JFK 50 Years On

Charles P. Pierce on JFK's assassination.

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.

The Warren Commission was a natural outgrowth of a mentality that had infected the government from the moment that the government decided that it would build, in secret, a weapon that would not only win World War II, but also have the potential to end civilization if it -- or the men who allegedly were in control of it -- ever ran amok. What historian Garry Wills calls the "Bomb Power" was based from its beginnings in the notion that there were things about their government that the American people need not know. From this came an irresistible impulse to treat the American people -- for whom the Founders intended all of what John Adams called "the awful knowledge" about their leaders -- like fragile children who must be protected at all costs from what their government found necessary to do on their behalf. From this has come a hundred commissions and boards and gatherings of the shamans of the security state -- the slow bureaucratic response to the Watergate crimes, the Tower Commission on Iran-Contra, even the Simpson-Bowles budget commission -- all of which sprang from the notion that the nation's elite should conduct the nation's business in as quiet a manner as possible, so as not to disturb the horses or wake the children. The Warren Commission was the first of these, and it did its job very well. What unruly bloggers call The Village can be said to have been founded in the premise that the American people needed to be shielded, for their own good, from the full knowledge of the facts surrounding the murder of their president in broad daylight in the streets of an American city.
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I don't know if we'll ever settle who shot from where. But I do know that, almost from the start, the government has known more about this event than it has been willing to share with the people who, allegedly, govern themselves through it. It is long past time for that to end. It has been 50 years. So many people connected, in one way or another, and by one person or another, to the events in Dallas are dead. The Soviet Union is dead. Do not protect yourselves by claiming to protect us. We have been protected for too long and from too much of what the government has done in our name. We are not children, huddled at the classroom door, wondering why the nuns are weeping, and why the world has suddenly gone so silent all around us.

I was mercifully shielded from the events surrounding JFK's assassination. It happened on my 4th day in the Marine Corps and consisted of one short announcement from my Drill Instructor, "The President's been shot. Stand by.", and that was it. I got to watch his funeral on an 8-inch black-and-white TV crammed together with about 200 other recruits in a dark, dank shower room. I hardly watched TV during my enlistment, and the war of words about it was raging when I got out three years later.

I'd like to know who did it. The only thing I'm convinced of is that Oswald did not act alone if he acted at all. Too much hearsay/speculation/revelation to the contrary. The Warren Commission was a pack of lies/whitewash/coverup. "Magic bullet" my ass. So far, the best answer is a CIA/Mafia effort, but I don't know for sure. I hope I live long enough for it to come out.