Book Review: Martyrs to the Unspeakable: The Assassinations of JFK, Malcolm, Martin, and RFK by James Douglass

By Bruce K. Gagnon 

I’ve recently finished reading the latest James Douglass exceptional historical treasure entitled Martyrs to the Unspeakable: The Assassinations of JFK, Malcolm, Martin, and RFK. Having previously read his remarkable book JFK and the Unspeakable I had a good clue what to expect from this new undertaking.

I was not disappointed as I read this excellent recounting of our government’s deceit, arrogance, murderous past, wars, and denial of democracy.

I am certain that any person wishing to understand our current political situation will greatly benefit from reading this monumental recounting.

JFK

James Douglass writes: “We can discern an underlying purpose from the public record: covering up systemic state killings, fragmenting the movement for change, and strengthening wartime policies… Congress and the presidents after Kennedy have sustained the Cold War, foreign interventions, the War on Terror, and a new Cold War. The death of a country and the world has become apparent destiny.”

Early on in JFK’s presidential campaign in 1960 he was made an offer by the Zionist lobby in the US. According to a JFK political columnist friend he expressed indignation, “As an American citizen he was outraged to have a Zionist group come to him and say: ‘We know your campaign is in trouble. We’re willing to pay your bills if you let us have control of your Middle East policy.’”

One key issue JFK had with Israel was its development of nuclear weapons at the Dimona nuclear facility. David Ben-Gurion [Israel’s first prime minister] met with JFK and the president made it clear that he unreservedly opposed the development of nukes by Israel. Ben-Gurion lied to JFK claiming that the main purpose of Dimona reactor was for desalinization purposes.

Douglass remembers: “From the Dimona reactor to the Palestinian refugees, Kennedy and Ben-Gurion were at odds…Ben-Gurion’s retirement, and his successor Levi Eshkol’s continuing coverup of Dimona, would eventually secure Israel’s bomb-making in the depths of the Negev desert.”

JFK’s determination to resist Israeli control of his government created a sharp divide. In 1961 the president stated, “We sometimes find ourselves in difficulty due to our close relationship with Israel. If these ties hurt anyone, they hurt the US more than Israel.”

JFK’s determination to force Israel to register as a foreign agent under FARA (Foreign Agents Registration Act) angered the Zionists. Douglass reports, “After JFK was assassinated the Department of Justice subsequently lost all of the political cover necessary to force the Israel lobby to register under FARA.”

Douglass suggests that in addition to JFK’s efforts to reign in Zionist control of the US government, the president also stepped into the danger zone when he fired CIA Director Allen Dulles (and some of his key agents). “In the Cold War thinking of such men and their Mafia-style agency, Kennedy’s dialogue with [Soviet leader] Khrushchev for nuclear disarmament, with Castro for a normalized US-Cuban relationship, with [President] Sukarno for a peaceful Indonesia – and down the list of the president’s priorities for a better world – meant defeat for their national security state. Reconciliation with the enemy was treason. Anticommunist warriors played the nuclear (extinction) game to win.”

Essentially JFK was killed by what we today call the ‘Deep State’.

Kennedy further got himself into hot water with the ‘ruling elites’ when he planned the withdrawal of US troops from Vietnam by the end of 1963 as was disclosed in the RAND Corporation’s study the Pentagon Papers.

General Curtis LeMay summed up the Pentagon’s view of JFK’s rejection of a full invasion of Cuba and the deal with the Soviets that their missiles would be pulled out of Cuba if the US would remove its nuclear-tipped Jupiter missiles in Turkey. Feeling snubbed by JFK, LeMay snorted at the time, “What does a politician know about war? Who needs the president if there is a war? Nobody!”

Malcolm X   

Douglass shares that “Malcolm’s most powerful enemies, who tracked every move he made, saw where he was going. They were threatened by his vision. They tried to kill it by killing him. Malcolm’s life was taken by a conspiracy involving the Nation of Islam, the New York City Police Department (NYPD) and US intelligence agencies.”

FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover “was in charge of purging the country of ‘alien radicals.’ That meant, first and foremost, Black radicals”

After Malcolm’s 1964 visit to Mecca he felt that Allah had given him the power to confront evil: “And if I can die having brought any light, having exposed any meaningful truth that will help to destroy the racist cancer that is malignant in the body of America – then, all of the credit is due to Allah. Only the mistakes have been mine.”

In September 1960, Malcolm became an ally of Premier Fidel Castro and his Cuban delegation to the United Nations in a confrontation with the US government. The US State Department restricted the Cubans to Manhattan Island and the hotel they were to stay at suddenly demanded a $20,000 security fee. Castro responded that their delegation would camp out. Malcolm arranged for the Cuban delegation to stay at the Theresa Hotel in Harlem.

As a supportive crowd gathered outside the hotel Malcom met Castro at midnight and told Fidel a parable: “No one knows the master better than his servants. We have been servants ever since we were brought here. We know all his little tricks. Understand? We know what he is going to do before he does.”

Douglass recalls that “Malcom made Harlem the North American stage for what would be the first meeting anywhere between Soviet Chairman Nikita Khrushchev and Premier Fidel Castro. It took place at the entrance of the Hotel Theresa at high noon on Tuesday, September 20, 1960, a month and a half before the election of JFK as US president.”

Four days before the Cuban leader’s plane landed in New York for the UN events, as a CIA document discloses, “a CIA-organized plot to assassinate him was formally set in motion at a meeting at a New York hotel with a key Mafia figure [Johnny Rosselli] whom the Agency wanted to handle the assignment.”

Castro was one of the few world leaders who escaped a CIA assassination plot.

In July 1964 Malcom flew to Cairo to observe the Second Organization of African Unity (OAU).

An analyst of the Cairo conference observed, “Malcolm’s main goal for the Summit was to convince the African leaders to pass a resolution addressing the plight of African Americans, condemn the US for racism, and to propose steps to bring the US accountable for bringing about needed changes.”

Malcolm, Douglass writes, had developed a new strategy. In an April, 1964 speech in Cleveland Malcolm urged: “We need to expand the civil-rights struggle to a higher level – to the level of human rights. Whenever you are in a civil-rights struggle, whether you know it or not, you are confining yourself to the jurisdiction of Uncle Sam…All of our African brothers and our Asian brothers and our Latin-American brothers cannot open their mouths and interfere in the domestic affairs of the US…But the United Nations has what’s known as the charter of human rights, it has a committee that deals in human rights.”

Martin Luther King became impressed with Malcom’s international strategy and also began to echo this new African-American human rights organizing avenue.

On February 9, 1965 Malcolm flew from London to Paris for a speaking event. At Orly Airport he was barred from entering France and was sent back to London.

Douglass reports that, “A highly placed North African diplomat said word had been passed quietly to his country by French intelligence ‘that the CIA planned Malcolm’s murder, and France feared he might be liquidated on its soil,’ scapegoating France.”

On February 14, 1965 at 2:45 am the Queens, New York home of Malcolm’s family was fire bombed. The sleeping family barely escaped alive. But it was a sign of things to come.

Malcolm X was shot multiple times and died from his wounds in Manhattan, New York City, on February 21, 1965, at the age of 39 while preparing to address the Organization of Afro-American Unity at the Audubon Ballroom in the neighborhood of Washington Heights.

A. M. Babu, a Tanzania cabinet minister later described his American comrade’s dilemma at the critical hour: “Malcolm had the vision to see the threat that a united Third World would pose to imperialism.”

Martin Luther King Jr.   

Jim Douglass sadly recalls that “Martin King did not live to make public his support of Robert Kennedy for president. Following [President Lyndon] Johnson’s March 31, 1968 announcement of his withdrawal from the race, King was shot dead four days later.”

On December 23, 1963, a month after JFK’s assassination, a nine-hour conference was held at FBI headquarters to plan an intensive campaign against Dr. King.

Standing in his Riverside pulpit in New York, April 4, 1967, Martin Luther King Jr. spoke truth to the war-making power of his nation. He knew the war in Vietnam now as never before – from seeing and feeling in his soul the impact of his government’s napalm and white phosphorus bombs, searing the flesh of the Vietnamese people.

James Douglass reports “MLK’s assassination cannot be understood apart from his resistance to the Vietnam War, nuclear war, and his organizing of the Poor People’s Campaign to abolish poverty.”

In a series of lectures MLK delivered over Canadian Broadcasting Corporation at the end of 1967, Dr. King envisioned first a national, then a global, nonviolent revolution against corporate wealth and military power.

Douglass writes, “King’s other goal was the abolition of war. He told his staff that, what was important, ‘after we get [to Washington with the Poor People’s Campaign], and stay a few days’ was to ‘call the peace movement in, and let them go on the other side of the Potomac and try to close down the Pentagon, if that can be done.’”

Just before MLK’s murder by the Deep State in Memphis on April 4, 1968 local authorities withdrew all police and fire department protection usually given to the visiting legend. On the morning after King’s assassination, the Memphis Police Department ordered the crime scene destroyed. (We recently saw the same thing happen just after the killing of Charlie Kirk on the campus of Utah Valley University – the crime scene was immediately destroyed.)

Douglass concludes that MLK “recognized there could be no peace unless the warfare economy would be deconstructed and freed from the total military-industrial hold on it, for the sake of serving instead the people working in the factories and the fields: ‘A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military [offense] than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.’”

RFK

Douglass reminds the reader about the post-WW2 program called ‘Operation Paperclip’ that brought 1,500 former high-level Nazis into the US seeding the entire military industrial complex with these operatives. One such example was the CIA’s MKUltra mind control program that Sirhan was very likely subjected to prior to RFK’s murder when the accused was missing for an extended period of time. His family could not find him during this period. After the killing of RFK was done, Sirhan was confused and unable to articulate much of what happened that tragic night.

Douglass again shares the truth: CNN investigative reporter Brad Johnson, in recapping the thirteen eyewitnesses with the best view of the [June 5, 1968 RFK] shooting, concluded, “The tip of Sirhan Sirhan’s gun was never close enough to RFK’s body to have created the point-blank Kennedy wounds reported in the RFK autopsy.”

Douglass recalls: “On behalf of his brother, Robert Kennedy discovered how the Bay of Pigs [1961] planners over-rode the president’s orders, lied and plotted against him…The Bay of Pigs showed JFK, with the help of RFK, the folly of allowing his top spies and generals to channel him into their Cold War plots. The Bay of Pigs was the first stage of the president’s enlightenment through the courage of confronting his national security hierarchy.”

It was then that JFK decided to attempt to “splinter the CIA in a thousand pieces and scatter it to the winds.” In the end it cost him his life.

On June 23, 1965, just months after being elected to the US Senate representing the state of New York, RFK picked up his brother JFK’s fallen baton in his first major Senate address.

RFK said: “I rise today to urge action on the most vital issue now facing this nation and the world. This issue is not in the headlines. It is not Vietnam, or the Dominican Republic, or Berlin. It is the question of nuclear proliferation – of the mounting threat posed by the spread of nuclear weapons. Five nations now have the capacity to explode nuclear bombs…perhaps a score of other nations are now in a position to develop nuclear weapons within three years. Two of these nations – Israel and India – already possess weapons-grade fissionable material, and could fabricate an atomic device within a few months.”

The New York Times, in its front-page article on Senator Kennedy’s speech, made no mention of the hazards represented by a nuclear-armed Israel. However, RFK’s leaning into the Unspeakable made news on the other side of the world. As Seymour Hersh would point out a quarter-century later in The Samson Option, “The senator’s remarks caused a sensation in Israel,” even though they “were little noted elsewhere.”

In February, 1967 RFK went to Paris and met with President Charles De Gaulle who urged him to publicly oppose Lyndon Johnson’s war in Vietnam. Once back in Washington RFK met with Johnson who was very angry about his meeting with De Gaulle and threatened the senator by saying: “I’m going to destroy you in six months. We’re going to win in Vietnam by the summer. By July or August, the war will be over. You and every one of your dove friends will be dead politically in six months. You guys will be destroyed.”

Douglass concludes: “Nixon and the military-industrial complex would be the main beneficiaries of the gunning down of Robert Kennedy. The Vietnam War that Kennedy pledged to end would continue for seven more terrible years during the administrations of Presidents Nixon and Ford.”

My final thoughts

It is my belief that at least since the JFK assassination the secret government (the CIA, Wall Street and the MIC) have been fully in control of America. The US is now a rogue state. No one is allowed to become president, from any political party, that is not under their control.

I am reminded when Obama ran for the presidency, he wrote his obligatory book prior to the election. In the book there was a missing year. The only thing Obama told about that period was he went to work for ‘Business International Corporation’. Some time after Obama’s election victory, renowned journalist and filmmaker John Pilger said, ‘I know Business International Corporation. It is a well-known CIA front group.’ Obama was essentially put through a screening program and he obviously passed the test.

This remarkable book by James Douglass educates, stimulates and raises serious moral and ethical questions about our current time. How do people of good will, who truly seek peace, operate when we live under a government that is run by the corporate state? How can we support candidates for Congress or the White House who we know are under the thumb of the ruling oligarchies?

For me these are the real questions that must be debated and answered if we are to re-establish any real hope of democracy in America. As long as we avoid having this discussion we will remain like a small boat adrift at sea. Coupled with that is the urgent need for a dramatic increase in movement resistance building using the lessons from our past great leaders.

But first the public must know the history – how the Deep State operates – where they are taking us – and how we should effectively react? This book by James Douglass will go a long way in freeing our minds from corporate brainwashing about how our nation actually works. It is a must read for those who truly wish to be serious about ending fascism – defined as the wedding of corporate power and government.

~ Bruce K. Gagnon coordinates the Global Network Against Weapons & Nuclear Power in Space. He is a Vietnam-era veteran and lives in Brunswick, Maine.