On January 26, 2006, Professor Joan Mellen, author A Farewell to Justice, and a friend of mine, gave a lecture to the Ethical Culture Society in New York City, titled "How the Failure To Identify, Prosecute and Convict President Kennedy's Assassins Has Led To Today's Crisis Of Democracy." (By the way, this blog is cited in Joan's book as a source in the Notes.)

I would like to suggest that the truth about the Kennedy assassination, far from being a matter of interest only to historians, and not even to most of them, will help us understand how we have arrived at a point where people as respectable as New York attorney Martin Garbus are comparing the current U.S. government with the rise of fascism in the mid-twentieth century. It's my belief that the present state of our political culture is a direct result of the fact that those responsible for the murder of President Kennedy have never been brought to justice.

To sum up: “A Farewell To Justice” suggests that the clandestine service of the CIA not only covered up the truth about the Kennedy assassination - that's easy to demonstrate from the four million documents now residing at the National Archives - but organized the event itself. That the CIA escaped without penalty, this extraordinary fact, has been integrated over these forty-two years into the body politic. It has produced a political culture where the unthinkable has become accepted practice. Meaningful freedom of the press has fallen into serious jeopardy.

We have not been aided in understanding the meaning of the Kennedy assassination by the continued public silence of those closest to President Kennedy. One day I requested of Wilmer Thomas, one of Jim Garrison's law school classmates (Tulane School of Law, Class of 1949) to ask his acquaintance, Kennedy adviser Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., whom he believed was behind the assassination of President Kennedy. Professor Schlesinger observed, quietly, “We were at war with the National Security people.”

Audio File here