RECALLING THE MURDER OF PRESIDENT JOHN F KENNEDY, SIXTY ONE YEARS AGO

As readers who have read my book LBJ and the Conspiracy to Kill Kennedy: A Coalescence of Interests are aware, on Friday, November 22, 1963, sixty-one years ago this very day, I was home sick from school, sitting on the living room floor and carefully sipping a bowl of chicken soup, watching television while my mother was sewing on the couch next to me, and watching her soap opera, As the World Turns (an old and popular CBS soap opera of that era). At some time after 11:00 AM the program's video was interrupted and the Lidless Eye logo of CBS flashed on the screen with the audio interrupting the program for a special announcement that the president had been shot.  From there the news became progressively dimmer, and by nightfall we were watching and hearing reports of the new president's swearing in, the capture of Oswald. The rest of the weekend unfolded accordingly, and on that Sunday we were all glued to our television sets as Jack Ruby stepped from the crowd in the basement of the Dallas police department, and shot Lee Harvey Oswald live, on national television.  Just before Ruby stepped from the crowd and shouted "Oswald!" a car horn honked, as if giving a signal.

The whole thing, from start to finish, even to a boy only six years old as I was at the time, left an indelible impression, not the least of which was that the rosy patriotic view of America that I had been taught and read about, was simply not true. The lies confounded as the official narrative of the Warren Report was released a little over a year later. The report's findings were excerpted in almost every newspaper and magazine around the country, and I well remember looking at the diagram of the "magic bullet" in the paper, a diagram taken directly from the Warren Report itself, and turning to my father and stating matter-of-factly that "bullets don't do that." The whole thing - the whole thing - was a lie, and at seven years old I knew it, and our entire family knew it, and all of our family's friends knew it. I never ever again trusted the government, nor any of the shining city on a hill/indispensible nation narratives we kept telling ourselves ever since.  As I grew older and approached "draft age", the Vietnam War and its utter senselessness (and futility) drove the point home even more....

... as did the other two big assassinations of the 60s: that of Dr. Martin Luther King, and that of Senator Robert F. Kennedy Sr....

And now, we've come full circle, perhaps to the close of a long, miserable, and nasty arc of American history, that arc stretching from the JFK assassination, until now, for the son of assassinated Senator Robert F Kennedy and the nephew of that assassinated President now stands nominated by a Republican president to be the Secretary of Health and Human Services, a Kennedy who has raised serious issues about the state of science behind Covid and vaccines and big pharma's influence in general. A trial lawyer who has tried such cases successfully. And now he stands as the first Kennedy since his father and his uncle all those decades ago poised to enter the executive branch of government.

What all of this portends I do not know. But there is one thing about all of this that I do think is true: the old lying narratives, from JFK to covid and all the shining-claptrap-on-a-hill in between those two poles,  are coming to an end. No one believes those narratives any more nor the propatainment media promoting them.

It may not be the kind of justice that John F. Kennedy's or Robert F. Kennedy Sr.'s murders require or deserve, for the real conspirators and perpetrators were never apprehended to face any justice. But with the unraveling of trust in those institutions perhaps we are seeing an even deeper justice. We were told that Ruby murdered Oswald from some sort of misplaced sense of "patriotism."  We were told by the propatainment media all throughout this last election cycle that a certain segment of the voting population were racists, mysoginists, deplorables, garbage, or Nazis and Fascists, which is in this context  extremely interesting, because after shooting Oswald, his murderer, Jack Ruby, subsequently gave an interview in which he tried to warn the American public that the conspiracy behind the murder of President Kennedy was to usher in a whole new kind of fascist government, to fundamentally change the country... long before those words were uttered by Barack Obama, and long before the propatainment media openly showed its own fascism by denouncing its political opponents as everything short of the devil himself.

So maybe, just maybe, the return of a Kennedy, the late president's nephew, to the executive department of government means that at long last we have turned the corner from that awful event, and may learn who the perpetrators are.

Only can only hope.

See you on the flip side...

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