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Martyrs to the Unspeakable

By John Ketwig (reviewer)

Martyrs to the Unspeakable: The Assassinations of JFK, Malcolm, Martin, and RFK
by James W. Douglass
(Orbis Books, 2025)

In the fall 2018 issue of The Veteran, I reviewed Jim Douglass's landmark book JFK and the Unspeakable, and suggested that it might be the most important book I had ever read.

A lot has happened since I wrote that review. My library has grown significantly, with 78 books on the JFK assassination, and another 19 about the murders of the other three. Over the years, I have communicated with Jim Douglass by telephone and e-mail, but for the past 7 years, he has been inaccessible while working on his latest book. In 2019, I had a speaking engagement near Atlanta, and we took the opportunity to drive to Birmingham, Alabama, and have dinner with Douglass and his wife, Shelley. Their hospitality was exemplary, and the conversation ranged across a broad swath of historical topics. Soon after, he went to work on "the new book." In January of this year, that book was finally available, and it is not the slightest bit disappointing.

JFK and the Unspeakable is one of, if not the most respected, of the many books about that terrible day in Dallas. It is researched in exquisite detail and thoroughly documented. While researching that book, Douglass came across a variety of tidbits about the other three murders. He became convinced that all four of the landmark assassinations had been planned, orchestrated, and carried out by a conspiracy/cartel involving the CIA, FBI, top military leadership, including the Joint Chiefs of Staff, top government officials, and an assortment of top figures in America's "Mafia," or organized crime. Key players were certainly Alan Dulles, former Director of the CIA until he was fired by JFK following the disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba, a few months after Kennedy became President, the infamous Director of the FBI, J. Edgar Hoover, and Air Force General Lyman Lemnitzer, Chief of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. JFK replaced Lemnitzer with Air Force General Curtis Lemay, another strident warmonger.

It is important to keep in mind that JFK took office in January 1961, just 16 years after the end of World War II. In those few years, the Soviet Union had evolved from our ally against Hitler's Nazis to a bitter enemy. Alan Dulles and his brother, Secretary of State John Foster, had gained enormous influence in Washington, and their focus on the Soviet Union's ambitions was largely responsible for the Cold War. The Soviet Union had played a major role in defeating the Nazis, engaging the Germans from the East in a campaign that cost approximately 26 million Soviet deaths. The Soviet attack from the East actually reached Berlin before the Americans from the West. Throughout World War II, the Dulles brothers had acted as "fences," helping the Nazis unload millions of dollars' worth of captured art and jewelry to buyers throughout Europe and America. When the war ended, they conspired (with Operation Paperclip) to get more than 1,600 top Nazis pardoned for their war crimes and welcomed to America to help with our enormous military buildup and space program.

After Hiroshima and Nagasaki, America was considered the most powerful military on the planet, and our top military leaders wanted to use our nuclear weapons to take control of the world. Lyman Lemnitzer had urged a series of American presidents to bomb Fidel Castro's communist Cuba, along with Berlin, Moscow, and ultimately, Beijing. Estimates at that time predicted that a nuclear war would result in as many as 500 million immediate deaths around the planet, a terrifying number that led the prospects of nuclear war to become known as MAD, or mutually assured destruction. America's "experts" thought that we would win a nuclear exchange, and they were perfectly comfortable with the possibility that only one American might survive, making us the winners if our weapons were able to wipe out the entire population of the Soviet Union.

John Kennedy became President in January of 1961. His predecessor, "Ike" Eisenhower, had briefed him, insisting that Laos was targeted by "the communists" (the Soviet Union and Communist China) and if Laos became communist, all of Southeast Asia would fall "like dominoes." Kennedy initiated a conversation with Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev, and Khrushchev agreed that no one would benefit from a war in Laos. They negotiated a solution that allowed Laos to be governed by a neutral coalition of democratic and communist tribal leaders. The CIA and Joint Chiefs were appalled! At the same time, the top warmongers in the CIA and Pentagon informed JFK of plans to invade Cuba, a fledgling communist experiment just 90 miles from Florida. The generals expected Kennedy to authorize American air support for the invasion, and he refused. The invasion at the Bay of Pigs lasted about three days, and the invaders were either killed or taken prisoner. The Joint Chiefs of Staff, headed by Air Force Generals Lyman Lemnitzer and Curtis Lemay, along with CIA Director Alan Dulles, were astounded, and they became obsessed with eliminating John Kennedy and his brother Robert, the Attorney General.

In October of 1961, Khrushchev ordered a wall built to separate the democratic and communist areas of Berlin, Germany's largest city. General LeMay urged the President to nuke Berlin and Moscow. General Lucius Clay ordered American tanks to challenge the construction, and suddenly American and Soviet tanks were 100 yards apart in the middle of the divided city. Kennedy contacted Khrushchev through a diplomatic liaison; there was a secret exchange of letters, and the two tank armies simultaneously withdrew. Kennedy and Khrushchev began a top-secret correspondence that probably saved the world.

In April of 1962, our U2 spy planes revealed that the Soviets were installing nuclear missiles in Cuba, just 90 miles from Florida. Of course, the warmongers wanted to nuke both Berlin and Moscow. Khrushchev removed the missiles from Cuba, and Kennedy promised that the US would not invade or attack Fidel Castro's fledgling communist regime. The secret correspondence between the two leaders probably saved planet Earth from an all-out nuclear war. The warmongers were outraged!

It should be pointed out that Khrushchev was removed from office just nine months after Kennedy was assassinated in November 1963. Within three days of the JFK assassination, President Lyndon Johnson reversed JFK's orders to begin withdrawing American personnel from Vietnam, and he deployed American combat troops to Vietnam in the Spring of 1965. Although Douglass does not write about it in any detail in either book, within two weeks of LBJ's announcement that he was sending those combat troops to Vietnam, a summit meeting of the top organized crime heads from around the world met in Saigon and agreed to divide up the oncoming financial pie in a manner that would avoid stepping upon each other's toes.

When John F. Kennedy was assassinated in November 1963, I was a junior in high school. Everyone was shocked by the death of our youngest and most personable President ever. Over the years, we have heard snippets of information that convinced the majority of Americans that the assassination had been the work of a conspiracy. Throughout this period, African Americans were taking action to demand their civil rights. This rebellion began in the segregated South and spread throughout the country. A young, outspoken radical had changed his name to Malcolm X, a symbol of his conversion to Islam. At first, he was a disciple of Elijah Muhammad, head of the Nation of Islam, or NOI. Malcolm had a different vision, and he traveled throughout Africa, where a surprising majority of leaders heeded his call to cooperate and work together to advance the Black race. Malcolm envisioned an international movement that would include American blacks, and he wanted to go to the United Nations and have the US formally charged with illegal discrimination. He was subjected to intense surveillance and harassment, orchestrated by the FBI but made to look like a result of a power struggle within the Nation of Islam. He was assassinated in New York City on February 15, 1965.

The Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. had become the primary spokesman and activist of the civil rights, or human rights, movement. On April 4, 1967, his "Beyond Vietnam" speech at Riverside Church in New York declared that "the greatest purveyor of violence in the world" was the American government. Linking the terribly unpopular war in Vietnam with the violence happening in America's ghettos made King a hated enemy of many government officials, most notably J. Edgar Hoover, the Director of the FBI. Exactly one year later, King was assassinated in Memphis. Like JFK's murder in Dallas had involved Lee Harvey Oswald, a very elaborate plot had painted James Earl Ray as the assassin. James Douglass documents interviews with several witnesses who relate far different stories, all carefully documented. His book will convince you that Martin Luther King was actually murdered by a mysterious man named Raul, with the help of the FBI.

And then, of course, Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated in Los Angeles on June 5, 1968. President Lyndon Johnson hated the Kennedys, and so did J. Edgar Hoover. Another patsy, Sirhan Sirhan, was convicted of the killing, but he stood in front of RFK and about three feet away, while the shot that killed the Senator was fired from about three inches behind his ear.

Martyrs to the Unspeakable is an amazing, impressive book. Jim Douglass has tirelessly and methodically found and interviewed so many of the participants in these interwoven stories, and the documents that are threads skillfully combined to create a colorful, frightening cloak of secrecy and sabotage that obscured the truth and misled the American people. All I can do here is scratch the surface. The assassinations set the stage for the history of the later 20th century, a history that directly involved every member of VVAW. To repeat that word, the conspiracies were interwoven by an unscrupulous cartel of traitors who would do anything, and murder anyone, in their pursuit of wealth and power.

JFK and the Unspeakable is the most important book I have ever read, and Martyrs to the Unspeakable is a close second. It is an amazing and frightening piece of work, a portrait of America in decline, and the cast of characters who have been behind the most treacherous and evil events of our history. This book, and Jim Douglass's tireless work, will only have their due value if you read this book. If you do, I promise you will tell your friends about it as enthusiastically as I have just done here.

John Ketwig is a lifetime member of VVAW, and the author of ? and a hard rain fell: A G.I.'s True Story of the War in Vietnam and Vietnam Reconsidered: The War, the Times, and Why They Matter.