JFK (2 page)

Colonel Prouty heartrendingly details the destruction of rural peasant life where age-old communal law was based not on authority but on harmony and law was deemed less important than virtue. This tribal society ultimately presents a nonconsumerist code of life that does not depend on “the omnipresent paternalism of the international banker” or the chemical agricultural revolution or modem politics, and this presents a dangerous alternative and loss of market to capitalism.

In a parallel to our own national sense of betrayal over Vietnam starting with the My Lai incident, the Pentagon Papers, the secret bombing of Laos and Cambodia, Colonel Prouty, in a fascinating aside, traces the roots of the key 1950s decisions on Vietnam by the Dulles brothers and goes into the staged Tonkin Gulf incident and the official cover-up that sent us to the war.

Colonel Prouty also explores the true meaning of the Pentagon Papers and the shocking and fraudulent omissions in them, which will blow away the self-congratulatory complacency of our “liberal” media, which, Colonel Prouty shows us, never really understood the malignant forces that were operative behind the scenes of the Pentagon Papers—and once again robbed us of our history. Tantalizingly, Colonel Prouty points the finger of treason at McGeorge Bundy, then assistant to President Kennedy, who signed the key first draft of NSAM (National Security Action Memorandum) #273 on November 21, 1963, which was in contradiction to all previous Kennedy policy. How, Colonel Prouty speculates, could this happen unless such a person
knew
Kennedy would not be around the next day and “the new president” would? Also there is Bundy’s bizarre role in the Bay of Pigs fiasco, reexamined here in a shocking new light.

Having myself spoken with Lucien Conein, our chief CIA operative in Vietnam under Lansdale, I can verify that Mr. Conein totally conformed to Colonel Prouty’s version of events at the Diem killing in South Vietnam.

Prouty in effect totally reexamines the Pentagon Papers and the credibility of what a “leaked document” really is and how the media misunderstood; why the cabinet quorum was out of the country when Kennedy was killed
and,
more importantly, misunderstood the almost total reversal of our Vietnam policy in a matter of days after Kennedy’s death. Prouty rightly lambastes the media as “a growing profession that fully controls what people will be told and helps prepare us for war in places like Afghanistan, Africa, and the Caribbean, most recently Granada and Panama, the Middle East and other “LDCs”—a banker’s euphemism for “less developed countries.”

Colonel Prouty pushes on to the true inner meaning of Watergate and leaves you dangling with the clues, making us fully realize we have only heard some forty hours of four hundred hours of one of the most mysterious affairs of American politics, involving possibly Nixon’s own most secret revelations on the Kennedy murder. We must ask ourselves, What finally does Richard Nixon know of Dallas?

In another fascinating subtheme, Colonel Prouty shows how the roots of the 1950s decisions on Vietnam essentially emanated from the historically omitted presence of Chiang Kai-shek at the Tehran Conference of 1944—where, like colossi dividing the world, Churchill, Stalin, Roosevelt, and Chaing Kai-shek set forever the fuse of World War III. The enemy for the United States was no longer the Nazi movement but the more pernicious, property-stealing Soviet Communist world-around tribe. And of course, in seeking to destroy this new enemy at
all
costs, Colonel Prouty points once again to the infusion of Nazi personnel, methods, and ultimately a Nazi frame of mind into the American system—a course which, once seeded, changed forever the way we operated in the world—and led irrevocably, tragically for our Constitution and our history, to the paramilitary domestic coup d’état in Dallas, November 1963.

Colonel Prouty sets the stage for this horrible nightmare with his own personally documented dealings with the Pentagon—a fascinating side glimpse at his involvement in a small coup in Bolivia. He illustrates how Third World politics is more often a game between commercial “In” and “Out” power groups that compete for the lion’s share of the money by controlling their marketplaces with the U.S.A.’s help—the government of such a country is a business monopoly over its people and its territory and is motivated as much by pragmatic ideology as by the pragmatic control of the import-export business. . . by granting exclusive franchises to its friends, relatives, in all things from Coca-Cola to F-14 fighter planes. . . the supremely powerful international bankers keep the books for each side—how these Ins and Outs acquire bogeyman characteristics like “Communist,” “Drug dealer,” per the needs of our government and its attendant propaganda arm, our Fourth Estate; how Paz Estenssoro in Bolivia and Noriega in Panama and Hussein in Iraq have changed their identities several times from our “most-wanted” list to our favored-“commercial-ally” list. Prouty further illustrates that in 1975, our government spent $137 billion on military operations in Third World country LDCs and how that money is essentially funneled through American subsidiaries from our military-industrial complex. Money, Colonel Prouty
never
lets us forget, is at the root of power.

Colonel Prouty thus sets the stage for Dallas in all its horror. He explains the true inner myth of our most staged public execution, the “Reichstag Fire” of our era, behind whose proscenium, blinded by the light of surface-event television, the power of the throne was stolen and exchanged by bloody hands. He shows us that Kennedy was removed, fundamentally, because he threatened the “System” far too dangerously. Colonel Prouty shows us the Oswald cover story and how it has successfully to this day, my movie notwithstanding, blinded the American public to the truth of its own history—which requires, I suppose, a degree of outrage at our government and media and an urgency to replace it for the abuse of our rights as outlined in the Constitution and in the Declaration of Independence (“that whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of. . . [Life, Liberty and the pursuit of happiness], it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government. . . it is their Right, it is their Duty, to throw off such Government and to provide new Guards for their future Security”) but which too few of us have the energy for (except maybe the young, whom ultimately Colonel Prouty is addressing).

It is Colonel Prouty—with his background both as military officer and international banker—who shows us concisely that Kennedy was removed not only for his skittish policy on Vietnam and Cuba but because he fundamentally was affecting the economic might of this nation-planet, U.S.A., Inc., and its New World Order. Kennedy undermined, as Prouty fascinatingly outlines, not only the Federal Reserve Board but the CIA and its thousand-headed Medusa of an economic system (CIA: “Capitalism’s Invisible Army”), but most dangerously and most expensively (ultimately some $6 trillion in Cold War money) the world-around economic lines of the “High Cabal” and its military-industrial complex so ominously forecast by Eisenhower in his farewell address. In bringing back the ghost of Buckminster Fuller and his great book,
The Critical Path,
Colonel Prouty shows us what we must understand of world history—he probes beneath the Egyptian mast of events and scenery and thousands of Cecil B. De Mille extras—to the very core of history—the Phoenician sail lines, the industrial complex, the distribution of minerals and oil, the exploitation of the planet and
why,
and
who benefits.
These are the key questions of our times—controlling the way you think, the way the media tells you to think, and the way you must think if we are to resist the ultimate desecration of the planet at the hands of U.S.A., Inc., and its New World Order. Environment must be reversed. U.S.A., Inc., must—and can—be reversed with new leadership. Read as companion pieces to Colonel Prouty the unofficial “histories” of Buckminster Fuller in
The Critical Path
and Howard Zinn’s
People’s History of the United States,
to fully understand the scope of the “octopus” we are in mortal combat with. Churchill, many years ago, called it overtly “The High Cabal.” I am not sure, after all these years, that Mr. Churchill was being too dramatic.

Ultimately we must ask who owns America? Who owns reality? This book reads like Gibbon’s
Decline and Fall;
we see inside the wheel of our history how our various “emperors” come and go and their relationship to the military machine. Who owns our “history?” He who makes it up so that most everyone believes it. That person wins—as George Orwell so lucidly pointed out in
1984.
If Mr. Hitler had won the Second World War, the version of events now given to us (invasions of Third World lower slave races for mineral-resource conquest and worldround economic-military power) would not be too far off the mark. But instead of Nazi jackboots, we have men in gray suits and ties with attaché cases—“Lawyer Capitalism,” Buckminster Fuller labeled it. Whatever its name, or uniform—
beware
.

I thank Colonel Prouty, who is old now, in his seventies—on the verge of going to the other side. Yet he has paused (“How dull it is to pause, to make an end, to rust unburnished, not to shine in use!” as Tennyson once said) and mustered his final energy and a lifetime’s lucidity, and knowing full well the onslaught against his ideas and person that will come from the usual suspects, has once more ventured into the arena with the lions who kill and maim at the very least—and given us his truth at far greater personal expense than the reader of his volume will ever know. I salute you, Colonel Prouty—both as friend and warrier. “Fare thee well, Roman soldier.”

May 1992

Stone Discusses His Film
JFK
and Introduces the Real “Man X”

On the Friday before Christmas, in 1991, Oliver Stone’s epic film
JFK
opened in Washington. Shown in a theater on Capitol Hill for all members of Congress, their families and staffs, and for other invited guests, this movie with its stark portrayal of the death of President John F. Kennedy in Dallas, Texas, on November 22, 1963, has shocked the moviegoing public around the world. As the president of the National Press Club said a month later, when introducing Oliver Stone:
“JFK
may go down as the most talked about movie of the decade.”

That movie was built upon the symbiotic relationship between the courtroom strategy of the Garrison “conspiracy” trial in New Orleans, the classic “anti—Warren Commission” lore of Jim Marrs’s “Crossfire” narrative based upon the Dallas scene, and the electric shock treatment of the “Man X” question “Why?” and its stark analysis of the “power elite” of Washington’s military-industrial arena.

The movie speaks to all people, and its tragic “Crime of the Century” story has had a global impact, and the dust has yet to settle. Its message lives. The response to that stark “Why?” is “President Kennedy was assassinated as a result of a decision made . . . from within the military-industrial complex of power. . . at a level above the U.S. government to preserve the benefits (to them) of the war in Vietnam by denying his reelection in 1964.” That answer was derived from the facts and content of this book.

As Stone has said so frequently, “Had President Kennedy lived, Americans would not have become deeply involved in the Vietnam War.” Because of the enormous dollar potential of the war to the great military-industrial complex of the United States and because of other threats to the power elite, it had become absolutely necessary, for them, to bring about this coup d’état on the streets of Dallas. This book in its original form provided vital parts of the movie’s theme. In the final analysis, both the movie and book prove beyond all doubt that the government’s
Warren Commission Report on the Assassination of President Kennedy
was contrived and is false; and that the government used the Warren Commission to cover up the facts of the crime with a diversionary story.

As a result of the opening of this movie and amid the uproar that was sweeping across the country, the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., invited Oliver Stone to speak before its members and a nationwide audience on C-Span television. Stone appeared on January 15, 1992, before a packed auditorium. Katherine Kahler, president of the National Press Club, asked Oliver Stone to clarify a major and frequently asked question: “Does the Deep Throat-Man X character played by Donald Sutherland really exist?”

Stone responded: “I’m very glad this is asked, because so many people have asked me, when they came out of the movie, ‘Who is Man X?’ Let me just say that Man X exists. He’s here today on the podium. He is Fletcher Prouty. He served in the military since before World War II. From 1955 to 1964 he was in the Pentagon working as chief of special operations and in that capacity was with the Joint Chiefs of Staff during the Kennedy years. He was responsible for providing the military support of the clandestine operations of the CIA. . . that is, ‘Black Operations.’”

Oliver Stone had visited Fletcher Prouty in Washington in July 1990 and asked about his work in the Pentagon, especially during the Kennedy years, 1961—63. Stone added, “I understood his own shock and disbelief at what happened to the President and what happened in the years that followed. . . here and in Vietnam.

“Col. Prouty had never met with Jim Garrison, but over the years he had written many letters to him and had worked on Jim’s manuscript before its publication. They were well acquainted, by letters. I took the liberty of having a meeting take place between Mr. Garrison and Colonel Prouty because Jim Garrison had brought Prouty’s work to my attention. Some people have misunderstood and claimed that Man X never existed and that I made him up. I never did. That information in the movie came from Fletcher.”