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

by James W. Douglass

“You believe in redemption, don’t you?” John F. Kennedy, May 1, 1962

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 unspeakable is not far away.

A martyr is therefore a living witness to our new humanity.

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

War will exist until that distant day when the conscientious objector enjoys the same reputation and prestige that the warrior does today.”[14]

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

Oswald was on an assignment in Russia for American intelligence.”[166]

“Peace need not be impracticable, and war need not be inevitable,”

They joked among themselves that if someone shot at him, they’d get out of the way.

on behalf of America’s business elite, to beware “the ides of April” for his dominant role in settling the crisis.[168]

“Rendezvous,” a celebration of death. “Rendezvous” was by Alan Seeger, an American poet killed in World War I.

I have a rendezvous with Death At some disputed barricade, When Spring comes back with rustling shade And apple-blossoms fill the air— I have a rendezvous with Death When Spring brings back blue days and fair. It may be he shall take my hand And lead me into his dark land And close my eyes and quench my breath— It may be I shall pass him still. I have a rendezvous with Death On some scarred slope of battered hill, When Spring comes round again this year And the first meadow-flowers appear. God knows ’twere better to be deep Pillowed in silk and scented down, Where love throbs out in blissful sleep, Pulse nigh to pulse, and breath to breath, Where hushed awakenings are dear . . . But I’ve a rendezvous with Death At midnight in some flaming town, When Spring trips north again this year, And I to my pledged word am true, I shall not fail that rendezvous.[22]

From the moment on November 22, 1963, when Julia Ann Mercer was caught in traffic beside the grassy knoll, she has been very dynamic, very straightforward, and very determined to see and tell the truth. For some, that has made her a very dangerous person. It has also placed her in danger. However, she has never repudiated or compromised her testimony. Julia Ann Mercer summarized her response to the repeated government claims that she could not identify the driver of the pickup truck from which the rifle had been taken up the grassy knoll: “That is not true. I saw the driver very clearly. I looked right in his face and he looked at me twice. It was Jack Ruby.”[218]

Hoffman

However, when Ed finished telling Frederick excitedly in sign how he had seen the man who killed the president,

Would an innocent government, in its investigation of the murder of its president, ignore such evidence of treachery within its own ranks?[272]

“the thought that disturbed him the most, and that made the prospect of war much more fearful than it would otherwise have been, was the specter of the death of the children of this country and all the world—the young people who had no role, who had no say, who knew nothing even of the confrontation, but whose lives would be snuffed out like everyone else’s. They would never have a chance to make a decision, to vote in an election, to run for office, to lead a revolution, to determine their own destinies.”[343]

The autopsy X-rays had been used as incontrovertible proof that there was no exit wound in the rear of the skull—and therefore no assassin in front. Yet twenty-one doctors, nurses, and Secret Service agents at Parkland Hospital in Dallas had all, in their earliest statements, said they had seen a large wound in the right rear portion of JFK’s skull.[366] According to the X-rays’ “more scientific” proof, they all had to be wrong. On the other hand, the Warren Commission had ignored Dr. Cairns’s statement in an FBI interview that the Harper fragment

There was far too much bone density being shown in the rear of JFK’s skull relative to the front. The X-ray had to have been a composite. The optical density data indicated a forgery in which a patch had been placed over an original X-ray to cover the rear part of the skull—corresponding to the gap left in part by the Harper fragment,

When the government’s “best evidence” was finally examined independently, the tests showed the X-rays were a hoax. The bottom line of the Warren Report was a forgery. A fragment of the head that Jacqueline Kennedy had tried unsuccessfully to put together again has come back decades later to haunt the government’s cover-up.

As in Julia Ann Mercer’s experience, what Carolyn Arnold saw on November 22, 1963—Oswald eating lunch on the second floor, not preparing to shoot the president from the sixth—did not fit the government’s story. Carolyn Arnold was a witness to the unspeakable.

As Weisberg pointed out, the killing of Tippit provided a dramatic reinforcement of Oswald’s assumed killing of Kennedy. At the same time, the killing of a fellow police officer helped motivate the Dallas police to kill an armed Oswald in the Texas Theater,

After the lone assassin shot the president to death and wounded Governor Connally from a sixth-floor window in the Texas School Book Depository,[399] he hid his rifle and stepped quickly down four flights of stairs to the lunchroom, where he was seen calmly preparing to buy a bottle of Coca Cola from a vending machine.[400] He escaped from the building and walked seven blocks.[401] He took a bus that was headed back toward the Texas School Book Depository, got stuck with the bus in a traffic jam, and got off it. He walked three to four blocks to hire a taxi.[402] He offered to give up his taxi to an old lady when she asked his driver for help finding a cab (an offer she refused, allowing him to continue his escape without changing taxis).[403] He rode 2.4 miles in the taxi, taking him five blocks too far past his rooming house.[404] He paid his fare, got out, and walked five blocks back to his rooming house.[405] “He went on to his room and stayed about 3 or 4 minutes,”[406] picked up his jacket and a revolver, and departed.[407] The housekeeper saw him standing in front of the house by the stop for a northbound bus.[408] He apparently gave up on the bus and instead walked south another remarkably brisk nine-tenths mile.[409] All of these actions, following his killing of the president, were, by the Commission’s timetable, accomplished in forty-five minutes.[410] Oswald then, we are told, used his revolver to calmly murder Officer J. D. Tippit on a quiet street in the Oak ...

Bernard J. Haire

an hour and a half after Julia Ann Mercer saw a man, dropped off by Jack Ruby, carry a rifle up the same site.

What kept “the Wise allegation” from sinking into total oblivion over the years was the persistent conscience of Wes Wise, who in 1971 was elected mayor of Dallas. During his two terms as mayor (1971-76), Wise guided Dallas out from under the

“Well,” he said, “You’re aware of the idea of two Oswalds, I guess?”[484]

Robert Vinson

Robert Vinson who was the unauthorized passenger in the flight from Dallas led, the Vinsons suspected, to further developments in their lives.

On his new assignment, Vinson would soon learn that the CIA’s projects out of Site 51 included experimental aircraft shaped like saucers. The same was true at the CIA’s other base at Roswell, New Mexico, where the C-54 carrying the second Oswald had landed. Both Site 51 and Roswell were home to the “flying saucers” that people saw periodically in the area. They in fact came not from outer space but from the CIA, which encouraged the flying saucer reports as a convenient cover story for U.S. experimental aircraft.[506]

“Every time I’d see an article on the assassination, I stop and wonder if I have the answer to this puzzle. Could this small piece of information fit into the larger picture to help us learn what happened?”[520]

The interlocking testimonies of Wise, White, Burroughs, Haire, and Vinson have given us a back-stage view of the double Oswald drama directed by the CIA.

“I’ve just been given a list of the most recent casualties in Vietnam. We’re losing too damned many people over there. It’s time for us to get out. The Vietnamese aren’t fighting for themselves. We’re the ones who are doing the fighting. “After I come back from Texas, that’s going to change. There’s no reason for us to lose another man over there. Vietnam is not worth another American life.”[522]

That hypothesis has been strengthened as the documents, witnesses, and converging lines of inquiry have pointed more conclusively at the CIA. Yet understanding that the CIA coordinated the assassination does not mean that we can limit the responsibility to the CIA. To tell the truth at the heart of darkness in this story, one must see and accept a responsibility that goes deeper and far beyond the Central Intelligence Agency.

The problem that the throat wound raised, which Lynd and Minnis underscored, remains to this day.

JFK: Conspiracy of Silence,

The promoters of the systemic evil involved in killing President Kennedy counted on our repression and denial of its reality. They knew that no one would want to deal with the elephant in the living room. The Dallas and Bethesda doctors who saw the truth staring up at them from the president’s dead body, and who then backed away from it, were not unique. They are symbolic of us all.

Lt. Cmdr. Pitzer. David

Bill Pitzer

David Vanek, had not only killed William Pitzer, but that he had been killed in turn and his records obliterated to complete a cover-up.[614]

“Admittedly world organization with common obedience to law would be solution. Not that easy. If there is not the feeling that war is the ultimate evil, a feeling strong enough to drive them together, then you can’t work out this internationalist plan.”[631]

“Things cannot be forced from the top. The international relinquishing of sovereignty would have to spring from the people—it would have to be so strong that the elected delegates would be turned out of office if they failed to do it . . . War will exist until that distant day when the conscientious objector enjoys the same reputation and prestige that the warrior does today.”[632]

The man who proposed this secret, subversive process in 1948, diplomat George Kennan, said later, in light of its consequences, that it was “the greatest mistake I ever made.”[3] President Harry Truman, under whom the CIA was created, and during whose presidency the plausible deniability doctrine was authorized, came to have deep regrets. One month to the day after JFK’s assassination, Truman said he was “disturbed” because the CIA had “become an operational and at times a policy-making arm of the Government. This has led to trouble.…There is something about the way the CIA has been functioning that is casting a shadow over our historic position and I feel that we need to correct it.”[4]

The CIA’s plausible deniability for crimes of state, as exemplified by JFK’s murder, corresponds in our politics to what Thomas Merton called “the Unspeakable.” For Merton, the unspeakable was ultimately a void, an emptiness of any meaning, an abyss of lies and deception. He wrote the following description of the unspeakable shortly after the publication of The Warren Report, which he could have been describing: “[The Unspeakable]

That is the truth: Truth is God. We can discover the truth and live it out. There is nothing more powerful than the truth. The truth will set us free.