On Cuba, JFK Was Different from Trump
When President Kennedy approved the CIA’s plan to invade Cuba at the Bay of Pigs, his mindset was pretty much like that of President Trump and the U.S. national-security establishment today. Kennedy, like Trump, the Pentagon, the CIA, and the NSA today, was convinced that a communist regime 90 miles away from American shores constituted a grave threat to U.S. “national security,” the two most important words in the American political lexicon.
Therefore, Kennedy and the U.S. national-security establishment back then were on the same page as Trump and the national-security establishment are today: they felt that regime change was necessary to protect U.S. “national security,” whereby the communist regime in Cuba would be ousted from power and replaced with another pro-U.S. dictatorial stooge who would obey the orders of the U.S. Empire, such as former Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista or Venezuelan communist Delcy Rodriguez today.
But a big difference between Kennedy and Trump is that Kennedy was able to achieve a “breakthrough” by which he was able to see the Cold War and the anti-communist crusade, including the anti-Cuban animus, for the deadly and corrupt racket they were — a racket that not only kept the national-security establishment in existence but also ensured its ever-growing flow of taxpayer-funded largess.
Kennedy’s war against the national-security establishment began with the CIA’s disastrous failed invasion at the Bay of Pigs. Knowing that the CIA had lied to him and tried to manipulate him into coming to the invaders’ aid, including, if necessary, a full-scale invasion of Cuba, Kennedy said he wanted “to splinter the CIA into a thousand pieces and scatter it to the winds.”
After that disaster, the Pentagon continued to pressure Kennedy into invading Cuba and forcibly effecting a regime change. That pressure included a top-secret plan — one that the Pentagon kept secret for some 30 years, until the JFK Records Act forced the Pentagon to disclose it — called Operation Northwoods. The plan included terrorist attacks on American soil that would kill innocent people. The attacks would be made to appear as though Cuba had committed them, thereby giving JFK an excuse for ordering a regime-change invasion of Cuba.
To Kennedy’s everlasting credit, he rejected Operation Northwoods, much to the rage of the Pentagon and the CIA, which continued believing that Cuba posed a grave threat to U.S. “national security,” notwithstanding the fact that Cuba never attacked the United States or even threatened to do so.
During the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Pentagon was pressuring Kennedy to bomb and invade Cuba, even though it was a virtual certainty that that course of action would have meant all-out life-destroying nuclear war. This wasn’t too surprising given that the Pentagon had previously been pressuring Kennedy into launching a first-strike surprise nuclear attack on the Soviet Union, arguing that while America would lose tens of millions of people, every Soviet citizen would be killed. The result, the Pentagon said, would be that “we” would have won the war because we would still have had some Americans surviving it. Kennedy’s brother Robert challenged the plan by asking how such an attack would be different from the Japanese attack at Pearl Harbor. President Kennedy walked away from that proposal in disgust, stating “And we call ourselves the human race.”
Kennedy settled the Cuban Missile Crisis by vowing to not invade Cuba, which, needless to say, enraged the national-security establishment, given that it would leave the communist dagger pointed at America’s neck permanently in existence. The Joint Chiefs of Staff considered the settlement to be the biggest defeat in U.S. history and compared JFK’s actions during the crisis to Neville Chamberlain’s appeasement of Hitler at Munich.
After his “breakthrough” during the Cuban Missile Crisis, Kennedy was determined to move America in a totally different direction — one that entailed peaceful, friendly, and normal relations with the Soviet Union, China, Cuba, and the rest of the communist world. That, of course, would mean a lifting of the embargo on Cuba, the restoration of freedom of travel and freedom of trade to the American people, and the normalization of relations between the two countries.
Kennedy’s vision was, needless to say, anathema to the Pentagon, the CIA, and the NSA. It would have meant the end of the anti-communist crusade, which continues to drive the U.S. national-security establishment today, except for Venezuela, where the U.S. is now partnering with the unelected, communist-socialist, narco-terrorist regime that governs that country.
Most important, the national-security establishment realized that if Kennedy’s vision were to prevail, there would be no more justification for maintaining America as a national-security state. Without its official Cold War enemies, rivals, opponents, and competitors, Americans would inevitably begin thinking about restoring America’s founding governmental system of a limited-government republic. That would mean, of course, no more U.S. state-sponsored assassinations, coups, torture, indefinite detention, invasions, wars of aggression, and other dark-side totalitarian-like powers that accompanied America’s conversion to a national-security state.
Thus, the war between Kennedy and the U.S. national-security establishment was over a conflict of visions. Would America move in the direction of peace and harmony with the people of the world, or would America continue to be what Martin Luther King, Jr., would call the greatest purveyor of violence in the world.
The answer came on November 22, 1963, when President Kennedy lost his war against the national-security establishment. Ironically, at the moment he was assassinated, he had a secret emissary having lunch with communist leader Fidel Castro with the aim of normalizing relations between the two countries.
The U.S. national-security establishment snuffed out Kennedy’s life with the same ease that it has recently snuffed out the lives of those defenseless people in boats on the high seas in the Caribbean. Moreover, the lies they employed to cover up their murder of John Kennedy were as flagrant as those designed to justify the murders of American citizens Renée Nicole Good and Alex Pretti. As everyone can easily see, we are still living with the consequences of November 22, 1963.
See FFF’s book JFK’s War Against the National Security State: Why Kennedy Was Assassinated by Douglas Horne. Also, see JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters by James W. Douglass, as well as his excellent new book Martyrs to the Unspeakable: JFK, Malcolm, Martin, and RFK. Also, see The Kennedy Autopsy by Jacob Hornberger.