Laurel S. King
15595 Dermody Avenue
San Lorenzo, CA 94580
E-mail: LKing79592@aol.com

It is now 35 years after President John F. Kennedy was assassinated. The world has changed enormously. The sixties have worked their will on generations after them. We have passed through Viet Nam, Watergate, Irangate, and Monicagate. We have spawned Yuppies and Yippies. We have satellite TV, personal computers, and the Internet. We fight wars by cruise missile and watch them from the comfort of our living rooms. We are discovering new planets everywhere and are peering right to the known limits of our universe. We are debating about traces of ancient life on Mars and are finding water on the Moon. We are on the brink of a major cure for cancer.

In the midst of all these huge changes, which seem to appearing at ever-increasing rates, does an assassination seven presidents ago anymore? Author James Ellroy (Tabloid; the Black Dahlia) doesn’t think so. He has stated that he did not care then, and he does not care now, about who killed President Kennedy. His own mother had been murdered and the murder never solved. Maybe that is why he could not bring himself to care about the distant murder of this other parent, husband, uncle, cousin, son, and President.

But we should care. The relevance of the JFK assassination is unrelated to whether there was a conspiracy. It is also unrelated to who might have done the deed or who might have paid them. It is very much related, however, to our collective perception of the act and the long-lasting changes in American society that those perceptions helped wreak. The Kennedy assassination ushered in the age of Viet Nam, draft-dodging, Watergate, etc. that continues through the present in the person of our first Commander-in-Chief who never served in the military. After this assassination, America and the world were never again the same.

But there is another, less obvious, way in which the JFK assassination still matters. I speak of the behavior of the great institutions, and some of the individuals within them, immediately after the assassination. Examining how these people and agencies reacted to the assassination might tell us much about them, their ways, and their possible involvement in the case. At a bare minimum, their actions might offer us some clues as to how we might want to order them to act in future situations. It might show us how we should change their responsibilities. It might also indicate whether we should diminish some of their powers. Alternatively, we might simply learn that weaknesses in our institution allowed this terrible event to happen. Either way, we will have advanced our understanding of the assassination and of this country’s institutions.

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