IN a recording of a conversation aboard the aircraft which transported the body of President Kennedy to Washington it was recently revealed that General Curtis LeMay, Chief of Staff of the U.S. Air Force, was covertly present on the flight. LeMay and General Lyman Lemnitzer attempted to mount a coup d’état in June of 1962, which was concealed from public opinion. The coup was delayed until the assassination of Kennedy on November 22, 1963.

The information about the flight was found among the papers of General Chester Clifton, Kennedy’s principal military advisor. According to the The U.S. National Security Archive, which published the recording on Internet, an aide attempted at all costs to interrupt transmissions of the Air Force 1 Presidential aircraft and communicate with LeMay. In the first version of these recordings, care was taken not to mention the Chief of Staff, which generated more distrust concerning the assassination and the attitude of Le May, one of JFK’s most belligerent adversaries.

The confrontation of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the CIA with Kennedy began on April 18, 1961, when Admiral Burke and General Lemnitzer pressured the President to bomb Cuba and thus reverse the difficult situation facing the invaders. (1)

During the 1962 Missile Crisis LeMay advocated a preventive nuclear strike, going so far as to virtually insult President Kennedy by referring to the cowardice of Neville Chamberlain and stating that not attacking the country would be almost as bad as the pacification of Munich. (2)

The Air Force chief referred to the incident when Kennedy’s father Joseph when he was U.S. ambassador in London and was accused of advising the British Prime Minister to concede Czechoslovakia to Hitler in 1938 to pacify him. This incident led to Joseph Kennedy being removed from his position. LeMay asserted that the USSR could do nothing to prevent a direct and immediate military strike. He had the backing of all the chiefs of staff, including that of the Chairman of Joint Chiefs of Staff General Maxwell Taylor, appointed by Kennedy to replace Lemnitzer, in an unsuccessful attempt to contain the other military commanders. In spite of everything, JFK refused to bomb and invade Cuba, given that the Soviet response could lead to a nuclear war. LeMay described this crisis as the greatest defeat in the history of the United States. A few days previously, Lemnitzer and Allen Dulles, who was still CIA director, had proposed in a meeting of the Security Council to plan a surprise nuclear attack on the USSR. The President left the meeting angrily, according to his advisor Arthur Schlesinger.

Lemnitzer acted in conjunction with LeMay from June 1962, four months prior to the Missile Crisis, when he was replaced for having led a conspiracy to defeat the government. Subordinated to Eisenhower in World War II and seen as a hero, he had been promoted by Kennedy to the Joint Chiefs of Staff in 1960. He was called to a nighttime meeting at the White House, when the President made a shocking discovery: LeMay was plotting to overturn the government and replace it with a kind of South American military junta. (3)

Lemnitzer’s reaction was to accuse Kennedy of having lost the nation’s respect and having led the country to the brink of disaster, given his policies regarding the Soviet Union. A few days later, The New York Times published the information that Kennedy had ordered FBI agents to secure the offices of the Pentagon military chiefs.

The President preferred not to make the conspiracy public, in exchange for Lemnitzer’s resignation. Taylor was appointed in his place and the arrogant General assumed military command of NATO. The sedition was concealed and denied – it was adduced – because the hounded Kennedy did not wish to further undermine confidence in his government. (4)

LeMay’s presence in the presidential aircraft had been noted as connivance with the new President Lyndon B. Johnson. This was linked to the increasing confrontations of the Kennedy brothers with Johnson and the military/intelligence leadership, accentuated in 1963. They were intending to expose the corrupt political and administrative connections of Texan Billie Sol Estes, a millionaire who funded Johnson and was sanctioned by the courts after having been investigated by Attorney General Robert Kennedy. Estes declared that the Vice President obliged him to remain silent about the dirty business they were doing together. The brothers had decided to leave Johnson out of the 1964 ticket, given the information that Robert Kennedy had amassed about his corrupt affairs.

According to Madeleine Duncan Brown, Johnson’s lover, on November 21, the Vice President attended a private party in the home of the Dallas oil magnate Clint Murchinson, where Johnson uttered the enigmatic sentence that, from the next day, the accursed Kennedy brothers would no longer be a problem for him. (5)

The well-known investigator Carl Oglesby always viewed Johnson as the man to most benefit from the assassination and, in his book The Yankee Cowboy War, described the party the evening before as cover for the final coordination of the crime. Madeline Brown held an 80-minute interview with the author Robert Gaylon Ross on her 21-year relationship with Johnson, which included revelations which have been largely ignored by the media. Until her death in 2002, she never showed any hostility toward Johnson.

Oglesby listed the guests, all characters who hated or opposed Kennedy, and the alleged masterminds of the November 22 crime, which has gone unpunished for 50 years. The principal guest was FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, who Robert Kennedy considered an extortionist, a business partner of Meyer Lansky and a friend of the gangster Frank Costello, through whom he placed bets on horse races. For that reason he denied the existence of the Cosa Nostra. Also at the party were Allen Dulles, former CIA director; Richard Nixon, former Vice President, and Texans John Connally, former state governor; the oil millionaire H.L. Hunt; John J. McCloy, General Charles Cabell and his brother; and Dallas Mayor Earl Cabell. This last, acting unilaterally, changed the route of the Presidential convoy, facilitating the task of the snipers.

Robert was prepared to use this arsenal when he decided to break with the tradition of not challenging a member of his own party who was acting President, by presenting his candidacy in the 1968 primary elections, in which Johnson was running for reelection. LBJ had not only overturned JFK’s decision to downscale the war in Vietnam, but expand it, and had also refused to improve relations with Cuba, as Robert proposed to do when he assumed the Presidency.
Something similar to Johnson’s approach is now being undertaken by President Obama, insisting on attacking Syria and maintaining the blockade of Cuba, despite Kennedy’s legacy, which the latter’s daughter Caroline conferred on him January 27, 2008 during the Democratic Party primary. She published an article in The New York Times entitled "A President Like My Father," which ends emphatically, "I have never had a President who inspired me the way people tell me that my father inspired them. But for the first time, I believe I have found the man who could be that President — not just for me, but for a new generation of Americans." That was the first and only time that Kennedy’s daughter endorsed a candidate for the Presidency. Senator Edward Kennedy also spoke in favor of Obama to tip the balance, at that point swinging in favor of Hillary Clinton, toward the promising African American.

But now, by allying himself with questionable groups, Obama is pleasing the warmongers and Cuban-American ultra-conservatives who, according to Robert Kennedy’s investigations, were accomplices or participants in the assassination, which was precipitated, among other reasons, because the CIA knew that his brother was pressing for the normalization of relations with Cuba.

The Kennedy’s were attacking the philosophy of war which, at that time, was being strongly projected in the case of Cuban and Vietnam. A recent revelation is the David Talbot investigation, which demonstrates how Robert Kennedy immediately suspected the that the CIA, the Italian-American mafia and the Cuban-American gangs were all involved in the assassination, because he knew very well how they operated, and was prepared to denounce them. However, he was careful not to reveal that knowledge until he could head the government, since he understood that he faced a very powerful enemy. That is why he was assassinated in 1968.

In essence, that is the conclusion reached by the Congressional Committee in 1978 when it directed that the investigations be continued. It is not by chance that the most public defenders of the group of Cuban gangsters suspected of conspiring in the plot, are supported in eluding justice by Ileana Ros Lehtinen, Mario Díaz-Balart and a group of Congress members financed with resources that the government grants them in the name of freedom. Obama would seem to have forgotten that, right after his election, these ultra-conservatives refused to meet with him. Ileana Ros went so far as to refuse a telephone conversation with him. This group, which has the backing of the pro-Israeli lobby and the military-industrial complex, has hijacked U.S. Cuba policy, despite the fact that both civil and economic actors in U.S. society has stated that the normalization of relations is as important for the United States as it is for Cuba. •

(5) William Reymond. Le Derniere Temoin, (The Last Witness) Editions Flammarion. Paris 2003, P. 259.