JFK Blackmailed as a "Soviet Agent"? -- A Hypothesis

[Alan Dale]

I recall the atmosphere after the failure of the Bay of Pigs invasion. The Brigade's defeat, decimation and capture followed the humiliation of the downing, arrest and trial of Francis Gary Powers.


Ironically E. Howard Hunt's 1973 Give Us This Day sets the tone. At the time, the loudest cries of "Traitor!" came from the Cubans in Miami. In 1961 my Spanish teacher a graduate of the University of Havana assured me, "Ah, Felipe, Fidel es muy malo, muy malo."


Traitor SOB in the populace. Imagine the wrath in uniform and in cloak-and-dagger-stan.


Still playing with elements: JFK educated at London School of Economics under the avowed marxist Harold Lanski, the lad's father having been relieved of his ambassadorship for sympathies deemed unreliable.


William Donovan named by Roosevelt to head OSS by the intercession of William Stephenson that hero of Ian Fleming. Stephenson commenting to friend Stewart Menzies head of British intelligence that it was fortuitous that "one of our boys was named."


So perhaps from earliest days an institutional suspicion of JFK, perhaps confirmed by going wobbly on Bay of Pigs and missile crisis, a-tests and detente, Berlin Walls and First Strike eschewal.


See also Secret Service Agent Elmer Moore's troubling revelation to James Gouchenaur that the former regarded Kennedy as a traitor for giving things away to the Russians.


Can it be any wonder that the paranoid and outflanked Angleton did all he could to undercut the king; that the dethroned Dulles huffed and snorted of "little Kennedy. . .he thought he was some kind of god."


It is highly likely that the institutional prejudice went against Kennedy the peace-seeker as diabolically as Allen Drury's senators regarded anyone in a pink shirt.


We don't need no stinking trialshoot the traitor; repeat, shoot the traitor.


The deflection of the "communist" epithet to Oswald was window dressing. The message was as explicit as editor Dealey's defiant, "Americans want a leader on a horse, and you, President Kennedy are riding Caroline's bicycle."


This is a variation on the Nixonian treatment of the congresswoman he defeated; Red-baiting: always in season, no license required.


Bring your long arms to the Plaza. We ride at noon.

As the great Johnny Mercer would say ^ Too marvelous for words.

Thank you.