Deconstructing JFK: A Coup D'Etat over Foreign Policy?

[James DiEugenio]

My pal Aaron Good got the editors over at Covert Action magazine to print this essay.  It took some work but I think it turned out well.  I could not have so profusely filled it out with all those pictures. I only had one problem with the editing.  They wanted to include a footnote to Hersh's Dark Side of Camelot. I said anyone who knows me would understand I would not use a footnote to that book even if I was undergoing enhanced interrogation techniques. So we got that straightened out. These people are trying to revive the paper Zine of BIll Schaap and Ellen Ray who made history when they published On the Trail of the Assassins.

Anyway, here is some hidden history as they say. The part about Nasser and the Middle East is particularly interesting I think.

https://kennedysandking.com/john-f-kennedy-articles/deconstructing-jfk-a-coup-d-etat-over-foreign-policy

[Cliff Varnell]

DiEugenio:

<quote on >

The truth is, not only did Kennedy want to end America’s destructive (and self-destructive) military support for the collapsing colonial empire of France that had embroiled it in an unwinnable war in Vietnam; his speeches, correspondence and high-level meetings with emerging Third World leaders reveal his growing antipathy for colonialism, rejection of imperialism, toleration for the non-aligned movement—contrasting markedly with his predecessor—and promotion of nationalistic leaders, albeit ones that were considered to be “responsible” in their moderation. </q>

The overthrow of Diem in Vietnam occurred on JFK’s watch.  This prevented the North/South rapprochement on the table at that time. 

Beware the JFK fanboy adulation.  He screwed up royally in Vietnam.

Edited January 26, 2021 by Cliff Varnell

[Guest]

1 hour ago, Cliff Varnell said:

DiEugenio:

<quote on >

The truth is, not only did Kennedy want to end America’s destructive (and self-destructive) military support for the collapsing colonial empire of France that had embroiled it in an unwinnable war in Vietnam; his speeches, correspondence and high-level meetings with emerging Third World leaders reveal his growing antipathy for colonialism, rejection of imperialism, toleration for the non-aligned movement—contrasting markedly with his predecessor—and promotion of nationalistic leaders, albeit ones that were considered to be “responsible” in their moderation. </q>

The overthrow of Diem in Vietnam occurred on JFK’s watch.  This prevented the Norrh/South rapprochement on the table at that time. 

Beware the JFK fanboy adulation.  He screwed up royally in Vietnam.

A good question might be; to what extent was it in his control? He seemed very pro-rapproachment in general. Another good question might be; to what extent was any person or US president able to change the course of history in regard to US foreign policy. Anybody walking into the job inherited an infrastructure populated by a nest of serpents (military/cia/council on foreign relations). Was JFK's biggest folley that when he walked into the job, he had no idea how difficult it would be and how strong the network of pro war for profit people would be? It was certainly much easier go along with the program. 
 

[Cliff Varnell]

2 hours ago, Chris Barnard said:

A good question might be; to what extent was it in his control?

He was outplayed by the #3 man at the State Dept., Averell Harriman.

2 hours ago, Chris Barnard said:

He seemed very pro-rapproachment in general. Another good question might be; to what extent was any person or US president able to change the course of history in regard to US foreign policy.

October of 1963 the UN sent a delegation to Saigon to make a report on the conflict between Diem and his brother Nhu with the Buddhist protesters who’d been stirred up by the CIA.  By then the Buddhist uprising was beginning to cool off, and the initial report from the delegation was positive.  US aid to the Diem regime had been curtailed a month earlier, and if Kennedy had restored aid on the basis of the UN report the South Vietnamese generals would have taken that as a withdrawal of US support for a coup.

2 hours ago, Chris Barnard said:

Anybody walking into the job inherited an infrastructure populated by a nest of serpents (military/cia/council on foreign relations). Was JFK's biggest folley that when he walked into the job, he had no idea how difficult it would be and how strong the network of pro war for profit people would be? It was certainly much easier go along with the program. 

And the overthrow of Diem was the program JFK went along with.  
 
Don’t get me wrong, I admire JFK tremendously— but a screw-up is a screw-up.

 

[Benjamin Cole]

Great job of reporting and history-writing by James DiEugenio. 

What is interesting is that the interventionist foreign-policy JFK resisted continues to this day.

It is worth pondering the observations of Smedley Butler, and the role today of the US military as a global guard service for multinationals.  

There is no one planning an attack upon the United States. Yet the US spends $1.3 trillion a year on the DoD, VA, DHS, black budget and prorated interest on the national debt. 

You read about "US interests" in this or that region. What interests? Not mine. Not anyone I know. 

Even spookier: The multinationals are deep into bed with Beijing and the increasingly repressive CCP.  You see this confluence of interests in US news coverage, in compromised US foreign policy. Trump for all of his many flaws, was an positive aberration in this regard. And as brief an aberration as the establishment could make him. 

Perhaps JFK was taken down due to his foreign policy. 

I think the JFK assassination was a level below that, effected by some disgruntled CIA assets. But the case is still open. 

 

 

 

 

[Guest]

2 hours ago, Cliff Varnell said:

He was outplayed by the #3 man at the State Dept., Averell Harriman.

October of 1963 the UN sent a delegation to Saigon to make a report on the conflict between Diem and his brother Nhu with the Buddhist protesters who’d been stirred up by the CIA.  By then the Buddhist uprising was beginning to cool off, and the initial report from the delegation was positive.  US aid to the Diem regime had been curtailed a month earlier, and if Kennedy had restored aid on the basis of the UN report the South Vietnamese generals would have taken that as a withdrawal of US support for a coup.

And the overthrow of Diem was the program JFK went along with.  
 
Don’t get me wrong, I admire JFK tremendously— but a screw-up is a screw-up.

 

I agree with all of that, Harriman, Lodge and others, not working in the interests of the people of the USA, working in the interests of their class and corporations. I think you can only make decisions on the information in front of you. You can't be in multiple places at one time, gathering data yourself. This really highlights the problems in America then and ever since. The infrastructure around a leader is perfect for a leader to be subverted and bypassed. I think I admire him so much, because he had a go and sacrificed himself. If he hadn't, we wouldn't be nearly as concious or sceptical about events since. 

[Guest]

8 minutes ago, Benjamin Cole said:

Great job of reporting and history-writing by James DiEugenio. 

What is interesting is that the interventionist foreign-policy JFK resisted continues to this day.

It is worth pondering the observations of Smedley Butler, and the role today of the US military as a global guard service for multinationals.  

There is no one planning an attack upon the United States. Yet the US spends $1.3 trillion a year on the DoD, VA, DHS, black budget and prorated interest on the national debt. 

You read about "US interests" in this or that region. What interests? Not mine. Not anyone I know. 

Even spookier: The multinationals are deep into bed with Beijing and the increasingly repressive CCP.  You see this confluence of interests in US news coverage, in compromised US foreign policy. Trump for all of his many flaws, was an positive aberration in this regard. And as brief an aberration as the establishment could make him. 

Perhaps JFK was taken down due to his foreign policy. 

I think the JFK assassination was a level below that, effected by some disgruntled CIA assets. But the case is still open. 

 

 

 

 

In cinema, TV or now, streaming, we are trained from small children to buy into this heroes and villains narrative. In reality, most of the time it's never about that, it's usually about money. Of course I don't know 100% for sure in this case, but, when you apply the logic of Major General Smedley Butlers book "War is a racket" and think about how much a decade of Vietnam was worth in USD, it really outweighs any other motive. Everyone works on risk vs reward. LBJ could have been going to prison for his earlier misdemeanours, so he had a very strong motive or mission of self preservation. But, he'd need to know if he was involved in such a plan that he could never be held accountable, so he needs CIA & FBI guarantees. The same as the CIA guys, they can hate as much as they like but, is it worth jail-time and everyone knowing you are a cowardly killer who killed a generally well liked president (publicly) and father of two? They'd need to know they'd get away with it. The same with the mafia guys or cuban exiles. It's clear from Dealey Plaza that logistically there were a lot of people having to play their part, in support mostly. That says it's organised, rather than a rabble of dissidents.
Being rational, the USA had set themselves up to rule and dominate the world, through various organisations that facilitated and masked their real intentions, they succeeded the British who were overt with their colonialism and the USA setup a strategy of covert action. Right through to present day you can look at the Council on Foreign Relations, World Bank, IMF, NATO etc. If you have a president in office undoing that, and it looks like he might get 4 more years, and has brothers who may run after him (speculative) who have the same ideals, what do you do? Get rid of him as he is cutting peoples capacity to earn from foreign policy. 

[Chuck Schwartz]

In regards to JFK and Vietnam, my views are on that subject are largely in line with John Newman's "JFK and Vietnam".

[W. Niederhut]

10 hours ago, James DiEugenio said:

My pal Aaron Good got the editors over at Covert Action magazine to print this essay.  It took some work but I think it turned out well.  I could not have so profusely filled it out with all those pictures. I only had one problem with the editing.  They wanted to include a footnote to Hersh's Dark Side of Camelot. I said anyone who knows me would understand I would not use a footnote to that book even if I was undergoing enhanced interrogation techniques. So we got that straightened out. These people are trying to revive the paper Zine of BIll Schaap and Ellen Ray who made history when they published On the Trail of the Assassins.

Anyway, here is some hidden history as they say. The part about Nasser and the Middle East is particularly interesting I think.

https://kennedysandking.com/john-f-kennedy-articles/deconstructing-jfk-a-coup-d-etat-over-foreign-policy

Outstanding, concise history of JFK's foreign policy conflicts with the Deep State establishment, Jim!

This should be incorporated into mainstream American history curricula.

Regarding the Nasser era linkage between the Muslim Brotherhood, MI6, the CIA, and the Saudis, I've been reading Thierry Meyssan's 2019 book, Before Our Very Eyes, which presents an in depth history of "Anglo-Saxon" intelligence ops in the Middle East from 1920-2020.

It's the best explanation of what has been happening in Syria, Libya, and Egypt that I've read to date.

Before Our Very Eyes, Fake Wars and Big Lies: From 9/11 to Donald Trump: Meyssan, Thierry: 9781615770120: Amazon.com: Books

 

[W. Niederhut]

1 minute ago, W. Niederhut said:

duplicate

 

 

Edited January 26, 2021 by W. Niederhut

[James DiEugenio]

Benjamin and Chris, there is no doubt that  Kennedy's enemies won.  In doing some work with Doug Horne on the documentary, the whole thing about LeMay is even worse than I thought it was.  LeMay lied about where he was that day, and he disobeyed orders as to where he was to land in Washington.  And he refused to acknowledge his aide de camp while in the air.

And, as I note, JFK's policies were reversed in the places I described, plus some I had to leave out for length purposes. As Robert Dreyfuss, who wrote Devil's Game about the Middle East said, Nasser was the last time a true settlement could have been achieved there. I have not read the Meyssan book, thanks William. Will put it on my list.

Chuck, yes John's book is still one of the best.  But there has been other good work in that field: Gordon Goldstein, David Kaiser, Jim Douglass, among others.  I have John's new version of his book, but I am not done with it yet.  Some interesting stuff there about how bad the fight was in Washington after the Taylor/McNamara trip over keeping the withdrawal plan in the NSAM 263 write up.  Kennedy had to place it back in himself.  And one of the guys who wanted it out, Sullivan, later joined LBJ's secret team to plan on expanding the war after Kennedy's death. As Prouty said, what a nest of vipers. That particular story, of how LBJ turned McNamara around, and then not so secretly planned his expansion of the war, while lying his head off on the campaign trail, is really kind of sick. That whole thing, about "Let us continue.." makes me throw up these days when I watch it. The worst being, Johnson KNEW Kennedy was getting out of Indochina.  He knew Kennedy was planning to visit Jakarta in 1964 to bolster Sukarno.  He knew Kennedy favored Bosch in the Dominican Republic, but he sent in the military anyway to stop him. I can do no better than to quote Fulbright's researcher/staffer Carl Marcy on this, after Fulbright discovered that LBJ had lied to him about the Tonkin Gulf incident and the reason for invading Dominican Republic. Marcy wrote that what these dishonest interventions had done was:

"… turn the liberal supporters of President Kennedy into opponents of the policies of President Johnson, and the rightwing opponents of Eisenhower and Kennedy into avid supporters of the present administration. … We have tried to force upon the rest of the world a righteous American point of view which we maintained is the consensus that others must accept. Most of the tragedies of the world have come from such righteousness."

It was this false righteousness that polarized the Democratic Party and paved the way for the election of Richard Nixon.  And it led to the birth of the Neocon movement.

I will be speaking on this subject at Jacob Hornberger's upcoming Webinar.

Edited January 26, 2021 by James DiEugenio

[Greg Doudna]

James D., a personal note to add here: the recovery of the Republican Party after the Goldwater disastrous loss in 1964, to the point of the 1968 election of Nixon, has been credited to, more than any other single person, the work of the Republican National Committee chair from 1965-1969, a former Ohio State Republican Party chair, named Ray Bliss, from Akron, Ohio. Bliss never ran for political office himself and was not in the headlines or public limelight but was a kingmaker well known to every insider in the Republican Party. He also, as was noted in comment by some peers in obituaries, had a reputation for having no known ideological principles but worked with everyone focused entirely on pragmatic coalition building to put together enough votes to win elections, stunningly with the Nixon election of 1968. Today there is a political institute at the University of Akron named after him with a website giving his biography. 

The reason I mention this background is this: when I was 14 I had a paper route in my neighborhood near the Highland Square district in west Akron. In those days paperboys paid for their papers themselves, delivered them daily, then went around 2-3 evenings every week door to door to collect, with a puncher that would punch out the date on the customer's punch card. With absolutely no idea who this person was, one of my customers was listed as Ray Bliss, who I did not know from Adam. He lived with a socialite looking wife in a modest but well-kept upper-middle-class home on Dodge Avenue on my route.

My first time collecting I knocked on the door and a man, short and smoking, answered, and was unbelievably rude. He was very irritated that I had the nerve to knock on his door asking to be paid for delivering his paper. "All you service people sure want your money don't you!?" he sneered. When I tried to explain what he owed he cursed at me. The socialite wife who appeared moments later seemed embarrassed by his behavior and tried to shush him up while she paid me. Thereafter I never saw him again, only his wife when I went to collect, and she was always nice to me. 

I still had no idea who he was, only the rude arrogant customer on my route, when at a later stage they moved away on me leaving five weeks unpaid, which to a paperboy was a significant loss. I tracked down the address they had moved to, some apartment or condominium in another part of Akron, and got my father to drive me over there one evening. When I showed up at the door Mr. Bliss was there AGAIN, and really fumed at the nerve that I would show up asking for money. "You really want that money don't you?" This time I was ready for him. I said, "Yes sir, I delivered your paper in all kinds of weather and you are right, I would like to be paid". Again he expressed contempt for "you service people" while his wife paid me and apologized, and that was the last I had to do with him. 

I am a little amazed in retrospect but it is true: I did not realize who he was until a few years had gone by and I was reading about Ray Bliss of Akron, Ohio, praised and spoken of very highly by famous people. Because of the disconnect in glowing descriptions with the rude customer I remembered by the same name I first wondered if my customer was a different person by the same name. But when I saw a photo of the former Republican Party national chair I saw it was him. 

For a long time I was completely baffled at his reaction of being so irritated by a paperboy collecting for delivery of a paper for which he was a voluntary subscriber, which certainly was not a typical reaction. As I reconstructed it, the only interpretation that made sense is: as Republican Party national chair he spent most of his time in Washington, D.C., rarely getting home to Akron except for brief visits during that period. After the election of Nixon, Nixon thanked Bliss for his good work then replaced him. The newly-unemployed Bliss (perhaps not in the best of spirits) had just returned to Akron when, knowing nothing of any of that background, I had the misfortune to unwittingly knock on his door that evening. He may not have known that paperboys normally collected in the evening, and may have thought knocking on his door in the evening asking for money was out of line. 

Just an experience of a 14-year old encountering an attitude of the former national chair of the Republican Party, 1965-1969, toward "you service people". 

[Anthony Thorne]

Meyysan’s years of articles are archived over at the Voltaire site. Smart guy and he’s followed the twists and turns of the neocon movement since way back. I don’t agree with everything he says about JFK or 9/11, but that’s fine, and a lot of his historical articles are excellent.
 

https://www.voltairenet.org/auteur29.html?lang=en

[Chuck Schwartz]

Jim, when is Jacob Hornberger's upcoming Webinar? How can one access it?

[Paul Brancato]

3 hours ago, James DiEugenio said:

Benjamin and Chris, there is no doubt that  Kennedy's enemies won.  In doing some work with Doug Horne on the documentary, the whole thing about LeMay is even worse than I thought it was.  LeMay lied about where he was that day, and he disobeyed orders as to where he was to land in Washington.  And he refused to acknowledge his aide de camp while in the air.

And, as I note, JFK's policies were reversed in the places I described, plus some I had to leave out for length purposes. As Robert Dreyfuss, who wrote Devil's Game about the Middle East said, Nasser was the last time a true settlement could have been achieved there. I have not read the Meyssan book, thanks William. Will put it on my list.

Chuck, yes John's book is still one of the best.  But there has been other good work in that field: Gordon Goldstein, David Kaiser, Jim Douglass, among others.  I have John's new version of his book, but I am not done with it yet.  Some interesting stuff there about how bad the fight was in Washington after the Taylor/McNamara trip over keeping the withdrawal plan in the NSAM 263 write up.  Kennedy had to place it back in himself.  And one of the guys who wanted it out, Sullivan, later joined LBJ's secret team to plan on expanding the war after Kennedy's death. As Prouty said, what a nest of vipers. That particular story, of how LBJ turned McNamara around, and then not so secretly planned his expansion of the war, while lying his head off on the campaign trail, is really kind of sick. That whole thing, about "Let us continue.." makes me throw up these days when I watch it. The worst being, Johnson KNEW Kennedy was getting out of Indochina.  He knew Kennedy was planning to visit Jakarta in 1964 to bolster Sukarno.  He knew Kennedy favored Bosch in the Dominican Republic, but he sent in the military anyway to stop him. I can do no better than to quote Fulbright's researcher/staffer Carl Marcy on this, after Fulbright discovered that LBJ had lied to him about the Tonkin Gulf incident and the reason for invading Dominican Republic. Marcy wrote that what these dishonest interventions had done was:

"… turn the liberal supporters of President Kennedy into opponents of the policies of President Johnson, and the rightwing opponents of Eisenhower and Kennedy into avid supporters of the present administration. … We have tried to force upon the rest of the world a righteous American point of view which we maintained is the consensus that others must accept. Most of the tragedies of the world have come from such righteousness."

It was this false righteousness that polarized the Democratic Party and paved the way for the election of Richard Nixon.  And it led to the birth of the Neocon movement.

I will be speaking on this subject at Jacob Hornberger's upcoming Webinar.

Jim - I’m very interested in your first paragraph about LeMay. Where did you and a Doug come up with the info on LeMay lying about where he was or landing at a different airport against orders?