JFK assassination - 60th anniversary (1 Viewer)

[Combat]

Coming up this next week on Nov. 22. A lot of bad things began that day. I'm not a huge fan of JFK himself who had many personal failings and was mostly a do-nothing president, but the nature of his death let the genie out of the bottle. A loss of respect, shame, and dignity in America. Think of a time when the president felt secure enough to drive down the roads of a major city in a convertible because no one could contemplate any harm coming to him. Now we live in a security state of fear. Every nut learned from this event that they could make their mark in the modern TV age if they are willing to die to do it. Things have been in decline ever since. Mass shooting etc. There is no crystal ball to tell how the Vietnam war would have been impacted by JFK had he lived. I do think the chances are good that it would have played out about the same, but we will never know. JFK's assassination is one of those events for which the sum is greater than its part.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3afm8a4hv1I

 

[jazzeum]

There were the beginnings of an ugly current running through the US prior to that time. Dallas was the seeming center of extremism, known as the city of hate. Nothing happens in a vacuum. The politics of today can be traced back to those times.

 

[damian]

It does seem clear that there was a conspiracy to assassinate the President of the USA.
I just cannot bring myself to accept the lone disgruntled gun mam story.

 

[Combat]

There were the beginnings of an ugly current running through the US prior to that time. Dallas was the seeming center of extremism, known as the city of hate. Nothing happens in a vacuum. The politics of today can be traced back to those times.

There was a sense of innocence and decency in society that is long gone. The JFK assassination had a lot to do with that. It's hard to believe now, but the president was able for many decades to drive in an open car on a preannounced route in US cities because the idea of any harm coming to him was unthinkable. Oswald changed that. Now we live in a security state expecting acts of violence. All the mass shootings and school shootings and lack of fundamental trust in our citizens to behave responsibly is gone.

 

[Old Bill]

I have a great interest in the Kennedy Assassination. In England I remember exactly where I was (as the saying goes) when the news of his assassination broke over here.
My parents and all the neighbours in our Culdesac came outside, shocked and stunned. A lot were crying. They spent quite a while talking somberly amongst themselves.
I was 12 at the time.

Over the years I kept an interest and have lost count of the number of books I have read on the subject. (one of my favourite fiction books happens to be Stephen King's 11/22/63)

My wife and I visited Dealey Plaza area, the Sixth Floor Museum and the Conspiracy Museum in 1997.

There is a very interesting documentary on Amazon Prime (well a few actually) called Dark Legacy. Probably taken with a pinch of salt by most - but I don't know............

Roy

 

[GICOP]

I enjoyed watching the movie "Executive Action" starring Burt Lancaster and Robert Ryan, makes you think :wink2:

Cheers

Martyn

 

[Terp152]

It does seem clear that there was a conspiracy to assassinate the President of the USA.
I just cannot bring myself to accept the lone disgruntled gun mam story.

No, there is no solid evidence to support this. Pls ignore the Oliver Stone fantasy movie.

 

[Combat]

No, there is no solid evidence to support this. Pls ignore the Oliver Stone fantasy movie.

That's absolutely right. The evidence is conclusive that Oswald was the assassin. He was a very strange guy defecting to the USSR but there is zero credible evidence of the involvement of anyone other than Oswald after 60 years. Oswald's rifle was found at the crime scene. Bullet casings from Oswald's rifle were found by the window from which witnesses saw the rifle at the moment of the assassination. Oswald's prints were on the boxes by that window. He fled the scene, got a pistol, and killed a police officer less than an hour later. He is stone cold guilty of the assassination. The conspiracy nonsense is fantasy. Jack Ruby killing Oswald gave a lot of fodder to the conspiracy theory that there was a plan to "silence" Oswald but there were plenty of opportunities for the Dallas police to kill him instead of arresting him. After his arrest, Oswald was allowed to talk to his family and the world press. No plan to silence him would have entailed taking him into custody, allowing him to speak to the press, recruiting someone willing to kill him and spend the rest of their lives in prison while trusting that they would remain silent etc. Oswald did it all by his lonesome. The grassy knoll nonsense is particularly laughable. It appears to offer seclusion from the perspective of Elm St. where the assassination occurred, but the backside is open to half of Dallas. No assassin could have stood their with a rifle awaiting JFK and gotten away.

 

[damian]

No, there is no solid evidence to support this. Pls ignore the Oliver Stone fantasy movie.

Maybe.
I don't know.
I just find it hard to believe that the president of the USA could be assassinated in his own country like that.
It is the entrepot for all other conspiracy theories and a lot of giys who get deeply interested in the Kennedy assassination also go down a rabbit hole of other conspiracy theories.

 

[Combat]

Interesting that the South was solidly Democrat in JFK's day. He won Texas in 1960. California went for Nixon. How times have changed. Most of the Southern states didn't start voting Republican until 1980 when Reagan was the candidate. Now some states like Georgia are reverting back to Democrat. I lived in VA in the 80s and 90s when it was solidly Republican but now it is mostly Democrat leaning.

 

[damian]

Interesting that the South was solidly Democrat in JFK's day. He won Texas in 1960. California went for Nixon. How times have changed. Most of the Southern states didn't start voting Republican until 1980 when Reagan was the candidate. Now some states like Georgia are reverting back to Democrat. I lived in VA in the 80s and 90s when it was solidly Republican but now it is mostly Democrat leaning.

Was that not the old Civil War divide ?
The south Democrat, The North Republican

 

[jazzeum]

Was that not the old Civil War divide ?
The south Democrat, The North Republican

It’s a bit more complex than that. As of the beginning of the Civil War the northern states were split, although not evenly, between Republicans and Democrats, and not all Democrats can be grouped together. Some were tolerant of slavery while others weren’t. In the South, you have to recognize that there were Democrats and Southern Whigs; the Whig Party had had northern and southern branches. The northern Whigs eventually became the Republican Party in the mid 1850s; the Whig Party split apart over the slavery issue. In the South, even during the War, they maintained their own identity and opposed Davis’s administration. In the post Civil War era they eventually merged into the Democratic Party.

 

[Terp152]

Brad states the status of the political parties in the different parts of the country very well. NorthernDemocrat support for the war was important to Lincoln and the Republicans. He appointed "war Democrats" as political generals in the army to entice that support. Thus the army got Genl's McClernand, Butler, most famously Sickles.

 

[Combat]

The Sixth Floor Museum is a surreal place to visit in Dallas. Dealey Plaza and the old Texas School Book Depository building look much the same as they did on the day JFK was assassinated. The Hughes film captures the 6th floor window just moments before the first shot. Too bad the film cameras of that day didn't capture sound. One thing that almost all the witnesses agreed upon is that there were three shots. Almost no witness claimed that there were more than three shots or that the shots they heard originated from more than one location. They disagreed on that location due to the sound distortions in an open area but one shooter firing three shots was the near unanimous consensus. Consistent with the three bullet casings from Oswald's rifle found on the 6th floor.

Neat graphic of the motorcade route and witnesses.

Eyewitness to History: An Interactive Map of the Kennedy Motorcade – The Sixth Floor Museum at Dealey Plaza (jfk.org)

 

[jazzeum]

John Updike wrote the following a week after the death of JFK:

It was as if we slept from Friday to Monday and dreamed an oppressive, unsearchably significant dream, which, we discovered on awaking, millions of others had dreamed also. Furniture, family, the streets, and the sky dissolved; only the dream on television was real. The faces of the world’s great mingled with the faces of landladies who had happened to house an unhappy ex-Marine; cathedrals alternated with warehouses, temples of government with suburban garages; anonymous men tugged at a casket in a glaring airport; a murder was committed before our eyes; a Dallas strip-tease artist drawled amiably of her employer’s quick temper; the heads of state of the Western world strode down a sunlit street like a grim village rabble; and Jacqueline Kennedy became Persephone, the Queen of Hades and the beautiful bride of grief. All human possibilities, of magnificence and courage, of meanness and confusion, seemed to find an image in this long montage, and a stack of cardboard boxes in Dallas, a tawdry movie house, a tiny rented room where some shaving cream still clung to the underside of a washbasin, a row of parking meters that had witnessed a panicked flight all acquired the opaque and dreadful importance that innocent objects acquire in nightmares.

The dream began to lift at the sight, on television, of President Johnson giving his broad and friendly handshake, with exquisite modulations of political warmth, to the line of foreign dignitaries who had come to Washington as mourners. Reality was knitting itself together. The sanity of daylight has returned, but the dissipated dream should not be forgotten; it must be memorized and analyzed. We pray we do not fall into such a sleep again.
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[Combat]

The cable TV networks drug out all the old, debunked conspiracy theories this week. The most despicable is the one that claims that a secret service agent in the follow up car accidentally discharged his gun and shot JFK in the head. I know they run UFO and Bigfoot shows but those are mostly harmless. This type of programming is defamatory to a former secret service agent who is now deceased and can't defend himself. It's shameful. There is not a scintilla of evidence that supports this theory. There were numerous eyewitnesses to the event and several other secret service agents in the car. Not a single one of them ever claimed that Hickey accidentally killed JFK. And imagine the odds of a random and accidental shot hitting JFK squarely in the head of all the places that the shot could have gone.

 

[tdubel]

Not getting into conspiracy theories. That said there are way too many mob ties and interactions with theKennedys for me to believe this was a clean story. Additionally Oswald came up again in recently declassified Soviet defector intelligence. The Russians were not involved in theory but even this led to more questions. Again IMO the Kennedy assassination provided a lot of opportunities to many interested parties. There were a lot of people who benefitted from his removal. Same can be said of his brother’s assassination. Additionally, regardless of your thoughts or feelings, that family was dirty money, Joe Kennedy was not a saint. Karma is a funny thing.

TD