JFK & The Unspeakable: Why he died

JFK & The Unspeakable: Why he died
KBOO RADIO PORTLAND
6/10/2008 10:00:00

HOST: This is Linda Olson-Osterlund for K-BOO Radio. Joining me today in the studio is James Douglass. He's the author of a powerful and meticulously documented new book titled JFK and the Unspeakable: Why he Died and Why it Matters. Jim is a Catholic theologian and a lifetime activist for peace. He worked with Dorothy Day in Rome to persuade the bishops at the Second Vatican Council to issue a statement condemning war and supporting conscientious objection. The result was a document that declares nuclear war unthinkable. He and his wife, Shelley, are best known here in the northwest for confounding the Ground Zero Center for Nonviolent Action in Poulsbo, Washington. It became the headquarters for stopping the white train shipments of nuclear missile parts. JFK and the Unspeakable is his fifth book. Thanks for joining us today, James.

JAMES DOUGLASS: Thank you, Linda.

HOST: There are literally thousands of books written about the Kennedy assassination. What motivated you to write this one?

DOUGLASS: It was initially Martin Luther King's assassination. That murder, that martyrdom, that gift of life changed my life. Because as a professor or religion at the University of Hawaii, my students, in response to King's commitment against war and for a transformation of our society, burned their draft cards, formed the Hawaii Resistance and I joined their group - the beginning of the end of my academic career. And by learning more about King's assassination, the 'why' behind it, the 'why' that changed my life, their lives, many other people's lives in both negative and positive ways, I had to go finally by analogy to John Kennedy's assassination and also to Malcolm X and Robert Kennedy. So in the 1990s I began researching all four together. And I went to the King assassination trial in Memphis, learned through a government verdict, through a jury's verdict, that the government was directly involved in his assassination. And I went on from there to the assassination of John F. Kennedy. And that was, for the last 12 years especially, the focus of my - special focus of my research.

DOUGLASS: The unspeakable comes from Thomas Merton who is the spiritual guide for this experiment in truth. Merton wrote a great book called Raids on the Unspeakable. When, of course, as a Trappist monk at the Abbey of Gethsemane in the mid-1960's, he began from a contemplative standpoint to explore the systemic evil that was visible in the Vietnam war, in the the nuclear arms race and in the assassinations of JFK and Malcolm X. And he was looking forward and seeing more possibilities. And after that would become, would be the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy. The unspeakable is where we don't want to go. The unspeakable is a kind of evil that we are in denial of and that is so overwhelming that we simply cannot speak it and are in denial of it and don't want to go there. But Merton suggests we need to go there, and unless we go there, we will be overwhelmed by it in more profound ways than has already happened.

HOST: In your writing of this book you called it - not a journey into truth, but an experiment of truth. Is that your way of going into the unspeakable?

DOUGLASS: It's Ghandi's way. It's a way that involves going into darkness, in this particular instance especially, and trying to do so without regard to the consequences in the sense that we need to move as far as we can into that and to seek the truth in such a way that we can speak as clearly as possible what we are in denial of. Plausible deniability is a national security term for the deliberate effort to - after assassinating foreign leaders, after overturning governments, after violating international law in all kinds of ways, to cut out to avoid any trace of connection to leaders in our own government. And it is sanctioned by national security doctrines, memoranda, that are the guidelines for revolutions that the CIA used in Guatemala, in Iran, in various parts of the world and that form the background for the assassination of John F. Kennedy. We seem to feel in this country that we can allow our government to do such things abroad and then think we get a free pass in this country from assassinations, from election fraud, from coup detas. That is not the case. What we do abroad, we get at home. And it all came home on November 22, 1963.

HOST: As a central part of this book, you painstakingly reveal how Kennedy and Khrushchev came to the brink of committing the greatest unspeakable. And then what you talk about is a turning. Can you briefly describe that?

DOUGLASS: At the height of the Cuban missile crisis, the worst moment in history in terms of what could have happened and almost did happen, John F. Kennedy appealed to his enemy, Nikita Khrushchev, for help. Kennedy felt he was losing control, that he would be - we would be - the forces in the United States governments would be impelled to attack Cuba to destroy the Soviet missile sites and perhaps even to launch a first strike against the Soviet Union, which is what his military chiefs were pushing him very hard to do. And at that point he sent Robert Kennedy to Soviet ambassador Anatoli Dobrynin in Washington with that appeal to Nikita Khrushchev, I need your help. When Khrushchev received such a message from Dobrynin, he turned to his foreign minister, André Gromyko and said we have to let Kennedy know that we want to help him.

DOUGLASS: It was a word that even he could hardly believe that he was using. And he repeated it to a man who couldn't believe that his superior was saying such a thing. Yes, we have to let Kennedy know that we want to help him. We now have a common cause - to save the world from those pushing us toward war.

HOST: I was surprised to see in this book how many times and how much pressure was put on President Kennedy to start a nuclear war. Not just in Cuba, but in Berlin and Vietnam, over and over again. He was almost completely isolated in his refusal to either put ground troops in different locations and his refusal to consider nuclear war. What do you think gave him that strength to stand alone against all those forces?

DOUGLASS: John F. Kennedy, from his childhood, had the Angel of Death sitting on his shoulder. And especially in World War II that angel was close to him - in the Pacific Ocean when his PT boat was smashed into two by the Japanese destroyed that hit it, when he was on the verge of dying in those waters, when he was saving his crew members. And at point by point, from that point into his presidency, he was willing to face death and it became a kind of companion to him. Even his favorite poem, I Have a Rendezvous With Death, was a way of contemplating what was going to happen to him. When he began to get into these conflicts with the CIA, with his military joint chiefs of staff, and with his entire national security state becoming more and more and more isolated, he had certain guidelines. One was a prayer that he repeated frequently that came from Abraham Lincoln: I know there is a god and I see a storm coming. If he has a place for me, I believe that I am ready. Kennedy became accustomed not only to death, but to walking a path that would result in that consequence specifically from the actions he was taking. He accepted that consequence, if necessary. If he has a place for me, John F. Kennedy believed that he was ready. And as he reflected more and more on that in the final days of his life, speaking especially on the eve of his going to Dallas of his death there, it became clear that he was in fact ready.

HOST: I'm speaking with James Douglass. He's the author of a wonderful new book called JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why it Matters. Jim. can we talk a bit about some of the other forces against him? It wasn't just the military and the intelligence community and even the Senate. But it was also corporate interests. Can you talk a little bit about the steel crisis?

DOUGLASS: In 1962, JFK brokered an agreement between the Steelworkers Union and the leading U.S. steel corporations, particularly U.S. Steel, to avoid a wage price spiral that he feared would lead to inflation in the United States. In the week immediately after that agreement had been reached, the chairman of U.S. Steel, Roger Blough, had a meeting with President Kennedy and presented him with a Fada Com Plea [spelling not verified], a raise in prices that violated the agreement that Blough had just reached with the steel workers. JFK saw that his whole process had been sabotaged and that the steel companies, all the leading steel companies who raised their prices quickly, along with U.S. Steel, were issuing a challenge to his leadership as well as to the agreement that had just been reached with his guidance. He then went to the U.S. public and said that he would not stand for such a sabotaging of the common good and that it was a situation where they had to roll back their price increases.

Then he said privately - but it went on the front page of the Wall Street Journal - that his father had once told him that business leaders were all sons of bitches and he never knew what they meant, but that's what he had to accept.

HOST: He also did more than just go to the press. He actually began to withdraw Pentagon contracts from all of the major steel industries, systematically stopped them getting government contracts. And he also set his brother, who was Attorney General, to investigating them, the leaders of the steel companies, both personally and in their business dealings. He was very aggressive in pushing back at them and he was in the end successful.

DOUGLASS: They had to withdraw their price increases because they were under the pressure of the major defense contracts actually being withdrawn . These were huge profiteering industries. And they saw that Kennedy was serious in resisting the Military Industrial Complex that President Eisenhower had identified, but refused to confront himself.

HOST: Kennedy was forced repeatedly - because he could trust no one else - to use back channels to negotiate with Khrushchev. He was not only negotiating with Khrushchev to accomplish a test ban treaty, but he was also trying to seek some kind of rapprochement with Castro and Cuba. He used his brother. He also used journalists. Can you talk a little bit about how he had to go about seeking peace. He also was seeking withdrawal from Vietnam and his leaders were insubordinate. They did not follow his orders. They lied to him repeatedly.

DOUGLASS: William Atwood, the assistant to Adlai Stevenson at the United Nations was John F. Kennedy's intermediary in looking for negotiations with Fidel Castro. Castro responded very positively to that question. And on the very eve of - well, actually, on the day of Kennedy's assassination, Jean Daniel, another intermediary between Kennedy and Castro, was meeting with Castro and presenting to him the questions that President Kennedy had shared from the White House to go directly to Castro. Castro met for six hours with Jean Daniel asking him to repeat over and over and over again everything that Kennedy had said, including his strong support for the Cuban revolution. And he expressed the hope that with Kennedy a whole new chapter could be opened in Cuban-U.S. relations. But when he received the word as he was actually meeting with Jean Daniel that John F. Kennedy had been assassinated, Fidel Castro said everything has changed, everything is going to change. And it went nowhere with Kennedy's successor, Lyndon Johnson.

HOST: And Jean Daniel was a French journalist. There was also another journalist who tried to bring rapprochement with Cuba. That was a woman named Lisa Howard.

HOST: On the other side there was Luce, the head of journalistic empires, in a way. Wasn't he the head of Life Magazine and Fortune Magazine? And he took a very different tactic. Actually, he attacked Kennedy. Can you talk about that?

DOUGLASS: Henry Luce was the unofficial advisor to Henry Cabot Lodge who John F. Kennedy appointed to be his ambassador to South Vietnam. And Luce convinced Lodge that there should be no real negotiation with Diem, the president of South Vietnam. And through Henry Luce's pressures and advice, Henry Cabot Lodge became a force of reversal to his own superior, John Kennedy's, orders, that there be negotiations involving Diem, not a coup detas, and that Diem's life be saved if there were pressures against him. Everything that he was advising that Henry Luce opposed, Henry Cabot Lodge opposed also. So Henry Luce was a shadow behind the factors that resulted in Diem's being overthrown and also killed in the fall of '63. John Kennedy was trying to go on a different route and in fact signed a national security memorandum in October 1963 to end the Vietnam War by withdrawing 1,000 troops in '63 and all U.S. troops out by 1965.

HOST: And he actually, at the very last minute, was able to get someone through to talk to Diem to warn him that his life was in danger. Kennedy did not seem greedy for blood. Quite the contrary.

DOUGLASS: He was not at all greedy for blood. In fact, he was trying to encourage Diem, if he was surrounded by CIA forces that John Kennedy was trying to block, at least seek refuge in the U.S. Embassy. And his intermediary, a close friend who had gone to see Diem, couldn't convince him to do that either. Kennedy held himself responsible for not doing enough to save Diem's life, just as he held himself responsible for not doing enough to save the life of Patrice Lumumba on the eve of his coming into the presidency. But he blamed the CIA for being responsible for both of those assassinations.

HOST: Let's go back to Henry Luce again, if I'm remembering my reading. Isn't he responsible for a headline that said something like, beware of the Ides of April?

DOUGLASS: That was the headline in a Fortune Magazine editorial just after the steel crisis. And, of course, it was echoing Shakespeare on the assassination of Julius Caesar where a soothsayer says: Beware, the Ides of March. Henry Luce was telegramming to people who were on the alert for such symbols, that John F. Kennedy, because he was confronting the Military Industrial Complex, needed to beware of the Idea of April when the steel crisis occurred. In other words, look out JFK, look out for what's coming, just as Julius Caesar needed to look out for what was coming, his assassination.

DOUGLASS: Almost an overt threat and something that has been totally forgotten and lost by historians who talk about John F. Kennedy's assassination. It was the Military Industrial Complex that stood behind our national security state. And those are the shadows in which we have to look to find the ultimate sources of the assassination of John F. Kennedy.

HOST: You refer to a speech that Kennedy gave at American University as his most public declaration of his desires for peace. Can you talk about that?

DOUGLASS: Today is the 45th anniversary of that speech. It was held on - It was June 10, 1963 when JFK gave the most powerful, most visionary, most transforming and most consequential speech of his life. It was a speech in which he reached out to our enemies in the Soviet Union, in which he described their pain, their dying, their devastation during the Second World War and in which he then said that will belittle, however, compared to the suffering and death and devastation of both our countries and the world through a nuclear exchange. He said that the peace that he was developing in that speech and in his hopes for our country was not [indistinguishable] Americana enforced on the world by American weapons of war, which is precisely what the Military Industrial Complex stood for. He said that he would stop immediately testing nuclear weapons and would not test another one unless somebody else on the other side did. And then said let's negotiate to Soviet Chairman Nikita Khrushchev. Khrushchev responded by saying, this is the greatest speech an American president has given since President Roosevelt. And in six weeks, they had negotiated the limited nuclear test ban treaty and then were prepared to take further steps to end the cold war. Nikita Khrushchev and John Kennedy had become secret allies for peace.

HOST: And in my mind they're heroes. And in your book, there are other heroes throughout this darkness, all of these machinations to actually assassinate Kennedy, very intricate plots and lots of work done. There were still heroes. There were a few people - Jim and Elsie Wilcott, Abraham Bolden, just for a couple. If you could say something briefly about them.

DOUGLASS: Jim and Elsie Wilcott were a CIA profile in courage. They had both been employed by the CIA at the Tokyo station when John Kennedy was assassinated. They were among people who spoke openly about Lee Harvey Oswald being a CIA operative and that Jim Wilcott, as a CIA paymaster, actually had paid for the program of counterintelligence in which Oswald had been a CIA operative, a counterintelligence agent in the Soviet Union for a couple of years. And Wilcott recognized the numbers and the cryptonym under which he had been paying for Oswald's work. They resigned their jobs six years later and they made public their knowledge of Oswald being a CIA operative and a scapegoat in the assassination. And they suffered severe consequences in terms of threats against them, threats against their employment and severe health problems that may or may not be traceable to that also.

DOUGLASS: Abraham Bolden was a Secret Service agent. He's a man who I know well. He's become a close friend. And he was the first African American ever to be named to the Secret Service and even to the White House detail. John F. Kennedy personally hired Abraham Bolden when he met him in Chicago accidentally during a public appearance that Kennedy had there. Abraham Bolden became a whistleblower to the Chicago plot to kill John Kennedy on November 2, 1963 when Kennedy was scheduled to go to an Army-Air Force football game there. There was a parade route that would have been precisely the same kind as in Dallas - a dogleg turn, a scapegoat just over that dogleg turn - a man named Thomas Arthur Valley, who had the same kind of background as Lee Harvey Oswald and was a CIA operative. Bolden made public all of these details. As a result, he was immediately charged with a crime and bogus charges that he had accepted bribes. And even the man who was the chief witness later said that he had been coerced into giving false testimony against Bolden. Bolden went to jail for 45 months, almost lost his life.

HOST: These people and others refused to bow to the very real risk that they would be killed for speaking out. And that makes them heroes, in my mind. I want to turn now - we have only a couple minutes - to the parallels for this time. I know many of the people in our audience, in the K-BOO audience, are well aware that the Military Industrial Complex is still very much at work. There is a new presidential candidate who, for many people, represents hope and he's brought about a reinvigoration of the political process for many people. Can you talk about that parallel and the risks for it today.

DOUGLASS: It's extraordinarily significant that Barack Obama was endorsed by Caroline and Ted Kennedy in February, precisely at the site where John F. Kennedy gave the speech, which is the reason for his assassination. At American University, Obama was endorsed by the Kennedy's. For them to do that at that site meant they were saying we believe, we hope that Barack Obama is going to press for that vision of a disarmed world, or a transformed world, that John F. Kennedy gave to us on June 10, 1963. And perhaps at the same risk, we stand behind him.

HOST: So for those of us, would you give us advice about what to do in these times?

DOUGLASS: I think that, first of all, we need to see these times in terms of those times to understand the truth and to be prepared to live the truth at any consequence, just as John F. Kennedy was prepared to do and as these witnesses to the truth were prepared to do. It may mean risking one's reputation, one's job and one's life. If so, so be it. We need to go into that darkness in order to see the light.

HOST: Thank you so much, James Douglass, author of JFK And The Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters. You can pick up his book at Powell's where he did a reading last night. Thank you so much for joining us today in the studio.

DOUGLASS: Thank you.