by Anton Chaitkin, The Duran:

Click here for the first article in this series “John Diefenbaker’s Northern Vision Sabotaged by Rhodes Scholars” 

Method of Investigation

Investigators normally consider who benefitted from a crime, and what changed as a result of that crime.

In this case, we must first understand who Kennedy was, and what he fought for; who we were as a nation, and where we were headed when he was shot. Knowing that will make plain who killed him and why. It will help guide us to what we must now change for our survival.

Kennedy’s Nationalism

When Kennedy returned from his celebrated World War II Naval service and plunged into politics, he aimed to set the world back on the path of his late Commander-in-Chief, Franklin Roosevelt, and to bury imperialism.

In his first political speech, to the American Legion post in Boston, Nov. 18, 1945, in anticipation of a run for Congress, he explained Winston Churchill’s recent electoral defeat by contrasting the outlook of Churchill’s party with that of Franklin Roosevelt.

Churchill’s Conservative Party had governed England

“during the years of the depression when poverty stalked the Midlands and the coal fields of Wales, and thousands and thousands lived off the meager pittance of the dole. Where Roosevelt made his political reputation by his treatment of the depression, the Conservative Party lost theirs.”

And the English voters had been jolted by that contrast when soldiers from Roosevelt’s America were stationed there in wartime:

“England traditionally has been a country with tremendous contrasts between the very rich and the very poor. That arch Tory, Benjamin Disraeli, … once stated that England was divided into two nations—the rich and the poor…. With the … coming of the American troops with their high pay, with their stories of cars, refrigerators, and radios for all, a new spirit—a new restlessness—and a fresh desire for the better things of life had become strong in Britain.”

But Kennedy warned that even if the Labour Party were in power, “Britain stands today as Britain has always stood—for the empire.”

In that speech, Kennedy spoke also of the heroic Michael Collins, leader of the 1922 Irish armed revolt against Britain:

“This young man, who was killed in his early thirties, looms as large today in Ireland as when he died.”

In the view of the post-World War II Irish leaders, “everything that Ireland has ever gotten from England has been only at the end of a long and bitter struggle…. All have been in British and Irish prisons and many of them have wounds which still ache when the cold rains come in from the west.” Kennedy named “the fundamental problem behind all Irish politics—the problem of ending the partition, which divides the twenty-six counties of the south, which form Eire, and the six counties of the north known as Ulster which are attached directly to Great Britain. That this partition must be ended … all Irishmen agree.”

John Kennedy’s own family had been shaped over many generations in Ireland’s bitter conflict with the British.

Descended from Ireland’s 11th-Century High King Brian Boru, the Kennedys had been stripped of their lands and made tenant farmers. Several family members were casualties in the 1798 Irish uprising. County Wexford, the Kennedy ancestral home, was that insurrection’s center, and briefly held out as its own Wexford Republic.

The 1847-48 “Great Famine” was known to the Irish as deliberate genocide under British Prime Minister John Russell, who stationed half of the British Army in Ireland to oversee the export of masses of food, and to keep the captive population quiet. Hunger, disease, and emigration in slave-like ships cut the population from 9 million to 2 1/2 million. The devastation forced JFK’s great-grandfather Patrick Kennedy to emigrate, and led to his death in Boston of hardship-induced disease.

British mass murder was burned into the minds of the Kennedy family, and all the Irish. Kennedy cousins who had fought with the Irish Republican Army were among those with whom President Kennedy met on his 1963 visit to Ireland as U.S. President.

JFK was named for his maternal grandfather, the revered Boston Mayor and Congressman John F. Fitzgerald. “Honey Fitz” strongly supported Ireland’s struggle and published a weekly newspaper called The Republic. John’s Boston-born paternal grandfather, P.J. Kennedy, became the political boss in an Irish-American ward.

John embraced this Irish heritage. But his father, Joseph P. Kennedy, partnered with British and Wall Street financiers, pushed and shoved his way up into immense wealth, and finally thrust himself alongside the highest ranks of the British imperial oligarchy. John’s political career would be based on passionately held views opposite to the reactionary ideas for which his father became infamous. And yet in that close-knit family, Joe Kennedy would later put his money and connections behind all of his son’s electoral efforts.

Papa Joe supported Franklin Roosevelt for President, and on Jan. 7, 1938, FDR nominated him to be Ambassador to Britain. Three days later, Roosevelt began a secret correspondence with the British, warning them they risked arousing in America “a feeling of disgust” by the “corrupt bargain” they were making in backing the fascist regimes of Mussolini and Hitler. Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain termed FDR’s proposals “preposterous.” Joe Kennedy was confirmed by the Senate in the midst of this frosty exchange, which is now available from the British archives. [1]

A year later, after the Nazi invasion of Czechoslovakia, the President sent an ultimatum to the British government threatening that the U.S. would cut off aid to Britain if the Empire continued to sponsor Hitler’s takeover of Europe. [2]

But Ambassador Kennedy attached himself worshipfully to the hyper-aristocratic Foreign Minister Lord Halifax, to the royal family, and the whole set of Britain’s fascist strategists. He moved with John and his other eight children into the English neo-gothic castle, Wall Hall, owned by pro-fascist Wall Street banker J.P. Morgan, Jr. Morgan’s servants took care of the Kennedy family.

The outraged Roosevelt told his aide James Farley in 1939: “Joe has been taken in by the British government people and the royal family. He’s more British than Walter Hines Page [American Ambassador to Britain in World War I] was. The trouble with the British is that they have for several hundred years been controlled by the upper classes. The upper classes control all trade and commerce; therefore the policy of the British government relates entirely to the protection of this class.” [3]

Empire and Cold War

After President Roosevelt’s death, Winston Churchill and his American followers—notably the bipartisan clique of Democrats Dean Acheson and Averell Harriman, and the Republican brothers John Foster Dulles and Allen Dulles—wielded the apparatus of the Truman government to wrench American policy away from Roosevelt’s pro-nationalist, anti-imperial peace policy. British double agents, led by Kim Philby, meanwhile fed Russian paranoia with anti-American scare stories.

Churchill’s Cold War policy confronted a fearful U.S.A. with Soviet Russia’s aggressive moves on its periphery. America’s 1776-bred sympathy for the sovereign rights of colonial subjects was thus trumped by the contrived need to ally with London and the other European financier imperialists in the name of fighting Communism.

While viewing Soviet Communism realistically as a distortion of history and human nature, John Kennedy understood his father’s tragic blunder, and knew the British Empire and Wall Street were continuing the fascist policy that Roosevelt had fought against. He attacked both the Truman Democrats and the Dulles Republicans for blocking America’s support for the aspirations of the world’s poor. This betrayal of Roosevelt was handing the vulnerable nations to the Communists posing as anti-imperialists, and threatening nuclear-war annihilation.

Kennedy toured Asia and the Middle East in 1951 as a Congressman and Senate hopeful, accompanied by his younger brother Robert. In his radio report-back to the nation, we can see the intellectual fire and the sure grasp of history he would show a decade later in the Presidency:

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