The JFK Assassination Book That Cracked Open the American Establishment
November 22, 2020 was the 57th anniversary of the assassination of President Kennedy.
This event led to a crucial turning point in American history: the publication in 1966 of Mark Lane’s revisionist book on the assassination, Rush to Judgment. That book undermined the public's confidence in the government's version of what happened on November 22 in Dealey Plaza and the days immediately after. In doing so, the book began a tradition of widespread distrust of government reports explaining major events that disrupt American politics. This tradition now threatens to undermine the federal government, which relies on trust -- trust based on government explanations. Digital technologies of communication now allow rival interpretations to spread. The federal government, the newspapers (disappearing), the news networks (shrinking market share), and the book publishers (Amazon-crushed) can no longer suppress rival explanations, which the establishment's spokesmen dismiss as "conspiracy history."
Historical revisionists return the favor: "government conspiracy and cover-up." Millions of people believe them.
This was not true in 1965.
OFFICIAL NARRATIVES
We learn history primarily by stories. There are many great theories of historical causation, but without representative stories, these great theories do not have much impact on most people’s thinking.
The Bible is mostly stories. The four Gospels are stories. The Book of Acts is a series of stories. The Pentateuch is mostly stories: Genesis, Exodus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy. The exception is the Book of Leviticus: a book on laws. The historical books are stories. The prophetic books are mostly stories: Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Daniel. The Book of Ezekiel is tied to a specific time and place.
To establish legitimacy, every government relies on stories. Most important are the stories of the origin of the nation. This is why every American political party and every government administration invokes America's origin as well as a series of stories that have extended down through history. Nobody running for office criticizes Washington, Jefferson, and Lincoln. Nobody criticizes Teddy Roosevelt or his cousin Franklin.
Note: America's official origin began in 1775, not 1608. Politics brought America into existence. The official narrative is political.
The victors write the history textbooks that are used in public schools. This is an unbreakable rule. This is why the story of the American Revolution became the guiding history of the new nation. This began shortly after the war ended in 1783. The main books were David Ramsay’s History of the American Revolution (1789) and Mercy Otis Warren’s History of the Rise, Progress, and Termination of the American Revolution (1805).
The book that was never published would have been the first book in American revisionism. The author who burned his own manuscript had been the Secretary of the Continental Congress, Charles Thomson. Wikipedia reports:
He also prepared a work of over 1000 pages that covered the political history of the American Revolution. After leaving office, he chose to destroy the work in an effort to preserve the myths of War of Independence leaders as heroes and stated that his desire to avoid "contradict[ing] all the histories of the great events of the Revolution. Let the world admire the supposed wisdom and valor of our great men. Perhaps they may adopt the qualities that have been ascribed to them, and thus good may be done. I shall not undeceive future generations."
Any government that cannot link itself to accepted stories of the nation’s past is not going to survive. This is why Communist governments can lose legitimacy overnight. It is also why they always try to trace the history of the nation back to the Communist revolution, which becomes the new starting point for the nation’s history. They create a new history. This is true in North Korea. This is true in Cuba. This is true in communist China. Communist China’s government maintains power by its appeal to Mao, not by invoking Confucius or Buddha. This is why I don’t think that government will survive. There is one story that carries down through all of Chinese history: every Chinese dynasty eventually falls. That is a story none of the dynasties likes to tell.
When there is a visible disruption in a nation’s history, there is always an official story of how this disruption took place. The victors write the story.
The major disruptions are wars. The government that starts the war has an official version of why it started: the enemy nation was the aggressor. This is why a revisionist history of America is greatly needed. It should begin with the events leading up to the declaration of every war. Then it should talk about how this war was financed. Then it should talk about the postwar period in terms of social, political, and economic changes that the war produced. Each book should be in three parts, and perhaps each book has to be in three volumes. This project should cover these American wars: the Revolution, the War of 1812, the Mexican War, the Spanish-American War, World War I, World War II, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, and the two wars of George W. Bush, Afghanistan and Iraq.
World War I revisionism and World War II revisionism called into question the entry of the United States into the European wars. World War I revisionism became a significant intellectual force beginning in the early 1920's and extending through the 1930's. But it faded in popularity as the American establishment moved toward war in Europe in the late 1930's. The most detailed study of this intellectual transition is the two-volume work by revisionist historian James J. Martin, American Liberalism and World Politics, 1931–1941 (Devin-Adair, 1964). Fortunately, the Mises Institute has made it available online for free here.
World War II revisionism never got a fair hearing by the general public. It never entered into American history textbooks. It was actively suppressed. The Rockefeller Foundation in 1946 funded the Council on Foreign Relations’ two-volume study of the coming of the war. That study promoted the Roosevelt Administration’s narrative of the war’s origin. The two authors had been part of the OSS during the war. The OSS became the CIA after 1947. Very few historians knew this about the authors. Their narrative prevailed in the historical guild. I discussed this in a lecture for the Mises Institute in 2012. My lecture is here.
It was under Truman that the OSS became the CIA in 1947. That was the origin of the Deep State.
There was no major revisionist study of the Korean War. It really is the forgotten war. It was started by Truman in 1950. He did not ask Congress to declare war. He called it a police action. This ended the Constitutional requirement of a Congressional declaration of war.
Then came the Vietnam War. Lyndon Johnson started the war on August 5, 1965. He did not ask for a vote by Congress. The first American casualty was my friend Dick Sather. I have discussed this here.
THE ASSASSINATION
Johnson was in a position to start the Vietnam War only because of Kennedy’s assassination a little over seven months earlier.
The Warren Commission was set up by Johnson. It produced the first official report on the assassination. As with all previous assassinations in American history, the report concluded that the assassin acted alone. The Commission was deliberately set up in order to reach this official conclusion. Wikipedia reports:
[Attorney General] Nicholas Katzenbach has been named as providing advice after the assassination of John F. Kennedy that led to the creation of the Warren Commission. On November 28 he sent a memo to Johnson's White House aide Bill Moyers recommending the formation of a Presidential Commission to investigate the assassination. To combat speculation of a conspiracy, Katzenbach said that the results of the FBI's investigation should be made public. He wrote, in part: "The public must be satisfied that Oswald was the assassin; that he did not have confederates who are still at large".Four days after Katzenbach's memo, Johnson appointed some of the nation's most prominent figures, including the Chief Justice of the United States, to the Commission.
From start to finish, the goal of the Commission was to justify the official government narrative. The 888-page report was published in September 1964. The 26 volumes of supporting evidence were published in November 1964. Secret documents were put into the government archives until 2039. This was changed by law in 1966 and 1992. Supposedly, 98% of the files have been released.
RUSH TO JUDGMENT
Mark Lane was a lawyer. He did not trust the Warren Commission’s report or the 26 volumes. He began to research diligently. In August 1966, his book was published. Wikipedia's summary is accurate.
Rush to Judgment: A Critique of the Warren Commission's Inquiry into the Murders of President John F. Kennedy, Officer J.D. Tippit and Lee Harvey Oswald is a 1966 book by American lawyer Mark Lane. It is about the assassination of United States President John F. Kennedy and takes issue with the investigatory methods and conclusions of the Warren Commission. The book's introduction is by Hugh Trevor-Roper, Regius Professor of History at the University of Oxford. Although it was preceded by a few self-published or small press books, Rush to Judgment was the first mass-marketed hardcover book to confront the findings of the Warren Commission.The title of the book was taken from Lord Chancellor Thomas Erskine's defense of James Hadfield, who had attempted to assassinate King George III in 1800. According to Alex Raskin of the Los Angeles Times, "Rush to Judgment opened the floodgate for [Kennedy assassination] conspiracy theories."
I was a graduate student in American history when the book was released. I had just received my Master’s degree. I was about to begin my Ph.D. I can testify that this book created a national sensation. Its effect was far more widespread than book sales indicated. Its impact spread far beyond its readership. It became a phenomenon. Millions of people talked about it who had not read it -- as was also true of the Commission's report. The book launched the debate over the Kennedy assassination. That debate continues today.
More than any other American history book, Lane’s book brought historical revisionism to the general public. There have always been revisionist books, but this was the first revisionist book to become a nationwide bestseller.
To begin to study the Kennedy assassination, you have to read the Warren Commission’s report and Mark Lane’s book. If you do not read these two books, you will not understand the nature of the debate. Very little has changed since 1966 with respect to the official narrative versus the unofficial narrative.
The problem is that there are so many unofficial narratives. The Kennedy assassination has had more books written about it than have been written about any other event in history. The bibliography is enormous.
From the beginning, the government prejudiced the case by warning against conspiracy theories. That was where the phrase got into the English language. There is even a Wikipedia entry titled John F. Kennedy assassination conspiracy theories. In this article, we learn that there are between 1,000 and 2,000 books on the Kennedy assassination. Nobody really knows how many there are. I challenge you to find any single event in world history that has this many books devoted to it.
There is even a Wikipedia entry with this title: CIA Kennedy assassination theory. Before you are allowed to read this article, the Wikipedia editors added this:
This is significant: the establishment has been unable to suppress these alternative narratives. It has tried, but it has failed.
The London School of Economics (LSE) has an American studies center. It is establishment-oriented. In 2018, it ran an article by an American history professor. The title is significant: "Almost 60 percent of Americans believe in conspiracy theories about JFK. Here’s why that might be a problem." Why is this a problem? After spending his entire article on how the conspiracy theorists cannot be correct, he offered this conclusion:
How concerned should we be that most Americans cannot accept the official account of one of America’s most infamous murder cases? Do Kennedy conspiracy theories undermine our political institutions and our democracy? The answers are complex. Unlike other conspiracy theories suggesting contemporary wrongdoing, few people are taking up arms to protest the Kennedy Assassination. This is a good thing. But on the other hand, many conspiracy theorists use the Kennedy Assassination theories as evidence of other supposed conspiracies. For example, some people claim that the term “conspiracy theory” was invented by the CIA to put a stop to conspiracy theories about the Kennedy Assassination. (This claim is demonstrably false, and if it were true, it would have been the most ineffective plot ever). Those who believe in Kennedy conspiracy theories really do believe that there was a conspiracy 55 years ago that continues to this day. There is no reason to think that that distrust cannot breed more distrust.
This is the issue: distrust. Where there is widespread distrust of the government, the government faces a loss of legitimacy.
Are the conspiracy theorists correct? My friend Bill Marina, who taught history at the university of level, thought that Oswald acted alone. He was the only historian at Dealey Plaza when the assassination occurred. He taught a course on the Kennedy assassination for decades. It was always oversubscribed. But he never wrote his book to defend the Oswald-only theory. I begged him to do it repeatedly, and I wrote him a letter to this effect the week before he died. He just never got around to it.
In contrast, there is the work of a retired high school history teacher, Charles Burris. His recent article on the assassination is a good starting point. He says that Lyndon Johnson and the CIA organized the assassination. He links to dozens of books and articles. His article is here.
A serious historian considers the major arguments of both sides. Vincent Bugliosi's 2007 defense of the Warren Commission's findings is a lawyer's brief, as was Lane's. The other major defense is Gerald Posner's Case Closed (2003).
The trouble is, there is more than one side. Some revisionists blame the Mafia. Others blame the CIA, but not Johnson. But the vast majority of the books challenge the Warren Commission's report. Skepticism has lots of footnotes.
One thing is certain: the case is not closed. This is also certain: trust in the government's narrative has not been restored.
LOSS OF TRUST
This brings me to the topic at hand. Why do I think that Mark Lane’s book was crucial in American history? That book raises significant doubts about the government’s official narrative regarding the most important political assassination of the 20th century. Revisionist historians can argue that the assassination was crucial in American politics. Obviously, it was important. But the Vietnam War has faded in the memories of those who did not live through that era. Lyndon Johnson’s presidency has faded in people’s memory.
What we are seeing today for the first time in world history is a worldwide loss of trust in official government narratives. There is a crucial article that goes into this issue. It is an interview with Martin Gurri. Who is Martin Gurri? We read:
Martin Gurri is a former CIA analyst specializing in the relationship of politics and global media. His book, The Revolt of the Public and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium, first published in 2014 and updated in 2018, has been praised for foreshadowing the political shocks of Brexit and the rise of Donald Trump.Mr. Gurri has published numerous articles, studies, and opinion pieces on geopolitical- and media-related topics. His blog, The Fifth Wave, pursues the themes first elaborated in The Revolt of the Public.
I am going to be spending many articles on reviewing his book. It is a spectacular book. But first, I want to prepare you. Here is the interview.
He is arguing what I have been arguing for over 20 years. The Internet represents the greatest single threat to establishments around the world in the history of mankind. It is an even greater threat than Gutenberg’s development of movable metal type printing.
Gurri argues that this decentralizing technology is now driving politics. All over the world, voters are losing faith in the official narratives. As this happens, legitimacy is draining away from national governments.
I have argued that the prevailing government narrative of major events will prevail for a time, because there is no single alternative narrative. The government wins by default. But what Gurri is arguing now is that this is not sufficient to maintain government legitimacy. It is not the absence of a widely believed narrative for every event that is crucial. Instead, what is crucial is this: a growing minority of voters does not believe in the official narratives. These voters believe that their government is working against them. They are ready to pounce on every sign of government failure as evidence of a malevolent conspiracy. There is no agreement on which conspiracy, but there is agreement on the malevolent nature of each conspiracy.
He says that this has never happened before in political history. I agree with him. This is the sword of Damocles that is hanging over every national government.
What is going to cut the thread that suspends the sword? Gurri does not say. I will say: the great default. When the governments default on their welfare obligations to the elderly, all over the west, this will undermine national governments on a scale never before seen.
Two decades ago, that was the argument of Jacques Barzun and Martin Van Creveld. I have been referring back to their books ever since. Example: a 2011 article that I regard as the most important article I have published on this site: https://www.garynorth.com/public/8519.cfm. It discussed the loss of faith in political salvation.
That loss of faith was registered in the assassination of Kennedy, an apostle of can-do political liberalism. His successor was the incarnation of New Deal liberalism. He was the master of power. Unilaterally, he took the nation into a major war, a war that was increasingly resisted over the next decade. "Hey, hey, LBJ. How many people have you killed today?" He left office in disgrace.
In between was the growth of assassination revisionism. Mark Lane's book was the wedge. It split the establishment's document: the Warren Commission report.
The loss of trust in the federal government is down, as this 2019 Gallup report indicates. The high point was in October 1964: 77%. In 2019, this was down to 17%.
https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2019/04/11/public-trust-in-government-1958-2019/
The trend is down.
CONCLUSION
Mark Lane’s book legitimized conspiracy theories in the thinking of millions of Americans. His book was the wedge that cracked open the official narrative of what in 1966 was the most important narrative that the government had offered since the end of World War II.
Without the public school system, it will be more and more difficult to sustain the official narratives that the government has promoted since the beginning of the United States. As the Internet begins to replace the public schools, just as it is replacing TV networks and newspapers, the ability of the government to sustain its official narratives will be dramatically weakened. This is not going to take place overnight, but Gurri’s testimony is clear: nothing can reverse this.
It boils down to this economic rule: as the price of something declines, more of it is demanded. As the price of creating alternative media declines, more will be demanded.
This is exceedingly bad news for politicians around the world. It is exceedingly good news for liberty.