It’s been 60 years since the shots that profoundly changed the country’s history, as well as Yours Crudely’s personal life & the rest of the world. At the end of my morning jazz shift at WHRB, which I was doing from the night before, I read end-of-show news from the UPI ticker, including Air Force One landing in Dallas, then handed over the mike & went home to my radio-less room over a laundry near Central Square to take a nap. A few hours later, a classmate came by to share the news, inviting me to stop by his place the next eve. I did, and met the classmate who’d soon become my wife & lifelong partner.
My life, like everyone else’s near my age, was strongly affected by the “Big Event” in many other ways also, including the rapid escalation of the Vietnam war, widening culture gap, loss of trust in government, violent elimination of reformist leadership, & revelation by revelation emergence of what had actually taken place–& what was still taking place in the multi-layered establishment cover-up. Indeed, as is often the case, many of the earliest suspicions were raised in response to cover-up efforts, albeit not at all from the mainstream media, which 60 years on, seems no less reticent.
During those 60 years, alternative media emerged even for the masses, however, giving non-establishment views and findings a wider audience. Ditto for countless books by dedicated investigators, witnesses & even would be confessors with a bearing on what at least one ostensibly confessing CIA operative called “the Big Event,” the assassination of JFK, along with the cover-up to follow–something, incredibly, still perpetuated, even as the careful research has largely filled in the more truthful picture to show most of the main scope & most pertinent details of the actual coup….
It’s as if some things are just too incredible to gain a footing in belief, making it hard to know whether to credit the planners & scriptwriters (with their onion-peeling fall-back covers) or simply to blame both agents & targets of the deception for their uncritical dumb-flunkiness. Arguably in between the agents & targets, the mass-media have proven far closer to the former, if not indistinguishable.
Indeed, there’s a problem in pointing blame at what can’t be seen, partly because it seems so broad & amorphous. Focus on the “deep state” & you find the joint chiefs, CIA insiders & outsiders alike, J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI; focus on wealthy elite & you find oil interests, defense contractors, media moguls, & mob bosses, with active partnerships between….