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

by James W. Douglass

When the CIA in turn forwarded a copy of Duran’s statement to the Warren Commission, it had deleted her description of Oswald as blond and short (which was in conflict with the Oswald arrested in Dallas, who had brown hair and was five feet nine inches tall). It had also changed her strong statement that “he never called back” to “she does not recall whether or not Oswald later telephoned her at the Consulate number that she gave him.” When the authors of the Lopez Report noted these changes, they observed, “Had the [original] statements been included, the Warren Commission’s conclusions would not have seemed as strong”

The CIA also claimed in retrospect that its surveillance cameras had failed to photograph Oswald on any of his five trips to the Cuban and Soviet Embassies. HSCA investigators were blocked by the CIA from access to its surveillance photos (Lopez Report,

Yet even CIA witnesses were skeptical of the agency’s claim: “CIA officers who were in Mexico in 1963 and their Headquarters counterparts generally agreed that it would have been unlikely for the photosurveillance operations to have missed ten opportunities to have photographed Oswald” (ibid.,

Also arguing against the CIA’s claim was its surveillance cameras’ success in taking pictures at the Soviet Embassy in October 1963 of the mystery man who was not Oswald, yet who corresponded to the October 8 CIA cable’s wrong description of Oswald as “apparent age 35, athletic build, circa 6 feet, receding hairline, balding top.” Freedom of Information lawsuits have forced the CIA to surrender twelve photographs of this man. These photos provide further evidence of an Oswald impostor. The CIA has never identified the

Ten years before he became president, John F. Kennedy learned that it would be impossible to win a colonial war in Vietnam.

Instead, on October 11, 1963, six weeks before he was assassinated, President Kennedy issued his secret order for a U.S. withdrawal from Vietnam in National Security Action Memorandum (NSAM) 263.[3] It was an order that would never be obeyed because of his murder.

“White House Report: U.S. Troops Seen Out of Viet[nam] by ’65”;[4] in the New York Times, “1,000 U.S. Troops to Leave Vietnam.”[5]

JFK felt that his own demise was increasingly likely if he continued to buck his military advisers.

What is unrecognized about JFK’s presidency, which then makes his assassination a false mystery, is that he was locked in a struggle with his national security state. That state had higher values than obedience to the orders of a president who wanted peace.

His isolation grew as he rejected his military advisers’ most creatively destructive proposals on how to win the Cold War.

campaign of terrorism within the United States as a necessary evil in overcoming Communist Cuba:

Although “Operation Northwoods” had been blocked by the president, General Lemnitzer kept pushing on behalf of the Joint Chiefs for a preemptive invasion of Cuba. In an April 10, 1962, memorandum to McNamara, he stated: “The Joint Chiefs of Staff believe that the Cuban problem must be solved in the near future . . . they believe that military intervention by the United States will be required to overthrow the present communist regime . . . They also believe that the intervention can be accomplished rapidly enough to minimize communist opportunities for solicitation of UN action.”[16]

They thought it was Kennedy, not themselves, who had gone off the deep end. The future of the country was in their hands. For the CIA and the Joint Chiefs, the question was: How could Kennedy’s surrender to the Communists be stopped in time to save America? In their world of victory or defeat, JFK’s decision to withdraw from Vietnam was the last straw.

Brown opened up. With the president concentrating intently on his words, Brown critiqued the CIA’s and the Pentagon’s endorsement of the anti-communist ruler General Phoumi Nosavan. The autocratic general had risen to power through the CIA’s formation, under the Eisenhower administration, of a Laotian “patriotic organization,” the Committee for the Defense of the National Interest (CDNI).[23] Brown told Kennedy frankly that Laos

Brown critiqued the CIA’s and the Pentagon’s endorsement of the anti-communist ruler General Phoumi Nosavan. The autocratic general had risen to power through the CIA’s formation, under the Eisenhower administration, of a Laotian “patriotic organization,” the Committee for the Defense of the National Interest (CDNI).[23] Brown told Kennedy frankly that Laos could be united only under the neutralist Souvanna Phouma, whose government had been deposed by CIA-Pentagon forces under Eisenhower.

could be united only under the neutralist Souvanna Phouma, whose government had been deposed by CIA-Pentagon forces under Eisenhower. JFK questioned Brown extensively about the possibility of a neutral government under Souvanna that Britain, France, and the Soviet Union could all support, if the United States were to change policy.[24] Years later, Brown recalled his hour-...

In a March 9 meeting at the White House, he peppered his National Security Council with questions that exposed contradictions in U.S. policy and pointed the way toward a neutralist Laos. His questioning uncovered the uncomfortable truth that the United States had sent in much more military equipment in the past three months to aid Phoumi Nosavan than the Soviets had in support of the Communist Pathet Lao forces.[26]

At a March 23 news conference on Laos, Kennedy made his policy change public by stating that the United States “strongly and unreservedly” supported “the goal of a neutral and independent Laos, tied to no outside power or group of powers, threatening no one, and free from any domination.”[30] He endorsed the British appeal for a cease-fire between General

Phoumi’s army and the neutralist-communist forces arrayed against them. He also joined the British in calling for an international conference on Laos.[31] The Russians agreed. Kennedy’s

In spite of the president’s turn toward neutralism at his March 23 press conference, on March 30 General Lemnitzer told reporters that the neutralist leader Souvanna Phouma was not to be trusted. While Souvanna might not be a Communist, Lemnitzer said, “he couldn’t be any worse if he were a communist.”[33]

The first was the Bay of Pigs. As we have seen, Kennedy realized that the CIA and the Joint Chiefs had set him up at the Bay of Pigs for a full-scale invasion of Cuba, by a scenario designed to fail unless he agreed under overwhelming pressure

to send in the troops. When he refused to go along and accepted the defeat, he refocused his attention more critically on Laos. The same CIA and military advisers who had deceived him on Cuba were urging him to intervene in Laos. Moreover, the Joint Chiefs kept revising upward the number of troops they wanted him to deploy there: asking initially for 40,000; raising the number to 60,000 by the end of March; hiking it to 140,000 by the end of April.[35] Kennedy began to balk at their scenarios.

“Each time you give ground [as he thought JFK was doing in Laos], it is harder to stand next time.” Burke said the U.S. had to be prepared somewhere in Southeast Asia to “throw enough in to win—the works.”[37] Army general George H. Decker seconded Burke, saying, “If we go in, we should go in to win, and that means bombing Hanoi, China, and maybe even using nuclear weapons.”[38] With his customary insolence toward the president, Air Force general Curtis LeMay told JFK the next day before a room full of

national security advisers that he did not know what U.S. policy was on Laos. He underlined his disdain by adding that he knew what the president had said, but “the military had been unable to back up the President’s statements.”[39] At another meeting, General Lemnitzer provoked deeper questions in Kennedy about the Joint Chiefs by outlining a strategy of unlimited escalation in Southeast Asia, concluding, “If we are given the right to use nuclear weapons, we can guarantee victory.”[40] The president looked at him, said nothing, and dismissed the meeting. Later he commented, “Since he couldn’t think of any further escalation, he would have to promise us victory.”[41]

A military authority who reinforced Kennedy’s resistance to the Joint Chiefs was retired general Douglas MacArthur, who visited him in late April. MacArthur told the president, “Anyone wanting to commit American ground forces to the mainland of Asia should have his head examined.”[43] Kennedy cited MacArthur’s judgment to his own generals for the duration of his presidency. To put U.S. combat troops into Laos or Vietnam was a line he adamantly refused to cross for the rest of his life.

MacArthur made another statement, about the political situation Kennedy had inherited in Indochina, that struck the president so much that he dictated it in an oral memorandum of their conversation: “He said that ‘the chickens are coming home to roost’ from Eisenhower’s years and I live in the chicken coop.”[45] Malcolm X would become notorious for the same barnyard saying after JFK was killed in the chicken coop.

Secret Service agent Abraham Bolden.

Bolden defied them, saying he would do nothing that was not included in the school manual.[46] He outraged campus opinion by writing a letter to the school paper challenging the granting of scholarships to star athletes who were poor students. Bolden graduated cum laude from Lincoln.

Kennedy never passed Bolden without speaking to him. He asked about him and his family, in such a way that Bolden knew he meant it. He engaged him in small talk about Chicago and its baseball teams. The president often introduced Bolden to his White House visitors. Bolden could also see in Kennedy’s eyes a worry, a feeling that something was wrong around him.[49]

isolation and danger from the standpoint of security. Most of the Secret Service agents seemed to hate John Kennedy. They joked among themselves that if someone shot at him, they’d get out of the way. The agents’ drunken after-hours behavior carried over into lax security for the president.

Bolden refused to drink

or play cards with them. The other agents made remarks about “niggers...

Kennedy had had to push Khrushchev at Vienna to get him to agree on Laos. At first Khrushchev taunted his American counterpart with Cold War history, saying Kennedy “knew very well that it had been the US government [under Eisenhower] which had overthrown Souvanna Phouma.”[53] JFK conceded the point. He said, “Speaking frankly, US policy in that region has not always been wise.”[54] Nevertheless, he went on, the United States now wanted a Laos that would be as neutral and independent as Cambodia and Burma were. Khrushchev said that was his view as well.[55]

The Pentagon Papers have described the special American commitment to Vietnam that existed when Kennedy became president. Unlike any of the other countries in Southeast Asia, Vietnam was “essentially the creation of the United States,”[59] as was the leadership of Ngo Dinh Diem:

“If these men I saw at your request were bankers, I would know—without bothering to ask—that there would be no further extensions on my note.”[61]

“Whap! His hand slapped down on the desk. I jumped in my chair. ‘Because we were there!’ He slammed the desktop again. His face contorted in anger and pain. ‘We were there, in 1951. We saw what was happening to the French. We saw it. My brother was determined, determined never to let that happen to us.’”[80]

His military advisers continued to ride hard toward the apocalypse. Kennedy was appalled by Generals Lemnitzer’s and LeMay’s insistence at two summer meetings that they wanted

his authorization to use nuclear weapons in both Berlin and Southeast Asia. His response was to walk out of the meetings.[82]

After one such walkout, he threw his hands in the air, glanced back at the generals and admirals left in the Cabinet Room, and said, “These people are crazy.”[83] The Joint Chiefs wondered in turn why their commander-in-chief was reluctant to authorize their...

General Bruce Clarke, who commanded U.S. forces in Europe, learned of Clay’s exercise and put a stop to it.[84] When he told Clay to end the wall-bashing rehearsals, Clarke looked at Clay’s red telephone to the White House and said, “If you don’t like that, call the President and see what he says.”[85] Clay chose not to. Nor did either man ever inform the

president of what had gone on at the secret wall in the forest. While Kennedy remained unaware of Clay’s provocative planning, Khrushchev was much better informed. Soviet spies had watched the forest maneuvers, had taken pictures of them, and had relayed their reports and pictures to Moscow. Khrushchev then assembled a group of close advisers to plot out step by step their counterscenario to a U.S. assault on the Berlin Wall.[86] However, Nikita Khrushchev doubted that John Kennedy had authorized any such attack. He and the president had already begun their secret communications and had in fact even made private progress in the previous month on the question of Berlin. Khrushchev strongly suspected that Kennedy was being undermined.[87]

Khrushchev’s son, Sergei, in his memoir, Nikita Khrushchev and the Creation of a Superpower, has described from the Soviet standpoint how the two Cold War leaders had begun to conspire toward coexistence. His account has been corroborat...

“Today, every inhabitant of this planet must contemplate the day when this planet may no longer be habitable. Every man, woman and child lives under a nuclear sword of Damocles, hanging by the slenderest of threads, capable of being cut at any moment by accident or miscalculation or by madness. 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.”[94]

As Sergei Khrushchev commented, “It seemed to Father that other forces, bypassing the president, were interfering.”[95]

The Soviet leader did so, in gracious recognition that Kennedy was under even more intense pressure than he was. In both cases a back-channel communication via Robert Kennedy was critical. And in both cases Khrushchev, in withdrawing his tanks and later his missiles, achieved his own objectives in exchange from Kennedy: the removal of U.S. threats to bulldoze the Wall and to invade Cuba, and the withdrawal of U.S. missiles from Turkey and

Italy.

However, both the mini-crisis at the Berlin Wall and the huge one over Cuban missiles revealed the shakiness of Kennedy’s position in relation to his own military. In the crisis at the wall, Khrushchev knew more about the U.S. plans for attack than Kennedy did. Fortunately Khrushchev was sensitiv...

“Finally, to those nations who would make themselves our adversary, we offer not a pledge but a request: that both sides begin anew the quest for peace, before the dark powers of destruction unleashed by science engulf all humanity in planned or accidental self-destruction.”[101]

In Khrushchev’s first private letter to Kennedy, on September 29, 1961, the Soviet premier had written: “I note with gratification that you and I are of the same opinion as to the need for the withdrawal of foreign troops from the territory of Laos.”[103]