Johnson and Hoover were the contractors of the cover-up, but not the murder itself. Many clues direct suspicions towards other enemies of Kennedy, more powerful but less visible. Recent research now tends to confirm what Jim Garrison perceived already in 1968: “President Kennedy was killed for one reason: because he was working for reconciliation with the [Soviet Union] and Castro’s Cuba. […] President Kennedy died because he wanted peace”. The implications drawn by Garrison were frightening: “In a very real and terrifying sense, our government is the CIA and the Pentagon, with Congress reduced to a debating society. […] I’m afraid, based on my experience, that fascism will come to America in the name of National Security”. “National Security” are the key words here: they are, so to speak, the euphemistic name of the American Deep State, housed mainly within the CIA and the Pentagon, but closely linked to the larger economic elite.

The roots of what is commonly called the “National Security State” are ancient, and appear clearly in a little known episode in the history of the United States. In 1933, General Smedley Butler, a hero of the First World War who was immensely popular among veterans for defending their claims for the “soldiers bonus” in the midst of the Great Depression, was invited by the proxy of a network of businessmen to lead a coup d'état against President Franklin Roosevelt; he would assume the role of a “knight on a white horse” come to save the nation from the socialist policies initiated by a President of declining health. Butler could have easily mobilized 500,000 men to march on Washington on the occasion of the annual Veterans Convention, and force Roosevelt to appoint him to the position of “Secretary of General Affairs”, which would have made him the executive president and reduced Roosevelt to a merely representative role. To support the endeavor, a new lobby of major capitalist entrepreneurs was created, the American Liberty League, and the magazine Affairs undertook preparations to sway public acceptance toward the new lobby and coup. Butler feigned interest in order to accumulate as much information as he could about the plot, before denouncing it at Congress and on the radio. A congressional Committee on Un-American Activities (or McCormack-Dickstein Committee) investigated in November 1934 and, in its final report published in February 1935, claimed to have evidence that “certain persons had made an attempt to establish a fascist organization in this country. […] There is no question that these attempts were discussed, were planned, and might have been placed in execution when and if the financial backers deemed it expedient”. To Butler’s dismay, however, the report does not name any of the individuals involved ― an arrangement probably having been made with Roosevelt, allowing the for implementation of his New Deal in exchange for the plotters’ impunity.

This episode demonstrates the existence of complicity between the financial elite and the military, based on a common communist phobia, and hostility to the welfare state. The attempt to overthrow or weaken the democratic state by a combination of economic and military power is the essence of fascism. The relative victory of the democratic state over fascist forces in the 1930s forced the latter to change strategy, and that is the origin of the modern Deep State. It would be Roosevelt’s Vice President and successor, Harry Truman, who would be a docile instrument for this transformation. Propelled to the head of the State by Roosevelt’s death in April 1945, after only three months at the Vice Presidency, Truman was ill-prepared to negotiate this turning point in history. Roosevelt had not informed him of any confidential dossiers, and certainly not the top secret Manhattan Project. Four months later, during the Potsdam Conference, a coded telegram notified Truman that the last atomic test at Alamogordo, New Mexico was conclusive: “Operated on this morning. Diagnosis not yet complete but results seem satisfactory and already exceed expectations”. Without more than a day of reflection, he ordered the destruction of Hiroshima on August 6th 1945, and reveled at the announcement of the result: “This is the greatest thing in history!”, he is reported to have marveled ; he would attack again three days later on Nagasaki. We now know that this double crime against humanity was not drawn on military necessity, since Tokyo and 66 other Japanese cities had already been reduced to ashes under a barrage of incendiary bombs, and that the emperor had agreed to a conditional capitulation. Hiroshima and Nagasaki were a show of force designed to make the nuclear threat the instrument of a new world order based on terror. It was, for many, the true trigger of the Cold War and the arms race. Four years later, in August 1949, the Soviets were testing their first atomic bomb with plutonium. Presumably Roosevelt would have acted differently, who, before Congress January 6th, 1941, was calling for a disarmed world that would be “the very antithesis of the so-called new order of tyranny which the dictators seek to create with the crash of a bomb”.

The same Truman who baptized the world in nuclear fire is also responsible for the creation of the National Security State, born from the National Security Act of 1947 (amended in 1949). By this decree, the President wanted to surround himself with command structures adapted to the arising Cold War. First, Truman united the five military commands ─ Army, Navy, Air Force, Marine Corps and Strategic Command, already co-housed in the Pentagon since 1943 ─, into a permanent committee, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, with an appointed Chairman, thereby giving the military greater influence on foreign policy. Truman simultaneously instituted the National Security Council, which surrounds the President with the main actors of Foreign and Military Intelligence. Truman's successor, Dwight Eisenhower, created a specific position to preside over this structure, the National Security Advisor, who often prevails over the Secretary of State in issues of foreign policy (both positions will merge with Henry Kissinger, and later Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice). Eisenhower also established in 1952 the National Security Agency (NSA), whose existence was kept secret until 1957 (which earned it the journalistic nickname “No Such Agency”), and given the mission of global espionage.

All of the foundational top-secret reports of the National Security State are characterized by an alarmist exaggeration of the ambitions and power of the Soviet military, and established in the White House a climate of permanent war. The supposed hegemonic policy of the USSR was the justification for the “Truman Doctrine”, which affirms the right for the United States to intervene in the internal affairs of any country, near or far, who by leaning slightly to the left could trigger a “domino effect” and cause the collapse on an entire region under communist influence. Informed by a quasi-theological and apocalypticvision of the Cold War, the structures put in place by Truman would be, under the pretext of “national security”, a true imperial government, operating under guise to destabilize any insubordinate governments and to prop up dictators willing to remain under its tutelage.
The NSC-68 report of April 14th 1950, which had a great influence on the foreign policy of the United States for twenty years, asserted that the Kremlin posed a threat capable of the “destruction not only of this Republic but of civilization itself”. Its principal author, Paul Nitze, considered a preemptive nuclear attack against the USSR desirable, but impractical, “unless it is demonstrably in the nature of a counter-attack to a blow which is on its way or about to be delivered”. Unfortunately, “the idea of ‘preventive’ war ─ in the sense of a military attack not provoked by a military attack upon us or our allies ─ is generally unacceptable to Americans”. A surprise attack on the Soviet Union “would be repugnant to many Americans. […] Many would doubt that it was a ‘just war’ and that all reasonable possibilities for a peaceful settlement had been explored in good faith. Many more, proportionately, would hold such views in other countries, particularly in Western Europe”. This report raises an issue quite different from that of deterrence, the official justification of the atomic arsenal: how to strike first, strong enough to crush the striking power of the enemy, while maintaining an air of self-defense? This question obsessed the Pentagon throughout the Kennedy presidency and helped instill a culture of the false flag. The idea that the United States should take advantage of their lead in nuclear weapons to strike first, was widely shared and openly advocated by the commander of the Air Force General Curtis LeMay, already co-responsible for Hiroshima and Nagasaki. LeMay was caricatured as the paranoid General Jack D. Ripperin the film Dr. Strangelove or: How I learned to stop worrying and love the bombby Stanley Kubrick, which, coincidentally, was scheduled for release on November 22nd 1963.

The militarism of the National Security State is exacerbated by its converging interests with the arms industry, a market of hundreds of billions of dollars that includes some of the largest industrial groups, and consumes almost half of the National budget without any taxpayer influence or control. Armament firms have permanent delegates at the Pentagon, while almost every retired general serves on the board of one of these companies. The principles of capital accumulation require a constant and increasingmarket demand (consumption), and thus the logic of the military industry tends toward steadily increasing military budgets, and periodic renewal of stocks by war. In his Farewell Address delivered on January 17th1961, Eisenhower, a retired general, warned the nation against this new phenomenon: “This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence — economic, political, even spiritual — is felt in every city, every State house, every office of the Federal government. […] In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist”.

While the democratic state needs transparency to maintain the confidence of citizens, the National Security State, by contrast, thrives on opacity. On behalf of the sacrosanct “National Security Interest”, it operates in the utmost secrecy. It assumes the right and duty to hide from Congress all with which it is concerned, but also to hinder by all means the freedom of the press to investigate its actions. This state within the state, controlled by virtually irremovable generals, hostile to the democracy on which it feeds, is rendered largely invisible to Americans, not only by the secrecy surrounding it, but also because its power is exercised outside national borders. The internal history of this shadow government emerges only much later, and always incompletely, at the pace of archive declassification. It is yet still imperative that advocacy groups fight for access to these records and the voice make them public. It is the mission of the National Security Archive Project at George Washington University, which, since 1985 has already filed 40 suits against the Administration for obstruction under the Freedom of Information Act of 1966.

To fully grasp the pathogenic state of mind that reigns within the U.S. National Security apparatus, the best is probably to look into the strategic think tank that serves as its main brain, namely the RAND Corporation, founded in 1945 by the Air Force. In the 50s, the RAND went searching for scientific models to predict the evolution of the Cold War, and turned toward “game theory”, a new field in mathematics meant to model decision strategies between individuals seeking exclusively their personal interest in a competitive arena such as poker. Among several scientists hired by the RAND was a mathematician of genius named John Nash, whose research on “non-cooperative equilibriums” would earn him the Nobel Prize of Economy in 1994. Nash’s game theory reinforced the cold-warriors’ opinion that the worst mistake is to trust the enemy in any way, since the rule of the game is deception; rather, the enemy must be assumed to be cunning and ruthless and will only be defeated by a higher degree of cunningness and ruthlessness. The irony is that John Nash (portrayed as A Beautiful Mind by Hollywood) suffered of “paranoid schizophrenia” for which he was committed in mental hospital in 1958-59 and regularly thereafter. His vision of human relationships, which was transposed into a vision of international relationships by the RAND, is typical of psychopaths or near-psychopaths such as narcissistic or paranoid personalities. Fundamentally, the psychopath is incapable of empathy and experiences social life as a poker game, at which he excels. Personal gain is his only aim, and deception his main strategy.

But empathy, as we shall see, is precisely what enabled the Kennedy team to avoid nuclear war in times of crisis, as his Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara remembers in Errol Morris’s documentary The Fog of War: “Lesson #1: Empathize with your enemy. We must try to put ourselves under their skin, and look at us through their eyes, just to understand the thoughts that lie beneath their decisions and their actions”.