JFK
and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters
Review
of James Douglass' Book
Edward
Curtin
16
November, 2013
Despite
a treasure-trove of new information having emerged over the last
forty-six years, there are many people who still think who
killed President John Fitzgerald Kennedy and why are unanswerable
questions. There are others who cling to the Lee Harvey Oswald
“lone-nut” explanation proffered by the Warren Commission.
Both groups agree, however, that whatever the truth, it has no
contemporary relevance but is old-hat, history, stuff for
conspiracy-obsessed people with nothing better to do. The
general thinking is that the assassination occurred almost a
half-century ago, so let’s move on.
Nothing
could be further from the truth, as James Douglass shows in his
extraordinary book,
JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters (Orbis
Books, 2008).
It is clearly one of the best books ever written on the Kennedy
assassination and deserves a vast readership. It is bound to
roil the waters of complacency that have submerged the truth of this
key event in modern American history.
It’s
not often that the intersection of history and contemporary events
pose such a startling and chilling lesson as does the
contemplation of the murder of JFK on November 22, 1963 juxtaposed
with the situations faced by President Obama today. So
far, at least, Obama’s behavior has mirrored Johnson’s, not
Kennedy’s, as he has escalated the war in Afghanistan by 34,000.
One can’t but help think that the thought of JFK’s fate might
not be far from his mind as he contemplates his next move in
Afghanistan.
Douglass
presents a very compelling argument that Kennedy was killed by
“unspeakable” (the Trappist monk Thomas Merton’s term) forces
within the U.S. national security state because of
his conversion from a cold warrior into a man of peace. He
argues, using a wealth of newly uncovered information, that JFK had
become a major threat to the
burgeoning military-industrial complex and had to be eliminated
through a conspiracy planned by the CIA – “the CIA’s
fingerprints are all over the crime and the events leading up to it”
– not by a crazed individual, the Mafia, or disgruntled
anti-Castro Cubans, though some of these may have been used in the
execution of the plot.
Why
and by whom? These are the key questions. If it can be
shown that Kennedy did, in fact, turn emphatically away from war as
a solution to political conflict; did, in fact, as he was being
urged by his military and intelligence advisers to up the ante and
use violence, rejected such advice and turned toward peaceful
solutions, then, a motive for his elimination is established.
If, furthermore, it can be clearly shown that Oswald was a dupe in a
deadly game and that forces within the military/intelligence
apparatus were involved with him from start to finish, then the
crime is solved, not by fingering an individual who may have given
the order for the murder or pulled the trigger, but by showing that
the coordination of the assassination had to involve U.S.
intelligence agencies, most notably the CIA . Douglass does both,
providing highly detailed and intricately linked evidence based on
his own research and a vast array of the best scholarship.
We
are then faced with the contemporary relevance, and since we know
that every president since JFK has refused to confront the growth of
the national security state and its call for violence, one can
logically assume a message was sent and heeded. In this
regard, it is not incidental that former twenty-seven year CIA
analyst Raymond McGovern, in a recent interview, warned of the “two
CIAs,” one the analytic arm providing straight scoop to
presidents, the other the covert action arm which operates
according to its own rules. “Let me leave you with this
thought,” he told his interviewer, “and that is that I think
Panetta (current CIA Director), and to a degree Obama, are afraid –
I never thought I’d hear myself saying this – I think they
are afraid of the CIA.” He then recommended Douglass’
book, “It’s very well-researched and his conclusion is very
alarming.” [i]
Let’s
look at the history marshaled by Douglass to support his thesis.
First,
Kennedy, who took office in January 1961 as somewhat of a Cold
Warrior, was quickly set up by the CIA to take the blame for the Bay
of Pigs invasion of Cuba in April 1961. The CIA and generals
wanted to oust Castro, and in pursuit of that goal, trained a force
of Cuban exiles to invade Cuba. Kennedy refused to go along
and the invasion was roundly defeated. The CIA, military, and
Cuban exiles bitterly blamed Kennedy. But it was all a sham.
Though
Douglass doesn’t mention it, and few Americans know it, classified
documents uncovered in 2000 revealed that the CIA had discovered
that the Soviets had learned of the date of the invasion more than a
week in advance, had informed Castro, but – and here is a
startling fact that should make people’s hair stand on end –
never told the President. [ii] The
CIA knew the invasion was doomed before the fact but went ahead with
it anyway. Why? So they could and did afterwards blame
JFK for the failure.
This
treachery set the stage for events to come. For his part,
sensing but not knowing the full extent of the set-up, Kennedy fired
CIA Director Allen Dulles (as in a bad joke, later to be named to
the Warren Commission) and his assistant General Charles Cabell
(whose brother Earle Cabell, to make a bad joke absurd, was the
mayor of Dallas on the day Kennedy was killed) and said he wanted
“to splinter the CIA in a thousand pieces and scatter it to the
winds.” Not the sentiments to endear him to a secretive
government within a government whose power was growing
exponentially.
The
stage was now set for events to follow as JFK, in opposition to
nearly all his advisers, consistently opposed the use of force in
U.S. foreign policy.
In
1961, despite the Joint Chief’s demand to put troops into Laos,
Kennedy bluntly insisted otherwise as he ordered Averell Harriman,
his representative at the Geneva Conference, “Did you understand?
I want a negotiated settlement in Laos. I don’t want to put
troops in.”
Also
in 1961, he refused to concede to the insistence of his top generals
to give them permission to use nuclear weapons in Berlin and
Southeast Asia. Walking out of a meeting with top military
advisors, Kennedy threw his hands in the air and said, “These
people are crazy.”
He
refused to bomb and invade Cuba as the military wished during the
Cuban missile crisis in 1962. Afterwards he told his friend
John Kenneth Galbraith that “I never had the slightest intention
of doing so.”
Then
in June 1963 he gave an incredible speech at American University in
which he called for the total abolishment of nuclear weapons, the
end of the Cold War and the “Pax Americana enforced on the world
by American weapons of war,” and movement toward “general and
complete disarmament.”
A
few months later he signed a Limited Test Ban Treaty with Nikita
Khrushchev.
In
October 1963 he signed National Security Action Memorandum 263
calling for the withdrawal of 1,000 U. S. military troops from
Vietnam by the end of the year and a total withdrawal by the end of
1965.[iii]
All
this he did while secretly engaging in negotiations with Khrushchev
via the KGB , Norman Cousins, and Pope John XXIII , and with Castro
through various intermediaries, one of whom was French Journalist
Jean Daniel. In an interview with Daniel on October 24, 1963 Kennedy
said, “I approved the proclamation Fidel Castro made in the Sierra
Maestra, when he justifiably called for justice and especially
yearned to rid Cuba of corruption. I will go even further: to
some extent it is as though Batista was the incarnation of a number
of sins on the part of the United States. Now we will have to
pay for those sins. In the matter of the Batista regime, I am
in agreement with the first Cuban revolutionaries. That is
perfectly clear.” Such sentiments were anathema, shall we
say treasonous, to the CIA and top generals.
These
clear refusals to go to war and his decision to engage in private,
back-channel communications with Cold War enemies marked Kennedy as
an enemy of the national security state. They were on a
collision course. As Douglass and others have pointed out, every
move Kennedy made was anti-war. This, Douglass argues, was
because JFK, a war hero, had been deeply affected by the horror of
war and was severely shaken by how close the world had come to
destruction during the Cuban missile crisis. Throughout his life he
had been touched by death and had come to appreciate the fragility
of life. Once in the Presidency, Kennedy underwent a deep
metanoia, a spiritual transformation, from Cold Warrior to peace
maker. He came to see the generals who advised him as devoid
of the tragic sense of life and as hell-bent on war. And he
was well aware that his growing resistance to war had put him on a
dangerous collision course with those generals and the CIA. On
numerous occasions he spoke of the possibility of a military coup
d’etat against him. On the night before his trip to Dallas,
he told his wife, “But, Jackie, if somebody wants to shoot me from
a window with a rifle, nobody can stop it, so why worry about it.”
And we know that nobody did try to stop it because they had planned
it.
But
who killed him?
Douglass
presents a formidable amount of evidence, some old and some new,
against the CIA and covert action agencies within the national
security state, and does so in such a logical and persuasive
way that any fair-minded reader cannot help but be taken aback;
stunned, really. And he links this evidence directly to JFK’s
actions on behalf of peace.
He
knows, however, that to truly convince he must break a “conspiracy
of silence that would envelop our government, our media, our
academic institutions, and virtually our entire society from
November 22, 1963, to the present.” This “unspeakable,”
this hypnotic “collective denial of the obvious,” is sustained
by a mass-media whose repeated message is that the truth about such
significant events is beyond our grasp, that we will have to drink
the waters of uncertainty forever. As for those who don’t,
they are relegated to the status of conspiracy nuts.
Fear
and uncertainty block a true appraisal of the assassination – that
plus the thought that it no longer matters.
It
matters. For we know that no president since JFK has dared to
buck the military-intelligence-industrial complex. We know a
Pax Americana has spread its tentacles across the globe with U.S.
military in over 130 countries on 750 plus bases. We know that
the amount of blood and money spent on wars and war preparations has
risen astronomically.
There
is a great deal we know and even more that we don’t want to know,
or at the very least, investigate.
If
Lee Harvey Oswald was connected to the intelligence community, the
FBI and the CIA, then we can logically conclude that he was not “a
lone-nut” assassin. Douglass marshals a wealth of evidence
to show how from the very start Oswald was moved around the globe
like a pawn in a game, and when the game was done, the pawn was
eliminated in the Dallas police headquarters. As he begins to
trace Oswald’s path, Douglass asks this question: “Why was Lee
Harvey Oswald so tolerated and supported by the government he
betrayed?” After serving as a U.S. Marine at the CIA’s U-2
spy plane operating base in Japan with a Crypto clearance (higher
than top secret but a fact suppressed by the Warren Commission),
Oswald left the Marines and defected to the Soviet Union.
After denouncing the U.S., working at a Soviet factory in Minsk ,
and taking a Russian wife – during which time Gary Powers’ U-2
spy plane is shot down over the Soviet Union - he returned to
the U.S. with a loan from the American Embassy in Moscow, only to be
met at the dock in Hoboken, New Jersey by a man, Spas T. Raikin, a
prominent anti-communist with extensive intelligence
connections, recommended by the State Department. He passed
through immigration with no trouble, was not prosecuted, moved to
Fort Worth, Texas where , at the suggestion of the Dallas CIA
Domestic Contacts Service chief, he was met and befriended by George
de Mohrenschildt, an anti-communist Russian, who was a CIA asset.
De Mohrenschildt got him a job four days later at a graphic arts
company that worked on maps for the U.S. Army Map Service related to
U-2 spy missions over Cuba. Oswald was then shepherded around
the Dallas area by de Mohrenschildt who, in 1977, on the day he
revealed he had contacted Oswald for the CIA and was to meet with
the House Select Committee on Assasinations’ Gaeton Fonzi,
allegedly committed suicide. Oswald then moved to New Orleans
in April 1963 where got a job at the Reilly Coffee Company owned by
CIA-affiliated William Reilly. The Reilly Coffee Company was
located in close vicinity to the FBI, CIA, Secret Service, and
Office of Naval Intelligence offices and a stone’s throw from the
office of Guy Bannister, a former Special Agent in Charge of the
FBI’s Chicago Bureau, who worked as a covert action coordinator
for the intelligence services, supplying and training anti-Castro
paramilitaries meant to ensnare Kennedy. Oswald then went to
work with Bannister and the CIA paramilitaries.
During
this time up until the assassination Oswald engaged in all sorts of
contradictory activities, one day portraying himself as pro-Castro,
the next day as anti-Castro, many of these theatrical performances
being directed from Bannister’s office. It was as though Oswald,
on the orders of his puppet masters, was enacting multiple and
antithetical roles in order to confound anyone intent on deciphering
the purposes behind his actions and to set him up as a future
“assassin.” Douglass persuasively argues that Oswald
“seems to have been working with both the CIA and FBI,” as a
provocateur for the former and an informant for the latter.
Jim and Elsie Wilcott, who worked at the CIA Tokyo Station from
1960-64, in a 1978 interview with the San Francisco Chronicle, said,
“It was common knowledge in the Tokyo CIA station that Oswald
worked for the agency.”
When
Oswald moved to New Orleans in April 1963, de Mohrenschildt exited
the picture, having asked the CIA for and been indirectly given a
$285,000 contract to do a geological survey for Haitian dictator
“Papa Doc” Duvalier, which he never did , but for which he was
paid. Ruth and Michael Paine then entered the picture on cue.
Douglass illuminatingly traces in their intelligence connections.
Ruth later was the Warren Commission’s chief witness. She
had been introduced to Oswald by de Mohrenschildt. In
September 1963 Ruth Paine drove from her sister’s house in
Virginia to New Orleans to pick up Marina Oswald and bring her to
her house in Dallas to live with her. Thirty years after the
assassination a document was declassified showing Paine’s sister
Sylvia worked for the CIA. Her father traveled throughout
Latin America on an Agency for International Development (notorious
for CIA front activities) contract and filed reports that went to
the CIA. Her husband Michael’s step-father, Arthur
Young, was the inventor of the Bell helicopter and Michael’s job
there gave him a security clearance. Her mother was related to the
Forbes family of Boston and her lifelong friend, Mary Bancroft,
worked as a WW II spy with Allen Dulles and was his mistress.
Afterwards, Dulles questioned the Paines in front of the Warren
Commission, studiously avoiding any revealing questions. Back
in Dallas, Ruth Paine conveniently got Oswald a job in the Texas
Book Depository where he began work on October 16, 1963.
From
late September until November 22, various Oswalds are later reported
to have simultaneously been seen from Dallas to Mexico City. Two
Oswalds were arrested in the Texas Theatre, the real one taken out
the front door and an impostor out the back. As Douglas says,
“There were more Oswalds providing evidence against Lee Harvey
Oswald than the Warren Report could use or even explain.”
Even J. Edgar Hoover knew that Oswald impostors were used, as he
told LBJ concerning Oswald’s alleged visit to the Soviet Embassy
in Mexico City. He later called this CIA ploy, “the false
story re Oswald’s trip to Mexico…their ( CIA’s)
double-dealing,” something that he couldn’t forget. It was
apparent that a very intricate and deadly game was being played out
at high levels in the shadows.
We
know Oswald was blamed for the President’s murder. But if
one fairly follows the trail of the crime it becomes blatantly
obvious that government forces were at work. Douglass adds
layer upon layer of evidence to show how this had to be so.
Oswald, the mafia, anti-Castro Cubans could not have withdrawn most
of the security that day. The Sheriff Bill Decker withdrew all
police protection. The Secret Service withdrew the police
motorcycle escorts from beside the president’s car where they had
been the day before in Houston; took agents off the back of the car
where they were normally stationed to obstruct gunfire. They
approved the fateful, dogleg turn (on a dry run on November 18)
where the car came, almost to a halt, a clear security violation.
The House Select Committee on Assasinations concluded this, not some
conspiracy nut.
Who
could have squelched the testimony of all the doctors and medical
personnel who claimed the president had been shot from the front in
his neck and head, testimony contradicting the official story? Who
could have prosecuted and imprisoned Abraham Bolden, the first
African-American Secret Service agent personally brought on to the
White House detail by JFK, who warned that he feared the president
was going to be assassinated? (Douglass interviewed Bolden
seven times and his evidence on the aborted plot to kill JFK in
Chicago on November 2 – a story little known but extraordinary in
its implications – is riveting.) The list of all the people
who turned up dead, the evidence and events manipulated, the inquiry
squelched, distorted, and twisted in an ex post facto cover-up –
clearly point to forces within the government, not rogue actors
without institutional support.
The
evidence for a conspiracy organized at the deepest levels of the
intelligence apparatus is overwhelming. James Douglass
presents it in such depth and so logically that only one hardened to
the truth would not be deeply moved and affected by his book.
He
says it best: “The extent to which our national security state was
systematically marshaled for the assassination of President John F.
Kennedy remains incomprehensible to us. When we live in a
system, we absorb and think in a system. We lack the
independence needed to judge the system around us. Yet the
evidence we have seen points toward our national security state, the
systemic bubble in which we all live, as the source of Kennedy’s
murder and immediate cover-up.”
Speaking
to his friends Dave Powers and Ken O’Donnell about those who
planned the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba, JFK said, “They couldn’t
believe that a new president like me wouldn’t panic and try to
save his own face. Well, they had me figured all wrong.”
Let’s
hope for another president like that, but one that meets a different
end.
Edward
Curtin teaches sociology at Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts
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