Saturday night, I saw Bob Schieffer of CBS News, playing the role of senior uncle of US culture with tears in his eyes, tell us how much it affected him to see John F. Kennedy’s little boy “in his little boy suit” salute his father at his funeral. The CBS program also featured cameo shots of the likes of Walter Cronkite, Dan Rather and Jim Lehrer of PBS making pronouncements.
As a narrator of the CBS program which included footage of the motorcade in Dallas and events leading up to and including the funeral procession, including the riderless black horse prancing down the street behind the casket, Schieffer told us as if he and CBS knew with certainty, as if it were an absolute fact, that Lee Harvey Oswald, a lone nut, was fully responsible for the shooting.
I also saw that night a Facebook post advertising yet another book asserting JFK was killed by a conspiracy possibly involving high levels of the US government, Cubans and the Mafia. This book was supposedly written by an eye surgeon who used his professional equipment used to detect retina problems in diabetes sufferers to detect outlines of two shooters behind the wall at the “Grassy Knoll” on old photographs on his computer, proving Kennedy was shot from the front by unknown shooters. This post included several short videos of people giving testimony they saw two shooters on the grassy knoll, saw a man leaving the scene, saw a man disassembling a rifle there, saw puffs of smoke there when the shooting took place, etc.
The post also included short video interviews with a Parkland Hospital doctor, Jack Ruby, Oswald’s killer, and Lyndon Johnson’s mistress. The doctor interviewed in his white coat in a hospital in a video testified he saw Kennedy after he was shot in the Dallas hospital and he was definitely shot from the front by two bullets, one entering through his neck and exiting behind the shoulder, the other entering behind his right temple and exiting in the back of his head blowing out skull and brain tissue from the wound. The mistress said she was in Dallas that day and the day before and people were upset with Kennedy, especially Johnson who was in one of his rages, telling her Kennedy would never embarrass him again, and that was a promise. She said she telephoned people as soon as she learned of the shooting and one of them told her “they”, whoever they were, shot the SOB, i.e., Kennedy. Jack Ruby told us in a video the assassination involved high levels of the US government but the truth would never be known. To my knowledge Ruby never made any attempt to set the matter straight. Why not? Was there ever another murderer like this in history? Another video on the post showed a man who said Ruby called him the night before he shot Oswald, telling him the killing would occur, proving Ruby did not spontaneously shoot Oswald in a fit of rage or grief.
Well, somebody is lying or sadly mistaken, either these witnesses or CBS, or the Warren Commission, the committee Johnson set up to investigate the assassination, which declared it was the act of a lone gunman.
How could any television network in this day and age with all the evidence there is out there indicating the JFK assassination was a conspiracy tell thousands or millions of viewers with certainty Oswald did it alone?
Maybe it is possible Oswald did it alone somehow, however improbable it seems. But I also know it’s also possible it was a conspiracy, possibly involving Johnson, who had plenty of motive, and CBS made no mention of this.
Is it possible these witnesses, including a medical doctor who said he examined Kennedy in Parkland Hospital, were plants, liars, or conspiracy nuts out to sell books or attract attention? I don’t think so. I think they were truth tellers out to set the record straight.
Regardless, I think CBS owes we the people a retraction for distorting the minds of our children and grandchildren on primetime TV, for asserting certainty where none exists about a major event in US history.
Richard John Stapleton is an emeritus professor of business policy, ethics and entrepreneurship who writes on business and politics at www.effectivelearning.net and on Facebook.
Emboldened by the total success of the assassination of Kennedy and its cover-up, subsequent murders, Martin Luther King, Robert Kennedy, Malik El-Shabazz, Fred Hampton, Walter Reuther, James Hoffa, and the maiming of George Wallace (when he threatened to split Nixon’s vote), changed the course of American politics. This is as American as apple pie as “Convenient death” (or total incapacity) has often had a major impact upon American history; The “absence” of Taylor, Lincoln, Wilson, FDR and Kennedy all resulted in major shifts in national policy. See Michael Parenti’s “Dirty Truths” (City Lights 1996) and “History as Mystery” (City Lights 1999).
The telvision news media of the time, mainly limited to ABC, NBC, and CBS, were included by Jim Garrison in groups who were actively trying to suppress and debunk the story of his investigation. So, they were in on it from the start. Legally, this is called an accomplice after the fact. Is it any wonder that 50 years later they are still trying to cover it up? Tommy Rimes