In the 1950s, the US conducted clandestine activities to topple Sukarno. These led to souring of US-Indonesia relationship. Three months after assuming office, President John F. Kennedy invited Sukarno to the White House. With the relationship repaired, Kennedy promised to visit Jakarta after the 1964 election. Sukarno began building a special villa for Kennedy's visit. In a 1964 interview, reporter Cindy Adams asked Sukarno about the villa. Sukarno paused, and then said "Tell me, why did they kill Kennedy?" Third world leaders understood who killed Kennedy, not in the sense of who pulled the trigger, but the ones behind the awful act. They just didn't understand why.
In his farewell address in 1961, President Dwight Eisenhower warned the nation that the "potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.". He specified 2 dangers ahead.
The first is scientific-technological research and development becomes very costly and will be increasingly sponsored by the federal government. He warned of the "... danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite.”
The second is " ... the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex."
However, Eisenhower saw the threat of the military complex as the lesser of two evils. He thought it imperative that development in military capabilities must continue because of a hostile world. ''We face a hostile ideology -- global in scope, atheistic in character, ruthless in purpose, and insidious in method. Unhappily the danger it poses promises to be of indefinite duration.''
Post-war US foreign policy has been based on cold-war ideological doctrines of American exceptionalism against communist internationalism by any means possible. This has developed into US imperialism against states which have strategic interest to the West but not towing American agenda. The pursuit of these policies have seen US intrusion in political affairs of many countries, including assassinating unfriendly heads of states, and engineering regime change.
Kennedy came to the White House in 1961 with an entirely different world view. Those were times of the rise of nationalism and non-alignment as anti-colonialism spread all over the world. Kennedy understood leaders of third world nations want to choose their own destinies and be aligned to no one. The era of Western colonialism was over. A different approach was required, one based on co-operation, friendship and trust. He felt the hard approach on countries that did not tow American line will have the exactly opposite effect of driving them into the arms of the USSR.
VIETNAM
In the Indochina war before US involvement, JFK did not see an ideological contest between communism and free world. He saw nationalism vs colonialism and a hopeless French attempt to cling on to a far flung colony. US had sided with the colonialist. Nixon had suggested to nuke North Vietnam, but rejected by Eisenhower. In the end, the French lost Dienbienphu and left Vietnam. US had military advisors to support the South Vietnamese military. Kennedy went with the flow of his military advisors. US increased non-combat boots on the ground from a few hundred to 16,000. Bombing missions under the direction of South Vietnamese Air Force began. Kennedy refused to bomb North Vietnam. By 1962 his Defense Secretary Robert Mcnamara had made it clear to US personnel in Vietnam that they will withdraw by 1965. A few weeks before the assassination, JFK issued National Security Action memorandum# 263 which basically confirmed the decision to withdraw US troops from Vietnam. When Prsident Lyndon B Johnson (LBJ) took over, hundreds of thousands of US troops poured in, bombing of North Vietnam began in 1964, the war escalated, and the rest is history.
CUBA
In Cuba, JFK twice refused the advise of his military advisors. In the Bay of Pigs incident when Cuban exiles in US were taking a beating from Castro's forces, Kennedy was advised to invade Cuba. He refused. In the Russian missiles crisis, he was advised to bomb the nuclear missile sites. Again he refused, but choose to negotiate with Nikita Kruschev. Diplomacy won.
INDONESIA
After WWII and Japanese troops withdrew, Indonesia unilaterally declared independence on 17 Aug 1945 with charismatic nationalist leader Sukarno its first President. The Dutch returned but met resistance from nationalist forces. The British arrived to assist the Dutch. International condemnation and pressure led the Dutch to leave Indonesia in 1949, except for West Irian.
Two strong nationalists, Sukarno and Nehru, sponsored the Bandung Conference in Jakarta in 1955. It was their attempt to forge a non-aligned grouping. The cold war ideology of the US was vehemently against neutralism. Countries are either with the US or out. US was also wary of Sukarno because he had taken over control of Dutch major commercial interests and the communist party PKI had grown in strength. The US began to devise Sukarno's downfall. In 1958 the CIA started a covert action and staged an uprising. A pilot was shot down. He was captured and identified as American Alan Pope. With evidence, Sukarno was able to debunk CIA propaganda and the uprising ended.
Barely 3 months after inauguration, Kennedy repaired relation with Indonesia. He realised US had tried to take Sukarno down. He invited Sukarno to White House, secured the release of Alan Pope, sent a team of US economists to help Indonesia and promised to hasten the return of West Irian to Indonesia. Eventually, the UN, with US pressure, approved the return of West Irian from the Dutch to Indonesia. Sukarno protected US business interests in Indonesia with equitable profit sharing arrangements.
CONGO
Congo was a Belgian colony. Pro-independence movement forced Belgium to leave. In 1960 Congo became independent under a constitutionally elected nationalist president, Patrice Lumumba. The Belgians had departed abruptly and left the country with no governmental infrastructure. Chaos erupted and violence was rampant. The British and Belgians covertly planned a mineral rich region of Katanga to secede, led by their chosen front man Moïse Tshombe. A secessionist war followed. Lumumba sought the assistance of UN and US. With UN bureaucracy moving at slow pace and Eisenhower avoiding him, Lumumba turned to USSR which agreed to send aid. That sealed the fate of Lumumba.
Kennedy's policy of pacifism met with much push back from a Congress that saw a communist take over of Congo. Congress was supportive of Katanga and Tshome, the frontman of Britain and Belguim. In other words, back to European imperialism. By then, under Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjold, UN had sent in peace keeping force to reunite Congo, remove the mercenaries and expel Tshombe. On 17 Sep 1961, Hammarskjold was killed in a plane crash in Rhodesia in what many suspected was a sabotage. Kennedy went to the UN to encourage continuity of Hammarskjold's tasks.
After Kennedy's death, Johnson admin supported Mobutu on the strength of his anti-communist stand. With Lumumba dead, the SIMBA revolution began. These were basically tribesmen who fought with spears and arrows. With no Kennedy to pressure UN, the peace keeping force withdrew. Johnson admin invited the Belgians back to bring stability, as well as mercenaries from Rhodesia, South Africa and Cuba. Mobutu became president where he stayed on for 30 years, completely bankrupted the country, while he became the richest man in Africa.
THE PATTERN
There were several other areas of conflict, such as in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Ghana, Latin America, etc, all with interesting stories. but they all line up a similar pattern displayed in the four countries above.
Kennedy didn't step into the office with the cold-war mentality of the establishment US politicians. He had empathy for nationalist leaders who want to plot their own destiny, like Sukarno, Nasser and Lumumba. JFK basically went against the interest of European imperialists. He was against right-wing coups and military intervention. His willingness to engage socialist leaders,and non-aligned leaders is basically a precursor of 'detente' which later on in 1969 became the core of President Nixon's foreign policy. Detente is the relaxation of strained relationship through communication. In the aftermath of the cold war, it was a foreign relation policy designed to ease geopolitical tensions and reduce the escalation towards a nuclear conflict.
The pattern clearly established is Kennedy's pacifist policies up-ended post-war hard-fisted anti-communist foreign relation policies of Eisenhower, only for his successor Johnson to flip everything and revert to status quo.
MOTIVATION, MEANS AND OPPORTUNITY
A pre-meditated crime is always committed by a perpetrator(s) with motivation and has the means and opportunity. The pattern shows motivation is most certainly the desire to bring US foreign policy from Kennedy's detente with USSR and apathy for third world nationalism and non-alignment back to cold war ideology of anti-communism and anti-neutralism. The means obviously is available to the agency that has the experience and resources. The opportunity is Kennedy's open top motorcade tour of Dallas, a Democrat stronghold that harboured a lot of enmity for the first Catholic president.
JFK assassination documents were declassified in 2017 by court order made in 1967. Trump with-held some of the documents, obviously in deference to his intel advisors. 13 Dec 2022 Biden released all documents, except for 3% the CIA held back. After 50 years when all persons involved are dead, why does the CIA still want to retain thousands of documents?
John Foster Dulles was Eisenhower's Secretary of State where he wielded enormous influence on foreign affairs for more than a decade. He was the grand master for US foreign relation with policies primed on a staunch anti-communist and anti-neutralism stand. Nationalist third world countries are not acceptable. During the cold war, countries need to be pro-West, or they get regime-changed. A brilliant man given to making famous quotes. Here's a couple that underlie his thinking:
"Our capacity to retaliate must be, and is, massive in order to deter all forms of aggression."
"The ability to get to the verge without getting into the war is the necessary art. If you try to run away from it, if you are scared to go to the brink, you are lost."Massive retaliation, aggression and brinkmanship. The hallmarks of John Foster Dulles..
Allen Foster Dulles was the longest serving director of CIA (1953-1961). If his brother John was the foreign relations King, Allen was the espionage King. His covert exploits not authorised by Congress included the failed Bay of Pigs invasion, the evil mind control programme MK-ULTRA, regime change in Iran (1953), Guatemala (1954), the use of drug money to fund operations, and many others. The book 'The Devil’s Chessboard' by author David Talbot covered all the sordid deeds of Allen Dulles, depicting him as a very dark character who lived a life of assassinations and who would have no qualms killing a fellow American. Allen was dismissed from office by JFK following the failed Bay of Pigs invasion.
J Edgar Hoover was the Director of FBI (1924-1972). Hoover was gay, and with him compromised in some homsexual act, there was no counter-insurgency investigation. The immediate investigation of JFK assassination was basically left in the hands of Dallas police dept controlled by the Democrats.
Lyndon Byrd Johnson, JFK's vice president, was never called to account for his Freudian slip when he told his mistress Madeleine Brown several hours after the assassination "We've taken care of the son-of-a-bitch''.
George Walker Bush, the future 43rd president and future CIA director (1976-1977) was then a CIA lead agent. He was caught on camera in front of the hospital where Kennedy' was rushed to. He denied being in Dallas but CIA documents placed him in the city on that fateful day.
DONALD TRUMP
Just like JFK, Trump assumed office with policies that upset the status quo. Compared to Kennedy, Trump's situation was of a much higher severity in terms of a wide rage of policies, and the collusion of almost all government agencies. Whilst Kennedy faced push back on foreign policies, Trump faced foreign, economic, and wide ranging domestic policies in health, immigration, law and order etc. Kennedy had CIA undermining him in stealth, Trump had open revolt from CIA, FBI, Foreign services, Intelligence, DOJ etc. Kennedy set out to up-end cold war policies which at times were anti-European imperialism, and had all his work reversed by Johnson. Trump set out to clean the swamp, make peace, push America First foreign policy independent of European interests, but had all his efforts reversed by his successor Biden.
THE UGLY AMERICAN
This is a political novel by William Lederer and Eugene Burdick published in 1958. Set in South East Asia with the back ground of the geopolitics of the Cold War, it shows the arrogance and lack of empathy to local culture and language by the US diplomatic corps. US bungled their missions because the executives had no idea what was going on. On the other hand, their antagonists, the communist Eastern bloc, had success in many emerging countries. This book was wildly popular at the time, and probably played a role in Kennedy setting up the US Peace Corps, a programme that trains and deploys volunteers to provide international development assistance.
Both Kennedy and Trump faced a foe distinctly described by Eisenhower in 1961, a foe that is "a hostile ideology -- global in scope, atheistic in character, ruthless in purpose, and insidious in method"..
Journalist Jon Schwarz describes the dark world we live in thus :
"Yes, there is an amorphous group of unelected corporate lawyers, bankers, and intelligence and military officials who form an American “deep state,” setting real limits on the rare politicians who ever try to get out of line. They do collaborate with and nurture their deep state counterparts in other countries, to whom they feel far more loyalty than their fellow citizens. The minions of the deep state hate and fear even the mildest moves towards democracy, and fight against it by any means available to them. They’re not all-powerful and don’t get exactly what they want, but on the issues that matter most they almost always win in the end. And while all this is mostly right there in the open, discernible by anyone who’s curious and has a library card, if you don’t go looking you will never hear a single word about it."
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