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. It was first published in 1992 .

Prouty, served as Chief of Special Operations for the Joint Chiefs of Staff under President Kennedy in the last few years in his long career as a military intelligence agent. As such he has a different perspective to offer on the assassination and the events that led up to it. It is from this unique perspective that this book was written. It served as one of the sources for the Oliver Stone movie JFK, and it has an Introduction written by Stone himself.

Prouty was made famous for being the origin of the anonymous character "Mr. X", played by Donald Sutherland in the Stone movie. He is the character 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."

Stone opens his introduction to the book writing that "...Prouty is a man whose name will go down in history. Not as a respected Establishment figure, no. He will be erased from the present history books, his version of history suppressed, his credibility denied, his integrity scorned. Yet in time he will endure."