So now 60 years have passed since JFK was killed in Dallas. And because “the media” (whatever that means today) loves anniversaries we’re getting a fresh flow of interviews, articles, fascinating algorithmically created animations and podcasts on the subject of the assassination … and, you know, “what really happened.”
As someone who remembers 11/22/63 vividly and has followed the various investigations and reporting on the killing extensively (some say “obsessively”) for six decades, one of the recent interviews stands out. “JFK: What the Doctors Saw”, a documentary now on Paramount+ gathers the surviving team of doctors who were present when Kennedy was wheeled into the Parkland Hospital emergency room.
What I find interesting here is that nothing these gentlemen say has changed since that day. Nothing.
In fact, if you too are an obsessive, you can dial up any number of YouTube videos of these very same doctors over the years, usually separately, saying exactly what they’re saying now. Namely … (trigger warning alert for all you who believe America is so exceptional conspiracies never happen here) … wherever else shots might have been fired from, Kennedy was hit twice from the front. Once through the throat, a wound that was quickly obliterated for a tracheotomy incision, and then, most critically the enormous head wound that blew out a large part of the back of his skull.
Allow me to repeat: these are exactly the same wounds these same doctors described that day, in the immediate aftermath and ever since. Nothing they say has changed, even though hype around this documentary suggests some kind of new understanding. In other words, this “news”, while forever relevant is very, very old.
What I finally had to accept — as part of growing up and acknowledging the world as it is, not as it should be — is that, A: There will never be a definitive judgment on JFK’s assassination, in part because B: The case long ago became such a toxic stew of official and lunatic speculation that credible political leaders and professional reporters, people whose reputations might otherwise move public opinion toward acceptance of what the Parkland doctors have always said, edged further and further away from contact with the story. They too eacknowledging as I did that this will never be settled and that public association with anything but the (deeply compromised) Warren Commission conclusion is, you know, just bad career mojo.
I could go on ad nauseum, and I have. But today’s takeaway is … what it has always been.
The Parkland doctors have always described the throat entrance wound and the massive exit wound on the rear of Kennedy’s head in the same way. In other words … as result of shots from in front of the motorcade. If you want to get into the pretzel logic of how Lee Harvey Oswald — the sad, lone commie malcontent recently encamped in Dallas, the most rabidly right-wing big city in the USA, while simltaneously interacting with an improbable collection of mobbed-up spooks — pulled off two shots from the front while perched 100 yards behind JFK, well you’ve always had the Warren Commision to buck you up.