By Yoichi Shimatsu
Exclusive To Rense
11-22-23

Although perhaps it is too late to wreak vengeance against those individuals involved in murdering our nation’s duly elected leader (although with sneering hubris their ilk continues to persecute an popularly elected leader, indeed a former president defrauded of his hold on the Oval Office), let us swear to uphold the Constitution toward removing and imprisoning the cabal of self-serving politicians and their organized crime henchmen from ever again getting away with their treasonous crimes. The national remembrance of the achievements and courageous example of JFK calls on us to never again concede to Establishment lies and cover-ups, to always demand and stand with the truth.

Cuba Then, Palestine Today

Most biographers attribute the Kennedy assassination to his failure to wage the Vietnam War with anticommunist zeal, whereas in truth JFK was doomed precisely because he understood the power of diplomacy and truthful disclosure. JFK refused to further the anti-Castro CIA agenda of Jewish criminals with the Meyer Lansky mob aiming to recover their gambling dens, nightclubs such as Lansky’s Copacabana and whore houses in Havana, thereby angering their sleaze Cuban exile henchmen (a bay of pigs, for sure) into a murderous vendetta against the president.

The Cuban Revolution, led by Fidel Castro and Che Guevara, was indeed, as its opponents suggested, an illicit coup by radical revolutionaries against a duly “elected” hidden-Jewish dictatorship, much like the ragtag Hamas revolt in Gaza is today combating the overbearing foreign control of Yiddish crooks. Then and now, a treacherous and belligerent CIA was intent on installing a puppet regime under the leadership of corrupt lackey politicians beholden to organized crime interests. Now just as back then, proud young men and women, intent on recovering their national sovereignty, free of foreign control, fought back with whatever little in weapons against the military might of a ill-informed USA and its puppet regime of religious fanatics (Israeli Jews and Ladino Spanish-speaking Jewry in the New World). Against this favoritism toward a debased Jewry, the majority of Americans are Christians, either Catholic, Protestant or apostolic sects, with zero interest in coming to the aid of those descended from the self-serving and ethically heinous Sanhedrin that demanded the crucifixion.

To his everlasting credit, John Kennedy assumed a fine balance between the basic interest of a tolerant Christian community, while rejecting the outright fundamentalist demands of Archbishop Francis Spellman, the so-called “American Pope”, an avid promoter of U.S. military involvement in and against the former French colony of Vietnam. Whatever the pressures from the Catholic right of the Cardinal and CIA directors Allen Dulles (who employed a young Jacqueline Bouvier (later Kennedy) and then his replacement John McCone, JFK was confident that his White House and brain trust of realists on the ground in Asia could swing the Kremlin into accept a peacemaking compromise between Vietnam’s northern revolutionary regime (of Ho Chi Minh) and the Catholic-ruled South.

In the last months of his life, Kennedy could count on his realist-school fellows at the Pentagon, who included Air Force General Maxwell Taylor (appointed to head the Joint Chiefs), Roswell Gilpatic, the chief civilian secretary at the Pentaton; and the lesser-known Colonel Don Donahue at the Pentagon’s strategy center. During a summer program of the National Science Foundation , I was a guest at the Donahue home in Boston, which was more refined than your average Irish workingclass house and not quite the palatial quarters of a lace-curtain upper-crust Irish famiy. Donohue was a collegiate friend of Kenndy at Harvard, and sometimes served as his academic mentor. That was prior to World War II and JFK’s service aboard PT boat 109 in the Pacific War. Like many of Kennedy’s peers, Don Donohue later died too early.

On the Vietnam front, the Pentagon civilian crews at Ton So Nut Airfield and their top organizer Milton Spencer Taylor, the highest ranking Pentagon civilian between Honolulu and Washington D.C. fought the battles to forestall the North Vietnamese offense while awaiting peace talks. “Mike” Taylor was my stepfather, and his firm belief was that technology could vastly reduce human casualties in modern warfare, for example by deployment of unmanned weapons (camera-controlled machine guns along the Ho Chi Minh trail) and defoliation of jungle cover with Agent Orange. In his wildest imagination, he could not then begin to comprehend that the Vietnam War would drag out for 16 years or that defoliant chemicals might seriously poison vast areas of Southeast Asia to threaten millions of civilian lives.

Then a teenager, I was an unintended eavesdropper on his most secretive planning, serving as unofficial bartender to my stepfather, the highest-ranking civilian Pentagon official between Honolulu and Washington D.C. Milton Spencer Taylor was a Machiavellian conspirator, eroding the powers of the ultra-militaristic Pentagon officer corps on behalf of his own factional interests aligned with Defense Department civilian officials who were among Kennedy’s closest allies.

During boozing sessions with his faction members in the bar room of our French chateau, shipped from France brick-by-brick and rebuilt on top of a hill in Kobe, an enraged Milton aka Mike launched into tirades against the SoB officers, mostly Southerners, who were eager to launch suicide missions (of younger American pilots) into North Vietnam. Meanwhile, many of these same aggressive and hypocritical “patriot” officers were colluding with Yakuza gangsters who purchased spent cartridges and bomb casings to be shipped to Hong Kong (supposedly to be melted down for copper ashtrays) and then sent secretly onto to Chinese factories for refitting as live ammo to kill American soldiers in Vietnam. The militarism-minded scoundrels were ready to widen the war, no matter what the toll in young draftees, in order to personally profit from lucrative weapons transfers to the enemy side.

Hang Down Your Head

At the time I was transferred from a Catholic school in Kobe to a U.S. military-run high school near Tokyo (to prepared for college admission in the States), where the overwhelming sentiment among the faculty and students was then for a peaceful pullout of U.S. forces from the Vietnam conflict, under the influence of two Kennedy-allied teachers. In a mock election, I took the role of a warmongering madman a la Barry Goldwater in support of bombing Vietnam to smithereens. Needless to recall, my insane war jingoism lost the student vote. (Unfortunately, real life politics, that absurdist hard-line position won the day on November 22, 2023.)

One vivid memory of that mock election is how the antiwar teachers played on their guitars the Peter, Paul and Mary song “Hang down your head Tom Dooley”, ostensibly an Appalachian folk song about Thomas Doolah, the murderer of a woman, but subliminally in reference to the Catholic missionary doctor Thomas Anthony Dooley III, a leading advocate of U.S. military intervention in Southeast Asia. T.A. Dooley was a secret agent of the CIA, then under the control of the Yale Catholic CIA cabal that blindly supported the fanatical pro-war NYC archbishop Francis Spellman, who desperately wanted to recover Southeast Asia for the French Empire and take back Cuba from Castro.

Even two year’s after Kennedy’s assassination, Defense Secretary Bob McNamara’s assessment was that the American “troops would be out” of combat by Christmas 1965. What went wrong? Kennedy’s assumption that Soviet premier Nikita Khruschev would accept a draw in that war through diplomacy, elections and zones of influence within South Vietnam, proved to be a pipe dream. Unlike Cuba, far from its Soviet support base in the USSR, Vietnam bordered on Communist China, where Mao’s regime was all-too leery of Western duplicity in the wake of the Taiwan Strait Crisis (again a matter of concern today). Little known to CIA analysts in those early days of feigned “socialist brotherhood”, Beijing was far from ready to break relations with Moscow, as occurred later in the Sino-Soviet split.

Wake Up to Reality

The assassination of John Kennedy in late 1963 snapped apart all the tenuous arrangements and contingencies for a peaceful resolution of the Vietnam War, dooming American servicemen to unthinkable brutality in battle and from chemical contamination. I recall waking up at a U.S. air base in Japan to my mother’s shocked shout-out: “Clark, wake up! The president has been shot dead!” As I rolled out of a slumber, my first reaction was: “How’s that surprising, considering the way things have been going downhill for Mike and his bunch?” At the time, I was eager to join Air Force intelligence as a forward observer and was studying the Vietnamese language, The news from Dallas was the first of several big “dings” from reality knocking on my hollow head. Several of my high school classmates were soon thereafter severely wounded in helicopter crashes on the Viet battlefields.

There’s no doubt why JFK kept his cards close to his chest, with foes like Spellman and Yiddish mafia boss Meyer Lansky who lost his bid to recover his Copacabana casino in Havana, due to Kennedy’s realistic estimate of the Bay of Pigs fiasco. Another deuce from his deck came with the firing of CIA director Allen Dulles, who had played the key role in involving his attractive young secretary at the Agency Jacqueline Bouvier with the popular senator from Boston. Confident and sometimes brash, JFK was being surrounded with ardent foes by an Establishment intent on beating the Commies whatever the cost in American lives, including if it mean removal of a popular president.

Then there was the CIA agent and Marine Lee Harvey Oswald, who had guarded an underground nuclear warhead storage center at the US Naval base at Atsugi, near Tokyo, and went on to be a CIA spy in Russia. Of course, from the same doll cabinet popped out Jack Ruby aka Jacob Rubenstein, a former Marine who ran underground gambling parlors, strip clubs and bars in league with the Cuban exile mafia.

After the JFK’s death, of course, the massive escalation went badly as North Vietnamese regulars joined the fray and Vietnamese peasants turned unequivocally against the American war effort, bringing on the fiery napalm bombings and the CIA’s Operation Phoenix program to establish captive peasant villages “friendly” to the corrupt Saigon regime while napalm was dropped over the rest of the countryside, that is until Team Nixon signed the secret deal with Mao Zedong, to jointly eliminate all and any traces of the Secret War in Laos and Cambodia.

All of Mike Taylor’s colleagues with Air America were betrayed to the North Vietnamese or terminated by special ops groups in the clean-up of evidence. In a last desperate attempt to rescue his associates, he flew desperately though Laos as VNM troopers combed the hills. Later landing at a Thai military airfield in Chiang Mai, Thailand, he was detained by a CIA team, who demoted him to GS9 (busted down to a lieutenant’s pay) and told that any disclosure of what went down, courtesy of Henry Kissinger and Colin Powell, would directly lead to the shooting death of his wife and daughter.

The Kennedy Years and their aftermath are not quite yet over. It may sound crazy and even impossible, but Truth will Prevail and John F. Kennedy and his fallen family members will be vindicated. On this day, we must not grieve or forget but continue along the path of truth served with righteous energy, however far and for however long this quest must take. We owe at least that much to America of our hopes and dreams. May he rest in peace and may his clan carry on his quest.