A Tale of Two Georges

thursday, july 8, 2010
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I have not before used this blog to post a book review, but the book I'm now reading, Family of Secrets, by Russ Baker, merits a very close look, as a work on its way to drawing together the threads of a modern mystery that most believed would never yield to a solution - the assassination of President Kennedy.  That is not to say that Baker has solved the mystery...he has not.  But his research is pointing in the direction of, if not an outright solution, at least an explanation that makes sense, and is not weighed down by poor research and disinformation.

I was seventeen years old in November of 1963, and share the inexplicable feeling of many that something other than a civil servant was murdered on that day.  As we grasped for the meaning of the day and weekend following the crime, many of us felt the death of the youthful hope brought on by Kennedy's election in 1960.  There was a sense that the old guard would soon pass away, and a new generation would be free to take a second and better look at the world in a way that acknowledged problems and looked for solutions.  Kennedy's attitude toward the Americas to the south alone, (except for Cuba, the Kennedy blind spot) spoke to a new international relationship based in the parity between nations that a global economy would soon demand, rather than on the brutal power of empire.  When Kennedy died, it was as if the empire had won after all, and for many, idealism was put up on a shelf.

As Baker points out in his book, research and public commentary on the Kennedy assasination, carries the risk of labeling by the mainstream media as conspiracy theory, a legacy of the years of exploitive and populist investigations, described in books, articles and web pages of often dubious scholarship, a cottage industry driven by public hunger for an alternative to the inherently dissatisfactory version of history emerging from the deliberations of the Warren Commission and never improved upon by numerous subsequent government-sponsored inquiries. 

To give such efforts their due however, it must be acknowledged that over the decades since 1963 a core narrative has begun to emerge that would have remained buried but for the efforts of this army of historical archeologists.


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