This is the best book on JFK's assassination. Douglass not only establishes that the CIA conspired to and committed the murder and names names up to the level of Richard Helms (operations chief) above which the trail of responsibility and command disappears, he also untangles all of the CIA misdirections--for instance, their misdirection to Soviet Russia--which have made various investigations so confusing, establishes who Oswald was and what he thought he was doing (protecting the president), and how the coverup happened, and why, and who was involved at that point. Most important of all, Douglass provides brilliant analysis and original research on the motives--on who JFK was and what he had done and was doing that prompted the assassination.
Douglass assesses the Warren Commission Report and all the research and analysis that has been done since then, and provides detailed discussions of the shooters, the witnesses, the secondary plot (Chicago), and all the other issues that have arisen from misdirection, destroyed evidence, missing or mishandled evidence, misinterpreted evidence (deliberate and not), the tragic lives of people who knew some part of the truth and suffered because of it (or were killed) and much more. He is totally convincing on CIA guilt for the assassination.
But, as I said, his most important contribution is the CONTEXT, and why it matters.
In summary, what he says is that JFK's refusal to nuke Russia during the Cuban Missile Crisis was the heart of the motive. He stood alone against the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the entire "MIC" on that issue, with only his brother Bobby as an ally. He opened backchannels to Krushchev and Castro, to evade CIA monitoring, and to negotiate a new era of world peace (peaceful compe ion of the two economic systems, end to the proxy wars such as Vietnam). The Joint Chiefs felt that they had missile superiority over Russia, would "win" a nuclear war with Russia and should strike while they had the edge. Kennedy thought they were insane. Kennedy proceeded with his plans for world peace--first of all, by a secret agreement to withdraw U.S. missiles from Turkey (on Russia's border) in exchange for Russia withdrawing its missiles from Cuba, by sending wheat to Russia after a Russian harvest failure, the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty (first treaty limiting nukes), executive orders to de-escalate U.S. troops in Vietnam and other actions.
The Bay of Pigs fiasco, in the first months of JFK's presidency, was the CIA and the Miami mafia's doing. The CIA Director, Allen Dulles, lied to JFK that the invasion had local support in Cuba, and, when no local support materialized in Cuba, tried to blackmail JFK into involving the U.S. military in support of the ragtag band of CIA operatives who had "invaded" the island. As the result of that episode, JFK fired Dulles and vowed to "smash the CIA into a thousand pieces." (Douglass points to Allen Dulles as probable master-mind of the assassination, but doesn't nail him as well as he does Richard Helms. Dulles was no longer Director at the time of the assassination but could well have still been in control of various parts of it or all of it.)
The CIA was, in fact, doing this sort of thing to JFK all over the world--creating contrived, CIA-funded groups and factions, or outright false rebel groups (no group, as in Cuba) which were simply fronts for the CIA to control the country and to smash legitimate movements for social justice and sovereignty. Vietnam's communist party was, above all, a movement for social justice and sovereignty, led by Vietnamese hero Ho Chi Minh who had driven the French colonialists out of Vietnam and who was by no means hostile to the U.S. at the time that Vietnam declared its independence. The "South Vietnam" opposition was real but was far outnumbered by pro-Ho Chi Minh patriots and leftists, and was very, very corrupt. But it took JFK a long time to realize what the CIA was doing and to begin taking steps to the foil them. Communications were not instant in those days. JFK was often misinformed about what was going on in Vietnam, for instance, and would find out, after the fact, that his orders had not been obeyed.
Then came the Cuban Missile Crisis. Russia put nuke missiles in Cuba BECAUSE OF THE CIA'S ATTEMPTED INVASION OF CUBA (the "Bay of Pigs"). It was a provocative but, in these cir stances, an understandable action. (They weren't suicidal. They thought Cuba, an important ally, was going to be invaded again and that their missiles would deter it.) It was during this crisis that JFK's "learning curve" about the CIA and the MIC took a steep jump into enlightenment. He was dealing with people who thought nothing of hundreds of thousands of casualties on the east coast of the U.S., during a nuclear exchange, and the obliteration of an entire country, Russia, and the island of Cuba--with first strikes. They were arrayed against him with what was, to him, this insane notion.
In addition to meticulously laying JFK's growth as a man and a president, and his change from a "Cold Warrior" to a man saw beyond the "Cold War" to a peaceful world, Douglass provides CONTEXT that helps explain his opponents' thinking--which was, after he refused to strike Russia, that HE was the traitor! His peaceful resolution of the Cuban Missile Crisis and his subsequent actions, as his belief in diplomacy and peace grew, only confirmed their view. That was the best of them--those with genuine but deluded and twisted patriotism. Some were just insane powermongers and/or war profiteers--such as those we have seen recently, in our government, with the Bush Junta.
This is Why. It. Still. Matters.
Similar forces of vast secrecy, powermongering and war profiteering--some with roots back to those assassins, and some a new breed of the same--are still operating within our national political establishment and certainly within our government and military. That is why it matters! Things did, indeed, go very, very wrong in November 1963, and they have never been righted. Our government is now more secretive and undemocratic than it has ever been; it can be easily--EASILY--turned to war, mass murder, torture and other heinous crimes, and there is nothing that we can do about it. It all gets swept under the rug.
Douglass also addresses some things that have always bothered me (besides the assassination itself and the coverup), for instance, was LBJ (JFK's VP and successor) involved in the assassination? Douglass doesn't think he was, but establishes that he was involved in the coverup and convincingly establishes his reasons for that. The CIA misdirection (of the assassination) to Russia (by sending low level operative Oswald to Russia and returning him here in a state of mystification as to what his mission was) was intended to force his successor, LBJ, to nuke Russia in retaliation for the murder of the President. The CIA wanted, in this way, to achieve what they couldn't achieve with JFK as President--the obliteration of Russia. Herbert Hoover (of all people) informed LBJ of this misdirection just days after the assassination, and LBJ, a) did not want to nuke Russia for something they didn't do; and b) did not want the American people to find any of this out, because LBJ was not at all hostile to militarism and war (as JFK had become) and did not want the American people to turn against the MIC.
Three days after JFK's assassination, LBJ said, "Now they can have their war." He was speaking of the CIA and Vietnam.
Douglass doesn't go into the 1964 election--a year after JFK's assassination, with LBJ as the Democratic candidate. But his book leads up to it. JFK had intended to run on a platform of world peace in 1964 (Douglass does do ent this). He believed that the American people would be with him on this and it is clear that he would have won that election, hands down. How do I know this? Because LBJ ran on a peace platform and won one of the biggest presidential victories in our history. That was my first vote for president and I remember it well. I voted for peace and so did over 60% of the American people. The trouble was that LBJ was lying. He was already undoing JFK's de-escalation and planning a major war--to satisfy the war profiteer interests and the "anti-communists" and their allies, the corporatists, the banksters and the millionaires who dreaded social justice and other "communist" ideas, and, of course, the CIA, who had worked so hard to turn the extremely corrupt, fascist South Vietnamese 1%-ers and their leaders into a government that the U.S. could pretend to be "defending."
Peace would have won. That. Is. Why. It. Still. Matters.
Not many people know this, but 56% of the American people opposed the war on Iraq (Feb. '03, all polls). How this mostly peace-loving country was turned, once again, into the looting base for war profiteers and mass murderers and torturers and international scofflaws, with its democratic traditions, rights and love of justice and fairness shredded almost beyond repair, is OUR story NOW. It is the story of those of us who remember November 22, 1963, and those too young to remember.
"JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters" is not just highly recommended. It is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand our world, now.
Douglass is writing two more books--on Martin Luther King's assassination and Robert Kennedy's assassination, which occurred in the same year, 1968, only five years after JFK's assassination, with protests against the Vietnam War raging, and both of these leaders opposing the war. I look forward to those books. If the official stories are also wrong on those murders--and, from what I've read, they probably are--I would guess that digging out the truth will be harder in those cases than with JFK's murder. The techniques of misdirection and disinformation in a domestic assassination would likely be better honed five years later, colluders and cover would be more secure, and the perps bolder.
My guess: The CIA did both murders and the motive was similar--keeping the country on a war footing for its advantages to secret powermongers and for the profit of the "welfare capitalists" living on the public dole and planning world dominion. I am especially su ious about RFK's assassination. MLK's murder could have been ugly, hate-filled southern whites--they had murdered before--but given MLK's dramatic speech at Riverside Church eloquently condemning the Vietnam War--and the proximity of MLK's and RFK's murders (only three months apart), it is quite feasible that it had the same motive and the same perps (though different operatives): continued war and war profiteering, and smashing the hugely popular peace and justice movement that had arisen around these two leaders.
I await Douglass' research and analysis, in these next two books. I know less about these assassinations than about JFK's, for the simple reason that I couldn't bear to read about them; I became so disgusted that I just turned it all off, for a long, long time. This was a mistake. Our society has been gravely poisoned by these events and the remedy is not to close our eyes, but to figure out what the poison is and purge it. The remedy is openness and honesty--and also determination to restore our country's health and try to create a better world. Burying your head in the sand is not a remedy.
Douglass makes this very clear. The healing must start with the truth about JFK's murder, that elements within our own government and society killed the president because he wanted to create a more peaceful world.
He served in the U.S. Navy in WW II and suffered wounds in combat from which he had never fully recovered (chronic back pain). He was also a "Cold Warrior" until the Cuban Missile Crisis. That he could see beyond that paranoia is what makes him so special, and that and the coverup are what makes his murder such a terrible wound, from which many of us have never recovered. He had the ability to CHANGE--to abandon the politics of war and try to invent the politics of peace: helping the "evil communists" with their wheat failure, making treaties with them about nukes, talking to them, listening to them--hearing about Kruschev's problems with his own militarists from Krushchev himself, and trying to evaluate his evident desire for a peaceful world, without CIA filtering, lies, distortions, misdirection and arrogance. JFK took these steps though he had been schooled to do otherwise--to hate, fear and fight communists--because, when faced with nuclear armageddon, he found that he could not do that to the human race and determined to find humanity's way OUT of this conflict.
It's not that one leader is so important. No individual leader ever is. And it's not that JFK didn't make mistakes. He certainly did. It's all of us that matter and how we, collectively, govern ourselves, and what we believe in, and live for--and dream of. A world without war. A world without want. A government that truly reflects our own generous and peaceful spirit. A country and society that we can be truly proud of, in our deepest selves. Those shots in Dallas were aimed at all of us, as a nation, from within, by our own militarists and war profiteers. And until we face that awful reality, we cannot recover from it.
The OP asks for "accountability" for those who did it. That is basically impossible. But exposing the truth, and reforming or abolishing the ins utions that still operate in this way--in obsessive secrecy, in violation of the rule of law, for war and other profit--these actions ARE possible. Holding the system accountable IS possible. Renewing our democratic spirit IS possible.
We've just gone through a fresh set of horrors from the militarists among us, who are very like the militarists of 1963. They have cleverer ways of controlling our government now and even less accountability. We need to address this ulative militarism and secrecy. That IS possible. Difficult, but possible. But it has to begin with knowing what you are up against, facing the reality of it, understanding its origins, and forming your own view of what democracy is all about, and fighting for accountability NOW. We can't do 1963 over. All we have is now. Is it to be an oblivious now, in which huge crimes, treason, lawlessness and murder get swept away as if they never happened, and then get repeated in ugly cycles of mass murder and mass looting? Or is it to be a conscious now, fully informed about the past, awake, aware and determined to make a a better country and a better world?
That is why it still matters.
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