SECRET GOVERNMENT

"Did it ever occur to you, Kerry, that one of the best ways to hide something is right out in plain view, under everybody's nose?"

Perhaps hiding something out in the open was in fact the solution to the John Fitzgerald Kennedy murder.

An abundance of evidence, almost pointedly ignored by the Warren Commission, is to be found in the 26 Volumes of testimony and exhibits published by the government shortly after the Report was issued.

Note 41

There we learn that people who could not have been Oswald impersonated him previous to the assassination, that eye-witness testimony indicates Oswald was on the second floor of the Texas School Book Depository within seconds after the shots were fired, that the man who killed police officer Tippet made his escape in a car -- when it is known that Lee had never learned to drive -- and finally, that there occurred a host of suspicious activity in the vicinity of Dealey Plaza before, during and after the assassination that casts more than reasonable doubt on the lone-assassin theory.

Keeping in mind the assertion conveyed to me by Stan Jamison, that certain of the conspirators at the operational level wanted the mystery to come unraveled, so as to expose the people who had hired them (or at least to heat things up enough to make their ruling class bosses subject to blackmail) it is actually possible to surmise that the many conflicts between the Report and the evidence were intentional.

Did Brother-in-law and his accessories want to see just how far they could go in making the actual truth available to the public, confident of the probability that it would be safely ignored long enough for them to escape prosecution? Such a ploy is not as reckless as it may seem if we keep in mind that the actual assassins would have been positioned so as to take many important and powerful people with them if they went to prison. That would explain Richard Nixon's sweating in the Watergate tapes about E. Howard Hunt's power to make public further crimes, linked somehow in Nixon's mind with "the whole Bay of Pigs thing," in which Nixon obviously felt himself to be implicated.

Brother-in-law seemed to have devoted an unusual amount of thought to what "people," the membership of the general public, do and do not like. In that respect his intuition seems to have been keenly informed.

Among observations typical of his consciousness of public will was a statement he made many times: "You know, Kerry, the general public becomes very excited about things for a short interval, but it has a very brief attention span. Emotions don't run high about anything for long."

"Yeah, one of my teachers in high school used to tell us that a Greek philosopher once said, 'The wrath of the people is great, but their memory is short.'"

From that and similar comments I gathered vaguely that he was already looking forward to a day when it would be safe for the assassins to win public acceptance.

"Kerry, did you ever notice how people just love to eavesdrop?"

"That's why books about writing say it is always a good bet to open a story with dialogue."

"What about the idea of building a whole political movement on that idea -- that people love to spy on the lives of others. Would it grow fast or wouldn't it?"

"Sounds to me like it would work."

"Have you ever thought much about the possibilities of electronic politics? You know, you should."

"I keep telling him he should read more science-fiction," Slim contributed, speaking to Brother-in-law and looking at me. "Open up that narrow one-track mind of his with those horse-blinders on both sides, but he don't want to hear that."

"Science fiction bores me," I complained in reply. "I like to read relevant stuff about politics in fiction or non-fiction. Escapist literature isn't my bag."

"But, but, but, but, but..." Slim said in typical fashion when he wanted to point out to anyone that they were ignoring something.

Brother-in-law chimed in with, "Kerry, they can actually design secret governments based upon clandestine electronic communications. That's dealt with in some of the science-fiction Slim is talking about and it is also going to happen in the real world. Someday there will be individuals with microphones planted in their heads so that many people can hear what is going on in their lives. And they will be the centers of invisible governments, that everyone equipped to listen will belong to -- like big houses with one person at the center of every one of them. What do you think of that idea?"

I thought it both bizarre and impossible, but I did not want to say as much to them. "Yeah, that sounds like a pretty clever way to resist the government."

Note 42

"Kerry, what do you think of various organizations in the intelligence community joining forces for recruiting purposes, by implanting listening devices on individuals and observing their behavior until who they should work for is decided on the basis of what kind of people they are?"

Again, I expressed agreement to what seemed both irrelevant and unlikely.

"Remember Adolph Eichmann's plea at his trial in Israel that he was only following orders? I think that should be a legitimate defense. Don't you?"

"Like Paul Krassner said in The Realist: Where were all the defenders of Caryl Chessman at the Eichmann trial?"

Chessman was a confessed rapist in California whose execution was postponed for many years because he also happened to be quite intellectually gifted.

"Liberals are so hypocritical," I added. Actually, I believed in civil disobedience rather than blindly following orders, but again I saw no reason to say as much at this point to this particular individual. Agreeing with him as much as I could seemed by far the more prudent policy.

Note 43

I told Brother-in-law about a visit to Rockefeller Center's Radio City Music Hall that I made when pulling temporary additional duty in the Marines, on liberty in New York, stationed in Washington, D.C. for a Technique of Instruction Competition. "The Rockettes, in Israeli Army uniforms, with plastic submachine guns over their shoulders, marched out on the stage and the crowd went wild. I felt like I was at a Nazi rally. I think people who are persecuted sometimes acquire the characteristics of their oppressors."

Although he expressed agreement at my horror, I was sure it was for the wrong reasons. For when I spoke of what Hitler said of the power of brass bands to stir up the people, he was equally supportive. Besides that, I had listened many times as he spoke cheerfully of Goebbels' wife suggesting lampshades be manufactured from the skins of murdered Jews: "They tried it for awhile; it worked."

"Speaking of Hermann Goering, Kerry, you know he also protected Jews from the Gestapo." With characteristic inconsistency, Brother-in-law spoke as if he deemed that a point in Goering's favor. There was just no figuring this guy.

His attitudes about freedom seemed equally ambivalent. "You know, Kemil Ataturk was a strongman who took over the government of Turkey and directed it firmly out of poverty and backwardness into the industrial age. Something like that couldn't have happened there under a democratic regime."

"Yes. I studied him in college. Whenever he felt overworked, he used to take a vacation and plunge himself into a sex orgy. Now that man was all right. I can identify with someone like that."

Strong character was something that appealed to us both in others. "You know, I hated Batista's government in Cuba," I told him. "When Castro was fighting Batista I admired Fidel enormously. Then he got into power and executed so many of Batista's henchmen in the carnival atmosphere of those war crimes trials. That disappointed me. But remember that one guy, that general who told them all to go to hell? 'Of course I burned homes and killed women and children,' he said. 'I was a soldier. That was my job ' And when they marched him up to be shot, he swore at them all the way, calling them names right up until the moment he was killed. Now I have to admire a man like that, no matter whose side he is on."

"Yes, me too," Brother-in-law answered.

One of my theories to explain the popularity of John Kennedy was my notion that the American people had never matured politically to the point of outgrowing their need for royalty. "That's what's wrong with them," I said to Brother-in-law, "the Kennedys remind them of a royal family. They've never outgrown their need for a king. At heart they are still a bunch of Englishmen."

I was also intolerant of anything political that was in any way whatsoever tainted with religious faith. Eisenhower's "Pray for Peace" program had infuriated me. So again I was able to agree with Brother-in-law's conclusions, for reasons different than his, when said he thought Israel ought to be abolished.

"So do I. If the British were not Christians influenced by the prophecy in the Bible, that land would have gone back to its Arab residents at the end of the war. I don't think property rights, once usurped, ought to extend beyond one generation. What if a foreign power gave the United States, the freest, noblest and most industrially advanced nation in the world, back the Indians?"

At such times I did not think about what I said about giving the Southwestern U.S. back to Mexico, therefore the inconsistency did not occur to me -- but then there was no religious issue involved in that dispute.

Not only did Gary seemed pleased with my response to his proposal to abolish Israel, he acted like he would probably being doing something about it, such as joining a movement for that purpose, in the near future.

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CONFESSION TO CONSPIRACY TO ASSASSINATE JFK
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