JFK: The Lincoln Parallels

First, a disclaimer. I am not an authority on the Lincoln assassination. Not even close.

But close your eyes for a moment and imagine I'm some bigmouth in his cups, down at the end of the bar. (Never mind that you can't read if you close your eyes.)

I've noticed an odd parallel between the assassinations of Abraham Lincoln and John F. Kennedy.

There's an old Ann Landers column about curiosities between the two assassinations. You've probably seen it: Lincoln had a secretary named Kennedy, Kennedy had a secretary named Lincoln. Both secretaries warned their boss not to attend what turned out to be a rendezvous with death. Both slain presidents were succeeded by men named Johnson, and blah blah blah.

Cue the creepy music.

I'm not talking about the Ann Landers stuff.

No, I'm talking about similarities that to me, at least, suggest a pattern.

Historians know no more than the information made available to them, and for many years the United States War Department kept the records on Lincoln's assassination locked in files marked "secret."

This quotation is from a 1959 book called The Web of Conspiracy, by Theodore Roscoe. It was the first thing in that book to really get my attention. Readers familiar with the JFK case know that classifying much of the evidence "secret" is precisely what happened after the Warren Commission concluded its work in 1964.

Lee Harvey Oswald, the alleged Kennedy assassin, was of course shot down by Jack Ruby a few days after the assassination. No trial.

In the Lincoln case, John Wilkes Booth escaped the scene of the crime and evaded authorities for about twelve days, before finally being cornered and killed in a Virginia barn.

Yet in this instance, there was a trial. Not only did Booth have co-conspirators who were captured alive; they carried out coordinated attacks on several other government officials, including Vice-President Andrew Johnson, at nearly the same moment Booth was killing Lincoln.

This is sometimes overlooked. We learn, of course, about Booth shooting Lincoln. But these other crimes are downplayed, as is the fact of conspiracy. I don't think I learned there was a Lincoln conspiracy until my teen years, and only then because I had a book of historic photographs. It included pictures of the execution of four of the eight conspirators (above).

The other four received prison sentences.

Although trial proceedings were published at the time, the Bureau of Military Justice sat on a great deal of conspiracy information, and the Army chiefs refused to release much of the data on the assassination and the pursuit of the conspirators. Not until the mid-1930s were pertinent War Department records placed in the public domain. 

The mid-1930s!

Why were these records suppressed for so long? Theodore Roscoe argued that within, say, twenty-five years of Lincoln's killing, no Civil War-era intelligence secrets could have been compromised.

What could be compromised was the security of a myth, or the reputation of an institution, or the concealment of some figure or group who had been party to a heinous crime.

Roscoe continued:

The military censors had a field day with the Lincoln murder case. From the outset [Secretary of War Edwin] Stanton held that many of the facts relating to the assassination were "not in the public interest." Eventually so much of the truth was tampered with that no one could learn the truth. Thus an immense deception was imposed and a stupendous crime was covered...

Today the cover-up is conceded by at least one Government agency which tells us in its official literature that "confusion and mystery" cloak Lincoln's assassination and "we probably shall never know all the facts"...

Does any of this sound familiar? "So much of the truth was tampered with that no one could learn the truth."

I'm seeing some definite parallels between Lincoln and JFK. It is tempting to conclude that the similarities reveal a model for the clandestine removal of a president of these United States, but I think that would be reckless.

And anyway, I'm just the loudmouth drunk down at the end of the bar.

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Most of the material presented here comes from a single source: The Web of Conspiracy, by Theodore Roscoe (Prentice-Hall, 1959). I turned to Wikipedia for a few factoids, such as the location of Booth's death.

Litterbugs, Part Five – The Dump Festival

Just imagine: an entire festival celebrating garbage!

Okay, that's a slight exaggeration. But there used to be something very much like that in Kennebunkport, Maine. They called it the Dump Festival – I kid you not – and it was an annual thing. As founder Ed Mayo said, "We're honoring the importance of the old-fashioned town dump."

I'm piecing this together from scraps, so my info may be a little off. But it appears the Dump Festival was, at least in part, meant to raise awareness about littering. You could say it was ahead of its time: it began back in 1965.

A highlight of the Dump Festival was the crowning of "Miss Dumpy," the winner of a beauty pageant whose contestants wore outfits assembled from stuff mined out of the local dump.

The Miss Dumpy pageant: good, clean fun

The above photo is from an old issue of National Geographic magazine, which mentioned the Dump Festival in an article about trash and recycling. This woman placed second in the 1981 contest. The winner, whose photo did not scan well, was truly repulsive: her face and arms smeared with green goop, dead fish hanging from a mangled basket covering her upper torso, and – well, you don't want to know the rest.

The Dump Festival featured a parade, too. Like Miss Dumpy's ensemble, floats were constructed from (or at least decorated with) stuff excavated from the landfill.

I first heard of the Dump Festival in that National Geographic article, which dates to 1983. I remembered it when I started the litter and trash theme running through this blog, so I dug it out. Then I turned to the Internet. According to an item I found via Google, the festival was deemed unsafe in the early nineties, so the powers-that-be pulled the plug.

Ed Mayo told Nat Graph that the festival had a simple message: "Litter belongs at the dump, not along the road."

I second that!

JFK: The 50th Anniversary

The most recent public opinion polls I've seen on the JFK assassination are a little dusty. They go back nearly eight years, to November 2003, when ABC reported that 70% of those who were asked "suspect a plot."

We'll see some new surveys as we approach the fiftieth anniversary. Assuming they are honest (a risky assumption), there shouldn't be much change. The numbers have fluctuated somewhat over the years, but have consistently shown that at very least, the majority of Americans "suspect a plot."

Far more important is how many people still care. Most, I humbly submit, do not.

This is due largely to the passage of so much time. Most people now alive were not yet born when the assassination happened. Oliver Stone's JFK energized us for a time, but that has long since passed. Anymore, the Kennedy assassination is just a history lesson – and a confusing one, at that.

The Warren Commission said one guy did it. Fifteen years later the House Select Committee concluded there was "probably" a conspiracy. The Assassination Records Review Board skirted the matter, emphasizing the release of assassination records and – gulp! – restoring government credibility.

All along, there has been a deluge of books promoting often-conflicting theories. The not surprising result of all this is uncertainty. "One of the primary means of immobilizing the American people politically today," wrote E. Martin Schotz in 1992, "is to hold them in a state of confusion in which anything can be believed but nothing can be known, nothing of significance that is."

And that leaves us in a curious place. Most people believe there was a conspiracy to kill a duly elected president, but don't know its nature. It was a long time ago, though, so who cares?

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Even though we know there was a conspiracy to kill President Kennedy, those of us actively studying it seem unable to make much difference. We can't crack the media and we can't ignite the masses.

Instead of objective analyses of our issues, the media keeps feeding us leftovers: assassination re-enactments, new tests to prove the single bullet theory, and new attempts to shoot three rounds in six seconds from a third-rate weapon.

This is a great danger. To those who haven't read much in the field, and who don't much care to begin with, some of the lone nut nonsense might just seem plausible.

With the Internet, we can become the media. This is no small thing; David, after all, slew Goliath. But the Internet can be made to disappear, as it did in Egypt.

And then there is the lack of unity within our ranks. This is aggravated by some of our luminaries, who assume proprietary attitudes toward certain issues. Even worse is the promotion of ideas that make us all look ridiculous. In some ways we're our own worst enemy.

The fiftieth anniversary is still more than two years away, but we are already in a crucial phase. We must find a way to stand as one in the name of truth. We must emphasize those matters we have in common, since we share a common goal. We must find a way to make people care.

The propaganda war is on, and will only intensify as we near November 22, 2013. For as we reach the fiftieth anniversary of John F. Kennedy's assassination, the primary objective of our opponents will be to bury this case once and for all.

They are the enemies of truth.

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The quotation "One of the primary means of immobilizing..." is from History Will Not Absolve Us, by E. Martin Schotz.