DALLAS — Lee Harvey Oswald is said to have fired the bullets that killed President John F. Kennedy on Nov. 22, 1963.
Yeah, he is said to have done it. Doesn't mean he did.
Related: Lee Harvey Oswald, reconsidered
Also see: Sunday Globe Special: The Oswald Oddity
I'm sorry but believing that patsy was the lone gunman is absurd.
Dealey Plaza — a Texas tourist destination, the grassy knoll where conspiracy theorists believe a second gunman stood, gauging the difficulty of hitting a moving target in an open-top limousine.
Back and to the left.
After 20 minutes, or an hour, the tourists leave Dealey Plaza, which has barely changed since that faraway Friday. But for many residents in Dallas, derided for years afterward as the “city of hate,” that place and day cannot be left behind.
“There is no way we can ever erase the horror and sorrow of that time,” said Julian Read, who rode in Kennedy’s motorcade as press secretary to Governor John Connally of Texas, who was wounded in the shooting. “But with all that’s being done, I hope we can come to peace with this day.”
For the first time since the assassination, the city will hold an official, significant ceremony at Dealey Plaza on Friday to mark the anniversary. The historian David McCullough is scheduled to speak, as is Mayor Mike Rawlings, a first-term Democrat and graduate of Boston College. A Naval Academy chorus is planning to sing before an audience limited to 5,000 people, and bells will ring throughout the city.
The decades-long path to this event, paid for with $3 million in private donations, had been acrimonious at its beginning. Some civic leaders sought to demolish the Texas School Book Depository, where Oswald fired his rifle, and others stridently opposed transforming part of the building into a museum, which it is today.
“This was a period when Dallas was very much going forward through denial,” said Stephen Fagin, associate curator at The Sixth Floor Museum.
If denial was being practiced in the city, the assassination was often impossible to ignore out of state.
It still is. Who knows what direction the world might have taken had the brave man lived and his brother succeeded him?
Dallas businessmen were tossed out of cabs in New York, residents said. Long-distance phone calls were disconnected, restaurant service was denied, and insults surfaced with regularity.
On a vacation to the Virgin Islands, Adams recalled, she and her late husband mentioned that they lived in Dallas. The resort worker replied, “Oh, that’s where you kill presidents.”
According to Fagin, a letter from that time was addressed to “Shame On You, Texas,” instead of the correct location of Dallas. The US Postal Service, Fagin said, knew exactly where to deliver the envelope.
“It had an incredible impact, an unfortunate impact on this community and this state,” said Mark Connally, 61, the former governor’s son. “Unfortunately, all the good things get lost, and we’ve all had to live with the regret of what happened here.”
Adams, who helped shepherd The Sixth Floor Museum to reality, said that for years she had avoided looking at the former book depository, where Oswald worked after his return to Dallas the month before the assassination.
“That’s not unusual for Dallasites,” Adams said.
What did seem unusual, she added, was the damage to the city and its psyche. Los Angeles was not blamed for Robert F. Kennedy’s assassination in 1968, she said, and neither was Memphis for the death of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.
No, we were told it was an angry Palestinian and a racist redneck that did those, versions that did not jibe with subsequent investigations by independent researchers.
“I don’t know how someone puts himself in the position of living here and knowing the world thinks of you as a terrible place, and that the city killed the president,” Adams said. “The city didn’t kill the president.”
Here is who did:
The Military-Industrial Complex
The CIA
The Federal Reserve
Israel
The fact that the last two receive the least attention from the AmeriKan jewsmedia is an important indicator at who may truly be at the bottom of the damn thing.
Additionally, JFK would have understood "conspiracy theories" due to his exposure to Operation Northwoods. The man was horrified by such information, as is anyone who wanders across such things. You never see the world the same again. I believe the appropriate word is epiphany.
***
However much Dallas wanted to distance itself from its “city of hate” label, the reputation did not surface in a vacuum. The early 1960s saw a strident, extreme brand of conservatism emerge in Dallas, which retained vestiges of the Jim Crow, segregated South amid a growing, national civil rights movement.
It's the Tea Party today, so we know who will be framed if Obama is shot (and remember, Israel really does not like him right now; we got your back on that one, Mr. President.)
“It was a toxic element. Unfortunately, it became visible,” said Val Imm Bashour, society editor of the Dallas Times Herald in 1963. “It’s like all things that are radical. You know, it’s sort of like the bombings that you all had in Boston. There are just these elements that get carried away and will do anything that they feel accomplishes their purpose.”
Except it was homegrown in Dallas.
Bashour saw one of the most publicized episodes of that vitriol firsthand, less than a month before Kennedy’s visit.
While Bashour interviewed Adlai Stevenson, the US ambassador to the United Nations, one of 100 angry protesters used a sign to strike the two-time Democratic nominee for president on the head. Another spat at him.
After the assault, Stevenson was heard to say, “Are these human beings, or are these animals?”
The spasms of hate did not target only Northerners deemed too liberal, or socialist, or even Communist by extremists in a city that had become a Southwestern headquarters for the radical-right John Birch Society.
Three years earlier, after Senator Lyndon B. Johnson of Texas had agreed to become Kennedy’s running mate, he and his wife, Lady Bird, were accosted by a screaming crowd as they arrived at the Adolphus Hotel here.
Nearby stood Representative Bruce Alger, a Republican from Dallas, hoisting a sign that read, “LBJ Sold Out to Yankee Socialists.”
Texas oil barons H.L. Hunt and Clint Murchison also helped lead the anti-Kennedy vanguard, which attacked the president for his Catholic religion and plans for expanded social programs, and feared that he would target tax breaks for the oil industry.
Kennedy did target those tax breaks; it was called the oil depletion allowance.
Much of the criticism was brazen and public, perhaps no more visible than when E.M. “Ted” Dealey, publisher of the Dallas Morning News, stood to address Kennedy at a White House luncheon for Texas newspaper publishers in 1961.
“We need a man on horseback to lead this nation, and many people in Texas and the Southwest think that you are riding Caroline’s tricycle,” Dealey said.
Bill Minutaglio, a University of Texas journalism professor and co-author of a new book called “Dallas 1963,” said the “citizen-kings” of Dallas at the time — in business, the church, and media — were virulently anti-Kennedy. “These were a handful of people who were extremely powerful and action-oriented people who had hijacked the microphone,” he said. “They began, frankly, a war to overthrow Kennedy.”
It's what is called a limited hangout, in this case it is the Texas oil barons. While there is no doubt they were involved, their role was more along the lines of Mob and anti-Castro Cuban grunts and pawns.
Also see: Globe Admits Intelligence Agency Involvement in JFK Assassination
Related:
"Peter Janney, 64, a Beverly psychologist and first-time author of 548-page tome, “Mary’s Mosaic: The CIA Conspiracy to Murder John F. Kennedy, Mary Pinchot Meyer, and Their Vision for World Peace,” sees history differently. He’s convinced that the CIA, feeling threatened by Kennedy’s mistrust of the agency after the Bay of Pigs fiasco in Cuba, conspired to have the president killed, then eliminated Meyer as part of a coverup."
Also see: JFK and LSD
That soothed my anger, man.
The irony is that Oswald had only a fleeting link to Dallas. He had moved back to the area only the month before the assassination, and his Marxist leanings had included support for Fidel Castro and his defection to the Soviet Union in 1959.
Translation: he was being manipulated and set-up. He was an FBI informant fer crying out loud! They were telling him where to go.
Such is the legacy that J. Erik Jonsson, the cofounder of high-tech pioneer Texas Instruments, inherited when he became mayor in 1964. But despite the makeover, the taint of the assassination lingered as an unwelcome piece of municipal baggage. In the early 1970s, a movement to buy and demolish the former Texas School Book Depository, which lay vacant, found champions in Cowboys coach Tom Landry and businessman Ross Perot.
Why the destruction of evidence?
That effort spurred passionate debate about the city’s relationship to the shooting. In the end, the City Council defeated the demolition proposal. The building now houses The Sixth Floor Museum and — in a move fraught with forward-looking symbolism — the seat of Dallas County government.
“Dallas suffered so much. How does a community emerge from that?” asked Fagin in an interview at The Sixth Floor Museum, which opened in 1989....
The sniper’s nest that Oswald occupied at a corner window in the sixth floor of the building has been part of the exhibits, but the curators take no position on whether he acted alone. The museum presents a fact-based look at the city’s darkest day, but they do so in historical context, Fagin said. Kennedy and his times and presidency are examined, as well as straightforward, nonjudgmental synopses of the conspiracy theories that have emerged over the years.
Something you will not find in any jewspaper.
“Whatever baggage someone arrives with at the museum is the baggage someone leaves with,” Fagin said.
***
Over and over, city officials past and present say that Dallas moved on long ago, that the heinous act of a sociopathic gunman never defined a city that turned out by the thousands to give Kennedy a warm welcome before he was shot.
“You can’t say Dallas doesn’t love you, Mr. President,” Nellie Connally, the wife of the governor, turned and told Kennedy shortly before the fatal shots.
But since the assassination, that relationship has been conflicted at best. Dealey Plaza is a National Historic Site, but the landmark contains no official memorial to the president. Instead, a cenotaph erected by the city in 1970 to honor Kennedy is two blocks away, hidden from the plaza, behind a 19th-century courthouse.
A pair of X’s to mark the spots where bullets struck the president are periodically painted on Elm Street by self-styled “assassination researchers,” only to be removed by the city and then later repainted by the “researchers,” often conspiracy buffs....
See what I mean? I'm a self-styled buff.
What hasn’t changed, however, is keen interest in the assassination.
Hope and the search for truth burns like the eternal flame at his grave.
Near Dealey Plaza, the JFK Assassination Tour picks up 25,000 visitors a year to retrace the route of the presidential motorcade. The trolleys also pass where Oswald lived, where he shot and killed Dallas police officer J.D. Tippit, and where he was captured at the Texas Theatre....
I'm not even going to get into the Oswald-Tippit incident and its logistics here; suffice it to say that is another questionable scenario from the official story that goes unquestioned by the pre$$.
As he spoke, books about the assassination and gruesome photos of Kennedy’s autopsy were hawked. Nearby, 77-year-old James Tague told anyone who would listen that he had been the “third man wounded” 50 years ago when a bullet struck the pavement and kicked up asphalt that nicked his face.
Right, us self-styled buffs are all trying to make a buck.
Less than 2 miles away, Heather Foerster served drinks and lunch at Lee Harvey’s, a dive bar in the Cedars neighborhood where Lee Harvey Oswald bobblehead dolls, outfitted with plastic rifles, can be bought for $20.
On Saturday, the bar is hosting a “John F. Kennedy 5oth Anniversary” party with “music all night” and cuts from a new album titled “Tragic Tales from the Grassy Knoll.”
A party over the killing? Oooooh!
See: Dallas 1 PM
I wonder if that track is on the album.
Foerster smiled and shrugged when asked why a bar in Dallas, of all places, would adopt and flaunt Oswald’s name.
“What happened to us was horrible and insulting, and we’ve been unable to separate ourselves from it,” said the 40-year-old day manager. “We can’t escape it, so you just roll with it.”
Elsewhere in Dallas, the anniversary has evoked quiet reflection, combined with a hope that the city’s link to the assassination can finally cross a one-way bridge from memory to history.
Related:
"The mainstream totally controlled media is making an all out attack on the sensibilities of the American people during this 50th anniversary of the assassination. I have the feeling that they want this to be the end of the discussion, the climax and then the letdown.
--MORE--"
He nailed 'em on that one!
For some residents, that prospect remains elusive. “It’s still there. It stuck. Now, here we go through the whole thing again,” says Lindalyn Adams, whose husband stood in the hospital elevator where Oswald, comatose, was rushed after being shot by Jack Ruby.
“I know it will be very solemn and very emotional, my goodness,” Adams says, looking ahead to Friday’s ceremony. “I hope it would be a closure, but I don’t think it will.”
Never. We owe it to the great man.
--more--"
Related:
"Friday marks 50 years to the day since Kennedy was killed by a gunman in Dallas. Obama will meet privately at the White House that day with leaders and volunteers from the Peace Corps program Kennedy established. The presence of the Clintons’presence at the eternal flame where Kennedy is buried is sure to spark speculation about whether Obama has a favorite in the 2016 race to succeed him. For Hillary Clinton, his former secretary of state, her every move is examined for signs of whether she will run. Vice President Joe Biden, another potential candidate, plans to be at the medal ceremony and dinner but will not be at the grave.
Who gives a s*** about the 2016 campaign at a time like that?
President Harry Truman established an early version of the Medal of Freedom in 1945 to recognize those whose actions overseas advanced the national security of the United States or its allies....
Oh, so it was Truman who came up with idea to honor CIA scum!
By executive order in February 1963, Kennedy made bestowing the Medal of Freedom a presidential privilege and expanded its scope to honor contributions to world peace, culture, and other public interests."
I finally found an executive order I like.
"Clinton criticized Obama’s Syria policy, saying that any president would be a “total fool” to avoid taking action to stem a brutal civil war because of public resistance to foreign engagement.
I guess Obama will be backing Biden after that and the healthcare insult.
Among those on an unusually star-studded list of 16 recipients for the Presidential Medal of Freedom were Oprah Winfrey, the television entrepreneur; Dean Smith, the Hall of Fame college basketball coach; Bayard Rustin, the civil rights campaigner; Sally Ride, the late astronaut who was the first US woman in space; Benjamin C. Bradlee, the Watergate-era editor of The Washington Post; Daniel K. Inouye, the late senator from Hawaii; Loretta Lynn, the country music singer; and Gloria Steinem, the feminist writer."
Seeing as Henry Kissinger received one the Medal is worth about as much as a Nobel Prize.
"Visitors to JFK grave mourn loss, way things were; Lament a lack of statesmanlike leadership in D.C." by Matt Viser | Globe Staff, November 20, 2013
ARLINGTON, Va. — In the glow of history, the president buried beneath the eternal flame at Arlington National Cemetery represents the full promise of leadership — part reality, part myth — against which today’s politics are inevitably, unflatteringly, compared.
“He was a leader,” said Darryl Spears, a 49-year-old data analyst from Montgomery, Ala., who stood by John F. Kennedy’s grave on Tuesday. “We don’t have those anymore.”
How quickly America has forgotten George W. Bush!
He and other visitors filed solemnly past the granite stones where President Obama and former President Bill Clinton, presidents who themselves have labored to emulate Kennedy, will join together Wednesday and lay a wreath in commemoration of Friday’s 50th anniversary of Kennedy’s assassination in Dallas, on Nov. 22, 1963.
They can't hold a flame to him.
The visitors paid respects to a man they never met but whom they have felt they have always known, some brought to tears by the memory of his presidency and the assassination that ended it.
In interviews, they lamented the tragedy of the murder itself, but also the seeming absence, in a perpetually gridlocked capital, of a national leader with a vision to do great things.
That's what got him killed.
“There used to be statesmen in Congress when Kennedy served,” said Lane Hemming, a 71-year-old retired teacher from Rexburg, Idaho. “I can’t think of one statesman today. They’re politicians, not statesmen.”
Hyannis Port on Cape Cod represents happy times for the Kennedys. Arlington Cemetery, rising just across the Potomac River from the capital, represents the lives cut short.
Not far from Jack Kennedy lies Robert F. Kennedy, shot in Los Angeles in 1968. Just down the hill is Senator Edward M. Kennedy, the only one of the brothers to realize a full political career, who died in 2009.
That's because Ted got the message.
*********************
Comparisons to modern presidents are almost unfair. Kennedy and his White House are frozen in time in the minds of Americans, in a presidency not quite three years old.
“It’s a story that never finished,” said Brian Horais, a 64-year-old government retiree from Knoxville, Tenn. “So there’s a lot of magical nature to it.”
Clinton idolized Kennedy, and shook his hand during a trip to the White House as a teenager. For Obama, Kennedy helped propel the civil rights movement, many of the dreams of which were realized when the first black president was elected in 2008.
Obama won the White House with the help of crucial endorsements from Kennedy’s daughter, Caroline, and brother, Ted Kennedy (Obama and his wife, Michelle, will be joined not only by Clinton on Wednesday but also by Hillary Clinton, the candidate he beat for the 2008 Democratic nomination).
Obama is an enigma in that he appears to be pissing off the same interests.
Kennedy saw government as an instrument of great good, a vehicle to accomplish sweeping national goals. He pushed for Medicare and more funding for education, and he sought an increase in the minimum wage rate. He gained funding for a space program, and helped establish the Peace Corps.
It might have been once, but no longer. Corporate governance has failed.
That sense of the federal government as a positive force faded at times in the last half century. There was the disillusionment and corruption that marked the presidency of President Richard M. Nixon, and the laissez-faire, small-government policies of President Ronald Reagan.
Obama campaigned in 2008 on a Kennedyesque vision, promising programs to uplift Americans, put people to work, clean the environment. He has sought to reinvigorate the nation’s sense of government activism, particularly with his signature health care reform. But his presidency was weighed down by a crippled economy, strident Republican opposition, and a capital that is frequently ridiculed in the public discourse.
Truthfully, it is not that different from Kennedy's time.
Obama presided over a GOP-instigated government shutdown. His approval ratings have reached the lowest point of his presidency.
Kennedy was never tested by a second term.
He never got the chance.
************************
Arlington National Cemetery was a place Kennedy knew well, a place where he would visit frequently, thinking of his older brother, Joseph, who died in World War II.
In the spring of 1963, months before he was killed, Kennedy made an impromptu Sunday visit to the cemetery with one of his close friends, Charlie Bartlett.
It was one of the spots that Kennedy could go to get outside but still remain protected by the Secret Service.
“I said where are you going to be buried?” Bartlett recalled in an interview this week. “And he said, ‘Well, it’d be Boston where my library is going to be. Of course, there will be no library if there’s no second term. Because nobody would give a damn.’ ”
Several months later, he was buried not far from where they had been standing that day. There would be a library in Boston because, it turned out, people did give a damn.
And we still do.
--more--"
"Kennedy murder a breakpoint in time" by Mark Feeney | Globe Staff, November 21, 2013
That awful day in Dallas retains enormous symbolic importance as touchstone: marking a boundary between a pre-assassination then and a post-assassination now, a now that in significant ways remains with us.
The shock of Kennedy’s death eventually faded. Shock always does. Yet the confusion and suspicion that followed haven’t. They’ve become part of our cultural climate. We have not only grown accustomed to doubt and skepticism but come to expect them....
And that is a GOOD THING! Doubt is healthy!
Phrases like “conspiracy theory” and “distrust of government” were rarely if ever heard prior to Nov. 22, 1963. Soon enough they became commonplace. That a popular ’90s television series, “The X-Files,” would have three recurring characters known as the Lone Gunmen wasn’t necessarily surprising. (They even got a brief-lived spinoff series.)
Please don't bundle the JFK researchers with the UFO nuts.
The trio could have as easily been called the Grassy Knolls or the Oswald Patsies. Assassination terminology, with its weird blend of the sinister and casual, had long ago entered everyday vocabulary.
The surprise was the Lone Gunmen being portrayed as eccentric misfits. The great legacy of the assassination is how many people take for granted that the only place to find the truth is outside the public square. Or as the “X-Files” tagline has it, “The truth is out there.” Dealey Plaza is where “out there” begins.
The 50th anniversary brings abundant evidence of the hold Kennedy’s death retains on the popular imagination. Bill O’Reilly and Martin Dugard’s “Killing Kennedy: The End of Camelot” remains a bestseller more than a year after its release. It’s the most prominent of numerous books published in observance of the anniversary.
A cable movie adapted from “Killing Kennedy,” starring Rob Lowe as JFK, is one of many television movies and documentaries being shown throughout November.
That piece of crap supported the discredited Oswald is angry lone nut theory.
A theatrical film, “Parkland,” was released last month. It centers on events in and around Dallas’s Parkland Hospital, where Kennedy was taken after the shooting.
And where he was illegally removed; state and national laws stipulated that the autopsy should have been done in Texas by civilian doctors. The plane ride to Washington also breaks the chain of evidence and invalidates any findings at Bethesda with all its contradictions.
Art exhibitions relating to Kennedy and the assassination are on display in museums ranging from the Addison Gallery of American Art in Andover and the Yale University Art Gallery to the Amon Carter Museum in Fort Worth and New York’s International Center of Photography. Kennedy understood the camera as few public figures have, and his responsiveness to it contributed even more than his glamorous looks and heroic bearing did to there being so many striking images of him....
Of course, piety and grief gave way to disquiet and obsession. The Vietnam War and Watergate contributed to a darkening view of society, as did the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Kennedy’s brother Robert. But no other event carried quite the psychic charge that JFK’s death did. When a singer is shot onstage in Robert Altman’s 1975 film “Nashville,” a character tries to reassure the audience. “This isn’t Dallas.” No, it’s not. A dozen years after the assassination, everywhere was.
The most popular television series of the ’80s shared a name with the Texas city. Did the association with Kennedy’s murder no longer matter — or did it matter in a different way?
Where are they going with this?
*******************
For Oliver Stone, the assassination is a kind of creation myth in reverse.
Time to pile on Ollie despite his flaws from the greatest purveyor of myths that has ever existed -- the AmeriKan jewsmedia.
Eden became Gehenna just outside the Texas Schoolbook Depository. Stone’s 1991 “JFK” takes conspiracy as a given — but also Kennedy’s absolute virtue.
He certainly was when it came to his tenure future plans regarding the truly important events of the age.
Even though he’s seen in only the briefest of glimpses, Kennedy haunts the movie. By comparison, the way Kennedy’s memory haunts Clint Eastwood’s character in the 1993 thriller “In the Line of Fire” makes perfect sense. Eastwood plays a Secret Service agent who was on duty in Dallas 30 years before.
I'm tired of Hollywood and its version of history.
Our national horror stories subsequent to the assassination at least had redeeming elements: the bravery of soldiers in Vietnam, the way Watergate demonstrated the system worked, the heroism and sacrifice of New York firefighters and Flight 93 passengers on 9/11.
Wow, talk about revisionist history!
Sometimes the redemption takes time to come out, as with the success of Tony Mendez’s hostage-rescue mission, portrayed in “Argo.” There are no second acts in American lives, F. Scott Fitzgerald famously said. There certainly are silver linings in American failures, and Americans love finding them. (That’s one reason “Argo” won its best picture Oscar.) Not the Kennedy assassination: There were no silver linings. Even something as basic as conclusiveness would qualify as a silver lining. “We know who did it. We know how he did it. We know why he did it. Okay? That’s that.” Nothing like that was forthcoming.
Kennedy’s assassination was a political act and historical event.
Aren't they all?
Its failure to resolve itself was, and still is, a cultural phenomenon. There have been so many investigations of the assassination, starting with the Warren Commission: by journalists, authors, obsessives, even the House Select Committee on Assassinations, in the late ’70s. The name sounds like the title of a Philip K. Dick novel. The sum of the answers they tried to give, and the further doubts they raised, contributed even more to how what happened in Dallas has ramified than the actual killing did.
That cultural phenomenon has a pair of defining texts, its Old Testament and New: the 26 volumes of the Warren Commission report, with its finding that Oswald acted alone; and the Zapruder film, the 26.6 seconds of 8mm home-movie footage shot by Dallas clothing manufacturer Abraham Zapruder, with its recording of the actual event. One created the post-assassination landscape. The other, as some saw it, offered the promise of revelation, an answer at last.
The only problem is Zapruder -- in addition to being Jewish, which raises its own set of suspicions) -- gave the government access to the film within hours. There are those that claim the film has been edited and altered, with a suspicious red blob exploding in the front of Kennedy's head and a surprising dark spot in the back of the head where the exit wound was and where the sun would have been shining on it.
As we have seen much later, your TV is not to be trusted.
The Warren Commission report offers the truth, such as it is, handed down from on high.
And that, as we have painfully become aware, is never to be believed.
Commission members included the chief justice of the United States, eminent leaders of Congress, and a former head of the Central Intelligence Agency.
Yeah, a man Kennedy had fired! All those commissioners were there to hide or cover up aspects of their particular interest. If not, why was a banker appointed?
It’s one measure of how vastly the assassination changed the United States that the idea of a past CIA director being part of any comparable investigation now is inconceivable. The truth may or may not be out there, but wherever it is, the CIA is not to be trusted with it.
The report was obsolete the moment it was published, an overdetermined, contradictory, confusing, and often-implausible monument....
But it did provide a detailed record of Oswald and his movements.
The Zapruder film has no counterpart. What counterpart could it have? The film’s opaque brevity is as confusing as the report’s numbing immensity and claim to finality. In fact, the report’s attempts to interpret the film are no small part of the confusion, as the commission attempted to explain why the backward jerk of the president’s body didn’t suggest a bullet fired from somewhere other than Oswald’s perch. The phrase “magic bullet” entered the post-assassination lexicon. Yet precisely because of that capacity to confuse, the 486 Zapruder frames possess an ongoing relevance and suggestiveness given to very few works, let alone one intrinsically artless and inexpressive.
All of a sudden the AmeriKan media is endorsing the Zapruder film?
Hmmmmm!
Instead of counterparts, the Zapruder film has progeny. Every decade, the British film journal Sight & Sound polls critics for a list of the ten best films of all time. The most recent results, in 2012, named Alfred Hitchcock’s “Vertigo” as number one. There’s no need to solicit votes for the most discussed and analyzed film of all time. That would be the Zapruder footage.
For years, the film was impossible to see. Life magazine had bought it from Zapruder, a great journalistic coup — except that it wasn’t. To protect the magazine’s investment as well as for reasons of decency, the film was never shown.
It's called a cover up.
But everyone knew about it. It was widely discussed and referred to. Individual frames and sequences were reproduced in Life and elsewhere. It was a kind of like atmosphere: invisible yet everywhere.
Inaccessibility made the Zapruder film seem at once dubious (not seeing is not believing) and all the more authoritative (evidence that’s impossible to see is evidence that’s impossible to refute). Now you can see it on YouTube. In slow motion? Digitized? Zoomed in? With Dictabelt soundtrack? Hosted by Geraldo Rivera? Take your pick. The footage is there among countless cat videos and karaoke numbers and the latest viral sensations. All access, all the time. Ho hum. Except that 50 years later viewing it remains utterly unnerving — and stays so, no matter how many times you watch it. The horror of watching the impact of the second bullet, in frame 313, cannot be exaggerated....
They got that right.
Abraham Zapruder went out that day intending to take a home movie to show to his family. What he ended up with was something incalculably different, a piece of history unlike any other. Except that it did turn out to be a home movie, too: everyone’s home, everyone’s movie.
--more--"
Also see:
JFK’s wisdom for graduates
Three lessons from the Kennedy presidency
From a guy who wants to invade Syria and clean up whatever mess we make.
Did a mistake save the world?
JFK’s death left a gap that was never filled
When the joke was on JFK
Lessons JFK could teach senators about running for president
’60 tape reveals an uncertain John F. Kennedy
JFK’s last days filled with worry, tapes show
‘Once Upon a Secret’ by Mimi Alford
In the wake of a new book by an intern who said she had an affair with JFK, the question arises: At what point does the Kennedy library stop marketing myth and start addressing reality?
When the newspaper does.
Slow Saturday Special: Finally, a Hawkish Kennedy
JFK was a rapist.
50 years later, Beverly forensic pathologist examines JFK
JFK Library to open exhibit about president’s funeral
JFK’s hearse to be sold at Dallas auction
Bidder adds JFK hearse to collection
Framingham woman helped Jackie Kennedy reply to condolence letters
Boston helped build JFK
Time to play taps:
"With the whole nation and much of the world listening, Clark fumbled the sixth note of taps. His flub has gone down in bugling history as the poignant ‘‘broken note’’ of the Kennedy funeral. It was a testament to the anguish of the day, and to the human truth that under duress, even the best can make a mistake."
Please see:
Globe Recalls Camelot
The Last Legitimate President
Thanksgiving Celebration Canceled
NEXT DAY UPDATES:
I must admit I was shocked by the wrapping of today's Globe.
The news hit, a rogue wave: sudden, unthinkable, savage
From what I briefly read and perused the article is a "where were you when" piece.
Lawmaker calls for Peace Corps memorial
There is just something strange about war-makers calling for peace over a guy who was killed over it by forces that fund campaign coffers and investment portfolios.
Local groups plan events marking JFK assassination
I will be marking it with a day of silence on this blog today, leaving this to lead the top of my page until tomorrow in honor of the great man.
SATURDAY UPDATES:
His life fulfilled the Irish dream. His death shattered it.
Somber nation marks 50th anniversary of JFK death
JFK Elementary students learn about school’s namesake
Soon the kids were curious again about his death, about who killed him and why. The teacher, Heather Anderson, guided them back to talk of his life.
Yes, can't have inquisitive little minds inquiring about "conspiracy theories" in the inculcating indoctrination centers we call schools.
