💔 LEJ's Louisiana,

Yours Truly in a Swamp

a monthly e-column by Leonard Earl Johnson,

of Lafayette and New Orleans, Louisiana
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November 2019

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1963 JFK memento Photo credit LEJ.w0rld

J. F. K.,

assassinated

22 November 1963

by Leonard Earl Johnson

www.LEJ.world

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When it happened I was living in Springfield, the Prairie State Capitol of Illinois. I was twenty years old, and two-hundred-and-twenty miles north of home and school.

Illinois Capitol, Springfield
courtesy Illinois Secretary of State

I had flunked college and reluctantly found work with the Illinois Secretary of State. A glamorous job for a boy from the Shawnee National Forest, in the back hills of the Illinois Ozarks ~ where I longed to be.

My Village of Ullin, population 800, is below the Mason-Dixon Line, and culturally more akin to neighboring Southern states of Kentucky and Tennessee, than Illinois. It is in fact seventy-some miles closer to Memphis than Springfield.

Established in 1857, with the coming of the rail roads. Settled by mostly northern Europeans. It was a shipping link, connecting farm products, lumbermills, and limestone mines at Ullin to markets from Chicago to New Orleans and the world beyond. Since before the Civil War.

Ullin prospered under the political sunshine of Abraham Lincoln and the shadow of nearby Tennessean, Nathan Bedford Forest, a reckless philosopher-warrior most exemplified today in Steve Bannon. If you can imagine Bannon slim and inside a movable body, swinging a bloody machete at helpless folks. If so, then you can imagine Lieutenant General Forest, and the massacre at Fort Pillow (link in the Lagniappe Section of this column).

C. S. A. Lieutenant General Insignia

I had been exiled to labor midst Republican cronies of my Father at the State Capitol as punishment for failing grades at Southern Illinois University, Carbondale. College failure has taken me far, L. A. Norma likes to tell our friends.

I spent too much time liberating the downtrodden ~ in coffee shop and barroom bloviations ~ to notice my Father's blooming concern. Then, pow, one day I'm in Prairie cold Springfield with folks who may not know Annabel Lee from Hamlet but could speak political poetry like the Rosetta Stone's scribe and mason.

My Father saw it befitting my civil rights work (remember this was the Fabled Sixties) that I head to Springfield, "Where the tax man's bagman takes all that Gott damn tax money!" For it is true, all over the World, citizens live better under the crooked staff (church and state's, in both meanings of the term). This, is where politicians and priests have gone throughout history to get paid. Along with the contractors who build their roads, cathedrals, and airports. And their camp follower's Sons and Daughters.

"So, it was time to put the Son on the state payroll?" L. A. Norma says. "Anyone seeking work ~ from king to janitor ~ is after that tax money. In one form or the other."

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In the square around Illinois' Victorian Capitol stands a bigger than life statue of Lincoln. I went there on 22 November 1963, when I heard the news from Dallas. The inscription on its base is from Lincoln's farewell address, departing Springfield for Washington. It reads:

"I now leave, not knowing when, or whether ever, I may return..."

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Cabildo, Jackson Square, New Orleans / photo credit: Mark Tullos

That was fifty-six years ago this month, 2019. I did then, but don't any longer, believe the party line on Kennedy's murder. I have looked at it from a hundred different angles, and it did not happen as told by the Warren Commission.

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This I do know first hand.

In New Orleans, where many players in the JFK drama originated. At the Old U. S. Mint, decades after the assassination, the President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act of 1992's traveling circus convened.

Prompted, said the government, by Oliver Stone's movie, JFK, released the year before.

At the Old U. S. Mint Hearings, I sat next to Harry Connick, Sr., Orleans Parish District Attorney (and Father of the musician). Connick stood, took the witness chair and testified at this latest "full disclosure hearing." He testified as to the wicked work of his predecessor, Jim Garrison, NOLa D. A., at the time of the murder.

Later, Jim Garrison authored ON THE TRAIL OF THE ASSASSINS, inspiration for Stone's movie; and got himself elected Appellate Court judge. He retired from that office at age 70 and died that same year. In the film, Jim Garrison plays his arch villain in the drama, Earl Warren. There will always be irony in New Orleans, oui?

Connick testified that day in 1992, at the Old U.S. Mint that Jim Garrison burned the District Attorney's JFK investigation files ~ and he had not ought to have done that ~ because they belonged to the holy people of New Orleans, if not the whole wide holy World.

The World Wide Web had not yet come to pass, L. A. Norma pointed out, "Or Connick would have planted a righteous flag on its e-turf, too!"

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Turns out Garrison did not burn the files, as Connick testified. In a later tv- report filmed in Connick's own office. WDSU reporter, Richard Angelico captured Connick on film, rolling his eyes for heavenly guidance and retelling his well dressed disinformation about evil Jim Garrison and the missing files.

Like Julia Street chef Emeril Lagasse, "BAM!," Angelico pulled an affidavit from his coat pocket and read a retired Connick office worker's testimony that Harry Connick had ordered him to burn the files.

Praise the Lord, the worker, Gary Raymond, did not follow those orders, and kept the files in his car's trunk all the following years.

Just think, for the next twenty-some years, stopped at an intersection in Big Swamp City, you might have been sitting next to an old car carrying Jim Garrison's JFK files.

Ultimately Raymond was convicted of violation of grand jury secrecy laws and sentenced to six months. Becoming the only conviction in the Warren Commission's Kennedy Assassination probe.

Angelico turned the files over to the President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act of 1992. They are said to contain nothing of significance, though they had led to the only charge brought in the murder of the President of the United States.

Connick did an heroic backstroke before tv-reporter Richard Angelico's lens ~ sending the bar where I was watching on tv, into blubbery blustery blasts of merriment.

Connick ended the interview with the finely honed belly-flop of: "So what if I did? We needed the space," as we all hooted and slapped the bar from one end to the other!

So much for guardian of the sanctified City's property, mon bon ami, Harry!?

There will all ways be a New Orleans!

Even if we go underwater and never come out again.

~ Your Comments and Corrections are Welcome ~

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Lagniappe du jour