Stars in My Crown

What a Golden Age of Kennedy Assassination history and interpretation! Masterpieces of writing and research: Gerald McKnight's brilliantly argued Breach of Trust; Professor Joan Mellen's white-hot Farewell to Justice; and the tributary hymn-of-despair in David Talbot's Brothers. (We've also had the occasional fly-in-the-ointment from hall monitors and disinformationists: Waldron, Myers, Russo, Sturdivan, Bugliosi, Robert Stone. And it is amusing how virulently, predictably, and cowardly the mainstream media -- the Cerberai of the Unspeakable - continue to bark at the moon. As Lyndon Johnson once said: "Throw your bread upon the waters, and the sharks will get it.")

James Douglass's JFK and the Unspeakable is also a hymn, in a way a companion piece to the Talbot book. But Douglass's sound is a hymn of belief, hope, and transcendence. In Kennedy's murder by the forces of the Unspeakable, a contemporary crucifixion, Douglass sees meaning beyond the resulting Vietnam genocide, beyond the takeover of our society by back-stabbers, soul-crushers and ghouls, beyond the shifting of cultural meaning toward something hideously empty and narcissistic -- meaning in the symbol of a man willing to die for his beliefs, for his (in Douglass's term) "turning." One can argue with this, for at the heart of Douglass's profoundly spiritual argument, there is something anti-political. Rather than viewing John Kennedy's murder as a political and economic act by men who saw themselves only in those terms, we experience it through Douglass's writing as a modern day Stations of the Cross. First Station: Kennedy refuses war with Laos. Second Station: Kennedy refuses invasion and air attacks during the Bay of Pigs; Third Station: Berlin Wall goes up, Kennedy lets it stand. Etc. It is an agony, as we follow Kennedy's turning and his movement toward the Golgotha of Dallas.

So what do we do? Much can be said for acceptance and a belief in transcendence, a belief in Grace. But as Jack Kennedy said: "Here on earth, God's work must truly be our own." Do we let this crucifixion stand? Do we accept the vampires now in almost complete control? Do we try to protect a man who may soon be experiencing his own turning, Barack Obama? (Not necessary.) Do we take up arms against a sea of troubles and by opposing end them? Can they ever be ended here on earth? Do we let Catholicism be defined by Hitler-Jugend Joseph Ratzinger, the man who led the war against Liberation Theology? Do we let Christianity be defined by Tim LaHaye and his life-haters?

Such questions. That JFK and the Unspeakable forces us to ask them marks the Douglass book as a rare and beautiful masterpiece, one I'll be going back to many times through the years.