Reply #9: I recommend, "JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died And Why It Matters," by James Douglass.

[Peace Patriot]

Very convincing book that the CIA did it--and why. The all important question. What had JFK done to bring this down upon him?

I lived through that assassination and Douglass really nails the anti-communist hysteria of that era, in which the Joint Chiefs and the CIA were strongly pressuring JFK to nuke Russia while we had missile superiority. He wouldn't do it. And that is basically why they killed him. He had opened back-channels to Krushchev and Castro to end the Cold War--to disarm the nukes, to end all the proxy wars, to create world peace, with two peacefully competing systems. He thought they were nuts for advocating a first strike. They thought he was a traitor. They killed him. And what happened afterwards, according to Douglass and his meticulously documented book, is that, with the CIA having laid the trail of the assassination to Russia to pressure JFK's successor, LBJ, into nuking Russia, LBJ found out about it right away (from Hoover), did not want to nuke Russia for something they didn't do, and agreed to the coverup, which, among other things, covered up and messed up/confused the trail the CIA had laid to Russia. Douglass straightens it out and it's plain to see. The CIA wanted the upshot of their assassination to be the nuking of Russia.

Three days after the assassination, LBJ said, "Now they can have their war." He was talking about the CIA and Vietnam--one of the proxy wars that JFK had decided to de-escalate and end. THAT was the war profiteering, anti-communist "sop" thrown to the CIA and the Joint Chiefs, and the "military-industrial complex," in lieu of annihilating Russia.

JFK was convinced that the American people would be with him on his plan for world peace. And it's interesting what happened after he was killed. LBJ ran for president in 1964 as the peace candidate. I remember this well. It was my first vote for president. I voted for peace. LBJ won that election with the biggest mandate in presidential history. A mandate for peace. But, at the same he was talking peace, he was vastly escalating the war on Vietnam, which would ultimately claim over 55,000 U.S. soldier's lives and the lives to some 2 million Southeast Asians. So peace WOULD HAVE won. JFK was right. The difference is that JFK would have meant it.

And that is why all this matters, to this day. This country was deliberately turned away from peace. The war profiteers WON! We shouldn't have had this nuclear and conventional arsenal. We shouldn't have had a bloated military for Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld to hijack for a corporate resource war and world domination. JFK would have won the 1964 election with a landslide, on a platform of peace. And we would be living in a different world.

I'm willing to read another interpretation. I haven't read Bugliosi's book but I will. However, Douglass' book is so good, so well-documented, so attentive to sources and details, so full of original research and so true to that era, that I doubt that it can convince me of any other conclusion than that the CIA did it.

Douglass gets as far up the chain as Richard Helms, but that's far enough to know that it was a CIA plot--not a rogue plot. JFK had fired the CIA Director after the Bay of Pigs and had vowed to "smash the CIA into a thousand pieces." That provided the CIA with additional motivation. JFK and the CIA were deadly enemies. But the real key to their actions was that they truly believed that JFK's plan for peace was treason. Accommodating "communists" was treason. Letting them live was treason. I can see, in retrospect, that "treason" to them meant interfering with war profiteer profits. They had equated the MIC with patriotism--and also with capitalism and with God. "Godless communism" was the phrase of the day. They couldn't see past it. JFK, on the other hand, could see past it, and Douglass documents that change in JFK, after the Cuban Missile Crisis, very well. The CIA and the MIC simply couldn't abide JFK getting re-elected with a big mandate for world peace. It flew in the face of all their beliefs and worldly attachments. They had the power--the secret, separate government within the government--to stop it, and that's what they did.

Maybe you had to have lived through it to grasp how brilliant Douglass' book is--but he lays out the details of the assassination and the reasons for the assassination so well, that I think even youngsters will understand what happened. My husband was an AF jet fighter pilot during that era and generals used to visit the pilots and try to pump them up for annihilating Russia while we had the chance. That's what the generals wanted. Nobody knew about the "Cold and the Dark" in those days--as later elucidated by Carl Sagan--that even a limited nuclear exchange would kill the entire planet in months. They thought they could WIN. They thought it was okay to lose the east coast! The U.S. would win a nuclear war and recover! JFK's opposition to this madness infuriated the MIC establishment and they finally took him out. And guess who was the most unhappy man on earth, after that happened--Nikita Krushchev! He considered JFK a friend. He believed they were partners in peace. He was trying to change Russia the way JFK was trying to change the USA--to reduce the paranoia, to get rid of nuclear weapons, and even to help each other out (the Kennedy wheat deal with Russia, after a Russian crop failure--totally opposed by the Joint Chiefs).

Anyway, I'd say, read both books. Decide for yourself.