Who killed JFK, and why?
Who killed JFK, and why?
Implications for RFK Jr.’s presidential campaign
Cuban Television last night aired Oliver Stone’s documentary, JFK revisited, which provided me with an opportunity to see the 2021 documentary for the first time. The documentary reaffirms facts and interpretations that had been published in 2008 in a persuasive and comprehensive review of the JFK assassination literature by James Douglass,1 which Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., has characterized as the best book on the assassination.
Stone and Douglass review the various contradictions with respect to the questions of who was behind the assassination, and what were the reasons for it. They arrive to essentially the same conclusions, with Stone declaring that “conspiracy theories have become conspiracy facts.” They concur that the CIA ordered the assassination and covered it up, because the intelligence agency was opposed to Kennedy’s strategy of peace, which had emerged with clarity in 1963. Both cite: (1) Kennedy’s June 10, 1963 peace speech at American University, published in its entirely as an appendix in Douglass’ book; (2) Kennedy’s efforts to redefine the mandate of the agency and reduce its power,2 as a result of its deceiving of the president with respect to the Bay of Pigs; (3) Kennedy’s initiation of U.S. withdrawal from Vietnam;3 (4) JFK’s desire for better relations with Third World leaders like Lumumba and Sukarno; and (5) Kennedy’s opening to Fidel Castro, still in process at the time of JFK’s death.
Stone perhaps gives greater emphasis than Douglass to the damage that was done to the nation by the assassination. Stone maintains that the assassination and its coverup not only shifted the short-term balance of political power in favor of the warmongers; they also were the first steps in the fall of the nation into a long spiral of decline, gradually sending the nation into cynicism and despair. It was a crime so dark in causes and consequences that Douglass was moved to describe it as “unspeakable.”
The revisiting of the assassination and its motives, especially Stone’s emphasis on the profound long-term harm to the nation, leads me to reflect on ways that presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., could give greater stress to the assassination of JFK and its implications for the nation in the long term.
RFK Jr. ought to call upon the nation to retake JFK’s strategy of peace, ended by an unspeakable crime. Presidential candidate RFK Jr. ought to declare his intention to establish cooperative relations with Cuba, Venezuela, Nicaragua, Bolivia, Brazil, Iran, and Syria; just as JFK sought to develop cooperative relations with Third World leaders who were in the crosshairs of the Cold War conflict. RKF Jr. ought to declare the end of superpower rivalries and to pledge U.S. cooperation with Russia and China in the construction of a multipolar world order, just as JFK pledged cooperation with the Soviet Union to “build a world of peace where the weak are safe and the strong are just.” The presidential candidate should put forth not only a strategy for peace in Ukraine, but a projection for the construction of a national political will for cooperation and mutually beneficial trade among the nations of the world, the only solid foundation to lasting world peace and prosperity.
RFK Jr. ought to openly declare that JFK’s Alliance for Progress was flawed by idealist objectives that implicitly reflected U.S. interests, even though based in good intentions. RFK Jr. should announce that his presidency will seek the national political will and political maturity for cooperation with the development plans that are created by the peoples and nations themselves in the exercise of their sovereignty, without conditions for commerce, investment, or aid; and without interference in their internal affairs.
In memory of what might have been, let us recall the words of President John F. Kennedy at the American University commencement on June 10, 1963.
“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: 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.”
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Douglass, James W. 2008. JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters. New York: Touchstone, A Division of Simon & Schuster.
Douglass, JFK and the Unspeakable, Pp. 15-16.
Douglass, JFK and the Unspeakable, Pp. 180-90.