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John F. Kennedy vs. the Empire
by
Anton Chaitkin
This Nov. 22 is the 50th
anniversary of President John F. Kennedy's murder, a crime from which our
country has never recovered.
Investigators normally consider
who benefitted from a crime, and what changed as a result of that crime.
In this case, we must first
understand who Kennedy was, and what he fought for; who we were as a nation,
and where we were headed when he was shot. Knowing that will make plain who
killed him and why. It will help guide us to what we must now change for our
survival.
Kennedy's Nationalism
When
Kennedy returned from his celebrated World War II Naval service and plunged
into politics, he aimed to set the world back on the path of his late
Commander-in-Chief, Franklin Roosevelt, and to bury imperialism.
In
his first political speech, to the American Legion post in Boston, Nov. 18,
1945, in anticipation of a run for Congress, he explained Winston Churchill's
recent electoral defeat by contrasting the outlook of Churchill's party with
that of Franklin Roosevelt.
Churchill's
Conservative Party had governed England
"during
the years of the depression when poverty stalked the Midlands and the coal
fields of Wales, and thousands and thousands lived off the meager pittance of
the dole. Where Roosevelt made his political reputation by his treatment of
the depression, the Conservative Party lost theirs."
And
the English voters had been jolted by that contrast when soldiers from
Roosevelt's America were stationed there in wartime:
"England
traditionally has been a country with tremendous contrasts between the very
rich and the very poor. That arch Tory, Benjamin Disraeli, ... once stated
that England was divided into two nations—the rich and the poor.... With the
... coming of the American troops with their high pay, with their stories of
cars, refrigerators, and radios for all, a new spirit—a new restlessness—and
a fresh desire for the better things of life had become strong in
Britain."
But
Kennedy warned that even if the Labour Party were in power, "Britain
stands today as Britain has always stood—for the empire."
In
that speech, Kennedy spoke also of the heroic Michael Collins, leader of the
1922 Irish armed revolt against Britain:
"This
young man, who was killed in his early thirties, looms as large today in
Ireland as when he died."
In
the view of the post-World War II Irish leaders, "everything that
Ireland has ever gotten from England has been only at the end of a long and
bitter struggle.... All have been in British and Irish prisons and many of
them have wounds which still ache when the cold rains come in from the
west." Kennedy named "the fundamental problem behind all Irish
politics—the problem of ending the partition, which divides the twenty-six
counties of the south, which form Eire, and the six counties of the north
known as Ulster which are attached directly to Great Britain. That this
partition must be ended ... all Irishmen agree."
John
Kennedy's own family had been shaped over many generations in Ireland's
bitter conflict with the British.
Descended
from Ireland's 11th-Century High King Brian Boru, the Kennedys had been
stripped of their lands and made tenant farmers. Several family members were
casualties in the 1798 Irish uprising. County Wexford, the Kennedy ancestral
home, was that insurrection's center, and briefly held out as its own Wexford
Republic.
The
1847-48 "Great Famine" was known to the Irish as deliberate
genocide under British Prime Minister John Russell, who stationed half of the
British Army in Ireland to oversee the export of masses of food, and to keep
the captive population quiet. Hunger, disease, and emigration in slave-like
ships cut the population from 9 million to 2 1/2 million. The devastation
forced JFK's great-grandfather Patrick Kennedy to emigrate, and led to his
death in Boston of hardship-induced disease.
British
mass murder was burned into the minds of the Kennedy family, and all the
Irish. Kennedy cousins who had fought with the Irish Republican Army were
among those with whom President Kennedy met on his 1963 visit to Ireland as
U.S. President.
JFK
was named for his maternal grandfather, the revered Boston Mayor and
Congressman John F. Fitzgerald. "Honey Fitz" strongly supported Ireland's
struggle and published a weekly newspaper called The Republic.
John's Boston-born paternal grandfather, P.J. Kennedy, became the political
boss in an Irish-American ward.
John
embraced this Irish heritage. But his father, Joseph P. Kennedy, partnered
with British and Wall Street financiers, pushed and shoved his way up into
immense wealth, and finally thrust himself alongside the highest ranks of the
British imperial oligarchy. John's political career would be based on
passionately held views opposite to the reactionary ideas for which his
father became infamous. And yet in that close-knit family, Joe Kennedy would
later put his money and connections behind all of his son's electoral
efforts.
Papa
Joe supported Franklin Roosevelt for President, and on Jan. 7, 1938, FDR
nominated him to be Ambassador to Britain. Three days later, Roosevelt began
a secret correspondence with the British, warning them they risked arousing
in America "a feeling of disgust" by the "corrupt
bargain" they were making in backing the fascist regimes of Mussolini
and Hitler. Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain termed FDR's proposals
"preposterous." Joe Kennedy was confirmed by the Senate in the
midst of this frosty exchange, which is now available from the British archives.[1]
A
year later, after the Nazi invasion of Czechoslovakia, the President sent an
ultimatum to the British government threatening that the U.S. would cut off
aid to Britain if the Empire continued to sponsor Hitler's takeover of
Europe.[2]
But
Ambassador Kennedy attached himself worshipfully to the hyper-aristocratic
Foreign Minister Lord Halifax, to the royal family, and the whole set of
Britain's fascist strategists. He moved with John and his other eight
children into the English neo-gothic castle, Wall Hall, owned by pro-fascist
Wall Street banker J.P. Morgan, Jr. Morgan's servants took care of the
Kennedy family.
The
outraged Roosevelt told his aide James Farley in 1939,
"Joe
has been taken in by the British government people and the royal family. He's
more British than Walter Hines Page [American Ambassador to Britain in World
War I] was. The trouble with the British is that they have for several
hundred years been controlled by the upper classes. The upper classes control
all trade and commerce; therefore the policy of the British government relates
entirely to the protection of this class."[3]
Empire and Cold War
After
President Roosevelt's death, Winston Churchill and his American
followers—notably the bipartisan clique of Democrats Dean Acheson and Averell
Harriman, and the Republican brothers John Foster Dulles and Allen
Dulles—wielded the apparatus of the Truman government to wrench American
policy away from Roosevelt's pro-nationalist, anti-imperial peace policy.
British double agents, led by Kim Philby, meanwhile fed Russian paranoia with
anti-American scare stories.
Churchill's
Cold War policy confronted a fearful U.S.A. with Soviet Russia's aggressive
moves on its periphery. America's 1776-bred sympathy for the sovereign rights
of colonial subjects was thus trumped by the contrived need to ally with
London and the other European financier imperialists in the name of fighting
Communism.
While
viewing Soviet Communism realistically as a distortion of history and human
nature, John Kennedy understood his father's tragic blunder, and knew the
British Empire and Wall Street were continuing the fascist policy that
Roosevelt had fought against. He attacked both the Truman Democrats and the
Dulles Republicans for blocking America's support for the aspirations of the
world's poor. This betrayal of Roosevelt was handing the vulnerable nations
to the Communists posing as anti-imperialists, and threatening nuclear-war
annihilation.
Kennedy
toured Asia and the Middle East in 1951 as a Congressman and Senate hopeful,
accompanied by his younger brother Robert. In his radio report-back to the
nation, we can see the intellectual fire and the sure grasp of history he
would show a decade later in the Presidency:
"... It
[the post-war colonial world] is an area in which poverty and sickness and
disease are rampant, ... injustice and inequality are old and ingrained, ...
the fires of nationalism ... are now ablaze.... [F]or 100 years and more [it]
has been the source of empire for Western Europe—for England and France and
Holland....
"A
Middle East Command operating without the cooperation and support of the
Middle East countries ... would intensify every anti-western force now active
in that area, [and] from a military standpoint would be doomed to failure.
The very sands of the desert would rise to oppose the imposition of outside
control on the destinies of these proud peoples....
"The
true enemy of the Arab world is poverty and want....
"Our
intervention in behalf of England's oil investments in Iran, directed more at
the preservation of interests outside Iran than at Iran's own development....
[O]ur failure to deal effectively after three years with the terrible human
tragedy of the more than 700,000 Arab refugees [Palestinians], these are
things that have failed to sit well with Arab desires and make empty the
promises of the Voice of America....
"In
Indo-China [Vietnam] we have allied ourselves to the desperate effort of a
French regime to hang onto the remnants of empire.... To check the southern
drive of Communism makes sense, but not only through reliance on force of
arms....
"[One]
finds too many of our representatives toadying to the shorter aims of other
Western nations, ... too often aligning themselves too definitely with the
haves and regarding the actions of the have-nots as not merely an effort to
cure injustice, but as something sinister and subversive.
"The
East of today is no longer the East of Palmerston and Disraeli and Cromer....
We want ... allies in ideas, in resources, even in arms, but if we would have
allies, we must first of all gather to ourselves friends."[4]
Senator
Kennedy's Profiles in Courage
was his declaration of independence from the London-Wall Street power axis
and his defiance of dangerously deluded public opinion. The 1955 book is
built around its first chapter on John Quincy Adams, which begins: "The
young senator from Massachusetts stirred restlessly...."
He
depicts Adams coming under attack from the wealthy Anglophiles and Boston
public opinion. The Catholic Kennedy celebrates Adams the Puritan, who
"believed that man was made in the image of God," had "lofty
courage," and "never ... flinched before human antagonist ...
exile, torture, or death....
"An
American nationalist, ... he could not yield his devotion to the national
interest for the narrowly partisan, parochial and pro-British outlook which
dominated New England's first political party.... He denied the duty of
elected representatives 'to be palsied by the will of their constituents....
[T]he magistrate is the servant not of his own desires, not even of the
people, but of his God."
Speaking
on St. Patrick's Day, 1956, in Chicago, Kennedy gently asked Irish-Americans
to help reverse the betrayal of America's revolutionary heritage; and to
broaden the Irish national resentment of wrongs in favor of the universal
task of ending the imperial system.
In
Kennedy's most famous pre-Presidential speech, entitled "Imperialism the
Enemy of Freedom," in the Senate July 2, 1957, he demanded that the U.S.
side with Algerian Arab rebels against French imperialism. Attacking the
Dulles policy, he likened the North African situation to Vietnam, into which
we had
"poured
money and material ... in a hopeless attempt to save for the French a land
that did not want to be saved, in a war in which the enemy was both
everywhere and nowhere at the same time.... We accepted for years the
predictions that victory was just around the corner...."
Senator
Kennedy worked out that speech in close cooperation with the Algerian rebel
leadership. It thrilled the Arab world, and heartened all those who hoped for
an American return to the outlook last seen with Franklin Roosevelt. It put
Kennedy into a crucial tandem relationship to the Italian industrialist
Enrico Mattei, an anti-imperial strategist of petroleum and nuclear energy,
who was helping to fund the Algerian revolt.
The
speech was denounced by the Anglophile establishment of his own Democratic
Party.
Although
Kennedy attacked French imperial policy, that policy began to change. After
Charles de Gaulle became the President of France in 1959, he recognized the
futility of the overseas colonial wars, and worked toward granting Algeria
independence. De Gaulle began to withdraw France from its imperial alliance
with the British.
Kennedy
now focused increasingly on the whole of Africa: on Black Africans' fight for
independence and an escape from centuries of European-enforced backwardness
and poverty. He sought and won the chairmanship of the Africa Subcommittee of
the Senate Foreign Affairs Committee.
To the Presidency
In
his role as the unique anti-imperial U.S. political leader, the outside world
knew him better than did most Americans when he began his run for the
Presidency.
During
that 1959-60 campaign he met with Guinea's nationalist President Sékou Touré,
and became his close confidant.
Most
importantly, Kennedy opened channels of communication with Ghana's President
Kwame Nkrumah, the father of African nationalism. Candidate JFK met with
Ghana's Minister of Economy and with Ghana's UN representative.
Nkrumah
had led Ghana in the first successful Black African anti-colonial revolt,
against British rule, in 1957; Touré had followed in breaking Guinea from
France in 1958.
Kennedy
attacked the post-Roosevelt U.S. policy for demonizing Nkrumah and Touré as
Cold War neutrals, and thus driving them towards the Soviet bloc.
Africa
was politically red hot: During the 1960 U.S. Presidential campaign season,
13 Black African countries won their independence from France; Britain
recognized Nigeria and Somalia as independent.
Belgium
gave the Republic of Congo nominal independence, but British finance and
intelligence organized an armed secession attempt in Congo's Katanga
province, site of the vast Belgian/British copper and uranium mining company
Union Minière, with white mercenaries coming in from neighboring Northern
Rhodesia.
Nkrumah
shared two urgent concerns with Kennedy: imperial intrigues against Congo's
new Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba, Nkrumah's political follower; and his
plan to build a great dam to industrialize Ghana, and electrify all of West
Africa.
Presidential
candidate Kennedy used Africa to challenge the "Anglo-American"
world order, which had been established over the dead body of President
Roosevelt.
He
told Stanford University students in 1960,
"Call
it nationalism, call it anti-colonialism, ... Africa is going through a
revolution.... Africans want a higher standard of living. Seventy-five
percent of the population now lives by subsistence agriculture. They want an
opportunity to manage and benefit directly from the resources in, on, and
under their land.... The African peoples believe that the science,
technology, and education available in the modern world can overcome their
struggle for existence, ... that their poverty, squalor, ignorance, and disease
can be conquered.... [The] balance of power is shifting ... into the hands of
the two-thirds of the world's people who want to share what the one-third has
already taken for granted...."
The
Kennedy election platform called for a sharp increase in America's
industrial, scientific, and military power, a negotiated peace with the
Soviet Union, and the uplifting of mankind out of poverty and war.
When
Kennedy won the 1960 race, as President-elect he sent representatives to
Africa to announce America's return to national sovereignty—for ourselves and
others. The Kennedy team reported African crowds everywhere were chanting
"Kennedy! Kennedy! Kennedy!"
During
the Presidential campaign, and into the early days of his administration,
Kennedy's enemies acted to corner and destroy him.
Once
in office, Dillon informed Kennedy that his budget programs must be curtailed
to allay foreign bankers' doubts about the dollar.
When
Lumumba's murder became known to Kennedy and the world in mid-February, the
U.S. and Kennedy were blamed for it.
The
invasion at Cuba's Bay of Pigs April 17-19, was a terrible fiasco and
embarrassment to the new President.
The
Algiers Putsch of April 21-26, the French fascist generals' failed coup
d'état attempt against President de Gaulle, came a week after an Allen Dulles
representative in Madrid had assured the general that the U.S. would
recognize their new government, if they overthrew de Gaulle to stop Algerian
Arab independence.
British
intelligence and the Dulles faction were now jointly managing an apparatus of
assassins and insurrectionists throughout Europe, Asia, Africa, and the
Caribbean.
By
the end of April, Kennedy made it known that this situation was intolerable,
that the CIA was disloyal, and constituted "a reactionary
state-within-a-state."[6] Kennedy soon fired Allen
Dulles, along with CIA deputy directors Richard Bissell, a Harriman protégé;
and Charles Cabell, brother of the mayor of Dallas.
Over
the next two years, the Organisation de l'armée secrète (OAS) based in
Algiers and Madrid, murdered Kennedy's Italian ally, the industrialist Enrico
Mattei, and made several brazen, headline-grabbing attempts to assassinate
President de Gaulle.
Inauguration and Action
Kennedy's
Inaugural Address was entirely devoted to reasserting America's rightful
place in the world. He immediately began reversing the national surrender
that had made the U.S. government under Truman and Eisenhower-Dulles an
enforcer of the will of London and its Wall Street annex.
JFK's
ambassadors were sent throughout the underdeveloped world, and, for the first
time, to every African state. The President told each ambassador, you (not the CIA)
are in charge of the mission in the country to which you are accredited, and
you are not to defer to European imperialists.
On
the day he learned of the imperial murder of Lumumba, Feb. 13, 1961, Kennedy
issued top secret National Security Action Memorandum (NSAM) 16, directing
that, contrary to previous policy, U.S. aid to "newly independent
areas" would be provided independently of "Western Europe support
... whenever such action is in the United States' interest."
NSAM
60 (July 14 and 18, 1961) ordered the squeezing of Portugal's fascist Salazar
regime into ending its bloody war against rebels in Angola and Mozambique,
and JFK began aiding the rebels.
Ghana's
President Nkrumah got red-carpet treatment as the first foreign head of state
to visit the Kennedy White House, March 8, 1961. He and JFK began a personal
correspondence and permanent collaboration.
Nkrumah
had lived in the U.S. under Franklin Roosevelt, whose Tennessee Valley
Authority inspired his proposed great dam project on the Volta River. Kennedy
took up the financing of the project, construction to be supervised by
Kennedy's friend Edgar Kaiser of Kaiser Industries. Kaiser had led teams
building the Hoover, Bonneville, and Grand Coulee dams. Engineering work on
the Volta project was by Italian personnel developed under Enrico Mattei, who
had met with Nkrumah five days before Kennedy's inauguration.
The
Akosombo Dam on the Volta River created the world's largest artificial lake
and provided the electricity to power Ghana's drive to enter the modern
world. The project was dedicated in 1966, with a plaque honoring the martyred
John F. Kennedy. A week later, Nkrumah was overthrown in a coup planned in
London.[7]
Egypt's
President Gamal Abdel Nasser was, with Mattei, a sponsor of the Algerian Arab
rebels. JFK's election had excited his hopes for a return to American support
for Nasser's own secular nationalism, in Egypt's long war against Britain and
the British-created Muslim Brotherhood. U.S. aid for Nasser's great dam
project on the Nile had been promised by President Eisenhower, and withdrawn
by his Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, pushing Egypt toward the
Soviets, and leading to the 1956 British-French-Israeli invasion of Egypt in
the Suez Crisis.
Nasser
and Kennedy immediately began a personal correspondence. Later, Kennedy reversed
the Truman-Dulles policy and actively took Nasser's side against the
British-Saudi royalist axis in the Middle East.
Kennedy
had warm personal relations with Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru and
Indonesian President Sukarno, who had led their countries' independence
victories over the British and Dutch empires, and who aspired to neutrality
between the East and West.
Against
the howls of "Cold Warriors," JFK fought for U.S. aid to build
India's modern Bokara steel mill. U.S. funding was cancelled when Kennedy was
killed; the Soviets then funded it.
JFK
sent Attorney General Robert Kennedy to Indonesia in 1962, where he spoke
movingly on the central place of anti-imperialism in the modern world; RFK
then went on to the Netherlands to demand that the Dutch remove their
remaining military from Indonesia's West Irian province on the island of New
Guinea. Furious at the Kennedys, the Dutch were forced to pull out.
JFK
immediately began organizing aid for Indonesia's industrial development (NSAM
179, Aug. 16, 1962).
The
first aid package for Indonesia was approved by the Senate in November 1963,
a few days before Kennedy's murder. The U.S. policy was then changed to joint
action with the British for chaos in Indonesia and Sukarno's overthrow.
Steel Showdown: Kennedy and the American System
In
the Steel Crisis of April 1962, Kennedy successfully warred against the
British/Wall Street Morgan banking interest, controller of the U.S. Steel
Corporation. Seeking huge new investments in American industry and non-inflationary
growth, the President prevailed upon the Steelworkers Union to agree to a new
no-wage-increase contract, with the understanding that the companies would
not raise steel prices. Just after signing the contract, the U.S. Steel
chairman Roger Blough came to the White House and handed Kennedy a press
release he had just issued, announcing a big price increase. Other steel
companies followed suit immediately.
JFK
held a no-holds-barred press conference, roasting the unpatriotic
corporations for betraying the public interest. Anti-trust suits were
pressed; defense contracts were switched to the few companies which had not
raised prices; and Kennedy sent an emissary to read the riot act to the
Morgan bankers directly.
Edgar
Kaiser, then supervising construction of the Nkrumah-Kennedy Akosombo Dam,
chaired Kaiser Steel in California—one of the three sizeable companies which
worked with JFK and put competitive pressure on Morgan to back off the
attack. Morgan had its own war on against Kaiser, spurred by Kaiser's
generous treatment of its workers. U.S. Steel had set up operations in Utah
to try to shut the "rebel" Kaiser out of Western states' business.
After
72 hours, U.S. Steel was forced to rescind the price increase, all the other
companies following along. In this showdown, the Anglo-Wall Street axis was
particularly worried about Kennedy's alliance with authentic American
industrial interests.
Behind
this crisis was the fact that Kennedy's program was causing the greatest economic
expansion in modern U.S. history, a halving of idle manufacturing capacity,
strong profits, and a record increase in wages.
A
key policy was the investment tax credit, giving the steel industry and
others tax breaks for investment in new plant and equipment. Yet U.S. Steel
opposed this tax break, in line with the strategy of the British and their
Wall Street outposts to convert America into a post-industrial dump, and to
reduce the world's population. Once Kennedy was dead, and new wars consumed all
optimism, the financier apparatus would push the "green agenda" of
Malthus and the British imperial system, upon the depressed American
population.
This
article focuses on Kennedy's direct clashes with the extended British
imperial system, to efficiently illuminate the background of his murder.
But
the battle against the empire has taken place equally within America, as in
foreign policy.
Lincoln's
economic advisor Henry C. Carey explained the universal issue in his 1851 Harmony of
Interests:
"Two
systems are before the world.... One looks to pauperism, ignorance,
depopulation, and barbarism; the other to increasing wealth, comfort,
intelligence, combination of action, and civilization. One looks towards
universal war; the other towards universal peace. One is the English system;
the other ... the American system, for ... elevating while equalizing the
condition of man throughout the world."
JFK's
own preference of this American System may perhaps be summed up in his
remarks at a dinner given in his honor by Italian President Antonio Segni:
"We
[the U.S.A. and Italy] both believe in the achievement of social justice and
in progress for all our people. We both believe in democracy at what
Americans call 'the grass roots'—placing the individual ahead of the state,
the community ahead of the party, and public interests ahead of private....
"During
the 1930s, when despair and depression opened wide the gates of many nations
to [fascism and communism], my own nation adhered to the course of freedom
under the leadership of Franklin Roosevelt. His administration introduced a
higher degree of social, economic, and political reform than America had
previously seen—including tax and budget reforms, land and agricultural
reforms, political and institutional reforms. Workers were assured of a
decent wage—older citizens were assured of a pension—farmers were assured of
a fair price. Working men and women were permitted to organize and bargain
collectively. Small businessmen, small investors, and small depositors in
banks [thanks to the Glass-Steagall law—ed.] were given greater protection
against the evils of both corruption and depression. Farms were electrified,
rivers were harnessed, cooperatives were encouraged. Justice—social and
economic justice as well as legal—became increasingly the right and the
opportunity of every man, regardless of his means or station in life."
JFK's
policies for new jobs, higher minimum wages, and an industrial renaissance
are pure American System. Kennedy's passion-stirring Apollo space program
pitted him against the imperial hatred for American leadership in
technological progress; his Civil Rights action took on racial oppression—the
legacy and echo of empire. We will see below the coherence of these
initiatives with his directly anti-imperial objectives.
Strategy for Peace, and a Quick War with Britain
The
October 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis arose from Fidel Castro's request for
Russian nuclear-armed missiles in Cuba to block any U.S. invasion, and the
Russian gamble that placing offensive missiles close to the U.S. might help
them overcome their growing strategic disadvantage in the face of Kennedy's
economic/science/military buildup and foreign policy.
His
special counsel Ted Sorensen wrote a stirring day-by-day account, showing
JFK's precise, personal control of every aspect of the showdown, needed to
prevent a fiasco like the Bay of Pigs which would this time incinerate the
planet.[8]
A
personal correspondence which Kennedy and Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchov
had begun in 1961 was crucial in winning the Soviet stand-down, a retreat
accomplished without Russia's humiliation.
With
public support from the peaceful Cuban outcome, JFK began immediately—within
days—to apply his full leadership powers to spring the world out of the
imperial, Cold War nightmare.
His
first target was the festering crisis in Congo.
Kennedy
pulled the colonialist Belgian government into public alignment with U.S.
insistence on the unity of the independent Congo, and against the backing of
its imperial senior partner, Britain, for Katanga's secession.
On
Nov. 27, 1962, one month after the Soviet stand-down in Cuba, JFK and Belgian
Foreign Minister Paul-Henri Spaak issued a joint statement threatening
"severe economic measures" against Katanga unless secession were
quickly ended. That same day, with his finger in the British eye, Kennedy
arranged that he would meet British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan on Dec.
19.
Two
weeks before that scheduled meeting, newspapers reported that President
Kennedy had decided to cancel the planned production of the Skybolt
air-to-ground nuclear missile. Since a 1960 agreement with Eisenhower-Dulles,
the British had been counting on this American weapon to give them their only
credible independent nuclear war capability.
Sorensen
reported,
"The
President ... saw no point to a small independent British deterrent
anyway.... [Kennedy's decision] posed a major political crisis for
Macmillan's already shaky government.... In previous years Macmillan ... had
... praised the Skybolt agreement as the key to Britain's 'special
relationship' with the U.S.'.... Latent resentment of Kennedy's refusal to
consult more [with the British] on the Cuban missile crisis [now] boiled to
the top...."[9]
On
the day Kennedy arrived in Nassau, Bahamas, to meet with Macmillan, the
United Nations announced the United States decision to rush American arms and
military advisors to the UN peacekeeping forces in Congo—to equip them to
defeat the British-backed secession.
The
President would not budge on Skybolt. He "considered ... the development
of nuclear [weapons] capabilities by more countries, even allies—as a most
dangerous development." The Nassau Pact signed Dec. 22 specified that
the U.S. would sell Polaris missiles to the British, but they would have to
be carried on submarines under NATO, not independent British, command.[10]
With
the British regime on its heels politically, the U.S. began rushing trucks,
armored personnel carriers, and mine-clearing equipment to Congo.
Two
weeks later the U.S. government declared:
"the
United Nations forces in Katanga now occupy most key populated areas and
mining centers.... We expect Mr. Tshombe to end promptly the Katanga
secession by recognizing the U.N.'s full freedom of movement throughout
Katanga, [and by] advising all foreign mercenaries to disband and leave the
country."[11]
During
the following week, American-equipped UN troops put Katanga leader Moise
Tshombe under house arrest. The Congolese government demanded the withdrawal
of the British Consul in Katanga province. Hundreds of Congolese students
stormed and sacked the British Embassy, destroying Queen Elizabeth's
portrait. The students then marched to the U.S. Embassy and cheered for America.
The
British oligarchy's fury over Kennedy's threat to the imperial order, and
American "arrogance," was reported to their New York partners. The New York
Times noted on Jan. 14, that
"in
London, at least, there is a strongly developed fear that a Congo regime
supported by the United Nations would use its position to subvert the present
regimes in the Rhodesias, the Portuguese colonies ... and South Africa."
While
Britain's Congo secession leader Tshombe was being arrested, the chief Soviet
negotiator on nuclear weapons issues quietly arrived in the United States, on
Kennedy's request. The Administration then leaked to the press that the
"United States and the Soviet Union are actively and privately exploring
new approaches to a nuclear [weapons] test ban agreement that has been
eluding their negotiators for years," the Washington Post
reported Jan. 11, 1963.
Kennedy
now pushed this peace initiative with all his powers.
He
carefully built a consensus for progress, which would put political muscle
behind his efforts—a new Roosevelt coalition.
By
June 1963, Kennedy was moving the country into a new era. On two successive
days, he asked Americans to examine their own wrong and dangerous attitudes,
and announced new measures for a better world.
At
American University in Washington, D.C., June 10, JFK asked, "What kind
of peace do we seek?" He answered:
"Not
a Pax Americana enforced on the world by American weapons of war. Not the
peace of the grave or the security of the slave.... Our problems are
man-made—therefore, they can be solved by man. And man can be as big as he
wants. No problem of human destiny is beyond human beings. Man's reason and
spirit have often solved the seemingly unsolvable—and we believe they can do
it again....
"Let
us re-examine our attitude toward the Soviet Union. It is discouraging to
think that their leaders may actually believe what their propagandists write
... to realize the extent of the gulf between us. But it is also ... a
warning to the American people not to fall into the same trap as the Soviets,
not to see only a distorted and desperate view of the other side, not to see
... communication as nothing more than an exchange of threats.
"No
government or social system is so evil that its people must be considered as
lacking in virtue. As Americans, we find communism profoundly repugnant as a
negation of personal freedom and dignity. But we can still hail the Russian
people for their many achievements—in science and space, in economic and
industrial growth, in culture and in acts of courage....
"[Our]
two countries have ... [a] mutual abhorrence of war.... [W]e have never been
at war with each other. And no nation ... ever suffered more than the Soviet
Union suffered in ... the Second World War. At least 20 million lost their
lives.... A third of the nation's territory, including nearly two thirds of
its industrial base, was turned into a wasteland—a loss equivalent to the
devastation of this country east of Chicago.
"Today,
should total war ever break out again ... all we have built, all we have
worked for, would be destroyed in the first 24 hours.... We must conduct our
affairs in such a way that it becomes in the Communists' interest to agree on
a genuine peace....
"I
am taking this opportunity ... to announce two important decisions....
"First:
... that high-level discussions will shortly begin in Moscow looking toward
early agreement on a comprehensive test ban treaty. Our hopes must be
tempered with the caution of history—but with our hopes go the hopes of all mankind.
"Second:
... I now declare that the United States does not propose to conduct nuclear
tests in the atmosphere so long as other states do not do so.... We will not
be the first to resume...."
Kennedy's
speech was greeted with enthusiasm by the Soviets, who reprinted it in its
entirety for Russian citizens.
The
Partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty was soon signed by the U.S., U.S.S.R., and
Britain (the British did no negotiating, by Kennedy's insistence), and
subsequently, by 100 nations.
The
day after the Strategy for Peace speech, Kennedy went on television to report
enforcement of a court order requiring that Alabama Gov. George Wallace allow
the enrollment of two African-American students to the University of Alabama.
He
asked his national audience:
"If
an American, because his skin is dark, cannot eat lunch in a restaurant open
to the public, if he cannot send his children to the best public school
available, if he cannot vote for the public officials who represent him, ...
then who among us would be content to have the color of his skin changed and
stand in his place? Who among us would then be content with the counsels of
patience and delay?
"One
hundred years of delay have passed since President Lincoln freed the slaves,
yet their heirs, their grandsons, are not fully free ... from the bonds of
injustice ... from social and economic oppression...."
He
asked, who are we, and what is America to the human race?
"We
preach freedom around the world, and we mean it, and we cherish our freedom
here at home; but are we to say to the world, and much more importantly, to
each other, that this is a land of the free except for the Negroes; that we
have no second-class citizens except Negroes; that we have no class or caste
system, no ghettoes, no master race except with respect to
Negroes? ..."
"The
fires of frustration and discord are burning in every city, North and South,
where legal remedies are not at hand.... We face, therefore, a moral crisis
as a country and as a people....
"Next
week I shall ask the Congress of the United States to act, to make a
commitment it has not fully made in this century to the proposition that race
has no place in American life or law."
His
bill was given additional support from Martin Luther King's March on
Washington on Aug. 28, which the Administration worked to make a success.
Kennedy's bill was passed as the Civil Rights Act of 1964, after he was
killed.
The Shift in the Space Program
President
Kennedy spoke to the UN General Assembly on Sept. 20, as the U.S. Senate was
considering the test-ban treaty.
He
said we had achieved a pause in the Cold War, and that we must work for a
genuine détente between the great powers through cooperation in our mutual
interest.
Two
years earlier, he had proposed to Congress that the United States send men to
the Moon by the end of the 1960s. In that same speech, Kennedy announced that
we would "accelerate development of the Rover nuclear rocket. This gives
promise of some day providing a means for even more exciting and ambitious
exploration of space, perhaps beyond the Moon, perhaps to the very end of the
Solar System itself." The world was inspired and remembers John F.
Kennedy most vividly, in connection with the fulfillment of the lunar landing
phase of this ultimately aborted project.
Until
then, American pre-eminence in the contest with Soviet Communism was the
public rationale for the proposed leap in the space program. But by 1963,
Kennedy had shifted his objective to a joint space mission with the Russians.
Throughout his Presidency—after his Inaugural Address had urged,
"Together let us explore the stars"—he had NASA Deputy
Administrator Hugh Dryden exploring with Soviet scientists the possibilities
of joint work in space.[12]
This
dialogue persisted despite the Bay of Pigs invasion and crises over Berlin
and missiles in Cuba.
In
his Sept. 20 UN address, Kennedy had said:
"I
include among these possibilities [for great power cooperation] a joint
expedition to the Moon.... Why ... should man's first flight to the Moon be a
matter of national competition? Why should the United States and the Soviet
Union ... become involved in immense duplications of research, construction,
and expenditure? Surely we should explore whether the scientists and
astronauts of our two countries—indeed of all the world—cannot work together
in the conquest of space, sending someday in this decade to the Moon not the
representatives of a single nation, but the representatives of all of our
countries."
The
prospect of U.S.-Russian collaboration, or indeed of any dramatic space
objectives, had drawn the hostile fire of those politically invested in
Anglo-American geopolitics.
To
outflank resistance within the Executive branch, on Nov. 12, Kennedy directed
NASA Administrator James Webb
"to
assume personally the initiative and control responsibility within the
Government for the development of substantive cooperation with the Soviet
Union in the field of outer space ... as a direct outcome of my September 20
proposal ... including cooperation in lunar landing programs.... [The]
channel of contact ... between NASA and the Soviet Academy of Sciences has
been quite effective.... I would like an interim report on the progress of
our planning by December 15."[13]
Fidel
Castro began putting out feelers to Kennedy in 1963, making known, in the
words of William Attwood, JFK's advisor on African affairs, that
"he
was unhappy about Cuba's [Soviet] satellite status and was looking for a way
out, ... that he wanted an accommodation with the United States and would
make substantial concessions to this end; also that a rift was developing on
this issue between Castro and his chief pro-Communist associate, Che Guevara,
who considered him dangerously unreliable."[14]
President
Kennedy deployed Attwood to pursue contacts with Castro aimed at normalizing
Cuban-American relations. The dialogue proceeded through channels under the
President's personal control, including Attorney General Robert Kennedy, the
liaison to Castro's personal aide Major René Toledo, who said Castro wanted a
meeting with U.S. representatives without the presence of Guevara.
On
the morning of Nov. 19, Attwood was told that Kennedy wanted a report from
him following upcoming meetings at the UN, preparatory to the President's
face-to-face with Castro; and that the President "would not be leaving
Washington, except for a brief trip to Dallas."[15]
Vietnam
As
with Cuba and Congo, the Vietnam conflict was a bomb that had been planted in
Kennedy's path by the Churchill faction before he had assumed the Presidency.
Vietnam's
Sept. 2, 1945 Declaration of Independence from the French empire was modeled
on the U.S. Declaration. It began with these words:
" 'All
men are created equal; they are endowed by their Creator with certain
unalienable Rights; among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of
Happiness.' This immortal statement was made in the Declaration of
Independence of the United States of America in 1776...."
Six
months after Vietnam's Declaration, while JFK was an anti-imperial
Congressional candidate, on Feb. 16, 1946, Vietnamese nationalist leader Ho
Chi Minh wrote a letter to U.S. President Harry Truman, asking the U.S. to
honor the late Franklin Roosevelt's policy. Ho wanted American protection,
like that given to the Philippines, under which Vietnam could proceed to
national independence:
"...Our
Vietnam people, as early as 1941, stood by the Allies' side and fought
against the Japanese and their associates, the French colonialists....
"But
the French colonialists, who had betrayed in war-time both the Allies and the
Vietnamese, have come back and are waging on us a murderous and pitiless war
in order to reestablish their domination....
"This
aggression ... is a challenge to the noble attitude shown before, during and
after the war by the United States Government and People....
"Our
Vietnam people ... need security and freedom, first to achieve internal
prosperity and welfare, and later to bring its small contribution to
world-reconstruction.
"These
securities and freedoms can only be guaranteed by our independence from any
colonial power, and our free cooperation with all other powers. It is with
this firm conviction that we request of the United States as guardians and
champions of World Justice to take a decisive step in support of our
independence.
"What
we ask has been graciously granted to the Philippines. Like the Philippines
our goal is full independence and full cooperation with the United States. We
will do our best to make this independence and cooperation profitable to the
whole world."
But
the Truman Administration supported the British in restoring French rule over
Indochina. Ho's movement, relying on Communist support, defeated the French
and by 1954 had set up a government in North Vietnam. A U.S.-backed regime
was installed in South Vietnam under President Ngo Dinh Diem with U.S.
military advisors, and a new Indochina war ensued.
The
incoming President Kennedy was under pressure to send U.S. combat troops and
expand the war. He continued to consult ex-President Eisenhower, who
counseled restraint. In the first of two celebrated meetings, Gen. Douglas
MacArthur conferred April 20, 1961 with former PT-boat captain Kennedy in the
White House. The discussion was later summarized by Ted Sorensen:
"MacArthur...
warned him against the commitment of American foot soldiers on the Asian
mainland, and the President never forgot his advice."<[16]
Kennedy
had previously negotiated an agreement with the Russians on the neutrality of
Laos, which borders Vietnam.
By
1963, he had learned through the Bay of Pigs and the Cuban Missile Crisis
that avoiding betrayal and disaster depended on his personal control of the
Administration's actions. Kennedy relied on South Vietnam President Diem to
keep the U.S. role in the conflict there limited to U.S. advisors, and
planned to gradually withdraw the limited American military presence.
With
American industrial, scientific and military power at its height, Kennedy
aimed for an eventual Vietnam settlement under the umbrella of the détente he
was building with the Soviets.
Kennedy's
betrayal by Averell Harriman, then Assistant Secretary of State for Far
Eastern Affairs, led to the escalation of the war in Vietnam after Kennedy's
murder. Under confused circumstances engineered by Harriman and his followers
within the government, Harriman initiated a message approving Diem's overthrow.
President
Diem was assassinated Nov. 2, 1963, just 20 days before Kennedy himself was
killed.
Kennedy for Posterity
John
F. Kennedy's Presidency announced to mankind that the 1960s and the life of
the rising generation should be the era of peaceful cooperation to explore
the stars, to advance man's scientific powers, to end imperial resource-grabs
and reverse colonial poverty.
The
British Crown disagreed.
Two
months after Kennedy's inauguration, a royal family project issued a document
aimed at organizing the ultra-rich and world opinion to prevent precisely
this American objective.
Their
"Morges Manifesto" of April 29, 1961, proposed to deal with the
"crisis" and "emergency" in the Congo and throughout
Africa, and the "vast numbers" who "are losing their lives, or
their homes, in an orgy of thoughtless and needless destruction."
But
the "crisis," in the British view, was that "advancing
civilization" was bringing farms and dams to what they viewed as useless
dark-skinned people. The dying "vast numbers" they were concerned
about were animal wildlife—not impoverished humans.
This
was the founding document of the World Wildlife Fund (WWF), whose founders
were Prince Philip, consort of Queen Elizabeth II, and Prince Bernhard,
husband of Netherlands' Queen Juliana, and a former intelligence officer for
Hitler's SS.[17]
The
royals' Manifesto stated that "a supporting Club of leading citizens of
many countries, ... an active group of men of affairs," was to finance
"an international Trust." A "sort of 'war room' at the
international headquarters" was to coordinate "all the main
international bodies concerned in this world campaign ... to raise massive
support for the cause" of the royals' new, Green movement, or
"environmentalism. "
The
indicated sponsoring group, later called the "1001 Club," was
comprised of members of the financier families in the City of London,
billionaire owners of natural resources in Africa, Asia, the Middle East, and
Latin America, and leading strategists of imperial covert action.
President
Kennedy showed his dedication to the advancement of man's powers over nature
in his commitment to nuclear energy, based on the breeder reactor, fuel
reprocessing, and the use of thorium, as well as uranium. Kennedy announced
on Sept. 26, 1963, at the Hanford Nuclear station, that "by the end of
this century ... half of all electric energy generated in the United States
will come from nuclear sources." After 2000, virtually all new electric
power installations would be nuclear.[18]
As
the use of nuclear power was being accelerated, Kennedy said at Hanford,
"We must maintain an aggressive program to use our hydro resources to
the fullest. Every drop of water which goes to the ocean without being used
for power or used to grow, or being made available on the widest possible
basis is a waste...." He supported the North American Water and Power
Alliance (NAWAPA) program to divert rivers from Arctic and North Pacific flow
for the use of all North America.[19]
President
Kennedy brought about the construction of a nuclear power research reactor in
Vietnam. U.S. funding was announced on Aug. 9, 1963; the reactor was
dedicated by President Diem on Oct. 28, five days before he was murdered.
Kennedy
also financed a nuclear research reactor for his ally President Sukarno of
Indonesia, and the U.S. sent scientists to help with the experiments.
Indonesia set off its first sustained nuclear chain reaction on Oct. 17,
1964, before post-Kennedy intrigues led to Sukarno's overthrow.
The
Kennedy space program aimed for manned landings on Mars by the 1980s. Nuclear
rockets essential for this journey were being developed during Kennedy's
administration at the Rover project test site in Nevada.
Throughout
his Presidency, Kennedy promoted with great eagerness the desalination of
seawater for world development and peace. He reorganized the Atomic Energy
Commission to carry out research for nuclear-powered desalination. He
arranged nuclear desalination work with Russia, Mexico, Israel, Egypt, and
several other Arab countries, pushing particularly for joint Arab and Israeli
nuclear water projects as the basis for peace.[20]
This
had been his goal for some time. As a Senator in 1957, Kennedy proposed
"a
Middle Eastern Nuclear Center, similar to the Asian Nuclear Center already
proposed, which could bring untold benefits in energy utilization to former
deserts and wasteland. These projects would be developed and administered
under the auspices and control of the nations in the region.... [T]he
benefits ... would be mutual."[21]
During
the showdown with Governor Wallace over Federal intervention for civil
rights, Kennedy spoke—with Wallace present—at the 30th anniversary
celebration for the Tennessee Valley Authority at Muscle Shoals, Ala. The TVA
had long been racially integrated, and the workers, white and black, cheered
for their President.
Kennedy
detailed the tremendous economic growth of the region, of its private
industry and income, under this Federal program. He cited the thousands of
past and future world leaders who visit the TVA installations, "from
nations whose poverty threatens to exceed their hopes ... and they leave here
feeling that they, too, can solve their problems in a system of
freedom."
Without
mentioning Wallace, Kennedy said:
"From
time to time statements are made labeling the Federal Government an outsider,
an intruder, an adversary.... Without the National Government, the people of
the United States, working together, there would be no protection of the
family farmer.... [H]e never would have been able to electrify his farm, to
insure his crop, to support its price, and to stay ahead of the bugs, the
boll weevils, and the mortgage bankers.... [T]here would be no Hill-Burton
hospitals, which have helped develop the best hospital system in the world
today.... Only a great national effort ... can explore the mysteries of space
... and mobilize the human, natural, and material resources of our
lands."
JFK
closed by citing the favorite phrase of Sen. George Norris, TVA's co-founder
with Franklin Roosevelt:
"...his
reference, and his dedication, to 'generations yet unborn.' The first of
those generations is now enjoying the fruits of his labor, as will others for
decades to come. So let us all ... resolve that we, too, in our time, 30
years later, will, ourselves, build a better Nation for 'generations yet
unborn.' "
[2] Drew Pearson, Robert S.
Allen, "Washington Merry-Go Round," syndicated column, April 15,
1939. The authenticity of Pearson's column about FDR's warning is easily
confirmed from many sources. The British were full partners in Hitler's war
machine and looting. Roosevelt's demand that this Anglo-Nazi onslaught be
called off helped force a British commitment to Poland, and a September 1939
war declaration against Germany—but the British didn't mean it, and launched
no significant offensives. Hitler turned his army westward on May 10, 1940,
aiming at France and Britain; on that day Chamberlain resigned and was
replaced by Winston Churchill.
[7] "Exiles in London Led
Ghana Revolt; Nkrumah Foe Tells of Plot Mapped by Secret Group," New York
Times, Feb. 25, 1966.
[8] Op. cit., Sorensen, pp.
667-718.
[9] Ibid., pp. 564-565.
[10] Ibid., pp. 566-567.
[12] History will rightly note
that the anti-Newtonian scientific expertise of Dryden (airflow, turbulence,
problems of the boundary layer) and his chief Soviet counterpart Leonid Sedov
(continuum mechanics, non-steady motion of a wing, discontinuous velocity
fields, turbulent flows, boundary conditions) are implicitly anti-imperial.
[15] Ibid.
[16] Op. cit., Sorensen, p. 641.
[17] "Manifesto"
author Julian Huxley, Britain's senior African strategist, and president of
the British Eugenics Society, had written, in Man in the Modern World
(1947), "The lowest strata are reproducing relatively too fast.
Therefore ... they must not have too easy access to relief or hospital
treatment lest the removal of the last check on natural selection should make
it too easy for children to be produced or to survive; long unemployment
should be a ground for sterilisation."
[18] Atomic Energy Commission,
"Civilian Nuclear Power—Report to the President"; requested by
Kennedy March 17, 1962; issued Nov. 20, 1962.
[19] This program is urgently
needed today to provide millions of jobs, and triple the water table of the
American West, and Mexico (see www.larouchepac.com).
[20] Testimony of JFK's nuclear
advisor James T. Ramey at Senate hearings on Saline Water Conversion, May 19,
1965.
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