Who Really Killed Kennedy?: 50 Years Later: Stunning New Revelations About the JFK Assassination (49 page)

DiEugenio has argued that the absorption of the Gehlen organization into the CIA was symptomatic of a postwar world shaped by the Dulles brothers leading to a Cold War that became “about American versus Russian dominance in the resource rich Third World,” with the CIA standing for U.S. corporate interests in which morals played on part of the CIA’s operation in pursuit of these goals.
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The Guatemalan plots of 1954 and 1957, extensively discussed in previous chapters as having set a model both for the Bay of Pigs invasion and the JFK assassination, were but two of a series of CIA actions aimed at dominating resources in the Third World for US business interests. In 1953 President Eisenhower authorized Operation AJAX to overthrow
Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh in Iran after Mossadegh moved to nationalize Iranian oil interests. In a coup d’état staged by the CIA, Mossadegh was deposed, the oil interests were returned to the disposal of US and British petroleum corporations, and the Shah was returned to power.

Still, nothing better illustrates the chasm between the way the Dulles brothers saw the postwar world and JFK’s vision than Indonesia, where the threat of Communism drew CIA attention and intervention from 1957 through JFK’s thousand days in office and until the CIA was finally successful in engineering a
coup
in 1965. Despite a CIA attempt to assassinate Indonesia’s President Sukarno in 1957, JFK invited Sukarno to the White House on April 24, 1961, and again on September 12, 1961.
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Kennedy saw the potential of working with Sukarno to position him in a leadership position among the “non-aligned nations” of the Third World.

In 1965 the CIA engineered another
coup
and placed President Sukarno under house arrest. In the aftermath of the coup, the Indonesian army, under the control of CIA-backed General Suharto, engaged in a massacre in which tens of thousands of cadre and supporters of the Communist Party of Indonesia, known as the PKI, were murdered. Estimates are that as many as five hundred thousand Indonesians were killed in the massacre, political violence that took on a religious dimension in that Suharto and the vast majority of his supporters were Muslim and many of those slaughtered were Christian. The CIA assisted Suharto by handing over to the Indonesian army detailed death lists of PKI members targeted for killing.
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This CIA effort to exterminate Communists in Indonesia was successful. “Suharto’s attack on the Communists and the usurpation of the presidency resulted in a complete reversal of the US fortunes in the country,” wrote historian John Roosa in his 2006 book,
Pretext for Mass Murder: The September 30th Movement and Suharto’s
Coup d’état
in Indonesia
. “Almost overnight the Indonesian government went from being a fierce voice for Cold War neutrality and anti-imperialism to a quiet, compliant partner of the U.S. world order.”
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Roosa also pointed out how the 1965 Indonesian coup and massacre of Communists was a precondition to LBJ being able to ramp up the US military in Vietnam. “The ground troops that started to arrive in Vietnam in March 1965 would be superfluous if the Communists won a victory in a much larger, more strategic
country,” Roosa commented. “A PKI takeover in Indonesia would render the intervention in Vietnam futile. U.S. troops were busy fighting at the gate while the enemy was already inside, about to occupy the palace and raid the storehouses.”
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CIA estimates prepared before the Suharto
coup
gave doomsday predictions that Indonesia’s government under Sukarno was within two years of coming under PKI dominance.
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DiEugenio argued that one of JFK’s largest splits within the Eastern Establishment was that JFK was for Third World nationalism. In contrast, the predominant worldview pursued by the Dulles brothers involved globalism “or the One World free trade doctrine” that DiEugenio described as “the idea American companies can take advantage of ‘free trade’ in order to develop business connections overseas that allow them to exploit foreign workers at low prices, and then bring the profits back to corporate headquarters.”
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Turning back to Guatemala in the 1950s, Eisenhower’s concern stemmed from the possibility the Arbenz government might continue nationalizing land to the detriment of the United Fruit Company and its banana business in the United States. As noted in
chapter 5
, JFK’s father, Joseph P. Kennedy, the patriarch of the Kennedy clan, was never accepted by the largely Catholic and Jewish eastern mob. So too, Joseph P. Kennedy’s pacifism as US ambassador to Great Britain in the years prior to the start of World War II put him at odds with US financial interests supporting the Nazis as enemies of the Soviet Communists.

As his first term progressed, JFK was moving away from a confrontational model of how he wanted to wage the continuing Cold War. He learned in the Bay of Pigs not to trust the CIA and the military industrial complex. He learned in the Cuban Missile Crisis that he could reach out to Khrushchev in the Kremlin to resolve a crisis that could easily have escalated to a thermonuclear conflict. Kennedy refused to use the US military in both Laos and Vietnam, seemingly rejecting the Eisenhower-era notion of the “domino” theory that a victory for the Communists in any Third World country would inevitably spread Communism around the globe. Kennedy understood that no country could experience freedom unless the people of that country were willing to fight for themselves. He also understood that Communism in Laos or Vietnam would be different than Communism in China, as Communism in China was different than Communism in Russia. Even if all these nations were Communist,
nationalism in each country would still be the dominant characteristic.

JFK could deal with Sukarno as a Third World nationalist seeking to free itself from the shackles of European colonialism. JFK’s nemesis, Allen Dulles, could only see Communism in terms of black and white. Fundamentally, Dulles and those of his era—including Eisenhower and Nixon—were comfortable building the CIA around Nazis like Reinhard Gehlen. JFK, in sharp contrast, seriously questioned whether the United States needed the CIA at all. Where Eisenhower, Nixon, and Dulles saw covert action as a natural extension of foreign policy, JFK was distrustful—as distrustful of the CIA as he was of the military industrial complex in its totality. In foreign policy, LBJ made a natural Cold War warrior, anxious to exert American might and will into the Third World in a determination to roll back Communism wherever it popped up. When you have them by the private parts, their hearts and minds will follow, LJB liked to say. This quotation would have made JFK uncomfortable, both for its statement of force and its denial of the principle that no people can be free unless that people exerts a right to self-determination, an extension of the statehood politics JFK understood as an essential condition of freedom.

In recent years, strong documentary evidence is that George H. W. Bush was in the CIA decades before he became CIA director under the presidency of Gerald R. Ford in 1976. Strong documentary evidence has also come to light suggesting George H. W. Bush was in Dallas on November 22, 1963, despite his claims to the contrary.

On Wednesday, November 20, 1963, an advertisement under “Club Activities” was printed in the
Dallas Morning News
, stating that George Bush, president of Zapata Off-Shore Co., would be speaking for the American Association of Oilwell Drilling contractors on Thursday, November 21, 1963, at the Sheraton-Dallas Hotel. A photograph widely circulated on the Internet shows a man standing with his hands in his pocket that bears a striking resemblance to George H. W. Bush, on the street by the front doorway of the Texas School Book Depository in the immediate aftermath of the JFK shooting.
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An FBI memo written by J. Edgar Hoover on November 29, 1963,
advised that the FBI office in Miami, Florida, warned the Department of State on November 23, 1963, one day after the assassination, that “some misguided anti-Castro group might capitalize on the present situation and undertake an unauthorized raid against Cuba, believing that the assassination of President John F. Kennedy might herald a change in U.S. policy, which is not true.”
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In the last paragraph, Hoover noted that Mr. George Bush of the CIA furnished the background information contained in the report. Spokespersons for Bush suggested the reference might be to a different George Bush. A George William Bush was subsequently identified as a CIA employee. However, this George William Bush submitted a signed statement to the US District Court for the District of Columbia saying he had carefully reviewed the FBI memorandum written by the FBI Director, dated November 29, 1963, and he did not recognize the contents of the memorandum as information furnished to him orally or otherwise while he was at the CIA. Thus, he concluded, he was not the George Bush of the CIA referred to in the memo.
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When the memo surfaced, the
New York Times
questioned Stephen Hart, then a spokesman for then-Vice President Bush, and asked when George H. W. Bush first joined the CIA. Hart replied that Vice President Bush denied any involvement with the CIA before President Ford named him CIA Director in 1975. The newspaper also reported that Bill Divine, a CIA spokesman, declined to comment on the possibility that George H. W. Bush, or anyone else with that name, ever worked for the CIA. Devine told the
New York Times
, “We never confirm nor deny.”
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A second recently disclosed memo supports the same conclusion. FBI Special Agent Graham Kitchel wrote a memo to the FBI’s Houston bureau, dated November 22, 1963, the day of the assassination. The memo reads: “At 1:45 p.m. Mr. GEORGE H. W. BUSH, President of the Zapata Off-Shore Drilling Company, Houston, Texas, residence 5525 Briar, Houston, telephonically furnished this following information to writer by a long distance telephone call from Tyler, Texas.” Tyler is a small town about one hundred miles to the southeast of Dallas. The memo went on to say that “Bush stated that he wanted to be kept confidential but wanted to furnish hearsay that he recalled hearing in recent weeks, the day and source unknown.” Graham then relates how Bush suspected James Parrott, a student at the University of Texas, had been talking of assassinating JFK,
when JFK came to Houston. The lead turned out to be inconsequential. But in the last paragraph Graham confirmed that Bush was
going
to be at the Sheraton-Dallas Hotel in Dallas on the day of the assassination, returning to his residence in Houston on Saturday, November 23, 1963.
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Others, noting the discrepancy that the
Dallas Morning News
claimed Bush would be at the Sheraton-Dallas on Thursday night, November 21, 1963, while the Kitchel memo suggests Bush would be at the hotel on the night of the assassination, have claimed Bush made the call to Kitchel to establish an alibi. Russ Baker, author of the 2009 book,
Family of Secrets
, argued the real point of the call was “to establish for the record, if anyone asked, that Poppy Bush was not in Dallas when Kennedy was shot. By pointing to a seemingly harmless man who lived with his mother, Bush appeared to establish his own Pollyannaish ignorance of the larger plot.”
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Baker argued the truth was Bush had already stayed at the Sheraton in Dallas, on Thursday, as the
Dallas Morning News
printed. By telling the FBI in a phone call that he was
planning
to go there, he created a misleading paper trail suggesting that his stay in Dallas was many hours after the assassination, rather than the night before, since the phone call incoming to the FBI could have originated from anywhere.

Typically, George H. W. Bush has been vague about where he was when he first learned JFK had been shot, a moment virtually every American old enough to remember has fixed distinctly in their mind. When asked where he was when Kennedy was shot, George H. W. Bush has said vaguely that he was “somewhere in Texas.”
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There are over fifty-eight thousand names carved into black granite walls of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C. Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon both made the Vietnam War a centerpiece of their presidential administrations, continuing the conflict until the fall of Saigon on April 30, 1975. In retrospect, JFK was right. The Vietnam War was not a war the United States could win, if fought the way the military industrial complex wanted the war to be fought.

On August 2, 1990, some one hundred thousand Iraqi troops invaded Kuwait, starting what became known as the Gulf War. On September 11,
1991, President George H. W. Bush addressed a joint session of Congress, proclaiming the allied forces that came together represented a “new world order.” Here is the key passage of that speech:

We stand today at a unique and extraordinary moment. The crisis in the Persian Gulf, as grave as it is, also offers a rare opportunity to move toward an historic period of cooperation. Out of these troubled times, our fifth objective—a new world order—can emerge: a new era—freer from the threat of terror, stronger in the pursuit of justice, and more secure in the quest for peace. An era in which the nations of the world, East and West, North and South, can prosper and live in harmony. A hundred generations have searched for this elusive path to peace, while a thousand wars raged across the span of human endeavor.

Today that new world is struggling to be born, a world quite different from the one we’ve known. A world where the rule of law supplants the rule of the jungle. A world in which nations recognize the shared responsibility for freedom and justice. A world where the strong respect the rights of the weak. This is the vision that I shared with President Gorbachev in Helsinki. He and other leaders from Europe, the Gulf, and around the world understand that how we manage this crisis today could shape the future for generations to come.
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