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History Will Not Absolve Us: Orwellian control, public denial, and the murder of President Kennedy, by E. Martin Schotz. Published by Kurtz, Ulmer and DeLucia, Brookline, Massachusetts, 1996. 326 pages. $27.50.
One might expect a book on the Kennedy case written by a man who can put "M.D." after his name to dwell extensively on the medical evidence, which for so long has been a flashpoint of differing opinion and debate.
But E. Martin Schotz, M.D., a psychologist who practices in JFK's hometown of Boston, does nothing of the sort. He is of that school of thought that what happened in the JFK assassination has been patently obvious since the early going, to "anyone who knew how to look and was willing to do so." As he states in his Introduction, he and a group of like-minded individuals "came long ago to the conclusion that President Kennedy was the victim of a high-level CIA conspiracy," adding that he uses the term "CIA" to refer collectively to all American military intelligence agencies.
Readers may recognize the name E. Martin Schotz from the concluding paragraphs in Gaeton Fonzi's 1993 book The Last Investigation. He is the contributor to a "round-robin correspondence" to which author Fonzi refers, who observed that "To know the truth --- as opposed to only believe the truth --- is to face an awful terror and to no longer be able to evade responsibility." Most Americans believe there was a conspiracy to kill JFK, the reasoning goes, but don't want to know it, because that would mean having to do something about it.
This is at the heart of one of Schotz' central premises: that holding American citizens in a state of confusion in which anything can be believed, but nothing can be known for sure, is one of the primary means of keeping us politically impotent.
History Will Not Absolve Us is an anthology. Its centerpiece is a 1995 letter from Schotz to attorney Vincent Salandria, who was one of the first to write critically of the Warren Report, and is a member of the aforementioned round-robin correspondence. The letter occupies about twenty-five pages of the book. The remaining 250-odd pages, presented as appendices, give the reader the background necessary to understand the letter's assertions. Authors whose work appear here range from Schotz to Salandria to Raymond Marcus, to Fidel Castro and Nikita Khrushchev.
One of the central theses of History Will Not Absolve Us is that the conspiracy to assassinate JFK was acceptable to the American Establishment because it did not upset our constitutional process. There really was no coup d' etat, Schotz believes; the dead president was replaced according to constitutional law, and it was business as usual. It seems to me this is a matter of semantics. Changing the head of state using the bullet over the ballot, as the expression goes, is certainly acting outside of constitutional law.
The CIA bumped the President, Schotz writes, because he departed from its Cold War blueprint for dealing with the Soviet Union, and on the critical issue of peaceful coexistence with socialism. "As far as I'm concerned," Schotz writes to Salandria, "in confronting the murder of JFK we are not confronted with the task of repairing something that has been injured. We are confronted with the task of addressing a society that in 1963 was already profoundly ill, and if anything has become sicker in the intervening years. At the core of this illness is that mentality which pursues anti-communism and the Cold War above all else, a mentality which will subordinate any crime, including the threat to annihilate mankind, in pursuit of defeating this supposed enemy. I reiterate, what did Kennedy in was his effort to depart from this insanity."
But how did the CIA get away with this regicide? Somehow we embraced a collective denial, aided and abetted by a willing media, from both the left and right. The only public official to seriously investigate the circumstances of the assassinaton --- Jim Garrison --- was victimized by this same media in a well-orchestrated campaign to discredit him. Schotz uses the example of Garrison to illustrate the notion that there was an Orwellian use of language as a form of mind control. "The one public official in the entire country who courageously pursued the truth of the assassination of the President at enormous personal and professional cost was systematically labeled 'irresponsible and self-seeking.'"
The Nation magazine comes under special scrutiny and consideration. Schotz calls the defense of the Warren Commission by The Nation (and other leading lights of left/liberal thought), "disillusioning." Here, Dr. Schotz does invoke his professional expertise. Rather than jump to the conclusion that this defense was out of character, he argues, one should consider that the true character of the patient --- in this case, the liberal/left establishment --- had not been previously understood.
Before the Warren Commission published its final report, The Nation ran a Harold Feldman article that brought together evidence suggesting Lee Oswald had Intelligence connections. Simultaneously, The Nation stated editorially that while that was important, everyone should wait to see what the Commission concluded. "At first glance this position seems fair and opened-minded," Schotz writes. "However, if we think about it, we see something else. There is a big problem in The Nation's position which should have been obvious to us from the outset. If there was not U.S. governmental involvement in the murder, one would expect the government to be able to investigate the assassination; but what if there was? After all, Oswald certainly looked like a low-level CIA agent. Would it be reasonable to assume that the Warren Commission could actually entertain and honestly investigate the possibility that there had been a CIA conspiracy? Did such a question ever occur to [editor] Carey McWilliams and The Nation? It had to. And yet nowhere did they address this question to their readers. And this is critical."
Some of the essays presented in the book's appendices are positively eye-opening, at least to me; I don't pretend to be the most sophisticated or best-informed student of the assassination. A case in point is the text of a speech delivered by Fidel Castro the day after the assassination. It is simply astonishing, if this document is to be believed, what was known to Castro about Oswald in so short a time. "How strange that this former marine should go to the Soviet Union," Castro said, "and try to become a Soviet citizen, and that the Soviets should not accept him, that he should say at the American Embassy that he intended to disclose to the Soviet Union the secrets of everything he learned while he was in the U.S. service..." This, one day after the assassination, when Oswald was still alive!
One of the strangest parts of History Will Not Absolve Us comes toward the end. There are two excerpts, or "dialogues," from a play written by Schotz in 1984, which he says he wrote to investigate the logic of war and the logic of peace. In one of the dialogues, JFK and Allen Dulles have a conversation in heaven (although if you accept the idea of an afterlife, it's hard to believe JFK and Dulles would end up in the same place). Kennedy is sitting in a rocking chair when Dulles comes sauntering along.
Dulles: (friendly) Well, hello, Jack.The dialogue continues. Dulles does most of the talking. He tells JFK that he, JFK, had assaulted democracy by first running on an anti-communist platform, then turning away from it after his election. And the people, Dulles says --- meaning the CIA, apparently --- had the right to correct that mistake. Dulles says that if JFK had suffered a fatal stroke instead of being assassinated, the transition of power would have worked just the same: "We didn't take over the government, we just shot you." At the end of this dialogue, Kennedy not only accepts what Dulles says, he asks his forgiveness!
Kennedy: (jumps to feet) You! You dare speak to me?
Dulles: Why Jack, what's the matter?
Kennedy: Forget the pretense, do you think I don't know it was you who was behind my assassinaton?
Dulles: Oh, it's that, is it? Taking it personally, are you?
Kennedy: You're incredible. Do you expect me to greet my assassin with open arms?
Dulles: Now hold on, Jack. It is one thing to say that I was behind your assassination. It's another thing to call me your assassin.
Kennedy: And what would you call you?
Dulles: That's not the point, Jack. It's true I was behind your assassination, but who do you think was behind me?
Kennedy: Who?
Dulles: Why the people, Jack, the American people.
Kennedy: The people??
Dulles: Yes, and if the whole truth be told, who do you think was behind them?
Kennedy: Tell me.
Dulles: You, Jack, none other than you...
There have been a spate of books on the JFK case in the last few years, overwhelming an already glutted market. I think History Will Not Absolve Us is one of the most important. It doesn't waste any time preaching to the choir --- it discusses what we believe, and challenges us to know. What remains is to do something about it.
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