JFK (32 page)

There was a subtle reasoning behind the TFX decision. Jack Kennedy, Bobby Kennedy, McNamara, Goldberg, and many others of the inner circle were not at all concerned about the final outcome of an aircraft-to-be called the TFX. Kennedy was a World War II veteran and had been a member of Congress for most of the years since that time. He had seen nearly $3 trillion poured into the military-industrial machine during those years, and he had seen those weapons systems come and go.

To the Kennedy circle, the TFX, the Skybolt, the Dyna-Soar, the atomic-powered aircraft, and all the rest that had fallen into their laps with the election were just what Kennedy, Goldberg, and McNamara took them to be: devices that could be used to direct money into political districts that needed it for their own benefit and to assure the election of a Kennedy for years to come. This is why Gilpatric made the speech he did to the assembled bankers, and this is why McNamara said that the day had passed when the services would be allowed to develop their own weapons systems.

The services and the great industries for whom the military establishment existed were staggered by these developments. They had never encountered such a serious challenge. The one-two combination of punches they had suffered had them on the ropes. On January 17, 1961, they had heard Dwight Eisenhower, in a farewell address to the nation, urge vigilance regarding the dangers to liberty implicit in a vast military establishment and caution against the power of the military-industrial complex.

Now they had a President who was not just talking about that danger, but was taking their dollars away to use them as he chose. This was the underlying significance of that TFX decision.

Let’s return to a closing statement by “Ros” Gilpatric in his bankers’ speech of April 9, 1963: “I have not the slightest sympathy for the view sometimes heard that this country couldn’t afford disarmament.” Now, why was that on his mind, and on the minds of the entire Kennedy inner circle, at that particular time? The answer is quite startling. The Kennedys were counting on at least eight years in office to move mountains. At the same time, their determined opposition was keeping an eye on the same clock. The 1964 election was rapidly approaching.

At the beginning of this book, reference was made to a novel by Leonard Lewin,
Report From Iron Mountain on the Possibility and Desirability of Peace.
It happens that the book concerned a reputed top-level study that was officially commissioned in August 1963 but in fact dated back to early 1961. In other words, the study process started, according to Lewin, right after the inauguration, with the arrival of John F. Kennedy and his new administration.

A purported member of the Iron Mountain Special Study Group believes that the group’s mission was delineated by McNamara, William Bundy, and Dean Rusk. The members of the Kennedy circle were concerned that no really serious work had been done by any government instrumentality in planning for peace. The report contains a most portentous line: “The idea of the Special Study. . . was worked out early in 1963. . . . What helped most to get it moving were the big changes in military spending that were being planned. . . .”

The chronology of these developments, which are very cleverly woven into this novel by Lewin, is important. It began with the inauguration. The first big-money item was the TFX. That orchestrated solution was stretched from the inauguration to November 1962. The reaction of the military, of the aeronautical industry, and of Congress was predictable. Then, in April 1963, McNamara announced that things had changed. A few days later, Gilpatric made his important speech, and the Special Study Group was selected in August 1963. The Kennedys were on their way. They were going to ride on the TFX $6.5 billion into a second term, and then they were going to prepare America for peace. The Vietnam War and its hundreds of billions of dollars in expenditures were nowhere in their plans.

Could America really afford the Kennedys?

This Kennedy agenda began to surface with the TFX decision and was confirmed by the existence—known to very few—of the Special Study Group for “the possibility and desirability of peace.” Nothing, absolutely nothing, could have had a greater impact on the enormous military machine of this nation than the specter of peace. This Kennedy plan jeopardized not hundreds of millions, not even billions, but trillions of dollars. (The Cold War has cost no less than $6 trillion.) It shook the very foundation upon which our society has been built over the past two thousand years.

As the
Report From Iron Mountain
says:

John F. Kennedy and his advisers were playing a dangerous game as they expertly moved along the calendar toward reelection in 1964. Kennedy had accepted the challenge. The duel, perhaps the greatest in the history of this country, had begun. To begin with, he needed a strong plank upon which to build his platform for reelection. He chose Vietnam, the cessation of all American military involvement there.

As his first step, Kennedy sent Gen. Maxwell Taylor and Secretary McNamara to Saigon in late September 1963. They returned to the White House and presented him with their voluminous report on October 2, 1963. In part that report said: “It should be possible to withdraw the bulk of U.S. personnel by that time. . . .”

“That time,” as stated clearly in their report, was the end of 1965. One thousand troops were already slated to come home in time for Christmas 1963.

Kennedy planned to get out of Vietnam and to turn the war over to a new leader in South Vietnam. This was the first order of business. To his adversaries, this confirmed the nature of the course he had chosen. They began to move, to move swiftly and with finality.

Ngo Dinh Diem, the first president of South Vietnam, was killed on November 1, 1963, and Kennedy was killed on November 22, 1963.

Former Presidents Gerald Ford and Richard Nixon have written that President Kennedy was killed by a lone assassin named Lee Harvey Oswald. The Warren Commission reported the same thing.

That was not the way it happened at all.

PRESIDENTIAL POWER: Does it come with the office, or must the incumbent fight for it every step of the way? As James David Barber states in his book
The Presidential Character
:
¹
“Political power is like nuclear energy available to create deserts or make them bloom. The mere having of it never yet determined its use. The mere getting of it has not stamped into the powerful some uniform shape.”

John F. Kennedy came to the office of the presidency with style and enough experience to know that he would have to fight to wrest political power from entrenched interests of enormous strength. If anything hit President Kennedy harder than the utter defeat of the Cuban exile brigade on the beaches of the Bay of Pigs, it was the realization that he had let himself be talked into that operation by inexperienced men in the CIA.

Kennedy blamed himself and believed that he should not have authorized the invasion. On the other hand, the Cuban Study Group (see below) concluded that the cancellation of the crucial air strike was the cause of the failure of the Zapata operation.

CIA director Allen Dulles had not been there at the time of the final decision making or at the time of the invasion itself. He was on vacation. This was a most unusual absence by the man responsible for the entire operation.

In his book
Kennedy
,
²
Ted Sorensen makes a good case for his doctrine that “the Kennedys never fail.” However, Kennedy did fail in his attempt to gain full control of the CIA and its major partners in the Defense Department. It was the most crucial failure of his abbreviated presidency. He recognized his adversary during his first term, and as he related confidentially to intimate acquaintances, “When I am reelected. I am going to break that agency into a thousand pieces.” He meant to do it, too, but the struggle cost him his life.

Former President Harry S. Truman was deeply disturbed when he learned of the murder of Jack Kennedy in Dallas. That experienced old veteran of political wars saw an ominous link between the death of the President and the CIA. One month after that terrible event, just time enough to get his thoughts in order and on paper, Truman wrote a column that appeared in the
Washington Post
on December 21, 1963. He expressed his doubts about the CIA directly:

Truman’s characterization of the CIA as “a symbol of sinister and mysterious foreign intrigue” is, unfortunately, quite accurate. That “foreign intrigue” involved Cuba, Castro, and John F. Kennedy, at least in the minds of Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford, as is evidenced in their later writings about the assassination. And it was Lyndon B. Johnson who said the government operated a “Murder Inc.” in the Caribbean.

It is absolutely astounding that when the thoughts of these four presidents turned to the murder of JFK, they all wove a fabric of sinister intrigue that included the CIA in the scenario of his death. These men were telling us something. It is time we listened to and learned from what they have said.

The power of any agency that is allowed to operate in secrecy is boundless. The CIA knows this, and it has used its power to its own advantage. Only three days after the disastrous Cuban defeat, Kennedy set up a Cuban Study Group headed by Gen. Maxwell Taylor to “direct special attention to the lessons which can be learned from recent events in Cuba.”

With that action, which received little notice at the time, the President declared war on the agency. The Cuban Study Group was one of the most important creations of the Kennedy presidency, and it was the source of one of the major pressure points on the way to the guns of Dallas on November 22, 1963.

President Kennedy was seriously upset by the failure of the CIA and the Joint Chiefs of Staff to provide him with adequate information and support prior to his approval of the brigade landing at the Bay of Pigs. He was also upset by the results of the total breakdown of CIA leadership during the operation that followed that landing.
³

Kennedy’s good friend Supreme Court justice William O. Douglas, in recalling a discussion he had with Kennedy shortly after the disaster, said:

Can any President “ever be strong enough to really rule” the CIA and the Defense Department? Eisenhower had learned that he was not strong enough when a U-2 went down in the heart of Russia despite his specific “no-overflight” orders in 1960.

Kennedy set out to prove that he was “strong enough,” and he might have done so had he had a second term in office. Instead, he was first overwhelmed and then murdered.

Each member of the Cuban Study Group was chosen for a particular reason. Gen. Maxwell Taylor, for example, had been in retirement since he had differed, in public, with the Eisenhower policy concerning the strength of the U.S. Army and had resigned as its chief of staff. He had not been involved in any way with the decision-making process for the Cuban invasion. In fact, Kennedy had never met General Taylor prior to 1961.