The Devil's Chessboard: Allen Dulles and the Rise of America's Secret Government

by David Talbot

Breaking from the Cold War orthodoxy that prevailed in the Democratic as well as Republican parties, JFK suggested that Soviet expansionism was not the only enemy of world freedom; so, too, were the forces of Western imperialism that crushed the legitimate aspirations of people throughout the Third World. Kennedy’s thinking about the historical imperative of Third World liberation was remarkably advanced. Even today, no nationally prominent leader in the United States would dare question the imperialistic policies that have led our country into one military nightmare after another. Kennedy understood that Washington’s militant opposition to the world’s revolutionary forces would only reap “a bitter harvest.” If the United States stifled these legitimate forces of national self-determination, he said, then rising generations around the globe would be left with a grim choice “between radicalism and feudalism.”