Today, as I write this, the Los Angeles Times carries an AP dispatch reporting the conviction by a German court of an 88-year old man for murdering three Dutch civilians in 1944, as part of a Nazi hit squad during World War II. And The New York Times reports the arrests of two men charged with murdering five teenage boys in Newark in 1978. Such "cold cases" are neither uncommon nor uncommonly reported by the American news media. Only the major political assassinations of the Sixties, including that of John F. Kennedy, are swept under the rug.
While working for CBS News during the mid-1970s, years after the assassination, I smelled the fear of it that lingered over that organization. I learned of many things that a small handful of senior news executives, under the close personal supervision of their president, Richard S. Salant, hid from most of their own employees -- including their own esteemed anchorman, the late Walter Cronkite, whom they finagled into reading before a teleprompter a script he neither wrote nor vetted -- as well as from their viewing audience, to reassure them and allay their doubts that one man, acting alone, could have wreaked such havoc. Unseen by their viewing audiences, they courted former Warren Commission member John J. McCloy's advice on their script, conscious that Lyndon Johnson and J. Edgar Hoover were watching as well. At the same time, CBS News insiders and outsiders alike encountered stone walls when attempting to call these executives' attention to evidence in conflict with the official lone assassin thesis. There was a cover-up in the Kennedy assassination and, under its original ownership and management during the Paley-Stanton era, the executive hierarchy of CBS News was a part of it. I might have pursued a career in broadcast journalism elsewhere, however, I abandoned such ambitions because I could not tolerate the painful awareness that the biggest news story of my lifetime was somehow off limits, rendered impenetrable by those invisible constraints to which I alluded earlier. Journalism, ostensibly a noble calling, does not pay well to those below the superstar level; it doesn't pay nearly enough to justify such disillusionment. Fear of the Kennedy assassination and what it actually meant still lingers over us all, whether or not we are conscious of it. It is still evident in the defensive ridicule with which the mainstream news media treats the subject.
After earning a law degree and spending nearly 20 years in practice, I saw similar fear among some of the leading icons of the law profession. As I have only begun to discuss, it is evident in the manner through which members of the federal judiciary quashed the potential for putting the assassination under a forensic microscope in a court of law. Fear of the mere potential that the federal courts might be confronted with the need to decide whether a conspiracy took the life of an American president prompted them to run like children frightened of the bogeyman. I cannot rightly call it a spectacle, because the ways in which they shunned the controversy, employing outright, lies and deceit to suppress incontrovertible record facts, went largely unnoticed by the scriveners of the law newspapers and their general media cousins, who accept court decisions as written and report them only from the official point of view, never bothering to probe the substance of an underlying court record, never raising critical questions concerning the honesty and integrity of a judge's ruling. As I also discuss in this space, the presumption of honesty that attaches to judicial rulings is one of the great blindspots and vulnerabilities of our justice system, reinforced by professional disciplinary rules for attorneys that inhibit them from exposing outright fraud and ostracize them from "the guild" if they try.
One of the aspirations of this blog is to squarely confront that fear and vanquish it because, Unless we do, it will remain with us the rest of our lives and taint whatever legacy we wish to leave to future generations. More generally, this is a case study of how -- in a noisy, distracted, and disconnected society -- dissent that poses an imminent threat to the status quo can be crushed, and the dissenters effectively discredited, without giving the appearance of violating democratic principles. In a society held together by faith rather than by brute coercion, appearances are everything, albeit they can be deceiving.
What do I mean when I write of this fear of the assassination that still hangs heavy over us? As a prime example, I point to one of the worst of the contemporary fearmongers: the self-styled journalist and former practicing attorney, Gerald Posner, author of the book Case Closed, who found his niche in public discourse on this subject as a nay-sayer.
In 1992, in response to years of quiet lobbying by Keven Walsh and other students of Kennedy's murder, and the sudden impetus given the subject by Oliver Stone's movie, "JFK", Congress passed the JFK Assassination Records Act, mandating the disclosure by government agencies of their documentary archives on the case. Posner's book was published the very day, August 23, 1993, that the first "new" batch of previously-classified documents, most of them having originated with the House Select Committee on Assassinations' investigation of the late 1970s, was released by the National Archives. The timing was not coincidental. At that time, Posner insisted that he knew what the documents contained, and that they would support his anti-conspiracy stance, even though he had not actually seen them and had no means of plowing through all of them before making that claim. The fact is, that the HSCA had determined that Kennedy was probably assassinated as the result of a conspiracy, and the secret investigative files that it unsuccessfully attempted to hide for 50 years contained evidence extremely damaging to the Executive Branch's official verdict that Lee Harvey Oswald acted solely on his own. Nevertheless, mainstream media institutions soaked up Posner's assurance because it relieved them of the burden of making their own evaluation of the evidence, and validated their own premature endorsements of the Warren Commission Report years earlier. Posner spoke irresponsibly and to protect the salability of his book, but the media gave him a pass. Moreover, they made him an instant media hero. More recently, commenting on a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit to obtain files related to Lee Harvey Oswald that the CIA has never released, Posner "said that if there really were something explosive involving the C.I.A. and President Kennedy, it would not be in the files — not even in the documents the C.I.A. has fought to keep secret." "C.I.A. Is Still Cagey About Oswald Mystery," The New York Times, October 17, 2009, pg. A11 .
Posner has shown a strange, psychic capacity to predict what the government's archives will or will not show, before having had the chance to examine them. In reality, he is an advocate for ignorance: Don't worry about the files; they won't change anything. Fearmonger in disguise, he is the media's annointed fear comforter par excellence, the anti-conspiracy "go to" guy of their first choice.
Whoa! The government is still hiding files on Oswald? All this was supposed to have been cleared up years ago. The conspiracy theorists are upsetting us. Let's go to Posner and get "the real deal." We are afraid, Gerald. Save us from those subversives who undermine our confidence. Tell us we have nothing to fear.
And, so, he complies. Equilibrium is restored. Dissent is marginalized. Our society resumes its placid existence.
Look now, captains of America's vacuous communications media, upon your damaged opportunistic hero. It was not us, but his own flaws, that ruined him. We gloat, not at him, but at you. We exult, not in his misfortune, but at your gullibility, humiliation, and discredit in the eyes of the world. Go! Feed your audiences endless retreads of the old Jack Bailey TV show, "Queen for a Day", now pretentiously disguised as the new "reality" genre yet still a haven for exhibitionists. Sell your clientele's anti-flatulence and erectile dysfunction remedies to your hearts' content. Your constituencies dwindle in number year-after-year. You can no longer afford to hire and retain credible contingents of bona fide journalists. Your new currency is amateur cellphone videos. You have run out of steam. When we want the news, we get it from the Internet.
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About Me
- Roger Bruce Feinman, J.D.
- New York, New York, United States
- Roger Bruce Feinman practiced law in New York for 18 years after having worked for WPIX-TV News and CBS News, whose top executives he challenged over the journalistic ethics of their Warren Report documentaries. He worked closely for many years with Sylvia Meagher, late author of "Accessories After the Fact," who also indexed the published hearings and exhibits of the Warren Commision and the House Select Committee on Assassinations; he waged FOIA battles against government agencies; and he wrote "Between the Signal and the Noise," a study of popular conspiracy theories that has been assigned reading in college courses. As an attorney, he focused on insurance, reinsurance, and media errors & omissions litigation in trial and appellate courts. His views on the medical evidence in John F. Kennedy's assassination have been published in the Congressional Record, and he has lectured on the case before large audiences in Chicago, Dallas, Pittsburgh, and Washington, D.C. He studied the vibraphone with the late Ray Alexander, a former George Shearing sideman; played professionally for several years; and still dabbles in electronic musical remixing.