Image Source: Orbis Books
South Paris, Maine
The imperialist U.S. state stops at nothing; anything goes. Really? After victory in World War II and with U.S. manufacturing in high gear, the United States in the 1960s dominated world finances, trade, and politics. One dark cloud was the Soviet Union. Its industrialization had greatly expanded before the War and afterwards was recovering. The USSR was mentoring nations emerging from colonization.
Other challenges were a maturing Chinese Revolution, socialist revolution in neighboring Cuba, and the Soviet Union’s and China’s nuclear capabilities. Economic bounty at home was no panacea for the country’s rampant racial and social inequalities. War was looming in Vietnam.
Resistance was showing: California’s Free Speech Movement; Black people’s fight for political participation and constitutional guarantees, women’s demands for equality, rejection of U.S war in Vietnam, and alternative lifestyles.
The killings of four high-profile political figures intruded. They were President John Kennedy, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, and . Agents of the U.S. government were responsible. Individually or together, the victims had denounced war in Vietnam, possession and potential use of nuclear weapons, racial and economic oppression, and colonialism.
James Douglass reports on the assassinations. His JFK and the Unspeakable, first appearing in 2008, tells of the murder of President Kennedy. Douglass’s new book, Martyrs to the Unspeakable (Orbis Press), explores the killings of the other three leaders.
He states at the outset that, “Because they asked why, turned to create a better world, and were willing to die for it, they were shot down …They were targeted to keep us from realizing our movement for a more just and peaceful world.” He regards them as witnesses and martyrs. They knew they would die.
He continues: “The method of those four movement-shattering assassinations of the sixties had its root in the criminal conduct of their nation in World War II. The leveling of cities by U.S. fire-bombings in Hamburg, Dresden and Tokyo, by nuclear weapons at Hiroshima and Nagasaki …devastated the hope of humanity for a better world … As leaders for change, [they] had to be stopped to prevent a rising countermovement from spreading across the world, ending the Cold War and initiating a new era of justice and peace. U.S. security agencies thought they had no choice.”
He writes that the nuclear attack in 1945 “turned me toward Mohandas Gandhi, who had said the Bomb (sic) had in fact continued the war in a more terrible form under the cloak of peace.” Douglass values Gandhi’s “experiment with truth” as a model for non-violent political struggle. Gandhi was assassinated in 1948. Douglass published Gandhi and the Unspeakable: his Final Experiment with Truth” (Orbis) In 2012.
Catholic Workers Movement founder spoke at the college Douglass was attending. Her influence inspired his lifelong dedication to opposing war and nuclear weapons. He and his wife Shelley in 1993 founded a Catholic Worker hospitality house in Birmingham, Alabama. They live and work there still.
In this crowded, detail-filled new book, Douglass documents the doings and thinking of victims and their associates alike, U.S. intelligence and security operatives, Soviet officials, and many others. He gained information from his subjects’ speeches and writings, their colleagues’ recollections, news reports, commentary from biographers and observers, interviews he conducted, and declassified government documents, notably from the FBI.
The book has three sections: “The Witness,” “The Way,” and “The Why.” The first two of them offer historical segments on various episodes in his subjects’ lives. The pace quickens as their deaths draw near. He records the doings of government agents plus aspects of the wider political and international context. His third section attends to the convergence of Malcolm X and MLK that so alarmed so government officials, and to the interaction among JFK, RFK, and Soviet officials that allowed for resolution of the October (1962) Missile Crisis.
Bits of each victim’s history crop up in all three sections. Repetitions helped this writer absorb and understand a complicated narrative extending across time and space. The book’s voluminous footnotes are essential reading.
Appearing below are summaries of key narratives in the book that are revealing as to how and why the three political leaders died. The aim here is to highlight important themes and illustrate the kind of information appearing in the book.
Malcom X offending at home and abroad
Fidel Castro was in New York in September 1960 attending a meeting of the United Nations General Assembly. Malcolm X arranged for Castro and his party to transfer from the Shelburne Hotel downtown to the Hotel Theresa in Harlem. The first hotel charged excessively for “damages” and the State Department was restricting the Cubans’ movements.
Much to the delight of Harlem residents, Malcolm was soon conferring amiably with Castro at the Hotel Theresa. Some of the U.S. government’s most disliked foreign leaders were also visiting Castro at the hotel, among them: Premier Khrushchev of the USSR, Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, and Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser. The Eisenhower government, whose agents were busily monitoring Castro, had been upstaged and Malcolm X would pay.
Malcom in 1964 made a pilgrimage to Mecca, an obligation for Muslims. At the time, he was shifting his focus from fighting U.S. racial oppression to advocacy for brotherhood among all peoples and human rights for all. Having explained his ideas of African-American and African unity to the Algerian ambassador in Ghana, he heard the official say, “Brother Malcom, that sort of leaves me out. I am a Muslim brother and a revolutionary, but I am not black.” Malcolm X was learning.
Touring Africa that year, always tracked by the CIA, he conferred with leaders of the newly independent nations. In July at an African Unity Summit in Cairo, Malcom presented and gained approval for a proposal from his newly formed Organization of African-American Unity. It asked that African nations introduce a petition to the United Nations seeking judgment on human rights violations by the U.S. government.
Martin Luther King gets his revolutionary bearings
The FBI surveilled King and tapped his phone. The agency discovered embarrassing incidents calculated to provoke him to suicide. J. Edger Hoover learned that King’s most important outside advisor had been a member of the Communist Party USA and that a current member administered King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). U.S. officials, President Kennedy included, insisted to King that he dismiss the individuals. He took no action.
Speaking to the SCLC a month after his watershed Riverside Church address on April 4, 1967, King stated – as quoted by Douglass – that, “I think it is necessary for us to realize that we have moved from the era of civil rights to the era of human rights … Now, when we see that there must be a radical redistribution of economic and political power, then we see that …we have been in a reform movement … After Selma and the Voting Rights Bill, we moved into a new era, which must be an era of revolution.”
Malcolm X, having joined the protest in Selma and now taking his human rights and brotherhood campaigns overseas, was moving closer to MLK, and the latter was reciprocating. Douglass asserts that, “Together Malcolm and Martin could lead the world to a human rights revolution … [They were] “revolutionary prophets.” The prospect of their alliance was anathema to the U.S. government.
Scapegoats
Government functionaries arranged for the killings of three of these four high-profile victims. In Malcolm’s case, they farmed out the job. Malcolm X, a minister at a mosque associated with the Nation of Islam (NOI), had lodged criticisms against NOI’s leadership. The FBI, with New York Police Department assistance, aggravated the growing hostility, doing so by means of telephone surveillance, paid informers, and faked, accusatory letters to the NOI. Malcolm was eventually forced out. NOI assassins killed him in February 1965.
In the three other instances, the CIA and/or the FBI found and prepared substitute defendants, so-called patsies. Douglass’s documentation of pains taken to assure that James Earl Ray, Sirhan Sirhan, and Lee Harvey Oswald would be accepted as real perpetrators was a big step toward establishing the truth about the assassinations. Douglass’s findings on Oswald appear in his JFK book.
“Cold War agencies” had identified the imprisoned James Earl Ray’s potential as a patsy. They enabled his escape, equipped him with documents and a new identity, installed him across the street from the motel where MLK would be assassinated, placed a dysfunctional rifle close by, and arranged for the Memphis police to be far away. After the murder, in 1968, they delivered Ray to Montreal, organized his travel to Europe and finally to London, so he could be arrested.
Much information came to light in the assassination conspiracy trial that in 1999 delivered a verdict favoring the King family’s wrongful death lawsuit. Douglass, who attended the trial throughout, regards lawyer William Pepper, the family’s representative at the trial, as an emblematic witness to the truth.
Douglass later interviewed Glenda Grabow, witness at the trial. She had been a friend of “Raul,” who guided Ray in his wanderings in the United States and implemented arrangements in Memphis for King’s murder. She told the author about Raul’s criminal connections and of his confession to her of his role in the killing of King and of his part in the assassination of President Kennedy.
Palestinian refugee Sirhan Sirhan took the fall for the killer of Senator Robert Kennedy. Douglass indicates U.S. agents recruited Sirhan, subjected him to mind-control drugs, and prepared him both to adopt a hypnotic state on demand and to shoot while hypnotized. He was present in a Los Angeles hotel on June 5, 1968 as RFK celebrated his victory in California’s Democratic primary as a presidential candidate in elections that year.
Witnesses cited by Douglass indicated Sirhan had been placed a few feet in front of Kennedy and that his pistol shots went astray and hit bystanders. This Douglass regards as consistent with Sirhan having been hypnotized. He relies on the opinion of psychologists who interviewed the imprisoned Sirhan after his trial. They suggested Sirhan’s inability to remember the shooting indicate he had been hypnotized.
Douglass regards as important the pathologist’s report saying that the fatal bullet actually came from a gun fired only inches behind Kennedy’s head.
The CIA team, through trickery, had compromised defense attorney Grant Cooper’s integrity. The result was that Cooper cooperated with the prosecutors so that he himself would not be prosecuted later. His cooperation showed, according to Douglass, in his agreeing not to present the full pathology report to the jury.
Douglass points also to the bullying of a witness by a former CIA operative as he conducted a polygraph interview. The witness ended up backing away from her earlier testimony to the district attorney that she had seen the presumed shooter, the real one, arriving at the hotel. Her testimony was never made available to the defense.
RFK evolves
RFK devoted his inaugural Senate speech in 1965 to a call for elimination of nuclear weapons. Sympathetic to anti-colonialism, he believed independence forces would overcome U.S. forces in Vietnam just as African independence forces had neutralized the military power of French colonialism. As reported by Douglass, Daniel Ellsberg asked RFK why President Kennedy opposed “American ground combat in Vietnam … What made him so smart?” RFK replied that, “Because we there, in 1951. We saw what was happening to the French. We saw it.” The brothers had visited Indochina that year.
NAACP lawyer Marian Wright in 1967 brought RFK to the Mississippi Delta where, first-hand, he saw the suffering of poor Black children. Wright would soon convey RFK’s message to Martin King that poor whites and Blacks together must bring their struggles to Washington and stay. Accordingly, King’s Poor People’s Campaign was to have gathered in DC shortly after King’s assassination on April 4, 1968.
Douglass explains that in the last year of his life, RFK “deepened in his resolution to do all he could for his people, ‘poor people coming to stay’ in Washington, coming from the urban ghetto and the Indian reservations and Appalachian coal mines.” He describes RFK as “a peace president need[ing] the people’s movement, marching ahead of the government for justice and peace, all the way. Where the people lead, as they were doing through Martin King and Malcolm X, a peace president … will have the strength to follow.”
In the end
The present volume and Douglass’s earlier book on JFK establish U.S. government responsibility for the deaths of four U.S. leaders who were oriented to peace and human equality. His documentation of U.S. agencies’ careful preparations for the assassinations makes the case. The book teaches that the U.S. government, when pushed, stops at nothing in pursuit of imperialist purposes and repression of progressive political causes. That message has revolutionary implications.
Here’s why. Left-leaning activists have a choice. They either compromise and perhaps gain amelioration of problems or else they go all out for fundamental change, thus inviting horrific consequences. But these are not inevitable. The outcome turns on who holds political power.
Douglass establishes that one or more of the murdered leaders had opted for peace, no nuclear weapons, human equality, and a world without oppression. These are exactly the causes that, to reach fruition, would be taken up by masses of people exerting political power. In these circumstances, the aforementioned activists would be gaining a measure of protection. They might even win.
Having accumulated and correlated information on a massive scale, Douglass offers a report that is very bad news indeed, but not entirely. He writes that “awakening to reality – from our madness of empires, assassination, climate change and nuclear war – can offer hope to us all.” The drift of his message heads toward those masses of people working their way.
The aspirations of the doomed political leaders he writes about offer the promise of one or another kind of revolutionary change. Telling this story in the language of facts and historical inquiry amply qualifies Douglass as a practitioner of revolutionary journalism, a trade on display recently courtesy of George Burchett, son of “rebel journalist” Wilfred Burchett.
Lastly, former theology professor Douglass invokes moral values. He states that “initiating a nuclear war …[is] the darkest evil one can imagine.” He cites Martin King’s mention of both “life proceeding along the arc of the moral universe” and “a revolution of values.”
Ideas of right and wrong most certainly draw people into political action. They may sustain activists later on, as they gain experience and awareness of new realties, but not always. A call-out that something is wrong comes first – for Douglass now and for abolitionist editor William Lloyd Garrison long ago.
Their shared intensity of purpose manifests in Garrison’s call-out in the first issue of his Liberation magazine (1831): “I am in earnest — I will not equivocate — I will not excuse — I will not retreat a single inch — AND I WILL BE HEARD.” Douglass’s approach to his work and beliefs mirrors that of Garrison, without the dramatic flourish.
Loose ends remain. Douglass inserts the word “unspeakable” in the titles of his books. He uses it in the sense given to the word by Thomas Merton – Trappist monk, writer, and implacable critic of U.S. wars. For Merton, unspeakable “is the void that contradicts everything that is said even before the words are said; the void … [that is] the hollowness of the abyss.” In his text, Douglass uses the term sparingly with no elaboration as to its meaning.
Douglass concludes with reference to Palestine and “an unspeakable life circling back to its beginning – Count Folke Bernadotte.” His book starts with a detailed look at President Kennedy’s strenuous but failed efforts to prevent Israel from developing nuclear weapons.
It ends with a description of Bernadotte’s work and fate as United Nations mediator for Palestine in 1948. He worked to place Jerusalem under UN protection, establish boundaries, protect Palestinian refugees, and ensure their “right to return home” – and was assassinated. The shooter later on became the “closest friend” of David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s founder and first prime minister.
James W. Douglass, Martyrs to the Unspeakable: The Assassinations of JFK, Martin, Malcolm, and RFK, (Orbis Books, Maryknoll, NY, 2025) ISBN 9781626986268, Pp 590, www.orbisbooks.com
W.T. Whitney Jr. is a retired pediatrician and political journalist living in Maine.
COMMUNIST PARTY OF MAINE 