The JFK assassination documents--what the Trump administration should do

 A couple of weeks ago an editor at a major newspaper contacted me--we have corresponded before, never met in person--and asked if I would like to do an op-ed on the Trump administration's pending release of new JFK assassination documents.  It went through two drafts but he has decided not to use it.  I'm very disappointed because it might actually do some good.  Here is the text.

President Donald Trump, perhaps encouraged by his ally Tucker Carlson, recently ordered the declassification of all remaining records pertaining to the assassinations of John F. Kennedy, Robert F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. Carlson in 2022 accused the Central Intelligence Agency of involvement in JFK’s assassination and claimed that the agency was still withholding critical documents — an example of the corrupt behavior of the “deep state” which, then as now, in Carlson’s and Trump’s view, works only for itself. Trump is presenting himself as a tribune of the people who will let them see the truth. The new release will probably include some interesting information, but it almost certainly will not transform anyone’s understanding of the assassination.

We must begin with the history of the withheld records. In 1977-1978, the House Select Committee on Assassinations, or HSCA, led by chief counsel G. Robert Blakey, reinvestigated the JFK and Martin Luther King Jr. assassinations. The committee looked at millions of pages of documents from the FBI and CIA. Initially, those documents were sealed for 50 years, but in 1992, prodded by Oliver Stone’s conspiracy-minded film JFK, Congress passed the JFK Assassination Records Collection Act and set up a review board to look at all the select committee’s documents and release whatever they could. 

The review board did an excellent job, and the National Archives in College Park, Maryland, now holds an extraordinary collection of CIA and FBI documents on topics broadly related to the assassination, including FBI files on major organized crime figures and CIA files on many operations against Fidel Castro. I and several research assistants spent many weeks with those files in the early 2000s, culminating in the publication of my book, The Road to Dallas: The Assassination of John F. Kennedy in 2008. The HSCA had identified three two organized crime bosses—Santo Trafficante of Tampa and Carlos Marcello of New Orleans—as having the motive and opportunity to kill JFK, and new evidence allowed me to go further, confirming an organized crime conspiracy and identifying some of those involved in it.

The review board did withhold some documents broadly related to the assassination, mainly CIA documents. One must understand, however, that these are not CIA documents that no one else has ever seen. HSCA staffers and the review board saw them but found legitimate reasons not to release them — probably because, even many years later, they might compromise intelligence sources and methods. In short, no new release is going to reveal a sensational CIA officers’ plot to assassinate the president of the United States. The documents may contain important information about other CIA operations, but not that. 

Most assassination specialists have adopted one of two conclusions: either that Oswald and Jack Ruby, who killed him while Oswald was in police custody, both acted alone, or that Oswald was probably innocent and a grand deep-state conspiracy killed Kennedy. The latter group cannot give up the idea that the CIA killed Kennedy over differences in policy toward Cuba — even though the documents that have already been released show that the president and the agency were still working hand in hand to overthrow Castro well into the fall of 1963, when Kennedy was assassinated. 

The Trump administration’s move could fill in some gaps in the record.  There are FBI and CIA files that should have fallen within the purview of the review board in the 1990s but which it never saw. I identified in my research one such CIA file on Eladio del Valle — a former intelligence officer in the Cuban regime overthrown by Fidel Castro — who was murdered in Miami in 1967 and later linked to the assassination.  The CIA refused to release it. I also discovered long FBI files on Carlos Marcello that the review board hadn’t seen, and some of them were released to me with virtually every name in them redacted, making them useless.  Journalist Jefferson Morley has long been seeking the release on CIA man George Joanides, the case officer for a militant Cuban exile group who became the agency’s liaison to the HSCA. The Trump administration should establish a small permanent review board to release documents like these, which could add to our knowledge of the case.  Meanwhile, like the previous releases under President Biden, the unveiling of more review board documents will provide some interesting information without changing anyone’s views.  Adherents of the deep-state theory likely stand ready to argue that the truth has been withheld, no matter what the documents show. 

David Kaiser is the author of American Tragedy: Kennedy, Johnson, and the Origins of the Vietnam War (2000) and The Road to Dallas: The Assassination of John F. Kennedy (2008).

Missing the forest for the tree

 The tacit alliance between Donald Trump and the mainstream media--both of which enjoy making him the center of attention--is, I think, making it much harder for Americans to understand what is happening to our country, and why.   As I have said many times, Trump has become the leading political figure of our time because the leading professional politicians of both parties had lost the trust of the American people.  Nearly all Republican politicians now seem to understand this and have tied their fortunes tightly to his to an unprecedented extent.  His appeal certainly raises big questions about the state of our whole society.  Yet it should not obscure that his agenda satisfies the interests of a number of powerful constituencies that have been trying to influence American government and American life for decades--and those constituencies are delighted by much of what he is doing.

Foremost among those constituencies, perhaps, are three of the largest sectors of our economy: the fossil fuel industry, our leading financial institutions, and the cyber community.  The fossil fuel industry seems committed to the idea that carbon-fueled climate change is something that the world will have to live with, and is trying very hard not merely to maintain, but to expand, the production and distribution of its products.  Trump supports this effort totally both privately and publicly.  The financial community apparently chafes under even the modest regulatory efforts introduced by the Obama administration after the financial crisis, such as the Consumer Financial Protection Agency, which the Trump administration is now tossing into the dustbin of history.  Its subset, the crypto community, has secured the reversal of attempts to regulate this new and obviously unstable asset, and has even recruited Trump into their fold.  The youngest, most aggressive leaders of the tech industry have evidently persuaded the administration not to regulate the development of artificial intelligence.  

Three other constituencies have provided more of the ideology and most of the foot soldiers for our new regime.  The religious right has thrown in with Trump because of his opposition to abortion and gender ideology and has won its greatest victories in many decades.  The Federalist Society has supplied candidates for federal judgeships.  A whole network of rightwing foundations has supported and promoted ideologues dedicated to undoing the Progressive Era, the New Deal, and the Great Society--the source of Project 2025, the blueprint for what the administration is doing.  All these institutions were important before Trump came on the political scene, but none as yet enjoyed the influence that they have today.

Trump has also allied himself with AIPAC, now our most important foreign policy lobby, and with the conservative Jewish donors who fund it.  During the first Trump administration the late Sheldon Adelson, a Las Vegas casino owner, apparently bought the movement of the US Embassy in Israel to Jeruslaem with a $20 million contribution to a pro-Trump super Pac.  Trump has fallen into line with Benjamin Netanyahu's goals, has demanded the ethnic cleansing of the Gaza strip, and may shortly endorse the annexation of the West Bank.  The president seems to have plans to replace or at least balance our traditional European and Asian alliances with understandings with Russia and China based upon mutual recognition of spheres of influence.  Twenty years ago those policies would have enraged prominent neoconservatives--then a pillar of the Republican Party--but neoconservatism has given way to neo-isolationism in the Republican Party now.

None of these powerful constituencies care much about Trump's unprecedented expansion of executive authority, his extraordinary grant of power to Elon Musk and his team, or his purge of the federal bureaucracy because he is giving them what they want.  And the federal courts may ultimately bless most of what he is doing because so many of them--including the Supreme Court--now have Republican majorities.

And what of Trump's popular support?  So far it is more than holding firm.   Polls so far show a small plurality of voters approving of what he is doing--a better showing than he ever made during his first term.  His immigration policies and his attack on DEI are popular.  Everything depends,  however, on the economy.  He has no plan to stop inflation, his tariffs had far less institutional support and may contribute to it, and financial deregulation is almost certain, in my opinion, to lead to another economic crisis.  To judge from Kamala Harris's campaign, however, it does not seem likely that the Democratic Party is going to propose much of a new economic agenda, except to oppose further tax and spending cuts.

Trump's assault on the executive branch strikes many of us as a usurpation of the Constitution and a threat to our democracy.  That is how many Americans saw Lincoln and Roosevelt, who presided over other great turning points in US history, as well--but their supporters defended them because they believed in what they were doing.   So far approximately half of all Americans approve of what Trump is doing, as well.   The same condition that allowed him to become president--a broad loss of faith in our institutions--is allowing him to take extraordinary actions now.  This, for better or for worse, is how history works.

Old questions, new answers

 This week I have read a remarkable new book, We Have Never Been Woke, by a sociologist named Musa Al-Gharbi.   Al-Gharbi was born sometime in the mid to late 1980s, it appears, to a black father and a white mother, both of whom were serving in the military.  He grew up and went to college in Arizona. To judge from the autobiography he posted on his web site, he has been a deep thinker all his life.  His twin brother was killed in the military in Afghanistan in 2010, and Al-Gharbi emerged as a critic of US Middle Eastern policy and eventually converted to Islam himself.  In 2016, when he was around 30, he began graduate school at Columbia as a sociologist, and he earned his Ph.D. seven years later with a dissertation of extraordinary scope and relevance.  That dissertation has now become We Have Never Been Woke.  

This book is intellectually ambitious, readable, and based upon extraordinarily wide reading in social science literature.  Its bibliography lists about 1500 sources, which he uses with great economy.  Its subject is our educated elite, the people who make our educational, governmental, medical, financial, literary, artistic, industrial, and high-tech institutions.  He calls this elite "symbolic capitalists."  They are, he estimates, about two-thirds Democratic, and concentrate themselves in a number of "symbolic hubs," including the Boston, New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and D. C. metropolitan areas, as well as Chicago, Atlanta, and perhaps Houston and Dallas.  (The book doesn't pay too much attention to red states or conservative elites.)  He sees wokeness as the dominant ideology of symbolic capitalists, characterized by a focus (or obsession) with oppression based on race, gender, and sexuality.  He apparently reacted to the extremely woke environment of Columbia (which also had a huge impact on the somewhat younger Coleman Hughes) like Gulliver among the Lilliputians.  He was as we shall see affected somewhat by wokeness, but he saw himself essentially as an outsider who could see through it.  Interestingly enough, he not only identifies himself as a symbolic capitalist but uses the pronoun "we" to refer to them throughout.

The woke elite, Al-Gharbi argues from many perspectives, are hypocrites.  While they claim to side with the oppressed, they dominate the upper economic reaches of our society and now hold power over most of our institutions.  Most importantly, their actual impact upon society as a whole does nothing for the lower economic half of the population, regardless of its race, gender, or sexual orientation.  They speak a language that is inherently offensive to the majority of the population that has not secured at least a B.A. degree.  They live in the least egalitarian metropolitan areas in the country, and often resist measures--such as efforts to construct more affordable housing--that would actually help the less well off.  They have, of course, promoted the globalization of our economy that has taken away so many good working-class jobs.  He argues that much of the new economy, including Amazon, Uber and Lift, and Door Dash and Grub Hub, exploits poorly paid workers--many of them immigrants--to make the lives of symbolic capitalists easier and more convenient.  Those workers, he argues, serve their economic betters the way that servants did in earlier eras--but masters took more responsibility for the lives of servants in those days than they do now.  

Symbolic capitalists' control of the media--and, he argues, their dominance on social media--have allowed them to portray themselves as egalitarian.  That, Al-Gharbi thinks, relies on a misreading of economic data.  Occupy Wall Street, a key episode in setting the tone of the 2010s, focused on the top one percent of our economy, but he focuses on the top 40 percent, which includes most of our college educated population and which has also been making gains while the lower 50 percent stagnates.  And, echoing the point that I have made for years, he notes that the diversification of that top 40 percent, which now includes far more women and nonwhites, has done nothing for the bottom half--and the bottom half knows it.  

I think Al-Gharbi has an excellent sense of where the United States is today, but his grasp of the last century of US history seems to me much shakier.  He uses another term, the Great Awokening, which appears to have been coined by another left-center skeptic, Matthew Iglesias, to refer to the spread of the oppressor-oppressed model since around 2011.  That  seems to me very accurate, but he moves onto shakier ground when he tries to identify three previous Great Awokenings in the 1930s, the late 1960s, and the early 1990s.  I don't think that the New Deal had the same focus on race and gender, even though it benefited both black Americans and women substantially.  It was based specifically on narrowing the gap between the rich and the poor and assuring everyone a decent life.  The late 1960s are indeed a precursor to what we have experienced more recently, insofar as they saw the beginning of the repudiation of the ideas of meritocracy and the claim that American society was fundamentally racist, sexist and imperialistic that has now blossomed.  Those ideas did break into public consciousness in the early 1990s under the name of "political correctness," but the country as a whole was moving in a different direction.   I also disagree with his analysis of where these movements came from.  Every one of those eras, he claims, saw the educated class threatened by economic developments that limited its opportunities, and it tried to seize the moral high ground to regain its position.  Al-Gharbi often thinks like an economist: he thinks almost all behavior is motivated by very real self-interest.  I do think that the self-interest of women and nonwhites, especially in academia, has a lot to do with the spread of woke ideas in the last 20 years.   But as I have often written here, I think all this is part of a general rebellion against authority of all kinds--political, social and intellectual--that began in the late 1960s and has allowed for all sorts of left- and right-wing ideas that would have been written off as crazy in the  mid-twentieth century to flourish.  And last but not least, the many hundreds of scholars whom he lists in his bibliography do not include William Strauss and Neil Howe, who might have opened his eyes to different perspectives.

It is because symbolic capitalists--our college-educated elite--have done so little for the lower half of the economic order that Al-Gharbi concludes that its dominant ideology--and it is dominant among them, as we shall see--must serve a different purpose.  That purpose is simply to make its adherents feel morally superior to their foes, and therefore entirely deserving of whatever they have.   It also allows them to view their opponents--Trump voters--as moral reprobates, "deplorables," as one might say.  Yes, he admits, Republican elites are more culturally conservative and pro-free market than Democratic ones--but both elites and more pro-free market and culturally liberal than the average American.  Interestingly enough, he cannot give up the woke idea of white privilege, but he seems to admit that wealth bestows much more advantage on Americans than skin color, and he mentions the critical, much-ignored fact that a plurality of poor Americans are white.  (That is why I do not believe that white skin, in and of itself, confers any privilege at all any more.)  Citing numerous studies by others, he notes that many of the nonwhites benefiting from affirmative action are either from immigrant families or families that are already well-to-do.  He points out again and again that woke ideology is much less popular among the poor--of all races--than the well-educated.   The vast majority of Hispanics reject the term Latinx, which, like ritual "land acknowledgements" on web sites and at public events, simply signal that the speaker belongs to the morally elect.  He also cites studies showing that tribalism is a more powerful force among those who have been to college than those who have not, and that they are now less likely to change their minds in response to discovering facts that contradict their opinons.

In one of his more arresting sections, Al-Gharbi turns to the influence of woke ideas--including critical race theory--in schools and colleges.  I was glad to see him make the obvious point that while K-12 schools do not teach the intellectual history of critical race theory through the works of Derrick Bell and Kimberle Crenshaw, their curriculums often reflect the conclusions of critical race theory.  But then he points out that the biggest controversies over CRT in the classroom have involved either elite private schools like Dalton and Horace Mann in New York, or schools in very wealthy suburbs like Loudon County,  Virginia, just outside Washington, D.C.  And why, he asks, have these schools adopted these curricula?  Because they exist to feed students into the Ivy League and other elite institutions, whose admissions offices are actively recruiting social justice warriors who can talk the talk.  That does not, however, mean that those schools are actually educating their students to change the economic foundations of our society.  In fact, a recent study reported in the Boston Globe used linked in to find that more than half of Harvard graduates now go into consulting, finance, or information technology.

Some major newspaper columnists like David Brooks have quoted Al-Gharbi recently, but the New York Times has declined to review We Have Never Been Woke.  The Washington Post published a favorable review from a graduate student, which drew hundreds of outraged comments from woke readers, many of whom repeated the standard progressive talking point that "wokeness" is a right wing code word designed to fight social change.  I am delighted that Al-Gharbi is now an assistant professor at SUNY Stoney Brook and I think he can be one of the leading social scientists of his generation.  And I don't think it's coincidental that he has mixed ancestry, just like Coleman Hughes (whose parents black and Puerto Rican) and myself (whose parents were old-line WASP and first-generation American Jew.)  Many of us who grow up without a clearly defined ethnic identity seem to emerge with a frightening tendency to think for ourselves.

Al Gharbi never quotes or paraphrases Benjamin Disraeli's famous passage about "the two nations," but he might have.  His book was finished before the last election, but its results--and the findings of the CNN exit poll--confirm to me that his basic portrayal of the divide within our nation is accurate.  The real divide in our country is between the  approximately 45 percent who have at least a BA degree and the 55 percent who do not.  43 percent of the respondents in the CNN exit poll of voters had college degrees, and 56 percent of them voted for Kamala Harris while 42 percent voted for Trump.  57 percent of the respondents lacked those degrees, and 56 percent of them voted for Trump, as opposed to 43 percent for Harris.  Harris won 53-45 among white voters with degrees and lost by a two to one margin among white voters without them.  In my opinion, the lower economic half of our population--including growing numbers of Hispanics and black Americans--agrees with Al-Gharbi that the educated elite is dominated by a hypocritical ideology that is doing nothing for anyone but themselves.  And that, in my opinion, is the biggest reason that Donald Trump and the Republican party now control the entire federal government and have set about eliminating the influence of that ideology, while making the economic divide in the country wider than ever.