The Vision and Reality

 The Vision and the Reality 

Note: RFK, Jr. will be giving a live streamed speech on his views on Foreign Policy and a reflection of JFK's June 10 1963 Peace Speech at AU - on Tuesday, June 20, at 7 pm, from New Hampshire, the site of an early Democratic Party Primary election that can be viewed here: 

RFK Jr. to Deliver Major Foreign Policy Speech in New Hampshire | Kennedy24

The Vision and the Reality 

Every June 10th, the anniversary of President Kennedy's "Peace Speech" at American University, I think about President Kennedy's vision of world peace, and John Judge's vision of a Washington D.C. based permanent archive, library, museum and historical research center focused on political assassinations and how and why neither of those dreams and visions have been full filled. There's always a reason.

With JFK we know they blew his head open on a public street in front of hundreds of witnesses, including his wife, and as Gorby said when he visited Dallas, it was JFK's vision expressed in the Peace Speech that probably got him killed, or at least contributed to it. 

For John Judge it was his health, and the failure of those around him to do the right thing when he got sick and died. 

But both JFK's vision of world peace and John Judge's vision of a permanent DC based assassination research center can still be realized, if only those with the power to do so will take the time and put in the effort. 

As an ancient oriental philosopher once said in a haiku - and I am paraphrasing here - '

Before reality comes the vision. 

And we have a vision of what we would like the world to be.The vision is no problem, we can see it with our eyes closed, as it wasn't just JFK or John Judge's visions, but it was a mutual vision that many of us shared, and tried to make happen, and we have had many opportunities, but there was always a road block. 

When Daniel Ellesberg passed away this week, I recalled a meeting he had with a number of top flight JFK assassination researchers in San Francisco, and from some of those who were there, I learned that he said, okay, now you know the president was killed by a conspiracy, and the government was involved, -  what are you going to do about it? 

Well, each generation made that decision. The first generation of JFK researchers, led by Philadelphia attorney Vincent Salandria, started and maintained a chain mail network among their associates, that included Gaeton Fonzi, and others of his caliber. 

Some of them, including Carl Oglesby, and his cohorts formed an organization - The Assassination Information Bureau (AIB), that had walk in offices in Boston and Dupont Circle in DC, and was instrumental in getting Congress to form the Church Intelligence Committee (SSCIA) and the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA), both of which include records that the government still won't disclose. 

Oglesby was a New Leftist in the 60s, as I was, trying to sturr things up and make a difference. He also tried to percieve the Deep State in an unorthodox way - and wrote about it in his radical and influential book "Yankee and Cowboy War," dividing the lines in the Devil's Chessboard as not between, liberals and conservatives, democrats and republicans, right wing and left wing, but rather as the liberal Yankees of the Northeast and the Cowboy Reactionaries of the South, as best represented by LBJ, John Connally, the Bushs et al, and the Kennedys and their contingent. 

After the HSCA disbanded and it's records locked away for 50 years and not responsive to the Freedom of Information Act, John Judge and I co-founded the Committee for an Open Archives (COA) to lobby Congress to release the HSCA records. Though we were unsuccessful, we did learn a lot about Congress and how it operates. 

Before COA ever got started there was the AARC. Washington attorneys Bud Festerwald, Sr, and Jim Lesar started the Assassination Archives and Research Center (AARC) that now has most of its records in storage as they are being scanned and posted on line, but for a couple of years they had a walk in archives, library and research center near 14th Street, near the White House, where I spent many a nights reading the records released by the CIA and copied by the AARC. Festerwald, along with fellow Congressional investigator the irrascable Harold Weisberg, filed hundreds if not thousands of FOIA requests related to the JFK assassination. 

Today, Jim Lesar and Dan Alcorn of the AARC file most of the relevant FOIA requests related to the assassination and have represented other researchers in their quests, especially Jeff Morley. 

In Dallas, Gary Shaw and a number of others got together and started the Assassination Information Center on the third floor of a West End mall, behind the Texas School Book Depository. 

Shaw was a major instigator of the first successful Dallas ASK conferences, which was run by a professional, corporate conference organization. That's where John Judge decided that we should have our own organization and put on our own conferences, and thus began the formation of  COPA - the Coalition on Political Assassinations. The first two COPA meetings were held over a weekend at the Quaker Center on Capitol Hill, where three organizations - COA, AARC and Jim DiEugenio's California based group formed the coalition, with Dr. Cyrl Wecht named chairman. 

COPA sponsored two very successful national conferences in DC, one at the Sheraton, where Earl Warren lived and still haunts the halls today. It was at one of those two early COPA conferences in DC when Debra Conway got the idea for JFK LANCER - to educate a new generation about the assassination and began to organize conferences in Dallas that often competed with the COPA conferences. 

Former Dallas legal assistant Mary Ferrell began a chronology and index card name file on the day of the assassination, and her records now incorporate many of the recently released records and are made available on line at the MaryFerrell web site thanks to Rex Bradford. 

Now there are two other organizations that hold annual conferences in Dallas and sometimes elsewhere - the Judyth Baker group and I think she may have joined forces with the college professor David Denton who holds conferences at his school. 

For awhile there was a Florida group that met periodically, and included Gaeton Fonzi, and others have sprung up in England, where there's the Dealey Plaza UK group that meets at pubs for lunch and usually have a visiting guest speaker, and another in Australia, where Greg Parker has organized Justice for JFK.

There's a lot happening on line as well - with every conceivable belief having its own web site or Facebook page. 

Of those on line, I think the best are Jeff Morley's JFKFacts.org, Jim DiEugenio's Kennedys and King, and Russ Baker's WWWW. 

A few years before he died, John Judge finally got the Hidden History Museum formally institutionalized as a not for profit organization, and it looked like it was about to take off when he had a massive stroke and died. Those who were close to him at the time, and served on the board of the HHM, decided to disband COPA, even though the COPA board was not informed, and co-mingle the COPA funds with the HHM funds, and take the COPA and HHM archives to a strip mall in York, Pennsylvania. 

So those of us who wanted to continue the work of COPA formed a new organization CAPA - Citizens Against Political Assassinations, as a group of individuals and not organizations, under the belief that we all could get along if we had a common goal. Boy was that wrong. 

All of these organizations have gone through changes over time, and those that still exist will continue to do so, and they provide a good opportunities for those who are looking for something to do. a

The most significant things actually being done are by lawyers in the courts - as the AARC has been doing for years, and Bill Simpich and Larry Schnapf, along with the Mary Ferrell organization, have filed suit against the President and the National Archives for failure to enforce the JFK Act. 

While those of us who are not lawyers can't do that, we can support them, give them research facts that can be used in their arguments, and write and speak out about the government's failure to obey the law, as RFK, Jr., Jeff Morely and others have done and are doing. 

In addition, one Congressman has authored and submitted a new bill JFK Act of 2023, that is now being reviewed by a number of committees, but I believe it should be put on the fast track, much like the COVID Records Act of 2023 that passed Congress and was signed by the President three months ago in a process called Unanimous Consent, in which the bill is passed without any objection or debate. I believe the JFK Act of 1992 was passed that way and I know the COVID Records Act went though, with a 90 day deadline for release of all of the COVID records, and that deadline was yesterday, so they should be released today. I will be doing a separate blog post on the COVID law, not because of what it says, but because of how it was passed and how the government responds to it. 

There's also a new JFK Act of 2013 that deserves a closer look, and I will be giving it some time soon, but there's a lot to be done before our joint vision of peace and a permanent assassination research institute become a reality. 

NOTE: This is a first draft and I will be making corrections and additions and adding links ASAP.