I was just entering high school when Richard Nixon and John F. Kennedy squared off in the first-ever televised presidential campaign debate. My parents were diehard Demofiends, so they proclaimed Kennedy the heir to the throne and couldn’t care less what he said. As for the official scorecard, Kennedy won if you watched the debate on TV, and Nixon won if you listened on the radio.
Verdict: Nixon needed a better make-up artist and some medicine to keep him from sweating. Smiling more would’ve helped, too.
The point I’m concerned about is the dynamic that developed between the two from that moment on. As matters turned out historically, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) had its — dirty — hands in bringing down both of these gentlemen.
I only bring this up because JD Vance had the gall to proclaim this past week, while on a visit to the Nixon Presidential Library, that our 37th president was brought down by the Deep State. You can fill in the blank and pencil in “CIA.” You could probably add “FBI” as well.
Specifically, Vance said during his visit: “If you look at the story of how the deep state took down Richard Nixon, it’s not all that different from what the same groups of people, the same institutions, tried to do to Donald Trump in the first administration. There is a parallel.”
Further: “If Watergate happened tomorrow, it would be a 12-hour news story. The idea that it would have taken down a presidency is crazy.”
Kennedy was assassinated on November 22, 1963, during my first semester in college. At the time, I was, like my parents, Demofiend through and through. I made no connection that anyone, or any entity, other than Lee Harvey Oswald, had any part in Kennedy’s killing.
Later on, New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison ran his own investigation into the Kennedy matter, doubting the official recounting by the Warren Commission and just about everyone in D.C. Garrison became the fodder for filmmaker Oliver Stone and his film titled “JFK.”
In 2013, on the 50th anniversary of JFK’s death, television shows recounted the CIA’s involvement in the whole sordid affair, including its involvement with Oswald. One show, “JFK: The Smoking Gun,” even pinpointed the deadly bullet as belonging to a Secret Service agent’s gun, fired from a car following Kennedy’s open-air presidential vehicle. Oliver Stone went on to make a docuseries as well. In all these series, the CIA plays a role.
Here’s where it gets interesting. Kennedy had a troubled relationship with the CIA, beginning with the CIA-backed Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba, a fiasco quickly put down by Fidel Castro and his forces. The CIA blamed the failure on JFK, and JFK in turn distrusted the CIA for roping him into it. The CIA later became ever more resentful of Kennedy when he went all “soft” on communism with his nuclear-weapons agreements. Kennedy, in turn, vowed that, in a second term, he would slash the CIA’s budget and clean house.
Motive enough for murder?
Nixon didn’t follow Kennedy into the White House. Vice-President Lyndon Baines Johnson did, and he has also been long rumored as having had his hand in Kennedy’s shooting. LBJ basically hated JFK from the moment the Massachusetts man defeated him for the Demofiend nomination for president. Nixon then followed LBJ as president.
Nixon got his comeuppance, according to some not in the Deep State, by saying to the CIA Director early in his term that “I know who killed Kennedy,” meaning the CIA. The whole Watergate break-in at Democrat Headquarters was then conducted by former CIA agents, with miserable but totally avoidable mistakes. I mean, how bumbling could CIA agents be to get caught?
As for Deep Throat, the secret voice that supposedly revealed the secrets Nixon was hiding about the break-in, he was a disgruntled FBI agent — W. Mark Felt — who had been passed over by Nixon to be FBI Director. So who knows if what he told to Woodward and Berstein was the “whole truth and nothing but the truth,” or just “selective” truth to get back at the man who ruined his career?
On top of all this, Nixon turned out to be more “liberal” than JFK in running the country. I mean, he brought us OSHA, establied food and price controls, and expanded government far and wide.
But we’ll always have the saying, made famous by Dr. Spock in the “Star Wars VI” movie, that “Only Nixon could go to China.”
