JFK, Richard Nixon, the CIA, and Watergate

Uncovering the Truth about the JFK Assassination

Two weeks ago I published a long article on the JFK Assassination, pointing to the overwhelming evidence that Kennedy’s own successor Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson had very likely been a central figure in the plot.

I closed the essay by quoting several early paragraphs from a different article that I had published more than six years earlier:

…I never had any interest in 20th century American history. For one thing, it seemed so apparent to me that all the basic political facts were already well known and conveniently provided in the pages of my introductory history textbooks, thereby leaving little room for any original research, except in the most obscure corners of the field.

Also, the politics of ancient times was often colorful and exciting, with Hellenistic and Roman rulers so frequently deposed by palace coups, or falling victim to assassinations, poisonings, or other untimely deaths of a highly suspicious nature. By contrast, American political history was remarkably bland and boring, lacking any such extra constitutional events to give it spice. The most dramatic political upheaval of my own lifetime had been the forced resignation of President Richard Nixon under threat of impeachment, and the causes of his departure from office—some petty abuses of power and a subsequent cover-up—were so clearly inconsequential that they fully affirmed the strength of our American democracy and the scrupulous care with which our watchdog media policed the misdeeds of even the most powerful.

In hindsight perhaps I should have asked myself whether the coups and poisonings of Roman Imperial times were accurately reported in their own day, or if most of the toga-wearing citizens of that era might have remained blissfully unaware of the nefarious events secretly determining the governance of their own society.

Over the last dozen years my understanding of the past century of American history has been upended by several huge revelations, explosive discoveries that had long been concealed from me by the propaganda-bubble of mainstream media coverage in which I’d lived my entire life.

Of these, one of the most important was the true story of the Kennedy assassinations of the 1960s. I had always gullibly accepted the official narrative that a pair of deranged lone gunmen had killed our president and his younger brother. Meanwhile I had totally ignored the vague claims of conspiracy that were very occasionally mentioned with ridicule in the books and articles upon which I relied. Therefore, I was stunned to eventually discover that those vitally important historical events had become the subject of a vast subterranean world of solid scholarship, whose analysis and reconstruction seemed far more substantial and persuasive than what my trusted media sources had ever provided.

After carefully digesting and analyzing all this shocking new information, I eventually published my conclusions in a series of articles over the last six years, notably including these:

American Pravda: The JFK Assassination, Part I – What Happened?
Ron Unz • The Unz Review • June 18, 2018 • 4,800 Words
American Pravda: The JFK Assassination, Part II – Who Did It?
Ron Unz • The Unz Review • June 25, 2018 • 8,000 Words
American Pravda: The JFK Assassination and the Covid Cover-Up
Ron Unz • The Unz Review • December 19, 2022 • 6,900 Words
RFK Jr. vs. I.F. Stone on the Kennedy Assassinations
Ron Unz • The Unz Review • July 31, 2023 • 5,100 Words
American Pravda: JFK, LBJ, and Our Great National Shame
Ron Unz • The Unz Review • June 24, 2024 • 10,200 Words

Richard Nixon and John F. Kennedy

Discovering the truth of the JFK Assassination had completely overturned my accepted framework of modern history. But over the years I’ve encountered numerous lesser surprises as well, not nearly as world-shattering but still quite significant in their own right.

One of these, closely intertwined with Kennedy’s own story, has been my considerable reappraisal of Richard Nixon, the man whom Kennedy very narrowly defeated in 1960 and whose later political resurrection placed him in the White House eight years later. In some respects, their ultimate fates were paired, with Kennedy becoming the only modern American president to died by assassination, while Nixon became the first in more than a century to face impeachment, a legal blow that prompted his resignation, the first in our national history.

I’d known that Kennedy and Nixon had been political contemporaries and the media narrative that I’d casually absorbed had always portrayed them as polar-opposites in their political and ideological characteristics.

Together with his glamourous young wife Jackie, Kennedy had conjured the image of an American Camelot during the early 1960s. Presiding over our country as its royal couple, the youthful Kennedys had been adored by our national elites, ranging from Hollywood stars to leading academic intellectuals. Although the life of that handsome young prince was suddenly cut short by an assassin’s bullet, his heroic achievements remained in our national consciousness throughout the decades that followed. Probably no American political figure of the last century has received such glowing support from our national media and intellectual elites, and their hagiography has pulled along the rest of our citizens. For example, although he served less than three years in office, JFK was recently ranked as our third most popular president after Abraham Lincoln and George Washington.

Meanwhile, that same survey placed Nixon close to the bottom, well below any other modern president. Indeed, prior to the appearance of Donald Trump, I doubt that any other American president of the last one hundred years was so generally hated and despised by our media, a harsh verdict that long preceded his shameful departure from office. Since I was only a child during the Nixon Administration, I had unthinkingly absorbed those sentiments, partly because they were so widely and casually echoed by most of my friends and family members. But although I had never closely studied modern American history, in later years I sometimes wondered why that hostility had been so widespread in our elite media and academic circles.

My impression was that the main charges against Nixon had been his dishonesty, his political ruthlessness, and his cynicism, as demonstrated in the Red-baiting tactics that had helped him climb the greasy political ladder. But as I sometimes turned those notions over in my mind, they left me a little puzzled. Similar criticism seemed almost endemic to our entire political class and I wondered whether Nixon was really so much worse than all of his peers. After all, it was grudgingly conceded that Kennedy’s paper-thin victory in the 1960 presidential race had involved massive voter fraud in Texas and Chicago, so the balance of dishonesty and political ruthlessness hardly seemed entirely one-sided.

Elected to Congress in 1946, Nixon’s meteoric early career had been ignited when he boldly championed the “Pumpkin Papers” charges of Whitaker Chambers against Alger Hiss, in which the rumpled former Communist accused the ultra-respectable New Dealer of having been a longtime Soviet agent. Hiss was a pillar of the East Coast Establishment and the founding Secretary-General of the United Nations Conference, so although he was convicted of perjury and sent to prison, claims that he’d been railroaded spent decades as a leading liberal cause celebre and that surely explained much of the lasting animus the media directed towards the congressman who had ruined him. But the eventual release of the Venona Decrypts in the 1990s conclusively proved that Hiss had been guilty as charged, completely vindicating Nixon.

When Nixon’s political success inspired Sen. Joseph McCarthy to launch an anti-Communist crusade along similar lines, the latter was often far more slipshod and careless in his accusations, and Nixon attracted considerable right-wing animosity when he obliquely criticized McCarthy on those grounds in 1954 at the height of the senator’s power and influence. Ironically enough, it was actually the Kennedys who were close political allies of McCarthy, with Robert Kennedy serving as assistant counsel on his Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations in 1953 after losing out to Roy Cohn in the effort to become McCarthy’s top aide.

It can even be argued that Kennedy had unfairly Red-baited Nixon during their famous 1960 televised presidential debates. The Democratic candidate had been officially briefed on some of the secret plans of the Eisenhower Administration for overthrowing Castro’s Communist regime in Cuba, but then publicly accused Vice President Nixon of doing nothing in that regard, knowing that his opponent was sworn to secrecy on that project and therefore would be left looking weak on Communism.

Sometimes the friendship or hostility of our media determines whether controversial facts are widely broadcast to the world or are instead ignored. During the late 1930s patriarch Joseph Kennedy had made great efforts to discourage Britain from going to war against Nazi Germany and after that war broke out, he did his best to prevent America from joining the conflict. JFK’s famous Pulitzer Prize-winning 1956 bestseller Profiles in Courage included a chapter praising Republican Senate leader Robert Taft for loudly denouncing the blatant illegality of the postwar Nuremberg War Crime Trials, quoting Taft as declaring they “may discredit the whole idea of justice in Europe for years to come.” And in a 2019 article, I noted the shocking revelation of Kennedy’s own private postwar views of the dead German dictator.

A couple of years ago, the 1945 diary of a 28-year-old John F. Kennedy travelling in post-war Europe was sold at auction, and the contents revealed his rather favorable fascination with Hitler. The youthful JFK predicted that “Hitler will emerge from the hatred that surrounds him now as one of the most significant figures who ever lived” and felt that “He had in him the stuff of which legends are made.” These sentiments are particularly notable for having been expressed just after the end of a brutal war against Germany and despite the tremendous volume of hostile propaganda that had accompanied it.

I strongly suspect that if any of these same items had instead appeared on Nixon’s record, they would have received far greater negative public attention over the decades.

The liberal media later castigated Nixon for not ending the Vietnam War after he reached the White House in 1969. But although that charge was reasonable, he was merely continuing a conflict begun and greatly escalated under his Democratic predecessors Kennedy and Johnson.

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