Very partial list of grievances against those who hated JFK

[Peter Lemkin]

1963 – November 22nd – 2024
https://ratical.org/index.html#Friday61yrs



On another Friday, 61 years ago, A President For Peace was very publicly executed in the noon day sun. While his generals wanted to win the Cold War, he sought to end it. The escalating list of conflicts between President Kennedy and his national security state before he was assassinated includes:

1. 1961-1961: 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-Hammarskjöld-UN vision, which kept the Congo together and independent;
   
4. April 1962: conflict with big steel industrialists;
   
5. October 1962: negotiated resolution of the Cuban Missile Crisis by pledges of no US invasion of Cuba and withdrawal of US missiles from Turkey made to Nikita Khrushchev;
   
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;
   
9. Summer 1963: Partial 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 all U.S. personnel from Vietnam by 1965;
    
13. November 1963: Khrushchev decides to accept JFK’s invitation for a joint U.S.-Soviet expedition to the moon.
    

James Douglass: “Seeking light in a depth of systemic evil that Thomas Merton called ‘the Unspeakable,’ which he described in Raids on the Unspeakable, leads one to a Gospel story. Kennedy was learning to see through the eyes of his Communist adversaries. At great personal risk, he was turning from war to peacemaking. I was astounded by the grace-filled story of a president of the United States choosing peace—at the cost of his life.”



My mother worked for 30 years altogether, but 25 years for the deputy chief of staff in the personnel office of the U.S. Army, directly under the Joint Chiefs of Staff. She was the highest-paid woman employee of the Pentagon; she was five levels above top security. I mentioned to Fletcher Prouty the other day I worked from the bottom up and he worked from the top down, and we met at the Joint Chiefs. My mother’s job was to project overall national draft call figures five years in advance. She had to project an annual national Selective Service call that was right within a hundred people either way five years ahead. She knew from those projections and from the information she got that they were withdrawing from Vietnam.


If you want to get hold of the papers that prove Prouty’s point, I just got this today at the Government Printing Office—Foreign Relations in the United States, 1961-1963. The State Department papers are released in Volume 4 of the Vietnam series. This is August to December, 1963, and the security memoranda are in there that talk about Kennedy’s plan. It’s been backed up by Arthur Schlesinger and more recently—yesterday, I believe, or the day before—in the New York Times by Roger Hilsman.


He was pulling out. My mother knew that because she had to project those kind of figures. I asked her after she retired, “When did they tell you they would escalate in Vietnam?” because she had to be among the first to know. She said, “Late November of ’63.” I said, “The last week in November?” She said, “Yes, the Monday following the assassination.” I said, “Was this a few more advisers, a change in policy?” She said, “I couldn’t believe the figures. I took them back to the Joint Chiefs in what must have been the first protest by the civilian community to the war in Vietnam and said, ‘These can’t be right,’ and they said, ‘You’ll use them.’” They told her November 25, 1963 that the war in Vietnam would last for 10 years and that 57,000 Americans would die and to figure that in.
—John Judge on JFK film panel, American University, January 22, 1992