15-04-2009, 09:47 PM
Paul Rigby Wrote:Daily Mail, 25 November 1963, p.2
Untitled
By Don Iddon, NEW YORK, Sunday [Extract]
Some officials speculated here last night than an extremist group was behind the assassination of President Kennedy and that Lee Harvey Oswald was used as a “gun for hire” man.
It has all been a little too pat, too quick, too slick.
On the right:
Quote:Daily Mail, 25 November 1963, p.2
In a hat
By Bruce Rothwell, Sunday [Extract]
“A Dallas police officer said after the shooting of Oswald: “If I had seen Ruby I would have thrown him out.”
The official police version, to a Press Conference, is that Ruby had been waiting in a parked green convertible outside the headquarters, leaped over a barrier and shot Oswald.
But millions watching TV saw Ruby standing among reporters long before Oswald was brought to the basement to board an armoured car.
They saw him because he was wearing dark hat - and he was the only man in the throng of reporters wearing a hat.
Despite stringent security measures the police had announced Oswald’s transfer beforehand to the public. And all reporters had been required to show credentials before entering Ruby got in unnoticed.”
On the right again:
Quote:Daily Mail, 26 November 1963, p.1
Comment: The Anxious World
It was the time, yesterday, for the impressive last rites, the funeral orations, the eloquent tributes in assemblies like our own Parliament.
So hardly won; so well deserved.
It is not the time for the reality to break the dreamlike state of horror in which the American people have lived since their President was murdered. Not yesterday – nor, perhaps, today either.
They are still stunned by the shock, and the reaction is yet to come. When it does come, what will it be? Will the nation rise in anger and say: “Someone must pay for this?”
If so, who will pay? Who will be the scapegoats? Will the U.S. in its agony turn inwards and rend itself? These are some of the questions an anxious world is asking now.
Violence
An appalling undercurrent of violence in American life is revealed by the recent dire events, especially in the South, and more especially in Texas.
When the Washington Post says “respect for the office and person of the President precludes even the thought of physical violence against him,” it is demonstrably untrue.
Four American Presidents have been assassinated and four others shot at during the past century. Two other cold-blooded killings accompanied the murder of John Kennedy.
In Texas there is a homicide every eight hours and guns are bought and sold like cans of peas.
Hatred
It is against this background and that of racial conflict that we view the assassination while wondering what may come next.
It is devoutly to be hoped that the murder was the isolated act of one half-crazed man against whom vengeance has already been exacted by another.
Oswald had a record of unstable political affiliations. The frank, sympathetic way in which the dreadful deed has been handled in Russia must help to banish the idea that it was Communist inspired.
There is the opposite whisper – that the President was killed by racial extremists who hated him and his Civil Rights policies towards Negroes. According to this Oswald was a tool who was used and then liquidated.
Facts can be produced to fit this theory. The ease with which Oswald was picked up and the evidence against him made ready. His extraordinary end.
Depravity
Why, it is being asked, was it publicly known that he was to be moved to another jail? How was it that his killer could shoot him at point-blank range in spite of the strong police escort?
Such are some of the doubts and speculations. But the whole thing can just as well be explained by sloppy security measures, and, above all, by familiarity in the wearing and use of firearms in Texas.
Civilised men must hope that this is the true explanation. If it were not, one would despair at human depravity.
But if this is really what happened we can close a blood-stained chapter and turn our faces to the future.
From the left:
Quote:Daily Worker, 26 November 1963, p.2
A long, black record of violence
By Jack Sutherland
Will the truth ever be known about who shot and murdered President Kennedy as he drove through the streets of Dallas last Friday?
Says the police chief of Dallas: “The case is closed. We had all the evidence to convict Lee Oswald. Why, it was a cinch.”
But Lee Oswald, the 24-year-old accused, who amid a mass of contradictory accusations and evidence, maintained his innocence to the end, has himself been murdered while in police custody.
Far from being heavily guarded, as the first reports said, he was in fact (as anyone who watched the appalling scene on television can testify) paraded by the police along a corridor, an open target for his assassin.
The Southern racialists and opponents of democratic liberties and civil rights no doubt believe they have won a great victory.
The triumphant mood of Saturday after the murder of Kennedy must know be mixed with pure delight at the way events have turned out.
For these men are the embattled heirs to the longest and most savage traditions of political violence and frame-ups in the entire capitalist world.
If one has a sense of revulsion at the mere term “Southern justice,” it is because here there are people who have learned well, still believe in and practise the methods and the examples that made the American ruling class notorious.
The explosions at Dallas can be paralleled countless times in the history of the American people’s struggle for democratic rights.
Invariably the murders, provocations and frame-ups have been an attempt to postpone, delay and sidetrack the popular struggle to blacken its name, to destroy its leaders.
Who can forget, for instance, the name of Tom Mooney? On July 22nd 1916, during a peaceful parade in San Francisco an explosion occurred which killed ten innocent people and wounded 40 others.
Tom Mooney, a young trade union leader, was arrested with his wife and three other trade unionists. Tom had been active in organising the motormen and conductors of United Railways, and in organising a strike.
The arrest was the swift and sudden revenge of the employers. It was a warning to the unruly Labour movement of the city.
Tom Mooney was charged with murder and though there was completely irrefutable proof that Mooney and his friends had nothing to do with the explosion some were sentenced to death and some to long periods of imprisonment.
Even when the defence went to court with photographs which completely destroyed the whole fabric of underworld perjury used against the accused, the frame-up gang proceeded undaunted with the fabrication of false evidence.
Tears
It was 22 years later when Tom Mooney, his death sentence commuted, was eventually freed.
An account of his release says:“The tears became uncontrollable and his voice broke when he recalled the vilification that was directed at his mother, who gave her life in the fight for his freedom, and others dear to him in the courtroom where the sentence of death was pronounced upon him.”
Yes, tears have flown in plenty.
It was only four years after the events in San Francisco that an armed robbery took place in Briantree, Massachusetts, in which two employers were killed. This time the crime was pinned on two young radicals. Their names – Sacco and Vanzetti.
The fight for these two innocent men went on for seven years. New evidence was brushed aside, the confession of the man who actually committed the murder was dismissed.
Just before the two men were executed, Vanzetti said this: “If it had not been for this thing I might have lived out my life among scorning men. I might have died unknown, a failure. This is our career and our triumph.
Never in our full life can we hope to do such work for tolerance, for justice, for man’s understanding of man, as we do know by our accident.
Our words – our lives – our pain – nothing. The taking of our lives – lives of a good shoemaker and a poor fish peddlar – everything.”
Racists
Yet who have been worse victims of frame-ups and violence than the Negro people? No dossier will ever be long enough, comprehensive enough to catalogue the crimes committed against the Negroes by the race haters.
On March 25, 1931, in Alabama, nine Negro boys, aged 13 to 20, were pulled off a freight train and jailed in nearby Scottsboro. Two white girls accused them of rape.
In a framed-up trial they were sentenced to execution. Years of campaigning by the progressive movement, and eventually the repudiation of her evidence by one of the girls concerned, helped to free the boys. But only after the most appalling experiences in prison.
No one learned better than the nazis how powerful can be a political provocation and the frame-up of victims. The firing of the Reichstag in January 1933 was the excuse for the seizure of power by Hitler.
The arrest of Dimitrov and three other Communists on framed-up charges of setting fire to the Reichstag was used by the nazis to attack first the Communist Party, then the Social Democrats and eventually the entire Labour and progressive movement in Germany.
But their plans hardly went smoothly and by the time Dimitrov appeared in court and made his famous defence the whole world knew what the nazis were up to.
The last war saw the growth of democratic sentiments, ideas of a new and better society, and hopes for a peaceful world. The organisation of the cold war was in itself a gigantic provocation.
The Rosenbergs were two of the victims of that period and they will never be forgotten for their courage and their stand against American reaction.
They faced death with bravery. When they were offered their lives in return for a confession of guilt, they replied to Eisenhower: “By asking us to repudiate the truth of our innocence the Government admits its doubts concerning our guilt. We will not help to purify the foul record of a fraudulent conviction and a barbaric sentence.”
Temporary
President Kennedy’s death is a tragedy which may set back the struggle for civil rights in America and may hinder the development of peaceful relations between the world’s Great Powers.
If we do not know who killed him, we know who has been rejoicing over his death – who stood to gain most by his violent end.
But violence of this kind, the attempts to blame the progressive movement and make martyrs of innocent men and women, have only a temporary effect on history.
Men are murdered, tears are shed, people are confused, but in America, as elsewhere, the great underlying movement of the people for equality and democracy is by now too great to be halted.
And left again:
Quote:Daily Herald, 26 November 1963, p.3
Johnson’s investigators fly into Dallas
By Antony Currah
The F.B.I. began an investigation over the heads of the Dallas police here today in an attempt to discover whether the assassination of President Kennedy was organised by an international political ring.
Assistant Attorney-General Jack Miller, who flew from Washington last night after the slaying of the President’s alleged killer, Lee Harvey Oswald, by a strip-tease club owner, is expected to be in the city for many days.
After 52-year-old Jack Ruby shot Oswald with a .38 revolver at point blank range in the underground car park of Dallas police the police chiefs declared the case against Oswald closed.
But the F.B.I. reacted quickly and announced: “It is far from closed.”
Questions
Mr. Miller was immediately ordered by new President Lyndon Johnson to the tense city.
The fantastic case of the assassination and the killing of Oswald, who denied his guilt, raised grim implications and leaves many questions unanswered.
Investigators believe it is impossible with Oswald’s background of Communist sympathy and pro-Castro crusading to eliminate the possibility of accomplices.
Police evidence now made public reveals Oswald had a map in his rented Dallas room in which he marked the line of rifle fire of the President’s route past the office building where he is said to have crouched at a sixth floor window.
Yesterday, with the amazed eyes of the world upon them, the police force of Dallas still left a great deal unexplained.
Today there was still no logical answer to the slaying of Oswald beneath the police H.Q. It happened after a series of anonymous phone calls threatening Oswald’s life.
And in the early morning on the day of his planned transfer by armoured car to the county jail three-quarters of a mile away, another threatening call was received by the F.B.I.
Yet, despite this, police chief Jesse Curry kept his promise to Pressmen not to move Oswald until 10 a.m. in front of the nation’s TV cameras.
Orders had been given only Pressmen with bona fide police passes would be allowed anywhere in the building.
Yet the staggering fact remains that club owner Ruby – he legally changed his name from Rubenstein – had been wandering round police headquarters since the day of the assassination.