Patrick Lawrence: What Died 60 Years Ago?
A President and a Nation’s Promise
On January 9, 1953, The Washington Post published an editorial we can read all these years later as a murmur amid a long silence. “Choice or Chance” was a blunt worry about what the Central Intelligence Agency was getting up to. Was the CIA to analyze information it gathered or that had come to it—a matter of chance—or was it actively and covertly to execute interventions of its own choosing? Was its swiftly accumulating power properly subject to political oversight, or was it, as The Post appeared to think, becoming a power unto itself—operating, in effect, beyond lawful controls? These were the questions five years after the agency was founded, one year after President Truman created the National Security Agency by secret decree.
The CIA hardly invented clandestine operations, coups, assassinations, disinformation campaigns, election fixing, bribery in high places, false flags, and the like. But it was elaborating and institutionalizing such intrigues. The extra–Constitutional autonomy of what we now call the national-security state was already evident. The Post stood with those who objected—at least it did on page 20 of that winter Friday’s editions. The agency’s activities were “incompatible with a democracy,” Washington’s local paper protested. Reform was in order.
As interesting as The Post’s editorial was the dead quiet that followed. Nothing more was published on the topic for 20 years. The Post’s comment prompted no significant reforms. In an appointment whose importance will be evident, the easily manipulable Truman named Allen Dulles the CIA’s director less than a month after The Post editorial appeared. Dulles, in turn, put Frank Wisner, a former Office of Strategic Services man, in charge of the agency’s “black operations.” These included, among much else, making maximum use of the media by compromising its ranks—not least its high command.
I describe the national-security state’s early, formative years, during which it gathered not only power, but also the unlawful sovereignty by way of which “the intelligence community”—odious phrase—now plagues us. As Aaron Good writes with impressive acuity in his not-to-be-missed American Exception: Empire and the Deep State (Skyhorse, 2022), by the time Truman authorized the NSA and named Dulles to run the CIA, the Deep State—and I am fine with this term—was already a reality and had determined that democracy was an impediment to its interests and operations it would not tolerate.
President Kennedy was assassinated a decade after The Post registered its concern about the CIA’s activities and Dulles assumed control in Langley, Virginia. Turning time in the other direction, it was 60 years ago Tuesday that JFK keeled over in the back seat of his Lincoln Continental while driving through Dallas. There is no danger of overstating the significance of Kennedy’s murder: The consequences of his death cannot be overstated.
Let us consider these. What else slumped over on the afternoon of November 22, 1963? What did America lose besides a president? Extending the thought to take in our decade of assassinations, what did Americans lose with the murders of Malcolm X (February 1965), King (April 1968), and Robert F. Kennedy (two months later)? Martin Luther King, Jr., I will mention straightaway, was not the only one of these four to have a dream. They all did.
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Many writers and analysts have implicated Dulles and the CIA in John Kennedy’s assassination with varying degrees of certainty. Most recently we have David Talbot’s The Devil’s Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA, and the Rise of America’s Secret Government (Harper Collins, 2015) and Oliver Stone’s two films, JFK (1991) and JFK Revisited (2021). As Stone asserted in an interview recorded two years ago this month, Dulles was operationally responsible, in all likelihood in the service of various New York financial interests who considered Kennedy a threat to the order, global and domestic, from which they benefited.
A snippet from that exchange:
Dulles, yes, but I think he had to get permission from higher-ups, somebody in, I think, the East Coast financial structure, maybe—you know the Rockefellers have done so much evil to this country I certainly could not put it beyond their capacity to have participated, because Kennedy was dangerous to business, and they knew it, and what they feared most was his reelection in ’64…. That’s the way I see it. They knew if he got reelected they would be dead in the water because he would have more power.
When I recorded these remarks I immediately drew lessons from them. Here I will mention two.
One, by 1963 the government that is supposed to serve Americans would no longer be legible to them. Events, contexts, responsible parties and their motivations and intentions: None of this would any longer be transparent. As David Talbot puts it well, the age of secret government had arrived. When we consider the CIA’s confidence as it executed a coup in broad daylight—and the murder of a sitting president has no other name—we have to conclude that by 1963 the Deep State considered its power and autonomy beyond challenge. It could do anything, in other words, and get away with it.
This is to say that JFK’s murder marked that moment when the national-security state put Americans on notice. It is likely that few people understood this at the time, but that afternoon it asserted what we are best off recognizing now as its ultimate authority—its hidden hegemony, its anti-democratic preeminence—in determining the direction of postwar American society. Anyone who may doubt this can fast-forward to the Russiagate years, when the Deep State’s various manifestations—the intelligence agencies, law enforcement, the judiciary, the media, and so on—conspired to take down another president, this time bloodlessly.
Two, and this arises from the reality just noted, the democratic process in America has been severely compromised since the early 1960s, and I choose here the mildest language for the condition I describe. If there is a Deep State that permits democratic procedures to take place but does not permit change unacceptable to it, can we speak of such a nation as a democracy, or do we speak of such a nation as a democracy so as to comfort ourselves, to avoid facing what has become of us and been done to us—to flinch, at last, from the hard work of retrieving our public life?
Am I saying that American democracy died in Dallas on November 22, 1963? That we lost that day an authentic democratic process the power of which, according to the Constitution, is supreme? Well done: It is precisely what I am saying, the truth once again proving bitter. Look at the decades since. Have we done much more than spin our wheels, getting nowhere close to the kind of society with the kind of domestic and foreign policies we deserve? This is what comes of not, to keep it simple, facing up.
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I am not among those who unduly glorify JFK, or for that matter his brother. Kennedy arrived in the White House a committed Cold Warrior with his share or more of the orthodoxies of the age. But the unmistakable feature of his presidential years was growth, it seems to me. At the time of his death his vision of America and of the world, if I am not excessively generalizing, was very different from what it was at the start. He seems to have achieved a certain new enlightenment.
Somewhat in the way of FDR, Kennedy came to favor a cooperative coexistence with the Soviet Union, in part, maybe, because of his experience with Khrushchev during the Cuban Missile Crisis. As is well-known, he had ordered the beginning of a radical withdrawal from Vietnam shortly before he was killed. More broadly, Kennedy wanted to cultivate and project another image of who Americans were, to display another attitude, to tell the world we would be different from what we had been by way of another posture and ultimately another purpose. We would go to others in peace and with respect, not war and one or another kind of abuse or coercion.
Chas Freeman, in a recent interview on Radio Open Source, mentioned that Kennedy wanted to build a world wherein all people were free to live by their own histories, traditions, and cultures, none required to conform to the expectations of others. Can we count JFK an advocate of multipolarity decades before his time? I think so. Multipolarity was the inevitable consequence of the collapse of the Cold War binary. Kennedy, we must wonder, may have seen that far ahead. Was he our first post-exceptionalist president? The scholars can address this thought better than I, but I am perfectly happy to pose the question.
There is a photograph of Jack and Bobby standing in the Oval Office staring at one another in what looks to be a state of anxiety on the way to mild shock, as if to say, “Whaaat???” I think it was taken around the time of the Bay of Pigs episode, when Dulles tried to trap Kennedy into supplying air cover and JFK shut him down. I have always read the picture, a well lit black-and-white, to show that moment when the two Kennedys realized the CIA and the national-security state altogether had become a monster, that they would have to take it on, and, maybe, that they were both courting trouble. It is well-known that Kennedy had concluded that the agency should be dismantled and that he fired Dulles in November 1961, seven months after the Bay of Pigs disaster. And it is better known what happened two years after that.
We lost the promise of a better way of life, a more honest way of life, a fairer and more decent way of life when Kennedy lost his life, one that drew from the well of common dreams, not separateness and self-interest—“Ask not,” etc. A better way of life and a better world, one that would have had aspects of beauty about it. America was to remake itself in a new image so far as I understand JFK’s aspirations as they evolved during his White House years. This promise was vibrantly alive during that decade. Bobby and King and in his way Malcolm saw it as JFK did. Then the decade turned into a murder spree intended to extinguish it.
“You’re only a casualty insofar as you forget, and if you remember you are alive,” Oliver Stone said when I interviewed him, “and you’re no longer a casualty because you’re carrying forth a fight, a crusade, not to forget.” Sixty years after the dark day in Dallas, as November 22, 1963, is called, we should ask ourselves whether we are content to be casualties or whether we insist on living and not forgetting.
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