Kennedy assassination update Who started the Vietnam War? By Mat Wilson They say that Richard Nixon opened the door to China, because he kept it closed long enough to exploit anti-Communist hysteria. They say that Kennedy started the Vietnam war, because he was murdered before being granted the opportunity to satisfy his schedule of total withdrawal, which was supposed to be completed by 1965, 'win, lose or draw'. So much for what THEY say... In recent years, much has been written about a so-called unbroken chain of events which stretch from Dallas on the 22nd of November, to Watergate, the scandal that cost Nixon the presidency. Secrecy and denial may have blunted the effort to determine the entire truth, but it has not obliterated the trail from Dallas to Watergate. Unlike the shock that engulfed most, Richard Nixon and Nixon crony, Watergate burglar E. Howard Hunt, were both committed to alibi or to the avoidance of being associated with Dallas Texas, on the day Kennedy was assassinated. On November 22, 1963, Nixon claimed that he was in New York, and indeed he was, having left Dallas Texas at 9:05 a.m. about two hours before Kennedy's arrival. Ironically, Nixon landed at New York's Idlewild at 1:00 p.m., latter renamed Kennedy International Airport. The flight offered Nixon the air tight alibi that a person in-the-know desperately required. Howard Hunt, who was also reportedly in Dallas on the 22nd of November, also established an air-tight alibi to prove that he was not in Dallas. According to Hunt, he was not in his CIA office in Langley Virginia (why not?), but with friends in Washington D.C. "And since it is a law of physics that you can't be in two places at the same time", Hunt boldly asserts, "I was not in Dallas Texas." Hunt's appeal to the "laws of physics" ignores the manipulations of covert action crusaders who practice the fraudulent art of being at more than one place at a time. Remember the "Oswald double" who has made the task of tracing the real steps of the real Lee Harvey Oswald, practically impossible? The major preoccupation of spooks like Howard Hunt is deception, and their colorful denials have been permanently exposed. In the final analysis the fact that Nixon and Hunt both secured "air-tight" alibies to account for their whereabouts when Kennedy was assassinated, is more incriminating than not. Most people vividly recall exactly what they were doing and where they were when they heard the tragic news about the Kennedy assassination, they were not vague, evasive or preoccupied by the need to produce law of physics-style alibis. The common suspicion that Nixon and Hunt were privy to the fact that Kennedy was going to be assassinated, is well founded. Nixon and Hunt were violent anti-Communist crusaders with a penchant for plotting the assassination of "foreign" leaders and for perverting democratic principles. Moreover, Hunt and Nixon were two of the earliest and most persistent advocates who promoted assassination plots against Castro, and when Kennedy did not enthusiastically endorse anti-Castro plots or a military invasion of Cuba, they were invariably obsessed by the perceived need to get rid of him as well. On November 22, 1963, quoted in the New York Times after having made a timely evacuation from Dallas, Richard Nixon publicly recognized his anti-Kennedy zeal through the bold assertion: "I am going to work as hard as I can to get the Kennedys out of there. We can't afford four more years of that kind of administration." While Nixon publicly exposed his commitment to get rid of the Kennedys, he did not say how he planned to accomplish his goal. At any rate, the fact that Nixon did not plan to defeat the Kennedys through legitimate political elections is quite obvious. In 1963, Nixon was the most popular Republican in the nation, yet despite the declared intention "to get the Kennedys out of there", he refused to run for the presidency until a shadowy committee to elect Richard Nixon was created in 1967. Political pundits, experts at creating a theory which matches the limit of public awareness, have repeatedly claimed that Nixon's decision not to run in 1964 was a brilliant tactical exploit. It was, they claim, foolish to challenge the unbeatable wave of popularity that brought Johnson a landslide victory in 1964. And so, it is popularly asserted, Richard Nixon, the brilliant statesman, staged one of the greatest political comebacks in American history, when he became the President in 1968. It is indeed a convenient theory but it ignores the fact that Nixon was not a typical politician but a man immersed in the shadowy world of secret politics. The fact that Nixon was largely a low key behind-the-scenes political operator until the Kennedys were assassinated, suggests that the so-called Nixon comeback was anything but legitimate. Politics, in the Nixon tradition was about behind-the-scenes plotting to destroy political enemies, it was not about fair play elections. And if Nixon did not aim for the presidency in 1964, it was not because he thought he couldn't win, but because the plotting of political cronies like J. Edgar Hoover precluded the possibility of a Nixon presidency in 1964. John Ehrlichman, Nixon's former counsel, made that quite evident when he said: Hoover and Nixon had kept in touch during all the years Nixon was out of office. Rose Mary Woods had been Hoover's Nixon contact for the exchange of information and advice between them. Whenever Nixon travelled abroad as a private citizen, the FBI agents who posed as "legal attaches" in U.S. embassies were instructed by Hoover to look after Nixon. Hoover fed Nixon information during those years via Cartha De Loach, and through Lou Nichols, a retired Bureau assistant director who had become a distillery executive. But Hoover was more than a source of information -he was a political advisor to whom Nixon listened. (Witness to Power; The Nixon Years, 1982, Simon & Schuster, New York p.156-7) And so, despite the popular belief that shrewd political acumen kept Nixon out of the White House race in 1964, the evidence suggests that Hoover dictated the Nixon decision to "wait it out". Indeed, pre-Kennedy assassination knowledge probably convinced Nixon to refrain from opposing Johnson in 1968. Clearly, evidence which strongly suggests that Nixon had foreknowledge about the Kennedy assassination is compelling. On November 21 1963, J.Edgar Hoover and Richard Nixon were at the home of wealthy oil baron Clint Murchison, in Dallas Texas. (p.14 High Treason) Murchison was a wealthy Texan who owned everything from the Dallas Cowboys to Henry Holt and Company, the publishing house that promoted the propaganda that Hoover published, to the racetrack where Hoover placed $100 bets, to the luxurious Del Charro Motel in California, where Hoover vacationed annually free of charge, to oil-gas interests... Murchison's empire, it appeared, was tailor-made to suit the interests of J. Edgar Hoover. The alliance between Hoover and Murchison was indeed like an ideal circle of corruption. Murchison, the recipient of huge loans from Teamster's pension funds, was evidently well served by the "politically correct" Teamster's union, whose administration was shaped by Hoover's capacity to blacklist the so-called un-Americans within. And the "dissent-free" Teamsters were at liberty to abuse pension funds at will. Business associates like Mafia crime boss Carlos Marcello gave Murchison additional "empire-building" clout. (mafia kingfish, p312) Travelling in a circle which linked the Mafia, the Director of the FBI, Lyndon Johnson and ultra-Conservative wealthy Texan reactionaries who vilified Kennedy because he was supposedly soft on Communism, Richard Nixon was surrounded by people who were enthusiastic about supporting a plot to murder the President. In particular, the fact that Richard Nixon spent the eve of the assassination in Dallas Texas with Johnson and Hoover cronies, the oil-rich Murchisons, goes a very long way in casting a dark cloud of suspicion towards the arch-Republican Nixon, who virtually assured a Democratic landslide victory by not challenging Johnson in 1964. Like the ultra-Conservative Murchison, who provided financial support to the so-called liberal, Lyndon Johnson, Nixon secretly supported the Democrats, not the Republicans. Kennedy assassination plotters had evidently created "politically peculiar" secret alliances that escaped the notice of political pundits who promoted "Nixon the brilliant political comeback strategist" theories, to account for Nixon's conspicuous absence in 1964, and his "miraculous" return in 1968. What the pundits failed to explore is the probability that Richard Nixon did not run in 1964 in order to help Lyndon Johnson shed the scornful claim that he was the "accidental" President. Moreover, it is also safe to assume that Richard Nixon did not oppose the candidacy of Lyndon Johnson because he was absolutely certain that Johnson would reverse the foreign policy course of action that Kennedy had charted. If that was not clearly the case, there is no way that Nixon would have tolerated the "landslide mandate" that fell into Johnson's lap, through the decision to allow the "trigger happy" Barry Goldwater, to lead the Republicans. Preoccupied by the need to cover up the truth about the Kennedy assassination, Lyndon Johnson publicly embraced the "let us continue" pledge, and with Nixon's undeclared support, "landslide Johnson" privately promoted the commitment "to begin", not where Kennedy had left off, but where Johnson and Nixon wanted to go. And so, like the convoluted plot of a Shakespearean play, the Nixon-assisted Lyndon Johnson landslide foreshadowed the dramatic new beginning in Vietnam    -the introduction of the combat divisions that Kennedy had vigorously opposed. The popular misconception that Johnson and Nixon inherited the Vietnam war reflects a gross distortion maintained by obsessive secrecy and ignorant "punditeering". In actual fact, Nixon, Johnson, Hoover and the like, "engineered" the Vietnam war. To be sure, since the man was murdered, the propaganda mill repeatedlly churns out the fraud that Cold Warrior John F. Kennedy started the Vietnam War. We do not have the time nor the inclination to challenge 27 years of rhetoric, ignorance and fraud. We’ll just tell you what John F. Kennedy said, and you can make up your own mind. John F. Kennedy said: "In 1965 I’ll become one of the most unpopular Presidents in history. I’ll be damned everywhere as a Communist appeaser. But I don’t care. If I tried to pull out completely now from Vietnam, we would have another Joe McCarthy red scare on our hands, but I can do it after I’m reelected. So we had better make damned sure that I am reelected". [POSTSCRIPT] The "textbook/cloned" historians that CNN routinely parades over the air, thrive on the statistical claim that Eisenhower kept involvement in Vietnam low whereas Kennedy escalated America's commitment to over 16,000. But a simple statistical analysis, of the sort that McNamara used to project optimism is absolutely meaningless. Colonel Fletcher Prouty, former liaison between the CIA and the Pentagon, explains the meaningless "numbers game" that superficial analysts use to distort history. According to Colonel Prouty: Don't get trapped into the numbers game. JFK had about 16,000 US military in Vietnam. He emphasized that they were not in combat slots, but this does not count all the guys with the CIA, etc... But this was true of the Eisenhower days. I and my whole squadron were in and out of Vietnam all the time in 1952, 1953 and 1954 and I am sure that the people who followed me in that job were there even more. My brother was with a group in Hanoi in 1954 and 1955. We had alot of guys helping at Dien Bien Phu ...aerial work mostly. We had naval units and plenty of army people. On top of that, the CIA had large units from Korea, Taiwan and the Philippines in Vietnam and they had been there a long time. They began to go with Lansdale in '54. It is not the numbers that matter. It is what the President intended. JFK let things roll along...things that had been started by Eisenhower, and some of them grew. But he was going to get out of there by 1965 and wanted a record of bringing men home during 1963 and 1964. When I was working on NSAM 263 [Taylor/McNamara Report] I was very well briefed on this plan of Kennedy's. He was getting out and he wanted that on the record. That is why he was shot. There are no shortage of references citing Kennedy's commitment to pull out of Vietnam by 1965. As a matter of fact, Kennedy was so absolutely committed to withdrawal, he actually believed that anyone who suggested otherwise was a blundering idiot. In his own words, Kennedy defined the political and the moral challenges he faced over the war in Vietnam when he said: If I tried to pull out completely now from Vietnam, we would have another Joe McCarthy red scare on our hands, but I can do it after I am reelected... In 1965, I'll become one of the most unpopular Presidents in history. I'll be damned everywhere, but I don't care. To be sure, partisan and ideological bickering has obscured this simple, undeniable fact, and Canadians are probably in the best position to resolve the controversial quagmire of hostile disagreement. In particular, when Kennedy asked Canadian Prime Minister Pearson about what he would do in Vietnam, Pearson told him that he would pull out and Kennedy's reply did not leave any room to doubt his firm intentions. Indeed, when Prime Minister Pearson advised him to pullout, Kennedy said, "Any damn fool knows that. The question is, how?" And so, in the final analysis, if Kennedy was not assassinated, "any damn fool knows" that win, draw or lose, Kennedy would have ended America's involvement in the Vietnam war by 1965 as promised, and Lyndon Johnson would have been denied the opportunity to reverse his plans. And that is the ultimate tragedy of the Kennedy assassination. As President, we granted him the opportunity to save the world by averting nuclear war during the Cuban Missile Crisis, but we denied him the opportunity to spare us the grief over Vietnam. And that is what makes John F. Kennedy the greatest and the most underestimated President in world history. To be sure, common ignorance has made us retreat in the comfort of "we will never know what might have been", but we know the man, we understand his leadership qualities, we know what he had planned, and we know that it would have made all the difference in the world. It is no longers safe to hide behind ignorance. John F. Kennedy was determined to save America from the pain of the Vietnam quagmire and he was willing to pay any price to do it. Does anybody miss the stark contrast between the myth that Johnson picked up where Kennedy left off and the reality that he was murdered to facilitate the ignorant crusade that claimed over 35,000 American lives? And these are the ignorant crusaders.