> 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
The phrase "bring an end to the Cold War" may be subject to widely varying but legitimate interpretations.
It's undeniable that Kennedy opened secret backchannel negotiations with Khrushchev that were part of a larger policy shift that probably caused some "members of his own U.S. military-intelligence establishment to regard him as a virtual traitor" -- I mean, just think of Curtis LeMay, his chief of the Strategic Air Command.
There were lots of people like LeMay back then. They would have preferred Kennedy be gone, but that obviously doesn't mean they tried to kill him.
SA