JFK & the Unspeakable: Why He Died & Why It Matters (4 page)

Congo leader Patrice Lumumba is assassinated by the Belgian government with the complicity of the CIA in the Congo’s secessionist province of Katanga, three days before the presidential inauguration of John F. Kennedy, known for his support of African nationalism.

January 19, 1961:
During hi last day in the White House, President Eisenhower gives President-elect Kennedy a transitional briefing. When Kennedy raises the possibility of the United States supporting a coalition government in Laos that would include Communists, Eisenhower says it would be far better to intervene militarily with U.S. troops.

January 20, 1961
: President Kennedy delivers his Inaugural Address, balancing Cold War statements with the hope “that both sides begin anew the quest for peace, before the dark powers of destruction unleashed by science engulf all humanity in planned or accidental self-destruction.”

March 23, 1961:
Over the opposition of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the CIA, President Kennedy changes policy on Laos by ending U.S. support of anti-communist ruler General Phoumi Nosavan, whose government was installed by CIA-Pentagon forces under Eisenhower. At a news conference Kennedy says the United States “strongly and unreservedly” supports “the goal of a neutral and independent Laos” and wants to join in an international conference on Laos.

April 15-19, 1961:
A Cuban exile brigade, trained and commanded by the CIA, invades Cuba at the Bay of Pigs. As the Cuban army led by Premier Fidel Castro surrounds the invading force, President Kennedy refuses to send in U.S. combat forces. The exile brigade surrenders, and more than one thousand of its members are taken prisoner. President Kennedy realizes he has been drawn into a CIA trap designed to force him to escalate the battle by ordering a full-scale invasion of Cuba by U.S. troops. Kennedy says he wants “to splinter the CIA in a thousand pieces and scatter it to the winds.”

June 3-4, 1961:
At a summit meeting in Vienna, John Kennedy and Nikita Khrushchev agree to support a neutral and independent Laos—the only issue they can agree upon. Khrushchev’s apparent indifference to the deepening threat of nuclear war shocks Kennedy.

July 20, 1961
: At a National Security Council Meeting, the Joint Chiefs of Staff and CIA director Allen Dulles present a plan for a preemptive nuclear attack on the Soviet Union “in late 1963, preceded by a period of heightened tensions.” President Kennedy walks out of the meeting, saying to Secretary of State Dean Rusk, “And we call ourselves the human race.”

August 30, 1961
: The Soviet Union resumes atmospheric testing of thermonuclear weapons, exploding a 150-kiloton hydrogen bomb over Siberia.

September 5, 1961
: After the Soviet testing of two more hydrogen bombs, President Kennedy announces he has ordered the resumption of U.S. nuclear tests.

September 25, 1961
: President Kennedy delivers a speech on disarmament at the United Nations in which he states: “The weapons of war must be abolished before they abolish us . . . It is therefore our intention to challenge the Soviet Union, not to an arms race, but to a peace race—to advance together step by step, stage by stage, until general and complete disarmament has been achieved.”

September 29, 1961
: Nikita Khrushchev writes a first confidential letter to John Kennedy. He smuggles it to the president in a newspaper brought by a Soviet intelligence agent to Kennedy’s press secretary Pierre Salinger. In the letter Khrushchev compares their common concern for peace in the nuclear age “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.”

October 16, 1961
: Kennedy responds privately to Khrushchev, writing: “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.”

October 27-28, 1961
: After a summer of U.S.–Soviet tensions over Berlin culminating in Khrushchev’s August order to erect a wall between East and West Berlin, General Lucius Clay, President Kennedy’s personal representative in West Berlin, provokes a sixteen-hour confrontation between U.S. and Soviet tanks at the Berlin Wall. Kennedy sends an urgent, back-channel appeal to Khrushchev, who then initiates their mutual withdrawal of the tanks, prefiguring the resolution of the Cuban Missile Crisis one year later.

November 22, 1961
: While refusing the Joint Chiefs’ recommendation that U.S. combat troops be deployed to defeat an insurgency in Vietnam, President Kennedy orders the sending of military advisers and support units—the beginning of a steady military buildup in Vietnam during his presidency.

November 30, 1961
: President Kennedy authorizes “Operation Mongoose,” a covert-action program “to help Cuba overthrow the communist regime.” He appoints counterinsurgency specialist General Edward Lansdale as its Chief of Operations.

April 13, 1962
: President Kennedy, backed by overwhelming public support, forces the leaders of the steel industry to rescind a price increase that violates a Kennedy-brokered agreement to combat inflation. Kennedy’s anti-business statements and beginning cancellation of the steel companies’ defense contracts make him notorious among the power brokers of the military-industrial complex.

April 25, 1962
: As authorized by President Kennedy, the United States sets off the first of a series of twenty-four nuclear tests in the South Pacific.

May 8, 1962
: Following President Kennedy’s instructions, Defense Secretary Robert McNamara orders General Paul Harkins at a Saigon conference “to devise a plan for turning full responsibility [for the war in Vietnam] over to South Vietnam and reducing the size of our military command, and to submit this plan at the next conference.”

June 13, 1962
: With his Russian wife, Marina, and infant daughter, June, Lee Harvey Oswald returns to the United States with a loan from the State Department, after his highly publicized October 1959 defection to the Soviet Union and two and one-half years living as an expatriate in Minsk.

As the Oswalds settle in Fort Worth, Texas, Lee Oswald begins to be shepherded by intelligence asset George de Mohrenschildt, at the instigation of Dallas CIA agent J. Walton Moore.

July 23, 1962
: The United States joins thirteen other nations at Geneva in signing the “Declaration on the Neutrality of Laos.” CIA and Pentagon opponents regard Kennedy’s negotiation of the Laotian agreement as surrender to the Communists. They undermine it by supporting General Phoumi’s violations of the cease-fire.

In another conference on the war in Vietnam, at Camp Smith, Hawaii, Secretary McNamara discovers that his May 8 order to General Harkins has been ignored. He repeats President Kennedy’s order for a program to phase out U.S. military involvement in Vietnam.

October 16, 1962
: President Kennedy is informed that photographs from a U-2 reconnaissance flight show Soviet medium-range ballistic missiles in Cuba. Kennedy calls a top-secret meeting of his key advisers, who become the Executive Committee (ExComm) of the National Security Council. At their first meeting, they debate ways of destroying the Soviet missiles by preemptive attacks on Cuba, prompting Robert Kennedy to write a note to the president saying: “I now know how Tojo felt when he was planning Pearl Harbor.”

October 19, 1962
: As President Kennedy resolves to blockade further Soviet missile shipments rather than bomb and invade Cuba, he meets with his Joint Chiefs of Staff. They push for an immediate attack on the missile sites. General Curtis LeMay tells him, “This [blockade and political action] is almost as bad as the appeasement [of Hitler] at Munich.”

October 22, 1962
: President Kennedy delivers a televised speech to the nation, announcing the U.S. discovery of Soviet missile sites in Cuba. He declares “a strict quarantine on all offensive military equipment under shipment to Cuba” and calls for “the prompt dismantling and withdrawal of all offensive weapons in Cuba.”

October 27, 1962
: A Soviet surface-to-air missile shoots down a U-2 reconnaissance plane over Cuba, killing the Air Force pilot. The Joint Chiefs and ExComm urge a quick retaliatory attack. Kennedy sends a letter accepting Khrushchev’s proposal to withdraw the Soviet missiles in return for JFK’s pledge not to invade Cuba, while ignoring Khrushchev’s later demand that the United States remove its analogous missiles from Turkey beside the Soviet border. JFK sends Robert Kennedy to meet with Soviet ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin. RFK gives Dobrynin a secret promise that the missiles in Turkey will also be withdrawn as part of the agreement. He appeals for a quick response by Khrushchev, saying many generals are pushing for war and the president may lose control. Upon receipt of this message from Dobrynin, Khrushchev announces publicly he is taking the Soviet missiles out of Cuba in exchange for Kennedy’s no-invasion pledge.

The Joint Chiefs of Staff are outraged by Kennedy’s refusal to attack Cuba and his concessions to Khrushchev.

December 18, 1962
: After visiting Vietnam at President Kennedy’s request, Senator Mike Mansfield issues a report cautioning Kennedy against being drawn “inexorably into some variation of the unenviable position in Vietnam which was formerly occupied by the French.”

March 19, 1963
: At a Washington news conference, the CIA-sponsored Cuban exile group Alpha 66 announces its having raided a Soviet “fortress” and ship in Cuba, causing a dozen casualties. The secret purpose of the attack in Cuban waters, according to Alpha 66’s incognito CIA adviser, David Atlee Phillips, is “to publicly embarrass Kennedy and force him to move against Castro.”

March 31, 1963
: President Kennedy orders a crackdown on Cuban refugee gunboats being run by the CIA out of Miami. Robert Kennedy’s Justice Department confines the movement of anti-Castro commando leaders to the Miami area, while the Coast Guard seizes their boats and arrests the crews.

April 11, 1963
: Pope John XXIII issues his encyclical letter,
Pacem in Terris
(“Peace on Earth”). Norman Cousins presents an advance copy in Russian to Nikita Khrushchev. The papal encyclical’s principles of mutual trust and cooperation with an ideological opponent provide a foundation for the Kennedy–Khrushchev dialogue and Kennedy’s American University address in June.

President Kennedy writes secretly to Premier Khrushchev that he is “aware of the tensions unduly created by recent private attacks on your ships in Cuban waters; and we are taking action to halt those attacks which are in violation of our laws.”

Also in early April, James Donovan, U.S. negotiator, returns to Cuba to confer with Premier Fidel Castro for the further release of Bay of Pigs prisoners. The CIA attempts through an unwitting Donovan to foist a CIA-contaminated diving suit on Castro, as a gift by the Kennedy-appointed negotiator, in a failed effort to simultaneously assassinate Castro, scapegoat Kennedy, and sabotage a beginning Cuban–American dialogue.

April 18, 1963
: Dr. Jose Miro Cardona, head of the Cuban Revolutionary Council in Miami, subsidized by the CIA, resigns in protest against Kennedy’s shift in Cuban policy. Cardona concludes from Kennedy’s actions: “the struggle for Cuba is in the process of being liquidated by the [U.S.] Government.”

May 6, 1963:
In another conference on Vietnam chaired by Secretary McNamara at Camp Smith, Hawaii, the Pacific
Command finally presents President Kennedy’s long-sought plan for withdrawal from Vietnam. However, McNamara has to reject the military’s overextended time line. He orders that concrete plans be drawn up for withdrawing one thousand U.S. military personnel from South Vietnam by the end of 1963.

President Kennedy issues National Security Action Memorandum 239, ordering his principal national security advisers to pursue both a nuclear test ban treaty and a policy of general and complete disarmament.

May 8, 1963
: At a protest in Hue, South Vietnam, by Buddhists claiming religious repression by the Diem government, two explosions attributed to government security forces kill eight people, wounding fifteen others. The government accuses the Viet Cong of setting off the explosions. A later, independent investigation identifies the bomber as a U.S. military officer, using CIA-supplied plastic bombs. The Buddhist Crisis touched off by the Hue explosions threatens to topple Ngo Dinh Diem’s government, destroying the possibility of a Diem–Kennedy agreement for a U.S. military withdrawal from Vietnam.

June 10, 1963
: President Kennedy delivers his Commencement Address at American University in Washington proposing, in effect, an end to the Cold War. Rejecting the goal of “a Pax Americana enforced on the world by American weapons of war,” Kennedy asks Americans to reexamine their attitudes toward war, especially in relation to the people of the Soviet Union, who suffered incomparable losses in World War II. Now nuclear war would be far worse: “All we have built, all we have worked for, would be destroyed in the first 24 hours.” He announces his unilateral suspension of further nuclear tests in the atmosphere, so as to promote “our primary long-range interest,” “general and complete disarmament.”