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Notes -
Finished The Devil's Chessboard. My opinion about the main theme of the book is basically unchanged since my last post on it.
The last section of the book is all about the JFK assassination. The basic theme, according to the book, is that a ton of people around Lee Harvey Oswald and the Book Depository building had "links" or associations with the CIA, anti-Kennedy Republican activists, and anti-Castro activists and a bunch of weird stuff happened around Oswald himself, including being allowed to live in the Soviet Union for a number of years, and move back with a Russian wife, at the height of the Cold War, with basically a rubber-stamp level of scrutiny. Also supposedly the whole Warren report was a whitewash.
To all of this I say, well maybe, but this is a lot of smoke but not much fire. Okay, it seems pretty unlikely that Oswald just up and decided to shoot the President one day. But exactly who did what here, and why? There's no more information on that in here than I had before. And if it was an organized conspiracy by... some groups... exactly what did they hope to accomplish by doing this? Why did they actually pull off an assassination of Kennedy, but not any other American president? Did they just kind of decide that that was too far and not to do it again? Is it like part of the plan or something to be so vague and confusing about exactly what happened that nobody has any idea what to do?
Kennedy was the first time that there had been a major conflict in goals between the newly created security organs/State Department and the President over a question of foreign policy. They conflict had already been brewing for some time: Over the course of his two terms, Eisenhower became increasingly resentful of the CIA for running roughshod over his foreign policy goals in favor of regime change to install anti-communist hardliners. Read Legacy of Ashes if you want more info on that. When Kennedy came to power, the friction between the office of the presidency and the State Department /intelligence agencies finally boiled over. Cuba was a fixation for the agencies. Getting Cuba out of the communist sphere was a huge, huge priority. The CIA never expected the Bay of Pigs invasion to work by itself. It was designed to pressure whoever was president at the time into sending massive airstrikes and possibly ground troops to assist. Kennedy screwed that up. He refused to send anything. This made the CIA absolutely furious. Cuba had now slipped into the Soviet sphere of influence permanently. Kennedy was also furious at the CIA’s attempts to railroad him, and was beginning to plan on steps to limit the CIA’s influence on foreign policy. Then Kennedy’s head mysteriously exploded. As for why it never happened again, it did. It just didn’t need to be as shocking and overt. The CIA forced Nixon out of office for abandoning the Vietnam war instead of escalating it to all of Southeast Asia. Woodward and Bernstein were laundering information leaked to them by the CIA. Then they spiked Carter’s attempt at reelection for being too weak overseas. Then they installed a CIA officer, George H.W. Bush as President. Every President after that, except Trump, has had connections to the CIA. Clinton, Bush II, Obama. Mysteriously, the President always just lets the CIA do whatever they want now. Imagine that!
Deep Throat was Deputy Director of the FBI. You can argue that the FBI and CIA were working together against the White House, but that argument needs to be made - conventional wisdom is that the FBI and CIA are outgroup to each other within the internal politics of the US Deep State. To say that Deep Throat was working for the CIA is obviously silly.
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How was Obama connected to the CIA? Serious question.
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