The COPA blog

John Geraghty · June 2, 2008

JFK assassination plot in Chicago

http://ie.youtube.com/watch?v=NBKcJAwwKrQ

John Geraghty · June 2, 2008

Cynthia McKinney to attend COPA L.A.

Green party presidential candidate and former Democratic Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney will speak on the 6th of June at the COPA conference on the assassination of Robert Kennedy.

Ms. McKinney also spoke at the COPA conference on the assassination of Malcolm X, held at the Audubon ballroom in February of this year.

The Friday of the conference will be carried live on COPA’s website, be sure to drop by between 7-10pm L.A. time or 10pm-1am EST.

John Geraghty · June 2, 2008

If you want to feature the Friday of the COPA conference embed this html code into a post.

I also encourage you to embed the chat for the stream underneath the video.

Thanks,

John

John Geraghty · June 2, 2008

COPA listed in Associated Press calendar

COPA’s conference on the RFK assassination has been listed in the Associated Press calendar for the coming week. The calendar is sent to all major and minor news media organizations throughout the US. At the moment COPA is mentioned all over the net, from the Boston Globe to Fox news to Forbes.

http://www.foxnews.com/wires/2008May30/0,4...alendar,00.html

http://www.boston.com/news/education/highe..._news_calendar/

http://www.forbes.com/feeds/ap/2008/05/30/ap5065123.html

John Geraghty · June 2, 2008

Video promo for COPA in L.A.

Here is a promotional video for the L.A. conference. Please distribute to mailing lists, your blog and your friends.

http://ie.youtube.com/watch?v=Cn-2ce6SVpw

Dawn Meredith · June 3, 2008

[quote name='John Geraghty' date='Jun 2 2008, 11:31 PM' post='146733']

Video promo for COPA in L.A.

Here is a promotional video for the L.A. conference. Please distribute to mailing lists, your blog and your friends.

http://ie.youtube.com/watch?v=Cn-2ce6SVpw

Thanks John. COPA is fortunate to have you. I hope I can get the streaming to work as I won't be able to get to LA, have to work. Looks like there will be great conferences.

Dawn

William Kelly · June 3, 2008

I second Dawn's motion, thank's for all you do JG.

Also a sneak peek at another emerging witness:

http://realhistoryarchives.blogspot.com/20...ard-hughes.html

http://www.johnhmeier.com/

John Geraghty · June 4, 2008

John Meier says Howard Hughes organization was involved in the RFK assassination

Courtesy of Lisa Pease' Real History blog.

This may be a topic of discussion at the COPA conference in L.A.

John Meier, former advisor to the recluse billionaire industrialist Howard Hughes, claims that the Hughes organization was involved in the assassination of Robert Kennedy in 1968.
Among Mr. Meier’s acquaintances were members of the Nixon family, Vice President Hubert Humphrey, Robert F. Kennedy, Los Angeles Mayor Sam Yorty, Head of the F.B.I. J. Edgar Hoover, Paul Schrade (who also was shot at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles along with Robert Kennedy), Harry Evans (who was six feet away from Kennedy when he got shot) and numerous others that are pertinent to this subject.

Mr. Meier had been introduced to Sirhan Sirhan’s lawyer, Mr. Lawrence Teeter, by Paul Schrade in 2005. Mr. Meier had numerous telephone conversations, e-mail exchanges, and meetings in Los Angeles with Mr. Teeter regarding Robert Kennedy’s assassination. The meetings that occurred during the week of February 13th - 19th 2005 in Beverly Hills, California, were recorded by Mr. Teeter. During that time Mr. Meier was also in communication with Paul Schrade and his wife.

Mr. Meier claims that Mr. Teeter was preparing for a new trial for Sirhan Sirhan based on the new evidence that they had put together.

Mr. Teeter died in Conchitas, Mexico on July 31, 2005.

Mr. Meier had his lawyer, Mr. Dale Pope get in touch with the State Bar of California, in order to retrieve all the documents, tape recordings, and e-mails that were in the hands of Mr. Teeter pertaining to Mr. Meier. After getting no satisfaction from the State bar of California, Mr. Meier had been informed by a contact that a burglary took place at Mr. Teeter’s home. Mr. Pope then was told by Mr. John Fulton from the State Bar of California that there was indeed a theft of records from Mr. Teeter’s home. Mr. Meier has not been given back any of the items that he requested.

Mr. Meier is now preparing to release the information that he has in regard to the Robert Kennedy assassination.

Go to www.johnhmeier.com for more information on Mr. John Meier and the harassment by the U.S. Government on Mr. Meier and his family

Video log by Mr Meier about Hughes involvement with the assassination and his knowledge of the affair.

http://ie.youtube.com/watch?v=jGAHYTu_6wg

John Geraghty · June 4, 2008

SF Gate article on the RFK assassination

Mentioned in this article are Shane O’Sullivan, William Turner, Philip Van Praag, Robert Joling, all of whom will be presenting at the COPA conference this Friday in Los Angeles.

(06-02) 20:11 PDT — The assassination was over in a few seconds. In the photograph of that moment, Bobby Kennedy, his eyes open and glazed, lies on his back on a hotel pantry floor, his head cradled by a busboy dressed starkly in white - a tableau that seems almost angelic were it not so brutal.

Less than 26 hours after being shot early on June 5, 1968, right after winning the California presidential primary, Kennedy was dead. He was 42.

Three major assassinations rocked America in the 1960s. Two of the assassins - Lee Harvey Oswald, the killer of John F. Kennedy, and James Earl Ray, who shot Martin Luther King Jr. - are dead. But Sirhan Sirhan, convicted of killing Robert F. Kennedy 40 years ago this week in the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles, is living out his days in the California state prison at Corcoran. He is 64 and has never fully explained what happened that night other than to say he can’t remember it.

Sirhan was a seemingly unremarkable man. He was a Palestinian who was raised in the Middle East until he was 12, when his family settled in Southern California. Before the Kennedy assassination, he held a series of menial jobs and at one point worked at the Santa Anita racetrack and had hoped to be a jockey.

After Los Angeles police found his diary, in which he had written, “RFK must die,” investigators concluded that he was angry about Kennedy’s support for Israel and somehow had tied the assassination date - he wrote that Kennedy must be killed “before 5 June 68″ - to the one-year anniversary of the Six-Day War.

Open and shut

Los Angeles police, who declined Monday to comment on their investigation, deemed the assassination an open-and-shut case - Sirhan did it by himself. Independent investigators who have looked at the case over the years, however, suggest otherwise.

“The interesting thing is how under-examined the Robert Kennedy assassination is, compared to President Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr.,” said David Talbot of San Francisco, author of “Brothers,” a book that looks into Robert Kennedy’s own investigation into his brother’s death and his conviction that JFK was the victim of a conspiracy.

“Bobby remains the unknown territory,” Talbot said. “But even if you look at it minimally, there are questions that come to mind.”

Among them:

– Sirhan fired his .22-caliber revolver from a few feet in front of Kennedy, according to police, yet Los Angeles County coroner Thomas Noguchi reported that the fatal shot was fired less than one inch from Kennedy’s head, behind his right ear. Of the four shots fired at Kennedy, all came from the rear. None of this was raised at Sirhan’s trial because his defense was based on the theory that he suffered from “diminished capacity” rather than on any challenge of prosecutors’ evidence.

– Sirhan’s revolver held eight rounds; a radio reporter’s tape recording of the shooting has sounds of what one audio expert describes as 13 shots. Sirhan never had a chance to reload before bystanders tackled him. Two of the sounds on the tape are what forensic experts call “double shots,” which means two shots so close together that they couldn’t have come from the same revolver.

– Several witnesses saw a security guard just behind Kennedy draw his revolver, and one reported seeing him fire it.

– Over the years, Sirhan has told investigators who interviewed him in prison that he was in a hypnotic trance during the shooting and can’t remember it at all. He said he could not remember writing, “RFK must die.” He did not respond to an interview request for this story.

Night of celebration

On the night Kennedy was killed, the hotel ballroom was filled with supporters celebrating his victory in the California primary and looking to the Democratic convention in Chicago. The last thing Kennedy said from the ballroom podium, just after midnight, was, “My thanks to all of you, and now it’s on to Chicago, and let’s win there.”

In the pantry, as Kennedy moved through the crowd, he was surrounded by friends, including Paul Schrade of the United Auto Workers, labor chairman for Kennedy’s campaign.

“All of a sudden, I got hit in the head by a bullet,” Schrade said. “I shook violently. I thought I was being electrocuted. When I came to, I was on the floor.”

Schrade was one of five people besides Kennedy who were hit by bullets. For the past 33 years, he has been investigating the shooting.

Mystery bullet hole

Unlike the JFK assassination, which created an outdoor crime scene in Dallas sprawling from the grassy knoll to the Texas School Book Depository, the shooting of Robert Kennedy happened in a confined space. Stray bullets ended up buried in walls and the ceiling, where they could be tracked down.

In photos, police investigators can be seen circling what they later said was a bullet hole in a ceiling panel, behind where Sirhan fired. For Sirhan to have shot into that panel, he would have had to “either turn around or the bullet would have to have made a U-turn,” said Philip Van Praag, a retired electrical engineer and audio expert who co-authored a book about the case.

Then there was the mystery of the woman in the polka dot dress. According to witness Sandra Serrano, the woman fled from the hotel kitchen with an unidentified man, shouting, “We shot him, we shot him.” When a bystander asked who got shot, the woman said, “We shot Kennedy.” Other witnesses reported seeing the woman, though it is not clear whether they heard the comment.

In a new film about the assassination, “RFK Must Die,” Irish documentary maker Shane O’Sullivan asked Serrano about what happened later. She said Los Angeles police spent hours trying to convince her she was wrong in what she saw, and she finally gave in. Forty years later, however, she told O’Sullivan that her original version was correct.

‘I don’t remember’

In fact, the iconic polka dot dress is also something fixed in the mind of Sirhan himself.

William Turner, a retired FBI agent who wrote a book about the case, says he interviewed Sirhan in prison in 1975.

“He told me, ‘I don’t remember anything after the woman in the polka dot dress asked me for coffee, and heavy on the cream and sugar,’ ” said Turner, who lives in San Rafael. “He said he had amnesia from that time until he was overpowered in the pantry after the shots were fired. He said, ‘I must have done it, but I don’t remember.’ “

Turner thinks Sirhan was “hypno-programmed to shoot” and that he was a real-life Manchurian Candidate - the fictional brainwashed dupe whose controllers want to assassinate a presidential candidate. Turner suspects the same villains as do the JFK conspiracy theorists - “organized crime and, predominantly, people from the CIA.”

Van Praag and a fellow investigator, former American Academy of Forensic Scientists president Robert Joling, don’t subscribe to any one conspiracy theory, but they are convinced more than one gunman was involved. The two have written a book about the killing, whose title, “An Open and Shut Case,” is a dig at the police investigation.

Van Praag, a former senior instructor in commercial audio-video systems for Ampex Corp., analyzed a tape recording of the killing made by a Polish radio reporter. He said he heard 13 shots over five seconds and was able to isolate the sounds well enough to say that two different weapons were firing during those five seconds.

Guard passed polygraph

One of those weapons, according to the documentary, “Conspiracy Test: The RFK Assassination,” which ran on the Discovery Times Channel a year ago, could have been held by Thane Eugene Cesar, the security guard who was near Kennedy.

Dan Moldea, who wrote a book, “The Killing of Robert F. Kennedy: An Investigation of Motive, Means and Opportunity,” said he thought for years that “Cesar had done it.” But in 1987 he persuaded Cesar to undergo a polygraph examination that the former guard “passed with flying colors,” Moldea said.

“He’s being accused of murder all over the place,” Moldea said, adding that he is now Cesar’s protector and would be willing to “bring him forward” if authorities ever reopen the case.

In fact, reopening the case is not a far-fetched idea.

Joling says an “independent panel of forensic scientists” should be created to “reinvestigate this matter on all the evidence.” The case “should be resolved in a truthful, factual and honest presentation,” he said.

“Let the chips fall where they may. That way, at least, the American people will know that somebody without a stake in the outcome made this finding.”

Online and on screen

Documents and other information about the Robert Kennedy assassination can be found at these Web sites:

www.anopenandshutcase.com

www.maryferrell.org/wiki/index.php/Robert_Kennedy_Assassination

www.aarclibrary.org

www.robertfkennedylinks.com/assassination.html

www.realhistoryarchives.com/collections/assassinations/rfk.htm

www.aldridgeshs.qld.edu.au/sose/modrespg/mystery/rfk/titlepg.htm

www.paperlessarchives.com/rfk_assassination.html

A new documentary, “RFK Must Die,” will be screened at 9:20 tonight at the Roxie Theater, 3117 16th St., San Francisco.

Another documentary, “Conspiracy Test: The RFK Assassination,” ran on the Discovery Times Channel last year and can be found on YouTube.

E-mail Michael Taylor at mtaylor@sfchronicle.com.

http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c.../MNN110S5KH.DTL

This article appeared on page A - 1 of the San Francisco Chronicle

John Geraghty · June 5, 2008

Bill Eppridge, RFK assassination photographer

Sun reporter

June 4, 2008

New Milford, Conn.

The kernel was planted in Bill Eppridge’s mind while he was studying photojournalism at the University of Missouri.

“Create a photographic epic poem.”

Eppridge was taking a history course in the late 1950s taught by the university’s poet-in-residence, John Neihardt, who was best known for his 1932 book, Black Elk Speaks, about an Oglala Lakota medicine man who had witnessed Gen. George Custer’s defeat at Little Big Horn and the Massacre of Wounded Knee. Outside of class, Eppridge spent a lot of time discussing what Neihardt, the poet laureate of Nebraska and the Plains, called epic poems. He asked Neihardt if he had ever seen a photographic version of an epic poem.

“I have seen a lot, but never really something I would call an epic,” the professor told him, Eppridge said.

Forty years ago tomorrow, Eppridge captured what could be described as an epic photo and certainly one of the most famous images in modern American history: A mortally wounded Robert F. Kennedy lying cradled in the arms of an anguished hotel busboy named Juan Romero.

The slow-motion events of that night, June 5, 1968, remained with Eppridge forever.

“Every day I think about it,” he said, sitting in a wooden rocking chair as a thunderstorm boomed in the hills surrounding the Connecticut home he shares with his wife, and editor, Adrienne Aurichio. “Bad dreams go away. … I don’t think nightmares ever do.”

In 1966, Life magazine assigned Eppridge to cover Kennedy, the 42-year-old New York senator, former U.S. attorney general and brother to assassinated President John F. Kennedy, for a six-month assignment.

“He’s a superb photojournalist,” Donald M. Wilson, assistant publisher of Life at the time, said of Eppridge. “I worked there for many years, knew all the greats. He was excellent.”

In 1968, after Kennedy announced his intention to seek the Democratic nomination for president, Eppridge volunteered to cover his campaign. From state to state, in open limousines and among the throngs of people, the specter of the candidate’s brother’s tragic death always seemed to accompany them.

Eppridge was in Los Angeles the June evening when Kennedy won the California primary. Inside the Ambassador Hotel that night, he stood directly behind Kennedy and his wife, Ethel, as the candidate gave his victory speech - “now it’s on to Chicago” - to a crowded ballroom. Eppridge was in the kitchen, hanging tight to the sparsely protected candidate as he left the ballroom the same way he had entered it. The photographer was not far behind Kennedy when Sirhan Sirhan, a 24-year-old Palestinian whose motives were believed to be tied to Kennedy’s support of Israel, fired eight .22-caliber shots. One struck Kennedy in the head. He would die the next day.

“I have been living with this thing 40 years now,” Eppridge said. “There’s not a day that goes by that I don’t think, somehow, about him. Or that campaign. Or the consequences of his assassination.”

Eppridge, an avid outdoorsman who had slogged his way through a Vietnam stint and other conflicts for Life, immediately recognized the firecracker pops as gunshots. His thought that they came from a .25-caliber gun was off just a little.

Eppridge pushed himself and CBS cameraman Jim Wilson forward through the small, dense crowd stuffed in the narrow kitchen. He stopped briefly to photograph a wounded Paul Schrade, a United Auto Workers official. Then he continued to push and covered the 12 or so feet to the candidate.

Instinct took over. Emotion, for the moment, repressed. Eppridge crouched at Kennedy’s feet, the television light for Wilson’s camera eerily illuminating the scene. Bracketing the imprecise exposure, the first two grainy frames of Tri-X black and white film show Romero holding Kennedy’s head and looking down at him. In a third frame, backlit and underexposed, Romero looks up. The images after that show the bedlam that erupts.

As he recalls that night, Eppridge sits with a slouch. Steel and titanium rods run through him: He wears a back brace to help with the genetic osteoporosis intensified by years of carrying camera gear and bags. His gaze turns down. He reveals what Kennedy told him and others on the trail.

“There were something like 22,000 Americans killed because that [Vietnam] War didn’t end when [Kennedy] said he was going to end it. If he told us once he told us 20 times that ‘When, not if, but when I am president, that day the war ends. We’re out.’”

In April, Abrams published Eppridge’s book, A Time It Was: Bobby Kennedy in the Sixties. He had published an earlier book, Robert Kennedy: The Last Campaign, in 1993 that eventually sold out its 10,000 copies, but the results left him unsatisfied.

“The words really weren’t mine,” he said of that earlier effort, on the 25th anniversary of Kennedy’s death. “I wasn’t able to talk too much about what I felt.

“That didn’t get the message out as far as I was concerned. It’s important that we recognize and realize who this man was, and what he meant, and what might have been. Because, he certainly, historically, will be proved to be a most important figure in the history of this country.”

The new volume includes Eppridge’s own text - and pictures he didn’t know he had.

“One day, I heard this little yelp,” Eppridge recalled. His wife was cleaning out his unorganized archive, full of the cardboard boxes that Eppridge says all photographers use for storage. “She called to me and said. ‘You might want to see this.’”

She had uncovered more than 2,000 photographs - in unopened boxes - that were sent to him when Life magazine folded in 1972.

“You’d be off on the next assignment, and you just didn’t have time to look at what it was you did,” he said. “You’d always be looking to the future.”

Among the photos were 500 from his Kennedy assignment, including some that would become logical closers for his latest book, such as a motion-blurred, watery view from the photographers’ bus of the funeral procession as it approached Arlington National Cemetery.

Much of 2008 reminds Eppridge of the tumultuous ’60s: an unending war, an embattled White House. And then there is Democratic candidate Barack Obama, whose style has been compared to Kennedy’s.

Eppridge and his wife traveled to an April rally in Philadelphia to hear Obama speak. It was the first time Eppridge had ventured near politics of any sort in almost 40 years.

There were more than 20,000 people there and, unlike in 1968, enormous security. All serious candidates for the presidency, not just the party nominees, get Secret Service protection now. Kennedy did not even have police protection in Los Angeles.

“Security is incredible with this guy,” Eppridge said of Obama. “And I was glad to see it.”

When not watching the security at work, he studied Obama and the crowds.

“It’s fascinating to watch him work the crowds, and the crowds look the same,” he said. “And they look at him like God. And Bobby’s people did the same.”

Returning to Missouri to teach a workshop in the early 1970s, Eppridge went to his former mentor Neihardt, who asked to see the Kennedy photographs. He sat silently while going through the images, Eppridge recalled. When he finished, a half-minute passed before the poet looked up.

“You did it,” he told his former student. “That is an epic poem.”

christopher.assaf@baltsun.com

Bill Eppridge

Age: 70

Education: Bachelor’s degree in photojournalism

Career: Photographer for Life magazine where he covered Barbra Streisand in Paris, the 50th anniversary of the Soviet Revolution, the Beatles’ first visit to the U.S., civil unrest in Mississippi and the war in Vietnam; staff photographer for Sports Illustrated; has covered such things as the Olympics and the America’s Cup, the Mount St. Helens eruption and the Exxon Valdez oil spill in Alaska.

Awards: Twice named Photographer of the Year by the National Press Association while in college.

Books: A Time It Was: Bobby Kennedy in the Sixties; Robert Kennedy: The Last Campaign; provided photographs for Upland Passage: A Field Dog’s Education and Jake: A Labrador Puppy at Work and Play.

Personal: Lives in New Milford, Conn., with his wife, Adrienne Aurichio. She is also his editor.

Online

See a multimedia presentation on Bill Eppridge at baltimoresun.com/eppridge

John Geraghty · June 5, 2008

Priscilla Johnson McMillan on assassinations

It seems as though the International Herlad Tribune has picked up where the North American Newspaper Alliance left off (NANA was formed by British intelligence agent and James Bond creator Ian Fleming).

See the article bottlefed by Oswald’s NANA as referenced by COPA’s William Kelly here

Priscilla Johnson McMillan wrote a biography of Lee Harvey Oswadl. She acted as Marina Oswald’s minder, she met Lee Harvey Oswald in Russia and her husband wrote a book about James Earl Ray.

International Herald Tribune

Why assassination talk is taboo

By Priscilla Johnson McMillan

Wednesday, June 4, 2008

Shock ran through many of us when Hillary Clinton raised the specter of Robert Kennedy’s assassination 40 years ago this week to justify her decision to stay in the presidential race. Although Clinton regarded her comments as innocent, they were disturbing because fear for the safety of Barack Obama has been a disquieting undercurrent throughout the primary season. Clinton’s remarks only served as an incitement.

While writing a biography of Lee Harvey Oswald, I learned that there is a web of associations in the mind and emotions of the assassin that leads him toward his victim. Almost anything can contribute.

Oswald, for example, may have begun to consider committing an act of political violence as early as 1962, when he was living in Minsk, which was then in the Soviet Union. There, he heard a relative of his wife, Marina, recount in hushed, frightened tones the details of a shooting attempt on the Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev that had just taken place at a nearby hunting lodge.

Commenting on the secrecy that surrounded the attempt, Oswald said, “If this had happened in America, it would have been in all the newspapers and everyone would be talking about it.”

For Oswald, another suggestive event appears to have occurred on June 12, 1963, when civil rights leader Medgar Evers was slain by a sniper outside his home in Jackson, Mississippi, a city close to New Orleans, where Oswald by then was living.

But the associations that affected Oswald most had to do with President Kennedy himself. Oswald was attracted by Kennedy’s youth and the spirit of hope he conveyed. And there were personal resemblances. Kennedy was, like Oswald during the summer of 1963, a husband and father of a young daughter, with another child expected soon.

We know that these similarities were in Oswald’s mind because he talked about them to his wife, Marina. When the Kennedys’ child Patrick was born prematurely in August and died, the Oswalds took it to heart and were afraid that something similar would happen to their child.

Oswald had often told Marina that he wanted enough children for a “whole football team,” like the Kennedy family, and, during the summer of 1963, he boasted that he would be president or prime minister some day.

Not only does a chain of suggestion sometimes lead an assassin to his victim, the act of assassination itself is, to an appalling degree, contagious. As the convicted bank robber James Earl Ray watched reports of President Kennedy’s assassination on a rickety television set at the federal penitentiary in Jefferson City, Missouri, in 1963, he jumped up, a fellow convict later reported, and shouted that he was going to kill the Reverend Martin Luther King. Less than five years later, he did.

There are other signs pointing to the contagious nature of assassination, among them the succession from the Evers shooting in June 1963 to that of John Kennedy in November the same year to those of Malcolm X in 1965, King in April 1968, Robert Kennedy in June of that year, and, finally, the attempt on former Alabama governor George Wallace in a Maryland shopping center in 1972.

Not only is the crime of assassination contagious: Most people, at some level, know it. That knowledge accounts for the curtain of silence that until recently has enveloped the anxiety many people - and not only blacks - feel about the peril that constantly confronts Barack Obama. Even the dismay that greeted Mike Huckabee’s careless gaffe before the NRA recently failed to inhibit Hillary Clinton.

Clinton, who has been shielded by the Secret Service since 1992, raised the taboo subject, and in a way that could only lead emotionally troubled members of the public to thoughts of her rival for the nomination.

The trouble is that because of the contagiousness - and, for many, the parricidal appeal - of the act of assassination, Clinton’s intentions do not matter. A remark such as hers only compounds the atmosphere of suggestion.

Priscilla Johnson McMillan is author of “Marina and Lee.”

William Kelly · June 5, 2008

Priscilla Johnson McMillan on assassinations
It seems as though the International Herlad Tribune has picked up where the North American Newspaper Alliance left off (NANA was formed by British intelligence agent and James Bond creator Ian Fleming).

See the article bottlefed by Oswald's NANA as referenced by COPA's William Kelly here

Priscilla Johnson McMillan wrote a biography of Lee Harvey Oswadl. She acted as Marina Oswald's minder, she met Lee Harvey Oswald in Russia and her husband wrote a book about James Earl Ray.

International Herald Tribune

Why assassination talk is taboo

By Priscilla Johnson McMillan

Wednesday, June 4, 2008

Shock ran through many of us when Hillary Clinton raised the specter of Robert Kennedy's assassination 40 years ago this week to justify her decision to stay in the presidential race. Although Clinton regarded her comments as innocent, they were disturbing because fear for the safety of Barack Obama has been a disquieting undercurrent throughout the primary season. Clinton's remarks only served as an incitement.

While writing a biography of Lee Harvey Oswald, I learned that there is a web of associations in the mind and emotions of the assassin that leads him toward his victim. Almost anything can contribute.

Oswald, for example, may have begun to consider committing an act of political violence as early as 1962, when he was living in Minsk, which was then in the Soviet Union. There, he heard a relative of his wife, Marina, recount in hushed, frightened tones the details of a shooting attempt on the Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev that had just taken place at a nearby hunting lodge.

Commenting on the secrecy that surrounded the attempt, Oswald said, "If this had happened in America, it would have been in all the newspapers and everyone would be talking about it."

For Oswald, another suggestive event appears to have occurred on June 12, 1963, when civil rights leader Medgar Evers was slain by a sniper outside his home in Jackson, Mississippi, a city close to New Orleans, where Oswald by then was living.

But the associations that affected Oswald most had to do with President Kennedy himself. Oswald was attracted by Kennedy's youth and the spirit of hope he conveyed. And there were personal resemblances. Kennedy was, like Oswald during the summer of 1963, a husband and father of a young daughter, with another child expected soon.

We know that these similarities were in Oswald's mind because he talked about them to his wife, Marina. When the Kennedys' child Patrick was born prematurely in August and died, the Oswalds took it to heart and were afraid that something similar would happen to their child.

Oswald had often told Marina that he wanted enough children for a "whole football team," like the Kennedy family, and, during the summer of 1963, he boasted that he would be president or prime minister some day.

Not only does a chain of suggestion sometimes lead an assassin to his victim, the act of assassination itself is, to an appalling degree, contagious. As the convicted bank robber James Earl Ray watched reports of President Kennedy's assassination on a rickety television set at the federal penitentiary in Jefferson City, Missouri, in 1963, he jumped up, a fellow convict later reported, and shouted that he was going to kill the Reverend Martin Luther King. Less than five years later, he did.

There are other signs pointing to the contagious nature of assassination, among them the succession from the Evers shooting in June 1963 to that of John Kennedy in November the same year to those of Malcolm X in 1965, King in April 1968, Robert Kennedy in June of that year, and, finally, the attempt on former Alabama governor George Wallace in a Maryland shopping center in 1972.

Not only is the crime of assassination contagious: Most people, at some level, know it. That knowledge accounts for the curtain of silence that until recently has enveloped the anxiety many people - and not only blacks - feel about the peril that constantly confronts Barack Obama. Even the dismay that greeted Mike Huckabee's careless gaffe before the NRA recently failed to inhibit Hillary Clinton.

Clinton, who has been shielded by the Secret Service since 1992, raised the taboo subject, and in a way that could only lead emotionally troubled members of the public to thoughts of her rival for the nomination.

The trouble is that because of the contagiousness - and, for many, the parricidal appeal - of the act of assassination, Clinton's intentions do not matter. A remark such as hers only compounds the atmosphere of suggestion.

Priscilla Johnson McMillan is author of "Marina and Lee."

Hey, thanks for this one John, I'm so glad PJM is staying in the game, and bringing so many new metaphors to the table - the "parricidal appeal of the act of assassination" and "compounding the atmosphere of suggestion."

I like the concept of "contagious assassination," as it was contagious among those who were successful at doing it.

But here's PJM, really stretching it to apply a totally psych motive to the accused assassin, motives that just don't work when applied to the patsy.

She seems to be setting the stage for another Hinkley/Chapman role model.

BK

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