In his book, Deep Politics and the Death of JFK,
Peter Dale Scott talks about America�s destructive actions rooted so deep in
its politics that they prove not to be anomalies but integral parts of our
political psyche. Scott invokes Jung�s buried shadow, �the repository for
repressed unpleasantness.� Yet the shadow (as in who knows what evil lurks in
the hearts of men), can still be exposed by the freedoms still available to us
in America. And this is our salvation.
Healing, as Scott
writes, �can come from an enlargement of insight,� which suggests optimism. He
adds �for if America were no more than its shadows depicted here, logic and
common sense would rule out the writing and publication of this book.� And so Deep Politics is an invitation to
understand beyond political paradigms of logic or reason the irrational and/or
criminal forces at work in the woodwork, chewing down the State House while
other carpenters toil incessantly to Raise
High the Roof Beams.
And so, according
to Scott, the murder of John F. Kennedy was not a historic one-off, but the
body politic�s modus operandi, cloned in the assassinations of Robert F.
Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, and I might add John Lennon and the
attempted assassinations of George Wallace, Gerald Ford and Ronald Reagan.
Scott reports that within the investigatory process of the Warren Commission,
there were some 21 or more violent deaths. And 16 more that died at the time of
the Garrison investigation of 1967, later immortalized in Oliver Stone�s
milestone film, JFK, not to mention
our memory.
Along with these
shadows (a term also used in theater to describe the dark side of a character),
comes the cast of suspects, the usual round of lone nut gunmen, Mafiosi,
tainted patriots, CIA and Secret Service �Secret Sharers,� dark operatives,
drug runners, money launderers, pimps, generals, defense contractors,
politicians, spinmeisters, spymasters, the hated minority, world leaders,
plotters, the vicious and/or bereaved Americans. This cast persists from drama
to drama.
In fact, we can
follow it via Watergate to Iran-contra and Iraqgate to 9/11 to find the lone
terrorist patsies capped by bin Laden, the NORAD generals, the CIA/FBI/NSA
nexus, the corrupt politicians, the cabinet, the hapless president, the vice
president who would be king, the drug-runners, money-launderers, defense
companies, corporate donors, spinners, military bases where assassins train,
Wall Street where financial hitmen train, and so on.
In fact, in a
separate article JFK and
9/11, Scott elaborates on these two American real-life tragic movies, their
similar devices in scripts and players, and how they play over and over again
on the unsuspecting and suspecting public, shadows (paradigms) projected by
light on a huge white screen of time.
It is my impression
that the desire to absorb the shadow paradigms may be also at the root of our
fascination with political cum sci-fi melodramas, movies from Dr. Strangelove to The Matrix to The Good
Shepherd, whose truly dark scenarios are missing from �All the News That�s
Fit To Print� and the everyday media, whose real/life counterparts are
scathingly replayed on the Internet for their agog scholars.
Perhaps our
blindness towards America�s shadows is that we so recognize them in fiction
that we no longer fear them in reality, even though they have the potential to
lull us into a virtual Apocalypse Now.
For instance, let me deal with a major example from Scott�s book, a staple of
the American shadow, the obfuscation to make war.
Two scenarios: NSAM 263 AND NSAM 273
National Security
Action Memoranda 263 was issued by John F Kennedy on October 11, 1963. It was
Kennedy�s last NSAM policy directive issued on Vietnam. Simply stated, it
called for a withdrawal of 1,000 troops, combatants, from Vietnam. Beyond that
stunner, was Kennedy�s firm ambition, made known to Defense Secretary Robert
McNamara and the generals, to withdraw the balance of the troops by the end of
1965. The NSAM document, Scott points out, is on the screen of Stone�s JFK for six seconds, fast enough in film time to see, but merely a blip to fully
understand. And to watch it morph, supposedly following in Kennedy�s directive
steps to NSAM 273, is mind-boggling. This National Security Action Memo was
issued only four days after Kennedy�s death by Lyndon Johnson, giving General
Maxwell Taylor, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the permission to
escalate �to insure victory� and take the �war North.�
For Kennedy�s NSAM
263, as Scott tells us, �reflected the �political� priority of avoiding an
unlimited commitment to the war, by the signal (important politically but not
militarily) of withdrawing 1,000 troops. Johnson�s NSAM 273, while deceptively
reiterating language from a still earlier and lower-level document about
withdrawal, chose instead the �military� option of escalation, and also
reversed Kennedy�s most recent Vietnam policy NSAM.�
Beyond that Johnson
had an ongoing flow of information from the military of the darker, truer
picture of Nam events, via a back channel. This while the military and Johnson
forwarded a rosier series of reports to Kennedy (who never saw the darker),
though Kennedy bought none of it.
Stone�s JFK critics from Leslie Gelb in the Times to Alexander Cockburn in The
Nation, Scott points out, �replaced
this verifiable issue of fact by an unverifiable one: whether or not JFK would
have pulled the United States out of Vietnam.� That is speculation not history.
And it was the escalation permitted by NSAM 273 that led to the military
bombing of North Vietnam. This, in turn, led to US destroyer patrols and the
August 1964 Gulf of Tonkin incidents, which had been discussed in the Pentagon
before but only then received presidential authorization. The falsified attacks
on American warships in the Gulf of Tonkin led to a full-out escalation into
perdition.
Supposedly,
McNamara himself never saw the plans until November 20. But there�s no question
that NSAM 273 wants the US to fight. NSAM 263 expresses Kennedy�s desire for
limited engagement and ends with his assassination. This is the shadow of our
history and its movie running in memory.
The execution of the scenario
With NSAM 263,
Kennedy bucks the intense bureaucratic opposition, from the career generals to
the fresh-stung Bay of Pigs attendees; from the CIA and Cuban loyalists to the
fired CIA director and assistants; from the frustrated defense industrialists
who saw millions, billions slipping away, to the oil-thirsty corporations
eyeing Southeast Asia for petro-profits; from the diehard anti-communist
ideologues thinking JFK was going soft on commies to the drug lords of the
Mafia and their CIA partners anxious to peddle their wares in the fog of war;
from the open-pocket politicians to the close-mouthed killers; in short, from
all came back the shock wave of triangulated assassination as if set in motion
by the laws of physics and nature itself.
And so, the Secret
Service turns the Kennedy car left off the planned route of Main Street to a
short distance on Houston Street to a left again onto Elm Street into Dealey
Plaza, a long volley of shots exploding from the front, the right and the rear,
killing Kennedy, wounding Texas Governor John Connally, eight wounds in all,
the limousine slowed from 25 to 10 mph, then sped up on the direct route to
Parkland Hospital; the full 26 seconds of shadows and cutouts caught on the
dress manufacturer Abraham Zapruder�s 8-millimeter camera. The film, film for
the folly, for perpetuity, for Life
Magazine, for prevarication, recut that very night by the CIA.
And behind the four
door Lincoln convertible (a bullet hole in the upper right of its windshield),
we find at a reasonable distance the finned Cadillac convertible with the vice
president in mint condition. Johnson was host that previous evening to Allen
Dulles, former CIA chief, the soon to be member of the Warren Commission. It is
a feeding frenzy, blood on the water.
And the cast of
characters caught on stills standing in the Plaza or in front of the Texas
School Book Depository are alleged to include rightwing extremist Joseph Milteer,
CIA agent Lucien Conein, the CIA's Colonel Edward Lansdale and GHW Bush, among
others. This with multiples of the lone goat Oswald identified here and there
and caught in a matter of minutes, just like Sirhan Sirhan, Talmadge Hayer,
John Hinckley, Arthur Bremer, and so on, systemic, repeating themselves, Sam
Giancana, Jimmy Roselli, Carlos Marcellus, Santo Trafficante, players in a
national drama that will be revived when necessary like Hello Dolly or even Sondheim�s Assassins.
The drama shakes
the paradigm of propriety to pieces: that this couldn�t happen but did happen
and will happen time after time, one way or the other, to replace those who get
in the way of those with the more profitable direction. The 9/11 Commission in
for the Warren Commission, the obfuscators greasing the wheels of progress and
war, the giant reels of the projector showing us the news of democracy in
action from Cuba to Vietnam, Iran to Iraq, Chile to Nicaragua, and so on --
American as apple pie. And with a president who knows better today that he must
surge in Iraq in his blue serge suit, red tie and white shirt. So it goes. It
is endemic this epidemic of �killing and creation� as our world turns.
Beyond it all, the
indelible sunshine of life, the cloudless blue skies of November 22, 1963, in
Dallas and September 11, 2001, in New York City, and all the days between. Days
of the fall, the coming thanksgiving for all we have and have not, for how it
is, and can be, for better or for worse.
Thanks to Peter
Dale Scott, poet, professor, political seer, for seeing the shadow, and Oliver
Stone for putting it on film. After all what is film, like life, but the
capture of shadow and light?
Jerry Mazza is a freelance writer living in New York
City. Reach him at gvmaz@verizon.net.