31. A Loss of Trust--the Assassination of JFK

November 26, 2021

Ten Factors that make us who we are:  1, the economy (use of the government); 2, sex and the pill; 3, science (acquired a central focus); 4, war (more of it); 5, climate (burning up the planet); 6, organized religion. (deception); 7, cosmos ();  8, gender redefinition (the blurring of male-female);  9, race (importance in history);  10, trust (actually, loss of it).

The tenth factor, Loss of Trust,  is the subject of this essay.  Kennedy as a person to revere.  Various facts and theories about the assassination.

PHF Progress:  1, fixing two wells in Pezoan;  2, David sent 2,000 bars.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Hello, this is Tom Newhouse. I am uh this is my 31st podcast, which is entitled A Loss of Trust, The Story of the Assassination of JFK. As a baby boomer, I don't relish living in the shadow of the greatest generation. After all, they survived the Great Depression, fought in World War II, and made the U.S. economy into a powerhouse, the likes of which had never been seen before. What did we baby boomers do? We fought a useless war based on a lie, the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution. We forgot about any lessons learned from that war and went on to fight two more wars, both based on lies and both costing more than five trillion dollars. Then we converted our economy into an oligarchical state where three white men now own more than half of the rest of owned by the American population. So generationally speaking, I'm not feeling too proud about our accomplishments. But as baby boomers, there's more to us than meets the eye. In today's podcast, I start by laying out ten factors that make us who we are, and then I spend the rest of the podcast focusing on the tenth factor. I hope you enjoy the ride. Well, the first factor that I have identified is called the is the economy. Unlike our parents, our youth was not overshadowed by the Great Depression. This means we started out more optimistic than pessimistic. When Judy Garland sang Somewhere Over the Rainbow to our parents, who had forked over a nickel to sit in the theater, they reacted more wistfully, hoping the words would one day come true. When we heard that song on our televisions, usually around Thanksgiving, we just thought it was a cute song. We reacted less wistfully and more with an entitled optimism. And we have economists to thank for this. Whether they are neoliberals or Keynesians, most economists agree that the government rightfully has a role to play in maintaining the economic ship of state on a safe trajectory. Every once in a while, a George W. Bush or a Donald J. Trump imperils the economic ship in favor of enriching their friends. But basically, we've learned our lesson. The government has a role to play. Factor number two, sex. We grew up with the pill, and thanks to science, we understand hormones associated with human sexuality. This means that drugs could be developed so that one amorous night would not lead to a lifetime of regrets after a shotgun wedding. The pill made it possible to dabble in sex without tying the knot, and as a result, we became frank thinkers and frank speakers about all matters sexual as we were less afraid of sex and felt free to discuss it. Factor three, science. Thanks to the Russian Sputnik, science in the United States acquired a central focus in our lives. We landed on the Moon and saw the Earth from 180,000 miles up. Advances in physics shook our concepts about space and time. We accept now the fact that we are part of a continuing explosion that started 14 billion years ago and will continue for another five. Advances in biochemistry made us question the very concept of free will. How can our actions be free when a little serotonin completely changes how you think and how you behave? Advances in medicine mean that more of us are living longer, replacing or rebuilding various joints in our bodies, like yours truly. War. With regards to basic bellicosity, we are no different from previous generations of humans and all species Homo. We continue to invade and or bomb willy-nilly. However, the development of ballistic and tactical nuclear weapons means that one day the sirens may sound and that within 30 minutes mushroom clouds will appear, heralding Armageddon and the utter annihilation of humanity. Despite such a terrifying prospect, we continue to threaten our neighbors while investing in our quote unquote defense budgets and short shrifting basic education for our children. Climate In the 1980s, when we were in our thirties, it began to dawn on us, at least some of us, that we are the Earth's worst enemy. We are burning up the planet and we are only thinking of ourselves and the economy. We are just as narrow minded as when we were knucklewalkers a million years ago. Factor six, organized religion. We discovered that mainstream religion and its leaders have deceived us over the years. As a result, organized religion has lost credibility and many of us are going back to spiritual behaviors reminiscent of our primate ancestors. Factor seven Cosmos Thanks to the Hubble Space Telescope and to NASA, we know that somewhere in the Kuiper belt there's an asteroid with our name on it. In other words, we can't continue to pretend that the Earth is a safe place to live. Elon Musk would have said that. Factor eight gender redefinition Starting in the nineteen sixties, men began to view women as more than mere objects of sexual desire. The classical notion of sexuality defined as male-female got blurred, and new categories of genders such as bisexual and homosexual have become common. Right now, our Secretary of Transportation is on paternity leave after adopting two children with his same sex partner. Factor nine, race. We began the 50s with great discomfort, particularly among whites with people of other racial and ethnic backgrounds. Pioneers such as Sammy Davis Jr. and Mae Britt showed the path to the future, but it took many decades for progress to become evident. Only a few years ago, the need for further progress was highlighted by the murder of George Floyd and the subsequent Black Lives Matter demonstrations. And with factor nine, race, we seem to have taken a giant leap backwards lately. A majority of states now have introduced legislation to prevent teaching our children about how race has factored in American history. This is known as critical race theory. And many race and many states have passed legislation to prevent equal access to the polls, ensuring white dominance in future elections. In more than one way, we are going backwards on race. Factor 10. Trust. Last and certainly not least is trust, or actually loss of trust. The debate over what reality is and about whether we can trust others with whom we do not agree is highlighted by one event, the assassination of JFK on November 22, 1963. Since that date, over 60% of Americans continue to believe that there was more than one assassin, that the event was a planned event, not a spur-of-the-moment action by a disaffected young man, and that the government has consistently misrepresented the facts. Charles Eisenstein, in his essay, The America That Almost Was and Yet May Be, wrote, It, that is, the government's obfuscation, is like a radioactive pellet lodged inside the body politic, generating an endlessly metastasizing cancer that no one has been able to trace to its source. And that cancer has led to today, when an entire political party will not recognize the truth about the last election, and where that political party's elected officials sworn to uphold the Constitution have broken their oaths. How do you cure cancer? If you do nothing, cancer becomes fatal. The patient, in our case, us, may be close to dying of a heart attack brought on by 58 years of not telling the truth about the assassination. Until we recognize the truth, the body politic dies a slow and inexorable death. So here we are, shortly before Thanksgiving, when we normally give thanks for what we have been given. It's also the time around when Kennedy was shot. And we simply cannot, we still cannot trust each other. And the majority of us still believe that elements of our government continue to lie to us. Speaking personally, I have a powerful flashball memory etched somewhere in my cerebellum of a social science studies classroom located on the ground floor of the South Lake Junior High Building and of our class teacher announcing Kennedy's death. I do not remember whether she was crying, but I'm sure she was. St. Clair Shores, Michigan, where we lived, was a working class, is a working class suburb of Detroit. It's predominantly Catholic, so Kennedy was revered. But you didn't have to be Catholic to honor him. There were lots of people of all religions and no religion who appreciated him as a human being, even if they didn't agree with his principles. You'd have to be the emotional equivalent of a wooden stick to not appreciate his immortal words. Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country. So fifty-eight years have passed. For most of those years, I have not thought about how Kennedy died, and until just days ago, I willfully preferred ignorance over knowing the difference between the lone assassin theory and the myriad conspiracy theories. But with my continuing convalescence, waiting for my right knee to heal, I have allocated time to learning things of which I had chosen to be ignorant. After reading a book and watching dozens of lectures on YouTube, I have developed my own personal opinions about the episode. Here is a list of newly acquired facts that I have added to a rather large spot in my cerebellum, probably 10 million neurons. Despite this, I still remain torn about whether it was a lone government or a conspiracy. But the fact that the government has not been forthcoming continues to full to fuel the multitude of conspiracy theories. Here are some intriguing facts of which I was unaware. The trip to Texas started in Houston, then went to San Antonio and from there to Fort Worth, Dallas, and finally Austin, where there was a huge fundraiser all set up and waiting. With this trip, Kennedy hoped to get lots of exposure to Texans who were by and large Democrats, and to fend mens uh fence and to mend fences uh within the party because it was split into two subparties, the conservative wing led by Governor Connolly, and the liberal wing led by Senator Yarborough. Kennedy's idea was that a big show, uh flashy show with lots of people, would unite the two factions and earn a lot of goodwill. And it was a very good strategy and it was working very well. And people were just giddy with happiness over how well this trip was turning out. Because Kennedy was incredibly charming and his wife was incredibly beautiful. And also she was not just beautiful, but she was um very well spoken, very highly educated. Um, it was just all superlatives. Um, part of his strategy was to travel slowly through the downtowns, showing off his elegant wife. Um, and also uh he made sure that there were no Secret Service agents standing on the running boards of the car. Of course, that would not have stopped any bullets. Everyone was in a good mood. Fort Worth was the center of the liberal wing of the party, and the Kennedys left Fort Worth in a very good mood and took a very short plane ride to uh to Dallas. Uh Jackie, who had just lost a child and had been sad for months, was really beginning to come out of her uh depression and she was being really enjoying herself on this trip. The people were so lovely, so enthusiastic. They were just um uh it was all such a high. Um, the the people who were standing next to the roads were so happy. Uh jubilant is the word for it. Um, and the same was true as they uh when they arrived in Dallas. They had uh, even though there were a lot of far, far right people, a lot of Republicans and a and even farther right than uh the conservative Democrats, and even the Republicans in Dallas, nonetheless, uh the feeling of goodwill was palpable. Um, but unfortunately, this seemed to transfer to security, and the city of Dallas did a pretty lousy job of uh of security, and so did the CI, the FBI, and the Secret Service apparently did fairly well, but the FBI did not do a very good job, and nobody checked out the buildings along the way. There were a lot of things that people didn't do that normally they should have done. It was almost as if you could make no mistakes. But then two other major events of our lifetimes, 9-11 and 1-6, were also characterized by sloppiness on the part of local and federal authorities. In fact, after these three major preventable events, one has to conclude that Americans are just plain lazy when it comes to dotting the I's and crossing the T's. The Warren Commission was severely hampered. First, LBJ wanted the process to be short and swift because there was an election coming. At first, he sent someone to Girl Warren, uh Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, to request uh that he oversee the commission. Warren ignored the request because he was still grieving, having been a very close friend of JFK. He did not relish the notion of sifting through minute details of the assassination day after day for a better part of a year, adding fuel to his internal grief. So, right off the bat, Earl Warren was not motivated to do a good job. In addition, for some unknown reason, Warren added Alan Dulles as a member of the committee. This was a big slap to uh the liberal wing of the Democratic Party, and of course to now dead Kennedy, because Dulles had been fired by Kennedy over the Bay of Pigs fiasco, and Dulles and Kennedy did not see eye to eye. Dulles was a cold warrior par excellence and was very much into nuclear war and were working with generals to plan out nuclear wars. And Kennedy represented a new way of thinking that actually we as humans could actually survive and not kill each other off. And maybe we could explore ways to working with our enemies. Kennedy was looking into a rapprochement with the Soviets, and Khrushchev knew that. The fact that both the CIA and FBI withhold held very important information was no coincidence. It's what Dulles would have wanted. Dulles was on the committee and uh the FBI and CIA withheld tremendous amounts of information from the Warren Commission. So the Fox was definitely inside the hen house. Another impediment to running the commission was what LBJ said to Earl Warren. When Warren ignored his request, LBJ sent the courier, as I mentioned. And Warren dropped everything and went immediately to the White House, which was highly irregular. There, because he's the head of the third branch of government and he has to drop everything because of the first branch of government. So there, uh once he arrived, LBJ said to Warren that he could not turn down this assignment because there was a good chance of nuclear war erupting if the involvement of Russia and Cuba in the assassination were to leak out. Since it had been recently established that 40 million Americans would soon die instantly in a nuclear Holocaust, LBJ asked Warren whether he wanted the blood of those 40 million on his hands. And LBJ wrote later that Warren left the White House crying. Years after the Warren Commission had completed its work, a copy of a letter written by J. Edgar Hoover detailing the fact that Lee Harvey Oswald had flown to Mexico City back in September, only two months before that, and had met with a number of Soviet and Cuban officials regarding his possible defection to Cuba. According to the one-shooter hypothesis, Oswald was not a particularly talented person, but he was a narcissist convinced of his own specialness, similar to Trump. And he was convinced that his name had to go down in history. Several sources, including the Hoover letter, have stated that he was even talking about assassinating Kennedy in September. The one-shooter folks like to point out Oswald's numerous weaknesses, his narcissism, being a loner. But there are so many unanswered questions. His mother says he was employed by the CIA, which uh the CIA denies. And yet he spoke good Russian, and that probably couldn't have happened if he hadn't been CIA trained, because he didn't have the time. He left Japan in his assignment in Japan and defected to the Soviet Union right away. So he had to have prepared for his stint because how where did he when did he learn the Russian? And then when he was trying to repatriate from the Soviet Union, the State Department loaned him money and got him a passport within 24 hours so he could come back to the United States with his new Russian wife, his Soviet wife. Um, who who else would that ever happen to? And why did that happen to him? The conspiracy folks maintain that the CIA um was uh using him as a um as a patsy, as he said, as somebody who was going to uh who was a fake defector and was uh doing work for the CIA. It's an undisputed fact that Oswald attempted to murder General Walker, a person of extreme right philosophy, uh in the spring, uh uh a few months uh before in the spring of 1963. And that makes sense because if you're a one-shooter believer, then um you could understand how he would shoot someone that he disagrees with. But what about Kennedy? Oswald believed in civil rights and is known to have spoken admiringly of Kennedy and his attempts to improve civil rights in the United States. Also, what about the rapprochement with uh between uh Kennedy and Christoph and Castro? Oswald would have liked that. He would have appreciated that. So why would Oswald attempt to assassinate Kennedy who was doing something that he admired? Regarding the issues around Kennedy's wounds and the bullet holes, there was very pure doc poor documentation of Kennedy's wounds, and as a result, there was uncertainty about whether the bullets came from behind, uh, that is the Texas School Book Depository, or from ahead, the grassy knoll. In fact, the original autopsy and notes were burnt by the Naval Medical Examiner in Annapolis, Maryland, in his home fireplace. He didn't like the blood splashes on the documents. Talk about a litany of errors and inappropriate conduct. Anyway, the lack of good data regarding entry and exit wounds has spawned an enormous conspiracy industry. And after 58 years, people still aren't quite sure whether Oswald acted alone. Something that really adds to the notion of conspiracy has been the murder of Oswald by Ruby. Ruby was a nightclub owner who was well known by the police and politicians, as nightclubs with scantily clad dancers tend to attract our civil servants during their off hours and their on hours. Ruby's actual name was Rubinstein. He grew up in Chicago in a poor family and had to fend for himself on the street, including working with the gangster elements. So he was a sketchy person. But he had a knack like so many in organized crime, and made himself seem clean when he was in fact dirty as sin. There are two fundamentally different ways of looking at Jack Ruby. The people who knew him well, such as the police, thought of him as a Peter Pettigrew type figure, the character in Harry Potter who always Always wanted to be somebody, but in the end allied himself with El Capo, Dei Capi, Lord Voldemort. Jack Ruby was someone who always wanted to be in the limelight to absorb some of the vibes from the more successful people. And this version of Jack Ruby portrays him as someone who wants to be in the center. And that's why he was at the police station the day Oswald was admitted. He was very upset that JFK, his president, had been murdered. The day he killed Oswald, Ruby actually helped newsmen gain access to the garage where Oswald was being transferred to a waiting vehicle. So this vision of Ruby, the one shooter hypothesis, sees him as recruiting emotionally, pulling the trigger as a spur-of-the-moment behavior. And of course, he would have had a gun on himself at all times because any gangster worth his salt was always prepared. Now, along the conspiratorial side, um, another that's the second way of viewing Jack Ruby as a lower-level mafiosi connected to the Carlos Marcello crime syndicate based in New Orleans, but which extended all the way to Dallas. Jack Ruby probably had to pay the syndicate regularly just for his nightclub carousel to exist. If the CIA mafia conspiracy is true, Marcello was already known as an important CIA collaborator, as he, the CIA, and several other mobsters were employed by the CIA to assassinate Fidel Castro. In fact, that very day, that fateful day in November, there was an unsuccessful CIA attempt on Castro's life using a poisoned ballpoint pen. But that was just one of many attempts, all of which are still unacknowledged by the CIA, which surely will never release details of its multiple assassination campaigns. One very intriguing connection to the CIA mafia collaboration is the death of Dorothy Kilgallen two years after the assassination. She was a highly successful investigative journalist and writer. Ernest Hemingway called her the greatest female writer alive. She was also a panelist on What's My Line? Probably the most intellectual and squeaky clean game show in the history of TV. Everyone watched it, including my parents, who were downright puritanical when it came to any reference to sexuality. Dorothy Kilgallen was charming, well dressed, and an extremely capable communicator. She crafted her questions and always outshone the other three panelists with her quietly brilliant rationalizations. One day in 1965, just a few hours after filming yet another episode of What's My Line, Dorothy Kilgallen died, purportedly of a drug and alcohol overdose. In the months before that evening, Ms. Kilgallen had interviewed Jack Ruby twice during his trial. She had also visited New Orleans because she was convinced that the mobster Carlos Marcello was involved in the Kennedy assassination and that Ruby was working for this for Marcello. Author Mark Shaw wrote a book about Dorothy's mysterious death called The Reporter Who Knew Too Much. Mr. Shaw posits that the Kennedy patriarch Joe Kennedy owed Marcello for help during the 1960 election, but that his two sons, Jack and Robert, were instead of uh remunerating or awarding rewarding Marcello, were actually trying to prosecute him, uh trying to rid American society as part of a campaign to rid American society of the mafia. And Jack also felt that he wanted to get rid of the CIA, although that probably is impossible. Robert was JFK's attorney general, and he didn't twiddle his thumb, so he was very much involved in getting rid of the mafia. Anyway, on that fateful day in 1965, when Dorothy Kilgallen was getting close to publishing her book about the Marcello connection to the Kennedy assassination, she was found dead in her apartment in Manhattan. The Manhattan police requested that the Brooklyn police do the autopsy. Apparently the Brooklyn police were mafia-controlled, and so it was their bailiwick. Um so they did the uh right sort of autopsy, which was finding that Dorothy Kilgallen had killed herself of alcohol and barbiturates. Sort of like um that beautiful woman, uh Marilyn Monroe, who was a girlfriend of JFK, uh, and suddenly died of alcohol and barbiturates. Anyway, Kilgallen was found in bed, in a bed that she never used, wearing a hairpiece and street clothing. Uh so that means she never went to sleep, she never got undressed, holding a book that she didn't even like. And her notes about Ruby and Marcella were nowhere to be found. Furthermore, only a few weeks later her secretary uh mysteriously dies, and her notes have disappeared. At the funeral to Dorothy Kilgallen, there were 10,000 people. None of her friends and family ever came forward to complain about the irregularity of the whole thing. Uh, if you're a believer in conspiracies, you would probably say that they were all afraid. Well, with evidence like this, how can you not believe that the JFK assassination was far more than one disillusioned young man who got lucky with a cheap gun and managed to get off three shots in six seconds with two of the shots actually finding their marks? And so I close today's podcast with a statement there might be nine other factors that characterize our generation, the baby boomer generation, but disillusionment brought on by loss of trust is really the story to end all stories. And November 22nd, 1963 has become a bellwether of so many more disillusionments. Well, that's the end of podcast number 31. Just a note on the progress of Project Hope and Fairness. We fixed two wells in the village of Pesuan a couple weeks ago. Now they don't have to drink muddy water out of shallow holes. The water in the old wells that now have uh electric pumps is clear and clean. Um, in the village of Depa, David Logbo Zigro has just finished um making 2,000 chocolate bars, and he has just dropped them off today at the DHL office in Abidjan. Um you can already buy bittersweet and milk chocolate bars uh for$2.50 each. Uh they make great stocking stuffers. Just contact me if you want to buy some at TWNEUHAUS at gmail.com. Twnewhouse at gmail.com. Well, looking forward to hearing from you and uh I'll talk to you soon. Bye.