All the way with JFK

[phil82]

Alright, I'll ask: just where were you the day Kennedy died? If you're under fifty of course you weren't there, but I was on duty at Ohakea where there was some sort of exercise going on which involved, among other things, a number of F105 Thuds. I recall when the news broke that I personally felt amazed, having just spent three weeks in the US, how such a thing could happen in the US of A.

[kiwithrottlejockey]

From the Los Angeles Times....

Fifty years after JFK assassination, conspiracy theories live on

By DAVID HORSEY | 5:00AM PST - Thursday, November 21, 2013



THE 50th anniversary of the assassination of President Kennedy also marks 50 years of conspiracy theorists trying to sell an array of alternative explanations for JFK’s murder. Over all the long years since November 22nd, 1963, conspiracy theorists have fingered more than 40 different groups, 80 different assassins and in excess of 200 co-conspirators.

Of course, not all of those accusations can be true. In fact, given the abundance of contradictory theories about who did the deed, it is far more reasonable to assume none of them is true than it is to believe one might just be right.

A whole lot of people are uncomfortable with simple explanations for big events. There are regions of the world — Pakistan, for instance, or the American South — where preposterous conspiracy theories are a ubiquitous force in politics and must be reckoned with by anyone trying to govern rationally.

One December day in 2007, I was in Aswan, Egypt, having a drink at the Old Cataract Hotel with a sophisticated Egyptian college professor. At one point in an otherwise cordial conversation, I told him that Barack Obama might very likely become president of the United States. The professor scoffed at the idea, declaring it impossible. He insisted there were corporate overlords who pick and choose American presidents and direct their every move and they would never choose a black man.

It did me no good to argue that, though corporations and the moneyed class have enormous influence, the United States is still a functioning democracy. The professor believed what he wanted to believe.

In that, he is like many — perhaps most — human beings who resist the idea that random acts and human folly have more influence on events than elaborate, secret schemes of sinister powers. What people believe is a choice driven less by facts than by how they want to see the world.

For some, Barack Obama cannot be merely a gifted, but standard-issue, Democrat from Illinois; he has to be an anti-Christian, radical outsider who wants to close churches, confiscate guns and enslave white citizens.

For others, the destruction of the World Trade Center on September 11th, 2001, cannot have been caused by a crew of Al Qaeda amateurs who got lucky; it has to have been a plot carried out by American security services at the direction of President George W. Bush.

And, for some people who cling to conspiracy as explanation, John F. Kennedy’s presidency could not have been ended by Lee Harvey Oswald, a left-wing loner who wanted to do something big; it had to have been the work of the CIA or Lyndon Johnson or the Mafia or all of them scheming together.

Conspiracies work with precision in TV shows like “Scandal”, “24” and “Homeland”. They are wrapped in a grandiose cloak of history and power in Dan Brown’s paranoid thrillers. In the real world, though, conspiracies tend to unravel. Somebody squeals, somebody leaks, somebody betrays. We always find out — and usually because a conspiring collective of humans is bound to screw up. Any 50-year-old conspiracy to kill JFK would have to be an exception to that rule.

For me, it is easier to accept that the truth is exactly what it has long appeared to be: A history-shifting tragedy occurred because one inconsequential misfit with a mail-order rifle got a clear shot.

www.latimes.com/opinion/topoftheticket/la-na-tt-conspiracy-theories-live-on-20131120,0,6555690.story

[kiwithrottlejockey]

I was in Standard 3 at Mahora Primary School in Hastings back in 1963.

I cannot recall exactly where I was when JFK was assassinated, but I can remember it being big news.

[Dave Homewood]

I love the way that every time the anniversary comes around of Kennedy's death people around the world feel they have to eliminate themselves from the conspiracy by telling everyone else their alibi of where they were when it happened.

[phil82]

It wasn't me Dave, for sure. I wasn't even in America let alone Dallas.

It's not just an anniversary, it's fifty years, and comes with lots of "what ifs" because at 43 he was the youngest President ever [dead at 46] and would undoubtedly have been elected for a second term. He also got to shag Marylyn Monroe...

[suthg]

We were at home I think, on a Saturday morning and a trucking firm had arrived to deliver some furniture at about 10am and he was the first to tell us, I was 10 at the time and Dad had just finished with a builder over two months, adding a large lounge extension to the house. Bill Elder of Elders Transport, Martinborough was the man!

I remember Dad not believing him and almost having an argument with him! The remainder of the unloading became very much second place to the topic of discussion.

[kiwithrottlejockey]

[Luther Moore]

Nov 22, 2013 12:43:01 GMT 12 phil82 said:

having just spent three weeks in the US

Plotting the assassination?


I used to be obsessed with the JFK assassination, now I look more into what he was like as a leader rather than how he was killed. A lot of people know him as the President who was assassinated rather than a great leader.

My parents were telling how scared they were at school when the whole missile crisis was going on, Mum was thirteen at the time and said she used to sit in class waiting for the bomb to drop on Auckland.

One of the best documentaries I have seen was ''The Search for Kennedy's PT109'' Didn't know until I watched it that an Aussie and a few Natives saved his life in WWII.

[Dave Homewood]

Did you know that RNZAF members saved the front half of the PT-109, and built a back into the halved boat creating a new boat which they used for recreation. When time came to leave the island they scuttled it.

[corsair67]

I still reckon a jealous husband blew his brains out.....and no doubt took the shot from the grassy knoll.

Either that, or big pharma was behind it.

[Dave Homewood]

Maybe Jackie Kennedy had him taken out, the jealous wife?

[Luther Moore]

Nov 23, 2013 10:10:38 GMT 12 Dave Homewood said:

Did you know that RNZAF members saved the front half of the PT-109, and built a back into the halved boat creating a new boat which they used for recreation. When time came to leave the island they scuttled it.

What,where,when?? Please tell me more Dave. Didn't the boat go down in one piece though?

[Dave Homewood]

No apparently it was cut in half, and the bow end washed up on shore. The RNZAF Sawmill unit guys 'repaired' it for their own uses.

[Dave Homewood]

Luther, you can read about the PT109 story in an all new feature on my Wings Over Cambridge site dedicated to the RNZAF Sawmill Units, written by Michael Tuck who's father Stanley Tuck was the CO of the units. This has literally just been uploaded this week, by co-incidence:
www.cambridgeairforce.org.nz/RNZAF_Sawmills.html

[Luther Moore]

Dave, how well known is this story? I know it says on your site that it's not well known but has this story ever reached the USA that you know of? You could be on to something here.I always thought it was cut in two but Watching the doco they found what looked to be like the whole PT boat, it was under the sand though. All other reports say it was cut in two.

[Dave Homewood]

I really don't know much more, I didn't do the research for this Sawmill page, it was Mike Tuck. He told me the other day that he met a member of the sawmill unit not so long back who saw that in Mike's manuscript and confirmed the story to him. The old chap promised to write all his memories down for Mike but a few days later he dropped dead so it never happened. But Mike was pleased that he had this recent confirmation of the story that he'd heard from other veterans over the years. I'm sure he also said that the boat in RNZAF hands had PT109 still painted on the bow.

[Dave Homewood]

It's possible there are photos of the kiwis fishing from the recovered bow section around in private collections, maybe one day a photo will turn up.

[kiwithrottlejockey]

From the Los Angeles Times....

Kennedy assassination was the pivot in the lives of baby boomers

By DAVID HORSEY | 5:00AM CST - Friday, November 22, 2013



I AM one of those who can easily answer the most singular question of my generation: “Where were you when John F. Kennedy was assassinated?”

On this day exactly 50 years ago, I was a seventh-grader at R.H. Thomson Junior High School in Seattle. I was walking from the band room to another class when I saw a boy running in my direction through the crowded hallway. He was shouting something like, “They got him! They shot that bastard Kennedy!”

I remember the kid’s face was filled with a menacing glee. At the time, I didn’t think as much about his expression as I did about what he was saying. Was it true? Within a few minutes, the entire student body was called into the lunchroom. The principal somberly announced that the president was dead and that school was called off.

I rode a bus home, talking about the startling news with the girl who first taught me to dance. Much of the next four days I spent in front of a black-and-white television, watching everything, even more attentive than my parents and sister. I saw the new president, Lyndon Baines Johnson, step off Air Force One in Washington. I witnessed the murder of Lee Harvey Oswald. I listened to all the commentary, all the reporting. I did not miss a minute of the magnificent, woeful funeral pageant. The only time I did not watch was when there was nothing to see but a silent view of the White House at night (yes, there was once a time when, even with one of the biggest news stories of the century underway, the networks took a break to collect information and think about it before they said anything).

As a 12-year-old, I was already interested in politics and fascinated by history. I knew what I was seeing on TV was history at its most dramatic and politics at its most dark. I had not been a fan of JFK. My family was staunchly Republican. On election night in 1960, I went to bed praying that Richard Nixon would come out the winner. But we were not Kennedy haters — not like that kid who had run down the hall of my school.

The memory of that boy is a useful reminder that the stream of bile and anger in American politics today is nothing new, it has only been magnified by the Internet, talk radio and partisan cable news. The unhinged right-wing vilification of President Obama may seem unique, but it is a direct descendant of the extremist hatred directed at Kennedy.

Dallas was a hotbed of that hate in 1963. Texas right-wingers looked at the war-hero president who saved the world from nuclear war and all they saw was a Communist tool who deserved to be impeached. That is why JFK’s advisors were reluctant to let him go to Dallas. They feared for his life. That he was killed by a Marxist malcontent is ironic, but, in those days, the left had its extremists too, as the Symbionese Liberation Army and the Weather Underground would prove in the years to come.

It may be even more ironic that John Kennedy is the one Democrat today’s Republicans have adopted as a political hero and sterling example of what this century’s Democrats are not. Many contemporary liberals, on the other hand, are not entirely comfortable claiming JFK, not because of his policies, but because of his private life. Younger people who have heard far more about Kennedy’s sexual escapades than about his presidency must imagine him as a political version of Don Draper from TV’s “Mad Men”.

Yet, for all the myth and gossip that surrounds JFK, there is plenty that is real and admirable. The best candidate was elected in 1960 — a serious, brave man who not only stood up to the Soviets, but also stood up to the truculent military brass and Cold War hawks who thought nuclear war was an acceptable option. Kennedy’s charm and capacity to inspire were not shallow attributes, they moved a nation and galvanized a new generation. When his life was cut short, something great was lost for us all.

We baby boomers were too young to fully appreciate how Kennedy’s assassination would send our Leave-It-To-Beaver lives in a new direction. We did not know Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy would also be gunned down (Bobby’s assassination being another event I would experience through television on the night of the 1968 California presidential primary). We did not know about a place called Woodstock or a campus named Kent State. We did not know men would walk on the moon so soon or that the Berlin Wall would fall so peacefully. And, way back then, September 11th was just another day.

JFK’s death was the pivot on which our childhoods turned. It was the beginning of the end of our innocence. Even 50 years later, it feels like a promise unfulfilled, a dream stolen. Kennedy’s Camelot was more than just a story. It is golden thread permanently woven into the fabric of our American lives.

www.latimes.com/opinion/topoftheticket/la-na-tt-kennedy-assassination-20131122,0,7286038.story

[kiwithrottlejockey]

President John F. Kennedy and wife Jackie greeting the crowd at Love Field, Dallas, Texas upon arrival for campaign tour on day of his assassination.
— Photograph: Art Rickerby/Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images/November 22nd, 1963.

(click on the photograph to open an index page of stories about the JFK assassination @ the Los Angeles Times)

[jonesy]

Wateched a doco the other day showing the media rection at the time and there was the news anchor puffing away on a ciggie whilst delivering the news! My, how the times have changed....