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

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    March 19, 1963 : At a Washington news conference, the CIA-sponsored Cuban exile group Alpha 66 announces its having raided a Soviet “fortress” and ship in Cuba, causing a dozen casualties. The secret purpose of the attack in Cuban waters, according to Alpha 66’s incognito CIA adviser, David Atlee Phillips, is “to publicly embarrass Kennedy and force him to move against Castro.”
    March 31, 1963 : President Kennedy orders a crackdown on Cuban refugee gunboats being run by the CIA out of Miami. Robert Kennedy’s Justice Department confines the movement of anti-Castro commando leaders to the Miami area, while the Coast Guard seizes their boats and arrests the crews.
    April 11, 1963 : Pope John XXIII issues his encyclical letter, Pacem in Terris (“Peace on Earth”). Norman Cousins presents an advance copy in Russian to Nikita Khrushchev. The papal encyclical’s principles of mutual trust and cooperation with an ideological opponent provide a foundation for the Kennedy–Khrushchev dialogue and Kennedy’s American University address in June.
    President Kennedy writes secretly to Premier Khrushchev that he is “aware of the tensions unduly created by recent private attacks on your ships in Cuban waters; and we are taking action to halt those attacks which are in violation of our laws.”
    Also in early April, James Donovan, U.S. negotiator, returns to Cuba to confer with Premier Fidel Castro for the further release of Bay of Pigs prisoners. The CIA attempts through an unwitting Donovan to foist a CIA-contaminated diving suit on Castro, as a gift by the Kennedy-appointed negotiator, in a failed effort to simultaneously assassinate Castro, scapegoat Kennedy, and sabotage a beginning Cuban–American dialogue.
    April 18, 1963 : Dr. Jose Miro Cardona, head of the Cuban Revolutionary Council in Miami, subsidized by the CIA, resigns in protest against Kennedy’s shift in Cuban policy. Cardona concludes from Kennedy’s actions: “the struggle for Cuba is in the process of being liquidated by the [U.S.] Government.”
    May 6, 1963: In another conference on Vietnam chaired by Secretary McNamara at Camp Smith, Hawaii, the Pacific Command finally presents President Kennedy’s long-sought plan for withdrawal from Vietnam. However, McNamara has to reject the military’s overextended time line. He orders that concrete plans be drawn up for withdrawing one thousand U.S. military personnel from South Vietnam by the end of 1963.
    President Kennedy issues National Security Action Memorandum 239, ordering his principal national security advisers to pursue both a nuclear test ban treaty and a policy of general and complete disarmament.
    May 8, 1963 : At a protest in Hue, South Vietnam, by Buddhists claiming religious repression by the Diem government, two explosions attributed to government security forces kill eight people, wounding fifteen others. The government accuses the Viet Cong of setting off the explosions. A later, independent investigation identifies the bomber as a U.S. military officer, using CIA-supplied plastic bombs. The Buddhist Crisis touched off by the Hue explosions threatens to topple Ngo Dinh Diem’s government, destroying the possibility of a Diem–Kennedy agreement for a U.S. military withdrawal from Vietnam.
    June 10, 1963 : President Kennedy delivers his Commencement Address at American University in Washington proposing, in effect, an end to the Cold War. Rejecting the goal of “a Pax Americana enforced on the world by American weapons of war,” Kennedy asks Americans to reexamine their attitudes toward war, especially in relation to the people of the Soviet Union, who suffered incomparable losses in World War II. Now nuclear war would be far worse: “All we have built, all we have worked for, would be destroyed in the first 24 hours.” He announces his unilateral suspension of further nuclear tests in the atmosphere, so as to promote “our primary long-range interest,” “general and