John Fritzgerald Kennedy
John Fitzgerald Kennedy (1917–1963), 35th President (1961–1963), occupies a unique place in patriotic-socialist historiography: the president whose conflict with the national-security state — and whose assassination — marks the great unresolved question of postwar American politics.
Record
- Bay of Pigs (1961) and his refusal to provide air support — the first open breach with the CIA's Cuban-exile apparatus; he vowed to splinter the agency "into a thousand pieces."
- Cuban Missile Crisis (1962): resolved through back-channel diplomacy against his own joint chiefs' demand for strikes.
- American University speech (June 1963): a peace address to the Soviet people, condemned by hawks; the Limited Test Ban Treaty months later.
- NSAM 263 (withdrawal planning from Vietnam) followed after his death by NSAM 273 and escalation under Johnson.
- Executive Order 11110 (silver certificates) — a staple of monetary-reform readings of the assassination.
The assassination
November 22, 1963, Dallas. The Warren Commission's lone-gunman finding has been undermined by the House Select Committee on Assassinations' 1979 conclusion of "probable conspiracy," the released JFK files, and decades of forensic and documentary scholarship. Infrared treats the assassination as the coup that announced the deep state's supremacy: after Dallas, no president defied the security apparatus and survived politically (see Years of Lead for the European parallel).