Did the CIA Kill JFK? Leading Expert David Talbot on Allen Dulles, Kennedy’s Assassination, & the Rise of America’s Secret Government | SYSTEM UPDATE #175
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Welcome to a new episode of System Update, our live daily show that airs every Monday through Friday at 7 p.m.
Eastern, exclusively here on Rumble, the free speech alternative to YouTube.
David Talbott is an investigative journalist, a historian, and an author who played a really significant role in the advent of the internet and specifically the ability for political journalism to exist on it.
He was the founder of Salon.com, which along with Slate for a long time were the only online political magazines available on the internet and really revolutionized the way in which political journalism could be done online.
Salon ended up being my journalism home from 2007 until 2012.
In fact, it was the first journalism job I had where I was actually hired by a site or a media outlet to do my journalism.
It was where I think I really learned how to do journalism and that was what led me to The Guardian.
David Talbot was a crucial figure in being able to pave the way for that kind of journalism to be available by people who could reach large audiences without having to go to work for the New York Times or NBC News.
But I think his more significant contribution is the fact that he is the author of The Devil's Chessboard, which for me, as I've said many times, is the definitive account of the history of the CIA and the history of the U.S.
security state as it was formed under President Truman in the wake of World War II and then the need for the United States to fight the Cold War.
And it is a remarkable story in particular of two brothers, one of whom was Alan Dulles, the other John Foster Dulles.
Alan Dulles ended up running the CIA, kind of like his own private fiefdom, and so much of what the CIA is and has become was the result of his leadership over that.
And he was able to turn it into a private militia, one that went around the world, engaging in all kinds of cues, even though it was only meant at first to collect intelligence, and increasingly involved itself in our domestic politics, one of the primary topics of our show.
And The Devil's Chessboard covers not only that history in a very compelling way, but also talks a lot about the role that the CIA may have played in the assassination of John F. Kennedy, the hatred that Alan Dulles harbored for JFK, particularly after JFK fired him in the wake of the Bay of Pigs.
And what's so amazing is that even though the CIA was always a suspect in the assassination of JFK, Alan Dulles Wormed his way onto the Warren Commission, which is what ended up issuing the definitive official story that it was Lee Harvey Oswald and only Harvey Oswald who acted alone in killing the American president.
This book, and Talbot himself, has a lot of informed questioning of that official narrative, especially now with a lot of the updates that have appeared since that book was published.
So we were able to sit down with David Talbot, something I've been wanting to do for quite a long time, and really delved into How is it the CIA became such a dominant force in American political life and in our government?
How the national security state turned into this sprawling, unaccountable, secret part of our government?
And how the assassination of JFK should be thought about 60, 70 years later, while the government continues to keep many of the key documents concealed and classified, even though there's obviously no valid reason for them to do so anymore.
Talbot was Incredibly interesting as an interviewee.
He was somebody who I think knows more about the history of the CIA than almost anybody else.
The book, I cannot recommend highly enough, but I also think you're going to find this interview to be very illuminating of many of the key topics that we focus our journalism and our program here.
So here is my interview with David Talbot.
David, welcome to System Update.
Thank you so much for taking the time to talk to us.
We're extremely excited to have you and looking forward to our discussion.
My pleasure.
So our paths crossed, not extensively, but some, because I spent five years writing at Salon.com, which was the journal that you founded back in the late 1990s and early 2000s.
But what really kind of What stimulated me and blew me away was when I read your book, I think it was in 2017, 2018, The Devil's Chessboard, and I have spent a lot of time in my journalism career focused on the U.S.
security state, the CIA, but to me there was so much in here that I hadn't known before.
It changed the way I thought about it.
I thought it was the definitive account of the history of the U.S.
security state in the wake of World War II, and I mostly want to spend most of our time talking about how it relates to our current politics, but just to ask a couple questions that kind of are the key revelations for me, starting with this amazing role that these two brothers, Alan Dulles and John Foster Dulles, played in shaping America in the post-World War II era.
I think you can make an argument that they're two of the most influential people of the last half of the 20th century.
Talk a little bit about Who they are and how it is that they came to be such extraordinarily influential figures in our politics.
Well, thank you, Gunn.
I've been a colleague and fan of yours for some time.
Yes, they shaped U.S.
foreign policy for many years.
John Foster Dulles and his younger brother, Allen Dulles.
John Foster was the head of the State Department, Secretary of State under Eisenhower, President Eisenhower, and his brother at the same time became head of the CIA.
They were Quite wealthy.
They'd been running the largest law firm on Wall Street, Sullivan and Cromwell, for a number of years, from the 1930s or 20s on.
And they had always been, though, I think, focused on power.
And they finally achieved that one-two punch during the president Eisenhower's administration, when Allen became CIA director and his older brother became an estate partner.
Eisenhower essentially outsourced the foreign policy of the U.S.
to the brothers.
They ran it for him.
He said later, bitterly, as he left office, President Eisenhower, that Allen Dulles had left him a legacy of ashes, and that's what they did.
They left him a Cold War exterminationist policy towards the Soviet Union, which we, unfortunately, are continuing today.
So the farewell address that Dwight Eisenhower gave in 1961 has become, I think, widely celebrated.
It obviously gave us this term, the military-industrial complex.
Eisenhower had seen it all, right?
He was a five-star general, war hero from World War II, served eight years as American president.
From 1952 until 1960, and he chose, with his 15 minutes he had on national television, to spend a good amount of that speech warning about the dangers of the military-industrial complex, how it would become more powerful than even the democratically elected president or democratic institutions.
Do you think that the role that Allendale has played in expanding the CIA into this behemoth that Nobody could control, no one even really knew what it was doing, including Eisenhower, was a part of what shaped those warnings and that perspective that he had?
Yeah, look, I think Eisenhower was a little hypocritical in delivering that speech.
I'm glad he did.
It's become a very famous speech, as you point out.
And yet he empowered the military-industrial complex as president.
He thought that empowering Dulles, Allen Dulles, of the CIA was war on the cheap.
The assassinations, the overthrows of governments, the coups that Allen Dulles was responsible for as CIA director during the 50s and during the Cold War were endorsed by President Eisenhower.
So he allowed the military industrial complex under the Dulles brothers to really grow to Frankenstein proportions.
And then he realized, yes, as he was leaving office, that, oh, I better warn the nation about this.
So there's a bit of hypocrisy, I think, in what he did.
The focus on the CAA kind of comes and goes, ebbs and flows.
There was a great deal of focus on it in the mid-1970s with the Church Committee.
That was probably the first time Americans really got a clear glimpse of, not a full glimpse, but still a clear glimpse of what the CIA was capable of doing when nobody was watching it with these kind of unlimited powers it had, unmoored from any legal constraints.
But we actually started focusing again on it with the emergence of Donald Trump and the kind of word that he waged and that he had waged on him by the CIA, by the FBI, kind of denounced him publicly.
They did a lot to undermine his presidency.
I think because the CIA has such a kind of mythical role in the United States, people don't realize that it didn't always exist.
We didn't always have this part of the government that was completely secretive, that was there to kind of operate without democratic accountability.
It was this creation under Harry Truman with the National Security Act.
When the CIA was created, when this kind of part of the U.S. security state was created to confront the Soviet Union to wage the Cold War, what was the thinking of the people who Did they have kind of a limited vision of what the CIA would be or did they ever imagine that it would end up being this kind of monster that was out of everybody's control?
Well, I think you put your finger on it.
President Harry Truman, when he created the CIA in 1947, saw it as an agency that would just collate the information that the president needs about other countries.
He did not see it as a, quote, Gestapo that was acting on its own to overthrow governments and kill people.
So he thought, President Truman, that it was out of control, and he couldn't control it.
He wrote an op-ed piece only a week or so after the Kennedy assassination in 1963, saying the CIA indeed was out of control.
And there was overthrowing governments and doing dark deeds around the world.
And a lot of people interpreted that as the CIA had brought home its killing machine to kill President Kennedy.
Alan Dahls flew down to Missouri to confront the aging Harry Truman at that point, said, you didn't mean to write this op-ed in the Washington Post.
Will you please retract it?
But he was stubborn.
He said, no, I did write it.
And I meant every word of it.
So, Alan Dahls did the next best thing, which a spymaster would do.
He went back and changed the record.
He said that the op-ed piece had been written by one of Harry Truman's underlings, that he didn't know what he was doing, he's quite old, and so forth.
That went into the CIA record.
So, often Alan Dahls would change reality through the written word, through the documents.
And that's what he was doing, or tried to do, in the case of Harry Truman.
So yes, it was supposed to be a very limited, I think, agency in the beginning.
There was some attempt, you're right, to establish congressional oversight over the agency in the 1970s during the Frank Church investigation, but that was very limited.
And the new books that really tout that, that say the CIA has been brought to heel, are ridiculous.
The CIA largely does what it wants to do to this very day.
Yeah, absolutely.
One of the things that really kind of blew me away in reading your book was, you know, World War II plays such a central role in the mythology of the United States.
It's the thing that Kind of almost every American agrees was this just war, maybe the last like obviously just war that we fought.
It's something so central to the ability to get Americans on board.
If you notice, I'm sure you notice, but every time it comes time for a new war, The framework of World War II and Nazism is instantly imposed.
Every new country that we want to go to war with gets depicted as the new Hitler that's happening now with Vladimir Putin, Benjamin Netanyahu said Hamas are the new Nazis.
It was done with Ahmadinejad and Saddam Hussein and Muammar Gaddafi and on and on.
There's so many different Hitlers and yet the Kind of central fairy tale which is that the United States stood firmly opposed to Nazism before World War II.
We entered World War II to defeat it and then afterward it became our implacable enemy.
There's a lot more nuance and complexity to the United States' relationship to Nazism and Nazis both before World War II and after.
You talk about the Dulles' relationship with Nazi Germany before the war and kind of close up to the war but then also after the war there was some contact between that part of the security state and American Nazism.
Talk about what that relationship was both before World War II and then after.
Yeah, I'm very glad, Glenn, that you raised this.
Look, I think the Cold War policy of the U.S., I said earlier it was an exterminationist policy against the Soviet Union, was a Nazi ideology.
And The truth is, the historical truth, is that the Cold War apparatus in this country and what was left of the Nazi regime were coalesced in the years after the war against the Soviet Union.
Alan Dulles, even during the war, I think acted as a double agent in Switzerland.
working for the OSS, the predecessor to the CIA.
He was ostensibly working for President Roosevelt, but he was really meeting secretly with Nazis all during the war.
A man like Karl Wolf, who was head of the SS in Italy, he saved his neck when he was surrounded, Wolf was, at a villa in northern Italy by Italian partisans.
He sent a raiding party, the Allendals, to save him.
Reinhard Galen was head of Hitler's intelligence on the Eastern Front, very bloody, bloody front during the war.
He was rehabilitated by Allendalz after the war and became head of West German intelligence, one of our key, one of the CIA's key allies.
All during the Cold War period into the 1960s.
This is a man, Reinhard Galen, who should have faced prosecutors at Nuremberg after the war.
Instead, he became head of West German intelligence because of Allen Dulles.
So, So, the exterminationist view of Russia, of the Soviet Union that the Nazis held during the war, was, I think, incorporated, introduced into the Cold War orthodoxy of the intelligence apparatus in this country.
And I think the alliance between Elmdahls' CIA and the West German intelligence apparatus under Reinhard Galen has to be closely looked at.
Yeah, I mean, it was even to the point where there were some major Nazi war criminals who ended up not going to Nuremberg, not being put on trial, not being punished in any way because Allen Dulles intervened on their behalf.
There was this idea that Nazi scientists could help the American space program, that Nazi scientists or Nazi intelligence agents would be helpful to the United States in the fight against Russia since Nazi Germany fought Russia, the Soviets, during World War II.
There was this recent incident in Canada where the Canadian parliament, to the great humiliation of Justin Trudeau and to the Canadians, stood with President Zelensky and gave that standing ovation to somebody who ended up, oops, being a member stood with President Zelensky and gave that standing ovation to somebody who ended up, oops, being a member of the
And I think the idea with this kind of now newfound focus on Russia as this enemy is that, you know what, maybe anybody who ended up fighting Russia Is something that we ought to applaud because there's kind of this revisionism now to suggest that well, maybe the Russians Were an even worse threat at least as bad, but maybe even worse than Nazi Germany Was that a pervasive idea in the American government in the CIA?
After World War two that like yeah, of course the Nazis were pretty bad We just got in the end up we just got done fighting them But on some level maybe it's those Russians who were even worse and we can work with the Nazis in our crusade against the Soviets Absolutely.
It was the view of Cold War leaders in this country, including Allen Dulles, that the former Nazis formed a bulwark against the Soviet Union, against Soviet expansionism.
But it extended to liberals in their countries.
Reinhard Galen, this ex-Nazi spy chief who became head of the West German intelligence, had plans actually to exterminate, after the war, liberal journalists and politicians in West Germany.
That was known to Alan Dulles and the CIA, his plans.
So, yes, they were a bulwark of sorts against the Soviet Union, but in fact, they repressed, I think, progressive elements at home.
Now, let me also add that Reinhard Galen was a terrible spy.
His organization was infiltrated heavily by Soviet spies during the Cold War, and he was clueless about that.
So, in actuality, he was not really good at the spycraft that he, you know, pretended he was so good at.
One of the major topics of your book, of course, is the relationship between Allen Dulles, on the one hand, and the CIA, and JFK.
And you talk about the assassination of JFK.
And I think it was very commendable what you did, which was you treated the topic journalistically, so you never went further than what the evidence permits for you to go.
But obviously, one of the theories that people had long
I suspected, and I think that your book gave a lot of fuel to, was this anger that Allen Dulles felt towards JFK because of the fact that JFK finally did the unthinkable, fired Allen Dulles after the debacle of the Bay of Pigs, and Allen Dulles was obviously furious that this sort of newcomer, this young president, would fire Allen Dulles, this person who saw the CIA as his own kind of fiefdom,
What possibility or probability do you assign to the possibility that Alan Dulles was in some way involved in the assassination of JFK?
Well, look, before I wade into those waters, I want to say this book, my book, fortunately, was a New York Times bestseller, despite the New York Times.
It was completely blacklisted, blacked out by the Washington Post, by the New York Times, by every major media outlet.
The Washington Post book editor told my publicist at a major New York publishing company, we won't touch this book with a 10-foot pole.
That's an exact quote.
Every book that I've written before that book, before The Devil's Just Word, was reviewed very favorably by the press in this country.
So there is a reason why they wouldn't go there.
Because I raised issues that are impermissible.
That are taboo.
And one of the taboo topics in this country, the United States, is the assassination of President Kennedy, which happened almost 60 years ago.
Still, at this late date, the media refuses to, I think, seriously consider the possibility that elements of the U.S.
government killed the president.
Now, why do I think this was organized, the killing and the cover-up, by Alan Dulles?
And by the way, I have a long chapter in my book called The Power League.
Allen Dulles would never have acted on his own against a president who he despised.
He always acted on behalf of his wealthy and powerful clients.
And I believe that Alan Dulles was not alone in doing this, that he was backed by people who are very powerful in the national security state and on Wall Street, where he'd spent most of his career.
So, Alan Dulles was head of the CIA, and he was, as you say, fired by President Kennedy after the disastrous invasion of Cuba.
in April 1961.
He was given a medal when President Kennedy was ushered honorably out the door, but he despised the president for firing him.
He couldn't believe that this young, untested president had the temerity to fire someone as senior as him, someone as powerful as him.
I believe that he turned his house in Georgetown, the neighborhood in Washington, into an anti-Kennedy, then, operation.
CIA, high-level CIA operatives, deputies, continued to report to Allen Dulles in the months and years after his firing, including James Angleton and Richard Helms, who later became head of the agency.
I think John McCone, who was put in charge of the agency by President Kennedy was a figurehead.
He didn't know what was going on.
The people who really understood how the CIA operated were still in charge.
Alan Dahls was still in charge and his deputies.
Then he conveniently had himself appointed to the Warren Commission.
This political enemy of the President was put in charge of the investigation of the murder of the President.
This should have been, I think, spotlighted by the press, should have been debated by the press.
Instead, he was seen as a wise man doing his national duty by serving on the Warren Commission.
After the president was killed.
In fact, he suppressed information, vital information, that would have brought the CIA and the FBI into focus during the investigation.
He ran a cover-up, not a real investigation, Allen Dulles.
So, I believe that he had the motive, that he certainly had the killing machine, he used the killing machine again and again.
to overthrow governments, to kill people overseas that he thought were opposed to U.S. interests.
I believe he brought that killing machine home.
Now, the assassination operation for the CIA was run by a guy named William Harvey, very promoted, very respected figure within the CIA.
And I asked for his travel records because his own deputy, he was at the Rome station at the time President Kennedy was killed.
The CIA had stashed him away there because Bobby Kennedy, who was Attorney General at the time, wanted to fire him.
But they stashed him in Rome.
He flew, apparently, to Dallas in the weeks or days before the assassination.
Why the hell was the Rome station chief going to Dallas when his own deputy, Mark Wyatt, confronted him saying, why are you going to Dallas?
He said to look around.
I later, while I was doing my research for the book, demanded that the CIA, under the Freedom of Information Act, Supply Harvey's travel records.
They refused to release those almost 60 years later.
So, you know, they have something, I think, to hide.
They still, at this late date, are withholding thousands of documents, the CIA, that relate to President Kennedy's assassination and his presidency.
It's an outrage.
These belong to the American people and they should be released.
Yeah, I mean, one of the things that when I read your book, I may have known this before, but I never really focused on it so much as when I was immersed in your book.
And by the way, let me say, I wish I had read your book when it came out so that I could have been one of the voices in the media kind of countervailing this blackout.
Because ever since I've read it, I've done nothing but sing its praises.
I've told people in my audience so many times, if you read one book and you want to understand what the CIA is, read The Devil's Chessboard.
It really is, you know, I don't think you can understand the U.S.
security state, the CIA, the deep state, whatever you want to call it, without this book.
I really believe that.
But one of the things that really amazed me was the fact that Allen Dulles ended up on the Warren Commission, because even back then, There was a lot of skepticism about who killed JFK.
There was a lot of doubt and a lot of cynicism on the part of the American public about whether Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone, whether there were powerful forces behind the killing.
To have Allen Dulles, who basically owned the CIA, and as you say, even once he was fired, he still exerted immense influence within the CIA.
It's like when these guys leave the CIA, John Brennan and David Petraeus and James Clapper, who leaves the top level, they're not really out of the intelligence community, they're still very much connected to it.
The fact that he ended up on the Warren Commission by itself shows the Warren Commission as a joke and a fraud.
Was that a source of anger and journalistic protest at the time, or was American journalism So deferential to the U.S.
security state, to the kind of powers that be, that they just kind of accepted Allen Dulles as, as you said, as this wise man whose experience would be helpful.
Yeah, the latter.
The American media.
Jan Wiener, who is publisher of Rolling Stone, the founder of Rolling Stone Magazine, was on my board at Salon.
And I remember a meeting with Jan, where we were hanging out in his office in New York, and he said to me, very skeptically, If there was a conspiracy to kill the president, the media would have uncovered this years ago.
Somebody would have talked.
That's ridiculous.
You and I know how supine the American media is.
They're a lapdog.
And yes, they were even more so during the investigation of President Kennedy's murder.
Alan Dulles was friends with all these people.
Friends with the people ran CBS, the Paley family.
Friends with the Salzburgers at the New York Times.
At the New York Times, they called him Ali.
He was so close to them.
Newsweek, I found this letter from the Newsweek editor in his own files, in Dulles' files at Princeton.
He was quite proud of it.
It was a letter from the editor of Newsweek thanking Alan Dulles for shaping coverage of the Warren Report after it came out.
He said, we had a tight deadline.
It was so great to have you.
Tell us what to write, how to cover this document.
I mean, it's outrageous.
So yes, the American media was a collaborator with the Warren Commission, not a critic.
You know, I think there's all this debate all this time about what the political bias or the ideological bias of the American corporate media is.
And oftentimes people debate, is it left wing?
Is it right wing?
And I guess You know, on certain issues, social issues and the like, you can probably trace a liberal bias, obviously.
People who work in large city media outlets in New York and Washington tend to be more liberal in a sort of like very, you know, kind of like cultural way.
But I've always thought that the primary ideology of the American media is servitude to the U.S.
foreign policy community, to the CIA, to the intelligence community.
You go back decades and you see Reports, I mean here in Brazil, for example, I spent a lot of time focused on the 1964 coup that was threatened by the Kennedy administration, then the Johnson administration, for the failure of Brazil's elected president to move further away from Moscow.
He was kind of this, you know, center-left figure who was doing things like rent control and land reform, and that was too much for Washington.
They engineered a coup working with right-wing Brazilian generals, and that led to a 21-year dictatorship that the CIA supported.
And you go back and read Time Magazine, which for kids out there used to actually matter and be influential in the New York Times, invariably they would describe these coups as revolutions against corruption or blows for democracy.
They would constantly describe things through the lens of the U.S. security state and how they wanted to propagandize the public to see it.
Do you think, I mean, there have been times after the Iraq war where the New York Times apologized for being too credulous about the things they were being fed by the intelligence community.
Do you think that subservient relationship between the corporate media on the one hand and the U.S. government on the other has gotten worse, has gotten better, or more or less is what it's always been?
Thank you.
Well, I'm full of dismay as a journalist about how corrupt and how close the corporate media is to the national security state.
You're right, going back to President Kennedy's time, it's clear to me, I interviewed his Secretary of Defense, Robert McNamara, among many others.
It was clear to me that President Kennedy would not pursue a war, an expanded war in Vietnam.
He would have withdrawn those troops.
He was attempting to have a rapprochement with Castro in Cuba, with Khrushchev in the Soviet Union.
And yes, the American media went along with him, partly, and partly was very critical of him.
And he realized that he was creating great tensions within the country, including the media, as he pursued his policies of peace, JFK.
Today, unfortunately, you see it again and again.
The New York Times, yes, did apologies after the fact about Iraq, the invasion of Iraq, which has been a complete disaster.
But where they did, they buried that apology on page 14, I think.
Their Nord Stream pipeline explosion.
It was clear to Seymour Hersh, it was clear to me, and other people looked into it, other journalists, that this was a CIA Ukrainian operation meant to damage the energy interests of Russia.
And yet the New York Times is confounded, is mystified by this explosion.
What's happening in Gaza and Israel, once again, I think the one-side coverage in this country and the clampdown on dissent in this country, you know, debate within political leaders and intellectuals and artists is frightening, I think.
The American media speaks as one voice on one issue after the next, particularly when it comes to wars, wars that we're involved in.
Yeah, I mean the fact that Seymour Hersh, one of the greatest journalists of, you know, the last several decades, can't get published in any major American media outlet speaks volumes about the, not about Seymour Hersh, but about the nature of corporate media.
I want to actually talk a little bit, with the time I have left, about the Current state of the CIA and the political framework as pertains to it in terms of who's now skeptical of it and who isn't.
But before I do, I just want to stay with the JFK thing for just a little bit longer because you referenced earlier the fact that Allen Dulles hated JFK.
And of course there are people who insist that the CIA had no role in JFK's killing because they're just kind of hacks and, you know, spokespeople for the US government.
But there are people who are very strong critics of the CIA, people like Noam Chomsky, who have objected to the notion that there was anywhere near sufficient tension between the CIA and JFK that they would want to kill him because according to Noam Chomsky, his view, JFK was basically doing everything the CIA wanted with some exceptions.
I mean, he was the one who authorized the Bay of Pigs invasion, the attempts to remove Fidel Castro from power.
He was the one who authorized the deployment of thousands of military advisors to Vietnam on the way to Probably the deployment of combat troops.
And so his argument is, and he's generally an opponent of these kinds of theories, these kind of conspiracy theories, and that's what it is.
A conspiracy theory, sometimes those are true, sometimes those are false.
I don't see that as derogatory.
But his argument is there was no real reason for the CIA to look at JFK as an impediment to what they wanted to do.
How do you see that question?
Well, he's wrong.
I have great respect for Noam Chomsky as well, but unfortunately some of the leading lights of the American left are absolutely wrong about the Kennedy presidency and what it meant to American history.
I did the research.
I interviewed all the people who are still living, who are involved in the Kennedy presidency, and who are around the Kennedy presidency, and I came to a very different conclusion.
JFK was breaking with Cold War orthodoxy.
That's what got him killed.
It's very clear to me as a historian journalist who's done the work that that's what happened.
He broke from the generals.
He broke from the CIA, as I said earlier, to establish peace, a detente with the Soviet Union.
He was very afraid of an accidental nuclear war breaking out.
He himself was a student of history as a young boy.
He had read about World War I and what a calamity that was.
He thought it would be even worse, a nuclear war, if we were plunged into one.
He was dead set.
at establishing peace.
All you have to do is listen to his peace speech that he delivered in June of 1963, I think at Sealand State, at American University, in which he said that we should actually empathize with the Soviet people, with the Russian people.
At the height of the Cold War, he's telling us, the American people, to empathize with our enemies.
I think that's what got him killed, that kind of attitude.
Again and again, Kennedy was intent on peace, withdrawing troops in Vietnam, establishing peace in Cuba, which was a Cold War hotspot at the time, and with the Soviet Union.
And I think because of that, because he was endangering their racket, And let's face it, they make a lot, a lot of money, the military-industrial complex.
You can see how their profits have gone soaring and their stocks, because the wars in the Middle East and Ukraine, it's disgusting, it's blood money.
So billions of dollars are at stake.
And when JFK threatened that, to break from Cold War orthodoxy, he was threatening their racket too.
And that's why they killed him.
Yeah, you know, I think, and I have my difference of the Chomsky including on this, I think sometimes what gets overlooked is maybe JFK didn't usher in a revolution, you know, there was a continuity, but even minor attempts to resist The CIA, especially after eight years of Dwight Eisenhower, who, as you said, basically gave foreign policy to the Dulles brothers, would be seen as a reason for being that angry.
I had RFK Jr.
on my show, and one of the arguments he made about why the CIA and the Dulles part of the sort of shadow government hated JFK so much, and this is an argument I think one of the strongest to support this view, was that he did originally authorize the deployment of military advisors, but when he began to see how many there were and how many were being killed and how many were in danger,
he realized that it had been a major mistake and he was ready he realized that it had been a major mistake and he was ready to sign a deployment order requiring the withdrawal of those military advisors that ended up not happening because And then LBJ gets inaugurated.
And before you know it, you have the Gulf of Tonkin incident and the Senate's authorizing the deployment of actual combat troops and then you have the Vietnam War.
Do you think that's a fairly accurate description of what JFK was doing with regard to the Vietnam War? - Sure.
Yeah, I think he was appalled by the killing.
I think that's true.
Bobby Kennedy Jr.
has that right.
You know, I just spent the last two years investigating Kennedy's policy in Vietnam with Oliver Stone because I wrote the screenplay for Oliver, which I hope is made into a Hollywood movie now.
And so we both investigated this quite deeply.
And of course, Oliver Stone has a big stake in Vietnam.
He was there as a soldier.
He got wounded.
He killed people.
He's not proud of that.
He did the movie JFK.
He's very invested in this subject, and he's done a lot of reading and thinking about it.
So between the two of us, I think we came to the right conclusion.
Kennedy was withdrawing from Vietnam.
He intended to withdraw after he was safely reelected in 64.
He didn't believe that it was a winnable war.
Douglas MacArthur, the general, had warned him not to get involved in a land war in Asia.
He didn't want to do that.
He didn't want another Korea.
It was quite clear from talking to McNamara as Secretary of Defense and others that that's what he intended to do.
No, Bobby Kenny, by the way, you brought him up, Bobby Kenny Jr.
I met with Bobby some 20 years ago, and I told him that it would be remarkable if he looked into the assassination of his father and his uncle.
He looked down his plate.
I met with him at the Parker House Hotel in Boston 20 years ago, and he said, we, meaning his generation, were always taught to look forward, not back.
He refused to go there, to the dark side, and who killed his uncle and father.
He did.
I think in the later years, because of my book and others, he did what was necessary.
I have a lot of respect for his commitment to finding the truth.
A commitment, unfortunately, not shared by most of his family.
Yeah, I mean, I had him on and I definitely disagreed with some of his positions, including on Israel, but I walked away thinking he was one of the most kind of open-minded and earnest people I've ever encountered in terms of being a political candidate on that level.
Somebody very willing to kind of change their mind, to rethink their foundational views.
And obviously growing up as a member of the Kennedy family and being so entrenched in the Democratic Party, They were kind of, as you said, taught not to question those things, and he finally is, and that has alienated from his family.
Let me just ask you, because I could talk to you all night, and I'm going to for sure ask you to come back on, because I have so many things to talk about.
I'm going to try and just, in respect for your time, pick a couple of questions that move us forward to where we are today.
One of the things that Donald Trump did, Regardless of what you think about him was as I said he picked very public fights with the CIA with the FBI in part because he was angry about the Russiagate narrative that they had created but for other reasons as well and one of the things he had promised to do in addition to doing things like pardoning Julian Assange and Edward Snowden was declassifying all of the JFK documents and Why do you think he didn't?
it had been spent 65 years.
There's no conceivable reason that the government should be able to keep those documents secret for anywhere near this period of time.
And yet, on his way out with the impeachment trial hanging over his head, he neither pardoned Assange nor Snowden, nor did he order these declassification documents of the CIA.
Why do you think he didn't?
What kind of leverage was exerted to prevent him from doing that?
Well, look, I have mixed feelings myself at the Trump presidency in In some ways, I think he's right that there would not be a war in the Ukraine if he had been re-elected, because he knew what to tell Putin, and he knew how to horse straight with leaders like that.
I think, though, he got rolled a lot of his presidency.
He talked a good game, but he got rolled.
He should have released his JFK documents, and he didn't.
He should have stood up more often to the CIA, and he didn't.
I think they did roll him because they're so powerful, essentially, and they threatened him again and again.
But, you know, he didn't have the wherewithal to stand up to them.
I think the COVID lockdown, he now admits that was a mistake.
He listened to Dr. Fauci.
He didn't listen to his own instincts.
And I think that was a terrible thing for the American people, the way that was implemented by the government.
David, there was this exchange on the Rachel Maddow program days before Donald Trump was inaugurated that was one of the most unwittingly revealing clips I've ever seen where Chuck Schumer went on Rachel Maddow's show.
It was a day after Donald Trump had mocked the CIA for getting Iraq wrong and this kind of open warfare erupted.
And Chuck Schumer said something to Rachel Maddow that Everybody in Washington thinks, but you're never supposed to say, let me just show you, and for the audience who hasn't seen it, play this short clip, because I want to ask you about it.
The latest statement, latest tweet, as you were just saying, President-elect's latest unsolicited pronouncement on the intelligence community.
This was his tweet just a little while ago tonight.
You see the scare quotes there.
The intelligence briefing on so-called Russian hacking was delayed until Friday.
Perhaps more time needed to build a case.
Very strange.
We're actually told, intelligence sources tell NBC News since this tweet has been posted, that actually this intelligence briefing for the President-elect was always planned for Friday.
It hasn't been delayed.
But he's taking these shots, this antagonism is taunting to the intelligence community.
You take on the intelligence community, they have six ways from Sunday at getting back at you.
So, even for a practical, supposedly hard-nosed businessman, he's being really dumb to do this.
What do you think the intelligence community would do if they were motivated to?
I don't know, but from what I've been told, They are very upset with how he has treated them.
Very upset with how he's treated them.
Well, let's leave aside the fact, David, that Rachel Maddow began as this very kind of left-wing voice.
And before you know it, she's working for NBC News, and she goes around saying things like, intelligence sources tell NBC News, and treating it as the gospel.
I guess that's just what happens when you get a $30 million contract from a corporation.
You start becoming very compliant with what you're supposed to do.
But what Chuck Schumer there said was kind of amazing.
It should create a revolution if you really think about it, which is you don't go around criticizing the CIA, even if you're the President of the United States, because they have six different ways till Sunday to get back at you.
In other words, the CIA is more powerful than the President.
If you criticize the CIA, they will destroy you.
And this is something Chuck Schumer is saying.
It's common knowledge in Washington, which it is.
Do you think that the CIA ended up attempting to or in fact subverting or in other ways undermining Trump's candidacy and especially his presidency?
Yes, I do.
And I'm no fan of President Trump, as you know.
I'm a critic of his.
But I think he was undermined again and again by what he called the deep state, and what I call the national security state.
They didn't trust him.
They wanted the president to be Hillary Clinton, and they resented him from day one.
And they tried to sabotage his presidency.
I believe Chuck Schumer, I remember that statement, was speaking the truth.
The CIA is its own government.
It does what it wants to do.
You piss them off at your own liability.
So he was telling President Trump, wise up, they're coming after you.
I believe that President Trump, unfortunately, as I said earlier, did compromise again and again.
But we know that how powerful they are.
MSNBC, where Rachel Maddow supposedly rules, reigns as a liberal voice, is nothing but owned, I think, an apparatus owned by the national security state.
Again, again, you have guests from that world, the NSA, the CIA, the FBI, on her show.
Not as someone that she grills, but as happy collaborators of hers on the show.
CNN, the same thing.
Ex-generals.
So, in the old days, it used to be Operation Mockingbird.
The CIA had to do this all secretly, you know, influence the press.
Now, they do it out front.
They own the press.
I mean, they are the press.
So people like us at Ceylon, it was a happy coincidence that we were able to operate independently for a while.
The Intercept did.
You obviously do down in Brazil.
But it takes people in kind of funny corners of the media to speak the truth because the mainstream media is full of lies.
Absolutely.
David, last question.
You know, if you look at the history of American politics in the 1960s, the 1970s, there was a lot of uproar and upheaval because people were angry about the Vietnam War.
They were angry about the CIA and the FBI and a lot of what it was doing.
And oftentimes that anger came from the American left or from American liberals.
Even going into the 1980s, the opposition to the CIA dirty wars in Central America under President Reagan, that was definitely the breakdown, including following 9-11.
And now if you look at polling data or media commentary and the like, what it shows continuously, consistently, is that the people who now hold the CIA, the FBI, Homeland Security in the highest regard are people who self-identify as Democrats and American liberals and the people who now harbor skepticism toward and even distrust of these agencies are people on the American right.
Is this shift something that you've seen before and how do you explain it?
Yeah, I think it's bizarre, Glenn, and I can't stand it.
You know, I was only two years old.
I was a young Vietnam War protester, and our leaders were on the left, Tom Hayden, Jane Fonda, people like that, that we looked to.
And we were applauded when Democrats in Congress began to vote against funding that war in Vietnam in the 1970s, and finally had the courage to cut off funding for the Vietnam War.
Those people came from the Democratic side.
But you're right.
The Democrats have now become the war party.
That's why I told Bobby Kenney Jr.
if he decided to leave the party, after all his family's commitment to that party, after all it meant to them, that I would be with him.
Because I've been a lifelong Democrat, and I too am dismayed, depressed, angry at what the party has become, the war party.
So yes, I do believe that some weird transformation has happened in this country, and that we are now seeking, or we're looking, we're witnessing a new realignment in American politics.
Well, David, I know it sounds a little odd because I'm a few years late, but it's the first time I've gotten to tell you directly that I want to congratulate you on this book, which I really regard as an indispensable book, one of the most important books written in years in American political life.
And I really appreciate your taking the time to come on our show and talk about it.
I hope to have you back on again soon because you're such an important voice that is connected to these issues in a way not many people are.
