16 January 2010
Season of the Witch
Here is The Wink, in all it’s strange glory.
Congressman Thomas is in the bow-tie just over Lady Bird Johnson’s right shoulder).
Shoot, if you go back and look at the 1970s with fresh eyes you see the Season of the Witch. I don’t know what Rex or the other grown-ups at the time thought about it.
This is a little out of sequence, I’m afraid, but with Dr. King’s birth coming up on Monday we may as well look again at what went on to help build up the wars that defined the previous decade, the one within America and the one without, and how we got to the overhaul of the institutions that survived them.
That is the defining imperative behind Rex’s service at the zenith of his career, in the shadows of the Oil Shock and the Pike and Church Committees that sought to pull the fangs from the intelligence community.
I have a friend who was one of the grownups then, and one time years later he leaned over to me and whispered, quite confidentially, that it was Lyndon Johnson who orchestrated the killing of John Kennedy, and thus was responsible for everything downstream of that event.
He was surprised that I wasn’t surprised, and in fact the theories had been out for years.
I don’t know the truth about any of that, and doubt that anyone will. I have done enough research about the personalities of the time to think that just about anything is possible. I have come to my peace with the idea that Oswald acted alone and moved on, just as the world has, but I am still troubled by the odd coincidences.
The Wink is one of them. I have slightly cropped this photo, taken on Air Force One, just as Vice President Johnson is about to be sworn in as the newest President of the most powerful democracy in the world.
Why the sixteen-term Congressman from Texas chose that moment to have the most famous facial tic in history perhaps means nothing. It must be part of the reaction to the sad emotion of the time, like the grin.
James Earl Ray’s bogus Canadian Passport
Another odd one is the fact that country cracker Assassin James Earl Ray was arrested, not in some remote Super Eight Motel, but in London, England. How an escaped prisoner from Missouri wound up in Portugal and London, bound for Brussels, is a little beyond me. But it was a very messy decade, all in all.
As the decades have passed along, Dr. King has assumed a mythic position in the American saga, and rightly so. In my pantheon, he is one of the most courageous of men. To go forth into the world each day, knowing his destiny, is something so beyond my capability that when I finally stood before his stately tomb next to the Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, I was humbled beyond words.
As you have been dragged along with this messy narrative of a very squared-away naval officer, you have seen just how strange it all was, going from the tightly buttoned-down world of Dwight Eisenhower to Woodstock in just a decade.
What went down was pretty amazing, and when the shooting was done in SE Asia, at least the high-velocity kind the Americans practiced, the machine had to be brought to heel.
The way they do that here is by Blue-ribbon panels and budget cuts, which have the practical effect of strangling things and making the normally inefficient work of government dysfunctional.
Yes, we will get to the Schlesinger Commission, and the Williamsburg Agreement on the military intelligence budget, and the transformation of the Intelligence Community in which Rex participated. Maybe tomorrow.
But along the way, I think we need to remember all those odd things that happened, beginning with the murder of a President in Dallas, and just a few months later one in Saigon.
There were two wars. One here, and one there. The observance of the birth of Dr. King is Monday, and like some of you I am old enough to remember him in life, an outsized figure whose impact was not universally welcomed in the midst of the season of the witch.
Dr. King is one of my heros from the one right here.
Copyright 2010 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com
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