History of Choice

An explosive new film about the death of President John F Kennedy is about to be released. It offers compelling evidence that Fidel Castro was the key component in the ordering of President Kennedy’s assassination. The producer has provided documentary proof that Lee Oswald went to the Cuban Embassy in Mexico City where he was paid money to carry out the assassination.

The film claims that only a few days after Kennedy's death President Lyndon Johnson quashed the FBI investigation of this theory, even to the point of recalling the FBI agent who had been dispatched to Mexico City to investigate why Oswald went to the Embassy in Mexico just weeks before Kennedy’s death.

Forty-three years on, this documentary evidence suggests that President Johnson’s reason for blocking the investigation was that proof of a Cuban link would have placed him under insurmountable pressure to invade Cuba, only a year after the Cuban missile crisis, which brought the USA, Soviet Union, and the world to the brink of nuclear war. The relations between the Communist world and the Western world were still so raw that the results could have been cataclysmic.

This theory is fascinating because it gives us a glimpse of what might have happened, but didn’t. I still recall the ludicrous useless emergency preparations we made in the sixties. My school had us squat along the wall beneath the windows, covering our heads, in order to protect us from the impact of a thermo-nuclear blast.

Whatever the truth, we are free to wonder what the consequences may have been. Just imagine; the killing of Hitler without trial might have set a precedent, which would have become accepted. The death of Gandhi in custody could have changed the course that led to Indian independence. The death of Saddam Hussein, whilst still monarch of his country, could have actually saved hundreds of thousands of lives. And today, Ariel Sharon lies in hospital. It’s indisputable that choices he made during his life had a profound impact on not only the Middle East, but also the world. I shudder to think of some choices he could have made. We’ll never know.

There’s a children’s book that is making the rounds since Christmas. It’s a fast moving interactive adventure story in which every paragraph requires a choice and every choice leads you to another page, another dilemma. Yet, mysteriously, whatever your choices and adventures along the way every reader ends up at the same end of the story.Fortunately, human history, however, is not like this. Cabinet papers reveal what happens when highly able people are tested by circumstances. They show how we react by trying to guess the future, trying to write the script of history in advance. The United States has something called a ‘game room’ where learned individuals test certain scenarios to help model where the world, as well as the United States, may stand should certain events occur. It is suggested that some of those scenarios may then be but into motion to help encourage a desired outcome.

Whatever the practices and decisions exercised by our governments, I am grateful for so many routes history did not take. And as we begin our new year many people will be praying for the wisdom of our leaders and the choices they make.

We always hope that circumstances do not ask of our leaders more than they can manage. When the disciples of Jesus asked Him how to pray, He gave them the Our Father, the Lord's Prayer which has near its end, the mysterious request, ‘Do not lead us into temptation.’ One translation of that clause is ‘do not put us to the test.’ Do not ask any of us to decide what is beyond us; may history always have surprises that save us from ourselves.