JFK

Yesterday marked the 40th anniversary of the Kennedy assassination in Dallas, Texas. There was a fair amount of coverage in the media to mark the anniversary, but I actually felt underwhelmed by the amount of coverage I saw. Maybe it's because I don't have cable so I wasn't aware of myriad programs on the various channels or maybe Michael Jackson's arrest trumped old news like Kennedy. After all, Kennedy has been dead almost as long as he was alive! Still he casts a long shadow on American politics and culture.

The one TV program I did see was Peter Jenning's ABC special, The Kennedy Assassination: Beyond Conspiracy. I found it to be very interesting and compelling support of the lone gunman theory. They showed a lot of evidence about Oswald's personal history, and Ruby's as well, that I had never seen/heard before. They also spent an unexpected amount of time and attention debunking the myths and misinformation presented in Oliver Stone's "JFK."

It seems very likely that Oswald was just a mixed up young failure, desperate for attention, who finally snapped and found his 15 minutes of fame. Ironically, Jack Ruby went through almost the same process. I was surprised to see the similarities in the characters and personalities of the two men. Ruby also seemed to snap at the last minute and took the law, and history, into his own hands. The scene of Oswald's murder on live television in the basement of the Dallas police department is truly terrifying.

In fact, I never cease to feel chills whenever the topic of Kennedy's assassination comes up. The violent images of two real-life murders, the panic and chaos following the assassination, and the dark uncertainty of the motives for the crime and its perpetrators: it is one of the most frightening stories I've ever heard.

To me, what makes it different from 9/11 or other tragic pieces of history is the very intimate human aspect of the story. The situation involved basically three men, none of whom knew each other, each following their own motives and desires for power and attention of varying degrees. There is no mysterious, evil villain to hold responsible, a la Saddam Hussein or Osama Bin Laden. None of the characters are larger-than-life. These were men, each complex in his own way, and each pursuing his own ideas of justice and doing what he felt was the right thing.

I had never realized before seeing the program that the conspiracy theories became prevalent in American discussion so soon after the assassination occurred. I assumed that was a more recent development, which reached its peak in the Oliver Stone film. However, it's now obvious that the initial assumption by authorities and the pubic, and certainly by LBJ, was that of a conspiracy to assassinate the President, conducted either by Communist Russia, Castro's Cuba, the American mob, or, finally, by forces within the U.S. government itself.

Forty years after the events of November 1963, it seems highly unlikely that some piece of evidence or personal testimony proving the conspiracy wouldn't have surfaced by now. Secrets that big are just too hard to keep for that long. It reminds me of the theories of Elvis faking his death. Some stories are so upsetting that we create fantastic explanations to deal with a tragic loss. Like Peter Jennings articulated, we don't like to think that a single human individual is capable of committing such an evil act that would change the world so dramatically.