There are anniversaries ­- births, triumphs, marriages – and there are anniversaries – deaths, defeats, tragedies. And then there is the Kennedy assassination.

Nothing else in America’s frame of reference resonates so searingly – and so controversially. Pearl Harbor begot V-J Day and a sense, however imperfect, of some closure. The assassination of John F. Kennedy – 50 years ago this Nov. 22 – is still an open case in the court of American public opinion.

That’s because of one word: “conspiracy.” No matter what the alternative scenario, if there’s doubt that Kennedy was killed other than by a lone, Communism-enamored loser out to make horrific history, you have the cornerstones of conspiracy. And an anniversary like no other.

According to public opinion polls over the years, a majority of Americans have continued to suspect conspiracy. Many think Lee Harvey Oswald did not act alone – or wittingly – or at all. Just last month a national AP-GfK Roper Public Affairs and Corporate Communications poll found that 59 percent of Americans still thought multiple people were involved in assassinating President Kennedy. The U.S. House Select Committee on Assassinations gave more than cover to conspiracy advocates when, in 1978, it formally found that Kennedy “was probably assassinated as a result of a conspiracy.” To be sure, no one labeled the HSCA a bunch of agenda-driven, publicity-crazed conspiracy nuts for their conclusion.

And while Oliver Stone’s 1992 “JFK” was flawed, it did serve to ramp-up conspiracy interest for another generation. It also prompted the expedited release of classified information.

Now here we are in the spring of 2013 and already the media drum beat is audible. We’re learning that at least two major films, a documentary and a TV movie will be out later this year to herald the haunting countdown to the 50th anniversary of Dallas infamy. So steel yourself for those graphic Zapruder images that loom again. Also prepare for a point-and-counterpoint media frenzy.

Many of you likely saw the Associated Press story that ran two Sundays ago in the Tampa Tribune. It chronicled interest in JFK-assassination theories this last half century, but it also – inevitably, it seems, with some media – included absurdly extraneous context that does a disservice to truth-searching. After noting familiar conspiracy suspects – from payback Mafiosi to avenging Cuban exiles to “military-industrial complex” elements – the piece inexplicably gave credence to whatever buffoon theorized that Kennedy’s limo driver shot him “as part of an effort to cover up proof of an alien invasion.” Shame on the AP for trafficking in such drivel and thus trivializing those who don’t support a lone-assassin theory. It was awful timing for bad editing.

Even worse, the piece then characterized conspiracy theorists as those seemingly willing to go to any lengths to avoid confronting the much more likely scenario: “that Oswald, a hapless former Marine, was in the right place at the right time, with motive and opportunity” to pull off the crime of the century.

This is not the forum to confront character assassination. Nor is this the time to delve into numerous inherent conflicts ­- from the Parkland Memorial Hospital entry wound that morphed into an autopsy exit wound to cherry-picked Warren Commission testimony to the improbable Jack Ruby.

Two main points for now:

The Warren Commission’s motivation was not conspiracy – but national security. The world had dodged a nuclear bullet the year before over Soviet missiles in Cuba. As President Lyndon Johnson made clear to an initially uncooperative Chief Justice Earl Warren: If you have more than three rifle shots – thus more than one shooter – and your prime suspect once defected to the Soviet Union, who knows where this will lead? We have a dead suspect. He was a loser loner. Leave it at that. Do you want to risk WWIII?

As for the 24-year-old Oswald, he was almost assuredly a U.S. government operative, albeit one who didn’t know where he fit in America’s internecine, often rogue, Cold War tool box. Hence that haunting “patsy” reference after his arrest and before his execution.

Consider a few basic biographical facts on Oswald:

? While in the Marines, Oswald was assigned to Atsugi, Japan, the U-2 spy base. As in Gary Powers’ flights. As in strict government clearance. It was no place for security risks.

? The United States invested in Oswald. He was sent to foreign language school where he learned Russian, which he would speak – and write – well. It was no place for dullard losers.

? Oswald would become a “defector” to – and then a “re-defector” from – the Soviet Union. Such scenarios were not unheard of during the height of Cold War paranoia.

? Oswald was, inexplicably enough, known to be involved with both anti-Castro exiles in Louisiana as well as the pro-Castro Fair Play for Cuba Committee. As for the latter, he was the only FPCC “member” in the New Orleans “branch.” In intelligence circles, such blatant imposters are known as “dangles” – would-be bait to the other side.

And a lot more.

Put it this way: Oswald was no John Hinckley, Squeaky Fromme or Arthur Bremer.

Last night the history group called Preservation Dallas gave a special award to Lindalyn Adams, one of the people who created The Sixth Floor, the Kennedy assassination museum downtown.

That’s great. She deserves it. Now I want to know why The Sixth Floor got Robert Groden thrown in the slammer.

Groden is a best-selling author whose books argue that the killing of the president in Dallas a half century ago was a conspiracy. On weekends, when tourists, including plenty of assassination buffs, flock to downtown to visit Dealey Plaza where it happened, Groden sets up a table there and lectures and sells books and videos. After ticketing, arresting and jailing him on multiple occasions over the years, the city of Dallas has backed off, apparently agreeing with Groden’s lawyers that he was never breaking the law in the first place.

But Groden still has a federal civil rights lawsuit against the city plodding its way slowly through the court system. I hope someday the lawsuit will answer my question.
In today’s Dallas Morning News story about the award for Adams, the executive director of the museum, Nicola Longford, makes a statement that is quite telling, if you’re as close to this stuff as I have been. It’s your typical Morning News party-pix happy-talk everybody’s-just-GRAND-GRAND story, in which Longford says, “The Sixth Floor has a collective responsibility to maintain the landmark district site.”

Robert Groden is suing Dallas, but it’s the museum that’s doing the city’s dirty work.

Oh, is that right? When exactly did that duty get assigned to the museum? Is that responsibility the reason security personnel from the museum asked the Dallas PD to go arrest Groden on June 10, 2010? That was the city’s version later, under oath, when they responded to Groden’s lawsuit. The cops told the court they popped Groden and threw him in the Lew Sterrett jail because a security guard from the museum told them to. This is after Longford told me the museum had nothing to do with it — apparently not a truthful statement, if the city is to be believed.

Listen: Adams and curator/designer Connover Hunt did the city a huge solid by saving the School Book Depository Building and turning the sixth-floor “sniper’s nest” into a museum. Had it been up to the usual powers that be in Dallas, the building would have been imploded and the site turned into an animatronic Biblical theme park.

But the mission of the museum has been perverted in recent years. It has become a kind of enforcement arm for the ilk of people in Dallas who can’t stand controversy about the assassination. Their official line, as purveyed by the museum, is that some lone nut named Oswald did it, that’s it, forget about it, it wasn’t Dallas’ fault.

For all I know that’s true. But it’s also true that a whole bunch of people disagree, and the intensity of that debate is higher this year because of the impending 50th anniversary of the event. The city has gone to absurd lengths to control that anniversary, giving itself permits that will effectively lock down Dealey Plaza and bar the general public during the entire week of the event.

Why? Who? Who wants this done? Who is afraid of what being said? And why is the museum, which touts itself as a center for scholarly research, out there in the plaza with the gendarmes getting somebody who disagrees with them about history hauled off to the slammer? Who told Longford it was any of her damn business what goes on in Dealey Plaza?

Right now, as the anniversary approaches, the fact that somebody in Dallas is still this touchy about it is the most interesting thing about the anniversary. Otherwise I’m not sure many people would pay attention. But apparently somebody with a lot of stroke in this city wants the bolts screwed down tight on free speech in Dealey Plaza that week. Why?

http://www.youtube.com/channel/UCOpje8kixcV-skbCZOOiNIw

Friends,

We now have 272 people signed on in support of our petition to Dallas Mayor Rawlings to open Dealey Plaza to the American people on November 22 this year, the 50th anniversary of the JFK assassination. Have you signed on already? If not, please do, and please send the petition on to everyone you know. We need this to go viral.
https://www.change.org/petitions/mayor-mike-rawlings-dallas-tx-open-dealey-plaza-to-the-public-on-november-22-2013

We are also hoping to have you with us that day in Dallas to observe our Moment of Silence at 12:30 pm and to attend our 20th annual conference in Dallas, “Fifty Years is Enough! Free the Files, Find the Truth!” with the best speakers and information on all the major assassinations. More information at www.politicalassassinations.com. Make your registration and reservations now to get discount rates before the end of June.

Also, on Monday June 10 this year, at 12:00 pm, we will gather at the memorial plaque at American University in Washington, DC for our annual commemoration of the “And We Are All Mortal” speech given by JFK there in 1963 to end the nuclear arms race and the Cold War and find real peace with the USSR and other nations in the world. Researchers have lunch afterwards. Hope you can attend this year, the 50th anniversary of that speech as well.

This is also the 45th anniversary year for the assassinations of Martin Luther King. Jr. (April 4) and Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. (June 10). On April 4th we handed out hundreds of flyers at the new Martin Luther King Memorial in DC calling for release of all records on his life and death, and we are working with members of Congress to introduce the Martin Luther King Records Act in this session and get it passed. Legal petitions may lead to a new trail for Sirhan Sirhan this year, or to a new Grand Jury investigation by the Los Angeles D.A.

Thanks for your support in this critical year. Donations are not tax deductible but can be made to COPA, P.O. Box 772, Washington, DC, 20044 or at our website. John Judge, Coalition on Political Assassinations.

Is the Trilateral Commission behind an anti-conspiracy conspiracy?

Nothing could be crazier or sadder. It is the continued determination of a small group of people in Dallas to tightly control public observations of the upcoming 50th anniversary of the Kennedy assassination here. They want to banish the public from Dealey Plaza where it happened so that no one can go there and raise questions.

Jared Boggess

At the behest of this group, the city has agreed to barricade and shut down Dealey Plaza for two weeks bracketing the November 22 anniversary of President John F. Kennedy‘s murder in 1963. The longer this goes on and the closer we draw to the date, the more I feel myself getting spooked out by the whole thing. This is some weird stuff.

The city’s stated goal is to keep Kennedy assassination conspiracy theorists away from the immense hordes of international press that city leaders fear will show up for the event. First of all, immense hordes are not coming. C’mon. If you asked people on the street right now to tell you who JFK was, half would guess he was a rapper.

But a pretty decent-sized contingent of press might show up to see Dallas acting like we did it. “Half Century Later, Dallas Still Guilty” — now that’s a decent little color piece. The more City Hall keeps doing cheap imitations of a 1950s TV detective show, the better chance we have of actually drawing interest and attention next November, all of it bad.

Last week another shoe dropped onto the overwhelming mountain of evidence already arguing that shutting down Dealey Plaza is a manifestly imbecilic and self-defeating idea. An appeals court came down entirely on the side of Robert Groden, a best-selling author and assassination expert whom the city has been hounding for a decade. The court’s finding was a refutation of everything the city has ever said about its right to control Dealey Plaza.

In 2010 a trial court judge quashed the city’s case against Groden for selling assassination tracts in Dealey Plaza. Even though the city had come up with three different versions of what they claimed Groden did wrong, the trial judge said it still failed to find a single law he had broken. By the way, this was the 81st time the city had been tossed out of court for trying to banish Groden form Dealey Plaza. Eighty-one. If in the first 80 times you do not succeed, try an 81st!

The city appealed the trial judge’s ruling in 2010. It took the appeals court three years to make up its mind, but last week a judge finally handed down the score: Groden 81, city of Dallas goose-egg. A few days later the city informed Bradley Kizzia, Groden’s lawyer, that they will not appeal again. The city attorney’s office confirmed this to me.

I learned recently that when Dallas Mayor Mike Rawlings was in Washington last January for the inauguration, he met with John Judge of the Coalition on Presidential Assassinations, a national umbrella group for assassination scholars and conspiracy theorists, to explore the possibility of compromise on the 50th observations. Judge told me that he offered the mayor three possible compromise positions.

First, Judge suggested the city move its memorial event to the Kennedy Memorial site two blocks from Dealey Plaza and leave the plaza open to the public to whom to it belongs. Second, if the city insisted on using the plaza for its memorial, Judge proposed the city allow COPA to be present during the observation in some nondisruptive fashion. And finally if the city just could not share the moment, Judge suggested that a staggered timing be worked out so that COPA could move into the plaza and hold its own event immediately before or immediately after the city’s event.

Mayor Rawlings confirmed to me he had met with Judge in Washington and discussed possible points of compromise. Of the suggestion that the official event remove itself from Dealey Plaza and leave the plaza open, Rawlings told me he told Judge, “I don’t think so.” He said he did agree to relay a request from COPA that it be allowed to meet with the committee sponsoring the event to present its thoughts, something the committee has declined to allow so far in spite of previous requests from COPA.

Rawlings told me that since returning to Dallas he has met with members of the event committee and has relayed COPA’s request to talk to them. He sounded reasonably though not totally optimistic that such a meeting will take place. “If they [the committee] want to, I think we will make that happen,” he said.

He also said this about Judge and his group: “John’s a nice guy. It was a good conversation. I felt that they cared about this day as much as anybody, so we needed to continue that dialogue.

“I was pleased with a couple of things I heard them say. One is that it’s not a massive group. I was afraid it was 500 people or something. I think it’s not. I think it’s a smaller group. And second, they’ve been very respectful [in the past]. In fact they were complaining about somebody who had disrespected their moment of silence. So I liked the tenor of what they were talking about.”

COPA, by the way, has a long history of solemn and respectful observations at Dealey Plaza on previous anniversaries of JFK’s death. Like Groden, Judge and most of the people we are talking about here are mature scholars who choose their words carefully and know how to behave when they go downtown. The suggestion that there is something ominous or dangerous about them — a linchpin of the city’s 81 failed cases against Groden — is a lot of what keeps getting the city laughed out of court.

In fact, for the most part the assassination writers and theorists only look scary when you read about them in the pages of The Dallas Morning News, whose writers have described them as necrophiliacs and fiends in the past. The News, of course, was singled out at the time of the assassination for having fanned the flames of extremism in Dallas. Plus ça change.

Dallas would probably have had an easier time of it in the courts if it had launched a jack-booted horseback and lasso round-up of professors of Greek love poetry. No judge has ever been able to find anything wrong with people standing around on the grass on Dealey Plaza speaking to the hordes of tourists who come there seeking answers to the JFK assassination mystery.

And it is a mystery. Most of the world takes it as a mystery. But organizers of the official Dallas City Hall event for the 50th are determined that no one must be allowed to speak those three words — it’s a mystery — at any time or in any place near the event.

Groden was a consultant to the U.S. House Select Committee on Assassinations convened in 1976, which said in a report two years later it had found credible scientific evidence that Lee Harvey Oswald did not act alone in killing Kennedy. The report didn’t say who did it. It said it was a mystery.

The murder is still an open case, a point driven home here recently when sponsors of the city’s official 50th observation succeeded in luring members of the Kennedy family back to Dallas for an official event — the first time since the assassination. At a gathering in the Arts District, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said exactly the same thing the city has been persecuting Groden for saying in Dealey Plaza: It’s a mystery. Kennedy said his father, the assassinated RFK, publicly endorsed the lone-gunman findings of the Warren Commission but privately dismissed those findings and derided the commission’s report as “a shoddy piece of work.”

Early on in this effort, city officials went to great lengths to explain their sensitivity to the feelings of the Kennedy family, even suggesting at one point that the word “assassination” would be banished from all publicity and proceedings lest it cause the Kennedys to recall something they had perhaps forgotten about. Of course, that story went sailing out the window when RFK came to town and said his father thought the Warren Commission was bunk.

In fact for all its lugubrious, funeral-home hand-wringing, it’s the city now that begins to emerge as ludicrous and profane in its treatment of this event. How could Dallas, of all the cities in the world, ever have gotten the idea that it had the right to control this particular conversation?

The mayor’s more reasonable tone may offer hope for a more reasonable outcome, but he was careful to tell me that this particular piece of business is not in his hands. He repeated a few time that decisions about the 50th are in the hands of “the committee.”

I am slowly coming to my own personal theory about “the committee,” the people behind Dallas’ effort to basically make this day go away. The committee includes some window-dressing and diversity names, but the core group is made up of way-back Dallas society and money names including Ruth Sharp Altshuler, Deedie Rose, Erle Nye, Margot Perot and Caren Prothro. I suspect their obsession with this event is linked somehow with the Kennedy assassination having been the first time in human history that international live television took a place most people had never heard of before and cast it out naked onto the center stage of world attention, covered in shame and blood as if in a scene from Stephen King‘s Carrie.

For the people on whose watch all of that happened in 1963, the assassination became the cause for their own personal arrested development. Only by thinking of it that way can I make sense of their approach to the 50th.

It’s not the Kennedy family they’re worried about. And I don’t even think it has anything to do with the city’s vaunted image. Images don’t really go back 50 years. More like 50 minutes in this world.

It’s the nightmare. They’re afraid the nightmare is coming back. The strangest thing, the spookiest thing, the saddest thing in all of this is that they are the ones conjuring it out of the ground.

Original at Dallas Observer:  http://www.dallasobserver.com/2013-03-07/news/dallas-still-wants-to-control-speech-on-jfk-anniversary/full/

Court rules Dallas must allow conspiracy vendors at Dealey Plaza
by BRAD WATSON
WFAA Channel 8, Dallas, TX
March 5, 2013
http://www.wfaa.com/jfk/Court-rules-for-JFK-conspiracy-vendor-at-Dealey-Plaza-against-city-195439101.html

(The case was decided by Judge Kristin Wade, of the Dallas County Criminal Court of Appeals.)

DALLAS — An appellate court ruled Tuesday that the city of Dallas must stop an enforcement effort against JFK conspiracy vendors selling materials at Dealey Plaza ahead of the 50th anniversary of Kennedy’s assassination.

The Dallas County Criminal Court of Appeals ruled in favor of Robert Groden, a longtime conspiracy theorist and vendor who was arrested in 2010 for selling merchandise in Dealey Plaza. The appellate court upheld a lower court’s decision to toss the city’s case out.

“It’s a matter of free speech, it’s a First Amendment issue,” Groden said. “The city wanted us out of here; it didn’t want anyone giving an alternative point of view about the Kennedy assassination.”

Workers are already laying new sod at Dealey Plaza in an effort to upgrade the area before Nov. 22, the anniversary of John F. Kennedy’s death. In 2010, police arrested Groden for selling merchandise at a park, claiming that vendors harassed visitors.

But the judge pointed out that the city doesn’t list Dealey Plaza as a park, and there wasn’t a way to get a sales permit. The city told News 8 it won’t appeal further.

So the vendors remain and some visitors like Peter Crowell from Punta Gorda, Fla., support them.

“Well, first of all, it’s the United States of America. You know, I mean, these are all protected rights that we all have,” he said.

Since Groden’s arrest, the City Council revised the law to allow the sale of First Amendment-protected items.

On the anniversary, The 50th Committee expects 5,000 tickets to be available for the event. About two thirds of those will be handed out to the public at random. But Groden is already skeptical if conspiracy buffs will be included.

“Who determines who gets the tickets?,” Groden wondered.

The Dealey Plaza renovation should be finished by the end of March,
according to the contractor, Dallas-based Phoenix Restoration and
Construction.

Robert Groden (right) and his colleague Marshal Evans sit near the infamous stockade fence at the Dealey Plaza “grassy knoll” as they wait for tourists on July 8, 2010. (G.J. McCarthy/Staff photographer)

For close to two decades the city of Dallas and Robert Groden have been at odds over his right to set up a table at Dealey Plaza from which he sells his DVDs, magazines and books insisting John Kennedy was killed by a cast of co-conspirators. For now, at least, that battle has come to an end: As noted below, in recent days a Dallas County Criminal Court of Appeals upheld a municipal court judge’s December 2010 decision to toss out the city’s case against Groden, who never left Dealey Plaza despite dozens of arrests and even more warnings. But the case is far from closed.

In June 2010 Groden filed a federal suit against the city that alleged, among other things, malicious prosecution. That case was put on hold while the city and Groden duked it out elsewhere.“But now that we have this ruling, we can look ahead to federal court,” says Groden, who served as the staff photographic consultant to the House Select Committee on Assassinations and was a consultant on Oliver Stone’s JFK. “And now we’re hoping to show beyond any question that what the city did was wrong. .. This has been going on for 14 years, this degree of harassment, and it has to stop.”

Over the years Groden’s been given 80 citations for illegally peddling his wares on city-controlled parks property, and 80 times those citations were tossed. The city long claimed that Dealey Plaza was a municipal park over which it had total authority, but as Dallas Municipal Judge Carrie Chavez ruled in December 2010, the site of the assassination is never mentioned in the Dallas City Code. So she tossed the case. (Chavez, incidentally, is no longer a municipal judge: She wasn’t recommended for rehire last summer during those contentions muni judge back-and-forths at City Hall.)

As you can read below, on February 15 Judge Kristen Wade of the County Criminal Court of Appeals ruled that Chavez was absolutely right in her initial ruling. In documents filed in federal court last week, (now-outgoing) Dallas City Attorney Tom Perkins wrote that Dallas “will not further appeal the municipal court’s order quashing the misdemeanor information against Groden. Therefore, the City cannot further prosecute Mr. Groden in with respect to his actions that gave rise to that misdemeanor charge.”

“The city was just plain wrong,” says Groden, who believes his persecution and prosecution was led by the city in concert with the Sixth Floor Museum at Dealey Plaza. “As we get closer and closer to November 22, it’s becoming more and more obvious the city and the Sixth Floor Museum are trying to censor what we’re trying to say — that there was an alternative. We’re saying, ‘Think, look at the evidence.’ And the Sixth Floor doesn’t want you to see the evidence.”

And Groden says he has more: Upcoming, he promises, is his latest book JFK: Absolute Proof, which has “tons of new evidence I couldn’t talk about before,” he says. If you need a copy he’ll be out in Dealey Plaza, where he’s been for years — now, with a judge’s blessing. Of course, still in question is whether he’ll be there on November 22 …

“For 49 years now people like myself and the Coalition of Political Assassinations have kept the issues of the assassination alive and done very respectful observations on the anniversary of the assassination for 49 years,” he says. “Now it’s the magic 50, and the city can make money off it and they want to take it over and pretend like they’ve been doing their job all these years. But people are aware of what the city’s trying to do; they know there’s a degrees of censorship related to Dealey Plaza. But people want to know the truth.”

“Obviously you know and I know that the assassination has attracted the attention of lots of eccentric people, even crazy people. They can be irritating, and I think I’m guilty of having expressed that irritation by making fun of some of them here in the past.
COPA is not crazy people. If anything, the dedicated scholars and investigators of COPA and some other study groups are the monks who have kept scholarship alive on these questions over long decades of derision and even aggressive attack like the behavior of the City of Dallas. If there is a body of knowledge out there now capable of responding to your own personal curiosity about these questions, it exists today only because of the work of COPA and some other groups and individuals.”

To: Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.

Dear Mr. Kennedy:

You and your sister, Rory, appeared here in Dallas a few days ago as part of the run-up to this city’s observance of the 50th anniversary of the murder of your uncle, President John F. Kennedy, in Dealey Plaza in Dallas on November 22, 1963. This letter to you is my request for your help in an urgent related matter.

See also:
Assassination? What Assignation?

Your visit here was taken by the Dallas establishment as a welcome gesture of reconciliation, since as far as most people know none of your family has come here officially since the assassination a half-century ago. I don’t diminish that.

But in your appearance here you revealed that your father, Robert F. Kennedy, was skeptical of the work of the Warren Commission and skeptical of the single-gunman theory it propagated. I did not attend the event where you spoke. I understand from the reports that you mentioned the Mafia and rogue CIA agents as possible co-conspirators.

Let me mention quickly, for what it’s worth, that I do not have a personal theory about the assassination of your uncle. Like anybody else who has been a reporter in Dallas for a long time, I have traipsed across the trail many times, but only enough to remind me how little I know and how silly it would be for me to offer opinions. That’s not why I am bothering you.

This is why. Are you aware — do you have any knowledge of — the vicious campaign of repression that the City of Dallas has carried out for many years and is still prosecuting against people here for doing exactly what you just did so easily on a Dallas stage: expressing skepticism about the Warren Commission?

Mark Graham

Here’s a visual, RFK Jr.: Charles Groden, the skeptic City Hall keeps shutting down.

One man in particular, Charles Groden, has been ticketed more than 80 times and jailed twice, in spite of findings by city judges in each and every instance that he had broken no law by speaking and offering books for sale on city land near where your uncle was killed.

Even today the city is using a bogus, and probably illegal, permitting procedure to clamp down Soviet-style on assassination skeptics for the November 22, 2013 observances at Dealey Plaza. The entire thrust and style of the event itself is designed to ward off any discussion of theories that depart from the Warren Commission findings.

In fact, at the press conference to announce plans, the mayor of Dallas, an otherwise reasonable man, instructed reporters that the event itself was to be called only “The 50th,” without any verbal reference or allusion to the murder of your uncle, a bizarre exercise in euphemism that should tell you all you need to know.

The problem of suppression, sadly, goes far beyond the case of Groden. In fact the city has raised a large sum of money privately for “security” in order to bar presence at the event next November of a group called COPA, Committee on Presidential Assassinations.

Obviously you know and I know that the assassination has attracted the attention of lots of eccentric people, even crazy people. They can be irritating, and I think I’m guilty of having expressed that irritation by making fun of some of them here in the past.
COPA is not crazy people. If anything, the dedicated scholars and investigators of COPA and some other study groups are the monks who have kept scholarship alive on these questions over long decades of derision and even aggressive attack like the behavior of the City of Dallas. If there is a body of knowledge out there now capable of responding to your own personal curiosity about these questions, it exists today only because of the work of COPA and some other groups and individuals.

These are the people Dallas is banning from the observances. What you were allowed to say without incident on a stage in Dallas last weekend they will not be allowed to say at the observance itself next November. In fact they will not be allowed to be even physically present and silent, under an especially Kafkaesque ruling by the city that the moment of silence they wished to observe on November 22 would conflict with other moments of silence already planned. Under current arrangements they will be physically shut out of Dealey Plaza, banned by a jury-rigged ticketing process.

Why? That’s another long conversation. Are the answers psychological, moral, political or conspiratorial? I don’t have an answer worth uttering. I don’t know.

I do know this. Your uncle and father would never have countenanced the suppression of free speech being carried out in Dallas now around your family name. No one could do more to defeat those efforts now than a Kennedy. A word from any one of you on this subject, publicly or privately, would go far.

Please don’t be deceived by the fawning reception I’m sure you received here. What’s going on behind those practiced smiles is not pretty. They invoke your name to justify their actions, insisting that free speech at the event on November 22 would be an affront to your family.

Your words here last weekend put the lie to that rationale but did not put an end to the effort. That will take more. This is an urgent sincere plea that you do more.

http://blogs.dallasobserver.com/unfairpark/2013/01/if_rfk_jr_is_skeptical_of_the.php

A Washington-based group that has long questioned the official version of John F. Kennedy’s assassination says the city of Dallas is trampling its rights by barring it from Dealey Plaza for this year’s 50th anniversary of the murder of the nation’s 35th president.

The Coalition on Political Assassinations has gathered every year since 1994 at the site where Kennedy was killed by a sniper on Nov. 22, 1963. The group typically observes a  moment of silence and members often give speeches. But this year it was denied a permit, the group’s director told FoxNews.com.

“It’s ironic that the city wants to celebrate JFK’s life — and not his death — at the very place where he was assassinated,” John Judge, the executive director of the group, said. “They are afraid of the thousands of people that will come to the site to commemorate his death and call for the truth.”

The annual gatherings were first loosely organized by journalist Penn Jones, who was one of the earliest skeptics of the official explanation of the assassination. Judge was a friend of Jones, who died in 1998.

“When he died, I promised him I would keep the tradition going,” Judge said.

Although a federal commission studied the shooting and determined that Lee Harvey Oswald, a socialist drifter and former Marine, had acted alone, the assassination has long been the subject of conspiracy theories. Judge said his coalition, which focuses on killings ranging from the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., to recent drone attacks in the Middle East, has no single theory about how Kennedy was killed. But the group rejects the findings of the Warren Commission and does not believe Oswald, who was killed two days after the assassination, played any role in Kennedy’s death.

Regardless of who killed Kennedy, Judge believes his group has every right to mark the date at the site.

“This is content-based denial of free speech in a public park,” Judge wrote on his organization’s website. “Dealey Plaza belongs to history and to the American people, especially on the 50th anniversary.”

Dallas Mayor Mike Rawlings denied that the city banned the coalition from the event, but acknowledged that officials intend to focus on the late president’s life and ensure the event was open “mainly” to residents of Dallas.

“We make sure that opposing voices are heard in Dallas and celebrate freedom of speech,” Rawlings said. “But with this event, we focus on Kennedy’s life and legacy.”

In May, Rawlings put together a committee called The 50th Committee, to organize the anniversary. Most board members were alive to remember the president’s assassination.

“We have one board member who was waiting for Kennedy at a luncheon that he never attended,” Rawlings said.

Rawlings, for his part, remembers sitting cross-legged inside the Leawood Elementary School’s gym in Kansas and being told the news by his teacher.

“I knew it was important,” he recalls. “It was the president.”

Rawlings said his office has reached out to Judge to discuss the event.