November 22, 1963

Why We Need the Real History of the Kennedy Assassination

By Jefferson Morley 

Sunday, November 24 1996; Page C01 The Washington Post 

AFTER 33 years the discussion of the Kennedy assassination is stuck
between the myth of the "lone nut" and the myth of conspiracy. The huge
accumulation of facts about Nov. 22, 1963 amounts to something more than
trivia but less than historical truth. Consensus, after a third of a
century, remains elusive.

Indeed, since the bitter debate around Oliver Stone's conspiratorial 1991
film "JFK," the very idea of a consensus history of the Kennedy
assassination has sounded quaint. In general, the notion that one version
of history can suit all parties concerned has become embattled since the
cultural convulsions of the 1960s. In the particular case of the murdered
president, what possible telling could possibly satisfy all? A majority of
Americans, according to polls, are convinced or strongly suspect there was
a conspiracy. Many leading opinion makers at news media organiza tions and
some historians assure us that there is no credible evidence of such. And
never the twain shall meet.

Yet we are closer than ever to having a firm factual basis for an
assassination consensus. The JFK Assassination Records Act, passed
unanimously by Congress in 1992, has resulted in the release of hundreds
of thousands of pages of assassination-related documents since 1993. A
five-member civilian review board, under the capable leadership of a
federal judge, John Tunheim, has ordered the disclosure of another 2,000
documents. The board continues to take depositions and to pursue records
that the FBI, the CIA, the National Security Agency and other federal
entities want to keep secret.

Still, many tough-minded partisans who have dominated both sides of the
JFK debate for years say that seeking assassination consensus is a fool's
errand. The conspiracy theorists (or the government's apologists) are
emotionally and intellectually incapable of accepting the overwhelming
evidence of Lee Harvey Oswald's sole guilt (or the existence of
conspiracy). So why bother?

We should bother because of the undiminished centrality of Nov. 22, 1963
in the American imagination. The Kennedy assassination is a factor in the
crisis of legitimacy that now undermines the U.S. government's ability to
address a wide variety of public ills. In 1964, the first year that the
government failed to offer a convincing account of the president's murder,
76 percent of the American people had a great deal of confidence in their
government; in 1996, the figure is 19 percent. The inability of the
government to present a credible explanation of how Kennedy was killed is
not the only nor the most important reason for this decline. But it surely
has played a role. Reaching a common understanding about the causal chain
of events leading to Kennedy's murder would be an important symbolic step
toward restoring faith in American democracy. 

We should not bother to reach a consensus out of fear that hypothetical
persons complicit in President Kennedy's murder are a menace to democracy
today. This is the paranoid position. It might have been a highly
plausible feeling in the tumult of the `60s and `70s and a useful
corrective to the patriotic excesses of the `80's. But, with the end of
the Cold War, assassination paranoia, like assassination secrecy, is hard
to justify. With the Cold War over, we should be confident enough as a
country to face our once-secret history -- without prejudice, denial or
paranoia.

We need to take stock of what the nation's confusion and doubt about
Kennedy's murder means. When CBS News pollsters found that 49 percent of
people surveyed in 1993 said they believed the CIA was involved in the
Kennedy assassination, they are not weighing in with finely-tuned
assessment of the evidence about what happened in Dallas that day. Rather,
the people are using the Kennedy assassination to dramatize their
suspicions of the most secretive components of the national security
bureaucracy. These suspicions continue to resonate today; witness how
willing some people are to believe allegations that the CIA foisted the
crack cocaine epidemic on America in the 1980s. Dismissal of such fears is
a sure-fire recipe for deepening popular contempt for the already
much-abused democratic process.

The view of many national media commentators is that the American people
are slightly paranoid, irrationally suspicious of their government, misled
by demagogues. This view is particularly evident in the comments of
leading East Coast journalists over the years. From retired Washington
Post editor Ben Bradlee to CBS anchorman Dan Rather; from conservative
columnist George Will to liberal scribe Anthony Lewis; from the late
leftist muckraker I.F. Stone to the right-wing philosopher William F.
Buckley, there is widespread agreement: The government's official version
of Kennedy's murder has some flaws, but it is ultimately irrational to
reject its essential conclusion. A lone nut, no one else, was responsible.
Arguments to the contrary are but illustration of the paranoid style in
American politics.

By contrast, the West Coast media elites (i.e., Hollywood) are more in
step with public opinion. Stone's "JFK" is but one of a generation of
feature films that portray the hidden hand of undemocratic forces lurking
behind the facade of official history. In the 1993 film "In the Line of
Fire," Clint Eastwood played an aging Secret Service agent haunted by his
own failure to react quickly to the gunfire in Dealey Plaza. Decades
later, he finds himself taunted by another would-be presidential assassin,
a renegade CIA "wet boy," the movie's term for a trained killer. He may a
"lone nut" but Eastwood angrily realizes that the agency bears
institutional responsibility for him. This rumination on the legacy of
Nov. 22, 1963 in the guise of a multiplex action thriller was a huge hit.

When serious journalists have ventured into this tricky territory to
present and analyze new evidence made public since 1993, they have gotten
comparatively little attention. For example, "Oswald Talked," a
provocative book by journalists Ray and Mary LaFontaine of Dallas, was
published earlier this year and went unreviewed anywhere in the national
media. Maybe I am biased because I edited an article the LaFontaines wrote
for Outlook about their findings. But the judicious findings of Evan
Thomas, the Washington bureau chief of Newsweek and no conspiracy
theorist, also attracted little comment.

In his recent book about the CIA, "The Very Best Men," Thomas laid out the
sometimes curious actions of top CIA officials before and after Nov. 22,
1963 and added a variety of interesting details from previously
unavailable sources. He concluded that "there is no evidence that the CIA
itself somehow became sucked into an assassination conspiracy," a
formulation that tacitly accepts the possibility that persons not
institutionally affiliated with the CIA did plot. Thomas's finding can
certainly be debated, but it is reasonably stated and defensible -- the
sort of proposition that can help build consensus.

The paranoid stance of many (but not all) JFK conspiracy theorists is less
helpful. The entrepreneurs who traffic in JFK speculation (the chauffeur
did it, the three tramps did it, Jimmy Hoffa did it, the Freemasons did
it) have trivialized history. They have played fast and loose with the
evidence, and with the reputations of people who assuredly had nothing do
with Kennedy's murder.

It is understandable that some people have grown weary of the "Who Shot
JFK?" debate. The vast majority of American adults -- concerned but not
crazy, interested but not obsessed -- have no reason to be satisfied with
the competing mythologies of the Kennedy assassination story. The notion
that Oswald acted alone has high-level validation but little persuasive
power. The notion of dirty tricks around Kennedy's murder has persuasive
power but lacks coherence and has little official validation. One of the
most shocking moments in American life still has not found its place in
American history.

Is consensus possible? I believe it is, if public discussion can follow a
few basic principles as the full historical record continues to emerge.

First, it's time to let go of the simplistic "conspiracy vs. lone nut"
paradigm which both the tabloids and the mainstream media habitually use
to frame the JFK debate. This dialog of the deaf was the result of the
government's secrecy about the assassination and its investigatory
aftermath. Now that the shroud of secrecy is finally being lifted by the
review board, the "lone nut-conspiracy" polemics are passe.

Second, we need to forge a common understanding of Kennedy's death that
unites, not divides, the American people. Any such understanding must
begin with the common sense observation of the respected Cold War
historian Michael Beschloss: that "the most likely explanation for the
cause of Kennedy's death lies in his policies." We must obtain documents,
known to exist but still secret, about Kennedy's covert policies toward
Cuba and organized crime; about the CIA and FBI's knowledge of the persons
involved in these covert policies who were in Dallas in late 1963 and who
had contact the accused assassin; about the withholding of such
information from assassination investigators. In pursuing this search, we
should not scapegoat any persons, groups, political creeds or
institutions.

Third, we need to respect the complexity of history. There is no longer
any doubt that Lee suddenly became a figure of strong interest to
CIA-funded anti-Castro Cubans and a small group of senior CIA officials in
the four months before the assassination. Some of the Cubans involved have
talked about this. Win Scott, the head of the CIA station in Mexico,
discussed it in a chapter of an unpublished memoir suppressed by the
agency until 1993. A retired senior CIA counterintelligence officer whom I
interviewed in 1994 spoke of a "keen interest" in Oswald's Cuba-related
activities. Thus the gunfire in Dealey Plaza, no matter who perpetrated
it, represented an extraordinary failure in national security
intelligence-gathering and dissemination. We cannot understand this
failure -- and the cover-up of it -- until we see all the decisions that
went into it.

Fourth, only the American people can make certain that all documents are
released. Some will argue that all the information relevant to Kennedy's
murder was voluntarily released by executive branch agencies years ago and
that the remaining top secret documents are irrelevant to the judgment of
history. But we should not be willfully naive. The FBI, and to a lesser
extent the CIA, are still resisting the review board's declassification
orders. With a staff of only 25 and funding that is scheduled to run out
in less than a year, the review board is not likely to win its ongoing
disputes with Executive Branch agencies unless it has strong support from
the public and the media.

There is still much work to be done to catalog and analyze the new
evidence but the grounds for consensus are now emerging. The story of the
Kennedy assassination and the mystery that has surrounded it for the last
33 years is not a saga of an immense and monolithic conspiracy. Nor is it
simply the tale of a lone nut. Rather it is a chapter in the history of
the Cold War, a cautionary tale for the next generation of Americans about
the perils of secrecy in a democracy.

Jefferson Morley is an editor in the Outlook section of The Washington Post.
-- 
You are totally objective or you are dishonest. There are no other alternatives.

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