The JFK Assassination - 50 Years Later

I was a few months past 11 years old on November 22, 1963, when I and classmates returned to school after a short recess and witnessed the stunned shock and disbelief of the teachers and school staff to the news that President John F. Kennedy had been assassinated.  The shock extended to everyone we knew and over the following days people remained glued to their televisions watching the unfolding drama of a nation in mourning and the president's funeral.  A doubt few who lived through those days will forget the experience. Now, it's 50 years later and I still vividly recall that November day and the events that followed.  A piece in the Washington Post revisits the scene of the crime, if you will, and the Texas School Book Depository - now a museum that a dear friend and historian here in Hampton, Virginia helped create.  Here are highlights:

DALLAS — Dealey Plaza is a depression. It’s a shallow basin on the western edge of downtown, framed by concrete structures called pergolas and peristyles that were built by the Works Progress Administration. Designed as a gateway to the city, the plaza is more of an ode to the automobile, because the broad lawn is sliced by three streets: Elm, Main and Commerce. They slope from east to west and converge beneath a rail line in what is known as the triple underpass.

That’s where President and Mrs. Kennedy were headed, on Elm, when the ghastly thing happened.

On the north side of the plaza is the famous grassy knoll, where the second shooter supposedly lurked. There’s actually a second grassy knoll on the south side of the plaza. And the grassy knolls aren’t actually knolls (as in, a hillock, a mound), but rather are just slopes on the rim of the plaza.
The place hasn’t changed much since Nov. 22, 1963. Some signage is different. Skyscrapers loom in the distance. The live oaks are bigger. Otherwise, it’s remarkably preserved, including the building on the northeast corner of the plaza, which in 1963 was a warehouse known as the Texas School Book Depository. Up there, behind a pile of boxes in the southeast corner of the sixth floor, Lee Harvey Oswald pulled the trigger.

“It’s smaller than I thought it would be,” Kimberly Feare, 52, of Redwood City, Calif., said of Deal­ey Plaza on a recent Saturday afternoon. “But maybe it’s dwarfed by the incident itself. It’s such a huge thing.”

There, off the cuff, from a tourist, is the central tension of the Kennedy assassination.  This was, as she noted, a huge thing, a moment routinely and almost numbingly cited as an end to our innocence, as the termination of postwar conformism and the beginning of the chaos and madness and rage of the 1960s. It killed the first television president, his death captured on film. The assassination has been, ever since, the subject of obsessive investigation. There is always more to learn, always another factoid to gnaw.

The conspiracy theorists have one advantage: They don’t have to have all the answers, merely enough questions and doubts to shatter the mainstream consensus. The Lone Nut orthodoxy is essentially a closed narrative — it all but says “Keep moving folks, nothing to see here” — while the conspiracy theories are self-sustainingly open-ended, branching infinitely, a perpetual-motion mystery that will be with us forever.

And they do one more thing: They bequeath the assassination a deeper layer of meaning. This is an institutional murder. The bad guys are powerful people in the shadows of our civilization. This is not some small event — it’s an epic struggle between enlightenment and evil.

For many of us, what we see at Dealey Plaza says a lot about who we are. It reflects a worldview. It reveals how we process information. It even becomes part of our identity, like party affiliation or religious belief. And thus, as we study the facts, and scrutinize the images, and examine all the angles and trajectories, we are vulnerable to confirmation bias. Believing is seeing.

Out of Touch: Mitt Romney Gives His Horse a Soundtrack

I truly have nothing against the wealthy or those who are fans of horseback riding and horses. In fact, I grew up around horses and my parents had horses up through the time they moved to Virginia Beach while I was in college. And some family members in the Charlottesville area continue to have horses. But none of us ever (1) selected a sound track for our horse's dressage event or (2) were running a national campaign for president where we were trying to dispel the impression that we were utterly out of touch with what the lives of everyday Americans entail. That is not to say that Mitt Romney and his wife Ann are bad people. They are simply completely clueless when it comes to everyday concerns of most Americans - or at least those outside the tiny enclaves of the extremely wealthy. Ann Romney may have been a stay at home mother, but I suspect she had plenty of paid help to do those inconvenient tasks like house cleaning, doing laundry and/or yard work. Yes, we have had very wealthy presidents. But honestly, in my memory few would be presidents have been as seemingly out of touch with reality as Mitt and Ann Romney. Even George Bush, Sr., seems in comparison to have at least had some smidgen of empathy of average people. Here are highlights from The Hill on Mitt Romney soundtrack selection for his horse:

Mitt Romney may be running for president, but he still has time for his horse. Romney personally selected the music accompanying the choreographed performance of a horse competing in an international dressage championship beginning Wednesday.

Romney and his wife Ann co-own Rafalca, a highly regarded 15-year-old Oldenburg mare they have sponsored in numerous dressage competitions including this year’s World Cup Final, which takes place in the Netherlands. Dressage is a highly disciplined form of horsemanship that can appear to look like dancing.

The Romneys can’t attend the competition this year—due to that little thing known as running for president—but Romney kept up tradition by picking the music for Rafalca’s performance.

JFK at the wheel of a sailboat off Hyannis Port is something average folks can at least distantly understand. Choreographed horsemanship in fancy cloths to music just doesn't equate to anything most people experience in their lives. Yet Romney pretends that he's just an average guy.

Rick Santorum Again Attacks the Separation Of Church And State

With the Wisconsin GOP primary next week, Rick Santorum appears to be pulling out all the stops to rally would be Christianist and Kool-Aid drinker supporters. Why do I say this? Because Rick "Man on Dog" Santorum is again railing against John F. Kennedy's views on the separation of church and state under the U. S. Constitution. As a former daily mass attending Catholic I find the Opus Dei loving Santorum beyond scary. And, as noted before, I cannot help buy wonder what internal self-loathing and psychologically twisted secret issues drive Santorum (e.g., is a closeted gay?). Here are highlights from Huffington Post on his latest attack on the concept of the separation of church and state in American law and policy:

On Friday, as Mitt Romney continued to consolidate establishment support for his presidential candidacy within the Republican Party, getting the endorsement of Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wisc) days ahead of the Wisconsin primary, Rick Santorum soldiered on in a seemingly different quest.

Santorum wrote a 2,400-word essay essentially defending the substance of what he was trying to convey a month ago when he said that former President John F. Kennedy's 1960 speech on church and state made him want to "throw up."

[H]is essay on the RealClearReligion website did not pull punches in going after Kennedy. "Kennedy took words written to protect religion from the government and used them to protect the government from religion," Santorum said, referring to the phrase "separation of church and state."

Santorum then compared Kennedy to former Turkish President Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, who in 1923 ushered an era of secularism into the majority Muslim country by helping to establish the Republic of Turkey.

Santorum's decision to write such an essay is as clear a sign as any that even if he does not win the GOP nomination, he wants to use his time as a competitive candidate to shape the public debate. Such an essay holds little political upside, since it will only draw attention to his inflammatory comments in the past about Kennedy.

Santorum should do the country a favor and drop out of the GOP nomination process and check himself into a good psychiatric institution. He needs help in understanding that it's 2012, not 1112.

Joe Scarborough Chides Rick Santorum - and the GOP

As I will write in a future post, part of me would love to see Rick Santorum get the GOP presidential nomination because it might represent the best chance to see the party get hit with a crushing electoral defeat under a standard bearer that best personifies the extremism and insanity that are now the hallmarks of the party base. Even if "Frothy Mix" doesn't get the nomination, which increasingly looks to be the case, the GOP would be well advised to listen to the criticism of former GOP Congressman Joe Scarborough. But to do so would mean standing up to the Christianist/Tea Party base - something no one in the GOP seems willing to do. As a result, expect even more extremism as the base gets increasingly hysterical over changes in American society and that scary thing known as modernity. Here are some column highlights from Politico:

The story of Santorum’s implosion sheds light on an important political and cultural truth: Americans are in the market for someone to expand prosperity and opportunity, not indulge in moral meddling. It’s a key lesson for Republicans who want to attract sufficient numbers of independent voters to win nationally: remember that this is the 21st century, not the 19th.

When Santorum should have been talking about his grandfather’s working-class roots, he was talking instead about your wife’s birth control pills. When he should have been connecting with blue-collar Catholics, he was instead insulting their martyred president. And when Mr. Santorum should have been talking about how the grandson of a coal miner graduated college with two advanced degrees, he instead mocked the aspirational idea that we should send more of our kids to college.

[A]s he has shown on the campaign trail all year, Rick Santorum has absolutely no discipline when it comes to tempering his message.

Perhaps a political party that promotes state-ordered vaginal probes, re-litigates contraception, mocks higher education, attacks JFK and runs down rabbit trails irrelevant to most Americans’ lives is best suited to win back the White House. But I doubt it.

A New Book, “Jack and Lem: John F. Kennedy and Lem Billings, the Untold Story of an Extraordinary Friendship”

This new book by David Pitts, who has a longstanding interest in Kennedy, said that the inspiration for the project came from reading a variety of books over the years about the former president in which the name Lem Billings kept appearing, but was never fully explained. Pitts began researching the pair’s relationship and uncovered how progressive Kennedy was in terms of accepting Billings’ sexual orientation. It sounds like it would be an interesting read:

Beginning with their years at Choate, Billings often spent holidays and vacations with the Kennedys, although his family lived in Baltimore. He was also a fixture at the White House, which many found odd. Billings had a room there, and he frequently listened to the president vent about the international crises in Cuba and Berlin. Politicos wrote him off as Kennedy’s school friend who was a political lightweight, and others felt that he simply spent too much time hanging around.Persistent rumors about Kennedy’s bisexuality are not answered in this book. Pitts uncovered no evidence that suggested a sexual relationship between the two friends.