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Teshuvah, “turning,” the rabbinic word for repentance, is the explanation for Kennedy’s short-lived, contradictory journey toward peace.
September 25, 1961: President Kennedy delivers a speech on disarmament at the United Nations in which he states: “The weapons of war must be abolished before they abolish us . . . It is therefore our intention to challenge the Soviet Union, not to an arms race, but to a peace race—to advance together step by step, stage by stage, until general and complete disarmament has been achieved.”
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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.
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.”
Kennedy had attended the San Francisco conference that founded the United Nations in April-May 1945, as a journalist for the Hearst press.
“To those new states whom we welcome to the ranks of the free, we pledge our word that one form of colonial control shall not have passed away merely to be replaced by a far more iron tyranny. We shall not always expect to find them supporting our view. But we shall always hope to find them strongly supporting their own freedom—and to remember that, in the past, those who foolishly sought power by riding the back of the tiger ended up inside.”[29] The new president’s tiger parable could cut in opposite directions. What to an American audience was a cunning communist tiger was to nonaligned
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Six months later the United States took its missiles out of Turkey.
John Kennedy’s third Bay of Pigs was his Commencement
Address at American University in Washington.
Nikita Khrushchev was deeply moved. He told test-ban negotiator Averell Harriman that Kennedy had given “the greatest speech by any American President since Roosevelt.”[174]
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.
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.
Kennedy initiated a whirlwind public education campaign on the treaty, coordinated by Norman Cousins.
“One of the ironic things about this entire situation is that Mr. Khrushchev and I occupy approximately the same political positions inside our governments. He would like to prevent a nuclear war but is under severe pressure from his hard-line crowd, which interprets every move in that direction as appeasement. I’ve got similar problems.”[215]
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Fidel Castro has assured both Tad Szulc and Ethel Kennedy that he knows John and Robert Kennedy “had nothing to do with the CIA attempts on his life.”
On June 19, 1963, President Kennedy succumbed to Cold War pressures and stepped backward. He approved a CIA program of sabotage and harassment against targets in Cuba that included electric power, transportation, oil, and manufacturing facilities.[68] Kennedy was responding both to mounting demands in his own administration for increasing pressure on Castro and to the appearance of a more aggressive Cuban government policy of exporting revolution to other Latin American countries. While adhering to his promise to Khrushchev not to launch a U.S. invasion of Cuba, Kennedy nevertheless agreed to
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At his first visit on Friday afternoon, September 27, Oswald did indeed speak briefly with Valery Vladimirovich Kostikov.
face, ‘This won’t do for me! This is not my case! For me, it’s all going to end in tragedy!”[137]
Hoover simply gives Johnson the raw fact of an Oswald impostor in Mexico City, then lets Johnson chew on its implications.
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.
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(without Hoover’s reference to an impostor)
“Suddenly a President arrives on the scene,” he said, “who tries to support the interests of another class (which has no access to any of the levers of power) to give the various Latin American countries the impression that the United States no longer stands behind the dictators, and so there is no more need to start Castro-type revolutions. What happens then? The trusts see that their interests are being a little compromised (just barely, but still compromised); the Pentagon thinks the strategic bases are in danger; the powerful oligarchies in all the Latin American countries alert their
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“There he sat,” he told friends later, “telling me to get ready to put ground forces into Asia, the thing he himself had been carefully avoiding for the last eight years.”[19]
MacArthur told the president, “Anyone wanting to commit American ground forces to the mainland of Asia should have his head examined.”[43]
RFK’s response: “Whap! His hand slapped down on the desk. I jumped in my chair. ‘Because we were there!’ He slammed the desktop again. His face contorted in anger and pain. ‘We were there, in 1951. We saw what was happening to the French. We saw it. My brother was determined, determined never to let that happen to us.’”[80] John Kennedy had been there. He had seen it with Robert, when the French troops were doing it. A friend on the spot, Edmund Gullion, had underlined the futility of American combat troops replacing the French. Ellsberg wrote that he believed what Robert Kennedy said, “that
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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.
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
If the United States instead increased its military support of Diem, Galbraith wrote Kennedy, “there is consequent danger we shall replace the French as the colonial force in the area and bleed as the French did.”[124] Galbraith’s warning echoed what John Kennedy remembered hearing as a congressman from his friend Edmund Gullion in Saigon in 1951.
Isaiah Berlin, the British philosopher, once observed of Kennedy: “I’ve never known a man who listened to every single word that one uttered more attentively. And he replied always very relevantly. He didn’t obviously have ideas in his own mind which he wanted to expound, or for which he simply used one’s own talk as an occasion, as a sort of launching pad. He really listened to what one said and answered that.”[157]
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Kennedy was now on the alert to remove any obstacles from the way to a future withdrawal from Vietnam.
The editors of Fortune knew the decision to raise steel prices had been made by the executive committee of U.S. Steel’s board of directors. It included top-level officers from other huge financial institutions, such as the Morgan Guaranty Trust Company, the First National City Bank of New York, the Prudential Insurance Company, the Ford Foundation, and AT&T.[32]
Fortune gave Kennedy a deadly warning of its own by the title of its editorial: “Steel: The Ides of April.”
Richard Starnes of the Scripps-Howard newspapers, whose dispatch on the CIA the same day had shocked readers of the Washington Daily News. Starnes’s provocative theme was how the CIA’s “unrestrained thirst for power” in Vietnam had become a threat to its own government back in Washington.[57]
J. Edgar Hoover knew the CIA had infiltrated the FBI’s decision making as well, making it possible for the CIA to cancel the FBI’s FLASH on Oswald at a critical moment in October, setting up the assassination of Kennedy.
Diem said bluntly, “The CIA is intriguing against the Government of Vietnam.” Lodge, who was directing the CIA’s communications with the generals plotting against Diem, said in response (presumably with a straight face): “Give me proof of improper action by any employee of the U.S. Government and I will see that he leaves Vietnam.”[120]
Yet only two days before, Lodge reported that General Don had sought him out at the Saigon airport to get confirmation that the CIA’s Lucien Conein “was authorized to speak for me [and the U.S. government].”[126] The nervous generals needed last-minute reassurance that the United States would not thwart them—as Kennedy was telling Lodge he still might do, in spite of Lodge’s counterarguments that it couldn’t be done.
Martineau told the agents the FBI had learned from an informant that four snipers planned to shoot Kennedy with high-powered rifles.
In August 1963 as Oswald was preparing to move from New Orleans back to Dallas, Vallee moved from New York City back to Chicago.[175] Just as Oswald got a job in a warehouse right over Kennedy’s future motorcade route in Dallas, so, too, did Vallee get a job in a warehouse right over
morning hours of November 1, while the president was sleeping upstairs, McGeorge Bundy and Roger Hilsman were poring over Conein’s blow-by-blow account of the coup.
In January 1995, the Secret Service deliberately destroyed all its records of the Chicago plot to kill President Kennedy (with other key JFK security documents) when the Assassination Records Review Board
Richard Bissell, then head of the CIA’s covert action, said, “The Agency had put a top priority, probably, on a range of different methods of getting rid of Lumumba in the sense of either destroying him physically, incapacitating him, or eliminating his political influence.” Ibid. As De Witte shows, it was the Belgian government that actually carried out Lumumba’s assassination on January 17, 1961, three days before Kennedy became president.
