Kennedys and King Test host626

Author: Jerry Fresia

  • The Missile Crisis: Writing on the Wall

    The Missile Crisis: Writing on the Wall

    The Missile Crisis: Writing on the Wall

    By Jerry Fresia, Ph.D.

    Martin Sherwin’s Gambling with Armageddon, the story of the Cuban Missile Crisis, is nothing short of a powerful, gripping tale. I’ve read a few accounts of those much-discussed thirteen days, but none come close to the palatable sense of drama and suspense that Sherwin delivers.

    As readers of this site will likely know, as soon as President Kennedy became aware that Khrushchev had placed offensive missiles in Cuba, he assembled many of his close advisers who would then meet daily with the president to flesh out new developments and possible responses. This group of decision-makers has come to be known as the Executive Committee of the National Security Council or ExCom. Luckily for us, these meetings were secretly recorded and constitute our best way of grasping the reality of the ebb and flow of the individual participants thinking.

    In addition, there were also side meetings. These occurred in the Oval Office, the Pentagon, and the State Department. There were also revelations brought to light through memoirs, interviews, anniversary meetings, subsequent articles, and, of course, similar accounts offered by Soviet participants. 

    I mention this in order to explain what makes Sherwin’s style so engaging. Sherwin leads the reader through this labyrinth chronologically. Hour by hour, day by day, we watch the unfolding and changing positions, the points of view articulated inside smaller group meetings, but hidden or modified when the actors are re-assembled as a whole. Along the way, there are surprises, new crises, wisdom and insight, maturity, reckless posturing, a heavy dose of misinformation, and a touch or two of plain old madness. 

           Interestingly, Sherwin believes that to understand the Missile Crisis, one needs to understand the Cuban revolution. This is insightful because Sherwin is implicitly drawing a through-line with the liberation or reform efforts of Mosaddeq, Árbenz, and Castro, and Kennedy who, while not administering reform, blocks, repeatedly, the CIA’s effort to effect regime change in Cuba. I shall argue that there is in this episode a power dynamic that is foundational to understanding the assassination of President Kennedy.

    Liberation Movement Cuba [1]

    By opening the door to an examination of the Cuban revolution,[2] Sherwin is allowing us to view the Missile Crisis as a conflict between two distinct systems of power: one source of power are those forces committed to the preservation of colonial regimes and the other is the forces resisting that preservation in order to effect national liberation. This puts JFK in a bind. Simultaneously, by virtue of his position as president alone, he would be compelled to use his military to elevate corporate interests and squash liberation movements. This, in effect, is his presidential responsibility, his job. And yet we see him feverishly working to block his military from restoring a colonial government on the Cuban island. Let’s follow Sherwin’s lead, then, taking a peek at the Cuban revolution and the reform efforts of Mosaddeq in Iran and Árbenz to which Sherwin also calls our attention.

    Under Batista, 70 percent of Cuba’s arable land was owned by foreigners. Castro’s first priority was the redistribution of land through his Agrarian Reform act. Most of the sugar industry was owned by Americans. In addition, Castro’s reforms included education, health care, housing, and road building in rural zones. Some American ranches were nationalized, and the Cuban government ordered foreign refineries to refine Soviet crude oil. American refineries refused, and Castro nationalized them in response. The US government then ended its sugar quota, which gave Castro a good reason to nationalize all American properties. An embargo followed while Castro went on to seize all Mafia casinos, broke up drug and prostitution rings, and effectively ended the Mafia-politician corruption centered in Havanna. 

    Liberation Movement: Iran

    “Mohammad Mosaddeq, the elected prime minister of Iran, had nationalized the assets of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, a British enterprise that had refused to cooperate with the Iranian government’s demand for access to its books. Agents from M16, Britain’s CIA equivalent, suggested a joint operation to overthrow Mosaddeq, and President Eisenhower endorsed the idea.”[3]

    Liberation Movement: Guatemala

    “Jacobo Árbenz, the president of Guatemala who….[following] through on his economic and social reform campaign promises… threatened the landholdings of the United Fruit Company…[which had affiliations with both John Foster and Allen Dulles]….President Eisenhower authorized a…“psychological warfare and political action, ” “subversion,” and “assassination,” all cobbled together as Operation PBSUCCESS.” The operation did not run smoothly. CIA-trained fighters were pinned down until CIA planes bombed Guatemala City. Árbenz was able to flee the country.[4]

    In each of these movements[5] we find the material interests of the most powerful jeopardized. Or, if we continue examining these events in terms of clashing systems of power, we might say, using economic terms, that the surplus takerswere being overtaken by the people from whom the surplus was being taken, the expropriated. Further, a key element in this dynamic was the progressive leadership by a head of state. From the point of view of American corporate titans newly ascended–following WWII– to world hegemonic power, each of these national liberation movements would be seen as a five-alarm fire. Note the position of the CIA, which played the key role in suppressing the liberation movements in Iran, Guatemala, and Cuba: liberation movements present “The gravest danger to the US….(my emphasis).” [6] Why the gravest? Because the US believed in and feared “Soviet expansionism,” which in turn was perceived as frustrating the US hegemonic ability to expropriate colonized wealth and resources throughout the world. Note too, Eisenhower’s Secretary of State John Foster Dulles’ fear: “The poor always want to plunder the rich; there is a rising tide all over the world wherethe common man aspires to higher and wider horizons [and where] Russia is able to expand her influence over the earth by associating with these dangerous currents.”[7]

    The Eisenhower Factor

    “Russia is definitely out to communize the world. We face a battle to extinction between the two systems.” So wrote Dwight D. Eisenhower in his diary in 1946. In 1958, Eisenhower told Greece’s Queen Frederika  that “To accept the Communist doctrine and try to live with it would cost too big a price to be alive.” While we may have been led to believe that Allen Dulles was the rabid anti-Communist ideologue, Sherwin believes that it was actually Eisenhower (my emphasis). Argues Sherwin, Allen Dulles was “the mouthpiece, almost a puppet for Eisenhower (my emphasis).”[8]  

    So we find that even before Kennedy became president, he wasn’t trusted, given his views expressed in the Senate chamber on western imperialism. That he arranged to send to every member of the Senate, Burdick and Lederer’s The Ugly American, a book which may have made cold warriors wince.  Not surprisingly, Eisenhower was terribly upset with JFK’s victory in 1960 (his blood pressure “soaring to dangerous levels”). He was convinced that Kennedy had allowed communism to thrive just off the Florida coast and that he would “do almost anything to avoid turning the country over to ‘the young genius.’ ”[9]   It was “the repudiation of everything I’ve done for eight years.”[10]

    “It is now clear  from available evidence,” writes Sherwin, “that he would impose on his successor” a way to ensure that he would be saddled with the commitment to “eliminate Castro and his government” from Cuba.[11] This desire, not surprisingly, was consistent with a group of corporate leaders with business interests in Cuba (surplus takers) who had met with CIA Director Allen Dulles. They wanted Dulles to pass a message on to Eisenhower: “Get off of dead center and take some direct action against Castro.”[12] Eisenhower understood his order: At an NSC meeting he “decided that Castro should join Mosaddeq and Árbenz as yet another CIA Cold War trophy.”[13] This “new plan, a full-fledged invasion would be delivered to former Navy lieutenant, JFK, as an action program approved by the 5 star general-president who had organized and commanded the invasion of Normandy.”[14]

    The reader may be familiar with the rest of the Bay of Pigs story, but it is necessary to retell it in the context of the missile crisis. 

    Due to a recent declassification of thousands of pages from the CIA in 2011 (50th anniversary of the Bay of Pigs Invasion), it is now known that the CIA task force in charge of the paramilitary assault knew the operation could not succeed without becoming an open invasion supported by the U.S. military. According to Peter Kornbluh, this was the most important revelation of the declassification of the official history of the CIA. [15]

    Thomas L. Hughes, a former intel specialist, told Sherwin: the entire operation was intended to “entrap” JFK, who repeatedly warned the Bay of Pig planners that under no circumstances would he authorize American combat forces to become involved in the operation.[16] And so he didn’t, and the revolutionary-minded Castro and his government survived, the only one by the way, to survive the relentless onslaught of American military power since 1917. 

    But there would be one more chance for the corporate surplus-takers and their banished allies to get their resources and power re-established in Havana. It would be the Missile Crisis.

    Thirteen Days

    Perhaps the one thing in reading Sherwin’s tale that grabbed my attention was the story of Senator Kenneth Keating from New York. The official story is that on 14 October 1962, photo-intelligence analysts discovered that Khrushchev had placed offensive surface-to-surface nuclear ballistic missiles on the island of Cuba. The information was relayed to President Kennedy on 16 October 1962, and on 29 October, Khrushchev agreed to withdraw his missiles, hence the Cuban Missile Crisis of thirteen days.

    But a Republican Senator from New York, Kenneth Keating, had been insisting since 1 September that, indeed, Soviet missiles had been placed on the island, and this was a full month before President Kennedy was presented with evidence. Further, John McCone, CIA Director, also was insisting on the delivery of missiles to Cuba. But playing his cards closely, McCone said he had no source, merely that his pronouncements were a “hunch.”

    Keating, who died in 1975, never revealed his source, but after years of pressuring, even by Senator Ted Kennedy, Keating only would say that his mystery source had provided conclusive evidence and that he was an official intelligence source within the DOD. Interesting, too, is that on October 16, when Kennedy assembled his team of advisors to deal with the crisis, “his advisers speculated that an official in the Defense Department served as Keating’s source. They named him, but the person’s name has been deleted from the official transcript of the meeting and remains classified.”[17]

    The gravity of the crisis, one would assume, would have required an immediate notification of the president. Further, that a CIA Director would just happen to have a hunch, which just happens to mirror reality precisely, strains credulity.  A more likely explanation is that this was another effort to entrap the President: he had to act since the missiles were already installed and loaded. Further, it shows that the initiation of hostility would have been welcomed by members of the JCS and others: a pretext to eliminate the Castro menace once and for all and, finally, the island could be returned to the corporate surplus takers who had ruled there since 1900. 

    The Chomsky Factor

    Let us pause for a moment to consider the Noam Chomsky perspective to help understand the power dynamics in this saga.   Chomsky has claimed that if the Nuremberg laws were applied, then every post-war American president would have been hanged for committing atrocities. The reason why is this: the CIA has had the responsibility to crush liberation movements around the globe. The surplus takers must win; investors and wealth accumulators must win. The people on the bottom, the expropriated, must lose. It’s a system of power. This is why Chomsky will say that presidents really don’t make policy. The policies flow from institutions, and presidents just get on board and execute the policy handed to them.

    But what happens if a president like Kennedy keeps pushing for peace and doesn’t get on board when his closest advisors push hard to support covert wars that keep colonial systems in place? 

    Armageddon Nears

    Other than on the very first day when Kennedy said that they might have to take military action and “wipe them out,” Adlai Stevenson, UN Ambassador, countered no. A diplomatic solution is possible. From that point forward, Kennedy never wavered in his belief that a peaceful resolution was the only sensible one. Yet, the Joint Chiefs of Staff and its Chairman and many others were ferociously committed to removing Castro by military force. Kennedy was lucky to have the UN Ambassador in the group who suggested a blockade as a way. This approach was useful in stalling the implementation of the policy favored by the Hawks.

    As with the Bay of Pigs fiasco, the contempt for Kennedy was not disguised. Admiral George Anderson Jr., Chief of Naval Operations, felt that the blockade was a “lame response by a president who ducked military intervention in the Bay of Pigs.” Anderson was also furious when Kennedy insisted on having total control over military operation decision-making and that he, the president, was crossing “a bright red line.”[18]

    McCone reported Eisenhower’s position, which was “as hawkish as the Chiefs all out military action.” Kennedy didn’t respond, believing that Eisenhower was “out of touch with the world.”[19]

    Undersecretary of State George Ball’s position was that the situation was a “test of will” that required that the US respond with decisive military force in order to maintain the confidence of our allies.”[20]

    Treasury Secretary Douglas Dillion said that, “A military strike is our only solution. Survival of the free world fabric is at stake.” [21]

    General Taylor, Chairman of the JCS, intoned: “All the commanders and the Chiefs want a military assault and then invasion, take it out with one hard crack.”[22]

    Chief of Staff of the Air Force General Le May declared: “This blockade and political action, I see leading into war….This is almost as bad as the appeasement at Munich.”[23]

    President Kennedy sharing an insight with General Wheeler mused,  “Cuba added to the Soviet arsenal didn’t add particularly to our danger. The real danger is the use of nuclear weapons.”

    General Wheeler: “Am I clear that you are addressing yourself as to whether anything at all should be done?”

    President Kennedy: “That’s right.” [24]

    Aftermath

    James Douglas points to the Cuban missile crisis as a turning point in the presidency of John Kennedy. During the last year of his life, he saw a more confident, more imaginative, peace-driven president emerge, pointing to the following bold peace initiatives that flowed from his missile crisis experience: 

    1) His audacious peace speech in June of 1963, where he states again his belief, as he did during the ExComm meetings, that while we probably would not change our minds about each other’s economic systems, we could live peacefully together; 

    2) He engineered the passage of the Partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty; 

    3) He proposed a way to withdraw from Vietnam with NSA Memorandum 263; and 

    4) he had established a covert dialogue with Fidel Castro. And if that were not enough, I would add his proposal to collaborate with the Soviets in placing a man on the moon.[25]

    Concluding Thoughts

    • The story of the Cuban Missile Crisis is, in important ways, an explanation of JFK’s assassination. Most of his advisors were flat out moving in a warlike position, as he was holding firm. He had established a direct back channel with Khrushchev in 1961, which he used to ask (the “enemy”) for help in blocking his general’s efforts. Afterward, he had also established back-channel talks with Castro in hopes of achieving a US-Cuba détente. 
    • Daniel Ellsberg noted that when the missile crisis was over, there was a “fury” within the Air Force. “There was virtually a coup atmosphere in Pentagon circles. Not that I had the fear there was about to be a coup – I just thought it was a mood of hatred and rage. The atmosphere was poisonous, poisonous.”[26]
    • The JCS, so committed to finding a path toward war, were out-maneuvered and instead were left not just with a peaceful solution, which they despised, but also a commitment by JFK to Khrushchev not to invade Cuba, ever. Further, Kennedy’s successful diplomacy also turned on meeting the second demand by Khrushchev that Kennedy dismantle the Jupiter nuclear missiles in Turkey, placed there by Eisenhower. Kennedy kept this capitulation secret, given the complexity of the negotiation at the time and the risk of the [27]JCS succeeding in pushing their agenda to the fore. Writes Sherwin: “If a diplomatic solution was still possible, he would have to pursue Khrushchev’s offer privately.” [28]
    • Kennedy ended Operation Mongoose at the conclusion of the crisis. The CIA, however, hoping for a slip into overt military action, kept the program going throughout the thirteen days and beyond.
    • The US intelligence was not terribly accurate. Instead of 10,000 Soviet troops in Cuba, there were 40,000. Also, the US was unaware that some of the nuclear weapons were operational and that missile crews were under orders to launch their missiles were the US to attack. Therefore, every single military response put forward by ExComm members apart from the blockage, if carried out, would have likely resulted in a nuclear war.
    • Often, Kennedy is lauded for his diplomatic skills but chided for having created the crisis in the first place. Khrushchev has said that he put the missiles into Cuba for two reasons: 1) to prevent an invasion, and 2) to respond in kind to the missiles put on the border of the Soviet Union in Turkey and also those in Great Britain. We now know that both the attempted invasion and the placement of missiles in Turkey and Great Britain were under the orders of Eisenhower, who arrived in office with 1,200 nuclear missiles in the US arsenal and left with 22,000. [29]

    Who Was Kennedy?

    In a campaign speech in October 1960, Senator Kennedy said: “I want to talk with you tonight about the most glaring failure of American foreign policy today – about a disaster that threatens the security of the whole Western Hemisphere – about a Communist menace that has been permitted to arise under our very noses, only 90 miles from our shores.” Yet just two years later, Kennedy said in a speech to the Inter-American Press Association, “A small band of conspirators …[had made] Cuba a victim of foreign imperialism… an instrument of the policy of others, a weapon in an effort dictated by external powers…. Without it, everything is possible.”[30]

     In the first statement, he sounds like one of his own JCS generals. In the second, anti-communism is soft; his understanding of the plight of those suffering under the weight of foreign wealth extraction could have been made by Árbenz or even Castro. Was this the turn that Douglass speaks about? Yes, a change in confidence, perhaps. But I think it always was the private Kennedy, hidden when he chose to run to the right of Nixon during the McCarthy era. His private conversations and his public commitment to peace not only show him not to be an anti-communist ideologue, they show him, as president, to be a threat to the national security interests of the US.  Writes Sherwin, “It is fantastic to watch Kennedy’s mind, how he thinks about things. It’s so different from the rest of his advisors, how those same people, in smaller private meetings just wanting to know when they can start bombing.”[31]

    Chomsky states, “The thesis is understood to imply that JFK would not have responded to the changing conditions in the manner of his closest advisers and war mongers. If true, the thesis is important, lending weight to the belief that Kennedy was indeed a remarkable if not unique figure.”[32]

    This statement was made in relation to JFK’s Vietnam policy. But I think the sentiment would apply equally to his handling of the missile crisis. 

    ________________________________________

    Footnotes

    [2] Aleksandr Fursenko and Timothy Naftali, Hell of a Gamble: Khrushchev, Castro, and Kennedy.

    [3] Martin Sherwin’s Gambling with Armageddon, the story of the Cuban Missile Crisis (New York: First Vintage Books Edition, February 2022), p. 140-1.

    [4] Sherwin, p. 141-2; PB was the CIA cryptonym for Guatemala.

    [5] And we could add the “regime prevention” in the Belgian Congo with the CIA assassination of Patrice Lumumba days before Kennedy assumed office as well as the regime change in Chile in 1973 when the CIA orchestrated regime change installed General Pinochet and ousted popularly elected president, socialist Salvador Allende who committed suicide rather than being captured to the coup forces.

    [6] Noam Chomsky, Rethinking Camelot, JFK, the Vietnam War, and US Political Culture, (Noam Chomsky, 1993), p.50.

    [7] Chomsky, p.26.

    [9]  Ibid,p. 122-125.

    [10] Ibid, p. 123.

    [11] Ibid, p. 144.

    [12] Ibid, p. 124.

    [13] Ibid, p. 142

    [14] Ibid, p. 145.

    [15] “Top Secret CIA ‘Official History’ of the Bay of Pigs: Revelations.” Nsarchive2.gwu.edu. Retrieved 2019-03-01.

    [16] Sherwin, p. 156.

    [17] The Historian as Detective: Senator Kenneth Keating, the Missiles in Cuba, and his Mysterious Sources https://www.jstor.org/stable/24911742

    [18] Sherwin, p. 362.

    [19] Ibid, p.  274.

    [20] Ibid, p.  267.

    [21] Ibid, p.  245.

    [22] Ibid, p.  248.

    [23] Ibid, p.  290.

    [24] Ibid, p. 194.

    [25] James W. Douglas, JFK and the Unspeakable, Why He Died and Why It Matters (New York: Simon & Schuster, Inc> 2008), p. 326.

    [26] Daniel Ellsberg, The Doomsday Machine, Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner (New York: Bloomsbury Publishing) pp. 201-222.

    [27] Ibid, pp.  201-22.

    [28] Sherwin, p. 422.

    [30] Douglass, p.251

    [32] Chomsky, p. 81.

  • Four Died Trying, Chapter One

    Four Died Trying, Chapter One

    Four Died Trying is a mini-series streaming on Amazon and Apple TV, on the four major political assassination of the sixties: John Kennedy, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy. Jim DiEugenio wrote a review of the Prologue to this series at his Substack site. Please read that before your read this.

    Chapter One of Four Died deals with the era of the fifties. In other words this installment was meant to lay in the backdrop of what was changed and how those attempts at change were then themselves stopped and rolled back. The main talking heads in this chapter are Bobby Kennedy Jr., Oliver Stone, author Mark Crispin Miller and screenwriter Zachary Sklar.

    The view taken by the narrative is that of, let us call it, “The Haunted Fifties”, the title of an I. F Stone book on the subject. The chapter concentrates on the fear of communism, of being accused of being a communist, and the rise and fall of Senator Joe McCarthy. In accordance with the last, Kennedy talks about his grandfather’s relationship with the senator and how this led to his father’s initial service on McCarthy’s committee. After a few months, RFK switched over to the Democratic side and – although the film does not show it – he was instrumental in causing the senator’s downfall.

    Professor Miller goes into how, in 1947, President Truman was maneuvered into making government employees sign loyalty oaths. This was Executive Order 9835, which mandated there be a loyalty investigation of persons entering as employees of any department of the executive branch of the national government. The film then comments on how this policy was proven to be unwarranted since the FBI had infiltrated the communist party in America to the point that any meeting had as many informants as it did communists. Yet many people were unjustly harassed: the film makes the talented actor and singer Paul Robeson a prime example.

    II

    From here, the film goes into the Hollywood sideshow set up by the House on Unamerican Activities, featuring people like Richard Nixon. Zachary Sklar’s father was a victim of all this and Sklar vividly describes how fearful the writer was of a visit by the FBI and being called as a witness before the committee – as one of his writing partners, Albert Maltz, was. Some of the clips, particularly of actors Adolphe Menjou and Robert Taylor, are rather nauseating in their obsequiousness. The film gives the Hollywood Ten case its proper due, especially the plight of writer Dalton Trumbo, who, with the help of producer Kirk Douglas and ultimately President John F. Kennedy – who went to a theater to see the Trumbo/Douglas film Spartacus – finally broke the Hollywood backlist. The film shows a rather rare clip of baseball player Jackie Robinson, who unlike Menjou and Taylor, managed to keep some of his dignity in the face of this charade.

    The film also includes some of the artistic reactions to McCarthyism, e.g. director Don Siegel’s classic allegory disguised as a sci-fi thriller film, Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Professor Miller aptly comments on how the pressure got to the point that it was almost like the Bill of Rights was on trial. Perhaps this point should have been made more explicitly: that it was not and is not illegal to be a communist. At least not according to the First Amendment. And if this point had been delineated more strongly then perhaps the film could have dovetailed into a larger theme, that is how The Fifties was really a kind of “make believe” era, one for which the perfect figurehead was President Dwight Eisenhower. One in which a rising economic tide masked the serious problems ignored at home, and a marked tendency to use the CIA to intervene in the Third World abroad.

    The title of the series is so evocative and Chapter One, which is not long – just under 40 minutes—is rich on foreshadowing. So yes, the chapter is worth watching, especially if one is unfamiliar with the anti-communist sturm und drang of the 50s.

    III

    The chapter begins dramatically and suggestively. Each of the four murdered political leaders are seen speaking, one by one, on TV screens. Suddenly, unexpectedly, a gunshot can be heard, the screen goes to complete static and the image of the speaker disappears. JFK is first. He can be heard saying “Not a Pax Americana enforced by American weapons of war.” Then Bam! He’s gone. Then Malcolm appears: “People in power have misused it and now there has to be a change, a better world has to be built.” Bam! Malcom is gone. We see bombs being dropped over Vietnam. MLK, Jr. is speaking, “The bombs in Vietnam explode home. They destroyed the dream and the possibility for a decent America.” Bam! Martin is gone. Finally, RFK appears and says, “Cannot continue to deny and postpone the demands of our own people.” Bam! TV goes to static. RFK is gone too.

    These are the four who died trying. But we aren’t told in this chapter what each of them did to warrant being murdered and what the shared trying consists of specifically. The chapter works better as an unfolding, ominous, wait-and-see decade.

    The characterization of postwar America presented to the viewer is an America hell bent on developing a massive military arsenal to combat an evil empire. Director John Kirby’s use of old propaganda film, which scared the daylights out of Americans back then, is effective in making the propagandists sound and look ridiculous today. But the reality of the impact of the propaganda, hysterical though it may seem today, is not lost on the viewer. The fear ginned up that the Russians were about to end civil liberties in America had a near totalitarian quality about it. The set up seductively invites the viewer to yearn for that knight in shining armor to save us all from this American styled, glitzy – America is nothing if not beautiful things to buy – star-spangled neo-fascism.

    The centerpiece in this tableau are several clips of Eisenhower’s well known Farewell Address where he warned citizens of the rising power and presence in American life of the “military industrial complex” (MIC). Kennedy, Jr. is brought in to concur: The MIC “would hollow out the middle class” and “direct” [America] toward constant wars.”

    Eisenhower’s warning becomes more ominous: the MIC represents “misplaced power” that “endangers our liberty and democratic processes.” In fact, Eisenhower concludes that the MIC has penetrated so thoroughly into the American way of life that it has become the very “structure of our society.” Against this tale of America on the ropes, RFK, Jr. provides a bit of foreshadowing that is more specific: the “whole administration” of his uncle, JFK, “was a battle with his own military brass and the intelligence apparatus.”

    Amid this intensity of American ideological managing during the 50s, NYU Professor Miller (who is used throughout as a commentator), explains that because the USSR was “shattered” following WWII, the Soviet Union, actually posed no real military threat to the US. However, Miller wishes to make clear that, “There is no doubt the US was now up against a totalitarian enemy, whose history of bloodshed and oppression is beyond question.” But hold on: There is a real threat to our civil liberties, but not from the Russians themselves but from the anti-communists behind McCarthyism. As Miller explains, “There was no chance that …[the totalitarian enemy] could extend to this country and in any way threaten American democracy. It was the anti-communists who did that.”

    Indeed, Kirby and producer Libby Handros are onto something. We need to be aware of the machinations of the far right, especially when they have the guns and/or the power.

    Context

    One of the many fifties propaganda film voices lets us know that “the main target of the American communists has been labor.” Now there’s something that could provide a clue as to what is going on beneath the surface. The far right aren’t just a collection of madmen and women. As owners of the country they have material interests. So I took a quick look to see what animated the first Red Scare.

    Something that may have been added to the context was what many feel was a prime motivation for the first Red Scare, that is the rise of unions in America. With FDR as president, hundreds of socialists and communists coopted the labor movement and were among the militants pushing for the organization of labor in the industrial sectors of the economy. Consequently, the 30’s saw the greatest growth of unions in American history. Along with numerous social programs, a middle class was being created. And with marginal income tax rates above 90 percent and corporate tax rates above 50%, capitalist were not just on the defensive, they were apoplectic.[1]

    Further, the accomplishments of socialists and communists in the 30s helped build the very middle class that RFK Jr is worried about being “hollowed out.” And to cite one other example of concrete success, because of the pressure organized by A. Philip Randolph, an early supporter of the Bolshevik Revolution, President Roosevelt signed an executive order that opened the defense industry to black workers.[2]

    IV

    Can the situation following WWII be explained by ideology alone? The US did become the world-wide hegemonic power. It inherited, in a certain respect, the colonies of the western world lost during the war. And it was the very rise of the left and the democratic forces and their collision with the burgeoning American empire that explains why the ruling class in 1947 was extremely fearful and why, subsequently, they felt compelled to instill fear among ordinary citizens over the fraudulent Russian presence within the US., which is what Miller is trying to elucidate.

    In the period of 1945-1946, the fired-up union members, many socialists and communists, in a massive outpouring of militancy, struck industries across the nation. More than five million workers were involved and these strikes lasted four times longer than those strikes during the war. “They were the largest strikes in American labor history.”[3]

    The government lost no time in retaliating. The Taft-Hartley Act followed quickly, as did Truman’s loyalty program, both in 1946. The Taft-Hartley Act established new restrictions on labor organizing and was quickly passed. Truman’s Loyalty Program forced employees of the Federal Government to sign oaths declaring that they did not have “sympathetic association” with Communists.[4] This is not to suggest that these acts were due to labor struggles alone. There were many important international acts as well that helped the government in intensifying the fear of the Soviet Union, not the least of which was Winston’s Churchill declaring, also in 1946, that an “Iron Curtain” had descended around Europe.

    As I have mentioned, Chapter One begins with Eisenhower warning Americans of the implications of the rise of the MIC. But if you listen closely and if you look for his explanation as to why this rise took place, he merely states that the US was “compelled”, with no explanation.

    When asked to explain US foreign policy, Michael Parenti, taking into account the imperatives of a capitalist economy noted:

    “The goal is to support all those countries, leaders, and movements that welcome in multinational corporate investors, that open up their land, their labor, their markets and their natural resources to the expropriation and exploitation by these rich people. A side of the same goal is to obliterate or wipe out or undermine any leader, political movement, or nation that tries to develop its own land, labor, and resources for itself.”[5]

    In 1947, the CIA was established. In this postwar year of turmoil, the CIA identified former colonial uprisings or national liberation movements as the most important challenge facing the US. We know JFK was both in support of anti-colonial movements and in favor of peace, but “not a Pax Americana enforced by American weapons of war.” Notice how the analysis changes when we link Kennedy’s peace ambition to the specifics of US foreign policy identified by Parenti. The quest for peace suddenly becomes quite edgy, terrifying, enormously subversive, complex, and risky. Is this sort of quest that may not be possible given the structure of the general foreign policy outlined above. Is Kennedy impossible?

    Chapter One, is good as far as it goes, particularly as a foreshadowing instrument. I appreciate the trajectory or arc of the series plan. There are many moving parts which need to be brought together and I look forward to seeing how the producers and writers manage that task. Clearly a new perspective is in the offing. I only hope that it is edgy, that it does not ignore the sacred cows, and that it locates the threat they posed in the context of the American political economy. We owe that much to those who died trying.

     

    [1]https://www.google.com/search?q=rick+wolff%2C+socialists+and+communists%2C+great+depression&rlz=1C5CHFA_enIT1028IT1029&oq=rick+wolff%2C+socialists+and+communists%2C+great+depression&gs_lcrp=EgZjaHJvbWUyBggAEEUYOdIBCTE1NTU3ajBqNKgCALACAQ&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8#fpstate=ive&vld=cid:0b2672f5,vid:jfUj5x_PwKA,st:0

    [2] https://inthesetimes.com/article/a-philip-randolph-march-on-washington

    [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_strike_wave_of_1945%E2%80%931946

    [4] I would assume that a “small c” communist would be anyone who identified with communist philosophy. Suspect but probably not a target. Whereas, “capital c” Communist indicates that the person in question is a member of a Communist Party.

    [5] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KUkwpVXaytc&ab_channel=TS%2FALCOLLECTIVE

  • The Execution of JFK: Extremism in Defense of Liberty

    The Execution of JFK: Extremism in Defense of Liberty

    “There is only one party in the United States, the Property Party…and it has two right wings: Republican and Democrat.” – Gore Vidal

    “Give me liberty or give me death.” – Patrick Henry, Founder.

    Ideological managers have had a field day responding to Trump shenanigans. “Democracy is foundational” to our way of life we have been told ad nauseam. But it isn’t and never has been. What is foundational is just the reverse. It’s liberty.

    This sounds like an innocent assumption, but it has a fundamental consequence. The concept of liberty, when used by elite Americans, is not a garden variety, context-free, concept of freedom. It is a concept that has embodied within it a system of private enterprise. It signifies the right of individuals to own and dispose of productive property.

    So, when Patrick Henry announces that he would prefer death than to have his liberty denied, he is saying that the King has no right to tax him, an owner of private property.[1] Only property owners themselves have the right to decide such things, only owners have the right to dispose of their property (that they stole). What Henry can’t live without is free enterprise.

    Recall that the revolutions of Europe, of which the American revolution is an extension, emerged along the routes of commerce, throughout the medieval market towns or burgs, and within the larger centers of trade where the demand for credit and capital resonated with the vision of some type of government where owners could call the shots. After all, “No one can deny,” asserted the foreign merchants of Antwerp angered by the restrictions placed on trade, “that the cause of the prosperity of this city is the freedom granted to those who trade here.”[2] Justice Story would distill the fundamental notion further: “the equation of personal liberty with private property should be held sacred.” Henry’s siren call, then, could just as easily have been turned around: restrict my right to own and dispose of property you risk your life.

    The post-war political murders and coups through the 1960s fit this frame. It is structural.

    New Realities of Liberty Post-WW II

    “It’s tyranny,” Benjamin Rush shouted in reference to some of the democratic features of the Articles of Confederation before they were cast aside by the men of property. “The moment we submit to them we become slaves.”

    Similarly, in 1948, with the US owning 50% of the world’s wealth and having but 6.3% of the population, George Kennan urged that the US maintain this relationship of “disparity” and, in so doing, “dispense with all sentimentality…[concentrating] our attention everywhere.”

    With the newly minted CIA sanctioned to carry out “massive covert” operations, Allen Dulles, then head of the CIA under Eisenhower, had the cover he needed to use violence for simple annoyances. “Dag is becoming troublesome…and should be removed,” Dulles said of Dag Hammarskjöld, apparently murdered in 1961.[3]

    Complicating the postwar defense of liberty was the “greatest threat,” as perceived by the CIA: the rise of anti-colonial, national liberation movements. The approach to this problem, urged by the CIA, was to return former colonial populations to “traditional subordination” or re-colonization.

    Coups and Murders

    Since its inception, the CIA’s attention had been “concentrated everywhere” but three major foreign events prior to Kennedy’s inauguration belie the structural constraint of having to defend liberty. For example, in 1953 in Iran, the government of Mohammed Mosaddegh stripped foreign investors of their property rights in oil and perhaps unaware, crossed a sacred red line and invited a coup.

    Similarly, the ouster of Jacobo Árbenz in Guatemala was triggered because corporate investors and those who owned huge swaths of land, such as the United Fruit Company, sounded the alarm when Árbenz gave property to landless peasants and softened exploitative labor practices – a “communist reign of terror”- that diminished private control by United Fruit.

    In 1961, Patrice Lumumba, as the first prime minister of the resource rich Democratic Republic of the Congo, was uninterested in re-colonization. He was an African nationalist who sought independence and neutrality, not subordination. The Belgian government tagged Lumumba a communist. President Eisenhower authorized his “elimination.” And so the CIA helped remove him.

    The 1960s murders of Malcom X, MLK, Jr., and Fred Hampton follow similar patterns. X, as with Lumumba, supported national liberation movements, working with leaders of former colonies across Africa. In addition, X brought the issue not of property rights but of human rights to the UN. MLK, Jr. and Hampton both were overtly committed to transforming “the very structure of American society.” Hampton was explicitly anti-capitalist and had innovatively organized across racial lines developing a host of successful social programs.

    But you may ask, so what? Aren’t these good things? No one is getting hurt. Many people are being helped. My response is this: think structure and recall Kennan’s plea: drop the sentimentality. And think of what the architects of our system admonished. Madison: “Democracies have ever been found incompatible with personal security and the rights of property” (my emphasis). And here is where the Kennedys, not socialists at all, get snared. All the programs to mitigate the harshness of the market or to dampen competition over wealth are “wicked projects” because they also mitigate and dampen private rights to property. Moreover, the CIA was concerned with charismatic young leaders, movement builders, who could influence a majority which could then shift power. “The majority, having such coexistent passion or interest, must be rendered, … unable to…carry into effect schemes of oppression.” Rendered unable!. It’s structural.

    The Unfamiliar[4] JFK

    Noam Chomsky has noted that slight deviations from the orthodoxy of power can be met with removal. “The liberal intellectuals…are typically the guardians at the gates: we’ll go this far, but not one millimeter farther; and it’s terrifying to think that somebody might go a millimeter farther.” 

    Below are examples when JFK went one millimeter farther and more. I’ll also include context and the reactions of power when appropriate.

    – JFK, as a Senator in 1957, on the floor of the Senate, criticized French and American colonial imperialism and supported African national liberation efforts. As we have seen this was a direct confrontation with the CIA agenda.

    – Also as a Senator, JFK bought copies of The Ugly American for every senator. Dulles refused to hang the standard presidential photo at Langley.

    – A poisonous atmosphere greets JFK when he arrives at the White House in 1961. The Church Committee suggests that Allen Dulles rushed the murder of Lumumba so that it would take place before JFK was sworn in.

    – The CIA and the JCS approve the CIA invasion force for an assault on Cuba. The CIA knows that the Soviets have learned the date of the invasion more than a week in advance and have informed Castro. The CIA never tells JFK and instead tells the president that the invaders will be greeted as liberators. JFK approves the plan but stipulates no US military support will be given. The CIA and the JCS believe JFK will be forced to send in US military forces once the plan fails. He doesn’t. Gen. Lemnitzer, Chairman of the JCS urges JFK to send in troops. JFK still refuses and accepts defeat. Afterwards, Lemnitzer will say, “Here was a president who had no military experience at all, sort of a patrol-boat skipper in World War II. Kennedy’s attitude was absolutely reprehensible, almost criminal.” JFK told Arthur Schlesinger that Lemnitzer “was a dope.” JFK fires Dulles and the next two top men at the CIA. JFK also tells Schlesinger draw up a plan to radically restructure the CIA and cut its budget. That document is not released in full by the CIA even today.

    – Castro nationalizes Standard Oil and other industries held by the Rockefellers.

    – June 1961, in a White House meeting with Khrushchev’s spokesperson who asked why he wasn’t moving faster to improve relations between the USSR and the US, JFK said “You don’t understand this country. If I move too fast on U.S.-Soviet relations, I’ll either be thrown into an insane asylum, or be killed.”[5]

    – July 1961, at a National Security Council meeting, Lemnitzer presented Kennedy with an official plan for a surprise nuclear attack on the Soviet Union. Kennedy was disgusted and walked out of the meeting and later remarked to Secretary of State Dean Rusk “and we call ourselves the human race.”

    – Early 1962 CIA plans to murder Castro. JFK is kept unaware; no approval is given.[6]

    – CIA, with French Generals, plan to murder De Gaulle for allowing national liberation movements to unfold in Algeria. French Ambassador calls JFK to inquire. JFK responds, “I’m not in control of my own government.”

    – March, 1962, General Lemnitzer presents a plan, Operation Northwoods, that would arrange a terror campaign in Miami and Washington in order to blame Castro and foment revulsion against the Castro government. JFK rejects the idea and three months later he transfers Lemnitzer to Europe.

    – In 1962 JFK sends over 30,000 troops to Mississippi to block segregationists and permit African American James Meredith to attend college.

    – 1961: Despite the Joint Chiefs’ demand to put combat troops into Laos, advising 140,000 by the end of April, JFK bluntly insisted otherwise. Speaking to Averell Harriman, ““Did you understand? I want a negotiated settlement in Laos. I don’t want to put troops in.” Cambodian neutrality and a coalition government is achieved in Laos. CIA fails to honor.

    – Roger Hillsman, advisor: on multiple occasions JFK was only the person in his administration to oppose the introduction of US ground troops [Vietnam], “he was a barrier in that sense.”

    – For several months, the JCS withheld from JFK what they knew about the coming Russian deployment of nuclear missiles in Cuba to insure that JFK would have no time to stop the deployment until they were in place nearly ready to fire. They wanted Kennedy to be backed up against the wall with no option other than to attack Cuba while carrying out a massive surprise nuclear strike to destroy the USSR and China.[7]

    – Cuban Missile Crisis: JFK holds out against his advisors, for a negotiated settlement, refuses to use force, even after a US pilot is shot down. JFK, by means of private messages, aligns with Khrushchev against his own hardliners. Khrushchev does the same to avert hostilities and a likely nuclear war. LeMay, who believes this is the last chance to attack USSR, calls JFK’s actions “dismaying weakness,” sacrificing the defense of Europe.

    – As a result, JFK gives Khrushchev assurances that there will be no US invasion of Cuba. Operation Mongoose is dead. The CIA is angry and concludes that JFK is “dropping even the pretense of overthrowing Castro.[8]

    – Daniel Ellsberg noted that when the missile crisis was over there was a “fury” within the Air Force. “There was virtually a coup atmosphere in Pentagon circles. Not that I had the fear there was about to be a coup -I just thought it was a mood of hatred and rage. The atmosphere was poisonous, poisonous.”

    – Ellsberg notes that civilian distrust of leadership, becomes more intense under JFK. JFK believed that his generals, especially LeMay, were “essentially insane, mad, reckless, or out of touch with reality.”

    – LeMay argues that in nuclear war, the president should not be part of the decision making process at all. “After all, who is more qualified to make that decision…to go nuclear….some politician who may have been in office for only a couple of months or a man who has been preparing all his adult life to make it? Some politician who held back air support from the invasion force at the Bay of Pigs, who had refrained from knocking down the new Berlin Wall, who had refused to send combat troops to Vietnam, having earlier rejected sending them to Laos?[9]

    – JFK forces US Steel to rescind its price increase, by means of a public humiliation. “My father always told me,” JFK shares, “that all businessmen were sons of bitches, but I never believed it until now.”

    – Against the CIA, Kennedy supports Sukarno, Nasser, Nehru and the Non-Aligned movement.

    – By 1963, the CIA is heavily invested in continuing the Vietnam conflict under its own control, was “virtually running the show.”[10]

    – In June 1963, JFK delivers his “peace speech” in which he advocates the abolishment of nuclear weapons, rejects the Pax Americana (the military and economic architecture, which gave US worldwide military and economic supremacy ) in favor of closer relationships and joint projects with the US’s official enemy, the Soviet Union.

    – In June 1963, JFK makes a national televised address saying that civil rights are a moral issue.

    – October 1963, JFK fights for, gets ratified, and then signs the Limited Nuclear Test Ban Treaty with the Soviet Union.

    – In June 1963, JFK makes a national televised address saying that civil rights are a moral issue.

    – On the last day of his life, a Kennedy emissary was in Cuba meeting with Castro in the hope of organizing future direct meetings between the two leaders. This is the message that JFK sent to Castro:

    I believe that there is no country in the world including any and all the countries under colonial domination, where economic colonization, humiliation and exploitation were worse than in Cuba, in part owing to my country’s policies during the Batista regime. I approved the proclamation which Fidel Castro made in the Sierra Maestra, when he justifiably called for justice and especially yearned to rid Cuba of corruption. I will even go further: to some extent it is as though Batista was the incarnation of a number of sins on the part of the United States. Now we shall have to pay for those sins. In the matter of the Batista regime, I am in agreement with the first Cuban revolutionaries. That is perfectly clear.

    Conclusion

    Let me clarify what I mean by a structural analysis. We may refer to Chomsky’s famous summary of post-war US presidents whom he argues could have been tried at Nuremberg for war crimes as were certain Nazis. What does this tell us? That Americans have a terribly faulty way of choosing presidents? Well, we do, but that’s not it. Chomsky is telling us that late capitalism – as a system – is necessarily imperialist. It doesn’t matter who is president, if he or she wishes to stay in that job, he or she will pull the levers of imperialism, as directed by corporations. And so it was with JFK.

    However, we find JFK sporadically, early on, moving in directions that were somewhat troublesome for imperialists. By 1963 he simply was not doing his job. I believe elements within the national security state, rang the alarm, as had been the case with others outlined above, and planned his removal. Supporting liberation movements in Africa undercut the wish of foreign investors to see an abundance of new investment opportunities that recolonization would bring. His support of non-aligned movement leaders threatened investments of men and women of property over vast swaths of the globe as did his efforts at peace making which so annoyed General Le May and others. His willingness to confide in his official enemy against his own generals throughout 1963 was placing the interests of the majority over the opulent few. He was standing liberty on its head and had to be removed.

    Using the language of the Framers, I believe JFK was simply “incompatible” and was “rendered unable” to beautify the world as were the other “bothersome” people who were splendid leaders of non-propertied people. Given that all these leaders were young, popular, and charismatic must have simply freaked out those who ran the national security state. Simply put, a substantial shift in power was in the offing.

    One final point: NARA has not released 8 pages of the Church Committee report on “assassinations.” Disappearing bothersome people is not uncommon. But let us be clear: the murders of the 60s were done at the behest of a corporate directed government or state power. They were not assassinations. An assassination occurs when a lone nut murders a powerful figure. With assassinations, there is no culpability by the state. To call these murders assassinations suggests that the national security state did not direct the murder. It’s time we pull back the curtain, understand what liberty means, and call a spade a spade. JFK, Malcom X, MLK, Jr, RFK, and Fred Hampton were executed by the state for not serving corporate interests and the interests of the opulent few. These people were murdered in the defense of liberty.

    NOTES:

    [1]Henry was a slaver and stealer of lands belonging to indigenous people.

    [2]Hannah Josephson, The Golden Threads (New York: Duell, Sloan and Pearce, 1949). 231.

    [3]South African National Intelligence Agency, 1993. Hammarskjöld was killed when his plane was sabotaged in the air.

    [4]The word used by Daniel Ellsberg to characterize the JFK found in James Douglas, JFK and the Unspeakable.

    [5]Edward Curtin. Click for more.

    [6]Church Committee and the CIA’s own Inspector General Report

    [7]John M. Newman, Official Website

    [8]David Talbot, Brothers, 173.

    [9]Daniel Ellsberg, Doomsday Machine, 113.

    [10]Douglas, 185-186.