JFK – A Repentant Cold Warrior?

Jim Pederson Dyed-In-the-Wool History January 29, 2025 R1 (R2 pending)

John F Kennedy’s brief presidency marks a critical point in American history about which much remains not definitively known and is still actively debated. He rapidly became a symbol to the New Left, which was to rise shortly following his passing, and he is also seen very positively by many on the Libertarian Right based on, what would appear to be, his growing opposition to Cold War policies and possible opposition to the Federal Reserve Board system. For most with a memory of that time period he is remembered as an old style moderate Democrat reflecting the end of a bygone time that some scorn and many, perhaps most, would long to return to.

Kennedy is generally seen as a Cold Warrior who started to change and favor détente during the course of his presidency. Kennedy, who was a Catholic, is portrayed by some as having had a spiritual rebirth leading him to turn away from US Cold War policy that came very close to bringing about a nuclear war. This case is made by author James Douglas in JFK and the Unspeakable whose book is written in a theological context referring to the writing of prominent religious writer Thomas Merton from the time period. The degree to which JFK was a committed cold warrior in the first place could be debated to a limited extent. He was the son of Joe Kennedy who was an ardent isolationist and had expressed reservations about the expanding US role in Southeast Asia along with imperialist expansion in Africa (1 pp. 7-15). Kennedy didn’t necessarily see war and peace as a strictly political issue saying to a friend from his war experience on PT 109, “Admittedly world organization with common obedience to law would be solution. Not that easy. If there is not the feeling that war is the ultimate evil, a feeling strong enough to drive them together, then you can’t work out this internationalist plan (2 p. 88). Things cannot be forced from the top.”

John Kennedy was the second son and became the center of his family’s political ambition after Joe Jr. was killed in WWII. He won the presidency in a very close election in 1960 against Vice President Richard Nixon that may have been won on election fraud in Illinois and Texas although Nixon chose not to challenge the results. Kennedy had established himself as a Cold Warrior in 1958 when, in a major speech, he accused the Eisenhower administration of allowing a missile gap to open up with the supposedly superior Soviet forces. He repeated this during the 1960 campaign arguing for increased military spending. His science advisor Jerome Wiesner informed Kennedy in February 1961 that “the missile gap was fiction”, which drew a response of anger as opposed to relief. The United States actually held an overwhelming strategic advantage and Kennedy had bought into the Cold War myth and rode it all the way to the presidency (3 p. 14). Kennedy also enlarged the Army’s Special Forces, renaming them the Green Berets to carry out counter insurgency warfare operations. (1 p. 8)

This is a video of the first Kennedy - Nixon debate which was also the first televised presidential debate. During the debates Kennedy continued to make the "Missile Deficit" argument which he later found to be entirely false. It is thought that Kennedy's appearance and presentation during the debate was critical to him winning the presidency.

The Cuban Revolution

The Story of Kennedy’s presidency, US intervention in Cuba, the Bay of Pigs, and the Cuban Missile Crisis has to start with Castro and the Cuban Revolution that began in 1957 and ended in late 1958 and the beginning of 1959. Like Mao Zedong in China and Ho Chi-Mein in Vietnam, Castro wasn’t immediately branded as a communist or his rise to power a communist takeover but it evolved that way fairly quickly.

Castro came to power after ousting Fulgencio Batista. Batista had been elected in 1940 defeating Gru San Martin but in 1944 his handpicked successor, Carlos Saladrigas y Zayas, was defeated by Gru San Martin and Batista left the country. After two administrations that failed to live up to expectations especially with regard to government corruption, Bautista ran again in 1952. Anticipating defeat, he overthrew the government in March in a bloodless coup closing congress and calling for a new election in 1954 (4). He was elected president in 1954 without opposition and reinstituted the 1940 constitution which was in many respects pro-labor. In the US the Sugar Act of 1956, intended to support domestic sugar producers (Sugar production in Cuba was also largely controlled by American interests), hurt Cuban sugar exports to the US which, in turn caused Bautista’s support to rapidly erode especially with the influential agricultural industry. Several groups that denied the validity of the earlier election developed armed resistance, generally focusing on sabotage, and the one that would eventually rise to power was the 26th of July movement led by Fidel Castro who had previous involvement in revolutionary activities in other parts of Latin America. Castro and his brother Raul had been imprisoned after a failed attack on an army barrack on July 26, 1953 when most of the attackers were killed but the Castro brothers were eventually given amnesty. (4)

Throughout the 1950’s Havana was a major tourism destination with gambling and other vices and was deeply connected to the American Mafia (5). Illegal drugs weren’t just available, they were plentiful and cheap. Havana was similar to what Las Vegas would become. It was estimated that in 1950 Havana had 270 brothels (6). Bautista saw tourism and gambling as core industries and had a long time association with American mobsters Meyer Lansky and Lucky Luciano, who lived for a while in Cuba under Bautista’s protection (7 pp. 46-47). The US had extensive interests and holdings in Cuba. Quoting President Kennedy, “At the beginning of 1959 US companies owned about 40% of Cuban sugar lands, almost all the cattle ranches, 90% of the mines and mineral concessions, 80% of the utilities, practically all the oil industry, and supplied 2/3 of Cuba’s imports” (8). Former US ambassador to Cuba, Earl Smith, testified to congress in 1960 that “until Castro, the US was so overwhelming influential in Cuba that the American ambassador was the second most important man, sometimes even more important than the Cuban president.” (9 p. 66) The relationship between the US and Cuba was very much like that of a colonizer and colony with US interests owning most of the land and raw materials and extracting the profit while Cuba provided generally low skilled labor that was enriching a small number of people within Cuban society but not the people as a whole and these conditions were ripe for revolution.

Castro returned to Cuba in December of 1956 as the island was descending into civil war aboard a yacht with 81 other men most of whom were quickly killed or captured. About a dozen escaped including the Castro brothers and Ernesto “Che” Guevara who made their way into the Sierra Maestra Mountains where they began a guerilla campaign against the Batista government. During 1957 there were numerous disturbances including an attack on the presidential palace in Havana and a general strike. Bautista suspended the constitution in August of 1957 with the promise that a new presidential election would take place in June of 1958. Violence escalated in 1958 including the burning of sugar plantations and mills, bombings in Havana and disruption to mining production. In response to the fighting the US issued an arms embargo against Cuba which would end up hurting Bautista’s forces. Bautista launched an offensive into Sierra Maestra but was pushed back by the July 26th fighters into government held territory (4). Castro’s forces kidnapped a number of Americans and Canadians in June and July but the anger this triggered in the US caused him to release them within a couple of weeks. The rescheduled election was finally help on November 3rd but there was minimal participation in the rebel held areas. On December 27th a rebel force under Che Guevara captured the government garrison at Santa Clara along with a large supply of arms. Bautista, recognizing his position was unrecoverable, fled to the Dominican Republic on January 1, 1959 and then to Portugal. Guevara entered Havana on January 3rd followed by Castro on January 8th.

Castro placed Guevara in charge of military prisons and oversaw the executions of about 600 people linked to the Bautista regime (4). The US had been amongst the first countries to recognize Castro’s government and in April of 1959 he embarked on a 11 day tour of the country where he met with Vice President Richard Nixon and Castro pledged to remain unaligned in the conflict between the US and Russia. The primary purpose of the trip was to get US financial aid which failed amongst rising tensions and Castro then turned to property confiscation to raise funds. Because US firms owned so much of Cuba, they were prime targets of these policies. Castro negotiated a trade pact with the Soviet Union in February of 1960 that helped to stabilize his regime, which was very unstable prior to that, and accelerated confiscation of foreign owned land and assets. By the end of 1960 economic activity between the US and Cuba had largely stopped.

Above is s picture of Italian American organized crime figure Lucky Luciano. Luciano was a major player in tourism and gambling in Cuba before the revolution and was a close associate of Bautista (Getty Images)

Below is a picture of Fidel Castro in 1959 after he took power in Havana (Britannica)

The picture above is of Ernesto "Che" Guevara who was a major Latin American revolutionary figure and close associate of Castro although he wasn't originally from Cuba.

The picture below is of Castro and the fighters of the July 26th Movement in the Sierra Maestra area where they were based in 1957 and most of 1958

The Bay of Pigs

The failed Bay of Pigs operation was a covert project initiated under the Eisenhower administration. Training of the exile troops in Guatemala had already begun by the late summer of 1960 (4 p. 275). Kennedy eventually rejected the Trinidad Plan that called for an amphibious and airborne assault favoring a night landing without direct US military intervention (4 p. 293). The revised plan that Kennedy approved called for an April landing and Kennedy emphasized that he wouldn’t authorize direct the introduction of US ground troops even if the exile army faced defeat. The CIA’s covert-action chief, Richard Bissell agreed to this and added that there would be minimal need for air strikes and the Cubans on the Island would join the revolt (4 p. 296). When the invasion was launched on April 15, 8 B-26 bombers carried out strikes against the Cuban Air Force that were only partially successful (4 p. 303). Security Adviser, McGeorge Bundy, told CIA deputy director General Charles P. Cabell that further strikes would not be initiated until a beachhead was established. Because this never happened, this decision effectively cancelled the airstrikes. The exile brigade was surrounded and surrendered on April 19 (4 pp. 319-22). The military and the CIA were extremely disappointed at Kennedy’s decision to accept defeat and the president came to see this as a sort of trap or setup to force him to escalate the conflict.

This video is of JFK's Bay of Pigs speech from April 17, 1961 where he tries to explain his position of allowing the operation to go forward but not providing direct air or potentially ground support. He attempts to convey a position of strength regarding the potential for future intervention if deemed necessary.

This short video address the thought process behind the invasion and how so many apparently qualified people could be so wrong. It goes over the very impressive academic and professional background of the planners. The Bay of Pigs is frequently used as an academic case study in "Group Think" decision making where a collection of people adopt a common and highly flawed perspective on a topic.

Operation Mongoose and Operation Northwoods

Following the very public failure of the Pay of Pigs in April of 1961 it probably would have seemed reasonable or prudent to simply back away but US military leaders collectively chose to go all in. In late 1961 Operation Mongoose planned an extensive campaign of terrorist acts against Cuban civilians to be carried out by the CIA in Cuba (11 pp. 26-29) (12 pp. 170-200) to be run out of JMWAVE which was a secret US government covert operations and intelligence gathering operation on the campus of the University of Miami (13). The goal of the program was to cause the Cuban government to divert resources to deal with the terrorist attacks and to introduce restrictions on the Cuban population that would lead to a popular revolt against Castro and ultimately regime change. (14 pp. 53-64) The Operation was led by USAF General Edward Lansdale and for the CIA, William King Harvey. The name was given at a White House meeting on November 4, 1961 and was authorized by President Kennedy on November 30, 1961. The plan reportedly included plans to assassinate Castro to be carried out by the Mob under the direction of the CIA. Operation Mongoose made little progress prior to the Cuban Missile Crisis in October of 1962.

In late 1961 and 62 Operation Northwoods was devised to influence US public opinion and world opinion and to get support from the Organization of American States (OAS) for an invasion of Cuba using a variety of false flag attacks on different targets (15 pp. 70-71). The plan was to conduct a false “Communist Cuban terror campaign in Florida and Washington, D.C.” that would include hijacking commercial airliners, bombing buildings and ships, and political assassinations generally aimed at the Cuban exile community. Some of the specific options under consideration included a staged shoot down of a US military aircraft, staged aircraft hijacking, sinking of boats of Cuban refugees in the Caribbean, blowing up a US ship, and orchestrating various acts of terrorism in a number of US cities. Joint Chief of Staff Chairman Lyman Lemnitzer signed off on the proposal and arranged for CIA operatives to carry out the faked terrorist attacks. Twelve proposals were identified in a February 2, 1962 memorandum written by Brigadier General William H Craig and submitted to Brigadier General Edward Lansdale entitled "Possible Actions to Provoke, Harass or Disrupt Cuba.," (15 p. 71) Lemnitzer presented the collection of plans to Secretary of Defense McNamara on March 13, 1962 and it was passed to Kennedy for his approval three days later. Kennedy rejected the plan and made clear that there was no chance the US military would at that point take military action against Cuba (15 pp. 71-72) . Following the presentation of the Northwoods plan, Lemnitzer was removed from his post a Joint Chiefs of Staff but became the Supreme Allied Commander of NATO in January of 1963.

The memorandum above was the Joint Chiefs of Staff approval for Operation Northwoods to conduct a variety of false flag attacks to generate support for an invasion of Cuba. The individual proposals each involved detailed plans are were separate but coordinated fake terrorist attacks. This plan was readily dismissed by JFK but it does demonstrate what sort of thinking was within the realms of normalcy within the military, State Department, and CIA.

Joint Chief of Staff Chairman Lyman Lemnitzer, pictured above, was the man responsible for pulling together Operation Northwoods and presenting it to the President. He was relieved of his position after that but shortly afterwards wound up as head of NATO

USAF General Edward Lansdale was the leader of Operation Mongoose to commit terrorist acts in Cuba to try to topple Castro and the was approved by Kennedy but didn't make much progress prior to the Cuban Missile Crisis.

Cuban Missile Crisis and the Khrushchev Letters

The next and most dangerous crisis was the Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962. Khrushchev wrote in his memoirs “we were quite certain that the [Bay of Pigs] invasion was only the beginning and that the Americans would not let Cuba alone”[(5 p. 492). This led to the idea of installing nuclear weapons in Cuba and hiding them from the US until it was too late to do anything about it. The Soviet leader went on to say later, “The main thing was that the installation of our missiles in Cuba would, I thought, restrain the United States from precipitous military action against Castro’s government. In addition to protecting Cuba, our missiles would have equalized what the West likes to call ‘the balance of power.’ The Americans had surrounded our country with military bases and threatened us with nuclear weapons, and now they would learn just what it feels like to have enemy missiles pointing at you” (5 p. 494) This, however, showed a general lack of understanding of the American Cold War mindset that was nearly to prove catastrophic. As the US became aware of construction in Cuba, the pressures on President Kennedy for a preemptive U.S. strike was intense (1 pp. 20-21). Kennedy secretly taped the White House meetings during the crisis and the tapes were declassified, transcribed, and published in the 1990’s (6). Kennedy was consistently almost alone in resisting war and maintaining his policy of a blockade. After refusing to authorize a massive air strike on October 19, 1962 Air Force Chief of Staff General Curtis LeMay, challenged the president saying “This [blockade and political action] is almost as bad as the appeasement at Munich. . . I just don’t see any other solution except direct military intervention right now.” On Wednesday, October 24, a Soviet submarine was about to be intercepted by U.S. helicopters with depth charges. Kennedy felt that he had lost all control of the situation and that nuclear war was imminent (1 pp. 22-23). Then Khrushchev ordered the Soviet ships to stop dead in the water rather than challenge the U.S. quarantine. The standard interpretation of this event is simply that Khrushchev “blinked” yet there was much more going on in the background.

There were twenty-one secret confidential letters between Kennedy and Khrushchev from 1961 to 63 (7). Some of these were debates that didn’t really resolve anything but they did establish a path of direct communication that was direct and went around formal channels. On Friday night, October 26, Kennedy received a letter from Khrushchev where he offered to withdraw his missiles. In exchange, Kennedy would pledge not to invade Cuba which created some hope. However, the next morning, Kennedy received a second letter from Khrushchev adding to the terms. He demanded a U.S. commitment to remove missiles from Turkey and Russia would promise not to invade Turkey. This was reasonable in its symmetry but put Kennedy in a very difficult position of surrendering the defense of a member NATO state and he was on shaky ground already domestically. JFK sent a message via Robert Kennedy to Ambassador Anatoly Dobrynian to pass to Khrushchev offering to remove the missiles from Turkey but said it couldn’t be done immediately. Khrushchev accepted and this defused the situation. Kennedy’s promise was fulfilled six months later (1 pp. 23-29) although that remained a long standing issue. So how close did the world come to a nuclear war? From the perspective of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, close but maybe not close enough thinking they would not meet with much of a reprisal. In 1992 there was an article in the Russian press that indicates this might have been misplaced hubris. According to the article, unbeknownst to the US, Soviet forces in Cuba had possessed a total of 162 nuclear warheads that were operational and had been prepared to launch on October 26, the day the U2 had been shot down over Cuba. Kennedy’s Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara wrote of this in his memoirs, “Clearly, there was a high risk that, in the face of a U.S. attack—which, as I have said, many in the U.S. government, military and civilian alike, were prepared to recommend to President Kennedy—the Soviet forces in Cuba would have decided to use their nuclear weapons rather than lose them. “We need not speculate about what would have happened in that event. We can predict the results with certainty . . . And where would it have ended? In utter disaster.” (8 p. 341)

This is JFK's famous Cuban Missile Crisis Speech given on October 22, 1962. It contains a good deal of specific detail and allegations while also conveying a sense of calm and decisiveness. It also has some key content that is more directed at the Soviets and a broader world audience.

From this point forward Kennedy gave all indications that he wanted to deescalate and potentially end the Cold War including a graduation speech he gave at the American University in Washington on June 10, 1963 where he specifically proposed the possibility of ending the Cold War (1 pp. 31-3). This put him directly at odds with the “military industrial complex” and the CIA that leads to the final act in his story, the assignation, which remains extremely relevant in the modern world. He had already gone against the CIA’s plan to initiate a coup in Indonesia and appeared to be moving away from sending US forces to Vietnam. There have been numerous theories put forth on this event but here we will focus on just one which is the most plausible. The Warren Commission, which had as one of its key members Allen Dulles who was fired by Kennedy as the head of the CIA after the Bay of Pigs, of course concluded that Kennedy was shot by one lone crazed, communist sympathizer gunman. Most people didn’t believe it then and even more don’t believe it now (9) yet doubters were given the label of “conspiracy theorist” which was a term rolled out in the New York Times. If Kennedy was killed as part of a criminal conspiracy, Lee Harvey Oswald’s extremely unusual life would hold the key evidence although accepting the Warren Commission findings would also require the acceptance of a large number of intertwined unusual circumstances and untimely deaths.

This is what came to be referred to as JFK's "Peace Speech" given on June 10, 1963 at the graduation of American University in Washington. It shows a clear break from the policies of the military and foreign policy establishment and a departure from his own positions prior to becoming president. At this point he had only a few months left to live.

Oswald

Oswald joined the Marines in 1956 after dropping out of high school where he developed some unusual skills. From September 1957 to November 1958 Oswald was a Marine Corps radar operator at Atsugi Air Force Base in Japan which served as the CIA’s main operational base in the Far East and one of two bases that the U-2 flew from. At Atsugi he had a “crypto” clearance, which is higher than top secret, and listened regularly to U-2 Radio communications (1 pp. 36-9). From there he was reassigned as a radar operator to Marine Air Control Squadron No. 9 in Santa Ana, California. According to former Marine Corps Lieutenant John E Donovan, who was Oswald’s commanding officer in El Toro, Oswald “had the access to the location of all bases in the west coast area, all radio frequencies for all squadrons, all tactical call signs, and the relative strength of all squadrons, number and type of aircraft in a squadron, who was the commanding officer, the authentication code of entering and exiting the ADIZ, which stands for Air Defense Identification Zone. He knew the range of our radar. He knew the range of our radio. And he knew the range of the surrounding units’ radio and radar (10 pp. vol 8, p. 298)”.

He was released from his marine commitment on September 11, 1959 on a hardship plea. A couple months later Oswald presented himself at the American University in Moscow with the stated intent of renouncing his US citizenship. He handed Counsel Richard E. Snyder a note requesting that his citizenship be revoked and affirming his allegiance to the “Union of Soviet Socialist Republics” (10 p. 747). While, in a sense, Oswald was a cog in a larger machine but both the breadth and depth of highly classified information he had was not “small deal”. This would have been a major leak or espionage incident. He would have been very attractive to the Russians and the US government couldn’t have passively handed him over as a professed traitor. Anyone who has held these sorts of clearances and high access to these sorts of data either in the military or as a civilian contractor would readily understand that. After a year of living in Minsk, Oswald returns to the US embassy in Moscow and is welcomed back. As opposed to being arrested and prosecuted, he is given a loan and returned to the states. Later, on June 25, 1963 he was granted a passport overnight with the stated destination of the Soviet Union. From there the strange behaviors and movements continue until November 22 when his path and Kennedy’s intersect in Dallas. Two days later, after appearing very confident while in custody like the whole event was some sort of misunderstanding, he was shot and killed by terminally ill Dallas nightclub owner Jack Ruby.

Above is Lee Harvey passport. For someone who was a relatively high profile traitor with highly classified knowledge he moved around very easily with full knowledge of the US government. To the right is his booking photo.

This short video of Oswald in New Orleans handing out flyers for "Fair Play for Cuba" was nearly lost. He is articulate for somewhat awkward.

So we are left with a choice of either taking this at face value or looking for another explanation and it happens that there is one. According to former CIA agent and former assistant to the Deputy Director Victor Marchetti and in his book, The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence, “At the time, in 1959, the United States was having real difficulty in acquiring information out of the Soviet Union; the technical systems had, of course, not developed to the point that they are at today, and we were resorting to all sorts of activities. One of these activities was an ONI [Office of Naval Intelligence] program which involved three dozen, maybe forty, young men who were made to appear disenchanted, poor American youths who had become turned off and wanted to see what communism was all about. Some of these people lasted only a few weeks. They were sent into the Soviet Union, or into Eastern Europe, with the specific intention the Soviets would pick them up and ‘double’ them if they suspected them of being U.S. agents, or recruit them as KGB agents. They were trained at various naval installations both here and abroad, but the operation was being run out of Nag’s Head, North Carolina” (11 pp. 144-5). While there isn’t any absolute proof Oswald was part of this program, it fits his story almost perfectly. Former roommate of Oswald in Santa Ana, James Botelho who became a judge in California, has long held the belief that Oswald’s conversion to communism was an act. He said in an interview with Mark Lane, “I’m very conservative now [in 1978] and I was at least as conservative at that time. Oswald was not a Communist or a Marxist. If he was, I would have taken violent action against him and so would many of the other Marines in the unit….“I knew Oswald was not a Communist and was, in fact, anti-Soviet. Then, when no real investigation occurred at the base [after Oswald’s presence in the Soviet Union was made public], I was sure that Oswald was on an intelligence assignment in Russia”(1 pp. 38-41). Oswald was the only Marine ever to defect from his country to another country, in this case a Communist country, during peacetime. That should have been a major event yet Marine Corps and American Intelligence decided to conduct no real investigation into the event (1 pp. 38-41).

If Oswald was not some incredibly eccentric lone gunman with a past too strange to make up, the only other real viable conclusion is that JFK was killed by our own government and specifically by the CIA.

Here is a restored version of the famed Zapruder tape showing the assassination

The video to the right is of Kennedy's secret society speech from 1961 that can actually be interpreted a variety of ways. This is only part of the whole speech and is an audio tape with still images.

Bibliography

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4. Britannica - Cuban Revolution. [Online] 2024.

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16. Khruschev, Nikita. Khruschev Remembers. Boston : Little Brown, 1970.

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18. Wells, Paul. Private Leters Shed Light on Cold War. Montrael Gazatte. July 24, 1993.

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21. Commission, Warren. The Warren Commission Report. New York, New York : St Martin's Press, 1964.

22. Summers, Anthony. Conspiracy. New York, New York : Paragon House, 1989.