“Let the word go forth from this time and place, to friend and foe alike, that the torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans…” -John F. KennedyWith these now legendary words, spoken moments after taking the oath of office in January of 1961, our nation’s 35th president not only paid homage to his contemporaries, but ushered in a new era in American history – an era in which giant leaps would be taken in the realms of foreign policy, civil rights and technological innovation, among others. That John Fitzgerald Kennedy would be cut down before his administration could effectuate most of those changes, slaughtered in broad daylight on domestic soil, only served to galvanize the American government into seeing that many of those strides were made. In less than a year, the Civil Rights Act would be signed. Within the decade, man would set foot on the moon. And though it would take another dozen years, the U.S. would eventually pull out of Vietnam. As the songwriter Robert Hunter has imagined JFK’s apparition responding to the rumor of his own demise, “Bullets are like waves, they only rearrange the sand/History turns upon the tides and not the deeds of man.” So if the best intentions of JFK’s presidency were ultimately fulfilled, then why, half a century later, should we still bother to examine his death? First and foremost, we do so because it remains an open murder case. Despite the early and very best efforts of the Warren Commission and theAmerican media to stuff the whole matter down the memory hole, the U.S. House Select Committee on Assassinations would conclude in 1979 that JFK’s murder was “probably” the result of a conspiracy. And although the Justice Department sent a report to the House Judiciary Committee nine years later questioning the acoustic evidence and by extension the HSCA conclusion, the overwhelming weight of the evidence considered by the committee remains. With only one alleged conspirator, Lee Harvey Oswald, ever officially accounted for, and no other federal criminal investigation into the matter ever conducted, the case remains, by any rational metric, unsolved. Second, it is because the American people demand it. In multiple public opinion polls conducted since the revelations of the mid-1970s, somewhere between 65 and 81% of respondents have demonstrated their doubt that a single individual committed the murder. “Conspiracy theorists” – by definition, people who believe that some criminal acts are committed by two or more individuals – are, in large part, us. JFK assassination research is also compelled by the very real possibility that the tools of modern forensic science, combined with the release of thousands more classified government files and a new official investigation, could yet solve this case. It has now happened with some of the most heinous crimes of the civil rights era. Why not this one, too? Finally, we study this case because in point of fact, the promise of the Kennedy administration was never truly fulfilled. If, as many historians believe, JFK at the time of his death was evolving from an aristocratic Cold Warrior into a populist peacemaker, then our ongoing propensity for unproductive foreign entanglements and the continuing marginalization of millions of Americans do his legacy no justice. If, in figuring out how and why JFK was killed, we might also stumble upon a heightened awareness of what ails our nation, then we will have truly passed the torch of enlightenment to a new generation of Americans. - Ben Wecht
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Ben WechtFreelance Writer and Editor, Educational Video Producer and Distributor, CLE and Professional Education Administrator Archives
November 2020
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