November 22, 2013, marked the 50th anniversary of the assassination of John F. Kennedy, and might be a good time to revisit Oliver Stone’s 1991 film, JFK, and to re-read James W. Douglass’s book, JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters (Orbis Books, 2005).

Douglass, born in Canada, an academic and peace activist involved with the Catholic Worker, has produced the most carefully documented account of Kennedy’s assassination.  He shows Kennedy’s gradual transformation from Cold Warrior to ardent champion of peace after the Cuban Missile Crisis.

He demonstrates that Kennedy was assassinated by the CIA at the behest of others, quite probably the military Joint Chiefs of Staff, whose first-strike nuclear policy was trying to push the President into war with the Soviet Union.

Lee Harvey Oswald, a former U.S. Marine, who had renounced his U.S, citizenship and moved to Russia, was welcomed home four years later, given back his passport, and relocated to New Orleans, where he began publically to support Cuba, and got himself arrested for handing out pro-Castro pamphlets.  He was all along a secret CIA operative.  At one time was invited to speak to the Jesuit scholastics of the New Orleans Province.  In his talk he raised the possibility of a military coup d’état in the U.S.

By setting up Oswald as an assassin employed by foreign powers, it was hoped that the U.S. government would be pushed into declaring war on both the USSR and Cuba.  The newly sworn-in President, Lyndon Johnson, who became aware of the plot, chose instead to cover it up, and established the Warren Commission to this end.

The CIA made many mistakes in carrying out its complicated plot, and many people who knew something about it were either murdered or died mysteriously shortly afterward.  Douglass does not implicate Lyndon Johnson in the plot but, recently, Johnson’s former mistress did so just before she died.