Unlike previous anniversaries of the Kennedy murder, where the New York Times has attempted to mount a serious defence of the discredited Warren Commission, the Grey Old Lady has apparently decided that strategy no longer works — and that, instead, it’s going to treat the 50th anniversary of the assassination as something to laugh about.
This started with the Errol Morris interview with Josiah Thompson – restyled “Tink” for the occasion and cackling over the Dealey Plaza atrocity – but it was apparently just the Times’ first foray. Now the paper has followed up with a yet more trivial piece: a two-page article dedicated to a self-styled “performance artist” who has apparently bought himself the cemetery plot next to Lee Harvey Oswald’s, in Fort Worth.
You can read the story, if you’ve time on your hands, here. But why is this news?
Let’s be charitable and assume that he really is a “performance artist” and not just another paid timewaster like the individual who showed up wearing a pope outfit and carrying a “CIA killed Kennedy” sign at the LA premiere of JFK. I interviewed that fellow on video for the BBC and he cracked rather rapidly under my devastating barrage of questions, admitting that he’d been paid to show up in the silly outfit and “hadn’t been doing this for very long.” Doing what? Spreading disinfo and eating up media time? On whose behalf?
Whether or not the dude with the cemetery plot is on the level, this isn’t news. It certainly isn’t worth two pages in any newspaper. Fifty years ago the President of the United States was murdered in cold blood on the streets of Dallas, Texas, and a Texan became the country’s unelected leader. The assassins and the intellectual authors of the killing have yet to be identified. A committee composed mainly of the murdered President’s enemies declared the crime (and the subsequent murder of a policeman) solved, blaming the whole thing on a lone individual who had been denied a lawyer and murdered in police custody. This is news: interesting, serious stuff – worthy of a serious newspaper article, almost!
Stand by for more silly-season pieces from the NYT, and an exclusive interview with Tom Hanks about his next big Hollywood movie, KEEP MOVING! THERE’S NOTHING TO SEE HERE!
the president and the provocateur 