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

by James W. Douglass

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. We are told we can be safe only through the threat of escalating violence. Once again, anything goes in a fight against evil: preemptive attacks, torture, undermining governments, assassinations, whatever it takes to gain the end of victory over an enemy portrayed as irredeemably evil.

When the enemy is seen as human, everything changes.

Respect means recognizing and acknowledging our enemies’ part of the truth, whether or not that makes life more difficult for us.

Merton’s poem was really an anti-poem, spoken by the commandant of a Nazi death camp. It was titled: “Chant to Be Used in Processions around a Site with Furnaces.” Merton’s “Chant” proceeded matter-of-factly through the speaker’s daily routine of genocide to these concluding lines: “Do not think yourself better because you burn up friends and enemies with long-range missiles without ever seeing what you have done.”[1]

In our Cold War history, the Unspeakable was the void in our 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]

Our collective denial of the obvious, in the setting up of Oswald and his transparent silencing by Ruby, made possible the Dallas cover-up. The success of the cover-up was the indispensable foundation for the subsequent murders of Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, and Robert Kennedy by the same forces at work in our government—and in ourselves. 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.

The trial took place in Memphis, only a few blocks from the Lorraine Motel where King was killed. In a wrongful death lawsuit initiated by the King family, seventy witnesses testified over a six-week period. 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]

Eventually I came to see all four of them together as four versions of the same story. JFK, Malcolm, Martin, and RFK were four proponents of change who were murdered by shadowy intelligence agencies using intermediaries and scapegoats under the cover of “plausible deniability.”

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

October 16, 1961: Kennedy responds privately to Khrushchev, writing: “I like very much your analogy of Noah’s Ark, with both the ‘clean’ and the ‘unclean’ determined that it stay afloat. Whatever our differences, our collaboration to keep the peace is as urgent—if not more urgent—than our collaboration to win the last world war.”

June 13, 1962: With his Russian wife, Marina, and infant daughter, June, 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.

President Kennedy writes secretly to Premier Khrushchev that he is “aware of the tensions unduly created by recent private attacks on your ships in Cuban waters; and we are taking action to halt those attacks which are in violation of our laws.”

Castro,

Why is the CIA doing this?

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.

July 26, 1963: President Kennedy makes a television appeal to the nation for support of the test ban treaty, quoting Nikita Khrushchev on a nuclear war they both hope to avoid: “The survivors would envy the dead.”

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.

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

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.”

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, Dallas, where sniper teams assassinate him by crossfire.

As Albert Einstein said, with the unleashing of the power of the atom, humanity reached a new age. The atomic bombing of Hiroshima marked a crossroads: either we would end war or war would end us.

As we shall see, because of his continuing turn from nuclear war toward a vision of peace in the thirteen months remaining to him, he was executed by the powers that be.

there is nothing so threatening to systemic evil as those willing to stand against it regardless of the consequences.

Preventing another war became John Kennedy’s main motivation for entering politics after the Second World War.

those who foolishly sought power by riding the back of the tiger ended up inside.”[29]

“Let both sides explore what problems unite us instead of belaboring those problems which divide us . . . “Let both sides unite to heed in all corners of the earth the command of Isaiah—to ‘undo the heavy burdens . . . (and) let the oppressed go free.’”

JFK understood the power of peace and respect for his fellow man. The world could learn from his example still today. Somehow, this speech feels like it was meant for us; this age. Maybe that's a testiment to just how far we have receded as a country or just how much the notion of progress can be simply, an illusion.

In the nuclear age, how were his experience of the horror of war and his commitment to peacemaking to be reconciled with his passionate resistance to a totalitarian enemy?

“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]

“President Kennedy is a shrewd and sometimes adventurous leader. He means well and has the highest motives, and he is, without doubt, in a position sometimes so impossible as to be absurd.”[31]

Kennedy’s handwriting, a favorite saying of his from Abraham Lincoln: “I know there is a God—and I see a storm coming; If he has a place for me, I believe that I am ready.”[33]

The new president had bitterly disappointed the CIA and the military by his decision to accept defeat at the Bay of Pigs rather than escalate the battle. Kennedy realized after the fact that he had been drawn into a CIA scenario that was a trap. Its authors assumed he would be forced by circumstances to drop his advance restrictions against the use of U.S. combat forces.

At his death Allen Dulles left the unpublished drafts of an article that scholar Lucien S. Vandenbroucke has titled “The ‘Confessions’ of Allen Dulles.” In these handwritten, coffee-stained notes, Dulles explained how CIA advisers who knew better drew John Kennedy into a plan whose prerequisites for success contradicted the president’s own rules for engagement that precluded any combat action by U.S. military forces. Although Dulles and his associates knew this condition conflicted with the plan they were foisting on Kennedy, they discreetly kept silent in the belief, Dulles wrote, that “the realities of the

situation” would force the president to carry through to the end they wished: “[We] did not want to raise these issues—in an [undecipherable word] discussion—which might only harden the decision against the type of action we required. We felt that when the chips were down—when the crisis arose in reality, any action required for success would be authorized rather than permit the enterprise to fail.”[50] But again, as Kennedy said, “They had me figured all wrong.”

John Kennedy reacted to the CIA’s plotting with a vehemence that went unreported until after his death and has been little noted since then. In a 1966 New York Times feature article on the CIA, this statement by JFK appeared without further comment: “President Kennedy, as the enormity of the Bay of Pigs disaster came home to him, said to one of the highest officials of his Administration that he wanted ‘to splinter the C.I.A. in a thousand pieces and scatter it to the winds.’”[56]

In his short presidency, Kennedy began to take steps to deal with the CIA. He tried to redefine the CIA’s mandate and to reduce its power in his National Security Action Memoranda (NSAMs) 55 and 57, which took military-type operations out of the hands of the CIA.

President Kennedy then asked the three principal CIA planners for the Bay of Pigs to resign: Director Allen Dulles, Deputy Director Richard Bissell, Jr., and Deputy Director General Charles Cabell. JFK also “moved quietly,” as Schlesinger put it, “to cut the CIA budget in 1962 and again in 1963, aiming at a 20 per cent reduction by 1966.”[59]

He never managed to splinter the CIA in a thousand pieces and scatter it to the winds. But Kennedy’s firing of Dulles, Bissell, and Cabell, his reduction of the CIA budget, and his clear determination to deal with the Agency placed him in direct conflict with a Cold War institution that had come to hold itself accountable to no one.

The Bay of Pigs awakened President Kennedy to internal forces he feared he might never control.

monastic superiors.

Tendency away from peace and toward militarization. The opposite of the isolationism of the post-WWII period. A bizarre obsession with hard-line prevention of Communism- which is interesting as that is how Hitler gained power, in part, in the 1930s under the guise of protecting citizens from Communist invasion/influence. One would think the turn would be away from fascism and war after such a devastating conflict. There must be far deeper motivations for the CIA and others to take such a hard stance- probably related to money and power with the Cold War as a catalyst for certain agencies/players to profit; but who?

“The great error of the aggressive Catholics who want to preserve their power and social status at all costs is that they believe this can be done by force, and thus they prepare the way to lose everything they want to save.”[65]

everyone living in Cold War America, a nation whose anti-communism and commitment to nuclear supremacy had placed, for example, its newly elected president “in a position sometimes so impossible as to be absurd.”

House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA),

You know what happens when you keep your eye fixed on something. You begin to see things that aren’t there.

“It is a curious fact that each of these extreme opposites resembles the other. Each believes that we have only two choices: appeasement or war, suicide or surrender, humiliation or holocaust, to be either Red or dead.”[72]

(Anything short of a nuclear attack on Russia rates as ‘appeasement’.)”

“We cannot go on indefinitely relying on the kind of provisional framework of a balance of terror. If as Christians we were more certain of our duty, it might put us in a very tight spot politically but it would also merit for us special graces from God, and these we need badly.”[76] Merton was praying that Christians in particular—and a particular Christian, John Kennedy—would become more certain of their duty to take a stand against nuclear terror, which would place JFK especially “in a very tight spot politically.”

The Cuban Missile Crisis may have been the most dangerous moment in human history. In the thirteen days from October 16 to 28, 1962, as the Soviet Union installed nuclear-armed missiles in Cuba, President Kennedy demanded publicly that Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev dismantle and withdraw the missiles immediately. Kennedy also set up a naval “quarantine” that blockaded Soviet ships proceeding to the island. Ignoring the parallel of the already existing deployment of U.S. missiles in Turkey alongside the Soviet Union, Kennedy declared that the deployment of Soviet missiles in Cuba was “a deliberately provocative and unjustified change in the status quo which cannot be accepted by this country.”[77] In spite of Kennedy’s militant stand, his and Khrushchev’s eventual resolution of the crisis by mutual concessions was not viewed favorably by Cold War hard-liners.

In July 1993, the U.S. State Department, in response to a Freedom of Information Act request by a Canadian newspaper, declassified twenty-one secret letters between John F. Kennedy and Nikita Khrushchev.[90] These private, confidential letters between the Cold War leaders, begun in September 1961 and continued for two years,

Kennedy had been stunned in Vienna by what he felt was Khrushchev’s hardness of heart toward a nuclear war and his unwillingness to compromise. Now as the threat of war over Berlin continued, Khrushchev expressed a regret about Vienna. He said he had “given much thought of late to the development of international events since our meeting in Vienna, and I have decided to approach you with this letter. The whole world hopefully expected that our meeting and a frank exchange of views would have a soothing effect, would turn relations between our countries into the correct channel and promote the adoption of decisions which would give the peoples confidence that at last peace on earth will be secured. To my regret—and, I believe, to yours—this did not happen.”[93]

They say that you sometimes cast politics out through the door but it climbs back through the window, particularly when the windows are open.”[94]