Two major American parapolitics journals closed at the beginning of this year. Both were primarily dedicated to the JFK assassination, though Probe also covered the King family’s landmark case and its successful outcome — establishing that Dr Martin Luther King was killed, not by a lone assassin, but by a conspiracy. This story was largely ignored by the American and British media, including our own dear Guardian, whose American reportage is in a class of its own when it comes to stumblefootedness and unthinking fealty to the neo-liberal line.
Does it seem strange that I refer to neo-liberalism in the context of the King and Kennedy assassinations? I hope not. Assassination – normally of indigenous people in far-off places like Chiapas – is a powerful tool for keeping people toeing a certain economic line. At the low end of the neo-liberal scale, for example in Mexico, democracy works like this: vote for the PRI or PAN and have some waterproof cardboard to roof your shack; vote for the PRD and we’ll kill you.
Higher up the social scale there is more money, and a greater variety of forms of cooption. But the neo-liberal system reserves the right to eradicate those who want to change it — even if they are middle-class or wealthy. I think JFK was in this category. For all his wealth and foreign adventurism, JFK was extremely (politically) liberal. He began much of the civil rights legislation which was seen to completion by LBJ. He was interventionist rather than laissez-faire; he picked fights with the directors of US Steel and with the oil companies. And he was killed in that centre of the oil culture, Dallas, on his way to make a speech at the International Trade Mart….. whose head, in New Orleans, was a man named Clay Shaw…….
Probe and The Fourth Decade (TFD) formerly The Third Decade (TTD) were outstanding founts of information of this ilk. Both followed the releases of the Assassination Archives Record Board, which has provided a huge trove of additional material — multiple Oswalds, formerly censored files from the House Commission in the 70s, Government surveillance of the Garrison investigation.
The Fourth Decade had a great mix of scholarship and good writing – exemplified by ‘You Don’t Know Me But You Will: the World of Jack Ruby’ (TTD November 1987), and ‘These Are A Few of my Favorite Forgeries’ (TTD March 1986) by the editor/publisher Jerry D. Rose. It also featured a number of articles which were so strange they really belong in a book of Macabre Assassination Tales, alongside Ambrose Bierce and Philip K. Dick. These are tales from the periphery of what seems to be the assassination conspiracy, or of some parallel covert activity, laying trails before and afterwards, handing out snippets of proprietory information to selected individuals — weird tales, whose protagonists are justly paranoid, and possibly subjects of some unscrupulous and unannounced Acid-testing. Outstanding in this category are ‘Dan Rather in Dallas’ by Monte Evans (TTD Sept. 1990), three articles about the Winnepeg Airport Incident by Peter Whitmey (TTD Nov. 1990, TFD Nov. 1995, and TFD March 1999), ‘From April to November and Back Again’ by K. S. Turner (TFD Nov. 1991, follow-up by William E. Kelly, Jr., TFD Nov. 1999).
The Fourth Decade ran stories of many a different stripe: detailed pieces on the autopsy evidence and subsequent alteration thereof; long diatribes by Harrison E. Livingstone; and, recently, a piece based on AARB releases, which suggests that the CIA was running a variety of activities out of the Texas School Book Depository, including an arms-running ring (‘The Glaze Letters’ by William Weston, TFD May 1999). The implications, of course, are extraordinary.
Both Probe and The Fourth Decade closed for financial reasons and due to the amount of work involved in putting them out. Probe, edited and published by Jim di Eugenio and Lisa Pease, is still to be found on the web at: www.webcom.comctka
Back copies of The Fourth Decade (and its predecessor The Third Decade) will, I imagine, still be available from Professor Jerry Rose c/o State University College, Fredonia, NY 14063, USA.)