Even
shortly after the Kennedy assassination Americans still lived in their make-believe
world. Magazines were stuffed with
cigarette ads telling us to “Take a puff.
It’s spring time.” Tareyton
smokers would rather “fight than switch.”
Carltons had “precision air vents, high porosity paper, and activated
charcoal. Pall Malls were smooth and
mild and if cigarettes caused the deaths of millions of Americans, who raised
an eyebrow? Shrewd businessmen and
politicians counted on our deep seated gullibility and naiveté then and more so
after the Warren Commission published its whitewash of the Kennedy
assassination in 1964.
It
was understandable because we were a different people who tolerated distraction
and loved happy endings. Stories of the
sophisticated young President being gunned down in Dallas were softened and
modified for public consumption. The
Media played its part in the cover-up with endless stories of John Kennedy
often written by enraptured young intellectuals like Arthur Schlesinger Jr. JFK read 1200 words a minute and went to Ivy
League schools like Choate, Princeton, and Harvard. He was handsome and well dressed. He called LBJ a “riverboat gambler.” He thought Nixon had no class. All that fluff and rubbish was the
problem. Even in its tabloid aspect, who
cares if he slept with Marilyn Monroe, the girlfriend of Sam Giancana or a
Kennedy maid? Americans just wanted to
know who shot him and why.
Among
the Media’s wailing and sobbing can be found the beginnings of the
assassination’s cover-up techniques still in use today. I call one “Sequencious Interuptus” and refer
to Life Magazine’s October 2, 1964 “Facts
and Photos that Shaped the Warren Report.”
Of course, tinkering with the Abraham Zapruder film by reversing or
eliminating frames is nothing new. What
was new to me was the passing off of Life’s
eight color sequences as “crucial” – especially frame 6 – the head shot. (Show all of Zapruder’s frames and in
sequence). It was the first time I
noticed Sequencious Interruptus which was to become a classic disinformation technique.
By
freezing the frame anyone can interrupt the others and defy the laws of physics
that say in part that a body in motion tends to stay in motion (JFK’s head
snapping back). It’s like in football
where the runner reaches out for the goal post and the
ball stops in mid-air. Did the ball make
it into the end zone? The referees make their decision
upon review of the whole sequence. If
the Zapruder frames are interrupted, anything can be assumed like: the shot
came from behind or from the pergola area.
Sequencious Interruptus was a cheap, but effective trick to try to prove
Lee Harvey Oswald was the lone gunman in order to cover-up a conspiracy.
