AMERICAN COUP D'ETAT?

                                 AMERICAN COUP D’ETAT ?




All of us at one time or another while reading history in school have learned about Coup d’etats, “the sudden and illegal seizure of a government, usually instigated by a small group of the existing state establishment to depose the established government and replace it with a new ruling body, civil or military.” (Wikipedia) They are about as far removed from our experience living in a democracy as you could go. In my life I never gave any thought to the possibility of a coup in the United States.

So you might imagine how surprised I was to find, while reading a wonderful article written by Robert Kennedy, Jr.(son of President John Kennedy’s brother the Attorney General and later New York Senator Robert F. Kennedy, in the December 2013 issue of Rolling Stone, that at least one of our presidents felt a coup might be in the works.

I will digress a moment here because most of my readers would be surprised to find me reading anything in Rolling Stone while others would wonder why I am just now, in June 2014, getting to their 2013 issue. Here is the answer: I was sitting in the doctor’s office, and unless I wanted to read about pregnancy or other female issues, I was left with a well worn copy of Rolling Stone. Happy to see an article with a political bent to  it I grabbed it up.

When the very young John F. Kennedy became president, he was following the highly-seasoned, military-oriented, fan of both the CIA and the Defense Department: General Dwight D. Eisenhower. President Eisenhower had two of his good friends helping him in the administration, both with the last name of Dulles. One was at the State Department and the other at the CIA. As we all know from history, at the time Kennedy replaced Eisenhower plans were in place to support Cubans living in the United States who would invade their own country and try to take it back from the dictator Fidel Castro.

The young new president did not fancy this plan, but he was reluctant to stop something so well along in planning and preparation. The CIA wanted it, the Defense Department wanted it, and the Joint Chiefs of Staff wanted it. He had just entered office and must have been daunted by the unanimity that surrounded the invasion plans.

So he hesitated, and they moved forward.

As the ill-fated invasion was underway, the young new president refused to provide the air cover that would be required for it to be successful.

The invasion failed.

Kennedy, as outlined in his subsequent writings, was angry, mostly at himself for not acting on his own instincts. The Dulles at CIA was out. The Joint Chiefs were castigated. A lot of bad feelings were flowing around Washington, DC. 

In Robert Kennedy’s article he mentioned that his uncle, the president, trusted only two members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and no one at the CIA. Tough spot for any president.


Let's also say that the young president was not held in great regard by the folks at CIA and Defense, Cuban Americans felt betrayed, and the retired general living at Gettysburg, PA, was not a very happy camper.

This mess was unfortunately followed by a very unsuccessful summit meeting in Europe between Kennedy and Chairman Khruschev of the USSR. The Chairman was blustery. Kennedy was sophisticated. The Chairman took his measure and probably said something like: Great. The old general/president is gone, and I now have a chance to put some pressure on this young whippersnapper. Well, in fairness, I expect Khruschev used a much stronger word than whippersnapper.

In any event, off went the Russians, hurrying along plans to load a lot of missiles onto Cuban soil ready to blast Americans into space if the Cold War ever became a Hot War.

Mostly the same advisors were collected together. to discuss this new situation in Cuba.  Most of them advised  bombing or invading Cuba. The Generals liked the idea and were probably writing little notes to one another in the Cabinet Room saying “told you so” in reference to the Bay of Pigs. The “spooks” at CIA liked the idea. They had been trying to kill Castro for years with poison, assassination, and other sundry tricks from their book of such things.

President Kennedy was willing to go to the brink, confront possible nuclear war, but he was unwilling to attack Cuba. Books written since imply that most of his advisors were in favor of a quick strike on Cuba. The president and his brother, the attorney general, worked hard through back channels to try to find a way out.

During all this, things were not going all that well in Asia, especially Vietnam and Laos.
What the CIA wanted to do and what the Joint Chiefs wanted to do was not what the president decided to do.

When the president realized that his generals were exerting pressure on him and were unhappy with his decision about the missiles in Cuba, he made an effort to see if Chairman Khruschev might be facing a similar problem in the Kremlin. It turned out that Kremlin hard liners were pushing Khruschev to rattle his sabers and nukes also.

I am not making an effort to parse what Robert Kennedy’s excellent Rolling Stone article said other than to tell you that for the first time in print, at least the first time I've seen it in print, and I read a lot of this stuff, Kennedy points out that his uncle, President John F. Kennedy, articulated a fear that if the Cuban Missile Crisis did not turn out better than the other times he failed to take the advice of the Defense Department and the CIA, he believed a Coup d’Etat could occur in the United States, where he would be removed as President by the military and that he communicated this fear to Khruschev.

The President died of an assassin’s bullet in Dallas, TX, not long thereafter.

Did America have a Coup and tell no one about it?

History continues to wrestle with what really happened in Dallas, Texas and a large number of people are unaccepting of the official reports. The truth in matters like this rarely comes out until most of the contemporaries have died. If there is a truth, other than what we have been told, my generation will not live long enough to know it.

Our Sacred Obligations

  OUR SACRED OBLIGATIONS


I am writing this column on Memorial Day.

It is always a very moving experience for me to celebrate our fellow Americans who have paid the ultimate price to protect us as well as to thank those veterans who returned home from their service.

I am not unmindful that many of those who survived their years of service returned physically or mentally wounded. For some of them, the rest of their lives included wrestling with the road to recovery and for some wrestling with the bureaucracy charged with caring for them.

I am told that problems have existed in the Veterans Administration for many years. Our current president, during his campaign for the office, identified these problems and promised to solve them.

How many Americans know that the Veterans budget is second only to the Defense budget in size. If we are allocating huge financial resources to serving the needs of our veterans, why is it not working?

One paper recently talked about millions of dollars spent on redecorating a reception area at a Veterans hospital while needy veterans were waiting weeks for appointments.

It was not so long ago that we read stories that veterans were buried in the wrong graves at Arlington Cemetery, were buried on top of each other in the same grave, and that a lot of back-up information as to names of the dead was incorrect.

Now comes news that 26 hospitals throughout the country were cooking the books. Pretending to serve vets but leaving them for long periods of time without care. Some of them died from the delay. This isn’t one problem hospital. This is systemic.

It has been my pleasure to have been asked to speak on a number of occasions on Memorial Day or Veterans Day at the Massachusetts Veteran Cemetery in Winchendon, MA. This year I felt it important to acknowledge that we are falling short of what Americans want with reference to serving our veterans and honoring those who have died.


Let us not permit our country to fail in the important task of honoring those who died for our nation and those who returned from the wars with serious physical or mental problems or to say thank you for your service to every man or woman who put their lives at risk.

Obviously we have not performed well with reference to our veterans. With such a huge budget and such a large number of people who need treatment the problem is one of management.

My message to President Obama and Secretary Shinseki: you need to INSPECT what you EXPECT.