excerpts from the book
JFK and the Unspeakable
Why He Died and Why It Matters
by James W. Douglass
Touchstone Books, 2008
pxvi
Our collective denial of the obvious, in the setting up of Oswald
and his transparent silencing by Ruby, made possible the Dallas
cover-up [of the JFK assassination]. The success of the cover-up
was the indispensable foundation for the subsequent murders of
Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, and Robert Kennedy by the same
forces at work in our government - and in ourselves. 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.
pxvii
The only trial ever held for [for Martin Luther King's murder]
took place in Memphis, only a few blocks from the Lorraine Motel
where King was killed. In a wrongful death lawsuit initiated by
the King family, seventy witnesses testified over a six-week period.
They described a sophisticated government plot that involved the
FBI, the CIA, the Memphis Police, Mafia intermediaries, and an
Army Special Forces sniper team. The twelve jurors, six black
and six white, returned after two and one-half hours of deliberation
with a verdict that King had been assassinated by a conspiracy
that included agencies of his own government.
pxvii
JFK [John Kennedy] , Malcolm [X], Martin [Luther King], and [RFK
[Robert Kennedy] were four proponents of change who were murdered
by shadowy intelligence agencies using intermediaries and scapegoats
under the cover of "plausible deniability".
pxvii
Our citizen denial provides the ground for the government's doctrine
of "plausible deniability". John F. Kennedy's assassination
is rooted in our denial of our nation's crimes in World War II
that began the Cold War and the nuclear arms race. As a growing
precedent to JFK's assassination by his own national security
state, we U.S. citizens supported our government when it destroyed
whole cities (Hamburg, Dresden, Tokyo, Hiroshima, Nagasaki), when
it protected our Cold War security by world-destructive weapons,
and when it carried out the covert murders of foreign leaders
with "plausible deniability" in a way that was obvious
to critical observers.
pxxvi
June 10, 1963: President Kennedy delivers his Commencement Address
at American University in Washington proposing, in effect, an
end to the Cold War. Rejecting the goal of "a Pax Americana
enforced on the world by "American weapons of war,"
Kennedy asks Americans to reexamine their attitudes toward war,
especially in relation to the people of the Soviet Union, who
suffered incomparable losses in World War II.
pxxviii
October 11, 1963: President Kennedy issues National Security Action
Memorandum 263, making official government policy the withdrawal
from Vietnam of "1,000 U.S. military personnel by the end
of 1963" and "by the end of 1965 ... the bulk of U.S.
personnel."
p33
The national security doctrine of "plausible deniability"
combined lying with hypocrisy. It marked the creation of a Frankenstein
monster.
Plausible deniability encouraged the autonomy
of the CIA and other covert-action ("intelligence")
agencies from the government that created them. In order to protect
the visible authorities of the government from protest and censure,
the CIA was authorized not only to violate international law but
to do so with as little consultation as possible. CIA autonomy
went hand in glove with plausible deniability. The less explicit
an order from the president, the better it was for "plausible
deniability".
p36
The military-industrial complex was totally dependent on "a
Pax Americana enforced on the world by American weapons of war."
That Pax Americana policed by the Pentagon was considered the
system's indispensable, hugely profitable means of containing
and defeating Communism. At great risk Kennedy was rejecting the
foundation of the Cold War system.
p137
The pressures on President Kennedy came less from constituents
than from the weapons-making corporations that thrived on the
Cold War, and from the Pentagon and the CIA that were dedicated
to "winning" that war, whatever that might mean.
p137
In the summer of 1963, the leaders of the military-industrial
complex could see storm clouds on their horizon. After JFK's American
University address and his quick signing of the Test Ban Treaty
with Khrushchev, corporate power holders saw the distinct prospect
in the not distant future of a settlement in the Cold War between
the United States and the Soviet Union.
... In [the] direction of U.S.-Soviet
disarmament lay the diminished power of a corporate military system
that for years had controlled the United States government. In
his turn toward peace, Kennedy was beginning to undermine the
dominant power structure that Eisenhower had finally identified
and warned against so strongly as he left the White House.
p140
John and Robert Kennedy had become notorious in the ranks of big
business. JFK's strategy of withdrawing defense contracts and
RFK's aggressive investigating tactics toward men of power were
seen as unforgivable sins by the corporate world. As a result
of the president's uncompromising stand against the steel industry
- and implicitly any corporation that chose to defy his authority
- a bitter gap opened up between Kennedy and big business, whose
most powerful elements coincided with the military-industrial
complex.
p142
President Kennedy to his advisors Sorenson, O'Donnell, and Schlesinger
I understand better every day why [Franklin]
Roosevelt, who started out such a mild fellow, ended up so ferociously
anti-business. It is hard as hell to be friendly with people who
keep trying to cut your legs off.
p142
In his deepening alienation from the CIA, the Pentagon, and big
business, John Kennedy was moving consciously beyond the point
of no return. Kennedy knew well the complicity that existed among
the Cold War's corporate elite, Pentagon planners, and the heads
of "intelligence agencies." He was no stranger to the
way systemic power worked in and behind his national security
state.
p143
We have no evidence as to who in the military-industrial complex
may have given the order to assassinate President Kennedy. That
the order was carried out by the Central Intelligence Agency is
obvious. The CIA's fingerprints are all over the crime and the
events leading up to it.
p219
In the fall of 1963, the president [John Kennedy] ordered a U.S.
withdrawal from Vietnam... Kennedy's horror of the nuclear war
he had skirted during the [Cuban] missile crisis [1962], his concern
for American troops in Vietnam, and his turn toward peace with
Nikita Khrushchev and Fidel Castro, had, in his critics' eyes,
made him soft on Communism.
For our covert action specialists in the
shadows, accountable only to their own shadows, what Kennedy's
apparent defeatism meant was clear. The absolute end of victory
over the evil of Communism justified any means necessary, including
the assassination of the president.
p220
a month and a half after the Cuban Missile Crisis [1962], Nikita
Khrushchev sent John Kennedy a private letter
"We believe that you will be able
to receive a mandate at the next election. You will be the U.S.
President for six years, which would appeal to us. At our times,
six years in world politics is a long period of time... during
that period we could create good conditions for peaceful coexistence
on earth and this would be highly appreciated by the peoples of
our countries as well as by all other peoples.
p222
To the power brokers of the system that [President] Kennedy ostensibly
presided over, his and Khrushchev's turn toward peace was, a profound
threat... As the Cold War elite knew, Kennedy was already preparing
to withdraw from Vietnam. They feared he would soon be able to
carry out a U.S. withdrawal from the war with public support,
as one part of a wider peacemaking venture with Khrushchev (and
perhaps even Castro).
p238
The pressures on [President] Kennedy for an attack on the Soviet
missile sites in Cuba were overwhelming, from both his military
and civilian advisers. He resisted those pressures and instead
worked out the mutual concessions with Khrushchev that resolved
the crisis. The Joint Chiefs of Staff were infuriated by his steadfast
refusal to launch an attack. The president said to Arthur Schlesinger,
"The military are mad. They wanted to do this." By "this"
he meant an attack on Cuba, perhaps involving also a preemptive
strike on the Soviet Union. For the joint Chiefs, Kennedy's peaceful
resolution of the crisis with Khrushchev meant a lost opportunity
to defeat the enemy, the best opportunity they ever had to "win"
the Cold War.
p238
One month after the [Cuban] Missile Crisis, the Joint Chiefs pushed
for a buildup in U.S. strategic forces to a disarming first-strike
capability. On November 20, 1962, they sent a memorandum to Secretary
of Defense McNamara stating: "The Joint Chiefs of Staff consider
that a first-strike capability is both feasible and desirable."
p249
At the risk of his political future (and his life), John Kennedy
continued to pursue a secret dialogue toward a rapprochement with
Fidel Castro.
p250
The CIA had not only closely monitored Kennedy's secret turn toward
Castro from the beginning... The Agency had also divulged the
Kennedy-Castro connection to its Cuban exile network in Miami,
thereby inflaming the exiles' anti-Kennedy sentiment that went
back to the Bay of Pigs. From the CIA's command center in Langley
to its largest hub of activity in Miami, President Kennedy in
his developing détente with Fidel Castro was now regarded
as a total traitor to the anti-communist cause.
p273
The withdrawal of agents from the presidential limousine in Dallas
"was a Secret Service decision, not a JFK desire as 'official'
history (Warren Commission]... The Secret Service lied, using
JFK as a scapegoat."
Besides withdrawing security from Dealey
Plaza and the presidential limousine, the Secret Service also
planned the turn that slowed Kennedy's limousine to a crawl. That
forced slowdown completed the setup for the snipers in waiting.
... Thus, not only did the Secret Service
plan and coordinate a turn that flagrantly violated its own security
rule of a forty-four-mile-an-hour minimum speed for the presidential
limousine. Through orders from Washington, the agency responsible
for the president's security created a vacuum of security - in
Dealey Plaza, all around the presidential limousine, and on the
surrounding buildings as well.
... The only "Secret Service Agents"
in Dealey Plaza when the shots were fired were imposters and killers,
bearing false credentials to facilitate their escape and coerce
witnesses into handing over vital evidence that would vanish.
The vacuum created by orders from Washington was immediately filled.
When the president's security was systematically withdrawn from
Dealey Plaza, his assassins moved swiftly into place.
p305
The CIA coordinated and carried out the president's murder...
Yet understanding that the CIA coordinated the assassination [of
John Kennedy] does not mean that we can limit the responsibility
to the CIA..
... The CIA was the coordinating instrument
that killed the president, but the question of responsibility
is more systemic, more personal, and more chilling.
p313
Hospital corpsman James Jenkins, who assisted in the autopsy [of
JFK}, confirmed that the doctors were obeying military orders.
Jenkins said the pathologists' failure to probe the president's
wounds was done at the command of Admiral Calvin Galloway, the
hospital commander, who directed the autopsy from the morgue's
gallery.
Jenkins thought it odd the autopsy would
even be done at Bethesda, rather than by the civilian doctors
at Parkland Hospital in Dallas:
"In retrospect, I think it was a
controlling factor. They could control Humes, Boswell, and Finck
because they were military... I think they were controlled. So
were we. We were all military, we could be controlled. And if
we weren't controlled, we could be punished and that kept us away
from the public."
Jenkins said his experience of the president's
autopsy changed forever his view of his own government:
"I was 19 or 20 years old, and all
at once I understood that my country was not much better than
a third world country. From that point on in time, I have had
no trust, no respect for the government."
p313
The process of killing President Kennedy and covering up the conspiracy
relied on parties whom the plotters knew in advance they could
count on to enter into a conspiracy of silence. Those few witnesses
who courageously broke the silence, such as Dr. Charles Crenshaw,
suffered the consequences of being isolated and singled out. But
the Dallas and Bethesda doctors who changed their testimony under
stress, who lied out of fear for their lives, or who followed
orders in not probing wounds and then stonewalling questions,
were not alone. They joined in a larger conspiracy of silence
that would envelop our government, our media, our academic institutions,
and virtually our entire society from November 22, 1963, to the
present.
p381
The doctrine of "plausible deniability" in an old government
document was a key enabler of the assassination of President Kennedy.
The document was issued in 1948, one year after the CIA was established,
fifteen years before JFK's murder. That document, National Security
Council directive 10/2, on June 18, 1948, "gave the highest
sanction of the [U.S.] government to a broad range of covert operations"
- propaganda, sabotage, economic warfare, subversion of all kinds,
and eventually assassinations - all seen as necessary to "win"
the Cold War against the Communists. The government's condition
for those covert activities by U.S. agencies, coordinated by the
CIA, was that they be "so planned and executed that ... if
uncovered the US government can plausibly disclaim any responsibility
for them.
p382
What George Kennan and Harry Truman realized much too late was
that in the name of national security, they had unwittingly allowed
an alien force to invade a democracy. As a result, we and the
world had to deal with a U.S. government agency authorized to
carry out a broad range of covert, criminal activities on an international
scale, theoretically accountable to the president but with no
genuine accountability to anyone.
p384
President Kennedy's courageous turn from global war to a strategy
of peace provides the why of his assassination. Because he turned
toward peace with our enemies, the Communists, he found himself
at odds with his own national security state. 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. Given the Cold War dogmas that
gripped those dominant powers, and given Kennedy's turn toward
peace, his assassination followed as a matter of course.
p384
At the climax of his presidency in the missile crisis, john Kennedy
turned a corner. Although JFK was already in conflict with his
national security managers, the missile crisis was the breaking
point. At that most critical moment for us all, he turned from
the remaining control his security managers had over him toward
a deeper ethic, a deeper vision in which the fate of the earth
became his priority. Without losing sight of our own best hopes
in this country, he began to home in, with his new partner, Nikita
Khrushchev, on the hope of peace for everyone on this earth -
Russians, Americans, Cubans, Vietnamese, Indonesians, everyone-no
exceptions. He made that commitment to life at the cost of his
own.
p386
excerpts from President John F. Kennedy's Commencement Speech
at American University, June 10, 1963
I have chosen this time and place to discuss
a topic on which ignorance too often abounds and the truth is
too rarely perceived-yet it is the most important topic on earth:
world peace.
What kind of peace do I mean? What kind
of peace do we seek? Not a Pax Americana enforced on the world
by American weapons of war. Not the peace of the grave or the
security of the slave. I am talking about genuine peace, the kind
of peace that makes life on earth worth living, the kind that
enables men and nations to grow and to hope and to build a better
life for their children-not merely peace for Americans but peace
for all men and women-not merely peace in our time but peace for
all time.
... We {United States and Soviet Union]
are both devoting massive sums of money to weapons that could
be better devoted to combat ignorance, poverty, and disease. We
are both caught up in a vicious and dangerous cycle, in which
suspicion on one side breeds suspicion on the other, and new weapons
beget counter-weapons.
Both the United States and its allies,
and the Soviet Union and its allies, have a mutually deep interest
in a just and genuine peace and in halting the arms race.
... We must persevere in the search for
peace in the hope that constructive changes within the Communist
bloc might bring within reach solutions which now seem beyond
us. We must conduct our affairs in such a way that it becomes
in the Communists' interest to agree on a genuine peace. Above
all, while defending our own vital interests, nuclear powers must
avert those confrontations which bring an adversary to a choice
of either a humiliating retreat or a nuclear war.
... We have been talking in Geneva about
other first-step measures of arms control, designed to limit the
intensity of the arms race and to reduce the risk of accidental
war: Our primary long range interest in Geneva, however, is general
and complete disarmament - designed to take place by stages, permitting
parallel political developments to build the new institutions
of peace which would take the place of arms.
... Chairman Khrushchev, Prime Minister
Macmillan, and I have agreed that high-level discussions will
shortly begin in Moscow looking toward early agreement on a comprehensive
test ban treaty.
... l now declare that the United States
does not propose to conduct nuclear tests in the atmosphere so
long as other states do not do so. We will not be the first to
resume.
... The United States ... will never start
a war. We do not want a war. We do not now expect a war. This
generation of Americans has already had enough ... of war and
hate and oppression. We shall be prepared if others wish it. We
shall be alert to try to stop it. But we shall also do our part
to build a world of peace where the weak are safe and the strong
are just.
Assassinations
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