Death of a dream
Book shows how Kennedy and Khrushchev worked for peace up to JFK’s death
By Paul Sawyer 11/19/2009
IIn “JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters,” Jim Douglas meticulously illustrates the great courage and commitment it took for President John Kennedy to avoid nuclear war and point a path toward world peace at the height of the Cold War.
Douglas admits “Kennedy was no saint,” but he presents vital new information revealing a humane character steering America in a sharply different direction.
Quoting from previously secret correspondence contained in 21 private letters between Kennedy and Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev, Douglas finds that the two men attempted to moderate the Cold War and fashion agreements to avoid nuclear disaster.
During the Cuban Missile Crisis, for instance, Kennedy sends his brother, Attorney General Bobby Kennedy, to tell the Soviet ambassador personally of the urgency for an agreement on withdrawing their missiles. According to Khrushchev’s recollection, Bobby informed the emissary that “the president is not sure the military will not overthrow him and seize power.” Khrushchev then pulled the missiles out, and relates that he and Kennedy chose “a common cause to save the world from those pushing us toward war.”
The American military, particularly US Air Force Gen. Curtis LeMay, who had pushed Kennedy for a preemptive nuclear attack on the Soviet Union, was increasingly at odds with the president. The military’s anger grew when Kennedy did not attack Soviet-backed Cuba, entered into a nuclear test ban agreement with Khrushchev and then outlined pathways to peace and understanding with the Soviets in his June 1963 American University address.
Kennedy’s October 1963 decision to withdraw US military advisers from Vietnam and avoid an Asian land war was the last straw for these military hawks. Their industrial profiteers and political backers could no longer endure Kennedy, and at that point, his days were numbered. The following month, Kennedy was assassinated.
Douglas shows how Lyndon Johnson’s handpicked Warren Commission began with a predetermined outcome agreed upon by Johnson and FBI Chief J. Edgar Hoover, pegging Lee Harvey Oswald, the CIA-FBI operative, as the lone killer.
The result has been a continuing policy of successive US imperial wars and interventions — from Panama to Afghanistan — carried out by a tight-knit group of military-industrial-political leaders.
But the assassins not only killed a president; they also buried his character and falsified his legacy. By blaming Kennedy for starting the Vietnam War, they stripped from him his courageous efforts to bring about world peace and to muzzle nuclear weapons. They also muffled his anti-colonial effort to moderate the continued thrust toward corporate economic dominance of the US-led post-World-War II Imperium. These policies still linger today in the Obama administration, carried forward by entrenched remnants of the political putsch that eliminated Kennedy. The devastating and costly Central Asian wars and the attempt to blunt revolution in the Americas continue such policies.
Douglas’ book has been sidelined by the corporate media with almost no reviews. This is no accident, given the extensive effort already invested in diminishing the heroism of Kennedy — who risked and lost his life for change — and in obscuring the truths of his murder.
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The Kennedy family had a clear history of cheating its way to power, money, and gratification of the flesh; denying family, laws of the land, and God.
As Sawyer collates or revises the Kennedy Mythology might we wonder, if JFK is an example of the American President, warrior broken turning old, cheating the U.S.A. out of its manifest destiny? May God and heroes preserve and prosper our republic.