In the old Soviet Union regime
skeptics often observed that while true believers knew what the future held, the
past was constantly changing. An example of this strange state of affairs is provided
by a photo
of Stalin standing next to several other Bolsheviks. The picture indicates,
however, that one VIP has been airbrushed
from the stage. To the chagrin of the artistic revisionist, comrade Trotsky’s
uninhabited shoes testify to the renegade’s former prominence.
One wouldn’t expect this kind of deception in the United
States , but much the same thing has occurred
with the assassination of President Kennedy. The actual portrait of the
real assassin—a pathetic loser whose delusions of grandeur are clearly revealed
in his “Historic Diary”—has been airbrushed away to make room for
grand conspiracies involving persons or institutions that folks like Oliver
Stone wish to revile.
Of particular significance is the obsessive desire by
leftists—including political wannabes like sportscaster Bob
Costas—to connect Kennedy’s assassination to Dallas
itself, a city that was then a hotbed of conservative opposition to the
President.
The New York Times provided yet another example of this
revisionism when it published an odious opinion piece by one James
McAuley, a “Marshall scholar
studying history at the University of
Oxford Dallas
as an “actor” and not merely the geographical “stage” for JFK’s assassination.
Not mentioned in this fatuous retrospective is the fact that
a communist who adored Fidel Castro and had lived in the Soviet
Union longer than in Dallas
was the person who actually shot the President from the sixth floor of the
building where he had recently secured a menial job. Nor do McAuley and most
other “observers” care to note that seven months earlier this unstable fellow
who didn’t drive a car attempted to assassinate a right-wing Texas
politician, General Edwin Walker, with the same mail-order rifle he clearly
fired on November 22nd.
On that fateful day, after failing to reconcile with his
estranged wife, the high-school dropout and twice court-martialed Marine who
attempted suicide in the Soviet Union carried an
elongated object wrapped in brown paper to work—an odd package that he told his
co-worker and driver contained curtain rods. One could continue for hours
discussing definitive incriminating evidence like Oswald’s makeshift shooting
blind, eyewitness descriptions, bullet cartridges, and the killing of Officer
J. D. Tippit.
According to a commemorative editorial in USA
today a while back, evidence related to JFK’s assassination is “sparse” and presumably inconclusive.
Those editors, like most Americans, have never seriously reviewed the evidence.
Anyone who has read even part of the massive Warren Report could never assert that evidence
in this case is “sparse”—a claim that would probably seem foolish even to folks
who’ve perused Gerald Posner’s quite manageable “Case Closed.”
Vincent Bugliosi, author of the monumental assassination work,
“Reclaiming History,” demonstrated to a group of lawyers that
they weren’t thinking logically about JFK’s murder by asking for a show of
hands of those who had reviewed the Warren Report. The sparse number didn’t
compare with the scores of hands raised earlier when he inquired about
conspiracy proponents.
Most Americans know little more about the assassination than
what they’ve seen in Oliver Stone’s massively dishonest film, “JFK.” I
regularly showed this dramatically gripping movie to seniors at the prep school
in La Jolla where I taught for twenty years. That
screening was followed by a condensed dose of real evidence as organized by
Brandeis history scholar Jacob
Cohen (“Yes, Oswald Alone Killed Kennedy,” Commentary Magazine, June,
1992). The typical result, at least for students who bothered to read Cohen’s
article, was shock at Stone’s cinematic rape of history—at the director’s ignoring
or twisting of obvious facts to make the event fit his own desires.
Stone and others, however, get away with these monumental deceptions
because journalists, intellectuals, and politicians have for decades been
unwilling to provide to the general public, on a regular basis, even basic
facts concerning Oswald that are clearly known—only a handful of which have
been offered above. Like Stalin, they wish to airbrush out of the picture the “silly
little communist” (Jackie Kennedy’s words) who clearly murdered the
President and to manipulate a tragic historical event to further their own agendas.
