09-08-2013, 02:57 PM
Last 100 days is now 528 on Amazon.
Here is an updated version of my Amazon review. Amazon has not yet replaced it for the older one.
Please like this review on Amazon if you are able to. I will now turn my attention to writing a real review of Destiny Betrayed. That book really has not gotten the wider readership it deserves. What are other Rhode Island Green Mountain Boys doing about that? The bluefish gotta know that the food exists before they bite? The garbage books don't need chum thrown overboard: they have humble vessels like the NewYork Times Book Review and Good Mornings America. Soldier on, because I heard somewhere that there might be a war on.
________________
12 of 20 people found the following review helpful
3.0 out of 5 stars JFK and the Unspeakable, LIGHT!, July 28, 2013
By Brookbird34 "Nathaniel Heidenheimer" (NYC) - See all my reviews
This review is from: JFK's Last Hundred Days: The Transformation of a Man and the Emergence of a Great President (Hardcover)
This book is best discussed with reference to JFK and the Unspeakable, which has been completely censored by the Corporate media for reasons apparent about 3 minutes after takeoff. There are some unique things about Clarke's book, but also some severe limitations inherent in its form, which is a day by day account of the last hundred days. These vignettes are at once refreshing and restrictive. In general, this book can serve as good introduction to an incredibly busy period that is the most important one in terms of understanding America right now, when elected officials are pawns to intelligence agencies and their corporate masters. Now the National Security State is 65. Under JFK it was 13-16: things were not yet set in stone and much of today's corporate media censorship of the latest academic research is designed to keep us in the dark about this period of fluidity when the National Security State, suddenly had a new, and very different daddy.
Especially after the Eisenhower-Dulles period, the contrast in presidential-CIA relations was extreme, although, as Gareth Porter points out in his absolutely essential book Perils of Dominance, there were also some similarities. Hence this question of Presidential-CIA relations is not solely a personal JFK v. Dulles "thing" but contains key structural elements in US Cold War political and economic evolution.
The best aspect of Last Hundred is a unique admission-- for a mass marketed book-- of just how fast JFK was changing the dynamics of US foreign policy in 1963. FINALLY, a book that will be widely known, is formally slaying the horrible "Best and the Brightest" by David Halberstam!
In reality the academic works showing that JFK was not "just another Cold Warrior" have been available for years, and have been especially persuasive on the JFK as detente midwife theme since the new records of the Assassination Records Review Board ARRB forced release ofmore than six million new documents in the late 1990s. It takes a while for those to be analyzed by historians. However, by around 2008 about seven new academic works on, for example Vietnam between 1960-65, have all shown that the evidence that JFK was getting out of VIetnam was far stronger than had perviously been known.
Hundred Days, to its credit, is very clear in stating this abrupt contrast with LBJ's hawkishness.
The major weakness of the book stems from its form, namely its strict narrative focus on the life of JFK and his family. Why is this a weakness? Because in dealing with US foreign policy in 1963 we are truly at a fork in the road. Yes the US had already become "globocop" i.e. completely interventionist since at least 194, but there was still some ambiguity-- more than most would think-- about whether the US should perceive third world colonial struggles as inherently between communist and non-communist ideologies. In fact, JFK was unique in the US Senate of the 1950s in arguing that all colonial struggles were not inherently pro or anti-communist, but were essentially longings for liberty from imperialism. Clarke does manage to sneak in some background here, but not enough to show just how unique JFK was.
This emphasis is really needed because of the degree to which polemicists, especially those ALLEGEDLY on the left such as Chomsky, have inaccurately maintained the Cold War Liberal catechism that JFK was "just another Cold Warrior."
Much of the book is focussed on JFK's Vietnam policy, as it should be. The problem here is that some in-country background is absolutely essential. This is because the CIA was, in actuality, making its own policy in VIetnam, as even a front page New York Times article of October 3rd, 1963 argued. [ look up October 3rd, 1963 Black Op Radio to read the Arthur Krock piece] Clarke's book is critical of JFK for being ambiguous about the coup. But that criticism is impossible to evaluate without more knowledge of the intense conflict between CIA and their ostensible masters in the White House, unless we know more about this "Intra-Administration" conflict as Krock piece put it, i.e. the conflict between Kennedy and CIA, which was evident in nearly all of his foreign policies from Laos to Vietnam and also involving Cuba, Indonesia, Brazil, Congo and the USSR.
In a 2013 world in which we increasingly see the limitations of elected pols that are imposed by intelligence agencies [e.g. the NSA phone tapping and what this implies for Representation] 1963 is the point of no return.
It is the last point at which we can, if the author is brave enough, see presidents struggle against the restrictions of CIA.
And that is where a contrast with 100 Days is needed. JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters is a book originally published in 2008. Later it was reissued by Touchstone in 2010. It is the most important book published since 1945.
Unspeakable has more than 2,500 footnotes mostly from author interviews of first hand participants and also from academic sources. It has earned the highest praises from Daniel Ellsberg, of Pentagon Papers fame, from Marcus Raskin, who worked in the Kennedy White House under McGeorge Bundy, from Ray McGovern who was CIA pdb to President H.W. Bush and from academics from Princeton to Berkley.
Yet this book argues that JFK was assassinated by CIA. Therefore it is completely censored in the US media in spite of the 20 years of research which shows in every page. The book has not received a single mention in US corporate Media save one occasion: on January 11th in Dalls RFK Jr and his sister Rory were interviewed before an audience of ten thousand, and he mentioned this book as having convinced the entire family, once and for all, of the case for conspiracy in the JFK assassination.
YET WHERE IS THAT INTERVIEW ON THE INTERNET? It ended up never even being shown on Charlie Rose. The next day in the very municipal-minded Dallas Morning News, there was a brief mention of The Unspeakable, but only in condescending terms that completely ignored its scholarly heart.
JFK and the Unspeakable is truly a dissident book in the United State of 2013. Here we don't Siberia the authors we just confine their books to desperate please written with amazon inserts. Please look up this book, see what's been written about it. { one source is Are Presidents Afraid of the CIA by Ray McGovern, see the last half of that long article.}
Hundred Days is a good introduction to the new research, but several of its assertions are dubious without analysis of the sourcing, particularly with regard to JFK's personal life. More axes have been ground into JFK's back than q-tips into Bush ears, all while the media protest they have been too easy on the 35th president. They protest too much as a contrast with Krock's less corrupt piece shows.
If you read only one book on JFK, it should be unspeakable. In a completely corrupt corporate media world we need to most need to hear dissidents about 1963. It was when the CIA was unsweetened 16. It was the last time we see the seem. And there is much more to see than one might think. America you are too processed! Listen to your best dissident! JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters(see a few of the recommendations bellow)
A few other points about Hundred Days... First Clarke seems convinced that the Bobby Baker scandal was as much a threat to JFK's 1964 electoral prospects as it was for LBJ's. Well, not even Robert Caro's terrible volume 4 LBJ bio [ hey I loved the first 3, especially volume 3 which is a near masterpiece!] -- which is about as pro LBJ and anti-JFK as you can get outside the Dalek-Chomsky-Hersh and the always widely reviewed NYT complex-- gets anywhere near that view. Clarke is certainly free to argue this, but he doesn't. Yes, asks us, in effect, to assume with him that the Baker scandal, which is much more complex than he presents involving key figures in the aerospace industry, and prostitutes wrapped by hidden camera film footage, was as much a threat to JFK as to Johnson, although the key figures in that scandal were all from the Johnson wing of the Democratic Party. Clarke needs to back up this leap of logic with evidence. He offers virtually none. If he's going to challenge the consensus view he need to put a lot more in that slingshot. His writing is smooth as silk. Here is one more example of narrative dexterity purchased at the price of historical context.
Clarke's sheering of the Quarum Club/Bobby Baker sullied lamb robs us of a key glimpse of how the Military Industrial Congressional Complex. Without the aerospace dimension, the corruption is reduced to mere beltway scandal, rather than a source of insight into the structural dimensions of the MICC which can help explain our transformation into a Garrison State, and also explain the clear differences between LBJ and JFK over Vietnam policies. As stated above, Clarke is very clear on these differences, but he is too shy about exploring their structural explanations within the early Cold War US economy.
Now, one might ask, isn't that demanding a bit much for a narrative history that does a good job of succinctly summarizing the most recent diplomatic history on the US and Vietnam btw. 1960-65? Well it depends on how much the author "let's the roots dangle" to use a phrase of the flint-like poet Charles Olson. The role of such a curiosity-peeking, cursory book is to suggest trap doors for readers who wish to dig deeper. Much of today's mass market circulation Cold War history books might be described as subtle propaganda, to the extent that they cover these trap doors rather than tap them to expose the broad avenues of revelations they offer about the MICC. Clarke lets the roots dangle for other aspects of his narrative, but not for the most important parts.
Clarke's reluctance to even hint at the abundant evidence that CIA was making its own policies--as opposed to carrying out orders of the Commander In Chief-- is especially glaring when discussing the role of Bobby Kennedy and his relations with Anti-Castro Cubans in Operation Mongoose and the subsequent clamp down JFK executed against these CIA operatives in 1963. He seems to take Richard Helms literally, a language deficiency for which there is no app save promotion at the New York Times, gods help us.
Re JFK's economic policy Clarke has his finger on the right pulse of the moment, in a key early reelection meeting JFK had in November. There, Clarke suggests that JFK was confronted by the cruel electoral choice of either supporting new federal anti-poverty programs or courting new, mostly white, suburban lower middle class voters by playing into Republican smaller government rhetoric.
Clarke is prescient in his sensing of this later dichotomy for the Democratic Party as early as November 1963. The problem is that he reifies the dichotomy to early: the key point about JFK's economic policy was that he was a Full Employment Democrat, a species that suffered severe habitat destruction between the years 1963-68. Clarke points out several times that Unemployment was around 5.5%. He fails to mention that the rules for measuring unemployment have been changed twice since the JFK years. Hence 5.5% in 1963 would be closer to 4.0% right now. Now consider that JFK was increasingly switching to Full employment glide mode as he recognized the need to reemphasize economic common denominators -- and wide screen, not on the internet before targeted audiences-- to compensate for the racial divisions that threatened the New Deal Coalition. Clarke discusses "the Kennedy Tax Cuts" as they have come to be artfully foreshortened, without mentioning the areas where taxes would increase: taxes on repatriated profits of US based multi-national corporations. He also fails to mention that, unlike the later Republican tax cuts, JFK's domestic tax cuts were strictly tethered to domestic reinvestment, in a way that later Republican Financial Sector legislation never was. Again, there is significant baby sacrificed with the conflation, bathwater phrase "tax cuts"
This relates to another key point Clarke glosses: JFK's relations with the Luce Press (today Time-Warner) Clarke tells us that JFK viewed the Luce media empire as hostile to his presidency and his policies. The author virtually scoffs at this view, and contextualizes it in terms of what he feels is JFK's somewhat vain, over-concern with his historical legacy. I am not so sure his readers would join him if his they knew more about the Luce-Kennedy relationship. There is heck of a lot of there there and its in North Virginia not Oakland. For more on this relationship see the famous article by Carl Bernstein, of Watergate fame on the role of the CIA in the US media. Also see these books: the essential Battling Wall Street by Donald GibsonBattling Wall Street : The Kennedy Presidency, Total Cold War by Kenneth Osgood, Nervous Liberals by Brett Gary, and The Mighty Wurlitzer by Hugh Wilford.
----------------
ON JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters by James W. Douglass. PS This book is or was available on Kindle but now seems not to be available on kindle at last for the last two weeks. I have never seen that happen with Kindle editions of any other book...This is the one book the government does not want to take off again before 11/22/13.
"Arguably the most important book yet written about a U.S. president ... Should be required reading for all high school and college students, and anyone who is a registered voter!"--JOHN PERKINS, author of Confessions of an Economic Hitman
"With penetrating insight and unswerving integrity, Douglass proves the fundamental truths about JFK's assassination . . . by far the most important book yet written on the subject."--Gaeton Fonzi, former Staff Investigator, US House Select Committee on Assassinations
"An unfamiliar yet thoroughly convincing account of a series of creditable decisions of John F. Kennedy--at odds with his initial Cold War stance--that earned him the secret distrust and hatred of hard-liners among the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the CIA."--Daniel Ellsberg, author, Secrets: A Memoir of the Vietnam War and the Pentagon Papers
"Douglass writes with moral force, clarity, and the careful attention to detail that will make JFK and the Unspeakable a sourcebook for many years to come, for it provides us with the stubborn facts needed to rebuild a constitutional democracy within the United States."--Marcus Raskin, co-founder, Institute for Policy Studies
"Remarkable . . . . This book should be required reading for every American citizen."--Richard Falk, Milbank Professor of International Law Emeritus, Princeton University
Here is an updated version of my Amazon review. Amazon has not yet replaced it for the older one.
Please like this review on Amazon if you are able to. I will now turn my attention to writing a real review of Destiny Betrayed. That book really has not gotten the wider readership it deserves. What are other Rhode Island Green Mountain Boys doing about that? The bluefish gotta know that the food exists before they bite? The garbage books don't need chum thrown overboard: they have humble vessels like the NewYork Times Book Review and Good Mornings America. Soldier on, because I heard somewhere that there might be a war on.
________________
12 of 20 people found the following review helpful
3.0 out of 5 stars JFK and the Unspeakable, LIGHT!, July 28, 2013
By Brookbird34 "Nathaniel Heidenheimer" (NYC) - See all my reviews
This review is from: JFK's Last Hundred Days: The Transformation of a Man and the Emergence of a Great President (Hardcover)
This book is best discussed with reference to JFK and the Unspeakable, which has been completely censored by the Corporate media for reasons apparent about 3 minutes after takeoff. There are some unique things about Clarke's book, but also some severe limitations inherent in its form, which is a day by day account of the last hundred days. These vignettes are at once refreshing and restrictive. In general, this book can serve as good introduction to an incredibly busy period that is the most important one in terms of understanding America right now, when elected officials are pawns to intelligence agencies and their corporate masters. Now the National Security State is 65. Under JFK it was 13-16: things were not yet set in stone and much of today's corporate media censorship of the latest academic research is designed to keep us in the dark about this period of fluidity when the National Security State, suddenly had a new, and very different daddy.
Especially after the Eisenhower-Dulles period, the contrast in presidential-CIA relations was extreme, although, as Gareth Porter points out in his absolutely essential book Perils of Dominance, there were also some similarities. Hence this question of Presidential-CIA relations is not solely a personal JFK v. Dulles "thing" but contains key structural elements in US Cold War political and economic evolution.
The best aspect of Last Hundred is a unique admission-- for a mass marketed book-- of just how fast JFK was changing the dynamics of US foreign policy in 1963. FINALLY, a book that will be widely known, is formally slaying the horrible "Best and the Brightest" by David Halberstam!
In reality the academic works showing that JFK was not "just another Cold Warrior" have been available for years, and have been especially persuasive on the JFK as detente midwife theme since the new records of the Assassination Records Review Board ARRB forced release ofmore than six million new documents in the late 1990s. It takes a while for those to be analyzed by historians. However, by around 2008 about seven new academic works on, for example Vietnam between 1960-65, have all shown that the evidence that JFK was getting out of VIetnam was far stronger than had perviously been known.
Hundred Days, to its credit, is very clear in stating this abrupt contrast with LBJ's hawkishness.
The major weakness of the book stems from its form, namely its strict narrative focus on the life of JFK and his family. Why is this a weakness? Because in dealing with US foreign policy in 1963 we are truly at a fork in the road. Yes the US had already become "globocop" i.e. completely interventionist since at least 194, but there was still some ambiguity-- more than most would think-- about whether the US should perceive third world colonial struggles as inherently between communist and non-communist ideologies. In fact, JFK was unique in the US Senate of the 1950s in arguing that all colonial struggles were not inherently pro or anti-communist, but were essentially longings for liberty from imperialism. Clarke does manage to sneak in some background here, but not enough to show just how unique JFK was.
This emphasis is really needed because of the degree to which polemicists, especially those ALLEGEDLY on the left such as Chomsky, have inaccurately maintained the Cold War Liberal catechism that JFK was "just another Cold Warrior."
Much of the book is focussed on JFK's Vietnam policy, as it should be. The problem here is that some in-country background is absolutely essential. This is because the CIA was, in actuality, making its own policy in VIetnam, as even a front page New York Times article of October 3rd, 1963 argued. [ look up October 3rd, 1963 Black Op Radio to read the Arthur Krock piece] Clarke's book is critical of JFK for being ambiguous about the coup. But that criticism is impossible to evaluate without more knowledge of the intense conflict between CIA and their ostensible masters in the White House, unless we know more about this "Intra-Administration" conflict as Krock piece put it, i.e. the conflict between Kennedy and CIA, which was evident in nearly all of his foreign policies from Laos to Vietnam and also involving Cuba, Indonesia, Brazil, Congo and the USSR.
In a 2013 world in which we increasingly see the limitations of elected pols that are imposed by intelligence agencies [e.g. the NSA phone tapping and what this implies for Representation] 1963 is the point of no return.
It is the last point at which we can, if the author is brave enough, see presidents struggle against the restrictions of CIA.
And that is where a contrast with 100 Days is needed. JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters is a book originally published in 2008. Later it was reissued by Touchstone in 2010. It is the most important book published since 1945.
Unspeakable has more than 2,500 footnotes mostly from author interviews of first hand participants and also from academic sources. It has earned the highest praises from Daniel Ellsberg, of Pentagon Papers fame, from Marcus Raskin, who worked in the Kennedy White House under McGeorge Bundy, from Ray McGovern who was CIA pdb to President H.W. Bush and from academics from Princeton to Berkley.
Yet this book argues that JFK was assassinated by CIA. Therefore it is completely censored in the US media in spite of the 20 years of research which shows in every page. The book has not received a single mention in US corporate Media save one occasion: on January 11th in Dalls RFK Jr and his sister Rory were interviewed before an audience of ten thousand, and he mentioned this book as having convinced the entire family, once and for all, of the case for conspiracy in the JFK assassination.
YET WHERE IS THAT INTERVIEW ON THE INTERNET? It ended up never even being shown on Charlie Rose. The next day in the very municipal-minded Dallas Morning News, there was a brief mention of The Unspeakable, but only in condescending terms that completely ignored its scholarly heart.
JFK and the Unspeakable is truly a dissident book in the United State of 2013. Here we don't Siberia the authors we just confine their books to desperate please written with amazon inserts. Please look up this book, see what's been written about it. { one source is Are Presidents Afraid of the CIA by Ray McGovern, see the last half of that long article.}
Hundred Days is a good introduction to the new research, but several of its assertions are dubious without analysis of the sourcing, particularly with regard to JFK's personal life. More axes have been ground into JFK's back than q-tips into Bush ears, all while the media protest they have been too easy on the 35th president. They protest too much as a contrast with Krock's less corrupt piece shows.
If you read only one book on JFK, it should be unspeakable. In a completely corrupt corporate media world we need to most need to hear dissidents about 1963. It was when the CIA was unsweetened 16. It was the last time we see the seem. And there is much more to see than one might think. America you are too processed! Listen to your best dissident! JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters(see a few of the recommendations bellow)
A few other points about Hundred Days... First Clarke seems convinced that the Bobby Baker scandal was as much a threat to JFK's 1964 electoral prospects as it was for LBJ's. Well, not even Robert Caro's terrible volume 4 LBJ bio [ hey I loved the first 3, especially volume 3 which is a near masterpiece!] -- which is about as pro LBJ and anti-JFK as you can get outside the Dalek-Chomsky-Hersh and the always widely reviewed NYT complex-- gets anywhere near that view. Clarke is certainly free to argue this, but he doesn't. Yes, asks us, in effect, to assume with him that the Baker scandal, which is much more complex than he presents involving key figures in the aerospace industry, and prostitutes wrapped by hidden camera film footage, was as much a threat to JFK as to Johnson, although the key figures in that scandal were all from the Johnson wing of the Democratic Party. Clarke needs to back up this leap of logic with evidence. He offers virtually none. If he's going to challenge the consensus view he need to put a lot more in that slingshot. His writing is smooth as silk. Here is one more example of narrative dexterity purchased at the price of historical context.
Clarke's sheering of the Quarum Club/Bobby Baker sullied lamb robs us of a key glimpse of how the Military Industrial Congressional Complex. Without the aerospace dimension, the corruption is reduced to mere beltway scandal, rather than a source of insight into the structural dimensions of the MICC which can help explain our transformation into a Garrison State, and also explain the clear differences between LBJ and JFK over Vietnam policies. As stated above, Clarke is very clear on these differences, but he is too shy about exploring their structural explanations within the early Cold War US economy.
Now, one might ask, isn't that demanding a bit much for a narrative history that does a good job of succinctly summarizing the most recent diplomatic history on the US and Vietnam btw. 1960-65? Well it depends on how much the author "let's the roots dangle" to use a phrase of the flint-like poet Charles Olson. The role of such a curiosity-peeking, cursory book is to suggest trap doors for readers who wish to dig deeper. Much of today's mass market circulation Cold War history books might be described as subtle propaganda, to the extent that they cover these trap doors rather than tap them to expose the broad avenues of revelations they offer about the MICC. Clarke lets the roots dangle for other aspects of his narrative, but not for the most important parts.
Clarke's reluctance to even hint at the abundant evidence that CIA was making its own policies--as opposed to carrying out orders of the Commander In Chief-- is especially glaring when discussing the role of Bobby Kennedy and his relations with Anti-Castro Cubans in Operation Mongoose and the subsequent clamp down JFK executed against these CIA operatives in 1963. He seems to take Richard Helms literally, a language deficiency for which there is no app save promotion at the New York Times, gods help us.
Re JFK's economic policy Clarke has his finger on the right pulse of the moment, in a key early reelection meeting JFK had in November. There, Clarke suggests that JFK was confronted by the cruel electoral choice of either supporting new federal anti-poverty programs or courting new, mostly white, suburban lower middle class voters by playing into Republican smaller government rhetoric.
Clarke is prescient in his sensing of this later dichotomy for the Democratic Party as early as November 1963. The problem is that he reifies the dichotomy to early: the key point about JFK's economic policy was that he was a Full Employment Democrat, a species that suffered severe habitat destruction between the years 1963-68. Clarke points out several times that Unemployment was around 5.5%. He fails to mention that the rules for measuring unemployment have been changed twice since the JFK years. Hence 5.5% in 1963 would be closer to 4.0% right now. Now consider that JFK was increasingly switching to Full employment glide mode as he recognized the need to reemphasize economic common denominators -- and wide screen, not on the internet before targeted audiences-- to compensate for the racial divisions that threatened the New Deal Coalition. Clarke discusses "the Kennedy Tax Cuts" as they have come to be artfully foreshortened, without mentioning the areas where taxes would increase: taxes on repatriated profits of US based multi-national corporations. He also fails to mention that, unlike the later Republican tax cuts, JFK's domestic tax cuts were strictly tethered to domestic reinvestment, in a way that later Republican Financial Sector legislation never was. Again, there is significant baby sacrificed with the conflation, bathwater phrase "tax cuts"
This relates to another key point Clarke glosses: JFK's relations with the Luce Press (today Time-Warner) Clarke tells us that JFK viewed the Luce media empire as hostile to his presidency and his policies. The author virtually scoffs at this view, and contextualizes it in terms of what he feels is JFK's somewhat vain, over-concern with his historical legacy. I am not so sure his readers would join him if his they knew more about the Luce-Kennedy relationship. There is heck of a lot of there there and its in North Virginia not Oakland. For more on this relationship see the famous article by Carl Bernstein, of Watergate fame on the role of the CIA in the US media. Also see these books: the essential Battling Wall Street by Donald GibsonBattling Wall Street : The Kennedy Presidency, Total Cold War by Kenneth Osgood, Nervous Liberals by Brett Gary, and The Mighty Wurlitzer by Hugh Wilford.
----------------
ON JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters by James W. Douglass. PS This book is or was available on Kindle but now seems not to be available on kindle at last for the last two weeks. I have never seen that happen with Kindle editions of any other book...This is the one book the government does not want to take off again before 11/22/13.
"Arguably the most important book yet written about a U.S. president ... Should be required reading for all high school and college students, and anyone who is a registered voter!"--JOHN PERKINS, author of Confessions of an Economic Hitman
"With penetrating insight and unswerving integrity, Douglass proves the fundamental truths about JFK's assassination . . . by far the most important book yet written on the subject."--Gaeton Fonzi, former Staff Investigator, US House Select Committee on Assassinations
"An unfamiliar yet thoroughly convincing account of a series of creditable decisions of John F. Kennedy--at odds with his initial Cold War stance--that earned him the secret distrust and hatred of hard-liners among the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the CIA."--Daniel Ellsberg, author, Secrets: A Memoir of the Vietnam War and the Pentagon Papers
"Douglass writes with moral force, clarity, and the careful attention to detail that will make JFK and the Unspeakable a sourcebook for many years to come, for it provides us with the stubborn facts needed to rebuild a constitutional democracy within the United States."--Marcus Raskin, co-founder, Institute for Policy Studies
"Remarkable . . . . This book should be required reading for every American citizen."--Richard Falk, Milbank Professor of International Law Emeritus, Princeton University