The history that might have been: John F. Kennedy assassinated 59 years ago today in Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963

In The Man in the High Castle, an alternate history novel by American writer Philip K. Dick, published and set in 1962, events takes place 15 years after a different end to the Second World War, and depict intrigues between the victorious Axis Powers – primarily, Imperial Japan and Nazi Germany – as they rule over the former United States, as well as daily life under totalitarian rule. A television series was loosely adapted from the book and ran for four seasons from January 2015 until November 2019.

In a similar vein, The Plot Against America is a novel by Philip Roth published in 2004. It is an alternate history in which Franklin D. Roosevelt is defeated in the presidential election of 1940 by Charles Lindbergh. Adapted for television as a six-part miniseries that aired in March and April 2020, The Plot Against America imagined an alternate American history told through the eyes of a working-class Jewish family in Newark, New Jersey, as they watch the political rise of Lindbergh, an aviator-hero and xenophobic populist.

The fascination with alternate timelines is not limited to science fiction writers. Historians have been known to wonder if the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy, in ending Camelot, changed the course of history for the worse? It’s a popular, if not almost universal view, that it did. But historian David Hackett Fischer, in his 1970 book, Historians’ Fallacies: Toward a Logic of Historical Thought, warns of the dangers of counterfactual historiography, which extrapolates a timeline in which a key historical event did not happen or had an outcome which was different from that which did in fact occur. Had Kennedy lived would the United States have exited Vietnam closer to 1964 than 1975? Would Lyndon Johnson’s landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964 have passed so soon under JFK? We can only wonder.

As Kennedy’s presidential limousine, a modified 1961 Lincoln Continental four-door convertible, turned off Main Street at Dealey Plaza around 12:30 p.m. Central Standard Time on Friday, Nov. 22, 1963, three shots rang out as the motorcade passed the Texas School Book Depository. If you were born in 1957 or earlier, you have a highly detailed and exceptionally vivid flashbulb memory snapshot of that moment and where you were and what you were doing. I was in my Grade 1 class in Oshawa, Ontario here in Canada at St. Christopher Separate Elementary School on Annapolis Avenue that day.

Secret Service Agent William Greer, 54, the limousine driver, sped to Parkland Hospital where Father Oscar Huber, a 70-year-old Vincentian priest from Holy Trinity Catholic Church, who had been watching the presidential motorcade, having walked the three blocks, arrived to administer the sacrament of last rites (extreme unction) to the mortally wounded 46-year-old president.

Just two hours and eight minutes after Kennedy was shot, Vice-President Lyndon Baines Johnson (LBJ), who was also in Dallas, riding in a car behind the president with his wife, Lady Bird Johnson, and Texas Senator Ralph Yarborough, was sworn in as president of the United States aboard Air Force One at Love Field, as the presidential plane’s four jet engines were being powered up, by Judge Sarah Tilghman Hughes, a federal judge for the United States District Court for the Northern District of Texas, the only woman in U.S. history to have sworn in a United States president, a task usually executed by the chief justice of the United States, using a Roman Catholic missal taken from a side table in Kennedy’s airplane cabin, which Larry O’Brien, a member of JFK’s inner circle as  special assistant to the president for congressional relations and personnel, is said to have mistakenly taken to be a Bible, as it was bound in calfskin and embossed with a crucifix. Would O’Brien, a practicing Irish Roman Catholic, mix up a missal with a Bible in the chaos of the moment? Perhaps. Or maybe he thought it was a perfectly natural thing, given his own religious background, to have Johnson, a Stone-Campbell  Movement Disciple of Christ adherent, sworn in with a missal.

Also, while the oath should have been, according to Article II, Section 1, Clause 8 of the United States Constitution, “I do solemnly swear that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my ability preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States,” Hughes said in 1968 she also mistakenly added, “So help me God” to the end of the oath she read on the plane: “Every oath of office that I had ever given ended up with ‘So help me God!’ so it was just automatic that I said [it].”

While conspiracy theories about Charles Harrelson, actor Woody Harrelson’s father, being one of the “three tramps” on the grassy knoll – a second shooter in Dallas – along with two other shadowy figures, Charles Rogers and Chauncey Holt, continue to have some currency, it appears the boxcar tramps actually were Gus Abrams, Harold Doyle and John Gedney, and that Lee Harvey Oswald, as the Warren Commission concluded, acted alone. Harrelson, however, was later convicted of the assassination of U.S. federal district court Judge “Maximum John” H. Wood, Jr., shot dead in the parking lot outside his San Antonio, Texas townhouse on May 29, 1979. Harrelson, 69, died March 15, 2007, incarcerated at Supermax, the United States’ most secure federal penitentiary in Florence, Colorado.

It was also on Nov. 22, 1963 that C.S. Lewis, the former atheist-turned-Anglican apologist died, as did Aldous Huxley, author of the dystopian novel Brave New World, which anticipated developments in reproductive technology, sleep-learning, psychological manipulation and operant conditioning, leading Modern Library in 1999 to rank it fifth on its list of the 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century. Kennedy, Lewis and Huxley all died within hours of each other, In January 1982, Reformed Protestant Calvinist-turned Catholic apologist Peter Kreeft, a professor at Boston College since 1965, published Between Heaven and Hell: A Dialog Somewhere Beyond Death with John F. Kennedy, C.S. Lewis & Aldous Huxley, where he imagines the three discussing life after death and the claims of Christ.

The deaths of Kennedy, Lewis and Huxley came one day after CBS aired what is believed to be the first major U.S. news report to feature The Beatles on Thursday, Nov. 21, 1963, which you can watch here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z-sI-e-eJwQ

Steve Gillon, host of the new History Channel podcast 24 Hours After: The JFK Assassination, says the assassination of JFK is the only time when the nuclear codes were temporarily lost.

“The president always has a military aide who carries an attache with all the nuclear codes,” he says. “He was in a backup car, and in all the chaos of rushing to the airport, the aide got lost. The codes were soon reunited with the president, but I think that’s the only time I know of in the nuclear age where, if the president had wanted to launch a nuclear strike, he would not have been able to because he wouldn’t have access to the codes.”

The president is always followed by the briefcase, the so-called “nuclear football,” and a military aide wherever he goes. It has joined every president when they are away from the White House since the Cuban Missile Crisis in October 1962. The football is carried to allow the president to be able to launch a nuclear strike at short notice if needed.

It originally got its name from an Eisenhower-era nuclear war plan, code-named ‘Dropkick’, and was created to make sure a nuclear war option was always near the president. There are three of the bags in total, one is with the president, one with the vice president and the other kept safe in the White House.

“The ‘ball carriers’ who look after the cases also carry Beretta pistols and are authorized use deadly force against anyone who tries to take it.

Little is made public about what is inside the cases and it regularly changes. A small antenna that pokes out the top of the case means it likely contains a satellite phone.

There is also a 75-page book that informs the president of his options for a nuclear strike, with another highlighting places he could hide during a nuclear war.

A ten-page folder on contact details for military leaders and broadcasters sits next to a sealed laminated card known as the Biscuit.

This looks like a large credit card and shows letters and numbers, with the president having to memorize where on it sits the Gold Code.

In the event of a nuclear strike, the commander-in-chief of the U.S. armed forces will say the code down the phone to the National Military Command Centre in Washington D.C.

Despite the bags being kept at the White House when the president is in residence, it is widely thought he carries a card with the launch code on him all the time.”

Ohio-class ballistic missile submarines (SSBNs) sail somewhere off Norfolk, Virginia and San Diego, with North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) personnel at the Cheyenne Mountain Complex, near Colorado Springs, Colorado, and the U.S. Strategic Command, (USSTRATCOM), the global warfighting command at Offutt Air Force Base in Omaha, Nebraska.

In the event of a national emergency, the Federation of American Scientists (FAS) says, a series of seven different alert conditions (LERTCONs) can be called. The seven LERTCONs are broken down into five defence conditions (DEFCONs) and two emergency conditions (EMERGCONs). Defence readiness conditions (DEFCONs) describe progressive alert postures primarily for use between the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the commanders of unified commands. DEFCONs are graduated to match situations of varying military severity, and are numbered 5,4,3,2, and 1 as appropriate. DEFCONs are phased increases in combat readiness. In general terms, these are descriptions of DEFCONs:

EMERGCONs are national level reactions in response to ICBM (missiles in the air) attack. By definition, other forces go to DEFCON 1 during an EMERGCON.

During the Cuban Missile Crisis, the U.S. Strategic Air Command was placed on DEFCON 2 for the first time in history, while the rest of U.S. military commands (with the exception of the U.S. Air Forces in Europe) went on DEFCON 3. On Oct. 22, 1962 SAC responded by establishing Defense Condition Three (DEFCON III), and ordered Boeing B-52 Stratofortress long-range, subsonic, jet-powered strategic bombers on airborne alert. Tension grew and the next day SAC declared DEFCON II, a heightened state of alert, ready to strike targets within the Soviet Union.

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The Truth is in Here? U.S. National Archives set to release final JFK assassination records Oct. 26

The U.S. National Archives and Records Administration at College Park, Maryland is set to release on Oct. 26 the final 3,000 never-before-seen documents the federal government says it holds related to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.  The records at issue are documents previously identified as assassination records but withheld in part or in full.

An additional 34,000 previously redacted files are also scheduled for release with the redacted text restored for the new releases. Under the terms of The John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act of 1992, the United States government was given 25 years to make public all Kennedy assassination-related files. That deadline expires Thursday. President Donald Trump tweeted Oct. 21 that “subject to the receipt of further information, I will be allowing, as president, the long blocked and classified JFK FILES to be opened.” The records are to be released this week “unless the president certifies, as required by The John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act of 1992, that continued postponement is made necessary” by specific identifiable harm, including harm to intelligence, law enforcement, military operations or foreign relations. A statement from the White House on Saturday said: “The president believes that these documents should be made available in the interests of full transparency unless agencies provide a compelling and clear national security or law enforcement justification otherwise.”

The John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act of 1992 resulted from filmmaker Oliver Stone’s 1991 movie JFK, which added more fuel to 28 years of inflamed public fascination with the idea of conspiracy and cover-up connected to the Kennedy assassination, despite the official finding of the 1964 Warren Commission that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone in assassinating Kennedy in Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963.

Earlier this year, the National Archives and Records Administration released at 8 a.m. on July 24 a set of 3,810 documents, along with 17 audio files, previously withheld in accordance with The John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act of 1992. The materials released July 24 were available online only initially, with access to the original paper records promised “at a future date.” The National Archives and Records Administration established the John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection in November 1992, and it consists of approximately five million pages of records. The vast majority of the collection, about 88 percent, has been open in full and released to the public since the late 1990s, the National Archives says.

Highlights of the July 24 release included FBI and CIA records and 17 audio files of interviews of Yuri Nosenko, a KGB officer who defected to the United States in January 1964. Nosenko claimed to have been the officer in charge of the KGB file on Lee Harvey Oswald during Oswald’s time in the Soviet Union. The interviews were conducted in January, February, and July of 1964. The set of documents released in July included 441 documents previously withheld in full and 3,369 documents previously released with portions redacted. The redacted text is restored for the new releases.

Josh Sanburn, a writer for TIME, suggested last December “the files – many of which trace back to the House Select Committee on Assassinations from the 1970s – promise to be less about second shooters and grassy knolls and more about what the government, particularly the CIA, might have known about assassin Lee Harvey Oswald before Kennedy’s death.”

According to the National Archives, the final records release includes information on the CIA’s station in Mexico City, where Oswald showed up weeks before JFK’s death; 400 pages on E. Howard Hunt, the Watergate burglary conspirator who said on his deathbed that he had prior knowledge of the assassination; and testimony from the CIA’s James Angleton, who oversaw intelligence on Oswald. “The documents could also provide information on a CIA officer named George Joannides, who directed financial dealings with an anti-Castro group whose members had a public fight with Oswald on the streets of New Orleans in the summer of 1963,” says Sanburn.

As President Kennedy’s presidential limousine, a modified 1961 Lincoln Continental four-door convertible, turned off Main Street at Dealey Plaza around 12:30 p.m. Central Standard Time on Friday, Nov. 22, 1963, three shots rang out as the motorcade passed the Texas School Book Depository. If you were born in 1957 or earlier, you have a highly detailed and exceptionally vivid flashbulb memory snapshot of that moment and where you were and what you were doing. I was in my Grade 1 class in Oshawa, Ontario here in Canada at St. Christopher Separate Elementary School on Annapolis Avenue that day. Kennedy, who was born 100 years ago, was the fourth United States president to be assassinated, after Abraham Lincoln in 1865, James Garfield in 1881 and William McKinley in 1901.

Secret Service Agent William Greer, 54, the limousine driver, sped to Parkland Hospital where Father Oscar Huber, a 70-year-old Vincentian priest from Holy Trinity Catholic Church, who had been watching the presidential motorcade, having walked the three blocks, arrived to administer the sacrament of last rites (extreme unction) to the mortally wounded 46-year-old president.

Just  two hours and eight minutes after Kennedy was shot, Vice-President Lyndon Baines Johnson (LBJ), who was also in Dallas, riding in a car behind the president with his wife, Lady Bird Johnson, and Texas Senator Ralph Yarborough, was sworn in as president of the United States aboard Air Force One at Love Field, as the presidential plane’s four jet engines were being powered up, by Judge Sarah Tilghman Hughes,  a federal judge for the United States District Court for the Northern District of Texas, the only woman in U.S. history to have sworn in a United States president, a task usually executed by the chief justice of the United States, using a Roman Catholic missal taken from a side table in Kennedy’s airplane cabin, which Larry O’Brien, a member of JFK’s inner circle as  special assistant to the president for congressional relations and personnel, is said to have mistakenly taken to be a Bible, as it was bound in calfskin and embossed with a crucifix. Would O’Brien, a practicing Irish Roman Catholic, mix up a missal with a Bible in the chaos of the moment? Perhaps. Or maybe he thought it was a perfectly natural thing, given his own religious background, to have Johnson, a Stone-Campbell  Movement Disciple of Christ adherent, sworn in with a missal.

Also, while the oath should have been, according to Article II, Section 1, Clause 8 of the United States Constitution, “I do solemnly swear that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my ability preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States,” Hughes said in 1968 she also mistakenly added, “So help me God” to the end of the oath she read on the plane: “Every oath of office that I had ever given ended up with ‘So help me God!’ so it was just automatic that I said [it].”

While conspiracy theories about Charles Harrelson, actor Woody Harrelson’s father, being one of the “three tramps” on the grassy knoll – a second shooter in Dallas – along with two other shadowy figures, Charles Rogers and Chauncey Holt, continue to have some currency, it appears the boxcar tramps actually were Gus Abrams, Harold Doyle and John Gedney, and that Lee Harvey Oswald, as the Warren Commission concluded, acted alone. Harrelson, however, was later convicted of the assassination of U.S. federal district court Judge “Maximum John” H. Wood, Jr., shot dead in the parking lot outside his San Antonio, Texas townhouse on May 29, 1979. Harrelson, 69, died March 15, 2007, incarcerated at Supermax, the United States’ most secure federal penitentiary in Florence, Colorado.

Some conspiracies, however, are … well, conspiracies. Others remain unproven matters of conjecture. And still others exist on the fringes of tinfoil hat conspiracy theory speculation.  In April 2016, then Republican presidential primaries candidate Donald Trump accused Canadian-born Republican Texas Senator Ted Cruz’s father, Rafael B. Cruz, a Cuban-American Christian preacher, of being alongside Lee Harvey Oswald several months before he shot the president, “channeling a National Enquirer story that the Cruz campaign has denounced as false,” wrote McClatchy Newspapers correspondent Maria Recio for the Miami Herald at the time. Responding in Indiana, Ted Cruz, challenging Trump for the Republican presidential nomination at the time, quipped: “I guess I should go ahead and admit that yes, my dad killed JFK, he is secretly Elvis and Jimmy Hoffa is buried in his backyard.”

The assassination of Lincoln, however, was part of a larger conspiracy, a fact that’s largely forgotten today. What is remembered is that actor John Wilkes Booth entered Lincoln’s State Box at the Ford Theater in Washington, D.C. on April 14, 1865 undetected and shot him in the back of the head. Lincoln, mortally wounded, was taken to the Petersen House across the street and died at 7:22 a.m. April 15. On April 26, Booth was found hiding in a barn near Port Royal, Virginia and was shot and killed by a Union solider after he refused to surrender and the barn in which he was hiding was set ablaze.

Co-conspirator Lewis Powell attempted to assassinate Secretary of State William Seward, but only managed to injure him. At the same time, another co-conspirator, George Atzerodt was supposed to have killed Vice-President Andrew Johnson, but backed out.

Eight Lincoln co-conspirators were caught over the next few days and tried by a military court. They were found guilty on June 30 and given various sentences depending upon their involvement. Powell, Atzerodt, David Herold, and Mary Elizabeth Jenkins Surratt were charged with conspiring with Booth, along with various other crimes, and all were hanged in Washington on July 7, 1865 – with Surratt becoming the first woman executed by the United States federal government.

It was also on Nov. 22, 1963 that C.S. Lewis, the former atheist-turned-Anglican apologist died, as did Aldous Huxley, author of the dystopian novel Brave New World, which anticipated developments in reproductive technology, sleep-learning, psychological manipulation and operant conditioning, leading Modern Library in 1999 to rank it fifth on its list of the 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century. Kennedy, Lewis and Huxley all died within hours of each other, In January 1982, Reformed Protestant Calvinist-turned Catholic apologist Peter Kreeft, a professor at Boston College since 1965, published Between Heaven and Hell: A Dialog Somewhere Beyond Death with John F. Kennedy, C.S. Lewis & Aldous Huxley, where he imagines the three discussing life after death and the claims of Christ.

The deaths of Kennedy, Lewis and Huxley came one day after CBS aired what is believed to be the first major U.S. news report to feature The Beatles on Thursday, Nov. 21, 1963. Correspondent Alexander Kendrick interviewed The Beatles in England, including in his 5:09 clip footage recorded at the Winter Gardens Theatre in Bournemouth, England five days earlier, which you can watch here:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UeolhjIWPYs

Did the assassination of President Kennedy, in ending Camelot, change the course of history for the worse? It’s a popular, if not almost universal view. But historian David Hackett Fischer, in his 1970 book, Historians’ Fallacies: Toward a Logic of Historical Thought, warns of the dangers of counterfactual historiography, which extrapolates a timeline in which a key historical event did not happen or had an outcome which was different from that which did in fact occur. Had Kennedy lived would the United States have exited Vietnam closer to 1964 than 1975? Would LBJ’s landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964 have passed so soon under JFK? We can only wonder.

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Banned and challenged books: Libraries take a stand

Spring of 1975: I was an idealistic, although in retrospect naive as to how power actually works in practice, 18-year-old advocate of intellectual freedom as Grade 12 wound down and I saw the increasing efforts of Ken Campbell and his ilk attempt to ban important literature in high school libraries and banish it from the curriculum. Campbell, a Baptist evangelical from Milton, Ontario, had founded a lobby group called Renaissance Canada a year earlier in 1974. While the library and English Department at Oshawa Catholic High School were in no way disposed to buckle under to such a censorship challenge, I saw the fight was real, especially in Peterborough and surrounding area, as downtown Pentecostals, not to mention Bible Belt evangelical adherents from Burleigh Falls to Buckhorn, on the southern edge of the Canadian Shield north of Peterborough, were making rumblings and by early 1976 would publicly launch the Peterborough Committee for Citizens on Decency as their campaign vehicle to ban Margaret Laurence ‘s The Diviners, published just two years earlier in 1974, taking their fight to the public in venues ranging from signing petitions in Peterborough churches to letters to the editor in newspapers, right up to appearing as delegations before trustees of what is now known as the Kawartha Pine Ridge District School Board. Laurence was living in Lakefield near Peterborough.

In 1968 the Ontario Ministry of Education had given local school boards the authority to determine which literary works would be used in English classes. In the winter of 1976, writes Sheila Turcon, an archivist in the Mills Memorial Library’s William Ready Division of Archives and Research Collections at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, “complaints were lodged at two Peterborough high schools against both The Diviners and Alice Munro’s Lives of Girls and Women (1971). Both books should have been reviewed by a special committee which had been established two years earlier to review complaints against other books. However, only Laurence’s book was dealt with by the committee.

“The book had been opposed by Jim Telford, a board of education trustee and member of the Pentecostal community, and Rev. Sam Buick. They and their supporters told the Globe and Mail that the novel ‘reeked of sordidness.’ The review committee did not agree and gave its unanimous support for the retention of The Diviners.”

Buick at the time had pastored the Dublin Street Pentecostal Church in downtown Peterborough for three years since 1973.

“On April 22, 1976, the full board decided ten votes to six to keep the book on its approved textbook list,” Turcon said. “Despite this ruling, only Bob Buchanan from Lakefield Secondary School continued to teach it.”

In the end, the new Campbellites did not prevail, but the fight was very public, very protracted and very nasty.

It was in the months leading up to the emergence of the full backdrop in Peterborough, living  50 miles or so down the road to the southwest in Oshawa, I took it upon myself to form a group of high school students from the half dozen or so high schools in Oshawa at the time called the Students Against Arbitrary Censorship Committee (or S.A.A.C.C.) Not the most elegant name or acronym, but I hadn’t enjoyed the benefit of a Loyalist College advertising or marketing course at that point in my life. That would have to wait until the early 1980s when I studied print journalism. So there it was, the Catholic kid, from the faith that brought you the Index Llibrorum Prohibitorum, leading the freedom-to-read charge. Poor Sister Conrad Lauber, my erudite principal. No doubt my S.A.A.C.C. and later Grade 13 high school debating activities have been almost enough on their own to merit her a get-out-of-purgatory-free card, in the unlikely event she might some day need it, simply for enduring my campaigns and playing devil’s debating advocate under the school’s banner. And while my school, and Sister Conrad, stood up, however, uncomfortably at times for my free speech rights, not all Catholics by any means did. After one of my letters to the editor appeared in the op-ed section of the Catholic Register, a gentleman from Geraldton, Ontario took the trouble to write me a handwritten letter, sending it to my home address on Nipigon Street, telling me I was heading for hell. Anonymous telephone calls crisply conveyed similar messages. Pity my long suffering parents. Aside from The Diviners, some of the books Campbell wanted to ban 40 years ago, such as J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye, have remained perennial favourites of censorship advocates, and still show up on banned and challenged book list challenges.

When I said earlier I was naive at 18 as to how power actually works in practice, it is because I thought things like common sense and logic would trump know-nothing ignorance in any given debate and decision, and those advocating banning a book might actually have bothered to read it first. That sort of thing. And I didn’t necessarily think this would be a life-long struggle between the forces of intellectual freedom and ignorance, not to put too fine a point on it. Of course, I was wrong on all counts. Hence the need 40 years on in the struggle to have annual events like “Banned Book Week” from Sept. 27 to Oct. 3, spearheaded by sponsoring organizations such as the Chicago-based Office for Intellectual Freedom of the American Library Association, the American Booksellers Association, the Association of American Publishers, the National Association of College Stores and PEN American Center.

While I still feel just as strongly and passionately about intellectual freedom and taking a stand against book banners, I have also these many years on, learned to see the world, dare I say it, in many more shades of grey, than my young black-and-white 18-year-old idealist self. I may still disagree with book banners, but Campbell, who I never actually met, was something of an evangelical caricature for me as a teenager. I know real-life evangelicals now and count a fair number as good friends. They’re not all book banners. And being a Protestant (or Catholic for that matter) evangelical is not incompatible with being an intellectual. Who would have thought that at 18? Not me. And even those who would still ban books I wouldn’t, I’d be hard pressed not to concede that both the world is a nastier, trashier place in some ways than it was 40 years ago (probably the lament of every aging generation, I know) and that I really can’t always accurately judge people’s motives from the outside and what’s inside their hearts, a gift I seemed to have thought I possessed in my youth.

After spending upwards of 30 years working in print journalism, with the exception mainly of the five-year period between 1990 and 1995, when I redressed my youthful lackluster academic performance in university by returning first to Trent University in Peterborough to complete my Honours B.A. in History and then on to Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, as an Ontario Graduate Scholar, for a couple of years to do a master’s degree in History, I had the opportunity to return in a small way earlier this year to academia working simply as a clerk at the University College of the North (UCN) new Thompson campus library here in Northern Manitoba. There is something so very Victorian in that word clerk that makes me want to pronounce it “clark,” as I imagine perhaps joining Charles Dickens over a Christmas bowl of Smoking Bishop, that particular concoction of Clementines, sugar, cloves, moderately sweet red wine and ruby port.

I am happy to note the “Mission of the University College of the North Libraries” explicitly affirms endorsing “the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, which includes, along with the right to express thoughts publicly, the fundamental right of access of every person to all expressions of knowledge. The intellectual freedom fostered and protected by the enshrinement of these rights is basic to the proper functioning of the University and to the healthy development of Canadian society of which it is a part. The University College Libraries supports the principles of intellectual freedom as they are pertinent to all of its activities.”

The 10 books pictured here – Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, George Orwell’s Animal Farm, John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men and The Grapes of Wrath, Sherman Alexie’s The Absolutely True Story of a Part-Time Indian, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird, Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye and D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover – are all found in our stacks for students, faculty, staff and community users to borrow and read. They are also books that have been banned or challenged, some perennially, in other places.  “A challenge is an attempt to remove or restrict materials, based upon the objections of a person or group,” says the American Library Association.  “A banning is the removal of those materials. Challenges do not simply involve a person expressing a point of view; rather, they are an attempt to remove material from the curriculum or library, thereby restricting the access of others.”

The American Library Association “promotes the freedom to choose or the freedom to express one’s opinions even if that opinion might be considered unorthodox or unpopular and stresses the importance of ensuring the availability of those viewpoints to all who wish to read them.”

You can discover the “top ten frequently challenged books lists of the 21st century” to date and the methodology used to make that determination by checking out the Office for Intellectual Freedom of the American Library Association webpage http://www.ala.org/bbooks/frequentlychallengedbooks/top10#toptenlists

The Banned Books Week website “drew more than 92,000 users and had more than 207,000 page views in 2014,” Publishers Weekly noted Sept. 18. “, Banned Books Week 2015 will, for the second consecutive year, focus on a single category – this time young adult books, which dominates the list of the 311 challenged books in 2014, led by Sherman Alexie’s The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian. (In 2014, graphic novels was the category of focus.) “There have been very serious flaps over why YA books have very dark themes,” noted Judy Platt, chair of the BBW co-ordinating committee and director of Free Expression Advocacy at AAP.”

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On Nov. 22, 1963 LBJ was sworn in by Judge Sarah Tilghman Hughes, a federal judge and the only woman in U.S. history to have sworn in a United States president, while mistakenly using a Roman Catholic missal instead of a Bible

Fifty-one years ago tomorrow, United States President John Fitzgerald Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963.

As Kennedy’s presidential limousine, a modified 1961 Lincoln Continental four-door convertible, turned off Main Street at Dealey Plaza around 12:30 p.m. Central Standard Time, three shots rang out as the motorcade passed the Texas School Book Depository. If you were born in 1957 or earlier, you have a highly detailed and exceptionally vivid flashbulb memory snapshot of that moment and where you were and what you were doing. I was in my Grade 1 class in Oshawa, Ontario here in Canada at St. Christopher Separate Elementary School on Annapolis Avenue that day.

Secret Service Agent William Greer, 54, the limousine driver, sped to Parkland Hospital where Father Oscar Huber, a 70-year-old Vincentian priest from Holy Trinity Catholic Church, who had been watching the presidential motorcade, having walked the three blocks, arrived to administer the sacrament of last rites (extreme unction) to the mortally wounded 46-year-old president.

Just  two hours and eight minutes after Kennedy was shot, Vice-President Lyndon Baines Johnson (LBJ), who was also in Dallas, riding in a car behind the president with his wife, Lady Bird Johnson, and Texas Senator Ralph Yarborough, was sworn in as president of the United States aboard Air Force One at Love Field, as the presidential plane’s four jet engines were being powered up, by Judge Sarah Tilghman Hughes,  a federal judge for the United States District Court for the Northern District of Texas, the only woman in U.S. history to have sworn in a United States president, a task usually executed by the chief justice of the United States, using a Roman Catholic missal taken from a side table in Kennedy’s airplane cabin, which Larry O’Brien, a member of JFK’s inner circle as  special assistant to the president for congressional relations and personnel, is said to have mistakenly taken to be a Bible, as it was bound in calfskin and embossed with a crucifix. Would O’Brien, a practicing Irish Roman Catholic, mix up a missal with a Bible in the chaos of the moment? Perhaps. Or maybe he thought it was a perfectly natural thing, given his own religious background, to have Johnson, a  Stone-Campbell  Movement Disciple of Christ adherent, sworn in with a missal.

Also, while the oath should have been, according to Article II, Section 1, Clause 8 of the United States Constitution, “I do solemnly swear that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my ability preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States,” Hughes said in 1968 she also mistakenly added, “So help me God” to the end of the oath she read on the plane: “Every oath of office that I had ever given ended up with ‘So help me God!’ so it was just automatic that I said [it].”

While conspiracy theories about Charles Harrelson, actor Woody Harrelson’s father, being one of the “three tramps” on the grassy knoll – a second shooter in Dallas – along with two other shadowy figures, Charles Rogers and Chauncey Holt, continue to have some currency, it appears the boxcar tramps actually were Gus Abrams, Harold Doyle and John Gedney, and that Lee Harvey Oswald, as the Warren Commission concluded, acted alone. Harrelson, however, was later convicted of the assassination of U.S. federal district court Judge “Maximum John” H. Wood, Jr., shot dead in the parking lot outside his San Antonio, Texas townhouse on May 29, 1979. Harrelson, 69, died March 15, 2007, incarcerated at Supermax, the United States’ most secure federal penitentiary in Florence, Colorado.

It was also on Nov. 22, 1963 that C.S. Lewis, the former atheist-turned-Anglican apologist died, as did Aldous Huxley, author of the dystopian novel Brave New World, which anticipated developments in reproductive technology, sleep-learning, psychological manipulation and operant conditioning, leading Modern Library in 1999 to rank it fifth on its list of the 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century. Kennedy, Lewis and Huxley all died within hours of each other, In January 1982, Reformed Protestant Calvinist-turned Catholic apologist Peter Kreeft, a professor at Boston College since 1965, published Between Heaven and Hell: A Dialog Somewhere Beyond Death with John F. Kennedy, C.S. Lewis & Aldous Huxley, where he imagines the three discussing life after death and the claims of Christ.

The deaths of Kennedy, Lewis and Huxley came one day after CBS aired what is believed to be the first major U.S. news report to feature The Beatles on Thursday, Nov. 21, 1963. Correspondent Alexander Kendrick interviewed The Beatles in England, including in his 5:09 clip footage recorded at the Winter Gardens Theatre in Bournemouth, England five days earlier, which you can watch here:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UeolhjIWPYs

Did the assassination of President Kennedy, in ending Camelot, change the course of history for the worse? It’s a popular, if not almost universal view. But historian David Hackett Fischer, in his 1970 book, Historians’ Fallacies: Toward a Logic of Historical Thought, warns of the dangers of counterfactual historiography, which extrapolates a timeline in which a key historical event did not happen or had an outcome which was different from that which did in fact occur. Had Kennedy lived would the United States have exited Vietnam closer to 1964 than 1975? Would LBJ’s landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964 have passed so soon under JFK? We can only wonder.

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