plus two photo sections. You must hand it to Mr. Bugliosi -- he sure is the Joan of Arc of this event. Regardless of POV -- and of course his POV is to basically suffocate and de-mystify the mysterious -- one cannot but admire his passion and hard work. And, he is a very funny writer. His various descriptions of Oswald the Cheapskate, Oswald the Potential Jet Hijacker ("jumping around the house in his underwear, preparing athletically for the hijacking, only caused baby June to think he was playing with her"), Marina the Sex Maniac, Marguerite the Harpy (and the Sex Maniac). His best humor (and his nastiest spite) is left for the real chuckleheads in the research community: the pathetic Robert Groden (VB's telling of Groden's self-destruction over O.J.'s shoes is almost worth the price of the book), the hapless "photo expert" Jack White, Mark Lane's endless sliminess and self-promotion etc.

But the problem with the book is its boy scout level worship of everything Official. Bugliosi discredits most everything he writes because from early on we see that his prism is exactly what one would expect from an establishment-based former D.A. (From Los Angeles of all places! L.A. law enforcement may not be the cesspool that Dallas's was in the early-1960s, but it was [and remains] pretty close.) The book is a valentine to the honor of Gerald Ford, Earl Warren, J.Edgar Hoover, David Belin, Arlen Specter, Henry Wade(!), Jesse Curry, Will Fritz, Allen Dulles(!!), every member of the Dallas Police Department (except Roger Craig, of course), every member of the FBI, every member of the Clark Panel/Rockefeller Commission/HSCA/ARRB, every member of the Secret Service (except Abraham Bolden), every member of the mainstream media circa 1963-64, the Bethesda autopsy doctors, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Dick Helms and James Angleton, those fine patriots David Atlee Phillips, David Morales, Sam Halpern and Guy Bannister, plus every official crime lab Vince could think of.

How touching. (Or as VB would say, "my, my.") Yes, my-my indeed. What sort of world does Bugliosi live in? Are we really supposed to take on faith -- which is what one must do to accept much of the evidence he provides -- the honor of people involved in investigating such a history-changing event? Yes, we are. There must be a 1,000 instances in the text and endnotes along the lines of: "What kind of loonie-bird could believe [fill-in-the-blank] would jeopardize his life/career/reputation/freedom by covering up murder?"

Well, where do we start? Sadly, the history of the world is one long continuing account of people in power doing exactly that in order to remain in power, exactly to keep their reputations/freedoms/careers. If a bunch of dime-a-dozen Ivy League legal hustlers (and oh boy how VB loves the Ivy League!) trying to make their bones are faced with the challenge of covering up a crime which if exposed would crack in two the very establishment they wish to enter and dominate, and if there is already plenty of proof that being offered that gig and turning it down for some kind of pusillanimous and righteous reason may lead to harmful effects (Ruby/Oswald being Exhibit A), the really confusing and naive conclusion would be to assume the hustlers would not grab for the brass ring. And to assume some sort of holy righteousness on the part of the apparatchiks who made up the Warren Commission, a personal morality that would lead John McCloy to stand up and say "Hey, Mr. Chief Justice. This stinks. And the odor is coming from my pal James Angleton's death-squad offices down at Langley, and from our Mexico City Station" -- to quote that great philosopher Michael Corleone: "Who's being naive, Vince?"

If only the world and the powerful were that way. We know they are not. And surely former D.A. Bugliosi knows they are not. So one wonders what private ghosts he's trying to exorcise with this book. He's a brilliant man with a great sense of humor -- he can't possibly believe in the automatic honor of these people, can he? Is he trying to convince himself in a late stage of life that everything he did in service to establishment power was not so much sound and fury, signifying nothing? Is Mr. Bugliosi trying to make up for not becoming a revolutionary? Is he trying to avoid the same feeling Dave "Maurice Bishop" Phillips felt on his death bed, when he confessed to his estranged brother that "Yes" he was in Dallas on 11/22/63? -- the kind of feeling one gets when one looks toward eternity?

I believe Mr. Bugliosi is -- unlike practically all members of great power elites -- an honorable man. There is no way someone creates this sort of work for the money. And it is heroic how far he went with his obsession. (In medieval times, like his role model Joan of Arc, he would've been burned at the stake.) Next time, sir, see a psychiatrist.

(And for what really happened that day in Dallas: James Douglass's JFK and the Unspeakable has the answers.)

Stars in My Crown

What a Golden Age of Kennedy Assassination history and interpretation! Masterpieces of writing and research: Gerald McKnight's brilliantly argued Breach of Trust; Professor Joan Mellen's white-hot Farewell to Justice; and the tributary hymn-of-despair in David Talbot's Brothers. (We've also had the occasional fly-in-the-ointment from hall monitors and disinformationists: Waldron, Myers, Russo, Sturdivan, Bugliosi, Robert Stone. And it is amusing how virulently, predictably, and cowardly the mainstream media -- the Cerberai of the Unspeakable - continue to bark at the moon. As Lyndon Johnson once said: "Throw your bread upon the waters, and the sharks will get it.")

James Douglass's JFK and the Unspeakable is also a hymn, in a way a companion piece to the Talbot book. But Douglass's sound is a hymn of belief, hope, and transcendence. In Kennedy's murder by the forces of the Unspeakable, a contemporary crucifixion, Douglass sees meaning beyond the resulting Vietnam genocide, beyond the takeover of our society by back-stabbers, soul-crushers and ghouls, beyond the shifting of cultural meaning toward something hideously empty and narcissistic -- meaning in the symbol of a man willing to die for his beliefs, for his (in Douglass's term) "turning." One can argue with this, for at the heart of Douglass's profoundly spiritual argument, there is something anti-political. Rather than viewing John Kennedy's murder as a political and economic act by men who saw themselves only in those terms, we experience it through Douglass's writing as a modern day Stations of the Cross. First Station: Kennedy refuses war with Laos. Second Station: Kennedy refuses invasion and air attacks during the Bay of Pigs; Third Station: Berlin Wall goes up, Kennedy lets it stand. Etc. It is an agony, as we follow Kennedy's turning and his movement toward the Golgotha of Dallas.

So what do we do? Much can be said for acceptance and a belief in transcendence, a belief in Grace. But as Jack Kennedy said: "Here on earth, God's work must truly be our own." Do we let this crucifixion stand? Do we accept the vampires now in almost complete control? Do we try to protect a man who may soon be experiencing his own turning, Barack Obama? (Not necessary.) Do we take up arms against a sea of troubles and by opposing end them? Can they ever be ended here on earth? Do we let Catholicism be defined by Hitler-Jugend Joseph Ratzinger, the man who led the war against Liberation Theology? Do we let Christianity be defined by Tim LaHaye and his life-haters?

Such questions. That JFK and the Unspeakable forces us to ask them marks the Douglass book as a rare and beautiful masterpiece, one I'll be going back to many times through the years.

The Glory and the Sorrow

 

The most beautifully written, most passionate, and probably the saddest of all the books in the canon. As a reader of most everything released on John and Robert Kennedy and their murders, I certainly never expected to pick up a Kennedy book and find myself thinking on almost every page: "Man, I never knew that." You'll find yourself thinking the same throughout Brothers.

The book rejects all irony, camp, narcissism, deconstructionism, moral relativism, nihilism, sexual prurience and other malignancies of our time. (`Though the word "Bush" is mentioned.) John and Robert Kennedy were heroes. They were murdered by evil men. End of story.

David Talbot takes the top off the cesspool of enemies who brought down the US Government in 1963 and murdered the leading Presidential candidate of 1968. Who were the enemies? Sex haters, race haters, America-Firsters, oil junkies, mob guys, fascist intelligence agents, military dictators, tweed-covered garbage such as Dick Helms and Des FitzGerald, right-wing publishers and editors, drug executioners, psychopathic politicians, Goldwaterites. (Basically the sum and substance of the Bush Reich.) And that's the horror of the book. Forty years later, what is left on a popular or establishment level of the idea that society and government must be judged by the way the weakest and most vulnerable among us are taken care of?

The answer is: nothing. There is nothing left of that. Which is why the sense of doom and sorrow one takes from Brothers will be long lasting. The worst of our history murdered the best and got away with it. Scott free. Not only did they get away with it, but they've created the sort of society diametrically opposed to everything JFK and RFK stood for: a country where the least human and most nakedly aggressive dominate everything. This was the newer world others' sought. Born from the gore of Dealey Plaza, they've achieved it.

For a bracing and deeply moving reminder of what was lost, one cannot do better than David Talbot's magnificent book.

Saint Joan

The United States of America has never really had its J'Accuse! -- until now. While the Dreyfus Affair was mere curiosity compared to the permanent, global-reaching effects of the national security state execution of President John F. Kennedy (don't think they're permanent? -- pick up a newspaper), quite a few books on the crime have been labeled Zolaesque: Rush to Judgment, Weisberg's Whitewash, Sylvia Meagher's Accessories After the Fact (a worthy forerunner to Farewell to Justice -- Meagher and Mellen being sisters of heart, toughness, and understanding -- if not conclusion), Anthony Summers's Conspiracy and, of course, Gerald Posner's Case Closed. (Just kidding). But they were not, because they couldn't be. The cover-up of the crime continued well into the 1990s and -- like the film or not -- it was Stone's JFK which caused the break in the dam. The wave of the past couple decades, beginning with the publication and media-embrace of the malignant Case Closed, has been intensely anti-conspiracy. As all US society has seemingly moved toward the worship of power for power's sake, leading to the establishment of the Bush/Cheney Reich, anti-conspiracy ideology has become its own form of totalitarianism: in the power-saturated universe of Millennial America, seething with plots, anti-plot pronouncements have become as necessary as squeals in a slaughterhouse. But there has been a counterwave, now tidal. More fresh evidence regarding 11/22/63 has become available these past years than was available to the Warren Commission, Jim Garrison, or the House Select Committee on Assassinations when they were conducting their investigations/cover-ups. We've had to be patient, and now it's pay-off time: Christopher Lawford on the family, Gareth Porter and John Newman on JFK and Vietnam, Bradley Ayers and Richard Whalen on Kennedy and Cuba, Gerald McKnight on the Commission, and David Talbot's coming book on Bobby and the murder (`though the Mellen book may've made that release somewhat compromised).

Farewell to Justice is the book we've been waiting for since the day the music died. Professor Joan Mellen's always been one of the world's best film critics, a magnificent biographer (Kay Boyle, Marilyn Monroe, Bobby Knight!), and a great writing teacher. Now she has broken the case. There's no guessing here. No theoretical chapters on the validity of the Zapruder Film, the DalTex Building vs. a storm-drain opening, no jacket holes or bullet fragments. Just the moment-by-moment narrative of what happened to Jack Kennedy, 46 years ago. And best of all, why it happened. The names are here: initiators, designers, middle-managers, and the mechanics. Mellen is also overwhelming in her recapture of what was really happening in the early 1960s. Not only those who care not about history relive it. As Americans, all of us re-live Dallas every day of our lives. Everywhere we look, we can see the ghost of John F. Kennedy -- and the shadows of the men and women who killed him. There is only one way to finally let him -- and us -- rest in peace: a cleaning-out from power of all those directly and indirectly responsible for the murder, and of all those who have knowingly benefited from it. Germany could only put the ghosts of the Third Reich to rest through a complete de-Nazification. The United States must do the same.

There is also sadness in the book, for those of us who see the Kennedys as true heroes. (And they were.) Mellen has solved many mysteries in the book and one of the most startling is her clinching the case as to whether or not Robert Kennedy knew of the Castro murder plots. As Mellen demonstrates, his involvement went beyond mere knowledge. By answering this question, she also answers the question as to why the Kennedy Family has been so forceful in impairing post-Warren investigations of the crime.

Mellen's passion, brilliance, understanding, writing talent and just-plain-sleuthing-genius has resulted in a book which will change history. The corporate media will no doubt try to burn her at the stake. They will fail. Because there is no answer to this book. Except justice and revenge.