It's a good bet that you remember where you were and what you were doing on November 22, 1963, if you were at least three years old and not in a vegetative state. That was the day John Fitzgerald Kennedy, President of the United States, was murdered.
Me, I remember.
My impressions of that day are probably a little different from most people's.
It was a Friday. I was 12 years old and at school when word came that classes were cancelled for the rest of the day because someone had shot the President. For a heartbeat, I was swept with elation – no math class today, and I hated math.
Then it sunk in.
By the time I got to the bar, where I knew my old man would be, the regulars had already assembled. No business as usual today. All bets were off. The watering hole was the logical place to gather. These guys were, like my dad, working class stiffs. Construction guys. Truck drivers. Carpenters. Plumbers. Regular guys. Most of them were WWII or Korean War veterans.
There was Big Johnny, the owner and bartender, naturally. Little Johnny, his eldest son, on leave from the Army. Big Johnny had a guilt-thing going on because he hadn’t served in the Big War with the rest of the boys. 4F, I heard. He certainly was a soft, tubby little man. Parted his thinning locks up the middle, like an old-time, wild-west bar-keep. To make up for missing the party, Big Johnny offered up his eldest son, identifiable as his offspring by the identical bulbous nose. Little Johnny was a sergeant and an M.P. stationed in Berlin.
The German one.
Randy Ross, a local cop, was there, too. At one time had been a notable “tough cop” with the Chicago P.D. rubber-hose brigade. Don’t know why he left the city to take up small-town policing. Ross had caught a bullet in the head making a routine traffic stop out on route 12 one lonely night, and hadn’t been quite right since. Some say it improved his manner considerably. He was still a cop, but “temporarily” assigned to the school cross-walks while the days ticked away until his retirement. He liked us kids to call him “Officer Randy.” We got along well with him because he seemed to be doing his thinking on a child-like level these days. No sense of subtlety or guile.
If you said, sarcastically, “Real good move, Officer Randy,” he’d blush a little and say “Gee, thanks.” Couldn’t understand the sarcasm, see?
He also sometimes got words confused. Once he mentioned that he was going to an optimist to get some reading glasses. That brought out some general mirth. “Don’t laugh,” Randy said. “You might need glasses yourself someday.”
Chuck, of Chuck’s Trucking fame, was there. He was a round, ruddy-complexioned guy with eyes, nose and mouth continually at war for control of his face. The family business included two sons, and a grandson about to graduate high school. They worked together, drank together, stuck together. I wondered what that was like.
Also on hand was Nora, who got both blonde hair and an inflated sense of
desirability from out of a bottle. She drank Jack Daniels, measured in fists, not fingers, chain-smoked camels and had the baritone voice to prove it. She would laugh at a dirty joke as easily as anyone else, and could generally top it with a dirtier one. I guess I always thought of her as “one of the guys.”
Stanley was another regular. An accountant of some kind. On the oily side, a smidge too polite, committed to a losing battle to look dapper. Combed his remaining strands of hair from just above his left ear, across the top of his head to the right ear, held it in place with a pound of brilliantine and some nails. He tried to have a dashing mustache, but he clipped it too short, making it look like a coal miner’s runny nose. Stanley was a “confirmed bachelor,” as gay men were called back then. He was mostly quiet.
Then there was my dad.
Everybody said hello to him when he sauntered in with me in tow. They were sometimes a little too cheerful, I thought. A little bit too “hail and well met” with smiles that looked like they were pumped up. It was the way you might say, “gooood boooy” to a dog you were afraid might bite you.
I guess they all knew my dad was nuts.
I perched on a stool next to him and sipped a coke from the bottle, as the men watched, in stoney silence, the live news reports of Kennedy’s death. Wasn’t the first time they’d seen it. They watched it over and over, as if hoping that a subsequent report would refute the earlier reports of the President’s demise.
Walter Cronkite went over the known details once more, top to bottom, no new news and then went to a station break. Hardly anyone stirred. What was there to say?
“Oh-oh,” said Officer Randy. “Somebody fucked up.” Spoken with the expression and tone of a man whose keen olfactory wit had detected a rude and silent fart.
“More like everybody fucked up,” coughed Nora. “Who was guarding him, the fucking Cub Scouts?” It was rhetorical.
“No….Secret service, I think,” said Randy.
“Well, all I know is, Oswald is one hell of a marksman,” said Sergeant Little Johnny. “They’re saying he hit a moving target with that shitty Manlicher-Carcanno from 6 floors up. What’d they say, two hits out of three shots in, six, seven seconds? Not sure I could do it?” Little Johnny held the highest award the Army gave out for marksmanship.
Several heads nodded sagely.
“You guys remember when the mob got Vincelli in that barbershop?” Chuck asked no one in particular. “Where was his bodyguard? Out taking a piss or something, am I right? It was a double-cross. The body-guard was the inside man, am I right? And this guy Oswalt. It’s like right away they knew it was him. How? How come the cops made him for it so fast? And found him so fast?”
“Yeah,” said Randy Ross. “Jeese, those Dallas cops must be REALLY good, huh?”
Chuck went on. “If he was some kind of lone nut fanatic, wouldn’t he be proud? Take the credit? Am I right? He says he’s just a patsy.”
“Or maybe Oswalt is a dead herring,” intoned Randy as if channelling Sherlock Holmes. “Maybe they just want the real killers to think they got away with a frame up so they’ll get careless and then, pow!”
The group stared at Randy as if he’d started to sing Ave Maria in Mandarin Chinese.
But a couple days later, Randy began to seem as much savant as idiot.
Because a couple days later, the Dallas cops were transporting the suspect, Lee Harvey Oswald, and in waltzes mafia underling Jack Ruby, like he owns the place, and shoots Oswald dead, right in front of the cops, the TV cameras, God and everybody in Big Johnny’s bar.
It produced a moment of stunned silence from the collection of usual suspects gathered thereat.
“What the fuck?” said Chuck.
“What the fuck?” echoed the sons of Chuck like a Greek chorus.
“This is bullshit,” Said Sergeant Little Johnny. “BullSHIT!”
“Bullshit,” agreed the others, desperately looking to each other for a reasonable explanation.
“Oh-oh,” said Randy. “Somebody fucked up.”
My dad stared grimly into his beer.
“Mother-fuckers,” he said simply, as if reminding the group of the operant natural law which governed all such phenomena, the way “gravity,” would suffice to explain a man’s fall from a great height.
The Kennedy Murder – these guys never called it “assassination” – would be the leading topic of conversation for many days to come, if, indeed, mumbling, grumbling, head-shaking and muttered profanities can be considered conversation.
When the Warren Commision report came out the following year, the verdict was that Lee Harvey Oswald, acting alone, shot JFK .
And Oswald was dead.
So, like, case closed, daddy-o.
The regulars at the bar didn’t buy the Warren Report.
For one thing, a lot of these guys, like my dad, were combat veterans, and Arlen Specter’s ridiculous fairy tale about a zig-zagging “magic bullet” held as much water as a leaky thimble. For another, as Sergeant Little Johnny so immediately pointed out, it was an impressive feat of marksmanship that Oswald had carried off. (A feat that, to this day, has not been replicated by any of the numerous expert shooters who have tried it. And Oswald himself, it turns out from his Marine Corps records, was only a mediocre shot at best.)
There’s an old African proverb that says, “Even a jackal will insult a dead lion,” which, in this case, roughly translates as, “Blame the dead guy.”
Oswald never made it to trial, never got his day in court. We never got to hear the evidence against him or hear his defense.
Some people still think he did the crime.
Of course, some people probably still believe the earth is flat…
Many years later, I happened to assist in an investigation (I was hardly more than a gofer for the detective on the case). A series of rapes had been committed against young women (all of a similar physical description) in a medium-sized mid-western city. The assaults were increasing in brutality -- characteristic of an assailant who would be killing his victims before long.
The local police were on the case.
They picked up a transient (nowadays called "homeless") man whom they liked for the crime. He attempted to escape and was shot dead by the cops. After that, the rapes stopped and everyone was happy that the law had got their Smackwater Jack.
Case closed, daddy-o.
Except that the family of one of the victims thought there was just something fishy about it.
Enter, my boss. He said the case gave him an itchy feeling in the back of his neck. What my mentor found out was that the rapes had not stopped. They were still happening, but they were happening near Phoenix, Arizona. The rapist, as it turned out, was a cousin of one of the local cops. The hapless homeless gentleman was just a patsy. He took the heat for the crime while the cop hustled his cousin out of town.
The homeless man never made it to trial, never got his day in court. We never heard the evidence against him or heard his defense. Some people still think he did the crimes...
Unfortunately, this is not a unique and isolated case. I personally know of two others:
A small town rape-murder suspect allegedly hangs himself in his cell "with his shoelaces." Case closed.
Another murder suspect dies in a hail of police gunfire. Case closed.
Even when it turns out later that the most incriminating evidence against him had been planted on the scene by one of the officers, that case is still closed.
What I learned from those events applies to the JFK murder.
Whenever a suspect, prime or otherwise, gets shot “resisting,” or "escaping," or hangs himself in his cell "by his shoelaces," or dies of "an overdose," or accidentally falls down and hits his head, or has a heart attack or gets struck by fucking lightning before he gets to trial, I, like my mentor, start getting an itchy feeling in the back of my neck.
It’s my bullshit detector going off.
JFK’s murder was a critical moment in our national history.
It proved you could kill the president and get away with it
It set the style for things to come.
Because if you can get away with THAT, then you can get away with ANYthing.
As subsequent and quite recent events clearly demonstrate.
To any mind not impermeable to reason, the evidence is overwhelming that the “official story” of the JFK murder --- like some other “official stories” -- is a scam.
But, hey, maybe you believe that Oswald, acting alone, did the deed.
That's cool.
Just be careful you don’t sail off the edge of the earth.
sj
I want to thank everyone who's given their support by passing the word around. We're starting to sell a few of these CD's. Enough so we can chip in a small donation for the 20 or so ponies at the horse rescue where I've been spending some time.
When you have an itch you can't reach to scratch yourself, you find out who your friends really are. I enjoy finding a pony's "sweet spots," places they like to be touched. Chest, ears, under the chin. I like it because they like it. It's something I can do for them and I don't ask for anything in return. I think that's a good start for a friendship.
...there's only the present moment.
That's my partner getting well-deserved adoration from some little girls, while he's practically dozing off. Sometimes, it's good to be a horse.
