Ramsey Clark (1927-2021)

https://www.upi.com/Top_News/US/2021/04/11/Ramsey-Clark-attorney-general-under-Lyndon-Johnson-dies/4201618146028/

Ramsey Clark has died and I must say I'm disappointed.

I first encountered him in the 1990's and found him to be an interesting if somewhat baffling figure. At that point in time I was still wrestling with my own political views and understandings of US history. Clark was someone who challenged me. Demonised by the Right (and much of the Left) he seemed determined to ally with every enemy of the United States and every person who waged some kind of ideological war with the Federal Government.

How strange it was for such sentiments to be coming from one such as him! Clark was the former Attorney General of the United States who served for two years in that capacity under Lyndon Johnson. His father was even an Associate Justice of the US Supreme Court from 1949-1967.

While I don't believe in the US system nor do I hold to the values and ideals of Classical Liberalism I can hold a degree of respect for those who do and more so those that are willing to apply these beliefs consistently even in the face of perceived patriotic obligation. If you understand the universal claims of Liberalism (even as expressed in the founding documents of the United States), then you'll also understand that 'my country right or wrong' is not commensurate with those ideals.*  

Clark seemed committed to the truth and to a set of ideals and he didn't care who it upset. And therefore he was willing to represent Bosnian Serbs, accused FBI-killer Leonard Peltier, along with various Nazis, African dictators, and members of the PLO.

But then strangely right at this same time I encountered him in another vein. The Oliver Stone film JFK had prompted me (and many others) to revisit the Kennedy assassination and ultimately the assassinations of the period. I started to read a lot and was stunned to find that Clark played no small role in the cover-up. He defended the official stories of the JFK and MLK assassinations and the findings of the Warren Commission.

He even became something of a nemesis to Jim Garrison, the famous Louisiana District Attorney who in the late 1960's rejected the Warren Commission and sought to prove there was in fact a conspiracy in Dallas. In this context Clark comes across as a defender of the Establishment and the status quo.

But in another vein, Clark had no problem accusing the United States of genocide and every imaginable evil – views that I came to resonate with by the late 1990's and early 2000's.

But he remained hostile to the notion that elements within the US government (such as the CIA and FBI) might have been involved in the assassination of its president, and a civil rights leader hated by the Establishment?

He was and apparently always will remain a puzzling figure to me. I still wonder if he didn't possess some kind of extreme loyalty to LBJ? But then, I think of his criticism of the Vietnam War and it doesn't seem to be so. In fact not a few thinkers draw a direct connection between the JFK/MLK assassinations and US-Vietnam policy.

I can understand that maybe Clark was still a true believer in the 1960's Great Society narrative, while he served under Johnson. And then (it would seem) he changed throughout the 1970's and came to reject his earlier views and work with that administration. If so, then why not talk about it? What a golden opportunity, to testify as a former insider and blow the whole thing wide open!

But he never did that. Was it a case of personal ego, a reticence to admit negligence on his part, or error?

Was he reluctant to come clean on those points due to some kind of potential danger to him or loved ones? Was he an activist who simply refused to discuss those points? I don't know.

I knew he was into his nineties and expected his death to come any day. I must say I am rather disappointed. I always half expected that there would be some late-in-life or even deathbed confession.

One of the last figures intimately connected with the great persons and events of that era is now gone and I'm quite certain he's taken more than a few secrets to the grave.

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*This would be yet another point in which the US Constitution contradicts itself – in its notions of treason. Indeed the very narrative is contradictory, for in terms of British Common Law – the Founders were traitors deserving of death.