[lbo-talk] Why not Paul

Carl G. Estabrook galliher at illinois.edu
Tue Nov 29 17:37:10 PST 2011


Douglass is quite an admirable man whom I was privileged to know slightly long ago. But the book is an extreme case of the wish's being father to the thought.

He argues that, after the Bay of Pigs and the Missile Crisis, Kennedy decided to try and bring an end to the Cold War. This included opening- up secret back-channel dialogue with Nikita Khrushchev in 1963, which "caused members of his own U.S. military-intelligence establishment to regard him as a virtual traitor who had to be eliminated." The book may be fantasy and wrong in its estimate of Kennedy's policy, but it's not absolute nonsense. Daniel Ellsberg blurbed it with "Douglass presents, brilliantly, an unfamiliar yet thoroughly convincing account of a series of creditable decisions of John F. Kennedy - at odds with his initial Cold war stance - that earned him the secret distrust and hatred of hard-liners among the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the CIA." --CGE

On Nov 29, 2011, at 7:22 PM, Doug Henwood wrote:


>
> On Nov 29, 2011, at 8:16 PM, Carl G. Estabrook wrote:
>
>> For the final flowering of the fantasy, see the (very) recent book
>> by theologian James Douglass, JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died
>> and Why It Matters (Orbis, 2008).
>
> What's the soundbite? He didn't die for our sins, did he?
>
> Doug
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