FOIA on Martin Luther King

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16. Speech by Norman Mailer. This was beyond a doubt, the most striking presentation during the Friday morning session. Mailer spoke briefly and left the conference shortly after the speech.

17. Mailer said that political intelligence as a subject was as powerful as "peace". Interest in assassination is obsessive. The obsession arises from the fact that a solution to the problem is not found, and attention is constantly drawn back to the unanswerable question.

18. He said that we have here the most powerful nation in the world which cannot come to grips with a question which seems as amazingly simple as the Kennedy assassination. The result has been that this nation has decided to shut down investigation and has thus alienated itself from its own history. This alienation has brought apathy, a trait noticeable in the reaction to investigations which bring no wide response.

19. A nation which rejects its own history is on the path to a totalitarian regime. Facts, meanwhile, have a peculiar ability to change when they are investigated, and investigators must therefore rely upon hypothesis. The history of the last ten years has been made unendurable by the abundance of hypotheses. They range from the opinion that an assassination is an accident lacking any particular sequence to the hypothesis that secret police forces are engaging in a world conspiracy.

20. The present conference must help us to learn whether there are possibilities, and what possibilities exist, to solve these questions.

21. Speech by Robert P. Smith. Mr. Smith was described as the director of research of the Committee, but he seems to be one of the major motive forces in this organization.

22. Mr. Smith pointed out that he had spent the last three years studying the Kennedy case. Much research had been done, but nothing had changed, so far as practical action was concerned, in the last nine years.

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