Wonderful new book: Betting on the Africans

[Jim DiEugenio]

http://www.ctka.net/2013/africans.html

Excellent new book with a lot of new research in it about a neglected area. This guy really did some digging.

Beautifully complements Richard Mahoney's breakthrough work JFK:Ordeal in Africa.

Whenever you think you know who Kennedy was, something like this comes out and changes the calculus.

[Vasilios Vazakas]

Excellent review for a very good book that has never been discussed before in relation to the JFK case.
This book adds new and obscure pieces of the puzzle that could help us in our search of the true sponsors of the assassination.

[Jim DiEugenio]

Thanks VV.

I thought I knew just about everything there was to know about JFK's foreign policy.

Then something like this comes along and makes me admire the guy even more.

I mean that thing about thwarting the possible Russian airlift , and getting sixteen countries to sign on. I mean this is just three years after the CIA had cooperated on killing Lumumba, the continent's hero.

And I didn't know that in November of 1963, he commissioned a report so he could compete with DeGaulle in France's former colonies. And he tried to bribe Portugal into freeing its remaining colonies. And he actually aided the African rebels resisting Portugal.

Anyway, this is what I will be talking about at Duquesne. Did Kennedy's foreign policy get him killed?

Sure looks like it.

[Jim Hargrove]

Anyway, this is what I will be talking about at Duquesne. Did Kennedy's foreign policy get him killed?

Sure looks like it.

Hi, Jim,

Now this is something completely different, but I'd already have bet the farm that Kennedy's foreign policy doomed him, and there are so many foreign places to look. Now Africa gets mixed in with the usual suspects: Vietnam and Cuba topping the list.

And since I'm betting my non-existent farm, it looks from my pasture like the Bay of Pigs sealed the president's fate. That's why the designated patsy was passing out FPCC fliers in front of Clay Shaw's Trade Mart, why the patsy-to-be allegedly tried to get to Cuba via Mexico City, and why "Lee Oswald" tried to buy a rifle from Castro's favorite American gun-runner, Robert McKeown (who said "Oswald" offered him up to $10,000 for a rifle). McKeown's rifle would have looked SO GREAT at the TSBD!

Just my two cents.

Jim

[Tracy Riddle]

In the late 50s/early 60s, practically every month a new independent country was appearing in Africa. Kennedy was from a younger generation that could see how colonialism was not sustainable or defensible. As he tried to do in Latin America (sometimes successfully, sometimes not), he realized that the US could not be seen siding with the imperial powers while the Soviets and Chinese portrayed themselves as "liberators." The entire Third World would end up going Communist if given that choice. So Kennedy had to walk a fine line between "liberation theology" (so to speak) and neo-colonial exploitation. He was probably doomed from the start.

This speech probably helped get Robert Kennedy killed.

[Jim DiEugenio]

Well, in the second edition of Destiny Betrayed, I spent a lot of time examining the Bay of Pigs. And there is no doubt in my mind that Kennedy's refusal to bail out the landing party was a really crucial event in turning a lot of powerful people against him.

And the fact that he then investigated the whole thing, something that Uncle Ike would not have done. And then he fired the top level of the CIA--something that had not been done before or since.

But in my talk I am going to be widening the scope. Most JFK assassination books concentrate on Vietnam and Cuba.

But Kennedy's foreign policy changes were even wider than that. I mean, to give you one example, the guy was for Arab nationalism! He favored Nasser over Saudi Arabia. And the Kennedys actually commissioned a State Department study analyzing the cost benefit ratio of bringing back Mossadegh in Iran. Another reversal of the Dulles brothers, who favored the royalists in the Middle East.

So anyway,this is what I will be discussing in depth with a lot of new facts.

[Anthony Thorne]

I'll have to read JFK: ORDEAL IN AFRICA. I'm part way through Richard Mahoney's SONS AND BROTHERS and it's a wonderful book, not the least because Mahoney seems to be one of the few biographers unafraid to discuss the details of the assassinations (both of them) that differ with the official story.

[Jim DiEugenio]

If you read my review of Betting on the Africans, I state that it is a complement to JFK:Ordeal in Africa. If you read both of them you will get a great overview of Kennedy's Africa policy.

But you will also get a fine view of Kennedy's vision of America in the Third World also.

There is one other new book out on the subject, Kennedy, Johnson and the Non-Aligned World. I will be reading that one soon.

BTW, after you read my review, drop a line at Amazon. I think I am the only one who reviewed the book. Which shows you how acute our "research community" is.

But better, buy the book. It is a real gem.

PS, great speech by RFK in Capetown Tracy. Yep, that was not good for his health.

[Vasilios Vazakas]

The bay of pigs was an important factor but not the only one. It helped energize the Anti-Castro Cubans, some CIA and Army officers against Kennedy
so to false sponsor them after the crime. It was JFK's general policy, economic, domestic and foreign policy, the sum of all of them that led to his assassination. He was kind of an anomaly that sprung out of the system and they had to correct it.

[Jim DiEugenio]

I agree VV that Kennedy was a shock to the system. And that the general sum of what he was doing and how fast he was doing it was something they had not planned for.

But I really think that when you measure all of these things, his foreign policy was the one that bugged them the most.

One of the things I will be talking about at Duquesne is how that crappy poseur Clinton, Spielberg's best buddy, completed David Rockefeller's 30 year quest for globalization in the Western Hemisphere.

If you read Gibson's book you will see that JFK and King David really did not like each other. Because if you read Betting on the Africans you will see that Kennedy was for nationalism, and not just against colonialism, but against imperialism in the Third World.

BTW, wait until you see the connection between Clinton, Rockefeller, Clinton's former chief of staff,and Landesman, the guy Hanks hired to write and direct this rerun of the WR Parkland. Its in Reclaiming Parkland. An alternative journalist who had been around the block on the CIA's connections in Hollywood tipped me off to it.

Because they are so politically and historically callow, Hanks and Spielberg really think Clinton and Obama are the cat's meow. And don't even begin to understand, let alone comprehend, what was at stake in 1963.