TEN
THE ASSASSINATION of President John F. Kennedy has been a never-ending puzzle for researchers and assassination “buffs.” They can tell you the name of the street where Lee Harvey Oswald lived while he worked in Minsk in the Soviet Union or the precise weight loss of the so-called Magic Bullet that the Warren Commission says passed through both President Kennedy and Texas governor John Connally before it mysteriously came to rest among the sheets on a stretcher in Parkland Hospital. This research has become such a mad game that few people ever think of basic facts and causes. Who ordered the murder of President Kennedy? Why was it done, and for whose benefit? Who manages and perpetuates this omnipresent cover-up, even today?
On the other side of the coin, those who have created the entrancing cover-story scenario have provided so many precious and diversionary “golden apples” that many researchers have taken the lure and stopped to examine every one of them. As an example: It is clear from the abundant evidence that Lee Harvey Oswald did not kill President Kennedy. Then why study Oswald and that whole matter to absurdity? Such actions are an utter waste of time and serve to obfuscate the truth.
The murder of President Kennedy required the simultaneous existence and application of three fundamental factors:
1. the decision and the power to do it;
2. the professional mercenaries or “mechanics” to carry it off precisely as a team effort; and
3. the application and maintenance of the cover-story scenario to assure continuing control of the government of the United States of America thereafter.
The first two requirements were relatively simple ones and were the work of professionals. Once the decision had coalesced within the power elite, the die was cast. The “mechanics” were from “Murder Inc.,” the international specialist group that is maintained by the government, just as ex-President Lyndon B. Johnson confirmed in his interview with Leo Janos that appeared in the July 1973 issue of the Atlantic Monthly magazine. The continuing cover story, on the other hand, was difficult to create and manipulate and is by far the most important factor. It is this third factor that reveals the nature of the top echelon involved and the power and skillful determination of the plotters who benefited by gaining control of the presidency.
After all, the members of this cabal were able to control a commission created by a President and headed by the chief justice of the United States. They obtained the written endorsement of two men who later became Presidents: Ford and Nixon. They have controlled the media and congressional activity, to the extent that the assassination has never been investigated adequately. And they have controlled the judicial system of the state of Texas where by law a trial for the murder of President Kennedy should have been, and must still be, convened. The book is never closed on murder.
Why, then, was Kennedy killed? What brought about the pressures that made murder of the President essential, no matter what it cost? This chapter will probe this subject within the scope of the parameters of that time and will attempt to link the assassination with the Vietnam War—a link that unquestionably exists.
On November 8, 1960, Sen. John F. Kennedy was elected President of the United States of America by a margin of 112,000 votes—a one-half-vote-per-precinct edge, the slimmest victory margin for the presidency since 1884.
Just over a thousand days later, President Kennedy was shot dead in the streets of Dallas by the closely coordinated rifle fire of a team of hired guns—or, to use the CIA terminology, “mechanics.” Pressures that had built during the election had become even greater during those intervening three years. Someone else wanted to take over control of the presidency before JFK could be reelected in 1964, and wanted it badly enough to kill and to put up with the eternal burden of maintaining the cover-story scenario—that one lone gunman, from a sixth-floor window of the Texas School Book Depository building, did it with three shots from an old, Italian-made rifle with an unreliable telescopic sight. To maintain that cover story has taken real power; and those responsible for the assassination have that power.
It is relatively easy to assassinate a President; there are ways to beat the defenses. “Providing absolute protection for anyone is an impossible task,” as the Secret Service men themselves say.1 After all, on November 22, 1963, when JFK died, the Secret Service did not own a single armored automobile for the protection of the President. The FBI owned four of them; but the Secret Service had never asked for one.
The actual killing of the President is relatively simple, but shielding the gunmen and those who hired them, arranging for their safe and undetected removal from the scene, creating a “patsy” (the word used by Oswald himself before he, too, was murdered) to take the blame, and releasing a cover-story scenario in those early hectic moments and keeping it intact for the next several generations takes a cabal with the power and longevity of a great machine. The deft way it has been orchestrated reveals the skill of the plotters and indicates that those responsible included top-level government officials, plus their power-elite masters. The fact of conspiracy is revealed by the discovery of such circumstances.
More important by far, this cover story was not designed for the sole purpose of concealing the identity of the killers and their supporting team. It was designed to make possible the total takeover of the government of the United States of America and to make it possible for this cabal to control a series of Presidents from Lyndon B. Johnson to the present day. Look at the record.
What created this murderous cabal? What were the enormous conflicts that brought about the murder of a young and extremely popular President? Kennedy had just established the first plank in the platform for his reelection with his promise to bring one thousand men home from Vietnam by Christmas of 1963 and to have all Americans out of Vietnam by the end of 1965. His trip to Texas with Johnson and Connally marked the beginning of his 1964 reelection campaign. The cabal could wait no longer. The die had been cast, and the shots had to be fired in Dallas that day.
There can be only one reason powerful enough to cause the almost spontaneous coalescence of such a cabal for that single purpose. That reason was the fear of Kennedy’s all-but-certain reelection. The alternative was to take control of the power of the presidency at all costs. In raising the age-old question “cui bono?”—who benefits?—we must examine the nature of the fatal pressures that enveloped the days of the Kennedy administration; and we must understand how they stood in the way of other plans by other peoples in their relentless drive for world power.
The American public has been led to believe that the mystery of the President’s assassination was supposed to have been resolved by the massive investigation of the crime by those prominent members of the commission established on November 29, 1963, by the new President, Lyndon Baines Johnson, one week after the death of JFK. On that troubled day, LBJ called his trusted friend and confidant, J. Edgar Hoover, longtime director of the FBI, to the White House for a heart-to-heart discussion. LBJ and Hoover had lived across the street from one another in Washington, D.C., for nineteen years. Hoover had been a frequent visitor to the Johnson ranch on the banks of the Pedernales River in Texas. They were the type of friends who got along by necessity. They needed each other; they understood each other; they had been through fire together. They knew where many bodies were buried along the corridors of power.
On this day, LBJ sorely needed the ear and advice of his old comrade. A record of this meeting is contained in a memorandum written and signed by Hoover on the day of the meeting. As Hoover reported, Johnson asked him if he “was familiar with the proposed group he was trying to get to study my [Hoover’s] report” on the JFK murder. Hoover had responded in the negative. Johnson said he hoped the “study” could get by “just with my [Hoover’s] file and my [Hoover’s] report.”
Then Johnson asked Hoover what he thought of the proposed members of the group. He listed the names: Allen Dulles, John McCloy, Gen. Lauris Norstad, Congressmen Hale Boggs and Gerald Ford, and Senators Richard Russell and John Sherman Cooper. “He [Johnson] would not want [Sen.] Jacob K. Javits” for reasons not explained, wrote Hoover.
President Johnson did not discuss with Hoover the name of the man he wanted to head the group, Chief Justice Earl Warren; and for some reason, General Norstad was able to remove himself from the final commission list.
Following this meeting, President Johnson, by Executive Order 11130, dated November 29, 1963, “created a commission to investigate the assassination on November 22, 1963, of John Fitzgerald Kennedy, the 35th President of the United States.”
The President directed this commission “to evaluate all facts and circumstances surrounding the assassination and the subsequent killing of the alleged assassin and to report its findings and conclusions to him.”2
Note that Johnson’s directive required this commission to do no more than “evaluate all facts” and “report its findings.” Neither of these is conclusive. The commission served to deter legal action in Texas and silenced the threat of a major congressional inquiry. From the very first day of the creation of the Warren Commission, it had before it the inference that the alleged assassin was the man Jack Ruby had killed in Dallas while the alleged killer was being moved from one jail to another. The commission may have begun its investigation with the FBI “study . . . and its files and report”; but by the time it published its own twenty-six-volume report, in September 1964, it had been carried away by the entrancing cover story designed by the power cabal . . . the same cover story that lives today.
The first thing that President Johnson ought to have done was to demand that a trial for the murder of JFK be held in Texas. The fact that a man named Lee Harvey Oswald was dead was no barrier to the legal requirement. Oswald did not kill JFK. He was the “patsy” of the cover-story scenario. It would have been utterly impossible for the Dallas police to explain what truly incriminating information they had that was of sufficient merit to warrant the arrest of that young man while he was seated in a distant theater. Certainly the members of the Warren Commission were competent enough to understand that. Instead, they were the victims of great pressure brought to bear by those orchestrating the cover-up.
Because it is apparent that enormous pressure at the highest level had been generated during those thousand days of the Kennedy era, from November 8, 1960, to November 22, 1963, it is important that the “Days of Camelot” be reviewed and analyzed.
The very word “Camelot” as a definition of the Kennedy “thousand days” needs review. During the 1962-63 period, the U.S. Army had a typical contract study named “Camelot” under way in a “think tank” group that was associated with the American University in Washington. Because of some of the Kennedy-period treatment of the army, or what the army perceived that treatment to be during the JFK-McNamara days, there were many army officials who were quite vocal about their dislike of both men and of their policies. Not surprisingly, then, this study by the members of that army-contract think tank was unfriendly to Kennedy. It used the word “Camelot” in a derogatory sense, and its title was purposely intended to be a bit of a sarcastic rebuke of the President. It certainly was not intended to praise his name and record. Interestingly, this derogatory term has now lost that meaning for most and has become a public symbol of Kennedy and the presumed style and grace of his presidency.
It all began with the romantic election. Kennedy was viewed as a virtual messiah. Such was the power of the Kennedy charisma that the wife of a famous member of the Kennedy entourage was heard to say during the intermission of a play at the old Warner Theater, shortly after the Kennedy inauguration, “Isn’t all this just marvelous? It is just like the break between B.C. and A.D.”3
By the closing days of Dwight Eisenhower’s second term as President, the giant multinational business machine that had engineered his travels from SHAPE (Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers, Europe) via the presidency of Columbia University to the presidency of the United States had learned that the ever-popular “Old Man” could be tough. Eisenhower left office on the wave of a substantial federal budget surplus and with a tip of his cap to the dangers of the military-industrial complex. As a result, these master manipulators had held billion-dollar items back from the budget of 1961-62, knowing full well that they could do better with a reliable old friend as President in 1961. They expected that new President to be Richard M. Nixon.
Nixon had always been the special friend of big business. As he likes to tell it, while he was still in the navy during World War II, he responded to a want ad in a Los Angeles newspaper that had been placed there by a moneyed group seeking a young, malleable candidate to run for Congress. With their financial help, he won that election. The remainder of his storied political life was lived under the shadow and tutelage of moneyed power centers.
What Nixon does not say is how he got into a position to take on that role in the first place. In 1941, he worked in the Office of Price Administration beside another up-and-coming young lawyer, Irving S. Shapiro. There they both learned the ways of serving big business and the value of an “anti-Communist” stance. (Shapiro, son of an expatriate Lithuanian, went on to become the Justice Department lawyer in a widely publicized trial against the eleven top leaders of the U.S. Communist Party.4 From there, he moved upward step by step in the DuPont Company, until he reached the position of chairman.) Nixon attacked Alger Hiss and Helen Gahagan Douglas viciously on his way to the House of Representatives, thence to the Senate, and the vice presidency.
Though his years of public life gave Nixon some popularity, they did not win him the presidency against John F. Kennedy in 1960. Thus, the many big-money projects deferred from the Eisenhower era were heaped upon the shoulders of President Kennedy. The greatest of these multi-billion-dollar packages, as described in previous chapters, was to be the war in Vietnam. It had been kept almost dormant during 1960, but it was ready to flare up on call.
Just before the inauguration, when President Eisenhower spoke privately to Kennedy, he informed him that his only concern in Southeast Asia would be the tiny kingdom of Laos. Military activity in Laos was already a public issue. In contrast, Time magazine had carried only six articles about Vietnam during 1960. Although the conflict in Vietnam had been moved along clandestinely since 1945, it was still just simmering when Kennedy came into office.
The CIA’s anti-Castro planning was expedited. Just after the election, the CIA had made its move to increase its secret Cuban project from a small, three hundred-man operation to a three thousand-man, “over-the-beach” assault. By the time of the inauguration of Kennedy, the momentum of that effort was (as CIA Director Allen Dulles and CIA Deputy Director for Plans Richard Bissell put it, as a threat to JFK) harder to contain than to just let the Cuban exiles loose in an attempt to free their country themselves. Kennedy was getting his baptism of CIA pressure.
There were even bigger budget matters bottled up in anticipation of a Nixon inauguration. For several years, the air force had wanted a new jet fighter aircraft. This dream plane was called the “Everest” fighter, after Gen. Frank Everest, its staunchest supporter. The navy needed one also. However, Eisenhower, determined to go out with a budget surplus, would not allow the awarding of any major contract that could be charged to his term. By the time of Kennedy’s inaugural, there was the promise of a $2-$4 billion air force budget item that could be used for the biggest military aircraft procurement award ever made. The entire aviation industry knew this, and pressures ran high in an attempt to win that prime contract.
Robert S. McNamara had been named to be Kennedy’s secretary of defense. A World War II air force statistician and Harvard Business School professor, he had more recently been the president of Ford Motor Company, where (as part of a group known at Harvard as the “whiz kids”) he had gone directly from his air force duties right after the war. McNamara had become president of the Ford Motor Company on November 9, 1960, the day after Kennedy’s election.
McNamara was not familiar with aircraft or with the complex system of procurement used by the military, but he had a pretty good idea of what the availability of $4 billion meant politically. He announced he would make the award after careful study.5
Before long, the contest for the jet fighter had been narrowed to the Boeing Aircraft Company and a joint proposal presented by General Dynamics and the Grumman Aircraft Company. The aircraft the military desired was called a “Tactical Fighter Experimental,” or TFX. The air force wanted an extremely unconventional aircraft, with wings that could be swept back in flight for higher speed.
Then McNamara sprang a surprise. He took some of the navy’s procurement money and added that to the total and said this would represent “more bang for the buck” because of what he called “commonality.” He believed that even though the air force and navy specifications differed widely, there ought to be enough “common” parts to lower the unit aircraft cost. By this time, the total program had been increased to 1,700 aircraft—235 of which would be for the navy—for a total initial procurement cost of $6.5 billion.
This was the largest single procurement contract ever put together in peacetime. Kennedy and his inner circle had their own ideas of what they were going to do with the disposition of that vast amount of money. They were a bold and politically savvy group. The election of November 1960 had been too close for comfort. They looked ahead to November 1964 and realized that $6.5 billion (or more) would pave a lot of streets on the road to reelection.
So Kennedy added Labor Secretary Arthur Goldberg, a wise old World War II OSS veteran, to the TFX team. He had not confided in Goldberg before the Bay of Pigs decision, a mistake he was not going to repeat. Goldberg had an idea. It was to use this $6.5 billion potential in every possible way, in selected “politically” marginal counties throughout the United States, to strengthen the Democratic party. Goldberg and McNamara began to work together. McNamara set up a suite of offices, one corridor ring in from his own in the Pentagon, with a staff that had nothing else to do than to plot the course of the TFX source selection program.
I had an office a few doors down the hall from this new suite, and I visited them frequently to join its chief, Ron Linton, and other Pentagon “whiz kids” for lunch. I noticed that the walls of this suite of offices were lined with maps of the United States showing all the states and counties. They were political maps. In short order, at Goldberg’s suggestion, one set of those maps was colored to show every county that Kennedy had carried in 1960 and every county that had gone to Nixon.
Then the staff of this office, working with Department of Labor statistics, made detailed studies of each of the major proposals for the TFX. A proposal is an enormous stack of paper. Quite frequently a single proposal for some military item would arrive at the Pentagon in a large delivery truck. This process of “mapping” the proposals included the prime contractors, that is, Boeing or General Dynamics/Grumman, and from them right on down to the smallest subcontractor. These contractors were plotted on county maps. Goldberg’s team marked the site of each facility, taking into account how many people it would employ, how much money would be spent there, how much new construction was involved, and every other political consideration.6
In a short time it was possible to get a visual plot of the impact of the award of a Boeing contract on one set of maps and of the General Dynamics/Grumman contract on another. Through confidential handling of copies of these charts, senators, congressmen, and local politicians throughout the Democratic organization were able to capitalize on the outcome of these proposals. Within no time, word that these charts were being developed in McNamara’s office reached the contractors themselves.
I happened to visit the office one day when word had been received from one of the prime contractors that it planned to open a new facility in a remote county in Utah. That county had been a Republican county in 1960. Needless to say, the process of wooing future Republican votes in this manner was repeated all over the country. Six and a half billion dollars is a lot of money, and it goes a long, long way in a campaign.
While the studies of the political impact of the award of this huge contract were being made, McNamara was forced to draw out the routine source selection process. He had two of the nation’s industrial giants, with their vast array of subcontractors and sub-subcontractors, locked in the biggest battle in corporate history. He managed to string out four full evaluation studies, each one of which nitpicked every item in each proposal, before he sent the whole package to the Source Selection Board, the final, ultimate arbiter, made up of senior officials from both services.
Later, during the 1963 senatorial hearings on the award of this contract, Gen. Curtis LeMay, chief of staff of the air force, told a Senate Investigations Subcommittee chaired by Sen. John L. McClellan that some 275,000 man-hours of work had been poured into this selection process.
The selection could have been made during Eisenhower’s presidency. It certainly could have been made in 1961. Everything had been ready for a quick decision, in favor of Boeing, right after the Kennedy inauguration. But, with the addition of the navy money and the Goldberg-McNamara political selection concept, the decision was pushed back month after month in every county across the nation while the politicians wrung every ounce they could out of this process—and to hell with the aircraft companies and the services. The Kennedy team had, as always, its eye on the election of 1964.
Finally, on November 23, 1962—more than two years after the election—the decision of the Source Selection Board was made. Most of the senior officials at that meeting came away believing that the decision had been made in favor of Boeing. Eugene Zuchert, the secretary of the air force, confided to a few friends that evening that the decision had been made in favor of Boeing.
Behind the scenes, however, another decision had been made, and it overruled the entire military system. Any major change of the military procurement system, especially as it pertains to a $6.5 billion contract, is bound to have the impact of someone attempting to rewrite the Holy Bible. It cannot be done without an intense, prolonged, and very heated argument.
McNamara knew that he and Kennedy were playing with fire. On the Friday afternoon that he received the choice of the Source Selection Board in favor of Boeing, McNamara already knew the results of the final political survey of the two proposals, that is, the Goldberg comparison. It indicated clearly that the General Dynamics/Grumman proposal would get a greater return for the Democrats at the ballot boxes.
Moreover, he had an additional major problem to resolve on his own. He had to be sure that the choice he was going to make would indeed fly. McNamara basically did not know one aircraft from another. He had a man on his staff, Alfred W. Blackburn, who was an experienced test pilot; Blackburn had been hired in 1959 by the Defense Department’s Bureau of Research and Engineering specifically for the TFX project. Blackburn, however, favored the Boeing proposal, so McNamara could not discuss his personal problem with him.
To play this card, McNamara called an old friend and asked for the name of a man who could vouch for the design of the General Dynamics model. This friend suggested Lockheed’s Kelly Johnson, head of the famous “Skunk Works,” a shop where many of the finest aircraft built by Lockheed had been designed. Johnson had designed the CIA’s U-2 spy plane, among others. McNamara had the General Dynamics specifications delivered to Johnson and asked him to verify their suitability. Johnson studied the aircraft designs carefully.
The fate of the $6.5 billion TFX project had been placed in the hands of a man who had devoted a lifetime to building superior aircraft, and to building them in direct competition with both Boeing and General Dynamics. Even at this stage of the game, fate played its part.
Years before, Roger Lewis, chairman of the board and president of General Dynamics, had worked at Lockheed. He and Kelly Johnson had been good friends, and still were in 1962. Lewis was an old aircraft professional who had been around the business since its golden years in the 1930s. Kelly looked over the General Dynamics design very carefully—no doubt thinking how much this meant to his old associate.
Johnson called McNamara and told him that the plan from General Dynamics was acceptable, and he assured McNamara that the aircraft would fly. Later, Roger Lewis was to say in a rather low key manner, “The company expects to produce an exceptional aircraft and that its qualifications to do so are unparalleled.”
With the Goldberg review in hand, and supported by the call from Kelly Johnson confirming the airworthiness of the design, McNamara scheduled a meeting for November 24, 1962, to announce the decision. He ignored the vote of the Source Selection Board and all its senior military members and announced his choice of the General Dynamics design. With that he authorized the start of the engineering-design work, wind-tunnel testing, construction of a model of the plane, and all the other actions essential to the development of a total weapons system.
On April 8, 1963, during a period of intense controversy, McNamara authorized the issuance of a contract from the air force procurement offices at Wright Patterson Air Force Base, which in turn authorized General Dynamics and Grumman to turn out twenty-two test models of the TFX.
Gen. Curtis LeMay later testified that no one from the original air force-navy evaluation teams on up to the final air force-navy board that recommended the Boeing design—and this included himself—had ever recommended the General Dynamics model. The members of the Source Selection Board, which had voted for Boeing, were stunned by the development. Al Blackburn, who had worked on the project since 1959, resigned. This is to say nothing about the shocked feelings at Boeing and its long list of subcontractors.
The decision sent tremors throughout the entire aeronautical industry and the business world. If Boeing, traditionally the number-one defense contractor, could be set aside, anyone could be excluded from any contract, for what seemed to be arbitrary political reasons. LeMay added, “I was surprised that the decision was made without consultation. I don’t consider this the normal procedure. I thought we had such a clear-cut and unanimous opinion all up and down the line that I was completely surprised at the decision.”7
In the face of the heated opposition, McNamara held his ground. He said he had chosen the General Dynamics model of the TFX because that company’s proposal showed a better understanding of the costs involved and offered a minimum divergence from a common design for air force and navy versions of the fighter. Of course, this only added fuel to the fire, because this was the very reason the services did not like the General Dynamics version. They all knew that a carrier-based aircraft had to be designed much differently from a land-based one.
In testimony before Congress, McNamara came back again and served notice on the generals and admirals, saying that the TFX decision process was a sample of a new policy. He said that the day had passed when the services would be allowed to develop their own weapons systems. He added that he picked General Dynamics over Boeing because Boeing had fudged and actually had planned to build different planes for the navy and the air force.
In the heat of battle, the Kennedy forces were pressing their point firmly, but cloaking it in equable terms. In contrast to some of the Pentagon civilian hierarchy of earlier days—for example, Charlie Wilson of General Motors, Tom Gates of Morgan Guaranty Trust, and Neil McElroy of Lever Brothers—the McNamara staff was pure Ivy league: Roswell Gilpatric, Cyrus Vance, Eugene Zuckert, and Paul Nitze. They were neither military specialists nor industry favorites. Because of Kennedy they had been given the power to make these decisions despite the desires of the old military-industry team in high places. It was precisely those men in high places who were upset. It was those men and their associates who began to believe, and proclaim, “Kennedy has got to go!”
Gilpatric, a New York banker who was McNamara’s deputy, was sent out to make an important speech to a bankers’ convention on April 9, 1963. Its title, “The Impact of the Changing Defense Program on the United States Economy,” was actually more pertinent than his audience expected it to be. He spoke about the TFX decision to bankers—and, of course, to the news media—at a time when this was a white-hot subject.
In an early paragraph, he revealed the scope of his subject. The new Kennedy policy was a blockbuster. Gilpatric said—and when he did, windows rattled in defense installations all over the world—“I have not the slightest doubt that our economy could adjust to a decline in defense spending.” He was touching on a sacrosanct subject: Can any nation afford, or exist, with peace?
Having dropped that bomb, he moved along to a rationale for the TFX decision. He noted, “The shifts of defense spending within the budget can create intense problems in individual communities.” If his listeners understood what he meant, they knew he was getting very close to the Goldberg procurement policy. “We do try to make a special effort to give work,” he said, “where it can be done effectively and efficiently, to depressed areas.”
But translate the reference to “depressed areas” to mean “areas that voted for Nixon and therefore are needed in the Democratic column,” and you’re closer to the truth.
Then Gilpatric made a daring comment: “The fundamental fact we all have to bear in mind is that the Department of Defense is neither able nor willing to depart from the requirements of national security in order to bolster the economy, either of the nation as a whole, or of any region or community.”
Despite this statement, that is precisely what the implementation of the Goldberg policy had just indrectly done. As though he believed no one would perceive the real message, Gilpatric added (perhaps for the edification of Boeing and its host of allies in and out of the military), “In the award and management of contracts we have undertaken a wide range of steps to improve the whole process. . . . The handling of the TFX contract illustrated several of the techniques being worked out for use on development contracts where particularly acute problems have arisen in the past.”
Then Gilpatric closed with: “Mr. McNamara and I, after an acceptable TFX proposal was offered, had to make a judgment between these two proposals . . . the air force and navy will get a better buy for the taxpayers’ dollars than would have been forthcoming if the contract had been let earlier. . . . ”
Gilpatric made these statements during a time of intense Senate hearings on the TFX. You will note how carefully both he and McNamara avoided any direct mention that they had arbitrarily gone along with the Goldberg formula augmented by the assurances of Kelly Johnson at Lockheed.
Indeed, Kelly Johnson’s role in this selection has not been mentioned elsewhere. I was a friend of Roger Lewis’s, president of General Dynamics, and was told this account of the “Skunk Works” role by Mr. Lewis himself.
As noted earlier, Kennedy’s thousand days were marked by repeated and violent eruptions among power-elite elements within the government and its multinational corporate environment, and this is one that stands out. It is chillingly coincidental that Kennedy’s murder in Dallas one year later occurred not too many miles from the Fort Worth factories where the TFX, and quite incidentally the Bell helicopters for Vietnam, were being built.
There was a subtle reasoning behind the TFX decision. Jack Kennedy, Bobby Kennedy, McNamara, Goldberg, and many others of the inner circle were not at all concerned about the final outcome of an aircraft-to-be called the TFX. Kennedy was a World War II veteran and had been a member of Congress for most of the years since that time. He had seen nearly $3 trillion poured into the military-industrial machine during those years, and he had seen those weapons systems come and go.
To the Kennedy circle, the TFX, the Skybolt, the Dyna-Soar, the atomic-powered aircraft, and all the rest that had fallen into their laps with the election were just what Kennedy, Goldberg, and McNamara took them to be: devices that could be used to direct money into political districts that needed it for their own benefit and to assure the election of a Kennedy for years to come. This is why Gilpatric made the speech he did to the assembled bankers, and this is why McNamara said that the day had passed when the services would be allowed to develop their own weapons systems.
The services and the great industries for whom the military establishment existed were staggered by these developments. They had never encountered such a serious challenge. The one-two combination of punches they had suffered had them on the ropes. On January 17, 1961, they had heard Dwight Eisenhower, in a farewell address to the nation, urge vigilance regarding the dangers to liberty implicit in a vast military establishment and caution against the power of the military-industrial complex.
Now they had a President who was not just talking about that danger, but was taking their dollars away to use them as he chose. This was the underlying significance of that TFX decision.
Let’s return to a closing statement by “Ros” Gilpatric in his bankers’ speech of April 9, 1963: “I have not the slightest sympathy for the view sometimes heard that this country couldn’t afford disarmament.” Now, why was that on his mind, and on the minds of the entire Kennedy inner circle, at that particular time? The answer is quite startling. The Kennedys were counting on at least eight years in office to move mountains. At the same time, their determined opposition was keeping an eye on the same clock. The 1964 election was rapidly approaching.
At the beginning of this book, reference was made to a novel by Leonard Lewin, Report From Iron Mountain on the Possibility and Desirability of Peace. It happens that the book concerned a reputed top-level study that was officially commissioned in August 1963 but in fact dated back to early 1961. In other words, the study process started, according to Lewin, right after the inauguration, with the arrival of John F. Kennedy and his new administration.
A purported member of the Iron Mountain Special Study Group believes that the group’s mission was delineated by McNamara, William Bundy, and Dean Rusk. The members of the Kennedy circle were concerned that no really serious work had been done by any government instrumentality in planning for peace. The report contains a most portentous line: “The idea of the Special Study . . . was worked out early in 1963. . . . What helped most to get it moving were the big changes in military spending that were being planned. . . . ”
The chronology of these developments, which are very cleverly woven into this novel by Lewin, is important. It began with the inauguration. The first big-money item was the TFX. That orchestrated solution was stretched from the inauguration to November 1962. The reaction of the military, of the aeronautical industry, and of Congress was predictable. Then, in April 1963, McNamara announced that things had changed. A few days later, Gilpatric made his important speech, and the Special Study Group was selected in August 1963. The Kennedys were on their way. They were going to ride on the TFX $6.5 billion into a second term, and then they were going to prepare America for peace. The Vietnam War and its hundreds of billions of dollars in expenditures were nowhere in their plans.
Could America really afford the Kennedys?
This Kennedy agenda began to surface with the TFX decision and was confirmed by the existence—known to very few—of the Special Study Group for “the possibility and desirability of peace.” Nothing, absolutely nothing, could have had a greater impact on the enormous military machine of this nation than the specter of peace. This Kennedy plan jeopardized not hundreds of millions, not even billions, but trillions of dollars. (The Cold War has cost no less than $6 trillion.) It shook the very foundation upon which our society has been built over the past two thousand years.
As the Report From Iron Mountain says:
War itself is the basic social system. It is the system which has governed most human societies of record, as it is today. . . . The capacity of a nation to make war expresses the greatest social power it can exercise; war-making, active or contemplated, is a matter of life and death on the greatest scale subject to social control. . . . War-readiness is the dominant force in our societies. . . . It accounts for approximately a tenth of the output of the world’s total economy.8
John F. Kennedy and his advisers were playing a dangerous game as they expertly moved along the calendar toward reelection in 1964. Kennedy had accepted the challenge. The duel, perhaps the greatest in the history of this country, had begun. To begin with, he needed a strong plank upon which to build his platform for reelection. He chose Vietnam, the cessation of all American military involvement there.
As his first step, Kennedy sent Gen. Maxwell Taylor and Secretary McNamara to Saigon in late September 1963. They returned to the White House and presented him with their voluminous report on October 2, 1963. In part that report said: “It should be possible to withdraw the bulk of U.S. personnel by that time. . . .”
“That time,” as stated clearly in their report, was the end of 1965. One thousand troops were already slated to come home in time for Christmas 1963.
Kennedy planned to get out of Vietnam and to turn the war over to a new leader in South Vietnam. This was the first order of business. To his adversaries, this confirmed the nature of the course he had chosen. They began to move, to move swiftly and with finality.
Ngo Dinh Diem, the first president of South Vietnam, was killed on November 1, 1963, and Kennedy was killed on November 22, 1963.
Former Presidents Gerald Ford and Richard Nixon have written that President Kennedy was killed by a lone assassin named Lee Harvey Oswald. The Warren Commission reported the same thing.
That was not the way it happened at all.