John and Jackie Kennedy arrive in Dallas, 22 November 1963. Photograph: Art Rickerby/Time Life Pictures/Getty
There is no more hope to ever see a righteous Kennedy emerge and challenge the U.S. war machine. But the legacy lives on. President John F. Kennedy remains a heroic, almost Christ-like figure, in the heart of a growing community of citizens who have become aware of the disastrous longtime effect of his assassination. He is perhaps the only hero whose public cult could ever redeem the United States.
by Laurent Guyénot
Anybody following closely the recent developments in JFK
research cannot fail to notice that there are basically two kinds of
books on Kennedy’s assassination. (I am only talking of books seriously
engaged in the pursuit of truth, not those defending the Warren
Commission cover-up, such as Vincent Bugliosi’s pitiful Reclaiming History, 2007).Fifty years of investigative work and archive declassification has narrowed down the list of credible suspects: on the one side are books blaming a faction within the Military-Intelligence complex, the most recent and authoritative being: James Douglass, JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He died and Why it Matters (Touchstone, 2008), David Talbot, Brothers: The Hidden History of the Kennedy Years (Simon & Schuster, 2007), and Mark Lane, Last Word: My Indictment of the CIA in the Murder of JFK (Skyhorse Publishing, 2011).
On the other side are books blaming Lyndon Johnson, represented recently by Phillip Nelson, LBJ: The Mastermind of JFK’s Assassination (XLibris, 2010), James Tague, LBJ and the Kennedy Killing, by Assassination Eyewitness (Trine Day, 2013), and Roger Stone, The Man Who Killed Kennedy: The Case Against LBJ (Skyhorse, 2013), just available this month.[i]
I will summarize the arguments of both theses, highlight their
shortcomings and contradictions, and attempt to overcome them by
pointing to an alternative hypothesis.I will contend that these two trails of investigation, if coherently connected, do compliment each other, but not quite as two halves of the truth; rather as two thirds of the truth. The remaining third piece of the puzzle is the really “Unspeakable”.
1. The Military-Intelligence complex
Douglass, Talbot and Lane basically agree with what New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison perceived already in 1968: “President Kennedy was killed for one reason: because he was working for reconciliation with the [Soviet Union] and Castro’s Cuba. […] President Kennedy died because he wanted peace.” The implications drawn by Garrison were frightening: “In a very real and terrifying sense, our government is the CIA and the Pentagon, with Congress reduced to a debating society. […] I’m afraid, based on my experience, that fascism will come to America in the name of National Security.”[ii]
What is commonly called the “National Security State” came to existence in the aftermath of the Second World War. Its birth certificate is the National Security Act of 1947, by which President Truman organized the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) under an appointed Chairman, and established the National Security Council (NSC) to advise him (Eisenhower would later create the position of National Security Adviser to preside over it). The founding texts of this Cold War apparatus are characterized by an alarmist exaggeration of the ambitions and power of the Soviet military, justifying the right of the United States to intervene in the internal affairs of any country, near or far, who by leaning slightly to the left could trigger a “domino effect” and cause the collapse on an entire region under communist influence (the “Truman Doctrine”). The National Security Council report NSC-68 dated April 7th 1950, which had a great influence on the foreign policy of the United States for the following twenty years, asserted that the Kremlin posed a threat capable of the “destruction not only of this Republic but of civilization itself.” Its main author, Paul Nitze, considered a preemptive nuclear attack against the USSR desirable, but impractical, “unless it is demonstrably in the nature of a counter-attack to a blow which is on its way or about to be delivered.” For “the idea of ‘preventive’ war—in the sense of a military attack not provoked by a military attack upon us or our allies—is generally unacceptable to Americans.”[iii] This report thus raises an issue quite different from that of deterrence, the official justification of the atomic arsenal: how to strike first, strong enough to crush the striking power of the enemy, while maintaining an air of self-defense. This question obsessed the Pentagon throughout the Kennedy presidency.
This paranoid militarism was fueled by the arms industry, which formed with the Pentagon what Eisenhower coined the “Military-Industrial complex” in his well-known Farewell Address on January 17, 1961, when he warned the nation that “this conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry” has created “the potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power.”[iv]
Meeting
with the Joint Chiefs of Staff. To the right of the President is
General Curtis LeMay, commander of the U.S. Air Force. Convinced that
nuclear war was inevitable, and the sooner the better, he had only
contempt for what he perceived as Kennedy’s naïve and cowardly pacifism.
For his part, Kennedy was revulsed by his readiness to kill a few
hundred of millions of people in a few hours. “I don’t want that man
near me again,” he would once say to his assistant Charles Daly after
having listened to his argument for preemptive nuclear strikes.[v]
On three continents, the CIA, directed by Allen Dulles, overthrew democratically elected governments and replaced them with dictatorships under U.S. tutelage. Its first major success was in the Middle East, with the 1953 coup against the Iranian Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh, who intended to nationalize the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (AOIC, renamed British Petroleum in 1954); the CIA then flew the Shah Mohammad Pahlavi into Tehran, and proceeded to train his dreaded secret police, the SAVAK.[viii] Around the same time, in Latin America, the CIA oversaw the coup against the elected president of Guatemala Jacobo Arbenz, by a military junta responsible for more than 200,000 civilian deaths from 1954 to 1996. By his plan to redistribute a portion of land to 100,000 poor farmers, Arbenz threatened the interests of the multinational United Fruit Company, the giant banana corporation that held more than 90% of the land. A CIA manual entitled A Study of Assassination, written in 1953 and declassified in 1997, contains detailed instructions on the various methods of murder by weapons, bombs or simulated accidents. In some cases, it is recommended that assassins be “clandestine agents or members of criminal organizations.”[ix]
When Kennedy succeeded Eisenhower in January 1961, the CIA had set a goal to overthrow Fidel Castro in Cuba. Paramilitary training camps were set up in Nicaragua for Cubans who had fled Castro’s revolution, joined by other mercenaries from Latin America. The plan was to land these counter-revolutionaries in Cuba, then send to their aid the U.S. Air Force and Navy under the pretext of supporting a popular uprising, and thereby invade Cuba without ethical controversy—a method of fighting imperialist wars through proxy civil wars, that today rings familiar.
The plan had been supervised by Eisenhower’s Vice-President Nixon, but was postponed until after the 1960 elections, which Nixon was sure to win. When Kennedy was elected, Dulles wasted no time in selling the operation to the new President, assuring him that the invasion by Cuban exiles would be sufficient to trigger a popular uprising. Kennedy agreed, but warned clearly that he would not allow any participation of the U.S. Army—which would amount to an act of war. Dulles was convinced that once put before the impending crisis, the President would concede, as he explained in notes published posthumously: “We felt that when the chips were down—when the crisis arose in reality, any action required for success would be authorized rather than permit the enterprise to fail.”[x] The operation was launched April 15, 1961: a contingent of 1,500 armed Cuban exiles boarded seven boats from the Nicaraguan coast and landed in the Bay of Pigs in Cuba. They were quickly surrounded by Castro’s army and, as expected, called the United States for help. Five U.S. destroyers and aircraft carrier Essex were just less than 2 miles from the Cuban coast. But Kennedy understood that he had been deceived and refused to engage his ships, personally telephoning the captain of the fleet to forbid any movement. About 200 Cuban rebels were killed and 1,300 captured by Castro’s forces. Kennedy took public responsibility for the failure of the operation, but was furious with the CIA: “I want to splinter the CIA in a thousand pieces and scatter it to the winds,” Mike Mansfield heard him say. He started by firing the chief instigators of the operation, the Director Allen Dulles and his two Deputy Directors Charles Cabell and Richard Bissell.[xi]
Cuban
exile Felix Rodriguez, son of a former minister of Batista, was a key
leader in the Bay of Pigs invasion. He later worked under the CIA in
Nicaragua then in Bolivia, where he hunted down Che Guevara. He is here
posing with Che on October 9, 1967, before having him shot (and keeping
his Rolex watch as a trophy). In the 80s, Rodriguez was involved in the
illegal support of the Contras of Nicaragua, for which he had frequent
contacts with Vice-President George H. W. Bush.[xii]
These Cuban patriots are organized around the Cuban Revolutionary Council, which defines itself as the legitimate government to replace that of Castro, and which serves as umbrella organization for many militant groups, financed by American institutions to the tune of $ 2 million per year.
In the summer of 1962, while discussing with friends a political thriller entitled Seven Days in May, Kennedy said that he found this story of a military coup for control of the White House, credible:
“It’s possible. It could happen in this country,” he said, “if, for example, the country had a young President, and he had a ‘Bay of Pigs’.” If this “Bay of Pigs” was followed by one or two other clashes with the generals, he added, “…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 what segment of democracy they would be defending if they overthrew the elected establishment.”[xiii]But the CIA is like a clan united by a code of honor. The remaining members of the management team, almost all recruited by Dulles, remained loyal to their former boss and took a violent resentment toward Kennedy; they would no longer seek Presidential assent and effectively transformed the CIA into a parallel power. The grudge was even stronger among Cuban exiles, a diaspora of nearly one million people concentrated around Miami. The United States is for them a temporary haven and they are not as concerned with the Cold War as with restarting and winning the Cuban civil war. These Cuban patriots are organized around the Cuban Revolutionary Council, which defines itself as the legitimate government to replace that of Castro, and which serves as umbrella organization for many militant groups, financed by American institutions to the tune of $ 2 million per year.
Kennedy did have a couple more “Bay of Pigs”. The second one resulted from the first one, for the failed Bay of Pigs invasion had convinced Fidel Castro to officially declare himself a communist and place his country under the protection of the Soviet Union. In October 1962, the CIA’s U-2 spy planes photographed in Cuba Soviet nuclear warheads pointed at the United States. During a meeting of the National Security Council that lasted 13 days, Kennedy resisted the generals’ vehement requests for an immediate preemptive air strike against the Cuban missiles’ launch sites, an attack that would probably not destroy all missiles before they could be fired, and would amount to a declaration of war against the Soviet Union. Kennedy simply enforced “a strict quarantine on all offensive military equipment under shipment to Cuba,” and instructed his brother Robert to enter into talks with the Soviet Commander in Chief Nikita Khrushchev through his ambassador in Washington Anatoly Dobrynin.[xiv]
According to an account given by Khrushchev’s son, Robert Kennedy’s message was: “If the situation continues much longer, the President is not sure that the military will not overthrow him and seize power. […] The situation might get out of control, with irreversible consequences. […] I don’t know how much longer we can hold out against our generals.” Khrushchev would comment to his Foreign Affairs Minister Andri Gromyko, “We have to let Kennedy know that we want to help him… Yes, help. We now have a common cause, to save the world from those pushing us toward war.” Kennedy and Khrushchev would emerge from the crisis with a secret agreement in which Kennedy promised not to invade Cuba and to dismantle the American missiles in Turkey, in exchange for the withdrawal of Soviet missiles in Cuba.[xv]
Kennedy had thus deprived the Joint Chiefs a historic opportunity to engage with communist powers.
In avoiding disaster the two Heads of State were brought closer; Khrushchev sent Kennedy a private letter in which he expressed his hope that, in the eight years of Kennedy’s presidency,“[they] could create good conditions for peaceful coexistence on earth and this would be highly appreciated by the peoples of [their] countries as well as by all other peoples.”
This was the second letter of their back-channel correspondence, which would include a total of twenty-one. The first had been written by Khrushchev during the Berlin Crisis, September 29, 1961: wrapped in newspaper and discreetly handed to Kennedy’s Press Secretary Pierre Salinger by Georgi Bolshakov, a KGB agent loyal to Khrushchev and operating under the cover of a press editor. Kennedy responded positively to Khrushchev’s proposal to bypass their respective bureaucracies “for a personal, informal but meaningful exchange of views,” that “must be kept wholly private, not be hinted at in public statements, much less disclosed to the press.”[xvi]
Through such secret dialogues, the two men worked cooperatively to avoid catastrophe. “One of the ironic things about this entire situation,” Kennedy commented to journalist Norman Cousins, “is that Mr. Khrushchev and I occupy approximately the same political positions inside our governments. He would like to prevent a nuclear war but is under severe pressure from his hard-line crowd, which interprets every move in that direction as appeasement. I’ve got similar problems.”[xvii]
