Chapter 14 We started this ego drenched memoir in New York in the early sixties and wound our way west from there to Indianapolis, then San Jose, then Marin, Mexico, and finally Santa Cruz and Boulder Creek. Now I want to go back to the early sixties and trace the path of progressive, populist evolution and the effects on it, of the trail of assassinations that cut down its most dynamic leadership throughout that promising, hopeful, and yet tragic, period, the sixties. Obviously there were two opposing movements, one directed towards freedom, civil rights, equality, peace, love, and justice, the other, much of it covert, a stubborn resistance to this peaceful evolution, using intimidation, repression, and, if necessary, murder to stifle this humanitarian progressive political movement. The decade of the sixties began with the exciting victory of John F. Kennedy, elected to the presidency, eloquently saying in his inaugural address, "Do not ask what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country." The dull mercenary, materialist days of the Eisenhower era were over. Kennedy immediately stirred up the cultural landscape, inviting Duke Ellington and his big band to perform at the White House. We in the arts felt that for once we were in for a good ride! JFK appointed his brother Bobby Attorney General and right away Bobby started to dismantle organized crime. He started in Henderson, Kentucky, where a candidate for sheriff, promising to clean up the gambling and vice and corruption of this gaming city, was murdered (assassinated) before he could regain the position he had held a short time before. The story was, he had started to root out corruption in Henderson, when he was set up, drugged, carried unconscious, and left in the hotel room of a prostitute. This caused him to lose the job of sheriff but he exposed this plot and was running for sheriff again when he was murdered. Bobby came down to Henderson and busted the leader of the crime family who was in control there. Then Bobby went on to dismantle the leadership of organized crime across the nation. He expelled Trafficante to Central America, he was after Giancana, Maracellos, Hoffa, and all the leadership of organized crime. Hoover, who was tied up with this top element of organized crime, was furious; so was the CIA who were using the New Orleans branch and the Dallas branch of the Mafia to try to kill Fidel Castro and foment a revolution in Cuba. Before Castro came to power, Cuba had been a Mafia playground. They wanted it back. So there were a lot of people, an evil cabal, who wanted to put things back as they had been. They felt betrayed by JFK, especially Giancana who helped get him elected at the urging of Joe Kennedy, Jack's father. Joe was made rich during prohibition by bootleg gin now known as Gordon's. He had many dealings with the mob. He went to Giancana to get his support for Jack in Chicago. When Jack made Bobby Attorney General and Bobby immediately went after the top layer of organized crime, the mob felt betrayed by Jack and Bobby and decided to hit Jack instead of Bobby. Their logic was expressed in this parable. "If you want to stop the dog's tail from wagging you cut off the dog's head." Bobby, who had taken over the Justice Department, had his own men in there chasing down the top mob leaders but was neutralized by Jack's death. Until his victory in the California primary, he was no longer a threat. At that point he too was assassinated. Sirhan Sirhan was blamed for his death but Sirhan fired from in front of Bobby. The fatal bullet came from behind. There was one man, a guard, hired just that day to replace the regular guard (that should have been there) but who called in "sick." This replacement guard was the only one who had drawn his gun and fired one shot. Bobby grabbed his clip-on tie as he fell. According to David Schiem, author of "Contract on America," this guard was connected to the mob. All this information and much more has been concealed by a massive cover-up in Washington. Now some of it is surfacing because of the "Freedom of Information Act." It is said that Meyer Lansky had Hoover in his pocket because he (Lansky) had evidence of Hoover's homosexuality. So there was a convergence of top elements of law enforcement, the military, and organized crime that wanted things to be the way they had been and, rightly so, blamed JFK for getting in their way. Jack and Bobby were changing the way business was being done in Washington. The established corrupt factions no longer held sway. Then on October 11, 1963, one month and ten days before his murder, Jack sent a National Security Action Memorandum (NSAM #263) to the Defence Department to withdraw one thousand U.S. troops from Vietnam. He planned to be completely out by 1965. This was apparently the final straw that broke the camel's back. Only four days after Kennedy's assassination on November 26th, Johnson (now the new President) issued another NSAM #273 ordering controversy about Vietnam policy within the Washington bureaucracy to cease and General Maxwell Taylor proclaimed that "to ensure victory, we must prepare for whatever level of activity may be required." Johnson said he was carrying on Kennedy's policy in Vietnam, but actually he was reversing it. Kennedy meant to gradually disengage in Vietnam, while history shows us that Johnson gradually escalated our involvement in the conflict. Thus the direction of our nation was turned around 180 degrees from peace towards war, from freedom and cultural creativity back towards conformity, fear and police and federal interference in the private lives of its citizens--not all at once but gradually, culminating in Nixon's election and finally the "Watergate" scandal that drove him from power. Of course it wasn't just JFK's murder, although that was primal to the process,next came Malcom X's assassination, then Martin Luther King, and finally Bobby Kennedy. The hope of our nation, one after another, its greatest leaders viciously struck down. Surely one has to see a pattern here. The great positive joyousness of the promise of the 60's eventually turned back by murder, over and over again. These four political stars--Jack, Malcom, Martin, and Bobby--were the most critical loses to our freedom movement but they weren't the only ones. There was Medgar Evers, there were the four little girls in the Atlanta church bombing, there were three million Vietnamese and fifty-six thousand young American soldiers, sailors, and airmen, all part of a massive bloodletting. We danced, we sang, we made music and art, we made love, we marched, we protested, we voted, we discovered the very gates of Paradise, but we did not shake the icy grip of corporate corruption and fear from around the throat of our sickened society. We seem not to be able to learn from history but the truth is we haven't been told our real history. We've been lied to, kept from knowing what really happened, had the actual facts distorted or hidden whenever possible to advance the agenda of those in power. And what is their agenda? Why, to stay in power and pass that power on to their children. Not much different from the age old concept of royalty. And when someone really gets in their way, they are not above murder which necessitates covering up what dark deeds are done to preserve the status quo. So we are fed lies, distortions, empty dreams and fantasy analysis (spin) ad infinitum to turn our heads away from reality and keep us confused, isolated, and immobilized. We are told that the dancing, the music, the art, the great social movements of the 60's were bad and the conniving murderous resistance to these social movements was moral, "American," good. We are told that war is peace, that in order to keep our freedom we must give it up. Now let's take a look at another aspect of this same situation. Historically in our country and in most of the world, the great outstanding leaders and leadership of progressive social movements has come from the second generation of the middle class and especially the upper middle class. The Kennedy boys were no exception to this rule. So it is no accident that the middle class is being slowly squeezed out of existence. Reagan did it and now G.W. Bush is doing it again, incurring giant deficits and driving the value of the dollar down, union busting, and outsourcing good paying manufacturing jobs and skilled white collar jobs. The gap between the rich and the poor grows bigger and bigger and the social safety net is being dismantled gradually one piece at a time. Unemployment insurance, healthcare, and now Social Security are all taking big hits financially due to the ballooning deficit. The deficit was created by a preemptive war we were lied into and now the same liars are harping on us that Social Security is going broke. Government by fear and deceit with the hidden agenda of removing the middle class and turning the United States of America into a banana republic with a shriveled middle class, an even smaller upper class of the very wealthy, and the rest of us poor as church mice. This is the cumulative result of the murders of our great progressive leadership in the 60's, the glowing, hopeful 60's. There have been ups and downs along the way since then, but basically the downside has overwhelmed the upside. We have become disillusioned and fearful. Many of our youth feel it is a ticket to assassination to stand out as successful leaders of a progressive mass movement. I can't believe this is all accidental. Anyone smart enough to kill the President and get away with it, smart enough to target hundreds of thousands of black voters who could be counted on to vote against the present administration in key states that would control the electoral college, is not just having a series of lucky accidents. This is a concerted political conspiracy to turn back history to before FDR's "new deal." As a matter of fact, all this was sketched out in detail at the beginning of this century by a right wing think tank calling itself "The Project for a New American Century" in a work entitled "Rebuilding America's Defenses." This work, which outlines the aspirations of empire for American corporate interests, could easily be compared to an earlier German version in a book called "Mien Kampf." Although this American version lacks the racist ideology of its forerunner, it has all the rest of the planning for global economic and political domination. Ironically, it even speaks of the need for a cataclysmic national catastrophe to mobilize the public. Founders of this organization include Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz, and David Pearl, among others. One of the more gruesome suggestions is to target germ warfare to certain DNA groups, thus changing germ warfare, in their words "from a weapon of terror to a political" tool. This work can be found under their heading "Project for a New American Century" on the internet. What has this to do with the 60's? I believe that in the beginning of the 60's when JFK was elected President and the movements for peace, civil rights, women's liberation, and the environment began to come together, the extreme right wing became so fearful of losing control they decided that a campaign of murder was the only way they could change the direction in which the country was headed. Thus, the coalition of extreme right wing ideology, organized crime, and big corporate business, along with certain high ranking levels of the intelligence community got together to perpetuate this campaign of a national reign of terror. The four assassinations of the President, Malcom X, Martin Luther King, and Bobby Kennedy were the fruits of this fear. These murders brought the people's movement to a crippling halt. Now we are watching an historic reversal of the social progress which was made by centuries of struggle. The vibrant promise of the 60's lies moldering in the dust. I recommend these two books for research reading, "Deep Politics and the Death of JFK" by Peter Dale Scott published by the University of California and "Contract on America" by David E. Schiem, published by Shapolsky Press.