[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. 

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.