Limbaugh’s Legacy: Normalizing Hate for Profit

BY ANTHONY DIMAGGIO

 FEBRUARY 19, 2021
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Drawing by Nathaniel St. Clair

Rush Limbaugh’s death represents a moment for reflection on the state of American politics. Limbaugh amassed a fortune of more than $600 million over 32 years in the talk radio business, in the process building up more than 15 million regular listeners. It was no exaggeration when CNN referred to him as a “pioneer of AM talk-radio.” He made possible the rise of propagandistic partisan media, demonstrating that this format could be incredibly profitable for news channels looking for low-budget programming filled by pundits who tell audiences what they want to hear, while strengthening their prior beliefs and values.

Reflecting on Limbaugh’s legacy, The New York Times described the “rightwing” “megastar” by his “slashing, divisive style of mockery and grievance,” which “reshaped American conservatism.” CNN remembered him as a “conservative media icon who for decades used his perch as the king of talk-radio to shape the politics of both the Republican Party and nation.” MSNBC reported that Limbaugh was a “powerful and controversial voice in American politics” who was known for pushing a “conservative slant.”

One might have plausibly characterized Limbaugh as a conservative in the 1990s and 2000s, despite his conspiratorial paranoia against the Bill Clinton administration, and his long history of sexist and racist rants. But for those following his career over the last decade, it should be clear that Limbaugh had crossed over from conservative to neofascist in his politics. The racist and conspiratorial “birther” nonsense Limbaugh trafficked in during the late 2000s and early 2010s, his reference to liberal activist Sandra Fluke as a “slut” and a “prostitute,” his labeling of feminists as “Feminazis,” and his incessant race-baiting by trafficking in anti-black stereotypes and rhetoric, all reinforced his profile as a rightwing ideologue who had long straddled the line between conservative and far-right reactionary. But during the Trump years and in the run-up to them, Limbaugh’s politics became noticeably more extreme, as the Republican Party itself moved further and further toward embracing neofascistic politics.

This piece is not devoted to the “greatest hits” of Rush Limbaugh cliches that have gotten so much attention among critics. Rather, I review the most extreme of Limbaugh’s comments in recent years that have consistently been swept under the rug in mainstream academic, journalistic, and Democratic discourse. The simple reason for why you probably haven’t heard most of these statements is because they reveal Limbaugh’s politics to be neofascistic, and referring to a powerful pundit like Limbaugh in those terms simply will not do in polite society. In a country that has long convinced itself, in Sinclair Lewis’s famous words, that “It Can’t Happen Here,” American political culture simply won’t allow for the possibility that the U.S. has become neofascistic in its politics.

To be clear, when I talk about “neofascism,” I’m referring to a school of thought established by social scientists and journalists recognizing that, while the exact features of classical Italian and German fascism are not going to repeat themselves in future settings, we may observe enough of an overlap between the features of classical fascist regimes and current political contexts to speak of an updated, contemporary version of (neo)fascistic politics. More specifically, I am referring to a constellation of traits that relate to neofascistic politics, including the embrace of white supremacy, the rampant trafficking in conspiratorialism fueled by the cult of personality of a demagogic leader, support for paramilitarism and the romanticization of eliminationist rhetoric and violence against alleged enemies of The Leader, efforts to idealize and impose one-party rule, and Orwellian efforts to gaslight political critics by inverting reality and trafficking in blatant propaganda. I explore each of these traits, related to Limbaugh, below.

White Supremacy

Limbaugh’s bigotry never fit the conventional mold of white supremacists donning Klan robes or goosestepping Nazis shouting “Sieg Heil” to The Fuhrer. Modern white supremacy is much more subtle than that; its advocates have spent years – decades really – mainstreaming their hate rhetoric to a popular audience, while denying that they are trafficking in neofascistic themes. Limbaugh pioneered this form of white supremacist hate, although the primary target wasn’t black Americans, but Muslims and undocumented immigrants.

Limbaugh’s Islamophobia was unrelenting. He referred to Muslims in blanket negative terms, including:

1) The position that Muslims are unintelligent and incapable of serious intellectual accomplishments, reflected in Limbaugh’s comparison between “the number of Muslims who have been Nobel prize winners to the number of Jews who have been Nobel prize winners,” which he declared no “contest.” Limbaugh was clear that he believed “Muslim contributions to science and math are myths.”

2) The belief that Muslims are contemptuous of democracy, via Limbaugh’s claim that “there is not a Muslim nation democratic in the way we are anywhere in the world,” and by his dismissal of the 2011 democratic Egyptian uprising as a phony revolution pursued under the “guise” of democracy.

3) The contention that Muslims represent a fifth column in their alleged efforts to take over American politics, evidenced by his wild conspiratorial fearmongering – which was rejected as “dangerous” by Congressional Republican leadership – about the Muslim Brotherhood taking over the State Department through the “presence of Huma Abedin,” one of “Hillary Clinton’s top-level aides,” who Limbaugh described as “so close to the powers that be.” Abedin’s position concerned Limbaugh because, as he explained, “Human’s mother is best friends with the wife of the new Muslim Brotherhood President of Egypt.”

4) The myth that the public was in “panic” that “Obama is a Muslim,” with Limbaugh’s Islamophobia buttressed by references to the President as “Imam Hussein Obama,” and his claim that the President was a “defender of Islam,” and dead-set on “constantly denigrating Christians.” Limbaugh characterized Muslims as a foreign, exotic other, via his denigration of Obama for claiming Muslims are “a part of the fabric of America,” to which Limbaugh responded that he “didn’t know that.”

5) The position that Muslims represent a terrorist threat to the nation, via Limbaugh’s objection to distinguishing between “Islamic extremism” and “all of Muslims,” and his contention that “in a more sensible time,” “we did not say ‘German Nazis’ – we said ‘Germans’ or ‘Nazis’ and put the burden on non-Nazi Germans, rather than on ourselves, to separate themselves from the aggressors.”

Limbaugh’s white supremacy extended to his attacks on undocumented immigrants. Drawing on classic fascist themes out of Hitler’s Third Reich, Limbaugh referred to Latin American immigrants as an “invasive species,” comparing them to “mollusks,” while depicting them as an “invasion force” that “contributes to the overall deterioration of the culture of this society.” Limbaugh lamented that “we have now imported the third world,” and “they have not assimilated.” He warned that, due to undocumented immigrants, “we are at the forefront of a dissolution of a nation” – facing the “breakdown of organized society.” Perhaps not-so-subtly drawing parallels to Nazi-era propaganda and the purity of the nation and its racial and ethnic identity, Limbaugh warned about unauthorized immigration that “the objective is to dilute and eventually eliminate or erase what is known as the distinct or unique American culture…this is why people call this an invasion.” And Limbaugh recycled Nazi propaganda depicting Jews as an infection when he wonderedaloud about the “dangers of catching diseases when you sleep with illegal aliens.” When taken together, these comments reveal that Limbaugh was a shrewd operator. He was a bigot, consistently smuggling white supremacist themes into his programs, while being careful to avoid recognizing what he was doing, and counting on his listeners’ ignorance to obscure his recycling of Nazi-style white supremacist propaganda.

Conspiracy Theories and the Cult of Personality

Limbaugh made sure his political fortunes were inseparably linked to Donald Trump’s. This was abundantly clear in his conspiratorial rhetoric. He took as articles of faith the former President’s baseless “election fraud” propaganda, coupled with other wild conjecture about Democratic plots to take down Trump. Limbaugh speculated that the Democratic Party was attempting to infect Trump with Covid-19, that “radical leftists” and “the Democratic Party” had engaged in a “fraud” to “beat Trump” via “ballot harvesting” and other election scams in battleground states; that the Covid-19 lockdown represented an effort “to take down the U.S. economy” by imposing “globalism and world government”; that the official Covid-19 death counts were inflated due to “fake causes” listed “on death certificates” and the “staged overrunning of hospitals”; and that newly reported Covid-19 cases were “being reported in states that Trump needs to win,” implying that these cases were part of a coordinated Democratic effort to undermine the former President’s candidacy. None of these assertions were accurate. But fascists aren’t exactly known for embracing leaders who rationally engage in empirical evidence.

Conspiratorial Eliminationism

Closely overlapping with Limbaugh’s white supremacy was his conspiratorial eliminationism, which focused on black Americans and the Democratic Party. During the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020, Limbaugh demonized people of color, stoking fear via his talk about “saving America from a race war that the Democrats are out there actively trying to promote…they want chaos, they want this constant us-versus-them aspect of daily life.” In contrast, Limbaugh claimed, Trump was “making it clear that he’s interested in people who are constructive, productive, generally happy. He’s not interested in parasites, the generally miserable.” The “parasites” reference was another example of Trump’s eliminationist rhetoric, echoing Nazi propaganda, but directed against the Republican Party’s political enemies. Limbaugh was equally vicious in his targeting of Black Lives Matter, which he classified as “Marxist” and a “full-fledged anti-American organization.” Limbaugh’s eliminationism also extended to LGBTQ activists, which he condemned for working with the “deep state” to impose a “30 years” long “cultural rot” in America. “What a cesspool the Democrat Party has turned the country into, what a cesspool American morality has become, what a cesspool the American left is turning our culture into,” Limbaugh lamented, as the country “descend[s]” into “a filthy gutter” politics dominated by “transgenders” and “gay people” fighting for, and winning equal rights. Such incendiary rhetoric was clearly intended to reinforce the belief in listeners’ minds that the U.S. was divided between two peoples – the hard working and the virtuous on the one hand, and the morally depraved and the rotten on the other. This language mirrored Nazi propaganda, which pitted notions of an impure minority against the lost purity and greatness of the nation’s past.

Eliminationism and Paramilitarism in Pursuit of One-Party Rule

Limbaugh was pining for civil war well before the events of January 6^th at the U.S. Capitol building. He spoke romantically about rightwing paramilitary-style activists, referencing Occupy Wall Street and Black Lives Matter by name in mid-2020, wondering: “Well, where are all the people with guns to ‘push back’ against the left? They’re [the left] threatening to beat you upside the head and do whatever other kind of physical damage to you they can.” Limbaugh called on “armed right-wingers” to “push back against the Democrats, against the left, against the media…who’s got all the guns in this country? We’ve got all the guns,” but the right was “not pushing back. If there’s no pushback and if the pushback isn’t seen, then people are going to get dispirited and think nobody cares about this assault on the country.”

Limbaugh eventually got what he wanted, as neofascist Trump supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol on January 6^thseeking to overturn certification of Democratic President-elect Joe Biden’s victory in the 2020 election. At the time, Limbaugh announced that “I actually think that we’re trending toward secession…there cannot be a peaceful coexistence” with “two completely different theories of life, theories of government” which he claimed divided American politics between left and right, and between Democrats and Republicans. Reinforcing this position, Limbaugh romanticized the Capitol insurrectionists, which he likened to Revolutionary War era rebels and patriots: “We’re supposed to be horrified by the protesters…There’s a lot of people out there calling for the end of violence…lot of conservatives, social media, who say that any violence or aggression at all is unacceptable regardless of the circumstances. I am glad Sam Adams, Thomas Paine, the actual tea party guys, the men at Lexington and Concord, didn’t feel that way.” Such statements made clear Limbaugh’s support for paramilitary efforts to impose one-party rule by overturning the 2020 election.

Gaslighting the Public on Neofascism

With such an egregious record of trafficking in, and embracing neofascistic political rhetoric, the rational observer should be asking a simple question: how did Limbaugh get away with it without being run out of the “conservative” media? One answer is that rightwing pundits have become expert gas lighters, smuggling in white supremacist and neofascistic rhetoric into their programs, while consistently stopping short of admitting this is what they’re doing. They rely on the staggering historical ignorance of their audiences, whom they correctly believe know little about classical fascism, and will not notice that they’re smuggling into programs extremist discourse, even as their followers come to embrace neofascistic political ideology.

A second way they get away with it is because the right projects their own neofascistic politics onto critics in Orwellian ways that seek to erase or invert reality. Limbaugh was only one of many pundits, including Mark Levin, Glenn Greenwald, and Tucker Carlson, who claim that white supremacy and paramilitarism on the right do not exist, or that they are being promoted instead by the Democrats and their supporters. Limbaugh echoed this position, maintainingthat “white supremacy or white privilege is a construct of today’s Democratic Party,” and that they “are such a small number – you could put them in a phone booth.” Such a position, of course, is absurd considering that the former President and rightwing media spent years normalizing white supremacist and neofascistic political ideology, to the point where one in ten Americans and a third of Republicans say it is acceptable to hold neo-Nazi views, a third of the country engages in some form of Holocaust-denial, and a third agree that the U.S. should “protect and preserve its White European heritage.”

The United States has entered a crisis moment, fueled by the ascendance of rightwing extremism. The realities of neofascistic politics are being swept under the rug because it simply “won’t do” to admit that large numbers of Americans have embraced the ideology of hate. There is little hope of moving forward and beating back this extremism until Americans are honest about how pervasive the problem has become. “Conservative” media venues have been empowering and enriching the merchants of hate for years. We should remember this toxic history when we reflect on the legacy of Rush Limbaugh and his impact on American values and discourse.

Anthony DiMaggio is Associate Professor of Political Science at Lehigh University. He earned his PhD from the University of Illinois, Chicago, and is the author of 9 books, including most recently: Political Power in America (SUNY Press, 2019), Rebellion in America (Routledge, 2020), and Unequal America (Routledge, 2021). He can be reached at: anthonydimaggio612@gmail.com. A digital copy of Rebellion in America can be read for free here.

 

Washington DC: The Unaffordable and Unecessary War Capital of the World

by David Stockman Posted onMay 15, 2024

Ultimately, there is no mystery as to why the Forever Wars go on endlessly. Or why at a time when Uncle Sam is hemorrhaging red ink a large bipartisan majority saw fit to authorize $95 billion of foreign aid boondoggles that do absolutely nothing for America’s homeland security.

To wit, Washington has morphed into a freak of world history – a planetary War Capital dominated by a panoptic complex of arms merchants, paladins of interventionism and Warfare State nomenklatura. Never before has there been assembled and concentrated under a single state authority a hegemonic force possessing such unprecedented levels of economic resources, advanced technology and military wherewithal.

Not surprisingly, the world’s War Capital is Orwellian to the core. Its endless pursuit of war is always and everywhere described as the promotion of peace. Its jackboot of global hegemony is gussied-up in the form of alliances and treaties ostensibly designed to promote a “rules-based order” and collective security for the benefit of mankind, not simply the proper goals of peace, liberty, safety and prosperity within America’s homeland.

Unfortunately, the whole intellectual foundation of the enterprise is false. The planet is not crawling with all-powerful would-be aggressors and empire-builders who must be stopped cold at their own borders, lest they devour the freedom of all their neighbors near and far.

Nor is the DNA of nations infected with incipient butchers and tyrants like Hitler and Stalin. They were one-time accidents of history and fully distinguishable from the standard run of everyday tinpots which actually do arise periodically. But the latter mainly disturb the equipoise of their immediate neighborhoods, not the peace of the planet.

So America’s homeland security does not depend upon a far-flung array of alliances, treaties, military bases and foriegn influence operations. The whole framework of Pax Americana and the Washington based promotion and enforcement of a “rules-based” international order is an epochal blunder.

In that regard, the founding fathers got it right more than 200 years ago during the infancy of the Republic. As Brian McGlinchey recently noted,

Let’s review some key excerpts of Washington’s foreign policy guidance, starting with the principle he put above all others:

“Nothing is more essential than that permanent, inveterate antipathies against particular nations, and passionate attachments for others, should be excluded; and that, in place of them, just and amicable feelings towards all should be cultivated.”

With this guidance, Washington echoed the wisdom of other American founders. Thomas Jefferson urged “peace, commerce, and honest friendship with all nations, entangling alliances with none.” John Quincy Adams approvingly said, “[America] has abstained from interference in the concerns of others, even when conflict has been for principles to which she clings… She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own.”

Needless to say, peaceful commerce is invariably far more beneficial to nations large and small than meddling, interventionism and military engagement. In today’s world it would be the default state of play on the international chessboard, save for the Great Hegemon on the banks of the Potomac. That is to say, the main disturbance of the peace in today’s world is invariably fostered by the self-appointed peacemaker, who, ironically, is inherently the least threatened large nation on the entire planet.

That is to say, the United States is essentially invulnerable to conventional military invasion and occupation. On the North American continent its $28 trillion GDP towers over the combined $3.8 trillion GDP of its Mexican and Canadian neighbors by more than 7X.

And on either shore arise the vast Atlantic and Pacific moats, which are even greater barriers to foreign military assault in the 21st century than they so successfully proved to be in the 19th century. That’s because today’s advanced surveillance technology and anti-ship missiles would consign an enemy armada to Davy Jones’ Locker nearly as soon as it steamed out of its own territorial waters.

The fact is, in an age when the sky is flush with high tech surveillance assets a massive conventional force armada couldn’t possibly be secretly built, tested and mustered for surprise attack without being noticed in Washington. There can be no repeat of the Akagi, Kaga, Soryu, Hiryu, Shokaku and Zuikaku strike force steaming across the Pacific toward Pearl Harbor sight unseen.

As a practical matter, even America’s ostensible “enemies” have no offensive or invasionary capacity at all. Russia has only one aircraft carrier—a 1980s era vessel which has been in dry-dock for repairs since 2017 and is equipped with neither a phalanx of escort ships nor a suite of attack and fighter aircraft – and at the moment not even an active crew.

Likewise, China has just three aircraft carriers – two of which are refurbished rust buckets purchased from the remnants of the old Soviet Union, and which carriers do not even have modern catapults for launching their strike aircraft.

Indeed, invasion of the American homeland would require a massive conventional armada of land, air and sea-based forces many, many times larger than the military behemoth that is now funded by Washington’s $900 billion defense budget. The logistical infrastructure that would be needed to control the vast Atlantic and Pacific Ocean moats surrounding North America and to sustain an invasion and occupation force of the US mainland is so mind-mindbogglingly vast as to be scarcely imaginable.

For want of doubt, the graphic below compares Washington’s 11 carrier battle groups, which cost about $25 billion each including their escort ships, suites of aircraft and electronic and missile capabilities. But self-evidently, none of the non-NATO countries shown in the red area of the graphic – China, India, Russia or Thailand – will be steaming their tiny 3, 2 and 1 carrier battle groups toward the shores of either California or New New Jersey any time soon. Any invasionary force that had any chance of surviving a US fortress defense of cruise missiles, drones, jet fighters, attack submarines and electronics warfare would need to be 100X larger.

Yet there is no GDP in the world – $2 trillion for Russia, $3.5 trillion for India or $18 trillion for China – that is even remotely close in size to the $50 to $100 trillion GDP that would be needed to support such an invasionary force without capsizing the home economy.

At the same time, the 11 US carrier battle groups, which will cost upwards of $1.2 trillion over the next decade, would have no role in a continental Fortress America defense at all. They would be sitting ducks in the blue waters, and far less effective than aircraft and missile defenses based in the North American interior.

In short, these massively expensive forces have no purpose other than global power projection and the conduct of wars of invasion and occupation abroad. That is, they are military accoutrements of the War Capital, not even remotely relevant to a proper Fortress America defense.

In today’s world the only theoretical military threat to America’s homeland security is the possibility of nuclear blackmail. That is to say, a First Strike capacity so overwhelming, lethal and effective that an enemy could simply call out checkmate and demand Washington’s surrender.

Yet there is no nation on earth that has anything close to the First Strike force that would be needed to totally overwhelm America’s triad nuclear deterrent, and thereby avoid a retaliatory annihilation of its own country and people if it attempted to strike first. After all, the US has 3,700 active nuclear warheads, of which about 1,770 are operational at any point in time. In turn, these are spread under the sea, in hardened silos and among a bomber fleet of 66 B-2 and B-52s – all beyond the detection or reach of any other nuclear power.

For instance, the Ohio class nuclear submarines each have 20 missile tubes, with each missile carrying an average of four-to-five warheads. That’s 90 independently targetable warheads per boat. At any given time 12 of the 14 Ohio class nuclear subs are actively deployed, and spread around the oceans of the planet within a firing range of 4,000 miles.

So at the point of attack that’s 1,080 deep-sea nuclear warheads to identify, locate and neutralize before any would be blackmailer even gets started. Indeed, with respect to the “Where’s Waldo?” aspect of it, the sea-based nuclear force alone is a powerful guarantor of America’s homeland security.

And then there are the roughly 300 nukes aboard the 66 strategic bombers, which also are not sitting on a single airfield Pearl Harbor style waiting to be obliterated, but are constantly rotating in the air and on the move. Likewise, the 400 Minutemen III missiles are spread out in extremely hardened silos deep underground. Each missile currently carries one nuclear warhead in compliance with the Start Treaty, which would also need to be taken out by would be blackmailers.

Needless to say, there is no way, shape or form that America’s nuclear deterrent can be neutralized by a blackmailer. And the best thing is that the nuclear triad will cost only about $75 billion per year to maintain over the next decade, including allowances for periodic weapons upgrades.

As shown below, therefore, the heart of America’s military security requires only 7% of today’s massive military budget. Indeed, the heart of the nuclear deterrent – sea-based ballistic missiles – is estimated by CBO to cost just $188 billion over the next decade, or 1.9% of the $10 trillion national defense baseline.

10-Year Cost Of US Strategic Nuclear Deterrent Per CBO Estimates, 2023 to 2032

Here’s the thing. The actual cost of the national security budget is $1.3 trillion per year. Yet if you allow an ample $250 billion per year for a Fortress America continental defense and $75 billion for the triad strategic deterrent, the question recurs. Where does all the rest – $975 billion – go?

As we will amplify in the next article, it goes to the War Capital’s pursuit of global military and political hegemony and to fund the deferred cost of past overseas policing operations, neither of which were and are necessary for America’s homeland security. And beyond that, tens of billions more slop-over into pure budget maintenance: That is, military contractor lobbying and bribes, think tank studies and advocacy programs and NGO and national security agency propaganda and influence operations all around the planet.

Still, just consider the implications of the chart below. About $346 billion of the $1.3 trillion national security budget is for veterans compensation, health and other benefits. These programs serve upwards of 6.2 million disabled veterans and dependents and 9.2 million enrollees in the Veterans health care system.

Yet absent all the unnecessary wars that have occurred since the Cold War went into full force in 1948-1949, the US would have only 60,000 veterans of foreign wars today, of which just 11,448 ar currently receiving disability benefits. Even when you add in their dependents, the total of WWII era vets receiving disability compensation is just 34,265 or 0.6% of the total beneficiary roll of 6.159 million.

At average compensation and health care cost of $35,000 per beneficiary, the total cost would be $1.2 billion currently and barely $10 million per year by 2035 when only 311 WWII vets are projected to remain.

That’s right. The FY 2024 cost of veterans benefits owing to unnecessary wars, such as the 1.385 million Vietnam vets on disability and the 3.37 million Gulf War vets receiving disability payments and VA health care, is $345 billion.

And that deferred cost figure for the Forever Wars amounts to 116% of China’s current $298 billion defense budget, 425% of India’s $81 billion, 480% of Russia’s $72 billion (pre-Ukraine) 595% of Germany’s $58 billion and 690% of South Korea’s $50 billion military budget, notwithstanding the madman who rules across the DMZ.

Yet it only gets worse from there. By the end of the 10-year budget window, the $550 billion baseline cost of veterans benefits will amount to 50,000 times more than what a Fortress America homeland security policy would have generated over the past seven decades.

Needless to say, that begs the question for Part 2: Why in the world has Washington become the War Capital of the World, generating hideously excessive costs that the taxpayers of America neither benefit from nor can remotely afford?

David Stockman was a two-term Congressman from Michigan. He was also the Director of the Office of Management and Budget under President Ronald Reagan. After leaving the White House, Stockman had a 20-year career on Wall Street. He’s the author of three books, The Triumph of Politics: Why the Reagan Revolution Failed, The Great Deformation: The Corruption of Capitalism in America, TRUMPED! A Nation on the Brink of Ruin… And How to Bring It Back, and the recently released Great Money Bubble: Protect Yourself From The Coming Inflation Storm. He also is founder of David Stockman’s Contra Corner and David Stockman’s Bubble Finance Trader.

President John F. Kennedy: His Life and Public Assassination by the CIA

by Edward Curtin / November 23rd, 2023

What is the truth, and where did it go?
Ask Oswald and Ruby, they oughta know
“Shut your mouth,” said the wise old owl
Business is business, and it’s a murder most foul

Don’t worry, Mr. President
Help’s on the way
Your brothers are coming, there’ll be hell to pay
Brothers? What brothers? What’s this about hell?
Tell them, “We’re waiting, keep coming”
We’ll get them as well

— Bob Dylan, Murder Most Foul

*****

Why President Kennedy was publicly murdered by the CIA sixty years ago has never been more important.  All pseudo-debates to the contrary – including the numerous and growing claims that it was not the U.S. national security state but the Israelis that assassinated the president, which exonerates the CIA – the truth about the assassination has long been evident.  There is nothing to debate unless one is some sort of intelligence operative, has an obsession, or is out to make a name or a buck.  I suggest that all those annual JFK conferences in Dallas should finally end, but my guess is that they will be rolling along for many more decades.  To make an industry out of a tragedy is wrong.  And these conferences are so often devoted to examining and debating minutiae that are a distraction from the essential truth.

As for the corporate mainstream media, they will never admit the truth but will continue as long as necessary to titillate the public with lies, limited hangouts, and sensational non-sequiturs.  To do otherwise would require admitting that they have long been complicit in falsely reporting the crime and the endless coverup.  That they are arms of the CIA and NSA.

The Cold War, endless other wars, and the nuclear threat John Kennedy worked so hard to end have today been inflamed to a fever pitch by U.S. leaders in thrall to the forces that killed the president. President Joseph Biden, like all the presidents that followed Kennedy, is JFK’s opposite, an unrepentant war-monger, not only in Ukraine with the U.S. war against Russia and the U.S. nuclear first-strike policy, but throughout the world – the Middle-East, Africa, Syria, Iran, and on and on, including the push for war with China.

Nowhere is this truer than with the U.S. support for the current Israeli genocide of the Palestinians in Gaza, a slaughter also supported by Robert Kennedy, Jr., who, ironically, is campaigning for the presidency on the coattails of JFK and his father Senator Robert F. Kennedy, who would be appalled by his unequivocal support for the Israeli government.  By such support and his silence as the slaughter in Gaza continues, RFK, Jr. is, contrary his other expressed opinions, supporting a wide range of war-related matters that involve the U.S.- Israel alliance, which is central to the military-industrial forces running U.S. foreign policy.  To say this is dispiriting is a great understatement, for RFK, Jr., a very intelligent man, knows that the CIA killed his uncle and father, and he is campaigning as a spiritually awakened man intent on ending the U.S. warfare state, something impossible to accomplish when one gives full-fledged support to Israel.  And I believe he will be elected the next U.S. president.

The Biden administration is doing all in its power to undo the legacy of JFK’s last year in office when on every front he fought for peace, not war.  It is not hard to realize that all presidents since John Kennedy have been fully aware that a bullet to the head in broad daylight could be their fate if they bucked their bosses.  They knew this when they sought the office because they were run by the same bosses before election.  Small-souled men, cowards on the make, willing to sacrifice millions to their ambition.

I believe that the following article – my final one on this matter – which I published two years ago, is worth reading again if you have once done so, and even more important if you have never read it. It is not based on speculation but on well-sourced facts, and it will make clear the importance of President Kennedy and why his assassination lay the foundation for today’s dire events.  In this dark time, when the world is spinning out of control, the story of his great courage in the face of an assassination he expected, can inspire us to oppose the systemic forces of evil that control the United States and are leading the world into the abyss.

*****

• Pressured to Wage War
• A War Hero Who Was Appalled By War
• A Prescient Perspective
• Patrice Lumumba
• Dag Hammarskjöld, Indonesia, and Sukarno
• The Bay of Pigs
• Kennedy Responds After the Bay of Pigs Treachery
• The Fateful Year 1963
• The Assassination on November 22, 1963
• Who Killed Him?
• Who Was Lee Harvey Oswald?
• Who Had the Power to Withdraw the President’s Security?
• Oswald, The Preordained Patsy
• The Message to Air Force One
• Oswald’s Prepackaged Life Story
• Epilogue by James W. Douglass
• References

Despite a treasure trove of new research and information having emerged over the last fifty-eight years, there are many people who still think who killed President John Fitzgerald Kennedy and why are unanswerable questions. They have drunk what Dr. Martin Schotz has called “the waters of uncertainty” that results “in a state of confusion in which anything can be believed but nothing can be known, nothing of significance that is.”¹

Then there are others who cling to the Lee Harvey Oswald “lone-nut” explanation proffered by the Warren Commission.

Both these groups tend to agree, however, that whatever the truth, unknowable or allegedly known, it has no contemporary relevance but is old-hat, ancient history, stuff for conspiracy-obsessed people with nothing better to do. The general thinking is that the assassination occurred more than a half-century ago, so let’s move on.

Nothing could be further from the truth, for the assassination of JFK is the foundational event of modern American history, the Pandora’s box from which many decades of tragedy have sprung.

Pressured to Wage War

From the day he was sworn in as President on January 20, 1961, John F. Kennedy was relentlessly pressured by the Pentagon, the Central Intelligence Agency, and by many of his own advisers to wage war – clandestine, conventional, and nuclear.

To understand why and by whom he was assassinated on November 22, 1963, one needs to apprehend this pressure and the reasons why President Kennedy consistently resisted it, as well as the consequences of that resistance.

It is a key to understanding the current state of our world today and why the United States has been waging endless foreign wars and creating a national security surveillance state at home since JFK’s death.

A War Hero Who Was Appalled By War

It is very important to remember that Lieutenant John Kennedy was a genuine Naval war hero in WW II, having risked his life and been badly injured while saving his men in the treacherous waters of the South Pacific after their PT boat was sunk by a Japanese destroyer. His older brother Joe and his brother-in-law Billy Hartington had died in the war, as had some of his boat’s crew members.

As a result, Kennedy was extremely sensitive to the horrors of war, and, when he first ran for Congress in Massachusetts in 1946, he made it explicitly clear that avoiding another war was his number one priority. This commitment remained with him and was intensely strengthened throughout his brief presidency until the day he died, fighting for peace.

Despite much rhetoric to the contrary, this anti-war stance was unusual for a politician, especially during the 1950s and 1960s. Kennedy was a remarkable man, for even though he assumed the presidency as somewhat of a cold warrior vis-à-vis the Soviet Union in particular, his experiences in office rapidly chastened that stance. He very quickly came to see that there were many people surrounding him who relished the thought of war, even nuclear war, and he came to consider them as very dangerous.

A Prescient Perspective

Yet even before he became president, in 1957, then Senator Kennedy gave a speech in the U.S. Senate that sent shock waves throughout Washington, D.C. and around the world. ² He came out in support of Algerian independence from France and African liberation generally and against colonial imperialism. As chair of the Senate’s African Subcommittee in 1959, he urged sympathy for African independence movements as part of American foreign policy. He believed that continued support of colonial policies would only end in more bloodshed because the voices of independence would not be denied, nor should they be.

That speech caused an international uproar, and in the U.S.A. Kennedy was harshly criticized by Eisenhower, Nixon, John Foster Dulles, and even members of the Democratic party, such as Adlai Stevenson and Dean Acheson. But it was applauded in Africa and the Third World.

Yet JFK continued throughout his 1960 presidential campaign raising his voice against colonialism throughout the world and for free and independent African nations. Such views were anathema to the foreign policy establishment, including the CIA and the burgeoning military industrial complex that President Eisenhower belatedly warned against in his Farewell Address, delivered nine months after approving the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba in March 1960; this juxtaposition revealed the hold the Pentagon and CIA had, and has, on sitting presidents, as the pressure for war became structurally systemized.

Patrice Lumumba

One of Africa’s anti-colonial and nationalist leaders was the charismatic Congolese Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba. In June, 1960, he had become the first democratically elected leader of the Congo, a country savagely raped and plundered for more than half a century by Belgium’s King Leopold II for himself and multinational mining companies. Kennedy’s support for African independence was well-known and especially feared by the CIA, who, together with Brussels, considered Lumumba, and Kennedy for supporting him, as threats to their interests in the region.

So, three days before JFK’s inauguration, together with the Belgian government, the CIA had Lumumba brutally assassinated after torturing and beating him. According to Robert Johnson, a note taker at a National Security Council meeting in August 1960, Lumumba’s assassination had been approved by President Eisenhower when he gave Allen Dulles, the Director of the CIA, the approval to “eliminate” Lumumba. Johnson disclosed that in a 1975 interview that was discovered in 2000.³

On January 26, 1961, when Dulles briefed the new president on the Congo, he did not tell JFK that they already had Lumumba assassinated nine days before. This was meant to keep Kennedy on tenterhooks to teach him a lesson. On February 13, 1961, Kennedy received a phone call from his UN ambassador Adlai Stevenson informing him of Lumumba’s death. There is a photograph by White House photographer Jacques Lowe of the horror-stricken president sitting in the oval office answering that call that is harrowing to view. It was an unmistakable portent of things to come, a warning for the president.

Dag Hammarskjöld, Indonesia, and Sukarno

One of Kennedy’s crucial allies in his efforts to support third-world independence was United Nations’ Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjöld. Hammarskjöld had been deeply involved in peacekeeping in the Congo as well as efforts to resolve disputes in Indonesia, both important countries central to JFK’s concerns. Hammarskjöld was killed on September 18, 1961 while on a peacekeeping mission to the Congo. Substantial evidence exists that he was assassinated and that the CIA and Allen Dulles were involved. Kennedy was devastated to lose such an important ally.⁴

Kennedy’s strategy involved befriending Indonesia as a Cold War ally as a crucial aspect of his Southeast Asian policy of dealing with Laos and Vietnam and finding peaceful resolutions to other smoldering Cold War conflicts. Hammarskjöld was also central to these efforts. The CIA, led by Dulles, strongly opposed Kennedy’s strategy in Indonesia. In fact, Dulles and the CIA had been involved in treacherous maneuverings in resource rich Indonesia for decades. President Kennedy supported the Indonesian President Sukarno, while Dulles opposed him since he stood for Indonesian independence.

Just two days before Kennedy was killed on November 22, 1963, he had accepted an invitation from Indonesian President Sukarno to visit that country the following spring. The aim of the visit was to end the conflict (Konfrontasi) between Indonesia and Malaysia and to continue Kennedy’s efforts to support post-colonial Indonesia with non-military economic and development aid. His goal was to end conflict throughout Southeast Asia and assist the growth of democracy in newly liberated post-colonial countries worldwide.

Of course, JFK never made it to Indonesia in 1964, and his peaceful strategy to bring Indonesia to America’s side and to ease tensions in the Cold War was never realized, thanks to Allen Dulles and the CIA.  And, Kennedy’s proposed withdrawal of American military advisers from Vietnam, which, in part, was premised on success in Indonesia, was quickly reversed by Lyndon Johnson after JFK’s murder and within a short time hundreds of thousand American combat troops were sent to Vietnam. In Indonesia, Sukarno would be forced out and replaced by General Suharto, who would rule with an iron fist for the next 30 years. Soon, both countries would experience mass slaughter engineered by Kennedy’s opponents in the CIA and Pentagon.⁵

The Bay of Pigs

In mid-April 1961, less than three months into his presidency, a trap was set for President Kennedy by the CIA and its director, Allen Dulles, who knew of Kennedy’s reluctance to invade Cuba. They assumed the new president would be forced by circumstances at the last minute to send in U.S. Navy and Marine forces to back the invasion that they had planned. The CIA and generals wanted to oust Fidel Castro, and in pursuit of that goal, trained a force of Cuban exiles to invade Cuba. This had started under President Eisenhower and Vice President Nixon. Kennedy refused to go along with sending in American troops and the invasion was roundly defeated. The CIA, military, and Cuban exiles bitterly blamed Kennedy.

But it was all a sham. Classified documents uncovered in 2000 revealed that the CIA had discovered that the Soviets had learned the date of the invasion more than a week in advance and had informed Cuban Prime Minister Fidel Castro, but—and here is a startling fact that should make people’s hair stand on end—the CIA never told the President. The CIA knew the invasion was probably doomed before the fact but went ahead with it anyway.

Why? So, they could blame JFK for the failure afterwards.

Kennedy later said to his friends Dave Powell and Ken O’Donnell, “They were sure I’d give in to them and send the go-ahead order to the [Navy’s aircraft carrier] Essex. They couldn’t believe that a new president like me wouldn’t panic and save his own face. Well, they had me figured all wrong.”⁶

This treachery set the stage for events to come. Sensing but not knowing the full extent of the set-up, Kennedy fired CIA Director Allen Dulles (who, as in a bad joke, was later named to the Warren Commission investigating JFK’s assassination) and his assistant, General Charles Cabell (whose brother, Earle Cabell, to make a bad joke absurd, was the mayor of Dallas on the day Kennedy was killed.) It was later discovered that Earle Cabell was a CIA asset.⁷

JFK said he wanted “to splinter the CIA in a thousand pieces and scatter it to the winds.” Not sentiments to endear him to a secretive government within a government whose power was growing exponentially.⁸

Kennedy Responds After the Bay of Pigs Treachery

The stage was now set for events to follow as JFK, now even more suspicious of the military-intelligence people around him, and in opposition to nearly all his advisers, consistently opposed the use of force in U.S. foreign policy.

In 1961, despite the Joint Chiefs’ demand to put combat troops into Laos – advising 140,000 by the end of April – Kennedy bluntly insisted otherwise as he ordered Averell Harriman, his representative at the Geneva Conference, “Did you understand? I want a negotiated settlement in Laos. I don’t want to put troops in.”⁹   The president knew that Laos and Vietnam were linked issues, and since Laos came first on his agenda, he was determined to push for a neutral Laos.

Also in 1961, he refused to accede to the insistence of his top generals to give them permission to use nuclear weapons in a dispute with the Soviet Union over Berlin and Southeast Asia. Walking out of a meeting with his top military advisors, Kennedy threw his hands in the air and said, “These people are crazy.” ¹⁰

In March 1962, the CIA, in the person of legendary operative, Edward Lansdale, and with the approval of every member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, presented the president with a pretext for a U.S. invasion of Cuba. Code-named Operation Northwoods, the false-flag plan called for innocent people to be shot in the U.S., boats carrying Cuban refugees to be sunk and a terrorism campaign to be launched in Miami, Washington D.C., and other places, all to be blamed on the Castro government so that the public would be outraged and call for an invasion of Cuba. ¹¹  

Kennedy was appalled and rejected this pressure to manipulate him into agreeing to terrorist attacks on Americans that could later be used against him. He already knew that his life was in danger and that the CIA and military were tightening a noose around his neck. But he refused to yield.

As early as June 26, 1961, in a White House meeting with Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev’s spokesperson, Mikhail Kharlamov, and Khrushchev’s son-in-law, Alexei Adzhubei, when asked by Kharlamov why he wasn’t moving faster to advance relations between the two countries, JFK said “You don’t understand this country. If I move too fast on U.S.-Soviet relations, I’ll either be thrown into an insane asylum, or be killed.”¹²  

JFK refused to bomb and invade Cuba as the military wished during the Cuban missile crisis in October 1962. The Soviets had placed offensive nuclear missiles and more than 30,000 support troops in Cuba to prevent another U.S.-led invasion. American aerial photography had detected the missiles. This was understandably unacceptable to the U.S. government. While being urged by the Joint Chiefs and his trusted advisors to order a preemptive nuclear strike on Cuba, JFK knew that a diplomatic solution was the only way out as he wouldn’t accept the death of hundreds of millions of people that would likely follow a series of nuclear exchanges with the Soviet Union. Only his brother, Robert, and Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara stood with him in opposing the use of nuclear weapons. Daniel Ellsberg, a former Pentagon and Rand Corporation analyst, reported a coup atmosphere in the Pentagon as Kennedy chose to settle rather than attack.¹³   In the end, after thirteen incredibly tense days of brinksmanship, Kennedy and Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev miraculously found a way to resolve the crisis and prevent the use of those weapons.

Afterwards, JFK told his friend John Kenneth Galbraith that “I never had the slightest intention of doing so.”¹⁴

The Fateful Year 1963

In June, 1963, JFK gave a historic speech at American University in which he called for the total abolishment of nuclear weapons, the end of the Cold War and the “Pax Americana enforced on the world by American weapons of war,” and movement toward “general and complete disarmament.” ¹⁵  

A few months later he signed a Limited Test Ban Treaty with Nikita Khrushchev. ¹⁶

In October 1963 he signed National Security Action Memorandum 263 calling for the withdrawal of 1,000 U. S. military troops from Vietnam by the end of the year and complete withdrawal by the end of 1965. ¹⁷

All this he did while secretly engaging in negotiations with Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev via Saturday Evening Post editor and anti-nuclear weapon advocate, Norman Cousins, Soviet agent Georgi Bolshakov,¹⁸ and Pope John XXIII,¹⁹ as well as with Cuba’s Prime Minister Fidel Castro through various intermediaries, one of whom was French Journalist Jean Daniel. Of course, secret was not secret when the CIA was involved.

Kennedy, deeply disturbed by the near nuclear catastrophe of the Cuban missile crisis, was determined to open back channel communications to make sure such a near miss never happened again. He knew fault lay on both sides, and that one slip-up or miscommunication could initiate a nuclear holocaust.  He was determined, therefore, to try to open lines of communications with his enemies.

Jean Daniel was going to Cuba to interview Fidel Castro, but before he did he interviewed Kennedy on October 24, 1963.  Kennedy, knowing Daniel would tell Castro what he said, asked Daniel if Castro realizes that “through his fault the world was on the verge of nuclear war in October 1962… .or even if he cares about it.”  But he also added, to soften the message:

I approved the proclamation Fidel Castro made in the Sierra Maestra, when he justifiably called for justice and especially yearned to rid Cuba of corruption. I will go even further: to some extent it is as though Batista was the incarnation of a number of sins on the part of the United States. Now we will have to pay for those sins. In the matter of the Batista regime, I am in agreement with the first Cuban revolutionaries. That is perfectly clear. ²⁰

Such sentiments were anathema, shall we say treasonous, to the CIA and top Pentagon generals. These clear refusals to go to war with Cuba, to emphasize peace and negotiated solutions to conflicts rather than war, to order the withdrawal of all military personnel from Vietnam, to call for an end to the Cold War, and his willingness to engage in private, back-channel communications with Cold War enemies marked Kennedy as an enemy of the national security state. They were on a collision course.

The Assassination on November 22, 1963

After going through the Bay of Pigs, Cuban Missile Crisis and many other military cliffhangers, Kennedy underwent a deep metanoia, a spiritual transformation, from Cold Warrior to peacemaker. He came to regard the generals who advised him as devaluing human life and hell-bent on launching nuclear wars. And he was well aware that his growing resistance to war had put him on a dangerous collision course with those generals and the CIA. On numerous occasions, he spoke of the possibility of a military coup d’état against him.

The night before his trip to Dallas, he told his wife, “But, Jackie, if somebody wants to shoot me from a window with a rifle, nobody can stop it, so why worry about it.”²¹  

And we know that nobody did try to stop it because they had planned his execution from multiple locations to assure its success.

Who Killed Him?

If the only things you read, watched, or listened to since 1963 were the mainstream corporate media (MSM), you would be convinced that the official explanation for JFK’s assassination, the Warren Commission, was correct in essentials. You would be wrong, because those corporate media have for all these years served as mouthpieces for the government, most notably the CIA that infiltrated and controlled them long ago under a secret program called Operation Mockingbird.²² In 1977, celebrated Watergate journalist, Carl Bernstein, published a 25,000-word cover story for Rolling Stone, “The CIA and the Media,” in which he published the names of many journalists and media, such as The New York Times, CBS, Time, Newsweek, etc., who worked hand in glove with the CIA for decades. Ironically, or as part of “a limited hangout” (spy talk for admitting some truths while concealing deeper ones), this article can be found at the CIA’s own website.

Total control of information requires media complicity, and with the JFK assassination, and in all matters they consider important, the CIA and the MSM are unified. ²³  Such control extends to literature, arts, and popular culture as well as news. Frances Stonor Saunders comprehensively documents this in her 1999 book, The Cultural Cold War: The CIA And The World Of Arts And Letters, ²⁴ and Joel Whitney followed this up in 2016 with Finks: How the CIA Tricked the World’s Best Writers, with particular emphasis on the complicity of the CIA and the famous literary journal The Paris Review.  Such revelations are retrospective, of course, but only the most naïve would conclude such operations are a thing of the past.

The Warren Commission claimed that the president was shot by an ex-Marine named Lee Harvey Oswald, firing three bullets from the 6th floor of the Texas School Book Depository as Kennedy’s car was already two hundred and fifty feet past and driving away from him. But this is patently false for many reasons, including the bizarre claim that one of these bullets, later termed “the magic bullet,” passed through Kennedy’s body and zigzagged up and down, left and right, striking Texas Governor John Connolly who was sitting in the front seat and causing seven wounds in all, only to be found later in pristine condition on a stretcher in Parkland Hospital.²⁵  And, any lone assassin looking out the 6th floor window would have taken the perfect shot as the limousine approached within forty feet of the TSBD on Houston St.

The absurdity of the government’s claim, a ballistic fairy tale, was the key to its assertion that Oswald killed Kennedy. It was visually shattered and rendered ridiculous by the famous Zapruder film that clearly shows the president being shot from the front right, and, as the right front of his head explodes, he is violently thrown back and to his left as Jacqueline Kennedy climbs on to the car’s trunk to retrieve a piece of her husband’s skull and brain.

This video evidence is clear and simple proof of a conspiracy.²⁶ 

Who Was Lee Harvey Oswald?

But there is another way to examine it.

If Lee Harvey Oswald, the man The Warren Commission said killed JFK, was connected to the intelligence community, the FBI and the CIA, then we can logically conclude that he was not “a lone-nut” assassin or not an assassin at all. There is a wealth of evidence to show how, from the very start, Oswald was moved around the globe by the CIA like a pawn in a game, and when the game was done, the pawn was eliminated in the Dallas police headquarters by Jack Ruby two days later.

James W. Douglass, in JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters, the most important book on the matter, asks this question:

Why was Lee Harvey Oswald so tolerated and supported by the government he betrayed?

This is a key question.

After serving as a U.S. Marine at the CIA’s U-2 spy plane Atsugi Air Force Base in Japan with a Crypto clearance (higher than top secret, a fact suppressed by the Warren Commission) and being trained in the Russian language, Oswald left the Marines and defected to the Soviet Union. ²⁷   After denouncing the U.S., rejecting his American citizenship, working at a Soviet factory in Minsk, and taking a Russian wife—during which time Gary Powers’ U-2 spy plane was shot down over the Soviet Union—he returned to the U.S. with a loan from the American Embassy in Moscow, only to be met at the dock in Hoboken, New Jersey, by Spas T. Raikin, a prominent anti-Communist with extensive intelligence connections recommended by the State Department. ²⁸

Oswald passed through immigration with no trouble, was not prosecuted, moved to Fort Worth, Texas where, at the suggestion of the Dallas CIA Domestic Contacts Service chief, he was met and befriended by George de Mohrenschildt, an anti-communist Russian, who was a CIA asset. De Mohrenschildt got him a job four days later at a photography and graphic arts company that worked on top secret maps for the U.S. Army Map Service related to U-2 spy missions over Cuba.

Oswald was then shepherded around the Dallas area by de Mohrenschildt. In 1977, on the day he revealed he had contacted Oswald for the CIA and was to meet with the House Select Committee on Assassinations’ investigator, Gaeton Fonzi, de Mohrenschildt allegedly committed suicide.

Oswald then moved to New Orleans in April, 1963 where he got a job at the Reily Coffee Company owned by CIA-affiliated William Reily. The Reily Coffee Company was located in close vicinity to the FBI, CIA, Secret Service, and Naval Intelligence offices and a stone’s throw from the office of Guy Banister, a former Special Agent in Charge of the FBI’s Chicago Bureau, who worked as a covert action coordinator for the intelligence services, supplying weapons, money, and training to anti-Castro paramilitaries. Oswald then went to work with Banister and the CIA paramilitaries.

From this time up until the assassination, Oswald engaged in all sorts of contradictory activities, one day portraying himself as pro-Castro, the next day as anti-Castro, many of these theatrical performances being directed from Banister’s office. It was as though Oswald, on the orders of his puppet masters, was  enacting multiple and antithetical roles in order to confound anyone intent on deciphering the purposes behind his actions and to set him up as a future “assassin” or “patsy.”

James Douglass persuasively argues that Oswald “seems to have been working with both the CIA and FBI,” as a provocateur for the former and an informant for the latter. Jim and Elsie Wilcott, who worked at the CIA Tokyo Station from 1960-64, in a 1978 interview with the San Francisco Chronicle, said, “It was common knowledge in the Tokyo CIA station that Oswald worked for the agency.”²⁹

When Oswald moved to New Orleans in April, 1963, de Mohrenschildt exited the picture, having asked the CIA for and been indirectly given a $285,000 contract to do a geological survey for Haitian dictator “Papa Doc” Duvalier, which he never did, but for which he was paid.³⁰

Ruth and Michael Paine then entered the scene on cue. Ruth had been introduced to Oswald by de Mohrenschildt. In September, 1963, Ruth Paine drove from her sister’s house in Virginia to New Orleans to pick up Marina Oswald and bring her to Dallas to live with her, where Lee also stayed on weekends. Back in Dallas, Ruth Paine conveniently arranged a job for Lee Harvey Oswald in the Texas Book Depository, where he began work on October 16, 1963.

Ruth, along with Marina Oswald, was the Warren Commission’s critically important witness against Oswald. Allen Dulles, despite his earlier firing by JFK, got appointed to a key position on the Warren Commission.  He questioned the Paines in front of it, studiously avoiding any revealing questions, especially ones that could disclose his personal connections to the Paines. For Michel Paine’s mother, therefore Ruth’s mother-in-law, Ruth Paine Forbes Young, was a close friend of his old mistress, Mary Bancroft, who worked as a spy with Dulles during WW II. Bancroft and he had been invited guests at Ruth Paine Forbes Young’s private island off Cape Cod.

Ruth and Michael Paine had extensive intelligence connections. Thirty years after the assassination, a document was declassified showing Ruth Paine’s sister Sylvia worked for the CIA. Her father traveled throughout Latin America on an Agency for International Development (notorious for CIA front activities) contract and filed reports that went to the CIA. Her husband Michael’s step-father, Arthur Young, was the inventor of the Bell Helicopter, a major military supplier for the Vietnam War, and Michael’s job there gave him a security clearance.

From late September through November 22nd, various “Oswalds” were later reported to have simultaneously been seen from Mexico City to Dallas. Two Oswalds were arrested in the Texas Theater, the real one taken out the front door and an impostor out the back.

As Douglass says:

There were more Oswalds providing evidence against Lee Harvey Oswald than the Warren Report could use or even explain.³¹

Even J. Edgar Hoover knew that Oswald impostors were used, as he told LBJ concerning Oswald’s alleged visit to the Soviet Embassy in Mexico City. He later called this CIA ploy, “the false story re Oswald’s trip to Mexico . . . their (CIA’s) double-dealing,” something that he couldn’t forget. ³²

It was apparent to anyone paying close attention that a very intricate and deadly game was being played at high levels in the shadows.

We know Oswald was blamed for the President’s murder. But if one fairly follows the trail of the crime, it becomes blatantly obvious that government forces were at work. Douglass and others have amassed layer upon layer of evidence to show how this had to be so.

Who Had the Power to Withdraw the President’s Security?

To answer this essential question is to finger the conspirators and to expose, in Vincent Salandria’s words, “the false mystery concealing state crimes.”³³

Neither Oswald, the mafia nor anti-Castro Cubans could have withdrawn most of the security that day. Sheriff Bill Decker ordered all his deputies “to take no part whatsoever in the security of that [presidential] motorcade.” ³⁴ Police Chief Jesse Curry did the same for Dallas police protection for the president in Dealey Plaza. Both “Chief Curry and Sheriff Decker gave their orders withdrawing security from the president in obedience to orders they had themselves received from the Secret Service.” The Secret Service withdrew the police motorcycle escorts from beside the president’s car where they had been on previous presidential motorcades as well as the day before in Houston and removed agents from the back of the car where they were normally stationed to obstruct gunfire.

The Secret Service admitted there were no Secret Service agents on the ground in Dealey Plaza to protect Kennedy. But we know from extensive witness testimony that, during and after the assassination, there were people in Dealey Plaza impersonating Secret Service agents who stopped policeman and the public from moving through the area on the Grassy Knoll where some of the shots appeared to come from. The Secret Service approved the fateful, dogleg turn (on a dry run on November 18) where the car, driven by Secret Service agent William Greer, moved at a snail’s pace and came almost to a halt before the final head shot, clear and blatant security violations.  The House Select Committee on Assassinations concluded this, not some conspiracy theorist.³⁵

Who could have squelched the testimony of the many doctors and medical personnel who claimed the president had been shot from the front in his neck and head, testimony contradicting the official story?

Who could have prosecuted and imprisoned Abraham Bolden, the first African-American Secret Service agent personally brought on to the White House detail by JFK, who warned that he feared the president was going to be assassinated? (Douglass interviewed Bolden seven times and his evidence on the aborted plot to kill JFK in Chicago on November 2 is a story little known but extraordinary in its implications.)

The list of all the people who turned up dead, the evidence and events manipulated, the inquiry squelched, distorted, and twisted in an ex post facto cover-up clearly point to forces within the government, not rogue actors without institutional support.

The evidence for a conspiracy organized at the deepest levels of the intelligence apparatus is overwhelming. James Douglass presents it in such depth and so logically that only one hardened to the truth would not be deeply moved and affected by his book, JFK and the Unspeakable.

But there is more from him and other researchers who have cut the Gordian knot of this false mystery with a few brief strokes.

Oswald, The Preordained Patsy

Three examples will suffice to show that Lee Harvey Oswald, working as part of a U.S. Intelligence operation, was set up to take the blame for the assassination of President Kennedy, and that when he said in police custody that he was “a patsy,” he was speaking truthfully. These examples make it clear that Oswald was deceived by his intelligence handlers and had been chosen without his knowledge, long before the murder, to take the blame as a lone, crazed killer.

First, Kennedy was shot at 12:30 P.M. CT. According to the Warren Report, at 12:45 P.M. a police report was issued for a suspect that perfectly fit Oswald’s description. This was based on the testimony of Howard Brennan, who said he was standing across from the Book Depository and saw a standing white man, about 5’10” and slender, fire a rifle at the president’s car from the sixth-floor window. This was blatantly false because photographs taken moments after the shooting show the window open only partially at the bottom about fourteen inches, and it would have been impossible for a standing assassin to be seen “resting against the left windowsill,” (the window sill was a foot from the floor), as Brennan is alleged to have said. He would have therefore had to have been shooting through the glass. The description of the suspect was clearly fabricated in advance to match Oswald’s.

Then between 1:06 and 1:15 P.M. in the quiet residential Oak Cliff neighborhood of Dallas, Police Officer J.D. Tippit was shot and killed. Supposedly based on Brennan’s description broadcast over police radio, Tippit had stopped a man fitting the description and this man pulled a gun and shot the officer. Meanwhile, Oswald had returned to his rooming house where his landlady said he left at 1:03 P.M., went outside, and was standing at a northbound bus stop. The Tippet murder took place nine-tenths of a mile away to the south where a witness, Mrs. Higgins, said she heard a gunshot at 1:06 P.M., ran outside, saw Tippit lying in the street and a man running away with a handgun whom she said was not Oswald.

Oswald is reported to have entered the Texas Theater minutes before the Tippit murder. The concession stand operator, Warren Burroughs, has said he sold him popcorn at 1:15 P.M., which is the time the Warren Report claims Tippit was killed. At 1:50 P.M., Lee Harvey Oswald was arrested in the Texas Theater and taken out the front door where a crowd and many police cars awaited him, while a few minutes later a second Oswald is secretly taken out the back door of the movie theater. (To read this story of the second Oswald and his movement by the CIA out of Dallas on a military aircraft on the afternoon of November 22, 1963, documented in great detail by James W. Douglass, is an eye-opener.)

The official narrative of Oswald and the Tippit murder begs credulity, but it serves to “show” that Oswald was a killer. ³⁶

Despite his denials, Oswald, set up for Kennedy’s murder based on a prepackaged description, is arraigned for Tippit’s murder at 7:10 PM. It was not until the next day that he was charged for Kennedy’s.

The Message to Air Force One

Secondly, while Oswald is being questioned about Tippit’s murder in the afternoon hours after his arrest, Air Force One has left Dallas for Washington with the newly sworn-in president Lyndon Johnson and the presidential party. Back in D.C., the White House Situation Room is under the personal and direct control of Kennedy’s National Security Advisor, McGeorge Bundy, a man with close CIA ties who had opposed JFK on many matters, including the Bay of Pigs and Kennedy’s order to withdraw from Vietnam.³⁷

As reported by Theodore White, in The Making of the President 1964, Johnson and the others were informed by the Bundy controlled Situation Room that “there was no conspiracy, learned of the identity of Oswald and his arrest …”³⁸

Vincent Salandria, one of the earliest and most astute critics of the Warren Commission, put it this way in his book, False Mystery: ³⁹

This [announcement from the Situation Room to Air Force One in flight back to Washington, D.C] was the very first announcement of Oswald as the lone assassin. In Dallas, Oswald was not even charged with assassinating the President until 1:30 A.M. the next morning. The plane landed at 5:59 P.M. on the 22nd. At that time  the District Attorney of Dallas, Henry Wade, was stating that “preliminary reports indicated more than one person was involved in the shooting … the electric chair is too good for the killers.” Can there be any doubt that for any government taken by surprise by the assassination — and legitimately seeking the truth concerning it — less than six hours after the time of the assassination was too soon to know there was no conspiracy? This announcement was the first which designated Oswald as the lone assassin….

I propose the thesis that McGeorge Bundy, when that announcement was issued from his Situation Room, had reason to know that the true meaning of such a message when conveyed to the Presidential party on Air Force One [and to a separate plane with the entire cabinet that had turned around and was headed back over the Pacific Ocean] was not the ostensible message which was being communicated. Rather, I submit that Bundy … was really conveying to the Presidential party the thought that Oswald was being designated the lone assassin before any evidence against him was ascertainable. As a central coordinator of intelligence services, Bundy in transmitting such a message through the Situation Room was really telling the Presidential party that an unholy marriage had taken place between the U.S. Governmental intelligence services and the lone-assassin doctrine. Was he not telling the Presidential party peremptorily, ‘Now, hear this! Oswald is the assassin, the sole assassin. Evidence is not available yet. Evidence will be obtained, or in lieu thereof evidence will be created. This is a crucial matter of state that cannot await evidence. The new rulers have spoken. You, there, Mr. New President, and therefore dispatchable stuff, and you the underlings of a deposed President, heed the message well.’ Was not Bundy’s Situation Room serving an Orwellian double-think function?⁴⁰

Oswald’s Prepackaged Life Story

Finally, Air Force Colonel Fletcher Prouty adds a third example of the CIA conspiracy for those who need more evidence that the government has lied from the start about the assassination.

Prouty was Chief of Special Operations in the Pentagon before and during the Kennedy years. He was the liaison between the Joint Chiefs and the CIA, working closely with Director Allen Dulles and others in supporting the clandestine operations of the CIA under military cover. He had been sent out of the country to the South Pole by the aforementioned CIA operative Edward Lansdale (Operation Northwoods) before the Kennedy assassination and was returning on November 22, 1963. On a stopover in Christchurch, New Zealand, he heard a radio report that the president had been killed but knew no details. He was having breakfast with a U.S Congressman at 7:30 AM on November 23, New Zealand time. A short time later, at approximately 4:30 PM Dallas time, November 22, he bought the Christchurch Star 23 November 1963 newspaper and read it together with the Congressman.

The newspaper reports from the scene said that Kennedy had been killed by bursts of automatic weapons fire, not a single shot rifle, firing three separate shots in 6.8 seconds, as was later claimed for Oswald. But the thing that really startled him was that at a time when Oswald had just been arrested and had not even been charged for the murder of Officer Tippit, there was elaborate background information on Oswald, his time in Russia, his association with Fair Play for Cuba Committee in New Orleans, etc. “It’s almost like a book written five years later,” said Prouty. “Furthermore, there’s a picture of Oswald, well-dressed in a business suit, whereas, when he was picked up on the streets of Dallas after the President’s death, he had on some t-shirt or something…

Who had written that scenario?  Who wrote that script…So much news was already written ahead of time of the murder to say that Oswald killed the President and that he did it with three shots…Somebody had decided Oswald was going to be the patsy…Where did they get it, before the police had charged him with the crime?  Not so much ‘where,’ as ‘why’ Oswald?⁴¹

Prouty, an experienced military man working for the CIA in the Pentagon, accused the military-intelligence “High Cabal” of killing President Kennedy in an elaborate and sophisticated plot and blaming it on Oswald, whom they had begun setting up years in advance.

The evidence for a government plot to plan, assassinate, cover-up, and choose a patsy in the murder of President John Kennedy is overwhelming.⁴²

Five years after JFK’s assassination, we would learn, to our chagrin and his glory, that the president’s younger brother, Senator Robert F. Kennedy, equally brave and unintimidated, would take a bullet to the back of his head in 1968 as he was on his way to the presidency and the pursuit of his brother’s killers. The same cowards struck again.

Their successors still run the country and must be stopped.

Epilogue by James W. Douglass

John F. Kennedy was raised from the death of wealth, power, and privilege. The son of a millionaire ambassador, he was born, raised, and educated to rule the system. When he was elected President, Kennedy’s heritage of power corresponded to his position as head of the greatest national security state in history. But Kennedy, like Lazarus, was raised from the death of that system. In spite of all odds, he became a peacemaker and, thus, a traitor to the system….

Why? What raised Kennedy from the dead? Why did John Kennedy choose life in the midst of death and by continuing to choose life thus condemn himself to death? I have puzzled over that question while studying the various biographies of Kennedy. May I suggest one source of grace for his resurrection as a peacemaker? In reading his story, one is struck by his devotion to his children. There is no mistaking the depth of love he had for Caroline and John, and the overwhelming pain he and Jacqueline experienced at the death of their son Patrick. Robert Kennedy in his book Thirteen Days has described how his brother saw the Cuban Missile Crisis in terms of the future of his children and all children. I believe John Kennedy was at least partially raised from the dead of the national security state by the life of his children. The heroic peacemaking of his final months, with his acceptance of its likely cost in his own death, was, I suspect, partly a result of the universal life he saw in and through them. I think he believed profoundly the words that he gave in his American University address as his foundation for rejecting the Cold War: ‘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. ⁴³

ENDNOTES:

1. History Will Not Absolve Us: Orwellian Control, Public Denial, and the Murder of President Kennedy, E. Martin Schotz, Kurtz, Ulmer, & DeLucia Book Publishers, 1996. [?]
2. JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died & Why It Matters, James W. Douglass, Orbis Books, 2008[1][2], p. 8 and p. 212; Destiny Betrayed, James DiEugenio, 2nd Edition, Skyhorse Publishing, 2012, pp. 17-33. [?]
3. The Devil’s Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA and the Rise of America’s Secret Government, David Talbot, Harper Collins, 2015, pp. 375–389. MORI DocID: 1451843 p. 464, p. 473 of “The CIA’s Family Jewels,” 16 May 1973, The National Security Archives. [?]
4. Investigation into the condition and circumstances resulting in the tragic death of Dag Hammarskjold and of members of the party accompanying him (United Nations General Assembly document,) Judge Mohamed Chande Othman, September 5, 2017, p. 49 and 50, Dag Hammarskjöld Plane Crash Recent Developments, UN Association, Westminster Branch UK. [?]
5. Edward Curtin interviews Greg Poulgrain on The Incubus of Intervention: Conflicting Indonesian Strategies of John F. Kennedy and Allen Dulles, Global Research, July 22, 2016;  Chapter 2 – JFK, Dulles and Hammarskjöld of The Incubus of Intervention; Greg Poulgrain, JFK vs Allen Dulles: Battleground Indonesia, Simon & Schuster, 2020. [?]
6. Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., American Values, Harper Collins, 2018, p. 117. [?]
7. Dallas Mayor During JFK Assassination Was CIA Asset, Who.What.Why, August 2, 2017. [?]
8. Peter Kornbluh confirmed this in a phone conversation with the author in May 2000. See The ULTRASENSITIVE Bay of Pigs Newly Released Portions of Taylor Commission Report Provide Critical New Details on Operation Zapata, National Security Archive Briefing Book No. 29, May 3, 2000. [?]
9. Averell Harriman interviewed in Charles Stevenson, The End Of Nowhere; American Policy Toward Laos Since 1954, 1972, p. 154. [?]
10. Richard Reeves, President Kennedy: Profile of Power, Simon & Schuster, 1994, p. 222. [?]
11. Pentagon Proposed Pretexts for Cuba Invasion in 1962, FOIA documents at National Security Archive. [?]
12. Pierre Salinger, P.S.: A Memoir, St. Martin’s Press, 1995, p. 253. [?]
13. Talbot, op. cit., p. 453. [?]
14. John Kenneth Galbraith, A Life in Our Times, Houghton Mifflin, 1981, p. 388. [?]
15. American University Commencement Address, President Kennedy, June 10, 1963. [?]
16. President Kennedy Radio and TV Address to the American People on the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, July 26, 1963; Treaty Banning Nuclear Weapon Tests in the Atmosphere, in Outer Space, and Under Water, signed at Moscow August 5, 1963, entered into force October 10, 1963. [?]
17. See James K. Galbraith, “Exit Strategy,” Boston Review, October/November 2003. [?]
18. Pierre Salinger, With Kennedy, Doubleday & Co., 1966, p. 198. [?]
19. See Norman Cousins, The Improbable Triumvirate: John F. Kennedy, Pope John, Nikita Khrushchev – An Asterisk to the History of a Hopeful Year, 1962-1963, W.W. Norton & Co., 1972. [?]
20. Jean Daniel, “Unofficial Envoy – An Historic Report from Two Capitals,” The New Republic, December 14, 1963. [?]
21. Kenneth P. O’Donnell and David F. Powers, “Johnny, We Hardly Knew Ye;” Memories of John Fitzgerald Kennedy, Little Brown, 1972, p. 25. [?]
22. See Operation Mockingbird, the only FOIA-released-by-CIA documents at The Black Vault.  Carl Bernstein, “THE CIA AND THE MEDIA – How Americas Most Powerful News Media Worked Hand in Glove with the Central Intelligence Agency and Why the Church Committee Covered It Up.” Rolling Stone, October 20, 1977. [?]
23. James F. Tracy, “The CIA and the Media: 50 Facts the World Needs to Know,” Global Research/ratical.org, 2018. [?]
24. Frances Stonor Saunders, The Cultural Cold War: The CIA And The World Of Arts And Letters, New Press. 1999.  See Also: James Petras, “The CIA and the Cultural Cold War Revisited,” Monthly Review, November 1999. [?]
25. See Vincent J. Salandria, “The Warren Report?“ Liberation, March 1965. [?]
26. Zapruder Film in slow motion (1:33). [?]
27. Gerald D. McKnight, Breach of Trust: How the Warren Commission Failed the Nation and Why, Univ. Of Kansas Press, 2005, review by Jim DiEugenio. [?]
28. Douglass, op. cit., p. 46. [?]
29. See James and Elsie Wilcott: CIA Profile in Courage, excerpt from JFK and the Unspeakable, pp. 144-148, 421-422. [?]
30. Douglass, op. cit., p. 47-48. [?]
31. See Oswald’s Doubles: How Multiple Lookalikes Were Used to Craft One Lone Scapegoat, excerpt from JFK and the Unspeakable, pp. 286-303, 350-355, 464-470, 481-483. [?]
32. Douglass, op. cit., p. 81. [?]
33. Vincent Salandria, The JFK Assassination: A False Mystery Concealing State Crimes, presentation at the Coalition on Political Assassinations, November 20, 1998. [?]
34. Dallas Deputy Sheriff Roger Dean Craig, When They Kill A President, 1971. [?]
35. Douglass, op. cit., pp. 270-277 and endnote 75 of James Douglass’ 2009 COPA Keynote Address.  Secret Service Final Survey Report for the November 21, 1963, visit by President Kennedy to Houston, cited in Appendix to Hearings before the HSCA, vol. 11, p. 529. [?]
36. Douglass, op. cit., pp. 287-304. [?]
37. Talbot, op.cit., pp. 407-8.  &  NSAM 263 (document 194), Foreign Relations of the United States, Vietnam v. IV, Aug-Dec’63. [?]
38. Theodore White, The Making of the President, 1964, Atheneum, 1965, p. 33.  See also Let Us Begin Anew: An Oral History of the Kennedy Presidency, Gerald S. Strober, Debra Strober,  Perennial, 1993, pp. 450-451. [?]
39. False Mystery, Essays on the JFK Assassination by Vincent Salandria, rat haus reality press, 2017. [?]
40. Bundy Continued to Shape Hawkish Policies, in Vincent J. Salandria, “The Assassination of President John F. Kennedy: A Model of Explanation,” Computers and Automation, December 1971, pp. 32-40. [?]
41. David T. Ratcliffe, Understanding Special Operations: 1989 Interview with L. Fletcher Prouty, rat haus reality press, 1999, pp. 214-215. [?]
42. See The President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection at The National Archives. [?]
43. James Douglass, “The Assassinations of Martin Luther King and John F. Kennedy in the Light of the Fourth Gospel,” Sewanee Theological Review, 1998. [?]

Edward Curtin writes and his work appears widely. He is the author of Seeking Truth in a Country of Lies. Read other articles by Edward, or visit Edward's website.