Kennedy

In a couple of days we will have the 50^th anniversary of the assassination of President Kennedy. I was in the eighth grade. I remember they dismissed school early in the afternoon, or at least I think they did. One stunned kid was upset because he had said something jokingly about Kennedy maybe getting shot early in the morning. I told him not to worry about it, that what he had said had nothing to do with what had happened. After school I went to a barbershop and got a haircut.  There were only three networks then, and all of them went to full time coverage of the events. There was nothing else on TV in our town, and I got tired of it after a while. I think I saw the coverage of Ruby shooting Oswald live two days later, but I am not sure. I’ve seen it so many times since.

Over the years I’ve read a fair amount about the assassination, from the Warren report to some fairly wooly conspiracy theories.  After all that I have no definite opinion about what happened. I believe the official version that Oswald killed the president and acted alone in doing so  is probably the most likely single explanation. That’s where I’d place my bet, if I had to bet. However, if asked to make odds, I’d assign it a probability under 50% because there are so many other reasonable hypotheses  and so many loose ends and puzzling facts including  the magic bullet,  the handling and mishandling of forensic evidence, the testimony of Governor Connally about the number of shots fired, the  testimony of witnesses in Dealey Plaza, the circumstances of Oswald’s arrest, some of the events at Parkland Hospital, the behavior of the Dallas police after they had Oswald in custody, the histories and associations of Oswald and Ruby, and the apparent bias of those on the Warren Commission toward a particular conclusion.

Oswald was a self proclaimed Marxist and a defector to the Soviet Union. He certainly had contact with Soviet intelligence people while in Russia and probably later. He was involved in various pro-Castro activities in the months before the assassination, and was in contact with officials at the Cuban embassy in Mexico City a couple of months before the assassination. None of this proves that either the KGB or Castro’s intelligence service was running Oswald as an agent and/or was involved in the assassination. However, in seeking to explain something, it often helps to see who benefits from it. Both Castro and the Soviets had strong reasons to want Kennedy dead. For the Soviets his  death would eliminate a charismatic and   committed anti-communist who was immensely popular throughout the world and would give them revenge for his thwarting  them in the recent missile crisis. For Castro it  would mean  the end of the attempts by  the CIA under the Kennedy brothers’ direction  to have him killed.  Over the years several defectors from the Soviet bloc have offered evidence and testimony suggesting Castro  or the Soviets were behind the assassination. (The Soviets are said to have been worried enough that they might be blamed that they began a disinformation campaign claiming  the president was killed by American intelligence or security agencies. This absurd tale was disseminated in the United States through the usual pro-Soviet conduits in the  media and the culture and entered the folklore through  various sensational books, magazine articles, and bad  movies and TV shows.  It is not mentioned much these days and, as far as I know, no serious people take it seriously.)

Just as Oswald’s background points to Castro and the Soviets, Jack Ruby’s  points to the mafia. Ruby was a  strip club operator who had at least some association with important gangsters in Dallas and perhaps other cities.  People who believe the mafia ordered the assassination of the president often cite these connections of the man who silenced Oswald as evidence for their opinons. I am aware of no evidence that Ruby was an important gangster or that he had been used as a hit man before he killed Oswald.  Still the mafia had its good reasons for wanting Kennedy dead.  There is some evidence that gangsters in Chicago and other places helped Kennedy win both  the nomination and the general election in 1960. If this is true, they might have felt they had been double crossed when Kennedy’s administration took vigorous actions against organized crime.  Irrespective of that, some gangsters certainly had reasons to want Kennedy dead in the hope that a new administration would be less hostile.

 Then  there is the person who benefitted most obviously from Kennedy’s death – Lyndon Johnson who became president because of it. Johnson was an especially unscrupulous, corrupt, and ruthless politician whose career before 1963 had been full of stories of rigged elections, scandals, and suspicious deaths of witnesses.  People who think he was involved in the assassination have pointed out that, because of his political connections in Texas and the power of the presidency, he would have been more able than either the Soviets or the mafia to cover up a conspiracy.  Given his loathsome character, it is hard to dispute the claim that Johnson would have been capable of conspiring to kill Kennedy, and he surely had a motive, but, as far as I know, no one has produced any strong evidence that he did.

So I don’t know what to believe, and don’t expect ever to know. There is no explanation that is  fully convincing, and the government has done little to clear things up. Besides the official conclusions of the Warren Commission that there was not a conspiracy, we have  the at least once official conclusions of a committee of the congress that there probably was a conspiracy. Besides the plausible or semi-plausible stories, we have the implausible or even nutty ones muddying things.  My mother once told me that every deadbeat in the state of Texas will tell you he was in Billie Sol Estes’ living room the night he was arrested. I don’t know about that, but sometimes it may seem that every nut case living in north Texas  in 1963 claimed some connection to Kennedy’s assassination. A number of years ago, but over twenty years after  the assassination, a colorful character, whose application for a loan had been rejected  by the Dallas-based company where I worked, sent our CEO a letter of complaint explaining that he was too important a person to be  turned down for a loan because he had been a major figure in the assassination of John Kennedy. I don’t think the guy was unique.

As an aside, people who think the disgraceful behavior of those in the traditional media during Obama’s campaigns and administration is something new should look back at what was going on in the early 1960’s.  Sober, self-important journalists referred to Kennedy’s administration as “Camelot” without an observable trace of irony. After the assassination, establishment journalists blamed the killing on a “climate of hate” in Dallas because the city had been a source of criticism of Kennedy’s foreign policies by conservatives.  How criticism by conservatives that Kennedy was too easy on the communists would inspire a pro-communist (especially a pro-communist who is said to have earlier  taken a shot at one of those conservative critics)  to take a shot at him was never explained. The dodge did, however, serve the purpose of allowing those in the traditional media to avoid blaming communists or their sympathizers for what happened. It was a commonplace for years after the event. Some people still say it. 

Practical Politics

Conservatives are rightly concerned that governments are punishing  religious people for declining  to sell their goods or services for use in weddings between homosexuals, in clear violation of those religious people’s rights. However, not too long ago governments in many states - often at the insistence of religious conservatives - had laws forbidding homosexual activity, in a clear violation of homosexuals’ rights. Someone defending individual rights consistently would have spoken up against both sets of violations. There are people who did, but they usually are not people of power and influence in society. The more common response was to decry one and accept or even approve of the other, depending on how one  felt about the opinions and actions of those affected, under the assumption that it is all right to use the power of the state to force one’s notions about propriety onto others.

I and many people of liberal opinions believe that assumption is wrong. What I want to show now is that, its wrongness aside, it is also dangerous and often counterproductive. It is natural and unavoidable that people will have widely differing notions about what are the proper ways to live and behave, and that the practices and opinions of some people will be repugnant to others. This produces discord in society, but as long as people respect others’ rights to their lives, lifestyles, and opinions, it does not have to produce strife. (For example, while there is a variety of strongly held opinions on religion in this country, the principle and practice of full freedom of religious opinion for all within a secular republic has led to almost no serious religious conflicts in our history  and avoided the large religious wars, pogroms, and massacres so common in the history of Europe, Asia, and Africa.) Strife does come when people decide to use the power of the state to force others to conform to their desires. Each group of partisans  then likely will feel that if someone’s notions of  proper thought and behavior are going to be forced on society, it surely had better be theirs, and act accordingly.

When this happens, some people will win and get the power of the state  behind them for a while. They will have the satisfaction not only of being able to behave the way they want but also of forbidding others from doing things they disapprove of. The risk is that if the political mechanism exists for them to dictate to others, it exists for others to take control of and use to dictate to them. Political pendulums do swing, and the excesses of one group can increase the resentment and, once control of the government changes, the excesses of the opponents. Assuming that most people are more strongly interesting in being able to do what they want than in being able to dictate what their neighbors do, we have an almost game theoretic solution that  the safe policy is one of mutual tolerance where no group tries  to use the power of the state to force its opinions onto others, and indeed, there is no mechanism within the state for doing so.  Of course there are people more interested in causing others trouble than in seeing to their own business and interests, but these people are, to one degree or another, sociopaths, irrespective of what title or political office they hold.   

Worries about the Market

A couple of days ago I read a warning about the prices of stocks based on the high value of a couple of macro-technical indicators – the CAPE, a ratio of present stock price to average earnings over the last ten years,  and the q ratio, a ratio of present stock price to an estimated cost of replacing all of a firm’s assets.  Such warnings are commonplace, and may be justified in our present situation. All the two indicators really are are measures which go up when stock prices increase a lot and go down when stock prices decline a lot. As such they can offer suggestions as to when stocks are expensive or cheap. The problems and the silliness begin when people try to go beyond their probabilistic and suggestive utility and treat  them as having almost mystical predictive powers.

It is interesting to look at two periods when the CAPE and the q ratio were low that did turn out to be good times to buy stocks. (It is also worth remembering the ratios have also been low at times when stocks turned out to be bad buys and high when stocks turned out to be good buys.) The first was the decade immediately after World War II. Stocks were a  great buy at that time. However the reason they were is that the economic condition of the country changed  - from depression to a quarter century of the greatest prosperity it had yet experienced. If that had not happened, and if the predictions of the leading economists of the day that the ending of wartime government spending would lead to massive unemployment and a continuing depression had come true, stocks would have been a bad buy irrespective of what the metrics suggested. The second time was in the late 1970’s and the early 1980’s. Once again stocks were a great buy, but once again,  the reason was a change in the conditions of the country. The nation went from the malaise of the inflationary depression of the 1970’s to another  quarter century of  the greatest prosperity it had ever experienced.  If it hadn’t, and if economic, political, and geopolitical events had  continued on the trajectory of the 1970’s,  stocks would have been a bad buy irrespective of the metrics. It was not the indicators, but the impending macro-economic improvements that made stocks a good buy at both of those times.  

Stocks prices tend to be low when people are dubious about the economic state and future of the country. Times when such pessimism is unwarranted are often good  times to buy. Stock prices tend to be high when people are expecting   growth and prosperity. Times when such optimism is wrong are often  bad times to buy. Whether stocks are too expensive now will be answered by how the nation’s economy does in the next few years, and that is a hard question to consider. The anti-growth policies and plans of the present administration are a serious threat. The ability of firms to lower costs of debt and the continuing effects of new technologies are good signs. The fact is that we don’t know for sure what will happen, and no chart, wave theory, or horoscope will tell us. That is why investors should be careful and diversified in their investments.