There are
even some on the left, like Noam Chomsky
and Alexander Coburn, who argue that
this whole interest in the assassination
comes from a Kennedy revival, a Camelot yearning, the yearning for lost messiah. I'm giving quotes these are quotes right from Chomsky, Coburn and Chomsky and others. They challenged the notion that Kennedy was assassinated for intending to withdraw from Vietnam or undo the CIA or the cold war. These things could not have led to his downfall because they were not true. Kennedy was a cold-warrior, a counter-insurgent who wanted a military withdrawal from Vietnam only with victory.
I have
argued similarly, in my book Democracy
For the Few, that, in fact, indeed, Kennedy was a cold warrior and a counterinsurgent and that he should not be romanticized as a progressive. Chomsky Coburn and others claim that the change of administration that came with JFK's assassination had no large scale effect on policy not even on tactics. In other words if Kennedy had lived he likely would have fabricated a Tonkin gulf casus belli, he would have introduced ground troops in a massive land war as Lyndon Johnson did. He would have engaged in the merciless b-52 carpet bombings of Laos Cambodia and Vietnam as Richard Nixon did. He would have risked destroying his own electoral base proving himself a mass murderer as bad as Nixon.
Chomsky and Coburn
don't tell us how they know that. All we
know is the one surviving Kennedy, Robert
Kennedy in fact went a different way. He became an anti-war critic, he opposed the war, he broke with the Johnson administration and he said that his brother's administration, his administration had committed terrible mistakes. The evidence we do have in fact is that John Kennedy observed Cambodian neutrality and negotiated a ceasefire and coalition government in Laos, which the CIA refused to honor. They preferred to back a right-wing faction that continued the war.
Chomsky says much about troop withdrawal and all that but he says very little about troop escalation, other than to offer Roger Hillman’s speculation that Kennedy might well have introduced U.S. troops ground troops in south Vietnam. Maybe so, maybe not. In fact, the same Hillman noted in the new York times not long ago--and Chomsky doesn't note it--that in 1963 Kennedy was the only person in his administration who opposed the introduction of U.S. ground troops. He was the only thing preventing an escalation of the war. Forget the question of withdrawal not withdrawal he was a barrier in that sense.
Whether or not there are certain left analysts who think Kennedy was or wasn't a progressive or liberal and thinks that the CIA had no reason to kill him or other people had no reason to be dissatisfied him, the fact is do they see it that way? You know entrenched interests are notorious for not seeing the world the same way that left analysts do [audience laughs].
In 1963 people in right-wing circles, including elements in various intelligence organizations did not believe that Kennedy could be trusted with the nation's future. Some months ago on a San Francisco talk show I heard a guy come on uh it was on KGO, and he said—“I’ve never said this before, I never said it, it's the first time I’m saying it--but I worked for army intelligence and, uh, in 1963, I was in Japan, and ...the accepted word around then was that Kennedy would be killed because he was messing too much with the intelligence community. And when word came of his death, we were all I could hear were delighted comments like ‘We got the bastard!’”
Well, JFK's enemies saw something was what they saw was something different from what Chomsky and Coburn have seen: they fixed on Kennedy’s refusal to provide air coverage the Bay of Pigs, his refusal to go in with U.S. forces, his unwillingness to launch another invasion of Cuba, his no-invasion guarantee to Khrushchev on Cuba, his atmospheric test ban treaty with Moscow, his American University speech calling for a re-examination of our cold war attitudes toward the soviet union, his unwillingness to send ground forces in a massive form into Vietnam, his anti-trust suit against General Electric, his fight with U.S. steel over price increases, his challenge to the Federal Reserve Board, his warm reception at labor conventions, his call for racial equality and responsiveness to civil rights leaders (reluctant responsiveness), his talk of moving forward in a new frontier.
Erwin Knoll, the progressive, says that he admits he has no idea who killed Kennedy but this doesn't keep him from asserting that the Oliver Stone film was manipulative and that Stone provided false answers! How do you know that, Erwin, if you have no idea who killed Kennedy?
And the remarkable thing about Erwin Knoll and Noam Chomsky and Alexander Coburn is they don't know a damn thing about the criticisms and investigation that's been made. We've said this again and again in the rebuttals in the exchange in the nation: every almost every one of them said Alexander Coburn doesn't know anything about this case. He doesn't know anything about Lee Harvey Oswald, really doesn't know. Just some of the questions I brought up, they don't know any and they never deny it. They never say anything, they go on with their with their patronizing comments--well Chomsky patronization and condescension, Coburn with vitriol and venom.
They go on attacking those who supposedly are idealizing Kennedy. Irwin Knoll shows he's flexible, though: he says he allows that the Warren Commission did a hasty, slipshod job of investigation. I disagree: the commission did a brilliant job of investigation. It sat for 51 long sessions over a period of several months, much longer than most major investigations. It compiled 26 volumes of testimony and evidence. It had the investigative resources of the FBI and CIA at its command. Far from being hasty and slipshod, it painstakingly crafted theories that moved toward its foreordained conclusion: that Oswald was the assassin. It framed an argument and moved unfailingly to fulfill that argument. It failed to call witnesses who saw something different from what it wanted to hear, who saw, who not only heard but who saw, people on the grassy knoll shooting. It failed to call them, it ignored or reinterpreted what little conflicting testimony that did creep into its proceedings. All this took deliberate effort, it was carefully crafted, painstakingly. A hasty, slipshod investigation would show traces of randomness in its errors, some would go this way some would go that way, but the commission's distortions consistently move in the same direction in pursuit of a prefigured hypothesis.
The gullible U.S. public that Erwin Knoll talks about (Knoll condemns Oliver Stone for playing on the gullibility of the American people)--see he's not gullible, he's cool; he doesn't fall for this, he's so cool he didn't even go see the movie. You see the U.S. public has not bought the official explanation, 78 percent say they believe there was a conspiracy, and both Chomsky and Coburn, Coburn in the nation Chomsky in z magazine, and again in the letter in exchange with me, both of them dismissed that fact and point out the same identical analog: they point out that, in fact, over 70% of people also believe in miracles, so what does that prove? And what does that got to do with the question at hand? That people can have a stupid opinion about one thing doesn't mean they're stupid about everything; in fact Chomsky and Coburn are themselves evidence of that. In any case, the comparison is between two different things, they're comparing the public's gullibility about miracles with the public's unwillingness to be gullible about the official lineup of being fed and shoved in their faces for 30 years. That's not gullibility at all [applause].
Coburn and Noam Chomsky have told us that we must not reduce great developments in history to conspiracy, for then we lose sight of institution, class, and other systemic factors of American capitalism. I don't need them to tell me about systemic factors in American capitalism; I use a structural analysis in all my writings. But investigating the JFK conspiracy, we are not looking for an escape from something unpleasant and difficult--that's psychiatrist Noam Chomsky speaking. But we're hitting upon the nature of state power in what is supposed to be a democracy. Conspiracy is not something that's in contradistinction to structural analysis, it is part of it.
These guys will use conspiracy, they will use legitimacy, they will finance elections, they will use publicity campaigns, they will set up liberal-ish organizations, they will set up alternative trade union movements, they will use assassins and death squads...they will use every single conceivable thing there is. And this was one of the things they used when they had someone who was giving them trouble, when they had someone who was standing in their path, because he was a little too bright and too shiny.
When they had an agenda to save Southeast Asia from communism, they would kill one of their own and that is a tremendous revelation--it was a startling revelation to the American public, to make them realize what kind of a gangster government and national security state we really have in this country and what it does around the world.
