“If you want to tell people the truth, make them laugh, otherwise they’ll kill you.” — George Bernard Shaw

I’m nearing the end of the podcast series “Who Killed JFK?” with Rob Reiner and Soledad O’Brien. It’s been 60 years since President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, and yet the official line remains that Lee Harvey Oswald was the lone gunman.

“Ich glauben est niche,” which is German for “I believe it not.”

One of the biggest problems United States government has in these modern times is getting its constituents to believe what it tells them. The JFK issue stands as one of the great examples of why.

I certainly don’t know who actually did kill Kennedy that fateful day, but I have no faith whatsoever in the official explanation given by the Warren Commission investigation. There are just too many holes in the story.

It makes no sense that one lone gunman could have fired the shots that killed the President from the sixth floor of that library. Not only was it an extremely difficult longshot, it failed to explain why film footage shows a stricken Kennedy suddenly moving back and to the left.

Reiner, in his podcast, also interviewed several knowledgable people who placed Oswald elsewhere than on the sixth floor of that library.

Again, I know not who actually killed the President, but I have never believed the official line of just who did.Our government officials somehow were hell bent on pointing the finger at Oswald, perhaps because he was once a communist, and, as he suggested, he was just a patsy, two days later to be rubbed out by Mobster Jack Ruby.

Reiner, and for that matter former Townbroadcast columnist Ranger Rick, have suggested three other culprits — the CIA, the Mob and a group of pro-Cuba, anti-Castro forces.

The real issue for me, however, is that our government has a poor track record for telling us the truth about important developments and issues.

Back in 1898. The U.S. battleship Maine was sunk in Havana Harbor in Cuba and media megaphones insisted without evidence that Spain was guilty in order to send us into an easily won, but morally questionable, war.

A similar incident occurred in 1964 in the Gulf of Tonkin in Vietnam that drew us foolishly into that conflict, a war in which we didn’t learn the lessons of history that you can’t win a war of occupation, simply because you don’t live there.

We failed to learn the lessons of Vietnam when George W. Bush and friends dragged us into Iraq with false assertions of weapons of mass destruction and the notion advanced by Vice President Dick Cheney that we would “be greeted as liberators.”

So, borrowing a page of a children’s fable, the U.S. government ran into a case of “the boy who cried wolf” when the Covid pandemic visited in 2020 and 2021.

It isn’t just governments who commit these dirty deeds of telling us lies. Corporations and their chief executive officers too often, I have found in my career, fib to the public when something controversial happens, like when the boss has to step down “to spend more time with his family.”
That reminds me of when a Hastings restaurant suddenly closed and its sign declared, “Closed because of gas leak.” No such leak was present and the eatery was shuttered not long afterward.

We may never really know the causes of controversial developments that occur even close to home. And it is rare indeed when a CEO or newsmaker comes clean with the public that doesn’t really need to know.

This all started for me personally in my earliest days on this planet. When I learned my parents told me lies about the existence of Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, the Tooth Fairy and where babies come from, I began to apply all explanations of strange phenomena as bereft of truth.

In recent years I have come to understand this sad truth:

“The more you think critically, do the research and pay attention, the more you come to realize you’ve been lied to all your life.”