We've all become Hamlets in our country,
children of a slain father-leader...
...whose killers still possess the throne.
The ghost of John F. Kennedy confronts us with
the secret murder at the heart of the American Dream.
He forces on us the appalling questions:
Of what is our Constitution made?
What are our lives worth?
What is the future of a democracy where a President
can be assassinated under suspicious circumstances
while the machinery of legal action scarcely trembles?
How many more political murders disguised as
heart attacks suicides, cancers, drug overdoses?
How many plane and car crashes will occur
before they are exposed for what they are?
"Treason doth never prosper," wrote an English poet.
What's the reason?
For if it prosper, none dare call it treason.
The American public has yet to see the Zapruder film.
Why?
The American public has yet to see
the real X-rays and autopsy photographs.
Why?
Hundreds of documents could help prove this conspiracy.
Why are they being withheld or burned by the government?
When my office or you, the people,
asked those questions, demanded evidence...
...the answer from on high has always been:
national security.
What kind of national security do we have
when we're robbed of our leaders?
What national security permits the removal...
...of fundamental power from the people and
validates the ascendancy of an invisible government
in the Unite States?
The kind of national security is...
...when it smells like it,
feels like it,
and looks like it...
you call it what it is: Fascism!
I submit to you that
what took place on November 22,1963 was a coup d'etat.
Its most direct and tragic result...
...was the reversal of Kennedy's decision
to withdraw from Vietnam.
The war is the biggest business in America...
...worth $80 billion a year.
President Kennedy was murdered
by a conspiracy planned
at the highest levels of our government...
...carried out
by fanatical and disciplined cold warriors...
...in the Pentagon and CIA's covert-operationapparatus.
Among them, Clay Show, here before you.
It was a public execution,
and it was covered up by like-minded people
in the Dallas Police，
the Secret Service,
the FBI,
and the White House up to and including
J. Edgar Hoover, and Lyndon Johnson
who were accomplices after the fact.
The assassination
reduced the President to a transient official.
His job is to speak as often as possible
of the nation's desire for peace
while he acts as a business agent in the Congress
for the military and their contractors.
Some people say I'm crazy.
Southern caricature seeking higher office.
There's a simple way to determine if I am paranoid.
Ask the two men who profited most
from the assassination former President Johnson
and your new President, Nixon...
...to release the 51 CIA documents
pertaining to Lee Oswald and Jack Ruby.
Or the secret CIA memo on Oswald's activities in Russia
that was destroyed while being Photo copied.
These documents are yours.
The people's property.
You pay for it.
But as the government sees you as children...
...who might be too disturbed to face this reality...
...or because you might lynch those involved...
...you cannot see these documents for another 75 years.
I'm in my 40s...
...so I'll have "shuffled off this mortal coil" by then.
But I'm telling my eight-year-old son
to keep himself physically fit...
...so that one glorious September morning, in 2038...
...he can go to the National Archives
and learn what the CIA and FBI knew.
They may push it back then.
It may become a generational affair.
Questions passed from parent to child.
But someday,
somewhere,
someone may find out the damn truth.
We better.
Or we might just as well build
ourselves another government...
...like the Declaration of Independence says to,
when the old one don't work.
Just a bit farther out West.
An American naturalist wrote:
"A patriot must always be ready to defend his country...
...against its government."
I'd hate to be in your shoes today.
You have a lot to think about.
You've seen evidence the public hasn't seen.
Going back to when we were children...
...I think most of us in this courtroom
thought justice came automatically.
That virtue was its own reward.
That good triumphs over evil.
But as we get older we know this isn't true.
Individual human beings have to create justice,
and this is not easy...
...because the truth often poses a threat to power...
...and one often has to fight power
at great risk to themselves.
People like
S.M. Holland Lee Bowers...
...Jean Hill, Willie O'Keefe...
...have all taken that risk
and they've all come forward.
I have here some $8,000 in these letters...
...sent from all over the country.
Quarters, dimes, dollars from housewives...
...plumbers, car salesmen, teachers, invalids.
These are people
who cannot afford to send money but do.
People who drive cars...
...who nurse in hospitals...
...who see their kids go to Vietnam.
Why?
Because they care.
Because they want to know the truth.
Because they want their country back.
Because it still belongs to us
as long as the people have the guts to
fight for what they believe in.
The truth is the most important value we have,
because if it doesn'tendure...
...if the government murders truth...
...if we cannot respect these people...
...then this is not the country I was born in,
or the country I want to die in.
Tennyson wrote: "Authority forgets a dying king."
This was never more true than for John F. Kennedy
whose murder was probably one of the most terrible moments
in the history of our country.
We, the people,
the jury system sitting in judgment on Clay Show...
...represent the hope...
...of humanity against government power.
In discharging your duty...
...to bring a first conviction
in this house of cards against Clay Shaw...
"...ask not what your country can do for you...
...but what you can do for your country."
Do not forget...
...your dying king.
Show this world...
...this is still a government
"of the people,by the people and for the people."
Nothing as long as you live will ever be more important.
It's up to you. |