JFK: The CIA, Vietnam, and the Plot to Assassinate John F. Kennedy
JFK had already fired Allan Dulles as head of the CIA.
"Only three days after the disastrous Cuban defeat, Kennedy set up a Cuban Study
Group headed by Gen. Maxwell Taylor to ‘direct special attention to the lessons
which can be learned from recent events in Cuba.’
“With that action, which received little notice at the time, the President
declared war on the agency. The Cuban Study Group was one of the most important
creations of the Kennedy presidency, and it was the source of one of the major
pressure points on the way to the guns of Dallas on November 22, 1963.
“Kennedy’s good friend Supreme Court justice William O. Douglas, in recalling a
discussion he had with Kennedy shortly after the disaster, said:
This episode seared him. He had experienced the extreme power that these groups
had, these various insidious influences of the CIA and the Pentagon, on civilian
policy, and I think it raised in his own mind the specter: Can Jack Kennedy,
President of the United States, ever be strong enough to really rule these two
powerful agencies? I think it had a profound effect . . . it shook him up!”
Epilogue
With these examples I believe we have taken a good look at the plot
to assassinate President John F. Kennedy and the atmosphere in which such
planning took place. You can easily visualize a businessman's club in downtown
Washington, New York, London, Frankfurt, Tokyo, or Toronto. A group of senior
members have gathered after lunch for a third martini. One of them mentions that
a director of his company had called that morning to say that Kennedy's denial
of the TFX procurement contract to the Boeing Company had hit his company, a
major subcontractor, very hard. This struck a nerve of one of the other members,
who reported that Roz Gilpatric, who works with that "goddamn" McNamara, had
been telling the bankers things were going to change. They could no longer count
on the practices that had feathered their nests for so many years.
Another member took a quick sip of his martini and said "I had a call from one
of our bankers in the City early this morning. He wanted to know how we were
doing and was it true that Kennedy was going to take all Americans out of
Vietnam. By God, we can't have that. We've just sold McNamara of that electronic
battlefield. It will be worth about one and one-half billion to us. That'll go
down the drain."
An elderly member, who used to visit the Dulles family in their summer home on
Henderson Bay, leaned over toward the center of that small group and almost in a
whisper said that his boys had just completed a ten-year war in Vietnam. The
total was in the thousands, and the cost ran into the billions of dollars. Then
he looked around the group of old cronies and snarled, "That goddamn Kennedy
bastard has been working all summer with some of Old Joe's Irish Mafia and his
favorite generals and they are planning every which way to get us out of
Vietnam. This can't happen. He's got to go. Right now he's a sure thing for
reelection and then there is Bobby and after him Teddy. I tell you that Kennedy
has got to go."
On the perimeter of that intense group sat a younger man quietly attentive to
every word and watching every move. Just then, as the speaker finished his
words, he saw a wink in the eye of a senior member. He rose quietly and walked
to a position behind his chair. That member turned and whispered a few words.
They were all that he needed to hear, "In the fall, somewhere in the south. Find
a way to get as many key people out of the city as possible. It's all up to
you."
There was the decision. It had been the result of a consensus of not that one
meeting, but of many. This meeting was the climax. This man was a skilled
professional. He knew the codes, how to use them and who to call. He knew
exactly how to set the train of events into operation. He knew then that his
biggest job would be to put a small cadre of the men in the world at work right
away on the cover story and on the deception plan.
He would handle the call to the agent for the "mechanics" who operated from a
foreign country, and he would begin the moves that would result in the
ever-normal selection of the site. He would have to speak to no more than three
others, and they would not know him except by an exquisite code. It was his job
to handle the Secret Service, the FBI, and the Pentagon. As required, he would
be assisted at every step by the CIA. He would not report back to the "members."
Should there be a change of plan, they could reach him. From that day until
November 22, 1963, the plan ran smoothly. The game plan of the High Cabal never
fails, because they are at the top. Even if it should fail, no one would ever be
able to prosecute them or their allies.
I said in the beginning that this was not intended to be simply a history. It is
an analysis of the secret history of the United States since World War II.
More importantly, I emphasized that I believe that God does not throw the dice.
The affairs of man and nature are not determined at random or by mere chance.
You have had the opportunity to travel back through those years with me and will
recall that 1963 marked a major turning point in this century because the power
elite moved that year to remove John F. Kennedy from the White House and to take
the course of the Ship of State into their own hands.
Furthermore, the year 1972 stands out as another one of those signal turning
points. Recall the Nixon- era White House "Conference on the Industrial World
Ahead" and the fact that those highly selected attendees had devoted three days
to a discussion on the subject, "A Look at Business in 1990." That was February
1972, and as those sessions came to a close, Roy Ash, president of Litton
Industries made his momentous closing statement that described events that would
occur twenty and thirty years hence.
His words have now become fact and cannot be changed. This is the way of the
world as it approaches the year 2000. There are major plans, as David
Rockerfeller notes, and when a Vietnam War, the assassination of John F.
Kennedy, or the destruction of a Korean airliner are necessary, they will be
caused to happen. They will not be left th chance or the bad aim of a lone
gunman in a sixth-floor window in Dallas. This is the way things are. Successful
men plan ahead. Brave men, such as Oliver Stone, make such films as JFK. The
rest of us are the victims or the beneficiaries of all the rest.
AFTERWORD 1996
Stone's JFK-and the Conspiracy
Few motion pictures of the past several decades have had the impact upon the
general public as did Oliver Stone's film JFK. The fact of the existence of a
conspiracy to kill the President of the United States is shocking; yet many
Americans try to brush it aside.
Although the great majority of Americans do not believe the Warren Commission's
conclusion that Lee Harvey Oswald by himself killed Kennedy, they find it all
but impossible to believe the alternative. This homespun psychological safety
net was shattered by Stone's film. From the time they saw that film they have
been unable to accept the creative falseness of the cover story. That film made
conspiracy the only true conclusion.
Of particular note was the film's effect upon the professional community of
assassination buffs. To begin with, these writers and researchers are not a
homogeneous society. There are some who support the
government line, with its Warren Commission, magic bullet, Lee Harvey Oswald,
Jack Ruby, and all the rest of that massive, highly contrived fiction. Then
there are the dedicated researchers who know that the Warren Commission Report
was a smoke screen and that all of its mythology is a masterful cover story
designed and nourished at the highest level by those who have spent a lifetime
concealing the facts of the case. It was this latter group of buffs who found
encouragement in Stone’s masterful film, as well as renewed strength in its
message.
To these more or less well organized groupings, we must add the new and rapidly
growing hordes of assassination investigators who encountered reality and
encouragement in the film and who have become interested in its challenging
message. For them Stone’s film presented a comprehensive coverage of the
assassination and all of its ramifications, public and private, that provided
everyone with material they may not have heard before.
And, then there are the pure professionals. Many of the more prominent of this
groups viciously attacked Oliver Stone and his movie. Now why would they, of all
people, so violently denigrate the film that supported the fact of the
conspiracy? Don’t they see the truth? Have they made public their own personal
beliefs? Quite frankly, I doubt it. These hard-liners comprise the most ardent
sector of the assassination buff melange because they are professional writers
and journalists who work for some of the most important media outlets in the
country.
One of them, Leslie Gelb, is the man Robert McNamara placed in charge of the
task force that produced the “Defense Department History of United States
Decision making in Vietnam”, aka the Pentagon Papers. His task force is the one
that came up with the following “historical fact”:
22 Nov 1963 Lodge confers with the President. Having flown to Washington the day after the conference, Lodge meets with the President and presumably continues the kind of report given in Honolulu.
Gelb had all but concealed Kennedy’s NSAM #263 in the Pentagon Papers, by
dividing it into meaningless sections, and continued his assault on that Kennedy
policy as he berated Stone for his film.
Another of these prominent writers was Tom Wicker of the New York Times. He also
attacked Stone’s use of Kennedy’s Vietnam policy statement, NSAM #63, with the
comment, “I know of no reputable historian who has documented Kennedy’s
intentions.” NSAM #263 is the official and complete documentation of Kennedy’s
intentions. It was derived from a series of White House conferences and from the
McNamara-Taylor Vietnam Trip Report, and it stated the views of the President
and of his closest advisers as is made clear in the U.S. government publication
Foreign Relations of the United States, 1961-1963, vol. IV, “Vietnam:
August-December 1963”. That source is reliable history. Wicker’s December 22,
1961, Times article was a lengthy and unnecessarily demeaning diatribe against
Stone and his movie.
So many of these professional writers attacked the film, even well before it was
on the screens of the nation, that Oliver Stone took the unusual step of
publishing The Book of the Film in 1992. In this important work, Stone does what
few others have done. He presents the full JFK debate by publishing the
demeaning articles of his detractors and the responses of his supporters side by
side in the text. This even-handed approach is rare in such public debates.
For the record, these reactions and commentaries came from the following people
(number of articles in parentheses):
David Ansen, (2); Robert Sam Anson, (1); David W. Belin, (3); Jimmy Breslin,
(1); Joseph A. Califano, Jr., (1); Alexander Cockburn, (4); Alan M. Dershowitz,
(1); Roger Ebert, (); Gerald R. Ford, (1); Leslie H. Gelb, (1), Tom Hayden, (1);
Robert Hennelly, (2); George Lardner, Jr. (4); Anthony Lewis, (1); Norman
Mailer, (1); William Manchester, (1); Richard M. Most, (1); Daniel Patrick
Moynihan, (1); John Newman, (1); Andrew O’Hehir, (1); L. Fletcher Prouty, (2);
Ron Rosenbaum, (1); Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., (1); Katherine Seelye, (1); Brent
Staples, (1); Oliver Stone, (12); Garry Trudeau, (1); and Tom Wicker, (1); and
others.
This latter group, among them Robert Sam Anson, Leslie Gelb, George Lardner,
Anthony Lewis, William Manchester, Arthur Schlesinger, and Tom Wicker came out
of nowhere to attack Oliver Stone, Jim Garrison and myself for what the movie
offered the public: much of their work was done before the film had been
produced and shown to the public. This is a rare form of movie review and was
almost universally adversarial, even though, in most cases, they, the writers,
were in error and not the film itself. What is it that bonds these major writers
together? The truth?
What is most interesting about this latter group of professional writers, most
of whom work for major media bosses, is that they all wrote negatively about the
film and all wrote in support of the anticonspiracy, lone-gunman, Warren
Commission theory. They are a highly motivated clan...for money.
Here is where this remarkable film of Stone’s hits the hardest among all of
these “experts”. It strengthens the arguments of those who believe that there
was a massive conspiracy, and it does battle, as did David versus Goliath,
against the power of the throne. To all of this, the film - for both sides -
enlivened the game and created new flocks of believers.
One of the film’s major achievements was that it aroused the United States
Congress to “mandate a comprehensive review of all federal government records
related to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, including the records
of the Warren Commission, the House Assassinations Committee, the Church
Committee, and all Executive branch agencies, including the CIA and the FBI”.
This was well intentioned; but in reality it is a sham. The answers to the
source of the decision to murder John F. Kennedy are not in government files.
This actions alone aroused the profession of the assassination buff to its
highest level, as evidenced by the activities of the Coalition On Political
Assassinations and others like it.
These achievements serve to make the film exceptional; but this was not the end.
It was the goal of Oliver Stone and of those of us who worked with him that the
truth about the murder of John F. Kennedy be brought to as many viewers as
possible, not only in the United States of America but also around the world.
This has been done, and the impact upon the ordinary layman who has not made a
special study of this subject has, in many instances, been far greater,
proportionately, than upon the professionals.
As the reader will have noted, this has been a primary objective of this
autobiographical book of mine. This is one reason why Stone used parts of it in
his script.
I have tried to put the Kennedy assassination in proper prospective with a
chronological time-line as a guiding star. I recall well the first acts of the
Cold War that began in 1944, even before the end of the hot war known as World
War II. I have underscored the beginning of the warfare in Indochina that
actually began on the same day as the surrender of the Japanese on September 2,
1945, and of the Korean War that the “Big Four” at the Teheran Conference so
amply provided for in November 1943.
With this time-line, it became imperative that I fit the assassination of the
President into the most crucial of periods: the twenty years from 1955 to 1975
that the military-industrial complex had set for the superescalation of the
warfare in Vietnam. It was then, in late 1963, that President Kennedy, in full
coordination with his closest team of top-level advisers in the White House and
in the Pentagon, signed his National Security Action Memorandum #263 of October
11, 1963. This directive, among many other things, ordered that 1,000 U.S.
military personnel be brought home by the end of 1963, and that the bulk of U.S.
personnel be withdrawn by the end of 1965. NSAM #63 and its accompanying policy
became the “straw that broke the camel’s back.” That carefully crafted and
determined policy in the impending climate of Kennedy’s assured reelection in
1964 led directly to the consensual decision at the highest levels that the
President must be killed and that control of the U.S. government must be put in
other hands. In other words, Kennedy’s Vietnam policy announcements made a coup
d’etat necessary.
This was the burden of the Stone film. The inclusion of this little-known NSAM
#263 in the film became the principal point of attack of the big guns that were
leveled at Stone, Garrison, and myself. It really is amazing that the most
vitriolic attacks were those that attempted to inform the public that there was
no such directive. The furor over that one item, NSAM #263, was evidence that
Stone had hit his target. This alone uncovered the “Why?” of the assassination.
IN the film’s closing scenes between “Garrison” and Man X”, who was a
representation of this author, one could feel the tension build in every
audience in every theater. When “Man X” says “Why? Why was Kennedy killed? Who
benefited? Who has the power to cover it up?” the audience is forced to look at
the real cause of the assassination and not at some prearranged fabrication of
that terrible event. Stone had succeeded in carrying the theme from the
comprehensive, widespread scope of the early and disorganized misapprehensions
of the assassination lore, as typified by the Warren Commission’s report,
through the specific tensions of the Garrison trial in New Orleans to the summit
of activity in Washington, and then attacked the real issue, “Why was John F.
Kennedy killed?”
It was altogether fitting, it was purely masterful, that Stone had those last
scenes filmed on the mall in Washington, D.C., between the Lincoln Memorial and
the Washington Monument with the rising dome of the Capitol building looming
over Costner (Garrison) and Sutherland (Prouty) in the distance. Only a few
steps farther down the road from there, the Kennedy Center itself is overlooked
by the old faded yellow brick building that was CIA headquarters and the
long-time office of Director of Central Intelligence Allen W. Dulles until
Kennedy fired him. The setting itself was classic. This scene tells its own
story. This is the heart of the District of Columbia. It is the place where so
much of that fatal decision, for the U.S. government and for all of us, was made
by the cabal.
And with those words about the film and its terrific impact on all assassination
buffs of all kinds and all beliefs, I wish to close with a few words that have
become more meaningful with the passage of the decades since November 22, 1963.
During my nine years in the Pentagon, I can recall no month that was more
hectic, more confused and more explosive than January 1961, the last month of
the eight-year Eisenhower administration and the month during which Kennedy was
inaugurated. there was something about that period that bore some special
message of its own - for the future. What was happening, especially there in the
Pentagon, was not simply the routine changing of the guard. That month carried
its own message, a premonition of sinister things to follow.
The closely knit Eisenhower team was so confident that Nixon would be elected
that they had arranged such things as the annual budget, procurement schedules
and other long-range objectives, including the Vietnam War, the anti-Castro
activities, and the space program, for the Nixon administration to carry out.
These plans included big-ticket items such as the Air Force’s scheduled
procurement of the new TFX swing-wing fighter aircraft at $6.5 billion, among
others. The Kennedy election, assuring a drastic change in key positions up and
down the line, put all of those plans in jeopardy. No one stood more to lose
than our friends in the highly dedicated industrial sector of the nation,
particularly in the military-industrial group.
Then, on January 17, 1961, President Eisenhower delivered his Farewell Address
to the American public. Oliver Stone chose to open his film JFK with a few
selected lines from that memorable speech:
...The conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms
industry is new in the American experience. The total influence - economic,
political, even spiritual - is felt in every city, every statehouse, every
office of the Federal Government... In the councils of government we must guard
against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by
the military industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of
misplaced power exists and will persist... We must never let the weight of this
combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take
nothing for granted...
Two days after Eisenhower’s address, I walked into the office of Secretary of
Defense Thomas Gates at the close of the business day, as had been my custom for
months, prepared to give him a few brief words on what was taking place in the
business of “providing the military support of the clandestine operations of the
CIA” - more specifically, an update on the status of the Cuban Exile operations
- later to be known as the Bay of Pigs operation. On that late afternoon, a
blizzard was raging outside. From the Pentagon we could barely see the buildings
of Washington across the Potomac. And on that late hour, as I approached Mr.
Gates‘s office, I saw that the hallway, the anteroom, and his office were jammed
with well-wishers. This was to be his last day as secretary of defense.
As I look back at those nine years, I have always believed that he was the best
and most qualified man ever to hold that office. As Mr. Gates was in no position
for a briefing at that curtain-lowering time, his secretary ushered me into the
office of Deputy Secretary of Defense James Douglas, another able gentleman. He
greeted me with his characteristic smile, strolled across his office, and leaned
against the window sill. As I looked over his shoulder, I saw nothing but raging
snow. I said, “Mr. Douglas, I have briefed you from time to time over the past
six years. I regret that this will be our last briefing.” Then I went on to give
him a report on the status of the Cuban Exile program that the Eisenhower
administration had stated, as a formal CIA activity, back in March 1960.
When I finished the brief report, I asked an essential question, “Each time I
have come in here, or into Mr. Gates’s office, I have known that you gentlemen
were well aware of the subject of these briefings over the years, and of their
background; but tomorrow, when I come in here, there will be some new men to be
briefed. Can you tell me, do I have to go back to B.C. or early A.D. with that
briefing, or may I assume that they have been informed of the subjects I shall
be covering?”
Mr. Douglas turned away and looked out at the snow and the dim outline of the
city. Finally he turned back, and said, “Prouty, I’ll be damned if I know what
to say. I haven’t met the bastards and I haven’t the slightest idea what they
know and what they do not know. They have never asked us for such information.”
Of course he was referring to Robert McNamara, the new secretary of defense, and
to Roswell Gilpatric, the new deputy, a totally new team in both person and
political ideology, let alone “military strategy in the days of the hydrogen
bomb.” This was the best characterization, that I can recall, of the climate
that existed in Washington between the two administrations since that unexpected
election of John F. Kennedy.
Few people have realized the true atmosphere of the Eisenhower-Kennedy
transition, and nowhere else in the government was that transition more
acrimonious than in the Pentagon. As a military officer I worked with the Gates
team and without a break continued along with the McNamara team.
I cite this fact, at the close of my book, because as I look back over those
years it has become clear to me that the Kennedy victory at the polls, in 1960,
was perhaps as much a cause of his eventual assassination, in 1963, as anything
else. There was no way he could win against the in-place power centers,
including that of the military-industrial complex, as President Eisenhower
himself had warned.
As you can see, such things have nothing to do with a “lone gunman” (Oswald),
with Fidel Castro and the Cubans, with the Mafia, and all the rest of the lore
that has blossomed since November 22, 1963. They are a part of the true story,
and the others are parts of the essential “cover story” that has lived and been
made to flourish since mid-November 1963.
Stone asked me to become a technical advisor as he developed the script for his
film back in July 1990. He came to my home a few days after I had triple bypass
coronary surgery in October 1990 and gave me a copy of the initial version of
the script. I noticed as I studied it that he was arranging things so that the
general public would have “a level playing field”. He wanted those who knew
little about the details of the assassination and its aftermath to get a good
comprehensive view of the entire situation.
Then, as Stone himself learned more about the assassination, he chose the work
of two highly regarded researchers and writers: Jim Garrison and Jim Mars, along
with the experienced photography expert, Bob Groden. Garrison was an excellent
selection because he was the first and only official member of any court
jurisdiction in the country to do what ought to have been done in Texas, where
the crime had taken place, i.e., take it into a court for trial. With this
endeavor Jim had put many of the actual facts of the assassination into the
record and had advanced public knowledge of the crime and of its raging cover
story, including the Warren Commission ruse. With Jim Marrs, Stone had one of
the finest and most honest technicians in the investigation business.
It has been my endeavor, since 1985 when I first sat down at my computer, to
write the story of the Cold War as few have seen it, to explain what took place
at the close of World War II that led to the Korean and Vietnamese wars, and to
describe the events that led to the assassination of John F. Kennedy on November
22, 1963, and answer the question why that terrible event was planned and
executed. In this endeavor I had the invaluable assistance of Oliver Stone, Jim
Garrison, and so many others dating from the eventful days of my own military
career.
As Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote: “There is properly no history; only biography.”
With this work, I have added a bit of autobiography.