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

by James W. Douglass

“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 listeners at least as likely to have capitalist as communist stripes. That would prove to be the case in Kennedy’s presidency by his support of U.S. counterinsurgent warfare in South Vietnam, where a client government would then wind up inside the U.S. tiger it had been riding.