.
From Slate, Jeff Franzen, an eyewitness, age six, “just behind the grassy knoll”:
…As the president’s car started approaching, there was a wave of sound—I could hear louder and louder cheering from further up the route. As the car turned the far corner, people started walking and running down the hill to be where we were to see the motorcade for a second time. It was a crystal clear day and the sun was over our shoulder. Then the car came down the hill toward us and I heard the three pops. I assumed it was firecrackers—that made sense to me at a parade.
I was looking at the car with the president in it and—after the pops—I saw what I thought was confetti. It was the shot that caused the president’s head to explode. My Mom cried out, “Oh, my God.” So I’m watching, I hear the bangs, see what I think was confetti, hear my mom yelling, and I realized something was very wrong…
Murray Kempton and James Ridgeway, reporting for TNR, in 1963:
… They ask too much of us when they ask us to act up to the grand style. We are not emotionally affluent people. And yet some of us always complained that Mr. Kennedy did not seem quite emotionally committed enough… He had too much respect for the grand style to counterfeit it; how much truer to him might we have been if we had come down in scale and if the many of us who must have remembered the lines from Cymbeline had thought them proper to speak.
“Fear no more the heat of the sun/Nor the furious winter’s rages.
Thou thy worldly task hast done/Home art thou and ta’en thy wages.
Golden lads and girls all must/As chimney sweepers come to dust.”… For we had lost in the instant the hope of beginning again. Reason might argue that the sense of a new start was already gone. The main story in the morning’s Washington Post had detailed the exculpations of a Congressman who had made a 1,000 percent profit from a stock company which had enjoyed his good offices with the Internal Revenue Service. The very Senate which dissipated in shock at the news from Texas had just before been waspishly disputing the privileges and emoluments of elective office. For weeks it had been hard to remember anyone in Washington talking about anything except who was getting what from whom. Mr. Kennedy seemed to be wasting in his city and to be nourished only by the great crowds in the countryside. The films from Dallas, painful as they were, reinforced the feeling that he was his old self only away from Washington. It could be argued then that we would see a time when we recognized that all that promise had been an illusion; but you need only look at hope lain dead to know how easy it is to look forward to regret. It had been less than three years since Mr. Kennedy had announced that a new generation was taking up the torch, now old General de Gaulle and old Mr. Mikoyan were coming to see the young man buried…
Charles P. Pierce, today:
The murder of John Kennedy in broad daylight in the streets of an American city remains, to me, an unsolved crime. I do not accept the notion that the Warren Commission, created to allay public panic and not to investigate, and composed of wise men from Washington who had made careers out of knowing more than they ever would tell, somehow still managed to stumble onto the correct interpretation of all of the events of that surreal weekend. (Hell, Allen Dulles was on that Commission and Kennedy had fired his lying ass less than a year earlier.) I stopped believing in the Warren Commission even before it was put together. I stopped believing in the Warren Commission when I sat on my living room floor and watched the accused murderer of the president get gunned down on live TV in a roomful of Dallas cops. I stopped believing in the Warren Commission when I watched a lynching with my parents while the dead president was lying in state in the White House and as the country went numb around me…
Just Some Fuckhead, Thought Leader
I think Pierce is being a little dramatic here.
dmbeaster
@Just Some Fuckhead, Thought Leader: Yeah, but Pierce is simply expressing a major dividing line of opinion — the belief in an unrevealed conspiracy behind it all.
PsiFighter37
I was born nearly 25 years after this went down, but regardless of your opinion of it – it seems clear to me that it had a major impact on the state of the country. I’m not one to wear rose-colored glasses about JFK, who had a shitload of personal faults and didn’t accomplish as much as people would like to think – but it definitely shattered the post-WWII reverie that a lot of the country had been living in.
Mustang Bobby
I suspect that John F. Kennedy would be bitterly disappointed that the only thing remembered about his life was how he left it and how it colored everything he did leading up to his death. The Bay of Pigs, the steel crisis, the Cuban missile crisis, the Test Ban Treaty, even the space program are dramatized by his death. They became the stuff of legend, not governing, and history should not be preserved as fable.
Comrade Jake
But what about the magic lougie?
Litlebritdiftrnt
That was a truly beautiful piece by Pierce. It had an almost poetic tone to it and I loved the Much Ado About Nothing quote.
Tissue Thin Pseudonym (JMN)
The conspiracy theories are built around facts pulled out of context and baseless conjecture. There were only three shots fired. There was no magic bullet. Pierce is wrong: the Warren Commission did pretty much accidentally stumble onto the correct answer which isn’t as strange as it sounds since the correct answer was also the obvious one.
But for the first time this season a major women’s college hockey game is actually on TV and I’m not busy with a Gopher game tonight so I’m gonna watch it as soon as this stupid high school football game is over.
The Dangerman
@dmbeaster:
I think it’s pretty clear that Oswald fired 3 shots from the Book Depository…
…if any of them hit Kennedy is an entire other matter altogether.
Cassidy
@Tissue Thin Pseudonym (JMN): I think the whole thing is interesting, when measured against today’s outrage over the NSA and other three letter agencies, that out society is always prone to believe that dark forces are at work when the reality is so much more benign.
magurakurin
off topic, but, wow, I just scanned over the front page posts. Why didn’t one of you front page people tell Richard who Mclaren was when he started? I’m not even going to wander into that thread.
And Kennedy, yeah, whatever. I suppose in another decade these CT will be completed drowned out by the lingering 911 CT’s. lucky us.
Yatsuno
@magurakurin: Sometimes the child must put the hand upon the stove to learn the lesson…
Omnes Omnibus
@magurakurin: @Yatsuno: mclaren is over there now saying stuff. Including more on McMegan.
The Other Chuck
@Tissue Thin Pseudonym (JMN):
You mean except for the one in the Warren Commission’s own report.
I don’t buy conspiracy theories because they’re simply not credible the vast majority of the time, Occam’s Razor and all. Thing is, the Warren Report seems to require an even greater suspension of disbelief.
Just Some Fuckhead, Thought Leader
@dmbeaster: Maybe we’ll know in 2017 when the last 1200 pages of the Warren Commission’s investigation are released.
Anne Laurie
@dmbeaster: Not a conspiracy, as I understand it, but a crudely overlapping/interlinking series of patched-together coverups and Just So Stories intended to draw attention away from all sorts of ugly “realities”.
Can’t speak for Pierce — or for Sec. of State Kerry — but I’m personally convinced that JFK was assassinated by Lee Harvey Oswald. A sad little crazy pinballing on the edges of a lot of Big Crazy… the various national alphabet-letter “security” agencies, the Mob, the rightwingers in the Pentagon, the Birchers & their associates in the official Republican Party, the extraction-industry “bidnizmen”… none of whom planned for some patsy with sharpshooter training to get lucky and step into history.
As another half-crazed loner involved in many of those same circles at the same time would say a decade later, “It’s not the crime, it’s the cover-up”.
Betty Cracker
Contra Pierce, I think it’s likely that the Warren Commission did reach the right conclusion, even if they were more focused on placating the people and protecting their fellow public servants’ asses than getting to the bottom of JFK’s murder. But Pierce is right about the culture of secrecy: It’s infantilizing, insulting and unworthy of a democracy.
dmbeaster
@The Dangerman: I am not a believer in any of the conspiracy theories. I re-read the Warren report the other night. There is actually not that much to it. It is strongest on identifying Oswald as the shooter, and that there was no other shooter. It is middling on the conspiracy aspects of it, but that also probably reflects: a) the more limited information available to it at the time; b) some obfuscation by the intelligence services on the point; and/or c) its desire perhaps to reach such a conclusion of no conspiracy.
I think the obfuscation by intelligence services represents other motives than hiding a conspiracy, but there clearly was some less than candid behavior by them.
The thing about any conspiracy theory is why would anyone use Oswald sporting an old Italian military rifle? It makes no sense, and the science that Oswald used his rifle to kill Kennedy is very strong – many times stronger than any competing conspiracy theory on the subject.
Most interesting thing I read this week was an article at Salon about recent research concerning Oswald’s trip to Mexico City shortly before the assassination. He reportedly attended parties with Cuban delegation members in which there was talk of anger over recent JFK attempts on Castro’s life, and that someone should kill Kennedy. Oswald was a huge admirer of Castro, and had already tried to assassinate General Walker (using the same rifle). It is easy to conjecture a shift onto Kennedy, even though at that time, he did not yet have his job at the depository, nor was the Kennedy trip to Dallas yet planned.
NotMax
@Anne Laurie
Double ditto for those unwilling to entertain that the magnitude of what occurred was enough to drive Ruby over the edge.
Tissue Thin Pseudonym (JMN)
@The Other Chuck: No, the one in the Warren Commission’s report didn’t exist. They worked from incorrect information about where Kennedy and Connolly were actually sitting. Once you analyze the film and the car, you realize that Kennedy was sitting about six inches higher than Connolly and slightly to one side. As soon as you put them in the correct positions, the bullet takes a very simple path to account for all of the wounds.
The Dangerman
@The Other Chuck:
Yes, there was a magic bullet in the WC report and the trajectory has been shown to work; if it came from Oswald, it was his second round. The first round didn’t come close to the limousine. If he was the assassin, his aim improved markedly from Shot 1 to Shot 2…
…but your larger point on the Warren Commission is correct. It has some serious problems.
RandomMonster
@Betty Cracker:
Betty FTW
SiubhanDuinne
@Litlebritdiftrnt: His description of the nuns made me tear up.
SiubhanDuinne
@Betty Cracker:
Yes, exactly this. I don’t have a dog in the fight either way. Could have been LHO acting alone, could have been a grand CIA-Cuban-USSR-whatthefuckever conspiracy. I don’t know. And that’s the point, this has been veiled for decades, and it is an insult to American citizens that we have no access to the facts.
The Other Chuck
@Tissue Thin Pseudonym (JMN): Huh, I took a look at the alternate seating positions, which seem quite plausible (why wouldn’t you rest your arm on the side of an open-top car?) and the fact that the bullet had a full metal jacket, and now well, I’m reasonably disabused. This after I’d been ranting and raving about the magic bullet theory all last week.
So it’s basically the Commission’s report that came up with the twisted explanations to fit preconceived theories. Ironic. Hell, I think they were more thorough with the forensics after Lincoln’s assassination, even though everyone saw Booth do it at point blank range.
Tissue Thin Pseudonym (JMN)
@The Other Chuck: Right. I’m not kidding when I say that the Warren Commission accidentally arrived at the correct conclusion. The investigation it conducted was worthless. It just so happens that the obvious answer, and the one that they so desperately wanted to be true, was in fact almost certainly true.
The Other Chuck
@SiubhanDuinne: Consider that if Oswald was in fact a foreign agent, either “taking initiative” or worse, acting on orders, that World War III would have been inevitable if that fact came out right then. So they put a lid on it, and not knowing how much longer the cold war was going to go on, they kept that lid tight til everyone involved would be long dead. Post cold war, well just layer on decades of bureaucratic inertia.
The Dangerman
@dmbeaster:
Oswald was, through his actions in New Orleans, shown to be a “huge admirer of Castro”. I think some of his actions in New Orleans were highly suspicious (a suspicion exacerbated by the Mexico City trip). I think Oswald had some sort of relationship with the CIA…
…which brings us back to the mysterious quote from Nixon about “the Bay of Pigs” thing on the Watergate Tapes.
As for Walker, it’s the same as his first shot on 11/22; a wild miss.
Oswald could be the single shooter, but there are a whole host of questions that aren’t well answered yet, even after the House Select Committee on Assassinations in the later 70’s (which completely butchered the open motorcycle mic science, FWIW)
eemom
@Omnes Omnibus:
Looks like the jury’s still out on whether someone who says “I’d bang her till she couldn’t walk” is likely a cismale, though.
Betty Cracker
@The Other Chuck: World War III would have been inevitable why? Sure, people would have been pissed off. But isn’t it insulting that our own government would consider us too stupid to process the facts and react appropriately? Who the hell are they to make that judgment? Leadership is guiding the people to the appropriate response, not burying the facts and sticking a binky in our mouths for 100 years.
Tissue Thin Pseudonym (JMN)
The Badgers are really fortunate not to be down a couple of goals. Their d-zone coverage has been poor but the Whioux have rolled several pucks through the crease without hitting the net. And Wisconsin’s breakout plays are downright mystifying.
Bob In Portland
@Tissue Thin Pseudonym (JMN): A month and a half before the assassination someone was impersonating Oswald in front of the Soviet embassy in Mexico City. Hoover and LBJ talked about it the day after the assassination.
Take that out of context.
Betty Cracker
@eemom: I was convinced by the original “I’d tap that,” but I thought we should seize the opportunity to get an affirmation for the archives.
Suffern ACE
@Bob In Portland: that was Oswald impersonating himself?
Yatsuno
@Omnes Omnibus: Oh good. I really want Richard to get his TBogg unit virginity out of the way. Maybe I’ll sneak down and push things along.
Bob In Portland
@The Dangerman: Geez, no wonder why we’re where we are. When Oswald was handing out “Hands Off Cuba” pamphlets in New Orleans just about everyone involved was either CIA or FBI, down to the cameramen, the guy he scuffled with and the guy Oswald hired to hand out pamphlets with him. And the guys he debated with on the radio afterwards.
Betty Cracker
@Yatsuno: Nagahappen. Half a TBogg, tops.
Bob In Portland
@Suffern ACE: Google “fake Oswald Mexico City” to see the picture. Like I said, Hoover talked to LBJ about how another person used Oswald’s name and was tapped on the phone line and his picture was taken by CIA surveillance cameras. Who would impersonate a nobody a month and a half before the assassination in front of the Soviet embassy? Who knew that his performance would be recorded? Who benefits?
Anybody with more than a passing knowledge of the assassination knows the problem with multiple Oswalds. When Oswald took a car for a test drive and went to the firing range in the weeks before the assassination, there was another Oswald working his job at the Book Depository. When Oswald was in the Soviet Union there was a Lee Harvey Oswald in New Orleans signing a contract to buy trucks for anti-Castro folks.
But the guy photographed in front of the Soviet embassy didn’t even looked like the guy arrested for JFK’s murder.
I’ve always thought that people who hang out at balloon juice were pretty smart people.
Tissue Thin Pseudonym (JMN)
@Bob In Portland: I don’t know that one specifically, but given the number of Oswald “facts” that turned out to be complete misrepresentations on the part of the conspiracy theorists I no longer care enough to track down every single one that comes up. You guys have no credibility left to make it worth bothering.
Omnes Omnibus
@eemom: @Betty Cracker: Yeah, “tap that ass” is something I have never heard from anyone by a straight man. Doesn’t mean that no one else would say it, but I am willing to play the probabilities.
Keith G
@Just Some Fuckhead, Thought Leader:
As I was reading it, I was thinking 1) Charlie, let it go. And then 2) Charlie, maybe you need a vacation.
The Dangerman
@Bob In Portland:
It’s a wild cast of characters to be sure (some of whom, like Howard Hunt, show up both in the Bay of Pigs and Watergate and, of course, HH is purported to have had a deathbed “confession” about his connection to Dallas with his Son, yet another colorful character); trying to unfuck the rats done by the professional ratfuckers isn’t for the feint of heart…
…and then we have Kennedy himself, who was hardly a Saint (not referring to the Women thing here; referring to the abuse of drugs for his back pain).
Betsy
Did anyone hear fucking David Brooks on NPR today. Saying the Keenedy Adminsitrion was so idealistic and romantic that it basically had the perverse effect of making everyone disillusioned with government and polticis. Fuckign @&)6;! David Brooks
nastybrutishntall
I refuse to believe that this came from Charlie Pierce. There is no mention of how Obama could have prevented Kennedy’s death, nor how we are all President Kennedy now because of extrajudicial assassination DRONEZ!1!. Therefore, someone has killed Charlie Pierce and is writing his column. I fear for my country.
burnspbesq
I choose not to join in the orgy of morbid curiosity sparked by the anniversary.
At this point, does it matter, even a little bit, who pulled the trigger?.
EconWatcher
Most JFK conspiracy theorists are nuts, but that does not mean that the notion that Oswald had some assistance or encouragement is nuts. For anyone who is interested in a reasonable exploration of the possibility, check out the new edition of Anthony Summers’ Not in Your Lifetime.
I think anyone who says he knows for sure whether there was a conspiracy or not, simply has not read enough. It’s certainly possible that Oswald acted alone. But his story is so weird and murky, and intersects in so many bizarre ways with people motivated and ruthless enough to want to kill Kennedy, that you just can’t be sure.
Don DeLillo’s excellent novel Libra lays out a fascinating possible scenario of conspiracy, but also uses the incident as a way of exploring how some aspects of history are just unknowable.
EconWatcher
@Tissue Thin Pseudonym (JMN):
You’re right that nutjob conspiracy theorists have made it almost impossible to discuss the assassination in a reasonable way, and there is a lot of shameless distortion by people trying to push their pet theories. But there are some lingering unsettling facts that are reasonably well documented and hard to dismiss.
There is decent documentation for the possible “fake Oswald” in Mexico City that Bob in Portland mentions, including a transcript from a phone call in which J. Edgar Hoover discussed it. Another that has always bothered me is the encounter right after the shooting, when a Dallas police officer pulled a gun on a man on the fabled grassy knoll who, the police officer said, showed Secret Service ID. The Secret Service later excluded the possibility that this actually could have been one of their agents. The encounter was documented by the officer shortly after the incident.
Does any of this definitively prove conspiracy? No. And digging further into the story leads you into a hall of mirrors. But I really don’t think we can be confident of the ultimate question, based on the known record.
Another Botspaliner
I’ll just quote Booman:
“But I’m talking about the revelation that the man who was in charge of misinformation and psychological warfare against Castro was in “contact” with Oswald, and fingered him as a commie on the afternoon of the assassination, and was put in charge of records for the CIA during the HSCA investigation in 1978.
That’s a conspiracy.”
Bob In Portland
@The Dangerman: There is an excellent essay called “The Posthumous Assassination of JFK” in the book THE ASSASSINATIONS. The CIA had a problem in the 70s. Everybody still felt well towards JFK (people had pictures of him in their living rooms). Meanwhile, the various congressional investigations of the 70s made the Agency look bad. So from that point on stories began appearing to assassinate JFK’s character. That’s when stories about the womanizing, drug-taking, etc., started surfacing. The essay actually tracks the major ones back to CIA assets in the media. JFK and Marilyn Monroe? Donald Spoto’s definitive bio of Monroe says that it was all bull.
Sondra
Even now I cannot bring myself to participate in this anniversay. I am just as sad and unable to motivate myself to move as I was when it happened. Maybe more so because now that I’ve become an adult, my Junior High School self seems very callous to me.
It was stunning then but now I wonder how I (we) woke up the next day, got dressed, put on our bobby sox and weejuns and just went to school…took our classes, met our sorority sisters, practised for the school play, and just got on with things.
I remember we just didn’t want to do it. Some of us were more pragmatic than others of us but really no one gave us a choice. No one even “counciled” us through the trauma. We were expected to go on and so on we went.