Somewhere, Allen Dulles is smiling: Dallas + 60

By Scott Ross

“I’m afraid, based on my own experience, that fascism will come to America in the name of national security.” ― Jim Garrison

22 November 1963: The day our pretense of representative democracy died at noon (high noon, or as close as makes no nevermind, a time appropriate to legends of the West) on a Texas street. I was just under three years of age, so of course I remember nothing of that day, or of the days that followed. The only reason I knew anything at all about John Fitzgerald Kennedy was because of a memorial album of his speeches in my parents’ record collection, although I did not understand more than a few words of it until as an adolescent I listened to it again. My knowledge of how he died was restricted to a tall, slender commemorative hardcover book called, after a line in his Inaugural address, The torch is passed… This was, of course, mythology, embracing as it did the inane accusations against Lee Harvey Oswald, surely involved in some way with what happened that day but just as assuredly not as a shooter — or, as a contemporary 45 by Anthony Newley I picked up in a bargain bin when I was 10 or so had it, a “mad assassin.” There was nothing mad about the people (plural) who fired their high-powered rifles (no Mannlicher-Carcanos in their hands!) from multiple angles toward the president’s open car that day; as cold and calculating a bunch as can be imagined. The hagiography fairly drips from Newley’s lyrics, and the heavenly choir in the background is a marker of conventional public grief. I don’t doubt his sincerity, or his passion, but listening to the record today my gorge becomes buoyant at the sanctimonious attempt to turn the man into, at the very least, a demi-god. (The “B” side offering, a folk-flavored setting by Newley of Walt Whitman’s “Oh, Captain! My Captain!” was subtler, and less lachrymose.)

While I had begun to suspect by that age that the charges of a larger conspiracy I had begun to pick up in pieces via the broader culture probably had some meat to them, I didn’t know nearly enough… although I the not-enough I did know was sufficient to make me laugh at a joke by Woody Allen on one of his nightclub LPs, reissued as a set when I was 14, when he says he’s “working on a non-fiction version of the Warren Report.” Hearing a recording of a late-1960s campus address by Mark Lane on public radio during the Carter years probably opened more doors of enquiry to me than anything else I’d read or heard before it, but it wasn’t until around 2017 that I dug deeply into what is now, at least to this writer, incontrovertibly a plot between, at the very least, factions within the CIA, the FBI, the “anti-Castro” Cuban community in America, the Mafia and, in all likelihood, some elements in the DoD, the Secret Service and the Dallas police department.

I did not come to my conclusions, as many did, in 1991, when Oliver Stone’s genuinely ground-breaking JFK hit the theaters.* I am ashamed to admit that I was kept from this remarkable, and consequential, movie by a misleading article in the then occasionally still-useful magazine The Advocate, with its provocative yellow-press headline (“Oliver Stone’s JFK — Pinko Homos Iced the Prez?”) I associated Stone with the ludicrous sexual elements of Midnight Express, for which he had been given an Academy Award, and was in no mood to sit through a three-hour attack on my sexuality. That JFK is of course no such thing, and that there were homosexual (and presumably bisexual) men prominent in the New Orleans and Dallas underworld-CIA-FBI nexus is now understood, at least by those not attempting to run cover for the permanent American government: In addition to Oswald’s assassin Jack Ruby and Oswald himself, possibly (or so Joan Mellon suggests) involved with Ruby, which makes the killing doubly weird, there were the genuinely bizarre David Ferrie and the businessman Clay Shaw, the man Jim Garrison, the New Orleans District Attorney, charged with complicity in Kennedy’s murder and whose CIA connections and activity are now well-documented. Shaw’s trial, which ended in acquittal, is still the only one related to Kennedy’s murder in the past six decades, but much of what Garrison got out there, including the heretofore suppressed Zapruder film of the assassination, stuck, even if it seems to be fading away today.

My immersion into the labyrinth surrounding the killing of John F. Kennedy came much later, as I said, when I was forced to leave the rented home I had maintained for years and made to move elsewhere. I needed something to listen to while clearing through 13 years’ worth of living in a mandated six weeks, and somehow — I no longer recall the route that brought me there — found myself down the JFK rabbit-hole. Or holes, as there are far too many burrows in that particular warren to constitute a single edifice. Sometime, months (or was it years?) later I re-emerged, shaken to my bones by what I’d learned not merely about the events in Dallas but also about the subsequent murders of Dorothy Killgallen, Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy from Lane, Mellon, Stone, Garrison, Douglas Horne, L. Fletcher Prouty, Cyril Wecht, Alan Dale, David Talbot, Gaeton Fonzi, David Lifton, Lisa Pease, John Barbour, Len Osanic, Brent Holland, Harold Weisberg, Sylvia Meagher, Michael Parenti, Jim Marrs, Joseph McBride, Richard Belzer and David Wayne and, although he annoys me thoroughly, James DiEugenio. Do some of their theories and presented evidence contradict those of the others? Yes. Does everyone agree on everything? By no means. Does every one of them agree on the basics? Absolutely. There is no question, if one has examined the events even cursorily, that a thinking person can come to any conclusion other than that the President of the United States was murdered by a cabal of proto-fascists, inside the government and out of it, whose conspiracy 60 years ago, and about which we as Americans have still been told nothing close to the truth, has led us to the foul, pestilent present we inhabit.

When friends have from time to time over the past several years asked me why I care so much about that day six decades ago in Dallas I reply with two observations: a) a man was murdered, horribly; and b) it was the day everything changed. Kennedy’s public murder was the event that made possible the growth and consolidation of what Dwight Eisenhower (who helped create it) in his farewell address to the nation famously called the military-industrial complex. The president’s killing showed the world — much of which, being older and more experienced in such things than Americans, understood the shooting in Texas to be a palace coup — that CIA and DoD ran things. Whether Lyndon Baines Johnson was involved in it beyond being told of the coming assassination I don’t pretend to know, but he was placed in the car just behind Jack Kennedy’s where his masters could assure him of a good, hard look at his boss’s brains being blown out by rifle shots from three different directions. One of Johnson’s first acts as president four days later? Rescinding and reversing Kennedy’s recent NSAM (National Security Action Memorandum) 263 dated 11 October 1963 drawing down the troops in Vietnam. LBJ had obviously seen enough.

Some readers of these words, born after that terrible day in 1963 know little or nothing about John F. Kennedy, or his murder, or the Warren Commission, and many don’t care. They certainly have not heard of Allen Dulles, the former director of CIA fired by Kennedy over his appalling mishandling of the Bay of Pigs invasion, which the president (“Fucked again!“) had to bear full responsibility for and who, ever-so-coincidentally, headed the official commission of inquiry into the death of the man who’d removed him from his job. It is Dulles’ bloody legacy, as well as that of such sociopaths and psychopaths as James Jesus Angelton and Curtis LeMay, which dictates American foreign and (in complete violation of CIA’s charter and the law) domestic policy. Does anyone with a functioning brain imagine it is accidental that the 342-page USA-PATRIOT Act was all written up and ready to go a mere month after the highly suspicious events of September 11, 2001? If ever a piece of legislation had CIA and NSA fingerprints all over it, surely it was that one. Dallas 11/22/63 announced to all future occupants of the Oval Office that they are not running things. Kennedy was the last man who thought the president was in charge, and he was violently disabused of that notion.

Yet I look in vain on this day for signs from any of the “legacy media” that the events in Dallas in 1963 even happened. Do we see a “Google Doodle” of JFK today? Does Microsoft Edge “news” feature a single story on the anniversary?

They have no more lies, no more phony explanations, no more accusations to make against the shade of Lee Harvey Oswald and so as far as they are concerned… or as far as they want you to believe, which amounts to the same thing… it never happened. And to most Americans under the age of 60, it apparently didn’t happen. “We’ll know our disinformation program is complete,” CIA Director William Casey said to Ronald Reagan in February of 1981, “when everything the American public believes is false.” And lo, it did come to pass. This is why Allen Dulles is smiling.

It isn’t merely that CIA can, through their lackeys in the American press, smear anyone who brings up the myriad contradictions and mind-boggling “coincidences” rampant on that day as a Conspiracy Theorist — a phrase, I would like you to remember, CIA itself decided upon in 1964 to discredit anyone who questioned the fruits of the Warren Commission. No, their lapdogs at Time, MS-NBC, CNN, The New York Times, the Washington Post, Fox News et al. will do the smearing for them and will, as evidenced today, simply fail to note the significance of the day and thus exclude it from the national conversation. It isn’t merely as well that CIA can take out a troublesome president, although the evidence suggests that the one-time CIA Director George Herbert Walker Bush (with Richard M. Nixon one of only two men on earth who claimed not to remember where they were that day in 1963) had dinner with his good friend John Hinckley Sr. the night before his boss was shot on a Washington, D.C. street. It is, rather, the totality of America’s manipulation of world events in the 60 years since pesky little JFK was exterminated that tells us — tells the world — who is in charge. Such neocons as Irving Kristol, Paul Wolfowitz, Elliot Abrams, Richard Perle, Paul Bremer, Dick Chaney, Donald Rumsfeld, Condoleezza Rice, John Bolton, Victoria Nuland, Robert Kagan, David Brooks, Charles Krauthammer, David Frum, Jeffrey Goldberg, Ben Shapiro, Madeline Albright, Joseph Biden, and Bill and Hillary Clinton (and you thought they were “liberals”) in collusion with “think-tanks” (the neologism itself a real howler when you contemplate the depth of the “thought” they produce) like the American Enterprise Institute, the Foundation for Defense of Democracies and the Project for a New American Century have infiltrated government and perpetrated every disastrous, ill-conceived military action of the last 23 years and more. They fail, and fail, and fail again, and never, ever pay for their failure. On the contrary, they show up over and over, in every administration, dreaming their dreams of conquest, depleting our treasure, bringing misery to the earth, and failing yet again.

These brilliant minds, which presumably subsist on a diet of Chardonnay and Magical Thinking, decide on a thing and then decide that thing is true, only to see it, inevitably, blow up in the collective face of the United States. We can cultivate the Mujahideen and get them to weaken the Soviets! We can fund and arm Osama Bin Laden and get him to do our bidding! Saddam has weapons of mass destruction™! Let’s topple him! Gaddafi is a terrorist! Let’s get rid of him! We’ll get Putin to invade Ukraine by provoking him mercilessly, and then the Russians will turn on him! Let’s threaten Venezuela! Let’s threaten China! Let’s threaten Iran! “This time next year we’ll be raising a glass in Tehran,” sez Bolton. They have instead weakened America in the world, run up our deficit, and brought us all to the brink of nuclear annihilation, a thing John F. Kennedy and Nikita Kruschev also did, in 1962, and managed to pull back from. Does anyone in his or her right mind imagine for one moment that Joe Biden is Jack Kennedy?

What emboldens these lunatics is the security they feel knowing CIA is there to provide. Had John Fitzgerald Kennedy lived to extricate America from Vietnam and, as he vowed toward the end, “splinter the CIA into a thousand pieces, and scatter it into the winds,” I do not delude myself into believing we would be living in Shangri-La any more than we would be had Henry Wallace been allowed to be the Vice Presidential nominee in 1944. But could the world that followed possibly have been worse than this one? I beg leave to doubt it.

That is why it matters.

^{Although I feel certain that someone (his mother, most likely) instructed John-John to do this as his dead father’s caisson passed, the Stan Stearns image is one of the most famous of that godforsaken week.}

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*I don’t mean its iconography necessarily, although it’s an often exhilaratingly edited picture, but its role in the passage of the President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act of 1992, although CIA has still managed, in the 30 years since the bill was enacted, to withhold most of the relevant information in its files… if indeed they have not been (as many suspect) summarily destroyed.

Text copyright 2023 by Scott Ross