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JFK and the Unspeakable:
Why He Died and Why It Matters

by James W. Douglass

Review by Nory Fussell

Russ and Mary Jorgenson recently donated this remarkable book to the library at the Peace Center of Nevada County. It is “required reading” for anyone interested in steering the course of Peace, Truth and Justice.

Pointing directly to the same forces that today market fear, armaments and turmoil throughout the globe, this is not “just another” JFK assassination book. It reads like three or four condensed into one, simultaneously a political thriller, a history, an expose’ and spiritual biography. It is also a heart breaker, given the gradual political and psychological disempowerment of the US citizenry since November 22nd, 1963.

JFK’s presidency and assassination were among the seminal and defining events of the modern era. As surely as he inspired youthful energy and dreams of a brighter future, he was also turning from Cold Warrior to a man seeking a peaceful world for his children, for all children. He had begun secret communications with Nikita Khrushchev and Fidel Castro in which they were speaking peace. His decisions regarding Vietnam, the Bay of Pigs and the Cuban Missile Crisis had angered the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the CIA, the Mafia, Cuban nationals – in his moves toward peace he was creating many enemies. At one point Kennedy wanted to “splinter the CIA into a thousand pieces and scatter it to the winds.”

Thomas Merton wrote, in 1965, “One of the awful facts of our age is that [the world] is stricken … to the very core of its being by the presence of the Unspeakable” which he defined as an evil whose depth and deceit seemed to go beyond the capacity of words to describe. Four years before Kennedy’s death, Eisenhower gave us his prophetic “military industrial complex” warning. It wasn’t long before that militarist oligarchy would take this country, its economy, politics, media and foreign policy like a pit bull, by the throat and not let go.

James Douglass does a remarkable job of weaving together documents released through the JFK Records Act, personal letters and the volumes circulated by previous writers and investigators. Revealing names, dates and times, plots, sub-plots and counter-plots, the author leads us through the elaborate-but-sloppy setups of Thomas Arthur Vallee and Lee Harvey Oswald as patsies for two separate assassination plots; we see the uncooperative tactics of Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge, among others, working against JFK in his efforts to disengage from SE Asia; we are given insights into the Cold War mentality prevalent in the early ‘60’s, to how much was happening in this very brief period of history; and we’re left to imagine the entirely different world we might be living in had things played out differently.

Consider what we know today, and how we yet go about our daily lives. CIA psy-ops and covert operations in Guatemala, Chile, Cuba, Haiti, Iran, Nicaragua, Panama, etc. (just to name a few) – aggressive interferences in the affairs of sovereign nations designed to further US interests. Consider how few are aware of the Dec. 8, 1999, US court case in which twelve jurors determined through “overwhelming evidence” that Martin Luther King was assassinated by a conspiracy that included agencies of the US government. Consider that more than half the US population believes that the Warren Commission (JFK assassination) and the Kean Commission (Sept.11, 2001) findings are, at least, questionable, but accept that “the official story” will go down in history unchallenged in any meaningful way, accept living with The Big Lie.

We know much about the dark and paralyzing forces at work within our own society and government, but we seem to shun the responsibility to stand and speak against them. Douglass warns us, “The Unspeakable is not far away... By avoiding our responsibility for the escalating crimes done for our security [i.e., the destruction of whole cities – Hamburg, Dresden, Hiroshima, Nagasaki] … we opened the door to JFK’s assassination and its cover-up.”

“The Unspeakable” is ubiquitous in our world: throughout this national security state, with its “theology of redemptive violence” and its “plausible deniability”; throughout a complicit, complacent and consumerist US population; throughout a willing and bloated professional military class, the most awesome ever assembled. In his shift toward peace, JFK was up against hard-line hawks willing to accept, even eager to bring about, the unspeakable outcome of a nuclear confrontation with the Soviet Union.

As We the People struggle for health care, for truth in media, a stable economy and effective and compassionate leadership, the same cabal that took down JFK will continue to attack sovereign nations in our names, risking young lives to bring down bogeymen created by the CIA (Hussein, Noriega, Suharto, bin Laden, etc.) They are to be found wherever the current “central front of the war on terror” may be, depending on resources, strategies or political egos. This book leaves one with the sense that perhaps that central front, as well as the lair of The Unspeakable, is to be found in Langley, Virginia.

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