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As a ward director in the 1960 Nixon campaign, I was disgusted when John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson seemed to have stolen the election. Nevertheless, on that day three years later I wept, watching the black-and-white TV along with my wife. For three days we watched, doing little else.
The event has even more depth for me now, as I see it in retrospect: the time when our national course took a sharp turn away from the one we had followed since the country's founding. The worldly wise Europeans knew they had witnessed a coup d'etat. How silly! This is America! The deed was done by a lone madman, captured and almost as promptly executed, saving us a trial.
During the recent 40th anniversary week, Peter Jennings--earnest, likeable, Eagle Scoutly--reassured us with a two-hour special to confirm the lone nut theory by use of computer imaging. It required a leap of faith for those who wished to believe; it seemed fraudulent to anyone who has studied the subject. If Lyndon Johnson were alive, he would have phoned Jennings to tell him what a good job he had done, calling him "brother" as he did J. Edgar Hoover.
Lee Harvey Oswald surely was involved in the Kennedy assassination, in some way. But he did not fire the fatal shot. That one came from the front. It is more difficult to prove how Oswald was involved, than it is to prove he did not fire the fatal shot.
Irving Zapruder caught it all with his 8 mm movie camera. A few years ago the complete version was made available to the public in VHS format, a copy of which I acquired, against the admonition of the Columbus Dispatch which editorially shamed those who would profit from people's morbid curiosity. We can see Kennedy hit, throwing his arms up to his throat, John Connolly reacting less than a second later, a lapse undiscernible from Jennings' hokey depiction. Connolly, to his dying day (confirmed by his wife, in the car beside him), insisted that he and Kennedy were not hit by the same bullet. Next we see Kennedy's brain splash out of the back of his head, from a shot that causes the people at the foot of the grassy knoll to hit the ground and look behind them. Dr. Cyril Wecht, the respected forensic pathologist, says the bullet passed through the head front to back.
Testimony in several History Channel showings newly broadcast during the recent memorial week included that of LBJ's long-time mistress and an attorney with the law firm that represented him. Both affirmed, at length, that LBJ was behind it. Michael Piper, whose book "Final Judgment" is an extremely useful compendium for anyone curious about the networking of people and organizations involved, discounts the assertion of the attorney, Robert McClellan, in which McClellan says Johnson and a senior member of the law firm were the perpetrators, whereas Piper sees LBJ only as a cooperator, vital in the coverup. He believes McClellan is attempting to draw blame away from the CIA because of certain relationships. Piper details the CIA ties to the Mossad and to organized crime, whose head (and Jack Ruby's boss) was Meyer Lansky, a hero in Israel for his role in obtaining arms for the Irgun and the Haganah in the late 1940's. He draws the tracks to JFK's refusal to permit export of nuclear equipment and materials to Israel after Charles DeGaulle had cut off French supplies to complete the nuclear facility at Dimona. When David Ben Gurion turned to Kennedy for help, he hit a stone wall. The nuclear race was on in the Middle East. Without that ability, obtainable only from the United States, Israel would be a military nobody. The future of Israel was on the line. Johnson made Israel a nuclear power.
Those whose faith in our government and the American Broadcasting Company enables them to accept Peter Jennings' report also won't feel it necessary to wonder why the Commander in Chief of the Armed Forces of the United States, informed by his Chief of Staff at 9:06 that "the nation is under attack" after the second tower was hit, continued his placid conversation with second graders about their reading lesson for at least ten minutes before calmly thanking the teachers and moving to another room to take a telephone call prior to his scheduled speech at 9:30. Or why the F-16's at Andrews Air Force Base weren't even ordered to gas up until after the Pentagon was hit at 9:38, and had to take off without their missiles which are stored on the other side of the base. Or why, even though the FAA knew that Flight 77 had been hijacked and was heading straight for Washington, when it plowed into the Naval Command Center at the Pentagon more than half an hour later, no one there had been warned. As the Navy brass was meeting there, Vice President Dick Cheney was in the emergency control center beneath the White House getting a series of FAA reports as the plane closed in on Washington, a drama described by Secretary of Transportation Norman Mineta to the 9/11 commission. The facts are contained in the FAA flight records seized by the FBI that day.
The truth would surely destroy the Bush administration, just as it would have destroyed the Johnson administration, changing the course of history from that time in many ways, a number of which one can picture as preferable to what has occurred these past forty years. The course of our history has become staked out by lies. That is what took us into Vietnam and Iraq, and without a major reversal of federal policy will continue to mark the direction for "America," once admired throughout the world, now distrusted and despised.
The event has even more depth for me now, as I see it in retrospect: the time when our national course took a sharp turn away from the one we had followed since the country's founding. The worldly wise Europeans knew they had witnessed a coup d'etat. How silly! This is America! The deed was done by a lone madman, captured and almost as promptly executed, saving us a trial.
During the recent 40th anniversary week, Peter Jennings--earnest, likeable, Eagle Scoutly--reassured us with a two-hour special to confirm the lone nut theory by use of computer imaging. It required a leap of faith for those who wished to believe; it seemed fraudulent to anyone who has studied the subject. If Lyndon Johnson were alive, he would have phoned Jennings to tell him what a good job he had done, calling him "brother" as he did J. Edgar Hoover.
Lee Harvey Oswald surely was involved in the Kennedy assassination, in some way. But he did not fire the fatal shot. That one came from the front. It is more difficult to prove how Oswald was involved, than it is to prove he did not fire the fatal shot.
Irving Zapruder caught it all with his 8 mm movie camera. A few years ago the complete version was made available to the public in VHS format, a copy of which I acquired, against the admonition of the Columbus Dispatch which editorially shamed those who would profit from people's morbid curiosity. We can see Kennedy hit, throwing his arms up to his throat, John Connolly reacting less than a second later, a lapse undiscernible from Jennings' hokey depiction. Connolly, to his dying day (confirmed by his wife, in the car beside him), insisted that he and Kennedy were not hit by the same bullet. Next we see Kennedy's brain splash out of the back of his head, from a shot that causes the people at the foot of the grassy knoll to hit the ground and look behind them. Dr. Cyril Wecht, the respected forensic pathologist, says the bullet passed through the head front to back.
Testimony in several History Channel showings newly broadcast during the recent memorial week included that of LBJ's long-time mistress and an attorney with the law firm that represented him. Both affirmed, at length, that LBJ was behind it. Michael Piper, whose book "Final Judgment" is an extremely useful compendium for anyone curious about the networking of people and organizations involved, discounts the assertion of the attorney, Robert McClellan, in which McClellan says Johnson and a senior member of the law firm were the perpetrators, whereas Piper sees LBJ only as a cooperator, vital in the coverup. He believes McClellan is attempting to draw blame away from the CIA because of certain relationships. Piper details the CIA ties to the Mossad and to organized crime, whose head (and Jack Ruby's boss) was Meyer Lansky, a hero in Israel for his role in obtaining arms for the Irgun and the Haganah in the late 1940's. He draws the tracks to JFK's refusal to permit export of nuclear equipment and materials to Israel after Charles DeGaulle had cut off French supplies to complete the nuclear facility at Dimona. When David Ben Gurion turned to Kennedy for help, he hit a stone wall. The nuclear race was on in the Middle East. Without that ability, obtainable only from the United States, Israel would be a military nobody. The future of Israel was on the line. Johnson made Israel a nuclear power.
Those whose faith in our government and the American Broadcasting Company enables them to accept Peter Jennings' report also won't feel it necessary to wonder why the Commander in Chief of the Armed Forces of the United States, informed by his Chief of Staff at 9:06 that "the nation is under attack" after the second tower was hit, continued his placid conversation with second graders about their reading lesson for at least ten minutes before calmly thanking the teachers and moving to another room to take a telephone call prior to his scheduled speech at 9:30. Or why the F-16's at Andrews Air Force Base weren't even ordered to gas up until after the Pentagon was hit at 9:38, and had to take off without their missiles which are stored on the other side of the base. Or why, even though the FAA knew that Flight 77 had been hijacked and was heading straight for Washington, when it plowed into the Naval Command Center at the Pentagon more than half an hour later, no one there had been warned. As the Navy brass was meeting there, Vice President Dick Cheney was in the emergency control center beneath the White House getting a series of FAA reports as the plane closed in on Washington, a drama described by Secretary of Transportation Norman Mineta to the 9/11 commission. The facts are contained in the FAA flight records seized by the FBI that day.
The truth would surely destroy the Bush administration, just as it would have destroyed the Johnson administration, changing the course of history from that time in many ways, a number of which one can picture as preferable to what has occurred these past forty years. The course of our history has become staked out by lies. That is what took us into Vietnam and Iraq, and without a major reversal of federal policy will continue to mark the direction for "America," once admired throughout the world, now distrusted and despised.