This article was posted on Ken Rahn's site after I dug it out of the archives of The Nation. Read it. Read it and weep. There is a sub-rosa message here linking the Medgar Evers, Jr. murder, the 16th Baptist Church Choir Girl Bombing and the JFK Assassination all of which were accompanied by flow of funds from Wickliffe Draper through his J.P. Morgan account and right into The Mississippi Sovereignty Commission coffers of James Eastland and Guy Banister. The last Draper J.P. Morgan funds flow happened 10 days before the Freedom Riders were murdered in Mississippi about 6 months after Condon wrote this article. All of these Civil Rights acts of violence were Pioneer Fund sponsored retributional and vindictive events, funded by Wickliffe Draper and organized by Senator James Eastland, Robert Morris and Guy Banister.
‘Manchurian Candidate’ in DallasRichard Condon
The Nation, 28 December 1963, pp. 449–451
Richard Condon is the author of The Manchurian Candidate(McGraw-Hill), The Oldest Confession (Appleton) and other books.
Paris
I was reading about how Senator Thruston Morton of Kentucky absolved the American people from any guilt in the assassination of the President when a reporter from a South African press association telephoned from London to ask if I felt responsible for the President’s killing, inasmuch as I had written a novel, The Manchurian Candidate, on which had been based a film that had just been “frozen” in the United States because it was felt that the assassin might have seen it and been influenced by it. I told the reporter that, with all Americans, I had contributed to form the attitudes of the assassin; and that the assassin, and Americans like him, had contributed to the attitudes which had caused me to write the novel.
The differences between Senator Morton’s views on this and my own are vast. The man who shot John Kennedy, Senator Morton said, “was a stranger to the American heritage” and “his mind had been warped by an alien violence, not by a native condition.”
Brainwashing to violence and assassination is the line taken in my novel. On its melodramatic surface, the book is a study of the consequences of “a mind warped by alien violence,” but I had also hoped to suggest that for some time all of us in the United States had been brainwashed to violence, and to indicate that the reader might consider that the tempo of this all-American brainwashing was being speeded up.
I meant to call attention, through example, to the proved brainwashing to violence shown by the increased sale of cigarettes after they had been conclusively demonstrated to be suicide weapons. I meant to show that when the attention of a nation is focused upon violence—when it appears on the front page of all newspapers, throughout television programming, in the hundreds of millions of monthly comic books, in most motion pictures, in the rhythms of popular music and the dance, and in popular $5 novels which soon become 50c paperbacks; when a most violent example is set by city, state and federal governments, when organized crime merges with organized commerce and labor, when a feeble, bewildered set of churches cannot counteract any of this and all of it is power-hosed at all of us through the most gigantically complex overcommunications system ever developed—we must not be surprised that one of us bombs little girls in a Sunday school or shoots down a President of our republic. We can feign surprise, as we did with the murder of President Kennedy, but none of us seemed either surprised or moved by the murder of Medgar Evers, who was also a man who had a young wife and children, and whose assassin most certainly matched the basic, American psychological pattern of the killer of our President.
I was not surprised at the similarities between the two American products, Lee Oswald and Raymond Shaw, one all too actual, the other the fictional leading character of The Manchurian Candidate. Oswald’s wife has said she married him because she felt sorry for him; absolutely no one had liked him, “even in Russia.” The novel says, “It was not that Raymond was hard to like. He was impossible to like.” Oswald spoke frequently of the hardships his mother had experienced in the depression, before he had been born, and his mother had been quick to say that “they” had always been against her boy. In the novel, I quoted Andrew Salter, the Pavlovian psychologist. “…the human fish swim about at the bottom of the great ocean of atmosphere and they develop psychic injuries as they collide with one another. Most mortal of these are the wounds gotten from the parent fish.” The Associated Press dug up a truancy report on Oswald which said his resentment had been fixed on “authority.” On the surface he was calm, but inside there was much anger. “The resenters,” says the Chinese brainwasher in The Manchurian Candidate, “those men with cancer of the psyche, make the great assassins.” Raymond Shaw’s account of his past was confusingly dramatic, as was Oswald’s. It all seemed to revolve around his mother, as did Oswald’s.
The brainwasher who was describing Raymond Shaw to an audience in an amphitheatre might have been describing the murderers of John Kennedy and Medgar Evers. “It has been said that only the man who is capable of loving everything is capable of understanding everything. The resentful man is a human with a capacity for affection so poorly developed that his understanding for the motives of others very nearly does not exist. They are men of melancholic and reserved psychology. They are afflicted with total resentment.”
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Lee Oswald’s indicated murder of Mr. Kennedy seems motivated only by his resentment against the most successful man in the world, resentment against a wonderfully intelligent, puissant, healthy, wealthy, witty and handsome man who was so rich in spirit that he made no attempt to conceal his superiority, who dominated the world and outer space, and who had an inexpressibly fine wife and two lovely children. From the view of this resentment, as long as this fellow stayed out of Lee Oswald’s path he would be all right, but when he came laughing into Dallas, and the newspapers printed a map that showed he would drive right past where Lee Oswald worked for a lousy fifty bucks a week, it was more than this classical resentment could bear.
It takes time to achieve such resentment and to fire it there must be careful nurturing by constant unrelenting conditioning to violence. Oswald was not the only violence-packed American who was capable of murdering President Kennedy. The assassination was a wasteful, impersonal, senseless act, but the United States has undergone such a massive brainwashing to violence that such a senseless waste is á la mode.
Ralph Gleason wrote in the San Francisco Chronicle after the President’s murder: “…we bred his murderer, our society produced him and he is, in one sense, a part of us all.” Then Senator Morton said: “…let us not mourn the American soul…let the blame be on him who actually committed the crime…what happened was not America’s fault.”
John Hay Whitney, publisher of the New York Herald Tribune and thus a leading figure in the overcommunications industry, most hotly denied that the American people must share the guilt for President Kennedy’s murder. He amplified his defense by saying: “It’s true that there is hate in America, and violence, and brutality. But violence has not been and is not now a dominant strain in our character.”
To me, it seems certain that Mr. Gleason is right and Senator Morton and Mr. Whitney are mistaken. Neither saints nor assassins appear among us fully grown and wholly developed. All of us are nothing more than the result of our conditioning.
When the fanatic is a ruler, rather than the assassin of a ruler, the people who permitted him to take power must be blamed—whether they be the Germans of 1933–35 for Adolf Hitler, or the people of Chicago, Illinois, for their local government. But when the fanatic is the assassin, he emerges from the very fabric of the people. In answer to Senator Morton: if the American people are encouraging a mass educational system—the overcommunications industry—which instructs for the production of the highest crime rate and the most widely shared violence dependencies of any country in the world, is it not time to say, most particularly by our government, that each American is responsible for that state of affairs because he does nothing to change it? We are not, as some well-meaning European newspaper put it, a violent and unstable people because such “toughness” was required to tame the wild frontier 125 years ago. We are violent and unstable because we have been so conditioned to these responses that civilized, thoughtful conduct has become impossible for us.
It is a hell of a spot for a country to be in. Who, the least brainwashed among us, will cast the first redemptive thought?
Editorials
The New Republic
"Another Beginning" ( 7 December 1963)
"How Could It Happen?" ( 7 December 1963)
The Nation
"John F. Kennedy" (14 December 1963)
"The Climate of Violence" (14 December 1963)
"The American Condition" (21 December 1963)
"The Warren Commission" (28 December 1963)
"Task of the Warren Commission" (27 January 1964)
"Then How About Koch?" (2 March 1964)
"The Dallas Rejoinder" (25 May 1964)
Commentary
"The Warren Commission: An Editorial" ( January 1964)
Articles
The New Republic "When Castro Heard the News" (Jean Daniel, 7 December 1963)
"Unofficial Envoy: An Historic Report from Two Capitals" (Jean Daniel, 14 December 1963)
"Further Clarification: Interviews with Kennedy and Castro" (Jean Daniel, 21 December 1963)
"Seeds of Doubt: Some Questions About the Assassination" (Jack Minnis and Staughton Lynd, 21 December 1963)
"Seeds of Doubt" (Annotated version)
The Minority of One
"Who Killed Whom and Why?" (M.S. Arnoni, January 1964)
"The Death of a President" (Eric Norden, January 1964)
"16 Questions On The Assassination" (Bertrand Russell, September 1964)
New Times
"The Dallas Investigation" (11 December 1963)
"Assassin or Fall Guy?" (23 September 1964)
National Guardian
"Oswald Innocent? A Lawyer's Brief" (Mark Lane, December 1963)
The Nation
"A Most Unstuffy Man" (H. Stuart Hughes, 14 December 1963)
"The TV Image" (Paul T. David, 14 December 1963)
"The Roots of the Agony" (Reece McGee, 21 December 1963)
"'Manchurian Candidate' in Dallas" (Richard Condon, 28 December 1963)
"Oswald and the FBI" (Harold Feldman, 27 January 1964)
"Tussle in Texas" (Saul Friedman, 3 February 1964)
Commentary
"The Oswald Affair" (Leo Sauvage, March 1964)
The New Leader
"Thomas Buchanan, Detective" (Leo Sauvage, 28 September 1964)
"In Defense Of A Theory" (Thomas G. Buchanan, 9 November 1964)
"As I Was Saying" (Leo Sauvage, 9 November 1964)
Reactions of the Left
The Left reacted as strongly as the Right did. Without benefit of formal investigation, they securely and self-confidently blamed right-wing Americans for the assassination. How did they know? They didn't, pure and simple, because they couldn't have
—it was too early. No official evidence or findings had been released, and the Warren Commission was still deep in its work. But that didn't stop The Left from announcing The Truth.
Editorials We present early editorials from The New Republic, The Nation, and Commentary. The two from The New Republic are not polemic. The first,
"Another Beginning," discusses with hope the transition to Lyndon Johnson's administration.
"How Could It Happen?" takes an incredulous look at how Jack Ruby was able to enter the Dallas Police Station and kill Oswald. Seven editorials from The Nation deal with various aspects of the assassination and early reaction to it.
"John F. Kennedy" notes that the late President was just beginning to reach his stride when he was cut down.
"The Climate of Violence" calls for concerted effort to begin to change America's social climate of violence rather than just bemoaning it.
'The American Condition" says that like it or not, Oswald was "one of us."
"The Warren Commission" supports the fledgling organization but calls for diligence in evaluating it and checking its conclusions.
"Task of the Warren Commission" notes just how difficult the Commission's job will be.
"Then How About Koch?" makes the point that if the University of Illinois gives its professor Revilo P. Oliver merely a slap on the wrist for writing a hate-filled article about the late JFK, it should not have fired professor Leo Koch for advocating liberalized social morays on campus.
"The Dallas Rejoinder" concludes the series by observing that the claim of "don't blame us" by certain well-placed Texans rings a bit hollow. Finally,
"The Warren Commission: An Editorial," from Commentary, warns that the Commission must be exceedingly thorough or it won't be believed.
Articles The three articles by Jean Daniel in The New Republic make some of the earliest reactions by individuals of the Left that we have.
"When Castro Heard the News" deals with the reactions of Fidel Castro to the assassination, which Daniel could observe directly because he was interviewing Castro as the news came in.
"Unofficial Envoy: An Historic Report from Two Capitals" and
"Further Clarification: Interviews with Kennedy and Castro" deal mostly with the Cuban missiles, but are included here because of their intense interest and their tight relation to the first article. Together, these articles make riveting reading.
Two days after Mark Lane's infamous
Oswald Innocent? A Lawyer's Brief appeared in the National Guardian, Jack Minnis and
Staughton Lynd published a superficially similar article in The New Republic entitled
Seeds of Doubt: Some Questions About the Assassination. The articles are similar in that they both deal with doubts concerning the official story of the assassination
—primarily whether there was only a single shooter. Lane refers to the Minnis-Lynd article both in the reprinted version of his article and in A Citizen's Dissent (1968). Although both references lead the reader to believe that the articles are similar and that Lane's is more detailed, and presumably better, nothing could be further from the truth. The Minnis-Lynd article is actually much more reasonable and far less dogmatic than Lane's. I consider it "must reading" for anyone interested in early reactions to the assassination because it shows that dedicated people on the Left could actually write a balanced, enquiring article rather than something harsh and condemning. If you want to see a longer commentary on the article, go to Staughton Lind's biography. Best of all, read Lane's article first, then Minnis-Lynd's and see the vast difference for yourself.
M.S. Arnoni was the publisher of the leftist monthly entitled The Minority of One--Independent Monthly For An American Alternative--Dedicated To The Eradication Of All Restrictions Of Thought. During the early sixties, it published many articles of consequence on the JFK assassination that helped promote the idea of conspiracy. The article
"Who Killed Whom And Why?" was written 1 December 1963 and published in the January 1964 issue. In it, Arnoni offers the idea of Kennedy-the-warrior, even to the point of his administration's planning to stage a fake international incident that would provide an excuse to "take back" Cuba. He pictures the conspiracy that killed Kennedy as having arisen with a group of highly placed military men who were embittered at Kennedy's seeking detente with the Soviet Union, whom they considered their mortal enemy. He further pictures this cabal as being so strong as to effectively tie the government's hand for the present. In other words, the leftist Arnoni is blaming a rightist plot. He ends by predicting that if the Johnson Administration eases off from negotiating with the Soviets, this will prove that the rightist conspirators have reached their goal.
Eric Norden was a leftist freelance writer. His long article
"The Death Of A President" appeared in the same issue of The Minority of One as Arnoni's did, which makes it another very early reaction by the Left. Norden review all the difficulties with the official explanation, which was still less than one month old as he was writing, and concludes that Kennedy was most likely killed by a rightist plot initiated at very high levels, which involved Oswald and Ruby but made them both fall guys. Also, the Dallas Police Department must have been deeply involved in the plot. Further, the plot was set up so as to make it appear the work of Leftists, for which Norden takes a certain amount of umbrage. He ends by noting that signs of a backlash against Leftists were already beginning to appear in the U.S.
One prescient aspect of Norden's article is his dire warning about how much the Warren Commission (which was still called the "special Presidential commission") would be at the mercy of the investigating agencies FBI, CIA, and SS for their information. They would hardly criticize themselves or each other. This prediction turned out to be right on the money. As you read Norden's highly detailed article, you may find it interesting to see what fraction of his "facts" were correct. My reading suggests that he was right far more often than he was wrong.
Bertrand Russell was a world-famous socialist in England who became interested in the JFK assassination under the influences of
Mark Lane and
Ralph Schoenman. In September 1964, Russell published his famous
"16 Questions On The Assassination" in M.S. Arnoni's The Minority of One. For this, he was roundly criticized on both sides of the Atlantic (see
Bertrand Russell for details). The article, which incorporated many ideas from Mark Lane, dwelt on omissions, inconsistencies of the Warren-Report-to-be, as well as alternative evidence (generated by Mark Lane) that ran counter to the Commission. In that sense, it is like reading Mark Lane all over again. As with Lane, it is full of errors. Its questions of the Commission have also been answered. We include it here for historical value, as a picture of a great man adversely affected by compatriots unworthy of his intellect.
The Soviet Union reacted immediately after the fact. It released a series of news articles that are reviewed in Norden's
"The Death of a President." He says that "The reaction of the Soviet press to the Kennedy assassination was one of grief and shock mixed with deep apprehension that the act was part of a carefully planned plot to heat up the Cold War by shifting the blame for the President's death to the Soviet Union and Cuba." The USSR also commented at great length in a series of broadcasts, the thrust of which was followed by several of its satellite states. They produced the first conspiracy theories (involving the ultrarightists of the American south), which a week or so later began to be espoused by American leftists. Transcripts of the relevant portions of those broadcasts are reproduced
here.
On a longer time scale, the Soviet press also produced a series of articles in their weekly New Times, which at its maximum was printed in 53 languages. They began commenting on the assassination soon after it occurred. These articles pushed the idea that the assassination was the work of reactionary rightist elements in the United States, whose goal was to get the U.S. government to blame the Soviet Union and thereby deepen the Cold War. The two earliest of these articles that we have been able to find appeared before the Warren Report did. They are
"The Dallas Investigation," in the New Times of 11 December 1963, and a
review of Joachim Joesten's "Assassin Or Fall-Guy?", the issue of 23 September 1964, just before the Warren Report was released.
Some writers, particularly Armand Moss in his Disinformation, Misinformation, and the "Conspiracy" to Kill JFK Exposed, have proposed that the Soviet Union was using this propaganda to try to take advantage of America's time of weakness and soul-searching by driving a wedge into it and dividing it. We discuss this idea at greater length under "Soviet Fostering of Conspiracy."
Mark Lane was one of the first Americans to raise his voice against the "official" version of the assassination as he saw it developing. As early as December 19, 1963 (less than one month after the assassination), he published a five-page lawyer's brief in New York's leftist National Guardian, promoting Oswald's innocence. Entitled
"Oswald Innocent? A Lawyer's Brief," it occupied nearly one-half the Guardian's twelve pages. It was received so favorably that the Guardian reprinted it, along with a page of comments and a page of letters from readers, as a special eight-page tabloid-size pamphlet. Because this pamphlet so thoroughly captures Lane's early reaction to the assassination, we reproduce it in its entirety here. For a more detailed background to this article, see
Lane's biographical sketch.
The liberal The Nation also weighed in, with a series of six articles over two months. These articles, which collectively declined to invoke a conspiracy of the Right, drew the ire of legions of leftists and began the split down the middle that is discussed further under
Reactions to the Warren Report. The idea in many minds was that you weren't a good leftist unless you didn't see the obvious rightist plot and the Warren Commission's role in hiding it from the public. The militant side criticized The Nation roundly for not jumping onto the bandwagon. It got worse when The Nation supported the Warren Report after it appeared.
The first article,
"A Most Unstuffy Man," by H. Stuart Hughes, was a brief paean to the President who died at the top of his form.
"The TV Image," by Paul T. David, is a one-pager that marvels at the power of television for those four days. It also speculates that the uninterrupted coverage gave a great boost to Lyndon Johnson and the Democratic party. Reece McGee's
"The Roots of the Agony" recounts this professor of sociology's observations of the unique social mores of Texas that led him to conclude that the assassination almost certainly had to happen in Texas. This is great background reading for the setting of the assassination.
"'Manchurian Candidate" in Dallas," by Richard Condon, describes his belief that Lee Harvey Oswald was conditioned by society, directly or indirectly, to do his evil deed.
"Oswald and the FBI," by Harold Feldman, uses several pieces of evidence to raise the question of whether Oswald could have been an agent of the FBI. Saul Friedman's
"Tussle in Texas" describes the hegemony of the extreme Right in Texas at that time, and particularly in Dallas. Texas was different, and Dallas more different. Did this have anything to do with the assassination? The question is raised but not answered.
Leo Sauvage was chief U.S. correspondent for the French daily Le Figaro. He took an early interest in the JFK assassination and soon published the book L'Affaire Oswald in Paris. In March 1964 he published a summary of the book under its English title
"The Oswald Affair" in Commentary, making it one of the earliest articles published after the assassination. The gist of his argument was that there are so many loopholes in the evidence against Lee Harvey Oswald that there is certainly far more to the story than had come out to that point.
After
Thomas Buchanan published his early book Who Killed Kennedy?, Sauvage aligned himself strongly against it. He did battle with Buchanan in a three-part series in The New Leader (
"Thomas Buchanan, Detective," by Sauvage;
"In Defense Of A Theory," by Buchanan;
"As I Was Saying," by Sauvage) in its issues of 28 September and 9 November 1964. Because these articles draw on Buchanan's book that was published in May 1964, well before before the Warren Report was issued the following September, we include them here as pre-WCR reactions. For more information on Sauvage, see his
biography. Thomas Buchanan was an American expatriate living in Paris at the time of the assassination. He kept copious notes on it and soon developed a theory on what had happened and why. Those ideas were published in a six-part series in the French weekly L'Express and shortly thereafter (May 1964) turned into the book Who Killed Kennedy? It was very influential in Europe but never in the United States. For more on Buchanan, see his
biography.
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