"NIGHTMARE: Post-WWII Prosperity becomes 1960s Assassinations and War": Part 4 of 5. Chapter 13 from "Our Country, Then and Now"

"Kennedy's Economics"; "Kennedy's Assassination"

Serialization of selections from my book Our Country, Then and Now continues with the cooperation of my publisher, Clarity Press. Today we continue with Part 4 of Chapter 13: "NIGHTMARE: Post-WWII Prosperity becomes 1960s Assassinations and War," with sections on "Kennedy's Economics"and "Kennedy's Assassination."

To Recap: With Germany and Japan obliterated and Great Britain and France vastly weakened, World War II launched the US on the profound era of prosperity taking place during the 1950s. Meanwhile, the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) had prevailed on the US government, even before it entered the war, to maintain as its war aim the achievement of global military dominance. But President Franklin Roosevelt’s close relations with Soviet leader Joseph Stalin opened the door for the Soviet Union to emerge as the controlling power over Eastern Europe and an eventual rival to US nuclear weapons stockpiles.

Thus emerged the Cold War, one feature of which was the dominance of US society by what President Dwight D. Eisenhower later termed “the military-industrial complex.” Soon after Eisenhower was succeeded in office by President John F. Kennedy, the nation’s post-war prosperity and optimism collapsed into a nightmare of assassinations and war.

We continued in the previous installment with an account of the growing international crises under President Eisenhower, including the start of the still-ongoing CIA practice of subverting and overthrowing foreign governments. The situation came to a head under President Kennedy when the CIA sponsored the failed Bay of Pigs invasion in Cuba. Meanwhile, the US military was preparing to replace France as the neo-colonialist power in Vietnam, including control of the Golden Triangle drug trade by the CIA. But after the Cuban Missile Crisis, both Kennedy and the leaders of the Soviet Union were taking small steps toward a new era of world peace.

Now, in Part 4, we continue with President Kennedy’s enlightened approach to economics that had created a new era of economic growth without inflation and was also reaching out to bring Americans living in poverty into the producing economy. These policies were bitterly opposed by David Rockefeller and the big bankers.

Then, on November 22, 1962, Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas. As I continue to study history, it is increasingly apparent that the orders to kill Kennedy could only have come from the international globalist financiers, including the same forces that tried but failed to assassinate French President Charles de Gaulle. Also, the assassination could not have taken place without the collusion of the Rockefeller interests. Why else would Rockefeller cohort and CFR director John J. McCloy been seated on the Warren Commission? Also plausible was the involvement of Israel, whose program to develop nuclear weapons Kennedy opposed.

Kennedy’s Economics

John F. Kennedy’s economics program was a modernization of New Deal thinking. When he took office in 1961, the nation was mired in a recession for which the Eisenhower administration had no answer. From 1941 onward, the US economy had been on a powerful wartime trajectory, but with Eisenhower’s conservative budgetary policies, it had run out of steam.

Kennedy immediately took the initiative with tax policies favoring capital investment by US industry, encouragement of low interest rates to encourage consumer spending, and an emphasis on measures to enhance productivity over financial speculation. He also favored expanding low-cost credit for under-served areas like black communities. These measures were a frontal assault on banking profitability. [i]

Part of Kennedy’s intended program to reform taxation was the elimination of the oil depletion allowance, which allowed investors in oil to deduct a significant proportion of their corporate income to compensate for the presumed depletion of oil deposits. By proposing to eliminate the oil depletion allowance, Kennedy made implacable enemies of a whole class of industrial and financial titans.

[Kennedy also favored government deficit spending, even at times of economic growth. Fiscal conservatives howled. But it was really an adaptation of Keynesian economics that had appeared during the Depression.]

Upon Kennedy’s death, the US had experienced thirty-three consecutive months of GNP expansion. He also succeeded in beating back exploitative price increases by US Steel, a controversy that earned him more enmity from big business and banking. This included criticism from David Rockefeller, whose letters to and from Kennedy appeared in Life in July 1962. Says Professor Donald Gibson:

“Claiming to reflect the concerns of bankers in the US and abroad, Rockefeller advised the president to make a ‘vigorous effort’ to control government spending and to balance the budget. He also suggested to Kennedy that interest rates were being kept too low and too much money was being injected into the economy.” [ii]

Kennedy also believed that the government should regulate the flow of capital between the US and overseas. This again placed him diametrically opposed to the big US banks like David Rockefeller’s Chase Manhattan Bank that were global powerhouses and that thrived on usurious loans to developing countries.

Finally, Kennedy was increasingly a friend to the civil rights movement, where Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and other leaders were beginning to advocate for economic fairness. [Kennedy-era memoirist Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., even wrote of a “Negro Revolution.” Schlesinger also wrote of Kennedy’s concern that despite economic growth, unemployment and poverty remained high and the rich didn’t pay their fair share of taxes. The poverty disproportionately victimized blacks and residents of Appalachia who had lost mining jobs to technology.

Kennedy’s Assassination

Few historical figures have been so tragically prevented from pursuing their laudable objectives than the late President John F. Kennedy. Here is my own experience:

By the fall of 1960, my family had moved to Williamsburg, Virginia, when my dad was transferred by Dow Chemical in Michigan to a textile processing plant owned in partnership with the German Badische Corporation. That fall, I went around with a newly-found friend handing out presidential campaign literature for US Senator John F. Kennedy.

We had heard the candidate would be making a speech at the Williamsburg Court House. Instead, his brother Robert Kennedy showed up and gave a stirring talk on his and JFK’s hopes for our country. Within a couple of weeks, John F. Kennedy defeated Vice-President Richard M. Nixon in a close election.

A little over three years later, I was a senior at James Blair High School in Williamsburg, when a teacher told me I should go to the school office. They had a radio on and were listening to a broadcast saying that President Kennedy had been shot in Dallas, Texas. Later that day we heard he was dead.

That weekend I was working at a part-time job as an announcer at the local radio station WBCI, when a listener called to say that Lee Harvey Oswald had been shot. I hurried to the teletype machine, then back to the microphone, to announce that Oswald, Kennedy’s claimed assassin, had been shot in the basement of the Dallas police station by a man named Jack Ruby. That week, I wrote an article for the school newspaper, the Blarion, decrying the terrible state of violence in our country and how badly the assassination of our young, brilliant president boded for the future.

Three years later, I was attending a talk in New Haven, Connecticut, being given by a law professor at the Yale University Law School on the Warren Commission Report on the assassination. The professor spoke vehemently in favor of the Warren Commission and its “proof” that Oswald was the lone assassin.

I raised my hand and said that I had just finished reading Mark Lane’s Rush to Judgment that questioned the “magic bullet” theory that the same bullet that killed Kennedy came out of his body and wounded Texas governor John Connally who was sitting on the other side of the limousine. Researchers to this day ridicule the absurd “magic bullet” theory.

The law professor then seemed to become nearly hysterical. He talked at length about how the “magic bullet” theory was absolutely proven and should never be doubted by anyone. I went away unconvinced, but it was a long time before I felt I was getting a grasp on what actually took place on that terrible day in November 1963 and why it might have happened.

Today I feel I do have a grasp. One of the books I later read was Professor Donald Gibson’s book The Kennedy Assassination Cover-Up. In his book, Gibson writes that two of the institutions most instrumental in perpetrating the cover-up were the Washington Post and the Yale University Law School. Of course I vividly remembered my encounter with the Yale law professor.

It is clear to me, and I think it has been proven more than circumstantially, that President John F. Kennedy was assassinated by a conspiracy coordinated by the CIA. That it was in fact a conspiracy, i.e., one involving at least two shooters, was established conclusively, based on acoustic evidence, by the House Select Committee on Assassinations, which submitted its report in 1979.

While they did not establish who the shooters were, some members of the committee believed it was done by figures from organized crime. The fact that Kennedy was shot from the front, not from the rear by Lee Harvey Oswald, as the Warren Commission claimed, has been proven by expert medical testimony that the frontal shot was an entrance, not an exit, wound.

But then, who coordinated the shooting, and why? I believe the evidence is persuasive that Kennedy was been making a radical shift in post-World War II US government foreign and domestic policy and that people working for the government habituated to killing their fellow human beings for “official” purposes may have done so in this case also.

The CIA had a litany of grievances against John and Robert Kennedy, starting with the Bay of Pigs fiasco. The mob was also bitterly angry over RFK’s vendetta against them. They were accustomed to working in close partnership doing the dirty work of both the CIA and FBI. [iii]

In fact, members of the CIA team were named as perpetrators by co-conspirator E. Howard Hunt in a death-bed confession to two of his sons. [iv] The names he gave were David Morales, Frank Sturgis, Antonio Veciana, David Atlee Phillips, William K. Harvey, and Cord Meyer. I believe it likely that CIA director of counterintelligence James Jesus Angleton was one of the coordinators of the assassination and cover-up. There are indications that CIA involvement reached to the top of the agency, [v] whose director was then John McCone.

A vast quantity of journalistic research points to the likelihood of the FBI having been involved, along with organized crime, specifically the Chicago mob, the US Secret Service, the US military, Dallas police officials, Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson, various bankers and oil magnates, and possibly Europeans and Israel. [vi]

But despite the thousands of books and articles published, the fact remains that no one has yet identified the actual individuals who gave the orders to shoot the president. The same goes for the 1968 killing of Robert Kennedy. But someone did.

Undoubtedly the action was not viewed with disfavor by the Council on Foreign Relations and the Rockefeller syndicate, whom Kennedy had antagonized by [misgivings about Vietnam which was] starting to disrupt their plans for global US military dominance.

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[i] The best available account is Donald Gibson’s Battling Wall Street: The Kennedy Presidency, Sheridan Square Press, 1994.

[ii] Ibid, p. 73.

[iii] See Seymour Hersh, “The Kennedys’ Secret Sicilian Operation: What the CIA Didn’t Tell the Warren Commission,” Substack.com, March 29, 2023.

[iv] John Koerner, Why the CIA Killed JFK and Malcolm X: The Secret Drug Trade in Laos, Chronos Books, Winchester UK and Washington DC (2014), p. 20-21.

[v] The weekend after the killing, the CIA took custody of the famous Zapruder film. We now know that the film was altered by the CIA to obscure the frames that proved Kennedy had been shot in the head from the front. Another alteration removed evidence that Kenney’s limousine had stopped on the street when the shots were fired. See “The Zapruder Film Mystery” on YouTube.

[vi] See William Dankbaar, Files on JFK: Interviews with Confessed Assassin James E. Files. YouTube has an interview with James E. Files that describes his delivery of the fatal frontal shot on Kennedy from the Grassy Knoll. On the involvement of the CIA in the assassination cover-up, see Mary's Mosaic: The CIA Conspiracy to Murder John F. Kennedy, Mary Pinchot Meyer, and Their Vision for World Peace by Peter Janney. Regarding Israel’s possible involvement, see “Did Israel Kill the Kennedys?” by Laurent Guyénot, Unz Review, June 3, 2018.

This Ends Part 4 of 5.

Part 1 of 5: Nightmare

Part 2 of 5: Nightmare

Part 3 of 5: Nightmare

Richard C. Cook is a retired U.S. federal analyst with extensive experience across various government agencies, including the U.S. Civil Service Commission, FDA, the Carter White House, NASA, and the U.S. Treasury. He is a graduate of the College of William and Mary. As a whistleblower at the time of the Challenger disaster, he exposed the flawed O-ring joints that destroyed the Space Shuttle, documenting his story in the book “Challenger Revealed.” After serving at Treasury, he became a vocal critic of the private finance-controlled monetary system, detailing his concerns in “We Hold These Truths: The Hope of Monetary Reform.” He served as an adviser to the American Monetary Institute and worked with Congressman Dennis Kucinich to advocate for replacing the Federal Reserve with a genuine national currency. See his new book, Our Country, Then and Now, Clarity Press, 2023. He has recently been named a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG).

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