Painting a new picture of JFK as a man, president

A new book by Jim Douglass, “JFK and the Unspeakable,” not only adds a coherent narrative to the events surrounding the Nov. 22, 1963, assassination, but also sheds new light on JFK, the man and the president.

I read this book with intense interest because I served in Washington as a lobbyist for the Quakers on peace and justice issues before, during, and after the Kennedy administration, and had contacts with Kennedy and his Senate and White House staff. Indeed, I was one of six Quakers in a delegation to talk with him in the White House on May 1, 1962, noted briefly in the book.

Douglass paints a far different picture of Kennedy from the conventional wisdom of a hawkish, shrewd, rich, witty, charismatic and philandering politician. Kennedy’s near-death experiences in World War II, the deaths of family and colleagues, and his own health problems gave him a sense of the transitory nature of life. His study of politics and history, especially of the French experience in Algeria and Indochina, gave him an appreciation of the inability even of great powers to hold back liberation movements in the post-colonial world. And his willingness to expose himself to many divergent viewpoints gave him a breadth of understanding of the human condition.

These experiences helped give Kennedy the inner confidence to stand up to the power and prestige of the CIA and Joint Chiefs in a series of events during his presidency, which Douglass spells out in detail: his refusal to order U.S. air support for the invading Cubans at the Bay of Pigs; his agreement with Nikita Khrushchev to settle for a coalition government in Laos; and his refusal to buckle to tremendous pressure for military airstrikes against the Soviet missile sites in Cuba during the October 1962 crisis.

The Cuban missile crisis was the seminal event in solidifying Kennedy’s commitment to preventing a nuclear war at all cost and moving toward arms control and disarmament. This became evident in his June 10, 1963, American University speech in which he reached out to Soviet leaders and presented an alternative to the Cold War and a perpetual arms race. The limited test ban treaty was the first result and a hoped-for beginning of a peace race rather than an arms race.

Kennedy then further antagonized the intelligence-military establishment by contemplating an opening to Fidel Castro and preparing to halt the escalation from advisers to troops in South Vietnam, says Douglass, citing numerous official and unofficial sources.

Having established a motive for the assassination of the president, Douglass hypothesizes that “the CIA coordinated and carried out the president’s murder” but the responsibility was not limited to the CIA. His case is overwhelming and nearly mind-numbing in detail, with nearly 100 pages of fine-print footnotes to back up some 400 pages of text. It includes the curious government disinterest in Lee Harvey Oswald’s defection to the Soviet Union and his return to the United States, the numerous contradictions in evidence that may be explained by the existence of an Oswald double, Oswald’s various handlers, an abortive assassination plot in Chicago earlier in November, lax Secret Service protection in Dallas, Ruby’s role with the CIA, and the shout by Oswald to newsmen after his capture that he was only a patsy. If you are looking for a real-life murder mystery to read this summer, this book is for you.

This book implicitly raises crucial issues as voters consider the 2008 presidential and congressional elections:

Regardless of the whodunit mystery, it is clear Kennedy had become increasingly estranged from the intelligence-military establishment. Do any of the current presidential candidates have JFK’s experience, conviction and courage to challenge the military industrial complex, to take realistic steps away from the addiction to war, and to find new, creative ways to deal with “terrorism”? Is the American public today as ready to accept far-reaching changes as it was in 1963, after being traumatized by the Cuban missile crisis?

Are any of the candidates willing to challenge the Pentagon’s out-of-control spending which is impoverishing the entire social safety net, and which is almost twice as much as the military spending of all the other nations in the world combined?

Do shrill corporate media commentators and analysts have the power and manipulative skill to motivate a sufficient number of people in or out of government to plan and execute such a murder today?

Edward F. Snyder lives in Bar Harbor. He is executive secretary emeritus of the Friends Committee on National Legislation in Washington and heads the Friends Committee on Maine Public Policy.