American Conspiracies: Lies, Lies, and More Dirty Lies That the Government Tells Us Read Online Free PDF Page B

think this guy is gonna die within the next couple of years? I’d have to tell you no, he looks fit as a fiddle for his age.”
    Their faces were expressionless. They said they were finished, and thanked me. I looked coldly at them and said, “You’re done. You’re all done?”
    They said yes.
    I said, “You’re sure? There’s no other question you want to ask me, there’s nothing you want to tell me, anything like that?”
    â€œNo, sir, we’re all done.”
    In that case, I wanted to send them back with something to think about. “Well,” I said, “I have something that I want to tell you , and I’ll leave it up to your discretion who should hear this. You take it to whoever you think is appropriate. A need-to-know basis.”
    They feigned being very surprised and said, “Governor, we don’t understand what you’re talking about.”
    I said, “Well, here’s what I’m talking about. If you or your people ever put a tail on me again, and don’t tell me beforehand, and I discover it—you’re gonna find the tail floating in the river.”
    They looked at me in seeming astonishment. They looked at each other and pretended they didn’t have a clue as to what I was talking about.
    I said, “That’s fine. If you don’t get it, you can take it and tell it to somebody that does. I’m sure somebody upstairs, above you, knows exactly what I’m talking about— if you don’t. So you be the judge, like I say take it to where it needs to go.”
    I’ve often wondered how far it went. Did it get to George Tenet, who was the director of the CIA at the time? To George Bush? Dick Cheney? Or maybe it didn’t even leave the room. Maybe they didn’t even bother with passing along my little message, I don’t know. But at least I got it off my chest, and let them know that the next time they try to fool me, they ought to do a better job.
    One night after I got back to Minnesota, I had dinner with Jack Tunheim. He was a Minnesota federal judge who, after Oliver Stone’s JFK film came out, was put in charge by President Clinton of reviewing the still-classified assassination archives for potential release. Tunheim told me that, in following up on the intelligence side, he’d encountered some of the shadiest characters that he’d ever come across. The judge also told me I had great knowledge of the case, and that I was on the right track.
    On the fortieth anniversary of the assassination on November 22, 2003, I decided to go to Dallas again to pay my respects. I’d left office the previous January. I was the only elected official who spoke in Dealey Plaza that day. No one else even bothered to show up. This speaks volumes to me. Does our government still have a collective guilty conscience when it comes to John F. Kennedy?
    When I ended up teaching at Harvard in 2004, I decided to focus my next-to-last class on the Kennedy assassination. I knew that was a gutsy move to make at the Kennedy School of Government. I hadn’t wanted to try it too soon because, if Harvard objected, I didn’t want to go through a big fight. Anyway, I got away with it. My guest speaker was David Fetzer, a University of Minnesota Duluth professor and former Marine who’s an expert on the ballistics evidence that shows it had to be more than just Oswald shooting.
    I noticed there were people in my class that day who’d never attended any of the others. They were too old to be students. Their sole purpose in being there was apparently to debunk any conspiracy theories. They didn’t completely disrupt the class, but they would speak out of turn and insinuate that it was un-American and undermining our great country by bringing up the past and questioning the integrity of all those great men on the Warren Commission. Never question your government was the message. So where did these people