If you were alive and were of at least school age, you remember where you were on Nov. 22, 1963, a day that America lost its innocence when John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, Texas.
When word flashed across America — by radio and television, there was no social media — everything stopped.
Do you remember where you were and what you were doing?
I was the editor of four weekly newspapers in Brooklyn, and I remember first the flash that he had been shot, which stunned me and my small staff.
We were an offset operation, meaning we were working with a very early type of computerized typesetting, utilizing punched tape. An older woman was the typist.
Her name was Rose and she wore an orange bouffant wig that we were not supposed to know was a wig.
We always had a news radio station on in the small newsroom on Flatbush Avenue, and when she heard that the beloved 35th president of the United States had been shot, Rose burst into tears.
I tried to comfort her by saying, “They say he is shot. That doesn’t mean he was killed.”
A little later the radio reported the worst, that the president was dead, the first American president assassinated since William McKinley in 1901. Rose backed away from the keyboard, buried her head in her hands, and wept. Her wig was askew on her head.
It was a beautiful sunny Friday in Dallas, and in Brooklyn.
I ordered my small staff out on to the streets to interview Brooklynites — man in the street interviews — while I dug through the newspaper clippings to write a story about JFK’s visits to Brooklyn, especially during the 1960 presidential campaign. He was enormously popular in Brooklyn.
We would put out a special edition.
The same was true for the Brooklyn College evening division newspaper, where I was the editor.
After 60 years, is there anything left to say?
Yes.
I have written about it before, I visited the Sixth Floor Museum at Dealey Plaza. I interviewed James Leavelle, the 10-gallon-hat wearing Dallas homicide detective who was guarding assassin Lee Harvey Oswald when he was shot in the stomach and killed by nightclub owner Jack Ruby. (Leavelle expressed great lifetime regret at failing to protect his prisoner.)
In the decades since, a government-appointed commission found that Oswald acted alone, and a tidal wave of conspiracy theories was generated, believing Supreme Court Chief Justice Earl Warren and Pennsylvania U.S. Sen. Arlen Specter were part of a massive cover-up.
Although Congress in 1992 passed the John F, Kennedy Assassination Records Collection act, mandating that all records be released by 2017, both Presidents Trump and Biden allowed postponements on the advice of the FBI, CIA and other security agencies.
Why?
Trump ultimately released tens of thousands of documents, the majority of which include at least some redactions, CNN reported, adding that by December 2022, Biden had released more than 14,000 additional JFK assassination-related documents.
Earlier this year, the National Archives reported that 99% of the records have been released.
What is in the remaining 1%, which amount to thousands of documents?
Why the secrecy?
The FBI and CIA maintain that even after 60 years, the documents contain names and personal details of still-living intelligence and law-enforcement informants from the ‘60s and ‘70s, who could be at risk if they were publicly identified, wrote reporter Philip Shenon in a piece for Politico.
Some of these informants live overseas, where the U.S. could not protect them, and the spy agencies claim the documents would reveal the location of some safe houses that are still in use. Wow. Talk about a long-term lease.
How much of the estimated 14,000 remaining documents contain that kind of classified information, and why could not they be redacted?
The 1992 law was adopted in hopes of controlling a firestorm of conspiracy theories whipped up the year before by the release of Oliver Stone’s popular film “JFK,” which suggested Kennedy was killed in a coup d’etat involving his successor, President Lyndon Johnson, Shenon writes.
Stone was a propagandist, his movie was fiction, and yet, long before Instagram and Tik Tok, millions of people were brainwashed by a damn movie that embraced conspiracy theories.
The general rule of thumb is that bad information is countered by good information, even though that gets progressively harder when too many Americans can’t spell critical thinking, let alone practice it.
Nevertheless, another rule of thumb is that sunlight is the best disinfectant. That means transparency will dissolve the lies.
I can’t say it works in every case — such as for the deluded fools (and anti-Semites) who believe Israel is committing genocide and colonialism and apartheid. All three are lies. But I’ll stick with trying the truth.
The cloak of secrecy around the JFK assassination gives oxygen to the conspiracy theories.
I believe that releasing the remaining 1% would not satisfy all the hard core conspiracy theorists, who have so much emotion invested in the CIA or Lyndon Johnson or the Mafia or Fidel Castro or Regis Philbin killing JFK that they can’t back off.
But 99% of us will be able to move on.
Nice, Stu. Love your remarks about the present situation in Israel and Palestine NOT being colonialism,etc. The New New Left thinks all is rative when it comes to various cultures. It surely is not. And I love this.
Oswald was a bit of a crazy loaner who had fallen in love with a Russian woman and the Russian people and hated JFK as the symbol of the US aggressive handling of the Cold War. Period. He just didn’t understand the implications of the Cokd War on an international level. A similar syndrome.
I don’t doubt that LHO was the lone gunman on that day based on all evidence released to date. However, I think the sealing of information for so long does suggest there were others behind the plot. Some of the theories about conflicts involving the POTUS’ father or Hoover’s FBI were all plausible but unproven theories.
I do hope that while she is still living (now 82), it’s important to see what can be gotten out of LHO’s widow. Her stories have evolved quite a bit since her initial testimony to the Commission so any statements from her should be scrutinized but nonetheless evaluated.
Nice article. I did not realize it’s been 60 years!
Interesting thought, to get the widow, but….after 60 years, and with her own self interest, I don’t know how reliable she would be.
Stu—-
Have you read Rush to Judgement by Mark Lane? It clearly explains the failure of the Warren Commission. After that read Encounter With Evil: The Abraham Zapruder Story by Jacob Hornberger, published two years ago. It’s an eye opener.
The fact that documents are still being withheld/redacted after 60 years means that something isn’t right.
John
I did a lot of reading 50 years ago. I will do no more. Yes, withholding the documents certainly raises red flags.
Thanks, Stu, for bringing up (or should I say “back”?) this otherwise timely topic. I, too, am of that era, and was sitting in a junior high science class in Camden, when, at about 1pm our time, the announcement came over the PA system. All the Camden schools at that time were dismissed early.
Your thoughts above also reminded me of the line from the Rolling Stones song (Sympathy for the Devil):
“I shouted out
Who killed the Kennedys?
When after all
It was you and me.”
The rest of the files will probably be released in 40 years on the anniversary of the assassination in 2063. Maybe,
Your thoughts about the release of the documents are admirable, but I have to disagree. As you pointed out, the lack of ability in critical thinking so prevalent today would preclude any acknowledgment of actual truth. As for the “Where was I” question, 8th grade Social Studies class. I remember Mr. Maher the teacher, a big, heavy set dude as I recall answering a knock at the door and returning with his cheeks bright red, and tears trickling down them and announcing what had happened and we were dismissed from class. The fact that I still recall it so vividly speaks volumes as to its effect on me.
Intelligent disagreement is always welcome here. Even if you are wrong. 😄
Why is it so difficult for so many people to understand it was a mob hit? The evidence is overwhelming, from RFK’s anti-mob crusade (after they were the very people who got JFK nominated and elected), the fact that Oswald’s father-figure/uncle was a New Orleans mob bag man (whose payees included Jim Garrison, which is why he deflected every time it was suggested it was the Mafia) to Jack Ruby being part of the Chicago “Outfit.”
I recommend everyone find and read “Contract on America: The Mafia Murder of JFK” by David Scheim. He is a legitimate investigative journalist (as opposed to a tinfoil-hatter typing away in his mother’s basement) whose primary sources of info were the tens of thousands of pages of info (obtained via FOI requests) that were kept out of the Warren Commission report because they contradicted or didn’t buttress the “Oswald/lone gunman” fairytale LBJ and others mandated.
No rational human being can read this book and not be convinced it was the mob (with help from the CIA which, we know, collaborated with the Mafia on attempts to kill Castro) and no other entity or entitities.
Thanks, Darrow! I will buy me a copy of that one. I can still remember being let out of kindergarten early that day, and that is saying something because I can’t remember much of anything else from that time of my life. I’ve always been fascinated by this case, and I guess I always will be. The so-called “magic bullet” is something I could never, ever get past. Just doesn’t make any logical sense.
Hope you like it!
I was eight, in Catholic grade school. The Nuns wept. The first Catholic President had been murdered. I did’t really get it, why would somebody want to shoot the President? Seemed like a nice a nice enough guy. He let rockets go to space, He seemed to be liked by everybody, why would you shoot a President? Now look at the world evrybody shoots everybody, class dosen’t matter, and who the hell is the President? What does he do? What does he stand for? I may as well be eight again.
Sow hat do you think of M$L now. A sex offender in their midst.
https://twitter.com/TizzyEnt/status/1727107301025386865
What the hell are you talking about? M$L? WTF?