found Oliver Stone’s film JFK persuasive, even though the conspiracy it
concocts seems to include Vice President Johnson, the Pentagon brass, the
CIA, the military-industrial complex, the Mafia, and the Mormon Tabernacle
Choir. Textbooks bear some responsibility for the public gullibility, because
they do a poor job of discussing Kennedy’s murder. Half-blindly trust the
Warren Commission conclusion that Oswald was the lone and
idiosyncratically motivated killer. The others cast doubt on the Warren
Commission but leave completely vague who else might have been involved.
According to historian Jeffreys-Jones, The CIA and American Democracy,
140, Attorney General Robert Kennedy did not want the public to know about
JFK’s Operation Mongoose or contracts with the Mafia; secrecy on these
points helped make the Warren report incomplete about both Castro and the
Mafia. LBJ thought Castro probably had JFK killed in retaliation for JFK’s
attempts on his life, but no textbook raises the possibility. See Nathan Miller,
Spying for America (New York: Paragon, 1989), 375. In 1978 the House
Select Committee on Assassinations concluded the Mafia probably did it,
since both Oswald and his slayer, Jack Ruby, had mob ties, but no textbook
raises the possibility. See G. R. Blakey, “Murdered by the Mob?” Washington
Post, 11/7/1993.
27 Christopher Cerf and Victor Navasky, The Experts Speak (New York:
Pantheon, 1984), 145; Ameringer, U.S. Foreign Intelligence, 261-64.
28 Kissinger, quoted in Thomas G. Paterson, J. G. Clifford, and K. J. Hagen,
American Foreign Policy: A History Since 1900 (Lexington, MA: D. C.
Heath, 1983), 589.
29 My thanks to David Shiman for some of the ideas and wording of these
paragraphs on Chile, parts of which originally appeared as “U.S. in the Third
World: Challenging the Textbook Myth,” by David Shiman and James W.
Loewen, Chapter 11 of T. M. Thomas et al., eds., Global Images of Peace:
Transforming the War System (Kottayam, India: Prakasam Publications,
1985), reprinted in this country as Global Images of Peace and Education
(Ann Arbor: Prakken, 1987). David also suggested the term international
good guy and the book’s title.
30 Gagnon, “Why Study History?” 60.
31 George W. Ball, “JFK’s Big Moment,” New York Review of Books,
2/13/1992, 16-20; Jeffreys-Jones, The CIA and American Democracy, 131;