After Thirty Years: Making Sense of the Assassination

Abstract

In context of other books about JFK assassination, Deep Politics, by Peter Dale Scott, is an unremarkable work. The field brims with books that conjure up fantastic conspiracies through innuendo, presumption, and pseudoscholarship while ignoring provable but inconvenient facts. Yet there is something exceptional and disturbing about Deep Politics-and it is not that a tenured English professor wrote its opaque prose. Rather it is that Deep Politics is a University of California Press book, approved for publication by an editorial committee consisting of twenty professors, including four senior historians. This peer approval by a major university press illustrates boundless and utter disbelief in Warren Report that exists even in highest reaches of academy, and reveals gross inattention given to subject by serious historians. It is instructive to compare scholars' treatment of JFK assassination with their output and stance toward Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, one other event in recent history that seared national consciousness. Like assassination, attack was subject of an executive branch investigation followed by a separate congressional investigation. Like assassination, conspiratorial theories about surprise attack (mainly, that FDR knew in advance) have always dogged official story. By and large, historians have promptly exposed distortions of documentary record and faulty logic, thereby relegating December 7th conspiracy theories to political fringes where they belong. In stark contrast, historians have forged nothing close to a consensus on assassination; in fact their voice is rarely raised. Very few of more than 450 books and tens of thousands of articles that compose vast assassination literature published since 1964 have been written by historians. And when they do write about Kennedy presidency, history becomes bifurcated. The assassination is treated as a footnote or afterthought if it is addressed at all. Consequently, field is left by default to fevered imagination of authors like Peter Dale Scott, who banks on what H. L. Mencken once called the virulence of national appetite for bogus revelation. Future historians will have to account for this abdication because it carries