By William Rivers Pitt
t r u t h o u t | Perspective
Tuesday 4 November 2003
"Robert Kennedy died last night. Martin Luther King was shot a month ago. And every day my Government gives
me a count of corpses created by military science in Vietnam. So it goes."
- Kurt Vonnegut
Benjamin Disraeli, in a speech before the British Parliament, once said, "Assassination has never changed the history of the world."
Some terrible decades later, the sentiment was repeated by Robert Kennedy, who commented upon the death of his brother with the
Disraelian observation, "Assassins have never changed history." Benjamin and Robert were both wise men. Both were completely wrong
in ways difficult to measure. Robert, specifically, was not just wrong, but dead wrong.
Very soon now, newspapers and magazines and television screens will become filled with images of President John Fitzgerald
Kennedy. The 40th anniversary of that deadly day in Dallas approaches, and so we will see the Zapruder film again and again, see his
head blasted open, see Connolly bellow from the front seat, see Jackie crawl desperately across the trunk of the car to retrieve pieces of
her husband's skull.
We will hear, of course, all of the theories that have surrounded his death. It was Oswald, acting alone. It was the Cubans. It was the
Mob. It was the CIA. It was all of them together. At the end of it, however, there is a truth that sets the theories aside. The shooting of
President Kennedy was Act Two in a five-scene opera of death and ruin that has forever changed the face and nature of this nation and
the world. Benjamin Disraeli was wrong. Assassination changed history, and we are the poorer for it.
The first act came in a driveway in Mississippi, on the night of June 12, 1963. Medgar Evers was an African American activist fighting for
equal rights for his people in the South. He opened a chapter of the NAACP in the heart of Mississippi, investigated acts of violence
against African American citizens, organized boycotts of local merchants who practiced segregation, and brought national attention to
the civil rights struggle while fighting to get African American James Meredith admitted to the segregated University of Mississippi.
Medgar Evers was shot in the back and died in front of his wife and children on that night in June. He was 37 years old.
more here...(i thought this may have been posted already, but wasn't in a search...mods, do what you gotta do)
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