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ON THE ORIGINS OF THE
ASSASSINATION OF JFK
Jim Fetzer
A report from the Senate
Foreign Relations Committee to the President warned of the major problem with
right-wing extremism running through the military. "Among the key targets of the extremists, the committee
said, was the Kennedy administration's domestic social program, which many
ultraconservatives accused of being communistic. The 'thesis of the nature of
the Communist threat', the report warned, 'often is developed by equating
social legislation with socialism, and the latter with Communism. . . . " . . . much of the
administration's domestic legislative program, including continuation of the
graduated income tax, expansion of social security (particularly medical care
under social security), Federal aid to education, etc., under this philosophy
would be characterized as steps toward Communism'. Thus, 'This view of the
Communist menace renders foreign aid, cultural exchanges, disarmament negotiations,
and other international programs as extremely wasteful if not actually
subversive'." He and Air Force General
Edward Lansdale viewed Operation Mongoose, set up to take out Castro, as
"a golden opportunity" for the military to show that it could succeed
where the CIA (at the Bay of Pigs) had failed. Lemnitzer "was raging at
the new and youthful Kennedy White House. He felt out of place and out of time
in a culture that seemed suddenly to have turned its back on military
traditions. Almost immediately he became, in the clinical sense, paranoid; he
began secretly expressing his worries to other senior officers . . . . "Lemnitzer had no
respect for the civilians he reported to. He believed they interfered with the
proper role of the military. The 'civilian' hierarchy was crippled not only by
inexperience', he would later say, 'but also by arrogance arising from failure
to recognize its own limitations. . . . The problem was simply that the
civilians would not accept military judgments.' In Lemnitzer's views, the
country would be far better off if the generals would take over. "For those military
officers who were sitting on the fence, the Kennedy administration's botched
Pay of Pigs invasion was the last straw. 'The Bay of Pigs fiasco broke the
dike', said one report at the time. 'President Kennedy was pilloried by the
superpatriots as a "no win" chief. . . . The Far Right became a fount
of proposals born of frustration and put forward in the name of anti-Communism.
. . . Active duty commanders played host to anti-Communist seminars on their
bases and attended or addressed Right-wing meetings elsewhere. "Although no one in
Congress could have known it at the time, Lemnitzer and the Joint Chiefs had
quietly slipped over the edge." Eisenhower's suggestion of
creating "a pretext for invading Cuba--a bombing, an attack, an act of
sabotage--carried out secretly against the United States BY the United States .
. . to justify the launching of a war", was a dangerous suggestion from a
desperate president, who wanted to retire from office with a flourish.
"Although no such war took place, the idea was not lost on General
Lemnitzer. But he and his colleagues were frustrated by Kennedy's failure to
authorize their plan and angry that Castro had not provided an excuse to
invade. "The final straw may
have come during a White House meeting on February 26, 1962. Concerned that
General Lansdale's various covert action plans under Operation Mongoose were
simply becoming more outrageous and going nowhere, Robert Kennedy told him to
simply drop all anti-Castro efforts. Instead, Lansdale was ordered to concentrate
for the next three months on gathering intelligence about Cuba. It was a
humiliating defeat for Lansdale, a man more accustomed to praise than to scorn. "As the Kennedy
brothers appeared to suddenly 'go soft' on Castro, Lemnitzer could see his
opportunity to invade Cuba quickly slipping away. The attempts to provoke the
Cuban public to revolt seemed dead and Castro, unfortunately, appeared to have
no inclination to launch any attacks against Americans or their property.
Lemnitzer and the other Chiefs knew there was only one option left that would
insure their war. They would have to trick the American public and world
opinion into hating Cuba so much that they would not only go along, but would
insist that he and his generals launch their war against Cuba. . . . They prepare a plan, called
OPERATION NORTHWOODS, which "called for a war in which many patriotic
Americans and innocent Cubans would die senseless deaths--all to satisfy the
egos of twisted generals back in Washington, safe in their taxpayer-financed
homes and limousines. One idea seriously considered involved the launch of John
Glenn, the first American to orbit the earth. On February 20, 1962, Glenn was
to lift off from Cape Canaveral, Florida, on his historic journey. The flight
was to carry the banner of America's virtues of truth, freedom, and democracy
into orbit high over the planet. "But Lemnitzer and his
Chiefs had a different idea. They proposed to Lansdale that, should the rocket
explode and kill Glenn, 'the objective is to provide irrevocable proof that . .
. the fault lies with the Communists et al Cuba [sic]'. This would be
accomplished, Lemnitzer continued, 'by manufacturing various pieces of evidence
which would prove electronic interference on the part of Cubans'. Thus, as NASA
prepared to send the first American into space, the Joint Chiefs of Staff were
preparing to use John Glenn's possible death as a pretext to launch a war. . .
. "Among the actions recommended was 'a series of well
coordinated incidents to take place in and around' the U.S. Navy base at
Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. This included dressing 'friendly' Cubans in Cuban
military uniforms and then have them 'start riots near the main gate of the
base. Others would pretend to be saboteurs inside the based. Ammunition would
be blown up, fires started, aircraft sabotaged, [and] mortars fired at the base
with damage to installations. "The suggested
operations became progressively more outrageous. Another called for an action similar
to the infamous incident in February 1898 when an explosion aboard the
battleship MAINE in Havana harbor killed 266 U.S. sailors. Although the exact
cause of the explosion remained undetermined, it sparked the Spanish-American
War with Cuba. Incited by the deadly blast, more than one million men
volunteered for duty. Lemnitzer and his generals came up with a similar plan.
'We could blow up a U.S. ship in Guantanamo Bay and blame
Cuba', they proposed; 'casualty lists in U.S. newspapers would cause a helpful
wave of national indignation.' "There seemed no limit
to their fanaticism: 'We could develop a Communist Cuban terror campaign in the
Miami area, in other Florida cities, and even in Washington', they wrote.
'The terror campaign could be pointed at Cuban refugees seeking haven in the
United States. . . . We could sink a boatload of Cubans en route to Florida
(real or simulated) . . . . We could foster attempts on lives of Cuban refugees
even to the extent of wounding in instances to be widely publicized. Bombings
were proposed, false arrests, highjackings. . . . "Among the most elaborate
schemes was to 'create an incident which will demonstrate convincingly that a
Cuban aircraft has attacked and shot down a chartered civil airliner en route
from the United States to Jamaica, Guatemala, Panama or Venezuela. The
destination would be chosen only to cause the flight plan to cross Cuba. The
passengers would 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." Lemnitzer and his covert
action officer, Brigadier General William H. Craig, reviewed their final plans
for OPERATION NORTHWOODS, which would have placed the responsibility for both
over and covert operations in the hands of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, before
heading for a "special meeting" in Secretary of Defense Robert
McNamara's office. 'An hour later he met with Kennedy's military
representative, General Maxwell Taylor. What happened during those meetings is
unknown. But three days later, President Kennedy told Lemnitzer that there was
virtually no possibility that the U.S. would ever use over military force in
Cuba.' "Undeterred, Lemnitzer
and the Chiefs persisted, virtually to the point of demanding that they be
given authority to invade and take over Cuba. . . . Lemnitzer was virtually
rabid in his hatred of communism in general and Castro in particular and Castro
in particular. . . . What Lemnitzer was suggesting was not freeing the Cuban people
but imprisoning them in a U.S. military-controlled police state. 'Forces would
assure rapid essential military control of Cuba', he wrote, 'Continued police
action would be required'. . . . "By then McNamara had
virtually no confidence in his military chief and was rejecting nearly every
proposal the general sent to him. The rejections became so routine, said one of
Lemnitzer's former staff officers, that the staffer told the general that the
situation was putting the military in an 'embarrassing rut'. . . . Within
months, Lemnitzer was denied a second term as JCS chairman and was transferred
to Europe as chief of NATO. Years later
President Gerald Ford appointed Lemnitzer, a darling of the Republican right,
to the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board. . . . "Even after Lemnitzer
lost his job, the Joint Chiefs kept planning 'pretext' operations at least into
1963. Among their proposals was a plan to deliberately create a war between
Cuba and any of a number of its Latin American neighbors. This would give the
United States military an excuse to come in on the side of Cuba's adversary and
get rid of Castro. . . . Among the nations they suggested that the United States
secretly attack were Jamaica and Trinidad-Tobago. Both were members of the
British Commonwealth. . . . "Lemnitzer was a
dangerous--perhaps even unbalanced--right-wing extremist in an extraordinarily
sensitive position during a critical period. But Operation Northwoods also had
the support of every single member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and even senior
Pentagon official Paul Nitze argued in favor of provoking a phony war with
Cuba. The fact that the most senior members of all the services and the Pentagon
could be so out of touch with reality and the meaning of democracy would be
hidden for four decades." * *
* Now, given this background,
it is not a stretch to imagine that the Chiefs came to the conclusion that the
only obstacle between them and a Cuban invasion was their Commander in Chief
himself. The President's enormous popularity meant, in their minds, that his
assassination by a pro-Cuban, communist sympathizer would not only remove a
weak and spineless leader from the nation's stage but almost certainly lead the
country to rise up and demand retaliation by a full-fledged invasion of Cuba
that would--finally and permanently--rid the world of Castro and demonstrate
the importance of the military power exercised by the Chiefs. This plan was far
more elegant than blowing up a plane-full of college students, because the only
casualties would be a pinko-wimp president and a suitably designated patsy, a
small price to pay for strengthening freedom and democracy. * *
* In 1968, during his
testimony under oath before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Robert
McNamara vigorously denied that the Gulf of Tonkin resolution had been
predicated upon a phony attack upon a U.S. warship with these words: "I must address the
suggestion that, in some way, the Government of the United States induced the
incident on August 4 with the intent of providing an excuse to take the
retaliatory action which we in fact took. . . . "I find it
inconceivable that anyone even remotely familiar with our society and system of
Government could suspect the existence of a conspiracy which would have
included almost, if not all, the entire chain of military command in the
Pacific, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the Joint Chiefs, the
Secretary of Defense and his chief assistants, the Secretary of State, and the
President of the United States." * *
* "Inconceivable",
indeed! As though McNamara had never heard of OPERATION Jim Fetzer, a professor of
philosophy at UMD, is the editor of ASSASSINATION SCIENCE (1998) and of MURDER
IN DEALEY PLAZA (2000) and a frequent guest on radio talk shows discussing the
death of John F. Kennedy. |