The Myth of Camelot

international | history and heritage | opinion/analysis Wednesday November 26, 2008 15:43 by Jim

The assassination of President Kennedy

After the death of Kennedy it seemed that everything was going wrong.
Vietnam, Watergate, the race riots, the cultural chasm between young and old, rich and poor, the collapse of traditional family values and the explosion of drug culture and sexual license among an angry disillusioned generation of baby boomers who should have inherited the American Dream that the “greatest generation” including Kennedy had sacrificed so much for and the rise of nihilistic violence by Manson, the Weathermen, the slaughter at My Lai, the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy himself who seemed to be the last of idealistic liberals left after the end of the war. All the problems seemed to have burst to the surface following the death of Kennedy when the hopes and dreams of millions of the young who had been brought up to believe in a safe rational world were shattered.

John F. Kennedy, the young skeletal teenage girl crazy sex maniac, like the shambolic drunken jock George W. Bush was the never destined to be President of the United States. Kennedy’s youth was plagued by a bewildering list of near fatal and crippling illnesses which probably explains why he womanised as if it was his last day on earth. He was the second son of ruthless businessman and politician Joseph P. Kennedy, a real life Gatsby, the patriarch of the Irish Catholic immigrant family who had clawed their way up the greasy pole of American politics. Joseph Junior, JFK’s elder brother was the chosen one who unfortunately was blown to pieces during a combat mission over Europe during WW2 while earning his mandatory war hero credentials for the long journey to the White House. Luckily “Jack,” who strictly speaking was an invalid who should not have been a serving U.S. Navy officer, had the necessary war heroics on his political CV because he failed to post a watch on his modest PT boat before it was cut in half by a Jap destroyer but had helped to rescue his crew by swimming to neighbouring islands for help. Jack entered politics at the same time as other men like Richard Nixon, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush who were of the same venerated wartime generation. He did not rock the boat on Capitol Hill and made a name for himself as a fiercely anti-communist patriot urging America to close the gap with the Soviet Union after the inconclusive Korean War, the launch of Sputnik, the drift and paranoia of the Eisenhower years. Jack Kennedy married Jacqueline Bouvier because an American politician needs to be a family man after all and heirs were required to maintain the Kennedy family dynasty but continued to live the playboy lifestyle right up until his untimely death. His wife allegedly helped to ghost write his Pulitizer-prize winning book, “Why England Slept.” As President he dealt with a near apocalyptic nuclear stand off with the Soviet Union over Cuba while he was romping with call girls in the White House swimming pool and functioned on a diet of painkillers and uppers administered by his quack doctors because of his agonising back injuries for which he wore a heavily padded brace. In November 1963, he was riding a wave of popularity and good will and seemed destined for a second term. He had convinced discriminated blacks he was sympathetic to the Civil Rights movement but continued to dither when it came to any tangible measures because he wanted to keep the racist Democrats of the Deep South on his side. He was also considering whether to increase U.S. military involvement in South Vietnam as it became clear that a Communist offensive against the weak and divided former French colony was in the offing.

The trip to Texas during which he planned to visit various cities was a preparation for the 1964 Presidential election. JFK had lost the city of Dallas in 1960 and there was a rift emerging between the liberal and conservative wings of the Democrat organisation in the Lone Star State. Kennedy was hated by the local right wing establishment especially the oil men, bankers and newspaper publishers but beloved of local poor Blacks and Hispanics.
After visiting San Antonio and Forth Worth, the next stop was Dallas. Kennedy had read the criticism of him in the Dallas Morning News which printed an ad by a right wing group that accused him of treason and surrender to communism aggression. Adlai Stevenson, the UN Ambassador, had been physically attacked during a visit a month before by a hysterical mob. "Oh, God, we're really heading into nut country today," the president said when he saw the ad. He told his wife: "You know last night would have been a hell of a night to assassinate a president. I mean it. There was the rain, and the night, and we were all being jostled. Suppose a man had a pistol in a briefcase."

Air Force One landed at Lovefield at 11.40 am where the President and First Lady were greeted by Vice-President Johnson, Texas Governor Connally and local dignitaries. After briefly shaking hands with the crowds at the airport the President and the Governor of Texas and their wives boarded the open top limousine that would take them through the low rise suburbs and along Main Street through the high downtown Dallas area that proved to be thronged with hundreds of thousands of enthusiastic people. A map of the route had been printed in local newspapers well in advance. The Secret Service intervened on several occasions to keep the crowds away from the limousine as Kennedy made unscheduled stops to shake hands. Kennedy had ordered the clear plastic bubble top removed and that bodyguards were not to ride on the standing positions on the back of the limousine so that the crowds would get an unobstructed view. This was the first time since the death of their infant son that the still grieving Mrs. Kennedy was accompanying her husband on his trips and the motorcade was designed to make the most of her public appeal.

The destination of the motorcade was the Trade Mart where Kennedy was to speak to local business leaders over a luncheon. To get there the motorcade needed to turn right from Main onto Houston before turning sharply left through Dealey plaza overlooked by the Texas School Book Depository and curve downhill beneath a railroad bridge, to access the ramp onto the Stemmons Freeway. Just before the entering the plaza, Mrs. Connally turned in her seat and said “You can’t say Dallas doesn’t love you, Mr. President!” to which he replied “No you can’t!”

After the hairpin into Dealey Plaza the open slow moving limousine was a perfect target for a supposed sniper in the upper floor of the Depository and most witnesses heard three shots ring out though there may have been others. It was difficult to tell because the area was an echo chamber surrounded by tall buildings. One of the bullets hit JFK in the back of the neck and exited his throat before wounding the Governor in the back, chest, wrist and leg. JFK did not fall across the backseat because the stiff back brace kept his torso upright. The second hit the President in the back of the head and blew away the right side of his skull. Covered with his blood Mrs. Kennedy seemed ready to leap out of the car when a Secret Service Agent pushed her down and reached the President a fraction too late after having the presence of mind to leap from the running board of the follow up car and dash toward the limousine. He beat his fist on the trunk in frustration. Kennedy was rushed to Parkland Hospital but died in the emergency room of his massive fatal head wounds despite the best efforts of the doctors to save him. Despite a fist size hole in the right side of his chest Governor Connally would survive his wounds.

The rest of the tragic story has entered American mythology – the flag draped coffin borne on a gun carriage to Arlington cemetery, the Irish Cadets at his grave side, the salute of John Jnr., the dignity of his widow and the eternal flame over his grave. The playboy President was transformed into a liberal martyr and the American people felt like they had been robbed of a leader who promised so much. Almost immediately the focus was on a sinister assassination plot by unseen forces.

Lee Harvey Oswald, 24, the alleged assassin was an unusual character to say the least. Born in New Orleans in 1939 he had experienced a chaotic childhood as his mother went through a string of disastrous relationships following the death of his father which meant he was attended dozens of schools and played truant as they trekked across the country. He was a sensitive child who failed to make friends and lived under his overbearing mother’s thumb. As child he was often picked upon and when assessed was found to be He flirted with communist beliefs in order to get attention and court controversy until he followed his older brother into the U.S. Marine Corps in 1956. His service was dishonourable, he responded poorly to military discipline and in one incident shot himself with an unauthorised firearm. He spent much of his stint in Japan as a radar operator but it is believed that he mixed with local communists and prostitutes while on leave. He made few friends in the Marines and got the nickname “Ozzy Rabbit” because of his wiry physique and was derided for his relatively poor rifle performance. He is rumoured that a fellow Marine who was found dead of a self-inflicted gunshot wound may have been murdered by the violent tempered private who once got in another incident got in a fight with a sergeant. There were also suspicions among his fellow Marines that Oswald was a homosexual.

Following his discharge sickened by materialistic capitalist society and having taught himself rudimentary Russian he travelled to Moscow in 1959 using his meagre savings under the guise of a tourist but pretended to attempt suicide by cutting his arm in order to seek asylum. He apparently hoped to rise to the top of the Communist Party and become a major leader of the utopian Soviet society. The ploy worked but he was soon put to work in a radio plant in Minsk while under constant secret surveillance by the KGB in a bugged apartment. He was quickly bored by his meagre position, a lazy worker spending much of his free time going to the cinema or attending dances where he met a Russian girl named Marina Prusakova, a pharmacist whose stepfather was a low ranking officer in the KGB. His Russian friends were attracted to him especially women because he was a novelty in their otherwise drab lives under communism and told them tales of the better living conditions in America but they soon grew tired of his egoism. He began the tortuous bureaucratic process of leaving the Soviet Union and returning to the United States before he met his wife with whom he had a baby daughter prior to his disillusioned return to the States in 1962. He was interrogated by the FBI and a file was kept on his activities. The FBI suspected that the Marina, pregnant again with another girl, was in fact a Soviet agent.

His wife readily took to American capitalist society and soon the issue of Oswald’s unemployment create a rift between the couple and Oswald regularly beat her during heated rows. Oswald drifted between menial jobs having no high school diploma or college education though he was widely read and always took the opportunity to lecture anyone who would listen about his communist views. Oswald purchased a rifle and revolver in March 1963 using an assumed name, Alek Hidell, while he took to carrying a fake ID under the same name and had his wife take pictures of him dressed in black posing with the weapons in the backyard of one of their rented homes as a self-styled fighter of fascists. Oswald was stalking the former General Edwin Walker a closet homosexual and outspoken member of right wing organizations who had resigned from the U.S. Army after he distributed John Birch Society literature to his troops. On the night of April 10, 1963 a bullet fired through the window of his home missed his head by inches and struck a wall. The mangled bullet would later be matched to Oswald’s rifle and the bullets that were recovered following the JFK killing. Oswald told his wife about his action but she did not go to the police.
Oswald moved to New Orleans where he got another menial job and rented a small office where he produced pro-Castro leaflets that he distributed on the streets. In May of 1963, he had tried to infiltrate an anti-Castro group and when he was recognised on the street there was a violent altercation. Oswald was later interviewed, participated in a debate over Cuba on local radio and was confronted over his politics and activities in Russia and filmed on local television but then received no further publicity. The FBI continued to monitor his activities.

Marina returned to Dallas where she lived with Ruth Paine, a left leaning Quaker who sympathised with her plight and her failing marriage to Oswald. Oswald meanwhile visited the Cuban embassy in Mexico City where he tried to get a Cuban visa. There was a heated row when Oswald was refused and he was thrown into the street.

In October Oswald moved to Dallas and Ruth Paine got him a job at the Texas School Book Depository through a friend. Oswald lived apart from his wife in a rooming house under an assumed name but visited his wife and their two girls at the weekends. When his wife discovered that he was living under an assumed name there were more arguments. The FBI knew that Oswald was living in Dallas in October of 1963 during the planning of Kennedy’s trip to the city and the planned route was published in local papers as early as November 16. The house in the suburb of Irving where Marina lived with Mrs. Paine was used to store Oswald’s belongings including his rifle which was wrapped in a blanket in the garage. On Thursday 21st November 1963, Oswald asked a co-worker, Buell Wesley Frazier, for a ride to Irving to pick up some “curtain rods” and on Friday morning having spent the previous night with his wife left his wedding ring and $170 behind and he got a ride to work from Frazier with a long brown paper package. Oswald hurried into the Depository and Frazier did not see him again. Oswald was last seen working with a clipboard on the sixth floor of the building where other co-workers had been working to replacing flooring. They went down to the street to watch the motorcade leaving the quiet unsociable Oswald on his own as usual.

Prior the arrival of the motorcade a young man was seen in the sixth floor corner window with a rifle but was assumed to be a Secret Service agent and nearby police officers were not notified by the unsuspecting eye witnesses. As the motorcade passed through Dealey Plaza the man with the rifle was seen shooting at the limousine before disappearing from the window. Immediately following the assassination motorcycle police officer Marion Baker entered the building and with the supervisor Roy Truly hurried to the roof where he had seen a flock of pigeons rising into the air. On the second floor he saw a figure walking into the lunchroom through the glass window in a vestibule doorway. He confronted the man with his pistol but Truly explained that the man was Lee Harvey Oswald. The two men rushed upstairs while Oswald bought a coke from the vending machine and headed downstairs and strolled out of the building just before it was surrounded by a cordon of police officers.

Some witnesses believed that there was another shooter on a grassy knoll dotted with trees to the right of Elm behind a picket fence that cordoned off the car lot of the rail yard near the railroad span. A police officer dropped his motorcycle and ran up the slope but found nothing. A black couple who had been standing near a retaining wall next to an ornamental colonnade are said to have been eating lunch on a bench and may have dropped a coke bottle as the motorcade passed and the shooting began. Abraham Zapruder who filmed the motorcade and captured the gruesome murder of the President was standing only metres away from the location where years later conspiracy theorists claimed an assassin with another rifle had been hiding and yet did not report seeing anyone or catch any image of a second gunman on film. Other motion pictures of the assassination that captured the knoll during the assassination show nothing but grainy blurry shapes that have only a tenuous resemblance to human beings but are proof enough for believers in a conspiracy, some of whom claimed they can see a police officer with rifle.

He was next seen frantically boarding a bus on Elm Street a few blocks from the TSBD. A former landlady recognised him and as the bus got caught in the massive traffic jam caused by the assassination he fled and got a cab. The taxi took him to within a few blocks of his rooming house where he got out. Oswald arrived at the rooming house minutes later went to his room and emerged again zipping up his jacket before immediately leaving ignoring his current landlady who was watching the events unfold on live television.

Meanwhile description of the man with the rifle in the TSBD gather from witnesses to the assassination at the scene in Dealey Plaza was broadcast on the police radio net. A few minutes later Officer J.D. Tippet was shot dead by a man fitting the description of the Dealey Plaza assassin who opened fire when the officer got out of his car to talk to him. The shooting happened only a few blocks from Oswald’s rooming house. A fanciful theory that Tippet was in fact the second gunman, the so-called “badgeman,” and ironically was himself eliminated during his mission to eliminate the “patsy” later emerged as the official version was questioned over the years.

Later a zipper jacket was found in a car lot nearby as the police and vigilante civilians pursued the suspect.

A shoe salesman at the store not far from the second fatal shooting recognised the man who hid in the porch of his premises with his back to the street as a police car performed a u-turn and headed in the opposite direction. The man had visited the shop before November 22 and he also fitted the description of the man which was now broadcast on local radio. The man walked away and entered a nearby cinema, The Texas Theatre which he entered without paying for a ticket. The salesman talked to the teller and decided to call the police.

Scores of police officers arrived from all directions at the cinema and when the houselights went up Oswald was arrested after scuffle during which he tried to open fire with a revolver. As he was led out of the theatre a large mob had gathered who screamed for the suspect to be lynched. The revolver and the ammunition in his pockets were later matched to the bullets removed from Tippet’s body. Oswald was taken to police headquarters and fingerprinted and interrogated. The police station was soon crowded with reporters and newsmen and TV crews and would remain so for the next two days. Oswald was identified as the assassin of Tippet and the assassin of JFK by witnesses who were undergoing questioning at the station. Meanwhile the rifle and three spent hulls had been found in the 6th floor of the TSBD along with some brown wrapping paper found in a nest of boxes stacked around the corner window. Negatives were found during a search of the house at Irving of the original backyard photographs which Marina had burned as soon as she realised Oswald may have been involved. The photos proved that Oswald did own the rifle and revolver. Analysis of the rifle uncovered Oswald’s fingerprints and fibres of his shirt were found between the butt plate and the wooden stock. His fingerprints were also found on the stack of boxes around the window. Dallas Police soon had enough evidence to formally charge Oswald with the murder of the President and Tippet though he continued to deny his obvious guilt and claimed he was a “patsy” to international press who were crammed in the hallways of the station.

Among the throng was Jacob Rubenstein, a Jewish strip-club owner originally from Chicago, who went by the name Jack Ruby who offered refreshments to cops and reporters and acted as a go between for hacks who were trying to get the latest scoop. At a brief press conference where Oswald was brought out in front to the media Ruby was in attendance. Oswald again arrogantly denied his guilt before being brought back to his cell, claiming he was being mistreated and demanding that a member of the ACLU as his legal representation. After repeated interrogations and visits from Marina, his mother and his perplexed brother Robert he still denied his guilt.

Disgusted by Oswald, Jack Ruby deeply upset by the assassination and behaving more eractically than usual ranted at anyone who would listen about his fears that Oswald might beat the rap and that Jacqueline Kennedy would be forced to testify that the murder trial. Police later found the local paper in Ruby’s room above his strip club open on a page that printed the emotional letter of a family man who was distressed by the death of the President. Jack Ruby, a volatile and psychotic individual with underworld connections seems to have gone over the edge with grief, rage and paranoia over the advert in the Dallas Morning News which he feared was financed by Jews. He was across the street wiring money to a stripper who was short of cash when the transfer of the prisoner was about to commence in the basement of Dallas Police Headquarters.

The Dallas Police had received death threats against Oswald from unknown persons the night before his transfer to the Dallas County Jail. On the morning of the 24th November Oswald was brought down in to the underground car lot by elevator handcuffed to police officers and was only feet away from the police car in front of photographers and newsmen when he was shot and killed by Jack Ruby live on television. Ruby had managed to slip past the single officer at the top of the ramp and arrived at the line of men near the car when the prisoner emerged with his police bodyguards. Ruby was wrestled to the floor and disarmed of his revolver while Oswald was taken to Parkland Hospital where he died in the trauma room next door the room the President had died. The massive internal bleeding in the abdomen due to the point blank gunshot was too much for the doctors and the patient was soon pronounced dead.

The bizarre background and chaotic life of Oswald and the equally murky past of Ruby soon convinced millions that there had to be a plot of some kind. The beloved President could not have meet his end in such as an unseemly fashion at the hands of an incompetent nobody like Oswald. He was too much of a saint, too perfect to have died in banal circumstances. In the decades since as the mythology grew around the case, Oswald became a CIA agent, a patsy for the Mafia, an agent of Fidel Castro or anti-Castro forces, a Manchurian candidate and much more as the Vietnam conflict escalated under the Johnson administration, a man who was to become almost an American Macbeth who Oliver Stone, once a young idealist who was broken psychologically by the horror of Vietnam, would later accuse of direct complicity in the death of his predecessor.

After the death of Kennedy it seemed that everything was going wrong.

Vietnam, Watergate, the race riots, the cultural chasm between young and old, rich and poor, the collapse of traditional family values and the explosion of drug culture and sexual license among an angry disillusioned generation of baby boomers who should have inherited the American Dream that the “greatest generation” including Kennedy had sacrificed so much for and the rise of nihilistic violence by Manson, the Weathermen, the slaughter at My Lai, the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy himself who seemed to be the last of idealistic liberals left after the end of the war. All the problems seemed to have burst to the surface following the death of Kennedy when the hopes and dreams of millions of the young who had been brought up to believe in a safe rational world were shattered.

The legacy of Kennedy is the false hopes that have emerged again and again – the hopeful détente period of Ford and Carter following the shambolic end of Nixon and Vietnam was it itself to end in the humiliating embarrassment of the American hostages in Teheran when American power seemed in be in terminal decline, the Reagan revolution that ended with the sordid Contra affair, the Bush administration that saw the end of the Cold War, the restoration of pride in American arms with the "liberation" of Kuwait only for recession to hit and ruin the party. The Clinton era was soiled by sexual sleaze and scandal that might have been replicated in Kennedy’s second term had he lived. The false peace of the 1990’s was the prequel to horror of 9/11 and the fiasco of the Iraq War which ruined the neo-con dream of an Christian American hyperpower.

The election of Obama, a man with the Kennedy panache and oratorical skill, promises to return America to the imagined glory days.

If Americans feel good about their leaders they feel good about themselves.

Kennedy was no saint but the real Kennedy, a cynical manipulative self-centred politician no longer exists. Instead the lost hero, the slain Arthur, the mourned Pericles of the Golden Age of Athens has replaced him, struck down because he was too good for the world and immortalised by an eternal flame.

A man who does not exist, a man who is but a dream.