JFK & the Unspeakable: Why He Died & Why It Matters (100 page)

However, in 1996 the Assassination Records Review Board (ARRB), following the leads of researchers, located David Vanek. ARRB staff members interviewed him by phone. Doctor David Vanek was by then a colonel in the U.S. Army Reserve Medical Corps. He had indeed attended the same January-April 1964 session of the Special Warfare School that Daniel Marvin had, but said he could not remember Marvin: “I’m not familiar with that name.”
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Asked if he recalled attending any course where movie film or still photos of the JFK assassination were shown, he said, “Jesus, I don’t remember that at all.”
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When he was read Marvin’s account of their alleged encounter with the CIA “Company man,” Vanek said he did not recall the incident. He denied even being at Fort Bragg in August 1965, when he “may no longer have been in the military.”
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Nevertheless, he did admit that, while in the Army, he worked under cover in Vietnam in 1964 “as a civilian ‘employee’ at a provincial office of the Agency for International Development”
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(a CIA front). According to David Vanek’s Curriculum Vitae, his military duty included “Special Assignment on Loan from US Army to Agency for International Development (South Vietnam)—1964-1965.”
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He was then in Bangkok from 1965-1967 as a civilian “Counterinsurgency Warfare Specialist (GS 13) for Advanced Research Projects, Agency of Office Secretary Defense (Thailand Field Unit).”
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Vanek was apparently well versed in CIA cover stories and covert warfare. However, when asked if he recognized the name William Bruce Pitzer, he said, “No, not at all.”
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Regardless of who may have been involved in Pitzer’s death, Dan Marvin remains convinced that the assignment he turned down at Fort Bragg was carried out by another assassin. For Marvin, the key to William Pitzer’s murder was given in the words of the Company man under the trees. Yet Marvin did not comprehend their meaning until almost three decades later, when he learned of Pitzer’s death. Only when the name of William Bruce Pitzer flashed across Marvin’s television screen did he understand that the CIA’s designated “traitor” was in fact a JFK witness, and “the enemy” to whom Pitzer “was preparing to give state’s secrets” was the American people.

John Kennedy was turning. The key to understanding Kennedy’s presidency, his assassination, and our survival as a species through the Cuban Missile Crisis is that Kennedy was turning toward peace. The signs of his turning are the seeds of his assassination.

Marcus Raskin worked in the Kennedy administration as an assistant to National Security Adviser McGeorge Bundy. Not long after the Bay of Pigs, Raskin witnessed an incident in the Oval Office that tipped him off to Kennedy’s deep aversion to the use of nuclear weapons.

During the president’s meeting with a delegation of governors, New York governor Nelson Rockefeller, expressing his irritation at the guerrilla tactics of the Viet Cong, said, “Why don’t we use tactical nuclear weapons against them?”

Raskin, watching Kennedy closely, was in a position to see what happened next. The president’s hand began to shake uncontrollably.

JFK said simply, “You know we’re not going to do that.”
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But it was the suddenly shaking hand that alerted Raskin to Kennedy’s profound uneasiness with nuclear weapons, a mark of conscience that would turn later into a commitment to disarmament.

Nevertheless, in the year leading up to the Cuban Missile Crisis in October 1962, Kennedy was responsible, as we have seen, for belligerent Cold War policies. Khrushchev was rightly shocked when he read what Stewart Alsop wrote in the
Saturday Evening Post
after interviewing Kennedy: “Khrushchev must
not
be certain that, where its vital interests are threatened, the United States will never strike first. As Kennedy says, ‘in some circumstances we might have to take the initiative.’”
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Kennedy had also intensified the arms race with the Soviet Union, “doubling the production of Polaris missile submarines from ten a year to twenty, increasing the number of Strategic Air Command nuclear-armed bombers in the air on alert at all times from 33 percent to 50 percent, signing off on one thousand new U.S. intercontinental ballistic missiles, each one with a charge eighty times more powerful than the atomic bomb dropped at Hiroshima.”
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During these disastrous decisions that moved the United States closer to the brink of nuclear war over Cuba in October, Kennedy also gave hints of the turning he would experience with his enemy Khrushchev in the midst of that crisis.

On the morning of May 1, 1962, President Kennedy met in the Oval Office with a delegation of Quakers dedicated to a process of total disarmament and world order. The six members of the Society of Friends who saw the president represented one thousand Friends who had been vigiling for peace and world order outside the White House and the State Department during the previous two days.

As Kennedy was well aware, the Quakers were adamantly opposed to his ever exercising his function as commander-in-chief of the armed forces, unless he should choose to order the troops to convert their bombs into ploughshares. The six Friends submitted to him a statement urging the government to change direction “from headlong preparation for nuclear war to a total foreign policy geared to the peace race [a term Kennedy himself had used in his September 25, 1961, address to the United Nations],” so as to achieve a “speedy transition from a precarious balance of terror to general and complete disarmament.”
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What was Kennedy doing, meeting with a group of peacemakers committed to “general and complete disarmament”?

The Quakers had drawn shrewdly and sympathetically on JFK’s own vision and language. In his UN speech challenging the Soviet Union to a peace race, he had described the process and goal of such a race: “to advance together step by step, stage by stage, until general and complete disarmament has actually been achieved.”
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The Quakers were aware that, five days before JFK’s UN speech, his disarmament representative, John McCloy, and Khrushchev’s representative, Valerian Zorin, had signed an agreement outlining a “program for general and complete disarmament.”
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The McCloy-Zorin Agreement had then been quickly adopted by the UN General Assembly.
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The Quakers were simply asking Kennedy to be true to what he had already agreed to in the United Nations.

The president began the meeting by responding positively to a Quaker appeal. He said, “I’ve received a number of letters from Quakers objecting to the government’s announcement that a Polaris submarine would be named the ‘William Penn.’” He smiled wryly, recognizing the irony of putting a great pacifist’s name on a nuclear weapons system.

“I can assure you,” he said, “that this will not be done.”
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The six Friends, sitting in a half-circle with JFK in his rocking chair, were surprised. The president, by personally sinking the Navy Department’s hypocritical choice of name for its Polaris submarine, had just made clear that he was more prepared to listen to the Quakers than they had assumed. They were accustomed to speaking truth to power, but not to having someone in power listen.

Samuel Levering, chair of the Friends Committee on National Legislation, told the president that Friends believed the alternative to an arms race leading to our total destruction was “world order which meant general and complete disarmament, peacefully enforced by a developed and strengthened United Nations.”
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Kennedy nodded in agreement.

As we know, the young reporter John F. Kennedy, while witnessing the founding of the United Nations in San Francisco, had then already understood that the solution to war was world order, while recognizing the difficulty in attaining it. He had written in his notebook:

“Admittedly world organization with common obedience to law would be solution. Not that easy. If there is not the feeling that war is the ultimate evil, a feeling strong enough to drive them together, then you can’t work out this internationalist plan.”
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At that same time, having just lost close friends, his brother, and his brother-in-law to war, JFK had written to a
PT
boat friend a prophetic understanding of the problem whose formulation could have come straight from the Quakers:

“Things cannot be forced from the top. The international relinquishing of sovereignty would have to spring from the people—it would have to be so strong that the elected delegates would be turned out of office if they failed to do it . . . War will exist until that distant day when the conscientious objector enjoys the same reputation and prestige that the warrior does today.”
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As president, John F. Kennedy was now in a position to push for a realization of the vision of disarmament and world order that he shared with the Quakers. But he also understood with them the truth, as experienced day by day in his presidency, that “things cannot be forced from the top.”

He continued to listen intently to the visitors seated around him.

Dorothy Hutchinson, president of the U.S. section of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, said, “We’re here to suggest a completely different orientation in foreign policy—a whole series of initiatives for peace.” The U.S. could, for example, dismantle a foreign base or halt nuclear testing.
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Hutchinson was challenging Kennedy on his resumption of nuclear testing in the South Pacific only one week before. The U.S. test on April 25, 1962, had been the first of a series of twenty-four atmospheric tests that would continue until the following November.

Kennedy nodded in response to her suggestion that he begin instead a series of initiatives for peace. However, he knew that to take such steps for peace he had to overcome obstacles in his own government. He said, “All virtue does not reside on our side.”

It was a heretical, anti–Cold War statement that he would develop the following year in his American University address, where he would insist that it wasn’t just the Russians who were to blame for the nuclear threat to life on earth. First of all, for there to be any hope at all for peace, we had to examine our own attitudes as Americans. Self-examination was the foundation of peace. “All virtue does not reside on our side.”

As JFK spoke of having already taken steps for peace that he admitted were small, the Quakers broke in to suggest a bolder initiative—food for China. The United States should offer its surplus food to the People’s Republic of China, then considered an enemy nation but one whose people were in a famine.

Kennedy said, “Do you mean you would feed your enemy when he has his hands on your throat?”

The Quakers said they meant exactly that. Sam Levering said pointedly, “As Quaker Christians, we know that Jesus said, ‘If your enemy hungers, feed him.’ As a Catholic, you know that.”

Kennedy said, “I do know that. I’d propose making food available immediately if it were politically possible. But the China lobby is strong. There’s no point in my marching up Capitol Hill to defeat, like [President] Wilson did.”
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The Friends were equally uncompromising with the president when it came to disarmament. While affirming Kennedy’s support for the United Nations, they stressed the need for real steps toward general and complete disarmament. The Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, they felt, was a disappointment. Its Advisory Board members lacked any past commitment to disarmament.

The president did not argue the point. He had not appointed any pacifists to the board. His appointments were in fact often more conservative than he himself was, as had been the case with Arms Control and Disarmament Agency director William C. Foster, a Republican. But his reasoning was, as the Quakers stated in their confidential record of the meeting, “If skeptical people on the Board become convinced of the necessity and feasibility of disarmament, you have a better chance [in Congress] than if the Board is made up of people known to have had long time convictions in favor of disarmament.”
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Kennedy said with a smile, “You believe in redemption don’t you?”

He added, “The Pentagon opposes every proposal for disarmament.”
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David Hartsough, at the age of twenty-two the youngest Quaker in the group, said the essence of what Kennedy then told them was: “The military-industrial complex is very strong. If you folks are serious about trying to get our government to take these kinds of steps, you’ve got to get much more organized, to put pressure on the government to move in this direction.”
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The members of the delegation agreed afterward on the striking fact that John Kennedy seemed to feel more boxed in by adversaries near at home than he did by enemies abroad. Henry Cadbury, the group’s elder and a distinguished theologian, saw the president as “frustrated and trapped,” especially by the power of the Pentagon.
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