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

by James W. Douglass

For Americans, the unthinkable was not the act of waging nuclear war but the act of talking with the Communist devil who ruled the island nation ninety miles from Florida, who was in fact key to stopping a nuclear holocaust.

Veciana’s CIA adviser was a man who used the cover name “Maurice Bishop.” Veciana revealed that “[Bishop] kept saying Kennedy would have to be forced to make a decision, and the only way was to put him up against the wall.”[9]

So Bishop targeted Soviet ships to create another Soviet–American crisis.

As Fonzi showed by his HSCA investigation, “Maurice Bishop” was in fact David Atlee Phillips, who would become a key player in John Kennedy’s assassination and would subsequently be promoted to...

The Alpha 66 raid was only the beginning. It was followed up eight days later by another Cuban exile attack that damaged a Soviet freighter in a Cuban port.[12] The JM/WAVE chief of operations coordinating these efforts to force Kennedy’s hand against Castro was the CIA’s David Sanchez Morales, a longtime co-worker of David Atlee Phillips. Morales would also participate in JFK’s murder, as he would admit to friends in the 1970s.[13]

Instead of backing Alpha 66, President Kennedy ordered a government crackdown on all Miami exile raids into Cuba. In doing so, he enlisted the help of his brother.

November 22, Veciana would immediately recognize the newspaper and television pictures of Lee Harvey Oswald as being of the young man he had seen in Dallas with his own CIA handler “Maurice Bishop.” However, in his subsequent meetings with Bishop, Veciana would be careful never to allude to the Oswald meeting both men knew he had observed, which if known further could serve as a critical evidentiary link between the CIA and the accused assassin of the president.[111] Sixteen years later, after Veciana did finally describe the Oswald meeting to the House Committee and came to the very edge of identifying David Atlee Phillips as “Maurice Bishop,” he was shot in the head by an unidentified gunman in Miami. Veciana recovered from the assassination attempt. He never admitted publicly that Phillips was Bishop, though he acknowledged as much privately to Fonzi.[112]

Hoover knows very well that the falsified evidence of a Cuban-Soviet plot to kill Kennedy (which Johnson has just been given by McCone) came from the CIA. Hoover simply gives Johnson the raw fact of an Oswald impostor in Mexico City, then lets Johnson chew on its implications.

The CIA’s case scapegoated Cuba and the U.S.S.R. through Oswald for the president’s assassination and steered the United States toward an invasion of Cuba and a nuclear attack on the U.S.S.R.

One must give the CIA (and the assassination sponsors that were even further in the shadows) their due for having devised and executed a brilliant setup. They had played out a scenario to Kennedy’s death in Dallas that pressured other government authorities to choose among three major options: a war of vengeance against Cuba and the Soviet Union based on the CIA’s false Mexico City documentation of a Communist assassination plot; a domestic political war based on the same documents seen truly, but a war the CIA would fight with every covert weapon at its command; or a complete cover-up of any conspiracy evidence and a silent coup d’état that would reverse Kennedy’s efforts to end the Cold War.

City scenario was being questioned and could implicate not the Communists but the CIA itself in the assassination, the Mexico City Station back-pedaled to cover up the false evidence. It began to say that its audiotapes of the “Oswald” phone calls to the Soviet Embassy had been routinely destroyed, and therefore no voice comparisons were possible to determine if the speaker really was Oswald.[148]

emplacement of the missiles. And I might add here that for us Cubans it didn’t really make so much difference whether we died by conventional bombing or a hydrogen bomb. Nevertheless, we were not gambling with the peace of the world. The United States was the one to jeopardize the peace of mankind by using the threat of war to stifle revolutions.”[168]

After becoming president, Kennedy would cite Edmund Gullion’s farsighted analysis to his military advisers, as they pushed hard for the combat troops that JFK would never send to 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.

Kennedy had decided to pull out one thousand members of the U.S. military by the end of 1963, and all of them by the end of 1965.

JFK felt that his own demise was increasingly likely if he continued to buck his military advisers. He then proceeded to do exactly that. After vetoing the introduction of U.S. troops at the Bay of Pigs, he resisted the Joint Chiefs’ even more intense pressures to bomb and invade Cuba in the October 1962 missile crisis. Then he simply ignored his military and CIA advisers by turning sharply toward peace in his American University address, his Partial Test Ban Treaty with Nikita Khrushchev, and his quest for a dialogue with Fidel Castro. His October 1963 decision to withdraw from Vietnam once again broke the Cold War rule of his national security state. As Merton had hoped, Kennedy was breaking through to a deeper humanity—and to its fatal consequences.

As spring turned into the summer of 1963, President John F. Kennedy had decided to withdraw the U.S. military and neutralize Vietnam, just as he had done in Laos.

The pressures on President Kennedy came less from constituents than from the weapons-making corporations that thrived on the Cold War, and from the Pentagon and the CIA that were dedicated to “winning” that war, whatever that might mean.

Yet in the summer of 1963, the leaders of the military-industrial complex could see storm clouds on their horizon.

After JFK’s American University address and his quick signing of the Test Ban Treaty with Khrushchev, corporate power holders saw the distinct prospect in the not distant future of a settlement in the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union.

that direction of U.S.-Soviet disarmament lay the diminished power of a corporate military system that for years had controlled the United States government. In his turn toward peace, Kennedy was beginning to undermine the dominant power structure that Eisenhower had finally identified and warned against so strongly as he left the White House.

John and Robert Kennedy had become notorious in the ranks of big business. JFK’s strategy of withdrawing defense contracts and RFK’s aggressive investigating tactics toward men of power were seen as unforgivable sins by the corporate world. As a result of the president’s uncompromising stand against the steel industry—and implicitly any corporation that chose to defy his authority—a bitter gap opened up between Kennedy and big business, whose most powerful elements coincided with the military-industrial complex.

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.

In 1952 Kennedy had been elected to the Senate over the heavily favored incumbent senator, Henry Cabot Lodge. From 1953 to 1960, Lodge served the Eisenhower administration as UN ambassador, squashing UN opposition to CIA coups carried out in Iran and Guatemala under the direction of Allen Dulles. When JFK defeated Nixon for the presidency in 1960, Lodge as Nixon’s vice-presidential candidate lost to Kennedy again. Lodge had then been hired by anti-Kennedy media magnate Henry Luce as his consultant on international affairs.[98] The struggle for power between the two dueling Massachusetts dynasties, the Fitzgerald Kennedys and the Cabot Lodges, continued.

However, the Soviets had discovered the plot to kill the president and knew the CIA planned to implicate them.

JFK’s opponents in the Kremlin were not only secretly monitoring the CIA’s preparations to kill Kennedy. They were also trying to disrupt the plot, save the life of a president they knew they could work with, and keep from being scapegoated for his murder.

the early summer of 1963, besides sidestepping the Pentagon and the CIA on Vietnam, the president had also left them out of consultations for his American University address and the test ban treaty. The reason was simple. Kennedy knew the military-intelligence elite was opposed to all his efforts to end the Cold War. They wanted to win it.

In the wake of the April 1962 steel crisis, Luce’s Fortune magazine had implicitly warned the president, on behalf of America’s business elite, to beware “the ides of April” for his dominant role in settling the crisis.[168] The Fortune editorial was a corporate declaration of war against the Kennedy administration and a veiled personal threat to the president. Henry Luce and his media empire epitomized the corporate, military, and intelligence forces that wanted to stop Kennedy.

Lodge’s commitment to engineering a coup against Diem was no problem to the CIA’s chief of covert operations, Richard Helms, who had the same goal. When Helms allied the CIA to the State Department circle pressuring Kennedy for a coup, he told Harriman, “It’s about time we bit this bullet.”[61] Helms could only welcome Lodge’s and the State Department’s enthusiasm for a coup as additional cover for company business. Whether knowingly or not, Henry Cabot Lodge, in his push to carry out a Saigon coup that was facilitated by the CIA, was helping to provide the impetus for a Washington coup as well.

Kennedy had continued to puzzle over the question: How could he begin withdrawing U.S. troops from Vietnam when practically his entire military command and circle of advisers wanted to expand the war? The president knew his key ally in the Pentagon was his loyal civilian bureaucrat Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara. However, McNamara’s power on his behalf was hedged in by the noncooperation of the top brass.

the “McNamara-Taylor Report.” When the secretaries finished typing up the report in Krulak’s office, it was then bound in a leather cover, flown to Hawaii, and placed in the hands of McNamara and Taylor on their way back from Vietnam. They read the report on their flight to Washington, and presented it to Kennedy at the White House on the morning of October 2.[66] JFK accepted its recommendations, most significantly one for the withdrawal of one thousand military personnel from Vietnam by the end of that year. That 1963 withdrawal, together with Kennedy’s plan “to withdraw the bulk of U.S. personnel by the end of 1965,” became official government policy on October 11, 1963, in the president’s National Security Action Memorandum (NSAM) Number 263.[67]

Although CIA and military intelligence reports from Vietnam continued to be optimistic, the president had seen through to the truth, thanks especially to MacArthur, Galbraith, and Mansfield. As he told Charles Bartlett, “We don’t have a prayer of staying in Vietnam. We don’t have a prayer of prevailing there.”

Hilsman wrote Lodge: “I have the feeling that more and more of the town is coming around to our view [for a coup against Diem] and that if you in Saigon and we in the [State] Department stick to our guns the rest will also come around. As Mike will tell you, a determined group here will back you all the way.”[90] Hilsman’s secret message spurring on Lodge subverted Kennedy’s purpose. The back-channel letter demonstrated just how isolated Kennedy had become. Even his aide for the Far East, Forrestal, and his point man on Vietnam, Hilsman, were encouraging Lodge behind the president’s back to launch a coup against Diem.

The consequence in the early 1960s, when Kennedy became president, was that the CIA had placed a secret team of its own employees through the entire U.S. government. It was accountable to no one except the CIA, headed by Allen Dulles. After Dulles was fired by Kennedy, the CIA’s Deputy Director of Plans Richard Helms became this invisible government’s immediate commander. No one except a tight inner circle of the CIA even knew of the existence of this top-secret intelligence network, much less the identity of its deep-cover bureaucrats. These CIA “focal points,” as Dulles called them, constituted a powerful, unseen government within the government. Its Dulles-appointed members would act quickly, with total obedience, when called on by the CIA to assist its covert operations.

In the fall of 1963, as the president ordered a U.S. withdrawal from Vietnam, he was being eased out of control, by friends and foes alike, for the sake of an overriding vision of war. They all thought they knew better than he did what needed to be done to win the war in Vietnam, and elsewhere across the globe against an evil enemy. Kennedy’s horror of the nuclear war he had skirted during the missile crisis, his concern for American troops in Vietnam, and his turn toward peace with Nikita Khrushchev and Fidel Castro, had, in his critics’ eyes, made him soft on Communism.

The brilliantly conceived Kennedy assassination scenario being played out, scene by deadly scene, was based on our Manichean Cold War theology. After a decade and a half of propaganda, the American public had absorbed a systematic demonizing of Communism. Atheistic Communist enemies armed with nuclear weapons were thought to constitute an absolute evil over against God and the democratic West. Against the backdrop of this dualistic theology, a beloved president seeking a just peace with the enemy could be murdered with impunity by the covert-action agencies of his national security state. U.S. intelligence agencies, coordinated by the CIA, carried out the president’s murder through a propaganda scenario that projected the scheme’s inherent evil onto our Cold War enemies.

When we take off our Warren Commission blinders, we can see that the letter sent to the Soviet Embassy was designed to implicate the Soviets and Cubans in the murder of the president of the United States.

Khrushchev’s generous retreat at the Berlin Wall, made in response to a back-channel appeal by Kennedy,[76] would be repeated in the Cuban Missile Crisis.

As we saw, the pressures on Kennedy for an attack on the Soviet missile sites in Cuba were overwhelming, from both his military and civilian advisers. He resisted those pressures and instead worked out the mutual concessions with Khrushchev that resolved the crisis. The Joint Chiefs of Staff were infuriated by his steadfast refusal to launch an attack.

From Palamara’s interviews, it soon became obvious that the withdrawal of agents from the presidential limousine in Dallas “was a Secret Service decision, not a JFK desire as ‘official’ history (Warren Commission/[Jim] Bishop/ [William] Manchester/ Secret Service) has told us all. The Secret Service lied, using JFK as a scapegoat.”[307]

Thus, not only did the Secret Service plan and coordinate a turn that flagrantly violated its own security rule of a forty-four-mile-an-hour minimum speed for the presidential limousine.[309] Through orders from Washington, the agency responsible for the president’s security created a vacuum of security—in Dealey Plaza, all around the presidential limousine, and on the surrounding buildings as well.

the only “Secret Service Agents” in Dealey Plaza when the shots were fired were imposters and killers, bearing false credentials to facilitate their escape and coerce witnesses into handing over vital evidence that would vanish. The vacuum created by orders from Washington was immediately filled. When the president’s security was systematically withdrawn from Dealey Plaza, his assassins moved swiftly into place.

Butch Burroughs and Bernard Haire are complementary witnesses. From their perspectives both inside and outside the Texas Theater, they saw an Oswald double arrested and taken to a police car in the back alley only minutes after the arrest of Lee Harvey Oswald.

In a colossal CIA blunder, Robert Vinson’s providential presence on the second Oswald’s flight from Dallas has enabled us to see the planning for the Oak Cliff follow-up to the assassination. First, in Dealey Plaza, came the killing of JFK by snipers firing from the grassy knoll and the Texas School Book Depository. Then in Oak Cliff, the scenario continued with Oswald’s “escape” in a taxi, while the second Oswald was driven into the same area in the Rambler station wagon by the man Roger Craig described as “a husky looking Latin”[518]—corresponding to Robert Vinson’s description of the Oswald companion who got on the C-54, standing 6’ to 6’1”, weighing 180 to 190 pounds, whom Vinson, like Craig, said looked Latino, probably Cuban.[519] Officer J. D. Tippit was then shot to death by a man who witnesses said looked like Oswald. After Tippit’s murder and Oswald’s capture, in a shell game featuring the Oswald lookalike, he and his Cuban-looking companion flew out of Oak Cliff on the CIA plane.

Thanks to the pieces of information presented by Mayor Wes Wise, auto mechanic T. F. White, concession stand operator Butch Burroughs, hobby shop owner Bernard Haire, and Air Force Sergeant Robert Vinson, we now have a larger picture of the way in which two men played the role of Lee Harvey Oswald in the Oak Cliff section of Dallas on the afternoon of November 22, 1963. The interlocking testimonies of Wise, White, Burroughs, Haire, and Vinson have given us a back-stage view of the double Oswald drama directed by the CIA.

Malcolm Kilduff told me in an interview that President Kennedy made a powerful statement to him on Vietnam just before they departed for Texas.[521]

Kennedy said to Kilduff: “I’ve just been given a list of the most recent casualties in Vietnam. We’re losing too damned many people over there. It’s time for us to get out. The Vietnamese aren’t fighting for themselves. We’re the ones who are doing the fighting. “After I come back from Texas, that’s going to change. There’s no reason for us to lose another man over there. Vietnam is not worth another American life.”[522] What Kennedy meant was clear, Kilduff said: “There is no question that he was taking us out of Vietnam. I was in his office just before we went to Dallas and he said that Vietnam was not worth another American life. There is no question about that. There is no question about it. I know that firsthand.”[523]