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John F. Kennedy on War & Peace
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1961: U2 spy planes spotted offensive missile sites in Cuba
A U2 spy plane captured images of a missile site in Cuba. The discovery became public when Pres. Kennedy addressed the nation: "Within the past week, unmistakable evidence has established the fact that a series of offensive missile sites is now in
preparation on that imprisoned island," he said.Commercial air travel to Cuba was suspended. The world was on the brink of nuclear war for another 6 days, until Soviet premier Nikita Krushchev announced that the missiles would be removed.
Source: The Rise of Marco Rubio, by Manuel Rogi-Franzia, p. 47-48
, Jun 19, 2012
1962: Rejected faking Gitmo attack as war pretext with Cuba
The American military had planned fake terrorist attacks on our own citizenry at Guantanamo. Operation Northwoods was approved in 1962 for action against Cuba.Here was the background: At a White House meeting in Feb. 1962, when various covert action
plans seemed to be going nowhere, Robert Kennedy ordered a stop to all such anti-Castro efforts. The Joint Chiefs decided the only option was to trick the American public and world opinion into a justifiable war.
When the document was presented that
March, JFK [concluded] that there was virtually no possibility of our using overt force to take Cuba. So operation Northwoods remained secret for 35 years.
It seems that all through history, wars and takeovers are started with false flag operations:
the Reichstag fire, the Chinese supposedly attacking Japan, the Gulf of Tonkin incident with Vietnam. The list goes on and on. History has a way of repeating itself, like that old cliche: if it works once, let's try it again.
Source: 63 Documents, by Gov. Jesse Ventura, p. 37-38
, Apr 4, 2011
1963: Planned to remove all troops from Vietnam by 1965
Vietnam was a sham from the get-go, trumped up by the military industrial complex. If President Kennedy had lived, we'd have started withdrawing troops by late 1963 and had all our servicemen out of there by the end of 1965. The idea that
JFK was responsible for having escalated the war is simply bogus. It's obvious his plans were to pull us out, but he'd said behind the scenes he had to wait until after the next election to do it. When the Joint Chiefs of Staff
(JCS) official file from those years was declassified in 1997, it contained a memorandum of conference on May 6, 1963. That one and a follow-up memo from late October (less than a month before JFK was assassinated) clearly show we were starting to get
out of Vietnam and leave matters in the hands of the South Vietnamese, where they belonged. Unfortunately, this is again a case of misleading the people for years, by keeping the true thoughts of John F. Kennedy out of the public realm.
Source: 63 Documents, by Gov. Jesse Ventura, p. 46
, Apr 4, 2011
1940: best-seller, "Why England Slept"
Jack was fearless enough to tear around Europe in his own convertible in 1937; and, amid the tensions of 1939, to explore the Soviet Union, the Balkan countries, parts of the Middle East, Czechoslovakia, and Germany, returning to London on
September 1, the day Germany invaded Poland. The book that resulted from these travels--an expansion of his Harvard senior honors thesis and titled "Why England Slept"--was published in 1940 and became a best-seller.
Source: True Compass, by Edward M. Kennedy, p. 24
, Sep 14, 2009
1943: PT-109 rammed; crew rescued from South Pacific
In 1943, Jack got himself assigned as commander of a patrol torpedo boat. PTs were small, often badly built, lightly armed craft deployed to prowl combat-zone waters at night in search of Japanese destroyers and cruisers.On Aug. 2, as part of a squad
of 15 such craft sent to intercept a Japanese convoy, PT 109 was rammed by an enemy destroyer and sliced in half. Two of the 13-man crew were killed. My brother exhorted the survivors to swim toward a flyspeck island, personally towing the badly burned
engineer for 5 hours by clamping the man's lifeboat straps in his mouth. Jack then swam back out into the ocean to try and signal a passing boat. Unsuccessful, he swam back to his men half unconscious. The ordeal continued for a week, with Jack directing
swims to larger islands. On Aug. 9, the party made contact via a message Jack had scraped into a coconut shell. (That coconut is now in the John F. Kennedy Library in Boston.) The message made it to an American base, which sent a PT to rescue the men.
Source: True Compass, by Edward M. Kennedy, p. 74-75
, Sep 14, 2009
1961: Accepted sole responsibility for Bay of Pigs disaster
In 1960, one year after Fidel Castro had overthrown the corrupt dictator Fulgencio Batista, Cuba began shipping millions of tons of its most lucrative crop, sugar, to the Soviet Union in return for oil and grain. In May, Cuba established diplomatic
relations with the Soviet Union.Each of these moves accelerated the collision course of Castro's regime with American security interests. Eisenhower had approved a CIA-drafted paper, "A Program of Covert Action Against the Castro Regime" [which Jack
inherited].
Jack, feeling his way through the opening weeks of his presidency, grew skeptical of the ever more ambitious and complex Cuba invasion plan: defections from Castro's army would follow; the population would rise up to embrace the invaders;
and the hated regime would be ousted with minimal casualties. As history shows, the invasion was a failure.
On April 21, Pres. Kennedy stepped before the microphones at a press conference and accepted sole responsibility for the Bay of Pigs disaster.
Source: True Compass, by Edward M. Kennedy, p.174-176
, Sep 14, 2009
In early 1960s, nobody protested US attacks in Vietnam
The Vietnam War actually began for the US in 1950, and from 1954 to 1960, the US had a kind of Latin American-style terror regime in place. And it wasn't any joke; they killed about 60,000-70,000 people. But there was no protest. Zero. When Kennedy took
over, they escalated it, and pretty soon it became a direct US attack. Still no protest. Through the early 1960s, you couldn't get anybody to sign a petition. By 1966, Vietnam was becoming a big issue. But protests were met with extreme hostility.
Source: Power and Terror, by Noam Chomsky, p. 25
, May 21, 2002
Increased anti-guerilla forces; founded the Green Berets
His pride was the Army Special Forces, rapidly growing to a level some five or six times as large as when he took office. The President directed that the Special Forces wear green berets as a mark of distinction.
He wanted them to be a dedicated, high quality elite corps of specialists, trained to train local partisans in guerilla warfare, prepared to perform a wide range of civilian as well as military tasks.
He personally supervised the selection of new equipment--the replacement of boots with sneakers for example. "The new anti-guerilla forces proved one of his most important military contributions.
In South Vietnam, they delivered babies, chopped trails, dug wells, prevented ambushes, raised morale and formed effective bands against the Communist.
Source: "Kennedy" by Ted Sorensen, p. 632-633
, Jan 1, 1965
Page last updated: Apr 28, 2013
