If I treated this blog like a newspaper columnist with a daily column, I would say (as “they” do in the theater), “the show must go on.” But I get distracted. This time the distraction is “the fault” of a book about the Kennedy assassination, Lee Harvey Oswald, Jack Ruby, J. Edgar Hoover, the Warren Commission, the “magic bullet,” and various conspiracy theories about what really happened.
Personally, I don’t think we know the truth about what happened. The book I’m reading arrives at the same conclusion. Suffice it to say, I’ve been stuck reading the book and looking up stuff on Google from time to time. I’ll talk about the book later, but I want to finish it first.
Goodness knows I’ve seen enough fiction and quasi-documentaries about the assassination from Oliver Stone’s work to Jim Garrison’s approach. And then, too, there’s 111/22/63 by Steven King. That novel was freaky enough to make one wonder about the whole thing even if they never wondered about it before.
I have a feeling that the lack of closure, aside from concrete evidence, comes from the fact that the federal government botched every part of its response beginning with forcibly extracting Kennedy’s body from Parkland Hospital before the M.E. was done, to Hoover’s declaration that Oswald acted alone before he could have known one way or the other, to the slipshod work of the Warren Commission.
People wondered: Is the government scared senseless, completely inept, or pretending to be inept because there’s something going on it wanted to cover-up? And, years from now, will files ultimately be declassified that tell us which of these scenarios is true?
When I was in high school, I read a lot of stories about time travelers heading into the past to try and undo crimes and other unfortunate events in the past. Early on in his genre, people were usually trying to save President Lincoln. Recently, tinkering with the past became more multifaceted on the TV series “Timeless.” King, as readers of 11/22/63 know, sends his main character back in time to try and save President Kennedy.
When the protagonist returns from the past, he finds the world in one hell of a gosh-awful mess. We can debate, of course, whether or not that mess is a horror story from King’s imagination or the reality we’re currently living in. I don’t believe that gosh-awful mess was likely, so I think the U.S.A and the world would have been much better off if Oswald (or whoever) had missed or had never been in Dallas at all.
So, seeing all the parts to this story again, I was pulled away.
–Malcolm
Malcolm R. Campbell
Publisher: Thomas-Jacob Publishing
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