By coincidence, I am reading The Ultimate Sacrifice: John and Robert Kennedy, the Plan for a Coup in Cuba, and the Murder of JFK today, on the 43rd anniversary of JFK's assassination. It's not a book I ever expected to read, as I've never been particularly curious about the Kennedy family or the various mysteries surrounding JFK's death.

Earlier this year, however, I picked up a copy of Don DeLillo's novel Libra, a fictional recreation of the life of Lee Harvey Oswald. I was attracted more by the author's name than by the promised storyline, but as I read I became increasingly involved with the personalities, motivations and unanswered questions behind JFK's assassination.

Not long after finishing Libra, I downloaded several audio lectures offered by the New York Sound Posse. One of these was called Who Planned The Murder of JFK, Who Carried It Out, and Who Covered It Up, delivered by Joan Mellon. I highly recommend giving it a listen.

If you don't do audio, the transcript of the lecture is also available online, where it is presented in article form under the descriptive title How the Failure To Identify, Prosecute and Convict President Kennedy's Assassins Has Led To Today's Crisis Of Democracy. The title pinpoints what interests me in this topic and why I started reading The Ultimate Sacrifice.

Although the foreground topic, the question of who killed Kennedy, is an absorbing one, it is the background topic--deception and its consequences--that ties past to present. Mellon discusses how the United States refusal to deal with the death of JFK reinforced patterns of institutional dishonesty in the press and in government and created a tolerance for such dishonesty among the American public.

I was born almost a year after JFK was killed. As a result, I never thought I could really grasp what his death meant to those who lived through it. It was as though the distance between the start of my life and the end of his created a gap I could never get past. It is strange to think that as more time passes, I find my understanding of the meaning of his death growing so much deeper.