Kennedy Assassination Obsession

My obsession with the Kennedy Assassination has largely abated since the 50th anniversary of the event one year ago today.

It was briefly rekindled in the spring, when I wrote one or two blog entries about it, and i went so far as to read a huge part of Case Closed, which is an extensive and very detailed book that argues that Lee Harvey Oswald, and only Oswald, was responsible for the assassination. It was an intense fascination, but that went away quickly enough.

The fact of the matter is, like with so many other things, I had to admit that I just did not have any of the answers.

If there is one thing that I think I have gotten more comfortable with in getting older, it is growing more comfortable with not having all of the answers, and knowing and accepting my own limitations. Some who harbor in that spirit of conquering everything and knowing no boundaries or limitations would surely suggest that this is a defeatist attitude. Personally, I believe it is something that happens when we grow older, and more mature. That ability to understand that you do not have to impose yourself, or your will, on everyone else, and not forcing your own answers down everyone's throats.

That does not mean that the Kennedy Assassination was not a fascinating subject matter. Of course it is. That is why people are still talking about it all of these years later, even though there are now few people still alive who were actually there in Dallas, let alone in Dealy Plaza, on that fateful day, 51 years ago now.

The fact of the matter is that there are just so many theories, when you start to investigate it. The official one is that Oswald did it, and acted alone - the old "lone gunman" theory. This is not accepted by many people, and I think that is understandable, even if many arrogant believers look down on others who express any doubts about this official version.

I can accept that Lee Harvey Oswald was involved. In fact, it is hard to dispute. However, seeing Kennedy fly backwards and to the left from the kill shot makes it still difficult to swallow the official account without any serious scrutiny. There are other reasons to doubt the official version, but this is the main one that really bothers me, and prevents me from believing that Oswald alone killed President Kennedy from behind. The way Kennedy flies backward just seems too suspect. This is the main source of doubt, and why it just seems hard to accept the official version advocated most famously (and probably capably) by Gerald Posner (author of Case Closed).

There are other questions that linger, as well. However, I am not writing this in order to embark on yet another series of blog entries investigating this case. To some extent, that was done already around this time last year, as well as earlier this year (perhaps around springtime, if memory serves correctly).

No, this is simply to acknowledge the significance of this event, now over half a century ago. To me, it seems that America changed fundamentally following not just the assassination, but the official and unofficial investigations that followed, with the lingering doubts that gave rise to conspiracy theories. But that the dream of Camelot ended all of a sudden on that November day, and the idealistic vision and belief of and by Americans that this young man represented the best that the nation had to offer, and it was this innocent interpretation that was also killed on that day. A part of what America believed of itself ended on that day, and the nation really began to change more radically following that event than it did probably roughly forty years later, following the September 11th attacks. Both events changed the country, and indeed the world. However, the Kennedy Assassination really saw the beginning of the rise of skepticism. A lot of it was perhaps healthy, and ended the surely unhealthy and excessive spirit of conformity of the fifties. But I think that this skepticism also has itself grown excessive, to the point that none of us know exactly what to believe in anymore, if anything.

That, to me, is a large part of what makes this particular event in American history so endlessly fascinating. Seeing images from those days is like glimpsing at pictures from our childhood. we know it is the same person, but it feels like it was someone else, because it relates so little to our reality now. That is the same thing with the United States back in November of 1963. It was the same country in a literal way, yes. But it was a very different nation, as well. Remember that those were the days of Camelot, with all of the images of this young, highly intelligent, and energetic White House, with a handsome and idealistic President and his beautiful, idealistic family. The nation supported him, and it believed of him, and of itself, that we were all working hard to truly create a better world, and that this better world was our goal, that it was attainable. Does anyone believe that now?

It represented a different America. An America that was on top of the world at that point in time. Easily the world's leading superpower, and it seemed that the dominant version of history up to that point was that all of American history was leading to that era of the fifties and early sixties, just prior to the assassination, when the United States was the envy of the entire world. It had a wonderful past that itself was inspiring, and the future looked bright and without limitations.

Compare that with how we view things now. The country has been stagnating for a long time. Politics, far from being idealistic and representative of the best that the country has to offer, far more often is seen as the worst that this country has to offer, with unprecedented corruption and greed and political posturing being the order of the day. That glorious American past has increasingly been called into question, as more people are recognizing the dark underbelly of what was once seen as a truly great and fitting history. There was the invasion of the continent by Europeans, there was the genocide of the natives, there was slavery, followed closely by institutionalized racism. There was lawlessness in the west, and we no longer view cowboys as necessarily the good guys anymore, something that surely would have seemed unthinkable in November of 1963. The United States saw itself rise in power, but we tried to grow an empire, committing crimes along the way, particularly in the Philippines. We had seen ourselves as liberators in Europe and Asia during World War II, but more people are beginning to question the indiscriminate fire bombings, as well as our decision to drop the atom bomb over Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

In short, everything is different now. How we view ourselves, how we see the world, and our role in it. Not everybody has accepted these different interpretations, and I believe that is what the cultural wars that we are seeing now, which has been translated politically to the red state versus blue state tug of war, is all about. But even within the liberal and conservative, or red state versus blue state debate, it is no longer idealism that defines our goals. What defines it more is skepticism, and that, I believe, is why mudslinging has become so inevitable in our political debates and discourse.

There is unprecedented skepticism far greater than is reasonable by the right towards all things related to government, even when the emphasis on weakening the elected government translates to empowering all powerful, and anti-democratic, corporations. On the left, probably the skepticism of so much of the traditional institutions and historical interpretations, so that everything seems evil and filled with malice, also goes too far. Both sides accuse the other of too much naivete about certain things, and too much skepticism with other things. The left accuses the right of being too naive and forgiving with the excesses of corporate supremacy and wealth addiction, while being too hard line with skepticism of government programs, to the point where effective governance and democracy itself is compromised. The right accuses the left of being too naive and forgiving of government programs, while being too hard line against big business, to the point that it hurts the economy.

All of that began with shots in Dallas on this November day, fifty one years ago. Shots that were truly heard around the world, when that young and idealistic leader was gunned down. It was not just Kennedy that was assassinated on that day, I think. It was the interpretation of the country and what it stood for that Americans wanted to believe, and indeed had long believed in without much questioning, that was taken from us forever as well.