[You have likely gotten much of your news from one source during this crisis — the television. Once a junior partner in the new business, TV has come full flower in its coverage of the Kennedy assassination.
Part of it is propitious timing. This season, news broadcasts expanded from 15 to 30 minutes. Steps had already been undertaken to provide live coverage of events, as was demonstrated so shockingly with Jack Ruby's murder of Lee Harvey Oswald just a few hours ago.
And so, television news has transformed from sideshow to centerpiece. May we never have to be glued to it for such a spectacle again…]
by John Boston
I learned of the assassination in high school geometry class, after returning to school from lunch. Then I understood why one of the right-wing S.O.B.s among the students had been standing outside the school door as I came in, clasping his hands over his head in the manner of a victorious prize fighter.
Tragedy, drama, outrage, grief. Yeah, we’re all together, we all agree, at least the reasonable ones among us. But what next? What does this mean?
We’ve all heard that this is the American Century, and at least since the end of World War II, the US of A has been riding high internationally, both in public prestige and power and in less obvious ways, exercising its will in more covert fashion in countries all around the world, getting its way with little meaningful challenge.
We are told that the accused assassin lived for several years in the Soviet Union, and that he is involved with something called the Fair Play for Cuba Committee—Cuba, one of the countries the United States tried to dominate, in that case with disastrous results publicly exposed. Is the murder of our President a response to our government’s covert activity in Cuba, or in the world generally?
We do not know and we may never know. But this terrible event is America’s first significant reminder since Pearl Harbor that it does not look down on the world from a protected height and is not immune either to the sweep of history or to its caprice. Will our government and people take the lesson and conduct themselves circumspectly in the world, for example in Vietnam, where there seems to be developing an open-ended American commitment to prop up a government as incompetent as it is undemocratic, regardless of cost or consequences?
We will all know soon enough.
Rumors are rife, of course, and there are those who want there to be a vast conspiracy behind Kennedy's assassination…I'm not sure a conspiracy is needed, any more than in the assassination of Medgar Evers in June, except in the larger sense of those who feel entitled to kill their political adversaries…a group JFK was not himself excluded from. Some of the deep-in Kremlinologists are reporting mutters of disapproval toward Khrushchev for his liberalizations of the USSR and particular for the trumped-up Cuban crisis…which could've been settled quietly, as it apparently was, by trading the closure of US missile bases in Turkey in exchange for no bases in Cuba, but instead was turned into a spitting match that helped terrify much of the world's people…and motivate enemies of both of these somewhat reformist leaders…less showboating and more cooperation might actually lead to a better world, but what fun would that be when a self-righteous "hero" can pick up a gun and go to town.