Tarnishing Martin Luther King’s Legacy

“What is now happening… in the course of history, happened repeatedly to the theories of revolutionary thinkers and leaders of oppressed classes fighting for emancipation. During the lifetime of great revolutionaries, the oppressing classes constantly hounded them, received their theories with the most savage malice, the most furious hatred and the most unscrupulous campaigns of lies and slander. After their death, attempts are made to convert them into harmless icons, to canonize them, so to say, and to hallow their names to a certain extent for the “consolation” of the oppressed classes and with the object of duping the latter…”

The words quoted above could well express the popular legacy of singular peoples’ leaders like Eugene Debs, Mother Jones, Paul Robeson, or Martin Luther King Junior. However, they were not written about them, but for Karl Marx. They were offered by Vladimir Lenin over a century ago.

But Lenin’s words do not fully measure the ruthlessness of the US ruling class’s profound racism and anti-Communism. US elites and their loyal servants cannot tolerate for more than a moment the “danger” of venerated, respected African American leaders who refuse to bow before the altar of mindless, ritualized anti-Communism. It is not enough to dilute their thinking, minimize their actions, and sanitize their reputations, they must be “scandalized,” to paraphrase the Negro spiritual popularized by Paul Robeson.

It was in contempt of these slanders that the aging intellectual giant W.E.B. Du Bois publicly announced his application for membership in the Communist Party, packed his bags, and moved to Ghana.

In the wake of his assassination, the legacy of ML King followed the path outlined by Lenin: his early, conciliatory speeches were widely quoted; politicians and celebrities pointed approvingly of his commitment to nonviolence; and he was “canonized” with a national holiday.

But his outspoken criticism of the war in Vietnam, his focus on poverty and working class issues, and his revealed respect and willingness to work with Communists could not go unchallenged.

King’s impassioned Riverside Church speech against war and imperialism became a touchstone for the anti-war movement in the era of endless wars.

Coming just three months before his assassination, his less well-known Freedomways speech denouncing anti-Communism and honoring Communists like Neruda, Picasso, and Dubois existed as a profound irritant to the guardians of capitalism.

Consequently, attempts to tarnish King’s reputation have escalated in recent years. The most recent and, arguably, the most scurrilous is a new article by Professor David Garrow, published in a conservative UK magazine.

The Pulitzer Prize-awarded Garrow has researched some FBI records declassified in recent months from their depository in the National Archives. Apparently, Garrow found both reports and summarized and partial transcripts of tape recordings made from wiretaps of locations occupied by King (residence, hotels, SCLC headquarters) and other documents. The original tapes and full transcripts will remain unavailable until 2027.

Garrow’s self-described “pain-staking work” fixated on two aspects of the FBI’s quasi-legal or Robert Kennedy-approved surveillance: King’s sex life and his association with Communists. Judging from the article, Garrow shows little historian’s interest in the other interactions of King with his associates, officials, the media, or the public that might be revealed from these files. Nor does he demonstrate a hint of skepticism over the reliability, bias, or accuracy of transcripts or summaries. The hushed, provocative tone of Garrow’s sensational revelations lull the reader into forgetting that the eaves-droppers who made the transcripts were drawn from J. Edgar Hoover’s stable of nearly all-white, conservative, often racist and surely rabidly anti-Communist agents. It is easy to overlook that the reports and summaries were not primary sources; by Garrow’s own admission, they were one or two removes from both the original tapes and the full transcripts.

Moreover, Garrow’s editing and interpretation place us further removed from the primary sources.

Garrow’s interpretative skills are challenged by his incredible spin on an excerpt from an FBI report that deplores King’s sexual activities because they “‘leave him highly susceptible to coercion and possible blackmail.’” Garrow tags this with his own bizarre understanding: “presumably by knowledgeable Communists” [my emphasis]. Are we to believe that the FBI thinks that King is both a closet Communist and a potential object of Communist blackmail? The fact that the FBI tried to coerce and blackmail King to kill himself little more than a year after the referenced memo renders Garrow’s presumption absurd. The FBI wanted to compromise King; they were not protective of others compromising him.

Garrow incredibly and boldly asserts that the FBI “would not have had any apparent motive for their annotations to inaccurately embellish upon the actual recording and its full transcript, both of which remain under court seal and one day will confirm or disprove the FBI’s summary allegation.” FBI employees would need a remarkable ability to anticipate that their notes, summaries, and reports would one day end up in the National Archives for this defense to make any sense at all. Hoover’s 1963 G-men hardly feared that their often illicit and illegal activities would one day be revealed to the public. As for motive, wouldn’t Hoover’s well-established hatred of King be enough?

But more significantly, transcribers of the tapes need not have purposely embellished the transcripts, though conservative, white, racially-backward agents may well have meant to portray King in the worst possible light. They may simply have been unable to unscramble, interpret, or weigh the nuances of the original tapes. Garrow gives us no assurances that the transcribers (or the summarizers)-- likely only marginally familiar with African American language subtleties, slang, or humor-- were reliable conveyors of what they were hearing. Any competent historian would note these reservations.

The most sensational of Garrow’s claims-- the charge that grips our scandal-mongering press-- is that King stood by and laughed while an associate raped a woman in his presence. A casual reader would assume that this claim carried the same evidentiary weight as the summaries or partial transcripts that he cites.

That would be a mistake.

The rape claim is from “a newly-released summary document from [Assistant FBI Director] Sullivan’s personal file on King,” according to Garrow. But the term “summary document” is misleading. The document is a rambling, heavily annotated, and edited narrative allegedly compiled by Sullivan and collected in the 1975 Church Committee review of FBI documents. The claim that King witnessed and laughed at the rape is written in long hand by an unidentified person below the typed allegation of a rape. Garrow cites a contiguous typed reference to an FBI document as though it reinforces the provenance of the salacious charge against King. But there is no reason to believe that it is connected to the scribbled libel that appears to be an afterthought.

It must be stressed that Garrow does not offer a reference to a transcript or a tape for what appears to be Sullivan’s personal attempt to construct an indictment of King. We have no reason to expect a future tape confirming or denying his ugly claim. To be fair to King’s legacy, one must underscore that Sullivan initiated and executed the vile anonymous letter to King suggesting that he commit suicide and threatening exposure if he didn’t. Garrow fails to do so.

To shore up his demonstration of King’s FBI-attested promiscuity and add some National Enquirer spice to his account, Garrow reports the escapades of former baseball pitcher, Don Newcombe, who, like Elvis Presley after him, offered unsolicited celebrity snitching to the President and the FBI. Newcombe had a story about King that merits attention only because it adds scandal.

Close King associate Stanley Levison earns a central place in Garrow’s saga. FBI surveillance of Jack O’Dell and Levinson have served for decades as the basis for red-baiting charges that King was a Communist or crypto-Marxist.

With regard to the Communist connection, Garrow surprisingly discards his hard-and-fast confidence in FBI surveillance. He asserts that “FBI documents emphasised how ‘as of January, 1957, Stanley Levison and Roy Bennett were to become inactive in CP financial operations’” [my emphasis].

But this does not fit the Communist-influence narrative. He scolds the FBI for making too little of Levison’s generous personal contributions to King:

The FBI’s failure ever to cite those figures in its warning memos to Kennedy, coupled in March 1964 with its failure to emphasise Levison’s simultaneous large gifts to King, inexplicably rendered its “secret member” allegation against Levison far less powerful than could have been the case. To have a reported “secret member” writing some of King’s speeches, as the FBI highlighted to Kennedy, was one thing, but the remarkable dollar amounts Levison was bandying about could have made for a much more striking portrayal than the FBI ever painted.

Apparently, the rabidly anti-Communist Hoover FBI was insufficiently vigilant to suit Garrow’s taste. Garrow leaves no innuendo untouched.

I met my brother the other day

I gave him my right hand

And just as soon as ever my back was turned

He scandalized my name

Garrow’s account follows a host of other post-mortem smears constructed long after any primary witnesses or participants can respond. Sometimes the claims are salacious (King, Robeson, Aptheker), sometimes revisionist (Shostakovich, Brecht). But in all cases, new “evidence” is discovered or new informants conveniently appear with revelations never subjected to legal adjudication or measured evidentiary standards. In this case with King, none of his alleged intimates ever came forward during his lifetime to expose his supposed indiscretions. Thus, one must either leave the questions as unsettleable personal matters, affirm the charges on the basis of celebrity-mongering rumor, innuendo, or vendetta, or, as with Garrow, trust that the FBI is an objective source with no special animus or motivation, even with regard to hostilely targeted figures on the left.

Of course Garrow differs: “But the FBI’s allegation that King ‘looked on, laughed and offered advice’ as a forcible rape took place right in front of him makes that stance [dismissing the “evidence”] unsupportable by anyone.”

Before our NSA age of wholesale spying on virtually everyone, government intrusion into citizens’ personal lives was viewed as morally reprehensible, and evidence garnered, accordingly, as fatally tainted. Garrow exploits the fact that those standards have been swept away.

The danger of our times, of course, is trial by innuendo in the court of yellow journalism, guilt by association and rumor, slander by anonymous sources, settling vendettas, and the ugly politics of smear. Clearly, Garrow doesn’t share these fears:

King’s far-from monogamous lifestyle, like his binge-drinking, may fit albeit uncomfortably within his existing life story, but the suggestion—actually more than one—that he either actively tolerated or personally employed violence against any woman, even while drunk, poses so fundamental a challenge to his historical stature as to require the most complete and extensive historical review possible.

For Garrow, the record is already settled, only to be conclusively affirmed in 2027.

This is a tragic and strange tale of history as promissory note, history as lurid voyeurism, history through the eyes of the state’s police.

Sadly, Garrow’s academic colleagues have been slow to redress this tragedy.


Greg Godels
FBI investigation file numbers 1-100-18429 and 1-105-10677
zzsblogml@gmail.com

Patriotic Paranoia

.....  I find the view… that prevails today in large portions of our governmental and journalistic establishments so extreme, so subjective, so far removed from what any sober scrutiny of external reality would reveal, that it is not only ineffective, but dangerous as a guide to political action.

This endless series of distortions and oversimplifications; this systematic dehumanization of the leadership of another… country; this routine exaggeration of... military capabilities...: this monotonous misrepresentation of the nature and the attitudes of another... people...; ...this reckless application of the double standard to the judgment of…[their] conduct and our own, this failure to recognize, finally, the commonality of many of their problems and ours...: and the corresponding tendency to view all aspects of the relationship in terms of a supposed total and irreconcilable conflict of concerns and of aims;  these, I believe, are not the marks of the maturity and discrimination one expects of the diplomacy of a great power...

And we shall not be able to turn these things around as they should be turned, on the plane of military and nuclear rivalry, until we learn to correct these childish distortions... If we insist on demonizing these… leaders -- on viewing them as total and incorrigible enemies, consumed only with their fear and hatred of us and dedicated to nothing other than our destruction -- that, in the end, is the way we shall assuredly have them, if for no other reason than that our view of them allows for nothing else, either for them or just us.

The above, edited-for-clarity quote comes to me courtesy of a thoughtful friend, E. Martin Schotz, and is taken from George Kennan’s 1982 book, The Nuclear Delusion: Soviet-American Relations in the Atomic Age. Kennan is widely recognized as one of the architects of the Cold War. His post-World War II writing on the supposed Soviet threat spurred the US policy of containment. Some thirty-five years after he helped spark a wasteful arms race that threatened to destroy the world, Kennan had the powerful second thoughts reflected above.

I purposefully excised the references to the Soviet Union in the Kennan quote with the hope that others might see how unerringly Kennan’s words capture US foreign policy today towards our newly contrived “enemies.” Without much imagination, one could credibly substitute the names of countries that have been anointed “incorrigible enemies” of the US in recent years: Cuba, Yugoslavia, Serbia, Iran, Venezuela, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Russia, China, and the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK).

Unfortunately, despite George F. Kennan’s never-too-late regrets, the arrogance of empire remains a deeply embedded disposition of US ruling elites. The frequent and persistent wars of aggression underscore the Marxist-Leninist thesis that a reach for dominance over all rivals or those daring to show independence is an essential, inescapable feature of mature capitalism.

If we take seriously Marx, paraphrasing Hegel, asserting that history repeats “the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce,” then we must believe that we live in times of frightening absurdity. The irresponsible demonizing of Milosevic, Saddam, Gaddafi, or al-Assad has tragically sacrificed well over a million lives to US and NATO aggression, but the painting of Russia, DPRK, and the People's Republic of China (PRC) as absolute evil today reaches previously unimaginable levels of madness and danger.

Russia

Last week’s indictment of 13 Russian nationals and 3 Russian entities only underlines the vacuity of the Mueller investigation. Over nine months of probing, interviewing, and developing evidence has produced (1) an  admission of lying to the FBI by General Flynn, an indictment based on his efforts on behalf of Israel (and not Russia), (2) an indictment of Rick Gates, a lobbyist, fundraiser, and political operative accused of working unregistered for a previous Ukrainian government, (3) an indictment of a bigger fish, Paul Manafort, who for four decades represented any and every shady international character with the wherewithal to pay his fees. He, too, was accused of failure to register, laundering money, and making false statements, practices that occupied him for his whole career, (4) a guilty plea by George Papadopoulos, a bit player with an ego far larger than his résumé, who habitually met with any contact that he could impress that he was a “player,” (5) an indictment of and guilty plea of Richard Pinedo, an internet hustler who stole identities (any connection to Russia was “unwitting”), and most recently, (6) the guilty plea of Dutch lawyer Alex van der Zwaan, who earned a brief imprisonment by lying to the FBI about the date of his last meeting with Gates, placing it in mid-August instead of September.

For a fishing expedition, the taxpayer-funded Mueller excursion has landed few trophies. Until last week’s indictment, it was hard to find anything importantly connecting Russia, the Russian government, or the highest levels of the Trump administration. No doubt the paucity of connections or evidence of “collusion” spawned the latest indictments.

But even assuming that there is evidence forthcoming to back up the latest Russian indictments (they are, of course, merely formal charges unless prosecuted), it is more than curious that there is no direct claim of linkage either to the Russian government or to the Trump presidency. Instead, we have a charge that a wealthy, well connected caterer has established an organization dedicated to injecting information onto social media and, in a few cases, staging modest political events in the US. This, surely, is a far cry from the primary mission of the Special Counsel: to establish “any links and/or coordination between Russian government and individuals associated with the campaign of President Donald Trump.…”

Judging by last Friday’s indictments, one might be inclined to view the machinations of Concord Catering, the Internet Research Agency, Concord Management and Consulting, and their alleged mastermind, should the charges be true, as very much akin to the private operations of the intrusive NGOs funded by billionaires George Soros or Bill Gates in numerous countries. In all cases, wealthy individuals use their resources to change the direction of target countries in ways that conflict with the current leadership.

As weak as the Mueller investigation has been, it continues to stimulate a hungry news media bent upon demonizing Russia. And there are plenty of pundits and opinion-makers ready to accommodate.

One of the most ridiculous “contributors” to the RussiaGate fiasco is Harvard Law professor, Laurence Tribe. A liberal icon with academic and policy gravitas, Tribe claimed, according to Glenn Greenwald, that Russian President Putin may have been responsible for the death of an important, conspiracy-related person in a recent airliner crash in Russia. Tribe never bothered to verify that said “victim” was on the flight. He wasn’t. But never mind.

Thanks to the RussiaGate hysteria, the FBI and CIA now enjoy more credibility than at any time since the heyday of Joe McCarthy. The Pew poll reports that, for the first time, Democrats now have more confidence in these illiberal institutions than do Republicans.

Both the Washington Post and NPR have found their own FBI expert in the person of a three-year veteran of the agency, Asha Ranappa. Now serving as a lecturer at Yale University, her articulate, confident voice and intoxicating earnestness make one forget that a very brief tour as an agent hardly constitutes expertise on the history and workings of the FBI any more than my three high school years selling shoes in a department store make me an expert on the shoe industry. Nevertheless, the attractive Ranappa is the darling of the networks, even Comedy Central. She’s not above discussing with an interviewer that she was voted “America’s hottest female law school dean.”

In a Washington Post op-ed published earlier this month (and in a more recent NPR interview), Ranappa enthusiastically defends the FBI against the highly publicized Nunes memo. She rests the argument on a tissue of weasel phrases-- “would have,” “could include,” “would probably have,” “suggests that” and so forth-- that amount to a “just-so” story and not a robust defense of the FBI. She emphasizes the fact that FISA warrants are difficult for the FBI to acquire and renew. They are not. Out of 35,529 FISA requests for electronic surveillance from 1979 to 2013 only 12 have been denied! Unless one zealously believes that the FBI never oversteps its bounds, this speaks poorly for the scrutiny of a secret process by a secret court and Ranappa’s faith in the process.

On the thin basis of the Nunes memo, Ranappa stops a “could have” short of accusing Carter Page-- a target of FBI surveillance-- with being a Russian spy: “...the memo suggests that the Trump campaign could have had an active Russian spy working as a foreign policy adviser.” [my italics] No one but Ranappa has gone beyond collusion to lodge such a serious charge. In better times, without new evidence, this would surely be grounds for libel.

These are not better times.

Of course, the trusted FBI, working diligently with Mueller and feeding gossip to the mainstream press, failed abysmally to find and thwart the 19-year-old mass murderer in Parkland, Florida, despite multiple alerts from private citizens and a Facebook threat with the perpetrator identified by name! It never dawns on the pundits in the monopoly corporate media that these devastating, catastrophic errors suggest a more universal incompetence.

This failure did not deter NPR from offering the following inflammatory headline: “As An American Tragedy Unfolds, Russian Agents Sow Discord Online.” The source for NPR’s sensational story accusing “agents” of “sowing discord” over the Parkland shootings is a well-financed website dubbed Hamilton 68. As Julian Assange points out, H68 is less a watchdog over Russian propaganda than itself a source of propaganda. Its leaders and advisors are veteran Cold Warriors and intimates of the US national security apparatus, less-than-independent, less-than-objective monitors. Curiously, the identified ‘Russian agents’ that they monitor are the state-supported news and entertainment agencies that Russia has established internationally. They are only “agents” because the US government has insisted that RT, Sputnik, and others now register as such. Supposedly, the same logic would apply to NPR-- itself a government-supported news and entertainment agency. ‘Agents’ are lurking everywhere!

But the reigning award for Russia-baiting must go to former Dutch Foreign Minister Halbe Zijlstra, who has maintained that two years ago he overheard Vladimir Putin discuss grandiose plans to create a Greater Russia hacked out of Eastern Europe and the Middle East. When it was demonstrated that he could not possibly have overheard any such comments, he backed off and claimed that he had overheard a friend who had overheard… The ensuing kerfuffle forced his resignation.

Finian Cunningham reminds us that former Polish Foreign Minister Radek Sikorski also claimed that he personally overheard Putin express similar expansionist plans in 2008. He, too, was forced to retract, labeling his claim as a “surreal joke” (Sikorski is the spouse of the rabidly anti-Soviet, anti-Communist Washington Post pundit and Cold Warrior, Anne Applebaum).

And now (2-20-18, Code Red for America), The New York Times resident village idiot, Thomas Friedman, weighs in with a host of hyperbole: Russia presents “the biggest threat to our democracy today,” “...to undermine the very core of our democracy,” “...to poison American politics.” In his servile mind, “Our FBI, CIA, and NSA, working with the special counsel, have done us amazingly proud.”

Is it war that Friedman wants? He asks that “we bring together our intelligence and military experts to mount an effective offense against Mr. Putin-- the best defense of all.”

Russiaphobia and Putin-fever continue to reach absurd levels.

China and the DPRK

The PRC is also a target for hysterical patriot paranoia. FBI Director Christopher Wray, addressing the Senate Intelligence Committee, explained: "One of the things we're trying to do is view the China threat as not just a whole-of-government threat, but a whole-of-society threat on their end, and I think it's going to take a whole-of-society response by us." With this tortured “whole-of-society” explanation, the Director and his staff see danger from Chinese students, visitors, scholars, businesspeople, athletes, and entertainers-- all would-be “collectors.”

Presumably, US students, scholars, businesspeople, athletes, and entertainers (the “whole-of-society”) should be vigilant and active against the Chinese threat. Another step towards a vigilante society.

Predictably, The Washington Post picked up on this bizarre forewarning with an op-ed from the breathless Josh Rogin. Rogin expands the Chinese machinations into a “massive foreign influence campaign” (China is Infiltrating US Colleges, 2-19-18). Quoting the deranged Marco Rubio, Rogin sees a nefarious plot to implant a pro-China bias in innocent, vulnerable students and faculty in the Chinese university-affiliated Confucius Institutes. Established as a language proficiency and cultural link to US higher education, Rogin and his friends see a conspiracy lurking behind this innocuous facade.

Rogin offers a curious and contradictory defense of campus free speech: “Confucius Institutes must… yield full control over curriculum to their American hosts and pledge not to involve themselves in issues of academic freedom for American or Chinese students.”

Protecting “academic freedom” by denying it!

The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) is no newcomer to demonization. It has long been on the US and EU lists of “evil” actors despite neither owning foreign military bases nor pursuing any overt aggression. More than any other country, DPRK foreign policy revolves around the simple demand that they be left alone. The only official corollary to their isolationism is the goal of Korean unification.

Nonetheless, the US and some of its allies have been picking a fight with DPRK for several decades. As tensions mounted, the DPRK made overtures to the new Moon government of the Republic of Korea, including several highly publicized, well-received gestures surrounding the Winter Olympics.

A promise of peaceful, rational discourse was met with a feverish mania in US ruling circles and with their media servants. The Washington Post called the demure DPRK visitor to the games, Kim Yo-jong, “the Korean Ivanka Trump,” a witless comparison that serious people should find embarrassing.

Justin Peters, writing in Slate, gives the DPRK cheerleaders a proper smart-ass thrashing: “Why did the cheerleaders make the trip? Because North Korea is an oppressive totalitarian state that hopes to use every facet of its involvement in the Pyeongchang Games for propaganda purposes. The objective is to project strength, confidence, and unanimity, in the process extending the influence and stability of the Kim regime.”  He offers his explanation for their prowess: “I suppose it is easy to mastermind mosaics on a large scale if participation is compulsory and missing your cue carries a hideous punishment, but, still, impressive stuff...To be clear, the cheerleaders’ enthusiasm is likely compulsory and the cheerleaders themselves are surely being monitored ceaselessly by state minders during their stay in Pyeongchang.”

Not to be outdone, The Guardian gave a slightly different spin: “At the end of each row, older male minders sat still for the entire game, a reminder that despite appearances, these women were also prisoners of one of the most brutal regimes in the world.” (Check out the video supplied by The Guardian and see if you can find the elusive “male minders.”)

But The Independent deviates from this slave/prisoner narrative. The cheerleaders are not intimidated into their cheerful performances, they are “picked for having the right ‘ideology.’ They are closely vetted to ensure that they’ll properly represent North Korea both at home and abroad, according to local reports, through a process that checks whether they’re related to Japanese sympathisers or defectors.”

Clearly, the corporate media do not know what to do with the DPRK cheerleaders-- The New York Post headline exclaimed: Kim impersonator a hit with North Korean cheerleaders, while the infamous Washington Free Beacon headline disagrees: North Korean Cheerleaders Were Not Impressed by Kim Jong Un Impersonator. Skye News thought the cheerleaders were ”appalled” and Reuters saw them as “caught off guard.”

********

Like the media lapdogs who, generations ago, demeaned any spark of humanity exhibited by Soviet citizens, today’s patriotic “journalists” stamp out any hint of human sentiment or empathy towards the “enemies” anointed by the imperialist state.

As the US empire recognizes its decline, it engages in more and more desperate means to shore up the sinking credibility of its institutions. The compliant media, two political parties that can only agree on manufactured enemies, and even a spineless left, join in conjuring evil spirits in need of an exorcist. Unfortunately, we live in a world of destructive, devastating weapons that threaten the very existence of the planet. As George Kennan’s belated apology reminds us, the folly of demonizing, fostering manufactured enemies, fear-mongering, and bear-baiting court disaster. We are well along that destructive path.

One can only hope that wiser heads will emerge and call for a retreat from this course.

Greg Godels

zzsblogml@gmail.com

Looking Back: 50 Years after the JFK Assassination

They are derisively called “conspiracy theorists”. They carry the torch for the beliefs that sixty to eighty percent of their fellow citizens share since the assassination of President John Kennedy. From October 17 to October 19, several hundred gathered in Pittsburgh for the “Passing the Torch” symposium, a forum devoted to many of the leading investigators discussing alternate visions to the US government's official version of the murder of Kennedy.

For three days, a group of ordinary-looking, very well-spoken, collegial people discussed and debated the plausibility of conflicting explanations of the Kennedy assassination. Those who have been misled by the corporately-compromised media would be disappointed with the participants: there were no ominous references to the Holy Grail, Area 51, or Roswell, except in jest. Rather, the atmosphere of the gathering was more akin to a convention of neurosurgeons without the glamor of a glitzy destination. The few cranks-- anti-Federal Reserve exponents and religious zealots-- saw their comments politely dismissed.

Questions and Answers

Broadly speaking, there are two research methodologies that engage assassination investigators. One group of researchers develop, examine, analyze, and debate the physical evidence. The objects of their study are the familiar artifacts: the Zapruder film, the so-called “pristine bullet,” the rifle associated with Oswald, autopsy photos, etc. Of course not all physical evidence is either direct or clearly relevant. Photos, personal accounts, audio tapes, documents, etc. may be merely suggestive and open to broad interpretation. While physical evidence may count as “hard” data, it virtually never fills all of the narrative space between the premeditation to murder and the completion of the act. The judicial system recognizes this oft-occurring opening by placing the “hard” evidence before a jury with the hope that they will have the collective judgment to satisfactorily fill the gaps and arrive at a well-considered conclusion.

But it would be naive to press the idealized courtroom analogy too hard. The court of public opinion, like the real judicial system, allows of differential resources, bias, and clandestine influence. But where honest people recognize that the courts are “overly” fair to the rich, and that the poor suffer a surfeit of fairness, the court of public opinion dispenses entirely with the notion of fairness. With the Kennedy assassination, the government and its agencies have invested overwhelmingly in the Warren Commission/Oswald-did-it-alone version. The US government has resisted, at every step, revealing relevant evidence that might shed new light on the case; it has even denied access to evidence developed to support the conventional view; and it has actively interfered with independent investigations of the assassination. Now-public documents show that the security agencies spied on and interacted with the Garrison investigation in New Orleans. Recent revelations demonstrate that the CIA established their former (1963) chief of covert operations in Miami as their liaison with the 1976 House Select Committee on Assassinations... without revealing this relevant fact (the Joannides affair). This revelation has belatedly driven the formerly compliant final head of that investigation, G. Robert Blakey, into uncharacteristic fits of indignation:

I am no longer confident that the Central Intelligence Agency co-operated with the committee.... I was not told of Joannides' background with the DRE [Revolutionary Student Directorate], a focal point of the investigation. Had I known who he was, he would have been a witness who would have been interrogated under oath by the staff or by the committee. He would never have been acceptable as a point of contact with us to retrieve documents. In fact, I have now learned, as I note above, that Joannides was the point of contact between the Agency and DRE during the period Oswald was in contact with DRE. That the Agency would put a 'material witness' in as a 'filter' between the committee and its quests for documents was a flat out breach of the understanding the committee had with the Agency that it would co-operate with the investigation.

Given that researchers face a hostile government and its lap-dog media, it is truly amazing that researchers have advanced the study as far as they have. Of course hostile intelligence agencies and a media with blinders only reinforce the suspicions that the truth remains to be uncovered.

Blending into the physical evidence and further filling the evidentiary gaps are the circumstances and personal ties of the key players in the murder-- so-called “circumstantial evidence.” For example, the bizarre trajectory of Lee Harvey Oswald's brief adult life is breathtaking and complex. He crosses paths with a wide variety of diverse and contradictory characters while taking on equally contradictory personae.

Apologists for the Warren Commission want us to believe that these oddities reflect an isolated, but unstable personality. But the narrative fails the “credible-movie-script” test: No one would believe this tale if it were a movie.

Further, Oswald's Mexico trip the month before the assassination is a surreal saga fraught with confusion, misidentification, and mystery.

Beyond Circumstances

Is there anything that a Marxist could add to nearly fifty years of skepticism over the Warren Commission and the account of the assassination defended by the security agencies, US elites, and the corporate media?

Certainly a strong case could be made for the account offered by the former head of Cuban counterintelligence, Fabian Escalante. His book, JFK: The Cuba Files, based on his careful review of Cuban evidence, presents many new elements of the days, events, and personalities leading up to the assassination, though no citation of his work arose during the three-day symposium in Pittsburgh. In fact, I inquired of a lobby bookseller with a trove of assassination and associated books why he failed to offer Escalante's book in his extensive collection. He muttered something about how youthful Escalante looks in his pictures despite his retirement-- clear recognition of Escalante's work, but an evasion of its absence.

It is unfortunate that investigators ignore his book because he untangles much of the Mexico City puzzle. And his profiles of likely suspects add much to the existing biographies. But one senses a hesitance to accept a contribution from a Cuban official, a remnant of Cold War distrust. Moreover, the investigators, with only a few exceptions, own a rather conventional, naive politics. At the end of the symposium, a panelist posed what proved to be an embarrassing, but revealing question: How many here would welcome a Kennedy Presidency today?

The participants and audience demonstrated resounding approval with an enthusiasm betraying frenzied devotion to a fallen martyr rather than mere respect for a murdered President.

Perhaps it is here that a Marxist can make a modest contribution to our understanding of the Kennedy assassination by adding an element of political realism and historical context.

Regard Oswald's strange course from his adolescence in the mid 1950s through his death in November of 1963. Many point to the incredible twists and turns taken by him through this period. They argue that other forces must be at play: Oswald must have been a puppet. Opponents dismiss this as only indicative of his instability.

But these arguments miss the point.

The real conundrum is in reconciling that bizarre path with the known, demonstrable behavior of the US security services. It was in that period that their covert and overt surveillance reached unparalleled heights. And it was in that time frame that their suppression and prosecution of the left was at its pinnacle. It is simply impossible for Oswald, posturing as a Communist or Marxist militant, to have escaped their constant attention and, indeed, harassment, if anyone in the higher echelons of the many bureaus and agencies believed that posture. Consequently, it would be beyond comprehension that Oswald would have been where he was alleged to be at the moment of the assassination without those many security offices discounting his “leftist” credentials.

Reflect on the following:

● Oswald was allegedly a self-proclaimed Communist in his adolescence before his Marine Corps enlistment and remained so during his 35 months in the Corps (Oct. 1956-September 1959), often sharing his politics with fellow Marines. Despite his openness, he was given at least a “confidential” security clearance and assigned to a secret U-2 base in Japan. He was trained in sophisticated radar tracking and had access to much sensitive information.

At the same time, hundreds of Communists and thousands of liberals were under surveillance, lost their jobs, or were in jail. Communist leader Claude Lightfoot was sent to jail in 1956 when Oswald joined the Marines. A year earlier, copywriter Melvin Barnet was fired from his job at the New York Times for his political views. The infamous FBI COINTELPRO, a program of active measures against Communists and other leftists, began in 1956. Leaders of the ACLU were informing to the FBI in that period. A Professor at the University of Michigan, Chandler Davis, went to jail for his views in 1959, at a time Oswald was espousing Communism to his fellow Marines.

Is Oswald's story credible? Did he escape the net that captured liberals who were victimized by snitches and liars? What accounts for his immunity?

● Upon discharge, Oswald set off within 10 days on his voyage to the Soviet Union and defection. Investigators quibble over the formalities of the defection, but no one questions that Oswald made the strongest political statement by surrendering his passport and taking residence in the USSR from late 1959 until June of 1962. After stating his misgivings about the USSR, he was smoothly integrated into a nest of anti-Bolshevik Russians living in arguably one of the most rabidly reactionary, anti-Communist cities in the US, Dallas, Texas (the other candidate being Miami, Florida). Oswald and his young wife quickly find friends who would, by inclination, stand off from his politics, social status, and manners. At no time does this produce a backlash commensurate with the tenor of the times.

It wasn't until late 1962 that Junius Scales, a district functionary of the Communist Party in North Carolina, was released from prison for merely being a Communist. The Smith Act, The Internal Security Act, the Immigration and Nationality Act, and the Communist Control Act remained in full force in this period, all aimed at suppressing and repressing Communists. Spanish Civil War vet and Communist Archie Brown was arrested in 1961 under the Communist Control Act. In 1962 and 1963, Jack O'Dell was forced out of his leading role in the Southern Christian Leadership Conference by the Kennedy administration for his alleged Communist affiliation. The US government pressed again to revoke Paul Robeson's passport in 1962. The Berlin Crisis, the Bay of Pigs invasion of 1961 and the October Cuban missile crisis of 1962 brought anti-Communism in the US to a boil.

It was in the midst of this atmosphere that Oswald brought his crackpot leftist ideas to Dallas and into the arms of anti-Communist fanatics. While working at an enterprise engaged in classified military work, Oswald contacted both the Communist Party and the Socialist Workers Party-- he had maintained subscriptions to their respective newspapers since his return to the US. Unlike thousands of people who were denied employment, experienced harassment, or found their names on watch lists, Oswald enjoyed a charmed life within a cesspool of right-wing intrigue and anti-Red hysteria.

●The spring of 1963 brought Oswald to New Orleans where he mounted a one-man campaign to establish left credentials while blatantly drawing attention to his activities, a bizarre goal for an authentic leftist in a hostile environment and with no allies. Warren Commission apologists like Gerald Posner answer that these actions only prove that Oswald was unbalanced and unpredictable.

But that evades the pertinent question.

Where were the security services that were systematically hunting, harassing, and persecuting everyone in the US with even a pinkish tint? How does Oswald escape their net? Did anyone in the US leave such a trail of provocative left-wing foot prints as did Oswald?

Before, during, and after Oswald's pro-Cuban adventure in the deep South, critics were threatened, beaten, and even killed for opposing segregation. And yet Oswald's television notoriety earned by defending revolutionary Cuba brought a violent reaction only when Oswald provoked one. Lee Harvey Oswald was perhaps the only self-proclaimed leftist in the US who traveled, lived, and acted with impunity during this repressive era.

● Immediately before leaving for Mexico in September of 1963, Oswald telephoned the head of the Texas Socialist Labor Party to mention that he wanted to meet before he left for Mexico City, a conversation that was surely overheard by authorities. What would be the likelihood that the correspondence between two public Marxists would not be the subject of interest in these repressive times and in the paranoid South?

Border crossings were, as they are today, designed to filter those worthy of scrutiny or detention. Yet Oswald went on his merry way to Mexico City with his passport and visa intact. For years, Mexico had been a haven for political expatriates and fleeing victims of the blacklist. All were under constant attention from US and Mexican authorities. Like Portugal and Spain in World War II, Mexico was to the Cold War a hot bed of spying and intrigue where all the antagonists maintained robust stations. Enter Lee Harvey Oswald. Flashing his leftist credentials, Oswald visited and revisited the Cuban and Soviet embassies loudly touting his desires to travel to Cuba and the Soviet Union. Without doubt, these plans were exposed to US authorities, who, uncharacteristically, did virtually nothing. Should his plans have been actuated, he could have been the US's first double-defector! No one seemed too alarmed in the higher echelons of the CIA and FBI.

This tortured history could easily be dismissed as the expression of an unstable, twisted mind. But that dismissal would only strengthen the oddness of the lack of action on the part of the US security services that would have had to curiously dismiss Oswald's vocal leftism and uncommonly audacious expression of that postured leftism.

Viewed from the Marxist left, Oswald's showy exhibition with a gun in one hand and a copy of The Worker and The Militant in the other smells of a provocation. Even a newcomer to the culture of the left knows that Trotskyists and Communists are water and oil. Thus, for a “veteran” of the left like Oswald to go to some lengths to make such a display is only intelligible if he were seeding evidence for some unrevealed purpose. Was the carefully posed picture meant to impress the left? Of course not. Was it meant to make a different impression?

Oswald was likely the only “leftist” in the US to never make first-hand, direct contact with other leftists, to never attend a meeting, to never join an organized demonstration or vigil in 6-8 years of off-and-on “activism.” He was well known as a “leftist” to non-left acquaintances and co-workers as well as much of the general public. But the broad left only knew him through correspondences.

In the end, it is impossible to reconcile Oswald the “leftist” with the unlikely indifference of the US intelligence and police establishment. At the same time, it is impossible to accept the authenticity of that leftism.

But if Oswald was not genuine, if he was only posing as a leftist, what was he really?

Since the intelligence and police agencies ignored Oswald as though they knew he were not a leftist, since he slipped easily through the net that captured thousands of the faintly pink, who did they think he was? He certainly did plenty to deserve their attention, attention that they seemed determined not to give.

Until we know who Oswald really was, we will never solve Kennedy's assassination.

Zoltan Zigedy

zoltanzigedy@gmail.com