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
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  |
|
Introduction
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’s JFK 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. That must have
been a tough job, Jim. He then taught theology at Bellarmine College [now
called Bellarmine University]
in Louisville, Kentucky, the University
of Hawaii, and in the Program for the Study and the Practice of
Nonviolence at the University of Notre Dame.
Jim and
Shelley Douglass helped form
the Ground Zero Center for Nonviolent
Action[3]
alongside the Trident Submarine base in Seattle, Washington. He served a year
and a half in jail for acts of civil disobedience at the Trident base. The
Douglass’s and Ground Zero developed an extended community in 250 towns and
villages and cities, vigiling by the railroad tracks of the Trident nuclear
weapons shipments.
In September of ’89 they moved to
Birmingham, Alabama. From Birmingham he has taken part in a series of peace
making journeys to the Middle East and peace walks through Israel, the West
Bank, and Jordan, and five visits to Iraq. In ’93 the Douglass’ founded Mary’s House, a Catholic Worker house of hospitality in Birmingham
for homeless families.[4]
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
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, and more significantly of
Washington, can be the most hopeful experience of our lives.
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 on 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. agencies,
coordinated by the CIA, was that they be, as the document says, “so planned and executed that . . . if uncovered the US
government can plausibly disclaim any responsibility for them.”[12]
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. government responsibility for criminal activities on an ever-widening
scale.
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 the CIA has been functioning that is casting a shadow over our historic position and I feel that we need to correct it. [14]
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, with immunity from its lethal power granted to
U.S. citizens. That assumption proved to be wrong.
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 and Nagasaki in
order to stop a Soviet advance to Japan. Truman’s further, post-war decision
for U.S. nuclear dominance in the world rather than allowing for
international control of nuclear weapons was his second disastrous mistake,
in terms of initiating the nuclear arms race in the world and subverting
democracy in the 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. 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?
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. These words were spoken by him after the 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 third Bay 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]
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. combat forces. He had been lied to in such a way that in order to “win”
at the Bay of Pigs, he would be forced to send in U.S. troops.
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
across the Pacific, deliberately trying to provoke the Soviets in a way that
could justify our superior U.S. forces blanketing the USSR with an all-out
nuclear attack.
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, and ultimately the 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:
LeMay: “This [blockade and
political action] is almost as bad as the appeasement [of Hitler] at Munich.
. . . I think that a blockade, and political talk, would be considered by a
lot of our friends and neutrals as bein’ a pretty weak response to this. And
I’m sure a lot of our own citizens would feel that way too.
“In other words, you’re in a pretty bad fix at the present time.” Kennedy: “What did you say?” LeMay: “I say, you’re in a pretty bad fix.” 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. The president then leaves the room but the tape keeps on
recording. Two or three of the generals remain, and one [Shoup] says to
LeMay,
[Shoup:] “You pulled the rug right out from under him.”
LeMay: “Jesus Christ. What the hell do you mean?” [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 coming from both
the Joint Chiefs and the Executive Committee of the National Security
Council. At the same time, John Kennedy and Nikita Khrushchev, the two men
most responsible for the Cuban Missile Crisis, seemed locked in a hopeless
ideological conflict. The U.S. and Soviet leaders had been following Cold War
policies that now seemed to be moving inexorably toward a war of
extermination.
Yet, as we have since learned, Kennedy and Khrushchev had been
engaged in a secret correspondence for over a year that gave signs of hope.
Even as they moved publicly step by step toward a Cold War climax that would
almost take the world over the edge with them, they were at the same time
smuggling confidential letters back and forth that recognized each other’s
humanity and hope for a solution. They were public enemies who, in the midst
of deepening turmoil, were secretly learning something approaching trust in
each other.
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. Let’s not try to distinguish who are the clean and the
unclean on this Ark Mr. President. We’re in a sea of nuclear weapons. Let’s
just keep the Ark afloat.’
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. He talks about the beauty there and says, ‘Yes, Mr. Chairman,
Noah’ Ark – that’s our symbol. We have to keep the Ark afloat.’[29]
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,
intensifying the already overwhelming pressures on Kennedy to bomb Cuba, the
president sent his brother, Attorney General Robert Kennedy, secretly to
Soviet Ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin. RFK told Dobrynin, as
Dobrynin reported to Khrushchev, that the president “didn’t know how to
resolve the situation. The military is putting great pressure on him . . .
Even if he doesn’t want or desire a war, something irreversible could occur
against his will. That is why the President is asking for help to solve this
problem.”[30]
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, he turned to his Foreign
Minister, Andrei Gromyko and said, “We have to let Kennedy know that we want
to help him.”
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 and his secret promise to
withdraw U.S. missiles from Turkey – as he would in fact do.
By the way, I was in Rome, Italy
at this time. I didn’t know, of course, the secret pledge that Kennedy had
given to Khrushchev or that he would in fact withdraw his missiles from
Turkey. So I wrote an article for Dorothy
Day’s Catholic Workernewspaper – the most radical Catholic paper in
the country if not in existence – and proposed what I thought was outrageous
(and Dorothy published it right away), that what we should do is in exchange
for Khrushchev withdrawing the missiles from Cuba, Kennedy should have had
the guts to withdraw his missiles from 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
on 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 address.[35]
It was a decisive signal to both Nikita Khrushchev, on the one hand, and
JFK’s national security advisers, on the other, that he was serious about
making peace with the Communists. After he told the graduating class at
American University that the subject of his speech was “the most important
topic on earth: world peace,” he asked:
“What kind of peace do I mean?
What kind of peace do we seek?” He answered, “Nota 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 attitude [toward peace] is as
essential as theirs.” What about our attitude toward war and the nuclear arms
race?[37]
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. He wants to go to Moscow. He doesn’t trust,
trying to negotiate a nuclear test ban treaty in Washington. He says I want
to go to Moscow, in their capitol, not ours, as soon as possible.
So to clear the way for such a
treaty what does he do? He said he was suspending U.S.
atmospheric tests unilaterally. He is doing unilateral renunciation of his
testing before anything with Khrushchev.[38]
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. government statements, published the entire speech all across the
country. Soviet radio stations broadcast and rebroadcast the speech to the
Soviet people. In response to Kennedy’s turn toward peace, the Soviet
government even stopped jamming all Western broadcasts into their country.
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 would produce
agreement on a test ban treaty or anything else.”[40]
In contrast to the Soviet media that were electrified by the speech, the U.S.
media ignored or downplayed it (as they’re done to the present). For the
first time, Americans had less opportunity to read and hear their president’s
words than did the Russian people. A turn-around was occurring in the world
on different levels. Whereas nuclear disarmament had suddenly become
feasible, Kennedy’s position in his own government had become precarious.
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. Every time Averell Harriman
had a question from the Soviet negotiators, he said, ‘Excuse me please.’ He
ran to a telephone and he ran back with the answer. The telephone was
directly to Kennedy. Kennedy negotiated that treaty point
by point, personally, right straight through. That’s why it happened in six
weeks.[41]
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 had proposed, and was willing to sign, a Limited Test
Ban treaty. Today that treaty has been signed. It will not put an end to war.
It will not remove basic conflicts. It will not secure freedom for all. But
it can be a lever, and Archimedes, in explaining the principles of the lever,
was said to have declared to his friends: “Give me a place where I can stand
and I shall move the world.”
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, he went back with a conviction, I’ve got to
deal with this man. I’ve learned. And at that point Kennedy is reaching out
to Castro. This is an incredible kind of underground communication that’s
going on while in the midst of the United Nations they’re condemning each
other and shaking their fists and so forth.
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 to the White House to see Kennedy and then he went
from there directly to Cuba to see Castro. Kennedy gave him questions and
concerns to share with Castro.
When Daniel was in Cuba he thought
he wouldn’t even get a chance to see Castro because Castro was overwhelmed
with stuff. All of a sudden Castro appeared at his hotel and he sat up with
him all night asking him to repeat, time after time after time again exactly
what Kennedy had said. Then they had several subsequent meetings.
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 magazine by Jean Daniel and it’s as if historians
never knew this existed. The whole thing was out there [three] weeks after
these events took place and Jean Daniel reported what Kennedy had said, what
Castro had said – the whole shebang.[50]
On October
11, 1963, President Kennedy issued
a top-secret order to begin withdrawing the U.S. military from Vietnam.
In National
Security Action Memorandum 263, he ordered that 1,000 U.S. military
personnel be withdrawn from Vietnam by the end of 1963, and that the bulk of
U.S. personnel be taken out by the end of 1965.[51]
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, it was not only John Kennedy who
was murdered on 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
conflicts with his national security state before a possible coup. What about
six?
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.
troops from 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 about his presidency, and would have
dire consequences. As interpreted by the most powerful people in the nation,
the steel crisis was a logical prelude to Dallas. It was a seventh Bay of
Pigs.
An
eighth Bay of Pigs was Kennedy’s diplomatic opening to the fiery third-world
leadership of President Sukarno of Indonesia. Historians never mention
this. Sukarno was “the most outspoken proponent
of 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, in 1955.”[54] The 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. president resolved what seemed a hopeless conflict
between Indonesia and its former colonial master, the Netherlands, averting a
war. To the 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 would have
dramatized in a very visible way Kennedy’s support of Third World
nationalism, a sea change in U.S. government policy. That decision to visit
Sukarno was an eighth Bay of Pigs.
Kennedy’s Indonesian policy was
also killed in Dallas, with horrendous consequences. After Lyndon Johnson
became president, the 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. and the 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] speech that John [Judge] was quoting.
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, Kennedy acted as if
he already knew about Khrushchev’s hopeful change of heart on that critical
issue. JFK was already telling NASA to begin work
on a joint U.S.-Soviet lunar mission. On 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
and the USSR in outer space, including cooperation in lunar landing
programs.”[60]
That further visionary step to end the Cold War also died with President
Kennedy. As you know, the U.S. went to the moon alone. U.S. and Soviet
rockets continued to be pointed at their opposite countries rather than being
joined in a project for a more hopeful future. Sergei Khrushchev said, “I
think if Kennedy had lived, we would be living in a completely different
world.”[61]
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 offer its surplus food to the
People’s Republic of China. China was considered an enemy nation. Yet it was
also one whose people were beset by a famine.
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 lobby in Washington to accomplish that.[64]
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 at the height of the Cold War.
Vice President
Lyndon Johnson said he thought
Kennedy’s decision to sell wheat to Russia would turn out to be “the worst
political mistake he ever made.”[65]
Today JFK’s controversial decision “to feed the enemy” has been forgotten,
It’s been wiped out. In 1963, the wheat sale was seen as a threat to our
security: feeding the enemy to kill us. Yet JFK went ahead with it, as one
more initiative for peace.
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 to Dallas. He pointed it out to Jacqueline Kennedy, and he
talked about the possibility of his being assassinated that very day.
“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 in
particular.[68]
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, “This is the night I should go to the theater.” Robert replied, “If
you go, I want to go with you.”[69]
Kennedy prepared himself for the
same end Lincoln met during his night at the theater – he prepared for
it. Late at night on the June 5, 1961, plane
flight back to Washington from his Vienna meeting with Nikita Khrushchev, a
very weary President Kennedy wrote down on a slip of paper, as he was about
to fall asleep, a favorite saying of his from Abraham Lincoln – it was really
a prayer. Presidential secretary Evelyn Lincoln discovered the slip of paper
on the floor. On it she read the words: “I know there is a God and I see a
storm coming. If he has a place for me, I believe that I am ready.”[70]
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 after their honeymoon.[72]
She memorized the poem, and recited it back to him over the years. In the
fall of 1963, Jackie taught the words of the poem to their five-year-old
daughter, Caroline.
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]
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 and one in
Washington. When he issued his [encyclical letter, Pacem
in Terris (“Peace on Earth”), published on April 11, 1963, centering
on the principles of mutual trust and cooperation with an ideological
opponent] – he was dying at the time, he had cancer. And they knew he was
dying – especially Khrushchev.
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 is, who? Khrushchev.
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. when Kennedy went
out west on a so-called conservation tour, he’s talking about conservation
and he mentioned that the Test Ban Treaty had just been passed. Everybody
stood up in Salt Lake City, no liberal center, and gave him a standing
ovation for ten minutes. What’s going on here?
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 together
for four years and we graduated in the same class, 1960. I liked him. He
liked me I, think.
Q: Did you send him your book?
JD: I did. I did send Leon a copy.
I haven’t seen Leon Panetta since 1960, let me be clear. I’m not going to
destroy his security clearance with what I say [laughter]. When he was
selected as the director of the CIA a mutual friend of ours at the Resource Center for Nonviolence in Santa Cruz,
called me – he was a good friend of Leon’s – and said he wanted to give him
and Sylvia, Leon’s wife, the book. So he said ‘Will you inscribe it for him?’
So I did. And he gave it to Sylvia Panetta for her and 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.
He’s supposed to be taking orders and here he is lobbying for 60,000 more
American troops. Obama had actually told him, according to this article last
August that he didn’t want him to make that recommendation. And McChrystal
not only makes the recommendation, he goes public with it.
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. Before he became a President
of the United States they knew – I’m talking about the Central Intelligence
Agency in particular – they knew he was a supporter of third world
nationalism. That was a major, major theme in his campaign. No historian
writes about this.
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 Lumumbawas
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 whywas 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 who was sympathetic to Patrice Lumumba.
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, these people in these certain positions, they don’t just do
what you say you want them to do. And Obama, of course, has that problem too.
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.’ Kennedy says, ‘Oh. Alright.’ Right away he negotiates a
peace.
I didn’t even include that
one. That could have been a first Bay of Pigs right
around the Bay of Pigs. He’s negotiating peace with the Communists
in Laos for a neutralist government. There is all
kinds of stuff that has been wiped out of the history that we have.[81]
Thank you.
John Judge: Thanks for sharing.
Complete text of the American
University Speech is available at ratical.org/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.
An indication of the yearning for
peace people in the U.S. had following the terrifying days of the Cuban
missile crisis was that the first occurrence of applause in Kennedy’s speech
was his announcement in the following that “high-level discussions will
shortly begin in Moscow looking towards early agreement on a comprehensive
test ban treaty.” Kennedy began the next sentence, “Our hope must be
tempered” and had to pause for 8 seconds to let the audience applause subside
before continuing. Applause caused the President to pause a second time
(again for 8 seconds) after stating in the following paragraph that the U.S.
“does not propose to conduct nuclear tests in the atmosphere so long as other
states do not do so.” (First at 22:04 and second at 22:37 min:sec in the audio and
video recordings provided with the transcript of JFK’s address.)
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 in Moscow looking towards early agreement on a comprehensive test ban treaty. Our hope must be tempered – Our hopes must be tempered with the caution of history – but with our hopes go the hopes of all mankind. Second: To make clear our good faith and solemn convictions on this matter, I now declare that the United States does not propose to conduct nuclear tests in the atmosphere so long as other states do not do so. We will not – We will not be the first to resume. Such a declaration is no substitute for a formal binding treaty, but I hope it will help us achieve one. Nor would such a treaty be a substitute for disarmament, but I hope it will help us achieve it.
Copyright © 2008, 2009, 2010 Jim
Douglass
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