Yesterday was the fifty-fifth anniversary of the
assassination of John F. Kennedy, and I thought I would take note of it by
telling several stories. I can recall
vividly where I was when I heard the news that Kennedy had been shot. I was in the catalog room of Widener Library
at Harvard. This was before the
catalogues were put on line, and to find a book, one went to the long room,
just to the right when you had climbed the stairs from the entrance of the
library to the second floor, and walked up and down the rows of card catalogue holders
until you found the right drawer to pull out.
In the far corner of the room was the checkout desk, behind which, up
two or three steps, was the entrance to the stacks.
On November 23rd, I was flipping through cards
looking for a book when I noticed four or five people at the checkout desk,
bent over a small radio. I walked over
to find out what was up, and heard the news.
I rushed home to my apartment and turned on the little black and white
TV set with the rabbit ears antenna that one moved this way and that to pick up
the signal. I was glued to the set for
several days, and was actually watching Lee Harvey Oswald being hustled out of
the jail on his way to a more secure location when Jack Ruby shot him. You couldn’t actually see Ruby or the
gun. It was all a scrum of people
obscuring the view.
As luck would have it, my wife’s parents showed up from
Chicago a few days later for a visit, and they took the two of us to a
well-known Italian restaurant on the North Side reputed to be a mafia hangout. The other guests at dinner were a rich pistachio
nut importer and his wife, daughter, and prospective son-in-law. The nut man was politically connected with
the family of Speaker of the House John McCormack. The McCormacks were long time political
rivals of the Kennedys, and were beside themselves with delight at the
assassination, which they figured would tilt the Boston balance of power away
from the ascendant Kennedys. The dinner
was my introduction to the realities of tribal politics.
It was that evening that I first ate Fettuccini Alfredo.
While I am at it, I guess I should note the passing of James
Billington, 89, long time Librarian of Congress. In 1958-59 and 59-60, I taught with Jim
Billington in Social Sciences 2, one of the Harvard General Education courses
in the old Gen Ed program. There were
six of us – five first-rate young historians and me – and we shared the
once-a-week lectures to the entire 280 students, meeting our 30 student
sections the other two days. The course
covered European history from Caesar to Napoleon, and Jim, an expert on Czarist
Russia, gave the first five lectures. We
all took pretty much the standard scholarly line on the Roman empire [I, needless
to say, was faking it as best I could], but Jim was a devout Protestant, and he
presented the Conversion of Constantine to the students as the Triumph of
Christianity, much to the dismay of the rest of us.
That was the course in which I first learned the important
lesson that one’s frame of reference may not match that of one’s students. Arno Mayer was an expert on the Versailles
Conference, so naturally he got to give the next series of five lectures after
Jim, on the Middle Ages. His first
lecture was on the Barbarian Invasions that brought down the western half of
the Empire, and Arno had the inspired idea of linking the battles of the Huns
and Goths and Visigoths with the Romans to WW II battles, which had, after all,
been fought on the same plains and across the same rivers. The five of us sat at the back of the lecture
hall and marveled at Arno’s tour de
raison, but when we returned to our separate classrooms, we found that the students,
most of whom had been four or five when the war ended, were utterly mystified
by the lecture.
21 comments:
Prof. Wolff,
Actually, the 55th anniversary was on November 22, Thanksgiving Day this year. I too, like most people who lived through that horrible day, vividly remember where I was when I learned that President Kennedy had been shot. I was in homeroom in my sophomore year in high school. Classes were canceled, and I walked home with my history teacher, who was stumbling, with tears streaming down her face, asking “Why?”
I have read several books about the assassination and the various theories about who may have been involved and why. The book that I regard as the best researched and most convincing is Gerald Posner’s Case Closed. He explores every possible detail and concludes that Oswald acted alone. The aspects that most people find suspicious and convinces them that Oswald was not the lone assassin are the single bullet theory and the Zapruder film showing President Kennedy’s head jolting backwards. Posner makes a convincing argument that both of these can be explained and do not prove that Oswald was not the lone gunman.
One bit of trivia that Posner notes demonstrates the egotism of some lawyers who think they have the expertise to try any case. Jack Ruby was defended by Melvin Belli, known as the King of Torts. Ruby apparently thought that given Belli’s huge verdicts in torts lawsuits that he was getting the best attorney that money could buy. Well, Belli may have known a lot about personal injury law, but he knew zilch about criminal law, in particular, Texas criminal law. Belli, expecting to benefit from the publicity the case would generate, decided to represent Ruby for nothing. Well, nothing is what Ruby got. It turns out that Texas had a defense called murder without malice, which equated to manslaughter and had a maximum penalty of five years. Ruby’s shooting of Oswald would have qualified, because he said on TV that he only shot Oswald because Oswald had killed his President – no malice aforethought. Belli instead had Ruby plead insanity and put in evidence regarding Ruby’s troubled upbringing and his mother having been committed to an insane asylum. The defense strategy humiliated Ruby. Worse, the jury did not buy the insanity defense, convicted Ruby and the judge sentenced him to death. (He won an appeal from that conviction – not for incompetence of counsel – but died of cancer before he could be retried.)
The lesson? When you hire an attorney, make sure the attorney is knowledgeable about the area of law that is relevant to your case. And you get what you pay for – ask O. J. Simpson.
That September I had tuned four years old. I recall that the adults around me were crying when Kennedy was assassinated. Strangers also. The sixties were terrifying for a little boy: I had understood what the Cuban Missile crisis meant. Today I curse myself for my ignorance, back then and now. I was bullied ad a kid. My parents did nothing. I earned a PhD in mathematics, but was relegated to technical support. There were unconscionable suppurating assholes there too. I left, and vowed never to empty the digital bedpans of academics again.
Anonymous,
The sixties were terrifying for pretty much everyone, in the United States and around the world. In grammar school and high school, we were trained to go through duck and cover exercises, hiding under our desks in the event of a nuclear attack, as if a wooden desk would protect us from the nuclear blast and the fall-out to follow. Gorbachev’s assessment that Trump is a fool (“not the work of a great mind”) for pulling out of the nuclear arms treaty with Russia is an understatement.
Yes indeed, tremendously unoriginal. Despite Professor Wolff's efforts, the comments are ruined.
I feel I need to set the record straight. Today I went back to read the comments under Prof. Wolff’s post Navel Gazing. In the comments, both Jerry Fresia and David Palmeter claimed that Nancy Pelosi voted in favor of the war in Iraq. She did not:
https://www.thoughtco.com/2002-iraq-war-vote-3325446
Moreover, in 2011 she voted against extending the Patriot Act:
https://www.democraticleader.gov/newsroom/pelosi-statement-patriot-act/
It seems to me that if you are going to stigmatize someone with having engaged in reprehensible conduct as an elected legislator, you should at least get your facts correct.
Yes, I know, more of my irrelevant self-indulgent effluvia. What do the facts matter in this age of Il Duce.
And the Comment section has been ruined by my pointing out that Il Duce’s ignorant withdrawal from the nuclear treaty with Russia has returned us to the harrowing threat of nuclear war that hung over our heads in the 1960s?
Good catch MS. I was too quick to assume Pelosi did vote for Iraq #2. Many Democrats did, after voting against Iraq #1 and getting burned for it.
You aren't the Lone Ranger on the nuclear issue, not just the latest but what he's done to the Non-Proliferation Treaty. His comments going back to the campaign that we're spending too much money defending Japan and S. Korea, that they should get their own nukes and take care of themselves, his threatening to pull out of NATO, telling the Europeans we no longer have their backs, is an excellent way to to tell the countries that are not now acknowledged nuclear powers start their own programs is, to me, the biggest danger of all the big dangers that Trump creates.
I was 17, in high school when Kennedy was killed. I recall not feeling any grief and even a bit happy that we were being let out of school early, but everyone else immediately put on faces of mourning and so I did too. I wondered then and still do what percentage of the grieving mourners were faking it too like me, but my sense of survival told me not to pry.
In situations of mass emotivity, I still wonder how many are faking it because I rarely am moved when everyone else is.
Now when I think back at Kennedy's assassination, I am moved to tears, but that is not real grief but the reaction of an old man who now cries when he recalls people and situations from his childhood which he then detested and which if he thinks about them rationally today, he still sees as detestable. I guess I'll have to read Proust some day about memory and recalling things past. I've never read much Proust, besides Swann's Way, which was assigned in the university, but from what I know about him, I like him as much as I dislike JFK.
A question to MS.
I understand your story about Jack Ruby and Melvin Belli. I am sure you are right and a defence based on murder without malice would have been a safer bet.
My question is was Ruby actually insane or not? Should the jury have bought his insanity plea?
Prof Wolff in the post has, I believe, mis-labeled the course in question (which is not meant as criticism, as it was a long time ago, after all). Social Sciences 2 was the late Samuel Beer's course; the course Prof Wolff is describing had a different label, but I'm not sure exactly what that designation was. (Though if I were to check Wolff's online autobiography, I cd prob find out.)
There is a book of essays by former Soc Sci 2 teaching assistants -- M. Richter (ed.), Essays in History and Theory (Harv.U.P., 1970) -- that lists at the end the teaching staff in Soc Sci 2 from 1946-1970. There are a number of recognizable names there, including some people who I'm sure Wolff knew, but Billington, Mayer, and Wolff aren't on that list, which confirms that the European history survey Prof Wolff is describing is a different course.
p.s.
Beer was still teaching Soc Sci 2 when I was an undergraduate at Harvard in the late 1970s; I didn't take Soc Sci 2, though I did take in my last semester a course on British politics that Beer co-taught. He retired from teaching at Harvard shortly thereafter (i.e., became emeritus) and went to teach at Boston College in a chair named for Tip O'Neill (if I recall correctly). He died in his late 90s a few years ago. There is a fairly lengthy obit in the American Political Science Assn journal PS; it might or might not be readily accessible online. Anyway, Soc Sci 2 was a legendary course, and quite a few of the TA's went on to become prominent historians, sociologists or political scientists.
Anonymous,
That’s a good question. I am not aware of any evidence that Ruby was clinically insane. He did have a very bad temper, and could fly off the handle with little provocation. But the defense Belli made was akin to temporary insanity, which would be understandable, since Ruby was a great admirer of President Kennedy. My impression from reading Posner’s book is that Belli was not even aware of the alternative defense, which would have been a safer bet. The following is an excerpt from https://www.history.com/topics/1960s/jack-ruby, which makes things clearer:
At his high-profile trial, Jack Ruby was defended pro bono by prominent California attorney Melvin Belli, who argued that psychomotor epilepsy had caused Ruby to mentally black out and subconsciously shoot Oswald, and that due to this condition he should be treated with leniency. However, on March 14, 1964, after deliberating for just over two hours, a jury found Ruby guilty of murder with malice and sentenced him to death by the electric chair. Belli expressed outrage at the verdict and claimed that Ruby, a Jew, was a victim of discrimination. In October 1966, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals reversed the conviction on the grounds of improper admission of testimony and the fact that Ruby could not have received a fair trial in Dallas at the time due to excessive publicity. A new trial was scheduled to take place in Wichita Falls, Texas, in February 1967. However, on December 9, 1966, Ruby was admitted to Parkland Hospital (the same place where Kennedy and Oswald had died) with pneumonia. Soon after, he was diagnosed with lung cancer. On January 3, 1967, he died at age 55 from a blood clot in his lung.
Offering a defense of psychomotor epilepsy, causing Ruby “to black out and subconsciously shoot Oswald,” in my opinion, borders on legal malpractice. The jurors watching the video of Ruby shooting Oswald would have seen that Ruby had not blacked out. I do not know for certain, but it appears that Ruby did not even testify – Belli tried to prove that Ruby suffered from psychomotor epilepsy through the testimony of a medical expert. It would have been easier to prove absence of malice by having Ruby take the stand and testify that he acted spontaneously, overcome with grief by the assassination of a President whom he admired. Belli may have been a great personal injury lawyer, but he was way out of his league trying a criminal case in a venue he was totally unfamiliar with.
s. wallerstein,
On Nov. 23, 1963, I was surrounded by adults who were crying uncontrollably. I am sure that their grief was genuine. And if you watch footage of the funeral, the tears and sobbing of people on the street, men and women included, do not appear, at least to me, to have been feigned. I will never forget the repetitive beating of the drums and the black stallion being led down the avenue, with the boots of the fallen rider sitting in the stirrups in reverse. You may not have been impressed by President Kennedy, and may have found his foreign policy repugnant, but too many Americans – myself included – he was a charismatic, handsome, witty, literate and oratorically gifted leader. That he was promiscuous and unfaithful – about which Jacqueline Kennedy knew, by the way – was between him and his wife, and not a basis by which to judge him as a President. While he did come late to support civil rights legislation, he laid the foundation for the passage of that legislation under Lyndon Johnson. And then there was the Peace Corps and the space program, all due to his initiatives. Regarding Viet Nam, it is documented that he was entertaining serious doubts about continuing American participation in that fiasco, and historians will speculate for decades to come whether he would have withdrawn American troops had he not been assassinated.
One of the interesting points about the Warren Commission is that although Oswald *may* have acted alone, Johnson did not believe that he did. Johnson pressured the Commission into coming up with a result that he himself thought was probably false. Johnson thought that the assassination might have been the product of a Castroite conspiracy. If this had come out he would have been obliged to invade Cuba with WWIII as a probable consequence. Rather than risk a nuclear war it was better to promote the lone gunman theory especially as this was a lot less embarrassing for the FBI. (If the President’s assassination had been the outcome of a conspiracy rather than a lucky hit by an unpredictable lone gunman, then this would tend to have shown that the FBI was falling down on the job as one of its functions was to detect and foil conspiracies of this kind. Thus J Edgar Hoover as well as President Johnson, both had an interest in pushing the lone gunman theory. ) See Olmsted’s *Real Enemies*, ch. 4 and Dallek’s life of Johnson (vol. 2) pp 51-52.
Charles,
Recent reports have indicated that both Jacqueline and Robert Kennedy believed that Johnson had been part of a conspiracy to assassinate President Kennedy. In the years following the assassination, there was a theater production on off-Broadway, titled MacBird, modeled after Macbeth, portraying Johnson as an assassin.
Because of his escalation of the Vietnam War, Johnson has been the object of much calumny. Although there is justification for this criticism – but for his handling of the Vietnam War, Johnson would have gone down as one of the greatest Presidents of the 20th century – historian Michael Beschloss, in his recent book Presidents Of War, revealed something about Johnson that was not known, and which he only learned by scrutinizing presidential papers that have recently been declassified. In the course of the Vietnam War, General William Westmoreland requested permission from Johnson to use tactical nuclear weapons against North Vietnam. Johnson angrily denied the request, and warned Westmoreland never to raise the issue again, and never to disclose their conversation. There is no question, I submit, that if Johnson had given the ok to Westmoreland’s request, the U.S. would have crushed North Vietnam and “won” the war – but at a terrible cost to our honor and prestige – something Johnson appreciated. So, despite all the rebuke that Johnson is subjected to, we can be thankful that, when push came to shove, he did the right thing in this regard. Moreover, when he realized that his leadership was tearing the country apart, and causing him immense emotional pain, he publicly declared that he would not run for re-election in 1968 – something neither Nixon nor Il Duce would ever contemplate doing.
To the statement, “the U.S. would have crushed North Vietnam and ‘won' the war – but at a terrible cost to our honor and prestige,” I should have added, “and with the loss of an enormous number of North Vietnamese civilian lives,” a consideration that I believe Johnson also took into account and which persuaded him to reject Westmoreland’s request.
LBJ decided not to run for re-election in 1968 because a largely unknown anti-war candidate, Senator Eugene McCarthy, almost defeated him in the New Hampshire primary.
Johnson escalated the Viet Nam in geometric proportions, backed the 1964 military coup in Brazil, invaded the Dominican Republic in 1965 and in the same year backed and financed the genocidal anti-communist coup in Indonesia. He was an imperialist.
He didn't use nuclear weapons in Viet Nam, but neither did Nixon, who probably received the same suggestions from the Army. In fact, LBJ invaded more countries and undoubtedly is responsible for more civilian deaths than Trump, who, in spite of his incredible vulgarity,
racism and macho bluster, hasn't invaded anyone yet.
s. wallerstein,
We are entering some murky areas w/ respect to the civil wars in Brazil, Dominican Republic and Indonesia. I would concede that the U.S. involvement in the 1964 military coup in Brazil appears to have been facilitated by the CIA, although its role is not entirely clear due to the still classified status of documents relating to that insurrection. Justification for, vs. condemnation of, the role of the U.S. in the coups in the Dominican Republic and Indonesia is, I submit, not clear-cut. In the Dominican Republic, the U.S. acted to overturn a military coup that had unseated the country’s president, Cabral Reid. U.S. intervention was supported by the OAS. Regarding Indonesia, Sukarno had become president w/ the help of the Japanese during WWII. While he was a beloved nationalist leader who was instrumental in overthrowing Dutch rule, over time – he ruled Indonesia for 20 yrs. – his rule became increasingly autocratic. While the U.S., via the CIA, did provide financial support to his overthrow, the U.S. did not intervene militarily.
Regarding Johnson’s declaration that he would not run for re-election in 1968, yes, Sen. McCarthy’s showing in the New Hampshire primary played a significant role, but Johnson could still have persisted in running in the remaining Democratic primaries and probably would have been nominated – Bobby Kennedy and Hubert Humphrey only entered the primaries because Johnson withdrew his name. Would Johnson have lost to Nixon? No way of telling. Nonetheless, Johnson told the nation that he would not run and was going to devote the remainder of his term to seeking a resolution of the war. He failed. But his achievements in passing the Civil Rights Law of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and the War on Poverty were great achievements, for which he deserves credit.
While Nixon did consider, and rejected, using nuclear weapons in Vietnam (https://www.nytimes.com/1985/07/22/us/nixon-says-he-considered-using-atomic-weapons-), he escalated the was beyond anything Johnson did by approving the bombing campaign in Cambodia.
Don't have time for a long comment, but the two decisions that committed the US to large-scale mil involvement in Vietnam were both made in 1965. Not to excuse Nixon for his actions in any way, but the really crucial, fateful decisions were made in 1965.
MS,
You gloss over the horrors of the 1965 coup in Indonesia. Most estimate that between 500,00 and a million people were murdered by rightwing death squads and the military, although some estimates run as high as 3 million. All backed and financed by the CIA and the government of LBJ, the land of the free and the home of the brave. A top-secret CIA report ranks the Indonesia genocide along with the Stalinist purges, the Maoist purges and the Nazis as one of the worst mass murders of the 20th century.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indonesian_mass_killings_of_1965–66#Foreign_involvement
You yourself note above that Robert Kennedy suspected LBJ of being behind his brother's assassination. RFK was no fool or crazy radical like myself. He had worked with LBJ, knew him well and had good sources (I imagine) within the media, the FBI and the CIA, with whom to discuss his theories. I myself have no special theory about who was behind JFK's murder, but the fact that RFK suspected LBJ indicates that LBJ was a very very Machiavellian and unscrupulous person. By the way, that Oswald acted alone does not prove that he was not the agent of more powerful people: maybe LBJ, maybe Fidel, maybe the Mafia, maybe the anti-Castro gusanos, etc.
Below is a link to a 2013 Boston Globe report which discusses the many possible conspiracies that Robert Kennedy considered as being likely involved in his brother’s assassination.
https://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2013/11/24/his-brother-keeper-robert-kennedy-saw-conspiracy
The most likely theory involves a conspiracy between Mafia bosses, angry at the Kennedy brothers for Robert Kennedy’s relentless investigation of them as Attorney General, Jimmy Hoffa, being investigated for his mob connections, and Cuban exiles, irritated that the brothers appeared to be relenting on efforts to assassinate Castro. After Ruby killed Oswald, there were theories that Ruby was in on the assassination and killed Oswald to shut him up about who had hired him. We will never know the truth, but one interesting item I did not know until I read this report today is that when Santo Trafficante, the mob boss of Miami, was imprisoned in Havana in 1959 (Trafficante was the Mafia don portrayed in Godfather II as investing in the Batista regime, along with Meyer Lansky), Ruby, known as being a foot soldier for the Mafia, visited him in prison. This supports the theory that Ruby was acting as a gunman for the mob when he killed Oswald – not because he was overcome with grief by the assassination of a President he loved.
MS,
Thanks.
The link didn't work for some reason, but I found the story googling it. Worth reading.
Sorry. For those who may still be interested in reading the article, here is the complete link:
https://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2013/11/24/his-brother-keeper-robert-kennedy-saw-conspiracy-jfk-assassination/TmZ0nfKsB34p69LWUBgsEJ/story.html
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