This month you're going to wonder what the heck I'm up to, because this is supposed to be a religiously-themed blog and I'm going to appear to be talking politics. But bear with me, because this topic has everything to do with religion, morality, and truth, and very little to do with politics. Certainly it has nothing to do with political partisanship, other than as a warning that we -especially as Mormons- ought to avoid identifying ourselves as fiercely loyal to one political party over another.
The real theme of this post is last-days prophecy. If you stay with me on this trip you'll begin to question whether I am a liberal or a conservative, because I'll have good things and bad things to say about those who advocate for either side. I consider myself neither Republican nor Democrat, but I can hardly be accused of political apathy. By the time we get to the end of this piece, I hope you'll see why those labels are ultimately meaningless.
So let's get to it, shall we?
Something caught my attention on page 8 of Val Brinkerhoff's book, The Secret Chamber. During Jesus' visit to the Nephites, he warned of the great sins of the gentiles in the last days. I found it intriguing that each time Jesus listed the sins we would be guilty of, there were two in particular that were at the top of the list every time. Jesus said that in the last days we, the Gentiles,
will be lifted up in pride
and be filled with lyings (#1)
and deceits (#2)
and mischiefs
and all manner of hypocrisy
and murders
and priestcrafts
and whoredomes
and secret abominations
...and the fullness taken from us.
(3 Nephi 16:10)
Except we repent of
all lyings (#1)
and deceivings (#2)
and envyings
and strifes
and priestcrafts and whoredoms
...we will be cut off.
(3 Nephi 21:14-21)
We must repent of
all lyings (#1)
and deceivings (#2)
and whoredoms
and secret abominations
and idolotries
and murders
and priestcrafts
and envyings
and strifes
and all wickedness & abominations
...and be filled with fire and the Holy Ghost.
(3 Nephi 30:2)
I don't know if you've noticed, but lies and deceptions on a grand scale seem to suddenly be everywhere these days. At the moment it appears it's those crazies on the political Left who have lost their collective minds, because they seem all too willing to believe anything told to them by someone with a 'D' after his or her name.
But may I remind you conservatives that it was not that long ago that you bought into the lies and deceptions of the party you aligned with? It was only 13 years ago when
Republican Dick Cheney, Vice President at the time and one of the most palpably wicked men in government, was celebrated at BYU where he had been invited to give the commencement address. At the time, Cheney had been instrumental in deceiving nearly all of America into going to war against a people who had never harmed us and wished us no ill. That war was promoted by Cheney and others on "the right" as necessary to defend our freedoms. Yet ironically, while our soldiers were getting maimed and killed to ostensibly defend our freedoms over there, our politicians were busy diminishing our liberties here at home.
But I'm not here to rag on Republicans. Instead I want to focus praise on a particular conservative president -one by the name of John F. Kennedy.
Now, everyone knows JFK was a Democrat, so he must have been the furthest thing imaginable from a conservative, right? Well, by today's liberal standards, he sure wouldn't make it as a Democrat. But when he was running for congress in 1946 he ran as a conservative Democrat, which in those days was not at all an oxymoron. Plenty of Democrats were conservatives.
It wasn't long after the assassination took place in 1963 before rumors began to leak that the official story of Kennedy's assassination had lots of holes in it. Tellingly, it was liberals who were the ones investigating those contradictions. The first articles to question the official narrative were written by liberal reporters and published in Ramparts and The Guardian, two decidedly left-wing magazines.
Conservatives weren't interested in reading those rags. We didn't care who killed Kennedy, we were just glad he was dead.
I say "we" because although I was only 11 years old at the time, my parents had voted for Nixon, and everyone I knew felt that the loss of a Democrat in the White House could only be a good thing. You've probably heard that the entire nation mourned upon hearing of the death of JFK. But that isn't quite true. Not everyone mourned. I knew a good many adults in my world and at church who could only say "good riddance." The only grieving any of us witnessed over the death of John F. Kennedy was what we saw on TV. President Kennedy was not a good man, that much I knew.
As I got older I began to hear rumors that the FBI and CIA may have been involved in the assassination of JFK, but I dismissed those rumors because I knew America's intelligence community was known to be decidedly right-wing, and The Right was on the side of patriotism and devotion to country. They would never be involved in anything underhanded.
What I did not realize at the time is that when it comes to those in the upper reaches of government power, the term "right-wing" is not synonymous with "conservative." Right-wingers in the deep state are authoritarians, concerned with accumulating and keeping power, just as left-wingers in high office have little in common with rank-and-file liberal voters. In government parlance, The Right is authoritarian and The Left is totalitarian. If you're wondering what the difference is to the average American on the ground, well...there isn't any. It's not a question of which faction will serve the people, but which faction will get to rule over them. We are all being played for suckers by the Power Elite. Each side has one aim: to get and keep power, and in turn to prevent the other side from getting and keeping power.
It took over fifty years before I began to reassess my opinion of John F. Kennedy. It helped that the information in those files that were declassified in the early 90s resulted in numerous books that revealed the bigger picture. There were also congressional hearings in the 70s chaired by Idaho Democratic Senator Frank Church. His committee exposed some of the more egregious operations carried out by America's Intelligence branches and decried the lack of congressional oversight. At the time, I was not at all comfortable with Congress attacking my beloved Central Intelligence Agency. In those days I was convinced the CIA was fighting the good fight for truth, justice, and the American way. Exposing their deeds, even if sometimes those deeds were done in the dark, could only leave America exposed to its enemies.
There were also former CIA defectors who blew the whistle on some of the inner workings of the agency. I felt those guys were traitors, too, because as I have written elsewhere, when I was in my teens and early twenties I believed it was treasonous to question anything the U.S. government did. I no longer hold those beliefs, mostly because it is clear as glass that the U.S. government has not been answerable to the people since at least 1963. It was in that year that it became obvious that our government had been taken over by people no one ever elected and no one seems able to unseat.
That would be the mysterious "Deep State," a term coined by Peter Dale Scott, a liberal professor of political science at UC Berkeley, and a highly respected JFK Assassination researcher. Scott had previously coined the term "Deep Politics" to describe the hidden operations of the Permanent State, that cabal of operatives who are a staple of Washington politics and who have become the real power in Washington regardless of who is elected to office.
Let's Talk About The Deep State
According to Professor Scott, the "deep state" refers to the CIA, FBI and the fifteen other intelligence communities, as well as the Military-Industrial Complex that Eisenhower warned against. It consists also of long-term staff both in congress and the White House who seem to always keep their jobs no matter who gets voted in or out. In short, the Deep State is the term used to encompass the entire Permanent State, a conglomeration of entities that exist not to serve the country, but to perpetuate their own power. Those factions that make up the the Deep State are not always in lock-step with each other; there is serious competition between the various factions. But when they sense danger of exposure, they will circle the wagons against the interests of the people and rush to cover for one another.
Surprisingly, Peter Dale Scott, the foremost authority on the Deep State, does not believe that those in the Deep State currently trying to unseat Donald Trump are Leftists. Of course the Democrats in congress are, but not the power elite behind the scenes. Scott asserts that the Deep State continues to be under the control of the "right-wing" Neocons, and that Rumsfeld and Cheney were at the heart of the Deep State since 1975, when they secured top positions in the Ford administration. Professor Scott insists that the Neocons were never unseated. Rather, the evidence shows that the Deep State today is as intent as ever in starting a cold war with Russia, and that's a decidedly Neocon goal; they maintain the cold war position that Russia must be defeated militarily and economically, and have never wavered from that view. If that sounds odd to you, don't forget that there is nothing conservative about the Right-wing; they are all about keeping power, and Donald Trump has been a challenge to that power because he promised to drain the swamp. The Neocons are swamp creatures, and lest you forget, Mitt Romney is not a conservative, he's a Neocon who wants you to think he's a conservative. You can watch Dale Peter Scott explain it all in this interview: CIA vs Trump.
Whoever it is that's in charge, it's clear that the Deep State does not care about the will of the voters; it actually sees the voters as something of a nuisance. In fact, the politicians you elect to office often defer to the will of the Deep State, and not to the will of those who elected them, because the hidden government has the power to shred the careers of those who directly go up against it. The Deep State operates outside the democratic process. It traffics in lies and deceptions on a massive scale. And very few Americans seem to notice or care.
It Began As A Simple Collection Agency
What is commonly known as the "National Security State" began innocuously enough in 1947 when President Harry Truman created the Central Intelligence Agency. This agency had one purpose: to collect information on the Soviet Union. It had no power to act on its own. All it was supposed to do was collect information and pass that information on to congress and the president.
But only a year later, it was given much broader powers under an act known as NSC 10/2. With this new authorization to engage in covert activities, the CIA now had broad latitude to engage in otherwise illegal acts. As long as congress was unaware of what was going on and could deny authorizing these covert actions, it was pretty much anything goes. The president was supposed to be apprised of any and all covert plans on the part of the CIA, but the agency soon found ways to skirt that requirement.The Special Projects office of the CIA was soon involved in torture, sabotage, murder, and the overthrowing of foreign governments it deemed hostile to the interests of the United States. And surprise, surprise! Although the CIA was created by Truman ostensibly to fight communism, once the CIA was loosed from its tethers, it began to focus its efforts primarily on making millions of dollars for its directors and their friends on Wall Street. According to author Laurent Guyenot,
"One of the inherent problems with the CIA was its leadership. Among its seven founding directors, only one was not a banker or lawyer on Wall Street. The head position was ultimately awarded to Allen Dulles, who with his brother John Foster, soon to be Secretary of State under Eisenhower, had worked for one of the largest law firms on Wall Street, Sullivan & Cromwell, before entering politics. Hence the CIA was said to be directed from New York rather than Washington. In this context, national interest merged with the private interests of large industrial groups. Although created under the National Security Act in 1947, and thus dedicated to the struggle against the communist threat, the CIA would prioritize the interests of global financial stakeholders." (Laurent Guyenot, JFK-9/11: 50 Years of Deep State)In case you didn't catch that, the CIA was supposed to dedicate itself to the struggle against communism, but instead those running the agency focused their energies on making money -scads of money- for themselves and their friends. Their priority was no longer patriotic service to their country (if it ever was such) but a nifty way to accumulate money and power.
If this reminds you of the secret combinations warned about in the Book of Mormon, I don't think that's a coincidence. Moroni warned us in Ether 8:22 to watch for secret combinations -men who combine together in secret- who would virtually supplant the legitimate government, and employ murder and other dark arts in order "to get power and gain."
The CIA's first major coup was in clandestinely overthrowing Iran's Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh in 1953. For half a century British and American oil companies had controlled virtually all the oil coming out of Iran. If you've ever wondered how those rich, snooty Downton Abbey types came into their fabled "old money" and managed to live high on the hog without ever having to work, there's your answer: some of the richest families in England lived lavishly off their investments in Iranian oil.
Mossadegh decided this wasn't the best deal for the Iranian people, many of whom remained poor while the foreigners skimmed off all the riches from his country. He wanted to "break the chains of slavery and servitude" his people were suffering under what he called "colonial interests." He shut out Big Oil by nationalizing the oil fields so Iranians would be the ones benefiting from the sale of the oil on their lands. Suddenly that endless spigot of money pouring into the coffers of the upper crust Anglo-American establishment ran dry.
The CIA was instrumental in overthrowing Mossadegh and replacing him with their own puppet, Shah Mohammed Pahlavi. The CIA oversaw the training of the Shah's secret police, the SAVAK, which included methods of torture employed against the Iranian people. Mossadegh found himself imprisoned for life, and in no time at all everything was back to normal for British Petroleum.
Then there was the CIA's lucrative banana wars:
"In Central America, the CIA began harassing President Jacobo Arbenz of Guatemala, elected in 1951. By his plan to redistribute a portion of land to 100,000 poor farmers, Arbenz threatened the interests of the multinational United Fruit Company, the giant banana corporation that held more than 90% of the land. The Dulles brothers were shareholders of United Fruit, for whom they had written capital contracts in the '30s; John Foster even sat on its board of directors. Therefore the Dulles brothers orchestrated, financed, and armed the coup against Arbenz by a military junta responsible for more than 200,000 civilian deaths from 1954 to 1996, especially among the Mayan population. A CIA manual entitled A Study of Assassination, written in 1953 and declassified in 1997, contains detailed instructions on the various methods of murder by weapons, bombs, or simulated accidents." (Guyenot, ibid.)According to George Washington University's National Security Archive, there are still over 100,000 pages of documents on CIA activities in Guatemala that have not been released.
In 1961 the CIA wanted to murder the first elected president of the Republic of Congo, Patrice Lumumba, who had led Congo to independence from Belgium. The motive was control of the vast mineral resources in that country. Apparently these deep state operatives were heeding Chairman Mao's assertion about the Congo: "If we can take the Congo, we can hold the whole of Africa."
But CIA officials had the feeling that John F. Kennedy, the incoming new president, would not approve of their killing Lumumba, so they murdered Lumumba three days before Kennedy's inauguration. That covert action in the Congo was ranked as the largest in the agency's history at the time.
President Truman eventually regretted ever having anything to do with creating the Central Intelligence Agency:
"For some time I have been disturbed by the way the CIA has been diverted from its original assignment. It has become an operational and at times a policy-making arm of the government.... I never had any thought that when I set up the CIA that it would be injected into peacetime cloak and dagger operations."Once Kennedy became president he was constantly bumping heads not only with the CIA, but with his own military Joint Chiefs of Staff. But before we get into all that, lets take a step back. Because ten years before Kennedy was ever elected, the CIA managed to pull of its greatest accomplishment: near complete control of America's news media. Sorry I made you wade through all that exposition, because this is the real point of the entire essay, and the reason why today we are experiencing deception on a scale we've never seen before.
-former President Harry Truman, December 22nd, 1963, one month to the day after the JFK assassination, op-ed section of the Washington Post.
Listen To The Mockingbird
In the 1950s, Allen Dulles and Cord Meyer launched the most successful propaganda operation in the history of the world. Code named "Operation Mockingbird" it was initially a method by which the CIA provided payments to select journalists in return for a positive spin whenever something unfavorable to the CIA might show up in the news feed. As one CIA operative said to Phil Graham, "You could get a journalist cheaper than a good call girl, for a couple hundred dollars a month."
Soon the CIA was funneling vast amounts of real money to CBS, Newsweek, The New York Times, The Washington Post, and twenty other media outlets in exchange for those institutions writing pieces the CIA wanted published, and to get them to refrain from covering stories the CIA did not want covered. That's why, if you were around in the 50s, you never heard anything about the CIA's involvement in Iran and Guatemala. William Colby, Director of the CIA from 1973-1976 let slip when he boasted that "the CIA owns anyone of any significance in the major media."
Many years ago when I worked in radio, I had a close friend who had been hired as a reporter at CNN's Washington Bureau. He gave me the phone number to reach him, but I never seemed to get past the receptionist, who always wanted to know who I was and what I was calling about so she could take a message. Finally after many times trying to reach my friend, he finally got back to me and told me "next time just tell the receptionist you're with 'the Company' and she'll put you right through." So the next time I called, I told the receptionist I was with the Company and sure enough, I got right through. Didn't even have to give my name. ("The Company," for those who may not know, is code for the Central Intelligence Agency. Company calls always get priority service.)
"In the 1950s, outlays for global propaganda climbed to a full third of the CIA's covert operations budget. Some 3,000 salaried and contract CIA employees were eventually engaged in propaganda efforts. The cost of disinforming the world cost American taxpayers an estimated $265 million a year by 1978, a budget larger than the combined expenditures of Reuters, UPI and the AP news syndicates. (Alex Constantine, Mockingbird: Subversion of the Free Press by the CIA.)Let that sink in for a moment. Three thousand American journalists, members of an industry that prides itself on being independent and beholden to no one, were secretly working undercover for the CIA.
And nothing has changed. Just turn on any news outlet today and you'll see some stories spun to appear one way, while other important stories will not be covered at all. Reporters still cover what the Deep State wants covered and ignore what the Deep State wants ignored. The only difference is today most reporters don't need much prodding. We're looking at a new generation of newsreaders whose political values mostly mirror those of the Deep State they answer to. And they still get paid and they still get their daily talking points delivered to them directly.
Remember "gravitas"? That was actually funny. The gravitas talking point took place right after George Bush the Younger won the Republican nomination for president. "Gravitas" is a word few people know and almost no one uses in conversation. At the time, Bush was widely considered to be a lightweight, so he chose "Deep State Dick" Cheney to be his running mate. When that choice was reported on the evening news, every single reporter at all the separate news outlets reported it the same way on the same day, every one of them using an obscure word they had probably never heard before. Here's the clip:
And here's an example provided by one of my favorite liberal journalists, Glenn Greenwald, who put together this revealing montage showing how his fellow journalists constantly parrot the same lame talking points when attacking President Trump. (This was from March of last year. Turns out it was not the beginning of the end for Donald Trump after all.)
If you still need convincing, here's a formerly classified document issued by the CIA in 1967 to its media assets instructing them on how to counter criticism of the Warren Report. And if you would like a more complete account of Media/Deep State collusion than I have room for here, Click on The CIA and the Media: 50 Facts the World Needs to Know.Author Peter Janney pointed out that:
"Under Cord's tutelage, Mockingbird became a stunning success. Whenever the CIA wanted a story slanted in a particular way, it got it. This amounted to a subversion of democracy's most precious cornerstone, a free press...Using newspapers, magazines, radio and television, even Hollywood, the CIA's disinformation spin machine went to work shaping public opinion and perceptions, undermining the integrity and independence of an indispensable pillar of the democratic process." (Peter Janney,Why John F. Kennedy Died And Why It Matters
Mary's Mosaic: The CIA Conspiracy to Murder John F. Kennedy, Mary Pinchot Meyer, and Their Vision for World Peace.)
John F. Kennedy could never run for president and win today -at least not as a Democrat. He would have to take a page out of the playbook of that other Eastern liberal, Donald Trump, and run as a Republican. Yes, he would be hated and despised by the establishment just like Trump is, but at least he might be able to pull off some classical liberal accomplishments just as Trump has done. Here is what Greg Gutfeld had to say about Trump, and I can easily see it applying to JFK if he were alive today:
"Imagine a democratic president doing this in three years:
Ushering in prison reform.
Drawing down wars because he's stingy about blood and treasure.
Ushering in record employment for women and minorities.
Growing median household income 8.3 percent to a record $66,000.00.
Placing restrictions on China for suppressing Muslims.
"That sounds like the greatest Democratic president in history -he just happens to be a Republican. And he just happens to be Donald Trump, so they hate him."
The rank-and-file Democratic voters loved JFK, but the political establishment hated him. They felt they had been betrayed because he had suddenly turned from a hawkish cold-war warrior to a man who preferred to broker peace.
Writes author James Douglass,
"John F. Kennedy was no saint. Nor was he any apostle of nonviolence. However, as we are all called to do, he was turning. Teshuvah, "turning," the Rabbinic word for repentance, is the explanation for Kennedy's short-lived, contradictory journey toward peace." (James W. Douglass, JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died & Why it Matters.)By the time Kennedy came to office in January 1961, the CIA was preparing to overthrow Castro using a small army of anti-Castro Cubans who would storm the beach at a place called Bay of Pigs. Kennedy warned them not to go through with it, but they set it up anyway because the American aircraft carrier Essex was anchored only two miles out from shore with a group of destroyers. Once the invasion was underway, they thought, Kennedy would have to order the Essex to provide air cover for the invasion.
But Kennedy knew such an action would be interpreted as an act of war, and possibly trigger World War III. So he never gave the order to the Essex, and the Bay of Pigs invasion failed. Kennedy took the blame for the failure of the operation but he was furious with the CIA. "I want to splinter the CIA into a thousand pieces and scatter it to the winds," he told everyone within earshot.
Mistake.
The CIA had only been in existence for 16 years and already it was so powerful it could operate as a parallel government, independent of the president's wishes. Plus, they had the press on their side, so any move the president might make against the CIA would quickly be countered in the press. The CIA could get the media to smear Kennedy as being ineffective and unqualified. The CIA could label him an appeaser who is soft on communism and a puppet of Khrushchev. Never mind that Kennedy spoke out against communism many times, including at the Salt Lake Tabernacle in 1960 where he declared that "the enemy is the communist system itself- implacable, insatiable, unceasing in its drive for world domination." That declaration wouldn't matter once the CIA's media smear machine went into action.
The CIA was also known to kill its enemies without compunction, and by promising to break the agency into a thousand pieces, the president had just painted a target on himself.
Jack Kennedy was never going to win at the CIA chessboard. Besides, Kennedy was already having to deal with those maniacs at the Joint Chiefs of Staff who actually looked forward to a nuclear war with the Soviet Union. To them, getting Cuba to appear to attack the U.S. would be a dandy reason to retaliate, and that would draw the Russians into a nuclear showdown. Appalled by their obsession to start a nuclear war, Kennedy told one of his advisers, "those people are crazy!"
The Joint Chiefs of Staff proposed several ways to get the Cubans to draw first blood; that way the U.S. could retaliate on the pretense that Cuba attacked first. To that end, the generals drew up a proposal that went by the code name "Operation Northwoods" that suggested several ways the U.S. could make it look like Cuba had attacked us:
A "Remember the Maine" incident could be arranged in several forms: We could blow up a US ship in Guantanamo Bay and blame Cuba. We could blow up a drone vessel anywhere in the Cuban waters. We could arrange to cause such an incident in the vicinity of Havana or Santiago as a spectacular result of a Cuban attack from the air or sea, or both. The presence of Cuban planes or ships merely investigating the intent of the vessel could be fairly compelling evidence that the ship was taken under attack. The nearness to Havana or Santiago would add credibility especially to those people that might have heard the blast or have seen the fire. The US could follow with an air/sea rescue operation covered by US fighters to "evacuate" remaining members of the non-existent crew. Casualty lists in US newspapers would cause a helpful wave of national indignation.The most outrageous suggestion was this one:
It is possible to create an incident which will demonstrate convincingly that a Cuban aircraft has attacked and shot down a chartered civil airliner enroute from the United States to Jamaica, Guatemala, Panama or Venezuela. The destination would be chosen only to cause the flight plan route to cross Cuba. The passengers could be a group of college students off on a holiday or any grouping of persons with a common interest to support chartering a non-scheduled flight.
An aircraft at Eglin AFB would be painted and numbered as an exact duplicate for a civil registered aircraft belonging to a CIA proprietary organization in the Miami area. At a designated time the duplicate would be substituted for the actual civil aircraft and would be loaded with the selected passengers, all boarded under carefully prepared aliases. The actual registered aircraft would be converted to a drone.
Take off times of the drone aircraft and the actual aircraft will be scheduled to allow a rendezvous south of Florida. From the rendezvous point the passenger-carrying aircraft will descend to minimum altitude and go directly into an auxiliary field at Eglin AFB where arrangements will have been made to evacuate the passengers and return the aircraft to its original status. The drone aircraft meanwhile will continue to fly the filed flight plan. When over Cuba the drone will begin transmitting on the international distress frequency a "MAY DAY" message stating he is under attack by Cuban MIG aircraft. The transmission will be interrupted by the destruction of aircraft which will be triggered by radio signal. This will allow IACO radio stations in the Western Hemisphere to tell the US what has happened to the aircraft instead of the US trying to "sell" the incident.Someone had obviously put a lot of thought into this. Needless to say, Kennedy wisely rejected all of those proposals, but that just made his enemies more bitter. He thought they were nuts for suggesting such outlandish schemes and they thought he was crazy for not recognizing how brilliant those ideas were. Jack later complained to his brother, Bobby, "Those sons of bitches with all the fruit salad just sat there nodding, saying it would work."
Whatever scheme that could be used to justify getting America into war, General Curtis LeMay was itching for it. "The time is now" he frequently insisted, promising the president that we could wipe out most of Russia with our bombers before the Soviets could react. That would, of course, kill millions of innocents, but LeMay felt nuclear war with Russia was inevitable anyway, so why don't we strike first and have the advantage? After the meeting, Kennedy said to his brother Robert, "keep that guy away from me."
During the Cuban missile crisis, tensions reached their peak. Everyone in America knew we were just one false move away from nuclear war with Russia. The Russians were on edge and so were we. Any slight move or miscalculation and one country or both could start the launch. We were at a very stressful stalemate with Russia, and Kennedy's military advisers were practically begging to get the go-ahead.
That's when Kennedy decided to try and get a private message to Khrushchev, bypassing the spooks and the generals. Kennedy didn't know it, of course, but he was following the counsel of the Lord in D&C 98:34 where the Lord says that if any nation should proclaim war against His people, we should lift up a banner of peace to show that we do not desire war. Kennedy sent a private message to Khrushchev via his brother Robert through the Soviet Ambassador to Washington.
This was Robert Kennedy's message:
"If the situation continues much longer, the president is not sure the military will not overthrow him and seize power...The situation might get out of control, with irreversible consequences...I don't know how much longer we can hold out against our generals."
Khrushchev would comment to his foreign affairs minister Andri Gromyko, "We have to let Kennedy know that we want to help him...Yes, help. We now have a common cause, to save the world from those pushing us toward war."
Khrushchev and Kennedy worked out a way to continue communicating through back-channel correspondence that would not be seen by either side's military or security apparatus. As Kennedy later learned, Khrushchev had been facing the same pressures to go to war from his side as Kennedy had on his. "One of the ironic things about this entire situation," Kennedy commented to Norman Cousins, "is that Mr. Khrushchev and I occupy approximately the same political positions inside our governments. He would like to prevent a nuclear war but is under severe pressure from the hardline crowd, which interprets every move in that direction as appeasement. I've got similar problems."
Writes author James Douglass,
"Half a world apart, in radical ideological conflict, both Kennedy in his call for help and Khrushchev in his response had recognized their interdependence with each other and the world. They joined hands. After threatening to destroy the world, the two enemies turned to each other in desperation and grace. Instead of annihilation, they chose, in Khrushchev's words, 'a common cause, to save the world from those pushing us toward war.' " (James W. Douglass, JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died & Why it Matters.)
*****
Epilogue
"They had killed Jack because he and his ally-in-peace Nikita Khrushchev were steering the world away from the Cold War toward peace, thereby eliminating the military-industrial-intelligence complex's most treasured weapons- the fear of war, the fear of "Communist takeover," and the manipulative use of Fear itself. The Cold War was about to end, and with it the covert action arm of the Central Intelligence Agency. The Agency would have been all but neutered, it's funding and resources cut, its menacing grip on public opinion exposed and eliminated. It also meant the eventual curtailment of many of the defense industries, including the proliferation of nuclear arms. There would have been no war in Southeast Asia or Vietnam; that, too, was about to end. A rapprochement with Fidel Castro and Cuba was on the horizon. Both Jack and Fidel wanted 'a lasting peace.'
"Little attention had been paid to the parting words of a previous president. President Eisenhower had warned the American public in early 1961 of the evil that had spawned since World War II: 'In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, of the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.'
"Indeed, it had; so much so that in less than three years, anyone who tried to stop it -including the elected president of the United States- would be eliminated.
"Simply put, peace -particularly world peace- wasn't good for business."
-Peter Janney, Mary's Mosaic, pg 390.