Like many Americans, my mother was captivated by the Kennedy glamour, but one of the things that especially aroused her admiration was the president’s dealings with the major steel companies. The events in question unfolded in the spring of 1962, and it makes for an interesting story, particularly in lieu of our ongoing ‘Occupy’ protests—for when push came to shove, JFK made the decision that human needs take precedence over corporate profits.
What started out as an attempt by the administration to mediate a labor dispute between steel unions and management—a process the press at the time came to refer to as “jawboning”—quickly escalated into a major confrontation between the administration and the heads of some of the most powerful corporations in America. What it boils down to is the president had brokered an agreement, signed on April 6, 1962, under which United Steelworkers gained some benefit increases, but no wage increase, in return for which the steel companies promised to forego a price hike. The president’s main concern was avoiding an inflationary spiral, but four days later, on April 10, U.S. Steel reneged on the deal, with company chairman Roger Blough handing Kennedy a four-page mimeograph of a company press release announcing a price increase, the same press release that, as it turned out, had simultaneously been distributed to the media. Reportedly, Kennedy read the statement, then turned to Blough and commented, “You’ve made a terrible mistake.” The following is from the book, JFK and the Unspeakable, by James W. Douglass:
After Blough departed, Kennedy shared the bad news with a group of his advisers. They had never seen him so angry. He said, “My father always told me that all businessmen were sons-of-bitches, but I never believed it until now.” His explosive remark appeared in the New York Times on April 23, 1962. The corporate world never forgot it.
He phoned steelworkers union president David McDonald and said, “Dave you’ve been screwed and I’ve been screwed.”
The next morning U.S. Steel was joined in its price increase by Bethlehem Steel, the second largest company, and soon after by four others. In response Kennedy mustered every resource he could to force the steel companies to roll back their prices. He began at the Defense Department.
Major defense contracts with the giant steel mills were cancelled in favor of smaller companies that had not announced price increases, with Kennedy even resolving to do business with overseas companies should it become necessary. But it didn’t stop there. Attorney General Robert Kennedy launched an investigation into price fixing and violations of anti-trust laws by the major steel corporations, and even convened a federal grand jury. As RFK later commented in an interview, “We were going to go for broke: their expense accounts and where they’d been and what they were doing. I picked up all their records and I told the FBI to interview them all—march into their offices the next day.” Every Big Steel executive in the country was subpoenaed, for both company as well as personal records, and on April 13, the corporate oligarchs surrendered. The first to cave was Bethlehem Steel, which had gotten wind it was to be excluded from bidding on three naval vessels, with U.S. Steel folding soon after. According to Douglass, the president’s offensive was backed “by overwhelming public support.”
Now give some thought to this: suppose JFK were president today. What would he do? I have a feeling that when the Wall Street protests broke out, or sometime shortly thereafter, we would have seen him make some move, either take some measure or at very least issue a forceful statement, which would have immediately established him as a hero to the protesters. But what have we seen instead? The man currently in the Oval Office has lifted not a single finger to rein in the rampant abuses of the bankers. He does nothing and he says nothing. He said absolutely zero, issued no public statement of any kind, even as protesters were attacked by militarized police who assaulted them with batons, chemical agents, and flash grenades in Oakland, New York, and elsewhere. Last week, following the disgraceful conduct of the police at UC Davis, I wondered what if any would be Obama’s response to such a heinous attack on a group of Americans exercising their first amendment rights. How could he stay silent, how could he hold his tongue—after watching a loutish, hooligan cop strutting up and down, hooved-quadruped-like, contemptuously saturating passive, nonviolent demonstrators with his rotating, aerosol stream? How could he? But he did. Mr. Hope-and-Change kept mute. We heard no expression of support for the protesters, or even sympathy, not even the most banal, mealy-mouthed platitude. And you know what the truly odd thing about it is? That nobody even questions such silence. It’s as if for most Americans the notion of a president standing up to corporate power has become about as unlikely and difficult to conceive of as a pig flying over a barn.
The Douglass book on Kennedy is packed with information, going into detail on the Vietnam War, the Bay of Pigs, also JFK’s stormy relationship with both the CIA as well as his rebellious ambassador in Saigon. What I found especially mind boggling is that Allen Dulles ended up being on the Warren Commission—after getting fired by Kennedy as CIA director. Now imagine…you get into an argument one day with your boss, your boss fires you, and later on down the road you manage somehow to get appointed to a commission charged with investigating your boss’s murder. This is what happened with Dulles, a man whose career achievements included some of the CIA’s nastiest operations. Dulles spawned the MK Ultra mind-control program, initiated several attempts to assassinate Fidel Castro, and presided over the overthrow of Mohammad Mossadeq in Iran, an act which continues to reverberate today. Nonetheless on November 29, 1963, Lyndon Johnson appointed him as one of seven members of the Warren Commission.
Douglass refers to the JFK assassination as a “false mystery,” and his thesis is that the CIA was the main party behind it. However, he does leave the door open to the possibility that another hand may have been involved as well:
In the course of experimenting in the dark truth of JFK’s death, the ongoing, deepening historical hypothesis of this book has been that the CIA coordinated and carried out the president’s murder. That hypothesis has been strengthened as the documents, witnesses, and converging lines of inquiry have pointed more conclusively at the CIA. Yet understanding that the CIA coordinated the assassination does not mean that we can limit the responsibility to the CIA. To tell the truth at the heart of darkness in this story, one must see and accept a responsibility that goes deeper and far beyond the Central Intelligence Agency.
The CIA was the coordinating instrument that killed the president, but the question of responsibility is more systemic, more personal, and more chilling. Thomas Merton described it rightly as the unspeakable.
I say, the book covers a lot of ground, but from my perspective, its chief defect is it barely touches on the subject of Israel. What was Kennedy’s relationship with the then-leaders of Israel and what was his relationship with the Israeli lobby here in America? Here Douglass doesn’t provide much information, but two books which do explore this question are America’s Defense Line, by Grant Smith, and Final Judgment, by Michael Collins Piper. I have not yet had a chance to read the Piper book, although from what I hear it is extremely well researched and presents a pretty convincing case for Israeli involvement in the assassination. As for Smith’s book, though it doesn’t go so far as to point a finger at the Israeli Mossad, it does nonetheless provide a wealth of information on JFK’s efforts to force Israel to open its Dimona nuclear plant to inspections as well as plans by RFK and the Justice Department to enforce the Foreign Agents Registration Act, an enforcement which would have obliged the American Zionist Council, forerunner to today’s AIPAC, to register as an agent of a foreign government. But of course these efforts were, as Smith puts it, “shattered by a cataclysm that would forever shift the advantage back to the AZC: the assassination of President John F. Kennedy on November 22, 1963.”
Despite the tragic occurrences of that dreadful date, the sixties remained a time of hope and optimism. You could turn on the radio and hear the Beach Boys singing of sand, surf, and beautiful women, and everybody all over the country, myself included, was California dreaming. And it wasn’t just in America either. Take a look at the following video which shows footage of the Beach Boys arriving in London:
I love watching this video because it takes me back to a simpler time, a pre-destruction era, a time when America and England had yet to be shipwrecked by bankers, Zionists, and war criminals. The video seems to date back to sometime in the mid-to-late-sixties, but of course even then the termites were already in the woodwork destroying the foundation of the house. As Smith notes,
The exemption of Israel from Kennedy’s nuclear nonproliferation regime was confirmed after his death by President Lyndon Johnson in a telephone call to Clark Clifford…Clifford replaced Robert MacNamara as secretary of defense. In 1968, as the Israelis ramped up processing at their Dimona facility while denying to the US that there was a weapons program, Clifford placed an urgent call to Johnson:
Here Smith breaks off and provides a quote from the Seymour Hersh book, The Samson Option, which in turn quotes the Clark Clifford phone call to Johnson:
“Mr President, I don’t want to live in a world where the Israelis have nuclear weapons.” Johnson’s reply was definitive: “Don’t bother me with this anymore.” And he hung up.
Yep. As I said above, the termites were already in the woodwork. And the last chance to save the house from collapse probably died on June 6, 1968 with the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy. Curious, is it not, how both JFK and his younger brother were killed by “lone gunmen”? Curious, that is, of course, if you accept the official versions of both deaths. But maybe the official explanation of the RFK assassination is equally as false and absurd as the one presented by the Warren Commission and its duplicitous appointees. It has been claimed, here, that Sirhan Sirhan, the alleged assassin of RFK, like Oswald in the JFK assassination, was a mere patsy set up to take the fall. What would have happened had RFK been elected president in 1968? Would we have seen a reopening of the investigation into his brother’s death? Could that have been the motive for his killing, and if so, is it possible both assassinations were carried out by the same “unspeakable” forces? As the article notes, both assassinations are said to have been “staged events that fit into a recurrent pattern.”
There’s a lot about the JFK assassination that we still probably don’t know, and there are also factors that, though a part of the public record, have certainly been played down. How many Americans, for instance, are aware that the real name of Jack Ruby, the man who shot Lee Harvey Oswald on nationwide TV, was Jacob Rubenstein? I’d be willing to bet there are quite a few. The vision dims as the liver grows more diseased with cirrhosis. Yet at the same time, we cling to our recollections and remembrances—and while America’s time of useful consciousness may be rapidly running out, we must also remember that death, in whatever form it may come, inherently is followed by rebirth.
Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country—those famous words. JFK spoke them on January 20, 1961, and today, 50 years later, they still have not faded from our memories. I think the reason for that is so many people like my mother took them quite literally to heart. John F. Kennedy, it could be argued, was the last president who inspired us to strive for a shared ideal, who made us feel we were all linked by a common humanity and destiny, and who, in so doing, made us happy and proud that we were Americans. No other president since then has come close to that.
Uprooted Palestinian
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