The day that will live in infamy

The day that will live in infamy

by 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.

Anyway, the old saying goes that everyone remembers where they were when they heard the news and I expect that's true.  And 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. But all these documentaries with archival footage have reminded me just why --- aside from the horrific act itself --- it's had such a hold on our national imagination and why it's created such fodder for conspiracy theories. Certain facts of this assassination are simply astonishing and frankly make the official version hard to believe.

First of all, there are the politics of the time, which many of you will find very familiar. The following leaflet was handed out on the day Kennedy arrived in Dallas:



This was an ad taken out in the Dallas Morning News the day of the assassination:

WELCOME MR. KENNEDY TO
DALLAS. . .
. . .A CITY so disgraced by a recent Liberal smear attempt that its citizens have just elected two more Conservative Americans to public office.
. . .A CITY that is an economic "boom town," not because of Federal handouts, but through conservative economic and business practices.
. . .A CITY that will continue to grow and prosper despite efforts by you and your administration to penalize it for its non-conformity to New Frontierism.
. . .A CITY that rejected your philosophy and policies in 1960 and will do so again in 1964--even more emphatically than before. ..

Plus ça change and all that rot, right? This is why I tend to scoff just a tiny bit when people assure me that the right has only recently become a bunch of radicals.

That's the political environment in which this assassination took place. And then we had the shooter revealed to have been someone with extreme left wing views, who had defected to the Soviet Union and then was let back into the country ---- and he was repeatedly paraded around before the cameras like Miss America at which point he was himself assassinated on live television. You can't blame people for being skeptical that this event was the simple work of mad men and lone wolves. In fact, these circumstances guaranteed that conspiracy theories would abound.

Despite people's assurances one way or another, the fact is that we will never know definitively if there was a conspiracy or if Oswald acted alone. (Well, unless there is irrefutable documentation somewhere that's been hidden.) But it is not unreasonable to be suspicious of the official accounts, that's for sure. That's not to say that this means the government was somehow responsible, just that it had good reason to want to close the books on the case, in a simple way, as soon as it could. Sometimes governments determine that finding the truth, whether a trial or in an investigation, could be so destabilizing that they decide "justice" is less important than confidence and security.  (I think we can see echoes of that sort of thinking in our civic lives today...)

The good news is that we baby boomers are soon to shuffle off our mortal coils and that will over time leave these mid-20th century obsessions to the history books. But I would recommend that young people look at those documents I published above and recognize what they mean --- the right wing has always been the right wing. The left reinventing the wheel every few years in order to counteract the "growing radicalization" of the right is a big waste of energy. They've always been radical. And by assuming they aren't,  they've been allowed to assume more and more political power.


Update: Dennis Hartley wrote a good post about assassination films a while back.