We live in strange times. No doubt about it.
A former president is probably weeks, maybe months away from a felony indictment on serious charges he left office with a cache of classified records, some so secret even the feds searching his Florida home this summer for them found themselves without the requisite security clearances to read them.
A few more classified records turned up the other day, in a storage unit owned by the criminal suspect, the former president. Prosecutors asked a judge to start holding folks in contempt after the latest discovery. The judge asked the lawyers last week to work it out amongst themselves. But some pundits wonder if the judge’s directive doesn’t justify some new search warrants.
We are also mere days away from criminal referrals from the ominously named Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol. That was the coup attempt in January 2021. Almost 1,000 low-level rioters have already been charged—a couple of cool cats, Oath Keepers, were convicted by a jury of seditious conspiracy, among other serious felonies, last month for their roles. They face decades in prison.
The congressional criminal referrals will name some of the higher level players, no doubt.
One obvious suspect among several: The same Florida man who absconded with those top secret records.
The Former Guy—for those who disallow his name to pass over their lips (I don’t blame you)—certainly made a mess of things. Even his once-vaunted New York real estate company is a convicted felon now. Didn’t you know, bro, corporations are people, too.
Oh, and The Former Guy, he keeps talking about stolen election conspiracies and tearing up the Constitution he once swore to protect in order to retake his former job.
He also announced his 2024 candidacy for the Republican nomination to be our next President of the United States of America!
Pathetic.
We are living through strange times. And they are bound to get a bit stranger. Maybe even a little dangerous.
When I get a bit discouraged by all this insanity—and I do folks—I think back to difficult times the nation has faced in the past. This country has been through far worse than the political upheaval we are living through today.
I fancy myself a student of history. And one of the most profound periods in modern American history to me was the tumult of the 1960s and 1970s, particularly involving the nation’s deep politics.
It is during this period when the public’s faith in government was shattered, never to recover, actually. It is during this period where our current political conniptions were birthed, I’m convinced.
If there’s one date to pinpoint when everything changed in America, when the country took a wrong turn, down a dark road on which we somehow still blindly meander, it is Nov. 22, 1963.
For you younger readers, that’s the day John F. Kennedy, the 35th president of the United States, was gunned down at lunchtime in downtown Dallas in front of hundreds of people gathered to view his motorcade as it wound its way slowly from Houston onto Elm Street.
America has not been the same since.
Kennedy’s murder, for example, directly led to the Vietnam War, a horrific lost cause that claimed 58,220 American lives and millions more Southeast Asians. The mass death was attended by lie after lie from people entrusted with our security, eventually enraging large segments of the population.
Before “peace with dignity” was supposedly achieved by the man Kennedy beat for the presidency in 1960, Richard Nixon, the war literally tore the country apart, protests about which made January 6 look like a little girl’s tea party.
Add in there the Civil Rights movement and the era’s other political assassinations— Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy in 1968 alone—Kent State, the Pentagon Papers, endless Cold War intrigue, and finally, Watergate and Nixon’s resignation.
My mom remembers Nixon’s departure from the White House and the swearing in of the new president, Gerald Ford. I was in her big fat belly, late as usual, and was born just after Ford took office. Ford remains the only president of the United States never elected by the people— he was appointed by Nixon to be vice president when Nixon’s first VP, Spiro Agnew, got caught up in a tax evasion case.
Ford pardoned Nixon for Watergate, dooming his own political future, in fact. But he had another claim to fame besides that—he served on the Warren Commission, the government body appointed to “investigate” the murder in Dallas of JFK.
Today, the Warren Commission is a hollow, incomplete, likely somewhat fabricated record of the events of Nov. 22, 1963. Once called conspiracy theorists, the scholars and researchers and journalists who from day one started poking giant holes in the Warren Commission’s hastily stitched together report, sit comfortably on a pedestal of revelation now. The true “conspiracy theorist” is anyone who actually thinks Lee Harvey Oswald alone shot Kennedy from the sixth floor of the School Book Depository.
I don’t think the poor lad killed anyone, or even fired a rifle that day.
Even Kennedy’s successor, Lyndon Johnson, told a television reporter after he left office that he was not satisfied with the Warren Commission’s conclusions—he then asked that his opinion be kept off the record.
I could go on and on about JFK’s murder and the now obvious cover up that attended it—the threads of deceit are literally everywhere, from the preposterous magic bullet, to the phony autopsy records that sit in the National Archives, the two Oswald wallets after Dallas Police Officer J.D. Tippit was found shot to death, the Zapruder film that clearly shows one shot from the front (don’t forget kids, the American public didn’t even get to watch the Zapruder film until 1975, 12 years after the assassination), and on and on and on.
Obfuscation. Endless lying. Withholding or destroying public records. And a little blackmail between 1963 and 1975 tell us all we need to know about what we still don’t know.
And then there were the government’s half-hearted attempts at redemption: the Church Committee, the Rockefeller Commission and the House Select Committee on Assassinations, which convened during the 1970s. They literally exposed a whole rotten series of undemocratic government abuses by the CIA and FBI, from illegal wiretapping and domestic surveillance, from foreign political assassinations to nefarious associations between organized crime figures and U.S. intelligence. It was a smorgasbord of disturbing acts exposed for all to see and supposedly done under the guise of national security.
It was here that the government sort of, kind of, first admitted a likely conspiracy existed leading to JFK’s death in Dallas. Many of the government records of these investigations were locked away, scheduled for public consumption only sometime late in this decade, or perhaps never.
But in 1991 Oliver Stone’s film “JFK” aroused a fury in the American public. Awakened from its collective slumber, people demanded to know the truth from its government about what the hell happened in 1963. The outcry led to the formation of a pretty powerful body, the Assassination Records Review Board (ARRB). That new independent federal agency was given a 4-year mandate to examine every scrap of hidden JFK record it could get its hands on, with an eye toward declassifying them all. The federal law creating the ARRB gave the various U.S. government agencies still holding records, including the CIA, FBI, Pentagon and other national security services, until 2017 to declassify everything in their possession. Four million declassified pages now sit permanently in the National Archives thanks to the ARRB. But thousands of documents remained hidden, the agency’s work unfinished.
Only one person can lawfully hold up this process in any way—the sitting president.
So when 2017 came around, The Former Guy, though he squealed on the campaign trail how he couldn’t wait to declassify all JFK records (remember when he accused opposing candidate Sen. Ted Cruz’s dad of participating in the 1963 ambush in Dallas? Good times!), when the time came, he demurred—not for a year, but for the rest of his entire term in office!
Fast forward to 2021 and Joe Biden’s first year in office, the remaining records again came up for declassification. Assassination researchers were licking their chops. A few records were revealed, but a further 15,000 documents continued to be withheld, Biden suggesting the pandemic had slowed the process.
Now it’s 2022, 59 years after the events of 1963. And this week on Dec. 15 President Biden again is set to either declassify all the records, or again dribble a few out and hold the rest back, “for reasons of national security,” or some other tired excuse that becomes less and less believable every year.
One JFK research group, the Mary Ferrell Foundation, which claims the largest archive of searchable JFK records online, filed a federal lawsuit in October seeking to force the Biden Administration to abide by the law and release the last records. “These failures have resulted in confusion, gaps in the records, over-classification, and outright denial of thousands of assassination-related files, five years after the law's deadline for full disclosure,” the foundation claims in its lawsuit and on its website.
In this ugly age of Qanon, covid denial and election conspiracies, it hardly helps bolster trust in government when the truth of something as important—and as, well, ancient—as Nov. 22, 1963 remains so plainly and purposely hidden from the public.
How could any sane person, certainly no student of American history, not believe there isn’t a REAL conspiracy lying at the very heart of the JFK assassination when our own government refuses year in, year out to reveal what it knows, what is fundamentally ours to know?
The old saying goes: Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. How can we avoid that pitfall if the past is purposely hidden from our view?
President Biden should declassify all JFK records once and for all. No matter how ugly, no matter how embarrassing, the American people deserve the truth. We deserve to know our own history. Period.
It may be the only way we can ever really right the wrong turn this nation took when Kennedy’s motorcade slowly veered onto Elm Street from Houston on that fateful day in Dallas.
