McGeorge Bundy, Kennedy’s special assistant for national security matters who signed NSAMs 263 and 273, told Newsweek, “I don’t think we know what he would have done if he’d lived. I don’t know, and I don’t know anyone who does know.”269 Indeed, as Time magazine observed, “Even [Kennedy] may not have known what he really planned to do in Vietnam after the election.”270
Since we are attempting to know the unknowable, those of us who are further handicapped by not knowing Kennedy personally are in no position to weigh in meaningfully on the issue. But based merely on what I have read about John F. Kennedy, I sense that he was a rationalist, even more, in fact, than an intellectual, which he surely was too.† Because he was a rationalist who had personally experienced the horrors of war,‡ I feel Kennedy would have only sent combat troops to Vietnam if he strongly believed that the Communist (Hanoi and the Vietcong) aggression was a part of Soviet Communism’s plan to ultimately conquer the world—that is, if he strongly believed that his failure to fight in Vietnam would imperil this nation’s security. Since we know, not just from hindsight but from the absence of evidence to the contrary at the time that the Communist aggression was nothing more than a civil war between North Vietnam (and the Vietcong) and South Vietnam,* my guess is that his rationalism, coupled with his firsthand knowledge that war was hell, would have prevailed. This is why I am inclined to agree with this assessment by Kenneth P. O’Donnell and David F. Powers, next to Bobby Kennedy the president’s closest advisers: “All of us who listened to President Kennedy’s repeated expressions of his determination to avoid further involvement in Vietnam are sure that if he had lived to serve a second term, the members of American military advisers and technicians in the country would have steadily decreased. He never would have committed U.S. Army combat units and draftees to action against the Viet Cong.”271 In other words, there would never have been a Vietnam War with its enormous loss of lives and cataclysmic consequences for decades to come.
There is also no question in the minds of two others of his closest aides, Theodore C. Sorensen and Arthur Schlesinger Jr., that Kennedy would not have sent combat troops to Vietnam. In a 2005 op-ed piece in the New York Times, they wrote of their being witnesses to seeing Kennedy, leaning back in his Oval Office rocking chair, “tick off all his options [in Vietnam] and then critique them.” They said he concluded “that withdrawal was the viable option,” and they point out that his clear predilection was set forth in a November 14, 1963, press conference, just eight days before his death, in which he stated, “That is our object, to bring Americans home.”272
But what Kennedy would have done is a question whose answer is lost to history. No one knows—that is, except Oliver Stone, who knew for sure, proceeded to present it as a fact to his audience, and built a central part of his movie around the proposition that because Kennedy was going to withdraw, he was murdered.
Parenthetically, the larger notion Stone propounded in his film (of which the Vietnam withdrawal, he suggested, was the most important manifestation, the straw that broke the camel’s back) was that Kennedy’s being “soft on Communism” triggered a deadly response from members of the military-industrial complex. Hating Communism as they did, they were greatly angered by any move by Kennedy toward detente with the Soviet Union (which Kennedy obviously preferred over a nuclear war). As support for Kennedy being soft on Communism, Stone showed an excerpt of Kennedy’s speech at American University in Washington, D.C., on June 10, 1963: “We must reexamine our own attitudes toward the Soviet Union…Our most basic, common link is that we all inhabit this small planet. We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children’s future. And we are all mortal.” Stone’s audience didn’t hear the prelude to this statement—the reality that we live “in an age when a single nuclear weapon contains almost ten times the explosive force delivered by all of the allied air forces in the Second World War,” where “the deadly poisons produced by a nuclear exchange would be carried by wind and water and soil and seed to the far corners of the globe and to generations yet unborn…I speak of peace, therefore, as the necessary rational end of rational men.” The president’s remarks, obviously, did not betray any softness toward Communism, only a concern for survival of the human race. Since when is detente and a desire for peace the equivalent of capitulation to the enemy? In a memorandum to Robert Manning, assistant secretary of state, on June 11, 1963, McGeorge Bundy said, “This speech should not be misunderstood as indicating any weakening in the American resolution to resist the pressures for Soviet expansion.” It was “designed to emphasize the positive opportunities for a more constructive and less hostile Soviet policy.”273
Contrary to Kennedy’s being soft on Communism, the generally accepted view of historians has been that Kennedy, with a nod here and a nod there to political doves, was a moderate. Some even felt he was a cold warrior at heart. We know, for instance, that during his less than three years in office at the height of the cold war, and despite the Nuclear Test-Ban Treaty (between the United States, Soviet Union, and Great Britain) that was agreed on in July of 1963 but not formally ratified until October 7, 1963,* he substantially increased our military capability against Russia as well as the nation’s defense budget. In the president’s speech in Fort Worth on the morning of the assassination, he pointed out that “in the past three years we have increased the defense budget of the United States by over 20 percent, increased the program of acquisition of Polaris submarines from 24 to 41, increased our Minuteman missile-purchase program by more than 75 percent, doubled [i.e., increased by 100 percent] the number of strategic bombers and missiles on alert, doubled the number of nuclear weapons available in the strategic alert forces, increased the tactical nuclear forces deployed in Western Europe by over 60 percent, added five combat-ready divisions to the Armies of the United States and five tactical fighter wings to the Air Force of the United States, increased our strategic airlift capability by 75 percent and increased our special counterinsurgency forces which are engaged now in South Vietnam by 600 percent.”274 Since our sworn enemy at the time was Soviet Communism, and therefore this military buildup was, indeed, against the Communist threat, not the Bolivian civilian militia, certainly the American military couldn’t be too unhappy with the above numbers, could it? Nor could the defense industry (the “industrial” part of Stone’s military-industrial complex), which made billions off building these weapons, have been.
And after all, it was Kennedy who campaigned for president in 1960 arguing that there was a “missile gap” between the Soviet Union and us (citing the launching of the Soviet Sputnik on October 4, 1957, and by a powerful rocket, the Soviet SS-6, that was capable of reaching U.S. soil from Russia) that America had to close and then overcome;* who challenged Russia to an arms race in 1961; and who made Nikita Khrushchev blink during the Cuban missile crisis in 1962. And it was Kennedy who wrote these words to Khrushchev on April 18, 1961: “Mr. Chairman…You should recognize that free people in all parts of the world do not accept the claim of historical inevitability for Communist revolution. What your government believes is its own business; what it does in the world is the world’s business.” In a letter to Khrushchev on October 22, 1962, Kennedy wrote that “the United States could not tolerate any action on your part which in a major way disturbed the existing over-all balance of power in the world.” As Pierre Salinger has written, “If the strength and stridency of Kennedy’s anti-communism have ever been in doubt, they should be dispelled…The theme of anti-communism [was] recurrent” in his administration. In NSAM 132, a memo to Fowler Hamilton, administrator of the Agency for International Development, signed by Kennedy on February 19, 1962, Kennedy said, “As you know, I desire the appropriate agencies of this Government to give utmost attention and emphasis to programs designed to counter Communist indirect aggression, which I regard as a grave threat during the 1960’s. I have already written the Secretary of Defense ‘to move to a new level of increased activity across the board’ in the counter-
insurgency field.”275
Conscious, as all presidents are, of their place in history, one can reasonably assume that Kennedy would have made every effort to prevent a geopolitical tilt toward Communism in the world from taking place “on his watch.”
But all of this is really beside the point. Since X categorically tells Garrison in the film about the military-industrial plot to kill Kennedy, and there are scenes in JFK actually depicting the Joint Chiefs of Staff setting in motion this conspiracy to murder Kennedy, what evidence does Stone have that such a conspiracy actually took place? For starters, as previously indicated, Stone has admitted that he made up the scene in Washington between X and Garrison. Moreover, Stone has no evidence that such a conspiracy ever took place. He simply manufactured the entire conspiracy out of whole cloth for his gullible audience. But he did have a source for the naked allegation that such a conspiracy took place: the redoubtable, aforementioned Fletcher Prouty—you know, the fellow who was an active member of the group that believes the Holocaust is a Jewish hoax. Just who, specifically, did the late Mr. Prouty allege were the members of the military-industrial complex who actually conspired to murder Kennedy? Prouty didn’t mention one single name, falling back, instead, on the always available, guilty, and universally maligned “they.”
But let’s listen to Prouty tell, in his own words in Lyndon LaRouche’s publication, Executive Intelligence Review, what he believed happened. Prouty said that after NSAM 263 was published on October 11, 1963, ordering the withdrawal of 1,000 military advisers from Vietnam,
to those working close to the scene in the Pentagon, and to those people who had the prospect of building helicopters and fighter aircraft and guns and tanks and all the rest of it, this was terrible. This was anathema. They had had plenty of orders through World War II. There was a big build-up for the Korean War, and now, for ten years, they had been building up on the prospect that there would be even a bigger war, a consumers’ war, for them in Vietnam. Amid all these pressures, it’s not too unrealistic [certainly not for someone like you, Mr. Prouty] to see that some of them sat somewhere and said, “Look, we’ve got to do some planning. We’ve got to get this guy Kennedy out of office.” And the more they thought about it, and the more they talked about it, they realized that legitimate, honest-to-God…political planning was not going to get him out. Kennedy was going to win. At that point, somewhere, a small voice said, “We’re going to get that bastard out right now,” and there are ways to do it. As Lyndon Johnson said, “We have a Murder, Incorporated,”* a professional group—no Lee Harvey Oswald, or other goons like that—a professional group, trained, equipped, salaried, and everything, to do assassinations. They were given a job. They did their job. They killed the President. There was a coup d’etat in this country, and following it, the biggest residual job people have had within that group has been to run this cover story.276
This “small voice” Prouty imagined and speculated that “they,” the conspirators, heard, was heard only by Prouty. And when people start to hear small voices in their head…well, I think you know what I’m about to say.
So this small-voice reverie and naked theorizing of Fletcher Prouty’s was converted by Oliver Stone, with full knowledge that he had absolutely nothing to support it, into the motive for Kennedy’s murder in his fantasy movie. Stone presented to his audience Prouty’s fantasizing about the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the defense industry plotting Kennedy’s murder as though it actually happened. Prouty’s small voice, then, became the principal foundation and spin for the whole movie.
Two footnotes to all of this: First, when Robert Kennedy is shown in Stone’s movie being murdered in Los Angeles in 1968, Garrison tells his assistants, “They [the same power structure that murdered JFK] killed Robert Kennedy.” And it’s very clear that Stone wants his audience to believe that “they” also killed Martin Luther King Jr., whose murder is also shown. “And now King,” Garrison tells his wife in exasperation over her less-than-total acceptance of his conspiracy theories. “Don’t you think this [referring to the Kennedy case by looking at the Warren Commission volume in his hand] has something to do with that [referring to the story on the television screen about King’s murder]?” Stone removed all ambiguity as to what he was trying to convey in JFK in a December 23, 1991, Time interview:
Question: “Is it accurate to say that you think the assassinations of John Kennedy, Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy are linked?”
Stone: “These three leaders were pulling out of the war in Vietnam and shaking up the country. Civil rights, the cold war itself, everything was in question. There’s no doubt that these three killings are linked, and it worked. That’s what’s amazing. They [the conspirators] pulled it off.”277
And when asked by a reporter in his appearance before the National Press Club on January 15, 1992, “Did you mean to imply in JFK that the U.S. government might be implicated in the assassination of both Martin Luther King Jr. and Bobby Kennedy?” Stone answered “Yes.”278
Second, as we’ve seen, Stone has occupants of the highest corridors of power in our national government conspiring with the nation’s most powerful business and industrial titans to murder President Kennedy. But as we’ve also seen, another major part of Stone’s JFK depicts the plot to kill the president being hatched by Clay Shaw, David Ferrie, and Lee Harvey Oswald in the presence of a homosexual prostitute. How did each of these two completely disparate groups happen to decide on killing Kennedy at the very same place and time? Did either get in the other’s way at Dealey Plaza? Or were they working together? But if so, how in the world would the Joint Chiefs of Staff and presidents of our nation’s largest corporations have known of the existence of the shabby, New Orleans conspirators? And how would the latter have possibly known that the former were planning to murder Kennedy? When the Joint Chiefs of Staff, et cetera, decided to kill Kennedy, even if they somehow found out about their soul mates in New Orleans, would they have been likely to entrust the mission to kill the president to such a motley group of losers? Stone isn’t troubled by any of these questions and none are dealt with in the movie, Stone not providing his audience with any scene connecting the two groups.
29. Stone used X to dispense other goodies to his audience. X tells Garrison that he was in New Zealand at the time the president was shot and “Oswald was charged at 7:00 p.m. Dallas time with Tippit’s murder. That was two in the afternoon the next day, New Zealand time [nineteen-hour time difference between Dallas and New Zealand], but already their papers had the entire history of the unknown, twenty-four-year-old…Oswald—studio pictures, biographical data, Russian information—and were pretty sure he killed the president.” This was proof to X that the conspirators had determined before the assassination that Oswald was to be the patsy and they already had information to send out on him before he was even charged. But number one, was X, who supposedly was in Christchurch, New Zealand, at the time (Prouty, allegedly, actually was), the only person in a foreign country who felt the information about Oswald reached him or her (such as an employee at a newspaper, or radio or TV station) earlier than it should have? The information on Oswald went out from Dallas throughout the entire civilized world and there’s nothing in the vast literature I have seen on the assassination indicating that anyone in Paris, Rome, Brussels, Berlin, London, or anywhere else, felt they received information on Oswald earlier than they should have. Or was X suggesting that for some unfathomable reason the conspirators were interested in getting out a quick story on Oswald only in Christchurch, New Zealand? What was so important about Christchurch?
In any event, Stone doesn’t tell his audience that there was nothing unusual about the New Zealand paper having an “Extra” edition (headlined “Kennedy Shot Dead”) out on Oswald and the Tippit killing by 2:00 p.m. on November 23. Without even hearing what the Christchurch newspaper’s explanation for all of this is (see later), if the first information on Oswald went out over the wires in Dallas at 7:00 p.m., when Oswald was ch
arged with Tippit’s murder, then obviously this would not have given the New Zealand paper enough time to have already published details about Oswald’s life at that moment in New Zealand, which would be 2:00 p.m. the next day. But information on Oswald’s background started going out over the wires several hours before he was formally charged with Tippit’s murder. Though he was charged at 7:00 (actually 7:05) p.m. Dallas time, he was arrested five hours and ten minutes earlier, at 1:50 p.m. Dallas time (8:50 a.m. the next day, New Zealand time), and Captain Glen King, Dallas police chief Jesse Curry’s administrative assistant, testified that he had heard that an hour after Oswald’s arrest (2:50 p.m. Dallas time, 9:50 a.m. New Zealand time) a member of the media already had a photo of Oswald.279 All indications are that from the moment Oswald arrived, in custody, at the Dallas Police Department around 2:00 p.m. forward, it was the policy of the Dallas Police Department to be very cooperative with the press and to make them privy to the main things happening on the case.280 However, I have been unable to find a record of which media outlet first got the news out about Oswald’s arrest and the time it did so. But under no circumstances was it later than 3:54 p.m. Dallas time when Bill Regan of NBC News announced on national television that “Lee Oswald seems to be the prime suspect in the assassination of John F. Kennedy.” So wire stories about Oswald’s background would have started going out all over the world no later than 3:54 p.m. Dallas time (10:54 a.m. New Zealand time), giving any newspaper in New Zealand over three hours, more than ample time, to publish a brief sketch of Oswald’s background before 2:00 p.m.
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