Well-Publicized Anniversary

The 50th anniversary suggests much history of interest—at least to the usual types who bother paying attention to history.

Early this month, Charles Pierce noted efforts in Dallas to create a November 22 tourist event that would kind of ignore a little thing that happened fifty years ago.

But as Pierce says, "50 years ago 'civic leaders with deep ties to the city' of Dallas were a major part of the problem with the atmosphere when Kennedy came to town."

Earlier this week Sam Seder did a very interesting Majority Report interview with Bobby Kennedy, Jr., on "JFK's Vision of Peace." RFK Jr. shared some fascinating details about how JFK, surrounded by war hungry right-wing military brass, undertook secret diplomacy with Kruschev, who responded to the chance of finding a way out of the box his own hawks were creating. RFK Jr. also says that after the trip to Dallas, JFK had planned to announce withdrawal from Vietnam. Then LBJ was in the position of insisting he would not be known as the president who "lost Vietnam."

Text of the speech Kennedy was to have given in Dallas.

Some observations from Digby—

It occurred to me this week that very few people who are younger than I am can remember the Kennedy assassination --- which means that this commemoration is a lot like the memories of Roosevelt's death were to me when I was a little kid. Ancient history.

I was in the second grade in Wichita Kansas where my father was working for a defense contractor maintaining the nuclear missile silos. My teacher came into the room sobbing and told us all that we were going home, that the president had been killed. All the adults I saw for the next couple of weeks seemed to be shell-shocked, even my parents, who were big Kennedy haters.

...I don't think you can fully understand my generation without realizing that this was probably the most important national event of our young lives. The president was assassinated. To people my age that was not an abstract concern. It was something that happened. And it was only a few years later that it was further seared into our consciousness with the killings of Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy and the attempt on George Wallace. You have to understand that to kids who grew up in that time, this was normal.

People think the hippies were just a bunch of kids doing drugs (and they were) but there was a real message behind their "peace and love" campaign that sprang from this violence. And the young revolutionaries that everyone now sees as some left wing version of the Michigan Militia weren't responding to something like the horrifying prospect of health insurance for everyone. They were (at least in part) responding to the fact that our leaders were being killed. There was a sense of urgency. Something's happening here ...

I've been watching all these remembrances over the past couple of weeks realizing that it's the last time anyone will really care much about this. It will soon pass completely into the history books and that will be that. ...

Digby includes images of the "Wanted For Treason" handbill, and the full-page "American Fact-Finding Committee" ad that ran in the Dallas Morning News on November 22, 1963.

Pierce again, on the Warren Commission as

... a natural outgrowth of a mentality that had infected the government from the moment that the government decided that it would build, in secret, a weapon that would not only win World War II, but also have the potential to end civilization if it -- or the men who allegedly were in control of it -- ever ran amok.

A secrecy that could only become

... an irresistible impulse to treat the American people... like fragile children who must be protected at all costs from what their government found necessary to do on their behalf.
From this has come a hundred commissions and boards and gatherings of the shamans of the security state -- the slow bureaucratic response to the Watergate crimes, the Tower Commission on Iran-Contra, even the Simpson-Bowles budget commission -- all of which sprang from the notion that the nation's elite should conduct the nation's business in as quiet a manner as possible, so as not to disturb the horses or wake the children. The Warren Commission was the first of these, and it did its job very well....

There's that, and the fact that the types behind the 1963 "liberal treason" accusations were regarded then as beyond polite notice. Over the last fifty years, the money has not only bought its own media empire, it has also bought unlimited access to, and unquestioned respect from, Establishment media.