JFK
Educated Guesses From The Hendrix Faculty 2
This month on Educated Guesses from the Hendrix Faculty, we will be speaking with Dr. Skok and Dr. Hancock, getting their conjectures regarding the greatest unknown in American political history, the assassination of our nation’s most reverberant golden ponyboy.
- BACKGROUND:
November 22, 1963. Dallas, Texas. A president is shot to death by a sketchy 24-year-old doofus who just got back from the U.S.S.R., where he lived, married a local, and spoke fluent Russian. This dude, Lee Harvey Oswald, had many odd ties to the CIA, what with his close friend George De Mohrenschildt (a confirmed CIA asset), and military service at Atsugi in 1957 (A U.S. Air Force Base in Japan that hosted CIA psychedelic mind-control experiments in line with MK-ULTRA). He also had weird ties to the mafia, Castro, and so on. Lee was murdered two days after the crime, on live TV, having adamantly sworn innocence at every chance, by a seedy strip club guy named Jack Ruby, who himself died a few years later after successfully keeping his mouth shut, so we never really got to hear Lee’s, or, anyone’s side of the story. Did he act alone? History Professors Jonathon Hancock and Deborah Skok say…
- HANCOCK:
I should preface with the fact that I specialize in early American history, and have not immersed myself in the granular specifics of this incident in particular. Nevertheless, I think that events of great importance like this, which capture the public imagination in this cross-generational way, have dynamic narratives which morph along with our understanding of the present. The assassination has been and will be reassessed and reinterpreted, but historians tend to be skeptical towards conspiratorial thought without explicit evidence. Oswald was certainly sketchy, and I’d grant that a lot of questions surrounding his background and the Zapruder film don’t have easy answers. Nevertheless, I find the continued interest in the question itself, as a sociological phenomenon, to be the more interesting aspect of the situation.
- SKOK:
The Kennedy assassination is the massive, alluring black hole at the center of Modern American History. There are thousands of books at this point that have been written on the topic, hundreds of movies, and more online content than anyone could quantify. This glut of information is a double-edged sword, as much of it is based on very tenuous evidence. The Warren Commission, which LBJ established to investigate the assassination, was itself pretty shoddy, and left many ambiguities in its verdict that Oswald acted alone. This lends legitimacy to many flimsy narratives, as they seem “on par” with the truth. I’m fairly confident that most of the ephemeral trivia that hovers around this event is hearsay, and that a “definitive” answer will never surface. It’s worth putting this event into the broader context, however, of the CIA and FBI’s shady domestic activities throughout the 20th century. I would believe almost anything about the CIA, just based on their documented history, especially in this particular time period. Truthfully, I grant that many individuals and groups had something to gain from the death of JFK. I don’t know who all was involved, but a couple of important things to keep in mind here are Occam’s Razor, and the fact that it’s much harder to keep a conspiracy under wraps for 50 years, than to actually do one.