A Weekend in Dallas
Revisiting political assassinations. And a welcome.
Housekeeping
I’ve made a Substack because there is a chance that Twitter goes under and hedging bets is important. However, I think that what I said 11 days ago stands:
I don’t intend to use this as a space for the kinds of writing that I do for magazines, websites, etc. I believe in editors and editorial endeavors and institutional structures and centralized knowledge. But a little anarchy every now and then never hurt anyone.
There’s no plan to “monetize” this list, but I plan to market Blowback stuff and my future writing for publications and whatever other stuff I happen to be cooking up.
11/22/63
I went to Dallas this past weekend to attend a pair of conferences on the John F. Kennedy assassination. Since making the second season of Blowback, I’ve come to believe in the importance of revisiting the era of political assassinations in America. Archival, journalistic, and often academic records indicate, at minimum, that elements of the American D.C. and military intelligence communities, organized crime, and anti-Castro Cuban exiles collaborated in a successful plot to kill President John F. Kennedy.
That we can say as much as the above, with high confidence, comes from a perhaps surprising but undeniable source: Oliver Stone’s 1991 movie JFK, whose popularity led Congress to create the Assassination Records Review Board (ARRB). The subsequent declassifications of CIA, FBI, Secret Service, Customs and hundreds of thousands of other records have further filled in an operational portrait of November 22, 1963 sketched out over the past decades by a wide assortment of historians, independent researchers, left-wing activists, and legendary muckrakers.
The granularity of the JFK assassination has for decades been its defining feature, perhaps the majority of the files of fed flotsam through which the narrator of Don DeLillo’s Libra must sift. And it’s true: the forensics and Dealey Plaza witness statements and meat-and-potatoes crime are compelling details on their own. When Geraldo Rivera aired Robert Groden’s copy of the famed Zapruder film on “Good Night America” in 1975, millions of Americans for the first time saw what DeLillo himself later described to The Paris Review as a kind of civic-religious experience:
Kennedy was shot on film, Oswald was shot on TV. Does this mean anything? Maybe only that Oswald’s death became instantly repeatable. It belonged to everyone. The Zapruder film, the film of Kennedy’s death, was sold and hoarded and doled out very selectively. It was exclusive footage. So that the social differences continued to pertain, the hierarchy held fast—you could watch Oswald die while you ate a TV dinner, and he was still dying by the time you went to bed, but if you wanted to see the Zapruder film you had to be very important or you had to wait until the 1970s when I believe it was shown once on television, or you had to pay somebody thirty thousand dollars to look at it—I think that’s the going rate.
The Zapruder film is a home movie that runs about eighteen seconds and could probably fuel college courses in a dozen subjects from history to physics. And every new generation of technical experts gets to take a crack at the Zapruder film. The film represents all the hopefulness we invest in technology. A new enhancement technique or a new computer analysis—not only of Zapruder but of other key footage and still photographs—will finally tell us precisely what happened.
DeLillo’s faith in technology circa 1993 was half-correct. Josiah “Tink” Thompson, a private investigator who was hired by LIFE magazine as part of its team covering the event, published a 1967 bestseller considered among the most persuasive of its time called Six Seconds in Dallas. (Although I missed his talk this weekend, he was present at one of the conferences) In 2021 he published an update, Last Second in Dallas, which describes a painstaking forensic audio investigation of a Dallas motorcycle cop’s hot mic, additional windshield glares, and other physical details that indicate the presence of multiple shooters.
That you can go to Dealey Plaza and identify where a bullet broke a piece of sidewalk, and that the Sixth Floor Museum allows you to recreate Lee Harvey Oswald’s alleged performance with a cruddy bolt-action mail-order rifle, is a further kind of seduction. The Warren Commission’s charge that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone, as did his assassin, wannabe mafioso Jack Ruby, was at odds with reams of forensic evidence in its own appendices. These include glaring holes in the chain of custody of key evidence, as well as the multiple eyewitnesses of activity on the “grassy knoll” from which they believed a shot or shots were fired, and the botched autopsy of the president.
But DeLillo was only half-correct. Criminal forensic science is a speculative art that incorporates and interprets various scientific practices and observations. Tink Thompson and others (such as Dr. Cyril Wecht, past president of the American Academy of Forensic Sciences, to name the most respected) have assembled honest and thoroughgoing material that testifies to the best of what this can mean. The worst of forensics is increasingly known to all. Every week brings a new story of a physical or chemical tests used by law enforcement that is bupkis, and yet was instrumental in locking up an innocent person. Forensic pathology can occasionally address the question of how an event unfolded but offers less in the way of why — motive and causation, more salient factors in determining historical truth. So, to answer DeLillo’s call from the past: precisely what happened?
The short version is this: on November 22, 1963 — 59 years ago today — Kennedy was killed and was replaced by Lyndon Johnson. In the months prior to his death, the Kennedy administration had taken the first steps toward breaking with the Joint Chiefs, National Security Council, CIA, FBI and other agencies on key questions. A diplomatic backchannel between the White House and Castro was opening up. Leading organized crime figures such as Carlos Marcello, the “Little Man” in charge of New Orleans and Dallas rackets, had come under increased Justice Department scrutiny. Although escalation in Vietnam was a more distant fork in the road, “Cowboy” military industrialists in the Sunbelt correctly sensed hesitation from “Yankee” Eastern financiers about a substantial military reinvestment just as the inflation threat was beginning to rear its head in the mid-1960s.
This was a replay of an older Cold War battle, between the forces of “containment” (Harry Truman, Dean Acheson, George Kennan) and “rollback” (Douglas MacArthur, most Republicans, Birchers, etc.) who had fought over control of the Korean War, and whether the war in East Asia would be permitted to blossom into a third World War.
The current war in Ukraine, though being waged between a nuclear power and a proxy for a nuclear power, does not, I believe, bring us close to the same kind of armageddon that was around the corner in the 1950s and 1960s. The dropping of the atomic bomb was a fresher memory in those years, and Truman felt compelled at the height of the Korean War to publicly insist that he wouldn’t rule out using the A-bomb (much to the chagrin of American allies in Korea). Despite press anxieties over Putin nuclear “threats,” the same kind of strategic tension that led to the use of the atomic bomb in 1945 — forcing an unconditional Japanese surrender to the U.S. rather than a negotiated peace with Soviet forces —does not exist in 2022. And any use of nuclear weapons now would push their operators into pariah territory.
But while I feel the threat of world war is diminished, in part due to a level of global economic integration that did not exist at the end of World War II, the Cold War culture that produced a spectacular string of political murders in the 1960s and onward is very much still with us, a malevolent spectral influence that desires a world society still centered on capital accumulation.
John F. Kennedy was no secret socialist. However, the drift of his government away from 110% commitment to war machine that maintains American neo-colonial influence, to borrow Kwame Nkrumah’s term, led to his execution in Dallas. And in answering why such an act came to pass, I am thus left wondering: what might happen if someone were try and seriously change such a trajectory today? Is anyone really brave enough to try?