The Chris Moeller Archives

His death has been the ultimate “hit,” up to this point, by the Deep State. They took batting practice against equatorial nations. The far right wing elements of our brutal government still today make their bread from the yeast of the mythical Cold War threat in Eastern Europe. They've never relinquished their power-- the only true power that resides in Washington. The spooks back in Kennedy’s day-- the scum on the bottom of your shoe personified by the likes of Guy Banister, Howard Hunt, and David Phillips-- were never going to accept the United States at peace with Castro’s Cuba only 90 miles off our shore. This bunch was even opposed to peace talks with Vietnam. Peace with the Communists was considered capitulation. 

But they pulled the damn thing off. We can admit that now as the entire concern fades on cue with what Studs Terkel called our condition of the United States of Alzheimer’s. Donald Trump will likely be the last American president to even promise the declassification of the secret assassination files, and it turned out that he had just been blowing smoke. The hardliners against the Soviets lassoed into their horrific scheme the Cuban exile circus clowns of the Bay of Pigs and the anti-Castro thugs in the Trafficante/Marcello/Roselli/Giancana criminal syndicates, farmed out the hit in order to keep the entire lot of them safe from blowback, caught the president in a nest of gunfire in Dallas, shot him through the larynx from behind, blew out the back of his skull-- and his brains onto the dress and hands of his terrified wife from behind a fence on the knoll, blamed it all on “a nut” that New Orleans Mafioso Carlos Marcello and CIA anti-Castro figures knew well and that could be pinned as both a murderer and-- this is important-- a “leftist,” then chose a Marcello stooge to quickly and forever silence the nut in question. 

Most of us don’t venture an opinion on the Kennedy murder investigation today. There are too many names in any possible conspiracy to try to remember. Too many webs to untangle. Too many contradictions in the tragic character of Oswald, that vast collection of contradictions and spy assignments that made him so vulnerable to the power of his handlers. Most of us have adopted the same posture on the matter as that of Fidel Castro for all those years: Butt your nose out, or it might get shot off. It could have been Fidel in Jack’s place if the G men had had more competence, or if Kennedy hadn’t prevaricated on the topic of the island. The empire will do as the empire does, but like El Comandante, take care of you and yours, and be wary of what is spooned onto your plate and what cigars you put in your mouth. 

Americans don’t seem all that pissed about it anymore, but they should be, more so now, in fact, because the conspirators got away with it. When, in 1978 and 1979, the House Committee on Assassinations finally set fire to the preposterous Warren Commission Report, we were obviously too distracted by Studio 54 and the peak seasons of Saturday Night Live to give much of a damn. I was still in short pants but although the nation's lawmakers had finally determined that a conspiracy of bad actors, and not a lone gunman, likely killed the president, I suspect we had already grown too emotionally dependent upon the lone gunman theory to collectively part with it, or to demand actual justice.

Even though many of the same heels (Hunt as the prime example) had been rounded up and imprisoned for their Constitutional crimes during the subsequent Watergate scandal, and we had come to learn about the covert CIA attempts on Castro and other heads of state, and we had finally seen the Zapruder film, and we had finally heard the actual witness testimony, and heard what had been omitted or ignored by the Warrens, and seen Sam Giancana shot dead before he could give his compelled congressional testimony, and we had heard about the body of John Roselli, following his testimony, decomposing in a 55-gallon oil drum in Miami’s Dumfoundling Bay, it was post-trauma symptomatic to admit-- maybe still today-- that such a thing was capable of ever happening. The president being murdered by elements of the nation’s intelligence service? We figuratively shelved the entire horror, sort of how United Artists literally shelved Frankenheimer’s Manchurian Candidate for a quarter century following Kennedy's death. The mind shuts down as a coping mechanism. Perhaps the collective one does as well. 

This is why I laugh at Tom Brokaw’s publishing choice for our “greatest generation.” The World War II generation, really? The assassination perpetrators? The group that turned on their own during the ‘50s and created a seemingly-everlasting era of paranoia, fear, and loathing? That generation? If we’re going to indulge such nonsense at all, I favor instead-- to wear the championship heavyweight belt-- the baby boomers. Imagine having to endure teen angst and the palace revolution of your government by radical right wing jacknuts at the same time. Despite the personal anguish, the boomers changed the world. They became the first generation since the radical laborists of the late 19th century to truly challenge the actions of their government. They were the first to recognize-- at least during their youth-- the folly of empire, even as it stubbornly endures today. 

Of all the historical “threats to democracy” that are being touted now towards a comparison with the Trump antler brigade storming the people’s castle-- this would be your Civil Wars, your disputed elections of 1876 and 2001, etc., I don’t read or hear anybody nominating November of 1963. A vital comparison from then to today is the way we see the news media hurry its attempts to carve out historical context from still-developing events. So I’ll give it a go too. The media back then (as now) wasn’t adversarial towards entrenched power at all. In ’63, the Warren Commission was elevated to sovereign authority of assassination investigation by the incoming president, ending the legal possibility at that critical time of any other law enforcement entity taking a look at the murder. The commission was served by and steered behind the scenes by Allen Dulles, the CIA’s former head, author of the ’53 Iranian coup, the ’54 Guatemalan coup, and (most ironically) the MKUltra mind control program. He had been fired by Kennedy just two years previous over the disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion. For LBJ to choose Dulles to fill one of the limited seven seats on this all-star roster was like putting the fox at the head of the Henhouse Massacre Committee. Did the JFK assassination conspiracy stretch all the way to the top of the United States government? All we have as evidence is the fact that Johnson tabbed Earl Warren, then the chief justice of the supreme court, to lead the commission and then the resulting report spread manure like a farmer racing to wrap up in the field before a storm. 

Not only are Americans not appropriately angry today about the coup of one of their all-time favorites, they seem to be increasingly angry instead at the monolithic and vague idea of “conspiracy theories.” Instead of calling for more government openness and demanding the release of secret files, a new hysteria seems to be lumping all opinion unapproved by the neoliberal government in with QAnon and the like. A nitwit on the Independent’s website made the fantastical leap from QAnon’s pedophile inventions all the way back to an actual endorsement of the long-ago-discredited Warren Report. Netflix and National Geographic both turned down Oliver Stone’s new documentary JFK: Destiny Betrayed, which is nevertheless headed to the Cannes Film Festival in 2021. Executives claim the denial was due to an “unapproved fact check,” begging the question, of course: unapproved by whom?

If the goal of a coup d'etat is political suppression, murdering Kennedy was more than a home run. It was a grand slam. Not only did it punish the man and his family and his country and its citizens for his having policed organized crime and for waging peace during a hysterical anti-Communist era, it continues to suppress, intimidate, and threaten nearly six decades on. Do a Google search on Stone’s new documentary right quick and see how many critics are willing to immediately surmise, film project unseen, that Stone’s film has issues with historical accuracy. And this is based solely on the fact that giant media corporations have reported problems with it and then not even specified their problems. I guess if you succeed in making the connection between Jack Ruby spending a month in Havana in 1959 and moving within the Giancana and Marcello criminal circuit before killing Oswald under the pretense that you lost your cool in a heated moment after you snuck into the Dallas police station, you're liable to also believe that Hillary operates a pedophile ring out of a pizza restaurant. 

It’s a bullshit claim to say that Americans “love conspiracy theories.” They actually hate them with a passion. What we actually love is secrecy and pat endings, where we find solace, and I’ll match you example for example. We’re begging-- and we have been begging-- for more Warren Commissions to be formed and gently assure us that each of our national, institutional sins are only the sins of lone nuts and not instead those of our collective failure, or worse, perhaps our own personal culpability. Read me another bedtime story, Uncle Sam… or Uncle Joe, so I can get to sleep.