While JFK’s proposal has been forgotten in popular memory and sometimes overlooked by historians, it was understood as highly significant at the time. Kennedy was pushing, not just a scientific endeavor, but a peaceful end to the Cold War.
Talbot writes, “Like many convicted Nazi criminals in the early Cold War years, a number of the Nuremberg defendants sentenced to prison were later the beneficiaries of politically motivated interventions and early releases; few of the many thousand convicted Nazis were still in prison after 1953. A number of those interventions on behalf of fortunate war criminals could be traced to the quiet stratagems of Allen Dulles.”
Since the reviewers at mainstream news organizations are studiously avoiding David Talbot’s groundbreaking Devil’s Chessboard, CTKA’s Jim DiEugenio takes up the challenge of explaining why the book is so important.:
“Talbot goes much further than these previous authors in his attempt to excavate just how involved Allen Dulles was in some of the unsavory aspects that helped create and maintain the Cold War state. Many of these aspects were ignored or minimized in the previous books. But Talbot does not shy away from detailing Dulles’ role in attempting to undermine some of America’s allies, like France during the revolt of the French generals in 1961. Beyond that, he goes much further than they do in explaining Dulles’ dismissal by President Kennedy (it was not all about the Bay of Pigs).”
Now, says the U.K. Independent, modern art was a “weapon” deployed by the agency, and interviews with a couple of retired CIA men confirm the claim.
“Would Abstract Expressionism have been the dominant art movement of the post-war years without this patronage? The answer is probably yes. Equally, it would be wrong to suggest that when you look at an Abstract Expressionist painting you are being duped by the CIA.”