lewrockwell | No president since John F. Kennedy has dared to take on the CIA or
the rest of the national security establishment or to operate outside
the bounds of permissible parameters within the paradigm of the
national-security state.
That might have been because post-JFK presidents just happened to
find themselves on the same page as the Pentagon, the CIA, and the NSA.
But another possibility is that the one mentioned by Schumer: They
knew that if they opposed the national-security establishment at a
fundamental level, they would be subjected to retaliatory measures.
Kennedy had come into office as a standard Cold Warrior and as a
supporter of the national-security state system, the totalitarian-like
apparatus that was grafted onto America’s federal governmental system
after World War II. But after he was set up and betrayed by the CIA with
respect to the Bay of Pigs invasion, he was at loggerheads with that
agency for the rest of his presidency. After the Bay of Pigs, he vowed
to tear the CIA into a thousand pieces and scatter them to the winds. He
also fired CIA Director Allen Dulles, who, in a rather unusual twist of
fate, would later be appointed to the Warren Commission to investigate
Kennedy’s murder.
Kennedy’s antipathy toward the CIA gradually extended to what
President Eisenhower had termed the military-industrial complex,
especially when it proposed Operation Northwoods, which called for
fraudulent terrorist attacks to serve as a pretext for invading Cuba,
and when it suggested that Kennedy initiate a surprise nuclear attack on
the Soviet Union. (The latter suggestion caused Kennedy to indignantly
leave the meeting of the Joint Chiefs of Staff when the suggestion was
made and remark to an aide, “And we call ourselves the human race.”
