"[A]t a July 20, 1961 National Security Council meeting, CIA Director Allen Dulles and the Joint Chiefs of Staff urged a preemptive nuclear attack on the Soviet Union ..."

Carol Baas Sowa reviews James W. Douglas' book:

JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters.

Snippets from her work in Today's Catholic. Friday, March 11, 2011.


"In a letter to another friend in the '60s, [Trappist monk Thomas] Merton expressed his fear that then President John F. Kennedy lacked the depth and compassion for mankind as whole that the perilous Cold War needed to avert nuclear annihilation.

"Merton wrote, hopefully and prophetically Maybe Kennedy will break through into that someday by miracle. But such people are before long marked out for assassination...

"The battle was on though, and at a July 20, 1961 National Security Council meeting, CIA Director Allen Dulles and the Joint Chiefs of Staff urged a preemptive nuclear attack on the Soviet Union, leading to Kennedy's walking out of the meeting in disgust, exclaiming, And we call ourselves the human race.

"The book's chapter on Vietnam and how Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge -- in league with CIA agents in various government branches -- callously abetted the assassination of Ngo Dinh Diem and Ngo Dinh Nhu, while Kennedy urgently sought to save the lives of these rulers we had originally maintained in power, is just one of many appalling incidents Douglass documents that underscores the president's struggle with dark and powerful forces spiraling out of control..."

Regarding Kennedy's own assassination on Nov. 22, 1963, she tells us:

"Identification by witnesses and whose stories of events surrounding Nov. 22, 1963 you choose to believe can arguably be brushed aside, but there are more than enough documented facts here to scare the hell out of you.

"And they should, Douglass points out, make us consider our own role as not - so - innocent bystanders.

"If Merton's systemic evil exists and we recognize it and do nothing, are we not a part of it?"


Humm ... :)

Like you mean for the past 25 years right here in Brackettville's Saint Mary Magdalene's Catholic Parish?

Zip 78832?

Where Merton's "systemic evil" really rocks?

Even right at this precise moment in time?

You bet!! :)