Kennedy Assassination an Analysis of Why Kennedy\'s

Kennedy Assassination

An Analysis of Why Kennedy's Assassination is a Turning Point

The 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy was a turning point in American history. On a superficial level, it served as the eradication of post-War idealism, of American "purity" and patriotic zeal. Kennedy's death ushered in an era of social revolution throughout the 1960s and 1970s. On a deeper level, however, Kennedy's assassination and the events surrounding it pushed many Americans toward a more skeptical and cynical view of their government. If Eisenhower warned of the rise of the military-industrial complex (MIC) in his 1961 Farewell Address, Kennedy's death opened the door even more widely to the notion of government conspiracy and the power of the MIC (Jarecki, 2008, pp. 152-154). This paper will analyze the Kennedy assassination and show why it serves as a turning point in American history.

To say that President Kennedy's assassination was just another event is to miss a large amount of the factors that surrounded it. Kennedy entered the White House on the heels of President Dwight D. Eisenhower, who intimated that a powerful new force in American politics had entered the scene: this was the MIC. The 20th century thus far had been one in which America had developed a colonial presence in the Philippines, South America, Central America, Africa, and the Middle East. With the formation of the Central Intelligence Agency in the middle of the century, the U.S. instituted a secret government agency whose ties with big business made it appear eerily fascistic. After all, it was "John Foster Dulles, who spent decades working for some of the world's most powerful corporations and then became secretary of state. It was Dulles who ordered the 1953 coup in Iran, which was intended in part to make the Middle East safe for American oil companies" (Kinzer, 2006, p. 4). John's brother Allen Dulles headed the CIA, and coups became the name of the game -- like the one in Guatemala, "where a nationalist government had challenged the power of United Fruit, a company [Dulles'] old law firm represented" (Kinzer, p. 4).

Leading up to Kennedy's assassination, the CIA had attempted to inspire a coup in Cuba in the botched affair known as the Bay of Pigs Invasion. The failure of the operation was an embarrassment to Kennedy and only served to aggravate relations among Cuba, the U.S. And the Soviets. Kennedy was quoted in The New York Times (after his death) as saying that he wanted to "splinter the CIA in a thousand pieces" (Mellen, 2005, p. 161). In fact, Kennedy removed Allen Dulles as Director of the CIA in what has been interpreted as proof of Kennedy's desire to break up the CIA and the MIC. This has been taken by many investigators as a necessary and essential event in preparing for the crucial turning point of Kennedy's assassination: As Mellen observes, "That the CIA exacted its revenge on Kennedy has been an open secret since 1963" (p. 162). Jim Garrison would famously posit the hypothesis (helping to fuel Americans' belief in government conspiracy) that Oswald (the man accused of killing Kennedy) did not and could not have acted alone.