“Conspiracy” is a word that produces in the liberal establishment one of the most intriguing brands of schizophrenia known to modern psychiatry. The liberals are conspiracy-paranoid when they contemplate alleged conservative conspiracies, but conspiracy-blind when they look at pro-Communist conspiracies.
No hunting dogs ever tracked down their prey more eagerly than the liberals when they salaciously researched, investigated, and pilloried with pitiless publicity every bit and piece of the Watergate conspiracy. They shamelessly licked their chops when John Ehrlichman was convicted for the crime of conspiracy.
In instigating and prosecuting suits against corporations for violations of anti-trust laws, liberal bureaucrats have been so eager to weave a fabric of circumstantial evidence to prove the crime of conspiracy that they persuaded some courts to accept the doctrine of “conscious parallelism.” Thus, when business groups submit identical prices on public bids, this is presented as evidence of conscious parallelism, which translates into business conspiracy.
When the news of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy first hit a stunned nation on November 22, 1963, the liberal establishment had a spasm reaction and made immediate accusations about “right-wing plot” and “the shame of Dallas.” When it turned out that the assassin was Lee Harvey Oswald, a pro-Communist who had renounced his citizenship to live in the Soviet Union, married a Russian, had close and recent contacts with Cuban Communists, and was even a member of a Castro front called the Fair Play for Cuba Committee, the liberal establishment reversed direction.
The prime objective of the Warren Commission (whose most famous members were then Supreme Court Justice Earl Warren and Congressman Gerald Ford) became, not to find out who killed Kennedy and why, but to prove that the murder was not the result of a conspiracy. In order to sustain that preordained proposition, it was necessary to assert that Oswald acted alone — and that was repeated with near-religious fervor.
The House Assassinations Committee, after a two-year, $5.8 million investigation, finally concluded last month that Kennedy “was probably assassinated as the result of a conspiracy.” The Committee did not find out who the conspirators were because the trail is cold; too many have died, and the Committee’s money has run out. But the evidence of the conspiracy is significant: a fourth shot was fired that fateful day which all admit could not have come from Oswald’s gun.
How sad that a conspiracy to assassinate a U.S. President will probably now remain forever unsolved. And sadder still is the fact that the conspiracy remained uninvestigated for 14 years because of the preconceived notions of the Warren Commission.
An investigation should seek the facts — not be circumscribed by the ideological predilection of the liberal establishment that, if the personalities lean toward the Communist side, there can be no conspiracy, but if they lean to the conservative side a conspiracy can be presumed.
One of the principal problems in the SALT II negotiations with the Soviets is verification of compliance by means of space satellites. Our satellite verification of SALT compliance is now compromised, perhaps hopelessly, by the delivery of a top-secret technical manual for our KH-11 satellite surveillance system by spy William Kampiles to the Soviet Union. This former CIA employee was convicted last November 17 for stealing the manual and selling it to the Soviets for $3,000. The secrets he sold were worth millions; indeed, they may have been priceless.
Time was when neither Congress nor the courts was conspiracy-blind. In the Communist Control Act of 1954, Congress proclaimed: “The Congress finds and declares that the Communist Party of the United States, although purportedly a political party, is in fact an instrumentality of a conspiracy to overthrow the Government of the United States.” And in upholding the conviction of top Communists in the 1951 case of Dennis v. United States, Justice Jackson declared: “What really is under review here is a conviction of conspiracy, after a trial for conspiracy, on an indictment charging conspiracy, brought under a statute outlawing conspiracy.”
The liberal establishment to the contrary notwithstanding, conspiracies do exist. Our national survival and the safety of our Presidents may depend on taking off our blinders and facing facts, even when they may not accord with our prejudices.
