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

by James W. Douglass

Also in early April, James Donovan, U.S. negotiator, returns to Cuba to confer with Premier Fidel Castro for the further release of Bay of Pigs prisoners. The CIA attempts through an unwitting Donovan to foist a CIA-contaminated diving suit on Castro, as a gift by the Kennedy-appointed negotiator, in a failed effort to simultaneously assassinate Castro, scapegoat Kennedy, and sabotage a beginning Cuban–American dialogue.

May 6, 1963: In another conference on Vietnam chaired by Secretary McNamara at Camp Smith, Hawaii, the Pacific Command finally presents President Kennedy’s long-sought plan for withdrawal from Vietnam. However, McNamara has to reject the military’s overextended time line. He orders that concrete plans be drawn up for withdrawing one thousand U.S. military personnel from South Vietnam by the end of 1963.

President Kennedy issues National Security Action Memorandum 239, ordering his principal national security advisers to pursue both a nuclear test ban treaty and a policy of general and complete disarmament.

May 8, 1963: At a protest in Hue, South Vietnam, by Buddhists claiming religious repression by the Diem government, two explosions attributed to government security forces kill eight people, wounding fifteen others. The government accuses the Viet Cong of setting off the explosions. A later, independent investigation identifies the bomber as a U.S. military officer, using CIA-supplied plastic bombs. The Buddhist Crisis touched off by the Hue explosions threatens to topple Ngo...

Address at American University in Washington proposing, in effect, an end to the Cold War. Rejecting the goal of “a Pax Americana enforced on the world by American weapons of war,” Kennedy asks Americans to reexamine their attitudes toward war, especially in relation to the people of the Soviet Union, who suffered incomparable losses in World War II. Now nuclear war would be far worse: “All we have built, all we have worked for, would be destroyed in the first 24 hours.” He announces his unilateral suspension of further nuclear tests in the atmosphere, so as to promote “our primary long-range interest,” “general and complete disarmament.”

June 25, 1963: Lee Harvey Oswald is issued a United States

passport in New Orleans, twenty-four hours after his application and one year after his return from defecting to the Soviet Union. On his passport application, he id...

August 9-10, 1963: Lee Harvey Oswald is arrested in New Orleans while passing out Fair Play for Cuba leaflets. He and three anti-Castro Cuban exiles, who confront him and tear up his leaflets, are charged with disturbing the peace. After Oswald spends the night in jail, he meets privately with New Orleans FBI agent John Quigley. Oswald’s street theater discredits the Fair Play for Cuba Committee and prepares the ground for his portrayal in November as a pro-Castro assassin of President Kennedy.

August 24, 1963: Presidential advisers Roger Hilsman, Averell Harriman, and Michael Forrestal draft a telegram to newly appointed Saigon ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge that conditionally authorizes U.S. support of a coup by rebel South Vietnamese generals. President Kennedy, who is in Hyannis Port, endorses the telegram. He soon regrets the hasty policy decision that puts the U.S. government on record in support of a coup.

In El Paso, Texas, U.S. counterintelligence agent Richard Case Nagell, who has met with Kennedy assassination planners, walks into a bank and fires two pistol shots into a plaster wall just below the ceiling. He waits outside to be arrested and tells the FBI, “I would rather be arrested than commit murder and treason.”

The Senate approves the Limited Test Ban Treaty by a vote of 80 to 19.

In Mexico City, a man identifying himself as Lee Harvey Oswald visits the Cuban and Soviet consulates, displaying leftist credentials and applying for immediate visas to both Communist countries. When suspicious employees put him off and escort him outside, he flies into a rage, creating memorable scenes.

September 28, 1963: The man identifying himself as Oswald returns to the Mexico City Soviet Embassy, renewing his request for a quick visa to the Soviet Union. When Soviet officials offer him forms to fill out, he becomes even more agitated than on the previous day. He places a revolver on the table, saying it is necessary for his protection. He is again escorted to the door. This visit to the Soviet Embassy becomes a repeated reference

during incriminating phone calls by “Oswald,” wiretapped and transcribed by the CIA, in which the speaker associates himself with a Soviet assassination expert working at the embassy. When it is pointed out that the phone caller speaks broken Russian, whereas Oswald is fluent in the language, the CIA claims the audiotap...

October 11, 1963: President Kennedy issues National Security Action Memorandum 263, making official government policy the withdrawal from Vietnam of “1,000 U.S. military personnel by the end of 1963” and “by the end of 1965 . . . the bulk of U.S. personnel.”

October 16, 1963: After a successful job referral by Ruth Paine, Lee Harvey Oswald begins work at the Texas School Book Depository in Dallas.

November 1, 1963: Rebel South Vietnamese army units, supported by the CIA, encircle and bombard President Diem’s presidential palace in Saigon. Diem and his brother Nhu flee from the palace in darkness. They take refuge in the Saigon suburb of Cholon.

In Chicago, the Secret Service arrests two members of a four-man sniper team suspected of planning to assassinate President Kennedy during his visit to Chicago the following day. The other two snipers escape. Thomas Arthur Vallee, a mentally damaged ex-Marine working in a building over Kennedy’s motorcade route, is monitored by the Chicago Police.

While the two suspected snipers are questioned at Chicago Secret Service headquarters, potential assassination scapegoat Thomas Arthur Vallee is arrested. The other two alleged snipers remain at large in Chicago. Only Vallee is ever identified publicly.

In Washington, the Soviet Embassy receives a crudely typed, badly spelled letter dated nine days earlier and signed by “Lee H. Oswald” of Dallas. The letter seems to implicate the Soviet Union in conspiring with Oswald in the assassination of President Kennedy that will occur four days later. Soviet authorities recognize the letter as a forgery or provocation and decide to return it to the U.S. government, whose FBI agents had already opened and copied the letter on its way into the embassy.

November 21, 1963: Before leaving on his trip to Texas, President Kennedy, after being given a list of the most recent casualties in Vietnam, says to Assistant Press Secretary Malcolm Kilduff: “After I come back from Texas, that’s going to change.

Vietnam is not worth another American life.”

November 22, 1963: At 12:30 p.m., with security having been withdrawn from the surrounding area and the presidential limousine, President Kennedy is driven around a dogleg turn to a virtual stop in Dealey Plaza,...

When the president’s body is brought to Parkland Hospital, Dallas, twenty-one witnesses see a massive head wound in the

right rear of his skull, evidence of a fatal head shot from the front. At a press conference, Dr. Malcolm Perry repeatedly describes an entrance wound in the front of the throat, further evidence of shooting from the front.

Lee Harvey Oswald is arrested in the Texas Theater at 1:50 p.m., following the murder of Dallas Police officer J. D. Tippit at 1:15 by a man whom witnesses identify as Oswald. At 1:53 p.m., a man resembling Oswald is also arrested in the Texas Theater and taken out a different door. At 3...

Admiral Calvin Galloway, hospital commander, orders the doctors not to probe the throat

wound. X-rays taken that night show an intact rear skull, where a large occipital fragment of the president’s skull, which will be found the next day in Dealey Plaza, was blown out—proving the X-rays are fraudulent, created to disguise a massive exit wound in the rear.

At 11:55 p.m. on the third floor of Dallas Police headquarters, CIA-connected nightclub owner Jack Ruby, whom a witness saw deliver a gunman to the grassy knoll that morning, is given access to the doorway where prisoner Lee Harvey Oswald is about to be brought by police to a midnight p...

again given access to the prisoner Lee Harvey Oswald, this time as Oswald is brought from the basement to the garage of Dallas Police headquarters while being transferred to the Dallas County Jail. Ruby shoots Oswald to death at point blank range, as seen on television by millions.

President Truman was aboard the cruiser Augusta, returning from the Potsdam conference, when he was informed of the United States’ incineration of Hiroshima by the atomic bomb. Truman was exultant. He declared, “This is the greatest thing in history!” He went from person to person on the ship, officers and crew alike, telling them the great news like a town crier. Dorothy Day observed: “‘Jubilant’ the newspapers said. Jubilate Deo. We have killed 318,000 Japanese.”

Yet he exuded an ironic joy in life. Both the weaknesses and strengths of his character drew on his deeply held belief that death would come soon. “The point is,” he told a friend during a long talk on death, “that you’ve got to live every day like it’s your last day on earth.

Preventing another war became John Kennedy’s main motivation for entering politics after the Second World War. When he announced his candidacy for Congress on April 22, 1946, in Boston, Kennedy sounded more like he was running for president on a peace ticket than for a first term as a Democratic

member of Congress from Massachusetts: “What we do now will shape the history of civilization for many years to come. We have a weary world trying to bind the wounds of a fierce struggle. That is dire enough. What is infinitely far worse is that we have a world which has unleashed the terrible powers of atomic energy. We have a world capable of destroying itself. The days which lie ahead are most difficult ones. Above all, day and night, with every ounce of ingenuity and industry we possess, we must work for peace. We must not have another war.”[9]

War will exist until that distant day when the conscientious objector enjoys the same reputation and prestige that the warrior does today.”[14]

On July 1 in London, he had

dinner with William Douglas-Home, a former captain in the British army who had been sentenced to a year in jail for refusing an order to fire on civilians. Douglas-Home became his lifelong friend. Kennedy observed in his diary, “prowess in war is still deeply respected. The day of the conscientious objector is not yet at hand.”[15]

particularly in Indochina and Algeria. Speaking in the Senate on April 6, 1954, Kennedy critiqued predictions of a U.S.-sponsored French victory in Vietnam over Ho Chi Minh’s revolutionary forces. “No amount of American military assistance in Indochina,” Kennedy warned in words he would be forced to recall as president, “can conquer

an enemy which is everywhere and at the same time nowhere, ‘an enemy of the people’ which has the sympathy and covert support of the people.”[21] In an exchange with Senator Everett Dirksen, Kennedy said he envisioned two peace treaties for Vietnam, “one granting the Vietnamese people complete independence,” the other “a tie binding them to the French Union on the basis of full equality.”[22]

In 1957 Kennedy came out in support of Algerian independence. That spring he talked with Algerians who were seeking a hearing at the United Nation...

The speech created a furor. Kennedy was widely attacked for imperiling the unity of NATO. His biographer, Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., wrote of the episode, “Even Democrats drew back. Dean Acheson attacked him scornfully. Adlai Stevenson thought he had gone too far. For the next year or two, respectable people cited Kennedy’s Algerian speech as evidence of his irresponsibility in foreign affairs.”[24] However, in Europe the speech provoked positive attention, and in Africa excitement.

he told the Senate in 1959: “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 in bondage.” He therefore advocated “sympathy with the independence movement, programs of economic and educational assistance and, as the goal of American policy, ‘a strong Africa.’”[25] Historians have scarcely noticed JFK’s continuing support for a free Africa during his 1960 presidential campaign and in the presidency itself, documented in Richard D. Mahoney’s comprehensive study JFK: Ordeal in Africa.[26]

One of Kennedy’s worst decisions as president would be to develop the role of counterinsurgent warfare by enlarging the U.S. Army’s Special Forces, then re-baptizing them as the Green Berets. Kennedy promoted the Green Berets as a response to communist guerrillas, failing to recognize that counterinsurgent warfare would turn into a form of terrorism. The idea that the

United States could deploy Green Beret forces in client states “to win the hearts and minds of the people” was a contradiction that would become a negative part of Kennedy’s legacy.

Trappist monk Thomas Merton,

The Seven Storey Mountain,

“In actual fact it would seem that during the Cold War, if not during World War II, this country has become frankly a warfare state built on affluence, a power structure in which the interests of big business, the obsessions of the military, and the phobias of political extremists both dominate and dictate our national policy. It also seems that the people of the country are by and large reduced to passivity, confusion, resentment, frustration, thoughtlessness and ignorance, so that they blindly follow any line that is unraveled for them by the mass media.”[30]

Merton did not always feel such sympathy for President Kennedy. In a critical, prophetic letter a year earlier to his friend W. H. Ferry, he wrote: “I have little confidence in Kennedy, I think he cannot fully measure up to the magnitude of his task, and lacks creative imagination and the deeper kind of sensitivity that is needed. Too much the Time and Life mentality, than which I can imagine nothing further, in reality, from, say, Lincoln. What is needed is really not shrewdness or craft, but what the politicians don’t have: depth, humanity and a certain totality of self forgetfulness and compassion, not just for individuals but for man as a whole: a deeper kind of dedication. Maybe,” Merton speculates in an inspired insight, “Kennedy will

break through into that someday by miracle.

But such people are before long marked out for as...