Democracy is good; but can one have too much of a good thing, no? Policy makers in the Kennedy administration thought so. Chomsky explains:

Another problem that's pointed to over and over again in these [U.S. government] secret documents is the excessive liberalism of Third World countries. (That was particularly a problem in Latin America, where the governments weren't sufficiently committed to thought control and restrictions on travel, and where the legal systems were so deficient that they required evidence for the prosecution of crimes.)

This is a constant lament right through the Kennedy period (after that, the documentary record hasn't yet been declassified). The Kennedy liberals were adamant about the need to overcome democratic excesses that permitted "subversion" - by which, of course, they meant people thinking the wrong ideas.

....A study of the inter-American system published by the Royal Institute of International Affairs in London concluded that, while the US pays lip service to democracy, the real commitment is to "private, capitalist enterprise." When the rights of investors are threatened, democracy has to go; if these rights are safeguarded, killers and torturers will do just fine.

Parliamentary governments were barred or overthrown, with US support and sometimes direct intervention, in Iran in 1953, in Guatemala in 1954 (and in 1963, when Kennedy backed a military coup to prevent the threat of return to democracy), in the Dominican Republic in 1963 and 1965, in Brazil in 1964, in Chile in 1973 and often elsewhere. Our policies have been very much the same in El Salvador and in many other places across the globe. [1]

The need to contain democratic 'excesses' was a theme echoed more than twenty years later in a report issued in 1973 by the newly-created ' Trilateral Commission', a neoliberal think tank. The report was called ' The Crisis of Democracy' (1973) [for more about about the 'crisis', see the Carter Administration]. Here is how this concept was applied to FOREIGN policy during the Kennedy administration:

The Commission's report is concerned with the "governability of the democracies."    Its American author, Samuel Huntington, was former chairman of the Department of Government at Harvard, and a government adviser. He is well-known for his ideas on how to destroy the rural revolution in Vietnam. He wrote in Foreign Affairs (1968) that "In an absent-minded way the United States in Vietnam may well have stumbled upon the answer to 'wars of national liberation.' " The answer is "forced-draft urbanization and modernization." Explaining this concept, he observes that if direct application of military force in the countryside "takes place on such a massive scale as to produce a massive migration from countryside to city" then the "Maoist-inspired rural revolution may be "undercut by the American-sponsored urban revolution." The Viet Cong, he wrote, is "a powerful force which cannot be dislodged from its constituency so long as the constituency continues to exist."

Thus "in the immediate future" peace must "be based on accommodation" particularly since the US is unwilling to undertake the "expensive, time consuming and frustrating task" of ensuring that the constituency of the Viet Cong no longer exists (he was wrong about that, as the Nixon-Kissinger programs of rural massacre were to show). "Accommodation" as conceived by Huntington is a process whereby the Viet Cong "degenerate into the protest of a declining rural minority" while the regime imposed by US force maintains power. A year later, when it appeared that "urbanization" by military force was not succeeding and it seemed that the United States might be compelled to enter into negotiations with the NLF [National Liberation Front] (which he recognized to be "the most powerful purely political national organization"), Huntington, in a paper delivered before the AID-supported Council on Vietnamese Studies which he had headed, proposed various measures of political trickery and manipulation that might be used to achieve the domination of the U.S.-imposed government, though the discussants felt rather pessimistic about the prospects.... - Chomsky, [2]

Dean Rusk, who would later prosecute the [Vietnam] war to its fullest as Secretary of State in the Kennedy-Johnson years - and, later still, become a member of CPD-II [the Committee on the Present Danger, reconstituted in the Reagan years] - wrote the following memorandum in the spring of 1950 while acting as Deputy Secretary of State for Far Eastern Affairs [in the Truman Administration]: "The Department of State continues to hold that Southeast Asia is in grave danger of Communist domination ....[and] the resources of the United States should be deployed to reserve Indo-China and Southeast Asia from further Communist encroachment. - Jerry Sanders, Peddlers of Crisis: The Committee on the Present Danger and the Politics of Containment (Boston, MA: South End Press, 1983), page 125.

The Eisenhower-Dulles doctrine extended 'containment' policy to Asia. It was Maxwell Taylor (later, an influential adviser to Kennedy) who would articulate a policy of 'flexible response' as early as 1956. It would continue to develop within the ranks of the establishment elite, where it would finally find voice in Henry Kissinger:

It was given a considerable boost by the publication of Henry Kissinger's Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy in 1957. Kissiner's book was the outgrowth of a Council on Foreign Relations and Rockefeller-sponsored study over which he served as executive director. As Kissinger described the deliberations of the group, they were, in parallel fashion to Taylor, searching for flexibility in the use of nuclear weaponry in a manner short of the massive dosage prescribed in the Dulles doctrine [under Eisenhower] Nitze, who by this early date has already raised the issue of tactical nuclear weapons for limited theater use, was one of the many Cold War luminaries who sat on the panel. - Jerry Sanders, Peddlers of Crisis: The Committee on the Present Danger and the Politics of Containment (Boston, MA: South End Press, 1983), page 126.

Fancy names were devised for the strategies they used to hide the brute fact of the political trickery about which Chomsky speaks in the passage above: 'plausible deniability', for example.

Lying has always played a role in promoting U.S. military objectives. But it was the Wilson Administration in particular that attracted Hitler's admiration by pioneering State Propaganda. The entire Cold War period that followed, founded on what was in effect a forty year lie, developed increasingly sophisticated strategies for bolstering that Lie, by blurring the line between reality and fiction. The modus operandi of the Intelligence Community is no longer, as the media would have us believe, the simple 'gathering of intelligence', if ideed it ever was. It is, rather, the profound manipulation - for political purposes - of reality. Its purpose is the creation of a Virtual (Political) Reality, and the means it uses to do this is 'covert operations' of a very sophisticated sort - an activity more akin to active and agressive Paradigm Shifting than to the gathering of information/intelligence.

The Eisenhower and Nixon administrations utilized information distribution techniques (e.g., disinformation campaigns) and applied them to domestic situations (in Cointelpro, for example). The Ronald Reagan Administration perfected methods for neutralizing the press at home and making covert action fiscally profitable abroad (The Enterprise). The George HW Bush Administration ultized Press Blackouts and a reporter Pool System in the first Gulf War. George W Bush's experiment with Embedded Reporters is a subtler and more powerful manipulation of the press during wartime, a branch of Psy-Ops (Psychological Operations designed to plant clusters of mutually-supporting fictions in the press, aimed at influencing public opinion and policy-makers).

Do a Search on the PNAC signatories below. They are neo-con pseudo-scholars: Some are authors, editors, & pundits -- Donald Kagan (PNAC Co-founder) William Safire Norman Podhoretz Charles Krauthammer Midge Decter (Rumsfeld biographer) Daniel Pipes Some are sociologists -- Nathan Glazer Daniel Bell

Many of these strategies of deception are made possible through the infiltration of research organizations, the media and other types of business by the CIA. The CIA plants in these organizations are then used as springboards for selected covert operations. This strategy derives orginally from Allen Dulles's idea of 'moving [covert operators] up and further into their cover'. [3]

In 1989, L. Fletcher Prouty described the practice in this way:

When we put them in other departments and agencies, they might be somebody's assistant. Then they've been there for three years and the man who was above them, who was probably a political appointee, leaves. That agency might move this man up. Or when a newer political appointee comes, he has no knowledge that this man is really from CIA. He's just a strong person in his office and he gives him a broader role.

Sometimes these people were working in another agency so long we nearly forgot them. One man I know was in FAA and we needed his work to help us with FAA as a focal point there. He'd been there so long the FAA had him in a very big, very responsible job, where probably 90% of his duties were regular FAA work. A very effective individual. When we needed him to help us with some of our activities on the covert side of things, he was in a much better position to handle this than he had been originally.

.... more important than the dollars the Agency gets is what it can do with those dollars to make them cover all sorts of research, development, procurement, real estate ventures, stockpiles, and anything else money will buy, including tens of thousands of people who do not show on any official rosters. [4]     [CIA operatives are seeded in Think Tanks ]

For example:

From 1950 until the exposure of the CIA's penetration of domestic foundations in the mid-1960s, the Congress for Cultural Freedom spawned international seminars, regional programs, and about two dozen cultural, literary, and political magazines throughout the Western world (the flagship was England's "Encounter"). Many leading intellectuals were involved: Sidney Hook, Arthur Koestler, Melvin J. Lasky, Irving Kristol, Dwight Macdonald, Daniel Bell, Edward Shils, and Ignazio Silone. After CIA funding ended in 1967 the Ford Foundation tried to take up the slack, but CCF was never quite able to recover from the embarrassment.[5]

A restructuring of the U.S. government took place in the early years of the Cold War. It brought

Search on these neo-con foundations: * Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation * Carthage Foundation * Earhart Foundation * Charles G. Koch * David H. Koch * Claude R. Lambe * Philip M. McKenna * J.M. Foundation * John M. Olin Foundation * Henry Salvatori Foundation * Sarah Scaife Foundation * Smith Richardson Foundation And on these neo-con think-tanks: * American Enterprise Institute * Hudson Institute

into being the Defense Department, the Secretary of Defense, and the CIA. "By the 1950s, the CIA had riddled the nation’s businesses, media and universities with tens of thousands of part-time, on-call operatives." - agents who would later become PNAC signatories, like William F. Buckley. [6]

The men behind this restructuring - Lovett, Harriman, and others - were waiting in the wings when John Kennedy took the reins of power from republican president Dwight Eisenhower.

Kennedy asked Robert Lovett (Defense Secretary in the Truman Administration, Prescott Bush's associate in Brown Brothers Harriman, and chair of the 1946 'Lovett Committee' out of which was born the Cold War and the CIA), to be his Defense Secretary. Lovett declined, but nevertheless wound up playing a tremendously influential role in hand-picking members of the Kennedy Administration. [See: Robert Lovett]

In addition, from the Eisenhower Administration Kennedy inherited CIA Director Allen Dulles, and Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Lyman Lemnitzer. About Lemnitzer:

By now, many are familiar with Operation Northwoods, the U.S. plan to wage terrorist attacks against American citizens and blame Fidel Castro as a pretext for war. "We could blow up a U.S. ship in Guantanamo Bay and blame Cuba", the document read. "Casualty lists in U.S. newspapers would cause a helpful wave of national indignation," it continued. Developed through the far-right stewardship of General Lyman L. Lemnitzer [Chairman, Joint Chiefs of Staff, under Kennedy] in an early '60s atmosphere of anti-Communist paranoia, Operation Northwoods was approved by all Joint Chiefs of Staff, but nixed by the civilian leadership.

... Though President Kennedy assured Lemnitzer that America would never overtly attack Cuba, military ideologues met one month after submitting Northwoods and wrote a memo to Robert McNamara claiming that the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who saw "no prospect" of Castro being overthrown through "internal uprising or external political, economic or psychological pressures," felt that "military interventions [would] be required to overthrow the present Communist regime." The memo indicated that the Joint Chiefs believed that this could be "accomplished rapidly enough to minimize communist opportunity for solicitation of U.N. action" and that after U.S. forces assured "rapid essential control of Cuba, continued police action would be required." In other words, they would bypass the U.N. and America's military would keep Cuba's peace. "[W]hat Lemnitzer was suggesting," Bamford wrote, "was not freeing the Cuban people, who were largely in support of Castro, but imprisoning them in a U.S.-controlled police state." [7]

Some suspect that 9/11 was another 'Operation Northwoods':

In their 1963 book, The Far Right, Donald Janson and Bernard Eismann exposed similar dangers. "Concern had grown that a belligerent and free-wheeling military could conceivably become dangerous to the stability of the United States as the mixture of rebelliousness and politics had in nations forced to succumb to juntas or fascism," they wrote. But though the far right remained frustrated in the 1960s, it's as if their dream has been fulfilled today, with Dick Cheney, Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz and other Project for a New American Century (PNAC) think tankers filling in for Lemnitzer et al and PNAC's "catastrophic and catalyzing event - like a new Pearl Harbor" taking Operation Northwoods' place. On the eve of September 11, Bush verified PNAC's prophecy, dictating into his diary, as Bob Woodward noted in Bush at War, that "The Pearl Harbor of the 21st Century took place today" and interjecting that "[t]his was a war in which people were going to have to die." [8]

Current Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, who signed the 1997 'statement of principles' on which PNAC was founded, also recently came up with the notion of a Proactive, Preemptive Operations Group (P2OG)', the sole purpose of which would be to 'stimulate' terrorists into action. See: Rumsfeld.

More about the similarities between Operation Northwood and 9/11 :

James Bamford, formerly Washington Investigative Producer for ABC's World News Tonight with Peter Jennings, and who has written investigative cover stories for the New York Times Magazine, the Washington Post Magazine, and the Los Angeles Times Magazine, describes an operation which suggests that even the U.S. armed forces may be suspect.

Mr. Bamford's book, "Body of Secrets: Anatomy of the Ultra-Secret National Security Agency from the Cold War Through the Dawn of a New Century", reveals that the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) drew up and approved plans for "launching a secret and bloody war of terrorism against their own country in order to trick the American public into supporting an ill-conceived war they intended to launch against Cuba."

Mr. Bamford writes: "Codenamed Operation Northwoods, the plan . . . called for innocent people to be shot on American streets; for boats carrying refugees fleeing Cuba to be sunk on the high seas; for a wave of violent terrorism to be launched in Washington, D.C., Miami, and elsewhere. People would be framed for bombings they did not commit; planes would be hijacked. Using phony evidence, all of it would be blamed on Castro, thus giving Lemnitzer [Chairman JCS] and his cabal the excuse, as well as the public and international backing, they needed to launch their war."

September 11 was a godsend for the U.S. military-industrial complex. A $48 billion increase in the "defense" budget sailed through both houses of Congress, bringing U.S. military spending to $379 billion.

This, according to the Washington Post (January 27, 2002), represents "the biggest one-year rise since the Reagan buildup two decades ago and a suspension of 'the peace dividend.'" . . . It matches the combined military spending of the 15 countries with the next biggest defense budgets. (The proposed increase alone is about the same as the entire defense budget of the next biggest spender--Japan.) . . . It would roughly match, in inflation adjusted terms, the U.S. defense budget in 1967, at the height of the Vietnam War. [9]

A similarly rapid increase in military spending occured under Kennedy. It, also, was based on what historian Howard Zinn calls 'invented scares':

In 1960, the military budget was $45.8 billion--9.7 percent of the budget. That year John F. Kennedy was elected President, and he immediately moved to increase military spending. In fourteen months, the Kennedy administration added $9 billion to defense funds, according to Edgar Bottome (The Balance of Terror).

By 1962, based on a series of invented scares about Soviet military build-ups, a false "bomber gap" and a false "missile gap," the United States had overwhelming nuclear superiority. It had the equivalent, in nuclear weapons, of 1,500 Hiroshima-size atomic bombs, far more than enough to destroy every major city in the world-the equivalent, in fact, of 10 tons of TNT for every man, woman, and child on earth. To deliver these bombs, the United States had more than 50 intercontinental ballistic missiles, 80 missiles on nuclear submarines, 90 missiles on stations overseas, 1,700 bombers capable of reaching the Soviet Union, 300 fighter-bombers on aircraft carriers, able to carry atomic weapons, and 1,000 land-based supersonic fighters able to carry atomic bombs.

...When John F. Kennedy took office, he launched the Alliance for Progress, a program of help for Latin America, emphasizing social reform to better the lives of people. But it turned out to be mostly military aid to keep in power right-wing dictatorships and enable them to stave off revolutions. [10] [For more on the origins of this policy, in the Marshall Plan, see the Truman Administration

During the Cuban Missile Crisis, Kennedy assembled a group to advise him:

Kennedy assembled a small group that came to be called the Executive Committee of the National Security Council - or ExComm for short. ... Included in the ExComm were the regular participants in National Security Council meetings, plus Kennedy's brother, the attorney general Robert Kennedy, and the President's chief speechwriter, the White House counsel Theodore Sorensen. Both of these men could help Kennedy to think about the domestic political aspects of the crisis. The President also invited several other key advisors to join the group: C Douglas Dillon, who had held high posts under Eisenhower and who gave Kennedy a link to the Republican leadership; Dean Acheson and Robert [A] Lovett, who had served under President Harry Truman and could help Kennedy see the current crisis in longer historical perspective; and a former ambassador to the Soviet Union, Llewellyn (Tommy) Thompson, probably the person in the President's circle who was best acquainted with Khrushchev. [11]

Kennedy created the Taylor Commission to ascertain the reasons for the failure of the Bay of Pigs invasion. Their report found ...

... that the CIA, at White House direction, had organized and trained Cuban exiles to enter Cuba, foment anti-Castro sentiment, and ultimately overthrow the Cuban government. Originally intended by the Eisenhower Administration as a guerrilla operation, Zapata was supposed to operate within the parameters of NSC Directive 5412, that called in part for plausible U.S. deniability. However, in the Kennedy Administration, the operation grew in size and scope to include a full-scale military invasion ...

In large measure, the report blamed the operation's planners at the CIA's Directorate of Plans for not keeping the President fully informed as to the exact nature of the operation. However, the report also criticized the State Department, JCS, and the White House for acquiescing in the Zapata Plan, that "gave the impression to others of approving it" and for reviewing "successive changes of the plan piecemeal and only within a limited context, a procedure that was inadequate for a proper examination of all the military ramifications."

..... The lessons of Operation Zapata led the report to recommend six courses of action in the fields of planning, coordination, effectiveness, and responsibility in overall Cold War strategy. The report recommended the creation of a Strategic Resources Group (SRG) composed of representatives of under-secretarial rank from the CIA and the Departments of State and Defense. With direct access to the President, the SRG would act as a mechanism for the planning and coordination of overall Cold War strategy, including paramilitary operations. [13]

Michael Forrestal, the son of James Forrestal, the man who had been first U.S. Secretary of Defense (under Truman) played a role in the Kennedy Administration:

Kennedy chose a moment when the Secretaries of State and Defense and the CIA director were all out of Washington to launch his coup against Diem with the famous Cable of August 24 (the key document in the Pentagon Papers) to Lodge, and the responsible Cabinet officials all had subordinates sign off on the cable for them, so the coup in popular media lore came to be blamed on George Ball, Michael Forrestal, Averell Harriman, and Roger Hilsman, not on Kennedy.

Of all of the Kennedy deceptions the most dangerous was his proposal to Khrushchev, secret for thirty years, that the United States and the Soviet Union join forces to atom bomb China's nuclear facilities before they achieved the bomb. [14]

[JFK's] dad, a big donor to FDR and friend of Navy Secretary James Forrestal, got him into the Navy without a physicial examination, which he could not pass, going directly into Naval intelligence in Washington D.C. as an ensign after having been drafted and rejected for the Army. [15]