JFK’s War With the National Security Establishment: Why Kennedy Was Assassinated
Douglas Horne
II served on the staff of the President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Review Board (ARRB) from August of 1995 through September of 1998, during the final three years of its limited four-year lifespan — and was promoted from a Senior Analyst position on the Military Records Team, to that of “Chief Analyst for Military Records,” halfway through my tenure at the ARRB.The ARRB was an independent federal agency created by the JFK Records Act of 1992; our mission was to locate any and all records that could “reasonably” be considered related to the assassination of the 35th President, and to ensure their declassification (to the maximum extent possible, as defined within our Congressional mandate), followed by their release and subsequent placement within a special open collection (the “JFK Records Collection”) at the National Archives. The JFK Act required all agencies and branches of the government to transfer assassination records directly to the National Archives (in an “open in full” status), unless there were portions of those records that an agency wanted to redact (or withhold) in part, or in full. It was the ARRB’s job to define what constituted an assassination record; to do all we could to ensure that agencies conducted full and honest searches for assassination records; and to review those records which agencies did NOT want released in full. At the end of the ARRB’s lifespan, we had reviewed about 60,000 records that government agencies wanted partially or fully redacted. Our five VIP Board Members, who served part time, voted on the disposition of these 60,000 records that were under dispute, after first receiving and considering the staff’s recommendations; and their votes essentially determined which portions of those disputed records would see the light of day. [Agencies had to comply with the formal decisions of the ARRB regarding document release, and act accordingly, or else appeal to the President. President Clinton never upheld any agency objection over any of the Review Board’s recommendations; some compromises were reached, at the suggestion of the President’s chief counsel, but no ARRB decision to release information was ever overturned by appeal.] It was a noteworthy exercise in “citizen review,” and the ARRB went into its task with all assassination records benefiting from the presumption of full and immediate disclosure, unless an allowable criterion for redaction (established by the JFK Records Act) was established. The five board members overwhelmingly and routinely voted to release disputed records, whenever presented with a choice, unless stringent conditions for exceptions to this policy, outlined in our legislative charter, were met. As a result of the JFK Records Act and the activities of the ARRB (the “search and enforcement arm” created by the Act), there are now about 6 million pages of records related to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in the JFK Records Collection at the National Archives.
During my three years on the staff of the ARRB, and while subsequently researching the manuscript for my five-volume book, Inside the Assassination Records Review Board, I became increasingly aware of the broad levels of conflict between President Kennedy and his own national security establishment — those officials within the State Department, the Pentagon, the National Security Council (NSC), and the CIA who helped him to formulate and carry out the nation’s foreign and military policy around the world. This internal conflict over just what our nation’s foreign and military policies ought to be, at the height of the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union, commenced early in the first year of JFK’s presidency, and continued to escalate during the 34 months of his administration. Although John F. Kennedy gave a robust inaugural address that seemed in the eyes of many to establish his credentials as a traditional, mainstream Cold Warrior, his ensuing behavior early in 1961, and his increasing and open skepticism, throughout his first year in office, toward the bellicose and inflexible advice he was receiving from within the federal bureaucracy, signaled a growing gulf between the young 35th President and the national security establishment that was supposed to serve him and implement his policy decisions.
By the end of November 1961, profoundly dissatisfied with his own national security advisory apparatus, President Kennedy had firmly pushed back against the national security establishment (in this case the NSC, the State Department, and the CIA) by purging and/or reshuffling many of the civilian hawks in his own administration into other positions, and by placing officials more in line with his own views into key positions. [A change in the top leadership at the Pentagon was to come later, in 1962.] Throughout 1961, the new President had painfully but quickly learned to be quite skeptical of the advice he was receiving, pertaining to matters of war and peace, from his hawkish advisors; and as 1961 progressed, John F. Kennedy repeatedly demonstrated what the hawks in government (the majority) no doubt considered a disturbingly independent (and increasingly all-too-predictable) frame of mind in regard to the national security recommendations he was receiving from the “sacred cows” and “wise men” in Washington, D.C. As I shall demonstrate in this essay, by the end of 1962, the national security establishment in Washington D.C., which had quickly come to know JFK as a skeptic during 1961, had come to view him as a heretic; and by November of 1963, the month he was assassinated, they no doubt considered him an apostate, for he no longer supported most of the so-called “orthodox” views of the Cold War priesthood. Increasingly alone in his foreign policy judgments as 1963 progressed, JFK was nevertheless proceeding boldly to end our “Holy War” against Communism, instead of trying to win it. In retrospect it is clear that the national security establishment wanted to win our own particular “jihad” of the post-WW II era by turning the Cold War against the USSR into a “hot war,” so that we could inflict punishing and fatal blows upon our Communist adversaries (and any other forces we equated with them) on the battlefield. It was this desire for “hot war” by so many within the establishment — their belief that conventional “proxy wars” with the Soviet Bloc were an urgent necessity, and that nuclear war with the USSR was probably inevitable — to which President Kennedy was so adamantly opposed. And it was JFK’s profound determination to avoid nuclear war by miscalculation, and to eschew combat with conventional arms unless it was truly necessary, that separated him from almost everyone else in his administration from 1961 throughout 1963, as events have shown us.
This essay will explore, one year at a time, the seminal events in JFK’s ongoing and escalating conflicts with the national security hard-liners in his okown administration. At the essay’s end, I will address the inevitable question that arises today, fifty years after his death: Did these internal conflicts over the conduct and very future of the Cold War with the USSR lead to JFK’s death? Did powerful forces and individuals within his own administration cast a veto on his presidency, and his life, over reasons of state policy at the height of the Cold War? These are the questions the reader should keep in mind while reading this essay.
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