Veterans News Now – by George Beres
The modern American tragedy is that persons with great wealth use it to expand their riches and to further diminish resources of the common person. That is the undeniable conclusion I’ve found after more than a decade studying evidence that has surfaced about the assassination of President John Kennedy, for which the wealthy of corporate America had a major responsibility.
Identity of the killers is not yet fully conclusive. What has become clear is it was not a lone gunman like Oswald, and it was not a foreign government like the U.S.S.R. or Cuba.
Increasingly clear to the many researchers who have responded to me is that it was a joint venture in murder from within– the effort of major corporations to remove a figure who stood in the way of their continuing excessive profits. Most impressive among those who have combed the records that brought them to similar conclusions is Professor Jim Fetzer of the University of Minnesota, with whom I’ve worked.
I find that the conspiring multi-millionaires had two collaborators: the military with need for perpetual war to justify its existence, and the CIA, which this president-for-peace said he intended to dismantle.
Sixty-five years earlier, Henry Wallace, the man who should have become president after the 1945 death of Franklin Roosevelt, warned us that the thirst for money of corporate powers would lead us toward fascism. That view is what got wealthy funders of the Democratic Party to insist Roosevelt replace him as vice-president with Harry Truman in 1944. For a country that had defeated the epitome of fascism, Nazi Germany, in World War II, what Wallace said seemed to border on lunacy. The public took it as a joke. Today his prophecy is moving toward reality because of the dominance of the very rich.
Only two other happenings in American history produced comparable national trauma to that of the 1963 assassination of Kennedy They were the assassination of Abraham Lincoln a century earlier and the 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor that brought the country into the Second World War. Both in their time were viewed as the product of conspiracies. For Lincoln, John Wilkes Booth had collaborators, including a woman. Pearl Harbor today is limited to the diminishing suspicion that Roosevelt sought the attack to get us into a war he believed necessary.
Uncertainties about the killing of Kennedy have not diminished, but have grown more widespread through growth of corporate control with passing years. Assassination of a president in modern times– its planning and execution– is of such scope to require silent cooperation of many. New information gained over the past half-century suggests a number of persons knew of the conspiracy as it grew. Most were not actively involved, but shared guilt for the killing through acquiescence– silent refusal to stop or discourage it for fear corporate recrimination would be directed toward them.
Kennedy’s death continues to concern us because of subsequent worldwide traumas which can be seen as a pattern of corporate conspiracies, and involved several presidents. They began with Johnson’s Gulf of Tonkin lie that fueled the Vietnam War, followed by the sabotage of Jimmy Carter’s helicopters intended to rescue American prisoners in Iran, and Ronald Reagan’s Iran/Contra scandal. Still to come were the Bill Clinton and 1st George Bush incursions into the Balkans and the Middle East, and the second George Bush aggression in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The thread that ties together most of the Kennedy conspiracy theories is that a powerful group wanted to remove him in order for them to control policy and direction of government. This view involves shared efforts of the military-industrial complex with banking leaders, who were early versions of terrorists preceding by four decades the 21st century’s stateless terrorism.
War is seen as necessary for powerful corporate leaders whose pursuit of profit depends on exploiting the growing military character of our democracy. Their aim has been to fuel a constant demand for the weapons of war and their byproducts.
Kennedy had vowed to bring 1,000 troops home from Vietnam by Christmas, 1963, and to have all U.S. personnel out by the end of 1965. That would have ended massive corporate profiteering from the war. So those with profits at stake set into motion plans to kill the president. That also is the view of a significant figure in the Kennedy administration, J. Fletcher Prouty. His book on the assassination, “JFK,” was the main resource for the movie of that name by Oliver Stone.
The basic conspiracy theory shared by most researchers is that Kennedy’s killing made it possible for a superpower group within America to expand its profits by extending war in the Far East, then the Middle East. Their goal was to have it go on for decades to come. Such conflict would continue the need for spending billions of dollars on armaments each year to replace those destroyed during the previous year. The market would be endless.
A major government figure of the time, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., said Kennedy signaled his intention to withdraw from Vietnam in several ways, and put it on the record with his National Security Action Memo #263 of Oct. 11, 1963.
Further motivation for those favoring war-at-any-cost was Kennedy’s plan to take the CIA out of covert operations. U.S. financial powers had to protect it because of the protection it gave them. They saw war as a lucrative business. The matter of blood spilled meant little to them, and not only because it produced constant demand for their war products. It also gave them the means to destroy what they viewed as prime threats to their overriding influence, the Soviet Union and Socialism. The CIA was essential to them, and they tolerated no threat to it.
Is the jury still out on identity of the Kennedy assassins? It should be, but it is not because our leaders have chosen not to raise any questions about corporate influence on the faulty Warren Commission investigation. Their hand yet may be forced by reviews of the shallow Commission in articles such as this as the 50th anniversary of the tragedy approaches.
If so, it is the rich leaders of very big business who have the most at stake.
George H. Beres is a retired journalist whose work now appears as a free-lancer. He is a graduate of the Northwestern University Medill School of Journalism, and later served as sports information director at Northwestern, then at the University of Oregon. His wife, Silvia, is a watercolorist and art teacher. Their sons are TV newsmen, Nick in Nashville and Roland in Madison, Wis. While serving in the army in Korea, he was news director of the Armed Forces Korea Network (AFKN). A native of Pekin, Ill., he has resided the last 34 years in Eugene, Ore. Early in his career, he was a columnist for the Decatur (Ill.) Herald & Review. Today he hosts a weekly half-hour discussion program, “To Pursue the Truth,” on Community TV in Eugene, and writes a monthly column for the Northwest Senior News. Main focuses of his writing are politics, classical music, sports and religion. He is a first-generation American, with ethnic roots in Greece.