Kennedy, Now More Than Ever

Why we need RFK Jr. to Restore Public Trust

By Aaron Good, Special to The Kennedy Beacon

As President, John F. Kennedy “wanted to reverse the imperialistic policies of Truman and Eisenhower, rein in the CIA, and support freedom movements around the world. He wanted to revive Roosevelt’s impulse to dissolve the British empire rather than take it over.” So reads the website for the presidential campaign of John F. Kennedy’s nephew, Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

It is hard to overstate the importance of these words. Not only is a presidential contender speaking about the reality of the post-World War II US as first and foremost a global empire. The words also call attention to how the JFK assassination prevented President Kennedy from democratically breaking with the imperial “consensus.” To the extent that the US Empire was any kind of consensus, it was a consensus among the milieu at the pinnacle of corporate wealth—i.e., from the American oligarchy.

Let us look honestly at the overriding power of the elite US consensus for global empire. When we do, we can easily surmise that JFK was killed for breaking with that consensus. This conclusion is all the more obvious when one factors in the absurdity of the government’s narrative of two “lone nuts.” We have one “lone nut” named Lee Oswald who allegedly killed the President. Shortly thereafter, a second “lone nut” named Jack Ruby was able to randomly walk into a police station and murder the first “lone nut.” Shortly before he himself was assassinated, Lee Oswald said, “I didn’t shoot anyone…I’m just a patsy!” After murdering Oswald, Jack Ruby later said, “Everything pertaining to what's happening has never come to the surface. The world will never know the true facts…The people who had such an ulterior motive will never let the true facts come above board.” Like Oswald, Jack Ruby would be dead before he could testify about this in open court.

On the day that Jack Ruby killed Lee Oswald, American power elite figures began lobbying the new president to establish a blue-ribbon panel which would present a no-conspiracy account of the assassination to the US public. 

A key figure in this campaign was The New York Times’ Joseph Alsop—a man who had also gone on assignments for the CIA undercover as a journalist. Another figure lobbying for the blue-ribbon cover-up was Eugene Rostow, Dean of Yale Law School. Alsop and Rostow were acting at the behest of Establishment luminary, Dean Acheson—Truman’s Secretary of State. Acheson was a man of great power, a figure whose subordinates penned famous or (infamous) documents laying out containment as well as the permanent war economy, which gave rise to the military industrial complex. I’m referring to George Kennan’s “Long Telegram,” and Paul Nitze’s NSC 68. 

How, in November of 1963, could Acheson have possibly known that there wasn’t a conspiracy behind the President’s assassination and the subsequent assassination of the only suspect? It is almost as implausible as the “magic bullet” theory.

American Conspiracies and Public Trust

There is a lively history of elite conspiracy in the US—and a history of American elites theorizing about conspiracies. The founding document of the United States, The Declaration of Independence, is essentially an elaborated conspiracy theory—a series of bullet points denouncing the Crown for systematically conspiring to deprive American colonists of liberty. Distrust and suspicion have waxed and waned over time. Throughout US history, conspiratorial actions were known about or suspected by various Americans. Such would include Aaron Burr’s separatist conspiracy, John Quincy Adams’ “corrupt bargain,” the dubious pretext for the Mexican-American War, the assassination of Zachary Taylor, the Supreme Court’s 14^th amendment-corporate personhood ruling, the Teapot Dome Scandal, and so on.

Under FDR’s New Deal—and after US victory in World War II—there was a period of high public trust in government. As Kennedy states in the quote above, Roosevelt didn’t want the US to become a new British Empire. And yet, that is exactly what FDR’s administration allowed to happen. 

Under FDR, the State Department essentially tasked Wall Street’s Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) with formulating plans for US entry into World War II and for postwar peace. CFR man and media tycoon, Henry Luce, pitched this global imperialist plan to the US public with his well-known essay, “The American Century.” Roosevelt’s vice president, Henry Wallace, argued against this plan in his speech “The Century of the Common Man.” In 1944, the Wall Street elites and party bosses conspired to remove the progressive Wallace from the ticket, replacing him with the more pliable Harry Truman. As president, Truman would go on to drop atom bombs on Japan, create the CIA, and establish a permanent war economy in the US with the outbreak of war in Korea.

The public’s high level of faith in the US government persisted through most of the Eisenhower years. It did decline a bit in the last year of the administration after it became obvious that Ike had lied to the public about the U2 flights over the Soviet Union. The U2 incident notwithstanding, it wasn’t until 1964 that public trust in the government began its long and precipitous decline, as I write in my 2022 book, American Exception: Empire and the Deep State: 

Historian James DiEugenio points out, “[S]omething did go wrong in 1963. [. . .] [I]n 1964, the year the Warren Report was issued, the percentage of people who said they trusted Washington to do the right thing most of the time was almost 80 percent. But in that year, a toboggan slide began which resulted in the dwindling of that figure to below 20 percent by 1993.” As of 2019, according to the Pew Research Center, “Only 17 percent of Americans today say they can trust the government in Washington to do what is right ‘just about always’ (3 percent) or ‘most of the time’ (14 percent).”

While Vietnam and Watergate can explain the plunge from 1965 on, the JFK assassination and the release of the Warren Report likely explain the 1964 starting point. Majorities of Americans increasingly came to doubt the Warren Report’s conclusion that President Kennedy had been killed by a “lone nut” who days later was killed by a second “lone nut” in a police station full of officers and journalists. The Vietnam War and the political assassinations of 1968 (Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy)—these tragic events further contributed to a decline in public trust, as did Watergate and the post-Watergate intelligence investigations.

Dallas Sparked a Rolling Cataclysm

In myriad ways, the 1963 JFK assassination served as a catalyst for this era of democratic decline: President Kennedy signed an order in October 1963 to begin a phased withdrawal from Vietnam which would conclude in 1965. JFK was assassinated on Friday, November 22nd. His funeral was on Monday, November 25. On Tuesday, November 26, President Johnson effectively reversed JFK’s withdrawal order by signing an order that authorized the US to carry out new and aggressive covert operations against North Vietnam. It was these operations which would later generate the dubious pretext for the Vietnam War.

Vietnam War spending was so damaging to the US balance of payments position that it led to the end of the Bretton Woods system which had been established near the end of World War II. Under that system, the dollar was pegged to gold to settle international payments. Because the US was hemorrhaging gold due to the war, LBJ and Nixon essentially defaulted on US promises to the international community. While stalling for time by negotiating with other countries, the US actually solved the dollar overhang by orchestrating the oil shocks of the 1970’s. This served to channel all those dollars out of foreign central banks and into the coffers of the major oil producers—overwhelmingly US client states like Saudi Arabia, Iran, and Indonesia. These countries then invested petrodollars in US Treasury bills and in Western banks, which then made massive loans to Third World countries. When the Federal Reserve hiked interest rates astronomically, the result was the Third World debt crisis. 

While this debt crisis was a catastrophe for the global south, it was a tremendous boon to American and other Western oligarchs who could take over the economies of poor countries, relegating much of humanity to debt peonage.

This US-led international regime took its mature form under President Ronald Reagan. Shortly into his term, oil prices and interest rates fell, as if by magic. The looting of foreign economies was of course lucrative, but the new system also gave the US oligarchy or deep state something even more valuable: a new dollar system wherein the US could fund deficit spending in perpetuity because the dollar was backed by nothing. Countries in trade surplus held reserves in dollars or American treasuries, allowing the US to finance endless deficits. For the first time in human history, an empire dominated the international political economy by virtue of its position as a debtor, not a creditor!

The Missing “Peace Dividend”

Massive profiteering during this era gave rise to a new stage for the US oligarchy. Income and wealth became more and more concentrated year after year, administration after administration. The end of the Cold War was perceived by some as ushering in the “end of history.” With no major adversary in sight, there was talk of how the US could afford a “peace dividend” to usher in an age of rising prosperity.

Unfortunately, what we can see today with several decades of hindsight is that the US used this opportunity to further pursue global dominance. The fall of the USSR was not simply due to internal decline. The US waged hybrid war to destroy the Soviet bloc. There was economic warfare in the form of oil price manipulation, loans to Eastern bloc countries, and an expensive arms race instigated by the US side. 

There was also cultural warfare in the form of civil society manipulation—e.g., US support for groups like Polish Solidarity. Additionally, there was paramilitary violence—e.g., US support for jihadis in Afghanistan. This destabilized Afghanistan by design, provoking a Soviet invasion to which the US responded by sending even more arms and money to Islamist terrorists in Afghanistan.

What followed the Cold War was a series of disastrous US imperial blunders. After promising not to expand NATO “one inch to the East,” the US under President Bill Clinton began admitting formerly communist countries into NATO. In the 1990s, China and Russia began to speak of the need for a “multipolar” world. The US made no moves in this direction, instead getting economically and militarily involved in the periphery of the former Soviet Union. When 9/11 came, it gave the US a pretext to pursue imperial policies in those same regions and countries. When the 9/11 Wars stalled in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Arab Spring served as a catalyst to resume the US regime change agenda in the Middle East. The US destroyed Libya and almost destroyed Syria—but for Russian intervention on behalf of its longtime Syrian ally.

Perhaps in response to Syria, the US stepped up operations in Ukraine. In 2014, the US backed a coup that ousted a leader deemed insufficiently anti-Russian by the managers of the US Empire. Russian fears of NATO in Ukraine eventually led to an initial small-scale Russian invasion in 2022. When Russia and Ukraine were close to negotiating an end to the war very shortly after it began, the US intervened to scuttle the peace deal. The rest is the history that we are living through.

Resisting Top-Down Despotism

What I hope the reader by now can grasp is that our system of governance is not what it purports to be. While we can broadly observe that the US public is polarized along some left-right political and cultural divides, the real political story of our time is not left-right, but top-down. 

In this formulation, the “top”—those persons and interests which exercise true political and economic power—is extremely small. This is an anti-democratic system of governance allowing for minority rule over the US. 

Since the US is the hegemon of the global economic system, this tiny minority controls the fate of much of humanity. They refuse to address existential threats like the risks of nuclear doomsday, looming ecological catastrophe, the biological arms race, or staggering levels of inequality. Since US rulers refuse to exercise their power responsibly, wisdom compels us to confront the regime. They have lost all legitimacy. Revolutionary reform is essential.

Given the gravity of our crises, a new pro-democracy political coalition needs to form in opposition to top-down despotism. A coalition is not the same as an alliance. There need not be any mutual defense pledge or big umbrella organization. While certain critics of the “false left-right paradigm” are dubious, it may be existentially important for the public to think more along lines of “top-down” vs. democracy. 

To the extent that the US Left does not represent opposition to top-down despotism, it is a failure that needs to be confronted and corrected. With that in mind, how strange is it that Robert F. Kennedy Jr.—essentially a New Deal Democrat running against a neoconservative corporate Democrat—is more popular with people who do not identify as Democrats?

Perhaps the American people would be best served by turning the 2024 presidential election into a referendum. Do we or don’t we want domestic despotism, material insecurity, and empire abroad—all in service to an oligarchy of corporate wealth?

To wit, the US consolidated the colonialist system of Western imperialism after World War II. American leaders organized the transition from old colonialism to a neocolonial, US dollarized global empire. Now, at the end of this cycle, the US Empire is hurtling toward the fate of all empires. The increasing despotism of our era—perceived by growing numbers on the Left and Right—must be understood in the context of a crumbling empire.

Can the US peacefully wind down the empire? Can we restore some semblance of the rule of law? Can we change our current course toward turnkey totalitarianism? Can whatever is left of American democracy respond sensibly to the existential threats posed by the nuclear doomsday machine, by the biological arms race, by looming ecological catastrophe, and by staggering levels of inequality? In other words: Can a US political coalition emerge and take power on the basis of a shared desire to preserve human existence from the threats posed by our current leaders? 

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is the first presidential contender to directly confront the crises of a dying empire. While people from all political perspectives can find certain areas of disagreement with Kennedy, such things pale in significance compared to the imperative of peacefully winding down the US Empire. What President Kennedy said about the Cold War during his 1963 “peace speech” applies to us all today: "If we cannot end now our differences, at least we can make the world safe for diversity."

Aaron Good (PhD) is author of American Exception: Empire and the Deep State and the host of the American Exception podcast on Patreon.