It's hard for us to see ourselves as living in a country that has been transformed by a violent, internally generated regime-change operation. We think of "regime change" as what the CIA does to other countries, including Iran, Indonesia and most of Latin America. But this same rogue agency staged a coup d'e'tat on Nov. 22, 1963 that confirmed the U.S. as a national security state ruling a global capitalist empire.

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There is a special problem in discussing the historical significance of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. Apart from the bare fact that he was fatally shot while sitting beside his wife in the back of an open limousine in Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963, nearly every detail of what happened is contested to this day. The farcical Warren Commission, hastily appointed by Lyndon Johnson a week after the assassination, reported on Sept. 24, 1964, that Lee Harvey Oswald was the lone assassin. But most Americans, with good reason, reject this conclusion.

1. The Cover-up

Sen. Richard Schweiker (R-PA) was a member of the 1975 Church Committee tasked with reviewing U.S. intelligence activity. He and Sen. Gary Hart (D-CO) headed a subcommittee looking into the role of the intelligence agencies in the JFK assassination. In 1976. on CBS's Face the Nation, he had this to say about the Warren Commission:

I think the [Warren] report, to those who have studied it closely, has collapsed like a house of cards... the fatal mistake the Warren Commission made was not to use its own investigators, but instead to rely on the CIA and FBI personnel, which played directly into the hands of senior intelligence officials who directed the cover-up.

The cover-up referred to by Schweiker was clearly at work in the emergency room of the Parkland Hospital where Kennedy was taken immediately after being shot. We have videos of the recollections of two of the doctors present in the operating room-Drs. Robert McClelland and Charles Crenshaw. Both saw a massive wound in the back of Kennedy's head. It looked to them like an exit wound, suggesting that at least one bullet had hit his head from the front. They say their impression was shared by many of the doctors present. Their opinion contradicted the conclusion of the Warren Commission that JFK was killed by a lone assassin (Oswald) firing from an upper window of the Texas Book Depository behind the Kennedy limousine.

Earl Rose, forensic pathologist, professor of medicine, and Dallas County medical examiner was in his office across from the trauma room when Kennedy's body was being wheeled out on a gurney. He told the Secret Service agents that Texas law required him to perform a post-mortem examination prior to the removal of the body. They physically blocked him. According to Dr. McClelland (19 minutes into the video), one agent "picked him up and set him against the wall." Then they took the body from the hospital to the airport from which it was immediately flown to Bethesda Naval Hospital in Maryland. Only then was an autopsy performed, overseen by military brass, FBI and Secret Service agents.

Just before the procedure began, one of the three military doctors conducting the autopsy, Commander James J. Humes M.D., got a telephone call from one of the nation's most distinguished brain scientists. Robert B. Livingston M.D. was Scientific Director of both the NIH Mental Health Institute and the Neurological Diseases and Blindness Institute as well as Director of the Laboratory of Neurobiology since 1956. In 1965 he founded the world's first multi-disciplinary Department of Neurosciences at UCSD.

Livingston told Humes that the small circular wound observed by the Parkland doctors in Kennedy's front neck "had to be a wound of entrance and that if it were a wound of exit, it would almost certainly be widely blown out." (This meant that the bullet could not have come from Oswald.) There was a brief interruption in the call, after which Humes came back on and said: "The FBI will not let me talk any further." Livingston said he was dismayed "over the abrupt termination of my conversation with Dr. Humes, through the intervention of the FBI. I wondered aloud why they would want to interfere with a discussion between physicians." He concluded that the autopsy was "under explicit non-medical control."

One of the nine persons LBJ appointed to the Warren Commission was former CIA Director Allen Dulles. The absurdity of this appointment should have been enough to remove all credibility from the commission. Johnson knew that Kennedy and Dulles had been enemies. Kennedy had fired Dulles after the disastrous 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba by CIA-trained exiles. David Talbot, in his brilliant book The Devil's Chessboard (2015), explains that the invasion was doomed from the start because the plan had leaked to newspapers and, according to internal CIA documents, recent Cuban defense preparations had rendered the plan inoperable. Dulles persisted because he was confident that Kennedy would have to rescue the overwhelmed invaders with American forces, thereby going to war with Cuba.

When Kennedy refused to do so, it was a crushing blow to Dulles's reputation. Kennedy was furious at Dulles for having assured him the invasion would succeed, and for attempting to trap him into a war he didn't want, one that could have become a confrontation with the USSR (Cuba's ally). In the two years between the Bay of Pigs and the Kennedy assassination, Kennedy and Dulles waged a publicity war over who was to blame for the embarrassing failure.

According to Talbot, Dulles continued to play a major role in the CIA after his dismissal. LBJ knew all about this. Appointing this seasoned liar and instigator of violent regime changes to the Warren Commission proves that Johnson wasn't looking for unvarnished truth. As Talbot explains, Dulles got his prote'ge', J. L. Rankin, appointed as chief counsel for the commission, and made sure the investigators focused narrowly on Oswald: "He deftly maneuvered to keep the investigation on what he considered the proper track. He showered Rankin with memos, passing along investigative tips and offering guidance on commission strategy." The commission never got to see the extensive documentary evidence of the CIA's connection to Oswald for years before 1963.

2. The Coup

Kennedy's relationship with the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) was one of mutual disrespect. They thought he was a weakling for deciding not to order the military to rescue the exile force at the Bay of Pigs. As presidential historian Robert Dallek said in a 2013 article in The Atlantic: "In the White House, [Kennedy] fought--and defeated--his most determined military foes, just across the Potomac: the members of the Pentagon's Joint Chiefs of Staff." The defeat was short-lived.

To appreciate what Kennedy was up against, consider the recommendation he received from the JCS and the CIA at a National Security Council meeting on July 20, 1961. Talbot quotes James Bamford's account in Body of Secrets (2002):

The plan called for innocent people to be shot on American streets; for boats carrying refugees fleeing Cuba to be sunk on the high seas; for a wave of violent terrorism to be launched in Washington, D.C., Miami, and elsewhere. People would be framed for bombings they did not commit; planes would be hijacked. Using phony evidence, all of it would be blamed on Castro....

This plan was codenamed Operation Northwoods. It would almost certainly have precipitated a nuclear war with the USSR. Kennedy rejected it.

His most important fight with the JCS was over how to respond when he learned in October of 1962 that Soviet Premier Khruschev had placed medium-range nuclear missiles in Cuba. The chiefs wanted him to bomb the missile installations (which would kill many Russians) and blockade Cuba. Kennedy chose to do only the blockade, believing that bombing would increase the risk of nuclear war. His gamble worked. The Soviet ships carrying military supplies turned back on Oct. 25 before they reached the American line. Khruschev agreed to withdraw his missiles from Cuba in exchange for an American pledge not to invade Cuba and removal of American medium-range missiles from Turkey.

To the CIA and his ferocious generals, Kennedy's pledge to Khruschev amounted to a decision to peacefully coexist with the communist regime in Cuba. Any doubt about whether JFK had gone "soft on communism" was dispelled in his eloquent commencement address at the American University in June of 1963. It was titled "A Strategy of Peace." He asked: "What kind of peace do I mean and what kind of a peace do we seek? Not a Pax Americana enforced on the world by American weapons of war." He displayed something unusual in American political discourse at this time--an appreciation of Russia's achievements and its great suffering during WWII:

As Americans, we find communism profoundly repugnant as a negation of personal freedom and dignity. But we can still hail the Russian people for their many achievements in science and space, in economic and industrial growth, in culture, in acts of courage.

And no nation in the history of battle ever suffered more than the Soviet Union in the Second World War. At least 20 million lost their lives. Countless millions of homes and families were burned or sacked. A third of the nation's territory, including two thirds of its industrial base, was turned into a wasteland....

He announced that his government was working with Moscow toward an "agreement on a comprehensive test ban treaty." This resulted in the Partial Test Ban Treaty of Aug. 5, 1963. And, as he also promised in his speech, a direct communication "hotline" between Washington and Moscow was set up on Aug. 30.

As Ray McGovern wrote in Truthout (12/27/09), "Few Americans are aware that, just before he was assassinated, Kennedy had decided to pull all troops out of Vietnam by 1965." He initiated this policy in his National Security Action Memorandum Number 263 of Oct. 11, 1963. On Nov. 21, the day before his death, he told Assistant Press Secretary Malcolm Kilduff: "We're losing too damned many people over there.... After I come back from Texas, that's going to change. There is no reason for us to lose another man over there. Vietnam is not worth another American life."

The mutual disrespect between JFK and the military had come to a head. Daniel Ellsberg (who was then serving as a defense analyst in the Pentagon) told David Talbot, "There was virtually a coup atmosphere in Pentagon circles.... It was a mood of hatred and rage. The atmosphere was poisonous, poisonous." The CIA felt empowered to kill him, and laid down a warning sign to any future president against challenging the military-industrial complex. The murderers achieved their purpose. They locked the U.S. into its role as what Martin Luther King, a year before his own assassination, called "the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today."

3. The Military-Industrial-Government Complex

It's hard for Americans to see themselves as living in a country that has been transformed by a violent, internally generated regime-change operation. We think of "regime change" as what the CIA does to other countries all over the world, including Iran, Congo, Vietnam, Indonesia and most of Latin America. But the same rogue agency that toppled so many other governments also staged a coup d'e'tat in 1963 that confirmed the mission of the U.S. as a national-security state ruling a global empire.

The CIA is arguably the most subversive agent of a ruling class that emerged when American society and economy were organized around fighting WWII. C. Wright Mills wrote about this class in his eponymous 1956 book The Power Elite. He argues that there are three central domains in American life: the economy (with large corporations as the main players), government and the military. Other domains, such as education and religion, are secondary and subordinate. The big three are highly interdependent, and their leaders "tend to come together, to form the power elite of America."

To retain their status and wealth after 1945, this elite needed to perpetuate a militaristic posture toward some suitably powerful nation. This is why we have had a never-ending cold war that shapes our society to this day, with China and post-communist Russia alternating as Enemy du Jour. This is why a sheep-like Congress allocates without real protest an annual military budget three times that of China and over 12 times that of Russia. The U.S. total of $778 billion in 2020 was 39% of worldwide military spending.

To the capitalist elite the real enemy in WWII and beyond was the Soviet Union. The German branches of American corporations such as GM, Ford and Standard Oil made huge profits through their enormous contributions to Hitler's rearmament in the 1930s. They continued to support the German war effort after Hitler declared war on the U.S. As Michael Dobbs wrote in the Washington Post:

When American GIs invaded Europe in June 1944, they did so in jeeps, trucks and tanks manufactured by the Big Three motor companies.... It came as an unpleasant surprise to discover that the enemy was also driving trucks manufactured by Ford and Opel -- a 100 percent GM-owned subsidiary -- and flying Opel-built warplanes.

Historian Jacques R. Pauwels points out that the Third Reich was a corporate paradise: investors retained ownership of workplaces, but there were "no left-wing parties, no unions, unlimited numbers of slave-labourers" and a torrent of lucrative orders from an authoritarian state creating a war machine. Today's economy, ruled by a military-industrial-government complex, is a reasonable facsimile of this fascist paradise with democratic side constraints.

The Dulles brothers were at the center of the U.S. power elite during the decade before JFK's assassination. John Foster Dulles was Secretary of State from 1953 to 1959, and Allen Dulles was CIA Director from 1953 to 1961. Together they were the Overt and Covert of American foreign policy. Talbot tells us that Allen called himself "the secretary of state for unfriendly countries." Adam LeBor describes the agenda of the Dulles brothers as one of "government-sanctioned murder, casual elimination of 'inconvenient' regimes, relentless prioritization of American corporate interests and cynical arrogance on the part of two men who were once among the most powerful in the world."

To Allen Dulles a country was "unfriendly" if its politics interfered with American corporate interests. What happened in Guatemala was a vivid demonstration of the penalty for unfriendliness. In 1954 President Eisenhower, following the advice of the Dulles brothers, authorized the CIA to overthrow the democratically elected President Jacobo Arbenz. They were responding to complaints by the United Fruit Company that Arbenz was forcing it to sell its vast uncultivated landholdings to the government for a price ($1.2 million) based on the tax value the company's own accountants had declared. UFCO and the U.S. state department wanted $16 million. Arbenz wanted to re-distribute the holdings to landless peasants.

After the coup, Guatemala endured a succession of brutal dictatorships so oppressive that a 36-year civil war began in 1960 that killed over 200,000 people, mostly Mayan. To this day, the U.S. continues to support a militarized white oligarchy ruling amid widespread poverty and violence that drives Guatemalans to seek asylum in the U.S.

JFK paid the price for trying to turn the U.S. into an "unfriendly country."

Authors Bio:

I'm a retired philosophy professor at Centre College. My last book was Posthumanity-Thinking Philosophically about the Future (Rowman & Littlefield, 2004). I am an anti-capitalist.