Sixty Years Later

 

JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters, James W. Douglass, Orbis Books, April 30, 2008.  

This November 22, will be the sixtieth anniversary of JFK’s assassination. The world is still asking questions about this tragedy. More information on this event remains top secret and will not be opened to the public unless ordered by the sitting President of the United States. However, the following author provides an intriguing approach to laying out a new context for understand the possible figures involved in the assassination of JFK.

James Douglass, in JFK and the Unspeakable, gets straight to the point by arguing that JFK was an existential threat to the military-industrial-complex and its mega profit industry. He was scuttling their communist conspiracy world view which justified the post-WWII massive military expansion. The panic set in, quickly, with people such as the Director of the CIA, Alan Dulles, and General Curtis LaMay, Chief of Staff of the USAF, J. Edgar Hoover (Director of the FBI) and other power elites, when they discovered that JFK no longer wanted to move the US away from a permanent war economy. They considered him a “threat” to the security of the United States and the American way of life.

On the other hand, there were those, according to Douglass, who believed JFK was bent on saving the planet from nuclear annihilation and an end to colonial domination: Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev USSR (Soviet Premier), Pope John XXIII, (Catholic Pope), Ho Chi Minh (revolutionary leader of the Viet Minh), Martin Luther King (Civil Rights Leader), Dorthy Day (NY Catholic Worker) and a Trappist Monk, Thomas Merton.

 

Ho Chi Minh

 

Thomas Merton

If the title of this book makes you suspect that it is another in a long line of exhausting conspiracy scenarios – regarding the events of November 22nd 1963 - go to the website of Orbis Books and parous the six-page introduction and ten-page chronology. On a personal note, this intro made it impossible for me to put down the book, even till the wee hours of the morning.

Douglass’ interest is not primarily the immediate scenario of the events of JFK’s death but rather Kennedy’s “turn to peace” during his final months of his life. The “turn” that made likely, if not inevitable, his being “marked for assassination” (to use Thomas Merton’s phrase), energized those in the peace movement on a world-wide scale. Douglass’ meticulous research illuminates JFK’s remarkable - and little noted - transition from Cold Warrior to proponent of “complete and general disarmament,” a phrase he used in several public addresses to describe his ultimate goal as President.

Moreover, JFK’s “New Frontier” presidency was far more than a “space-race” and militarist call for weapons research. Douglass, I believe, could have added an essential element to his research by addressing JFK’s New Frontier vision for a new society of social justice at the national and international levels. This would complement his thesis that JFK proved to be dangerous to the status quo business and militarism. In 1960, at his acceptance speech as the presidential candidate for the Democratic Party, Kennedy states:

“We stand today on the edge of a New Frontier - the frontier of the 1960s, the frontier of unknown opportunities and perils, the frontier of unfilled hopes and unfilled threats. ... The pioneers gave up their safety, their comfort, and sometimes their lives to build our new west. They were determined to make the new world strong and free - an example to the world. ... Some would say that those struggles are all over, that all the horizons have been explored, that all the battles have been won. That there is no longer an American frontier. ... And we stand today on the edge of a new frontier, the frontier of unknown opportunities and perils. ... Beyond that frontier are uncharted areas of science and space, unsolved problems of peace and war, unconquered problems of ignorance and prejudice, unanswered questions of poverty and surplus. ... I'm asking each of you to be pioneers towards that New Frontier. My call is to the young in heart, regardless of age. …” (Michael E. Eidenmuller (1960-07-15). John F. Kennedy, 1960 Democratic National Convention, American Rhetoric, Retrieved 2012-02-23.

Drawing upon the research of others, and recently declassified federal records, and upon his own interviews of witnesses, Douglass provides a detailed narrative of the key events that occasioned Kennedy’s turn to active peacemaking - his refusal to provide military support for the CIA-initiated Bay of Pigs invasion, the Cuban missile crisis, and the growing alienation with his military advisors as he proceeded to secretly explore peacemaking initiatives with both Castro and Khrushchev.

 

Nikita Khrushchev

No doubt this proved subversive as I am sure the CIA and FBI had knowledge of this clandestine operation.

Following the Cuban missile crisis, both JFK and Khrushchev admitted to one another that they were terrified by the prospect of nuclear war. Kennedy began to resist further U.S. military involvement in Vietnam. In July of 1963 U.S. and Soviet negotiators agree on the Limited Test Ban Treaty, outlawing nuclear tests “in the atmosphere, beyond its limits, including outer space, or under water, including territorial waters or high seas.” The Senate approved the treaty, 80 to 19, September 24th.

Having begun his research focused on Kennedy’s turn to peacemaking, and discovering the enormous resistance to those efforts on the part of JFK’s military advisors, and all of this in the light of new information and his own interviews, when Douglass comes to the events immediately surrounding the president’s death, he provides a new context. He lays out the results of that research by giving the back-story of a number of eye-witnesses - some familiar, others relatively unknown (in some cases because their stories were officially discounted, in other cases because it took years for them to overcome governmental intimidation).

Douglass’ narrative covers new contextual material, to the best of my knowledge, different from other JFK authors such as Lane, McKnight, DiEugenio, etc. Here are some of the new constructs that I believe provide for a re-reading of the power dynamics at play in the assassination of JFK:

* The extent to which both Khrushchev and JFK had to work against their own generals …

* The fact the Khrushchev studied and was moved by Pope John XXIII’s encyclical Pacem in Terris …

* The key role of Norman Cousins and nuclear disarmament …

* The (foiled) attempt on JFK’s life in Chicago just three weeks before the Dallas assassination, entailing a pattern remarkably similar to that of the Dallas event - a set of assassins, a carefully cultivated patsy positioned in a window overlooking the presidential motorcade moving through a dogleg in the route …

* Strong evidence for the presence and activities of a Lee Oswald look-alike, which accounts for the phenomenon of “too many Oswalds” sighted at certain stages of the narrative …

* The significance of a crucial speech - little noted at the time and less remembered since - that JFK gave as a commencement address at American University in Washington, five months before his death. In it he issues an urgent call for peace -  “Not”, he insisted, “a Pax Americana enforced on the world by American weapons of war” in which JFK commits himself to a “complete and general disarmament” …

The entire book could be read as a commentary the American University speech, whose full text is included as an appendix. Douglass’ account shows how JFK arrived to this point, the peace pivot, and why public expression of his purpose could be seen as treasonous by those who saw U.S. domination supported by preemptive strikes as absolutely necessary U.S hegemony.

In the end, Douglass does in fact provide another conspiracy theory. But the motives, methods and the rich nature of the fresh data provides a necessary reading for anyone who cares about the security of the U.S. and the rest of the world.

The seriousness of Douglass’ purpose is expressed eloquently in a paragraph from his Introduction: “I will tell the story as truthfully as I can. I have come to see it as a transforming story, one that can help move our own collective story in the twenty-first century from a spiral of violence to a way of peace. My methodology is from Gandhi. This is an experiment in truth. Its particular truth is a journey into darkness. If we go as far as we can into the darkness, regardless of the consequences, I believe a midnight truth will free us from our bondage to violence and bring us to the light of peace” (pp. xviii-xix).

And at the present historical moment, the Israel-Hamas war should be reassessed in terms of a president with leadership skills such as JFK’s. Doubtful of Biden or Trump are suited for this type of challenge.

Ed Martin

Tubac, Arizona

Long Beach, California