The other night, while flipping through the tv, I got sucked into watching a movie I hadn’t seen in ages: Oliver Stone’s JFK. I remember seeing the film in the theater with my dad when it first came out; and then, like any other obsessive-compulsive history buff, I had watched it a few times here or there over the years. Until the other night, though, I hadn’t seen it in possibly more than ten years… which got me thinking: could it happen today?
Could the assassination of a U.S. President possibly go unsolved in the year 2011?*
So I started visualizing the Kennedy assassination as if it occurred today – with hundreds of iPhone videos and thousands of digital photos. Had somebody seen something in the grassy knoll, they would have tweeted about it or texted a friend. Had people really seen a guy in the 6th floor of the Texas Schoolbook Depository, it almost certainly would have landed on Facebook. And if it was, in fact, a conspiracy – if multiple groups of people really did plot to kill the President – the cover-up would have been impossible… information moves just too damn fast.
Almost everyone nowadays is a conduit of information; almost everyone acts like an amateur journalist. In the last year alone, not one but two – TWO – U.S. Congressmen resigned over digital photos leaked to the media… so I find it very had to believe that even the most sophisticated of villains could murder a chief executive (in broad daylight, no less) and manage to get away with it.
Every President is most certainly mortal, and as Michael Corleone so eloquently reminds us: “If history has taught us anything, it’s that you can kill anybody.” But thanks to modern technology and the vigilance of its users, even in our darkest of hours we should never again have to endure such a decades-long mystery as the one that still surrounds the death of President Kennedy.
*Yes, I know: according to Trivial Pursuit, Jeopardy and just about every American History textbook in the world, Lee Harvey Oswald killed John F. Kennedy… but I’ve never believed it was that simple. Oswald almost certainly was involved at some level; and though I do think Oliver Stone’s mass-conspiracy theories went a little too far, I’m 100% with him on the suggestion that there were in fact multiple shooters.)
As a general rule, I don't do 850-page books. Not only are they anathema to my obsessive-compulsive/damn-I-want-to-finish-this-book-right-now tendencies, but they're so physically big that you can barely get a grip on them while you're lying in bed. (That's what she said.)