The famous expression “Murder will out” is credited to both Geoffrey Chaucer and Don Quixote. Shakespeare put the same idea a bit more colorfully: “Murder, though it have no tongue, will speak with most miraculous organ.” It is true that murder and its circumstances do struggle to expose themselves despite all human efforts to slam down the lid of secrecy.
President John Kennedy has been dead almost fourteen years, but his ghost will not lie down. The Warren Commission, which had a monopoly on the murder investigation in the precious months when the trail was fresh, raised more questions than it answered. The steady stream of books that continues to flow from the typewriters of amateur detectives may someday rank John F. Kennedy with Abraham Lincoln as the most-written-about Americans.
As soon as President Kennedy was shot, there was an immediate attempt to pin the blame on a conspiracy of rightwingers, oil millionaires, and Dallas residents. After Lee Harvey Oswald was caught, gave the Communist clenched-fist salute for photographers, and demanded a lawyer who was famous for defending Communists, the establishment reversed its field and assured us that Oswald was a loner and there could not possibly have been any conspiracy.
In order to investigate the assassination and come up with this result, it was necessary to take the position that a single bullet miraculously zigzagged through both President Kennedy and Governor John Connally and remained virtually intact. It was necessary to ignore conflicting testimony, inexplicable coincidences, and a series of unexplained deaths of persons whose lives crossed the Kennedy assassination trail.
The official Warren Commission conclusion is that President Kennedy was murdered by Lee Harvey Oswald who acted alone, without any co-conspirators, from psychotic motives that had nothing to do with his political beliefs or affiliations. The big majority of Americans remain unconvinced.
One reason that the people remain unsold on the Warren Commission theory is that it is obvious that Oswald was an authentic Marxist who maintained links with both Soviet and Cuban Communists. He had spent more time in Russia than in Dallas. In September 1963, when Castro was announcing that President Kennedy was in greater danger of assassination than he was, Oswald went to Mexico City and conferred at the Cuban Embassy.
Perhaps the continued life of the Kennedy ghost is also an unexpected byproduct of Watergate. After all, Watergate proved conclusively that conspiracies do exist. John Ehrlichman went to jail for the crime of conspiracy, and there was no liberal outcry against imprisoning him on that specific charge.
Admitting the existence of a Communist conspiracy, however, is the great liberal taboo. Liberals abolished the Senate and House Internal Security Committees because they think there are no longer any conspiracies to investigate.
Even though it is very late to start, perhaps a Congressional investigation of Kennedy’s assassination can dig up some of the answers to the remaining mysteries. How did Oswald get advance information of Kennedy’s Dallas tour in time to obtain a job high up in the building the President’s car would pass?
Oswald had gone to Russia in 1959 and renounced his U.S. citizenship. How did it happen that the State Department official who granted him a return visa subsequently turned up in a political intelligence job on our SALT negotiating team? Why did the Soviets allow Oswald’s Russian wife to emigrate to America?
Now that Castro wants U.S. recognition, he might even explain to Congress why Oswald went to the Cuban Embassy in Mexico and what he did there. A good Congressional investigation could prove that murder can “speak,” as the poets said, despite the Warren Commission’s attempt to silence its tongue.
