A 50-Year-Old Murder

A 50-Year-Old Murder: Why does it matter?

My first awareness to the historical controversy surrounding the death of President John F. Kennedy arrived when I was about 12 years old. It may have been on the 30th Anniversary that I listened to my Dad recount his memory of that November weekend of 1963. He recalled it crisply, clearly and I remember it precisely. After graduating from Allen County High in 1962, he found employment at Woodmaster and was at work when the news came that the President had been shot. One of his coworkers told me that Dad left work early that day in tears.

Dad told me that he and his grandmother, Mammy Smalling, watched the coverage on a black and white television set and prayed for the president until the news came that he was deceased. He said that they were watching as Lee Harvey Oswald was being transported two days later and witnessed his murder by Jack Ruby. I can remember Dad putting his hands in his lap and just saying hopelessly, “It was all too much at once.” I’ve talked to a lot of people since but Dad’s account governs my understanding of how the average person witnessed the event. Dad and Mammy continued to watch the funeral and the rest of the coverage, heartbroken. It was something he shared with his grandmother that would stand the test of time, a flashbulb memory that he cherished all of his life.

My second attachment to the case came from my Papa Doc, my mother’s father. Papa was a very intelligent man. He could have done anything with his life but God called him into the ministry. I’m unsure of its origins but Papa had an oversized, coffee table book titled, “The Torch is Passed” published by the Associated Press. In it, AP published a minute-by-minute account of their news coverage with full-page color photographs. I was hooked. It later worked out that this book became a permanent addition to our library.

Throughout my high school and college education, I came to regard John F. Kennedy as a good president with an above average and positive contribution to our nation’s history. I came to abhor his personal habits and derelictions to moral duty and virtue but recognize that’s true of all our public officials, regardless of party or claims otherwise. I first watched Oliver Stone’s JFK and thought he was crazy, anti-American trash. Born on the Fourth of July cemented my belief in this. How could anyone hate America so much?!

Then as life continued on, and I witnessed our nation grow more and more blood thirsty and desirous of war with no national security interest apparent, witnessed the lies that officials of both parties told to wage those wars, I came to understand what Oliver Stone and others were saying.

What patriots like Jim Garrison in New Orleans and Colonel Fletcher Prouty at the Pentagon and others have noted about the manipulation of truth for political gain, and corporate treasure, is evident in our day-to-day bureaucracy.

If you step that backward through our recent history of the past years: Obama (Libya, Benghazi, Egypt, Syria, NDAA) George W. Bush (Iraq, Afghanistan, 9/11/2001, Patriot Act), Bill Clinton (NAFTA, Monica and as governor of Arkansas, especially), George H. W. Bush (Desert Storm, Iran-Contra, Panama, and as head of the GOP and CIA in the 1970s), Ronald Reagan (Grenada, USSR, Iran, Nicaragua-Iran Contra, War on Drugs), Jimmy Carter (Iran especially, USSR), Gerald Ford (Chief Pardoner and Warren Commission hijinks), Richard Nixon (Watergate, Laos, Cambodia, as VP in the 1950s), Lyndon Johnson (Vietnam, complicity in the Assassination, Great Society and MORE) and you find yourself back to John F. Kennedy.

John F. Kennedy’s most scandalous facts were in his private life. In his government, his crimes included financial policy that resisted reliance on the Federal Reserve and made enemies of bankers and Wall Street corporations. He resisted Cold War hard-liner attempts to press him into war with the USSR over Cuba, Vietnam, and Berlin. He warmed relations with the Soviets, instead, and discussed arms control and treaties that infuriated the war corporatism industry. He would not give the Joint Chiefs the war they needed to make their corporate clients happy. He had to go.

In recent personal analysis of the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Bay of Pigs, and the Berlin crisis, I have concluded that President Kennedy made enemies through his declination to wage war without a national security interest. No president since had been so hesitant. In his final days, President Eisenhower, a career military man, that had spent his eight years in office replacing conventional weapons strategy with a push button nuclear arsenal, said the gravest threat to our liberty was the “military industrial complex,” and that influence by those that sought to wage war for profit should not be granted.

Where are we now? I believe we’re in the date when Jesus said there would wars and rumors of wars. We hear it every single day. There is some nation we need to straighten out. Does it affect us in any way? No, we just don’t like it. We don’t like their leader or we don’t like their politics. They are no threat to us but maybe they have some natural resource or there’s financial gain to conquering them and expanding the American empire. (Woes betide any nation, however, that observes a need straighten out the USA.)

There is an idea that America doesn’t make mistakes. That if we do it, is okay. After all, who is big enough to take us in hand? President Kennedy, for all his personal moral ambiguity, had a clear sense of responsibility on a global level. If we took the lives of others, or committed to sacrificing the lives of our own people, it had better be worth the price. He believed every nation had to do their own work bringing freedom to their people. He had a long view of history and recognized that the nation with 30,000 nuclear weapons had a responsibility to lead by example and that example was not imperialistic, it was diplomatic. He didn’t buy into the US vs THEM philosophy that has since crippled our foreign policy. Have you noticed how America always has to have a boogeyman?

For years it was the Communist threat, the USSR or Cuba, then it was international terrorism and more recently it is fundamental Islam that has become our enemy. Has anyone considered when and where that fundamentalist vein of Islam derives? At least the Anti-West brand of it? Step it back to realize it came bitterness sown from the United States and British intervention in Middle Eastern affairs to exploit their natural resources unfairly, inhumanely and without invitation to do so.

Sure, I’m not sounding very American. If American means we’re always right and don’t get in our way then I say I’m not American. That’s no different than the young man who stood in front of the tank in Tieananmen Square in the 1980s to defy the armies of despotism to give him liberty or give him death. There was a time in this country when that was a pretty popular notion, too.

We need a Kennedy of the 21st Century to say, we can have liberty and security. It doesn’t show weakness to sit down with our enemies. It shows bravado and hybris (and utter foolishness) to suggest that we are above that. It is also contrary to the faith espoused by religious saber rattling Americans that vote. If you want peace, you must believe in diplomacy. If you want America to be premier, lead by example and govern with humility. Apologize when you are wrong.

Live so that even your enemies are at peace with you. That’s the doctrine for America’s future. Not more bluster and threats and bombings. The cowboy way may have settled the west but it will never bring peace to the globe.

If every nation on earth wants to be Communist, Muslim or otherwise, all we can manage is what happens between Canada and Mexico. If we desire allies and not enemies, there’s fence mending to do. Can we not foreswear our history of meddling and intervening and admit our mistakes in order to move forward?

In the coming days, I will mourn the murder of this man whose policies were good for our nation. I will mourn that because of the good he attempted, forces of evil were marshaled against him. Because of that, two children were robbed of their father, a young wife of her husband and a nation of its hope of balancing the walk between security and freedom. It’s been fifty years. We have never been more unbalanced than now. “National Security” is an excuse for war, for spying on our own citizens, drone attacks both overseas and at home, a growing police state, molestation at airports, censorship of speech, press, “free speech” zones at rallies (out of sight and hearing of officials), and more.

We should mourn this unbalance and look to the words of President Kennedy and his example to resolve that we are “unwilling to witness or permit the slow undoing of those human rights to which this nation has always been committed, and to which we are committed today at home and around the world.”

So when I post about the President’s murder I’m saying that it is time for a reckoning. It’s time to rewind the clock and find a president that doesn’t think diplomacy is weak, and doesn’t see war or invasion the answer to all our problems. This fifty-year cycle must be broken.

One step in restoring America’s moral light is facing the truth about 11/22/1963 and allow the system of Justice to work unobstructed in ferreting out those responsible for the murder of our President. We grieve Trayvon Martin, Jon-Benet Ramsey, Nicole Brown-Simpson and so many others but yet we have NEVER concluded the death of our own President!

And that’s why on November 22, 2013, I will light a candle on my desk and I’ll watch President Kennedy deliver a speech at the American University that includes these lines:

“For in the final analysis, our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet. We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children's futures. And we are all mortal.”

May God Bless the memory of our president and our great nation, that we may understand and honor his sacrifice by adopting policies of peace as President Kennedy taught us.