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It was certainly tough for me. I was a very young Kennedyite, and I never really faced what happened until I read this book. Douglass nails it--solves the mystery--and understands the event at every level, from the nitty-gritty details of the conspirators' misdirections and coverups, to the motives of all parties--JFK himself, the murder plotters, witnesses, patsies, the Joint Chiefs, the Russians, LBJ, everybody--up to the higher levels of that event: our nation's spiritual struggle over nuclear weapons and war and war profiteering.
The book is compelling on the level of mystery--totally convincing, extremely well-documented--but it is absolutely brilliant on the question of "Why It Matters." In truth, that assassination created today's world of out-of-control U.S. war and war profiteering. That is what was at issue in that assassination. JFK had opened a back-channel to Krushchev to END the "Cold War," to get rid of nuclear weapons, to stop all the proxy wars and to create a world of peaceful competition between the two economic systems. He was in the midst of this essentially spiritual transformation--triggered by his having faced armageddon during the Cuban Missile Crisis--when he was cut down, and this is why he was cut down. The "military-industrial complex" that Eisenhower had warned against was already out of control. Many people have suspected that the CIA did it and that this was the motive. Douglass establishes this beyond any question, in my mind.
One especially compelling detail that Douglass makes clear is that the paranoid fear of communism and of Soviet Russia was genuine in some leaders of the MIC--some generals, some members of the CIA, for instance. They considered JFK to be a traitor. Others were just powermongers and war profiteers. I lived through this period, and experienced the McCarthy era and the continued paranoia in the society around me into the 1960s, as I was just becoming politically aware. It was an era in which people simply could not see that nuking another country over an economic system, and taking "300,000" U.S. casualties was not a "victory." We didn't know in those days that it would have destroyed the entire planet within months. But we were beginning to get an inkling of the devastation it would bring down. And still, many people thought that we should use these weapons to destroy Russia and smash communism.
The Joint Chiefs wanted to nuke Russia--to wipe it off the face of the earth, and take the casualties here--while they had missile superiority. JFK refused--he thought they were insane--and he subsequently decided to end the "Cold War" but he was all alone in that decision (except for his brother Bobby). When he began implementing that decision over the following year, with his backchannels to Krushchev and Castro (trying to get around the CIA), his "wheat deal" with Russia, the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty and his orders starting withdrawal of U.S. troops from Vietnam, these actions triggered the assassination conspiracy at the CIA, among people who believed that JFK was a traitor. (The conspiracy was led by Richard Helms and probably by Allen Dulles but James Douglass is unable to nail Dulles definitively--JFK had fired him, and he slips well behind the curtain at that point, until he reemerges, of all things, as a member of the Warren Commission!).
This is the explanation--that has been so elusive for everyone, I think--in understanding how supposedly patriotic Americans in positions of high authority could ever assassinate a president of the United States. John Wilkes Booth, you can understand. He did not feel loyal to the Union. Miami anti-Castro Cubans, you could understand. Their loyalty was to Batista (that monster) and to their own money and privilege in "their" Cuba. JFK had foiled their dream of overturning the Cuban revolution. Mafia, you can understand. Bobby was an anti-racketeering A.G. But it was not really understandable how high placed defenders of our country--people who, like JFK himself, had fought WW II--could ever participate in this, with such determination, efficiency and secrecy, never breaking ranks. Anti-communist paranoia is a vital key to the story.
It was, in essence, not real, yet it was enforced as a doctrine, driven by war profiteers. Peace itself was treated as a "communist" idea. Peace activists were called "peaceniks," to associate them with the Russians, and to imply that they were traitors. Most Americans wanted peace--as I will prove below--but they couldn't get past this dogma, that communism was so evil that it had to be destroyed in order to have peace--a peace that never came.
If you lived through that era, it's hard for you to see it. It was "the air we breathed." It was a pervasive disconnect from reality--that the only way to have a peaceful world was for America to kill all the communists. And if you think only of the details of the assassination, as a plausible murder mystery, you can end up not looking too closely and dismissing it as "tinfoil," because you can't imagine how and why loyal Americans would do that--assassinate a president, a war hero, over policies that weren't going to de-fund anybody's pet nuclear missile program or bomber contract right away. He wasn't proposing unilateral disarmament, or immediate dismantling of the war machine, or anything sudden or extreme. They killed him for merely trying to envision something better and taking some mild steps toward that end. But if you don't grasp that THEY viewed these steps as extreme--as, indeed, traitorous--then it is hard to accept what they did (as realistic motivation). You just want to turn away from it. You don't want to face it. Douglass does a very good job of documenting and emphasizing this detail--the anti-communist paranoia of the era--the why.
Oh, and one other thing: They set it up to point to Russia as the perpetrator, to force LBJ to nuke Russia in retaliation. (And that is how LBJ--who was not part of the conspiracy--became part of the coverup.) This is another important point that reveals their motive and points back to the key event--JFK's refusal to nuke Russia, the year before, during the Cuban Missile Crisis. That, his solution to it (withdrawing U.S. missiles from Turkey), and his subsequent growing independence of thought, his envisioning of a peaceful world, his recognition that Russia had changed, under Krushchev, that they, too, wanted peace, his assessment of the Cuban revolution as justified, and all the actions he began taking to end the "Cold War," are why the patriots among the conspirators felt justified in killing him, and why the dirtbag war profiteers didn't care. Three days after the assassination, LBJ said, "Now they can have their war." He was speaking of the CIA and Vietnam. The justification for Vietnam was anti-communist paranoia.
To the North Vietnamese and their many supporters in South Vietnam, the issue was independence, also social justice. To JFK, the issue was the ravages of war, nuclear war or proxy conventional war, vs another way: peace. He was a perfectly loyal American, too, who could not fathom the others' willingness to sacrifice 300,000 Americans to end communism. He thought communism would ultimately lose in a peaceful competition. He managed to shed his paranoia--a remarkable feat, for that era--and was done in by those who could not.
"Why It Matters" is that we are still there.
Those who profited from paranoia, fear and war, back then, did not trust the American people. They knew that JFK was right in his assessment that Americans wanted peace, and that Americans would re-elect him, overwhelmingly, in 1964, on his new platform of world peace. I know this was true, and remember it well, because 1964 was my first vote for president--a year after Kennedy was assassinated. I voted for the "peace candidate" in 1964--LBJ--who won one of the biggest landslides in history. The issue was peace. LBJ successfully painted his opponent, Barry Goldwater, as a warmonger. The people voted overwhelmingly for peace.
The problem was that JFK would have meant it, and LBJ did not. LBJ was, even as he spoke to us of peace, undoing Kennedy's orders and escalating the U.S. military presence in Vietnam, and deceiving Congress with the "Gulf of Tonkin" incident. JFK would have been re-elected, overwhelmingly, with a huge mandate for nuclear disarmament, ending the 'Cold War,' pulling out of Vietnam and opening up our relations with the Soviet Union to dialogue and peaceful interaction. That's what the American people wanted. They were ready to shed the paranoid fear of communism. They wanted our country to take genuine steps toward world peace. And that's what they were denied, then, in the intervening years of war, and now. We will not be permitted a president who genuinely wants peace. That is the reality. That is why it matters. The methods have changed for installing and controlling war-friendly presidents. (Now they have Diebold.) The goal has not changed. The goal is to use the U.S. war machine for profit. And there is no such thing as civilian control of this monster--the U.S. war machine. No man or woman who is intent on dismantling it (reducing it to a true defensive force) will be permitted into the White House.
"JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died And Why It Matters" is a healing book in that it helps you to see all of this very clearly--the continuum from then to now. Douglass does not make the connection explicit (that I recall). He doesn't have to. It's before our eyes every day in the news. Our country does not have to be this way--at war with the world, seeing "terrorists" everywhere, now killing dozens of innocent people in Afghanistan every week with "drone" airplanes; a few years ago, slaughtering a hundred thousand innocent people in one week of bombing in Iraq, to steal their oil, torturing prisoners in violation of all the rules we thought we lived by, engaging in a U.S. military buildup in South America, spending trillions of dollars on war materials and military bases around the world, propping up hideous regimes (like those in Colombia and Saudi Arabia and Honduras and Uzbekistan), always on the wrong side of peoples' struggles for independence and social justice and dying--literally DYING--as a democracy and a country--drained of our resources, in debt unto the 7th generation, harming the poor, padding the pockets of the super-rich and killing the planet, not with nuclear war (yet) but slowly, with our corporate rulers' greed and lawlessness.
This is the nightmare world of the assassins. This is the world they created out of their paranoia, war profiteering and hatred.
Compare it to this ideal, spoken by John F. Kennedy, at his Inaugural, before he faced armageddon, and before he had conceived the dangerous notion of world peace: "Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can for your country."
His country did nothing for him. It killed him. But he did something for his country. He planted a seed that is still out there, lying fallow, waiting for us to water it and nurture it into life: a country at peace, a world without war.
We look at the situation now and we think it's overwhelming. It does seem that way. The war profiteers rule. But--another value of Douglass' book is that he helps you understand just how difficult it was for JFK to think his way out of the "Cold War." His speeches and debates during the campaign in 1960 are like night and day from his speeches just before he died--speeches that Douglass points out, were not well-covered in the news. How did he get from one place to the other? It was a remarkable journey--a gift to us all--a template for transformation. It was very, very difficult. He was at the center of world power, personally responsible for the U.S. war machine, for its nuclear arsenal and for the safety of the American people. He had been a Navy lieutenant during WW II, trained to kill on our behalf. He had seen action. He had been wounded. He had been heroic under fire. He was furthermore from a rich family, who had benefited greatly from our capitalist system. How on earth did he overcome all of these pressures to "go along, get along" with the "military-industrial complex" and try to see out of it, and to get us out of it? And how can we--each of us, who aren't asking what our country can do for us, but what we can do for our country--finish his truncated journey, on our children's behalf? If JFK could see past the Forever War, way back then, in the midst of the "Cold War," with anti-communist paranoia all around him, so can we.
My advice: Start with the 'TRADE SECRET' voting machines.
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