Word: oswald
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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...
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...
...assassination of Lee Harvey Oswald is also depicted ineptly. The spectator is plunged into the episode without warning of what is about to happen, and the deed is done so swiftly that the eye can scarcely follow it. Yet the moviemakers do not even bother to repeat in slow motion a scene that is surely one of the most exciting and significant stretches of live action ever shown on a screen...
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...