by StarmanSkye » Mon Jun 19, 2006 3:15 am
I lean towards the interpretation that JFK was VERY cognizant of the real division of political and economic power in America, concentrated in the Military Industrial Complex and allied with International Banks, Wall Street, the CIA/NSA, organized crime, and the energy/resource/extractive industries. Certainly, he had to be keenly aware of the dangerous tightrope he was walking in bucking the war-profiteer interests of the Pentagon gang, by attempting to extricate America from involvement in a war in SE Asia that the MIC and politicos/technocrats et al were working behind the scenes to make a key part of America's foreign policy agenda. I believe this clique of powerful interests working in secrecy to undermine American ideals, esp. high regard for government transparency, rule of law, human rights and diplomacy, constituted the 'conspiracy Kennedy was speaking about in the speeches cited. Notably, I believe Kennedy was aware of and strongly opposed to the enormous abuses of authority, corruption and fraud by which democracy had been subverted in the years following WW II and the Korean War, with the US dragging its feet if not having second thoughts about its wartime promises of independence given to colonial territories, and budding democracies being undermined and brutal dictators set in-place to protect American economic interests -- as had occurred with disasterous consequences in Iran, Guatamala, and the Phillipines. IMO, if Kennedy meant to identify the intrigues of the Soviet Union in the Cold War as the subject of his speeches about secret infiltrations and subversions and covert warfare, he would have been explicit. As it was, I think he was being deliberately ambigious, allowing his critics and a mostly clueless public to assume he was talking about Communism, when he was REALLY talking about a secret, dangerous rightwing conspiracy that was taking-over America's democracy from within -- in order not to openly antagonize the MIC and alert them to what he was saying -- a 'message' that was only accessable to those relatively few members of society whose perceptions and awareness were similiar to JFK's.<br><br>Using documents made available thru Freedom of Information, contemporary researchers like Newman have been able to make a very compelling case that Kennedy was very much at-odds with the same MIC powerful interests Eisenhower spoke of at the close of his administration -- and who remain the most probable suspects in what was essentially a coup d'etat of JFK's assassination -- and also behind the killing of RBK and MLK.<br><br>JFK and Vietnam: Deception, Intrigue, and the Struggle for Power (Hardcover) <br>by John M. Newman <br><!--EZCODE AUTOLINK START--><a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0446516783/002-9562079-0135207?v=glance&n=283155">www.amazon.com/gp/product...e&n=283155</a><!--EZCODE AUTOLINK END--><br>--quote--<br>Editorial Reviews<br>From Publishers Weekly<br>Had he lived, would President Kennedy have committed U.S. troops to Vietnam? According to the evidence marshalled here, the answer is a resounding no. Newman, who teaches international politics at the University of Maryland, argues that when JFK went to Dallas he already intended to withdraw U.S. advisers from Vietnam, but held off to ensure his reelection in 1964. The book traces the president's pullout plan back to April '62, when he stated that the U.S. should seize every opportunity to reduce its commitment to Vietnam. A month later Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara asked U.S. generals in Saigon how soon the South Vietnamese would be ready to take over the war effort. This well-documented study shows that JFK was for a time deceived by Gen. Maxwell Taylor, head of the joint chiefs, and others in a blizzard of briefings that claimed unadulterated progress and success. Newman maintains that although the president paid public lip service to a continued commitment to appease the right, his goal was to abandon a venture that he early recognized as a lost cause. No other study has revealed so clearly how the tragedy in Dallas affected the course of the war in Vietnam, since two days after the assassination Lyndon Johnson signed a National Security Action Memo that opened the way for the fateful escalation of the war. Photos. <br>Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc. <br><br>From Kirkus Reviews<br>Bold and authoritative revisionist analysis of Kennedy's Vietnam policy, by a US Army major who teaches history at the Univ. of Maryland. What was JFK's real agenda regarding Vietnam? Newman claims that the young President planned to withdraw American forces from that war-torn country--and his case is strong. The author pictures an isolated Kennedy battling both cold war jingoism and a military- industrial lobby avid for a war that would make tens of billions of dollars. Conventional wisdom generally sees JFK's early attacks on Eisenhower's covert liaison with France regarding Vietnam as simple political expediency, and Kennedy as another adherent to the domino theory. JFK's speeches buttress that position, but Newman, working with newly declassified material, argues that these speeches were simply requisite political twistings and turnings--and that Kennedy planned to get the US out of Vietnam despite a hawkish palace clique (led by Lyndon Johnson) that fed him disinformation on this most crucial foreign-policy issue. Document by document, incident by incident, the author reveals Kennedy as stranded within his own Administration, alienated by his desire to avoid this ultimate wrong-time, wrong-place war. Newman's research culminates in two crucial National Security Action Memos. In one, authored several weeks before Kennedy's death, the President formally endorsed withdrawal from Vietnam of a thousand advisors by the end of 1963 (to be followed by complete withdrawal by the end of 1965). In the second, written six days after the assassination, LBJ reversed the withdrawal policy and planned in some detail the escalation to follow. Crucial to any reevaluation of JFK as President and statesman, this electrifying report portrays a wily, stubborn, conflicted leader who grasped realities that eluded virtually everyone else in the US establishment. -- Copyright ©1992, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved. <br><br>****<br>You make a good point, Sunny, referencing Marrs, in that JFK's was spectacularly public and bloody in order to make the point that NO ONE can act with impunity in challenging or circumventing the PTB.<br>Starman<br> <p></p><i></i>