Deconstructing JFK: A Coup dÉtat over Foreign Policy?
By James DiEugenio - January 14, 2021
Kennedy delivers famous speech in West Berlin in June 1963, five months
before his assassination. [Source: 20minutos.es]
[While not averse to foreign meddling or even sanctioning the assassination
of foreign leaders, Kennedys foreign policy positions drew the ire of a
collusion of interests that wanted him gone. DiEugenio argues that Kennedys
positions on foreign policy leading up to his assassination and the
deleterious events that occurred after his death culminate in simply too
many dramatic reversals to be chalked up to coincidence.Editors]
When Oliver Stones blockbuster film JFK premiered in 1991, it delivered a
hugely embarrassing shock to academic historians, Democratic Party grandees,
corporate media pundits and other respected purveyors of conventional
wisdom.
Thats because, for the preceding 27 years following Kennedys
assassination, all of them had been faithfully, if falsely, promulgating the
myth that Lee Harvey Oswald was the lone gunman, and that Lyndon Johnsons
murderous expansion of the Vietnam War had been a continuation of Kennedys
policies.
Stones film demolished that myth, establishing very clearly the existence
of a conspiracy behind Kennedys assassination, while pointing to the fact
that, by October of 1963, Kennedy had decided to try and extract America
from the growing quagmire in Vietnam.
Oliver Stone directing JFK. Kevin Costner, featured behind him, played
District Attorney Jim Garrison who investigated the JFK assassination.
[Source: variety.com]
Stones film was based on a memoir by New Orleans District Attorney Jim
Garrison about the JFK assassination, On the Trail of the Assassinsa book
which founders of CovertAction Magazine, Bill Schaap and Ellen Ray,
encouraged Garrison to write. They subsequently published the book with
their publishing house called Sheridan Square Press and handed it over to
Oliver Stone to produce the film.[1] It was just one part of the ample
documentary record establishing that the foreign policy decisions of Lyndon
Johnson were not a continuation of Kennedys policies, but rather a
revitalization of the imperialist policies adopted by Allen and John Foster
Dulles in the 1950s and followed by every U.S. President before and after
Kennedy since the end of World War II.
The truth is, not only did Kennedy want to end Americas destructive (and
self-destructive) military support for the collapsing colonial empire of
France that had embroiled it in an unwinnable war in Vietnam; his speeches,
correspondence and high-level meetings with emerging Third World leaders
reveal his growing antipathy for colonialism, rejection of imperialism,
toleration for the non-aligned movementcontrasting markedly with his
predecessorand promotion of nationalistic leaders, albeit ones that were
considered to be responsible in their moderation.
JFK gives speech with map of Vietnam in the background. [Source: anistor.gr]
Stones film created a firestorm over Kennedys assassination, and the
question of who Kennedy really was and what he believed.
Kennedy had expanded the U.S. presence in Vietnamincreasing the number of
military advisers from a few hundred to over 16,000 and commencing bombing
of South Vietnam under the direction of the U.S.-created South Vietnamese
Air Force.[2] However, his administration had resisted bombing North Vietnam
(which began in August 1964) and enacted National Security Action memorandum
(NSAM) 263 of October 1963, which encapsulated Kennedys decision to
withdraw U.S. troops from Vietnam.
Lyndon Johnsons NSAM 273 of November 26, 1963, by contrast, authorized
planning to begin for graduated offensive operations against North
Vietnam.[3]
LBJ shakes hands of American GIs heading to Vietnam. [Source:
lbjlibrary.org]
NSAM 273 makes apparent that Kennedys death was not simply a footnote to a
conflict which liberal media darlings like the late David Halberstam had
depicted as some kind of inevitable epic tragedy.
With the help of retired Colonel Fletcher Prouty and historian John Newman,
Stones film shook that orthodoxy to its foundations. Newmans 1992 book,
JFK and Vietnam, explained this new thesis in extraordinary detail.[4]
In 1997 new documents were declassified which proved that Kennedys
Secretary of Defense, Robert McNamara, had made it clear to American
personnel in Vietnam that they were leaving the country by 1965.[5]
Scholars like Gordon Goldstein, David Kaiser, James Blight, and Howard Jones
have since demonstrated thatalthough Stone, Prouty and Newman were harshly
criticized by the mainstream mediathey were correct about this issue.
Kennedy was planning to withdraw from Vietnam at the time of his
assassination; Johnson knowingly reversed that decision quickly after
ascending to the office and launched a full-scale ground invasion following
the August 2, 1964, Gulf of Tonkin incidentin which the U.S. shelled
North Vietnam in order to provoke a retaliatory attack that could be branded
as an act of foreign aggressionabout which Johnson lied to the public.[6]
As Fletcher Prouty once noted, Kennedy did not have to accept defeat at the
Bay of Pigs invasion. Admiral Arleigh Burke advised him to intervene with
naval forces located in the Caribbean, which Kennedy refused to do.[7]
During the Cuban Missile Crisis, Kennedy further resisted the advice of his
military advisers to bomb the missile silos or invade Cuba.[8]
JFK meets with General Curtis LeMay and the pilots who discovered the Cuban
missiles. [Source: smithsonianmag.com]
These three instancestwo in Cuba, one in Vietnamare almost always
mentioned in books about Kennedy or his assassination. Yet they are never
grouped together to mark out a pattern of choice for purposes of
explication. This struck the present author as odd because, taken as a
whole, they seemed to present just such a pattern, one that chose not to use
direct military intervention in the Third World. Is it possible to explicate
a pathway to the pattern, and to show other parallels in Kennedys foreign
policy?
II
Blessed with stunning good looks and charisma, John F. Kennedy was groomed
for high office by his wealthy father Joseph, who had opposed U.S.
intervention in both world wars.[9] In 1951, Congressman Kennedy decided he
would run for the Senate the next year against Henry Cabot Lodge.
Interrupted by his service in World War II, Lodge had been a senator for
about 16 years. Kennedy felt that, to challenge that long experience, he had
to take a high-profile overseas journey to show the Massachusetts electorate
that he was as knowledgeable about foreign affairs as his opponent.
Debate between Kennedy and Lodge at Faneuil Hall during Kennedys first
Senate run in 1952. [Source: digitalcommonwealth.org]
So, along with his brother Robert and sister Patricia, he decided to visit
the Middle East, Asia, and particularly Indochina. As he said, his purpose
was to get some first-hand knowledge, some facts to bite on, to know how
these people regard us.[10]
When Kennedy arrived in Saigon, he first listened to the French commander
General Jean de Lattre de Tassigny say that, with 250,000 troops, the French
could not lose.[11] But there was another person in Saigon that Kennedy
decided to meet. He was Edmund Gullion. Kennedy had first met Gullion at
the State Department back in 1947, while getting help for a speech. In
Saigon, Gullion met the young JFK at the rooftop restaurant of the Hotel
Majestic. There, Kennedy heard a very different message about French
prospects:
In twenty years, there will be no more colonies. Were going nowhere out
here. The French have lost. If we come in here and do the same thing, we
will lose too, for the same reason. Theres no will or support for this kind
of war back in Paris. The home front is lost. The same thing would happen
to us.[12]
Kennedy as part of delegation visiting with General Jean de Lattre de
Tassigny who is leading the delegation through the streets of Saigon. (1951)
[Source: kennedysandking.com]
The impact of what Kennedy saw and heard altered the prevailing, hackneyed
picture of the Free World vs. The Communist Menace in the Third World. His
view now became more nuanced and subtle. As biographer Herbert Parmet wrote,
Jack Kennedy was evolving into a spokesman for a more sophisticated view. He
was beginning to call attention to the soft spot of the Western cause, to
the frustration of a region that had long contended with colonial
domination.[13]
In other words, with Gullions help, Kennedy saw the French war in Indochina
not as a contest between the communists and Western republicans. He now saw
it as the doomed struggle of French empire to hold on to a far-flung colony
that wanted to be independent. In other words, it was really a battle
between colonialism and nationalism, and America was backing the
colonialists. As his brother later said, this meeting had a very, very
major impact on his thinking.[14]
When Kennedy returned home, almost immediately he began writing,
broadcasting, and making speeches opposing further American involvement in
Indochina.[15] This contrasted with what Vice President Richard Nixon was
proposing. As his biographer Stephen Ambrose said, in 1954 Nixon proposed
using atomic weapons to save the French siege at Dien Bien Phu. When
President Eisenhower turned that down, Nixon proposed sending American
troops into the conflict.[16]
JFK as a freshman in Congress in 1947 with Nixon (right). [Source:
archives.gov]
This conflict between Senator Kennedy on one side and Nixon, Eisenhower and
the Dulles brothersCIA Director Allen and Secretary of State John Fosteron
the other, expanded and burst into the pages of the press in 1957.
Nixon with Eisenhower (left) and John Foster Dulles (right). [Source:
gettyimages.com]
On July 2, 1957, Kennedy made a speech in the Senate which, as The New York
Times proclaimed, was the most comprehensive and outspoken arraignment of
Western policy toward Algeria presented by an American in public
office.[17]
As Allan Nevins later wrote, no speech on foreign affairs by Mr. Kennedy
attracted more attention at home and abroad.[18] In this speech, Kennedy
harshly attacked the Eisenhower administration for its support of France in
its war to keep Algeria a colonial possession. He stated that the record of
the United States in this case is, as elsewhere, a retreat from the
principles of independence and anticolonialism
.[19] He then lambasted the
administration and his colleagues in the Senate with this peroration:
Yet, did we not learn in Indochina . . . that we might have served both the
French and our own causes infinitely better, had we taken a more firm stand
much earlier than we did? Did that tragic episode not teach us that,
whether France likes it or not, admits it or not, or has our support or not,
their overseas territories are sooner or later, one by one, inevitably going
to break free
. With each departure a grand myth has been more and more
deflated. The problem is to save the French nation, as well as free
Africa.[20]
[Source: content.time.com]
What Kennedy was referring toabout saving the French nationwas the fact
that the Algerian conflict was so divisive, so ugly, and so ingrained that
an open rebellion against withdrawing had sprung up. This eventually became
the Secret Army Organization (OAS). They tried to assassinate President
Charles DeGaulle more than once.
Kennedys speech was bitterly attacked from all sides, including by
Democrats like Adlai Stevenson and Dean Acheson.[21]
British journalist Alistair Cooke insightfully summarized what Kennedy had
done. By enraging an ally and attacking the administration he had made
himself the Democrat whom the President must do something about. It is a
form of running martyrdom that Senators Humphrey and Johnson may come to
envy.By the end of the year, Kennedy was on the cover of Time. The story
was entitled Man Out Front.[22]
III
The 1958 best-selling book The Ugly American was a thinly disguised portrait
of growing American involvement in Vietnam. It infatuated Kennedy so much so
that he bought a hundred copies and sent one to each of his senatorial
colleagues. He also paid for a large advertisement for the book in The New
York Times.[23]
[Source: amazon.com]
That book depicted how out of touch State Department representatives were
with both the politics and the peoples of the native countries in which they
served. Before his campaign for the presidency Kennedy told Harris Wofford:
The key thing for the country is a new foreign policy that will break out of
the confines of the Cold War. . . . The most likely candidates are [Lyndon]
Johnson or [Stuart] Symington, but if either of them is nominated we might
as well elect Dulles or Acheson; it would be the same cold-war foreign
policy all over again.[24]
In that presidential election, Kennedy tried to make Africa an issue. He
repeatedly attacked the Eisenhower administrations record there, and he
mentioned the continent 479 times in his 1959-60 campaign speeches. In one
speech he said America had lost ground in Africa because the administration
had failed to see the rising tide of nationalism there.[25]
Once in office, and contrary to popular belief, one of the first areas of
foreign policy that concerned him was the ongoing Congo crisis.
Because of his strong interest in Africa, Kennedy had been in favor of the
democratically elected president of this newly freed constitutional
republic, Patrice Lumumba.
Patrice Lumumba arrives in New York on July 24, 1960. [Source: wikiwand.com]
But the former colonizers and Eisenhower had different designs. Belgium had
left the Congo abruptly, with very little formal transition. They did this
hoping that the fledgling, poor, and generally uneducated country would fall
into chaos. This would then serve as a pretext for the Belgians to return to
the former colony. That is what happened.
Lumumba first asked the UN and Dag Hammarskjöld to intervene. But
anticipating this would occur, Belgium, and to a lesser degree France and
England, arranged to have the mineral-wealthy province of Katanga secede
under the leadership of their paid front-man Moïse Tshombe.[26]
UN Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjöld greets Moïse Tshombe at
Elizabethvillle airport on August 15, 1960. [Source: libya360.wordpress.com]
When the UN was slow to act, Lumumba made a visit to Washington searching
for help. Eisenhower deliberately left for Rhode Island to avoid meeting
him. Secretary of State Christian Herter was noncommittal and deferred the
matter to the UN and Hammarskjöld. He in turn left the impression that
Eisenhower was working with the Secretary-General, which he was not. Left
with no options, Lumumba turned to Moscow for aid. The Russians agreed to
help him. That sealed his fate in the eyes of Washington.
As the Church Committee later revealed, in mid-August of 1960 on the orders
of President Eisenhower, Allen Dulles initiated a series of assassination
plots to kill Lumumba.[27] On August 26th, Dulles sent an assassination
order to the CIA station chief in Leopoldville. The order authorized a
budget of $100,000, the equivalent of a million dollars today, to terminate
Lumumba.[28]
As John Newman describes in his book Countdown to Darkness, although the
Agency tried four or five different methods to kill Lumumbaincluding
poisoning him and sending hired killers codenamed QJ/WIN and WI/ROGUE to
murder himfor one reason or another none of the plots worked.
What was eventually decided was that the CIA would help their agent, Joseph
Mobutu, capture him and then transport him to Katanga. There, under the
supervision of the Belgians, Lumumba was killed by firing squad. His body
was then soaked in sulfuric acid. When the acid ran out, his corpse was set
afire.[29] As the late Jonathan Kwitny wrote:
the precedent for it all, the very first coup in postcolonial African
history, the very first political assassination, the very first junking of a
legally constitutional democratic system, all took place in a major country,
and were all instigated by the United States of America.[30]
Lumumba being tortured before his death. [Source: thepatriot.co.zw]
Lumumba was killed on January 17, 1961, just three days before Kennedys
inauguration. There is some evidence indicating that the Agency was in haste
because they feared what Kennedy would do once he was in office.[31]
Clare H. Timberlake [Source: wikipedia.org]
If that was the case, the assumption was correct. During his first week in
office, not knowing Lumumba was dead, Kennedy ordered a complete review of
Eisenhowers Congo policy. Kennedy recalled Ambassador Clare Timberlake, and
eventually replaced him with Gullion. That, in itself, was a clear signal of
a sea change in policy. Timberlake had backed the Katanga secession and the
arming of Tshombe.[32]
Edmund Gullion [Source: bidd.org.rs]
Kennedy did not find out about the murder of Lumumba until February 13th.
White House photographer Jacques Lowe was in the Oval Office when Kennedy
got the news from UN Ambassador Adlai Stevenson. Lowe snapped this picture
and later said that Kennedy groaned and said, Oh no!
Kennedy hears news of Lumumba assassination. Photo by Jacques Lowe. [Source:
theguardian.com]
Thomas J. Dodd [Source: wikipedia.org]
As Hammarskjöld had predicted, Kennedys new policy was going to meet with
resistance. Domestically, this took the form of conservative Democrat
Senator Thomas J. Dodd. He began holding hearings during which he defended
the Katanga freedom fighters and questioned how America had lost the Congo
to communism.[33] Dodd was supplemented in the media by right-wing columnist
and TV star William F. Buckley. As Jonathan Kwitny once wrote, Buckley saw
the spirit of Edmund Burke in the face of Moïse Tshombe.[34]
William H. Buckley [Source: williamhogeland.wordpress.com]
But then, on the night of September 17, 1961, something even more troubling
occurred. This was the death in a plane crash of Dag Hammarskjöld. Today,
after Susan Williams book Who Killed Hammarskjöld?[35] and the film Cold
Case Hammarskjöld, it seems to this writer fairly clear that his death was a
case of sabotage and did not occur by accident. But what is important to
this discussion is that Gullion cabled Kennedy to tell him that he felt it
was an assassination at the time it happened.[36]
Dag Hammarskjölds plane crash, another unsolved crime of the 1960s.
[Source: newsbeezer.com]
Historically, this is important because it seems to have galvanized Kennedy
into taking control of the situation himself. Kennedy now went to the UN and
said that they must continue the mission Hammarskjöld had started, i.e.,
using a UN military force to reunite Congo, remove the mercenaries and expel
Tshombe.
The administration now backed labor leader Cyrille Adoula to be the new
prime minister; they employed bribery, blackmail, and threats in order to
have him elected in 1961 instead of the more popular Antoine Gizenga,
Lumumbas former Deputy Prime Minister who was imprisoned on the island Bula
Mbemba after he accused Adoula of treason.
Adoula was an anticommunist moderate who had ties to the U.S. through
CIA-connected labor unions. When he became prime minister, Adoula declared
the Congo must not become a battlefield for the Cold War.[37]
JFK and Adoula in the White House, February 5, 1962. [Source:
jfklibrary.org]
Kennedy gave secret approval to new Secretary-General U Thant to expand
military operations if needed to back up Adoulas authority. He further
managed to greatly decrease surreptitious funding from the Belgian/British
company Union Minière to Tshombe.[38]
On December 24, 1962, Katangese troops fired on a UN helicopter. This began
a large offensive code-named Operation Grand Slam. One month later, the
secession effort was over. JFK wrote congratulatory notes to all those
involved.[39] America had stood up against European imperialism in Africa.
IV
Egypt straddled Africa and the Middle East. Its charismatic and articulate
leader, Gamal Abdel Nasser, had refused to join the Baghdad Pact when
invited by Foster Dulles. He told the Secretary of State that he could not
join any anti-communist alliance that included Great Britain as a partner or
silent partner, since they had been the worlds greatest colonizer for
decades. If he did, he would be perceived by his followers as being a
Western stooge.[40]
Gamal Abdel Nasser waves to Egyptian crowd. [Source: egyptianstreets.com]
This stance is what made Nasser so popular to the Arab world and also so
anathema to Israel and Saudi Arabia. Nasser was a Pan-Arabist. He was also a
secularist and a socialist who was opposed to the Muslim Brotherhood, a
militant fundamentalist group.
The Brotherhood was originally financed by the British.[41] And many of its
members were recruited from the ranks of the extreme form of Islam practiced
in Saudi Arabia, called Wahhabism. The first formal treaty between England
and Saudi Arabia was signed in 1915.[42]
Why was this a mutually beneficial relationship? And why would Britain be
opposed to Nasser, to the point of also financing the Brotherhood in Egypt?
The British did not want Nassers Pan-Arabism to spread for the same reason
that the Saudis did not.
The socialist Nasser believed that the petroleum of the Middle East belonged
to all Arabs and should be used for the progress of the region as a whole.
Financially, Great Britain would rather deal with the individual monarchies
instead of a confederacy of republics.[43]
And the Saudi royal family certainly did not want to share their oil wealth
or give up their monarchical control. In fact, when Nasser forged a
confederacy with Syria to form the United Arab Republic, the Saudis
successfully worked to break up the union.[44]
John Foster Dulles too was opposed to Nassers Pan-Arabism. He once said
that the Egyptian leader whipped up Pan-Arabism much as Hitler whipped up
Pan-Germanism as a means of promoting an expansion of his power.[45]
This was the same reason Israel feared Nasser: If Nasser managed to unify
the Middle East, the combined might of all the nations, from many
directions, could possibly overwhelm Israeli forces. Further, Nasser was
bound by the ideas of Arab unity and he felt a moral, political, and
ideological obligation to the Palestinian people.[46]
Kennedy was puzzled by the Dulles/Eisenhower policy toward Nasser and the
Middle East. He did not understand why Foster Dulles pulled out of his
arrangement to help fund Nassers goal of the Aswan Dam across the Nile.
JFK did not support Eisenhowers military intervention in Lebanon in 1958.
As we have seen, he protested American support for the brutal French
colonial war to keep the predominantly Muslim state of Algeria part of the
French commonwealth. As George Ball once wrote, Kennedy believed that these
kinds of policies worked in favor of the Soviets by ceding them the issues
of independence, nationalism and infrastructure development.[47]
To Kennedy, someone like Nasser provided a counterweight to the problem of
Islamic fundamentalism, which was an issue he had mentioned in his 1957
Algeria speech. There, he noted the socio-political pull in the Muslim world
toward Arab feudalism and fanaticism.[48]
Consequently, Kennedy did not understand Eisenhowers freeze out of Nasser
after the Suez crisis of 1956. This would have been an opportune moment for
a warming of relations with the wildly popular leader.
Eisenhower and Nasser after the 1956 Suez crisis. [Source: csmonitor.com]
Nasser now had to turn to the Soviet Union for help in building Aswan. In
1957, the administration announced the Eisenhower Doctrine, which now
allowed direct American intervention in the face of any Soviet threat.
Nasser felt that this was aimed at him, and some commentators believe such
was the case.[49]
Eisenhower, Vice President Richard Nixon, and Foster Dulles all feared
Nassers ability to control the entire Middle East. They decided to lean in
the opposite direction, toward King Saud of Saudi Arabia.
The administration invited him to Washington, where he agreed to the
Eisenhower Doctrine.[50] What made this even worse is that Saudi Arabia had
taken over sponsorship of the Muslim Brotherhood from Great Britain, and was
promoting the fundamentalist, terrorist group worldwide.[51]
Nixon and Eisenhower give the royal treatment to Saudi Prince Ibn Saud as
part of a strategy designed to isolate Nassers Pan-Arabism. [Source:
commons.wikimedia.org]
V
Kennedy openly acknowledged that he felt all of the above were in error. In
a 1959 speech, he said:
But if we can learn from the lessons of the pastif we can refrain from
pressing our case so hard that the Arabs feel their neutrality and
nationalism are threatened, the Middle East can become an area of strength
and hope.[52]
Nasser was already predisposed to favor Kennedy because of his criticism of
France in the Algerian conflict. Kennedy began a prolific correspondence
between the two leaders, eventually made up of 91 letters from 1961 to 1963.
John Badeau [Source: wikipedia.org]
Both men were warm, respectful and candid with each other in these letters.
Kennedy had paid the highest compliment to Nasser when he appointed Dr. John
Badeau as the ambassador to Egypt. The former president of the American
University in Cairo, Badeau was probably the premier scholar on the history
of Egypt in the U.S. who spoke fluent Arabic.
That appointment communicated how much Kennedy wanted to establish a genuine
relationship with Nasser. What also turned the relationship benign was that
Kennedy offered Nasser ten million dollars to prevent the ancient monuments
of the Nile Valley from being overrun by flooding.[53]
Kennedy had told his National Security Adviser, McGeorge Bundy, that he
wanted to place a priority on developing a relationship with Nasser.
Therefore, he appointed Robert Komer to the National Security Council. Komer
was very much in favor of courting Nasser, and though Jewish he was not at
all beholden to Israel. Komer thought, like Kennedy, that the U.S. could
harness Arab nationalism through the widespread appeal of Nasser. After all,
that appeal had caused Prince Talal to defect from Saudi Arabia to Egypt in
1962.
Robert Komer [Source: commons.wikimedia.org]
In the fall of 1961, the relationship underwent a crisis of sorts. The
confederation between Syria and Egyptthe United Arab Republicwas
dissolved. Kennedy went to work to cushion the blow to Egypt.
He offered even more aid to Nasser, and extended a large loan in order to
soften the economic impact. He also refused to recognize the new government
in Syria until Nasser did.[54] Kennedy continued to push the UN plan to
repatriate the Palestinian refugees from the Nakba, long after David
Ben-Gurion of Israel had turned it down. (See the exchange of letters
between Kennedy and Nasser.)
In fact, Kennedy and Nasser were exchanging letters on the Palestinian
refugee problem for many months. Kennedy essentially took this up on his own
and alerted Nasser that he was pushing the issue through his Israeli
ambassador in Tel Aviv. And in an April 1963 letter to Nasser, Kennedy
assured the Egyptian leader that, unlike his predecessors, he was not
opposed to his renewed efforts to form a Pan-Arab union.
By 1962 everyone in the State Department was impressed by what Kennedy had
achieved: He had turned a negative into a positive. But there was a problem
that began to arise at this time.
Abdullah al-Sallal [Source: wikipedia.org]
There was a war breaking out in Yemen between the remnant of the preceding
monarchy and a rebel force led by Colonel Abdullah al-Sallal, a young
nationalist who wanted to modernize Yemen and demanded that the British get
out of Aden. Saudi Arabia funneled arms to the royalists, led by Mohammed
al-Badr, the son of Imam Ahmed, who had ruled despotically from 1948 to
1962, and Nasser sent an expeditionary force totaling 70,000 men to support
al-Sallal.[55]
Kermit Roosevelt [Source: wikipedia.org]
Great Britain and Israel both wrote to Kennedy pleading with him not to
support Nasser. Oil company lobbyists, such as Kermit Roosevelt and
Christian Herter Jr., who were on friendly terms with the State Departments
Middle East experts, were also trying to push Kennedy to toughen his
position toward Nasser. But Kennedy resisted his allies and declared he
would back Nasser in his effort to turn Yemen into a republic.[56]
As the war dragged on, Kennedy sent Ellsworth Bunker to negotiate a truce.
The problem was that the Saudis looked at the conflict as a way to drive a
wedge between JFK and Nasser, so they resisted signing any formal truce.
Christian Herter Jr. [Source: wikipedia.org]
Kennedy was not at this time willing to give up the U.S. relationship with
Saudi Arabia because of the big oil investments we had there, as Kennedy
put it to Komer. There was fear that the situation in Yemen could spark a
Nasserist revolt against the Saudi monarchy and threaten Aramcos control of
the Dhahran oil field.
To prevent that from happening, the JFK administration, in April 1963,
dispatched eight American F-100 fighter bombers and an undetermined number
of military advisers to familiarize Saudi officers with the latest
techniques in aerial combat and counterinsurgency.[57]
This frustrated Kennedys attempt to bring his relationship with Egypt to
full fruition and soured relations with Nasser. General Curtis LeMay and
other Pentagon hawks were pushing at this time for a more expanded U.S. role
in the Yemen conflict which Kennedy was against.
Under pressure Kennedy warmed to the house of Saud. [Source:
houseofsaud.com]
VI
At the end of World War II, nationalist leader Sukarno proclaimed Indonesia
to be an independent nation. But when British forces began landing there
after Japans defeat, they started to aid the Dutch in taking back their
former colony. Sukarno and his Muslim partner Mohammed Hatta now began a
guerrilla war of liberation. International pressure helped convince the
Netherlands to cede control of the giant archipelago to Sukarno. But the
Dutch held onto what was then called West Irian.
JFK and Sukarno in an open car in Washington in April 1961. [Source:
smh.com.au]
Like Lumumba and Nasser, Sukarno was a charismatic leader, a forceful
speaker, and a strong proponent of anti-colonialism. In 1955 he and Nehru of
India sponsored the Bandung Conference in Indonesia.
This was the first meeting of what was called the Non-Aligned Movement.
Generally, these were emerging nations on the African or Asian continent
that did not wish to be pawns in the Cold War. They wanted to be free to
choose their own foreign policies and trade partners without being tarred as
a Soviet or American crony.
As many have pointed out, the year the conference was called seemed to be
more than just happenstance. Because in the two prior years the CIA had
overthrown its first democratically elected governments: in Iran in 1953,
and Guatemala in 1954. Neither deposed leaderMohammad Mossadegh in Iran,
Jacobo Árbenz in Guatemalawas a communist, or aligned with the USSR.
The main goal of both was to remove foreign domination of their natural
resources so they could be better utilized by the native peoples. In
Guatemala this meant the American owned United Fruit Company; in Iran it was
the British/American conglomerate the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company.
Therefore, the Dulles brothers and President Eisenhower decided to intercede
on both corporations behalf. For this reason, many of the leaders of these
non-aligned nations openly expressed their displeasure with the diplomacy of
John Foster Dulles.[58]
Allen Dulles with JFK during the Bay of Pigs crisis. [Source:
thedailybeast.com]
By the late fifties, the PKI, Indonesias communist party, was one of the
largest in the world. In 1957, an assassination attempt was made on Sukarno
and he used it to take control of the last Dutch business holdings in the
archipelago. But the CIA, which was already funneling money to create an
opposition to Sukarno, blamed it on the PKI.[59]
The combination of these eventsSukarnos leadership of a world neutralism
position, his seizure of business interests and the growth of the PKIall
made him a target of the Dulles brothers continuing interest in the
technique of the coup détat. Because in Foster Dulless eyes, there really
was no such thing as being neutral in the Cold War. To the Secretary of
State, neutrality was simply a transitional state headed toward communism.
He also called it an obsolete
immoral and shortsighted conception.[60]
Therefore, in 1958, the administration staged what was, at that time, the
largest covert action ever attempted by the Agency. But the clandestine
aspect was blown when, during the CIA-backed uprising, a pilot was shot
down.
Alan Pope had Agency identification on him when he was captured. Since
Popes bombing run had killed many civilians, Sukarno was able to use his
prisoner as an exhibit to show who was really behind the attempted
overthrow. This great propaganda victory was the beginning of the end of the
action.
Alan Pope, left, at his trial. [Source: intisari.grid.id]
As noted throughout this essay, Kennedy disagreed with the Dulles view of
neutralism. In fact, his pre-inauguration task force concluded that
non-alignment should not be detrimental to American interests. Tactically,
Kennedy believed that by not accepting neutrality, the United States made
the Soviets more attractive in the Third World.[61] Therefore, when Kennedy
assumed office, he began to reverse the previous administrations policy,
this time in Indonesia.
Just three months after his inauguration, Kennedy decided to invite Sukarno
to Washington. He was interested in securing Popes release. The new
president asked CIA Director Allen Dulles for a briefing on how Pope had
become a prisoner. Dulles gave him a redacted version of a CIA internal
report.
But Kennedy understood what the meaning of it was. He exclaimed after
reading it, No wonder Sukarno doesnt like us very much. He has to sit down
with people who tried to overthrow his government.[62]
JFK poses with Sukarno during his visit. [Source: idpinterest.com]
Kennedys interactions with Sukarno were based on securing Popes
releasewhich he didand also on improving American relations.
Kennedy commissioned a team of economists from Tufts University to develop a
plan to extend economic aid to Indonesia in non-military ways. He also
arranged to have West Irian turned over from the Netherlands to Indonesia;
this was called the New York Agreement. It was another reversal of the
previous administration.
In deference to the Netherlands, Eisenhower had kept the resolution bottled
up at the United Nations. President Kennedy entrusted the negotiations to
his brother Robert and Ellsworth Bunker. Sukarno was jubilant when it was
approved at the UN and signed into law.[63]
The new president also helped arrange favorable profit-sharing between
American business interests in Indonesia and the government of that
country.[64] Kennedy now promised to visit Sukarno in the campaign year of
1964. Sukarno had drawn up plans to construct a villa for that visit.
VII
Jacqueline Kennedy and his brother Robert co-wrote a letter to the Soviets
about a week after President Kennedys assassination.
They warned that the quest for détente between the slain president and
Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev would not continue under Johnson. To
continue that quest, Robert would resign as Attorney General, run for
elected office and then run for the presidency himself.[65]
But that was not all that changed. In Congo, after the fall of Katanga,
Kennedy wanted the Congolese army trained by Colonel Michael Green, an
expert in the area. Green had developed a territorial plan for Leopoldville
to hold the country together. The Pentagon stalled on the completion of this
plan.[66]
Meanwhile Mobutu became a favorite of the military and Fort Benning crowd
[Fort Benning was the home of the U.S. Army School of the Americas and U.S.
army airborne school where Mobutu asked to train]. When Kennedy met Mobutu
at the White House Rose Garden in May 1963, he told him: General, if it
hadnt been for you, the whole thing would have collapsed and the Communists
would have taken over.[67] However, Kennedy was not committed to Mobutu as
the head of state at this time. He was also in the process of trying to
convince the UN to prolong its stay in Congo by addressing the General
Assembly in September of 1963.
JFK and Mobutu at the White House, May 1963. [Source: globistan.com]
At the time of Kennedys death, the so-called Simba and Kwilu rebellions
erupted, which were Lumumbist in orientation.
A simba rebel with traditional weapon and clothing. [Source: wikipedia.org]
Jonathan Kwitny described the natives who participated in these rebellions,
stereotypically, as a horde of barbaric rabble made up of starving
farmers turned cutthroats who practiced black magic against any educated
person, or one of foreign influence. This included being thrown off bridges
in a burlap bag into the river below.[68]
President Johnson and the CIA used these uprisingswhich were supported by
Argentine revolutionary Che Guevarato turn Congo into a Cold War cauldron.
The violence was blamed on Maoist China, as one of the primary leaders,
Pierre Mulele, Lumumbas former education minister, had been trained in
guerrilla warfare there.
Pierre Mulele [Source: twitter.com]
Kennedys chosen Congo leader, Cyrille Adoula, resigned after instituting
economic austerity measures at U.S. government urging, which exacerbated the
inequality lying at the root of the Simba revolt.
Adoula was replaced by, of all men, the former leader of Katanga, Moïse
Tshombe. Without Kennedy to persuade them to stay, in the summer of 1964,
the UN left. The U.S. now invited the Belgians back into the country.
Mercenaries, whom the UN force had fought to expel, were also now invited
back into Congo. The mercenaries were from the white supremacist countries
of Rhodesia and South Africa. The CIA also sent in Cuban exiles from the Bay
of Pigs invasion to fly jet sorties against the natives.
A rebel in the eastern city of Uvira declared to a journalist,
Look, we are a people who fight for liberty with spears and clubs. You, the
powerful Americans, are crushing us with bombs and planes. God will judge
you, God will punish you![69]
White mercenaries were brought back into Congo by the CIA to suppress a
guerrilla rebellion. [Source: historica.fandom.com]
With the betrayal of Kennedys policy and growth of another dirty war,
Gullion resigned. As the American ambassador to the UN, Adlai Stevenson said
America, in the one year after Kennedys assassination, went from being a
champion of the African cause to being as reviled as the Belgians.[70]
In the following year, 1965, Joseph Mobutu became the political strongman of
Congo. He stayed in that position for more than 30 years, impoverishing his
country while becoming the wealthiest man in Africa.[71]
Misfortune bedeviled one other African country after Kennedys
assassination: Ghana.
President Kennedy had enjoyed friendly relations with Kwame Nkrumah, Ghanas
first post-independence leader, and promised funding for the construction of
a dam on the Volta River.
Nkrumah was a socialist and Pan-Africanist who supported Lumumba. He wanted
to industrialize Ghanas economy and dreamed of creating a United States of
Africa.
Kennedy meets with Kwame Nkrumah in the White House in March 1961. [Source:
jfklibrary.org]
On February 26, 1966, Nkrumah was overthrown in a coup masterminded by CIA
agent Howard Bane, whose role was subsequently exposed by CIA Angola Station
Chief John Stockwell.[72]
After the coup, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) sent a delegation to
Ghana that instructed the new ruling junta to end Nkrumahs
industrialization program. Ghanas economic development was set back for the
next 50 years, with Nkrumahs overthrow representing a blow to all of
Africa.[73]
[Source; theghanareport.com]
VIII
In the Middle East, President Johnson did not see the political upside in
trying to be fair to Nasser. As the Egyptian leader once wrote to Kennedy,
there is a very strong Jewish vote in America, but a rather weak Arab vote.
Therefore, the political pressure was all one way.
But since Johnson was not the advocate for Third World struggles that
Kennedy was, it made things all the worse for the Cairo Conference sponsor.
For instance, Nasser was opposed to Johnsons escalation of the Vietnam War.
When this opposition was voiced, Johnson cut aid to Egypt and shipped more
arms to Israel. As was the case under Eisenhower, this gravitated Nasser
toward the USSR.[74]
When Badeau saw what was happening, like Gullion, he resigned. As with
Eisenhower and Foster Dulles, Johnson now began to tilt further toward Saudi
Arabia, a fundamentalist, terror-sponsoring monarchy. He supplied them with
an air-defense system, offered them military bases, and a $100 million grant
for trucks and other transport vehicles.[75]
LBJ greets the Saudi Prince on the White House lawn. [Source: alplm-cdi.com]
As Roger Mattson wrote in his book Stealing the Atom Bomb, no president in
the atomic age was more opposed to nuclear proliferation than Kennedy. In an
exchange of letters in May and June of 1963, Kennedy threatened to pull
funding for Israel unless he was allowed to send inspectors to the nuclear
reactor plant at the Dimona site.[76]
However, when the CIA told Johnson that it appeared Israel had secretly
developed an atomic device, LBJ barely reacted.[77] During the Six Day War
of 1967, although Johnson requested that Israel not strike first, they did
soafter Defense Secretary Robert McNamara gave his approval.[78]
LBJ and his National Security team during the Arab-Israeli crisis of 1967.
[Source: foreignpolicyjournal.com]
And we all know about the infamous Liberty incident, which occurred during
that war. Israeli jets attacked the USS Liberty, a National Security Agency
(NSA) spy ship. This resulted in 34 dead and 171 wounded. Johnson did not
break relations with Israel, and there were no trials held over this
atrocity. After the war, because of this clear favoritism, Nasser broke
relations with the United States.[79]
USS Liberty incident led Nasser to break relations with the U.S. [Source:
wrmea.org]
IX
When President Johnson entered the Oval Office, there was a bill for
continuing aid to Indonesia ready for him to sign. Everyone in the Asia
division of the State Department knew that signing the document would have
been a matter of routine with Kennedy. It was for a rather small amount as
part of a larger grant to be issued later. Everyone involved was surprised
when Johnson balked at signing it.[80]
But further, Johnsonagain differing from Kennedynow made sure that
whatever aid did go to Sukarno was military-oriented. Also, Johnson did not
follow through on Kennedys pledge to visit Sukarno in 1964. As Roger
Hilsman of the State Department later wrote, Johnson was making a major
shift in policy: Kennedys attempt to channel Sukarnos nationalism in
constructive ways was being abandoned. America was now moving toward a hard
line on Indonesia.[81] Like Gullion and Badeau before him, Hilsman resigned
in 1964.
Sukarno also realized that, with Kennedys death, the tide had turned. In
August 1964, on Indonesias Independence Day, he made his famous Year of
Living Dangerously speech, predicting that 1965 would be fateful. In fact,
by September 1964, the CIA was planning covert action against Sukarno and
enlisting possible alternatives to his leadership. They also planned on
creating agitation between the communists and non-communists.[82]
The White House was on board with this new paradigm of fracturing Sukarnos
ruling coalition.[83] In one-year, American policy had gone from doing all
that was possible to support Sukarno to now planning for new leadership.
As Sukarno understood, 1965 was fateful. To be more accurate, it was
catastrophic. Marshall Green, a long time protégé of the Dulles brothers,
now became the American ambassador in Jakarta.
Johnson meets with Ambassador Green. [Source: consortiumnews.com]
What happened there in the fall of 1965 has been shrouded in mystery for
decades. But new work by Geoffrey Robinson, Jess Melvin, Brad Simpson, and
Greg Poulgrain, have shown that the savage and comprehensive attacks on the
PKI that took the lives of at least 500,000 people was planned and executed
as a genocide. It was a way to remove Sukarno by not assaulting him
directly.[84]
In this writers opinion, the last chapter of Poulgrains book, JFK. vs.
Allen Dulles: Battleground Indonesia, is the best explication of how this
occurred and how General Suharto was at the center of the storm.
Indonesian soldier before executing so-called communist suspects. [Source:
insideindonesia.com]
Like Mobutu in Congo, Suharto now became the new strongman in Indonesia
while Sukarno was placed under house arrest. He ruled for three decades as
the people in Indonesia worked largely for foreign companies at minimal
wages. Due to economic and social chaos, it all came crashing down in 1998.
General Suharto [Source: britannica.com]
Conclusion
In light of the changes described above, the presidency and assassination of
John Kennedy needs to be reevaluated.
Kennedy to be sure was not averse to foreign meddling or even sanctioning
the assassination of foreign leaders[85] and at times caved in before
right-wing pressure. However, his administration engaged with socialist and
non-aligned leaders like Nasser and Sukarno, supported diplomatic solutions
to conflict through the UN, stood up to European imperial agents, and was
generally against right-wing coups and military intervention.
The deleterious events that occurred after his death are simply too much to
be chalked up to coincidence. I have deliberately avoided describing
specific escalations in Vietnam, and the dropping of Kennedys attempt at
détente with Castro. Those have been dealt with at length elsewhere, such as
in James Douglasss book JFK and the Unspeakable.
What I am trying to show here is that those were not isolated examples, but
part of a broader pattern of foreign policy, one that did not start after
the 1962 Missile Crisis but well before. Like the Dulles Brothers, Lyndon
Johnson simply did not have the empathy or understanding for the problems of
the Third World that Kennedy did, and was intent on ratcheting up Cold War
conflicts and giving a green light to the most aggressive elements in the
U.S. national security establishment.
The progressive leaders and peoples living in the emerging nations
significantly understood what happened after Kennedys assassination. In a
1964 interview with reporter Cindy Adams, Sukarno described the special home
he designed for Kennedys visit. He then paused, began to perspire, mopped
his brow and said, Tell me, why did they kill Kennedy?[86]
Nasser fell into a depression and ordered Kennedys funeral to be broadcast
four times on Cairo television.[87] When Kwame Nkrumah was shown a copy of
the Warren Report, he turned to the title page. He then pointed to the name
of Allen Dulles. He returned it to the American ambassador and simply said,
Whitewash.[88]
