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Check out these words of JFK on the book Seven Days in May. They were uttered after the Bay of Pigs but before the Cuban Missile Crisis:
.... JFK said he would read the book. Hed did so that night. The next day Kennedy discussed with his friends the possibility of thier seeing such a coup in the United States. Consider that he said these words after the failed Bay of Pigs invasion and before the Cuban Missile Crisis:
'It's possible. It could happen in this country, but the conditions would have to be just right. If, for example, the country had a young President, and he had a Bay of Pigs, there would be a certain unseasiness. Maybe the military would do a little criticizing behind his back, but this would be written of as the ususal military dissatisfaction with civilian control. Then if there were another Bay of Pigs, the reaction of the country would be, 'Is he too young and inexperienced?' The military would almost feel that it was their patriotic obligation to stand ready to preserve the integrity of the nation, an only God knows just what segment of democracy they would be defending if they overthrew the elected establishment'
Pausing a moment, he went on, "Then, if there were a third Bay of Pigs it could happen.' Waiting again until his listeners absorbed his meaning, he concluded the an old Navy phrase, "But it won't happen on my watch."
On another occasion Kennedy said of the novel's plot about a few military commanders taking over the country, 'I know a couple who might wish they could.' The statement is cited by biographer Theodore Sorenson as a joke. However, John Kennedy used humor in pointe ways, and Sorenson's preceding sentence is not a joke: "Communications between Chiefs of Staff and their Commander in Chif remained unsatisfactory for a large part of his term."
Director John Frankenheimer was encouraged by President Kennedy to film Seven Days In May 'as a warning to the republic.' Frankenheimer said, 'The Pentagon didn't want it done. Kennedy said that when we wanted to shoot at the Chite House he would conveniently go to Hyannis Port that weekend. (JFK and the Unspeakable, pp12,13)
Now cut to Douglass overview of the Bay of pigs:
Four decades after the Bay of Pigs, we have learned that the CIA scenario to trap Kennedy was more concrete than Dulles admitted in his handwritten notes. A conference on the Bay of Pigs was held in Cuba March 23-25, 2001, which included 'ex-CIA operatives, retired military commanders, scholars, and journalists.' News analyst Daniel Schorr reported on National Public Radio that 'from the many hours of talk and heaps of decassified secret documents' he had gained one new perception on the Bay of Pigs:
'It was that the CIA overlords of the invasion, director Allen Dulles and deputy Richard Bissell, had their own plan of how to bring the United States into the conflict. It appears that they never really expected an uprising agaist Castro when the liberators landed as described in their memos to the White House. What they did expect was that the invaders would establish and secure a beachhead, announce the creation of a counterrevolutionary governemnt and appeal for aid from the United States and the Organization of American States. The assumption was that President Kennedy, who had emphatically banned direct American involvement, would be forced by pubic opinion to come to the aid of the returning patriots. American forces, probably Marines, would come in to expand the beachhead.
' In effect, President Kennedy was the target of a CIA covert operation that collapsed when the invasion collapsed' (JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters, p. 14-15)
Remember this the next time you read in the Corporate Media that the CIA is merely the tool of the president. It was not the last covert action the CIA would take without presidential authorization. After reading Douglass' book one wonders if it even made the final dozen. _________________
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