L. Fletcher Prouty - JFK: The CIA, Vietnam, and the Plot to Assassinate John F. Kennedy

Copyright 2009 by L. Fletcher Prouty

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Prouty, L. Fletcher (Leroy Fletcher), 1917-

JFK : the CIA, Vietnam, and the plot to assassinate John F. Kennedy / L. Fletcher Prouty ; with an introduction by Oliver Stone.

p. cm.

Originally published: New York : Carol Pub. Group, c1996.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

9781602397316

1. Kennedy, John F. (John Fitzgerald), 1917-1963--Assassination. 2. Conspiracies--United States--History--20th century. 3. United States. Central Intelligence Agency--History--20th century. 4. Intelligence service--United States--History--20th century. 5. Vietnam War, 1961-1975--Secret service--United States. I. Title. II. Title: J.F.K.

E842.9.P76 2009
973.922092--dc22

2009024566

Printed in the United States of America

by Oliver Stone

FLETCHER PROUTY is a man whose name will go down in history. Not as a respected Establishment figure, no. He will be erased from the present history books, his version of history suppressed, his credibility denied, his integrity scorned.

Yet in time he will endure. Young students in the twenty-first century (given the planets capacity to reform and revive itself before then) will come back to his writings in the alternative written press (small publishing houses, low-circulation magazines) and discover through Colonel Prouty no less than the Secret History of the United States, circa 1944 to the present. With this single volume, Colonel Prouty blows the lid right off our Official History and unforgivably, sadly, inexorably, for anyone who dares enter this cave of dread and shame, shines his torch forever onto the ugliest nest of vipers the civilized world has probably seen since the dreaded Mongol raiders of the tenth and eleventh centuries.

This is scary stuff. The MK Ultra of espionage books, JFK will anger you and make you sad. You will never view the world again in the same light. Behind everything you read or see from this point on will flicker forever your most paranoid and darkest fears of the subconscious motives beneath the killer ape that became man.

Was Stanley Kubrick right in his revelation of the warrior ape in 2001, throwing the bones of the slain into the air, becoming the spaceship baby of tomorrow? Will we transmute our killer instincts to peace and the search for light? Or will we tread the path of war, not only between tribes, but between us and our environment?

My mother was French, my father American. I had the opportunity young in life to spend summers in France in the 1950s and never once heard anyone young or old ever allude to the massive French collaboration with the Nazis in World War II. In every aspecteven my mothers talethe truth was denied, ignored, and mostly forgotten. Of such is history madeuntil, of course, contrary events like the Klaus Barbie trial in Lyons, France, surface and tear and remind. Like my film JFK.

Such was my experience in writing Platoon out of a feeling that Vietnam was an Orwellian memory hole, to be forgotten, realities distorted by newsmen and official historians, official body counts, and the official lies that devastated the American character.

I experienced it again in the mid-1980s in Central America, talking to fresh-faced American troops in green uniforms with no memories of Vietnam, save for embarrassed stares, once again lining up to shoot Nicaraguans in the invasion of 1986 that never was. And again in Russia, in the early 1980s, on another screenplay, talking to youngsters with no knowledge whatever of Stalins crimes, and old people who denied their past out of fear.

Such is the memory of manat best a tricky one, per Orwell. Who controls the past controls the future. There is about us a wall, alone, beyond which our conscious mind will not let our unconscious go. That margin, however, fades with the quotient and fashion of time because as time changes so do our mind-sets. The loss of fear allows the mind to drop its censors and think the unthinkable. Such a golden moment. We all know it. The exciting liberation of our own thought process. It is that access point to history which every filmmaker, poet, artist, seeks entry to. To collide with the forces of historyto merge with the backbeat of its onward push. Jack London, John Reed, Upton Sinclair, clashing with the stormy forces of early-twentieth-century history. Glorious cavaliers.

The key question of our time, as posed in Colonel Proutys book, comes from the fabled Report From Iron Mountain on the Possibility and Desirability of Peace by Leonard Lewin (based on a study commissioned by Defense Secretary Robert McNamara in August 1963 to justify the big, planned changes in defense spending contemplated by Kennedy):

The organizing principle of any society is for war. The basic authority of a modem state over its people resides in its war powers.... War readiness accounts for approximately a tenth of the output of the worlds total economy.

In illustrating this proposition, Colonel Prouty traces the divergent paths of early 1950s Vietnamthe Saigon Military Mission, Ed Lansdale, Lucien Conein, Tom Dooley, Wesley Fishel, and Archbishop Spellman. How Mao with his guerrilla-war ideology deeply influenced our civic action paramilitary concepts in Vietnam and Central America. How the helicopter and its econo-military needs drove us to Vietnam. How the TFX fighter battle between Boeing and General Dynamics split the Kennedy administration. He explains clearly for the first time the vast errors of South Vietnamappointed President Ngo Dinh Diemhis failure with the Buddhists and his own army; the disastrous hamlet program that ruined the South Vietnamese peasant economy; the expelling of the Chinese mercantile society; the influence of Lansdale; the arrogance of Americas racist Third World attitudes that blinded us to the true vacuum we created by dividing and marginalizing a wholly artificial client state called South Vietnam in conflict with Vietnams postWorld War II right to determine its own independence.

Colonel Prouty heartrendingly details the destruction of rural peasant life where age-old communal law was based not on authority but on harmony and law was deemed less important than virtue. This tribal society ultimately presents a nonconsumerist code of life that does not depend on the omnipresent paternalism of the international banker or the chemical agricultural revolution or modem politics, and this presents a dangerous alternative and loss of market to capitalism.