Part 1 | Part 2 [to be published]
The following is a nonverbatim transcript of a talk that I delivered at the November 2024 Lancer conference in Dallas on the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.
One of the fascinating aspects of James Douglass’s remarkable book about the Kennedy assassination is its title: JFK and the Unspeakable. What could he possibly mean by “the unspeakable?” Even more fascinating, though, is the book’s subtitle: “Why He Died and Why It Matters.”
In fact, at this point — more than 60 years after Kennedy’s assassination — I believe that it is the “why” of the assassination that is the most important issue — more important than the number of bullets fired at Kennedy, the number of shooters, the bullet trajectories, and other such issues.
Allende and the Cold War
In 1970, a man named Salvador Allende was elected president of Chile. I believe that that election — and the aftermath of that election — provides valuable insights into the “why” of the Kennedy assassination six years before.
Allende’s election took place during the Cold War, the period of time during which U.S. officials convinced the American people that the Reds were coming to get them. At the end of World War II, U.S. officials told Americans that while they should be pleased at having defeated Nazi Germany, unfortunately they could not rest, because, they said, the United States now faced an even more dangerous enemy: the Soviet Union, which, ironically, had been America’s World War II partner and ally — and the “godless communism” that the Soviets represented.
The communists, Americans were told, were everywhere — Red China, North Korea, North Vietnam, Yugoslavia, Eastern Europe, and, later, Guatemala, Cuba, and elsewhere. They were also here in the United States — in the army, the State Department, Congress, and Hollywood, where Dalton Trumbo and other screenwriters were prevented from working and supporting their families owing to some purported connection to communism in their past. There were the McCarthy hearings, and some even suggested that President Eisenhower was a Red.
The notion was that there was an international communist conspiracy to take over the world, including the United States, that was centered in Moscow, Russia — the same Russia that today we are told is going to sweep across Europe with its powerful army, then cross the English Channel and conquer England, then cross the Atlantic Ocean and conquer South America, Central America, Mexico, and then the United States — once it finishes conquering Ukraine.
The national-security state
To combat this supposed grave Cold War threat, America’s federal governmental structure underwent the most monumental transformation in its history. In the late 1940s, the federal government was converted from a limited-government republic to a national-security state.
Under a limited-government republic, the federal government’s powers were limited to those enumerated in the Constitution and were expressly restricted by the Bill of Rights. That restriction on federal power encompassed the small, basic army that came with that type of governmental structure.
That all changed once the federal government became a national-security state. The national-security establishment, which consisted of a vast, permanent, all-powerful military-intelligence sector, effectively became a fourth branch of government — and the most powerful branch at that. It now wielded omnipotent powers, including the power of assassination.
Mind you, there was no legislative enactment granting such omnipotent powers, and there was no constitutional amendment amending the Fifth Amendment, which expressly prohibits the federal government from killing people without due process of law. The national-security branch simply acquired omnipotent powers by default — by virtue of its overwhelming power within the overall federal governmental structure. The rationale was that since the Reds didn’t have to comply with constitutional niceties, we would have to become like them in order to defeat them.
Central to a national-security state is the concept of “national security,” which over time became the most important term in the American political lexicon. No one has ever defined the term with any specificity. Instead, it has always been assumed that the national-security establishment wields the power to interpret the term and to ferret out and eliminate any and all threats to “national security.” Under this new governmental system, no other branch of the federal government would be able to second-guess the national-security branch when it came to interpreting and protecting “national security.”
Allende’s threat to “national security”
After President Allende was elected with a plurality of the votes, the election was thrown into the hands of the Chilean congress. It was assumed, however, that he would be confirmed by the congress since he had won.
Immediately, however, U.S. officials in both the executive branch and the national-security branches, deemed Allende a threat to U.S. national security because he was a socialist, even a communist. Some time after his election, he invited Cuban communist leader Fidel Castro to visit him in Chile. When they conducted a parade down the streets of Santiago, tens of thousands of Chileans cheered them. Most Chileans loved Allende and Castro and their socialist notion that the primary purpose of government is to take care of people.
To deal with this supposed grave threat to U.S. national security, U.S. officials had a two-track plan: first, to bribe the Chilean congress with U.S. taxpayer money into not voting for Allende and, second, to encourage a coup whereby the Chilean national-security establishment would violently prevent Allende from taking power or violently remove him from power if the Chilean congress were to confirm him as president.
What is still a mystery is why U.S. officials didn’t simply assassinate Allende. After all, assassination was one of the omnipotent powers vested in the U.S. national-security establishment. The CIA had already orchestrated the assassination of Congo leader Patrice Lumumba just before Kennedy came into office. In partnership with the Mafia, the CIA had also tried to assassinate Castro several times. In the CIA’s regime-change operation in Guatemala in 1954, the agency had a “kill list”; while it is still kept secret on grounds of “national security,” it is a virtual certainty that the country’s democratically elected socialist president, Jacobo Arbenz, who was befriending communist nations, was at the top of the list.
So, why not Allende? My hunch is that it’s because by 1970, there were growing suspicions and doubts about the official lone-nut narrative of the Kennedy assassination. For example, there was Mark Lane’s best-selling book Rush to Judgment. Equally significant was New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison’s prosecution of Clay Shaw, in which Garrison alleged that the Kennedy assassination was actually a regime-change operation on the part of the U.S. national-security establishment. Thus, I think that U.S. national-security officials concluded that an assassination of Allende might cause people to look more closely at the Kennedy assassination.
Gen. Rene Schneider
There was a big obstacle to the coup plan — General Rene Schneider, who was the overall commander of the Chilean armed forces. A man of great integrity, his position was very simple. He said that like other Chilean soldiers, he had taken an oath to support and defend the Chilean constitution. He maintained that since the constitution did not provide for a coup as a means to remove the country’s president, people would simply have to wait until the next election to remove Allende from power.
The position of the U.S. national-security establishment was completely different. It maintained that it is the duty of the national-security branch of the government to protect the nation from all threats, foreign and domestic. The constitution is not a suicide pact. If following it meant that the nation would be destroyed, then it would be foolhardy to follow it. Chile didn’t have the luxury of waiting until the next election. By that time, our government said, Chile would be another Cuba, both economically and politically. There would be no more elections. Thus, protecting “national security” trumped the terms of the constitution. It was the moral duty of the national-security branch to violently remove a president from power whose policies posed a threat to “national security” in order to save the nation.
The CIA orchestrated a plan to violently kidnap Schneider and remove him as an obstacle. When the kidnapping attempt took place on the streets of Santiago, Schneider, who was armed, fought back. He was shot dead by the would-be kidnappers.
At the risk of belaboring the obvious, no U.S. official in Washington, D.C., or Virginia, where the CIA and the Pentagon are located, was ever brought to justice for the conspiracy to kidnap Schneider or for his murder. His murder produced such a big backlash among the Chilean people that the Chilean congress was pressured into rejecting the CIA’s bribes and confirming Allende as president. Nonetheless, U.S. officials continued pressing the Chilean national-security branch of the government into instituting a military coup in order to “save” the country.
The Chilean war
On September 11, 1973, the national-security branch of the Chilean government initiated a violent war against the executive branch of the government. The army surrounded Allende’s position in the national palace with infantry and tanks and proceeded to try to kill him. When that failed, the air force was called in to fire missiles into Allende’s position. Allende and other members of the executive branch valiantly fought back. They wore military helmets and were firing high-powered rifles at the attacking forces.
In the end, however, the executive branch of the government was no match for the national-security branch. Allende, along with some of his colleagues, was dead, with others captured, incarcerated, and brutally tortured. Under orders from the leader of the coup, Gen. Augusto Pinochet, Chilean national-security personnel proceeded to round up some 50,000 innocent people — that is, people who had supported Allende and socialism. Pinochet’s goons proceeded to torture most of them. Female prisoners were raped or sexually assaulted in brutal ways. Some 3,000 people were executed or “disappeared.”
U.S. officials, needless to say, were exultant. Don’t forget, after all, that communist forces were still killing U.S. soldiers in Vietnam as part of the supposed international communist conspiracy to take over the world. Here was Pinochet balancing things out, with the brutalization of tens of thousands of “communists” — that is, people who were guilty of having supported Allende and his socialist/communist agenda. Soon after that, the United States, Chile, and other South American authoritarian regimes entered into the biggest kidnapping, incarceration, torture, and execution ring in history — Operation Condor.
This article was originally published in the February 2025 issue of Future of Freedom.
