.There's something about this time of year after the time change when suddenly it's dark at 5 and the city lights seem brighter than usual with the approach of the holidays that seems to stir the heart if not the soul. We eat more than we should, plans for the season dance in our heads like sugar plums, and the hustle & bustle of life ticks up a notch. At some point we secretly wish it were January and it was all over for another year but it's too early for that yet. For the present stick to your plan if you have one. Otherwise start making a list and check it twice just like Santa is doing. We'll all make it thru somehow like we always do.
Friday, November 15, 2013
Wednesday, November 13, 2013
November 11, 1963
On November 11, 1963 President John F. Kennedy visited Arlington National Cemetery to commemorate the occasion. He brought along his son John-John, who was soon to turn three years old.
The President has seemed gloomy in recent days probably due to the death two months ago of his 2-day old son Patrick and the unraveling situation in South Vietnam.
A strange mood on contentment seems to always com...e over the President when he visits Arlington. A veteran himself, the President has told others that he would like to be buried at Arlington.
John-John is playful and delights everyone with his antics, running around all over the place.
As he leaves the cemetery, JFK tells Congressman Hale Boggs, “This is one of the really beautiful places on earth. I could stay here forever.”
The President’s car drives away as John, Jr. waves to the crowd.
The President has seemed gloomy in recent days probably due to the death two months ago of his 2-day old son Patrick and the unraveling situation in South Vietnam.
A strange mood on contentment seems to always com...e over the President when he visits Arlington. A veteran himself, the President has told others that he would like to be buried at Arlington.
John-John is playful and delights everyone with his antics, running around all over the place.
As he leaves the cemetery, JFK tells Congressman Hale Boggs, “This is one of the really beautiful places on earth. I could stay here forever.”
The President’s car drives away as John, Jr. waves to the crowd.
Bill Minutaglio & Steven L. Davis - Dallas 1963
Reading this book kept me in chills and a cold sweat. When President Kennedy visited Dallas in November of 1963 he went into the captial of Right Wing Crazy in the early 60's. Dallas was the national headquarters for ALL of the right wing anti-communism nuttiness and the racism that was sweeping the country at the time with Cuba such a big focus with Castro seizing power in 1959 and the burgeoning civil rights movement.
I did not realize before reading this book just how crazy Dallas was. The place was a loony bin according to this book. Adali Stevenson had been physically roughed up in a prior visit. Even LBJ and Lady Bird were treated horribly in a previous visit. JFK was warned repeatedly not to go to Dallas, but there was no way he was not going. It was critical to keep Texas in the Democratic column in 1964 and it was necessary to heal a breech between the liberal and conservative wings of the party. Dallas itself hated President Kennedy. Dallas voted for Nixon in 1960 though the Democrats carried the state. Paradoxically, Nixon flew out of Dallas the morning JFK arrived.
The books is hypnotic as it moves toward the inevitable consclusion that we all know so well, those who lived through that time. Read about the power structure in Dallas. Read about the hate-filled local newspaper. Read about about traitorous Gen. Edwin Walker, truly a crazy man, who whipped up right wing frenzy at will. Dallas showed an outpouring of adoration to the Kenndys when they arrived, the undertone of right wing craziness was there. A man named Lee Harvey Oswald was a product of that hatred.
The reader cannot help but compare Dallas 1963 to the present time and the same type of hatred toward President Obama. The right wing hatred and paranoia we see today is nothing new.
I did not realize before reading this book just how crazy Dallas was. The place was a loony bin according to this book. Adali Stevenson had been physically roughed up in a prior visit. Even LBJ and Lady Bird were treated horribly in a previous visit. JFK was warned repeatedly not to go to Dallas, but there was no way he was not going. It was critical to keep Texas in the Democratic column in 1964 and it was necessary to heal a breech between the liberal and conservative wings of the party. Dallas itself hated President Kennedy. Dallas voted for Nixon in 1960 though the Democrats carried the state. Paradoxically, Nixon flew out of Dallas the morning JFK arrived.
The books is hypnotic as it moves toward the inevitable consclusion that we all know so well, those who lived through that time. Read about the power structure in Dallas. Read about the hate-filled local newspaper. Read about about traitorous Gen. Edwin Walker, truly a crazy man, who whipped up right wing frenzy at will. Dallas showed an outpouring of adoration to the Kenndys when they arrived, the undertone of right wing craziness was there. A man named Lee Harvey Oswald was a product of that hatred.
The reader cannot help but compare Dallas 1963 to the present time and the same type of hatred toward President Obama. The right wing hatred and paranoia we see today is nothing new.
Monday, November 11, 2013
Reading Makes You More Empathetic? So What!
Should Literature Be Useful?
Posted by Lee Siegel
Two recent studies have concluded that serious literary fiction makes people more empathetic, and humanists everywhere are clinking glasses in celebration. But I wonder whether this is a victory for humanism’s impalpable enrichments and enchantments, or for the quantifying power of social science.
The two studies, one by a pair of social psychologists at the New School, and another conducted by researchers in the Netherlands, divided participants into several groups. The methodology was roughly the same in both studies. In the New School experiment, one group read selected examples of literary fiction (passages by Louise Erdrich, Don DeLillo, and others); another read commercial fiction, and another was given serious non-fiction or nothing at all. The subjects were asked either to describe their emotional states, or instructed, among other tests, to look at photographs of people’s eyes and try to derive from these pictures what the people were feeling when the photographs were taken.
The results were heartening to every person who has ever found herself, throughout her freshman year of college, passionately quoting to anyone within earshot Kafka’s remark that great literature is “an axe to break the frozen sea inside us.” The subjects who had read literary fiction either reported heightened emotional intelligence or demonstrated, in the various tests administered to them, that their empathy levels had soared beyond their popular- and non-fiction-reading counterparts.
The studies’ conclusions are also particularly gratifying in light of the new Common Core Standards, hastily being adopted by school districts throughout the country, which emphasize non-fiction, even stressing the reading of train and bus schedules over imaginative literature. Here at last, it seemed, was a proper debunking of that skewed approach to teaching the art of reading.
There is another way to look at the studies’ conclusions, however. Instead of proclaiming the superiority of fiction to the practical skills allegedly conferred by reading non-fiction, the studies implied that practical effects are an indispensable standard by which to judge the virtues of fiction. Reading fiction is good, according to the studies, because it makes you a more effective social agent. Which is pretty much what being able to read a train schedule does for you, too.
Americans have always felt uncomfortable about any cultural activity that does not lead to concrete results. “He that wastes idly a groat’s worth of his time per day, one day with another, wastes the privilege of using one hundred pounds each day”: though Benjamin Franklin was fairly indifferent to money himself, the sentiment he expressed in that bit of advice became a hallmark of the national character. Idleness is still anathema in American life. (Kim Kardashian, who has restlessly turned her idle time into a profitable industry, is a Puritan at heart.) And the active daydream of writing and reading fiction is idleness in its purest state, neither promising nor leading to any practical or concrete result. From the didactic McGuffey Readers that lasted from the middle of the nineteenth century to the middle of the twentieth century to William Bennett’s “Book of Virtues” in our own time (a liberal response, “A Call to Character” by Colin Greer and Herbert Kohl, was published a few years later), the American impulse to make room for literature by harnessing it to a socially useful purpose has taken many forms. You might even say that the two archetypal fictional American characters, Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer, invented by the country’s most scathing satirist, are essentially arguments for the superiority of idleness over any morally, socially or financially useful American activity.
Perhaps it is appropriate, in our moment of ardent quantifying—page views, neurobiological aperçus, the mining of personal data, the mysteries of monetization and algorithms—that fiction, too, should find its justification by providing a measurably useful social quality such as empathy. Yet while the McGuffey Readers and their descendants used literature to try to inculcate young people with religious and civic morality, the claim that literary fiction strengthens empathy is a whole different kettle of fish.
Though empathy has become something like the celebrity trait of emotional intelligence, it doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with the sensitivity and gentleness popularly attributed to it. Some of the most empathetic people you will ever meet are businesspeople and lawyers. They can grasp another person’s feelings in an instant, act on them, and clinch a deal or win a trial. The result may well leave the person on the other side feeling anguished or defeated. Conversely, we have all known bookish, introverted people who are not good at puzzling out other people, or, if they are, lack the ability to act on what they have grasped about the other person.
To enter a wholly different realm, empathy characterizes certain sadists. Discerning the most refined degrees of discomfort and pain in another person is the fulcrum of the sadist’s pleasure. The empathetic gift can lead to generosity, charity, and self-sacrifice. It can also enable someone to manipulate another person with great subtlety and finesse.
Literature may well have taught me about the complex nature of empathy. There is, for example, no more empathetic character in the novel or on the stage than Iago, who is able to detect the slightest fluctuation in Othello’s emotional state. Othello, on the other hand, is a noble and magnanimous creature—if vain and bombastic as well—who is absolutely devoid of the gift of being able to apprehend another’s emotional states. If he were half as empathetic as Iago, he would be able to recognize the jealousy that is consuming his treacherous lieutenant. The entire play is an object lesson in the emotional equipment required to vanquish other people, or to protect yourself from other people’s machinations. But no one—and no study—can say for sure whether the play produces more sympathetic people, or more Iagos.
Indeed, what neither of the two studies did was to measure whether the empathetic responses led to sympathetic feeling. Empathetic identification with the ordeals suffered by Apuleius’s golden ass, Defoe’s Moll Flanders, Shakespeare’s King Lear—a play Dr. Johnson wanted to be performed with a revised, happy ending because he said its spectacle of suffering was too much to endure—Dostoevsky’s Raskolnikov, Alyosha, or Prince Myshkin, Emma Bovary, not to mention the protagonists of misanthropic modernists like Céline, Gide, Kafka, Mann, et al.—empathetic sharing of these characters’ emotions could well turn a person inward, away from humanity altogether. Yet even if empathy were always the benign, beneficent, socially productive trait it is celebrated as, the argument that producing empathy is literature’s cardinal virtue is a narrowing of literary art, not an exciting new expansion of it.
Fiction’s lack of practical usefulness is what gives it its special freedom. When Auden wrote that “poetry makes nothing happen,” he wasn’t complaining; he was exulting. Fiction might make people more empathetic—though I’m willing to bet that the people who respond most intensely to fiction possess a higher degree of empathy to begin with. But what it does best is to do nothing particular or specialized or easily formulable at all.
Fiction’s multifarious nature is why so many people have attributed so many effects to imaginative literature, some of them contradictory: catharsis (Aristotle); dangerous corruption of the spirit (Plato); feverish loosening of morals (Rousseau); redemptive escape from personality (Eliot); empowering creation beyond the boundaries of morality (Joyce). Fiction ruined Don Quixote, young Werther, and Emma Bovary, but it saved Cervantes, Flaubert, and Goethe.
It’s safe to say that, like life itself, fiction’s properties are countless and unquantifiable. If art is made ex nihilo—out of nothing—then reading is done in nihilo, or into nothing. Fiction unfolds through your imagination in interconnected layers of meaning that lift the heavy weight of unyielding facts from your shoulders. It speaks its own private language of endless nuance and inflection. A tale is a reassuringly mortalized, if you will, piece of the oceanic infinity out of which we came, and back into which we will go. That is freedom, and that is joy—and then it is back to the quotidian challenge, to the daily grind, and to the necessity of attaching a specific meaning to what people are thinking and feeling, and to the urgency of trying, for the sake of love or money, to profit from it.
Lee Siegel is the author of two collections of criticism, “Falling Upwards: Essays in Defense of the Imagination,” and “Not Remotely Controlled: Notes on Television.”
Inconsistencies in the Warren Report
Special SeriesThe Kennedy Assassination, 50 Years LaterNews >
History >
The Kennedy Assassination, 50 Years LaterInconsistencies Haunt Official Record Of Kennedy's Death
by Marcus D. Rosenbaum
November 10, 2013 5:10 AM Listen to the StoryWeekend Edition Sunday
7 min 30 sec PlaylistDownloadTranscript
Enlarge image
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Jacqueline Kennedy (center), with Edward and Robert Kennedy on either side, watches the coffin of President John F. Kennedy pass on Nov. 25, 1963.
Keystone/Getty Images
Jacqueline Kennedy (center), with Edward and Robert Kennedy on either side, watches the coffin of President John F. Kennedy pass on Nov. 25, 1963.
Keystone/Getty Images The first thing T. Jeremy Gunn says when you ask him about President John F. Kennedy's assassination is, "I'm not a conspiracy theorist. I don't have a theory about what happened."
But he knows a lot about it from his work for the Assassination Records Review Board, established by Congress in 1992, about a year after the Oliver Stone film J.F.K. reignited questions about the assassination. The film rejected the official 1964 conclusion of the Warren Commission, which placed guilt on Lee Harvey Oswald alone. Instead, Stone proposed a vast government conspiracy linked to the C.I.A.
The Warren Commission in 1964 had hoped that its well-written, 450-plus-page report would put questions about the assassination to rest. Of course, it didn't. Immediately after the report, nearly 90 percent of the public believed it. But by 1966, only 36 percent of Americans believed Oswald acted alone. Today, just 24 percent think so.
In Depth
For more coverage of the 50th anniversary of the Kennedy assassination, visit:
"22 Days In November" from member station KERA in Dallas
"November 1963: Remembering JFK" from member station WBUR in Boston
To set the record straight, Congress set up the Review Board to release still-classified government material related to the assassination. Gunn, as its director of research and general counsel, and later as its executive director, read everything he could find in the government's files and questioned dozens of doctors and former officials, many of them under oath.
In the end, the Review Board released thousands — if not tens of thousands — of documents, "Almost everything that was substantively related to the assassination," Gunn says.
Yet for Gunn and much of the public, the record was still not set straight. "There were many things that were disturbing," Gunn says.
A Blood-Stained Report Destroyed
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The Warren Commission delivers its report on Kennedy's assassination to President Lyndon B. Johnson in the Cabinet Room of the White House on Sept. 24, 1964. From left: lawyer John McCloy, General Counsel J. Lee Rankin, Sen. Richard Russell, Rep. Gerald Ford, Chief Justice Earl Warren, President Johnson, former CIA Director Allen Dulles, Sen. John Sherman Cooper, and Rep. Hale Boggs.
Francis Miller/Time Life Pictures/Getty Images
The Warren Commission delivers its report on Kennedy's assassination to President Lyndon B. Johnson in the Cabinet Room of the White House on Sept. 24, 1964. From left: lawyer John McCloy, General Counsel J. Lee Rankin, Sen. Richard Russell, Rep. Gerald Ford, Chief Justice Earl Warren, President Johnson, former CIA Director Allen Dulles, Sen. John Sherman Cooper, and Rep. Hale Boggs.
Francis Miller/Time Life Pictures/Getty Images When Gunn pored over the material, what stuck out most for him was the medical evidence, like what he learned in his 1996 deposition of James Joseph Humes. Humes, who died three years later, was one of the doctors who performed the autopsy on Kennedy's body.
For one thing, Humes told Gunn that the autopsy was not performed strictly by the book; some procedures were left out, such as removing and weighing all the organs. Then, Humes made an eye-opening revelation.
"Dr. Humes admitted that the supposedly original handwritten version of the autopsy that is in the National Archives is in fact not the original version," Gunn says. He says Humes had never said that publicly before, even to the Warren Commission.
In the deposition, Humes explained that when he took the material home after the autopsy was completed, he began thinking about how he had once seen the bloodstained chair Abraham Lincoln had been sitting in when he was shot.
"I thought this was the most macabre thing I ever saw in my life," Humes said. "It just made a terrible impression on me. And when I noticed that these bloodstains were on this document that I had prepared, I said nobody's ever going to get these documents. So I copied them ... and burned the original notes in the fireplace."
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i
Exhibit 1, from Kennedy's autopsy report, is the bloodstained document Dr. James Joseph Humes did not destroy.
Apic/Getty Images
Exhibit 1, from Kennedy's autopsy report, is the bloodstained document Dr. James Joseph Humes did not destroy.
Apic/Getty Images When Gunn asked him whether there was anything in the original document that was not in the copy, Humes replied, "I don't think so."
Then Gunn showed Humes another document from the autopsy, a two-page document Gunn had marked as Exhibit No. 1. It, too, had blood stains, but Humes had not destroyed it. Why? Humes said it was because the document had been prepared by another doctor at the autopsy.
"I didn't — wouldn't — have the habit of destroying something someone else prepared," Humes told Gunn during questioning.
Imperfect Pictures
After that, Gunn turned to the official autopsy photographs, the ones that are kept in the National Archives. Humes had never handled them before; the Warren Commission had never shown them to him. In fact, when Humes testified before the Warren Commission, he complained that the artist who drew the schematics he was using for his testimony was not allowed to see the photos.
When Humes did get a close look at the pictures — in his Review Board deposition — he said he found it hard to tell what was what in the pictures.
In fact, Gunn says, it's hard for anyone to tell what's what in the pictures, especially such important details as how many bullet wounds there are, and whether they are entry wounds or exit wounds.
So Gunn turned to a retired Navy warrant officer, Sandra Spencer, who, according to government records, had processed the autopsy film. She had not been questioned by the Warren Commission.
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The president is struck by a bullet as he travels through Dallas in a motorcade Nov. 22, 1963. Next to him in the car is his wife, Jacqueline, and in the front seat is Texas Gov. John Connally.
Three Lions/HultonArchive/Getty Images
The president is struck by a bullet as he travels through Dallas in a motorcade Nov. 22, 1963. Next to him in the car is his wife, Jacqueline, and in the front seat is Texas Gov. John Connally.
Three Lions/HultonArchive/Getty Images When Gunn showed her the official photos from the National Archives during her deposition in 1997, she said they were not the pictures she remembered processing.
Spencer, who died about a year ago, was in her 20s when she worked in Washington, D.C., at the Navy's central photo lab. At that time, the lab processed all official White House photographs.
For questioning, she brought with her some pictures she had printed just a few days before Kennedy was murdered. She explained that the lab bought huge quantities of photographic paper, so the markings on the back of the prints she brought would certainly match the autopsy photos she processed. But they didn't, suggesting they were printed at a different time or a different place.
What's more, the official pictures weren't anything like the ones she remembered.
"The prints that we printed did not have the massive head damages that is visible here," she told Gunn. "... The face, the eyes were closed and the face, the mouth was closed, and it was more of a rest position than these show."
The National Archives' photos seemed to be taken in a bright, medical setting. The body was bloody. Spencer said the pictures she had processed seemed to be taken in a darkened room with a flash. She called them "pristine." "There was no blood or opening cavities ... or anything of that nature. It was quite reverent in how they handled it," she said.
Of course, Gunn interviewed Spencer 30 years after the event, and that's a long time to remember every detail. But still, why didn't she recognize any of the official autopsy photos? Why are they on different paper from what she was using at the time? And whatever happened to the pictures she did remember processing?
Tracking Oswald
Gunn, who now teaches history at Al Akhawayn University in Morocco, can recite a litany of other unresolved questions surrounding the Kennedy assassination — ones the Warren Commission failed to answer.
For example, in New Orleans in 1963, Oswald came in contact with the FBI. When he was arrested after a scuffle at a demonstration, he asked to meet with the FBI.
"Why would Oswald ask to see someone from the FBI?" Gunn asks. "But an FBI agent went and interviewed Oswald, came back and wrote a memo on it, put it in the file."
Lee Harvey Oswald is led down a corridor of the Dallas police station for questioning in connection with Kennedy's assassination on Nov. 23, 1963.
AP A few days later, Gunn says, someone at headquarters in Washington saw that Oswald was engaged in pro-Fidel Castro activities and instructed the field office to interview him. But the FBI field office didn't reply that it had already interviewed him. Instead, it said that it would see what it could do.
All the FBI files were in order, Gunn says. Nothing seemed to be missing, so why wouldn't they mention the previous interview? "It doesn't make sense," Gunn says.
Oswald's trip to Mexico City a few weeks before the assassination also raises unanswered questions.
"Mexico City in the 1960s was probably the spy capital of the Western Hemisphere," Gunn says. Naturally, the CIA had operations watching all the embassies in Mexico, tapping their phones and photographing comings and goings.
While he was there, Oswald attempted to obtain visas from the Cuban consulate and the Soviet embassy. In one taped conversation, Oswald — or someone saying he was Oswald — called the Soviet embassy.
Then-FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover listened to the tape and told President Lyndon Johnson that it wasn't Oswald's voice.
Whose voice was it? No one knows. The tape has disappeared.
Nor are there any photos of the Soviet embassy the day Oswald supposedly went there. The CIA told the Warren Commission that its camera wasn't working that day.
Why did Oswald ask to meet with the FBI in New Orleans? Why did he go to Mexico City? What happened to the evidence of his visit? More mysteries.
'It's Too Late'
So what's the truth about the assassination?
"For me, it's quite simple," Gunn says. "I don't know what happened."
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President John F. Kennedy aboard the "Honey Fitz" off Hyannis Port, Mass., on Aug. 31, 1963.
Cecil Stoughton/UPI/Landov
President John F. Kennedy aboard the "Honey Fitz" off Hyannis Port, Mass., on Aug. 31, 1963.
Cecil Stoughton/UPI/Landov "There is substantial evidence that points toward Oswald and incriminates Oswald," he says, "and the only person we can name where there is evidence is Oswald. But there's also rather important exculpatory evidence for Oswald, suggesting he didn't do it, and that he was framed."
Some believe the Warren Commission did not resolve the mysteries because it was part of a giant cover-up, perhaps to hide a conspiracy that reached deep inside government itself.
Others point to a more benign explanation. The new president, Johnson, was pushing the Warren Commission to come to a conclusion quickly. He wanted to move the country forward, not dwell on its traumatic past.
Besides, Gunn says, the panel genuinely believed that Oswald had killed Kennedy. "So they wanted to write the document in a way that would reassure the American public that it was a single gunman acting alone, somebody who's a little bit unstable, and that that's the explanation for what happened." Since the facts aren't clear, though, that document can look like a whitewash.
For the Warren Commission, transparency had its own difficulties. "There are serious problems with the forensics evidence, with the ballistics evidence, with the autopsy evidence," Gunn says. "And, in my opinion, if they had said that openly, it would have not put the issue to rest."
Dr. T. Jeremy Gunn served as executive director of the Assassination Records Review Board.
Courtesy of T. Jeremy Gunn Faced with that, the Warren Commission went with what it believed.
Gunn says that wasn't enough. It's not that he thinks all the loose ends needed to be tied up. "It wouldn't be unusual if Oswald had done the crime — or not done the crime — to have evidence that's inconsistent," he says.
It's the big mysteries that cause him the most trouble.
"If the president had been killed as part of a conspiracy, that needed to be known," he says.
"The institution that had the opportunity to best get to the bottom of this, as much as it was possible, was the Warren Commission, and they didn't do it," he says. "Now it's too late to do what should have been done originally."
Marcus D. Rosenbaum is a former senior editor and producer at NPR. He now works as a freelance journalist and teacher.
History >
The Kennedy Assassination, 50 Years LaterInconsistencies Haunt Official Record Of Kennedy's Death
by Marcus D. Rosenbaum
November 10, 2013 5:10 AM Listen to the StoryWeekend Edition Sunday
7 min 30 sec PlaylistDownloadTranscript
Enlarge image
i
Jacqueline Kennedy (center), with Edward and Robert Kennedy on either side, watches the coffin of President John F. Kennedy pass on Nov. 25, 1963.
Keystone/Getty Images
Jacqueline Kennedy (center), with Edward and Robert Kennedy on either side, watches the coffin of President John F. Kennedy pass on Nov. 25, 1963.
Keystone/Getty Images The first thing T. Jeremy Gunn says when you ask him about President John F. Kennedy's assassination is, "I'm not a conspiracy theorist. I don't have a theory about what happened."
But he knows a lot about it from his work for the Assassination Records Review Board, established by Congress in 1992, about a year after the Oliver Stone film J.F.K. reignited questions about the assassination. The film rejected the official 1964 conclusion of the Warren Commission, which placed guilt on Lee Harvey Oswald alone. Instead, Stone proposed a vast government conspiracy linked to the C.I.A.
The Warren Commission in 1964 had hoped that its well-written, 450-plus-page report would put questions about the assassination to rest. Of course, it didn't. Immediately after the report, nearly 90 percent of the public believed it. But by 1966, only 36 percent of Americans believed Oswald acted alone. Today, just 24 percent think so.
In Depth
For more coverage of the 50th anniversary of the Kennedy assassination, visit:
"22 Days In November" from member station KERA in Dallas
"November 1963: Remembering JFK" from member station WBUR in Boston
To set the record straight, Congress set up the Review Board to release still-classified government material related to the assassination. Gunn, as its director of research and general counsel, and later as its executive director, read everything he could find in the government's files and questioned dozens of doctors and former officials, many of them under oath.
In the end, the Review Board released thousands — if not tens of thousands — of documents, "Almost everything that was substantively related to the assassination," Gunn says.
Yet for Gunn and much of the public, the record was still not set straight. "There were many things that were disturbing," Gunn says.
A Blood-Stained Report Destroyed
Enlarge image
i
The Warren Commission delivers its report on Kennedy's assassination to President Lyndon B. Johnson in the Cabinet Room of the White House on Sept. 24, 1964. From left: lawyer John McCloy, General Counsel J. Lee Rankin, Sen. Richard Russell, Rep. Gerald Ford, Chief Justice Earl Warren, President Johnson, former CIA Director Allen Dulles, Sen. John Sherman Cooper, and Rep. Hale Boggs.
Francis Miller/Time Life Pictures/Getty Images
The Warren Commission delivers its report on Kennedy's assassination to President Lyndon B. Johnson in the Cabinet Room of the White House on Sept. 24, 1964. From left: lawyer John McCloy, General Counsel J. Lee Rankin, Sen. Richard Russell, Rep. Gerald Ford, Chief Justice Earl Warren, President Johnson, former CIA Director Allen Dulles, Sen. John Sherman Cooper, and Rep. Hale Boggs.
Francis Miller/Time Life Pictures/Getty Images When Gunn pored over the material, what stuck out most for him was the medical evidence, like what he learned in his 1996 deposition of James Joseph Humes. Humes, who died three years later, was one of the doctors who performed the autopsy on Kennedy's body.
For one thing, Humes told Gunn that the autopsy was not performed strictly by the book; some procedures were left out, such as removing and weighing all the organs. Then, Humes made an eye-opening revelation.
"Dr. Humes admitted that the supposedly original handwritten version of the autopsy that is in the National Archives is in fact not the original version," Gunn says. He says Humes had never said that publicly before, even to the Warren Commission.
In the deposition, Humes explained that when he took the material home after the autopsy was completed, he began thinking about how he had once seen the bloodstained chair Abraham Lincoln had been sitting in when he was shot.
"I thought this was the most macabre thing I ever saw in my life," Humes said. "It just made a terrible impression on me. And when I noticed that these bloodstains were on this document that I had prepared, I said nobody's ever going to get these documents. So I copied them ... and burned the original notes in the fireplace."
Enlarge image
i
Exhibit 1, from Kennedy's autopsy report, is the bloodstained document Dr. James Joseph Humes did not destroy.
Apic/Getty Images
Exhibit 1, from Kennedy's autopsy report, is the bloodstained document Dr. James Joseph Humes did not destroy.
Apic/Getty Images When Gunn asked him whether there was anything in the original document that was not in the copy, Humes replied, "I don't think so."
Then Gunn showed Humes another document from the autopsy, a two-page document Gunn had marked as Exhibit No. 1. It, too, had blood stains, but Humes had not destroyed it. Why? Humes said it was because the document had been prepared by another doctor at the autopsy.
"I didn't — wouldn't — have the habit of destroying something someone else prepared," Humes told Gunn during questioning.
Imperfect Pictures
After that, Gunn turned to the official autopsy photographs, the ones that are kept in the National Archives. Humes had never handled them before; the Warren Commission had never shown them to him. In fact, when Humes testified before the Warren Commission, he complained that the artist who drew the schematics he was using for his testimony was not allowed to see the photos.
When Humes did get a close look at the pictures — in his Review Board deposition — he said he found it hard to tell what was what in the pictures.
In fact, Gunn says, it's hard for anyone to tell what's what in the pictures, especially such important details as how many bullet wounds there are, and whether they are entry wounds or exit wounds.
So Gunn turned to a retired Navy warrant officer, Sandra Spencer, who, according to government records, had processed the autopsy film. She had not been questioned by the Warren Commission.
Enlarge image
i
The president is struck by a bullet as he travels through Dallas in a motorcade Nov. 22, 1963. Next to him in the car is his wife, Jacqueline, and in the front seat is Texas Gov. John Connally.
Three Lions/HultonArchive/Getty Images
The president is struck by a bullet as he travels through Dallas in a motorcade Nov. 22, 1963. Next to him in the car is his wife, Jacqueline, and in the front seat is Texas Gov. John Connally.
Three Lions/HultonArchive/Getty Images When Gunn showed her the official photos from the National Archives during her deposition in 1997, she said they were not the pictures she remembered processing.
Spencer, who died about a year ago, was in her 20s when she worked in Washington, D.C., at the Navy's central photo lab. At that time, the lab processed all official White House photographs.
For questioning, she brought with her some pictures she had printed just a few days before Kennedy was murdered. She explained that the lab bought huge quantities of photographic paper, so the markings on the back of the prints she brought would certainly match the autopsy photos she processed. But they didn't, suggesting they were printed at a different time or a different place.
What's more, the official pictures weren't anything like the ones she remembered.
"The prints that we printed did not have the massive head damages that is visible here," she told Gunn. "... The face, the eyes were closed and the face, the mouth was closed, and it was more of a rest position than these show."
The National Archives' photos seemed to be taken in a bright, medical setting. The body was bloody. Spencer said the pictures she had processed seemed to be taken in a darkened room with a flash. She called them "pristine." "There was no blood or opening cavities ... or anything of that nature. It was quite reverent in how they handled it," she said.
Of course, Gunn interviewed Spencer 30 years after the event, and that's a long time to remember every detail. But still, why didn't she recognize any of the official autopsy photos? Why are they on different paper from what she was using at the time? And whatever happened to the pictures she did remember processing?
Tracking Oswald
Gunn, who now teaches history at Al Akhawayn University in Morocco, can recite a litany of other unresolved questions surrounding the Kennedy assassination — ones the Warren Commission failed to answer.
For example, in New Orleans in 1963, Oswald came in contact with the FBI. When he was arrested after a scuffle at a demonstration, he asked to meet with the FBI.
"Why would Oswald ask to see someone from the FBI?" Gunn asks. "But an FBI agent went and interviewed Oswald, came back and wrote a memo on it, put it in the file."
Lee Harvey Oswald is led down a corridor of the Dallas police station for questioning in connection with Kennedy's assassination on Nov. 23, 1963.
AP A few days later, Gunn says, someone at headquarters in Washington saw that Oswald was engaged in pro-Fidel Castro activities and instructed the field office to interview him. But the FBI field office didn't reply that it had already interviewed him. Instead, it said that it would see what it could do.
All the FBI files were in order, Gunn says. Nothing seemed to be missing, so why wouldn't they mention the previous interview? "It doesn't make sense," Gunn says.
Oswald's trip to Mexico City a few weeks before the assassination also raises unanswered questions.
"Mexico City in the 1960s was probably the spy capital of the Western Hemisphere," Gunn says. Naturally, the CIA had operations watching all the embassies in Mexico, tapping their phones and photographing comings and goings.
While he was there, Oswald attempted to obtain visas from the Cuban consulate and the Soviet embassy. In one taped conversation, Oswald — or someone saying he was Oswald — called the Soviet embassy.
Then-FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover listened to the tape and told President Lyndon Johnson that it wasn't Oswald's voice.
Whose voice was it? No one knows. The tape has disappeared.
Nor are there any photos of the Soviet embassy the day Oswald supposedly went there. The CIA told the Warren Commission that its camera wasn't working that day.
Why did Oswald ask to meet with the FBI in New Orleans? Why did he go to Mexico City? What happened to the evidence of his visit? More mysteries.
'It's Too Late'
So what's the truth about the assassination?
"For me, it's quite simple," Gunn says. "I don't know what happened."
Enlarge image
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President John F. Kennedy aboard the "Honey Fitz" off Hyannis Port, Mass., on Aug. 31, 1963.
Cecil Stoughton/UPI/Landov
President John F. Kennedy aboard the "Honey Fitz" off Hyannis Port, Mass., on Aug. 31, 1963.
Cecil Stoughton/UPI/Landov "There is substantial evidence that points toward Oswald and incriminates Oswald," he says, "and the only person we can name where there is evidence is Oswald. But there's also rather important exculpatory evidence for Oswald, suggesting he didn't do it, and that he was framed."
Some believe the Warren Commission did not resolve the mysteries because it was part of a giant cover-up, perhaps to hide a conspiracy that reached deep inside government itself.
Others point to a more benign explanation. The new president, Johnson, was pushing the Warren Commission to come to a conclusion quickly. He wanted to move the country forward, not dwell on its traumatic past.
Besides, Gunn says, the panel genuinely believed that Oswald had killed Kennedy. "So they wanted to write the document in a way that would reassure the American public that it was a single gunman acting alone, somebody who's a little bit unstable, and that that's the explanation for what happened." Since the facts aren't clear, though, that document can look like a whitewash.
For the Warren Commission, transparency had its own difficulties. "There are serious problems with the forensics evidence, with the ballistics evidence, with the autopsy evidence," Gunn says. "And, in my opinion, if they had said that openly, it would have not put the issue to rest."
Dr. T. Jeremy Gunn served as executive director of the Assassination Records Review Board.
Courtesy of T. Jeremy Gunn Faced with that, the Warren Commission went with what it believed.
Gunn says that wasn't enough. It's not that he thinks all the loose ends needed to be tied up. "It wouldn't be unusual if Oswald had done the crime — or not done the crime — to have evidence that's inconsistent," he says.
It's the big mysteries that cause him the most trouble.
"If the president had been killed as part of a conspiracy, that needed to be known," he says.
"The institution that had the opportunity to best get to the bottom of this, as much as it was possible, was the Warren Commission, and they didn't do it," he says. "Now it's too late to do what should have been done originally."
Marcus D. Rosenbaum is a former senior editor and producer at NPR. He now works as a freelance journalist and teacher.
A Traditional Republican Take on JFK
Samuelson is the house economic Republican. His evaluation of JFK reflects this. The tax cut set off the inflation of the late 60's and set the pattern for budget deficits? Huh? JFK's perceived weakness by Krushchev may have contributed to the Cuban Missile Crisis, but JFK's handling of the crisis prevented World War III, which Samuelson ignores Unlike LBJ and later Bush, JFK stood up to the military, which Samuelson ignores. A more balanced understanding of JFK is behind this Republican's grasp.
Opinion Writer The JFK fascination
It’s not about him. It’s about us.
As the 50th anniversary of John F. Kennedy’s assassination approaches, we’ve been deluged with essays, books, Web sites, videos and a new movie marking the event. The fascination with the Kennedys endures, though it’s probably on its last lap. After all, about three-quarters of Americans either weren’t born when Kennedy was shot or were too young (under 5) to grasp what happened. It’s a distant and disconnected event to them.
by Robert J. Samuelson
There is a coyness to some retrospectives. In a long essay in a recent New York Times Book Review, Executive Editor Jill Abramson wonders “Was Kennedy a great president?” — a question she never answers — and opines that he “remains all but impossible to pin down,” whatever that means. The question is actually easy to answer. He was not a great president. He was somewhere between middling and mediocre.
At his death, he had no major legislative accomplishments. His two major proposals — a tax cut to spur the economy and civil rights legislation — languished in Congress. He expanded the Vietnam War, and though some supporters argue he would have reversed that in a second term, presidents are judged on what they did, not what they might have done. His economic policies, symbolized by the proposed tax cut and called the “new economics” (an American Keynesianism), had damaging long-term consequences. They unleashed inflation in the late 1960s and 1970s; and they effectively abolished the commitment to balanced budgets — a loss that still haunts us.
Beyond Vietnam, his foreign-policy track record was lackluster. The Bay of Pigs was a disaster. At a 1961 summit in Vienna with Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev, Kennedy was — by his own admission — cowed. Later, the Berlin Wall went up. He did defuse the Cuban missile crisis in 1962, but the crisis may have resulted partly from Khrushchev’s sense that Kennedy could be intimidated.
It is cruel but true that the most consequential moment of Kennedy’s presidency was his assassination: It so filled the country with grief and guilt that, pushed by a masterful legislator, Lyndon Johnson, Congress passed the tax cut and civil rights legislation. Moreover, the shift in public opinion enabled Johnson, after his 1964 landslide election, to advance his Great Society agenda: Medicare, Medicaid, the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and more.
None of this sustains the Kennedy fascination. It’s too wonky and nuanced. The fixation has other sources. For starters, it’s history as soap opera. Vigorous president gunned down in his prime. Beautiful wife. Young children. But this appeal is superficial. Its real power is that for many Americans — baby boomers, members of the World War II generation — Kennedy’s life and death represent a larger personal and historic metaphor.
I was a college freshman when Kennedy was shot. The Camelot illusion was that he and we were in control of events. His approval rating averaged 70 percent, the highest of modern presidents. Partly, this reflected a less critical public climate. Eisenhower, with eight years in office and more opportunities to disappoint and anger, had ratings nearly as high (65 percent). But it was also Kennedy’s personality. He inspired confidence and oozed charm. He certainly mesmerized me.
As it happened, my wife and I visited the Kennedy Library last summer. Going through the exhibits, I sensed being transported back to the early 1960s and, despite knowing what’s occurred in the five decades since, feeling invigorated and hopeful. The Kennedys were what we all wanted to be. No, we wouldn’t end up in the White House. But just as they had achieved their ambition, we could achieve ours. And we would make the United States and the world a better place.
Kennedy’s assassination shattered the illusion of control. Who could imagine an American president being shot? But many unimagined events followed: race riots in Los Angeles, Detroit and other cities; a powerful antiwar movement; the assassinations of Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King; a president’s resignation (Watergate).
Camelot was that brief interlude when we thought we could impose our will. That is its magnetism. It was less an innocent time than a simplistic one. We thought we could engineer the future and discovered that the future wouldn’t cooperate. Our continuing seduction by the Kennedy narrative presumes that had he lived, the future would have been better. He would have grasped the folly of Vietnam, embraced the new youth culture and advanced civil rights. This subtext sustains the Kennedy fascination.
It requires us to suspend disbelief, for there was a great contradiction at the core of Kennedy’s brief presidency. Though he projected mastery, he followed events more than he led them. It takes a huge leap of faith to think a second term would have been much different.
Opinion Writer The JFK fascination
It’s not about him. It’s about us.
As the 50th anniversary of John F. Kennedy’s assassination approaches, we’ve been deluged with essays, books, Web sites, videos and a new movie marking the event. The fascination with the Kennedys endures, though it’s probably on its last lap. After all, about three-quarters of Americans either weren’t born when Kennedy was shot or were too young (under 5) to grasp what happened. It’s a distant and disconnected event to them.
by Robert J. Samuelson
There is a coyness to some retrospectives. In a long essay in a recent New York Times Book Review, Executive Editor Jill Abramson wonders “Was Kennedy a great president?” — a question she never answers — and opines that he “remains all but impossible to pin down,” whatever that means. The question is actually easy to answer. He was not a great president. He was somewhere between middling and mediocre.
At his death, he had no major legislative accomplishments. His two major proposals — a tax cut to spur the economy and civil rights legislation — languished in Congress. He expanded the Vietnam War, and though some supporters argue he would have reversed that in a second term, presidents are judged on what they did, not what they might have done. His economic policies, symbolized by the proposed tax cut and called the “new economics” (an American Keynesianism), had damaging long-term consequences. They unleashed inflation in the late 1960s and 1970s; and they effectively abolished the commitment to balanced budgets — a loss that still haunts us.
Beyond Vietnam, his foreign-policy track record was lackluster. The Bay of Pigs was a disaster. At a 1961 summit in Vienna with Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev, Kennedy was — by his own admission — cowed. Later, the Berlin Wall went up. He did defuse the Cuban missile crisis in 1962, but the crisis may have resulted partly from Khrushchev’s sense that Kennedy could be intimidated.
It is cruel but true that the most consequential moment of Kennedy’s presidency was his assassination: It so filled the country with grief and guilt that, pushed by a masterful legislator, Lyndon Johnson, Congress passed the tax cut and civil rights legislation. Moreover, the shift in public opinion enabled Johnson, after his 1964 landslide election, to advance his Great Society agenda: Medicare, Medicaid, the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and more.
None of this sustains the Kennedy fascination. It’s too wonky and nuanced. The fixation has other sources. For starters, it’s history as soap opera. Vigorous president gunned down in his prime. Beautiful wife. Young children. But this appeal is superficial. Its real power is that for many Americans — baby boomers, members of the World War II generation — Kennedy’s life and death represent a larger personal and historic metaphor.
I was a college freshman when Kennedy was shot. The Camelot illusion was that he and we were in control of events. His approval rating averaged 70 percent, the highest of modern presidents. Partly, this reflected a less critical public climate. Eisenhower, with eight years in office and more opportunities to disappoint and anger, had ratings nearly as high (65 percent). But it was also Kennedy’s personality. He inspired confidence and oozed charm. He certainly mesmerized me.
As it happened, my wife and I visited the Kennedy Library last summer. Going through the exhibits, I sensed being transported back to the early 1960s and, despite knowing what’s occurred in the five decades since, feeling invigorated and hopeful. The Kennedys were what we all wanted to be. No, we wouldn’t end up in the White House. But just as they had achieved their ambition, we could achieve ours. And we would make the United States and the world a better place.
Kennedy’s assassination shattered the illusion of control. Who could imagine an American president being shot? But many unimagined events followed: race riots in Los Angeles, Detroit and other cities; a powerful antiwar movement; the assassinations of Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King; a president’s resignation (Watergate).
Camelot was that brief interlude when we thought we could impose our will. That is its magnetism. It was less an innocent time than a simplistic one. We thought we could engineer the future and discovered that the future wouldn’t cooperate. Our continuing seduction by the Kennedy narrative presumes that had he lived, the future would have been better. He would have grasped the folly of Vietnam, embraced the new youth culture and advanced civil rights. This subtext sustains the Kennedy fascination.
It requires us to suspend disbelief, for there was a great contradiction at the core of Kennedy’s brief presidency. Though he projected mastery, he followed events more than he led them. It takes a huge leap of faith to think a second term would have been much different.
Sunday, November 10, 2013
James Meredith - A Mission from God
What to make of James Meredith? This is the question after reading his autobiography.
Of course I knew that Meredith integrated The University of Mississippi in 1962. Everybody knows that. What I did not know before reading this book was the details of that momentous event and I did not know anything about one James Meredith. Now I know about both.
James Meredith is a mess. Great person for his courage in 1962 and afterwards and for being a cultural icon. Yet he admittedly comes across as vain and self-centered. His politics is all over the place. It is as if he revels in being "different" just for the sake of being different. I get the impression that he likes to run his mouth just to create attention and controversey.
There is a statue of Meredith on the campus of Ole Miss. Meredith demands in the book that the statue be torn down, yet I don't get a good reason in the book for why it should be torn down.
He complains over and over that white supremacy and racial prejudice still exist in this country, and who can argue with that, yet he says that blacks have to assume responsibility for their own future as if there were no structural problems standing in their way. He seems to contradict himself.
James Meredith inexplicably worked a year for the arch-segregationist Sen. Jesse Helms of North Carolina. I would never forgive Meredith for this. There is a Republican side to Meredith that I do not understand.
Meredith talks about how much he admired his father, yet he admits that in the last 2 years of his father's life, he did not visit his father. The last time he saw his father was at his Ole Miss graduation. I do not understand this.
His Ole Miss experience with the stress that it put on his family had a severe price. His sister hanged herself at the age of 25.
James Meredith was and is a brave man who talks about education these days. Nobody can ever take away from him the part he played in the civil rights movement of the 60's. It's just that he is a strange bird.
Meredith was shot while on a civil right march in 1966 heading down from Memphis down highway 51. The word went out that he was dead. This was perhaps his last day in the world spotlight.
He supported Ross Burnett in his relection bid for governor. Stange man indeed!
After spending 9 years in the Air Force, James Meredith was not naive or innocent. He had enough credits to almost graduate at then Jackson State College in Jackson. He deliberately sought to enroll at Ole Miss to challenge the structure of white supremace in the state of Mississippi. Four times he was turned away when he tried to register. The Kennedys got involved. I suppose the President can be faulted for not handling the situation with proper federal force until it was too late. There was the famous riot on September 30, 1962 when two people were killed and scores were injured. The right-wing General Edwin Walker, fired by the Kennedy administration, was there stirring up the masses. Meredith was able to register the next day in the mess that was the Ole Miss campus. It is utterly amazing and mind-boggling to realize that just 51 years ago it took mass rioting and deaths to integrate the Univ. of Mississippi.
Of course I knew that Meredith integrated The University of Mississippi in 1962. Everybody knows that. What I did not know before reading this book was the details of that momentous event and I did not know anything about one James Meredith. Now I know about both.
James Meredith is a mess. Great person for his courage in 1962 and afterwards and for being a cultural icon. Yet he admittedly comes across as vain and self-centered. His politics is all over the place. It is as if he revels in being "different" just for the sake of being different. I get the impression that he likes to run his mouth just to create attention and controversey.
There is a statue of Meredith on the campus of Ole Miss. Meredith demands in the book that the statue be torn down, yet I don't get a good reason in the book for why it should be torn down.
He complains over and over that white supremacy and racial prejudice still exist in this country, and who can argue with that, yet he says that blacks have to assume responsibility for their own future as if there were no structural problems standing in their way. He seems to contradict himself.
James Meredith inexplicably worked a year for the arch-segregationist Sen. Jesse Helms of North Carolina. I would never forgive Meredith for this. There is a Republican side to Meredith that I do not understand.
Meredith talks about how much he admired his father, yet he admits that in the last 2 years of his father's life, he did not visit his father. The last time he saw his father was at his Ole Miss graduation. I do not understand this.
His Ole Miss experience with the stress that it put on his family had a severe price. His sister hanged herself at the age of 25.
James Meredith was and is a brave man who talks about education these days. Nobody can ever take away from him the part he played in the civil rights movement of the 60's. It's just that he is a strange bird.
Meredith was shot while on a civil right march in 1966 heading down from Memphis down highway 51. The word went out that he was dead. This was perhaps his last day in the world spotlight.
He supported Ross Burnett in his relection bid for governor. Stange man indeed!
After spending 9 years in the Air Force, James Meredith was not naive or innocent. He had enough credits to almost graduate at then Jackson State College in Jackson. He deliberately sought to enroll at Ole Miss to challenge the structure of white supremace in the state of Mississippi. Four times he was turned away when he tried to register. The Kennedys got involved. I suppose the President can be faulted for not handling the situation with proper federal force until it was too late. There was the famous riot on September 30, 1962 when two people were killed and scores were injured. The right-wing General Edwin Walker, fired by the Kennedy administration, was there stirring up the masses. Meredith was able to register the next day in the mess that was the Ole Miss campus. It is utterly amazing and mind-boggling to realize that just 51 years ago it took mass rioting and deaths to integrate the Univ. of Mississippi.
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