November 22, 1963 . . . and beyond

It’s the 50th anniversary of three notable deaths. Aldous Huxley, author of Brave New World, is often overlooked on the date of his passing because his fame is not as widespread as that of C. S. Lewis, the Christian apologist whose Chronicles of Narnia is read in classrooms. On November 22, 1963, the news that Huxley and Lewis would no longer put pen to paper was put on hold as television, radio, and newspapers (no one used the word “media” much back then) placed all of their focus on John F. Kennedy, the 35th president of the United States who was assassinated in Dallas, Texas early in the afternoon.

I was six-years-old, a first grader at a parochial school where the principal announced the tragedy over the PA system. We stood next to our desks, said a prayer, probably a “Hail Mary” or something equally meaningless, and were dismissed early. Once home, I didn’t really grasp the reason for my mother’s tears. I knew JFK as an image on the black-and-white TV screen, someone not unlike Ben Casey, the doctor played by Vince Edwards on a series popular at the time. There were soon clues that Kennedy was more important than a TV doctor.

Once the news broke, there was no other news. Television covered the story around the clock for four days. There was the news of the assassination attempt, the confirmation that Kennedy was dead, interviews with tearful Americans, the arrest of Lee Harvey Oswald, then Oswald's death at the hands of Jack Ruby, all culminating in Kennedy's funeral on Monday November 25 followed by burial in Arlington Cemetery. Kennedy's body was laid to rest, but his ghost has haunted the country ever since.

There are questions, not only about the possibility of a conspiracy in his death, but about his life and legacy. Was Kennedy a great president comparable to Lincoln and FDR? Or was he simply a great cultural icon, a political Elvis? One thing is certain: He was an inspirational figure to millions of people, including many who were not born in 1963.

Shortly after his father’s death, John Kennedy Jr was asked if he remembered him and where was he now?

"Heaven,” the little boy said.

In November 22, 1963: Reflections on the Life, Assassination, and Legacy of John F. Kennedy by Dean R. Owen, the author quotes Reverend Billy Graham who recalled visiting Kennedy only four days before his inauguration as president in January 1961. Kennedy asked Graham about the Bible and where he believed history was heading. Graham told the newly elected president that history would come to a dramatic end with the second coming of Jesus Christ.

Kennedy said, “I’m interested in that.”

Brian W. Fairbanks

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Lying Bastard Johnson

In summer 1964 during one of my family’s visits to Euclid Beach, an amusement park in Cleveland, Ohio, cotton candy and roller coasters had to compete with politics for the attention of the patrons. Senator Edward Kennedy was present to do his democratic duty by supporting Lyndon Johnson in that year’s presidential race. The uncouth Texan inherited the presidency the previous November after Edward’s brother, John F. Kennedy, was assassinated. On that day at Euclid Beach, Kennedy scribbled his indecipherable autograph for me, and I also got a white Stetson made of hard plastic with an LBJ campaign button attached to the headband. Setting the button aside, I often wore the hat in the years ahead, but I would imagine myself as John Wayne or Clint Eastwood when playing cowboy, not LBJ. Who would want to be him? Wayne and Eastwood did their own shooting even if they only used blanks on a movie set. LBJ used real bullets, but let others pull the trigger for him, not only in Vietnam, but, if a new book is to be believed, much closer to home.

“Lyndon and I both wanted to be president,” a tipsy Richard Nixon told political consultant Roger Stone, “but only he was willing to kill for it.” And he did kill for it, at least according to Stone whose book, The Man Who Killed Kennedy: The Case Against LBJ, was discussed one recent night on Coast to Coast with weekend host John B. Wells.

“Oh boy,” Wells repeatedly said as Stone shared one awful anecdote after another concerning the vile, despicable man who succeeded JFK as president. Johnson owed his political career to bribes, blackmail, threats, and murder, reaching the highest office in the land by engineering the assassination of the man he reluctantly served as vice president. You’ve seen the photo of LBJ being solemnly sworn in next to a shaken Jacqueline Kennedy. But have you seen the other picture, snapped seconds later, when a grinning LBJ winks conspiratorially at a friend in the rear, as if to say, “We pulled it off”?

Sure, he probably did more than any president in promoting civil rights, but, as Stone reports, Johnson was a nasty bully who abused his family, his friends, his associates, and even his dogs. A photo of LBJ picking his beagle off the ground by its ears made the rounds in the ‘60s and still alarms animal lovers. This is the man who painted his republican opponent, Barry Goldwater, as a right wing maniac itching to press the nuclear button while portraying himself as a man of peace who would bring the troops home from Vietnam. After his landslide victory in November 1964, Johnson continued and even accelerated the war.

Johnson and his policies were responsible for much of the violence that tore the country apart in 1968, including the riots that disrupted that summer’s democratic convention. By then, he was so despised even by his own party that he didn’t have a prayer at the ballot box. Rather than risk a humiliating defeat, he went on TV to announce he would not seek or accept his party’s nomination. You could say we have Johnson to thank for Richard Nixon.

It’s certainly no surprise to think that Johnson had a role in JFK’s assassination. Until Stone, however, few regarded him as the key figure that set the plot in motion with his Texas cronies. It was Johnson who insisted that JFK visit Dallas, a trip that Kennedy was dreading. And it was Johnson’s equally devious pal, Texas Governor John Connally, who insisted that JFK take the route he did. The assassins were lying in wait, and another Johnson chum, Jack Ruby, was waiting to silence the alleged assassin, the “patsy,” as Lee Harvey Oswald described himself, two days later.

You won’t hear any of this on television during the week leading up to the 50th anniversary of that awful day in Dallas. Television is doing its part to drown out all conspiracy theories and to continue promoting the lie. On Nova, George Clooney lovingly narrated an account of television’s coverage of the tragedy, even depicting Walter Cronkite as some kind of hero. Bill O’ Reilly, the chinless twit of Fox News, has already done his part for the cover-up by putting his name on Killing Kennedy, a book that is the basis for a movie on the National Geographic channel that resurrects the long discredited lone gunman theory. All the other familiar talking heads will also serve their corporate masters by concealing and even mocking the truth. We’ll hear the standard line trotted out to address and quickly dismiss the conspiracy theories: “People just can’t accept that a nobody like Oswald could change the course of history and take out a president, especially one as glamorous as Kennedy.”

No, people just can’t accept a story that is contradicted, and quite dramatically at that, by the evidence. The Zapruder film, unseen by the public until 12 years after the fact, completely demolishes the lone assassin story. To accept the Warren Commission Report as the truth requires even more imagination than I had when pretending to be a cowboy in that stupid LBJ hat.

Brian W. Fairbanks

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Jerome Corsi asks: Who Really Killed Kennedy?

Jerome R. Corsi's Who Really Killed Kennedy? kept me reading over three consecutive nights, but for a die-hard conspiracy theorist who has already explored alternative histories of the 1963 assassination, it offers few revelations and fails to acknowledge what may have been the most significant factor in the 35th U.S. president’s death: John F. Kennedy’s decision in June 1963 to issue currency through the United States Treasury, as the Constitution requires, a fearless or foolhardy move that threatened the Federal Reserve’s stranglehold on the economy. Kennedy bravely took on the Mafia and the CIA, swearing to smash the latter into a thousand pieces and scatter it to the wind, but that may have been child’s play compared to challenging the banking establishment that likely controls both.

Despite that omission, Corsi’s book is a valuable crash course on the Kennedy assassination, gathering evidence from a variety of sources to summarize what is now known or plausibly suspected concerning the shocking events in Dallas on November 22, 1963.

The characters already familiar to us from Oliver Stone’s 1991 film, and dozens of other documentaries and books (the best of which remains The Assassinations, edited by James DiEugenio and Lisa Pease) reappear in Corsi’s pages. They include such now infamous figures as Lee Harvey Oswald who did not act alone and may not have acted at all in pulling the trigger, and Jack Ruby, the nightclub owner with Mafia ties, who did pull the trigger on Oswald, not in a fit of psychotic patriotism, as the white-washed version claims, but on orders from people that both men knew and likely worked with. Allen Dulles, the CIA director, fired by Kennedy after the Bay of Pigs fiasco, is the chief culprit in Corsi’s view, an amoral son of privilege who had solicited help from Nazis in forming the agency and joined forces with organized crime and foreign assassins to eliminate the president. Also slithering about, certainly involved at least on the periphery, are three future presidents: Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, and George H. W. Bush.

Few people today accept the official Warren Commission report, a tall tale that is sure to receive heavy rotation in the mainstream media this year, the 50th anniversary of JFK’s death. In a way, I almost envy those naïve dreamers who continue to believe it. The story of a lone assassin and his magic bullet is a comforting fantasy, far less frightening than the truth. Since the lies are still so aggressively promoted, it’s clear that the Kennedy assassination was about much more than the elimination of one man, and the powerful forces behind it are still in power today.

Jerome Corsi sees the big picture, and connects the assassination to the New World Order, that utopia for corporate and banking interests that will be a prison or death sentence for the rest of us. Read Who Killed Kennedy? Read it and weep - for Kennedy, for your country, and for yourself.

Brian W. Fairbanks

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JFK: Liberal or Conservative?

In his inaugural address in 1961, John F. Kennedy, who at age 43 was the second youngest man elected to the U.S. presidency, spoke of the torch being passed to a new generation of Americans. Nearly three decades later, when 46-year-old William J. Clinton took the oath of office, we had all seen the black-and-white photo of a teenaged Clinton shaking hands with JFK. To democrats, it seemed symbolic of further torch passing. In reality, it was a handshake and nothing more.

History is written by the victors. Sadly, JFK’s assassination prevented him from joining that club. With his death, the historians took over, distorting the man and his legacy. When the handsome Irishman isn’t portrayed as a lecherous bed-hopper who turned the White House into a brothel, he is held up as the embodiment of modern liberalism.

In JFK, Conservative, Ira Stoll makes the case that the 35th president’s true heir was not the democrats that followed him as commander-in-chief (Lyndon Johnson, Jimmy Carter, Clinton, and Barack Obama), but Ronald Reagan who, like Kennedy, opposed oppressive government regulations, favored tax cuts to boost an ailing economy, stood firm against Communism, and held a deep religious faith.

In his lifetime, Kennedy rejected the “liberal” label. As a newly elected Senator in 1953, he told The Saturday Evening Post that he was “not a liberal at all,” adding “I’m not comfortable with those people.” A friend, Washington columnist Joseph Alsop, remembered Kennedy as regarding “those people” with “Genuine contempt. He really was – contemptuous is the right word for it.” Nor did liberals think highly of him. In 1958, Eleanor Roosevelt told a TV reporter that she would do all she could to prevent a “conservative” like Kennedy from winning the democratic presidential nomination.

Kennedy did win the nomination, and went on to face his republican opponent, vice president Richard Nixon, in a series of televised debates. Unfortunately, the debates are remembered less for what the candidates said than for how they looked.

“I don’t believe in big government,” Kennedy told the American television audience. The democrat and supposed liberal who, in producer Don Hewitt’s view, “looked like a young Adonis,” also took a hard line against Communism, warned of criminal control of labor unions, and vowed to prevent Red China from gaining admittance to the United Nations. Nixon, plagued by five o’ clock shadow and a pool of perspiration on his lower lip, promised higher salaries for government employees, expressed a need for more taxes, and warned that Kennedy’s support for the opponents of Fidel Castro was “dangerously irresponsible.” As Nixon related in his memoirs, “Kennedy conveyed the image – to 60 million people – that he was tougher on Castro and communism than I was.”

Free trade and tax cuts took precedence over liberalism’s pet issues during the Kennedy administration while the later presidency of “conservative” Richard Nixon was characterized by wage and price controls, the first presidential visit to Moscow, and the opening of relations between the U.S. and Red China.

Kennedy’s politics were influenced, Stoll believes, by his spiritual beliefs. The author argues that religion played a bigger role in Kennedy’s life than we’ve been led to believe. In his inaugural address, Kennedy said “the rights of man come not from the generosity of the state but from the hand of God.” Two of Kennedy’s aides, Kenneth O’ Donnell and David Powers, remember that “Kennedy was a more deeply religious man than he appeared to be or wanted to appear to be.” If he did not always live a Christian life away from the prying eyes of the media, he did something else when no photographers were present: he prayed and attended church services.

“The informing spirit of the American character has always been a deep religious sense,” he once said. Kennedy also quoted Alexis de Tocqueville: “Where there is no respect for God, can there be much for man?”

There’s little question that the definition of “liberalism” has changed in the five decades since JFK was in the oval office. It could be argued that liberalism once meant protecting the minority from the majority and letting the individual flourish. Now, the respect for man that de Tocqueville spoke of has been replaced by respect for mankind which, for today's leftists, is a collectivist stance that ignores the individual and defines everyone according to race, gender, economic class, and sexual orientation. Everyone is now part of a separate group that eyes with suspicion the group to which they don’t belong. And each group wants to know what their country can do for them, not what they can do for their country.

That is not the America that JFK, Conservative, or even JFK, the liberal of an earlier era, bravely led for too short a time.


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