The reason this culture was so impervious to serial evidentiary disappointments was because it was motivated by a myth: If only the threads of this dastardly crime could be unraveled, it would finally reveal what kept America from becoming a land of milk and honey. A lot of apparently sophisticated people succumbed to that silly temptation. “Members of his own government felt he must be eliminated,” Martin Sheen confidently blurbed in a 2010 book, JFK and the Unspeakable, that did a great deal to keep that myth alive. Said Yoko Ono: “I cried all night reading it, and didn’t sleep a wink.”
And many conspiracy authors today hold on to the belief that JFK was going to end the war in Vietnam and usher in a whole new world of peace and security:
This reverence owes little to what JFK accomplished in office, which was very little. To be blunt, it has more to do with how he died. When I needed to get across the Kennedy assassination’s impact in my first book, I chose unadorned brevity: “The bottom had dropped out of the United States of America.” Had I chosen to elaborate, I might have documented all the ways that baby boomers, who were children when the trauma was visited upon them, remain in the denial phase of their mourning to this day. Their failure to mourn became a species of magic thinking. As Ettingermentum, who is 22, puts it: Boomers came to “believe that Kennedy was going to do something that some people really didn’t want him to do, that those people took drastic action to prevent it, and that this was followed by the end of the American Golden Age.”
And there is the corollary view that America can only return to greatness when it uncovers the truth about the JFK assassination.
Here is an excerpt from my book, Oliver Stone's Film-Flam: The Demagogue of Dealey Plaza: (pages 577 - 579)
The crux of JFK: Destiny Betrayed is a jejune political theory that JFK was going to withdraw from Vietnam and usher in an era of peace and detente. The CIA and the military-industrial establishment had to stop this, and the only way was to have JFK killed.
Emerging from this erroneous reading of history is a nihilist prescription, that unless we unravel the JFK conspiracy, the United States can never fully realize the promise of democracy.
Here is author David Talbot: (54:11 in Episode 4 of Oliver Stone's documentary series JFK: Destiny Betrayed)
I think there's a direct thread between the events of 1963, and the kind of horror show that America is having to endure right now. And I think once you kill a president in broad daylight on the streets of an American city, and everyone knows that powerful forces did it, and it can never be solved, that crime, that sends a signal, not only to the American people, but to the American media, to American future leaders. And if American really wants a democratic society, then we should get to the bottom of this traumatic crime that continues to reverberate throughout American history.
What kind of message is this? Telling people that their actions are useless unless the supposed JFK conspiracy and cover-up are revealed? Is this not a nihilist recipe for inaction?
A minute later (55:30) the narrator asks this question:
Can a democracy survive if it does not know its deepest secrets about the darkest days of its past?
None of this is new. Stone is just recycling the discredited theories of Fletcher Prouty, the model for Mr. X in his film JFK. Here is what Prouty wrote in his article “The Shadow of Dallas” in the January 1974 issue of Genesis magazine:
Until our government moves positively against this continuing cover-up of the three assassinations, and the many related crimes, we shall not have a free and unfettered country. The “offer they cannot refuse” hangs over the head of every man in office and over his every decision. Watergate has helped us considerably. It has shown us what the will of the people can do. But until the people of this country rise up and demand that the stains of Dallas be removed, we shall continue in an uncertain manner and with an unknown shadow over us all.
This message of hopelessness is courtesy of a man who believes that Russian dictator Vladimir Putin is rational, calm, and thoughtful.
This naive theory rests on the belief that JFK wanted to completely withdraw from Vietnam, an assertion that is not backed up by the evidence.
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