Why the hell didn't anyone heed Eisenhower's warning about the Military Industrial Complex?
Just over 50 years ago, in his Presidential farewell speech, Dwight D. Eisenhower warned us about the potential for the Military Industrial Complex to harm our democracy.
With the military budget now flirting with the trillion dollar mark, it just seems somewhere down the line since 1961, someone could have used this to curb the insanity.
You would think they would have listened to the General who won WWII, right?
It's not like he was a left-leaning peacenik like me 
= new reply since forum marked as read
and he was shot for it 
He nails the CIA up to Richard Helms. He makes an overwhelmingly convincing case against them, not only on who did it but on WHY. He employs voluminous new research, new documents and new analysis and re-analyzes everything that was already known. The case is closed, as far as I'm concerned. No one has done a better investigation.
JFK was a "Cold Warrior" coming out of the 1950s but the Cuban Missile Crisis utterly changed his perspective. He was the first and only president to face Armageddon. He was urged to inflict Armageddon, not only on Russia but on a portion of the United States--the Joint Chiefs and the MIC were unanimous on this--and he refused. That and his backchannels to Krushchev and Castro--and probably his firing of CIA Director Alan Dulles--were his death warrant. Douglass also lays this out meticulously--they considered him a traitor for not nuking Russia and for trying to get around their layers and layers of obstruction, spying and dirty ops to find the way toward world peace--disarmament, no more "Cold War."
You are in error in two ways. First of all, you fail to understand the context in which JFK was changing his mind about the "Cold War" and what this meant to the MIC (disarmament, real peace, no more war profiteering). It was, to them, a deadly threat. JFK could not just "declare peace." He could not just suddenly dismantle the war machine. He could not just abandon its jingoistic phrases. And he was cut off in the middle of his turn toward peace. Bang, bang; shoot, shoot. End of his transformation from "Cold Warrior" to "peacenik."
That is the second error you are making. The man was in transition. He was in the process of turning against the MIC when he was assassinated. You see things as black and white. The evidence is overwhelming that JFK was not that kind of leader. He was thinking things through and bringing morality to bear on the matter of incinerating millions of people. He was looking at all the implications of the "Cold War." He told Castro, for instance, that he sympathized with the Cuban revolution--with their overthrow of the heinous Batista regime. The MIC merely saw "communists"--the "enemy." This was after the Cuban Missile Crisis--and it became evident that the CIA and the MIC were going to continue to CREATE situations (like the "Bay of Pigs"
that drew the U.S. officially into wars all over the world, and this could easily lead to Armageddon--to the ultimate confrontation between the U.S. and Soviet Russia, with nuclear weapons--which JFK averted the first time (the Cuban Missile Crisis--i.e., Cuba's desire for Russian protection because of the Bay of Pigs invasion), but what of the next and the next?
This is why, a) JFK fired Alan Dulles (he was trying to FORCE the President into wars by lying to him), and b) why JFK had to create direct communication with Krushchev (no lying CIA or other MIC operatives between them) to START nuclear disarmament talks (first, the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty--an amazing achievement, as a 'first," negotiated directly, by backchannel, against the strong opposition of the MIC) and forge new and more friendly relations (the Russian wheat deal--also opposed by the MIC). What he found out is that Krushchev also wanted peace. Russia, too, was changing. Stalin was gone. Stalinism had been overcome. The Great Bugaboo--the Devil, the "enemy"--wanted peace!
You are demanding a black and white picture and ignoring the subtleties (and the evidence) of how people with a conscience change, especially in very difficult, dangerous situations. There is absolutely no way that JFK could have altogether given up "Cold War" rhetoric and could have dismantled the MIC all on his own. He needed a huge mandate from the American people just to begin to act on what he'd learned from Krushchev. And he was counting on one--and would have gotten one (as I explained in my comments about the 1964 election)--if he had lived to run for a second term. And THAT is what the CIA acted to prevent. They acted to prevent a genuine peace campaign, by a very popular leader, from getting massively endorsed by the voters, which would have given JFK the support and the momentum to reverse the direction of U.S. foreign and military policy away from Armageddon and toward peaceful competition.
It would not have been sudden, dramatic change--for instance, immediate "smashing of the CIA into a thousand pieces" or immediate drastic cuts in the war budget, but it would have been a beginning, with the U.S.genuinely pledged to world peace and to finding peaceful solutions--not more war--in conflicts that were arising all over the world, in Africa, in Latin America, in Asia (where, in almost every case, the CIA was deliberately misinterpreting mere independence revolutions or socialist revolutions as a dire threat from Soviet Russia). Vietnam was one of the many places that the CIA was instigating war and drawing the U.S. in. The signs that JFK was opting for peace include his signature, in his last days in office, on withdrawals of U.S. troops from Vietnam--and there are many others, those I've mentioned and more--for instance, his world peace speech to American University, six months before he was murdered, which is hardly ever cited. He was altering the "Cold War" rhetoric in significant ways, to bend it toward peaceful purposes. (He calls for a world without nuclear weapons, in that speech.)
I actually remember watching his debates with Nixon on TV during the 1960 campaign. I didn't understand JFK's stance then, but I do now. His "missile gap" and so forth strike me as ridiculous now--pure jingoism. And I am also well aware of RFK's role in the "Army-McCarthy" red-baiting hearings. I watched those on TV, too! But, having lived through that era, as a college student and beyond, I and those around me could all see JFK change, and, a few years later, we saw RFK change as well. I had no idea what a deadly struggle JFK was engaged in, with the CIA and the MIC. But I noted many of accomplishments--like those listed above (the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, the Russian "wheat deal" --which, as a young person, I took for granted as right and good, but which, over the years I've realized were amazing, given the times. It never occurred to me, personally, that JFK would allow nuclear Armageddon to happen, though many others were not sure at all and greatly feared it, during the Cuban Missile Crisis. What none of us knew is that he stood ALONE (except for Bobby) against the war-crazy establishment.
We would not be here today--we would have suffered "Nuclear Winter," killing all life on earth--but for that man's unbelievable courage. And Douglass convinces me that he paid for it with his life.
The total impact of Douglass' remarkable book is that it all, suddenly, makes sense--not only the plots, subplots and misdirections of the assassination itself, and why, for instance, LBJ participated in the coverup, but also JFK's changed thinking, in the 1963 American University speech--an about-face from the '60 debates--his various peace moves, the clear threat that he posed to the MIC and its overseers at the CIA, and the tenor of the times (utter paranoia, indeed, mad "anti-communism," with even sane men--mere patriots--asserting that losing the east coast to nuclear war was acceptable to them). Douglass covers all of the ground, from means and opportunity to motive, includes analysis of other investigations, and solves all the mysteries (including the pointed misdirection to Russia, by which the CIA wanted to force LBJ to nuke Russia in retaliation for the assassination--a part of the plot that got derailed by none other than J. Edgar Hoover. The Russia misdirection was why LBJ participated in the coverup--he did not want his hand to be forced by MIC and public sentiment against Russia).
You really need to read Douglass' book before you say that I'm "pulling things out of my ass." Douglass arrives at the truth of that event and the why of that event. He is a largely unheralded investigator and writer but a great one. He even tracks the influences on JFK in his change toward peace, to, among others, Thomas Merton, through Ethel Kennedy. (Merton was the Trappist monk whose writings against nuclear weapons were suppressed by his religious order.) JFK was a man with a conscience and a growing sense of responsibility, who are able to change, and had changed significantly, by the time he was cut down.
It is a bitter, bitter pill for all of us to take, for our society to get well. The truth about this still sends many people into fevers of denial. If you can get past that--the denial--and read Douglass' book objectively, I think you will agree with me that he arrives at the truth. His book is not a "conspiracy theory." It is a conspiracy proof--and the "bad guys" were our own.
Perhaps the best solution to warding off undue influence of the military-industrial complex and the influence of Wall Street is a formal constitutional amendment instituting publicly funded elections. If you can replace private cash in the campaign process with strictly taxpayer dollars only, I would think that after a few election cycles, the corporate special interests would lose grip on Congress and the legislative agenda.
Until then, you'll continue to have grotesquely tilted budgets similar to this one:
Mo money, mo money . . . . and so on . . humans may indeed be fucked 
