The son of a John F. Kennedy advisor has a question

[McXorsett]

"The record of meetings, tapes and memoranda demonstrates otherwise. One from General Maxwell Taylor to his fellow Joint Chiefs of Staff, dated October 4, 1963 and conveying the President's decision states plainly: “All planning will be directed towards preparing RVN forces for the withdrawal of all U.S. special assistance units and personnel by the end of calendar year 1965.”

The other topic was America's nuclear war-fighting plans. Twenty years ago my student Heather Purcell discovered in the Vice Presidential security file for 1961 that the US strategic plan foresaw a nuclear first strike on the USSR and China, to be launched on an unspecified pretext in late 1963.

Kennedy's reaction to this was fury. It was not for nothing that President Johnson, staring out of the window on the flight from Dallas, remarked to Bill Moyers, “I wonder if the missiles are flying.”

Did these matters play a role in Kennedy's death? And if they did, what was their importance, compared with (say) the possibility that Kennedy might have been about to normalize relations with Cuba – or even to end the Cold War?"

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James Galbraith teaches at the LBJ School of Public Affairs. His father, John Kenneth Galbraith,
tutored John F. Kennedy at Harvard and served as his Ambassador to India from 1961 to 1963. He
stood 6 feet, 8 inches tall – a most inconvenient size.

http://jfkfacts.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/galbraith-on-jfk.pdf

[ucrdem]

1. Welcome. Answer: yes, yes.

Part II answer: my view is that the oil and logistics boys (HL Hunt, Brown & Root et al.) had financial motives, the joint chiefs had Dr Strangelove fantasies, Dulles was seeking revenge, but they'd all hated the Kennedys since Joe was ambassador to Britain. Probably before. So the second answer is, the reasons given were basically rationalizations and secondary to a longstanding and eerily familiar Kennedy Derangement Syndrome spawned and nurtured by the usual suspects. This by the way is largely based on observing ODS propaganda currently in circulation.

[JimboBillyBubbaBob]

2. Did these matters play a role?

This reminds me of the situation wherein author and historian Burke Davis wrote of the Southern psyche in the decades that followed the Civil War, when he noted "...a thousand what ifs course through the grandson's blood..." I was a few weeks short of 10 years of age when this murder went down. I recall tiny details about that afternoon like it were yesterday. I suppose it speaks to what a generation or two of us has had implanted in our personal psyches. It has always been there, lurking in the margins as the years have gone along. The other evening I was watching a DVRed special on the assassination. My wife enters the room and says, "Oh no, not Kennedy again!!??" She continued, "he's always dead at the end, you know what happens, why do you watch that?" Why? I don't know, maybe it's like Burke Davis said and I think about what ifs.