Charles P. Pierce | The Kennedy Assassination And American Fragility

[WilliamPitt]

OFF/AFP/Getty Images

The Kennedy Assassination And American Fragility
By Charles P. Pierce
Esquire

22 November 2013

What I remember is nuns, crying. It was the middle of the day and we were just finishing our art lessons. Sister Kathleen Robert, on whom I had a hopeless crush, was riding herd over a class of fifth-graders already in the beginning of the annual mania of the holiday season. Then, as we worked on our watercolors -- mine looked like Jackson Pollock crossed with a blind gorilla -- she left the classroom and didn't come back. After a while, we all got curious and looked out the door of the classroom and down the hall. Sister Kathleen Robert was in the middle of a group of nuns and they were all crying and they all looked like lilies, bent in the weeping autumn rain.

Sister Superior gave us the news over the PA system and then they let us out of school early. Because I lived so far away -- in another town, actually -- I had to take two municipal buses to get to and from school. I had to change at the old bus terminal just off the common in downtown Worcester. I remember walking down Front Street and people were milling around the Common, wandering this way and that, looking like there was no place to go, no place that was safe, no place like home. Some of them watched the television sets in the shop windows because that was when televisions in a shop window was a kind of exotic novelty. I remember cab drivers, sitting on the hoods of their cabs, talking lowly and flicking cigarette butts into the gutter, one after another. I bought a comic book -- maybe two -- and got on the bus home and nobody on the bus said a word. And that was the day the president was murdered.

The murder of John Kennedy in broad daylight in the streets of an American city remains, to me, an unsolved crime. I do not accept the notion that the Warren Commission, created to allay public panic and not to investigate, and composed of wise men from Washington who had made careers out of knowing more than they ever would tell, somehow still managed to stumble onto the correct interpretation of all of the events of that surreal weekend. (Hell, Allen Dulles was on that Commission and Kennedy had fired his lying ass less than a year earlier.) I stopped believing in the Warren Commission even before it was put together. I stopped believing in the Warren Commission when I sat on my living room floor and watched the accused murderer of the president get gunned down on live TV in a roomful of Dallas cops. I stopped believing in the Warren Commission when I watched a lynching with my parents while the dead president was lying in state in the White House and as the country went numb around me.

(snip)

I don't know if we'll ever settle who shot from where. But I do know that, almost from the start, the government has known more about this event than it has been willing to share with the people who, allegedly, govern themselves through it. It is long past time for that to end. It has been 50 years. So many people connected, in one way or another, and by one person or another, to the events in Dallas are dead. The Soviet Union is dead. Do not protect yourselves by claiming to protect us. We have been protected for too long and from too much of what the government has done in our name. We are not children, huddled at the classroom door, wondering why the nuns are weeping, and why the world has suddenly gone so silent all around us.

http://www.esquire.com/blogs/politics/anniversary-of-jfk-assassination-112213

[Patrick57]

1. Its just all wrong!

The open top car.
Security men in another vehicle.
Motorbike security holding back.
Sharp hairpin turn.
Withdrawn CIA and Fed presence.
Three shots from one man.
Multiple wounds.
The car sped away only after the mortal shot had been inflicted.
Open and shut case when LHO was murdered by Ruby.
Magic bullet.
and so on....

There's enough there to at least warrant a better explanation than the Warren Commission came up with.

[monmouth3]

2. The shot that Connelly absorbed was from the front (grassy knoll??). Too many questions and I'll be

dead before the answers come, if they ever do.

[Patrick57]

3. 50 years of hiding the truth.

I think we've waited long enough. The news clip I would like to hear from the BBC would sound like this,

"Today marks 50 years of fobbing off the entire world to what was a blatant cover up of the conspiratorial assassination of JFK. Back in the early 1960's when common man trusted/feared the powers that be, their absurd investigations and conclusions implying a lone shooter version of events were accepted. With the facts that have been presented since then, its time to commemorate what really took place that day...

On this day 50 years ago, a precise and highly organized 'Coup d'Etas' took place and several perpetrators from strategic positions executed JFK. The authorities that covered the case at that time claimed that a single assailant, namely LHO, was solely responsible for this crime and before he could be properly investigated, was conveniently disposed of, thus putting an end to any further investigation.

Since then these authorities have been severely reprimanded and the events of that day have been properly and thoroughly investigated. The findings of a 'Real Truth Commission' gathered enough evidence to uphold proof that more than one person took part in the shooting that day therefore proving the assassination of John F Kennedy was a conspiracy."

Who else would like to hear this when the assassination of JFK is being reported?

[TBF]

5. Oh I think the CIA were there -

and were quite instrumental in the events of the day.

[warrior1]

4. Quote from Mrs. Kennedy:

"They killed my husband."

[pacalo]

6. Another quote, as to why she didn't change her blood-splattered clothes:

"I want them to see what they've done."

[roamer65]

8. Quote from Richard Nixon on Jack Ruby.

"I know that guy."