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

by James W. Douglass

The president alienated the CIA and the military a second time by his decisions during the Cuban Missile Crisis.

John Kennedy’s third Bay of Pigs was his Commencement Address at American University in Washington.

President Kennedy’s fourth Bay of Pigs toward the coup d’état he saw as possible was the Partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty that he and Nikita Khrushchev signed.

As soon as one gets involved in the machinery of politics one gets involved in its demonic futilities and in the great current that

sweeps everything toward no one knows what.”

His fifth alienation from his CIA and military advisers came from his risk-filled turn toward dialogue with an even more irreconcilable enemy than Nikita Khrushchev: Fidel Castro.

Right up to his death, Kennedy remained in some ways a Cold Warrior, in conflict with his own soaring vision in the American University address.

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.

even the assassination of a president could be funded unconsciously by American taxpayers and carried out unknowingly by government employees, while only a few such as CIA Deputy Director for Plans Richard Helms and Counterintelligence head James Angleton knew the intended result beforehand.

John Kennedy was killed by people who knew their national security state inside out and could direct it according to their will.

The personally fatal fall JFK was about to enter, in late 1963, was the same time his military commanders may have considered their last chance to “win” (in their terms) a preemptive war against the Soviet Union.

The assassins’ purpose seems to have encompassed not only killing a president determined to make peace with

the enemy but also using his murder as the impetus for a possible nuclear first strike against that same enemy.

The test ban treaty was JFK’s critically important way to initiate with Khrushchev the end of the Cold War and their joint leadership in the United Nations for the redemptive process of general and complete disarmament.

That would be “love” as Gandhi understood it, love as the other side of truth, a respect and understanding of our opponents that goes far enough to integrate their truth into our own. In the last few months of Kennedy’s life, he and Khrushchev were walking that extra mile where each was beginning to see the other’s truth.

President Kennedy’s courageous turn from global war to a strategy of peace provides the why of his assassination.

Peacemaking was at the top of his agenda as president. That was not the kind of leadership the CIA, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the military-industrial complex wanted in the White House.