Pending Questions

By coincidence, I just finished James W. Douglass’s JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters. It led me to wonder aloud—and comment to friends—about the possibility of assassination—pre-July 13.

Douglass compiled a mass of information about the 2-plus years of Kennedy’s presidency, the Bay of Pigs, the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Test Ban Treaty, and Kennedy’s readiness for neutrality in Laos and allegedly Vietnam. Everything that the war party hated.

I hadn’t known how eager Kennedy’s military chiefs were to follow up the Bay of Pigs with an invasion and, in some cases (Remember Curtis LeMay?) to launch a nuclear strike on the USSR. They hated JFK’s compromises in Southeast Asia and resisted disarmament.

They weren’t called neocons back then, but the mentality is recognizable in the unified war party of today, those calling always for more escalation, more belligerence, more “force projection,” and of course more spending on all the supposedly necessary weapons.

Today, like back then, anyone resisting or questioning the drumbeat of war was and is quickly labeled a wuss and a softie for starters, followed by accusations of doing the enemy’s bidding, a virtual or actual traitor (a la Russiagate). Back then, you were smeared as a pinko or outright commie; today’s equivalent is “agent of Putin,” someone who fails to see him as the new Hitler and probably has a secret bank account in rubles. Kennedy had a hard slog getting Senate approval of the Test Ban Treaty until it became clear that he had a potent ally: the American people.

Douglass’s thesis is that the war party—what we have begun to call the Deep State now, headquartered at the CIA—hated JFK and had him whacked. They then covered up the inconvenient facts, threatened and harassed skeptics and witnesses, and quietly eliminated any who wouldn’t shut up. (That list is extensive.) He marshals disturbing evidence to support his conclusions.

Douglass shows through 400 pages how a conspiracy at that level can work with relative ease once people realize the power of the forces determined to impose their official narrative. Many people had important facts that undermined the Oswald-as-assassin story, but they quickly saw how dangerous it was to stick to their stories, even for the first autopsy pathologists who clearly saw the front-entry bullet wound in the president’s remains and later allowed themselves to be misinterpreted.

There’s a lot we don’t know about the July 13 shooting, and old-fashioned incompetence should never be dismissed as an explanation. Why should the Secret Service function any better than the rest of our crumbling institutions?

That said, in piecing together the truth about the attempt on Trump’s life, we should be alert to stonewalling, crazy claims of easily disprovable facts, and especially pressures on eyewitnesses to unsay what they’ve already stated on the record and on camera. We should watch the composition of investigative bodies, check the members’ connections to the intelligence and Homeland Security agencies, and pay attention to the handling of forensic evidence.

We should listen carefully for news of the dead shooter’s recent movements and contacts and an explanation of his curiously opaque past.

Meanwhile, I am frankly shocked by how many people close to me find the attempted murder worthy of kinda-sorta jokes about how close the shooter came. Spare me your sick humor—assassination is no substitute for politics, and also, be careful what you endorse. What goes around, comes around as  Trump—himself the proud assassin of an Iranian general—should recall.