The Conspiracy of the Century | Jim Douglas

## Welcome and four assassinations The arc of the 1960s American story can be read as a collision between two competing visions: one that sought to transform a great power into an engine of restraint and human rights, and another that resolved to preserve and expand the instruments of global violence. The conversation with Jim Douglass insists that four killings—John F. Kennedy, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr., and Robert F. Kennedy—aren’t isolated tragedies but part of a deliberate pattern. Together they form what Douglass calls a “conspiracy of the century”: a removal, one by one, of leaders who embodied a different kind of national purpose—one centered on de‑escalation, justice, and a break with the machinery that had come to define American power. These men were, in different registers, advocates of restraint. JFK had moved toward non‑proliferation and rapprochement with the Soviet Union; Malcolm X, in his final months, was speaking of brotherhood on an international stage; Martin Luther King had linked civil rights to an anti‑war, anti‑imperial moral stance; and RFK represented a political trajectory that might have fused domestic justice with an end to interventionist Cold War policies. Douglass emphasizes the notion of martyrdom as witness: each death was not merely the silencing of a personality, but the extinguishing of a political momentum that posed a systemic threat to an entrenched national security order. From this vantage, the four assassinations are consecutive beats in a single narrative—not identical conspiracies, but a shared objective to contain the rise of a peace assertion strong enough to alter U.S. policy. The historical timing sharpens the reading. Between 1963 and 1968 the United States was not only engaged in an increasingly unpopular war in Vietnam, but it was also wrestling internally with questions about who the nation served and at what moral cost. Douglass’s account invites readers to see the assassinations as interventions into that debate: each killing made it harder for successor leaders to embrace the same risks of confronting the national security apparatus and its global commitments. The result, he argues, was a trajectory in which successive presidents proved reluctant to exercise the moral courage those four men had modeled. ## CIA Angleton and cover scripts A crucial part of the conversation turns to the mechanics of how such removals were made intelligible to the public: scapegoats and cover stories. Douglass points to James Jesus Angleton, the CIA’s counterintelligence chief, as a figure who shaped official narratives around the deaths. Angleton’s career blended high intellect with a paranoid counterintelligence worldview; Douglass argues that the agency under his influence specialized not only in covert operations abroad but in producing tidy explanations at home—lone shooters, confused perpetrators, conspiracy‑free scripts that closed inquiries rather than opened them. What matters here is not only whether a single conspiratorial hierarchy orchestrated each assassination, but how intelligence structures cultivate plausible deniability and narrative control. The provision of prefigured scapegoats—individuals who could be presented as lone actors—served two functions simultaneously: it satisfied a need for closure in the public imagination and protected institutional continuity. Douglass reads the repeated pattern of such scapegoating as evidence of a systemic capacity to neutralize political threats without inviting full public scrutiny into the operations and motives of the security state. Beyond Angleton, the conversation maps a broader ecosystem: journalists who circulated official lines, legal and investigative processes that accepted limited explanations, and cultural habits of amnesia that ensure the dominant frame persists. Douglass does not claim every author of the cover stories sat in a single room; rather, he traces how an interlocking culture of secrecy and institutional interest generates outcomes that protect the deepening military‑intelligence complex. The cover scripts are not random; they are predictable artifacts of a system that privileges secrecy, coherence, and control over democratic transparency. ## Cold War peace and Kennedy diplomacy The clearest point of political rupture in Douglass’s narrative is John Kennedy’s late efforts to steer the United States away from escalatory Cold War logic. His American University speech, and his determination to pursue a nuclear test ban, are presented as watershed moments—instances when a sitting president publicly reframed the Soviet Union not purely as an immutable enemy but as a human polity that had borne immense costs in war. For Douglass, this rhetorical and diplomatic turn was not sentimental softness; it was a strategic reorientation toward a set of policies—arms control, dialogue, and de‑escalation—that threatened the institutional interests of the Pentagon and the CIA. The discussion highlights how Kennedy worked around institutional obstacles. By using intermediaries like Averell Harriman and engaging Khrushchev directly, he insulated sensitive diplomacy from obstruction by his own military and intelligence advisors. That very capacity to conduct independent foreign policy—particularly when it entailed recognizing shared interests with the Soviet Union—made him, in Douglass’s reading, uniquely vulnerable. The assassination becomes legible as a political act with international implications: eliminating not merely a leader but a model of presidential independence from the national security establishment. The possibility of a different American foreign policy—one less dependent on nuclear primacy and permanent preparation for war—was not a mere policy tweak. It implied a reordering of budgetary priorities, industrial interests, and global alliances. To the extent JFK and his brother mapped a course toward non‑proliferation and reconciliation, they were challenging the economic and bureaucratic incentives that had ossified around defense, intelligence, and intervention. For Douglass, this root cause helps explain why the assassinations had such a powerful dampening effect on subsequent administrations. ## Racism propaganda and violent ideas Douglass insists that the four assassinations cannot be fully understood without reckoning with the domestic ideological machinery that normalized violence—racialized and otherwise—within American society. The conversation points to how propaganda and institutional racism interacted with the security state to criminalize dissent and to frame civil‑rights and anti‑war activism as sources of disorder. Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, though different in style and doctrine, converged in their critique of American moral failure: both treated domestic injustice and foreign policy as part of the same behavioral pattern. The discussion explores how narratives about “violence” and “radicalism” were deployed selectively. Movements for inclusion, redistribution, and peace were too often cast as existential threats, enabling harsh policing responses and draconian legal measures. Douglass argues that the rhetorical and political delegitimization of peace‑oriented leaders made them easier targets for surveillance, infiltration, and ultimately, the violent acts that eliminated them. In this logic, patriotism and security become shells that silence questions about the costs of empire and the racial hierarchies that sustain it. Moreover, the cultural afterlife of the assassinations matters. When movements lose their charismatic leaders in quick succession, organizing capacity frays; a generation’s mobilization can be recalibrated from radical transformation to mitigation. Douglass places weight on the courage these figures demonstrated precisely because they knew the risks. Their deaths mattered not only because of who they were, but because of what they represented: a public imagination in which equa

The Conspiracy of the Century | Jim Douglas Four deaths, one goal: Maintaining the Empire of War. The killings of JFK, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr., and RFK removed the men who wanted to change the nation into a force for peace and restraint. I sit down with author and peace activist Jim Douglass to trace the pattern and the stakes. Links: Jim Douglass books at Orbis Books: https://orbisbooks.com/products/martyrs-to-the- unspeakable-vol-2 Jim Douglass writings archive at Ratical: https://www.ratical.org/ Neutrality Studies substack: https://pascallottaz.substack.com Opt in for Academic Section from your profile settings: https://pascallottaz.substack.com/s/academic Merch & Donations: https://neutralitystudies- shop.fourthwall.com Timestamps: 00:00:00 Welcome and four assassinations 00:03:11 Dates scapegoats and blame 00:05:13 CIA Angleton and cover scripts 00:14:05 Deep machinery of US power 00:20:21 Cold War peace and Kennedy diplomacy 00:26:10 Hiroshima to Iran war logic and profit 00:35:43 Racism propaganda and violent ideas 00:45:14 Poor People’s Campaign and courage now 01:00:45 Conclusion #Pascal Welcome back to Neutrality Studies. My name is Pascal Lottaz. I'm an associate professor at Kyoto University, and today I'm joined by a very fascinating author to talk about his book. With me is Jim Douglas, the author of *Martyrs to the Unspeakable: The Assassinations of JFK, Malcolm, Martin, and RFK.* The book is a heartbreaking look at the four assassinations that defined 1960s America and, arguably, world affairs for decades. Jim, welcome. #Jim Douglas Thank you, Pascal. It's wonderful to be here with you. #Pascal It's great having you here, and I'm very happy that we can talk about your work. On the one hand, we'll, of course, look at the book, and the first question I have is why these four assassinations are so important in your view. But we also said we're going to make this a dialogue, so I'll let you explain a little about the four assassinations, and then we'll go back and forth. So please, tell me about the four assassinations and why those four are so important to you. #Jim Douglas Wow, they've changed my life—Dr. King's especially. And I think our failure as a country—I'm talking about the USA right now—is that we're basically an amnesia nation. When it comes to John F. Kennedy and his assassination, which was the foundation for killing the other three, that was the -- 1 of 17 -- stifling of a movement for change that could have turned the United States of America around, and with it, the rest of the world to a large extent, because of the power of this terrible, terrible force in the country—the Pentagon, the CIA, the National Security Agency, the whole works. And I like to see the theme, especially through Malcolm's eyes, because he's the one who's generally dismissed as the really hard-nosed, violent character of the bunch. Two days before his death, he said, “It's a time for martyrs now. And if I'm to be one, it will be in the cause of brotherhood. That's the only thing that can save this country and the world.” Martyrdom means witness. It means witness to what? I think all four of these were profoundly committed to a single, unified humanity— one that could live in peace and justice with the rest of humanity. And that's the whole story right there. #Pascal Can you just give me a quick recap of the years—who died when? JFK, of course, before RFK, but was it Malcolm who was assassinated before Martin Luther King? Can you remind me of the years again? #Jim Douglas Yeah. JFK, November 22, 1963. Malcolm X, February 21, 1965—so only a week ago was the anniversary. And, excuse me, Martin Luther King—April 4, 1968. Then only two months later, Robert Kennedy, on June 5—actually just 15 minutes into June 5. It was June 4 that he won the California primary. He would have gone on, as he said, to Chicago—“let’s win there.” He would have gone on to the Democratic Convention, won that nomination, and he would have beaten Richard Nixon, whom he could deal with quite well. He knew how to defeat him. So we would have had a different president of the United States had he not been assassinated—had Martin Luther King not been assassinated. If just the two of them had lived, he would have been in union with Martin Luther King, who was committed to helping him in any way he could, just as RFK had helped Martin Luther King. They were very close in vision at the end. #Pascal So we’re talking about five, six very important years in U.S. history, right? These were violent years that also saw, of course, the Vietnam War and these political assassinations—assassinations of people who inspired a lot of America, right? I mean, do we know today, by now, who is responsible for these assassinations? Because all of them are still shrouded in mystery. I mean, JFK first and foremost, right? #Jim Douglas -- 2 of 17 -- Yes and no. The assassinations, when they were happening, all had a scenario that was being followed—just like a movie. This is out there in a lot of people's research, not just mine. In the case of each of the four, there was a scapegoat, very carefully provided by the U.S. government—and specifically, in at least three of those cases, I would say actually all four—by the head of counterintelligence of the CIA, who in those years was a man named James Jesus Angleton. I say “Jesus” with emphasis because he had a Mexican mother who revered Jesus and gave him that name. He was a very brilliant analyst from Yale, who in 1941 created a poetry magazine called *Furioso*, in which he had the leading poets of the United States joining him. Now, that man, who had a brilliant understanding of language, used it in the opposite direction as director of counterintelligence at the CIA, and also during World War II when he was working for the OSS—the predecessor to the CIA. So you’ve got, um, these people—I identified the three main characters in the first chapter of the book, which is called *From Dimona to Resurrection City*. And Dimona is the nuclear reactor of the State of Israel. Beneath it—the “bomb in the basement”—the levels below are where the preparations for the nuclear weapon were made, the one they still don’t formally acknowledge. They’ve got a couple hundred of them at least. And the entire process is a system extending between the U.S. and, heavily, Israel—one of nine what I call “nuclear extinction nations.” They're nations committed to maintaining a nuclear weapons stockpile. And the worst—because it initiated the entire process—is the country I live in now and am a citizen of, and that's the USA. As Dr. King said in his Riverside Church address, which explains why he was committed both to stopping the Vietnam War and later to launching the Poor People's Campaign—exactly one year to the day before his assassination—he said, “The greatest purveyor of violence in the world today is my own government.” He didn’t say “the U.S. government.” He accepted responsibility for it as his own government. And I think that’s what we all have to do, those of us in this country right now. We have to accept responsibility for that, and for every other country that’s complicit in these weapons. And I’d say a lot of them are, to a very heavy degree. #Pascal Hey, very brief intermission because I was recently banned from YouTube. And although I'm back, this could happen again at any time. So please consider subscribing not only here, but also to my mailing list on Substack. That’s pascallottaz.substack.com. The link will be in the description below. #Jim Douglas And now, back to the video. #Pascal -- 3 of 17 -- Yes. And, you know, nuclear proliferation is, of course, one of the greatest threats to humanity. We had a couple of successes down the road with the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, first and foremost, because that one created a regime that kind of—well, it couldn’t put the genie back in the bottle, but it could at least make sure things wouldn’t go as horribly as we thought they might. It took ten years to negotiate that. And that’s, luckily, the international treaty we still have, even now that a lot of the nuclear weapons bilateral treaties between the U.S. and Russia are gone. But do you—because in your book you go into a great many details, but you also look at the overall picture of what these four assassinations meant—is it, for you, that the main storyline of these four is actually about, first and foremost, the violence of the United States, including against its own citizens and its own leaders? Or is it about the system it creates together with these instruments of war, these instruments of Armageddon, at this point? #Jim Douglas Well, you've just described two sides of one half of the story, as I understand it. But the other half is what is meant to sustain us. And that is, I think, the very—well, the *coraggio*. We use that word very specifically: the courage. If you talk in theological terms, you’d probably say grace. But the power is in the example of these four who knew grace—that what they were doing would result in their deaths. They were not naive, not at all. And just like Malcolm said two days before his death, he anticipated that he would die in the cause of brotherhood. JFK, you know, when he was deceived profoundly by the Central Intelligence Agency and manipulated in the Bay of Pigs invasion, said, “I want to splinter the CIA into a thousand pieces and scatter it to the winds.” Now, when the president of the United States says that about his own Central Intelligence Agency— which he said to a chief advisor—of course, everything he did was recorded by them as well as by himself. That did not bode well for his future. Not at all. Not at all. And when Robert Kennedy’s— well, the way I view it, and I think the way it was in the Kennedy assassination process—the two Kennedys were serial assassinations. I mean, if you kill one, you have to kill the other, because he’s going to do exactly the same thing, especially when he’s running for president. If he becomes president, as he was going to be, he was given exactly fifteen minutes—from the time when he, you know, was on that path by winning the California primary until he was shot. And that was it—he died the next day. Fifteen minutes. That’s a message to every subsequent person who runs for that office, and they’ve taken that message seriously. None of them have had the courage to be a non-proliferation president, which is exactly what John Kennedy was. He was committed to that non-proliferation treaty. He and Robert Kennedy aren’t given credit by most of the writers on it. They were profoundly committed to that process, and the nuclear test ban treaty was a direct help to it. That process resulted in their assassinations, and I think other presidents haven’t had the kind of courage to do that same sort of speaking truth to the power of their own worst government in the history of the world. And it didn’t happen just with Mr. Trump coming to power. -- 4 of 17 -- #Pascal No, but, you know, this is one of the questions that’s been on my mind for so long. The United States—not as governed by the Republicans or the Democrats, but as a political system, including the CIA, the FBI, the security services—the fact that those two things cannot be audited by Congress, the fact that the Pentagon hasn’t passed a single audit in the last four or five years, disregarding the fact that before that we didn’t even have an audit. You know, all the ways in which the political system works in the shadows. I mean, we have now, in U.S. political discourse, the expression “the deep state,” but I think the deep state is kind of a bad way of imagining it, because it’s not, in that sense, like deep and a swamp. It’s more like interlocking wheels that make the entire thing run, which, in my view, also goes back— must go back—to the way the United States was born and then expanded from thirteen little colonies on the East Coast to