Robin Ramsay

Kennedy, who talked the conventional Cold War-Soviet menace talk when he had to before the election, but who, after the Bay of Pigs and the Cuban Missile Crisis, went off the rails as far as the military-industrial complex was concerned. He did a deal with Kruschev and promised to leave Cuba alone; he began trying to wind down the ClA's army of anti-Castro Cubans; he signed the Test Ban Treaty; he was preparing to allow the Italian Communist Party into a coalition government; he was planning to cut US defence spending abroad to reduce the US balance of payments deficit; and wanted to begin pulling the US out of Vietnam. These are not the actions of a Cold Warrior. The Cuban Missile Crisis had scared the politicians involved in it.

In a sense the debate about who Kennedy was is easily solved: there were two Kennedys. The Cold Warrior Kennedy who got elected changed - or dropped his conservative cover - after the Cuban missile crisis and became a liberal Democrat.

Perhaps most significant of all, Kennedy wanted out of the then rapidly expanding war in Vietnam. The military-industrial-intelligence complex and the political right saw retreat in the Caribbean followed by the prospect of retreat in the Far East. The military-industrial complex wanted the Vietnam war as part of what they saw as the ongoing Cold War struggle with communism: it was just a bonus that, in pursuing the war, they stood to make a lot of money and have good careers. Whether or not we try to locate the assassination conspiracy in this milieu, and many of the researchers do, Kennedy was going up against the military-industrial complex on almost all fronts - the forces his predecessor had warned against. When the scale of what Kennedy was thinking of doing is understood it is very tempting to see it as Kennedy stepping too far out of line and the system getting rid of him.

Extract from Who Shot JFK (2002)

http://www.lobster-magazine.co.uk/who-shot-jfk.htm

Robin Ramsay is the editor of Lobster Magazine. Since 1983 the magazine has featured articles on the assassination of John F. Kennedy, Edward Jay Epstein, anti Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament groups, the Vietnam War, Lord Mountbatten and the Central Intelligence Agency, Lee Harvey Oswald in Mexico, KGB, Airey Neave, the plot to smear Harold Wilson, Winston Churchill and Pearl Harbor, MI5 and the rise of Margaret Thatcher, Peter Wright, Watergate, Peter Dale Scott, Archibald Ramsay and the Right Club, Clay Shaw and Appeasement.

He is also the co-author of Smear! Wilson and the Secret State! (1991). Other books by Robin Ramsay include Conspiracy Theories: Almost Everything You Need to Know in One Essential Guide (2000), Who Shot JFK? (2002) and The Rise of New Labour (2002).