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

by James W. Douglass

However, Khrushchev was powerless to stop it even if he wanted to. Just as Kennedy would discover he had no control over Ngo Dinh Diem in South Vietnam, neither was Khrushchev able to control Ho Chi Minh in North Vietnam. Diem and Ho had minds and policies of their own.

Kennedy and Khrushchev each had a piece of the truth. North Vietnam was in fact sending its troops and arms through “a neutral and independent” Laos into South Vietnam. But this infiltration was part of a nationalist Communist movement that would have been ruling all of Vietnam had not Diem, backed by the Eisenhower administration, blocked an election called for by the Geneva settlement. As Kennedy argued, North Vietnam was indeed violating the neutrality of Laotian territory. But as

Khrushchev insisted, Ngo Dinh Diem’s government, illegitimate from the start, was suppressing its own people. The overarching truth plaguing Kennedy’s and Khrushchev’s agreement on a neutral and independent Laos was that peace in Laos and Vietnam was interdependent.

John Kennedy contradicted his commitment to a peaceful settlement of the Laos crisis by his decision to deploy CIA and military advisers there and to arm covertly the members of the Hmong tribe (known by the Americans as the “Meos”). On August 29, 1961, following the recommendations of his CIA, military, and State Department advise...

ahead with the equipping of two thousand more “Meos.” That brought to eleven thousand the number of mountain men of Laos recruited into the CIA’s covert army.[109] From Kennedy’s standpoint, he was supporting an indigenous group of people who were profoundly opposed to their land’s occupation by the Pathet Lao army. He was also trying to hold on to enough ground, through some effective resistance to the Pathet Lao’s advance, to leave something for Averell Harriman to negotiate with in Geneva toward a neutralist government. But he was working within Cold War assumptions and playing into the hands of his own ...

Kennedy went ahead in strengthening the CIA-“Meo” army, so as to stem a Communist takeover in Laos, while at the same time tryin...

In early 1962 General Phoumi built up the garrison of Nam

Tha, only fifteen miles from the Chinese border. Phoumi used his reinforced base to launch provocative probes into nearby Pathet Lao territory. For a time the Pathet Lao ignored Phoumi, aware that he was trying to create an international incident. Eventually they did engage in a series of firefights with Phoumi forces, but refrained from attacking Nam Tha. However, Phoumi’s troops abandoned Nam Tha anyhow, claiming they were under attack, and fled across the Mekong River into Thailand.[113]

Then they waited for the United States to intervene in the conflict t...

As the Times of London reported, “CIA agents had deliberately opposed the official American objective of trying to establish a neutral go...

reinforcement of Nam Tha, and had negatived the heavy financial pressure brought by the Kennedy administration upon Phoumi by su...

Emboldened by his knowledge of his CIA backing, Phoumi was brazen in his defiance of President Kennedy’s policy. The Times correspondent stated: “The General apparently was quite outspoken, and made it known that he could di...

because he was in communication with other America...

But JFK also authorized Averell Harriman to transfer Jack Hazey, the CIA officer closest to Phoumi.[117] Hazey had been the Agency’s counterpart in Laos of David Atlee Phillips in the Caribbean, who would deploy anti-Castro Cubans in raids designed to draw JFK into a war with Cuba. In neither case did the president bite.

Harriman and Pushkin respected each other and were inclined to conspire together for peace.

This largely unwritten understanding would become known in U.S. circles as the “Pushkin agreement.”

The president’s most bitter opponents to a Laotian settlement, in the Defense Department and the CIA, tried to destroy the agreement. They kept up their support of General Phoumi’s provocations and violations of the cease-fire. Averell Harriman told Arthur Schlesinger in May 1962 that JFK’s Laos policy was being “systematically sabotaged” from within the government by the military and the CIA. “They want to prove that a neutral solution is impossible,” Harriman said, “and that the only course is to turn Laos into an American bastion.”[122]

Harriman said he would send the instructions the following week.[129] In fact Averell Harriman sabotaged Kennedy’s proposal for a mutual de-escalation with North Vietnam. In response to the president’s order to wire such instructions to Galbraith, Harriman “struck the language on de-escalation from the message with a heavy pencil line,” as scholar Gareth Porter discovered by examining Harriman’s papers. Harriman dictated instructions to his colleague Edward Rice for a telegram to Galbraith that instead “changed the mutual de-escalation approach into a threat of U.S. escalation of the war if the North Vietnamese refused to accept U.S. terms,” thereby subverting Kennedy’s purpose.[130]

When Rice tried to re-introduce Kennedy’s peaceful initiative into the telegram, Harriman intervened. He again crossed out the de-escalation proposal, then “simply killed the telegram altogether.”[131] As a result of Harriman’s obstruction, Galbraith never did receive JFK’s mutual de-escalation proposal to North Vietnam.[132]

course in Vietnam. In the spring of 1962, as Kennedy moved steadily toward a Laotian settlement, he instructed Robert McNamara to initiate a plan to withdraw the U.S. military from Vietnam. The first step was taken by McNamara at a Secretary of Defense (SECDEF) conference on the Vietnam War held in Saigon on May 8, 1962.

By his quick examination the Secretary of Defense had demonstrated the president’s position that the United States had nowhere to go militarily in Laos. The choice they had to make was between the negotiated compromise JFK was seeking (which the military regarded as a sellout to the Communists) and an absurd commitment to wage an ever-escalating war in Laos, North Vietnam, and China.

By going along with the military on crop destruction, Kennedy was violating both his conscience and international law. In August he had already approved a separate herbicide operation whose purpose of defoliation, as recommended by McNamara, was to “deny concealed forward areas, attack positions, and ambush sites to the Viet Cong.”[148] However, in his August approval, Kennedy had asked “that every effort be made to avoid accidental destruction of the food crops in the areas to be

sprayed.”[149]

At the time JFK was preoccupied with reports of Soviet missiles being sent secretly to Cuba, which when confirmed a week later would begin the October 16-28, 1962, Cuban Missile Crisis.

Moreover, he had been singularly responsible for convincing the Eisenhower administration to support the rise to power of Ngo Dinh Diem. Mansfield had endorsed Diem as a Vietnamese nationalist independent of both the French and the Viet Minh. The Senator’s support proved so critical to the survival of Diem’s government in the late fifties that Mansfield was known popularly as “Diem’s godfather.”[152] Nevertheless, by the fall of 1962, Mansfield had become opposed to the increasing U.S. commitment to a war in support of that same government. His reversal moved JFK to ask him to investigate the situation firsthand.

“I got angry with Mike for disagreeing with our policy so completely, and I got angry with myself because I found myself agreeing with him.”[156]

“decidedly purple language,”[160]

That afternoon the president issued National Security Action Memorandum Number 217, forbidding “high ranking military and civilian personnel” from going to South Vietnam without

being cleared by the State Department office where Hilsman worked.[162] This action by JFK, reining in the military’s travel to Vietnam, for the sake of a neutralization policy, did not please the Pentagon.

“After Mansfield left the office, the President said to me, ‘In 1965, I’ll become one of the most unpopular Presidents in history. I’ll be damned everywhere as a Communist appeaser. But I don’t care. If I tried to pull out completely now from Vietnam, we would have another Joe McCarthy red scare on our

hands, but I can do it after I’m reelected. So we had better make damned sure that I am reelected.’”[163]

Nhu was delivering this unwelcome message directly to a key representative of the institution most involved in trying to control the South Vietnamese government: the CIA. It was the CIA that, operating under its front organization, the Agency for International Development (AID), had already managed to put advisers in at least twenty of the government’s forty-one provinces.[175]

Then on May 8, 1963, mysterious explosions set off in the South Vietnamese city of Hue began a chain reaction of events that in the next six months would obliterate the hope of a Kennedy-Diem alliance for peace, overthrow the Diem government, and result in the November 2 assassinations of Diem and Nhu.

sponsor, the Central Intelligence Agency. Greene observed in his memoir, Ways of Escape, it was no coincidence that “the Life photographer at the moment of the explosion was so well placed that he was able to take an astonishing and horrifying photograph which showed the body of a trishaw driver still upright after his legs had been blown off.”[186] The CIA had set the scene, alerting the Life photographer and Times reporter so they could convey the terrorist bombing as the work of “Viet Minh Communists” to a mass audience.[187]

A decade later, plastic bombs were still a weapon valued in covert U.S. plots designed to scapegoat an unsuspecting target. In March 1962, as we have seen, General Lyman Lemnitzer, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, proposed “exploding a few plastic bombs in carefully chosen spots” in the United States, then arresting and blaming Cuban agents for the terrorist acts.[189]

In 1970 Hoa Binh located such a man, a Captain Scott, who in later years became a U.S. military adviser in the Mekong Delta. Scott had come to Hue from Da Nang on May 7, 1963. He admitted he was the American agent responsible for the bombing at the radio station the next day. He said he used “an explosive that was still secret and known only to certain people in the Central Intelligence Agency, a charge no larger than a matchbox with a timing device.”[191]

On January 17, 1961, three days before JFK was inaugurated as president, Dwight D. Eisenhower in his farewell address warned of a new threat to freedom from within the United States. In response to a threat from without, Eisenhower said, “We have been compelled to create a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions. Added to this, three and a half million men and women are directly engaged in the defense establishment. We annually spend on military security more than the net income of all United States corporations.

“In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. “We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted.”[7]

father, Joseph P. Kennedy, Sr., while a businessman himself, had also been President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s first chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). As a former Wall Street insider who knew the system, the senior Kennedy had cracked down on Wall Street profiteers. Some of the financial titans of the thirties regarded JFK’s father as a class traitor, “the Judas of Wall Street,” for his work on behalf of FDR.[30] It was in the light of Joseph Kennedy’s fight to initiate government controls over Wall Street, and the opposition he encountered, that he made his all-businessmen-are-s.o.b.’s remark to JFK.

Why did the financial interests behind U.S. Steel announce the price increase in such a way as to deliberately “provoke the President of the U.S. into a vitriolic and demagogic assault?”[33]

he either had to accept the price hike and lose credibility, or react as he did with power to roll back the increase and thereby unite the business world against him. His unswerving activist response then served to confirm the worst fears of corporate America:

Media controlled by the same interests adopted the characterization of RFK as ruthless until his murder six years later.

We have no evidence as to who in the military-industrial complex may have given the order to assassinate President Kennedy. That the order was carried out by the Central Intelligence Agency is obvious. The CIA’s fingerprints are all over the crime and the events leading up to it.

the Warren Report did not mention that in the Marine Corps Oswald had been a

radar operator specifically for the CIA’s top-secret U-2 spy plane.

The CIA’s E. Howard Hunt, while imprisoned for the Watergate break-in, told the New York Times that Pash’s CIA assassination unit was designed especially for the killing of suspected double agents.[48] That placed Pash’s terminators under the authority of counterintelligence chief Angleton. Joseph Trento testified that his sources confirmed, “Pash’s assassination unit was assigned to Angleton.”[49]

Committee later discovered.[50] Among the notes for ZR/RIFLE that Harvey then scribbled to himself were: “planning should include provisions for blaming Sovs or Czechs in case of blow. Should have phony 201 [a CIA file on any person “of active operational interest”][51] in RG [Central Registry] to backstop this, all documents therein forged and backdated.”[52] In other words, in order to blame an assassination on the Communists, the patsy should be given Soviet or Czechoslovakian associations. (Oswald’s would be Soviet and Cuban.) An appropriately fraudulent CIA 201 personnel file should be created for any future assassination scapegoat, with “all documents therein forged and updated.” Harvey also reminded himself that the phony 201 “should look like a CE

[counterespionage] file,” and that he needed to talk with “Jim A.”[53]

In the mid 1970s, the Senate’s Church Committee on intelligence and the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) opened the CIA’s lid on Lee Harvey Oswald and discovered James Jesus Angleton. They found that Angleton’s Special Investigations Group (SIG) in CIA Counterintelligence held a 201 file on Oswald in the three years prior to JFK’s assassination.

It was Angleton’s staff member, Ann Egerter, who opened Oswald’s 201 SIG file on December 9, 1960.[56] Egerter was questioned by the House Select Committee. They knew they could not expect her, as a CIA employee, to answer truthfully, even under oath, the question whether Oswald was a CIA agent.