11-22 and The Way Things Are

So much for diplomacy. As for an informed electorate, all major American newspapers and television networks are owned by defense corporations like G.E. The Permanent Warfare State has absorbed the media into its own project, neutralizing mainstream American journalism. Even the largest and oldest Leftist journal, The Nation, utterly fails the JFK test that any reliable news outlet must pass. In this case, as in 9-11, journalistic integrity can be measured by the frequency with which the phrase "intelligence failures" appears in its pages. Crime and failure are not the same thing.

Elsewhere on the Left, Noam Chomsky and Alexander Cockburn seem to me quite wrong about 11-22 and its significance, but they are vocal and passionate critics of the long history of global CIA violence and political sabotage. Yet both writers argue that leadership figures count so much less than the elites they represent, that it doesn't much matter who's in office. This kind of thinking prizes independence more than insight; since everyone else quarrels over who killed JFK and what it means, one can easily find a fresh position by simply declaring that the assassination itself is a red herring, the wrong place to look for an understanding of politico-economic reality. A single hearing of the American University Speech, a single reading of NSAM-263, ought to persuade anyone so circumspect as Noam Chomsky that unique officeholders do emerge, at least once or twice per century.

Because of their genius and the painful but powerful psychic integrity of their inner lives, the brothers Kennedy were gradually transformed from opportunistic anti-communists into prophets of peace, justice, and diplomacy. Having read NSAMs 263 and 273, having heard the recordings of the American University speech and Robert Kennedy's speech at Cape Town, and having seen the Zapruder film one thousand times, we at Lancer understand the monumental and unique struggle that began in January 1961 and ended in June 1968. Whereas Rush To Judgement was the best-selling book in America throughout 1966, most of today's journalistic readership considers the passage of the JFK Records Act a proof that there is nothing significant in the files, so that reading about them would be a waste of effort. Paradoxically and yet predictably, the passage of the JFK Records Act marks the beginning of the period in which 11-22-63 no longer matters much in the official political order. Even if by some miracle LBJ, Hoover, Ed Lansdale and Alan Dulles were posthumously tried and found heinously guilty, nothing would change in the affairs of the current regime. The Carter Administration marks the end of presidential politics for the victors of 1964 and their hangers on. Current and future administrations do not share with Johnson, Nixon, and Ford the personal terror of being found out regarding "The Whole Bay of Pigs thing."

Disputes among critics are harmless compared to the government's assault on the public mind. Given what we now know about the national and global consequences of this assassination, our trouble in 2002 has grown more or less directly out of 11-22-63. It seems to me there is a Political Justice Movement in the United States today, of which the Committee on Political Assassinations (COPA) and JFKLancer are crucial parts. It is small yet, and its growth is not keeping pace with the rapidly escalating need for it. But in response to the pressures of recession, the Patriot Act, endless war, and the events of 9-11-01, the Political Justice movement is indeed growing, and many of those drawn to it find themselves led on as if by a specter to the Kennedy Assassination. Whether their initial interest is in heroin traffic, CIA black ops, police malfeasance, Constitutional history, the Federal Reserve, US-Latin American economic partnership, or any other aspect of the modern world, sooner or later the myriad implications of this event become relevant, and on looking at the evidence, another critic is born.

From my perspective, the heart of the matter is this:

(a)   The forty years since 11-22 have been disastrous for global peace and democracy because of CIA-driven U.S. militarism, and

(b)   The powers of the Presidency have been usurped by this process and its unaccountable participants.

It's critically important that Americans achieve an awareness of these two facts, and a modicum of the evidence for each. As U.S. citizens say, "THEY" killed JFK. But we tend to say "WE" created Bin Laden, Hussein, Trujillo, The Shah, Samoza, and the rest. Until Americans learn to distinguish between the People and the CIA, political justice will remain frozen. They can come to an awareness of this with or without the JFK story; and they need not share our high regard for the incoming Administration of 1961. Some feel that Thomas Jefferson was the last strong, diplomacy-oriented President. So long as they come to notice the harm done them by the Deep Politics of militarism, there is still hope for the United States.

Most of the people who killed the Kennedys and Dr. King are dead now. The methods of the unpunished conspirators and opportunistic accessories continue and many of their Pre-Carter secrets remain hidden, despite the heroic efforts of the much-maligned Church Committee and its successors. But the secret history of the JFK Assassination is -- thanks in part to Harold Weissberg, John Judge, Rex Bradford, Peter Dale Scott and, ironically, Bill Clinton -- no longer mysterious; in the background of day-to-day politics, the threat of murder haunts the American state. At the October 26^th "Not In Our Name" rally in NYC's Central Park, one of the 25 thousand demonstrators carried a sign that read, "DEMOCRACY IS OVER." In dark moments like the 9-11 attacks, Paul Wellstone's murder, and every November 22^nd since 1963, Americans must ask themselves whether this shocking assertion is correct.

Among our predecessors we might do well to include the 19^th Century Abolitionists, whose efforts to abolish slavery were driven by a passionate commitment to the utopian core of 18^th Century American ideals. Whereas the Constitution was shaped by a troubled mixture of democracy and elitism, the Declaration of Independence harbors the sleeping giant of freedom and equality. Abolitionism rode into success on the back of President Lincoln's agonizing War against Secession. In the period of Reconstruction that followed, there was a serious drive for universal suffrage, a tiny but emergent culture of mutual respect and civic solidarity, and the election of the first African Americans to Congress (Joseph H. Rainey of South Carolina became the first African American Member of Congress in 1870, five years after Lincoln's murder; Shirley Chisholm of New York became the first African American Congresswoman in 1968, five years after the murder of John F. Kennedy). The Assassination of President Lincoln destroyed this state of affairs and perpetuated the legacy of white supremacy that has vitiated American experience at home and abroad for the last hundred years. Lyndon Johnson effectively stole from RFK the credit for authorship of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, and--like the War on Poverty, it withered on the vine when Vietnam hit it.

In John F. Kennedy and the Second Reconstruction, Carl Brauer takes serious account of the conflicts over Civil Rights and Federalism that raged in the South in the 1860's and the 1960's. But whenever anyone begins to coordinate the genuine historical import of these two convulsions in American culture, the murders of Abraham Lincoln and John F. Kennedy, his thought gets derailed. Somebody mentions the long list of unlikely but goofy coincidences: both were succeeded by a Vice President named Johnson; Kennedy rode in a Lincoln, --and remember this one? Lincoln was shot in a theatre by an assassin who fled to a warehouse. Kennedy was shot from a warehouse by an assassin who fled to a theatre. The lie slips in, wrapped in the apparently harmless amusement of a kind of trivia game, whose implicit logic of utterly accidental coincidences precludes conspiracy. Because these long lists of coincidences are a century apart, they can't have any historical meaning at all, except to show that apparently significant connections might as well be random and ought not be explored. It's as if this handy device were meant to make us focus on Regis Kennedy's name, instead of his theft of Jean Hill's film.

A new book (Wedge: From Pearl Harbor to 9/11: How the Secret War Between the CIA and FBI Has Endangered National Security) by Mark Riebling, presents itself as a scathing indictment of U.S. intelligence agencies' disastrous failure to share information with one another. But the pages about the JFK assassination are a mixture of truisms and disinformation. Amazingly, the book takes it for granted that Oswald killed the President, but then gives an account of the Kostikov story. Although Riebling quotes the cable description of the Mexico City mystery man as "35, heavy-set, and balding," Wedge never acknowledges that this was not Lee Harvey Oswald at all. Today we have Hoover's November 25^th conversation with LBJ, in which the Director admits that the intercept is not Oswald's voice, and the surveillance photos "do not correspond to Oswald's appearance." With Riebling's Wedge, the CIA-dominated publishing industry has moved the public from one cover-up to the other. Rather than continue to rely on the discredited LHO Lone Nut cover story, the current propaganda technique is to explain that "Oswald" contacted the KGB-13^th in Mexico City, and that this implied Soviet involvement was a potential trigger for nuclear war, for the prevention of which LBJ assembled the Warren Commission in order to cover up this Soviet involvement. By admitting all this while withholding the central fact that this was not Oswald, the book adapts to the post-ARRB environment: now that anyone interested can learn about the Kostikov story, Agency-driven work can neutralize the releases by absorbing them into its own, profoundly misleading public account of 11-22. This is the political environment in which critics attempt to prevent unaccountable authoritarians from controlling the past, the present, and the future.

JFK was murdered because he had ceased to cooperate with the national security state. So a rollback of that state would amount to a justice more fitting, more poetic, and more important than the arrest of the whole web of participants from the shooters on up. What such an institutional return to constitutional principles would entail I have little idea; a rebirth of authentic popular sovereignty in the U.S. seems to me as unlikely as, say, a military Emperor like Diocletian or Czar Alexander carrying out the will of his own puppet parliament. Instead, the permanent warfare / oil / banking / narcotics State and its deep political system (which killed so many civil leaders in, for instance, the 1960's) persists, occasionally sacrificing the jobs of a few individuals (like Richard Nixon and Oliver North) to provide the vast majority of its participants with a sort of homeopathic immunity from Justice. Johnson carried out his side of the Faustian bargain he had made with the forces that killed his predecessor, and the napalm began to flow. With RFK's murder, the field was left to Nixon, who sabotaged the 1968 Peace Talks, prolonged the war by 7 years, and escalated it on a gigantic scale. Since (as Christopher Hitchens points out in the documentary The Trials of Henry Kissinger), most of the names on the Vietnam War Memorial are dated after Nixon's election, he and his National Security Advisor can reasonably be said to have murdered the majority of the 58 thousand Americans --and the 1.2 million Vietnamese-- who were killed in that period.

The secrecy that permitted Nixon and Kissinger to commit their crimes against humanity has been restored by the rise of the CIA Presidency embodied in the Bush dynasty. In his magisterial book, History Will Not Absolve Us, E..Martin Schotz has written that:

at the moral center of our culture is a black star which absorbs all light which is thrown into it. If you write something which impinges too closely to the center and send it to someone well-situated in the bureaucracy, you will rarely receive a reply. (283)

In this black hole metaphor about the central depths of deep politics, Schotz gives an apt picture of the crushing gravitational power pervading American culture, pulling information, treaties, resources and lives into its center. But let me reverse this figure, and describe the political justice movement as a bright stellar ball of fire, radiant with a light and heat that remain utterly dwarfed by the cold darkness in which it continues to shine. Here is Ralph Waldo Emerson on the matter: "In a virtuous act, I add to the world; I plant into deserts conquered from Chaos and Nothing, and see the darkness receding on the limits of the horizon."

The poet Holderlin wrote, "where grows the danger, there grows also the saving power." Though the violence and the contempt for the law continue, though the intelligence budgets are soaring and the world is militarized as never before, people now know that the government routinely lies. They know that it does so when big business and the military subvert popular sovereignty. And they are beginning to realize that the government is a public institution that they can collectively change for the better, so that it works for peace and economic justice, educating the population instead of jailing it. Though the world ails miserably, it is also rife with viable solutions waiting for widespread acceptance. The kind of truth-telling exemplified by, say, South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission may be the lever that eventually overturns American denial, and turns our faces away from current obsessions with SUV's, atheletes, actors, fashion, cars, guns, etc., and toward policy once again.

The nightmare of deep politics is that the political killings of 1963 and 1968 were part of an ongoing, murderously wrongheaded trend in our national life and that not even a Nuremberg tribunal would restore American politics to Constitutional principles. Bringing individuals to justice without restructuring the system will only stabilize the abuses by soothing the public, diminishing the popular interest in more radical reforms. I find a collective guilt in the American failure to restrict the intelligence services from: collaborating with organized crime, engaging in drug commerce, destabilizing sovereign governments foreign and domestic, assassination of the leadership of citizens' movements all over the globe, and generally fulfilling the fears of Thomas Hobbes:

also all men that are ambitious of military command, are inclined to continue the causes of war and to stir up trouble and sedition: for there is no honor military but by war; nor any such hope to mend an ill game as by causing a new shuffle. (Leviathan XI.)

Intelligence operatives still behave this way, sabotaging democracy's efforts to survive, while the only popular energies that might overcome the resulting militarism are dissipated in worship of the Invisible, or of celebrities, -- or of political personalities (for instance, JFK) without regard to their real activities in office.

Theodor Adorno, a German Jewish social philosopher, wrote that in modern Germany, "responsibility for the atrocities of Hitler is shifted onto those who tolerated his seizure of power, and not to the ones who cheered him on." The attitude that everything should be forgotten and forgiven, which would be proper for those who suffered injustice, is practiced by those party supporters who committed the injustice." There is only a kernel of truth, then, in the otherwise reactionary sentiment that somehow, everybody did it. Rather like the Rolling Stones in their Miltonic "Sympathy for the Devil" ("I shouted out, 'Who killed the Kennedys?' / When after all, it was you and me"), I.F. Stone wrote in 1963, "All of us had a finger on that trigger in Dallas." US means the American public, as though the Secret Service's failure to protect the President soaked the whole American population with its guilt. Though the journalist seems to have meant that Kennedy's mass appeal elevated him into a vulnerable celebrity, the sense this really makes is that our failure to prevent the crime is continuous with our failure to understand it afterward.

It's this failure to confront deep politics, I think, and not any failure to resist Kennedy's charisma, that universalizes the guilt in the events of November 22 and gives them their permanent relevance to world affairs, to any study of ideology and denial, and to Constitutional Crises like the one that rages now.