10-04-2009, 09:24 PM
(This post was last modified: 10-04-2009, 09:25 PM by Paul Rigby.)
Entry the first - what the CIA's strategy of polarisation had achieved in the US on the eve of Kennedy's murder:
Quote:Sunday Telegraph, 24 November 1963, p.17
But Will the True Lesson Be Learned?
By Claud Cockburn
As I left Idlewild Airport on Thursday, the last of twenty American friends who had all said much the same thing, said to me: “Remember, the Union survived the last time we had a civil war. I believe we can do it again.”
For those two months in the United States – a great deal familiar after thirty years than I had expected it to be – that was the kind of talk I heard. Talk of violence and disruption. Talk of a society as near explosion as it was a century ago.
And now, thinking back to a trivial conversation in New York or Washington, I can even now recall a little drunken man who had no information but had absorbed the atmosphere through his pores, saying “They shot Lincoln after he freed the slaves. What d’you think they’ll do to the Kennedys?”
Of course nobody except the man or men who planned to kill him, foresaw the assassination of the President. The assassin had plenty of time. The tour of Texas was, for the most serious political reasons, very well-publicised in advance. Plenty of time to tell just where to place a telescopically-sighted rifle. By a hideous irony, only a few days earlier Mr. Kennedy came to New York and caused dismay to the FBI and the New York Police Department by driving from the airport to his hotel without the customary escort. His decision disorganised the traffic considerably; but while cursing the man for not being more conventional, and thus making us late for our appointments, most of us were also glad that in the city of New York he felt safe.
A Climate of Stress
So why was he killed in Texas? Which asks another question: Why did I, like every other observant man who came from the United States to London recently, try to convey to people here a sense of foreboding; a feeling that the situation in the United States was more electric – perhaps desperately electric – than almost anybody here seemed to believe?
It is possible that this killer was a lone maniac – a van der Lubbe of 1963. But the climate which produced him was not an accident.
It seems by hindsight that we might have taken some warning from the fact that a few weeks ago the American Ambassador to the United Nations, himself an ex-candidate for the Presidency, was struck and spat upon as he toured Texas. I thought at the time that the official apologies from the civic dignitaries of Dallas for this outrageous event were notably perfunctory. Mr. Stevenson said that as for him he was not upset by what had happened – but he felt sorry for the people of Texas.
The people of Texas were not at all sorry for themselves.
They thought – and some of them told friends of mine who had been down there at the time – that this was a natural reaction to the presence of a statesman who favoured the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty (and was thus pretty much of a Red), and was an official of an Administration which favoured Civil Rights for Negroes (and thus a near-Communist and certainly a Federal Enemy of the Sovereign Rights of the State of Texas).
Feud Between Democrats
That was the climate of the State into which Mr. Kennedy had to venture in an effort to mend the mouldering political fences of the Democratic party in that section of the South. The Presidential Election of 1964 looked to be such a damned-near-run thing that those 25 Texan votes in the electoral college might swing it one way or another. There was also a savage internal battle going on in the State, a battle typical of those which plagued and wrecked the last months of the Kennedy Administration.
It would take too long to spell it all out; but it involved a deadly feud between a “liberal” Democrat who supported all that “the New Frontier” had been supposed to stand for, and a “conservative” Democrat who could have been very important to Mr. Kennedy in the Presidential contest. Part of his purpose in Texas had been to fix up this feud. It is a feud which, on a national scale, he had been for months trying to fix, patch up or postpone.
Personally, I believe nobody could have done it. I listened to Mr. Kennedy’s speech in the garish wastes of the American Hotel, New York, when he tried to tell the biennial convention of the AFL-CIA (the great chiefs – if you dare leave out Hoffa – of the American trade union movement) that the Civil Rights question was in essence an economic, not a racial problem. If the Congress would pass his Tax Bill, then a great wind of economic prosperity would sweep America. And the Negroes would sail with it. But if his Bill failed to pass, and unemployment rose, soared perhaps, then what would his Civil Rights avail the Negro?
In that strange setting (where between-the-sessions-snacks cost £2 to £3) it was oddly reminiscent of Karl Marx at his simplest.
That was Mr. Kennedy’s bet, his great, terrible and necessary gamble. He had, that is to say, by moving as gently as possible on the Civil Rights issue, by paying out much in patronage to the Southern Senators, including the men from Texas, to seek to create a coalition of Democrats and Republicans in the Congress which would somehow speed the passage of the Tax Bill.
In my own view and that of large numbers of white and Negro Americans with whom I have recently spoken, the bet was tragically on the wrong horse. I agree with those of the President’s advisers who told him that the racial issue, the colour question, is something which cannot be explained simply in terms of rich and poor.
People who believe that it can be so explained keep quoting what they claim is an old Brazilian proverb. It says that “the rich Negro is a white man and the poor white is a Negro.” Very neat. So neat that I suspect it is no more Brazilian than I am but was made up in the shuttle-plane between New York and Washington.
Neither Side Appeased
If it were true, how do you explain Mr. Gaston, the Negro-multimillionaire in Birmingham, Alabama, who for a long time thought the “race issue” was a lot of nonsense, and ended up putting his resources at the disposal of the militant Negroes in Birmingham? Mr. Gaston may be a specially rich Negro, but among rich Negroes he is not otherwise special.
In other words, the sudden upsurge of Negro indignation at the condition of the Negro people – the realisation as the days, and above all the school terms, go by of what the white man has done and is doing to them and their children – is partly an expression of class conflict, but also a movement which cuts across racial lines.
So that Mr. Kennedy’s gamble did little to appease the Negroes and nothing, absolutely nothing, to appease the whites. On the contrary, the Southern white segregationists, believing – with an eye on the election of 1964 – that they had the President locked in a grim half-nelson, became during the last few weeks continuously more aggressive.
The great August “March on Washington” by the Negroes was written off in the North and elsewhere as a proof that really there is nothing to worry about; calm and reason will prevail, and this splendid demonstration of Negro “responsibility” will convince everyone that their demands are just.
The North then sat back and snored its “liberal” pleasure. What actually happened as a result of the Washington march, as distinct from what the Northern pundits said was happening, was the deliberately spectacular murder of those Negro girls in the Birmingham church, and a subsequent tussle between the President of the United States and the Governor of Alabama, in which – despite all soft talk to the contrary – the Governor came off best.
The killings, the behaviour of the Governor, and what amounted to a reign of terror in Mississippi, were the outward signs of the white counter-attack. That attack has been mounting in violence for weeks.
It has created an atmosphere of furious violence in the South, an atmosphere in which every device of the police State – including political murder – is regarded as the justified defence of freedom of “the South” or “the State” or “the Southern way of living” against intrusion.
It is an atmosphere in which there are plenty of men in a condition of mind to plan an assassination, and plenty of half-crazy dupes available to pull the trigger.
Just a week ago I sat, at a very respectable Washington dinner party, beside a respectable Southern lady who told me she spent almost the entire morning in her bath trying to make up her mind what degree of allegiance, if any, she owed the Federal Government as and when it was in conflict with her native state of Georgia, and at what point it would be right for the South to “start shooting.” She ran the hot water again and again, missed an appointment with her hairdresser, and at the end of it still stood dripping on the bathmat, no nearer a solution.
A ludicrous, possibly harmless lady. But a silly symbol of a state of mind which among the “extremists” of the South – a term used to indicate a majority of the white population – is no more ludicrous nor harmless than a bunch of rattlesnakes.
If This Were Europe
Indeed, an American who had just returned from a tour of the South, where he had consorted principally with the rich and powerful whites, said, “The only way you can begin to get an idea of the Administration’s problems is to imagine that there was a United States of Europe with Hitler in it, and no major policy could be carried out, or put into effect, without taking account of ‘the German vote’ and ‘opinion in Berchtesgaden.’
On occasions like this, decent people are inevitably inclined to take almost for granted that the monstrosity of such an act as the assassination of Mr. Kennedy must at least produce a “revulsion of feeling.” They are fumbling in the dark for some sort of compensatory factor.
There will, of course, be genuine outbursts of horror from some of those who have been active in fomenting hatred and madness, and some big floods of crocodile tears too. But from what I know of Southern attitudes I must say that in my estimation very few among the white segregationists are likely to draw decent or proper conclusions from the event.
Some of them will, naturally, prefer to see it as the isolated act of a maniac, without reference to the climate of violence which has been created and in which such acts can occur. Many more, I should judge, will secretly come to view the assassination as a bloody episode in a period when they have for months been preparing and practising bloodshed.
One thing perfectly certain is that no degree of shock, no talk of “pulling together in the hour of national mourning” will cause these people to desist from policies which are driving the United States to the verge of general civil conflict.
On the contrary, with President Lyndon Johnson in the White House, himself a Southerner, a man of elaborate compromises, and certainly not a man of the New Frontier, they are most likely to feel that now is the moment to intensify their attack.