The Gordian Knot: Why 54 Years of Revelations Have Failed to Make a Difference
Appended, annotated essay excerpted from my book, The Deep State in the Heart of Texas
We all know that the ancient legend of the Gordian knot represents a no-win situation, a seemingly intractable obstacle. In the legend, it was a strand of many knots tied by King Gordius, the father of future King Midas, designed as an intricate puzzle which, if solved, would transfer his power to whomever solved it. After a great many failed attempts to untie it by many contestants, Alexander the Great succeeded by reimagined the problem. He cut it with his sword in the best known version of the legend, and pulled the linchpin of the yoke it was tied to in another version, allowing it to unravel itself.
For those of us who study seriously and honestly the assassination of President Kennedy and other deep political conspiracies, we eventually see them for what they are, modern-day, darker versions of the Gordian knot. We have spent decades trying and failing to untie it when the solution is as simple as refusing to play the game.
Chris Hedges said, “You don’t fight tyrants because you are going to win. You fight tyrants because they are tyrants.” But our 54-year fight has been ineffective. We must to do something different and better.
What is the goal of assassination research?
Many who study American Deep State assassinations and other deep political events believe the goal is to “solve the case.” They are wrongheaded.
They have been duped in large part by one of the conspiracy’s longtime tricks. It is essential conspiracy propaganda to parse the theory; to call its different segments different theories. Using the plural, “theories,” is a Thought-terminating Cliché. The counter-propaganda antidote to this is to point out that there is only the conspiracy theory, the one to which the Warren Commission Report refers. Then point out that there are at least half-a-dozen single-bullet theories.
The short answer to who the conspirators are is, basically, the same ones who were trying to kill Castro. It is the same variety of groups with the same leaders and hierarchy, and it is mainstream history since the Church Committee reports in 1975-1976.1
The short answer to who the conspirators are is, basically, the same ones who were trying to kill Castro.
Putting great effort into finding the minutia of the conspiracy is counterproductive, and has been for a long time. There is a lack of a realpolitik goal by conspiracy realists, due to the wrongheaded belief that redoubling our efforts to debate, discuss, release more files, or publish will bring us any closer to justice, or change anything.
One of the reasons I accepted an invitation to speak at the JFK Historical Group conference in Alexandria, Virginia in 2014 was that it was the 20th anniversary of my trip to Washington DC to the organizational meeting of the Coalition On Political Assassination (COPA). I planted the seed in 1991 at the South By Southwest conference that led to the Assassination Symposium on John F. Kennedy (ASK) conferences, which in turn led to Lancer and COPA, and now the first post-COPA conferences.
I saw long ago that while COPA became the only one to attempt and achieve any gravitas or integrity, the conferences became big-tent revivals inside the bubble of assassination research. As a result, these conferences have outlived their usefulness.
We need a new paradigm, like a think tank, to replace the status quo of a precarious, loose, ragtag public resistance which, seen from outside our bubble, is a total half-century failure.
What is the problem with assassination research?
E. Martin Schotz defined the problem in his 1998 COPA speech, “The Waters of Knowledge versus the Waters of Uncertainty: Mass Denial in the Assassination of President Kennedy,” especially in reference to “pseudo-debate.”
He said, “The lie is that there is a mystery to debate. And so we have pseudo-debates. Debates about meaningless disputes, based on assumptions which are obviously false. This is the form that Orwell’s crimestop has taken in the matter of the President’s murder. I am talking about the pseudo-debate over whether the Warren Report is true when it is obviously and indubitably false…there is no mystery except in the minds of those who are willing to drink this premise. The premise is a lie, and a society which agrees to drink such a lie ceases to perceive reality. This is what we mean by mass denial.”
“The lie is that there is a mystery to debate.”
Martin Schotz went on to say: “…our problem, the problem for people who want the truth to be known, is that despite the lack of government credibility, the public does not have the ability to think its way through the lies and discern the truth. The great shame of the ‘critical community’ is that rather than seizing on this as its mission, the critical community has chosen to ally itself with the government and has only fostered further public confusion.”
At the end of Randy Benson’s documentary, The Searchers, the late John Judge said, “A lot of people like to play the game, even within the research community, that we’ll never know. But I think that it’s an empirical question and we can know. By pooling our energies together we can make changes. I mean, we’ve gotten to see some documents that have rewritten the whole history. And we all do pray we’re wrong. We’d rather be wrong than right, you know. We’d rather not live in the world the evidence takes us to. On the other hand, if I lived in a world where I felt I couldn’t know the truth, that I couldn’t know anything, that would be disturbing to me.”2
Many believe another lie: that the most incriminating files have long been destroyed. Do we know files have been truly destroyed? Even if they were, Oliver Stone’s “stripped Mercedes” analogy still applies. When asked at a Congressional hearing what he expected to find, Stone said the JFK assassination files, like a Mercedes Benz left on the street in Harlem for years and stripped of its essentials would still be recognizable as a Mercedes.
But even with Stone’s positive thinking, it is wrong to accept the lie that the most important files were destroyed. We have seen examples of the Deep State writing and keeping secret histories. It is only possible to lie to us and keep us ignorant for as long as they have if they are truthful and knowledgeable among themselves. It is more than possible to use the proof we have to force full disclosure. We can know and we will know.
We have seen examples of the Deep State writing and keeping secret histories. It is only possible to lie to us and keep us ignorant for as long as they have if they are truthful and knowledgeable among themselves.
As insightful as Schotz was in his speech, he was not yet fully immune to helping the Deep State lie. He spoke of the “the coverup.” The American Deep State assassination conspiracies have never been coverups. Nothing was really covered up. The conspiracies are only denied with obvious Big Lies. Plausibility was never a requirement. Nothing shows this fluidity of physical evidence or irrelevance of plausibility better than the Single-bullet Theory.3
The idea that a cover-up was a Big Lie was revealed in the Warren Commission Report, Chapter VI Investigation of Possible Conspiracy, Conclusion, p. 374: “Based upon the investigation reviewed in this chapter, the Commission concluded that there is no credible evidence that Lee Harvey Oswald was part of a conspiracy to assassinate President Kennedy.”
Now let us re-read that taking out those artful qualifiers: “Based upon the investigation reviewed in this chapter, the Commission concluded that there is...evidence...of a conspiracy to assassinate President Kennedy.”
The Warren Report’s conspiracy conclusion goes on to say, “Review of Oswald’s life and activities since 1959, although productive in illuminating the character of Lee Harvey Oswald (which is discussed in the next chapter), did not produce any meaningful evidence of a conspiracy.”
The artful qualifier there being “meaningful” evidence of conspiracy. Nonetheless, evidence of conspiracy. Do you see now how thoroughly we have allowed ourselves to be duped from the beginning?
The conspirators’ greatest success is their propaganda. Only the government possesses the minute history of their assassinations. We could continue to guess the details and hope for the luck to stumble across evidence for them. Or we could just make the government tell us everything, right now. We have long had enough proof of the conspiracy and conspirators. What we do not yet have is the power to force the usurpers of our government to give us the details of their conspiracy. Forcing the lies to stop forces every historian to deal with reality.
The conspirators’ greatest success is their propaganda. Only the government possesses the minute history of their assassinations. We could continue to guess the details and hope for the luck to stumble across evidence for them. Or we could just make the government tell us everything, right now.
Note that even David Talbot’s great book, The Devil’s Chessboard, has changed nothing, just as with James Douglass’ book, JFK and the Unspeakable. The Lincoln assassination is the model for the propaganda paradigm of the JFK assassination. Without a new counterpropaganda paradigm, the status quo of endless debate, discussion, and publishing will remain, as illustrated in a 2014 essay by Steven Hager.4
The Lincoln assassination is the model for the propaganda paradigm of the JFK assassination. Without a new counterpropaganda paradigm, the status quo of endless debate, discussion, and publishing will remain.
The first book proving the conspiracy behind the JFK assassination was Who Killed Kennedy? by Thomas G. Buchanan, published in May 1964. Buchanan wrote in his preface: “The entire text of the report you are about to read-excerpts of which first appeared in L’Express of Paris—was filed in Washington in March, 1964, with the President’s Commission on the Assassination of President Kennedy, headed by Chief Justice Earl Warren. This action was taken at the request of a staff member of that commission.”
This first of all the books proving the conspiracy shows our folly in thinking that yet another book will change anything. We have always known the truth and it has not set us free. Our messianic fixation on the power of books to end the coup continues to be our worst delusion. That is the Gordian knot tied by the conspirators to distract us.
Our messianic fixation on the power of books to end the coup continues to be our worst delusion.
The one thing we have never had is an endgame.
“The Endgame” is an idea I want us all to think about. It is a chess analogy for where we stand and what we need to focus on.
By an effective endgame, I mean a strategy to stop the Deep State’s ability to lie. We are in a long middle game where the Deep State controls the board, except for a fatal weakness it can only distract us from, keeping us too busy to play it to checkmate. We need to stop being distracted and find the fewest moves to victory.
If the Deep State thinks we are unaware of all this, it just lets us continue in our delusions while it plays higher priority games with others. We become a threat only when we see the endgame moves to checkmate and start playing them. But if we do find all the correct moves in advance and play them flawlessly to the end, the Deep State can’t stop us.
Any previously unknown evidence that surfaces could of course be added to the endgame. But the purpose is to devise a strategy that could have been used anytime since the assassination, and still can be by using the proof we have. The idea is to stop playing the conspirators’ game of trying to untie their Gordian knot, and force a resolution. Theirs is a waiting game designed not to end but just to wait; for one more book, one more scrap of evidence, one more declassified file, one more film, one more conference, one more online forum; one more debate, one more mock trial, ad infinitum.
The idea is to stop playing the conspirators’ game of trying to untie their Gordian knot, and force a resolution. Theirs is a waiting game designed not to end but just to wait.
As I said, we could continue to guess the details and hope for the luck to stumble across evidence for them. Or we could just make the government tell us everything, right now. We have long had enough proof of the conspiracy and conspirators. What we do not yet have is the power stop the official propaganda of denial. Forcing the lies to stop forces every historian to deal with reality.
John Judge also said in The Searchers, “If you want a democracy, you have to solve the Kennedy assassination.” He almost nailed it but for a slip of the tongue. He failed to incorporate Vince Salandria’s False Mystery concept. The assassination has long been solved, yet democracy is still absent, and will continue to be without an endgame. The axiom is actually, “If you want a democracy, you have to resolve the Kennedy assassination.”
Can we learn anything about endgame strategy from our best and brightest assassination researchers? Yes but only a negative example. Our best thinkers are the best example of the point I made about the folly of continuing to rely on the failed, half-century paradigm of books, journals, speeches, mass education, conferences, mock trials and file releases. If their work couldn’t resolve the conspiracy, none can.
Politico's August 3, 2017 article on the July file release by Philip Shenon and Larry Sabato showed how the Deep State is prepared to continue its successful strategy of Big Lies through the new file releases and beyond, ad infinitum.5
There were a couple of good rebuttals to the Politico article. But the Deep State continued to double down with Kurt Andersen’s subsequent article, “How America Lost Its Mind,” in The Atlantic Monthly’s September issue. Andersen resurrected the old, debunked, gaslighting, Big Lie of mass public mental retardation.6
I did not think the Deep State was so stupid or factionalized as to spout their usual disinformation knowing the jig was up with the new file releases. If they were that stupid or factionalized, the endgame would be easy. I thought it was more evidence they knew the most damaging released files would not threaten them.
As I told friend and researcher Nathaniel Heidenheimer on Twitter, “They are a tiny minority and so are we. Wars are fought by tiny minorities.” We are now well into the deaths of the second generation of critics. At the conferences I attended in the last couple of years, I was struck hard by the realization that the torch has already been passed. It is our turn to lead, and to learn from our mentors’ successes and mistakes. As Kennedy wrote in his undelivered Dallas speech, “Learning and leadership are indispensable to each other.”
How do we start thinking outside the book?
My focus since I found my own answers is to do only what is necessary to achieve justice in a realpolitik sense. One idea was John Judge’s and COPA’s pursuit of citizen petitioned grand juries. The case has been exhausted in two of our three branches of government: executive and legislative. We have barely used the judicial branch remedies provided specifically for that purpose in the First Amendment.
A more direct pursuit has been William Pepper’s attempt to pursue a defense for James Earl Ray, and lately, to get a new trial for Sirhan Sirhan. The courts tasked with the decision have stonewalled. Of course, that is all they can do. The evidence and arguments are overwhelming in favor of a new trial.
New accessories after the fact reveal themselves every day by their obstruction of justice. As conspirators, they are as guilty as the ones who pulled the triggers. There are still living direct conspirators too, like Bill Moyers, who needs to be subpoenaed and asked under oath specific questions about his role in the planning of the motorcade route.7
New accessories after the fact reveal themselves every day by their obstruction of justice. As conspirators, they are as guilty as the ones who pulled the triggers.
The burden of proof in a conspiracy is circumstantial. Two juries have already gotten beyond a reasonable doubt on conspiracy, Jim Garrison’s (JFK) and William Pepper’s (MLK). A third will too. Pepper is also the lead attorney adjudicating a new trial for Sirhan Sirhan, for which overwhelming evidence of Sirhan’s innocence has been presented. The same conspirators were behind those assassinations.
Another realpolitik idea that becomes obvious once we start thinking outside the book, is the exhumation of President Kennedy’s remains for forensic examination. Cyril Wecht called for such an exhumation in his keynote address to the Alexandria, VA conference in 2014. There is historical and legal precedent for the exhumation of U.S. presidents for that purpose:
“[Zachary] Taylor was apparently the first President to be exhumed for a pathological examination, but other Presidents were exhumed for different purposes.
“The coffin of Abraham Lincoln was opened four times — most recently on Sept. 26, 1901, to confirm that it contained his remains.”8
When the truth is accepted by even a single legal authority, exhumation will be done because the law demands it. The law requires a truthful accounting of President Kennedy’s wounds in order to set the record straight and to determine exactly the extent of the criminal autopsy.9
The purpose of a think tank is to critically pursue such ideas and relentlessly contemplate new ones.
What is our mission?
We need a small, trusted group of experienced researchers supported and protected by a permanent endowment fund. The mission has to be a sophisticated, aggressive counterpropaganda operation.
Vincent Salandria said it first and best:
“The tyranny of power is here. Current events tell us that those who killed Kennedy can only perpetuate their power by promoting social upheaval both at home and abroad. And that will lead not to revolution but to repression. I suggest to you, my friend, that the interests of those who killed Kennedy now transcend national boundaries and national priorities. No doubt we are dealing now with an international conspiracy. We must face that fact and not waste any more time microanalyzing the evidence. That’s exactly what they want us to do. They have kept us busy for so long. And I will bet, buddy, that is what will happen to you. They’ll keep you very, very busy and, eventually, they’ll wear you down.” — Vincent J. Salandria (1975) quoted by Gaeton Fonzi, The Last Investigation (1993)
Why a think tank?
The modern game plan of using anti-democratic propaganda against U.S. citizens began with a memo written by Supreme Court Justice Lewis F. Powell in 1971. “Based on the ideas presented in the Powell Memo, the Republican party created think tanks responsible for dispersing misleading information with a false cloak of authenticity.”10
It cannot be emphasized enough. As Jonathan Marshall put it in his 2016 column on the subject, “Think tanks...are prime movers of the domestic propaganda....”11
A 2014 list published in a blog entry, “The Most Popular Washington Think Tanks,” which is apparently now behind a pay wall, at linktank.com shows the need for an opposition think tank. Studying the Web site’s listed shows how many think tanks run at a deficit. Doing a “find” command using the text string “$1,” I saw that nine of these 50 think tanks operate quite modestly. Number 34 in the list, the International Institute for Strategic Studies takes in $1,342,151 and operates at $694,724. That is far below "one-percenter" money. Imagine what a deep political research think tank could do with that. As of 2014, IISS supported 52 staffers with that budget.
Newsrooms used to run at a deficit as a matter of course. What used to be honest journalism has been forced to show a profit the only way it can, by marketing sensational entertainment. Propaganda has no such restriction. Someone somewhere knows this and has more than enough big money to fund a think tank for deep political research.
Who would staff such a think tank?
The types of people we want are not motivated by ego, or a need for external validation, or money per se.
They are too savvy to join yet another group of well-meaning, optimistic dreamers with no time or resources. They know the research community and its pitfalls, and generally shun it.
Instead, they all have busy lives with all the large and small problems that go with it, giving them far less time than they would like to do the important research they have been struggling with for decades.
Despite their ability to appreciate visionary plans, adding their names to a list of researchers, even a select list of respected researchers, and little else, means nothing to them. These traits are represented by our role model, Peter Dale Scott, of course, but also by the life and career of the late attorney and publisher William H. Schaap. He is an example of exactly the type we aspire to and want.12
It is a bit of a chicken and egg problem. But imagine the response after such a think tank has the funding, structure, leadership, headquarters and mission securely established. Imagine the response if we offer such researchers a salary, benefits, staff, office and whatever other terms of employment they may need to continue their research and start new projects.
Over decades, trillions of dollars have been granted in support of the Big Lies of the American Deep State. Where is the pittance for the truth?
We cannot change the conspirators, nor can we reach an imaginary critical mass through public education, but we can change ourselves — and we must if we want to stop playing their Gordian-knot games.
As Lennon and McCartney wrote, “You tell me it’s the institution/Well you know, you’d better free your mind instead.” Because freeing our minds is the one true revolutionary act.
Only then will we weaponize the law and the truth and, as Charles Drago put it, “Return the goddamn fire in Dealey Plaza!”13
ENDNOTES:
“Church Committee,” Wikipedia. Acessed Jan. 23, 2023. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church_Committee
Randolph Benson, The Searchers: The Story of Researchers of the JFK Assassination, Critical Focus Films, 2017. Accessed Jan. 23, 2023. https://www.thesearchersfilm.com/
For a clear understanding of this implausibility, see my essay, “True Believers: Tom Snyder Talks to Arlen Specter”:
Steven Hager, “I Was Ambushed By a Dogma Patrol, The Tin Whistle, Dec. 12, 2014. Accessed Jan. 23, 2023. https://stevenhager.net/2014/12/12/i-was-ambushed-by-a-dogma-patrol/
Philip Shenon and Larry J. Sabato, “How the CIA Came to Doubt the Official Story of JFK’s Murder,” Politico, Aug. 3, 2013. Accessed Jan. 23, 2023. http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/08/03/jfk-assassination-lone-gunman-cia-new-files-215449
Kurt Andersen, “How America Lost Its Mind, The Atlantic Monthly, Sept. 2017. Accessed Jan. 23, 2023. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/09/how-america-lost-its-mind/534231/
Richard Bartholomew, Transcript of workshop by George Michael Evica, “John Connally’s Roll in the Planning of the Trip,” Assassination Symposium on John F. Kennedy, Dallas, Texas, Nov. 20, 1993. bartholoviews.substack.com
Michael Marriott, “Zachary Taylor's Remains Are Removed for Tests,” New York Times, Jun. 18, 1991. Accessed Jan. 23, 2023. https://archive.nytimes.com/query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage-9E0CEFDD1F38F93BA25755C0A967958260.html 60.html
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Egberto Willies, “Meet The Man Who Told The GOP How To Destroy America’s Middle Class,” Addicting Info, Dec. 26, 2013. Accessed Jan. 23, 2023. https://web.archive.org/web/20200919044741/http://www.addictinginfo.org/2013/12/26/powell-memo-gop-blueprint/
Jonathan Marshall, “US Arms Makers Invest in a New Cold War,” Consortium News, Sept. 1, 2016. Accessed Jan. 23, 2023. https://consortiumnews.com/2016/09/01/us-arms-makers-invest-in-a-new-cold-war/
Zachary Sklar, “William H. Schaap, radical lawyer and publisher, dies at age 75,” Mondoweiss, Mar. 12, 2016. Accessed Jan. 23, 2023. http://mondoweiss.net/2016/03/william-h-schaap-radical-lawyer-and-publisher-dies-at-age-75/
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