Word: oswald
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Most Curious. For one thing, he was smarting under the Warren Commission's criticism that the FBI had failed to inform the Secret Service that Lee Harvey Oswald, whom Hoover's boys had under on-and-off surveillance for months, was a possible threat to the life of President Kennedy. The criticism, said Hoover, was "a classic example of Monday-morning quarterbacking." Since the assassination, Hoover said, the FBI has started turning over to the Secret Service "thousands of names of beatniks and kooks and crackpots." But, he added, he didn't see how all this...
Criticism of the FBI for its failures in the Kennedy case, said Hoover, was "unjust and unfair." That was most curious, since Hoover himself ordered disciplinary action against three FBI agents, including James Hosty Jr., the Dallas agent who had been keeping an eye on Oswald for months, who was suspended for 30 days without pay and transferred to Kansas City...
Both poetry and prose refuse to criticize. Those who wrote at that time knew that John Kennedy had faults, but they seem to have decided to let posterity uncover them. The poets are free in criticizing the society that produced Lee Oswald and the society that watched Kennedy's death. "Prim doormen bland and perfectly usual/Such memorial!" writes Lorenzo Thomas...
Belli compared the Ruby trial with the Sacco-Vanzetti and Scopes affairs as having projected highly unfavorable images overseas of the American jury system. In his travels abroad he noticed that an overwhelming majority of Europeans were certain that "Oswald, Ruby, the CIA, the FBI, and even President Johnson" were linked in a conspiracy to assasinate John Kennedy...
Among the failures, happily, there are fascinations: Oswald's frowsy but amiable landlady, the enormously corpulent cabby who picked him up after the crime, the curly-haired, fine-featured shoe salesman who tracked him to the Texas Theater, the clean, sunny, comfortable ranch house where the killer lived with his wife and children. At one point the film reports without comment that only five hours before he killed the President, Oswald was telling a friend how much he enjoyed playing with his baby daughter...