I should have pointed out that the above list was taken from notes I took while reading Carl Oglesby's The Yankee Cowboy War. That segment, in fact, was pretty much copied verbatim.
Here are ALL the notes I took on my reading of that book. I concentrated more on the first half, as the second half got into details about Nixon that didn't interest me as much as Oglesby's over-arching thesis of an ongoing Yankee-Cowboy bifurcation of the American Establishment.
Here are my notes on the book:
The Yankee and Cowboy War: The Astonishing Link between the JFK Assassination and the deposing of Nixon – Conspiracies from Dallas to Watergate and Beyond
by Carl Oglesby
• Watergate and the JFK assassination were not isolated incidents, but linked parts of a secret war between two American Elites: The Yankees (Eastern Establishment) and the Cowboys (Sunbelt, New Money, Counter-Establishment)
• A hidden drama of coup and counter-coup, intrinsically linked conspiracies, inner oligarchic power sphere, invisible gov’t, above the law, beyond moral rule… a clandestine American state, embryonic police state.
• Operation Garden Plot, COINTELPRO, Operation Chaos.
• CIA contracting ITT to oust Allende in Chile is an example of ruthlessness, just like crimes and cover-up at Dealy Plaza and the Watergate.
• What are the origins of these internal government divisions:
1.CIA intel division vs. CIA operational division.
2.Pentagon vs. FBI
3.CIA vs. Pentagon
4.CIA vs. FBI
5.POTUS and all of the above
• Destabilization of the post-Reconstruction unity, which, in turn, was made stronger by FDR in the WWII period. 60’s, 70’s tumult.
• The intensification of clandestine, illicit measures against racial and anti-war dissent coincided with the use of these methods within the state as consensus failed.
• Dallas/Watergate: breakdown of the incumbent national coalition…Greater Northeast powers with the greater Southwest powers, the post-Civil War, post-Reconstruction coalition, the New Deal, the Yankees and Cowboys.
• Cold War tensions between two separate and distinct and contradictory domains of World Historical Truth: Northeast “détente” and Southwest “militarism”.
• In Europe, we could evidently live with communism, whereas in the Third World, we evidently could not. “Spheres of “détente and violence”… an untenable paradox.
• When it became clear that the USA couldn’t win militarily in the Third World without risking war in the North Atlantic, consensus dissolved.
• Dallas, Nov 22, was an elite power collision, both sensed and real.
• Dichotomous Disunity: The Southwest was pro-escalation, on balance, Frontierist, China-loby position.
• Dichotomous Disunity: The Northeast was pro-pullback, on balance, Atlanticist, CFR, NATO-conscious position.
• YANKEE:
1.David Rockefeller
2.Ivy League
3.Exclusive clubs of Manhattan, Boston and Georgetown.
4.CFR, Round Table
5.Eleanor Roosevelt
6.The Dulles Brothers
7.Massive Retaliation Doctrine
8.The Kennedys
•COWBOYS:
1.Howard Hughes
2.NFL
3.Exclusive clubs of New Orleans, Dallas and Orange County (both sides)
4.LBJ
5.Conally and Hunt
6.Bay of Pigs team
7.Nixon
• The persistence of Civil War splits in the current situation.
• Carroll Quigley had already talked of these themes before Oglesby. His Tragedy and Hope.
• Disintegration of Wall Street influence as the Southwest and Far West influence increase, commensurate with a dissolving of the Middle Class and a rise in bourgeoisie.
• Northeast Establishment: Semi-aristocratic.
• Southwest Counter-Establishment: Petit Bourgeois.
• Southwestern money was dependant on government investment: Oil, military, aviation, space, natural resources. This is a paradox.
•Oglesby argues that the Atlanticist / Frontierist split is primal, and that it runs under everything… 1960.
• YANKEE:
1.Global Scope
2.At home in the Great World
3.Regards it as a whole, in context
4.Good World Order = Relations with allies
5.Relations with Western Democracies
6.USA continuation of Europe’s culture
7.Europe as key world theater
8.Fate of USA linked with Europe
9.White cultural destiny transcending boundaries of nation.
10.The West = One World
11.Monopolists who broke faith with the Vietnam project because of the high probability of failure.
12.Monopolist East Coast Establishment
• COWBOY:
1.Ties to Europe NOT obvious
2.Old World vs. New World
3.Rejects Atlanticism in favor of Frontierism
4.Expanding wilderness frontier and “Pacific strategy”
5.Cowboy entrepreneurs fought to keep faith alive because of the necessity of success.
6.Tycoon (Western)
7.They supported Johnson and Nixon all the way towards a final military solution
8.“Only the strong survive”
• What were the roots of the union in the first place? The frontier which allowed for the continued emergence of entrepreneurs long after the establishment of the first monopolies.
• Marx never studied states that had so much frontier.
• The frontier was a reprieve for democracy… and capitalism! All it took was genocide.
• Energies of expansion took two centuries… finally taking Alaska and Hwaii. We have no way of knowing how important this expansionism was in keeping the natural American Cowboy/Yankee divide under control.
• The success of various Asian revolutionary movements proved a perplexing dilemma to the USA. Now, with Asians successfully defending themselves as self-modernizing, post-colonial entities against American influence, America had run out of frontier.
• To comprehend the assassination of JFK (as with Lincoln) is to understand a basic event in modern government. It’s a necessity to understand… an “absolute pre-condition” to self-government, the first step towards the restoration of a legitimate state.
• Today’s frontier is the fact that there is no more frontier.
PART 2 – CLANDESTINE AMERICA: 3 STORIES
• What is actually possible on the stage of American politics? Can presidents be assassinated by conspirators who go free and win out in the end? Are events which the media soberly report on often little more than playshows contrived by Machiavellian power elites for the manipulation of mass consciousness?
• Three stories (of many more) that illustrate the existence of a vast clandestine American state that predates Nixon and lingers still, having led us down the path of Dallas, Watergate, Operation CHAOS, Operation Garden Plot, CoIntelPro, etc.:
1.The Round Table
2.Operation: Underworld (WWII era federal collaboration between police apparatus and Lansky Syndicate)
3.The Gehlen Org (Nazi spy Reinhard Gehlen running NATO’s intel operations during Cold War years)
• Miles Copeland, in the October 1973 edition of The National Review, argues that the “concatenating” world-scale disasters mounting over the coming years “batters with cumulative force against the foundations of human society.” Process of breakdown leads to escalation of “left-wing terrorism.”
• Governments will be “forced” to use totalitarian methods of social control. Watergate gave us a slice-of-life look at the apparatus as it was developing at the time. The inevitability of terror in a collapsing situation culminates in the inevitability of a Gestapo response. “The only answer to the problem of terror seems to be to keep whole communities under surveillance.”
• Copeland assumes much, that people will prefer police state to enduring terror. In other words, it’s better to impose a police state than to suffer a revolution.
• The “methods” Copeland was referring to in his article were already old hat by the time he wrote.
• Sy Hersh, in the Christmas edition of 1974’s New York Times, exposed CIA-run domestic intel agency.
• The CIA seek to track and neutralize “terrorists” (unlike normal police, who seek evidence and build a case).
• J. Edgar Hoover memo May 1968, evidence of mass suppression against anti-war and civil rights groups… CoIntelPro was about stifling dissent. We have a concrete evidentiary line that provides a sequence of repression against dissent.
• “Buckleyite” conservatism’s failure (according to Oglesby) is its anti-constitutional mania for the state-financed repression and subversion of political dissent and radical/popular movements of reform, and its imperious demand of: “Order! Silence! Sleep!”
• Tyranny is not a remedy for terror, it IS terror. That is why they go so well together. The choice between the two is one that can only be identified as a choice by terrorists and tyrants. A single composite choice on the same coin. There are no anti-republican or anti-democratic methods to defend republicanism or democracy.
• Andrew St. George in Harpers, around the same time as Copeland’s National Review essay, provides a liberal take that is a disquietingly similar survey. Where Copeland found totalitarianism necessary, St. George finds it irresistible.
• “Technofascism” emerges from the material conditions of ultramodern production… the computerization of everyday life.
• St. George incorporates the theories of Weber, Ellul and Arendt without a trace of unconfidence: Watergate = “the inward turning of the nation’s aggressions.” “Defactualization” and “policeness”… “fully achieved, seamlessly engineered, cybernetically controlled techno-totalitarianism.” “Information deteriorates upwards through bureaucracies.”
• “Owing largely to the Bay of Pigs, the CIA ceased being an invisible government… it became an empire.”
• However, St. George seems to forget that it wasn’t Nixon, the Joint Chiefs of Staff or the CIA who were being deceived… it was the American people.
• St. George talks about Hoover distrusting the CIA, but that doesn’t make him a hero. He was one of the worst… and was merely angry at a rival power structure.
• The Army’s involvement in keeping tabs on anti-war protestors.
• “The simple fact is that as the 60’s turned into the 70’s, America became a nation under surveillance.” This did not stop with Watergate.
• The certain knowledge of a clandestine American power elite, which these writers still pretended to see as a future threat.
• The way into clandestinism was not led by pious elders, but by ordinary people with ordinary motives. Three examples…
• THE ROUND TABLE
• Historian Carroll Quigley’s book, Tragedy and Hope basically lays it all out. The right-wing “Birchers” conception is not that far off the mark.
• The Round Table groups were/are semi-covert policy/action groups.
• Trustee: Lord Milner (1905-1925)
• The aim was a federation of the English-speaking world along the lines laid down by Cecil Rhodes.
• By the year 1915, Rhodes’ Round Table groups were operating in England, the USA, South Africa, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and India.
• The US group included George Louis Beer, Walter Lippmann, F Aydelotte, Shepardson, Lamont, Greene and Canham… a Yankee Bouquet.
• Financed initially by the Rhodes Trust, and associates of Rhodes, but since 1925, contributions come from wealthy individuals, foundations and firms associated with banking: Carnegie, UK Trust, JP Morgan, Rockefeller and Whitney families, Lazard bros, Morgan, Grenfell and Co.
• In each dominion, a group was set up to serve as cover for the Round Table.
• In London, the cover group was/is The Royal Institute for International Affairs (RIIA)… the secret nucleus of the Round Table Group.
• In New York, the American faction front group was/is The Council on Foreign Relations (CFR).
• (editorial aside… the Bush Dynasty represents the shift from old to new establishments… even physically moving from New England to Texas)
• New York and London formed an axis of Anglo-centric world advancement. Unite the English-speaking world, help undeveloped areas advance towards stability, law, order and prosperity. “Modern history is NOT the invention of an esoteric cabal designing events omnipotently to suit its ends. A multitude of conspiracies contend in the night. Conspiracy is the normal continuation of normal politics by normal means.”
• No Illuminati-style organization runs everything. The Yankee/Cowboy divide sees a divided socio-historical American order, conflict-wracked and dialectical rather than serene and hierarchical. Results constantly elude every faction because all conspire against each other and each against all.
• “Conspiratorial play is a universal of power politics, and where there is no limit to power, there is no limit to conspiracy.”
• Why are the Round Table groups important? Because it is precisely the kind of semi-hidden organization that standard consciousness does not recognize as a force in the flow of events, and yet whose influence is vast. How much of what we take for granted is the artifact of Yankee bankers?
• KENNEDY DERIVATION
• JFK’s great-grandfather was an Irish “cooper”. His grandfather was an East Boston saloonkeeper. His father Joe was an operator, speculator, wheeler-dealer, and Prohibition-era smuggler snubbed by the Boston Brahminate.
• JFK ascended upon supporting intervention in WWII, against his ambassador father’s stance.
• JFK’s acceptance into the Anglo Establishment opened its American branch (according to Quigley). He was very much in his father’s camp, however, until the moment of truth. Joe Kennedy associated with aristocratic England – Chamberlain and the like – and thus, he fell.
• OPERATION UNDERWORLD
• In 1940-1942, sabotage by German U-boats and Italian saboteurs on the East Coast showed FDR certain vulnerabilities.
• Meanwhile, Meyer Lansky was facing Italian holdouts to the formation of “The Syndicate” (with Lucky Liciano at the head)… the businesslike, corporate superstructure discipline and organization he sought to bring to organized crime.
• Key development in organized crime in the post-Prohibition era was the centralizing of business authority in an unimpeachable bureaucracy… that was the same development that happened in business and politics (Hughes, Nixon, Lansky) around the same time.
• We don’t know who made the suggestion, but Operation Underworld did take place. Lansky secured the docks from Fascist sabotage and FDR did favors for organized crime.
• Syndicate collaboration with the US war effort included General Patton flying the black and yellow standard of Lucky Luciano when he landed in Sicily, thus getting help from the local Mafiosi. In effect, Patton restored the Mafia to power in Sicily.
• FDR also got Lansky to deal with Cuba’s Batista because they had a relationship.
• French Corsican Syndicate goon squads were used by the CIA in their anti-communist efforts on the European mainland after the end of WWII.
• The only significant resistance to the Nazis were the communists. The non-communist Left was non-military, badly organized. The only group sufficiently organized and disciplined to challenge the French Communist Party for control of the docks was the Corsican mob… The French Connection.
• Heroin-producing capital of the Western World was Marseilles. It was a Lansky/Luciano/Trafficante production base.
• The integration of government and criminal organizations extends from the municipal to the federal. Law enforcement and security also fall under its purview. It constitutes a burden of corruption possibly too heavy to throw off.
• FDR made the Mafia de facto leaders of the East Coast docks. He restored the Mafia to power in Sicily. Via Lansky and Batista, he extended its power into the Caribbean and Central America. At Marseilles, he helped create a rampant drug problem that raged throughout the Cold War.
• FDR’s dictum that some crooks are patriotic and that the patriotic ones are okay to do business with was trouble.
• “Operation Underworld” led to “Operation Gemstone”. FDR’s bad choices led to Watergate.
• THE DERIVATION OF NIXON
• Smathers Danner Rebozo Nixon.
• Mobbed up Miami was the place where Richard Nixon fell into the swirl.
• Rebozo was an anti-Castro Cuban exile… first in a long line. He was all mobbed up. His Key Biscayne Bank laundered stolen securities for the mob.
• Rebozo and Nixon very likely set up a black market tire operation together during WWII… “the bending of the twig.”
• Richard Nixon: A-B-C:
1.Prohibition: Organized crime takes over distilleries
2.Repeal: Bootlegging goes legit! Syndicate expands into legal ventures. Organized crime gets a foothold into certain operations of state.
3.Cuba/Batista: Lansky gets molasses. Cuba becomes the Sicily/Corsica of North America.
4.WWII: Roosevelt accepts secret arrangement with organized crime. Kansas Standard gets too brazen with its smuggling operations. Smathers takes the case and comes into contact with Nixon in 1942.
5.1944: Nixon does a sheepdipping tour in the Navy.
6.1946: Nixon runs for Congress.
7.1948: Nixon runs again.
8.1950: Nixon runs for Senate.
9.1952: Nixon chosen to be Eisenhower’s Vice President, putting him a heartbeat away from the Presidency.
• It’s a Frankensteinian story… the Yankees helped create the Beast that threatens to devour them. (shades of Al Qaeda!)
• THE GEHLEN ORG
• Andrei Vlassov was a Red Army officer working for an anti-Bolshevist spy ring. Through him, Nazi spy-master Reinhard Gehlen had access to the anti-communist Eastern Bloc “machine”. After the Nazi defeat at Stalingrad, Gehlen knew his only hope was to give himself (and his intelligence assets) up to the USA or the CCCP.
• In April 1945, Gehlen and his top aides gathered in Saxony. They looted their intel archives, burned much of it, and buried the rest (52 crates) in a Bavarian field (Misery Meadow). He waited for the Americans.
• In May, he surrendered to the 101st Airborne. On August 22, 1945, dressed in the uniform of an American general, he met with Allen Dulles and Wild Bill Donovan of the OSS.
• Europe, Gehlen said, would soon become a battlefield again… between the USA and the USSR. He told them that the USSR was better prepared for the intelligence war to come. Gehlen offered a read-made intelligence apparatus… the Nazi one. All those nationalists and partisans and anti-communists on the inside… and all those documents.
• Gehlen’s four conditions for helping the USA:
1.The Gehlen Org would have complete autonomy within the OSS.
2.Only the Gehlen Org would be used against the USSR.
3.The New German government’s intelligence agency would be… Gehlen’s.
4.Gehlen would never be asked to go against German national interests.
• The Americans went for it.
• Allen Dulles set it up in secret for the OSS. In 1948, the OSS became the CIA. The Gehlen Org soon became NATO’s official intel agency, and Gehlen was made leader of West Germany’s BND (Bunesnachtendienst).
• Gehlen’s career spans the Cold War. He and his staff’s spirit had more power over official American perceptions in the post-war world than a German victory would have gained them..
• Vlassov Gehlen Dulles
• Thus, a Czarist spy ring inside a Nazi spy ring resides at the center of America’s spy org. This is a buzzard that has roosted again and again.
• Clandestinism is a disease of Republican twilight… from Republic to military Empire.
• The liberal sees fascism as being due to technocracy, and he is wrong.
• The conservative sees fascism as a natural reaction to subversion, and he is rong.
PART 3 – DALLAS
• Have you ever read the text of Ford’s pardon of Nixon? If not, you should do so now. It’s just… wow.
• “The whole Bay of Pigs thing…”
• A new understanding of the Bay of Pigs fiasco as a conflict between Yankee and Cowboy establishments is needed.
• The question of hempispheric revolution so divided the Kennedy administration that the US could neither accept Fidel Castro nor destroy him.
• The Kennedy administration was in sharp conflict over what to do. The formulation and implementation of Frontier Camelot Cuban policy was disfigured by this conflict.
• Nixon’s analysis was that Kennedy had abandoned the original plan and gone ahead with a new plan that didn’t include air support or assassinating Castro. Why the changes?
• Castro’s air force consisted of two trainer jets.
• Look to the assassination of Allende in 1973 for the implenetation of Kennedy’s abandoned “Kill the leader” policy.
• Smathers/Kennedy confrontation about killing Castro.
• CIA got Hughes’ Maheu to contract Roselli to kill Castro.
• Kennedy nixes the plot to kill Castro on moral grounds, the “activist wing” of the intel community calls on its underworld assets to do it instead.
• Schizophrenia of the CIA.
• Kennedy tried to reform intel to make it more responsive to the White House.
• The right accuses Kennedy of invading Cuba too timidly and the left, too casually.
• Halberstram wrote a great book about the divisions in the White House and Kennedy’s seeking to disempower LBJ’s circles.
• Vietnam was the most tragic test of the Yankee/Cowboy coalition… Frontier Camelot. Bay of Pigs was the first frisson.
• Mossadegh in 1953… Arbenz in 1954… the Dominican Republic in 1965… Allende in 1973… all equally ruthless as the original Bay of Pigs plan, but “successes”!
• Vietnam was the same, only worse. Left blames Kennedy for getting America involved. Right blames him for not doing so strongly enough.
• How it shakes out:
1.Clandestine organizations get involved
2.Small force gets pinned down
3.Escalation forced, to rescue first group
• Special War Doctrine was supposed to render big wars unnecessary. Commando-spy politics. But it rarely works out that way.
• First you send in the spies. Then you send in the commandoes. Then you send in the special forces. Then you send in the infantry and air force.
• Rostow – “Communism is a disease of transition to which societies are susceptible during modernization.”
• “Special Forces help secure the ruling class of country x so that it may conglomerate in the happy molecule whose master atom is the multinational corporation.”
• Kennedy had NO friends in the clandestine establishment.
• National Security Agency Memo 55 and 57 proved that Kennedy was fully intending to pull out of Vietnam and disengage. The documentary evidence is definitive.
• Nov 22, LBJ NSAM 273 reverses Kennedy’s withdrawal plans.
• Evidence that Kennedy intended a Vietnam pullback:
1.In the summer of 1961, as an outgrowth of the bitter experience of the Bay of Pigs (says Prouty), the Kennedy circle promulgated two key National Security Agency Memos, NSAM 55 and 57. The first, a “red-striped” memo on which Prouty was the JCS briefing officer, directed the Chiefs to take the command of the Vietnam operaion away from the CIA and commence a policy of disengagement. The second, not yet released, emerges in Prouty’s description as a vast philosophical document of comprehensive scope propounding a doctrine of nonintervention in Third World revolutions and a concept of severe limitation in future clandestine operations.
2.(Ret.) General James M. Gavin in 1968: “There has been much speculation about what President Kennedy would or would not have done in Vietnam had he lived. Having discussed military affairs with him often and in detail for 15 years, I know he was totally opposed to the introduction of combat troops in Southeast Asia. His public statements just before his murder support this view. Let us not lay on the dead the blame for our own failures.”
3.Paul B. Fay Jr., Navy Undersecretary under JFK: “If JFK had lived, our military involvement in Vietnam would have been over by the end of 1964.”
4.Kennedy remarked to his aide Kenneth O’Donnell in 1963: “In 1965, I’ll become one of the most unpopular presidents in history. I’ll be damned everywhere as a Communist appeaser. But now I don’t care. If I tried to pull out completely now from Vietnam, we would have another Joe McCarthy red scare on our hands, but I can do it after I’m reelected. So we had better make damned sure I’m reelected.”
5.Wayne Morse, however, maintained that Kennedy was changing his Vietnam policy at the very hour of Dallas: “There’s a weak defense for John Kennedy,” he told the Boston Globe in mid-1973. “He’d seen the error of his ways. I’m satisfied if he’d lived another year we’d have been out of Vietnam. Ten days before his assassination, I went down to the White House and handed him his education bills, which I was handling on the Senate floor. I’d been making two to five speeches a week against Kennedy on Vietnam… I’d gone into President Kennedy’s office to discuss education bills, but he said, ‘Wayne, I want you to know you’re absolutely right in your criticism of my Vietnam policy. Keep this in mind. I’m in the midst of an intensive study which substantiates your position of Vietnam.”
6.We come to know this study through the Ellsberg Papers as the McNamara study. In an interview in late 1973, Ellsberg said, “A very surprising discovery to me in the fall of ’67, as I began to study the documents of ’61 in connection with the McNamara study project, was that the major decision Kennedy had made was to reject the recommendation made to him by virtually everyone that he send combat troops to Vietnam. Kennedy realized that most of the people in the country, whatever their politics, would have said, ‘If it takes combat troops, or if it takes heavy bombing or nuclear weapons, it’s obviously not worth it for us. We won’t succeed.’ Prouty supports this view also from personal Pentagon and intelligence-community experience and believes that Kennedy “gave a hint of his plans for disengagement when he said, speaking of the Vietnamese, ‘In the final analysis it is their war. They have to win or lose it.’”
7.September 1963: The JFK administration launches a general program for disengagement while trying to make it appear we have won the war without having actually fought it. Taylor and McNamara go to Saigon and come back saying they have seen the light at the end of the tunnel. It is announced that the American mission is beginning to draw to a successful end. It is a foreshadowing of the Senator Aiken Plan of 1967: Announce a victory at a press conference and march home as in triumph. General Paul Harkins, commander of the Military Assistance Command in Saigon, tells the troops: “Victory in the sense it would apply to this kind of war is just months away and the reduction of American advisers can begin any time now.”
8.October 2 1963: McNamara takes to the steps of the White House to tell the press of plans to withdraw one thousand US troops from Vietnam before the year is out.
9.November 1-2: the Diem regime, hopelessly tied to a policy of no negotiations with the Viet Cong, is overthrown, then Diem and his brother Nhu are mysteriously assassinated. General “Big” Minh’s regime, incubated in Bangkok exile for exactly this purpose, takes over shortly and proclaims its intention of negotiating a settlement and a coalition government with the Viet Cong. It is no secret that Kennedy was behind the coup and the coming of Big Minh, although there is a question as to whether he was also behind the assassinations of Diem and Nhu. Kennedy had professed public disfavor with their rule and had declared Diem “out of touch with the people.” He sanctioned the Minh takeover and approved of its pronegotiations policy. But what do we make out of Howard Hunt’s furtive work in the files of the State Department, busy with scissors and paste to create his own little “Pentagon Papers” convicting Kennedy of the murders of Diem and Nhu? Was he helping the truth or plying his disinformation tirade?
10.Nov 15: In spite of confusion in Saigon resulting from the coup, “a US military spokesman carried on the McNamara-Taylor-Harkins line,” as recorded in the GOP’s 1967 Vietnam study, “and promised 1,000 American military men would be withdrawn from Vietnam beginning on Dec 3.”
11.Nov 22: Dallas. Within days of taking over, LBJ issues NSAM 273, reversing the Kennedy policy of withdrawal and inaugurating the period of build-up leading toward conventional war.
12.Early December: The first of the one thousand US troops ordered home begin withdrawal from Vietnam. LBJ’s new orders have not reached the field.
13.March/April 1964: Joint Chiefs draw up and submit to Johnson a list of ninety-four potential targets for bombing in Vietnam.
14.May: The new government in Saigon calls on the US to bomb the North. LBJ declines to rule it out.
15.June: There is a big war powwow of LBJ and JCS in Honolulu. LBJ resists pressure for a congressional resolution and decides to step up war effort. Gen. William Westmoreland takes command of US forces in Vietnam. Ambassador Lodge resigns and is replaced by Taylor.
16.July: South Vietnamese commandos -- CIA/Special forces units – raid two North Vietnamese islands in the Gulf of Tonkin.
17.August: on intelligence patrol in the Gulf of Tonkin, US destroyers Maddox and Turner Joy report being attacked by North Vietnamese torpedo boats. This leads to the Gulf of Tonkin resolution, opening the way for major escalation.
18.Nov: The Viet Cong hit Bien Hoa air base in the South and the JCS grow heated in their demand for heavy US retaliation. LBJ wins the 1963 election on a “peace” platform vs. Goldwater’s (and later Nixon’s) air-war line; Johnson’s was the biggest “peace mandate” ever until Nixon’s of ’72.
19.Dec: Johnson approves a plan for air attacks on North Vietnam, “reprisal air strikes for 30 days, then graduated air warfare against North backed by possible deployment of ground combat troops.”
20.Feb, 1965: Viet Cong attack US military advisers’ compound at Pleiku. In “retaliation” Johnson orders the first air strikes against the North. The air war is on.
21.April: The First March on Washington to Protest the War in Vietnam is held by SDS; 20,000-25,000 hear SDS and SNCC speakers call for a mass antiwar movement.
• Reasons why the Cowboys would think JFK’s admin was as bad as it could possibly be:
1.Kennedy’s 1962 Geneva Accords on Laos made concessions to the Communists and led to the pullout of eight hundred US military advisors.
2.Kennedy intervened through the UN and, with direct US assistance, supported Congolese nationalism against Belgian-backed secessionists.
3.Kennedy cut off foreign and military aid to seven Latin American countries, most sensationally Haiti, on grounds that repressive strongman government was incompatible with the aims of hemispheric reform.
4.He struggled with Big Steel and Detroit Iron to hold down prices. Faced with an inflation rate of 4 percent, miniscule by comparison to the 70’s, JFK actually wanted to impose a provisional price freeze and won labor’s agreement to the most limited settlements since World War II on the promise that industry would hold the line on prices. When Big Steel took it all back, JFK fought (unsuccessfully) for a court-ordered price rollback. It brings to mind the observation of Indira Gandhi that Kennedy “died because he lost the support of his peers” – ie, the support of the Yankee financial powers animating the vast reaches of the iron and steel industry. For contrast, when steel raised its prices five dollars a ton in 1967, LBJ merely said that steel executives “knew his feelings” and that price controls “could not be ruled out” in the future. LBJ allowed another steel price raise to pass without comment in 1968.
5.JFK proposed elimination of the oil-depletion allowance in Jan 63. This by itself could easily have screwed to the sticking point the courage of the American oil cartel as a whole, and most particularly its mainly Southwestern components, the so-called Independends (distinct from the mainly Yankee “majors”). The oil-depletion allowance was and remains the whole basis of Southwestern oil’s special power and glory. Kennedy had already aroused Texan ire in 1961 by attempting to collect a federal tax on state business transactions, a tax no Texan could remember having ever seen collected. Now came the attack on the depletion allowance. Oil industry spokesman angrily predicted a 30 percent drop in earnings if Kennedy’s proposed tax reforms won out.
6.JFK encouraged the civil-rights movement openly. He introduced his civil-rights bill in June 63 in concert with MLK’s march on Washington. The whole Camelot legislative program was blocked by the civil-rights debate.
7.The New Frontiersman attack on LBJ as a personality began in 61 and intensified toward Dallas, focusing in the Kennedy brothers’ pressure on LBJ’s Bobby Baker softspot. The feud between LBJ and RFK was unrivaled. What was at stake was not simply LBJ’s political career but the whole question of Texas power and its political relationship to Eastern power. When LBJ man Connally was dispatched in October 63 to convince Kennedy that he must come politicking soon in Texas, Connally’s argument was that the Texas Dem Party was in a growing state of disaffection from the national party under the reign of the Kennedys and that fences had to be mended or Texas might bolt the party in 64.
8.RFK’s Justice Dept campaign against Jimmy Hoffa, within a wider Frontier Camelot campaign to bust the larger Teamster/Syndicate connection, threatened to expose and destroy a major and basic sphere of Syndicate activity, the Teamster Pension Fund complex.
9.On April 1, 63, Kennedy announced that all US raids on Cuba would stop. On April 4, Det Sgt C.H. Sapp of the Miami Police Intelligence Unit reported to Assistant Chief of Police A.W. Anderson the following: “For the past three days the Intel Unit has been receiving information concerning the feelings and proposed actions of the Cuban refugee colony in Miami. Since President Kennedy made the news release that the US governmet would stop all raiding parties going against Castro’s government, the Cuban people feel that the US government has turned against them… All violence hitherto directed toward Castro’s Cuba will now be directed toward various governmental agencies in the US.”
10.In Sept 1963, even as he was taking the first perceptible steps toward a Vietnam pullback, Kennedy ordered the FBI to raid secret CIA guerrilla training camps and staging bases in Florida and Louisiana. Dave Ferrie, linked by New Orleans District Attorney James Garrison to Clay Shaw and the CIA, was involved in the operation of the Louisiana camps. The camps were situated on land owned by a gambling associate of Jack Ruby’s, Bill McLaney. The McLaney brothers, cogs in the Lansky Syndicate, were among the big losers when the Cuban revolution ejected the Syndicate and its casinos from the island. Frank Fiorini (aka Sturgis) of the Watergate burglary was also connected to the base Kennedy closed at No Name Key. Sturgis was visible at Dallas two months later and was actually questioned by the FBI in connection with the Assassination.
11.Constant and passionate struggle to win the hearts and minds of the JCS was a leading existential feature of the actual life of Frontier Camelot. Camelot-Pentagon differences were multitudinous and many-layered, from theories of war to theories of peace, and they were heatedly joined, as indicated for example by Halberstram’s report that on the question of nuclear disarmament, “McNamara virtually locked [the Joint Chiefs] in a room for a week to fight it out with them.”
12.But more gut-basic still was Kennedy’s assault on the sanctity of the defense budget. His administration drew up three defense budgets. The 1962 budget was $51.6 billion. In 1963, it went down to 50.8 billion. In 1964, it went down again to 49.9 billion. As of Watergate, after almost a decade of Cowboy rule, it had grown again to about twice that size.
• Khrushchev claims RFK wrote warning of a possible military coup if the Missile Crisis lasted too long.
• Pre-assassination, the White House experienced increased polarization of its intel apparatus. JFK’s assassination seemed to resolve all that. It got rid of one policy and put another into its place.
• LBJ talked peace while plotting war a la Joint Chiefs of Staff.
• The consequences of the failure of Frontier Camelot stretched out over the next decade like the path of a tornado.
• Kennedy LBJ was a Yankee to Cowboy transition.
• Eventually, the Yankees re-grouped and forced the abdication of LBJ, followed by the Paris Peace Accords and the renewal of liberal reforms, with RFK as heir apparent. This was swiftly followed by the assassination of RFK and Martin Luther King Jr. Meanwhile, the world burned (Paris, Greece, Prague, Mexico).
• On to Nixon and Watergate.
• We know Nixon was involved in developing the Bay of Pigs plan with Sturgis, Hunt, the Watergate Cubans, CIA elements Howard Hughes (through Maheu) and the Lansky Syndicate (via Rosselli). We see that JFK’s murder was a coup d’etat in effect… but was it one by design?
