I wonder how many people realize that the first JFK conspiracy theorist was none other than President John F. Kennedy himself.
It all began with Kennedy reading a novel called Seven Days in May, which revolved around a military coup orchestrated by the Pentagon to protect the country from a president whose policies, in the eyes of the military establishment, constituted a grave threat to national security.
The novel was co-written by two journalists, Fletcher Knebel and Charles W. Bailey Jr. According to an article entitled “The Movie That JFK Wanted Made, But Didn’t Live to See” by Patrick Kiger, which is posted at www.weta.org, Knebel had been inspired to write the book after a conversation with U.S. Air Force Gen. Curtis LeMay, who had nothing but disdain for President Kennedy, with the feeling being mutual. According to the article, LeMay went off the record to “castigate JFK as cowardly in his handling of the Bay of Pigs crisis.” From that conversation, Knebel and Bailey wrote their novel about a right-wing military coup designed to oust the president from office to protect national security.
JFK read the novel in 1962. By that time, of course, the CIA’s ill-fated Bay of Pigs invasion had already occurred, an event that left Kennedy with lots of egg on his face. Kennedy was so angry at having been set up and double-crossed by the CIA that he vowed to tear the agency into a thousand pieces and, in the process, fired the much-revered Allan Dulles as CIA director, along with two of his principal deputies.
By that time, Kennedy had also fired U.S. Army Gen. Edwin Walker, a right-wing conservative who was caught indoctrinating his troops with literature from the John Birch Society, which viewed both JFK and his predecessor Dwight Eisenhower as covert communist agents.
Kennedy wanted the novel made into a movie, to serve as a warning to the American people of the grave danger that the national-security establishment posed to America’s republican form of government. In his article, Kiger points out: “As JFK aide Pierre Salinger later told journalist and author David Talbot, ‘Kennedy wanted Seven Days in May to be made as a warning to the generals. The President said, ‘The first thing I’m going to tell my successor is, ‘Don’t trust the military men–even on military matters.'”
Here’s what Kennedy said about the possibility of a military coup within the United States:
It’s possible. It could happen in this country, but the conditions would have to be just right. If, for example, the country had a young President, and he had a Bay of Pigs, there would be a certain uneasiness. Maybe the military would do a little criticizing behind his back, but this would be written off as the usual military dissatisfaction with civilian control. Then if there were another Bay of Pigs, the reaction of the country would be, “Is he too young and inexperienced?” The military would almost feel that it was their patriotic obligation to stand ready to preserve the integrity of the nation, and only God knows just what segment of democracy they would be defending if they overthrew the elected establishment…. Then, if there were a third Bay of Pigs, it could happen…. But it won’t happen on my watch.
Later, during the Cuban Missile Crisis, U.S. Attorney General Robert Kennedy told Soviet Ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin, “We are under severe stress. In fact we are under pressure from our military to use force against Cuba….If the situation continues much longer, the president is not sure that the military will not overthrow him and seize power.”
Of course, JFK wasn’t the first president to warn of such a danger. That’s precisely what Eisenhower warned in his remarkable Farewell Address, where he bluntly told the American people (and Kennedy) that the military-industrial complex, which, he observed, was entirely new to America’s governmental structure, posed a grave threat to the liberties and democratic processes of the American people.
Kennedy contacted his friend John Frankenheimer, the Hollywood director who had directed the Cold War thriller The Manchurian Candidate, who agreed to direct the film.
The movie — entitled Seven Days in May — starred Burt Lancaster, Kirk Douglas, Frederic March, and Ava Gardner. Unfortunately, it wasn’t released until after Kennedy’s assassination.
Now, before anyone cries, “Conspiracy theory!” recall that the scenario depicted in Seven Days in May actually played out in real life in Chile during the early 1970s, with the U.S. national-security establishment playing the principal role in the operation.
In 1970, Salvador Allende was duly elected president of Chile. A self-avowed socialist-communist, Allende began adopting many of types of economic policies that had been adopted by President Franklin Roosevelt during the 1930s as part of his New Deal program to deal with the Great Depression.
President Nixon decided that Allende posed a grave threat to U.S. national security and ordered his national-security establishment to take the necessary steps to oust him from office. When bribery of Chilean congressmen failed to prevent Allende’s installation as president, U.S. officials decided on a right-wing military coup — the same type of coup depicted in Seven Days in May.
The process necessarily entailed convincing the Chilean national-security establishment to carry out the coup. Chilean military officials were brought to the United States for training, where they were indoctrinated with the notion that a nation’s military establishment has the solemn duty to oust an elected president from office whose policies are threatening national security, which was precisely the mindset that both JFK and Ike were concerned about here at home within the Pentagon and the CIA.
The CIA proceeded to do everything it could to bring economic chaos and crisis to Chile, with the aim of causing the Chilean people to welcome the coup when it finally came. One of the things they did was bribe the nation’s trucking union to go on strike, so that food could not be delivered to towns and villages across the country.
One of the barriers the Pentagon faced was that the commanding general of the Chilean army, Gen. Rene Schneider, refused to go along with the coup. His position was that he had taken an oath to support and defend the Chilean constitution. Since Allende had been duly elected under the Constitution, Schneider’s position was that he should be permitted to complete his term and that the matter should be determined in the next national election.
That’s not the way Nixon, the Pentagon, the CIA, U.S. conservatives, and personell within the Chilean national-security establishment saw it. The way they viewed it was the same way that military officials in Seven Days in May viewed it — that when a president is implementing policies that pose a grave danger to national security, it is the solemn duty of the national-security establishment to protect national security by ousting him from office. In their eyes, the national-security establishment, not the president and not the Constitution, is the final and ultimate determiner of what constitutes a threat to national security and what needs to be done to remove it.
Since Schneider posed an insurmountable obstacle to the coup, Pentagon officials conspired to have him kidnapped and removed from the scene. Schneider was murdered during the kidnapping attempt.
In 1973, with the full support of the Pentagon and the CIA, Chilean Army Gen. Augusto Pinochet initiated a right-wing military coup in Chile that violently removed the popularly elected Allende from power. It then proceeded to do something that might have even shocked Kennedy and Eisenhower: Pinochet and his national-security state goons proceeded to round up some 30,000 people, incarcerate them in military dungeons or concentration camps, torture them, or execute them, all without any semblance of due process or a trial.
Their crime? They believed in socialism or communism, and therefore, in the eyes of both the Chilean national-security establishment and the U.S. national-security establishment (which was flooding the Pinochet regime with U.S.-taxpayer-provided foreign aid), that made them subject to be kidnapped, tortured, or murdered without due process or trial.
As I point out in my book Regime Change: The JFK Assassination (which is now ranked #60 in Amazon’s Top 100 Best-Selling Books in 20th Century American History and #16 in Kindle Short Reads in History), there are those who feel that it is just inconceivable that the U.S. national-security establishment would protect national security in the same way that the Chilean national-security establishment did. Oh sure, they say, that happens in other countries, even with the support of the U.S. national-security establishment, but it just could never happen here, not even if Kennedy was withdrawing U.S. troops from Vietnam, supposedly displaying cowardice at the Bay of Pigs, supposedly showing weakness toward the communists during the Cuban Missile Crisis, and reaching out to the Soviets and the Cubans in an attempt to establish friendly relations at the height of the Cold War, just as Allende was doing prior to his violent ouster from office.
John F. Kennedy obviously didn’t consider such a scenario to be inconceivable at all. After all, that’s why he wanted Seven Days in May made into a movie — to serve as a very real warning to the American people of the danger that a national-security apparatus poses to the freedom and well-being of the citizenry.