http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/157075755...ASIN=1570757550

Does anyone know anything about this upcoming book? I like the title. After a whole generation has been trained to remove the assassination from history by magazines typing the words conspiracy thoery, it IS necessary to say why it matters, especially for those forty years and younger. It is absurd that this should be in need of emphasis and is in further testimony that we are all living in Orwell's liver. Got a light?

Apparently in 1998 the author wrote a 17-page pamphlet entitled: Compassion and the Unspeakable in the Murders of Martin, Malcolm, JFK, RFK.
http://www.amazon.com/Compassion-unspeakab...432&sr=1-12

Charles Drago started a thread about it here: http://educationforum.ipbhost.com/index.ph...mp;#entry140562

More info here: http://portinexile.blogspot.com/2008/03/jf...books-4308.html

The CTKA site now has a review by Jim DiEugenio of JFK and the Unspeakable.

http://www.ctka.net/2008/jfk_unspeakable.html

Ron W

Interesting review. It includes the following:

Michael Paine did not just work at Bell Helicopter. He did not just have a security clearance there. His stepfather, Arthur Young, invented the Bell helicopter. His mother, Ruth Forbes Paine Young, was descended from the Boston Brahmin Forbes family -- one of the oldest in America. She was a close friend of Mary Bancroft. Mary Bancroft worked with Allen Dulles as a spy during World War II in Switzerland. This is where Dulles got many of his ideas on espionage, which he would incorporate as CIA Director under Eisenhower. Bancroft also became Dulles' friend and lover. She herself called Ruth Forbes, "a very good friend of mine." (p. 169) This may explain why, according to Walt Brown, the Paines were the most oft-questioned witnesses to appear before the Commission.

Ruth Paine's father was William Avery Hyde. Ruth described him before the Warren Commission as an insurance underwriter. (p. 170) But there was more to it than that. Just one month after the Warren Report was issued, Mr. Hyde received a three-year government contract from the Agency for International Development (AID). He became their regional adviser for all of Latin America. As was revealed in the seventies, AID was riddled with CIA operatives. To the point that some called it an extension of the Agency. Hyde's reports were forwarded both to the State Department and the CIA. (Ibid)

Ruth Paine's older sister was Sylvia Hyde Hoke. Sylvia was living in Falls Church, Virginia in 1963. Ruth stayed with Sylvia in September of 1963 while traveling across country. (p. 170) Falls Church adjoins Langley, which was then the new headquarters of the Central Intelligence Agency, a prized project of Allen Dulles. It was from Falls Church that Ruth Paine journeyed to New Orleans to pick up Marina Oswald, who she had been introduced to by George DeMohrenschildt. After she picked Marina up, she deposited her in her home in Irving, Texas. Thereby separating Marina from Lee at the time of the assassination.

Some later discoveries made Ruth's itinerary in September quite interesting. It turned out that John Hoke, Sylvia's husband, also worked for AID. And her sister Sylvia worked directly for the CIA itself. By the time of Ruth's visit, Sylvia had been employed by the Agency for eight years. In regards to this interestingly timed visit to her sister, Jim Garrison asked Ruth some pointed questions when she appeared before a grand jury in 1968. He first asked her if she knew her sister had a file that was classified at that time in the National Archives. Ruth replied she did not. In fact, she was not aware of any classification matter at all. When the DA asked her if she had any idea why it was being kept secret, Ruth replied that she didn't. Then Garrison asked Ruth if she knew which government agency Sylvia worked for. The uninquiring Ruth said she did not know. (p. 171) This is the same woman who was seen at the National Archives pouring through her files in 1976, when the House Select Committee was gearing up.

When Marina Oswald was called before the same grand jury, a citizen asked her if she still associated with Ruth Paine. Marina replied that she didn't. When asked why not, Marina stated that it was upon the advice of the Secret Service. She then elaborated on this by explaining that they had told her it would look bad if the public found out the "connection between me and Ruth and CIA." An assistant DA then asked, "In other words, you were left with the distinct impression that she was in some way connected with the CIA?" Marina replied simply, "Yes." (p. 173)

Douglass interpolates the above with the why and how of Oswald ending up on the motorcade route on 11/22/63. Robert Adams of the Texas Employment Commission testified to having called the Paine household at about the time Oswald was referred by Ruth -- via a neighbor-- to the Texas School Book Depository (TSBD) for a position. He called and was told Oswald was not there. He left a message for Oswald to come down and see him since he had a position available as a cargo handler at a regional cargo airline. Interestingly, this job paid about 1/3 more than the job Oswald ended up with at the TSBD. He called again the next day to inquire about Oswald and the position again. He was now told that Lee had already taken a job. Ruth was questioned about the Adams call by the Warren Commission's Albert Jenner. At first she denied ever hearing of such a job offer. She said, "I do not recall that." (p. 172) She then backtracked, in a tactical way. She now said that she may have heard of the offer from Lee. This, of course, would seem to contradict both the Adams testimony and common sense. If Oswald was cognizant of the better offer, why would he take the lower paying job?

In addition to his work on the true background of the Paines, which I will return to later, Douglass' section on the aborted plot against Kennedy in Chicago is also exceptional. The difference between what Douglass does here and what was done in Ultimate Sacrifice is the difference between confusion and comprehension. After they were informed of a plot, the police arrested Thomas Vallee on a pretext. Interestingly Dan Groth, the suspicious officer in on the arrest of Vallee, was later part of the SWAT team that assassinated Black Panthers Fred Hampton and Mark Clark in 1969. (p. 204) Groth took several lengthy leaves from Chicago to Washington for special training under the auspices of the FBI and CIA. Groth never had a regular police assignment, but always worked counter-intelligence, with an early focus on the Fair Play for Cuba Committee. (Ibid)

http://www.chicoer.com/news/ci_9216329

Visiting anarchist author claims government killed Kennedy
By LARRY MITCHELL - Staff Writer
Article Launched: 05/10/2008 12:36:13 AM PDT


CHICO -- As an anarchist, Jim Douglass says he has no respect for the power of the presidency.
So, he continues to be surprised that he's written a book about the assassination of President Kennedy.

Douglass holds Kennedy himself in high esteem, however.

Every Thanksgiving, which is around the time of year Kennedy was killed, Douglass said he gives special thanks for the slain president. If it weren't for Kennedy, the world would have been destroyed by nuclear weapons by now, he said.

Douglass, who lives in Birmingham, Ala., is in Chico this weekend, talking about his newly published 544-page book, "JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters."

A Catholic theologian and pacifist, Douglass has written several books about non-violence and the principles of Jesus' Sermon on the Mount. This latest book, which he spent 12 years researching and writing, is something quite different for him.

Kennedy was killed by his own government because he embraced world peace, Douglass said. The assassination was coordinated by the CIA, he added.

When his presidency began, Kennedy stood firmly behind the thinking and policies that fueled the Cold War, Douglass said, But he underwent a critical change during the Cuban missile crisis.

In that episode, when the world may have come closer to nuclear war than at any other time, Kennedy and Russian Premier Nikita Khrushchev, through a series of communications, made commitments to peace that put them at odds with the military leaders of their countries, Douglass said. As a result, he said, Khrushchev was removed from power, and Kennedy was assassinated.
Douglass said Kennedy fell victim to the "military-industrial complex" described by President Eisenhower.

The author said America's corporate leaders are dedicated above all to expansion and profit, and its military chiefs are committed absolutely to dominance. Neither could abide Kennedy embracing world peace, seen most clearly in a speech he gave in June of 1963, when he called for ending the Cold War, Douglass said. Five months later, Kennedy was dead.

The author said he hoped his book will get people to recognize the power of America's military-industrial complex.

That complex can be dismantled, he asserted.

Douglass said he and his wife, Shelley, have been part of the Catholic Worker movement for many years. Its followers pursue non-violence, voluntary poverty, and prayer, and they extend hospitality to the poor. Douglass will spend the weekend in Chico, making a number of appearances today:

This book is selling SURPRISINGLY WELL. It is about to crack the top 1000 of Amazon. Perhaps it is worth giving it a push? It is often necessary to create a common denominator text for a society to begin discussing a big, long-ignored problem. I have posted about it on ten major newspaper sites. Check out some of these reviews.

http://www.maryknollmall.org/description.c...8-1-57075-755-6

In a year that has already produced pro-conspiracy books from Harvard University PRess (ok in my opinion) and former Washington Post Editor Jefferson Morley (absolutely essential) this sounds like it could be the best pro-conspiracy argument ever.

I have never seen reviews like this.

“Jim Douglass proposes a shocking rereading of the Kennedy presidency and assassination. He depicts a president deeply changed by the Cuban missile crisis and determined to end the Cold War with the USSR, change relations with Cuba and withdraw the troops from Vietnam. Thereby he became ‘marked for assassination.’ Douglass' message is that the greatest obstacle to world peace was and still is the secret National Security State that was built in the U.S. by the Cold War. To create a more peaceful world, U.S. Americans will have to take seriously the need to dismantle this secret government. Are we willing to take the risks?”—Rosemary Radford Ruether, Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary

“As always, Jim Douglass, a digger for facts and a debunker of myths, raises questions that cry out for answers—ones we deserve but haven’t been getting.”—Colman McCarthy, author, I’d Rather Teach Peace

“One of the most important books in recent years, JFK and the Unspeakable sheds the light of truth on our war-making government and its pursuit of global domination at all costs. I hope many churchpeople will read it to understand the depth of our country’s unspeakable darkness and be free, in the spirit of John Kennedy and Jim Douglass, to pursue ‘peace for all humanity.’” —John Dear, S.J., author, Living Peace

“For those who think that economics and politics are merely profane matters without spiritual roots and consequences, reading James Douglass should be a giant step toward right-mindedness. Bluntly stated, he has painstakingly unmasked the normalized politics of our marauding, perpetual-war economy as nothing less than the willful embracing of the Unspeakable, the voice from whence the spirits of havoc and horror, deceitfulness and murder are begotten.”—(Rev.) Emmanuel Charles McCarthy

“Reading this book brings astonishment and deep sadness because of what might have been. Readers will, I hope, be inspired to work for a return to the kind of leadership JFK offered.”—Bishop Thomas J. Gumbleton "JFK and the Unspeakable is an exceptional achievement. Douglass has made the strongest case so far in the JFK assassination literature as to the Who and the Why of Dallas. The conjunction of unrestrained elements in cold war America—defense industry elites, Pentagon planners, and the heads of the intelligence community—were the forces that led inexorably to Dallas and the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.”--Gerald McKnight, author, Breach of Trust: How the Warren Commission Failed the Nation and Why

“With penetrating insight and unswerving integrity, Douglass probes the fundamental truths about JFK’s assassination. If, he contends, humanity permits those truths to slip into history ignored and undefined it does so at its own peril. By far the most important book yet written on the subject.”—Gaeton Fonzi, former Staff Investigator, US House Select Committee on Assassinations

“Douglass presents, brilliantly, an unfamiliar yet thoroughly convincing account of a series of creditable decisions of John F. Kennedy—at odds with his initial Cold War stance—that earned him the secret distrust and hatred of hard-liners among the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the CIA. Did this suspicion and rage lead directly to his murder by agents of these institutions, as Douglass concludes? Many readers who are not yet convinced of this ‘beyond reasonable doubt’ by Douglass’s prosecutorial indictment will find themselves, perhaps—like myself—for the first time, compelled to call for an authoritative criminal investigation. Recent events give all the more urgency to learning what such an inquiry can teach us about how, by whom, and in whose interests this country is run.”—Daniel Ellsberg, author, Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers

“For forty years Jim Douglass has been our leading North American Catholic theologian of peace. But this monumental work on the witness of JFK is something deeper still. Douglass is trying to get us to connect the dots between our ‘citizen denial,’ the government’s ‘plausible deniability,’ and the Unspeakable. This book has the potential to change our narrative about our country, and our lives as citizens and disciples. May we have ears to hear these truths, hearts able to bear their burden, and hands willing to build a new story.”—Ched Myers, author, Binding the Strong Man: A Political Reading of Mark’s Story of Jesus

“This book’s story of JFK and the ‘unspeakable’ is a stunning mix of political thriller and meticulous scholarship. Even as it points persuasively to rogue powers at work in the U.S. military-industrial complex, it also witnesses to the power of spirit, inspiring prophetic voices like Thomas Merton’s, turning a president like John Kennedy toward peace, thus also enabling readers to see into the current deep structure of U.S. war and empire. Douglass’s book offers a goldmine of information and is indispensable for building prophetic spirit and hope.”—Mark Lewis Taylor, Princeton Theological Seminary

“A remarkable book: devastating in its documented indictment of the dark forces that have long deformed the public life of this country, while also illuminating JFK’s final vision of world peace and documenting beyond reasonable doubt the unspeakable assassination of our last partially admirable president. This book should be required reading for every American citizen.”—Richard Falk, Milbank Professor of International Law Emeritus, Princeton University

“This is the most thoroughly researched and documented book ever written about President Kennedy’s determination to prevent a nuclear war—and how his success in that struggle cost him his life. And yet, Douglass leads us well beyond the ‘whodunit’ dimensions of the story. He leads us straight into the urgent implications for the present, into what Thomas Merton called the ‘unspeakable.’ In the shadows of our own time we begin to become better prepared to break free of the violence that threatens all of us today.”—Don Mosley, co-founder Jubilee Partners

“A remarkable achievement, outstanding even in an overcrowded field. It is profoundly conceived, researched, considered, argued, and written. Douglass shows persuasively how Kennedy’s innovative steps in foreign policy produced dangerous opposition within his own national security establishment. Not all will agree with his detailed speculation as to what happened in Dallas. But Douglass’s large picture of America’s political agony is, I believe, incontrovertible and certain to last.”--Peter Dale Scott, author Deep Politics and the Death of JFK

"Jim Douglass’s spiritual and eloquent telling of President John F. Kennedy’s martyrdom for peace is a peerless and extraordinary historical contribution.”—Vincent J. Salandria, author, False Mystery: Essays on the Assassination of JFK

“Douglass writes with moral force, clarity, and the careful attention to detail that will make JFK and the Unspeakable a sourcebook for many years to come, for it provides us with the stubborn facts needed to rebuild a constitutional democracy within the United States.”--Marcus Raskin, co-founder, Institute for Policy Studies

“Jim Douglass never ceases to surprise us, taking us where we do not expect or often wish to go. In this fascinating work he links politics and spirituality. In re-forming the past he reshapes the future, with hope, thank God.”--Bill J. Leonard, Dean and Professor of Church History Wake Forest University Divinity School

“Jim Douglass is a courageous and single-minded Christian whose convictions are reflected in his life and witness. In this provocative new book, he brings together history and spirituality at the intersection of one of the most pivotal—and yet still mystifying—events of the past century. A myth-exploding story and compelling read.”--Timothy George, Dean Beeson Divinity School of Samford University

“In JFK and the Unspeakable Jim Douglass steadily guides us toward a strategy of peace. By dramatizing JFK’s remarkable conversion away from a U.S. foreign policy based on military threat and force, Douglass holds forth hope for current generations to similarly dismantle our addiction to war. Douglass’s dedication to nonviolence could have salvific effects as people ponder this astonishing book.”—Kathy Kelly, Voices for Creative Nonviolence

An astonishing new examination of the Kennedy assassination and its meaning today for the struggle for peace.

James Douglass lays out the journey that led JFK in the course of three years from his position as a traditional ColdWarrior to his determination to break with the logic of the Cold War and lead the world in an entirely different direction. This sequence of steps led his adversaries in the military and intelligence establishment to view him as a virtual traitor who had to be eliminated.

Douglass’s book has all the elements of a political thriller. But the stakes couldn’t be higher. Only by understanding the truth behind the murder of JFK can we grasp his vision and assume the urgent struggle for peace today.

“For forty years Jim Douglass has been our leading North American Catholic theologian of peace. But this monumental work on the witness of JFK is something deeper still. . . .This book has the potential to change our narrative about our country, and our lives as citizens and disciples.May we have ears to hear these truths, hearts able to bear their burden, and hands willing to build a new story.”—Ched Myers, author, Binding the Strong Man

James W. Douglass is a longtime peace activist and writer.He and his wife Shelley are co-founders of the Ground Zero Center for Nonviolent Action in Poulsbo, Washington, and Mary’s House, a Catholic Worker house of hospitality in Birmingham, Alabama. His books include The Nonviolent Cross, The Nonviolent Coming of God, and Resistance and Contemplation.
_________________
Operation Mockingbird Spartacus:
http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/JFKmockingbird.htm
Operation Mockingbird Education Forum
http://educationforum.ipbhost.com/index.php?showtopic=5142

I was sent a free advance copy of the book by the publisher (anyone else?).

That always raises my suspicions.

I have not read any of it yet.

Jack

Jack, keep your suspicions raised; nothing wrong with that. However one explanation might be that the book is published by a small publisher without the add budget of the Corporate Liars so sending the book to well known researchers like yourself was perceived as a low budget word of mouth strategy. I have no problem with promoting books that are good and seek the truth. Wish there were more emphasis on spreading the word.

I will eventually read the book. I reserve my opinion till then.
But I was immediately put off by the very small type size and
the "grayness" of the ink used. Not easily read by someone with
glasses. Publishers ought to know that bigger type sizes and
blacker ink help readership.

Jack

Jack,

Sure can relate there. I have read a few books lately that were older issues and small type and light ink. I do not wear glasses yet, but perhaps very soon.

I think I will order a copy and give this book a read, does sound very interesting.



Mike

WOW! Those are 'high marks' from many I respect greatly. The fact it tries to tie what happened then to what is happening now and what needs to be done is very important.....too many are just involved in the [albeit interesting and necessary] who/how-done-it aspects - but without tying together the implications of what it did to the Country and they WHY it was done then to what needs to be done NOW to get our Country [and Planet] back - it is just an interesting murder mystery! I've met and known Catholic Worker folks, and while most have never heard of them, they are really a great group of dedicated and politically active/progressive humanitarians. It is on my shortlist, for sure!

Kennedy was killed by his own government because he embraced world peace, Douglass said. The assassination was coordinated by the CIA, Douglass added.

What a ridiculous statement. As I have posted before, it is intellectual sloppiness at best to state the JFK was killed by "the government". The U.S. government consists of three branches: the executive; the legislative and the judicial. Presumably Douglass does not claim that Congress secretly voted to engage someone to kill the President, or even that high-ranking members of Congress were involved. Re the judicial branch, I suspect Douglass never argues that Earl Warren orchestrated a cover-up to shield his own role as a conspirator. The CIA is part of the executive branch of government. There is of course not a scintilla of evidence that the CIA as an institution killed JFK. But even if one wanted to enter fantasy land and argue that John McCone and Richard Helms together plotted the murder, one cannot state that means our "government" did it.

It is one thing to argue, even in the absence of any evidence, that certain high-ranking members of the US government were involved in a conspiracy but it violates all principles of clarity (and honesty) to claim as Douglass apparently does that "the U.S. goverrnment" did it.

I would also add that it is a strange sense of Christian ethics for Douglass to charge someone with murder based on a paucity of evidence.

I think the members of divinty schools who endorse the Douglass book are as wrong-headed as the mystery writers who so enthusiastically endorsed the Bugliosi book.

Those who think JFK had become a peacenik would do well to read the speech he was to deliver at the Trade Mart.

Jim Douglas is fairly well known for his work on the Martin Luther King assassination. He was the only journalist to cover the civil trial brought by the Kings in 1999.

He spoke this year at COPA's conference in Memphis, http://www.politicalassassinations.com/Memphis.html

I just got a copy of the dvd of the conference. I will be uploading extracts from talks by Jim Douglas, Judge Joe Brown, John Judge and others to youtube fairly soon.
You will be able to see them at www.youtube.com/user/COPAorg

I recently uploaded video of Philip Van Praag discussing his new evidence on the RFK case on CBS. The video has been viewed more than 2,700 times in a few short days.

John

This book is dangerous for the controlled-left Kennedy bashers. If it manages to get inside Amazon 1,000 Sir Alex will have to get out the GTO for another muscular drive-by in Counterpunch.

It is the clearest answer to the charges that Kennedy was and remained a Cold Warrior who was killed by his own anticommunist experimentation. It answers this by consistently juxtaposing JFK's Cold War words with very immediate pressures he was receiving from the JCS and CIA. Never before have the apparent contradictions within JFKs Cold War related foreign policies been so thoroughly contextualized.

This book is could have a historic impact, provided it gets read by a critical mass of people.

It is an even stranger ethical grasp that compels such as Tim Gratz to rush to the defence of an organization that a) continues to lie and withhold critical evidence in the case under discussion; and b) has such a well-documented penchant for assassination, mass murder and subversion.

All things considered, I'd sooner listen to a scorpion or hyena on morality than you, Tim.

Paul

Why don't you reserve your criticism for this book until after you have actualy read it? I have this book and it is definately the one to get for this upcoming 45th anniversary. There is nothing wrong with Jim's "Christian ethics", he is as profoundly ethical as he is Christian. He is also not online so will not be able to discuss his book here.

Dawn

Dawn, as you know I am all in favor of reading books (I suggest you might profit from reading a book which has a premise you scorn) and I certainly intend to read Mr. Douglass' book.

But one need not read it to know that an assertion that President Kennedy was killed by "his government" is about as daft a statement as could be made by anyone holding a high school diploma.

Kennedy of course headed the executive branch of government so it can hardly be said that the executive branch of the government committed the assassination, unless you think it was an assisted suicide.

As I recall, the Democrats controlled both branches of the legislative branch. So do you think that Congress took a secret vote to assassinate the president who was the head of that party?

Or maybe it was the Earl Warren Supreme Court. Both Warren and Oswald were Commies, weren't they? But how did Warren get it by Justice White?

Of course none of the three branches of the federal government killed Kennedy. Indeed, there is no proof whatsoever that anyone receiving a federal paycheck was a conspirator. But even if rogue CIA agents were involved, or even if a CIA officer (or two) were involved, or an FBI agent or officer that does not translate into the proposition that the United States government killed Kennedy. The mind boggles at the size of that leap in logic.

It would be at least a more defensible statement if Douglass wrote that forces within the government killed Kennedy.

But since you have read the book, perhaps you could offer one or two items of evidence against the persons that Douglass, with his Christian ethics, brands as murders and traitors. I would think a miminal sense of ethics would require Douglass to have at least some evidence before he brands people as murderers. As far as I can tell, his argument boils down to something like: JFK was working for peace and the MIC did not like it so they killed him--with no evidentiary support for the involvement of any specific person.

And as I wrote before, if anyone seriously believe that JFK was turning into some sort of peacenik, read his scheduled speech before the Trade Mart in which he brags about the extent of his military build-up.

To Paul Rigby:

If you listen to scorpions, give me your address and I will find a competent mental health professional to consult with you. (If you listen to hyenas, perhaps you share their sense of humor, for which I applaud you.) I do suggest that mixing scorpions with hyenas is
a rather strange assortment.

I take it your reference to an organization is to the United States government and your opinions simply demonstrates your state-of-mind, which would no doubt be appreciated by your hyenas if not by your scorpions.

This book could be a gamechanger.

It has been inside the Amazon top 1000 for six days in a row. THIS IS THE HIGHEST RANKING BOOK THAT ARGUES FOR A CONSPIRACY THAT I HAVE SEEN SINCE I BECAME INTERESTED IN THE CASE ABOUT FIVE YEARS AGO.

So What?!?!?

I think communications matter. Think of how many millions of people scoffed at the idea that JFK was going to withraw from Vietnam after Time and NewSpeak scoffed front cover in 1992. Now years later, every major historian has shown that he WAS-- but how many have heard of it! Part of solving this case will be building a critical mass. We need to be aware of what aspects of the case that LOTS of others are reading so that we can build on this.

If you think communications strategies don't matter, I bet there are a few people in Lang... er Mclean VA who might --very discreetly-- disagree.

Interviews with Douglass on his book here:
http://www.911blogger.com/node/15987

He certainly seems in command of the history and facts, and is clear in his logic and thinking. Very interesting interviews - one for each chapter.

[note the confluence of Dallas/JFK and other assassinations/black ops on a 911 site...a good sign, IMO]

Just got it.

Will report on it soon.

BK

Bill you are in for a great read. You are footnoted, although I am sure this will not effect your review as it might some irrationally exuberant citizens.

Paul's Man Richard Starnes is directly quoted from the same article that Paul has posted here.

Also would be interested to hear Paul's comments on this re: the Lodge-Richardson spat that was more than a spat. Douglass basically argues that the
Coup was done two thirds behind JFK's back, by Lodge, Helms and Conein:

On September 13, 1963, Lodge sent a letter to Secretary of State Dean Rusk asking him to send longtime CIA operative Edward Lansdale
to Saigon "at once to take charge, under my supervision, of all U.S. relationships with a change of government here" Lodge wanted
Lansdale's expertise in "changing governements" so as to facilitate, "under my supervsion," the stalled coup. For Lansdale to be effective
Lodge wrote, he "must have a staff and I therefor ask tha he be put in charge of the CAS ["Controlled American Source", meaning the
CIA] station in the Embassy, relieving the present incumbent, Mr. John Richardson.

Although CIA director McCone denied Lodge's request for Lansdale. Richardson, whom Lodge thought too close to Diem. was recalled to
Washington, just as Lodge wished. The ambassador then became in effect his own CIA station chief in Saigon. He could now supervise
directly Lucien Conein, the CIA's intermediary to the South Vietnamese generals plotting against Diem....

Lodge's commitment to
engineering a coup against Diem was no problem to the CIA's chief of covert operations, Richard Helms, who had the same goal. When
Helms allied the CIA to the Stae Department circle pressuring Kennedy for a coup, he told Harriman, "It's about time we bit this bullet".
Helms could only welcome Lodge's and the State Department's enthusiasm for a coup as additional cover for company business. Whether
Knowingly or not, Henry Cabot Lodge, in his push to carry out a Saigon coup that was facilitated by the CIA, was helping to provide the
impetus for Washington coup as well. (p. 186, JFK and the Unspeakable)

Before diving into JWD and the Unspeakable, there's certainly something going backstage in Nam with Diem, the Catholic, and his pal Richardson, the Siagon CIA station chief, whose son has been doing some interesting research into his father's background that is available on the internet.

I think Richardson was also mixed up in the Berlin shennagans, but most importantly, he's a pivitoal player in a very hot spot, recalled to DC when his cover was blown by a newsreport, and like Fox Fallon, was portrayed as having a personal policy that was different than the government or the President.

Which, I quickl note, there are two reffernces to Richardson in the index so I'll wait to see what's there.

I discovered Richardson while trying to find the name of the professor who taught the class on the History of Vietnam at Antoch College, Yellow Springs, Ohio, around 1970, a class that I took as an exchange student from the University of Dayton. That professor said then that the Vietnam war was a civil war and that we backed the wrong guy, and that we trained Ho Chi Min, who should of been our guy. I later learned that this prof was a former CIA Saigon station chief, and am now wondering if it was Richardson?

I think Douglas' book will stur the debates on multi levels.

BK

Personally, I don't see anything in that speech overly pro-war or hawkish. Here it is for anyone else who would like to read it :

http://www.jfklibrary.org/Historical+Resou...art11221963.htm

Tim,

Why don't you read the book before you go off on Douglas.

He's been studying the case for years and has a good handle on what went down.

And while I agree with you that those who claim that the US government, particularly the CIA was behind the assassination, (like Douglas, Salandria, Garrison, et al.), are wrong in their general assessment regarding the CIA as the culpret, they are correct in that JFK's assassination was an inside job, committed by individuals on behalf of others in the US government.

JFK was killed as a result of a domestic conspiracy, by covert operatives who were part of an US intelligence network, and not by Cubans, Russians or any other foreign country.

Douglas shows how this is th case from high level intrigue to the assassins and patsies on the street.

BK

---------

Tim I think you would find this new book an interesting challenge to the view that JFK was Just Another Cold Warrior> not sure if you would put it like that, but that is certainly the thrust of most of what see in the mass media about JFK for the last 20 years.

Douglass, does not try to hide these cold war statements. Rather he explains them in the context of back channel deep detente discussions that were going on about Cuba, Vietnam, and the Cold War itself with the USSR.

I think we could agree that there are some books that try to overlook the more aggressive traditional cold-war sentences that came from JFK's lips, like other Cold War pols. The refreshing and also VERY VERY CONCINCING THING ABOUT Douglass's book is that he doesn't dodge these statements. He puts them in context as lines designed to buy him space and time with the permanent military bureacracy that eventually killed him.

It is a head on confrontation with the one sided arguments of Hersh, Chomsky, and Cockburn: thats why I think it is essential that left-liberals especially read this book, as most of the distortions about Kennedy have been aimed at this Nation magazine, Democracy Now crowd.

Interesting commont the the blog:

1 comments:
rusty said...
in 1963 america was looking forward to a total of 24 years worth of kennedys in the white house.

lyndon johnson, richard nixon, ronald reagan and, yes, even george bush sr. DID NOT LIKE THE LOOKS OF THAT.

when everyone agrees on what needs to happen there is no conspiracy.

June 6, 2008 1:44 AM
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Jim Douglass is a rare bird.

He comes from a theological background, much like Rev. Martin Luther King, and he has absorbed the previous works of Vince Salandria, Martin Scholtz, Gaeton Fonzi, and the network of independent researchers that is documented in John Kelin's new book.

This background gives him a unique perspective to approaching the Unspeakable, the assassination of President Kennedy, about which he is very eloquent.

I look forward to seeing more of his COPA presentations and want to thank you guys for working out all the screws to get these up and running.

BK

Gaeton Fonzi's Review of JFK and The Unspeakable:

JFK and the Unspeakable
Posted on Apr 29, 2008 10:23am CST.
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On the Road to Peace by John Dear S.J. Tuesday, April 29, 2008
Vol. 2, No. 34

This week, Orbis Books publishes one of its most significant books in years, a labor of some 15 years work by Jim Douglass. JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters tells the painful, hopeful story of John F. Kennedy's efforts to save us from nuclear war, his decision to pull out troops from Vietnam, and his call for nuclear disarmament, a vision that animated shadowy forces in the U.S. government to do away with him and his vision.

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I consider Jim one of the world's leading theologians of Christian nonviolence. His brilliance is reflected in his powerful books, The Nonviolent Cross, Lightning East to West, Resistance and Contemplation and The Nonviolent Coming of God (all recently republished by Wipf and Stock).

JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters
by James W. Douglass
Orbis Books, 544 pages, $30
JFK and the Unspeakable is the first of three volumes (the other two, on the assassinations of Malcolm X and Dr. King, and then Robert F. Kennedy.) It reads like a Robert Ludlum political thriller, only the stakes are much higher, all too real, and all too current. It is the ultimate American story, for it sheds light not only on our history, but on the predicament we face today.

It traces the life of John F. Kennedy into the presidency, through the Bay of Pigs invasion and the Cuban Missile crisis, right through the weeks before his death. With every turned page, we observe him transform from a conventional Cold Warrior to someone determined to pull the world back from the edge of a nuclear apocalypse.

His change is evident in his secret back-channel dialogue with Soviet Premier Nikita Khruschchev and his historic American University peace speech a few months before he was killed. He said:

"I have ... chosen this time and place to discuss a topic on which ignorance too often abounds and the truth too rarely perceived. And that is the most important topic on earth: peace ... not merely peace for Americans but peace for all men and women, not merely peace in our time but peace in all time. I speak of peace because of the new face of war. Total war ... "

A Quaker friend, David Hartsough, told me some years ago that when he was 22, in 1962, he spent time with Kennedy in the White House. He was vigiling for total nuclear disarmament with more than a thousand Friends outside the White House and the State Department. Turns out, JFK welcomed in David and five others to discuss the issue. They gave the president a statement urging a change in direction "from headlong preparation for nuclear war" to "general and complete disarmament."

The group was surprised by how open and friendly JFK was, and surprised in particular by how seriously he listened. But then, as Jim Douglass records, JFK offered a sober word to them: "The military-industrial complex is very strong. If you folks are serious about trying to get our government to take these kinds of steps, you've got to get much more organized, to put pressure on the government to move in this direction."

Such a trend in JFK's thinking, later made evident in his speech, alarmed members of his own U.S. military-intelligence establishment, and finally they regarded him as a dangerous traitor who had to be eliminated.


Douglass tells the story as no mere reporter. He keeps an eye on the mystical veins of history, relying at times on the prophetic voice of his friend Thomas Merton, the Trappist monk, a reliable and prophetic commentator on world events in his day. It was Merton who first wrote about the "unspeakable" in his classic collection of essays, Raids on the Unspeakable (a favorite of mine).

"I have little confidence in Kennedy," Merton wrote a friend in January 1962 "What is needed is not shrewdness or craft, but what the politicians don't have: depth, humanity, and a certain totality of self-forgetfulness and compassion, not just for individuals, but for humanity as a whole: a deeper kind of dedication. Maybe Kennedy will break through into that some day by miracle. But such people are before long marked out for assassination."

What the visionary Merton foretold, the chronicler Douglass charts in detail. JFK, along with Khrushchev and Pope John XXIII, had brought the world back a step from nuclear war. Kennedy planned to remove all U.S. troops from Vietnam. His heart was coming into its own. He embraced global peace; he broke through toward compassion for all of humanity under nuclear siege. And among obstinate powers, his compassion marked him as a candidate for the anonymous bullet.

The implications are staggering. Who can face them? The truth shatters the American myths that lull us asleep, and our hearts lurch in fear. But at some level we know the truth already; American myths have recently grown patently threadbare. One thinks of the Bush administration's disregard of the economy, the children of Iraq, the world's poor, the planet itself -- all in the name of some interest most Americans cannot name or relate to. American myths no longer add up.

The mind protests, nevertheless. Could they go so far as to assassinate a president? Certainly national institutions aren't as insane as all that? The thought sets us reeling. But take a moment to ponder and the dissonance eases. If officials can institute policies that kill three million people in Southeast Asia, a million and a half in Iraq, half a million people in Central America and Colombia, if they shrug at global warming, if they institute a vast, secretive industry for building a nuclear arsenal, controlling outer space, stealing the world's natural resources -- surely they can dispatch a prominent leader who tries to reverse direction, and dispatch him without compunction.

I've pestered Jim for years about the nonviolence of Jesus and Gandhi. And I've found him all too happy to talk. Gandhi, he said, was not only committed to nonviolence, he was committed to truth. He insisted that his people seek it; he insisted they pursue it, experiment in truth by organizing campaigns of nonviolent love.

For Jim, writing the book, he said, was his own Gandhian experiment in truth. It was his effort to face the truth of our country, our government, and our predicament today. The truth, Jim says, is humanity's only hope. Only truth can wake us to reality and inspire our work for transformation.

Jim, though, weaves no hovering dream. While his sober eye searches out the moral and spiritual dimensions, he's an assiduous journalist as well. Here is a story told with immense skill. He lays out the fine details (his endnotes run a hundred pages). He chronicles the details of Lee Harvey Oswald, how CIA and Mafia operatives framed him, how the assassination was set for Chicago, how the plan was foiled, how they had a contingency, and how the deed was done in Dallas. He chronicles the spate of witnesses that died or disappeared during the few years following -- details to make us recoil and blanch.


In our hands lies an account of spirituality wed to the gritty details of history. JFK himself began to see the two as one. He began to hold a view of history in loftier terms than mere national security. And some resolved to put it to an end. They had more in mind than to eliminate one man. They conspired to eliminate a vision.

And to this extent they succeeded. Since his death, the NSA-Pentagon military complex, the secret government within the government, has wreaked unprecedented havoc on our nation and the world, reaching unprecedented heights of violence with the imperial Bush-Cheney administration.

Dare we admit we suffered a kind of coup-d'etat? That we've transmogrified toward NSA dictatorship? That we have on our hands a species of national security state? That our lust for war and money and domination has risen to unprecedented heights?

Our knees tremble to think on it. But Jim's book persuades us. And ultimately it frees us because it wakes us up to the mordant reality of our warmaking government. The book shakes us awake to truth.

It may be helpful to read it as we watch Hillary Clinton and Barak Obama battle for the Democratic nomination, as we hear John McCain talk of "a 100 years of war." There we can here the old assumptions staking our future on a perpetual war-economy. The nation still plunges headlong toward the Unspeakable.

The Unspeakable. Merton was trying to name that ineffable systemic evil that dominates us and beggars our powers to define them. St. Paul tried his hand at it; he gave it a sweeping name, "the principalities and the powers"

Other names have emerged over two millennia: Eisenhower's "the military-industrial complex," Walter Wink's "the domination system," "Babylon," according to John of Patmos, or in Dorothy Day's idiom, "the filthy rotten system." However we name it, Jim urges us to face it and expose it. We expose it by proclaiming the truth about it. To be sure, we'll bring upon ourselves its malign gaze. But at the same time we'll find ourselves liberated and healed. We'll find ourselves able to turn from our love of death toward new life and a sharp vision of equality for all humanity.

It was a bad time in the American 1960s. But Jim's account breaks barriers of time and space. The story is timeless, universal. I believe it points us back to another moment when myth and history converged. A time when the world gasped at the possibility of redemption, even of resurrection. Jim's story points us back to the life and death of Jesus of Nazareth -- he who exposed the system of his day and by example showed succeeding generations how.

"I speak of peace because of the new face of war," JFK said at American University on June 10, 1963. (The entire speech is included at the end of the book.)

Total war makes no sense in an age where great powers can maintain large and relatively invulnerable nuclear forces. It makes not sense in an age where a single nuclear weapons contains almost ten times the explosive force delivered by all the allied air forces in the Second World War.

What kind of a peace do we seek? Not a Pax Americana enforced on the world by American weapons of war. Not the peace of the grave or the security of the slave. I am talking about genuine peace, the kind of peace that makes life on earth worth living, and the kind that enables people and nations to grow, to hope, and to build a better life for their children--not merely peace for Americans but peace for all men and women, not merely peace in our time but peace in all time.

Gaeton Fonzi, staff investigator for the U.S. House Select committee on Assassinations, calls Jim's book "by far the most important book yet written on the subject." Many other experts agree that Jim's work is an "exceptional achievement," the best yet. Read it, and get a big dose of truth.

Archives

From Fair Play:
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http://spot.acorn.net/jfkplace/09/fp.back_...ssue/letam.html[/i]

A Letter to the American People
(and Myself in Particular)
On the Unspeakable

Copyright © by James W. Douglass
All Rights Reserved

I am writing this letter to the American people --- and to one of us in particular, myself --- because I think we are living in denial of the martyrdoms of Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X, and John and Robert Kennedy.

Two prophets, a president, and a president-to-be were martyred between November l963 and June l968, four and a half years that raised some of the greatest hopes in American history. Has our downward spiral ever since as a people, from hope to despair, from faith in change to an acceptance of systemic evil, been because we haven't recognized the truth of those martyrdoms, bound up as they were with unspeakable forces that continue to threaten us all?

Martin, Malcolm, JFK, and RFK were martyrs, "witnesses" to a transforming truth each was willing to die for. Have the deeper changes they envisioned for the U.S. and the world failed to occur because we failed to return their witness? But as the King family and others have challenged the government disclaimers of those executions, has the dam of our collective denial begun to break? Will we finally recognize our martyrs, simultaneously naming the unspeakable, and thereby see the gifts of their lives re-born in us as a people?

Beginning in the sixties, we as a people developed a profound skepticism about our government's explanations of our political assassinations, as we were given one lone-nut explanation after another for the murders of John Kennedy, Martin Luther King, and Robert Kennedy. Yet with the powerful encouragement of our media we have become agnostics, saying "the truth will never be known," when it comes to accepting personal responsibility for the possibility, even the likelihood, that those murders were carried out and covered up by our government.

We are in denial. While in a post-Vietnam War, post-assassinations era we may question whether our government intelligence agencies are reliable sources, we in fact continue to rely on them for basic information and security. Yet it is public knowledge that those same agencies throughout the Cold War carried out covert action campaigns to overthrow foreign governments and assassinate their leaders whenever they were thought to be dangerous to the interests of a power elite in the United States. How likely is it that those same powerful forces, driven by a theology of absolute good versus absolute evil, did not in fact "find it necessary" to employ their covertly honed assassination and disinformation techniques in the United States itself? How willing are we --- am I --- to acknowledge even as a possibility what international observers regard as simple U.S. history?

Perhaps most critically, as the next presidential election rolls around, what could be the consequences to a candidate, identified for whatever reasons as "dangerous to national security," from our continuing denial and refusal of responsibility as a people for our legacy of assassination politics?

Here is another question, one of evidence, for you the American people, and for myself, one citizen in your midst: What are we to make of the November 10, l998, Washington Post article that tells how John Kennedy apparently had two brains?

The article cites the conclusion of a report by the military analyst for the Assassination Records Review Board:

The central contention of the report is that brain photographs in the Kennedy records are not of Kennedy's brain and show much less damage than Kennedy sustained when he was shot in Dallas and brought to Parkland Hospital there on Nov. 22, l963. The doctors at Parkland told reporters then that they thought Kennedy was shot from the front and not from behind as the Warren Commission later concluded. "I am 90 to 95 percent certain that the photographs in the Archives are not of President Kennedy's brain," [Douglas] Horne, a former naval officer, said in an interview. "If they aren't, that can mean only one thing --- that there has been a cover-up of the medical evidence...The second brain was consistent with a shot from behind. The first one was not."

In 1998 I interviewed a former official in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations whom I admire greatly concerning the assassinations of Martin Luther King and John and Robert Kennedy. At one point in that interview with former Attorney General Ramsey Clark, I raised the question whether the official photos and X-rays of President Kennedy's body corresponded to the President's wounds which the doctors at Parkland Hospital in Dallas saw immediately after he was shot.

Ramsey Clark responded that there was no question in his mind that the photos and X-rays were of Kennedy. Then admitting just a scintilla of doubt, he made the following statement:

"But if they're not [authentic], then you have something of a magnitude beyond common experience that would reflect so devastatingly on our society as a whole and its corruptibility that you don't know how to deal with it."

I think Ramsey Clark summarized beautifully a problem that is not unique to him but one we have as a people when we stop short and look into the abyss of the assassination of John F. Kennedy. The cover-up of the President's assassination is marked by one act of criminal government malfeasance after another: the deliberate burning of the autopsy notes, the counterfeit photos and X-rays, the government's cleaning and refitting of the bullet-pocked and brain-tissue-splattered presidential limousine thus eliminating vital forensic evidence, the Warren Commission's magic bullet charade, Army Intelligence's arrogant destruction of its Oswald file...What the cover-up reveals as much as the murder itself is precisely what that brother who once headed our Justice Department said: "something of a magnitude beyond common experience that would reflect so devastatingly on our society as a whole and its corruptibility that you don't know how to deal with it."

Since I began researching the assassinations of Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, and John and Robert Kennedy, I have been shocked by the obvious signature that is written across all four of them. It is the signature of what President Eisenhower identified as the military-industrial complex of our government. We can read that signature at once in Dallas in the identity of the scapegoat Lee Harvey Oswald.

On November 23, l963, Fidel Castro gave a speech on Cuban radio and TV in which he analyzed the wire service reports the day before that had instantly identified Oswald as the assassin. Castro asked brilliantly obvious questions about Oswald that have been suppressed in our own media for decades.

He asked:

Can anyone who has said that he will disclose military secrets [as Oswald said to the Soviet Union] return to the United States without being sent to jail? How strange that this former marine should go to the Soviet Union and try to become a Soviet citizen, and that the Soviets should not accept him, that he should say at the American Embassy that he intended to disclose to the Soviet Union the secrets of everything he learned while he was in the U.S. service and that in spite of this statement, his passage is paid by the U.S. Government...He goes back to Texas and finds a job. This is all so strange!

Fidel Castro recognized "CIA" written all over Lee Harvey Oswald and the press releases on him that were being sent around the world within minutes of the assassination. The whole Dallas set-up was obvious to someone as familiar with CIA assassination plots as Fidel Castro was.

When Lee Harvey Oswald was arrested in Dallas after the assassination, he was carrying a Department of Defense ID card that is routinely issued to U.S. intelligence agents abroad. The FBI later obliterated the card by "testing" it but writer Mary La Fontaine discovered a copy of it in l992 in a Dallas Police Department photo. Oswald had been a radar operator for the CIA's U-2 spy plane while he was a Marine stationed at Atsugi Naval Air Station in Japan. The Atsugi base served as the CIA's center for its Far East operations. His fellow Marines David Bucknell and James Botelho said that when Oswald "defected" to the Soviet Union, he did so under the direction of U.S. intelligence. The professed traitor Oswald was given a U.S.-government loan to assist his return from the USSR. When he settled in Dallas, his closest friend and mentor was longtime U.S. intelligence operative George DeMohrenschildt.

The more one investigates the assassination of John Kennedy, the more one becomes immersed in the depths of U.S. intelligence. The American intelligence community was the sea around Lee Harvey Oswald, Jack Ruby, and the host of anti-Castro Cuban exiles and gun runners with whom Oswald and Ruby worked closely.

John F. Kennedy was murdered because he was turning, in the root biblical sense of the word "turning" --- teshuvah in the Hebrew Scriptures, metanoia in the Greek, "repentance" in English. John Kennedy was murdered because as president of the United States he had begun to turn away from, to repent from, his own complicity with the worst of U.S. imperialism. As a result of the Cuban Missile Crisis, Kennedy was exploring a policy of peace with the USSR and Cuba. He and Nikita Khrushchev had signed the Limited Test Ban Treaty. Quiet contacts were being made through the United Nations for Kennedy to negotiate with Castro on a new U.S.-Cuban relationship (a story told by Cuba's then-UN ambassador Carlos Lechuga in his book In the Eye of the Storm and U.S. diplomat William Attwood in The Reds and the Blacks and The Twilight Struggle).

Kennedy's best statement on his turn toward peace was his June l0, l963, American University address. It anticipates Dr. King's courage in taking a stand against the Vietnam War in his April 4, l967, Riverside Church address. I believe they are parallel in meaning. John Kennedy's American University address was to his death in Dallas as Martin Luther King's Riverside Church address was to his death in Memphis.

When President Kennedy said at American University that the peace he sought was "not a Pax Americana enforced on the world by American weapons of war," the priests of our national security state saw him as a heretic. When he went on in that electrifying speech to ask Americans in l963 "to reexamine our attitude toward the Soviet Union" and "to reexamine our attitude toward the Cold War," those statements at the height of the Cold War were as courageous as Martin Luther King's denunciation of his government at the height of the Vietnam War.

By the Fall of l963 John Kennedy had also decided to withdraw from Vietnam. Robert McNamara in his memoir In Retrospect has described the contentious October 2, l963, National Security Council meeting at which Kennedy decided, against the arguments of most of his advisors: l) to withdraw all U.S. forces from Vietnam by the end of l965; 2) to withdraw l,000 U.S. troops by the end of l963; 3) to announce this policy publicly "to set it in concrete," which McNamara did at a press conference when the meeting was over. Ken O'Donnell in Johnny, We Hardly Knew Ye supplements McNamara's account by adding: "When McNamara was leaving the meeting to talk to the White House reporters, the President called to him, 'And tell them that means all of the helicopter pilots, too.'"

After JFK's assassination, his withdrawal policy was quietly voided. In light of the future consequences of Dallas, it was not only John Kennedy who was crucified on November 22, l963, but 58,000 other Americans and over three million Vietnamese, Laotians, and Cambodians.

Malcolm X's assassination on February 2l, l965, at the Audubon Ballroom in New York was quickly attributed by the police and the media to the Nation of Islam. In the year since Malcolm X had left the Nation of Islam, tensions between its leader Elijah Muhammad and his former star disciple had increased dramatically. When Malcolm X was killed, the wounded, captured assailant Thomas Hayer was in fact an NOI member. So, too, were the two men who were arrested later and also charged with Malcolm X's murder. All three were convicted, but the latter two claimed with Hayer's support that they weren't even in the Audubon Ballroom that afternoon.

Their lawyer William Kunstler, in supporting their claim, pointed out the deeper forces at work in Malcolm's death. He said the crime "was committed by members of the Newark mosque, including Thomas Hayer, and it was undoubtedly the result of terrible, terrible hostility which was engendered by the FBI telling [both Malcolm and Elijah Muhammad] in anonymous letters that they were going to kill each other [and which] created this terrible, terrible tension that led these five men at the Newark mosque to eliminate Malcolm X; and even though they fired the guns, three of them, the FBI was the real hand on the trigger" (in Malcolm X As They Knew Him, edited by David Gallen).

The key to understanding Malcolm's assassination is the last year of his life. He spent over half of it outside the United States, on four separate trips abroad. In his Autobiography Malcolm tells the well-known story of his transforming April l964 Hajj to Mecca, where he experienced a profound unity of worship with Muslims of every race, including those "whose hair was the blondest of blond, and whose skin was the whitest of white." The Autobiography says little, however, of Malcolm's July 9 to November 24, l964, travels through Africa, an equally important story he was saving for a book he didn't live to write.

The purpose of Malcolm's tour of Africa was to internationalize the plight of Afro-Americans in the U.S. Malcolm went first to Cairo, where he attended the African Summit Conference and appealed to the delegates of 34 African nations "to help us bring our problem before the United Nations, on the grounds that the United States is morally incapable of protecting the lives and the property of 22 million African-Americans."

Malcolm wanted to unmask the U.S. government at the United Nations. He was taken seriously in that purpose by African heads of state and by his own government. U.S. intelligence agents followed him closely, as can be seen from CIA and FBI documents. Malcolm was acutely aware of the surveillance, which was made obvious by the agents in order to intimidate him.

At the Cairo conference Malcolm collapsed with stomach pains and was rushed to a hospital. His stomach was pumped, and he survived. The doctors told him he had consumed "a toxic substance" at dinner. They ruled out food poisoning. Malcolm thought he had been poisoned by the same forces that were shadowing him. He then wrote an open letter to friends in Harlem in which he said:

You must realize that what I am trying to do is very dangerous, because it is a direct threat to the entire international system of racist exploitation ... Therefore, if I die or am killed before making it back to the States, you can rest assured that what I've already set in motion will never be stopped...Our problem has been internationalized (Malcolm X, By Any Means Necessary).

Malcolm continued his human rights campaign for African-Americans for four and a half months throughout Africa, speaking before huge crowds in nation after nation, dogged everywhere by the CIA. Malcolm's friend, the writer Louis Lomax wrote: "By then the CIA was following Malcolm's every move; agents were aboard every flight he took, other agents watched his hotels and even kept him under surveillance during meal time" (Louis E. Lomax, To Kill a Black Man). Malcolm told his sister, Ella Collins, that he narrowly avoided another poisoning in Ethiopia.

On February 9, l965, twelve days before his assassination, Malcolm X was barred from visiting France on another speaking trip. When his plane landed, the French government without explanation ordered him to leave the country. Malcolm believed the State Department was responsible. After Malcolm's death, journalist Eric Norden discovered the reason why France had barred Malcolm. Norden was told by a North African diplomat that "his country's intelligence apparatus had been quietly informed by the French Department of Alien Documentation and Counter-Espionage that the CIA planned Malcolm's murder, and France feared he might be liquidated on its soil." The diplomat then commented in elegantly modulated French: "Your CIA is beginning to murder its own citizens now."

On the day before his assassination, Malcolm X phoned Alex Haley and told him why he was going to stop saying that it was the Muslims who were about to kill him. He said: "I know what [the Muslims] can do and what they can't, and they can't do some of the stuff recently going on."

Malcolm then made a final remark that Haley thought "an odd, abrupt change of subject" but which may have been no change of subject at all: "You know, I'm glad I've been the first to establish official ties between Afro-Americans and our blood brothers in Africa." Malcolm knew that was the real reason his life had been targeted. And he had no regrets.

But there may have been a second reason. Continuous FBI and CIA surveillance had discovered that Malcolm was exploring an even more startling alliance than his ties with African leaders, a collaboration with Dr. Martin Luther King.

On February l4, l965, Malcolm and Martin conferred on the phone. Their conversation was described by William Kunstler: "There was sort of an agreement that they would meet in the future and work out a common strategy, not merge their two organizations, but that they would work out a method to work together in some way. And I think that that quite possibly led to the bombing of Malcolm's house that evening in East Elmhurst and his assassination one week later."

As those who were monitoring their communications knew, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King were moving toward an alliance that would have shaken the system to its foundations. Both were targeted.

The FBI had been plotting Martin Luther King's assassination ever since its failure in l964 to destroy his reputation and drive him to suicide. In November l964 J. Edgar Hoover had authorized his assistant William C. Sullivan to send anonymously to Coretta Scott King an audiotape of a bawdy party King had attended. Accompanying the tape was a letter addressed to Martin Luther King. Sullivan later testified before the Senate's Church Committee on intelligence activities that the FBI had hoped, first, to break up King's marriage and thereby reduce his status. By circulating the tape as widely as possible to media contacts, they also hoped to destroy his reputation, and ultimately, his spirit.

A further intention, King's death, is revealed by the FBI's anonymous letter to him. It concludes:

King, there is only one thing left for you to do. You know what this is. You have just 34 days in which to do (this exact number has been selected for a specific reason, it has definite practical significant [sic]). You are done. There is but one way out for you. You better take it before your filthy, abnormal fraudulent self is bared to the nation.

The FBI mailed the package to the Kings on November 2l, exactly 34 days before Christmas l964, the deadline they had chosen for King to take "the one way out ".

The package sat around in an office and was not opened by Coretta King until January 5, l965. When she, Martin, and several friends listened to the tape and read the letter, they knew at once from other FBI efforts that the source was J. Edgar Hoover and that the purpose was to destroy Martin Luther King by any means possible.

However, King was not driven by such methods to the personal breaking point or public ruin that his enemies desired. So the FBI took further steps.

Clifton Baird was a Louisville, Kentucky, police officer in l965 when he was asked to help kill Martin Luther King. On September l8, l965, Baird gave a ride home in his car to fellow Louisville officer Arlie Blair after their 3-ll pm shift. Baird parked his car in Blair's driveway, and the two men talked. Alarmed at what Blair was saying, Clifton Baird secretly turned on a microphone hidden under his seat that was connected to a recorder in a rear speaker.

What Baird taped was an offer to engage in a conspiracy to kill Dr. King. He later shared the information with author William F. Pepper who included it in his book on the King assassination Orders to Kill. Blair told Baird that an organization he belonged to was willing to pay $500,000 for the death of King. Would Baird be willing to participate? Baird said he definitely would not. He urged Blair to stay away from it, too.

The next day at a Louisville police station, Clifton Baird saw Arlie Blair conferring with a group of police officers and FBI agents. The FBI agents had, over a period of sixteen years or more, developed a close relationship with members of the Louisville police force. When the group went into a room and closed the door, Baird overheard them discussing the offer in heated terms and referring to him as "a nigger lover".

On September 20, l965, Baird taped a second car conversation with Blair. Blair again brought up the $500,000 bounty for King, which Baird had now connected with the FBI. Baird also realized then the reason behind a puzzling FBI investigation into his alleged involvement in a "dynamite ring" in Western Kentucky. The investigation was being held over his head to force him to join the conspiracy. Baird suspected he was being groomed to become its patsy -- "like James Earl Ray," he told Pepper.

After Baird refused to cooperate with the FBI plot and was exonerated from any bombing involvement, four local FBI agents he knew followed and harassed him for the next couple of years. He thought he "was being watched and warned to keep quiet." After King's assassination, the pressure ceased.

Thank God for Clifton Baird. By blocking the Louisville assassination plans at considerable risk to himself, Clifton Baird may have added as much as two years to the life of Martin Luther King. In the root sense of the word, Clifton Baird was like Dr. King a "martyr," one who lived and spoke the truth at the risk of his life.

Myron Billett was another witness to the truth. By undergoing a conversion in his own life, Myron Billett was able to reveal that in January l968 FBI and CIA agents offered a New York Mafia leader a $l million contract to kill Martin Luther King.

My lens for seeing the life of Myron Billett is the testimony of Rev. Maurice McCrackin, the much loved Cincinnati minister and prophet of peace who died on January 30, l997. Maurice McCrackin told me he met Myron Billett in the late seventies while McCrackin was visiting prisoners at Ohio State Penitentiary in Columbus, Ohio. Billett, a former Mafia member, was serving a sentence for manslaughter. McCrackin became his best friend. When Billett was released from prison for health reasons, McCrackin baptized him. He then ministered to his friend through the eighties. As a repentant Christian, Billett renounced his mob past and broke silence concerning his criminal involvements. He told the following story to Maurice McCrackin, William Pepper, members of the House Select Committee on Assassinations, and on a l989 BBC documentary shortly before his death.

Myron Billett was a messenger and go-between for Chicago Mafia don, Sam Giancana. In January l968 Giancana asked Billett to make the arrangements for "a very important meeting" between New York Mafia leader Carlo Gambino and some government representatives. Billett set up the meeting at a motel in Apalachin, New York, the site of an early l960s mob summit.

Billett said that at the meeting (which he attended) the three representatives of the CIA and FBI asked Carlo Gambino if he would accept a $l million contract to assassinate Martin Luther King. Billett recalled the exact words of Gambino's reply: "In no way would I or the family get involved with you people again. You messed up the Cuba deal. You messed up the Kennedy deal."

The CIA and FBI men said they would make "other arrangements" and departed.

After Dr. King was assassinated on April 4, Sam Giancana gave Myron Billett $30,000 and told him to start running: They both knew too much and were going to be killed. Giancana was in fact murdered in his Chicago home in June l975, just before he was scheduled to testify before the Church Committee concerning assassination plots. His killing took the form of a symbolic warning to other possible assassination witnesses. Giancana was shot seven times in a circle around his mouth.

Like Clifton Baird, Myron Billett said he had been shadowed in obvious ways, apparently designed to intimidate him. But Myron also continued to speak the truth. Maurice McCrackin said of him: "There's no finer person and more caring spirit I've known than Myron. He was very gentle and always the same. It was just remarkable looking at him and realizing what he'd been part of."

The final chapter of Martin Luther King's life began on January l4, l967, the day on which King committed himself to deepening his opposition to the Vietnam War. He was at an airport restaurant on his way to a retreat in Jamaica. While looking through magazines, he came across an illustrated article in Ramparts, "The Children of Vietnam". His coworker Bernard Lee never forgot King's shock as he looked at photographs of young napalm victims.

He froze as he looked at the pictures from Vietnam. He saw a picture of a Vietnamese mother holding her dead baby, a baby killed by our military. Then Martin just pushed the plate of food away from him. I looked up and said, "Doesn't it taste any good," and he answered, "Nothing will ever taste any good for me until I do everything I can to end that war."

On April 4, l967, Dr. King shocked his government and scandalized the media by his uncompromising speech against the Vietnam War at New York's Riverside Church. Three decades later, we can sense the power of his words then by applying them to a currently unacknowledged evil.

In the following passage from King's Riverside Church address, for the "Vietnam War" let us substitute the "sanctions against Iraq," an analogous crime today in which our government and the United Nations systematically kill 6,000 to 7,000 Iraqi children per month.

Somehow this madness must cease. We must stop now. I speak as a child of God and brother to the suffering poor of [Iraq]. I speak for those whose land is being laid waste, whose homes are being destroyed, whose culture is being subverted...I speak as a citizen of the world, for the world as it stands aghast at the path we have taken. I speak as an American to the leaders of my own nation. The great initiative in [these deadly sanctions] is ours. The initiative to stop [them] must be ours.

When Martin Luther King applied these words to our government's crusade against not Saddam Hussein but Ho Chi Minh, he was exposing the hypocrisy of a murderous system. When King walked "among the desperate, rejected and angry young men" of our ghettos, he urged them to choose nonviolent action. When they replied angrily, "What about Vietnam?" he said, "I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today --- my own government."

In his King biography Bearing the Cross, David Garrow cites J. Edgar Hoover's ominous response to King's indictment, a private communication to President Lyndon Johnson: "Based on King's recent activities and public utterances, it is clear that he is an instrument in the hands of subversive forces seeking to undermine our nation."

The perception by government leaders that Martin Luther King was their worst domestic enemy deepened from mid-l967 on, as King announced the plans for a Poor People's Campaign in Washington, D.C. An interracial army of poor persons would come together in the nation's capital in late April l968. They would then engage in wave after wave of mass civil disobedience to dislocate the functioning of the city.

The crowds of poor Americans from around the country would tie up Washington until Congress passed a comprehensive anti-poverty bill. The absolute minimum in legislation, King told reporters, was a full-employment commitment, a guaranteed annual income, and a half million units of low-income housing per year.

Policymakers feared King would succeed in bringing the nation's capital to a crunching halt until they made a commitment to eliminate poverty in the United States. The dreamer of l963 had become the nightmare of l968 to the White House and the Pentagon.

The intelligence community also knew, from listening electronically to King's every word, that he had an even broader vision of the Poor People's Campaign. With the Vietnam War at its peak in the Spring of l968, King told his staff, "After we get [to D.C.] and stay a few days [we'll] call the peace movement in, and let them go on the other side of the Potomac and try to close down the Pentagon."

In his Canadian Broadcasting Corporation lectures at the end of l967 (later published as The Trumpet of Conscience), King's vision went beyond even these overwhelming concerns. He saw the next step as a global nonviolent movement using escalating acts of massive civil disobedience to disrupt the entire international order and block economic and political exploitation across borders.

The power structure knew the breadth of this prophet's vision and that Memphis was a last chance to stop him before he led the Poor People's Campaign into Washington.

Imagine playing chess with an opponent who always knows what your next move will be. Memphis police sources have described the extent of federal electronic surveillance of Dr. King on his March l8, l968, visit to Memphis when he stayed at the Holiday Inn Rivermont Hotel. Every room in his suite was bugged, even the bathroom. With this total electronic surveillance as well as undercover agents placed within the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the federal government planned its moves with confidence.

When Dr. King returned to Memphis on March 28, the march he was about to lead had been targeted by the government. Memphis minister Samuel "Billy" Kyles, who was close to police sources, said in l993 that the FBI had hired provocateurs to disrupt the march. Rev. James Lawson, who had invited King to Memphis, witnessed the provocateurs' actions and a curious police response to them. He noticed a group of youths on the sidewalk between the marchers and the police. Although Lawson knew the young black activists of Memphis, he recognized no one in this group. He saw them begin to break windows, while the police watched them impassively. Lawson realized he was witnessing a violent scenario being played out to justify police violence against the marchers.

The government-sponsored violence in the March 28 march is what forced Martin Luther King to return to Memphis on April 3. As those monitoring his moves knew, King had to prove he could lead a peaceful march in Memphis before he could lead the Poor People's Campaign to Washington.

On the day after the disrupted march, the FBI's Domestic Intelligence Division issued a memorandum. It recommended that an FBI-authored article be given, "on a highly confidential basis," to a "cooperative news media source". The FBI article read in part:

The fine Hotel Lorraine in Memphis is owned and patronized exclusively by Negroes but King didn't go there from his hasty exit [from the march]. Instead King decided the plush Holiday Inn Motel, white owned, operated and almost exclusively white patronized, was the place to `cool it.' There will be no boycott of white merchants for King, only for his followers.

Six days before King's assassination, the FBI was applying pressure to move him from the Holiday Inn Rivermont, where he had stayed on his last two Memphis visits, to "the fine Hotel Lorraine" where he would be killed. King co-worker Hosea Williams testified in the l993 HBO television trial of James Earl Ray that when he arrived with Dr. King on April 3, they were looking forward to staying at the Rivermont Holiday Inn, and that he was surprised that they were taken to the Lorraine Motel. He said that neither he nor anyone else in the entourage was familiar with the Lorraine and no one understood why the change was made. Williams also said that Dr. King was "initially" given a room on the ground floor but for some reason, his room was changed.

The owners of the Lorraine Motel, Walter and Lorraine Bailey, had been asked by "an SCLC representative" (whom the SCLC said later they knew nothing about) to change King's room. They were instructed to move King from the priority suite they had assigned him, on the ground floor facing an inner courtyard, to a second floor room with a balcony overlooking a swimming pool in front of the motel. When Lorraine Bailey learned on April 4 that Dr. King had just been shot on the balcony, she groaned, "My God, what have I done?" and suffered a stroke. She never regained consciousness and died five days later at the same hospital where King had been taken, St. Joseph's, just as his funeral was beginning in Atlanta.

In the last year of his life Martin Luther King denounced and unmasked the mighty in their prosecution of the Vietnam War. He called his own government "the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today." He proclaimed good news to the poor by organizing the Poor People's Campaign that he hoped would shut down Washington, D.C., until the government agreed to eliminate poverty in America. He took on the lot of poor Memphis sanitation workers in a dramatic strike on the eve of the Poor People's Campaign. Because he had become a prophet of poor people's resurrection, Martin Luther King was executed by the system.

When Robert F. Kennedy was shot to death at l2:l5 am on June 5, l968, at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles, in a sense everyone already knew the story.

A lone fanatic, in this case Sirhan Sirhan, had gunned down not a president but a man who had just won the California Democratic primary, very likely a president-to-be, and a president-to-be who even more than his brother was "turning" in the biblical sense. Turning away from, repenting from, his obedience to the same forces that had killed his brother. Turning away from military and corporate power. Turning toward the people. Turning toward farm workers. Turning toward blacks. Turning toward the poor of all colors. Turning toward those trapped on both sides of the lines in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia. A man turning toward that impossibility which his brother John showed a few signs of becoming and he a few more, a prophetic president. To be a prophetic president of a state sanctioning a military industrial complex was impossible, unless one turned toward the ultimate witness of truth. And as Bobby Kennedy turned in that direction, he received its reward not surprisingly before he could become president.

But this time, unlike Dallas, it did seem to be an open-and-shut case.

Everyone knew Sirhan Sirhan had appeared suddenly before Robert Kennedy in the hotel pantry. Everyone knew that Sirhan had fired his pistol from an outstretched arm several feet in front of Kennedy. And we knew that Bobby Kennedy had died of three gunshot wounds, and that five other persons in the pantry had been wounded from the eight bullets Sirhan had fired. It all added up.

An open-and-shut case.

It was so simple a way of disposing of so obvious a target as Robert Kennedy that one almost wondered if the forces behind the Grassy Knoll hadn't learned how to be a bit more circumspect. So that a Warren Report wouldn't even be needed. And it wasn't. In the case of the lone nut killing Robert Kennedy we the American people accepted the Los Angeles Police's verdict that it was an open-and-shut case.

Lost in the relief that we finally knew who was killing whom were a few unanswered questions.

The famous coroner Dr. Thomas Noguchi in the most thorough autopsy of his career came up with some troublesome findings in the assassination of Robert Kennedy. He concluded that Kennedy had been shot dead from behind by a gun held one inch from the edge of his right ear, three inches behind the head. All three bullets which struck Kennedy had entered from behind him at a steep upward angle, causing powder burns from shots fired one to three inches away.

Yet every witness of the shooting placed Sirhan Sirhan several feet in front of Kennedy when firing his gun. The witnesses were equally clear that Kennedy never turned his back to Sirhan.

Another question arose from the three bullet holes found in the pantry ceiling, the two bullets dug out of the center divider of the swinging doors, and the total of six people who had been shot --- in Kennedy's case three times. Sirhan's gun held eight bullets, and he had not re-loaded. These numbers didn't add up.

Most disturbing of all was the testimony of Don Schulman, a runner for a TV station, that he had seen a security guard fire three times. The recently hired security guard walking just behind Kennedy, Thane Cesar, admitted pulling his gun but denied firing it.

And so it goes, with the questions piling up in Los Angeles as in Dallas, Harlem, and Memphis. In some respects the cover-up by the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) task force, called "Special Unit Senator" (SUS), outdoes them all. In his book The Robert F. Kennedy Assassination, Philip Melanson describes the systematic intimidation by SUS interrogators of a series of key witnesses who had been prepared to offer evidence of a conspiracy before they were broken down. The two LAPD officers who ran Special Unit Senator were Manuel Pena and Enrique "Hank" Hernandez. Both had extensive CIA backgrounds in training Latin American security forces. Until shortly before Senator Kennedy's assassination, Manuel Pena had been on loan from the LAPD to the CIA as an instructor for national police and intelligence services in Latin America. Special Unit Senator's second-in-command, Hank Hernandez, stated in his own resume that in l963 he had played a key role in the CIA's "Unified Police Command" training in Latin America. Pena and Hernandez coordinated an investigation which not only threatened and discredited conspiracy witnesses but by the department's own admission destroyed 2,400 photographs, negatives, and X-rays of assassination evidence before Sirhan's trial. Then Assistant Police Chief Daryl Gates defended the further destruction of the door frame wood and ceiling tiles which showed bullet holes on the grounds that they would not fit into a card file.

Robert Kennedy was assassinated within seconds after moving decisively toward the presidency by winning the California Democratic primary. Kennedy was committed to ending the Vietnam War, which after his death would continue for seven more years under Presidents Johnson, Nixon, and Ford. He was also dedicated to abolishing poverty by a uniquely reconciling coalition of blacks, whites, Hispanics, and Native Americans. In the Spring of `68, Robert Kennedy was walking and talking a radical transformation of the USA, in harmony with the vision of the already gunned-down Martin Luther King. It is astonishing that such a man almost became president, unsurprising that he was assassinated the moment he became the key candidate. Not incidental is the fact that as president he would have had the power to re-open the national security lid of the can of worms around JFK's murder.

Parallels between the JFK and RFK cover-ups are striking. The Warren Commission's inquiry was steered by Allen Dulles, the CIA head whom John Kennedy had fired after the Bay of Pigs. In the view of international observers, investigator Dulles played an unacknowledged dual role. He was also the chief suspect. Two CIA-affiliated police officers controlled the Los Angeles investigation of Senator Kennedy's murder. As in the Warren Commission, the fox was again in charge of solving the henhouse killing.

Is the history of our assassination politics really all that mysterious?

In this land of denial, how can we learn to see and speak the truth? Is it a question of where our hearts are?

As I near the end of this letter to you the American people and to myself, one more American trying to overcome my denial, I want to go back to the event that began this series of public executions, the killing of President Kennedy.

As muck-raking biographers have made every American aware, John F. Kennedy was no saint. But he was a martyr. "Martyr" means witness, especially a witness to truth at the cost of one's life. In the last year of his life, John Kennedy was turning toward peace at the risk of his life. In his conflicts with the CIA and the military-industrial complex, he faced the magnitude of that systemic evil from which we recoil in the face of his execution. After his death he was quoted in The New York Times as having said that he wanted "to splinter the CIA in a thousand pieces and scatter it to the winds" (Times, April 25, l966, p. 20). The system made certain that intention was never fulfilled. Like Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, and Robert Kennedy after him, John Kennedy was a martyr for peace and justice.

Are we aware that a month after John Kennedy's assassination, President Harry S. Truman repeated President Eisenhower's warning about the military-industrial complex with a more specific focus on the CIA? This is what President Truman said in Independence, Missouri, on December 2l, l963, while the country was still in shock from Dallas:

I think it has become necessary to take another look at the purpose and operations of our Central Intelligence Agency --- CIA...

For some time I have been disturbed by the way the CIA has been diverted from its original assign