« I know my friends have | Main | All of us were horrified »
November 22, 2003
Tales From The Assassination
I suppose I'd be derelict if I didn't write about the JFK assassination today, on this 40th anniversary of the event. Given my unique connection to the case - a connection that only a dozen or so people in my generation share - this day has a different feel to me than it does to even those who lived through that searing afternoon.
Even all these years later, it still boggles my mind that I (who was born in 1968) spent 1994-1997 working for a commission concerned with a 1963 murder - an event that had happened more than 30 years prior, and five years before I was even born! That's actually one of the first things that comes to my mind when someone mentions the Kennedy assassination - the incredible charisma that John Fitzgerald Kennedy had. 40 years ago, a man was killed; yet that individual had so much charisma and so much star power that today, even people who were born a decade after his death still find his persona magnetic, and still consider his death one of the great tragedies of the 20th century.
Yes, we know now that so much of the Kennedy mystique was manufactured... he was a serial philanderer, and many of his conquests would probably be considered date rape by contemporary standards; he was reckless and arrogant; there is strong evidence that his father worked with the Chicago mob to steal the 1960 election; and he was on amphetamines and all sorts of drugs while he was President, due to his back condition. We know all of that... and yet still, his character, his persona draws people to believe in Camelot even though we know it was a lie. Manufactured or not, it takes an incredible amount of charisma and magnetism to pull that off. My whole life, I've wished for that kind of charisma, that "something" that makes everyone in the room know that you're there as soon as you walk in, and just draws them to you as the center of everything, a sort or vortex that draws the entire room toward you and makes you THE MAN. In that respect alone, if for no other, I respect the hell out of John F. Kennedy.
I know, you want me to get to the assassination. Christopher, you worked on the case for three and a half years; you saw all the files the government doesn't want us to see; you talked to people who were really involved in the whole thing. You MUST know something that we don't... so what *really* happened on November 22, 1963? Well... do you really want to know? You wanna know the deepest, darkest, most dastardly secret the American government has in its closet? Come closer... I can't say it out loud, so I have to whisper it... lean in close to me, and I'll tell you... here goes:
I... have... no... idea.
One of the great conundrums I learned about this case is that the chain of evidence and the (deliberate?) holes in the official story are so screwed up beyond repair that it is impossible for even two people to interpret the case the exact same way. They may draw the same conclusion, but they'll have different opinions or interpretations as to how they reached that conclusion and why. On the Assassination Records Review Board, we had 25 people working on the case. Even though we were specifically charged NOT to reach a conclusion as an organization, all 25 of us had opinions. We ranged the gamut going in, from die-hard Warren Commission defenders to a conspiracy buff so radical he made Oliver Stone look rational. And when it was over, after all 25 of us spent three plus years looking at the same evidence, we still had 25 different opinions and conclusions. So the one thing I can say without question or reservation is this: No one will ever know the true and complete story of what happened on November 22, 1963. Whether Oswald did it himself or was wholly uninvolved, there are just too many questions that will never be answered, and we'll never have a 100% complete and accurate account of that day's events.
All right, all right... don't call me a tease. I'll get to it. Fine, you say - no one will ever know the truth. You still have to have an opinion, Christopher. What happened??
Here's my opinion, though it be no more valid than anyone else's. This is NOT an official theory or based on any inside knowledge, this is just what I think after having studied the case for as long as I did. First of all, on the shooting... I count five shots, every time I watch the Zapruder film, every time I think of the day when we looked at Kennedy's actual clothing from the day, every time I consider the medical evidence. I personally think there had to be five shots. The first missed the car completely; it hit the curb in front of the car, where curb fragments opened a small cut on the cheek of one of the witnesses, James Tague. I think the second shot hit Kennedy in the throat from the front. The third was something close to a dud, hit Kennedy in the back but made little more than a surface wound. The fourth hit Governor Connolly from the back, and the fifth and final shot, the kill shot, hit Kennedy from the front and to the right. Yes, I believe there was a shooter on the Grassy Knoll.
Now, what do I think that means? Who was the second shooter, and what/whom did he represent? Who orchestrated the conspiracy? I can't tell you. Not because I know and just am forbidden or afraid to tell you - if I knew, I'd say it. I can't tell you because I don't know. I *am* sure it was not Lyndon Johnson, nor the CIA as an organization, nor the "military-industrial complex" as a whole. I don't think there was a palace coup that day, orchestrated from within. My best guess is that there was a loose configuration of right-wing elements - rabid anti-Casto Cubans, elements of the Mafia, rogue anti-Communist Americans (including rogue operatives who may at one point have been contracted by the US government for work in the intelligence capers of the time, like overthrowing Arbenz in Guatamala or trying to kill Castro), and far right wing businessmen who didn't like Kennedy's social or economic agenda. It wasn't some massive plot by the Right to overthrow the government, it was just a handful of right wing nut jobs, the McVeighs and Coulters of their time, who in my mind pulled it off.
Now, the "cover-up." I don't think the Warren Commission ever intended to do a real investigation of the case. I think they were formed to cover the US Government's butt. For two reasons: one, at the height of the Cold War, the Secret Service and FBI had messed up, and the President of the United States had been killed. We couldn't just say, "folks, we'll never know the truth... and oh by the way, here are the specific details of how we screwed up." No, at that time there needed to be an open and shut case, without foreign involvement, and without complexities - and that's what the Warren Commission delivered.
The second reason is that I do not believe that Lee Harvey Oswald's defection to the Soviet Union was real. I believe he was a part of a fake defector program run by American intelligence to place operatives - even if they were only there to learn about what the Soviet system might do with defectors. It isn't such a wild theory. We know the Soviets ran false defectors to the West all the time. The Cold War was on, and I frankly HOPE our intelligence community was doing stuff like that - we SHOULD have been. Be that as it may, I think Oswald was a fake defector, and the Warren Commission knew early on that any real investigation of him with end up blowing his cover story as a lie, and exposing the defector program - which would have endangered the lives of other operatives. So, they had a ready-made cover story that had already been worked on for years... they had their single shooter and their easy explanation, and they constructed their entire case around protecting and building up that theory - ignoring any evidence to the contrary, and in some cases perhaps manipulating existing evidence or testimony in order to do so. The Warren Commission wasn't the fox guarding the chicken coop, as many suggest, there to make sure the coup plotters weren't exposed; but they were there to protect the official story, even at the expense of the whole truth. I can virtually 100% guarantee you that had a prosecutor gone to trial with the Warren Commission's case, any fair minded jury would have taken less than a day to come back with a not guilty verdict - the government just did not prove its case.
I'm not endorsing the conspiracy theorists - far from it. 95% of them are whack jobs who figuratively still live in their parents' basement with a pair of Vulcan ears hanging on the bedpost and with Dungeons and Dragons paraphenalia all around. Oliver Stone took "dramatic license" to a whole new definition in his film - in fact, my proudest achievement at the ARRB, in my mind, was doing the research before our deposition of Fletcher Prouty, who was the basis for Stone's "Mr. X" character played by Donald Sutherland. I think we proved beyond the shadow of a doubt - and anyone who reads the transcripts would have to agree - that Prouty's story is dubious at best, and a wholly sensationalized concoction at worst. In my opinion, we proved his entire story and premise to be a falsehood - and though it's not my voice on much of the tape, nor me being credited with the questions in the transcripts, believe you me that I was the one who did the research and prepped my bosses with the right questions to ask. One of the buggest purveyors of hooey got exposed, in my opinion - and *my* work made it happen. So please don't count me in with the nut jobs who think LBJ AND the CIA AND the Mafia AND anti-Castro Cubans AND the miliary industrial complex AND Big Oil killed Kennedy so that we could stay in Vietnam OR go back to overthrowing Castro OR protect Big Oil OR reverse the Civil Rights movement.
So, 40 years later... here we are. We went into Vietnam, we lost, and we got out. And today, we're back, though this time as welcome visitors. The Civil Rights movement happened anyway, thankfully, and we are a more diverse culture than we ever were. JFK died, his brother ascended, then died; his other brother ascended and then descended from Chappaquiddick bridge. JAn entire generation knows the name "John Kennedy" as the cute guy who Elaine fantasized about in the Master of Your Domain episode of Seinfeld, who published a mediocre magzaine, and then fell from the sky. The Challenger explosion and now September 11, 2001 have replaced November 22, 1963 as the moments most indeliably seared into the living memory of the American consciousness. And yet we still talk about this man, and his death still is ranked by the public as one of the greatest American tragedies. And his death and the pain around it permanently impacted my life.
I got a job as a 26 year old fresh from the Midwestern prairies, investigating the death of a man murdered five years before I was even born. I went to Washington from small town Minnesota, and got to see the "magic bullet" and Jackie's pink suit with my own eyes. I got to interview a guy who'd once contracted with the CIA to train Cuban exiles for the re-invasion of Cuba and overthrow of Castro; as I walked from his house to my car after the interview, he called me back to him, put his arm around my shoulder and said softly, "You seem like a good kid; don't get too close to the truth, or They'll get you. Just leave well enough alone." (Probably paranoid bunk, but how cool is it that I actually got to have someone say that to me in a context and circumstance where it seemed plausible and not just a part of some cheesy, hack spy thriller plot?) I got to sit in the parts of the Pentagon that aren't there and talk military intelligence operations with men who knew the men who'd run those operations in the 50s and 60s. I got to do the research that thoroughly debunks one of the grandest, most widely discussed conspiracy theories, and the guy who pushes it.
I got to talk with the man who'd run the CIA's Berlin station in the 60s when the Wall went up, and find out first hand what it was like to be there at that time. My papers - the papers of some brash and overly cocky 20something from a small Minnesota town - are still on file at the National Archives; you could go into that massive library and ask to see my files, and you'd get six boxes full of 'em. Pretty darn cool, I have to say. I got bored by the end of it, and I clashed with my bosses (to whom I now offer an unabashed apology, because time, experience, maturity and years of therapy have brought me to an understanding of just what a pain in the ass I really was!)... but at the end of the day, I was able to do all these things, and have an amazing chapter in my life.
And all because we as a culture are still fascinated with the life, and death, of a man who died before more than half of all living Americans were even born. Only in America, folks. Only in America.
