When John Hinkley failed to assasinate Ronald Reagan, I was working in a midwestern university library, and still young and stupid enough to blurt out a “joke” about sending a boy to do a man’s job. (This was so long ago, kids, all our spontaneous stupidity had to be delivered in the meatspace.) Since the head of the department was the widow of a minister in the short-lived Republic of Biafra, another librarian had left Hungary in early 1957, and a third’s earliest childhood memories involved fleeing Latvia with her parents in 1941, I was immediately educated that “nobody is happy in a place where political arguments are settled with machetes.”
Charlie Pierce at Esquire‘s Politics blog brings up a certain piece of Texas Republican history in connection with Ms. “Tempting as it may be, don’t shoot Obama”:
… Every president has to live with the notion that any random nut can buy a gun and stand a pretty good chance of getting the job done if the random nut doesn’t mind getting ventilated in return. Presidents get briefed on this stuff. But, as is the case in so many things, this president is different. History has made him so. An attempt on this president’s life would resonate, in history and in memory, far beyond Ford’s Theater, and Union Station in Washington, and the Exposition Grounds in Buffalo, and Dealey Plaza. It would resonate, in history and in memory, back to the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, and to an earthen dam in Philadelphia, Mississippi, and to 2332 Guynes Street in Jackson, Mississippi, where the blood of Medgar Evers still stains a driveway, and to a hundred dark roads, and to a thousand ghastly trees, freighted down with so much more than Spanish moss. Some bullets make history. A bullet fired at this president would gain its power from a history that we all have worked so hard to pretend never really happened before, and really could never happen again.
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It would blow apart the illusions. It would shatter the carefully designed latticework we’ve thrown up around those parts of this country’s bloody past in which the government was not only helpless, but actively complicit. We had state violence against black citizens in this country all the way up into my lifetime. We had the local respectable gentry sponsoring it from the shadows almost as long. It did not erupt, the way sudden murder does. It was a steady, foul pulse through the country’s politics, as mainstream in some places as Republicans and Democrats were.
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My god, nobody would ever believe it was a nut. It would be a harder sell than Oswald has been, all these years, and the polls indicate that the official explanation for John Kennedy’s murder is no more believable now to most people than it was in 1964. This, to me, always has been a remarkable thing. The American people have chosen to believe that their president was murdered in broad daylight, and probably with the connivance of elements of the government he led, and they have spent nearly 50 years walking around believing that, and the only concrete result of it all is that Oliver Stone got rich. There would be no official explanation possible for an attempt on the life of this president. There is nobody who would believe it. There would be too much damned history arguing from the other side.
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I mention all this only because we’re coming up on November 22 again. There will even be a Republican debate in Washington on that day. On November 22, 1963, there was a newspaper advertisement that accused President Kennedy of treason. It had two photos that looked like mug shots. It ran in a newspaper on the day of the president’s visit. In Texas. The president came home in a box.
JGabriel
Anne Laurie:
That’s why the happy Tea Partier prefers guns!
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The Dangerman
Oswald definitely fired from the Book Depository window and probably killed Tippitt.
If he killed JFK is an entirely different question ;-)
JGabriel
Charles Pierce:
I’m sure someone in the audience will celebrate by cheering Kennedy’s assassination while insisting it was done by a commie liberal.
If we’re really lucky, one of the GOP candidates will commemorate the event by accusing Obama of treason, just for old time’s sake.
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Cacti
No disrespect to Charlie, but when did state violence against black citizens end?
DCLaw1
Anne Laurie doesn’t quote Charles Pierce nearly enough.
No one of importance
@JGabriel:
“Insisting it was done by a commie liberal.”
Dunno about ‘liberal’ but Oswald was definitely a commie.
I for one believe he did it without assistance. But then I’m not bugfuck crazy.
piratedan
@DCLaw1: hey, its a pleasant fucking change from all of the damn McArdle bargle, Sully writhings and Bobo vomitus that used to be the common fodder of discussion around here. I’d much rather be pimping Senor Pierce than that lame-ass collection of poseurs pretending to be thoughtful. I’d personally be fine with cat/dog blegging, job threads, JC’s continuous goldbergian existence, Kay’s grass roots and links to the best of Pierce, Benen, Maddow and TBogg with a smattering of Tom’s stuff to give the place a patina of class. No offense to any of the other FP’ers, I read it all faithfully tbh.
Jess Sane
One asshole has been making fun of the Kennedy assassinations and the plight of Biafra for over three decades now, and some people still think he’s cool.
TenguPhule
Of course not, its a whole damn party of nuts that will not stop coming until they are terminated, every one of them. Because if even one escapes, the whole cycle starts again.
Phylllis
I just finished reading Candice Millard’s Destiny of the Republic about Garfield’s assassination, and the parallels to the political climate, then and now, were downright chilling.
Citizen_X
@Jess Sane: Maybe because “some people” realized, after listening for about, oh, five seconds, that “making fun” was never the fucking point.
anniecat45
For what this is worth –
I worked for some years for a lawyer who, as a young attorney, worked on the Warren Commission. He told me that he, and a great many of his fellow law clerks and young lawyers, had come to work in Washington because John Kennedy had inspired them. He said most of them were convinced at the start that the assassination had been a conspiracy, although no one agreed on who the conspirators might have been. He said the atmosphere among the Warren Commission people — and a lot of other people in the government — was like a friend had been killed, the grief and shock was that great, and they were determined to find out who did it.
He said they investigated from hell to breakfast (his term) and never found any hard evidence of a conspiracy, even though that’s what they were looking for. He also pointed out that between the line investigators, lawyers, and assorted support staff, any cover-up would have meant dozens of people keeping totally quiet about it for all these years, and he was very emphatic about how unlikely that is. He also said that “hard evidence” is not the same thing as “some blowhard writing a move script and leaving out half the facts.”
Also for what it’s worth, one of the Dallas newspapers for many years had a reporter on permanent assignment to cover John Kennedy’s murder. This guy had read and investigated every single thing ever published about the assassination, and his conclusion after many years of this was that Oswald killed Kennedy and was acting alone.
Myself, I think we’re too individualistic and fragmented in this country to have a serious conspiracy. I also think that a conspiracy, awful as it would have been, at least provides the illusion of order and that this drives a lot of conspiracy theorizing (on many subjects).
The Dangerman
@anniecat45:
What I find interesting about the conspiracy theories is how much they want to discredit the Warren Commission entirely; I find that folly. Just about everything of the WC can be true and yet still have a conspiracy. For example, I’m convinced Kennedy was hit from the rear, though the source(s) of those shots are somewhat unclear (it could very well have been Oswald).
Oswald was either a single shooter or he was, as he claimed, a “patsy” to something larger. He definitely shot from the Book Depository, at least the first shot. That shot was way wild and hit near the overpass; that is consistent with the theory that the rifle wasn’t all that accurate and that Oswald was a shitty shot, but, perhaps, hitting Kennedy wasn’t his goal (whatever that goal may have been).
The next 2 shots were bullseyes (including the magic bullet that hit Connally). Was that Oswald? Perhaps; perhaps not. What I find interesting about Oswald’s post-shooting strolls is that he was practically on a direct path to Ruby’s house when he came upon Tippitt. There’s a lot of mystery that remains to be explained as time goes along (and a lot of nonsense; the Dictabelt recordings, for example, are pretty much crap, which means the House Select Committee’s findings are pretty much crap).
JoyousMN
Jesus, has anyone taken to blogging with the enthusiasm and brilliance of Charles Pierce? I know he’s been writing for ages, but still.
He’s like a blogging tsunami.
Paul in KY
@The Dangerman: Oswald was considered a pretty good shot in military training.