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Jfk Quotes

“El Yauco is the mountain that stands across the Baluarte from Rosario. The top of it looks like the profile of John F. Kennedy in repose. The only flaw in this geographic wonder is that the nose is upside-down. Once, when Jaime and I had painfully struggled to the summit to investigate the nose, we found this message: MOTHER NATURE HAS NO RESPECT FOR YANQUI PRESIDENTS EITHER!”

“A rising sun died in America and the world on Nov. 22, 1963. Some say that we have never again seen such a rising sun in the sky as we did that morning. Even if it was cloudy or raining that day, the country and world were more innocent and optimistic at that moment than they have been since then. Some say that a piece of all of us – the hope that helps us get through another day - died that day. Others say the act just opened the eyes of many about what the U.S. government and other governments had done in our names for a long time.”

“Six point nine seconds of heat and light. Let's call a meeting to analyze the blur. Let's devote our lives to understanding this moment, separating the elements of each crowded second. We will build theories that gleam like jade idols, intriguing systems of assumption, four-faced, graceful. We will follow the bullet trajectories backwards to the lives that occupy the shadows, actual men who moan in their dreams.”

“The very word "secrecy" is repugnant in a free and open society; and we are as a people inherently and historically opposed to secret societies, to secret oaths and to secret proceedings...Our way of life is under attack. Those who make themselves our enemy are advancing around the globe...no war ever posed a greater threat to our security. If you are awaiting a finding of "clear and present danger," then I can only say that the danger has never been more clear and its presence has never been more imminent...For we are opposed around the world by a monolithic and ruthless conspiracy that relies primarily on covert means for expanding its sphere of influence–on infiltration instead of invasion, on subversion instead of elections, on intimidation instead of free choice, on guerrillas by night instead of armies by day. It is a system which has conscripted vast human and material resources into the building of a tightly knit, highly efficient machine that combines military, diplomatic, intelligence, economic, scientific and political operations. Its preparations are concealed, not published. Its mistakes are buried, not headlined. Its dissenters are silenced, not praised. No expenditure is questioned, no rumor is printed, no secret is revealed.”

“Anyone who studies this evidence with an open mind understands that there was a coup in America in 1963, and that the plot was cleverly designed in an attempt to blame the assassination of President Kennedy on both Fidel Castro’s Cuba, and the Soviet Union, at the same time.”

“Former CIA agent and Watergate convict, Howard Hunt suggested several prominent CIA officials involved in the plot to assassinate JFK, including Richard Helms—the top agency’s top man. The other CIA suspects Hunt named in his book were William Harvey and David Morales, a “cold-blooded assassin,” Hunt observed, who like his boss Harvey, was “possibly completely amoral.” While vigorously proclaiming his own innocence, Hunt speculated that Harvey—“a strange character hiding a mass of hidden aggression”—might have played the lead role in organizing the assassination, hiring Mafia sharpshooters “to administer the magic bullet” in Dallas. Hunt even went so far as to raise the possibility that Harvey was acting on orders from Vice President, Lyndon Johnson.”

“Equality in America has never meant literal equality of condition or capacity. There will always be inequalities in character and ability in any society. Equality has meant rather that in the words of the Declaration of Independence, "All men are created equal and are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights." It is meant that in a democratic society there should be no inequalities in opportunities or in freedoms.”

“She was a little removed,” Jack said as an adult. In private, he complained that Rose never told him that she loved him. Jack’s friend Charles Spalding, who saw the family up close, described Rose as “so cold, so distant from the whole thing . . . I doubt if she ever rumpled the kid’s hair in his whole life. . . . It just didn’t exist: the business of letting your son know you’re close, that she’s there. She wasn’t.” Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy told the journalist Theodore White that “history made him [Jack] what he was . . . this lonely sick boy. His mother really didn’t love him. . . . She likes to go around talking about being the daughter of the Mayor of Boston, or how she was an ambassador’s wife. . . . She didn’t love him. . . . History made him what he was.”

“By the time John F. Kennedy became involved in 1961, the situation was out of control. So Kennedy simply invaded the country. In 1962, he sent the U.S. Air Force to start bombing South Vietnam, using planes with South Vietnamese markings. Kennedy authorized the use of napalm, chemical warfare, to destroy the ground cover and crops. He started the process of driving the rural population into what were called 'strategic hamlets,' essentially concentration camps, where people were surrounded by barbed wire, supposedly to protect them from the guerillas who the U.S. government knew perfectly well they supported. This 'pacification' ultimately drove millions of people out of the countryside while destroying large parts of it. Kennedy also began operations against North Vietnam on a small scale. That was 1961.”

“By the time John F. Kennedy became involved in 1961, the situation was out of control. So Kennedy simply invaded the country. In 1962, he sent the U.S. Air Force to start bombing South Vietnam, using planes with South Vietnamese markings. Kennedy authorized the use of napalm, chemical warfare, to destroy the ground cover and crops. He started the process of driving the rural population into what were called 'strategic hamlets,' essentially concentration camps, where people were surrounded by barbed wire, supposedly to protect them from the guerillas who the U.S. government knew perfectly well they supported. This 'pacification' ultimately drove millions of people out of the countryside while destroying large parts of it. Kennedy also began operations against North Vietnam on a small scale. That was 1962.”

“In 1963, the Kennedy administration got wind of the fact that the government of Ngo Dinh Diem it had installed in South Vietnam was trying to arrange peace negotiations with the North. Diem and his brother, Ngo Dinh Nhu, were trying to negotiate a peace settlement. So the Kennedy liberals determined that they had to be thrown out. The Kennedy administration organized a coup in which the two brothers were killed and they put in their own guy, meanwhile escalating the war. Then came the assassination of President Kennedy. Contrary to a lot of mythology, Kennedy was one of the hawks in the administration to the very last minute. He did agree to proposals for withdrawal from Vietnam, because he knew the war was very unpopular there, but always with the condition of withdrawal after victory.”

“Oscar Handlin has said, “Once I thought to write a history of the immigrants in America. Then I discovered that the immigrants were American history." In the same sense we cannot really speak of a particular immigrant contribution to America, because All Americans have been immigrants or the decedents of immigrants, even the Indians as mentioned before, migrated to the American continent. We can only speak of people whose roots in America are older or newer.”

“Let the word go forth from this time and place, to friend and foe alike, that the torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans - born in this century, tempered by war, disciplined by a hard and bitter peace, proud of our ancient heritage. . . Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country.”

“Jimmy Allen wasn’t. And yet, he was on that map. One of the four dead men Nan had drawn JFK Jr.’s attention to. Three of those four had been scheduled to appear in front of Congress in regard to the assassination: Johnny Roselli, George de Mohrenschildt (Lee Harvey Oswald’s friend), and Carlos Prio Socarrás, one-time president of Cuba. All of them had died violently before they could testify: Roselli murdered, de Mohrenschildt and Prio by suicide. And then there was Jimmy Allen. What made him so special? What was his connection to the assassination? Why had Nan drawn JFK Jr.’s attention to him?”

“The left denounces Kennedy for invading Cuba as casually as the right denounces him for invading it too timidly. One side sees Kennedy’s 'betrayal' and the other sees his 'failure to understand the situation.' The idea that the actual policy as carried out was the free synthesis of a totally absorbing internal conflict over which neither side had complete control does not seem to be widely entertained.”

“...the attitude of the Joint Chiefs after the Missile Crisis was precisely what one might imagine, given the above events: ’We told you so; you failed to follow our advice and allowed this catastrophe to happen; you then failed in your duty to cleanse Cuba of Communist influence and an undeniable military threat to the United States by force, when presented with the perfect justification for war; and in doing so, you have proven yourself unfit to be President.’ In my view, the foregoing events — revealed by the Northwoods documents — are the Rosetta Stone to the Kennedy assassination. It is my opinion that the great disfavor with which the hawks (i.e., the overwhelming majority) in his own national security establishment viewed his eventual resolution to the coming Cuban Missile Crisis was the proximate cause of JFK’s assassination , one year later in Dallas.”

“Before the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, the very word conspiracy was seldom used by most Americans. The JFK assassination was the seminal national event in the lives of the Baby Boomer generation. We’ve heard all the clichés about the loss of our innocence, and the beginning of public distrust in our government’s leaders, being born with the events of November 22, 1963, but there’s a good deal of truth in that. President Kennedy tapped into our innate idealism and inspired a great many people, especially the young, like no president ever had before. John F. Kennedy was vastly different from most of our elected presidents. He was the first president to refuse a salary. He never attended a Bilderberg meeting. He was the first Catholic to sit in the Oval Office, and he almost certainly wasn’t related to numerous other presidents and/or the royal family of England, as is often the case. He was a genuine war hero, having tugged an injured man more than three miles using only a life preserver’s strap between his teeth, after the Japanese had destroyed the boat he commanded, PT-109. This selfless act seems even more courageous when one takes into account Kennedy’s recurring health problems and chronic bad back. He was an intellectual and an accomplished author who wrote many of his memorable speeches. He would never have been invited to dance naked with other powerful men and worship a giant owl, as so many of our leaders do every summer at Bohemian Grove in California.”

“As we know, Clay Shaw was acquitted, and the establishment celebrated another victory over the truth. In my view, Ferrie, Banister, Shaw, and Jack Ruby would have been the conspirators Oswald worked with personally, on the ground level, while far more powerful forces manipulated everything behind the scenes. I share Jim Garrison’s theory that Oswald was some kind of intelligence operative who was assigned to infiltrate what he was told was a plot to kill the president, shortly before the actual assassination. At least that’s where I think the evidence logically leads.”

“On November 26, 1963, President Johnson had signed National Security Action Memorandum, 273, which was in diametrical opposition to JFK’s NSAM 263. While Kennedy’s body was still warm in his grave when LBJ’s signature changed future US direction in Vietnam, NSAM 273 had, incredibly enough, actually been drafted on November 21, 1963, while Kennedy was still alive. The memo was written by National Security Advisor McGeorge Bundy (more on him later). Why would such a memo have been created, when it contradicted JFK’s policy and certainly would not have been signed by him? LBJ let it be known early on that he wanted to “win” in Vietnam, and had no intention of following Kennedy’s plans to withdraw completely by 1965.”

“It is a little-known but significant fact that no president has appeared more times in Superman comic books than JFK. He was even entrusted with Superman's secret identity and once pretended to be Clark Kent so as to prevent it from being exposed. When Supergirl debuted as a character, she was formally presented to the Kennedys. (Not surprisingly, the president took an immediate liking to her.) In a special issue dedicated to getting American youth to become physically fit — just like the astronaut 'Colonel Glenn' — Kennedy enlists Superman on a mission to close 'the muscle gap'.”

“The record is replete with witnesses reporting that they were intimidated by various authorities. Could all of them, unconnected and unknown to each other, be having the same fantasies? And if the threats were real, the obvious question is: why would any law enforcement officer at any level, or any anonymous phone caller, for that matter, threaten someone if the assassination was the result of a random act by a lone nut that was no longer alive? But this is akin to asking why any information about the murder of John F. Kennedy was ever withheld, let alone still withheld after fifty years, on the grounds of “national security” if Lee Harvey Oswald was a minimum-wage loser, with no conspirators, who was out to impress his estranged wife.”

“The assassination of President Kennedy killed not only a man but a complex of illusions. It demolished the myth that hate and violence can be confined in an airtight chamber to be employed against but a few. Suddenly the truth was revealed that hate is a contagion; that it grows and spreads as a disease; that no society is so healthy that it can automatically maintain its immunity. If a smallpox epidemic had been raging in the South, President Kennedy would have been urged to avoid the area. There was a plague afflicting the South, but its perils were not perceived. Negroes tragically know political assassination well. In the life of Negro civil-rights leaders, the whine of the bullet from ambush, the roar of the bomb have all too often broken the night's silence. They have replaced lynching as a political weapon. More than a decade ago, sudden death came to Mr. and Mrs. Harry T. Moore, N.A.A.C.P. leaders in Florida. The Reverend George Lee of Belzoni, Mississippi, was shot to death on the steps of a rural courthouse. The bombings multiplied. Nineteen sixty-three was a year of assassinations. Medgar Evers in Jackson, Mississippi; William Moore in Alabama; six Negro children in Birmingham—and who could doubt that these too were political assassinations? The unforgivable default of our society has been its failure to apprehend the assassins. It is a harsh judgment, but undeniably true, that the cause of the indifference was the identity of the victims. Nearly all were Negroes. And so the plague spread until it claimed the most eminent American, a warmly loved and respected president. The words of Jesus "Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me" were more than a figurative expression; they were a literal prophecy. We were all involved in the death of John Kennedy. We tolerated hate; we tolerated the sick stimulation of violence in all walks of life; and we tolerated the differential application of law, which said that a man’s life was sacred only if we agreed with his views. This may explain the cascading grief that flooded the country in late November. We mourned a man who had become the pride of the nation, but we grieved as well for ourselves because we knew we were sick.”