Why Was JFK Murdered?

A transcript of the Lew Rockwell Show episode 150 with James W. Douglass

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ANNOUNCER: This is the Lew Rockwell Show.

ROCKWELL: Well, how wonderful to have with us this morning Professor Jim Douglass. Jim taught religion at the University of Hawaii. He and his wife, Shelley, are the founders of the Catholic Worker House in Birmingham, Alabama.

But today we’re going to talk to him about his extremely important book, JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters.

Now, Jim, you were close to Thomas Merton, influenced by Thomas Merton, and part of this title comes from Merton. Would you explain that to us?

DOUGLASS: Yes, Lew. Thomas Merton wrote a book called Raids on the Unspeakable, a series of essays. He talked about the unspeakable as a kind of power and a kind of reality that went almost beyond the power of speech. It was suggested for him by the nuclear arms race, by the Vietnam War, and by the assassinations of John F. Kennedy and Malcolm and Martin and RFK. It was a kind of evil where we don’t want to go. That might be one way of coming up with what he meant by the unspeakable.

ROCKWELL: Well, Jim Douglass, thank goodness you have gone where maybe others have feared to go. And all the people that I’ve talk to – and I’ve read, myself, a good amount of Kennedy revisionism, but I was extremely impressed by all you’ve done. And the people I’ve talked to who are the real experts tell me this is the best book and the most important book ever written on the Kennedy assassination. So not only do you go over why, clearly, this was a conspiracy, it just wasn’t a typical lone nut who appears from time to time in American history and is of great use to the power elite, but you show us why he was killed, why this is so important, and why we should all be concerned about it, not simply a historical event we can forget about, but why it continues to have impact on the nature of American society, of the wars that the government fights, what’s happening in terms of the police state here at home, and why it affects every person here today listening to this show.

DOUGLASS: Yes, I really appreciate your emphasizing the whys, because all I hoped to do was to tell the story of the why. I, of course, included the plot, but the only reason I did that was to fill in the picture. My point is not, and I did not write an analysis of the Kennedy assassination. It was to tell the story of JFK, and of all of us, for that matter. It was representing everyone in this country and, because of the nature of the conflict, in some sense, everybody in the world. We’re talking about weapons that could destroy the world. And that story, and of his turning – I use that word advisedly. It comes from the Hebrew Scriptures – his turning away from that kind of destructive power, towards peace, that’s the “why” of his assassination.

ROCKWELL: You know, we hear, for example, about his speech where he said he was going to undo the CIA as an organization. Was that part of it, I mean, in terms of what the CIA did then, what it does today, what the Pentagon does, the Military-Industrial Complex?

DOUGLASS: He underwent a break with the CIA relatively early in his administration at the Bay of Pigs because he understood – he was not a stupid man. He was a very shrewd person. (Laughing) And he understood that he was being manipulated and set up at the Bay of Pigs so that he would have to call in the U.S. troops to win against Castro, and the CIA lied to him to set him up, they lied about the conditions of the uprisings that they told him were going to occur in Cuba and all this kind of thing. And the whole Bay of Pigs invasion had been organized during the Eisenhower administration. But when Kennedy realized afterwards the extent to which he had been lied and set up, he said, I want to splinter the CIA in a thousand pieces and scatter it to the wind. And he very deliberately did take steps to impair the CIA from doing that in the future. He fired the man in charge, Allen Dulles, who had been the cold warrior up to that point, and fired his main subordinates who had set him up in the Bay of Pigs. And then, of course, after his assassination, who does Lyndon Johnson, his successor, appoint for the so-called Warren Commission as the major influence within it, but Allen Dulles. He should have been considered, rightly, as the main suspect in the assassination rather than appointed to investigate it. That’s the fox investigating the murder in the hen house.

ROCKWELL: Can you look at the Kennedy assassination as a coup d’etat?

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