Sixty Years and Counting

 

Where were you the day America lost its innocence? I was in the principal’s office at Our Lady of Victory school when the news bulletin flashed at 1:30 and then Walter Cronkite appeared on the screen to report that President Kennedy was shot. I hadn’t finished my science fair project and I was waiting for the principal to admonish me for my failure to get it done timely.

 By 2PM, it didn’t matter. JFK had died.

 It was a somber weekend, for sure. The heavens opened and poured all day Saturday, from Long Island to Washington. For a twelve-year-old kid, up to that point, it was the saddest and most depressing day in my life.

 Sunday was better. It was a brisk, sunny, fall morning as I walked to OLV, where I served the ten o’clock Mass at my local parish. When I got home, my parents were watching the continuing coverage which was transpiring in Washington and Dallas. My Dad put the football game on the radio as a distraction. When Oswald died after Ruby shot him, the cheer from the crowd was deafening on that old AM radio.

On Monday, November 25, from sunrise to late that night, we watched the funeral, the walking procession with the riderless horse from the White House to the Church to Arlington National Cemetery and back to the White House, where many world leaders and dignitaries paid their respects. It was a truly sad day. And our country has not been the same since.

Sixty years have elapsed since November 22, 1963 and we are no closer to solving this crime than the day it was committed. With all the technology we have developed, and all the theories, conspiracy or forthright, we have heard, our government is unwilling to release the information surrounding this tragedy for us to finally put it all to rest. Why? Do certain people fear that something will be exposed which might be embarrassing to them? Or criminal?

So many of the actors in this event are now dead. But the agencies where they worked still exist. Obviously, Parkland Hospital is still in Dallas and so is the Texas School Book Depository. The administrators of those facilities have nothing to fear in any investigation of the actions done that day by their predecessors or employees.                                                                                           

But what about the government of the United States? Can its agencies lay claim to the same? The FBI, the CIA, the Secret Service -  are these entities’ hands clean and pure? Or the Congress? Yes, they have on occasion pronounced that committees were formed to investigate Kennedy’s assassination. But nothing of any import has ever been released. Why not?

The same is true with every President’s administration since Johnson. He proclaimed via executive order that the records would be sealed until 2039, seventy-five years after the Warren Commission completed its work. And no President since then has had the guts to write an executive order to override this decision. Why? Executive orders are not law under the Constitution.

Not long after the Kennedy assassination, Mark Lane wrote a book called Executive Action, which provided an excellent theory how and why JFK was murdered. This was written in 1966 or 1967 and the movie of the same name, was released in 1973. This was probably the earliest of the thousands of conspiracy theories espoused by many since then.

Since then, we are no closer to knowing the why for JFK’s death.

The question which we all should be asking this many years later, to paraphrase Senator Howard Baker of his question to Watergate witnesses, is: What did the government know and when did it know it? Perhaps, the next President will have the balls to write and declare an executive order to overturn Johnson’s coverup order and get the answers to all the questions surrounding this terrible day.

We will never recover the innocence we had on November 21, 1963 and lost on November 22, 1963. But for our posterity, we can be proud that we tried.

Then, maybe, finally, John F. Kennedy will be able to rest in peace.  Amen.