19-12-2013, 06:13 AM
This document is online at: http://ratical.org/ratville/JFK/COPA1998EMS.html
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
This is an annotated transcript that started with the copy at
http://spot.acorn.net/jfkplace/09/fp.bac...chotz.html. All
hyperlinks, and footnotes by David Ratcliffe with the permission and
encouragement of E. Martin Schotz.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
The Waters of Knowledge versus the Waters of Uncertainty:
Mass Denial in the Assassination of President Kennedy
By E. Martin Schotz
Coalition on Political Assassinations Conference
20 November 1998
Dallas, Texas
Contents
* Introduction
* What The Waters of Knowledge Tell Us
* Why The Cover-Up Was Necessary
* The Waters of Uncertainty -- The Essence of the Cover-Up
* The Malignant Nature of Pseudo-Debate
* The Role of Robert F. Kennedy
* The Assassination Records Review Board
* Conclusion
* Notes
Introduction
My task this afternoon is to explore with you the reasons the American
people do not know who killed President Kennedy and why. In order to do this
we will have to deal with three interdependent conspiracies which developed
in the course of the assassination and its aftermath. These are:
1. the criminal conspiracy to murder the President by a cabal of
militarists at the highest echelons of power in the United States;
2. the conspiracy which aided and abetted these murderers after the fact,
by covering for the assassins, also a true criminal conspiracy
involving an extremely wide circle of government officials across the
entire political spectrum and at all levels of government; and
3. a conspiracy of ignorance, denial, confusion, and silence which has
pervaded our entire public.
The major focus of my talk today is this third conspiracy on the part of the
public, which includes our so-called "critical community." I want to show
you that our failure to know is not based on any lack of data or because the
data is ambiguous. It is all extremely simple and obvious.[1] Rather we
don't know because we are deeply emotionally resistant to what such
knowledge tells us about ourselves and our society. Furthermore the
powers-that-be do not reward people for such knowledge. Indeed if a person
is willing to acknowledge the truth, is in a position to share such
knowledge with the public, and wishes to do so, then the organized
institutions of our society will turn sharply against such a person.
Now this is not a new problem in the history of society. In fact, I want to
read to you a Sufi tale from the Ninth Century which can help to orient us
to the problem. The tale is entitled "When the Waters Were Changed." It goes
as follows:
When the Waters Were Changed
Once upon a time Khidr, the Teacher of Moses, called upon mankind
with a warning. At a certain date, he said, all the water in the
world which had not been specially hoarded, would disappear. It
would then be renewed with different water, which would drive men
mad.
Only one man listened to the meaning of this advice. He collected
water, went to a secure place where he stored it, and waited for
the water to change its character.
On the appointed date the streams stopped running, the wells went
dry, and the man who had listened, seeing this happening, went to
his retreat and drank his preserved water.
When he saw, from his security, the waterfalls again beginning to
flow, this man descended among the other sons of men. He found
that they were thinking and talking in an entirely different way
from before; yet they had no memory of what had happened, nor of
having been warned. When he tried to talk to them, he realized
that they thought that he was mad, and they showed hostility or
compassion, not understanding.
At first he drank none of the new water, but went back to his
concealment, to draw on his supplies, every day. Finally, however,
he took the decision to drink the new water because he could not
bear the loneliness of living, behaving and thinking in a
different way from everyone else. He drank the new water, and
became like the rest. Then he forgot all about his own store of
special water, and his fellows began to look upon him as a madman
who had miraculously been restored to sanity.[2]
The struggle for truth in the assassination of President Kennedy confronts
us with the problem of the "waters of knowledge" versus "the waters of
uncertainty." Let me give you an example involving two important individuals
who attempted to bring the truth before the American people. I am speaking
of New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison and filmmaker Oliver Stone.
Both Garrison and Stone knew that the President was the victim of a
conspiracy by high level US military intelligence officials. Each in his own
way tried to bring such knowledge to the attention of the American people.
In the case of Oliver Stone, even before his film JFK had received its final
cut there developed an unprecedented campaign of slander against Stone, that
he was a madman, that he was a drunk. In the face of this attack Stone was
advised to compromise and did so.[3] He backed off from telling the American
people that his film was the truth, and instead claimed that his film, JFK,
was "my myth." In other words Stone said "I have my myth and you are
entitled to yours. I'm not saying I know what happened here. There is
uncertainty." The instant Stone did that, the campaign of slander ended. He
was again acceptable. He was invited to address Congress and was permitted
to ask the government to release more information so as to help us clear up
the supposed mystery.
Jim Garrison's story is different. In the face of his effort to reveal the
true nature of the assassination there was a campaign to discredit him. It
was claimed that he was a drug addict, that he had ties to the Mafia, that
he was grandstanding and self seeking. But Garrison never backed down. And
because of that, even today a noted biographer cannot get a major publisher
to enter into a contract to do an honest biography of the man. He is still
an outcast, a madman as far as the society is concerned. Stone agreed to
drink the waters of uncertainty and society recognized him as having
miraculously recovered his sanity. Garrison refused, insisting on continuing
to drink the waters of knowledge, and for this he suffered accordingly.
Not too long ago I received a letter from a lawyer and leading human rights
activist in Bangladesh. Her name is Sultana Kamal, and in commenting on my
book, History Will Not Absolve Us,[4] she wrote the following: "There are so
many ways human beings invent to humiliate their basic sense of dignity --
the sense of dignity which comes from the courage to acknowledge the truth.
Instead we choose to live in falsehood to make ourselves instrumental in
remaking conditions which bring us indignity, loss of self esteem and again
bind us to the task of reconditioning the evil cycles of denial of truth and
justice to ourselves."
What The Waters Of Knowledge Tell Us
Over and over again we hear people asking for more and more information from
the government. I suggest to you that the problem is not that we have
insufficient data. The problem is that we dare not analyze the data we have
had all along. In fact we need very little data. Honestly, as far as I'm
concerned you can throw almost the whole 26 volumes of the Warren Commission
in the trash can. All you need to do is look at this.
[Commission Exhibit 385] [Supplemental Report exhibit 59]
Commission Exhibit 385 Supplemental Report exhibit 59
Here [on the left] is the Warren Commission drawing of the path of the
"magic" bullet. And here [on the right] is a photograph of the hole in the
President's jacket.
Now what does this tell us? It tells us without a shadow of a doubt that the
President's throat wound was an entry wound, and that there was a conspiracy
without any question. But it tells us much more. It tells us that the Warren
Commission knew that the conspiracy was obvious and that the Commission was
engaged in a criminal conspiracy after the fact to obstruct justice. The
Chief Justice of the United States was a criminal accessory to the murder of
the President. Senator Arlen Specter is a criminal accessory to murder. The
Warren Report was not a mistake; it was and is an obvious act of criminal
fraud.[5]
Think of this for a moment. The Warren Report is an obvious criminal act of
fraud and no history department in any college or university is willing to
say so. What does such silence mean?
It means that we are dealing with something that has affected every history
department of every college and university in our society, every major
newspaper and magazine, and all means of mass communication. It has affected
virtually every "loyal American." This phenomenon is what George Orwell in
his novel 1984 called "crimestop" or "protective stupidity."
According to Orwell, "crimestop" is really a form of self mind control in
which we find the affected individual "stopping short, as though by
instinct, at the threshold of any dangerous thought ... not grasping
analogies ... failing to perceive logical errors ... misunderstanding the
simplest arguments ... and ... being bored or repelled by any train of
thought" if such is inimical to the powers that be.
As a clinician, I look at "crimestop" as a mass psychological illness, an
involuntary intellectual emotional and spiritual illness, part of the
psychology of war which has pervaded our society.
So let us go on and ask who was Lee Harvey Oswald. I suggest to you that it
is equally obvious that Oswald was a CIA agent from the data the Warren
Commission provided to us. Look at the relevant chapter in Sylvia Meagher's
Accessories After the Fact, which was published in 1967.[6] Indeed, what
Meagher did was to confirm what Harold Feldman, with the help of Vincent
Salandria, had already suggested in The Nation magazine even before the
release of The Warren Report.[7] If you look at History Will Not Absolve Us,
you will find that Castro could see this immediately by knowing how to read
our press. And Castro was not the only one who saw this.[8]
The following is the text of an internal memorandum from the Assistant
Attorney General of the United States to President Johnson's press secretary
Bill Moyers, written just three days after the assassination:
Memorandum for Mr. Moyers
It is important that all of the facts surrounding President
Kennedy's assassination be made public in a way which will satisfy
people in the United States and abroad that all the facts have
been told and that a statement to this effect be made now.
1. The public must be satisfied that Oswald was the assassin; that
he did not have confederates who are still at large; and that the
evidence was such that he would have been convicted at trial.
2. Speculation about Oswald's motivation ought to be cut off, and
we should have some basis for rebutting thought that this was a
Communist conspiracy or (as the Iron Curtain press is saying) a
right-wing conspiracy to blame it on the Communists. Unfortunately
the facts on Oswald seem about too pat -- too obvious (Marxist,
Cuba, Russian wife, etc.). The Dallas police have put out
statements on the Communist conspiracy theory, and it was they who
were in charge when he was shot and thus silenced.
3. The matter has been handled thus far with neither dignity nor
conviction. Facts have been mixed with rumor and speculation. We
can scarcely let the world see us totally in the image of the
Dallas police when our President is murdered.
I think this objective may be satisfied by making public as soon
as possible a complete and thorough FBI report on Oswald and the
assassination. This may run into the difficulty of pointing to
inconsistencies between this report and statements by Dallas
police officials. But the reputation of the Bureau is such that it
may do the whole job.
The only other step would be the appointment of a Presidential
Commission of unimpeachable personnel to review and examine the
evidence and announce its conclusions. This has both advantages
and disadvantages. I think it can await publication of the FBI
report and public reaction to it here and abroad.
I think, however, that a statement that all the facts will be made
public property in an orderly and responsible way should be made
now. We need something to head off public speculation or
Congressional hearings of the wrong sort.
Nicholas
deB.
Katzenbach
Deputy
Attorney
General[9]
There are two aspects of this memorandum to which I want to draw your
attention. First we see written proof that Attorney General Robert Kennedy's
aide was engaged in a criminal conspiracy to cover up the crime three days
after the fact. But there is another aspect. Look what Katzenbach says about
the frame-up of Oswald. "Unfortunately the facts on Oswald seem about too
pat -- too obvious ..." What does this mean? It means Katzenbach can see
that this guy has been set up.
So we have to ask ourselves, "Who can murder the President, frame a CIA
agent, and command this kind of cover?" I am not going to reiterate what
Vince Salandria has presented to you. As we knew at the time, Kennedy had
begun a process of rapprochement with the USSR[10] and had been making clear
moves away from the Cold War.[11] The very simple and obvious question is,
Who had the means and motive to organize a conspiracy to assassinate
President Kennedy, frame in advance a CIA agent for the murder, use
immediately all media channels to spill the frame-up of Oswald to the world,
have the White House radioing Air Force One on the way back from Dallas that
Oswald was it before the Dallas police had anything on him?[12] Who can do
all this and command a complete cover-up by all our society's institutions?
Only one institution had the means and motive to accomplish all this, an
element of the United States government that is so necessary to the
"defense" of the nation that to expose it would be unthinkable -- the answer
is obvious -- high US military intelligence.
But I want to take us a step further, because today the truth is not just
that our military intelligence assassinated our President. Today,
thirty-five years later, such an assertion is a half-truth. The full truth
today must include an acknowledgment that the source of the assassination
conspiracy was knowable and known at the time, and continues to be. The full
truth requires that we acknowledge that every leading institution of this
society has cooperated in covering up the President's murder.
Why The Cover-Up Was Necessary
At the time of the assassination what would have happened if it had been
acknowledged that the assassination had been a high level conspiracy of the
US military intelligence apparatus? I suggest to you that if this truth had
been acknowledged early on, our own CIA and military would have emerged as
leading threats to freedom, democracy and peace here at home as well as
throughout the world. Such an awareness on the part of a significant portion
of our public would have led to the fragmentation of our society, and to a
level of domestic turmoil which would have disrupted America's international
empire. Think of the potential function of such truth in the context of the
political movements of the 60's. In no way could the United States have
prosecuted the Vietnam War under those circumstances. An enormous
anti-militarist opposition would have thwarted much of what our military
intelligence has perpetrated over the years in Latin America, and around the
world.
What does all this tell us about ourselves? Well, one of the implications is
that we have a very strange sort of democracy. It is a democracy in which
the press is so free that the President can't have sex with a White House
intern without being hauled before the court of public opinion, but the
military intelligence establishment can openly assassinate the President and
escape without any serious effort by that press to call it to account. The
President lying in a civil deposition, and supposedly obstructing justice
over something that is totally meaningless, gets infinite attention from our
media. This, while clear obstruction of justice in the murder of a President
passes in silence.
To see such a thing is to realize when we call ourselves "free" and
"democratic", we are wrapping ourselves in the window dressing of a modern
militarist empire -- an empire of which we are but subjects. Granted, ladies
and gentlemen, some of us in this country may be privileged subjects, maybe
even the majority of us are privileged subjects, but when the day is done,
that is what we are -- subjects. We are not citizens of a free democratic
society, but subjects of a modern version of the Roman Empire. I suggest to
you that this is a truth about ourselves which most Americans would rather
not hear, because we Americans love to bask in the illusion that we are a
beacon to the world, that we are freer and more democratic than the poor of
the world whom our tax dollars have so effectively helped to murder and
suppress.[13]
This is the truth which the powers that be have no interest in the American
people knowing and which the American people are more than happy to be
protected from. Under such conditions it isn't hard to motivate people to
avoid the truth. It is only necessary to supply them with a workable lie.
But just what lie would serve this purpose? What lie could bind the society
together and allow people to preserve their illusory identity as "citizens
of a free democratic state"? Here we come to the "waters of uncertainty."
The Waters of Uncertainty -- The Essence of the Cover-Up
The lie that was destined to cover the truth of the assassination was the
lie that the assassination is a mystery, that we are not sure what happened,
but being free citizens of a great democracy we can discuss and debate what
has occurred. We can petition our government and join with it in seeking the
solution to this mystery. This is the essence of the cover-up.
The lie is that there is a mystery to debate. And so we have pseudo-debates.
Debates about meaningless disputes, based on assumptions which are obviously
false. This is the form that Orwell's crimestop has taken in the matter of
the President's murder. I am talking about the pseudo-debate over whether
the Warren Report is true when it is obviously and undebatably false. The
pseudo-debate over whether the Russians, or the Cubans, or the Mafia, or
Lyndon Johnson, or some spinoff from the CIA killed the President. These are
all part of the process of crimestop which is designed to cover up the
obvious nature of this assassination. And let us not forget the
pseudo-debate over whether JFK would or would not have escalated in Vietnam.
As if a President who was obviously turning against the cold war and was
secretly negotiating normalization of relations with Cuba,[14] would have
allowed the military to trap him into pursuing our war in Vietnam.
Since the publication of History Will Not Absolve Us, what I have found most
striking is the profound resistance people have to the concept of
pseudo-debate, a resistance in people which is manifest as an inability or
unwillingness to grasp the concept and to use it to analyze their own
actions and the information that comes before them. Even amongst "critics"
who are very favorably disposed to my book, I note a consistent avoidance of
this concept. And I see this as part of the illness, a very dangerous
manifestation of the illness, which I want to discuss further.
The Malignant Nature of Pseudo-Debate
Perhaps many people think that engaging in pseudo-debate is a benign
activity. That it simply means that people are debating something that is
irrelevant. This is not the case. I say this because every debate rests on a
premise to which the debaters must agree, or there is no debate. In the case
of pseudo-debate the premise is a lie. So in the pseudo-debate we have the
parties to the debate agreeing to purvey a lie to the public. And it is all
the more malignant because it is subtle. The unsuspecting person who is
witness to the pseudo-debate does not understand that he is being passed a
lie. He is not even aware that he is being passed a premise. It is so subtle
that the premise just passes into the person as if it were reality. This
premise -- that there is uncertainly to be resolved -- seems so benign. It
is as easy as drinking a glass of treated water.
But the fact remains that there is no mystery except in the minds of those
who are willing to drink this premise. The premise is a lie, and a society
which agrees to drink such a lie ceases to perceive reality. This is what we
mean by mass denial.
That the entire establishment has been willing to join in this process of
cover-up by confusion creates an extreme form of problem for anyone who
would seek to utter the truth. For these civilian institutions -- the media,
the universities and the government -- once they begin engaging in denial of
knowledge of the identity of the assassins, once they are drawn into the
cover-up, a secondary motivation develops for them. Now they are not only
protecting the state, they are now protecting themselves, because to expose
the obviousness of the assassination and the false debate would be to reveal
the corrupt role of all these institutions. And there is no question that
these institutions are masters in self protection. Thus anyone who would
attempt to confront the true cover-up must be prepared to confront virtually
the entire society. And in doing this, one is inevitably going to be
marginalized.
The Role of Robert F. Kennedy
It is at this point that we can begin to look at the role of the "critical
community" in this process, but before I do this I want to examine the role
of Robert F. Kennedy.
When I have tried to point out to people that Robert F. Kennedy, in
cooperating with the cover-up, became in every sense of the word an
accessory after the fact in his own brother's murder, there has generally
been an instant recoil. But I want to tell you that this is not an opinion;
this is just a fact. There is no way we can deny this, if we think about it.
I'm not talking about why he became an accessory, but the fact that he did
is absolutely undeniable. Robert F. Kennedy had a legal sworn obligation to
seek out the assassins, and in failing to do so he joined the criminal act
of conspiracy with the criminal act of cover-up and sealed the deal. And
don't let anyone tell you that it was because he couldn't put two words
together after his brother was murdered. I have seen his correspondence with
Ray Marcus. And if it were some kind of personal emotional reaction, how is
it that none of the people surrounding Robert Kennedy could utter the
obvious truth of the assassination? No, Robert Kennedy's cooperation,
agonizing and humiliating as it must have been for him, was dictated by
political considerations, which led him away from his legal and moral
obligation to tell the American people what he knew.
When I start talking to people about this, I hear Robert Kennedy's actions
defended with the idea that if he had spoken out he would have been
marginalized. And this is important, because maybe that was part of Robert
Kennedy's motivation. But I think the person who responds to me in this way
is telling me something about his or her own motivation. The person is
telling me that in their opinion, the desire not to be marginalized can
somehow justify lying to the public about what you do and don't know about
the assassination of the President. I want to say in no uncertain terms this
lying is not only profoundly lacking in morality but is in addition
profoundly foolish and is totally indefensible. It was indefensible for
Robert Kennedy and it is indefensible for any one of us.
There is no justification whatsoever for lying to anyone about what you do
and don't know about this murder. Quite to the contrary, if telling the
truth marginalizes you, then that is the place to be. After all, if enough
people are willing to be marginalized, then before you know it, society has
developed a different center. This is the politics of truth. But Robert
Kennedy wasn't really used to the politics of truth. Instead, he was
captivated by the illusory politics of power, influence and access. And I am
afraid that many of us are also caught up with such ideas.
So now we have come to a problem. Our society confronts the individual with
a choice: "If you want to avoid marginalization, you compromise the truth."
And the problem is that the moment you compromise with the truth, the moment
you contribute false uncertainty, at that moment you have joined the
cover-up. This is the critical point. Another way of saying this is, that
society is prepared to confer a reward to anyone who is willing to drink the
waters uncertainty. The reward is legitimacy; the reward is credibility; the
reward is access; the reward is rescue from being marginalized.
I understand that the pressure to compromise the truth is enormous, because
our society finds the truth and it implications so repugnant. Any normal
person wants to be able to communicate. A normal person doesn't want to be
isolated, doesn't want to turn people off. But in being concerned that the
truth as we know it will turn off our neighbor, in compromising and
pretending we do not know, for the sake of having "credibility," we are
destined to become part of the problem rather than part of the solution. We
are destined to become agents of the public's confusion and denial.
So there can be no doubt about what I am saying, I need to examine specific
examples of how the so-called "critical community" has been operating.
The Assassination Records Review Board
Given what I have set before you -- the whole effort by the "critical
community" to petition the United States Government to establish a Board
which would assist it in resolving the "mystery" of the assassination --,
such an effort represents precisely the process described by Sultana Kamal
in which people "choose to live in falsehood, to make ourselves instrumental
in remaking conditions which bring us indignity, loss of self esteem and
again bind us to the task of reconditioning the evil cycles of denial of
truth and justice to ourselves."
The President was assassinated, the government covered for the assassins,
the media covered for them, all the established institutions of society fell
in line with this, and the public was not prepared to take matters into its
own hands. This is the sorry truth of American democracy, and there is
nothing to be done about it, other than to witness the full horror and shame
of it all, to feel the helplessness that is our reality before this state
which is in the grip of militarism and the economic interests which this
militarism serves.
Our problem is not that our government lacks credibility in the eyes of many
of its subjects. That's our government's problem. Anyone who takes the
government's problem as his own problem in so doing becomes an agent of the
government, if not a government agent. And it should be clear that the
government is more than happy to have you do this.
No, our problem, the problem for people who want the truth to be known, is
that despite the lack of government credibility, the public does not have
the ability to think its way through the lies and discern the truth. The
great shame of the "critical community" is that rather than seizing on this
as its mission, the critical community has chosen to ally itself with the
government and has only fostered further public confusion.
So we have a Board set up on the false premise that the problem is that the
government wasn't open enough with the public when it came to the
assassination. Not one member of the Board is capable of coming before you
and stating the most simple and axiomatic truths of this case. There was a
conspiracy without a doubt. The Warren Report was an obvious act of criminal
fraud. Senator Arlen Specter should be indicted for criminal obstruction of
justice. Can any member of that Board come before you and say that? Of
course not. Because respected members of the legal and academic
establishment who can get the appropriate security clearances to serve on
that Board are incapable of speaking simple truths like this. And if you try
to get them to admit this kind of thing they look at you as if you are some
kind of weirdo, or nut. And I remind you, they do not feel that way about
Oliver Stone today, because he isn't saying these are facts. These are only
theories, "myths," and he is not claiming that he knows what happened. So he
is not a problem.
In fact they can use the film JFK now, and claim they are responding to the
film through this Review Board. And COPA and JFK Lancer and all the
"respected" members of this critical community go and praise this Board and
testify before it, and they and the Board embrace each other. What is there
to say? This is our independent research community. With this as our
independent research community there is no mystery about why the public
doesn't know who killed President Kennedy and why.
I was going to read to you how the press is using the statements of various
respected researchers who are here. I was going to read to you the COPA
mission statement and dissect it -- but what is the point? For the sake of
completeness and for illustration, when and if this speech is ever
published, I'll include this as an appendix. You know I like appendices?
But I would rather, at this point, leave it up to any person individually,
if they wish, to take what I've said here, think about it and try to apply
it to anything that comes before him. If anyone is interested in doing this,
I'll be happy to communicate further on an individual basis, but really I've
said enough about the "critical community."
Conclusion
In conclusion I want to share with you something a close friend, Professor
Rudi Cardona, pointed out after reading an earlier draft of this speech.
Although Rudi has lived in this country for many years, he was born and
raised in Costa Rica and has a real international perspective. He mentioned
that throughout our history, we Americans seem always to prefer domestic
tranquility over justice and the principles which supposedly underlie our
democracy. He remarked on how a recent TV series on slavery had shown that
Washington and Jefferson knew slavery was wrong but could not bring
themselves to oppose it openly because of the turmoil this would have
caused. Of course, the turmoil they were concerned about was the turmoil
that whites would feel. The slaves were not being spared any turmoil.
And I think the analogy is very apt, because to those who would attempt to
defend the cover-up, by suggesting that the truth would have been too
painful for our country to endure, I want to remind us that the people of
Vietnam were not spared the turmoil of our military rule. The people of
Latin America and South America have not been spared. By cooperating in
holding this society together through lies, we have made it that much more
possible for our military intelligence apparatus to impose enormous
suffering on people throughout the world. And this turmoil and mayhem has by
no means been ended.
On April 25th of this year [1998], Guatemalan Bishop Juan Jose Gerardi
Conedera was assassinated one day after he stood before an audience in the
Metropolitan Cathedral of Guatemala City and gave a speech in which he
presented the findings of an in-depth probe into thousands and thousands of
murdered and disappeared persons, casualties of a campaign of terror against
the people of Guatemala waged by their own government, a right wing
militarist government which over the years has enjoyed the consistent
training and support of our US military intelligence establishment, the well
protected home of the assassins of President Kennedy.
I want to read to you some of the thoughts Bishop Conedera expressed in his
April 24th speech. Amongst other things he said,
"The root of humanity's downfall and disgrace comes from the
deliberate opposition to truth ... this reality that has been
intentionally deformed in our country throughout thirty-six years
of war against the people.
"To open ourselves to the truth and to bring ourselves face to
face with our personal and collective reality is not an option
that can be accepted or rejected. It is an undeniable requirement
of all people and all societies that seek to humanize themselves
and to be free....
"Truth is the primary word, the serious and mature action that
makes it possible for us to break the cycle of death and violence
and open ourselves to a future of hope and light for all ...
"Discovering the truth is painful, but it is without a doubt a
healthy and liberating action."
Thank you very much.
Notes
-------------------------
1. See E. Martin Schotz, History Will Not Absolve Us, Orwellian Control,
Public Denial, and the Murder of President Kennedy (Brookline, Mass.:
Kurtz, Ulmer, & DeLucia, 1996) for an explication of the transparency
of the assassination its ensuing obfuscation. From the book's
Introduction,
In our efforts to confront the truth of the assassination of
President Kennedy we are at a very different point today than
we were thirty years ago when the first critical analyses of
the Warren Report were published. Dozens of books and
thousands of magazine articles have been written about this
case. Almost without exception, no matter what the author's
view concerning who killed President Kennedy or why, these
works have directly or indirectly contributed to the public's
conviction that the murder of the President is a mystery. As
a result, although a vast majority of our public believes
that there was a conspiracy, most people do not know this as
a fact and are convinced that they can never know for sure
what happened.
On both points the public is mistaken. The murder of the
President is not a mystery. The nature of the conspiracy that
took President Kennedy's life was from the outset quite
obvious to anyone who knew how to look and was willing to do
so. The same holds true today. Any citizen who is willing to
look can see clearly who killed President Kennedy and why.
(pp. 3-4)
2. Idries Shah Tales of the Dervishes, Teaching-stories of the Sufi
Masters over the past thousand years (New York: E.P. Dutton & Co.,
1969), pp. 21-22.
3. From History Will Not Absolve Us, p. 286:
. . . The pressure [to compromise] was intense and Stone
turned for advice to Frank Mankiewicz, an old Kennedy ally.
The advice apparently was that Stone should not insist that
his film was the truth (which he knew it was), but that he
should simply present it as his interpretation. Thus, with
the release of the film Stone began referring to the film as
his "myth." The instant he did that, the criticism was muted.
He was invited to address Congress and call for the release
of more information. Once again he became acceptable.
Stone knows this movie is not myth. It is a brilliant
synthesis of twenty-five years of critical work by Garrison
and independent citizens. It is completely factual except for
the obviously created and condensed scenes. Beyond that, to
call on the government to provide further information is to
logically contradict the film's central thesis that the
government was behind it. So Stone wound up being turned
against his own film.
There is a very important lesson in this. There is no mystery
in the JFK assassination today. And to pretend otherwise is
to join the cover-up, something Stone has done in calling for
the release of more information and referring to his film as
"myth."
4. The complete book is available online.
5. See an annotated transcript of Vincent Salandria's speech -- also
presented at the 1998 Coalition on Political Assassinations conference,
"The JFK Assassination: A False Mystery Concealing State Crimes" -- for
a detailed explication listing many instances of malfeasance,
misfeasance, and obstruction of justice carried out by officials of the
U.S. government responsible for the investigation of President
Kennedy's assassination -- some of whom were themselves criminal
accessories after the fact.
6. Meagher, Sylvia. Accessories After the Fact: The Warren Commission, the
Authorities and the Report. New York: Bobbs-Merrill Company, Inc.,
1967.
7. Feldman, Harold. "Oswald and the FBI", The Nation, 27 January 1964.
8. "Concerning the Facts and Consequences of the Tragic Death of President
John F. Kennedy, speech commentary delivered by Fidel Castro on Cuban
radio and TV, Saturday evening, November 23, 1963, Appendix II, History
Will Not Absolve Us
9. Memorandum to Bill Moyers, Press Secretary to President Lyndon Johnson,
from Deputy Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach, written November 25,
1963, three days after the assassination of President Kennedy; report
from Hearings Before the Select Committee on Assassinations of the
United States House of Representatives, 95th Congress, 2nd Session,
Volume 3, pp. 566-68.
See pages 2, 3, and 4 of a copy of this memorandum from a segment of a
so-called FBI "file": "62-109090 File (Headquarters Warren
Commission)," "11-25-63 Katzenbach to Moyers, w/Evans to Belmont cover
(62-109090-1st NR 2)". A local-to-ratical PDF copy is replicated from
History Matters' section on Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI).
The full title of the twelve volumes of hearings is:
INVESTIGATION OF THE ASSASSINATION OF PRESIDENT JOHN F. KENNEDY:
HEARINGS BEFORE THE SELECT COMMITTEE ON ASSASSINATIONS OF THE U.S.
HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES NINETY-FIFTH CONGRESS, SECOND SESSION,
SEPTEMBER 18, 19, 20, AND 21, 1976
See a complete alternate copy of the 12 volumes at: HATHI TRUST Digital
Library
10. One of the foundations of this rapprochement was a confidential
correspondence between Khrushchev and Kennedy that began with a 26-page
letter from the Soviet Chairman to the American President. It was
written during the Berlin crisis on September 29, 1961, and smuggled in
a newspaper carried by Georgi Bolshakov, a Soviet intelligence agent,
to Pierre Saligner, Kennedy's press secretary. Bolshakov was also an
editor of USSR magazine and an interpreter for visiting Russian
officials in Washington. He spent an entire night translating the
letter from Russian and gave Salinger the original in Russian as well
to permit comparison by U.S. translators. [Pierre Salinger, With
Kennedy (New York: Doubleday, 1966), pp. 197-199]
See Jim Douglass, JFK and The Unspeakable, Why He Died and Why It
Matters (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2010): "In July 1993, the U.S.
State Department, in response to a Freedom of Information Act request
by a Canadian newspaper, declassified twenty-one secret letters between
John F. Kennedy and Nikita Khrushchev." (p. 23) In 1996 all the private
correspondence between JFK and Khrushchev was published in Foreign
Relations of the United States (FRUS), 1961-1963, Volume VI,
Kennedy-Khrushchev Exchanges (Washington: U.S. Government Printing
Office). The Kennedy-Khrushchev Exchanges: Document List contains 120
communications, of which 21 make up the secret letters between JFK and
Khrushchev. It is not clear precisely which of the 120 make up the
subset of 21 private communications. Here is a list of what probably
constitutes the bulk of the private missives:
o Document 21: Letter From Chairman Khrushchev to President Kennedy,
Moscow, September 29, 1961
o Document 22: Letter From President Kennedy to Chairman Khrushchev,
Hyannis Port, October 16, 1961
o Document 23: Letter From Chairman Khrushchev to President Kennedy,
Moscow, November 9, 1961
o Document 24: Letter From Chairman Khrushchev to President Kennedy,
Moscow, November 10, 1961
o Document 25: Letter From President Kennedy to Chairman Khrushchev,
Washington, November 16, 1961
o Document 26: Letter From President Kennedy to Chairman Khrushchev,
Washington, December 2, 1961
o Document 27: Letter From Chairman Khrushchev to President Kennedy,
Moscow, December 13, 1961
o Document 32: Letter From Chairman Khrushchev to President Kennedy,
Moscow, February 10, 1962
o Document 34: Letter From President Kennedy to Chairman Khrushchev,
Washington, February 15, 1962
o Document 37: Letter From Chairman Khrushchev to President Kennedy,
Moscow, February 21, 1962
o Document 42: Letter From Chairman Khrushchev to President Kennedy,
Moscow, March 10, 1962
o Document 51: Letter From President Kennedy to Chairman Khrushchev,
Washington, July 17, 1962
o Document 71: Letter From Chairman Khrushchev to President Kennedy,
Moscow, October 30, 1962
o Document 82: Letter From Chairman Khrushchev to President Kennedy,
Moscow, November 22, 1962
o Document 84: Letter From President Kennedy to Chairman Khrushchev,
Washington, December 14, 1962
o Document 85: Letter From Chairman Khrushchev to President Kennedy,
Moscow, December 19, 1962
o Document 99: Letter From Chairman Khrushchev to President Kennedy,
Moscow, May 8, 1963
11. In the summer of 1962 John Kennedy gave himself three Bay of Pigs -type
events -- specific conflicts with his national security managers from
the military and intelligence establishments -- before a military coup
would overthrow him and seize control of the United States. A list of
such conflicts between himself and his national security state
includes:
1. 1961: negotiated peace with the Communists for a neutralist
government in Laos;
2 April 1961: Bay of Pigs and JFK's response: "[I want] to splinter
the CIA in a thousand pieces and scatter it to the winds."
3. 1961-63: Kennedy-Hammarskjold-UN vision kept the Congo together
and independent;
4. April 1962: conflict with big steel industrialists;
5. October 1962: Cuban Missile Crisis;
6. 1961-63: Diplomatic opening to Third World leadership of President
Sukarno;
7. May 6, 1963: Presidential order NSAM 239 to pursue both a nuclear
test ban and a policy of general and complete disarmament;
8. June 10, 1963: American University Address - the Real JFK Jubilee
- not November 22;
9. Summer 1963: Nuclear Test Ban Treaty;
10. Fall 1963: beginning of back-channel dialogue with Fidel Castro;
11. Fall 1963: JFK's decision to sell wheat to the Russians;
12. October 11, 1963: Presidential order NSAM #263 to withdraw U.S.
troops from Vietnam by 1965;
13. November 1963: Khrushchev decides to accept JFK's invitation for a
joint expedition to the moon.
For a summary of JFK's turning toward peace during his Presidency that
marked him out for assassination, see Jim Douglass, "The Hope in
Confronting the Unspeakable in the Assassination of President John
Fitzgerald Kennedy," Keynote Address at the Coalition on Political
Assassinations Dallas Conference, 20 November 2009. Many endnotes in
this annotated transcript include segments from JFK and the
Unspeakable.
12. For a compilation of biographical details on Lee Harvey Oswald which
confirm his identity as an agent for U.S. intelligence services see
"Oswald and U.S. Intelligence," Appendix V, History Will Not Absolve
Us. For a series of letters which grew out of the revelation by
Theodore H. White that on the flight back to Washington, President
Johnson, aboard Air Force One, was informed that Oswald had been
arrested and that there was no conspiracy, see "Internal Data on the
United States Government's Immediate Reaction to the Assassination,"
Appendix IV, Ibid.
13. For background on what our tax dollars fund and have perpetrated over
the decades around the world, see, for example, Killing Hope: US
Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II by William Blum
(Common Courage Press, 2008); "Be nice to America. Or we'll bring
democracy to your country!," an animated cartoon about US foreign
policy written by William Blum; War Is A Racket by retired USMC Major
General Smedley Butler, two time Medal of Honor recipient, 1935;
American War Machine: Deep Politics, the CIA Global Drug Connection,
and the Road to Afghanistan, by Peter Dale Scott (Rowman & Littlefield
Publishers, 2010) - see chapters 3, 4, 7, 10 available online.
14. Three weeks after the assassination French journalist Jean Daniel wrote
about his role as an unofficial emissary to Castro from Kennedy in
"Unofficial Envoy: An Historic Report From Two Capitals," New Republic
(December 14, 1963), p. 15-20.
When President Kennedy spoke at the United Nations on September 20,
1963. "he suggested that its members see the Test Ban Treaty as a
beginning and engage together in an experiment in peace:
Two years ago I told this body that the United States had
proposed, and was willing to sign, a Limited Test Ban treaty.
Today that treaty has been signed. It will not put an end to
war. It will not remove basic conflicts. It will not secure
freedom for all. But it can be a lever, and Archimedes, in
explaining the principles of the lever, was said to have
declared to his friends: "Give me a place where I can stand
and I shall move the world."
My fellow inhabitants of this planet: Let us take our stand
here in this Assembly of nations. And let us see if we, in
our own time, can move the world to a just and lasting peace.
When he said these words, John Kennedy was secretly engaging in another
risky experiment in peace. That same day at the United Nations, Kennedy
told UN Ambassador Adlai Stevenson that his assistant William Attwood
should go ahead "to make discreet contact" with Cuba's UN Ambassador
Carlos Lechuga. The question: Was Fidel Castro interested in a dialogue
with John Kennedy? A strongly affirmative answer would come back from
Castro, who had been repeatedly urged by Khrushchev -- by Khrushchev --
to begin trusting Kennedy." Quoted in The Hope in Confronting the
Unspeakable in the Assassination of President John Fitzgerald Kennedy.
The story of Kennedy's quest to negotiate with Castro on a new
U.S.-Cuban relationship is told by Cuba's then-UN ambassador Carlos
Lechuga in his book In the Eye of the Storm: Castro, Khrushchev,
Kennedy, and the Missile Crisis (Ocean Press, 1995) and by U.S.
diplomat William Attwood in The Reds and the Blacks; A Personal
Adventure (Harper & Row, 1967) and The Twilight Struggle: Tales of the
Cold War (Harper & Row, 1987).
See also: Document 367. Memorandum by William Attwood and Document 374.
Memorandum From William Attwood to Gordon Chase of the National
Security Council Staff, New York, November 8, 1963, from FRUS,
1961-1963, Volume XI, Cuban Missile Crisis and Aftermath, October
1962-December 1963 (Washington: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1997);
"Kennedy Sought Dialogue with Cuba -- Initiative With Castro Aborted by
Assassination, Declassified Documents Show," The National Security
Archive, November 24, 2003.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
This is an annotated transcript that started with the copy at
http://spot.acorn.net/jfkplace/09/fp.bac...chotz.html. All
hyperlinks, and footnotes by David Ratcliffe with the permission and
encouragement of E. Martin Schotz.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
The Waters of Knowledge versus the Waters of Uncertainty:
Mass Denial in the Assassination of President Kennedy
By E. Martin Schotz
Coalition on Political Assassinations Conference
20 November 1998
Dallas, Texas
Contents
* Introduction
* What The Waters of Knowledge Tell Us
* Why The Cover-Up Was Necessary
* The Waters of Uncertainty -- The Essence of the Cover-Up
* The Malignant Nature of Pseudo-Debate
* The Role of Robert F. Kennedy
* The Assassination Records Review Board
* Conclusion
* Notes
Introduction
My task this afternoon is to explore with you the reasons the American
people do not know who killed President Kennedy and why. In order to do this
we will have to deal with three interdependent conspiracies which developed
in the course of the assassination and its aftermath. These are:
1. the criminal conspiracy to murder the President by a cabal of
militarists at the highest echelons of power in the United States;
2. the conspiracy which aided and abetted these murderers after the fact,
by covering for the assassins, also a true criminal conspiracy
involving an extremely wide circle of government officials across the
entire political spectrum and at all levels of government; and
3. a conspiracy of ignorance, denial, confusion, and silence which has
pervaded our entire public.
The major focus of my talk today is this third conspiracy on the part of the
public, which includes our so-called "critical community." I want to show
you that our failure to know is not based on any lack of data or because the
data is ambiguous. It is all extremely simple and obvious.[1] Rather we
don't know because we are deeply emotionally resistant to what such
knowledge tells us about ourselves and our society. Furthermore the
powers-that-be do not reward people for such knowledge. Indeed if a person
is willing to acknowledge the truth, is in a position to share such
knowledge with the public, and wishes to do so, then the organized
institutions of our society will turn sharply against such a person.
Now this is not a new problem in the history of society. In fact, I want to
read to you a Sufi tale from the Ninth Century which can help to orient us
to the problem. The tale is entitled "When the Waters Were Changed." It goes
as follows:
When the Waters Were Changed
Once upon a time Khidr, the Teacher of Moses, called upon mankind
with a warning. At a certain date, he said, all the water in the
world which had not been specially hoarded, would disappear. It
would then be renewed with different water, which would drive men
mad.
Only one man listened to the meaning of this advice. He collected
water, went to a secure place where he stored it, and waited for
the water to change its character.
On the appointed date the streams stopped running, the wells went
dry, and the man who had listened, seeing this happening, went to
his retreat and drank his preserved water.
When he saw, from his security, the waterfalls again beginning to
flow, this man descended among the other sons of men. He found
that they were thinking and talking in an entirely different way
from before; yet they had no memory of what had happened, nor of
having been warned. When he tried to talk to them, he realized
that they thought that he was mad, and they showed hostility or
compassion, not understanding.
At first he drank none of the new water, but went back to his
concealment, to draw on his supplies, every day. Finally, however,
he took the decision to drink the new water because he could not
bear the loneliness of living, behaving and thinking in a
different way from everyone else. He drank the new water, and
became like the rest. Then he forgot all about his own store of
special water, and his fellows began to look upon him as a madman
who had miraculously been restored to sanity.[2]
The struggle for truth in the assassination of President Kennedy confronts
us with the problem of the "waters of knowledge" versus "the waters of
uncertainty." Let me give you an example involving two important individuals
who attempted to bring the truth before the American people. I am speaking
of New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison and filmmaker Oliver Stone.
Both Garrison and Stone knew that the President was the victim of a
conspiracy by high level US military intelligence officials. Each in his own
way tried to bring such knowledge to the attention of the American people.
In the case of Oliver Stone, even before his film JFK had received its final
cut there developed an unprecedented campaign of slander against Stone, that
he was a madman, that he was a drunk. In the face of this attack Stone was
advised to compromise and did so.[3] He backed off from telling the American
people that his film was the truth, and instead claimed that his film, JFK,
was "my myth." In other words Stone said "I have my myth and you are
entitled to yours. I'm not saying I know what happened here. There is
uncertainty." The instant Stone did that, the campaign of slander ended. He
was again acceptable. He was invited to address Congress and was permitted
to ask the government to release more information so as to help us clear up
the supposed mystery.
Jim Garrison's story is different. In the face of his effort to reveal the
true nature of the assassination there was a campaign to discredit him. It
was claimed that he was a drug addict, that he had ties to the Mafia, that
he was grandstanding and self seeking. But Garrison never backed down. And
because of that, even today a noted biographer cannot get a major publisher
to enter into a contract to do an honest biography of the man. He is still
an outcast, a madman as far as the society is concerned. Stone agreed to
drink the waters of uncertainty and society recognized him as having
miraculously recovered his sanity. Garrison refused, insisting on continuing
to drink the waters of knowledge, and for this he suffered accordingly.
Not too long ago I received a letter from a lawyer and leading human rights
activist in Bangladesh. Her name is Sultana Kamal, and in commenting on my
book, History Will Not Absolve Us,[4] she wrote the following: "There are so
many ways human beings invent to humiliate their basic sense of dignity --
the sense of dignity which comes from the courage to acknowledge the truth.
Instead we choose to live in falsehood to make ourselves instrumental in
remaking conditions which bring us indignity, loss of self esteem and again
bind us to the task of reconditioning the evil cycles of denial of truth and
justice to ourselves."
What The Waters Of Knowledge Tell Us
Over and over again we hear people asking for more and more information from
the government. I suggest to you that the problem is not that we have
insufficient data. The problem is that we dare not analyze the data we have
had all along. In fact we need very little data. Honestly, as far as I'm
concerned you can throw almost the whole 26 volumes of the Warren Commission
in the trash can. All you need to do is look at this.
[Commission Exhibit 385] [Supplemental Report exhibit 59]
Commission Exhibit 385 Supplemental Report exhibit 59
Here [on the left] is the Warren Commission drawing of the path of the
"magic" bullet. And here [on the right] is a photograph of the hole in the
President's jacket.
Now what does this tell us? It tells us without a shadow of a doubt that the
President's throat wound was an entry wound, and that there was a conspiracy
without any question. But it tells us much more. It tells us that the Warren
Commission knew that the conspiracy was obvious and that the Commission was
engaged in a criminal conspiracy after the fact to obstruct justice. The
Chief Justice of the United States was a criminal accessory to the murder of
the President. Senator Arlen Specter is a criminal accessory to murder. The
Warren Report was not a mistake; it was and is an obvious act of criminal
fraud.[5]
Think of this for a moment. The Warren Report is an obvious criminal act of
fraud and no history department in any college or university is willing to
say so. What does such silence mean?
It means that we are dealing with something that has affected every history
department of every college and university in our society, every major
newspaper and magazine, and all means of mass communication. It has affected
virtually every "loyal American." This phenomenon is what George Orwell in
his novel 1984 called "crimestop" or "protective stupidity."
According to Orwell, "crimestop" is really a form of self mind control in
which we find the affected individual "stopping short, as though by
instinct, at the threshold of any dangerous thought ... not grasping
analogies ... failing to perceive logical errors ... misunderstanding the
simplest arguments ... and ... being bored or repelled by any train of
thought" if such is inimical to the powers that be.
As a clinician, I look at "crimestop" as a mass psychological illness, an
involuntary intellectual emotional and spiritual illness, part of the
psychology of war which has pervaded our society.
So let us go on and ask who was Lee Harvey Oswald. I suggest to you that it
is equally obvious that Oswald was a CIA agent from the data the Warren
Commission provided to us. Look at the relevant chapter in Sylvia Meagher's
Accessories After the Fact, which was published in 1967.[6] Indeed, what
Meagher did was to confirm what Harold Feldman, with the help of Vincent
Salandria, had already suggested in The Nation magazine even before the
release of The Warren Report.[7] If you look at History Will Not Absolve Us,
you will find that Castro could see this immediately by knowing how to read
our press. And Castro was not the only one who saw this.[8]
The following is the text of an internal memorandum from the Assistant
Attorney General of the United States to President Johnson's press secretary
Bill Moyers, written just three days after the assassination:
Memorandum for Mr. Moyers
It is important that all of the facts surrounding President
Kennedy's assassination be made public in a way which will satisfy
people in the United States and abroad that all the facts have
been told and that a statement to this effect be made now.
1. The public must be satisfied that Oswald was the assassin; that
he did not have confederates who are still at large; and that the
evidence was such that he would have been convicted at trial.
2. Speculation about Oswald's motivation ought to be cut off, and
we should have some basis for rebutting thought that this was a
Communist conspiracy or (as the Iron Curtain press is saying) a
right-wing conspiracy to blame it on the Communists. Unfortunately
the facts on Oswald seem about too pat -- too obvious (Marxist,
Cuba, Russian wife, etc.). The Dallas police have put out
statements on the Communist conspiracy theory, and it was they who
were in charge when he was shot and thus silenced.
3. The matter has been handled thus far with neither dignity nor
conviction. Facts have been mixed with rumor and speculation. We
can scarcely let the world see us totally in the image of the
Dallas police when our President is murdered.
I think this objective may be satisfied by making public as soon
as possible a complete and thorough FBI report on Oswald and the
assassination. This may run into the difficulty of pointing to
inconsistencies between this report and statements by Dallas
police officials. But the reputation of the Bureau is such that it
may do the whole job.
The only other step would be the appointment of a Presidential
Commission of unimpeachable personnel to review and examine the
evidence and announce its conclusions. This has both advantages
and disadvantages. I think it can await publication of the FBI
report and public reaction to it here and abroad.
I think, however, that a statement that all the facts will be made
public property in an orderly and responsible way should be made
now. We need something to head off public speculation or
Congressional hearings of the wrong sort.
Nicholas
deB.
Katzenbach
Deputy
Attorney
General[9]
There are two aspects of this memorandum to which I want to draw your
attention. First we see written proof that Attorney General Robert Kennedy's
aide was engaged in a criminal conspiracy to cover up the crime three days
after the fact. But there is another aspect. Look what Katzenbach says about
the frame-up of Oswald. "Unfortunately the facts on Oswald seem about too
pat -- too obvious ..." What does this mean? It means Katzenbach can see
that this guy has been set up.
So we have to ask ourselves, "Who can murder the President, frame a CIA
agent, and command this kind of cover?" I am not going to reiterate what
Vince Salandria has presented to you. As we knew at the time, Kennedy had
begun a process of rapprochement with the USSR[10] and had been making clear
moves away from the Cold War.[11] The very simple and obvious question is,
Who had the means and motive to organize a conspiracy to assassinate
President Kennedy, frame in advance a CIA agent for the murder, use
immediately all media channels to spill the frame-up of Oswald to the world,
have the White House radioing Air Force One on the way back from Dallas that
Oswald was it before the Dallas police had anything on him?[12] Who can do
all this and command a complete cover-up by all our society's institutions?
Only one institution had the means and motive to accomplish all this, an
element of the United States government that is so necessary to the
"defense" of the nation that to expose it would be unthinkable -- the answer
is obvious -- high US military intelligence.
But I want to take us a step further, because today the truth is not just
that our military intelligence assassinated our President. Today,
thirty-five years later, such an assertion is a half-truth. The full truth
today must include an acknowledgment that the source of the assassination
conspiracy was knowable and known at the time, and continues to be. The full
truth requires that we acknowledge that every leading institution of this
society has cooperated in covering up the President's murder.
Why The Cover-Up Was Necessary
At the time of the assassination what would have happened if it had been
acknowledged that the assassination had been a high level conspiracy of the
US military intelligence apparatus? I suggest to you that if this truth had
been acknowledged early on, our own CIA and military would have emerged as
leading threats to freedom, democracy and peace here at home as well as
throughout the world. Such an awareness on the part of a significant portion
of our public would have led to the fragmentation of our society, and to a
level of domestic turmoil which would have disrupted America's international
empire. Think of the potential function of such truth in the context of the
political movements of the 60's. In no way could the United States have
prosecuted the Vietnam War under those circumstances. An enormous
anti-militarist opposition would have thwarted much of what our military
intelligence has perpetrated over the years in Latin America, and around the
world.
What does all this tell us about ourselves? Well, one of the implications is
that we have a very strange sort of democracy. It is a democracy in which
the press is so free that the President can't have sex with a White House
intern without being hauled before the court of public opinion, but the
military intelligence establishment can openly assassinate the President and
escape without any serious effort by that press to call it to account. The
President lying in a civil deposition, and supposedly obstructing justice
over something that is totally meaningless, gets infinite attention from our
media. This, while clear obstruction of justice in the murder of a President
passes in silence.
To see such a thing is to realize when we call ourselves "free" and
"democratic", we are wrapping ourselves in the window dressing of a modern
militarist empire -- an empire of which we are but subjects. Granted, ladies
and gentlemen, some of us in this country may be privileged subjects, maybe
even the majority of us are privileged subjects, but when the day is done,
that is what we are -- subjects. We are not citizens of a free democratic
society, but subjects of a modern version of the Roman Empire. I suggest to
you that this is a truth about ourselves which most Americans would rather
not hear, because we Americans love to bask in the illusion that we are a
beacon to the world, that we are freer and more democratic than the poor of
the world whom our tax dollars have so effectively helped to murder and
suppress.[13]
This is the truth which the powers that be have no interest in the American
people knowing and which the American people are more than happy to be
protected from. Under such conditions it isn't hard to motivate people to
avoid the truth. It is only necessary to supply them with a workable lie.
But just what lie would serve this purpose? What lie could bind the society
together and allow people to preserve their illusory identity as "citizens
of a free democratic state"? Here we come to the "waters of uncertainty."
The Waters of Uncertainty -- The Essence of the Cover-Up
The lie that was destined to cover the truth of the assassination was the
lie that the assassination is a mystery, that we are not sure what happened,
but being free citizens of a great democracy we can discuss and debate what
has occurred. We can petition our government and join with it in seeking the
solution to this mystery. This is the essence of the cover-up.
The lie is that there is a mystery to debate. And so we have pseudo-debates.
Debates about meaningless disputes, based on assumptions which are obviously
false. This is the form that Orwell's crimestop has taken in the matter of
the President's murder. I am talking about the pseudo-debate over whether
the Warren Report is true when it is obviously and undebatably false. The
pseudo-debate over whether the Russians, or the Cubans, or the Mafia, or
Lyndon Johnson, or some spinoff from the CIA killed the President. These are
all part of the process of crimestop which is designed to cover up the
obvious nature of this assassination. And let us not forget the
pseudo-debate over whether JFK would or would not have escalated in Vietnam.
As if a President who was obviously turning against the cold war and was
secretly negotiating normalization of relations with Cuba,[14] would have
allowed the military to trap him into pursuing our war in Vietnam.
Since the publication of History Will Not Absolve Us, what I have found most
striking is the profound resistance people have to the concept of
pseudo-debate, a resistance in people which is manifest as an inability or
unwillingness to grasp the concept and to use it to analyze their own
actions and the information that comes before them. Even amongst "critics"
who are very favorably disposed to my book, I note a consistent avoidance of
this concept. And I see this as part of the illness, a very dangerous
manifestation of the illness, which I want to discuss further.
The Malignant Nature of Pseudo-Debate
Perhaps many people think that engaging in pseudo-debate is a benign
activity. That it simply means that people are debating something that is
irrelevant. This is not the case. I say this because every debate rests on a
premise to which the debaters must agree, or there is no debate. In the case
of pseudo-debate the premise is a lie. So in the pseudo-debate we have the
parties to the debate agreeing to purvey a lie to the public. And it is all
the more malignant because it is subtle. The unsuspecting person who is
witness to the pseudo-debate does not understand that he is being passed a
lie. He is not even aware that he is being passed a premise. It is so subtle
that the premise just passes into the person as if it were reality. This
premise -- that there is uncertainly to be resolved -- seems so benign. It
is as easy as drinking a glass of treated water.
But the fact remains that there is no mystery except in the minds of those
who are willing to drink this premise. The premise is a lie, and a society
which agrees to drink such a lie ceases to perceive reality. This is what we
mean by mass denial.
That the entire establishment has been willing to join in this process of
cover-up by confusion creates an extreme form of problem for anyone who
would seek to utter the truth. For these civilian institutions -- the media,
the universities and the government -- once they begin engaging in denial of
knowledge of the identity of the assassins, once they are drawn into the
cover-up, a secondary motivation develops for them. Now they are not only
protecting the state, they are now protecting themselves, because to expose
the obviousness of the assassination and the false debate would be to reveal
the corrupt role of all these institutions. And there is no question that
these institutions are masters in self protection. Thus anyone who would
attempt to confront the true cover-up must be prepared to confront virtually
the entire society. And in doing this, one is inevitably going to be
marginalized.
The Role of Robert F. Kennedy
It is at this point that we can begin to look at the role of the "critical
community" in this process, but before I do this I want to examine the role
of Robert F. Kennedy.
When I have tried to point out to people that Robert F. Kennedy, in
cooperating with the cover-up, became in every sense of the word an
accessory after the fact in his own brother's murder, there has generally
been an instant recoil. But I want to tell you that this is not an opinion;
this is just a fact. There is no way we can deny this, if we think about it.
I'm not talking about why he became an accessory, but the fact that he did
is absolutely undeniable. Robert F. Kennedy had a legal sworn obligation to
seek out the assassins, and in failing to do so he joined the criminal act
of conspiracy with the criminal act of cover-up and sealed the deal. And
don't let anyone tell you that it was because he couldn't put two words
together after his brother was murdered. I have seen his correspondence with
Ray Marcus. And if it were some kind of personal emotional reaction, how is
it that none of the people surrounding Robert Kennedy could utter the
obvious truth of the assassination? No, Robert Kennedy's cooperation,
agonizing and humiliating as it must have been for him, was dictated by
political considerations, which led him away from his legal and moral
obligation to tell the American people what he knew.
When I start talking to people about this, I hear Robert Kennedy's actions
defended with the idea that if he had spoken out he would have been
marginalized. And this is important, because maybe that was part of Robert
Kennedy's motivation. But I think the person who responds to me in this way
is telling me something about his or her own motivation. The person is
telling me that in their opinion, the desire not to be marginalized can
somehow justify lying to the public about what you do and don't know about
the assassination of the President. I want to say in no uncertain terms this
lying is not only profoundly lacking in morality but is in addition
profoundly foolish and is totally indefensible. It was indefensible for
Robert Kennedy and it is indefensible for any one of us.
There is no justification whatsoever for lying to anyone about what you do
and don't know about this murder. Quite to the contrary, if telling the
truth marginalizes you, then that is the place to be. After all, if enough
people are willing to be marginalized, then before you know it, society has
developed a different center. This is the politics of truth. But Robert
Kennedy wasn't really used to the politics of truth. Instead, he was
captivated by the illusory politics of power, influence and access. And I am
afraid that many of us are also caught up with such ideas.
So now we have come to a problem. Our society confronts the individual with
a choice: "If you want to avoid marginalization, you compromise the truth."
And the problem is that the moment you compromise with the truth, the moment
you contribute false uncertainty, at that moment you have joined the
cover-up. This is the critical point. Another way of saying this is, that
society is prepared to confer a reward to anyone who is willing to drink the
waters uncertainty. The reward is legitimacy; the reward is credibility; the
reward is access; the reward is rescue from being marginalized.
I understand that the pressure to compromise the truth is enormous, because
our society finds the truth and it implications so repugnant. Any normal
person wants to be able to communicate. A normal person doesn't want to be
isolated, doesn't want to turn people off. But in being concerned that the
truth as we know it will turn off our neighbor, in compromising and
pretending we do not know, for the sake of having "credibility," we are
destined to become part of the problem rather than part of the solution. We
are destined to become agents of the public's confusion and denial.
So there can be no doubt about what I am saying, I need to examine specific
examples of how the so-called "critical community" has been operating.
The Assassination Records Review Board
Given what I have set before you -- the whole effort by the "critical
community" to petition the United States Government to establish a Board
which would assist it in resolving the "mystery" of the assassination --,
such an effort represents precisely the process described by Sultana Kamal
in which people "choose to live in falsehood, to make ourselves instrumental
in remaking conditions which bring us indignity, loss of self esteem and
again bind us to the task of reconditioning the evil cycles of denial of
truth and justice to ourselves."
The President was assassinated, the government covered for the assassins,
the media covered for them, all the established institutions of society fell
in line with this, and the public was not prepared to take matters into its
own hands. This is the sorry truth of American democracy, and there is
nothing to be done about it, other than to witness the full horror and shame
of it all, to feel the helplessness that is our reality before this state
which is in the grip of militarism and the economic interests which this
militarism serves.
Our problem is not that our government lacks credibility in the eyes of many
of its subjects. That's our government's problem. Anyone who takes the
government's problem as his own problem in so doing becomes an agent of the
government, if not a government agent. And it should be clear that the
government is more than happy to have you do this.
No, our problem, the problem for people who want the truth to be known, is
that despite the lack of government credibility, the public does not have
the ability to think its way through the lies and discern the truth. The
great shame of the "critical community" is that rather than seizing on this
as its mission, the critical community has chosen to ally itself with the
government and has only fostered further public confusion.
So we have a Board set up on the false premise that the problem is that the
government wasn't open enough with the public when it came to the
assassination. Not one member of the Board is capable of coming before you
and stating the most simple and axiomatic truths of this case. There was a
conspiracy without a doubt. The Warren Report was an obvious act of criminal
fraud. Senator Arlen Specter should be indicted for criminal obstruction of
justice. Can any member of that Board come before you and say that? Of
course not. Because respected members of the legal and academic
establishment who can get the appropriate security clearances to serve on
that Board are incapable of speaking simple truths like this. And if you try
to get them to admit this kind of thing they look at you as if you are some
kind of weirdo, or nut. And I remind you, they do not feel that way about
Oliver Stone today, because he isn't saying these are facts. These are only
theories, "myths," and he is not claiming that he knows what happened. So he
is not a problem.
In fact they can use the film JFK now, and claim they are responding to the
film through this Review Board. And COPA and JFK Lancer and all the
"respected" members of this critical community go and praise this Board and
testify before it, and they and the Board embrace each other. What is there
to say? This is our independent research community. With this as our
independent research community there is no mystery about why the public
doesn't know who killed President Kennedy and why.
I was going to read to you how the press is using the statements of various
respected researchers who are here. I was going to read to you the COPA
mission statement and dissect it -- but what is the point? For the sake of
completeness and for illustration, when and if this speech is ever
published, I'll include this as an appendix. You know I like appendices?
But I would rather, at this point, leave it up to any person individually,
if they wish, to take what I've said here, think about it and try to apply
it to anything that comes before him. If anyone is interested in doing this,
I'll be happy to communicate further on an individual basis, but really I've
said enough about the "critical community."
Conclusion
In conclusion I want to share with you something a close friend, Professor
Rudi Cardona, pointed out after reading an earlier draft of this speech.
Although Rudi has lived in this country for many years, he was born and
raised in Costa Rica and has a real international perspective. He mentioned
that throughout our history, we Americans seem always to prefer domestic
tranquility over justice and the principles which supposedly underlie our
democracy. He remarked on how a recent TV series on slavery had shown that
Washington and Jefferson knew slavery was wrong but could not bring
themselves to oppose it openly because of the turmoil this would have
caused. Of course, the turmoil they were concerned about was the turmoil
that whites would feel. The slaves were not being spared any turmoil.
And I think the analogy is very apt, because to those who would attempt to
defend the cover-up, by suggesting that the truth would have been too
painful for our country to endure, I want to remind us that the people of
Vietnam were not spared the turmoil of our military rule. The people of
Latin America and South America have not been spared. By cooperating in
holding this society together through lies, we have made it that much more
possible for our military intelligence apparatus to impose enormous
suffering on people throughout the world. And this turmoil and mayhem has by
no means been ended.
On April 25th of this year [1998], Guatemalan Bishop Juan Jose Gerardi
Conedera was assassinated one day after he stood before an audience in the
Metropolitan Cathedral of Guatemala City and gave a speech in which he
presented the findings of an in-depth probe into thousands and thousands of
murdered and disappeared persons, casualties of a campaign of terror against
the people of Guatemala waged by their own government, a right wing
militarist government which over the years has enjoyed the consistent
training and support of our US military intelligence establishment, the well
protected home of the assassins of President Kennedy.
I want to read to you some of the thoughts Bishop Conedera expressed in his
April 24th speech. Amongst other things he said,
"The root of humanity's downfall and disgrace comes from the
deliberate opposition to truth ... this reality that has been
intentionally deformed in our country throughout thirty-six years
of war against the people.
"To open ourselves to the truth and to bring ourselves face to
face with our personal and collective reality is not an option
that can be accepted or rejected. It is an undeniable requirement
of all people and all societies that seek to humanize themselves
and to be free....
"Truth is the primary word, the serious and mature action that
makes it possible for us to break the cycle of death and violence
and open ourselves to a future of hope and light for all ...
"Discovering the truth is painful, but it is without a doubt a
healthy and liberating action."
Thank you very much.
Notes
-------------------------
1. See E. Martin Schotz, History Will Not Absolve Us, Orwellian Control,
Public Denial, and the Murder of President Kennedy (Brookline, Mass.:
Kurtz, Ulmer, & DeLucia, 1996) for an explication of the transparency
of the assassination its ensuing obfuscation. From the book's
Introduction,
In our efforts to confront the truth of the assassination of
President Kennedy we are at a very different point today than
we were thirty years ago when the first critical analyses of
the Warren Report were published. Dozens of books and
thousands of magazine articles have been written about this
case. Almost without exception, no matter what the author's
view concerning who killed President Kennedy or why, these
works have directly or indirectly contributed to the public's
conviction that the murder of the President is a mystery. As
a result, although a vast majority of our public believes
that there was a conspiracy, most people do not know this as
a fact and are convinced that they can never know for sure
what happened.
On both points the public is mistaken. The murder of the
President is not a mystery. The nature of the conspiracy that
took President Kennedy's life was from the outset quite
obvious to anyone who knew how to look and was willing to do
so. The same holds true today. Any citizen who is willing to
look can see clearly who killed President Kennedy and why.
(pp. 3-4)
2. Idries Shah Tales of the Dervishes, Teaching-stories of the Sufi
Masters over the past thousand years (New York: E.P. Dutton & Co.,
1969), pp. 21-22.
3. From History Will Not Absolve Us, p. 286:
. . . The pressure [to compromise] was intense and Stone
turned for advice to Frank Mankiewicz, an old Kennedy ally.
The advice apparently was that Stone should not insist that
his film was the truth (which he knew it was), but that he
should simply present it as his interpretation. Thus, with
the release of the film Stone began referring to the film as
his "myth." The instant he did that, the criticism was muted.
He was invited to address Congress and call for the release
of more information. Once again he became acceptable.
Stone knows this movie is not myth. It is a brilliant
synthesis of twenty-five years of critical work by Garrison
and independent citizens. It is completely factual except for
the obviously created and condensed scenes. Beyond that, to
call on the government to provide further information is to
logically contradict the film's central thesis that the
government was behind it. So Stone wound up being turned
against his own film.
There is a very important lesson in this. There is no mystery
in the JFK assassination today. And to pretend otherwise is
to join the cover-up, something Stone has done in calling for
the release of more information and referring to his film as
"myth."
4. The complete book is available online.
5. See an annotated transcript of Vincent Salandria's speech -- also
presented at the 1998 Coalition on Political Assassinations conference,
"The JFK Assassination: A False Mystery Concealing State Crimes" -- for
a detailed explication listing many instances of malfeasance,
misfeasance, and obstruction of justice carried out by officials of the
U.S. government responsible for the investigation of President
Kennedy's assassination -- some of whom were themselves criminal
accessories after the fact.
6. Meagher, Sylvia. Accessories After the Fact: The Warren Commission, the
Authorities and the Report. New York: Bobbs-Merrill Company, Inc.,
1967.
7. Feldman, Harold. "Oswald and the FBI", The Nation, 27 January 1964.
8. "Concerning the Facts and Consequences of the Tragic Death of President
John F. Kennedy, speech commentary delivered by Fidel Castro on Cuban
radio and TV, Saturday evening, November 23, 1963, Appendix II, History
Will Not Absolve Us
9. Memorandum to Bill Moyers, Press Secretary to President Lyndon Johnson,
from Deputy Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach, written November 25,
1963, three days after the assassination of President Kennedy; report
from Hearings Before the Select Committee on Assassinations of the
United States House of Representatives, 95th Congress, 2nd Session,
Volume 3, pp. 566-68.
See pages 2, 3, and 4 of a copy of this memorandum from a segment of a
so-called FBI "file": "62-109090 File (Headquarters Warren
Commission)," "11-25-63 Katzenbach to Moyers, w/Evans to Belmont cover
(62-109090-1st NR 2)". A local-to-ratical PDF copy is replicated from
History Matters' section on Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI).
The full title of the twelve volumes of hearings is:
INVESTIGATION OF THE ASSASSINATION OF PRESIDENT JOHN F. KENNEDY:
HEARINGS BEFORE THE SELECT COMMITTEE ON ASSASSINATIONS OF THE U.S.
HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES NINETY-FIFTH CONGRESS, SECOND SESSION,
SEPTEMBER 18, 19, 20, AND 21, 1976
See a complete alternate copy of the 12 volumes at: HATHI TRUST Digital
Library
10. One of the foundations of this rapprochement was a confidential
correspondence between Khrushchev and Kennedy that began with a 26-page
letter from the Soviet Chairman to the American President. It was
written during the Berlin crisis on September 29, 1961, and smuggled in
a newspaper carried by Georgi Bolshakov, a Soviet intelligence agent,
to Pierre Saligner, Kennedy's press secretary. Bolshakov was also an
editor of USSR magazine and an interpreter for visiting Russian
officials in Washington. He spent an entire night translating the
letter from Russian and gave Salinger the original in Russian as well
to permit comparison by U.S. translators. [Pierre Salinger, With
Kennedy (New York: Doubleday, 1966), pp. 197-199]
See Jim Douglass, JFK and The Unspeakable, Why He Died and Why It
Matters (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2010): "In July 1993, the U.S.
State Department, in response to a Freedom of Information Act request
by a Canadian newspaper, declassified twenty-one secret letters between
John F. Kennedy and Nikita Khrushchev." (p. 23) In 1996 all the private
correspondence between JFK and Khrushchev was published in Foreign
Relations of the United States (FRUS), 1961-1963, Volume VI,
Kennedy-Khrushchev Exchanges (Washington: U.S. Government Printing
Office). The Kennedy-Khrushchev Exchanges: Document List contains 120
communications, of which 21 make up the secret letters between JFK and
Khrushchev. It is not clear precisely which of the 120 make up the
subset of 21 private communications. Here is a list of what probably
constitutes the bulk of the private missives:
o Document 21: Letter From Chairman Khrushchev to President Kennedy,
Moscow, September 29, 1961
o Document 22: Letter From President Kennedy to Chairman Khrushchev,
Hyannis Port, October 16, 1961
o Document 23: Letter From Chairman Khrushchev to President Kennedy,
Moscow, November 9, 1961
o Document 24: Letter From Chairman Khrushchev to President Kennedy,
Moscow, November 10, 1961
o Document 25: Letter From President Kennedy to Chairman Khrushchev,
Washington, November 16, 1961
o Document 26: Letter From President Kennedy to Chairman Khrushchev,
Washington, December 2, 1961
o Document 27: Letter From Chairman Khrushchev to President Kennedy,
Moscow, December 13, 1961
o Document 32: Letter From Chairman Khrushchev to President Kennedy,
Moscow, February 10, 1962
o Document 34: Letter From President Kennedy to Chairman Khrushchev,
Washington, February 15, 1962
o Document 37: Letter From Chairman Khrushchev to President Kennedy,
Moscow, February 21, 1962
o Document 42: Letter From Chairman Khrushchev to President Kennedy,
Moscow, March 10, 1962
o Document 51: Letter From President Kennedy to Chairman Khrushchev,
Washington, July 17, 1962
o Document 71: Letter From Chairman Khrushchev to President Kennedy,
Moscow, October 30, 1962
o Document 82: Letter From Chairman Khrushchev to President Kennedy,
Moscow, November 22, 1962
o Document 84: Letter From President Kennedy to Chairman Khrushchev,
Washington, December 14, 1962
o Document 85: Letter From Chairman Khrushchev to President Kennedy,
Moscow, December 19, 1962
o Document 99: Letter From Chairman Khrushchev to President Kennedy,
Moscow, May 8, 1963
11. In the summer of 1962 John Kennedy gave himself three Bay of Pigs -type
events -- specific conflicts with his national security managers from
the military and intelligence establishments -- before a military coup
would overthrow him and seize control of the United States. A list of
such conflicts between himself and his national security state
includes:
1. 1961: negotiated peace with the Communists for a neutralist
government in Laos;
2 April 1961: Bay of Pigs and JFK's response: "[I want] to splinter
the CIA in a thousand pieces and scatter it to the winds."
3. 1961-63: Kennedy-Hammarskjold-UN vision kept the Congo together
and independent;
4. April 1962: conflict with big steel industrialists;
5. October 1962: Cuban Missile Crisis;
6. 1961-63: Diplomatic opening to Third World leadership of President
Sukarno;
7. May 6, 1963: Presidential order NSAM 239 to pursue both a nuclear
test ban and a policy of general and complete disarmament;
8. June 10, 1963: American University Address - the Real JFK Jubilee
- not November 22;
9. Summer 1963: Nuclear Test Ban Treaty;
10. Fall 1963: beginning of back-channel dialogue with Fidel Castro;
11. Fall 1963: JFK's decision to sell wheat to the Russians;
12. October 11, 1963: Presidential order NSAM #263 to withdraw U.S.
troops from Vietnam by 1965;
13. November 1963: Khrushchev decides to accept JFK's invitation for a
joint expedition to the moon.
For a summary of JFK's turning toward peace during his Presidency that
marked him out for assassination, see Jim Douglass, "The Hope in
Confronting the Unspeakable in the Assassination of President John
Fitzgerald Kennedy," Keynote Address at the Coalition on Political
Assassinations Dallas Conference, 20 November 2009. Many endnotes in
this annotated transcript include segments from JFK and the
Unspeakable.
12. For a compilation of biographical details on Lee Harvey Oswald which
confirm his identity as an agent for U.S. intelligence services see
"Oswald and U.S. Intelligence," Appendix V, History Will Not Absolve
Us. For a series of letters which grew out of the revelation by
Theodore H. White that on the flight back to Washington, President
Johnson, aboard Air Force One, was informed that Oswald had been
arrested and that there was no conspiracy, see "Internal Data on the
United States Government's Immediate Reaction to the Assassination,"
Appendix IV, Ibid.
13. For background on what our tax dollars fund and have perpetrated over
the decades around the world, see, for example, Killing Hope: US
Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II by William Blum
(Common Courage Press, 2008); "Be nice to America. Or we'll bring
democracy to your country!," an animated cartoon about US foreign
policy written by William Blum; War Is A Racket by retired USMC Major
General Smedley Butler, two time Medal of Honor recipient, 1935;
American War Machine: Deep Politics, the CIA Global Drug Connection,
and the Road to Afghanistan, by Peter Dale Scott (Rowman & Littlefield
Publishers, 2010) - see chapters 3, 4, 7, 10 available online.
14. Three weeks after the assassination French journalist Jean Daniel wrote
about his role as an unofficial emissary to Castro from Kennedy in
"Unofficial Envoy: An Historic Report From Two Capitals," New Republic
(December 14, 1963), p. 15-20.
When President Kennedy spoke at the United Nations on September 20,
1963. "he suggested that its members see the Test Ban Treaty as a
beginning and engage together in an experiment in peace:
Two years ago I told this body that the United States had
proposed, and was willing to sign, a Limited Test Ban treaty.
Today that treaty has been signed. It will not put an end to
war. It will not remove basic conflicts. It will not secure
freedom for all. But it can be a lever, and Archimedes, in
explaining the principles of the lever, was said to have
declared to his friends: "Give me a place where I can stand
and I shall move the world."
My fellow inhabitants of this planet: Let us take our stand
here in this Assembly of nations. And let us see if we, in
our own time, can move the world to a just and lasting peace.
When he said these words, John Kennedy was secretly engaging in another
risky experiment in peace. That same day at the United Nations, Kennedy
told UN Ambassador Adlai Stevenson that his assistant William Attwood
should go ahead "to make discreet contact" with Cuba's UN Ambassador
Carlos Lechuga. The question: Was Fidel Castro interested in a dialogue
with John Kennedy? A strongly affirmative answer would come back from
Castro, who had been repeatedly urged by Khrushchev -- by Khrushchev --
to begin trusting Kennedy." Quoted in The Hope in Confronting the
Unspeakable in the Assassination of President John Fitzgerald Kennedy.
The story of Kennedy's quest to negotiate with Castro on a new
U.S.-Cuban relationship is told by Cuba's then-UN ambassador Carlos
Lechuga in his book In the Eye of the Storm: Castro, Khrushchev,
Kennedy, and the Missile Crisis (Ocean Press, 1995) and by U.S.
diplomat William Attwood in The Reds and the Blacks; A Personal
Adventure (Harper & Row, 1967) and The Twilight Struggle: Tales of the
Cold War (Harper & Row, 1987).
See also: Document 367. Memorandum by William Attwood and Document 374.
Memorandum From William Attwood to Gordon Chase of the National
Security Council Staff, New York, November 8, 1963, from FRUS,
1961-1963, Volume XI, Cuban Missile Crisis and Aftermath, October
1962-December 1963 (Washington: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1997);
"Kennedy Sought Dialogue with Cuba -- Initiative With Castro Aborted by
Assassination, Declassified Documents Show," The National Security
Archive, November 24, 2003.
"Let me issue and control a nation's money and I care not who writes the laws. - Mayer Rothschild
"Civil disobedience is not our problem. Our problem is civil obedience! People are obedient in the face of poverty, starvation, stupidity, war, and cruelty. Our problem is that grand thieves are running the country. That's our problem!" - Howard Zinn
"If there is no struggle there is no progress. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and never will" - Frederick Douglass
"Civil disobedience is not our problem. Our problem is civil obedience! People are obedient in the face of poverty, starvation, stupidity, war, and cruelty. Our problem is that grand thieves are running the country. That's our problem!" - Howard Zinn
"If there is no struggle there is no progress. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and never will" - Frederick Douglass
