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.

Errol Morris' Short Film on Josiah Thompson

The best case for the existence of a conspiracy to kill John F. Kennedy, one that deviates from the official version of a lone gunman that is memorialized  in the Warren Commission report, is still the photographic evidence taken that day from bystanders in Dealey Plaza in Dallas, particularly the Zapruder film.

Today on its web site the New York Times publishes a short film by Errol Morris, "November 22, 1963." Morris interviews Josiah Thompson, author of an early and extremely influential book on the Kennedy assassination, Six Seconds in Dallas (1967).

Thompson's argument is simple a one. Look at the pictures -- just look at them -- of the assassination. The conclusion one must come to is that the kill shot came from the front and to the right of the motorcade as it drove down Elm Street, the area that is known as the grassy knoll. This means that the conspiracy theorists are correct because the Warren Commission's official conclusion is that the only gunman was Lee Harvey Oswald who made an impossibly difficult kill shot with a junk Italian rifle from his perch on the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository.

I immersed myself in the Kennedy assassination for a couple of years. I did so from the perspective of Deconstruction and the idea that everything is textual, everything -- for us to know it -- is written. So what was the "Moby Dick" of all that Kennedy assassination literature trying to say?

The photographic documentation alone compels one to accept that there was a conspiracy to assassinate Kennedy. After spending time with the literature I arrived at the working hypothesis based on the simple but necessary question "cui bono?" that LBJ was involved in the conspiracy. LBJ handpicked the Warren Commission. The Warren Commission relied on J. Edgar Hoover's FBI for its research and documentation in formulating its lone gunman theory. LBJ and J. Edgar were good buddies whose careers both benefited from Kennedy's departure. Both were buddies of proto-Tea Partier Texas oil mogul Clint Murchison, Sr.

To flesh out the nature of the LBJ "cui bono?" I looked at the TFX contract investigation. All the major Congressional investigations of the Kennedy administration -- Billie Sol Estes, TFX, and Bobby Baker -- track back to LBJ. The answer to who benefited with Kennedy out of the way is obvious.

Check out Errol Morris' film on Josiah Thompson. It's dynamite.