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A review by bennyandthejets420
The Devil's Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA, and the Rise of America's Secret Government by David Talbot
3.0
There are a couple ways to take this book and the general idea of the idea that the CIA killed Kennedy.
1) Completely reject it. The arguments here are familiar and generally run the gamut from "someone would have said something" (which Talbot spends a paragraph on) to "the CIA can't even do X do you think they could assassinate Kennedy?" Talbot doesn't spend much time trying to convince you. He assumes that if you're here, you're at least open to the idea of learning more about the subject. As such, Talbot's hand here is one of arrangement. He presents motives, players, histories, and associations in a measured, careful way and leaves you to draw your own conclusions, a rhetorical approach I found a bit underwhelming. He doesn't really address any embedded criticisms nor does he outline any orienting approaches to the subject. In fact, there's not a whole lot to answer the idea of "why you should care." He frames his book as "the facts that are." This leads to the second approach.
2) Accept it, but don't really do anything about it. Honestly, what can you do? If one spends any time reading stuff like Thomas Pynchon or watching any of the movies from the post Watergate or really just grappling with the enormity of the idea that a rogue branch of the US government, employing thousands of people with an overhead of millions if not billions of dollars, assassinated a sitting president, one gets the impression that it's hopeless. I am reminded of the real truth of a movie like Chinatown, which basically comes down to "there's nothing you can do to stop the cycle of exploitation, violence, and abuse. If you do try to fight it, you'll just end up hurting someone you love and the cycle will continue unabated." So, you just kind of accept it and move on. If you spend any time engaging with serious Kennedy researchers or serious researchers regarding deep state, or deep politics, it is this conclusion that they are most afraid of. That people accept the truth of what happened and just decide to ignore it. Their alternative is that real truth about the CIA's involvement in American life and the ability they have to move unsupervised would lead to a kind of political uprising, much like the opinion of some close followers of the murder of Jeffrey Epstein. But no such political uprising appears to be on the way. This leads to the third approach.
3) Become a Kennedy investigator yourself. This is the approach Talbot clearly favors. One of the rare bits of overt editorializing (rather than implicit, like his choice of sources and presentation) occurs on page 494 when Talbot is describing the lead up to Kennedy's assassination in Dallas. Worth quoting in full:
This is the closest Talbot gets to showing his full hand, which is namely: that the American press establishment pales in comparison to valiant independent researchers and that you, yes you Reader, should do the same. In this he does get something completely right, that the press establishment is unextractably embroiled in corporate interests and so cannot be relied upon for the Truth in these cases. But this approach also suggests, that while there may be no smoking gun to this whole thing, one can arrive at a sort of truth by practice, one can rifle through sources, draw connections, disprove official statements enough that the truth becomes manifest through habit. If you watch the Oliver Stone documentary that came out recently (either 2 or 4 hour version, the four version goes into detail on evidence contradictory to the Warren Commission which Talbot summarizes in, like, a single paragraph) that's the impression you come away with. These people believe in this truth through finding it out for themselves and by telling you about it. I find that kernel of knowledge to be rather fascinating. In the absence of a kind of revolutionary politics that stems from the mass reveal of destabilizing truth, the most we can hope for is a kind of individualized revolution of habits wherein people decide the truth for themselves.
1) Completely reject it. The arguments here are familiar and generally run the gamut from "someone would have said something" (which Talbot spends a paragraph on) to "the CIA can't even do X do you think they could assassinate Kennedy?" Talbot doesn't spend much time trying to convince you. He assumes that if you're here, you're at least open to the idea of learning more about the subject. As such, Talbot's hand here is one of arrangement. He presents motives, players, histories, and associations in a measured, careful way and leaves you to draw your own conclusions, a rhetorical approach I found a bit underwhelming. He doesn't really address any embedded criticisms nor does he outline any orienting approaches to the subject. In fact, there's not a whole lot to answer the idea of "why you should care." He frames his book as "the facts that are." This leads to the second approach.
2) Accept it, but don't really do anything about it. Honestly, what can you do? If one spends any time reading stuff like Thomas Pynchon or watching any of the movies from the post Watergate or really just grappling with the enormity of the idea that a rogue branch of the US government, employing thousands of people with an overhead of millions if not billions of dollars, assassinated a sitting president, one gets the impression that it's hopeless. I am reminded of the real truth of a movie like Chinatown, which basically comes down to "there's nothing you can do to stop the cycle of exploitation, violence, and abuse. If you do try to fight it, you'll just end up hurting someone you love and the cycle will continue unabated." So, you just kind of accept it and move on. If you spend any time engaging with serious Kennedy researchers or serious researchers regarding deep state, or deep politics, it is this conclusion that they are most afraid of. That people accept the truth of what happened and just decide to ignore it. Their alternative is that real truth about the CIA's involvement in American life and the ability they have to move unsupervised would lead to a kind of political uprising, much like the opinion of some close followers of the murder of Jeffrey Epstein. But no such political uprising appears to be on the way. This leads to the third approach.
3) Become a Kennedy investigator yourself. This is the approach Talbot clearly favors. One of the rare bits of overt editorializing (rather than implicit, like his choice of sources and presentation) occurs on page 494 when Talbot is describing the lead up to Kennedy's assassination in Dallas. Worth quoting in full:
Those resolute voices in American public life that continue to deny the existence of a conspiracy to kill President Kennedy argue that "someone would have talked." This line of reasoning is often used by journalists who have made no effort themselves to closely inspect the growing body of evidence and have not undertaken any of their own investigative reporting. The argument betrays a touchingly naive media bias--a belief that the American press establishment itself, that great slumbering watchdog, could be counted on to solve such a monumental crime, one that sprung from the very system of governance of which corporate media is an essential part. The official version of the Kennedy assasination--despite its myriad improbabilities, which have only grown more inconceivable over time--remains firmly embedded in the media consciousness as unquestioned as the law of gravity.
This is the closest Talbot gets to showing his full hand, which is namely: that the American press establishment pales in comparison to valiant independent researchers and that you, yes you Reader, should do the same. In this he does get something completely right, that the press establishment is unextractably embroiled in corporate interests and so cannot be relied upon for the Truth in these cases. But this approach also suggests, that while there may be no smoking gun to this whole thing, one can arrive at a sort of truth by practice, one can rifle through sources, draw connections, disprove official statements enough that the truth becomes manifest through habit. If you watch the Oliver Stone documentary that came out recently (either 2 or 4 hour version, the four version goes into detail on evidence contradictory to the Warren Commission which Talbot summarizes in, like, a single paragraph) that's the impression you come away with. These people believe in this truth through finding it out for themselves and by telling you about it. I find that kernel of knowledge to be rather fascinating. In the absence of a kind of revolutionary politics that stems from the mass reveal of destabilizing truth, the most we can hope for is a kind of individualized revolution of habits wherein people decide the truth for themselves.