Episode 4: JFK - "we did y'all a favor"

"You peons wanted your Camelot myth, so we did you a favor by pop-popping your golden prince."

😐

Links:

https://www.buzzsprout.com/1125110/14127319

https://www.amazon.com/Trail-Assassins-Murder-President-Kennedy/dp/1620872994

https://www.amazon.com/Plausible-Denial-Mark-Lane/dp/0859651495

Need more? You can visit the website at: https://consaracytheories.com/ or my own site at: https://saracausey.com/. Don't forget to check out the blog at: https://consaracytheories.com/blog. 

Transcript

Transcription by Otter.ai.  Please forgive any typos!

Welcome to con-sara-cy theories. Are you ready to ask questions you shouldn't and find information you're not supposed to know? Well, you're in the right place. Here is your host, Sara Causey.

Hello. Hello, and thanks for tuning in. Tonight's episode will be a bit dark a bit macabre at least in my opinion. I would love to have a whiskey sour for this one. This feels like a whiskey episode to me, but I'll have to settle again for like a Shirley Temple and ginger ale something non alcoholic. But yeah. Let's saddle up and do this. So in tonight's episode, I'm going to probe this issue of we did y'all a favor. Now this podcast is not exclusively dedicated to JFK in the pop pop. As I've said before, it's an issue that we're going to visit and revisit numerous times over the course of this journey because it's like a wellspring. It just keeps going and going and just when you think you cannot possibly have another holy shit moment. You always do. There's always some new discovery, there's always some new mind bending, what the eff moment that comes out of it. Even things that are only tangentially related, even things that are on the periphery, wind up. Just bowling you over. It is one hell of a topic for sure. And I thought about this exact issue whenever I was recording my review on the daytime broadcast of Noam Chomsky, his book rethinking Camelot? Because it's like, if we just drag this guy, if we assume that JFK had no redeeming qualities at all, he was just terrible and human garbage can, which I'm not saying that's the case, to be clear, sort of playing devil's advocate here. If we assume he had no redeeming qualities at all, then why would some agency or some group or some person come out and say, Yeah, we did it. Allah, the barren Lea revelation of Daphne Park saying that about Lumumba Yeah, we did it, it was us. Like, why not take the credit for it? Why not say, We saved you from something really terrible? I don't, I don't understand the need to still keep that information under the rug. 60 years out. If it's true. Jack, of course has passed away, Jackie has passed away. So it's like what, what would be the point of continuing to hide it in the shadows? If one of these organizations felt like they really did America a giant favor that day? Then why keeping in hiding? If he was really that terrible? Why would we still all these years later, decades later, as a matter of fact, still not be allowed to know what really happened? Why not just come out with it. To me this, this reminds me of the phone call that I've talked about on the air before it's shown in JFK revisited Oliver Stone sort of sequel or follow up addendum film to the first movie, and it's a phone call between LBJ and Robert McNamara. And it took place February 25 1964. And you can just hear like the condescension and the better than in LBJ is voice as he's shooting out McNamara and he's like, I always thought it was foolish for you to make any statements about withdrawing. I thought it was bad psychologically, but you and the President thought otherwise. And I just sat silent. Okay, you know, yeah, anytime that I imagine a crooked southern politician I just sort of imagined LBJ voice in my mind. That's just my opinion. But that's, that's how it goes. This the same kind of energy as though for this with me. It's the same kind of like, condescension, you're a little peon. Well, you peons wanted your Camelot myth. You wanted to believe he was a golden Prince. You just love Jack and Jackie Oh, she's beautiful. She's elegant. Oh, he's handsome. Oh, they're just great. So we did you a favor, by pop popping your golden prints so that you could hang on to the mythology? How ridiculous it's like to me It's sickening to even go there. And to imagine that that would be the right course of action, that it's justifiable in some way. To use an analogy from my daytime broadcast, I talk about the economy, the job market, etc. You we get the same energy there. It's okay for us to lie to you peons and play about the condition of the job market. Now we'll go back and we'll quietly revise the job market numbers so that historically speaking, it'll be clear that the job market was not an in fact robust and the economy was not in fact, resilient and we were bullshitting the hell out of people. But in the moment, we want you to sit down, shut up and assume that everything is great people are flush with cash, there's plenty of money, inflation is abating. The Fed has succeeded and everything is great. Shut your mouth. Go back to sleep, little peon. Take your pablum and don't be a problem to anybody. We're getting that same kind of condescending energy in this narrative. I feel you idiots wanted to believe in Camelot. So it was better for us to just eliminate him than it was for you to know that he was absolute garbage. I think we're mature enough to handle it at this point. If if that were true, which I'm not saying it is, I think I think we would be mature enough to handle it. You have entire generations of people that don't care. Not only is it a matter of they weren't alive in 63. It's a matter of they don't give a shit about history periodic. They don't care and trying to explain to them how this impacts their life. This is of no consequence to them, they want to go back on tick tock, and they want to play and worry about celebrity gossip. So it's like well, why not just come out with it? In Jim Harrison's book on the trail, his analysis is I feel like I feel like the entire book is good. When I read it for the first time I was expecting it to be somewhat maniacal and cuckoo, but it's just it isn't he seems very down to earth in this book. And towards the end of the book, I'm on page 324 of the paperback edition that I have. He writes, looking back today with new information and new insights, it is possible to put together and inform historical speculation of what happened to President Kennedy and why I believe that what happened at Dealey Plaza in Dallas on November 22 1963, was a coup d'etat. If we concur with Jim Garrison that it was a coup d'etat on American soil, then, but okay, let's let me flesh it out even further, if we agree that it was a coup d'etat on American soil. And we also agree with this narrative that JFK was just terrible garbage and needed to be gotten out of the way. Again, I asked, Well, why not just admit it? Why not put it out there on Front Street having an agency say we did it or we were part of the conspiracy or we sat silent, we sat on our hands and let other people do it on purpose because we wanted rid of him. After all this time, why not just come out with it, adding more fuel to that fire. There's a passage in Mark Lane's book plausible denial. When I read it. I laughed out loud. But at the same time, it was a sad laugh. I'm on page 53 of the hardback edition that I have from the library. I couldn't believe I found it at the library. I was like, wow, everybody should be reading this. But it's the last paragraph on page 53. Langley had accomplished its goal with the help of its man on the commission. And by this he's referring to the Charlie India alpha, and the positioning of Allen Dulles on the Warren Commission. Langley had accomplished its goal with the help of its man on the commission. At a meeting of the commission members held on July 9 1964, former Charlie India Alpha director Allen Dulles advised his colleagues not to be worried that their final report would be closely scrutinized, but nobody reads don't believe people read in this country. There will be a few professors that will read the record the public will read very little and quote Yeah, I did. I laughed at that because it was like, you could say the same thing even even more so today. If you think about the public not reading in 1964 Oh, a few dry academics will probably go through it but John and Jane Q Public are not going to read don't make the mistake of thinking these ignorant peons read all can imagine him being like a villain twirling a wax mustache and smoking one of those long cigarettes and a long cigarette holder. Don't think the public reads are a bunch of effing idiots. They're not going to actually read it. It can be a complete shitstain on a piece of paper and they're not going to know it and they're not going to read what has really changed today. I'm sure there are fewer people who read now in 2024, then we're reading in 1964. So to me that further begs the question, why not just release it? Release it in a document that most people are never going to bother to read? And then the truth will just be out there. If it if it really is the case that Kennedy was that terrible and needed to be gotten rid of not through the electoral process, but through a pop pop. And oh, some beneficent agency was just saving the peons from themselves. Why not just come right out and admit it.

So there's an interesting epilogue, toward the back of Mark lanes book, and it's called operations of pata. Now, I'm not going to get into some of the things further in this epilogue, because they need to be reserved for an episode all its own this horrifying question of operations of pada. And where was Poppy Bush? And why are there all of these weird references? There's just some very odd circumstantial evidence connecting Poppy bush to the Bay of Pigs invasion, and pointing to evidence that he was already involved with the agency when JFK was in office, even though we're not supposed to think that he was. I don't want to go down that rabbit hole in this episode, because we could be here all night. And I want to just really make sure that I dedicate another episode to that and I stick with what I intended to talk about for tonight. But Mark lanes book plausible denial, if you haven't read it, go check it out. Go go buy it on Amazon. It's worth your time and money, in my opinion. So in this epilogue of operations upon I'm on page 328 of the hardback edition that I have, Thomas Reeves wrote a book a question of character about John Kennedy's private life, the premiere intellectual at The Washington Post's Sunday book review. And then in parentheses, we see book world may 26 1991, Jonathan Yardley said of it, there are no surprises in this biography of John Fitzgerald Kennedy. No new revelations about Eastern policymaking, no unduly original insights into the Kennedy legend. No fresh breaths of scandal, instead of question of character performs to modest but valuable services. It brings together in a single volume, all the existing information about Kennedy, much of which was reported in books or articles of widely varying import and intentions. And as its title suggests, it undertakes to assess Kennedy, not merely in political or mythological terms, but in moral ones. So then Mark writes, why then the featured Yardley Page Three byline treatment, apparently so that the post could offer an analysis that admittedly is more Yardley than Reeves. So now he goes back to quoting Jonathan Yardley, again, the Reeves does not quite come right out and say so. His analysis suggests that the pop pop of John F Kennedy, however cruel and ghastly, may have spared the nation, something even worse than the prolonged orgy of grief and hagiography that followed it. He suggested that the gentleman's agreement by which details of Kennedy's private life where kept secret might well have been violated, for whatever reason during a second term, and then a vote of impeachment might well have followed. This hadn't come to pass could have been even more damaging than Watergate, the spectacle of a president of the United States on trial for illicit liaisons within and without the White House for questionable relationships with ranking figures of the underworld. This would have been more than the United States of the mid 1960s could have stomached. The proceedings would have torn us apart in ways we can scarcely imagine, and left us with a cynicism about politics, by contrast with which the residue of Watergate would seem a mild case of disenchantment, Better that than the handsome young president died a mythical if not actual hero, and that the true story of his character emerged so tentatively and gradually, that we were given time to come to terms with it. Had we been forced to bear in a single blow the full import of the story, Thomas Reeves tells it would have shattered us in quote. Oh, I'm thinking of Colonel Kurtz and Apocalypse Now. The horror, the horror. Oh, what President Kennedy did with his penis up the horror. He had illicit liaisons within and without the White House. Oh, yeah, I was alive and well in the 90s. And depends on what your definition of e is. E is. I remember all that crap. I think the nation is pretty well able to deal with the idea that politicians have sex. Man, I wish I had a whiskey. So the residue of Watergate would seem a mild case of disenchantment. Oh. So Elaine goes on to to give a little bit of explanation before exploring the Washington Post newly developed moral concept that appears to argue that capital punishment is appropriate in those few jurisdictions where adultery is still considered a criminal act, it might be useful to examine the major premise it relies upon. Exactly. This feels very puritanical. There's another passage in here where Mark lane is talking. I think it might have been to David at Lee Phillips at the, their debate that they had, but he's talking about how, like, the the agency is trying to tell him that he's being immoral and he's like, You guys run whorehouses kind of rich that you have these honey traps where you film people cavorting with prostitutes and potentially giving up secrets for blackmail, but you're telling me that I'm immoral. Saying the same kind of thing here. Kennedy's personal and sexual liaisons we are told had underworld overtones courtesy of Frank Sinatra and Sam Giancana. Sinatra, it will be recalled was inelegantly publicly and permanently barred from the White House by Kennedy. The trauma inflicted on the aging singer resulted in an aggravated abandonment of principle, Sinatra became a Republican. And then he goes on to talk about how Sinatra had supported Reagan bush and been at the White House and was kind of welcomed back during the Reagan Bush years. I believe it is the view of most Americans that it was not better that the handsome young president died of mythical if not actual hero that day in Dallas. Most of us I suspect prefer the electoral process and the ballot box rather than the concealed Rifles of snipers as Indians to move our democracy. Perhaps the cynical assessment that Kennedy's death may have benefited the nation arises out of our distance from the events of 1963. The case is 28 years old, in quote, of course, now it's more than 60. But okay, so here's, here's the argument. We did y'all a favor, it was better that your golden friends died a hero, even if he was a mythical hero, not an actual hero. It was better for the nation. Because your little peons and plebs back in the 60s, you could not have handled it. If he had been impeached for sex scandals. It would have just been so traumatizing it would have made Watergate look like a peanut. Okay. Well, I mean, we survived the 90s. We survived all of the sexual trauma and drama of the Clinton years. There was nasty stuff on TV about that all the time. It was a huge topic of conversation. So yeah, I mean, I almost sent sometimes these, these questions and these issues, it's almost like how do you even How do you even go there? How do you, it seems seems so irrational and stupid that it's like, how do you even How can you even put together a rebuttal? No, in my opinion, it's not better for somebody to have their head blown off in front of God and everyone, including the man's wife, and little children that were out there to wave at the motorcade. It's not better to do that, than to say this guy was promiscuous. He cheated on his wife, he had some unsavory connections to the mafia. I mean, we all pretty much know that information. Now. In Jim Marrs book, crossfire. He talks about, allegedly, you know, this is Jim Marrs his research, not mine. He talks about how allegedly, Hoffa was giving literal suitcases of money to the Nixon campaign. Whereas John Khanna and the Chicago mob was back in Kennedy and they had helped Kennedy win in West Virginia and in Illinois, where he was having some trouble. I mean, I don't feel like I am so shattered by that revelation that I'm gonna go jump off the roof tonight. So somebody will say Yeah, but it's 2024. There's so much more cynicism. People don't trust the government back in the 1960s. Pre Pop Pop, they really did. That was when America lost its innocence. So before that happened, it would have been earth shattering. It would have been very upsetting to have a presidential sex scandal. Okay, let's assume that's true. Let's assume that people at that point in history in American history were so fragile that a sec scandal would have absolutely rocked them to the core. And that maybe even though I mean, if we're just talking about being impeached for sex scandals, okay, that seems awfully thin to me. But let's even take it there. Let's say that in his second term, he had wound up getting impeached and it had been this big national embarrassment. I just don't find that that holds enough water otter to say, well, he had it coming. He deserved it. To me this is the same as the rough justice notion that I had talked about in that rethinking Camelot episode where someone had written to.

It wasn't to Noam Chomsky was to Seymour Hersh about this idea of rough justice. Well, if Kennedy was planning to do away with Castro, but somebody did away with Kennedy instead, maybe it was karma, maybe he didn't come on. I guess we can sort of say the live by the sword die by the sword politics can be a very dangerous game that can be unfortunately, an area that people go into that may put them in danger. That argument might hold more water than the idea of well, we did all a favor. You know, we made your little golden Prince a martyr. And now he can be a Jesus figure instead of you guys all knowing that he was trashed. So you're welcome. Again, I go back to if that was really the case, then why not take your victory lap and be honest about it? Why not put it out on Front Street in a report that the public will never read? Why hide it? For the record, in terms of my opinion, I don't I don't believe either the rough justice. It was karma. He had it coming. And I don't believe the guy was a complete garbage can either. I agree honestly, with what Mark lane is saying here. I believe it as the view of most Americans that it was not better that the handsome young president died of mythical if not actual hero that day in Dallas. Most of us I suspect prefer the electoral process. Yeah, exactly. Even though I think I think a lot of people are disillusioned. And I think collectively, a lot of people realize that the whole idea of your vote counts get out there on voting day. Yeah. I feel like Doug, in that episode of Black Jeopardy on SNL where he's like, you know, they've already decided before they even happens, you already know that they know who's gonna win. Even so, you don't have coup de tos on American soil. That's just not something that these agencies should be allowed to do. This is like a Banana Republic where Oh, somebody gets elected. But you know, maybe they weren't really elected. Maybe the mom helped them get in there. But no, no worries. We'll just pop them and then it'll be over with What a shit show man what this is crazy to me. But what do you think? Okay, let's, let's put the question back to you. The listener. Do you think that we were done a favor that day? Do you think the golden Prince died a martyr rather than going through something like Watergate? Although I would say instead of comparing it to Watergate, it would probably be if you're talking about sex scandals, it would be more apples to apples to talk about all the Bill Clinton stuff. Was it better for him to pass away a martyr? A golden Prince, this young, attractive dude in his prime instead of taking the nation through an impeachment scandalizing 1960s America? Do you think it was rough justice? Do you think it was karma? Or do you feel like the truth is probably somewhere else. Point to ponder. On that note, I'm going to sign off. Stay safe, stay sane. Stay a little crazy. It's up to you. But I will see you in the next episode.

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