Today is the anniversary of the Kennedy Assassination.
President-elect Donald Trump promised during his reelection campaign that he would declassify all of the remaining government records surrounding the assassination if he returned to office.
That release is overdue, isn’t it? It’s been simmering for 61 years.
November 22, 1963. Seeing that date in writing still gives me the chills, even when the year is omitted.
It’s strange to see how unimportant that date is to younger people, even though it remains possibly the most memorable day of our lives for me and my classmates. We were just the right age – old enough to worship JFK as the eloquent, dashing young hero-President who got us through the Cuban Missile Crisis and let his adorable kids play in the Oval Office, but not old enough to be cynical about his recklessness, or his philandering, or anything else that would have shattered the myth of Camelot.
Since he was our unsullied idol, his death was elevated to a Homeric level of tragedy. He was our Achilles, the seemingly invulnerable icon somehow brought down by a cheap shot from a distant coward.
There was no relief from sadness that weekend because we were reminded of our grief by an entire nation echoing our feelings. It was the sole subject discussed by our relatives, our friends, and every talking head on every TV channel across the republic. Normal TV programming was pre-empted by made-for-grief TV. We were bathed in sorrow, immersed in our sense of loss. The limitless resonance of those feelings made that weekend more memorable than the times when I lost my parents or my dearest friends.
When November 22nd arrives, all those memories return as if they had happened last week. For those of us in the early boomer demographic, November 22nd is our generation’s day, more even than September 11th. For me, it reverberates even more than December 25th or July 4th because it is so personal, so particular to our age group and our most powerful, enduring memories.
For at least two generations, more than a century ago, April 14th was that kind of day, and then it wasn’t. I can remember that Lincoln was killed in April because it was when lilacs last in the dooryard bloom’d, but it’s not on the top of my mind that it happened on the 14th, or that it happened on Good Friday. When I see the words “April 14th” written out, it doesn’t produce any reaction.
December 7th was once that kind of day, but the memory no longer stirs us the way it stirred The Greatest Generation. When I see “December 7th,” I immediately recognize its importance, but there’s no emotion.
November 22nd is already fading. For those too young to recall the emotions of that weekend, it’s just the day between the 21st and the 23rd. We boomers will be gone soon, and the date of Kennedy’s assassination, like that of Lincoln’s, will fade from America’s collective memory, absent even a Whitman poem to mark the month.
A nice rememberance, but I disagree with three points here, and, like most people, I’m going to comment on those negatives (sorry.)
1.You would know this better than me, but I think a lot of Kennedy’s iconic status was post assassination. He had many enemies in many communities. Obviously primarly the cold war hawks who thought that Kennedy was too much of a compromiser (on the other side, it’s a complete lie that Kennedy wasn’t an ardent anti communist, he had zero intention of pulling the U.S out of Vietnam post election. His plan was eventually to get to what Nixon adopted of ‘Vietnamization.’) He was disliked by many business people who he called ‘sons of bitches’ especially ‘big oil’ businesspeople and, he was disliked by many ‘fiscal conservatives’ like Eisenhower (or who ‘liked Ike’.)
Robert Kennedy was so concerned with the virulence of many of these Kennedy haters that he ordered the FCC to take the leading Kennedy hater on the radio off the air.
And, Goldwater himself claimed that Kennedy only had a narrow lead in the polls over him. I don’t know about that specifically, but it wouldn’t surprise me if what was accurate was that the leading Republicans for the nomination – Henry Cabot Lodge and Nelson Rockefeller were only narrowly trailing Kennedy at the time of Kennedy’s assassination (after all Kennedy went to Texas to shore up his support there) and Goldwater simply transferred their polling to himself.
2.I disagree that Oswald was a ‘cheap coward.’ Of course, the more frequent term used to describe Oswald was a ‘lone nut’ or an ‘insignifant loner’ but, in any case, he may have been weird but he was certainly not a ‘nut’ and he may have been a ‘loner’ but he certainly was not insifiigant. How many Americans went to the Soviet Union where he tried to defect (apparently the Soviets wouldn’t make him a citizen, so he had to remain an American citizen, but they allowed him to remain and work there) and then later went back to the United States. I believe in the entire history of the Soviet Union that Oswald may have been the only American who tried to defect/defected there who wasn’t guilty of espionage and fled one step ahead of being arrested. That alone makes Oswald a significant historical figure in his own right.
And from that, he certainly wasn’t unknown, at least not to the CIA. In 1963 alone, Oswald was on five separate CIA watchlists. The CIA lied to the Warren Commission about the extent to which they followed Oswald and this didn’t come out until 10-15 years ago. Whatever Oswald did, whether he killed Kennedy, whether he was a patsy as he claimed, whether if he killed Kennedy and acted on his own, or killed Kennedy on behalf of pro Castro Americans, or killed Kennedy on behalf of anti Castro Americans who were posing as pro Castro Cubans, I think the evidence is clear on one thing: the CIA knew of Oswald being involved in plots to kill Kennedy that they could only have intentionally done nothing to prevent it, if Oswald was not part of the CIA’s own plots to kill Kennedy. (I personally believe that Kennedy was ordered killed by the psychopath former head of the CIA, Allen Dulles, who Kennedy fired and the assassination was carried out by people in the CIA who were loyal to the psycopath Dulles.)
3,I disagree that younger people aren’t familiar with Kennedy, or at least one of the myths of Kennedy. I’ve heard in many forums many younger people make the claim that Kennedy was killed in a coup. (I think the psychopath Dulles acted out of revenge, and maybe as a warning to future Presidents, and maybe just because he liked assassinating heads of state I don’t consider that to go so far as to be a ‘coup.’) This is usually tied in with younger people who are crypto bugs (they would have been gold bugs previously) and Trump supporters. I agree they know nothing of the actual record of Kennedy. These are I guess, meta myths.
You are of course wrong on point two because you misquoted me. I said it was a “cheap shot from a distant coward.” Shooting an unarmed man from a distance in a non-combat situation is certainly the act of a coward. Was it a “cheap shot”? The dictionary says “a deliberate act of roughness against a defenseless opponent,” so it was, in fact, a cheap shot by definition. Furthermore, I’m writing about how it felt in our puerile POV, not necessarily in objective reality. My own class was studying The Iliad at the time and the parallel to cowardly Paris killing Achilles at a distance from behind fortified walls seemed obvious.
Kennedy’s approval rating is something like 90% now, which is absurd. Nobody else is even close. But even during his presidency, he was the most popular president since they started to keep track of such things. So your point is approximately half-right. He certainly was elevated to sainthood in death, far beyond the regard he enjoyed in life, but in terms of the popularity any living person can realistically achieve in a divided world, he is and will probably always remain, the most popular post-war President. An average approval rating of 71% throughout an entire Presidency is just unreachable. Plus, of course, I was talking specifically about my age group, those who were young teens when he died. To us he was a hero. To those of us who were Catholic, he was a living saint.
I don’t have any facts to dispute point three, but I think the people you are talking about are a minuscule fringe group of ultra-crazies. But I didn’t say Kennedy would be forgotten. If anything, he may have achieved legendary status. Again you are creating a straw man. I did say that the date of his death would no longer resonate as it does with boomers. My granddaughter wants to be a history teacher, so for fun I quizzed her on famous dates. She knew 9/11/2001, 7/4/1776, and 12/7/1941, but had absolutely no guess on 11/22/1963. (She guessed correctly at 4/14/1865.)
1.Yes, I changed what you said to what is more frequently said about Oswald in part because I wasn’t sure what you meant by ‘cheap shot from a distant coward’ and in part because I was using what you said as a springboard to make the point I wanted to make.
I have no doubt you are correct, but anybody who wants to kill a world leader of any even half decent country almost by definition is going to have to be from a ‘cheap shot by a distant coward.’ Would you expect anybody who wants to assassinate a President to give them a gun and say ‘okay 40 paces’?
Of course, I’m not trying to praise Oswald here (and I don’t even necessarily agree that he did assassinate Kennedy), but I was trying to rebut all of these decades of dishonest claims about Oswald, which is why I restated what you said.
2.From the website you linked to: By September, his approval rating had slid to the mid-50s, the lowest of his presidency. A small rebound of 2 points in the following months did not establish a strong pattern. Significantly, the disapproval rating climbed steadily throughout the year, which might have posted an intensifying problem had Kennedy lived to contest the 1964 presidential election.
I actually don’t fully agree with that assessment. Their own graph shows a sharp increase in Kennedy’s disapproval rating from January to May (14 to 25%) but then more of a levelling off from May to November (25 to 30%, which is within the margin of error in polling.)
As to any context on that, not for every or even any Presidential race per se, but especially shown in governor races, it used to be the case that a governor needed higher than a 50% approval to win because the expectation was that not every person who approved of the governor would vote for then (Anne Richards in Texas is the extreme outlier on that though obviously there were other issues.) Now, that’s flipped, that even if a governor is under 50% approval that people (especially those in the same party) will vote for them as being better than their alternative.
So, I think from this evidence it can probably be said that Kennedy at 58% would have been reelecteed, but that Kennedy at 55% would have been a close election.
3.I’m not so sure about that. The same argument that ‘they are a miniscule group of fringe crazies’ was also said about the Trump cult in 2015. Yes, I don’t dispute that they are outsized in their presense. The libertarian Austrian economics devotees/gold bugs (now cyrpto devotees) who backed Ron Paul so publicly in 2008 and 2012 only helped Ron Paul get about 10% of the vote in the primaries he ran in, but that’s still more than a miniscule group. Those are the same people who are into this ‘Kennedy meta myth.’
One more thing sorry on point three. The obvious place to look to see if this is nothing more than a miniscule group of fringe crazies is to see if Joe Rogan discusses JFK. Even though Rogan seems to be regarded as a diminshed figure, he actually still has millions of listeners. (Over 30 million subscribers combined on youtube and spotify though they aren’t necessarily all American and they don’t all necessarily listen daily.)
From the quick Google search:
1.Joe Gets Trump to Discuss JFK Files and UFO Disclosure
2. joerogan on January 5, 2022: “The great and powerful @officialoliverstone has a new JFK documentary out on …
3.JFK vs The Military Industrial Complex with @joerogan …
Facebook · Robert F. Kennedy, Jr
9K+ reactions · 1 year ago
Discussing my uncle, JFK, and his approach to peace while facing the military industrial complex with Joe Rogan.
So, Rogan and by extension his many young male listeners continue to have an interest in JFK, and the third one with RFK JR is all about (what I refer to as_the Kennedy meta myth.
Certainly that’s not a huge amount of discussion for a more than 2 year period, but it suggests to me that it’s a myth that’s believed by more than a miniscule group of fringe crazies, and is a relatively popular myth with young males.
Who regards Rogan as diminished? He’s one of the most influential media people in the country. His audience age is also young so only expect him to get stronger.
Again on point 3 – that has nothing to do with what I said. The young today have no clue on the meaning of November 22. Given that my granddaughter is a straight-A student who wants to teach history, I’d be willing to bet that the percentage of those under 30 who could recognize that date would be below 10%, and the number who could actually produce that date in response to a direct question would be less than 2%.
Kids today are mighty dumb unless they attend elite schools. If shown the date July 4, 1776, I wonder how many high school seniors could identify its significance. If asked directly “On what date and year was the Declaration of Independence adopted?”, I’ll bet it would be below 50%, maybe far below.
As for Pearl Harbor Day, Mabe zero %
Yes, I agree with that. If that’s all you meant but I don’t think the date itself is as significant as the enduring (but ever slightly changing) myth.
Of course, I appreciate that for you personally the date itself is very significant.
1.It wasn’t up to Kennedy to choose the Republican nominee. If Kennedy was around 55% favorable when the Republican convention was held in July of 1964 I doubt that Goldwater would have received the nomination.
2.Goldwater was an impressive man in some ways, but he was genuinely a lunatic in other ways.
Kennedy would have won in a massive landslide. You’re forgetting who he would have been running against, and the actual result of that 1964 election. Lyndon won by something like 23 points.
On the other hand, if history could have been re-written to a Kennedy-Nixon rematch, Nixon might have had a shot if Kennedy’s popularity was near its nadir.
I’m sorry to have gotten into an argument with you over this. We’ve had discussions about these sorts of things before; whether to interpret text narrowly (the letter of the text) or more broadly (the spirit of the text.)
While I did deliberately change what you said on point one, in all the other points, I’ve simply not appreciated how precisely you mean them.
On this specifically. somebody first said (it might have been Lenin) ‘everything is connected to everything else.’ I’m aware of how Goldwater won the Republican nomination, that Henry Cabot Lodge and Nelson Rockefeller basically destroyed each other, but at the convention the governor of Pennsylvania, William Scranton was widely favored over Goldwater.
Had Kennedy not been assassinated which resulted in LBJ receiving massive sympathy support to ‘implement Kennedy’s program’ (which despite the cynism regarding LBJ that’s pretty much what he did as President) I think it’s unlikely that the Republican Party would have conceded the 1964 election so easily by nominating Goldwater and likely would have persuaded WIlliam Scranton to run against President Kennedy.
This would have resulted in a closer election, maybe similar to what you said about a Kennedy-Nixon rematch.
Goldwater and Kennedy were good friends, and had discussed campaigning together from city to city in a series of debates, ala Lincoln-Douglas, even traveling together on Air Force One.
That would have accorded Goldwater an aura of respect that LBJ of course denied him, instead portraying him as a lunatic. Just because of that. a Kennedy/Goldwater election would have been closer than Johnson/Goldwater.
I posted this in the wrong place, so I’ll repost it here if you don’t mind while adding something
1.It wasn’t up to Kennedy to choose the Republican nominee. If Kennedy was around 55% favorable when the Republican convention was held in July of 1964 I doubt that Goldwater would have received the nomination.
2.Goldwater was an impressive man in some ways, but he was genuinely a lunatic in other ways.
This is a bit off topic and doesn’t directly involve Goldwater or his lunacy, but it’s to do with a friend of mine who’s into both film noir and design aesthetics and it indirectly is about Goldwater and his lunacy.
Actor Raymond Massey both starred in an early film noir classic Fritz Lang’s The Woman in the Window and was the father of Geoffrey Massey who was the co-architect of Simon Fraser University here in British Columbia along with acclaimed architect Arthur Erickson. (Raymond Massey was born in Canada and became an actor here but became an American citizen after moving to Hollywood.)
Anyway, Raymond Massey was a Goldwater supporter in 1964 and my friend saw a video on youtube that featured him endorsing Goldwater with Massey discussing Vietnam and saying “”Barry Goldwater doesn’t want to fight wars. Barry Goldwater wants to put a stop to that mess in Vietnam” and complaining “we are fighting a no win war in Vietnam, a war we don’t want to win.” (this video is still on youtube)
And my friend said ‘Goldwater was the peace candidate. LBJ’s ‘daisy ad’ was a cheap shot.’
And I replied. Yeah, Massey was using weasel words and leaving out that the way that Goldwater wanted to end the war in Vietnam was to threaten to use nuclear weapons to force negotiations and when that failed, to use nuclear weapons to end the war.” Goldwater was a lunatic who had no problem with killing tens of millions of people, he was no ‘peace candidate.’
“f you don’t take my word for this, what exactly do you think that Goldwater was referring to when he said ‘extremism in the defence of liberty is no vice”? The ‘extremism’ was the use of nuclear weapons.
Would’ve, could’ve, should’ve nonsense and frivolous conspiracy theories notwithstanding have often wondered about JFK’s high (71%) approval rating. 1) He was indeed very likable and self-deprecating. 2) Jackie 3) Caroline/John Jr. ie young likable children. 4) NASA program ~ hey, we’re going to the moon! etc, etc.
Also, growing up in the ’60s politically was a frickin’ disaster, but looking back on it comparing it to the last 50+ yrs the ’60s wasn’t so bad after all, eh. Again, the space program and rock ‘n’ roll baby!
btw, was in 4th grade when JFK was assassinated. Vivid memories. Saw Oswald killed on live TV IIRC ABC TV. Digressing.
And so it goes …
Also, after the Bay of Pigs/Cuban Missile Crisis his approval increased ie Americans rallying around the flag as per usual.
Also, in regard to the headline, I agree with that mostly because something like 99% of the documents have already been released and it’s hard to believe that there would be some new big revelation but that at least one of the released documents would at least obliquely mention something of significance in an unreleased document.
This leads to something of a love/hate relationship with the movie JFK. While Oliver Stone and his movie were directly responsible for getting Congress to act to have the documents released (which is why many of the significant documents, like the one I mentioned that proved that the CIA lied to the Warren Commission about the extent to which it followed Oswald) have come out in the last 10-15 years.
I agree that many people especially those in the media have not generally paid attention to these newer released documents so the tired cliches and falsehoods of ‘Oswald alone’ are still regarded as the ‘truth’ by many Americans.
On the other side though, Stone’s movie so flooded the zone with shit, that thanks in part anyway to him, that it basically became impossible to know what might be true but sounded a bit loony and what was genuinely a loony conspiracy theory.
However, while I like to regard myself as an independent thinker, I acknolwedge that my view that the CIA, if people in the CIA themselves didn’t kill Kennedy, knew about the assassination plans in more than enough detail to prevent them and intentionally chose not to. For the people who have actually read the newer released documents this seems to be becoming the consensus view of the Kennedy assassination.
I’m not sure that there is a consensus here that it was the psychopath Dulles who was behind it.
Did I mention that Allen Dulles was a psychopath?
Well, in TV shows, whenever there is a murder, the first question they ask is, “Who had the most to gain from his death?” So when I look at that, plus the state in which JFK was killed, plus the character of Lyndon Baines Johnson, I feel like I have an excellent idea who was ultimately behind it. He may have employed Cubans, or the Mafia, or Allen Dulles, or Oswald, or a mysterious shooter still unidentified, but he was an evil mofo, he did it, and he got away with it.
I don’t know if you’re being serious here or not, but I think there is no question that Oswald was tied up with the assassination of Kennedy in some way, and I don’t know that there’s any evidence that Oswald had any connection to LBJ.
This is what I’m referring to in regards to Oswald:
Lee Harvey Oswald, Lyndon Johnson & the JFK Assassination – Nov. 1 2019
by John Delane Williams (Author)
Despite the title (I haven’t read the book so I don’t know what it says), this is what the book says about itself: Incorporating the work of Ernst Titovets, this book explores the life of Lee Harvey Oswald, painting him as a real person—not as the straw man concocted to match the image of a lone assassin in search of greatness or infamy. Among other facets of his life and personality, the text explores Lee Harvey Oswald’s relationships with Jack Ruby, David Ferrie, and Judyth Baker.
So, despite the book title, there is no reference to any relationship Oswald had with LBJ or with anybody know to be associated with LBJ.
To be pedantic more than anything, but if the book wants to pain Oswald as a real person it should refer to him as Lee Oswald and not ‘Lee Harvey Oswald.’ It’s a policing reference to use a person’s full name and Oswald was not referred to with his middle name.
I was not serious.
Having been down this rabbit-hole before enough times to get bored with it: the most interesting thing about Oswald was that time he tried and failed to shoot an Army general. Kennedy practice run? He was just really pissed at the guy?
The most interesting thing about the few remaining Kennedy items is this:
What could have been important enough to hide it for 61 years? Why?
I imagine at some point I will be old enough that September 11th is a meaningless day as well. It’s weird to think about.
The young don’t get it because they grew up after what his assassination caused. They didn’t know America when politics still had true believers. When we had a reason to trust and put our faith in leaders.
After this, we had every reason to believe the government or those in it were directly responsible for making our lives worse in order to expand their personal power. And a bunch of things happened in short succession to prove it: Rfk, Dr King, hell even Marilyn Monroe.
We didn’t have conspiracy theory before this. We had no reason to believe the government wanted anything except to make the country better.
Kids today? They know better.
I know this is taken as a fact and that the polling of the day confirms it, but I heard a radio show from the late 1940s called The Life of Riley that was performed live before a studio audience and they made some joke about the government (and this was even shortly after World War II) something about how incompetent the government was, or how it couldn’t be trusted, and given the polling data, the response from the audience to the joke was stunning. It received the loudest laugh of the entire broadcast and I think also received thunderous applause that went on for around 30 seconds.
This actually shouldn’t necessarily be too much of a surprise, given the levels of inflation post World War II, and I think it suggests that even then the amount of trust and faith that people had in leaders was more complicated and not as high as is now generally believed.
No conspiracy theories?
How about the Blood Libel? That dates back centuries.
I was in 5th grade. A 4th grade teacher ran into our room and told our teacher to cut on the TV. We were carving green bricks at the time with knives (something that they don’t do today). I remember hearing the news and dropping my knife onto the table in shock. They sent us home, and we were glued to the TV all weekend. My mother and I saw Oswald killed live on TV. It was a horrible time.
4th grade at St. Patrick’s the principal (a nun) announced on the “intercom” JFK was shot! A few of the boys started shooting imaginary guns. ~ minutes later she announced JFK was dead. Many of the girls started to cry.
Yes, glued to the TV Friday to Monday. Glorious black and white Zenith.
I wasn’t alive when it happened, but growing up in the aftermath, it certainly was talked about every single year. It does seem strange that at some point, it wasn’t brought up anymore. I figured on the 50th anniversary in 2013, there would be some more discussion about it than in prior years. Google would always put new images up each day and I thought for sure they would put up something related to JFK. Well Google did do something around that time, but I was surprised to see it was a game commemorating the 50th anniversary of Dr Who. I didn’t think Dr Who was all that big, but I guess it had become more important at least to Google.
To be fair about the exact date though, I knew all about the assassination but I never remembered the specific date because I wasn’t alive when it happened. I always know it is about this time around Thanksgiving, but Nov 22 has never been a date that would trigger any meaning to me.