Deep State, JFK’s Death & Ike’s Farewell

Did JFK's assassination & the alleged “Benign Coverup” give rise to belief in a Deep State of shadowy bureaucrats running the USA? Or, were those conspiratorial seeds planted by President Ike’s warning about a “Military Industrial Complex”?

The recent WSJ story was pretty set on the death of JFK & the CIA’s ham hocked investigation as being the chief catalyst for today’s belief in the Deep State. It summed up renewed interest in the topic thanks to a cache of 82,864 pages released by the Trump Administration that supposedly “lay bare the extent to which the CIA tried to hide what it knew from the very day Kennedy was shot, and how its clumsy efforts fed dangerous suspicions about the agency and the nature of the American government. As waves of hysteria shook the country in the aftermath of the assassination, the story” behind the story “took on a life of its own.”

Agreed, “As a series of investigations proceeded, CIA officials would give wildly divergent accounts … leading a small part of the public to consider an idea that had previously been nearly taboo in America: What if elements of the government itself conspired to take over?” Yet, even the wildest conspiracy theories need some official insight to establish a semblance of credibility. Might folks today but not alive at the time be reminded that President Eisenhower had eerily warned in his farewell Address on January 17, 1961: “In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the miliary-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.” Of course, Ike did not mention the CIA or FBI of 1961 let alone the ballooning federal bureaucracy of 2025. He most certainly wasn’t forecasting via premonition the Kennedy assassination. But, if ever the seeds of a conspiring Deep State were planted, wasn’t that farewell speech the real prime mover?

Davd Soul