I very much can empathize with your first paragraph ... so, after avoiding the topic for a long time, I read with interest your summary of what is known and what is known to be not known.
There is also a lesson of larger interest. It has been said that the trust in US institutions, including mainstream media, is at an all time low. So the question of what these institutions can do to regain the trust of the people (a question essential to the survival of our democracy) is important. Being open, transparent and honoring the facts would at least be a starting point.
The problem with conspiracy theories, usually, is not that conspiracies don't happen, but that most don't pass an occum's razor test; humans love good stories so much that they believe, or pretend at believing so to speak, in some nonsense because it's a better story; something more diverting, or even something poetically true - but different, causally, from the boring brutal truth. I put nothing past the US gov during the Cold War. I had long assumed it was the mob that somehow got JFK, but hadn't thought about it in many years until I started reading Tim about it recently. That is a very canny quote from Lasch! Cheers
I’m coming to this post very late (John Ganz directed me to your terrific, most recent piece) but I just want to add to your excellent summation that it cannot be overstated how much the Kennedys were hated by certain elements of the American Right in the wake of the Bay of Pigs and his openings to Krushchev. I too am a skeptic of conspiracy theorizing. The truth is often quite a bit plainer than we want it to be. But when it comes to the Cold War CIA, a conspiratorial framing is almost a prerequisite. Please allow me to be quite a bit more speculative than you allowed yourself to be: There was a real sense of panic among the right wings of the military, the CIA and the business community that Kennedy was going to draw down the American presence in Vietnam and pursue detente with the Soviets. Whether true or not, that was the sense, and for many, the fear. Some true anti-communist believers felt that the Kennedy presidency had become an existential threat to US hegemony. When Kennedy was elected, he was generally viewed by these types as a green, manageable, conventional Cold Warrior that the Joint Chiefs and the Dulles CIA could lead to their preferred conclusions. The Kennedy brothers felt this, resented it, and pushed back against these entrenched right wing elements of the foreign policy establishment. It wasn’t just the Cuban exiles who despised Kennedy after the Bay of Pigs. Their wealthy American funders and the CIA soldiers of fortune who trained them, along with their ideological fellow travelers in the military felt a white-hot rage at the betrayal of their cause by this man that they viewed as a total upstart naïf. Eisenhower had ceded so much power to these elements of the government that they had real reason to believe that they ran the foreign policy show (which worked hand in glove with American business interests). It’s not a stretch at all to imagine that men who had spent 15 years perfecting the art of killing and overthrowing world leaders, some of whom had recently assisted in the attempt to assassinate De Gaulle for his abandonment of Algeria, would at least entertain the notion of murdering a president who they considered an actual traitor. One doesn’t have to lionize Kennedy (I certainly don’t) or ascribe great peacemaking skills to him to recognize that his enemies in the US saw him in this light.
To be clear, this is all circumstantial. But it is far more absurd to ignore these currents than to acknowledge and investigate them. The entire history of the CIA from 1945 to 1975 beggars belief in its brazenness, impunity, and imperial, vigilante violence. And that’s just what we KNOW. To imagine rogue elements of the agency involved in plots against Kennedy is hardly a leap.
Good post Tim, as per. If you don't know it, you might like the novel The Shape of the Ruins, which is about similar matters in Colombia and touches on the JFK assassination as well.
I like your point about emphasizing structure vs individual actors and conspiracies, about how a commitment to thinking about the world in terms of the former doesn't mean the latter plays no role. Simon Clarke has a remark to this effect: "It is important not to underestimate the extent to which the capitalist class seeks directly to impose its class interests on the state, and indeed such direct political intervention by sections of the capitalist class is a normal aspect of the functioning of the state. Direct political intervention can acquire decisive importance in periods of crisis that call for a restructuring of the forms of political domination. There is a tendency for sophisticated intellectual Marxists to turn their backs on the evidence of such direct interventions in order to concentrate on more subtle mechanisms. The development of the capitalist state form is not a spontaneous unfolding of the logic of capital, it is something arrived at through trial and error in the unfolding of the class struggle, conditioned to a considerable extent by the direct agency of sections of the capitalist class and so, incidentally, conditioned by the outcome of struggles within that class." Of course the same goes for actions by state agencies.
I very much can empathize with your first paragraph ... so, after avoiding the topic for a long time, I read with interest your summary of what is known and what is known to be not known.
There is also a lesson of larger interest. It has been said that the trust in US institutions, including mainstream media, is at an all time low. So the question of what these institutions can do to regain the trust of the people (a question essential to the survival of our democracy) is important. Being open, transparent and honoring the facts would at least be a starting point.
The problem with conspiracy theories, usually, is not that conspiracies don't happen, but that most don't pass an occum's razor test; humans love good stories so much that they believe, or pretend at believing so to speak, in some nonsense because it's a better story; something more diverting, or even something poetically true - but different, causally, from the boring brutal truth. I put nothing past the US gov during the Cold War. I had long assumed it was the mob that somehow got JFK, but hadn't thought about it in many years until I started reading Tim about it recently. That is a very canny quote from Lasch! Cheers
I’m coming to this post very late (John Ganz directed me to your terrific, most recent piece) but I just want to add to your excellent summation that it cannot be overstated how much the Kennedys were hated by certain elements of the American Right in the wake of the Bay of Pigs and his openings to Krushchev. I too am a skeptic of conspiracy theorizing. The truth is often quite a bit plainer than we want it to be. But when it comes to the Cold War CIA, a conspiratorial framing is almost a prerequisite. Please allow me to be quite a bit more speculative than you allowed yourself to be: There was a real sense of panic among the right wings of the military, the CIA and the business community that Kennedy was going to draw down the American presence in Vietnam and pursue detente with the Soviets. Whether true or not, that was the sense, and for many, the fear. Some true anti-communist believers felt that the Kennedy presidency had become an existential threat to US hegemony. When Kennedy was elected, he was generally viewed by these types as a green, manageable, conventional Cold Warrior that the Joint Chiefs and the Dulles CIA could lead to their preferred conclusions. The Kennedy brothers felt this, resented it, and pushed back against these entrenched right wing elements of the foreign policy establishment. It wasn’t just the Cuban exiles who despised Kennedy after the Bay of Pigs. Their wealthy American funders and the CIA soldiers of fortune who trained them, along with their ideological fellow travelers in the military felt a white-hot rage at the betrayal of their cause by this man that they viewed as a total upstart naïf. Eisenhower had ceded so much power to these elements of the government that they had real reason to believe that they ran the foreign policy show (which worked hand in glove with American business interests). It’s not a stretch at all to imagine that men who had spent 15 years perfecting the art of killing and overthrowing world leaders, some of whom had recently assisted in the attempt to assassinate De Gaulle for his abandonment of Algeria, would at least entertain the notion of murdering a president who they considered an actual traitor. One doesn’t have to lionize Kennedy (I certainly don’t) or ascribe great peacemaking skills to him to recognize that his enemies in the US saw him in this light.
To be clear, this is all circumstantial. But it is far more absurd to ignore these currents than to acknowledge and investigate them. The entire history of the CIA from 1945 to 1975 beggars belief in its brazenness, impunity, and imperial, vigilante violence. And that’s just what we KNOW. To imagine rogue elements of the agency involved in plots against Kennedy is hardly a leap.
Good post Tim, as per. If you don't know it, you might like the novel The Shape of the Ruins, which is about similar matters in Colombia and touches on the JFK assassination as well.
I like your point about emphasizing structure vs individual actors and conspiracies, about how a commitment to thinking about the world in terms of the former doesn't mean the latter plays no role. Simon Clarke has a remark to this effect: "It is important not to underestimate the extent to which the capitalist class seeks directly to impose its class interests on the state, and indeed such direct political intervention by sections of the capitalist class is a normal aspect of the functioning of the state. Direct political intervention can acquire decisive importance in periods of crisis that call for a restructuring of the forms of political domination. There is a tendency for sophisticated intellectual Marxists to turn their backs on the evidence of such direct interventions in order to concentrate on more subtle mechanisms. The development of the capitalist state form is not a spontaneous unfolding of the logic of capital, it is something arrived at through trial and error in the unfolding of the class struggle, conditioned to a considerable extent by the direct agency of sections of the capitalist class and so, incidentally, conditioned by the outcome of struggles within that class." Of course the same goes for actions by state agencies.
For people following this story, and Morley in particular, none of this is new.
If you wanted to, there are many, many places you could look. I list many of them here.
https://medium.com/@jylterps/ask-not-what-your-country-did-to-him-and-all-of-us-reflection-on-the-60th-anniversary-of-jfks-b00574e4c648
Thanks for reading! I make no claim to originality here; the idea is to bring the conversation to people who don't already read Morley.
Thanks, I hope you do that. It was a pivotal event in the nation's history, with ongoing reverberations from that day since and today still.