John Chuckman

EXPANSION OF COMMENTS POSTED TO AN ARTICLE IN CONSORTIUM NEWS

 

“A Call to Reinvestigate American Assassinations”

 

While I am completely in sympathy with the idea that the major American political assassinations need re-investigation, I know, at the same time, that it is pretty much a waste of breath to advocate for it.

Why were the original investigations, endowed with large resources of money and personnel, so badly handled?

And, as a long-time student of the John Kennedy case, I can say flatly that the investigation of his assassination was more than badly handled.

It was deliberately and consistently mishandled. It was manipulated.

Who had such power to see that it was mishandled?

Well, those same interests have not gone away. There are new names a couple of generations later, of course, but the interests remain.

Indeed, I think it easy to argue that those interests have only become more powerful inside American society, a society where the disparity between the great bulk of citizens and the privileged has grown immensely since John Kennedy’s time. The country, in many ways, is not recognizable as the same place, the place in which I grew up. Hopes, aspirations, and opportunities have all been blunted or diminished for the bulk of Americans while the privileged establishment has burgeoned to become more powerful than ever.

All of the evidence we have about the American power establishment’s reinvigorated efforts to dominate the globe (following its quiet, grim recognition that America’s relative economic position in the world has seriously deteriorated since the halcyon decades after WWII) – its efforts to pursue “full-spectrum dominance,” its efforts in the bloody Neocon wars, its efforts against Russia and against China, its efforts in Latin America, and its horrific level of spending on the military and on security, including an entirely new kind of security involving the compromise of every single American’s intimate privacy – tells us that the interests which deliberately mishandled investigating Kennedy’s assassination, and did so in two major efforts, are very much still around.

America’s power establishment today lies pretty much around the clock about many subjects. It is simply a way of life for those pursuing great power and undertaking many dark deeds.

https://chuckmanwordsincomments.wordpress.com/2018/07/13/john-chuckman-comment-the-first-genuine-information-in-the-kennedy-assassination-records-release-to-give-us-some-genuine-information-about-what-happened/

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Response to a comment about Americans must not surrender but demand the truth:

Oh, yes, I certainly do see a lot of Americans fighting for this, or any other, truth.

Sorry, but your rhetoric achieves little beyond raising your blood pressure.

Americans, in general, today seem quite indifferent to truth of any kind. From embracing nonsense claims about “healthy stuff” and burying their minds in “social media” to accepting the almost continuous military atrocities abroad by America and its close allies.

Americans, for the most part, couldn’t care less about what America does in the Middle East and in other distant places. They certainly don’t want to hear about what really causes all those unpleasant, desperate refugees in the Middle East or in Central America – that is, the activities of their own armed forces. They certainly don’t want to hear about all the massive amounts of death and destruction, none of which would have happened without America’s efforts. And America’s press accommodates the wish completely, never honestly investigating such matters, always supporting the establishment’s “narrative.”

As the melodramatic, much-quoted movie-script line goes, “You can’t handle the truth!” Interestingly, that script line and the movie from which it comes were themselves dishonest defenses of Pentagon interests. So constant and penetrating so deeply into society are the establishment’s efforts to propagandize that popular entertainment is enlisted to the task.

Truth in America has become a rhetorical, argumentative word, devoid of any real meaning. It is even often used pejoratively.

In an empire where wars, coups, dirty operations, and assassinations are part of the week-to-week efforts of government – always lying as it does its dirty work – there is no such thing as truth. There is only “controlling the narrative,” getting our “story out there,” and countless big and little lies. The best of literature, art, music, and certainly science honors truth. Politics and the pursuit of power tend to avoid it completely.

Much of the rhetoric in the American “fake news” controversies is on the level of Baptist tent preachers blubbering about Satan rather than saying anything genuine about truth. Truth, despite all kinds of twisted arguments and insincere discussions, in most cases, actually isn’t that difficult a concept to understand or to adhere to. There really is something of the elegant simplicity of Keats’ lines about truth being beauty and beauty truth.

Something either happened or it didn’t, and honest investigators, whether journalists or criminal investigators or special commissions, either report it or they don’t. But it should be obvious that where whole areas of potential information are simply ignored – as in the Middle East today where never once is the Syrian or Iranian or Russian point of view reported or discussed. Always, the same sources are quoted on almost everything. It should be obvious there is no honest effort to report truth.

But most humans are just built that way. Whether in religious, political, or social matters, the original endowment of understanding and point of view provided by society from birth is not questioned and certainly not deeply investigated. The limited number who do question or investigate end up being regarded as eccentrics or kooks or geniuses not understood by most.

Going back to Kennedy’s death, a great many witnesses and valid pieces of evidence were simply ignored while, in a number of cases, lesser witnesses and highly dubious, even compromised, evidence was admitted into the record. Of course, that is only a fraction of what was done badly in the Warren report.

It is the same for every aspect of America’s imperial involvement in the world. Interests totally overshadow truth. Truth indeed becomes quite “inconvenient.”

The Kennedy and King assassinations revolved around this same central gravitational mass. Kennedy’s assassination was about American establishment concerns with Cuba, and to a lesser extent with Russia, and King’s was about an establishment frightened at the prospect of millions of young black men being mobilized against wars and for greater justice at home.

If you doubt that assertion about establishment concerns with King, just look, all these decades later, at the huge bellowing, angry noise in America over some black football players briefly, respectfully kneeling at a game during the national anthem in protest against police violence on the streets, where American police kill about three people every single day, people who are mostly unarmed, many of them being black, and the police involved almost never are charged with anything.

King was okay, could be tolerated at least, when he just gave “Sermons on the Mount,” so to speak, about justice and equality. But when he later began actively opposing a major war and made fiery speeches to striking black workers in various cities, well, that became a very different matter. With his fame and eloquence, he was starting to challenge the interests of those who really ran America.

The same establishment was furious about Castro, whose magnetism appealed even to some young Americans, and who very much challenged the traditional American Plantation System in Latin America, and great resources were spent by CIA trying to do everything from killing him or toppling his government and to sabotaging the economy and demonizing his words and acts. Unless you go into the literature of the time, it is hard today to appreciate the fierce intensity of that reaction. And those horrible Russians, imperial America’s damned Carthaginians, were actually helping him.

The only acceptable response was the square-jawed, fierce-eyed, ready-to-kill one displayed by innumerable American players of the time – Guy Bannister, J. Edgar Hoover, Lyndon Johnson, or Richard Nixon kind of stuff. John Kennedy completely lacked that quality, even though he delivered some pretty martinet-sounding speeches at times which I found rather unsettling.

His gross failures – as judged by the square-jawed set of powerful American figures – in the Bay of Pigs invasion and in the Cuban Missile Crisis, made him a marked man. His firing the CIA’s top three men, all establishment darlings, after Kennedy’s being humiliated by the CIA’s fiasco at the Bay of Pigs didn’t help. Nor did his angry promise to one day splinter the CIA into pieces, especially when combined with the fact that he made concessions to Russia over Cuba – my God, a promise never to invade again! Can you imagine that? – and established back-channel communications with Khrushchev during the Cuban Missile Crisis.

It was all even further fired up by insider knowledge of Kennedy’s intimate relationship with Mary Pinchot Meyer, an eastern establishment family dissident and non-conformist artist-type, and his reportedly having been introduced to some drugs by her in their trysts. She was, we learn from later accounts, the only woman with whom he had a relationship of equals and perhaps the only woman he ever came close to loving, and she was what later would be called very much a peacenik.

Truth and bloody empire cannot coexist. Lies are an inherent part of all the killing and oppression required by imperial enterprises, and since America’s enterprise is global in extent, its crimes and lies are many. We see this clearly in the contemporary case of Israel with its efforts to establish itself as a kind of miniature replica of imperial America in its region. Some of its many ruthless efforts do get recorded, but it is only some, and a compliant Western press minimizes what they report and uses all the euphemisms they can muster. The participants in empire always avoid, as much as possible, direct observation or reporting of their efforts. Always. That’s why secret security services are called secret and why classifying things is virtually an industry in Washington.

That’s why we can still look at old photos of Winston Churchill and think of him as that great cherubic-faced defender of democracy and all good things Western. He was in fact a dedicated imperialist, a man ready to do anything from machine-gunning revolting peasants to making ugly deals with criminals. The only reason he was not willing to do a deal with Hitler, who offered him one around guarantees for the British Empire, was his inability to accept having one country dominate the Continent, reflecting a very long-standing, basic principle of British foreign policy, and his own vanity – and he was immensely vain – in regarding himself as a greater figure than Herr Hitler, as he called him in his memoirs. He was not an enemy of tyrants in general. He was certainly not a defender of human rights in general. And he often laughed at aspects of democracy. In his World War II memoirs, you can clearly sense, too, some admiration of Stalin.

I don’t care which aspect of American government you talk about, it’s always the same. The FBI is a perfect example. The history of that organization is extremely dark and unpleasant. Yet today, we get all these assertions, during the controversy concerning Trump and the FBI, about this or that besmirching the FBI’s reputation. The FBI, in fact, has no reputation, beyond one manufactured by its public relations organization and the ever-supporting main-line press. The arguments about it all are phony.

Below is a piece about the FBI I wrote years ago, and nothing has really changed. It could readily be updated to double its length with a variety of tales.

Now, apart from other matters, they are in the business of trying to influence American elections, but even that is not new. It was learned just the other day in an interview with a former senior FBI official that a regular part of the FBI’s counterintelligence operations inside the United States involved working to prevent any seriously progressive or leftish politicians from being nominated for seats in Congress.

https://chuckmanwords.wordpress.com/2009/05/26/the-dreadful-record-of-the-fbi/ 

Here are a few other points:

https://chuckmanwordsincomments.wordpress.com/2018/02/09/john-chuckman-comment-i-am-amazed-at-how-some-americans-get-so-worked-up-only-now-about-an-fbi-that-has-always-been-political-and-corrupt-americas-stasi/

Here is a brief discussion around one of the only truly valuable documents ever released by government on the John Kennedy assassination.

https://chuckmanwordsincomments.wordpress.com/2018/07/13/john-chuckman-comment-the-first-genuine-information-in-the-kennedy-assassination-records-release-to-give-us-some-genuine-information-about-what-happened/

Yet there has been no public controversy or big discussion about the document, which contains, unmistakably, threads of the real truth. It has been all but been completely ignored by the press.

The authorities releasing this were so confident in the public’s unquestioning mindset that they weren’t concerned when they did so, and it appears they were right to think that way. Either that or they blundered, but it still had almost zero impact.

Which is to say, that none of this historical stuff, the stuff that would be pored over in yet another investigation, can make any difference unless the structure under which investigations must operate, the very structure of the way America is governed, is changed, and just what are the chances of that?

Here is a good summary of what I mean:

https://chuckmanwordsincomments.wordpress.com/2018/07/22/john-chuckman-comment-how-american-politics-really-work-why-there-are-terrible-candidates-and-constant-wars-and-peoples-problems-are-ignored-why-heroes-like-julian-assange-are-persecuted-and-r/

 

John Chuckman

COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE IN RUSSIA INSIDER

“JFK Took a Bullet When He Tried to Make Peace With Russia, Trump Bent the Knee Instead”
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Response to another comment which said, “I still believe that the assassination was Israel’s response to Kennedy’s pressure exerted on Ben-Gurion, to shed light on Dimona’s nuclear reactor in Israel”:

This is a possibility. Israel sure had motive. And Israel acts with no conscience or ethics regularly.

Jack Ruby who featured as a central figure in the plot was more than a small-time Mafia figure. He identified very strongly with his Jewish heritage.

Of course, the CIA, on Cuba, was already in bed with the Mafia, too. And a big Mafia figure, Meyer Lansky, was an intense Israel loyalist.

So, a mix of actors is quite possible.

There is even a theory that CIA had set up a phony assassination attempt to scare Kennedy into doing something about Cuba.

This phony set-up included the Oswald imposter going to Mexico City to associate Oswald’s name with Cuba and Russia.

This theory says that other covert actors became aware of this effort and used the opportunity in Dallas to really kill Kennedy from the grassy knoll.

No matter what the details, CIA had to be involved in some fashion if only for the reason they have done nothing but lie and hide stuff ever since.

LBJ and J Edgar Hoover both hated the Kennedys and were glad for the chance to go along with anyone getting rid of him.

LBJ removed the investigation from Dallas and put it into the hands of the phony Warren Commission.

Hoover did all the investigation for the phony Commission. They did none of their own. And Hoover was fixated for no known reason on Oswald almost from the very start.

Of course, CIA itself had lots of reasons to kill Kennedy.

He fired the three top men after the Bay of Pigs, including the legendary Allen Dulles.

He threatened more action against CIA.

He ignored their advice during the Missile Crisis, and formed an extensive backchannel communication with Premier Khrushchev.

He promised never to invade Cuba again.

And he had as his closest girlfriend, Mary Pinchot, a well-off and well-connected woman who talked extensively of peace in private with Kennedy and is known to have introduced him to some drugs.

Mary was herself murdered, in professional assassin-style, less than a year after Kennedy at a time when her own investigation into his death may have been having some success. She was extremely well-connected, knowing everyone who was anyone in Washington, and her ex-husband was a very high CIA official.

John Chuckman

EXPANSION OF COMMENTS POSTED TO AN ARTICLE BY YOUSSEF EL-GINGIHY IN THE INDEPENDENT

JFK files: As Donald Trump looks to release classified documents, last living link to assassination drops bombshell
Antonio Veciana, 88, has authored a memoir that promises to shed light on one of the greatest mysteries of our time

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/long_reads/john-f-kennedy-assassination-cuba-cia-lee-harvey-oswald-antonio-veciana-a7957481.html

This is one of the best summary articles to appear in any newspaper on the subject of the assassination.

I have a life-long interest in the assassination, have read most of the important literature on it, have written published essays on the subject, and have always been a skeptic on the Warren Report.

Indeed, “skeptic” is too tame a word. I have always treated the Warren Report as a shameful compilation of lies since its publication.

One of the greatest minds of the 20th century, Bertrand Russell, after reading an advanced copy of the report back in the 1960s, said:

“If, as we are told, Oswald was the lone assassin, where is the issue of national security?”

That profound question has never been answered.

Readers may enjoy;

https://chuckmanwords.wordpress.com/2011/10/18/1544/

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Response to another reader who said: “The key to what happened centres on Kennedy’s sacking of John Foster Dulles in November 1962”

Yes, that and one or two other important events, but I think you mean his brother, Allen Dulles, Director of CIA.

The outcome of the Cuban Missile crisis, including Kennedy’s backchannel communication with Khrushchev, was another.

Kennedy opposed both Pentagon and CIA advice during the Crisis, and thank God that he did. They would have launched WWIII by landing troops to destroy the Soviet installations.

The CIA and Pentagon were ignorant of the fact that the Soviets had many thousands of troops in Cuba working on and guarding their medium-range missile installations.

The Soviet troops were equipped with a number of short-range Luna nuclear-armed missiles ready to be fired at any landing force.

I think perhaps the final spur for the assassins, if any were needed, was Kennedy’s romantic affair with Mary Pinchot (Meyer), a well-connected society type who had a project for world peace. She introduced Kennedy to marijuana in the White House and may well have introduced him to LSD.

She had a bit of a hare-brained scheme for getting eight high Washington society women to turn on their husbands to LSD and somehow manipulate them for world peace. The list of names does not come down to us, but they were all wives of major figures in Washington.

One can just imagine the mandarins at Langley listening to recordings of the Kennedy-Pinchot pillow-talk in 1963. And with Kennedy’s proved independent-mind set, I think they decided he was a danger to their idea of the United States.

Mary was assassinated less than a year after Kennedy, and her diary was stolen. She had got up a head of steam concerning what may have really happened to Kennedy while working on her own investigation, and being so well-connected, her investigation might well have been fruitful. After all, her ex-husband, Cord Meyer, was a high-ranking CIA operator.

She was completely aware of the things the CIA did and knew well many people like James Angleton and the Washington Post’s Ben Bradlee, almost certainly a covert CIA man.

By the way, many well-informed people believe Angleton himself ran the program of fake American defectors to the Soviet Union in the late-1950s, the one for which Oswald was recruited as a young Marine. Here was a young Marine in the late-1950s suddenly receiving communist literature in the mail at his base and who somehow mysteriously learned to speak Russian.

He was obviously being “sheep-dipped” for his “defection” to the Soviet Union. He then went to live in the Soviet Union for a couple of years, coming back to the United States with a Soviet bride, both of them admitted with relatively little trouble considering the harsh political climate then. They ended-up living among, and being assisted by, a community of Russian-speakers in Dallas, a truly remarkable connection.

The defection program was just the kind of goofy, elaborate scheme that that dangerous man, Angleton, was fond of. Years later, he was dismissed from the CIA, having caused a great many serious internal problems.

But he was still regarded as a demi-god in intelligence circles in the early 1960s, and his name comes up several times in key events around the assassination, especially for some years afterward. He was involved in retrieving secret files from Mexico City after the assassination, he was involved in events around Mary Pinchot’s murder, and he became embroiled in the infamous Nosenko affair at CIA during the 1970s, an affair with some connections to the assassination.

Having been part of the (secret) defector program and having returned to the US made Oswald a perfect candidate for patsy, being vulnerable to being described as a far-out communist, something he most certainly was not. We know Oswald was working as a paid FBI informant at the time (his informant number actually was discovered long ago), and he must have stumbled across the plotters in New Orleans who, in turn, saw his potential as a patsy.

The Kennedys were leaning hard in those last days on all the CIA-established Cuban refugee terror camps in an effort to improve American-Russian and American-Cuban relations. The CIA operations had been huge and made anything Osama bin-Laden later had in the mountains of Afghanistan look like scout camps. And, of course, the Kennedys well knew that the CIA often ignored or misinterpreted presidential directives with which its management disagreed, as they still do today. So, the FBI, undoubtedly against J Edgar Hoover’s personal wishes, was ordered to become involved in discovering and breaking-up facilities. Oswald was just one of their informants. He obviously hit the jackpot and paid with his life.

JOHN CHUCKMAN

POSTED RESPONSES TO A COLUMN BY ANDREW COHEN IN TORONTO’S GLOBE AND MAIL

The Kennedys were simply America’s Borgias.

The Borgias had grace and beauty and wealth, but they also were ruthless and murderous and had ambition beyond bounds.

The full story of the Kennedys’ greed and manipulation has not been – and likely never will be – told. Despite many revelations coming to light, the family has succeeded time and again in suppressing much evidence.

This film may or may not be what the author of this article claims, but it does seem strange to me a man who wants to be taken seriously would spend time criticizing a television show.

We know, absolutely, that such a show will be vapid, whether it dwells on the sleaze or not.

Here are some reflections on Kennedy, the president, people may enjoy:

https://chuckmanwordsincomments.wordpress.com/2010/11/19/the-dark-aspects-of-kennedys-road-to-the-white-house-were-far-darker-than-described-by-british-journalist-andrew-marr/
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Joe Kennedy wasn’t just a crook as a reader has commented.

He was a ruthless and highly immoral man whose behavior included acts like bringing home young women he picked up or paid for sex right in front of his family gathered in the living room.

He was also brutally anti-British in his views, and correspondingly somewhat of a Hitler admirer.

He was so stupidly outspoken in these unpleasant views that the British government asked the United States to withdraw him as ambassador to Britain, not a common occurrence in diplomacy, a request with which Roosevelt complied.

Joe made his fortune in illegal alcohol, working with some very unpleasant and murderous gangsters, a connection which was exploited later in getting funds and support for his son’s drive to be president.

Jack himself, while a far classier guy on the surface with his tailored suits and quotes and manners, shared a number of his father’s characteristics, albeit in varied forms.

John’s womanizing we all know about, although not everyone is aware that at least one of the women – Judith Exner, a woman who paid him calls right in the White House – was tied to high levels of the Mob.

And not everyone knows that one of his early relationships, while in the military, was with a woman German spy. J Edgar Hoover was on to it, and had it not been for the Kennedy wealth and influence, his career would have died right there.

The abuse of privilege, in avoiding responsibility for your actions, was just as big a part of the Kennedys as it was that dishonest mediocrity and ignorant frat boy, George W Bush.

Much was made of John’s PT-109 exploits at the time of his running, and he did help save a man’s life, but the entire incident – the loss of his craft and the misery of his crew – was owing to his incompetence and lack of appropriate caution as a commander.

The same behavior from anyone else, without the connections, might well have resulted in a court martial.

Kennedy’s good taste included taking on people like Theodore Sorensen as writer/advisor – his family wealth allowed them to hire what essentially became a platoon of smart flaks, people who helped very much in smoothing over the bumps in the road of family history and who gave an aura of intelligence and worth.

But it is certain that more dishonesty came into play here too. Sorensen almost certainly wrote Kennedy’s Pulitzer prize-winning book, although he was such a loyal follower he denied it always. Sorensen also, to a certainty, was author of speech phrases like “Ask not what….” If you read Sorensen’s book about Kennedy, the cadence and style of the writing are so recognizable.

John also played a very two-faced game in the White House with regard to Cuba. After the Missile Crisis blew up in his face – and the CIA, as well as attempting to assassinate Castro many times, had been very much in the business of planning another invasion of Cuba as Khrushchev feared when he considered sending missiles to Cuba – the agreement that ended the crisis was Kennedy’s agreeing to not invade Cuba as well as withdrawing certain missiles from Turkey.

Word of the agreement made the anti-Castro thugs the CIA had sponsored for years – Osama’s boys in the mountains made a peanut-sized operation compared to the multi-million dollar terror operation the CIA ran in the early 1960s (just one of countless examples of U.S. hypocrisy around the use of terror) – bitterly, fiercely angry, making them one of the prime suspects in Kennedy’s assassination.

Kennedy had his brother, as Attorney General and stand-in voice of the President, make a big show of raiding camps in the South where these thugs carried on with their CIA-provided weapons and training. Robert also secretly was in charge of more attempts to murder Castro.

The Kennedy brothers were always getting involved in heated battles. For reasons that still are not clear, Robert conducted a vendetta against a number of big mobsters, despite the fact that the Mob had financed his brother’s presidential campaign and kept such connections as Judith Exner. That behavior made the Mob another chief suspect for Kennedy’s assassination.

Both of the Kennedys actually, for whatever well-organized group killed Jack knew they also had to kill Robert if he was going to become President. Robert’s ruthless use of power meant that the full powers of the office of the president would go after his brother’s assassins, as the pathetic Warren Commission never made any attempt to do.

Sleaze in fancy suits, ruthless people with a veneer of class – that’s the Kennedys.

 

 

 

 

 

JOHN CHUCKMAN

POSTED RESPONSES TO A COLUMN BY ANDREW COHEN IN TORONTO’S GLOBE AND MAIL

The Kennedys were simply America’s Borgias.

The Borgias had grace and beauty and wealth, but they also were ruthless and murderous and had ambition beyond bounds.

The full story of the Kennedy’s greed and manipulation has not been – and likely never will be – told. Despite many revelations coming to light, the family has succeeded time and again in suppressing much evidence.

This film may or may not be what the author of this article claims, but it does seem strange to me a man who wants to be taken seriously would spend time criticizing a television show.

We know, absolutely, that such a show will be vapid, whether it dwells on the sleaze or not.

Here are some reflections on Kennedy, the president, people may enjoy:

https://chuckmanwordsincomments.wordpress.com/2010/11/19/the-dark-aspects-of-kennedys-road-to-the-white-house-were-far-darker-than-described-by-british-journalist-andrew-marr/
_______________________________

Joe Kennedy wasn’t just a crook as a reader has commented.

He was a ruthless and highly immoral man whose behavior included acts like bringing home young women he picked up or paid for sex right in front of his family gathered in the living room.

He was also brutally anti-British in his views, and correspondingly somewhat of a Hitler admirer.

He was so stupidly outspoken in these unpleasant views that the British government asked the United States to withdraw him as ambassador to Britain, not a common occurrence in diplomacy, a request with which Roosevelt complied.

Joe made his fortune in illegal alcohol, working with some very unpleasant and murderous gangsters, a connection which was exploited later in getting funds and support for his son’s drive to be president.

Jack himself, while a far classier guy on the surface with his tailored suits and quotes and manners, shared a number of his father’s characteristics, albeit in varied forms.

John’s womanizing we all know about, although not everyone is aware that at least one of the women – Judith Exner, a woman who paid him calls right in the White House – was tied to high levels of the Mob.

And not everyone knows that one of his early relationships, while in the military, was with a woman German spy. J Edgar Hoover was on to it, and had it not been for the Kennedy wealth and influence, his career would have died right there.

The abuse of privilege, in avoiding responsibility for your actions, was just as big a part of the Kennedys as it was that dishonest mediocrity and ignorant frat boy, George W Bush.

Much was made of John’s PT-109 exploits at the time of his running, and he did help save a man’s life, but the entire incident – the loss of his craft and the misery of his crew – was owing to his incompetence and lack of appropriate caution as a commander.

The same behavior from anyone else, without the connections, might well have resulted in a court martial.

Kennedy’s good taste included taking on people like Theodore Sorensen as writer/advisor – his family wealth allowed them to hire what essentially became a platoon of smart flaks, people who helped very much in smoothing over the bumps in the road of family history and who gave an aura of intelligence and worth.

But it is certain that more dishonesty came into play here too. Sorensen almost certainly wrote Kennedy’s Pulitzer prize-winning book, although he was such a loyal follower he denied it always. Sorensen also, to a certainty, was author of speech phrases like “Ask not what….” If you read Sorensen’s book about Kennedy, the cadence and style of the writing are so recognizable.

John also played a very two-faced game in the White House with regard to Cuba. After the Missile Crisis blew up in his face – and the CIA, as well as attempting to assassinate Castro many times, had been very much in the business of planning another invasion of Cuba as Khrushchev feared when he considered sending missiles to Cuba – the agreement that ended the crisis was Kennedy’s agreeing to not invade Cuba as well as withdrawing certain missiles from Turkey.

Word of the agreement made the anti-Castro thugs the CIA had sponsored for years – Osama’s boys in the mountains made a peanut-sized operation compared to the multi-million dollar terror operation the CIA ran in the early 1960s (just one of countless examples of U.S. hypocrisy around the use of terror) – bitterly, fiercely angry, making them one of the prime suspects in Kennedy’s assassination.

Kennedy had his brother, as Attorney General and stand-in voice of the President, make a big show of raiding camps in the South where these thugs carried on with their CIA-provided weapons and training. Robert also secretly was in charge of more attempts to murder Castro.

The Kennedy brothers were always getting involved in heated battles. For reasons that still are not clear, Robert conducted a vendetta against a number of big mobsters, despite the fact that the Mob had financed his brother’s presidential campaign and kept such connections as Judith Exner. That behavior made the Mob another chief suspect for Kennedy’s assassination.

Both of the Kennedys actually, for whatever well-organized group killed Jack knew they also had to kill Robert if he was going to become President. Robert’s ruthless use of power meant that the full powers of the office of the president would go after his brother’s assassins, as the pathetic Warren Commission never made any attempt to do.

Sleaze in fancy suits, ruthless people with a veneer of class – that’s the Kennedys.

 

 

 

 

 

 

JOHN CHUCKMAN

POSTED RESPONSES TO A COLUMN BY ANDREW MARR IN THE TELEGRAPH

It seems to me that Andrew Marr misses many of the juicy bits about Kennedy.

This is pretty tepid stuff, and none of it is news to people who lived in America at that time.

The treatment of Hubert Humphrey, one of the more honorable men to run for president in the 20th century, was very shabby.

But the Kennedys were ruthless people, all of them. They were the kind of people who would send a quick elbow into the face of an opponent in a race of any kind.

Britain knew what a truly nasty, prejudiced, and ruthless man the father was from the time he served as American ambassador. He left an outstandingly unfavorable impression.

The old man wasn’t just said to be a rum-runner during prohibition, that’s in fact how he made his fortune, and he maintained mob connections afterward.

The connections of the old man with the mob gave Jack a huge secret campaign contribution. There was a suitcase delivered with a $1 million cash gift, a very great deal of money in 1960.

Indeed, it has been reported many times that mob donors were extremely disappointed in Kennedy as President, accusing him of ingratitude.

The connections continued with Jack himself who was a friend of “the rat pack” in Vegas. One of Jack’s girlfriends, Judith Exner, was a former (?) girlfriend of Chicago mafia boss, Sam Giancana.

Perhaps the dirtiest Kennedy business was election fraud. Jack was elected by a very close vote, and it was fraud in Chicago that gave him Illinois plus fraud in Texas, courtesy of good old Lyndon, that tipped the total in his favor.

The election practices in Chicago were legendary when I was a young man. Vote counters who kept pencil lead under a fingernail to spoil paper ballots, local politicos who accompanied voters into the supposedly secret voting machines of the time, and the wholesale registration of names from local cemeteries as valid Democratic voters.

Lyndon Johnson’s career in politics in Texas is documented as having begun with local machine vote fraud with his first election to Congress. He made sure Kennedy got the same favorable treatment. His exclusion from any important roles in the administration was made all the more painful for knowing how he helped Kennedy get elected.

Mr Marr thinks Nixon might have made a good president if elected at a younger age, but there is little basis for that belief.

Nixon had a long and hateful record as a red-baiter. His first run for the Senate in California, while not involving vote fraud, very much involved the lowest of low tactics. He called the honorable woman, Helena Gahagan Douglas, who was his opponent, “pink right down to her underwear” among other charming epithets. Nixon’s work on the Alger Hiss case (a convicted spy) almost certainly involved fraudulent evidence from J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI. Hoover was always a friend and admirer of Nixon’s, Hoover being one of the most unsavory characters ever to hold power in America.

Kennedy’s entire presidency was riddled with ambiguities and dark doings, despite his heroic appearance.
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On the Cuban Missile Crisis, often cited as Kennedy’s best moment, there is a complex background which makes his role far less admirable and indeed helps make Kennedy responsible for its ever happening.

Kennedy was a martinet about military matters, and he dedicated his administration to getting rid of Castro. It was under Kennedy that many plans and attempts to murder Castro were made, reportedly his brother being the main report-to for the dirty work.

Yes, Kennedy was angry with the CIA for its failure at the Bay of Pigs invasion, but only because the failure embarrassed him, not because he didn’t wholeheartedly support the goal.

It was under Kennedy that the mafia was involved with the CIA in its efforts to kill Castro. At least two big mafia figures were involved in these efforts, Sam Giancana and Johnny Roselli. After Kennedy’s assassination, when it was reported that these men might be telling what they knew to Congressional investigators, they were both murdered in classic mafia style.

Kennedy kept a set of terrorist camps going and growing, run by the CIA and using Cuban émigrés, in places like Florida that make the efforts of Osama bin Laden in the mountains of Afghanistan look like Boy Scout stuff.

Millions of dollars were poured into training, equipment, and supplies and plans for dirty tricks. Some of the members of these vast terror groups shot up Soviet ships from boats, planted bombs in places like hotels, buzzed Cuban locations with planes, and even attacked those in the United States who did not support them.

American spy planes regularly flew over Cuba, and surreptitious missions were taken by submarine, landing cutthroats to do dirty work. And, of course, the U.S. refused to return Guantanamo to the Cubans from whom it was on lease, the lease having expired.

It truly did appear from both Castro’s and Russia’s point of view that America was preparing to invade Cuba.

Kruschev fixed upon the movement of missiles to Cuba to protect Castro. It still is not completely clear whether he planned to use them as bargaining chips or only as a defensive threat. In the end, the Missile Crisis was settled by an American commitment not to invade Cuba, plus some other matters as removing Jupiter missiles from Turkey.

It may be argued that Kennedy’s response to events in Cuba brought us closer to nuclear war than is generally known. The Russians had armed with nuclear warheads a number of the short-range missiles, as protection while the rest were assembled. The idiots in the Pentagon were ready to land an assault force immediately, and it is likely that they would have been met with tactical nuclear weapons on the beach which were in the battlefield commander’s control. Kennedy did not oppose the Pentagon, he only wanted to try another approach first. That was his merit.

More than a few people think that Kennedy’s settlement was the beginning of assassination plans by whatever group did in fact assassinate him. Kennedy had so many bitter enemies – the mafia, elements of the CIA, the ferocious and armed Cuban émigré community, plus others, including Israel for his intense secret opposition to its becoming a nuclear power – and no one who has studied events of that time carefully believes that poor old Oswald was anything but a patsy in some plot he did not even understand.

The modern history of America has a good deal in common with that of the Borgias in Italy. What we get on television and in newspapers and in most books is highly sanitized.