JFK: The CIA, Vietnam, and the Plot to Assassinate John F. Kennedy

JFK: The CIA, Vietnam and the Plot to Assassinate John F. Kennedy (ISBN 978-0806517728) is a book by L. Fletcher Prouty who was a Washington insider for nearly 20 years. Made famous for being the origin of the anonymous "Mr. X", played by Donald Sutherland in the Oliver Stone movie JFK, who asks Jim Garrison to ponder why Kennedy was killed. The president, he claims, had angered the military-industrial establishment with his procurement policies and his determination to withdraw from Vietnam, and had threatened to break the CIA into "a thousand pieces" after the Bay of Pigs Invasion fiasco. The book speculates that President Kennedy's death was, in effect, a coup d'état that placed in the White House a very different man with a very different approach. A man much more acceptable to what Prouty consistently calls "the power elite."