November 22.
Another anniversary of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in 1963.
I remember the day vividly. JFK was the president who drew many of us into politics for the first time. He tapped into our fledgling ideals. Then gunned down.
I was, what…a junior at University High School in Honolulu. It was the day of our high school picnic at Ala Moana Park. I think we were still on the chartered bus on the short drive between Manoa and Ala Moana when we heard the news, and can vividly recall the feeling of emptiness and despair. A few of us walked off to be more alone, trying to come to terms with the awful reality. The picnic became a wake.
Here’s my recommendation, if you’re at all interested in this event of nearly 50 years ago. Start reading Jim Douglass’ tome, JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters. It’s a huge 560-page epic that pulls together an amazing variety of sources to weave together a sense of the time, of the national and international political setting, the dynamics of history and the interplay of forces.
Don’t be put off by the author’s religious frame of reference, as it doesn’t intrude that much into the historical narrative. Douglass, a Catholic academic who started out as a religion professor at the University of Hawaii in the late 1960s and early 1970s, acts here as a historian of considerable vision.
As one Amazon reviewer wrote: “If you can read only one book on the life of JFK, this is it. ”
And there’s even a Kindle version of the book for those who prefer this format.
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hard to believe it was so many years ago. I was just getting out of junior high in Ma. when the news came over the PA system.
I was living in Germany at the time . My German babysitter invited me over to watch the funeral on their TV.
Take a look at this blog… hoboroad.blogspot.com
The guy found a copy of a 1963 Honolulu Star Bulletin about JFK’s assassination inside of a wall during a remodeling project. He shows some of the ad’s as well, very interesting.
I agree with your take on the book. I would say that, aside from that book, Harvard historian David Kaiser’s The Road to Dallas is also very good on showing just how mob connected everyone was who the Warren Commission said weren’t
Aside from the books, people need to realize that despite the JFK Act and the Assassination Records Review Board there appears to be considerable foot dragging on the declassification of much more documentation and, yes, some documents known to exist are “missing.” Goes to show you – unless watched constantly the government will obfuscate or obstruct anything that requires them to open records. They are trying to drag feet until no one remembers who the heck JFK RFK or MLK were. Gee, I wonder why. Must be pretty good, whatever it is.
Government lie? Go figure.
Here is Roger Ebert’s comments on Oliver Stone’s movie “JFK”, which Ebert considered one of the top ten films of the 1990s and the best film of 1991.
http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20020429/REVIEWS08/204290301/1023
Ebert states that the glory of the film is the way captures the mood of the country.
I once wanted to read a book on the JFK assassination that was recommended by Gore Vidal, but I did not buy it because reviews on amazon instantly convinced me of big holes in its arguments.
The most convincing presentation on the JFK assassination for me so far is the NOVA special “Who Shot President Kennedy”.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UngjS-ok1Zc
What fascinates me the most about the JFK assassination are the theories themselves, which tend to reveal more about the background of the theorist. Oliver Stone was a Republican who went to Yale and joined the Marines to fight in Vietnam, and his thinking seems to reflect an isolationist streak in conservative thought. From the left, Gore Vidal is attacking the military industrial complex in a similar vein.
The glorification of JFK also serves certain agendas. LBJ pushed through his civil rights agenda claiming that it was a continuation of JFK’s wishes. Jackie Kennedy claimed that every night JFK would play Richard Harris’s rendition of Camelot on his record player; she and the Kennedy family deliberately lied to glorify JFK in order to establish the family as a political dynasty.
In fact, it is as if society in general has a greater agenda in glorifying the Kennedy’s and spinning conspiracy theories.
If you watch “Mad Men”, there is a sense that JFK’s assassination and the suicide of Marilyn Monroe mark the end of an era. In a sense, the early 1960s are just a technicolor extension of the 1950s. (A character on the show points out that women back then either dressed as a “Marilyn” or a “Jackie”.) One gets the sense in this period that the old order itself is fermenting and fragmenting, and these two deaths mark a kind of accelerated breakup of that order.
But what is especially interesting is a shared type of lament between those who long for the old order of the 1950s, on the one hand, and those who project their liberal hopes on Kennedy and mourn the supposed death of “what could have been”, on the other. Two competing mythologies wax nostalgic on the early 1960s.
Conspiracy buffs will enjoy Errol Morris’s “The Umbrella Man,” an op-doc video on the online edition of the NYT. Morris interviews Josiah “Tink” Thompson, the Haverford philosophy professor who left academe to become a private investigator. Thompson tracked down the mysterious figure who was seen at the scene of the shooting holding an open black umbrella under the clear skies of Dallas.
Worth reading:
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/27/opinion/sunday/Douthat-The-Enduring-Cult-of-Kennedy.html?src=me&ref=general
Actually, the comments are even more worth reading, at least for their criticism of the author.
Douthat pronounces Kennedy a mediocrity, but that was not the case at all. That is, I tend to agree with Douthat’s evaluation of the cult of Kennedy, but not with Douthat’s estimation of Kennedy.
Kennedy seems to me like a Cold War (moderate) conservative, but one who was very quick to learn. So he got his country into the Cuban missile crisis, but he uniquely was able to get his country out. He also theorized that crisis, coming up with the word “groupthink”, and came up with the general premise that one should try to offer one’s opposition a face-saving way out of a confrontation, contributing significantly to the field of crisis management. Not only could Kennedy admit a mistake, but he could theorize from it. That is a rare intelligence, I think.
I would assume that the same kind of re-evaluation was in the works for Kennedy’s Vietnam policy. Robert McNamara says as much, that Kennedy would have disengaged the US from Vietnam. But that would not be based on a conversion to liberalism, but on sheer intelligence. Perhaps the same could be said for the civil rights movement, to which even the liberal Robert Kennedy was originally cool.
A comparison could be made to Obama on his reaction to the rebellions in Arab countries. Almost all of the foreign policy establishment wanted to support the dictators like Mubarek. Obama sat them down his foreign policy staff and had them write out the basic assumptions of US foreign policy. Then Obama asked them, “How many of you believe that these dictators are actually going to remain in power? Do you really want to let the US fall on the wrong side of history?” So there was a shift in policy, not based on ideological conversion, but on rational reflection. This is Obama at his best, displaying his academic skills and intellectual virtuosity. It’s Obama as a teacher and a thinker.
(It was also, for better or worse, based on Obama’s fixation on public relations and image. When the rebellions first broke out, Obama lamented “What will it do to my image among young people if I support these dictators?” In some respects Obama transferred his concern about his own global image to a foreign policy concern about the image of the US.)