Debuting "The American Friend"

I'm writing a new column over at Defector.

I am a very lucky guy. Late last year, I pitched David Roth at Defector Media on the idea of doing a monthly global politics column. He and his smart, wise colleagues agreed to my pitch. Today marks the publication of the first edition of THE AMERICAN FRIEND. If you want to read the article, click here. It’s substantially longer than and topically apart from what I expect future columns to be like.

Shout out to Dan McQuade for coming up with this cool badge to put on the artwork accompanying the column:

Now to business. Here’s how the first edition of THE AMERICAN FRIEND begins. Thank you for reading:

The simplest way to start is at the end. On Nov. 22, 1963, President John F. Kennedy was shot to death while riding in a motorcade in Dallas, Texas. Kennedy was killed by a bullet to the head. Wounded in the attack was Texas Governor John Connally, and dead elsewhere in the city was Dallas cop J.D. Tippit. All three crimes were attributed, after his arrest on the premises of the Texas Theater, to Lee Harvey Oswald.

Oswald is the anchor enigma of the crime because he was shot and killed two days later, Nov. 24, by a local nightclub owner named Jack Ruby. The Warren Commission, convened by President Lyndon Johnson, issued its final report in 1964 and concluded that Oswald had wounded Connally and killed Kennedy and Tippit all by his lonesome. There was no “conspiracy,” left-wing or right, a conclusion that fit prerogatives privately laid out in a Justice Department memo on the same day, Nov. 25, 1963, that JFK himself was laid to rest. 

The Warren Commission could only guess at the motives of Oswald, an ex-Marine who defected to the Soviet Union and returned with a Russian wife before moving between Dallas and New Orleans, but the Commission determined that Ruby had impulsively killed Oswald out of affection for the dead president and his living wife. Ruby died in custody, mentally unwell and of cancer, in January 1967. In April 1968, Martin Luther King Jr. was shot while visiting striking sanitation workers in Memphis, Tenn.; a couple months later, Bobby Kennedy, who had served as his brother’s attorney general and had grown something of a liberal conscience in the intervening years, met the same fate in the kitchen of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles, the night of the California Democratic primary, which he had won.

If the assassinations themselves were experienced as shocks—traumas in the literal sense, violent departures from assumed social trajectories connected to the fates of left-of-center heroes—the true cognition shift came with…

Click here to keep reading. See you soon.