One of the most under-reported aspects of President John F. Kennedy’s term in office was his decision to end the Cold War and establish peaceful and friendly relations with the Soviet Union, Cuba, and the rest of the communist world. In 1963 America, that was a remarkable — and highly dangerous — thing for any president to do.
After all, that’s what got the democratically elected president of Guatemala, Jacobo Arbenz, regime-changed by the CIA in 1954, six years before Kennedy became president. Having no interest in helping the United States wage the Cold War, Arbenz reached out to the Soviets in a spirit of peace and friendship and was immediately deemed a threat to U.S. national security. He was ousted from power in a violent coup orchestrated by the CIA.
Ten years after the Kennedy assassination, the democratically elected president of Chile, Salvador Allende, was also ousted in a coup that was orchestrated by both the CIA and the Pentagon. The reason? Allende had no interest in waging the Cold War. Instead, like Arbenz, he reached out to the Soviets and Cubans in a spirit of peace and friendship, which is why the Pentagon and the CIA deemed him a threat to national security, both here in the United States as well as in Chile.
Kennedy challenged the national-security state
That is precisely what Kennedy was doing. He was openly challenging the prevailing mindset in Washington, a mindset that was firmly ensconced within the U.S. national-security establishment. It was a mindset that held that there was an international communist conspiracy to take over the world that was supposedly based in Moscow. The only way to defeat this conspiracy and prevent America from going Red, it was believed, was to wage the Cold War against “godless communism” and against communist nations, especially those within the Soviet bloc.
Kennedy threw down the gauntlet in his famous Peace Speech at American University on June 10, 1963. While he didn’t formally declare an end to the Cold War, that was the practical import of his message. He pointed out that there was no reason for the United States and the Soviet Union to have a hostile relationship. The two nations had worked together to win World War II, Kennedy pointed out, and there was no reason why they couldn’t work together peacefully and harmoniously, notwithstanding their different ideologies.
Needless to say, the U.S. national-security establishment was vehemently opposed to Kennedy’s new direction for America, just as they were opposed to the same vision when it was expressed by Jacobo Arbenz in 1954 and Salvador Allende in 1970. In the eyes of the Pentagon and the CIA, the Cold War was a war to the finish. The communists were hell-bent on conquering the United States and the rest of the world, military and CIA officials believed, and would never cease trying to do so. In their minds, Kennedy was engaging in naive thinking and, in the process, endangering the United States.
Interestingly, the issue raised by Kennedy in his speech was never seriously discussed or debated within the mainstream press or among the American people, especially since he was assassinated just a few months later. After his assassination, his successor, President Lyndon Johnson, who was on the same page as the Pentagon and the CIA, continued moving American down the Cold War road.
Was Kennedy right? Should the United States have ended the Cold War in 1963? Could the United States and the Soviet Union have peacefully coexisted rather than continued engaging in a hostile relationship?
The Cold War was the wrong war
I submit that Kennedy was right, but I go a step further. I say that the Cold War should never have been waged in the first place. Doing so was one of the greatest mistakes in U.S. history, one that came with massive death, suffering, and destruction of the rights and liberties of the American people.
The Cold War also fundamentally altered America’s governmental structure by converting the federal government from its founding system of a limited-government republic to a national-security state, a type of totalitarian system in which officials wield omnipotent dark-side powers, such as assassination, kidnapping, torture, indefinite detention, coups, and alliances with foreign dictatorships.
Over time, the national-security establishment — the Pentagon, the CIA, and the NSA — effectively became a separate branch of the federal government — and the most powerful branch. Today, it is that branch that actually runs the federal government, with the other three branches maintaining a veneer of being in control but in actuality deferring to the overwhelming power and control of the Pentagon, the CIA, and the NSA.
The Cold War became a lucrative racket that enriched not only the national-security establishment but also its ever-growing army of “defense” contractors who were feeding at the public trough.
Waging the Cold War caused the United States to get embroiled in two land wars in Asia, one in Korea, and one in Vietnam, which unnecessarily cost the lives of more than 100,000 U.S. soldiers.
The Cold War also brought the United States and the Soviet Union to within an inch of all-out nuclear war during the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962, a crisis that was in large part caused by the U.S. national-security establishment.
Perhaps most important, the Cold War stultified the consciences of the American people and warped and perverted their moral values, a phenomenon that unfortunately continues to exist today.
Why did the United States decide to wage the Cold War? After all, as Kennedy pointed out in his Peace Speech, the United States and the Soviet Union had partnered together in World War II to defeat Nazi Germany. Why couldn’t they continue to work together after the war was over? Why was it necessary for the United States to immediately go into a Cold War against its wartime partner and ally as soon as World War II was over?
With its invasion of Russia, Nazi Germany came extremely close to conquering the entire nation. In the process of doing so, it wreaked massive death and destruction across Russia. By the end of the war, Russia had lost more than 20 million people. Moreover, the entire nation, including its industrial capacity, was decimated.
When Soviet troops began pushing Nazi troops back toward Germany, they necessarily did so by invading and occupying Eastern European nations. By the time Germany surrendered, the Soviet Union was occupying Eastern Europe and the eastern half of Germany.
After the war was over, the Soviet Union refused to return to its borders and instead insisted on continuing to occupy and control Eastern Europe and East Germany. The Soviet’s actions weren’t justifiable in a legal sense, but they were certainly understandable in a practical sense. The Soviets didn’t want another German invasion of their homeland. They looked on Eastern Europe as a buffer against that possibility. They also saw a divided Germany as an additional insurance policy against another German invasion.
U.S. officials took the Soviet Union’s decision and used it to justify the Cold War. They said that the Soviet Union’s aggressive actions against Eastern Europe and East Germany proved that the communists were hell-bent on conquering the world, including Western Europe and the United States. That’s why U.S. officials brought NATO into existence — ostensibly to protect Western Europe from a Soviet attack.
That rationale was pure nonsense. There was never any reasonable possibility that the Soviet Union was going to initiate a new world war against Western Europe, especially since that would almost certainly have meant going to war against the United States. Remember, after all, that at the end of World War II, the Soviet Union was decimated while the United States still had its industrial might. Moreover, the United States had nuclear weapons and had shown a willingness to use them against populated cities.
There were people within the United States who were determined to convert America’s governmental system to a national-security state. In order to do that, they needed to scare the American people to death. That’s what they did with “godless communism” and the Soviet Union. They made Americans convinced that the Reds were coming to get them. If the federal government wasn’t converted to a national-security state, the argument went, the Reds would succeed in taking over America. Before long, communists would be running the federal government and America’s public schools.
Still shell-shocked over the massive death and destruction wreaked by World War II, a war that most Americans were opposed to entering prior to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, the American people passively deferred to the judgment of U.S. officials. Most everyone, including Senator John Kennedy, became a Cold Warrior and an anti-communist crusader.
Here in the United States, officials went after people who believed in communism with a vengeance. They didn’t kill them, but they did everything they could to destroy them. That’s what the McCarthy hearings were all about — trying to ferret out which Americans had any connection to communism in their past and then doing everything possible to get them fired from their jobs and destroyed. Moreover, the FBI and the CIA did everything they could to infiltrate and destroy such entities as the U.S. Communist Party and the Fair Play for Cuba Committee, a national organization that opposed the U.S. government’s policies toward Cuba, especially its brutal economic embargo that targeted the Cuban people with death and impoverishment.
In the process, most Americans forgot a fundamental principle about liberty: In a free society, people have the natural and God-given right to believe in and advocate any political and economic philosophy, no matter how destructive or harmful others might consider it to be. In a free society, it is the role of government to protect, not destroy, the exercise of such a right.
Even though they might not have recognized it, American communists were actually the lucky ones. That’s because the Pentagon and the CIA took an entirely different approach toward foreign communists. With the conversion of the federal government to a national-security state, military and CIA officials now wielded the authority to actually kill foreigners who believed in or advocated communism. That’s where the power of assassination came into play. The CIA and the Pentagon now wielded the power to assassinate foreign communists.
The war on Cuba
The best example of this phenomenon was Cuba. After Fidel Castro’s forces succeeded in ousting Cuba’s pro-U.S. right-wing dictator, Fulgencio Batista, from power, Castro declared Cuba’s independence from the United States, an action that did not sit well with U.S. officials, who had controlled Cuba for more than half-a-century. More important, Castro declared himself a socialist and a communist. Most important, Castro reached out to the Soviet Union in a spirit of peace and friendship, just as Arbenz had done and just as Kennedy and Allende would later do.
In the eyes of the Pentagon and the CIA, Castro’s actions were enough to justify not only his assassination but also acts of sabotage and terrorism within Cuba, not to mention an invasion of Cuba with the aim of effecting regime change.
One of the most fascinating aspects of all this was the response of the American people, including the U.S. mainstream press, to the acts of aggression on the part of the U.S. national-security establishment. In their minds, there was nothing wrong with what the Pentagon and the CIA were doing. It was all considered normal and right. After all, Castro was a communist, right? The communists were hell-bent on conquering the world, right? Castro was reaching out to the Soviet Union in peace and friendship, right? Then, what was wrong with trying to assassinate him? What was wrong with committing acts of sabotage and terrorism within Cuba? What was wrong with targeting the Cuban people with death and impoverishment with a brutal, never-ending economic embargo? What was wrong with invading Cuba with the aim of ousting the communist regime and replacing it with another pro-U.S. dictatorship?
That was the prevailing mindset among the American people and the U.S. mainstream press. That mindset was a perfect example of what the Cold War and the conversion to a national-security state had done to stultify, warp, and pervert the consciences and moral values of the American people.
After all, keep something important in mind: Cuba never committed any act of aggression against the United States! It has always been the United States that has aggressed against Cuba, with its assassination attempts, embargo, sabotage, terrorism, and paramilitary invasion.
Moreover, consider the response of the U.S. mainstream press to learning about the CIA’s repeated assassination attempts against Castro. It’s always a yuk-yuk attitude with references to the CIA’s plans to assassinate Castro with an exploding cigar. But never does the U.S. mainstream press confront something important: that the CIA’s assassination plots against Castro constituted nothing less than acts of attempted murder.
The fact is that as deadly and destructive communism might have been, Castro and everyone else in the world, including American citizens, had the right to subscribe to it without being harassed, abused, spied on, and assassinated by the CIA, the Pentagon, and the FBI. Again, freedom necessarily entails believing in and advocating any political or economic philosophy whatsoever. Moreover, what happened in Cuba is a matter for the Cuban people, not the CIA and the Pentagon, to resolve.
There is something else that is important to keep in mind. Although the Soviet Union unilaterally declared an end to the Cold War in 1989, the U.S. government did not. U.S. officials were not about to let go of their Cold War racket that easily. Rather than dismantle NATO, whose mission of protecting Western Europe from a Soviet invasion was now moot, U.S. officials instead kept NATO in existence and, even worse, had it begin absorbing former Warsaw Pact countries, which would enable U.S. (and other NATO countries) to station troops, tanks, planes, and missiles ever closer to Russia’s borders.
The Pentagon and the CIA, of course, were fully aware of where NATO’s actions would ultimately lead — to Ukraine, which is located on Russia’s borders. They knew that once they threatened to absorb Ukraine into NATO, Russia would have to act to prevent that from happening, especially since it would mean that both American and NATO troops and armaments would now be stationed on Russia’s borders. They knew that Russia’s response would be no different from what the U.S. response would be if Russia stationed troops, missiles, and armaments in Cuba.
But once again, the U.S. mainstream press and many Americans could not see what was actually happening. Having had their consciences stultified and their moral values warped and perverted, they could only view Russia as an “aggressor,” one that was supposedly threatening to revive its Cold War quest to take over the world and make it Red.
One of the most interesting aspects of the Cold War involved an American woman named Ana Montes, who got convicted of spying for Cuba. She had worked for many years within the bowels of the national-security establishment, where she was feeding secret information to the Cuban regime.
After Montes got caught, she stated that she was only trying to help the Cuban people, with whom she genuinely sympathized. In 2002, she pled guilty and was given a 25-year jail sentence by a federal judge who made it clear that she was a very bad person who had betrayed her country. She is set to be released next year.
While we don’t know the full extent of the secret information that Montes gave the Cubans, it necessarily had to be related to acts of aggression by U.S. officials. Keep in mind, again, that in the adverse Cold War relationship between the United States and Cuba, it has always been the U.S. government — specifically the Pentagon and the CIA — who have been the aggressors. They have been the assassins, the murderers, the saboteurs, the terrorists, and the enforcers of the embargo against Cuba. As such, it is they who have committed the acts of evil against a country that should never have been any of their business — a country that they never had the legitimate moral or legal authority to aggress against.
Suppose Montes, for example, gave Cuban authorities secret information about CIA’s plans to murder a particular Cuban official. Under the Cold War mindset and under the laws of a national-security state, she would be considered a bad person, one who had betrayed her country. Or what if she gave Cuban officials secret information about how to circumvent the U.S. government’s brutal embargo that targets the Cuban people with death and impoverishment as a way to achieve a political goal (i.e., regime change). Once again, she would be considered a bad person who had betrayed her country.
But one thing is for sure: If the U.S. government had not been waging its Cold War and if the U.S. government had not been converted to a national-security state, the U.S. government would never have been initiating its immoral and evil actions against Cuba, in which case there would have been normal relations between the United States and Cuba. That would have meant that Montes would never have been placed in a position of having to help Cuba protect itself from U.S. acts of aggression against Cuba.
According to Wikipedia, one U.S. national-security official, Scott Carmichael, alleged that Montes provided information to Cuba about a “clandestine U.S. Army camp in El Salvador.” Carmichael said that Montes was responsible for the death of Green Beret Sergeant Gregory Fronius, who was killed in El Salvador in 1987.
Questions, though, naturally arise. What business does the U.S. military have being in El Salvador? Were Fronius and other U.S. soldiers there to kill “communists?” Or were they supporting a right-wing pro-U.S. military dictatorship whose death squads were assassinating, executing, raping, and torturing innocent people — that is, people who were guilty of nothing more than believing in communism or socialism? Did the information that Montes supposedly provided save innocent people from being killed, raped, executed, or assassinated?
One thing is for sure: In a national-security state, those types of questions are not supposed to be asked. Everyone is expectedly to automatically and blindly support whatever U.S. forces are doing with their interventions and acts of aggression against foreign regimes. Failure to do so is considered a betrayal of one’s country.
Granted, Montes didn’t have to go to work for the U.S. national-security establishment, and she didn’t have to break her contract to keep national-security state matters secret. Montes made her bed and she had to sleep in it. But the fact is that it was the Cold War and the U.S. conversion to a national-security state that gave rise to the overall situation. The Ana Montes case is a good example of what the Cold War’s perversion of moral values has done to people.
There are also the many Cold War coups that the CIA and the Pentagon orchestrated to consider in all this, especially given the massive death, suffering, and destruction they wreaked around the world. The CIA’s Guatemala coup in 1954, for example, give rise to a three-decade civil war that ended up killing more than a million people. The CIA’s Chile coup gave rise to a 17-year-long brutal military dictatorship that rounded up, tortured, raped, or killed some 60,000 people whose only “crime” was believing in communism or socialism. There was also the CIA’s participation in Operation Condor, an international kidnapping, torture, and assassination program that victimized countless people in South America.
President Kennedy was right when he attempted to end the Cold War racket in 1963. It should never have been continued after 1989. The fact is that it should never have been waged in the first place. The American people would be well-served to finally bring an end to the Cold War today and, equally important, to restore their founding system of a limited-government republic to our land.
This article was originally published in the April 2022 edition of Future of Freedom.