Read an Excerpt

Dallas '63

The First Deep State Revolt Against the White House

OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA

Introduction: The JFK Assassination as a Structural Deep Event

Two kinds of power can be discerned at work in the byzantine processes of American politics. In The American Deep State, I used two terms from Hannah Arendt (following Thucydides) to describe them: "persuasion through arguments" ([TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]), versus "coercion" by force and violence ([TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII])." In another essay, Arendt wrote that only the former was true power: "violence and power [i.e., persuasive power] are not the same.... Power and violence are opposites; where the one rules absolutely, the other is absent." One can add that a persuasive politics is one of openness, whereas a violent politics is usually shrouded in exclusion and secrecy.

The distinction is both extremely important and hard to define precisely; a number of other opposing terms can be used, that are roughly but not exactly coterminous. Arendt herself also writes of "top down" and "bottom up" power, others of egalitarian or democratic versus oppressive power. It is clear that top-down power is not always violent, just as democratic power is not always nonviolent. However the terms "persuasive," "bottom-up," and "democratic," even if not synonymous or exactly coterminous, help us to focus on a Socratic ideal of influence by persuasion that has, though the centuries, been a lodestar of western civilization. By contrast their opposites — "violence," "top-down," "repressive" — epitomize what I believe civilization should be moving away from.

These dyadic alternatives represent not just alternative ideologies and lifestyles, but also divisions in most large-scale societies and bureaucracies. Here we find agencies, like the U.S. State Department, whose stated aim is diplomatic persuasion, and other agencies, like the Pentagon, whose business, ultimately, is violence. In America always, but particularly in the Kennedy era, we have seen occasional confrontations between the two tendencies on both the bureaucratic and also the popular levels: witness the wrangles over the meaning and application of the Second Amendment.

In this book I would also like to paraphrase Arendt's contrast between power and violence by using two common terms with a common Greek origin: true power unites consolidates a society through dialogue; violence divides a society through the dialectics inherent in violence. For whereas power tends to resolve and reduce social tensions through persuasion, violence tends to perpetuate them by creating resentment and opposition.

As authors from Aeschylus to Jacques Ellul have written, "violence creates violence." The dialectical response may be delayed for centuries, as in pre-revolutionary France or Tsarist Russia, but violence can create social divisions that are very difficult to resolve or dissipate. America is an outstanding exemplar of both forces: the product of a revolution proclaiming equality, it is still living with the violent consequences of slavery.

In foreign policy Since World War Two, American foreign policy has witnessed the interplay of two opposing strategies towards the Soviet Union: coexistence through persuasive diplomacy at the United Nations, versus military dominance disguised by the code phrase "Peace Through Strength." The title of a policy book by statesman-financier Bernard Baruch in 1952, "Peace Through Strength" was a slogan used by Ronald Reagan (and by Republican platforms since) to describe an overt strategy of global domination and American hegemony. It was used to proclaim the official end of an earlier U.S. foreign policy, dating from the end of Eisenhower administration to the beginning of Jimmy Carter's – a policy of détente.

But the Pax Americana in the post-Reagan era of U.S. hegemony has not been peaceful at all, quite the reverse. As former U.S. Army officer Andrew Bacevich has commented, "belief in the efficacy of military power almost inevitably breeds the temptation to put that power to work. 'Peace through strength' easily enough becomes 'peace through war.'" In my last chapter I compare the last years of the Pax Americana today to the last years of the Pax Britannica in the late 19 Century, when hubristic over-reaching led dialectically to a series of minor conflicts, followed by a World War.

The tension between the two American policies, détente versus hegemony, has been acute since the fall of the Berlin Wall. Jack Matlock, former U.S. ambassador to Moscow and an adviser on Russian affairs to Reagan and G.H.W. Bush, has said more than once that when Gorbachev, after negotiations the West, agreed in 1990 to pull back Soviet troops in Eastern Europe, the West in return gave a "clear commitment" not to expand.

Yet the American response was in fact quite different. As Matlock wrote recently in the Washington Post,

President Bill Clinton supported ... the expansion of NATO to include former Warsaw Pact countries. Those moves seemed to violate the understanding that the United States would not take advantage of the Soviet retreat from Eastern Europe.... [To Putin] President George W. Bush ... delivered the diplomatic equivalent of swift kicks to the groin: further expansion of NATO in the Baltics and the Balkans, and plans for American bases there.

On one level it is possible to view American foreign policy of the last half century as one of a shifting ebb and flow between the two policies, détente versus hegemony. But on another level there has been an unchecked and significant structural change between the agencies advocating them. Since World War Two there has been a visible loss of power by those U.S. agencies advocating détente (most notably the State Department) to the agencies advocating expansion and hegemony (the Department of Defense, and its postwar ally in intervention, the CIA).

The massive projection of U.S. wealth and power abroad has produced a massive increase of covert unchecked power in Washington, to the extent that we now have what the journalists Dana Priest and William Arkin have called

two governments: the one its citizens were familiar with, operated more or less in the open: the other a parallel top secret government whose parts had mushroomed in less than a decade into a gigantic, sprawling universe of its own, visible to only a carefully vetted cadre — and its entirety ... visible only to God.

The latter has become so powerful that some of us have come to call it the "deep state."

Mike Lofgren has described the visible public state as "the tip of the iceberg," and the covert deep state as "the subsurface part of the iceberg." But this metaphor, though spatially useful, misses an important difference between the two levels. The public state that we see is a defined structure; the deep state, in contrast, passes through covert agencies into an undefined system, as difficult to define, but also as real and powerful, as a weather system. More specifically, it interacts not only with the public state but also with higher sources of its power: most significantly with the financial institutions of Wall Street that were responsible for forcing a CIA on a reluctant President Truman in the first place.

Because of this interaction, I find myself sometimes using "deep state" in an inclusive sense, to refer to all those forces outside the public state with the power to influence its policies, and more often using "deep state" in a restrictive sense, meaning those active covert agencies in and around Washington, that sometimes take guidance in their policies, not from the White House, but from the deep state as a whole. This ambiguity in language may sometimes be confusing, but reflects the ambiguity and diffuseness of deep power itself.

For example, we must also take into account the private consulting firms, like Booz Allen Hamilton, to which 70 percent of America's huge intelligence budget is now outsourced. And they in turn work with the huge international oil firms and other multinational corporations that project a U.S. presence throughout the world. These corporations, and oil companies in particular, desire U.S. hegemony as a guarantee to their overseas investments, and as an inducement to governments in remote places like Kazakhstan to be open to influence from America, not just from their immediate neighbors Russia and Iran.

The power of the public state is based on the constitution and periodic elections, and is thus limited by checks and balances. The power of the covert deep state, in contrast, is unchecked; and has expanded as the global U.S. presence has expanded. The two kinds of power were destined to come into conflict. The public state aims at openness and persuasion. The deep state represents the opposite, intervention by secrecy and violence.

This is a book about the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, who after the brush with nuclear war in the Cuban Missile Crisis took initial steps to reduce the role of hegemonic violence in American foreign policy. But on another level this is also a book tracing, especially in its last chapter, how the forces of hegemonic violence in America came to be prevalent over the once predominant forces in America calling for containment, parity, and coexistence.

It is a central proposition of this book that the road to U.S. hegemony must be understood as in part a consequence of a series of structural deep events. And this series began with the assassination in 1963 of a president who was moving to change U.S. policies with respect to Cuba, Vietnam, and above all the Soviet Union.

By "structural deep events" I mean events that are never fully understood, arise out of ongoing covert processes, have political consequences that enlarge covert government, and are subsequently covered up by demonstrable omissions and falsifications in historic records. Here the assassination in Dallas can be compared to later structural deep events, notably Watergate and 9/11.

I cannot say often enough that I am not attributing all these deep events to any single agency or "secret team." Nor is the purpose of this book to identify the president's killers. But in Chapter 2 I will show how alleged evidence about Lee Harvey Oswald in Mexico was manipulated and altered by elements in the CIA and their Mexican clients, the Dirección Federal de Seguridad (DFS). In other words, elements in the U.S. Government (not limited to the CIA) were involved in the assassination cover-up.

In Chapter 3 we will see that Oswald, far from being a neglected "lone nut," had generated government files that were being manipulated and altered from at least the time of his alleged defection to the Soviet Union in 1959. In Chapter 4, we will see how these manipulated files became the subject of extended disagreement between the State Department, on the one hand, and military intelligence agencies, on the other – at a time when State and Pentagon were also divided on the issue of coexistence with Cuba and the Soviet Union, or alternatively the rollback of communism by invading Cuba.

Glenview, Illinois, the home of Marine Intelligence files on Oswald, had also hosted a meeting in 1960 of the Christian Anti-Communist Crusade (CACC) that attacked Eisenhower's growing rapprochement with Moscow. The CACC was part of a well-funded interlocking right-wing complex of anti-détente organizations that also included the John Birch Society and the American Security Council.

I deal with the assassination itself in Chapter 5, and show how some elements in this Birchite right-wing complex exploited the assassination for political purposes. This paralleled the manipulation of the U.S. official investigation of the assassination, in a brief vain attempt to implicate a Cuban, Paulino Sierra Martinez. (Sierra had been working, at the request of Robert Kennedy, to move out of the United States Cuban exile groups who had been attacking Soviet ships in Havana harbor.) Some in the Birchite complex may even have had prior knowledge of the assassination.

In Chapter 6 I look at the mysterious movements of a wealthy right-wing industrialist, William Pawley, a man with Birch Society connections who also had the ear of Republican presidents Eisenhower and Nixon. In particular we shall look at how a mysterious raid into Cuba the summer before the assassination, the so-called Bayo-Pawley mission (involving at least two of the future Watergate burglars), may have been planned precisely to ensure that the CIA, Life, President Nixon, and perhaps even the Kennedy family, would later be coerced into an assassination cover-up.

In moving from a focus on Oswald's files to a focus on the assassination itself, this book will survey many different aspects of the American deep state, from those forces underpinning the power of the Kennedy White House to those opposed to the Kennedy White House. In my last two chapters I will argue that a showdown in the 1960s and 1970s between those two opposing attitudes to power – the open forces of democratic persuasion (the public state) versus the exclusive and covert forces of violence and dominance (the deep state), led to a series of structural deep events: Dallas, Watergate, and the so-called October Surprise of 1980. All three terminated the careers of presidents who had attempted to cut back the growing power of the CIA.

In Chapter 7 I will argue that these structural deep events (even though not the work of a single mastermind or secret team) were nonetheless all interconnected, arising from a common milieu and with certain recurring characteristics.

In Chapter 8 I shall argue also that in the same two decades embracing the Vietnam War (1960–1980), the growing unchecked power of the deep state contested and repeatedly overcame the democratically elected authority of the White House. Three presidents in this period — Kennedy, Nixon, and Carter — took steps to challenge the growing power of the CIA; and in diverse ways all three saw their political careers terminated by structural deep events: assassination, Watergate, and the so-called October Surprise. (Less dramatically, the careers of Johnson and Ford were also ended.)

But in this unfortunate and very conflicted period in U.S. presidential history, the first of these shocks to White House power came from the gunshots in Dallas in 1963.

The CIA, the Mafia, and Oswald in Mexico

Overview: The Mexican CIA-Mob Nexus

Those who have spent years trying to assess the role of the Kennedy assassination in US history are accustomed to the debate between structuralists and conspiratorialists. In the first camp are those who argue, in the spirit of Marx and Weber, that the history of a major power is determined by large social forces; thus the accident of an assassination, even if conspiratorial, is not an event altering history. (On this point Noam Chomsky and Alex Cockburn agree with the mainstream US media they normally criticize.)

At the other end of the spectrum are those who talk of an Invisible Government or Secret Team, who believe that surface events and institutions are continuously manipulated by unseen forces. For these people the assassination exemplifies the operation of fundamental historical forces, not a disruption of them.

For years I have attempted to formulate a third or middle position. To do so I have relied on distinctions formulated partly in neologisms or invented terms. Over forty years ago I postulated that our overt political processes were at times seriously contaminated by manipulative covert politics or parapolitics, which I then defined as "a system or practice of politics in which accountability is consciously diminished." In Deep Politics and the Death of JFK, I moved towards a less conspiratorial middle alternative. I discussed instead the interactions of what I called deep political processes, emanating from plural power sources and all only occasionally visible, all usually repressed rather than recognized. In contrast to parapolitical processes, those of deep politics are open-ended, not securely within anyone's power or intentions.

---

Excerpted from Dallas '63 by Peter Dale Scott. Copyright © 2015 Peter Dale Scott. Excerpted by permission of OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

---