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23 Nov 11 - 01:05 PM (#3262156) Subject: BS: President Kennedy assassinated From: kendall On this date in history, President Kennedy was killed in Dallas Texas. |
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23 Nov 11 - 01:09 PM (#3262161) Subject: RE: BS: President Kennedy assassinated From: Bobert And the rich people popped the corks in the safety of their mansions... B~ |
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23 Nov 11 - 01:21 PM (#3262171) Subject: RE: BS: President Kennedy assassinated From: GUEST,BigDaddy And every year on this date (and other times as well), I reflect on what might have been. This was a blow that staggered our country, and when RFK was murdered in 1968 we were knocked flat. I fear we may never fully recover. Our best hope right now is President Obama, IMHO, and when I see how he is reviled by the same sort that hated the Kennedys, it scares the hell out of me. |
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23 Nov 11 - 01:26 PM (#3262175) Subject: RE: BS: President Kennedy assassinated From: BTNG Ya know, I still don't remember where I was, when it happened, people keep asking if I do remember. |
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23 Nov 11 - 01:28 PM (#3262177) Subject: RE: BS: President Kennedy assassinated From: Jeri I'm sure this was meant for yesterday, Nov 22nd. |
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23 Nov 11 - 01:31 PM (#3262180) Subject: RE: BS: President Kennedy assassinated From: gnu He got it mixed up with Mum's Bday... both important dates in history. >;-) |
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23 Nov 11 - 02:16 PM (#3262219) Subject: RE: BS: President Kennedy assassinated From: BTNG totally irrelevant, but today is the 48th anniversary of the first episode showing of the British TV series Doctor Who. (23 November 1963) |
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23 Nov 11 - 03:01 PM (#3262251) Subject: RE: BS: President Kennedy assassinated From: VirginiaTam I don't remember where I was when he was assassinated, but I remember the television coverage of a state funeral when I was about 5 years old. What I remember most was US flag draped over coffin and my mamma weeping inconsolably which upset me more than anything ever had or did in my early childhood. My Daddy was serving in Korea at the time and I remember wishing he was home. |
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23 Nov 11 - 03:23 PM (#3262256) Subject: RE: BS: President Kennedy assassinated From: Beer Home room teacher had been called away to the office. when he returned he was well in tears. Then he made the announcement. This was in Nova Scotia. He wasn't our President but we felt as if he was. Adrien |
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23 Nov 11 - 03:28 PM (#3262260) Subject: RE: BS: President Kennedy assassinated From: gnu VT... the flag... and the horses... and people crying. They cried for good reason, as has been alluded to in earlier posts. Fortunately, the good people of the USA have moved steadily onward. I hope it continues, however toooo slowly it may seem at times. |
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23 Nov 11 - 03:33 PM (#3262264) Subject: RE: BS: President Kennedy assassinated From: GUEST,999 I was doing a school exam but had finished before my classmates and Miss van Reet came over and whispered that President Kennedy had been shot. She had some tears in her eyes and she brought a kleenex for me, too. When the test was over about 15 minutes later she told the class and EVERYbody was in tears. |
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23 Nov 11 - 05:43 PM (#3262332) Subject: RE: BS: President Kennedy assassinated From: Little Hawk I was at school when the news got announced, and I think I was in the cafeteria at the time. The thing that most shocked me about it was that the majority of the students around me didn't seem to care all that much. Some of the teachers and staff were certainly upset about it. The thing is, I was in rural upstate New York at the time, an intensely conservative area, and most people around there hated John Kennedy. I think many of them were secretly pleased that he was dead, but they weren't going to say it out loud. The ensuing days of mourning were traumatic for the whole nation, in fact the whole world, and will never be forgotten by those who lived through them...but the USA was sharply divided. Many loved John Kennedy. Many hated him and wished him dead. I will not forget the coldness of many of the Republicans in that town on that day and in the ensuing days. It was the beginning of a very disturbing trend in American politics, a secret war in my opinion, and it's still happening today. |
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23 Nov 11 - 06:05 PM (#3262340) Subject: RE: BS: President Kennedy assassinated From: Jeri They let us out early, but I don't think they told us why. I stopped at the corner store, and I think somebody told me there. I remember thinking about it all the way home, and my house was about a half mile away. I knew it was something big that happened, but it didn't sink in until later. I remember when I went to bed, I had what must have been a half hour emotional talk with God about being good to him. |
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23 Nov 11 - 06:18 PM (#3262344) Subject: RE: BS: President Kennedy assassinated From: Bobert I remember that day well...Mr. Cormiae's 5th period US Government class... He was a Kennedy kind of guy... Someone came to the door, asked him to step into the hall, he came back and announced it to the class... The 1960 campaign was my first... I was like 13 years old and my mom was a campaign worker... I also agree with BigDaddy... The assassinations in the 60's killed off the progressive movement and it has not seen daylight since... B~ |
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23 Nov 11 - 06:22 PM (#3262349) Subject: RE: BS: President Kennedy assassinated From: gnomad I was a bit young (9, and in the UK) to have that 'where were you when it happened?' memory, but the day does still stand out. An adult neighbour was visibly upset and asked what I thought about it, but I knew nothing, never mind having an opinion. I don't think my Mum even knew, as she went around to the neighbour when I asked, presumably to find out more. Our normal news source would have been the morning paper next day, there being no TV and almost no radio in our house. In some ways it was to me the beginning of learning that life isn't all roses, I have the impression that I am not alone in that. |
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23 Nov 11 - 06:38 PM (#3262362) Subject: RE: BS: President Kennedy assassinated From: Micca I was a Ordinary Seaman on a ship inbound on The Bristol Channel, I had just taken the wheel for my trick at 9.55 at the start of the 10 to 3 watch when it was announced on the 10 oclock news on the BBC. The mate sent me to tell the skipper and we woke and told the rest of the crew, all the deckhands stayed up at least until the next watch change drinking tea and wandering around aimlessly in shock. |
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23 Nov 11 - 07:16 PM (#3262377) Subject: RE: BS: President Kennedy assassinated From: kendall Jeri is right, one of the problems with being retired is that one day is pretty much like another. I was putting up storm windows with my Father in law when we got the news. I remember just as clearly when President Roosevelt died, my first thought was, There goes our democracy. He, being a democrat and all. |
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23 Nov 11 - 07:17 PM (#3262378) Subject: RE: BS: President Kennedy assassinated From: Jack Campin If it wasn't for the fact the alternative was so much worse, we'd all be celebrating the well-deserved execution of an overprivileged playboy at the head of an imperialist mass murder machine who risked the survival of civilization to maintain American hegemony and started a war that left millions dead. |
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23 Nov 11 - 07:20 PM (#3262379) Subject: RE: BS: President Kennedy assassinated From: gnu It is slightly odd to hear some of the stories... that the death of JFK affected so many people, so far away, so deeply. I understand why but I never knew of the far reaching effects on people "so far away" - on a ship in England late at night? Just seems odd to me. But, I understand. I was six years old and I only understood the shock and the grief. It wasn't until years later I understood what his death really meant to US society as a whole. Until today, I didn't know it meant somewhat the same to those "so far away". |
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23 Nov 11 - 07:21 PM (#3262380) Subject: RE: BS: President Kennedy assassinated From: Janie I was in 7th grade Art class, the last period of the day. The Principal came over the PA to announce the president had been shot and there were unofficial reports that he was dead. As I recall, a little while later they switched the PA to broadcast the news reports and we listened to the official announcement that President Kennedy was dead. It was 2 days before my 12th birthday. Eisenhower and Kennedy were the only two Presidents in my memory. There was God, there was Jesus, and right below them there was the President of the United States. The world turned upside down that day. Not because it was Kennedy, but because it was the President. I'm not sure it has stopped spinning for me since. |
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23 Nov 11 - 07:35 PM (#3262384) Subject: RE: BS: President Kennedy assassinated From: GUEST,999 "If it wasn't for the fact the alternative was so much worse, we'd all be celebrating the well-deserved execution of an overprivileged playboy at the head of an imperialist mass murder machine who risked the survival of civilization to maintain American hegemony and started a war that left millions dead." Mr Campin, thank you. It wasn't the person that got my heart all those years ago in high school, it was the mystique. I happen to agree with you--as I so often do. I would however correct a point of history: the CIA had assured the American president that Russia did not have the 'moxie' to back up the threat. B |
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23 Nov 11 - 07:43 PM (#3262388) Subject: RE: BS: President Kennedy assassinated From: GUEST,999 Another point of history: he certainly enlarged the war, but he didn't start it. (I prob'ly know more about that war than anyone you ever met, no offense.) |
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23 Nov 11 - 08:27 PM (#3262406) Subject: RE: BS: President Kennedy assassinated From: Little Hawk Previous USA administrations worked hand in glove with the French to maintain French colonial rule in Vietnam, but that effort met defeat. The country was partitioned, and the next move the USA made was to make sure that it would not be re-united by abrogating scheduled re-unification and national elections, and installing a corrupt Catholic-Vietnamese puppet government in the southern half, and putting American military advisors in to help that government quash resistance from the Buddhist majority. That happened under the Eisenhower government. So Kennedy did not start that war. He did continue it, and Johnson turned it into a giant American war, and Nixon followed along the same path. It so happens, Jack, that you are quite right about Kennedy being "an overprivileged playboy at the head of an imperialist mass murder machine who risked the survival of civilization to maintain American hegemony". Indeed. However, ANYONE who had become president would have gone on to command that same imperialist mass murder machine. It's the overall system itself that is the problem...just as it was in imperial Rome. To blame it all on the president of the day or the Emperor of the day (in Rome) is to miss the point. He's just temporary. And he is, to a great extent, a front man for huge imperial interests who will destroy him if he doesn't serve them obediently and faithfully. I think Kennedy was the kind of man who had such self-confidence that he thought he could take on certain entrenched powers in the system and beat them. He swore that he would break the CIA, and I think he intended to do just that. I also think that's one of the reasons he died young. There were things I liked about Kennedy, things I don't see in many USA presidents. He had guts and he had style...and the courage of his convictions. He could inspire people. He was also...as you pointed out...a hell of a lot better than the Republican alternative. |
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23 Nov 11 - 08:36 PM (#3262411) Subject: RE: BS: President Kennedy assassinated From: GUEST,999 "to make sure that it would not be re-united by abrogating scheduled re-unification and national elections" The promise of free elections which were disallowed because it was obvious which way the elections were gonna go. |
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23 Nov 11 - 08:39 PM (#3262413) Subject: RE: BS: President Kennedy assassinated From: gnu Sorry to seem so lazy, but, were the French in Vietnam for over 200 years? Was the "war" about mining? Mostly phosphorus mines? I apologize for being uneducated about Vietnam and lazy about googling history but it seems some of the posters to this thread may have some "quick" answers in this regard. |
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23 Nov 11 - 08:55 PM (#3262417) Subject: RE: BS: President Kennedy assassinated From: Little Hawk Right on, 999. Ho Chi Minh would have been elected president of ONE united Vietnam if the scheduled elections had been held. The USA made darn sure that never happened, and installed their handpicked dictator, Ngo Dinh Diem, in the South. The determination of both the French and the USA to prevent genuine self-rule in Vietnam caused a 30 year war and cost the lives of tens of millions of Vietnamese. Establishment of the Republic of Vietnam Main article: 1955 State of Vietnam referendum Diệm's appointment came after the French had been defeated at the Battle of Dien Bien Phu and were ready to withdraw from Indochina. At the start of 1955, French Indochina was dissolved, leaving Diệm in temporary control of the south.[11] A referendum was scheduled for October 23, 1955 to determine the future direction of the south. It was contested by Bảo Đại, the Emperor, advocating the restoration of the monarchy, while Diệm ran on a republican platform. The elections were held, with Diệm's brother and confidant Ngô Đình Nhu, the leader of the family's Can Lao Party, which supplied Diệm's electoral base, organising and supervising the elections.[12][13] Campaigning for Bảo Đại was prohibited, and the result was rigged, with Bảo Đại supporters attacked by Nhu's workers. Diệm recorded 98.2% of the vote, including 605,025 votes in Saigon, where only 450,000 voters were registered. Diệm's tally also exceeded the registration numbers in other districts.[12][14] Three days later, Diệm proclaimed the formation of the Republic of Vietnam, naming himself President. Under the 1954 Geneva Accords, Vietnam was to undergo elections in 1956 to reunify the country. Diệm, noting that South Vietnam was not a party to the convention, canceled these. Criticising the Communists, he justified the electoral cancellation by claiming that the 1956 elections would be "meaningful only on the condition that they are absolutely free", despite his numerically impossible tally in the 1955 contest.[15] After coming under pressure from within the country and the United States, Diệm agreed to hold legislative elections in August 1959 for South Vietnam. Newspapers were not allowed to publish names of independent candidates or their policies, and political meetings exceeding five people were prohibited. Candidates were disqualified for petty reasons such as acts of vandalism against campaign posters. In the rural areas, candidates who ran were threatened using charges of conspiracy with the Viet Cong, which carried the death penalty. Phan Quang Dan, the government's most prominent critic, was allowed to run. Despite the deployment of 8,000 ARVN plainclothes troops into his district to vote, Dan still won with a 6–1 ratio. The busing of soldiers occurred across the country, and when the new assembly convened, Dan was arrested. The tale of USA involvement in Vietnam is a tale of international gangsterism on a grand scale. Never has a war been more justly lost than the American War in Vietnam. |
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23 Nov 11 - 09:04 PM (#3262423) Subject: RE: BS: President Kennedy assassinated From: GUEST,999 The earliest French presence was to export tobacco. I am not aware that phosphorus ever entered the deal. The French were as colonializing as were the British, Spanish, Portuguese and Italians. Interesting to note that they all collapsed--almost. Later, it became about rubber. Then when artificials came along, well, that was that. The houses on the hill fell down. |
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23 Nov 11 - 09:10 PM (#3262426) Subject: RE: BS: President Kennedy assassinated From: GUEST,999 LH, we gotta be two of few people here who ever read Regis Debray. (Nothing to do with Vietnam, no offense to those who want none.) |
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23 Nov 11 - 09:10 PM (#3262427) Subject: RE: BS: President Kennedy assassinated From: Little Hawk There's an interesting scene in the extended version of "Apocalypse Now" about some holdout French plantation owners deep in the interior of the country, still defending their little piece of France in Southeast Asia. |
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23 Nov 11 - 10:26 PM (#3262460) Subject: RE: BS: President Kennedy assassinated From: Janie Sheesh, guys. Seeing, interpreting, judging the world and it's people only through the lens of politics and power is a very narrow view. LH, I do not at all question the validity of your perceptions of your community when Kennedy was assassinated. I do suggest your perceptions are not a corner on the market on reality. My own perception was and is that the vast majority of a nation's citizens were shocked and grieved by the assassination of a president, regardless of their political views. Go read some Jung, boys. |
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23 Nov 11 - 10:49 PM (#3262471) Subject: RE: BS: President Kennedy assassinated From: Little Hawk I agree with you, Janie. The vast majority of Americans were very shocked and grieved by Kennedy's assassination. The mere idea of the president...any president...being assassinated was a total shock to everyone in those prosperous and optimistic times. The small town I was living in was mostly hard right Republicans who truly hated Kennedy and the Democrats. They were shocked, all right...but some of them could hardly conceal their satisfaction at his demise. I knew people in that town who thought the Congress and federal government were full of secret Communist agents working for the Kremlin and selling out America. I kid you not. It was "Wingnutville", USA. Upon returning permanently to Canada in 1969 after 10 years living in the vicinity of "Wingnutville", I had tears of relief and joy in my eyes after crossing the Canadian border. I felt like kneeling down and kissing the ground. |
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23 Nov 11 - 10:57 PM (#3262477) Subject: RE: BS: President Kennedy assassinated From: GUEST,999 "Seeing, interpreting, judging the world and it's people only through the lens of politics and power is a very narrow view." How did you see it, Janie? |
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23 Nov 11 - 11:24 PM (#3262486) Subject: RE: BS: President Kennedy assassinated From: EBarnacle If you look at a resource map of SE Asia, you can see a lot of what of the war was about. Getting back to the original subject, I was in a computer class at Drexel then [Institute of Technology] when the shots were fired. When I left class, a friend told that the President had been shot. My reaction was "President Hagerty?!" the rather unpopular president of the school. Incidently, he was a friend of the Kennedy family. When word got around, we all went over to the student center to watch the proceedings. Going to class seemed rather pointless. |
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23 Nov 11 - 11:40 PM (#3262490) Subject: RE: BS: President Kennedy assassinated From: Janie How did I see it, Bruce? At that time in my life? When I reflect on that, I realize I don't see it much differently now from how I saw it then. Frightening. Destructive. Incomprehensible. At age 11, such an act was not not only inconceivable to me, but also unimaginable. The beginnings of loss of innocence, perhaps? |
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23 Nov 11 - 11:43 PM (#3262491) Subject: RE: BS: President Kennedy assassinated From: Janie Er...awkward choice of words. Not much if any difference between inconceivable and unimaginable. |
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23 Nov 11 - 11:55 PM (#3262493) Subject: RE: BS: President Kennedy assassinated From: Janie I don't know if the grief of the nation would have been more or less intense had it been a different president, but I think the assassination of any president at that time would have provoked intense shock and grief throughout the nation. I am sorry (in some measure) to say I don't think that is true any longer. Intense media and the technological ability to scrutinize being what it is these days, it is not possible to hide the very human clay feet of any world or national leader. Which tends to leave those of us in parts of the world with access to information who are willing to think without public representations of archetypes and without heroes. |
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24 Nov 11 - 12:47 AM (#3262500) Subject: RE: BS: President Kennedy assassinated From: Nancy King Jeez, seems like I'm a bit older than most of you -- except Kendall, of course... ;o) I was a senior in college (Colby, in Waterville, Maine) when Kennedy was shot. Had just come back to the dorm after class and lunch. A friend in the dorm told me and my roommate that she'd heard it on the radio and we went to her room and listened to the radio reports all afternoon. That evening everyone gathered in the chapel for an impromptu memorial service. Everyone was terribly shocked. No one was thinking about who or what started the war -- just that this unspeakable thing had happened. I really wanted to go home (Washington DC), but couldn't, because it would have meant missing some classes, and there was a $75 fine for missing the last class before a holiday (Thanksgiving, in this case), and $75 was a lot of money for a student back then. The next day was Saturday, and I regularly babysat for a professor's kids. I remember watching their TV -- people arriving at the White House in the rain -- and the kids whining in the background, "But I wanna watch Roy Rogers!" It seemed to me then, and still does, that that's when America lost her innocence. If THAT could happen, then ANYTHING could happen. And of course, lots more horrible things happened later in the 1960s. Wow -- 50 years next November 22. --Nancy |
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24 Nov 11 - 12:54 AM (#3262501) Subject: RE: BS: President Kennedy assassinated From: Little Hawk Again, I agree. It was a far more innocent and optimistic time than we are in now. Kennedy's death was the loss of innocence for an entire generation. The media are also crueler now than they were back then, in my opinion. They talk openly about stuff now that they would have been ashamed to talk about openly in 1963. Heroes are not as easy to find now, that's for sure...specially in the field of politics. I have some heroes, but they are either long dead...or they are musical performers whose work I greatly admire. |
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24 Nov 11 - 01:26 AM (#3262506) Subject: RE: BS: President Kennedy assassinated From: Janie We all must and probably ought at some point lose our innocence. But there is a developmentally appropriate time for that to happen - a stage in cognitive and moral development when the loss of innocence can yield to thoughtful reflection and thoughtful choices (which is not to say that all thoughtful reflections lead all thoughtful people to the same thoughtful conclusions) that are not, by and large, cynical. So far in this thread we are mostly baby boomers commenting. It occurs to me that it is supremely arrogant of me to speak of an age of innocence. The preceding generations within the memory of most of our cohort here on Mudcat, our mothers and fathers and grandparents, experienced WWI, the Great Depression and WWII, and came away from those experiences determined that the next generation could have the luxury of a time of innocence. |
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24 Nov 11 - 02:55 AM (#3262517) Subject: RE: BS: President Kennedy assassinated From: GUEST,Patsy It did have an effect on me in the UK. I was about almost 8 and until President Kennedy appeared I hadn't the slightest interest at all in politics. In England I suppose we had been used to a lot of 'stuff shirts' like Macmillan or Douglas Hume and all of a sudden there was JFK who's charisma alone was like a breath of fresh air (my first crush). So it did have a devastating effect on me. As far as I remember my family and I had been watching a certain new British long running soap opera and I remember the newsflash that followed. I also remember the footage of Lee Harvey Oswald getting shot and because I didn't understand being young I was so glad that he got his 'just desserts' it might not be entirely true but that was just seeing it through a child's eyes. |
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24 Nov 11 - 07:28 AM (#3262598) Subject: RE: BS: President Kennedy assassinated From: GUEST,kendall He was not a great president; he wasn't even a good president. All he had was charisma. At least he only started one war. |
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24 Nov 11 - 08:25 AM (#3262625) Subject: RE: BS: President Kennedy assassinated From: Will Fly Thank you Kendall. Spot on. |
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24 Nov 11 - 06:11 PM (#3262948) Subject: RE: BS: President Kennedy assassinated From: Stringsinger The best account is Thom Hartmann and Lamar Waldron's book "Ultimate Sacrifice" which tells that Carlos Marcello of the Texas mafia ordered the hit on JFK. This will soon be made into a movie next year. It was this reason that the US offered it's embargo on Cuba which had nothing to do with the assassination. Appaarently LBJ thought that it did unless (for conspiracy theorists) he had something to do with the hit. Oliver Stone got it wrong although it made a pretty good movie. De Caprio will play the guy who gets the skinny from Marcello and Robert de Niro will play Marcello. Apparently, there were two attempts before Dallas. Each time a patsy was set up. Johnny Roselli in Chicago ordered it, Trafficante in Miami ordered it but Marcello succeeded. Oswald was the last patsy and he didn't do it. Waldron and Hartmann did over a ten year period research on this. BTW the CIA was in cohoots with Marcello. |
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24 Nov 11 - 06:15 PM (#3262952) Subject: RE: BS: President Kennedy assassinated From: Greg F. He was not a great president; he wasn't even a good president. Point is, we'll never know. He never had a chance to play it out. |
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24 Nov 11 - 06:16 PM (#3262956) Subject: RE: BS: President Kennedy assassinated From: Stringsinger I visited site, stood on the grassy knoll near the tunnel which was sealed up. No way in hell could Oswald have done it, logistically impossible. The cop on the bridge overlooking the street must have been in on it. Marcello was the missing owner of the Carousel Club that Ruby owned. They were partners. They had to kill Oswald to keep him from blowing the whistle. Both Marcello and Ruby (nee Rubenstein) are gone now. Ruby was related to Harry Ruby of the Detroit Purple Gang. |
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24 Nov 11 - 06:37 PM (#3262967) Subject: RE: BS: President Kennedy assassinated From: Ebbie This last week there was an interesting and fairly convincing documentary on television. They went back to the basics and on to setting up the format from the sixth floor of the building, using laser to establish the means and probability that Oswald was the shooter. It of course is not conclusive evidence that he acted alone. One thing baffles me. Common sense seems to indicate that most people include other people in their motives and plans, but we are asked time and again to accept that there was no conspiracy, that each assassin acted alone. |
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24 Nov 11 - 07:32 PM (#3262997) Subject: RE: BS: President Kennedy assassinated From: BTNG Oh right the old CIA were involved conspiracy, them and The Mafia. At the end of the day, it simply doesn't matter, Kennedy died on 22nd November 1963 and he's still dead now, as are Oswald and Ruby. |
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24 Nov 11 - 07:51 PM (#3263007) Subject: RE: BS: President Kennedy assassinated From: kendall We must know where we were to know where we are, and we must know where we are to know where we are going. Experiment. Get a friend to take you to a strange city blindfolded. Get out of his car and try to figure out how to get home. |
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24 Nov 11 - 08:11 PM (#3263015) Subject: RE: BS: President Kennedy assassinated From: gnu I can do that Kendall. I don't understand the experiment??? |
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24 Nov 11 - 09:53 PM (#3263051) Subject: RE: BS: President Kennedy assassinated From: Beer Neither do I Gnu Kendall, you made a comment a above that got me thinking. This is your quote "He was not a great President; he wasn't even a good President. All he had was charisma". Well, today at 60 plus I agree with you a bit. But go back to 63 for a moment. I don't know how old you were but I was 16 and was still living in a world of hero's. Kennedy was one. He had stood up against the Russians in 62 and we were grateful. I know I was because we were scared shit less that they were going to destroy us. Sure lots of propaganda was involved, but I was not 40, 50 or 60 trying to understand politics. I was out there trying to get laid. Politics was the furthest thing from my mind. So yes, he was my hero as were others. All to be destroyed in adulthood. Point being. I will always consider him a great man because when I reflect back to the age of innocents I still see him as a hero. |
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24 Nov 11 - 10:22 PM (#3263057) Subject: RE: BS: President Kennedy assassinated From: Beer and this is not a pick on Kendall. It is pointing to a time when i (we) believed in hero's. Like Roy Rogers, Zorro, Lone Ranger, Santa Clause and many others. Naive, sure, but is it any different now? |
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24 Nov 11 - 10:23 PM (#3263058) Subject: RE: BS: President Kennedy assassinated From: pdq From a biography of Carlos Marcello: "After becoming president John F. Kennedy appointed his brother, Robert Kennedy, as U.S. Attorney General. The two men worked closely together on a wide variety of issues including the attempt to tackle organized crime. In March 1961, the Attorney General took steps to have Marcello deported to Guatemala (the country Marcello had falsely listed as his birthplace). On 4th April, Marcello was arrested by the authorities and taken forcibly removed to Guatemala. It did not take Marcello long to get back into the United States. Undercover informants reported that Marcello made several threats against John F. Kennedy, at one time uttering the traditional Sicilian death threat curse, "Take the stone from my shoe." In September 1962 he told private investigator Edward Becker that a dog will continue to bite you if you cut off its tail (meaning Attorney General Robert Kennedy.) Whereas if you cut off the dog's head, (meaning President Kennedy) it would cease to cause trouble. Becker reported that Marcello "clearly stated that he was going to arrange to have President Kennedy killed in some way." Marcello told another informant that he would need to take out "insurance" for the assassination by "setting up some nut to take the fall for the job, just like they do in Sicily." |
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24 Nov 11 - 11:34 PM (#3263075) Subject: RE: BS: President Kennedy assassinated From: Janie Well said, Beer. I remember the school drills to dive under the desk in the event of a nuclear attack. I remember Mom no longer making "snow" ice cream for us because of concerns about radioactivity from nuclear tests. I remember my not well-off, and not prone to paranoid parents reviewing their finances, trying unsuccessfully to find a way to afford an underground bunker to protect our family in the event of a nuclear attack. I remember a call to serve others that was influential and inspiring to a young girl just entering junior high school, and that has shaped my life and my career. I will always comprehend Kennedy as an icon while understanding with maturity that he also had feet of clay. |
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24 Nov 11 - 11:45 PM (#3263078) Subject: RE: BS: President Kennedy assassinated From: Beer You brought up other memories that i had forgotten. Along with three other chums we started to dig up a spot in the woods for a shelter. Never did complete it but in my mind I think i could find it. Probably not as I'm sure it is overgrown by now. Still see it though when i close my eyes. ad. |
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25 Nov 11 - 08:54 AM (#3263233) Subject: RE: BS: President Kennedy assassinated From: kendall I was 29 when he was killed. The Russians put missiles in Cuba because we had put them in Turkey. Kennedy agreed to not invade Cuba if they took their missiles away. It was a done deal from the start.They both saved face. The experiment. All I was trying to illustrate was, if we don't know what happened in our past it could happen again and we would have no clue how to deal with it. If someone dropped me in the middle of Boston and I didn't know where I was I'd have a hell of a time getting back to "God's country." I just proved that there is no such thing as a good example. |
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25 Nov 11 - 11:02 AM (#3263316) Subject: RE: BS: President Kennedy assassinated From: EBarnacle Funny thing, the Russians are complaining about missiles which could be targetted on them being installed in NATO companies. Here we go again! |
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25 Nov 11 - 10:53 PM (#3263627) Subject: RE: BS: President Kennedy assassinated From: EBarnacle I normally don't do the cut and paste routine but Tom Wicker, one of the participants in that day's events just died. Here's his obit. Former NYT columnist, author Tom Wicker dies Below: George Tames / AP In this Sept. 13, 1963 photo, former New York Times reporter Tom Wicker stands in front of the White House in Washington. Wicker, who covered President John F. Kennedy's assassination for the Times, went on to serve as the paper's Washington bureau chief and columnist has died at his home. MONTPELIER, Vt. — Tom Wicker, the former New York Times political reporter and columnist whose career soared following his acclaimed coverage of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, died Friday at his home in Rochester, Vt. He was 85. Wicker died after an apparent heart attack Friday morning, his wife Pamela said. "He'd been ill with things that come from being 85," she said. "He died in his bedroom looking out at the countryside that he loved." Wicker grew up in poverty in Hamlet, N.C., and wanted to be a novelist, but pursued journalism when his early books didn't catch fire. He worked at weekly and daily newspapers in North Carolina before winning a spot as a political correspondent in the Times' Washington bureau in 1960. Three years later, he was the only Times reporter to be traveling with Kennedy when the president was shot in Dallas. Gay Talese, author of the major history of The New York Times, wrote of Wicker's coverage: "It was a remarkable achievement in reporting and writing, in collecting facts out of confusion, in reconstructing the most deranged day in his life, the despair and bitterness and disbelief, and then getting on a telephone to New York and dictating the story in a voice that only rarely cracked with emotion." One year later, Wicker was named Washington bureau chief of the Times, succeeding newspaper legend James Reston, who had hired Wicker and called him "one of the most able political reporters of his generation." In 1966, Wicker began his "In the Nation" column, becoming, along with colleague Anthony Lewis, a longtime liberal voice on the Op-Ed page. Two years later he was named associate editor of the Times, a post he held until 1985. He ended his column and retired to Vermont in 1991 but continued to write. He published 20 books, ranging from novels about gritty, hard-scrabble life in the South to reflections on the presidents he knew. Among his books was "A Time to Die," winner of the Edgar Allan Poe Award in 1976, which recounted Wicker's 1971 experience as an observer and mediator of a prison rebellion at New York's Attica prison. Wicker, the son of a railroad man, started in journalism in 1949 at the weekly Sandhill Citizen in Aberdeen, N.C., where he was paid $37.50 a week to report on such local news stories as the discovery of "the first beaver dam in anyone's memory on a local creek." He moved on to a local daily and then to the larger Winston-Salem Journal, where he worked for most of the 50s, with time out in 1957-58 to serve as a Nieman fellow at Harvard University. He went to work for the Nashville Tennessean in 1959 but then a year later was hired by Reston. In mid-1961, when Times veteran Bill Lawrence abruptly quit his post as White House correspondent in a dispute with management, Wicker got the assignment. He said it was a dream assignment — "sooner or later most of the government's newsworthy business passes through the White House" — and especially covering the excitement of the Kennedy era. On Nov. 22, 1963, Wicker was in the first press bus following the Kennedy motorcade when the president was assassinated. He would later write in a memoir that the day was a turning point for the country: "The shots ringing out in Dealey Plaza marked the beginning of the end of innocence." At that moment, however, all he knew was that he was covering one of the biggest stories in history. "At first no one knew what happened, or how, or where, much less why," he later wrote. "Gradually, bits and pieces began to fall together." Wicker dictated his story from phones grabbed here and there, with most of his writing done at a desk in the upper level of the Dallas airport. "I would write two pages, run down the stairs, across the waiting room, grab a phone and dictate," Wicker later wrote. "Dictating each take, I would throw in items I hadn't written, sometimes whole paragraphs." Although Wicker didn't even have a reporter's notebook that day and scribbled all of his notes on the backs of printed itineraries of the presidential visit, his story captured the detail and color of the tragic events. Describing the president's widow as she left the hospital in Dallas, Wicker wrote: "Her face was sorrowful. She looked steadily at the floor. She still wore the raspberry-colored suit in which she greeted welcoming crowds in Fort Worth and Dallas. But she had taken off the matching pillbox hat she had worn earlier in the day, and her dark hair was windblown and tangled. Her hand rested lightly on her husband's coffin as it was taken to a waiting hearse." In 1966, Wicker was named a national columnist, replacing retiring Times' icon Arthur Krock, who had covered 10 presidents. Wicker's first column reported on a political rally in Montana. He would later say that it was a huge step to move from detached observer to opinion holder — and especially in the times he was writing. "My own transition from reporter to columnist coincided roughly with the immense American political re-evaluation that sprang in the sixties from the Vietnam War and the movement against it, from the ghetto riots in the major cities, and from the brief flowering of the counterculture," Wicker wrote in his 1978 book, "On Press." Wicker was not lacking in opinions, though, and over the years took strong and sometimes unpredictable stands, emphasizing such issues as the nation's racial divide. On race, he said in a 1991 interview in the Times: "I think the attitudes between the races, the fear and the animosity that exist today, are greater than, let us say, at the time of the Brown case, the famous school desegregation decision in 1954." Although Wicker was attacked by President Nixon and Vice President Spiro Agnew for his negative coverage during the Nixon administration, he argued in a 1991 book, "One of Us: Richard Nixon and the American Dream," that Nixon accomplished much in his presidency and deserves a high ranking in history. In his final column, published Dec. 29, 1991, Wicker commented on the fall of the Soviet Union and urged President George H.W. Bush to "exercise in a new world a more visionary leadership" on non-military issues like the environment. "As the U.S. did not hesitate to spend its resources to prevail in the cold war, it needs now to go forward as boldly to lead a longer, more desperate struggle to save the planet, and rescue the human race from itself," he wrote. Copyright 2011 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed. |