Wednesday, July 10, 2024

American Pravda: JFK, Richard Nixon, the CIA, and Watergate, by Ron Unz - The Unz Review

 "Over the last dozen years my understanding of the past century of American history has been upended by several huge revelations, explosive discoveries that had long been concealed from me by the propaganda-bubble of mainstream media coverage in which I’d lived my entire life." - Ron Unz

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Uncovering the Truth about the JFK Assassination

Two weeks ago I published a long article on the JFK Assassination, pointing to the overwhelming evidence that Kennedy’s own successor Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson had very likely been a central figure in the plot.

I closed the essay by quoting several early paragraphs from a different article that I had published more than six years earlier:

…I never had any interest in 20th century American history. For one thing, it seemed so apparent to me that all the basic political facts were already well known and conveniently provided in the pages of my introductory history textbooks, thereby leaving little room for any original research, except in the most obscure corners of the field.

Also, the politics of ancient times was often colorful and exciting, with Hellenistic and Roman rulers so frequently deposed by palace coups, or falling victim to assassinations, poisonings, or other untimely deaths of a highly suspicious nature. By contrast, American political history was remarkably bland and boring, lacking any such extra constitutional events to give it spice. The most dramatic political upheaval of my own lifetime had been the forced resignation of President Richard Nixon under threat of impeachment, and the causes of his departure from office—some petty abuses of power and a subsequent cover-up—were so clearly inconsequential that they fully affirmed the strength of our American democracy and the scrupulous care with which our watchdog media policed the misdeeds of even the most powerful.

In hindsight perhaps I should have asked myself whether the coups and poisonings of Roman Imperial times were accurately reported in their own day, or if most of the toga-wearing citizens of that era might have remained blissfully unaware of the nefarious events secretly determining the governance of their own society.

Over the last dozen years my understanding of the past century of American history has been upended by several huge revelations, explosive discoveries that had long been concealed from me by the propaganda-bubble of mainstream media coverage in which I’d lived my entire life.

Of these, one of the most important was the true story of the Kennedy assassinations of the 1960s. I had always gullibly accepted the official narrative that a pair of deranged lone gunmen had killed our president and his younger brother. Meanwhile I had totally ignored the vague claims of conspiracy that were very occasionally mentioned with ridicule in the books and articles upon which I relied. Therefore, I was stunned to eventually discover that those vitally important historical events had become the subject of a vast subterranean world of solid scholarship, whose analysis and reconstruction seemed far more substantial and persuasive than what my trusted media sources had ever provided.

After carefully digesting and analyzing all this shocking new information, I eventually published my conclusions in a series of articles over the last six years, notably including these:

Richard Nixon and John F. Kennedy

Discovering the truth of the JFK Assassination had completely overturned my accepted framework of modern history. But over the years I’ve encountered numerous lesser surprises as well, not nearly as world-shattering but still quite significant in their own right.

One of these, closely intertwined with Kennedy’s own story, has been my considerable reappraisal of Richard Nixon, the man whom Kennedy very narrowly defeated in 1960 and whose later political resurrection placed him in the White House eight years later. In some respects, their ultimate fates were paired, with Kennedy becoming the only modern American president to die by assassination, while Nixon became the first in more than a century to face impeachment, a legal blow that prompted his resignation, the first in our national history.

I’d known that Kennedy and Nixon had been political contemporaries and the media narrative that I’d casually absorbed had always portrayed them as polar-opposites in their political and ideological characteristics.

Together with his glamourous young wife Jackie, Kennedy had conjured the image of an American Camelot during the early 1960s. Presiding over our country as its royal couple, the youthful Kennedys had been adored by our national elites, ranging from Hollywood stars to leading academic intellectuals. Although the life of that handsome young prince was suddenly cut short by an assassin’s bullet, his heroic achievements remained in our national consciousness throughout the decades that followed. Probably no American political figure of the last century has received such glowing support from our national media and intellectual elites, and their hagiography has pulled along the rest of our citizens. For example, although he served less than three years in office, JFK was recently ranked as our third most popular president after Abraham Lincoln and George Washington.

Meanwhile, that same survey placed Nixon close to the bottom, well below any other modern president. Indeed, prior to the appearance of Donald Trump, I doubt that any other American president of the last one hundred years was so generally hated and despised by our media, a harsh verdict that long preceded his shameful departure from office. Since I was only a child during the Nixon Administration, I had unthinkingly absorbed those sentiments, partly because they were so widely and casually echoed by most of my friends and family members. But although I had never closely studied modern American history, in later years I sometimes wondered why that hostility had been so widespread in our elite media and academic circles.

My impression was that the main charges against Nixon had been his dishonesty, his political ruthlessness, and his cynicism, as demonstrated in the Red-baiting tactics that had helped him climb the greasy political ladder. But as I sometimes turned those notions over in my mind, they left me a little puzzled. Similar criticism seemed almost endemic to our entire political class and I wondered whether Nixon was really so much worse than all of his peers. After all, it was grudgingly conceded that Kennedy’s paper-thin victory in the 1960 presidential race had involved massive voter fraud in Texas and Chicago, so the balance of dishonesty and political ruthlessness hardly seemed entirely one-sided.

Elected to Congress in 1946, Nixon’s meteoric early career had been ignited when he boldly championed the “Pumpkin Papers” charges of Whitaker Chambers against Alger Hiss, in which the rumpled former Communist accused the ultra-respectable New Dealer of having been a longtime Soviet agent. Hiss was a pillar of the East Coast Establishment and the founding Secretary-General of the United Nations Conference, so although he was convicted of perjury and sent to prison, claims that he’d been railroaded spent decades as a leading liberal cause celebre and that surely explained much of the lasting animus the media directed towards the congressman who had ruined him. But the eventual release of the Venona Decrypts in the 1990s conclusively proved that Hiss had been guilty as charged, completely vindicating Nixon.........

Read full text: https://www.unz.com/runz/american-pravda-jfk-richard-nixon-the-cia-and-watergate/

...........Many of those who have investigated the JFK Assassination have concluded that what happened amounted to a political coup, whose reality was concealed by our American media, and I think the same may be said of the removal of Richard Nixon a decade later, though the coup was a silent one, utilizing judicial means.

 

I opened this piece by quoting several paragraphs I’d published almost exactly six years ago, emphasizing that until the last dozen years I’d regarded modern American history as too bland and boring to study, in sharp contrast to the endless political coups and assassinations of the Roman and Hellenistic empires. Although numerous highly-suspicious deaths of important American figures seemed to surround the 1963 JFK Assassination, an even more remarkable series of such mysterious deaths had occurred soon after the end of World War II, and these had been the subject of that previous article.

Among those who grow skeptical of establishment media verdicts, there is a natural tendency to become overly suspicious, and see conspiracies and cover-ups where none exist. The sudden death of a prominent political figure may be blamed on foul-play even when the causes were entirely natural or accidental. “Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.” But when a sufficient number of such persons die within a sufficiently short period of years, and overwhelming evidence suggests that at least some of those deaths were not for the reasons long believed, the burden of proof begins to shift….

I do not think that any similar list of comparable individuals during that same time period could be produced for Britain, France, the USSR, or China. In one of the James Bond films, Agent 007 states his opinion that “Once is happenstance, twice is coincidence, three times is enemy action.” And I think these six examples over just a few years should be enough to raise the eyebrows of even the most cautious and skeptical.

Foreign leaders outraged over America’s destructive international blundering have sometimes described our country as possessing physical might of enormous power, but having a ruling political elite so ignorant, gullible, and incompetent that it easily falls under the sway of unscrupulous foreign powers. We are a nation with the body of a dinosaur but controlled by the brain of a flea.

The post-war era of the 1940s surely marked an important peak of America’s military and economic power. Yet there seems considerable evidence that during those same years, a varied mix of Soviet, British, and Zionist assassins may have freely walked our soil, striking down those whom they regarded as obstacles to their national interests. Meanwhile, nearly all Americans remained blissfully unaware of these momentous developments, being lulled to sleep by “Our American Pravda.”

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