The murder of John F. Kennedy

The murder of John F. Kennedy in Dallas, Texas, on November 22, 1963, fostered intense national desire to assign blame for the crime and bring those responsible to justice. One view of the assassination was articulated in detail in the 1964 Warren Commission Report (WCR), which anticipated revelation of "all the facts and circumstances surrounding the assassination and the subsequent killing of the alleged assassin" (Warren Commission). Nearly five years later, in 1968, civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr., was murdered in Memphis, Tenn. The official view of the killing was that James Earl Ray, apprehended weeks after the event, had stalked and murdered King because of racial hatred; he pleaded guilty in 1969 and was sentenced to life imprsonment. About two months after King died, Robert Kennedy, presidential candidate, was murdered in Los Angeles. Palestinian Sirhan Sirhan, apprehended at the scene, was convicted of that crime (Blumenthal and Yazijian passim). Sandwiched between the two assassinations was the withdrawal from politics of President Lyndon Johnson, who had overseen escalation of U.S. involvement in Vietnam since 1964, year of the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution--later revealed to have been based on a phony charge that American ships had been attacked by North Vietnam. The resolution gave LBJ latitude to prosecute the war (Schaller, Scharff, and Schulzinger 259). U.S. failure to rout the North Vietnamese became a divisive domestic issue, diverting resources fro

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socialist government in Chile--in the process either sanctioning or condoning the deaths of Americans whose knowledge of American involvement in the coup could be damaging (Hauser passim). All the while, there was persistent and growing antiwar protest because of mounting evidence of government duplicity. Publication of the Pentagon Papers disclosed everything from phony body counts to atrocities in Vietnam (Schaller, Scharff, and Schulzinger 342-3). Other Watergate-era disclosures included Nixon's political-enemies list, the secret taping of White House conversations, and the creation of the "so-called Plumbers unit, a band of operatives charged with stopping leaks from government officials" (Schaller, Scharff, and Schulzinger 343). The ethos of duplicitous government behavior has been summed up by Noam Chomsky: Serious civil rights or antiwar groups have regularly discovered government provocateurs among their most militant members. Judicial and other harassment of dissidents and their organizations has been common practice, whoever happens to be in office. So deeply engrained are the habits of the state agencies of repression that even in the glare of Watergate the government could not refrain from infiltrating an informer i

Category: Government - T