JFK and the Unspeakable(Wikipedia)

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/JFK_and_the_Unspeakable 

The book took Douglass twelve years to write.^[4] The book was rejected by Orbis three times before it was accepted. Publisher Robert Ellsberg said that besides the book's 500-page length, it fell outside the usual range of topics published by Orbis, and that he was reluctant to enter the "dark thicket" of Kennedy conspiracy theories. However, according to National Catholic Reporter, "after sending the book to a wide range of historians and analysts, Mr. Ellsberg was persuaded of the book's significance."^[1]

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The title is a reference to Thomas Merton's Raids on the Unspeakable, regarding (according to Douglass) "a kind of systemic evil that includes such realities as the Holocaust, the Vietnam War, the nuclear arms race, and these assassinations", which Merton calls a "void".^[4] In Merton's words, the void "gets into the language of public and official declarations ... and makes them ring dead with the hollowness of the abyss. It is the void out of which Eichmann drew the punctilious exactitude of his obedience."^[5] Douglass links this description with the height of the Cuban Missile Crisis, seeing both Kennedy and Khrushchev "encounter[ing] that void simultaneously". Douglass describes (citing Khrushchev's memoirs) Kennedy deciding to reach out to Khrushchev via his brother Robert F. Kennedy to declare that he is losing power to his generals, who favour nuclear war, and that he needs Khrushchev's help to avoid it.^[4] Douglass concludes that Kennedy "turned from global war to a strategy of peace. That's the why of his assassination."^[4] Douglass avoids much of the practical detail of the "how"; the single bullet theory is not mentioned, and the book includes no photographs or maps. Instead, Douglass follows the intelligence links around Kennedy, Lee Harvey Oswald, and key people involved in the post-assassination investigation.^[6]

The book highlights the Bay of Pigs Invasion as the Central Intelligence Agency's attempt to entrap Kennedy into a full-scale US invasion of Cuba. Citing Daniel Schorr's conclusion that "In effect, President Kennedy was the target of a CIA covert operation that collapsed when the invasion collapsed", the book argues that the result of this operation was Kennedy's avowed intention "to splinter the CIA in a thousand pieces and scatter it to the winds." The forced resignation of CIA Director Allen Dulles and several deputies served notice that this statement might be followed through.^[7] The book describes Kennedy's conflict with the military, including over the Cuban Missile Crisis (1962), the Partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty (ratified by the Senate in September 1963), and a back-channel to Fidel Castro in September 1963, via William Attwood, aimed at normalising relations, and National Security Action Memorandum 263 (beginning withdrawal from Vietnam).^[7] The book also cites an April 1962 confrontation with the US steel industry, led by U.S. Steel, which together with five other steel companies declared a price increase shortly after an agreement had been brokered to avoid them, in order to control inflation. The Kennedy administration raided corporate offices, issued subpoenas, and tasked the Defense Department with overseas marketing of its steel. Shortly after the steel industry backed down, Henry Luce's Fortune published an editorial, headlined "Steel: The Ides of April", stating that the price rise had been conceived in political terms as a means to either damage the President's credibility, or to unite the business world against him.