Staggeringly well-researched and intelligent overview not only of
the JFK assassination but also of the rise of forces undermining
American democracy - of which the assassination, Scott says, is
symptomatic. Scott (English/UC at Berkeley; coauthor, Cocaine
Politics, 1991, etc.) advances the idea that each decade has
produced its own adjustment to prolonging and deepening the cold
war but that this adjustment can't be seen merely as an effort of
nefarious power grabbers but rather as a synergism emerging from
many interrelated political layers reacting to each other. The
author is less interested in actual facts than in working toward
public control of political life. To do this, he uses a huge
magnifying glass he calls "deep politics" - the study of "political
practices and arrangements that are usually repressed rather than
acknowledged." The JFK assassination, he contends, is only one of
four incapacitating political crises in Washington since WW II: The
others are McCarthyism, Watergate, and the Iran-contra scandal,
which, along with the JFK killing, have striking continuities in
personnel, supranational ties, and outcome. Scott warns: "I am not
suggesting that the four crises were part of some single
conspiracy, only that we recognize that in all cases the outcome
was roughly the same: a prolongation of a system committed to the
Cold War." His chief villain is J. Edgar Hoover, the real power
behind McCarthyism, McCarthy himself having been a weak arm of
systematic governmental violence that increased during Hoover's
incumbency and that involved organized crime, assassination of
black leaders, CIA assassinations, and much, much more. A kind of
Rosette stone for cracking open the deepest darkness in American
politics. Will test the most well-informed. (Kirkus Reviews)
Peter Dale Scott's meticulously documented investigation uncovers
the secrets surrounding John F. Kennedy's assassination. Offering a
wholly new perspective - that JFK's death was not just an isolated
case, but rather a symptom of hidden processes - Scott examines the
deep politics of early 1960s American international and domestic
policies. Scott offers a disturbing analysis of the events
surrounding Kennedy's death, and of the 'structural defects' within
the American government that allowed such a crime to occur and to
go unpunished. In nuanced readings of both previously examined and
newly available materials, he finds ample reason to doubt the
prevailing interpretations of the assassination. He questions the
lone assassin theory and the investigations undertaken by the House
Committee on Assassinations, and unearths new connections between
Oswald, Ruby, and corporate and law enforcement forces. Revisiting
the controversy popularized in Oliver Stone's movie JFK, Scott
probes the link between Kennedy's assassination and the escalation
of the U.S. commitment in Vietnam that followed two days later. He
contends that Kennedy's plans to withdraw troops from Vietnam -
offensive to a powerful anti-Kennedy military and political
coalition - were secretly annulled when Johnson came to power. The
split between JFK and his Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the
collaboration between Army Intelligence and the Dallas Police in
1963, are two of the several missing pieces Scott adds to the
puzzle of who killed Kennedy and why. Scott presses for a new
investigation of the Kennedy assassination, not as an external
conspiracy but as a power shift within the subterranean world of
American politics. "Deep Politics and the Death of JFK" shatters
our notions of one of the central events of the twentieth century.
General
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