Jefferson Morley
speaker
178 appearances
2 recordings
2 series
first heard Jan 2025
last heard Mar 2025
Jefferson Morley’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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So then over the years, if we look at the pattern, the CIA has issued false statements regularly and consistently about the assassination ever since 1963.
So 60 years later, when Congress has passed a law saying everything's got to be made public and the decision has to be taken out of the hands of executive branch agencies and the public interest in full disclosure has to be respected and honored, for the CIA to now control the process is again, a conflict of interest and a corruption of the process.
And it's certainly not in compliance with what Congress wanted. And let me point out one thing about the JFK Records Act. We live in a time of polarization, bitter polarization. And yet, the JFK Records Act passed both houses of Congress unanimously. 535 elected representatives approved of this bill. No one, no one dissented on the record, including Senator Joe Biden.
So this is what the people want. They want a full disclosure. And the CIA has stepped in and prevailed on both President Trump and President Biden to give them what they want. What they want is continued indefinite secrecy around JFK assassination records. Now, It is no surprise that given that set of facts, people are going to have suspicions about the CIA.
And that's not the fault of conspiracy theorists. That's the fault of the CIA itself.
Now- Yeah, no, that's a very good point. And, you know, I mean, Kennedy was a politician. He was running for reelection. He said different things at different times. He presented himself as a fierce cold warrior sometimes and was very eloquent in defending the free world and that stuff.
But if you look at Kennedy's record in 1963, his policies were a very bold challenge to the conventional wisdom of the national security agencies in the United States in several ways. He pushed a test ban treaty with the Soviet Union, a measure that his generals on the Joint Chiefs of Staff unanimously and vehemently privately opposed. Kennedy used his prestige as a peacemaker,
which he gained during the Cuban Missile Crisis to prevail upon the generals and to get the Senate to approve that. And when they did approve it in September, 1963, Kennedy said that was his proudest moment as president. So Kennedy was moving the country, the ship of state in a new direction, not radically, slowly, but definitely. And the enemies of his policies
in Cuba, in Vietnam, for example, were very, very unhappy with him in 1963. That's the political setting in which Kennedy is assassinated, in which there are real schisms in his administration about the wisdom of his policy. And there is a pervasive feeling among the enemies of his policies that Kennedy is not only weak, but he's actually a danger to U.S. national security.
That was a very common feeling in the upper echelons of the CIA and the Joint Chiefs of Staff in 1963.
Well, so if we compare our situation today with that time, you know, We live in a multipolar world now, right? Russia is a superpower. China is a superpower. So in 1962, there were really only two superpowers, Soviet Union and the United States. And they were locked in the stance called the Cold War, which doesn't really evoke the full danger of the situation.
What you had was two nuclear armed superpowers who really did not talk to each other or negotiate with each other. were armed to the teeth with, you know, extensive, massive nuclear arsenals, which were on a hair-trigger setting. A missile could get from the Soviet Union to the United States in 15 minutes. So if there was a nuclear attack launched, the U.S.
government would have to decide in 15 minutes whether to respond. And likewise for the Soviet Union. So the world lived in a state of anxiety suppressed anxiety that we really don't feel today.
And those feelings came to the fore in what's called the Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962, in which the United States discovered that the Soviet Union was installing nuclear missiles in Cuba, just 90 miles south of Florida. And President Kennedy demanded that those missiles be removed. The Soviet Union refused. They said, you have missiles on our border, 20 miles from our border.
How can you be offended by our missiles 90 miles from your border? And Kennedy said, if those missiles aren't removed, I'm going to attack. We're going to destroy them ourselves. Kennedy was under huge pressure from his generals who said right from the start, just go in and destroy those missiles. Kennedy pursued a peaceful solution and rejected the unanimous recommendation of his generals.
And for two weeks, the world lived in a very real fear that there was about to be a nuclear war in which 10 million people might be killed in a matter of days. And President Kennedy was the president who was going to have to push the button and make that happen. And Kennedy thought, this is crazy. I don't want to go to war over Cuba. It's not an important country. I
Kennedy got the Soviet Union to back down, and they withdrew the missiles. And Kennedy enjoyed a tremendous boon in his popularity. Peace was popular. And so after that, Kennedy had a new vision of the world. He never wanted to be put in that position again. He saw how dangerous the Cold War was, how it might create a war really over nothing that was very important. Cuba was not important.
Not many people, not important to the U.S. economy, not a threat strategically. You know, it was not important. And yet Kennedy had almost been forced to nuclear holocaust. So that was why he pushed the test ban treaty. That was why he didn't pursue the overthrow of Castro. That was why he put out private feelers. Would Castro be interested in a diplomatic settlement of the country's
That was why Kennedy was holding back in Vietnam. And in October 1963, he signs on to a symbolic 1,000-man withdrawal of U.S. troops. So while Kennedy's military and intelligence apparatus favored a very aggressive military approach—overthrow Castro, don't make deals with the Soviet Union, escalate in Vietnam— Kennedy didn't want to do that.
And in June of 1963, he makes a very important speech to the graduating class at American University in 1963. And he says, we do not want a Pax Americana imposed by US weapons. It's a very striking statement for a U.S. president to make, and not one that any president before him had ever made. He was saying, you know, we don't want to be the world's policemen.
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