There are two famous NSC directives[forget the numbers] showing K's reluctance over Vietnam. LBJ escalated the war immedietely after assuming power.
> 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.
There is famous photo of Oswald holding up party newspaper's that he was purportedly selling. If you look closely these paper's are the Militant and the People's Weekly World. Eccentric indeed! Oswald defected to the USSR in the 1950's and then returned a few years later--no questions asked--with a Russian wife in tow. Impossible in McCarthyite America. Oswald's tax returns are still classified so noone knows who was paying him all those years. Oswald worked for military intelligence in Korea. Anyone running a Cuba solidarity campaign in early 60's New Orleans[or even today] would be taking their life into their own hands.
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.
Cockburn flip-flopped on the 'conspiracy' business. He coauthored a fine and influential article in 1975 in Harper's on RFK assasination that laid to rest the official version. C now defends the 'magic bullet' theory.
Of course Kennedy was a doctrinaire right-wing anti-communist and imperialist. Noone elected in 1961 wouldn't be. But that's not how his assassins viewed him. The milieu[Birchers, White Russians, Mafia, elements of CIA]that bumped him off saw him as a blood red communist. The kind of people who saw a Communist coup when the DoD refused to carry out Truman's orders to drop nuclear bombs on China and N.Korea during the Korean War. The refusal to use nuclear weapons in Vietnam was also seen as a Communist coup.
Sam Pawlett