JFK Conference: James DiEugenio made clear how Foreign Policy changed after November 22, 1963

[Jim DiEugenio]

211. Jim Replies on JFK as Cold Warrior

At post 174, I responded to the Missile Crisis and BOP stuff you first used.

Now let me show what the focus of my talk was. It was about places that are ignored and what the Dulles brothers had done there. There is no doubt they were ideological and, through Sullivan and Cromwell, financial Cold Warriors.

In several areas, Kennedy reversed course very soon:in Laos, where Ike wanted him to commit and told him he should; in Congo, where Ike and Dulles approved the murder of Lumumba and the dividing up of Katanga into a shell state for England and Belgium to exploit; and in Indonesia, where Dulles and Ike had tried to overthrow Sukarno and refused to help him get West Irian back from the Dutch.

JFK got an agreement for neutralization in the first: he refused to let Katanga split off and backed Hamarksjold's independence policies to the point of approving a UN mission to stop Katanga from splitting off; and he sent RFK and Ellsworth Bunker to the Hague to get the Dutch to return West Irian back to Indonesia.

In return, after his death, all three of these are reversed back by the CIA and LBJ. That was my point. Ike and LBJ were real Cold Warriors. Not Kennedy. This is all reviewed in detail in my book Destiny Betrayed.

But in Pittsburgh I went beyond this due to more research in two new books. So at Duquesne I expanded this to include other places in Africa and the Middle East where JFK reversed Dulles and offended NATO allies in the Third World e.g. Egypt and Iran.

So yes, what I said was accurate in reference to the best modern scholarship in the field. Unfortunately, like the JFK murder, the subject has been politicized by those who have an agenda on both the left and right.