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Edited on Tue Nov-03-09 07:08 PM by Peace Patriot
documents Kennedy's desire to work with Diem to provide neutral status for Vietnam in the "Cold War"--such as had been arranged for Laos--and when the CIA had Diem assassinated, against Kennedy's wishes, that hope was ended. The CIA was also instigating Catholic-Buddhist hatred and violent incidents, to further weaken Diem. Kennedy was distraught when Diem was assassinated (also documented).
Kennedy had the further problem that his ambassador in Vietnam, Henry Cabot Lodge, was a traitor working with the CIA to overthrow Diem and get the war going. He repeatedly ignored Kennedy's cables to meet with Diem. Communications were a lot slower and more difficult in those days. Lodge simply took a free hand and did his own policy--war--not Kennedy's, which was to try to broker a peace with the north and keep Vietnam out of the "Cold War."
As Douglass painstakingly documents, in great, eye-opening detail, Kennedy was a changed man after the Cuban Missile Crisis, when he had stared Armageddon in the face, with all of his generals and virtually the entire "military-industrial complex" urging him to nuke Russia while the US had missile superiority. He steadfastly refused, and had only Bobby as his ally and confidante on this. Instead, he opened back-channels to Krushchev and Castro, and brokered an end to that conflict, and then went further, and began negotiating with Krushchev (using very secret envoys to try to get around the CIA) on complete nuclear disarmament, and detente with Cuba (no invasion). (Cuba had agreed to Soviet missiles because of the earlier Bay of Pigs effort to invade Cuba--they were afraid. His bargain with Krushchev was removal of US missiles from Turkey--an immediate threat to Russia. They too had become afraid of a US attack). Kennedy was going for world peace. He negotiated the first limitation on nuclear weapons with Krushchev--the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty. He envisioned a demilitarized competition between the two economic systems, an end to nuclear threats and an end to the proxy wars (like Vietnam).
Douglass also meticulously documents the CIA's assassination of Kennedy because of his turn toward peace. He exonerates LBJ of the assassination, but says that he did participate in the coverup, because the CIA had set up Oswald to point to Russia as the perpetrator, with the object of pressuring LBJ to nuke Russia in revenge. Johnson knew that Russia was innocent, and that the CIA had done it. He found this out right away. So he acted to help cover up the CIA trails. Three days after Kennedy was assassinated, LBJ remarked, "Now they can have their war." He was talking about Vietnam.
Douglass's book is a very compelling and convincing read. Something changed inside of me when I read it. I had never faced these facts before. My first experience of politics was joining the JFK campaign in 1960. I was only 16 and couldn't even vote. There was something about him--even though looking back at his "Cold War" rhetoric in that campaign, I'm not sure what it was. Maybe his humor--his great wit and intelligence. I sensed something, as did many others of course. During the Cuban Missile Crisis, I never had the slightest doubt that we were in safe hands. Now I read about it, and I think, "Oh God it was close!" If Krushchev had sneezed the wrong way, we wouldn't be here. As Carl Sagan has since established, even a limited exchange of nuclear weapons would destroy the entire planet in months. All over. Fini. Kaput. And our insane military generals wanted all out nuclear war, wipe Russia off the face of the earth, and we would take only, oh, 300,000 casualties I think is the number they came up with for Kennedy. Not long afterward, JFK suggested to a filmmaker that he turn the book "Seven Days in May" into a movie.
Kennedy's assassination was devastating to me. I have never gotten over it. I eventually figured that the CIA did it, but I was never into the details, the way some very courageous and persistent people were. I simply let it crush hope. And nothing, and I mean nothing in this country, was the same after that. All hope in a peaceful world was gone. Bobby's assassination and Martin Luther King's were additional blows and I became something of an existentialist, with Albert Camus as my hero--who basically said, 'You have to do the right thing with no hope in your heart.' My interpretation: We will never succeed in creating a just world, but we must never stop trying. Why should we try? Because we are called to try--that is our nature. It is a tragic nature.
I still feel that way, pretty much. But Douglass' book made me realize that we must heal ourselves--and by extension, our society, which suffered great wounds back then. We shouldn't let it fester. We need closure. And Douglass is so right, that we need to understand those events--why JFK died and why it matters NOW--because this world--in which our democracy has become so deformed by war that it is barely recognizable as democracy--was shaped by that murder.
One other thing: Kennedy was sure that the American people would welcome a plan for world peace for his second term--that they would side with him in this dire controversy about the use of nuclear weapons and proxy wars. And he was right about that. When LBJ ran for president in 1964 (after finishing JFK's term), he ran as the "peace candidate." I remember it well. It was my first vote for president. I vote for peace. And so did the American people, in an unprecedented landslide for peace. And then, within a year, we were in full scale war in Vietnam. Johnson was lying. But it does prove that JFK had judged the American people correctly. We didn't want that war, or nuclear war, or any wars any more, at all, ever. That, I believe, is the "will of the people." And that has not changed in forty-five years, no matter how much the corpo-fascist media has tried to make it seem otherwise.
We don't need war. We don't need a great war machine. Maybe we need a bit of defense, temporarily, until our reputation in the world improves from all our good works, and until there is general disarmament. But we need to return to JFK's vision, of demilitarized and fair competition, in a world without war.
'Jamais plus la guerre!' (--Pope Paul VI, 1965, United Nations)
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