I’ve written here before about the compromise solution of the Cuban Missile Crisis. There long has been speculation that foreign policy hawks in the US had JFK assassinated for taking a diplomatic approach to Cuba instead of a more militant one. We finally are starting to see more of this as official history emerges from government archives:

…National Security Archive today posted an audio tape of the President and his national security advisor, McGeorge Bundy, discussing the possibility of a secret meeting in Havana with Castro. The tape, dated only seventeen days before Kennedy was shot in Dallas, records a briefing from Bundy on Castro’s invitation to a U.S. official at the United Nations, William Attwood, to come to Havana for secret talks on improving relations with Washington. The tape captures President Kennedy’s approval if official U.S. involvement could be plausibly denied. The possibility of a meeting in Havana evolved from a shift in the President’s thinking on the possibility of what declassified White House records called “an accommodation with Castro” in the aftermath of the Cuban Missile Crisis. Proposals from Bundy’s office in the spring of 1963 called for pursuing “the sweet approach…enticing Castro over to us,” as a potentially more successful policy than CIA covert efforts to overthrow his regime. Top Secret White House memos record Kennedy’s position that “we should start thinking along more flexible lines” and that “the president, himself, is very interested in [the prospect for negotiations].” Castro, too, appeared interested.

Food for thought when looking at the US faith-based revenge assassination doctrine of state actors, as pushed into the news in recent weeks.

Update 19 Jan 2020: Lawfare implores the US to resist its impulse to assassinate leaders.

…openly targeted a senior official of a sovereign nation-state, carrying out a satisfying act of short-term revenge but undermining its long-term strategic interests…in a destabilizing era of open assassination…a favorite tactic of weak states seeking leverage against strong powers. […] Banning assassination was not just the right thing to do; it was how modern nation-states consolidated their power. […] Democratized digital technologies have enabled weaker states and nonstate actors to more effectively target the United States and its personnel and facilities abroad in ways that were once exclusive to Washington’s arsenal. U.S. policymakers must resist the temptation to use their technological and military prowess to target senior government officials, remembering who is watching and learning from what they do.

See also the CIA roles in Au service de la france: “We know how to discredit him…”