Why is it so important for some people that the Kennedy assassination

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33. As someone who was a young person of voting age at the time it happened, I highly recommend

Charles Pierce's piece today in Esquire. I saw this thanks to Will Pitt's post on DU today. Notice that Pierce addresses your exact question "why it's so hard to accept that a great man like Kennedy was killed by an insignificant loser like Oswald."


http://www.esquire.com/blogs/politics/anniversary-of-jfk-assassination-112213

a couple of excerpts>

The Warren Commission was a natural outgrowth of a mentality that had infected the government from the moment that the government decided that it would build, in secret, a weapon that would not only win World War II, but also have the potential to end civilization if it -- or the men who allegedly were in control of it -- ever ran amok. What historian Garry Wills calls the "Bomb Power" was based from its beginnings in the notion that there were things about their government that the American people need not know. From this came an irresistible impulse to treat the American people -- for whom the Founders intended all of what John Adams called "the awful knowledge" about their leaders -- like fragile children who must be protected at all costs from what their government found necessary to do on their behalf. From this has come a hundred commissions and boards and gatherings of the shamans of the security state -- the slow bureaucratic response to the Watergate crimes, the Tower Commission on Iran-Contra, even the Simpson-Bowles budget commission -- all of which sprang from the notion that the nation's elite should conduct the nation's business in as quiet a manner as possible, so as not to disturb the horses or wake the children. The Warren Commission was the first of these, and it did its job very well. What unruly bloggers call The Village can be said to have been founded in the premise that the American people needed to be shielded, for their own good, from the full knowledge of the facts surrounding the murder of their president in broad daylight in the streets of an American city.

snip>

One argument with which I have no patience is that the distrust of the Warren Commission, a distrust that has remained remarkably consistent for five decades, is based in our disbelief that a great leader could be gunned down by an ordinary schmoe with a cheap rifle. This. we are told, is too much for our delicate sensibilities to handle. This is arrant, infantilizing nonsense. At the time of his death, John Kennedy had a national security establishment that was a writhing ball of snakes. (Not for nothing did he insist that his White House cooperate with the filming of Seven Days In May.) There were the ongoing plots against Castro in which his brother was intimately involved. There is a contemporary memo for something called Operation Northwoods that called for what we would now call "false flag" operations within the United States, including blowing up John Glenn on the launching pad in Florida, that could be blamed on Cuba and used as a pretext to invade. You can see a copy of it in the John F. Kennedy Library. Since then, we have seen Vietnam, Watergate, Iran-Contra. Richard Nixon sabotaged the Paris Peace Talks to help him get elected, and Ronald Reagan's people may have done the same thing with the release of the hostages in Iran. Don't tell this generation that we don't believe the Warren Commission out of some mushy, mythical notion of proportionality. There is no proportionality to the deceptions involved in official murder. We've read enough Graham Greene to know that. We watched enough happen on the television. We can see a church by daylight.

snip>

end of quotes



It's not that people MUST believe in a conspiracy, but that, if you were alive and sentient at the time, you knew enough BEFORE the assassination to know that a simple-minded politically neutral explanation of the event would have to be proved beyond reasonable doubt in order have any credibility. The network of complex, interwoven, rabid and festering hatreds was vividly real BEFORE the event. If you didn't live at that time, you would not believe the virulent level of multi-faceted hatred operating in the country at the time. This was not post-assassination theorizing. When the official explanation attempted to make everyone forget what was already known about the ongoing lethal political atmosphere, it stopped being believable.