Dave Ratcliffe edits, footnotes and links articles to James Douglas's 2009 Dallas COPA Presentation
Many thanks to Dave for doing this important work.
Please go to original link:
Please go to original link:
http://www.ratical.org/ratville/JFK/Unspeakable/COPA2009.html
[BK- I have only copied it here for archival purposes]
[BK- I have only copied it here for archival purposes]
This is an annotated transcript of the complete recording of
this presentation by Jim Douglass that began with Bill Kelly’s original transcript
(at: http://jfkcountercoup.blogspot.com/2009/12/jfk-at-american-university.html)
of just the Keynote Address as a starting point. The book referenced here is
the 2010
Simon & Schuster softcover edition.
Jim Douglass on The Hope in
Confronting the Unspeakable
in the Assassination of President John Fitzgerald Kennedy
Coalition on Political Assassinations Conference
20 November 2009
Dallas , Texas
in the Assassination of President John Fitzgerald Kennedy
Coalition on Political Assassinations Conference
Jim Douglass, author of JFK and The Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters
Delivers the Keynote Address at the Coalition on Political Assassinations Conference
Delivers the Keynote Address at the Coalition on Political Assassinations Conference
See the video or download (right-click) local copies of: video (mp4) (98 MB), audio (mp3) (63 MB).
Contents
Introduction by
John Judge
“It's that everything [in the Cold War in 1962-1963] was
totally out of control and then, through a kind of incredible process where
these two men were communicating secretly with each other over the year
previous [Sep 1962-63], and smuggling letters back and forth to each other, in
the midst of this conflict, they were beginning to trust each other.... It's a
remarkable process. And it's all beneath the surface. But so are all the things
that count as Merton understood.... And that's why I have some hopes that if we
are willing to go deeply enough into the darkness – and Kennedy was, and
Khrushchev was – anything can happen for the good. But if we don't go into the
darkness it doesn't happen.”
What do you hope readers take away from your book?
Hope itself – from seeing what JFK, and all the supporting witnesses in the story, went through to live out the truth. Had he not turned from war, along with his enemy, Nikita Khrushchev, the world would now be a nuclear wasteland. Had these witnesses not been courageous enough to speak the truth, we would know far less of the liberating truth of the story. What I found remarkable was that the deeper the darkness, the greater the hope, because of his and their transforming witness to the truth. That leaves the question: Are we who hear their story prepared to carry on the peacemaking and truth-telling? Will we live out the truth as they did? It’s a hopeful, inviting question.
Is there anything else you uncovered about the JFK assassination conspiracy that you wish had been included in JFK and the Unspeakable, or were you able to fit all of your findings in the book?
I included only what I could back up with solid sources that the reader could check out. Hence all the endnotes. There is far more than this beneath the surface. Yet we know enough, and have known enough for a long time, to see the truth. I believe that what is written here about the assassination is only a tiny, visible piece of a systemic evil that continues to reach into the depths of our world. But grace also abounds. Peace is possible.
“You believe in
redemption don’t you?”
John F. Kennedy -May 1,
1962
John F. Kennedy -
Introduction By John Judge:
Recently you may know that Oliver Stone was on the Bill
Maher show he and gave him a copy of the book we’re going to be talking about
tonight, JFK and the Unspeakable by
Jim Douglass. Stone wrote in a recent article, - The murder of President
Kennedy was a seminal event for me and for millions of Americans. It changed
the course of history. It was a crushing blow to our country and to millions of
people around the world. It put an abrupt end to a period of a misunderstood
idealism, akin to the spirit of 1989 when the Soviet bloc to began to thaw and
2008, when our new American President was fairly elected.
Today, more than 45 years later, profound doubts persist about how President Kennedy was killed and why. My film JFK was a metaphor for all those doubts, suspicions and unanswered questions. Now an extraordinary new book offers the best account I have read of this tragedy and its significance. That book is James Douglass’sJFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters. It is a book that deserves the attention of all Americans; it is one of those rare books that, by helping us understand our history, has the power to change it.
The subtitle sums up Douglass’s purpose: Why He Died and Why it Matters. In his beautifully written and exhaustively researched treatment, Douglass lays out the “motive” for Kennedy’s assassination. Simply, he traces a process of steady conversion by Kennedy from his origins as a traditional Cold Warrior to his determination to pull the world back from the edge of destruction.[1]
Today, more than 45 years later, profound doubts persist about how President Kennedy was killed and why. My film JFK was a metaphor for all those doubts, suspicions and unanswered questions. Now an extraordinary new book offers the best account I have read of this tragedy and its significance. That book is James Douglass’sJFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters. It is a book that deserves the attention of all Americans; it is one of those rare books that, by helping us understand our history, has the power to change it.
The subtitle sums up Douglass’s purpose: Why He Died and Why it Matters. In his beautifully written and exhaustively researched treatment, Douglass lays out the “motive” for Kennedy’s assassination. Simply, he traces a process of steady conversion by Kennedy from his origins as a traditional Cold Warrior to his determination to pull the world back from the edge of destruction.[1]
Jim Douglass is an author. I know him somewhat also through
the Catholic Worker’s movement[2]
and his peace work over the years. His most recent book, JFK and The
Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters was published
in April 2008 by Orbis Books [and released
by Simon & Schuster in paperback in 2010].
From 1963 to ’65 he served as a theological adviser on
questions of nuclear war and conscientious objection to Catholic Bishops at the
Second Vatican Council in Rome Bellarmine
College Louisville ,
Kentucky
Jim and Shelley Douglass helped form
the Ground Zero Center for Nonviolent
Action[3]
alongside the Trident Submarine base in Seattle ,
Washington
In September of ’89 they moved to Birmingham ,
Alabama Birmingham Middle
East and peace walks through Israel West Bank , and Jordan Iraq Birmingham
He has also written four books on the theology of
nonviolence: The Nonviolent Cross(Macmillan 1968),[5] Resistance and Contemplation (Doubleday 1972),[6] Lightning East To West (Crossroads 1983),[7]
and The Nonviolent Coming of God (Orbis Books 1991).[8]
All four book have been republished by WIPF
and Stock Publishers in Eugene, Oregon.
This is the distinguished guest we have to talk to us
tonight and we’re glad that his search for the truth of theology and
nonviolence has led him into the truth of these assassinations. Jim Douglass.
Keynote Address
James Douglas:
James Douglas:
I had to think a long time about what to say here tonight.
I’m not primarily a researcher. I come at this from a different perspective
maybe and I don’t have the expertise of probably 90 percent of the people, or
100 percent of the people in this room. So after thinking about what I could
share with you I decided to talk about hope and the hope of confronting the
unspeakable in the assassination of President Kennedy. Let’s see where it goes
and then maybe you can share your reflections on what I have to share.
Concerned friends have asked me – as perhaps they have asked
you as well – over the years if engaging in such a probe into darkness as John
Kennedy’s assassination hasn’t made me profoundly depressed. But on the
contrary, my experience has been it’s given me great hope.
As Martin Luther King said, the truth crushed to earth will
rise again. Gandhi spoke hopefully of experiments in truth, because they take
us into the most powerful force on earth and in existence, what he
called truth force, satyagraha.
That is how I think of this work, as an experiment in truth;
one that will open us up, both personally and as a country, to a process of
nonviolent transformation. I believe this experiment we are doing into the dark
truth of Dallas Washington
But as you know, it does require tenacity and patience to
confront the unspeakable. We, first of all, need to take the time to recognize
the sources in our history for what happened in Dallas November 22, 1963 .
The doctrine of “plausible
deniability” in an old government document provides us with a source of the
assassination of President Kennedy. The document was issued in 1948, one year
after the CIA was established, 15 years
before JFK’s murder. That document, National Security Council Directive 10/2,
[on June 18, 1948,][9] “gave the highest sanction of the [U.S.] government to a broad range
of covert operations”[10]
– propaganda, sabotage, economic warfare, subversion of all kinds, [and eventually assassinations][11]
– that were seen as necessary to “win” the Cold War against the Communists. The
government’s condition for those covert activities by U.S. CIA , was that
they be, as the document says, “so planned and executedthat
. . . if uncovered the US
In the 1950’s, under the leadership of CIA
Director Allen Dulles, the doctrine of “plausible deniability” became the CIA ’s
green light to assassinate national leaders, conduct secret military
operations, and overthrow governments that our government thought were on the
wrong side in the Cold War. “Plausible deniability” meant our intelligence
agencies, acting as paramilitary groups, had to lie and cover their tracks so
effectively that there would be no trace of U.S.
The man who proposed this secret, subversive process in
1948, diplomat George Kennan, said later, in light of its
consequences, that it was “the greatest mistake I ever made.”[13]
President Harry Truman, under whom the CIA
was created, and during whose presidency the plausible deniability doctrine was
authorized, had deep regrets. He said in a
statement on December 22, 1963: For some time I have been disturbed by the
way the CIA has been diverted from its
original assignment. It has become an operational and at times a policy-making
arm of the Government. This has led to trouble and may have compounded our
difficulties in several explosive areas. . . .
We have grown up as a nation, respected for our free institutions and for our ability to maintain a free and open society. There is something about the way theCIA has been functioning that is casting
a shadow over our historic position and I feel that we need to correct it. [14]
We have grown up as a nation, respected for our free institutions and for our ability to maintain a free and open society. There is something about the way the
Truman later remarked: “The CIA was set up by me for the sole purpose of getting all the
available information to the president. It was not intended to operate as an
international agency engaged in strange activities.”[15]
President Truman’s sharp warning about the CIA ,
and the fact that warning was published one month to the day after JFK’s
assassination, should have given this country pause. However, his statement
appeared only in an early edition of The Washington Post, then vanished
without comment from public view.
What George Kennan and Harry Truman realized much too late
was that, in the name of national security, they had unwittingly allowed an
alien force to invade a democracy. As a result, we now had to deal with a
government agency authorized to carry out a broad range of criminal activities
on an international scale, theoretically accountable to the president but with
no genuine accountability to anyone.
Plausible deniability became a rationale for the CIA ’s
interpretation of what the executive branch’s wishes might be. But for the
Agency’s crimes to remain plausibly deniable, the less said the better to the
point where CIA leaders’ creative
imaginations simply took over. It was all for the sake of “winning” the Cold
War by any means necessary and without implicating the more visible heads of
the government.
One assumption behind Kennan’s proposal unleashing the CIA
for its war against Communism was that the Agency’s criminal power could be
confined to covert action outside the borders of the United
States U.S.
During the Cold War, the hidden growth of the CIA ’s
autonomous power corresponded to the public growth of what was called a
fortress state. What had been a struggling post-war democracy in our country
was replaced by the institutions of a national security state. President Truman
had laid the foundations for that silent takeover by his momentous decision to
end the Second World War by a demonstration of nuclear weapons on the people of
Hiroshima Nagasaki Japan U.S. U.S.A.
A democracy within a national security state cannot survive.
The president’s decision to base our security on nuclear weapons created the
contradiction of a democracy ruled by the dictates of the Pentagon. A
democratic national security state is a contradiction in terms.
The insecure basis of our security then became weapons that
could destroy the planet. To protect the security of that illusory means of
security, which was absolute destructive power, we now needed a ruling elite of
national security managers with an authority above that of our elected
representatives.
So from that point on, our military-industrial managers made
the real decisions of state. President Truman simply ratified their decisions
and entrenched their power, as he did with the establishment of the CIA ,
and as his National Security Council did with its endorsement of plausible
deniability.
His successor, President Eisenhower, also failed to
challenge in his presidency what he warned against at its end, the military-industrial complex.[16]
He left the critical task of resisting that anti-democratic power in the hands
of the next president, John Kennedy.
When President Kennedy then stood up to the Pentagon, the CIA ,
and the military-industrial complex, he was treated as a traitor. [His attempt
to save the planet from the weapons of his own state was regarded as treason.
(inserted by Bill Kelly)]
The doctrine of plausible deniability allowed for the assassination of a
president seen as a national security risk himself.
The CIA ’s “plausible
deniability” for crimes of state, as exemplified by JFK’s murder, corresponds
in our politics to what the Trappist monk and spiritual
writer Thomas Merton[17]
called “the Unspeakable.” Merton wrote about the unspeakable in the 1960’s,
when an elusive, systemic evil was running rampant through this country and the
world. The Vietnam War, the escalating nuclear arms race, and the interlocking
murders of John Kennedy, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, and Robert Kennedy were
all signs of the unspeakable.
For Merton, the unspeakable was ultimately a void, an
emptiness of any meaning, an abyss of lies and deception. He wrote the
following description of the unspeakable shortly after the publication of The
Warren Report, which he could have been describing. He said, “[The
Unspeakable] is the void that contradicts everything that is spoken even before
the words are said; the void that gets into the language of public and official
declarations at the very moment when they are pronounced, and makes them ring
dead with the hollowness of the abyss.”[18]
The void of the unspeakable is the dark abyss. It’s the midnight reality of plausible deniability that
we face when we peer into our national security state’s murder of President
Kennedy. And that, I believe, is precisely where hope begins.
Why President Kennedy was murdered can be, I believe, a
profound source of hope to us all, when we truly understand his story.
Now how can that possibly be? The why of his murder as a
source of hope?
Let’s begin with the way Kennedy himself looked at the
question.
One summer weekend in 1962 while he was out sailing with
friends, President Kennedy was asked what he thought of Seven
Days in May, a best-selling novel that described a military takeover in the
United States. JFK said he would read the book. As you know he was a very fast
reader. He came back the next day and said, yes, he’d read it. And then he
discussed with his friends the possibility of their seeing just such a coup in
the United States Bay of Pigs and
before the Cuban Missile Crisis:
“It’s possible. It could happen in
this country, but the conditions would have to be just right. If, for example,
the country had a young President, and he had a Bay of Pigs ,
there would be a certain uneasiness. Maybe the military would do a little
criticizing behind his back, but this would be written off as the usual
military dissatisfaction with civilian control. Then if there were another Bay
of Pigs, the reaction of the country would be, Is he too young and
inexperienced?’ The military would almost feel that it was their patriotic
obligation to stand ready to preserve the integrity of the nation, and only God
knows just what segment of democracy they would be defending if they overthrew
the elected establishment.”
Pausing a moment, he went on, “Then, if there were a thirdBay of
Pigs , it could happen.” Waiting again until his listeners absorbed
his meaning, he concluded with an old Navy phrase, “But it won’t happen on my
watch.”[19]
Pausing a moment, he went on, “Then, if there were a third
Let’s remember that JFK gave himself three strikes before he
would be out by a coup, although he bravely said it wouldn’t happen on his
watch.
As we know, and as the young president John Kennedy knew, he
did have a Bay of Pigs . The president bitterly
disappointed the CIA , the military, and the CIA -trained
Cuban exile brigade by deciding to accept defeat at the Bay of Pigs
rather than escalate the battle.
Kennedy realized after the fact that he had been drawn into
a CIA scenario whose authors assumed he
would be forced by circumstances to drop his advance restrictions against the
use of U.S. Bay
of Pigs , he would be forced to send in U.S.
But JFK surprised the CIA
and the military by choosing instead to accept a loss. “They
couldn’t believe,” he said, “that a new President like me wouldn’t panic and
try to save his own face. Well, they had me figured all wrong.”[20]
We know how JFK reacted to the CIA ’s
setting him up. He was furious. When the enormity of the Bay of Pigs
disaster came home to him, he said he wanted “to splinter
the CIA in a thousand pieces and scatter it to the winds.”[21]
He ordered an investigation into the whole affair, under the
very watchful eyes of his brother, Attorney General Robert Kennedy.
He fired CIA Director
Allen Dulles, Deputy Director Richard Bissell, Jr., and Deputy Director General
Charles Cabell. That was a huge decision firing the top of the CIA ’s
hierarchy, including the legendary leader who had come to personify the agency,
Allen Dulles.
The president then took steps “to cut the CIA
budget in 1962 and again in 1963, aiming at a 20 per cent
reduction by 1966.”[22] John Kennedy was cutting back the CIA ’s
power in very concrete ways, step by step.[23]
We know how the CIA
and the Cuban exile community regarded Kennedy in turn because of his refusal
to escalate the battle at the Bay of Pigs . They hated
him for it. They did not forget what they thought was unforgivable.[24]
In terms of JFK’s own analysis of the threat of an overthrow
of his presidency, he saw the Bay of Pigs as the first
strike against him. It was the first big stand he took against his national
security elite, and therefore the first cause of a possible coup d’etat.
However, in terms of our constitution, our genuine security,
and world peace, the position Kennedy took in facing down the CIA
and the military at the Bay of Pigs , rather than
surrendering to their will, was in itself a source of hope. No previous
post-war president had shown such courage – or any president since then.
Truman and Eisenhower had, in effect, turned over the power
of their office to their national security managers. Kennedy was instead acting
like he was the president of the country by saying a strong No to the
security elite on a critical issue. If we the people had truly understood what
he was doing then on our behalf, we would have thought the president’s stand a
deeply hopeful one.
In terms of his Seven
Days in May analysis of a coming coup, John Kennedy did have a second
“Bay of Pigs .” The president alienated the CIA
and the military a second time by his decisions during the Cuban Missile
Crisis.
JFK had to confront the unspeakable in the Missile Crisis in
the form of total nuclear war. At the height of that terrifying conflict, he
felt the situation spiraling out of control, especially because of the actions
of his generals.
For example, with both sides on hair-trigger alert, the U.S.
Air Force test-fired missiles from California U.S. USSR
As we know from Kennedy’s secretly taped
meeting with his Joint Chiefs of Staff on October 19, 1962 , the Chiefs were pushing him
relentlessly to launch a pre-emptive strike on Cuba Soviet Union . In this encounter, the
Chiefs’ disdain for their young commander-in-chief is summed up by Air Force
Chief of Staff General Curtis LeMay when he says:
“In other words, you’re in a pretty bad fix at the present time.”
Kennedy: “What did you say?”
Kennedy: [laughing] “You’re in with me, personally.”[25]
As the meeting draws to a close, Kennedy rejects totally the
Joint Chiefs’ arguments for a quick, massive attack on Cuba LeMay ,
[Shoup:] “You pulled the rug right
out from under him.”
[Shoup:] “He’s finally getting around to the word ‘escalation.’ . . . If somebody could keep ’em from doing the goddamn thing piecemeal, that’s our problem . . .”[26]
The White House tapes show Kennedy questioning and resisting
the mounting pressure to bomb Cuba U.S.
I re-read several of these
letters yesterday. A man was asking me to read them to him over the radio. I
was struck especially by the first things that Khrushchev says
in his first letter to JFK when he is sitting by the Black Sea
in his home.[27]
He’s looking our over the water and it’s a very beautiful letter, beginning of
the letter especially. He looks out over the water and he reflects on what he’s
seeing and how what a contrast this is to what they’re trying to address.
He says I want to suggest to you Mr. President a symbol of
our problem. This is Khrushchev, the communist: ‘It’s Noah’s Ark. Ark
Kennedy, who after this letter was
smuggled to him in a newspaper to his press secretary, wondered, ‘Why do I want
a newspaper given to me by a KGB agent?’ He found out
there was a 26-page
letter to the President inside it from Nikita Khrushchev.[28]
When Kennedy responded to this he was sitting by the Atlantic Ocean
in Hyannis Port. Ark Ark
So even in the midst of the missile crises these two men had
begun to, through their secret communications, they had begun, almost beyond
their intentions, to develop a bit of trust in each other.
On what seemed the darkest day in the crisis, when a Soviet
missile had shot down a U2 spy plane over Cuba Cuba
In his memoirs, Khrushchev recalled a further,
chilling sentence from Robert Kennedy’s appeal to Dobrynin: “If the situation
continues much longer, the President is not sure that the military will not
overthrow him and seize power.”[31]
The editor to Khrushchev’s memoirs felt he had to stick a
endnote in there and say, There’s no evidence of this. There’s no evidence of
this. [Laughter] Well, apparently, the president thought there was some.
Sergei Khrushchev, Nikita’s son (who
as you probably know is now in this country and is a citizen), has [recounted]
the thoughts his father described to him when he read Dobrynin’s wired report
relaying John Kennedy’s plea: “The president was calling for help: that was how
father interpreted Robert Kennedy’s talk with our ambassador.”[32]
So at a moment when the world was falling into darkness,
Kennedy did what from his generals’ standpoint was intolerable and
unforgivable. JFK not only rejected [his] generals’ pressures for war. Even
worse, the president then reached out to their enemy, asking for help. That was
treason.
When Nikita Khrushchev had received Kennedy’s plea for help
in Moscow
Khrushchev stunned himself by what he had just said: Did he
really want to help his enemy, Kennedy? Yes, he did. He repeated the
word to his foreign minister:
How do we understand that moment? The two most heavily armed
leaders in history, on the verge of total nuclear war, joined hands against
those on both sides pressuring them to attack. Khrushchev ordered the immediate
withdrawal of his missiles, in return for Kennedy’s public pledge never to
invade Cuba U.S. Turkey
By the way, I was in Rome , Italy Turkey
This was outrageous for this to even be suggested in the
most radical publication I could find in my particular community. Kennedy did
it. Kennedy did it. I remember that history. I remember what was unthinkable
for him to do such a thing.
The two Cold War enemies – both of them – had turned, so
that each now had more in common with his opponent than either had with his own
generals. As a result of that turn toward peace, one leader would be
assassinated thirteen months later. The other, left without his peacemaking
partner, would be overthrown the following year. Yet because of their turn away
from nuclear war, today we are still living and struggling for peace on this
earth. Hope is alive. We still have a chance.
What can we call that transforming moment when Kennedy asked
his enemy for help and Khrushchev gave it?
From a Buddhist standpoint, it was enlightenment of a cosmic
kind. Others might call it – from their perspective – a divine miracle. Readers
of the Christian Gospels could say that Kennedy and Khrushchev were only doing
what Jesus said: “Love your enemies.” That would be “love” as Gandhi understood
it. Love as the other side of truth; a respect and understanding of our
opponents that goes far enough to integrate their truth into our own. In the
last few months of Kennedy’s life, he and Khrushchev were walking that extra
mile where each was beginning to see the other’s truth.
Neither John Kennedy nor Nikita Khrushchev was a saint. Each
was deeply complicit in policies that brought humankind to the brink of nuclear
war. Yet, when they encountered the void – that Merton, for example, was
talking about – then by turning to each other for help, they turned humanity
toward the hope of a peaceful planet.
John Kennedy’s next “Bay of Pigs ,”
his next critical conflict with his national security state, was his American
University Address. Saturday Review editor Norman Cousins
summed up the significance of that remarkable speech: “At American
University June 10, 1963 , President Kennedy proposed an end
to the Cold War.”[34]
I believe it is almost impossible to overemphasize the
importance of President Kennedy’s American University American
University
“What kind of peace do I mean? What kind of peace do we
seek?” He answered, “Not a Pax Americana enforced on the world by American
weapons of war.”
Kennedy’s rejection of “a Pax Americana enforced on the
world by American weapons of war” was an act of resistance to the
military-industrial complex. The military-industrial complex was totally
dependent on “a Pax Americana enforced on the world by American weapons of
war.” That Pax Americana, policed by the Pentagon, was considered the system’s
indispensable, hugely profitable means of containing and defeating Communism.
At his own risk Kennedy was rejecting the very foundation of the Cold War
system.
In its place, as a foundation for peace, the
president put [forward] a compassionate description of the suffering of the
enemy, the Russian people. They had been our allies during World War Two and
had suffered mightily.[36]
Yet even their World War Two devastation he said, would be small compared to
the effects of a nuclear war on both their country and ours.
In his speech, Kennedy turned around the question – I heard
this question all the time in the 1960s, every time in the peace movement we
tried to suggest alternatives – that question that was always asked when it
came to prospects for peace was, “What about the Russians?” It was assumed the
Russians would take advantage of any move we might make toward peace.
Kennedy asked instead, “What about us?”
He said, “[O]ur
Within the overarching theology [of our country] – the Cold
War was a big theology – a theology of total good versus total evil (and you
know who the total good is, it’s us), Kennedy was asking a heretical question,
coming especially from the president of the United
States
Kennedy said he wanted to negotiate then, a nuclear test ban
treaty. Where did he want to do it? With the Soviet Union
in Moscow Moscow Washington Moscow
So to clear the way for such a treaty what does he do? He said he was suspending U.S.
John Kennedy’s strategy of peace penetrated the Soviet
government’s defenses far more effectively than any missile could ever have
done. The Soviet press, which was accustomed to censoring U.S.
Nikita Khrushchev was deeply moved by
the American University Address. He said Kennedy had given “the greatest speech
by any American President since Roosevelt .”[39]
JFK’s speech was received less favorably – where? – in his
own country. The New York Times reported his government’s
skepticism: “Generally there was not much optimism
in official Washington that the President’s conciliation address at American
University U.S.
President Kennedy’s next critical conflict with his national
security state, propelling him toward the coup d’etat he saw as possible (this
was number 4), was the Partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty that he signed with
Nikita Khrushchev on July 25, 1963, just six weeks (if you can imagine that –
six weeks to negotiate that treaty) after the American University Address.
The way he did it was he sent Averell Harriman as his
representative to Moscow
The president did a total end run around his military
advisers [the Joint Chiefs of Staff] who were opposed to it. He didn’t even
consult them on it.
He was fiercely determined but he was not optimistic that
the Test Ban Treaty [would] be ratified by the defense-conscious Senate. In
early August, he told his advisers that getting Senate ratification of the
agreement would be “almost in the nature of a miracle.” And we can understand,
given what is happening in Congress today, what he faced in terms of at the
height of the Cold War, getting a nuclear test ban treaty through the
Senate. He said if a Senate vote were held right
then, on August 7, it would fall far short of the necessary two-thirds.[42]
What did he do? He initiated a whirlwind public education
campaign on the treaty, coordinated by Saturday Review editor Norman
Cousins, who directed a committee of – whom? – people like us – peace
activists. He also got business leaders, he got labor leaders, he got editors
of women’s magazines, he got everybody he could together with Norman Cousins
doing all the coordinating. They went out and they did a job, a furious round
of public education.
In September public opinion polls showed a turnaround – 80
percent of the American people were now in favor of the Test Ban Treaty. On September 24, 1963 , the Senate
approved the treaty by a vote of 80 to 19 – 14 more than the required
two-thirds. No other single accomplishment in the White
House gave Kennedy greater satisfaction.[43]
On September 20, when Kennedy spoke
at the United Nations, he suggested that its members see the Test Ban Treaty as
a beginning and engage together in an experiment in peace:
Two years ago I told this body that the United
States
My fellow inhabitants of this planet: Let us take our stand here in this Assembly of nations. And let us see if we, in our own time, can move the world to a just and lasting peace.[44]
My fellow inhabitants of this planet: Let us take our stand here in this Assembly of nations. And let us see if we, in our own time, can move the world to a just and lasting peace.[44]
When he said these words,
John Kennedy was secretly engaging in another risky experiment in peace. That
same day at the United Nations, Kennedy told UN Ambassador
Adlai Stevenson that his assistant William Attwood should go ahead “to
make discreet contact” with Cuba’s UN Ambassador Carlos Lechuga.[45]
The question: Was Fidel Castro interested in a dialogue with John Kennedy? A
strongly affirmative answer would come back from Castro, who had been
repeatedly urged by Khrushchev – by Khrushchev – to begin trusting Kennedy.
Now think about that a moment. This is Khrushchev who is
telling Castro to trust Kennedy. What had been the relationship with Khrushchev
and Castro? Castro was furious with Khrushchev for what he did in the Cuban
Missile Crisis. Khrushchev didn’t consult with Castro. He pulled the missiles
out because he was afraid that – like that – they were going to have a nuclear
war. And when Kennedy said ‘I need your help’ he responded to Kennedy with help
to keep the world from going down in nuclear war. From Castro’s standpoint he’s
pulling out the deterrent from aggression from the north by the American
capitalist president.
So Castro would not talk to Khrushchev. He had no
communication with him for half a year. He was totally boycotting communication
with him. Finally Khrushchev wrote one of these letters
of his and this time he writes it to Castro about how beautiful the sea is.[46] Castro said afterwards how beautiful a letter that was.[47]
So he consented to go over to the Soviet Union and travel around with
Khrushchev for a month and be comrades again.
During that month what did Khrushchev do? He did a
teach-in. He brought Kennedy’s correspondence and
he read Kennedy’s correspondence to Castro during that month like a teach-in.[48]
So when Castro went back to Cuba
Kennedy and Castro actually began that dialogue on
normalizing U.S.-Cuban relations, through a series of mediations but the
primary one was a French journalist named Jean Daniel who had gone to Washington Cuba
When Daniel was in Cuba
On the afternoon of November
22, 1963 when John Kennedy was killed, those two men were together
speaking about the hope that came from what Kennedy was trying to do in
reaching out to Castro. The phone call came, that he was dead, and Castro stood up and he said, “Everything is changed.
Everything is going to change.”[49]
This was all written about [three]
weeks later in the New Republic
On October 11, 1963 , President Kennedy issued a top-secret
order to begin withdrawing the U.S. Vietnam U.S. Vietnam U.S.
Kennedy decided on his withdrawal policy, against the
arguments of most of his advisers, at a contentious October 2 National Security
Council meeting. When Defense Secretary Robert McNamara was leaving the meeting
to announce the withdrawal to the White House reporters, the President called
to him, “And tell them that means all of the
helicopter pilots, too.”[52]
Everybody is going out.
In fact, it would not mean that at all. After JFK’s
assassination, his withdrawal policy was quietly voided. In light of the future
consequences of Dallas November
22, 1963 , but 58,000 other Americans and over three million
Vietnamese, Laotians, and Cambodians.
In his reflections on Seven
Days in May, John Kennedy had given himself three Bay
of Pigs-type
The Bay of Pigs ;
The Cuban Missile Crisis;
Nuclear Test Ban Treaty;
The beginning of the back-channel dialogue with Fidel
Castro;
JFK’s order to withdraw U.S. Vietnam
This, however, is a short list of the increasing conflicts
between Kennedy and his national security state. A short list.
We can add to the list a seventh Bay of Pigs :
the steel crisis, in which he profoundly alienated the military industrial
complex before the Cuban Missile Crisis even took place. The steel crisis was a
showdown the president had with U.S. Steel and seven other steel companies over
their price-fixing violations of an agreement he had negotiated between U.S.
Steel and the United Steelworkers’ Union .
In a head-on confrontation with the ruling elite of Big
Steel, JFK ordered the Defense Department to switch huge military contracts
away from the major steel companies to the smaller, more loyal contractors that
had not defied him. After the big steel companies bitterly backed down from
their price raises, JFK and his brother, Robert, were denounced as symbols of
“ruthless power” by the Wall Street power brokers at the center of the military
industrial complex.
By an editorial titled, “Steel: The Ides
of April”[53]
(the month in which Kennedy faced down the steel executives), Henry
Luce’s Fortune magazine called to readers’ minds the soothsayer’s
warning in Shakespeare of the assassination of Julius
Caesar. Fortune was warning Kennedy that his actions had confirmed
the worst fears of corporate America Dallas Bay of Pigs .
An eighth Bay of Pigs was Kennedy’s
diplomatic opening to the fiery third-world leadership of President Sukarno of Indonesia Third World neutralism in the
Cold War.” He had actually coined the term “Third World .”
That’s where it comes from, from Sukarno of Indonesia [who had coined it] “at
the first Conference of Non-Aligned Nations that he hosted at Bandung ,
Indonesia CIA wanted Sukarno dead. It wanted what it
saw as his pro-communist “global orientation” obliterated.[55]
During Eisenhower’s presidency, the CIA
repeatedly tried to kill and overthrow Sukarno but failed.
JFK, however, chose to work with Sukarno, hoping to win him
over as an ally, which he did. Sukarno came to love Kennedy. The U.S. Indonesia Netherlands CIA ’s dismay, in 1961
Kennedy welcomed Sukarno to the White House. Most significantly, three days before his assassination, President Kennedy said he
was willing to accept Sukarno’s invitation to visit Indonesia the following
spring.[56]
Sukarno even built a house for him there. His visit to Indonesia Third
World nationalism, a sea change in U.S. Bay
of Pigs .
Kennedy’s Indonesian policy was also killed in Dallas CIA finally succeeded in overthrowing Sukarno in a
massive purge of suspected Communists that ended up killing 500,000 to one
million Indonesians.[57]
Last Sunday I interviewed Sergei Khrushchev about an
important late development in the relationship between his father and President
Kennedy. In his interview, Mr. Khrushchev confirmed that his father had decided
in November 1963 to accept President Kennedy’s repeated proposal that the U.S. Soviet Union fly to the moon together.
In Kennedy’s September 20, 1963 ,
speech to the United Nations, he had once again stated his hope for such a
joint expedition to the moon. He had proposed it earlier [in September 1961].[58]
However, neither American nor Soviet military leaders – neither side, jealous
of their rocket secrets – were ready to accept his initiative. If they merged
their rocket secrets, they can’t use them in war. Nikita Khrushchev, siding
with his own rocket experts, felt that he was still forced to decline Kennedy’s
proposal – when Kennedy had re-proposed it in September [1963].
JFK was looking beyond the myopia of the generals and
scientists on both sides of the East-West struggle. He knew that merging their
missile technologies in a peaceful project would also help defuse the Cold War.
It was part of his day-by-day strategy of peace in the [American
University
Sergei Khrushchev said his father talked to him about a week
before Kennedy’s death on the president’s idea for a joint lunar mission.
Nikita Khrushchev had broken ranks with his rocket scientists. He now thought he and the Soviet Union
should accept Kennedy’s invitation to go to the moon together, as a further
step in peaceful cooperation.[59]
In Washington November 12, 1963 , JFK issued his National
Security Action Memorandum 271, ordering NASA to implement, as he put it,
my “September 20 proposal for broader cooperation between the United
States USSR
That further visionary step to end
the Cold War also died with President Kennedy. As you know, the U.S. U.S.
In the final weeks of his presidency, President Kennedy took
one more risky step toward peace. It can be seen in relation to an
amazing meeting he had the year before [on May 1, 1962 ] with six Quakers who
visited him in his office. This is the President with six Quakers – just the
seven of them.[62]
One thousand members of the Society of Friends[63]
had been vigiling for peace and world order outside the White House. President
Kennedy agreed to meet with six of their leaders. So that’s all we have to do
to see the President – just vigil outside the White House – he’ll invite you
in.
I have interviewed all three survivors of that meeting with
the president, from 47 years ago. They remain uniformly amazed – they were
amazed then and they’re just as amazed today when they talk about it – these
are radical peace activists, they’ve all been arrested multiple times (as have
I for that matter) – they remained uniformly amazed at the open way in which
the President listened and responded to their radical Quaker critique of his
foreign policy.
They said they’d never met anybody who listened as well as
he did. As one of them said you could tell he wasn’t thinking of something to
say to them, and he wasn’t countering or whatever – although he said honest
things as we’ll see in a moment here.
Among their challenges to him was a recommendation that the United
States China China
Kennedy said to the Quakers, “Do you mean you would feed
your enemy when he has his hands on your throat?”
The Quakers said they meant exactly
that. They reminded him it was what Jesus had said should be done. Kennedy said
he knew that, and knew that it was the right thing to do, but he couldn’t
overcome the China Washington
Nevertheless, a year and a half later in the fall of 1963,
against overwhelming opposition – again, nobody reports this today –, Kennedy
decided to sell wheat to the Russians, who had a severe grain shortage. He
outraged critics who said in effect to him what he had said to the Quakers:
Would you feed an enemy who has his hands on your throat? Kennedy was getting
the same thing back.
By the way, when I met with one of these Quakers, who is a
very very good friend named David Hartsough, who’s a big peace activist in San
Francisco I said, ‘David, do you realize you got President Kennedy killed?” [laughter]
And he says ‘Ohhh.’
There is a whole series of things that the Quakers
recommended – I’m only citing one of them – that Kennedy did. Like the Nuclear
Test Ban Treaty, like peaceful initiatives like selling wheat to the Russians;
he carried out. I don’t even know that Kennedy ever even referred to his
meeting with the Quakers. He just did it. I’m sure he was thinking about such
things on his own. But this is the perspective of the President of the United
States
Vice President Lyndon Johnson said he
thought Kennedy’s decision to sell wheat to Russia
The violent reaction to his decision was represented on
Friday morning, November 22, 1963 ,
by a threatening, full-page advertisement addressed to him in the Dallas
Morning News. The ad was bordered in black, like a funeral notice.
Among the charges of disloyalty to the nation that the ad
made against the president was the question: “Why have you approved
the sale of wheat and corn to our enemies when you know the Communist soldiers
travel on their stomachs’ just as ours do?”[66]
JFK read the ad before the flight from Fort Worth Dallas
“But, Jackie,” he said, “if somebody
wants to shoot me from a window with a rifle, nobody can stop it, so why worry
about it?”[67]
President Kennedy’s courageous turn from war to a strategy
of peace provided many more than three Bay-of-Pigs-type causes for his
assassination – many more. Because he turned toward peace with our enemies, the
Communists, he was continually at odds with his own national security state.
Peacemaking was at the top of his agenda as president. That was not the kind of
leadership that the CIA , the Joint Chiefs of
Staff, and the military industrial complex wanted in the White House. Given the
Cold War dogmas that gripped those dominant powers, and given Kennedy’s turn
toward peace, his assassination followed as a matter of course.
That is how he seemed to regard the situation:
that it would soon lead to his own death. As you know he was not afraid of
death. As a biographer observed, Kennedy talked a
great deal about death, and about the assassination of Lincoln
His conscious model for struggling
truthfully through conflict, and being ready to die as a consequence, was
Abraham Lincoln. On the day when Kennedy and Khrushchev resolved the missile
crisis, JFK told his brother, Robert, referring to the assassination of Lincoln
Kennedy prepared himself for the same end Lincoln
Kennedy loved that prayer. He cited it repeatedly. More
important, he made the prayer his own. In his conflicts with Khrushchev, then
much more profoundly with the CIA and the
military, he had seen a storm coming. If God had a place for him, he believed
that he was ready.
For at least a decade, JFK’s favorite
poem had been “Rendezvous,” a celebration of death. Rendezvous was by Alan
Seeger, an American poet killed in World War One. With the same background as
Kennedy: from Harvard, volunteering for the war. The poem was Seeger’s
affirmation of his own anticipated death.[71]
The refrain of Rendezvous, “I have a rendezvous with Death,”
articulated John Kennedy’s deep sense of his own mortality. Kennedy had
experienced a continuous rendezvous with death in anticipation of his actual
death: from the deaths of his PT boat crew members, from drifting alone in the
dark waters of the Pacific Ocean, from the early deaths of his brother Joe and
sister Kathleen, and from the recurring near-death experiences of his almost
constant illnesses.
He recited Rendezvous to his wife,
Jacqueline, in 1953 on their first night home in Hyannis
I have thought many times about what took place then in the
White House Rose Garden one beautiful fall day in 1963.
On the morning of October
5, 1963 , President Kennedy met with his National Security Council
in the Rose Garden. It was a beautiful day so they went outside. Caroline
suddenly appeared at her father’s side. She said she wanted to tell him
something. He tried to divert her attention so that the meeting could continue.
He told her to go over across the lawn where her mother was riding a horse.
Caroline kept tugging at his coat and persisted. So the
president smiled and he turned his full attention to his daughter like he would
to anybody he was speaking with which is what people always said – he gave you
his total attention. And he said, ‘Go ahead. What do you want?’ While
the members of the National Security Council sat and watched,
Caroline looked into her father’s eyes and she said:
I have a rendezvous with Death
At some disputed barricade,
When Spring comes back with rustling shade
And apple-blossoms fill the air –
I have a rendezvous with Death
When Spring brings back blue days and fair.
It may be he shall take my hand
And lead me into his dark land
And close my eyes and quench my breath –
It may be I shall pass him still.
I have a rendezvous with Death
On some scarred slope of battered hill,
When Spring comes round again this year
And the first meadow-flowers appear.
God knows ’twere better to be deep
Pillowed in silk and scented down,
Where love throbs out in blissful sleep,
Pulse nigh to pulse, and breath to breath,
Where hushed awakenings are dear . . .
But I’ve a rendezvous with Death
At midnight in some flaming town,
When Spring trips north again this year,
And I to my pledged word am true,
I shall not fail that rendezvous.[73]
At some disputed barricade,
When Spring comes back with rustling shade
And apple-blossoms fill the air –
I have a rendezvous with Death
When Spring brings back blue days and fair.
It may be he shall take my hand
And lead me into his dark land
And close my eyes and quench my breath –
It may be I shall pass him still.
I have a rendezvous with Death
On some scarred slope of battered hill,
When Spring comes round again this year
And the first meadow-flowers appear.
God knows ’twere better to be deep
Pillowed in silk and scented down,
Where love throbs out in blissful sleep,
Pulse nigh to pulse, and breath to breath,
Where hushed awakenings are dear . . .
But I’ve a rendezvous with Death
At midnight in some flaming town,
When Spring trips north again this year,
And I to my pledged word am true,
I shall not fail that rendezvous.[73]
After Caroline said the poem’s final
word, “rendezvous,” Kennedy’s national security advisers sat in stunned
silence. One of them said later the bond between father and daughter was so
deep “it was as if there was ‘an inner music’ he was trying to teach her.”[74]
JFK had heard his own acceptance of death from the lips of
his daughter. While surrounded by a National Security Council that opposed his
breakthrough to peace, the president once again deepened his pledge not to fail
that rendezvous. If God had a place for him, he believed that he was ready.
So how can the why of his murder give us hope?
Where do we find hope when a peacemaking president is
assassinated by his own national security state? How do we get hope from that?
The why of the event that brings us together tonight
encircles the earth – the why encircles the earth. Because John Kennedy chose
peace on earth at the height of the Cold War, he was executed. But because he
turned toward peace, in spite of the consequences to himself, humanity is still
alive and struggling. That is hopeful. Especially if we understand what he went
through and what he has given to us as his vision.
At a certain point in his presidency, John Kennedy turned a
corner and he didn’t look back. I believe that decisive turn toward his final
purpose in life, resulting in his death, happened in the darkness of the Cuban
Missile Crisis. Although Kennedy was already in conflict with his national
security managers, the missile crisis was the breaking point.
At that most critical moment for us all, he turned from any
remaining control that his security managers had over him toward a deeper
ethic, a deeper vision in which the fate of the earth became his priority.
Without losing sight of our own best hopes in this country, he began to home
in, with his new partner, Nikita Khrushchev, on the hope of peace
for everyone on this earth – Russians, Americans, Cubans, Vietnamese,
Indonesians, everyone on this earth – no exceptions. He made that commitment to
life at the cost of his own. What a transforming story that is.
And what a propaganda campaign has been waged to keep us
Americans from understanding that story, from telling it, and from re-telling
it to our children and grandchildren. Because that’s a story whose telling can
transform a nation.
But when a nation is under the
continuing domination of an idol, namely war, it is a story that will be
covered up. When the story can liberate us from our idolatry of war, then the
worshippers of the idol are going to do everything they can to keep the story
from being told.[75]
From the standpoint of a belief that war is the ultimate
power, that’s too dangerous a story. It’s a subversive story. It shows a
different kind of security than always being ready to go to war.
It’s unbelievable – or we’re supposed
to think it is – that a president was murdered by our own government agencies
because he was seeking a more stable peace than relying on nuclear weapons.[76]
It’s unspeakable. For the sake of a nation that must always
be preparing for war, that story must not be told. If it were, we might learn
that peace is possible without making war. We might even learn there is a force
more powerful than war. How unthinkable! But how necessary if life on earth is
to continue.
That is why it is so hopeful for us to confront the
unspeakable and to tell the transforming story of a man of courage, President
John F. Kennedy. It is a story ultimately not of death but of life – all our
lives. In the end, it is not so much a story of one man as it is a story of
peacemaking when the chips are down. That story is our story, a story of hope.
I believe it is a providential fact that the anniversary of
President Kennedy’s assassination always falls around Thanksgiving, and
periodically on that very day. This year the anniversary of his death, two days
from now, will begin Thanksgiving week.
Thanksgiving is a beautiful time of year, with autumn leaves
falling to create new life. Creation is alive, as the season turns. The earth
is alive. It is not a radioactive wasteland. We can give special thanks for
that. The fact that we are still living – that the human family is still alive
with a fighting chance for survival, and for much more than that – is reason
for gratitude for a peacemaking president, and to the unlikely alliance he
forged with his enemy.
So let us give thanks this Thanksgiving for John F. Kennedy,
and for his partner in peacemaking, Nikita Khrushchev.
Their story is our story, a story of the courage to turn
toward the truth. Remember what Gandhi said that turned theology on its head.
He said truth is God. That is the truth: Truth is God. We can discover the
truth and live it out. There is nothing, nothing more powerful than the truth.
The truth will set us free.
Question and Answer
Q: You talked about the quote by Truman in December of 1963,
and you said it sunk without a trace. Not quite. In January, Allen Dulles went
to Truman, and visited him, and tried to get him publicly to retract that
statement. Which is very interesting because he was on the Warren Commission.
Secondly, Allen Dulles actually said, ‘That Kennedy, he actually thought he was
president’ after he was dead. A third point: you’re talking about the Pentagon
versus JFK at the Missile Crisis. You talked about how LeMay
was saying after JFK had left the room. I’m sure you know why the tape was
there: because he thought that they had all lied to the press about what really
happened during the Bay or Pigs. So now he wanted to get them on tape so they
couldn’t lie again after the missile crisis. And he said afterwards ‘One thing
about those guys: if I listen to them there’ll be nobody to argue with once the
holocaust comes.’ The last point: when he was preparing for his trip to see
Sukarno he asked Allen Dulles for the CIA ’s
file. And Dulles gave him a redacted version of the file. But there was enough
in it that he could read it and he said, ‘No wonder this guy doesn’t like us.
We tried to overthrow his government.’
JD: Thank you.
Q: Jim could you repeat again about President Truman’s
column in the Washington Post, December
22, 1963 . You’re telling me it only lasted as long as the early
edition until somebody probably made some phone calls?
JD: The question is what happened to that column, that
statement that President Truman made that was published in the December 22, 1963 Washington
Post.[14]
It vanished. There is a researcher who discovered it sometime later. He did as
much research as he could to try to find out where it appeared after
this early edition of the Washington Post. It didn’t appear in
any further edition of the Washington Post nor anyplace else. Zero.
That’s what the researcher could discover. What happened? Lisa [Pease] has got
an idea on that.
LP: I stumbled across this recently where, in later years
somebody said, ‘It wasn’t really Truman who wrote that. It was one of his aides
who wrote it using Truman’s name.’ And as we all know Harry Truman was alive at
the time and if that was not his statement he would have been the first to come
forward and say that’s not what I believe. You can see how they try and
whitewash that in different ways.
JD: As Jim was saying he resisted Dulles, when Dulles tried
to get him to retract the statement.[15]
LP: And there was nothing else in the press going on at that
time that would have given rise to those comments. The only thing that had
happened was the assassination of Diem a month earlier.
JD: Right after the assassination of John Kennedy, there’s
Truman saying ‘the CIA is casting a shadow
over our history.’ One month to the day.[14]
Q: Two things. One, you mentioned about the proposal to
change the moon race to be a cooperative effort. You can’t find that on NASA’s
website. And was the U.N. speech the first place where this floated?
JD: No he said it back in ’61. He was already proposing it
to Khrushchev in ’61. And he proposed it repeatedly. He was intent on getting
the missile technology together so that they wouldn’t be using it as rockets.
But Khrushchev, just a week or two before the assassination, Sergei is quite
emphatic about this: he had changed his mind. And Kennedy had a National
Security Memorandum on this subject simultaneously with that.[60]
Either he is awfully intuitive or they were communicating. Sergei said he
didn’t know of any official communication.
Q: The other question is tangential: have you looked at John
Paul the First?
JD: I know the book on John Paul I and what he might have
done. He only lasted a month as folks who remember him would recall. I’ve read
the work and I think it’s interesting. I’m not a researcher into John Paul I.
I am into John XXIII. He was amazing. I didn’t mention him
tonight, but he was the mediator between Khrushchev and Kennedy at the height
of the missile crisis. He made a public appeal – of course we didn’t hear about
it in this country – but he made a global public appeal after checking with
both of them on how he could say it in a way that would truly mediate them.
Khrushchev said afterwards that Pope John XXIII’s words were
the most hopeful thing he experienced at that point in the missile crisis that
gave him a huge amount of hope.
Then John XXIII became a kind of unofficial spiritual
advisor to these two guys, one in Moscow
Khrushchev loved Pope John XXIII. And John XXIII issued this
incredible papal statement that’s the background for the American University
Address.[35]
It has the same kinds of themes in it. The first person to receive a copy of
that – the first person in the world outside the Vatican
Nikita Khrushchev, in russian translation was handed a copy
of that – a couple of weeks before it was published – by Norman Cousins who
said, ‘The pope wants you to have this.’ Khrushchev could not believe he was
being given that and he went through it with Norman Cousins. Then Cousins said
I’ve got something else for you and put it around his neck: a papal medal from
the Pope to Khrushchev.
So when Norman Cousins left from visiting Khrushchev and
Khrushchev had this papal medal on, he walks into the next office for a meeting
with all his Commissars and everybody and he’s going like this. Nobody says
anything. So he takes it off and he drops it on the floor. Finally someone
says, ‘What’s that?’ and he says, ‘Oh it’s only a medal from the Pope.’
So when Cousins came back and met with him again Khrushchev
told him this story with glee. And Cousins went back and told it to Kennedy.
And Kennedy smiled at Cousins and said ‘There are some things that Chairman
Khrushchev can do that I can’t do as the first Catholic President. I can’t brag
about my medal from the Pope.’ He didn’t get one – Khrushchev did.
But that’s the kind of undercurrent there was at the time.
There was hope, hope, hope, that we would move – I mean we in the big, big, big
sense – would move in a different direction. A lot of people felt that. Even
here in the U.S. Salt Lake City
Q: They were downwind.
JD: They were downwind and they were also outside the
beltway. A lot of people outside the beltway had been terrified by the missile
crisis – rightly so, as Kennedy and Khrushchev were. And when this new
wind – not a downwind from the radiation – was going on, that was hope.
That was hope. We don’t remember this stuff. It’s meant to be wiped out. Those
who control the past control the future. Those who control the present control
the past. Mr. Orwell had it down.
Q: Can I add a tag? The person who followed Pope John XXIII
in was James Angleton’s asset – the guy who became Pope Paul. He had been
running since World War II. Kinda sad.
JD: We don’t get too many saints as Popes – or as presidents
either for that matter. And John Kennedy was not a saint. But he was something
else. You know what the term martyr means, it means witness. It means witness.
He was a witness to a vision. He was a martyr. Not a saint but he was a martyr.
That’s good enough for a President.
Q: Thanks Jim. This is purely speculative but there was a
lot of talk about hope this past election year. Do you have any idea how
whether or not Obama might be aware of this work? There was a article a couple
of months ago where Leon Panetta made some kind of strange remark that sounded
like he was aware of your book. I mean Obama seems to be in the same situation
that Kennedy was in.
JD: Leon Panetta and I went to school together. We were
friends. We went to Santa Clara University
Q: Did you send him your book?
JD: I did. I did send Leon CIA a mutual
friend of ours at the Resource Center for
Nonviolence in Santa Cruz, called me – he was a good friend of Leon Sylvia , Leon
And Obama was given the book. A friend of a friend was at a
rally. I learned about this months later. When Obama was walking out of the rally
he was shaking hands with people, he got a book. So he had to walk away with
this book. What he did with the book, I don’t think it’s necessarily on his
night table every night.
But there is something a little bit hopeful here. You know a
guy named Larry Wilkerson?Lawrence Wilkerson is
the former Chief of Staff of Colin Powell. He apparently read this thing. A
friend of mine and he had lunch together and he was going on about this.
There was an article in Rolling
Stone magazine two weeks, three weeks ago about Obama and the Generals.[77]
It’s a very important article. A very important article. [Richard Dreyfuss –] A
guy who’s a very good analyst of the situation in Washington – I’ve read his
articles before in Rolling Stone – he said that Obama was facing
then, and now, rebellion by his generals.
It’s pretty obvious. Here’s General McChrystal, he’s not
supposed to be President of the United States
This is insubordination of a major nature. I’m reading the
article and there’s Lawrence Wilkerson being quoted in it. And the article ends with Lawrence Wilkerson being quoted in it
and he says, What Obama has to do is to face down his General McChrystal just
the way that President John F. Kennedy faced down General Curtis LeMay in the
Cuban Missile Crisis. That’s what we need in this moment in history.[78]
So we have got to keep telling this story, telling this
story. It does get through. It does get through to people at all kinds of
levels. Whether you went to school with them or not. And I don’t know how it
gets through – all you got to do is just tell the story. This is a transforming
story.
Some people say, Obama is terrified because he understands
the implications of his power. That’s quite possible. But Kennedy understood
the implications of his power. He wasn’t just terrified. He was inspired by
what he could do with that regardless of the consequences.
And if we understand it sufficiently, the first
time around, we got to understand it right now and get far enough out ahead of
this President so that, as the people lead, the leader will follow, and has a
little bit of space because of us. That’s the key. It’s not Obama.
Q: As a researcher I try to think linearly to piece it all
together. What struck you as a final, final of those 9 or 10 things that he’s
doing right?
JD: In my opinion – this is only my opinion, I don’t know –
in my opinion, they had a profile on Kennedy before he became President of the United
States United
States
There are hundreds of references in his campaign for his support
for third world nationalism. It was his way also of saying I’m a kind of
supporter of civil rights. He wasn’t coming right out a giving a big – of
course he phoned to help Martin Luther King and that signaled it in a big, big
way.
He was a person who was sympathetic to Patrice
Lumumba. And Patrice Lumumba was not
assassinated after Kennedy became president. Although Seymour Hersch
says so in his book. He is absolutely wrong.[79]
Patrice Lumumba was assassinated days before Kennedy became
President. And why was he assassinated at that time? So that he would
not be imprisoned at a time when a man would become President of the United
States
There is a picture of Kennedy when he
receives the news of Patrice Lumumba’s assassination. We have it – it’s on the
cover of Richard Mahoney’s book, a very fine book on Kennedy’s African
policies.[80]
You look at that picture: Kennedy is sticken at the very moment – with a kind
of agony in his face – when he hears on the phone that Patrice Lumumba has just
been assassinated. Because he felt, that perhaps if he had spoken out as a
Presidential candidate on Lumumba that wouldn’t have happened.
Kennedy took responsibility for all this stuff including the
assassination of Diem, which was being pushed, as you know, by other folks –
very, very heavily. He was trying to get Diem to do certain things that would
avoid it.
When you’re President of the United
States
So I think the profile of Kennedy was very high before he
even came in. I don’t think the decision to assassinate him was made before he
came in. But I think they had their eye on him from the moment he came into
office. And when he’s making remarks to Eisenhower which indicates he wants to
negotiate with Laos – even in his meeting with Eisenhower before he becomes
President, he’s asking questions of Eisenhower that already are a sign that
he’s going to negotiate peace in Laos rather wage war with them. Which as Eisenhower
says, ‘There’s no choice but to wage war in Laos
I didn’t even include that one. That could have
been a first Bay of Pigs right around theBay of
Pigs. He’s negotiating peace with the Communists in Laos
Thank you.
John Judge: Thanks for sharing.
Notes
Starting with No.10
below, endnote citations from JFK and
The Unspeakable begin with “page X, fnY.” indicating page X in the
book where the quote (in this
Address) or detail occurs and fnY being the endnote itself. Hyperlinks to
most book titles go to WorldCat.org,
“the world’s largest network of library content and services. WorldCat
libraries are dedicated to providing access to their resources on the Web,
where most people start their search for information.” These links were
accessed from the greater Boston Cincinnati , Ohio Ohio Ontario United States United Kingdom
See The
Catholic Worker Movement on the internet as well pages on Wikipedia and Dorothy Day–Catholic
Worker Collection at Marquette
University
Ground Zero Center For
Nonviolent Action offers the opportunity to explore the meaning and
practice of nonviolence from a perspective of deep spiritual reflection.
Providing a means for witnessing to and resisting all nuclear weapons. Address:
16159 Clear Creek Road NW , Poulsbo ,
WA 98370
From the Diocese
of Birmingham in Alabama - Directory:
Mary’s House - The Catholic Worker House of Hospitality
2107 Avenue G
Birmingham, AL 35218
Contact: Shelley Douglass
205-780-2020
Email: shelleyd9 [at] juno [dot] com
Mary’s House - The Catholic Worker House of Hospitality
2107 Avenue G
Birmingham, AL 35218
Contact: Shelley Douglass
205-780-2020
Email: shelleyd9 [at] juno [dot] com
The
Nonviolent Cross: A Theology of Revolution and Peace (2nd
edition, Wipf & Stock, 2006). Read the Foreward
by Ched Meyers.
See description of the Special Group 10/2 and its
descendant, the Special Group 5412 or 5412/2, as explained by Col. L. Fletcher
Prouty (USAF, ret.) in “The Forty Committee,” Genesis,
February, 1975, pp.28, 105-108; and “Appendix C, NSC
5412, ‘National Security Council Directive on Covert Operations’,” from David
Ratcliffe, Understanding
Special Operations and Their Impact on the Vietnam War Era, 1989 Interview
with L. Fletcher Prouty, Colonel USAF (Retired), (rat haus reality press,
1999), pp. 330-32.
See also: Document 292. National Security Council Directive on Office of Special Projects – NSC 10/2 from Foreign Relationsof the United States, 1945-1950, Retrospective Volume, Emergence of the Intelligence Establishment, (Washington: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1996).
See also: Document 292. National Security Council Directive on Office of Special Projects – NSC 10/2 from Foreign Relationsof the United States, 1945-1950, Retrospective Volume, Emergence of the Intelligence Establishment, (Washington: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1996).
page 381, fn1.
Peter Grose, Gentleman Spy: The Life of Allen Dulles (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1994), p. 293.
Peter Grose, Gentleman Spy: The Life of Allen Dulles (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1994), p. 293.
The text in square braces above is included as it appears in
the Afterword of the 2010
Simon & Schuster paperback edition of JFK and the Unspeakable, p.
381.
page 33, fn133-35.
cited by Grose, Gentleman Spy, p. 293.
cited by Grose, Gentleman Spy, p. 293.
page 381, fn3.
Grose, Gentleman Spy, p. 293.
Grose, Gentleman Spy, p. 293.
page 332, fn679-680.
Excerpt of page 332 follows, with endnotes 679 and 680 following the text.
Excerpt of page 332 follows, with endnotes 679 and 680 following the text.
...President Truman restated his radical critique of the CIA
in a letter written six months after the Washington
Post article.679 The managing editor of Look magazine had
sent Truman the latest Look featuring a piece on the CIA .
Truman wrote back:
“Thank you for the copy of Look with the article on the Central Intelligence Agency. It is, I regret to say, not true to the facts in many respects.
“TheCIA was set up
by me for the sole purpose of getting all the available information to the
president. It was not intended to operate as an international agency engaged in
strange activities.”680
“Thank you for the copy of Look with the article on the Central Intelligence Agency. It is, I regret to say, not true to the facts in many respects.
“The
Letter from Harry S. Truman to William B. Arthur, June 10, 1964 . Off
the Record: The Private Papers of Harry S. Truman, edited by Robert H.
Ferell (New York: Harper & Row, 1980), p. 408. I am grateful to Tim Murphy
for pointing out this letter to me.
Ibid. President Truman had either forgotten or was avoiding
the fact that his National Security Council on June 18, 1948 , approved top-secret directive NSC
10/2. U.S. intelligence agencies were thereby authorized to engage in
”propaganda, economic warfare, preventive direct action including sabotage,
anti-sabotage, demolition and evacuation measures; subversion against hostile
states including assistance to underground resistance movements, guerrillas,
and refugee liberation groups.” Peter Grose, Gentleman
Spy: The Life of Allen Dulles (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1994), p.
293. NSC
10/2was the secret foundation for the enormous buildup of the CIA’s
“strange activities” that so alarmed Truman in December 1963.
See Also: endnote
9, above.
Thomas Merton, a contemplative monk in the Abbey of
Gethsemani in Kentucky Bellarmine
University
Merton was being blocked from publishing his thoughts on
nuclear war by his monastic superiors. Merton, like Kennedy, decided to find
another way. The words pouring out of Merton’s typewriter were spilling over
from unpublished manuscripts into his Cold War letters....
OnDecember
31, 1961 , Merton wrote a letter anticipating the Cuban Missile
Crisis ten months later. It was addressed to Clare Boothe Luce, the wife
of Time-Life-Fortune owner Henry Luce, a Cold War media baron whose
editorial policies demonized the communist enemy. Clare Boothe Luce, celebrated
speaker, writer, and diplomat, shared Henry Luce’s Cold War theology. In 1975
Clare Boothe Luce would lead investigators into the JFK assassination, working
for the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA), on a time-consuming
wild goose chase based on disinformation. HSCA analyst Gaeton Fonzi discovered
that Luce at the time was on the board of directors of the CIA -sponsored
Association of Former Intelligence Officers.67 Even
in the early sixties, Merton with his extraordinary sensitivity may have
suspected Luce’s intelligence connections. In any case he knew her as one of
the wealthiest, most influential women in the world, with a decidedly
anti-communist mind-set. He welcomed her, as he did one and all, intohis circle of correspondents.
In his New Year’s Eve letter to Clare Boothe Luce, Merton said he thought the next year would be momentous. “Though ‘all manner of things shall be well,’” he wrote, “we cannot help but be aware, on the threshold of 1962, that we have enormous responsibilities and tasks of which we are perhaps no longer capable. Our sudden, unbalanced, top-heavy rush into technological mastery,” Merton saw, had now made us servants of our own weapons of war. “Our weapons dictate what we are to do. They force us into awful corners. They give us our living, they sustain our economy, they bolster up our politicians, they sell our mass media, in short we live by them. But if they continue to rule us we will also most surely die by them.”68
Merton was a cloistered monk who watched no television and saw only an occasional newspaper. However, he had far-flung correspondents and spiritual antennae that were always on the alert. He could thus identify in his letter to Clare Boothe Luce the strategic nuclear issue that would bring humanity to the brink in October 1962: “For [our weapons] have now made it plain that they are the friends of the ‘preemptive strike’. They are most advantageous to those who use them first. And consequently nobody wants to be too late in using them second. Hence the weapons keep us in a state of fury and desperation, with our fingers poised over the button and our eyes glued on the radar screen. You know what happens when you keep your eye fixed on something. You begin to see things that aren’t there. It is very possible that in 1962 the weapons will tell someone that there has been long enough waiting, and he will obey, and we will all have had it.”69
“We have to be articulate and sane,” Merton concluded, “and speak wisely on every occasion where we can speak, and to those who are willing to listen. That is why for one I speak to you,” he said hopefully to Luce. “We have to try to some extent to preserve the sanity of this nation, and keep it from going berserk which will be its destruction, and ours, and perhaps also the destruction of Christendom.”70
As Merton challenged the Cold War dogmas of Clare Boothe Luce, he was raising similar questions of conscience to another powerfully situated woman, Ethel Kennedy. This was the period in which Merton still had little confidence in John Kennedy. He was nevertheless beginning to catch glimpses of a man who, like himself, was deeply troubled by the prevailing Cold War atmosphere. He began a December 1961 letter to Ethel Kennedy by noting a parallel between JFK’s and his own thinking: “I liked very much the President’s speech at Seattle which encouraged me a bit as I had just written something along those same lines.”71Merton was referring to John Kennedy’s rejection, like his own, of the false alternatives “Red or dead” in a speech the president gave at theUniversity
of Washington
Merton made an extended analysis of the same Cold War cliché, “Red or dead,” in the book his monastic superiors blocked from publication, Peace in the Post-Christian Era. There he observed: “We strive to soothe our madness by intoning more and more vacuous cliches. And at such times, far from being as innocuous as they are absurd, empty slogans take on a dreadful power.”73
The slogan he and Kennedy saw exemplifying such emptiness had begun inGermany Russia
What the heroic emptiness of “Better dead than Red” ignored was “the real bravery of patient, humble, persevering labor to effect, step by step, through honest negotiation, a gradual understanding that can eventually relieve tensions and bring about some agreement upon which serious disarmament measures can be based”74—precisely what he hoped Ethel Kennedy’s brother-in-law would do from the White House. In his letter to her, Merton therefore went on to praise John Kennedy, yet did so while encouraging him to break through Cold War propaganda and speak the truth: “I think that the fact that the President works overtime at trying to get people to face the situation as it really is may be the greatest thing he is doing. Certainly our basic need is for truth, and not for ‘images’ and slogans that ‘engineer consent.’ We are living in a dream world. We do not know ourselves or our adversaries. We are myths to ourselves and they are myths to us. And we are secretly persuaded that we can shoot it out like the sheriffs on TV. This is not reality and the President can do a tremendous amount to get people to see the facts, more than any single person.”75
With inclusive language that did not single out JFK, but again with heavy implications for the president, Merton continued: “We cannot go on indefinitely relying on the kind of provisional framework of a balance of terror. If as Christians we were more certain of our duty, it might put us in a very tight spot politically but it would also merit for us special graces from God, and these we need badly.”76
Merton was praying that Christians in particular—and a particular Christian, John Kennedy—would become more certain of their duty to take a stand against nuclear terror, which would place JFK especially “in a very tight spot politically.” Besides praying, Merton was doing more than writing words of protest on the backs of envelopes. He was appealing to the president, through Ethel Kennedy, for a courageous stand in conscience. Whether or not JFK ever read Merton’s graceful letter to his sister-in-law, he would soon have to respond, in October 1962, to “special graces from God” if humanity were to survive.
On
In his New Year’s Eve letter to Clare Boothe Luce, Merton said he thought the next year would be momentous. “Though ‘all manner of things shall be well,’” he wrote, “we cannot help but be aware, on the threshold of 1962, that we have enormous responsibilities and tasks of which we are perhaps no longer capable. Our sudden, unbalanced, top-heavy rush into technological mastery,” Merton saw, had now made us servants of our own weapons of war. “Our weapons dictate what we are to do. They force us into awful corners. They give us our living, they sustain our economy, they bolster up our politicians, they sell our mass media, in short we live by them. But if they continue to rule us we will also most surely die by them.”68
Merton was a cloistered monk who watched no television and saw only an occasional newspaper. However, he had far-flung correspondents and spiritual antennae that were always on the alert. He could thus identify in his letter to Clare Boothe Luce the strategic nuclear issue that would bring humanity to the brink in October 1962: “For [our weapons] have now made it plain that they are the friends of the ‘preemptive strike’. They are most advantageous to those who use them first. And consequently nobody wants to be too late in using them second. Hence the weapons keep us in a state of fury and desperation, with our fingers poised over the button and our eyes glued on the radar screen. You know what happens when you keep your eye fixed on something. You begin to see things that aren’t there. It is very possible that in 1962 the weapons will tell someone that there has been long enough waiting, and he will obey, and we will all have had it.”69
“We have to be articulate and sane,” Merton concluded, “and speak wisely on every occasion where we can speak, and to those who are willing to listen. That is why for one I speak to you,” he said hopefully to Luce. “We have to try to some extent to preserve the sanity of this nation, and keep it from going berserk which will be its destruction, and ours, and perhaps also the destruction of Christendom.”70
As Merton challenged the Cold War dogmas of Clare Boothe Luce, he was raising similar questions of conscience to another powerfully situated woman, Ethel Kennedy. This was the period in which Merton still had little confidence in John Kennedy. He was nevertheless beginning to catch glimpses of a man who, like himself, was deeply troubled by the prevailing Cold War atmosphere. He began a December 1961 letter to Ethel Kennedy by noting a parallel between JFK’s and his own thinking: “I liked very much the President’s speech at Seattle which encouraged me a bit as I had just written something along those same lines.”71Merton was referring to John Kennedy’s rejection, like his own, of the false alternatives “Red or dead” in a speech the president gave at the
Merton made an extended analysis of the same Cold War cliché, “Red or dead,” in the book his monastic superiors blocked from publication, Peace in the Post-Christian Era. There he observed: “We strive to soothe our madness by intoning more and more vacuous cliches. And at such times, far from being as innocuous as they are absurd, empty slogans take on a dreadful power.”73
The slogan he and Kennedy saw exemplifying such emptiness had begun in
What the heroic emptiness of “Better dead than Red” ignored was “the real bravery of patient, humble, persevering labor to effect, step by step, through honest negotiation, a gradual understanding that can eventually relieve tensions and bring about some agreement upon which serious disarmament measures can be based”74—precisely what he hoped Ethel Kennedy’s brother-in-law would do from the White House. In his letter to her, Merton therefore went on to praise John Kennedy, yet did so while encouraging him to break through Cold War propaganda and speak the truth: “I think that the fact that the President works overtime at trying to get people to face the situation as it really is may be the greatest thing he is doing. Certainly our basic need is for truth, and not for ‘images’ and slogans that ‘engineer consent.’ We are living in a dream world. We do not know ourselves or our adversaries. We are myths to ourselves and they are myths to us. And we are secretly persuaded that we can shoot it out like the sheriffs on TV. This is not reality and the President can do a tremendous amount to get people to see the facts, more than any single person.”75
With inclusive language that did not single out JFK, but again with heavy implications for the president, Merton continued: “We cannot go on indefinitely relying on the kind of provisional framework of a balance of terror. If as Christians we were more certain of our duty, it might put us in a very tight spot politically but it would also merit for us special graces from God, and these we need badly.”76
Merton was praying that Christians in particular—and a particular Christian, John Kennedy—would become more certain of their duty to take a stand against nuclear terror, which would place JFK especially “in a very tight spot politically.” Besides praying, Merton was doing more than writing words of protest on the backs of envelopes. He was appealing to the president, through Ethel Kennedy, for a courageous stand in conscience. Whether or not JFK ever read Merton’s graceful letter to his sister-in-law, he would soon have to respond, in October 1962, to “special graces from God” if humanity were to survive.
Ibid., p. 44.
Ibid., p. 26.
Public
Papers of the Presidents: John F. Kennedy, 1961, “Address
in Seattle at the University of Washington’s 100th Anniversary Program,” November 16, 1961 (Washington: U.S.
Government Printing Office, 1962), p.
726.
Ibid., p. 122.
Merton, Cold War Letters, p. 29.
From the dust jacket of Peace
in the Post-Christian Era:
Publisher description: “Substitute ‘war on terrorism’ for
‘war on communism’ and Merton’s insights continue to challenge our culture of
war and ourselves to become Gospel people of peace and nonviolence. This book stands
at the heart of the Merton canon ... Read it and take up where Merton left
off-questioning the culture, denouncing war and nuclear weapons, taking risks
for the truth, pointing the way to peace, and discovering anew how to be
Christian in these post-Christian times.” John Dear, author, Living Peace.
Writing at the height of the Cold War, Merton issued a passionate cry for
sanity and a challenge to the idea that unthinkable violence can be squared
with the Gospel of Christ. Censors of Merton’s order blocked publication of
this work, but forty years later, despite changing circumstances, his prophetic
message remains eerily topical. At a time when the “war on terrorism” has
replaced the struggle against communism, Merton’s work continues to demonstrate
the power and relevance of the Gospel in answering the most urgent challenges
of our time.
page 382, fn5.
Thomas Merton, Raids on the Unspeakable (New York: New Directions, 1966), p. 4.
Douglass also includes this quote in the Introduction on page xv where it is preceded by the following:
Thomas Merton, Raids on the Unspeakable (New York: New Directions, 1966), p. 4.
Douglass also includes this quote in the Introduction on page xv where it is preceded by the following:
“One of the awful facts of our age,” Merton wrote in 1965,
“is the evidence that [the world] is stricken indeed, stricken to the very core
of its being by the presence of the Unspeakable.” The Vietnam War, the race to
a global war, and the interlocking murders of John Kennedy, Malcolm X, Martin
Luther King, and Robert Kennedy were all signs of the Unspeakable. It remains
deeply present in our world. As Merton warned, “Those who are at present so
eager to be reconciled with the world at any price must take care not to be
reconciled with it under this particular aspect:as the nest of the Unspeakable.
This is what too few are willing to see.” [Merton’s emphasis]
When we become more deeply human, as Merton understood the process, the wellspring of our compassion moves us to confront the Unspeakable. Merton was pointing to a kind of systemic evil that defies speech.
When we become more deeply human, as Merton understood the process, the wellspring of our compassion moves us to confront the Unspeakable. Merton was pointing to a kind of systemic evil that defies speech.
page 13, fn36.
Paul B. Fay, Jr. The Pleasure of His Company (New York: Dell, 1966), pp. 162-163.
In The Pleasure of His Company author Paul Fay writes the following leading up to the quote Jim Douglass begins with on page 162:
Paul B. Fay, Jr. The Pleasure of His Company (New York: Dell, 1966), pp. 162-163.
In The Pleasure of His Company author Paul Fay writes the following leading up to the quote Jim Douglass begins with on page 162:
The fiasco in Cuba
“Looking back on that whole Cuban mess, one of the things that appalled me the most was the lack of broad judgement by some of the heads of the military services,” he said one day. “When you think of the long competitive selection process that they have to weather to end up the number one man of their particular service, it is certainly not unreasonable to expect that they would also be bright, with good broad judgment. For years I’ve been looking at those rows of ribbons and those four stars, and conceding a certain higher qualification not obtained in civilian life. Well, if ------- and ------- are the best the services can produce, a lot more attention is going to be given their advice in the future before any action is taken as a result of it. They wanted to fight and probably calculated that if we committed ourselves part way and started to lose, I would give the okay to pour in whatever was needed. I found out among other things that when it comes to making decisions I want facts more than advice. As good old Harry Truman put it, ‘the buck stops right here.’ I can see now why McNamara wants to get some new faces over there in the Pentagon.”
Between theBay of Pigs and the
Cuban missile crisis, Fletcher Knebel and Charles W. Bailey, II brought out a
book, Seven
Days In May, which explored the possibility of a takeover by the military
in this country. Mrs. John R. Fell, an old friend of the Kennedys, had read an
advance copy of the book and had recommended it to the President one summer
weekend in 1962, during an afternoon sail on the Honey Fitz.
“I’d be interested to see if you agree that such a situation could develop in this country,” she said.
“Fletch sent me a copy but I haven’t gotten around to reading it,” the President said. “I’ll read it tonight and let you know.”
We were out on the Honey Fitz again the next day, and the President said he had read Seven Days In May the previous night. He discussed the possibility of such a military takeover very calmly:
“Looking back on that whole Cuban mess, one of the things that appalled me the most was the lack of broad judgement by some of the heads of the military services,” he said one day. “When you think of the long competitive selection process that they have to weather to end up the number one man of their particular service, it is certainly not unreasonable to expect that they would also be bright, with good broad judgment. For years I’ve been looking at those rows of ribbons and those four stars, and conceding a certain higher qualification not obtained in civilian life. Well, if ------- and ------- are the best the services can produce, a lot more attention is going to be given their advice in the future before any action is taken as a result of it. They wanted to fight and probably calculated that if we committed ourselves part way and started to lose, I would give the okay to pour in whatever was needed. I found out among other things that when it comes to making decisions I want facts more than advice. As good old Harry Truman put it, ‘the buck stops right here.’ I can see now why McNamara wants to get some new faces over there in the Pentagon.”
Between the
“I’d be interested to see if you agree that such a situation could develop in this country,” she said.
“Fletch sent me a copy but I haven’t gotten around to reading it,” the President said. “I’ll read it tonight and let you know.”
We were out on the Honey Fitz again the next day, and the President said he had read Seven Days In May the previous night. He discussed the possibility of such a military takeover very calmly:
Fletcher Knebel and Charles W Bailey, Seven
Days In May (New York: N.Y.: Harper & Row, 1962).
page 14, fn48.
Kenneth P. O’Donnell and Dave F. Powers with Joe McCarthy, Johnny, We Hardly Knew Ye; Memories of John Fitzgerald Kennedy (Boston: Little Brown, 1970), p. 274.
Kenneth P. O’Donnell and Dave F. Powers with Joe McCarthy, Johnny, We Hardly Knew Ye; Memories of John Fitzgerald Kennedy (Boston: Little Brown, 1970), p. 274.
page 15, fn56.
Tom Wicker, John W. Finney, Max Frankel, E. W. Kenworthy, “C.I.A.: Maker of Policy, Or Tool? Survey Finds Widely Feared Agency is Tightly Controlled,” New York Times (April 25, 1966), p. 20.
A local photocopy of this article (1.3 MB) was found in The Harold Weisberg Archive by searching on the string (including quotes): “C.I.A.: Maker of Policy, Or Tool?” and comes up as the first result.
Tom Wicker, John W. Finney, Max Frankel, E. W. Kenworthy, “C.I.A.: Maker of Policy, Or Tool? Survey Finds Widely Feared Agency is Tightly Controlled,” New York Times (April 25, 1966), p. 20.
A local photocopy of this article (1.3 MB) was found in The Harold Weisberg Archive by searching on the string (including quotes): “C.I.A.: Maker of Policy, Or Tool?” and comes up as the first result.
page 16, fn59.
Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., A Thousand Days, John F. Kennedy In The White House (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1965), p. 428.
Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., A Thousand Days, John F. Kennedy In The White House (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1965), p. 428.
In his short presidency, Kennedy began to take steps to deal
with the CIA . He tried to redefine the CIA 's
mandate and to reduce its power in his National Security Action Memoranda
(NSAMs) 55 and 57, which took military-type operations out of the hands of the CIA .
Kennedy's NSAM 55 informed the Joint Chiefs of Staff that it was they (not the CIA )
who were his principal military advisers in peacetime as well as wartime. Air
Force Colonel L. Fletcher Prouty, who at the time was in charge of providing
military support for the CIA 's clandestine
operations, described the impact of NSAM 55 addressed to General Lyman
Lemnitzer, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs:
“I can't overemphasize the shock – not simply the words – that procedure caused in Washington: to the Secretary of State, to the Secretary of Defense, and particularly to the Director of Central Intelligence. Because Allen Dulles, who was still the Director, had just lived through the shambles of the Bay of Pigs and now he finds out that what Kennedy does as a result of all this is to say that, ‘you, General Lemnitzer, are to be my Advisor’. In other words, I'm not going to depend on Allen Dulles and theCIA .
Historians have glossed over that or don't know about it.”58
“I can't overemphasize the shock – not simply the words – that procedure caused in Washington: to the Secretary of State, to the Secretary of Defense, and particularly to the Director of Central Intelligence. Because Allen Dulles, who was still the Director, had just lived through the shambles of the Bay of Pigs and now he finds out that what Kennedy does as a result of all this is to say that, ‘you, General Lemnitzer, are to be my Advisor’. In other words, I'm not going to depend on Allen Dulles and the
David T. Ratcliffe, Understanding Special
Operations: 1989 Interview with L. Fletcher Prouty (Santa Cruz, CA:
rathaus reality press, 1999), pp. 170-71.
pages 370-71, fn869-879.
An instance of the hatred people in the Cuban exile community felt and did not forget regarding John and Robert Kennedy is described in JFK and The Unspeakable on pages 370-71:
An instance of the hatred people in the Cuban exile community felt and did not forget regarding John and Robert Kennedy is described in JFK and The Unspeakable on pages 370-71:
On Thursday, November 21, as John
and Jacqueline Kennedy were arriving on Air Force One in Houston Texas Wayne Dallas
Wayne Dallas Wayne Cuba Wayne
Except for his work with January, the pilot kept totally to himself, refusingWayne Wayne
Wayne
The pilot described his boss as “an Air Force colonel who deals with planes of this category.”872 The colonel had bought the plane on behalf of a company known as the “Houston
Air Center Houston
Air Center CIA .873 As
revealed by the plane’s archived papers, the aircraft had originally been a
troop transport version of the DC-3, also known as a C-47, made in the Second
World War and sold by the government to a private airline after the war.874 It
was now being sold back to the government for use as a covert CIA
aircraft.
As Wayne and the pilot continued talking during their lunch break Thursday,Wayne
Then he looked up and said, “Wayne
AsWayne Wayne
Wayne
“You mean President Kennedy?”
The man said yes. WhileWayne CIA . He was with the CIA
in the planning of the Bay of Pigs . When many of his
friends died there, the planners and survivors of the operation bitterly blamed
John and Robert Kennedy for not providing the air cover the CIA
claimed they had promised.
Wayne
The man said, “They are not only going to kill the President, they are going to kill Robert Kennedy and any other Kennedy who gets into that position.”876
Wayne Wayne
The pilot looked at him. “You will see,” he said.
The two men went back to work. They were behind schedule, with less than twenty-four hours left to complete their task. “My boss wants to return toFlorida Dallas
In the course of their work, the pilot made another memorable remark. “They want Robert Kennedy real bad,” he said.
“But what for?”Wayne
“Never mind,” the man said, “You don’t need to know.”878
Thanks to the two men’s joint efforts, they succeeded in having the plane ready to go early Friday afternoon. By12:30 P.M. , all the DC-3 lacked was fuel-and whoever would
soon get aboard it to depart from Dallas
As they finished up their work, there was a commotion by the terminal. A police car took off at high speed. Wondering what was up,Wayne
Wayne
He walked back to the DC-3. It had received its fuel. The pilot was putting luggage on the plane.Wayne
Then he said, “It’s all going to happen just like I told you.”879
Wayne
Except for his work with January, the pilot kept totally to himself, refusing
The pilot described his boss as “an Air Force colonel who deals with planes of this category.”872 The colonel had bought the plane on behalf of a company known as the “
As Wayne and the pilot continued talking during their lunch break Thursday,
Then he looked up and said, “
As
“You mean President Kennedy?”
The man said yes. While
The man said, “They are not only going to kill the President, they are going to kill Robert Kennedy and any other Kennedy who gets into that position.”876
The pilot looked at him. “You will see,” he said.
The two men went back to work. They were behind schedule, with less than twenty-four hours left to complete their task. “My boss wants to return to
In the course of their work, the pilot made another memorable remark. “They want Robert Kennedy real bad,” he said.
“But what for?”
“Never mind,” the man said, “You don’t need to know.”878
Thanks to the two men’s joint efforts, they succeeded in having the plane ready to go early Friday afternoon. By
As they finished up their work, there was a commotion by the terminal. A police car took off at high speed. Wondering what was up,
He walked back to the DC-3. It had received its fuel. The pilot was putting luggage on the plane.
Then he said, “It’s all going to happen just like I told you.”879
Faxed letter from Wayne December
27, 1992 . I am grateful to Matthew Smith for sharing with me his
faxed correspondence from Wayne
Ibid.
Ibid.
Working with Matthew Smith in 1993, Wayne Wayne February 3,
1993 . Also Matthew Smith, Say
Goodbye to America: The Sensational and Untold Story behind the Assassination
of John F. Kennedy (Edinburgh
When Smith queried retired Air Force colonel Fletcher Prouty, former liaison between the Air Force and theCIA ,
on this development, Prouty said that aircraft numbers were never changed,
except by the CIA . The CIA
had apparently bought the plane.
January’s partner had sold the plane to theHouston
Air Center Houston CIA ,
identified the Houston Air
Center CIA
front, confirming Fletcher Prouty’s analysis that the DC-3 had become a CIA
aircraft upon its purchase at Red Bird Air Field. When the DC-3 flew out of Dallas November 22, 1963 ,
with an undisclosed number of passengers, it was a CIA
plane being flown by a CIA pilot. Ibid.
When Smith queried retired Air Force colonel Fletcher Prouty, former liaison between the Air Force and the
January’s partner had sold the plane to the
Research on the plane sold by Wayne Houston Air
Center Southlake ,
Tex.
January to Smith, December 27, 1
992.
Smith, Vendetta, p. 120.
Smith, Say Goodbye, p. 165.
Smith, Vendetta, p. 121.
Ibid.
page 22, fn85.
Sheldon M. Stern, Averting “The Final Failure”: John F. Kennedy and the Secret Cuban Missile Crisis Meetings (Stanford , Calif. Stanford University
From the dust jacket of this book:
Sheldon M. Stern, Averting “The Final Failure”: John F. Kennedy and the Secret Cuban Missile Crisis Meetings (
From the dust jacket of this book:
The Cuban missile crisis was the most dangerous
confrontation of the Cold War and the most perilous moment in human history.
Sheldon M. Stern, longtime historian at the John F. Kennedy Library, here presents a
comprehensive narrative account of the secret ExComm meetings, making the
inside story of the missile crisis completely understandable to general readers
for the first time. The author’s narrative version of these discussions is
entirely new; it provides readers with a running commentary on the issues and
options discussed and enables them, as never before, to follow specific themes
and the role of individual participants. The narrative highlights key moments
of stress, doubt, decision, and resolution – and even humor – and makes the
meetings comprehensible both to readers who lived through the crisis and to
those too young to remember the Cold War. Stern argues that President Kennedy
and his administration bore some of the responsibility for the crisis because
of covert operations in Cuba Cuba
Regarding these transcripts, Jim Douglass writes in endnote
83 on pages 399-400,
In 1997 Ernest R. May and Philip D. Zelikow edited and published
transcripts of the Cuban Missile Crisis tapes in their book The
Kennedy Tapes (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997). In
2000 the accuracy of their transcripts was challenged in two articles by
Sheldon M. Stern, historian at the JFK
Library from 1977 to 1999: “What
JFK Really Said,” Atlantic Monthly 285 (May 2000): pp. 122-28,
and “Source Material: The 1997 Published Transcripts of the JFK Cuban Missile
Crisis Tapes: Too Good to Be True?” Presidential Studies Quarterly 30
(September 2000): pp. 586-93 [copy of “ Source Material” is at JSTOR which
is out-of-reach for most people; one can purchase
a copy on amazon.com for 6 dollars –editor]. When Zelikow, May, and
Timothy Naftali brought out a revised set of missile crisis transcripts, The
Presidential Recordings: John F. Kennedy: Volumes 1-3, The Great Crises (New
York
page 22, fn87.
Ibid. p. 129.
Ibid. p. 129.
From JFK and
The Unspeakable, p. 23 (includes fn90):
In July 1993, the U.S. State Department, in response to a
Freedom of Information Act request by a Canadian newspaper, declassified
twenty-one secret letters between John F. Kennedy and Nikita
Khrushchev.90
Paul Wells, “Private Letters Shed Light on Cold War,” Montreal
Khrushchev’s first private letter to JFK was sent on September 29, 1961 during the Berlin Washington
This remarkable correspondence was initiated by Khrushchev less than four months after the summit meeting between him and JFK in
The summit meeting with Khrushchev had deeply disturbed
Kennedy. The revelation of a storm coming had occurred at the end of the
meeting, as the two men faced each other across a table. Kennedy’s gift to
Khrushchev, a model of the USSConstitution, lay between them. Kennedy pointed
out that the ship’s cannons had been able to fire half a mile and a kill a few
people. But if he and Khrushchev failed to negotiate peace, the two of them
could kill seventy million people in the opening exchange of a nuclear war.
Kennedy looked at Khrushchev. Khrushchev gave him a blank stare, as if to say,
“So what?” Kennedy was shocked at what he felt was his counterpart’s lack of
response. “There was no area of accommodation with him,” he said later.
The “So what?” attitude Khrushchev expressed in June 1961
had clearly been transformed by September when he
initiated a private correspondence that made a deeper communication
and understanding possible between these two human beings.
page 25, fn96.
Kennedy’s wrote his first letter back to Khrushchev onOctober 16, 1961 . FRUS
1961-1963, vol. VI, pp.
38-39.
Kennedy’s wrote his first letter back to Khrushchev on
page 174, fn3.
Sergei N. Khrushchev, Nikita Khrushchev and the Creation of a Superpower (University
Park , PA Pennsylvania
State University
From the dust jacket of this book:
Sergei N. Khrushchev, Nikita Khrushchev and the Creation of a Superpower (
From the dust jacket of this book:
More is known about Nikita Khrushchev than about many former
Soviet leaders, partly because of his own efforts to communicate through
speeches, interviews, and memoirs. (A partial version of his memoirs was
published in three volumes in 1970, 1974, and 1990, and a complete version was
published in Russia in 1999 and will appear in an English translation to be
published by Penn State Press.) But even with the opening of party and state
archives in 1991, as William Taubman points out in his Foreword, many questions
remain unanswered. In this book Sergei tells the story of how the Cold War
happened in reality from the Russian side, not from the American side, and this
is his most important contribution.
page 175, fn5.
S. Khrushchev, Nikita Khrushchev, p. 622.
S. Khrushchev, Nikita Khrushchev, p. 622.
p. 174, fn2.
S. Khrushchev, Nikita Khrushchev, p. 630.
S. Khrushchev, Nikita Khrushchev, p. 630.
page 31, fn125.
Norman Cousins, The Improbable Triumvirate: John F. Kennedy, Pope John, Nikita Khrushchev(New York: W. W. Norton, 1972), p. 9.
Norman Cousins, The Improbable Triumvirate: John F. Kennedy, Pope John, Nikita Khrushchev(New York: W. W. Norton, 1972), p. 9.
Complete text of the American University Speech is available
atratical.org/ratville/JFK/HWNAU/JFK061063.html.
Audio and video recordings are also included. The text is a representation of
President Kennedy’s actual delivery which is slightly different from the text
version at the JFK
Library as well as the copy in the Appendix in JFK and The
Unspeakable.
President Kennedy acknowledged the profound suffering the
Russian people underwent:
Among the many traits the peoples of our two countries have
in common, none is stronger than our mutual abhorrence of war. Almost unique
among the major world powers, we have never been at war with each other. And no
nation in the history of battle ever suffered more than the Soviet
Union in the Second World War. At least 20 million lost their
lives. Countless millions of homes and families were burned or sacked. A third
of the nation’s territory, including two thirds of its industrial base, was
turned into a wasteland – a loss equivalent to the destruction of this country
east of Chicago
President Kennedy’s soaring vision of peace expressed an
awareness and wisdom that is as clear today as it was then.
Some say that it is useless to speak of peace or world law
or world disarmament – and that it will be useless until the leaders of the Soviet
Union adopt a more enlightened attitude. I hope they do. I believe
we can help them do it. But I also believe that we must re-examine our own attitudes
– as individuals and as a Nation – for our attitude is as essential as theirs.
And every graduate of this school, every thoughtful citizen who despairs of war
and wishes to bring peace, should begin by looking inward – by examining his
own attitude towards the possibilities of peace, towards the Soviet Union,
towards the course of the Cold War and towards freedom and peace here at
home.
First: examine our attitude towards peace itself. Too many of us think it is impossible. Too many think it is unreal. But that is a dangerous, defeatist belief. It leads to the conclusion that war is inevitable – that mankind is doomed – that we are gripped by forces we cannot control.
We need not accept that view. Our problems are man-made – therefore, they can be solved by man. And man can be as big as he wants. No problem of human destiny is beyond human beings. Man’s reason and spirit have often solved the seemingly unsolvable – and we believe they can do it again.
I am not referring to the absolute, infinite concept of universal peace and good will of which some fantasies and fanatics dream. I do not deny the value of hopes and dreams but we merely invite discouragement and incredulity by making that our only and immediate goal.
Let us focus instead on a more practical, more attainable peace – based not on a sudden revolution in human nature but on a gradual evolution in human institutions – on a series of concrete actions and effective agreements which are in the interest of all concerned. There is no single, simple key to this peace – no grand or magic formula to be adopted by one or two powers. Genuine peace must be the product of many nations, the sum of many acts. It must be dynamic, not static, changing to meet the challenge of each new generation. For peace is a process – a way of solving problems.
First: examine our attitude towards peace itself. Too many of us think it is impossible. Too many think it is unreal. But that is a dangerous, defeatist belief. It leads to the conclusion that war is inevitable – that mankind is doomed – that we are gripped by forces we cannot control.
We need not accept that view. Our problems are man-made – therefore, they can be solved by man. And man can be as big as he wants. No problem of human destiny is beyond human beings. Man’s reason and spirit have often solved the seemingly unsolvable – and we believe they can do it again.
I am not referring to the absolute, infinite concept of universal peace and good will of which some fantasies and fanatics dream. I do not deny the value of hopes and dreams but we merely invite discouragement and incredulity by making that our only and immediate goal.
Let us focus instead on a more practical, more attainable peace – based not on a sudden revolution in human nature but on a gradual evolution in human institutions – on a series of concrete actions and effective agreements which are in the interest of all concerned. There is no single, simple key to this peace – no grand or magic formula to be adopted by one or two powers. Genuine peace must be the product of many nations, the sum of many acts. It must be dynamic, not static, changing to meet the challenge of each new generation. For peace is a process – a way of solving problems.
An indicator of the yearning for peace people in the U.S. Moscow
I am taking this opportunity, therefore, to announce two
important decisions in this regard.
First: Chairman Khrushchev, Prime Minister Macmillan, and I have agreed that high-level discussions will shortly begin inMoscow
Second: To make clear our good faith and solemn convictions on this matter, I now declare that theUnited States
First: Chairman Khrushchev, Prime Minister Macmillan, and I have agreed that high-level discussions will shortly begin in
Second: To make clear our good faith and solemn convictions on this matter, I now declare that the
page 46, fn174.
Schlesinger, A Thousand Days, p.904.
Schlesinger, A Thousand Days, p.904.
page 46, fn176.
Max Frankel, “Harriman to Lead Test-BanMission Union ] in July,” New York Times(June 12,
1963), p. 1.
Max Frankel, “Harriman to Lead Test-Ban
Watch, listen to, read the transcript of Radio and Television
Address to the American People by President Kennedy on the Nuclear Test Ban
Treaty, July 26, 1963, broadcast the day after “[n]egotiations were
concluded in Moscow on a treaty to ban all nuclear tests in the atmosphere, in
outer space, and under water.”
page 177, fn13.
Public Papers of the Presidents: John F. Kennedy, 1963, p. 698. Text of speech: Address Before the 18th General Assembly of the United Nations, September 20 1963
Public Papers of the Presidents: John F. Kennedy, 1963, p. 698. Text of speech: Address Before the 18th General Assembly of the United Nations, September 20 1963
page 70, fn89.
FRUS, 1961-1963, Volume XI, Cuban Missile Crisis and Aftermath, October 1962-December 1963 (Washington: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1997), p. 880.
This is from Document 374. Memorandum From William Attwood to Gordon Chase of the National Security Council Staff,New York November 8, 1963 .
FRUS, 1961-1963, Volume XI, Cuban Missile Crisis and Aftermath, October 1962-December 1963 (Washington: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1997), p. 880.
This is from Document 374. Memorandum From William Attwood to Gordon Chase of the National Security Council Staff,
page 67, fn72.
Nikita Khrushchev’s January 31, 1963, Letter to Fidel Castro; Laurence Chang and Peter Kornbluh, editors, The Cuban Missile Crisis, 1962 (New York: New Press, 1992), p. 319.
Khrushchev’s first letter to Fidel Castro opens with the following:
Nikita Khrushchev’s January 31, 1963, Letter to Fidel Castro; Laurence Chang and Peter Kornbluh, editors, The Cuban Missile Crisis, 1962 (New York: New Press, 1992), p. 319.
Khrushchev’s first letter to Fidel Castro opens with the following:
Our train is crossing the fields and
forests of Soviet Byelorussia and it occurs to me how wonderful it would be if
you could see, on a sunny day like this, the ground covered with snow and the
forest silvery with frost.
Perhaps you, a southern man, have seen this only in paintings. It must surely be fairly difficult for you to imagine the ground carpeted with snow and the forests covered with white frost. It would be good if you could visit our country each season of the year; every one of them, spring, summer, fall, and winter, has its delights.
Perhaps you, a southern man, have seen this only in paintings. It must surely be fairly difficult for you to imagine the ground carpeted with snow and the forests covered with white frost. It would be good if you could visit our country each season of the year; every one of them, spring, summer, fall, and winter, has its delights.
page 67, fn71.
Fidel Castro, Address to the Tripartite Conference on the Cuban Missile Crisis,January 11, 1992 ; Chang and
Kornbluh, The Cuban Missile Crisis, 1962, p. 343.
Castro describes the letter in passing and that it was 31 pages in James G. Blight, Bruce J. Allyn, and David A. Welch, Cuba on the Brink, Castro, the Missile Crisis, and the Soviet Collapse, (Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Maryland, 2002), p. 222.
Fidel Castro, Address to the Tripartite Conference on the Cuban Missile Crisis,
Castro describes the letter in passing and that it was 31 pages in James G. Blight, Bruce J. Allyn, and David A. Welch, Cuba on the Brink, Castro, the Missile Crisis, and the Soviet Collapse, (Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Maryland, 2002), p. 222.
page 68, fn76-77.
76. S. Khrushchev, Nikita Khrushchev and the Creation of a Superpower, p. 659.
77. Castro’sJanuary 11, 1992 ,
Address, Chang and Kornbluh, Cuban Missile Crisis, p. 344.
76. S. Khrushchev, Nikita Khrushchev and the Creation of a Superpower, p. 659.
77. Castro’s
pages 72-74, fn105-09; pages 86-89, fn166-71.
Jean Daniel, ”Unofficial Envoy: An Historic Report From Two Capitals,” New Republic (December 14, 1963), p. 15-20.
See Also: “Kennedy Sought Dialogue with Cuba – Initiative With Castro Aborted by Assassination, Declassified Documents Show,” The National Security Archive,November 24, 2003 .
Jean Daniel, ”Unofficial Envoy: An Historic Report From Two Capitals,” New Republic (December 14, 1963), p. 15-20.
See Also: “Kennedy Sought Dialogue with Cuba – Initiative With Castro Aborted by Assassination, Declassified Documents Show,” The National Security Archive,
page 188, fn74.
Foreign Relations of the United States, 1961-1963, Volume IV: August-December 1963(Washington, U.S. Government Printing Office, 1991), pp.395-396.
Foreign Relations of the United States, 1961-1963, Volume IV: August-December 1963(Washington, U.S. Government Printing Office, 1991), pp.395-396.
page 188, fn73.
O’Donnell and Powers, Johnny, We Hardly Knew Ye (Boston: Little Brown, 1970), p. 17.
O’Donnell and Powers, Johnny, We Hardly Knew Ye (Boston: Little Brown, 1970), p. 17.
page 137-42, fn35.
“Steel: The Ides of April,” Fortune (May 1962), p. 98.
“Steel: The Ides of April,” Fortune (May 1962), p. 98.
page 375, fn897.
Gerard Colby with Charlotte Dennett, Thy Will Be Done: The Conquest of the Amazon: Nelson Rockefeller and Evangelism in the Age of Oil (New York: HarperCollins, 1995), pp. 364, 369.
Gerard Colby with Charlotte Dennett, Thy Will Be Done: The Conquest of the Amazon: Nelson Rockefeller and Evangelism in the Age of Oil (New York: HarperCollins, 1995), pp. 364, 369.
pages 258-59, fn221-23.
Richard Bissel, cited in Evan Thomas, The Very Best Men: Four Who Dared: The Early Years of the CIA (New York: Touchstone, 1995), pp. 232-33.
In 1958 Allen Dulles appointed Richard Bissel to be the CIA’s Deputy Director for Plans (DDP). The DDP was responsible for what became known as the CIA’s Black Operations. An aspect of Bissel“s world view is expressed in the following from pages 258-259 of JFK and The Unspeakable.
Richard Bissel, cited in Evan Thomas, The Very Best Men: Four Who Dared: The Early Years of the CIA (New York: Touchstone, 1995), pp. 232-33.
In 1958 Allen Dulles appointed Richard Bissel to be the CIA’s Deputy Director for Plans (DDP). The DDP was responsible for what became known as the CIA’s Black Operations. An aspect of Bissel“s world view is expressed in the following from pages 258-259 of JFK and The Unspeakable.
Kennedy’s openness to Sukarno and
the nonaligned movement he represented once again placed the president in
direct conflict with the Central Intelligence Agency. The CIA ’s
Deputy Director of Plans, Richard Bissel, wrote to Kennedy’s National Security
Advisor, McGeorge Bundy, in March 1961:
“Indonesia
TheCIA wanted
Sukarno dead, and what the agency saw as his pro-communist “global orientation”
obliterated. Still justifying the CIA ’s
assassination efforts in an interview long after his retirement, Richard Bissel
put Congo
Assassination plots against such men, Bissel conceded, may at times have shown “bad judgement,” but only when they were unsuccessful. He insisted that plotting to kill such “mad dogs” was “not bad morality.” He regretted only that certainCIA
assassination plots had failed and become public.223
“
The
Assassination plots against such men, Bissel conceded, may at times have shown “bad judgement,” but only when they were unsuccessful. He insisted that plotting to kill such “mad dogs” was “not bad morality.” He regretted only that certain
“Memorandum From the Deputy Director for Plans, Central
Intelligence Agency (Bissel) to the President’s Special Assistant for National
Security Affaris (Bundy),” March 27, 1961, FRUS 1961-1963,
vol. XXIII, p. 329(emphasis
added).
Richard Bissel, cited in Evan Thomas, The Very Best
Men, pp. 232-33.
Ibid., p233.
page 258, fn219.
FRUS, 1961-1963, Volume XXIII, Southeast Asia (Washington: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1995), p. 695.
FRUS, 1961-1963, Volume XXIII, Southeast Asia (Washington: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1995), p. 695.
pages 376-377, fn902-916.
The endnotes listed above on pages 376-77 of JFK and The Unspeakable present background on the fate of President Sukarno. One portion of this is included below occurring near the bottom of page 376:
The endnotes listed above on pages 376-77 of JFK and The Unspeakable present background on the fate of President Sukarno. One portion of this is included below occurring near the bottom of page 376:
In October 1965, the enemy that
Sukarno had learned to fear most, the CIA ,
finally succeeded in toppling his government. Ralph W. McGehee, a CIA
agent for 25 years, has summarized in his book, Deadly Deceits, the CIA ’s
elimination in 1965-66 of both the government of Sukarno and the Communist Party
of Indonesia that was represented in it:
“The Agency seized this opportunity [of a failed October 1965 coup attempt by junior Indonesian military officers] to overthrow Sukarno and to destroy the Communist Party of Indonesia (PKI ),
which had three million members. As I wrote in The Nation, ‘Estimates of
the number of deaths that occurred as a result of this CIA
[one word deleted by the CIA , which censored
McGehee’s article] operation run from one-half million to more than one million
people.’”909
“The Agency seized this opportunity [of a failed October 1965 coup attempt by junior Indonesian military officers] to overthrow Sukarno and to destroy the Communist Party of Indonesia (
Ralph W. McGehee, Deadly
Deceits: My 25 Years in the CIA (New York: Sheridan Square
Publications, 1983), p. 57. One sentence cited from article by Ralph W.
McGehee, “Foreign Policy By Forgery: The C.I.A. and the White Paper on El
Salvador
“Initially, the Indonesian Army left the P.K.I. [Communist Party of Indonesia] alone, since it had not been involved in the coup attempt. [Eight sentences deleted here by the CIA.] Subsequently, however, Indonesian military leaders [seven words deleted by the CIA] began a bloody extermination campaign. In mid-November 1965, General Suharto formally authorized the ‘cleaning out’ of the Indonesian Communist Party and established special teams to supervise the mass killings. Media fabrications played a key role in stirring up popular resentment against the P.K.I. Photographs of the bodies of the dead generals [who had been killed in the failed coup] – badly decomposed – were featured in all the newspapers and on television. Stories accompanying the pictures falsely claimed that the generals had been castrated and their eyes gouged out by Communist women. This cynically manufactured campaign was designed to foment public anger against the Communists and set the stage for a massacre . . . To conceal its role in the massacre of those innocent people the C.I.A., in 1968, concocted a false account of what happened (later published by the Agency as a book, Indonesia–1965: The Coup that Backfired) . . . At the same time that the Agency wrote the book, it also composed a secret study of what really happened. [One sentence deleted by the CIA.] The Agency was extremely proud of its successful [one word deleted by the CIA] and recommended it as a model for future operations [one-half sentence deleted by the CIA].”
“Initially, the Indonesian Army left the P.K.I. [Communist Party of Indonesia] alone, since it had not been involved in the coup attempt. [Eight sentences deleted here by the CIA.] Subsequently, however, Indonesian military leaders [seven words deleted by the CIA] began a bloody extermination campaign. In mid-November 1965, General Suharto formally authorized the ‘cleaning out’ of the Indonesian Communist Party and established special teams to supervise the mass killings. Media fabrications played a key role in stirring up popular resentment against the P.K.I. Photographs of the bodies of the dead generals [who had been killed in the failed coup] – badly decomposed – were featured in all the newspapers and on television. Stories accompanying the pictures falsely claimed that the generals had been castrated and their eyes gouged out by Communist women. This cynically manufactured campaign was designed to foment public anger against the Communists and set the stage for a massacre . . . To conceal its role in the massacre of those innocent people the C.I.A., in 1968, concocted a false account of what happened (later published by the Agency as a book, Indonesia–1965: The Coup that Backfired) . . . At the same time that the Agency wrote the book, it also composed a secret study of what really happened. [One sentence deleted by the CIA.] The Agency was extremely proud of its successful [one word deleted by the CIA] and recommended it as a model for future operations [one-half sentence deleted by the CIA].”
page xxii.
On September 25, 1961 President Kennedy delivered a speech on disarmament at the United Nations in which he states, “The weapons of war must be abolished before they abolish us . . . It is therefore our intention to challenge the Soviet Union, not to an arms race, but to a peace race – to advance together step by step, stage by stage, until general and complete disarmament has been achieved. We invite them now to go beyond agreement in principle to reach agreement on actual plans.” JFK Address at U.N. General Assembly,25 September 1961 .
See film and text transcript at the JFK Library.
On September 25, 1961 President Kennedy delivered a speech on disarmament at the United Nations in which he states, “The weapons of war must be abolished before they abolish us . . . It is therefore our intention to challenge the Soviet Union, not to an arms race, but to a peace race – to advance together step by step, stage by stage, until general and complete disarmament has been achieved. We invite them now to go beyond agreement in principle to reach agreement on actual plans.” JFK Address at U.N. General Assembly,
See film and text transcript at the JFK Library.
page 383, fn8-9.
8. Jim Douglass’ interview with Sergei N. Khrushchev,November 15, 2009 .
9. S. Khrushchev, Nikita Khrushchev and the Creation of a Superpower, p. 696.
8. Jim Douglass’ interview with Sergei N. Khrushchev,
9. S. Khrushchev, Nikita Khrushchev and the Creation of a Superpower, p. 696.
page 383-84, fn10.
National Security Action Memorandum Number 271: “Cooperation With theUSSR November 12,
1963 .
National Security Action Memorandum Number 271: “Cooperation With the
page 384, fn11.
Frank Sietzen, “Soviets Planned to Accept JFK’s Joint Lunar Mission Offer,” SPACEWAR(October 2, 1997), p. 3. In myNovember 15,
2009 interview with him, Sergei Khrushchev said he thought that if
Kennedy had lived, and if he and Nikita Khrushchev had stayed in power for
another five-plus years, the two leaders would have ended the Cold War by
1969.
Frank Sietzen, “Soviets Planned to Accept JFK’s Joint Lunar Mission Offer,” SPACEWAR(October 2, 1997), p. 3. In my
pages 321-24, fn629-645.
“Visit of Six Friends to President John F. Kennedy on behalf
of Friends Witness for World Order, May
1, 1962 ,” The Quaker Collection,
Haverford College.
Henry J. Cadbury, “Friends with Kennedy in the White
House,” Friendly
Heritage: Letters from the Quaker Past (Norwalk, Conn.: Silvermine
Publishers, 1972)
The Religious Society of Friends website reads: QUAKERS:
RELIGIOUS WITNESSES FOR PEACE SINCE 1660 www.quakers.org
pages 323, fn634.
E. Raymond Wilson, Uphill for Peace: Quaker Impact on Congress (Richmond, Ind.: Friends United Press, 1975), p. 79.
E. Raymond Wilson, Uphill for Peace: Quaker Impact on Congress (Richmond, Ind.: Friends United Press, 1975), p. 79.
pages 328, fn654.
O’Donnell and Powers, “Johnny We Hardly Knew Ye,” p. 381.
O’Donnell and Powers, “Johnny We Hardly Knew Ye,” p. 381.
pages 369, fn865.
“WELCOME MR. KENNEDY,” Commission Exhibit No. 1031, Warren Report, p. 294.
“WELCOME MR. KENNEDY,” Commission Exhibit No. 1031, Warren Report, p. 294.
pages 369, fn867.
O’Donnell and Powers, “Johnny We Hardly Knew Ye,” p. 25.
Immediately following this quote on page 369 the author writes in JFK and The Unspeakable:
O’Donnell and Powers, “Johnny We Hardly Knew Ye,” p. 25.
Immediately following this quote on page 369 the author writes in JFK and The Unspeakable:
“You know,” he said, “last night
would have been a hell of a night to assassinate a president.” He paused.
“I mean it. There was the rain, and the night, and we were all getting jostled. Suppose a man had a pistol in a briefcase.” Kennedy pointed his right hand like a pistol at the wall, moving his thumb as the hammer. “Then he could have dropped the gun and the briefcase, and melted away in the crowd.”869
In two subliminal scenes, JFK had sketched the assassinations of both himself that same day in Dealey Plaza and of another president (in the making) four and a half years later, his brother, Bobby, the night he would get jostled by the crowd in the pantry of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles.
“I mean it. There was the rain, and the night, and we were all getting jostled. Suppose a man had a pistol in a briefcase.” Kennedy pointed his right hand like a pistol at the wall, moving his thumb as the hammer. “Then he could have dropped the gun and the briefcase, and melted away in the crowd.”869
In two subliminal scenes, JFK had sketched the assassinations of both himself that same day in Dealey Plaza and of another president (in the making) four and a half years later, his brother, Bobby, the night he would get jostled by the crowd in the pantry of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles.
William Manchester, The
Death of a President (New York: Harper & Row, Popular Library,
1967), p. 37.
page 224, fn14.
Ralph G. Martin, A Hero For Our Time: An Intimate Story of the Kennedy Years (New York: Ballantine Books, 1983), p. 500.
Ralph G. Martin, A Hero For Our Time: An Intimate Story of the Kennedy Years (New York: Ballantine Books, 1983), p. 500.
page 224, fn15.
Robert F. Kennedy, Thirteen Days: A Memoir of the Cuban Missile Crisis (New York, Signet, 1969), p. 110.
Robert F. Kennedy, Thirteen Days: A Memoir of the Cuban Missile Crisis (New York, Signet, 1969), p. 110.
page 224, fn16.
Evelyn Lincoln, My Twelve Years With John F. Kennedy (New York: Bantam Books, 1966), p. 230.
Immediately following this quote on page 224 the author writes in JFK and The Unspeakable:
Evelyn Lincoln, My Twelve Years With John F. Kennedy (New York: Bantam Books, 1966), p. 230.
Immediately following this quote on page 224 the author writes in JFK and The Unspeakable:
Kennedy loved that prayer. He cited it at the annual
presidential prayer breakfast on March
1, 1962 ,17 and again in a speech in Frankfurt ,
Germany
T. S. Settel, editor, The
Faith of JFK (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1965), p. 92.
Nicholas A. Schneider, Religious
Views of President John F. Kennedy (St. Louis: B. Herder, 1965), p.
99.
page 225-26, fn20.
Geoffrey Perret, Jack: A Life Like No Other (New York
Geoffrey Perret, Jack: A Life Like No Other (
page 226, fn21.
Ibid.
Ibid.
page 225-26, fn22.
The formal title of Alan Seeger’s most famous poem seems to have been “Rendezvous,” as it is identified at http://www.english.emory.edu/LostPoets/Seeger.html. However, in The Oxford Book of American Verse, Seeger’s poem is titled by its refrain, “I have a Rendezvous with Death.” The Oxford Book of American Verse, chosen and edited by Bliss Carman (New York: Oxford University Press, 1927), pp. 624-25.
The formal title of Alan Seeger’s most famous poem seems to have been “Rendezvous,” as it is identified at http://www.english.emory.edu/LostPoets/Seeger.html. However, in The Oxford Book of American Verse, Seeger’s poem is titled by its refrain, “I have a Rendezvous with Death.” The Oxford Book of American Verse, chosen and edited by Bliss Carman (New York: Oxford University Press, 1927), pp. 624-25.
page 226, fn23.
Richard D. Mahoney interview of Samuel D. BelkIII .
Richard D. Mahoney, Sons
& Brothers: The Days of Jack and Bobby Kennedy (New York: Arcade,
1999) p. 281.
Richard D. Mahoney interview of Samuel D. Belk
The following, from pages 267-268 and 454-455 of JFK and
The Unspeakable reveals the level of power and control exercised by
specific units of authority within the U.S. Government to cover-up how the
assassination of President Kennedy was carried out.
Ed Hoffman had witnessed a
critically important scene in the assassination scenario. The “suit man,” who
tossed the rifle to the “railroad man” for rapid disposal, had been equipped
beforehand with a powerful means of identification. His just showing it at the
murder scene, with the smell of gunpowder still in the air, had so reassured a
suspicious police officer, Joe Marshall Smith, that he immediately put his gun
away and let the suspect go without detaining or questioning him.269The
man, whose credentials passed him off as a Secret Service agent, was in fact a
methodical assassin in an orchestrated killing of the president. Moments
before, as Hoffman had seen, the documented “Secret Service agent” had fired
his rifle at President Kennedy before tossing it to an assistant. Thus, the assassins
were not only well prepared to identify themselves as government agents. They
also seemed confident that they would not be exposed from their bold use of
Secret Service credentials to assure their escape. They were right. The Warren
Commission went out of its way to ignore the obvious evidence of Secret Service
imposters at a source of the shots.
As we learned from Secret Service agent Abraham Bolden, the Secret Service took the extraordinary step of withdrawing and replacing all of its agents’ commission books a month and a half following the assassination, moving Bolden to suspect that Secret Service identification had been used as a cover by the assassins of President Kennedy. Officer Joe Marshall Smith, who was familiar with Secret Service credentials, said he had confronted a man behind the fence at the top of the grassy knoll who showed him such credentials. That raises the question: What was the source of the Secret Service identification displayed by JFK’s assassins?
In June 2007, in response to a fifteen-year-old Freedom of Information Act request, theCIA
finally declassified its “Family
Jewels” report. Buried in the 702-page collection of documents was a memorandum
written by Sidney Gottlieb, chief of the CIA ’s
Technical Services Division (TSD ). Gottlieb
was the notorious designer of the CIA ’s
contaminated skin diving suit intended in the spring of 1963 for the
assassination of Castro, the scapegoating of Kennedy, and the destruction of an
incipient Cuban-American rapprochement.
In his secret May 8, 1973,CIA
memorandum, Sidney Gottlieb stated that “Over the years” his Technical Services
Division “furnished this [Secret] Service” with “gate passes, security passes,
passes for presidential campaign, emblems for presidential vehicles; a secure
ID photo system.”270 The
Secret Service supposedly received its identifying documents from the Bureau of
Engraving and Printing, as Abraham Bolden said it did in the replacement of its
agents’ commission books in January 1964.271 Since
the Bureau of Engraving and Printing is, like the Secret Service, a part of the
Treasury Department, it is reasonable in terms of in-house security and
accessibility that it – and especially not the CIA
– would provide the Secret Service commission books. Yet here is the CIA ’s
Sidney Gottlieb acknowledging that “over the years” his Technical Services
Division “furnished” such identification to the Secret Service – identification
that could just as easily have been given at any time, as might prove useful,
to CIA operatives using a Secret Service
cover. The source was the same.
There is a certain criminal consistency between Gottlieb’s having prepared a poisoned diving suit meant for Castro’s murder and his perhaps having furnished as well the Secret Service credentials used by the assassins on the grassy knoll. However, Gottlieb was only aCIA
functionary who carried out higher orders. The more responsible assassins were
above him.
What does the phenomenon of a sniper team supplied with official government credentials for an immediate cover-up tell us about the forces behind the crime?
Would an innocent government, in its investigation of the murder of its president, ignore such evidence of treachery within its own ranks?272
As we learned from Secret Service agent Abraham Bolden, the Secret Service took the extraordinary step of withdrawing and replacing all of its agents’ commission books a month and a half following the assassination, moving Bolden to suspect that Secret Service identification had been used as a cover by the assassins of President Kennedy. Officer Joe Marshall Smith, who was familiar with Secret Service credentials, said he had confronted a man behind the fence at the top of the grassy knoll who showed him such credentials. That raises the question: What was the source of the Secret Service identification displayed by JFK’s assassins?
In June 2007, in response to a fifteen-year-old Freedom of Information Act request, the
In his secret May 8, 1973,
There is a certain criminal consistency between Gottlieb’s having prepared a poisoned diving suit meant for Castro’s murder and his perhaps having furnished as well the Secret Service credentials used by the assassins on the grassy knoll. However, Gottlieb was only a
What does the phenomenon of a sniper team supplied with official government credentials for an immediate cover-up tell us about the forces behind the crime?
Would an innocent government, in its investigation of the murder of its president, ignore such evidence of treachery within its own ranks?272
Two books about Ed Hoffman
(Eyewitness, p. 9; Beyond the Fence
Line: The Eyewitness Account of Ed Hoffman and the Murder of President Kennedy,
p. 33) and the hardcover text of this book (p. 265) have identified the “suit
man” seen by Hoffman with the man whom Dallas police officer Joe Marshall Smith
confronted with a gun behind the stockade fence. However, Smith said the man he
confronted “had on a sports shirt and sports pants,”so how could it have been
the same man? (I am grateful to reader Norman J. Granz for raising this
question.)
Hoffman communicated that, in addition to the “suit man” and the “railroad man,” he saw two other men behind the fence just before the shooting:
“a) A man in a plaid shirt, labeled ‘P’ (dotted black line on Photo 23) [inBeyond the Fence Line, p. 34], stepped around from the north end of the fence, walked up to the man in the business suit ‘A’ and spoke to him a few seconds.
“b) After this brief encounter, the man in the plaid shirt turned and walked back around the east side of the fence and out of Ed’s view (solid black line on Photo 23).
“c) The police officer ‘F’ (Photo 23), who had been standing at the east end of the fence, followed the man in the plaid shirt as he walked around the east side of the fence.” (Beyond the Fence Line, p. 32)
The “suit man” walked over to the “railroad man” a final time, spoke with him briefly, and returned to the fence where he bent over, picked something up, and looked over the fence. Hoffman then saw a puff of smoke by the “suit man” after which the “suit man” turned suddenly with a rifle in his hands. The “suit man” ran to the “railroad man,” tossed the rifle to him, then walked back casually alongside the fence until a police officer came quickly around the fence and confronted him with a revolver. (This is not the officer who was at the east end of the fence before who, unlike the officer coming around the fence had not been wearing a hat. Beyond the Fence Line, p. 33.)
To return to the question, how could the man Officer Joe Marshall Smith confronted, who he said “had on a sports shirt and sports pants,” have been the “suit man” Ed Hoffman was watching?
After the shooting, Officer Smith came around the fence at the same point where Hoffman’s “man in a plaid shirt” had been just moments before. “The man in a plaid shirt” may be the man in “a sports shirt and sports pants” who Smith said showed him Secret Service credentials. Officer Smith may have then confronted a moment later “the suit man” merging the two men in his memory in an interview fifteen years later. (Conspiracy, p. 50.)
Other witnesses said they encountered plainclothesmen behind the fence who showed them Secret Service identification. “The man in a plaid/sports shirt,” like “the suit man,” would likely have had such Secret Service credentials as cover in case he was challenged.
Hoffman communicated that, in addition to the “suit man” and the “railroad man,” he saw two other men behind the fence just before the shooting:
“a) A man in a plaid shirt, labeled ‘P’ (dotted black line on Photo 23) [inBeyond the Fence Line, p. 34], stepped around from the north end of the fence, walked up to the man in the business suit ‘A’ and spoke to him a few seconds.
“b) After this brief encounter, the man in the plaid shirt turned and walked back around the east side of the fence and out of Ed’s view (solid black line on Photo 23).
“c) The police officer ‘F’ (Photo 23), who had been standing at the east end of the fence, followed the man in the plaid shirt as he walked around the east side of the fence.” (Beyond the Fence Line, p. 32)
The “suit man” walked over to the “railroad man” a final time, spoke with him briefly, and returned to the fence where he bent over, picked something up, and looked over the fence. Hoffman then saw a puff of smoke by the “suit man” after which the “suit man” turned suddenly with a rifle in his hands. The “suit man” ran to the “railroad man,” tossed the rifle to him, then walked back casually alongside the fence until a police officer came quickly around the fence and confronted him with a revolver. (This is not the officer who was at the east end of the fence before who, unlike the officer coming around the fence had not been wearing a hat. Beyond the Fence Line, p. 33.)
To return to the question, how could the man Officer Joe Marshall Smith confronted, who he said “had on a sports shirt and sports pants,” have been the “suit man” Ed Hoffman was watching?
After the shooting, Officer Smith came around the fence at the same point where Hoffman’s “man in a plaid shirt” had been just moments before. “The man in a plaid shirt” may be the man in “a sports shirt and sports pants” who Smith said showed him Secret Service credentials. Officer Smith may have then confronted a moment later “the suit man” merging the two men in his memory in an interview fifteen years later. (Conspiracy, p. 50.)
Other witnesses said they encountered plainclothesmen behind the fence who showed them Secret Service identification. “The man in a plaid/sports shirt,” like “the suit man,” would likely have had such Secret Service credentials as cover in case he was challenged.
For the preceding analysis, as well
as this
book as a whole, I am especially grateful for the work and inspiration
of Vincent
Salandria, who has long emphasized the importance of the government’s
ignoring the evidence of phony Secret Service agents in Dealey
Plaza Dealey
Plaza
Regarding the unthinkable – that a president of the United
States Dallas
There is no rational manner in which we can strip away the
guilt of the highest levels of our national security state. The government’s
consistent criminal pattern of ignoring a whole series of data indicating
conspiracy and consistently twisting the meaning of evidence to support a
single assassin killing compels the conclusion that the U.S.
Robert Dreyfuss, “The
Generals’ Revolt - As Obama rethinks America Afghanistan October 29, 2009 .
The relevant segment at the end of the article is:
Wilkerson, the former aide to Colin Powell, hopes Obama will
follow the example of President Kennedy, who faced down his generals during the
Cuban Missile Crisis. “It’s going to take John Kennedy-type courage to turn to
his Curtis LeMay and say, ‘No, we’re not going to bomb Cuba
On page 211-12 of JFK and
The Unspeakable the author writes:
On January 17, 1961 , three days before John Kennedy took
office as president, Congo CIA .213 As
Madeleine Kalb, author of The Congo Cables, has observed, “much of the
sense of urgency in the first few weeks of January [1961] which led to the
death of Lumumba came . . . from fear of the impending change in Washington U.S.
In 1959, the year before Kennedy was elected president, he had said to the Senate: “Call it nationalism, call it anti-colonialism, call it what you will, Africa is going through a revolution . . . The word is out-and spreading like wildfire in nearly a thousand languages and dialects-that it is no longer necessary to remain forever poor or forever in bondage.”216 InAfrica and Europe , Kennedy had
become well known as a supporter of African nationalism. JFK even took his
support of the African independence movement into his 1960 presidential
campaign, saying then repeatedly, “we have lost ground in Africa
because we have neglected and ignored the needs and aspirations of the African
people.”217 It
is noteworthy that in the index to his 1960 campaign speeches, there are 479
references to Africa .218
TheCIA took
seriously Kennedy’s African nationalist sympathies. As his inauguration
approached, the CIA ’s station chief in Leopoldville ,
Lawrence Devlin, spoke of “the need to take ‘drastic steps’ before it was too
late.”219 CIA
analyst Paul Sakwa pointed out in an interview that the decision to put Lumumba
in the hands of his assassins was made by men “in the pay of and receiving
constant counsel from the CIA station.”220 The
CIA succeeded in having Lumumba killed in
haste by Belgian collaborators three days before Kennedy took his oath of
office.
In 1959, the year before Kennedy was elected president, he had said to the Senate: “Call it nationalism, call it anti-colonialism, call it what you will, Africa is going through a revolution . . . The word is out-and spreading like wildfire in nearly a thousand languages and dialects-that it is no longer necessary to remain forever poor or forever in bondage.”216 In
The
Ludo De Witte, The
Assassination of Lumumba (New York CIA head Allen
Dulles’s August 26, 1960 ,
letter concluding that Lumumba’s “removal must be an urgent and prime objective
and that under existing conditions this should be a high priority of our covert
action.” Ibid., p. 17. Richard Bissell, then head of the CIA ’s
covert action, said, “The Agency had put a top priority, probably, on a range
of different methods of getting rid of Lumumba in the sense of either
destroying him physically, incapacitating him, or eliminating his political
influence.” Ibid. As De Witte shows, it was the Belgian government that
actually carried out Lumumba’s assassination on January 17, 1961 , three days before Kennedy became
president.
Madeleine G. Kalb, The
Congo Cables: The Cold War in Africa – from Eisenhower to Kennedy (New
York: Macmillan, 1982), p. 196.
Schlesinger, A Thousand Days, pp.
553-54.
Ibid., p. 554.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Richard D. Mahoney interview of Paul
Sakwa, May 2, 1978 , Washington ,
D.C. Africa , p. 266, endnote 58.
From the jacket of Ludo De Witte’s The
Assassination of Lumumba:
Patrice Lumumba, first prime minister of the Republic to Congo 17 January 1961 . Democratically elected to lead the
Mouvement National Congolais, the party he founded in 1958, Lumumba was at the
centre of the country’s growing popular defiance of the colonial rule of
oppression imposed by Belgium Kinshasa Congo CIA . Chilling
official memos which detail “liquidation” and & “threats to national
interests” are analysed alongside macabre tales of the destruction of evidence,
putting Patrice Lumumba’s personal strength and his dignified quest for African
unity in stark contrast with one of the murkiest episodes of twentieth-century
politics.
On page 212 of JFK and
The Unspeakable the author describes when Kennedy received the news of
Lumumba’s assassination:
Four weeks later, on February 13, 1961 , JFK received a
phone call with the delayed news of Lumumba’s murder. Photographer Jacques Lowe
took a remarkable picture of the president at that moment. Lowe’s photo of
Kennedy responding to the news of Lumumba’s assassination is on the dust-jacket
cover of Richard D. Mahoney’s book JFK: Ordeal in Africa .
It shows JFK horror-stricken. His eyes are shut. The fingers of his right hand
are pressing into his forehead. His head is collapsing against the phone held
to his ear.
Kennedy was not even president at the time of Lumumba’s death. However, he recognized that if as president-elect he had spoken out publicly in support of Lumumba’s life, he might have stopped his assassination. After Kennedy had won the November 1960 election, Lumumba under house arrest had smuggled out a telegram congratulating Kennedy and expressing his admiration for the president-elect’s support for African independence.221 JFK had then asked Averell Harriman, “Should we help Lumumba?” Harriman replied that he “was not sure we could help him even if we wanted to.”222
In spite of his sympathy for Lumumba, Kennedy had not spoken out on theCongo
Kennedy was not even president at the time of Lumumba’s death. However, he recognized that if as president-elect he had spoken out publicly in support of Lumumba’s life, he might have stopped his assassination. After Kennedy had won the November 1960 election, Lumumba under house arrest had smuggled out a telegram congratulating Kennedy and expressing his admiration for the president-elect’s support for African independence.221 JFK had then asked Averell Harriman, “Should we help Lumumba?” Harriman replied that he “was not sure we could help him even if we wanted to.”222
In spite of his sympathy for Lumumba, Kennedy had not spoken out on the
Another “Bay of Pigs” event – akin to corporate interests
versus the public interest as occurred in “The Ides Of April” conflict
JFK had with big Steel industrialists – was his supporting the people
of the Congo in finding their own way in the interests of preventing the spread
of the Cold War and improving that nation’s own security. From pages 150-151
of JFK and
The Unspeakable:
In his book JFK: Ordeal in Africa ,
Richard Mahoney noted that Kennedy considered Gullion his most trusted third
world ambassador. He sent Gullion into the Congo Third
World . As Kennedy remarked over the phone one day, if the U.S.
In theCongo Congo Congo Congo
Seventeen years after JFK’s death, Gullion said, “Kennedy, I think, risked a great deal in backing this operation [of UN forces in theCongo U.S. Congo Bay
of Pigs , Laos Vietnam U.S. Congo CIA ,
which had been arming the Congo Katanga CIA ]
practice,” wrote Richard Mahoney, “was expressly contrary to U.S. Congo Congo CIA wanted the Cold War in the
Congo
In the
Seventeen years after JFK’s death, Gullion said, “Kennedy, I think, risked a great deal in backing this operation [of UN forces in the
Ibid., pp. 114, 246-48.
Herbert S. Parmet interview of Edmund
Gullion, August 18, 1980 ,
cited in Herbert S. Parmet, JFK:
The Presidency of John F. Kennedy (New York: Dial Press, 1983), p.
320.
Ibid., p. 81.
Ibid., p. 246.
Beyond this, an equally profound element of what “has been
wiped out of the history that we have” is, as Jim Douglass articulates
above, how the national security state implemented in the United States
after World War II created “a ruling elite of national security managers with
an authority above that of our elected representatives.” Consider how a cadre
of support personnel for these national security managers was put in place
beginning in the 1950s and continues to be operated today (why would
it have ever been shut down?) – and that this history is never acknowledged nor
addressed by officialdom in the government, media, or corporate domains of our
society (fromJFK and
the Unspeakable, pp. 196-197):
While the president struggled to
push his newly found politics of peace past the anti-communist priorities of
the CIA , that creature from the depths of
the Cold War kept sprouting new arms to stop him. As in Vietnam CIA had agents operating in other
branches of the government. Those extended arms of the agency acted to forward
its policies and frustrate Kennedy’s, as in the case of AID’s suspension of the
Commodity Import Program, thereby setting up a coup. J. Edgar Hoover knew the CIA
had infiltrated the FBI’s decision making as well, making it possible for the CIA
to cancel the FBI’s FLASH on Oswald at a critical moment in October, setting up
the assassination of Kennedy. How had the CIA ’s
covert arms been grafted onto these other parts of the government?
One man in a position to watch the arms of theCIA
proliferate was Colonel Fletcher Prouty. He ran the office that did the
proliferating. In 1955, Air Force Headquarters ordered Colonel L. Fletcher
Prouty, a career Army and Air Force officer since World War II, to set
up a Pentagon office to provide military support for the clandestine operations
of the CIA. Thus Prouty became director of the Pentagon’s “Focal Point
Office for the CIA.”110
CIA Director Allen Dulles was its actual creator. In the fifties, Dulles needed military support for his covert campaigns to undermine opposing nations in the Cold War. Moreover, Dulles wanted subterranean secrecy and autonomy for his projects, even from the members of his own government. Prouty’s job was to provide Pentagon support and deep cover for the CIA beneath the different branches ofWashington
“I want a focal point,” Dulles said. “I want an office that’s cleared to do what we have to have done; an office that knows us very, very well and then an office that has access to a system in the Pentagon. But the system will not be aware of what initiated the request—they’ll think it came from the Secretary of Defense. They won’t realize it came from the Director of Central Intelligence.”111
Dulles got Prouty to create a network of subordinate focal point offices in the armed services, then throughout the entireU.S.
The consequence in the early 1960s, when Kennedy became president, was that the CIA had placed a secret team of its own employees through the entireU.S.
As the son of an ambassador toBritain U.S.
One man in a position to watch the arms of the
CIA Director Allen Dulles was its actual creator. In the fifties, Dulles needed military support for his covert campaigns to undermine opposing nations in the Cold War. Moreover, Dulles wanted subterranean secrecy and autonomy for his projects, even from the members of his own government. Prouty’s job was to provide Pentagon support and deep cover for the CIA beneath the different branches of
“I want a focal point,” Dulles said. “I want an office that’s cleared to do what we have to have done; an office that knows us very, very well and then an office that has access to a system in the Pentagon. But the system will not be aware of what initiated the request—they’ll think it came from the Secretary of Defense. They won’t realize it came from the Director of Central Intelligence.”111
Dulles got Prouty to create a network of subordinate focal point offices in the armed services, then throughout the entire
The consequence in the early 1960s, when Kennedy became president, was that the CIA had placed a secret team of its own employees through the entire
As the son of an ambassador to
As members of this country’s society – taught from grade
school on that “We the people” collectively aspire to be sovereign and
self-governing as proclaimed by such founding documents as the Declaration of
Independence – we are all responsible for recovering and reclaiming the history
and purpose of our time and our place for the sake of our children and for the
benefit of all life that follows us here.
Editor’s Afterword
I was eight when President Kennedy was killed. At home sick
in bed that day, my father walked up the stairs, responding to my “Hi Dad”
greeting in a voice I’d never heard before with, “President Kennedy’s been
shot.” As for so many, something in him died that day. In 1977 a lawyer friend
loaned me his copy of Arthur Schlesinger’s A
Thousand Days, John F. Kennedy In The White House. I’d never read dry
biography like that before. By the time I was finished, a budding understanding
had begun of what JFK was trying to do while he was President. That he was
learning French in anticipation of meeting DeGaulle in early 1964, to establish
a more thorough communication of ideas and meaning with the French President,
was an example of the type of engagement with life John Kennedy expressed.
I read many books on JFK’s life and death in the later
seventies and eighties. In subsequent years, from interviewing Fletcher
Prouty in 1989, to the release and ferment created by Oliver Stone’s
film JFK in 1991, I
wondered what might surface to clarify our obfuscated history. I briefly
communicated with Jim Douglass in 2000 when he contacted me to purchase a copy
of Understanding
Special Operations and sent along a copy of his article, “The
Martin Luther King Conspiracy Exposed in Memphis”. At that time I was not
aware of this trial. I asked if I could reprint the article on ratical. He was
pleased and gave his permission. Twelve years later this work has been updated
with links to the original sources referenced throughout the complete trial
transcript.
Now with JFK and
The Unspeakable we have an outstanding sourcebook weaving
together many threads leading to the seminal event of
post-WWII America 14:45-16:50 minutes) includes a segment from
the Preface (page ix), the last portion quoted here:
Thanks to the truth-telling of many, many witnesses who have
risked their lives; thanks to a recent flood of documents, through the JFK Records Act –
hundreds of thousands of documents are now available on the Kennedy
assassination as a result of that law, passed as a result of Oliver
Stone’s film and the appeal at the end of it – thanks to all of that
the truth is available. Not only can the conspiracy that most Americans have
thought was likely now be seen in detail. Not only can we know what happened in
Dallas
On our behalf (he was President of the
Before we knew it, he turned toward peace with the enemy who almost committed that crime with him (Nikita Khrushchev).
For turning to peace with his enemy (and ours), Kennedy was murdered by a power we cannot easily describe. Its unspeakable reality can be traced, suggested, recognized, and pondered. That is one purpose of this book. The other is to describe Kennedy’s turning.
I hope that, by following the story of JFK’s encounter with the unspeakable, we’ll be willing to encounter it too.
In November 1963, Charles “Chip” Bohlen, a distinguished
member of the U.S. France
Emotions are often difficult to
recall, but I well remember feeling, as I sat under the soaring arches of the
great cathedral, that the future had collapsed on the present. Here I was, with
thirty-five years of experience in the Foreign Service and extremely skeptical
about the great men in public life, yet completely crushed by Kennedy’s death.
I still feel that a great future was extinguished by his death.
Had Kennedy lived, in all probability he would have visited the
Except for the Cuban missile crisis and the nuclear test ban treaty, Kennedy’s record of achievements in foreign affairs is sparse. By the time of his assassination, he was beginning to move with more confidence. I am sure he would have tried some innovations to end the dreary cold war. I do not know what they would have been, but he would have had a fine second term.
(Charles
E. Bohlen, Witness To History, 1929-1969, Norton, 1973, p. 504)
Among other posts, Mr. Bohlen was ambassador to the Soviet
Union and an expert on its society. The management and
manipulation of people’s awareness and perceptions by official investigations
like the Warren Commission and House Select Committee on Assassinations, as
well as collusion by the commercial press with government pronouncements, has
literally been “unbelievable.” In the above quotation, Ambassador Bohlen edges
as far as he was psychologically able to towards asking the question, Why?
Jim Douglass dedicates his book “To Vince Salandria and
Marty Schotz, teachers and friends”. Illuminating speeches by each man at the
1998 COPA conference provide transformative clarity. Vincent Salandria’s “The JFK
Assassination: A False Mystery Concealing State Crimes” presents a detailed
explication listing many factual instances of malfeasance, misfeasance, and
obstruction of justice carried out by officials of the U.S. government
responsible for the investigation of President Kennedy’s assassination – some
of whom were themselves criminal accessories after the fact. Martin Schotz’s “The Waters of
Knowledge versus the Waters of Uncertainty: Mass Denial in the Assassination of
President Kennedy,” is a useful distillation of elements of his unique and
vital 1996 book, History Will Not
Absolve Us: Orwellian Control, Public Denial, and the Murder of President
Kennedy. The center of the book is a Letter to
Vincent J. Salandria, dated April 5, 1995, that “belongs to a process of
investigation, study, and thought which now spans more than three decades.”
This work is even more relevant today, now fifty years later.
Through the work of Vince Salandria, Marty Schotz, and Jim
Douglass, a lucid and coherent account is available of why President Kennedy
was assassinated and by whom. Marty Schotz sums up this understanding in
the Introduction of History Will Not
Absolve Us:
In our efforts to confront the truth
of the assassination of President Kennedy we are at a very different point
today than we were thirty years ago when the first critical analyses of the
Warren Report were published. Dozens of books and thousands of magazine
articles have been written about this case. Almost without exception, no matter
what the author’s view concerning who killed President Kennedy or why, these
works have directly or indirectly contributed to the public’s conviction that
the murder of the President is a mystery. As a result, although a vast majority
of our public believes that there was a conspiracy, most people do not know
this as a fact and are convinced that they can never know for sure what
happened.
On both points the public is mistaken. The murder of the President is not a mystery. The nature of the conspiracy that took President Kennedy’s life was from the outset quite obvious to anyone who knew how to look and was willing to do so. The same holds true today. Any citizen who is willing to look can see clearly who killed President Kennedy and why
Dave Ratcliffe wrote:
Exploring the why of the President’s
extra-constitutional firing goes to the heart of our country’s current darkness
and offers us all unprecedented hope in transforming it. The future is up to
each and every one of us. It is ours to create. As Carl Jung observed, “In the
last analysis, the essential thing is the life of the individual. This alone
makes history, here alone do the great transformations first take place, and
the whole future, the whole history of the world, ultimately spring as a
gigantic summation from these hidden sources in individuals. In our most
private and more subjective lives we are not only the passive witnesses of our
age, and its sufferers, but also its makers. We are our own epoch.” Similarly,
Jim Douglass reminds us of an essential paradox calling out for more
consciousness. “What I found remarkable was that the deeper the darkness, the
greater the hope, because of his and their transforming witness to the truth.
That leaves the question: Are we who hear their story prepared to carry on the
peacemaking and truth-telling? Will we live out the truth as they did? It’s a
hopeful, inviting question.”
—David Ratcliffe, 8 March 2013
John Kennedy was turning. The key to understanding Kennedy’s
presidency, his assassination, and our survival as a species through the Cuban
Missile Crisis is that Kennedy was turning toward peace. The signs of his
turning are the seeds of his assassination.
Marcus Raskin worked in the Kennedy administration as an assistant to National Security Advisor McGeorge Bundy. Not long after theBay
of Pigs , Raskin witnessed an incident in the Oval Office that
tipped him off to Kennedy’s deep aversion to the use of nuclear weapons.
During the president’s meeting with a delegation of governors,New York
Raskin, watching Kennedy closely, was in a position to see what happened next. The president’s hand began to shake uncontrollably.
JFK said simply, “You know we’re not going to do that.”622
But it was the sudden shaking hand that alerted Raskin to Kennedy’s profound uneasiness with nuclear weapons, a mark of conscience that would turn later into a commitment to disarmament. . . .
On the morning ofMay 1, 1962 , President Kennedy met in the Oval Office with
a delegation of Quakers dedicated to a process of total disarmament and world
order. The six members of the Society of Friends who saw the president
represented one thousand Friends who had been vigiling for peace and world
order outside the White House and the State Department during the previous two
days. . . .
The Friends were equally uncompromising with the president when it came to disarmament. While affirming Kennedy’s support for the United Nations, they stressed the need for real steps toward general and complete disarmament. The Arms Control and Disarmament Agency,[A, B, C] they felt, was a disappointment. Its Advisory Board members lacked any past commitment to disarmament.
The president did not argue the point. He had not appointed any pacifists to the board. His appointments were in fact often more conservative that he himself was, as had been the case with Arms Control and Disarmament Agency director William C. Foster, a Republican.[A, B] But his reasoning was, as the Quakers stated in their confidential record of the meeting, “If skeptical people on the board become convinced of the necessity and feasibility of disarmament, you have a better chance [in Congress] than if the Board is made up of people known to have had long time convictions in favor of disarmament.”635
Kennedy said with a smile, “You believe in redemption don’t you?”
He added, “The Pentagon opposes every proposal for disarmament.”636
David Hartsough, at the age of twenty-two the youngest Quaker in the group, said the essence of what Kennedy then told them was: “The military-industrial complex is very strong. If you folks are serious about trying to get our government to take these kinds of steps, you’ve got to get much more organized, to put pressure on the government to move in this direction.”637
The members of the delegation agreed afterward on the striking fact that John Kennedy seemed to feel more boxed in by adversaries near at home than he did by enemies abroad. Henry Cadbury, the group’s elder and a distinguished theologian, saw the president as “frustrated and trapped,” especially by the power of the Pentagon.638
“He seemed to indicate,” Dorothy Hutchinson thought, “that he had gone as far as he can alone.”639 . . .
Kennedy’s dialogue with the Quakers was a hopeful sign of what would come in the last year of his presidency, when he would make a crucial turn toward peace.
From a perspective in the administration working under McGeorge Bundy, Marcus Raskin saw the Cuban Missile Crisis as the event that was the catalyst in JFK’s change. Reflecting decades later on the shift he had seen then in Kennedy’s attitude, Raskin said:
“After the Cuban Missile Crisis, it became clear to him that there had to be a way out of the arms race. He really was frightened, truly frightened of it in ways he understood before, but not in an existential way. I would argue that it was at that moment when very serious discussions began going on internally within the administration.”646
Raskin credits Jerome Wiesner, Kennedy’s science advisor, with playing an important role in this dynamic. Five weeks after the Missile Crisis, onDecember 4, 1962 ,
Wiesner sent Kennedy a memorandum stating that, as Raskin put it, “the McNamara
defense build-up was an unmitigated disaster for the national security of the United
States United States United
States
With the help of Marcus Raskin and JFK Library Archives Technician Sharon Kelly, I found Wiesner’sDecember 4, 1962 , memorandum in the JFK Library’s
National Security Files. Although much of the memorandum remains classified, we
can see in its opening paragraphs why Wiesner’s critique of McNamara would have
convinced Kennedy, for Wiesner takes up McNamara’s own argument on behalf of
the president against the Joint Chiefs’ first-strike policy. However, using
McNamara’s logic, Wiesner says that unfortunately the Defense Secretary’s
actual force recommendations end up playing into the Joint Chiefs’ logic,
thereby heightening Soviet fears of a first-strike—justifiably so. Wiesner
writes:
“There is no question but that the recommended force levels are greatly in excess of those required to maintain a secure deterrent . . . Defense Secretary McNamara’s assertion, with which I am in full agreement, that a really acceptable first-strike posture cannot be achieved, the size and rate of build-up of the recommended force levels could easily be interpreted by the Soviets as an attempt on our part to achieve such a posture. The distinction between a ‘credible first strike’ capability and a strong second strike counterforce capability is very difficult for an enemy with inferior forces to judge . . . I believe that the net effect of the resulting build-up of Soviet missile forces will be an over-all reduction in this country’s security in the years to come.”648
Wiesner’s convincing critique of McNamara left the president significantly to the left of the Defense Secretary, the same man he was relying on to control the Joint Chiefs’ ambitions for a Cold War “victory” that could destroy the world. Kennedy felt he could not afford to veto his loyal but wrong Defense Secretary’s force recommendations simply on the basis of his science advisor’s more astute reading of nuclear strategy. JFK’s position was becoming increasingly untenable. Yet with an insight that went to the heart of the symptoms plaguing his presidency inCuba Vietnam
I know of no evidence that the president ever even referred again to the radical counsel he received from his six Quaker critics, who pushed him to act consistently with his own underlying vision of world order. Yet he in effect adopted the Quaker’s recommendations as a strategy for his goal of ending the Cold War.
To work his way out of the arms race (and free from the kind of dilemma that arose from his science advisor knowing more about nuclear war, even its strategy, than his Defense Secretary), Kennedy decided to create a series of peace initiatives. He began with the American University address, the Partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, National Security Action Memorandum 263 withdrawing U.S. troops from Vietnam, and a covert dialogue with Fidel Castro.
During his final months in office, he went further. Compelled by the near-holocaust of the Missile Crisis, he tried to transcend the government’s (and his own) disastrous Cold War assumptions by taking a visionary stand for general and complete disarmament.
OnMay 6, 1963 ,
President Kennedy issued National
Security Action Memorandum Number 239, ordering his principal national
security advisers to pursue both a nuclear test ban and a policy of general and
complete disarmament. . . .
Marcus Raskin has commented on the meaning of this document: “The President said, ‘Look we’ve really got to figure out how to get out of this arms race. This is just impossible. Give me a plan, the first stage at least of how we’re going to get out of the arms race.’
“This would be a 30% cut of arms. Then move from that stage to the next stage. He was into that. There’s no question about it.”651
In the three paragraphs of NSAM 239, Kennedy uses the phrase “general and complete disarmament” four times—twice in the opening paragraph, once each in the final two paragraphs. It is clearly the central focus of the order he is issuing.
The president’s accompanying, secondary emphasis is on “a nuclear test ban treaty,” which he mentions three times. It is his secondary focus that shows just how strongly he is committed to to NSAM 239’s higher priority, general and complete disarmament. For we know that in the three months after NSAM 239 was issued, JFK concentrated his energy on negotiating a nuclear test ban agreement with Khrushchev, a goal he accomplished.`
General and complete disarmament is the more ambitious project in which he says he wants immediate steps to be taken: “an urgent re-examination of the possibilities of new approaches to significant measures short of general and complete disarmament,” such as the 30 percent cut in arms mentioned by Raskin.
In his American University address the following month, he reiterates: “Our primary long-range interest [in the Geneva talks] is general and complete disarmament—designed to take place by stages, permitting parallel political developments to build the new institutions of peace which would take the place of arms.652
The American University address an the test ban treaty opened the door to the long-range project that was necessary for the survival of humanity in the nuclear age. The test ban treaty was JFK’s critically important way to initiate with Khrushchev the end of the Cold War and their joint leadership in the United Nations for the redemptive process of general and complete disarmament.
In NSAM 239, Kennedy said why he was prepared to pursue such a radical program: “the events of the last two years have increased my concerns for the consequences of an un-checked continuation of the arms race between ourselves and the Soviet bloc.”
Having been shaken and enlightened by the Cuban Missile Crisis, Kennedy had the courage to recognize, as head of the most disastrously armed nation in history, that humanity could not survive the nuclear age unless theUnited States
“You believe in redemption don’t you?” Kennedy said to his Quaker visitors. As usual, his irony told the truth and doubled back on himself. Ted Sorenson observed that when it came to disarmament, “The President underwent a degree of redemption himself.”653
Marcus Raskin worked in the Kennedy administration as an assistant to National Security Advisor McGeorge Bundy. Not long after the
During the president’s meeting with a delegation of governors,
Raskin, watching Kennedy closely, was in a position to see what happened next. The president’s hand began to shake uncontrollably.
JFK said simply, “You know we’re not going to do that.”622
But it was the sudden shaking hand that alerted Raskin to Kennedy’s profound uneasiness with nuclear weapons, a mark of conscience that would turn later into a commitment to disarmament. . . .
On the morning of
The Friends were equally uncompromising with the president when it came to disarmament. While affirming Kennedy’s support for the United Nations, they stressed the need for real steps toward general and complete disarmament. The Arms Control and Disarmament Agency,[A, B, C] they felt, was a disappointment. Its Advisory Board members lacked any past commitment to disarmament.
The president did not argue the point. He had not appointed any pacifists to the board. His appointments were in fact often more conservative that he himself was, as had been the case with Arms Control and Disarmament Agency director William C. Foster, a Republican.[A, B] But his reasoning was, as the Quakers stated in their confidential record of the meeting, “If skeptical people on the board become convinced of the necessity and feasibility of disarmament, you have a better chance [in Congress] than if the Board is made up of people known to have had long time convictions in favor of disarmament.”635
Kennedy said with a smile, “You believe in redemption don’t you?”
He added, “The Pentagon opposes every proposal for disarmament.”636
David Hartsough, at the age of twenty-two the youngest Quaker in the group, said the essence of what Kennedy then told them was: “The military-industrial complex is very strong. If you folks are serious about trying to get our government to take these kinds of steps, you’ve got to get much more organized, to put pressure on the government to move in this direction.”637
The members of the delegation agreed afterward on the striking fact that John Kennedy seemed to feel more boxed in by adversaries near at home than he did by enemies abroad. Henry Cadbury, the group’s elder and a distinguished theologian, saw the president as “frustrated and trapped,” especially by the power of the Pentagon.638
“He seemed to indicate,” Dorothy Hutchinson thought, “that he had gone as far as he can alone.”639 . . .
Kennedy’s dialogue with the Quakers was a hopeful sign of what would come in the last year of his presidency, when he would make a crucial turn toward peace.
From a perspective in the administration working under McGeorge Bundy, Marcus Raskin saw the Cuban Missile Crisis as the event that was the catalyst in JFK’s change. Reflecting decades later on the shift he had seen then in Kennedy’s attitude, Raskin said:
“After the Cuban Missile Crisis, it became clear to him that there had to be a way out of the arms race. He really was frightened, truly frightened of it in ways he understood before, but not in an existential way. I would argue that it was at that moment when very serious discussions began going on internally within the administration.”646
Raskin credits Jerome Wiesner, Kennedy’s science advisor, with playing an important role in this dynamic. Five weeks after the Missile Crisis, on
With the help of Marcus Raskin and JFK Library Archives Technician Sharon Kelly, I found Wiesner’s
“There is no question but that the recommended force levels are greatly in excess of those required to maintain a secure deterrent . . . Defense Secretary McNamara’s assertion, with which I am in full agreement, that a really acceptable first-strike posture cannot be achieved, the size and rate of build-up of the recommended force levels could easily be interpreted by the Soviets as an attempt on our part to achieve such a posture. The distinction between a ‘credible first strike’ capability and a strong second strike counterforce capability is very difficult for an enemy with inferior forces to judge . . . I believe that the net effect of the resulting build-up of Soviet missile forces will be an over-all reduction in this country’s security in the years to come.”648
Wiesner’s convincing critique of McNamara left the president significantly to the left of the Defense Secretary, the same man he was relying on to control the Joint Chiefs’ ambitions for a Cold War “victory” that could destroy the world. Kennedy felt he could not afford to veto his loyal but wrong Defense Secretary’s force recommendations simply on the basis of his science advisor’s more astute reading of nuclear strategy. JFK’s position was becoming increasingly untenable. Yet with an insight that went to the heart of the symptoms plaguing his presidency in
I know of no evidence that the president ever even referred again to the radical counsel he received from his six Quaker critics, who pushed him to act consistently with his own underlying vision of world order. Yet he in effect adopted the Quaker’s recommendations as a strategy for his goal of ending the Cold War.
To work his way out of the arms race (and free from the kind of dilemma that arose from his science advisor knowing more about nuclear war, even its strategy, than his Defense Secretary), Kennedy decided to create a series of peace initiatives. He began with the American University address, the Partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, National Security Action Memorandum 263 withdrawing U.S. troops from Vietnam, and a covert dialogue with Fidel Castro.
During his final months in office, he went further. Compelled by the near-holocaust of the Missile Crisis, he tried to transcend the government’s (and his own) disastrous Cold War assumptions by taking a visionary stand for general and complete disarmament.
On
Marcus Raskin has commented on the meaning of this document: “The President said, ‘Look we’ve really got to figure out how to get out of this arms race. This is just impossible. Give me a plan, the first stage at least of how we’re going to get out of the arms race.’
“This would be a 30% cut of arms. Then move from that stage to the next stage. He was into that. There’s no question about it.”651
In the three paragraphs of NSAM 239, Kennedy uses the phrase “general and complete disarmament” four times—twice in the opening paragraph, once each in the final two paragraphs. It is clearly the central focus of the order he is issuing.
The president’s accompanying, secondary emphasis is on “a nuclear test ban treaty,” which he mentions three times. It is his secondary focus that shows just how strongly he is committed to to NSAM 239’s higher priority, general and complete disarmament. For we know that in the three months after NSAM 239 was issued, JFK concentrated his energy on negotiating a nuclear test ban agreement with Khrushchev, a goal he accomplished.`
General and complete disarmament is the more ambitious project in which he says he wants immediate steps to be taken: “an urgent re-examination of the possibilities of new approaches to significant measures short of general and complete disarmament,” such as the 30 percent cut in arms mentioned by Raskin.
In his American University address the following month, he reiterates: “Our primary long-range interest [in the Geneva talks] is general and complete disarmament—designed to take place by stages, permitting parallel political developments to build the new institutions of peace which would take the place of arms.652
The American University address an the test ban treaty opened the door to the long-range project that was necessary for the survival of humanity in the nuclear age. The test ban treaty was JFK’s critically important way to initiate with Khrushchev the end of the Cold War and their joint leadership in the United Nations for the redemptive process of general and complete disarmament.
In NSAM 239, Kennedy said why he was prepared to pursue such a radical program: “the events of the last two years have increased my concerns for the consequences of an un-checked continuation of the arms race between ourselves and the Soviet bloc.”
Having been shaken and enlightened by the Cuban Missile Crisis, Kennedy had the courage to recognize, as head of the most disastrously armed nation in history, that humanity could not survive the nuclear age unless the
“You believe in redemption don’t you?” Kennedy said to his Quaker visitors. As usual, his irony told the truth and doubled back on himself. Ted Sorenson observed that when it came to disarmament, “The President underwent a degree of redemption himself.”653
“Visit of Six Friends to President
John F. Kennedy on behalf of Friends Witness for World Order, May 1, 1962 ,” p. 3, The Quaker Collection,
Haverford College.
Ibid.
Henry J. Cadbury, “Friends with
Kennedy in the White House,” p. 278, Friendly
Heritage: Letters from the Quaker Past (Norwalk, Conn.: Silvermine
Publishers, 1972)
Marcus Raskin, “JFK and the
Culture of Violence,” American Historical Review(April 1992), p. 497.
Jerome B. Wiesner, Memorandum for
the President, December 4, 1962 .
Papers of President Kennedy, National Security Files, JFK Library.
Public Papers of the Presidents: John F.
Kennedy, 1963 “Commencement
Address at American University in Washington,” June 10, 1963 , p. 463.
—JFK and
the Unspeakable, pp. 320, 321, 323-24, 325-26, 327-28
Copyright © 2008, 2009, 2010 Jim Douglass
Book excerpts reproduced with the permission of Orbis Books.
Book excerpts reproduced with the permission of Orbis Books.
This document is available on the web at:
http://ratical.org/ratville/JFK/Unspeakable/COPA2009.html
http://ratical.org/ratville/JFK/Unspeakable/COPA2009.html
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