Get back... and to the left: How long should we wait for the truth?
What happened during The Beatles' breakup took half a century to become clear and we're still waiting with JFK. What makes you think we get the facts now?
How long does it take for narratives to be corrected or completed?
The 58th anniversary of the JFK assassination was this time last week and it passed relatively quietly as anniversaries not divisible by five tend to do. It might have been more worthy of comment had a release of documents on the events in Dallas and their aftermath happened in October.
Instead, the publication of the files was delayed by President Biden — on the advice of the national archivist — because “the pandemic has had a significant impact on the agencies reviewing the redactions”. The information is now scheduled to be revealed in two tranches; one on December 15 and the other in December 2022 after the second batch of files has undergone “an intensive 1-year review”.
You don’t need to be Oliver Stone — who returned to the story with his new documentary JFK Revisited: Through the Looking Glass — nor even someone on their umpeenth viewing of the original 1991 movie JFK to have sneaking suspicion that the US government will further delay the release of those files or redact them so throughly they resemble a goths’ outing to a volcanic beach.
Alan Barth1’s aphorism, “news is the first draft of history”, has been used, abused, rewritten and retooled so often over the years that there should probably be some kind of moratorium2 on referencing it. But the reason Barth’s words have become so well-worn is because they boil a huge truth about journalism down to an economical seven-word phrase.
It took just four weeks after the Kennedy assassination for the “first draft” to be questioned when attorney Mark Lane wrote an article for the National Guardian. In it he presented 15 questions, from the perspective of a defence attorney, on officials’ public statements about the murders of Kennedy and J.D. Tippit, the police office killed 45 minutes after the assassination. Lee Harvey Oswald was charged with both killings.
12 days after Oswald was shot dead by Jack Ruby, the American Civil Liberties Union published a long statement in which it stated:
… Lee Harvey Oswald, had he lived, would have been deprived of all opportunity to receive a fair trial by the conduct of the police and prosecuting officials in Dallas, under pressure from the public and the news media. From the moment of his arrest until his murder two days later, Oswald was tried and convicted many times over in the newspapers, on the radio, and over television by the public statements of the Dallas law enforcement officials.
The first draft of the official history of the Kennedy Assasination — the report of the President’s Commission on the Assassination of President Kennedy aka the Warren Commission — was presented to President Johnson on September 24 1964 and made public three days later. It reached the conclusion that some — many, even — felt it had been set up to reach: Oswald assassinated Kennedy and he acted alone in doing so.
In 1978, the official history was redrafted somewhat by a special House committee — the Select Committee on Assassinations — which concluded that “on the basis of the evidence available, President John F. Kennedy was probably assassinated as a result of a conspiracy.”
Back in 1992, Congress passed a law requiring all remaining papers on the assassination to be released by Oct. 26, 2017. President Trump delayed that release on “national security grounds”, the favourite get-out clause of politicians eager to avoid a difficult conversation. A Gallup poll conducted in April 2001 — five months before 9/11 began the new golden age of conspiracy theories — found that 81% of Americans believed more than one person was involved in the killing of Kennedy.
In 2017, a poll commissioned by FiveThirtyEight found that 61% of Americans did not believe that Oswald alone killed Kennedy, with Democrats and Republicans equally convinced that there was a conspiracy. In the immediate aftermath of the Warren Commission, 87% of the American public said they agreed with the official explanation: Oswald did it.
We are more than 58 years on from the day that Walter Cronkite said:
From Dallas, Texas, the flash, apparently official: "President Kennedy died at 1 p.m. Central. Standard. Time."
Cronkite said “apparently official” because having come up through journalism as a wire reporter he’d had a cautiousness drilled into him that made him wait for official word. In a sense we have waited for over half a century for the whole word to be available. And, even when the files are finally released, redactions will mean that gaps in the story remain.
In a piece for the LRB published in 1991 — the same year Oliver Stone’s JFK came to US movie theatres — Christopher Hitchens produced a list of unlikely but true events in US history beginning with the Kennedy assassination:
President Kennedy was shot down in the light of broad day. His assassin was murdered on camera while in maximum security. Richard Nixon’s intimates fed high-denomination dollar bills into a shredder in order to disguise their provenance in the empire of – Howard Hughes? Marilyn Monroe fucked both Kennedy brothers before taking her own life, if she did indeed take it. Frank Sinatra raised money for the Reagans and acted as at least a confidante to the First Lady. Norman Podhoretz’s son-in-law Elliott Abrams, while working as Reagan’s Assistant Secretary of State, dunned the Sultan of Brunei for a $10 million backhander to the Contras and then lost the money in a Swiss computer error. Ronald Reagan sent three envoys with a cake and a Bible to Tehran to discuss an arms-for-hostages trade with the Ayatollah Khomeini. Robert MacNamara went to a briefing on Cuba believing that it was more than likely that he would not live through the weekend. The Central Intelligence Agency was caught, in collusion with the Mafia, plotting to poison Fidel Castro’s cigars. Ronald Reagan’s White House was run to astrological time, and its chief spent his evenings discussing Armageddon theology with strangers. Oliver North recruited convicted narcotics smugglers to run the secret war against Nicaragua. George Bush recruited Manuel Noriega to the CIA. As the Watergate hounds closed in, Henry Kissinger was implored to sink to his Jewish knees and join Richard Nixon in prayer on the Oval Office carpet, and complied. Klaus Barbie was plucked from the SS ‘Most Wanted’ list and, with many of his confrères, given a second career in American Intelligence. J. Edgar Hoover amassed tapes of sexual indiscretion in Washington, partly for his own prurient needs and partly for the ends of power. He caused blackmail letters to be sent from the FBI to Dr Martin Luther King, urging him to commit suicide.
Thrusting your fist into that pick’n’mix and retrieving even a handful of those events leaves you thinking: There are some conspiracies — conspiracies of silence, conspiracies of elite self-interest, conspiracies of criminal and political convenience — which have been turned into what Hitchens called “unsightly bulges” in “the great, grey safety curtain” of politics.
A similar list could easily be constructed from events in the UK, from Arms to Iraq to the Al Yamamah deal, to Boris Johnson having so many affairs that it’s not possible for Wikipedia to accurately note how many children he has, to Dominic Cummings’ viral campaign for Specsavers, to Tony Blair being a godfather to one of Rupert Murdoch’s children, to a genuine interview question during a general election being, “Would you nationalise sausages?”, to The Sun printing a front page based on neo-nazi conspiracy theories then pretending that it never happened, and on and on and on.
Hitchens, himself hardly free from sin, wrote that journalists “find and pronounce on corruption and malfeasance, and gravely too, but it’s always as if the horror is somehow an invasion or interruption.” He was doing so before the height of the Major “sleaze” era, before the Clinton administration which provided him with such rich material that he could name a book No One Left To Lie To, and before the Boris Johnson premiership, which he missed by being so inconsiderate as to die 8 years before Wurzel Gummage’s malfeasant cousin came to office.
While I’ve dedicated most of this edition to Kennedy and the idea of stories left officially unfinished or quickly pushed into ‘conspiracy’ territory, it was actually the less life and death content of the new/old Beatles documentary Get Back that sent me down this largely derelict cul-de-sac.
Peter Jackson’s indulgent documentary, almost Beckettian in its commitment to boredom (I’d call it Waiting For Ringo but the drummer kept good time both at the kit and away from it), is a great example of how long it can take for more about a story to come out. The narrative around The Beatles’ final album — in terms of release if not recording — was set in most people’s minds by the Let It Be film and the recriminations that rumbled on through the early years of the members’ solo careers.
But with access to 60 hours of film and 150 hours of audio, Jackson was able to stitch together a fuller picture of the recording. Sometimes it’s far, far too full — it may take me years to get back to liking I’ve Got A Feeling after hearing it so many times in quick succession — but it muddies the clean narrative of “band hate each other and disintegrate” as well as perhaps finally putting paid to the notion that Yoko Ono was the catalyst for it all.
What’s interesting though — to me at least — is how even with 7 hours of the process available to peruse (and a much, much longer director’s cut likely to appear at some point) journalists and critics find it hard to shake off the stories they have lashed themselves to in the years since The Beatles ended.
That’s why you get snitty little asides like the one in The Independent’s review which chortles that the documentary captures “two and a half geniuses and Ringo Starr sitting in a room” and desperate dispatches like Philip Norman’s Times piece in which he begs readers to favour his memories of the period over what they can see with their own eyes.
Worst of all, Get Back has triggered less pseud’s corner outbursts and more pseud’s circle jerk explosions like Jonathan Freeland in The Guardian writing…
They Shall Not Grow Old was the title Peter Jackson gave to the first documentary he made, and he could have named his latest exactly the same way. Instead it is called Get Back, and while the earlier film restored archive footage of the young British men who fought the first world war, this new one – nearly eight hours long and making its debut in three parts this weekend – does the same for the young British men who conquered the world by more peaceful means; four of them to be precise, known for ever as the Beatles.
… an opening paragraph so painful that it made me wistful for the last time I had root canal surgery.
58 years after the Kennedy assassination and 51 years after The Beatles broke up neither story has got past the drafting stage. With that context it’s worth looking very sceptically at the “first drafts” of history that journalists offer up today. How will they look five years from now let alone fifty? And what theory that’s dismissed as conspiracy now will turn out to simply be obvious then?
The long-serving Washington Post editorial writer whose run at the paper went from 1943 through to 1972.
Typically I have just suggested a ban and immediately broken it.
I hadn't heard that phrase until I read this piece, so I'm glad you broke it!
Great article by the way.