The Future of Freedom Foundation held its “The National Security State and JFK” Conference on Saturday, June 3, 2017, at the Dulles Airport Marriott in Northern Virginia. The conference examined the nature, origins, and consequences of America as a national security state since the end of World War II, including such programs as regime-change operations, invasions, occupations, coups, support of dictatorships, assassination, torture, indefinite detention, rendition, and kidnappings.

The conference also focused on President John F. Kennedy’s turn toward peace and friendly relations with the Soviet Union and Cuba and his resulting war against the U.S. national-security establishment.

This once in a lifetime event lined up one of the most impressive array of eleven expert speakers for this conference, including Ron Paul, Oliver Stone, Jeffrey Sachs, Michael Glennon, Douglas Horne, David Talbot, Peter Janney, Jefferson Morley, James DiEugenio, and Jacob Hornberger.

Here Stephen Kinzer addresses the conference on “Regime Change: Roots of the Imperial Temptation.”  

Stephen Kinzer is a former New York Times reporter and is currently a world affair columnist for the Boston Globe. Having taught at both Northwestern University and Boston University, he also currently a senior fellow in international and public affairs at the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs at Brown University.

A longtime critic of America’s interventionist foreign policy, Kinzer’s books include Bitter Fruit: The Story of the American Coup in Guatemala; All the Shah’s Men: An American Coup and the Roots of Middle East Terror; Overthrow: America’s Century of Regime Change from Hawaii to Iraq; The Brothers: John Foster Dulles, Allen Dulles and Their Secret World War; and, most recently, The True Flag: Theodore Roosevelt, Mark Twain, and the Birth of American Empire.

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