Whole spate of new Kennedy books timed for November’s anniversary, and historians are still turning up new details. The Washington Post reviewed a bunch of them; here’s Evan Thomas on Robert Dallek’s ‘Camelot’s Court: Inside the Kennedy White House’:
… Kennedy was devoted to the Great Man theory of history. As he spoke about Churchill, Stalin and Napoleon, “his eyes shone with a particular glitter, and it was quite clear that he thought in terms of great men and what they were able to do, not at all of impersonal forces,” observed the British historian Isaiah Berlin after several conversations with Kennedy at White House dinners. But of course even the greatest men, from time to time, need wise advisers to battle the impersonal forces. Kennedy surrounded himself with what he called a “ministry of talent,” personified by McGeorge Bundy, the brainy but chilly Harvard dean who became national security adviser. These men — and they were all men back then — were well-intentioned, but, as Dallek shows, they often served Kennedy badly.
In particular, they had difficulty handling the military and the intelligence community. The current Pentagon is relatively restrained about the use of force. Not so the top brass in 1961. Consider Air Force Gen. Thomas Power, the head of the Strategic Air Command. “Why are you so concerned with saving lives?” Power once asked the authors of a Rand Corp. study. “The whole idea is to kill the bastards. At the end of the war if there are two Americans and one Russian left alive, we win.”
Power’s boss, Air Force Chief of Staff Curtis LeMay — a model for Gen. Jack D. Ripper in the doomsday movie “Dr. Strangelove” — described Power as a “sadist” and “not stable.”
In his first few months in office, Kennedy was bamboozled by the CIA, which persuaded the new president to back a “secret” invasion of Cuba. The Bay of Pigs was a fiasco. After the defeat, Jackie Kennedy recalled her husband crying in the privacy of his bedroom. “He put his head in his hands and sort of wept,” she said, according to Dallek’s recounting. John Kennedy’s repeated refrain: “All my life I’ve known better than to depend on the experts. How could I have been so stupid, to let them go ahead?”…
And here’s Thurston Clark on ‘Why we’re still obsessed with John F. Kennedy‘:
… One of the greatest challenges Kennedy poses to anyone writing about him is that, because he rigorously compartmentalized his friends and family members, their impressions and recollections of him are sometimes at odds…
Three days before going to Dallas, he told Lincoln he was thinking of replacing Lyndon Johnson with North Carolina Gov. Terry Sanford as his running mate in 1964, but he did not share this bombshell with his brother Bobby, with whom he often spoke several times a day. Not surprisingly, Bobby later dismissed the conversation as a fabrication, telling historian Arthur Schlesinger, “Can you imagine the president ever having a talk with Evelyn about a subject like that?” Yet when former Cabinet member Abe Ribicoff went sailing with Bobby several months after Dallas, he was shocked to discover that he knew things about John that Bobby did not, confirming his impression that the president had “exposed different facets of himself to different people.”…
In a 1986 set of recollections by close associates of Johnson, I found that, according to speechwriter and adviser Horace Busby, two weeks before JFK traveled to Texas, Johnson told Busby that when he was with the president in Austin on the evening of Nov. 22, he would tell him he had decided against running for vice president in 1964 and would instead return to Texas to run a newspaper. Busby doubted that he was serious and thought that LBJ just wanted the president to cajole and flatter him. But given Kennedy’s increasing estrangement from Johnson, it is possible that he would have accepted his offer with alacrity…
raven
I didn’t know about his relationship with Gene Tierney until I saw this great review of LEAVE HER TO HEAVEN (1945) by Tired Old Queen at the movies.
billgerat
Complex people are complex.
Mnemosyne (iPhone)
@raven:
I’ll have to go back and watch that review later, because that’s one of my favorite films. Poor Gene Tierney had a genuinely tragic life.
JPL
Anne, There is a new book about the current President, also. It’s called The President Devotional. JFK was blamed entirely by the Air Force for botching the raid. The Tea Party will dis the new book on Obama cuz he’s a muslim. Deep seeded hatred creates it’s own reality.
Since Cole, appears to be asleep, can you put up a football thread?
Keith G
@billgerat: People who seek out and get to that level of power and achievement are not your regular guy/gal. More often than not, they are weird fucking folks (dispite the façade they go to great pains to create).
Omnes Omnibus
That pretty much was the point of Halberstam’s The Best and the Brightest.
WRT GEN Power, if Curtis LeMay thought you were out there, you were really out there.
Jay C
That excerpted description of Kennedy’s responsibility for the Bay of Pigs operation in April of 1961 sounds a bit facile, though: The invasion of Cuba had been planned and organized by the Eisenhower Admin in 1960, and the plans for it had been pretty well advanced by the time Kennedy was inaugurated in January of 1961. IIRC, Eisenhower and Nixon had taken their time bringing the President-elect up to speed on the planned invasion, and Kennedy had been presented with pretty much a fait accompli when he took over: with few choices outside of either going ahead with the operation, or cancelling it outright. The notion that JFK was “bamboozled” by the CIA is a tidy, if probably inaccurate reading (even though yes, The Company’s botch of the Bay of Pigs was probably the worst pooch-screwing in the Agency’s history): if he was, he had a lot of company in the delusion….
Yatsuno
@JPL: Cole is being traumatised by the ineptitude of the Stillers right now. Please leave a message after the tone.
Chris
It’s impressive how fucking insane the top military brass of that era was. Interesting how the civilian/military relationship was inverted by the time of the 2000s, when the civilians were the ones urging more war and a significant part of the opposition or simply caution came from generals.
celticdragonchick
Christ on a crutch.
When Curtis LeMay says someone is a loose cannon…wow.
SFAW
AL –
According to Boston Globe resident male quarter-wit (Joan Vennochi has the female beat covered on that) and pundit-who-eerily-resembles-Jonah-Goldberg-right-down-to-the-world-class-level-of-stupidity, Kennedy was a Conservative, at least by current standards. Good to know.
I would have thought Curtis LeMay would have been the Turgidson model, except for the bopping-the-buxom-assistant part. Maybe he was nuts enough for both roles? Kinda like Bill James’s take on Rickey Henderson?
At least Kennedy wasn’t a Moooslim, I guess.
ETA: And, re: football: Detroit beats Dallas, 31-30. Any day that ‘Murica’s Team gets beat is a good day, as far as I’m concerned.
SFAW
@celticdragonchick:
Maybe I’m ignorant of reality, but I always saw LeMay as an uber-hawk, but not totally nuts.
celticdragonchick
@Chris:
Vietnam was a disaster in many ways (for the army in particular) regarding troop retention, leadership development and discipline.
It is one of the reasons why the military is overwhelmingly against the draft. It is also why so many voices in the military (both active duty and retired general rank officers) were speaking out about Gulf War II and said it was a really bad idea. The military is a hammer…and Iraqi reconstruction was not a nail.
celticdragonchick
@SFAW:
His reputation may not be completely deserved, true.
Ash Can
@Mnemosyne (iPhone): According to that review, things ultimately worked out all right for her. And @raven: that’s a delightful review. Thanks for the link.
Omnes Omnibus
@SFAW: The problem is that Detroit should lose as well. It is generally for the best.
SFAW
@Omnes Omnibus:
Why the hate for the Lions? They’ve been the league joke for so long, shouldn’t they be cut some slack?
gogol's wife
@raven:
That’s fun. I love that film.
Ash Can
Hey, I’m just glad that the Bears aren’t going to lose this week.
raven
@gogol’s wife: I bought the DVD and was surprised that the ending was so silly. It seems like the book had an explanation of why Cornel went to the joint but they didn’t bother to put it in the film!
JPL
@SFAW: The last minute and a half was great. Since I had on the Saints, I only watched the last few minutes of the Detroit/Dallas game. The Falcons are losing but the game is early.
Amanda in the South Bay
@celticdragonchick:
The downside to not having the draft being, that a lot of the populace is insulated from the reality of war.
Omnes Omnibus
@SFAW: All teams in the NFC North except the Packers should lose. Unless their winning on a particular occasion benefits the Pack.
Yatsuno
@Ash Can: I have to wait until tomorrow to experience the Seahackitude. It might help they’re playing the Lambs. But probably not.
raven
@Omnes Omnibus: In “The Coldest Winter” Halberstam says JFK created “the greatest lying machine in history” in regard to Vietnam and that he just wanted to kick the can down the road for the next sap to deal with.
raven
@Omnes Omnibus: Did you see that last drive by the Lions?
WereBear
@Mnemosyne (iPhone): One of my favorites, too. A well-done handling of, at the least, narcissitic disorder.
One of the most chilling rowboat scenes ever!
Spaghetti Lee
You know, most critics say that the Kennedy presidency was the most influential presidency of all time. Anyone who heard one of his speeches went on to run for office themselves.
Omnes Omnibus
@raven: Yeah. I was not pleased. That fake spike by Stafford was pretty damned smart.
WereBear
@Spaghetti Lee: Ya nut!
raven
@Spaghetti Lee: I heard his fucking speeches and went on to “shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe to assure the survival and the success of liberty.” What a joke.
Spaghetti Lee
@Omnes Omnibus:
You think you’re not pleased. At least you still have the division lead and get to feast on Josh Freeman and the Vikings tonight. Is Freeman still the starter or did they sit him for a tackling dummy?
raven
@Omnes Omnibus: Crafty Ol Dawg.
Omnes Omnibus
@Spaghetti Lee: When Rick Wakefield dies, don’t expect us to be nice.
@Spaghetti Lee: Last I heard, the Vikes are going with Ponder.
SFAW
@Spaghetti Lee:
Is that because Lou Reed wrote all of Kennedy’s speeches?
Spaghetti Lee
@Omnes Omnibus:
Rick Wakeman will never die. He will simply summon his chariot pulled by golden dragons and cross into his next universe.
And I’m not making fun of Reed, just all the yap-yap surrounding him.
SFAW
@Omnes Omnibus:
You need some serious therapy. Packers? One quarter-step above the Cowboys. If that.
ETA: Incoming!
Omnes Omnibus
@SFAW: It wasn’t Cale because he didn’t drone.
Spaghetti Lee
@Omnes Omnibus:
Ah, so the tackling dummy, then.
Omnes Omnibus
@Spaghetti Lee: Fuck. Stupid spelling.
As far as the yap-yap, that is the purpose of RIP threads isn’t?
SFAW
@Omnes Omnibus:
I hear you’re a big Rick Astley fan, too.
No, I won’t provide a link. I’m not that much of a sicko.
Yet.
Omnes Omnibus
@SFAW: You are obviously suffering from sunstroke, so I will let it pass.
SFAW
@Omnes Omnibus:
Wrong President, if yer talking about dronezzz.
dmsilev
@celticdragonchick:
To be fair, LeMay may have simply been applying his extensive personal experience in the matter.
Omnes Omnibus
@SFAW: Slow hanging curveball.
Another Holocene Human
Fuck the Kennedys. Well, except for that whole crusading for the rights of intellectually disabled children. And Ted was a good senator even if he was a bad man. But otherwise, fuck em.
So like this whole “Stop Watching Us! (Psst, Look At Me!!)” thing is drawing the sorts of lefties/liberals who hate warpigs and have a knee-jerk notion that any sort of espionage is suspect because warpigs are for it, so they’re agin’ it and that settles it. Some have referred to it as “unilateral disarmament”.
Although sometimes you do have to unilaterally de-escalate. Obama did that with executive overreach. I wish I could say he did that politically–I mean, by Jove, the man tried–but racist haters gotta hate and the longer he’s President, the angrier those sumbitches get. Oh well.
I know there are law nerds who work on this stuff, so it doesn’t surprise me to see ACLU involved. However, it does strike me that to the extent liberals get swept into that stuff it’s a serious lack of a) context, eg that the US lacks laws preventing corporations from invading your privacy and that is in fact how the public sector gets a lot of info on you, through this private back door; b) a lack of heart, in that it’s a highly self-interested endeavor (oh noes, someone is tapping mah calls) when we live in an age of civil rights outrages that are crying out to be addressed; c) drawing from a and b, severely skewed priorities, going after matters that are either already pretty regulated or fairly old hat while missing the whole elephant under the tent which is surveillance and harassment of domestic muslim groups (religious, social, or charities), or the wrongness in our foreign policy in general, like maybe arming one side in a drug war in Latin America is kind of a bigger deal than tapping the phones of German diplomats in terms of human costs.
It’s hard for me to call someone who lacks empathy a “liberal”. Lefty-cosplay dudebros might be more like it.
SFAW
@Omnes Omnibus:
You’re just jealous because I’m a J-E-T-S fan.
Who I still say shoulda picked up Alex Smith about 37 seconds after the Super Bowl was over.
Goblue72
Kennedy’s record boils down to a tax cut, the Bay of Pigs disaster, nearly getting us into WW3, kickstarting the Vietnam War, continued punting on civil rights, a State Dept PR/study abroad program and some nice speeches. He’s only relevant because he was assassinated when the Boomers were young and as with all things Boomer, if its important to Boomers, the rest of us have to hear about ad infinitum.
Give me LBJ any day. Vietnam was no different an imperial foreign war outrage than half a dozen other American imperial mis-adventures. (We still aren’t out of Afghanistan folks). At least with LBJ, we got three major Civil Rights acts (Civil Rights, Voting & Housing), Medicare, Medicaid, Head Start, food stamps, other major anti-poverty programs, Work Study, college financial aid, federal aid to K-12, NEA/NEH, PBS and the greatest immigration reform of the 20th century (and the single biggest reason we are lucky to live in a browner America).
But hey, middle class white kids were getting drafted to war, so Johnson is a rat.
Spaghetti Lee
@Omnes Omnibus:
No, that’s the purpose. But I assure you it’s mostly resentment on my part. I’ve tried to get into the Velvet Underground. It’s embarrassing to tell people it doesn’t do much for you. It’s like saying you eat Froot Loops for breakfast five nights a week. Same with Big Star and the Pixies and all the rest of the “this is what real music fans listen to” bands. That, and listening to all the “I saw Reed in concert at a dive bar in ’81” stories and realizing that my generation’s musical nostalgia is going to be, shall we say, less impressive.
SFAW
@Omnes Omnibus:
I kinda figured that, thought I’d oblige you.
Even if you are a Pats fan.
Another Holocene Human
wow, that was rambling and incoherent. I think my starch to coffee ratio at breakfast was a bit off
Geeno
LeMay WAS loony tunes. Just less so than some others. Yeah the state of the general staff in the late fifties and early sixties is kind of scary from a “how is there still life on this planet” point of view. A lot of these guy were convinced by WWII and/or Korea that nothing less than an all out nuclear war would end the cold war, and we should strike NOW while we still have the advantage.
raven
@Goblue72: They were both fucking pigs.
Mr Stagger Lee
Chris Matthews will be unbearable throughout November on a scale 10 to the tenth power.
Jesus, how JFK would have dealt with (a) Ted Cruz
(b) the Tea Party
(c) Sarah Palin
(d) John Boehner
(e) Fox News
Plus how JFK walked on water, cured leprosy, would have stopped the implementation of the Designated Hitter rule in the American League(snark to you snark deprived) if Lee Harvey Oswald wasn’t a motivated Marine with his rifle.
J R in WV
Stafford’s passing to get to the one line, and then, THEN to leap over the offensive and defensive lines for a touchdown while telling everyone that he’s gonna spike the ball to stop the clock with 12 seconds to go.
Wonderful!
Not to mention the near record setting pass receiving and run after the catch by his top receiver. Sweet game, I loves to root against the Cows.
jl
Wait, what? Duh Raiduhs is winning? After a week off. I remember I was a fan once, but I was a child and learned to put away childish things. But, I have grown used to being merciful and gracious and regarding them with pity. And their next few weeks looks soft.
But, nice 49ers game this morning. I won’t watch for a few weeks, that was a nice NFL game to watch at the laundromat.
And I heard a clip of Issa talking half sane on some news talkie this morning about the ACA. Ha ha ha. The GOP humiliates itself on the budget and debt limit. And now, what do they have to answer problems with internet rollout of ACA? They have no alternative. I guess forced to play a semi constructive role in critiquing problems until they can roll out a way to subvert it.
OTOH, maybe I’ve gone mad, simply mad. Hope you folks are enjoying reality, whatever that is today, how would I know?
raven
@J R in WV: Texas did that when Makovic was coach and I always think it’s a great play.
the google tells me :
The Clock Play, also known as the Fake Spike Game,[1] was an American football game played on November 27, 1994. The contest was played by the National Football League’s Miami Dolphins and New York Jets[2] that featured one of the most famous comeback plays in league history.[3] Dolphins quarterback Dan Marino ran a trick play, pretending to stop the game clock but instead throwing a pass that scored the game-winning touchdown, ultimately giving Miami the 28–24 victory.
low-tech cyclist
@Another Holocene Human:
I don’t know that I’d go that far, but I’ll be so fucking glad when November 23 gets here. I was 6 when Kennedy was elected, and 9 when he got assassinated. I’ve been hearing about motherfucking JFK practically my whole life. And it’s not like he was a particularly great President.
Once the 50th anniversary of his death has passed, can we just let him slide into history, and talk about him less than we talk about Truman or Ike? Pretty please?
jl
And, wrt to JFK compartmentalism. I remember reading same thing about Jefferson, Lincoln and FDR. I think that’s a common trait of people who know how to gain and wield political power.
Edit: and I agree with commenter above that ‘the experts’ are not main culprits in setting Bay of Pigs mess in motion. I’ve also read that one of Eisenhower’s big weaknesses as prez was that he fell in covert operations and secret tricks during WWII, and couldn’t stay away from them afterwards, when most of them ranged from horrible ideas to counterproductive BS.
Goblue72
@raven: you are insane, if you really think that. or consumed by left wing purityness.
Goblue72
@Mr Stagger Lee: I’d prefer if he left the DH alone and instead extricated us from Interleague play.
Omnes Omnibus
@Goblue72: Or he went to Vietnam.
raven
@Goblue72: Horseshit. Any motherfucker that wore a phony ass silver star on his lapel can fucking rot in hell.
cmorenc
@Chris:
…and the world is damn lucky that Kennedy had learned a hard lesson about the military/CIA’s gung-ho inclinations from the Bay of Pigs when the Cuban Missle Crisis came around. Some of the top brass were rooting for it to quickly ripen into an excuse for a US preemptive first nuclear strike against Russia before they could do so. Kennedy played his hand masterfully in forcing the Russians to back down.
I was thirteen at the time, and clearly remember how acutely aware how tense everyone (even down in my small town in southeastern N.C.) was, convinced we were near the edge of a nuclear war with the Russians. It’s hard for people younger than about 60 to remember that in nearly every town, someone you knew had built a nuclear fallout shelter, either underground or half-underground with thick radiation-blocking brick or concrete walls above ground, and stocked it with enough survivalist supplies to wait the holocaust out a few weeks. The vast majority of households had not gone that far, but there were enough of them to make me wonder sometimes what eventually happened to these weird windowless bunkers.
Anne Laurie
@Geeno:
I think it’s hard for Kidz These Days, aka anyone born after 1970, to appreciate how much of the “Boomer” self-involvement came from growing up with every adult around you convinced that the world was going to blow up, because
reasonsMutually Assured Destruction. Everything from Da Hippies to the Reagan Backlash grew out of this poisoned soil…raven
@Omnes Omnibus: One of my best friends was killed on November 22, 68. I didn’t find out until almost Christmas because I was way the hell down south and it took that long for the word to get back to the world and back to me.
SFAW
@raven:
Don’t get the reference – you talking about Kennedy, or Johnson?
Anne Laurie
@raven: Well, I wouldn’t want to have been married to, or working for, either the generals or the presidents in question!
raven
@SFAW: The Mission that Never Was
Lieutenant Commander Lyndon B. Johnson, a Texas congressman temporarily serving in the U.S. Navy, received his nation’s third-highest combat decoration while on a 1942 fact-finding mission. The future president was so proud of his award that he wore the silver lapel pin for the rest of his life.
WereBear
It is something I’ve told people many times… but I can tell they don’t get it. Which is just as well.
I don’t know many people in my cohort who reproduced, for instance.
SFAW
@raven:
Had not heard of that one before. I can see why you’d be pissed.
Thanks for helping edumacate me.
raven
@WereBear: I had Mr Hollister for social studies when the news of the assassination came. “WHERE DO WE GO FROM HERE” he wept. I won’t tell you what my smart ass 13 year old buddies and I were saying.
raven
@SFAW: That’s just part of it but it’ll do for starters. All this bullshit about the legislation he passed doesn’t mean shit to me.
Bubba Dave
@raven:
I’m not going to say he was a good man, but for all the reasons@Goblue72: lists he was a great President. On my list he’s behind only Lincoln, FDR, and Washington.
raven
@Bubba Dave: Good for you.
gogol's wife
@raven:
You sound like my father. He actually met him around 1942 and couldn’t stand him. Nothing good he did could ever erase that personal contact.
ETA: And I realize you have many other reasons not to like him, just an anecdote.
J R in WV
@raven: I was 12, and dumbstruck.
During the Cuban missle crisis (I was 11 I think) I took a pick and shovel and wheelbarrow, and tried to build a bomb shelter in our basement. Unfortunately, it was ridge cap rock, once you got through about a foot of topsoil it was harder than concrete.
Years later my Dad had the new furnace installed down there, and they used a jackhammer for several days to make a flat space big enough for a furnace and water heater.
But Kennedy was a great president [as opposed to being a great man], and we will never know how he died, really, nor what he would have done had he lived.
aimai
@SFAW: Is that Jeff Jacoby? I hate him and Vennocchi with a burning flame.
raven
@gogol’s wife: Thanks!
raven
@J R in WV: See I am myopic. My frame of reference is Vietnam and I’ll never stop feeling how I feel. It’s personal. The greatest fucking generation sold our asses down the river for nothing.
goblue72
@raven: so you have a personal traumatic experience. i get that. but what that has to do with an objective assessment of Presidential legacies in the context of other Presidential legacies is completely beyond me. Heck, if Nixon had defeated Kennedy, we’d still have been in Vietnam and it likely would have been even bloodier.
Judged by the totality of Johnson’s policies and legislative outcomes (which is how we judge Presidential legacies, and not by individual personal experiences), Johnson was the greatest and most effective 20th century President for moving forward progressive policies – second only to FDR.
goblue72
@aimai: hilariously, i think they are still using the same inkdot heat shot of his that the Globe has been using for the last 20 years. course, Jacoby has been writing the exact same column for the last 20 years and only switching out the title.
Omnes Omnibus
@goblue72: Lying a country into war has a net detrimental effect on a president’s legacy. GWB probably would have been mediocre to bad but for the war. LBJ would have been great but for the war.
raven
@goblue72: who the fuck is “we”?
raven
Jay C
@Goblue72:
FWIW, I agree with your basic premise (assuming I read it right) that Kennedy is overrated as a President, and Lyndon Johnson underrated. I also think, that aside from that Vietnam thing, they’d be chiseling LBJ’s homely mug onto Mt. Rushmore as we type: if it wasn’t there already.
Unfortunately, you can’t separate out “that Vietnam thing” from Johnson’s legacy: it will be forever clouded by the initiation and escalation of (what even at the time was widely considered) an unwinnable foreign war – and Afghanistan under Bush 43 and Obama doesn’t come close to the scale of the expense, effort and (especially ) the bloodshed this country endured during Vietnam. Truman and Eisenhower share some of the blame, and Kennedy’s and Nixon’s hands are also far from stainless – but Johnson let a marginal conflict in a faraway marginal country develop into a bloody neocolonialist debacle whose effects haven’t really dissipated from our society or politics in over forty years.
But progressive domestic policies and programs? LBJ and (his idol) FDR. No contest….
Chris
@jl:
Eisenhower’s Big Idea, I believe, was that CIA covert operations could provide a less bloody, less costly and less public alternative to the straightforward use of military force as in World War Two and Korea.
He was wrong, of course, because as it turns out putting up a friendly dictator isn’t the end of the story, the conflict will go on and if anything be even more of a mess when it finally blows up later on. You can lay the Iranian Revolution and the next three decades and change directly at the feet of Eisenhower’s CIA (Truman actually liked Mossadegh and repeatedly told the British to get stuffed when they asked for his help). The coup in Guatemala was followed by the sad Cold War history we all know. And putting Mobutu in charge in Zaire, well, the ball still hasn’t stopped rolling from that one.
Interesting thing about that, though: for all the CIA’s skill at overthrowing fledgling democracies, they apparently were completely out of their element when it came to taking on an actual communist regime (Fidel Castro).
Yatsuno
@Anne Laurie:
Adjusted that fer ya my good lady. Many of us 80s kids though for sure Ronaldus Maximus wasn’t afraid to pull the trigger. That really didn’t subside until the Berlin Wall fell.
SiubhanDuinne
@JPL:
The Falcons are still losing, but now there’s 6:40 remaining in the 4th.
Chris
@cmorenc:
This was apparently a major concern for the British during the fifties, actually. They realized that America still had nuclear superiority over Russia, and were afraid that the U.S. would choose to force a confrontation ASAP so that they could nuke Russia back to the stone age before Russia developed the capacity to the same in retaliation. (Western Europe, of course, being right on the Soviet Bloc’s border rather than protected by two oceans, would have paid the price). Thank God, it didn’t turn out that way.
As for the Cuban missile crisis and reaction to it? My dad’s memory as a ten or twelve year old kid was of going to confession every single day until it was over, because people were that convinced that the world was gong to end. Kind of glad I didn’t have to live through that…
ETA: it’s also why, as epically overrated as I think JFK is, I still give him credit. Civilization could’ve ended on his watch, and he made sure it didn’t. Kind of makes me wonder what would’ve happened if Nixon had been in charge during that event.
Commenting at Balloon Juice since 1937
Take it away Peggy Noonan.
I won’t be reading anything about Kennedy.
PopeRatzo
@Omnes Omnibus:
Packers are scum.
Do they still have special dormitories where they make the black players live “for their own safety”?
That part of Wisconsin is the South Carolina of the Midwest.
SFAW
@aimai:
Exactly. I thought I had said that in the comment, but looking back I found that I had apparently made it an exercise for the advanced student.
Jacoby is a moron, perhaps even more than Jonah, but it’s basically flip-a-coin on that. Jacoby is USDA Prime Stupid, and insists on displaying it almost every Wednesday and Sunday.
Vennochi: since reading some bit of idiocy of hers a couple of years ago (hey, I’m a slow learner), I often refer to her as “the always clueless Joan Vennochi.” She writes as if she’s the token-women’s-issues writer, but never really makes it about women’s issues – it’s usually about a particular woman. She (apparently) hated Elizabeth Warren because Benghazi! or who-knows-what. I think she and Scot Lehigh were hired – at approximately the same time, I think, but not sure – to be the “sensible centrist” op-ed writers, but she’s somewhat right wing, in a faux-populist way (sort of), and seems to be writing the same basic column repeatedly. On the other hand, Scot Lehigh, although I don’t always agree with his point/premise, has shown the ability to look at the current batch of Rethugs, and say “WTF?” And I think he was all over Mittens’s flip-floppery.
Sorry, aimai, that was a very-long-winded way of me saying: I agree with you 100 percent.
Omnes Omnibus
@PopeRatzo: You, sir, are an idiot.
goblue72
@Jay C: Another 50 years from now when all the Boomers have fully passed and Vietnam is just another chapter in an American history textbook, while LBJ’s legislative accomplishments live on (esp. Medicare/Medicaid and the civil rights acts), the whole “LBJ would be great but for Vietnam” thing will thankfully fade away. 1.2 million people total were killed in the Korean War (roughly equal to Vietnam), and today what your average American knows about the Korean War they learned from a TV sitcom, while Truman is held up by liberals as a great President.
goblue72
@raven: “we” as in “the United States”. jeez – lay off the rage-a-hol. it makes you look like a tool and a fool.
SFAW
@goblue72:
Minor quibble: he has more than one column that he cycles through. I think it’s about three: (1) Arab/Israeli situation; (2) Non-conservatives suck, and (3) Liberals really fucking suck. There may be one or two that I’ve forgotten, but that’s pretty much it.
His big “device,” as in “look how clever and fair-minded a writer I am by using this device in my op-ed,” is to insert some back-handed semi-praise of non-wingtards, in about the third paragraph, followed two or three paragraphs later with some screed equating liberals with the Anti-Christ. Which is no mean feat for a Jewish kid from Cleveland.
But, Jewish or not, Cleveland or not, let it never be said that Jacoby is not as scrupulously committed to journalistic integrity and ethics as Jonah “Anybody Know Anything About Fascism? Can you Send Me Your Notes? And thanks for gettin’ me a job, Ma!” Goldberg.
PurpleGirl
@WereBear: Or growing up with the idea that if the big one was going to happen, it was best to live in NYC and near ground zero (Empire State Building) so that you went up in smoke with the bomb in a flash. WRT to Kennedy: I was 12 when he was assassinated. Remember the drills of getting under your desk and putting your arms around your neck and forehead as a safety precaution… a lot of help that would be. See my comment abouve about going up in the flash with the bomb.
Cervantes
@raven: The greatest fucking generation sold our asses down the river for nothing.
The destruction of Vietnam? It wasn’t for nothing. The purpose was to crush independent nationalism, thereby preventing its spread. And this purpose — this imperial purpose — was achieved.
I agree that you, and most of the kids who went, were lied to, and got nothing. I might even agree that most Americans got nothing directly. But you can bet your bottom dollar that there were people who gained a great deal.
Ruckus
@raven:
I don’t have the level you have for JFK but I still don’t think he was all that. But LBJ? For all he did for the future he sure fucked us in the present. I guess you had to be there to get it, looking in the mirror of history they both look pretty good. And for sure neither fall to the level of shrub the idiot son, but they were the cause of many many lives lost and destroyed and the embodiment of the imperial US.
It really tells me that a president is rarely going to be truly remembered for what they have done, both the good and the bad. People want to forget the bad and celebrate the good be it their birthday or a president. Don’t ever let them do that for presidents, otherwise we will never get better. We may not anyway but at least we should try.
Ruckus
@goblue72:
Those who forget history are doomed to repeat it.
Those who tell us to forget history are worse. They try to force everyone else to repeat it.
Your posts are the living embodiment of that quote. Yes Korea was a big deal. So was Vietnam. They were almost bigger deals than Iraq. The thing that made Iraq different was we had Korea and Vietnam as examples and the powers that were either forgot or didn’t give a shit about them being the big deals they were. Many didn’t learn a fucking thing from them and it sounds like you didn’t either.
WereBear
@PurpleGirl: Exactly. I never understood people who were so determined to hang out in their bomb shelter and come out to… what?
Them saltines would only last so long.
Bob In Portland
Most Americans, and by most I mean a majority, are obsessed about JFK’s Presidency because his murder is suspicious. By suspicious I mean that most people don’t believe a lone nut did it. What most sentient beings who’ve spent a little time examining the case believe is that people in the CIA did it.
The CIA has a lot invested in throwing all sorts of shit against the wall. If you believe the Mafia did it, or Marilyn Monroe’s avenger or Castro or the Russians did it, that’s okay with them.
But the CIA did it, and when you have a coup on Friday you don’t go back to your desks on Monday. You have to keep yourself protected by continuing to be in control. If you can grasp that fact then our political history for the last fifty years begins to make sense. You understand why everyone involved in bringing down Nixon was connected to the CIA. You know why Gerald Ford of the Warren Commission ended up being appointed President. You understand why the CIA worked hard for GHW Bush to get to be President, and why the October Surprise happened. It should alert you to suspect anyone who passes the first primary in Langley.
You can whistle past the graveyard, but if you refuse to admit how it happened politics in America becomes just an intellectual game to keep you occupied during your timeon earth.
Chris
@Cervantes:
How do you figure? However high the cost was, Vietnamese nationalism won that round in the end, and we lost. Along with whoever was profiting from the colonial/neocolonial order there.
(There’s a school of thought, also, that holds that the shock of losing that war – “the Vietnam Syndrome,” as the neocons call it – and the backlash against militarism that came from it is the reason we didn’t send the Army down to Central America or Iran to help the regimes down there fight against their revolutions the way we’d helped Saigon. Worth considering too under the “aftereffects of Vietnam” and “U.S. vs third world nationalism” columns, though I’m not entirely sure I buy it).
Sorry to be disagreeing with you again – I promise it’s not personal :)
Tehanu
@Anne Laurie:
Damn straight. I spent most of my childhood and adolescence reading things like “Level 7” and then pretending that stuff couldn’t really happen because it was “just” science fiction. I also vividly recall going around during the Cuban Missile Crisis with my metaphorical fingers in my ears and chanting “La la la”, because denial meant I didn’t have to start crying hysterically.
goblue72
@Bob In Portland: The only people obsessed with JFK are those over the age of 50. I’m assuming you’re a Boomer? Gen X/Y/Millenials – we couldn’t care less about the JFK assassination – or RFK’s for that matter. Or rather, it doesn’t loom that much larger than McKinley’s assassination as far as historical event with any sense of tangibilty to our cultural identity.
In sharp contrast, the assassination of MLK, even though we didn’t live through it (or we very very young when it happened), still exists in our Gen X/Y/M inherited cultural memory as a “very big deal” – if only as one milestone amongst other milestones in our Gen X/Y/M sense that the majority white culture is infected with a racism virus that just won’t go away – and is still relevant to our generation, given how much browner we are than the Boomers or “Silent Generation”.
To put it in sharper relief, the assassination of Malcolm X is probably more relevant to us X/Y/M’ers than the assassination of JFK.
goblue72
@Ruckus: Jeesus some of you people like to read stuff between the lines that ain’t there. Do I think Vietnam wasn’t a big deal? Of course not. Just that in the longer scope of U.S. history, its importance has been inflated in our current cultural memory in large part not because of its own intrinsic importance as being a bigger deal than other conflicts, but because it was a war that happened to affect a population bubble (the Boomers) as they were coming of age.
If Korea happened when Boomers were young (instead of happening to the Silent Generation), we’d be hearing never-ending sagas about Korea along with umpteen movies about it.
gogol's wife
@goblue72:
Well, as Ruckus says, you don’t have much of a sense of history. The first presidential assassination since Lincoln was/is a very big deal. It changed a lot about how American life is lived.
ETA: I guess I don’t have much of a sense of history — you’re right, it wasn’t the first since Lincoln. But the rest of my statement stands!
gogol's wife
@goblue72:
There are umpteen movies about Korea.
Ruckus
@goblue72:
You really have a very self centered view of history.
Open your eyes and look at not only the events but why and how they happened.
And you proved my point that people, like yourself, who want to wash over history(and not just the high points) are destined to relive history. People who gloss over Vietnam will want to gloss over Iraq and the cycle will continue, like it mostly has for the entire history of man. We have the means to record and review history much better than in any time prior and yet you want to throw all that away and have your own history. Grow up and at least try and learn from those that had to suffer history live rather than stick your fingers in your ears and yell Lalalalalalalalal……
It probably won’t make your life a lot better but it might and you might actually be able to leave a legacy of giving a shit for future generations instead of being like a conservative and sticking your head up your ass all the while going me, me, me, me.
I’ve said all I’m going to say, I’ve determined that giving up on lost causes keeps my BP at a more normal level.
goblue72
@gogol’s wife: The first Presidential assassination since Lincoln led to a wave of anti-anarchist hysteria, the creation domestic surveillance programs that would become the FBI, and the passing of anti-sedition laws that would culminate years later under Wilson with the Palmer raids. It also resulted in T.R. becoming President who would irrevocably change the office of President and the role of U.S. in world affairs.
I could just as easily make the argument that the Great Depression, or WW II, or Prohibition, etc. “changed a lot how American life is lived”.
And in present day – which is all that matters since the past is past – there are a heck of lot of people not starving in the streets during the Great Recession thanks to Johnson’s legacy – and not due to Joe Kennedy’s son or a war amongst several in Southeast Asia.
Steeplejack
@Spaghetti Lee:
LOL.
karen marie
Esquire has a series of articles about Kennedy, one in particular stood out to me, The Flight From Dallas. It’s all the more interesting with the knowledge that both Kennedy and Johnson separately came to the conclusion someonecelse should be the VP candidate in ’64.
Steeplejack
@cmorenc:
Asked and answered.
goblue72
@Ruckus: What am I supposed to learn that I don’t already know? That war sucks? That rich and powerful white men who pull the strings will throw as many young men (and women) on the pyre if there’s a buck to be made? That it takes an immense about of populist action to even have a hope of stopping the titans of industry from invading some Third World country once every decade or two? That American history is littered with the blood of brown people in foreign lands? (You think Vietnam was the first time we burned down the villages of Southeast Asian civilians (men, women & children)? That Iraq was the first time we water-boarded prisoners? If so, the Filipinos would like to talk to you about American genocide.)
Some white middle class kids get killed in Southeast Asia and its a BFD that we are all to learn some life changing lesson about? Brown (and yellow and red) America has been living it for centuries. Wake me up when there’s something new to learn.
So in that context of a long string of blood that extends well past the first Boomer, pardon me if I decide to judge what’s important by some additional factors – like how many poor kids get to have food on the table or poor old sick people get to see a doctor. Poor people have been on the wrong end of a gun (or the lash) for a long, long time. Vietnam wasn’t any different. It just happened to be televised. And 20 years from now, rich white men will be getting us into another foreign atrocity. And poor people (both American and foreign) will do the dying. So I think I’ll focus on how we can carve out more scraps for the 99% in the in-between times.
Ruckus
@cmorenc:
A friends dad had built one in their front yard. From the way it was laid out you didn’t even know it was there from the street.
I kept trying to get her to take me down there and show me. I wanted to see the bombshelter as well.
raven
@goblue72: You are such an asshole. How ya feel about the 3 million dead gooks?
Paul in KY
@Goblue72: IMO, Pres. Johnson was a ‘rat’ for not stopping the Vietnam War, only due to base political reaons (his theoretical re-election campaign).
Vietnam was not a drip drip kind of war. We had hundreds of Americans dying every month over there!
Paul in KY
@gogol’s wife: Pres. McKinley has a sad…
SFAW
@Paul in KY:
Week
SFAW
@Ruckus:
R-r-r-rimshot!