Presidents Have Little Control Over Their Governments

The Cuban Missile Crisis in October 1962 was a wake-up call for President John F. Kennedy and his Soviet counterpart, Nikita Khrushchev, General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.  Both leaders realized that the military competition between the two nuclear powers could end in the annihilation of both countries.

The table was set for ending the dangerous and unpredictable Cold War.  The Soviet Communist Party and the Russian people had had enough of a government in which not even the leaders of the Bolshevik Revolution had been safe.  On February 25, 1956, in a speech to a closed session of the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union titled “On the Cult of Personality and its Consequences,” Khrushchev had denounced the autocrat Stalin.  President Kennedy had just experienced the frightening situation where the US military/security complex was on the verge of starting a war with the Soviet Union without the President’s approval.

The Cuban Missile Crisis was resolved by Kennedy and Khrushchev working together without their warmongering officials.  The crisis was resolved by Khrushchev removing the Soviet missiles from Cuba in exchange for Kennedy’s promise to quietly remove the American missiles in Turkey six months later.

However, before the two leaders could end the Cold War, Kennedy was assassinated by the CIA and the Joint Chiefs of Staff for being soft on communism and threatening US national security and the power and budget of the US military/security complex.  Similarly, Khrushchev was removed by hard-line elements in the Politburo for his unwarranted trust of the capitalist power.  The Cold War resumed, and it was left to Reagan and Gorbachev to try again. Gorbachev paid for it by being placed under house arrest by hardline elements in the Politburo who thought he was liberalizing too quickly and trusting the West without securing ironclad security agreements.  It was Gorbachev’s arrest that brought down the Soviet Union.

Based on my experience in the Congressional staff and as a presidential appointee in the Reagan administration, I have on various occasions attempted to help Americans understand that the president is not all powerful and has little control over his administration.  Here are two of my most recent attempts to impart understanding to the American public:

https://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2025/09/24/america-a-lost-nation/

https://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2025/03/23/my-time-in-the-reagan-administration/

 

In this column I am going to use President John F. Kennedy as an example and allow him to tell you in his own words and to allow James W. Douglass to tell you in a passage from his book, JFK and the Unspeakable,  about Kennedy’s assassination how extremely difficult it is for a president to exercise control over his government.

Vietnam is the example.  Kennedy realized that Vietnam was a trap, that the military/security complex was ramping up a war that America could not win and would have difficulty extracting itself from, as many years later President Nixon and Henry Kissinger found.  Kennedy told Senator Mike Mansfield, Representative Tip O’Neill, US Marine Corps Commander General David M. Shoup, Senator Wayne Morse, and columnist Charles Bartlett that he had made the decision to pull US forces out of Vietnam before the Pentagon ramped up the war.  Kennedy told them that it would have to await until 1964 after his reelection. Kennedy said: “We don’t have a prayer of prevailing there. But I can’t give up a piece of territory like that to the Communists and then get the American people to reelect me.”

As James Douglass notes, “a mind needs hands to carry out its intentions. A president’s hands are his staff and extended government bureaucracy.” As Kennedy knew, when it came down to the nitty-gritty of carrying out his decision to end US involvement in Vietnam before it grew larger, his administration’s hands were resistant to doing what he wanted them to do, especially the Pentagon’s hands.  He also knew that in order to withdraw from Vietnam after he won re-election in the fall of 1964, he now had to inspire his aides to move the machinery for withdrawal that he had activated on October 11, 1963, with National security Action Memorandum 263.

The day before he left for Dallas where he was assassinated, he told one of his reluctant aides, Michael Forestal, that “I want to start a complete and very profound review of how we got into this country (Vietnam), what we thought we were doing, and what we now think we can do. I even want to think about whether or not we should be there.”

As Douglass says, “The president’s mind had to coax his government’s hands gently and circumspectly to get them to function as he wished.”  Instead, they killed him.

Nixon also wanted to get America out of Vietnam, and he and Kissinger faced the same problem that Kennedy did.  Nixon could not pull out, accept an American defeat, and win reelection.  Nixon desperately needed a face-saving negotiated settlement, but North Vietnam, realizing it had the winning hand, was uncooperative.  It was this frustration that led to the extension of violence to Laos and Cambodia. The American liberal-left has never made the slightest effort to understand the predicament that President Johnson’s expansion of the war presented for Nixon..

Nixon was already in trouble with the military/security complex.  He had opened to China, thus reducing that foreign threat, and he had negotiated the Strategic Arms Limitation talks (SALT I) agreement and the anti-ballistic missile treaty with the Soviet Union, thus curtailing those military expenditures and reopening a possible end of the profitable Cold War.  By this time there were many suspicions of the Warren Committee’s report on Kennedy’s assassination, and physical violence could not be used against Nixon.  Instead the CIA assassinated him politically by orchestrating the “Watergate scandal” that the Washington Post managed for the CIA.

I have reported my personal experience in the difficulty President Reagan had in getting his tax bill out of his own government and the difficulty he had in getting his government’s cooperation in ending the Cold War.

In American history there are endless explanations that serve agendas instead of the truth.  Republicans and Democrats, liberals and conservatives, will concoct narratives that are false in order to blame one another.  Ideologues produce narratives that advance their causes.  This has always been a problem.  However, it was greatly magnified by the Cold War era during which the communist enemy and the Israeli ally narratives were set in stone.  These narratives retain a strong influence over American minds, and, thereby, limit a president’s ability to deal with real problems.

 

Note:  As I have previously explained, when the CIA pulls off an event, the cover story is already written.  It is given to the media and becomes the official narrative before anyone has had a chance to think about what has happened.  Challenges to the official narrative are then dismissed as conspiracy theories. The CIA has several other cover stories ready for use if the original one wears thin.

I am aware of the explanations that the Mafia killed JFK, that Israel killed JFK, and so on.  These narratives are completely implausible.  None of these alternative assassins had the power to pull Kennedy’s Secret Service protection off his open limousine.  None had the power to get Jack Ruby inside the Dallas jail with a pistol so he could assassinate Oswald before Oswald could be interrogated.  None had the power to have the Joint Chiefs order military doctors to reconstruct Kennedy’s head so that the damage would correspond to the alleged shot from behind and to silence the Dallas doctors who knew the truth.  None had the power to prevent the Warren Commission from calling the witnesses whose evidence did not support the Warren Commission’s narrative.

Certainly Israel had a motive–Kennedy’s intent to stop Israel’s nuclear weapons development–but Israel did not have the power to turn the entire US government into a conspiracy to cover up Israel’s assassination of a US president.  Only the CIA and the Joint Chiefs had the power to cover up their assassination of Kennedy.

 

Source: https://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2025/09/28/presidents-have-little-control-over-their-governments/