My friend and website partner Paul Trejo brought up two points in his last blog post which interest me. I am a graduate student in the History Department of Arizona State University and my focus this fall is the US Civil War.
Paul's blog provokes me to ask: Did the Civil War ever really end?
Paul's thesis is that the Radical Right wing extremists who were running Dallas at the time, led by General Edwin Walker, killed JFK.
The reason? Communism. Commuism combined with the ancient racism of Southern reactionaries boiled over into JFK's murder.
The Soviet Union was leading the world into space, the Soviet Union was colonizing the Americas in Cuba, the Soviet Union was successfully financing anti-capitalist revolts in Asia and Africa. On a personal level, General Walker was disgusted with his Korean War and NATO duties because it seemed the US government was now bent on accomodating -not destryoing- communism. For example, JFK signed an absurdly peaceful Nuclear Test Ban Treaty with the USSR three months before he was killed.
The repeated success of Moscow's global agenda, in General Walker's eyes, became an emergency under Kennedy. The failed US-sponsored Bay of Pigs attack on Cuba was unthinkable to Walker: How could any true American allow a piss-poor Cigar Republic like Cuba defeat the US???
Obviously, so thought Walker and the rest of the extreme Right, JFK was a communist.
Paul Trejo says, "This was a widespread feeling in the Southern USA, as expressed by Radical Right journalists such as Kent and Phoebe Courtney." Moderate Republicans might in good faith of JFK's patriotism argue that the country was too soft on communism, but the Radical Right had no faith in the Kennedys nor America's constitutional processes. The John Birch Society and the Minutemen thought JFK wasn't merely mistaken about the correct way to deal with the Soviets and Castro, they thought JFK must be part of the communist conspiracy. Along with JFK, the United Nations, the CIA, and the liberal media establishment were communist controlled, according to the extreme Right.
Now, hold on a minute, what does all this Cold War paranoia from the extreme Right have to do with racism and the South?
Chief Justice Earl Warren's leadership of the Supreme Court handed down the monumental Brown v. Board of Education decision in 1954, sparking a New Civil War between the Southern racists and the US government. The hippie-commie-liberal president Eisenhower was even part of the enemy camp according to General Walker, Billy Hargis, and the KKK.
As Paul Trejo shows, the fanatical fear of communism grew hand-in-hand with the outrageous appearance of blacks in white schools, blacks voting, and blacks enjoying unprecedented friendships or protection from new allies in the white political elite of Washington. White Citizens Councils popped up all over the South to derail school integration and defend apartheid. 100s of "segregation academies" were created and still exist as a loophole to the Brown decision; while states like Louisiana and Virginia toyed with the idea of eliminating public education altogether if it meant educating blacks and whites in the same school.
Emmett Till, Willie Edwards, Herbert Lee, 4 precious schoolgirls in Birmingham, and 100 other mostly forgotten victims of the Southern Radical Right movement should remind us that JFK was but one Civil Rights martyr lost in this New Civil War.
Racial integration was communism, according to the right wing extremists. Anticommunist fanatics joined up with racists in what JFK called "Nut Country," a/k/a, Dallas and Texas. Linking the Red Scare sponsors with the Southern Radical Right racists created a passionate force enraged enough to shoot at a moving target, driving by in a convertible, in a risky Wild West -type Dallas shootout on November 22, 1963.
JFK's murder was part of the New Civil War whose battles live on today in places like Charlottesville. Fear of communism and fear of racial equality killed JFK. The Radical Right killed JFK.
...so that's the thesis of this website. I now ask Paul Trejo to explain how JFK's execution was carried out in view of its Radical Right authorship. What were the operational details? How could radicals like Gen. Walker control the cops? What does Lee Harvey Oswald have to do with the JFK assassination?