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A compelling account of why JFK was assassinated and why the unmasking of this truth remains crucial for the future of our country and the world.

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JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters by James W. Douglass Book Review

Name: Bodhi Gaia
Rating: 5.0 out of 5 stars
Title: The Unspeakable is Our Denial
Date: Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on December 25, 2011
Review: Douglass argues the Cuban Missile Crisis, which brought the superpowers to the brink of a nuclear war, profoundly changed JFK. During the emergency, JFK’s hawkish cabinet and Pentagon officials pressured him to attack Cuba. Had he done so, we have since learned, Russian soldiers in Cuba possessed 130 Soviet nuclear-armed missiles with which they could have annihilated the US. Kennedy’s restraint in the face of his advisors’ hot-headed, maniacal demands for war with the USSR saved the world from a nuclear conflagration.

But Kennedy’s problems with the hawks began before the Cuban Missile Crisis, with the Bay of Pigs. The plan to overthrow the Castro regime had been hatched under the Eisenhower administration. Cuban exiles were assisted by the CIA in a plan that involved sending armed exiles onto the shores of Cuba. The right-wing exiles and their backers in the CIA hoped JFK would be pressured into sending US troops and/or air support for the attack, but JFK refused both. The exile brigade surrendered and more than one thousand were imprisoned in Cuba. Following that episode, an angry JFK said he wanted “to splinter the CIA in a thousand pieces and scatter it to the winds.”

For his refusal to countenance a nuclear war with the USSR over Cuba, the sociopathic hawks in the Pentagon and CIA saw JFK as “weak.” Many in the Cuban exile community in Miami also hated him for failing to provide air support to their illegal invasion. Five months after the Cuban Missile Crisis, JFK delivered a visionary address to the UN, calling for the abolition of nuclear weapons “before they abolish us…” This speech could not have thrilled the manufacturers of nuclear weapons nor the hawks in the Pentagon, who were pushing for a nuclear first strike against the USSR.

In September 1961, JFK and Khrushchev began a back channel correspondence that lasted the remainder of JFK’s life. Despite their differences, they came to a mutual understanding of the need for disarmament and détente. The understanding reached via this channel of communication helped save both of them from knuckling under to their more hawkish advisors during the Cuban Missile Crisis.

In November 1961 Kennedy ordered advisors and support units to Vietnam, beginning a steady buildup. Yet six months later he issued National Security Action Memorandum 239, including orders to withdraw all US military personnel from Vietnam by the end of 1963. He had already decided Vietnam was a lost cause; it wasn’t our war to fight.

In April of 1962 he forced the steel industry leaders to rescind price increases that violated a JFK-brokered agreement to fight inflation. When they balked, he canceled Pentagon contracts with the industry, earning him the wrath of the power brokers in the Military Industrial Complex. The next month, he ordered Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara to command General Paul Harkins to devise a plan for turning the Vietnam War over to the South Vietnamese and reducing the size of the US military command there.

It is uncertain when exactly JFK crossed the line — from pissing off the suits in the CIA and Military Industrial Complex, to their decision to kill him. But it might well have happened before the missile crisis. His support of a coalition government in Laos over a more militarized approach didn’t help his cause. A turning point may have been reached when JFK ordered a crackdown on the Cuban exile gunboats being run by the CIA out of Miami. The CIA’s repeated attempts to entrap the president into launching a US invasion of Cuba, which Douglass documents carefully, had failed yet again.

Of course, JFK was no angel, nor does Douglass present him as such. He made mistakes. Only nine days after his visionary American University address, JFK approved Operation Mongoose, a CIA program of sabotage and harassment against targets in Cuba. This was, as Douglass rightly says, against international law. Douglass suggests Kennedy did this under strain from hawks in his administration demanding increased pressure on Castro to counter Cuba’s policy of apparently exporting revolution in Latin America.

Once we accept that the CIA killed JFK, the point about whether JFK would or would not have pulled out of Vietnam becomes secondary. The CIA killed him — but why? It is wholly implausible that the CIA would kill a president simply to settle a score over his failure to be sufficiently belligerent toward Castro. They would only kill a president if they thought it would make a profound policy difference. And President Kennedy had repeatedly proven himself insufficiently hawkish for the crackpot “realists” in the CIA and Pentagon.

From 1957 to 1958 Lee Harvey Oswald worked as a radar operator at Atsugi Air Force Base in Japan. Here he had a “crypto” clearance (higher than “top secret”) and regularly listened to the U-2 radio communications. Atsugi was the CIA’s main operational base in the Far East; many U-2 spy planes departed from this base on their missions over the USSR and China. Oswald, having resigned from the Marines two months earlier, appeared at a US embassy in Moscow in 1959, saying he wanted to renounce his US citizenship and affirming his allegiance to the USSR. He said he would give them all information he had about US radar operations.

When the Soviets shot down a U-2 on May 1, 1960, the pilot, the pilot Gary Powers later questioned whether or not his having been shot down might have resulted from information Oswald provided to the Soviets. It was not an unreasonable conjecture, and it underscored the fact that Oswald’s giving all the information he had as a Marine radar specialist to the Soviets was a treasonous act, performed at the height of the Cold War.

This fact is significant, because when Oswald returned to the US Embassy in Moscow a year later, US officials welcomed him back with no questions asked. Not only was he not prosecuted, they gave him a loan to return to the US, and a new passport, 24 hours after he applied. Victor Marchetti, ex-CIA agent and author of the book The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence, told Anthony Summers that in 1959 the Office of Naval Intelligence launched a program involving sending approximately three dozen ostensibly disenchanted, poor American youths to the USSR in an attempt find out what communism was all about. Technical eavesdropping was less effective then, and human intelligence was pivotal for intelligence work. Judge James Botelho, Oswald’s former roommate in Santa Ana, said Oswald was never a Marxist or Communist. He claimed Oswald’s “defection” was a US intelligence trick, and that Oswald had been on assignment in Russia for US intelligence.

Upon arriving back from the USSR in 1962, Oswald was met by Spas T. Raikin, a representative of the Traveler’s Aid Society, an anti-communist organization with ties to the CIA. With Raikin’s help, Oswald, his wife and infant child passed easily through customs and immigration. That summer the Oswalds settled in Fort Worth, Texas. There, George de Mohrenschildt, an oil company consultant and CIA asset, befriended Oswald. De Mohrenschildt admitted in a 1977 interview that he has been given the assignment to meet with Oswald from J. Walton Moore, the Dallas CIA Domestic Contacts Service chief. (47)

De Mohrenschildt became Oswald’s mentor in Dallas, where he helped Oswald secure a new job with a graphic arts company. But De Mohrenschildt likely had little inkling of the convoluted and sinister plot in which he was enmeshed. Years later, in fact, he would express remorse over what had happened to both JFK and Oswald, who were both victims of the same forces.

In 1963 Oswald moved to New Orleans, where he worked at the Reily Coffee Company, owned by a wealthy supporter of the CIA-sponsored Cuban Revolutionary Council. The company was located near the offices of the CIA, FBI, Secret Service, and Office of Naval Intelligence. Oswald also worked directly across the street from the Naval Intelligence and Secret Service, in the detective agency of former FBI agent Guy Banister. Banister’s office was more a covert-action center for US intelligence than a detective agency. It helped supply weapons for CIA covert operations, including the Bay of Pigs and other Cuban-exile attacks on Cuba. Daniel Campbell, an ex-Marine hired by Banister, later admitted that “Banister was a bagman for the CIA and was running guns to the Alpha 66 (an armed anti-Castro group) in Miami.” (62)

It was in New Orleans that Oswald posed as a member of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee, distributing pro-Castro leaflets, apparently intent on drawing attention to himself as a Castro supporter. Oswald would continue to be shepherded and “mentored” by various CIA handlers until the assassination of JFK.

In addition to his documented history as a CIA asset, Oswald was also an FBI informant. Moreover, the evidence suggests that not only was Oswald not a communist, he was a supporter of JFK. Oswald’s work with the CIA and the Cuban exiles led him to believe JFK was going to be assassinated. Indeed, there was a plot to kill JFK in Chicago, only twenty days before JFK arrived in Dallas. Douglass cites compelling evidence that it was Oswald himself who tipped off the Chicago police who then arrested the gunmen on the eve of Kennedy’s arrival there.

This book is loaded with creepy details of how this assassination was done: how the autopsy process was taken over by the military; how JFK’s cranial x-rays were fraudulently re-made to cover up the documented fact of an entrance wound on his neck and witnesses seeing the back of his skull blown out; how his parade route was changed at the last day, making it more vulnerable to assassins; how fake “Secret Service” agents with Secret Service badges thwarted witnesses from pursuing a gunman seen fleeing from the grassy knoll after the shooting; how Jack Ruby was seen by a witness dropping off a gunman in Dealey Plaza at 11 a.m., an hour and a half before the assassination.

Twenty-one out of twenty-two witnesses at Parkland Hospital — most of them doctors and nurses, trained medical observers — agreed in their earliest statements that JFK’s massive head wound was located in the right rear of his skull, demonstrating a fatal head shot from the front. They were later pressured by the Warren Commission to recant their statements, making them consistent with the Commission’s fabrication of history. Dr. Malcolm Perry repeatedly described a bullet entrance wound in the front of the neck. Yet after being threatened by “men in suits” in the Secret Service, he later repudiated his first account as “inaccurate.” (308–09)

Douglass’s book is not a hagiography of JFK, who was certainly no saint. He was a Cold Warrior; he was a politician. But he was one who, certainly after the Cuban Missile crisis, was turning toward peace and disarmament. And Kennedy was well aware that his moves toward peace — in Indochina as well as with the Soviets, could cost him his life. By the time he went to Dallas, he was certainly aware that he had more to fear from the CIA and hawks in the military industrial complex than he did from the USSR.

This is a haunting book. It makes it clear that something fundamentally changed with JFK’s death. His murder was a coup d’état by the CIA acting on behalf of the military industrial complex. There is extraordinary detail and documentation in this book: it is 410 pages long, with 96 pages of endnotes. Douglass adduces evidence in some cases that did not emerge until after the fall of the Soviet Union, as in the case of the communications between the Kennedy family and the Soviet premier Khrushchev. The correspondence showed that the Kennedy family was well aware that JFK had been killed not by a lone gunman but by “a right-wing conspiracy.”

Douglass illustrates how the CIA plot was apparently designed to portray the assassin as a pro-Castro agent, to justify a retaliatory invasion of Cuba and possible nuclear strike against the USSR. But the evidence emerging after the murder revealed too many “Oswalds” in too many different places at the same time for that story to be credible. Moreover, it would have been impossible for Oswald to have killed JFK from where he was alleged to have done so.

President Johnson faced three choices in response to the assassination: (1) Take what was obviously bogus evidence of a Castro-Soviet connection to the murder and use it to justify an invasion of Cuba and possible hot war against the Soviets; (2) confront the CIA on its falsified documents of Oswald’s visit to the Soviet Embassy in Mexico City in the months prior to November 1963, and face a domestic war with the CIA in which it would fight with every covert weapon at its command; or (3) participate in a cover-up of any conspiracy evidence “and a silent coup d’état that would reverse Kennedy’s efforts to end the Cold War. He chose to cover up everything and surrender to Cold War prerogatives.” (81)

The FBI is revealed to have been implicated in the cover-up surrounding JFK’s assassination, as was the Dallas Police department. What is amazing is how the CIA had so much power to pull this off, but after reading Douglass’ careful, meticulous review of the evidence, one has little room to doubt it.

I keep returning to the “unspeakable” in the title, and “why it matters.” “Unspeakable” is a perfect word, because it connotes evil — “unspeakable evil” — and at the same time denotes what is forbidden or taboo. It is axiomatic within enlightened circles that there is evil at the heart of the United States. We saw it during the Civil Rights movement in the south, in the lynchings, the cross burnings. We saw it in the Vietnam War. And we saw it in the murder of JFK, certainly. But with the other evils, it was easier to place the locus of responsibility onto an Other. The problem was the southern racists, or the KKK, or the war criminals in the White House. Douglass makes clear, however, that the foe we face is much more formidable foe: it is ourselves, and our denial.

What does Douglass mean by the “unspeakable”? He means not only those men and institutions who killed JFK, those who dedicate their lives to promoting war and killing over peace and cooperation. Thomas Merton used the term “unspeakable” after the murders of JFK, MLK and Robert Kennedy in the 60s, for “an evil whose depth and deceit…go beyond the capacity of words to describe.” We might go so far as to say the unspeakable is the existence in the heart of the power structure of the US government, of a Mafia. Indeed, the CIA had an ongoing working relationship with the Mafia at the time of JFK’s killing.

Rather than define the unspeakable too narrowly, Douglass leaves us with some profound questions: “What does the nature of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy reveal about ourselves? What does it reveal about a national security state we have allowed to assume control over our lives? Have we reached the point where the state itself has become an enemy of the people, at least until we the people can manage to change, even revolutionize, its purpose? Can we transform our lives, and the state of the United States of America, so as to practice the truth that waging peace is our only real security?” (374)

Name: Stephen D. Clemens
Rating: 5.0 out of 5 stars
Title: Reintroducing JFK: Seeing our Slain President Through a New Lens
Date: Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on June 15, 2008
Review: I had just turned 13 the month before the startling news was broadcast into my 8th grade classroom: President John F. Kennedy was shot in Dallas and had been rushed to the hospital. It was followed by the bulletin that the President was dead. Lorenzo, my fellow classmate, an Italian Catholic, burst into tears. I sat quietly thinking: at least we got that Papist out of the White House! The anti-Catholic indoctrination I received from my church and parents never allowed me to see JFK as a person, only a symbol of a false religion to reject. Oh, and he was a Democrat as well!

Had I known the JFK that Jim Douglass reveals in his new book, I would have had more reasons to dismiss him: a President engaging in peacemaking activities with the Premier of the godless Communists, Nikita Khrushchev, passing letters back and forth that even members of his Cabinet were unaware! A US President secretly arranging for face-to-face consultations with Fidel Castro to resume normal diplomatic relations with a communist Cuba! The man who issued the secret National Security Action Memorandum 263 ordering the removal of 1,000 US Military advisors from Vietnam by the end of 1963 and ALL US Troops by the end of 1965. Under the guise of “peacemaking” President John F. Kennedy was urging “capitulation” to the Soviets in the Cold War — at least from my junior high school analysis.

Jim Douglass describes JFK’s “turning” — his movement toward peace rather than “victory” after the almost catastrophic “Cuban Missile Crisis” the year before in 1962. While the world was on the brink of nuclear devastation, I had practiced the “duck and cover” technique at school in the event the Ruskies dropped “the big one”. My own personal “turning” toward peace began five years later when I had to register for the military draft when I turned 18 in the fall of 1968. Fortunately I was no longer dependent on getting political perspective from US News and World Report (The Commies are killing our missionaries in Vietnam!) nor my theology from my evangelical/fundamentalist church (Jesus’ call to “Love your enemies” was trumped by St. Paul’s admonition to the Christians in Rome: “Let every soul obey the governing authorities”).

Having been issued a uniform and rifle for the compulsory ROTC class when I registered for my college freshman year, I had an epiphany on the rifle range when I realized that even though the targets were circular, they were, in reality, the bodies of the “Viet Cong”. Under no reading of Jesus’ teaching could I justify pulling the trigger so I registered as a conscientious objector. I had begun my own turning. Little did I know that one year later, I would be marching on the local Wheaton, IL draft board arm-in-arm with a Catholic priest! Another year later would find me taking some courses with that priest at the nearby Catholic Maryknoll Seminary. Soon I would discover Jim Douglass’ The Non-Violent Cross after I had left behind my anti-Catholic upbringing and was open to hearing the “Gospel” through a new lens. My own turning toward peace.

Why would a legendary peace theologian get caught up in conspiracy theory? That was my first question when I received an invitation to attend a Pax Christi retreat 5 or 6 years ago led by Jim Douglass. I’d read virtually all his excellent books, followed his campaign against the Trident and the White Train delivering nuclear weapons to those submarines, and had met him at several conferences on peacemaking. When he and his wife Shelly moved to Birmingham to form a Catholic Worker House, I anticipated seeing more of him because I was only four or five hours away in southwest Georgia. However, soon after they arrived, our family moved to Minnesota. Now here was a chance to re-connect with this insightful theologian-activist. But his retreat topic was on the connections between the assassinations of the Kennedy brothers, Martin King and Malcolm X! He talked about how American deals with its prophets — in similar fashion to the way the Romans dealt with the notorious Galilean troublemaker during the administration of Pilate and Felix. At the time, Jim was only beginning the long research project that has led to this first of what promises to be a trilogy of books on the killings of prophets and peacemakers in the 60s in America.

Research indeed! JFK and the Unspeakable has close to 100 pages of small-print footnotes to document and explain his sources about the JFK most of us did not know. However, a small but powerful force within the government, namely the CIA, the FBI, the Joint Chiefs of the military, and even some of his own Cabinet and advisors, came to feel the need to remove him as a danger to an American strategy of global domination. Kennedy, recognizing that the use of nuclear weapons against the Soviets would leave an estimated 140 million dead, decided you could not “win” the Cold War. The others in that military-industrial-intelligence complex felt that with “only” a few million Americans killed if America struck with a first-strike, we could “win”. The window for such an advantage in the nuclear arsenal and delivery systems would narrow and begin to close after 1964, leading some to conclude that the obstacle that the President embodied would have to be removed before the end of 1963.

The “unspeakable” in the title comes from Trappist monk/peacemaker Thomas Merton’s book, Raids on the Unspeakable. It is a term he used to describe the confluence of evil within systems like governments, corporations, and other power centers. Walter Wink uses the term “the Domination System”. St. Paul referred to “the Principalities and Powers”. President Eisenhower coined the phrase “the Military Industrial Complex”. Catholic Worker Dorothy Day talked about “this filthy, rotten system. The “unspeakable” that conspired (breathed together) against JFK (and later his brother as well) was the manifestation of the national security state that insisted on total allegiance to both its ideology and methodology. Kennedy ran for office as a Cold Warrior. Only his glimpse into the abyss that was the Cuban Missile Crisis allowed him to see how close that system pushed toward a nuclear holocaust.

Kennedy was truly saved by his enemy — Nikita Khrushchev. The irony this book discloses that all three antagonists, Castro, Kennedy, and Khrushchev, all had struggled for peaceful co-existence in opposition to their own advisors. Each leader was trapped within national systems that had a vested interest in keeping the conflict going rather than risking a negotiated resolution.

Through extensive interviews and research, Douglass paints a compelling portrait of the supposed assassin/”patsy”, Lee Harvey Oswald. While the Warren Commission (conveniently controlled by ex-CIA Chief, Allen Dulles) failed to interview numerous witnesses that might challenge the “lone gunman” theory, Douglass sought out the stories that convincingly (to me) argued for at least one or more “Oswald” doubles. Douglass argues that the CIA hoped to pin blame for the assassination of the US President on both Cuba and the Soviets, urging the new President, Lyndon Johnson to “retaliate” with their desired preemptive nuclear strike.

It was the successful cover-up orchestrated by the Warren Commission Report that led to the subsequent assassinations of Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, followed by Kennedy’s brother, Bobby is the argument Douglass puts forth. JFK and the Unspeakable is the first of a trilogy of books attempting to unmask or at least begin to demystify this force of evil that has so captivated our national soul.

Besides attempting to portray John Kennedy’s courage in his “turning”, Douglass also wants to steel his readers who are committed to peacemaking to be realistic about the challenges we face. If the “unspeakable” is willing to kill a sitting President, what should we expect if we attempt to follow Jesus down that same road? The Kennedy that Douglass portrays is less overtly religious than Martin King in his last days (“I only want to do God’s will.”). JFK “looked into the abyss” and chose his path of change or turning when he decided that the fate of the world’s children were at stake if these nukes were ever used again. Kennedy realized that even just the atmospheric testing of these weapons imperiled the health of all humanity with the radioactive fallout.

But Kennedy’s religious tradition also spoke to him clearly — especially through the powerful words of the initiator of Vatican II, Pope John XXIII with his final masterpiece, Pacem in Terris. The impact of this work so moved Nikita Khrushchev that he is reported to have kept a medallion given to him by this beloved pontiff on his desk in the Kremlin as a way to irritate some of his own Politburo advisors. Kennedy’s own commencement speech given at American University five months before his death certainly owed some of its power and insight to the recently deceased pope who died two weeks prior to that June 1963 address. In that speech which ironically was carried more widely over the radio to Soviet citizens (and ignored by most US media), Kennedy cautioned Americans not to demonize the other side. His words, “… not to see only a distorted and desperate view of the other side, not to see conflict as inevitable, accommodation as impossible, and communication as nothing more than an exchange of threats. No government or social system is so evil that its people must be considered as lacking in virtue.”, could (and should) be readily applied today to Ahmadinejad’s Iran.

The book also raises a very disturbing portrait of how this National Security State imperils our democracy. The idea of a group of secretive men (although there are probably some women in the mix today) deciding who can be or remain President exposes the figure-head nature of the power of that office. The collusion of un-elected agents, military officers, wealthy business elites, “diplomats” and others plotting behind the scenes to replace the elected head-of-state is not just something that happens in Third World nations. Was what happened in November 1963 in Dallas really a coup-d’etat?

Back in the mid-70s, William Stringfellow raised questions about the compatibility between democracy and the apparatus of a National Security State. Stringfellow, drawing on the insights of Biblical prophets and the writings of Jewish theologian Abraham Joshua Heschel, called the allegiance demanded of citizens by this obsession with “security” during the Cold War by its Biblical name: idolatry. With the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet empire, cold warriors searched about for new adversaries so they could continue to justify our dependence on and subservience to the military industrial complex out of fear. Terrorism conveniently became the new whipping boy and the anticipated “peace dividend” disappeared.

While Douglass’ JFK story harkens back to the Cold War, the idolatry of the National Security State is as strong as ever — and its practitioners stand ready to remove or marginalize any who stand in its way. How else could one explain the almost universal condemnation of former-President Jimmy Carter’s sit-down with the leadership of Hamas and Syria this Spring? Or the annual rite of genuflecting before the power of AIPAC by both Democrats and Republicans — each vying to out-do the other in pandering to the Israeli state, ignoring and neglecting the cries for justice emanating from behind the 26' tall “security barrier”, the new Berlin Wall that Carter has identified as apartheid?

This book is sobering, disturbing -but ultimately hopeful as well. If even such a stout Cold Warrior as John Fitzgerald Kennedy could decide to “turn toward peace” -albeit at a terrible price — can we too break the shackles of fear and greed and begin that same turning ourselves? As Jim Douglass reminded a friend of mine: who is the real “hero”, the prime mover of this story? It is God — God working through JFK, Khrushchev, and others who had the courage to take risks for peace. “After all,” Douglass reminded him, “the nuclear holocaust didn’t happen!”

We must open ourselves to recognize the common humanity we share, as “we all inhabit this small planet. We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children’s futures. And we are all mortal.” When we recognize and act on this, we join hands with the Creator and work together to build a world of peace. One place to start is exposing, unmasking, naming the truth behind this system. Exposing it to the light. It might put us in its target but only by escaping its clutches can we truly be free and healed of that primal urge to dominate.