Instead of using the assassination of President Kennedy as a means of belittling me, you should learn more.
Letter to Vincent J. Salandria
April 5, 1995
by E. Martin Schotz
EXCERPT...
Look at Kennedy’s American University speech in which he tried to indicate to the American people the direction our nation needed to go in securing world peace.[31] Interestingly he could not bring himself to tell the American people about the dangerous conflict that had erupted in Washington over the direction he was taking, even though at the time his brother, the Attorney General, was sending messages to Khrushchev to cool it, because they were worried about the possibility of assassination.[32]
This American University speech is so important. As I go back and reread it, I realize how advanced Kennedy’s position was at that time, much more advanced than anything we have coming from our government today. In that speech there is an understanding very close to the position George Kennan articulates in the later essays in The Nuclear Delusion.[33]
What I am referring to is an understanding that there was something of value to the powers that be in the United States, as well as to the people of the United States, in the existence of the Soviet Union: namely that there was an organized force on “the other side” that was also interested in disarmament. When I go back and read Mikhail Gorbachev’s Perestroika[34] today I think of where Kennedy and Khrushchev were in 1963 and the opportunity that was beginning to emerge and that was destroyed.
I know that no one seems to be interested in the McCloy-Zorin agreement.[35] Hardly anyone even knows about it any longer. And I really don’t understand why. Maybe they were just words as far as Kennedy was concerned in 1961 when it was signed. But as events developed, particularly after the Cuban Missile Crisis, I think the McCloy-Zorin agreement began to take on real significance. Because if you go back and look at that American University speech, I think Kennedy is talking about the McCloy-Zorin agreement without mentioning it by name. Khrushchev and Kennedy were talking about worldwide disarmament, conventional as well as nuclear. That is really radical. That is what Gorbachev was talking about, that you can’t settle problems with military means any longer. And the “powers that be” in this country didn’t want Gorbachev. And even the liberals were ecstatic when the Soviet Union collapsed and Yeltsin replaced Gorbachev. You read the American University speech by Kennedy and George Kennan’s later writing and you read Castro, Gorbachev, and Nelson Mandela[36] and you realize how foolishly narrow the political mind set that dominates this country is.
People are always asking how would our history be different if President Kennedy hadn’t been assassinated. For me this isn’t the question to ask. Rather ask how would history have been different if President F.W. de Klerk had been assassinated in the midst of South Africa’s transition to majority rule and the ending of apartheid. It seems to me that South Africa would still have gone through the changes it has accomplished because that society had the organized social momentum to move in that direction.
This is why I see Kennedy as a “de Klerk without an ANC.” He saw the handwriting on the wall in our situation, the way de Klerk did in his. But Kennedy didn’t have an “ANC,” an organized social movement for peaceful coexistence that could compel the society to move in that direction. So he was in a very vulnerable position.
And as in South Africa before the ascendancy of Nelson Mandela and the ANC to the government, we too in America are confronted by a “third force” which is shadowy and operates behind the scenes. You will recall that this “third force” in South African society turned out to have the clandestine backing of the government.
It seems to me that at the moment of the assassination the Kennedy forces had a choice. They could openly acknowledge to the American people what had happened. To do this might have meant to release a popular disillusionment with the military and the CIA. You understand that in such a situation these liberal leaders as well as the conservatives might lose control of the situation to popular forces. Or they could decide not to run that risk; they could accept the assassination as a brutal, heinous wound to their side, but nevertheless keep going with the people in the dark. Obviously this was the decision that was made. And in so doing they decided (perhaps unconsciously like the “innocent” parents of the anti-social teenager) that the CIA murder of the President was acceptable to American democracy. The fact that our press and universities fell into line is an indication that they too accepted American democracy as delimited by this liberal-conservative establishment.
Are the American people really any different? Do they really want to know what happened and take responsibility, as opposed to indulging themselves in endless speculation?
Warren Commission member John J. McCloy is quoted by Edward J. Epstein in Inquest as saying that the paramount importance of the Commission was to “show the world that America is not a banana republic where a government can be changed by conspiracy.”[37] Nowhere has the primary concern of the establishment been more honestly acknowledged in this case.
CONTINUED...
http://www.ratical.org/ratville/JFK/HWNAU/letterToVJS.html
That was 1995. We've learned a lot since then.
, thanks to the suggestions of some of my favorite DUers.
= new reply since forum marked as read
?itok=YAQnqMG4
