JFK & the Unspeakable: Why He Died & Why It Matters Read Free

full-scale invasion of Cuba by U.S. troops. Kennedy says he wants “to splinter the CIA in a thousand pieces and scatter it to the winds.”
    June 3-4, 1961: At a summit meeting in Vienna, John Kennedy and Nikita Khrushchev agree to support a neutral and independent Laos—the only issue they can agree upon. Khrushchev’s apparent indifference to the deepening threat of nuclear war shocks Kennedy.
    July 20, 1961 : At a National Security Council Meeting, the Joint Chiefs of Staff and CIA director Allen Dulles present a plan for a preemptive nuclear attack on the Soviet Union “in late 1963, preceded by a period of heightened tensions.” President Kennedy walks out of the meeting, saying to Secretary of State Dean Rusk, “And we call ourselves the human race.”
    August 30, 1961 : The Soviet Union resumes atmospheric testing of thermonuclear weapons, exploding a 150-kiloton hydrogen bomb over Siberia.
    September 5, 1961 : After the Soviet testing of two more hydrogen bombs, President Kennedy announces he has ordered the resumption of U.S. nuclear tests.
    September 25, 1961 : President Kennedy delivers a speech on disarmament at the United Nations in which he states: “The weapons of war must be abolished before they abolish us . . . It is therefore our intention to challenge the Soviet Union, not to an arms race, but to a peace race—to advance together step by step, stage by stage, until general and complete disarmament has been achieved.”
    September 29, 1961 : Nikita Khrushchev writes a first confidential letter to John Kennedy. He smuggles it to the president in a newspaper brought by a Soviet intelligence agent to Kennedy’s press secretary Pierre Salinger. In the letter Khrushchev compares their common concern for peace in the nuclear age “with Noah’s Ark where both the ‘clean’ and the ‘unclean’ found sanctuary. But regardless of who lists himself with the ‘clean’ and who is considered to be ‘unclean,’ they are all equally interested in one thing and that is that the Ark should successfully continue its cruise.”
    October 16, 1961 : Kennedy responds privately to Khrushchev, writing: “I like very much your analogy of Noah’s Ark, with both the ‘clean’ and the ‘unclean’ determined that it stay afloat. Whatever our differences, our collaboration to keep the peace is as urgent—if not more urgent—than our collaboration to win the last world war.”
    October 27-28, 1961 : After a summer of U.S.–Soviet tensions over Berlin culminating in Khrushchev’s August order to erect a wall between East and West Berlin, General Lucius Clay, President Kennedy’s personal representative in West Berlin, provokes a sixteen-hour confrontation between U.S. and Soviet tanks at the Berlin Wall. Kennedy sends an urgent, back-channel appeal to Khrushchev, who then initiates their mutual withdrawal of the tanks, prefiguring the resolution of the Cuban Missile Crisis one year later.
    November 22, 1961 : While refusing the Joint Chiefs’ recommendation that U.S. combat troops be deployed to defeat an insurgency in Vietnam, President Kennedy orders the sending of military advisers and support units—the beginning of a steady military buildup in Vietnam during his presidency.
    November 30, 1961 : President Kennedy authorizes “Operation Mongoose,” a covert-action program “to help Cuba overthrow the communist regime.” He appoints counterinsurgency specialist General Edward Lansdale as its Chief of Operations.
    April 13, 1962 : President Kennedy, backed by overwhelming public support, forces the leaders of the steel industry to rescind a price increase that violates a Kennedy-brokered agreement to combat inflation. Kennedy’s anti-business statements and beginning cancellation of the steel companies’ defense contracts make him notorious among the power brokers of the military-industrial complex.
    April 25, 1962 : As authorized by President Kennedy, the United States sets off the first of a series