from _The Yankee and Cowboy War: Conspiracies from Dallas to Watergate_, by Carl Oglesby (Kansas City: Sheed Andrews and McMeel, Inc., 1976) IV Neither Yankee Nor Cowboy "...Single acts of tyranny may be ascribed to the accidental opinion of a day....A series of oppressions, begun at a distinguished period and pursued unalterably through a change of ministers, too plainly prove a deliberate and systematic plan of reducing us to slavery." - Thomas Jefferson "But nobody reads. Don't believe people read in this country. There will be a few professors that will read the report...." - Allen Dulles to the Warren Commission. 9 Who Killed JFK? Those of us who _will_ read find the record tells us to turn against Yankee and Cowboy elites equally; to turn against the domination and closing up of political life by all the clandestine forces and powers. Many of us appear already well persuaded that democracy can no longer work and that we can only hope to make the technical oligarchy more receptive to individual merit. Or that the constitutional republic is made obsolete by the requirements of modern communications and control systems and the vicissitudes of the imperial stage. Or that independence either for the individual from the state or for government from a net of entangling alliances is an outmoded pastoral aspiration. I sense a pervasive American feeling that beneath the kinds of pressures and temptations the contemporary setting brings to bear upon indivdual sensibility and collective consciousness, no one need bother dream of enduring. No one will _not_ be jointly tempted and oppressed, no one will _not_ stoop and be taken at the same time. This is just the way we live now. How _does_ democracy govern a giganticized armed bureaucracy such as the country's public administation has become? How _does_ our republican Constitution answer the needs of our imperial presidency? How _does_ the heritage of independence express itself when the rulers choose to remake the world in the matrix of their computers? The defeat and impotence of the tradition underlie the perverse sophistication that shows through every nuance of the Dallas-Watergate story. Democracy, republicanism, independence, our triangular base of native, traditional, public values: these are treated by the operators on high as the values of political imbeciles. They, the men of the world at UCLA and Harvard, know that in reality the only serious political question is the question of the acquisition and use of power. There is a danger that Watergate and the subsequent CIA and FBI discoveries will have actually _deepened_ these attitudes in the public. I have a friend whose uncle was a straight-arrow Nixonian until Watergate, a hardworking middle-class shopkeeper. When he saw the truth of the men and the system he had been following with his hand over his heart like a fool, he said to himself, "So be it," and became a robber. He was at first successful but then took a foolish risk and was brought down in flight by a single shot from a trooper's rifle, another victim of Watergate. Will the new knowledge lead us only to accept the new state of total surveillance and to make new personal deals with the corruption and fascism implicit in its formations? Or will we turn the other way? The sophisticated contemporary assault on native political values (as exemplified by the report of the Trilateral Commission) flies wide of the mark. The challenge to democracy is not whether it too can govern the megastate, it is rather: Can it resume the struggle against it? Not whether the Constitution can be reconciled to a general prevalence of criminal practice within government, but rather: Can the true republicans resume the struggle against state crime? Not whether independence of person from the state and of government from entangling alliances are compatible with "today's needs," but rather: Can independents resume the struggle, precisely in view of "today's needs," against the entangling, entangled state? The traditional values stand in no shame for seeming unfeasible to us. It is not the purpose of values to be feasible, probably, only to help chart the way, help define the situation. If one cannot make the tradition speak to the current predicament, that is one way of measuring the predicament, of getting a sense of its span and character. But when we find our values incompatible with the lives we are leading, and can no longer deny this, our first response is often to try to change our values: we refute them, spit on them, call them obsolete, childish, premature, etc. This does not change the values, it only makes them more obscure; does not remove the need for values, only makes the values harder to find, harder to recognize and embrace. Thus, to all the admonitions about practicality and the new age from Yankee and Cowboy power elites alike, a trio of democrat, republican, and independent will respond with a single music: We are not obliged to conquer Babylon, only to maintain an active position within it, a life, a forward practice. The wheel spins. We do not come to politics to stop this spinning, only to play a role in it. Yes, we want to win an actual respite, to build a society of some grace and repose that might last a moment and leave something worth regarding. But that is the gamble of democracy, not the precondition. Independent, republican, and democrat may choose only to continue the ancient struggle. I must make this incantation of mine about the values I am calling traditional at least this much more explicit: By _democrats_, I mean those who believe that powers of decision in a healthy society repose sovereignly in the living generations. The state does not come from any power going beyond the human. The state comes from the people and is subservient to them equally and as a whole. By _republicans_, I mean those for whom the legitimate state is carefully circumscribed within society by an organic and reasoned body of explicit legal relationships and limits; those for whom the law is a set of limits to make society more prosperous and happy; who believe it is in the concrete self-interest of each generation after the next to preserve and refine this structure of law. By _independents_, I mean those for whom the state does not fill up the human universe and who believe that there are vast domains of human experience in which the state should not be allowed in any way to intrude; that parties tend easily to become instruments of the state they seek to possess and must therefore be resisted for what they represent in themselves, the will to power. To those who can see themselves anywhere in those vicinities, the question will rapidly become what to do. How do we resist the power-elite tendency to resolve differences through state violence? To these, I propose that a major immediate effort should be to politicize the question, Who killed JFK? That question sums up everything we need to fear in the Dallas-Watergate decade. To comprehend and solve that crime--and then the counter-crime of Watergate, "Who cashiered Nixon?"--is to restore the precondition of any self-governing and republican people, the security of the public state. As we are a single nation, we have a single president whose destiny is participated in by all. When the president bleeds, all of us have to sleep in it. But then to wake up, to acknowledge the blood, to take rational action to find the truth of it and all the mysteries around it and flowing from it across the decade and a half: that would begin to make America a free country again. No more than begin. Suppose the people successfully forced the isssue, that would still be no guarantee of the next step. What indeed happens if implicit power rivalries are forced to become explicit? And as I have said before: Solve the crime, catch the conspiracy, still the food and fuel and economic and social crises remain, the Middle-East remains, the DOD and KGB remain . . . the dialectic remains. But the events of 11/22/63 form a central episode in the flowering of the clandestine state. Study of the JFK murder brings us close-up to the cancer Dean saw growing on the presidency, but at another of its radiant epicenters. It is the same cancer that a host of observers since Ross and Wise in 1964 have decried under one name or another--a cancer of the defense establishment, the foreign policy establishment: a generalized state cancer whose growth we can trace back to the clandestine arrangements entered into by the U.S. government with the likes of Gehlen, Lansky, and the knights of the secret Round Tables. The cancer attacks at Dallas 1963 and at Watergate a decade thereafter from the other side, leaving a trail of blood and disrupted function between and beyond. It now rules us. But to get at Dallas '63 would be to get at this sickness by one of its major victories. It would be to get at the political bottom of the Vietnam war, of the structures of internal conflict that helped produce that entire decade, the decade of Dallas-Watergate and Vietnam. Understand Dallas: That is the start of the way out. As I write, there are new chances of congressional action such as have not heretofore existed, mainly stemming from the fact that Watergate and the CIA have definitively put right-wing subversion on the agenda. The Congress is agitated with the question and seems beginning to grapple with it in the committee system. But we have seen such flashes of Congressional light before. What can keep this issue alive now and detonate it at the heart of American political consciousness? One thing only, a movement of ordinary people demanding that the pressure toward the truth be increased and refreshed daily, ordinary people informed on the basic issues and confident of the authority of their purpose. As I conclude this book a new controversy is brewing. Once it becomes at last publicly indubitable that Kennedy was killed by a conspiracy hiding behind Oswald's and Ruby's graves, immediately the angry question will surface: Then what _kind_ of conspiracy was it? I have developed aspects of one view in this book: I say JFK was killed by a rightist conspiracy formed out of anti-Castro Cuban exiles, the Syndicate, and a Cowboy oligarchy, supported by renegade CIA and FBI agents. The Warren Commission thought always in terms of a lone assassin versus a _foreign_ conspiracy and scarcely entertained the domestic-conspiracy option except in those hushed, frightened secret meetings (transcipts of which were declassified in 1974 and 1975) called by Warren in January 1964 to discuss the troubling news that Oswald had possibly been an FBI informant for the fourteen months prior to the assassination. So it is today. The voices of cover-up are even now saying: There was no conspiracy, but if there was, it was a pro-Castro conspiracy. This view of Oswald has already begun to crystalize. It is the counterattack against a critique which has generally prevailed. But all of us theorizers and patient watchers who are faithful to the traditional resolve can say we are ready to face and try to deal with the truth of Dallas, whatever it turns out to be, certain indeed that if we cannot say who killed the president, then there is no respect in which we may still see ourselves as a self-governing people. We should then be obliged to celebrate our republic's anniversary by burying as a dead letter its one-time faith in people, law, and a sense of limits.