Interviewer: The motive behind the Kennedy assassination had to do with the sort of monumental policy changes that he was about to effect and that, could you give us sort of a characterization of who, in general terms, you think was responsible for this?

FP: Well, that's a good way to put it. There's no way in a brief period, I've done it as best I can through the book, to explain that when Kennedy became president, when the first moves he made, he gave McNamara orders to hold up on the TFX contract. Everybody kind of forget that, but that was a very advanced fighter plane contract worth $6.5 billion in 1961 money, which is a big contract. That's only letting the contract. They usually run 10 times that through what we call life of type. That was big money. They held up the contract, and finally, by a specialized system that McNamara and Arthur Goldberg, the Secretary of Labor, set up, they allocated the contract to a company that had created an area of subcontracting throughout the country in the political counties where Kennedy needed the vote most. Remember, Kennedy got elected by the skin of his teeth. So, where he had beaten Nixon by only a few votes, well, put a little factory there. Where Nixon had beaten him a little bit, put a bigger factory there. And they had it spread. It was a beautiful plan. It took walls of the Pentagon covered with these maps.

And then McNamara on the 23rd of November 1962 allocated that contract. Well, in the halls of the Pentagon, you couldn't hear a civil word. I mean, this was Kennedy, that, goddamn Kennedy, this because everybody knew that the contract was going to the contractor that the Eisenhower administration had set up. Things like that create pressures saying he is not going to put Americans in Vietnam. That war ran to a minimum cost of $220 billion, probably all up $500 billion. People will kill for money like that. They'll kill for contracts within that. Ten million men were flown to Saigon by commercial airline. It was worth a billion dollars.They wouldn't have gone. So, when you create that kind of pressure, you create what it takes to murder a president. And the decision then is very clean, handled by a few people. The gunmen come from outside the United States. Nobody knows about it. There's no Cubans involved. There's no mafia involved. There's no this involved. All these people that talk about it, that's a cover story. A cover story is the most difficult thing to run. That's been running 30 years now.

And think of the pressures that cover story has been creating over the last 30 years to keep it up front, to have really famous, intelligent newspaper men say, there's no substantive history, anything except that Oswald killed Kennedy, and so on and so on. So, I mean, it's a cover story. It's ridiculous. The American Medical Association trotted these poor old autopsy people out and were saying, oh, well, now the bullet went this way and went through Kennedy, he came out of his neck, of course, and went down into Connelly, broke his wrist right through his head. Right, exactly. You know, a cover story is a terrible thing to create. Murder is simple. Just a little scaffolding to do it. I hate to break off at this point.

And where can Phoenix be found today? Wherever governments of the left or the right use military and security forces to enforce their ideologies under the aegis of antiterrorism. Look for Phoenix wherever police checkpoints ring major cities, wherever paramilitary police units patrol in armored cars, and wherever military forces are conducting counterinsurgent operations. Look for Phoenix wherever emergency decrees are used to suspend due process, wherever dissidents are interned indefinitely in detention camps, and wherever dissidents are rounded up and deported. Look for Phoenix wherever security forces use informants to identify dissidents, wherever security forces keep files and computerized blacklists on dissidents, wherever security forces conduct secret investigations and surveillance on dissidents, wherever security forces, or thugs in their hire, harass and murder dissidents, and wherever such activities go unreported by the press. But most of all, look for Phoenix in the imaginations of ideologues obsessed with security, who seek to impose their way of thinking on everyone else.