Gotowa bibliografia na temat „President's Commision on the Assassination of President John F”

Distortion in intellectual history is not a direct function of distance from the present. The recent past can create its own problems of perspective. The assassination of President John F. Kennedy is a case in point. Is the controversy surrounding the assassination a worthy subject for an intellectual historian? After all, there is now little serious debate as to what happened in Dallas on 22 November 1963. Mainstream historians regard the case as closed, an issue settled by the exhaustive and fair-minded deliberations of the Warren Commission, whose report, issued in the autumn of 1964, concluded that a lone gunman, Lee Harvey Oswald, a sad and unsettled individual from a dysfunctional background, had killed the president. However, as we know, the topic remains, almost half a century later, a matter of huge fascination, but only outside the gates of the academy. The study of Kennedy's assassination is now best known to academics as a counterculture, which grossly caricatures the best practices of the academy and where extravagant theories tend to trump sound scholarship, plausibility and common sense. Indeed, this disjunction between the obsessions of amateur historians, known as buffs, and the reluctance of academic historians to lose caste by exploring subjects such as the Kennedy assassination which the wider public—but only the wider public—seems to find worthy of further research and explanation is, as Professor W. D. Rubinstein notes, an interesting sociological and historiographical phenomenon in its own right. Writing in 1994, Max Holland, the journalist and intelligence historian, noted that the history of the Kennedy era was “bifurcated”. For academic historian writing on the Kennedy presidency the assassination is “treated as a footnote or afterthought if it is addressed at all”, while “very few of the more than 450 books and tens of thousands of articles that compose the vast assassination literature published since 1964 have been written by historians.”

This paper explores the life and policies of late President John F. Kennedy and analyzes them in terms of their legacy in American politics and society. One word unequivocally characterizes Kennedy’s presidential term: incomplete. In its less than three years, he faced trouble passing all the needed legislation for his New Frontier program due to a reluctant Congress and foreign entanglements. And when he was finally starting to figure it out, he was assassinated in 1963, dramatically cutting his life short. Although he wasn’t in office for a complete term, Kennedy’s effect on American politics was profound and many of its effects are noted today. This article explores Kennedy’s immediate political legacy regarding how he played a role in shaping his successor’s policies and his lasting impact on the role of image in political debate and campaigning. In further analysis, in which many of the ideas present were gathered posthumously by scholars, it examines the Camelot myth as well as the Warren Commission and how they impacted and still affect the expectations and sentiments of the American public. It then dissects the 1960 Democratic Party’s platform position, the one Kennedy ran under, and discusses how that and Kennedy’s politics influenced democratic leaders and presidents after the assassination. In short, this paper aims to convince the reader that although cut short, John F. Kennedy’s political career profoundly affected Americans at the time, in the decades that followed his murder, and even through the 21st century.

The era of post-modernity has completely changed the way that we see, recognize and question the world, and what we accept to be true. During and after the 1960s many witnessed the rise of a greater multiplicity of local narratives. Prior to this, the grand narratives of the past, such as religion, the Enlightenment, and science were taken as whole, singular truths. However, such metanarratives tend to ignore the individual experiences that do not fit neatly into categories constructed by major institutional authorities. This disconnection from the personal pushed more people to doubt, in favour of the narrative(s) where the Self is visible and heard. It can be argued that this revolution in thought, and meaning and narrative-making in America grew after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in 1963. By examining Jean-Francois Lyotard’s theory of postmodernity, and those who expanded on his ideas, we can highlight how the assassination of JFK marked the onset and rise of the postmodern conspiracy theory. This includes the deconstruction of trust, the breakdown of “objective” reality and identity markers as well as the use of new mass media technologies, such as the film camera and the television.

Abstract The assassination of President John F. Kennedy ranks as one of the most controversial events in United States history. It is arguable that no other crime has been so closely scrutinized and analyzed. Two government investigative commissions delivered multivolume reports on the assassination—the Warren Commission in 19641 and the House Select Committee on Assassinations in 1979.2 Hundreds of books, as well as several hundred thousand government documents and scholarly research articles or reports, have been generated on the case. It is nearly impossible to cover all of the relevant material in a single volume, let alone a brief overview of the assassin’s life.

This chapter begins with Pope Paul VI's statement about John F. Kennedy's assassination, stating that the incident was a dastardly crime. It describes the synergy between the papacy and the White House during Kennedy's tenure that was evident well before the president's tragic death. It also recounts how John XXIII prevailed on Kennedy and Nikita Khrushchev to accept a compromise that involved the United States lifting its blockade and the Soviets promising to send no more warships to Cuba during the Cuban missile crisis of October 1962. The chapter looks at Kennedy's commencement speech at American University, which is considered as a kind of eulogy for Pope John as the president announced the suspension of nuclear weapons tests and the resumption of negotiations with the Soviets. It explores the convergence of papal pronouncements about international relations that blended church teaching and American ideals.