If John Kennedy were president today, there never would have been a Russian invasion of Ukraine. That’s because of two things: (1) Kennedy’s unique ability to step into the shoes of an adversary in an attempt to resolve a disagreement; and (2) Kennedy’s willingness to stand up against the Pentagon and the CIA and their fierce anti-Russia animus and ferocious anti-communist crusade.
As longtime readers of FFF know, for the past several years I have focused much of my attention on the Kennedy administration and the Kennedy assassination. This is best reflected by my new book An Encounter with Evil: The Abraham Zapruder Story, FFF’s other books relating to the assassination, including The Kennedy Autopsy and The Kennedy Autopsy 2 (both by me) and JFK’s War with the National-Security Establishment: Why Kennedy Was Assassinated (by Douglas P. Horne), and FFF conferences relating to the JFK administration and assassination, videos of which can be found in the multimedia section of FFF’s website.
The natural question arises: “Jacob, why do you do this? That was some 60 years ago. What possible relevance does it have to our lives today?”
The answer is a simple one: The Kennedy administration and the Kennedy assassination bear a direct relationship to the deep and perpetual — and now highly dangerous — foreign-policy crises in which our nation remains mired. More important, they point the way out of this horrific, never-ending morass of foreign-policy crises and an ever-shifting array of official enemies, adversaries, and opponents.
The Cold War, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, coups, invasions, assassinations, regime-changes, sanctions, embargoes, alliances with dictatorial regimes, war on terrorism, war on Islam, Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, North Korea, Cuba, Venezuela, Iran, Ukraine, and on and on on. The crises and ever-changing official enemies go on forever.
Is this the way you want to live your life — under a never-ending series of foreign-policy crises, not to mention fiscal and monetary crises arising largely from out-of-control federal spending on the U.S. national-security establishment and its ever-growing army of voracious “defense” contractors?
Not me. I want to live my life in a normally functioning society — one based on liberty, peace, prosperity, and harmony with the people of the world.
Is that possible? You bet it is! And by studying the Kennedy administration and the Kennedy assassination, we can get our nation out of this morass and back on the right road. That’s why I continue focusing people’s attention on JFK. I recommend starting with JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters by James W. Douglass. I then recommend going to my new book An Encounter with Evil: The Abraham Zapruder Story.
How would Kennedy have resolved the Ukraine crisis? He would have put himself into the shoes of the Russians to determine what it was that they wanted. He would have figured out that they didn’t want U.S. nuclear missiles pointed at them from their very own borders.
Kennedy would have understood how they felt about that. How can we be certain of that? Because when the Soviets were installing nuclear missiles in Cuba that were going to be pointed at the U.S., U.S. officials, including JFK, objected — vehemently objected. In fact, the reaction from the Pentagon and the CIA was so fierce that they were pressuring Kennedy to immediately attack and invade Cuba.
Kennedy instead put himself into the shoes of the Soviets and figured out why they were installing their missiles in Cuba. It was to deter another invasion by the U.S. national-security establishment (after the failed invasion at the Bay of Pigs).
Therefore, Kennedy fashioned a deal in which he guaranteed that he would not permit the Pentagon and the CIA to invade Cuba again. The Soviets, for their part, withdrew their missiles. Crisis over.
Oh, except for one thing. At the last minute of the negotiations, the Soviets stated that they wanted Kennedy to withdraw U.S. nuclear missiles pointed at the Soviet Union that the Pentagon had installed in Turkey. JFK understood why they would not want those missiles there. He secretly agreed with the Soviets to remove them.
The Pentagon and the CIA were livid over what Kennedy had done. They considered it to be the biggest defeat in U.S. history. They compared Kennedy’s handling of the crisis to Neville Chamberlain’s appeasement of Hitler at Munich. As I point out in my new book, during the negotiations U.S. Attorney General Bobby Kennedy stated that there was even a grave threat of a military takeover of the federal government.
No president since Kennedy has been willing to take on the Pentagon and the CIA with respect to foreign affairs. As Michael J. Glennon, professor of law at Tufts University, points out in his excellent book National Security and Double Government (which I highly recommend), it is the national-security establishment that is in charge of the federal government. The other three sections of the federal government, including the president, operate in support.
As I also explain in my new book, Kennedy was upsetting the anti-Russia, anti-communist applecart. That’s because he was determined to bring an end to the fierce and ferocious anti-Russia, anti-communist animus that was driving the U.S. national-security establishment. Kennedy announced a new direction for America — one that was based on peaceful and friendly relations with the Soviet Union and the rest of the communist world. In his Peace Speech at American University a few months before his assassination, he even issued words of praise for the Soviet Union. Can you even imagine President Biden doing such a thing? If he did, national-security statists would viciously condemn him, just as national-security statists viciously condemned Kennedy.
The Pentagon and the CIA were convinced that Kennedy’s new direction for America posed a grave threat to national security, just as they did when Guatemalan president Jacobo Arbenz announced the same type of policy ten years before. The CIA targeted Arbenz for regime-change. If he had not voluntarily fled the country, there is virtually no doubt that the CIA would have assassinated him.
Equally important, if Kennedy’s different vision for America had succeeded, the U.S. national-security establishment knew that it would have been finished. Kennedy still had another year in office. Moreover, it was a virtual certainty that he would smash the likely Republican nominee for president, Barry Goldwater, in the 1964 election, just as LBJ later did. That would mean another four years in which to implement his different vision for America. At the end of his second term, Bobby Kennedy stood a good chance of then being elected president.
By that time, there would have been no more Cold War, no Vietnam War, no more anti-communist regime-change operations, no more anti-communist assassinations, no more anti-communist coups, and no more anti-communist crusade.
Moreover, the Kennedys would never have permitted the Pentagon and the CIA to begin intervening in the Middle East. Therefore, there never would have been terrorist blowback, including 9/11. Therefore, there wouldn’t have been a war on terrorism and, therefore, no invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq.
Indeed, there would have been no more NATO and, therefore, no NATO threat to absorb Ukraine, which means that the Pentagon would not be able to use NATO to install install its nuclear missiles on Russia’s border with Ukraine. Thus, there would have been no reason for Russia to invade Ukraine.
In other words, the Pentagon, the CIA, and the NSA would have been left twiddling their thumbs for five years and possibly longer. No big official enemies. No ginned-up anti-Russia, anti-communist crises and wars. No perpetual chaos. No forever wars. Americans would undoubtedly have demanded the restoration of their founding governmental system of a limited-government republic and the dismantling of their post-World War II national-security state governmental structure, along its dark-side, omnipotent powers of assassination, kidnapping, torture, indefinite detention, and mass secret surveillance.
Kennedy’s assassination five months after his Peace Speech at American University in June 1963 put an end to his different direction for America. But at least his vision pointed the way out of the deep and highly dangerous morass into which our nation is now mired.
An Encounter with Evil: The Abraham Zapruder Story. Buy it today at Amazon. $9.95 Kindle. $14.95 print.