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Battling Wall Street : The Kennedy Presidency

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This is Number 2 of three books crucial to understanding how the US political system functions. Donald Gibson has eschewed the ordinary analyses of JFK's administration, preferring to examine the statements and policies which were planned and/or implemented. He compares primary source materials with media sources to compile a very clear picture of President Kennedy's goals for this country. An elitist himself, JFK never intended to dismantle the ruling class or the military-industrial complex. It was his intention to accelerate a plan of steady, stable economic growth keyed to technological research and development. Kennedy firmly believed in the ability of technology to solve the world's thorny problems and to raise the standards of living for all Americans. This view definitely extended to foreign relations, where President Kennedy favored a more diplomatic rather than exploitative approach to Third World nations, many of which were then teetering between defecting to the Communists or facing invasion by US military forces. Gibson describes how the entrenched powers of old and new money arrayed themselves against JFK, including the J.P. Morgan group, the Luce press, Life magazine, the Wall Street Journal, etc. The author presents an analysis of the US Steel crisis early in JFK's presidency. [USS and JFK committed themselves publicly to a freeze on steel prices as a boost to the economy; then USS executives publicly reneged, a move certain to discredit the President.] JFK's disdain for military and black operations is mentioned. Gibson establishes that President Kennedy entered the White House with a clear, cogent, and practical plan to decrease the gap between rich and poor and raise everyone's living standard. The established media of the time pilloried him for this. The reader is left to decide for himself how much this factor contributed to motivating JFK's assassination on November 22, 1963.

"Battling Wall Street: The Kennedy Presidency" is great reading for people who want to move beyond books about the mechanics of the Kennedy assassination. The book helps explain why the "Eastern establishment" and a lot of other influential people, might want to get rid of President Kennedy. Another book, "History Will Not Absolve Us : Orwellian Control, Public Denial, & the Murder of President Kennedy" provides additional pieces of the puzzle by explaining how the American establishment, including leading establishment liberals like Noam Chomsky and Alexander Cockburn, have worked to sell the Warren Commision's 'lone gunman' cover-up. The amazing thing about the Kennedy assassination is that, despite a lot of nonsense coming from the mainstream media, the American people know it wasn't a lone gunman and the killers didn't do us a favor.

In 1989 a book was published called "Crossfire", in which Texas-based journalist Jim Marrs reviewed most of the information he thought was then available concerning the JFK assassination. A large part of the book dealt with those people and groups whom he thought were the most likely to have killed Kennedy. Allen Dulles and his CIA were included in his list.
Donald Gibson has added one more suspect to this list in this book, and it would appear to this reader that someone has finally made sense of the events of November 22, 1963.
From this one book alone, one could seriously accept the idea that the eastern establishment, the Wall Street crowd, the corporate elite and all their connections had the most to lose with Kennedy as president. They had the motive and means to kill the president and then to cover it up. Gibson flatly states the establishment and the CIA's interests were intertwined. In fact, the CIA was merely the enforcer for the Council on Foreign Relations global agenda. Both Allen Dulles and John J McCloy were extremely important members of the Council, who managed to land on the Warren Commission and lead the cover-up. In fact, a case could be built that they organized the plot. All they needed was the green light from someone in the inner circle of the Rockefeller-dominated Council, like one of the Rockefellers.

this book helped give me a whole new meaningful perspective on the kennedy assasination..it sifts through all the misinformation, and the same tired trashy expose type books on the kennedy presidency that don't give any meaningful information, i am much more interested in a president's policies economic and otherwise as opposed to his sex life...i highly reccommend that anyone interested in politics, economics, or the kennedy assasination read this book twice and very slowly. gibson lays everything out clearly in an easy to understand way, i highly reccomend this book.

In reviewing the thoughts of most researchers of the JFK assassination, one sees that most of them invariably bring up the Cuba issue, and occasionally Lee Harvey Oswald's possible involvement with this issue.
Now, however, in this book, Professor Donald Gibson may have uncovered the real issues behind the death of President Kennedy. He reveals so many issues, in fact, that one has to begin to decide which one is the crucial one, the one that provoked the conspirators to decide to kill him.

The death of Kennedy seems to this observer of the American scene a resolution of the struggle of the two forces to decide who really rules America. Since people who run the government colluded with the murderers of the president, it's pretty obvious who really runs the show.
Readers of this book may want to try Gibson's second book, "The Kennedy Assassination Cover-Up". After forty years, Americans should want a reasonable answer to the question of who killed Kennedy. Gibson may provide the answer.

This book is a great read. The subject matter is interesting and thought provoking. I had the privilage of having Prof. Gibson in class. His knowledge is vast and inspiring. His passion has motivated me not only in the college realm but in life itself.

After reading "Battling Wall Street", I had a eureka moment that the exact date of the downfall of the Republic of the United States of America was November 23, 1963. Gibson clarifies that JFK was not shallow, nor a mere playboy( though Jack liked women indeed, indeed), nor was he a Wall Street Democrat like his dear old dad. Rather, Kennedy tried to continue the work of that Great Man - Franklin Delano Roosevelt - both economically and in foreign affairs that had lapsed under Truman and Ike, and definitely the New Deal Spirit died with the men who followed him into the Oval Office following his murder.
JFK was not a globalist, but rather an economic nationalist who wanted to have an economy that benefited the utilitarian well-being of all the American people, not just the barons of speculative finance; Kennedy had an abiding distrust of the international banking edifice that did nothing but rip-off the people in the First, Second and Third Worlds of planet Earth, and he was shortly putting the process in gear for abolition of the unconstitutional Federal Reserve to give back the currency to the American people.
MUST read for both JFK enthusiasts and his downers. It drives the mind to sorrow how much tragedy America could had avoided, perhaps, if Kennedy would had been allowed a second term in office and perhaps we today would had never heard of the specious term *NeoCon*(?).