"may I thank you a - gane"

 

On You Tube, video titled:

JACKIE KENNEDY'S "THANK YOU" MESSAGE TO THE WORLD  (JANUARY 1964)

uploader / channel:  David Von Pein's JFK Channel

(text of the speech)

I want to take this opportunity to express my appreciation for the hundreds of thousands of messages, nearly 800,000 in all, which my children and I have received over the past few weeks.

        The knowledge of the affection in which my husband was held by all of you has sustained me, and the warmth of these tributes is something I shall never forget.  Whenever I can bear to, I will read them.

        All his bright light gone from the world.  All of you who have written to me know how much we all loved him, and that he returned that love, in full measure.

        It is my greatest wish that all of these letters be acknowledged.  They will be, but it will take a long time to do so, but I know you will understand.

Each and every message is to be treasured -- not only for my children, but so that future generations will know how much our country and people in other nations thought of him.

Your letters will be placed with his papers in the library to be erected in his memory, along the Charles River in Boston, Massachusetts.

        I hope that in years to come, many of you and your children will be able to visit the Kennedy Library.  It will be, we hope, not only a memorial to President Kennedy, but a living center of study of the times in which he lived, and a center for young people and for scholars, from all over the world.

May I thank you again, on behalf of my children and of the president's family, for the comfort that your letters have brought to us all.

Thank you.

_______________________________

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"I know there is a God -- and I see a storm coming"

 

"The American people don't read."

~ Allen Dulles

----------------------------------------------------

One day in grade school or junior high, I came home from school with a statement that Pres. Kennedy was killed by someone else other than Lee Harvey Oswald.

        I can't remember what was actually said, or who told me.  My dad said No, some people say things like that, but it's all rumors, don't repeat it.

Usually my dad liked to talk about stuff, but he did not want to talk about that.

        I didn't mind -- I went forward to something else.  (Reruns of That Girl or Lucy might have been on...)

But I always remembered that conversation.

If we don't speak of it, everything will be better - ?

There's actually a book titled

JFK and the Unspeakable

written by James W. Douglass.

___________________________________

On You Tube there's a video:

JFK Assassination:  The Roger Craig Story.

        (In the space where they put the name of the channel, it's the same as the title of the video.)

It's 20 minutes long.

Roger Craig was a policeman in Dallas in November of 1963.  He tells his story -- his boss saying you are bystanders watching the motorcade, you are not to participate in any protection of the president.

        After the gunshots, everyone running toward the spot on Dealey Plaza where the president's car had been -- but two people running away...

__________________________________

[excerpt from Chapter One of JFK and the Unspeakable] --------------------

        Two critical questions converge at Kennedy's assassination.  The first is:  Why did his assassins risk exposure and a shameful downfall by covertly murdering a beloved president?  The second is:  Why was John Kennedy prepared to give his life for peace, when he saw death coming?

        The second question may be key to the first, because there is nothing so threatening to systemic evil as those willing to stand against it regardless of the consequences.  

So we will try to see this story initially through the life of John Kennedy, to understand why he became so threatening to the most powerful military-economic coalition in history that its wielders of power were willing to risk everything they had in order to kill him.

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domino theory

 

Allen Dulles

Friday, November 22, 1963

        President Kennedy murdered in Dallas, Texas

Sunday, November 24, 1963

        Lee Harvey Oswald murdered by Jack Ruby in Dallas

Monday, November 25, 1963

        President John Fitzgerald Kennedy's funeral

________________________________

I remember watching the funeral and the procession through the streets of Washington, D.C. -- it was on TV.  I was five years old, then, and my first friend to run around with and learn from was Sheri Witherspoon, who lived next door.  She was seven or eight years old, and seemed to know everything, from my point of view.

        She was at our house, watching the funeral with my parents and me.  I remember her saying, "I wish they'd take that flag off of there, so we can see him!"

Kids.

("I want to see the dead body!")

_________________________

The idea that doesn't go away, for me, is:

Some people in the government wanted to escalate America's involvement in Vietnam's civil war.

Kennedy did not want or intend to do this.

So -- they killed him and went ahead into Vietnam.

And the idea which attaches to that is -- the main reason to fight a war in Vietnam was so that some large manufacturing companies (Brown & Root, Texas-based; Bell Helicopter, Texas-based) could make a lot of money.

And why would the government help companies make a lot of money?  So that the companies can make large donations back to the politicians...?

If these things are true, it goes so far beyond what people in a democracy believe is right, that you almost can't talk about it because it's like you're acknowledging an evil and amorality that you don't want to believe exists.

John Kennedy was the president, not Allen Dulles or J. Edgar Hoover or any of those others.  So he got to say what military involvement by the U.S. was going to go forward.

        But not if they kill him.

        ("I'll give you your damn war...")

The online publication called the Daily Beast had a headline in October 2015:

Did CIA Director Allen Dulles Order the Hit on JFK?

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good-bye

 November 25, 1963

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trap of deception?

 

funeral procession, President Kennedy

from the Capitol back to the White House, then to St. Matthew's Cathedral, and finally to Arlington National Cemetery

JFK Revisited:  Through The Looking Glass

    I recommended this interesting program, and I thought it was free to watch with Prime, but then, I bought it -- so I could stream it anytime -- maybe it isn't free with Prime membership, maybe mine is only free because I paid for it already.  I'm not sure.  (Apology, if I gave wrong info:  didn't mean to.)

It's disturbing in places.  It does appear that hard evidence was tampered with and witnesses' stories were changed in order to conform to what the Warren Report was claiming.

'We say it was this way, so now make it look like it was this way....'

St. Matthew's

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to assure the survival and success of liberty

 

center / foreground:  President Kennedy

at right, in white overcoat:  Vice President Lyndon Johnson

assassination of President John F. Kennedy

in 1963

I sometimes think about the idea that Kennedy was going to cut back involvement with Vietnam's civil war -- when he was still living, we only had advisors over there, right?

        And then after Kennedy's death, pretty soon there in the Sixties, America had boots-on-the-ground in Vietnam -- we were "in" the war.

I read somewhere once that Kennedy had more experience in World War II than Johnson, and was therefore much more conservative about getting involved in other countries' conflicts.  He knew first-hand the horrors of war.

        There's that moment in Oliver Stone's 1991 film JFK, where someone -- I think it's the actor portraying Johnson -- grumbles, "I'll give you your damn war ..."

(Of course that's Stone's theory, not historical fact.)

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eerie beauty

 

[excerpt from A Thousand Days:  John F. Kennedy in the White House, by Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.]

PROLOGUE:  JANUARY 1961

It all began in the cold.

        It had been cold all week in Washington.  Then early Thursday afternoon the snow came.  The winds blew in icy, stinging gusts and whipped the snow down the frigid streets.  Washingtonians do not know how to drive in the snow:  they slide and skid and spin their wheels and panic.  By six o'clock traffic had stopped all over town.  

People abandoned their cars in snowdrifts and marched grimly into the gale, heads down, newspapers wrapped around necks and stuffed under coats.  And still the snow fell and the winds blew.

        At eight o'clock the young President-elect and his wife went to the Inaugural Concert at Constitution Hall.  An hour later they left at the intermission to go on to the Inaugural Gala at the Armory.  The limousine made its careful way through the blinding snow down the Mall.  Bonfires had been lit along the path in a vain effort to keep the avenue clear.  Great floodlights around the Washington Monument glittered through the white storm.  

It was a scene of eerie beauty.  As stranded motorists cheered the presidential car, the President-elect told his friend William Walton, "Turn on the lights so they can see Jackie."

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