Peter Dale Scott on "Why was JFK Killed?"

[Douglas Caddy]

Karen Croft and David Talbot interviewed Peter Dale Scott in the January 23, 2024, issue of The Kennedy Beacon. The link to the full article is at the bottom of this posting. What is posted here is that portion of the interview that deals with the assassination of President Kennedy.

The JFK Records Act leads us to another big question, because you’ve been doing research on the Kennedy assassination for so long. As another researcher once said, “Peter Dale Scott has forgotten more about the Kennedy assassination than we’ll ever know.” So, the big question is why was JFK killed?

We don’t live in a system like a monarchy. We live in a state of chaos — a kind of Hobbesian state of nature, with different, powerful oligarchs — and they’ve been battling each other in the U.S. ever since they met to draft the Articles of Confederation. And at least one of the states — South Carolina — was there to guarantee the protection of slavery, because in their state at least 60 percent of the people were black. So, this racist system was baked into America at the beginning. It was a kind of built-in conflict at the top level, which is what I think is now running this country, rather than a “deep state.” I was never happy about that term, even though I helped import it to the United States from Turkey, and said so when I wrote about it. It sounds like it’s a “thing.” What we actually live in is a kind of Hobbesian condition of chaos, a new Gilded Age, with greater and greater accumulations of private power.

Yes, but you sidestepped the question – why was President Kennedy eliminated? What made him a target?

Well, he was threatening an end to the Cold War, which was the basis of the military economy that had made America prosperous since 1953. He was threatening to ease us off the war economy, and to deal with problems at home like poverty and racism.

Record Group 111, Records of the Office of the Chief Signal Officer (111-SC-578830), Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

The Cold Warriors who ran the country maintained a constant state of alarm, constant preparedness. The sociologist C. Wright Mills, author of The Power Elite, recognized how they created a national security emergency “without foreseeable end.” He called these men “crackpot realists…In the name of realism they have constructed a paranoid reality all their own.”

A “paranoid reality” that was – and still is – very profitable for the military-industrial complex.

People forget President Kennedy’s 1963 Atomic Test Ban Treaty, which ended all nuclear arms testing above ground. It sounds petty now, but it wasn’t petty then. There had been no treaty with the Soviet Union since 1955 when Washington and Moscow agreed by treaty to respect the neutrality of Austria.

During the debate about the atomic test ban, the Cold War lobby and the media were saying you cannot conclude a deal with the Russians because they are Communists — but JFK did it. And worse than that, Kennedy — rightly — didn’t trust his CIA. So, the president was privately talking to his brother, Attorney General Robert Kennedy, and Bobby was privately talking to Georgi Bolshakov, the Soviet representative in Washington, as a back-channel to Khrushchev in the Kremlin. Well, the CIA and the DIA (Defense Intelligence Agency) knew about the back-channel. And a document that purports to be a DIA document — I think it’s authentic — comes out 12 years later, an analysis that Kennedy is doing something treasonous, illegal. That agency, the DIA, might have helped do him in. Ironically, the DIA was created by Kennedy, who distrusted naval intelligence and army intelligence.

Kennedy gave two important speeches, one day apart in June 1963. In the first one, the so-called Peace Speech, he said we should empathize with our enemy, the Russians. At the height of the Cold War, he said, “In the final analysis, our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet. We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children's future. And we are all mortal.”

And the very next day, he gave his swiftly composed civil rights speech on national TV, responding to the turmoil in the South, including Governor George Wallace, how he stood in the doorway at the University of Alabama to try to prevent two black students from integrating the university. The president told the nation that racial justice was “a moral issue. It is as old as the scriptures and is as clear as the American Constitution.”

I can see, and I believe I’m right in seeing, that there was a kind of retro Southern presence in the military. The Army slow-marched to the University of Mississippi in 1962 and to the University of Alabama the following year, after President Kennedy ordered Army troops to restore order on those campuses.

I could go on, but I won’t go on. There were probably five or six reasons Kennedy was killed —- it was a coalition that killed Kennedy. And it was a coalition that killed Kennedy in a way that they knew the media would have to come in and make it look like it had been a lone nut who had killed Kennedy.So, was the media part of the coalition?

Not in the actual assassination, but to cover it up, absolutely. It was planned that they were to play that role.

And who was organizing the whole thing, in your mind?

I’ve always said I’m here to analyze what was happening, the forces behind it, not to have a point of view about who did it. David, I know that in your book (The Devil’s Chessboard), you wrote that essentially it was the CIA — Allen Dulles, who was fired as agency director by JFK, and the network around him. I do think they were in it. But I have a whole chapter in my book Deep Politics about military intelligence — more importantly, the Military Intelligence Reserve, which interfaces with oil corporations, and had a conspiratorial unit in Dallas exploring petroleum deposits in the Soviet Union. I believe they were at least as involved in the murder as the CIA.

But the JFK plot was a coalition. The anti-civil rights people in the South were also part of it. I refer people to the Joseph Milteer story I talk about in my book Dallas 1963. There’s a white Southern factor that helped to kill Kennedy.

To paraphrase Jim Douglass (author of JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why it Matters), why does the JFK assassination still haunt us? 

I could go on and on and on about this, all this fuss now about truth and propaganda, about “fake facts” and so on. The truth is, we’ve been living with “fake facts” ever since the Warren Report. The Warren Report is so phony that even some of the men who drafted it, and signed it, didn’t believe it! Some were quite vocal about it. They were signing a fake document. To believe the Warren Report you have to believe that one bullet was able to cause seven wounds in two different people, hit a bone, and then fall unscathed onto a stretcher. It’s all in the report. And if you believe that, you’re nuts.

(Editorial note: The Warren Report’s “magic bullet theory” was finally “buried in concrete,” according to forensics expert Cyril Wecht, following former Secret Service agent Paul Landis’s recent account that he found the pristine bullet in the presidential limousine.)

National Archives and Records Administration , Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

And we all condition ourselves to say, Well, something went wrong with the JFK investigation, but I don’t want to think about that because then I’d have to think about everything.

Of course, a few of us do start thinking about everything and I came up with Deep Politics. But most of us, and you can’t blame them, they have to live lives and they have to earn incomes. They can’t afford to think about the assassination too much.

One last question about the Kennedy assassination. Why after all this time are you the only prominent intellectual in the country who has looked seriously into this historic event? Where were leading intellectuals on the left, like Noam Chomsky?

He won’t touch it. I’ll talk about it.

We read a quote of Chomsky where he said Kennedy was a warmonger and not worth discussing.

Well, I know about this issue because when the Pentagon Papers were released in 1971, they were later published by a maverick press, Beacon Press. The following year, they commissioned a follow-up volume of essays which was edited by Noam Chomsky and Howard Zinn. I was asked to write an essay, in which I stated that President Kennedy had plans, which he already began implementing, to withdraw most U.S. troops out of Vietnam by 1965. Chomsky was out of the country at the time so I sent my essay to Howard Zinn and he, thinking like Chomsky, said, “You don’t want to publish this.” And I said, “Why not?” He said, “It sounds like you think it would make a difference if we had a different president.” And I said “Yes, it did make a difference! That’s the whole point of my essay.” And Howard said, “Peter, that’s bad politics. It’s the system that’s wrong. You’ve got to be against the system.”

And that’s what Noam was about. Noam is not a Marxist, he’s an anarchist. He doesn’t want to see any good in Kennedy because he wants to get rid of the whole system. And replace it with what? I won’t go any further because Noam and I respect each other, but it’s quite clear that on the Kennedy record Noam and I have disagreed.

You’ve had a difficult time over the years getting your work about the Kennedy assassination published, haven’t you?

Yes. In 1970 I did a book called The War Conspiracy. And my thinking about the Kennedy assassination then was very primitive compared to what it is now. But I figured you couldn’t think about the state of war that we were in without thinking about the Kennedy assassination. I sent the manuscript to the publisher, Bobbs-Merrill. I only found out later that the head of their legal department at the time was William Harvey, who had been in the CIA and is someone many people suspect was involved in the assassination.

Bill Harvey? The CIA’s former assassination chief? He was working there?

Yes, he was the head of the legal department at Bobbs-Merill, which was a tiny little publishing house in Indianapolis. It normally did children’s literature like The Wizard of Oz, but suddenly had got into a phase of requesting manuscripts from people like me. They had gone to Ramparts magazine, and Ramparts made a deal with them without first consulting me.

Anyway, Bobbs-Merrill said to me, “We think you’ll have a better book if you save your four chapters on the Kennedy assassination for a different book.” They published the expurgated version of the book, but it was buried. They absolutely did not promote it.

So, it was a catch-and-kill situation?

It was a catch-and-kill situation. The word I think is “privished.”

Privished?

Instead of being published, you make it a private thing for the author and his friends. (laughs)

How have you managed to maintain your cheerful disposition, despite the efforts to censor you?

It sounds trivial, but I think I have an advantage in that I was not born in America. And I see America from outside, without getting furious. I think most Americans, when they begin to see the terrible things America has done — they’ve had president after president guilty of war crimes — either they suppress the thought, because it means changing their life too much to accept that thought, or they acknowledge it and get furious. They never say: Well, that’s the bad side and this is the good side.

And that’s what you say?

That’s what I say. I say it in my book that’s coming out, Reading the Dream. I say it’s important at all times to maintain balance. And don’t get 100 percent into an emotion or a single point of view. Realize that there are conflicting values and you have to reach a compromise. And the American political system, at its best, does just that. It’s a very crude way of reaching compromise. It could be a lot better, but it’s the best in the world. So, let’s keep it.

I’d like to quote something from the end of my book that is pertinent here. It’s my last paragraph: “In this post-secular time, passionate divisions, sometimes between retro and generative spiritualities, threaten more and greater wars. So let each of us, mindful of our own internal yin-yang doubleness, resolve to balance the urgent need to preserve the best in this precious world with the urgent need to make it better. Hopefully this book may contribute to a less fervid politics and a healthier, friendlier culture.”

But isn’t it true what the Irish say? Nobody throws themselves into politics with more passion than the Irish. But they still say that politics will break your heart.

Well, that’s very true. That’s why you have to balance politics with something else. In my case it’s poetry. And I’m not the only one. The investigative author Douglas Valentine, who has done good work about the CIA and drugs, also balances his life by writing poetry. Other political activists and writers take up athletics or travel, whatever — you have to keep balance in your life. I still take longish walks, every day. I used to play the piano. Now I don’t.

What did you play?

Mozart, Beethoven. I was trained, briefly, to be a concert pianist. But they kept saying that if I wanted to do it, I’d have to dedicate my life to it. I realized pretty quickly I didn’t want to do that. This was all when I was 13 or 14.

I had a friend who came to Berkeley in the ‘70s to work with me on the JFK assassination case and he went insane. Somebody else committed suicide. And some people who were looking down that dark well in the past were murdered, but that’s a whole different story. The deeper into it you get, the harder it is to keep balance. I take long breaks — I’ve actually retired (from giving interviews on this subject). I’m doing this for you.

Anyway, that’s my message – search for balance in your life. Take a walk, listen to music, savor a glass of wine.

The mind-body connection?

Right

Well, you’ll live forever, then.

 

https://open.substack.com/pub/thekennedybeacon/p/peter-dale-scott-on-trump-the-deep?r=5pqyc&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=email

[James DiEugenio]

Everyone should read this, first hand knowledge about ZInn and Chomsky about JFK and Vietnam.

Well, I know about this issue because when the Pentagon Papers were released in 1971, they were later published by a maverick press, Beacon Press.

The following year, they commissioned a follow-up volume of essays which was edited by Noam Chomsky and Howard Zinn. I was asked to write an essay, in which I stated that President Kennedy had plans, which he already began implementing, to withdraw most U.S. troops out of Vietnam by 1965. Chomsky was out of the country at the time so I sent my essay to Howard Zinn and he, thinking like Chomsky, said, “You don’t want to publish this.” And I said, “Why not?” He said, “It sounds like you think it would make a difference if we had a different president.” And I said “Yes, it did make a difference! That’s the whole point of my essay.”

And Howard said, “Peter, that’s bad politics. It’s the system that’s wrong. You’ve got to be against the system.”

Edited January 27 by James DiEugenio

[Steve Thomas]

- Peter Dale Scott -

"But the JFK plot was a coalition."

 

And that is what has frustrated so many people over the years.

Everybody has been looking for one cause and one group of people who were responsible, when in reality they should have been looking for the brandy snifter, cigar smoking coterie sitting in their plush leather chairs at the yacht club.

Steve Thomas

[Jim Hargrove]

Mr. Caddy,

Thank you for posting this thoughtful interview.  If there is one bright spot in all this (and even one is hard to find),  it is that what is probably the most culturally pervasive critique of the Kennedy Assassination cover story ever made, Oliver Stones’ “JFK,” did at least clearly hint at a widespread coalition to kill JFK, at least up to the high ranking bureaucratic level.  If memory serves, and it may not, the older motion picture “Executive Action” even looked at a level above the U.S. military and intelligence.  Steve Thomas’s parody of it above sound spot on to me.

No doubt President Kennedy’s quiet peace initiatives and his order to begin removing “advisors” from Vietnam infuriated this coterie Steve described.  But in my opinion the most immediate goal of assassination, at least looking at events transpiring hours after the hit, was to provoke an invasion of Cuba.  I didn’t see that mentioned above. 

[Robert Morrow]

Peter Dale Scott in his 1971 unpublished manuscript The Dallas Conspiracy proved that two of LBJ's closest friends D.H. Byrd and "merger king" James Ling made heavy insider stock buys into their defense contractor company in the weeks before the JFK assassination. Has anyone on this forum CONFIRMED that Peter Dale Scott was in fact correct about these very suspicious stock buys? I trust the careful Peter Dale Scott but I would like to have confirmation proof of this.

D.H. Byrd, James Ling - heavy insider buying into LTV just before the JFK assassination

http://jfkcountercoup.blogspot.com/2010/11/peter-dale-scott-dallas-copa-2010.html

 Go to footnote #49

 49. In early November 1963, Byrd and his investment partner, James Ling, made a significant insider purchase of stock in their defense industry investment, LTV. Although required by SEC rules to report this insider purchase, they delayed doing so until well after Kennedy’s assassination. Then in January LTV received the first major LBJ defense contract from the Pentagon – for a fighter plane designed for Vietnam. Cf. Joan Mellen, “The Kennedy Assassination and the Current Political Moment,” Part II, http://www.joanmellen.net/truth-2.html .

 

“Merger King” James Ling kept a bust of Lyndon Johnson in his Dallas office. Both James Ling and D.H. Byrd were very close to Lyndon Johnson. They bought 132,000 shares of LTV stock in the weeks before the JFK assassination

 https://www.nytimes.com/1981/07/12/business/conglamerateur-extraordinaire-james-j-ling-with-ltv-memory-he-s-taking-his-act.html

 [“Conglamerateur Extraordinaire: James J. Ling: With LTV a Memory, He’s taking his Act to the Oil Patch,” Leslie Wayne, NYT, July 12, 1981]

 QUOTE

 Nonetheless, he talks about the LTV episode as ''the front nine.'' His attention is now focused on ''the back nine.'' ''I didn't get a chance to finish it,'' he said, while seated in an office that featured a bust of Lyndon Johnson and newspaper clips about Mr. Ling on the walls in the outer hallway.

 UNQUOTE

 James Ling lived a lavish lifestyle in his in estate in Dallas’s Gaywood area

 [“Boldface Dallas: Today’s super rich dwarf the city’s gilded age by comparison,” Dallas Morning News, 1-12-2013]

 https://www.dallasnews.com/arts-entertainment/2013/01/12/boldface-dallas-todays-super-rich-dwarf-the-citys-80s-gilded-age-by-comparison/

 QUOTE

It wasn’t always this way. In early 1970s Dallas, opulence was at its most rarefied in the orbit of Troy Post and his pal and sometime partner, Jim Ling. Post was an insurance financier who owned 80 percent of Braniff Airways, all of National Car Rental and a jet-set resort in Acapulco, Tres Vidas en la Playa. Ling built one of the great conglomerates, Ling-Temco-Vought, known simply as LTV.

Post's massive Park Lane estate, his audacious business deals and his financial reverses were all the stuff of newspaper headlines. The lavishness of Ling's estate on Gaywood attracted so much media coverage that it became a target for the infamous jewel thief known as the King of Diamonds, who raided Dallas' oligarchs for a decade and never got caught. In January 1963, when the king entered a second-story balcony window and boosted the family gems while Ling and his wife watched TV downstairs, the heist made the front page of The Dallas Morning News. By 1970, financial reversals forced the Lings out of the house, and H.L. Hunt's sports-minded son, Lamar Hunt, moved in.

The delicious Post/Ling-style ostentation seemed colossal, but even when adjusted for inflation, the money in play does not measure up to the present scale of affluence.

UNQUOTE

 1986 NYT obituary on D.H. Byrd described him as a “Texas Philanthropist” with no mention of his close friendship with LBJ or that he owned the Texas School Book Depository at the time of the JFK assassination or that he and James Ling bought 132,000 shares of LTV stock in the weeks before the JFK assassination (at a time when Defense Secretary Robert McNamara and the business press were talking about cuts in defense spending)

 https://www.nytimes.com/1986/09/16/obituaries/d-harold-byrd-is-dead-a-texas-philanthropist.html

 QUOTE

D. Harold Byrd, a philanthropist who made his fortune in Texas oilfields and helped finance the exploration of Antarctica, has died. He was 86 years old.

Mr. Byrd, who was also a co-founder of the Civil Air Patrol and a geologist, died Sunday at his home after a short illness.

The philanthropist, as a cousin and close friend of Adm. Richard E. Byrd, financed some of the Antarctic explorer's ventures in the 1920's and 1930's. An Antarctic range, the Harold Byrd Mountains, was named for him.

Mr. Byrd used his oil profits to build a financial empire that included recreational facilities, manufacturing, real estate, commercial and industrial ventures and farming and ranching enterprises.

He and a small group of civilians founded the Civil Air Patrol in 1941 in Washington.

He also was co-founder and director of Dallas-area aircraft companies, including the Temco Aircraft Corporation. In 1957, he organized and became board chairman of the Space Corporation, which manufactured propulsion and ground test equipment for jet engines and aerospace ground support equipment.

Survivers include his wife, Mavis, and two sons.

 QUOTE

 D.H. Byrd was a national security insider bigtime and close personal friend of General Doolittle. Doolitte said in Byrd’s obituary in the Dallas Times Herald that “we were substantial friends from the early days of aviation.”

 Doolittle Report, 1954 - Wikipedia

 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doolittle_Report,_1954

 Very important Education Forum thread on D.H. Byrd:

 David Harold Byrd - JFK Assassination Debate - The Education Forum (ipbhost.com)

Edited February 5 by Robert Morrow

[Ron Bulman]

On 1/26/2024 at 9:26 PM, Douglas Caddy said:

Karen Croft and David Talbot interviewed Peter Dale Scott in the January 23, 2024, issue of The Kennedy Beacon. The link to the full article is at the bottom of this posting. What is posted here is that portion of the interview that deals with the assassination of President Kennedy.

The JFK Records Act leads us to another big question, because you’ve been doing research on the Kennedy assassination for so long. As another researcher once said, “Peter Dale Scott has forgotten more about the Kennedy assassination than we’ll ever know.” So, the big question is why was JFK killed?

We don’t live in a system like a monarchy. We live in a state of chaos — a kind of Hobbesian state of nature, with different, powerful oligarchs — and they’ve been battling each other in the U.S. ever since they met to draft the Articles of Confederation. And at least one of the states — South Carolina — was there to guarantee the protection of slavery, because in their state at least 60 percent of the people were black. So, this racist system was baked into America at the beginning. It was a kind of built-in conflict at the top level, which is what I think is now running this country, rather than a “deep state.” I was never happy about that term, even though I helped import it to the United States from Turkey, and said so when I wrote about it. It sounds like it’s a “thing.” What we actually live in is a kind of Hobbesian condition of chaos, a new Gilded Age, with greater and greater accumulations of private power.

Yes, but you sidestepped the question – why was President Kennedy eliminated? What made him a target?

Well, he was threatening an end to the Cold War, which was the basis of the military economy that had made America prosperous since 1953. He was threatening to ease us off the war economy, and to deal with problems at home like poverty and racism.

Record Group 111, Records of the Office of the Chief Signal Officer (111-SC-578830), Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

The Cold Warriors who ran the country maintained a constant state of alarm, constant preparedness. The sociologist C. Wright Mills, author of The Power Elite, recognized how they created a national security emergency “without foreseeable end.” He called these men “crackpot realists…In the name of realism they have constructed a paranoid reality all their own.”

A “paranoid reality” that was – and still is – very profitable for the military-industrial complex.

People forget President Kennedy’s 1963 Atomic Test Ban Treaty, which ended all nuclear arms testing above ground. It sounds petty now, but it wasn’t petty then. There had been no treaty with the Soviet Union since 1955 when Washington and Moscow agreed by treaty to respect the neutrality of Austria.

During the debate about the atomic test ban, the Cold War lobby and the media were saying you cannot conclude a deal with the Russians because they are Communists — but JFK did it. And worse than that, Kennedy — rightly — didn’t trust his CIA. So, the president was privately talking to his brother, Attorney General Robert Kennedy, and Bobby was privately talking to Georgi Bolshakov, the Soviet representative in Washington, as a back-channel to Khrushchev in the Kremlin. Well, the CIA and the DIA (Defense Intelligence Agency) knew about the back-channel. And a document that purports to be a DIA document — I think it’s authentic — comes out 12 years later, an analysis that Kennedy is doing something treasonous, illegal. That agency, the DIA, might have helped do him in. Ironically, the DIA was created by Kennedy, who distrusted naval intelligence and army intelligence.

Kennedy gave two important speeches, one day apart in June 1963. In the first one, the so-called Peace Speech, he said we should empathize with our enemy, the Russians. At the height of the Cold War, he said, “In the final analysis, our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet. We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children's future. And we are all mortal.”

And the very next day, he gave his swiftly composed civil rights speech on national TV, responding to the turmoil in the South, including Governor George Wallace, how he stood in the doorway at the University of Alabama to try to prevent two black students from integrating the university. The president told the nation that racial justice was “a moral issue. It is as old as the scriptures and is as clear as the American Constitution.”

I can see, and I believe I’m right in seeing, that there was a kind of retro Southern presence in the military. The Army slow-marched to the University of Mississippi in 1962 and to the University of Alabama the following year, after President Kennedy ordered Army troops to restore order on those campuses.

I could go on, but I won’t go on. There were probably five or six reasons Kennedy was killed —- it was a coalition that killed Kennedy. And it was a coalition that killed Kennedy in a way that they knew the media would have to come in and make it look like it had been a lone nut who had killed Kennedy.So, was the media part of the coalition?

Not in the actual assassination, but to cover it up, absolutely. It was planned that they were to play that role.

And who was organizing the whole thing, in your mind?

I’ve always said I’m here to analyze what was happening, the forces behind it, not to have a point of view about who did it. David, I know that in your book (The Devil’s Chessboard), you wrote that essentially it was the CIA — Allen Dulles, who was fired as agency director by JFK, and the network around him. I do think they were in it. But I have a whole chapter in my book Deep Politics about military intelligence — more importantly, the Military Intelligence Reserve, which interfaces with oil corporations, and had a conspiratorial unit in Dallas exploring petroleum deposits in the Soviet Union. I believe they were at least as involved in the murder as the CIA.

But the JFK plot was a coalition. The anti-civil rights people in the South were also part of it. I refer people to the Joseph Milteer story I talk about in my book Dallas 1963. There’s a white Southern factor that helped to kill Kennedy.

To paraphrase Jim Douglass (author of JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why it Matters), why does the JFK assassination still haunt us? 

I could go on and on and on about this, all this fuss now about truth and propaganda, about “fake facts” and so on. The truth is, we’ve been living with “fake facts” ever since the Warren Report. The Warren Report is so phony that even some of the men who drafted it, and signed it, didn’t believe it! Some were quite vocal about it. They were signing a fake document. To believe the Warren Report you have to believe that one bullet was able to cause seven wounds in two different people, hit a bone, and then fall unscathed onto a stretcher. It’s all in the report. And if you believe that, you’re nuts.

(Editorial note: The Warren Report’s “magic bullet theory” was finally “buried in concrete,” according to forensics expert Cyril Wecht, following former Secret Service agent Paul Landis’s recent account that he found the pristine bullet in the presidential limousine.)

National Archives and Records Administration , Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

And we all condition ourselves to say, Well, something went wrong with the JFK investigation, but I don’t want to think about that because then I’d have to think about everything.

Of course, a few of us do start thinking about everything and I came up with Deep Politics. But most of us, and you can’t blame them, they have to live lives and they have to earn incomes. They can’t afford to think about the assassination too much.

One last question about the Kennedy assassination. Why after all this time are you the only prominent intellectual in the country who has looked seriously into this historic event? Where were leading intellectuals on the left, like Noam Chomsky?

He won’t touch it. I’ll talk about it.

We read a quote of Chomsky where he said Kennedy was a warmonger and not worth discussing.

Well, I know about this issue because when the Pentagon Papers were released in 1971, they were later published by a maverick press, Beacon Press. The following year, they commissioned a follow-up volume of essays which was edited by Noam Chomsky and Howard Zinn. I was asked to write an essay, in which I stated that President Kennedy had plans, which he already began implementing, to withdraw most U.S. troops out of Vietnam by 1965. Chomsky was out of the country at the time so I sent my essay to Howard Zinn and he, thinking like Chomsky, said, “You don’t want to publish this.” And I said, “Why not?” He said, “It sounds like you think it would make a difference if we had a different president.” And I said “Yes, it did make a difference! That’s the whole point of my essay.” And Howard said, “Peter, that’s bad politics. It’s the system that’s wrong. You’ve got to be against the system.”

And that’s what Noam was about. Noam is not a Marxist, he’s an anarchist. He doesn’t want to see any good in Kennedy because he wants to get rid of the whole system. And replace it with what? I won’t go any further because Noam and I respect each other, but it’s quite clear that on the Kennedy record Noam and I have disagreed.

You’ve had a difficult time over the years getting your work about the Kennedy assassination published, haven’t you?

Yes. In 1970 I did a book called The War Conspiracy. And my thinking about the Kennedy assassination then was very primitive compared to what it is now. But I figured you couldn’t think about the state of war that we were in without thinking about the Kennedy assassination. I sent the manuscript to the publisher, Bobbs-Merrill. I only found out later that the head of their legal department at the time was William Harvey, who had been in the CIA and is someone many people suspect was involved in the assassination.

Bill Harvey? The CIA’s former assassination chief? He was working there?

Yes, he was the head of the legal department at Bobbs-Merill, which was a tiny little publishing house in Indianapolis. It normally did children’s literature like The Wizard of Oz, but suddenly had got into a phase of requesting manuscripts from people like me. They had gone to Ramparts magazine, and Ramparts made a deal with them without first consulting me.

Anyway, Bobbs-Merrill said to me, “We think you’ll have a better book if you save your four chapters on the Kennedy assassination for a different book.” They published the expurgated version of the book, but it was buried. They absolutely did not promote it.

So, it was a catch-and-kill situation?

It was a catch-and-kill situation. The word I think is “privished.”

Privished?

Instead of being published, you make it a private thing for the author and his friends. (laughs)

How have you managed to maintain your cheerful disposition, despite the efforts to censor you?

It sounds trivial, but I think I have an advantage in that I was not born in America. And I see America from outside, without getting furious. I think most Americans, when they begin to see the terrible things America has done — they’ve had president after president guilty of war crimes — either they suppress the thought, because it means changing their life too much to accept that thought, or they acknowledge it and get furious. They never say: Well, that’s the bad side and this is the good side.

And that’s what you say?

That’s what I say. I say it in my book that’s coming out, Reading the Dream. I say it’s important at all times to maintain balance. And don’t get 100 percent into an emotion or a single point of view. Realize that there are conflicting values and you have to reach a compromise. And the American political system, at its best, does just that. It’s a very crude way of reaching compromise. It could be a lot better, but it’s the best in the world. So, let’s keep it.

I’d like to quote something from the end of my book that is pertinent here. It’s my last paragraph: “In this post-secular time, passionate divisions, sometimes between retro and generative spiritualities, threaten more and greater wars. So let each of us, mindful of our own internal yin-yang doubleness, resolve to balance the urgent need to preserve the best in this precious world with the urgent need to make it better. Hopefully this book may contribute to a less fervid politics and a healthier, friendlier culture.”

But isn’t it true what the Irish say? Nobody throws themselves into politics with more passion than the Irish. But they still say that politics will break your heart.

Well, that’s very true. That’s why you have to balance politics with something else. In my case it’s poetry. And I’m not the only one. The investigative author Douglas Valentine, who has done good work about the CIA and drugs, also balances his life by writing poetry. Other political activists and writers take up athletics or travel, whatever — you have to keep balance in your life. I still take longish walks, every day. I used to play the piano. Now I don’t.

What did you play?

Mozart, Beethoven. I was trained, briefly, to be a concert pianist. But they kept saying that if I wanted to do it, I’d have to dedicate my life to it. I realized pretty quickly I didn’t want to do that. This was all when I was 13 or 14.

I had a friend who came to Berkeley in the ‘70s to work with me on the JFK assassination case and he went insane. Somebody else committed suicide. And some people who were looking down that dark well in the past were murdered, but that’s a whole different story. The deeper into it you get, the harder it is to keep balance. I take long breaks — I’ve actually retired (from giving interviews on this subject). I’m doing this for you.

Anyway, that’s my message – search for balance in your life. Take a walk, listen to music, savor a glass of wine.

The mind-body connection?

Right

Well, you’ll live forever, then.

 

https://open.substack.com/pub/thekennedybeacon/p/peter-dale-scott-on-trump-the-deep?r=5pqyc&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=email

Threads disappear from the first page within a day to two.  I thought this was worth a bump for any who might have missed it.

[Bill Fite]

Mr Caddy - thanks also for posting this interview.

[Douglas Caddy]

 

Delete

Edited February 22 by Douglas Caddy

[David Andrews]

I've always looked on the JFKA as a centrist act, where interests coalesced, only some of them politically right-wing.

[Paul Brancato]

I get emails from the Kennedy Beacon, RFK Jr’s campaign. I particularly loved this interview, and have always thought of Scott as the Dean of researchers. He goes on to say btw that he thinks RFK Jr’s time on the national stage has not yet arrived, saying 2028 rather than 2024. He may be right about that. In today’s NYT Ezra Klein has an interview, the gist of which is that Biden is a liability. He follows that with an analysis of what an open convention might look like. John Stewart’s first 2024 Daily Show from 2 weeks ago likewise focuses on what a poor bulwark against Trump’s fascism Biden is. 

Mr. Scott mentions Army Intelligence, and without actually naming it he points to Jack Crichton and his 488th when he says that a military intelligence unit in Dallas was looking at Russia’s oil reserves. 

 

[Joe Bauer]

Doug Caddy...thank you for posting this Peter Dale Scott entry.

It is so enlightening in so many ways.

Scott says to rationally and meaningfully study the JFK and JFKA story, you must study "everything" as well.

The huge percentage of peoples simply don't have the freedom and inclination to do so.

In reading the thread I also found myself linking back to the great philosophers and their teachings and sharings that in the least have guided us to be more than just law of the jungle dog-eat-dog bullies and survivalists. And led us to actually create something as close to the Greek ideal of a constitutional democracy as we have...

Cleisthenes and Pericles :

---

Solon, was a wise man among the Greeks. He blamed the turmoil of Athens on greedy aristocrats. He laid the foundation to make all citizens equal and reduce the greed among aristocrats. But, it was Cleisthenes who is remembered as the Father of Democracy.

Also Scott wonderfully expounds upon the need for balancing the descent into the dark heaviness of the JFKA with an equal amount of more light-minded, light-hearted  and even playful diversion of thought and activity.

So true! 

A walk outdoors? Or maybe just a drive which in my area means rich forest and ocean views? Cleaning chores around the house? Watching TV cooking shows, and/or comedic or old classic movies or TV shows on the internet...you name it.

Yes, a conglomerate killed JFK. They all hated JFK with equal fervor ...even to a murderous degree. Machiavellian in it's purest form. 

Murchison family seamstress and housemaid Mae Newman:

"When JFK was killed the mood in the Murchison household was joyous."

"Like the champaign and caviar flowed for a week. I was the only one who grieved for the Kennedy family."

Edited February 22 by Joe Bauer