This piece was originally written to be the final section of The JFK FAQ, cowritten by Jedediah Laub-Klein and Joe Green, which will be appearing soon. Because of space considerations (each question was to be limited to a 400-word answer) this section, written by Green, was substantially cut in the final article. However, the complete version of this essay is included below.

Why do people continue to insist that John F. Kennedy was murdered in a conspiracy?

Why do people in the major media and mainstream historians tend to avoid the subject, and then when they do, do so in a hostile or joking manner?

To answer this, we have to travel back in time and see the world as it was seen back then.

JFK entered the office of the president in 1960. Dwight Eisenhower, a famous military general, had stepped down after serving a second term. Kennedy was also a war hero, having become famous for his exploits with the boat PT 109.

He had come from a moneyed family; his father, Joseph Kennedy, was one of the most prominent democrats of his time. Joe Kennedy’s real estate holdings during the Great Depression made him an enormously wealthy man, and he eventually became the first head of the Securities and Exchange Commission, having been put in place by Franklin Roosevelt. Although technically a Democrat, Joe was not particularly liberal; he disliked Jews and assisted Joseph McCarthy during the Red Scare.

In many ways, however, John and Robert Kennedy (his brother) were quite different from their father, and they would grow to be even more different as they spent more time in the White House. John made Bobby the Attorney General of the United States, and together they grappled with the beginning of a period in U.S. history that saw huge social and geopolitical changes.

Historical Background & Relevant People

This was the beginning of the period known as the Civil Rights Era. Several African American leaders became prominent in the social justice and peace movements; two of the most important were Martin Luther King and Malcolm X.

This was the time of the Cold War. Tensions between the United States and Russia (or, as it was known then, the Soviet Union) were at an all-time high.

Also in 1960, it is important to remember that Kennedy’s opponent was Richard Milhous Nixon.  Nixon lost the presidency in an incredibly close vote in which the popular vote was with Nixon but the Electoral College put Kennedy in the White House. Whether true or not, Nixon had blamed the loss on the political machine in the state of Illinois, where the most powerful political figure was the mayor of Chicago, Richard Daley.

Kennedy’s running mate as Vice-President in 1960 was Lyndon Johnson. This was a political marriage, as Johnson was intended to help Kennedy in the South, especially to win all-important Texas. The two men did not especially like one another or agree with one another.

One thing that Kennedy used to draw a distinction between himself and Nixon was to come out and support Dr. Martin Luther King’s nonviolent resistance, going so far as to reach out to him when King was in jail for civil disobedience. Although JFK did not move quickly, or radically, in the direction of civil rights, this changed over is time in office, as did his views about a number of other things.

Lyndon Johnson (left) and Richard Nixon.

The Bay of Pigs

A key crisis event occurred right at the start of Kennedy’s presidency, in April of 1961. Cuba had been led by a man named Batista up until December of 1959, when he was overthrown by a revolution led by Fidel Castro and Che Guevara. Castro had upset the United States by nationalizing industry and accepting aid from the Soviet Union. He also upset the Mob by invalidating all of their previously held arrangements in Cuba. In response to this, military planners in the United States had been bucking to invade Cuba and “restore democracy,” that is, install a government favorable to the foreign policy goals of the United States.

This was Eisenhower’s plan. He had ordered more than a year prior. Kennedy had been in office only three months and allowed himself to be convinced that the invasion, led by American-trained Cuban rebels, would work.  It did not. At a key moment, Kennedy – feeling that he had been lied to – failed to authorize air cover for the invading rebels. The rebellion was quashed and there were many casualties. (Whether the air cover would have made much of a difference is highly debatable, and there are those who argue that it was designed to fail, thus prompting a full U.S. invasion.)

However, what is not arguable is that the CIA’s own report on the invasion, declassified in 1996, made the following points:

   1. The CIA exceeded its capabilities in developing the project from guerrilla support to overt armed action without any plausible deniability.

  2. Failure to realistically assess risks and to adequately communicate information and decisions internally and with other government principals.

   3. Insufficient involvement of leaders of the exiles.

   4. Failure to sufficiently organize internal resistance in Cuba.

   5. Failure to competently collect and analyze intelligence about Cuban forces.

   6. Poor internal management of communications and staff.

   7. Insufficient employment of high-quality staff.

   8. Insufficient Spanish-speakers, training facilities and material resources.

   9. Lack of stable policies and contingency plans. (emphasis mine)

Kennedy publicly took the blame, but in response to the Bay of Pigs he took away planning from the CIA and gave it to the joint chiefs. He also fired the head of the CIA, Allen Dulles, as well as Deputy Director Charles Cabell, and Deputy Director of Plans Richard Bissell.

In 1962 the joint chiefs were still obsessed with invading Cuba. They presented Kennedy with a plan called Operation Northwoods.

The Operation Northwoods documents, which were signed off on by Lyman Lemnitzer and all of the joint chiefs, called for an invasion of Cuba based on a false pretext. Some of the false pretexts suggested were using a fake plane, filled with college students, and blowing it up over international waters and blaming Cuba, or murdering John Glenn when he re-entered the atmosphere and blaming Cuba. The plan was presented in late 1962; Secretary of State Robert McNamara thought Lemnitzer had lost his mind, and Kennedy said no.

We have to try and understand JFK’s state of mind at this point. He has already taken away operational planning from the CIA; now, he finds that the joint chiefs are simply a different set of lunatics.

The Cuban Missile Crisis

During the Cuban Missile Crisis in October 1962, the world came incredibly close to being destroyed. At the time of the crisis, the Soviet premier was a man named Nikita Krushchev. Had Krushchev followed the advice of his military commanders, the world would have ceased to exist. The same is true for John F. Kennedy.

It began when U.S. patrols flying over Cuba spotted nuclear weapons being set up on the island. This is what the military establishment had feared – the Soviet Union gaining the power to threaten the Eastern seaboard with nuclear missiles just a few miles off the coast of Florida.

Tensions grew so high that Fidel Castro, the leader of Cuba, told the Soviet leader to launch nuclear missiles. He did this despite the fact he knew that Cuba would be blown off the map.

The President and his advisors deal with the Cuban Missile Crisis.

After a long and tense negotiation, JFK with particular help from his brother, the Attorney General Bobby Kennedy, were able to broker a deal. The Soviet Union removed the stockpile from Cuba and this led to JFK’s famous remark that “the Russians blinked.”

Following the crisis, JFK continued to make peaceful overtures in the direction of the Soviets, and started a back channel conversation with Fidel Castro, who grew to admire Kennedy.

Rocking the Boat

Any summary this brief of the time period is inevitably going to be too simplified to be anything than other than an introduction to this material. However, even a cursory glance at what was going on during Kennedy’s presidency reveals a number of things:

1. 1.    Kennedy grew to distrust his advisors, and actively ignored or even circumvented them.
   

2. 2.    He fired three key people from the CIA, including the head, Allen Dulles, who was a legend dating back to World War II.
   

3. 3.    He was withdrawing troops from Vietnam, when the official policy of the rest of the U.S. government was that       Vietnam was a key piece of real estate in the Cold War against Communism.
   

4. 4.    He was pursuing détente with Cuba and the Soviet Union.
   

5. 5.    He had started to make overtures in the direction of civil rights.
   

6. 6.    He signed a nuclear test ban treaty.
   

Furthermore, Kennedy was a popular president.

Kennedy was popular across the globe in a way that no President has been since. This was threatening to his political enemies, because it seemed to invoke the possibility of a Kennedy dynasty – first John, then Bobby, then Ted – each pursuing a “liberal” agenda.

“Liberal”

We should probably talk about what the word “liberal” means for a moment.

In our own day, the term has been debased to the point where many people have knee-jerk reactionary negative reactions to it. This has been the result of a successful, decades-long campaign to demonize the word.

However, it should be known that the liberal tradition goes back to the American Revolution. It is precisely what the revolution was all about. Liberalism promoted the idea of individual equality, democratic freedom, and natural rights against the divine right of kings. What most people understand to be their most basic freedoms – assembly, speech, and the like – are liberal traditions.

Many people see liberalism today in the context of “socialism,” or “handouts,” that is to say, social welfare programs and community programs. There is a germ of truth to this notion. For example, because of Franklin Roosevelt we have social security, which helps people when they retire.

We have the post office, and fire departments, and child labor laws, and food safety laws, and a vast array of consumer protections that uphold the clause in the Constitution to promote the general welfare. Liberal traditions are, by their very nature, in line with the people’s struggle for individual rights.

The reason this becomes relevant is in the final bit of historical context surrounding the Kennedy assassination.

Kennedy meeting with Dr. King and other leaders during the march on Washington.

   

Closing Observations

John Kennedy was shot to death on November 22, 1963. The official government body to investigate the crime, the Warren Commission, concluded that it was the work of a lone nut by the name of Lee Harvey Oswald. In doing so, it ignored reams of evidence to the contrary, and more specifically evidence that pointed to an internal conspiracy.

The broader context of this assassination is that there were many other people on the left who were murdered in the year following the JFK murder – as if those who performed the deed were emboldened by their success.

Let’s look at two final sets of data. First, Richard Nixon.

Richard Nixon, during the 1960s and early 1970s, faced three major obstacles to being elected to the Presidency:

1.JFK in 1960. As noted, Nixon lost the presidency under disputed circumstances.

2.Bobby Kennedy in 1968. Bobby, of course, was himself assassinated right after the California primaries in 1968, which left no real challenger. Nixon was elected President for the first time in 1968.

3.In 1972, with no serious opposition from the Democrats, a challenger did emerge from Nixon’s own party – a hard-right populist firebrand named George Wallace. Wallace was shot and paralyzed by Arthur Bremer in May of that year. Nixon won re-election in a landslide.

Please note: I am not making these observations to say that Nixon in any way had a hand in the assassination. In fact,

Nixon himself appears to have been taken out during the Watergate scandal. However, it should be noted that whatever forces were working against the left leaders during this period, they benefited Richard Nixon. This says less about Nixon then about the inclinations of those who were trying to destroy the left during this time. Nixon was their guy, whether he knew it or not.

And now the last set of data:

1.As noted, Robert Kennedy was murdered in June of 1968.

2.MLK had been assassinated only two months earlier in Memphis.

3.Malcolm X had been killed in 1965.

4.Several members of the Black Panther party would end up dead in the following years, including Fred Hampton and Mark Clark, shot to death by police in December 1969. The rest of the leaders were either exiled or imprisoned, and the Party broke apart.

5.Allard Lowenstein, who became a prominent Democratic leader (despite real reservations from his own party) after Bobby’s death, was much more moderate than other figures of this period. However, in 1980, he was also shot to death, in this case by his protégé, Dennis Sweeney.

6.Harvey Milk, an activist who became the first gay man to hold a public office in California, was shot to death in 1978 by his colleague Dan White.

7.John Lennon, who had been harassed by the FBI for many years and driven into semi-retirement, began to be more active in the late 1970s. Although a rock star, Lennon had always been an important counter-cultural figure and leftist icon. He was shot to death in 1980 in front of his hotel by Mark David Chapman. The hotel doorman, who witnessed the shooting, had been a member of the Cuban rebels and actually been present at the Bay of Pigs.

Kennedy signs the nuclear test ban treaty.

Were these deaths connected? A case can certainly be made for the first four. But even if each assassination were in isolation, one could hardly miss the pattern. Being an agent for change – real, democratic, change in favor of the people – is a dangerous business.