JFK & the Unspeakable: Why He Died & Why It Matters (3 page)

By overlooking the deep changes in Kennedy’s life and the forces behind his death, I contributed to a national climate of denial. Our collective denial of the obvious, in the setting up of Oswald and his transparent silencing by Ruby, made possible the Dallas cover-up. The success of the cover-up was the indispensable foundation for the subsequent murders of Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, and Robert Kennedy by the same forces at work in our government—and in ourselves. Hope for change in the world was targeted and killed four times over. The cover-up of all four murders, each leading into the next, was based, first of all, on denial—not the government’s but our own. The unspeakable is not far away.

Martin Luther King’s assassination awakened me. When King was murdered, I was a thirty-year-old professor of religion at the University of Hawaii. I had a seminar entitled “The Theology of Peace” with a dozen students. At our first class after Dr. King was killed, several of the students failed to show up on time. When they came in, they made an announcement to the class. They said that in response to the assassination of King, who had given his life for peace and justice, they had held an impromptu rally on campus. They had burned their draft cards, thereby becoming liable to years in prison. They said they were now forming the Hawaii Resistance. They asked if I would like to join their group. It was a friendly invitation, but it bore the implication: “Put up or shut up, Mr. Professor of Nonviolence.” A month later, we sat in front of a convoy of trucks taking the members of the Hawaii National Guard to Oahu’s Jungle Warfare Training Center, on their way to the jungles of Vietnam. I went to jail for two weeks—the beginning of the end of my academic career. Members of the Hawaii Resistance served from six months to two years in prison for their draft resistance or wound up going into exile in Sweden or Canada.

Thirty-one years later I learned much more about King’s murder. I attended the only trial ever held for it. The trial took place in Memphis, only a few blocks from the Lorraine Motel where King was killed. In a wrongful death lawsuit initiated by the King family, seventy witnesses testified over a six-week period. They described a sophisticated government plot that involved the FBI, the CIA, the Memphis Police, Mafia intermediaries, and an Army Special Forces sniper team. The twelve jurors, six black and six white, returned after two and one-half hours of deliberation with a verdict that King had been assassinated by a conspiracy that included agencies of his own government.
[8]

In the course of my journey into Martin Luther King’s martyrdom, my eyes were opened to parallel questions in the murders of John F. Kennedy, Malcolm X, and Robert F. Kennedy. I went to Dallas, Chicago, New York, and other sites to interview witnesses. I studied critical government documents in each of their cases. Eventually I came to see all four of them together as four versions of the same story. JFK, Malcolm, Martin, and RFK were four proponents of change who were murdered by shadowy intelligence agencies using intermediaries and scapegoats under the cover of “plausible deniability.” Beneath their assassinations lay the evil void of responsibility that Merton identified as the unspeakable.

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 JFK’s 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.

NOTES

[
1
]. Thomas Merton, “Chant to Be Used in Processions around a Site with Furnaces,” in
The Nonviolent Alternative,
edited by Gordon C. Zahn (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1980), p. 262.

[
2
]. Thomas Merton,
Peace
Merton, “Chant to Be Used in Processions around a Site with Furnaces,” in
The Nonviolent Alternative
, edited by Gordon C. Zahn (New
in the Post-Christian Era
(Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis Books, 2004), p. 119. Merton’s forbidden book was finally published by Orbis Books forty-two years after it was written. If we simply substitute “terrorist” for “communist” in Merton’s text,
Peace in the Post-Christian Era
is as relevant today as when it was written.

[
3
]. From Thomas Merton’s January 18, 1962, letter to W. H. Ferry, in
Letters from Tom: A Selection of Letters from Father Thomas Merton, Monk of Gethsemani, to W. H. Ferry, 1961-1968
, edited by W. H. Ferry (Scarsdale, N.Y.: Fort Hill Press, 1983), p. 15.

[
4
]. Thomas Merton,
Raids on the Unspeakable
(New York: New Directions, 1966), p. 5 (Merton’s emphasis).

[
5
]. Ibid., p. 4.

[
6
]. Peter Grose,
Gentleman Spy: The Life of Allen Dulles
(New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1994) p. 293.

[
7
]. William Blum,
Killing Hope: U.S. Military and CIA Interventions since World War II
(Monroe, Me.: Common Courage Press, 1995).

[
8
]. James W. Douglass, “The King Conspiracy Exposed in Memphis,” in
The Assassinations
, edited by James DiEugenio and Lisa Pease (Los Angeles: Feral House, 2003), pp. 492-509. Also available at
Probe
magazine Web site. The trial transcript for the wrongful death lawsuit of the Martin Luther King Jr. family versus Loyd Jowers “and other unknown co-conspirators,” held in Memphis, November 15-December 8, 1999, is online at www.thekingcenter.com.

[
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.

Chronology 1961-1963

January 17, 1961:
President Dwight D. Eisenhower delivers his Farewell Address, warning U.S. citizens of the rise in power of “the military-industrial complex,” the “conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry [that] is new in the American experience . . . We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes.”