How to explain the day John Kennedy died

It is still shocking how badly the Kennedy assassination traumatized us, how it launched millions of rounds of conspiracy theorizing, historical taxonomy, and sorrowful speculation about missing futures. And on this key anniversary, it feels as if all we can do is helplessly circle around the sadness at the heart of it all, about the event itself.

It is a thing that still lives and thrives in a fog of words, feelings, and memories. If we aren't careful, it can be a crutch of self-pity and misplaces frustration. And I think we need help thinking about what is important about it and what questions and challenges it raises that we still have to face. So if I can add my little bit, I'd point readers to something Daniel Schorr wrote in the New York Review of Books in October 1977 that shines through the event's aftermath like a light.

Schorr's essay, which is alas behind a archive paywall, is a patient and methodical effort to connect the investigations done by the Warren Commission in the aftermath of the tragedy to the work done in the mid-1970s as America sorted through the violence, horror, and shame of the 60s. Specifically, he dug through the findings of the Church Committee, which had hauled before the American people all the mischief and skullduggery its secret security services had carried themselves into. It was the kind of shocking and painful public reckoning that only a healthy democracy can live through, and people like me who remember it were in no way surprised by the recent NSA revelations, but have been horrified by our shrugging indifference to them.

Many of the things that Schorr explains in detail were new then but in the past decades have been well-digested and, sadly, forgotten. In particular, he looks at the CIA and the Mafia's efforts to turn back the Cuban revolution. It was both horrifying and plainly ridiculous:

"My favorite plot — nonlethal — was what someone in the CIA called “elimination by illumination.” It was dreamed up by General Edward Lansdale, Robert Kennedy’s coordinator for the hidden war against Castro. Never put into execution, the plan was to spread the word in Cuba of the imminent Second Coming of Christ, with the corollary message that Castro, the Antichrist, would have to go. At the appointed time, American submarines would surface off the coast, sending up star shells, which would presumably inspire the Cubans to rise up against Castro."

And Schorr also casually hints at scandals that continue today. For example, that Bill Moyers, who makes a living as a self-righteous media scold and sanctimonious old fart, almost certainly knows way, way more than he's telling about some important things. Specifically, Schorr notes that Moyer, as a top LBJ aide, was part of the conversation about the effort in the days after the assassination to cut off speculation about motivations and any possibility of Communist involvement (that's in the Church Committee report). And so, until that man speaks — and real reporter Robert Caro has spent decades politely inviting him to do so — he's a fraud and anything else he has to say is bullshit.

See, what I'm really talking about is journalism, and how they can help fix a problem. So much of what a reporter can do is really just putting things in context, of explaining the history and the mechanics of a complicated thing in a simple way. And by doing so, he probably comes closest to finding a motivation than anyone else:

"Had the [Warren] commission not been so completely sidetracked from every Cuban lead, it might have found what this reporter was able to find—buried in the commission’s own files or later dug up in congressional investigations and from other sources.

Where the 'Castro revenge' theory had run aground was on the lack of evidence that Oswald had any contact with anyone who knew about the CIA’s secret plotting against the Cuban leader. But Oswald did not need to have such contact to reach the conclusion that Castro, his hero, was being threatened and that he, in turn, could become a hero in Cuba by responding to the threat."

All the evidence is lying in plain sight; you don't need grassy knolls or magic bullets. Just the moral awareness of the irony of what had come back to haunt us:

"The possibility that Oswald acted on his own, inspired by Castro’s statement, cannot today be proved, but it has the elements of the fortuitous and the lunatic that sometimes govern history. The “conspiracy,” then, would have been a conspiracy of interlocking events—the incessant CIA plots to kill Castro, touching off a Castro warning, touching off something in the fevered mind of Lee Harvey Oswald. 

It would be comforting to know that Oswald acted on his own—not as part of some dark left-wing or right-wing plot to strike down a president. It is less comforting to realize that the chain of events may have started with the reckless plotting of the CIA against Castro, perhaps in pursuit of what it thought to be Kennedy’s aim. An arrow launched into the air to kill a foreign leader may well have fallen back to kill our own."

As you can see, Schorr is a hero to me, and I'm amazed at the variety of ways his courage took shape. When he wrote that piece for the NYRB, it was just about a year after being effectively fired by his long-time employer, CBS News, who wouldn't support him in an effort to protect the name of a source who had leaked a suppressed Congressional report about CIA overreach.

The more things are the same… CBS wouldn't stick up for Schorr then, but look at what they stand up for today: television personality like Lara Logan, who interprets her job as "Chief Foreign Correspondent" as being like a press officer to make members of the military-industrial complex look heroic and cool, cheerfully do their dirty work of slandering opponents, and have pictures of herself looking cute taken in tanks and helicopters. That's what corporate journalism is worth. And that's why so little makes sense any more.

Anyone who ever had a heart...

It's been nearly two weeks since Lou Reed died, and after reading as many tributes as I could find, and listening to most of his albums since, I'm pretty confident that most listeners got him all wrong.*

I've never been a big proponent of the New Criticism school of literary criticism, the idea that all you need to understand a work of art can be found right in the text itself. I was an English and History major all those years ago, after all. But as a mindset it is a pretty effective tool when sorting through popular culture — and it really lights up Lou Reed's work, which is too often befogged by his reputation and easy assumptions.

Lou Reed's work meant a lot to me, and since he died I've been struck by the strange number of ways his words and music are woven into my life. The first song I listened to after my daughter was born was by Lou Reed (it's how she got her middle name, in fact). Certain songs can summon thoughts and feelings with magical thoroughness: each time I hear "Sunday Morning" I'm back on certain New York streets at certain late hours remembering certain things — an insane feedback loop of nostalgia, sorrow, and regret that is so intense I don't want to talk about it. Some memories I can't even make sense of. Like that one afternoon shortly after I'd moved to Williamstown and was overwhelmed with how remote and lonely it felt, and the song "Dirty Boulevard" came on WEQX. Something about hearing it at that moment made me so happy I nearly cried.

This is all means quite a lot to me, but what I want to talk about is how he lives in our culture. The conventional line, which you've heard over and over again since his death, is that he was a consummate outsider, a poet of rough, beautiful, alternative lifestyles in the big, bad city. A chronicler of those things in the night that are frightening yet strangely attractive.

Well, a little, maybe, but no.

Let's go to the text. Consider the song "Perfect Day." The prejudiced reading is that it must have something to do with how groovy it is to get stoned in the park. But there is nothing in the song that suggests anything of the sort. You have to — and too few people can for some reason — take it at face value: that it is about how nice it is to spend the day with someone you love. Anything more and you are missing the signal by broadcasting your own noise.

The shocking truth is that Reed was an almost perfectly irony-free romantic, which is so weird and counter to his counter-cultural reputation — not to mention the generally accepted understanding of his prickly personality — that he becomes revolutionary.

The songs are crystalline images of very powerful emotions, and they work best when you trust him and meet him on his own terms. A real favorite song of mine is "Coney Island Baby," which captures the weird longing to be accepted and terror of boredom that is as perfect a summary of teenage longing as you'll find. But to really get it, you have to understand what it means to want to play football for the coach, and not think it means something kinky or sarcastic. You have to believe in the "glory of love" with all the seriousness and logic half-formed youth can muster. And, of course, you have to let "I swear I'd give it all up for you" be the last word.  Doesn't matter what "it" might be. You probably felt that way once. I hope you did.

Throughout his work he was exploring what we have in common. Think about Transformer, an album that can't shake its reputation as a roman a clef about drag queens, junkies, and whores. But none of that really matters if you don't know, or even better, can get past, the novelty of it. If it weren't such a plain amazing song, it would astonishing that "Walk on the Wild Side" is the song everyone knows from his solo period (and I'm still figuring out how my state senator tweeted his memory of driving down Route 7 blasting the song with his dad in the car… his dad being our long-time district attorney). This is very human and universal, like the best art is, about alienation and loneliness and redemption. About fun and the desperate lengths we go to make our lives less dull and sad. It's a fortunate, collateral effect that it happens to maybe make you realize how much you have in common with people you might too quickly dismiss as marginal.

And I really think that Lou chose his subjects out of an abundance of compassion. Even his legendary prickliness is a function of his intense sincerity and earnestness. He couldn't be bothered with the deep artifice we demand of public figures. He obviously had many deep personal relationships, so he wasn't a total misanthrope.

When you look at the work all together, you see what values are at work. Tolerance, community, curiosity, cynicism about nothing but cynicism itself. His art is about the incredibly ancient and durable and maybe trite idea that life is really worth all the trouble if you are honest with yourself and look at it right.

* Not really true. As with so many things his wife Laurie Anderson gets it: "Lou was a prince and a fighter and I know his songs of the pain and beauty in the world will fill many people with the incredible joy he felt for life. Long live the beauty that comes down and through and onto all of us."