The AARC presents a new series of lectures commemorating and honoring the legacy of President Kennedy, the inspirational meaning of his term of office, and the consequences of his assassination sixty-one years ago.
In the words of the distinguished British scholar Malcolm Blunt, “Jesus Christ, what we lost when we lost that man.”
Autumn Too Long: Observations in a Time of Fading Light
by Charles R. Drago
a wind has blown the rain away and blown
the sky away and all the leaves away,
and the trees stand. I think i too have known
autumn too long
— e. e. cummings
Submitted for your approval…
Envision a flickering television screen:
FADE IN
EXT. LIMBO – NIGHT
WILL TANNER, early forties, passes warily through a waterlogged curtain of fog and its fifty-one shades of gray. He is drawn toward distorted voices. As in most dreams, colors are dull, point-of-view perspective comes and goes absent apparent reason. The terrain is surreal, figures with bloody wounds materialize along Will’s route, wave like spectral Windsors at a parade, then dissolve into the enveloping mist.
Will is dressed entirely in black – turtleneck sweater, pants, athletic shoes. Strapped onto his torso is a black shoulder holster in which a pistol is visible. As the curtain slowly parts, Will begins to make out, just a few feet away and square on its mark, the outline of a short human figure holding a rifle.
Will approaches and sees not a living person, but a four-foot-tall cut-out of Lee Harvey Oswald lifted from one of the infamous “backyard” photos. Hanging from its neck is a sign that reads, “YOU MUST BE TALL AS LEE TO RIDE.”
Will passes the cut-out as the sound resolves into children’s excited laughter. The air clears. He steps up to a chain link fence. Within its confines is an amusement park ride. Scaled down models of the Lincoln limousine in which President John F. Kennedy was assassinated move along twin tracks. In each car there are two rows of two seats. Two children are in each of the first two rows. The rear bench seat is occupied by metal figures of JFK and Jacqueline Kennedy as they appeared in Dallas on November 22, 1963.
The cars move past Animatronic statues of waving motorcade onlookers. The children wave back. As the cars pass beneath a two- dimensional mock-up of the Texas School Book Depository, Oswald’s face and a rifle barrel emerge from the sixth-floor “sniper’s” window. Loud blanks are discharged.
The metal presidential heads, set on hinges, snap forward, then automatically pop back. The children are laughing. Will, now dressed impeccably in a gray Saville Row business suit, raises his eyes to the Oswald window. Again and again the face of the Dallas patsy emerges.
Finally the face is not Oswald’s. It is Will’s.
*********
Have all of our labors and sacrifices come to this? Reducing the study of the assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy to the equivalent of an amusement park ride for eternal adolescents? Should it be our faces that appear in the window?
The opening dream sequence from Episode One of my limited series Autumn Too Long purposefully poses more questions than it can possibly answer. We shall address at least a few of them now.
In order to begin honorably with a set of my own First Principles that inform this essay, I am obliged to pay homage to “Meditations,” that most profound and durable work of Marcus Aurelius. In it he offered this First Principle: “Of each particular thing, ask: What is it in itself, in its own constitution? What is its causal nature?” For nearly 30 years, alone and in the company of souls great and small, I’ve attempted to answer those questions as they pertain to the long solved/unsolved murder of John Fitzgerald Kennedy. Thus I offer the following:
Anyone with unfettered access to the evidence in this case who does not conclude to the degree of metaphysical certitude — “infallible assent to a proposition recognized as necessarily true” — that President Kennedy was assassinated by criminal conspirators is cognitively impaired and/or complicit in the crime.
And this:
Our goals as radical historians now must be to define and effect justice for President Kennedy and the untold millions, past, present and future, collaterally damaged by his assassins.
And this:
To attain these goals, we must abandon regurgitation and instead commit to cogitation — abandon all efforts to re-investigate long-explained phenomena and then declare established truth with an air of discovery.
And finally this:
We are at war with President Kennedy’s assassins, we have yet to return the fire from Dealey Plaza with lethal accuracy, and those who choose to seek profit from promoting what they know we already know open themselves to characterization as war profiteers.
How can we explain the insistence of a vast majority of celebrated Kennedy assassination researchers upon endlessly planning a route without having identified a destination? What is their end game? What are they after? Why do they bother?
This phenomenon hardly is restricted to our shared inquiries. Writing in The End of Science of what he perceives to be scientists’ fear of reaching for absolute answers, John Horgan notes: ” …after one arrives at The Answer, what then? There is a kind of horror in thinking that our sense of wonder might be extinguished, once and for all time, by our knowledge. What, then would be the purpose of existence? There would be none … Many scientists harbor a profound ambivalence concerning the notion of absolute truth. Like Roger Penrose, who could not decide whether his belief in a final theory was optimistic or pessimistic. Or Steven Weinberg, who equated comprehensibility with pointlessness. Or David Bohm, who was compelled both to clarify reality and obscure it. Or Edmund Wilson, who lusted after a final theory of human nature and was chilled by the thought that it might be attained. Or Freeman Dyson, who insisted that anxiety and doubt are essential to existence … ”
Maybe.
Or is it greed and/or ignorance driving the regurgitators?
A word may be in order concerning Keats’ currently fashionable Negative Capability ” quote, “of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts without irritable reaching after fact or reason.” End quote. The usefulness of this quality as a medium for the refinement of our investigative focus is defensible: so many possibilities, so little time. Yet it is the very discomfort of which the poet speaks that gives birth to the resolve required to overcome the bastards who would mire us in mystery. And since both “fact” and “reason” remain firmly within our reach, the adoption of Negative Capability as a defining principle for our efforts would be at least stupid, if not immoral. We have no right to the luxury of not knowing.
George Michael Evica
Let us leave behind, at least for a few blessed moments, those out-of-tune, regurgitating castrati. Permit me to re-introduce to all who truly seek to define and effect justice for President Kennedy my beloved friend, mentor, spiritual guide and now spirit guide, Professor George Michael Evica.
George Michael ascended 17 years ago, but always I refer to him in the present tense. George Michael is a polymath of the highest order. Among his areas of expertise which he discussed from classroom
and conference podiums as well as on the printed page and via electronic media are Myth and Ritual in Literature, Genre Studies in Literature, Literary Criticism, Consciousness Development and the Symbolic Process, Linguistics, Film Studies, Creative Writing, and Investigative Reporting. He pursued Advanced Studies in Linguistics and Anthropology at Columbia University and Advanced Studies in Myth and Literature at the Hartford Seminary Foundation. All of these disciplines and areas of inquiry and expertise — in the aggregate a furious storm of inspirational influences unsurpassed before or since — thoroughly inform his Kennedy-related endeavors.
Only the great knight errant Peter Dale Scott stands shoulder-to-shoulder with George Michael at the forefront of our battalion of Satyagrahi.
It is all but forgotten that George Michael organized and hosted the first national conference on the Kennedy assassination in October, 1975, at the University of Hartford. Jim Garrison was the keynote speaker, and he made certain to praise George Michael’s incomparable scholarship and absolute commitment to the searches for truth and justice.
George Michael is the first to understand the Kennedy assassination and other intelligence operations as by-design dramatic constructs, replete with all of the form’s essential elements.
James J. Angleton.
Evidence? Literati — storytellers — proliferate within the ranks of Kennedy assassination suspects. A most compelling example: While a Yale undergraduate, James Jesus Angleton edited the literary magazine Furioso. He carried on and published correspondence with Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, e.e. cummings, and T.S. Eliot, among other justly celebrated writers. At the risk of committing criminal understatement, I surmise that by the time Angleton assumed the duties of CIA Chief of Counterintelligence, he had become capable of exhibiting at least seven types of ambiguity.
Among other professional writers who, fairly or not, crowd the line-up of suspects are David Atlee Phillips, E. Howard Hunt, Edward Lansdale, and Clay Shaw.
Within A Certain Arrogance: The Sacrificing of Lee Harvey Oswald and the Cold War Manipulations of Religious Groups by U.S. Intelligence, his final book-length historical inquiry into the assassination and certain related pre- and post-event actions, George Michael supports and refines this assertion.
“Psychological manipulations of individual groups, whatever the procedures may have been called in the 18th and 19th centuries, drew upon discoveries in anatomy, mesmerism, hypnotism, counseling, studies in hysteria, rhetorical theory, psychoanalysis, advertising, behavior modification, and psychiatry. In the same periods, the literary forms of irony, satire, and comedy and the less reputable verbal arts of slander, libel, and manufactured lies were applied.”
Now, before we are tempted to argue that the harsh realities of war often require an honorable combatant to mimic, for a limited period and with noble intent, the darker designs of an evil foe, George Michael reminds us that, “Most of these genres and strategies were enlisted in the service of social, class, and political power.”
Haunting the pages of A Certain Arrogance is a revelation so menacing in its assaults on convention as to provoke a reflexive shielding of our eyes from its searing illumination. Yet George Michael could not spare us the psychic pain that is the unavoidable side effect of his radical scholarship insofar as such suffering remains the sine qua non for the eradication of the common malady we would treat.
Within the nucleus of the disease, George Michael discovers and reveals “a treasonous cabal of hard-line American and Soviet intelligence agents whose masters were above Cold War differences.”
Combined with lessons taken from my own decades of study, George Michael’s conclusion contributes to my certainty that the assassination of President Kennedy was a supra-national operation
George Michael and his brilliant, beautiful wife Alycia Brierley Evica welcomed me into their family, and I eagerly returned the compliment. The stories I could tell … but they are for another campfire. For our purposes, I shall often refer to the Evicas’s influence on my assassination research and, indeed, on the development of my modest skills as an investigator and evaluator of deep phenomena.
For now … November is a cruel month, and one that figures all too prominently in the life and times of George Michael.
It was on a brilliant, unnaturally warm November morning in 2007 that loved ones laid him to rest.
As I carried the incongruously small urn that contained his physical remains, my thoughts drifted to another November day, when George Michael and I had found ourselves in Dealey Plaza at dusk, far from the madding crowd. Light was filtered thinly through brittle leaves and sorrow. And I asked if he too sensed the presence of unquiet spirits.
As usual, George Michael was light years ahead of me. He said that he had experienced such feelings on many occasions in that terrible place. He spoke at length, his voice quiet yet redolent with conviction, about his certainty that the fight against the forces that assassinated President Kennedy, the same forces that today prowl the killing fields of the Middle East and eastern Europe and Africa and Asia and the Americas, endure into the next world.
The peace within Saint John’s churchyard where George Michael and Alycia find their rest represents but a temporary respite.
Permit me to offer two original hypotheses for your consideration. First up, what I have termed within the context of the Kennedy assassination, and by extension, in intelligence operations in general, as the “Doppelganger Gambit.”
“Doppelganger” classically is an unrelated human double and, in literature, often a harbinger of evil and even doom. “Gambit” may be defined as “a clever action in a game or other situation that is intended to achieve an advantage and usually involves taking a risk.” What I am describing finds two or more iterations of the same operation, individual, object, or occurrence that, upon examination, lead investigators to irreconcilable conclusions that ultimately promote internecine, inquiry-stymying conflicts.
Note, as revealed in our studies, the presence — with apologies to crows everywhere — of a double-murder of doppelgangers: Oswalds, rifles, Zapruder films, brains, autopsy films and reports, two official U.S. government investigations producing conflicting conclusions, identifications of conspiracy Sponsors, Facilitators and Mechanics (more on those categories in a moment), and attack scenarios.
This is not to discount the related manifestations of “natural doppelgangers,” which may best be appreciated as examples of “high strangeness.”
Thus the foundational objectives of the Kennedy cover-up are brilliantly served: endlessly prolong debate of the undebatable, afford to the lone nut lie the illusion of a level playing field with the conspiracy truth, and generate a paralytic sense of “we’ll never know” helplessness among all but the most impassioned, astute investigators.
Which leads us to focus on my second original hypothesis: my suspicions regarding the so-called “Chicago plot” Dallas doppelganger. I am doing so at greater length insofar as the research community majority’s egregiously superficial and complacent acceptance of the subject’s ludicrous paper-thin official narrative speaks powerfully to my regurgitation-cogitation observations.
My primary source is “The Plot to Kill JFK” by Edwin Black, as published in “The Chicago Independent” of November,1975.
President Kennedy is scheduled to attend the Army/Air Force football game in Chicago on November 2, 1963. As best can be discerned, the Chicago Police Department (CPD) and the U.S Secret Service (SS) — receive two tips alerting them to a plot to assassinate the chief executive as he rides in a motorcade from the airport to the sports stadium. Its route includes a 90-degree turn during passage through a warehouse district with multiple tall buildings.
The tips are said to come from an informant known to history only as “Lee”. The source of a separate tip identifying as an assassin one Thomas Arthur Vallee remains unknown to this day.
The “Lee” tip describes a four-man hit team of “organized, paramilitary assassins”.
On Thursday, October 31, a rooming house landlady reports to law enforcement authorities her discovery of rifles with telescopic sights and a map of the presidential motorcade route laid out on the bed of one of the “organized, paramilitary team’s” members (all four of the Latino suspects were staying at her facility). In response, 24-hour surveillance by the CPD and SS is ordered.
Surveillance is blown when an SS agent follows the vehicle of two men fitting the landlady’s description down a dead-end alley. The suspects turn around and pass the agent, whose window is lowered and the volume of his official radio is turned up. Hearing official chatter, the suspects realize that their cover has been neutralized.
Early the next day, two of those sloppy housekeepers from the “organized, paramilitary team” are picked up and brought to the SS. They never were arrested. There are no known records of their interrogations — if any were conducted. Are bells ringing?
Now we focus our attention on aspects of the life of Thomas Arthur Vallee — our story’s Lee Harvey Oswald doppelganger.
It seems that Vallee …
- Joined the United States Marine Corps in the mid-1950s.
- Was assigned to a U-2 base, Camp Otsu, in Japan.
- Home in the States, was assigned to recruit and train anti-Castro guerrillas for a return to Cuba, where they will assassinate The Beard.
- Held extreme conservative military views.
- Owned an M-1 Rifle.
- Gained employment in a warehouse building overlooking the presidential motorcade route.
More bells ringing? …
Based on the aforementioned anonymous tip, CPD officers Daniel Groth and Peter Shurla are assigned to follow Vallee, who they are determined to “get off the street.” On the morning of November 2, they get their chance. They pull over Vallee in his white Ford Falcon for a minor traffic violation. They observe a knife on the passenger seat. They arrest Vallee, charge him with unlawful use of a weapon, and proceed to search his vehicle’s trunk. In it they find 750 rounds of M-1 ammunition.
Allegedly under duress, Vallee consents to a search of his home by Groth and Shurla, where sure as shootin’ they discover the M-1. There are no known records of the serial number of Vallee’s weapon ever having been checked.
Two members of the four-man “organized, paramilitary team” remain at large. The threat level is heightened. Accordingly, the SS recommends that President Kennedy’s Chicago trip be cancelled. And so it is. The official excuse presented to the public: The president must remain in Washington to monitor events in Southeast Asia in the wake of the coup in South Vietnam that resulted in the murders of the Ngo brothers.
Are you sitting down? The two detained members of the “organized, paramilitary team” are released and disappear from history. And it gets better.
Subsequent to the unraveling of the Chicago charade, President Kennedy is allowed to make his previously scheduled trip to New Orleans — even after a “credible” warning of an assassination attempt in the Crescent City had been received, and with the certain knowledge that Chicago’s Modern Assassins Quartet remained at large.
I mention in passing that Thomas Arthur Vallee was not called to testify before the Warren Commission.
James W. Douglass reminds us that a contemporaneous attempt to check Vallee’s auto registration found that it was “frozen,” or classified, and available only to the FBI.
By 1975, Officer Shurla had been elevated to the force’s highest level intelligence unit.
Officer Groth, known to maintain significant intelligence connections, commanded the CPD team that assassinated Fred Hampton and Mark Clark.
Northern Illinois University Professor Dan Stern discovered that Groth received FBI and CIA high-level training, and that the CPD and CIA were “very tight.”
Thus my hypothesis holds that the Chicago charade is suggestive of the storytelling genius of one or more of the assassination conspiracy’s key Facilitators. It was, I submit, a designed doppelganger — crafted in its beyond-coincidence yet superficial mirror images of Dallas plot-related components to function as a bodyguard of lies protecting the one true operation from damage caused by anticipated all-but-inevitable leaks.
Leaked threats of a Dallas hit involving a trained team of assassins shooting the president from a warehouse with the aid of a former Marine who helped control U-2 missions from a secret CIA base in Japan plausibly could be attributed to the alleged Chicago operation and its doppelganger elements.
The results? Chicago was blown, Dallas was safe. Heightened security measures on November 22 were deemed unnecessary.
There simply is no other satisfactory explanation in terms of operational requirements for why Thomas Arthur Vallee, the Chicago patsy, would be so closely modeled on Lee Harvey Oswald. And it must be noted that those similarities, in the case of the alleged Windy City shooter, were paper thin — just close enough to cover Dallas leaks. The deeper elements of Oswald’s background that qualified him to be the “perfect patsy” were absent from the Vallee profile.
And why was a key Chicago charade informant publicly identified as “Lee”?
So does my Chicago hypothesis stand to reason? The late H.P. Albarelli, Jr. may have agreed with me, given his revelation, on page 325 of his A Secret Order: an intelligence officer who declined to be named in the book told him, “It’s a common ploy within the CIA. Sometimes there can be three or four operations in play at one time but only one is actually fully planned and intended to go forward.”
Another bit of admittedly circumstantial evidence must be noted. On what would be the last night of his life, President Kennedy responded to Texas Congressman Henry Gonzalez’s urgent plea for him to cancel his Dallas visit due to active serious threats, with an assurance that I paraphrase: “Don’t worry, Henry. The Secret Service has taken care of it.”
Indeed they had.
To my knowledge, challenges neither to my Doppelganger Gambit nor my Chicago plot hypotheses — nor, for that matter, any challenges to the stale, conventional interpretations of these matters — has been forthcoming
Regurgitators regurgitate.
A final point regarding the post-Chicago career advances of CPD officers Groth and Shurla. Can we detect a pattern developing? A rewards system? Captain William Westbrook of the Dallas Police Department has been linked to the fatal shooting of Officer J. D. Tippit. He later turns up in Laos and involved in CIA actions. Marrell ‘Mac’ McCollough, the Memphis police officer with intelligence connections clearly visible in photos kneeling next to the fallen, fatally wounded Martin Luther King, Jr., soon thereafter secured gainful overseas employment with the CIA. The odyssey of Thane Eugene Cesar, who as you will recall was the uniformed security guard positioned directly behind Robert Kennedy when he was assassinated — a journey that delivered Cesar to the Philippines where he comfortably lived out his days — has yet to be fully examined.
At this point, reconsideration of the Dallas patsy may be of value.
Who was Lee Harvey Oswald? What was Lee Harvey Oswald? A poetically insightful answer to those questions was provided by American novelist James Lee Burke — although he likely was not thinking of the accused assassin when he wrote, in Rain Gods:
“If an individual, through either his own volition or events over which he had no control, found himself taking up residence in a country undefined by flags or physical borders, he could be assured of one immediate and abiding consequence: He was on his own, and solitude and loneliness would probably be his companions unto the grave.”
And Graham Greene, long before “Oswald” became a household curse, nailed it with precision and concision in The Quiet American:
“Innocence is a kind of insanity.”
George Michael now must take a second curtain call. Not long before his ascension, he was approached by a young, full-of-herself graduate school filmmaker and asked if he would cooperate in the making of a documentary focused on his academic career in general and his Kennedy assassination research in particular. He agreed, and filming soon commenced.
All that has survived the wee documentarian’s sudden and shocking abandonment of the project are brief outtakes in which George Michael shares his thoughts on important areas of Kennedy-related investigations. They are available on the Mary Ferrell Foundation website. Offered here is a transcript of George Michael’s views on Oswald.
“We’re looking at a multiplicity of characters and characterizations. And Oswald was a self-characterizer.
“People think the whole essence of ‘I want to be a spy’ defines him. Not necessarily. There’s a kind of openness to experience, there’s an intelligence there, there’s a need to know, there’s duplicity, a kind of serious quietness about the person, and transformations which are very curious, very important.
“I’m interested in his speech patterns … grammar and rhetoric … logic or illogic …and how he goes right to the point, for example, incredibly and accurately pinpointing where he has to go.
“There is one-half a degree of separation between Lee Harvey Oswald and covert operations of the CIA.
“Once you have worked in the ‘field’ of Oswald and studied Oswald, you begin to see how many diverse and interesting and sometimes major contradictions there are in the Lee Harvey Oswald story.”
A third Evica curtain call? Why not?
In JFK Lancer’s Kennedy Assassination Chronicles, Volume 4, Issue 1, George Michael wrote, “In 1992, at the ASK Conference in Dallas, Charles Drago, novelist and investigative historian, first proposed an amnesty/immunity commission program relative to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. Drago, now a contributing editor [to this publication], reached sympathetic ears in both the media and the assassination research community. I began a close association with Drago at that time, and we both prepared for the moment when an amnesty proposal would have the greatest impact.”
That moment arrived when arguably the most prestigious JFK research conference series not called ASK — let’s refer to it as “Bengal” — at its 1997 Dallas event, announced its support of our formation of an independent task force to draft legislation establishing a legislative amnesty initiative. Its goal would be to encourage surviving material witnesses in the assassination to come forward.
The sole founders of that original JFK Truth and Amnesty Commission are George Michael, attorney William Xanttopoulos, researcher Chris Courtwright, and this writer.
We designed the initiative to be the logical successor legislation to the historic JFK Assassination Records Collection Act of 1992. It was modeled on the South Africa Commission of Truth and Reconciliation, and was intended, in the words of George Michael, “ … to make historical sense of the flood of new and important documents made available by the Assassination Records Review Board.” He added, “We are offering what most likely will be the last opportunity for these witnesses to clear their consciences, serve their country, and tell the truth.”
Bengal generously allowed the founders to conduct an informal introductory meeting in one of its conference’s break-out rooms. More than 50 conference attendees were extraordinarily excited about our plans to the point where, unasked, they wrote checks to support them. George Michael accepted the checks for safekeeping and took responsibility for setting up a non-profit corporation, including its financial component.
Then a top Bengal executive to whom we shall refer as “Kerr,” who had promised to provide live-or-die financial and logistical support to our effort, determined that a surprise was just what the moment called for. Kerr marched onto the break-out room’s dais with a well-known Kennedy researcher in tow and, without our permission, installed him as the putative Commission’s executive director.
George Michael privately informed Kerr that the addition to the Commission’s leadership structure she demanded was, for numerous reasons, unacceptable. The response: he stays, or our support goes.
Within 48 hours, George Michael and I secured unanimous agreement among Commission founders to withdraw from the Bengal affiliation. George Michael ripped up the checks and returned them to the original donors.
I strongly suspect that those with the most to lose if the Commission had moved forward had acted swiftly and effectively. And I can’t help but wonder if the same forces have blunted the more recent efforts to create a Truth and Reconciliation Commission.
I note for the record that none of the founders of that second attempt took the time and effort to research, let alone acknowledge our earlier effort. So I conducted a comprehensive education campaign, recounting our origin story every time I saw a Social Media announcement touting the current work. Only Professor Peter Dale Scott, a member of the later commission’s board, stepped forward to state publicly that, in his opinion, our groundbreaking initiative was worthy of the JFK research community’s attention and respect.
No one followed his lead.
The later commission, comprised of a “Who’s Who” (or as I prefer, “Who’s What?”) of Kennedy assassination researchers, apparently chose for its first formal act the submission of a petition to the United States government demanding release of all relevant sequestered files and physical evidence.
Years later, presuming a petition was ever submitted, a response remains … anticipated.
If these handkerchiefs-in-their-sleeves warriors had been on the march in Germany in 1940, they likely would have submitted to the Reich the following:
Dear Chancellor Hitler,
We the undersigned respectfully request that you reconsider your policies regarding the Jews of Europe.
Kindly,
What they and others have yet to understand is that speaking truth to power is almost always an exercise in frustration. Instead we must speak truth about power to those who are victimized by it.
Let us conclude by restating and reexamining my marching order with which I opened this essay — an order I have not the slightest authority to impose.
We are obliged, morally and professionally and as a matter of personal honor, to apply all that we have learned through our investigations to define and effect justice for John Fitzgerald Kennedy and for all collaterally damaged by his assassins.
Rest assured that I am not arguing for an abandonment of new research into the Dealey Plaza attack, including its preparations, execution, and ongoing cover-up, and the identity and motives of its Sponsors, Facilitators and Mechanics.
After all, please recall that earlier I made reference to the Kennedy assassination as a “solved and unsolved” case. Conspiracy has been proven. Justice has not followed.
“The CIA” is most frequently — and incorrectly — identified as the assassination’s Sponsor. The mindless assigning of guilt to a soulless corporate entity is, in this instance, the equivalent of crediting the chisel for the sculptor’s creation.
The CIA is, in my opinion and that of many others, nothing other than a secret police force servicing the global agendas of those individuals and families that, unencumbered by flags, anthems, pledges, and lines on maps, inhabit the highest levels of economic, political, and cultural power and influence.
You know — the Sponsors of the Kennedy assassination.
So what of justice?
I have neither the wisdom nor the temerity to attempt to define justice in this case — at least not without the collaboration of individuals far wiser and confident than am I. The late novelist and poet Jim Harrison was similarly flummoxed by his own search for justice’s very definition. He presented the problem in this heart-wrenching, brilliant passage from his novella Legends of the Fall:
“People finally don’t have much affection for questions, especially ones so leprous as the apparent lack of a fair system of rewards and punishments on earth. The question is not less gnawing and unpleasant for being so otiose, so naïve. And we are not concerned with the grander issues: say the Nez Perce children receiving the hail of cavalry fire in their sleeping tents. Nothing is quite so grotesque as the meeting of a child and a bullet. And what distances in comprehension: the press at the time insisted we had won. We would like to think that the whole starry universe would curdle at such a monstrosity: the conjunctions of Orion twisted askew, the arms of the Southern Cross drooping. Of course not: immutable is immutable and everyone in his own private manner dashes his brains against the long-suffering question that is so luminously obvious. Even gods aren’t exempt: note Jesus’s howl of despair as he stepped rather tentatively into eternity. And we can’t seem to go from large to small because everything is the same size. Everyone’s skin is so particular and we are so largely unimaginable to one another.”
Jim Harrison.
And what if somehow we can arrive at a definition of justice and a methodology to effect it? Won’t the Manichean world view re-assert its dominance and drag us back to states of ignorance and injustice and suicidal, unresolvable conflict?
Won’t the “Wayang Kulit,” the Indonesian shadow play in which leather puppets represent good and evil locked in eternal conflict, continue its endless series of revivals?
Some years ago, sickened by images of great white trophy hunters grinning emptily as they posed with the innocents they had slaughtered, I wrote the following brief poem — a hopeful conjuration to summon salvation and justice:
beauty beyond repair the fabric of the heart, torn by the gentlest rain, are the innocent spared pain by the god of bullets is the fading thought of the den, where cries dissolve to light, and then reunion, as if night were just a story take them for your wall, seek their courage from seasoned hearts, where you end is where the wolf starts the elk soars the pheasant gallops the elephant walks on water
How dare we think that we can end the madness? Forget Lee Harvey Oswald — who do we think we are? Are we, as I once naively boasted from a conference podium, the Lakota of AIM … the Jews of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising … the Viet Cong of Tet … the Palestinian resistors of Gaza?
How does our quest end for us? We turn again to novelist James Lee Burke for guidance. In this ruminative passage, written in the voice of his fictional Cajun detective Dave Robicheaux, he seems to tell us that the universe has no arc, but rather is a circle on which we run through eternity.
Burke:
“Down the canyon, smoke from meat fires drafted through the cedar and mesquite trees, and if I squinted my eyes in the sun’s setting, I could almost pretend that Spanish soldiers in silver chest armor and bladed helmets or a long-dead race of hunters were encamped on those hillsides. Or maybe even old compatriots in butternut brown wending their way in and out of history — gallant, Arthurian, their canister-ripped colors unfurled in the roiling smoke, the fatal light in their faces a reminder that the contest is never quite over, the field never quite ours.”
FADE TO BLEAK.
THE END
Charles R. Drago is an author, screenwriter, jazz critic, media host and festival producer, and radical historian focused on the political assassinations of the 1960s and related deep events. He has lectured and published widely on the latter topics at scholarly conferences and meetings and in scholarly journals throughout the United States.
Mr. Drago contributed the “Introduction” to A Certain Arrogance by George Michael Evica, a book-length investigation of U.S. intelligence manipulations of liberal religious and educational institutions during the Cold War. Professor Evica referred to him as “the conscience of JFK research community.” He is also the author of the “Afterword” to Coup in Dallas, by H.P. Albarelli, Jr..
Mr. Drago is the creator of Autumn Too Long and Phantoms of the 7th, limited series for premium cable, and the author of the novel Mairh: A False History, all works in progress.
Copyright © AARC. All rights reserved.