Doug is right on the Kennedy myth.
Noam Chomsky blew this one out of the water in his book 'Rethinking Camelot' (?) which was published around the time of the Oliver Stone film on the assassination. Chomsky does his usual diligent job of mobilising every scrap of evidence to show, beyond doubt, that Kennedy was a hawk on Vietnam. As I remember it, Chomsky credits Arthur Schlesinger as the originator of the myth of Kennedy's reluctance over Vietnam.
Much avoidance of the obvious conclusion on Kennedy - the assassin was a slightly eccentric leftist, who had sold the Militant newspaper, as well as being involved in a lot of cuba solidarity campaigns. Alexander Cockburn once argued that we should embrace Oswald as a hero for killing Kennedy, who was after all something of a mass-murderer. I don't know if political assassination is the best strategy (generally terrorism is an expression of having lost the argument), but the spirit is right.
In message <v0401170db386e61ba934@[166.84.250.86]>, Doug Henwood
<dhenwood at panix.com> writes
>Charles Brown wrote:
>
>>More specifically, this thread is on secret police in the U.S. and the
>>idea is that it was elite U.S.secret police operations that assassinated
>>the Kennedys It was a coup d'etat by one part of the ruling class against
>>another
>
>Far from proved, to put it mildly. Have you been watching a lot of Oliver
>Stone movies?
>
>This whole scenario depends on the belief that JFK was somehow not a good
>imperialist. But he was a rabid anti-Communist who campaigned on the
>fraudulent missile gap; to the Kennedys, Ike wasn't a sufficiently
>aggressive imperialist. He cut taxes on rich people; supply-siders revere
>him as a pioneer.
>
>What about Nixon? Did the CIA depose him, as John Ehrlichman and Kevin
>Phillips say?
>
>Doug
-- Jim heartfield