Kennedy Assassination – HystericallyBored

2013-07-052022-04-13

Dan Rather’s Big Lie

After 50 years, I remain fascinated by a single incident related to the Kennedy Assassination. And I really believe that you may find it as fascinating as I do no matter what you believe about the Kennedy Assassination. Actually, I don’t think that’s true at all, but I don’t care. You should be fascinated by it– it makes no sense. And it makes all the sense in the world.

It was known almost immediately that someone had shot a film of the assassination. In fact, there were several films, but there was only film that captured the essential event in glorious colour, with sharpness, and reasonable proximity: that is the film, of course, shot by clothing merchant, Abraham Zapruder, who was standing on a kind of pagoda with the assistance of his assistant, Marilyn Sitzman. A reporter chatted with Zapruder after the assassination. If you are into conspiracies– and who can resist– you will note that the reporter offered to put Zapruder in contact with a Secret Service Agent, who, we would have assumed, would have loved to have a beautiful, clear, colourful, cinematic souvenir of them all standing on the follow-up car staring at the assassination event.

The Secret Service accompanied Zapruder to a local television station and then to Eastman Kodak’s local processing plant, and then to another processing plant, the Jamieson Film Company, to have some copies made. The Secret Service had a look at this film. And then Richard Stolley, an editor from Life Magazine, amazingly arrived to negotiate with Zapruder for exclusive rights to the film and all prints from the film, for about $150,000. Richard Stolley worked for a man named C. D. Jackson at Time-Life.

C.D. Jackson was a close friend of the CIA, and helped establish the Bilderberg Group. You couldn’t make this shit up. Yes, this guy who had obtained custody of the most compelling evidence of a conspiracy in the Kennedy Assassination worked with the CIA.

We now know it didn’t work, but, if you were the suspicious sort, what this looks like is the conspirators jumping in to make sure that nobody ever sees the evidence that might disprove that Oswald and Oswald alone killed Kennedy, from the 6th Floor the Texas Book Depository, from behind.

I say it did not work. Or it worked better than in their wildest dreams.

Zapruder had a nightmare about people paying to see his film in Times Square. He didn’t mind the paying part. But I guess his nightmare included people being repelled about the idea of him selling frame 313, in which Kennedy’s head explodes. So a condition of sale was that frame 313 could not be shown. He kept his money.

Life Magazine eventually published very poor quality prints taken from the film, but that was all the American public would see of the film for a long, long, long time.

Understandably, there was considerable curiosity about the film. Once it became clear that a “commission” of sterile old fat white men was going to pin the whole thing on a “lone nut” no matter what the evidence was (I’m not sure why they even bothered to hold hearings or examine anything: they disregarded any evidence that opened any doors), there was even more curiosity. One of the central tenets of the Warren Commission’s findings was that all of the shots came from behind, from Oswald’s “sniper’s nest”. But some witnesses and conspiracy theorists didn’t believe Oswald could have fired all of the shots. Some people in Dealey Plaza thought the shots came from the grassy knoll. There was some discussion even at Parkland Hospital about an “entry” wound in the neck, and about the head snapping backwards, and even about an entry wound in the forehead.

In the midst this hot and heavy discussion rode CBS reporter Dan Rather to the rescue. The public was told that, as little children, as tiny, irresponsible, wee little children, they could not be trusted to view the best evidence of who killed their president, but Dan Rather would assume this burden for us, almost like Jesus going on the cross. And so Dan Rather watched the film very, very carefully– this was by far, the biggest news story of the decade, after all, so he wouldn’t want to miss a detail– and then, instead of staying to try to outbid Life Magazine for the film, he ran as fast as he could back to the local CBS affiliate so he could breathlessly report to the American public that the film, indeed, showed Kennedy’s head going violently forward with the impact of the third shot. “Forward and to the right”.

“forward and to the right”

I am still astonished at this. Kennedy’s head, of course, jerked violently backwards, to the left. It’s the most obvious thing about the third shot: backwards and to the left. As if Kennedy might have been shot from the front.

I leave aside the complicated argument that a shot from the rear could have produced that motion. It is possible, but complicated.

So, Dan Rather, with a chance to be at the center of the biggest news story of the decade, lies to millions of people. Why?

Was it a mistake? Could it be that Dan Rather, for all his fame and all of his promotion and self-promotion, and self-aggrandizement, and posturing, was a complete idiot who couldn’t tell left from right, up from down, or in from out? Could it be that he could not, fifteen minutes later, remember which direction Kennedy’s head was going in when his skull was blown open by a rifle shot, after viewing the most shocking, important 22 second film clip in history?

Did Dan Rather know that the assassination was to be pinned on a lone gunman shooting from above and behind and that all conspiracies were to be excluded? It seems unlikely: Rather saw the film on the day of the assassination. On the other hand, everyone knew, by then, that the suspect had worked in the Texas Book Depository, and I’m sure Rather’s instincts were that the American public needed to be reassured that there was no conspiracy regardless of whether or not there had actually been one. Oswald was in custody. He knew the outlines of the conspiracy. He certainly could have been aware of which conspiracy would be the preferred conspiracy.

But perhaps Dan was already prepared, emotionally and intellectually, to play his role in American politics and culture over the next forty years, that of a superficially liberal journalist, of slight but discernibly progressive inclinations, but fundamentally establishment in orientation and interests. This is someone who might eventually think that Nixon should be impeached, but only after he has observed that all political parties do dirty tricks. This is someone who would become opposed to the Viet Nam war only after every other credible authority has long before switched sides, and then he would try to make it sound like he was being courageous. Rather would observe that peaceniks are naïve, because, after all, real enemies will really resist all our attempts to take all their oil.

It was this kind of faux liberalism that led the New York Times to endorse the Iraq war at the time the Bush Administration was hustling it.

About the Camera

The Camera: a Bell & Howell Zoomatic Director Series Model 414 PD

1960 Bell and Howell Camera DUO Power Zoom Zoomatic its the image 1

Dan, do you wish that, fifty years later, people would just leave it alone? Sorry. You don’t deserve that kind of forgetfulness.

About Mrs. Kennedy

There is another surprise. Rather — accurately, for a change– described, in his first recorded account of the film, how Mrs. Kennedy had tried to get out of the car in the middle of the assassination. The next day, the day after the assassination, CBS decided to have Rather broadcast his experience of the film live again (Rather was being groomed after all). But, they told him, leave out the part about Mrs. Kennedy. It was considered indecorous. America, they said (according to Dan) was not “ready” to absorb the image of the first lady trying not to get shot.

In fact, I still believe Mrs. Kennedy was trying to retrieve part of John Kennedy’s skull, which had been blown off and was slipping down the back of the limo. It was later recovered by a bystander and “returned” to the Secret Service (and flown up to Bethesda to be reunited with the body.)

I am astonished, but then not astonished, at how casually the establishment decides for Americans what they should or should not know. Just astonished. The omission of important information about what happened is bad, bad journalism, dishonest and irresponsible. And it is these same people, these same institutions who turn pale and almost feint when the idea of getting your news through the internet is raised…. unmediated!! You must be mad!

My Theories on Conspiracies

The Magic Bullet

2011-04-222022-04-30

Zapruder Notes: Oswald, Kennedy, Connally

This is a rambling, improvisational discussion of some elements of the Kennedy Assassination. Look, it’s been a rambling, improvisational assassination. A good conspiracy theorist is allowed to wander.

A friend of mine is convinced that he Zapruder film shows that Kennedy and Connally were hit by the same shot. A version of the Zapruder film we looked at about five years ago seemed, to me, to be ambiguous on the issue.

There are now clearer reproductions of the frames of the Zapruder film available.

Firstly, it seems reasonable to me that there was a first shot that missed the limousine entirely, and many if not most of the eye-witnesses remember it. In fact, Kennedy himself, and Connally, appear to be startled by the sound and seem to be looking in the direction it came from just before the first hit.

Kennedy was hit while blocked from Zapruder’s view by the Stemmons Freeway sign. He emerges from the sign beginning to clutch his throat with his hands, in obvious pain. Connally does not emerge from behind the sign puffing his cheeks out and clenching his fist. He has not yet been hit. And if he has not been hit, there is a second gunman, because Oswald could not have fired again by frame 234.

Here are links to the critical frames:

Frame 160: First shot fired, a miss; reactions of people in limo and out. Poignantly, a young girl (Rosemary Willis, aged 10) running alongside the limousine stops and looks in the direction of the crowd on the opposite side of the road. She is on record: she remembers that she stopped running because she heard the first shot.

Frame 230: Kennedy is definitely reacting to the throat wound. I don’t think anybody seriously disputes this. Connally may or may not have been hit by now but if he was hit by the same bullet as Kennedy it is very odd that he is not reacting at all.

If you watch the Zapruder film in motion, you can see Connally’s sudden, involuntary, abrupt movement a few frames later which could only have come in response to a shot. If you watch the film in motion, the two reactions seem almost simultaneous– but that is partly because Kennedy has been hidden behind the sign. His reaction obviously started earlier than Z230. If you examine it frame by frame– which, logically, is the way you should look at it to understand what really happened– the two reactions are not simultaneous.

Dale Myers, among others with an axe to grind, insists that Connally was hit by the same bullet, and that his reaction at 234 proves it. But Kennedy has already been reacting for at least four frames, probably more. Four frames– 1/4 of a second– may not seem like much, but it is much, much longer than it takes for a bullet to travel through two bodies. For all practical purposes, Connally’s and Kennedy’s reactions should have been at exactly the same instant. Myers has to argue that Connally’s reaction was delayed, even though this bullet struck his ribs and shattered his wrist bone because Oswald could not have fired two shots between the time that Kennedy disappears behind the sign and the time he emerges clutching his throat.

And no matter how you cut it, you can’t really argue that Connally’s reaction was delayed if he was reacting to the same physical event as Kennedy. The bullet took out a piece of his rib and shattered his wrist. Connally’s jacket puffs forward after Kennedy is already clutching at his throat. Well, yes you can argue it…. In this age of instant, omnipresent video, we have seen lots of strange things. We see the driver of the limousine applying the brakes after hearing a shot. That’s about as crazy as you can get.

There are literally hundreds of books on the issue but in my mind there is no way around “conspiracy” if Connally was not hit by the same shot as the one that caused Kennedy’s throat or back wound (or both).

Frame 224: Connally’s jacket flips in front of his shirt. This is probably the point at which Connally was actually hit. Since Kennedy is already reacting to a shot, it simply is not possible that it was the same bullet.

Frame 236: Connally is clearly in pain, and his shoulder has dropped. If you jog between the two frames repeatedly, it seems pretty clear to me that Connally is trying to see what is happening in all the frames from emergence behind the sign to 230. Somewhere before 234, he has been hit.

Dale Myers, among others, argues that 224 and 225 show Connally being hit. This page contains links that defend that point. Well, no they don’t. They slip and slide around the issue, but the truth is Kennedy had to have been hit earlier. He is already reacting with his hands to his wound while Connally has not even grimaced yet. This is consistent with John Connally’s own memory of the event.

It’s not a slam dunk and people should learn to live with the uncertainty. You can make a case for 225, but the same arguments– sudden movement, body twisting, grimace– apply equally well to 234, suggesting a third possibility: that Connally was indeed hit by the shot that made Kennedy’s throat wound, but then was hit by a second shot at 234. Since Kennedy was hit shortly afterwards again, there would have had to have been two shooters.

However, because Kennedy is already reacting to the shot as he emerges from behind the Stemmons Freeway sign, it is possible that Connally was hit immediately after Kennedy. The famous jacket flap– the movement of his dark jacket over his white shirt– argues for it.* Those who are opposed to a conspiracy theory have to argue that it was the same bullet because it is impossible for Oswald to have fired two shots in such a short period of time (perhaps 1/2 second). But it is equally impossible that the bullet hung in the air for 1/4 second before continuing on to hit Connally. This was one of the first points seized upon by conspiracy theorists and it remains one of the most persistent.

Politics colours everyone’s perceptions of what the facts mean in the Kennedy assassination. Conservatives know that if there was a conspiracy, it was their conspiracy. The conspiracy was the expression of powerful and corrupt institutional forces determined to assert their control over government in the face of the self-confident, independent, sophisticated. liberal Kennedys.

John Connally’s own testimony is that he heard the first shot, and he thought it hit Kennedy. He didn’t hear the second shot which hit him. That leaves it possible– if, admittedly, less likely, that two shots were fired so close together that many witnesses thought they only heard one. As everyone knows, there would have been an echo. And some witnesses reported a “flurry” of shots, though most seem to have heard one shot distinctly, and then a “flurry”. In some ways, the reactions of Kennedy and Connally and Connally’s extensive wounds would be better explained by a “flurry” of shots– but the Warren Commission, of course, desperate to economize on assassins, made it all the work of a single bullet.

*Finally, another website points out — eureka! — that the bullet did not even go through the jacket lapel in the first place! So what the hell is that black thing flapping up in front of John Connally’s shirt? You got me. Or maybe it’s a kind of fluke combination of his shoulder going down in pain, the jacket pushed out where the bullet came through, the momentum of the car….. who knows.

The very last thing I will point out is that it is possible that one shot hit both Kennedy and Connally at the same instance and for reasons undiscovered they reacted at different speeds. After all, Kennedy was President. His reaction time should have been faster. (I’m kidding.) Connally was turning. Kennedy was waving. Who knows? It’s not the craziest idea in the world.

In either case, I must point out two obvious facts: firstly, the timing of the the shots does not, in any case, prove that Oswald fired them, or that he was alone. Secondly, Dale Myers, who glibly asserts that his “analysis” proves the shots could only have come from the 6th floor window “sniper’s nest” is a total dink and completely discredits himself on this account. If the conspiracy analysts are ridiculous sometimes with their assumptions about pristine bullets and manholes and post-assassination alterations to the body, his claim that his data about the angle of the shot is so accurate and precise that he can positively identify the exact window– as if he didn’t know already which one it was– that it came from… it’s beyond ridiculous. Talk about junk science. Why or why could he not have simply made his point without leaping to a conclusion which can only be political.

The only way to give credibility to a conclusion like that would be if you could take the raw information about the assassination, the physical properties of the car and the road and the buildings, give this information to a scientist who had never even heard of the Kennedy assassination, and ask him to please try to determine where the shots came from. I’ll bet he would not come back with “exactly” this or “exactly” that or “exactly” anything.

Although, it would be pretty funny, and not to Dale Myers, if he came back with: behind the car, about 6th floor, in some kind of book depository.

And he still cannot prove that Oswald acted alone (or that he even acted, other than to flee when he realized he had been set up) and he should know that and stick to what he can or cannot prove– not to the grand conclusion he really cares about. Given the incompetence of the investigation– which is all a conspiracy really needs to succeed– we will probably never know the truth. And that’s probably the way the real powers that be like it.

Overlooked in almost all of the discussions about conspiracy is the truly remarkable web of relationships between Oswald and various people associated with the CIA and the government. To argue that these relationships are not, at the very least, extremely suspicious, is ridiculous.

Note: it’s striking that not one of the secret service agents in the follow-up car looked up in response to the sound of the first shot. They looked back and to the right. One of them looked down and to the left. (In fact, Connally, Kennedy, and Jacqueline Kennedy all looked briefly to their left just after the first shot was fired.)

True, that’s where the crowd was. Also true: they did not distinguish a sound coming from above and back of the limousine.

Even more striking? Governor Connally stated that he immediately recognized the sound of a high-powered rifle. Why? Because he had served in the military, as had Kennedy. In fact, watching the film today, it is easy to imagine that Kennedy’s reaction to the sound of the first shot is that of a man who knows what he just heard and is processing it.

The Secret Service agents have only one job: detect threats to the life of the President and take immediate action to protect him. It is very striking that not a single one of them seemed to have a clue that their job was calling them on November 22, 1963. In fact, William Greer, the driver of the limo, famously applied the brakes, as if to make sure that Oswald or whomever was holding the rifle, got a good shot at the President.

Rather odd and ironic and strange that the one thing Will Greer should have been trained for during all his years as a Secret Service agent was how to react to someone shooting at the President… and how does he react? He puts on the brakes. It’s really amazing.

The most annoying thing about theorists on both sides? Their tired insistence that, after 50 years, they have incredibly discovered something new that nobody else knew before and that nobody else had ever thought of and which is of the ultimate significance.

The truth is that almost all of the real, substantive issues about the Kennedy assassination were uncovered within the first few years, and almost none of them have been explained or solved in a satisfactory, conclusive manner.

It is also true that paranoids have real enemies.

Zapruder Film: download.

All frames individually archived.

JFK WTC I

I keep thinking about the Kennedy assassination. It’s the only other event I can remember that parallels, in my mind, the impact of this catastrophe. At the time, people compared Kennedy’s violent death to Pearl Harbor, and the death of Roosevelt, so I guess that makes the lineage clear: Pearl Harbor, Roosevelt’s death, Kennedy’s Assassination, the World Trade Centre. In a league of their own.

Only four men died, initially, in the Kennedy Assassination– if you don’t count all those “mysterious” deaths of witnesses– but one was the youngest, brightest, and most forward-looking President in the history of the U.S. The others included one of the most baffling figures in American history: Lee Harvey Oswald. Oswald allegedly also killed Officer J.D. Tippit (one of the most puzzling peripheral characters in this drama) and was killed, in turn, by Jack Ruby, who, in turn, died of cancer in prison.

It is to the eternal shame of the Warren Commission that it did not create a sensation with a detailed biography of Lee Harvey Oswald, who joined the Marines, helped service U-2 spy planes in Japan, spoke fluent Russian, defected to the Soviet Union, married a Russian, defected back to the U.S., wandered around Dallas and Irving, Texas, and New Orleans, in the company of CIA agents and provocateurs, anti-Castro Cubans, and gay gun-runners and erstwhile assassins, and whose best friend in Dallas was a strange ex-Nazi CIA informant George De Mohrenschildt. Lone nut? Are you kidding? He had the craziest social life in Texas.

I just played back a speech Kennedy made in Houston on November 22, 1963. Someone converted it to an MP3 and put it up for file-sharing. (I love the internet.) He talks about 1990– I’m not kidding. In 1990, we will need three times as many spaces at our colleges and universities. In 1990, we will have long since landed on the moon and will have embarked on a new phase of the space program (the shuttle?). He talked about big government programs that would benefit all citizens. He talked about human progress and development.

Shameless, wasn’t it? One of the hallmarks of this age is that most of us would heap scorn and ridicule on big government programs even though those programs included civil rights, our highways, the internet, our defense systems, NASA, and the near destruction of organized crime.

There was a lot of innocence and optimism. The government of the United States can set it’s mind to a seemingly impossible task– landing a man on the moon — Johnson followed with a war on poverty– and accomplish miracles. It is amazing to me that Kennedy succeeded is his most grandiose project– though he never lived to see a man on the moon. He even succeeded within his schedule, before the end of the decade.

Kennedy’s charisma and wit were extraordinary. He describes a new booster rocket used in the space program and mispronounces “payload” into “payroll”. He pauses a second and then says, “it will be the largest payroll too… who should know that better than Houston?” and the audience roars with laughter. It’s not just the wittiness of the remark, but his timing, his utter confidence and charm, and total command of the facts and detailed information– correct names, numbers, statistics, (which, like it or not, was also a remarkable ability of Bill Clinton.) You had the extraordinary sense that he was probably smarter than his advisers.

This was a man so confident in his own abilities that he allowed film-makers to follow him around the White House recording every moment of the day. Nothing was staged or phony– these were real meetings and phone-calls. There was an extremely circumspect, tense phone call to a segregationist governor. There were discussions about how to deal with the crowds of segregationists blocking school entrances. It was extraordinary. I have not seen footage like this of any president since.

Kennedy wasn’t remotely perfect, of course, and it’s hard to tell where he was going since his administration was cut short. But he made a number of “helluva” good decisions and judgments under enormous pressure (the Cuban missile crisis, dispatching the National Guard to Mississippi), and he was arguably moving towards withdrawal from Viet Nam because he believed that the government of South Viet Nam did not have the support of it’s own people (it didn’t). And while Hoover’s FBI, terrified or indifferent, had made no progress against organized crime in 20 years, Bobby Kennedy turned the crime families upside down. By the way– the wonders of the Internet age– you can download a lot of Kennedy’s speeches through Morpheus or other file-sharing programs (along with the Zapruder film)– quite amazing. Listen for yourself. Has anyone sounded that articulate, and that visionary, in a million years?

By 1972, Nixon was talking about how best to withdraw, and that was probably the greatest difference between Kennedy and those who followed him: he thought ahead. He didn’t want to allow himself to be put into the position of having to “withdraw”. He wanted the nation to be somewhere farther along in science and education and culture 20 years down the road. He knew that new technologies would remake industrial America if the education system provided the talent and skills needed.

He was talking about 1990. He was thinking about quagmire. He reluctantly accepted the Bay of Pigs invasion, planned during the Eisenhower Administration, but when it failed he fired the people who planned it and had assured him it would succeed (one of these was the brother of Earle Cabell, the mayor of Dallas in 1963). He initially did not think America was ready to step ahead on civil rights but when Martin Luther King forced the issue, he realized there was only one path to follow, because there was a future and you had to think about that.

I think most people intuitively understood that the Warren Commission was a sham. The Zapruder film was withheld from the public for ten years because it was bought by Time-Life which was managed by C.D. Jackson who was a friend to the CIA and who kept it away from the public, possibly because it didn’t show what the Warren Commission claimed it showed. Dan Rather, the fatuous old ass, did see the film and publicly claimed that it showed Kennedy’s head jerking “forward” with the last shattering bullet. Then he assured America that all was well and that the constitution had worked and the peaceful transition of power had occurred. I have a feeling that a Chilean Dan Rather spoke similar words in 1973 in Santiago, with kind words for Pinochet.

In spite of this tacit complicity with the coup, media coverage of the assassination was genuine and stunningly compelling, probably because they didn’t know how to do it yet. There was no “The JFK Assassination” logo, no theme music, no pimped-up collagen-faced newsreaders with their best-rehearsed tragic faces, as there was in September 2001. Reporters didn’t habitually encourage people to cry on camera. News organizations routinely waited for confirmation before releasing new details.

There was Cronkite with a catch in his voice as he announced the death, sitting at a makeshift studio, reading the news on paper as it was handed to him, removing his glasses. The difference was that Cronkite was a newsman, a real reporter, who understood the significance of the story. And those men behind him at the teletype: real people, not props. And there was the incredible KBOX radio broadcast, live from the route ” something has gone terribly wrong with the motorcade…”. It was a reporter who was not yet trained on how to “package” a tragedy.

Anyone who is old enough probably remembers that the impact of the Kennedy assassination on the world was as great, if not greater, than this WTC attack. People stood on street corners in stunned disbelief. They crowded around stores watching television. Complete strangers began talking intimately. Men bit their lips and wept and young girls wailed in grief.

And it was a similar loss of innocence. This young, vibrant, popular president who was almost certainly headed for a second term, was suddenly replaced with the master of the back-room deal (not that Kennedy wasn’t), the sly old Lyndon Johnson. Nothing against Johnson– I think he was a better president than people give him credit for though his decision to escalate the American commitment in Viet Nam was was his undoing– but he didn’t have nearly the vision of Kennedy, or acute sense of what could or could not be accomplished, and at what cost. Johnson was old-style party politics, with cigar-chomping brokers, party favors, and big campaign contributions from vested interests.

[2022-04-27: I amend this: Johnson actually passed several visionary, milestone pieces of legislation. But he was absolutely underestimated on domestic policy, and disastrously wrong about Viet Nam.]

Most people probably felt they didn’t fully understand what had happened or who was responsible. But the idea that they would choose a man to be their leader and that their sacred right to do this was unabridged and incorruptible was skewered.

Johnson was defeated by Viet Nam, and Nixon by Watergate, and Carter by the “debacle in the desert” (anyone remember Ken Taylor). What is it with the U.S. and the Middle East?

I don’t know if it was Oswald alone or if Oswald even fired a shot. The paraffin test failed to pick up gunpowder on his fingers, and it seems a stretch to believe he was able to fire three shots, hide the rifle and remove his fingerprints, descend to the second floor and buy a coke before building manager Roy Truly and police officer Marion Baker ran into him in the lunch room.

I know the Warren Commission was totally concerned with convincing America that all was well and didn’t have the slightest interest in actually analyzing the crime. I know the autopsy was performed by a forensic pathologist named Humes who had no experience with gunshot wounds and couldn’t draw the correct conclusion until he was told what it was. But there are so many crack-pot conspiracy theorists out there that it’s hard to sort out the truth anymore. Most Americans seem to have come to the conclusion that there probably was a conspiracy. Someone changed the direction of history. Someone led us to Johnson and Nixon and Ford (who was on the Warren Commission) and Carter.

It wasn’t until Reagan came along that I think America realized it had finally emerged from it’s own quagmire, the nightmare of assassinations and wars and hijackings and oil crises, that seemed to have enveloped the 60’s and 70’s. They turned to Reagan after four smart presidents (Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Carter) and the world, by coincidence, changed dramatically at the same time. The cold war was over. The internet age had begun. A new era of unparalleled peace and prosperity emerged.

The Kennedy assassination followed a decade of relative peace and prosperity, as did the WTC. Kennedy won the narrowest of victories over Nixon. We all know about George Bush Jr.’s margin. Kennedy seemed to be entrusted with a new decade of progress and technological marvels. Bush inherited the first surplus since… Kennedy.

Kennedy’s assassination, like the WTC, was captured on video (film) and live on radio. The world watched in stunned disbelief. America was relatively isolationist under Eisenhower, but Kennedy launched the Peace Corps and a new era of activism abroad (Ich bin Ein Berliner). Bush seems to have started his administration with a return to isolationism, rejecting international treaties and choosing to “go it alone” on several international issues.

And now, the U.S. embarks on a declared war on terrorism, which, for me, bears an awful echo of Viet Nam. I don’t know if the results will be the same or not. There is an impressive tone of optimism out there about America’s ability to defeat terrorism, and just because America was equally optimistic, in 1965, about it’s ability to save Viet Nam doesn’t mean the results will be the same this time. But I think any thoughtful person would consider the question.