The way forward

Context, Complicity

4905-07 Magazine Street, New Orleans. If we understand what happened while Lee and Marina lived here from end of April to end of September 1963 we will understand the assassination.

Photograph ©️Robert Manz

It has been a while since I wrote seriously, formed my thinking regularly, and posted systematically here.

But I have been thinking hard about it and continuing original work. I am proud of my work on the Hitler assassination plots and will have more to say about that and its relevance to JFK. And to today.

I have begun to relax a bit about pace. I am deciding this is a vehicle to share my thinking and experience without the imperative of a well kept schedule to gain a place on your daily or weekly routine. I cannot keep up with reading Heather Cox Richardson daily; I could never keep up her writing pace.

So schedule is out, serendipity is in……. That is too light-hearted a word for the assassination of my president however; here is another key word I have been stumbling over.

Context.

In the past year the context of the meaning of the assassination and the failures to understand it has shifted. It used to be that the world that JFK set in motion —Optimism. Justice. Equality. Seek peace in strength. Progress. was the context and the problem was how can we live a lie? How can we seek all these good things while accepting that “two lone nuts” is a good explanation.

Now the context is a million times more urgent. In twelve short months the context has become, How do we get our democracy back without facing the truth?

We don’t.

So now I know why I am writing my truth about JFK and the plots to kill him, one of which succeeded. Because the only path out of the evil abyss we have sunk into where teens walking their dogs, delivery men bringing the packages can be assaulted and kidnapped by masked men in broad daylight by the powers of a now truly evil state.

We fumble for guardrails which have become few and feeble. One of them is still “the truth” even if the devil himself has tried to hijack it.

Hijack even the pursuit of the truth about the death of our president. Shame and ridicule to those of this community who collaborate.

So I will be writing about the imperatives of understanding the assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy in the context of the imperative to reclaim democracy for the United States of America.

We brought this on ourselves. We made a Faustian bargain in the aftermath of November 22, 1963. “Hang it on the neck of the lone commie nut, and we can get on with all those good things, like school lunch programs, desegregation, go to the moon and voting equality.”

The Great Society was built on mass acceptance of a lie .

(An evil war as well)

We are paying the price today. But we can change course.

I know what I’m going to write, and I know how I’m going to share. And I know how and why I will justify asking for support.

In this space, for free, readers will get my unvarnished thinking. About the story, about its relation to the current horrors, about my journey as a writer of simultaneously a novel and a screenplay.

I can now see my way clear to saying that the novel will draw on significant themes of War and Peace and the Spy who came in from the Cold - a nation’s trial and the betrayal of one of its “soldiers”. There is even a Natasha in this story. Guess who.

The novel stands at 53,000 words and my goal is 85,000.

The movie is more a cross between Seventh Seal and Spy who Came in from the Cold. Always betrayal. Redemption in family.

The screenplay was a finalist at the Woods Hole Film Festival two years ago and has been assessed by producer/consultants with some serious credentials. It is in the process of being rewritten, focused and put in context.

So here in the pages available to all I will share my process and progress.

In the paid section I will share the emerging works - chunks of both the novel and the screenplay which grow out of the process and thoughts that I share here. Work in process, subject to change.

It takes money to live, it takes money to go to conferences, it takes money to visit locations, it takes money to go to interview people. So, your support is appreciated.

Normally when I publish a section of either the novel or the screenplay I will write first a summary available to all, and then the piece itself behind the paywall available to paying subscribers. If I figure out how to let readers pay by piece I will try that too.

The summary will be brief but comprehensive, I hope an incentive but not a tease.

But I will publish here for all the just witten end of the novel, to show all where I am going…………..

The ghost of James Angleton on a phone call from Hell has just finished narrating to David Dawson, retired Warren Commission attorney The White Gloves Legend, a truer tale of the assassination of JFK. (The phone call had interrupted a peaceful evening watching Jeopardy.)

Now they wrap it up.

Here it is.

WE ARE ALL COMPLICIT

(©️ Robert Manz )

Dawson could see it all come together now. Angleton had known, and had done nothing.

“You knew! You were complicit!!” He accused the ghost vehemently and righteously.

“Of course I knew David, it was my job to know these things…….. you do too in your own way.”

“We all have something we knew about the assassination and did nothing to prevent or reveal.”

“We still have much about the assassination that we do not want to know.”

“So we still do nothing.”

“That ‘we’ is really ‘you’ for the last part David …….. you are still alive. You know that you declined to listen to the tapes that show the voice of someone not Lee Oswald spoofing him in Mexico City. You did nothing and you still do nothing about it.”

“What answer are you going to give when Final Jeopardy asks ‘name the assassin of President Kennedy?’ Will you object to the singular? Will you say the truth, ‘I don’t know’? Will you add to that truth and resolve to find out?”

“The clock is ticking David, what are you going to do?”

“So who did it?”, Dawson asked again in embarrassed exasperation.

The ghost chuckled.

“I could tell you David but what good would it do you? Will you call in the New York Times and do a stunt to reveal the killer(s)? When the Times asks ‘how do you know?’ will you answer ‘the Ghost of James Angleton told me?’”

“That will get a laugh won’t it?”

“Right up there with Lee’s girlfriend in New Orleans, right there with the pilot who fired a dart gun, with the memo from McCone to Rowley owning Oswald, with the confession by the cop the FBI stole, and finally with the so-called release by the devil himself of JFK assassination papers as a smokescreen for all his child rapes.”

“He will take some reporters to hell with him on that one, David. From what I hear the boss is a little apprehensive that there will be someone here who could upstage him.”

“But I digress.”

“Do your job David. Seek truth while you are still alive. While it can do you and your country some good. Look at the price you are paying for ignoring truth. The democracy JFK stood for and sought to renew - Make it a beacon and shining light for the world - is being taken over by obscenely rich white men who measure success in goading each other to cage fights and intelligence that is not human.”

“Yes I know who killed JFK but it’s not doing me any good and it wouldn’t do you any good; you have to find out and tell your honest story.”

“Wait a minute ghost you told me when we started that you don’t know who killed the president”

A somber complete silence.

“This is truth David; I lied.”

END

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Ps. You can find that early version of the original phone call at the link below.