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

by James W. Douglass

Khrushchev liked, he said, the comparison of their situation “with Noah’s Ark where both the ‘clean’ and the ‘unclean’ found sanctuary. But regardless of who lists himself with the ‘clean’ and who is considered to be ‘unclean,’ they are all equally interested in one thing and that is that the Ark should successfully continue its cruise. And we have no other alternative: either we should live in peace and cooperation so that the Ark maintains its buoyancy, or else it sinks.”[95]

“‘The President is in a grave situation,’ Robert Kennedy said, ‘and he does not know how to get out of it. We are under very severe stress. In fact we are under pressure from our military to use force against Cuba . . . We want to ask you, Mr. Dobrynin, to pass President Kennedy’s message to Chairman Khrushchev through unofficial channels . . . Even though the President himself is very much against starting a war over Cuba, an irreversible chain of events could occur against his will. That is why the President is appealing directly to Chairman Khrushchev for his help in liquidating this conflict. If the situation continues much longer, the President is not sure that the military will not overthrow him and seize power.’”[100]

Also at the height of the crisis, as writer Richard Rhodes learned from a retired Air Force commander, “SAC [Strategic Air Command] airborne-alert bombers deliberately flew past their customary turnaround points toward the Soviet Union—an unambiguous threat that Soviet radar operators would certainly have recognized and reported.”[104] With their far superior number of missiles and bombers, U.S. forces were prepared for a preemptive attack at the slightest sign of a Soviet response to their provocation. Fortunately the Soviets didn’t bite.

Again, the US is trying to incite a conflict. Why?

The crisis was over.[109] Neither side revealed that, as part of the agreement, on the analogous issue of U.S. missiles in Turkey Robert Kennedy had in fact promised Anatoly Dobrynin that they, too, would be withdrawn but not immediately.[110] It could not be done unilaterally at a moment’s notice. The promise was fulfilled. Six months later the United States took its missiles out of Turkey.

In the climactic moments of the Cold War, John Kennedy’s resistance to pressures for a first strike, combined with Nikita Khrushchev’s quick understanding and retreat, saved the lives of millions of people, perhaps the life of the planet.

In those days, however, when compromise was regarded as treason, U.S. military leaders were not pleased by the Kennedy-Khrushchev resolution of the crisis.

It was a crisis and something had to be done and there was only a choice of various evils. He chose the best evil, and it worked.

Truman continued to use the bomb as a threat to force Soviet concessions. He felt he did so successfully in Iran just seven months after Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The Russian army was prolonging a wartime occupation in northern Iran, seeking Soviet oil leases like those of the British in the south. Truman later told Senator Henry Jackson that he had summoned Soviet Ambassador Andrei Gromyko to the White House. The president demanded that the Russian troops evacuate Iran within forty-eight hours or the United States would use the atomic weapon that only it possessed. “We’re going to drop it on you,” he told Gromyko. The troops moved in twenty-four hours.[130] On a wider front, the United States enforced a Cold War strategy of containing the Soviet Union. The containment policy was formulated by State Department diplomat George Kennan, writing as “X” in the July 1947 Foreign Affairs. Although Kennan said the purpose of containment was more diplomatic and political than military, the Pentagon carried it out by encircling the U.S.S.R. with U.S. bases and patrolling forces. To match the efficiency of a totalitarian enemy, U.S. military leaders urged legislation that would mobilize the nation to a state of constant readiness for war. Thus the National Security Act of 1947 laid the foundations of a national security state: the National Security Council (NSC), the National Security Resources Board (NSRB), the Munitions Board, the Research and Development Board, the Office of the Sec...

Truman used, and then abused the notion of using nuclear weapons that he claimed only the U.S. had and then proceeded to do, on its face, the same thing the world did to Germany at the close of WWI which in part, led to Hitler's rise to power and eventual takeover, all in the name of preventing communism and something like what happened in Germany and WWII, from happening again? Ironically, all while fostering the same type of environment in the USSR, only with far more dangerous weaponry, expecting a different result. Essentially, the U.S. fostered, called for, and encouraged other countries to build nuclear weapons and then built agencies in America to regulate aspects of their use around the world/make sure America was winning the arms race, including the creation of the CIA who had unchecked power. The same CIA who attempts to corner President Kennedy and force a nuclear war with the USSR in the early 1960s? ..... WHAT?!

On June 18, 1948, Truman’s National Security Council took a further step into a CIA quicksand and approved top-secret directive NSC 10/2, which sanctioned U.S. intelligence to carry out a broad range of covert operations: “propaganda, economic warfare, preventive direct action including sabotage,

anti-sabotage, demolition and evacuation measures; subversion against hostile states including assistance to underground resistance movements, guerrillas, and refugee liberation groups.”[133] The CIA was now empowered to be a paramilitary organization. George Kennan, who sponsored NSC 10/2, said lat...

Since NSC 10/2 authorized violations of international law, it also established official lying as their indispensable cover. All such activities had to be “so planned and executed that any US government responsibility for them is not evident to unauthorized persons, and that if uncovered the US government can plausibly deny any responsibility for them.”[135] The national security doctrine of “plausible deniability” combined lying with hypocrisy. It marked the creation of a Frankenstein monster.

At the 1975 Senate hearings on U.S. intelligence operations chaired by Senator Frank Church, CIA officials testified reluctantly on their efforts to kill Fidel Castro. In late 1960, without the knowledge of President Dwight Eisenhower, the CIA had contacted underworld figures John Rosselli, Sam Giancana, and Santos Trafficante, offering them $150,000 for Castro’s assassination.[136]

In the spring of 1961, without the knowledge of the new president John Kennedy, the CIA’s Technical Services Division prepared a batch of poison pills for Castro. The pills were sent to Cuba through John Rosselli. The murder plot failed because the CIA’s Cuban assets were unable to

get close enough to Castro to poison him.[137] The CIA’s purpose was to kill Castro just before the Bay of Pigs invasion. As Bay of Pigs planner Richard Bissell said later, “Assassination was intended to reinforce the [invasion] plan. There was the thought that Castro would be dead before the landing. Very few, however, knew of this aspect of the plan.”[138]

On June 10, 1963, President Kennedy introduced his subject to the graduating class at American University as “the most important topic on earth: world peace.”

“Some say that it is useless to speak of world peace or world law or world government—and that it will be useless until the leaders of the Soviet Union adopt a more enlightened attitude. I hope they do. I believe we can help them do it.” He then countered our own prejudice with what Schlesinger called “a sentence capable of revolutionizing the whole American view of the cold war”: “But I also believe that we must reexamine our own attitude—as individuals and as a Nation—for our attitude is as essential as theirs.”

"our attitudes are as essential as theirs."

“Why do you see the speck in your neighbor’s eye, but do not notice the log in your own eye?” (Luke 6:41).

self-examination is the beginning of peace.

Thus ended Kennedy’s groundbreaking preamble, an exhortation to personal and national self-examination as the spiritually liberating way to overcome Cold War divisions and achieve “not merely peace in our time but peace for all time.”

Why was Lee Harvey Oswald so tolerated and supported by the government he betrayed?

his purpose in coming was to renounce his U.S. citizenship. He handed Snyder a note he had written, in which he requested that his citizenship be revoked and affirmed that “my allegiance is to the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.”[149]

From September 1957 to November 1958 Oswald had been a Marine Corps radar operator at Atsugi Air Force Base in Japan. Atsugi, located about thirty-five miles southwest of Tokyo, served as the CIA’s main operational base in the Far East.

From his radar control room at Atsugi, where he had a “crypto” clearance (higher than “top secret”), Oswald listened regularly to the U-2’s radio communications.

Yet when Oswald returned to the U.S. Embassy in Moscow after working for over a year at a Soviet factory in Minsk, he was welcomed back by American officials with open arms. Not only did the United States make no move to prosecute him, but the embassy gave him a loan to return to the country he had betrayed.[156] The toleration of Oswald’s apparent treason extended to his later obtaining a new passport overnight. On June 25, 1963, Oswald was miraculously issued a passport in New Orleans twenty-four hours after his application.[157] He identified his destination as the Soviet Union.[158]

Warren Commission, Accessories after the Fact, Sylvia Meagher concluded: “Decision after decision, the [State] Department removed every obstacle before Oswald—a defector and would-be expatriate, self-declared enemy of his native country, self-proclaimed discloser of classified military information, and later self-appointed propagandist for Fidel Castro—on his path from Minsk to Dallas.”[159]

When the authors of the Warren Report mentioned Oswald’s work in the Marine Corps as a radar operator, they neglected to point out that the future defector had a “Crypto” clearance, which was higher than “Top Secret,” and that his work immersed him in information about the CIA’s super-secret U-2 flights.[160]

If we turn from Warren Report psychology to Cold War history, why was the ex-Marine Lee Harvey Oswald not arrested and charged a year and a half before the assassination when he came back to the United States from the Soviet Union, where he had announced at the American Embassy in Moscow that he would hand over military secrets (about U-2 flights) to the Soviets? Whereas in Dallas Oswald would be arrested and murdered before we knew it, on his preceding odyssey as a traitor in and out of Russia and back to the United States he overcame government barriers with an almost supernatural ease. What was the secret of Oswald’s immunity to prosecution for having criminally betrayed the United States at the height of the Cold War? How did this unrepentant enemy of his country merit treatment as a prodigal son, embraced by his government with financial help and preferential passport rulings while he continued to proclaim allegiance to the USSR and Cuba?

Oswald’s trajectory, which would end up meeting Kennedy’s in Dallas, was guided not by the heavens or fate or even, as the Warren Report would have it, by a disturbed psyche. Oswald was guided by intelligence handlers. Lee Harvey Oswald was a pawn in the game. He was a minor piece in the deadly game Kennedy wanted to end. Oswald was being moved square by square across a giant board stretching from Atsugi to Moscow to Minsk to Dallas. For the sake of victory in the Cold War, the hands moving Oswald were prepared to sacrifice him and any other piece on the board. However, there was one player, John Kennedy, who no longer believed in the game and was threatening to turn over the board.

“Peace need not be impracticable, and war need not be inevitable,” he said in reference to his own experience. “By defining our goal more clearly, by making it seem more manageable and less remote, we can help all peoples to see it, to draw hope from it, and to move irresistibly toward it.” The second point in Kennedy’s theme was that self-examination was needed with respect to our opponent: “Let us examine our attitude toward the Soviet Union.” We needed to examine the root cause of our despair, namely, our attitude toward our enemy. Kennedy cited anti-American propaganda from a Soviet military text and observed, “It is sad to read these Soviet statements—to realize the extent of the gulf between us.” Then with his listeners’ defenses down, he brought the theme of self-examination home again: “But it is also a warning—a warning to the American people not to fall into the same trap as the Soviets, not to see only a distorted and desperate view of the other side, not to see conflict as inevitable, accommodation as impossible, and communication as nothing more than an exchange of threats.”

we felt the enemy’s pain, peace was not only possible. It was necessary. It was as necessary as the life of one’s own family, seen truly for the first time. The vision that John F. Kennedy had been given was radically simple: Our side and their side were the same side.

In the fourth and final section of his plea for self-examination, JFK appealed to his American audience to examine the quality of life within our own borders: “Let us examine our attitude toward peace and freedom here at home . . . In too many of our cities today, the peace is not secure because freedom is incomplete.” He would say more on this subject the following night in his groundbreaking civil rights speech. On the day after President Kennedy spoke at American University, Alabama governor George Wallace let the president’s will prevail and backed away from blocking a door at the University of Alabama, allowing two black students to register.

A warrior for peace- translated into sleeping with the enemy (communists) to major military leaders and others in the country who felt a preemptive strike and hard measures (killing millions with nucleaur weapons) was the best path forward. A warroior for Civil Rights- translated into just about the same as above for most of the south and certainly others throughout the country whose prejustice and racism was more than likely, just as loud as their knuckle dragging demands for neuclear war.

That night in a televised address to the nation, Kennedy described the suffering of black Americans under racism with a strength of feeling that recalled his compassion the day before for the Russian people in World War II:

“The Negro baby born in America today, regardless of the section of the Nation in which he is born, has about one-half as much chance of completing a high school as a white baby born in the same place on the same day, one-third as much chance of completing college, one-third as much chance of becoming a professional man, twice as much chance of becoming unemployed, about one-seventh as much chance of earning $10,000 a year, a life expectance which is 7 years shorter, and the prospects of earning only half as muc...

JFK’s identification with the Russian people’s suffering penetrated their government’s defenses far more effectively than any missile could have.

Khrushchev responded by proposing to Kennedy that they now consider a limited test ban encompassing the atmosphere, outer space, and water, so that the disputed question of inspections would no longer arise. He also suggested a nonaggression pact between NATO and the Warsaw Pact to create a “fresh international climate.”[175]

President Kennedy’s June 10, 1963, call for an end to the Cold War, five and one-half months before his assassination, anticipates Dr. King’s courage in his April 4, 1967, Riverside Church address calling for an end to the Vietnam War, exactly one year before his assassination. Each of those transforming speeches was a prophetic statement provoking the reward a prophet traditionally receives. John Kennedy’s American University address was to his death in Dallas as Martin Luther King’s Riverside Church address was to his death in Memphis.

Both de Mohrenschildts, Garrison said, were vigorous in their insistence to him that Oswald had been the assassination scapegoat.[194] On March 29, 1977, three hours after his revelation of the CIA’s sanctioning his contact with Oswald, George de Mohrenschildt was found shot to death in the house where he was staying in Manalapan, Florida. His death also occurred on the day Gaeton Fonzi, an investigator for the House Select Committee on Assassinations, left his card with de Mohrenschildt’s daughter and told her he would be calling her father that evening for an appointment to question him. Soon after de Mohrenschildt took the card and put it in his pocket, he went upstairs, then apparently put the barrel of a .20-gauge shotgun in his mouth and pulled the trigger.[195]

George de Mohrenschildt was another casualty of Dallas. Like Oswald, he, too, was a pawn in the game.

“A full-scale nuclear exchange, lasting less than 60 minutes, with the weapons now in existence, could wipe out more than 300 million Americans, Europeans, and Russians, as well as untold numbers elsewhere.” He quoted Chairman Khrushchev: “The survivors would envy the dead.” Besides helping to prevent war, he said, the test ban treaty “can be a step towards freeing the world from the fears and dangers of radioactive fallout.” He called to mind “the number of children and grandchildren with cancer in their bones, with leukemia in their blood, or with poison in their lungs . . . this is not a natural health hazard—and it is not a statistical issue. The loss of even one human life, or the malformation of even one baby—who may be born long after we are gone—should be of concern to us all. Our children and grandchildren are not merely statistics toward which we can be indifferent.”

“[This treaty] is particularly for our children and our grandchildren, and they have no lobby here in Washington.”

“A great deal changed after the [missile] crisis: A direct communication link between Moscow and Washington was established, nuclear testing (except for underground tests) was banned, and the confrontation over Berlin was ended. “But there was much that President Kennedy and my father did not succeed in seeing through to the end. I am convinced that if history had allowed them another six years, they would have brought the cold war to a close before the end of the 1960’s. I say this with good reason, because in 1963 my father made an official announcement to a session of the U.S.S.R. Defense Council that he intended to sharply reduce Soviet armed forces from 2.5 million men to half a million and to stop the production of tanks and other offensive weapons. “He thought that 200 to 300 intercontinental nuclear missiles made an attack on the Soviet Union impossible, while the money freed up by reducing the size of the army would be put to better use in agriculture and housing construction. “But fate decreed otherwise, and the window of opportunity, barely cracked open, closed at once. In 1963 President Kennedy was killed, and a year later, in October 1964, my father was removed from power. The cold war continued for another quarter of a century . . .”[216]

The Citizens Committee continued its campaign in support of the test ban. In September public opinion polls showed a turnaround—80 percent in favor of the treaty.

The Senate vote on ratification was held on September 24, 1963. The Senate approved the test ban treaty by a vote of 80 to 19—14 more than the required two-thirds. Sorensen noted that no other single accomplishment in the White House gave the president greater satisfaction.

One couldn’t talk with the devil in Havana and remain in communion with the gods of Washington.

For John Kennedy’s fifth Bay of Pigs was in essence a return to the Bay of Pigs.

On March 19, the CIA-sponsored Cuban exile group Alpha 66 announced at a Washington press conference that it had raided a Soviet “fortress” and ship in Cuba, causing a dozen casualties and serious damage.[7] Alpha 66 was one of the commando teams maintained by the giant CIA station in Miami, “JM/WAVE,” for its attacks on Cuba. Alpha 66 exile leader Antonio Veciana would admit years later to Gaeton Fonzi, a federal investigator for the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA), that the purpose of the CIA-initiated attack on the Soviet vessel in Cuban waters was “to publicly embarrass Kennedy and force him to move against Castro.”[8] 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 chief of the CIA’s Western Hemisphere Division.[10]

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]

The aborted scenario was an odd foreshadowing of the scapegoating process in JFK’s murder, in which a CIA-created trail would lead visibly from the victim, through Oswald, toward Castro, effectively destroying through Dallas any possible Cuban–American rapprochement.

The Reily Coffee Company was located at the center of the U.S. intelligence community in New Orleans, close by the offices of the CIA, FBI, Secret Service, and Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI).[38] Directly across the street from Naval Intelligence and the Secret Service was another office that Oswald worked in, the detective agency of former FBI agent Guy Banister.[39] Guy Banister Associates functioned more as a covert-action center for U.S. intelligence agencies than it did as a detective agency. Banister’s office helped supply munitions for CIA operations ranging from the Bay of Pigs to the Cuban exile attacks designed to ensnare Kennedy.

Banister’s secretary and confidante Delphine Roberts said Lee Harvey Oswald came to Banister’s office sometime in 1963, ostensibly to fill out an application form to become one of Banister’s agents.