What the New JFK Documents Reveal
JFK expert discusses the Schlesinger memo and the CIA five-year surveillance of Oswald
If you’re looking for an introduction to the just-released JFK material, there’s a good discussion on Breaking Points by Jefferson Morley, a bona fide expert. It’s worth listening all the way through.
Morley’s Substack site is here (much of it’s paid-only). His YouTube channel is here.
Two General Points
He starts with two general comments that I think are important (transcript edited for clarity and concision; emphasis mine below)
Why This Matters
• Why does it matter who killed JFK? “Because when JFK was killed and there was no accountability, the American Empire took a turn. Kennedy was trying to steer the ship one way, and when Kennedy was killed and there was no accountability, the ship was steered another way.
“And we never had a course correction after that, because the faction that avoided accountability with Kennedy's murder and avoided responsibility for it — they had impunity, and they could dominate all the policy debates that followed. And also because they had the secrecy apparat, the apparatus of secrecy around them.”
About ‘Smoking Guns’
• “People want a smoking gun; I say ‘Don't look for a smoking gun, look for a fact pattern. Don't push the string of a theory, look for a fact pattern and let the fact pattern tell you what's really going on here.’
Disclosures
A few selected disclosures to pique your interest:
• “After 60 years with this very significant disclosure that we got last week, the story of what happened in 1963 is becoming clearer. Two documents came out that I think are really important, and they kind of set the stage for what we're going to learn and what we have learned.”
The two documents mentioned are 1) a memo written by Arthur Schlesinger to JFK in June, 1961 warning that the CIA was undermining his presidency, and 2) a set of documents involving James Angleton, the CIA’s chief of counter-intelligence and the “dominant counterintelligence figure in the non-communist world.”
The Schlesinger Memo
Of the Schlesinger memo, Morley says:
• “A whole page of this document had been secret for 62 years. This is a very significant chapter [in the history] because … Kennedy is furious after the Bay of Pigs. He felt that the CIA was trying to impose their foreign policy on him, and he said ‘How could I have been so dumb?’ And he raged … there's a quote that you'll see all the time, ‘I want to split the CIA into a thousand pieces and scatter it to the winds.’ […]
“But when Kennedy calmed down, he said, ‘Well, what can I do?’ and Arthur Schlesinger, a liberal adviser, said, ‘Well, what you could do is, you could reorganize the CIA.’ And he writes a long memo — ‘if you want to do that, Mr. President, here's how you do it, and here's why you do it.’
“And this page that was kept secret for 60 years really tells the why of what Kennedy wanted to do. Now ultimately Kennedy didn't do it, [it’s] a big job to reorganize the CIA, [and] he had other priorities. He decided not to do it, but this is an insight into his thinking, and it's an insight into his thinking that the CIA didn't want anybody to know about.”
The Schlesinger memo is here.
The CIA’s Five-Year Surveillance of Lee Harvey Oswald
Regarding Angleton’s surveillance of Oswald, Morley says this:
• “Lee Harvey Oswald was not a lone nut. He was a known quantity to a small group of CIA Counter-Intelligence officers for four years between November 1959 and November 1963. We now have all of the information that the CIA had on Oswald — 42 documents, 180 pages of material.
“He was followed from beginning to end. There was no point in those four years, or very few points in those four years, where top people in the CIA did not have Lee Harvey Oswald's home address. And the guy's moving all the time. He goes to Moscow, to Minsk, he comes back to Fort Worth, he moves to New Orleans, he comes back to Dallas, he goes to Mexico, he comes back to Dallas [and] every step of the way, top people in the CIA knew about it.”
• “There were two FBI reports on Oswald, everything he had been doing recently — gotten arrested, he'd gone to Mexico City, he'd come back, two FBI reports saying Oswald’s in Dallas — they [the reports] land on [James] Angleton desk on November 14th and 15th, 1963. Never been explained.”
The interview also contains a story about assassination attempts made against Charles de Gaulle that De Gaulle thought the CIA was responsible for.
Stay tuned. This subject is back on the national radar.
You might think he's a bona fide expert, but there are others, and having read so many of the books by other experts, I would say I'm not sure I agree with all of his "takes," which I've heard during open Zooms.
I don't think we need to see the new documents to come to some very definite conclusions about what happened. I'm saying this before reading this, so I may amend or revise this after I hear what he says. But I did hear him on a podcast already commenting about it and I don't recall anything I haven't heard before.
Just as I thought, nothing I haven't already known for many years. Oswald was an intelligence agent. He was stationed in Japan while in the Marines and trained as a radio technician for the secret U-2 surveillance program -- that means he was CIA -- it's likely he faked being a double agent, considering Marina's father was KGB. Of course the CIA would be in contact with him. He was in the CIA.
Of course, we know it changed the course of history. We knew that for certain in the early 1970s. And our nation has continually moved right. If you look at Ike's platform in 1956, a conservative Republican, it sounds a lot like Bernie Sanders.
We've known for many years that the CIA hated JFK. Read Howard Hunt's memoir Give Us This Day about the Bay of Pigs. They blamed Kennedy for the failure because he prevented the second overflight of CIA B-25s to fully disable the Cuban Air Force, whose planes proved instrumental in the failure of the beach landing of the Cuban exiles.
I never heard the story about DeGaulle.
It seems Trump is representing a new even more conservative and authoritarian faction.
But what do I know? Just what it seems to me, weighing everything.
Thanks for the update on information just acquired in the latest file release by the National Archives.
I was 10 years old, in fifth grade and remember vividly that terrible day. We were released early from school and to this day can remember every step taken and every word spoken with my two chums who lived on my block. They can too, we all spoke about this about a month ago.
The murders of President Kennedy, his younger brother Robert, Martin Luther King, and Malcolm X took away any effective resistance to the Powell Memo that was written in 1971. The implementation of that memo's goals were fulfilled over the course of my life and have resulted in the hellhole in which we are now cast.
Somehow, someway. we must wrest control of our foreign policy and our privacy from the 17 different intelligence agencies that our feckless Congress and Senate fund. It is time for our country to live within its borders and start the serious reforms necessary to preserve a land that will host our descendants.