The J.F.K. Files, Trump, and the Deep State
So far, the newly released documents on John F. Kennedy’s assassination
seem only to confirm the wisest conclusions about the President’s death.
BK – Yes, that he was not murdered by
one man alone.
The release last
Thursday of previously classified, or at least unseen, government files of all
kinds relating to the assassination of John F. Kennedy is being heralded as
Donald Trump’s decision—though it was simply his decision not to prevent their release,
which had long been scheduled. In fact, at the last minute, Trump listened to
requests from the intelligence services not to release some three hundred of
the remaining three thousand files.
BK: You got your
numbers wrong Gopnik – get it right please – this is important.
But that decision
raised more suspicions, so on Friday night the President tweeted, “I will be
releasing ALL JFK files other than the names and addresses of any mentioned
person who is still living.”
BK: Wait a minute –
they’ve already released millions of documents with the names of living
persons, and the whole idea of releasing the document to set the record
straight includes the ability to identify, locate and interview persons mentioned
so the facts can be substantiated.
It’s always possible that some smoking gun of a document will
reveal itself in the remaining files.
BK: Smoking document have already been discovered among the
records released under the JFK Act, including the Northwoods documents, the
Higgins Memo, and the Secret Service Protective Research Files, all of which
support the idea that the assassination wa not the act of a deranged loner or
just a plot and conspiracy but a very specific covert intelligence operation.
Scrolling through the PDFs of the (very well presented) documents,
though, mostly reveals just what one expected: rumors and scuttlebutt, with
uncertain sourcing.
BK: Well, there’s thousands of documents, some hundred of pages
long, have you read them all? I don’t think so.
We learn that, two days after the assassination, the F.B.I. was
roiled by the possibility that
Jack Ruby was identical to a Florida racketeer named Rubin. And that, two weeks
before the assassination, one Robert C. Rawls overheard someone in a bar in New
Orleans offering to bet a hundred dollars that President Kennedy would not be
alive in three weeks’ time. But, the document reads, “He does not recall ever
seeing the man before and is not certain that he would recognize him if he did.
He admits being somewhat intoxicated at the time and said the man also was in
an intoxicated condition.”
Anything more notable that’s turned up simply echoes what we
already knew: the C.I.A. was enlisting gangsters in an effort to assassinate
Castro (with what depth of knowledge on the part of the Kennedy brothers is
still unclear);
BK: These CIA-Cuba and Castro assassination files are the most
significant and you can’t just gloss over them.
J. Edgar Hoover was obsessed with American Communists and with
Martin Luther King, Jr.,’s purported ties to them, to the point of mania;
BK: Why are these files unrelated to the assassination being
released? To confuse the easily confused Gopnik.
Lee Harvey Oswald went to Mexico City in the fall of 1963, probably
in order to try and get to Cuba, and while he was there had contacts with
Russian intelligence in the person of embassy staffers;
BK: Wait a minute. You are only giving this extremely significant
aspect of the assassination a half a sentence? You have no idea what you are talking
about if you don’t know about Oswald’s Mexico City connections, and it isn’t just
with Cuban and Russian intelligence.
Lyndon Johnson never entirely bought the Warren Commission’s
conclusion that Oswald had acted alone;
BK: Yea, LBJ, RFK, Jackie O, Richard Sprague, the list of
conspiracy theorizing luminaries is long, and LBJ leads the list, but Gopnik
isn’t on it.
Oswald was a good, not an inept, shot. (This last fact, known
already from Oswald’s service record from his time in the Marines, is curiously
sourced to a Cuban diplomat.)
BK: Oswald’ s brother Robert, a USMC marksman, said that if Lee
did not practice with that rifle in the days and weeks before the assassination
he did not take the shot that killed the President and wounded the governor.
And the Warren Commissions said Oswald did not practice with that rifle that
remained in Paine’s garage until the day of the assassination.
There are strange historical pleasures in sorting through the
records. The obsession with Castro and Cuba is, given that we now know that the
United States can actually flourish quite well with “Communists right off our
shores,” still startling.
BK: Cuba is the primary connection between all of the players in
this drama, including JFK, Oswald and Ruby. It’s the key.
Certainly, the entanglements of the government and the Mafia
remain shocking: one document, prepared for the House Select Committee on
Assassinations, summarizes the evidence flatly, stating that Allen Dulles, the
head of the C.I.A., authorized payment of a hundred and fifty thousand dollars
for a plot against Castro involving Johnny Roselli and Sam Giancana.
BK: Yea, and among the 98% of the records still being withheld are
the files on Giancana, Rosselli and Rosselli’s CIA case officer William Harvey,
though they did recently release the CIA’s Rosselli Chronology file, that
indicate that he was working on plans – not plot – plans to kill Castro from
the JMWAVE base in Florida in early 1963, supporting a team of commandos who
went into Cuba by boat with high powered rifle with the plans to kill Castro as
he road in an open jeep.
It’s scary to read the minutes of
a “Special Group meeting” in November, 1960—just before Kennedy’s
election—which included such Cold War worthies as Generals Charles Cabell and
Ed Lansdale, and in which someone asks if “any real planning has been done for
taking direct positive action against Fidel, Raul and Che Guevara.” Cabell
advises that the suggestion is “beyond our capabilities” but not, apparently,
beyond our consideration. (Ted Cruz’s dad, however, does not as yet seem to be
mentioned in any of the documents.)
Perhaps that smoking gun may yet exist; God knows there are enough
dogged assassination researchers out there to find it if it does.
BK: It isn’t Ted Cruz’s dad whose important but Steve Cruz, the
then 17 year old Cuban who got arrested with Oswald. Where’s his file, where’s
he today? He can answer a lot of these questions.
But, so far, the documents seem to confirm the wisest twin
conclusions about the J.F.K. assassination: Oswald was guilty, and acted alone;
BK: The documents do no such thing. The Warren Commission couldn’t
even do that, as the evidence and testimony indicates Oswald wasn’t even on the
sixth floor at the time of the shooting and was what he claimed to be – a patsy.
This shows Gopnick, like Shenon, Sabato and other mainstream ‘journalist’ are
not familiar with details of the case.
and, at the same time, the intelligence services—the F.B.I., the
C.I.A., and the rest—were up to their armpits in bad acts that they were trying
to keep concealed.
BK: Yea, yea, yea, the CIA, FBI, SS are only trying not be embarrassed
by the revelations, when in fact the government records prove they are guilty,
not only of neglect of duty, but for letting the assassination happen and
covering up the facts up to and past today, making this crime relevant today as
it was in 1963.
These conclusions, as I
wrote on the fiftieth anniversary of the
assassination, point to two more: that the Warren Commission is almost
certainly the only plausible account of what happened on that day in Dallas,
BK: The WC’s account
is not only implausible, it is unaccepted by 80% of the people, and accepted
only by those who haven’t even read it, like Gopnic. One more plausible account
is that what happened at Dealey Plaza, whatever Oswald’s role was – lone gunman
or patsy, it doesn’t matter, what happened was a successful covert intelligence
operation designed to protect its sponsors.
and that the underlife of the government was more sinister, or at
least more complicit in guilty knowledge, than the image makers of the time,
and the Kennedys, wanted to accept or to publicize.
The pretense last week was that, in releasing the files, Trump
took action on behalf of the American people, in the pursuit of openness. But
Trump acts in his own interest, and his pursuit of apparent openness has as its
real end the undermining of public institutions and practices which depend on
professionalism, independence, and trust.
BK: America’s trust in its government began to decline in 1964
with the release of the implausible Warren Report and continues today, and will
continue to decline until these records are released in full, unredacted,
complete with names. Trump has nothing to do but just release these records in
their entirety or cowtow to the CIA and military and withhold them in the name
of the guilty.
Trump was likely prodded to speak out about the files by Roger
Stone, one of the figures from the fringes of American life whom the President
has brought to the center. Stone wrote a book titled “The Man Who Killed
Kennedy: The Case Against LBJ.” Last week, his profane rants got him suspended
from Twitter, but he still appears to be in touch with Trump.
BK: Stone is a joke no one pays attention to except for Trump and
Glopnik
Stone has warned of the “deep state,” the new villain of
right-wing paranoia—well, an old villain, newly restored to primacy.
BK: You have no idea what the “deep state” is all about until you
read the works of Peter Dale Scott, which you have not, and such deep thinking
cannot be attributed to the links of Stone.
The thinking in this case seems to be that, if Trump’s followers
can be persuaded that no one in the “permanent government” should be trusted,
they can perhaps be more easily persuaded not to trust the institutions of the
state when, say, they pursue charges against anyone associated with his
campaign. The implicit, and increasingly explicit, argument here is: Don’t
listen to special counsels who worked for the F.B.I.; those are the guys that
withheld all those documents about the J.F.K. assassination.
BK: Well, you got that one wrong because as we speak and as I type
this the Attorney General of the United States is live on TV saying that the
FBI is preparing all of their remaining sealed files for release ASAP, today or
tomorrow but months before the records Trump will deal with next April. The FBI
is not the boogyman it used to be.
As David Frum has pointed out, what Trump’s surrogates really mean by “the deep state” is the rule of law. The idea that
there are civil servants or functionaries within the government whose chief
trait is loyalty to the Constitution and to the ongoing administration of the
state is intolerable to the autocratic mind. So, if those other actors
challenge the White House, they must be taunted, demoralized, and, if possible,
dismissed.
BK: If you knew what “deep state” really means, it is the ability
of such civil servant and party functionaries in power to abuse that power and
go beyond the Constitution, not those who do the right thing. And taunting,
demoralizing and dismissing are child’s play to getting away with political
assassination.
Yet what the true history of the Kennedy assassination, including
the newly released documents, reveals is not how formidable the government
agencies during the Cold War era were but how vulnerable they were to exposure
by what was then called “the press,” and to the countervailing power of
Congress.
BK: Where was “the press” in 1963 and today? They aren’t exposing
the vulnerable to the truth, but letting the government slide for breaking the
JFK Act law, with no repercussions in sight.
The genuine heroism of those members of Congress who in the
seventies pushed to reopen inquiries about the Kennedy assassination, in the
light of the post-Watergate revelations about C.I.A. murder plots, has not been
sufficiently applauded in this much more obedient day. Their work resulted, as
few people now recall, in a public apology from Richard Helms, the C.I.A.
chief, for the agency’s contacts with organized crime.
BK: Wow, that’s a 360.
The committee reviewed all the crucial evidence against Oswald and,
somewhat to its own surprise, validated it.
BK: That’s not true. They uncovered much more evidence of Oswald’s
contact with Cubans and CIA agents and officers (like David Atlee Phillips)
that goes against the grain of him being the lone assassin. They didn’t validate
anything.
(A tentative, last-minute conclusion that there may have been a
second, unknown gunman was based on acoustic evidence that has since been
universally discredited.)
BK: The acoustic evidence has never been repeated, the true test
of scientific validation, and not universally discredited, only by those embarrassed
by their clinging to the lone nut scenario.
The effort today is not to get at the truth but to make the truth
look unobtainable.
BK: The truth is obtainable – and is already known to most people
who know something about the case, and only those who want to protect the
guilty claim the truth is unobtainable. We already know the truth, the details
are in the files that are still being withheld.
By damaging people’s confidence not just in good government but in
the separation of powers, which allows one part of the government to
investigate another, you create an illusion of powerlessness that can only
produce rage and despair, the two emotions that Trumpism profits from.
BK: You can begin to regain the public’s confidence in government
only by releasing all of the files in full.
Progressives who imagine that conspiracy thinking ever helps their
causes are deluded.
BK: Wait a minute,
who brought Progressives into this? The JFK assassination and the release of
the government’s records is neither liberal nor conservative, right wing or
left wing, a Democratic or Republican cause – Congress passed the JFK Act unanimously
- when was the last time Congress agreed
on anything?
Pessimism about reform is essential to the authoritarian mind.
Confusion is its lifeblood. Then preposterous theories become just as likely as
rational ones.
BK: That’s what you would like – preposterous theories mixed in
with rational ones so the rational ones are ignored.
Any potential attempt to collude with a hostile foreign government
to undermine democracy becomes the same as an attempt by others to find out if
anyone has been potentially colluding. It’s Chinatown, friends. You can’t
trust anyone.
BK: We can learn whether or not Cubans or Soviets were behind the
Dealey Plaza operation, - and have learned from ELINT surveillance of their
leader, they were not. We can learn if the Russians influenced the last
election, and will. You can trust yourself if you know the facts.
What we should fear is not a deep state but a state robbed of its
depth.
BK: The deep state has robbed of us of our soul, and discovering
the truth about the assassination of President Kennedy helps restore that lost
spirIt.
As the historian Timothy Snyder has pointed out many times, it is
when states are robbed of their memory and their self-respect, which are most
often embodied in a civil-servant class, that tyranny flourishes. There is no
“deep state” that exists beyond the scrutiny of responsible citizens; there is
a cynical paranoia that always acts, and is meant to, as a pathogen to public
trust.
BK: We are being
robbed of our memory when the government refuses to release the records on the
assassination of the President and the public’s trust will not return until
they are released.
·
Adam Gopnik, a staff writer, has been contributing to The New Yorker si- -
