48 years ago

• I would have voted for Nixon. He saw Kennedy cheat and get away with it, even joke about it (‘my daddy promised a landslide’), so understandably he got scared and tried to cheat in ’72 when he would have won anyway. Sad. Even though Dick was no great shakes either: goodbye, gold backing; hello, affirmative action. But in ’60? Sure.
• I don’t blame Kennedy for being a Cold Warrior. One of the only things he believed in.
• The story about him starting the end of fedora-wearing by not wearing a hat to his inauguration is a myth. He wore a hat. (It started to go away in sunny California in the ’50s as cars got lower.)
• I don’t seriously follow the theories but believe Oswald was an American agent, not a lone loon or Soviet agent, recruited by intel while in the Corps and in a phony-defector spy program.
• So who put him and the grassy-knoll gunman up to it? The CIA? Some say JFK wanted to curb the Fed (issued lots of United States notes before he was killed, which were withdrawn afterwards). Johnson? Well, they hated each other. Did the Mob (Bobby turned on them) have that much power to pull it off, using a CIA operative like Oswald?
• Some say each new president is shown the uncut Zapruder film: ‘Any questions?’
• Did it change history? I’d like to think had it not happened, the cultural disaster later that decade wouldn’t have happened. But I don’t think it changed much. He would have buried Goldwater (whom I would have voted for), then made up the Tonkin Gulf attack to really get started in Vietnam. The country still would have turned against the war so the Democrat would have lost to Nixon in ’68.
• He was a big nothing but God have mercy on him.

Labels: fedoras, history, politics