JFK and the CIA
The day peace died
We now know most of what happened on that dark day of November 22, sixty-one years ago. After many years of competing theories, we now have solid evidence that the assassination of President John F. Kennedy was planned and carried out by the CIA, in retaliation for the peace project of JFK’s short-lived presidency. Kennedy’s project for peace included peace initiatives with respect to Russia, Vietnam, and Cuba; sustained private dialogue with Nikita Khrushchev; the signing of a nuclear test ban treaty as a first step toward complete disarmament, sustained through the development of institutions of cooperation in commerce and science; and support for and cooperation with Sukarno and the emerging Non-Aligned Movement.
We now know these important facts of American history as a result of the 2008 book by James Douglass, JFK and the Unspeakable, which presents the hypothesis that the CIA coordinated the assassination of a president who rejected the fundamental assumptions of the national security state, and who was actively engaged in pursuing initiatives that circumvented the structures of the state, including direct appeals to the people, who supported, Kennedy found, his gestures and initiatives toward peace. Douglass’ conclusions are well documented in the 518-page book, which puts together the various pieces by carefully examining all the available evidence, some of which gradually emerged over the years.
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The Cold War and JFK’s counterproject of world peace
Although the woke Left liked to condemn the American republic for slavery, conquest, and racism, in fact conquest is a normal human tendency, ironically providing the foundation for progress in economic development, science, philosophy, literature, and moral norms. The real test of the social and moral qualities of a conquering power comes following the conquest, and it is measured by the extent to which it uses the structures and advances attained through conquest to construct a society with justice for all.
In the case of the USA, the period of conquest began prior to its founding as a Republic and continued to the end of World War II, by which time it had arrived to be the hegemonic power of the modern world-system, which had been formed by the Western European conquest of the world beginning in the sixteenth century. As the hegemonic power in a world-system that was in transition to neocolonialism, the USA was perfectly positioned to lead the world toward a post-colonial world-system that recognizes the sovereignty of all nations and constructs peace and prosperity on the institutional foundation of mutually beneficial trade among nations.
However, the USA at that critical historic moment took a dark turn. It turned toward confrontation with its principal rival, the USSR, and with the emerging nations of the Third World, which were calling for a more just world order that uses the structures imposed by colonialism to develop a modern, equal, and just world, in which all nations have the possibility for modern economic and social development. The U.S. turn to confrontation occurred in a historic moment in which progress through conquest was no longer possible, and a world of competing imperialisms was no longer sustainable. It was justified through a Cold War ideology that falsely cast the Soviet Union as expansionist in its foreign policy.
The CIA was created by the National Security Act of 1947, which established, in addition to the CIA, the Office of the Secretary of Defense, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the National Security Council. On June 18, 1948, President Harry Truman issued a top-secret directive that authorized the CIA to engage in sabotage and subversion against hostile states. The order was in violation of international law, and it established official lying as necessary to prevent covert activities from being known by the people.
JFK’s differences with his own government, and especially with its national security sector, were visible even before Kennedy took office. As a Senator, even though JFK strongly embraced Cold War premises, he sometimes broke ranks with the West with respect to colonial wars, as was reflected in his support for the independence of Algeria. With respect to Indochina, he cautioned that military assistance has limits, and he ridiculed the notion that military force can conquer a so-called enemy of the people that “has the sympathy and covert support of the people.” As Chair of the African Subcommittee, Kennedy said to the Senate in 1959, “Call it nationalism, call it anti-colonialism, call it what you will, Africa is going through a revolution. . .. The word is out—and spreading like wildfire in nearly a thousand languages and dialects—that it is no longer necessary to remain forever poor and in bondage.”
A definitive breaking of trust between President Kennedy and the CIA occurred in April 1961. The CIA had trained Cuban exiles in a secret base in Guatemala for an invasion of Cuba at the Bay of Pigs. In reluctantly approving the plan, JFK made clear that there would be no military intervention with U.S. troops, even if the exile brigade faced defeat. Kennedy realized following the failed invasion that he had been drawn into a trap by the CIA, in which he was faced with the choice of accepting defeat or escalating the battle. The authors of the plan “assumed that he would be forced by circumstances to drop his advance restrictions against the use of U.S. combat forces.” In the aftermath of the Bay of Pigs defeat, Kennedy asked the three leaders of the failed operation to resign, namely, CIA Director Allen Douglas, Deputy Director Richard Bissel Jr., and Deputy Director General Charles Cabell. He also cut the CIA’s budget, aiming at a 20% reduction by 1966. And he tried through executive memoranda to redefine the agency’s mission and reduce its power.
Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev initiated private correspondence with Kennedy on September 29, 1961, with a letter that was twenty-six pages long, during the Berlin crisis. For the next two years, Khrushchev and Kennedy exchanged at least twenty-one secret letters, which included discussion of the possibilities for peaceful coexistence and of the need to avoid another world war. They also discussed the constraints placed on them by their respective states. The correspondence between them was helpful in avoiding a military confrontation during the Cuban missile crisis of 1962 and in making possible a private agreement, according to which the Soviets would withdraw its missiles from Cuba, and the USA would dismantle the missiles that it had installed in Turkey. The American military chiefs were outraged that Kennedy had not taken advantage of the situation created by the discovery of Soviet missiles to attack Cuba.
On June 10, 1963, Kennedy delivered an address at American University in Washington, in which Kennedy announced his decision for peace, taken against the advice of his political and military advisors, excepting Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy. He declared:
I have chosen this time and place to discuss a topic on which ignorance too often abounds and truth is too rarely perceived—yet it is the most important topic on earth: 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.
Kennedy further asserted that “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.” He further declared that a general and complete disarmament is the primary long-range interest of the United States, a disarmament designed to take place in stages, accompanied by the development of new institutions of peace. To this end, Kennedy announced that he, Khrushchev, and British Prime Minister Harold MacMillan had agreed to hold discussions in Moscow on a test-ban treaty.
Kennedy attended personally to working out with the U.S. negotiating team the details of the proposed nuclear test-ban treaty. There was strong opposition to the treaty from the Joint Chiefs and the CIA, as well as in the U.S. Congress, all under the influence of Cold War assumptions. Kennedy therefore went on a whirlwind public education campaign on the treaty, and he found that his message was well received by the people. In September 1963, public opinion polls showed that 80% of the people were in favor of the Treaty. It was ratified by the Senate on September 24, 1963, by a vote of 80 to 19, fourteen votes more than the required two-thirds majority.
Kennedy also sought better relations with Indonesia’s Sukarno, who was a guest at the White House in 1961. On August 16, 1962, Kennedy issued a national security memorandum countering CIA plots against Sukarno and ordering the State Department, Defense Department, CIA, AID, and the U.S. Information agency to take a more positive approach to Indonesia that would seek a new and better relation. A reciprocal visit by JFK to Indonesia was scheduled for the spring of 1964, for which Sukarno had promised the U.S. President “the grandest reception anyone ever received here,” while Kennedy viewed his visit as a way of dramatizing in a very visible manner Kennedy’s support for Third World nationalism. The event, to the world’s misfortune, was cancelled by Kennedy’s assassination. Sukarno was at that time a leading figure in the Non-Aligned Movement, which today consists of 120 member states, and which advocates for the step-by-step construction of an alternative world order based in respect for the sovereignty of all nations, non-interference in the affairs of states, and mutually beneficial trade among nations.
In March 1963, Kennedy initiated a new approach with respect to Cuba. The USA began a crackdown on Cuban émigré groups, preventing them from using U.S. territory to launch raids against Cuba, although Kennedy continued authorizing covert CIA operations against Cuba. In September, Kennedy initiated an indirect dialogue with Fidel Castro through intermediaries, which was still in process at the time of Kennedy’s assassination. Fidel of course responded favorably to this initiative; normal relations with the United States had been a persistent proposal of the Cuban Revolutionary Government since 1959.
With respect to Vietnam, Kennedy agreed to send military advisors, support units, and helicopters to Vietnam, but not combat troops. In his exceptional and honest memoir on the Vietnam War, Robert McNamara affirms that Kennedy was persistently opposed to sending combat troops to Vietnam, convinced that South Vietnamese leaders can only attain their nation’s sovereignty by themselves, with U.S. help, but primarily on the basis of their own legitimacy in the eyes of the people. As Kennedy became convinced that the government of South Vietnam was not up to the task, he turned toward withdrawal. He told McNamara to order the military to draw up plans for withdrawal, concerning which the military was dragging its feet. On October 11, 1963, the president’s National Action Security Memorandum Number 263 mandated the withdrawal of 1,000 military personnel by the end of the year and the withdrawal of the bulk of U.S. personnel by the end of 1965. With JFK’s assassination within six weeks, the executive order was never implemented, and it was never announced to the public.
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The CIA plan to assassinate the president
In the context of the Cold War against the Soviet Union, there was a naval intelligence program in which approximately three dozen young men were sent to the Soviet Union, presenting themselves as disenchanted with American society and wanting to learn about communism, with the intention of developing useful connection with Soviet intelligence, working covertly for the CIA. It seems that one of them was Lee Harvey Oswald, who in 1957 and 1958 had been a Marine Corps radar operator in a U.S. Air Force base in Japan. He had a high security clearance and listened regularly to radio communications among U.S. secret U-2 spy planes flying over the Soviet Union and China. On October 31, 1959, two months after being discharged from the Marine Corps, Oswald renounced his U.S. citizenship at the U.S. Embassy in Moscow, and he affirmed his allegiance to the Soviet Union. He further declared he had told Soviet officials that he would make known to them information concerning U.S. radar operations.
Oswald returned to the U.S. Embassy in Moscow after working for over a year in a factory in Minsk. The Embassy made no effort to prosecute him for his defection, and it lent him money to return to the United States. Once back in the USA, it seems that Oswald was working for the CIA as an agent provocateur, presenting himself as a member of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee and as a defender of Cuban socialism, distributing leaflets and conducting street theater designed to attract media attention, for the purpose of discrediting the Fair Play for Cuba Committee.
In his role as CIA agent provocateur, Oswald, without his knowledge, was being set up as a patsy and a scapegoat for the assassination of the president. Russia and Cuba were intended as secondary scapegoats. Using Oswald’s feigned support for the Soviet Union and Cuba to create the belief that the alleged assassin of the president was an agent of the Soviet Union and/or Cuba, public opinion could be rallied toward support for war with Russia and Cuba.
Douglass thoroughly documents the fact that over the years, various people have come forward with testimony indicating that the shots that killed President Kennedy were fired from a grassy knoll to the front of the presidential motorcade, and not from the Texas School Book Depository that the motorcade had passed, where Oswald was located. This accumulating testimony, gradually overcoming fear, pertains to Oswald’s various movements prior to the assassination, observations of the shooting, the escape routes of the shooters and Oswald, and medical observations of the president’s fatal wounds.
President Lyndon B. Johnson, upon being informed following the assassination of the CIA plan, refused to use Oswald’s feigned Soviet and Cuban connections to arouse public passion for war with Russia and Cuba, because it was evident that neither Russia nor Cuba had anything to do with the assassination. Nor did LBJ authorize investigation of the CIA’s involvement in the affair, which if made known, could have provoked a public outcry that would have resulted in the dismantlement of the CIA as well as intense internal conflict in the nation. Instead, Johnson created the Warren Commission, privately advising key members of the Commission to avoid all questions that would lead to revealing who Oswald really was and the role of the CIA in the Kennedy assassination. Accordingly, the Commission created the narrative that Oswald was a loner who was alienated from others and hostile to his environment and who had acted alone, a narrative that had many internal contradictions and inconsistencies with known facts, with the consequence that the Commission’s conclusions were never completely accepted by the people.
At the same time, having internalized Cold War anti-communist assumptions, LBJ was genuinely not in agreement with JFK’s peace project, which he quietly set aside. Immediately following the assassination, LBJ met with Kennedy’s advisors on Vietnam, all of whom, with the exception of Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, were opposed to Kennedy’s peace project. As is made clear in Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara’s memoir on the Vietnam War, LBJ’s orientation was clear at that initial meeting: the USA must and will win the war in Vietnam.
Moreover, JFK’s initiatives toward Cuba were dropped. Cuba was not informed of the shift, in spite of Fidel’s efforts to communicate his continued interest in rapprochement and a normal relation between Cuba and the USA.
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Final considerations
The unspeakable crime of the CIA destroyed emerging prospects for peace and sustained world cooperation at a critical time in human history. As such, it was a crime against the people of the United States and the peoples of the world.
The people of the United States should know of John F. Kennedy’s determined and courageous effort to establish peaceful co-existence among world powers as well as structures of peace and cooperation among nations, including cooperation between the Global North and South, which today remains a key demand and hope of the once-colonized peoples of the earth.
The people of the United States should know the story of JFK and the CIA. It is not a question of attacking the legacy of blameworthy individuals. Rather, it is a question of identifying pitfalls to the construction of peace, so that collective political intelligence can be mobilized to overcome them.
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