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
QUOTE
Having said that, you will learn something many useful things from Douglass’ 2009 speech.
UNQUOTE
– Robert Morrow 7-7-2022
“You believe in redemption don’t you?”
John F. Kennedy
May 1, 1962
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. (inserted by Bill Kelly)] The doctrine of
plausible deniability allowed for the assassination of a president seen as a
national security risk himself.
The CIA’s “plausible deniability” for crimes
of state, as exemplified by JFK’s murder, corresponds in our politics to what
the Trappist monk and spiritual writer Thomas Merton[17] called “the Unspeakable.”
Merton wrote about the unspeakable in the 1960’s, when an elusive, systemic
evil was running rampant through this country and the world. The Vietnam War,
the escalating nuclear arms race, and the interlocking murders of John Kennedy,
Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, and Robert Kennedy were all signs of the
unspeakable.
For Merton, the unspeakable was ultimately a
void, an emptiness of any meaning, an abyss of lies and deception. He wrote the
following description of the unspeakable shortly after the publication of The Warren Report, which
he could have been describing. He said, “[The Unspeakable] is the void that
contradicts everything that is spoken even before the words are said; the void
that gets into the language of public and official declarations at the very
moment when they are pronounced, and makes them ring dead with the hollowness
of the abyss.”[18]
The void of the unspeakable is the dark
abyss. It’s the midnight reality of plausible deniability that we face when we
peer into our national security state’s murder of President Kennedy. And that,
I believe, is precisely where hope begins.
Why President Kennedy was murdered can be, I believe, a profound
source of hope to us all, when we truly understand his story.
Now how can that possibly be? The why of his
murder as a source of hope?
Let’s begin with the way Kennedy himself
looked at the question.
One summer weekend in 1962 while he was out sailing with friends,
President Kennedy was asked what he thought of Seven Days in May, a
best-selling novel that described a military takeover in the United States. JFK
said he would read the book. As you know he was a very fast reader. He came
back the next day and said, yes, he’d read it. And then he discussed with his
friends the possibility of their seeing just such a coup in the United States.
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.
JFK Alienates The CIA And The Military
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.
Kennedy And Khruschev:
Two Enemies Become Peacemakers
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 footnote 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:
“Yes,
help. We now have a common cause, to save the world from
those pushing us toward war.”[33]
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 Worker newspaper
– 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, “Not a
Pax Americana enforced on the world by American weapons of war.”
Kennedy’s
rejection of “a Pax Americana enforced on the world by American weapons of war”
was an act of resistance to the military-industrial complex. The military-industrial complex was totally dependent on “a Pax
Americana enforced on the world by American weapons of war.” That Pax
Americana, policed by the Pentagon, was considered the system’s indispensable,
hugely profitable means of containing and defeating Communism. At his own risk
Kennedy was rejecting the very foundation of the Cold War system.
In its place, as a foundation for
peace, the president put [forward] a compassionate
description of the suffering of the enemy, the Russian people. They had been
our allies during World War Two and had suffered mightily.[36] Yet even their World War
Two devastation he said, would be small compared to the effects of a nuclear
war on both their country and ours.
In his speech, Kennedy turned around the
question – I heard this question all the time in the 1960s, every time in the
peace movement we tried to suggest alternatives – that question that was always asked when it
came to prospects for peace was, “What about the Russians?” It was assumed the
Russians would take advantage of any move we might make toward peace.
Kennedy
asked instead, “What about us?” He said, “[O]ur 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]
JFK’s Top-Secret Order
To Begin Withdrawal From Vietnam
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?
1. The Bay of Pigs;
2. The Cuban Missile Crisis;
3. American University Address;
4. Nuclear Test Ban Treaty;
5. the beginning of the back-channel
dialogue with Fidel Castro;
6. 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.
JFK Reaches Out To The Third World
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]
Kennedy’s Proposal For
A Joint U.S.-Soviet Moon Landing
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.
Giving Thanks For A Peacemaker
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
Lumumba was not assassinated after Kennedy became
president. Although Seymour Hersch says so in his book. He is absolutely
wrong.[79]
Patrice
Lumumba was assassinated days before Kennedy became President. And why was
he assassinated at that time? So that he would not be imprisoned at a time when
a man would become President of the United States 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.
Notes
Starting with No.10 below, endnote citations from JFK and The Unspeakable begin with
“page X, fnY.” indicating page X in the book where the quote (in this Address) or detail occurs and fnY being
the endnote itself. Hyperlinks to most book titles go to WorldCat.org,
“the world’s largest network of library content and services. WorldCat
libraries are dedicated to providing access to their resources on the Web,
where most people start their search for information.” These links were
accessed from the greater Boston area. Enter your zip or postal code (e.g.
43017 or S7K-5X2), City and/or state (e.g. Cincinnati, Ohio or Ohio or OH),
Province: (e.g. Ontario or ON), Country: (e.g. United States or United
Kingdom), or Latitude Longitude (e.g. 40.266000,-83.219250) to see listings of
libraries where you live. Where possible book title links reference the precise
edition cited in JFK and The Unspeakable. Where such editions could
not be found, alternate versions are linked to.
- Oliver Stone, “JFK and the Unspeakable,” The
Huffington Post, 23 July 2009 ↩
- See The Catholic Worker Movement on the
internet as well pages on Wikipedia and Dorothy Day–Catholic Worker Collection at
Marquette University. ↩
- Ground Zero Center For Nonviolent Action offers
the opportunity to explore the meaning and practice of nonviolence from a
perspective of deep spiritual reflection. Providing a means for witnessing
to and resisting all nuclear weapons. Address: 16159 Clear Creek Road NW,
Poulsbo, WA 98370 ↩
- From the Diocese of Birmingham in Alabama - Directory:
Mary’s House - The Catholic Worker House of Hospitality
2107 Avenue G
Birmingham, AL 35218
Contact: Shelley Douglass
205-780-2020
Email: shelleyd9 [at] juno [dot] com
↩ - The Nonviolent Cross: A Theology of Revolution and
Peace (2nd edition, Wipf & Stock, 2006).
Read the Foreward by Ched Meyers. ↩
- Resistance and Contemplation: The Way of Liberation (2nd edition, Wipf & Stock, 2006). ↩
- Lightning East to West: Jesus, Gandhi, and the
Nuclear Age (2nd edition, Wipf & Stock, 2006). ↩
- The Nonviolent Coming of God (2nd edition, Wipf & Stock, 2006). ↩
- See description of the Special Group 10/2 and its
descendant, the Special Group 5412 or 5412/2, as explained by Col. L.
Fletcher Prouty (USAF, ret.) in “The Forty Committee,” Genesis,
February, 1975, pp.28, 105-108; and “Appendix C, NSC 5412, ‘National Security
Council Directive on Covert Operations’,” from David Ratcliffe, Understanding Special Operations and Their Impact on
the Vietnam War Era, 1989 Interview with L. Fletcher Prouty,
Colonel USAF (Retired), (rat haus reality press, 1999), pp. 330-32.
See also: Document 292. National Security Council Directive on Office of Special Projects – NSC 10/2 from Foreign Relationsof the United States, 1945-1950, Retrospective Volume, Emergence of the Intelligence Establishment, (Washington: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1996).
↩ - page 381, fn1. ↩
Peter Grose, Gentleman Spy: The Life of Allen Dulles (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1994), p. 293. - The text in square braces above is included as it
appears in the Afterword of the 2010 Simon & Schuster paperback edition of JFK
and the Unspeakable, p. 381. ↩
- page 33, fn133-35. ↩
cited by Grose, Gentleman Spy, p. 293. - page 381, fn3. ↩
Grose, Gentleman Spy, p. 293. - Harry S. Truman, “Limit CIA Role to Intelligence,” Washington
Post, December 22, 1963, p. A11. ↩
- page 332, fn679-680. ↩
Excerpt of page 332 follows, with endnotes 679 and 680 following the text.
...President Truman restated his radical critique of the CIA in a letter
written six months after the Washington Post article.679 The managing editor of Look magazine
had sent Truman the latest Look featuring a piece on the CIA.
Truman wrote back:
“Thank you for the copy of Look with
the article on the Central Intelligence Agency. It is, I regret to say, not
true to the facts in many respects.
“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.”680
- Letter from Harry S. Truman to William B. Arthur,
June 10, 1964. Off the Record: The Private Papers of Harry S.
Truman, edited by Robert H. Ferell (New York: Harper &
Row, 1980), p. 408. I am grateful to Tim Murphy for pointing out this
letter to me.
- Ibid. President Truman had either forgotten or was
avoiding the fact that his National Security Council on June 18, 1948,
approved top-secret directive NSC 10/2. U.S. intelligence agencies were
thereby authorized to engage in ”propaganda, economic warfare, preventive
direct action including sabotage, anti-sabotage, demolition and
evacuation measures; subversion against hostile states including
assistance to underground resistance movements, guerrillas, and refugee
liberation groups.” Peter Grose, Gentleman Spy: The Life of Allen Dulles (New
York: Houghton Mifflin, 1994), p. 293. NSC 10/2 was the secret foundation
for the enormous buildup of the CIA’s “strange activities” that so
alarmed Truman in December 1963.
See Also: endnote 9, above.
↩
- Hear/See Audio and Text representations of Eisenhower’s
Farewell Address ↩
- ↩ Thomas Merton, a contemplative monk in
the Abbey of Gethsemani in Kentucky, was an early mentor to and
correspondent with Jim Douglass. See Thomas
Merton’s Life and Work, from the Thomas Merton
Center at Bellarmine University. From this Center is
available Merton’s Correspondence with: Douglass, James
William, 1937- as well as a complete List
of those in correspondence with Merton. On pages 17-20 of JFK and The Unspeakable Douglass
writes how
Merton was being blocked from publishing his thoughts on nuclear war by
his monastic superiors. Merton, like Kennedy, decided to find another way. The
words pouring out of Merton’s typewriter were spilling over from unpublished
manuscripts into his Cold War letters....
On December 31, 1961, Merton wrote a letter
anticipating the Cuban Missile Crisis ten months later. It was addressed to
Clare Boothe Luce, the wife of Time-Life-Fortune owner Henry
Luce, a Cold War media baron whose editorial policies demonized the communist
enemy. Clare Boothe Luce, celebrated speaker, writer, and diplomat, shared
Henry Luce’s Cold War theology. In 1975 Clare Boothe Luce would lead
investigators into the JFK assassination, working for the House Select
Committee on Assassinations (HSCA), on a time-consuming wild goose chase based
on disinformation. HSCA analyst Gaeton Fonzi discovered that Luce at the time
was on the board of directors of the CIA-sponsored Association of Former
Intelligence Officers.67 Even in the
early sixties, Merton with his extraordinary sensitivity may have suspected
Luce’s intelligence connections. In any case he knew her as one of the
wealthiest, most influential women in the world, with a decidedly
anti-communist mind-set. He welcomed her, as he did one and all, into his
circle of correspondents.
In his New Year’s Eve letter to Clare Boothe Luce,
Merton said he thought the next year would be momentous. “Though ‘all manner of
things shall be well,’” he wrote, “we cannot help but be aware, on the
threshold of 1962, that we have enormous responsibilities and tasks of which we
are perhaps no longer capable. Our sudden, unbalanced, top-heavy rush into
technological mastery,” Merton saw, had now made us servants of our own weapons
of war. “Our weapons dictate what we are to do. They force us into awful
corners. They give us our living, they sustain our economy, they bolster up our
politicians, they sell our mass media, in short we live by them. But if they
continue to rule us we will also most surely die by them.”68
Merton was a cloistered monk who watched no television
and saw only an occasional newspaper. However, he had far-flung correspondents
and spiritual antennae that were always on the alert. He could thus identify in
his letter to Clare Boothe Luce the strategic nuclear issue that would bring
humanity to the brink in October 1962: “For [our weapons] have now made it
plain that they are the friends of the ‘preemptive strike’. They are most
advantageous to those who use them first. And consequently nobody wants to be
too late in using them second. Hence the weapons keep us in a state of fury and
desperation, with our fingers poised over the button and our eyes glued on the
radar screen. You know what happens when you keep your eye fixed on something.
You begin to see things that aren’t there. It is very possible that in 1962 the
weapons will tell someone that there has been long enough waiting, and he will
obey, and we will all have had it.”69
“We have to be articulate and sane,” Merton concluded,
“and speak wisely on every occasion where we can speak, and to those who are
willing to listen. That is why for one I speak to you,” he said hopefully to
Luce. “We have to try to some extent to preserve the sanity of this nation, and
keep it from going berserk which will be its destruction, and ours, and perhaps
also the destruction of Christendom.”70
As Merton challenged the Cold War dogmas of Clare
Boothe Luce, he was raising similar questions of conscience to another
powerfully situated woman, Ethel Kennedy. This was the period in which Merton
still had little confidence in John Kennedy. He was nevertheless beginning to
catch glimpses of a man who, like himself, was deeply troubled by the
prevailing Cold War atmosphere. He began a December 1961 letter to Ethel
Kennedy by noting a parallel between JFK’s and his own thinking: “I liked very
much the President’s speech at Seattle which
encouraged me a bit as I had just written something along those same lines.”71 Merton was
referring to John Kennedy’s rejection, like his own, of the false alternatives
“Red or dead” in a speech the president gave at the University of Washington in
November 1961. Kennedy had said of this false dilemma and those who chose
either side of it: “It is a curious fact that each of these extreme opposites
resembles the other. Each believes that we have only two choices: appeasement
or war, suicide or surrender, humiliation or holocaust, to be either Red or
dead.”72
Merton made an extended analysis of the same Cold War
cliché, “Red or dead,” in the book his monastic superiors blocked from
publication, Peace in the Post-Christian Era. There he observed:
“We strive to soothe our madness by intoning more and more vacuous cliches. And
at such times, far from being as innocuous as they are absurd, empty slogans
take on a dreadful power.”73
The slogan he and Kennedy saw exemplifying such
emptiness had begun in Germany in the form, “Better Red than dead.” “It was
deftly fielded on the first bounce by the Americans,” Merton said, “and came
back in reverse, thus acquiring an air of challenge and defiance. ‘Better dead
than Red’ was a reply to effete and decadent cynicism. It was a condemnation of
‘appeasement’. (Anything short of a nuclear attack on Russia rates as
‘appeasement’.)”
What the heroic emptiness of “Better dead than Red”
ignored was “the real bravery of patient, humble, persevering labor to effect,
step by step, through honest negotiation, a gradual understanding that can
eventually relieve tensions and bring about some agreement upon which serious
disarmament measures can be based”74—precisely what he
hoped Ethel Kennedy’s brother-in-law would do from the White House. In his
letter to her, Merton therefore went on to praise John Kennedy, yet did so
while encouraging him to break through Cold War propaganda and speak the truth:
“I think that the fact that the President works overtime at trying to get
people to face the situation as it really is may be the greatest thing he is
doing. Certainly our basic need is for truth, and not for ‘images’ and slogans
that ‘engineer consent.’ We are living in a dream world. We do not know ourselves
or our adversaries. We are myths to ourselves and they are myths to us. And we
are secretly persuaded that we can shoot it out like the sheriffs on TV. This
is not reality and the President can do a tremendous amount to get people to
see the facts, more than any single person.”75
With inclusive language that did not single out JFK,
but again with heavy implications for the president, Merton continued: “We
cannot go on indefinitely relying on the kind of provisional framework of a
balance of terror. If as Christians we were more certain of our duty, it might
put us in a very tight spot politically but it would also merit for us special
graces from God, and these we need badly.”76
Merton was praying that Christians in particular—and a
particular Christian, John Kennedy—would become more certain of their duty to
take a stand against nuclear terror, which would place JFK especially “in a
very tight spot politically.” Besides praying, Merton was doing more than
writing words of protest on the backs of envelopes. He was appealing to the
president, through Ethel Kennedy, for a courageous stand in conscience. Whether
or not JFK ever read Merton’s graceful letter to his sister-in-law, he would
soon have to respond, in October 1962, to “special graces from God” if humanity
were to survive.
- Gaeton Fonzi, The Last Investigation (New
York: Thunder’s Mouth, 1994), pp. 53-59.
- Thomas Merton, Cold War Letters, (Maryknoll, N.Y.:
Orbis Books, 2006), p. 43.
- Ibid.
- Ibid., p. 44.
- Ibid., p. 26.
- Public Papers of the Presidents: John F. Kennedy,
1961, “Address in Seattle at the University of
Washington’s 100th Anniversary Program,” November 16, 1961
(Washington: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1962), p. 726.
- Thomas Merton, Peace in the Post-Christian Era (Maryknoll,
N.Y.: Orbis Books, 2004), PP. 121-22.
- Ibid., p. 122.
- Merton, Cold War Letters, p. 29.
- Ibid.
From the dust jacket of Peace in the Post-Christian Era:
Publisher description: “Substitute ‘war on terrorism’ for ‘war on
communism’ and Merton’s insights continue to challenge our culture of war and
ourselves to become Gospel people of peace and nonviolence. This book stands at
the heart of the Merton canon ... Read it and take up where Merton left
off-questioning the culture, denouncing war and nuclear weapons, taking risks
for the truth, pointing the way to peace, and discovering anew how to be
Christian in these post-Christian times.” John Dear, author, Living Peace.
Writing at the height of the Cold War, Merton issued a passionate cry for
sanity and a challenge to the idea that unthinkable violence can be squared
with the Gospel of Christ. Censors of Merton’s order blocked publication of
this work, but forty years later, despite changing circumstances, his prophetic
message remains eerily topical. At a time when the “war on terrorism” has
replaced the struggle against communism, Merton’s work continues to demonstrate
the power and relevance of the Gospel in answering the most urgent challenges
of our time.
- page 382, fn5. ↩
Thomas Merton, Raids on the Unspeakable (New York: New Directions, 1966), p. 4.
Douglass also includes this quote in the Introduction on page xv where it is preceded by the following:
“One of the awful facts of our age,” Merton wrote in 1965, “is the
evidence that [the world] is stricken indeed, stricken to the very core of its
being by the presence of the Unspeakable.” The Vietnam War, the race to a
global war, and the interlocking murders of John Kennedy, Malcolm X, Martin
Luther King, and Robert Kennedy were all signs of the Unspeakable. It remains
deeply present in our world. As Merton warned, “Those who are at present so
eager to be reconciled with the world at any price must take care not to be
reconciled with it under this particular aspect: as the nest of the
Unspeakable. This is what too few are willing to see.” [Merton’s emphasis]
When we become more deeply human, as Merton understood
the process, the wellspring of our compassion moves us to confront the
Unspeakable. Merton was pointing to a kind of systemic evil that defies speech.
- page 13, fn36. ↩
Paul B. Fay, Jr. The Pleasure of His Company (New York: Dell, 1966), pp. 162-163.
In The Pleasure of His Company author Paul Fay writes the following leading up to the quote Jim Douglass begins with on page 162:
The fiasco in Cuba raised strong doubts in his mind about the
intelligence and judgement of some of the top military men.
“Looking back on that whole Cuban mess, one of the
things that appalled me the most was the lack of broad judgement by some of the
heads of the military services,” he said one day. “When you think of the long
competitive selection process that they have to weather to end up the number
one man of their particular service, it is certainly not unreasonable to expect
that they would also be bright, with good broad judgment. For years I’ve been
looking at those rows of ribbons and those four stars, and conceding a certain
higher qualification not obtained in civilian life. Well, if ------- and
------- are the best the services can produce, a lot more attention is going to
be given their advice in the future before any action is taken as a result of
it. They wanted to fight and probably calculated that if we committed ourselves
part way and started to lose, I would give the okay to pour in whatever was
needed. I found out among other things that when it comes to making decisions I
want facts more than advice. As good old Harry Truman put it, ‘the buck stops
right here.’ I can see now why McNamara wants to get some new faces over there
in the Pentagon.”
Between the Bay of Pigs and the Cuban missile crisis,
Fletcher Knebel and Charles W. Bailey, II brought out a book, Seven Days In May, which explored the
possibility of a takeover by the military in this country. Mrs. John R. Fell,
an old friend of the Kennedys, had read an advance copy of the book and had
recommended it to the President one summer weekend in 1962, during an afternoon
sail on the Honey Fitz.
“I’d be interested to see if you agree that such a
situation could develop in this country,” she said.
“Fletch sent me a copy but I haven’t gotten around to
reading it,” the President said. “I’ll read it tonight and let you know.”
We were out on the Honey Fitz again
the next day, and the President said he had read Seven Days In May the
previous night. He discussed the possibility of such a military takeover very
calmly:
Fletcher Knebel and Charles W Bailey, Seven Days In May (New York: N.Y.:
Harper & Row, 1962). ↩
- page 14, fn48. ↩
Kenneth P. O’Donnell and Dave F. Powers with Joe McCarthy, Johnny, We Hardly Knew Ye; Memories of John Fitzgerald Kennedy (Boston: Little Brown, 1970), p. 274. - page 15, fn56. ↩
Tom Wicker, John W. Finney, Max Frankel, E. W. Kenworthy, “C.I.A.: Maker of Policy, Or Tool? Survey Finds Widely Feared Agency is Tightly Controlled,” New York Times (April 25, 1966), p. 20.
A local photocopy of this article (1.3 MB) was found in The Harold Weisberg Archive by searching on the string (including quotes): “C.I.A.: Maker of Policy, Or Tool?” and comes up as the first result. - page 16, fn59. ↩
Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., A Thousand Days, John F. Kennedy In The White House (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1965), p. 428. - page 15-16, fn58. ↩
On pages 15-16 of JFK and The Unspeakable Douglass writes how
In his short presidency, Kennedy began to take steps to deal with the
CIA. He tried to redefine the CIA's mandate and to reduce its power in his
National Security Action Memoranda (NSAMs) 55 and 57, which took military-type
operations out of the hands of the CIA. Kennedy's NSAM 55 informed the Joint
Chiefs of Staff that it was they (not the CIA) who were his principal military
advisers in peacetime as well as wartime. Air Force Colonel L. Fletcher Prouty,
who at the time was in charge of providing military support for the CIA's
clandestine operations, described the impact of NSAM 55 addressed to General
Lyman Lemnitzer, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs:
“I can't overemphasize the shock – not simply the words
– that procedure caused in Washington: to the Secretary of State, to the
Secretary of Defense, and particularly to the Director of Central Intelligence.
Because Allen Dulles, who was still the Director, had just lived through the
shambles of the Bay of Pigs and now he finds out that what Kennedy does as a
result of all this is to say that, ‘you, General Lemnitzer, are to be my
Advisor’. In other words, I'm not going to depend on Allen Dulles and the CIA.
Historians have glossed over that or don't know about it.”58
- David T. Ratcliffe, Understanding Special Operations: 1989 Interview
with L. Fletcher Prouty (Santa Cruz, CA: rathaus
reality press, 1999), pp. 170-71.
- pages 370-71,
fn869-879. ↩
An instance of the hatred people in the Cuban exile community felt and did not forget regarding John and Robert Kennedy is described in JFK and The Unspeakable on pages 370-71:
On Thursday, November 21, as John and Jacqueline
Kennedy were arriving on Air Force One in Houston to begin their Texas tour,
Wayne January was at Red Bird Air Field in Dallas preparing a DC-3 aircraft for
flight. In this narrative, we have already encountered January, who the day before
had refused to charter a flight for November 22 to a suspicious young couple,
accompanied by a man January later identified as Lee Harvey Oswald.
Wayne January was working on the DC-3 all day Thursday
with the pilot who was scheduled to fly it out of Dallas on Friday afternoon.869 It was their
third day on the job. Working together on a project they both enjoyed –
preparing an extraordinary machine for flight – the two men had become friends.
Wayne had also become curious about the background of his friend, who said he
had been born in Cuba, though Wayne could detect no trace of an accent. The man
said he had been in the Cuban Air Force, where he achieved a high rank.870
Except for his work with January, the pilot kept
totally to himself, refusing Wayne’s invitations to eat out with him. The pilot
confined himself to eating sandwiches with Wayne by the plane.871
Wayne became more curious. He asked the pilot about the
well-dressed man who had bought the plane from a company January co-owned. The
man had carried out the transaction with January’s partner by phone. The buyer
had made only one appearance at the airfield, when he came with the pilot on
Monday.
The pilot described his boss as “an Air Force colonel
who deals with planes of this category.”872 The colonel had
bought the plane on behalf of a company known as the “Houston Air Center.”
January would learn later that the Houston Air Center was a front for the CIA.873 As revealed by
the plane’s archived papers, the aircraft had originally been a troop transport
version of the DC-3, also known as a C-47, made in the Second World War and
sold by the government to a private airline after the war.874 It was now
being sold back to the government for use as a covert CIA aircraft.
As Wayne and the pilot continued talking during their
lunch break Thursday, Wayne suddenly found himself in a twilight zone, learning
more about secret government operations than he ever wanted to know. The moment
of transition came after a pause in their conversation. The other man sat
leaning against a wheel of the plane, eating his sandwich. He was silent for a
time, mulling over something in his mind.
Then he looked up and said, “Wayne, they are going to
kill your president.”875
As Wayne January described this scene three decades
later in a remarkable faxed letter to British author Matthew Smith, he tried to
convey his utter incomprehension of the man’s words. When Wayne asked the pilot
what he meant, the man repeated, “They are going to kill your president.”
Wayne stared at him.
“You mean President Kennedy?”
The man said yes. While Wayne kept trying to make sense
of his words, his co-worker revealed that he had been a pilot for the CIA. He
was with the CIA in the planning of the Bay of Pigs. When many of his friends
died there, the planners and survivors of the operation bitterly blamed John
and Robert Kennedy for not providing the air cover the CIA claimed they had
promised.
Wayne asked if that was why he thought they were going
to kill the president.
The man said, “They are not only going to kill the
President, they are going to kill Robert Kennedy and any other Kennedy who gets
into that position.”876
Wayne thought he was beginning to catch on. His friend
had gone off the deep end. Wayne tried to say so in a polite, circumspect way.
The pilot looked at him. “You will see,” he said.
The two men went back to work. They were behind
schedule, with less than twenty-four hours left to complete their task. “My
boss wants to return to Florida,” the pilot said. There was room in the plane
for more passengers than his boss. Wayne and the pilot were reinstalling
twenty-five seats in it.877 The DC-3 had to
be ready to take off from Dallas by early afternoon the next day, Friday,
November 22.
In the course of their work, the pilot made another
memorable remark. “They want Robert Kennedy real bad,” he said.
“But what for?” Wayne asked.
“Never mind,” the man said, “You don’t need to know.”878
Thanks to the two men’s joint efforts, they succeeded
in having the plane ready to go early Friday afternoon. By 12:30 P.M., all the
DC-3 lacked was fuel-and whoever would soon get aboard it to depart from
Dallas.
As they finished up their work, there was a commotion
by the terminal. A police car took off at high speed. Wondering what was up,
Wayne walked back to the terminal building. The driver of a passing car slowed
down and shouted at him, “The President has been shot!”
Wayne went into the building. He listened to a radio
until he heard the announcement that President John F. Kennedy was dead.
He walked back to the DC-3. It had received its fuel.
The pilot was putting luggage on the plane. Wayne asked him if he had heard
what had happened. Without pausing from his loading, the pilot said he had, the
man on the fuel truck had told him.
Then he said, “It’s all going to happen just like I
told you.”879
Wayne said goodbye to the pilot. With a sense of
profound sickness, he left work to find a television set where he could watch
the news of the president’s assassination unfold.
- Matthew Smith, Vendetta: The Kennedys (Edinburgh:
Mainstream, 1993), p. 119.
- Faxed letter from Wayne January to Matthew Smith, December 27, 1992. I am
grateful to Matthew Smith for sharing with me his faxed correspondence
from Wayne January.
- Ibid.
- Ibid.
- Working with Matthew Smith in 1993, Wayne January used his air craft
expertise to trace the DC-3 he and the pilot had worked on, whose FAA
registration number he remembered. He had personally flown the plane over
four thousand hours and readily recalled its number. January was
dumbfounded when the Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association (AOPA)
reported back to him that there was no such plane. He insisted that AOPA
archivists double-check their files. They finally discovered that after
the DC-3 had been bought at Red Bird Air Field, “the number had been
changed and the original number given to a small aircraft.” Faxed letter
from Wayne January to Matthew Smith, February 3, 1993. Also Matthew
Smith, Say Goodbye to America: The Sensational and Untold
Story behind the Assassination of John F. Kennedy (Edinburgh:
Mainstream Publishing, 2001), p. 167.
When Smith queried retired Air Force colonel Fletcher Prouty, former liaison between the Air Force and the CIA, on this development, Prouty said that aircraft numbers were never changed, except by the CIA. The CIA had apparently bought the plane.
January’s partner had sold the plane to the Houston Air Center, which did not register the plane until 1965 when it was about to resell it. A Houston investigator, who had once worked for the CIA, identified the Houston Air Center as a CIA front, confirming Fletcher Prouty’s analysis that the DC-3 had become a CIA aircraft upon its purchase at Red Bird Air Field. When the DC-3 flew out of Dallas the afternoon of November 22, 1963, with an undisclosed number of passengers, it was a CIA plane being flown by a CIA pilot. Ibid. - Research on the plane sold by Wayne January to the Houston Air Center
was done by Larry Hancock and reported in his book Someone Would Have Talked: Documented! The
Assassination of John F. Kennedy and the Conspiracy to Mislead History (Southlake,
Tex.: JFK Lancer, 2006), p. 256.
- January to Smith, December 27, 1 992.
- Smith, Vendetta, p. 120.
- Smith, Say Goodbye, p. 165.
- Smith, Vendetta, p. 121.
- Ibid.
- page 22, fn85. ↩
Sheldon M. Stern, Averting “The Final Failure”: John F. Kennedy and the Secret Cuban Missile Crisis Meetings (Stanford, Calif., Stanford University Press, 2003), pp. 123, 126.
From the dust jacket of this book:
The Cuban missile crisis was the most dangerous confrontation of the
Cold War and the most perilous moment in human history. Sheldon M. Stern,
longtime historian at the John F. Kennedy Library, here presents a
comprehensive narrative account of the secret ExComm meetings, making the
inside story of the missile crisis completely understandable to general readers
for the first time. The author’s narrative version of these discussions is
entirely new; it provides readers with a running commentary on the issues and
options discussed and enables them, as never before, to follow specific themes
and the role of individual participants. The narrative highlights key moments
of stress, doubt, decision, and resolution – and even humor – and makes the
meetings comprehensible both to readers who lived through the crisis and to
those too young to remember the Cold War. Stern argues that President Kennedy
and his administration bore some of the responsibility for the crisis because
of covert operations in Cuba, including efforts to kill Fidel Castro. Yet he
demonstrates that JFK, though a seasoned Cold Warrior in public, was deeply
suspicious of military solutions to political problems and appalled by the prospects
of nuclear war. The President consistently steered policy makers away from an
apocalyptic nuclear conflict, measuring each move and countermove with an eye
toward averting what he called, with stark eloquence, “the final failure.”
Previously published transcripts of the secret ExComm meetings are often dense
and impenetrable for everyone but the specialist. They also reflect the flaws
in the tapes themselves, such as rambling, repetitive exchanges, overlapping
conversations, and frustrating background noises. This narrative, on the
contrary, concentrates on the essentials and eliminates these peripherals. As
Robert Dallek notes in his Foreword, Stern’s work “will become the starting
point for all future work on President Kennedy’s response to the Soviet challenge
in Cuba.”
Regarding these transcripts, Jim Douglass
writes in endnote 83 on pages 399-400,
In 1997 Ernest R. May and Philip D. Zelikow edited and published
transcripts of the Cuban Missile Crisis tapes in their book The Kennedy Tapes (Cambridge, Mass.:
Harvard University Press, 1997). In 2000 the accuracy of their transcripts was
challenged in two articles by Sheldon M. Stern, historian at the JFK Library from
1977 to 1999: “What JFK Really Said,” Atlantic
Monthly 285 (May 2000): pp. 122-28, and “Source Material”: The 1997 Published Transcripts of the
JFK Cuban Missile Crisis Tapes: Too Good to Be True? Presidential
Studies Quarterly 30 (September 2000): pp. 586-93. When Zelikow, May,
and Timothy Naftali brought out a revised set of missile crisis
transcripts, The Presidential Recordings: John F. Kennedy: Volumes
1-3, The Great Crises (New York: W.W. Norton, 2001), Stern
critiqued their revision for further inaccuracies in his article, “The JFK Tapes: Round Two,” Reviews in
American History 30 (2002): pp. 680-88. Sheldon M. Stern has written a
comprehensive narrative account of the missile crisis deliberations of
President Kennedy and the Executive Committee of the National Security Council
(ExComm), citing his own transcripts of the tapes, Averting the “The Final Failure,”. My
citations of the tapes are taken from Averting “The Final Failure.”
- page 22, fn87. ↩
Ibid. p. 129. - From JFK and The Unspeakable, p. 23
(includes fn90): ↩
In July 1993, the U.S. State Department, in response to a Freedom of
Information Act request by a Canadian newspaper, declassified twenty-one secret
letters between John F. Kennedy and Nikita Khrushchev.90
- Paul Wells, “Private Letters Shed Light on Cold
War,” Montreal Gazette (July 24, 1993), p. A1. The
private letters between Kennedy and Khrushchev, known as the “Pen Pal
Correspondence,” were published with the Cold War leaders’ more formal
public letters in the State Department volume Foreign Relations of the United States [FRUS],
1961-1963, Volume VI: Kennedy-Khrushchev Exchanges (Washington:
U.S. Government Printing Office, 1996).
- ↩ Khrushchev’s first private letter to JFK
was sent on September 29, 1961 during the Berlin crisis. In 1996 all the
private correspondence between JFK and Khrushchev was published in FRUS, 1961-1963, Volume VI, Kennedy-Khrushchev
Exchanges (Washington: U.S. Government Printing Office).
The Kennedy-Khrushchev Exchanges: Document List contains
120 communications, of which 21 make up the secret letters between JFK and
Khrushchev. It is not entirely clear precisely which of the 120 make up
the subset of 21 private communications. Here is a list of what probably
constitutes the bulk of the private missives:
o Document 21: Letter From Chairman Khrushchev to President
Kennedy,
Moscow, September 29, 1961
o Document 22: Letter From President Kennedy to Chairman
Khrushchev,
Hyannis Port, October 16, 1961
o Document 23: Letter From Chairman Khrushchev to President
Kennedy,
Moscow, November 9, 1961
o Document 24: Letter From Chairman Khrushchev to President
Kennedy,
Moscow, November 10, 1961
o Document 25: Letter From President Kennedy to Chairman
Khrushchev,
Washington, November 16, 1961
o Document 26: Letter From President Kennedy to Chairman
Khrushchev,
Washington, December 2, 1961
o Document 27: Letter From Chairman Khrushchev to President
Kennedy,
Moscow, December 13, 1961
o Document 32: Letter From Chairman Khrushchev to President
Kennedy,
Moscow, February 10, 1962
o Document 34: Letter From President Kennedy to Chairman
Khrushchev,
Washington, February 15, 1962
o Document 37: Letter From Chairman Khrushchev to President
Kennedy,
Moscow, February 21, 1962
o Document 42: Letter From Chairman Khrushchev to President
Kennedy,
Moscow, March 10, 1962
o Document 51: Letter From President Kennedy to Chairman
Khrushchev,
Washington, July 17, 1962
o Document 71: Letter From Chairman Khrushchev to President
Kennedy,
Moscow, October 30, 1962
o Document 82: Letter From Chairman Khrushchev to President
Kennedy,
Moscow, November 22, 1962
o Document 84: Letter From President Kennedy to Chairman
Khrushchev,
Washington, December 14, 1962
o Document 85: Letter From Chairman Khrushchev to President
Kennedy,
Moscow, December 19, 1962
o Document 99: Letter From Chairman Khrushchev to President
Kennedy,
Moscow, May 8, 1963
This remarkable correspondence was initiated by Khrushchev less than four
months after the summit meeting between him and JFK in Vienna on June 3-4 which
had ended with a sense of foreboding, as Douglass describes in JFK and The Unspeakable on page 12:
The summit meeting with Khrushchev had deeply disturbed Kennedy. The
revelation of a storm coming had occurred at the end of the meeting, as the two
men faced each other across a table. Kennedy’s gift to Khrushchev, a model of
the USS Constitution, lay between them. Kennedy pointed out that
the ship’s cannons had been able to fire half a mile and a kill a few people.
But if he and Khrushchev failed to negotiate peace, the two of them could kill
seventy million people in the opening exchange of a nuclear war. Kennedy looked
at Khrushchev. Khrushchev gave him a blank stare, as if to say, “So what?”
Kennedy was shocked at what he felt was his counterpart’s lack of response.
“There was no area of accommodation with him,” he said later.
The “So what?” attitude Khrushchev expressed in June 1961 had clearly
been transformed by September when he initiated a private correspondence that
made a deeper communication and understanding possible between these two human
beings.
↩
- page 25, fn96. ↩
Kennedy’s wrote his first letter back to Khrushchev on October 16, 1961. FRUS 1961-1963, vol. VI, pp. 38-39. - page 174, fn3. ↩
Sergei N. Khrushchev, Nikita Khrushchev and the Creation of a Superpower (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University, 2000), p. 618-619.
From the dust jacket of this book:
More is known about Nikita Khrushchev than about many former Soviet
leaders, partly because of his own efforts to communicate through speeches,
interviews, and memoirs. (A partial version of his memoirs was published in
three volumes in 1970, 1974, and 1990, and a complete version was published in
Russia in 1999 and will appear in an English translation to be published by
Penn State Press.) But even with the opening of party and state archives in
1991, as William Taubman points out in his Foreword, many questions remain
unanswered. In this book Sergei tells the story of how the Cold War happened in
reality from the Russian side, not from the American side, and this is his most
important contribution.
- page 174-75,
fn4. ↩
Khrushchev Remembers, ed. Edward Crankshaw (Boston: Little Brown, 1970), p. 498. - page 175, fn5. ↩
S. Khrushchev, Nikita Khrushchev, p. 622. - p. 174, fn2. ↩
S. Khrushchev, Nikita Khrushchev, p. 630. - page 31, fn125. ↩
Norman Cousins, The Improbable Triumvirate: John F. Kennedy, Pope John, Nikita Khrushchev (New York: W. W. Norton, 1972), p. 9. - 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 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.
- page 46, fn174. ↩
Schlesinger, A Thousand Days, p.904. - page 46, fn176. ↩
Max Frankel, “Harriman to Lead Test-Ban Mission to Soviet [Union] in July,” New York Times (June 12, 1963), p.1 - Watch, listen to, read the transcript of Radio and Television Address to the American People
by President Kennedy on the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, July 26, 1963,
broadcast the day after “[n]egotiations were concluded in Moscow on a
treaty to ban all nuclear tests in the atmosphere, in outer space, and
under water.” ↩
- page 52, fn210. ↩
Cousins, The Improbable Triumvirate, pp. 128-29. - page 54, fn220. ↩
Theodore C. Sorenson, Kennedy (New York: Konecky & Konecky, 1965), p. 740. - page 177, fn13. ↩
Public Papers of the Presidents: John F. Kennedy, 1963, p. 698. Text of speech: Address Before the 18th General Assembly of the United Nations, September 20 1963 - page 70, fn89. ↩
FRUS, 1961-1963, Volume XI, Cuban Missile Crisis and Aftermath, October 1962-December 1963 (Washington: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1997), p. 880.
This is from Document 374. Memorandum From William Attwood to Gordon Chase of the National Security Council Staff, New York, November 8, 1963. - page 67, fn72. ↩
Nikita Khrushchev’s January 31, 1963 Letter to Fidel Castro; Laurence Chang and Peter Kornbluh, editors, The Cuban Missile Crisis, 1962 (New York: New Press, 1992), p. 319.
Khrushchev’s first letter to Fidel Castro opens with the following:
Our train is crossing the fields and forests of
Soviet Byelorussia and it occurs to me how wonderful it would be if you could
see, on a sunny day like this, the ground covered with snow and the forest
silvery with frost.
Perhaps you, a southern man, have seen this only in
paintings. It must surely be fairly difficult for you to imagine the ground
carpeted with snow and the forests covered with white frost. It would be good
if you could visit our country each season of the year; every one of them,
spring, summer, fall, and winter, has its delights.
- page 67, fn71. ↩
Fidel Castro, Address to the Tripartite Conference on the Cuban Missile Crisis, January 11, 1992; Chang and Kornbluh, The Cuban Missile Crisis, 1962, p. 343.
Castro describes the letter in passing and that it was 31 pages in James G. Blight, Bruce J. Allyn, and David A. Welch, Cuba on the Brink, Castro, the Missile Crisis, and the Soviet Collapse, (Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Maryland, 2002), p. 222. - page 68, fn76-77. ↩
76. S. Khrushchev, Nikita Khrushchev and the Creation of a Superpower, p. 659.
77. Castro’s January 11, 1992, Address, Chang and Kornbluh, Cuban Missile Crisis, p. 344. - page 90, fn176. ↩
Jean Daniel, “When Castro Heard The News,“ New Republic (December 7, 1963), p. 7. - pages 72-74, fn105-09; pages 86-89, fn166-71. ↩
Jean Daniel, “Unofficial Envoy: An Historic Report From Two Capitals,” New Republic (December 14, 1963), p. 15-20.
See Also: “Kennedy Sought Dialogue with Cuba – Initiative With Castro Aborted by Assassination, Declassified Documents Show,” The National Security Archive, November 24, 2003. - page 188, fn74. ↩
Foreign Relations of the United States, 1961-1963, Volume IV: August-December 1963 (Washington, U.S. Government Printing Office, 1991), pp.395-396. - page 188, fn73. ↩
O’Donnell and Powers, Johnny, We Hardly Knew Ye (Boston: Little Brown, 1970), p. 17. - page 137-42, fn35. ↩
“Steel: The Ides of April,” Fortune (May 1962), p. 98.
See “Fortune’s Warning To President Kennedy: Beware The Ides of April” with the complete 1962 Editorial and an excerpt from JFK and the Unspeakable. - page 375, fn897. ↩
Gerard Colby with Charlotte Dennett, Thy Will Be Done: The Conquest of the Amazon: Nelson Rockefeller and Evangelism in the Age of Oil (New York: HarperCollins, 1995), pp. 364, 369. - pages 258-59, fn221-23. ↩
Richard Bissel, cited in Evan Thomas, The Very Best Men: Four Who Dared: The Early Years of the CIA (New York: Touchstone, 1995), pp. 232-33.
In 1958 Allen Dulles appointed Richard Bissel to be the CIA’s Deputy Director for Plans (DDP). The DDP was responsible for what became known as the CIA’s Black Operations. An aspect of Bissel“s world view is expressed in the following from pages 258-259 of JFK and The Unspeakable.
Kennedy’s openness to Sukarno and the nonaligned
movement he represented once again placed the president in direct conflict with
the Central Intelligence Agency. The CIA’s Deputy Director of Plans, Richard
Bissel, wrote to Kennedy’s National Security Advisor, McGeorge Bundy, in March
1961:
“Indonesia’s growing vulnerability to communism stems
from the distinctive bias of Sukarno’s global orientation, as well as from his
domestic policies . . . That his dictatorship may possibly endure as
long as he lives strikes us as the crux of the Indonesian problem.”221
The CIA wanted Sukarno dead, and what the agency saw as
his pro-communist “global orientation” obliterated. Still justifying the CIA’s
assassination efforts in an interview long after his retirement, Richard Bissel
put Congo leader Patrice Lumumba and Sukarno in the same disposable category:
“Lumumba and Sukarno were two of the worst people in public life I’ve ever
heard of. They were mad dogs . . . I believed they were dangerous to the United
States.222
Assassination plots against such men, Bissel conceded,
may at times have shown “bad judgement,” but only when they were unsuccessful.
He insisted that plotting to kill such “mad dogs” was “not bad morality.” He
regretted only that certain CIA assassination plots had failed and become
public.223
- “Memorandum From the Deputy Director for Plans,
Central Intelligence Agency (Bissel) to the President’s Special Assistant
for National Security Affaris (Bundy),” March 27, 1961, FRUS 1961-1963, vol. XXIII, p. 329 (emphasis added).
- Richard Bissel, cited in Evan Thomas, The
Very Best Men, pp. 232-33.
- Ibid., p233.
- page 258,
fn219. ↩
FRUS, 1961-1963, Volume XXIII, Southeast Asia (Washington: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1995), p. 695. - pages 376-377, fn902-916. ↩
The endnotes listed above on pages 376-77 of JFK and The Unspeakable present background on the fate of President Sukarno. One portion of this is included below occurring near the bottom of page 376:
In October 1965, the enemy that Sukarno had
learned to fear most, the CIA, finally succeeded in toppling his government.
Ralph W. McGehee, a CIA agent for 25 years, has summarized in his book, Deadly
Deceits, the CIA’s elimination in 1965-66 of both the government of Sukarno
and the Communist Party of Indonesia that was represented in it:
“The Agency seized this opportunity [of a failed
October 1965 coup attempt by junior Indonesian military officers] to overthrow
Sukarno and to destroy the Communist Party of Indonesia (PKI), which had three
million members. As I wrote in The Nation, ‘Estimates of the number
of deaths that occurred as a result of this CIA [one word deleted by the CIA,
which censored McGehee’s article] operation run from one-half million to more
than one million people.’”909
- Ralph W. McGehee, Deadly Deceits: My 25 Years in the CIA (New
York: Sheridan Square Publications, 1983), p. 57. One sentence cited from
article by Ralph W. McGehee, “Foreign Policy By Forgery: The C.I.A. and
the White Paper on El Salvador,” The Nation (April 11,
1981), pp. 423-34 (with deletions by the CIA). McGehee also noted in
his Nation article, as then cited in his book on pp.
57-58:
“Initially, the Indonesian Army left the P.K.I. [Communist Party of Indonesia] alone, since it had not been involved in the coup attempt. [Eight sentences deleted here by the CIA.] Subsequently, however, Indonesian military leaders [seven words deleted by the CIA] began a bloody extermination campaign. In mid-November 1965, General Suharto formally authorized the ‘cleaning out’ of the Indonesian Communist Party and established special teams to supervise the mass killings. Media fabrications played a key role in stirring up popular resentment against the P.K.I. Photographs of the bodies of the dead generals [who had been killed in the failed coup] – badly decomposed – were featured in all the newspapers and on television. Stories accompanying the pictures falsely claimed that the generals had been castrated and their eyes gouged out by Communist women. This cynically manufactured campaign was designed to foment public anger against the Communists and set the stage for a massacre . . . To conceal its role in the massacre of those innocent people the C.I.A., in 1968, concocted a false account of what happened (later published by the Agency as a book, Indonesia–1965: The Coup that Backfired) . . . At the same time that the Agency wrote the book, it also composed a secret study of what really happened. [One sentence deleted by the CIA.] The Agency was extremely proud of its successful [one word deleted by the CIA] and recommended it as a model for future operations [one-half sentence deleted by the CIA].” - page xxii. ↩
On September 25, 1961 President Kennedy delivered a speech on disarmament at the United Nations in which he states, “The weapons of war must be abolished before they abolish us . . . It is therefore our intention to challenge the Soviet Union, not to an arms race, but to a peace race – to advance together step by step, stage by stage, until general and complete disarmament has been achieved. We invite them now to go beyond agreement in principle to reach agreement on actual plans.” JFK Address at U.N. General Assembly, 25 September 1961.
See film and text transcript at the JFK Library. - page 383, fn8-9. ↩
8. Jim Douglass’ interview with Sergei N. Khrushchev, November 15, 2009.
9. S. Khrushchev, Nikita Khrushchev and the Creation of a Superpower, p. 696. - page 383-84, fn10. ↩
National Security Action Memorandum Number 271: “Cooperation With the USSR on Outer Space Matters,” November 12, 1963. - page 384, fn11. ↩
Frank Sietzen, “Soviets Planned to Accept JFK’s Joint Lunar Mission Offer,” SPACEWAR (October 2, 1997), p. 3. In my November 15, 2009 interview with him, Sergei Khrushchev said he thought that if Kennedy had lived, and if he and Nikita Khrushchev had stayed in power for another five-plus years, the two leaders would have ended the Cold War by 1969. - pages 321-24, fn629-645. ↩
- “Visit of Six Friends to President John F. Kennedy
on behalf of Friends Witness for World Order, May 1, 1962,” The Quaker Collection, Haverford College.
- Henry J. Cadbury, “Friends with Kennedy in the
White House,” Friendly Heritage: Letters from the Quaker Past (Norwalk,
Conn.: Silvermine Publishers, 1972)
- The Religious Society of Friends website reads:
QUAKERS: RELIGIOUS WITNESSES FOR PEACE SINCE 1660 www.quakers.org ↩
- pages 323, fn634. ↩
E. Raymond Wilson, Uphill for Peace: Quaker Impact on Congress (Richmond, Ind.: Friends United Press, 1975), p. 79. - pages 328, fn654. ↩
O’Donnell and Powers, “Johnny We Hardly Knew Ye,” p. 381. - pages 369, fn865. ↩
“WELCOME MR. KENNEDY,” Commission Exhibit No. 1031, Warren Report, p. 294. - pages 369, fn867. ↩
O’Donnell and Powers, “Johnny We Hardly Knew Ye,” p. 25.
Immediately following this quote on page 369 the author writes in JFK and The Unspeakable:
“You know,” he said, “last night would have been
a hell of a night to assassinate a president.” He paused.
“I mean it. There was the rain, and the night, and we
were all getting jostled. Suppose a man had a pistol in a briefcase.” Kennedy
pointed his right hand like a pistol at the wall, moving his thumb as the
hammer. “Then he could have dropped the gun and the briefcase, and melted away
in the crowd.”869
In two subliminal scenes, JFK had sketched the
assassinations of both himself that same day in Dealey Plaza and of another
president (in the making) four and a half years later, his brother, Bobby, the
night he would get jostled by the crowd in the pantry of the Ambassador Hotel
in Los Angeles.
- William Manchester, The Death of a President (New
York: Harper & Row, Popular Library, 1967), p. 37.
- page 224, fn14. ↩
Ralph G. Martin, A Hero For Our Time: An Intimate Story of the Kennedy Years (New York: Ballantine Books, 1983), p. 500. - page 224, fn15. ↩
Robert F. Kennedy, Thirteen Days: A Memoir of the Cuban Missile Crisis (New York, Signet, 1969), p. 110. - page 224, fn16. ↩
Evelyn Lincoln, My Twelve Years With John F. Kennedy (New York: Bantam Books, 1966), p. 230.
Immediately following this quote on page 224 the author writes in JFK and The Unspeakable:
Kennedy loved that prayer. He cited it at the annual presidential prayer
breakfast on March 1, 1962,17 and again in a speech in Frankfurt, Germany, on June 25, 1963.18
- T. S. Settel, editor, The Faith of JFK (New York: E.
P. Dutton, 1965), p. 92.
- Nicholas A. Schneider, Religious Views of President John F. Kennedy (St.
Louis: B. Herder, 1965), p. 99.
- page 225-26,
fn20. ↩
Geoffrey Perret, Jack: A Life Like No Other (New York: Random House, 2001), p. 197. - page 226, fn21. ↩
Ibid. - page 225-26, fn22. ↩
The formal title of Alan Seeger’s most famous poem seems to have been “Rendezvous,” as it is identified at http://www.english.emory.edu/LostPoets/Seeger.html. However, in The Oxford Book of American Verse, Seeger’s poem is titled by its refrain, “I have a Rendezvous with Death.” The Oxford Book of American Verse, chosen and edited by Bliss Carman (New York: Oxford University Press, 1927), pp. 624-25. - page 226, fn23. ↩
Richard D. Mahoney interview of Samuel D. Belk III. Richard D. Mahoney, Sons & Brothers: The Days of Jack and Bobby Kennedy (New York: Arcade, 1999) p. 281. - ↩ The following, from pages 267-268 and
454-455 of JFK and The Unspeakable reveals
the level of power and control exercised by specific units of authority
within the U.S. Government to cover-up how the assassination of President
Kennedy was carried out.
Ed
Hoffman had witnessed a critically important scene in the
assassination scenario. The “suit man,” who tossed the rifle to the “railroad
man” for rapid disposal, had been equipped beforehand with a powerful means of
identification. His just showing it at the murder scene, with the smell of
gunpowder still in the air, had so reassured a suspicious police officer, Joe
Marshall Smith, that he immediately put his gun away and let the suspect go
without detaining or questioning him.269 The man, whose
credentials passed him off as a Secret Service agent, was in fact a methodical
assassin in an orchestrated killing of the president. Moments before, as
Hoffman had seen, the documented “Secret Service agent” had fired his rifle at
President Kennedy before tossing it to an assistant. Thus, the assassins were
not only well prepared to identify themselves as government agents. They also
seemed confident that they would not be exposed from their bold use of Secret
Service credentials to assure their escape. They were right. The Warren
Commission went out of its way to ignore the obvious evidence of Secret Service
imposters at a source of the shots.
As we learned from Secret Service agent Abraham
Bolden, the Secret Service took the extraordinary step of withdrawing and
replacing all of its agents’ commission books a month and a half following the
assassination, moving Bolden to suspect that Secret Service identification had
been used as a cover by the assassins of President Kennedy. Officer Joe
Marshall Smith, who was familiar with Secret Service credentials, said he had
confronted a man behind the fence at the top of the grassy knoll who showed him
such credentials. That raises the question: What was the source of the Secret
Service identification displayed by JFK’s assassins?
In June 2007, in response to a fifteen-year-old
Freedom of Information Act request, the CIA finally declassified its “Family Jewels” report. Buried in the
702-page collection of documents was a memorandum written by Sidney Gottlieb,
chief of the CIA’s Technical Services Division (TSD). Gottlieb was the
notorious designer of the CIA’s contaminated skin diving suit intended in the
spring of 1963 for the assassination of Castro, the scapegoating of Kennedy,
and the destruction of an incipient Cuban-American rapprochement.
In his secret May 8, 1973, CIA memorandum, Sidney
Gottlieb stated that “Over the years” his Technical Services Division
“furnished this [Secret] Service” with “gate passes, security passes, passes
for presidential campaign, emblems for presidential vehicles; a secure ID photo
system.”270 The Secret
Service supposedly received its identifying documents from the Bureau of Engraving
and Printing, as Abraham Bolden said it did in the replacement of its agents’
commission books in January 1964.271 Since the
Bureau of Engraving and Printing is, like the Secret Service, a part of the
Treasury Department, it is reasonable in terms of in-house security and
accessibility that it – and especially not the CIA – would provide the Secret
Service commission books. Yet here is the CIA’s Sidney Gottlieb acknowledging
that “over the years” his Technical Services Division “furnished” such
identification to the Secret Service – identification that could just as easily
have been given at any time, as might prove useful, to CIA operatives using a
Secret Service cover. The source was the same.
There is a certain criminal consistency between
Gottlieb’s having prepared a poisoned diving suit meant for Castro’s murder and
his perhaps having furnished as well the Secret Service credentials used by the
assassins on the grassy knoll. However, Gottlieb was only a CIA functionary who
carried out higher orders. The more responsible assassins were above him.
What does the phenomenon of a sniper team supplied
with official government credentials for an immediate cover-up tell us about
the forces behind the crime?
Would an innocent government, in its investigation of
the murder of its president, ignore such evidence of treachery within its own
ranks?272
- Two books about Ed
Hoffman (Eyewitness, p. 9; Beyond the Fence Line: The Eyewitness Account of Ed
Hoffman and the Murder of President Kennedy, p. 33) and
the hardcover text of this book (p. 265) have identified the “suit man”
seen by Hoffman with the man whom Dallas police officer Joe Marshall
Smith confronted with a gun behind the stockade fence. However, Smith
said the man he confronted “had on a sports shirt and sports pants,”so
how could it have been the same man? (I am grateful to reader Norman J.
Granz for raising this question.)
Hoffman communicated that, in addition to the “suit man” and the “railroad man,” he saw two other men behind the fence just before the shooting:
“a) A man in a plaid shirt, labeled ‘P’ (dotted black line on Photo 23) [in Beyond the Fence Line, p. 34], stepped around from the north end of the fence, walked up to the man in the business suit ‘A’ and spoke to him a few seconds.
“b) After this brief encounter, the man in the plaid shirt turned and walked back around the east side of the fence and out of Ed’s view (solid black line on Photo 23).
“c) The police officer ‘F’ (Photo 23), who had been standing at the east end of the fence, followed the man in the plaid shirt as he walked around the east side of the fence.” (Beyond the Fence Line, p. 32)
The “suit man” walked over to the “railroad man” a final time, spoke with him briefly, and returned to the fence where he bent over, picked something up, and looked over the fence. Hoffman then saw a puff of smoke by the “suit man” after which the “suit man” turned suddenly with a rifle in his hands. The “suit man” ran to the “railroad man,” tossed the rifle to him, then walked back casually alongside the fence until a police officer came quickly around the fence and confronted him with a revolver. (This is not the officer who was at the east end of the fence before who, unlike the officer coming around the fence had not been wearing a hat. Beyond the Fence Line, p. 33.)
To return to the question, how could the man Officer Joe Marshall Smith confronted, who he said “had on a sports shirt and sports pants,” have been the “suit man” Ed Hoffman was watching?
After the shooting, Officer Smith came around the fence at the same point where Hoffman’s “man in a plaid shirt” had been just moments before. “The man in a plaid shirt” may be the man in “a sports shirt and sports pants” who Smith said showed him Secret Service credentials. Officer Smith may have then confronted a moment later “the suit man” merging the two men in his memory in an interview fifteen years later. (Conspiracy, p. 50.)
Other witnesses said they encountered plainclothesmen behind the fence who showed them Secret Service identification. “The man in a plaid/sports shirt,” like “the suit man,” would likely have had such Secret Service credentials as cover in case he was challenged. - CIA Memorandum from Sidney Gottlieb, Chief, TSD [Technical
Services Division], to Carl E. Duckett, DDS&T [Director, Directorate
of Science and Technology], May 8, 1973. CIA’s “Family Jewels,” pp. 215,
218. Available at http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB222/family_jewels_full_ocr.pdf. [23.7 MB - See The CIA’s Family Jewels entry point
at the National Security Archive.] I am
grateful to Peter Dale Scott for alerting me to
this item in the “Family Jewels.”
- Author’s interview of Abraham Bolden, July 13 , 2003.
- For the preceding analysis, as well as this book as a whole, I am especially
grateful for the work and inspiration of Vincent Salandria, who has long
emphasized the importance of the government’s ignoring the evidence of
phony Secret Service agents in Dealey Plaza. In his landmark speech to the Coalition on
Political Assassinations (COPA), given on November 20, 1998,
Salandria stated: “ We know from the evidence that at
the time of and immediately after the assassination, there were persons
in Dealey Plaza who were impersonating Secret Service agents. This was
clear evidence of both the existence of a conspiracy and the commission
of the crime of impersonating federal officers. But our government showed
no interest in pursuing this compelling evidence of the existence of a
conspiracy nor in prosecuting the criminals who were impersonating
federal officers. In refusing to pursue the evidence of conspiracy and in
failing to pursue the criminals who were impersonating federal officers,
the Warren Commissioners, their staff, the Attorney General’s Office, and
the FBI became accessories after the fact and abetted the killers.” False Mystery, Essays on the Assassination of JFK
by Vincent Salandria, adapted and edited by David
Ratcliffe under the copyright of John Kelin (2017).
- ↩ Regarding the unthinkable – that a
president of the United States was murdered by our own government – see
a transcript of Vincent Salandria’s November 20, 1998
address in Dallas to the Coalition on Political
Assassinations wherein he argues,
There is no rational manner in which we
can strip away the guilt of the highest levels of our national security state.
The government’s consistent criminal pattern of ignoring a whole series of data
indicating conspiracy and consistently twisting the meaning of evidence to
support a single assassin killing compels the conclusion that the U.S. national
security state killed President Kennedy.
- Robert Dreyfuss, “The Generals’ Revolt - As Obama
rethinks America’s failed strategy in Afghanistan, he faces two
insurgencies: the Taliban and the Pentagon,” Rolling Stone,
Issue 1090, October 29, 2009. ↩
- ↩ The relevant segment at the end of the
article is:
Wilkerson, the former aide to Colin Powell, hopes Obama will follow the
example of President Kennedy, who faced down his generals during the Cuban
Missile Crisis. “It’s going to take John Kennedy-type courage to turn to his
Curtis LeMay and say, ‘No, we’re not going to bomb Cuba,’” Wilkerson says. “It
took a lot of courage on Kennedy’s part to defy the Pentagon, defy the military
– and do the right thing.”
- ↩ On page 211-12 of JFK and The Unspeakable the
author writes:
On January 17, 1961 , three days before John
Kennedy took office as president, Congo leader Patrice Lumumba was assassinated
by the Belgian government with the complicity of the CIA.213 As Madeleine
Kalb, author of The Congo Cables, has observed, “much of the sense
of urgency in the first few weeks of January [1961] which led to the death of
Lumumba came . . . from fear of the impending change in Washington” that would
come with Kennedy’s inauguration.214 1t was no
accident that Lumumba was rushed to his execution three days before the U.S.
presidency was turned over to a man whose most notorious foreign policy speech
in the Senate had been a call for Algerian independence. Senator John Kennedy’s
July 1957 speech in support of the Algerian liberation movement created an
international uproar, with more conservative critics (including even Adlai
Stevenson) claiming he had gone too far in his support of African nationalism.215
In 1959, the year before Kennedy was elected president,
he had said to the Senate: “Call it nationalism, call it anti-colonialism, call
it what you will, Africa is going through a revolution . . . The word is
out—and spreading like wildfire in nearly a thousand languages and
dialects—that it is no longer necessary to remain forever poor or forever in
bondage.”216 In Africa and
Europe, Kennedy had become well known as a supporter of African nationalism.
JFK even took his support of the African independence movement into his 1960
presidential campaign, saying then repeatedly, “we have lost ground in Africa
because we have neglected and ignored the needs and aspirations of the African
people.”217 It is
noteworthy that in the index to his 1960 campaign speeches, there are 479
references to Africa.218
The CIA took seriously Kennedy’s African nationalist
sympathies. As his inauguration approached, the CIA’s station chief in
Leopoldville, Lawrence Devlin, spoke of “the need to take ‘drastic steps’
before it was too late.”219 CIA analyst
Paul Sakwa pointed out in an interview that the decision to put Lumumba in the
hands of his assassins was made by men “in the pay of and receiving constant
counsel from the CIA station.”220 The CIA
succeeded in having Lumumba killed in haste by Belgian collaborators three days
before Kennedy took his oath of office.
- Ludo De Witte, The Assassination of Lumumba (New
York: Verso, 2001). De Witte cites CIA head Allen Dulles’s August 26,
1960, letter concluding that Lumumba’s “removal must be an urgent and
prime objective and that under existing conditions this should be a high
priority of our covert action.” Ibid., p. 17. Richard Bissell, then head
of the CIA’s covert action, said, “The Agency had put a top priority,
probably, on a range of different methods of getting rid of Lumumba in
the sense of either destroying him physically, incapacitating him, or
eliminating his political influence.” Ibid. As De Witte shows, it was the
Belgian government that actually carried out Lumumba’s assassination on
January 17, 1961, three days before Kennedy became president.
- Madeleine G. Kalb, The Congo Cables: The Cold War in Africa – from
Eisenhower to Kennedy (New York: Macmillan, 1982), p.
196.
- Schlesinger, A Thousand Days, pp. 553-54.
- Ibid., p. 554.
- Ibid.
- Ibid.
- Richard D. Mahoney, JFK: Ordeal in Africa (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1983), p. 69.
- Richard D. Mahoney interview of Paul Sakwa, May 2, 1978, Washington,
D.C. Summarized by Mahoney, JFK: Ordeal in Africa, p. 266,
endnote 58.
From the jacket of Ludo De Witte’s The Assassination of Lumumba:
Patrice Lumumba, first prime minister of the Republic to Congo and a
pioneer of African unity, was murdered on 17 January 1961. Democratically
elected to lead the Mouvement National Congolais, the party he founded in 1958,
Lumumba was at the centre of the country’s growing popular defiance of the
colonial rule of oppression imposed by Belgium. When, in June 1960,
independence was finally won, his unscheduled speech at the official ceremonies
in Kinshasa received a standing ovation and made him a hero to millions. Always
a threat to those who sought to maintain a covert imperialist hand over the
country, however, he became within months the victim of an insidious plot, and
was arrested and subsequently tortured and executed. This book unravels the
appalling mass of lies, hypocrisy and betrayals that have surrounded accounts
of the assassination since its perpetration. Making use of a huge array of
official sources as well as personal testimony from many of those in the Congo
at the time, Ludo De Witte reveals a network of complicity ranging from the
Belgian government to the CIA. Chilling official memos which detail
“liquidation” and & “threats to national interests” are analysed alongside
macabre tales of the destruction of evidence, putting Patrice Lumumba’s
personal strength and his dignified quest for African unity in stark contrast
with one of the murkiest episodes of twentieth-century politics.
- ↩ On page 212 of JFK and The Unspeakable the
author describes when Kennedy received the news of Lumumba’s
assassination:
Four weeks later, on February 13, 1961, JFK
received a phone call with the delayed news of Lumumba’s murder. Photographer
Jacques Lowe took a remarkable picture of the president at that moment. Lowe’s
photo of Kennedy responding to the news of Lumumba’s assassination is on the
dust-jacket cover of Richard D. Mahoney’s book JFK: Ordeal in Africa.
It shows JFK horror-stricken. His eyes are shut. The fingers of his right hand
are pressing into his forehead. His head is collapsing against the phone held
to his ear.
Kennedy was not even president at the time of Lumumba’s
death. However, he recognized that if as president-elect he had spoken out
publicly in support of Lumumba’s life, he might have stopped his assassination.
After Kennedy had won the November 1960 election, Lumumba under house arrest
had smuggled out a telegram congratulating Kennedy and expressing his
admiration for the president-elect’s support for African independence.221 JFK had then
asked Averell Harriman, “Should we help Lumumba?” Harriman replied that he “was
not sure we could help him even if we wanted to.”222
In spite of his sympathy for Lumumba, Kennedy had not
spoken out on the Congo leader’s behalf in the weeks leading up to his
assassination and Kennedy’s inauguration. When JFK received the delayed news of
Lumumba’s murder a month later, he was anguished by his failure at not having
helped him.
- Richard D. Mahoney, JFK: Ordeal in Africa, p. 59.
- Ibid.
- ↩ Another “Bay of Pigs” event – akin to
corporate interests versus the public interest as occurred in “The Ides Of
April” conflict JFK had with big Steel industrialists –
was his supporting the people of the Congo in finding their own way in the
interests of preventing the spread of the Cold War and improving that
nation’s own security. From pages 150-151 of JFK and The Unspeakable:
In his book JFK: Ordeal in Africa,
Richard Mahoney noted that Kennedy considered Gullion his most trusted third
world ambassador. He sent Gullion into the Congo in 1961 because that African
nation had become “a testing ground of the views shared by Kennedy and Gullion
on the purpose of American power in the Third World. As Kennedy remarked over
the phone one day, if the U.S. could support the process of change – ‘allow
each country to find its own way’ – it could prevent the spread of the Cold War
and improve its own security.”90
In the Congo, Gullion also represented Kennedy’s
support of a UN policy forged by the late Dag Hammarskjöld. Kennedy and Gullion
promoted Hammarskjöld’s vision of a united, independent Congo, to the dismay of
multinational corporations working ceaselessly to carve up the country and
control its rich resources.91 After Kennedy’s
death, the corporations would succeed in controlling the Congo with the
complicity of local kingpins. While JFK was alive, a Kennedy-Hammarskjöld-UN
vision kept the Congo together and independent.
Seventeen years after JFK’s death, Gullion said,
“Kennedy, I think, risked a great deal in backing this operation [of UN forces
in the Congo], backing this whole thing.”92 The risk came
from within his own government. Kennedy rejected his State Department’s and
Joint Chiefs’ proposals for “direct U.S. military intervention in the Congo in
September 1961 and December 1962.”93 Kennedy had
again feared he was being entrapped by his advisers, as in the Bay of Pigs,
Laos, and Vietnam, in an ever-deepening U.S. military involvement. His Congo
policy was also being subverted by the CIA, which had been arming the Congo’s
secessionist regime in Katanga in order to promote Belgian mining interests.
“This [CIA] practice,” wrote Richard Mahoney, “was expressly contrary to U.S.
policy and in direct violation of the UN Security Council resolutions.”94 Kennedy’s
policy, carried out by Gullion, was to support the UN peacekeeping operation.
The president often quoted the statement his UN ambassador Adlai Stevenson made
to the Security Council, that the only way to keep the Cold War out of the
Congo was to keep the UN in the Congo.95 But the
CIA wanted the Cold War in the Congo.
- Richard D. Mahoney, JFK: Ordeal in Africa (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1983), p. 108.
- Ibid., pp. 114, 246-48.
- Herbert S. Parmet interview of Edmund Gullion, August 18, 1980, cited
in Herbert S. Parmet, JFK: The Presidency of John F. Kennedy (New
York: Dial Press, 1983), p. 320.
- Mahoney, JFK: Ordeal in Africa, p. 246.
- Ibid., p. 81.
- Ibid., p. 246.
Beyond this, an equally profound element of what “has been wiped out of
the history that we have” is, as Jim Douglass articulates above, how the national security
state implemented in the United States after World War II created “a ruling
elite of national security managers with an authority above that of our elected
representatives.” Consider how a cadre of support personnel for these national
security managers was put in place beginning in the 1950s and
continues to be operated today (why would it have ever been shut
down?) – and that this history is never acknowledged nor addressed by
officialdom in the government, media, or corporate domains of our society
(from JFK and the Unspeakable, pp. 196-197):
While the president struggled to push his newly
found politics of peace past the anti-communist priorities of the CIA, that
creature from the depths of the Cold War kept sprouting new arms to stop him.
As in Vietnam, the CIA had agents operating in other branches of the
government. Those extended arms of the agency acted to forward its policies and
frustrate Kennedy’s, as in the case of AID’s suspension of the Commodity Import
Program, thereby setting up a coup. J. Edgar Hoover knew the CIA had
infiltrated the FBI’s decision making as well, making it possible for the CIA
to cancel the FBI’s FLASH on Oswald at a critical moment in October, setting up
the assassination of Kennedy. How had the CIA’s covert arms been grafted onto
these other parts of the government?
One man in a position to watch the arms of the CIA
proliferate was Colonel Fletcher Prouty. He ran the office that did the
proliferating. In 1955, Air Force Headquarters ordered Colonel L. Fletcher
Prouty, a career Army and Air Force officer since World War II, to set up a Pentagon office to provide military support
for the clandestine operations of the CIA. Thus Prouty became
director of the Pentagon’s “Focal Point Office for the CIA.”110
CIA Director Allen Dulles was its actual creator. In
the fifties, Dulles needed military support for his covert campaigns to
undermine opposing nations in the Cold War. Moreover, Dulles wanted
subterranean secrecy and autonomy for his projects, even from the members of
his own government. Prouty’s job was to provide Pentagon support and deep cover
for the CIA beneath the different branches of Washington’s bureaucracy. Dulles
dictated the method Prouty was to follow.
“I want a focal point,” Dulles said. “I want an office
that’s cleared to do what we have to have done; an office that knows us very,
very well and then an office that has access to a system in the Pentagon. But
the system will not be aware of what initiated the request—they’ll think it
came from the Secretary of Defense. They won’t realize it came from the
Director of Central Intelligence.”111
Dulles got Prouty to create a network of subordinate
focal point offices in the armed services, then throughout the entire U.S.
government. Each office that Prouty set up was put under a “cleared” CIA
employee. That person took orders directly from the CIA but functioned under
the cover of his particular office and branch of government. Such “breeding,” Prouty said decades later in
an interview, resulted in a web of covert CIA representatives “in the State
Department, in the FAA, in the Customs Service, in the Treasury, in the FBI and
all around through the government—up in the White House . . . Then we began to
assign people there who, those agencies thought, were from the Defense Department.
But they actually were people that we put there from the CIA.”112
The consequence in the early 1960s, when Kennedy became
president, was that the CIA had placed a secret team of its own employees
through the entire U.S. government. It was accountable to no one except the
CIA, headed by Allen Dulles. After Dulles was fired by Kennedy, the CIA’s Deputy
Director of Plans Richard Helms became this invisible government’s immediate
commander. No one except a tight inner circle of the CIA even knew of the
existence of this top-secret intelligence network, much less the identity of
its deep-cover bureaucrats. These CIA “focal points,” as Dulles called them,
constituted a powerful, unseen government within the government. Its
Dulles-appointed members would act quickly, with total obedience, when called
on by the CIA to assist its covert operations.
As the son of an ambassador to Britain and from his
many years in the House and Senate, John Kennedy had come to understand the
kind of power he would face as a changing president, trying to march to the
beat of a different drummer. However, in his struggles with the CIA, Kennedy
had no one to tell him just how extensive the agency’s Cold War power had
become beneath the surface of the U.S. government, including almost certainly
members of his own White House staff. In his final months, JFK knew he was
being blocked by an enemy within. However, he was surrounded by more
representatives of that enemy than he could have known.
As members of this country’s society – taught from grade school on that
“We the people” collectively aspire to be sovereign and self-governing as
proclaimed by such founding documents as the Declaration of Independence – we
are all responsible for recovering and reclaiming the history and purpose of
our time and our place for the sake of our children and for the benefit of all
life that follows us here.
I was eight
when President Kennedy was killed. At home sick in bed that day, my father
walked up the stairs, responding to my “Hi Dad” greeting in a voice I’d never
heard before with, “President Kennedy’s been shot.” As for so many, something
in him died that day. In 1977 a lawyer friend loaned me his copy of Arthur
Schlesinger’s A Thousand Days, John F. Kennedy In The White House.
I’d never read dry biography like that before. By the time I was finished, a
budding understanding had begun of what JFK was trying to do while he was
President. That he was learning French in anticipation of meeting DeGaulle in
early 1964, to establish a more thorough communication of ideas and meaning
with the French President, was an example of the type of engagement with life
John Kennedy expressed.
I read many
books on JFK’s life and death in the later seventies and eighties. In
subsequent years, from interviewing
Fletcher Prouty in 1989, to the release and ferment created by
Oliver Stone’s film JFK in 1991,
I wondered what might surface to clarify our obfuscated history. I briefly
communicated with Jim Douglass in 2000 when he contacted me to purchase a copy
of Understanding Special Operations and
sent along a copy of his article, “The Martin Luther King Conspiracy Exposed in Memphis”.
At that time I was not aware of this trial. I asked if I could reprint the
article on ratical. He was pleased and gave his permission. Twelve years later
this work has been updated with links to the original sources referenced
throughout the complete trial transcript.
Now with JFK and The Unspeakable we have an
outstanding sourcebook weaving together many threads leading
to the seminal event of post-WWII America. Speaking after the book’s release at Powell’s Bookstore in Portland,
June 2008, Douglass recounted how he sought to make the story as
clear as possible by summarizing it in about 5 sentences. The following excerpt
from the talk (14:45-16:50 minutes) includes a segment from the Preface (page
ix), the last portion quoted here:
Thanks to the truth-telling of many, many witnesses who have risked
their lives; thanks to a recent flood of documents, through the JFK Records Act – hundreds of thousands
of documents are now available on the Kennedy assassination as a result of that
law, passed as a result of Oliver Stone’s film and the appeal at the
end of it – thanks to all of that the truth is available. Not only can the
conspiracy that most Americans have thought was likely now be seen in detail.
Not only can we know what happened in Dallas. More important than filling in
the crime scene, we can know the larger historical context of the
assassination: why President Kennedy was murdered. We can know
the liberating truth. The story of why JFK was gunned down is
the subject of this book. I have told the story chronologically point-by-point
through a sea of witnesses. In brief that story is:
On our behalf (he was President of the United States so
he did it on our behalf), at the height of the Cold War, John F. Kennedy risked
committing the greatest crime in history, starting a nuclear war.
Before we knew it, he turned toward peace with the
enemy who almost committed that crime with him (Nikita Khrushchev).
For turning to peace with his enemy (and ours), Kennedy
was murdered by a power we cannot easily describe. Its unspeakable reality can
be traced, suggested, recognized, and pondered. That is one purpose of this
book. The other is to describe Kennedy’s turning.
I hope that, by following the story of JFK’s encounter
with the unspeakable, we’ll be willing to encounter it too.
In November
1963, Charles “Chip” Bohlen, a distinguished member of the U.S. foreign
service, was serving as U.S. Ambassador to France. He recounted his thoughts
and feelings at the time of President Kennedy’s death:
Emotions are often difficult to recall, but I
well remember feeling, as I sat under the soaring arches of the great
cathedral, that the future had collapsed on the present. Here I was, with
thirty-five years of experience in the Foreign Service and extremely skeptical
about the great men in public life, yet completely crushed by Kennedy’s death.
I still feel that a great future was extinguished by his death.
Had Kennedy lived, in all probability he would have
visited the Soviet Union. Such a visit would not have changed Soviet policy any
more than an Eisenhower visit would have, but he would have captured the
Russian’s hearts.
Except for the Cuban missile crisis and the nuclear test
ban treaty, Kennedy’s record of achievements in foreign affairs is sparse. By
the time of his assassination, he was beginning to move with more confidence. I
am sure he would have tried some innovations to end the dreary cold war. I do
not know what they would have been, but he would have had a fine second term.
(Charles E. Bohlen, Witness To History,
1929-1969, Norton, 1973, p. 504)
Among other
posts, Mr. Bohlen was ambassador to the Soviet Union and an expert on its
society. The management and manipulation of people’s awareness and perceptions
by official investigations like the Warren Commission and House Select
Committee on Assassinations, as well as collusion by the commercial press with
government pronouncements, has literally been “unbelievable.” In the above
quotation, Ambassador Bohlen edges as far as he was psychologically able to
towards asking the question, Why?
Jim Douglass
dedicates his book “To Vince Salandria and Marty Schotz, teachers and
friends”. Illuminating speeches by each man at the 1998 COPA conference
provide transformative clarity. Vincent Salandria’s “The JFK Assassination: A False Mystery Concealing State
Crimes” presents a detailed explication listing many factual
instances of malfeasance, misfeasance, and obstruction of justice carried out
by officials of the U.S. government responsible for the investigation of
President Kennedy’s assassination – some of whom were themselves criminal
accessories after the fact. Martin Schotz’s “The Waters of Knowledge versus the Waters of Uncertainty:
Mass Denial in the Assassination of President Kennedy,” is a useful
distillation of elements of his unique and vital 1996 book, History Will Not Absolve Us: Orwellian Control, Public
Denial, and the Murder of President Kennedy. The center of the
book is a Letter to Vincent J. Salandria, dated April 5, 1995,
that “belongs to a process of investigation, study, and thought which now spans
more than three decades.” This work is even more relevant today, now fifty
years later.
Through the
work of Vince Salandria, Marty Schotz, and Jim Douglass, a lucid and coherent
account is available of why President Kennedy was assassinated and by whom.
Marty Schotz sums up this understanding in the Introduction of History Will Not Absolve Us:
In our efforts to confront the truth of the
assassination of President Kennedy we are at a very different point today than
we were thirty years ago when the first critical analyses of the Warren Report
were published. Dozens of books and thousands of magazine articles have been
written about this case. Almost without exception, no matter what the author’s
view concerning who killed President Kennedy or why, these works have directly
or indirectly contributed to the public’s conviction that the murder of the
President is a mystery. As a result, although a vast majority of our public
believes that there was a conspiracy, most people do not know this as a fact
and are convinced that they can never know for sure what happened.
On both points the public is mistaken. The murder of
the President is not a mystery. The nature of the conspiracy that took
President Kennedy’s life was from the outset quite obvious to anyone who knew
how to look and was willing to do so. The same holds true today. Any citizen
who is willing to look can see clearly who killed President Kennedy and why
Exploring
the why of the President’s extra-constitutional firing goes to
the heart of our country’s current darkness and offers us all unprecedented
hope in transforming it. The future is up to each and every one of us. It is
ours to create. As Carl Jung observed, “In the last analysis, the essential
thing is the life of the individual. This alone makes history, here alone do
the great transformations first take place, and the whole future, the whole
history of the world, ultimately spring as a gigantic summation from these
hidden sources in individuals. In our most private and more subjective lives we
are not only the passive witnesses of our age, and its sufferers, but also its
makers. We are our own epoch.” Similarly, Jim Douglass reminds us of an
essential paradox calling out for more consciousness. “What I found remarkable
was that the deeper the darkness, the greater the hope, because of his and
their transforming witness to the truth. That leaves the question: Are we who
hear their story prepared to carry on the peacemaking and truth-telling? Will
we live out the truth as they did? It’s a hopeful, inviting question.”
—David
Ratcliffe, 8 March 2013
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