Latest / Book Club with Jeffrey Sachs / Season 5 Episode 2: James W. Douglass: Martyrs to the Unspeakable: The Assassinations of JFK, Malcolm, Martin, and RFK

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Season 5 Episode 2: James W. Douglass: Martyrs to the Unspeakable: The Assassinations of JFK, Malcolm, Martin, and RFK · Book Club with Jeffrey Sachs

0:00
SPEAKER_00: Hello, I'm Jeffrey Sachs.
0:01
SPEAKER_00: Welcome to Book Club, a monthly conversation with world-leading authors who have written scintillating, inspiring, and remarkably important books about history, social justices, and the challenges of building a decent world.
0:21
SPEAKER_00: Hello, everybody.
0:22
SPEAKER_00: Welcome to Book Club with Jeffrey Sachs.
0:25
SPEAKER_00: I am profoundly honored and excited and deeply grateful to our author guest today, Jim Douglas, who is a remarkable person you're going to get to know, who's written many remarkable, poignant, painful, shocking, and extremely important books.
0:48
SPEAKER_00: And the most recent of those, as far as I know, the most recent is the 2025 book Martyrs to the Unspeakable, JFK, Malcolm, meaning Malcolm X, Martin, Martin Luther King, and Robert Kennedy, Four Assassinations of the 1960s.
1:10
SPEAKER_00: Jim Douglas is a remarkable person who for many, many decades has been a leading voice for peace in the United States and worldwide.
1:21
SPEAKER_00: He is a theologian, he is a historian, he is an activist, especially a peace activist and an anti-nuclear weapons activist.
1:32
SPEAKER_00: And he's an investigator who has spent uh decades investigating the assassinations of the four uh leaders in the United States whose lives were completely intertwined, uh, but who each in their way was uh pursuing uh a um a remarkable uh journey of peacemaking.
2:01
SPEAKER_00: Uh President John F.
2:03
SPEAKER_00: Kennedy, Malcolm X, uh, Martin Luther King Jr., and uh Robert uh Kennedy.
2:10
SPEAKER_00: Jim, it's uh really great to be with you.
2:13
SPEAKER_00: Of course, I've been reading your works and listening to you for for many, many years.
2:20
SPEAKER_00: Uh your book, JFK and the unspeakable, uh, which is uh now uh almost 18 years uh in print and made a huge impact on our understanding and thinking about President Kennedy and and his uh death uh in 1963, made a huge impact on me.
2:40
SPEAKER_00: And you have studied the 1960s and these four assassinations uh that you discuss in your new book, Martyrs to the unspeakable, uh, for a worldwide listenership uh that may not really be familiar with uh this uh drama of the 1960s, uh a drama that for me I was uh uh started uh the 1960s uh uh at age seven.
3:12
SPEAKER_00: Uh and so age seven to seventeen was of course transformative.
3:17
SPEAKER_00: You're a little bit older than I am, but for America it was a shocking decade.
3:23
SPEAKER_00: Can you help uh us to understand why these four martyrs, and of course, a theme of yours for decades, that you have uh also uh invoked the great theologian uh Thomas Merton, uh, what is the unspeakable?
3:39
SPEAKER_01: Well, the unspeakable, the way uh Merton understood it is really a void, a void of evil.
3:48
SPEAKER_01: He, in a great book he wrote, Raids on the unspeakable, he said it's a void, a void within us, where we are in total denial of our responsibility for what he cites as the particular example of Adolf Eichmann's kind of evil uh in the Holocaust.
4:14
SPEAKER_01: And in the case of these assassinations, we are an amnesian nation.
4:21
SPEAKER_01: We we don't have any grasp of our our own history of the of the dots, the connecting the dots between JFK, Malcolm, Martin, and RFK.
4:34
SPEAKER_01: They were all taken out by our national security state.
4:38
SPEAKER_01: It's documented enormously, not just in the two books that you've referred to of mine, in many, many other books that more and more people have have come to, but we haven't connected the dots, and the dots come right to the government we have today.
4:55
SPEAKER_01: They go all the way back to um the first world war, certainly the second world war, when we became what Dr.
5:04
SPEAKER_01: King referred to in his Riverside Church Address as the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today.
5:09
SPEAKER_01: My own government.
5:11
SPEAKER_01: He didn't say that government, he said my government, until we can say our government is the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today, and that it is responsible for the assassinations of our four greatest leaders of the 60s.
5:25
SPEAKER_01: There were many other great leaders.
5:27
SPEAKER_01: In fact, the people were the main leaders, they were following the people, and that was the key to their assassinations and their interrelationships.
5:35
SPEAKER_01: So often, for example, the King family or or Malcolm and the Shabazz family and the the Kennedys, they're all seen as opposites.
5:44
SPEAKER_01: They're somehow, you know, it's nonsense.
5:49
SPEAKER_00: Absolutely, and and the way that the stories weave in your book is uh is remarkable, Jim.
5:55
SPEAKER_00: Can we start with President Kennedy?
5:57
SPEAKER_00: He was the first to be uh gunned down, and uh perhaps uh the most brazen, and your phrase amnesia nation is so right and and powerful.
6:10
SPEAKER_00: Here is uh a president of the United States killed in broad daylight in cold blood, and um it never ever was really looked into.
6:23
SPEAKER_00: And the whole way of thinking basically is that those who carried it out, the CIA and uh their alliance, mobsters and others, but it isn't even that subtle, by the way.
6:37
SPEAKER_00: It's not ingenious, uh it's not that it takes great genius to unravel or that you stumble upon contradictions uh decades later.
6:49
SPEAKER_00: From the beginning, it was clear that the story that we were told, that some lone gunman shooting from a building from behind with a particular rifle that couldn't even have done it, did the deed, and that this was known within minutes or hours of the assassination, the whole thing reeks of a kind of idiocy.
7:17
SPEAKER_00: So how is it?
7:18
SPEAKER_00: I've wondered about this for decades, Jim.
7:20
SPEAKER_00: How do they get away with it?
7:22
SPEAKER_00: What it what actually is happening here that we're seeing a president overthrown by his own state in a coup, and with so many contradictions to the official story, and not a dumb country, a pretty well-educated country, a lot of media, a lot of discussion, television shows, reporters who would like to perhaps make their name, an official investigation called the Warren Commission report, and it's all hokum.
7:55
SPEAKER_00: But it's all pretty obviously a hokum, even.
7:58
SPEAKER_00: It's not subtle.
8:00
SPEAKER_00: That's what I only learned as a grown-up many decades later.
8:04
SPEAKER_00: It's not subtle, it's just brazen.
8:07
SPEAKER_00: So help us to understand it.
8:10
SPEAKER_01: Um, I've been puzzling with this for a while, too, like you.
8:14
SPEAKER_01: In fact, it took me how many years before I started to ask questions about it.
8:20
SPEAKER_01: I was complicit in this assassination from 1963 until the 90s.
8:29
SPEAKER_01: Is that a pretty long time?
8:31
SPEAKER_01: That's longer than a few minutes on the part of the American people.
8:34
SPEAKER_01: 30 years I've been complicit with it.
8:36
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I'm with you there too, because I didn't know maybe something's not right, but there's a lot of crazy ideas around.
8:45
SPEAKER_00: Who knows?
8:46
SPEAKER_01: Have you ever watched a really bad movie, like a B movie?
8:51
SPEAKER_01: They call them B movies, you know, when you had double features.
8:54
SPEAKER_01: This is a B movie.
8:57
SPEAKER_01: It's not even a good movie.
8:59
SPEAKER_01: Right.
8:59
SPEAKER_01: That's what you'll learn.
9:00
SPEAKER_01: It's the Pentagon's B movie, which is also applies to another event we might get to somewhere along the line here, but it's the Pentagon's B movie.
9:08
SPEAKER_01: And it is actually according to a script.
9:13
SPEAKER_01: That's exactly the way it proceeded.
9:15
SPEAKER_01: And the the script was written especially by three people.
9:19
SPEAKER_01: I picked them out because they're the heads of the Central Intelligence Agency and Alan Dulles, number one.
9:27
SPEAKER_00: Yes, he he was the uh head of the CIA that Kennedy fired.
9:31
SPEAKER_00: Kennedy fired.
9:32
SPEAKER_00: So partly he wanted revenge, but mainly he wanted the CIA to be able to do its murderous business as it wanted to without uh any politicians like Kennedy interfering in that.
9:43
SPEAKER_01: And a key guy named James Jesus Angleton, you remember him?
9:48
SPEAKER_01: We do.
9:49
SPEAKER_01: James Jesus Angleton was the head of uh counterintelligence, and he wrote the scripts.
9:56
SPEAKER_01: He picked the scapegoats.
9:58
SPEAKER_01: This guy was brilliant.
10:00
SPEAKER_01: Uh he was uh, well, from the time he was at Yale in the early 40s, he was a great analyst of poetry.
10:08
SPEAKER_01: He's called the Poet Spy later on, and uh he wrote the scripts.
10:13
SPEAKER_01: So it is like a movie.
10:14
SPEAKER_00: It is a movie.
10:16
SPEAKER_00: And he's the one just to mention that when his personal safe was opened after his death, there is the file of his running Lee Harvey Oswald, the purported assassination.
10:29
SPEAKER_00: So after the CIA had told the American people repeatedly, we don't know this lone guy.
10:35
SPEAKER_00: Uh there's the big file of Angleton uh as his handler.
10:40
SPEAKER_00: It's a script.
10:41
SPEAKER_01: Who's the third?
10:42
SPEAKER_01: The third is the CIA to be director.
10:45
SPEAKER_01: He was deputy director at the time, and he's also um, you tell me, who's this uh this third guy?
10:52
SPEAKER_01: Helms, you're talking about.
10:54
SPEAKER_01: Yes, sir.
10:55
SPEAKER_01: Mr.
10:55
SPEAKER_01: Helms.
10:56
SPEAKER_01: Yep.
10:56
unknown: Mr.
10:57
SPEAKER_01: Oh, he's a dark force.
10:58
SPEAKER_01: Mr.
10:58
SPEAKER_01: Helms is a very, very dark force and and far more sophisticated than probably anybody else in the CIA.
11:05
SPEAKER_01: He you never get his finger quite on Mr.
11:08
SPEAKER_01: Helms unless you study the documents.
11:12
SPEAKER_01: And he, together with uh Dulles, is given a free ride into the CIA because Angleton was supposed to have done um polygraphs, supposed to have done examinations of people coming into the CIA.
11:27
SPEAKER_01: He's counterintelligence, and he was supposed to do that from the very beginning on all people, including the high people.
11:34
SPEAKER_01: He bypassed it all.
11:36
SPEAKER_01: I put it all in the book.
11:38
SPEAKER_01: Uh why?
11:39
SPEAKER_01: Because they had sixty of them.
11:43
SPEAKER_01: He he even gives the number of sixty of them.
11:45
SPEAKER_01: Those three were the the leaders, Helms and Dulles, and actually himself as well.
11:51
SPEAKER_01: But they all got bypasses on polygraphs, on careful examinations.
11:56
SPEAKER_01: Why?
11:57
SPEAKER_01: Because they were all Nazi affiliated.
12:00
SPEAKER_01: He's very specific about that in a confession he made in 1987, shortly before explain that.
12:08
SPEAKER_01: Well, a man named uh Joseph Trento uh wrote a book about the CIA, and um he interviewed Angleton practically on his deathbed, and Angleton made the most incredible kinds of uh statements.
12:21
SPEAKER_01: He described what I just told you.
12:23
SPEAKER_01: That's all out of his final confession.
12:26
SPEAKER_01: What is astounding to me is that James Jesus Angleton expressed an incredible amount of pain and complicity in himself because he said the fathers of the central intelligence agencies were all liars, and all they had in common were their capacity for lying and their ambition for total power, not only over the United States, but over the entire world.
12:53
SPEAKER_01: That's that was what they wanted.
12:56
SPEAKER_01: He says, these people belong in hell.
12:59
SPEAKER_01: That's what Angleton says at the end of his life.
13:02
SPEAKER_01: These people belong in hell, and I belong there with them.
13:05
SPEAKER_01: He's saying that, and he says, I'm gonna be there soon.
13:09
SPEAKER_01: It's astounding.
13:10
SPEAKER_00: And what is important for people to understand, and they don't until today, by the way, am I right, Jim, that I've come to believe the CIA till today runs American foreign policy, that it is not, you know, it's certainly it's not an intelligence agency.
13:28
SPEAKER_00: We've understood that for uh ever since the beginning.
13:31
SPEAKER_00: It was founded in 1947 with a dual use from the beginning, that it, yes, it was supposed to uh collect information and process it and provide that to the president, but it also was to do operational things, and that's the part that we're talking about.
13:48
SPEAKER_00: Operations means killing people, operations means making coups, operations means uh making these intricate uh plots to overthrow other governments.
13:59
SPEAKER_00: And it became the center of power in Washington.
14:04
SPEAKER_00: You described, for example, you know, brilliantly this just awful, awful, awful episode, which then went on to almost end the world, uh, the invasion that the CIA uh planted of Cuba in April 1961, which we call the Bay of Pigs uh invasion.
14:24
SPEAKER_00: But it was the CIA, uh, not uh anyone else in the government, not Eisenhower, not Kennedy, uh calling the shots will overthrow the government of Cuba and then uh implicating Kennedy in this, uh daring Kennedy, you won't let these uh this small group that's about to uh form a beachhead uh in the Bay of Pigs, as it's called in Spanish, in uh part of Cuba, just sit there.
14:54
SPEAKER_00: You're gonna bring in air cover for them.
14:56
SPEAKER_00: We're gonna have a full-fledged U.S.
14:59
SPEAKER_00: invasion.
15:00
SPEAKER_00: This was the CIA driving policy, not President Kennedy as President of the United States leading foreign policy.
15:08
SPEAKER_00: Seems to me that remains true till today, basically.
15:12
SPEAKER_01: It not only remains true, basically, till today, it's far worse today.
15:17
SPEAKER_01: It's far, far worse because we didn't deal with it.
15:21
SPEAKER_01: I didn't deal with it for 30 years.
15:24
SPEAKER_01: Yep.
15:24
SPEAKER_01: We haven't dealt with it.
15:26
SPEAKER_01: And John Kennedy dealt with it immediately.
15:30
SPEAKER_01: He said to a chief advisor, as cited in the New York Times a couple years after his death, I want to splinter the CIA in a thousand pieces and scatter it to the winds.
15:42
SPEAKER_01: And he began to do that.
15:44
SPEAKER_01: He fired Alan Ballis, he fired a bunch of his other chief people, he started cutting the CIA's budget.
15:52
SPEAKER_01: He was prepared to do just what he said, splinter the CIA in a thousand pieces and scatter it to the winds.
15:59
SPEAKER_01: He was even prepared, and this is almost funny.
16:02
SPEAKER_01: It's none of this is funny, but he was almost prepared, and he wanted to appoint Bobby Kennedy, the Attorney General.
16:10
SPEAKER_01: He said, I want to move you over to the CIA.
16:13
SPEAKER_01: And Bobby Kennedy said, That's not a, you know, it says Yeah, not it not a good idea.
16:19
SPEAKER_01: He probably already made a joke or two.
16:21
SPEAKER_01: I already live next to the CIA, you know, over in his his Hickory Hill house, which is only a hundred yards away from the CIA.
16:30
SPEAKER_00: Jim, two things strike me as uh kind of presidential admissions that this is already out of control.
16:39
SPEAKER_00: Yes.
16:40
SPEAKER_00: One is uh Eisenhower's farewell address in uh January 17, 1960.
16:46
SPEAKER_00: You know, Eisenhower, again, for people listening, he was uh, of course, the president from January 20th, 1953 to January 20th, 1961.
16:57
SPEAKER_00: But he was the supreme Allied commander during World War II.
17:02
SPEAKER_00: This is not a pushover, this is a general.
17:05
SPEAKER_00: Uh not only a general, he was the general that led uh the Allied war against Hitler.
17:12
SPEAKER_00: So this guy uh knew what he was talking about, and in his farewell address, he tells the American people beware the military-industrial complex, the unspeakable.
17:25
SPEAKER_00: He's warning us.
17:26
SPEAKER_00: This a general warning us.
17:28
SPEAKER_00: So he was already seeing Jim, even I mean, he saw it.
17:32
SPEAKER_00: It was out of his control.
17:34
SPEAKER_00: He was trying to tell us this.
17:36
SPEAKER_01: He was trying to tell us that.
17:38
SPEAKER_01: Yes.
17:38
SPEAKER_01: Yes.
17:39
SPEAKER_01: He's trying to tell us that, and he's been trying to tell us that ever since from you know, from his grave, and yet he didn't do anything about it.
17:48
SPEAKER_01: Exactly.
17:49
SPEAKER_01: It was the warning at the end.
17:50
SPEAKER_01: It was the warning at the end, and three days uh later, from that address, that great address that President Eisenhower gave, then JFK walks into the White House and he does deal with it.
18:03
SPEAKER_01: And that's precisely why he's assassinated.
18:05
SPEAKER_01: And why he's uh there's a bullseye on him before he gets into the White House.
18:11
SPEAKER_00: The other message from a president I wanted to ask you about is the astounding op-ed written by Harry Truman.
18:19
SPEAKER_00: It is instant.
18:20
SPEAKER_00: Just after Kennedy's assassination.
18:23
SPEAKER_00: If ever there was a statement saying, I know who did it, but without saying quite that, it's Truman writing in, I think it's December 63 in the Washington Post, but weeks of the assassination saying the biggest mistake I made was to allow the CIA this lawlessness.
18:44
SPEAKER_00: That's not an idea that just came out of nowhere.
18:47
SPEAKER_01: It was exactly one month later, December 22nd.
18:51
SPEAKER_01: And it only appeared in the very first edition of the New York Times that day, and then it I didn't know that.
18:56
SPEAKER_01: Oh, I didn't know that appeared after that very first edition, but it's out there if you get the first edition.
19:02
SPEAKER_01: And and some people did.
19:04
SPEAKER_01: This kind of media control, which of course is the government all the way through, CIA has its people posted at and this is mammothly documented.
19:15
SPEAKER_01: Rolling Stone magazine had a huge article on it, um, and in all kinds of investigative journalists have done stuff on it.
19:23
SPEAKER_01: The CIA has its people all the way through the key points in the mi in the media, pays them, pays them heavily, including uh the investigative journalists, a number of them.
19:35
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, not you.
19:36
SPEAKER_01: I'm not in you don't get paid by anybody except in the end, I think there is an eternal reckoning that comes in all of this.
19:46
SPEAKER_01: That's where JFK, Malcolm, Martin, and RFK are together.
19:51
SPEAKER_01: They are all marching to a different drummer.
19:55
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
19:56
SPEAKER_01: And that drummer is a very, very powerful drummer.
19:59
SPEAKER_01: It's what Dr.
20:00
SPEAKER_01: King called the arc of the moral universe, sometimes moral arc of the universe.
20:05
SPEAKER_01: It means exactly the same thing, and that's what they what they were marching to.
20:11
SPEAKER_00: Jim, I want to of course uh want us to uh to get to that, but I want to finish just uh an understanding on on the assassin Kennedy's assassination.
20:20
SPEAKER_00: Yes.
20:20
SPEAKER_00: One of the things your book also makes so vivid, yeah, uh is uh the CIA and the FBI are not different things.
20:31
SPEAKER_00: This is this is seamless.
20:33
SPEAKER_00: One there they have a kind of specialization.
20:37
SPEAKER_00: The FBI is to torment people internally, the CIA is to kill people outside mostly.
20:43
SPEAKER_00: Yes.
20:44
SPEAKER_00: But it's one organization basically.
20:47
SPEAKER_00: It's completely together in all of this.
20:51
SPEAKER_01: It is, as, and we can add the NSA, which does all the spying, that makes the assassinations so much easier to do, especially in other countries, of course.
21:03
SPEAKER_01: Uh we're assassinating people left, right, and center.
21:06
SPEAKER_01: And add in all of the rest of the United States government.
21:11
SPEAKER_01: Our government assassinated President Kennedy.
21:15
SPEAKER_01: He had one person on his side that he could rely on all the way through Bobby Kennedy.
21:21
SPEAKER_01: Without Bobby Kennedy, we would never have had a president Kennedy.
21:26
SPEAKER_01: And that's precisely why Bobby went down exactly the same way he did.
21:30
SPEAKER_01: There are serial murders, serial murders, JFK and RFK.
21:35
SPEAKER_01: But what you say about the seamless nature of the CIA and the FBI, it can be extended to the State Department, it can be extended, well, certainly to the uh war department.
21:46
SPEAKER_01: And I think our current president did one thing right.
21:49
SPEAKER_01: He na he he called it by the right name.
21:51
SPEAKER_01: Uh it is the war department, and that's what it was called originally.
21:55
SPEAKER_01: So it's seamless.
21:57
SPEAKER_01: And and the media, they fit in just as well.
22:00
SPEAKER_01: Well, for the reasons we already said.
22:02
SPEAKER_01: Um, we've got a government that is a government of war making and has been since the first world war, really.
22:12
SPEAKER_01: And we wait we we started to go a different direction with uh President Roosevelt.
22:18
SPEAKER_01: And that Nikita Khrushchev says, who's the enemy of Kennedy in this process that we're talking about right now, he regarded President Kennedy after he read the American University, heard the American University address, the greatest president since Roosevelt.
22:35
SPEAKER_01: That's why again why he had to be killed.
22:38
SPEAKER_00: I think they're the only two great presidents of uh modern America.
22:42
SPEAKER_00: Yes.
22:42
SPEAKER_00: You know, it's certainly from the 20th century on.
22:45
SPEAKER_00: Yes.
22:45
SPEAKER_00: Roosevelt and Kennedy.
22:47
SPEAKER_00: Roosevelt and Kennedy.
22:48
SPEAKER_00: And and not a single one other than that, that you could say truly uh marched to uh the drumbeat of uh the moral arc of the universe.
22:59
SPEAKER_01: But let's be clear: Roosevelt is not the equal of Kennedy.
23:03
SPEAKER_01: Kennedy, he lasted how many months?
23:07
SPEAKER_01: 34 months.
23:08
SPEAKER_01: Roosevelt lasted a lot longer than that.
23:10
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
23:11
SPEAKER_01: I love Roosevelt, though.
23:12
SPEAKER_01: I have to I have to say Roosevelt also went to war.
23:20
SPEAKER_01: He's not the match of Kennedy.
23:21
SPEAKER_01: Kennedy's the greatest president in the history of the United States.
23:25
SPEAKER_00: By the way, a line that you quote of Martin Luther King is a line that I came to myself when I was writing about Kennedy, and I didn't know that Martin Luther King said it, just saying that there were two Kennedy presidencies, uh the one up to the Cuban Missile Crisis and the one afterwards.
23:44
SPEAKER_00: For people to uh get the chronology, Kennedy came into office in January 20th, 1961.
23:51
SPEAKER_00: The Bay of Pigs invasion, this CIA operation, which was such a debacle uh disaster, was uh April 1961.
24:00
SPEAKER_00: Khrushchev responded in a uh pretty damn ham-handed way by putting in uh offensive nuclear missiles uh into Cuba in uh starting in the spring of 1962.
24:13
SPEAKER_00: And uh one of the lines that I really like about all of that is that when Khrushchev tells his foreign minister, Andrei Gromyko, uh, let's put missiles there, and Gromyko is shocked and says, create World War III.
24:28
SPEAKER_00: And uh Khrushchev says, No, this is nothing to do with war.
24:32
SPEAKER_00: We just have to show Americans, we have to put their nose into it, what they do to us.
24:37
SPEAKER_00: So Khrushchev did something pretty damn reckless.
24:41
SPEAKER_00: I like Khrushchev in a lot of ways, by the way, but he did something absolutely almost world-ending, not flippantly, but absolutely not seeing that it could step by step or very fast lead to the end of the world.
24:57
SPEAKER_00: And I think that's for me one of the most important lessons of everything about our modern history is how close we are to the brink always, because stupidity reigns supreme in general.
25:11
SPEAKER_00: Accidents happen, misinterpretations, evil people, all sorts of things bring us to places we can't even imagine we would end up with.
25:21
SPEAKER_00: But my point was that Kennedy saved the world in the Cuban Missile Crisis because he had a fundamental sense of humanity that his advisors somehow couldn't manifest.
25:35
SPEAKER_00: He just felt somehow Khrushchev didn't want to end the world, he didn't want to end the world, so they ought to be able to figure out a way not to end the world.
25:44
SPEAKER_00: And I would say it was at that level that Kennedy figured it out.
25:48
SPEAKER_00: It was gut feeling of decency.
25:50
SPEAKER_00: We don't want this to go bad, and neither does Khrushchev.
25:54
SPEAKER_00: So that was, you know, a profound moral insight, I would say, that Kennedy did not believe Khrushchev was evil.
26:01
SPEAKER_00: He believed he was a human being facing the same tensions that he, Kennedy, was facing.
26:07
SPEAKER_00: But for me, when I wrote about Kennedy's peace efforts in 1963, I regarded him as a transformed man and as the greatest single year of statesmanship in American presidential history.
26:22
SPEAKER_00: That there was nothing like it.
26:24
SPEAKER_00: The man was operating in the clouds.
26:27
SPEAKER_00: He was so gifted for a year in seeing the biggest picture in the world, that the world needed to be saved from itself.
26:37
SPEAKER_00: And he was determined to act on it.
26:40
SPEAKER_00: And he found the words for it, and he found the politics for it, and he found the diplomacy for it.
26:46
SPEAKER_00: It's an astounding performance, Jim.
26:48
SPEAKER_00: Unbelievable.
26:49
SPEAKER_01: He had one ally besides Bobby Kennedy, and I want to emphasize the importance of that ally.
26:58
SPEAKER_01: It was Nikita Khrushchev.
27:00
SPEAKER_01: Because Nikita Khrushchev and John Kennedy were conspiring together for peace from that very event that you described already, the Bay of Pigs.
27:12
SPEAKER_01: Bobby Kennedy said to Nikita Khrushchev's chief spy in the United States of America, a man named Georgie Bolshakov, who was undercover as a newspaper person at uh at their embassy in Washington.
27:27
SPEAKER_01: Only a couple weeks after the Bay of Pigs, Bobby Kennedy began meeting secretly with Khrushchev's primary spy in America.
27:37
SPEAKER_01: Can you imagine that kind of conspiracy and what the US government thought of that?
27:44
SPEAKER_01: That put uh President Kennedy uh in the bullseye of what would happen on you know November 22nd, very early.
27:54
SPEAKER_00: But you know, it it also is a it's a basic point, and it's a basic theological point also, and a and a very deep human point, which is the way to make peace is encounter with the other person.
28:08
SPEAKER_01: Absolutely.
28:08
SPEAKER_01: And that's what the Kennedys and Khrushchev resolved to do from two weeks after the Bay of Pigs.
28:14
SPEAKER_01: Actually, they they were kind of wanting to do it before then, but but the CIA was in the way, and the CIA was in the way before Kennedy even became president, as we were already you were already pointing out.
28:26
SPEAKER_00: I read uh uh, of course, uh deeply and uh I found it fascinating the private or the back channel correspondence between Kennedy and Khrushchev.
28:36
SPEAKER_00: And there's one one point I just want to bring to the reader's attention.
28:39
SPEAKER_00: At the end of the Eisenhower administration, Alan Dulles, uh the CIA chief who was this incredible disaster for the world, the mastermind of Kennedy's assassination with his colleague Angleton, Dulles also had the absolutely inane and destructive idea of uh sending a spy plane over the Soviet Union in the weeks before a high-level summit was to take place between uh Eisenhower and Khrushchev.
29:12
SPEAKER_00: And of course, Eisenhower was reluctant because what if the plane was shot down?
29:17
SPEAKER_00: And Dulles, who was an inveterate liar on everything, as you've already said, told him, well, the plane is designed to disintegrate, so nothing could ever be found.
29:27
SPEAKER_00: And if by any chance the pilot survived, he has a cyanide pill, so he he would die.
29:33
SPEAKER_00: So there's no chance of anything going wrong with Mr.
29:36
SPEAKER_00: President.
29:36
SPEAKER_00: So, of course, the plane is shot down.
29:39
SPEAKER_00: Eisenhower comes out and says, this wasn't a spy plane, this was a weather plane based in Turkey that went off course.
29:47
SPEAKER_00: And then the Soviets produce Gary Powers, the pilot, they produce the fuselage of the U-2, and they they catch the president of the United States in an absolutely bald public lie.
30:00
SPEAKER_00: So fast forward till April 1961, the Bay of Pigs invasion starts, and Khrushchev sends an urgent cable to Kennedy in this back channel saying, Mr.
30:12
SPEAKER_00: President, I'm sure it's not you, but there are parts of your government engaged in a piratical operation, wholly illegal, to invade Cuba.
30:21
SPEAKER_00: Kennedy writes back what I regard as the worst thing he ever wrote, uh, which is a letter back to Khrushchev saying, this has nothing to do with us.
30:31
SPEAKER_00: Uh this is uh these are Cuban uh refugees attacking their government.
30:36
SPEAKER_00: We have nothing to do with this.
30:39
SPEAKER_00: Khrushchev's response to this is astounding.
30:43
SPEAKER_00: Khrushchev essentially writes, if I could paraphrase it in one sense, don't ever write to me such garbage again.
30:52
SPEAKER_00: And um all of this, you know, basically Khrushchev had been lied to directly by Eisenhower and then by Kennedy within the space of a few months.
31:03
SPEAKER_00: And this exchange indirectly saves the world in a way because it humanizes the exchange.
31:11
SPEAKER_00: Kennedy's not some perfect person and Khrushchev a liar.
31:15
SPEAKER_00: Kennedy lied to Khrushchev.
31:17
SPEAKER_00: The CIA did this disastrous operation.
31:20
SPEAKER_00: Kennedy's a human being who gets all of this, and they have a communication.
31:26
SPEAKER_00: And the communication, the back channel that Bobby opened up.
31:30
SPEAKER_00: This is what saves the world in the end, which is absolutely incredible.
31:36
SPEAKER_00: I want to add a couple people to the list of those who saved the world because I think there are uh a few more that just uh deserve a note.
31:44
SPEAKER_00: I'll mention first, I love Ted Sorensen, who helped to write this beautiful language and also helped with the ideas.
31:52
SPEAKER_00: So I just want to say that Kennedy's counselor and speechwriter was a truly gifted humanitarian.
32:00
SPEAKER_00: A second person who helped in the Cuban Missile Crisis was Adlai Stevenson, the U.S.
32:06
SPEAKER_00: ambassador to the UN, who was the only one on the first day of the crisis who said to Kennedy, this needs to be resolved diplomatically.
32:15
SPEAKER_00: And Kennedy parked it away in his mind as all his advisors told him, well, we have to take out these nukes by force.
32:24
SPEAKER_00: But what Stevenson said prevailed in the end.
32:28
SPEAKER_00: And uh actually, I'll mention Utente, the Secretary General of the UN, because the UN deserves recognition for its role in peace.
32:38
SPEAKER_00: And the last one I want to mention uh is Pope John XXIII, uh, who, in the spring of 1963, in his dying days, dying of cancer, uses his remaining earthly energies to write an absolutely brilliant encyclical Pachamentaris, Peace on Earth, which is sent personally by the Pope to both Khrushchev in Russian translation and to Kennedy.
33:08
SPEAKER_00: Uh, and uh I believe that was a profound intervention that also enabled the two of them to get together.
33:17
SPEAKER_00: I think the Pope really played a profound role in the spring of 1963, Pope John XXIII.
33:25
SPEAKER_01: This is all documented hugely.
33:28
SPEAKER_01: Everything that you just said, uh I've documented it heavily in JFK and the unspeakable, and also in this in this work, without the grace of the interrelationships of these people, those three in particular, JFK, Pope John the Twenty Third, and Nikita Khrushchev, let let me just say a very simple thing.
33:52
SPEAKER_01: Pope John the 23rd sent, before anybody else read it publicly, a copy of his great encyclical that you just uh spoke about to Nikita Khrushchev in Russian translation, as presented to him personally by Norman Cousins, the intermediary who went between these three people, Norman Cousins, the uh editor, publisher of the Saturday Review.
34:18
SPEAKER_01: And when when Norman Cousins gave this encyclical to uh Nikita Khrushchev from Pope John, Khrushchev could not believe it.
34:28
SPEAKER_01: He just was so happy, he was radiant.
34:31
SPEAKER_01: And Norman Cousins said, I also have a medal from the Pope to give to you.
34:35
SPEAKER_01: And Khrushchev took the medal and he put it around his neck.
34:39
SPEAKER_01: And when Cousins left, Khrushchev took it into his meeting with all his commissars and and his leaders, and he's got this medal around his neck.
34:48
SPEAKER_01: Isn't it amazing?
34:49
SPEAKER_01: He's sort of waving it around.
34:51
SPEAKER_01: None of the other people say anything, and he drops it on the floor, and finally somebody says, What's that?
34:55
SPEAKER_01: And he says, Oh, it's just a medal from the Pope.
34:59
SPEAKER_01: So he tells that story to cousins.
35:02
SPEAKER_01: You know, next time Cousins comes, cousins tells it back to Kennedy, and Kennedy says, Well, there are some things that Khrushchev can can be proud of that I can be.
35:12
SPEAKER_01: The Catholic president can't be proud of having medal from the from the Catholic Pope, but Khrushchev can be proud.
35:19
SPEAKER_01: It's just this incredible relationship of love.
35:23
SPEAKER_01: It's absolutely proud.
35:24
SPEAKER_00: And it shows, by the way, the world really can be saved by the actions of a few people.
35:30
SPEAKER_01: And love wins.
35:31
SPEAKER_01: Exactly.
35:32
SPEAKER_00: And it's so important because we're constantly at the verge, constantly at the verge.
35:38
SPEAKER_00: And this is one of Kennedy's beautiful lines uh in his peace speech, the idea that we're gripped by forces we cannot control is wrong subject to the fact that they kill him afterwards for saying that and for doing this.
35:55
SPEAKER_00: And so, in this sense, it is the drama that a few people can save the world and a few peacemakers can be killed the same way.
36:06
SPEAKER_00: This is why we teeter at the edge so uh profoundly.
36:11
SPEAKER_00: I want to ask you what one uh kind of the technical side, and then we'll I want to move on to Malcolm X because your treatment of him is remarkable.
36:20
SPEAKER_00: I learned so much, and it was absolutely fascinating for me.
36:24
SPEAKER_00: How do they get away with it?
36:25
SPEAKER_00: Just a little bit of the mechanics.
36:28
SPEAKER_00: The forensics don't work, the motivations don't work, the fingerprints uh all over Oswald as a CIA-run individual are there.
36:39
SPEAKER_00: You have people like Earl Warren, who's not a slouch, uh, he was the Supreme Court justice.
36:46
SPEAKER_00: You have uh Jack Ruby, uh, who uh is a gangster part of this who kills NCIA who kills Oswald and then pleads to Earl Warren, help me get out of this, let me tell the truth.
37:01
SPEAKER_00: Somehow it doesn't work.
37:04
SPEAKER_00: Uh and the public senses it.
37:08
SPEAKER_00: I mean, it's not that your arguments are denied, they're not.
37:12
SPEAKER_00: They're overwhelmingly, overwhelmingly agreed by those who pay attention to this, that of course this was a conspiracy by the US government.
37:21
SPEAKER_00: But the denial of it and the fact that it just goes on without an accounting, and so it gets worse and worse because there's no accountability.
37:34
SPEAKER_00: That to me is the is the is the shock of it.
37:39
SPEAKER_01: There's no accountability, we get back to that void of the unspeakable that Martin's talking about.
37:45
SPEAKER_01: There's no accountability because of the void in us and the cover-up, which is in place before anything happens in the assassination.
37:59
SPEAKER_01: They have everything in place with contingency plans, contingency upon contingency upon contingency.
38:06
SPEAKER_01: So as James Angleton explains to us all, and it's all in the book, he explains to us there's just one false story after another.
38:15
SPEAKER_01: He's a genius.
38:17
SPEAKER_01: These people are geniuses.
38:19
SPEAKER_01: That you know, the whole story that was put out for a long time is all is all the CIA is Keystone cops, they fall all over themselves.
38:27
SPEAKER_01: They do not fall all over themselves.
38:29
SPEAKER_01: They are smart.
38:31
SPEAKER_01: And uh the scenario is all in place.
38:34
SPEAKER_01: It's like this, it is a B movie, but it's a B movie in which the script is going to be followed and then the contingency upon the contingency, the false story, false story, false story.
38:45
SPEAKER_01: I don't want to go through all the false stories because that'd take us the whole the whole program.
38:50
SPEAKER_01: But it's all in the book.
38:52
SPEAKER_01: The false stories are there in place, and the scapegoat is absolutely critical.
38:59
SPEAKER_01: So let's look just at the scapegoat.
39:01
SPEAKER_01: James Earl Ray for Dr.
39:04
SPEAKER_01: King or Lee Harvey Oswald for President Kennedy.
39:08
SPEAKER_01: Lee Harvey Oswald, who is he?
39:11
SPEAKER_01: He is a CIA asset.
39:13
SPEAKER_01: Absolutely.
39:14
SPEAKER_01: He's a CIA asset, but he's also a CIA asset who doesn't like it.
39:20
SPEAKER_01: He's a he's a a bit of a rebel.
39:23
SPEAKER_01: The the Oswald who was in in Russia and who went over there as an asset for the CIA, he got angry with them.
39:31
SPEAKER_01: And that's why he's the scapegoat.
39:34
SPEAKER_01: They're not only taking down John Kenny, they're taking down a guy who's who's a bit of a rebel against them.
39:41
SPEAKER_01: And if I'm right in a surmise, which I can't prove, that guy, Lee Harvey Oswald, is a whistleblower for the plot to kill Kennedy in Chicago before the one where he's killed.
39:53
SPEAKER_00: Oh, oh my god.
39:55
SPEAKER_01: Before the the one that he's where he's killed in DC.
39:58
SPEAKER_01: And um the the the the whistleblower in Dallas.
40:02
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, in Dallas.
40:03
SPEAKER_01: The whistleblower is a guy named Lee, and he's not identified as who he is.
40:06
SPEAKER_01: I think he's that Lee.
40:08
SPEAKER_01: Whoa.
40:09
SPEAKER_00: You know, the of course uh when when uh Oswald is picked up, the first word he says is I'm a Patsy.
40:16
SPEAKER_00: He is.
40:16
SPEAKER_00: And and he knows it.
40:18
SPEAKER_00: And every bit of his demeanor, every bit from then on is he knows he's being set up for something terrible.
40:25
SPEAKER_00: And he's being rushed through something that he knows is a complete setup.
40:29
SPEAKER_01: And then it makes sense, it makes sense uh for him to have been the whistleblower too, because he then he could have gone into Dallas thinking, well, I'm gonna be able to get out of this one too.
40:41
SPEAKER_01: He was not able to get out of that one.
40:43
SPEAKER_00: I don't know if you saw the book by Robert Tannenbaum or whether you know Mr.
40:47
SPEAKER_00: Tannenbaum.
40:48
SPEAKER_00: I just want to relate uh one thing that is uh absolutely in line with this.
40:53
SPEAKER_00: Tannenbaum was the uh deputy chief counsel for the House Assassinations Investigation Committee, which uh was uh impaneled in 1977 under uh chairmanship of uh Congressman Stokes of Cleveland.
41:09
SPEAKER_00: And Tannenbaum wrote a book last year, 2025, called That Day in Dallas: Lee Harvey Oswald Did Not Kill JFK.
41:19
SPEAKER_00: And the book recounts uh the things we're talking about and also uh Robert Tannenbaum's own angst and history.
41:28
SPEAKER_00: But the part that for me is so telling and sad is that Tannenbaum works out the leads and realizes in 1977, of course, it was the CIA.
41:42
SPEAKER_00: This is an inside job, and the evidence is quite, quite spectacular, actually.
41:47
SPEAKER_00: It's not even subtle.
41:49
SPEAKER_00: So he goes to the chairman.
41:51
SPEAKER_00: This is the drama of the book.
41:53
SPEAKER_00: He goes to the chairman of the committee and he says, Congressman Stokes, we now know the CIA did this.
42:01
SPEAKER_00: I want to start uh calling, subpoenaing witnesses and uh getting testimony under oath.
42:07
SPEAKER_00: And uh Stokes says no.
42:10
SPEAKER_00: And he says, What do you mean no?
42:13
SPEAKER_00: And uh Stokes says, in this town, you don't do that.
42:17
SPEAKER_00: You don't go after the CIA.
42:20
SPEAKER_00: And Cannenbaum is of course shocked and dismayed.
42:23
SPEAKER_00: He's given over his career, his life to this investigation.
42:27
SPEAKER_00: He's uncovered the key facts and he says to Stokes, but but why did you ask me to do this?
42:36
SPEAKER_00: And Stokes said, Because we didn't think you would get this far.
42:41
SPEAKER_00: That's that's the system.
42:43
SPEAKER_00: After you uncover it, it's covered up again.
42:47
SPEAKER_00: It's covered up again, it's covered up again, even when the facts stare you in the face.
42:54
SPEAKER_00: Oh my god.
42:55
SPEAKER_00: Can we turn, Jim, to uh to Malcolm X, who is uh To Malcolm X, to Malcolm X.
43:01
SPEAKER_00: Oh my god, I learned so much that I should have known but never really focused on.
43:07
SPEAKER_00: Malcolm X, can you describe him briefly for people who I mean, many people will know him all over the world, but uh just a little bit of background.
43:16
SPEAKER_00: But what I did not know fully, of course, I knew about his uh Hajj in 1964, but how he became the global diplomat, actually, how he realized that the United Nations in the early 1960s was the key to unlock this global white supremacy is unbelievable.
43:41
SPEAKER_00: And it's a it's so amazing to know this because you know I hang out at the UN, I deal with the all of these countries all the time, which is why I love, but I didn't realize Malcolm X's genius in understanding this.
43:58
SPEAKER_00: He becomes the lead diplomatic.
44:00
SPEAKER_00: Diplomat of the world, actually, connecting Khrushchev and Castro and then Kruma.
44:05
SPEAKER_00: Oh my God, it's an unbelievable story.
44:07
SPEAKER_00: So please take it away.
44:09
SPEAKER_01: Two days before he died, Malcolm X said what for me is the theme of the entire book.
44:18
SPEAKER_01: That's John F.
44:19
SPEAKER_01: Kennedy doesn't say it.
44:21
SPEAKER_01: Bobby doesn't say it.
44:22
SPEAKER_01: Even Dr.
44:23
SPEAKER_01: King doesn't say it.
44:24
SPEAKER_01: It's Malcolm who says it.
44:26
SPEAKER_01: He says, two days before he dies, to a photojournalist from Life magazine, and it appears in life the following week, and hardly ever anybody ever wants to cite it after that, which is very indicative of how powerful it is.
44:40
SPEAKER_01: He says, It's a time for martyrs now.
44:46
SPEAKER_01: And if I'm to be one, he will be one two days later, it's to be in the cause of brotherhood.
44:55
SPEAKER_01: That's the only thing that can save this country.
45:01
SPEAKER_01: And we can add, and the world.
45:03
SPEAKER_01: That's Malcolm X, and just the man who was presenting that whole issue to the United Nations of racism, which he's he feels, and I think rightly is a profoundly real reason for the division of humanity in the world to this day.
45:22
SPEAKER_01: And he embodies by his actual assassination Malcolm X, whom every time we see him through the entire book, he's sitting in the back of a restaurant.
45:36
SPEAKER_01: He's he's sitting in the back of a room.
45:39
SPEAKER_01: He's always aware that any an assassin can come in to get him at any moment.
45:44
SPEAKER_01: That's Malcolm X.
45:45
SPEAKER_01: He doesn't trust anybody, he doesn't even trust Alex Haley, the guy who's the biographer, maybe 25%.
45:53
SPEAKER_01: Uh and that's pretty good big for Malcolm.
45:56
SPEAKER_01: He doesn't trust anybody because he knows in himself how much he, during the his time in the Nation of Islam and in his earlier years, when he was uh messing around in Harlem and and um you know he was jiving people, he knows how much people can, all of us can be trusted in our worst moments.
46:19
SPEAKER_01: But Malcolm, it is who articulates the vision of martyrdom more profoundly than anybody else, and he says it's the only thing that can save this country.
46:27
SPEAKER_01: What does martyrdom mean?
46:29
SPEAKER_01: It means being a witness, a witness to one humanity, exactly what Malcolm saw from his Hodge to Mecca and what he embodied for that last year of his life in a profound way.
46:43
SPEAKER_01: I've never seen anything like it before.
46:45
SPEAKER_01: And and even JFK in his presidency, incredible.
46:50
SPEAKER_01: But Malcolm, my God, you're just you're right on when you talk about Malcolm.
46:55
SPEAKER_00: But by the way, Jim, you just made me realize something.
46:57
SPEAKER_00: I know it's a theme, but you made me really uh realize something.
47:01
SPEAKER_00: These were not only four absolutely uh incredible leaders, but the last year for each of them was a performance, a dazzling performance, the high wire act, unmatched even by their own standards beforehand.
47:20
SPEAKER_00: And I hadn't really realized that because they became martyrs in a sense, because they were so profound in their final year that they were a fundamental threat.
47:34
SPEAKER_00: They were always a threat.
47:36
SPEAKER_00: They were under surveillance, they were under attack, they were under plan to be killed or whatever.
47:41
SPEAKER_00: But the last year for each of them, Kennedy's last year as a statesman, Malcolm X after he comes back in the Hajj, Martin Luther King from the Riverside Church speech about Vietnam and poverty and linking the war against poverty and the civil rights movement with the international anti-colonial cause, Robert Kennedy in this campaign where he transforms himself into something that is going, that could unite the United States in peace.
48:11
SPEAKER_00: This is all their final act.
48:14
SPEAKER_00: And the fact that they're killed in their final act is not a coincidence.
48:19
SPEAKER_00: They become so threatening to the system because of their profundity in that transformation that they're experiencing that it pushes the unspeakable to act.
48:30
SPEAKER_00: I hadn't actually appreciated that, but the the last year for each of them, you could say, is another order of magnitude compared to the previous, however, remarkable they were.
48:43
SPEAKER_01: Beautiful.
48:45
SPEAKER_01: You get it.
48:47
SPEAKER_01: You get it.
48:48
SPEAKER_00: Well, you wrote it.
48:51
SPEAKER_01: But do we get it?
48:52
SPEAKER_01: The question is not do you and I get it, do we get it?
48:56
SPEAKER_01: Does humanity get it?
48:58
SPEAKER_01: And we have to get it.
48:59
SPEAKER_01: And that's where Dr.
49:00
SPEAKER_01: King says what can be must be, and what must be can be.
49:06
SPEAKER_01: And the two go together.
49:08
SPEAKER_01: The two go together.
49:09
SPEAKER_01: Free will and grace go together.
49:13
SPEAKER_01: And they can go together.
49:15
SPEAKER_01: They will go together.
49:17
SPEAKER_01: That's the vision of all four of these people.
49:21
SPEAKER_01: And the people who are left to embody it are us in this moment of history.
49:29
SPEAKER_01: This is the most critical moment of history.
49:31
SPEAKER_01: This is one second to midnight.
49:34
SPEAKER_01: We are the story.
49:36
SPEAKER_01: If we can resurrect these lives by our courage, the key in each one of them is what?
49:42
SPEAKER_01: Courageo, courage.
49:45
SPEAKER_01: Kennedy wrote the book, Profiles and Courage.
49:48
SPEAKER_01: Martin Luther King said, Hey, I wasn't very much a profile of courage during those two years when I didn't speak about the Vietnam War.
49:55
SPEAKER_01: He said that repeatedly.
49:57
SPEAKER_01: He says it in essence in his uh Riverside Church address.
50:01
SPEAKER_01: He talks about his responsibility, his guilt for not having spoken out on the Vietnam War.
50:07
SPEAKER_01: But that final year is an incredible turn.
50:12
SPEAKER_01: You got it.
50:13
SPEAKER_01: We got it.
50:14
SPEAKER_01: We don't have it in terms of our family.
50:18
SPEAKER_01: This is one family.
50:19
SPEAKER_01: That's a very simple truth.
50:22
SPEAKER_01: We are one family.
50:23
SPEAKER_00: It is the key, by the way.
50:25
SPEAKER_01: It's the key.
50:26
SPEAKER_01: And all of these four knew it profoundly.
50:29
SPEAKER_01: They were all deep believers, too.
50:31
SPEAKER_00: And it is why, of course, the essence of what you're writing is that all of these uh profound challenges, whether it was nuclear war as the most fundamental, because it means the definitive end of everything, whether it is the end of uh the uh imperial age, which we're still living through to this day, where the United States president sits and says, Well, I can overthrow this government, I can kidnap that president, I can launch an attack if I want, seemingly without uh a murmur right now in uh uh in Washington.
51:11
SPEAKER_00: And the civil rights movement and the International Brotherhood are all completely interwoven in this.
51:22
SPEAKER_00: And part of the reason is a particular part of the American hegemonic aspiration, this CIA desire to control the world.
51:33
SPEAKER_00: It's absolutely also motivated, whether they know it or not, or they do, but by white supremacy.
51:40
SPEAKER_00: It's not just an American supremacy, it's a white supremacy.
51:45
SPEAKER_00: Yes.
51:46
SPEAKER_00: Because what America is for them is white America.
51:50
SPEAKER_00: Yes.
51:51
SPEAKER_00: And that's why Herbert Hoover was nuts and evil, but probably not faking it when he said, this is the most dangerous Negro, speaking of Martin Luther King, but seeing that as a fundamental threat to America because for him, white supremacy was at the very core of the supremacy itself.
52:16
SPEAKER_00: America was to be supreme, but America being supreme meant white America was to be supreme.
52:23
SPEAKER_00: And it also, you know, shows this incredible interaction.
52:28
SPEAKER_00: I know it in my own work, uh, working with governments in Africa daily, the legacy of all of this, 65 years later, the United States, of course, went out of its way to make sure there could never be a united Africa, to make sure there could never be a voice that would speak against white supremacy.
52:52
SPEAKER_00: So they, as you describe at length, had to put or not decided to put the bullet through the head of Patrice Lumumba in 1960 to bring Nkrumah of Ghana down.
53:05
SPEAKER_00: And every time there is any opposition to white supremacy by any region of the world saying we should have regional integration, I would put, I put Nasser in the same category.
53:20
SPEAKER_00: He said the Arabs were under colonial rule for centuries, first Turkish, then British.
53:26
SPEAKER_00: We want to be independent.
53:27
SPEAKER_00: Ah, that made him an enemy of the Americans.
53:30
SPEAKER_00: You cannot be independent.
53:32
SPEAKER_00: We must dominate, and we means white America dominating.
53:37
SPEAKER_01: Yes.
53:38
SPEAKER_01: When you say Lumumba, you're saying the man that President Kennedy wanted to release.
53:44
SPEAKER_01: He's killed when?
53:46
SPEAKER_00: Days before Kennedy becomes president, three days before.
53:59
SPEAKER_01: And Kennedy doesn't know about it because the CIA covers that the death and the responsibility, up until a month later.
54:07
SPEAKER_01: Then Kennedy gets it from Stevenson, the man you were talking about before, his UN representative.
54:14
SPEAKER_01: When he hears it on the phone, we have a picture of him.
54:17
SPEAKER_01: He's devastated, he's shocked.
54:20
SPEAKER_01: It's just uh David Talbot in a what in his wonderful book, which is a companion to everything I've written.
54:26
SPEAKER_01: David Talbot in the Devil's Chessboard, which is describing the chessboard of Alan Dallas.
54:32
SPEAKER_01: A remarkable book.
54:34
SPEAKER_01: Yes, it is.
54:35
SPEAKER_01: David Talbot, remember the Devil's Chessboard.
54:38
SPEAKER_01: Everybody needs to read that one.
54:40
SPEAKER_01: So Lamumba goes down three days before Kennedy becomes president, and Kennedy finds out, and he's totally devastated because he knows I can't do anything now.
54:51
SPEAKER_01: And he takes responsibility for that one too.
54:54
SPEAKER_01: And what he decides to do uh and does do eventually through the the killing of another man in the Congo, Dog Hammersold.
55:04
SPEAKER_00: Dog Hammershold, Dog Hammershold, UN Secretary General murdered for trying to make peace in the Congo.
55:12
SPEAKER_01: Let me say Alan Dulles and the same people who killed President Kennedy.
55:17
SPEAKER_01: And I suggested that in the book as well.
55:20
SPEAKER_01: And Kennedy knew it when it happened because his his ambassador to the Congo was the person he, one of the people he trusted most and his most important ambassador, and he said immediately that plane didn't go down accidentally.
55:36
SPEAKER_01: And I have that from a telegram revealed many, many years later through the UN archives.
55:41
SPEAKER_01: So Kennedy knew as soon as that happened, and then he he made his great address to the United Nations where he mourns Dog Hammerschult's death.
56:05
SPEAKER_00: And so another brazen cover-up occurred.
56:10
SPEAKER_00: And uh to this day it said, we don't know what happened with Dog Hammershold, but of course he was murdered.
56:15
SPEAKER_01: But the United Nations is right now, and let everybody understand that, uh, doing an investigation of Dog Hammerschold's death, and it has been progressing.
56:26
SPEAKER_01: And if we can bring home that responsibility through the United Nations, which is pointing its finger more and more at the United States government and even specifically Alan Dulles through critical testimony.
56:41
SPEAKER_01: This is moving along.
56:43
SPEAKER_01: Everywhere in this world, things are moving in good ways as well as bad ways.
56:48
SPEAKER_01: But the primary responsibility of US propaganda if is for us to think that nothing good is happening and that we can't do a damn thing about it.
56:56
SPEAKER_01: We can change this just the way the movement that was ahead of these four prophets in the 60s, the movement kept them moving.
57:06
SPEAKER_00: Jim, what do we do now?
57:07
SPEAKER_00: You are uh great leader and historian and theologian, but also uh our great peace activist.
57:14
SPEAKER_00: Give us what to do now when we seem so paralyzed.
57:18
SPEAKER_01: Each of us and all of us have a way, and that's a way given us.
57:24
SPEAKER_01: From within, or if you're a believer, you can say through God.
57:28
SPEAKER_01: If you're an atheist, you can say through my heart.
57:31
SPEAKER_01: If you're anywhere in between, you can say there is a way in my life where I can speak for life, choose life, choose life in your life, the life of all of us, in your life, in my life, in Jeff's life, in Malcolm's and Martin's, JFK's, RFK's, they chose through courage, life, choose life.
57:58
SPEAKER_01: It's a biblical teaching, it's a teaching of the Quran, it's a profound teaching of Buddhism.
58:04
SPEAKER_01: Every great religion teaches it.
58:06
SPEAKER_01: We have to live it.
58:07
SPEAKER_01: If we live the way, by the way, Christians didn't call themselves Christians.
58:11
SPEAKER_01: Well, they weren't Christians, of course, they were Jews in the beginning, and Jesus was not a Christian, he never met a Christian in his life.
58:18
SPEAKER_01: He was a Jew.
58:19
SPEAKER_01: He was a very radical Jew from Galilee.
58:22
SPEAKER_01: He was a Galilean Jew.
58:23
SPEAKER_01: And we can find Galilean Jews today all over the place, including in Jerusalem.
58:30
SPEAKER_01: Um, thank God there are those people in Israel today who are rebelling nonviolently, creatively, their voice to the world.
58:40
SPEAKER_01: We can do it.
58:41
SPEAKER_01: That's the what Dr.
58:42
SPEAKER_01: King said.
58:43
SPEAKER_01: It's what Malcolm says, and it's what we can say by choosing it.
58:50
SPEAKER_01: It's very simple.
58:51
SPEAKER_00: Jim, yes.
58:52
SPEAKER_00: But very hard.
58:53
SPEAKER_00: It's it's simple, it's hard, it's profound.
58:56
SPEAKER_00: Caraggio, caraggio.
58:58
SPEAKER_00: On behalf of all of us uh listening to you and to your wisdom uh and to your profound uh thoughts about uh what we need to do.
59:06
SPEAKER_00: I want to thank you so much.
59:09
SPEAKER_00: Choose life, choose peace, coraggio, and uh I want to encourage all the listeners uh to read Jim Douglas's uh brilliant book, Martyrs to the Unspeakable, JFK, Malcolm, Martin, and uh RFK.
59:27
SPEAKER_00: And uh read uh alongside that JFK and the unspeakable, why he died and why it matters.
59:35
SPEAKER_00: Read also The Devil's Chessboard to get a better idea of uh Alan Dulles and uh how the CIA became the uh threat to peace that it is, and uh why we need in our time a fundamental turn toward peace.
59:53
SPEAKER_00: Well, we could not have a better guide and uh leader and uh brilliant author than Jim Douglas to show us the way forward.
1:00:02
SPEAKER_00: Thank you, Jim.
1:00:03
SPEAKER_00: It's uh been a great honor.
1:00:04
SPEAKER_00: Thanks to all of you listening into uh Book Club with Jeffrey Sachs.
1:00:16
SPEAKER_00: Thank you for joining in the conversation.
1:00:18
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