I was eavesdropping on a conversation between two African American men at the local coffee shop regarding Martin Luther King, Jr. and one observed "Once he started speaking out against the Vietnam War, he had to go." The other agreed: "he had to go." I hear this theory every now and again (see, e.g., Rage Against the Machine "You know they went after King / When he spoke out on Vietnam /He turned the power to the have-nots / And then came the shot") and wonder how prevalent it is. Given the history of racist violence in the United States, the "cover story" that he was assassinated by a white supremacist seems pretty plausible.
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MLK Had to Go
13 Dec 2007 10:42 am
Comments (68)
"Ya know they murdered X then tried to blame it on Islam."
WHAT WAS THE PRICE ON HIS HEAD!!!!
Matt apparently doesn't realize that a fairly large chunk of us think RFK and MLK were murdered by the powers that be.
As someone else said, it's kind of suspicious that the only people who got assassinated were anti-establishment. In an environment where political violence occurs naturally, it generally goes both ways.
It's like that dude Okum's cell phone or can opener or something, right?
"Through Counterintelligence it should be possible to pinpoint potential trouble-makers and neutralize them..."
"And neutralize them..."
"And neutralize them..."
"And neutralize them..."
"And neutralize them..."
"And neutralize them..."
"It wasn't just MLK: think of all the leaders of the anti-war movement who were assassinated: MLK, Bobby Kennedy, John Lennon,...and you can add in JFK, too if you wan"
Then there's that other one. How's that one go. I see it on the blogs all the time: correllation don't prove consanguinuity. SOmething like that.
... it's kind of suspicious that the only people who got assassinated were anti-establishment.
I would throw in George Wallace. The nature of the times can not be discounted. It would be loony, conservative-types who would feel most threatened by liberal reformers.
JFK was a leader in the anti-war movement? Hunh?
Of course he was shot by a white supremacist. But that doesn't mean his death wasn't raucously celebrated at FBI headquarters.
Hey wait, if you take the initials for Kennedy, King and Kennedy, do you realize what that spells??
Did that just totally blow your mind or what?
Of course he was shot by a white supremacist. But that doesn't mean his death wasn't raucously celebrated at FBI headquarters.
But his death being celebrated at FBI HQ doesn't mean the FBI organized the assassination.
Some pro-war people got shot as well. George Wallace was one. George Lincoln Rockwell, the now forgotten American Nazi leader, but well enough known in the 60's to get a Playboy interview, was shot and killed. Two different assassins tried to kill Gerry Ford Both missed (one never got off a shot). Ronald Reagan was shot less than four months after John Lennon.
Being a civil rights leader was a dangerous business. Martin Luther King, before the war was even an issue, narrowly missed death when he was stabbed by a deranged woman in Harlem. The doctors said that if he had sneezed or coughed, he would have bled to death from a knife edge wedged against an artery by his heart. Medgar Evers was killed before Vietnam really got started. Some idiot shot, but only wounded, James Meredith, the hero of the University of Mississippi intergration some years later. This does not include the endless array of beatings from the cops and mobs, and notes only prominent figures prior to the attacks, so Schwerner, Goodman, Cheney, Liuzzo, and countless more aren't counted. None of these incidents had anything to do with the war.
But his death being celebrated at FBI HQ doesn't mean the FBI organized the assassination.
And neither RATM lyrics nor overheard conversations in coffee shops are rigorously fact-checked.
Yeah but reagan survived, because he was not a pussy.
Surely someone can to the finger-work to google"James Earl Ray innocent" and get back to us.
Meanwhile, this is probably obvious, but Black people do seem more prone to believe wacky conspiracy theories than most of us because they've been victims of more wacky conspiracies than most of us.
Re "the "cover story" that he [Martin Luther King] was assassinated by a white supremacist seems pretty plausible. "
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The primary evidence for that being the fact that the white supremacist was still alive and talking for years afterward.
Anyone remember that elderly gun guru in the hills of Tennessee in the recent movie " Shooter"??
-------
Guru: "Oh, that ole boy's dead. First rule of political assassinations --always kill the shooter. That way there's no link back to the conspirators. Hell, those boys on the grassy knoll in Dallas were buried out in the desert within hours after Kennedy was shot."
Skeptical agent: "I don't suspose you have actual personal knowledge of that incident , do you?"
Guru: "Sure do. I still got the shovel."
---------------
heh heh heh
Doesn't matter who pulled the trigger at this point, but so far as (white) America's collective memory is concerned, MLK died sometime in 1965. Everything he did and stood for after the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act has been smoothly whitewashed over.
How does Larry Flint's attmepted assasination fit into all this?
Yes, and what about Dimebag Darrell? Coincidence?
BTW I'm "go" above. typo.
Yeah but reagan survived, because he was not a pussy. Posted by iron pimp hand
In fact, the bullet was on its way to Reagan's heart, but on the way it saw the Olympian majesty of His inspiring, folksy, yet steely visage, and the bullet lost its course.
And then Reagan wept, and His tears carved the Grand Canyon.
Dimebag Darrell had to go. He was too close to discovering the ultimate guitar riff, the one that would rock this country to its very core and shatter the ears and minds of the unprepared. Churches and government offices would spontaneously combust once this riff was played at full volume, so The Man had to take him out.
Yep, by this standard Gerald Ford was clearly the most dangerous threat to the American Establishment, since they tried to shoot him *twice* while Reagan and Wallace were only worth a single assassination attempt...
And wasn't his VP Rockefeller? That just proves even exceptionally wealthy conspirators are real cheapskates when it comes to hiring Presidential assassins...
How did James Earl Ray get to Europe after the assassination? He sure didn't have the money for the plane tickets nor did he know how to arrange for passports and the other complications of international travel.
Follow the tracks through Montreal.
The thing that interests me is why political assassinations seem to have dried up; whether it's technological improvements in policing, or that our politics is less cataclysmic, the end of the cold war, or what.
Here's the list of attempted assassinations:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_Presidential_assassination_attempts
Of course, most black folks, especially those older than about 30 or so, believe that MLK was the victim of a government conspiracy. And many believe that his anti-war activities were the last straw.
In fact, black folks are some of the most conspiratorially-minded Americans out there.
Why?
Because any halfway aware African-American understands that America has a long and sordid history of conspiring against the aspirations and hopes of black folks.
Americans get all weirded out when anyone talks about "conspiracy", as though it is an exotic creature that requires some sort of Rube Goldberg-like scheme in order to happen.
Nonsense.
Prosecutors routinely file conspiracy charges, whenever more than one perpetrator is involved in a crime, because a conspiracy is merely an agreement between more than one person to do something criminal. (I don't have the time to go to my Black's Law Dictionary so that rough definition will have to do.)
Most black folks know about the documented history of conspiracies by the government, against black folks.
When black folks were the victims of domestic terrorism by the KKK and other groups of that ilk, government officials conspired with those groups to make certain that they could continue their terrorism. Law enforcement officials and elected politicians all were, as has been proven, active participants in those conspiracies. Prominent Americans like Jack Johnson and Paul Robeson and Marcus Garvey were conspired against and persecuted by government officials. The establishment and maintenance of the entire Jim Crow system involved conspiracies by individuals at the highest levels of governments in this country - state, local and federal - to make certain that the laws of this country did not protect the constitutional rights of black Americans. And this went on for almost a century!
When black folks whispered about the Tuskegee experiments with syphilis, the general public said they were crazy. It was only after decades that the government admitted that they had indeed conspired to allow black men to be used as human guinea pigs so they could study the effects of that horrible disease.
The examples go on and on and on.
So why should the African-American community believe government protestations that they were not involved in a conspiracy against MLK when all of the evidence points to a conspiracy? I will not get into the details here, but I will argue that anyone who actually studies the facts has to come to the conclusion that there had to be some type of conspiracy for the murder to happen. If James Earl Ray did in fact shoot King, he certainly had help - as he has always stated - and if he had help, by definition, there was a conspiracy. The question then becomes whether the government may have been involved.
And when one considers the historical record - the fact that J. Edgar Hoover pointedly wanted to get rid of King, and had taken documented steps to destroy him - then its just a short walk over to the side of the conspiratorially-minded.
"Yep, by this standard Gerald Ford was clearly the most dangerous threat to the American Establishment, since they tried to shoot him *twice* while Reagan and Wallace were only worth a single assassination attempt..."
But he survived! Tells me this was a set-up deal designed to avert suspicion from Ford, the master architect. He was a member of the Warren Commission, you know.
"Yep, by this standard Gerald Ford was clearly the most dangerous threat to the American Establishment, since they tried to shoot him *twice* while Reagan and Wallace were only worth a single assassination attempt..."
But he survived! Tells me this was a set-up deal designed to avert suspicion from Ford, the master architect of it all. He was a member of the Warren Commission, you know.
See also the X Files episode "Musings of a Cigarette Smoking Man" for a fictional re-enactment of this theory...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Musings_of_a_Cigarette_Smoking_Man
There's also the idea that it was about poverty, not even Vietnam. RFK and MLK were BOTH killed for this reason, quite possibly. Though who exactly did it is the open question. A conspiracy of business interests? Country-club Republicans? Not really their style.
Black people do seem more prone to believe wacky conspiracy theories than most of us because they've been victims of more wacky conspiracies than most of us.
Law and Order had a great scene where McCoy is talking to a black civil rights leader in New York, an analogue of Louis Farrakhan, who refuses to believe that one of his own bodyguards was responsible, believing instead that there was a conspiracy among the white elites in New York to kill him. McCoy says that's crazy. He replies:
"Ten years ago, if you'd told me that the CIA would sell crack to black children in the inner cities of America to finance a war in Nicaragua, I'd have said you were crazy."
Cigarette Smoking Man of the X-files killed him over Vietnam, he actually admired King on race issues.
Wait, do people seriously believe Robert Kennedy was anti-establishment? The same Robert Kennedy that worked for Joe McCarthy in the 50's? The same RFK that was attorney general while Hoover was spying on MLK? Robert Kennedy didn't become the anti-war candidate until after Eugene McCarthy challenged Johnson in New Hampshire.
A NYT reporter went into South Carolina beauty parlors a little while back, wondering why so many blacks were backing Hillary over Obama. One common thread: Obama would just get shot.
Of course, things have changed--Oprah is bulletproof.
mad6798j,
you obviously don't have a lot of contact with black folks.
if you did, you'd know that one of the iconic images in the '70's was an image reproduced on everything from canvas to black velvet of MLK flanked by JFK and RFK. A very large percentage of homes in the black community had a version of this image.
why were JFK and RFK revered so by black folks?
because they were the first governmental officials, with power, who put their butts and their lives on the line for the rights of black folks.
when bobby kennedy and his brother sent federal marshals into the south to make certain that black protesters would be protected, you are darn straight that was anti-establishment.
when he traveled to south africa and talked about the dismantling of the apartheid system, you are darn straight that was anti-establishment.
when he talked, from his heart, about the devastating impact of racism and poverty in this country, yes, that was anti-establishment.
the bobby kennedy who was a mccarthy henchman in the '50's was not the bobby kennedy who was murdered in 1968.
because he was a thinking, growing human being, he evolved in a very positive way.
that certainly had a lot to do with why he was murdered.
I'm sorry, but am I the only one who thinks Yglesias' post and most of these comments are crazy? Conspiracy theories are all well and good if you have compelling evidence beyond "hey, MLK opposed Vietnam!" So did millions of other prominent public figures.
All these conspiracy theories, while superficially about distrust of the government, are really ways to make us feel good when a killing like this occurs. We simply can't believe that a pathetic creature like James Earl Ray either represents us or would be able to alter history, so we look to more sinister, outside forces to reassure of of the inherent good of the regular Joe. Unfortunately, Ray, Sirhan Sirhan and Oswald present stark evidence against that argument. A conspiracy theory is just a way to mask one very ugly truth: Democracy gives anyone the opportunity to become an assassin.
The problem with these consipriacy theories is that they are never broken, the "truth" neverr comes out. Not in JFK, RFK, MLK. The odds are--judging by all the other failed cover ups and governmental snitching--that at least one of these conspiricies would fall apart and the truth would be revealed. But no. Instead we have three monumental, perfect crimes.
Occam's toothbrush, my friend, Occam's toothbrush.
Yes, rubbing out John Lennon was critical for the establishment.
Seriously, however, an organization which has people who behaved as they did in the Whitey Bolger conspiracy is certainly capable of having people who would assasinate MLK. The best argument that the FBI did not participate is that Ray lived, and that the assasination did not occur earlier.
I actually heard a pretty good case made for the mob killing JFK. It went something like this. Kennedy patriarch makes money in bootlegging and so has mob ties. Chicago mob steals chicago and thus illinois for JFK. JFK shares girlfriend with Sam Giaccano (sp?). Kennedy brother declare war on mob. Oswald kills JKF, Ruby kills Oswald preventing him from talking. Ruby mob guy. Simple. Elegant.
what tickles me is that most of those who argue against conspiracies in, say, the jfk murder, know very little about the crime itself.
they simply repeat bromides about how people want complex answers to simple questions because of some sort of emotional need.
how many actually realize that the official government position in jfk's murder is that a conspiracy did most likely in fact occur? the last official inquiry, by congress, came to that conclusion. despite the fact that the investigation itself was much less than what it could have been. but the evidence was too overwhelming to deny, so they had no choice but to acknowledge the fact of a conspiracy.
the real argument is about the who and why.
only idiots who don't want to do the hard work of studying the facts still believe the warren commission.
and i say that in all awareness of the harshness of that statement.
the real evidence is that the simpleminded find it difficult to contemplate the reality that reality is a bit more complex than they wish to acknowledge.
Nonsense!
Everyone knows that Ngo Dinh Diem's clan had JFK assassinated in retaliation for his role in Diem's own murder.
Hm. I didn't interpret Matt's inquiry the way previous commenters did.
The question, it seemed to me, was "hey, anyone else have anecdotal evidence that the MLK assassination conspiracy theory is actually widely held by black people?"
The question is not whether the theory exists or whether it's true. The question isn't whether the black community has good reasons to be paranoid. There's this notion that conspiracy theories are popular in the black community. But is this still true, and is it still true about "old" events like Martin Luther King getting shot, or are the popular conspiracy theories about more current events, like the CIA funding the Nicaraguan contras with crack distribution, or maybe about something that happened this decade? For example, how widespread are the rumors of a conspiracy to bring down Michael Vick, briefly alluded to in this article?
In answer to the question I perceive, I don't have any anecdotes. Conspiracy theories haven't come up lately in my conversations with anybody, of any race.
Frankie D, you have two explanations for the Warren Commission's deficiencies. One is Robert Kennedy's interference in the evidence-gathering to protect his brother's name, which hindered the commission's work and led to ambiguous assertions in the final report. The other is a vast conspiracy. One of these explanations is well-reported via documents and interviews with participants. One isn't.
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. But every conspiracy theory rests on the assumption that the evidence was suppressed. It makes it convenient for those who believe the conspiracy, because they will never in their minds be proven wrong. I prefer to take the Occam's Razor approach and say the evidence doesn't exist because the conspiracy idea is lunacy.
brian,
where have i argued this:
"Frankie D, you have two explanations for the Warren Commission's deficiencies. One is Robert Kennedy's interference in the evidence-gathering to protect his brother's name, which hindered the commission's work and led to ambiguous assertions in the final report."?
i have never stated anything of the sort, nor do i believe that it is true.
and the documented truth is that intelligence agencies DID withhold crucial evidence from the warren commission. this has been acknowledged. hence, you have a documented conspiracy to withhold crucial evidence, in order to skew the outcome of an official investigation.
again, this has been admitted to.
and how is this for insanity?
jfk fires allen dulles, the head of the cia,who leaves in anger and disrepute after a number of intelligence failures. then, that person, allen dulles, gets appointed to the commission that investigates jfk's murder, as the liaison to the intelligence agencies. the agencies that would have incriminating evidence of a conspiracy.
and then we find out that those agencies did indeed withhold evidence.
who's insane? the person who ignores those facts, or the person who acknowledges them and attempts to reconcile them?
Actually, King is the one person in that group where I really do suspect there is some kind of, er, conspiracy. Ray was following King for quite a while, staying in hotels and traveling extensively. That requires more cash than it seems Ray would've had on hand, so it was probably coming from... somewhere.
ray has consistently stated that he received assistance.
he has acknowledged that he had assistance from a person he identified as "raul".
again, if ray shot king, it is clear that he had help - money, travel documents, logistical planning, etc- from someplace.
as ray himself has acknowledged.
Frankie d,
Have you read Vincent Bugliosi's Reclaiming History? I'd be curious to hear your take on it.
I agree with VB that Ozwald is the lone gunman, but his motive is what doesn't fit for me. Was he really a Marxist? If Allen Dulles hid anything it was Ozwald's motives.
RFK seems to be pure tragedy, a victim of palestinian rage. MLK, well I haven't read enough on that, but when Hover is you enemy...
Yes, I'm no certainly expert, but I'm with "Fuzzy Bastard" on this point. However, I'm still pretty skeptical that the likely "conspiracy" extended into the upper reaches of the U.S. government.
Clearly, there were a LOT of people, especially in a particular geographical region of the country, who really didn't like King or his activities...
Frankied, my not believing RFK was a saintly anti-authority figure has nothing to do with my "contact with black folks." I never made any claims regarding what black folks think or thought about RFK at all. I simply stated that he was not an anti-establishment figure.
But since you brought it up, Kennedy was not the first establishment figure to make gestures towards protection for african americans. JFK sent troops in to protect protesters? Eisenhower sent troops in to protect black school children. Kennedy spoke out against apartheid systems? Truman desegregated the military. Would you claim that Eisenhower or Truman were anti-establishment? Of course not. Get over your cult of the Kennedies.
To be clear, I'm not saying Kennedy wasn't sympathetic and supportive of minorities, or that they weren't appreciative of his efforts, I'm just saying he wasn't anti-establishment in any way.
Bugliosi has spent the last 20 years or so trying to rewrite history by ignoring crucial facts.
I've not read his book, but I've seen him on TV and he always simply argues as a lawyer presenting his brief. He does not answer and deal with inconvenient facts that contradict his argument.
He's a marvelous attorney. Not so good at investigating and presenting a full array of facts.
I tried criminal cases for 12 years. One of the things you realized was that determining how crimes have occurred is fascinating. Facts do fit together, if you have all of the facts and you have the time to put them together. It really is like putting a puzzle together.
When facts do not fit together, there is a reason. Either someone is being dishonest or certain facts are missing.
The idea that somehow, someway there are these strange, amorphous facts that just float out there without explanation, and we'll never be able to make sense of them...well, that is just BS.
Facts will tell you the truth of what has in fact occurred. If you have all of the facts.
If you look at the facts, RFK's murder makes no sense, if you try to make Sirhan Sirhan the only shooter. The forensic evidence that shows powder burns on RFK's skin, indicating a shot from within inches or so, when no one, NO ONE places Sirhan anywhere close to that distance. The number of bullet holes in the kitchen...The testimony from the rent-a-cop that he had in fact pulled his gun when he was right behind RFK, right where a coup de grace could have come from.... All of those facts have never been accounted for. And they make a helluva lot more sense than the idea that Sirhan shot RFK as described by the powers that be.
I always say that I do not know who killed JFK or RFK or MLK. I've just never been able to figure it out because of the paucity of evidence.
But I do know that the official explanations in each case do not make sense. I know those explanations are not true.
"Aids is killing the entire African Nation
And a vaccine is still supposedly under preparation
Well these governments, they don't mind their procrastination
They say we'll kill them off, take their land, and go there for vacation"
Didn't the FBI try to blackmail MLK into killing himself with evidence of his extra-marital affairs?
http://www.colorado.edu/AmStudies/lewis/2010/king.htm#FBI
So, Hoover was spying on King, trying to discredit him and trying to get him to kill himself. But that he would be complicit in his assassination? Perish the thought!
A lot of the assassination doesn't add up - what that means in terms of who did it, who knows? Considering that it happened at a time of frequent and improbably explained political assassinations, I wouldn't dismiss a larger conspiracy out of hand.
while the actions of truman and eisenhower were commendable, they were very different in character, from what jfk and rfk did.
it was not a coincidence that no major civil rights legislation emerged during truman's or eisenhower's administration. what they did were half-measures, at best. in fact, if there had ever been a time when desegregation should have been attacked, across the country, it was after WWII. but truman chickened out and only dealt with the military.
when the kennedys took their actions in the early '60's, they helped to push forward the civil rights movement that ultimately led LBJ to push for and sign his landmark bills. jfk put the muscle of the feds on the side of justice for black folks.
he was not perfect, by any means. and he was certainly still a politician. but black folks understood that a change had happened and that things were starting to happen that would have the impact of an earthquake.
this is historical fact. this is not my opinion. that is what happened.
again, why do you think black folks hold the kennedy brothers in such high esteem?
because they understand, clearly, the import of their actions.
conversely, black folks are very ambivalent about both eisenhower and truman because both presidents deserved that kind of lukewarm support.
to be for integration and equality for african-americans in the '60's was to be anti-establishment. deciding to back integration may not seem like such a big deal now, but back then, one was definitely working against the establishment if one did so.
the "establishment" was heavily invested in america's racist, segregated society.
eisenhower's milquetoast posture in this regard is best illustrated by his reaction to brown v bd of education. instead of using that supreme court case to move the us in a direction that valued integration, eisenhower basically ignored it. he did as little as he possibly could, and only intervened in little rock because he was forced to do so.
he'd taken very, very little action to make certain that his country had moved in a direction that was consistent with the principles of brown.
that is a huge reason that black folks are so ambivalent about him.
What makes the JFK killing so convoluted, with Oswald having had contact with so many potential conspiracies, is that Lee Harvey Oswald hungered to be part of a conspiracy, ideally a leftist one, but he was open so long as his name wound up in the history books. Typically, his potential co-conspirators, such as the KGB, his hosts in the Soviet Union for a couple of years, would realize sooner or later that he was a dangerous wacko and cut him off, fearing, rightly, that he would involve them in some nightmare for which they could be blamed.
One recurrent paranoid fantasy entertained by many blacks is that a famous fashion designer, such as Gloria Vanderbilt and Calvin Klein in the 1980s or Liz Claiborne and Tommy Hilfiger more recently, went on a famous TV talk show and announced "I hate blacks."
http://www.snopes.com/racial/business/hilfiger.asp
I was always puzzled by this, until I read the simple explanation of how these rumors start. A group of black girls are shopping for fun, and one tries on something by the currently hot designer. Her friends tell her it looks good on her and she should buy it. But, she knows she can't afford it, but she doesn't want to admit that to her friends, so she says, "Oh, I'd never buy anything from this designer. He/She is racist. I saw him/her on Oprah saying "I hate blacks." And it spreads from there.
There was always far more evidence that the FBI and/or CIA were actively involved in bringing down the Nixon Administration via Watergate (confirmed recently by the admission that J. Edgar Hoover loyalist Mark Felt was Deep Throat) than that either were involved in the JFK assassination. But, few in the media really cared because Nixon's resignation was the happy ending, so it was better not to inquire too deeply into the exact mechanics of the power struggle for fear it would tarnish the glow.
The MLK murder was clearly the work of a conspiracy, but conspiracies often turn out to be a lot more petty and boring than Oliver Stone, or many of Matt's readers, imagines. The most plausible explanation I've heard is that a racist doctor in the St. Louis area put out the word that he'd pay for a hit on MLK, and that the story circulated within prisons and other criminal circles until James Earl Ray took him up on it.
at least steve sailer gets one thing right: that MLK was killed by part of a conspiracy.
everything else is the typical half-truth, intended to confuse, rather than shed light, on an issue.
oswald was clearly working as a government agent when he made his trek to the soviet union, immediately after supposedly leaving the us military.
how did he get to the soviet union?
when he supposedly got tired of life in the soviet union, how did he return to the united states, with so little trouble? after supposedly defecting? and with a russian wife, who had relatives in the soviet intelligence services? with all of that, and just after the gary powers incident and the kruschev/kennedy confrontation, right at the height of the cold war, oswald just waltzes back to the us, with nary an eyebrow raised?
pleease...
there is even evidence that oswald received financial assistance from the government, in returning to the states, from the soviet union.
the whole oswald-as-communist-sympathizer is exactly what it appears to have always been: a fairly transparent attempt to draw attention away from his true relationship with united states inteligence services.
Re: you can add in JFK, too if you want.
Um, JFK got us deeper into Vietnam, and there is no evidence )other than Oliver Stone's fever dreams) that he would have conducted the war in any significantly different manner than Johnson had he served until 1968.
Re: Matt apparently doesn't realize that a fairly large chunk of us think RFK and MLK were murdered by the powers that be.
I can kinda understand some of the conspiracy stuff about JFK (though I think it's still looney), but with regard to RFK's murder, there's overwhelming evidence for Sirhan Sirhan (who is still alive I believe) being the assasin, and acting from outrage over Kennedy's pro-Israel stance.
Re: As someone else said, it's kind of suspicious that the only people who got assassinated were anti-establishment.
Um, JFK? He was president for crying out loud! You can't get any more Establishment than that! And for that matter his brother was a senator and had been Attorney General: that's inner Circle Establishment too! Of the three main 60s assassinations, the only one I think *might* involve a larger conspiracy was King's.
If James Earl Ray did in fact shoot King, he certainly had help - as he has always stated - and if he had help, by definition, there was a conspiracy. The question then becomes whether the government may have been involved.
This comment thread is, by definition, a conspiracy.
And the only question is whether the govermment is involved.
Of course the government is involved. We are everywhere. We know everything. Even that you, southpaw, aren't really left-handed.
whenever i read threads on this page - and others - i'm reminded of how poor our educational system is in this country.
and how little most younger americans know about the history of this country.
i say that because posters like JonF obviously do not have a clue about one of the most tumultuous and important periods in this country's history, the 1960's. if he did he would not simply state, without qualification, that because JFK was a president and RFK a senator, then they automatically had to be part of the "establishment". while it is certainly true that they occupied traditional positions of power, the fact that they had decided to pursue certain political and social paths, put them squarely outside of the mainstream, or the "establishment".
a little history lesson: since the civil war, the political establishment, from the courts to the congress to executive branch had worked very hard to maintain a legalized system of apartheid in this country. the supreme court, in its brown decision, first started to move away from this establishment position, but the fact that eisenhower essentially ignored brown was clear evidence that the establishment had no intention of moving away from the firmly entrenched establishment position.
(earl warren, as chief justice, should have been the ultimate "establishment" figure, but he was reviled then, as he is now, as a radical renegade, largely because of the brown decision, and other decisions that began to dismantle the apartheid system in this country.)
so when JFK and RFK, in responding to events that were swirling and exploding around them, signaled that they were going to move this country away from this apartheid system - which, again, had been in place for almost a century - you cannot imagine the hate and vitriol. to most people in authority, what kennedy began doing as president, and what RFK talked about doing as a presidential candidate, was extremely radical and certainly not indicative of someone who was invested in maintaining the establishment.
of course, neither JFK nor RFK was jerry rubin or abbie hoffman or huey newton or malcolm x, but what they did, regarding civil rights, was so outside the mainstream, so counter to what the "establishment" had protected for so long, it is not inaccurate to define both as being somewhat anti-establishment figures.
Re: the fact that they had decided to pursue certain political and social paths, put them squarely outside of the mainstream, or the "establishment".
In what possible sense were JFK's policies "out side the mainsteam"? I know a good deal about the 60s and I can make a solid case that LBJ was more "outside the mainstream" than Kennedy was. No one took a pot-shot at him despite his embrace of civil rights and the Great Society. Kennedy was a diletante with some fairly dangerous ideas on foreign policy.
Often forgotten here is the fact that in the 50s and early 60s the Democrats (and liberals in general) were the war party. Eisenhower had gotten elected by promising to get us out of Korea. Kennedy ran against Nixon on a fictitious "missile gap", authorized the disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion and several plots against Castro, and got us into Vietnam in a big way which included an assasination of the country's president. The GOP back then, and the conservative movement in general, was still struggling to rid itself of isolationism and the America First attitude. The Democrats did not embrace the Peace Movement until 1972 (remember, Humphrey did not repudiate Vietnam).
Too many people fell in love with a ridiculous myth when it comes to the Kennedys. And then they invent fake history to try to paper over the inconsistencies. You might be able to create a credible theory that some foreign entities (Castro or the Diems), or perhaps the Mafia, plotted Kennedy's death no one in the "estbalishment" had any motive to do so. Kennedy was their boy.
Re: so when JFK and RFK, in responding to events that were swirling and exploding around them, signaled that they were going to move this country away from this apartheid system - which, again, had been in place for almost a century - you cannot imagine the hate and vitriol.
Yep, there were an awful lot of bare-knuckled, rock-ribbed racists in the country, no argument there. But JFK dragged his feet on civil rights. Eisenhower meanwhile sent troops to enforce desegregation and LBJ pushed the civil rights agenda vigorously. How was Kennedy more a threat to racism than either his predecessor or successor?
All I know is that an NRA Master was unable to reproduce Oswald's shots using that rifle.
All I know is that RFK had close range powder burns toward his rear from a shooter some six feet or more away to his front.
All I know is that MLK was (allegedly) moved on the advice of Jesse Jackson from an inner room to a room with a balcony perfect for a sniper.
And Reagan was shot beautifully under the arm just where the vest didn't protect him, by a guy who supposedly bought a frickin' .22 to do an assassination, and Judy Woodruff heard shots from a Secret Service overwatch position above her (later recanting when she remembered how many news people died mysteriously after the JFK hit), and George Bush Sr was Vice-President (and his nephew had dinner with the assassins family before the hit, and the alleged assassin visited his home town at one point.)
Yeah, all coincidence. I'll buy that for a dollar.
WHY any of these hits were made may be a mystery, but there is little doubt that NONE of these were done by the people arrested for it.
Not to mention that in the Lincolm assassination, all roads out of Washington were blocked except one by order of the Secretary of the Treasury - and Booth went straight for that road. And when Booth's diary was recovered, it was seized by said Treasury Secretary and returned with missing pages.
This is how politics is conducted everywhere and every when, including the United States.
again, people like JonF know little about the '60's other than what they might read after doing a quick search on google.
now, i'm a google fan and i would not denigrate - totally - info gathered online, but often one gets a very distorted, incomplete view of history by relying on wikipedia and its ilk.
as i emphasized, and as you cursorily and grudgingly acknowledged, kenedy pissed off a lot of hardcore racists when he took certain actions in the civil rights arena.
memo to JonF: those hardcore racist were the establishment, and had been the establishment for all of this country's history! first, slavery and then the jim crow system of segregation had been one of the cornerstones of this country's history from its inception. when those establishment figures saw that kennedy was really serious about that civil rights stuff, well they were really, really pissed.
when the protests - led by poeple like MLK - in the south started escalating, kennedy had a choice. he could have essentially turned his back on the movement and let local officials crush it. or he could let local officials know that, contrary to what had been going on for the last century, he was going to use, literally, the muscle, and authority of the federal government to provide some small semblance of protection and assistance to people like MLK. (one of the best book on this issue is David Talbot's "Brothers: A Hidden History of the kennedy Years") He decided to come down on the right side of history and he decided to do what he could, as president, to provide protection to and assistance to the civil rights movement.
he was not only going to give a nice, little speech on it, as ike did, but he actually was going to pass LAWS that helped to desegregate this country in compliance with brown v board of education and our constitution!
talk about pissing off the racist establishment!
in fact, the Civil Rights Bill of 1964, that LBJ eventually passed and got credit for, was kennedy's bill: he conceived it, wrote it and introduced it. it essentially codified certain constitutional protections that had been ignored.
LBJ rightfully got credit for getting the bill passed, but the FACT is that LBJ merely moved JFK's legislation forward.
i was a kid during that period in history. i remember watching the evening news and seeing water hoses punishing black marchers. i remember seeing snarling dogs attacking defenseless black folks. i remember traveling with my family down to my dad's hometown, Montgomery, Alabama and not understanding why we had to wait until we reached our destination before we could use the restroom. i remember eating cold chicken out of a paper bag in the car because we couldn't stop, after we got south of ohio.
all of that started to change because of the choices and decisions that JFK, with input and advice from his brother, made. kennedy's civil rights bill, passed by LBJ, outlawed segregation in public places, for the first time in history.
that is not myth. the historical record is there for anyone to look at.
on the other hand, eisenhower is rightfully regarded as someone who punted on issues related to civil rights.
when brown v bd of education was decided in 1954, ike basically did nothing. the court had decided that seperate but equal facilities were not consistent with the constitution, but did ike do anything about it? sadly no.
does he deserve credit for what he did in little rock, by sending in the feds? sure, but even that action was forced on him, and it is remarkable because of its isolated nature. he also deserves a tiny bit of credit for a weak-as-cold-tea "civil rights" bill that was passed during his term, but that bill is remarkable for its impotence. it does very little and is primarily a token gesture. what else did ike do?
LBJ deserves all the credit he gets. no doubt about that. but the fact remains that he was building upon a foundation that JFK put down. again, the '64 civil rights act was literally kennedy's bill, introduced shortly before his death. LBJ took what kennedy hoped to do
and made it a reality.
and yes, kennedy was a cold warrior, at least on the campaign trail and in the first part of his term. but, again, facts are stubborn things and the fact is that he inherited almost all of the little problems you note. the bay of pigs was an operation planned in the previous administration. he did sign off on it, and he has to answer for that decision. we were already in vietnam when he came into office and he did slightly increase the number of "advisers" we had in vietnam. but, again, the fact is that our involvement escalated only when LBJ took office.
the fact is that we went from around 15,000 advisers to over 100,000 and then to 500,000 troops under LBJ. the gulf of tonkin happened and all of a sudden we were knee-deep in the big muddy.
if he lives, does kennedy escalate as LBJ did? we can only conjecture, but the fact is that he did not. while one can fault JFK for putting those advisers in and letting the CIA meddle in vietnam's affairs, the facts are that he inherited the problem, wrestled with the problem for a few years, raised the intensity slightly and then was gone. the best set of decisions? no. the groundwork for the utter disaster that followed because of LBJ's decisions? its ridiculous to even begin to argue that point. it makes no sense.
i go back to the point i made previously. why do you think the kennedy brothers were so revered in the black community? do you think that someone just decided to print a bunch of posters with king and the kennedy's and discount them to convenience stores in the city? how come ike is not regarded with the same sort of affection?
the answer is simple and it has nothing to do with any "myth" created by the media.
(black folks are fairly impervious to this type of mythmaking. generally, we do not buy into the BS that the media attempts to foist on the general public. we know better because of our history.)
no, black folks understood that what happened in the '60's happened because of the kennedy's. without their courage, LBJ does not do what he did and its very possible that we'd still be struggling with the kind of issues that dominated after brown.
(i think this is very possible. all you have to do is look at the assault on voting rights that has occurred in this administration to see how an unfriendly executive office can retard progress.)
was kennedy a saint and a perfect president?
hardly.
was he someone who had created bitter enemies in the "establishment" circles of this country? was he someone who might inspire certain powerful people, inside and outside of the government, to get rid of him?
you acknowledge that the mafia may have tried to get rid of him.
again, do a bit of research.
the government, the "establishment" had longstanding contacts with and relationships with organized crime. organized crime assisted the government with intelligence in world was 2. our cuban policy had largely been driven by our relationship with organized crime, which viewed the island as their cash register and playground. the CIA acknowledged that it conspired with the mafia on several assassination attempts on fidel castro in the '60'a and '70's. CIA officials were often best buddies with their organized crime contacts. j.edgar hoover long denied the very existence of the mafia, because, as many believe, he was in bed with organized crime, using them when he could for whatever purpose he wished. there are pics of j. edgar in the company of top-level mafia figures in the ;40's and '50's. (in later years, he became much more discreet about the company he kept after the mafia's existence became an accepted fact.)
the mafia had long been plugged into the "establishment" and had long had a major impact on many of the country's policy decisions. to say that the "mafia" may have done a certain action and then argue that "establishment" figures could not have been involved makes no sense. often, they were in the same bed. they may have been the same people.
the CIA hated kennedy. he didnt trust them. they did not trust him. they felt he'd betrayed the agency in the bay of pigs. he felt they'd tried to manipulate him. he'd fired allen dulles, on of the founding fathers of the agency. he'd threatened to dismantle the agency.
the mafia hated the kennedys. for the first time, the feds were starting to go after the mob. they were prosecuting its members. RFK had even deported carlos marcello, the head of the mob in the south. JFK was dragging his feet on doing away with castro and every year they werent in cuba was another year of lost revenues from the casinos and whorehouses and tourist traps.
only a fool would deny that the bitterness shared by such compadres was a reality and that it could have been turned on JFK. again, the historical record is there for anyone to review.
and its very likely that his assassination is proof of that hatred.
like the CIA funding the Nicaraguan contras with crack distribution, ...
That ones a bit beyond theory at this point...
The big question is, why are white people willing to call things like this a 'conspiracy theory' long after it's been revealed as true?
Comments closed December 27, 2007.
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Heads in the Sand
It wasn't just MLK: think of all the leaders of the anti-war movement who were assassinated: MLK, Bobby Kennedy, John Lennon,...and you can add in JFK, too if you want.
At some point it should be obvious that being openly anti-war is a hazardous occupation.
The "lone gunman" hypothesis has always seemed a bit ridiculous, esp. when so many of these people showed up and always shot at anti-establishment figures.
(And FWIW, the X-Files spin-off "The Lone Gunmen" featured an episode early in 2001 in which the military establishment tried to hit the World Trade Center with an airplane.)
Posted by Whispers | December 13, 2007 10:55 AM