General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: Octafish to attend JFK assassination conference. Do you think JFK still matters? [View all]starroute
(12,977 posts)Leave out the question of whether Oswald did it or not -- I suspect the waters have been so muddied that we may never know.
Leave out what Kennedy might or might not have done if he had lived -- before he was shot, I was as disillusioned with him as many people here are with Obama.
But we all know that the forces that control our society are master opportunists, and whether they actually did it or not, they definitely milked the event for all it was worth.
It came at a time when the country was finally getting over the trauma of McCarthyism and the left was starting to feel it was possible to enact meaningful reforms without being called a Commie. The assassination, and Oswald's apparent ties with Cuba, instantly raised fears that McCarthyism was about to start up all over again. I believe that was why the left didn't raise any real objections to the Warren Commission. They were just as glad to have the whole thing chalked up to a lone gunman.
But what happened instead was a kind of national case of post-traumatic stress disorder. The assassination demonstrated that nobody was safe. That even a president was vulnerable if somebody was determined to take them down. And, just possibly, that challenging certain givens of US policy was asking to be rubbed out. (Has anybody ever asked Jimmie Carter for his thoughts on the assassination and whether it affected how he acted in office?)
It's a lot like that quip (by Voltaire?) that if God didn't exist, it would have been necessary to invent him. If the Kennedy assassination hadn't happened, it would have been necessary for the right to invent an equivalent -- because it has been the basis of their continuing ability to govern through fear.
For all those reasons, I'm now less interested in the assassination itself than in the construction of the narrative surrounding the assassination in the days and weeks that followed. Where did the main explanations come from? Who offered them? Where was blame being placed? Was there any consensus emerging before the Warren Commission was assembled and and was that altered by the Commission's report?
At this point, I think "Cui bono?" matters a lot more than "Whodunit?"