Quote:The United States, with its unswerving dedication to violence and its cherished tradition of over-reacting, can look forward to the next months only with misgivings.

No man alive can guess how deeply the fabric of the nation has been wounded by the Byzantine horror of assassination compounded by assassination, of murder heaped upon murder. But it is foolhardy to assume that all will soon be as it was before. Indecency took the country by the throat in a raw, too-rich too-soon Texas city, and none can say what the ending will be.

Our credentials as a civilized people stand suspect before the world, of course, but the real depth of the disaster that has befallen us cannot yet be measured. In the 188th year, the republic has fallen upon unspeakably evil days, and great mischief is abroad the land. It remains to be seen whether more convulsions will rack us before it is over.

History warns us not to be optimistic on this score. We are not a mature people. When deeply hurt, we lash out; when troubled and afraid we too often seek comfort in wild excesses that remain to haunt us through history. Assailed by privation and hardship in a savage land, we slew innocent women as witches. Insane with rage at the murder of Lincoln, we fastened the vengeful Reconstruction on the South, and in doing so insured that the terrible wounds of the Civil War would fester and sicken us for a century and more.

Our initial response to the infant threat of Bolshevism was the disgrace of the Palmer raids, which made a mockery of civil rights and human decency in the winter of 1919-20. And what adult among us cannot remember the sorry episode that we customarily reduce to the convenient historical shorthand of McCarthyism? Joe McCarthy was in the van, and deserves to be memorialized in the name we give that time of trial, but behind him was an army of lip-movers, the get of witch burners and rack manipulators since the dawn of time. Americans were never able to understand the horror with which civilized nations viewed that dismal epoch; Americans knew (or thought they knew) that the hysteria was typical of us. Other people wondered and worried that it might well be typical.

We are still the children of the generations that wrested the land from savages in bloody combat. We waste our finest young men on foreign beaches and in alien jungles, we kill our families by the tens of thousands on our highways, we sell soap and celebrate violence simultaneously on the great medium for mass hypnosis that television has become, we educate our children in brutal games of cops and robbers and we don’t tell them until too late that it is not always the bad guys that get killed.

John Kennedy is a symbol of this profligate waste of our most valuable national treasure. He was not, as some would now have us believe, a household god. He was a man with all the vanity and frailty of all men, but he was uniquely a man whom the nation and the world could ill afford to waste so wantonly.

No more could we afford the grisly, bizarre sequel in Dallas. What manner of people have we become, that the wretched assassin could not be spared even long enough to get the due process that John Kennedy and so many other American men have died for?

Have the base instincts of revenge and hate imprisoned us beyond any hope of rescue? Have we embarked upon the dark sea of violence and despair that has engulfed so many civilizations that have gone before?

If we have, then heaven help our poor children. And if there remains time to turn back and retrace our way to humanity, compassion and decency, let us make the turning now. John Kennedy was cruelly taken in the summer of his life; if the foul act is to be given meaning, then it must become a signal for the moral regeneration of all the people of America.

Nathaniel Heidenheimer Wrote:Thanks Paul, just posted that along with your original Viet nam thread on 15 different sites.


Elapsed time: 9 minutes.

Nathaniel Heidenheimer Wrote:Paul if you get a minute posting here will grant you an vast readership from all over the country who will then cut and paste you into destinations..unknown.

St. Louis Post-Dispatch (heavy traffic!!)
http://www.stltoday.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=539930
also see this thread on Oswalds Ghost
http://www.stltoday.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=587103
Also see this one with fresh epiogue from John Newman
http://www.stltoday.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=588904

Just hold off on the purple track suit till the second date!

Quote:The Times, Tuesday, 8 October 1963, p.13:

Second leader: An Elusive Agency

President Kennedy’s failure to control the political activities of the Central Intelligence Agency has been one of the more disappointing and mysterious aspects of his Administration. It is to be hoped that his belated recall of MR. RICHARDSON, the head of the C.I.A. mission in South Vietnam, is a sign of a new determination to exert the full political control which the agency so badly needs. Few things damage a country more than if its representatives on the spot appear to be at odds with each other.

The Cuban fiasco provided a unique opportunity to reassess the role of the C.I.A. The evidence of Laos and South Vietnam is that the opportunity was fumbled. (In Laos two years ago the C.I.A. was still opposing the neutralist coalition some time after PRESIDENT KENNEDY had formally endorsed it.) It is important, however, that the C.I.A. should not become a scapegoat for what are often the sins of the Government. Its involvement with NGO DINH DIEM’S family in Vietnam was encouraged by the absence of clear direction from Washington. The American Government was split over the proper policy for Vietnam, and in the resulting cleavage the State Department went one way and some of the C.I.A., with some of the Pentagon, another. There should have been especially keen vigilance over the C.I.A., for it is well known that many members of its staff are out of sympathy with the basic assumptions of the Administration’s policies, as they were not, on the whole, in the days of MR. DULLES.

The difficulty that has always dogged the C.I.A. is that it is basically inimical to American traditions, and the country has been unable to assimilate it. Born out of the shock of Pearl Harbour, it found its present name in 1947. The original intention was that it should confine itself to the collection and evaluation of information, and many think it should return to this pristine state. It outgrew the restrictions almost by accident. The State Department was weak in staff and funds, and American policy demanded methods that were not compatible with normal diplomacy. Gradually MR. JOHN FOSTER DULLES found that he could sometimes act more effectively through his brother ALLEN, then head of the C.I.A., than through his own department. Repeated attempts to subject the agency to Congressional control stumbled on the obvious need for secrecy. Secrecy would disappear in the open arenas of American political life. At the same time the Dulles fraternity inhibited control by the Executive. The result was a new and secret kingdom which combined the collection of information with the formulation and the execution of policy.

After the Bay of Pigs PRESIDENT KENNEDY tried to restore the making of policy to the State Department, local authority to his ambassadors, and most operational responsibilities to the Pentagon. He has had some success with these reforms, but not enough. The recent troubles have already revived demands for more Congressional control, and some increase may be possible. In the end, however, only one person is in a position to exert full control, and that is the President himself.

Nathaniel Heidenheimer Wrote:You may have noticed how many have ONLY read Case Closed...