JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters

by James W. Douglass

connect the dots between our ‘citizen denial,’ the government’s ‘plausible deniability,’ and the Unspeakable.

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.

John Kennedy’s story is our story, although a titanic effort has been made to keep it from us. That story, like the struggle it embodies, is as current today as it was in 1963. The theology of redemptive violence still reigns. The Cold War has been followed by its twin, the War on Terror. We are engaged in another apocalyptic struggle against an enemy seen as absolute evil. Terrorism has replaced Communism as the enemy.

When the enemy is seen as human, everything changes.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer said, “the cost of discipleship.” There is no better reason for it than loving one’s enemies—not a sentimental love but, first of all, respect. Respect

means recognizing and acknowledging our enemies’ part of the truth, whether or not that makes life more difficult for us. Recognizing his enemies’ truths made life much more difficult, and finally impossible, for Kennedy—leaving us with the responsibility of recognizing the painfully obvious truth of Kennedy’s death.

we in this media-drenched society drink the waters of uncertainty.

We believe we cannot know . . . a truth whose basic evidence has been present since

the work of the Warren Commission’s earliest critics. Could there be a deeper reason for our r...

For President Kennedy, a deepening commitment to dialogue with our enemies proved fatal. If we are unwilling as citizens to deal with that critical precedent, what twenty-first-century president will have the courage on our behalf to resist the powers that be and choose dialogue instead of war in response to our current enemies?

to see more deeply into history than we are accustomed. If, for example, war is an unalterable reality of history, then we humans have a very short future left. Einstein said, “The unleashed power of the atom has changed everything save our modes of thinking, and we thus drift toward unparalleled catastrophes.” Unless we turn our thinking (and acting) away from war, we humans have had our day.

ontology of

nonviolence,

Thomas Merton

“Do not think yourself better because you burn up friends and enemies with long-range missiles without ever seeing what you have done.”[1]

Peace in the Post-Christian Era. Because his superiors had forbidden him to

publish a book on war and peace that they felt “falsifies the monastic message,”

Merton shared his fear of war with Ethel Kennedy and his hope that John Kennedy would have the vision and courage to turn the country in a peaceful direction. In the months leading up to the Cuban Missile Crisis, Merton agonized, prayed, and felt impotent, as he continued to write passionate antiwar letters to scores of other friends.

Maybe Kennedy will break through into that some day by miracle. But such people are before long marked out for assassination.”[3]

John F. Kennedy was no saint. Nor was he any apostle of nonviolence. However, as we are all called to do, he was turning. Teshuvah, “turning,” the rabbinic word for repentance, is the explanation for Kennedy’s short-lived, contradictory journey toward peace.

“The Unspeakable” is a term Thomas Merton coined at the heart of the sixties after JFK’s assassination—in the midst of the escalating Vietnam War, the nuclear arms race, and the further assassinations of Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, and Robert Kennedy. In each of those soul-shaking events Merton sensed an evil whose depth and deceit seemed to go beyond the capacity of words to describe.

When we become more deeply human, as Merton understood the process, the wellspring of our compassion moves us to confront the Unspeakable.

government’s covert-action doctrine of “plausible deniability,” sanctioned by the June 18, 1948, National Security Council directive NSC 10/2.[6] Under the direction of Allen Dulles, the CIA interpreted “plausible deniability” as a green light to assassinate national leaders, overthrow governments, and lie to cover up any trace of accountability—all for the sake of promoting U.S. interests and maintaining our nuclear-backed dominance over the Soviet Union and other nations.[7]

I knew nothing of “plausible deniability,” the unspeakable void of responsibility in our own national security state. That void of accountability for the CIA and our other security agencies, seen as necessary for covert crimes to protect our nuclear weapons primacy, made possible the JFK assassination and cover-up. While I wrote and acted in resistance to nuclear weapons that could kill millions, I remained oblivious of the fact that their

existence at the heart of our national security state underlay the assassination of a president turning toward disarmament.

national climate of denial.

Hope for change in the world was targeted and killed four times over. The cover-up of all four murders, each leading into the next, was based, first of all, on denial—not the government’s but our own.

They described a sophisticated government plot that involved the FBI, the CIA, the Memphis Police, Mafia intermediaries, and an Army Special Forces sniper team. The twelve jurors, six black and six white, returned after two and one-half hours of deliberation with a verdict that King had been assassinated by a conspiracy that included agencies of his own government.[8]

Beneath their assassinations lay the evil void of responsibility that Merton identified as the unspeakable.

the vacuum of responsibility and compassion, is in ourselves. Our citizen denial provides the ground for the government’s doctrine of “plausible deniability.”

By avoiding our responsibility for the escalating crimes of state done for our security, we who failed to confront the Unspeakable opened the door to JFK’s assassination and its cover-up. The unspeakable is not far away.

Compassion is our source of nonviolent social transformation.

What Jesus was all about, what we as human beings are all about in our deepest nature, is giving our lives for one another. By bearing that witness of martyrdom, he taught, we will come to know what humanity really is in its glory, on earth as it is in heaven. A martyr is therefore a living witness to our new humanity.

Did a president of the United States, while in command of total nuclear war, detach himself enough from its power to give his life for peace?

The belief behind this book is that truth is the most powerful force on earth, what Gandhi called satyagraha, “truth-force” or “soul-force.” By his experiments in truth Gandhi turned theology on its head, saying “truth is God.” We all see a part of the truth and can seek it more deeply. Its other side is compassion, our response to suffering.

Kennedy says he wants “to splinter the CIA in a thousand pieces and scatter it to the winds.”

April 13, 1962: President Kennedy, backed by overwhelming public support, forces the leaders of the steel industry to rescind a price increase that violates a Kennedy-brokered agreement to combat inflation. Kennedy’s anti-business statements and beginning cancellation of the steel companies’ defense contracts make him notorious among the power brokers of the military-industrial complex.

May 8, 1962: Following President Kennedy’s instructions, Defense Secretary Robert McNamara orders General Paul Harkins at a Saigon conference “to devise a plan for turning full responsibility [for the war in Vietnam] over to South Vietnam and reducing the size of our military command, and to submit this plan at the next conference.”

Lee Harvey Oswald returns to the United States with a loan from the State Department, after his highly

publicized October 1959 defection to the Soviet Union and two and one-half years living as an expatriate in Minsk.

As the Oswalds settle in Fort Worth, Texas, Lee Oswald begins to be shepherded by intelligence asset George de Mohrenschildt, at the instigation of Dallas CIA agent J. Walton Moore. Jul...

CIA and Pentagon opponents regard Kennedy’s negotiation of the Laotian agreement as surrender to the Communists. They undermine it by supporting Gene...

In another conference on the war in Vietnam,...

Hawaii, Secretary McNamara discovers that his May 8 order to General Harkins has been ignored. He repeats President Kennedy’s order for a program to phas...

General Curtis LeMay tells him, “This [blockade and political action] is almost as bad as the appeasement [of Hitler] at Munich.”

October 27, 1962: A Soviet surface-to-air missile shoots down a U-2 reconnaissance plane over Cuba,

The Joint Chiefs of Staff are outraged by Kennedy’s refusal to attack Cuba and his concessions to Khrushchev.

March 19, 1963: At a Washington news conference, the CIA-sponsored Cuban exile group Alpha 66 announces its having raided a Soviet “fortress” and ship in Cuba, causing a dozen casualties. The secret purpose of the attack in Cuban waters, according to Alpha 66’s incognito CIA adviser, David Atlee Phillips, is “to publicly embarrass Kennedy and force him to move against Castro.”

March 31, 1963: President Kennedy orders a crackdown on Cuban refugee gunboats being run by the CIA out of Miami. Robert Kennedy’s Justice Department confines the movement of

anti-Castro commando leaders to the Miami area, while the Coast Guard seizes their bo...