The Assassination of John F. Kennedy in Context

[David Andrews]

One could argue that Kennedy's father made him president in more than one way: the past influence and presumed continuing influence of the old player would have done as much to sell the son as the ballot shenanigans did. The December 19, 1961 stroke that left Joe speechless and motionless - coming only a few months after the BOP and the firing of Dulles - surely queered the sense of parental management relied upon by the old man's cronies in the eastern establishment and the mob. It cast JFK as indubuitably his own man, thus helping estrange him from the trust and cooperation of the powerful.

Edited August 12, 2010 by David Andrews

[John Dolva]

Jim, could you elaborate on or provide link to such that explains the Congo as an issue?

edit add: Thank you, Jim.

Edited August 12, 2010 by John Dolva

[David Andrews]

Jim, I appreciate your well-made points. Kennedy has been referred to as a liberal pragmatist, in the sense that he saw the motions toward national self-determination that were not only encouraged by FDR's anti-imperial vision of the post-war world, but were emerging sui generis in response to the liberation of Europe and Asia, just as they had emerged at the Versailles conference (including through uninvited representatives in 1919, such as Ho Chi Minh).

Nonetheless - Kennedy got into power, beating Humphrey, Johnson, and Symington for the nomination, and then beating Nixon, to a great degree because of the money and influence his father commanded. And with Joe's command also went, tacitly or overtly, Joe's imprimatur, the guarantee that a defiant liberalism would not be an issue in his candidate son. Surely this swayed Joe's old mob ties, already besmirched by JFK and RFK's committee action in the 1950s, and made the alliances in the mob for the brothers that even the CIA/Nixon-forged liaisons over Cuba could not have caused them to inherit. Surely Joe's presence helped sway the personalities for whom JFK had to appear more anti-Castro than Nixon in the debates. The extent to which JFK deviated from what was predicted by his supporters and foes is the extent to which he deviated from what his old man's money and character seemed to guarantee.

Joe was both a facilitator and a guarantor. He was a kind of demon of cronyism and dealmaking, lechery and betrayal, greed and superiority, that allowed JFK and RFK to rise as far as they did among various establishments. His death may have helped guarantee JFK's fall. As the substance of your two-part article on the emergence of Kennedy smears in the press since the 1970s shows, the research community needs to discover the origins of canards, misrepresentations, and lies about Kennedy crime ties and sex scandals, and weed these out. But at the end of the day, old Joe will still droop over the moral landscape like a poison tree, and his influence is the one that most of all will need to be evaluated, if only to prove how far the apples actually rolled from the branch. Even Jim Douglass was unable to go as deeply into Joe as Joe demands of us, though someone will have to.

I posted not in contradiction of your fine post, but merely to amplify this unfading, sour note in the threnody. It has to be dealt with, and it's part of what you called for yourself in the anti-smear article.

Edited August 12, 2010 by David Andrews

[John Dolva]

I don't know what people think of Soerensens Kennedy which goes in to the kind of patriarch Joe was, for all his own foibles he did not force or censor the thinking of his many children but rather encouraged individual open minded thinking, so I don't think he was a specter over the three brothers and their sisters. Ted was described as the most promising of the three but his time was in the future (and we sort of know what happened there). RFK entered into a radical alliance with King and Reuther.

I wonder what the world would be like had the US accepted Ho's offered cooperation and Ho's intended adoption of the US constitution. Instead the US sided with Vietnams old and continuing enemy, China.

[John Simkin]

The point of what I wrote above is to show that Kennedy was speaking about a new and original approach to foreign policy as far back as the mid fifties.

To understand what JFK was doing in the White House, and what got him killed, you have to understand where those ideas came from. And why they were so different than, not just the Establishment's, but also many in his own Cabinet. It is why JFK often had to go around his Cabinet to get his desired results e.g. using Galbraith and McNamara on VIetnam, using RFK on the Missile Crisis, using Attwood on the negotiations with Castro for detente.

I do not see the relevance of JFK’s criticism of British and French foreign policy in the 1950s. It is not unusual for American politicians to be opposed to British and French imperialism. In fact, it is a mainstream politics. The difficulty is to be against American imperialism. I would be much more impressed if you could find a speech by JFK attacking the CIA/United Fruit overthrow of President Arbenz in Guatemala in 1954. President Dwight Eisenhower justified it at the time by saying Guatemala was a "communist dictatorship... that had established... an outpost on this continent to the detriment of all the American nations". (Interestingly, it was the first successful operation that David Atlee Phillips was involved in and was used as a model to use against Fidel Castro).

http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/JFKarbenz.htm

You rightly say: “What Kennedy positioned himself as in 1960 is not a reliable barometer for the same reason as his ambiguous comments on Vietnam are not to be taken at face value in 1963. Why? Because he knew he had to say certain things to get re-elected in order to do the things he really wanted to do.”

I also accept that Kennedy’s foreign policy is distinctly different from that of Harry Truman and Dwight Eisenhower between 1945 and 1960. This is covered in some detail in David Kaiser’s book, American Tragedy: Kennedy, Johnson, and the Origins of the Vietnam War. Kaiser explains that while Kennedy was always strongly anti-communist, he disagreed with the way Truman and Eisenhower dealt with the problem.

David Kaiser, argues that Eisenhower’s policies “called for a military response to Communist aggression almost anywhere that it might occur”. Kaiser provides evidence that this strategy was “adopted by the State and Defence Departments in 1954-1956 and approved secretly by President Eisenhower.” (1)

According to one historian: “The CIA had learned a lesson from the Guatemalan revolution in the early 1950s, when a nationalist government expropriated the land and the public service enterprises of U.S. monopolies to the benefit of the peasants and the population in general. This experience gave rise to a program of infiltrating agents into countries convulsed by communist ideas.” (2)

In the final months of his administration, Eisenhower was mainly concerned with trying to overthrow the government of Fidel Castro in Cuba. He was also worried about events in Laos and Vietnam. However, Kaiser convincingly argues that Kennedy subtly changed foreign policy after he gained office. “Ironically, while Eisenhower’s supposedly cautious approach in foreign policy had frequently been contrasted with his successors’ apparent aggressiveness, Kennedy actually spent much of his term resisting policies developed and approved under Eisenhower, both in Southeast Asia and elsewhere. He also had to deal with the legacy of the Eisenhower administration’s disastrous attempts to create a pro-Western rather than a neutral government in Laos – a policy he quickly reversed, thereby avoiding the need for American military intervention there.” (3)

Kaiser admits that he the Kennedy administration did increase the number of American military personnel in South Vietnam from 600 in 1960 to 17,500 in 1963. However, although he sincerely wanted to help the South Vietnamese government cope with the Viet Cong he rejected war as a way to do so. Kennedy’s view of America’s involvement in Southeast Asia was expressed clearly at his first ever press conference. When asked about Laos he expressed his intentions to help create “a peaceful country – an independent country not dominated by either side but concerned with the life of the people within the country.” (4) This was a marked departure from Eisenhower’s policy of supporting anti-communist military dictatorships in Southeast Asia and the Americas.

This analysis of Kennedy’s foreign policy is supported by two of his most important aides, Kenneth P. O’Donnell and David F. Powers. In their book, Johnny, We Hardly Knew Ye: Memories of John Fitzgerald Kennedy, they describe how on 19th January, 1960, Eisenhower briefed Kennedy on “various important items of unfinished business”. This included news about “the rebel force that was being trained by the CIA in Guatemala to invade Cuba.” O’Donnell and Powers claimed that: “Eisenhower urged him to keep on supporting this plan to overthrow Castro. But Eisenhower talked mostly about Laos, which he then regarded as the most dangerous trouble spot in Southeast Asia. He mentioned South Vietnam only as one of the nations that would fall into the hands of the Communists if the United States failed to maintain the anti-Communist regime in Laos.” Kennedy was shocked by what Eisenhower told him. He later told his two aides: “There he sat, telling me to get ready to put ground forces into Asia, the thing he himself had been carefully avoiding for the last eight years.” (5)

According to David Kaiser, it was not only the CIA and the Pentagon who wanted him to send troops to Laos and Vietnam. Members of his own administration, including Lyndon Johnson, Robert McNamara, Dean Rusk, Alexis Johnson, McGeorge Bundy, Walt Rostow and Roswell Gilpatric, were also strongly in favour of Eisenhower’s policy of “intervention in remote areas backed by nuclear weapons”. (6)

Kennedy continued with his policy of trying to develop “independent” Third World countries. In September, 1962, Souvanna Phouma became head of a new coalition government in Laos. This included the appointment of the left-leaning Quinim Pholsema as Foreign Minister. However, Kennedy found it impossible to persuade Ngo Dinh Diem to broaden his government in South Vietnam.

The problem for Kennedy was that he did not have a consistent foreign policy. This is the point that James W. Douglass makes so well in JFK and the Unspeakable. Within days of making his American University speech, he is giving the go-ahead to the CIA to overthrow Castro.

As Arthur Schlesinger pointed out in an interview with Anthony Summers in 1978: “In 1963… the CIA was reviving the assassination plots at the very time President Kennedy was considering the possibility of normalization of relations with Cuba - an extraordinary action. If it was not total incompetence - which in the case of the CIA cannot be excluded - it was a studied attempt to subvert national policy.... I think the CIA must have known about this initiative. They must certainly have realized that Bill Attwood and the Cuban representative to the U.N. were doing more than exchanging daiquiri recipes…They had all the wires tapped at the Cuban delegation to the United Nations….Undoubtedly if word leaked of President Kennedy’s efforts, that might have been exactly the kind of thing to trigger some explosion of fanatical violence. It seems to me a possibility not to be excluded.” (7)

That “fanatical violence” was the assassination of John F. Kennedy.

(1) David Kaiser, American Tragedy: Kennedy, Johnson and the Origins of the Vietnam War, 2000 (page 2)

(2) Fabian Escalante, CIA Covert Operations 1959-62: The Cuba Project, 2004 (page 12)

(3) David Kaiser, American Tragedy: Kennedy, Johnson and the Origins of the Vietnam War, 2000 (page 2)

(4) Howard W. Chase and Allen H. Lerman, Kennedy and the Press: The News Conferences, 1965 (page 25)

(5) Kenneth P. O’Donnell & David F. Powers, Johnny, We Hardly Knew Ye: Memories of John Fitzgerald Kennedy, 1972 (page 281-282)

(6) David Kaiser, American Tragedy: Kennedy, Johnson and the Origins of the Vietnam War, 2000 (page 50)

(7) Anthony Summers, Conspiracy: Who Killed President Kennedy, 1980 (page 307)

[Peter McGuire]

Most commentators distinguish between Joe Kennedy's isolationist tendencies and JFK's internationalist vision.

I have never seen any source where Joe directly intervened in any way in a JFK directive, or even a speech. In fact, he actually liked Kennedy's groundbreaking Algeria speech in 1957--which was about as liberal as you could get at the time. If I am wrong, please indicate.

I have never thought about the Algeria speech in respect to JFK's father, but I have thought what the world could have been had a president with such vision - in 1957, no less, been allowed to live and complete his term.

Would there even be the conflict we have now that has caused the current war had such a president served?

Edited August 13, 2010 by Peter McGuire

[David Andrews]

I threw in my two cents as to Joe Kennedy within the "context" of the assassination. Just because they appeared subsequent to Jim Di's opinion upon another context doesn't mean I intended to contradict Jim, nor overrule his contribution.

I believe that Joe left Jack alone. But I also put forth that Joe stood as a sort of symbolic guarantor of JFK's being on the same page as the people who later opposed him - only some of whom held office, all of whom were Not Nice. And sitting back and chortling while those types were discommoded was quite the Joe Kennedy style.

It was in the style of his enemies to shoot his sons in the face and in the back.

I have a rough working weekend ahead of me, but I'll be back on the topic of Joe and on the family's mob ties, because I don't believe one should sentimentalize the people or things one loves. Especially when we love them for their dangerous games.

Edited August 14, 2010 by David Andrews

[John Simkin]

i]

JFK's enemies--including the people who killed him-- have done all they could to muddy the waters about the true circumstances of his death but also about who he actually was.

This sums it up totally. To muddy the waters about who he actually was gives left wing gatekeepers like Chomsky the power to say that there was no conspiracy because JFK was just another pol who was not doing anything to cause the powers that be TO kill him. Understanding who Kennedy was answers the question of why he was killed.

Before I saw Jim Di's words, that JFK had to SAY certain things in order to get elected, I was about to make the same point. His experience in World War Two had a profound affect on him and this experience set him apart totally from the true Cold Warriors.

Dawn

Are you accusing me of trying to "muddy the waters"? I think it is very important to see JFK as he really was, rather than what we wanted him to be.

[John Dolva]

I don't know if they are, but I don't think you are. It's a refreshing approach that does what, afaIu, Dawn says clarifies things.

[Robert Howard]

My favorite lines were

You gotta strike when the moment is right without thinking.

And after a while, you can work on points for style.

Like the club tie, and the firm handshake,

A certain look in the eye and an easy smile.

You have to be trusted by the people that you lie to,

You gotta keep one eye looking over your shoulder.

You know it's going to get harder, and harder, and harder as you

get older.

After more than a few years, I would almost go as far as to say that Japan is in 2010, what, was it David Lifton who said that the rosetta stone of the JFK Assassination

lies in the activities regarding Oswald in Mexico?

Or words to that effect.

I have a post on the Forum on one of the Japanese related threads, that reveals that Claire Booth Luce was Ambassador to Japan for a brief period in time before she

obtained her post as US Ambassador to Italy. Believe it was circa 1951

Then there are Angleton's connections to the old country, as well as one of the few mobsters, that being Angelo Bruno; I haven't

decided if the extensive files in the Archives on Bruno have anything of substance that would rival that of Giancana, Marcello, Trafficante, and Meyer Lansky

That begs the key question. Besides Johnny Rosselli who was pulling Jack Ruby's [i wanted to get drunk on kosher food] strings.

And I definitely know that when the HSCA was spinning Gaeton Fonzi around, he refers to this himself in his book narrative regarding how Blakey instructed him to

research Clair Booth Luce's leads regarding the Cuban's she had been in contact with regarding anti-Castro activities, I do not believe anything of real substance

came of that, and Fonzi expressed frustration over having to deal with Claire's leads, which is why I refer to them as spinning Gaeton Fonzi.

Anyone with a pulse knows that he is the real deal, I wish Fonzi had interviewed DeMohrenschildt before Epstein did; we might know a tad more, than we wound up with....

At any rate the following is something to chew on.

Part of the post is taken from the Batch Documents that Joe Backes went through; I am surprised if any reserarcher does not have every page of the 13 or so

Batch releases, for those who aren't educated in JFK 101 they are still on the world wide web...

It is also not a misprint that Philip Luce is said to have looked like Oswald, but photographs of him are not exactly everywhere on the internet, as far as I know....

So here's to remembering Bonze Bar-B-Que's......and October 31, 1963

Headlines for Día de los Muertos (Day of the Dead) October 31, 1963

http://www.azcentral...ad-history.html

http://www.maryferre...bsPageId=485294

Claire Booth Luce, former Ambassador to Italy, defended South Vietnam's

first lady, Mme Ngo Dinh Nhu against widespread charges that her government

persecutes Buddhists.

She said in New York that some of the monks who burned themselves to death

may have made a "good deal" for themselves because they assured themselves

of sainthood.

124-10027-10032 is a one page cable that identifies Barry Hoffman as a source within the Permanent Student Committee for Travel to Cuba. Gordon Hall the sponsor of Hoffman's trip saw in a newspaper where authorities were looking for the roommate of Lee Harvey Oswald when Oswald lived in Greenwich Village, N.Y.C. According to Hoffman the description matches that of Philip Luce.