Assassinations committee

There was a time, not so many years ago, when it would have been irresponsible of me, to say the least, to talk at the end of November about anything else than the annual national holiday of Thanksgiving.

There was even a time when I got letters from listeners who were surprised and delighted to hear about this quaint American custom but America's rise to world power has filled in many a gap in the foreigner's familiarity with this country and its ways. When I first went to Washington there were three full-time British newspaper correspondents there. Now, I suppose, there must be at least three dozen, what with the nuclear umbrella and television and the satellite and the rest. Everybody knows the American legends, if not the truths and since national legends are far more powerful than truth, there's not much point, so late in the day, in saying that the Mayflower never intended to land in Massachusetts but was blown several hundred miles off course. They landed, in fact, on Christmas Day. But being convinced that what day so-ever our Lord was born, most certainly it was not 25 December, they started to dig and build some rude shelters. They, also, being very dour religious men in command, absolutely forbade all merrymaking and celebration, either secular or religious. 

It wasn't, indeed, till the 1860s that somebody put the idea to Abraham Lincoln that it would be a charming thing to proclaim a national day of thanksgiving – thanksgiving for the establishment of the Massachusetts colony. This seemed such a bizarre, even a presumptuous, idea to other people and other states, that it didn't catch on as a general thing until the end of the nineteenth century when – since this is not a cosy little country like Switzerland, but a continent with many far-flung regions proud of their own history – well, different states, naturally, wanted to give thanks for 'their' admission to statehood. 

Only in this century have all the states agreed to regard the Massachusetts settlement as a national holiday and make it on the same day. Florida and Oklahoma, for some perverse reason, officially celebrate it the day after Thanksgiving. And somewhere along the line it's added a poetic touch by establishing a traditional meal which incorporates the staple foods and dishes the Pilgrims learned to grow and cook from the Indians. 

Last Thursday, there must have been a million turkeys murdered and served up – I don't include what seem to be suspiciously like plastic turkey served on airplanes – and masses of corn (that's maize) pudding and pumpkin pies and floods of cranberry sauce. 

So what it amounts to is that Thanksgiving Day, THE all-American family feast, more so really than Christmas, is a day of giving thanks to the first Americans, the Indian tribes who made it possible for the white man and woman to survive. And I sometimes wonder if the Indians think it was worth it. 

Well, since it's always a family time, it's usually a time when the pressures of the outside world, while they may not relax, they're ignored for a day or two. The papers may go on about all our troubles and record the death of giants and pygmies but most of us read the papers less because we're too busy getting ready for the trek to the family and busy bustling off into cars and planes and buses. Somewhere, somebody, I suppose, took a train but I haven't heard of it. 

Long ago, the railways actively dissuaded people from travelling on trains. It cost them too much to carry human beings. Goods trains, freight trains, were the ones that made a profit until freight retreated to the trucking industry and the men who drive huge trucks by night on transcontinental motorways. About 20 years ago, an old railroad man said to me, 'If it weren't for the commuter trains into the big cities, the railroad business would go broke.' Well, the commuters still pile into old and rickety trains and the railroad business has gone broke. Most of it, anyway. 

So, either this week we went off to join the mothers and fathers and children and grandchildren and cousins and aunts and love-lorn bachelors or they went off to join us. Not an Indian in sight. 

A jarring note is now struck, each year, at Thanksgiving. It's been bright and brilliant and piping cold most places but a cloud drifted in from the memory of 13 years ago. I remember my daughter, just home from school for Thanksgiving, and there was a stir of fun and games and much fuss about baking pies and the like for the coming festival, until just before two o'clock on that Friday when the networks brought us the outrage of the news from Dallas. There was, as most us remember, a presidential commission which called hundreds of witnesses and got out a vast report concluding that the assassination of President Kennedy was the sole work of one man, Lee Harvey Oswald. 

However, there's now a new committee of the House of Representatives called the House Select Committee on Assassinations, plural. They're looking, particularly, into the assassinations of President Kennedy and, nearly four years later, of the Reverend Martin Luther King. Why? 

Well, there've been shoals of so-called new evidence floating in down the years, most of it vanished without trace or was identified as a school of red herrings, but there are one or two disturbing items the commission didn't investigate, or couldn't have known about. The thing that has sparked the House investigation is the fact that much of the Kennedy and Martin Luther King evidence was either provided by or sifted by the FBI and the new widespread recognition since the Watergate enquiries that, under J. Edgar Hoover, the FBI suppressed a great deal of evidence on other matters. 

Also, people are inclined today to believe the ugliest rumours about the possible role of the CIA, since the CIA has been shown to be corruptible. So the puzzle to solve, if it is one, is between the view that Oswald acted alone or that he was the cat’s paw of a conspiracy which might involve foreign governments. For example, there's persuasive evidence to show that a Cuban agent, known to the FBI, worked both for the CIA and for Fidel Castro. There are several men, shadowy figures as yet, who are known to have left the United States in a hurry and gone into Cuba shortly after the Kennedy assassination. For a meatier example, there's a memorandum delivered by J. Edgar Hoover to the presidential commission which is now said to contain the information that Oswald had told the Castro government about his plan to kill the president. 

Personally, I cannot help thinking that there's at least a lurking element of guilt in the impulse to set up a new investigation because, since the Watergate scandal, we all know that the Kennedy administration actually brewed a plot to kill Fidel Castro and there's something eerie in the matter-of-fact announcement the other day that Castro himself has agreed to be interviewed by the committee's staff about his knowledge of Kennedy's assassination. 

Most papers and networks made a passing, respectful bow in the direction of this sombre anniversary but it was a doleful thing to think about during the days before Thanksgiving and, by Thursday, we were back to what newspapermen like to call the 'presidential honeymoon' of the president-elect. Between Thanksgiving and the inauguration of a president is always a happy time for the new man. Americans may bellow and rage during the campaign and both sides commonly foresee the end of the republic if the other fellow gets in. But once it's over, they're noticeable good natured about it. 

The old jokes linger on. Ford may not have been able, in Lyndon Johnson's cruel phrase, 'to walk and chew gum at the same time' but he was a good man and he lost with more grace than some other presidents I can recall. Truman was sniffy, to say the least, about receiving Eisenhower and when Eisenhower won, the gallant letter went from Stevenson to Eisenhower and not the other way round. 

People still wonder about Jimmy Carter and his character in a way I never remember their wondering about other presidents-elect. But there's general goodwill toward him and the hope of a new movement in government. Again, I can't help thinking about the difference between the old honeymoons and the new. When Kennedy came in 16 years ago, certainly he had one or two of his scouts in touch with the advisers of the retiring Eisenhower, picking up hints and advice about ways of proceeding smoothly from one administration to the next. But this is, above everything else, a bureaucratic age in government and although one of Mr Carter's most fervent vows was to reduce the bureaucracy of government, he has just appointed 131 people to arrange the transition from the Ford administration to the Carter administration. 

Among them are groups with forbidding titles. There are, for instance, 40 entitled Transition Liaison Officers. There are separate staffs to supervise the transition at the Justice Department, at the Department of Health, Education and Welfare, Treasury, Labour, so on. There are Environmental Transition Advisers and Transition Procedure Supervisors and, I have no doubt, Transition Clothing Supervisors because the other day Mr Carter made the astounding announcement that he would go to the inauguration in a top hat. 

Now this used to be, through the nineteenth and early twentieth century de rigueur. I can see now Roosevelt and Hoover together, bobbing toppers at each other in the presidential limousine. Eisenhower wouldn't do it and that seemed the end, as they say, of an era. Nixon didn't wear a topper twice. Ford was, of course, never inaugurated but I can't see him carrying a topper. A putter, yes! 

And now, when we all expected it would be all right to turn up on 20 January in blue jeans and a corn-cob pipe, our native son of Georgia says he'll wear a topper! This will throw all the guests into confusion but, I guess, it will be straightened out with consummate ease by the chief of protocol who has to arrange the transportation, the order of the cavalcade, the seating, the rules of precedence, the menu of the banquet, the decorations, timing, the lot. 

The chief of protocol is an old pro at handling crowds and staying sweet and calm as thousands cheer. She is, after all, Mrs Shirley Temple Black.

This transcript was typed from a recording of the original BBC broadcast (© BBC) and not copied from an original script. Because of the risk of mishearing, the BBC cannot vouch for its complete accuracy.

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