by Michael Green, 19 Sep 2007
Copyright 2007 Michael Green
The purpose of Bugliosi’s Reclaiming History is to defend the integrity of the USG National Security State by grossly distorting its nature and function, by disguising that it is the servant of factions of the ruling classes within the United States, and by pretending that the people who control it did not and could not contemplate the assassination of a democratically elected President whose recalcitrant politics fell outside their parameters. According to Bugliosi, only the lunatic can seriously entertain that Kennedy was murdered because he pursued détente with the USSR, championed nuclear disarmament, decided not to back the invasion of the Bay of Pigs with US military might, made a peaceful resolution of the Cuban Missile Crisis when the Joint Chiefs wanted invasion and war, and decided to withdraw US troops from Vietnam rather than pursue by brute force an imperial venture in Southeast Asia. According to Bugliosi, Oswald is not just the murderer of Kennedy, he is the only one involved, and he is nothing but “a first class ‘nut.’” (945) Thus, Kennedy’s murder is deprived of any political significance whatsoever, assassinating him yet again.
Bugliosi considers himself at liberty to mock those who appreciate the truth of the opposing world view, inter alia, “conspiracy icon Vincent Salandria [for claiming that] ‘the killing of Kennedy represented a coup d’état.’…I suppose that since a coup d’état is defined as a sudden, unconstitutional change of state policy and leadership ‘by a group of persons in authority,’… you couldn’t even have a coup without the involvement, cooperation, and complicity of groups like the FBI, CIA, and military-industrial complex.” Individuals who entertain such notions are so wrapped up in “their fertile delusions” that they substitute finding a motive for finding evidence, make no connections between, e.g., the CIA and Oswald, and thus sadly show nothing but “this crazy, incredibly childlike reasoning and mentality that has driven and informed virtually all of the pro-conspiracy sentiment in the Kennedy assassination from the beginning.” (985-987)
This essay answers Bugliosi by showing direct involvement of the Warren Commission and the US military in the cover-up, and by demonstrating that the assassination was a state murder, without attempting at this point the far more difficult and far less important task of saying which individuals did precisely what. All of the organs of state power participated in the cover-up; indeed none could do so without confidence in the cooperation of all the others. Some did so as part of their role in the murder, some like the FBI did so reluctantly, but there were no institutional whistleblowers because the consensus of persons with political power was firmly opposed to Kennedy’s foreign policy and they used their control of the organs of state power to kill him, and then replaced his foreign policy with theirs.
