JFK: The CIA, Vietnam, and the Plot to Assassinate John F. Kennedy

by L. Fletcher Prouty, Oliver Stone (Introduction), Jesse Ventura (Foreword by)

Overview

With an Introduction by Oliver Stone, the director of the hit movie JFK and a Foreword by Jesse Ventura, author of the New York Times Bestseller, They Killed our President, here is an insider’s view of JFK, the CIA, Vietnam and the plot that led to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.

Colonel L. Fletcher Prouty, the former CIA operative known as “X,” offers a history-shaking perspective on the assassination of president John F. Kennedy. His theories were the basis for Oliver Stone’s controversial movie JFK.

Prouty believed that Kennedy’s death was a coup d’état, and he backs this belief up with his knowledge of the security arrangements at Dallas and other tidbits that only a CIA insider would know (for example, that every member of Kennedy’s cabinet was abroad at the time of Kennedy’s assassination). His discussion of the elite power base he believes controlled the U.S. government will scare and enlighten anyone who wants to know who was really behind the assassination of John F. Kennedy.

This is must reading for anyone who believes that Lee Harvey Oswald did not act along and that a complicated plot led to the murder of President Kennedy.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781616082918
Publisher:	Skyhorse
Publication date:	04/01/2011
Edition description:	Second Edition
Pages:	416
Sales rank:	82,090
Product dimensions:	8.90(w) x 6.00(h) x 1.30(d)

About the Author

Academy Award-winning Oliver Stone has written and directed over 25 feature films and 6 documentaries, among them some of the most influential and iconic films of the last decades. Some have been at deep odds with conventional myth— films such as Platoon, Born on the Fourth of July, JFK, Natural Born Killers, Nixon, and Untold History of the United States.

Jesse Ventura is the former independent governor of Minnesota. He is also a former US Navy frogman, a professional wrestler, a movie actor, a visiting fellow at Harvard Kennedy School of Government, and the New York Times bestselling author of seven books, including American Conspiracies, 63 Documents the Government Doesn’t Want You to Read, and Don’t Start the Revolution Without Me! He was the host and executive producer of truTV’s Conspiracy Theory with Jesse Ventura, which won the Stony Award from High Times magazine in 2010. He was also the host of the political talk show Off The Grid, which aired on RT America and online at Ora.tv. He has a reputation as a rebel and a freethinker, and he has no qualms about questioning authority. He spends half the year in Baja, Mexico and the other half in his home state of Minnesota.

Table of Contents

Introduction: The Secret History of the United States (1943-90) Oliver Stone vii

Preface xxii

1 The Role of the Intelligence Services in the Cold War: 1945-65, the Vietnam Era 1

2 The CIA in the World of the H-Bomb 20

3 The Invisible Third World War 29

4 Vietnam: The Opening Wedge 42

5 The CIA's Saigon Military Mission 51

6 Genocide by Transfer-in South Vietnam 70

7 Why Vietnam? The Selection and Preparation of the Battlefield 81

8 The Battlefield and the Tactics, Courtesy CIA 102

9 The CIA in the Days of Camelot 118

10 JFK and the Thousand Days to Dallas 136

11 The Battle for Power: Kennedy Versus the CIA 153

12 Building to the Final Confrontation 170

13 The Magic Box, Trigger of the Expanded War in Vietnam 189

14 JFK Makes His Move to Control the CIA 205

15 The Erosion of National Sovereignty 219

16 Government by Coup d'État 232

17 JFK's Plan to End the Vietnam Warfere 246

18 Setting the Stage for the Death of JFK 266

19 Visions of a Kennedy Dynasty 286

20 LBJ Takes the Helm as the Course Is Reversed 312

21 Game Plan of the High Cabal 334

Afterword: Stone's JFK and the Conspiracy 347

Acknowledgments 356

Notes 357

Index 369

Editorial Reviews

Prouty, who was a Washington insider for nearly 20 years--in the last few of them as Chief of Special Operations for the Joint Chiefs of Staff under President Kennedy--has a highly unusual perspective to offer on the assassination and the events that led up to it. Familiar to moviegoers as the original of the anonymous Washington figure, played by Donald Sutherland in the Oliver Stone's movie JFK , who asks hero Jim Garrison to ponder why Kennedy was killed, Prouty leaves no doubt where he stands. The president, he claims, had angered the military-industrial establishment with his procurement policies and his determination to withdraw from Vietnam, and had threatened to break the CIA into ``a thousand pieces'' after the Bay of Pigs fiasco. His death was in effect a coup d'etat that placed in the White House a very different man with a very different approach--one much more acceptable to what Prouty consistently calls ``the power elite.'' Although he declares that such an elite has operated, supranationally, throughout history, and is all-powerful, he never satisfactorily explains who its members are and how it functions--or how it has allowed the current East-West rapprochement to take place. Still, this behind-the-scenes look at how the CIA has shaped postwar U.S. foreign policy is fascinating, as are Prouty's telling questions about the security arrangements in Dallas, his knowledge of the extraordinary government movements at that time (every member of the Cabinet was out of the country when Kennedy was shot) and his perception that most of the press has joined in the cover-up ever since. Photos not seen by PW. (Sept.)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Prouty, the mysterious ``X'' in Oliver Stone's JFK , promises to explain why Kennedy was assassinated. Instead, he delivers a muddled collection of undocumented, bizarre theories, most significantly that a super-powerful, avaricious power elite engineered the Cold War and all its pivotal events--Korea, Vietnam, the U-2 incident, the Bay of Pigs, and the Kennedy assassination. Although they are never identified, these shadowy technocrats, working through the CIA, allegedly had Kennedy murdered because he was on the brink of ending America's commitment to Vietnam, along with its billions of dollars of military contracts. Prouty avoids some very important issues. Would Kennedy, a Cold War warrior's warrior, have indeed ended American support for Diem? And why couldn't the omnipotent power elite ensure the election of Richard Nixon, its preferred candidate, in 1960--especially since Kennedy won by only .02 percent? A much better choice is John M. Newman's JFK and Vietnam: Deception, Intrigue, and the Struggle for Power ( LJ 3/15/92). See also James DiEugenio's Destiny Betrayed: JFK, Cuba, and the Garrison Case , reviewed in this issue, p. 123.--Ed.-- Karl Helicher, Upper Merion Twp . Lib., King of Prussia, Pa.

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