Transformational Journey – John F. Kennedy’s Turning toward Peace

ANGLO AMERICA, HISTORY, 15 Oct 2018

David T. Ratcliffe – TRANSCEND Media Service

2 Sep 2013 – In 1963 President John Fitzgerald Kennedy gave the commencement address to the graduating class at American University. In his book, The Improbable Triumvirate: John F. Kennedy, Pope John, Nikita Khrushchev, Saturday Review editor Norman Cousins summed up the significance of that remarkable speech: “At American University on June 10, 1963, President Kennedy proposed an end to the Cold War.” Khrushchev called the American University Address “the greatest speech by any American President since Roosevelt.” The speech is available in its entirety – in text, audio, and film – at: <http://ratical.org/JFK061063.html>. This is the real jubilee of 2013, not 22 November.

Nikita Khrushchev and John F. Kennedy in Vienna, 1961. TASS/ZUMA

I was eight when President Kennedy was killed. At home sick in bed that day, my father walked up the stairs, responding to my “Hi Dad” greeting in a voice I’d never heard before with, “President Kennedy’s been shot.” As for so many, something in him died that day. In 1977 a lawyer friend loaned me his copy of Arthur Schlesinger’s A Thousand Days, John F. Kennedy In The White House. I’d never read dry biography like that before. By the time I was finished, a budding understanding had begun of what JFK was trying to do while he was President. That he was learning French in anticipation of meeting DeGaulle in early 1964, to establish a more thorough communication of ideas and meaning with the French President, was an example of the type of engagement with life John Kennedy expressed.

Consider the following statement, made by the President early in 1961 (before the Bay of Pigs disaster) to Richard Goodwin, formerly a speehwriter and assistant special counsel of JFK’s whom he had recently appointed Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs. Imagine any President of the United States before or since, expressing this degree of understanding concerning the interrelatedness and interdependence of all things.

We can’t embrace every tinhorn dictator who tells us he’s anti-Communist while he’s sitting on the necks of his own people. And the United States government is not the representative of private business. Do you know in Chile the American copper companies control about eighty percent of all the foreign exchange? We wouldn’t stand for that here. And there’s no reason they should stand for it. There’s a revolution going on down there, and I want to be on the right side of it. Hell, we are on the right side. But we have to let them know it, that things have changed.

Remembering America: A Voice From the Sixties,
Richard Goodwin (Harper and Row: NY, 1989), page 147.

I read many books on JFK’s life and death in the later seventies and eighties. In subsequent years, from interviewing Fletcher Prouty in 1989, to the release and ferment created by Oliver Stone’s film JFK in 1991, I wondered what might surface to clarify our obfuscated history. I briefly communicated with Jim Douglass in 2000 when he contacted me to purchase a copy of Understanding Special Operations and sent along a copy of his article, “The Martin Luther King Conspiracy Exposed in Memphis”. At that time I was not aware of this trial. I asked if I could reprint the article on ratical. He was pleased and gave his permission. Twelve years later this work has been updated with links to the original sources referenced throughout the complete trial transcript.

Now with Douglass’s work, JFK and The Unspeakable – Why He Died and Why It Matters, we have an outstanding sourcebook weaving together many threads leading to the seminal event of post-WWII America. Speaking after the book’s release at Powell’s Bookstore in Portland, June 2008, Douglass recounted how he sought to make the story as clear as possible by summarizing it in about 5 sentences. The following excerpt from the talk (14:45-16:50 minutes) includes a segment from the Preface (page ix), the last portion quoted here:

Thanks to the truth-telling of many, many witnesses who have risked their lives; thanks to a recent flood of documents, through the JFK Records Act – hundreds of thousands of documents are now available on the Kennedy assassination as a result of that law, passed as a result of Oliver Stone’s film and the appeal at the end of it – thanks to all of that the truth is available. Not only can the conspiracy that most Americans have thought was likely now be seen in detail. Not only can we know what happened in Dallas. More important than filling in the crime scene, we can know the larger historical context of the assassination: why President Kennedy was murdered. We can know the liberating truth. The story of why JFK was gunned down is the subject of this book. I have told the story chronologically point-by-point through a sea of witnesses. In brief that story is:
On our behalf (he was President of the United States so he did it on our behalf), at the height of the Cold War, John F. Kennedy risked committing the greatest crime in history, starting a nuclear war.
Before we knew it, he turned toward peace with the enemy who almost committed that crime with him (Nikita Khrushchev).
For turning to peace with his enemy (and ours), Kennedy was murdered by a power we cannot easily describe. Its unspeakable reality can be traced, suggested, recognized, and pondered. That is one purpose of this book. The other is to describe Kennedy’s turning.
I hope that, by following the story of JFK’s encounter with the unspeakable, we’ll be willing to encounter it too.

In 2009 Jim gave the Keynote Address at the 2009 Coalition on Political Assassinations Conference in Dallas, The Hope in Confronting the Unspeakable in the Assassination of President John Fitzgerald Kennedy. With 81 footnotes, this presentation provides a detailed summation of elements explored in Douglass’ JFK and The Unspeakable. Published by Orbis Books in 2008, Orbis Books in 2008 (hardcover), the book referenced here is the Simon & Schuster 2010 (softcover) edition.

Near the end of the Keynote, Douglass poses the central question of his talk: “So how can the why of his murder give us hope? Where do we find hope when a peacemaking president is assassinated by his own national security state? How do we get hope from that?” He follows this with the essence of the transforming nature of the story of John Kennedy’s turning towards peace.

The why of the event that brings us together tonight encircles the earth . . . Because John Kennedy chose peace on earth at the height of the Cold War, he was executed. But because he turned toward peace, in spite of the consequences to himself, humanity is still alive and struggling. That is hopeful. Especially if we understand what he went through and what he has given to us as his vision.

At a certain point in his presidency, John Kennedy turned a corner and he didn’t look back. I believe that decisive turn toward his final purpose in life, resulting in his death, happened in the darkness of the Cuban Missile Crisis. Although Kennedy was already in conflict with his national security managers, the missile crisis was the breaking point.

At that most critical moment for us all, he turned from any remaining control that his security managers had over him toward a deeper ethic, a deeper vision in which the fate of the earth became his priority. Without losing sight of our own best hopes in this country, he began to home in, with his new partner, Nikita Khrushchev, on the hope of peace for everyone on this earth – Russians, Americans, Cubans, Vietnamese, Indonesians, everyone on this earth – no exceptions. He made that commitment to life at the cost of his own. What a transforming story that is.

One of the most remarkable dimensions of this transforming story is the secret correspondence between Nikita Khrushchev and John Kennedy. Khrushchev initiated this private channel of direct communication between himself and the U.S. President when he wrote JFK a 26-page letter dated September 29, 1961 during the Berlin Crisis. In it, the leader of Communist state, an avowed atheist, invoked the biblical analogy of Noah’s Ark to express their common concern for peace in the nuclear age.

I often think how necessary it is for men who are vested with trust and great power to be inspired with the understanding of what seems to be an obvious truism, which is that we live on one planet and it is not in man’s power—at least in the foreseeable future—to change that. In a certain sense there is an analogy here—I like this comparison—with Noah’s Ark where both the “clean” and the “unclean” found sanctuary. But regardless of who lists himself with the “clean” and who is considered to be “unclean,” they are all equally interested in one thing and that is that the Ark should successfully continue its cruise. And we have no other alternative: either we should live in peace and cooperation so that the Ark maintains its buoyancy, or else it sinks. Therefore we must display concern for all of mankind, not to mention our own advantages, and find every possibility leading to peaceful solutions of problems.

While annotating this transcript, I discovered that the entire Foreign Relations of the United States, [FRUS] of the Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon-Ford Administrations – 172 volumes total – are online at http://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments. The Kennedy-Khrushchev Exchanges: Document List (FRUS, 1961-1963, Volume VI, Kennedy-Khrushchev Exchanges) contains 120 communications, of which 21 make up the secret letters between JFK and Khrushchev. The President’s first letter responding to the Chairman acknowledged the fitting analogy of Noah’s Ark to their mutual dilemma.

I like very much your analogy of Noah’s Ark, with both the “clean” and the “unclean” determined that it stay afloat. Whatever our differences, our collaboration to keep the peace is as urgent—if not more urgent—than our collaboration to win the last world war. The possibilities of another war destroying everything your system and our system have built up over the years—if not the very systems themselves—are too great to permit our ideological differences to blind us to the deepening dangers of such a struggle.

The opportunity for Khrushchev and Kennedy to communicate directly through such an unmediated channel afforded each man the chance to begin to know each other as a human being he could respect. As Douglass writes in the Preface, “Respect means recognizing and acknowledging our enemies’ part of the truth, whether or not that makes life more difficult for us. Recognizing his enemies’ truths made life much more difficult, and finally impossible, for Kennedy—leaving us with the responsibility of recognizing the painfully obvious truth of Kennedy’s death.”

In the summer of 1962 while sailing with friends and discussing the recently published novel, Seven Days In May, that described a military takeover in the United States, President Kennedy “discussed the possibility of such a military takeover very calmly:”

“It’s possible. It could happen in this country, but the conditions would have to be just right. If, for example, the country had a young President, and he had a Bay of Pigs, there would be a certain uneasiness. Maybe the military would do a little criticizing behind his back, but this would be written off as the usual military dissatisfaction with civilian control. Then if there were another Bay of Pigs, the reaction of the country would be, Is he too young and inexperienced?’ The military would almost feel that it was their patriotic obligation to stand ready to preserve the integrity of the nation, and only God knows just what segment of democracy they would be defending if they overthrew the elected establishment.”

As if steeling himself for the final challenge, he continued, “Then, if there were a third Bay of Pigs, it could happen.”

Pausing long enough for all of us to assess the significance of his comment, he concluded with an old Navy phrase, “But it won’t happen on my watch.”

The above is from Paul B. Fay Jr.’s The Pleasure of His Company (p. 163), a recounting of Fay’s friendship with JFK that began in 1942 when the two men met in a PT boat training camp. Douglass explores the import of President Kennedy’s thinking regarding giving himself three Bay of Pigs -type events before seeing just such a coup in the United States.

As articulated both in his talk and with much more detail in JFK and The Unspeakable, there were many more than just three “Bay of Pigs” – comprising the escalating list of conflicts between President Kennedy and his national security state – before he was assassinated. A list of these conflicts includes the following:

1. 1961: negotiated peace with the Communists for a neutralist government in Laos;
2. April 1961: Bay of Pigs and JFK’s response: “[I want] to splinter the CIA in a thousand pieces and scatter it to the winds.”
3. 1961-63: Kennedy-Hammarskjöld-UN vision kept the Congo together and independent;
4. April 1962: conflict with big steel industrialists;
5. October 1962: Cuban Missile Crisis;
6. 1961-63: Diplomatic opening to Third World leadership of President Sukarno;
7. May 6, 1963: Presidential order NSAM #239 to pursue both a nuclear test ban and a policy of general and complete disarmament;
8. June 10, 1963: American University Address – the Real JFK Jubilee – not Nov 22;
9. Summer 1963: Nuclear Test Ban Treaty;
10. Fall 1963: beginning of back-channel dialogue with Fidel Castro;
11. Fall 1963: JFK’s decision to sell wheat to the Russians;
12. October 11, 1963: Presidential order NSAM #263 to withdraw U.S. troops from Vietnam by 1965;
13. November 1963: Khrushchev decides to accept JFK’s invitation for a joint expedition to the moon.

In his American University Address President John Kennedy proposed nothing less than an end to the Cold War. As Douglass writes in JFK and The Unspeakable, “It had become clear to America’s power brokers that the president of their national security state was struggling with his Communist opponent not so much over who would win the Cold War as on how to end it.” (p. 175) In his farewell address, 3 days before JFK’ inauguration, President Eisenhower warned Americans that

“we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes.”

President Kennedy’s repeatedly challenging the imperatives of the Pentagon, the CIA, and the military-industrial-intelligence complex was a clear and hopeful response to Eisenhower’s warning. This is one reason there was such a universal outpouring of grief throughout much of the world when he was assassinated. His turning towards peace with increased vigor and resolve after staring into the abyss with the enemy Nikita Khrushchev, during the Cuban Missile Crisis was treasonous to the entrenched monied interests standing behind the institutions of government representing those interests. The President’s actions, culminating in his efforts to end the Cold War was seen as heretical – as would be the case for a President today vis-a-vis the War on Terror – by the political theology of violence we were then and are now still thrall to as a society. Douglass fine tunes this point in the Preface:

John Kennedy’s story is our story, although a titanic effort has been made to keep it from us. That story, like the struggle it embodies, is as current today as it was in 1963. The theology of redemptive violence still reigns. The Cold War has been followed by its twin, the War on Terror. We are engaged in another apocalyptic struggle against an enemy seen as absolute evil. Terrorism has replaced Communism as the enemy. We are told we can be safe only through the threat of escalating violence. Once again, anything goes in a fight against evil: preemptive attacks, torture, undermining governments, assassinations, whatever it takes to gain the end of victory over an enemy portrayed as irredeemably evil. Yet the redemptive means John Kennedy turned to, in a similar struggle, was dialogue with the enemy. When the enemy is seen as human, everything changes.

That reconciling method of dialogue—where mutual respect overcomes fear, and thus war—is again regarded as heretical in our dominant political theology. As a result, seeking truth in our opponents instead of victory over them can lead, as it did in the case of Kennedy, to one’s isolation and death as a traitor. (pp. ix-x)

Paradoxically, all of us in this society are involved in an ongoing denial of the transformation of our most esteemed national values – including liberty and justice for all – that have been replaced by a national security state structure that began to take root in the 1940s and that led directly to the assassination of a President endeavoring to move the world away from war and towards peace. Consider how our failure to confront the Unspeakable caused this to manifest. How compassion is our source of nonviolent social transformation. And how understanding and sharing with others the transforming story of a President who turned towards peace and gave his life as witness to a new, more peaceful humanity, can help move our own collective story in the twenty-first century away from a spiral of violence that can only end in omnicidal oblivion and towards a process of peace-making. Such movement serving Life’s interests is not only for the future of our species, but for all life exploring itself – and the unknown possibilities of existence – on this planet. These ideas set the frame of the book at the end of its Introduction.

The Unspeakable is not far away. It is not somewhere out there, identical with a government that became foreign to us. The emptiness of the void, the vacuum of responsibility and compassion, is in ourselves. Our citizen denial provides the ground for the government’s doctrine of “plausible deniability.” John F. Kennedy’s assassination is rooted in our denial of our nation’s crimes in World War II that began the Cold War and the nuclear arms race. As a growing precedent to JFK’s assassination by his own national security state, we U.S. citizens supported our government when it destroyed whole cities (Hamburg, Dresden, Tokyo, Hiroshima, Nagasaki), when it protected our Cold War security by world-destructive weapons, and when it carried out the covert murders of foreign leaders with “plausible deniability” in a way that was obvious to critical observers. By avoiding our responsibility for the escalating crimes of state done for our security, we who failed to confront the Unspeakable opened the door to JFK’s assassination and its cover-up. The unspeakable is not far away.

It was Thomas Merton’s compassion as a human being that drew him into his own encounter with the Unspeakable. I love what Merton wrote about compassion in The Sign of Jonas: “It is in the desert of compassion that the thirsty land turns into springs of water, that the poor possess all things.”[9]

Compassion is our source of nonviolent social transformation. A profoundly human compassion was Merton’s wellspring for his encounter with the Unspeakable in the Holocaust, the Vietnam War, and nuclear annihilation. Merton’s understanding and encouragement sustained many of us through those years, especially in our resistance to the Vietnam War. As Merton’s own opposition deepened to the evil of that war, he went on a pilgrimage to the East for a more profound encounter. He was electrocuted by a fan at a conference center in Bangkok on December 10, 1968, the conclusion of his journey into a deeper, more compassionate humanity.

“The human being” was Jesus’ name for himself, literally “the son of the man,” in Greek ho huios tou anthrōpou.[10] Jesus’ self-identification signified a new, compassionate humanity willing to love our enemies and walk the way of the cross. Jesus told his disciples again and again about “the human being,” meaning a personal and collective humanity that he identified with himself. Against his followers’ protests, he told them repeatedly that the human being must suffer. The human being must be rejected by the ruling powers, must be killed, and will rise again.[11] This is the glory of humanity. As he put it in John’s Gospel, “The hour has come for the human being to be glorified. Truly, truly, I say to you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it bears much fruit” (John 12:24 ).

What Jesus was all about, what we as human beings are all about in our deepest nature, is giving our lives for one another. By bearing that witness of martyrdom, he taught, we will come to know what humanity really is in its glory, on earth as it is in heaven. A martyr is therefore a living witness to our new humanity.

Was John F. Kennedy a martyr, one who in spite of contradictions gave his life as witness to a new, more peaceful humanity?

That question never occurred to me when Kennedy died. Nor did it arise in my mind until more than three decades later. Now that I know more about JFK’s journey, the question is there: Did a president of the United States, while in command of total nuclear war, detach himself enough from its power to give his life for peace?

From researching JFKs story, I know much more today than I did during his life about his struggle to find a more hopeful way than the Cold War policies that were about to incinerate the United States, the Soviet Union, and much of the world. I know now why he became so dangerous to those who believed in and profited from those policies.

But how much of his future was John Kennedy willing to risk?

Kennedy was not naïve. He knew the forces he was up against. Is it even conceivable that a man with such power in his hands could have laid it down and turned toward an end to the Cold War, in the knowledge he would then be, in Merton’s phrase, marked out for assassination?

Let the reader decide.

I will tell the story as truthfully as I can. I have come to see it as a transforming story, one that can help move our own collective story in the twenty-first century from a spiral of violence to a way of peace. My methodology is from Gandhi. This is an experiment in truth. Its particular truth is a journey into darkness. If we go as far as we can into the darkness, regardless of the consequences, I believe a midnight truth will free us from our bondage to violence and bring us to the light of peace.

Whether or not JFK was a martyr, his story could never have been told without the testimony of risk-taking witnesses to the truth. Even if their lives were not taken—and some were—they were all martyrs in the root meaning of the word, witnesses to the truth.

The belief behind this book is that truth is the most powerful force on earth, what Gandhi called satyagraha, “truth-force” or “soul-force.” By his experiments in truth Gandhi turned theology on its head, saying “truth is God.” We all see a part of the truth and can seek it more deeply. Its other side is compassion, our response to suffering.

The story of JFK and the Unspeakable is drawn from the suffering and compassion of many witnesses who saw the truth and spoke it. In living out the truth, we are liberated from the Unspeakable.

9. Thomas Merton, The Sign of Jonas (New York: Harcourt, Brace & Company, 1953), p. 334.
10. As biblical scholars John L. McKenzie and Walter Wink have pointed out, the excessively literal translation “the son of the man” for Jesus’ Aramaic phrase was as meaningless in Greek as it is in English. The Aramaic idiom Jesus uses eighty-two times in the Gospels to identify himself, bar nasha, means humanity, personally and collectively. What he says about himself as “the human being,” he says also about humanity. His story is meant to be our story. See John L. McKenzie, The New Testament without Illusion (Chicago: Thomas More Press, 1980), pp. 114-24; James W. Douglass, The Nonviolent Coming of God (Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis Books, 1991), pp. 29-59; and Walter Wink, The Human Being: Jesus and the Enigma of the Son of the Man (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2003).
11. Mark 9:31; 10:32-34; Matthew 17:22-23; 20: 17-19; Luke 9:22; 9:44; 18:31-33.

Copyright © 2008, 2009, 2010, Jim Douglass
Book excerpts reproduced with the permission of Orbis Books. Orbis Books.

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