Why didn't the hippies get into the jfk assassination ?

[Peter Lemkin]

While not to try to mix this general thread with one on JFK, over the years I have become more and more convinced that JFK was murdered not only for specific policy / morality differences with others in power [both formal positions and positions not formally acknowledged], but because more generally he, as a person, was also undergoing paradigm shifts - as were many others increasingly just beginning to do. Some of this was forced upon him by his brushes with great stress [double-crosses by CIA and others] and deadly scenarios [Cuban Missile Crisis], etc. In his American University Speech he laid out a different vision/path/paradigm than was tolerable by the Unspeakable - a new vision/path/paradigm for a President and Nation that had been growing. Douglass does the best job of describing this blooming transformation of a human who happened to be the President and the effects of those changes on his fate and the fate of the Nation.
I believe that among his close associates Mary P. Meyers also was one of his fellow-travelers along this new path [with whom JFK smoked grass and apparently tried LSD and increasingly shared her/their views of moving toward Peace, not War; Love, not strife, etc.] For most of us here, who lived through the 60s/70s, those same changes came some years after the horror of Dallas. The same forces that killed JFK made sure that the paradigm shifting was stopped or limited to what was/is labeled as a lunatic fringe.

Who was sane and who crazy?!

[Phil Dragoo]

Peter

John F. Kennedy may have spun up to full rpm in '63 with EO 11110, the American University speech, NSAM 263, secret negotiations toward detente with Khrushchev and demarche with Castro

I submit the Bay of Pigs was a provocation designed to fail infamously, smearing Kennedy with the traitor label and various expletives on the lips of armed Cubans and their milint handlers

Oswald bifurcation carefully laid into the building wiring in '52 by master spooks in the college of Dulles-Jackson

Eisenhower era a somnambulistic ride in a golf cart blown up by the fall of Havana

Come the Beats, come the Beatles, the fruits of Sandoz, how much was the tiger awakening, how much was riding the tiger

The 'sixties saw a series of engineered V-2 crashes on the pad, JFK, MX, MLK, RFK, to the moon and the rise of Nixon

'70 with the Weather sweeping in to eclipse the Flower Children, after Altamont, busy screenwriters creating noire

Disco and faux Senate hearings culminating in Blakey's HSCA whitewash of his CIA dominatrix, the assassination of Lennon and the attempt on Reagan

I don't know that it was All About Mary with JFK; his personal journey marked him for martyrdom per Douglass channeling Merton

Some at every age are swept along--if they threaten the king, they are extinguished, hence lights don't last

Gunn questioned Custer why he didn't object; Custer's response: some did--they didn't last long

And yet, in a moment of not too much gravity, we might see he knew he was marked out for death

and provides a gimbaled compartment for meditation

Solving the case with Kierkegaard

[Jim Hackett II]

First I gotta say how can I not admire and respect David Crosby?
Truth to Power....

Drugs had very little to do with my own paradigm shift, more coincidental and just a little later than the huge awakening of Spring '67.
I hadn't rejected the redneck ways yet until summer '68.
Redneck in that time is not the redneck of today.
For years I had held silent sympathy and a feeling of kinship with the "damned civil rights workers invading the south", as they were named in the culture of the rednecks.

To me they were citizens actively seeking redress of a wrong. So I suppose even in grade school when JFK was murdered I was already taking the road less traveled for a while before '67

I can't leave out the war. In '67 I was loosing faith in Vietnamese victory, after 2 years and no end in sight - something was amiss here.
At this point in '67 I was fortunate enough to be in a high school "current affairs" class from a teacher not so anxious to toe the line and LIE to the students.

I am sure I was fertile soil for the teaching I was getting. Political discussion (dictations to the youngsters around) was part of the life in this Scot's-Irish household.
I was being shown the internal moral compass I was given was more correct than Archie Bunker/George Wallace/Curt Le May BS of the Waylon Jennings fans were trying to force into my gullet.

I have had Generation Xers claim "we had it easy with free sex and drugs", from fools that didn't live the oppression and like from Nixon that followed the 1960s.
Simplistic in the extreme and petty jealousy for something that never was in reality.

The only damn drug I had ever consumed at the age of 15 was alcohol. And I did not like it at all.
Oh the Parents of the kids undergoing the catharsis of the time, I can see now why parents were freaking out.
A generation, global generation was openly rejecting the capitalism the preceding generation had based their values upon.
The generation had had ENOUGH of drafting to war for Empire.
In my own time drugs had little to do with the choice I made to not be another damn fool redneck.

In my Junior year of high school a "drug list" of student was released. Today I would sue.
Anyway I was mightily offended. I hadn't even ever seen a joint, but by God if you punks are gonna accuse me I'm gonna find out what I am accused of enjoying.
I was pissed by the BS fascism of this falsified list.

You wanna know who made the list? No matter the intoxicants taken IF ANY, the unconventional thinkers, the long hairs, and the students that had the guts to confront BS shoveled into minds in classrooms.
Anyone that openly confronted racism in Martinsville Indiana in 1968 was definitely included in this list.
I did so and had to fight the 'necks, not a problem as I am not a total pacifist and was not then.

By 1968 my imposed short hair was gone and I was no longer asked by my parents if I wanted to go to family reunions.
What the parents did not know was the youths were having our own private reunions, where we didn't get harassed or told we looked like women with our hair.
By 1968 the murders of MLK and RFK destroyed any hope in "inside the system" change.
I was radicalized against the Establishment that summer - forever.

I was hitchhiking home from school one day on the primary highway from Indy to Bloomington. When another long hair picked me up. Oct. 68.
Why can I recall, two reasons. First I was introduced to pot on the ride and, second I chose to go the 15 miles past home to this man's apartment and the Indiana University culture I found there.
Gee Toto we ain't in Kansas no more.

SDS was active in the IU commons as well as other radical left groups of people. I had found a community that not only agreed with my views but even more so could support the views with history.
That community not the drug culture was responsible for stealing me away from the redneck mindbent sickness permanently.
Suddenly I wasn't hanging out at the local malt shop worried about getting a date with Sue Sweetcakes or who won the last big game.
Needless to say I have never gone to my "high school reunion" and never will, I see my friends from the time without the ceremonial gong shows endorsing the still racist town values.

I was hitching to Bloomington more and more often and detached the old MHS bullcrap. More and more involved in stopping the war before my number came up as white trash I knew it would.
I had been warned by a neighbor secretary of the Draft Board to avoid the draft if possible, an elderly lady knew more than I at that point.

I can and will state right here and now that there were a helluva lot more drugs (and much more dangerous drugs) in the USMC barracks than in the culture that shifted my own paradigm so radically.
The music and the culture were much more influential than the drugs to me in my catharsis.

In my opinion the culture went away to disco and I lost touch with the common culture of dancing and cocaine. Something happened between 1972 and 1975 that I was not aware of and still wonder about.
What happened to the activism? Was it really cocaine. Did the people not hear Sam Ervin's proceedings? Or Frank Church's reports?
The Mighty Wurlitzer won out. Dammit.
Or what?
Kids and "responsibilities"?

I cannot accept that as I know too many people my age that did raise their children as free thinking and aware citizens.

I still don't understand where did the impetus of 1971-2 go?

FWIW
Jim

[Tracy Riddle]

Nice post, Jim. I think something had gone seriously wrong by late 1969, when at the Altamont festival, 300,000 hippies let themselves be terrorized by a few dozen Hell's Angels. Marty Balin got punched out by one of them. The rest of the band stands around like sheep while a few wolves roam around doing whatever they like. The entire "Gimme Shelter" film is so depressing. The Grateful Dead are like, "Oh bummer, Marty got punched out. That's not cool."



Mick Jagger is prancing around on stage while one Angel watches as though he wants to smash Mick's face in. I think bad acid had something to do with it, but there was a general malaise and passivity at work. How were they going to change the world if they couldn't stop a handful of Nazi thugs from pushing them around? I won't get into Meredith Hunter's death, because there's a lot of controversy about whether he was pointing the gun at the stage and was responsible for his own death. I don't know, but the Angels' behavior was pretty bad before that happened.

[Steve Minnerly]

Peter wrote - While not to try to mix this general thread with one on JFK, over the years I have become more and more convinced that JFK was murdered not only for specific policy / morality differences with others in power [both formal positions and positions not formally acknowledged], but because more generally he, as a person, was also undergoing paradigm shifts
__________________________________________

Theres a Youtube interview with Harold Weisberg where he says that the common thread in many assassinations is when a leader that is in office changes his belief system.

[Jim Hackett II]

Too bad in '69 and 70 I was not aware of the Nixonian War on American Citizens.
At that point I knew but not enough did I know.

The Era of the psycho-hippie bad-jacketing with Altamont as Psyop and Charlie Manson and the SLA, Strange Days indeed.
Kent and Jackson State
the Tin Soldiers and Nixon were comin' ... but I didn't know the extent then.
Op-Chaos in full bloom and little did I know....
For example, I knew Al Butterfield blew the whistle on Nixon in '73. Watching PBS live before work everyday.

I did not know Butterfield was CIA and central in the Dorothy Hunt crash cover-up,
not until Fletcher Prouty told me in an interview. Not that I interviewed him, but....you know what I mean.
I did not then in 1973 imagine the extent of the Mil-Intell efforts to be the men behind the curtain.

I would have rejected out of hand in 1973 the idea of Watergate Burglers being directly involved in the plot to kill President Kennedy,
Now by the good work of DPF member researchers I know this to be true.

[Steve Minnerly]

Nice post, Jim. I think something had gone seriously wrong by late 1969, when at the Altamont festival, 300,000 hippies let themselves be terrorized by a few dozen Hell's Angels. Marty Balin got punched out by one of them. The rest of the band stands around like sheep while a few wolves roam around doing whatever they like. The entire "Gimme Shelter" film is so depressing. The Grateful Dead are like, "Oh bummer, Marty got punched out. That's not cool."



Mick Jagger is prancing around on stage while one Angel watches as though he wants to smash Mick's face in. I think bad acid had something to do with it, but there was a general malaise and passivity at work. How were they going to change the world if they couldn't stop a handful of Nazi thugs from pushing them around? I won't get into Meredith Hunter's death, because there's a lot of controversy about whether he was pointing the gun at the stage and was responsible for his own death. I don't know, but the Angels' behavior was pretty bad before that happened.

Seems like if the counter cultural movement was passive there never would have been a move away from the Einsenhower conformity. Just cause somebody is buzzed and laid back at a concert doesn't mean that they are like that every waking minute.

There was push back by the hippies. The anti war movement was push back. Chris Hedges routinely talks about how Kissinger admits in his autobiography that the Nixon admin was terrified of the anti war movement. Hedges often ends his speeches by saying that is the model of how you want the government to feel towards the people.

So yeah there was some passivity involved and some of it was probably due to the drugs.

But they weren't just being walked on like they were a carpet. Doesn't seem like the elites are frightened of the population at all today. If i had to pick out a time when people were abused and walked on Id say that that time is now more than back then.

[Albert Rossi]

I would propose "Forrest Gump" as an allegory for what we are talking about -- probably an unwitting one, so consider what follows a deconstruction or a reading against the grain.

Theme: shit happens, you can't make sense of the 60s and early 70s, and most Americans walked through those events as if they were a feather blown on the wind; what was really needed was the long cross country run at the end of the 70s to put it all behind us and prepare ourselves for the 80s, where all that matters is having your Apple stock split 10 ten times and taking care of your kid (though I'm not sure even that matters any more). Why try to make sense of something that is without any larger significance (wait ... did McAdams write that film?). Besides, the coeur simple is morally superior to the thinker or the intellectual. Flaubert's irony is not for most Americans. So Run, Forrest, Run!

Withdrawal into the private sphere is what allowed the 80s and 90s to happen. It is personally depressing to me to think of 1968, and then fast forward to 1984, with Reagan winning by an 80% landslide. What happened to all those bodies on the streets? Did all the hippies become yuppies?

Of course, not all of this occurred "without help". The assassinations, cointelpro, and acts of sabotage and provocation like the murder of Hampton or Kent State, basically destroyed the active left, driving it back inside, into the confines of the university classroom, where it is much less threatening.

"And that's all I have to say about that ..."

[Marlene Zenker]

I was 8 years old in 1960 and sensed something really evil about Richard Nixon. I was so worried that he would win that on the night of the election my mother let me stay up until 3AM at which point she made me go to bed. I awoke with a start in the morning fearing the worst, immediately turning on the radio and to my relief Kennedy had won.

I was 11 in 1963, when Ruby shot Oswald I knew it wasn't a lone gunman. I remember being appalled as they mentioned on TV either that night or during the weekend that LBJ was already moving his furniture into the Oval Office. But I was a kid and life went on. When Martin & Bobby were killed it only confirmed what I felt in my gut - maybe most significant to me was Bobby because "they" had already killed his brother, I had suspected LBJ and or Nixon in '63 though now I was more convinced it was Nixon, but life went on.

Dorothy Kilgallen's death was also very disturbing to me, as a New Yorker I read her column in the Journal American and watched her on "What's My Line". I had no idea she was investigating the assassination or her interviews with Ruby. Again, a gut feeling told me that she wouldn't commit suicide but life went on.

One Sunday, probably in 1974, I pulled out the NY Times Magazine section and on the front cover was a picture of Nixon and his "buds", the opening line of the article was something like "Richard Nixon and his cronies boarded a plane out of Dallas on November 22, 1963." I literally stood up and said to my parents "I knew it - Nixon was behind the assassination." They probably looked at me like I was crazy and life went on.

A couple years later I bought a copy of Irving Wallace's "The Book of Lists" and came upon the list of Dallas witnesses who died in such a short period of time - another "ah ha" moment and once again life went on.

I was completely unaware of Mark Lane, Mae Brussell, et al, I had no idea that research was ongoing regarding the case - I just always knew in my gut that things were very wrong.

I went to a Catholic grade school and entered a public high school in September 1966. That first term girls were required to wear skirts and boys to wear ties. In January of 1967 we had Winter Intercession - when we came back to school after 2 weeks, everyones hair was down to their asses, they were all wearing jeans, people were smoking pot and doing other drugs and it literally happened overnight. To this day - all these years later it still boggles my mind - how did it happen overnight?

My friends and I became activists, we protested, went to rallies, etc.. At the same time close friends joined the army and the marines, they all went to Vietnam, we continued to protest while being supportive to our military friends. I never understood why the returning soldiers, sailors, marines were vilified and I never understood why they didn't understand that we, at least my friends and acquaintances didn't blame them for the war, we just wanted them and the country to get out of the war.

I obviously understand now, but it wasn't our intention to hurt them and yet we did so profoundly.

We, the kids I hung around with back in the 60's, were so young and overwhelmed by the war and had so little access to facts other than newspapers (and I use the word facts lightly) we really didn't understand what was going on - though we did sense that things were never the same after the assassination(s).

[Keith Millea]

So much to say,but my head ain't in it today.

Except for the crowd around the stage,the rest of us (250,000),had a pretty damn good time.

Thank your Angels:

Tuff shit for the meth freak who pulled the gun.