Tag: Operation Northwoods

Douglas Horne on Operation Northwoods 

Doug Horne, formerly of the Assassination Records Review Board, talks about what i think is the single most significant finding of the ARRB: Operation Northwoods, the template for November 22, 1963.

New JFK files

Biden Faces October 26 Deadline for Release of More JFK Assassination Papers

(This article, written by Jefferson Morley and Rex Bradford, was first published in The Intercept, on October 20, 2021.)

President Joe Biden will soon decide an obscure but potent question: Which secret files related to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy should be made fully public?

When President Donald Trump faced the same decision four years ago, he delayed in the name of national security. While releasing thousands of files about the 1963 Kennedy assassination, Trump acquiesced to the demand of CIA Director Mike Pompeo to keep portions of thousands more secret until October 2021, 58 years after Lee Harvey Oswald was arrested as the gunman. For all his “deep state” rhetoric, Trump issued a memo giving the executive branch agencies four more years of secrecy.

Robert Dallek, denial, and JFK assassination story

JFK and Curtis LeMay
JFK and Air Force General Curtis LeMay. (Associate Press)

 

In an intriguing new piece for the Atlantic, “JFK v. the    Military,” historian Robert Dallek picks up on one of the  most important JFK revelations to emerge since Oliver  Stone’s “JFK.”

But Dallek also avoids its implications. And therein lies a tale of how historians — and the general public — think about JFK’s assassination 50 years later. …

What would JFK have said about the causes of his death?

What would President John F. Kennedy have thought about the enigmatic circumstances of his murder?

Alternative history (courtesy of Stephen King’s book cover)

Fifty years later, I think we don’t ask this question often enough. Instead we argue about what Rachel Maddow and Bill O’Reilly think. Media criticism is important, but it is no substitute for historical analysis. There are certainly other ways to think about the story.

Counterfactually, for example.

Imagine JFK had survived the gunfire in Dealey Plaza. What would he have said about its causes?

Kennedy, of course, did not have time to comment on the gunfire that claimed his life, other than to say, after a bullet struck him in the back, “My God, I’m hit.” But that exclamation illuminated his instantaneous awareness of a lethal situation. JFK had been a soldier/sailor in World War II. Twenty years before he had faced gunfire. He had seen men die from it. He knew that he had been shot. Before he could say anything more another bullet struck him in the head, fatally wounding him.

That was not inevitable.

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