From Democracy to Assassinocracy: The 1960s Roots of the Present Malaise
The outcome of the US presidential election in 2016 had
at least one good effect on society, which was that for the first time in a
long while people began to pay serious attention to politics. Before this time,
people had more of an indifferent tolerance of political views they didn’t like
because politics was seen as something abstract and distant from their lives.
After 2016, people were starting to feel directly threatened by the changing
political landscape, so political debate suddenly became high-stakes and
personal.
The problem was that many of the newly awakened had no
way to get oriented in this confusing new reality. They had no knowledge of
history, and nothing but equally benighted cable news anchors and late night
comedians to guide them. But there were a few older and more knowledgeable
analysts who were able to trace recent developments back through the decades
and see that the 1960s was the era in which the seeds of the present disaster
were planted. This is not to say that it couldn’t be traced back farther to the
flawed democracies that were founded on the Doctrine of Discovery laid down in
the 15th century, but the last time political leaders really talked about breaking
up the military industrial complex was in the period between 1963 and 1968. In
other words, the present catastrophe came out of the political assassinations
of those years. Thus it was curious to see talk of the JFK assassination
reappearing occasionally while Trump was wreaking havoc in the world in the
2016-19 period.
An
explanation of the mass disorientation felt since 2016
Hannah
Arendt in Origins of Totalitarianism of a “mixture of gullibility and
cynicism... prevalent in all ranks of totalitarian movements”:
In
an ever-changing, incomprehensible world the masses had reached the point
where they would, at the same time, believe everything and nothing, think
that everything was possible and nothing was true... The totalitarian mass
leaders based their propaganda on the correct psychological assumption that,
under such conditions, one could make people believe the most fantastic
statements one day, and trust that if the next day they were given
irrefutable proof of their falsehood, they would take refuge in cynicism;
instead of deserting the leaders who had lied to them, they would protest
that they had known all along that the statement was a lie and would admire
the leaders for their superior tactical cleverness… The result of a
consistent and total substitution of lies for factual truth is not that the
lie will now be accepted as truth and truth be defamed as a lie, but that the
sense by which we take our bearings in the real world… is being destroyed.[1]
|
Trump had a history of expressing interest in the JFK
murder, and here he was now, a complete Washington outsider, elected president
at a time when there was a legally-required deadline for the release of JFK
assassination records in 2017. Historian Richard Bartholomew described how
Robert Mueller, head inquisitor of the Russiagate investigation, is related to
Richard Bissell and Charles Cabell, two high-ranking CIA officers fired by JFK
and later implicated in the assassination. He writes, “If Trump really wanted
to discredit Mueller, all he would have to do is use his JFK Act powers to
release the files that are being illegally withheld or redacted since Oct. 26,
2017.”[2]
There was also the appearance of Roger Stone in the Trump campaign, a much reviled political fixer for the Republican Party who was now coming back to politics as a libertarian devoted to saving America from the devastation caused by the two-party establishment. Before he became infamous to a new generation through the Trump campaign, he had published a book on the JFK assassination in 2013 entitled, The Man Who Killed Kennedy: The Case Against LBJ (this earlier post goes over the case laid out by Stone). Curiously, the book has never been mentioned in all the media attention that has been given to him in recent years over his involvement with the Trump campaign. While Stone is well-known for his recent conviction for witness tampering, obstructing an official proceeding, and making false statements—and for his despicable antics and provocations during his long career in Republican political campaigns—for a while when he was out of the game he wore another more civilized mask. There are several videos on Youtube in which he speaks like a subdued, gentleman historian about his book—a book which the mainstream press and assassination researchers have studiously avoided reviewing seriously. In spite of its flaws, it raises some disturbing reminders about Lyndon Johnson that liberals and Democratic partisans would rather not draw attention to.
One review of the book that appears in internet
searches is a smear job that cherry picks one discredited source in the book
but ignores the central thesis and the other evidence supporting it.[3]
The tip-off that it is a smear comes when the reviewer dismisses in the same
way Jim Garrison’s trial of Clay Shaw for conspiring in the murder of JFK (more
about this trial below). He mentions a strategic blunder that Garrison made in
the trial but fails to mention everything that he got right, especially the
fact that after Clay Shaw died, the CIA admitted that he had indeed worked for
the CIA.
Roger Stone puts together a convincing argument that
LBJ had the motive, means and opportunity to be in on the assassination plot.
It’s unfortunate for him that his erratic and deplorable behavior as a
dirty-trickster damaged his credibility. What a pity that this book was not
written by someone without this baggage. However, the book shed some light on
what turned Roger Stone into the man he became. It was the personal and
political scandals of JFK and the corrupt Democratic party machine that turned
young Roger Stone into a cynical operator. The formative lesson seems to have
been that American electoral politics is a dirty cage match sport in which one
does whatever is necessary to win. Nixon, whom Stone was devoted to, was
consoled after his close loss to JFK by the joke that the Kennedy team “stole
it fair and square.” How Nixon and Roger Stone operated in subsequent years is
too well known to need repeating here.
The point of all this preamble is that the 1960s still matter, as Richard Bartholomew put it in the introduction to the article cited above:
What was left of the US
government by 1963, after the rise of the post-war Deep State, ceased to exist
entirely upon President Kennedy’s death. What replaced it can best be called an
assassinocracy. Trump is merely the latest manifestation of that usurpation,
and Clinton was aware of it all along. The assassinocracy is what creates the
lies voters believe. It is what has prevented candidates from addressing the
deep political issues of our time. The takeover was secured with the
assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Senator Robert Kennedy, the last
political leaders who directly addressed them. The assassinocracy is the thing
to understand and to stop if you want a legitimate election… we won’t have a
democracy until we resolve the Kennedy assassination.
 |
| Get the journal here. |
To further elaborate this point, I have included below an
interview from an obscure magazine from 1960 called NOLA Express.
Ironically, it became available through an FBI file on the dissident
interviewed which was made available to the pubic in subsequent years. In the
spring of 1968, the interviewee, Mark Lane, was in New Orleans helping district
attorney Jim Garrison with his case against Clay Shaw—a case which was, more
significantly, the only attempt ever to put someone on trial as a conspirator
in the murder of John F. Kennedy on November 22, 1963. In addition to aiding Garrison
he was also helping young men resist the draft. In the interview, Lane comments
on the failure of the liberal press to ask critical questions about the Warren
Commission cover up and to report on Jim Garrison’s work honestly. There is an
obvious parallel with the contemporary media’s hysterical Russiagate coverage
coinciding with its neglect of the military industrial complex pushing the
country towards war with China and Russia.
Mark Lane was well-known in the 1960s because only one
month after the assassination, he published “Oswald Innocent? A Lawyer’s
Brief” in the National Guardian, on December 19, 1963. Leading
periodicals such as New Republic, Look, Life, the Saturday Evening Post, and
the Progressive refused to touch it, though the New York Times
published a story about Lane’s National Guardian article and the
sensation it ignited by questioning the official explanation that only one
person had shot JFK from behind. Another article that appeared the same month by
Staughton Lynd and Jack Minnis entitled “Seeds
of Doubt: Some Questions about the Assassination.”
In 1973, Mark Lane, Dalton Trumbo and Donald Freed wrote
film Executive Action which was released nation-wide but was not a box-office
hit. Almost twenty years before Oliver Stone’s JFK it depicted the
assassination, like the latter film, as a plot carried out by a cabal of
wealthy industrialists and powerful interests who had been angered by Kennedy’s
policies such as his reduction of the oil depletion allowance, his interest in
ending the Cold War, and the possibility of a withdrawal from Vietnam.
For those who may not know the background to the interview in NOLA Express, first a summary of Jim Garrison’s trial of Clay Shaw as a conspirator in the murder of JFK, in New Orleans, 1969:
On the Trail of the Assassins—the
primary source material for Oliver Stone’s film JFK—is Garrison’s own
account of his investigations into the background of Lee Harvey Oswald and the
assassination of President Kennedy, and his prosecution of Clay Shaw in the
trial that followed.
The assassination of President John F.
Kennedy haunts the American psyche and stands as a turning point in the
nation’s history. The Warren Commission rushed out its report in 1964, but
questions continued to linger: Was there a conspiracy? Was there a coup at the
highest levels of government?
On March 1, 1967, New Orleans district
attorney Jim Garrison shocked the world by arresting local businessman Clay
Shaw for conspiracy to murder the president. His alleged co-conspirator, David
Ferrie, had been found dead a few days before. Garrison charged that elements
of the United States government, in particular the CIA, were behind the crime.
From the beginning, his probe was virulently attacked in the media and
denounced from Washington. His office was infiltrated and sabotaged, and
witnesses disappeared and died strangely. Eventually, Shaw was acquitted after
the briefest of jury deliberation and the only prosecution ever brought for the
murder of President Kennedy was over. In 1979, after Shaw’s death, Richard
Helms, Director of Covert Operations in 1963 (Director of Central Intelligence
1966 to 1973), admitted under oath to the US Senate’s Church Committee that
Clay Shaw had worked for the CIA. This statement vindicated Garrison and showed
that Shaw had committed perjury when he said during his trial that he had never
had any association with the CIA.
In the afterword of On the Trail of the Assassins,
Carl Oglesby wrote:
[Garrison] threatens to
make Hamlets of all who listen to him—children of a slain father-leader whose
killers, for all we know, still in secret possess the throne. He confronts us
with the secret murder at the heart of the contemporary American dilemma. His
whole terrifying narrative forces down upon us the appalling questions: Of what
is our constitution made? What is our vaunted citizenship worth? What is the
future of democracy in a country where a president can be assassinated under
conspicuously suspicious circumstances while the machinery of legal action
scarcely trembles? … We Americans like to regard ourselves as pragmatic about
politics, but this seems to mean that we tend to believe what makes us happy
and not to believe what confuses and depresses us. Garrison’s analysis of the
J.F.K. murder challenges us to be unhappy about our political environment and
to adopt a perspective that could easily put us at odds with it. [4]
An interview with Mark Lane, author, lawyer
and activist in the American anti-war movement of the 1960s
Credit to the website Kennedys
and King for posting the scanned FBI file from which the
following transcript was made.
From the FBI file on Mark Lane, Document ID
2212202, file no. 100-17689:
In March and April, 1968, Mark Lane was in New Orleans,
Louisiana, to assist New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison in Garrison’s
prosecution of New Orleans businessman Clay Shaw for conspiracy in the
assassination of President John F. Kennedy in November, 1963. While in New
Orleans, Lane met on several occasions with Bob Head and Darlene Fife who
originated and published the NOLA Express, a militant underground New
Orleans newspaper. Lane reportedly told Fife that he is a very close friend of
District Attorney Garrison, and was also to assist Darlene Fife in covering the
trial in New Orleans for the National Guardian newspaper of New York
City.
Lane reportedly told Fife that the right-wing element
in New Orleans is against District Attorney Garrison’s action against Clay
Shaw, and that he would be willing to accept support from the New Left movement
in the New Orleans area.
In Volume 1, Number 1, of the NOLA Express,
dated April, 1968, the following interview with Mark Lane took place and is set
forth below in its entirety:
Interview held on March 12, 1968:
Darlene Fife (DF): What are your objectives?
Mark Lane (ML): Garrison has limited objectives. He
wants the American people to know who killed the president. He wants to arrest
everyone in his jurisdiction [involved in the conspiracy], although he believes
no one will go to jail. And he wants the ramifications of be sufficiently great
so that the United States government will have to dissolve the Central
Intelligence Agency and find three new letters for the organization that will
be formed. He has no illusions about permanent change.
DF: Say Garrison gets all his convictions and it turns
out that high men in the CIA are involved and Johnson flees the country to join
the American deserters in Sweden. What do you think is going to happen?
Certainly there’s some kind of “power vacuum” left.
ML: Well, we are presently residing in a totalitarian state and the fact that there might be a power vacuum doesn’t frighten me. That would be a massive improvement over what we have at the present time. I don’t see President Johnson fleeing to Sweden. I don’t think that will be the result and I don’t think that what takes place in New Orleans in terms of the trial will have that kind of shocking effect upon the American people, firstly because they probably won’t even know about it because they have to rely on the media for the facts. And the media has not proved to be too reliable in this area for the last four and a half years. They might hear about a conviction or two, and Walter Cronkite in stentorian tones will make some reference to Southern justice. So I think that what is taking place here will never be accurately reported, just as what has been taking place here for the last year has been distorted by NBC, CBS, the New York Times, Time Magazine and most of all Newsweek, the liberal publication. And I think that one cannot expect that the facts which are presented at the Shaw trial will be genuinely broadcast around the country.
DF: Explain to me what Garrison is talking about when
he talks about an operational level, an intermediate level, and then the
sponsor level.
ML: I’ve recently interviewed a person closely
associated with the CIA for a number of years. I’ve talked with him about the
assassination of the president and he said it fits into the classic pattern of
a program for “executive action” and which any intelligence agency in the
United States or abroad would have used to bring about the operation. He says
the footprints of an intelligence operation are all over Dealey Plaza. He
describes it as at one end of the chart there is a sponsor; that is, the man or
organization who wants the job done. At the other end of the chart is the
target. The target is the objective the sponsor wants to achieve. It may be the
blowing up of a bridge, the sabotaging of a ship, or assassination of a head of
state. It may be going into an embassy and removing documents, photographing
them and returning them. In the latter case the objective is never to let anyone
know the job has been planned or has been done. However, when it comes to
blowing up a bridge or killing a president, it is of course impossible to
prevent knowledge that the job has been done, and then it is most important to
prevent anyone from knowing who the real sponsor is. In order to see to it that
the information is not divulged, first of all in the chain of command each
person just knows the person above him and below him. The chain can be broken
at any time by the removal—they call it the “permanent termination”—of anyone
in the chain. I asked him what was meant by that and he said, “You kill him.”
There is a series of false sponsors that is also established so that in case
anyone is curious, which the Warren Commission was not, they will find false
leads.
So if the Commission had examined the evidence closely
and found there was a conspiracy, and were they curious enough to have found
out who might have been behind the conspiracy, they would have uncovered many
false leads which were scattered around Dealey Plaza like leaves on an autumn
day. For example, they would have found out that Jack Ruby was associated with
organized crime. There would have been indications that Castro was involved in
the assassination. There are a whole host of clues that point in various
directions such as the extreme right, extreme left, or organized crime. These
are just three examples of the clues that were developed, but it never got that
far because the Commission, being a liberal body, decided that it had no concern
with the truth and that it would compromise. True liberalism. The Commission
decided it would compromise because those who planned the assassination
envisioned planes taking off the next morning to bomb China or Cuba or Russia,
or hopefully all three. The president didn’t want that to happen and the
Commission was designed to conceal the facts, and in concealing the facts, they
also concealed any evidence of a conspiracy, including the conspiracy the CIA
wanted them to fall upon—the evidence of a conspiracy of the left involving
foreign governments.
DF: The CIA was the sponsor and Kennedy was the target,
and all the people Garrison is investigating like Shaw and Ferrie were in the
intermediate level?
ML: Yes.
DF: Does Garrison have an inside view yet? Has anyone
confessed?
ML: No one has confessed, and I don’t think you can
expect many confessions in this case because if you’re convicted without
confessing, all you can get in a conspiracy to kill the president is twenty
years, and you don’t serve twenty years. You may just serve one third of the
term. And if you confessed, you’d probably be permanently terminated by the
sponsor.
DF: What kind of support has Garrison received from the
press or say a “movement”?
ML: Well, almost none from the press, as you know. The
press is almost unanimous. NBC had a historically unprecedented program
which was the trial of Clay Shaw. It took place on television before it took
place in real life. CBS did four one-hour reports on the Warren Report,
defending the report from its critics. At one point Walter Cronkite said,
“Garrison has made many charges, but he hasn’t proven any of them in court.” In
fact, Garrison has made two charges, one of them against Dean Andrews for
perjury in a case closely related to the assassination investigation, and the
other against Clay Shaw. It’s true he hasn’t proven the guilt of Shaw because
for over a year now Shaw has been doing everything to prevent that case from
coming to trial. About Dean Andrews: Three days after Cronkite said Garrison
had not proven anything in court, Dean Andrews was convicted of perjury. I
watched television the next night to see how Cronkite was going to explain
this, but he never did.
The only movement which has supported Garrison is the
Citizens’ Committee of Inquiry on various college campuses and cities which was
established early after the assassination for the purpose of making the facts
known. Of course, Ramparts Magazine has been very helpful in terms of
publishing new material, but one of the things that dismays me is that while
one would expect attacks from the right, one would expect the left to have a
more sophisticated view, a knowledgeable view of what takes place in this
society. One would expect the left to support Garrison, but the left seems to
be sitting back watching, waiting very cautiously. That’s not the position the
left should be taking at the present time, it seems to me. One of the problems
is the atmosphere around to convince us that Garrison is some kind of nut. One
listens long enough and tends to believe it and gives that as an excuse for not
participating. I think that’s unforgiveable.
DF: I think one of the problems is that, even assuming
everything Garrison says is true, you say you have to get three new letters for
the agency and everything is the same again. There have been heads of state
assassinated in other countries and nothing changes.
ML: Well, that’s a very cynical view by those who are
sitting back and taking no position right now, and saying that the truth is not
sufficient, the truth must do that which we want it to do; the abstract truth
is not sufficient. But I think things will change. [If change] comes from the
conclusion that the CIA, an agency of the federal government, killed President
Kennedy, things can never be exactly the same in America. I don’t think
revolution will take place the next day. I don’t think there will be rioting in
the streets, either, but I think there will be a change, and a healthy change.
DF: I know your position on the war in Vietnam. What is
Garrison’s view on the war?
ML: I spoke at the Louisiana Polytechnic Institute about four months ago. Garrison had been there just a year ago. That was before his investigation began, and they asked if he would go back to discuss the assassination, and I said I would raise the issue with him. I saw him the next day and told him I was there. He said, “I was there a year ago. Did they tell you?” I said, “Yes, they told me.” He said, “Did they tell you what I talked about there?” I said no. He said, “I was lieutenant colonel in the active reserve. I spoke in favor of the war in Vietnam.” He blushed. He said that in his forties when he came across the Warren Report and the contradictions, and he began his investigation, he realized for the first time that honorable men had issued this false report. It brought a great change in his thinking. He is now wholeheartedly against the war in Vietnam and has resigned as lieutenant colonel in the active reserve. And he believes in the very near future there will be an American Dien Bien Phu.[5] He says the American people probably don’t realize that those in this country and outside this country who oppose our policy in Vietnam are the only ones today defending American freedom.
- end of interview -
 |
Nearly twenty years before Oliver Stone’s film JFK, Executuve Action was released in 1973. The screenplay was co-written
by Dalton Trumbo, Donald Freed, and Mark Lane. The film depicts the assassination of President Kennedy as a conspiracy led by a cabal of wealthy industrialists and other power-holders who had
been enraged by Kennedy’s policies—reduction of the oil
depletion allowance, his approach to the USSR a likely withdrawal from Vietnam, and the possibility of an unbeatable “Kennedy dynasty”. The cabal enlisted a group of CIA-backed Cubans embittered over the Bay of Pigs fiasco,
along with several high-level, disgruntled American intelligence agents.
|
More on this topic: Garrison
Interview, “Some Unauthorized Comments on the State of the Union” (May 27,
1969), found in the US National Archives, described as
originally published in a “European publication.” Republished by Kennedys
and King on August 6, 2019.
Notes
[1].
[3].
Hugh
Aynesoworth, “Review
of The Man Who Killed Kennedy: The Case Against LBJ,” Washington
Times, February 25, 2014.
[4].
Jim
Garrison, On the Trail of the Assassins (Skyhorse Publishing, 1988,
2008). This passage from the afterword was used in Oliver Stone’s film JFK
in the concluding remarks to the jury at the end of the film. In spite of
allegations that Oliver Stone was just making stuff up in a Hollywood movie,
the script was faithful to the trial transcript and to Garrison’s account of
the trial.
[5].
Dien
Bien Phu refers to the decisive battle of 1954 which led to French withdrawal
from Vietnam and the UN agreement to partition the country into North and South
Vietnam. At the time this interview occurred, the Tet Offensive had already
occurred a few months earlier. American military operations ended in 1973 and
Saigon fell to North Vietnamese troops on April 30, 1975. This note does not
appear in the original article or the FBI file.
No comments: