JFK, The CIA, Vietnam, And The Plot To Assassinate John F. Kennedy
by; Oliver Stone
FLETCHER PROUTY is a man whose name will go down in history. Not as a respected Establishment figure, no. He will be erased from the present history books, his version of history suppressed, his credibility denied, his integrity scorned.
Yet in time he will endure. Young students in the twenty-first century (given the planet's capacity to reform and revive itself before then) will come back to his writings in the alternative written press (small publishing houses, low-circulation magazines) and discover through Colonel Prouty no less than the "Secret History" of the United States, circa 1944 to the present. With this single volume, Colonel Prouty blows the lid right off our "Official History" and unforgivably, sadly, inexorably, for anyone who dares enter this cave of dread and shame, shines his torch forever onto the ugliest nest of vipers the civilized world has probably seen since the dreaded Mongol raiders of the tenth and eleventh centuries.
This is scary stuff. The MKUltra of espionage books, JFK will anger you and made you sad. You will never view the world again in the same light. Behind everything you read or see from this point on will flicker forever your most paranoid and darkest fears of the subconscious motives beneath the killer ape that became man.
Was Stanley Kubrick right in his revelation of the warrior ape in 2001, throwing the bones of the slain into the air, becoming the spaceship baby of tomorrow? Will we transmute our killer instincts to peace and the search for light? Or will we tread the path of war, not only between tribes, but between us and our environment?
My mother was French, my father American. I had the opportunity young in life to spend summers in France in the 1950s and never once heard anyone young or old ever allude to the massive French collaboration with the Nazis in World War II. In every aspect - even my mother's - tale - the truth was denied, ignored, and mostly forgotten. Of such is "history" made - until, of course, contrary events like the Klaus Barbie trial in Lyons, France, surface and tear and remind. Like my film JFK. Such was my experience in writing Platoon--out of a feeling that Vietnam was an Orwellian memory hole, to be forgotten, realities distorted by newsmen and official "historians," official body counts, and the official 1ies that devastated the American character.
I experienced it again in the mid-1980s in Central America, talking to fresh-faced American troops in green uniforms with no memories of Vietnam, save for embarrassed stares, once again lining up to shoot Nicaraguans in the invasion of 1986 that never was. And again in Russia, in the early 1980s, on another screenplay, talking to youngsters with no knowledge whatever of Stalin's crimes, and old people who denied their past out of fear.
Such is the memory of man-at best a tricky one, per Orwell. "Who controls the past controls the, future. There is about us a wall, alone, beyond which our conscious mind will not let our unconscious go. That margin, however, fades with the quotient and fashion of time because as time changes so do our mind-sets The loss of fear allows the mind to drop its censors and think the unthinkable. Such a golden moment. We all know it. The exciting liberation of our own thought process It is that access point to history which every filmmaker, poet, artist, seeks entry to. To collide with the forces of history--to merge with the backbeat of its onward push. Jack London, John Reed, Upton Sinclair, clashing with the stormy forces of early-twentieth-century history. Glorious cavaliers
The key question of our time, as posed in Colonel Prouty's book, comes from the fabled Report From Iron Mountain on the Possibility and Desirability of Peace by Leonard Lewin (based on a study commissioned by Defense Secretary Robert McNamara in August 1963 to justify the big, planned changes in defense spending contemplated by Kennedy):
The organizing principle of any society is for war. The basic authority of a modern state Over its people resides in its war powers....War readiness accounts for approximately a tenth of the output of the world's total economy.
In illustrating this proposition, Colonel Prouty traces the divergent Paths of early 1950s Vietnam--the Saigon Military Mission, Ed Lansdale, Lucien Conein, Tom Dooley, Wesley Fishel, and Archbishop Spellman. How Mao with his guerrilla-war ideology deeply influenced our civic action paramilitary concepts in Vietnam and Central America. How the helicopter and its econo-military needs drove us to Vietnam. How the TFX fighter battle between Boeing and General Dynamics split the Kennedy administration. He explains clearly for the first time the vast errors of South Vietnam-appointed President Ngo Dinh Diem--his failure with the Buddhists and his own army; the disastrous "hamlet" program that ruined the South Vietnamese: peasant economy; the expelling of the Chinese mercantile society; the influence of Lansdale; the arrogance of America's racist Third World attitudes that blinded us to the true vacuum We created by dividing and marginalizing a wholly artificial client state called South Vietnam in conflict with Vietnam's post-World War 11 right to determine its own independence. Colonel Prouty heartrendingly details the destruction of rural peasant life where age-old communal law was based not on authority but on harmony and law was deemed less important than virtue. This tribal society ultimately depends on "the omnipresent paternalism of the international banker" or the chemical agricultural revolution or modem politics, and this presents a dangerous alternative and loss of market to capitalism.
In a parallel to our own national sense of betrayal over Vietnam Starting with the My Lai incident, the Pentagon Papers, the secret bombing of Laos and Cambodia, Colonel Prouty, in a fascinating aside, traces the roots of the key 1950s decisions on Vietnam by the Dulles brothers and goes into the staged Tonkin Gulf incident and the official cover-up that sent us to the war.
Colonel Prouty also explores the true meaning of the Pentagon Papers and the shocking and fraudulent omissions in them, which will blow away the self-congratulatory complacency of the "liberal" media, which, society ultimately presents a non-consumerist code of life that does not Colonel Prouty shows us, never really understood the malignant forces that were operative behind the scenes of the Pentagon Papers--and once again robbed us of our history. Tantalizingly, Colonel Prouty points the finger of treason at McGeorge Bundy, then assistant to President Kennedy, who signed the key first draft of NSAM (National Security Action Memorandum) #273 on November 21, 1963, which was in contradiction to all previous Kennedy policy. How, Colonel Prouty speculates, could this happen unless such a person knew Kennedy would not be around the next day and "the new president" would? Also there is Bundy's bizarre role in the Bay of Pigs fiasco, reexamined here in a shocking new light.
Having myself spoken with Lucien Conein, our chief CIA operative in Vietnam under Lansdale, I can verify that Mr. Conein totally conformed to Colonel Prouty's version of events at the Diem killing in South Vietnam.
Prouty in effect totally reexamines the Pentagon Papers and the credibility of what a "leaked document" really is and how the media misunderstood; why the cabinet quorum was out of the country when Kennedy was killed and, more importantly, misunderstood the almost total reversal of our Vietnam policy in a matter of days after Kennedy's death. Prouty rightly lambastes the media as "a growing profession that fully controls what people will be told and helps prepare us for war in places like Afghanistan, Africa, and the Caribbean, most recently Granada and Panama, the Middle East and other "LDCs"--a banker's euphemism for "less developed countries.
Colonel Prouty pushes on to the true inner meaning of Watergate and leaves you dangling with the clues, making us fully realize we have only heard some forty hours of four hundred hours of one of the most mysterious affairs of American politics, involving possibly Nixon's own most secret revelations on the Kennedy murder. We must ask ourselves, What finally does Richard Nixon know of Dallas?
In another fascinating sub-theme, Colonel Prouty shows how the roots of the 1950s decisions on Vietnam essentially emanated from the historically omitted presence of Chiang Kai-shek at the Tehran Conference of 1944-where, like colossi dividing the world, Churchill, Stalin, Roosevelt, and Chiang Kai-shek set forever the fuse of World War III. The enemy for the United States was no longer the Nazi movement but the more pernicious, property-stealing Soviet Communist world-around tribe. And of course, in seeking to destroy this new enemy at all costs, Colonel Prouty points once again to the infusion of Nazi personnel, methods, and ultimately a Nazi frame of mind into the American system--a course which, once seeded, changed forever the way we operated in the world--and led irrevocably, tragically for our Constitution and our history, to the paramilitary domestic coup d'etat in Dallas, November 1963.
Colonel Prouty sets the stage for this horrible nightmare with his own personally documented dealings with the Pentagon--a fascinating side glimpse at his involvement in a small coup in Bolivia. He illustrates how Third World politics is more often a game between commercial "In" and "Out" power groups that compete for the lion's share of the money by controlling their marketplaces with the USA's help--the government of such a country is a business monopoly over its people and its territory and is motivated as much by pragmatic ideology as by the pragmatic control of the import-export business...by granting exclusive franchises to its friends, relatives, in all things from Coca-Cola to F-14 fighter planes...the supremely powerful international bankers keep the books for each side--how these Ins and Outs acquire bogeyman characteristics like "Communist," "Drug dealer," per the needs of our government and its attendant propaganda arm, our Fourth Estate; how Pat Estenssoro in Bolivia and Noriega in Panama and Hussein in Iraq have changed their identities several times from our "most-wanted" list to our favored-"commercial-ally" list. Prouty further illustrates that in 1975, our government spent $137 billion on military operations in Third World country LDCs and how that money is essentially funneled through American subsidiaries from our military-industrial complex. Money, Colonel Prouty never lets us forget, is at the root of power.
Colonel Prouty thus sets the stage for Dallas in all its horror. He explains the true inner myth of our most staged public execution, the "Reichstag Fire" of our era, behind whose proscenium, blinded by the light of surface-event television, the power of the throne was stolen and exchanged by bloody hands. He shows us that Kennedy was removed, fundamentally, because he threatened the "System" far too dangerously. Colonel Prouty shows us the Oswald cover story and how it has successfully to this day, my movie notwithstanding, blinded the American public to the truth of its own history--which requires, I suppose, a degree of outrage at our government and media and an urgency to replace it for the abuse of our rights as outlined in the Constitution and in the Declaration of Independence ("that whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of...[Life, Liberty and the pursuit of happiness], it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government it is their Right, it is their Duty, to throw off such Government and to provide new Guards for their future Security") but which too few of us have the energy for (except maybe the young, whom ultimately Colonel Prouty is addressing).
It is Colonel Prouty--with his background both as military officer and international banker-who shows us concisely that Kennedy was removed not only for his skittish policy on Vietnam and Cuba but because he fundamentally was affecting the economic might of this nation-planet, U.S.A., Inc., and its New World Order.
Kennedy undermined, as Prouty fascinatingly outlines, not only the Federal Reserve Board but the CIA and its thousand-headed Medusa of an economic system (CIA: "Capitalism's Invisible army"), but most dangerously and most expensively (ultimately some $6 trillion in Cold War money) the world-around economic lines of the "High Cabal" and its military-industrial complex so ominously forecast by Eisenhower in his farewell address. In bringing back the ghost of Buckminster Fuller and his great book, The Critical Path, Colonel Prouty shows us what we must understand of world history-ire probes beneath the Egyptian mast of events and scenery and thousands of Cecil B. deMlille extras--to the very of history--the Phoenician sail lines, the industrial complex, the distribution of minerals and oil, the exploitation of the planet and why, and who benefits?
These are the key questions of our times--controlling the way you think, the way the media tells you to think, and the way you must think if we are to resist the ultimate desecration of the planet at the hands of U.S.A., Inc., and its New World Order. Environment must be reversed. USA., Inc., must--and can-be reversed with new leadership Read as companion Pieces to Colonel Prouty the unofficial "histories" of Buckminster Fuller in the "Critical Path", and Howard Zinn's "People's History of` the United States", to fully understand the scope of the "octopus' we are in mortal combat with. Churchill, many years ago, called it overtly "The High Cabal." I am not sure, after all these years, that Mr. Churchill was being too dramatic.
Ultimately we must ask who owns America? Who owns reality? This book reads like Gibson's Decline and Fall; we see inside the wheel of our history how various "emperors" come and go and their relationship to the] military machine. Who owns our "history" He who makes it up so that most everyone believes it.
That person wins--as George Orwell so lucidly pointed out in 1984. If Mr. Hitler had won the Second World War, the version of events now given to us (invasions of Third World lower slave races for mineral-resource conquest and world round economic-military power) would not be too far off the mark. But instead of Nazi jackboots, we have men in gray suits and ties with attache cases--"lawyer Capitalism," Buckminster Fuller labeled it. Whatever its name, or uniform--beware.
I thank Colonel Prouty, who is old now, in his seventies--on the verge of going to the other side. Yet he has paused "How dull it is to pause, to make an end, to rust unburnished, not to shine in use!" as Tennyson once said) and mustered his final energy and a lifetime's lucidity, and knowing full well the onslaught against his ideas and person that will come from the usual suspects, has once more ventured into the arena with the lions who kill and maim at the very least--and given us his truth at far greater personal expense than the reader of this volume will ever know.
I salute you, Colonel Prouty--both as friend and warrior. "Fare thee well, Roman soldier."
Oliver Stone
Santa Monica
May 13, 1992
