[Note: My podcast partner Greg Budell, longtime radio host at WACV 93.1 FM in Montgomery, Alabama, wrote this terrific piece for a local publication and was kind enough to share it with us.]
Boomers, this month, a good number of us will say, “Hard to believe it’s 60 years since JFK”. The anniversary must be more than a mere remembrance.
Other than women, there is no topic I’ve studied more voraciously than the events of November 22, 1963. I was a kid that day but had learned enough American history (as opposed to today’s approved history narrative) to know that 3 Presidents had been assassinated.
I believed, as most did then, that such an event could never happen again because government had learned something about Presidential protection after 3 dead Presidents.
It was 19-friggin-63! Not the Dark Ages. In the aftermath of Dallas, as a country, we naively bought the “lone assassin” theory pushed by the then-trusted media. That lone assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, didn’t survive the weekend. Dallas police, in an incalculable act of security ineptitude, allowed the self-described “patsy” Oswald to get murdered on live TV. I was watching.
“They just shot Oswald!” I shouted from the Budell living room. My parents, a room away in the kitchen, replied, “That’s not funny, Gregory Benjamin!”.
It wasn’t long before books (starting with Mark Lane’s “Rush to Judgement”) began asking the questions a diligent media should have asked on 11/22/63. The world we live in today was predicted by President Eisenhower in his prescient farewell address in 1961. It should be read in its entirety, but these perspicacious excerpts specifically warned America about today- and what we are witnessing in real-time.
“In this revolution, research has become central; it also becomes more formalized, complex, and costly. A steadily increasing share is conducted for, by, or at the direction of the Federal government. Today, the solitary inventor, tinkering in his shop, has been overshadowed by task forces of scientists in laboratories and testing fields.
“In the same fashion, the free university, historically the fountainhead of free ideas and scientific discovery, has experienced a revolution in the conduct of research. Partly because of the huge costs involved, a government contract becomes virtually a substitute for intellectual curiosity. For every old blackboard there are now hundreds of new electronic computers. The prospect of domination of the nation's scholars by Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money is ever present and is gravely to be regarded.
“Yet, in holding scientific research and discovery in respect, as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientifictechnological elite.”
Welcome to 2023. 60 years on, we are there. Or should I say, “we are theirs”?
Here’s one more like for Ike- “We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes’. Ike didn’t name the Internet specifically, but Big Tech today willingly censors free speech as directed by DC political powerbrokers. They are the scientifictechnological “elite” who are, in fact, endangering our liberties as Eisenhower warned.
They’re elite, alright. Polite society prohibits me from inserting the proper noun for the adjective here. Most Americans today were not around to witness- to feel- the tenor of America change in the snap of a finger. A bright and hopeful United States was quickly plunged into war by the dour scoundrel who succeeded JFK, Lyndon Baines Johnson.
In our Great American Numbness, little interference was put up as Johnson established an enormous government grift called The Great Society. Greatness was never realized but spending trillions proved money can’t buy prosperity.
It does buy votes. Votes are power.
Filmmaker Oliver Stone opened his 1993 hit “JFK” with the Eisenhower farewell speech, thus producing a movie with the conclusion at the beginning. From that open, the movie offers an entertaining mix of fact and theory about what really happened on November 22, 1963. “JFK” is not a documentary. The film drives home the point that our leaders do not serve at the pleasure of we, the people.
They serve themselves to serve at the direction of an entrenched bureaucracy that throws enough crumbs in our direction to keep us quiet.
JFK was wise to this. After being humiliated by the CIA’s horribly failed attempt to overthrow Fidel Castro, Kennedy promised to scatter the CIA into a thousand pieces. Instead, his brain was scattered into a thousand bits on a Dallas highway.
This past April, in my never-ending quest for fresh takes on JFK’s assassination, I came across a YouTube channel called “America’s Untold Stories.” It is hosted by Eric Hunley and Mark Groubert. I was so taken with Groubert’s storytelling (packed with an incredible “untold” volume of new info) I reached out for an interview. Mark is now a regular on my Thursday afternoon show at 3:30 every week (NewsTalk 93.1FM).
This engaging savant is amazing. I hope you’ll tune in. Among his many career experiences was time spent working with Oliver Stone on his 2021 follow-up film, “JFK Revisited”. Space prohibits a deeper dive here, but I urge you to check out America’s Untold Stories on YouTube and Rumble.
Groubert’s investigative reporting and his research for Oliver Stone combine for a gold mine of fascinating finds.
Some reading this may ask, “Why not leave this alone? This is crackpot conspiracy theorism”.
For one, JFK’s living nephew, Robert Kennedy Jr. has stated his belief that the US government not only killed his uncle in ’63, but his own father 5 years later. Nobody’s chasing him with a straight jacket. He’s running for President.
We celebrate our Veterans this month. These men and women who gave the best years of their lives for a strong, safe America are witnessing a horror show.
The entrenched bureaucracy has one of their own back in the White House. We are again involved in unwinnable wars, spending America into bankruptcy protecting everyone’s border except OURS. Insane. We owe our Vets a better outcome for their sacrifices.
As America closes in on its 250th birthday, we owe ourselves a truthful history and a recommitment to preserving our liberties. We must continue to ask questions and demand honest answers.
America’s story must be one where we learn from mistakes so as not to repeat them. Yet 60 years postDallas, we are, in fact, repeating them. We can’t have an honest history while the truth remains its elusive mistress.
Written with gratitude to all who have served, may God bless you all.
David, you speak for me as well. I, too, was but 12 at the time and until just a few years ago accepted the government version. Now, after the Russian hoax, the COVID debacle, the free speech clampdown orchestrated by Bidenesta's and the Biden attempt to jail his opponent for 2024, my eyes are opened. I trust no one in government and take nothing for certain from what I am told by those who speak for it. It's lies everywhere you look.
Time passing is relentless. JFK's assassination was two days before my 10th birthday but the memory of that day is still clear. I was at Edward A White elementary school on Fort Benning, Georgia. It had been a rough couple of years with my father having deployed to south Florida to help establish a MASH hospital for the Bay of Pigs invasion April of 1961. That was followed 18 months later by the Cuba Missile Crisis, October of 1962. He was deployed a lot during those uncertain times and as the oldest of six kids I had to help Mom with my siblings. Naturally she worried which in turn worried me. As a little kid I didn't really understand what was going on big picture but when your Mom is fretting and crying it has it's effects on you. And so it was in the middle of the school day November 22, 1963 our teachers started crying, school was stopped, and we were sent home. We didn't know why but when I got home my mother was at the kitchen table crying, my dad, a combat medic drafted in WW2, who served in Korea for 18 months, and would later go on to serve two tours in Viet Nam, the toughest man I have ever known was walking the house with tears in his eyes. Yeah, I remember November 22, 1963 and have, every year, for the last 59 years.