Kennedys and King Test host626

Tag: FOREIGN POLICY

  • What Mike Gravel Meant

     

  • Michael Kazin and the NY Review vs JFK

    Michael Kazin and the NY Review vs JFK

    Michael Kazin is a professor of history at Georgetown. The New York Review of Books is a leftwing, tabloid formatted political, cultural, and intellectual review. It specializes in contemporary political events, books, and the arts. In their May 27th issue, this respected publication allowed Mr. Kazin to do something that should have been prevented. Kazin was supposed to be reviewing part one of Fredrik Logevall’s, two volume biography of John F. Kennedy, JFK: Coming of Age in the American Century.

    What’s disturbing about Kazin’s review is this: it is not a review. After reviewing books for approximately two decades—and studying literary criticism for longer than that—I understand what the process entails. The most important thing about critiquing a book is an analysis of the text of the book. What that means is the critic describes what the author has written and analyzes both what is there and also what the author left out that might have altered his argument. When that process is completed, the critic evaluates the book in relation to other works in the field as a measure of value. Of course, there are many, many biographies of John F. Kennedy that Kazin could have used as a measuring rod.

    What is striking about Kazin’s review is that it is really a polemic against John Kennedy. Kazin used Logevall’s book as a springboard to trash the man and his career. One can easily detect this by noting how much of Kazin’s “review” deals with matters outside the time frame of the book, which only goes up to 1956. In fact, one can see what the “reviewer” is up to in his first sentence:

    Why, nearly six decades after his murder, do Americans still care so much about and, for the most part, continue to think so highly of John Fitzgerald Kennedy?

    If one has to ask that question, then obviously one is about to assault those people who do so. Kazin follows that up by pulling a page out of the Larry Sabato/Robert Dallek playbook. He now writes that Kennedy achieved little of lasting significance in his presidency.

    Again, please note: this is a review of a book that only extends itself to 1956. But Kazin is now talking about something Logevall has not gotten to yet. Beyond that, he is making a judgment about the years that the book does not address! Clearly, Kazin has an uncontrollable agenda about the Kennedy years in the White House that his editors allowed him to spew. He more or less writes that Kennedy achieved nothing of value either domestically or in foreign policy. I would think that signing two executive orders for affirmative action in his first year would count as something of value. (Irving Bernstein, Promises Kept, p. 56) After all, no previous president had done that. In foreign policy, I would think that constructing the Alliance for Progress and refusing to recognize the military overthrow of the democratically elected Juan Bosch in Dominican Republic would be something to address.

    But if Kazin did note just those two things about Kennedy’s foreign policy, then he would create a polemical problem for himself, because then the reader would ask: What happened to those two programs? The answer would be that Lyndon Johnson pretty much neutralized both of them. (Click here for details)

    In the last instance, concerning Dominican Republic, LBJ did more than that. In 1965, he launched an invasion to preserve the military junta and prevent Bosch from regaining power,which was a clear reversal of what Kennedy’s policy was. (Donald Gibson, Battling Wall Street, pp. 78–79) Pretty clever guy that Kazin.

    As one can see from the above linked article, Bobby Kennedy was very upset about what Johnson had done to the Alliance for Progress. As was RFK, Senator William Fulbright was beside himself about the Dominican Republic invasion. Fulbright’s staff had done some research by consulting sources on the ground. They concluded that Johnson had lied about the true state of affairs, especially concerning alleged atrocities by Bosch’s forces. (Joseph Goulden, Truth is the First Casualty, p. 166)

    That Johnson deception in the Caribbean paralleled another, even larger one: the Gulf of Tonkin resolution. In fact, it was Fulbright’s outrage over LBJ’s subterfuge in the Dominican Republic that provoked him into reviewing what Johnson had done to get America into Vietnam. One of Fulbright’s staffers, Carl Marcy, had reviewed both instances and he now believed Johnson had lied about each. He wrote a memo to Fulbright about it. He concluded that what Johnson had done in the last 24 months helped explain what happened to:

    …turn the liberal supporters of President Kennedy into opponents of the policies of President Johnson, and the rightwing opponents of Eisenhower and Kennedy into avid supporters of the present administration. (ibid)

    Feeling that he had been suckered, in 1966 Fulbright began his famous televised hearings on the Vietnam War. This is what began to split the Democratic Party asunder and aided the election of Richard Nixon. This is why it was smart for Kazin not to go there.

    The above points out just how wildly askew Kazin is in foreign policy. But as far as domestic policy goes, in addition to the two affirmative action laws, Kennedy granted federal employees the right to form unions and, by 1967, there were 1.2 million who had joined. That idea then spread to state and local government. In 1962, Kennedy signed the Manpower Development and Training Act aimed to alleviate African-American unemployment. In April of that year, Kennedy went on national television to begin what economist John Blair later termed “the most dramatic confrontation in history between a president and a corporate management.” (Gibson, p. 9) This was Kennedy’s battle against the steel companies who had reneged on an agreement he had worked out with them between management and labor. Kennedy prevailed after his brother, the attorney general, began legal proceedings against the steel cartel. If Kazin can indicate to me a recent president who has made such an address against another corporation or group of aligned businesses, I would like to hear it.

    In 1962, Kennedy tried to pass a Medicare bill. It was defeated by a coalition of conservative southern senators and the AMA. At the time of his death, Kennedy was planning to revive the bill through Congressman Wilbur Mills. (Bernstein, pp. 246–59) But also, on June 13, 1963, Kennedy made a speech to the National Council of Senior Citizens. This was part of those remarks:

    There isn’t a country in Western Europe that didn’t do what we are doing 50 years ago or 40 years ago, not a single country that is not way ahead of this rich productive, progressive country of ours. We are not suggesting something radical and new or violent. We are not suggesting that the government come between the doctors and his patient. We are suggesting what every other major, developed, intelligent country did for its people a generation ago. I think it’s time the United States caught up.

    In fact, one can argue that Kennedy proposed universal healthcare way before Barack Obama did. All one has to do is just look at this speech:

    How did Professor Kazin miss that one? It didn’t take deep research. After all, it’s on YouTube. Please note: in this speech Kennedy talks about how progressive goals for the public can be attained through government leadership and action.

    By 1960, because of his vote to table the measure, it was established that Richard Nixon was not going to advocate for federal aid to education. President Kennedy favored such aid and appointed a task force to study the issue. (Bernstein, p. 224) By October of 1963, Congress had passed the first federal aid to education bill since 1945. It would be signed into law by President Johnson.

    That last sentence is also apropos of the War on Poverty. It was not Lyndon Johnson who originated the War on Poverty, it was John Kennedy. Kennedy was influenced by the publication of Michael Harrington’s book The Other America. This provoked Kennedy to begin a series of talks with his economic advisor Walter Heller concerning the subject of how best to attack poverty. (Thurston Clarke, JFK’s Last Hundred Days, pp. 242–43) Kennedy decided he would make this an election issue and he would visit several blighted areas to bring it to national attention.

    Bobby Kennedy set his close friend David Hackett to actually study the problem of geographical areas of poverty and how it caused juvenile delinquency. (Edward Schmitt, President of the Other America, p. 68) In fact, JFK had allotted millions for demonstration projects to study possible cures for the problem. Hackett was also allowed a staff of 12 to do investigations and research for him. (Allen Matusow, The Unraveling of America, pp. 111–12) At his final meeting with his cabinet, Kennedy mentioned the word “poverty” six times. Jackie Kennedy took the notes of that meeting to Bobby Kennedy after her husband’s death. The attorney general had them framed and placed on his wall. (Schmitt, pp. 92, 96)

    So, between Heller and Hackett, and his plans around the 1964 election, the president seemed off to a good start. It took very little time for Johnson to place his own stamp on the program. Over RFK’s protests, Johnson removed Hackett from his position. (Matusow, p. 123) Heller resigned in 1964 in a dispute over the Vietnam War. LBJ then did something really odd. He appointed Sargent Shriver to run the War on Poverty. As Harris Wofford notes, everyone was puzzled by the decision to retire Hackett and replace him with Shriver, for the simple reason that Shriver already had a job in the administration: running the Peace Corps. (Wofford, Of Kennedys and Kings, p. 286) Consequently, the management of the program suffered. By 1968, Shriver had gone to Paris to serve as ambassador and LBJ had more or less abandoned the program. (Matusow, p. 270)

    This relates to the whole shopworn mythology that Kazin uses on the race issue. If anything shows his almost monomaniacal obsession, it’s this. Recall, Logevall’s book goes up to 1956. Kazin says that young JFK avoided the race issue for purposes of politics. Then how does one explain that in 1956 Kennedy made these remarks in New York:

    The Democratic party must not weasel on the issue…President Truman was returned to the White House in 1948 despite a firm stand on civil rights that led to a third party in the South. We might alienate Southern support, but the Supreme Court decision is the law of the land.

    Again, it takes no deep research to find this speech, because it was printed on page 1 of the New York Times of February 8, 1956. Kennedy did the same thing the next year in, of all places, Jackson, Mississippi. He said the Brown v. Board decision must be upheld. (Harry Golden, Mr. Kennedy and the Negroes, p. 95) How could doing such a thing gain him political advantage in that state? As author Harry Golden notes, at this point Kennedy began to lose support in the south and to receive angry letters over his advocacy for the Brown decision.

    It was obvious what Senator Kennedy was pointing at: President Eisenhower and Vice President Nixon were not supporting Brown vs. Board. In fact, as many historians have noted, Eisenhower had advised Earl Warren to vote against the case. (The Atlantic, “Commander vs Chief”, 3/19/18) The other civil rights issue that Kazin brings up is even fruitier. His complaint is that Kennedy did not try and pass his own civil rights bill in the Senate. Kennedy was elected to the Senate in 1952 and Lyndon Johnson became the senate Democratic leader in 1953. LBJ became the Majority Leader in 1954. As most knowledgeable people know, Johnson voted against every civil rights bill ever proposed in Congress from the time he was first voted into the House in 1937. Was the junior senator from Massachusetts going to override the powerful Majority Leader from his own party? It was Johnson and Eisenhower who were responsible for fashioning a civil rights bill. And they didn’t.

    After Eisenhower had been humiliated by Republican governor Orval Faubus during the Little Rock Crisis at Central High in 1957, he tried to save face. He and Nixon sent up a draft for a Civil Rights Commission to investigate abuses. The concept behind it was to split the Democratic Party: Norther liberals vs Southern conservatives. Johnson cooperated by watering down the bill even more to prevent the schism. Why did LBJ cooperate? Because he was thinking of running for the presidency and he saw what being against the issue had done to his mentor Richard Russell’s national ambitions. Senator Kennedy did not like the bill; he thought it was too weak. Johnson had to personally lobby JFK to get him to sign on. (Rowland Evans and Robert Novak, Lyndon Johnson: The Exercise of Power, pp. 122–25; 136–7) In a letter to a constituent, Kennedy wrote that he regretted doing so and hoped to be able to get a real bill one day with real teeth.

    From the day he entered the White House, Kennedy was looking to write such a bill. Advised by Wofford that such legislation would not pass in the first or second year, he did what he could through executive actions and help from the judiciary. He then submitted a bill in February of 1963. As Clay Risen shows in his book The Bill of the Century, it was not Johnson who managed to get it through. This was and is a myth. JFK began with a tremendous lobbying effort himself. After he was assassinated, it was Bobby Kennedy, Hubert Humphrey, and Republican senator Thomas Kuchel who were the major forces to finally overcome the southern filibuster. Also, as most knowledgeable people know, it was not Johnson who managed to pass the 1965 Voting Rights Act. That was owed to Martin Luther King’s galvanizing demonstration in Selma, Alabama. Johnson could not get an extension of Kennedy’s housing act through either. It was the occasion of King’s assassination that allowed it to pass.

    Plain and simple: Kennedy did more for civil rights than FDR, Truman, and Eisenhower combined. That is an historical fact. (Click here for the short version and here for the long version)

    Kazin writes something that I had to read twice to believe. He says that in his congressional races, from 1946–58, Kennedy never said or did “anything that might annoy his largely Catholic, increasingly conservative white base In Massachusetts.” I just noted his 1956 speech about civil rights in New York. But just as important, as readers of this web site know, from his visit to Saigon in 1951 and onward, Kennedy spoke out strongly against the establishment views of both Democrats and Republicans on the Cold War, especially as it was fought in the Third World. Kennedy assailed both the policies of Dean Acheson and John Foster Dulles as being out of touch and counter-productive in the struggles of former colonies to become free of imperialist influence. He noted this in 1956 during the presidential campaign:

    …the Afro-Asian revolution of nationalism, the revolt against colonialism, the determination of people to control their national destinies…In my opinion the tragic failure of both Republican and Democratic administrations since World War II to comprehend the nature of this revolution, and its potentialities for good and evil, has reaped a bitter harvest today—and it is by rights and by necessity a major foreign policy campaign issue that has nothing to do with anti-Communism. (Richard Mahoney, JFK: Ordeal in Africa, p. 18)

    Kennedy’s five year campaign to find an alternative Cold War foreign policy culminated with his famous Algeria speech the next year. There, he assailed both parties for not seeing that support of the French colonial regime would ultimately result in the same conclusion that occurred three years previous at Dien Bien Phu in Indochina. Kennedy’s speech was such a harsh attack on the administration that it was widely commented on in newspapers and journals. The vast majority of editorials, scores of them, decried the speech in no uncertain terms, as did Eisenhower, Foster Dulles, Nixon, and Acheson. But it made him a hero to the peoples of the Third World, especially in Africa. (Mahoney, pp. 20–24) This completely undermines another comment by Kazin: that Kennedy had “to surrender to the exigencies of cold war politics and the ideological make up of his party as he rose to the top of it.” As John Shaw wrote in his study of Kennedy’s senate years, JFK’s challenge to Foster Dulles allowed him to become a leader in foreign policy for his party and “to outline his own vision for America’s role in the world,” which Kennedy then enacted once he was in the White House. (JFK in the Senate, p.110) These were almost systematically reversed by Johnson. (Click here for details)

    Toward the end of his article, Kazin goes off the rails. He says there is no memorial statue of JFK in Washington. Well Mike, there is none of Truman or FDR either. He says there is no holiday for JFK. Again, there is none for Franklin Roosevelt either. And they have recently combined the Lincoln and Washington holidays into a single President’s Day. He also says that President Joseph Biden made no mention of the Kennedys in his campaign or during his brief presidency. Biden did make reference to RFK as his hero in law school, more than once. (See for example NBC news story of August 23, 2019, on a speech Biden gave in New Hampshire.) And Biden has RFK’s bust in the Oval Office and he transported a wall painting of President Kennedy from Boston to place in his study.

    If Kazin did not know any of the above, then it must be pretty easy to get tenure at Georgetown. If he did and ignored it all, then his editors should have never let this travesty pass. It does a disservice to the readers and it should be corrected. In a fundamental and pernicious way, it misinforms the public.

    Addendum:

    We urge our readers to write Mr. Kazin and complain to the NY Review of Books. There is no excuse for this kind of display of factual and academic ignorance and arrogance.

    JFK addressed the definition of a liberal and why he was one in a 1960 campaign speech. This speech is a good source to reference in any response to Mr. Kazin. (Click here for details)

  • Why the Vietnam War? by Michael Swanson

    Why the Vietnam War? by Michael Swanson

    In 2013, Michael Swanson wrote an interesting and unique book called The War State. That volume focused on the formation of the military industrial complex (MIC) right after World War II. One of the most important parts of the book was its description of Paul Nitze as a chief architect of that complex. Swanson detailed his role in the writing of NSC–68 and, later, the Gaither Report. Those two documents played key parts in constructing a massive atomic arsenal by wildly exaggerating the threat the USSR posed to America. They were also influential in the maintenance of a large standing army in peacetime, something America had not done after previous wars. The author also showed how crucial FDR’s death was to the rise of this deliberately alarmist illusion and how GOP Senator Bob Taft tried to resist it. He closed that work with Dwight Eisenhower’s memorable speech warning about the dangers of the MIC and President Kennedy’s dodging its attempts to persuade him to use American forces to attack Cuba during the Bay of Pigs episode and the Missile Crisis. (For my review, click here)

    Swanson has now written what is clearly a companion volume. Why the Vietnam War? focuses on what the French termed Indochina and how America entered that colonial conflict after France was defeated. Quite rightly, in the opening section of the book, he scores the 2017 Ken Burns/Lynn Novick documentary mini-series on the subject. He says that it devoted only one episode to the key period he will devote himself to, 1945–1960. He terms the series itself more about:

    the culture wars that began during those years of peak American involvement in the war and less about the causes of the war—much less any real lessons that can be drawn from it… (Swanson, pp. 17–18)

    Swanson is accurate as far as he goes. But I would go further. The Burns/Novick series was actually a kiss on the cheek to the forces that have tried so hard to place lipstick and mascara on the epochal disaster that took place in Indochina. That disaster was a result of, first, American support for France and, then, direct American involvement in the second part of the war. Any series that can deal with the formative years of American involvement without mentioning the name of Ed Lansdale or Operation Vulture, and then deals with the actual fighting of the war by discounting the Mylai Massacre, that production is serving as an appendage for the forces who wish to whitewash what happened there. (Click here for details) In fact, those forces do not want anyone to learn anything from the epic tragedy that was enacted as a result of direct American involvement. (Click here for my review)

    This refusal by the media and our political leaders allowed George W. Bush to pretty much repeat what Lyndon Johnson did. In 1965, Johnson used a deliberate deception to commit direct American intervention—including combat troops—into Vietnam. In 2003, Bush used a deliberate deception to commit direct American intervention—including combat troops—into Iraq. In the first instance, the deception was an alleged unjustified attack in open seas by North Vietnam on an innocent American patrol ship (i.e. the Tonkin Gulf Incident). In 2003, the deception was that Saddam Hussein possessed, and could use, Weapons of Mass Destruction. In both instances, neither the media, nor our elected representatives, supplied any kind of countervailing inquiry, in order to prevent two disastrous wars. In this author’s opinion—and likely Swanson’s—the Burns/Novick pastiche helps enable the possibility it will happen a third time.

    II

    The French first took control of Vietnam in the 1850’s; they then annexed Cambodia and Laos before the end of the century. (Swanson, p. 20) France treated Indochina as an economic colony creating monopolies on opium, salt, and alcohol. They constructed rubber plantations and mined zinc, copper, and coal. The work lasted from 6 am to 6 pm and the overseers used batons to beat anyone they thought was lazy. The colonizers also recruited informers to squeal on those who wished to rebel or organize resistance. They also taxed the colonists and sent the funds back to France. (Swanson, p. 22)

    There had been periodic resistance by the Vietnamese against both China and France. But the epochal event in the anti-colonial struggle was the French defat by the Third Reich in 1940. That shockingly quick loss allowed Japan, Germany’s Axis ally, to take over Indochina. But, in large part, Japan allowed the French to stay on as managers.

    In 1944, Japan took direct control. The OSS sent a man named Archimedes Patti (true name) to work against Japan and set up an intelligence unit in the area. Patti was aware that Franklin Roosevelt did not want to continue colonialism after the war. In fact, FDR told the Russians that one reason he wanted to disband colonialism was to avoid future wars for national liberation. (Swanson, pp. 25, 26)

    Since this was the aim, the OSS contacted Ho Chi Minh to know what he needed for his resistance movement and Ho met with Gen. Claire Chennault of Flying Tigers fame. (Ibid, pp. 31,32) For a brief time, Ho actually worked with the OSS and they supplied him with small arms. Patti was very impressed by the resistance leader and wanted the USA to support him against Japan. Patti also met with Vo Nguyen Giap, the future military commander of the Viet Minh. How close was the OSS to Ho Chi Minh? They actually saved his life when he was sick with malaria. (Swanson, p. 41)

    Once Japan was defeated, the plan was to have the Nationalist Chinese occupy the north, while the British occupied the south. (Swanson, p. 48) Everyone realized this was only a prelude to escorting the Japanese out and unifying the country. In fact, Ho and his followers had already designed a flag for Vietnam. He also went to work on a Declaration of Independence.

    It was not to be. The British, the largest colonizers on the globe, betrayed their trusteeship for their wartime ally, France. (Swanson, pp. 56–58) This caused a rebellion among Ho’s followers, the Viet Minh. England then asked the Japanese to aid their fight to put down the Viet Minh. Douglas MacArthur said about this reversal:

    If there is anything that makes my blood boil, it is to see our allies in Indochina and Java deploying Japanese troops to reconquer these little people we promised to liberate. It is the most ignoble kind of betrayal. (Swanson, p. 61)

    Hundreds of Viet Minh were killed in this struggle. The British commander, Douglas Gracey, left in late January of 1946. The French now returned. Ho tried to negotiate independence with the French. Those negotiations failed, as did a cease-fire attempt. (Swanson, p. 74) France now began to shell Haiphong and occupy Hanoi in the north. In December of 1946, Giap began a terrific assault on the latter city. That siege is usually designated as the beginning of the French Indochina War.

    III

    In 1947, the French talked their stand-in, Bao Dai, into returning as governor. (Swanson, p. 74) At around this time, Ho Chi Minh had approximately 60,000 troops and a million local reservists at his disposal. After his failure to take Hanoi, Giap decided to fight a passive/aggressive war, while building his forces to equal those of the French. (Swanson, p. 75) What is extraordinary about Giap’s early effort was that there was really little aid given to Giap by China, and less by Russia, in the early years.

    In fact, Stalin did not recognize Ho’s government at first. This changed in 1950. Swanson describes a visit to Moscow by Ho at this time. (Swanson, pp. 76–77) He then states that it was in 1950 that both the USSR and China officially recognized Ho’s government. But I think there was something else that could have been elucidated about this important time frame.

    As the Pentagon Papers state, in early 1950, France “took the first concrete steps toward transferring public administration to Bao Dai’s State of Vietnam.” (Pentagon Papers, complete collection, Vol. 1, p. A–7) This infuriated Ho, since he considered Bao Dai nothing but a puppet. Now Stalin and Mao Zedong recognized Ho, and Stalin instructed him that China would be aiding him most at the start. (Swanson, p. 77)

    This triggered a reaction by Washington. As Swanson notes, the 1947 announcement by the new president of the eponymous Truman Doctrine—which was based on George Kennan’s Long Telegram—signaled an end to Roosevelt’s neutralism toward nations emerging from colonialism. The team of Harry Truman and Secretary of State Dean Acheson strongly differed with Franklin Roosevelt and Cordell Hull on both Russia and the Third World. Therefore, when China and Russia extended recognition to Ho, Acheson now officially reversed the prior American policy of neutralism in Indochina. (Op. Cit. Pentagon Papers) Acheson now made a public statement in this regard:

    The recognition by the Kremlin of Ho Chi Minh’s communist government in Indochina comes as a surprise. The Soviet acknowledgement of this movement should remove any illusion as to the “nationalist” nature of Ho Chi Minh’s aims and reveal Ho in his true colors as the mortal enemy of native independence in Indochina.

    Acheson then went further. He said that Paris bestowing administrative powers on Bao Dai would lead “toward stable governments representing the true nationalist sentiments of more than 20 million peoples of Indochina.” (Ibid) This was an absurd statement. But it constituted a milestone. Not only would Truman and Acheson be abandoning FDR and Hull, they would be reversing that policy. Anyone cognizant of the history of the area would realize that Bao Dai was simply a figurehead for Paris. It was an insult to say he represented “native independence.” But Truman followed Acheson’s lead and said America also recognized the French mandarin as leader of Vietnam. Consequently, France requested funds for this colonial regime. On May 8, 1950, Acheson complied by saying the area was under threat from Soviet imperialism, which was more full-blown Cold War malarkey. (Op. Cit., Pentagon Papers, p. A–8) This groundbreaking reversal was one more example of what Anthony Eden called the incalculable foreign policy calamity that took place upon Roosevelt’s death. (Frank Costigliola, Roosevelt’s Lost Alliances, p. 2) Swanson gets the general outline, but I wish he had been a little more precise about it.

    Giap’s overall strategy proved successful. Even with Truman giving tens of millions to the French effort to reinstall colonialism, by 1951, Giap was in control of the countryside. When John Kennedy visited Saigon in that year, Giap had bases 25 miles outside the city. (Swanson, p. 67) In fact, the French had to install anti-grenade nests over restaurants and terraces. Swanson notes young Kennedy’s talks with reporter Seymour Topping and American diplomat Edmund Gullion. Both men revealed they had deep misgivings about the French effort. They did not think it would succeed and the war had now turned the Vietnamese against America. During his talk with the French commander there, Kennedy expressed so many reservations about their cause that the Frenchman filed a complaint with the American embassy about the impetuous congressman. (Swanson, p. 68) When the congressman returned to Boston, he made a speech warning about America tying itself to the desperate effort of France to hold on to its overseas empire.

    IV

    To disguise the betrayal of FDR’s neutralism and counter the beginning of Kennedy’s crusade—which will culminate in 1957 with his Algeria speech contra another doomed French colonial effort—the ploy used was the Domino Theory. (Swanson, pp. 86—87) This was the idea that, somehow, if America allowed one country in southeast Asia to go communist, it would cause a chain reaction that could extend out as far as the Philippines. It was propounded forcefully by President Dwight Eisenhower.

    What Swanson notes here is that, in spite of this posture, many prominent people simply did not believe the Domino Theory. And he lists high ranking Republicans like senators Barry Goldwater, Everett Dirksen, and Richard Russell. The amount of money America contributed to the French effort rose significantly when Eisenhower became president. And these three men objected to it. As Russell said of the expenditures:

    You are pouring it down a rathole; the worst mess we ever got into, this Vietnam. The President has decided it. I’m not going to say a word of criticism. I’ll keep my mouth shut, but I’ll tell you right now we are in for something that is going to be one of the worst things this country ever got into. (Swanson, p. 97)

    To put it mildly, these were prophetic words. Under Truman, America was giving tens of millions to the French war effort. Under Eisenhower, that figure soared into the hundreds of millions. It all culminated in the siege of Dien Bien Phu. Realizing their strategy there had been effectively countered by Giap, the French now pleaded for even more help to stave off a disastrous defeat. Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, Vice President Richard Nixon, and Admiral Arthur Radford all agreed the USA should offer the help, whether it be the insertion of American ground troops or Operation Vulture. The latter was the deployment of a huge air armada including atomic weapons. (Swanson, pp. 102–04)

    Eisenhower would only go along with Vulture if we could get England to endorse it. Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden would not approve the scheme. One reason he would not is he did not see Vietnam as being that important; another being he did not buy the Domino Theory. (Swanson, p. 108) Swanson does a good enough job on all this international intrigue, but I wish he would have included the part where, after Eden and Ike turned down the plan, Foster Dulles offered the atomic bombs to the French—and it appears he did so without the president’s authorization. (David Talbot, The Devil’s Chessboard, p. 245) They turned him down on the grounds the bombs would kill as many of their troops as the Viet Minh.

    Dien Bien Phu fell in May of 1954. There was no domino reaction.

    But Foster Dulles did react. Two days later, Dulles had a meeting with several military chiefs, one of them being Radford. The discussion centered on this question: Now that the French were gone, who would be the major power in Asia? Would it be China or the USA? (Swanson, p. 109) At this meeting, Radford was very clear that America’s enemy in Asia was now China. Unless America went after China, they would be free to spread communism throughout the continent, including Indonesia. Swanson interprets Radford’s belligerence retroactively. He now sees Radford’s Vulture plan as a way of checking China.

    At this meeting, Foster Dulles admitted that the Domino Theory was not valid in Vietnam. But he saw his new duty as enlisting allies in an alliance against China. Nixon felt a soft policy against China would not work; it would allow China to dominate Asia. Foster Dulles decided that at the upcoming peace conference ending the French Indochina War, the USA would only pay lip service to the ostensible agreement. They were not going to let the Geneva Accords allow for a vote that would unify the country, since they knew Ho Chi Minh would win that election. (Swanson, p. 114)

    At Geneva, the Chinese advised Ho Chi Minh to accept the partition of Vietnam. The reason being that Zhou EnLai did not want to fight another Korean War against the USA. (Swanson, pp. 124–25) Foster Dulles and his brother Allen, Director of the CIA, took control of decision making in Saigon. They employed legendary black operator Colonel Ed Lansdale to create this new country of South Vietnam, one that had not existed before. CIA official Bob Amory picked up the name of Ngo Dinh Diem from William O. Douglas. Amory then passed it on to Frank Wisner and Allen Dulles. And that is how Lansdale then chose the leader for this newly created country. (Swanson, pp. 128–29) Bao Dai agreed to appoint Diem as prime minister. Diem now denounced the Geneva Accords as non-binding. Lansdale quickly shuffled Bao Dai offstage by rigging elections for Diem. Diem would poll over 98% of the vote, garnering more votes than people who had registered in a district, which, of course, made a mockery of the whole electoral process. (Ibid, p. 128) This new country of South Vietnam was a creation of the United States and it was not at all a democracy. All this was done to deny an election that Eisenhower and Foster Dulles knew Ho Chi Minh would win.

    The real story, not reported in the papers or on television, is that America had created a dictatorship.

    V

    The best book I have read about Diem is Seth Jacobs’ Cold War Mandarin. Both Jacobs and Swanson note the importance of Wesley FIshel to the rise of Diem’s career in the United States. FIshel was an academic who participated in US involvement in Asian affairs. (Jacobs, pp. 25–26) What made Diem attractive to Fishel was the fact that he was against both the French and the Viet Minh. Because of this opposition, Diem left Vietnam and began to ingratiate himself with as many luminaries as he could: Fishel, Douglas MacArthur, Cardinal Francis Spellman, and Pope Pius XII. The last two owed to the fact he was a Catholic. By early 1951, Diem was being interviewed by no less than Dean Acheson to get his input as to what was really going on In Vietnam—where the USA was now tied to a French colonial war. (Jacobs, p. 28) Acheson was impressed and Diem settled in for a long American stay.

    Because of his Catholic background, Spellman offered him free lodging at Maryknoll Seminary in Lakewood, New Jersey. From this base, he went out on a speaking tour to colleges and universities in the East and Midwest, extolling his anti-French and anti-Viet Minh stance. FIshel got Diem a consultancy at Michigan State. As Jacobs notes, there was no university in the nation that was as dedicated as MSU to joining forces with the CIA and Pentagon in fighting the Cold War. Once the program was installed there, Diem and Fishel began the most ambitious of all the university’s programs in regards to nation building. (Jacobs, p. 30)

    It was at New York’s Yale Club in late 1951 where Diem met Justice Douglas. Douglas advised not just Robert Amory about the viability of Diem as a leader in Vietnam, but also Senator Mike Mansfield. Mansfield had been a professor of Asian history prior to becoming a senator, therefore his views on the subject carried some weight. In 1953, Douglas invited Spellman, Mansfield, and Senator John Kennedy to a luncheon for Diem at the Supreme Court building. (Jacobs, p. 31) During his speech, Diem complained that there had to be an alternative to the French and the Viet Minh, and if there was, it would be the driving force behind an independent Vietnam. Such a cause would give the people of that country something to fight for. Whereas the French found Diem unappealing, obsolete, and even stupid, somehow, with Spellman’s backing, he became popular in America.

    The timing, of course, was quite advantageous for Spellman. France was about to lose their colonial struggle at Dien Bien Phu. The Dulles brothers, Nixon, and Eisenhower had sunk 300 million into their winning this battle under General Henri Navarre. After making such an investment, that brain trust was not going to let Ho Chi Minh take command. And since Diem had been campaigning for three years, he was the natural choice to install as America’s mandarin. As Jacobs notes, what is surprising in reviewing the record is that there was really never any debate about this. (Jacobs, p. 33) Diem was popular in the proper echelons in America. There never seemed to be any question about whether or not his popularity would transfer to VIetnam, which was well over 60% Buddhist.

    Diem arrived in Saigon in June of 1954. He made no speech at the airport and the windows of his car were closed as he departed. (Swanson, p. 136) He now occupied the presidential palace with his brother Nhu and Nhu’s wife, Madame Nhu. The latter’s father became ambassador to Washington and her uncle became minister of foreign affairs. Eisenhower and Foster Dulles appropriated tens of millions to construct an army for him. Yet, almost at the outset, Ambassador Don Heath cabled Washington that Diem was the wrong man for the job. At this point, the Pentagon more or less agreed with Heath. They doubted if Diem could rally the populace around him and if he could not, “no amount of external pressure and assistance can long delay compete communist victory in South Vietnam.” (Swanson, p. 147) These ominous and well-founded warnings were ignored.

    Unlike Ho, Diem did not seem interested in making the lives of the peasantry easier. What he seemed to be interested in was consolidating his power. As noted above, Bao Dai was dispensed with first. Diem and Nhu then plotted to do away with the underworld drug organization, the Binh Xuyen. With the help of the army, they did. (Swanson, p. 159)

    Lansdale was Diem’s chief patron. In addition to rigging elections, he devised a propaganda operation to transfer one million Catholics south, in order to bolster Diem. (Jacobs, pp. 52–53) National Assembly candidates had to be first approved by Diem before they ran. The major party, the Can Lao, was run by Nhu. Diem and Nhu, now that they were secured by Lansdale, began to imprison and torture tens of thousands they thought could pose a threat to their regime. This included beheadings and disembowelings. (Jacobs, p.90) South Vietnam was, for all intents and purposes, a one-party state and that one party was founded by and supervised by Nhu and it also controlled the press. The constitution gave Diem the ability to rule by decree and change existing laws.

    As partly noted above, Diem took nepotism to new standards. Madame Nhu, the first lady, also served as a member of the assembly and headed the Women’s Solidarity Movement, a female militia. Another brother, Ngo Din Tuc, was the most powerful religious leader in the country. Diem’s youngest brother was ambassador to the United Kingdom. (Jacobs, pp. 86, 89)

    The puzzling thing about the above is that, in these formative years, Diem received the nearly unalloyed backing of both the American press and the Establishment. His regime worked with Fishel at MSU, but also with the Brookings Institute and the Ford Foundation. (Swanson, p. 172) From 1955–61, the USA sent his government two billion dollars. With all this power behind him, Diem appointed province and district chiefs. (Jacobs, p. 90) Yet Diem did not redistribute land. He simply moved peasants to unpopulated areas—and they were not given title. He was attempting to build a human wall along border areas. And like the French, he posted taxes on the property. Diem also used land transfers to enrich himself. (Swanson, pp. 172–75) The net result of all this, as both Swanson and Jacobs note, is that he was not able to establish any kind of loyal following among the peasant class, which made them easy targets for, first, the Viet Minh and, later, the Viet Cong. By 1960, the political arm of the Viet Cong was formed, called the NLF or National Liberation Front. This failure contributed to the creeping Americanization of the war.

    VI

    Swanson now begins to focus on a character who was central in insisting that America become directly involved in Vietnam: Walt Rostow. From his earliest days in academia—Harvard and MIT—Rostow was a rabid critic of Karl Marx and despised the doctrine of communism. At MIT, Walt became involved with the Center for International Studies (CENIS), a think tank devised as a method of getting MIT involved with the Cold War. (Swanson, pp. 194–195) In fact, even though he was a Democrat, he was discouraged by Eisenhower’s refusal to commit American ground troops to save the siege of Dien Bien Phu. He wrote several books and articles for CENIS. His most famous book was The Stages of Economic Growth. As Rostow told his friend C. D. Jackson, that volume was designed to counter Marx and show that economic progress in the Third World would lead not “to a communist end game utopia, but to a corporate capitalist end point.” (Swanson, p. 196) John Kennedy liked the aspect of Rostow’s philosophy that promoted the importance of utilizing foreign aid for democratic ends in the Third World.

    John Kennedy’s ideas about Vietnam overall, and South Vietnam in particular, differed from the Dulles brothers and also with what they had let Diem construct in South Vietnam. Senator Kennedy talked about offering the people in the area a revolution, one that was peaceful, democratic, and locally controlled. (Swanson, p. 215) As Swanson has demonstrated, that is not what Lansdale, Diem, and the Dulles brothers had created. When he became president, Kennedy resisted overtures by people like Lansdale and Rostow to utilize direct American involvement in theater. After the Bay of Pigs debacle, he tended to discount the input from the Joint Chiefs of Staff and retired CIA Director Allen Dulles. The president now turned to people like speech writer Ted Sorenson, Attorney General Robert Kennedy, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, and military aide General Maxwell Taylor for advice.

    Swanson spends many pages on describing the situation in Laos, next door to Vietnam. I found this part of the book quite helpful in understanding both Indochina, the ideas of the Joint Chiefs, and why Kennedy resisted them.

    Kennedy appointed a task force to study Laos and make recommendations about the country. Laos was newly formed in 1954, when it was carved out of French Indochina as a result of the Geneva Accords. It was a landlocked country of two million people. In 1954, the main vectors of power were the Royal Laotian government, the Pathet Lao, and the remnants of the French regime there. Charles Yost was the American ambassador and the embassy consisted of two rooms. (Swanson, p. 239) Prince Souvanna Phouma wanted no part of the Cold War. Prince Souphanouvong was his half-brother and he was the leader of the leftist Pathet Lao, located mostly in the northern part of the country. Because of this relationship, the prince thought he could form a working relationship with the Pathet Lao.

    Washington did not care for the idea, but what made the resistance to the idea puzzling was there so little to fight over in Laos. Ninety percent of the populace lived off self-sufficient farming. But yet, Foster Dulles decided to send them five times the country’s GNP in foreign aid. (ibid, p. 240) Before leaving the country, Yost suggested a partition, but no military aid. That was ignored and he left due to illness.

    Allen Dulles decided to set up a CIA station there. The Pentagon now set up a 22-man military outpost. This in a country where most of the people did not use the national currency and all but 10 per cent were illiterate. They did not even know what the Cold War was. In fact, Souvanna Phouma told the new ambassador, Graham Parsons, that the Pathet Lao were not communists. (Swanson, p. 249) In the face of this native advice, the CIA created a Cold War in Laos. Souvanna was blackballed and the CIA head of station, Henry Hecksher, invented something called the Committee for the Defense of National Interests (CDNI). Hecksher’s creation forced the prince to resign as Prime Minister. (Swanson, p. 253) The CDNI backed Colonel Phoumi Nosovan, who took power in late December of 1959. America now expanded its military mission there to 515 men. Allen Dulles assigned Phoumi a case officer, Jack Hasey. (John Newman, JFK and Vietnam, Second Edition, p. 13)

    Colonel Kong Le did not like the rapid polarization and disintegration of Laos. He supplanted Phoumi in August of 1960, declared Laos neutral, and invited Souvanna to return, which he did. (Swanson, p. 256) Allen Dulles now told Eisenhower that Kong Le was a Castro type communist, which he was not. Ambassador Winthrop Brown agreed with Kong Le that Laos should be neutral. It did not matter. In December of 1960, Kong Le was displaced and the CIA and Pentagon returned Phoumi to power. This drove Kong Le and his neutralists into the arms of the Pathet Lao, who were now getting aid from Hanoi. (Newman, p. 13)

    This is the messy situation that Eisenhower had left for Kennedy in Laos. What makes it even more startling is this: on January 19, 1960, the day before JFK’s inauguration, Eisenhower told Kennedy something that, in retrospect, is rather astonishing. Ike told him that Laos was the key to all Southeast Asia. If Laos fell, America would have to write off the entire area. (Newman, p. 9) If anything defines C. Wright Mills’ description of American leaders of the era as a bunch of “crackpot realists,” that judgment does.

    When Kennedy took over, he called in Winthrop Brown and asked him for his opinion. Brown started with, “Well sir, the policy is…” Kennedy cut him off and said, he knew what the policy was, he wanted to know what Brown thought. Brown replied that he favored a neutralist solution with Souvanna and Kong Le. He felt the alliance with Phoumi was a disaster. (Swanson, pp. 263–64)

    In what would be a repeated strophe, on April 5, 1961, Phoumi launched a (failed) assault against Kong Le and the Pathet Lao across the Plain of Jars. Brown was convinced this collapse could open up all the major cities to the Pathet Lao. (Swanson, p. 268) Kennedy decided to ignore the Joint Chiefs’ recommendation for direct intervention, made by Arleigh Burke and backed by Lyndon Johnson, which included using atomic weapons against China if they intervened. (Newman, p. 27) Instead, he made a show of force by moving a naval armada into the area. The Pathet Lao now called for a cease-fire. A neutralist conference was now at hand. After all the sabre rattling—referring to the Bay of Pigs debacle—Kennedy said to Schlesinger: “If it weren’t for Cuba, I might have taken this advice seriously” (Swanson, p. 284)

    VII

    The Pentagon now switched arenas. They planned for a showdown with China in either Thailand or Vietnam. (Swanson, p. 287; Newman, pp. 28–29) This not so hidden effort should be combined with the failure of Diem to attain even the semblance of functional democracy.

    Jacobs deals with what I believe is a key event indicating just how bad the Diem regime was on the eve of Kennedy’s presidency. Contrary to what the American media was depicting, there were intelligent alternatives to Diem even in the late fifties. But Diem’s Public Meeting Law stopped them from attaining recognition. That law limited candidates from speaking to a crowd of over five persons. Some candidates were threatened with arrest or trial on charges of conspiracy with the Viet Cong. (Jacobs, p. 113) In many instances, the ARVN just stuffed ballot boxes.

    Diem’s best-known critic was Dr. Phan Quang Dan. In the August 1959 national assembly elections, Diem sent 8000 soldiers to vote against Dan. Not only did the Saigon physician win anyway, he won by a margin of 6–1. (Jacobs, p. 114) When Dan was about to take his seat, he was arrested on charges of fraud. This was so outrageous that a group of prominent men met at the Caravelle Hotel to sign a letter of protest. The signers included Phan Huy Quat, a man who had previously been recommended to Eisenhower and Foster Dulles as a better alternative than Diem. Although this protest garnered some media attention in the USA, on orders of Diem, it was deliberately ignored in South Vietnam. The Caravelle Group was probably the last viable opportunity to install a government that could inspire popular loyalty in Saigon. (Jacobs, p. 116)

    In the summer of 1961, President Kennedy asked Vice President Johnson to go to South Vietnam on a goodwill tour. LBJ mightily resisted. Kennedy ended up ordering him to go. (Swanson, p. 303) On the advice of the Pentagon, LBJ asked Diem if he wanted American combat troops in theater. Diem declined, but said he needed more funds to build up the ARVN; apparently in order to protect his argovilles—groups of farming communities. (Swanson, p. 311) As the author notes, Diem changed his mind a few months later. In September of 1961, he was willing to accept combat troops. (Swanson, p. 326) This would later evolve into the Strategic Hamlet program.

    In late 1961—around when Kennedy sent Walt Rostow and General Max Taylor to Vietnam—the president met with Arthur Krock, a friend of his father’s. He told the journalist he had serious doubts about the Domino Theory and did not think the USA should get into a land war in Asia. (Swanson, p. 335) When Taylor and Rostow returned with a recommendation for inserting combat troops, Kennedy struck this from their report. He also circulated a press story saying no such recommendation was in the report. (Swanson, p. 339) Perhaps because of the Taylor/Rostow mission, Diem now told Ambassador Nolting he would like to place American troops across the demilitarized zone. Lyndon Johnson’s initial suggestion was now bearing fruit.

    Swanson names four men who had similar views to the president’s about Indochina. They were Senator Mike Mansfield, Ambassador to India John K. Galbraith, Attorney General Bobby Kennedy, and, later, Defense Secretary Robert McNamara. In two meetings in November, Kennedy made the decision that there would be no American combat troops sent to Vietnam. He would send more advisors and equipment, but no ground troops. Virtually everyone except the men mentioned above wanted the contrary and members of the Joint Chiefs wanted to go to war. (Swanson, p. 400) In fact, the Chiefs sent Kennedy a memo saying that a failure to enter Vietnam would lead to the collapse of Southeast Asia. But when McNamara forwarded the memo, he advised Kennedy that it required no action from the president at the time.

    In his coda, Swanson writes that the headlong push to go to war in Vietnam stemmed from four issues:

    1. The atomic advantage of the USA over Russia and China

    2. The failure to use that advantage at DIen Ben Phu and in Laos

    3. The Pentagon push that a showdown with China was inevitable in the battle for Asia

    4. The monolithic view that Hanoi was a satellite of China

    Swanson has written a cogent—and in some ways unique—overview of the struggle for imperial hegemony in Indochina, specifically, the rise and fall of the French effort and the seeds of the later American imposition in Laos and South Vietnam. Along the way, he foreshadows the fact that Kennedy was trapped by his own advisors and how his removal would lead to an epic tragedy.

  • Deep Fake Politics: Getting Adam Curtis Out of Your Head

    Deep Fake Politics: Getting Adam Curtis Out of Your Head

    Filmmaker Adam Curtis is a strange figure. He is a skilled film-maker with a unique—if by now cliché—style. His films delve into areas often ignored by “mainstream” media. In that way, he appears to be someone who explores deep politics, the term Peter Scott coined to describe “all those political practices and arrangements, deliberate or not, which are usually repressed rather than acknowledged.”[1] However, as someone steeped in deep political scholarship, Curtis’ omissions and distortions are glaring and egregious. These flaws are very much on display in his latest BBC series, Can’t Get You Out of My Head (hereafter CGYOMH).

    The series is eight hours long and, as such, this review will focus on select key areas—specifically those related to Curtis’ tendentious approach to issues and historical episodes that fall within the realm of deep politics. These topics include his approach to Western finance, his dismissal or obfuscation of state crimes/elite conspiracies, as well as his smug and derisive approach to the West’s enemies du jour (most notably China and Russia). A recurring theme is the fecklessness of Adam Curtis in terms of identifying villainous actors and how they might be confronted for the benefit of humanity. Eventually, this multi-part review will conclude with an assessment of his work and what it reveals about his politics. At the risk of spoiling the conclusion, CGYOMH and Curtis’ other trippy films offer the audience not an illuminating “red pill,” but rather a BBC-approved red placebo.

    Curtis opens CGYOMH with a quote from David Graeber: “The ultimate hidden truth of the world is that it is something that we make and could just as easily make differently.” I have some admiration of Graeber, but I find him an odd choice for Curtis to quote given Graeber’s left-anarchism and Curtis’ carefully contrived “apolitical” posture. Said Curtis to an interviewer, “People often accuse me of being a lefty. That’s complete rubbish. If you look at The Century of the Self, what I’m arguing is something very close to a neo-conservative position.”[2] He also said, “If you ask me what my politics are…I don’t really have any.”[3] Of course, being anti-left is not apolitical, but I digress.

    The world “is something that we make.” This formulation might be useful in a poetic sense. It is obviously a pithy restatement of humanism. Human societies have been created by humans. The ultimate truth of, say, an anthill is that it is made by ants and ants could just as easily make it differently. Unfortunately, and as Graeber would likely agree, the story of civilization is not a rosy tale of shared sacrifice and shared rewards. Civilization has always been predicated on hierarchy—on expropriation and exploitation. Civilization only advanced thanks to exploited persons, the fruits of whose labor allowed others to engage in other activities besides acquiring food. That said, as material capacity improves, civilization offers the means for enlightened progress.

    This fundamental, unresolved contradiction of human civilization should be at the center of any deep investigation into fundamental systemic problems. Alas, this is not the case for CGYOMH. Unlike Curtis, I don’t feel a need to disingenuously claim that I have no perspective on politics and/or history. If pressed, I would describe myself not as a Marxist, but as a Millsian, i.e., a scholar working in the tradition of the sociologist C. Wright Mills. That said, in 2021, it is harder to gainsay Marx’s overarching critiques of capitalism and class structure across time and space. Even Plato, centuries earlier, recognized much of this—though he deemed his insights so dangerous that he used fictional sock puppets like Socrates and Thrasymachus to make his points. Plato’s hypothetical myth of the metals was an acknowledgement of the necessity for stratification—and for the myths that must be deployed to obscure the injustice of it all. Similarly, the allegory of the cave can easily be read as an elitist argument for the technocratic manufacture of consent. Plato, by this reckoning, acknowledged the primacy of class…and saw it as desirable, or at least unavoidable.

    However, as stated above, civilization also offers redemption through enlightenment—the presumptuous control of our fate by way of human reason. My own study of deep politics has led me to conclude that under US hegemony, Western “liberal democracy” has failed to fulfill the promise of the Enlightenment. More precisely: state secrecy, the extreme concentration of politico-economic power, and high criminality have created a despotic anti-democratic system of top-down governance. We live under a political regime obscured and protected by the totalizing corruption and/or co-opt-a-tion of the liberal institutions that supposedly allow for democratic sovereignty. For us to arrive at solutions to our civilization’s crises, we must understand how and why we have arrived at this juncture. Such an undertaking requires a historical narrative. A narrative is, of course “a story,” something that Curtis repeatedly tells viewers is very dangerous. He repeatedly makes some variation of this claim throughout his own films, i.e., through his own stories.

    Curtis and “His Story”

    There are major problems with Curtis’ history, in particular his historical rendering of postwar US hegemony. In the 1950’s, C. Wright Mills wrote about two ideal types of history—drift vs. conspiracy. The older version of history as drift was history as “fate” or “The Unseen Hand.” This is tantamount to imagining the tale of Oedipus as something of an allegory for human history. The contemporary social science version of this is history as “drift” wherein innumerable human decisions collectively produce historical outcomes that no person or persons could have controlled.[4] Wrote Mills, the “view that all is blind drift is largely a fatalist projection of one’s own impotence, [or] a salve of one’s guilt.” The problem with this perspective is not all historical moments are so anarchic. What if the circle of elites with decisive history-making power is rather narrow and centralized, and what if the decisions of these elites are of great consequence? In such a context, history-making power may rest within circles of actors that are known or at least knowable.[5]

    Mills’ second problematic ideal type imagines history as “conspiracy.” This perspective maintains that history plays out along lines determined by compact sets of villains or heroes. Such views represent the failure to attempt the more challenging task of grappling with the ways in which evolving social structures provide opportunities to an elite of power which may or may not capitalize on them. Argued Mills, “To accept either view—of all history as conspiracy or all history as drift—is to relax the effort to understand the facts of power and the ways of the powerful.”[6]

    To restate: both ideal types—drift and conspiracy—are flawed. Elites do collaborate in the creation of history-making decisions, but they do so within various structural, historical, and institutional contexts. As Mills pointed out, the postwar US power elite were “Commanders of power unequaled in human history.”[7] In social science terms, the historical ideal types of drift/conspiracy are analogous to issues of structure/agency. How much can various outcomes be explained by structural factors or by human agency? Both factors can have more or less weight in different situations.

    The overwhelming postwar material power of the US vis-à-vis the rest of the world was a structural fact. That structural reality bequeathed to US policymakers tremendous agency—agency that was deployed to create the structure of the international capitalist system. This is structural power,[8] i.e., “agency of the highest order.”[9] Curtis fails to adequately examine just how and why postwar US elites successfully wielded this structural power to establish the subsequent liberal imperial order. Instead, he repeatedly focuses on marginal characters or bureaucrats or technocrats or those whose ideas inform various actors at the middle levels of power. In this way, Curtis time and again obscures the elite origins of the various ideas and techniques deployed by middling actors to serve power. Curtis thus functions as something of an anti-Mills, ignoring the sociologist’s assertion that a “master task” for intellectuals should be: “To confront the new facts of history-making in our time, and their meaning for the problem of political responsibility.” Curtis does the opposite, but in a stylish and disorienting way which serves to conceal his propagandistic function.

    This is not to state that he does so intentionally; I am agnostic on that score. However, if Curtis suddenly abandoned his myopia toward the power elite, he would likely find that he was no longer welcome on the BBC and his work would not likely be reviewed favorably by the prestige media.

    CGYOMH and the “American Century”

    Given the systemic crises that Curtis explores in CGYOMH, he would have been wise to devote some of the film’s eight-hour run-time to the origins of the US-led world order whose present decrepitude he documents. During and after World War II, there were debates over what to do with America’s historically singular position of unrivaled dominance. Wall Street’s Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) wanted an “American Century,” i.e., hegemony over the international capitalist system. Daniel Ellsberg aptly terms this covert empire—empire that does not acknowledge and actively obscures (to the extent possible) its imperialism.[10] This global imperialist turn was opposed by some at the time, most famously Henry Wallace, FDR’s vice president. Opposing the “American Century” proposed by CFR man Henry Luce,” Wallace instead called for a “Century of the Common Man” in which,

    No nation will have the God-given right to exploit other nations. Older nations will have the privilege to help younger nations get started on the path to industrialization, but there must be neither military nor economic imperialism. The methods of the 19th century will not work in the people’s century which is now about to begin.[11]

    Wallace’s defeat may have been inevitable. The forces driving US imperialism conspired against him at the 1944 Democratic convention. As Oliver Stone and Peter Kuznick describe in The Untold History of the United States, he was dropped from the Democratic ticket despite being the second most popular US politician at the time—behind only Franklin Roosevelt himself. Progressive internationalism was abandoned. Instead, the only viable foreign policy positions were confined to “containment” or “rollback”—both products of men in the service of Establishment scion Dean Acheson—respectively, George Kennan[12] and Paul Nitze.[13]

    The CIA was created with communism as its ostensible foil. Behind the scenes, the Agency was created largely at the behest of Wall Street forces.[14] Though the US did preside over a process postwar “decolonization,” the Cold War served as cover for neocolonialism—the preservation of colonial economic relationships without formal colonization. By 2021, it should be obvious that—because of the historical continuity it represents—the Cold War offered a massive structural pretext for neocolonialism. How much difference is there between early 20th century US imperialism, the Cold War, and the post-Cold War era? Think of the earliest so-called “banana republics,” the Cold War CIA Operation PBSUCCESS which overthrew Guatemalan democracy at the behest of United Fruit, the 1964 coup in Brazil, or the 21st century “lawfare” coups in Brazil which took Dilma Rousseff and Lula de Silva out of politics. It is one of the straighter lines that can be found in history and social science.

    While discussing many episodes involving covert operations and foreign policy debacles, Curtis largely ignores the driving, discernable corporate interests. These interests animated the CIA at its inception and throughout its existence. The pithy truism that “the CIA is capitalism’s invisible army” goes unacknowledged—the implication being that these criminogenic organizations are just more examples of the misadventures of misguided technocrats possessed of troublesome ideas.

    Monetary Myopia

    On money and finance, CGYOMH is at its obscurantist worst. Curtis acknowledges that in 1971 Nixon ended Bretton Woods, though he doesn’t name it. CGYOMH does explain that the period of fixed exchange rates was ended. Curtis also doesn’t adequately explain the crucial fact that while the soft gold standard of Bretton Woods was abandoned, the dollar was not. Once this post-Bretton Woods regime was consolidated, it allowed the US to run historically unprecedented balance-of-payments deficits without suffering inflation. The dollar and the US Treasury Bill replaced the role formerly played by gold, but without the limitations imposed by the scarcity of Gold. This “gave the US the Rumpelstiltskinian power to create credit that the rest of the world would have to treat as being ‘as good as gold.’”[15] It is hard to overstate the extent to which the establishment of this regime represented both the use and acquisition of enormous structural power for the US.

    It was Vietnam War spending that created the deficits that killed Bretton Woods.[16] In CGYOMH, Curtis states flatly that Vietnam caused the economic problems and the inflation of the 1970’s. However, chronological correlation does not imply causation. The Vietnam era was an economic boom period for the US. There was indeed a dollar glut in foreign banks which necessitated systemic adjustment, but this could have been addressed in different ways. Instead, it was resolved by closing the gold window and later by way of the “oil shocks.” The explosion in the price of oil did cause some economic problems for the US public. But here again, Curtis errs on the side of obfuscating conspiratorial elite malfeasance. He states that in 1973, Middle Eastern leaders “decided to use oil as a weapon…to force America to stop supporting Israel.” But as Gowan[17] and Varoufakis[18] point out, this explanation was essentially a cover story. The explanation Curtis puts forward,

    …runs counter to logic and evidence. For if the Nixon administration had truly opposed the oil price hikes, how are we to explain the fact that its closest allies, the Shah of Iran, President Suharto of Indonesia and the Venezuelan government, not only backed the increases but led the campaign to bring them about? How are we to account for the administration’s scuttling of the Tehran negotiations between the oil companies and OPEC just before an agreement was reached that would have depressed oil prices?[19]

    This is further corroborated by the former Saudi oil minister, Sheikh Ahmed Zaki Yamani, who told The Guardian that,

    I am 100 per cent sure that the Americans were behind the increase in the price of oil. The oil companies were in real trouble at that time; they had borrowed a lot of money and they needed a high oil price to save them.[20]

    The Shah of Iran—a CIA-installed dictator—told Yamani, “Why are you against the increase in the price of oil? That is what they want? Ask Henry Kissinger—he is the one who wants a higher price.”[21] In addition, secret Saudi agreements with the Nixon administration established that the kingdom would use oil revenues to buy US Treasury bills at special auctions,[22] and that Saudis would only sell oil in US dollars.[23]

    The final gambit to cement the post-Bretton Woods regime was the massive increase in interest rates. Bowing to David Rockefeller’s advice, Jimmy Carter tapped Paul Volcker to chair the Federal Reserve. Volcker then drastically raised interest rates. Though this was harmful to much of the US public, it served to stabilize the global financial system in such a way as to secure for the US the most “exorbitant privilege” in world history—ownership of the global reserve currency backed by nothing.

    The takeaway here is that Curtis is wrong on a crucial matter when he states in the third episode of CGYOMH that Nixon created a new global monetary system “by accident” and that the OPEC nations and Western bankers had themselves created an economic system beyond the control of politicians. In fact, the US government actually had enormous control over the monetary system, as well as the historically unprecedented ability to run massive to budget deficits to address any priority or social problem. This enormous economic power has studiously not been utilized for the benefit of most Americans. Through massive obfuscation of the true nature of American structural power over the global economy, the US public has been kept largely ignorant of the democratic state’s abdication of controlling authority over the domestic and international monetary system. This can be described as a central manifestation of American antisocialism—the prevailing US tendency to crush democratic political forces which would subordinate capital to human society rather than vice versa e.g. Wallace, and Bernie Sanders.

    In 1978, Paul Volcker—one of the first officials to call for the abandonment of Bretton-Woods—gave a speech admitting that, faced with collapse of Bretton Woods, the US privileged the retention of “freedom of action for national policy” over the creation “of a stable international system.” This speech was delivered shortly before Volcker’s appointment by Jimmy Carter to chair the Federal Reserve. In this same speech, Volcker stated that “controlled disintegration in the world economy is a legitimate objective for the 1980’s.”[xxiv] How did this play out? The enormous volume of petrodollars that flowed into US banks allowed for massive loans to the formerly colonized nations of the Global South. By the mid-1970’s, these nations were extremely vulnerable to any increase in interest rates. The massive Volcker interest rate hike led to the Third World debt crisis.[25] Writes Varafoukis,

    The IMF happily offered to lend money to governments for the purposes of repaying the Western Banks, but at an exorbitant price: the dismantling of much of their public sector, the shrinking of the newly founded state institutions, and the wholesale transfer of valuable public assets to Western companies. [The] crisis was the colonized world’s second historic disaster…from which most Third World countries have never quite recovered. [It all] proved more effective in destroying the enemies of US foreign policy around the globe than any military operation the US could ever mount.[26]

    The consolidation of this monetary regime was manifest in the so-called “Washington Consensus.” It was in this context that China entered as a major actor in the world economy. Here again, Curtis errs in such a way as to obscure Western imperialism and elite perfidy while conveniently depicting the West’s adversaries in a harsh light. In the fifth episode of CGYOMH, Curtis addresses the Asia crisis of 1997 and 1998. He discusses how a speculative bubble burst, resulting in capital flight and severe economic downturns for the effected countries. He states that the IMF tried to help, but (surprise!) their prescriptions just made things worse. Curtis even shows Malaysian prime minister Mahathir Mohamad denouncing the Western powers behind the corruption of global financial markets.

    However, the film fails to mention that Malaysia weathered this crisis remarkably well by doing the exact opposite of what the US-dominated IMF prescribed: the country enacted stringent capital controls to prevent capital flight that would have destroyed the country’s currency and thus its economy. Since this goes unmentioned, there is no need to explore the probability that these misguided IMF measures actually enrich Western economic interests through the impoverishment of other countries—by design.

    The Chinese Culprits

    After this myopic and obscurantist discussion of the Asia crisis, Curtis turns to his favorite bête noire, China. As Curtis describes it, Jiang Zemin—apparently a unitary actor with sole command over the Chinese state—decided that China would recycle its dollar surpluses into US treasury bills in order to keep its currency weak. This boosted China’s exports and strengthened the US dollar. China’s policy also allowed the US to keep interest rates low, flooding the US with cheap credit which would allow US citizens to buy even more goods produced by the scheming Chinese. This allows Curtis to essentially blame China for the bubble economy that emerged in the US, leading the poor Americans into “a protective dream world that was increasingly detached from the reality outside.” But as Michel Hudson often speaks and writes about, and as is delineated above, the system was designed to make surplus countries do exactly what the Chinese were doing: recycle dollars into US treasuries.[27] Cue Curtis’ nutty footage of a confused-looking George W. Bush walking around in a blue Zhongshan suit.

    If surplus countries like China do not invest in US treasuries, their currency will rise in value and damage their export economies. This demonstrates the remarkable fact that the US is able to dominate the global economy through its position as the biggest debtor in human history. Furthermore, for all the “free trade” mythology about the US, the country has refused to allow the Chinese to invest those dollars in key US companies. For example, the US government quashed a Chinese bid to acquire the oil company, Unocal, for $18.4 billion.[28]

    It is absurd for Curtis to suggest that Chinese machinations are responsible for the various speculative bubbles in the US economy. And it is risible to imply that the dystopian George W. Bush years were also somehow related to devious Chinese plots. In fact, China is well aware that by helping finance America’s massive military budget, the country is financing its own military encirclement. The Chinese are increasingly looking for ways to escape the dollar system without destabilizing their economy. The mandarins of US imperialism are acutely aware of this and have explicitly called for making sure that China cannot do any such thing. The US/NATO imperial brain trust known as the Atlantic Council recently issued a manifesto entitled “The Longer Telegram.” This is a straight steal from George Kennan’s 1946 Long Telegram, which explained the policy of containment toward the USSR. This time the warning is about China’s ambition to “undermine US dominance of the global financial system and the status of the US dollar as the global reserve currency.” The paper called for policymakers to “protect the global status of the US dollar.”[29]

    In 2003, US President George W. Bush—or Xiao Bushi (Little Bush), as the Chinese call him—launched the Iraq War. US leaders, as Curtis would have it, were presumably influenced in part by the dream-like state that China had contrived to addle the usually sensible and peaceful Americans. Curtis notes that while Vietnam caused inflation and political unrest, the Iraq War produced no such effects. Why? China, of course. With their nefarious purchasing of US Treasuries, CGYOMH implies, the Chinese have forestalled and/or sabotaged the political reckoning that liberal democracy is designed to produce.

    As for the lack of political unrest caused by Iraq—which really is not true, but let us grant it for the sake of argument—a responsible commentator might want to mention that unlike the Vietnam era, there were no Americans drafted to fight in Iraq. Additionally, the US waged the Vietnam War as the hegemon of the Bretton Woods system. Due to that system’s gold peg, the astronomical war spending did impact the US economy. With historic high-handedness and imperial hubris, the US defaulted on its obligations by unilaterally discarding Bretton Woods. Said Secretary Treasury John Connolly at the time (yes, that John Connolly), “It’s our currency, but it’s your problem.”[30]

    So while Curtis would like to blame China for US irresponsibility, the obvious fact is that it wasn’t China, but the post-Bretton Woods petrodollar/US Treasury-bill standard[31] that allowed the US to prosecute the Iraq War without experiencing the disastrous economic consequences that nations historically suffer after launching expensive military adventures. It was this same dynamic that allowed Reagan to slash taxes for the rich while exploding the military budget. This is why Dick Cheney famously said, “Deficits don’t matter.” He was largely correct, but this obviously belies the GOP/neoliberal Democrat austerity consensus, so it went substantively unexplored by the press.

    The Sub-Prime Crisis, Adam Curtis-Style

    As we should expect by the final episode of CGYOMY, Curtis does not handle the sub-prime crash very well either. Those foolish bankers and technocrats thought their data modelling and algorithms could effectively manage all risk. On the ground, this led to massive amounts of unrepayable loans being made to poor people who couldn’t pay it back. While Curtis does reveal the scandalous fact that the massive bank losses were transferred to the public domain, he does not reveal to his audience that the government could have bailed out homeowners for a fraction of the cost of bailing out the fraudulent banks. Writes Michael Hudson:

    You hear no talk from Mr. Paulson or Mr. Bernanke about bailing out homeowners by writing down their debts to match their ability to pay. This is what economies have done from time immemorial. Instead, the Republicans—along with their allied Wall Street Democrats—have chosen to bail out investors in junk mortgages presently far exceeding the debtor’s ability to pay, and far in excess of the current (or reasonable) market price. The Treasury and Fed have opted to keep fictitious capital claims alive, forgetting the living debtors saddled with exploding adjustable-rate mortgages (ARMs) and toxic “negative amortization” mortgages that keep adding on the interest (and penalties) to the existing above-market balance.[32]

    The result of the sub-prime bailouts was a massive upward shift of wealth and millions of evictions across the US. JP Morgan reportedly said that in an economic downturn, capital “return[s] to its rightful owners.” Firms like Blackstone benefitted from the American state’s largesse toward finance and the penury of former homeowners by buying up massive amounts of foreclosed properties. In 2020, Fortune reported that Blackstone had become “the world’s biggest corporate landlord,” with control of property worth a collective $325 billion.[33]

    Given these outcomes, it begs the question as to whether or not those at the pinnacle of wealth and power really would consider the affair to be a terrible mistake. While the crisis was devastating for the US public, high finance benefitted enormously. Banks made vast profits through control fraud as the bubble expanded. After all, loans created essentially out of thin air are what banks “sell.” Huge bonuses were paid on the basis of fraudulent lending practices. While the public may be ignorant of the structural power bequeathed by the Petrodollar/US T-Bill Standard, the people who run the Federal Reserve, the US Treasury, and the Too-Big-to-Fail/Jail banks are most certainly aware. The last scene of the film Margin Call neatly illustrates this protective scheme as Jeremy Irons says the crash will not hurt his company that much since the federal government will bail them out, which, in large part, they did.

    The opacity of the higher circles means that we are never likely to know the extent to which the subprime crisis, subsequent bailouts, and failure to prosecute the fraudsters collectively represent something of a rolling deep state coup by a financial Power Elite. Suffice it to say that we should all be so lucky as to spectacularly “fail” in such a way as to effect an historically monumental transfer of wealth to ourselves.

    The Deep State Financial Elephants in the Room

    If Curtis wanted to honestly report on big money’s takeover of politics and society, he could tell us about Blackstone, or more importantly, the “Big Three” capital firms—BlackRock, Vanguard, and State Street. As Paul Jay reported,

    Financialization of the economy produced two shadow banks that tower over the rest of the corporate world. Blackrock and Vanguard with other smaller money management firms, control 90% of the S&P 500 public companies, including fossil fuel companies, arms manufacturers and major U.S. media outlets that own ‘mainstream’ news. The top three financial services firms manage 15 trillion dollars of assets. That’s more than China’s 2019 GDP. Blackrock is the largest with 7.4 trillion, followed by Vanguard at 5.3 trillion and State Street Global Advisors at 2.5 trillion.[34]

    This massive concentration of politico-economic power is another crucial aspect that Curtis obscures. The hegemony of organized money over society did not arise by accident. It involved a series of coups d’etat profonde, or strokes of the deep state. In my dissertation, I defined the deep state as,

    …the various institutions that collectively exercise undemocratic power over state and society. Pluralistic to varying degrees, the deep state is an outgrowth of the overworld of private wealth. It includes most notably the institutions that advance overworld interests through the nexuses connecting the overworld, the underworld, and the national security organizations that mediate between them.[35]

    I would add that deep state can also refer to what is often called “the Establishment,” i.e., those parties whose political dominance has “been institutionalized via the cooptation or subversion of state, civil society, and liberal institutions. In this broadest sense, elements of organized religion, the educational system, the corporate media (and much of the ‘independent’ media) can be considered part of the deep state.”[36]

    By putting forward conventional or benign, idiosyncratic explanations of historical events—and by failing to interrogate deep political intrigues—Curtis lets culpable elite actors and institutions off the hook. This is beguiling and ultimately disempowering. The same can be said for his various critiques of technocrats and their “misguided” notions—wrongheaded ideas whose invariable usefulness to the politico-economic elite is typically obscured or regarded as coincidental. And of course, this criticism also applies to his oft-conveyed lament that the solipsistic foolishness of random persons is somehow to blame for the prevailing political dystopia we are living through. Given what has changed in US society since World War II, it is more accurate to blame the elites, and their American anti socialism, for the purposeful incremental neutering of American democracy.

    In Part 2, Aaron Good will explore how Curtis’ financial obscurantism is of a piece with his take on “conspiracy theories” and the parapolitical practices of America’s covert empire.

    see Deep Fake Politics (Part 2): The Prankster, the Prosecutor, and the Para-political

    see Deep Fake Politics (Part 3): Empire and the Criminalization of the State

    [1] Peter Dale Scott, Deep Politics and the Death of JFK (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1993), p. 7.

    [2] Adam Curtis and Chris Darke, “Interview: Adam Curtis,” Film Comment, July 17, 2012.

    [3] Curtis and Darke, “Interview: Adam Curtis.”

    [4] C. Wright Mills, The Power Elite (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1956), p. 21.

    [5] Mills, The Power Elite, p. 27.

    [6] Mills, The Power Elite, p. 27.

    [7] Mills, The Power Elite, p. 361.

    [8] Susan Strange, States and Markets, 2nd ed. (New York, NY: Continuum, 1994).

    [9] Aaron Good, “American Exception: Hegemony and the Dissimulation of the State,” Administration and Society 50, no. 1 (2018): p. 10.

    [10] Daniel Ellsberg, Conversation with author’s Intensive Peace Studies of the American Century class, February 2, 2021.

    [11] Wallace, Henry A. “The Century of the Common Man.” American Rhetoric. New York, NY, May 8, 1942.

    [12] Bruce Cumings, “‘Revising Postrevisionism,’ or, The Poverty of Theory in Diplomatic History,” Diplomatic History 17, no. 4 (October 1993): p. 564.

    [13] “NSC-68, 1950,” U.S. Department of State – Archive (Washington D.C., January 20, 2009).

    [14] Good, “American Exception: Hegemony and the Dissimulation of the State,” p. 15.

    [15] Aaron Good, “American Exception: Hegemony and the Tripartite State” (Temple University, 2020), p. 165.

    [16] Michael Hudson, Super Imperialism: The Origin and Fundamentals of US Dominance (Sterling, VA: Pluto Press, 2003), pp. 306–308.

    [17] Peter Gowan, The Global Gamble: Washington’s Faustian Bid for World Dominance (London, England: Verso, 1999), pp. 20–21.

    [18] Yanis Varoufakis, The Global Minotaur: America, Europe and the Future of the Global Economy, 2nd ed. (London, England: Zed Books, 2015).

    [19] Varoufakis, The Global Minotaur: America, Europe and the Future of the Global Economy, p. 97.

    [20] The Observer, “Saudi Dove in the Oil Slick,” The Guardian, January 13, 2001.

    [21] The Observer, “Saudi Dove in the Oil Slick,” The Guardian, January 13, 2001.

    [22] David E. Spiro, The Hidden Hand of American Hegemony: Petrodollar Recycling and International Markets (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1999), p. 107.

    [23] Spiro, The Hidden Hand of American Hegemony: Petrodollar Recycling and International Markets, 124.

    [24] Varoufakis, The Global Minotaur: America, Europe and the Future of the Global Economy, p. 100.

    [25] Varoufakis, The Global Minotaur: America, Europe and the Future of the Global Economy, p. 107.

    [26] Varoufakis, The Global Minotaur: America, Europe and the Future of the Global Economy, p. 108.

    [27] Michael Hudson, J Is for Junk Economics: A Guide to Reality in an Age of Deception (Glashütte, Germany: ISLET-Verlag, 2017), p. 79.

    [28] AP, “China’s CNOOC Drops Bid for Unocal,” NBC News, August 2, 2005.

    [29] Anonymous, “The Longer Telegram: Toward A New American China Strategy,” Atlantic Council Strategy Papers (Washington D.C., 2021).

    [30] Kevin Hebner, “The Dollar Is Our Currency, but It’s Your Problem,” IPE, October 2007.

    [31] Good, “American Exception: Hegemony and the Dissimulation of the State,” p. 12.

    [32] Michael Hudson, “The Paulson-Bernanke Bank Bailout Plan,” Counterpunch, September 22, 2008.

    [33] Shawn Tully, “How Blackstone Became the World’s Biggest Corporate Landlord,” Fortune, February 17, 2020.

    [34] Paul Jay, “Three Investment Banks Control More Wealth Than GDP of China – and Threaten Our Existence,” January 22, 2020.

    [35] Good, “American Exception: Hegemony and the Tripartite State,” p. 277.

    [36] Good, “American Exception: Hegemony and the Tripartite State,” p. 288.

  • President Kennedy and the Third World

     

  • John F Kennedy: When the US president met Africa’s independence heroes

     

  • Fred Litwin: Culture Warrior

    Fred Litwin: Culture Warrior

    Although this has been a long review, I am not exaggerating when I write it could easily have been much longer. I have left out many things for reasons of expediency. For example, Litwin does not mention the infamous CIA agent Bernardo DeTorres as an early infiltrator into Garrison’s office. DeTorres was later called as a witness before the HSCA. One reason being that he reportedly had pictures of Dealey Plaza in a safe deposit box. A second being he was in communication with people who talked about the assassination before it occurred. (DiEugenio, Destiny Betrayed, Second Edition, pp. 227–28) Further, David Ferrie’s colleague for raids into Cuba—and a suspect in the JFK case—Eladio Del Valle, was found killed, within 24 hours of Ferrie’s death. The report written up for Garrison read, “He was shot in the chest and it appears ‘gangland style’ and his body was left in the vicinity of BERNARDO TORRES’ apartment.” (ibid) If those two deaths, along with DeTorres’ infiltration, do not at least suggest attempts to cripple Garrison’s inquiry, then what does?

    Further, as already mentioned, Ferrie had a map of Dealey Plaza in his desk drawer at work; Sergio Arcacha Smith reportedly had diagrams of the sewer system in Dealey Plaza at his apartment in Dallas; and now DeTorres had pictures of Dealey Plaza in his safe deposit box. In the face of all this, who is deluded? Most objective people would say its Litwin. He doesn’t have to deal with the question since he leaves it all out.

    The portrait of Oswald in On the Trail of Delusion is pretty much the Warren Commission’s view of the sociopathic leftist. (pp. 25–26). Litwin achieves this, as he usually does, by leaving out important information. In Oswald’s teen years, Litwin does not mention David Ferrie and the Civil Air Patrol. Even though there are numerous witnesses on the record today testifying to Oswald’s attendance at CAP meetings. (John Armstrong, Harvey and Lee, pp. 123–25) We also have a picture of Ferrie with Oswald in the CAP which was produced by PBS Frontline back in 1993. When Oswald leaves for the USSR in the fall of 1959, Litwin does not mention the CIA/ONI fake defector program; or Otto Otepka and his request to the CIA about that program. He wanted to know which defectors—including Oswald—were genuine and which were not. (Armstrong, pp. 306–08; see also Lisa Pease, Probe Magazine, Vol. 4 No. 3)

    Since Litwin never mentions Otepka’s request, he does not have to address the fact that it was only at this time—December of 1960—that the CIA opened a 201 file on Oswald. This was thirteen months after he arrived in the USSR and announced he wished to renounce his American citizenship. Even Richard Helms was amazed that it took so long to open up this quite common file on a known Marine who defected to the USSR at the height of the Cold War. (John Newman, Oswald and the CIA, p. 51) But today we know that not only was the 201 file delayed, but the routing of incoming documents on Oswald was diverted in order not to create a 201 file. The HSCA and their analyst Betsy Wolf were onto this very odd arrangement. But Wolf’s milestone discoveries do not exist in the HSCA report or volumes. (Click here for details) Therefore, with what we know today, by 1960 there existed grounds for reasonable suspicion that Oswald was, at the very least, an asset of the CIA.

    With all the above noted about Oswald, need I add the last? Litwin does not review the present pile of evidence that Oswald worked out of Guy Banister’s office in the summer of 1963. (DiEugenio, Destiny Betrayed, second edition, pp.109–14) Or that the FBI covered this up. (Newman, p. 310) Litwin’s profile of Oswald is utterly worthless.

    What kind of a researcher is Litwin? In his Introduction, he writes that Oliver Stone teamed up with this reviewer to produce a documentary. That film will use the book Destiny Betrayed “to once again foist Jim Garrison on the American people.”He then explains that this is why he wrote his book on Garrison. (p. xix) Can the man be real? All Litwin had to do was email me, Oliver Stone, Stone’s secretary, or producer Rob Wilson and he would have discovered that what he just wrote was, once again, wrong. Oliver Stone liked the title, but the film is not based on Destiny Betrayed, not even close. The film is really built around the declassifications of the Assassination Records Review Board. It deals in large part with the ballistics and medical evidence that was finally set free as a result of that act. The material that Litwin tries to deny even existed. The production filmed 29 interviews. We only did one in the New Orleans area. The plurality of interview subjects were people like Dr. Gary Aguilar, Dr. David Mantik, forensic pathologist Cyril Wecht, former professor and surgeon Dr. Donald Miller, world famous criminalist Henry Lee, and ARRB analyst Doug Horne. In other words, this material is much more aligned with Litwin’s first book, which Dave Mantik wrecked, and which with I made the debris bounce a bit.

    From the beginning, I had serious problems with the work of Fred Litwin. As I noted in Part One, anyone who can write that there is no true indication in the JFK case of evidentiary fraud and misrepresentation, that person is simply not being candid with the reader. The radical alterations in the original autopsy evidence by the Ramsey Clark Panel is a prima facie case of alterations of the record. The now revealed trail of CE 399 is another. (Click here for details) I presented both of these aspects in my book, The JFK Assassination: The Evidence Today. As I have shown, Litwin denied that I had any witnesses or paperwork to demonstrate these facts. As I replied in Part One, that was a false statement. I had a surfeit of evidence with which to do so. And since he had my book in front of him, he had to know this.

    All of the above was puzzling to this reviewer. But when I later read that Litwin was also denying there was any disruption of policy between John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson over Vietnam, that was even more startling. Now Litwin was denying evidence that was historical in nature, not forensic. (Litwin, On the Trail of Delusion, p. 270) When he called Kennedy a Cold Warrior, that was the clincher. (Ibid, p. 271) No one today can make such a statement in the face of the current scholarship on this issue. (Click here for details)

    I now figured there had to be something lurking behind all of this. Something in Litwin’s past that would motivate it. So I decided to dig deeper. I actually read Litwin’s first book, Conservative Confidential. I think I struck the Mother Lode as far as Litwin’s modus vivendi.

    II

    In the United States, many of us are familiar with the unattractive personage of David Horowitz. Well, in Conservative Confidential, Litwin says that he was both inspired and entranced by a book Horowitz wrote called The Politics of Bad Faith. (Litwin, p. 19, references are to the e book version, so they may differ slightly) I was familiar with Horowitz from reading about him for my two part essay, The Posthumous Assassination of John F. Kennedy. Horowitz was a part of the illustrious Ramparts magazine back in the sixties and early seventies. From 1964-69, under the editorship of Warren Hinckle, that magazine soared to an apogee of journalistic excellence that has been unmatched in any venue since. Let me quote my eulogy for Hinckle about this matter:

    But to detail the contents of what the magazine exposed about America, who Hinckle decided to take on, the methods he employed and the price he was willing to pay, all these-and more-were, to my knowledge, unprecedented before him, and unmatched afterwards. Ramparts was so effective and influential that it became a regular target of the MSM, especially Time magazine and the New York Times, which obviously did not like being exposed as the poseurs they were. Beyond that, the CIA launched operations against Ramparts. These were commissioned by Desmond Fitzgerald, supervised by Richard Ober, and executed by Edgar Applewhite. As detailed in his book Secrets, the late Angus McKenzie showed how this program grew into MHCHAOS, the massive CIA spying on and infiltration of leftist protest groups in that decade.

    I won’t go into all the bombshell stories Hinckle printed that got the CIA angry with him. You can read this article for that information. (Click here for details) Suffice it to say, no other magazine I know of did more to expose the lies about the Vietnam War than did Ramparts under Hinckle. Hinckle also covered the JFK assassination, as he understood from his reading of the Commission volumes that something was rotten in Denmark. But further, Ramparts was one of the very few journals that covered Jim Garrison fairly.

    This unprecedented, brilliant, inspiring run all came crashing down due to internal dissension over Hinckle’s management style; mainly his perceived profligacy. After an in-house rebellion, Hinckle was out and the two new leaders were Robert Scheer and Horowitz. Horowitz then moved Scheer out and replaced him with the late Peter Collier. The approach of the magazine now changed. It became much more doctrinaire leftist, featuring writers like Alexander Cockburn, Noam Chomsky and Jonathan Kozol. It began to lose circulation. Perhaps seeing the writing on the wall, Horowitz and Collier transitioned out. They met with two members of the Rockefeller family who had backed the magazine. They now arranged temporary management for Ramparts, while they worked on their book, The Rockefellers: An American Dynasty.

    Ramparts fell in 1975. The next year, the Rockefeller book became a bestseller. The duo now wrote successful books about famous American families like the Fords, the Roosevelts and the Kennedys. Although Litwin says that Horowitz was involved in a rethinking of left-wing politics in the nineties, this is not really accurate. (Conservative Confidential, p. 20) Horowitz voted for Ronald Reagan in 1984 and he and Collier wrote an infamous article about their transformation in 1985. (See Washington Post, 3/17/85) In that article, the duo pretty thoroughly denounced everything that Ramparts ever stood for.

    David Horowitz has become a media provocateur against the Democratic Party and what he calls “the Left”—without differentiating between the two. For instance he once wrote that pipe bombs sent to Democratic politicians and CNN were false-flag operations, he supported the Alabama senatorial candidate Roy Moore, an accused pedophile, he called for the jailing of Hillary Clinton, and he was all in for Donald Trump. Through his David Horowitz Freedom Center, he has become a millionaire. (Chris Smith, California Magazine, Spring 2019)

    In Conservative Confidential Litwin describes various parallels with Horowitz. For example, in his book Litwin describes himself growing up as a Jewish socialist. He adds that he received a liberal education at Dawson College in Montreal. (p. 19) He then says he participated in left-wing activities, like anti-nuclear demonstrations, at Concordia University. Litwin seems to imply that he took his Horowitz/like right turn as a result of the 9/11 attacks. (ibid)

    There was something odd about this passage. First of all, Litwin writes near the beginning of the book that he worked on Wall Street for six years from 1985–91. (p. 14) Prior to that, he started his career on Bay Street in Toronto. (p. 18) Bay Street is the rough equivalent of Wall Street in Canada. He also spent about six years in the Far East—Singapore and Hong Kong—working for the huge computer company Intel. Today, Intel has annual revenues of about 70 billion per year and net income of about 20 billion. Was he still partaking in anti-nuke demonstrations in Hong Kong, and on Wall Street and Bay Street? While relying on his paycheck from Intel in the Far East? This is how he addresses the entire issue of his leftist activism in his nearly 20 years in the world of high finance and Intel processor sales: “This wasn’t always easy, working for The Man. But I managed.” (p.18) Since he does not describe very much at all about those years—he was in England for three years which he describes even less—it is a fair question to ask.

    III

    Litwin returned to Canada in 2000. He made his home in Ottawa and got into the music business. At this point he now describes his growing empathy for Horowitz and his writings, and then his reaction to 9/11. The explosions that took place that day inspired him to declare that Canada must stand with the USA. (p. 15) He writes that Mayor Rudy Giuliani’s actions were inspiring to him. He also adds that George W. Bush’s speech was “strong and quite moving.” (p. 17) He then says that the left’s reaction was bewildering to him. He names people like journalist Robert Fisk, author Naomi Klein and professor Michael Chossudovsky, He then of course adds Noam Chomsky. (pp. 24–34)

    If one looks carefully, there are two shell games going on in the above paragraph. From the likes of Collier and Horowitz, I am quite familiar with the technique. But one must be informed of a few facts to understand it. First, President Clinton had tried to kill Osama Bin Laden before 9/11. (Click here for details) Clinton had placed a strong emphasis on combating terrorism, and his top man on the issue, Richard Clarke, had put together a plan to do so. This was sidelined once George W. Bush got into office. Clarke was demoted. The Bush administration more or less ignored the problem, even when Clarke tried to push it on them. (Click here for details)

    After 9/11, the Bush administration fumbled an opportunity to kill Bin Laden in December of 2001 at the Battle of Tora Bora. They failed to tactically cut off his escape routes. He therefore retreated into Pakistan. It was left to Barack Obama to finally terminate him. (Click here for details)

    There is a similar underlying pattern with Litwin’s admiration for Giuliani. Once he became mayor in 1994, Rudy Giuliani was all but oblivious to the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. (Village Voice, 6/31/2007, article by Wayne Barrett) He did have one sarin gas drill in 1995, but it turned into such a disaster that he cancelled the follow up exercise. It was not until 27 months after he became mayor that Giuliani devised an Office of Emergency Management (OEM). He then placed it in Building 7 of the World Trade Center. His excuse was that he wanted to be able to walk there quickly. (ibid) He never did conduct what is called a high-rise drill; and partly because of inferior communications equipment, 121 firefighters never got out of the North Tower. Finally, as Barrett describes, no one in Giuliani’s administration had a top secret clearance on 9/11. Which is shocking in and of itself.

    After Bin Laden escaped from Tora Bora, the Bush Administration—for reasons no one understands even today—decided to invade Iraq. There is no other way to say this, even though Litwin denies it. (See Conservative Confidential, p. 54). There is little doubt that W was involved due to the Downing Street Memo. (Click here for details) But there is really no doubt Bush was directly involved with provoking the war due to the Manning Memorandum. In that one he actually talks about making up excuses to provoke a war with Iraq. (Click here for details) The Bush administration deceived the American public about the reasons for this invasion. In my opinion, and in the view of a man that Litwin liked, Vince Bugliosi, Bush should have been removed from office for this. (See Bugliosi’s book, The Prosecution of George W. Bush for Murder)

    There is no way to sugarcoat it: the assault on Iraq was the worst American foreign policy disaster since Lyndon Johnson invaded Vietnam in 1965. Even Donald Trump said so. And he used this to knock Jeb Bush out of the race in 2016. (Click here for details) The war cost about 2 trillion, and according to one credible study, took the lives of 650,00 Iraqis. (Business Insider, 2/6/2020; The Lancet, June of 2006) And it was all based on a pack of lies (i.e. the mythological WMD). But that does not even consider the blowback factor: the growing strength of al-Qaeda and the rise of ISIS.

    Try and find any of this information in Litwin’s book. I took extensive notes and I could not. Yet it is crucial in understanding the utter failure on 9/11 and afterwards. The other shell game is, of course, using people like Robert Fisk to represent “the left”and the Democratic Party. When one removes that Horowitz type chimera, its logical to conclude that the Democrats did a better job fighting terrorism than the Republicans did. But this does not fit Litwin’s new found philosophy or agenda.

    IV

    Like Horowitz, before 9/11, Litwin deplored the concept of “identity politics.” As he describes it, upon his return to Canada the nation had become “obsessed”with that subject. And the idea of “visible minorities”had become to him “a kind of mantra.” Like Collier and Horowitz, Litwin’s punchline in all this is that this concept was now a substitute for “the principle that merit should be the foremost consideration in employment….” (Litwin, Conservative Confidential, p. 20)

    As Collier and Horowitz used it, the argument about ignoring the idea of merit is what political consultants call a “wedge issue.” It appeals to the so-called “angry white man/Archie Bunker”vote. In political terms it is used to split the classic FDR coalition of working class Americans joining with minorities.

    As Litwin then writes, the nominal phrase for the formal program is affirmative action. What Litwin does not say is that John F. Kennedy was the first American president to sign an executive order in that regard. The order meant that his administration would seek out qualified minority members for hiring.

    On the day he was inaugurated, Kennedy was puzzled by the fact that, almost a hundred years after the Civil War, there were no black Americans in the Coast Guard parade. He called his Secretary of the Treasury, Douglas Dillon, and asked him to find out why. At his first Cabinet meeting, Kennedy told everyone to bring statistics about how many minority members were in each department. When he read the results he was stunned. Not only because of the extremely low numbers, but also because the numbers were mostly at the lower rungs of the employment scale. He signed his affirmative action order on March 6, 1961. He then extended it to include not just hiring, but government contracting. In other words, if you were involved with the defense industry in the south, you had to seek out minority workers, or risk closing your doors. This was the beginning of Kennedy tearing down Jim Crow Laws in the south. (Click here for details) No president had ever done anything approaching what Kennedy did on the issue before him.

    This was one of the real problems I had with the shabby Collier/Horowitz book on the Kennedy family, The Kennedys: An American Drama. With those two, whenever they talked about Bobby Kennedy trying to preserve his brother’s legacy, they would often phrase the term as “the Legacy.” (Collier and Horowitz, E book. p. 283) To make that work, they suppressed President Kennedy’s achievement in civil rights, and also his reforms from Eisenhower in foreign policy. With their monomaniacal approach, they could do that. As with his mentor, Litwin does the same with the words “progressive”and “anti-war,” except he places them in quotes. (See page 20 for an example)

    As with Collier and Horowitz, I was puzzled by what Litwin’s quotes signified. I mean, don’t some people call themselves progressive? Don’t others call themselves anti-war? What would one term Representative Ayanna Pressley? Wasn’t Eugene Debs anti-war? To the point he went to prison for that stance? One has to read what Litwin writes about Horowitz to comprehend this trope. In my view, reading Horowitz helps—at least partly—to understand the approach to all three of Litwin’s books.

    Litwin praises another book by Horowitz, this one was called Destructive Generation. That volume had the same theme as the Collier/Horowitz 1986 “Second Thoughts”conference in Washington. It was a way for them to vociferously attack everything that came out of the decade of the sixties. (James DiEugenio and Lisa Pease, The Assassinations, p. 357). With more foundation money, they then sponsored a follow up conference called “Second Thoughts on Race in America.” Like their coming out article in 1985, this was done with the cooperation of reporters and writers from The Washington Post, which, at that time was helmed by JFK’s false friend Ben Bradlee. Therefore, this conjunction made perfect sense. (Click here for details)

    In Destructive Generation, Collier and Horowitz wrote a revealing passage that pretty much laid bare their agenda:

    Just as Eisenhower’s holding pattern in the fifties led to JFK’s New Frontier liberalism in the sixties…so the clamped down Reaganism of the eighties has precipitated the current radical resurgence. (DiEugenio and Pease, p. 357)

    For me, the above distilled who these men were. How could anyone call what Eisenhower and John Foster Dulles did in the fifties a holding pattern? The overthrows of Arbenz in Guatemala, and Mossadegh in Iran, the attempted overthrow of Sukarno in Indonesia, and the eventual successful murder of Patrice Lumumba in Congo-those were holding patterns? That is pure bunk. Those were all attempts to use the CIA to stifle and destroy legitimate republics in the Third World. Was this what Litwin and Horowitz meant about standing up for freedom and liberty? It seemed to me kind of similar to the deaths of those 650,000 Iraqis.

    As per Eisenhower’s domestic policy, in my opinion its most prominent feature was its utter failure in civil rights. Eisenhower had many opportunities to finally fulfill the promise of the so-called party of Lincoln. He failed each time. He advised Earl Warren to vote negatively in the epochal Brown vs. Board Case. Which means he wanted to keep Jim Crow alive. At the crisis at Central High in Little Rock Arkansas, for three weeks he allowed the Jim Crow governor of the state, Orval Faubus, to terrorize students who were attending the school under the Brown vs Board decision. It was only after he had been humiliated by a Faubus double cross that he sent in troops to finally protect the students. In another case, Eisenhower allowed an admitted African American student, Autherine Lucy, to be literally run off the campus at the University of Alabama. (Click here for details)

    How was any of this standing up for freedom and liberty? (Litwin, p.20)

    V

    Here is the rub: It was John Kennedy who turned both of these Eisenhower stances around. It was Kennedy who was trying to stand up for liberty and freedom at home and abroad. The 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments should have granted African Americans citizenship and voting rights. Because of later Supreme Court decisions, referenced in the article above, and because of state laws, this was not the case. As noted above, President Eisenhower and Vice President Nixon had perfect opportunities to do something about Jim Crow and discrimination. They did next to nothing. In many ways what they did made the problem fester and magnify. In other words, it created a mess for President Kennedy and Attorney General Robert Kennedy. JFK ended up doing more for the cause of civil rights in less than three years, than Eisenhower, Truman and FDR did in three decades. And it wasn’t even close. (See the chart at the end of that linked article.) This was part of the legacy that Horowitz and Collier were trying to belittle.

    His very first week in office, Kennedy was attempting to reverse the Eisenhower/Nixon doctrine of undermining legitimate republics in the Third World. Not knowing that the Eisenhower/Allen Dulles attempt to kill Patrice Lumumba had ultimately succeeded, Kennedy was busy overturning that policy in order to bolster the constitutional and democratically elected Lumumba government. This included replacing the ambassador. (Richard Mahoney, JFK: Ordeal in Africa, pp. 63–65, 80) With the creation of the Alliance for Progress, he also tried to do something about the numerous CIA interventions in Latin America. (Click here for details) The Kennedy administration seriously thought of replacing the Shah of Iran in order to foster a more republican form of government there. (Robert Dreyfuss, Devil’s Game, pp. 224—25) Instead of undermining Sukarno in the Far East, Kennedy built a relationship with Indonesia which included sending economic advisors to suggest reforms in the economy. He even promised to visit Sukarno in 1964. (Greg Poulgrain, JFK vs. Allen Dulles: Battleground Indonesia, p. 257)

    Eisenhower allowing Jim Crow to persist, and undermining legitimate republics in the Third World was not standing up for liberty and freedom. To me, it was Kennedy who was standing up for liberty and freedom, both at home and abroad. But try and find any of this in the Collier/Horowitz book. When you do, please let me know. That book actually states that Kennedy was not withdrawing from Vietnam at the time of his death. (pp. 275, 279)

    The Collier/Horowitz book contains one of the oddest, most singular treatments of John Kennedy’s assassination in the literature. What makes it odd is this: They don’t describe it at all. No arrival at Love Field, no motorcade route, no shots ringing out, no race to Parkland, no announcement of Kennedy’s death by Malcolm Kilduff. In fact, they stop the story even before the trip to Texas. They close that long section of the book on President Kennedy with the impression that Kennedy was staying in Vietnam, and giving Bobby Baker—of all people—the last word on President Kennedy. (Collier and Horowitz, p. 279)

    Make no mistake, this was a cool and deliberate decision on their part. By treating it that way, and ignoring everything I have noted above, the impression left for the reader is this: Nothing happened in Dallas on November 22, 1963. Yet, to name just two instances, in about 8 months, LBJ is going to declare war on North Vietnam. And in about the same time frame, America’s policy toward Sukarno will be reversed from one of support, to one of taking covert action to remove him from office. These reversals would provoke cataclysmic results: a long and bloody war in Vietnam featuring American combat troops, something JFK would not even contemplate; and the overthrow of Sukarno, which would lead to the death of over 500,000 innocent civilians.

    To any informed person, as far as history goes, the book is a piece of junk. And it’s no coincidence that it was published the year before the duo got their feature story “Lefties for Reagan”in The Washington Post. As I have shown, the Katherine Graham/Ben Bradlee regime greatly appreciated this kind of denigration. But as far as the book’s utility went, I once pointed out what seemed to me the purpose of the volume. And also the future preoccupation of the authors: “If your function is to discredit a decade, what better way to do it than to smear the man most responsible for ushering it in.” (DiEugenio and Pease, p. 357)

    To someone like this reviewer Horowitz is now—and has been for a long time—a carnival barker, a rightwing clown. He once said:

    Obama is an anti-American radical and I’m actually sure he’s a Muslim, he certainly isn’t a Christian. He’s a pretend Christian in the same way he’s a pretend American. (8/21/14 interview on “Today’s Issues”)

    In 2001, at about the time Litwin discovered him, he said that black America should still be grateful for Lincoln winning the Civil War. This was 136 years after the war’s end. (Frontpage Magazine, 1/3/2001) But even before that he said, “If blacks are oppressed in America, why isn’t there a black exodus?” (Salon, 8/16/99)

    This was Litwin’s political savior? At least for awhile. To be fair, toward the end of Conservative Confidential, he notes that he had become disenchanted with the American rightwing because of their shortcomings on homosexuality and their extreme Islamophobia.

    VI

    The name Horowitz gave to his first foundation was the Center for the Study of Popular Culture. Based in Los Angeles, he wanted it to create a conservative presence in Movieland. The aim was to show that America’s popular culture had actually become something of a political battleground.

    This was another pattern that Litwin followed in Canada. He first tried to create a conservative book club. (Conservative Confidential, p. 54) When that did not go over very well he established both a blog and a film festival series. The first film he booked was Obsession: Islam’s War Against the West. That picture was highly praised by Glenn Beck and Sean Hannity. With just that description, and those accolades, one would wonder why Litwin calls his film group the Free Thinking Film Society. But it shows that, like Horowitz, his agenda is to influence the media by somehow portraying conservatives as being victims of a liberal media culture.

    This characteristic is particularly acute in his attacks on the Canadian Broadcast Corporation. (Conservative Confidential, Chapter 7) The ferocity of his attack on the CBC had me thinking that it had some kind of monopoly on broadcasting in Canada. And Canadians were having it forced down their throats against their will. So I called up Len Osanic to ask him if such was the case. It wasn’t. Len informed me that the vast majority of Canada has cable TV. And the outlying frontier areas have satellite. I also learned that streaming is becoming a market e.g. Hulu. What this means is simple: Canadians pick their package of channels they wish to view. Len told me that in Vancouver, his system allows you to choose fifty channels on the first tier. You can chose more, for a premium, on the second tier. In other words, one does not even have to choose the CBC. Len also told me that Fox is available, along with Discovery and the History Channel. (Osanic interview 2/10/21)

    When I was informed of this, I now discovered another pattern with Litwin. Like American right wingers, he wants the public to have a limited choice of what they can see. The reason he has it out for the CBC is simple, he does not think they are fair to Israel, and he really does not like the fact that they present the view that the JFK case was likely a conspiracy. (I Was a Teenage JFK Conspiracy Freak, p. 188)

    The Fifth Estate is the CBC’s equivalent of Sixty Minutes. Litwin blistered the show for having Jeff Morley on for an interview. (Click here for details) In fact, in addition to not wanting anyone to think LBJ made serious changes in Kennedy’s foreign policy, he also wants the reader to think that there has been no important information declassified by the Review Board. (Ibid, p. 193) In other words, there was nothing to see in the two million pages of documents declassified by the ARRB. And there was evidently nothing to see in the many interviews for the ARRB medical investigation. As I showed in the first part of this review, critiquing Litwin’s first book on the JFK case, this is simply not accurate, not by a long shot. Litwin can deny it from here until eternity but the ARRB inquiry helped redefine the core evidence in the JFK case.

    In the USA, this rightwing pressure eventually worked. The last two JFK specials that PBS produced, “Who was Lee Harvey Oswald?”in 1993 on Frontline, and “Cold Case JFK”on Nova in 2013, were attempts to revive the bloody corpse of the Warren Report. The problem was that they were both false at their foundations. (Click here for a review of the 2013 show) As Pat Speer has demonstrated, what they did in 1993 with the fingerprint evidence was simply a disgrace. (Click here and scroll down) I would hope that the Powers that Be in Ottawa are not influenced by the likes of Litwin.

    To understand Fred Litwin one must understand his entire political calculus. It’s not easy to do. Conservative Confidential is one of the most boring books ever composed. For the same reason that Horowitz’s books are so dull. Like most propaganda, they are repetitive and predictable. Once one understands the game being played, one sees how limited and constricted the data and analysis is. And one can also understand that there will be no intellectual elucidation from the exercise. For anyone who knows the JFK case, Litwin’s two books are not just boring, they are rather insulting. Since they assume the reader is ignorant or stupid. Thus is usually the case with Culture Warriors like Bill O’Reilly. On those grounds Litwin’s work is completely disposable, not even worth purchasing.

    But I want to close this series with a message not just about Fred Litwin, but about Paul Hoch. He, like Walt Brown, has always had the hatchet out for Garrison. Brown likes to call Garrison “a loser.” My question to Walt would be, who has ever “won”anything on the JFK case. Certainly not the Warren Commission; neither did the final phase of the HSCA; we now know the ARRB was also played. Inversely, I would also refer the reader to Brown’s bandying about the alleged Mac Wallace fingerprint evidence at the 40th anniversary of JFK’s death. He walked into the Dallas Police station, telling anyone who would listen that somehow the case could be reopened. He then went on Nigel Turner’s The Men Who Killed Kennedy series and said he could go into court with that evidence. As we all know today, under stringent forensic testing, that piece of evidence turned out to be ersatz. (Click here for details) This is the guy who called Garrison a “loser.”

    Hoch’s excuse for his vitriol was that there was a movement to create a congressional committee to investigate the JFK case in 1966. Garrison’s inquiry sidelined it. This disregards the fact that there was a congressional committee appointed about ten years later. As I have noted in this review, we know what happened to it. We also know that Hoch’s comments to Litwin on the work of Vincent Guinn and Tom Canning are provable malarkey. But beyond that, the HSCA was set up without J. Edgar Hoover, Dick Helms and James Angleton in power. Does any objective person think the results would have been different with those three men in power? I would like to hear the argument for that.

    As I have noted elsewhere, if anyone can show me anything of value that Hoch has produced on this case in the last 30 years, I would like to see it. His comments on the critics in the rough cut of Max Good’s film on Ruth Paine are, to me, a bit repulsive. In addition to that, his associations with people opposing the critics are notable. He would usually explain this by saying that he offers “help”to anyone.

    According to Litwin, that is not what happened with his book on Jim Garrison. On the (unnumbered) page 335, Litwin writes that Hoch “has patiently reviewed my book and notes and his suggestions have improved the book considerably.” In other words, Hoch served as an editor for On the Trail of Delusion. Not only did the alleged critic have no problem with the text, he approved the references to archives like those of Dick Billings and Irvin Dymond. He apparently felt no necessity to qualify the result. Which I have spent over 50 pages exposing as literary rubbish. To any objective person, if one needed any more proof, this should finish Hoch as being any kind of a critic.

    I will never be in the same room with Paul Hoch again.

    Click here for Fred Litwin, On the Trail of Delusion – Part Three.

  • Deconstructing JFK: A Coup d’État over Foreign Policy?

    Deconstructing JFK: A Coup d’État over Foreign Policy?

    Read Jim’s article at CovertAction magazine.

  • Nasser, Kennedy, the Middle East, and Israel

    Nasser, Kennedy, the Middle East, and Israel

    For decades, the critical community overlooked areas of Kennedy’s foreign policy outside of Vietnam and Cuba. KennedysandKing has attempted to correct that oversight in recent years. We have tried to educate our readers on issues like Kennedy’s policies in Congo, Indonesia, Dominican Republic, and Laos. We have also tried to show how, after his murder, those policies—as well as his policy toward Vietnam and his attempts at detente with Moscow and Havana—were also altered.

    But there is still another area of the world about which Kennedy’s reformist foreign policy is overlooked. That area is the Middle East. This is odd since many commentators justifiably perceive that the Middle East is one of the most important areas on the globe. It is a geographic sector which, for decades, has been looked upon as something like a tinder box. A tinder box that has gotten even more potentially explosive, because, after Kennedy’s assassination, both Israel and Pakistan acquired atomic weapons. As we shall see, Kennedy was greatly opposed to any more countries acquiring these devices. This was not the policy of the presidents who followed.

    Perhaps the best way to approach this subject is to define the phrase used above: reformist foreign policy. That phrase can only be rendered into practical form by showing what preceded Kennedy and to then demonstrate how he attempted to alter that which preceded him. Under President Eisenhower, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles was pretty much allowed to steward foreign policy. (A difference with Kennedy, since JFK largely ran his own foreign policy.) Dulles followed Truman’s Secretary of State, Dean Acheson. As strong a cold warrior as Acheson was, John Foster Dulles was probably even worse.

    For example, as discussed in my four-part review of the Ken Burns/Lynn Novick 18-hour mediocrity, The Vietnam War, it was Acheson who made the initial American commitment to the French in their struggle to retake Vietnam after World War II. (Click here for that critique) From 1948–50, the United States had more or less a neutralist policy towards Indochina. If anything, we were trying to persuade France to grant Vietnam independence under a nationalist leader. The State Department also found that there was no compelling evidence of the Soviets influencing Ho Chi Minh, the man who was then leading the struggle for independence in Vietnam. (Pentagon Papers, Vol. 1, p. A-6)

    American policy changed in 1950. It was caused by the fact that France now transferred administrative functions not to a nationalist leader, but to Bao Dai, the veteran French puppet in Indochina. This angered Ho Chi Minh, as he knew what was coming next. And at this point Ho’s Democratic Republic of Vietnam was formally recognized by China and Russia. (Ibid, p. A-7) In reaction to that recognition, Acheson decided to alter America’s neutralist policy. In May of 1950, Acheson agreed to the first French request for American financial aid to Bao Dai. Later that year, America stationed a Military Assistance Advisory Group in Saigon to provide support to the French effort to salvage their colonial empire. (ibid, p. A-8) In other words, knowing what the true facts were, Acheson decided that standing by a European ally during the Cold War was more important than siding with Third World nationalism. Even though, as I noted in my Burns/Novick critique, Franklin Roosevelt wanted former colonies to be able to choose their form of government after World War II. Roosevelt was a Democrat and Acheson was serving a Democratic president, Harry Truman.

    John Foster Dulles’ Cold War attitudes were even more extreme, since they were amplified by an almost mystical religiosity. And unlike Acheson, Foster Dulles would not even seriously consider a doctrine of neutrality towards the Third World. (Robert Rakove, Kennedy, Johnson, and the Nonaligned World, pp. 5–8) Under Foster Dulles and Dwight Eisenhower, the aid to France increased exponentially. It is common knowledge that by the last year of the French civil war, that is 1954, America was supplying nearly 80% of France’s military costs. In fact, as John Prados has noted in his book Operation Vulture, Dulles put together a plan to save the French garrison at Dien Bien Phu by way of a huge air armada and the planned use of atomic weapons. When Eisenhower backed out of the operation due to his failure to get British cooperation, Foster Dulles himself offered the atomic bombs to the French foreign minister, who respectfully declined. (David Talbot, The Devil’s Chessboard, p. 245) As the reader knows, after Dien Bien Phu fell, Eisenhower and Foster Dulles decided to split Vietnam in two. This move necessitated Allen Dulles inserting the CIA into Vietnam, in large part at the employ of General Edward Lansdale.

    America now assumed the role the French had played previously. And the American-educated Catholic, Ngo DInh Diem, became America’s version of Bao Dai: our puppet run by the CIA and Lansdale. To show what a dyed-in-the-wool Cold Warrior Foster Dulles was, around this point, in 1957, he made this startling statement: “We have a clean base there now, without a taint of colonialism. Dien Bien Phu was a blessing in disguise.” (Emmett John Hughes, The Ordeal of Power, p. 208)

    II

    As Acheson and Dulles were paving the way for an epic tragedy through their Cold War maneuvering in Indochina, Senator John Kennedy was doing something different. He was trying to find an alternative way to navigate the troubled Cold War straits, one that resisted the spread of communism, but encouraged the flow of nationalist decolonization movements. In 1951, on a visit to Saigon, he began questioning America’s growing involvement in Indochina as an exemplar of the mushrooming Cold War. At that point, while still a congressman, he began to doubt whether France was going to win the war. Also, if France lost, was the United States going to replace her as the imperial power on the scene. (Click here for an excellent precis of Kennedy’s attitudes on the subject)

    After much thought and analysis, Kennedy concluded that what Acheson and Dulles had designed in Indochina—and what Foster Dulles had extended throughout the globe with his string of foreign treaties such as SEATO, CENTO etc.—was flawed and short-sighted. This is why, when the book The Ugly American became a best seller, Kennedy purchased a hundred copies and sent one to each of his colleagues in the senate. That 1958 novel was a thinly disguised portrayal of America’s growing crisis in Vietnam. It depicted the main cause of the crisis as the incompetence and insensitivity of the State Department to the desires and aspirations of the native population. In fact, the publishing company used the advertising line that the book was an expose of how America was losing the Cold War. (Rakove, p. 23) Kennedy thought the book was aimed at the misguided, overweening anti-communism of Foster Dulles and Eisenhower. As the book’s authors tried to show, there was a way to fight the Cold War without resorting to atomic threats or backing brutal dictators. And if that was all the United States had to offer, she might as well just stay home. (ibid)

    Many of the leaders of these Third World countries were upset and apprehensive at what the Eisenhower administration had done in the name of anti-communism in Iran in 1953 and Guatemala in 1954. To put it mildly, the citizens of those two countries were not better off after Foster Dulles and Eisenhower decided to have CIA Director Allen Dulles covertly overthrow their popularly elected leaders. In fact, in direct response to those two actions, some of the leaders of these independent nations decided to call a conference and start a movement. This took place in April of 1955 at the city of Bandung in Indonesia. The two key organizers were Sukarno of Indonesia and Nehru of India. The general idea for the conference was that human rights should be honored throughout the world and the sovereignty and territorial integrity of all nations should be obeyed. Thirdly, that new nations had the right to trade with and have dealings with any other country they chose. Finally, if international disputes arise they should be dealt with peacefully and in conformity with the charter of the United Nations. This was the beginning of what was called the Nonaligned Movement.

    As author Robert Rakove has noted, neither John Foster Dulles, nor Dean Rusk looked upon the conference with affection or sympathy. In fact, Foster Dulles thought of staging his own conference to counter Bandung. Rusk, then at the Ford Foundation, looked at this idea with favor. Rusk said of the leaders at Bandung, “Some of these fellows were just plain rascals.” (Rakove, p. 52) Kennedy disagreed. He looked at these leaders as the wave of the future. (Philip Muehlenbeck, Betting on the Africans, p. xviii) Once he got to the White House, he wanted to deal with them and he did. One of the leaders at that conference was Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt. In fact, Egypt hosted what many historians see as the follow-up to Bandung: the Cairo Conference of 1957.

    Nasser did this after telling John Foster Dulles he would not join the Baghdad Pact (which eventually became CENTO). He told Dulles he could not join any organization that included the United Kingdom as a silent partner, since they were the largest colonial empire in the world. If he did such a thing, he would lose his stature in both Egypt and the Arab world. Philip Muehlenbeck wrote, “Clearly Nasser feared losing domestic popular support and being labeled as a ‘sellout’ or ‘western stooge’ unless he took a strong anti-British line.” (Muehlenbeck, p. 11)

    III

    Kennedy consciously rejected the similar paths taken by Acheson and Foster Dulles. For example, he told Harris Wofford prior to his nomination for the presidency that they had to win in Los Angeles, because if either Stuart Symington or Lyndon Johnson took the nomination it would just be more of Dulles/Acheson. He went on as follows:

    The key thing for the country is a new foreign policy that will break out of the confines of the Cold War. Then we can build a decent relationship with developing nations and begin to respond to their needs. We can stop the vicious circle of the arms race and promote diversity and peaceful change within the Soviet Bloc. (Muehlenbeck, p. 37)

    As the reader can see from above, Kennedy did not limit his approach to the African/Asian countries emerging from colonialism. He also wanted to promote American aid to those nations in the Eastern Bloc. (The Strategy of Peace, by John F. Kennedy, pp. 82–98) As George Ball, a Kennedy advisor in the State Department said, JFK wanted to alter the dynamic of American foreign policy. He thought that what Foster Dulles had done was to cede the decolonization issue to the Soviets. And by doing that, America had given an advantage to Moscow because they were now perceived as being for independence and nationalism. (Muehlenbeck, p. xiv)

    Nasser fit into Kennedy’s new calculus in a basic, but visionary, manner. In 1957, Kennedy gave his milestone speech on Algeria in front of a (virtually) empty senate. It did not matter that almost no one was there. That speech was so compelling, far-sighted, and harshly critical of the White House that it still created a mini-sensation in Washington and throughout the country. It essentially said that the administration was dead wrong in standing by France in its attempt to stop the secession of Algeria from the French commonwealth. We were on the wrong side of history. And what was going to happen in Algeria was the same thing that had just occurred three years prior in Vietnam.

    But there is a small section of that speech that has been overlooked. In fact, I myself had missed it until I read the speech for the third time back in 2013. Kennedy stated that the USA, instead of aiding France in its doomed war, should be starting exchange programs in Algeria in different fields, including education. That would help Algeria build up a civil servant class. And also tradesman and professionals and this could lead to “progress, stability, and good will.” He then followed that passage with this:

    In these days, we can help fulfill a great and promising opportunity to show the world that a new nation, with an Arab heritage, can establish itself in the Western tradition and successfully withstand both the pull towards Arab feudalism and fanaticism and the pull toward Communist authoritarianism. (Kennedy, p. 75, italics added)

    Kennedy had studied for this speech and knew Algeria was a predominantly Muslim country. The work he did is revealed by the follow up article published on the subject in Foreign Affairs magazine. (October, 1957, pp. 44–59) He understood that there was something of a tug of war going on in the Middle East. To Kennedy, John Foster Dulles had miscalculated the dynamics of that struggle.

    Nasser was a secularist leader who led a republic and had developed many socialist policies in Egypt, including land reform. He was also the most popular and charismatic leader in the Middle East and Arab world. This is remarkable since Nasser was not a fundamentalist. (Click here for a video)

    In fact, as he noted in the speech above, Nasser had tried to deal with the extremist Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, but he found them unreasonable to the point that they had planned several assassination plots against his government. Therefore, in 1954, he decided to go to war with that group. The Egyptian legal authorities arrested several leaders, raided their mosques, and stripped some of them of citizenship. This culminated in an assassination attempt by the Brotherhood against Nasser in October. That caused a fatal reprisal by Nasser. Thousands of members were arrested, many got long prison terms, and several were hanged. (Robert Dreyfuss, Devil’s Game, pp. 103–04)

    But there was a complicating factor behind Nasser’s war with those who advocated Muslim states and Sharia Law in the Arab world. First, the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt owed its start to the British, through a grant from the Suez Canal Company. And the British would use the Brotherhood as a counter to nationalists and communists in Egypt. (Dreyfuss, p.47) Second, the Brotherhood was later financed by Saudi Arabia. As Robert Dreyfuss has written, what Nasser opposed—a pan Islamic state—was begun by the cleric Jamal Eddine al-Afghani. He proposed it to the British and they helped sponsor his movement, turning him into a 19th century Islamic version of Pat Robertson. (Dreyfuss, p. 20) As Dreyfuss also noted, it was Afghani’s ideas which gave rise to Hasan al-Banna, who formally began the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt in 1928. This was years after Afghani had offered to go to Egypt as a British intelligence agent. (Dreyfuss, p. 20)

    The reader might ask: why would the British do such a thing in the Middle East? First, because at that time—through its financing of the Suez Canal—Egypt was an imperial appendage of England. And, therefore, England believed that the Islamists would work as a counterweight to nationalistic and revolutionary movements, both in Egypt and throughout the Middle East. (Dreyfuss, pp. 27–28) As Dreyfuss also notes, and it’s a key point, this fundamentalist messaging was new at the time. As he writes in Devil’s Game, “Not in centuries had Muslims heard a challenge to renew their societies according to the methods of the early caliphs.” (p. 30)

    The other reason that developed to favor British support was monetary. They began to realize that there was a wealth of petroleum lying under Middle East sand. (Dreyfuss, pp. 35–36). They then reasoned that it would be easier to deal with the states that had oil if they stayed Islamic monarchies than if they were transformed into secular, nationalist, republics. The United Kingdom was willing to do this even if it meant actually allying itself with the extreme form of Islam practiced in Arabia called Wahhabism. These Muslims were almost demonic zealots pledged to their belief in Islamic fundamentalism. And the Muslim Brotherhood had roots in Ibn Saud’s organization of the most militant wing of his followers. The first formal treaty between England and Saudi Arabia was signed in 1915. (Dreyfuss, pp. 38–39)

    IV

    With this background, the reader can see how someone like Nasser could pose a threat to England. Because he did turn Egypt into a secular, nationalist republic. He then became a hero throughout the Middle East, when he nationalized the Suez Canal. But beyond that, what the British and the USA really feared was that Nasser could create a pan Arab league which would then utilize the massive amounts of oil and cash to turn the Middle East into an area of productivity, education, and republics. That is how insanely appealing Nasser was to the Arab world. To use one example, Prince Talal of Saudi Arabia defected to Egypt and demanded a republic be established in Arabia. (Dreyfuss, pp. 97–99)

    On July 26, 1956, Nasser announced he was nationalizing the Suez Canal. This triggered meetings at the United Nations in order to stave off desperate measures by the co-builders and operators of the canal, England and France. Foster Dulles tried to arrange a deal within the Security Council. Prime Minister Anthony Eden of England was particularly virulent in his hatred of Nasser and discounted any UN conciliation. Eden now joined France and Israel—which looked upon Nasser as a formidable Arab nemesis—to stage an assault on Egypt. This was called the Suez Crisis. It began on October 28, 1956, with Israel crossing the Sinai to take the canal. President Eisenhower was not informed of this attack. (Leonard Mosley, Dulles, pp. 412–15) Eisenhower then got confirmation that the Israeli land invasion had been complemented by a British air strike on Nasser’s air force. Foster Dulles subsequently informed the president that both the British and French had sent battleships and troop carriers across the Mediterranean toward Egypt. (Mosley, pp. 418–19)

    Eisenhower was quite upset about all this being done behind his back. And Eden later said it was a mistake to launch the assault without directly consulting with Ike. (Mosley, p. 412) Foster Dulles now flew to New York to address the General Assembly, bypassing the Security Council where France or England could veto the resolution. He condemned the invasion of Egypt in the harshest terms and demanded a resolution demanding it be halted. This passed overwhelmingly. (Mosley, p. 423)

    During the crisis, Nasser had blocked the canal by sinking the ships in the waterway. (Mosley, p. 424). He emerged from this crisis more wildly popular than ever.

    But Foster Dulles had an erratic posture toward Nasser. The Secretary of State did not like Nasser’s support for Algerian independence or his recognition of China. And just before the Suez Crisis began, Foster Dulles pulled American support for the Aswan Dam to be built on the Nile. Some commentators think this is what caused the crisis, since Nasser now needed another source of income to build the dam. (Rakove, p. 11)

    As many commentators have noted, the end of the Suez Crisis was a golden opportunity to make amends with Nasser. That did not happen. And Nasser now turned to the USSR for aid in building Aswan. Also, in January of 1957, the White House announced the Eisenhower Doctrine. This allowed foreign countries to ask not for aid, but for American direct intervention in the face of a Soviet threat. It was motivated by growing influence in Syria and Egypt by Russia following the Suez Crisis and, also, because Nasser was now the undisputed leader of pan-Arab sentiments in the Middle East. (Muehlenbeck, pp. 13–16) Dulles’ policy was so schizoid toward Nasser in 1956 that some authors have concluded that he had tricked Eden. And this was the real reason America had done what it did during Suez. In a personal visit with the British prime minister, Eden had clearly hinted to Dulles an intervention was coming in Egypt. But Dulles told him he did not want to hear the specifics. By not telling Ike about the unnamed impending action, Dulles was able to take advantage of the president’s anger. And this allowed him to teach England a lesson: America was now in the driver’s seat and England was a passenger. (Mosley, pp. 424–25)

    But then Foster Dulles and Eisenhower did something even more inexplicable. Foster Dulles once told the National Security Council, “Although Nasser is not as dangerous as Hitler was, he relies on the same hero myth and we must try to deflate that myth.”  Vice President Nixon, as he usually did, warned the NSC that Nasser’s influence could facilitate communist influence in Africa.

    Eisenhower later wrote that he feared Nasser becoming “an Arab dictator controlling the Mediterranean”. (Muehlenbeck, p. 14) In order to counteract Nasser’s appeal to secular nationalism, they now turned to King Saud of Saudi Arabia. Eisenhower wrote to Foster Dulles: “If we could build Saud up as the individual to capture the imagination of the Arab world, Nasser would not last long.”  When Saud visited Washington in 1957, Eisenhower got him to agree to the principles of the Eisenhower Doctrine, which Nasser would not go along with. (Muehlenbeck, p. 15)

    In fact, one reason for the formulation of the doctrine was to try and curb Nasser’s influence in places like Jordan and Lebanon. Nasser understood this also. He said it was an attempt to isolate Egypt, thereby, “Accomplishing the aims of the Suez aggression by peaceful means.” (ibid) But if the goal was to distract from Nasser, the choice of Saud was as unwise as backing Ngo Dinh Diem against Ho Chi Minh. A longtime diplomat in the area characterized Saud as “weak, stupid and corrupt” and surrounded by Levantine courtiers. On top of his lack of understanding of the modern world, Saud was also personally dissolute: a drunk and a sex addict. He had countless children from a string of wives and concubines. So not only did he not appeal to those who advocated Arab nationalism and republicanism, he could not really appeal to the religious fundamentalists. (Dreyfuss, p. 122) But yet, that is what Eisenhower and Dulles were trying to do, to the point of conducting talks with close advisors to Saud. One of whom plotted to assassinate Nasser. But we must also note the following: Saudi Arabia was actively using its immense wealth to spread and sanction the Muslim Brotherhood worldwide. In other words, a terrorist fundamentalist group which advocated for Sharia law. (Dreyfuss, pp. 124–25) In a page right out of The Ugly American, America was ready to jump in bed with anyone who opposed nationalism, republicanism, and socialism.

    V

    As he did in most areas, John Kennedy devised much of his policy in opposition to what Eisenhower and Foster Dulles advocated for and acted upon. He was opposed to the landing of Marines in Lebanon in 1958 and the USA essentially allowing a military takeover there. (Click here for details) He and his brother also did not like what had happened in Iran, with the Shah essentially running a royalist dictatorship. The Kennedy administration held an internal debate over whether or not to try and help a nationalist government displace Shah Reza Pahlavi. (Dreyfuss, p. 225)

    But where Kennedy thought Foster Dulles had really screwed up was with Nasser. In his opinion, Foster Dulles had left Nasser with little choice but to go to the Soviets for partial funding of Aswan. During the 1960 campaign, Kennedy explicitly criticized Eisenhower on this issue. He said that Washington had to find a way to “recognize the force of Arab nationalism” and to “channel it along constructive lines.” (Muehlenbeck, p. 124). He also added this:

    But if we can learn from the lessons of the past—if we can refrain from pressing our case so hard that the Arabs feel their neutrality and nationalism are threatened, the Middle East can become an area of strength and hope. (ibid)

    As with other areas of the globe, Kennedy felt he could compete with the USSR in the Middle East. But he could only do so by working with Nasser rather than ostracizing him. Kennedy immediately set out to mend fences with the Pan Arabist. First, he appointed Dr. John Badeau as the American ambassador to Egypt. Badeau spoke Arabic, had been the head of the Near East Foundation, and probably knew more about Egypt than any other American. Kennedy then appointed Robert Komer to the NSC and made him a specialist in Middle East affairs. Komer was an efficient and loquacious bureaucrat who advocated for furthering a relationship with Nasser and was not beholden to Israel in disputes between the two. Finally, Kennedy told National Security Advisor McGeorge Bundy that he should put the question of better relations with Egypt near the top of the foreign policy agenda of the New Frontier. (Muehlenbeck, pp, 124–25).

    As the reader can see, as with another country in Africa, Congo, Kennedy pretty much broke with what had come before him. The president now began to exchange correspondence with Nasser on controversial areas of the world, like Cuba, Congo, and Palestine. As Badeau later wrote, “…the success of President Kennedy’s dealings with Arab leaders was the clarity and frankness with which he spoke and wrote to them…always in a spirit of respect and equality.” (ibid, p. 127)

    In September of 1961, the new relationship underwent its first crisis. The United Arab Republic, Egypt’s union with Syria, was broken up by the military. Nasser suspected this was done at the instigation of the CIA, which had previously plotted against him. Badeau tried to assure him that the USA was not involved. And Kennedy swiftly went to work to make the break up less jarring. He refused to recognize the new government in Syria until Nasser was ready to do so. Secondly, he requested both more aid and a large loan to Egypt to cushion the impact of the split. (Muehlenbeck, pp. 127–28). These two moves were effective in establishing a further rapport with Nasser. In fact, by late 1962, when Kennedy decided to sell surface to air missiles to Israel, he told Nasser about it in advance of any public notice. Nasser did not like the sale, but his respect for Kennedy and his appreciation of the heads up, stopped any formal or public protests against it.

    Kennedy also made it clear that he did not like having to deal with the dissolute Saud and his extremist monarchy. For him, Nasser represented the hopes and aspirations of Arab nationalism. He was the reformer who could lead into a new and different future. Consequently, JFK wanted to disconnect America from the relic of the past, namely the Saud family. This was demonstrated in the fall of 1962, when the monarch was in a Boston hospital.  Kennedy deliberately did not go to Hyannnis Port at this time. After the king was released, he rented a home in Palm Beach, fifteen minutes from the Kennedy compound in Florida. Still, Kennedy did not want to visit the man. Finally, the State Department insisted Kennedy visit the ruler of Saudi Arabia. Even at that, on the way over, he kept on telling his driver, “What am I doing calling on this guy?” (Muehlenbeck, pp. 133–34)

    By late 1962, the State Department had agreed that Kennedy’s effort to heal the rift with Nasser had largely succeeded. This policy had forestalled Soviet gains in Egypt and Syria, he had reoriented trade in both places toward the West, and Nasser had agreed to keep the Palestine issue from gumming up relations. (Muelhenbeck, p. 134)

    But something had now erupted in the area, which was about to disrupt the growing friendship. Similar to today, there was a war in Yemen. Today, the opponents are really Saudi Arabia and Iran and the war is fought through their proxies. In 1962, the war broke out because of the overthrow of the royal monarchy by a republican force. Quite naturally, Saudi Arabia supported the former and Nasser supported the latter. Egypt even sent ground troops. In addition to Saudi Arabia, the royalists were supported by Jordan (a monarchy), England, and significant for this essay, Israel. In defiance of London’s specific request, Kennedy declared he was backing Nasser and his desire to turn Yemen into a republic. (Muehlenbeck, p. 135) This was another example of Kennedy forsaking a European ally in order to forge a bond in the Third World.

    The problem was that Saudi Arabia saw this as an opportunity to drive a wedge between Kennedy and Nasser, who they despised. Therefore, they had no intention of negotiating for a truce, much less a peace settlement. Both British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan and Israel’s foreign minister, Golda Meir, tried to influence Kennedy to withdraw his backing of Nasser in Yemen. Kennedy decided to send Ellsworth Bunker to start negotiations. Bunker had a personal letter from Kennedy with him which he gave to Nasser. He reminded the Egyptian leader of how much he had withstood in order to back him and how much was now on the line. Kennedy was clearly frustrated by the failure to secure a truce either by Bunker or through the UN. (Muehlenbeck, p. 137)

    VI

    The other problem Kennedy had in his pro-Nasser approach was with Israel. Perhaps the only group of people who disliked Nasser more than the Muslim Brotherhood were the leaders of Israel. In 1954, Israel had commissioned a false flag bombing operation against Nasser, which is today called the Lavon Affair, after Israel’s then Minister of Defense Pinhas Lavon. In 1956, prior to the Suez Crisis, then Prime Minister David Ben Gurion was open about what he wanted Israel to get from the defeat of Nasser: the elimination of Jordan as a state, the East Bank would go to Iraq as the home for the Palestinians, the West Bank would be annexed by Israel, expansion of Israeli borders into south Lebanon, and annexation of parts of the Sinai (Patrick Tyler, Fortress Israel, pp. 82–83) But after the failure of the operation, UN Secretary General Dag Hammarskjold brought in a large peacekeeping force, in order to maintain the previous borders. In one of his first disagreements with Ben Gurion, Kennedy wanted this peacekeeping force strengthened,and he wanted no intervention by Israel in Jordan. (NSC memo by Robert Komer to JFK of 12/22/62; Samuel Belk memo to McGeorge Bundy of 8/23/63; Kennedy memo to Tel Aviv of 5/1/63)

    It is very clear from the cable traffic that the Israelis knew about Kennedy’s communications with Nasser. It is also clear that they did not like it and took every opportunity to demonize the Egyptian leader to Kennedy. This went as far as comparing Nasser with Adolf Hitler and saying that if Egypt were to win a war with Israel, Nasser would do to the Jews what the Third Reich did to them in Eastern Europe. (5/12/63 letter from Ben Gurion to Kennedy; memo of meeting between Kennedy and Ben Gurion of 5/5/30/61)

    From the partly declassified record secured by researcher Malcolm Blunt, Kennedy took this in stride and considered it to be boilerplate. In fact, at a press conference on May 8, 1963, Kennedy encouraged progress in the region as a whole,and this included acceptance of the aspirations of the Arab population for unity. (State Department cable of May 9, 1963) Kennedy then wrote a letter to Nasser and acknowledged the problems he was having with Israel. But added that this would not deter him from pursuing his relationship with Egypt. He then wrote that he would not oppose Nasser’s attempt to form a Pan Arab union. He closed by saying that Nasser could be reassured against any Israeli expansionism in the region. (Letter sent to Badeau in May of 1963)

    But not only were the Israeli leaders anti-Nasser per se, they looked askance at the idea of Pan Arabism. In a two for one sale, they tried to smear the movement by labeling it “Nasserism”. (State Department meeting with Israeli Minister of Education Abba Eban of 5/7/63) This is a key point for the future and the reader should keep it in mind as we progress.

    As anyone who followed the career of Prime Minister David Ben Gurion and his foreign minister Golda Meir would know, fundamentally they were opposed to negotiating with the Palestinians or with a third party representing the Palestinians. This was over the Palestinian homeland issue, in general, and the refugee dilemma, in particular. For instance, when asked during the 1948 war what should be done with the Palestinian population, Ben Gurion looked at his military commander Yitzhak Rabin and waved his hand in the air. (New York Times, October 23, 1979, story by David Shipler) In 1937, in a letter to his son, Ben Gurion had written, “We must expel Arabs and take their place.” (Journal of Palestine Studies, Vol. 41 No.2, pp. 245–50) Once he was in power, in 1948 during the Nakba, as quoted in Michael Bar Zohar’s biography, Ben Gurion had written in his diary that the Palestinian refugees should never return to Israel. (p. 148)

    Kennedy had a problem with this. He did want the refugees to return—and he even went beyond that. As a special envoy for the United Nations, Joseph Johnson had devised a plan in this regard. The United Nations would sponsor a program which would give the refugees a three-sided choice:

    1. They could stay where they were
    2. They could move elsewhere outside of Israel
    3. They could return to their homes in Israel prior to the Nakba

    The United Nations would pay the bill if they chose the last two options. Kennedy had backed this option plan even before it was officially stated by the UN. But it had been rejected by Ben Gurion in a cable to Secretary of State Dean Rusk. (January 24, 1963) What is remarkable about Kennedy in this regard is that, through his ambassador to Israel, Kennedy was still fighting for it into May of 1963. And at that May meeting, both Ben Gurion and Meir were in attendance.

    VII

    The other major issue Kennedy had with Israel was, of course, over the atomic reactor at Dimona. Again, when one studies the life and career of Ben Gurion, one can see that he wanted atomic weapons for Israel for decades on end. He once said that, “What Einstein, Oppenheimer, and Teller—the three of them are Jews—made for the United States, could also be done in Israel for their own people.” (Jeffrey Goldberg, The Atlantic, September, 2010) He felt that this was necessary especially in the case of the rise to power of someone like Nasser. As Zachary Keck wrote in The National Interest, this dated back to the founding of Israel in 1948:

    Ben Gurion viewed nuclear weapons as a last resort for ensuring the survival of the Jewish state in case its enemies used their much larger populations and economies to build conventionally superior militaries. (4/4/2018)

    Ben Gurion and the other Israeli leaders were so devoted to this aim that they resorted to two illicit means in order to secure the goal. First—there is no other way to say this—they involved themselves in a government-wide conspiracy to deceive Kennedy about the true nature of the Dimona reactor. Israel already had a small reactor in place at Soreq in the Negev Desert. This was legitimately used for research purposes and for energy in 1956 under the auspices of the Israel Atomic Energy Commission. It could not produce weapons grade plutonium.

    But, in 1958, Israel began building a much larger reactor nearby. At the beginning of construction, they were aided by France. This was seen as a favor by the French in return for Israeli cooperation in the plot to invade Egypt and dethrone Nasser during the Suez Crisis. Eventually the French pulled out when they concluded that the aim of the reactor was to produce weapons grade plutonium. After this, France discovered that Ben Gurion was trying to buy uranium from both Gabon and the Union of South Africa. (Cable from State in Paris to Dean Rusk, 8/14/63)

    Once Kennedy began receiving information like this—and from more than one source—he suspected he was being lied to. He was correct. In the cables and correspondence secured by Malcolm Blunt, this author noted six different instances where Kennedy, or his direct representative, was assured by Ben Gurion, Meir, or Abba Eban that Dimona was not designed to produce atomic weapons.

    I should note something for the record here before proceeding. Kennedy had been harshly opposed to Foster Dulles attempting to use atomic weapons in 1954 at Dien Bien Phu. He had tried to attain a test ban treaty with the Soviets and succeeded in 1963. Roger Mattson, an authority on DImona, has written that no president—before or since—was more opposed to nuclear proliferation than Kennedy. (Mattson, Stealing the Atom Bomb, pp. 38–40, 256) Therefore, Kennedy was not singling out Israel. He was simply and strongly against the spread of atomic weapons. Period. Consequently, he requested inspections of Dimona.

    To say that Israel was slow to respond and rather reluctant to allow full inspections is severely understating the case. Israel allowed two visits under Kennedy, one in 1961 and one in 1962. Each was about forty minutes in length and the inspectors were not given full access to the plant. (Memo from Robert Komer to Kennedy, 12/12/62) What made this worse was the fact that the State Department had told Nasser that Dimona was being built for peaceful purposes. (Cable from State in Cairo to Rusk, 4/25/63)

    In early summer of 1963, National Security Advisor McGeorge Bundy and Under Secretary of State George Ball joined Komer in his disdain for the mendacity and unfairness of what Israel was doing. On May 10, 1963, Kennedy sent a letter to Ben Gurion expressing his frustration at the state of affairs. He said Tel Aviv had not responded to a request for regular inspections. This puzzled him, since no other country in the Middle East was even close to being able to produce highly enriched uranium or weapons grade plutonium. He closed the letter with something no other president, before or since, had done with Israel: he threatened to pull American funding for Israel if no regular inspections were forthcoming.

    Ben Gurion called for a cabinet meeting before preparing a reply. The Ben Gurion letter was the usual boilerplate Kennedy had seen many times before. He again compared Nasser to Hitler and requested a bilateral defense treaty with America. (Letter of 5/12/63 from Ben Gurion to Kennedy) On May 27th, he replied a bit more rationally, but there was still no proposal about regular inspections.

    On June 15, 1963, Kennedy replied to Ben Gurion. And there was a supplementary note sent by Dean Rusk to the American ambassador in Tel Aviv. Kennedy repeated his warning: either there would be full and regular inspections or Ben Gurion would be placing future American aid in limbo. Rusk’s note said that these inspections had to be arranged before the reactor reached criticality.

    One day after Tel Aviv was in receipt of this letter, David Ben Gurion resigned his post as prime minister. He had held that office for a combined 14 years. To this day, there is a controversy about whether or not his retirement was caused by his conflict with Kennedy. Levi Eshkol now assumed office. About two weeks after Ben Gurion’s resignation, Kennedy wrote the following to Eshkol:

    This government’s commitment to and support of Israel could be seriously jeopardized if it should be thought that we were unable to obtain reliable information on a subject as vital to peace as the question of Israel’s effort in the nuclear field. (Letter of July 4, 1963)

    At the time of Kennedy’s assassination, Bundy was negotiating with Eshkol the terms of biannual inspections of Dimona. One sticking point was that Eshkol did not want Nasser to know about the visits. Whereas for Kennedy, this was one of the predicates for the inspections. (Bundy memorandum to Kennedy, 8/23/63)

    VIII

    A familiar pattern took place with American policy in the Middle East after Kennedy’s assassination—a pattern which has lasted until today. As with, for example, Sukarno in Indonesia, Lyndon Johnson did not see the point in keeping up the relationship with Nasser. Slowly but surely, President Johnson slipped back to the Eisenhower/Dulles policy in the Middle East. One problem between the two men was the new president’s escalation of the war in Vietnam. Quite naturally, Nasser was opposed to this new militaristic policy. When this difference came out into the open, Johnson retaliated by cutting aid to Egypt and shipping more arms to Israel. As could have been predicted, and as what happened under Eisenhower, this gravitated Nasser toward the USSR (Rakove, pp. 241–42)

    To make the split with Kennedy even more marked, Johnson now grew closer to Saudi Arabia. In fact, he began to set up what was essentially a military alliance with this fundamentalist monarchy. First, he equipped them with a 400-million-dollar air defense system. Then, he designed plans for military bases and also a 100-million-dollar grant for trucks and other transport vehicles. (Dreyfuss, p. 142) Saudi Arabia later declared Nasser an infidel. To this day, that brutal monarchy spends millions smearing Nasser’s legacy. (Consortium News, 10/15/2020, “In Defense of Nasser”)

    American policy toward Israel also changed under LBJ. As Roger Mattson notes in his book on the subject, when the CIA alerted the new president that it appeared that Israel had now developed the atomic bomb, Johnson barely reacted. (Mattson, p. 97) There was no official investigation launched. In fact, Johnson told the CIA not to alert either State or Defense about the discovery. Through Mattson, and also author Grant Smith, we know today that Israel had stolen hundreds of pounds of highly enriched uranium out of what was essentially their shell plant in Apollo, Pennsylvania, called NUMEC.

    During the Six Day War in 1967, Johnson clearly favored Israel. The ultimate proof of this is the infamous Liberty Incident. Israeli jets attacked an American communications vessel for hours. This resulted in 34 dead and 171 wounded. Johnson did not break relations with Israel. And there were no trials held over this atrocity. As the late Peter Novick noted in his controversial book, The Holocaust in American Life, it was after this war and this incident that the Holocaust seemed to loom ever larger in American culture. (Click here for a Novick lecture)

    Although it was praised at the time, the Carter/Anwar Sadat Camp David Accords were largely bilateral, that is between Egypt and Israel. Unlike with Kennedy, there was no address made to the Palestinian right of return. This is why the agreements were not accepted by the United Nations. In fact, as a result, Egypt was expelled from the Arab League for the next ten years. Most commentators believe that Nasser, who had died in 1970, would not have accepted such an agreement. As historian Jergen Jensehaugen wrote about the Accords in his book Arab-Israeli Diplomacy under Carter, the president was left,

    …in an odd position—he had attempted to break with traditional US policy but ended up fulfilling the goals of that tradition, which had been to break up the Arab alliance, sideline the Palestinians, build an alliance with Egypt, weaken the Soviet Union and secure Israel. (p. 178)

    This policy was accelerated and perhaps epitomized by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s disastrous war on Libya under President Obama. Again, Muammar Gaddafi was an Arab nationalist and socialist. He deposed a monarchy in 1969, attempted to turn his country into a republic, and allied himself with Nasser. A problem he had in Western eyes was his support of revolutionary movements elsewhere. And as John Ashton shows in his 2012 book on the case, it is much more likely that the Lockerbie bombing was done by Iran than Libya. Nevertheless, Hillary Clinton convinced Obama to go to war with Libya through NATO. This resulted in a disaster as it turned the country over to fundamentalists who sponsored terrorism. One would have thought that Obama would have learned the lesson of George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq and the rise of ISIS. (Click here for details)

    Which brings us to Donald Trump and his son-in-law Jared Kushner. Kushner had no foreign policy experience prior to entering the White House. Apparently his qualifications in this area were that he was married to Trump’s daughter Ivanka. Yet Trump placed him in charge of an overall Middle East peace plan. The Palestinians were dead set against Kushner’s role for the simple reason that he had a longstanding, friendly relationship with Israeli’s rightwing Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Trump also seemed oblivious to the cross purposes Kushner’s actions would have in regards to Secretary of State Rex Tillerson’s ideas. Tillerson thought Kushner’s Middle East plans were short on historical perspective and relied on money grants to function. Tillerson also thought that Kushner’s actions with Netanyahu were “nauseating to watch. It was stomach churning.” (Bob Woodward, Rage, pp. 64–65)

    Like Obama, Trump came into office talking about fairness for the ignored Palestinian interests. It appears that this disappeared under Kushner’s influence. In May of 2017, Trump was in Tel Aviv meeting with Netanyahu. Kushner called Tillerson into the meeting—which tells you something right there. When Tillerson got inside, Trump told him to watch a video that Netanyahu had just showed him. Tillerson deduced that the Israelis had spliced together a falsely edited presentation of Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas. Abbas was supposed to be Israel’s partner in Kushner’s plan, yet here he was ordering the murder of children. Netanyahu played the tape again and then said, “And that’s the guy you want to help?” He then left.

    Tillerson tried to inform Trump that what he just saw was a piece of fabricated propaganda. Trump ignored this. He now turned on Abbas and the Palestinians. He closed the office of the Palestinian Liberation Organization in Washington, cancelled nearly all US aid to the West Bank and Gaza, as well as 360 million in annual funds for the UN plan to aid Palestinian refugees. (Woodward, p. 67) This story is important, since it illustrates how easily Trump was deceived by propaganda and how resolute Kennedy was in the face of it.

    Netanyahu was the leader of Likud during the campaign of 1995, which resulted in the assassination of Labor’s Rabin. That race was marked by a definite attempt by Likud to polarize the voting populace into two opposing camps. If one had a conciliatory attitude toward the Palestinian problem, one was smeared as an appeaser. Rabin was campaigning on an anti-violence platform, in support of the Oslo peace process. Netanyahu characterized the land for peace program as not being in the Jewish tradition or maintaining Jewish values. This rhetoric inspired the worst aspects of the Likud to draw posters of Rabin in a Nazi uniform in the crosshairs of a gun. Netanyahu even led a mock funeral procession featuring a coffin and a hangman’s noose at an anti-Rabin rally. (Ben Caspit, The Netanyahu Years, p. 123) Urging his crowds on, they began to shout “Rabin is a traitor” and “Death to Rabin.” Even when he was alerted to a plot against Rabin and was asked to tone down his rhetoric, Netanyahu declined. (Charles Smith, Palestine and the Arab-Israel Conflict, pp. 464, 466) Netanyahu never accepted responsibility for building the polarization that resulted in Rabin’s murder. In the face of this, one has to wonder about Jared Kushner and Trump accepting a falsified video from a character like him. One is also reminded of Trump’s refusal to condemn White Supremacy and his characterization of Charlottesville as featuring fine people on both sides. As in the case of Rabin, these public pronouncements likely contributed to the kidnapping plot against governor Gretchen Whitmer.

    As the reader can see, the breakage in Kennedy’s policy in the Middle East has now led us to just about a reversal of his policy. Kennedy wanted to appeal to the Arab forces he considered moderates, in hope of spreading the elements of moderation—republics, socialism, free education—throughout the Middle East. He then could move on a solution to the Palestine problem. What has happened there today is that American policy now attempts to accent the extremes. This includes Trump saying that he helped save Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s “ass”, in the murder of author Jamal Khashoggi. ((Woodward, pp. 226–27) Make no mistake, this also extended to Hillary Clinton’s attempt to overthrow Syria’s President Bashar al-Assad via Operation Timber Sycamore. Assad is another secularist Middle East leader who does not wear a hajib. Evidently, President Obama saw the results in Libya and decided one disaster was enough on his watch.

    But after Iraq, Libya, and Syria, who could not see the pattern? As Kennedy warned in 1957, all of this unleashed Muslim fundamentalism. By simultaneously supporting Likud and the Saudis, the policy of polarization stays intact. It preserves Likud, as it retards any modernization and progress for the Arab citizenry. By doing so, it constitutes the posthumous triumph of the neocon philosophy over Kennedy’s attempt to befriend the last great leader of the Arab world.

    Jim extends his personal thanks to Malcolm Blunt for unearthing the research documents used in this article from the JFK library.

  • garrison: The Journal of History & Deep Politics, Issue 005