Among the flurry of books published around the 50th anniversary of the assassination of our 35th president is one by longtime political operative Roger Stone.
Stone takes a prosecutor’s approach in The Man Who Killed Kennedy: The Case Against LBJ, removing reasonable doubt with factual detail and annotation, and presenting a pretty convincing argument that centers on Roman philosopher Seneca the Younger’s motive axiom: “He has committed the crime who profits by it.”
But even Stone himself denies that his book’s main objective is to unofficially convict Lyndon Baines Johnson of John F. Kennedy’s murder.
“My book achieves nothing,” Stone said in an interview promoting his book, if it doesn’t convince people “that what the government tells you cannot be believed. Anything the government tells you needs to be regarded with a heavy dose of skepticism.”
Indeed, whether you believe LBJ was the personification of Seneca’s rule or the exception, the most compelling case presented in Stone’s book is that the Warren Commission report was a whitewash.
That’s not really news today, when four out of five Americans don’t believe the lone-gunman theory about Lee Harvey Oswald-a cause that wasn’t helped 35 years ago when the House Select Committee on Assassinations concluded that the killing was probably a conspiracy involving more than one shooter.
Still, news or not, it’s pertinent at a time when government is increasingly asking to be trusted with critical things like our health care.
Clearly, governments have been lying to citizens as long as men have instituted them.
Of equally timeless vintage is the coup d’état. Men killing other men to ascend to positions of power and rule is as old as humanity.
Surprisingly, even though our nation was formed, in essence, by overthrowing the colonial crown rule (and coups around the globe are more common than elections), as a people,Americans are naively slow to believe that our own government could ever be overthrown.
Perhaps that is because we define a coup in classic terms and examples, such as the French or the Russian Revolution, involving large-scale violence and social unrest.
Viewed more as a corporate type of coup, however, when a change in CEO completely changes the course of a company, that’s exactly what happened in 1963.
The Johnson administration was a radical departure from the Kennedy administration, and not only in terms of policy and philosophy, but in style and substance.
It’s impossible to say how a two-term Kennedy presidency might have shaped government for good. But from the start in the moments after JFK’s assassination, the historical record for the Johnson legacy is one of ignobility and downright deceit.
The government is on trial in Stone’s book, and the evidence he presents is overwhelming that “ official” truths were very often not the least bit true when it came to the assassination investigation.
The Warren Commission was about going through the motions, not getting to the bottom of things. Why else, for example, dismiss 51 earwitnesses who claimed they heard shots coming from the grassy knoll?
The book is full of data that will surprise many younger readers, particularly for whom the assassination is ancient history. And who can barely conceive, in today’s world of pervasive Internet and hundreds of 24/7 TV channels, that an “official” story was rarely questioned if it got buy-in by only three broadcast networks.
“Mack Wallace” is hardly a household name, for example, and certainly not one that would leap to the average citizen’s mind at the mention of JFK. Wallace was a trained killer and a convicted murderer with ties to LBJ, and Stone’s production of fingerprint evidence linking Wallace to the Texas School Book Depository is key to his central theme.
Stone has seen the ugly underbelly of political obstruction from the inside out, and that’s why he presents analytical prose with the credibility of common sense. A government that will withhold the truth about the death of its president will hardly hesitate to foil and stymie, through whatever means necessary, far lesser truths.
The main lesson Stone wants learned is for citizens to view government skeptically-which ironically is our historical heritage anyway. What were the Federalist Papers about if not persuading a skeptical electorate?
One danger in reading Stone’s book is the urge to think, happily, “Well, that couldn’t happen today.”
It’s true that nobody could suppress a live video of a presidential shooting for a dozen years, as was done with the Zapruder film. And it’s true that so many convenient and unnatural deaths, against all actuarial probabilities, could surround the investigations and avoid the scrutiny of our constant news cycle.
But mark Stone’s words-lust for political power is as bloodthirsty today as ever, and the government over which that power extends is larger than ever.
It’s past time for a “coming clean” party about JFK, and yet thousands of documents remain sealed. The “single bullet theory” is just one cruel joke on American gullibility, and a public skepticism needs to arise that will not accept being made patsy to a federal fiction.
LBJ is long dead. But our government lives on, and that’s why Stone is right.
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Dana Kelley is a freelance writer from Jonesboro.
Editorial, Pages 17 on 01/24/2014