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The Kennedy Assassination

17:51 / 05.12.05

I was surprised not to find any threads about this, forgive me if I missed one. I have been thinking a little bit about the cultural significance of John F. Kennedy's assassination lately, but I really don't know all that much about the theories regarding his death. So what do you guys think? Was it Oswald? Was there a conspiracy?

20:13 / 05.12.05

I think one of my favorite theories was the one in DeLillo's Libra, where Oswald's ready to pull the trigger then is surprised as hell when someone else gets a couple shots off first.

There's too much weirdness around JFK for there not to have been some monkey business.

22:23 / 05.12.05

Who killed the Kennedys? After all, it was you and me.

09:03 / 16.12.05

wtf...?

jfk was NOT some kind of a martyr of freedom, nor was he (as a hellblazer-comic nicely puts it) "the last chance on political decency in the US" that had to be killed by the evil guys in fedora & trenchcoat. he was just another bloody politician.

not that i like political (or any other) assasination. but:

does anybody care who exactly had his hand on the trigger in the case of one dead mafia-capo? and: does that knowledge, given it is to be found, alter somehow what we know about power, namely, that it corrupts?

DON'T BE BLINDED BY MYTHICAL STRUCTURE IN REAL EVENTS

09:39 / 16.12.05

while JFK was hardly jesus reborn, he was pretty important. his mythical qualities are potentially as important as his real actions and traits, i reckon.
whether his myth represents the reality of the man, it does represent the reality of our folk perceptions of him.

does knowing who pulled the trigger matter? not in itself, no. who did it and how points to a more important question.
that question is "why?", and it would be interesting to know an answer to that asked less than it answered.

perhaps kennedy was more use as a martyr to the american dream than as a legislator or commander in chief. perhaps kennedy was close to something that needs its privacy. perhaps he was just killed for pissing someone off, personally or otherwise.

all of these become more or less likely depending on who you suspect as the bullet-monkey and hir organ grinders.

another point is that it seems sensible to understand the how and why behind a succesful attempt upon the most powerful man in the world, if only to better understand the currents of power that flowed around him.

if they can kill kennedy in broad daylight i wonder what else can they do? what motivates them to do these things? are they or people like them likely to do something that drastic again?

09:40 / 16.12.05

back and to the side, back and to the side, back and to the side...

madhatter - where did anyone suggest jfk was a martyr for freedom? feathered up started a thread to talk about the jfk assasination which has intrigued people the world over since it happened.

People are interested because it was a very strange set of events - the assination itself captured on film, the arrest and trial of Oswald, Jack Ruby, the grassy knoll, and various conspiracy theories about the FBI, CIA etc

He was just another bloody politician, yes, but he was also gunned down in public and it was filmed and arguably the person who got done for it wasn't guilty.

Clearly people do want to discuss it and that's what this thread is for - if you don't want to discuss it - don't.

...back and to the side, back and to the side, back and to the side.

09:55 / 16.12.05

jub - i used the term "martyr" 'cause i wanted to point to the PERCEPTED significance of jfk's death ("oh my god! he angered THEM! THEY must be clearly enemies of freedom!") and it's mythical qualities.

i do like the diskussion. i just wanted to point out that the significnce of such an ambush is hardly especially great, since what it reveals to us - the existence of more then just the elected or even the known camarillas on an insane power-trip - is to be known without further knowledge of the details of the ambush.

but, as toksik wrote, the "mythical" questions lead to real ones, which i readily agree.

09:56 / 16.12.05

I think one of my favorite theories was the one in DeLillo's Libra, where Oswald's ready to pull the trigger then is surprised as hell when someone else gets a couple shots off first.

thats pretty much how i see it having gone down. having oswald placed as the obvious gunman to fill the role of mop up man and patsy simoultaneously seems the sensible way to organise a presidential assasination to me.
ideally oswald would be operating under the assumption that what he was doing had been his own idea, and would simply imagine that he had been beaten to a popular shot.

is the point in libra that he was a patsy or that he was just not fast enough to be guilty?

The Prince of All Lies

15:27 / 16.12.05

I think any discussion on JFK has to bear in mind the context. I mean, a couple of years later, they (I'm not gonna dare to make a hypothesis on who "they" are, if indeed there was a broad conspiracy) shot Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, and most importantly, Bobby Kennedy. That, I think, along with the massacre at the '68 Democratic Convention, was the deathblow of the "american dream", especially after reading Hunter S. Thompson's book on the '72 presidential campaign and Robert A. Wilson.
Whether you think the one who shot JFK was a lonely loon, the Illuminati or John Dillinger, I think this thread warrants a broader perspective of the social changes of that era and why it all fell apart.

16:52 / 16.12.05

Part of the point of Libra, if I'm remembering correctly, was that it wasn't so much a conspiracy as a social movement that made assassination inevitable.

*

18:48 / 16.12.05

Okay okay. I did it. Sheesh, you guys...

15:29 / 18.12.05

There's a whole thing in Ellroy's American Tabloid too, where he attributes it to a French merc. I enjoyed the book, anyway.

And it's 'back, and to the left', Jub.

I missed the Ch4(?) doc about a year or two back that supposedly proved it was completely Oswald, but I'm sure I'd not've agreed with their evidence in any case. Anyone see that?

15:44 / 18.12.05

It was Sir Menzies Campbell...

Oh... um wrong 'assassination'... and wrong Kennedy...

10:11 / 19.12.05

There was a thread discussing this peviously, but I can't find it ... oh no, yes I can. Here it is

Lots of cheerleading from me in that thread for a little Pocketbook Essentials book on the assasination which presents the thesis that the killing was carried out by associates of Lyndon Johnson. The book is well worth checking out. The author is Robin Ramsey, of Lobster magazine (link in the thread).

Tryphena Absent

10:30 / 19.12.05

It was Sir Menzies Campbell...

God I wish he'd stop doing that.