James DiEugenio

To say the bombing of Libya was not a good idea is being rather mild.

It was a horrendous idea. It threw Libya into becoming a slave auction state.

And it has nothing to do with feminism.

Reportedly it was those three who pushed that bomb of an idea on Obama.

Then Obama later said he was not going to go into Syria with an invasion.

Well, technically that was true.  But he did approve a giant covert operation against Syria's secular leader.  And this might have succeeded if Russia and Iran did not come to Assad's aid. 

In the latter two parts of my series I will show how these indicate that the Neocon creed came to power in  both parties.

And how it contrasts with what JFK did in comparable situations.

PS Matt was part of the Insurrection?

What ultimately happened  was that the Neocons ended up taking over both parties.

This is a theme I will get to in part 4.  

A perfect example is that the three witches--HRC, Power and RIce-- used NATO to bomb Africa.

Let me repeat: NATO to bomb Africa.

When Kennedy intervened in Congo, he went to the UN.

We will also see that although Obama tried to say he fended off the attempt to invade Syria, he did not.  He approved Timber Sycamore, a 1.2 billion CIA covert action which used Moslem Fundamentalists to get rid of a secular MIddle East leader, Assad.

Kennedy advocated the contrary with Nasser.  He wanted to use a secular socialist who went to war with the Moslem Brotherhood to westernize and modernize the Middle East.

This is what I mean about Kennedy being buried and the Neocons taking over both parties.

Ron:

That is technically correct.

The first outburst of the Neocons on foreign policy was with Cheney and Rumsfeld under Gerald Ford.  This was when they decided to clip Kissinger's wings because of his detente with Russia.  And they did.

The next move was the Committee on the Present Danger, to turn Russia into a military power the likes of Rommel, the Wehrmacht and Luftwaffe.  

This was temporarily stymied by Carter's presidency.   Which Paul Nitze called McGovernism without McGovern.

But it then exploded under Reagan, and man the defections that followed. American foreign policy has not been the same since.  And what Kennedy was trying was buried forever.

In the third or fourth part of my essay, I will put forth the concept that the Neocon movement was first named as such back in the seventies by Michael Harrington.

At the time he was referring to Democrats who had jumped ship on things like the War on Poverty and the Great Society.

This was really kind of prophetic, since that was just the beginning.  Almost all of Henry Jackson's foreign policy team would later jump to Reagan.

So, its an incredible irony, that the Neocon movement was in reality started by former Democrats. As I will argue, I doubt this would have happened if JFK had lived.

Nice one Ron.

BTW, if you have not seen this film, it is in keeping with those essays.

These guys even interviewed the children of Norman Cousins. 

Its free, and it has been shamefully ignored.

I agree Paul.

Can you imagine working on that speech for about a year, and having his wife translate articles from the French and Spanish?  Going all the way back to Roosevelt and his thoughts on the Middle East?

What is remarkable about that speech is thinking back to the time frame it was made in: The hotbed of the Cold War and Foster Dulles condemning the whole idea of neutrality in the Third World.

Kennedy got pilloried for making it.

Jean:

Thanks for that link to the Algeria speech.

We found out while making JFK Revisited, there is no film of it.

There is only a short film of Kennedy speaking some of the speech in his office.  I think he anticipated there would be no film of it.

But man was there a reaction.  138 editorials and columns, 2-1 negative. 

And even Acheson and Stevenson attacked him. I like the touch about Jackie yelling at Acheson at Penn Central.

Can anyone show me where I mentioned Israel in those two essays?

Ron:

In his 1957 speech JFK really gave it to Ike and Foster Dulles about Dien Bien Phu.

He said something like, has everyone forgotten what happened three years ago?

Do we really want to be on the wrong side of history again?

1 hour ago, Paul Brancato said:

Jim - this is incredible and much needed work. Amazing thing is that no one wants to actually discuss your well articulated and researched points. The second essay really hits home, and I’m really looking forward to the next two installments. 

Thanks William.  And i agree, the content of the two essays is pretty much being ignored.

Yet, theTruman split from FDR and JFK's return to FDR is what those two are about.

Can you imagine spending a year researching and writing a speech like Kennedy did on Algeria?

And then getting blasted for it.  When in fact you were utterly correct?

Everyone should take note of what happened in the Alec Baldwin case today.

It would have been worse in the Oswald case.

Because the instances of evidentiary manipulation were  more prolific.

In a point I will get to later, Kissinger was too moderate for the Neocons.

Rumsfeld and Cheney, who put the Neocon revolution in practice, sidelined him due to his attempt at detente.

They then revved up Nitze's Committee on the Present Danger, filled with Neocons, to create the USSR as a military juggernaut that could demolish the USA.  Which was another nutty Neocon theorem that Henry Jackson advocated.

As I will write, this was the precursor to the Jackson Neocons taking over under Reagan.

But the intellectual roots go back further to men like Strauss.

I actually meant it to be about JFK vs the Neocons.

BTW, how many people knew about JFK and his policy in Iran?

Larry Hancock first tipped me off to that.

Just remember, as Kai Bird pointed out, it was John McCloy who successfully lobbied the Carter administration to let the Shah into the USA.

That brought us Ronald Reagan.

Can you imagine one guy covering up the JFK case and doing that also?  And recall, it was CBS who let him consult on their 1967 cover up special.

I am going to get to what a neocon is in this essay.

It will be complete and accurate.

And I will show how they disavowed and buried Kennedy's foreign policy until today it might as well be in a museum.

Thanks William, I was going to wait to post them.

It will eventually be four parts.

The underlying theme is dual. 

its about why JFK was murdered, and how his political legacy was then buried and the opposition resurfaced with the neocons.

Unlike a lot of substack writers, who shall remain nameless, this work requires research and footnotes.

That is correct William.  it should be. 

What is the evidence that JFK despised Lyndon Johnson?

From everything I have read, and its a lot, Kennedy treated Johnson with respect both in the senate and as VP.  

The stuff that went on prior to the convention, Kennedy understood that as pure politics in a  political race. 

Kennedy understood that as a northeast Catholic liberal, LBJ would balance out the ticket in every way, geographically, religiously and politically.  

So it just made the most political sense.  I repeat, Sorenson's first list had Johnson at the top.  (Kennedy, p. 184) Sorenson then adds, "He had strong voter appeal in areas where Kennedy had little or none.. He was a protestant with a capital P. Above all, Kennedy respected him..."

Clark Clifford was managing Symington's campaign. When Kennedy approached him to feel him out, Clifford replied that Symington was not interested, he was playing for a second ballot.  (Schlesinger,  A Thousand Days, p. 40)

This is simply and utterly false.

And I showed why in my review of Sean Fetter's meritless book.

The reason being is simple:  from the very start, when Sorenson made out his  first list, Johnson was at the top.

The question always was whether or not, he would accept it .

Kennedy did not think he would.  But at the convention, Alsop, and Graham, said he should ask.  And Tommy Corcoran and Tip O'Neill both told him that he would take it and JFK said that would be his most likely path to victory. Since be had been hemorrhaging support in the south since his 1957 declaration for Brown v Board, which he did twice, once in Mississippi.  That is how the call came to be.  And Connally told LBJ he should accept.  Bobby Kennedy did everything he could to stop it, but he failed.

What Hersh did with this, like about everything he did in his trash compactor of a book, was simply and utterly wrong.  He relied on someone who was not even in on the deliberations, ignored all the established precedents, and from there zoomed to a preordained assumption that was simply mythological.  That Fetter, or anyone else, should rely on Hersh in this day and age for anything is simply unfathomable. Especially after the sorry debacles of the Marilyn Monroe trust and the Underwood messengering with Exner between Washington and Chicago. 

I mean please. Not on this forum.

BTW, that line of questioning about why Stringer did not follow his own method, that would open up a whole Pandora's Box.

Because the other questions would then follow: about how the heck does any experienced autopsy photographer take a picture like the mystery photo?

IMO, from what I have read, Stringer would then blame Humes.  Which would lead to the question of: why on earth would Stringer allow Humes to direct him about his profession, that he himself taught in the opposite manner?

You start going down that path and you literally have the rats jumping ship.

Further:

Stringer's testimony about the brain photos would be quite compelling.

Secondly, the ARRB had testimony that Stringer did not follow his regular routine when taking the other pictures.

His routine, which he actually taught, was three pictures of each impacted area: close up, medium shot and distant shot.

Why did he not do that in this case?

Johnny just pinned the tail on the donkey.

See, before any trial you have what is called in California a 402 hearing.

At that hearing the defense gets to challenge the prosecutor's evidence for issues of chain of custody and admissibility.

Can you imagine trying to get those pictures in with the witnesses above?  I mean Sibert and ONeill would be utterly humiliating.  

But then, there is the issue of dissection.

Tanenbaum: Dr. Humes, what was the cause of death in this case?

Humes: A bullet wound to the head.

Tanenbaum: Well, if such was the case, why did you not section the brain for a dissection?

Humes: In the interests of preserving the specimen.

Tanenbaum:  Preserving it for whom?  Did you plan on putting it on display in a museum?

I agree, nice one Paul.

BTW, as per Harriman, I don't think he had much to do with the formation of the Warren Commission.  At least I do not recall him from Don Gibson's definitive essay.

But Jim Douglass does mention him as secretly sandbagging a neutralist solution suggested by Galbraith through India about Vietnam. (pp. 119-21)

To Ben:

In 1964, Johnson attempted to keep secret his plan to escalate in Vietnam.  This included the fact that he had also planned for a casus belli event for which he would go to congress for a resolution.  That, of course, was the Tonkin Gulf Resolution, which he lied about as to where the ships were and that they were not just like patrols as we had all over the Pacific Ocean.

It was not until later that Fulbright realized that he had been duped by the White House, not just on Vietnam but also on Juan Bosch and the invasion of the Dominican Republic, which was also a reversal of Kennedy's policy.  It was when Fulbright began to call for his senate hearings that the Democratic Party began to reconsider what LBJ was doing.  But by then, 1966, it was a bit late.  And the plea was we could not abandon the effort in midstream with hundreds of thousands of men still there.

It was Fulbright who finally began to turn the tide against LBJ.  But the country had by now been polarized as hawks vs doves to such an extent that the facts did not really matter. You were either for the war, thus a patriot, or against the war, a sell out. And I should add, that polarization was magnified by Nixon to the point that it has never left the country.

I should add, back then you had liberal and moderate  Republicans, like Jacob Javits and John Sherman Cooper. They were both on that committee.  They were so critical about what LBJ had done that Johnson called CBS and asked Paley to censor the hearings. Fred Friendly resigned over that request when CBS showed a rerun of I Love Lucy instead.

Here is another one with Monika on Apple.

Nice that she is getting around,  her book is  quite valuable.

https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/special-guest-episode-monika-wiesak-author-of/id1721730634?i=1000661392705