Angel: "Withdraw from Vietnam!..." Devil: "....and Get Into a Hooker!"

The Washington Post talks about the dueling versions of John F. Kennedy, currently for sale on American newsstands. In The Atlantic, Robert Dallek suggests that, had JFK lived, he would have reestablished relations with Castro and withdrawn from Vietnam. In Playboy, Frank Sinatra's valet reveals some bad behavior from JFK involving hookers and cocaine. Forty years on, the only mischief we don't know about is his penchant for farting in public. (I'm working on the definitive book on that.)



The Washington Post roused my ire--watch out!--by calling Oliver Stone "a nutjob" for his movie "JFK." I find it highly odd that the newspaper that broke the story about Watergate would dismiss Stone's movie--actually 30 years' worth of theories collected under the clunky-but-necessary device of the Garrison investigation--so out of hand. I want my journalists, particularly the ones covering the government, to assume the worst and look for it, not gobble finger food at Georgetown parties, thinking only the best about their hosts. It's completely IMPOSSIBLE that people in positions of power, both in the government and outside it, wanted JFK dead, isn't it? That only happens in other, less important countries. Americans are much too virtuous for that...and we don't rig elections, either.



JFK is a movie, not a comprehensive brief on the most plausible theories regarding a conspiracy to assassinate the President. The Washington Post--and everybody else--knows the difference, but has no stomach to report what probably happened that day in Dallas. Can I give you the Social Security numbers of the gunmen? No--but since when are individual citizens expected to do the work of the the US Justice Department? What were we paying J. Edgar Hoover for? (Oh, sorry--he was busy wiretapping Martin Luther King and denying the existence of the Mafia.) 75% of what we know about the JFK assassination was uncovered by individual citizens. At what point does it become the government's responsibility to clear up this bit of unfinished business, and when can they be called to account for not doing it? Power corrupts on American soil just as effectively as everywhere else.



Here's all you need to know about the JFK assassination: the stated, current policy of the U.S. government is that there was a 95% chance that there were two or more people shooting at the President. Thus, conspiracy. The Warren Report of 1964 has been superceded by the report of the House Select Committee on Assassinations in 1978, which came to the above conclusion. So the truth that I think people ought to carry around with them is this: even the government thinks there was a conspiracy, but since it benefits nobody in power to find the killer(s), we'll never know.



That's not Oliver Stone's fault. And he's not a "nutjob" for suspecting that disinterest in solving the assassination may signal some degree of involvement in it. Here's what I took away from JFK, flaws and all: to not know who killed the President is to show the ultimate disrespect for democracy. Assassination is the ultimate undemocratic act. And to not investigate, properly and fully, who did it is to show utter contempt for truth. I'm no Kennedy-worshipper, but there's something to be said for the opinion that American democracy has been withering ever since November 22, 1963. George II--the Patriot Act--the War on Iraq--all these are the latest fruits of the tree planted then.