Professor Palermo on JFK Assassination Golden Jubilee

The 50th anniversary of the JFK assassination came and went pretty much like any other November 22. The city of Dallas did for the first time mark the day with an official ceremony on Dealey Plaza; that was something different. But for the most part the fourth estate handled the 50th anniversary the way it usually deals with the assassination, offering a combination of maudlin sentimentality (stories about the gore-caked pink dress Jackie wore) and studied obtuseness. The official story of the assassination promulgated by the Warren Commission in its lone gunman and single bullet theory was treated like an uncle that still lives at home in the grandparents' basement: not really accepted, not really discussed. When it was discussed, as PBS's NOVA did in "Cold Case JFK," it was usually done tendentiously; in this case using "state-of-the-art" forensics and computer simulation to argue that the Warren Commission's conclusions are sound.

As it did in 1963, November 22 fell on a Friday. Then came the weekend filled with college and professional football followed by the Thanksgiving week with people traveling and preparing for the holiday -- and quickly the 50th anniversary was gone, down the memory hole.

Last Wednesday I took the time to read Joe Palermo's three-part post on the 50th anniversary of the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Palermo is a history professor at Sacramento State who blogs for the Huffington Post. In parts one and two he probes the Warren Commission report, assessing its weaknesses and the public's skepticism of it; he focuses, as Seth Kantor did in his book The Ruby Cover-Up: Who Was Jack Ruby? (1978), on the Warren Commission's willful occlusion of Jack Ruby's ties to Dallas Police, organized crime and the Teamsters. In part three Palermo points to the national security conflict Kennedy was engaged in with his Joint Chiefs and how much Lyndon Johnson had to gain with Kennedy out of the picture.

Take the time to read Palermo's three-part post. It provides a valuable synopsis of the JFK assassination, an event that kicked off the cultural revolution of the 1960s in the United States; a cultural revolution that petered out with the conclusion of Watergate and Ford's pardon of Nixon and that set the stage for a neoliberal/neoconservative reaction that has lasted for more than three decades but is currently (Hallelujah!) fracturing.