RFK Jr. The Defender - January 05, 2022


CIAs War On Democracy with Edward Curtin

Hosted by
Robert F. Kennedy
Guests
Edward Curtin
Mentioned
Joe Kennedy Noam Chomsky Jim Douglas Patrick Lumumba Edward Curtin Alan Dulles Solomon Islanders Robert Heinlein Naomi Klein Eisenhower Kennedys Castro Dag Hammarskjold Vince Salandria Adlai Stevenson James Meredith Lyndon Johnson George Orwell Jacques Ellul Anthony Fauci and 15 more
Australian Authoritarianism with Monica Smit Government Hysteria with Alex Berenson

Episode Stats


Length

34 minutes

Words per minute

132.28

Word count

4,588

Sentence count

256

Harmful content

Toxicity

4

sentences flagged

Hate speech

5

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

Dr. Edward Curtin is a sociologist and writer who has written extensively about the role of the CIA and other intelligence agencies in destabilizing American democracy. He is the author of The Real Fauci, a book that documents the CIA's long history of spying on journalists and their families, and he has been a long-time critic of Operation Mockingbird. In this episode, Dr. Curtin and I discuss the CIA s long-term campaign to delegitimize American ideals and democracy, and the role played by the intelligence services in delegitimizing the American ideal of freedom, freedom, and democracy. He is a scholar of the classics of philosophy, literature, and theology, and a lifelong promoter of personal freedom and the American justice system, and an idealized vision for our country. Edward is a professor at the Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts and a widely read writer. He used to be a newspaperman for the Berkshire Eagle, one of the great local papers in our country, and is a longtime supporter of the ideals of freedom and justice championed by the framers of the Constitution and the Supreme Court. Ed is a great admirer of George Orwell and Aldous Huxley, two of the greatest novelists of the 20th century. And he is a champion of the anti-war movement, and of the fight for civil rights and civil liberties. This episode is a must-listen for anyone who wants to know what's going on in the world and what s going on. in the 21st century, and why we should be worried about it. and why it's important to have a better understanding of the dark side of history, and what it means and why it matters why we need to pay attention to it what it matters, and how we should care about it, and how it s important to know it, not just in the first place not only in order to understand it, . What do you think about it? Do you think it matters to you, do you agree with it, or disagree with it ? or do you have any thoughts on it matters? or don t you agree or disagree are you in any thoughts or opinions on what it does not matter ? or are you looking for more information about what it s really going on in our culture, or would you like to know more?

Transcript

Transcripts from "RFK Jr. The Defender" are sourced from the Knowledge Fight Interactive Search Tool. Explore them interactively here.
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 Hey everybody, it's my pleasure to have you as my guest today, Edward Curtin.
00:00:04.000 Edward Curtin is a sociologist.
00:00:08.000 He's a professor at the Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts.
00:00:12.000 He is a widely read writer.
00:00:14.000 He used to be a newspaper man for the Berkshire Eagle, one of the great local papers in our country.
00:00:21.000 He is a scholar of the classics of philosophy, literature, and theology, and sociology, and he's been a lifelong promoter of personal freedom and the American justice system and an idealized vision for our country.
00:00:41.000 Welcome, Ed.
00:00:43.000 It's a pleasure to have you.
00:00:44.000 Well, it's my pleasure to be here with you, Robert.
00:00:48.000 Thank you very much.
00:00:49.000 And one of the things that Ed has written extensively about is the role of the intelligence agencies in essentially the demolition of the American ideal of American freedoms and democracies.
00:01:07.000 I wrote an article actually mentioning my book about the role of the intelligence agencies in the COVID crisis that I covered extensively in my book to the response to the pandemic.
00:01:23.000 I wanted to start by asking you something.
00:01:25.000 Did you read Dick Russell's article in The Defender this week about the CIA control of Rolling Stone, of Daily Cosmic, I think Daily Beast?
00:01:37.000 Yes, I did read it.
00:01:39.000 Yes, I thought it was excellent.
00:01:42.000 Yeah, and he did some extraordinary research on that.
00:01:46.000 Yeah, that's true.
00:01:48.000 You've been a critic of Operation Mockingbird, which of course is the CIA's long, long history of program to control journalism in our country and around the world by essentially compromising journalists.
00:02:06.000 Yes, I have.
00:02:08.000 And actually, today, December 16th, I noticed there was a scathing article about you by an associate press writer, which I consider very clearly part of that whole Operation Mockingbird program to attack anyone.
00:02:32.000 Especially anyone who exposes, as you have in numerous ways in your last book and in the current Fauci book, the operations of the intelligence services, most especially the CIA. And as I've written...
00:02:51.000 And you know your book about your family and much more American values, which is a fantastic, a beautiful, beautiful book.
00:03:01.000 When it was published three or four years ago, I believe I was the only person to write a review of that book.
00:03:07.000 You were the only one to review it.
00:03:10.000 It was boycotted.
00:03:11.000 Totally.
00:03:12.000 By all the mainstream newspapers, the legacy media.
00:03:17.000 It was the, that book is basically a chronicle of my family's, of the Kennedy family's 60 year fist fight with the CIA.
00:03:27.000 Yeah, it was, it was, there was airtight wall to wall, like out of that book in the mainstream press, as you pointed out. - Aside from your devastating and, Really well-documented critique of the CIA in that book.
00:03:45.000 You know, it was just a lovely book as a family story.
00:03:49.000 It was the kind of family romance book that you would think the mainstream media would gobble up and surely give some great reviews to.
00:04:02.000 I think they honed in on your essential critique of the CIA. Just as they're doing now with your Fauci book, The Real Fauci, which again is devastating with its analysis of how the intelligence agencies have been involved in the whole germ propaganda and COVID and going back much further than that,
00:04:30.000 of course, as you document so assiduously in Chapter 12 of that book especially.
00:04:38.000 One of the reasons I wanted to have you on this show is that you've been an extraordinarily eloquent and articulate critic of that trend in our country.
00:04:51.000 Of the light brightness of American ideals of democracy that our framers put in motion and the assault on that since World War II by this growing power of the military-industrial complex.
00:05:07.000 Exactly what Eisenhower warned us of.
00:05:10.000 You see that not just as a political battle, but ultimately a spiritual war.
00:05:15.000 Definitely.
00:05:17.000 I think that We've been subjected for decades now to a materialistic propaganda effort that has tried to reduce the spiritual dimension of human life to nothing,
00:05:35.000 really, and to, in its place, put a deterministic view of life, life determined by things, by Technology, and it's a very, very dark, dark vision in which people really give up hope and embrace the, how shall I put it, the dark side of life.
00:06:00.000 And it's no wonder that there are so many people suffering tremendous anxiety and depression, and they're all drugged up on pharmaceutical drugs, which is part of this push to drug people.
00:06:15.000 And to take from them this sense of idealism and hope and love for other people and replace it with this very, very dark vision.
00:06:28.000 And the people who are doing this, there's something greatly evil about it.
00:06:34.000 You know, I know that's a strong word, but I think it is evil.
00:06:39.000 I know you're a great connoisseur of American literature and literature in general, and it's pretty extraordinary how Aldous Huxley and George Orwell and Robert Heinlein kind of predicted this dystopian embrace of, you know, what's called today transhumanism.
00:06:59.000 And the use, I remember in And, you know, we're now seeing basically the entire population that's lulled with pharmaceutical products and screens, and nobody's really noticing that, you know, our humanity as well as our democracy are under attack.
00:07:24.000 Well, I think some people are noticing, and with your help, And your great efforts.
00:07:31.000 I think more and more people are noticing this.
00:07:33.000 I see that perhaps it's just the people that I know.
00:07:37.000 They seem to be waking up to this reality that I noticed that you mentioned the French sociologist and theologian in your Fauci book, Jacques Ellul, who long ago, long ago, the late 40s, then in the late 50s and the early 60s, wrote a series of books One called propaganda, another called the technological society, in which he predicted all of this.
00:08:07.000 So it's been long in coming.
00:08:09.000 And that was at the time of Eisenhower's farewell address and the assassination of your uncle, President Kennedy, and then your father.
00:08:22.000 So This has been a long process and it's, I think, deeply tied in with the development of the CIA, their mind control programs, MKUltra and all of the others.
00:08:36.000 I guess I'd say there's a worldwide MKUltra program going on now.
00:08:41.000 To destroy people's ability to think and hope and have faith in the future.
00:08:48.000 My wife and I recently went to see, I don't go to movies that often, but we went to see West Side Story, the remake.
00:08:57.000 As a young man of 17, the original West Side Story affected me profoundly.
00:09:04.000 Even though it's a tragedy, it also It was a story of hope as well.
00:09:12.000 It seems to me that that feeling of hope, hopefulness, it was in the fall of 1961 when I first saw that film, the original.
00:09:22.000 I remember feeling a sense of optimism in the country, even though some bad things had already happened that year, the Bay of Pigs, the killing of Dag Hammarskjöld that month.
00:09:37.000 But I remember as a young person feeling, still feeling hopeful.
00:09:42.000 And that sense of hopefulness has been diminishing down through the decades.
00:09:48.000 I mean, it's long ago, and we've arrived now at this dark place where the forces who have been working on people seem to be triumphant, but I don't think they will triumph.
00:10:01.000 I think the human spirit is stronger than their evil.
00:10:08.000 Well, you come from a liberal community and a liberal background.
00:10:13.000 How do you think and how do you explain the fact that it is the people that is liberals like Noam Chomsky and, you know, these iconic figures of resistance, the corporate critics, Naomi Klein, the many, many others who have become most vociferous today.
00:10:34.000 In supporting these totalitarian lockdowns, all of the other things that accompany it, and forced vaccinations with a zero-liability pharmaceutical product that's experimental and that's made by these companies until recently regarded as criminal enterprises, but now they're embracing as kind of deities and saviors.
00:11:00.000 How do you explain that?
00:11:02.000 And you are right in the middle of one of those communities.
00:11:05.000 So how do you explain it, number one?
00:11:08.000 Number two, do you think that people will emerge at some point from this past psychosis?
00:11:15.000 Well, those are really hard questions to answer.
00:11:18.000 But to go to the first one, I think some of the people who...
00:11:24.000 Well, let me speak of Noam Chomsky to begin with, because he's sort of the godfather of many of the people on the liberal left and even further to the left.
00:11:38.000 He's a guy who...
00:11:40.000 I can't really tell you exactly what has motivated him, because I can only look at what he's done and what he said in recent years.
00:11:52.000 And I've had some correspondence with him, and I have good friends who have been involved with him going all the way back, Vince Salandria.
00:12:02.000 But he's had contact with Chomsky going back to the early 60s over the death of President Kennedy.
00:12:09.000 And Chomsky has, from the start, closed his eyes to President Kennedy's assassination and never really wanted to look at it.
00:12:19.000 He said he would at one point, but then he just turned away.
00:12:23.000 And he has some kind of unexplainable hatred for your family, which...
00:12:31.000 What the source of that hatred is, I don't know.
00:12:35.000 But he refused to look at the facts of the assassination and even said, well, it doesn't really matter.
00:12:42.000 It's not very important, which is absurd.
00:12:45.000 And he said the same thing about the attacks of September 11, 2001.
00:12:51.000 But what's motivating him?
00:12:54.000 I don't know.
00:12:55.000 But he has many acolytes, many people on the left, many prominent people today.
00:13:01.000 Who rely on him as their so-called godfather, Noam Chomsky, Noam Chomsky.
00:13:07.000 And what motivates them, I don't know either, except that perhaps it is their jobs and their careers, and they don't want to be shut out of the mainstream media and access to it.
00:13:22.000 You know, if you criticize or delve too deeply, Into a lot of these things, you could be fired very easily and your career is over.
00:13:34.000 So it's hard to understand people's motivations.
00:13:38.000 I do think there are people out there who really do work for intelligence agencies and not so-called independently, but they project themselves as independent writers.
00:13:53.000 Who they are?
00:13:54.000 I wouldn't want to hazard a guess, because it's very difficult to do that kind of thing.
00:14:01.000 Do I see a change coming among some of them?
00:14:04.000 Yes, I do see a slight change with some of them, but I don't know how far they will go.
00:14:12.000 It's not much of a change, for sure.
00:14:14.000 I also have corresponded with John Chomsky recently, and I'm very My family, I think.
00:14:27.000 And his kind of oeuvre.
00:14:29.000 The Kennedys...
00:14:34.000 Or when my uncle was killed, he was incapable of adjusting his thinking and his narrative.
00:14:42.000 And that's probably one of the reasons that he didn't want to look into it.
00:14:46.000 But I've always overlooked that part of him, you know, the extreme kind of poisonous, venomous hostility that he has toward my family, because he has such an interesting mind.
00:14:58.000 And he has this brilliant take on historical events that I think that I wouldn't want to miss, you know, even if he doesn't, even if he differs with me.
00:15:09.000 Very personal stuff.
00:15:12.000 The clarity of thought in which he views other parts of history and America's role in history is very interesting to me.
00:15:22.000 I don't accept it as received knowledge, but I want to hear what he has to say because he's brilliant.
00:15:32.000 Sometimes these little flashes of lightning that are very, very reliable in his His thoughts and his narratives and his writing are just things that I don't want to miss, despite the fact that he doesn't like my family a lot.
00:15:48.000 So I've had him when I was running my show at Air America.
00:15:52.000 I had him as a frequent guest on that show, and I had very, very congenial discussions.
00:15:59.000 Let me put it this way.
00:16:00.000 He's a curmudgeon, I think, to anybody.
00:16:03.000 He's a difficult, prickly kind of know-it-all character.
00:16:08.000 And that's just part of who he is.
00:16:10.000 He's smarter than anybody in the room.
00:16:13.000 And he acts like he knows that.
00:16:16.000 And he wants everybody to kind of recognize that.
00:16:19.000 So if you're put off by those kind of things, you wouldn't want to hang out with him.
00:16:25.000 But I have always been able to overlook those kind of things.
00:16:29.000 And I see the brilliance of the way that his mind burns.
00:16:34.000 And I always enjoyed having him on my show.
00:16:37.000 And so I had this little kind of weird side friendship with him where we didn't talk about the other stuff.
00:16:45.000 But recently I corresponded with him on email.
00:16:50.000 I invited him to come on this podcast to talk to me and he ultimately refused.
00:16:57.000 I directly refuse because he's always prided himself on being willing to debate in any forum.
00:17:04.000 I don't think that he wanted to have this debate with me.
00:17:07.000 And so he began, you know, kind of gratuitously insulting me and basically telling me I was a dangerous person and that I was stopping people from vaccinating and that this was going to kill people and, you know, all these kind of things.
00:17:23.000 And he became, in the end, he cut off the conversation in a very abrupt way, indicating that he didn't want to have anything more to do with things.
00:17:32.000 So it's interesting, though, because he is such an influential figure and there's other people like Naomi Klein, who I've always admired, whose books are, you know, again, brilliant.
00:17:45.000 Her analysis of history has a clarity to it and a truth to it that is just like a gut punch reading her books.
00:17:54.000 Yeah.
00:17:56.000 I've had a friendship with her, too, that appears to be over because, you know, she's part of this kind of liberal orthodoxy that has brought down Canada, that has transformed Canada into, you know, really a template for a ruthless kind of totalitarianism.
00:18:20.000 It's very, very strange.
00:18:22.000 Yeah, with Chomsky, for example, I've learned a lot from him over the years.
00:18:28.000 I agree with you.
00:18:29.000 He's very brilliant.
00:18:31.000 He's written some wonderful, great things.
00:18:34.000 I think he's taught a lot of people, a lot.
00:18:37.000 I do think something you said about his institutional analysis was, He does have a problem, I think, with understanding that history, to understand history and social issues and society, institutional and structural analysis is very important.
00:18:58.000 But people are people too.
00:19:00.000 And individuals do count.
00:19:03.000 And everyone isn't totally determined By their place within the social order and their institutional affiliations, people are able to rise above them.
00:19:18.000 For example, a lot of critiques are thrown at you, I've seen them at least, and I'm sure you have, to say, well, look, you're from this rich family and you're just in it to make a buck and to make your name and, you know, really the Kennedys are just this old line or new line.
00:19:41.000 Kind of new old Irish American wealthy families who all wanted to be kings and queens. 0.72
00:19:48.000 And, you know, that's the story with them.
00:19:52.000 This new AP piece out on you is, you know, you're making so much money. 1.00
00:19:57.000 And I mean, it's just, it's a ridiculous piece of garbage, a hit piece. 0.99
00:20:02.000 But going back to Chomsky... 0.97
00:20:05.000 I don't think, and I know you're very well aware of Jim Douglas's great book, JFK and the Unspeakable, where Jim very, very clearly shows how President Kennedy was transformed as a human being, as a person, in his years in office, and how he underwent a profound spiritual awakening that allowed him to almost...
00:20:34.000 Serve as a martyr for the cause of peace.
00:20:38.000 I think your father was very, very similar.
00:20:43.000 And there was something in their persons, in their background, of course, but in their persons, people can change.
00:20:53.000 People can change.
00:20:55.000 As President Kennedy said to a group of Quakers when they visited him in the White House, you believe in redemption, don't you?
00:21:03.000 And that was when he took a real radical turning towards peace.
00:21:08.000 So I think a lot of sociologists, a lot of scholars, intellectuals, don't get the personal part, the existential part.
00:21:18.000 The part that people can change, they do change.
00:21:22.000 There is redemption.
00:21:24.000 It's not easy, but it happens.
00:21:27.000 You know, in the piece I recently wrote, you know, Anthony Fauci wrote, Who knows?
00:21:33.000 I mean, it's possible that he could dramatically change.
00:21:37.000 But as I said, I'm not counting on it.
00:21:40.000 I'm not holding my breath.
00:21:42.000 Jim Douglas' book is an extraordinary book.
00:21:44.000 To me, it's the best book written on our family.
00:21:47.000 It's called The Odd J.F. Canyon's Fico.
00:21:50.000 He makes these really wonderful connections between that ultimate kind That my uncle had.
00:21:58.000 It really began during his experiences in World War II when his PT boat was cut in two in the blackened straits.
00:22:07.000 When it was in a fog, it was run over by a Japanese destroyer.
00:22:15.000 The captain, the commander of that destroyer, who my uncle invited to his inaugural ceremonies.
00:22:23.000 And my uncle was stranded with his men, one of whom was badly burned and would be rescued by towing him through the water with a allured in his teeth on a six-mile swim in the middle of the night.
00:22:38.000 And they were hiding for days from the Japanese who were looking for them.
00:22:42.000 They thought they were He was almost certainly dead.
00:22:52.000 And he had, at the beginning, I think, a lot of his, as Jim Douglas shows, a lot of his, the way that he subsequently interacted with the world.
00:23:05.000 And there were two Solomon Islanders, who ultimately were searching for confidence.
00:23:15.000 His coordinates on a coconut, which an islander is hid in the bottom of the canoe beneath a big vial of coconuts, and then they did the 11-mile paddle to the British naval base and gave the companion that coconut, and that resulted in my uncle being rescued.
00:23:37.000 During that period, during that period of the war, he developed this very important skepticism The upper brass came very handy to him during the Cuban Missile Crisis, during the Bay of Pigs, where he was always skeptical of the advice that he was getting from the upper brass, always insistent on doing independent investigations,
00:24:03.000 but also the affinity that he had for people from developing countries and colonial countries and their right to be free, which but also the affinity that he had for people from developing countries and colonial countries and their right to be free, which was part of his central thrust of his administration, which I think Jim Douglas
00:24:22.000 Solomon Islanders who were under colonial rule, first by the British and then later by the Japanese, and who were fighting side by side alongside the Americans and who rescued my uncle, that they deserved sovereignty and dignity and respect.
00:24:40.000 That had a profound impact on his life.
00:24:43.000 One of the things that I would mention with going back to Chomsky, the irony with Chomsky is that he really does not see the CIA as a menace to our country.
00:24:56.000 He sees it as a menace in In developing countries.
00:25:00.000 But he never saw the minutes that it was to our country.
00:25:04.000 And one of the things that I talk about in the book is that the CIA had a project for 30 years to blacken my family's name.
00:25:13.000 And it was run by a guy called Sam Halpern, who had been a New York Times bureau chief in Miami and Havana.
00:25:21.000 But he was really the entire time he was a CIA agent.
00:25:25.000 He later became a deputy director of the CIA. And it was his job for 30 years at the CIA to start rumors about my family.
00:25:34.000 He was the one who promoted the rumor that my uncle and my father had been involved in the Castro assassination and had spent I had no knowledge of the CIA's project to assassinate Katz from the CIA, was very nervous that they would find out about it.
00:25:55.000 He also was the one who promoted this affirmation that is now widely believed that my grandfather made money from bootlegging.
00:26:05.000 And if you talk to almost any American, they'll say, yeah, Joe Kennedy was a bootlegger.
00:26:10.000 And of course, he was never a bootlegger.
00:26:12.000 That was a CIA planted defamation or libel that took root and many, many other things.
00:26:22.000 And I show this in the book how they did.
00:26:27.000 Many of the other things that people believe about my family were originally sourced to Sam Albert and the CIA. But Noam Chomsky just believes that stuff, swallows all of those things, hook line and sinker,
00:26:44.000 I think because they were convenient to his worldview that the Kennedys were part of this aristocracy, part of this kind of deep state American imperialist aristocracy that is manipulating people all over the world.
00:26:59.000 And he was never able to acknowledge to himself that it was our family who essentially was battling that plutocracy. 0.97
00:27:10.000 Yeah, so they just flipped it.
00:27:13.000 You're so right that he was never really concerned about the CIA's activity within the United States, but always over there, over there, over there.
00:27:22.000 You know, coup d'etats, assassinations, all of that kind of stuff, which of course is true. 0.99
00:27:27.000 You know, Guatemala and Iran and all these other places.
00:27:31.000 But he wouldn't look at how they were operating here.
00:27:35.000 And one of the ironies of all of this is that your uncle...
00:27:39.000 President Kennedy was a true anti-colonialist even before he became President of the United States.
00:27:47.000 He made that famous 57 Senate speech.
00:27:50.000 He said some things that would shock the socks off a lot of people today.
00:27:55.000 The speech you're talking about.
00:27:58.000 It's a speech in which my uncle made this famous speech in the Senate, which completely isolated him from liberals and conservatives.
00:28:07.000 He said Africa should be ruled by Africans. 0.89
00:28:10.000 And even today, when I travel, I've run into hundreds and hundreds of people from Africa and from the Mideast whose name is Kennedy.
00:28:21.000 Because of that speech that he made, he's remembered in all these capitals.
00:28:25.000 It was very unpopular in our country at the time, because in our country we were trying to fortify NATO as a bulwark against communism.
00:28:36.000 And the NATO countries, France and Great Britain, were completely still dependent on their colonial possessions.
00:28:44.000 And there was a terror that if they were forced to relinquish Kenya and Tanzania and Libya, et cetera, that the United States would be left fighting communism alone because all the European nations would financially collapse.
00:29:03.000 So he was not only attacked on that speech by the right, by Rockefeller, Goldwater, Reagan, Nixon, et cetera, but by Adlai Stevenson on the left.
00:29:13.000 And all the kind of liberal infrastructure went after them, but he stuck with it.
00:29:17.000 And that became the theme of his administration.
00:29:25.000 He ruled from outside.
00:29:26.000 And that was another thing that alienated him from the CIA because, of course, Alan Dulles' project was to try to bring the entire globe under U.S. hegemony.
00:29:38.000 And, you know, to have the CIA operating, my uncle refused to go into Laos, despite the CIA's He's from the brass.
00:29:48.000 He refused to send combat troops to Vietnam.
00:29:51.000 and they were begging him for a quarter million and said it would collapse.
00:29:55.000 And he kept saying, "It's their war, it's not our war." He didn't believe in the domino theory.
00:30:01.000 He believed that people wanted to rule themselves and they had a right to do it.
00:30:05.000 And they had a right to experiment with all kinds of government.
00:30:08.000 In fact, he told Castro, if you want to experiment with Marxism, we have nothing to say.
00:30:13.000 That's you and your country's choice.
00:30:16.000 The only problem we have is if you let him fight the Soviets, to use your country for a staging ground or a military base in our hemisphere, But he was very, very much against colonialism and he ended up sending 16,000 advisors who were basically Green Berets to Vietnam We were not officially authorized to take part in combat activities.
00:30:41.000 He sent more people, he sent more troops than that, 20,000 troops, to Ole Miss, the University of Mississippi, to get one black man, James Meredith, registered.
00:30:53.000 And as you point out, a month before he died, my uncle found out that 75 Americans had been killed in Vietnam and he said, we're getting out and this is not worth another American life.
00:31:07.000 And he signed the national security order.
00:31:13.000 He was out of Vietnam by the end of 1964, with the first thousand out by December 63.
00:31:22.000 And he was then killed on November 22nd.
00:31:25.000 And one of the first things Lyndon Johnson did was to reverse that order.
00:31:29.000 Exactly.
00:31:30.000 Yeah.
00:31:30.000 And he was killed.
00:31:31.000 I don't hesitate in saying it.
00:31:34.000 He was killed by the CIA. And to take it back To something else you were just saying, when President Kennedy was first in office in the same year, in that 1961 that I referred to before, Patrice Lumumba was killed by the CIA, and he was an up-and-coming anti-colonialist leader in Africa.
00:31:57.000 And then in December of the same year, and I don't hesitate to say, a CIA assisted, if not run, assassination by a plane crash Also, Dag Hammarskjold wanted the same thing my uncle wanted, which was her developing world to be able to run itself at an end of colonialism.
00:32:22.000 Patrice Lumumba, people should understand who he was.
00:32:28.000 The Congo, which was the richest country on earth, based upon its mineral resources and its forests and all the other natural resources that it had, he was the only leader with the charisma and the credibility to unite all the diverse tribes of the Congo as the Belgians left.
00:32:49.000 And so the Belgians wanted to kill him, and the big multinational mining corporations and financial powers wanted him dead because they wanted to encourage war between all these little tribes and break the Congo down into bite-sized bits that I could say,
00:33:18.000 no, we are going to keep the resources for our country and manage them for the people of the Congo.
00:33:24.000 And my uncle loved Patrice.
00:33:27.000 And Alan Dulles knew that.
00:33:30.000 Alan Dulles wanted to make sure that he was killed before my uncle took office.
00:33:40.000 I remember he was murdered. 0.52
00:33:43.000 Dulles sent poison toothpaste to try to kill him that way.
00:33:47.000 But eventually he worked with the Belgian Secret Service to capture Lumumba and then execute him.
00:33:55.000 And then they put in Mobudo, who just pillaged that country and became one of the richest people in the world for the next, I don't know, 35 years. 1.00
00:34:06.000 Yeah.
00:34:07.000 So, you know, to me, the interesting part, I agree with everything you said, every word, and that's all accurate.
00:34:15.000 So you have this whole history of anti-colonialism in your family with your uncle and your father.
00:34:23.000 Ed, it's a pleasure to have you.
00:34:25.000 It's good you have thick skin.
00:34:28.000 I do too, but there's something in the Irish blood that makes us fight is too.
00:34:36.000 Well, Edward, thank you very much for joining me today.
00:34:38.000 As always, it's wonderful to spend time with you.