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Scam-a-lot (Part I) I would have filed this column last week, but I was in the middle of a 168-hour sleepless marathon of silent 8mm films shot at Hyannis Port, the White House lawn, and Dealy Plaza. Unlike Sander Vanocur, I can’t say I have personal memories of Camelot. I lived only 491 days during the Kennedy administration and spent most of that time suckling. But that’s not the only reason I’m nostalgic for an era that came and went faster than Phil Donohue’s comeback. It took 172 years for the United States to come up with a cool president. Since then, the best the Democrats could do was Bill Clinton. The best Republicans could do was Ronald Reagan. So young and hip was he, we can no more picture JFK as an 86-year-old than we can picture Larry King as a baby. GW’s speechwriters can’t write as well as JFK could mumble in his sleep. I don’t care if he made love to the entire Rockettes kick line: The standoff at the University of Alabama alone was worth every last string pulled in Cook County. Since those halcyon days, we’ve gone from the Bay of Pigs to the Jerry Springer Show. Each was reality TV, true to its time. Today, Haliburton, Boeing, and the Carlisle Group are asking what their country can do for them, while our country is asking what other countries can do for it. On November 22 of 1963, Camelot ended and Scam-a-lot began. Some folks dismiss the date’s significance in modern history, but can anyone tell me JFK’s birthday? After the atrocity, the only magic in America that remained was the single bullet theory. That little projectile went through necks, wrists, and nipples like Dennis Rodman’s jewelry. One 6.5 mm bullet, seven wounds. The bullet made more turns than a staircase in an Escher painting and wound up in John Connally’s thigh. And we think Mark McGwire’s 62nd home run ball is a once-in-a-lifetime souvenir. A few more bullets like that one and we could have taken Hanoi. Meanwhile, 175 feet away, Lee Harvey Oswald reloaded faster than Glen Campbell on a bender. The autopsy was botched worse than the OJ trial. The Dallas coroner’s room was more crowded than a phone booth during a 50s college fraternity prank. In the confusion, subtle differences--like that between an entrance wound and an exit wound--were lost. Meanwhile, J. Edgar Hoover, apparently not acting alone, was too busy trying on dresses to run a real investigation. Then came the biggest joke of the 60s other than Hogan’s Heroes—the Warren Commission. The Warren Commission raised the bar for starting with a wrong conclusion and working backwards. Their searing look at everything except the evidence and steadfast refusal to accept the truth as an explanation is to this day a model for rubber stamp bureaucracies everywhere. At age 90, Gerald Ford is still defending the findings of the Warren Commission because it’s easier than defending his pardon of Nixon. And though the rest of the Warren Commission is dead, they have been reincarnated as the Robert Durst jury. Click here to rant back. |