Figuring out the Kennedy assassination part 1

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Figuring out the Kennedy assassination part 1
Global Village Space |

Jacob G. Hornberger |

The Washington Post and Politico recently published two articles entitled “President Trump, Give Us the Full Story on the JFK Assassination” and “How the CIA Came to Doubt the Official Story of JFK’s Murder” by historians Larry J. Sabato and Phillip Shenon.

The thrust of the articles was to call on Trump to release all of the still-secret records relating to the JFK assassination belonging to the CIA and other federal agencies that the National Archives is required by law to release by October. In the Post article, the authors state that they have received reliable information that at least two federal agencies are going to try to persuade Trump to block the release of some of the records. In my opinion, it is a virtual certainty that the CIA is one of those two agencies.

Ever since the Kennedy assassination, people have tried to come up with a motive for Oswald. None of them, including the Warren Commission, has been successful.

Sabato and Shenon are correct in arguing that Trump should reject any such request. The notion that the release of records that are more than half-a-century old will threaten “national security” — however that undefined term is defined — is manifestly ludicrous.

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But then Sabato and Shenon go astray. Like so many others since the JFK assassination, they try to figure out what the motive of the accused assassin Lee Harvey Oswald was. In the Politico article, they posit that maybe — just maybe—Oswald somehow discovered the super-secret assassination attempts against Cuban leader Fidel Castro by the CIA and the Mafia, which had entered into an assassination partnership to kill Castro. Their thesis is that Oswald, as a supposed communist, loved and revered Castro, and therefore decided to retaliate by assassinating Kennedy.

There is a big problem, however, with that thesis, one that is inconsistent with the thesis. Like many other writers on the JFK assassination writers, the authors simply do not confront that inconsistency, perhaps thinking that if they just act like it isn’t there, their thesis might somehow, in isolation, make sense to people.

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June 1963. That was when President Kennedy made his famous Peace Speech at American University. In that speech, he threw down the gauntlet to the CIA, Pentagon, military-industrial complex, and the rest of the U.S. national-security establishment by announcing that he was ending the Cold War against Russia and the rest of the Soviet Union and was reaching out to the communist world in a spirit of mutual coexistence, peace, and friendship.

One that would obviously bring an end to the CIA’s assassination attempts against Castro and, for that matter, other people whose only crime believed in socialism or communism?

The speech was a culmination of a vicious war that had been waged between JFK and his brother Bobby against the CIA ever since the CIA’s disastrous plan to invade Cuba at the Bay of Pigs. The war had expanded to the Pentagon through Operation Northwoods, the infamous plan unanimously approved by the Joint Chiefs of Staff that called for a fraudulent pretext to invade Cuba, which the president nixed.

It continued through the resolution of the Cuban Missile Crisis, which the military establishment considered the worst defeat in U.S. history and akin to Chamberlain’s capitulation to Hitler at Munich.

The war between Kennedy and the CIA-Pentagon bureaucrats had become so vicious that the president didn’t even pay them the courtesy of advising them of what he planned to announce in his Peace Speech at American University.

Read more: Will Trump continue the CIA’s cover-up in the JFK assassination?

Kennedy didn’t stop there. Over the vehement objections of his national-security establishment, he entered into a nuclear-test ban treaty with the Soviets. He then ordered the Pentagon to begin a partial withdrawal of troops from Vietnam and told aides he would be ordered a full pull out after winning the 1964 presidential election.

Kennedy was the president who was making peace with Russia and the Cuba, both of which had responded positively to Kennedy’s plans to end the Cold War.

It is impossible to overstate the enormity of what Kennedy was doing and the rage and animosity it generated. To get a better sense of the magnitude of the change he was proposing and the enemies he was inciting within the national-security establishment, I recommend FFF’s ebook JFK’s War with the National Security Establishment: Why Kennedy Was Assassinated by Douglas Horne, who served on the staff of the Assassination Records Review Board, the agency that was responsible for bringing all those records to the National Archives that are set to be released in October.

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As Horne details, Kennedy was changing the direction that the nation had followed since the end of World War II and which it ended up following for another 25 years after Kennedy’s assassination. From 1945 to 1990, the United States was consumed with the gigantic threat that communism and the Soviet Union supposedly posed to the United States, a threat that would obviously guarantee ever-growing power and budgets for the national-security establishment, including its army of contractors, for decades to come.

As Horne details, Kennedy was changing the direction that the nation had followed since the end of World War II and which it ended up following for another 25 years after Kennedy’s assassination.

The change that Kennedy was implementing would have put the quietus to the Cold War and the U.S. government’s anti-communist crusade. In the process, it also threatened the ever-growing power and stream of income of the entire national-security establishment.

For their part, the bureaucrats within the national-security establishment were convinced that Kennedy’s actions would result in America falling under communist rule — that is, that Kennedy’s actions posed a grave threat to “national security.” After all, keep in mind that what Kennedy was doing — reaching out to the Soviet Union and Cuba in a spirit of peace and friendship — was what got Mossadegh in Iran, Arbenz in Guatemala, Castro in Cuba, and Allende in Chile targeted for assassination and regime change at the hands of the CIA and Pentagon.

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Figuring out the Kennedy assassination part 1