The Last Temptation
The Day John Kennedy Died
In “The Day John Kennedy Died”, a track from his album The Blue Mask, Lou Reed sings that he remembers he was upstate in a bar, as events concerning the JFK assassination were unfolding. The team from the local university was playing football on TV. The screen went dead, and the announcer reported that the president had been shot. In real life, however, there had been no live coverage of any football match on 11/22/63. The song was written in 1982, two years after the murder of John Lennon, and Lou Reed was probably blending in a single narrative recollections of the Dallas presidential assassination with recollections of the crime perpetrated by Mark Chapman against the former Beatle in New York: the day John Lennon died news about the shooting was indeed broken to the American public while everyone was watching Monday Night Football.
No one better than James Ellroy has analyzed how America lost its innocence in a brutal apotheosis of power games that took place between the end of World War II and the Watergate scandal. In American Tabloid he explores the private lives of the Kennedys. He portrays government agencies, mobsters and industrial tycoons who play major behind-the-scenes roles in the president’s assassination. His characters are prevaricators, dissemblers, spies and snitches. Some manage to redeem themselves after a life of crime, others remain committed to their manipulations and perpetuate their legacy of hate.
Bob Dylan’s “Murder Most Foul”, a song that was released in March 2020 during the current Covid19 pandemic, is dedicated to the John Kennedy assassination. Frequent allusions to a perfectly executed grand plan, and attention to details such as the presence of the so-called “three tramps” near the scene of the crime, make it plain that Bob Dylan never believed in the JFK lone gunman theory. Was alleged murderer Lee Harvey Oswald offered to the collective consciousness as a scapegoat for a crime he did not commit, or did not commit all by himself? Doesn’t it always happen that way, insinuates James Ellroy, whose novels explain how to sway public opinion in the elimination of a prominent personality. That’s when you need someone who is fickle, narcissistic and yet submissive, socially inept and easily dominated by a stronger father figure. If he’s prepared to pull the trigger, you will be able to maneuver him and control the context. Ellroy’s novels are a manual on how to work undercover, get rid of the problem, sweep all evidence under the carpet, and seduce and sedate the masses. You have to find something that’s so audacious no one will ever suspect the truth, the naked truth being so far-fetched that everyone will refute it and accept a surrogate explanation that’s more digestible than actual reality. “Thousands were watching, no one saw a thing,” sings Bob Dylan in “Murder Most Foul”.
In 1943, the year Dr Albert Hoffman discovered LSD, the SS and the Gestapo were doing experiments that led to the testing of mescaline on prisoners at Dachau. The goal: to control people by eliminating their will. After World War II the CIA started a project called MKUltra to create the so-called Manchurian Candidate, an unwitting assassin brainwashed and programmed to kill. High hopes were laid on the hallucinatory effects of LSD, and on hypnosis, to induce durable amnesia in the subjects after their perpetration of the crime. Did the Mind Kontrol Ultra operation succeed, or did the human spirit defeat its manipulators?
On Monday 8 December 1980, the day Mark Chapman killed John Lennon, almost everyone accepted that in this crazy world one more crazy man had done something crazy. Fenton Brestler did not. In his book The Murder of John Lennon he focuses on the gun used by Chapman, a manufacture produced by the Charter Arms Corporation of Bridgeport, Connecticut, proudly defined as “Undercover 38 Special”: a gun for people that mean business, ideally suited for both undercover detectives and murderers because it is easy to conceal until needed. It can’t miss the target, and it didn’t. The thesis of Fenton is simply that Mark Chapman was a CIA Manchurian Candidate, programmed to kill by hypnotic techniques and drugs designed to trigger him into action and successively ensure built-in memory loss. Yes, happiness is a warm gun indeed, as John Lennon used to sing.
There’s a movie I saw one time called The Manchurian Candidate. I actually saw it twice. The first viewing was its remake starring Denzel Washington as the protagonist. Then I watched the original that had been released in 1962, and remains distressingly relevant today. The plot revolves around a Soviet/Chinese conspiracy against the United States through the infiltration of a sleeper agent who blindly obeys orders without any memory of his actions. His assignment is to kill a presidential nominee and trigger chaos in America. In the film we see the “Manchurian candidate” take up a sniper’s position, ready to shoot. The assassination attempt fails thanks to the intervention of another agent interpreted by Frank Sinatra. The role of the “Manchurian candidate” is played by actor Laurence Harvey, whose name eerily resembles the name of JFK murderer Lee Harvey Oswald. In real life, the latter succeeded where the protagonist of the film had failed.
Who says you can’t repeat the past? In a book called Ronald Reagan, the Movie author Michael Rogin points out that — as confirming evidence of the power of film — on 30 March 1981 assailant John W. Hinckley Jr, infatuated with actress Jodie Foster and imitating the plot of Martin Scorsese’s movie Taxi Driver, deliberately shot president Ronald Reagan on the day of the Academy Awards: “obsessed with Taxi Driver, Hinckley had seen it again and again and had cast himself in the role of its isolated, deranged, and violent protagonist. Like the character played by Robert De Niro, Hinckley became a gun freak. Like him, he determined to win the woman he loved — Jodie Foster in Hickley’s fantasy, the character she played in the movie — by assassinating a political leader.” Who says that fiction doesn’t anticipate reality?
Sometimes life imitates art. “Murder Most Foul” is a song that seems to come from an unspecified time period, future or past, to tell us that 11/22/63 was the day the age of the Antichrist began. People still have mixed feelings about John Kennedy’s political legacy — was he a righteous president or a mediocre leader? We still don’t know for sure who killed him — a cabal of conspirators or Oswald the lone perpetrator, who had defected to Russia, defected again to the United States and even tried to defect to Cuba? Any hope for truth was swallowed whole by a strip club owner named Jack Ruby, who fatally shot Lee Harvey Oswald at point-blank range in a corridor of Dallas police headquarters, in spite of supposedly heavy surveillance.
Bob Dylan publicly declared during his 2019 tour that he counts himself among the admirers of The Last Temptation of Christ, a film by Martin Scorsese based on Nikos Kazantzakis’s novel of the same name. The message of the film is pretty straightforward. Jesus and Judas were allies. Right from the start and until the bitter end, Judas proves to be the strongest and most faithful among the disciples. Jesus has to die on the cross, and has to do it willingly to accomplish his mission to bring God and man together. God and man will never be together unless he dies, and Jesus tells Judas about their respective roles: “I am the sacrifice. Without you, there can be no redemption…You have to keep your promise. You have to kill me.” Judas replies with a question: “If you were me could you betray your master?” Jesus’ answer is uncompromising: “No. That’s why God gave me the easier job. To be crucified.” There will be no surrender, and they must not give in to temptation. No sacrifice, no salvation: resurrection is the only hope. Jesus’ place is on the cross because death is the door. They make a pact, and Judas helps Jesus go through that door. He loves Jesus so much he goes and betrays him to fulfil the mission. The authorities kill Jesus on the cross “like a human sacrifice”, and the age of Christ begins.
Judas’s kiss features prominently in Dylan’s songs, from “Seeing the Real You at Last” (“Whatever you gonna do / Please do it fast”) to “With God on Our Side” (“You’ll have to decide / Whether Judas Iscariot / Had God on his side”). “What Was It You Wanted”, from the album Oh Mercy, really begins to make sense if we imagine that Jesus is speaking through Dylan and asking Judas “What was it you wanted / When you were kissing my cheek / Was there somebody looking / When you gave me that kiss”. If history ever witnessed an episode where an archetype merges with a music performance, this happened during the 17 May 1966 Bob Dylan show in Manchester when someone in the audience, who was blaming Dylan for turning electric, shouted “Judas!” against him. Dylan responded “I don’t believe you…You’re a liar!”
Who was Judas Iscariot? A spy sent by the authorities to infiltrate Jesus’ inner circle? A traitor? Or should we reinterpret his alleged act of treachery in a new light? If Jesus was truly the son of God, come to earth to redeem humankind, then betrayal had to be part of God’s plan and had to be perfectly executed. And Judas was the most loyal and devoted of all his disciples, according to a design meant to prove the greatness of Jesus to the whole world thanks to the miracle of resurrection.
John Kennedy never rose from the dead. There was no “help on the way” for the president, he had no allies on that fateful day in Dallas. “Brothers, what brothers?”, sings Dylan in “Murder Most Foul”. No one came to save his soul, and “for the last fifty years they’ve been searching for that”. “Murder Most Foul” seems to be a song about the beginning of the last temptation in this modern age.
