The USA in the Time of John F. Kennedy
1961-1963
By Mike Donovan
Fourth President assassinated – Four times read his last rites before 1963 - First Catholic President – Clintonian Philanderer - VP Lyndon Johnson – Defeated Richard Nixon in microscopic close race in 1960 – Or did he? – PT 109 – “Moonbeam” – On The Hot SEATO – “We are all Berliners” – Two years, ten months, and two days in office - Princeton 35 – Stanford 40-41- Irving Street – Melbourne
The Electoral College score in 60 was 303 for Kennedy and 219 for Nixon. Racist Dixiecrat Harry Byrd won the state of Mississippi and a few other scattered EC votes for a total of 15. Byrd had never actively campaigned for top dog, but a lot of angry Southern Democrats voted the Byrd as a defiant gesture.
“Democracy is not perfect. But we don’t have to build a
damn wall to keep our people in.”
From the 1962 Berlin speech
Kennedy is a president whose era has been almost neglected by history, because interest in the person far surpasses interest in the events of the era in which he reigned. Most American can tell you a great deal about the Kennedy family history, but with the exception of the Cuban Missile Crisis, can tell you virtually nothing of American history in the years 1961-63. Documentaries on the personal Kennedys abound, while the documentaries on the world in 1963 are hard to find. Does anyone even know that there was a Congo Crisis that the USA WAS deeply involved in, or that our relations with France were strained over an Algeria in the 1962 revolution? What does the average US citizen today know about the steel strike, the crisis in Laos, or troubles with Sukharno in Indonesia? What about the wave of third world countries gaining their independence at a breathtaking rate? What does anyone here know about the serious threat made by Iraq to invade Kuwait in 1961? Zip, but the tragedies that have plagued the Kennedy family, the plane crashes, the philandering, the drugs, the dirty power politics of the Father Joe, of these things we all know plenty. Kennedy's murder has been given more historical attention by the American public than all the events of his administration combined.
The most important thing in Kennedy's time to many historians seem to be his concealed health problems, not his ideas for national health care. They write books on John's false front of robust health to mask the brutal back problems, Addison’s disease, and possible venereal disease. There is a lot of research about all the meds that he guzzled down, but the United States almost intervened in Kuwait in 1962 and no one's ever written a book about it.
Popular vote 1960--------------------------Kennedy D) 34,226,000
Nixon R) 34,108,000
Byrd Dx) 502,000
Personally, in all honesty, I hated John F. Kennedy. Couldn’t stand that man. I was six years old and he kept interrupting my cartoons. That’s all. Every time you turned around, the regularly scheduled cartoon show was being interrupted by some very boring speech by this very boring man. Just the sight of his face brought me down. I had no idea that I was witnessing the great events in American History. I had my selfish concerns. Who cares about the Freedom Riders or nuclear war when the Flintstones were being pre-empted?
The worst thing that anyone can say about Saint John Kennedy is that he may have stolen the election of 1960. Powerful Democratic Mayor Richard Daley of Chicago fraudulently altered the voting results in Chicago and thus gave Kennedy that state by a mere 8,800 votes. That's the charge.
A few thousand votes going the other way in Illinois would have swung the contest for Nixon in a photo finish. Nixon supporters wanted Dick to challenge the ill voting results in Ill. and demand a recount. But Nixon declined, possibly because an investigation may have revealed similar low down dirty deeds on his side of the field.
IRVING
If you are in Hyannis, find tiny Irving Street on a map and drive down it. The house on the right close up on the street with a white picket fence was the one in which John Kennedy lived before and during his presidency. Don’t try to drive down the little streets that lead into the Kennedy compound though, otherwise a burly young man will approach your car and tell you sternly to turn around and leave. Trust me on that one.
Kennedy’s cabinet;
Secretary of State-----------Dean Rusk ---------1961-1963
Secretary of Defense-------Robert McNamara-1961-1963
Sec. of Money-------------C. Douglas Dillon---1961-1963
Att. General---------------Robert F. Kennedy—1961-1963
Lyndon Johnson hated the Attorney General. He resented the fact that the President's little brother had more power than he did as VP. but it is difficult to argue that Robert Kennedy was not a diligent and intelligent AG who did his job well.
BIO: It’s sad that everyone can name President Kennedy’s death day but few can name his birthday. JFK was born on May 29, 1917 on Beals Street in Brookline, Mass, about a 15-minute walk from where I am writing.
Brother Robert was born about two blocks away after the family moved within the coolest neighborhood on earth (four front runners for President grew up within two miles of each other in Brookline; John and Bobby Kennedy, Dukakis and JF Kerry.
Kennedy’s grandfather on his mother’s side was ‘Honey’ Fitzgerald, a Mayor of Boston and United States Congressman. His father Joe was a rich banker.
A time-out now to tell the dad story before we go on with little John.
Kennedy’s father Joseph P. Kennedy is remembered historically as a ‘bootlegger’ during prohibition in the 1920’s but there is no proof that he did anything illegal. He speculated in booze legally in the 1920’s anticipating the end of Prohibition sooner or later. It was perfectly legal to import and own stocks of liquor during Prohibition. What was illegal was drinking it or selling it. Dynasty Dad has been bashed by history, but where’s the 80 proof?
Father Joe was so smart with his money that he dumped all his stocks just before the Great Crash of 1929, investing it in bonds. One of the urban myths of American history is that the Stock Market Crash of 1929 took everyone by surprise. Joseph Kennedy was one of many businessmen who saw the signs of an impending stock bust and acted according.
Joe became a very successful an innovate movie financier and producer in Hollywood in the 1930’s. He then moved on to a position of great importance in world politics when he became United States ambassador to Great Britain during the rise of Hitler. Kennedy was an isolationist at a time when FDR was dreaming of intervention.
Joseph’s record as Ambassador considering the course of WWII is, quite simply, a bad one. The British did not like him one bit, and thought that Joe knew nothing of history or international relations. Joe Kennedy was openly predicting after the Fall of France, that Britian would lose the war with Hitler. He thought that Britian should make a deal with Hitler while it still could, and that the United States should not get involved in this losing cause. Kennedy was making public statements that Britain was going to lose while the bombs were falling on London. Try to imagine how that sat with his British hosts. They also resented Joe for leaving London during the Blitz to stay at safe distant aristocratic locations.
Joe had a bad and combative relationship with FDR. Joe Kennedy Sr. wanted to be President in 1940 and was hoping that FDR would not seek a third term. He really thought he had a chance.
When late in 1940 Joe Kennedy finally agreed to resign the post of Ambassador to the court of St James, Roosevelt invited him to Hyde Park for dinner. After some small talk with several people the two men went into Franklin's study for a private talk. Kennedy came out ten minutes later and left the building and the grounds in a brisk huff. Roosevelt had thrown Joe Kennedy out of his house! FD told his wife that “I don't ever want to see that scoundrel again as long as I live!” Eleanor Roosevelt testified that it was the most angry she ever saw her husband get in his entire life. Not even the fascist dictators ever made him that furious. One rarely hears a Kennedy boasting of the great ancestry of Kennedy the Ambassador to England.
I am of the opinion however, that the Kennedy's loved their cutthroat father a great deal. He was doing it all for them.
Little John Kennedy was a lover of good books and a superior marbles champion. JFK went to the Edward Devotion School and the Dexter School in Brookline. I lived for 12 years on the site of the Dexter School. It had since been replace by the Dexter Park Apartment complex. I parked for 14 years in the lot where he once played football on grass.
The Kennedy’s bought a better home one block from the old one. Author Geoff Perret seems to feel that this was a calculated move up to a much more fashionable and upscale neighborhood. It was a block away, pal. I drive past both houses every time I cut through Brookline’s back streets to beat the red lights.
The K's bought their third home on Cape Cod, but this was not the nucleus of the Kennedy Compound. That would come later. The Kennedy’s moved to Riverdale NY in 1927. John Kennedy was placed in Riverdale Country School, making average grades and not reading a lot. He grew to love books as the years went by. He also liked to argue with the writer in the margins, something John Adams also did.
JK's high school years were at two exclusive and expensive schools, Canterbury at New Milford Connecticut, then the famous Choate, although he probably made it more famous than it ever could have become without him.
JFK entered Harvard University in the fall of 1936. He often walked on JFK Street, although it went by another name at the time. Jack played for the JV football team. One day his dad was visiting and Jack, (who was still in his football pads) got into a friendly wrestling match with Joe Sr’s chauffeur who (in his driving suit) spun the much thinner Jack over his shoulder and slammed him into the turf of Harvard yard. Kennedy’s back was hurt and would never be the same for the rest of his life.
In the summer of 1937 Kennedy went to Europe with a close friend for a driving vacation. Did he pay for it with the tips he had saved as a newspaper delivery boy? No, Jack was rich enough to take a fancy new Ford convertible all over Europe and stay at the best hotels. The two young men chased tourist spots and women. They picked up hitchhikers as they drove around a western Europe filled with political and military tension. The thumbers often gave them insights that professional writers never could. A German soldier in Italy hopped into their car near Milan. He told them that ‘yes, of course there is going to be a war. That’s because nothing is going to stop Hitler from attacking Russia. Nothing.”
The two Yanks drove along the beautiful Loire river in France, stopping at Amboise and at the chateaux of Chenonceaux. This isn’t important information except that I vacationed there with my wife and was exited to read that we had picked the same two spots. I still have a cigarette lighter from Amboise but it only has a few lights left. The bottle of wine we purchased in the cool musty and historical Chenonceaux cellar is long gone.
When Joe Sr. got into the movie business in the 30’s he bought a third home in Riverdale NY near the island, and later when Joe became very rich he bought a mansion in Broxville NY.
Joe Jr. was already attending Harvard when Jack enrolled. His big brother cast a big shadow over Jack for most of their young lives. Joe Jr. was being groomed for the Presidency of the United States. This was an open fact in the Kennedy home. Joe Jr. was at Harvard University knowing full well that some day his dad expected him to become the President. This took a lot of pressure off of Jack in some ways but put more pressure on him in others. He didn’t have to climb the mountain that Joe was supposed to but it made him want to climb it anyway just to prove he could.
John was a big man on campus because he was dynamic and because his father had big movie star friends that stopped by at Harvard smokers. He wrote his first book as a senior in 1940 called Why England Slept. It earned the young man royalties and was critically successful. It is a good book, but his connections helped. What college senior gets a major book published on foreign policy? He could have added that England slept “because my old man put a stop to any attempts by America to back England up.”
After Harvard, Jack attended Stanford Business School in California for a half a year, then took a tour of South America to party.
Kennedy was a war hero in the Pacific theatre. The Japanese destroyer Amagiri rammed his PT-109 in half in the dark of night in the Solomon Islands Campaign. It happened in the New Georgia phase of the Solomons operations in 1943.
Mr. Kennedy showed great courage and stamina in the ensuing survival and rescue ordeal. The collision killed two of Kennedy’s men. Young Jack though injured, led the group swim of 11 other survivors to an uninhabited Island (see map) from which friendly natives rescued them 8 days later. For a good book on the 109 see the one by Robert Donovan (with a name like that, it’s got to be good.). For a mediocre movie, see PT-109 starring Cliff Robertson. The island on which the 109 crew held out is now named Kennedy Island and is a part of the independent nation of the Solomon Islands. My Aunt Louise vacationed there.
When the United States entered the war, Joe Senior looked like a real bad guy but his sons made up for it with their service and sacrifice. Joe Jr. volunteered for a dangerous mission. He would pilot a plane loaded with high powered unconventional explosives and a homing device. The pilot was to bail out just before landfall on the continent and the plane would be guided by radar to crash kamikaze style into a German made-V-1 rocket base in France or Belgium. But the plane blew up over the English Channel. Kennedy managed to land in the water. But since he was in 7,892 pieces he did not survive. Suddenly Jack Kennedy was the man that the family expected to one day become President of the United States. Like comedian Lenny Clarke said to me when Bob Hope died. “Everybody moves up a notch.”
Jack Kennedy ran for Congress in Massachusetts in 1946 and won. In 1952 he was elected Mass. Senator and then he almost was the Vice Presidential nominee at the 1956 Democratic Convention. It might have been a break for him to be passed over, considering the election went so ‘badly for Adlai.’
JFK won the 1957 Pulitzer Prize for non-fiction with his book Profiles in Courage. It is a good book about politicians who did the courageous and right thing when it went against their own personal or political interest. However it is now well known that most of it was written by Ted Sorenson, so John did not live up to the title. PIC remained on the best-seller list for some times, partly because Joe Kennedy kept buying thousands of copies to keep his son's fame going strong. He could afford to eat the money for the political power that a successful author credit for his son meant. Maybe that's why we can still find so many copies of the hardcover in very good condition.
In 1958 Jack was re-elected to the United Senate from the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.
The barbs flew that he was a rich kid whose election had been bought and paid for by his influential father. Kennedy helped to defuse these accusations with his humor. In a post-election speech he told the crowd that on the night before the election he had received a wire from daddy which read, “Dear Jack: Don’t buy a single vote more than is necessary – I’ll be damned if I’m going to pay for a landslide.” It got a big laugh from his audience of supporters, although a Republican audience would have stoned the same line with folded arms.
Historians generally agree that Kennedy's record in the United Senate was not particularly impressive. In fact his Senate record was possibly even less impressive than that of Barak Obama! Like BO, JFK was only in the Senate long enough to start his campaign for the Presidency. At least Barak's father hadn't run with mobsters to make millions and buy Barry's way to the White House. At least Obama is a self-made political man. Since 1900, the Bushes, the Roosevelts, and the Kennedy, the 3 dynasties, were the only silver spoon brats to get in. All the others rose from the lower depths. Democracy embraces the poor, but it doesn't shut out the privileged either. Its a pretty good balance on balance.
Kennedy resigned his Senate seat in 1960 to run for President.
EVENTS
ELECTION OF 1960
CONFLICT IN LAOS
BERLIN CRISIS AND WALL
NUCLEAR PROLIFERATION
BAY OF PIGS 4.61
VIENNA SUMMIT
BERLIN CRISIS
BERLIN WALL
INDONESIA AND SUKHARNO
NUCLEAR TESTING DUEL
CUBAN MISSILE CRISIS
NASA MOON GOAL
STEEL PRICE CRISIS
CONFLICT IN VIETNAM
IRAQ THREATENS KUWAIT, 1961
CRISIS IN THE CONGO
STOCK MARKET CRASH OF 1962
RACIAL UNREST IN THE SOUTH
ACDA
DEALEY PLAZA
ELECTION OF 1960;
1960 marked the second time in US history that a Quaker Republican ran against a Catholic Democrat for President. The first time was in 1928. This time, however, the Catholic won.
Considering the tiny margin between victory and defeat, it's safe to say that any key factor against Nixon or in Kennedy’s favor decided the election. If Nixon had looked better on TV he would have won. If Krushchev had released the captured American airmen from the RB-47 incident of 1960 before election day, Nixon would have won. If there had never been a U-2 shootdown, Nixon wins. If there were no economic recession in 1960, Nixon wins. If Marylyn Monroe had got drunk with the right reporter and caused a “Bimbo Eruption” Nixon wins. If the Democrats hadn't stolen Illinois, Nixon would have won. All these little things combined meant the winning edge. The loss of any one of them would have probably changed history.
The Democrats had a wide open field with Kennedy, Johnson, Humphrey, Lashua, and Symington as the major players. The shadow of Adlai Stevenson was all the while hovering over the field pretending disinterest.
The turning point for Kennedy came when he won the hard-fought West Virginia primary. Kennedy spent a fantastic sum of 2 million dollars to win one state (remember, a gallon of gas was a nickel back then.) Kennedy beat challenger Humphrey by 83,059 votes. The defeated Humphrey said after West Virginia that he felt “like a small store owner trying to compete with a big supermarket chain.” Humphrey was always a human excuse-towel for his party. He was certainly capable of being one for himself.
Kennedy (Joe) bought the West Virginia primary election, but Humphrey would have done the same thing if he had the money that Joe Kennedy did.
Many observers were completely shocked that Kennedy won in West Virginia, especially that he did by a comfortable margin. People who were taking informal polls across the state were hearing nothing but “I'm for Humphrey.” Then on election day it all said something else.
The Kennedy's at first tried to buy every county Democratic chairman for $5,000 cash under the table. But then the Kennedys woke up. Most of these guys were just pocketing 90% of the cash. The real way to buy the election was through the sheriffs. These guys had all the juice, not the Democratic chairmen. So every country sheriff was bribed by Joe Kennedy, with Ted and Bobby playing direct bagman quite often. One guy swore in 1994 that he personally saw a Humphrey man bribed with a shoebox full of $40,000 in green cash to become a Kennedy man.
Hubert Humphrey said that Boston's venerable Cardinal Cushing (I heard his dreadful reciting of the rosary on the radio 8 billion times as a kid) told him that he resented people like Sorenson and Shriver claiming later to have helped elect Kennedy. The Cardinal said that he had met with the Kennedys and, that the Catholic Church had agreed to make generous donations to every Protestant church in West Virginia in order to eliminate their opposition to a Catholic candidate winning the primary. The Cardinal felt that his church money, not Sorenson's idealistic pronouncements, had been the more decisive factor. “Cushing provided the cushion,” quipped the Cardinal to the unamused Humphrey. So when my dad paid tuition at Catholic School for my sister Susan in 1960, and m mother put a dollar in the collection plate at church, they were both unwittingly pitching in to Kennedy's West Virginia.
The Wall Street Journal provided another story about how baldly Joe Kennedy bought the mountaineer election.
After Kennedy won in West Virginia, a group of Journal reporters felt that this was not kosher. Something just didn't add up. All their polls said Humphrey but the results said Kennedy. So they investigated and came to the conclusion that Joe Kennedy had bought the West Virginia primary in the most unseemly manner, even allowing dirty politics as a harsh reality.
The Journal team did all the work, wrote and rewrote the article and had it ready to go, But the editor in chief said that there is no absolute proof to back any of the charges. The boss liked the story, but he felt that it's release could determine the outcome of the Democratic nomination in Los Angeles. He didn't want the Wall Street Journal to decide the course of American history. So at the last moment he killed the story and Nixon.
For the record, the Kennedys claimed to have spent $100,000 in West Virginia. You couldn't even get the Warren Commission to believe that one.
West Virginia just about settled it. Senator Symington (“simple Symington” as Ethel Kennedy liked to call him behind his back) dropped out after a poor showing in a poor state.
It's hard to imagine now, but in the heat of the '60 primaries, John Kennedy was just another candidate to most Americans, many of them being far from charmed by his good looks. Many thought that he was probably too young for the job. Geraldine Ferraro said of JFK in a recent TV interview, “Remember, Camelot did not come until after the election.”
JF was not nationally beloved until he was assassinated. The sainthood he has achieved since his tragic death obscures the bitter resentments of his Democratic opponents in the primaries and the hostility of nation’s conservatives in his race against Nixon. Put simply, half the country hated Hyannis on Election Day, and if you include the supporters of the other Dems, there was a point early in 1960 when significantly more than half the country hated his guts.
The King of Russia, Nikita Krushchov also helped to put Kennedy in the White House. The Communist Party General Secretary hated Nixon and later confided to Kennedy during a one-on-one talk that the American owed his win to him, Nikita, personally. ‘How so?’ asked Kennedy by way of a look. The Russians had shot down a conventional reconnaissance plane (after the U-2 affair) and had captured 2 American pilots. In the interest of better relations, Krushchov (I alternate between spellings, Krushchev, and Krushchov are both ok) was planning on releasing them and sending them home to the states. But he delayed the release of the pilots until after the election. He did not want to give the Ike-Nixon team a diplomatic success to exploit in the upcoming election. There is little reason to doubt that Khrushchev’s boast was accurate. The pilots had to sit in Russian jail a few months longer because Krushchov did not want Nixon to win. Even the Communists hate Republicans!
Two-time loser Stevenson was definitely unofficially officially in the running for the 1960 nomination, but at crunch time Adlai deferred to the needs of his party and did not become an obstructionist like Teddy I-Me Roosevelt did in 1912 (when he walked out of the Republican Convention and formed a third party - the baby didn't get his bottle, the nomination.)
Lyndon Johnson was Kennedy’s chief rival for the nomination. Also a serious contender was Senator Stu Symington.
From the time he won the West Virginia primary, Kennedy was nearly certain to be the chosen man.
The Democratic Convention opened in LA in Los Angeles. Lyndon Johnson put up a fight to block Kennedy.
There was also a great deal of support for two time loser Adlai Stevenson. The widow of FDR, Eleanor Roosevelt was on the convention floor with a button supporting a Stevenson-Kennedy ticket. And her friends wondered why it had been difficult for her to get a floor pass from the Kennedy people who were controlling the convention.
The big criticism of the candidate Kennedy was that he wasn’t the most qualified person for the job, he merely had the best organization to win the nomination. The critics talk of the Kennedy money and power and effective political skills like that is something new and low life dirty in politics. It is the way the game is played and if all the critics of Kennedy had the same money and skills at grass roots politicking, they would have employed it. Its how Carter and Clinton won and its how Benjamin Harrison won in 1886.
Stevenson’s supporters were especially biter that they had the better man but he just happened to lose to someone better organized. Stevenson’s supporters led noisy demonstrations on the Convention floor trying to start a stampede for their man like the one that had launched Wendell Wilkie some years back. It failed and then they made disruptive demonstrations for Stevenson outside the convention hall.
They had only their milquetoast candidate to blame for their failure to win. Stevenson had played the passive noble above politics game and it backfired. He never actively sought the presidency in 1960 and hoped that it would be handed to him on platter of flatter. Kennedy knew he wasn’t loved by millions so he had to win the old-fashioned way, by hard campaigning, a lot of money and promises of political support later for political support now. If anyone out there thinks that’s below the belt they should try politics in some other country on some other planet.
Harry Truman for example, hated Kennedy and did everything in his power to influence the Party to choose someone else. He took shots at Kennedy from the time Harry realized that the young whippersnapper was the front-runner. When Kennedy won the nomination, Truman shut off his TV in disgust and refused to offer any public statement of congratulations or support. He thought that Kennedy was the best organized and the least qualified. Typical Truman. Well look who’s talking. What kind of popular love did Truman have to win the presidency? He was a pawn of the corrupt Pendergast political machine in Missouri in his early rise to power. Then he was a compromise alternative choice in 1944, his only real virtue being that he was unknown and wasn’t Henry Wallace. Then he inherited the Presidency because FDR died. Then he barely won re-election in a miracle comeback in 1948. Then he declined to seek the nomination in 1952 because he knew he couldn’t win it and his party didn’t want him. Truman left office with the lowest popularity of any president in the century, including Hoover. Now he sat high and morally mighty in 1960 saying that Kennedy had no business running for president. Look in the mirror four-eyes!
The Johnson and Stevenson people launched endless hatred at Kennedy at the Convention. Considering how close the 1960 election came out in November its safe to wonder how near these bitter people came to sabotaging their own party for selfish reasons.
So Stevenson was the better candidate. Did it not count in anyone’s mind that he had already been thrashed in two consecutive national elections? What’s the matter, was William Jennings Bryan not available ti run from the grave, so they had to settle for Stevenson. The national voters who didn’t love Stevenson had to be influenced in the negative by the way he had been destroyed twice by Ike. Nobody likes a loser except a stubborn impractical liberal. Kennedy was a practical centrist posing as a liberal.
Yes, he did not have a proud record on McCarthyism and Lyndon Johnson harped on that. Yes he didn’t really know a lot about the plight of the family farmer, and rural newspapers harped in that. Yes, he had a ruthless powerful political machine behind him and he wasn’t the arm and fuzzy guy people were trying to sell him as, and his opponents all harped on that, because they wished they did have that same power.
Johnson of all people had the nerve to call Kennedy a dirty fighter. Lyndon Johnson fought as dirty as anyone who ever played the political game. He was only moral about Kennedy’s morals when Kennedy won the scrum.
If the old guard Dems wanted to win in 1960 they had best look to someone who could defeat themselves first. Only someone capable of beating the Democratic old guard first could go on to beat the Republicans, and Kennedy was therefore their man.
Kennedy only won because he had the best political organization! What the hell kind of charge is that? Isn’t politics a dirty game of dog eat dog? The Patriots only won the 2004 Super Bowl because they had the most discipline and the best coaching staff! Unfair! They didn’t have the best players!
Kennedy won the nomination and the election because he was a conservative’s liberal, not a liberal’s liberal. On the night he was officially chosen, his dad Joseph was watching the even on TV at the home of publishing mogul Henry Luce. Henry remarked to Kennedy Senior that John would now ‘have to be to the left of center on domestic affairs.’ Joe Kennedy let out an angry and profanity-laced rebuttal at Luce, saying that no son of his was going to be to the left of anything.
Many were shocked when later John picked conservative Lyndon Johnson as his VP nominee. After all it was well known that Johnson disliked Kennedy and looked down on him as a young whippersnapper. But Kennedy and his dynastic advisors knew that it was more important to win than to be happy, and to win you had to win the South, and especially, you had to win Texas. Like Ohio and Florida, Texas is a perennial key up-for-grabs swing state. The venerable Johnson would also serve as a counter-weight to the image of Kennedy as too youthful and inexperienced.
Labor and the liberals (‘the lib-labs’) were especially angry with Kennedy for choosing Johnson. They felt betrayed. Johnson was the least progressive of all the Democrats in the field, especially on civil rights. Later on when he became president, Johnson re-invented himself as the champion of black rights and the author of the so-called “Great Society.” A few million fools, led by Doris Kearns Goodwin bought this line, but a look at the reaction to the Johnson VP nomination in 1960 says all you really need to know about where he really stood. If you gave Johnson enough whiskey he’d yell “yiiii-haaaa! Lets get some rope!” But as a politician he knew what he had to do.
The NAACP was furious with the Kennedy’s for choosing Johnson. But the South had to be won and had to be appeased. The solid South meant the good old boy South, not the progressive students and their black friends. Voting rights for blacks in the South were still being denied in many districts through poll taxes and other methods. Baseball pioneer Jackie Robinson said the choice of Johnson on the ticket was “loathsome.”
In the liberal dairy land of Wisconsin and Minnesota, the Johnson choice was simply unacceptable.
On top of this, many of the other candidates for President had been led to believe that they would be given the VP spot. They had not only been more civilized in their criticisms of Kennedy, they were more akin to Kennedy in policy. Kennedy had always been too liberal for the redneck, and too lukewarm and centrist for the liberals. He, or should we say his dad, had to choose which group to offend in choosing the VP. The Kennedy camp calculated that the liberals would have no choice but to accept Kennedy-Johnson as the lesser of two unsatisfactory evil tickets when they ran against Nixon. They had a larger fear that failing to add Johnson would cost them too many states in the redneck South and with them, the election.
When Johnson was named there was still the confirmation of the VP choice to go through with at the convention and there was a healthy fear of a rebellion from the lib lab wings, especially the Stevenson and Stuart Symington people. Symington had been under the impression that he was going to be the VP.
To avoid a bitter voting fight for Johnson, the Kennedy managers asked the convention floor to declare for Johnson by acclamation. A lot of boos went up at the idea. To make this official, the chairman had to decide that he heard yeas to boos by at least a two to one margin. The he asked the floor to formally declare for Johnson by acclamation and it seemed to many observers that the boos and the yeas were equally mixed. The chairman declared Johnson the VP nominee by acclamation and a wild chorus of boos went up by furious Democrats who didn’t like LBJ any more than I do 48 years later.
There are a lot of version as to what went down in the Kennedy camp in choosing their hated rival for VP. Some versions say that Joe Kennedy insisted that this was the only way to win and had to force his opinion on them until they reluctantly understood his fatherly wisdom. But Bobby Kennedy denied this in a 1965 interview. Bobby said that he and Jack alone made the decision to pick Lyndon.
Another popular account says that Kennedy planned to offer the job to Lyndon as a showpiece gesture because he knew that Lyndon would not accept. He was more powerful in the Senate than he could be as VP and he hated the Kennedys. But Johnson spoiled their plan by accepting and the Kennedys couldn't back down from their offer.
The two Presidential candidates of ’60 were both Cold Warriors. There wasn’t in this choice of Nix versus K the great liberal versus conservative chasm that has existed since McGovern vs. Nixon in 1972 and has continued since to the present time.
Kennedy not only was no anti-militarism lefty, he actually ran on the idea that Ike had weakened the nation’s military strength and he was going to fix it. Kennedy ran on the “missile gap”. That was his big driving accusation against Eisenhower. Kennedy and the Dems were claiming that the Soviet Union was so far ahead of the USA in missile technology and deployment that the US was vulnerable and it’s security actively threatened. It was quite a charge to make against a Republican Army hero. Here JFK was running against Nixon, one of the biggest red-bashers of all time and he was saying that the Ike-Nix team had let us down in the Cold War against the USSR. But the charge made sense because the launching of the Soviet satellite Sputnik had completely changed the American perception of its security. Even though later on it would be proven that the US was ahead in military missiles in 1960, no one could be sure back then. What was more, Kennedy had been told by his own military advisors before the election that there was in fact no missile gap and that the US was still ahead. But Kennedy in the spirit of Charles Van Doren, decided to ignore the truth and continue the lie. (Bob McNamara later estimated that when Kennedy took office the USA had 6,000 strategic warheads and the Soviet Union had about 200)
There were few big issues dividing the candidates. The focus of the campaign was probably on Kennedy’s Catholic religion. Some expected Nixon to make an issue of this but that would be politically inept. Kennedy’s Catholicism probably added as many votes as it took away. This wasn’t the 1850’s against Fillmore or Al Smith’s America of 1928. Catholics had been pouring into this country and multiplying for 120 years by the time Kennedy ran in 60.
Nixon may have hampered his chances when in his acceptance speech he pledged to campaign in all 50 states. Kennedy was free to concentrate his efforts on important states in the toss-up column while Nixon piled up frequent flyer miles in order to keep his promise that sounded good when he said it but was not so good in practice.
Nixon continually accused Kennedy of being not only inexperienced, but also wrong in his statements on foreign policy in the three key issues of the campaign, Laos, Cuba and Communist China. “He’s been up three times, he’s struck out three times, and now he wants to bat cleanup!” shouted Nixon to a supporting crowd.
The famous call to Coretta King helped to elect Kennedy also. Her husband Marty had been thrown in jail on a flimsy charge. Kennedy called her and pledged his moral support. It was a controversial call and angered many white racists, but did much more good than harm. It showed that the new guy had the backbone to take a moral stand at the risk of political backlash, a genuine ‘profile in courage.’ For a more cynical view of the call see the excerpt from the Ritchie Reeves book.
The Republicans tried to make health an issue. Kennedy was suffering with Addison’s disease and his VP had been through a major heart attack. Nixon went public with his medical report, why wouldn’t Kennedy do the same? Jack ignored the critics and kept his frail health a state secret through the campaign and then again during his presidency.
Illinois went for the Democrats but the charge has been made that J. Edgar Hoover helped cook the books in Cook County and this enabled Kennedy to take this key state by a tiny margin. But even if Nixon had won in Illinois, Kennedy would still have won in the Electoral College with 7 votes to spare so I don’t understand why the charge is so often made that Hoover’s corruption in Illinois gave the election to Kennedy. It is even suggested that Kennedy let Hoover get away with all his abusive actions because Hoover held this on Kennedy in his back pocket. In other words if Kennedy blew the whistle on Hoover, Hoover would blow the whistle on Kennedy.
Election of 1960 - Photo Finish
The defeat was a bitter one for the touchy Nixon. Because the result was so close, it became Republican sport in the winter of 1960-61 to blame Nixon for the defeat. Like a close sporting event, the close score led to the emergence of a million experts each of whom knew exactly which mistake had been made and what should have been done instead that would have made the difference. Instead of giving Nixon credit for putting up a fine and close battle, he was hit with a storm on second guessing criticism. The liberal Republicans charged that Nixon had been too conservative. The conservative Republicans charged that Nixon had been too liberal ( an alignment similar to the Republican analysis of John McCain's defeat in 2008 – I say he lost because he was personally discourteous to his opponent during all the debates and turned off the deciding undecideds.) Professional pundits explained why Nixon lost and what he could have done to win. Some even tried to blame the ref in Cook County, Illinois.
Richard M. Nixon ran for Governor of California in 1962 and lost another close one. It was at this press conference on election night that he made his famous sour statement to the press that ‘you no longer have Nixon to kick around any more.’ The events of 1968 to 74 would prove otherwise. By August of 74 Nixon had become a human soccer ball.
SUNDAY, JANUARY 19 1961, A DATE THAT WILL LIVE IN INFAMY
In a way the meeting on January 19 between President-elect Kennedy and lame duck President Eisenhower was the exact moment when the United States became committed to a long and losing war in Vietnam.
Democrats like to say that it was Ike that got us into Vietnam. Republicans like to say that it was Kennedy who got us in. Both take these historical positions for partisan reasons. I say that Kennedy got us in but that Ike shares the blame equally for the way he pushed Kennedy at this monumental meeting.
Kennedy had already visited the White House on December 6, 1960 as President-elect, and that meeting was cordial and general. Most of the incoming Kennedy team was not there on December 6, in fact most of them hadn't been appointed yet.
By January 19, the Kennedy team was ready to go, and the Inauguration was coming the next day when Ike invited Kennedy back to the White House for a final round of baton-passing talks.
MacNamara, Rusk, and Clifford went with Kennedy this time. Secretary of State Christian Herter and others were there with Eisenhower.
Eisenhower and Herter took complete control of the meeting. They did pretty much all the talking. This wasn't a meeting it was a classroom. It was a dramatic pow wow about Southeast Asia. No one was smiling. The subject matter came a complete surprise to the Kennedy group.
Ike and Herter took turns preaching in the most solemn imploring tones about the need to meet the threat of Communist aggression in Southeast Asia.
The key was Laos. The Communists, with the support of China and Russia were threatening to take over Laos. If Laos fell, the surrounding nations would be threatened. Once Laos went down, Thailand would fall too. So would Vietnam, Burma, Cambodia, Pakistan, and possibly Malaysia. Even Rhode Island might be threatened.
Ike told Kennedy that the United States would have to send ground forces into Laos, and the sooner the better.
Rusk, MacNamara, Kennedy and Clifford all palpitated.
If he failed to act, the new president would soon be taking the blame for “losing Laos.
Kennedy, Mac, Rusk and Cliff were numb. They had arrived at the White House in a festive mood on Election Eve and now they were being handed a confusing uncertain casualty-guaranteed war that none of them had counted on.
Unfortunately, none of the new guys knew enough about Southeast Asia and Laos to argue with Eisenhower. In addition, the weight of Eisenhower's prestige, charm and experience overpowered the incoming minds, adding magic to the points raised by Christian and Dwight. Who would have dared to argue with this guy?
The Kennedy youth were listening too well to their elders. They weren't challenging Ike on any of this. Eisenhower was selling the Kennedy team the idea that we absolutely had to intervene and win the civil wars of Southeast Asia.
Kennedy and his brains trust were being brainwashed. And it worked. Two months later there stood President Kennedy on national TV, pre-empting Gunsmoke, telling Americans that the preservation of a non-Communist government in Laos was crucial to the security of the United States, and that we were probably going to have to go in, just as we did in Korea. Americans looked at each other and shrugged their shoulders, “Hey Joe, did you ever hear of a country called Laos?” - “Yeah, it's in Africa you dummy.”
If Ike doesn't have this big sit-down with Kennedy's boys on Election Eve a lot of the Nam nightmare might never have gone down. It was here on 1/19/61 that we crossed the Rubicon in spirit. In fact came later.
INAUGURAL AND BEGINNINGS 1961
Kennedy’s inaugural speech has been reduced to a sound byte and has been overplayed in this country for almost 50 years. It was a hawkish Cold Warrish speech in which he tried to make it clear that he was no liberal when it came to foreign policy. The US under him was going to “pay any price” and “meet any burden” in the defense of liberty. In other words he would use our nukes if Krushchov tried to take West Berlin by military force.
After the election Kennedy had to appoint a new team. Superlawyer Clark Clifford heard that Robert Kennedy was going to be named Attorney General and he spoke frankly to the President-elect about the obvious accusations of nepotism that would surely arise. Robert Kennedy had passed the bar but he had never actually practiced law and now he was going to become AG just because he was a Kennedy.
To Clifford’s surprise, John agreed. The problem was Kennedy senior. Joe Kennedy was determined that his son Bobby was going to be AG and that was that. Kennedy asked Clifford to go see Joe Kennedy and talk his father out of it, a strange assignment.
Joe listened patiently to Clifford’s pleas that naming Robert Kennedy Attorney General would be a huge political mistake. Joe said thanks for stopping by, and Bobby Kennedy will be Attorney General. Clifford left in a huff. And to think how the Dems accused George W. Bush of being too dominated by his father.
Many of Kennedy’s closest staff people disliked Lyndon Johnson, the new Vice President. Kennedy reminded them not to look down on this accomplished man. “Remember, he looks down on you,” he told them. “None of you were elected to public office and he was the most powerful Senator in the Congress. If he thinks he’s better than me that’s my problem, But don’t get the idea that you’re better than him.”
Wow.
For Secretary of State, Kennedy chose Dean Rusk, a man he had never met but who came highly recommended by Walt Rostow. Rusk was President of the Rockefeller Foundation at the time of his appointment, but he came from a poor boyhood in Georgia. Rusk is always described as “solf-spoken.”
Rusk initially turned down the job because he couldn't afford the pay cut. Kennedy contacted the Rockefeller Foundation to get this problem solved. A “generous” termination settlement for Dean was arranged. That's the term they always use, but they never say how much. In any case the Rockefeller equivalent of “two weeks pay” made Rusk a rich man before he read his first State department memo.
Clifford says that he was disappointed in the choice of Rusk because it showed that Kennedy intended to run his own foreign policy. In other words, he thinks that Rusk is a bit of a 'yes man.'
For Secretary of Defense Kennedy decided upon a man who had zero experience in defense issues, Robert MacNamara, and it showed in his performance. Don't take my word for it. I'm biased.
I can't stand this guy. He's still giving boring interviews on TV. I read his boring useless book Out in the Cold, then tossed it into a snowbank so it could live up to the title. Give it a rest, Mac. You messed up. All the philosophizing and pontificating about the dangers of nuclear war and the need to find peace doesn't make up for your disastrous decisions in Vietnam.
MacNamara at the time was the President of the Ford Motor Company (the first time a non-Ford made it there.)
At least MacNamara actually lost money to take the job with the government, unlike the Dean Rusk squeeze that Kennedy put on Rockefeller.
MacNamara had to divest himself of large holdings in Ford stock because Ford did major business with the Defense department. Congressional hearings on Robert's appointment led to further demands that he get rid of stocks he owned in any company that did more than $10,000 worth of business with the US government. Supporters protested that this was extreme, and there were too many different ways to measure how much business is done between a company and a country. MacNamara gave in completely, lost 4 million, and the little controversy about his investments died on the vine. When Kennedy introduced MacNamara to the nation as his new Secretary of Defense he mentioned in the very first sentence that he is coming on board at great personal financial sacrifice.
DISUNITY IS OUR OPPORTUNITY
The Kennedy team set forth a new philosophy in foreign relations. Jack and his speechwriters and advisors saw the Eisenhower years as being too focused on a stark black and white perception of Cold War alliances. To Ike foreign nations evidently were either for us or against us. The US under Ike saw ‘neutralism’ as an act of open hostility. The ‘non-aligned’ states, with India the most obvious and important example, were tilting towards Communism if they did not ally themselves with the NATO powers and their pals.
The term ‘free world’ under the lecturing skills of John Dulles had taken on capital letters, much to the dismay of Artie Schlesinger and other Democrat liberals. To divide the world between the Commies and the ”Free World” was going too far to these people. Why could there be no middle ground? Communism was just as stubborn in its thinking, insisting that the rest of the world had to choose a side, and that the contest for monolithic domination was reality and that one side was going to win out and you might as well pick a team.
Kennedy, brother Bobby, Dick Goodwin, Ted Sorenson and Artie Schlesinger all felt a little differently. They were beginning to understand a new reality, especially in light of the proliferation of new nations arising from the fall of western colonialism. To their mind, the world was no longer locked into a Cold War tug-of-war in which one side was going to have to let go of the rope and suffer complete collapse. Neutralism did not have to been as an act of hostility against the United States. Nations were allowed to take slices of US philosophy and combine it with some elements of socialist philosophy if they wanted to. They didn’t have to be totally Free World nor totally Communist in their outlook and government. Some day there might be dozens of governmental philosophies to pick from and examine.
The perceived split between China and Russia gave impetus to the new American Kennedyesque thinking. If the Communist bloc was no longer monolithic, then there was no reason why we had to be monolithic in defense. “Against the world of coercion,” announced Secretary of State Rusk, “we affirm the world of choice.”
Kennedy gave a couple of key speeches in which he made the new thinking official’
“Pluralism is splitting both blocs apart and blurring the
old, tidy divisions of the cold war. One could almost
say that the process of competitive coexistence has
turned into one of competitive disintegration. Still,
one basic difference remains … Pluralism is incom-
patible with the Communist system; but it is wholly
compatible with – indeed, should be the basis of –
our system.”
This is all stimulating stuff intellectually, but in actual practice, Ike was more pluralistic and tolerant than the Kennedy team implies, and the Kennedy team was more strictly Cold War orientated than their own rhetoric implies. It was Ike who refused to undertake a Cold War military intervention in the Suez Canal Crisis, and it was Kennedy who chose to risk World War III with a Cold Warrior do or die stance in the Cuban missile crisis. Apparently this new wave of freedom of choice didn’t apply to a Cuba which had chosen socialism freely (pluralistically) and had been forced by US boycotts to turn to the USSR for financial help with a turn to the left as the quid quo pro.
HAM IN SPACE - JANUARY 31 1961
Kennedy' tenure wasn't two weeks old when the United States sent a rocket into outer space with a living creature on board. We sent the first mammal into outer space, not the Russians. On January 31 a Sammy Redstone rocket sent Ham, the chimpanzee into a low earth orbit for 16 minutes.
The animal didn't have a name until he returned safely to land on the USS Dover. NASA wisely decided that if the chimp got a name and became a national celebrity and then died in a mission failure, the results would have been quite damaging. So Ham was an unknown chump chimp went up and a great big Ham when he came back alive after mission accomplished.
A few weeks later the Russians sent Yuri Gargarin into full orbit and made the achievements of Ham look rather useless and laughable by comparison.
FOREIGN AFFAIRS – DOMINICAN REPUBLIC
Kennedy inherited an unhappy situation in the nearby Dominican Republic where a dictator ruled who was not friendly to the United States, and Lord knows, many of them often were. His name was Hector Miguel Trujillo and he was a rough customer with his own people.
On February 15, Secretary of State Dean Rusk informed Kennedy that if certain changes were not made in our sugar trade policies towards the Dominican Republic, it was very possible that a Communist dictatorship could emerge there. Kennedy snapped at Rusk, “Come on Dean, I have enough on my plate without having to panic over the stupid Dominican Republic!.” Rusk turned white with disbelief, but before he could say anything Kennedy broke into a laugh and said, “I'm just kidding. Of course it's important.”
Rusk was not used to the famous 'Kennedy wit.'
The State Department's Bureau of Inter American Affairs as well as the CIA was all in favor of inspiring a revolution to overthrow Trujillo, but Rusk was trying to caution Kennedy that this event could cause a pro-Communist reactionary regime taking Trujillo's place.
In the DR the CIA continued to conspire and Rusk in DC continued to perspire. But the Dominican people “took matters into their own hands and overthrew Rafael Trujillo the dictator.” On May 30 1961 a military coup put Trujillo into an early grave and created a grave crisis. Dominican leftists and rightists both presumed that the United States was behind the assassination. The reputation for coups and CIA conspiracies was hard to live down. In denying responsibility for the murder and revolution in the DR, the United States was the wolf who cried wolf.
Rusk and Kennedy were both trying to make a public case that the USA had no part in the rebellion/coup. Both men were embarrassed to learn that the CIA without White House or State Department support, permission or even knowledge had indeed been assisting the conspirators for some time before slay day. The CIA had not planned, inspired or launched the coup, but CIA assistance was certainly a green light and an inspiration for anyone sitting on the fence. kennedy had aided and abetted the assassination of a foreign leader without even knowing about it. At least with Castro and Diem he was a knave, but not a fool.
The US supported Joey Belanger to replace the fallen Trujillo. Belanger was the President of the DR with no real power while Trujillo had been King. The US saw the seating of Belanger as the least volatile solution. But an election in late 1962 put Juan Earnie Bosch in power. Bosch's claim to fame was as a writer. Talk about a weak solution to a big problem! Things would not settle down in the DR in Kennedy's time and LBJ sent the US Marines “down there” to settle things in 1965.
YURI GO ROUND – 4.12.61
The United States sent a chimp into space on January 31, 1961. On April 12, 1961 the USSR made real space history when it sent a human being into outer space.
The United States had to pretend it was happy when the Soviet Union shocked the world by sending Yuri Gagarin into outer space and around the globe, returning him home to Moscow safely.
Gagarin was basically riding in a little closet on top of an ICBM SS-6 missile. He traveled at 18,000 miles and hour and 187 miles high on April 12, 1961.
As his craft began to fall to earth Gagarin ejected and spent the last 7 kilometers floating down by parachute. One Russian farmer woman and her granddaughter watched as the first real astronaut fell safely back home.
The USA sent its congratulations but the smile was fake. This was a real setback U.S. national defense. Kennedy's team couldn't put a positive spin on this one in the era of nuclear warheads and intercontinental ballistic missiles. Yesterday it was a dog, today a man, tomorrow a warhead. For the first time Kennedy's campaign lie that the Soviets had a commanding lead in missiles and missile technology might be true after all, even though it was a known lie when he said it over and over on the campaign trail.
Within three months Kennedy saw to it that the budget for NASA was doubled. The Russians were up 2-0 in the space race, first with Sputnik, now with Vostok 1.
The worst thing about the Gagarin space flight was that it put Kennedy's macho ego on the defensive and helped lead the United States into the Vietnam War. The manned Soviet space lead was a defeat for Kennedy in the Cold War, and it would be followed by an ever greater setback later the same month at the Bay of Pigs. Krushchov would then bully Kennedy at the Paris summit. It is no exaggeration to say that Kennedy made the American commitment to Vietnam partly as a compensation for a series of defeats elsewhere, including space. He wanted to get re-elected in 1964 and had to stand up to the Communists somewhere, and that place was Vietnam.
Yuri Gagarin became a hero all over the world. A story went around that his first words when he looked out the window a the earth below were, “I don't see any God up here.” Actually his first words were, “Look at the earth! It is so very beautiful.” But it made for good Cold War God-vs.-Atheism propaganda to take something that Krushchev said in a speech and graft it on to the lips of the space cadet while he flew for Russia.
Gagarin was elected to the Soviet legislature in Moscow in 1962. YG died in a jet plane crash in 1968. It was May and he was testing a Mig-15 fighter when it crashed. Garagin is buried in the High Kremlin Walls.
CLOSING THE FICTIONAL MISILE GAP
In his farewell speech, Eisenhower had warned of the dangers from our nations "military-industrial complex." Ike kept a tight lid on defense spending, but left our nation's defenses strong.
Kennedy campaigned on this alleged "missile gap" between the USSR and the USA, as if we were way behind them in missiles or missile technology because of Sputnik. It was a campaign ruse and it helped John John get elected.
Now that he was in he would have to back up his pledge to rebuild our depleted national defense.
When Ike left office there were about 1,000 large nuclear bombs in the American arsenal. Kennedy knew that this was more than enough to deter the Soviet Union and far more than they had, but he was forced by his own posturing to have to raise the ante in the arms race.
From the first day he was President, Kennedy knew the true extent of American nuclear superiority. It was an even bigger US ad than he had imagined when he claimed the Russians had it in the 1959-60 campaign. It enabled him to stand up to Krushchev in two major confrontations, in Berlin and Cuba.
By the time Kennedy left Dallas in a box the United States had almost 1,800 large nuclear warheads. The liberal Democrat had out-militarized the military Republican Dwight Eisenhower.
ACDA
To try and get a grip on the rising threat of nuclear armageddon
the Congress formed the ACDA in 1961, the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency.
The whole ICMB business was new and analysis and decision making on it was all over the road. The State and Defense Departments were arguing with each other, Administration advisors were debating it with Kennedy, think-tanks from Rand and others were pitching in and stirring up the pot. It was at least time to get the nuclear umbrella under an organized intellectual umbrella. From now on all this blow up the world analysis had to take place under the direct or indirect auspices of the ACDA.
One of the most deadly debates concerned “first strike capability.” There are two definitions of first strike capability. The first is the ability to hit the other side with a nuclear strike without the other side being able to prevent it. Both sides had it by Kennedy's time. Conventional bombers could get some nukes through.
The second definition is “first strike capability” with the other side knocked out and unable to deliver an effective “second strike.”
No one in the collective JFK nuke brains trust thought that the Soviets didn't have the first definition. The second was debated. Those, like Nitze, who argued that the Soviets were close to achieving the second definition were not always well received. For they were also saying that the United States had only the first definition and not the second and was not about to acquire the second. If the pessimists were right, then the United States would in the very near future be vulnerable to losing a nuclear war decisively with the Soviet Union. If that point were reached, then even if there was no war there would be political intimidation. The Soviets could win one victory after another in the Cold War by holding the threat of emerging victorious in the hot one. If, for example, in these new parameters, North Korean invaded South Korea again, the UN might be scared to act the same way it did in 1950.
BAY OF PIGS FIASCO APRIL 1961
It wasn’t enough that Ike dropped Laos on Kennedy as an unsolved crisis for the young successor. Eisenhower also gave him Cuba and a CIA sponsored pending invasion, another hot potato for young John to juggle with his tender hands. Cuba would plague Kennedy’s entire presidency and may have had something to do with his death in Texas.
In these dark years of the Cold War any nation that went Communist was placed in the ‘L’ column for whoever was prez. Truman had already ‘lost’ China and had paid the price in 1952 when he declined to run a race he couldn’t win. The hero Eisenhower had taken the ‘L’ for Cuba. The plan was close to operational when Ike had to leave. But he still wanted the ‘L’ taken off his record.
Ike had briefed Kennedy on the Cuban operation weeks before the 1961 Inaugural. An army of Cuban exiles, now stationed in Guatemala, trained and supplied by the CIA were to take the beach at the Bay of Pigs in Cuba and march on Havana while a general uprising of right-wing spontaneous Cuban revolutionary support swept the island.
Kennedy could have stopped the invasion from proceeding but many military and CIA leaders had told him the plan had an excellent chance for success. The President was especially impressed by an eyewitness report from a Marine colonel in Guatemala stating that the brigade of exiles was well trained, ready to go and very impressive.
Kennedy had instinctual misgivings but was not in an easy position to say no. He certainly respected Eisenhower, and probably didn’t perceive the plan as a partisan political one. This wasn't some Republican scheme that he should kill since he was a Democrat. Both parties were Cold Warrior, and the CIA was neither Republican nor Democrat.
Kennedy had to be cautious though, because he had pledged during the 1960 campaign not to use US troops to overthrow Castro. He wanted the Administration to keep a safe distance from the blame if the thing failed. Kennedy would not promise anything but token clandestine air support. But he did want the Cuban win for his presidency. Getting a Communist country back into the freedom pack would make him a cinch in 64, and saying no could be politically risky. If word leaked out that Kennedy had nixed a viable plan to re-take Cuba from the Communist bloc, it would be a happy day for whoever was running against him in 1964.
Kennedy maintained room at all times for ‘plausible denial’. If he did approve the invasion of Cuba. The operation would have to be done in such a way that the United States could plausibly deny that it was officially involved. No US military forces could be openly committed to the action. John was determined to minimize any political risk, even if it meant maximizing logistical risk for the attack.
But in trying to have it both ways he ended up having neither. The political risks were there anyway. The impending invasion was about as secret as the location of the sun. People were chattering about it all over the streets of Havana. US mags and newspapers were reporting the training, arming and deployment of the invasion force out of Guatemala with the same sense of secrecy as they reported the sports scores. Kennedy was calling editors asking them to kill the stories, but the New York Times for one, virtually laughed in his face and hung up. The exile army bound for Cuba and glory was no cloak and dagger operation.
Diplomatically, invasion wasn’t as far out of the bounds as might seem. When Ike had severed diplomatic relations with Cuba, he had broadcast in effect that the US was close to war with the islanders. The severance of diplomatic relations is well understood to be a prologue to the start of war, so it might not have been so necessary for Kennedy to have been so fearful of direct US involvement. But he was stuck with his liberal campaign pledge and didn’t want to look like a liar four months into his term. He also really didn’t want any blood on his hands. Johnny was a good Catholic boy.
The army of Cuban exiles would be 2,000 strong at the most. They were trained in Nicaragua by the CIA. General Max Taylor, a friend of Kennedy later estimated that if he if had been assigned the Bay of Pigs as a conventional military target to take with US forces, he would have requested a full division of Marines, more than 14,000 men. And that would be to just take and hold the beach. These 2,000 Cuban exiles were going to conquer the entire island. Castro had a significant home field advantage and a militia of 200,000 troops.
The new team at the State Department could have protested the project vigorously and provided Kennedy with an excuse not to act. But the clandestine elements of the government helped to quash any efforts to evaluate the plan objectively. The CIA told Kennedy that there were so many Cuban exiles and other mercenaries being trained in Guatemala already for this operation that if the operation was scrapped there would be a ‘visibility problem.’ All these tough hombres would drift back into the states and begin talking. Guatemala was putting pressure on the US to get these rogues the heck out of here before the end of April. They were high visibility and were making the host government at Guatemala City very uncomfortable. The CIA also pointed out with some effect, that Russian Mig Fighters were expected to arrive in Cuba very soon. Cuban pilots had been trained in Eastern Europe and would be coming home Cuba to fly these jets. The time to act on “OPERATION SHAVEBEARD” was now, before the Migs arrived in Havanna on Russian freighters.
From Kennedy’s perspective the choice was only whether to accept or reject the CIA/Ike plan. No other ideas were fleshed out. His cabinet was not much involved until it was too late. As JFK’s close advisor Ted Sorenson puts it, “The problems of turning back a preconceived project ready to go, supposedly without overt American involvement seemed much more difficult than permitting it to go ahead.”
Many people were telling Kennedy that Cuba was a boiling cauldron of insurrection. Angry mobs were attacking government installations, and the Cuban Army was disloyal and rebellious. They would be as likely to support the invaders as to attack them. All of this was not true, particularly when logic is employed. A dictator’s first order of business is to put all political opponents large or small into prison or six feet under. Castro had not missed his cue. The CIA seemed to think that the Civil War in Cuba had not actually been settled in 1958-59. Now the Cuban people were supposedly ready to welcome back the people they had already thrown out.
Kennedy was later shocked to learn that there was, in fact, no coordinated uprising planned within Cuba if and when the initial landing had succeeded. The CIA had lied to him. They hoped it would happen, but it wasn't planned. The Cubans were expected to support the uprising spontaneously, ignoring their survival instincts, which would warn them of dire consequences if they backed an outside attempt to overthrow a dictatorial government. Organized Cuban opposition groups within Cuba did not even know of the attack until they heard of its failure on the news! John Brown at Harper’s Ferry had a more realistic chance of success.
There was a contingency plan to have the invaders escape into the Escambria Mountains and wage a guerilla war against Castro if the invasion did not succeed, but that too was a fantasy.
Later Kennedy said that only one person in or outside of his cabinet that knew of the Bay of Pigs plan had advised against it, and that was Senator William Fullbright (Sorenson includes Assistant Secretary of State Walter Rostow.) Senator Fullbright thought the whole Exile Army scheme hopeless from the start, and said so emphatically.
Fullbright was also from the start one of the consistent opponents of the Vietnam War. Fullbright wasn’t one of those weathervane liberals that support military operations until they fail, and then they suddenly become against militarism per se. William stuck to his anti-guns all his political life.
There were others who later claimed that they did not like the Pigs invasion idea for any of a number of good reasons, but they either kept quiet about it or expressed their misgivings so meekly that they had no right to say ‘I told you so’ when it flopped.
The decision to go ahead was made after a major meeting of the big security people on April 4 in the office of the Secretary of State, Dean Rusk. According to Paul Nitze who was there, Fullbright objected not on the grounds of feasibility, but on the grounds of morality. Fullbright didn't care one way or another whether it could or would work. He just thought it was morally wrong for the United States to attempt to overthrow a sovereign state because we didn't like its form of government. Good for him.
Nitze had spoken with right-wing nut CIA guy Edward Lansdale a few days earlier. To Nitze's surprise, Lansdale was against the plan. Lansdale wasn't on the same page as Fullbright but by accident they were both against it. It was Lansdale, not Fullbright who insisted to Nitze, that the plan was doomed to disaster. There wasn't enough military power, and no political support worth mentioning inside Cuba. Since Lansdale was a CIA and a military guy, his word was quite impressive in naysaying the Bay of Pigs plan.
When Kennedy went around the table on April 4, Fullbright made his case morally against it. Other than that no one really objected. Nitze, in fact, not only held his tongue on Lansdale's objections (which the General had hoped would be passed on to Kennedy,) he openly supported the plan and criticized Fullbright's objections. Nitze later admitted he was wrong not to mention Lansdale's opinion at this meeting. It might have made a difference, since Kennedy had every right, judging by what he heard here, to presume that the plan was bound to succeed.
4/17/61 CIA Invasion Hurled Back Into the Sea at Bay of Pigs
Brigade 2506, the invasion force on D-Day April 17 was only 1,400 strong. On the morning of the invasion air strikes by CIA planes disguised as Cuban defector planes tried to destroy the Cuban Air Force on the ground but fell far short of their goals. The men of Brigade 2506 hit the beach at the Bay of Pigs without air cover. The Castro only had to send in two old Sea Fury fighters and three US made T-33 trainers, converted for combat. These five Cuban jets stole the show and kept the attackers pinned to the beach. They also sank two small freighters off the coast that were the supply lifeline for the brigade if it had been able to hold on.
The 2506’ers radioed frantically for air support. A US aircraft carrier the Essex was 50 miles off the coast and could have scrambled help in a short time, but Kennedy was not going to commit US forces openly. He had said so from the start and did not budge when it meant life or death for the exiles on the beach. Brigade 2506 was shot to hell. Those that were not killed were captured and imprisoned. Kennedy is blamed then and to this day for the failure because of this decision not to call in air strikes. He may have paid for this failure with his own life.
A crucial element in this whole affair, largely ignored by the history books, was the international reaction to the initial air strikes against the Cuban Air Forces on the ground. At that moment, it certainly looked like the United States was using its air power to simply attack Cuba without provocation. The world did not know that the Bay of Pigs invasion was coming within a matter of hours. The USA was launching unprovoked attacks on Cuba with no apparent purpose except to be bullies and thugs.
A storm of international chastisement fell instantly upon the Kennedy/Rusk team over these attacks. Without this diplomatic firestorm reaction to the initial air strikes, Kennedy might well have authorized air support for 2506 when it hit the beach. But JFK didn't want another round of these protests.
The invasion may have failed even if it had the air cover. The Cuban people either loved the new regime or were afraid of it, neither trait encouraging for the exile invaders that were depending on a contagious revolutionary uprising from below. With air support, the invasion may have succeeded initially and failed later, with repercussions even worse for the United States.
UN Ambassador Adlai Stevenson was denying US involvement in the Bay of Pigs invasion during the whole thing. Kennedy had kept the poor guy in the dark. The country was humiliated even further by Adlai’s transparent denials at the UN.
In the aftermath a political cartoon showed the Bay of Pigs fiasco as an exploding Cuban cigar in Kennedy’s mouth. The humiliation may have made John excessively truculent later when there was a second Cuban Crisis, the one over missiles. His injured macho pride may have caused such an overreaction later that millions could have needlessly perished. He was more trigger-happy over Berlin and Vietnam later. It may have been for personal psychological reasons as much as for the defense of freedom and liberty. Injured male pride among Kings has caused as many wars as religion.
The fallout from Pigs was bad across the board. The left was mad at Kennedy for doing it, the right was mad at him for not doing it right, the world was mad at him for violating international law, the Russians were dancing in the Kremlin, and the Cuban rightists were so mad at him that their response may have come in Dealey Plaza.
Kennedy took the fall for a plan he didn’t like by Ike and the CIA, but a plan that he could not bring himself to say no to. He was caught in the classic Democratic Party trap. Wanting to be liberal and conservative at the same time. A true conservative would have provided air support and more. A true liberal would have rejected the plan from the start. ‘One bad general is better than two good ones,’ said Lincoln. That applies to political principles as well as generals.
One result from the disaster was that Kennedy changed his policy about foreign policy advisors. From now on he would take his worldly advice on from his inner circle of close friends, even if few of them had any formal expertise in the field. Instead of the CIA and the generals the President would take his counsel with Sorenson, Salinger, Davey O’Brien, Theodore H. White, or his brother Bobby. JFK had come to the conclusion that the Bay of Pigs was the swimming pool in the Pentagon basement.
Kennedy’s rejection of the advice of the CIA, and reducing its power after the Bay of Pigs may have given that organization the motive to murder him in Dallas. A substantial number of people in America consider the CIA a prime suspect in Kennedy’s slaying. The Langley Bunch had lost all influence at 1600 Pennsylvania and Kennedy's four year term was just beginning. If he were re-elected it would mean seven and a half years without power for the CIA.
Kennedy was disgusted with himself for even having listened to them in the first place. He was heard mumbling to himself repeatedly, “How could I have been so stupid. Why did I listen to them?”
Incredibly, JFK later suspected that the whole invasion plan was designed to fail. Kennedy came to believe that the CIA and the military, when they proposed the Pigs Op, had never even sincerely believed that it had a serious chance of success, at least not as it was originally structured. The vulcans of 62 were just leading Kennedy on in order to to get the US involved. When the operation stalled, the President would be forced to commit more US forces to finish the job right in an over the top invasion and the removal of Castro from power.
They sold Kennedy that the Castro take-down was a safe gamble. But the true odds were probably 150-1, and 30-1 even with air support. Kennedy learned the hard way to never trust a gambler betting with his heart with other people’s money.
LEMNUTZER
His actual name was General Lyman Lemnitzer but he was such a right-wing nut that several of Kennedy's aides referred to him behind his back as “General Lemnutz.” Lyman Lemnitzer was a hawk's hawk.
How complicit was General Lemitzer in the Bay of Pigs conspiracy? A lot of people would like to know.
This Lemnitzer guy is quite an important and mysterious character. The right seems to think he's a hero and no one there is trying to discredit or disown him. Lyman was awarded a lot of medals by Nixon and others.
But from the left, Lyman is a very bad character. The left spells it 'Lie-man' Lemnitzer.
Lemnitzer was allegedly one of the main masterminds behind something called Operation Northbridge, and it's so evil I don't even want to tell you about it.
After the Bay of Pigs, the United States would need an extra good pretext to invade Cuba without looking like imperialist bums. Lemnitzer and other right-wing military scoundrels had an idea. The plan was to commit acts of terrorism against United States citizens and targets, and blame it on the Cubans! Some versions of the plan had fake people sinking on an empty US warship, but others included major bombings of government buildings in which citizen casualties were not only unavoidable, but essential! They were worth the price. Some woman and her baby carriage might get blown to bits outside a Minneapolis Naval recruiting station, but that was ok because the ends justifies the means. Instead of conducting a war on terror, the United States would be conducting terror to provoke a war. Ouch.
Lemnitzer openly proposed this to Kennedy after the Bay of Pigs, and proposed it again after the Missiles of October. Kennedy eventually fired Lyman upstairs to NATO Commander in Europe (summer of 1962.) He had to get the right wing lunatic out of his essentially decent ear.
Lemnitzer was one of the militarists that Kennedy had the habit of storming out on in meetings. Kennedy would met with Le May, Lemnitz, and, Nitze and then walk out muttering, “I thought we were supposed to be a civilized nation,” The vulcans called him a milquetoast as he faded away down the hall for some more steroid shots at the White House gym.
The story of Lemnitzer and the Northbridge conspiracy is in the book, Body of Secrets, by Chuck “Bam “ Bamford. I don't know what to believe. There is a major NATO foundation and egghead research op named after him today. Lemnitzer served bravely in World War II at Sicily and led NATO forces in the 50's and again in the sixties. But if these Northbridge charges are true, then LL is one of history's bad guys.
What a plan. Not only would it mean mass murder of American citizens, it would have perpetrated the needless deaths in war of all those who fell in the subsequent invasion. What may be worst, it would have established a new American Foreign Policy approach, one based on great and terrible dirty lies. If Kennedy had said one word, the slaying of American citizens by American spies as a false pretext for war against Cuba would have gone down.
It is also alleged in the Bam book that the Lemnitz plan to attack ourselves was first proposed to Eisenhower and that he did not reject it. Ike oversaw feasibility studies and reports on the kill our own people scheme.
CIVIL RIGHTS/FREEDOM RIDERS MAY 1961
His closest, most loyal and most erudite supporters concede that Civil Rights for blacks was never really very high on Kennedy’s priorities. The martyr gets way more credit than he deserves on this score. JFK always believed in equality and was always against segregation, but efforts to achieve gains in this field always seemed rather perfunctory. To those around him it usually seemed like he was courting the right moral choice on race issues with more of a focus on winning the negro vote than on any special compassion or passion for a persecuted minority.
Kennedy was preparing for a summit meeting with Krushchov in the spring of 1961 when he was sidetracked by racial problems in the South. Throughout the ‘Freedom Riders’ crisis Kennedy acted as though these liberal whites and persecuted blacks were just a big pain in the neck, the last thing he felt like dealing with when the foreign policy field was fraught with danger in Laos, Cuba and Berlin.
Some 13 young whites and blacks had teamed up to challenge segregation in the nation’s transportation industry. They would leave Washington DC as a two team unit and ride through the South on Greyhound and Trailways buses. A recent federal ruling had declared segregation illegal in facilities that involved interstate transportation. States could still legally strong-arm blacks in municipal transportation systems, but the Greyhound bus terminals fell under federal jurisdiction. The new desegregation laws had yet to be really enforced or tested. Old signs for separating black and white were still stuck to a million Southern walls.
A brave group of seven blacks and six whites went on their bus tour of the deep South. Their trip wasn’t to visit the old Civil War battlefields, it was to establish new ones. These young warriors for justice stirred up deep trouble, crossing state lines and social lines too. They were going to integrate the bus stops all over the South just by using them.
At one point their Greyhound bus was followed out of Montgomery Alabama by a caravan of racist rednecks who were going to teach these whippercrackers a lesson. The whiffleheads gently slashed the tires on the Greyhound just enough for the bus to get out on the highway before it broke down in the small town of Anniston Alabama with that sad thudding drum roll of flats.
One of racist whites yelled “Leave the driving to us!” and threw a Molotov cocktail through one of the Greyhound’s open windows. The bus caught fire and the young crusaders were forced out of the bus. The mob of racist whites beat them up with fists, clubs, soda bottles, and other weapons of class destruction. The whites were hopelessly outnumbered in morals, but the liberals were outnumbered in people. No one died but one poor soul suffered permanent brain damage from the assault. 1961 had its Town of Pigs to match its Bay.
Another white gang attacked 'The Freedom Riders' when the convoy reached Birmingham. Local Bama Police, and FBI did nothing but take notes as the reds (as in redneck) beat up the liberals. The two brave liberal groups now combined for safety, but no bus driver would take them any further.
Being stranded in Birmingham is no treat in any era, but in May of 1961 it was a POW status for a white lib or a black political activist. The State department flew them all to New Orleans at taxpayer expense just to get them out of Alabama before they were all killed. Black leaders pleaded with President Kennedy to send in the US Army. But Jack did not want a repeat of Little Rock 1957. So instead of troops he sent a personal representative, a Mr. Sigenthaler to the Southern crisis zone. Critics charged that Kennedy was copping out, but Kennedy thought (desperately hoped) that the whole thing could be settled at the state level. The governor of Alabama had been the only Southern politician to support him in 1960 and he now assured Jack that the crisis could be contained without Federal help.
John and his brother Bobby telephoned Sigenthaler down in Alabama for his first report. While on the phone, Sigenthaler yelled “Holy mackerel Jack, there’s a negro getting beaten up by four white guys outside my window in my parking lot! I’ve got to go down and help.” Sig beat it down the stairs and out the door. Someone else picked up the phone and described to the President how four white thugs were still beating up two men. This little phone call had quite an effect on the K-Boys.
Bobby Kennedy was active throughout this crisis and there is little question that he did feel genuine passion on the Civil Rights issue. BK made up for the lack of it in the President, at least to some degree.
John Kennedy was always was weighing the political impact, and that included more than just the election of 1964. He needed the support of Southern Democrats on a daily basis to enact legislation, and if he humiliated them now, he would lose that political leverage.
Southern Democrats might ask for Republican support to stop Kennedy on the Greyhound crisis. Then the Southern Dems would owe the Republican a big-time log-roll favor, and in the end Kennedy could lose some major piece of progressive legislation to a combined Republican-Southern Democrat block. So ironically, standing up for right at this time might do more harm than good for progress.
JF Kennedy was always determined to be a uniter, not a divider, and always wanted the half a loaf he could achieve on Capitol Hill, rather than risk probably losing the whole loaf. He was a great compromiser. Now with the Civil Rights Crisis he was being forced to do the opposite of his nature, both with Congress and in the immediate theatre of action on the scene in the South.
Black leaders asked him to propose dramatic desegregation legislation now. To Kennedy this was impractical politically and would divide the country by stirring up a lot of racism, and stirring it up too suddenly. The timing was right but the gradualism wasn’t there. Black people in the South were asking for Federal troops, both for protection and for a political demonstration of the new national will.
Kennedy said wait. Martin Luther King yelled “Wait means never!”
Eventually the Alabama National Guard was called out to give the Greyhound and Trailways buses an escort. So it turned out it was like Little Rock all over again. But Ike had gotten more humanitarian and liberal credit for sending in the federal troops in 57 than Kennedy did for letting the state troops handle it in 61. Some black leaders were very unhappy with Kennedy over the lack of Presidential intervention in the Freedom Rider Crisis. Sigenthaler hadn’t done much.
Even if Kennedy knew that bold legislation on Civil Rights could not have passed the Congress, he could have proposed it anyway. Making a showcase of an issue in a losing cause is a stepping stone to victory. A more passionate liberal or a more intrepid integrationist would have done more, but Kennedy was neither. If he had been either he probably couldn’t have been elected in the first place in 1960.
SUKHARNO
Most Americans today have never heard of this famous historical man. But President Sukharno of Indonesia, was very famous in the Kennedy era. Even the average housewife in Muncie knew who Sukharno was.
One of the most volatile and difficult countries that Kennedy had to deal with in foreign affairs was Indonesia. It is a huge country made up of 8.2 trillion islands in South Asia. Indonesia was at a crossroads in geography and ideology. It wasn't Communist, but it had a big Communist movement inside. It had the largest Moslem population in the world (and still does,) but was not exporting radical Islam, and it also had enormous Christian and Hindu populations. It claimed to embrace democracy, but it was ruled by a dictator.
Indonesia was a prize. It was coveted by the east, the west, and to a lesser extent, by the Indonesians. This country didn't want to be a pawn in the Cold War. It was too strong and powerful want to to play that role, but on the other hand the role was hard to avoid since it was a fact, not a choice. But Indonesia was also definitely “neutral,” which in Kennedy's time was not a good thing. Neutral to Washington meant tilted against the United States, even if that tilt was adamantly unofficial.
President Sukharno made a state visit to Washington in early 1961 and shocked the Kennedy team with his arrogant attitude. He arrived at the airport and immediately asked to have prostitutes sent to his hotel. When Rusk and Kissinger wanted to discuss South Asian politics, Sukharno changed the subject to the nice-looking bodies of movie stars Marylyn Monroe and Gina Lollibridgida. I am not making this up.
Then Sukharno had the audacity to suggest to Dean Rusk that Jacqueline Kennedy pay a state visit to Indonesia without her husband, the President. People, I am not making this story up. Rusk sent a crisp note to Kennedy saying that he was not about to authorize such a trip, and he called Sukharno a couple of names too. Kennedy did not respond to the Rusk memo, which indicated he agreed with its delicate content.
This is a unique story in American history, a famous foreign President arriving to improve international relations in a dangerous region and wasting the whole trip in a sexual blackout.
The Kennedy team was elated to drive Sukharno to the airport and put him on a plane back to “Indo.”
Kennedy told Powers that he was shocked at Sukharnos bad behavior. “Nobody is as pure as the driven snow,” Kennedy said in almost confession, “ But how can a man let the ladies interfere with his ability to conduct international relations? It's beyond me.
“Sukharno should change the spelling of his name to “horno,” suggested Powers.
“That might be funny is it wasn't so serious,” replied Kennedy without a trace of a smile.
Just for the record the United States government denied Sukharno's request for prostitutes.
Former President Bill Clinton is currently writing a biography of Sukharno titled, “Sukharno the Great.”
PARIS IN THE SPRING
Kennedy and his First Lady flew to Paris on the way to meet Krushchov for the Geneva Summit of 61. Jacqueline was only 31 years old, was very lovely and spoke fluent French. She wore the finest French designer clothing. Her husband was only stopping by for a chat with De Gaulle, so she was feted more than he was. “I am the man who accompanied Jacqueline Kennedy to Paris,” he quipped to the delight of the sound-byte crowd all over the world.
Kennedy got along surprisingly well with De Gaulle, a man that Truman and Ike had not been fond of. Kennedy reassured him that he would make it clear to Krushchov that the US would fight to defend Europe with same ferocity that it would defend the United States. As long as Krushchov understood that, Kennedy was willing to negotiate the status of Berlin. De Gaulle liked the first part but not the second. He told Kennedy that under no circumstance should Kennedy offer to negotiate on Berlin. It would lead to needless concessions and would show weakness.
As for Russia, the problem was that it was Russia. De Gaulle said Kennedy's perception of Communism as the threat was off the mark. The real threat was Russia, and Russian nationalist aspirations. The Russian threat would have existed with or without Communism. I couldn’t agree more.
Charles De Gaulle was mad for Jackie and it no doubt improved Franc-Americans relations in Kennedy's time. He stared at her and talked to her like John Kennedy wasn't present or President. JFK put up with it for the good of the country.
She was a Bouvier, a French blooded beauty and her French was absolutely flawless. She served as Kennedy's interpreter with De Gaulle. Charles and Jacqueline talked more than Charles and Jack did. The Frenchmen were all infatuated with Jacqueline, and they had to laugh about it later, how they had ignored their own celebrity foxes and just stared at her all night.
KRUSHED IN VIENNA 1961
The Cold War now became a duel between Kennedy and Krushchev (or ‘Krushchov’ - either spelling is acceptable) ) of the USSR. The two men met in Vienna in early June of 1961, but it was not officially a Summit Meeting, just an informal get together among friends who might destroy the earth. It has come down to history as a “summit meeting” but it wasn't really.
Kennedy was very much opposed to Summits unless they were convened to solidify agreements already reached. Otherwise he felt that they raised false expectations. They were an invitation to the image of failure.
In Paris Krushchev stared at Jacqueline a lot. It was De Gaulle syndrome all over again. Nicky kept a steady of stream of light humor directed at Mrs. Kennedy who laughed and smiled back at the flirty Communist dictator.
Later on the two giants had a formal one on one. Kennedy kept warning Nikita about the dangers of ‘miscalculation’ until the Russian lost his temper,
“Miscalculation! Miscalculation! That's all I ever hear from you is this stupid word over and over. Miscalculation! Miscalculation! Enough already, I heard you the first 400 times!”
Krushchev anted to know if the was US suggesting that the USSR should sit at its desk with folded hands like a scared schoolchild?
Kennedy argued for a status-quo world where neither side tried to expand its way of life at the expense of the other. In offering to pledge America to not try to win the Cold War, Kennedy was taking a true left stance, compared to, say, a Ronald Reagan. But Krushchev didn't recognize the concession, and still acted as though Kennedy was being belligerent. Nicky wanted to know if Kennedy was saying that only in Russia could the socialist experiment be developed.
Kennedy kept returning to the goal of avoiding nuclear war. Krushchev showed him the Lenin Prize for Peace that he had won. “Lets hope you get to keep it,” said Kennedy. This is supposed to be one of the fine and famous examples of “the Kennedy Wit.” (Kennedy was funny the way the Beatles were funny – If they weren't super-famous and adored in another field, they never would have been considered funny at all.)
But most eyewitnesses were in agreement (Ted Sorenson and Dave Powers do not agree) that the Vienna exchange did not go well for Kennedy. He seemed to be on the defensive while the patronizing and experienced warrior from the coal mines of the Donets browbeat him with facts and philosophy and hardly let the young Kennedy even get a word in, let alone a winning argument. Kennedy himself later confided in despair to a close aide that Krushchev had treated him like a child.
A rumor went around Eastern Europe that Krushchov was boasting that he had taught the young freshman a lesson in the meaning of fear. Gromyko reported that Kennedy was left without an answer when Nicky demanded to know why the US had so many military bases overseas and asked against whom were they directed.
Certainly the experience State Department hands on hand thought that Krushchev had bested Kennedy badly. Most European leaders were downtrodden by Kennedy's efforts against “Special K” which was the CIA code-word for Krushchev.)
The US press thought that Kennedy had been verbally humiliated, European Allies were reeling from the unfavorable comparison between Ike and Kennedy. Harry MacMillan of the UK wrote in his diary that, “JFK makes Neville Chamberlain look like Joe Louis. We're in a fine mess.” MacMillan thought that Kennedy had been bullied into taking too tough of a stance, paradoxically enough. Now the world was on the brink of nuclear war because the skinny Harvard wide receiver had to prove he was man enough to match the bully coal miner.
NUCLEAR RECONSIDERED
Kennedy returned from Vienna all shook up and asked for an estimate on how many people would die in a nuclear war with the Soviet Union. The number reported was 70 million Americans, or one dead for every American who had watched him debate Nixon.
Kennedy returned from Vienna in a valley of despair. He knew that fatso had bested him, wiped the streets with him, indeed absolutely punked him. Harvard had not trained Kennedy to argue with a man who had climbed the ranks of vicious dialectic Russian argument festivals on Marx, labor and capitalism. This was a battle tested Communist professional arguer against a spoiled rich brat from Hyannisport and Harvard. It was Andre the Giant vs. Don Knotts in a $1,200 suit.
Tony Dobrynin was struck by how alone Kennedy conducted the debate. Eisenhower had never run the risk of losing arguments with foreign leaders because he consulted with his team before he responded to anything. He slowed it all down and let the Administration speak as a group through him. It was annoying but safe and defensive. Like FDR, Kennedy was conceited about the power of his charm and intellect, and it backfired from time to time on both of them (it certainly worked for both of them too.)
Kennedy had come to Vienna planning to more or less intimidate Krushchev but ended up in the fat man's half-nelson. Mr Harvard was going to stare down Krushchev over Berlin and Laos, but especially Berlin. He wanted to make sure that there be no “miscalculation” on Krushchev's part over Berlin. He would make sure that Krushchev understood that if he closes off Berlin there could be war. This was what De Gaulle had coached him to do and Kennedy had told De Gaulle, “Don't worry, I was planning on doing exactly that anyway.”
Kennedy was shocked and did not know what to do when Krushchev called his bluff and said, “OK, big tough guy, then there will be a war, because we are going to do what you are warning us that we not dare do, that is, cut off access to Berlin, and you do what you have to do.”
Kennedy was shaken up by having to return home with the prospects of World War III looking much more likely than it had looked when he left D.C. Some summit. He told a prominent national writer that he though there was a one in five chance of a nuclear war over either Berlin or Laos. He gave the same assessment to Bobby who passed bro's grim analysis on to others.
PEACE MEANS WAR
The irony of Berlin is that the trip-wire that would start World War III was actually a peace treaty. Krushchev repeatedly threatened to sign a Peace treaty with East Germany, and both sides knew that this might mean war. Of all the Nobel Prize ironies (Nobel invented dynamite.)
The war with Germany had ended in armistice but the formal political settlement was still unfinished. The status of Germany was an ad hoc helter-skelter solution of pure expedience between the big powers. If the Third World War had broken out over Berlin, one could argue that it wasn't even a WWIII, but was the final chapter in a World War II that had never been officially ended.
The Soviets were threatening to make a separate peace treaty with the portion of Germany they occupied, in defiance of the other Allies who controlled the other half. All sides were supposed to agree on a peace treaty for all of Germany, and in the mix, Berlin was still divided, its status ever-unofficial. By making a separate peace treaty, as Krushchov threatened to definitely do by the end of 1961, the Russians would then be able to dictate conditions inside Berlin, ostensibly with the sanction of international law.
The first thing the Soviets would do is declare that Berlin was a closed city, controlled by the Communist government of East Germany. The Western Allies would be denied permission to travel in or out of there. Those inside would have a few months to get out of Dodge or stay trapped there. The USA said no way, the USSR said watch me, and the world held its breath.
GIMMIE NUCLEAR SHELTER
Prior to the Vienna meeting Kennedy had paid little attention to the senators who were clamoring for nuclear war fallout protection plans for American citizens. Kennedy thought it was insane to plan for a nuclear war and thought that even preparing for one was inviting one, and was a sick idea. He was still the college philosopher thinking that a nuclear war must never be fought. But as president he had to throw the poetic stances out the window and deal. A nuclear war most certainly could be fought.
After Vienna Kennedy took the whole idea of saving a few extra million American lives completely seriously. Kennedy accepted that there was a difference between 30 million Americans dying in a nuke was and 60 million. Pompous poets could write that there was no difference, but Jack finally turned white as a ghost as faced up the the horrible fact that there was.
Vienna started the ball rolling on all that fallout shelter drilling that I got caught up in as a school-child. The entire Gate of Heaven School was air-raid sirened into the basement bathrooms once a day on average from the time I was 8 until at least the time I was 10 (1963-65). Every day we heard the sirens at the school at the most unexpected time and we all rushed in orderly fashion down to the basement. Sometimes we heard air raid sirens at home in the neighborhood. I can honestly say that it never dawned on me exactly what all this was for. We just did the drill so often that it became second nature. I think if the nuns told us anything they said it was a fire drill, not a nuclear war drill.
If Krushchov hadn't scared Kennedy at Vienna, the whole Gate of Heaven craziness might never have happened. Krushchev scared Kennedy and he passed the fear and panic on to the nation. And it was all about Berlin, the place where Hitler died. The devil lived in Berlin for at least 20 years before he returned to hell.
TALK SOUP
Over the next year, from the middle of 1961 to the middle of 1962, the Berlin crisis stalled. Kennedy was advised by some not to meet with the Russians at all, for that would be a signal to Kruscshchev that he could intimate John to the negotiating table. Dean Rusk suggested that the talks get down to the the State Department level where he could stall them indefinitely. Rusk met with Gromyko in all sorts of places worldwide, including some long afternoons in New York. They even went to a Mets game together in (Gromyko wore a Cincinnati Reds cap.)
The press reported for a year that talks with the Russians were going nowhere. The tone was critical of a perceived administration failure. But that was part of Rusk's plan. He was all in favor of freezing the situation for he felt that western Europe with its superior economy and political system would win, given time (he didn't figure it would take 28 years.) Rusk was assuring Kennedy discreetly that he was determined to keep the talks going just to stall everything where it stood. Rusk wanted to bend Gromyko's ear in 27 countries and in turn be the best listener ever when Gromyko talked and talked. Rusk wanted to turn the Berlin crisis into talk soup, and his plan actually worked rather well until Raoul Castro visited Moscow in the summer of 62 and negotiated for Soviet nuclear-tipped missiles going to Cuba.
CUBA + BERLIN = VIETNAM
“I have to take a stand somewhere,” Kennedy griped to Dean Aecheson when he got home. “This guy bullied me in Vienna, he's bullying me on Berlin. He's bullying me on Laos, and he's rubbing my nose in the Bay of Pigs. They're beating us in outer space. I've got to take a stand somewhere and I think I know where it is.
“You mean Vietnam.”
“Yes Dean, I mean Vietnam.”
“I couldn't agree more, Mr President.'
If Krushchev hadn't laughed in Kennedy's face at Vienna the United States might never have been bogged down for 15 years in Vietnam and all the nastiness (foreign and domestic) that came out of that conflict might never have taken place. Kennedy felt so humiliated by the personal disrespect that he decided to make Berlin a nuke high noon, and also to take a bold stance on Vietnam that he might otherwise have not taken. If Krushchev had behaved like a gentleman at Vienna instead of a crass disagreeable blowhard, (“I never expected him to be such a barbarian,” he told Rusk) the whole Vietnam mess might have been avoided. A right wing Republican could have kept his stature and allowed a few little defeats and still kept himself politically viable, but Kennedy was in no such position as the inheritor if FDR's liberal torch. So JFK dragged us into Nam because he had lost too many little ones in other spots and he had to show that his administration was not weak on Communism. Like Iraq, from 1991 to the present, once a President commits US forces to a region, its hard for succeeding presidents to get us out of there without seeming wimpy, unpatriotic, and unchivalrous towards their predecessors. Once Kennedy got us in to save his and our pride, the boots were in the quicksand.
I blame Krushchev's bullying far more than Kennedy's weakness. Jack had actually been well prepared for Krushchev's nasty deportment. I use the term “wimp” loosely to cover the way that one meeting went down, not in judgement of the man. He fought in WWII and played football in college. I fought in kindergarten and played whiffle ball in college. But John was not prepared for was the depth of knowledge and debating skills Krushchev possessed on various political points, such as colonial revolutions, labor relations, Marxism, disarmament, and the recent history of events all over the world. Kennedy was ready in a personal sense to take on Krushchev's bullying, but when Krushchev began besting him on specific issues the former Senator was knocked off balance and could not recover from the endless rain of Krushchev's uppercuts and left hooks. He couldn't very well stand up to Nick's personalty while getting knocked down on specifics.
At one point in Vienna, for example, Krushchev complained about the United States continued support for the colonial empires of Britain and France. It was a new day, argued Krushchev. These relics of old colonialism were doomed to the Marxian 'ash heap of history.' Look at Algeria! They are obviously going to win against imperialist France. It is only a matter of time before Algeria becomes independent, so why was the United States continuing to support France in this hopeless cause?
Kennedy responded with a reminder that he had voted in favor of Algerian Independence when he was a senator in 1956. In response, Krushchev laughed heartily in Kennedy's face.
It wasn't a fake laugh.
Moments like these can change the course of history. This was a new role for Kennedy, who was usually the one using the smile, the laugh, and the charm to woo the American press. But this wasn't James Reston he was dealing with, this was more like Jesse James. Kennedy didn't smile much at Vienna.
VULCANS OF 61
The Vulcans of 1961 were urging Kennedy to prepare for nuclear war as the only way to stand up to Krushchev. Men like Aecheson, Le May, Lemnitzer, Lansdale, Allen Dulles, Walter Rostow, and Paul Nitze (a Bush Vulcan later ) were of the same mind. They told Kennedy to ship two new Army division into West Berlin for starters. Nuclear weapons should be flown to the city also, and with much publicity. The US could even resume nuclear testing as a major warning.
On the other side were a few sane men protesting that Kennedy was presuming that the only contingency the US should prepare for was a Soviet blockade of West Berlin ala 1948, and a resulting military showdown.
The crows (halfway between hawk and dove) asked Kennedy to consider other possibilities, such as the Communists sealing East Berlin off without blockading access for the old Allies. This would give Kennedy options besides threatening nuclear war. The reasonable bunch included Dean Rusk (as usual), George Ball (as always) Chip Bohlen (big time), Averell Harriman, Ted Sorenson, the bow-tied historian Art Schlesinger, and Chester Bowles. Ball, Bohlen and Bowles were three liBBBerals that history can look back on fondly in the time when even the Dems were too militaristic.
As for the hawks, they were so prevalent at every level of high government that it would have been difficult for Kennedy to have ever maintained a crow foreign policy even if he had definitely decided on it. Rusk was reasonable, but the Vulcans dominated the military, the CIA, the FBI, and, to be honest, the United States Congress. Even the State Department had its hawks, although Rusk at the top was not.
Kennedy's VP was a tough guy, so he couldn't find any support there. Generals like Lemnitzer and Lansdale made Kennedy sleepless. The President also worried that low-level hawks out in the field could start a nuclear war without his personal permission. General Le May was so hell bent for war that Kennedy had to rudely walk out on meetings with him more than once, as a clear personal signal that this is no good. Kennedy called him “General Dis-May.”
How looney was Le May? When the Cuban Missile Crisis broke out in 1962 Le May advocated pre-emptive nuclear war!
DO NOTHING DO MUCH
This was the position that Dean Rusk unsuccessfully tried to persuade Kennedy to take. Rusk concluded that Krushchev was a position where the status quo was a defeat for Russia and the Commie Tsar was simply trying to stir up the pot for the sake of doing so. Kruschchev had everything to lose if things stayed the way there were in Berlin. Rusk believed that if Kennedy took any action on Berlin, he would be playing into Krushchev's hands. In fact, Rusk felt that Krushchev was playing a game with Kennedy, just seeing if he could make him jump. If Kennedy did nothing, Rusk believed, Krushchev would be punching the Kremlin walls in frustration. If Kennedy reacted at all to Krushchev's threats it would be a signal to Krushchev that he could play with Kennedy like a puppeteer.
Krushchev had bluntly told more than one international reporter that Berlin was “the testicles of the west.” He could squeeze them anytime he wanted to and make Kennedy and the west scream in pain and do his bidding. Squeezing Berlin also gave Krushchev the boost he needed at home, a 'wag the dog' tactic to make sure no one tried to overthrow him in the CPSU, and that the Russian people kept their morale high. As long as he was seen in Russia as the tough Communist hero, he could keep his job.
Rusk could not persuade Kennedy to do nothing and let Kruschchev do the squirming.
BERLIN CRISIS SUMMER OF 61
In the summer of 1961 the USA and the USSR were apparently preparing to go to war over Berlin.
Kennedy went on national television on July 25 and outlined his positions regarding Berlin, stating bluntly that the United States would go to war with the Soviet Union if it physically tried to forbid western access to West Berlin.
One of Kennedy's top aides was mortified when Kennedy mentioned in the speech “our legal rights to be in West Berlin”. At that time there was no such physical political entity, not officially, although people did call it that. Krushchev was threatening to make the division in Berlin permanent between east and west and here was Kennedy unwittingly validating the separation by referring to a “West Berlin” that was not on the Rand-McNally maps.
Johnny K told TV world (and Nicky K at his Crimean dacha) that the United States was going to increase the defense budget overnight to a staggering $47.5 billion. He was going to call up the reserves and triple the percentage of draftees that were actually called to serve. He did not announce that the United States was going to resume nuclear, something many of the hawks had advised him to do.
After the call to arms speech of July 25, the Soviets began dropping hints through lower level channels that Krushchev was not so much thinking of blocking off West Berlin as he was thinking of blocking off East Berlin.
That changed everything.
Refugees from East Berlin had been fleeing to West Berlin for months. In the 24 hours after Kennedy's speech, more than 3,000 East Berliners “voted for democracy with their feet.” A thousand a day for months were splitting over the split. What was worse for Krushchev, it was generally the talented and the reasonably well off that were leaving town. These were the best and the brightest East Germans going over to the capitalists. Teachers, doctors, stand-up comedians, lawyers, business owners, scholars, technicians, i.e., nothing but the best that society had to offer were leaving by the tens of thousands.
Kennedy and his people had many times discussed how much this was creating a crisis for Krushchev, and in a way, they wished it wasn't happening. With his population choosing West Berlin, Krushchev's East Berlin would soon be a ghost town if something weren't done. The refugee problem made for a situation where the status quo was a personal humiliation for Dr. Bombast.
For Krushchev, threatening to block off West Berlin was used for some time as a face saving device in response to the flight of the refugees. But the problem was out of control.
Now the Russian ambassador quietly told the Yanks that the Soviets and their East Germans allies were going to seal off East Berlin, not West.
This was something the Kennedy team had not anticipated, and they were in fact relieved. Kennedy had never threatened nuclear war over the blockading of East Berlin from West. Both men could save face. JFK could look like he had not backed down on his threats, and NK could look like he had made good on his threats. Both macho egos were now satiated and the world could go to sleep for the night.
On August 7 Krushchev went on chintzy Soviet national television and told the Soviet people (and a world wide monitoring audience) that the 1945-46 agreements between the Soviets and the other war allies were hereby abrogated unilaterally, and that the East Germans were legally in change of their own territory. He was showing off how bad he was.
But then Nickita added a not so bad obverse side of the coin, “We do not intend to infringe upon any lawful interests of the Western Powers. Barring access to Berlin or a blockade of West Berlin are entirely out of the question.”
Hal-le-lujah.
In one sentence Nickita had taken that size 10 shoe that he had so famously rapped on the desk at the UN over the Congo, and had used it instead to step on the fuse that was sparkling its way up the line towards igniting WWIII.
In Washington, Krushchev's speech was cause for celebration. Kennedy broke out the Chataneuf du Pape and called Judy Campbell for a date. If the East Germans wanted to lock the East Berliners up inside forever in Berlin, that was ok by him.
The American press saw it as a victory for the Russians, but Kennedy could handle it. The President would rather face the wrath of the St. Louis Post Dispatch than Russian nuclear bombs.
WALLA WALLA
On Friday the 13th of August, 1961 the Berlin Wall went up. It started with 27 miles of barbed wire and some wall here and there and eventually grew up to become the famous Berlin Wall.
O'Donnell told Kennedy that he had to respond, but Kennedy calmed the hothead down. The President told O'Donnell, “Better a damned wall than a damned war.”
One source says that the Kennedy administration had discussed the possibility of a wall going up for many months and they were politically prepared for it. Most sources say that the Berlin Wall took the the US intelligence community by surprise.
The construction of the wall was so secret it even took most East German Communist officials by surprise. The wall plan was so secret that only those at the very top knew about it until the last moment. That explains the complete intelligence failure on the part of the USA. We had electronic and human intelligence (including a certain Colonel Oleg Penkovsky inside the KGB) in place at many useful locations but how can you obtain information from the enemy that is as yet unknown to the enemy? The Russians hadn't even told the East Germans what they were going to do to them, and understandably.
Only after the fact of the wall was made general knowledge was the barbed wire wall upgraded, and cement and other materials brought into Berlin to make it permanent. If they had brought the materials into Berlin first, it would have been a tip-off.
The Berlin Wall kept an entire nation under house arrest from 1961 until 1989.
Some histories make it seem as though Kennedy was despondent over the news of the Great Wall of Berlin. Not true. Now Krushchev could stop the refugee problem that was a trigger for war. Kennedy knew that he wouldn't have to conduct a 1948 Berlin air lift. Freedom for West Berlin was now not only assured, but it had now been assured quite publicly on TV in an absolutely official policy speech by the Gensec himself. It was an early Christmas present from the jolly fat man from the land of the reindeer.
But Kennedy's ecstasy was cut short when the reaction from West Berlin came in. Kennedy hadn't given much thought to how the citizens of West Berlin would react to the sealing off of East Berlin (or “Eastie” as the East Berliners liked to call it.)
First there was panic. A new refugee problem emerged overnight. This time it was West Berliners fleeing greater East Germany while the travel zones were still working. These volk didn't trust Krushchev's word further than a malnourished four-year-old could throw him.
Kennedy was dismayed by the overreaction of West Berlin. He felt sure that the Communists would never seal off West Berlin. This was easy for him to think while sailing on the Marlin in Hyannisport, or playing spin the bottle in the White House basement with Evelyn Lincoln. But the threat was real enough to the average West Berliner.
The people in West Berlin were angry with Krushchev for sealing off East Berlin, but they got even madder when they learned that the United States gave the wall its tacit seal of approval.
Two days after the speech Krushchev made some blustering belligerent remarks for western consumption, but perhaps more for eastern. He wanted to make sure on his side of the fence that he was not admitting any Communist military inferiority, and that he had not been intimidated. He warned Konrad Adenauer, the West German Chancellor to watch his step,
“If Comrade Adenauer thinks he can achieve unification of the German nation by war, he is crazy. Germany will be reduced to dust.”
Two days later Krushchev went public trying to scare all the rest of the countries of free Europe along the same lines. He started his threats with the art treasures of Italy and Greece, how they will all be destroyed along with the nations that housed them. The Red nukes would destroy Norway, Belgium, Holland and Denmark also. Great Britian and France went into the dustpan without saying. The world hadn't heard such threats since Hitler needed elbow room in 1939.
But it was all a rhetorical compensation for Krushchev's essential retreat on Berlin. Kennedy had called his bluff on nuclear war and had won. He would do it again in 1962 over Cuba. It wasn't so much that Krushchev was a man of peace, it was a matter of a 17-1 (McNamara's estimate) nuclear superiority of US over the USSR in 1961.
And Krushchev could still make good his threat to sign peace treaty with East Germany, and he had the resumption of nuclear testing up his sleeve for further dignity.
BERLIN POLICY MOLDED IN CLAY
Kennedy took some showy steps to try and answer Krushchev's threat to finalize that peace treaty with East Germany. If Kennedy allowed Krushchev to do this, it would be a political defeat for the United States. At least that's the way many analysts saw it.
The president sent Lucius Clay to take command in Berlin. That was a big signal to the Russians. Clay had fought in World War II and was the big boss in Germany in the immediate post-war years. Here was MacArthur west. A good percentage of Germans respected Clay as fair man and some Germans even considered him a friend and a leader.
Clay was also a well known Republican, and he hated Jack's brother Bobby and didn't hide the fact from anyone. John F. called him and asked him to take over in Germany.
“I'll do my duty Mr. President, but I won't take any orders from your little punk brother.”
Kennedy defused it by laughing into the phone saying, “Don't worry Lucy, sometimes I can't stand the little punk either.” Bobby was standing next to the phone and he was not amused. In fact he stormed out when Jack hung up. But Clay was on the way to Berlin, like Mighty Mouse, to save the day.
Also on the way was LBJ. The Vice President was more or less ordered to go after he kicked and screamed that, “what if a bunch of shootin breaks out. I'll be right in the middle of it!” Johnson was received as a hero by the people of West Berlin and ended up enjoying himself.
The other gesture was the creation of a large heavily armed convoy of tanks, and all sorts of rolling US Army weaponry. This battalion size convoy would have all its arms locked and loaded and they would start out from the eastern border of West Germany. The convoy of defiance would roll east across Communist controlled East Germany to West Berlin.
The convoy would militarily re-enforce the garrison in West Berlin, which would still be heavily overmatched by the Soviet forces in the area. But the big convoy would send a loud political message that 'you ain't gonna push us around in Berlin.'
Communists slowed the convoy down a couple of times, a few guards and sentries causing some tension, but it made it to the western part of Berlin without shots fired. Johnson was there at the border to welcome the Yanks.
The press generally interpreted Kennedy's moves as something to
celebrate. He was hailed in US headlines as a tough guy.
But part of the press saw the bigger truth and it wasn't pretty. Krushchev had already said that he was not going to block western access across east Germany to west Berlin (no caps yet.) So Kennedy's convoy was a gust of wind against a stone wall. The appointment of Clay was an egg thrown against a tank. LBJ was an arrow shot at a plane. Krushchev had taken complete political control over the eastern half of Germany and the eastern half of Berlin. In doing so he had seized the rightful claims of the west to take part in the final determination of eastern Germany and eastern Berlin. Nicky had abrogated the understandings from the war meetings of Yalta and Teheran, set a new foreign policy for the USSR in Europe, and had defied Kennedy to do something about it. Kennedy was so busy being relieved that he did not have to start World War III over access to west Berlin that he was willing to let Krushchev get away with it.
The Berlin wall went up, but that wasn't the big thing. What hurt was Krushchev concluding his treaty of Peace and Friendship with the GDR, the German Democratic Republic.
It had taken 16 years to settle the matter, but now Germany was divided into two fake countries, each with special foreign policy agendas, not their own. And these two foreign policy agendas were mutually hostile.
TESTING ONE TWO – IS THIS ARMS RACE THING ON?
The Soviet Union resumed above-ground nuclear testing on August 30, 1961.
Kennedy responded by resuming American nuke testing too. The United States had no practical military intelligence reason to resume testing. A single bomb was detonated underground in Nevada, but it was strictly a political gesture. In fact, the equipment to measure and analyze the blast was not even set up and could not be for two weeks. But Kennedy wanted to blast to get into the papers. The scientific gain wasn't expected to be very useful anyway. So the Nevada bomb was set off without any information available on the results, unless you count the fact that it detonated.
Krushchev responded with two more above ground nuclear detonations, a week after the ka-boom of 8.30.
Late in 1961 Russia exploded a 50-megaton bomb in Siberia. That's a big one. To put it in perspective, Nagasaki was 20 kilotons.
One of JFK's liberal friends, I think it was Teddy White, told him not to respond in kind. By not responding with it's own nuclear tests, the United States could look like the good guys in the eyes of the world, and the Soviets would be made to play the bad guys.
“That's a good ah argument Teddy. But you ah know ah damn well that I'm ah not going to do that. You ah know I cannot do that. It ah sounds ah pretty good on papah, but I'm ah just not gonna do that.”
So America began detonating more above ground nukes in response. They were like two gunfighters at high noon shooting warning shots into the sky and staring at each other after each warning shot.
The mano y mano nonsense between K and K just never stopped. It was Shane vs. Jack Wilson, but extra dangerous because these were nuclear six-shooters, and each side thought that the other side was Jack Wilson.
DEAR JOHN LETTERS
In top secret private, Krushchov became pen pals with Kennedy after Vienna. The Gensec began writing Kennedy long handwritten personal letters, and Kennedy would read them on Cape Cod and write him back. These letters were delivered in cloak and dagger fashion. One was handed to Sorenson by a Soviet contact. It was hidden inside a newspaper. The exchanges were kept from the public and from all but the most top-level officials on both sides. Kennedy was afraid to tell his European allies about the correspondence because he did not want to seem that he was working with the Soviets without consulting them. But he felt that if he told the West Euros about the letters then the letters might stop, and he felt they were a positive development in the quest to avoid World War III. K and K agreed to refrain from the usual political and historical name-calling and rhetoric in their letters. Krushchov made Kennedy jealous with references to Jacqueline’s ‘superpower figure,’ but John let it slide in the interest of world peace.
DOGS OF WAR
The Soviet Ambassador dropped by the White House one day late in 1961 with a gift for the Kennedys. He said that Mrs. Kennedy had asked for it when they were in Vienna. It was a dog, the offspring of a Russian dog Strelka, that had circled the globe in outer space and returned alive.
The dog was named “Pushinka,” which means “Fluffy” in Russian. Jack looked at Jacqueline in borderline displeasure, as if to say, 'what did you get us into with your loose lips.' She looked at him with an equal sense of 'what the hell are we supposed to do now?' dismay and apologized, saying 'Jack I was just making conversation with the old guy.' The two eventually shook their head and laughed. They didn't decide then and there that the Fluffy Russian was now a Kennedy, so they tabled it for the moment and Fluffy was left to the care of a White House servant for the day.
The Kennedys gave in as the days passed. Caroline and John made friends with the animal. The First Family adopted Fluffy as a beloved member of the Kenne-Klan. Fluffy even learned to add 'ah' between barks.
It said a lot about the President's personality that they kept and loved the dog. He was just a mongrel, and not the prettiest dog of all time, but a nice bloke from all accounts.
In the meantime, Father Joe Kennedy had earlier given the First Family a highbrow pure Welsh terrier named Charlie. What a combo, the Prince and the Pauper, two Cold Warriors snuggling by the warm Kennedy fireplace while nuke ICBM's are being polished and maintained in silos all over Siberian East and the American West.
Joe Kennedy was hoping that the friendship between Charlie and Fluffy could remain platonic, but once it became a Kennedy the horse as out of the barn. The cosmomutt and the pure-bred became lovers. Four Kennedy puppies were born in the White House and spent some quality time making everyone laugh and smile in Hyannisport, while the photographers ate it up.
No doubt Krushchev was double-dealing in his generosity. he was rubbing it in our face that Russia was ahead of the United States in space technology. The dogs dad had gone into orbit and returned safely and that was the major point of the gift. Part of the gift was sincere, part of it wasn't. But it could have backfired. Kennedy might have spent many a winter night with Fluffy on his lap, staring at it, remember the point Krushchev was making, and then picking up the phone and calling some influential Senator wit a, “I ah think its ah time we ah tripled the budget on our ah apace program.”
Charlie and Fluffy's four new puppies were named Bronco, Rex, Fido, and Lashua. Reporters nicknamed them “pupniks.” The joke was of course a reference to the first Russian satellite, Sputnik.
Many accounts say that John Kennedy was the one that nicknamed them “Pupniks,” I'm going with the version that says the reporters named them that. I think the joke is too corny for a man of his urbanity. It wouldn't be too corny for a reporter, or me, but I don't think it fits in with the Kennedy wit. And a reporter has a motive to try and think of a clever joke on the matter, whereas Kennedy had more things on his mind.
It is often written that Pushinka was a gift from the Soviet General Secretary for Caroline Kennedy.
No.
Dave Powers was there when the dog was delivered as a gift for Mrs. Kennedy, and Jackie admitted the conversation with Krushchev where she had inadvertently asked for it in Vienna. Caroline was a little young to be owning a dog. I think the historians are projecting the Nixon Checkers speech into the Kennedy facts (In his famous 1952 speech defending his slush fund as legal, Nixon spoke of a gift arriving in the mail because his daughter Tricia had said on the campaign trail that she wished she had a dog. The gift arrived in a crate, a spotted spaniel, and Tricia named it 'Checkers.')
Have you ever had a stray cat stop by the house two days in a row and next thing you know it has reached a point where you might as well adopt it? I have. That's more or less what happened to the Kennedy's with Pushinka. I don't think they were one bit thrilled to have her at first, but they did the right thing and the polite thing. Krushchev in a sly gesture of class warfare had forced the most prestigious family in America into a position where they had to care for and love an ugly Russia mutt from a space-cadet parent. And the Kennedys turned the tables on him by doing just that. Pushinka died of natural causes in John John's home in 1976.
The first time Charlie brought her home to meet his Welsh Terrier parents they barked at him, “You can do better than that!”
LAOS 1961-62
Because the Vietnam problem continued to grow and grow after his death, the current view of the Kennedy years is that he was plagued by the burgeoning problem of Vietnam. In reality, Vietnam was a minor problem compared to the immediate crisis in Laos. For most of his term it was landlocked Laos dominating the headlines, not Nam. Kennedy didn't have his heart set on Nam until after Vienna.
LAOS
Kennedy met the day before his inauguration with the outgoing President Ike. The number one topic of conversation was Laos. Eisenhower said that Laos was the ‘cork in the bottle’ in Southeast Asia. If you uncork Laos, you expose the border of Thailand and invite the decline and fall of Cambodia, South Vietnam and Burma as well. “If a political settlement cannot be reached in Laos,” he told Kennedy, “then we must intervene.”
This was an unfair equation to drop on Jack’s lap. Eisenhower had refused to intervene in the Suez Canal Crisis in spite of pleas from allies and conservatives at home, and had repeated the pacifist performance with the French at Dien Bien Phu.
In Laos he had hesitated, because with Ike it was a toss between full-scale intervention and no intervention at all. This is an admirable conservative formula but also a permission-slip to not act on Laos and then leaves the no-win dilemma to the next President. To top it off he gives the new guy a stern advisory that we would have to intervene. In other words he told Kennedy which decision to make regarding the decision that he did not want to make himself.
Kennedy bluntly asked the grandfather, “If the situation is so critical, why didn’t you decide to do something in recent days.” Ike replied that he did not feel it was right to act on Laos with a new administration coming in. Eisenhower apparently was too busy ‘waging peace’ to back up his own advice.
The Communists of Laos under the military-political group, the Pathetic Lao (actually the “Pathet Lao” – I can't resist the twist), were fighting a civil war with the right wing forces under General Phil Nosovan. The United States gave the rightist Laotians $300 mil during the Ike years. Now Kennedy was being asked to insert troops.
The Communists controlled the northern areas near the two Communist supporting states of China and North Vietnam (what a coincidence). The Pathet Laos won a key victory over the Royal Laotian Army on the Plain of Jars a month after Kennedy took office. Jack asked the Joint Chiefs of Staff what it would take to save Laos from the Commies. The reply was 250,000 ground troops and a threat to use nukes in necessary.
But Laos presented too many difficulties. Our allies in the Royal Laotian Army were of little help. For one thing there were consistent reports that the Laotians were so passive and gentle a race of people that it was hard to motivate personnel on either side to fight hard. Opposing forces took breaks and went swimming in the same ponds. These were not the troops to unite with and fight the bad guys.
In 1985, Nixon asserted that the Vietnam War was essentially lost when we did not intervene in Laos during the Kennedy years. Nixon believed that if Kennedy had extended the DMZ to the west well into Laotian territory, the Ho Chi Minh Trail could have been effectively blocked. In Rich’s opinion, once the trail grew in strength and resilience in the mid-1960’s the war was lost. There was no way the US and its South Vietnamese allies could defend their entire long western border against attacks from both Laos and Cambodia. The VC supply line ran right up into China proper. The back door was limitlessly stocked with goodies.
A cease-fire agreement was reached, to the dismay of the hawks in the Pentagon who wanted victory in Laos, not a truce. By this new Geneva agreement, Laos would be ‘neutralized.’ The cease-fire in Laos deteriorated until by the end of the Kennedy era, the neutrality was clearly a sham that was favorable to the Communist cause. Of course the liberal English language histories only stress that the CIA conducted a secret war in Laos during these years, while completely omitting the Communist violations that were not even secret. The other side was blatantly violating Laotian neutrality with open armed attacks by both regular and guerilla units. The USA was trying to keep up the image of respecting the agreements while secretly assisting the conservative side through the CIA. The Communist side never had to worry about respecting treaties so they had no need to resort to covert operations.
Kennedy wanted to get tough in Laos but after the Bay of Pigs fiasco Kennedy began to back off on intervention. He told advisors that he had learned two lessons from the Cuban disaster. One was to never trust the advice of the CIA or his military again, and the other was to never commit US armed forces except in decisive force. For both these reasons Kennedy did not take Eisenhower’s advice and jump into the Laos fight. Kennedy asked how he could ask the American people to support a fight 9,000 miles away when they had not supported an operation against a Communist threat 90 miles away. The setback at the Bay of Pigs had tied Kennedy’s hands in Laos. He said so. “Without the Bay of Pigs, we would have troops in Laos right now,” he told a cabinet member in the fall of 61. But he could not risk another failed intervention when the heat was still on over the last one. On the other hand he couldn’t afford to continually look weak and retreating against Communist expansion. These were macho times and he knew he had to make a stand somewhere. He could not afford to look weak on anything, especially against Communism, unless of course he wanted to be a one-term president and hand the keys over to Goldwater or Lodge in 1964.
But Kennedy in 61 nevertheless threatened intervention in Laos as openly as possible. He moved American divisions from Okinawa to Thailand and airlifted a brigade right next to the Laotian border. The radio transmissions of the military movements were sent out over un-coded channels so the Commies would get the message. It was a bluff but to some extent it worked.
Just in time came a breakthrough towards a settlement. Soviet leader Khrushchev became willing to see a neutralist solution. He didn’t want a ground war in Asia, at least not one dependent on his Pathet Laotian allies who could not be counted on. Besides, if Krushchov could prevent American military intervention in Laos through a negotiated settlement, he could always use Laos as a base of guerilla operations later against Vietnam, where Soviets eyes were genuinely focused. Besides, they would use the ‘settlement’ as a cover for continued aggressions. Tie goes to the Communists because they never honor their agreements while we at least try to.
A cease-fire agreement was reached, to the dismay of the hawks in the Pentagon who wanted victory in Laos, not a truce. By this new Geneva agreement, Laos would be ‘neutralized.’ The cease-fire in Laos deteriorated until by the end of the Kennedy era, the neutrality was clearly a sham that was favorable to the Communist cause. Of course the liberal English language histories stress only that the CIA conducted a secret war in Laos during these years, while completely omitting the Communist violations that were not even secret. The other side was blatantly violating Laotian neutrality with open armed attacks by both regular and guerilla units. The USA was trying to keep up the image of respecting the agreements while secretly assisting the conservative side through the CIA. The Communist side never had to worry about respecting treaties so they had no need to resort to covert operations.
Krushchev and Kennedy agreed to the ‘neutralization and independence” of Laos and both knew that in doing so the west was virtually conceding Communist preeminence there.
BATTLE WITH US STEEL
Kennedy had asked Americans what they could do for their country and one thing he specifically asked was to keep prices from spiraling out of control. The administration worried about inflation as well as deflation. Wages shouldn’t rush ahead of productivity, and prices shouldn’t rush ahead of purchasing power. That included overseas purchasing power. Rising prices in the US could affect the balance of trade and create a deficit there which could affect the entire economy.
In April of 1961 JFK personally wrote to the chiefs of several of the largest steel firms asking them to hold the line on prices. He also wrote the president of the Steelworkers union asking them for the most modest wage increases they could possibly live with. It took a year but on April 3 1962 the steel workers had accepted a very modest new contract in the Kennedy spirit of patriotic sacrifice. One week later the king of the US Steel Corporation Roger Blough dropped by at the White House and handed the President a four page memorandum explaining why his company had decided to raise the price of steel by $6 a ton. Roger was not the least bit apologetic in tone or substance. He felt that the government had no authority on the matter, any more than they could tell the woman selling rusty chairs at a yard sale what prices she could set and not set.
Kennedy was livid. He said he was double-crossed. Just days earlier steel had publicly announced full cooperation with the unions and now they were sticking the workers with tiny wage increases they had agreed to, and were using the fact that they had only agreed to not raise prices on their word to raise them anyway. Unlike labor, big biz had not put it’s commitment to sacrifice in contract form.
Sorenson suggested that Kennedy call a press conference and refer to Blough as Captain Bligh. This was mutiny on the national bounty. Kennedy laughed and said that it was good, but too corny to use. But one joke by Sorenson did not soothe his anger. Then in a remark to his cabinet that leaked to the press he said,
“My father always told me that all businessmen
were sons-of-bitches, but I never believed it
until now.”
When the business community raised a fuss about the sensational quote Kennedy spoke to the press and gently refused to retract his statement, without taking it up a notch either. Jack decided to go over the heads of everyone big and appeal to the little millions that make up the public. He would shine a flashlight on the greed of steel for the people to see and try to use his personal powers to make things go more his way in behind the scenes maneuvers.
Bethlehem Steel, the next largest company, raised its prices too. Then four other big boys raised the steel bar as well. Kennedy fumed that their greed exceeded their sense of public duty, and that they had obviously not put their hearing aids in when they listened to his command at the Inaugural. They apparently only heard him say “Ask only what your country can do for you.” he quipped.
Kennedy decided to fight back by holding on to and wooing the 10% of American steel that was no going to raise its prices. He met with the smaller companies and urged them to do their part and he would help them hang on. The country backed Kennedy and soon orders for steel were pouring into the smaller companies for new steel. After three days US Steel backed down and rescinded their price increases.
Big business was bitter towards Kennedy. Business had long favored the Republican Party and Kennedy was trying to get them to trust him.
SINATRA - JUDY – CASTRO – SAM - AND DAN ROWAN
FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover was forever trying to drop hints to President Kennedy that he should stop having cheater sex with the girl friends of known mobsters. It was dangerous business and it might even involve some national security risks.
Finally Hoover went to White House in February of 1962 and had what is today called “an intervention” with JFK.
The number one problem babe was Judy Campbell. She was a Catholic schoolgirl grown up but she wasn't a pure one. She slept with mobster Sam Giancana, she slept with Frank Sinatra, and she slept with President Kennedy. Hoover's FBI had wiretaps on so many people in the country that it was easy to prove their concerns about Kennedy. K at first denied to Hoover that he was “shacking up” with Judy C. but Hoover produced telephone records of her calls to the White House, where Evelyn Lincoln played the Betty Curry enabler.
Where the FBI didn't have wiretaps with CIA did, and the two were tapping in secret competition with each other. A stand-up comedian from LA named Dan Rowan was sleeping around with some celebrity chicks and even his phone was tapped in order to find out what was going on with Sinatra.
The Kennedy's had a two track relationship with the mob. They tapped their phones and they tapped their girlfriends. The FBI was trying to break down the mob but the mob was protected by the CIA. That's because top mobsters were hired and paid by the CIA to try and assassinate Fidel Castro the dictator of Cuba and the arch-enemy of the United States.
When Castro took over in Cuba the mob was deeply embedded in Cuba in the casino gambling business (see Godfather II.) The mob had a stake in restoring Cuban democracy and free enterprise, and they were still stinging from Castro's expropriation without compensation of large mob properties. So the mob and the CIA had the common goal of killing Castro and getting a friendly Cuba back on the map. In the meantime the FBI is trying to prosecute these guys at face value, not knowing of the secret deals made with the CIA. And in the middle of all this the carnal President is having sex with mob girlfriends throwing a distressing and complicating factor into the situation for all parties.
The press knew all about Kennedy cheating on his wife seven days a week with seven different women, but back then they protected him. Hoover was fed up and told Kennedy to stay away from Frank Sinatra, and stay away with mob kingpin's mistresses. It was getting to be too much for the FBI to keep quiet about. Sinatra had more mob ties than Sonny Corleone.
When Hoover left, Robert Kennedy came in and took Hoover's side. “Stay away from Sinatra!” shouted the Attorney General at his brother. “We don't need no Judy Campbell. Hell, we got Marylyn Monroe and Anglie Dickenson in the bullpen. We can drop that peasant Judy. Next thing you know you'll be tagging chunky interns with a crush on you.” “Don't be ridiculous,” said John Kennedy to that one.
Kennedy was soon scheduled to leave for a short vacation in Florida where he was planning to stay as Sinatra's place. Instead he stayed at the home of Bing Crosby. Sinatra toned it down big time. he went from the guns of Chicago to the bells of St. Mary.
POOL PARTY SCANDAL JUNE 1962
Critics of the Kennedys were quick to find fault. The Kennedy ‘Hollywood on the Cape’ lifestyle was nauseating. The hip writers and movie stars, and Indian poets coming in and out of Hyannisport were a far cry from the tough leaders that Ike used to hang with.
A story made the rounds about a June 62 swimming pool party at Bobby’s place in the Hyannis compound. The party may have gotten a little out of control. I guess some distinguished guest in a thousand dollar suit got very drunk and jumped into the pool fully-clothed yelling ‘yiiii-haaaa!’ Then everyone started laughing it up and jumping fully clothed into the swimming pool. The Kennedy party, these so called new leaders of America splashed drinks and pool water till dawn and who knows what hanky-panky went on there too. It was a mockery of the dignity of their station. A couple of newspapers mentioned the notorious pool party. The general public soon heard the saucy tale too.
Of course, the real story was that Mrs. Bobby Kennedy slipped and fell into the pool and the tuxedoed white-haired historian/advisor Art Schlesinger jumped in to pull her out. Many hours later a second person slipped on the smooth tile near the edge and also took the ‘Nestea Plunge,’ but pulled herself out quickly without assistance. That's all that happened. But you know how it is when a story makes the rounds. By the time the story was passed on for the 20th time the whole Kennedy shindig were jumping into the swimming pool in expensive tuxes and gowns and the Russian Ambassador was on the roof making out with the maid.
THE FIRST FAMILY
A popular spoof of the Kennedys in 1962 was a comedy vinyl recording called The First Family. More households owned this album than did not in my 1960’s experience. It was a huge best seller starring Vaughn Meader and a cast of audio actors. It was good for the Kennedy’s because it disarmed their foibles and it was well known that they had thoroughly enjoyed the album themselves. The comedy was sharp but not vicious.
“The following is a public service announcement;’
Election Day is near.
Go to the polls and vote.
Vote for the Kennedy of your choice, but vote!”
You’d never get such nice comedy at your expense nowadays in politics. In 1992 Dana Carvey impressions of a vacillating verbal stumbler hurt George Bush Sr., and in 1976 Chevy Chase send-ups hurt Gerald Ford. But Vaughn Meader was helping John Kennedy. People who voted for Kennedy probably thought The First Family was funnier than those who did not vote Kennedy, that's the complete opposite of today's political comedy.
Naturally Kennedy helped Meader too. That superb impression of John F. Kennedy made Meader a big overnight star. Then Kennedy got shot and that was it. Three decades later Meader was middling for me at Bootlegger's Lounge in Caribou Maine (one show Friday - two shows Saturday). I got his autograph on an album cover and still have it.
I never heard a stand-up comedian take a real shot at Kennedy. Comedians Mort Sahl and Lenny Bruce loved him and they were the only two in that line of work at the time. I collect all the old timer comedy albums, and they rip Nixon and LBJ plenty, but Kennedy got the Obama 'get out of criticism free' card.
TEDDY MALO
When John Kennedy ran for president he resigned the Senate seat he held is Massachusetts. The governor named a replacement who agreed not to seek re-election when the time came. That role was being reserved for Theodore Kennedy.
A Ted Kennedy scandal was revealed in late 1961 that was politically dangerous and had to be controlled. I know that is hard to believe, but it really happened.
It seemed that ten years earlier, young Ted Kennedy had been expelled from Harvard for cheating! How was he going to win the 1962 Massachusetts Senate seat with such a scandal available for his opponent to explore and exploit?
A meeting of the JFK brains trust kicked the matter around, and they decided that Ted could win anyway and lets go ahead with it. Clifford said, “As long as Teddy didn't violate the first rule for a political man, he'll weather the storm.”
“And what's the first rule for a political man,” asked Sorenson?
“Never get caught in bed with a live man or a dead woman.” Clifford gave a self-satisfied smile around the room. Sorenson gave Clifford back a profile in frowning.
Here is the real story. The tale that “Kennedy got kicked out of Harvard for cheating” is told often by Kennedy and Dem-haters, but as usual it deliberately omits important exculpatory things (that's as big a word as I'll drop.)
Ted Kennedy was asked to resign from HU, which is not the same as being expelled. It leaves the door open to return some day.
The crime: Back in 52, Harvard freshman Kennedy had let another student, William Lashua take his Spanish exam for him. The co-conspirator had to fake being a Kennedy for an afternoon. Lashua gargled with whiskey (but didn't drink any,) put some red lipstick on his collar, borrowed a $4,600 suit, didn't tip his cab driver, and went off to the Harvard Spanish exam room. The poor kid even had to learn to fake the Kennedy speech quirk, inserting 11 needless ah's when he asked the professor for a number 2 pencil.
When Kennedy and Lashua got caught the dastardly duo were asked to leave Harvard yard for a few years.
Ted Kennedy then enlisted in the U.S. Army for two years. When he was honorably discharged, Kennedy re-applied for Harvard and was accepted. He graduated four years later with a degree in mixology.
I know I'm taking the cheap shots, but at least I'm defending his reputation overall against these now famous but chiseled-in-bias charges.
Later on Kennedy would violate the Clark Clifford Barnes rule for a political man, and still survive as a Senator. But the dead woman did ruin his insider chance at the Presidency in 1972.
Kennedy refused to ever speak to William Lashua again after the Spanish exam incident. Lashua wrote him an angry sheet in 1975, calling “TK” a hypocrite because they were both in on the fraud. Kennedy wrote him back. “I'm not mad because you got caught and got me in trouble. I'm mad because you got a C- on the exam!”
VIETNAM 1961 - 62
But Nam was different. Here the US Air Force and Navy could use international air space and waters to come and go freely. South Vietnam also had no border with China. Laos did, a virtual trip wire that could turn a victory there into a bigger problem than a defeat. The South Vietnamese had better and more clearly defined leadership, and more vigor for a fight, at least compared to the recreation minded Laotians. It was frustration over the Bay of Pigs, Berlin, and Laos that led directly to out commitment to war in Vietnam.
After China had switched over to Communism in 1949 the Democrats had been lambasted for the strategic setback. The charge the Truman Administration had “lost” China put a Republican in the White House in 1952. Kennedy and his team were well aware that if Vietnam fell to Communism on his watch the political price would be steep. He hadn’t
”lost” Cuba, he had just failed to take it back. But losing Vietnam would be a stark Cold-War defeat and Kennedy was not about to let that happen.
Kennedy decided that he would indeed make a stand in Southeast Asia; it just was not going to be in Laos. So when the Russians agreed to stop airlifting 4 tons of military supplies per day to Laos, and agreed to its neutralization, Kennedy put us on the ground in Vietnam.
President Diem of South Vietnam had in late 61 formally requested US assistance after shunning such overtures before, for reasons of national pride, personal power, and political expedience. When asked why he had changed his mind he replied, “Laos.”
Diem wanted US ‘advisors’ but forever remained opposed to regular US Army troops in force coming to his country. He felt (correctly) that once the US sent in large numbers of troops there would be political conditions attached and he would no longer be in control of his own country politically or militarily. That’s part of the reason he had to later be removed from power, so we could send in as many troops as we wanted whenever we wanted.
Some writers have another version of why Diem did not want major US troops in South Vietnam,
“Diem apparently feared that the introduction of large
numbers of American troops would not only give the
Vietcong a powerful rallying cry but would also give
the non-Communist opposition critical leverage.”
Professor Herring believes that the US made itself an obvious bad guy by entering the war, which would presumably raise VC morale or something. I'm not exactly sure what he means by the second point.
It was a coincidence of fate that just when Diem was ready to ask America to put up or shut up, Kennedy was searching for a place to show military strength in the name of freedom. Laos put the squeeze on both Kennedy and Diem to initiate a military working alliance in South Vietnam.
Diem was a major problem for the USA because he was perceived here as being a puppet of the United States when in fact he was stubbornly independent in all areas. In fact it was his unwillingness to be a US puppet that caused most of our problems with him.
Diem was a Roman Catholic President, and for his religion had many enemies at home. Buddhist opponents thought him a dynastic dictator. But his enemies went far beyond religion. The people resented in particular his brother Ngo head of homeland security for South Vietnam who had too much power that he had not earned. When Robert Kennedy and Jerry Van Dyke heard about this they were furious.
An important watershed in the US participation in Vietnam’s war was a National Security Memorandum of December 20, 1961, which recognized subversive warfare as a legitimate national security threat and recognized the right to counteract unconventional aggression with unconventional counter-force. Laos and Vietnam were specifically named as theatres of operation for US response. Action followed words. There were just over 2,000 Americans on the ground in Vietnam at the end of 1961.
On December 22, 1961 an American advisor/soldier named Davis was killed on the ground in combat in Vietnam. He was the first KIA. There would be more than 54,000 more to come. If Kennedy, or anyone in Kennedy’s cabinet, including Caroline or John John, or even Bushniki the Russian dog had known that this many would die, they would have pleaded with the President not to commit any troops.
But by the same logic of later omniscience if the Kaiser had known how many Germans would die for nothing on the stalemated Western Front, he never would have mobilized in 1914. No one knows what’s going to happen in war and dice.
In Kennedy’s time Americans were not officially fighting alongside South Vietnamese troops. We just happened to have a few thousand “advisors” over in the jungle. These advisors had a lot of pretty good ordnance on their person at all times. The advice they gave the South Vietnamese was to kill the enemy and here are the weapons to do it with.
By the end of 1961 the United States had 3,200 military advisors. By the end of 1962 the number was 9,000. They were organized under the acronym MAAG, the Military Assistance Advisory Group. Among the MAAG soldiers was a young Army man named Colin Powell the future Chairman of the US JCS and Secretary of State under George W. Bush. Powell arrived in Saigon on Christmas morning 1962. Three weeks later he was dropped off in a hot zone near the Laotian border and asked himself, “What the hell am I doing here?”
MAAG men gave advice and assistance to their counterparts in the ARVN, the Army of the ‘Republic of Vietnam.’ The North of course called itself the ‘Democratic Republic of Vietnam’. The less democratic the country, the more certain they call themselves democratic in their title. East Germany too was called the Democratic Republic of Germany. Take a guess what the official title of North Korea is to this day?
The armed services chiefs of the USA were pestering Kennedy to send more men and material to the Vietnam. He resisted, and some people today believe this is why he was killed in Dallas, so that the US militarist-industrialist machine could have its way in Vietnam.
The critics say that we had no real goal in Vietnam. But that is not true. The goal from the start was the cessation of the infiltration of the South from Communists of the North. Oh, sorry; that’s too simplistic and unsophisticated. The Communists were wonderful idealists and Communist China was not guilty of mass murder, torture and oppression and they were not trying to spread their philosophy to the South. In fact, Vietnam and China were old enemies.
Kennedy lost Laos and Vietnam became un-winnable, but for military, not political reasons. The demonstrators of 1968 would never have been there if we had won on the ground from the start. But we couldn't win because the Laos neutrality agreements of 1961 were not adhered to by the Communists and they used laos to outflank South Vietnam. The end-around route through Laos meant that we had to defend South Vietnam the long way, which was impossible.
The short way we had covered, the DMZ. But it was naïve to think that the long length of the political boundary would be respected or could be protected. It was a losing proposition. The Ho Chi Minh Trail through Laos prevented victory. We didn’t lose the Vietnam War, we Laosed it. Laos was the trigger that started it and the trump card that won it. Laos made the Ho Chi Minh Trail an immovable object, a supply line we could not break, flowing happily full steam into our side of Nam like an open spigot.
SUPPORT FOR KENNEDY ON NAM
Nevertheless whenever Kennedy asked his advisors where in Asia should the United States take a stand against Communism the answer always came back, “Vietnam.” There was division over intervening in Laos, but virtually none on Nam. Kennedy did not lead an unwilling nation into an unpopular war. The Cold War was on and he had run for Prez as Cold Warrior. The fight had to take place somewhere.
The US press was very hawkish on Vietnam in the Kennedy years. He didn't lead us blindly into a silly war no one wanted.
THE FIRST KUWAITI CRISIS – SUMMER OF 61
The First Crisis in Kuwait was a dress rehearsal for the Kuwaiti Conflict of 1990-1991.
In 1961 the tiny but oil rich state of Kuwait gained its independence from the United Kingdom. At the same time that it was granting this freedom to Kuwait it was informing the United States and others that it was withdrawing from the Middle East entirely. From this point on, Gulf security would be up to the Arab States or perhaps even the USA. The British Navy had secured the western oil supply since the Second World War. Now they were downsizing and cuts were made in the sand states. They were getting out.
But as soon as Britain cleared out, the Iraqis threatened to move in. On June 23, 1961 the President of Iraq, a Mr. Kassem spoke of acquiring Kuwait. He said that Kuwait was part of Iraq, the same threat made in 1990 by someone else. The Iraqi Army mobilized for a strike and a well-equipped brigade was placed near the Kuwaiti border.
On June 27th the Amir of Kuwait put out an SOS. Kuwait was asking the Arab League and the United Kingdom for military help. Iraqi troops could overrun the country in a matter of hours.
In a heartbeat the UK changed its mind. The military was mobilized and by July 1, a half a brigade of British Army troops were in place in Kuwait with more on the way.
By Halloween of 61 the Arab League had enough military force in Kuwait to enable to the British to pull out for good. Or so they thought. Iraq backed down, for now. Tommy would be back in 1990-91 when Sadaam Hussein carried out the threat, and the United States had to come to the rescue.
MR DOBRYNIN GOES TO WASHINGTON 3 62
The Soviets sent a new Ambassador to the USA, replacing the retiring Vladimir Ustenkoff. The new guy's name was Anatoly Dobrynin. “Tony D,” (as he was called by Mort Sahl on his fourth album,) was supposed to represent a sort of thaw in US-USSR relations, being more urbane and conversational than previous thugs like Molotov.
Dobrynin had spent much time in America in previous years, having been head of the America department in the Soviet Foreign Affairs Bureau.
When Dobrynin first went to the White House to present his credentials to the Kennedy administration, he was surprised to find himself alone in the Oval office with the affable new leader of the free world. Kennedy told him to dispense with the formalities. Dobrynin spoke perfect English and the two of them hung out informally for an hour or so and made small talk about everything but the threat of nuclear war between their two nations.
Kennedy took Tony on the tour, making vicious wise-cracks about everyone he introduced to the Soviet Ambassador. It said a lot about the brat from Hyannis,
“Mr Dobrynin, this is McGeorge Bundy. The ah
last time he smiled was ah when he saw his great
grandmother fall off a pair of water skis on Lake
Keuka in 1934.”
“Now this here is ah, Ted Sorenson, my ah so-called
speechwriter. If any of my ah rhetoric causes ah
trouble in the Kremlin, here is ah your culprit.”
“Now ah I'd like to introduce you to ah my press
secretary, Pierre Salinger, all ah six hundred pounds
of him. He tells us he's ah on a bread-free diet, but
we ah always ah catch him in the Rye.”
Dobrynin finally couldn't hold it in and burst out laughing, to the surprise of Kennedy. The wise guy prez thought he could slip the bad joke in over Dobryin's head, but Tony D was well aware of who wrote Catcher in the Rye. This was not your father's Soviet Ambassador.
Tony Dobrynin would last as Soviet Ambassador to the United States through 8 administrations and until the coming of Mikhail Gorbachov and the beginning of the end of the Cold War.
MEREDITH MISSISSIPPI
In 1962 a young man named Jim Meredith applied for admission to the University of Mississippi. He was refused because his skin-grade was too low. When the college accepted him, the whites rebelled and in riotous scenes, JM was almost physically prevented from entering the school.
SUPREME COURT OPENING 1962
Chuck Whittaker resigned from the Supreme Court in March of 1962. Kennedy had his chance to appoint a new Justice and show off some wisdom. Perhaps he could make up for some of his setbacks with a winner now. Kennedy sought advice carefully on the choice. He certainly didn’t want to do anything hasty. Robert Kennedy recommended William Henry Hastie for the position but John had to decline. Hastie would have been the first US Supreme Court Justice of African-American heritage. Bobby wanted this but John F hesitated. Part of the problem was that Hastie was quite the conservative, and naming him just because he was black might be unfair to capital D democratic principles. Two of the most famous Justices asked Kennedy privately not to name Hastie.
Kennedy named Byron White to the Supreme Court instead in March of 1962. White was Deputy Attorney General at the time.
OCTOBER 1962
First of all, what were the nuclear force capabilities of both sides in October of 1962? It was said then and is said now that the world was on the brink of nuclear destruction during this crisis. The adults around me were in physical fear for their lives. I saw it with my own eyes.
How did the two teams line-up in October of 1962?
The US had about 20 land-based Atlas nuclear tipped ICBM’s capable of hitting Soviet cities at the turn of a key and the push of a button. The Soviets had none in Russia with that kind of range. But they did have a couple of subs with nuclear missiles. Not as many as we had, but enough to destroy the main cities on our coasts, and invulnerable to preemptive destruction. The United States had more submarine nukes, probably a hundred missiles to about 25 for the Russians.
In bomber nukes, the US had the decided advantage because our bombers could refuel in the air and reach the USSR non-stop, while the Russians at the time could not. The USA also had medium range nuclear-armed rockets in England, Italy and Turkey, all capable of striking inside Russia.
So the United States had about a 20-1 advantage in nuclear force delivery capability. The Soviets had the medium range missiles capable of retaliating against our allies in Europe, but except for a few sub launched rockets, could not do much more to America than wipe out seaboard cities like New York, Boston, Washington and Seattle. We, on the other hand could destroy 200 or more cities and bases in every deep location inside the Soviet Union, and we could do this after they had hit us with everything they had. So in real military terms in 62 Kennedy was holding the cards and was not bluffing. He was willing to fight the Russians down to the last Italian.
The fictitious ‘missile gap’ that Kennedy had exploited to win the election was now working for him in its honest dimensions. It was a missile gap in our favor.
Many war planners at the Pentagon welcomed the crisis as a good excuse to launch the Third World War, They welcomed it. Better to fight now while we had the advantage, than years later when the Russians had nuclear equality. These hawks felt that the showdown was inevitable. The Vulcans of 62 can be summed up by paraphrasing George B. Shaw, 'Some people see the prospect of a nuclear with the USSR and ask, why. We see a nuclear war as unavoidable and ask, why not.'
CUBAN MISSILE CRISIS
The showdown over Cuba in 1962 has been called “The Gettysburg of the Cold War.” (I say the Gettysburg of the Cold War was the Gulf War of 1991.)
The missile gap created Cuba crisis and then decided it. The leader in the Kremlin, the bombastic Nikita Krushchov knew that the US could strike the USSR from German bases with nuclear bombs but that the Russians had no answer in the American theatre. So he hoped to use new friend Cuba as a base for the exiting new Russian S-4 missiles that could reach most of the prime targets in the eastern United States including the cities on the Great Lakes.
But the missile gap that Krushchev was trying to close with this deployment was the same gap that enabled Kennedy to play nuclear truth or dare in a way that could not have been played by any president after him. The Cuban Missile Crisis and how we handled it was a one shot deal. The USA would never have another showdown with Russia while holding such a nuclear advantage.
On October 15, 1962 U-2 reconnaissance aircraft pictures revealed missile silos in Cuba. They were camouflaged but the U-2 photos were technically better than the disguise. It was conclusive. The Cubans were preparing for the arrival for Soviet S-4 intermediate range missiles with a reach of 1,100 miles. Florida is only 90 miles from Cuba. The White House and the Empire State Building were within range.
On October 22, after a week of debate amongst EX-COMM, JFK's brains trust of 12 top advisors, the policy was decided and the stage was set for the big showdown.
Kennedy went on national television, interrupting my cartoons with an unveiled warning to the Soviet Union; that any missile launched from Cuba would be interpreted by the United States as a direct attack upon itself by the Soviet Union! And would be responded to with a “full retaliatory response,” not on Cuba, but on the USSR! It was blunt. It was specific. Some historians now believe it was reckless.
Kennedy also declared quarantine around the island of Cuba. From now on all ships bound for Cuba would be stopped and boarded by US warships and inspected for cargo. Any ships intending to supply Cuba with military weapons or systems supplies would be seized. The United States was going to treat the Soviet Union in 1960 the way England's Royal Navy treated the world in 1760.
Kennedy furthermore demanded the removal of all offensive missiles from Cuba. There was nothing in international law to justify these demands. Kennedy as simply using the elastic power of the presidency to do what he felt he had to do in foreign policy. He certainly didn't get a Congressional Resolution first, assuring majority support of his nuclear High-Noon scene with Krushchev.
Krushchov backed down, turned 26 ships back and removed the S-4 missiles already on the ground in Cuba, but his surrender did not come without a price. Krushchev demanded that the USA remove its intermediate range missiles in Turkey. What was more, Krushchev demanded that Kennedy pledge that the United States would not invade Cuba.
Kennedy at first agreed to only the second demand, but was eventually persuaded that the missiles in Turkey were obsolete turkeys anyway and he agreed to both conditions. The United States has honored that pledge to this day. We will not invade Cuba. K gave his word. So the Cuban Missile Crisis was not the one-way victory for the US over the USSR that it is usually thought to be. Not only did we have to promise not to invade, but also by formally agreeing to do so, we were acknowledging that we were about to. The no-invasion understanding was also an admittance that the Monroe Doctrine was not sacred, nor was the Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine. Cuba was getting a pass from now on. We had to put away the big stick bully in the Caribbean diplomacy of Teddy Roosevelt for one country.
The Soviet Presidium gave a sound censure to Krushchev for backing down to Kennedy and it marked the beginning of the end of his supremacy in the land of reindeer. But what else could he do? The United States had a 20-1 superiority in nuclear warheads and was ready to fight. Kennedy displayed cowboy belligerency worthy of George W. and his henchmen on Iraq. Krushchev walked into the street at high noon with his nuke gun-belt on, and then in stepped the captain of PT 109 who said “Go ahead, make my day.”
Kennedy had campaigned on the premise that Ike had been lax, if not quite weak, on defense. Now he was backing up his campaign rhetoric with a staggering display of nuclear brinkmanship. The world trembled. And everything worked out and we’re all living happily ever after. The good guys won without firing a shot.
But what if Khrushchev had ordered his ships to defy the blockade in spite of common sense? Kennedy might have been the guy remembered in history as the instigator of World War III. It would have been a thousand World War II’s in about 12 hours. And I never would have written this sentence and you might never have read it.
As a result of this crisis a so-called “hotline” was established between Washington and Moscow so that the leaders of both countries would be a moments reach for the phone away from direct contact with each other. By this it was hoped that the chance of war through misunderstanding could be forever avoided.
Russia felt humiliated and angry after backing down. They accelerated their end of the nuclear arms race with a vengeance in response to the CMC. Both sides were building fast and furious.
The USA did not make minor concession. Some historians dismiss the missiles in Turkey as not important because they were old and obsolete anyway, but Russian Gensecs were always complaining about them at US Presidents during one-on-one meetings. The Russians hated and feared these missiles in Turkey, and getting them removed made them feel safer and boosted their pride. If I had hostile nuclear missiles pointed at Boston from New Brunswick, it wouldn't mean much reassurance to me that they were 1974 models powered by 1975 technology.
A GALLING THOUGHT
An unexpected fallout from the undetonated missiles of October came from perceptions in Europe. Since the end of WWII Europeans wondered if the United States would really risk nuclear war and the destruction of American cities in order to defend western democracies in Europe. Would NATO (the USA plus others in essence) really go to war to defend Paris and Berlin?This is what the Europeans wondered. Would an Ike or a Kennedy really risk New York and Chicago to defend the freedom of London and Brussels?
President Kennedy had answered that in the affirmative during the ongoing crisis over Berlin.
Now with the Cuban missile crisis, men like De Gaulle and Adenauer had been shown an unexpected plot twist, one they weren't too sure they were fond of. Apparently the USA was capable of reversing the equation. The United States was willing to risk London and Paris in order to protect it's interests anywhere in the world. De Gaulle might die in a nuclear holocaust because the United States stood up to the Russians in Laos or Cuba, areas that had little or nothing to do with the lives of Europeans.
This was a galling thought, and after Cuba, the European NATO members became a little more cautious in asking the United States to act tough with the Russians. This new rethink Euro-policy continued indefinitely to the end of the Cold War in 1989. If the United States and the USSR had gone to war in 1962, the United States would have emerged the victor. Many US cities would have been destroyed, but many more would have been defended and spared. On the other hand, Europe's cities were sitting ducks for short range nukes, tactical Russian nukes, plus the full force of Soviet conventional military power. Europe would have paid a heavier price for war with Russia than America would have. That's for sure. Krushchev was always threatening the destruction of Western Europe as the first answer to an American attack on Russia, and that crazy porker meant every word of it.
THE SINO-SOVIET SPLIT
After the Cuban Missile Crisis, the beginnings of a feud between the USSR and China created much happy excitement in the west. There was talk of a Soviet invasion of Sinkiang Province in the Mongolian region of China. From now on American schoolchildren would be taught that the Soviet Union and China were enemies. I was taught this growing up. I always scratched my head on that one even as a boy. It never made sense but I was too young to disbelieve it. My friend Fred Wilson told me that his teacher reprimanded him in front of the class in the seventh grade for insisting that the Russians and the Chinese were allies.
What was this feud all about that was causing the two Communist nations to stand eye to eye on the brink of war? I have no idea. I’ve read a lot about it but I still can’t see the remotest reason why they would have been enemies at any point in time in the Cold War. Yet we have had national news magazines headlining the real possibility of full scale, and even nuclear, war between the USSR and China since the early sixties and into the 1990’s.
At the end of 1962 a high level KGB agent named Anatoly Golytsyn defected to the United States and warned our debriefing officers that the Sino-Soviet split was a disinformation campaign designed to weaken and divide the west its effort to fight Communism.. A month later another KGB officer defected to the USA named Yuri Nosenko. Yuri’s mission was to discredit Golitsyn and convince the USA that any talk of a disinformation campaign was ridiculous.. Two armed camps began to grow within the CIA, one of which believed Golitsyn, the other which believed Nosenko. Later of course, the Nosenko believers would have their way. Otherwise why would we have failed to ever consider the possibility of disinformation from the Communist bloc all these years? Eventually many Golitsyn believers had to resign from the CIA. So remember, the opinion that the Sino-Soviet split was disinformation is not a far out idea from some fanatical anti-Communist radical at a typewriter. A KGB defector said so and many in the US intelligence community thought so.
But the split has taken on the authenticity of an historical fact. Any book, any writer, indeed any politician who bought it, is at the very least irresponsibly forgetting the possibility that it was all disinformation. At the most they are being dupes.
The fake Sino-Soviet dispute disarmed more NATO divisions than both the Russian and Chinese armies ever could have.
The curtain was raised on the great Sino-Soviet Split disinformation play in Kennedy Administration.
Every time the Russians and the Chinese have a disagreement of any kind the story gets high publicity inside and outside the Communist bloc. Does that make any sense to anyone? They control the press, but no squabble is ever kept secret. In fact secret squabbles are spread out for the public to see. It only makes sense if its disinformation.
If a Chinese ambassador wants to protest a Russian action, there are many quiet ways to do it. But no, it will always be some big party conference meeting scene where the Chinese guys storms out while western reporters scramble for the phones.
The whole idea is to disarm the west by making it plain that the world of Communism is not monolithic. That way, all the Cold Warriors like Nitze Kissinger and Kennedy look ridiculous. US defense spending is reduced, (or not increased) by billions, and the United States sees local revolutions as local revolutions.
“MOONBEAM” - VOSTOK 5 AND 6
Early in his administration President Kennedy told Congress that the United States should set for itself the goal of sending a man to the moon and returning him or her safely. Critics in Republican press called the goal a “science fiction publicity stunt,” and the President a “space cadet.” One famous editor thereafter referred to JFK derisively as “moonbeam” in private conversation.
NASA would have the last laugh on the critics when Neil Armstrong hopped off a ladder and landed on the moon just before the end of the decade.
But in Kennedy's time it was Soviet achievements in space, not American thirst for knowledge, that got the US Space program going on all engines.
In June of 1963 the Soviets launched two fantastic manned space missions two days apart. One actually was manned, the other was womaned. Cosmonaut Mick Bykovsky was sent into space on June 14 1963 and then two days later the first lady in space made her feminine catwalk down the space exploration road. Valentina Tereshkova went into orbit for three full days, which was more space time that all the previous American right stuff boys combined. Bykovsky's five day flight is still the world's record for solo space missions. They both landed on the same day and were communicating with each other while in the heavens. Kennedy wasn't thrilled when he had to call and congratulate Valentina on the hot line a week later. He kept it short. It was 19 years before the world saw another female space cadet.
AID EPIDEMIC
“Too much foreign aid.” I heard adults bitterly griping about that all throughout my childhood. It is one of my earliest ‘political’ memories, beginning with the Kennedy years. “Too much foreign aid.”
Foreign aid was the New Deal dole for the whole world. Uncle Sam wasn’t even going to ask for the money back. If you were a small and poor country then the USA would just give you lots of money for food and what not. For fiscal year 1963 the Kennedy Administration asked for 4.9 billion for foreign aid. It settled for $3,200,000,000 which, in spite of the griping of the man and woman on the street, represented a slight reduction than that in any of the last few Eisenhower years.
Part of the reason for our generosity was Cold War calculation. Any country living in poverty would almost certainly face resultant political chaos and vulnerability. The newly independent third world nations were especially vulnerable to the political instability of poverty. In other words, these nations were ripe for Soviet infiltration, domination and loss to the free world camp. It was better to shore up the economy of Mali than to see it turn to Communism. This was part of the thinking behind ‘Foreign Aid.’ The Marshall Plan had stabilized the economies of the have nations in the late 1940’s. Under Ike and Kennedy, American financial gifts were now being offered to stabilize the have-nots. We’d saved Greece and Turkey from falling to the Communists with the help of several bil. For a few dollars less would could start rolling up the smaller swing states into the red white and blue column.
Various agencies for US foreign help distribution were combined under Kennedy into one larger oversight institution called AID, the Agency for International Development. The Peace Corps almost was included under the AID umbrella but managed to survive as an independent department.
THE PEACE CORPS
One of the outstanding successes of the Kennedy Administration was undoubtedly the Peace Corps. American volunteers would travel to the poorest places in the world and help those in need. American know-how and hard work would teach them to fish instead of giving them fish.
The Peace Corps was our antidote to accusations of American militarism and evil imperialism. But ironically, the Peace Corps had something to do with the Cold War.
It seemed that when it came down to grass-roots village level hard political effort, the Communists had been setting the global standard since the end of WWII. This ‘voice of the people’ quality had won China for Communism and a lack of it had lost it for capitalism and democracy. The PR tide of Communism had to be stemmed as well as it’s physical aggressions. Communism was campaigning like Jimmy Carter, while democracy was campaigning like Alan Keyes. America needed a Peace Corps to help win a ‘hearts and minds campaign’ all over the world.
Hubert Humphrey and a couple of lesser known Senators had proposed the basic idea for the Peace Corps in 1958. In 1960 Humphrey submitted a formal bill to Congress to form the Peace Corps.
The Peace Corps began in March 1, 1961 when Kennedy signed an executive order creating it. The first volunteers were trained and exported within a few weeks. The PC began with 500 people and by March 1963 had expanded to 5,000. Brave and selfless Americans were toiling in the fields of 40 countries, teaching the illiterate to read and instructing occasionally in democracy as well.
Kennedy appointed his brother in law to the head of the Peace Corps. Sergeant Shriver later said that Jack picked him because it was safer for Kennedy to fire a relative than a friend. If things went wrong with the Peace Corps, ‘the Sarge,’ as Kennedy liked to call him, could take the fall. Shriver is being unfair. Kennedy could have given him no important job at all.
But nothing really went wrong and the USA can present the Peace Corps if it ever gets stuck playing ‘defending your life.’ How could anyone ever say anything bad about the Peace Corps?
I thought seriously about joining when I was around 30. But I'm too selfish to actually do it.
BIRMINGHAM 63
Of all the racially segregated cities in the USA, Birmingham Alabama was probably the worst. The Reverend Martin Luther King went there to lead and organize a demonstration against segregation. The targets were the department stores where blacks were relegated to their own section at the lunch counter.
Birmingham hosted many protests over the course of 62-63. Martin Luther King was arrested in April of 1963 as part of an effort to protest with passive aggression by getting as many innocent black people as possible, including children, arrested.
King’s philosophy was in stark contrast to that of activist Malcolm X. King felt that if necessary he would fill up all the jails in Alabama with black people. Malcolm X felt, on the other hand, that if necessary he would fill up all the cemeteries in Alabama with white people.
APARTHEID AND SOUTH AFRICA
The United States was ever willing to give lip service condemnation to the racist policy of Apartheid in South Africa. Apartheid was as if conditions in 1930 Birmingham were applied to the entire country with federal county and local law strictly enforcing it. But what made it most bizarre was that Blacks were the vast majority and they were ruled by whites.
It was hard for America to show too much outrage with South Africa with conditions being as they were here. But the real problem for America as usual was the Cold War. South Africa was very cooperative in anti-communism issues, and had become an important ally in international relations with the US. Its strategic location at the naval crossroads of the Indian and Atlantic Ocean made it’s good will something that could not be dismissed lightly. Racism was bad, but the Gulag Communism of Soviet Russia and the mass murder in China were at least as evil and a threat to our national security that African apartheid was not.
South Africa was the lesser of two evils and was a thorn in the side of America’s self-image for most of the 20th century. Unfortunately for progressivism, Communism in Africa was showing signs of sprouting all over the place. Just when we would have liked to let go of South Africa politically, the Cold War made its friendship critical in global thinking.
This pattern of ‘waltzing with dictators’ plagued US foreign policy for the length of the Cold War. It’s easy to condemn now from the perspective of a world without the threats of advancing Communism and nuclear destruction. But from 1945 to 1991 the Cold War placed American leaders in no-wins situations all over the world.
The rest of Africa was showing signs of united political action. The OAU (Organization of American States) was formed in 1963 and met at Addis Ababa Ethiopia. Its first act was to recommend that the UN expel South Africa from the organization. It also called for a complete embargo against South Africa by the entire world unless and until Apartheid came to an end.
The best the US could consider was an arms embargo against SA or the threat of one. America even planned to ban arms that could be used to enforce Apartheid, while allowing arms that could be used to fight Communism, as if bullets had a political conscience.
Portugal was the second biggest villain on the OAU list of bad guys. The little nation still had big possessions in Africa and was not willing to get with the program of allowing African colonies their independence. The US did not want to put political pressure on Portugal because we were using the Portuguese Azores as a naval base. Portugal was helping us fight the cold war and getting a pass on colonialism in exchange.
NUCLEAR TEST BAN TREATY 8.5.63 / NO FIRST USE
Kennedy was the president when the world crossed the threshold to a point where a full-scale war could destroy the world. Mr Kennedy formed the ACDA, the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, to create an arm of the government dedicated full time to addressing this terrifying issue.
In August of 1963 the United States and the USSR signed in Moscow a treaty banning nuclear testing in the atmosphere and under the sea. Underground testing could still take place but the days of the big explosions on film were over. This treaty was one of the best things that happened in Kennedy’s time.
The NTBT of 8.5.63 has remained in force to the current day, and is respected by almost all nations. Russia may have cheated a few times, but this has not been proven. In 2006 North Korea detonated a nuclear weapon in the atmosphere setting off an international crisis. The 1963 treaty was cited as part of the international outrage against NK.
Just after the TBT signing Krushchev invited Secretary of State Rusk to the Crimea for informal talks. There he cornered Rusk on the “no first use” issue that seemed for some reason far more important to the Soviets than it did to the Americans.
“No first use” was a pledge by both nuclear powers to not be the first to use nuclear weapons in the event of a military clash between the USSR and the USA. The Russians were always fast willing to make the pledge and the Americans were not. This made the USA seem like the bad guys to most foreign eyes and the virtually foreign left at home. If the Russians could pledge not to be the first to use nuclear weapons, why shouldn’t we be able to make the same commitment to an obviously worthy cause?
Answer? Because only one side would honor their pledge. The Russians could lie and get away with it at home and abroad while the US would have to honor it’s word to it’s people and it’s allies or face political fallout over the threat of nuclear. The USA would be giving the USSR a free pass to start a conventional war wherever it felt it had the ad (the advantage) in the right place at the right time.
Most important, the only logical place where either side would be apt to introduce tactical nuclear weapons would be in Europe and that would obviously be in response to a Soviet invasion of West Germany. This was the ‘big one’ that everyone feared. The West Germans, supported by the Americans were not about to launch a full scale invasion of East Germany, but the reverse was a real threat from the other direction (unless it was up to Curt LeMay, but thankfully, it wasn't.) And since nukes would be ‘first use’ deployed in a desperate defensive situation rather than an offensive one, the Soviets had nothing to lose by offering ‘no first use’ while our side had very much to lose. They knew that the west would be on the defense in the event of a third Twentieth century war in Germany. Conventional equaled Soviet victory, so no first use equaled Soviet victory. Since the Soviets had a clear advantage in conventional weapons and ground forces in central Europe while NATO’s military might depended on nuclear weapons and the threat of their use to counterbalance that conventional edge, 'no first use' was a NATO no-no.
The USSR was trying to trick NATO into disarming itself from the right to use it’s only deterrent in the event of war while draping itself in the holy robes of peacemakers. 'No first use' was a gang of bank robbers trying to negotiate a deal with the bank guards to pledge not use their guns first in case of a robbery. The robbers would even be willing to agree that both sides would keep their bullets locked in a neutral vault.
In the Crimea in August of 63 Krushchev reminded Rusk that the Prime Ministers of France and Great Britain had assured him that they would not use nuclear weapons first. Nicky wanted to know why the US couldn’t pledge the same thing if it’s allies could. Rusk was on his own and had to think fast. He couldn’t pretend he needed to use the bathroom nor could he whip out his cell phone and talk to Kennedy for a quick answer. Dean told Nikita that the Russian leader would just have to presume that the USA just might be crazy enough to use nuclear weapons first and he couldn’t assuage any of Nikita’s fears to the contrary.
Bravissimo!
The no-first-use issue continued to be a hot topic in politics until the end of the century and is not a dead letter even today. In the stellar 1984 Democratic debate for the parry’s Presidential nomination, 8 of the 9 candidates pledged not to pledge no-first-use for the USA. Jesse Jackson said he would promise not to use nuclear weapons first, unless it was a case of a weapon targeted against a large convention of US conservatives.
The Test Ban Treaty had a tough time getting through the Houses of Congress. Poll in the first days after the August 5 signing showed the public 14 to 1 against the ratification. Kennedy was now victim of his own exaggerations made during the campaign. With the public fearful of the supposed ‘missile gap’ in which the USA was frightfully behind the USSR, Kennedy’s proposal to ban nuclear atmospheric testing seemed to most American to be the wrong call at the wrong time.
Kennedy quickly tried to get the Joint Chiefs of Staff to announce their support as publicly as possible in open hearings with all their reservations aired fully also. He felt wisely that it would have been more damaging for them to give their statements in a closed hearing and then have the public learn through press leaking of their secret reservations.
Then he had Defense Secretary McNamara go public as to just how awesome was our current stockpile of nuclear warheads. Contrary to Kennedy 1960 campaign propaganda, the United States was more than equal to the Soviet Union in Nuclear defenses and the test ban treaty was a reasonable deal. We had no less than 7,000 strategic nuclear warheads with deadly long range delivery systems attached to them. We also had a fantastic 25,000 tactical nukes capable of changing battlefields in shorter range launch systems such as conventional artillery or short surface to surface strike missiles.
The test ban treaty was ratified.
RUSSIAN REFLECTIONS
Dobrynin in his memoirs (1995) is critical of the Kennedy team. The long-time Russian ambassador to Washington negotiated with all the Presidents from Kennedy to Reagan. Dobrynin claims that there was never any hope for improved relations because everything went through Bobby Kennedy and that Bobby's idea of diplomacy was to simply present a complaint or an ultimatum and walk out. There was never any sense of trying to negotiate nor to try and find common ground in order to improve the relationship. Thats what Anatoly said.
A lot of people couldn't stand or get along with Bobby Kennedy. I'm not taking any sides on this one either, ... I'm just saying.
THE MARCH ON WASHINGTON 8.63
On August 28, 1963 a quarter of a million black Americans marched in Washington to protest for racial equality. It was at this rally that Martin Luther King gave his famous “I have a dream” speech.
Malcom X later said that many of these people were “bourgeois blacks using the march as a status symbol.”
VIETNAM 1963
LIAR, LIAR, MONKS ON FIRE – MAY-JUNE 1963
One of the most horrid and politically important episodes of the Vietnam War was the self-immolation of a Buddhist monk on the streets of Saigon in 1963. Few Americans have not seen the spectacular footage of the poor suicidal monk sitting in the lotus position calmly dying in a ball of fire. It is always shown on any documentaries on the war, even if it’s a three-minute piece on a 30 minute broadcast.
The suicide exposed the corruption of the Diem regime. Our allies in South Vietnam were repressive in so many ways that we were supporting a side just as evil as the one we were fighting. Diem was repressing religious freedom in Vietnam. It was so bad that Buddhist monks were driven to high profile suicides. What kind of war was this? The good guys are destroying religious freedom and we have the nerve to call the Communists on their atheism.
This anti-war version is still told today even though it is inaccurate. For one thing, if this was such a big issue, how come it never resurfaced as a major problem when the war escalated later on? The flames of the Buddhist suicides died down literally as fast they did figuratively.
The truth is that Buddhists were free to worship as they pleased within their own temples and outside of them with one condition. Diem did not think it was right to fly the Buddhist flag above the national flag in public processions, and a law was passed forbidding this. The flag rule was instituted because Diem first observed Catholics displaying the Vatican flag above the national flag, and Diem was a Catholic. The application of the new rule to the Buddhists came later.
A Buddhist leader delivered a rousing speech against the Diem government and a recording was scheduled to be played at a Hue radio station. A crowd of Buddhists had gathered outside the station for the event
when a bomb exploded in their midst killing eight. Diem was blamed but the bomb was later proven to have been detonated by the National Liberation Front, the Communist political organization in the South. Tensioned flared.
Then on June 11,1963 a hot sunny day in Vietnam got even warmer when a Buddhist monk doused himself with gasoline and flicked his Bic lighter. He sizzled for a while and then died while many horrified onlookers took pictures. In fact Buddhist leaders had told the press in advance exactly what when and where was going to happen.
There was little or no suppression of Buddhist religious freedom. For example, in South Vietnam Catholics had no choice but to serve in the army when drafted, but Buddhists were allowed to decline military service on conscientious grounds. Eight Buddhists were in Diems cabinet. His Vice President and his Foreign Minister were Buddhists.
So why the hoax and who could convince a monk to kill himself if the cause were not legitimate?
The Xi Lao pagoda in Saigon was one of many in that city. But this one was a religious front for political activity. Of the 4,777 pagodas in South Vietnam, only a dozen were under the hidden control of the National Liberation Front. The NLF was not Buddhist, but the Xi Lao pagoda was NLF. Some men with shaved heads and monks robes were not real monks. Xi Lao was filled with machines churning our propaganda sheets against the Diem government. The western press eagerly waited outside Xi Lao for the latest scheduled protest or self immolation. They bought all the lies about religious repression. For example the press reported that South Vietnam was 70% Buddhist when the figure was well below 40%.
The United Nations later investigated the Buddhist suicides (the famous guy Quang Duc wasn’t the only one, just the one best filmed). Two men testified that they had been lied to by the Xi Lao Buddhists. These were young idealist Buddhists and they were given a lot of bad info. One swore that he was told that all the pagodas in Saigon had been burned to the ground and the worshippers killed and tortured. He was given the robe, the gasoline, the Bic, and the specific route to the place where he was to set himself on fire. He made a wrong turn and saw a Buddhist temple completely intact and Buddhist worshippers going about their business unruffled by anybody. He knew he was duped and then went to the authorities with his story.
The leader of Xi Lao was a man named Tri Quang, supposedly an innocent moral Buddhist. But Quang had been arrested twice on charges of Communist complicity. He had studied religion in North Vietnam under a Buddhist branch that openly endorsed both Ho and Communism.
The monks who burned themselves were sincere fools and dupes in the service of Communism They were not proof of Diem’s corruption. The left still interprets these events today only within the framework of their self-righteous historical slant.
The left bias was and still is dependable on the “Buddhist Crisis”. Nam historian Michael MacLear writes that,
Madame Nhu, Diem’s sister-in-law, laughed off the suicide,
calling it a “barbecue.”
I have the footage of an interview in which she uses that word. She is very angry and serious and as she defends her family against the charges of religious oppression. When she begins to refer to the monk’s suicide she gropes for the right word in her broken English and comes up with “barbecue.” It is admittedly a bad and insensitive choice of words, but she is not ‘laughing off’ the suicide. Not at all. She is angry and disdainful, and there isn’t a distant dream of a smile in her face and voice, let along a laugh.
And now a personal note about the protest-suicide concept. If I had a serious enemy and he came to my house and said, “Oh yeah Donovan, you no good arrogant grouch, I’ll show you!” and then he whipped out a can of gasoline and set himself on fire, I’d be a dancin’ man. I’d get on my cell phone and call everyone I know, then hold the phone out so they can hear the snap crackle and pop. If only today’s Arab terrorists could learn from these wise Buddhists. Maybe we can send Al Qaida some footage of the 6/11 monk so they won’t take any of us with them next time they go violent.
FALL OF DIEM 11.1.63
President Diem was a brutal and repressive tyrant who represented the lesser of two evils in Vietnam. He was a Catholic and an anti-Communist. Most who knew him testify that he was an honest and sincere man.
The question is, how brutal was Diem as compared with the Vietnamese Communists, both North and South. Was there enough of a disparity in his favor to justify our support for him. This is a key question in evaluating America’s decision to support him between 1956 and 1963. If he was just as bad or worse than the Commies then we might have been the bad guys in the Vietnam War just for butting in without a good and moral cause. If Diem was clearly the lesser of two evil and if the Communists were the focus of evil in the modern world in 1963, then maybe we intervened with moral backing.
Author Al Kendrick claims that in the early 1960’s Diem purged local Communist leaders in the villages of South Vietnam to the tune of 75,000 executed and 50,000 thrown into jail. This is a high-end claim but liberal writers run with it and then say that these atrocities then created a leadership vacuum that attracted the North Vietnamese to move in. In other words, the North Vietnamese Communists (NVC’s) would not have attacked South Vietnamese villages and would not have begun their systematic assassination of village leaders if Diem’s Catholic regime hadn’t started the whole thing by murdering South Vietnamese Communist just for being Communists.
All this supposedly meant that the Communists had moral reasons for their next offensive against South Vietnamese villages. These villages were under the rule of Diem’s murderous puppets and the leaders of such places deserved no sympathy. It was like a movie where the good guys finds his family slain and then spends the rest of the movie killing the bad guys while the audience eats popcorn and cheers the righteous violence of revenge. The Communist were the Charles Bronson after the treatment they got under Diem, goes the thinking.
Communism in 1963 was grounded in adamant atheism, and an atheist has no cause to fear the spiritual consequences of murder, torture and repression. Therefore the Communist is ten times more likely to commit an atrocity than a Catholic, even though we all know of the stains on the Catholic record. The behavior of the Communists when Nam and Cambodia fell in 1975 trumps all arguments and is the bottom line on the entire war. Even if Diem was the scum the left wants us to believe he was, the Killing Fields trumps Diem. The left never bashes Ho or his murders, only Diems. Its rather sickening, actually. They don’t even give us the ‘both sides were bad.’ The left admires Ho. I would like to visit his grave at 3 am after drinking a gallon of lemonade. You will note that liberal historian always represent Ho’s goal as the “reunification” of Vietnam, as if he would ever have accepted any other form of government other than Communism in a united nation. They always use that word. They never write that he wanted to “conquer” or “subjugate” South Vietnam.
Kennedy and his people knew that Diem was repressive and murderous. They threatened to disconnect the pipeline of US support if he did not reform his government and moderate his behavior. Kennedy was in the classic Democratic bind, he was a liberal hawk. Being a Democrat hawk is about as easy to as being an obese pole-vaulter.
Big John and the CIA had decided by mid 1963 that Diem had to go. There were many reasons, not the least of which was the fear that Diem and his family might strike up a separate peace with the Communists which included expelling the Americans from the land. Rumors of this were reaching Kennedy’s desk throughout 1963. Several fact-finding missions to Vietnam led by famous men in 1962 and 63 had concluded that Diem was more of an obstacle to victory than an aid. But exactly who and what was to replace him was never really decided upon. Nevertheless, Diem had to make an exit.
The only way to get rid of this strong leader was by means of a coup. A coup often means that the dethroned leader will be assassinated. Kennedy tried to pretend he didn’t know this as he approved the coup.
The USA did not formally plan organize and implement the coup that overthrew Diem on 11-1-63, but without clear go signals from the US, the South Vietnamese Army generals would never have dreamed of trying it. It comes down to a simple explanation. We told the South Vietnamese generals that if there were not a regime change soon, then the United States would withdraw all of its financial support for the government of South Vietnam. That’s almost as good as pulling the trigger. Kennedy was an accessory to the murder of Diem.
We wanted a new government that we could control. On November 1, 1963 the Presidents Palace was overrun by a South Vietnamese coup squad. Diem and his brother fled the Palace and hid in a Catholic Church in the Chinese neighborhood of Saigon. They were later captured by South Vietnamese coup troops and put into the back of an American made APC. This heavily armored vehicle was not designed to protect anyone from shots fired from the inside. Both men were murdered during the cruise.
The CIA, Kennedy and even many of the coup leaders were shocked and saddened by the killing of Diem and his brother. They weren’t supposed to die. But things like that happen when Kings are replaced and it is weak to deny awareness of this as a probable consequence. JFK was at an NSC meeting when he was handed a telegram informing him of the killing of the Diems. He said nothing and rose from the table and left the room in a state of nervous agitation.
By the end of the month Kennedy had gotten the same treatment. The brutal hit squads of Diem might have had something to do with the event at Dealy Plaza. Who would have more of a motive to kill Kennedy than the close friends and associates of the leader that Kennedy had ordered killed?
The death of Diem left a leadership hole in Vietnam, a chaos of non-leadership that made things worse, rather than better for all concerned. The emptiness would not be filled until President Thieu took over in 1965.
With no strong leadership in place in South Vietnam, the United States had to fill the vacuum, thus entrapping the USA into full responsibility for the conduct of the war.
Why the coup if there was no plan to replace Diem with something or someone better? By 1963 the USA was drunk with the coup mentality. America had become too accustomed to overthrowing any government not to its liking, nuclear powers excepted of course. Qualified coup success like the ones in Guatemala and Iran were creating an ingrained and poisonous political mindset. The murder of our staunch ally Diem was not only counterproductive on its face, it also sent a chilling message to other states that might be thinking of joining up with the US in the struggle for freedom and democracy.
Only one side seems to have gained anything from the Diem demise, the Communists. They benefited from the coup much more than South Vietnam or the USA did. One NVA leader called it a ‘gift from heaven.’ Morale among the enemy skyrocketed and new calls were sent out for more infiltration and direct attacks on the land and forces of South Vietnam.
The assassination of Diem was not only morally wrong on general principles, it was a foreign policy catastrophe for the United States on many levels, and more than any action of Johnson, pulled us knee-deep into the trap of the Vietnam War.
Kennedy by the time of his death had authorized the sending of 16,000 fighting advisors in South Vietnam, and we had taken over 500 casualties.
Was Kennedy really going to withdraw from Vietnam? Did his assassination prevent this? Some historians seem confident that the answer is yes but how can they be so sure?
One thing was sure, if Kennedy was going to take the United States out of Vietnam he was not going to do it until after the 1964 Presidential election. He knew the political cost of losing Vietnam in the era of the Cold War. But after his likely re-election he would then have four years to repair the damage, and leave the party in good shape for ’68.
Even if he did make a decision to withdraw he would have to run it past every level of advisor and was certain to face strong opposition. Kennedy might have made such a decision and then backed off after pleas by the military, the CIA, the State Department, various anti-Communist Allies and his close friends. Only his brother Bobby and Chet Bowles seemed to be seriously suggesting that Vietnam was a loser and it was best to get out, no matter what the political cost, and Robert was the Attorney General not the Chairman of the JCS. It would have seemed out of place to make a crucial foreign policy decision based on the opinion of the Attorney General, even if he was his brother.
UGLY HOLLYWOOD
Kennedy allegedly had affairs with several movie stars, including the likes of Angie Dickenson, Marylyn Monrie, and Irene Ryan. His dad made much of his fame in fortune as a movie producer.
One movie that came out in 1963 was called The Ugly American, starring Marlon Brando as you know who. The movie was based on the book of 1958 by the same ugly title. It was an early marker in the rising trend of American self-flagellation in the arena of world politics.
Ugly is based on an American CIA agent who is overseas stirring up trouble in a third world country. The idea is that the Communists are trying to take over a fictional Asian country, a noble and charismatic Communist leader is waging war against colonial oppression, and the United States, the Ugly Nation, interferes in the name of what it thinks is freedom, and actually only helps the Communist cause by making all the locals angry about American interference.
The obvious take on it is that it was based on Vietnam, but when the book was written in '58 we weren't really in Nam yet. It's more likely that this was based on our interference in Indonesia, and its Civil War of the 1950's.
Brando is good, but Pat Hingle steals the movie as the gun runner from Argentina.
KENNEDENOMICS
The stock market was struggling during the election year of 1960 and continued on in a bad way for most of 1961. So much for moving foreward. But in 1962 it picked up again in a big way and the young prez found himself presiding over a boom cycle.
Back in 61 there was much debate within his advisory council about how to help jump start the economy. Tax cuts seemed an obvious call. Only one advisor was against it and that was the famous economist John Kenneth Galbreath.
Galbreath felt that tax cuts only helped people spend more money on toys, but that the important things like better schools, hospitals, water resources, law enforcement, and transportation infrastructures were not helped one whit by the cuts. JKG was not in favor of what would later be dubbed “trickle down economics.” Galbreath would rather take some risk of inflation by pumping government money into fields of action that improved the real quality of life, not just its peripheral moments of recreation. Butter, not toy guns. Economically Galbreaths’s influence pushed Kennedy closer to FDR than the Ron Reagan his other advisors were steering him towards.
CLINTON'S IDOL
I've tried to keep the womanizing stories out of the regular chronology of political events. The Kennedy scandals never broke out and hurt him, although there were enough close calls to make an Indiana Jones movie sequel. John dodged one arrow after another in the nick of time, especially during the election campaign of 1960 when any scandal released to the public with proper timing could have tipped the balance for Nixon.
Anyone who would cheat on 31 year old Jacqueline Kennedy is a first class idiot. That's my editorial comment for starters.
There is no doubt that Kennedy had a serious affair with Marylyn Monroe. Kennedy was a candle in her wind. I'm sure it never occurred to either of them in bed that they would both be dead within two years. Marylyn used to get drunk and threaten to go public with her relationship with Kennedy. The family lawyers and errand boys had to go visit her and calm her down. It was a close call. That white dress rising up over the sidewalk vents almost put Nixon in the White House.
The woman that most nearly ruined JFK did not go to bed with him. Her name was Florence Naze Kater and she just happened to be in the right place at the wrong time when Kennedy was just gearing up to run for President.
Who was Flo Naze? She was a small time landlord in Washington who just happened to rent her upper flat to a young lady that Kennedy was tapping. Florence would see the famous Senator climbing the middle class stairs with his lady friend. She'd hear the naughty noises, and then she'd see Kennedy sneaking out at 3 a.m. like a wayward college boy “out galavanting.”
Flo felt hurt because she was a sincere Catholic who had supported Kennedy, and now she knew what the country did not. Kennedy was a cad. And he was a disgrace to the Catholic faith he so publicly proclaimed.
One morning she confronted Kennedy at dawn on the stoop as he tried to flee the scene of the crime of infidelity one more time. She broke out a camera with a flash and popped. Kennedy tried to cover his face with a hankie, but the picture that came out was clear enough to suit her taste.
Florence began mailing the picture to prominent politicians and newspaper editors, with a story to explain the circumstances. If that had been done in today's political environment, Flo would have ended Camelot on the camera lot. Magazines and newspapers would have bid on the picture and made her almost rich.
But back then, reporters just looked the other way on things like that. The reason they looked the other way was because it was 1959 and that's just the way things were. I was four, so I can't testify, but that's just the way things were. Florence couldn't get any satisfaction because, just because. The proof didn't count because you just didn't report things like that.
When Kennedy got the nomination Florence got even madder and when he became President she went berserk. She made a placard of the picture of Kennedy trying to hide his face and marched in front of the White House on a regular basis. The Kennedys could have made a big mistake and denied the charge, but instead they shrewdly paid no attention to her except to occasionally say she was some nut-cake. No one took her seriously.
Kennedy almost got caught with a Radcliffe college student he was making it with. The Washington Star got pictures of him picking her up and dropping her off. Once again the editor killed the story at the last minute, and by many accounts, if they had not, the man would never have made President. When one of his insiders tipped him off the that the Star was on to him he gasped, “My God they even got her name!”
Then there was Alice Darr. Kennedy and Alice had an affair, but this time it was more dirt than normal. Alice Barr was a full time prostitute and madam who claimed that Kennedy was in love with her in the 1950's and had begged her to marry him.
But there is some dirt involved that is sealed up in a lawyer's office and even Seymour Hersh couldn't get it opened in the 1990's. Its a complex story, but the gist of it is that there is something spectacularly scandalous that the sleuths of the world have never found out, and Alice threatened to go public in 1960 and scared the daylights out of Clifford and the other Kennedy lawyers. They simply said that if this gets out, it's all over. There's no way to use damage control on this one. Maybe he violated the other half of the Clark Clifford Barnes rule of politics. Or he liked to get rubbed down with peanut butter and jelly before he made love. It was something you couldn't talk your way out of. Even Clinton's formula of “as long as everybody's on record denying it you got no problem,” couldn't have plugged the dike.
The best vague evidence seems to be that Kennedy had an illegitimate child by Alice Darr. There was a lot of intrigue in 1960 about past scandals and payoffs to keep things quiet. Kennedy got max Raab, a member of the Eisenhower Administration to play the middle and go the The Republicans and tell Nixon to “stop spreading rumors that I am a philanderer.” Nixon trusted Raab (who had no idea that kennedy actually was a philanderer) and gave instructions to the party to stop spreading rumors that Kennedy was a philanderer. It may have cost Nixon the election.
One thing was sure. Several women were paid off by the Kenedys to keep quiet. Clark Clifford adamantly denied later on that he ever played that role, but in denying it he's admitting that it was done by others.
ASSASSINATION; 11.22.63
There are a thousand expert opinions and theories about who killed Kennedy and what happened at Dealy Plaza 11.22.63. I am going to choose one and go with it.
Imagine if John's middle name had been Robert? Then the whole country would be debating the final episode of Dallas, “Who shot J.R.?”
You can study the JFK assassination for a lifetime and still not make a dent in finding the definite truth.
One fact stands out in my mind. The man was shot for a specific reason. It wasn't some nut that wanted attention like Sarah Jane Moore or Leon Czolgoltz. This was a paid hit. It's scary to think that there are really people and forces more powerful than the President of the United States. If they can do that to him for crossing them, what safety and reassurance is there for the average American?
Appointment in Dallas. That is the title of the book that seems to have the most credible inside scoop on the mystery of the Kennedy murder. McDonald was Chief of Detectives in the LA County Sheriff’s Department as well as head of security for Barry Goldwater’s 1964 Presidential campaign. He had invented the machine called Identi-kit, which enabled law enforcement to make composite pictures of suspects based on various descriptions. He also wrote a textbook on police interrogation techniques that was widely respected. The guy was reputable.
Hugh had a friend who fell terminally ill in 1964. Now that he was dying he felt he could tell his friend the inside story of the Kennedy assassination. He knew who did it although he could not name him, nor could he say where this killer was at the moment. But he knew a lot of other details. For one, he was sure that the killer was a hired gun, a rifle sniper from Eastern Europe who did it strictly for the money. He told McDonald to get word out around Eastern Europe that Hugh wanted to hire this guy at a big price to conduct a similar mission. A personal meeting could then be arranged.
McDonald eventually met a man called ‘Saul’ (not his real name) in the lobby of the Westbury Hotel in the Mayfair section of London. When Saul realized he had been duped he was silent for a couple of minutes. He recognized McDonald from an encounter many years earlier during the Bay of Pigs crisis. Saul was willing to talk, and confirmed the entire story that Hugh had heard from his ill friend. He also told McDonald that if he breathed a word of the meeting or the information to another living person he would be murdered within a week.
Now for the story.
It is important to note that Saul never knew who hired him. He picked up the money in a furtive manner and went to do his job. So even if Saul is the real killer, we still don’t know who paid him.
Alleged assassin Lee Harvey Oswald was indeed a patsy, just as he said he was when he was first arrested. Oswald had been coached. The real conspirators had convinced Oswald that Kennedy was riding in too many dangerous open limos. Someone should help Kennedy by missing him but scaring him plenty in a botched assassination attempt.
Oswald agreed but was told that he had to go through a test-firing first. The sinister men told Lee Harvey to scare a certain famous right-wing Army General named Edmond Walker for the same reason. Walker had to learn to tighten up his home security. So Oswald was instructed to shoot at Walker in his home but to miss on purpose. The newspapers of 1963 will show a shooting into the Dallas home of General Walker. The shooting took place late at night while Walker was in his den doing nothing important. The shot missed by plenty and then someone drove off. In that situation Mister McGoo could have killed Walker with a musket. But Oswald, a former Marine sharpshooter, missed by plenty. Certainly someone did.
So having passed the Walker walk through, the final exam came on November 22. Oswald was set up in the sixth floor window of the Texas School Book Depository to shoot at Kennedy and miss on purpose. Kennedy would never ride in an open limo again if Oswald could help it.
More than one eyewitness on the ground remembered seeing more than one man up in that sixth floor window of the TSBD openly flaunting a rifle a short time before the motorcade arrived. No real assassin would do that. Someone was setting Oswald up.
When Oswald took his deliberate lack of aim and fired, the real assassin would fire one or two shots under the cover of his noise and physical distraction.
The next step of the plan is the one that went wrong. Oswald was so open and obvious a shooter that it was presumed that all manner of law enforcement and secret service would immediately open up on Lee and kill him in a Bonnie and Clyde hail of bullets. He was not supposed to survive his patsy experience. His death was supposed to attract incredible amounts of attention helping to ensure a smooth exit for the real killer.
Real killer was in the blue building
Note from the map how illogical it would be for Oswald (red circle) to wait until Kennedy’s car had made the left turn onto the expressway ramp before shooting. The car would be coming closer and closer up Houston Street and even if he missed several times he would have time to try again with each chance getting only easier. Not even a lunatic would pass up the chance to shoot the target as it motored leisurely towards the shooter, with a near standstill to work with as it turned left. Who would wait until the target began distancing itself before opening fire?
The sniper who killed Kennedy was on a lower floor of the Records Building, the white one diagonally across the street from the School Book Depository. The first shot went through Kennedy’s neck and the second through the skull. Kennedy jerked backwards on the second shot as if hit from the front because Saul’s East European rifle was shooting exploding bullets which detonate on exit, not entrance.
Jack Ruby had a contract to kill Oswald if the Secret Service somehow failed to and he went into the toilet and vomited when he saw on TV that Oswald was arrested. His girl friend thought he just wasn’t feeling well.
There was no grassy knoll shooter. The late 70’s Congressional investigation concluded that only 20% of the eyewitnesses thought that shots had come from the grassy knoll. The sound of the five shots short-hopping each other in six seconds bounced around the box acoustics of Dealey Plaza, so many mistook the pops as coming from there.
As for the witnesses who saw the little smoke clouds coming from behind the picket fence, that would have made sense in 1863, not 1963. Modern rifles do not make that kind of smoke.
This is the gist of the book. It always seems to hold up when reading other books about the whole thing.
He was paid ten thousand dollars to kill the president.
People of my generation always tell you where they were when Kennedy was assassinated. Here’s my 2 cents.
I was in the fourth grade at Gate of Heaven High School when the Principal came over the p.a. in the corridors. The classroom doors swung open and Mother Superior announced that the president had been shot. She said with relished pause and with absolute drama.
Our home room nun was visibly upset but I don’t remember sensing that any of us were. We were silent and serious, but I don't remember any of the children gasping with emotion. Less than an hour later came another “Attention Please – Attention Please” and the second announcement, the one of his death. School was cancelled that day. I think we felt more bad for the nuns being so upset than we were about our President being killed. I don't remember any of my male buddies crying. Not once. So that's the report from the boys in the 7-9 years of age range on the slaying of Kennedy. None of us were happy. No one made a joke about it. But nobody cried. The adults were a different story.
I lived for years in fear of discovery that I had not mourned. I was certain that I would be punished if somehow they found out how I had not grieved. That is my honest memory of the Kennedy assassination. Guilt that I had not cried. I thought the shooting was a bad thing, but I had watched a few hundred war movies and tried to read several war books and knew what death and shooting was. I thought people were overreacting a little. I never told anyone that I didn’t cry over Kennedy. I was afraid to.
Once I'd say early in 1964 I accidentally let a mild curse word out in front of my sister followed by the name of JFK. “I'm telling!, said Sue, “you said 'JFK and a swear!” She blackmailed me for two years threatening to tell my parents that I had used JFK with a swear word. I was scared she would tell. That's the type of sainthood he had achieved in death (in Boston at least.)
Every-time there's a big tragedy in the news, there's always stories about “how do we tell the children?” - Children are less sensitive than adults on a lot of that stuff, not more. Don't panic on their behalf unless its someone close to them. They're a little more selfish and that makes them handle distant tragedy better. I never liked Clinton but if he had been assassinated I would have cried. I know I would have. I would have felt completely wounded inside. But as an 8 year old I didn't even want to cry when Kennedy died.
For years I got the creeps looking at pictures and paintings of Kennedy in our house that went up after he died, his eyes following me everywhere.
So who killed Kennedy? Here are the main suspects as far as I can tell;
One) The US Mafia, probably because Kennedy was having sex with some mobster’s wife. Some also think it was a mob hit because the Kennedys had risen to power with mob help, then betrayed this help when they took office. The K's prosecuted the mafia more than any previous administration. Of course it could also be a mob hit in the sense that some other political group hired a mob hit man to do the job, not a political act by the mob assassin, but a mob hit nevertheless.
Two) U.S. Steel has been named as a suspect. Kennedy cost this industrial giant a lot of money when he stopped the steel price increase in 1961 and then strong-armed the settlement of the huge steel strike. Thus he had hit them twice where it hurts most, in the pocketbook.
Three) The CIA – A prime suspect. The American public doesn't need a reason to suspect these people. They think that the CIA just likes to kill people because they are an evil organization. The CIA is routinely demonized in our culture so its no big deal for Americans to think they killed President Kennedy, or Sal Mineo either for that matter. If someone wrote a screenplay that the CIA had been behind the Jonestown Massacre in Guyana I'm sure it would be a major blockbuster movie and it would start with 'Based on a True Story.'
Four) The Cuban exiles – They had a motive. Kennedy had abandoned them at the Bay of Pigs and people died. He also sold out the cause when he agreed to not invade Cuba ever again as part of the deal to settle the missile crisis of 1962.
Five) Lyndon Johnson – Of course he didn’t pull the trigger but he had a lot to gain, the attack took place in a state he controlled, and he hated the Kennedys. My father was a Boston police officer through these years and he told me, 'You ask any cop and they'll tell ya that it was Johnson that killed JFK.”
Six) The military – The military industrial kings wanted the US to get more involved in Vietnam. Kennedy was probably going to take us out of there, so he had to be terminated.
Seven) The Russians – Lee Harvey Oswald spoke Russian and had defected to the Soviet Union for years. Krushchov had been humiliated in the Cuban showdown of October 1962 and sought revenge. Oswald was a bit insane and may have been programmed to kill like in The Manchurian Candidate.
Eight) - The FBI – Hoover hated the Kennedys, even more than LBJ did, and Edgar was a mentally unstable man.
Nine) - Lee Harvey Oswald. I doubt it.
Ten) – South Vietnamese loyalists - Revenge for the murder of Diem of South Vietnam
Eleven) Kennedy drowned surfing (that’s the theory of Steven Wright)
There may never be an answer to the mystery. There are a hundred people with a hundred different books with a hundred different theories and all a hundred percent sure that the other 99 are 100% wrong. You could open a JFK Library on the various Dealy Plaza theories, and it would probably be twice the size of the JFK Library at Boston Harbor.
AFTERMATH
Bobby Kennedy was at his house in Hickory Hill Virginia eating a tuna fish sandwich when he got the phone call that his brother had been shot. He was with guests including Bobby Morganthau a well known attorney. Bobby was planning to tell Bobby that Bobby was going to step down as Attorney General and wanted Bobby to take his place as the nations top lawyer. RFK was going to dedicate himself full time to run JFK's re-election campaign. Robert Morganthau never made AG thanks to someone or two guys in Dealy Plaza.
Bobby K was a loving brother but he also had to stay alert and get on the ball protecting his brother's reputation. There were a lot of materials in paper and on tape in the Kennedy White House that Bobby knew would be trouble if Johnson's people git their hands on them. The Kennedys and the Johnsons were in the same Party but not on the same team. Bobby and his people worked hard and fast to collect the boxes of papers and tapes and get them out of the White House. They were all safely tucked away in a safe at the Counterinsurgency Unit
CONCLUSIONS
The newer the biography of Kennedy the more they stress slimy sex stories and health problems. This is mostly because Kennedy’s life has been so thoroughly documented that there is little else to reach for to create bragging rights for an interesting new book.
The Kennedy health problems are boring and of limited relevance. He was in and out of hospitals and doctors offices all his life. So? The question is, did it destroy his capacity for studious hard-work and wise decision making, and clearly the answer is no. So who cares if he had back problems or Klunkos’ disease? I certainly don’t. The new biographers stress these health issues to boost salability. Some of these authors are probably suffering from their own health issues and it isn’t slowing down their debunking bios any more than it did Kennedy’s work schedule. They are creating a new general consensus that Kennedy was a lot sicker than people realized and maybe it hurt his ability to lead. I don’t buy it. Hitler in 1944, yes, Kennedy in 1962, no.
Some people are in perfect health and are lazy and content. Others have aches and pains and work hard and well at whatever it is they do. John Kennedy was such a man. A story is instructive. JFK started every day with an intense perusal of a stack of newspapers. One morning he spotted a story in a Detroit paper about the closing of a federal facility and the political turmoil it was causing. The economy was going to be hurt and people thrown out of work. The facility was essential, claimed those protesting the closure. Kennedy ordered his team to do a study on this problem right away and wanted a two page paper, complete with conclusions, on his desk within two hours. He got it and read it over brunch. An hour later he was giving a press conference and a Detroit reporter thought he could embarrass Kennedy by asking him about this problem. None of the national papers had carried the story. Kennedy went over the situation point by point and said that the facility was not essential and that the danger to the regions economy was highly exaggerated. He would support the closing in spite of the protests. The reporter was the one embarrassed. He had no answer for Kennedy’s well-informed arguments.
The one clear fact of Kennedy’s time: fear and hatred of Communism was so predominant that no candidate for any significant office from either party could dream of winning without waving the flag and boasting how tough he was going to be against the Soviets. There were no hawks and doves, only hawks and bigger hawks. No one was going to point fingers in 1964 and say that the US armed forces had deteriorated in the hands of the Democrats. Nothing could be further from the truth. The arms race had escalated wildly under Kennedy, the test ban treaty notwithstanding. And Americans were by and large not displeased at the time, only later did the masses begin pontificating against their leaders for the insanity they had achieved.
Here is a relevant excerpt from a Kennedy speech describing without shame, the military build-up in progress, the same build-up that would be condemned later by a majority of people all over the world;
In less than three years, we have increased by 50 percent
the number of Polaris submarines .. increased by more
than 75 percent our Minuteman purchase program …and
increased by 100 percent the total number of nuclear
weapons available to our strategic forces.
The above excerpt is from the speech he did not deliver at the Dallas Trade Mart on November 22, 1963. He left the stage bragging about our massive nuclear build-up, never dreaming that later generations would look at the entire nuclear arms race as suicidal foolishness.
Kennedy was a great man who showed courage in combat and in politics but whose tragic murder as a young man gave him sainthood. JFK needlessly almost started World War III over pro-Soviet missiles in Cuba when NATO already had missiles surrounding Russia. He was defending the Monroe doctrine but was it really necessary?
The Cuban Missile Crisis scared me as a young boy because all the adults were scared. I remember resting my weary 7 yr. old shoulder half way home from the milk store with a gallon of milk. I looked around the city block where I lived and thought, “This might not all be here tomorrow.” That moment was my first political experience.
Kennedy changed American politics because he re-introduced the sexy factor into presidential races that had been missing since ‘Handsome Frank’ Pierce. Let’s face it. If Kennedy had been the exact same guy and had been ugly instead of good looking, Nixon would have won the election. It’s usually in the very first sentence a writer types about him, how handsome he was. This new John was hotter than the last twelve presidents combined. Since 1960, there are always the candidates with that little edge they’re unashamedly throwing into the mix, the good-looking factor. You can still win without it, but now it’s a standard extra weapon. It wasn’t in play when Blaine was running against Cleveland but it’s been there since 1960 in men like Gary Hart, Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, VP candidate John Edwards in 2004, and of course, Robert, Ted, Joe, and Patrick Kennedy. Today the ugly candidates have to joke about it to minimize the negative impact. There was a time when it really made no difference.
JFK was not all about his looks once he became President, but he was all about his looks in getting there. Its pretty despicable. If John Kennedy had looked like James Carville, he wouldn't have gotten elected to the Worcester School Committee.
SOURCES;
Because he died in office, Kennedy did not have the chance to write his memoirs like such presidents as Eisenhower, Nixon, Ford and Clinton. No doubt this very literate President would have written an invaluable, prolific and excellent historical memoir. Great books died at Dealey Plaza too. Part of the reason why he had Schlesinger on the Brains Trust was to help him with the great history book he was planning to write.
So we have to rely on books by those who knew him. There are a hundred, “I knew Kennedy” books. Three were written by hookers. The best are obviously the one’s by those who were not only close to him, but powerful political thinkers in their own right. By this definition the two best would have to be the tomes by Sorenson and Schlesinger, written with the fresh perspective of the era. Unfortunately they are both dull tiresome books by 2 sycophants participants masquerading as authors.
Sorenson took another crack at it recently, but I don't know if I can put myself through another round with that guy.
Appointment in Dallas, by Hugh McDonald c)1967
There was an article in the Boston Globe a few years ago summarizing the best still standing theories on the who, what, and why in the President’s murder. Of the ten they listed, the Hugh McDonald thesis/book was listed sixth.
Best Evidence, by Robert Lifton – Alternates between compelling and boring chapters - Includes gory photographs. I mean very gory.
Scary gory.
The Burden and the Glory, by John F. Kennedy, c) 1964 – A collection of Kennedy thoughts as revealed through his speeches and letters. Introduction by a suspect in his death, Lyndon Johnson.
Conversations with Kennedy, by Benjamin Bradlee, – The rich famous and powerful hang out with the rich famous and powerful and then write about it. More entertaining than enlightening. Because of that stupid movie I can't get the image of Jason Robards out of my brain when I think of Ben Bradlee.
Conspiracy, by Anthony Summers – The first chapters were interesting, but then it bogged down in detail and I have not finished it. As the British like to say, ‘get on with it!’
The Dark Side of Camelot, by Seymour Hersch -c) 1997 – See more faults. Dark Side was a major best-seller in its day. I see Seymore on TV all the time and I read is books on My Lai and on KAL-007. I don't completely trust him, even though he did write for a while for the New York Times.
This book is all negative but at least its honest in its title. There's no feigned innocence. Its all dark material. Much of it is racy. Apparently this Kennedy guy made Bill Clinton look like a loyal husband.
Foreign Policy and US Presidential Elections, by Robert A. Divine, c) 1974 – This book is divine. I can't put it down.
From Hiroshima to Glasnost, At the Center of Decision – A Memoir, by Paul H. Nitze – c) 1989 – Pronouncing his name sounds dangerous close to 'Nazi', and a lot of lefties think it fits. Nitze had some input even into the Iraq invasion of 2003, so this man is important, even if he isn't as famous as his deeds.
This is a great work of political literature, beautifully written. Whether we agree with him on everything is another story.
Nitze is of the opinion that Kennedy was not intimidated and bullied by Krushchev at Vienna in the spring of 1961. It seems that the only people who take this stance are those within the administration who have a selfish interest in saying so. Most outside observers, both domestic and foreign thought that Krushchev put Kennedy in a half-nelson for two days at Vienna.
The Founding Father, by Richard J. Whalen, c) 1964 – A thorough, soft-hitting biography of the sly senior Kennedy Joseph P.
JPK was a “mortal enemy of FDR.”
Joe squarely and publicly placed the blame for the failure Bay of Pigs on the CIA at a time when his son was trying to own up to full responsibility.
Father K suffered a severe stroke after John was President. As for the dynasty, Joe said in 1961, “Now its Ted’s turn. Whatever he wants, I’m going to see he gets it.”
The more I read about Joe Kennedy, the worse he gets. This bio by “Whalee” as he was known in Hyannisport, is critical at times, but not to the point where he's a debunker.
Jack, by Geoffrey Perrot, c)2002 – This is a pure hatchet-job. The jacket has one reviewer calling it fair and balanced. That's a laugh.
The book was controversial for a short time on it’s publication but the historical distance of the events put the fire out as fast as it started. Perrot’s book was spotlighted for his debunking versions of Kennedy at Harvard and especially for his contention that the PT-109 war story might not have been as glorious as it became in the public mind. He's suggesting that Kennedy was to blame for the loss of PT-109, and his heroism is in proper perspective only a consolation for his overall failure as a commander.
Perrot is obsessed with telling sordid sex stories. That is what got the book so much publicity when it first came out. Every time someone recalls JFK swearing it gets in the book; every dirty passage in a JFK letter from his youth gets quoted in all its ribald detail. Yech. I don’t want to think about young Kennedy exploring the new frontier in a Mexican brothel. The big words can't hide the big Freudian complex.
Jack Kennedy; Socialist – A New Biography of JFK, by Sean Hannity, c) 2007 – The author signed my copy at the Tribeca Film Festival in New York City where I saw him (2002) robustly congratulating Al Franken on his recent success, to my disillusionment.
Franken was saying it right back, “Hey Sean you too man, congratulations!” I would rather see these left and right extremists dueling at sunrise with Aaron Burr's pistols. But there they were, embracing each other by the upper arms, being broadcaster comrades first, and political opponents second. I think the reverse should be true. I was disappointed in both of them. (By the way, if they did have a duel I'd be at the Weehauken grounds with a bag of popcorn sporting a red cap with a big 'H' on it.)
JFK, Ollie Stone’s film is a composite of a few of the better assassination theories. I fail to understand why so many were so offended by it, since all the angles in it had already been well illuminated for some time.
JFK: The Man and the Myth, by Victor Lasky, c) 1963 – A Kennedy bashing extravaganza, masquerading as a book by the rascal Victor Lasky. Vic takes his subject to the wall and then slaps him senseless for 458 pages. Lasky’s book was just reaching the best seller list when Kennedy was assassinated. Bad timing, bro.
Its gets worse for Lasky. The same thing later happened to his book about RFK.
Laskey is so one-sided and unbalanced that he creates sympathy for his target, at least he did for me when I read 90 pages on a bus on the way to a gig in Hyannis in 1984. I've added 260 pages since. He's mean, like Maureen Dowd mean. Its all just vendetta city. Kennedy can do no right by this guy.
I find Victor unpleasant to read yet a good writer. When I have seen him interviewed on TV he was surprisingly likeable. Vic was acerbic but had a warm sense of humor and a touch of sincere self-effacement. The late Vic Laskey seemed like good company. It’s too bad it didn’t show so much in his writing.
Johnny, We Hardly Knew Ye, by Kenneth P. O’Brien, David F. Powers – Kenny and Dave, I've hardly read ye. - I have only read the chapters on the Cuba and Berlin crisis, and was pleasantly surprised. These guys were serious insiders. One of them, I forget which one, was from “Southie.”
Kennedy, by Theodore C. Sorenson, c)1965 – A big book. I'm halfway done because he takes too long to get to the point. Otherwise I would have finished it a long time ago.
Its a great book, don't get me wrong. But Sorenson has rewritten the story in a new book, so I wonder how much of this one is bogus and the new one more explosive. It takes long enough to get through this one, now I have to read his new book on the Kennedy years too? It's like these retired sports stars who write a new biography every 9 years. We heard you the first time.
I long ago read Sorenson's excellent, “Profiles in Courage.”
The Kennedy’s, An American Drama, by Peter Collier & David Horowitz, c)1984 – C&H feel that the Kennedy record on civil rights was overrated, that John and Bobby only acted when a racial crisis forced them to, and that their equivocating encouraged the defiance of men like George Wallace.
Krushchev Remembers, by Nikita Krushchev, translated by Harrison Salisbury – They found a few dozen reel to reels of Krushchev speaking his mind in his old age and Salisbury and a big publisher made it into two books. Some of it is certainly disinformation.
To Move A Nation, The Foreign Policy of John F. Kennedy, by Roger Hillsman, c)1967 – RH was an insider in the Administration. Hill blames Secretary of State Rusk for most of the Kennedy failures, including and especially Vietnam and Laos.
A fine and thorough work of political literature by one of the lucky ones who made history and then wrote it.
Lost Victory, by William Colby – 'Cold War Colby' - The story of the Vietnam War by a CIA participant. I don't love his writing, but its worth the read because his opinions have the triple-score value of scholar, participant, and partisan spy chief. Colby casually drops in a sentence that the Sino-Soviet Split of the 1960's was largely staged disinformation, then continues on as though he didn't just say something major.
Memoirs: Andrei Gromyko, c)1989 – Volatile unrepentant memoir from the ultimate stubborn impossible argumentative Soviet Russian from the Cold War. Gromyko was Soviet Foreign Minister from 1957 to 1985.
Wow. What a son of a bitch. What a sincere, maddening interesting volatile readable son of a bitch.
His nickname was ‘Mr. Nyet.'
Andrei the Cold War Giant died on the operating table in July 1979 when Gorbachov had enough of his old way of doing things.
This book should be read by every High School history student in America just to know the what the how and why of Russian perceptions of America in the Cold War. This is their side of things by one of the top, if not the top, ideological spokesmen for Soviet interests.
The Men Who Killed Kennedy – The History Channel concludes that Kennedy had to have been shot by a sniper hiding in a sewer. I kid you not.
The Penkovsky Papers, by Oleg Penkovsky – The Soviet defector of the decade. His story and his papers. Fascinating read.
Portrait of the Assassin, by future President Gerald Ford. Ford had been a member of the infamous Warren Commission. He could have written a sequel about Sarah Jane Moore.
President Kennedy, by Richard Reeves – c ) 1993 is relentless, rich, and readable. I had this book lying around for years because I thought I had read enough on JFK with the Sorenson, Schlesinger, Lasky, and Powers/O’Donnell books. But this is the most valuable of them all, especially in not wasting my time with boring detail and ponderous reflection. It a no nonsense and in-depth look at his presidency and it moves. Its not entirely flattering to its subject, but its no cheap shot hatchet job either. Reeves does dwell on Kennedy's physical problems a little too much for my taste. The author likes to quote Kennedy swearing to the point where it makes the author look like a mischievous instigator. If Reeves learns of Kennedy dropping an 'f-bomb,' you can be sure it will be incorporated into his text somehow.
No More Vietnams, by Richard Nixon, c)1985 – After mismanaging he war, he later explains how it should have been managed properly. Good work.
That having been said, I have relied on this superb book a great deal.
Red Star Over Cuba, by Nathaniel Weyl, c) 1961 – This is a hot little right-wing paperback that came out just after the Bay of Pigs disaster. What is more interesting than the book is the two inserts courtesy of the original owner. They say much about the times. The first item is a stamp that is pasted beneath the inside title page. Also useful and entertaining is the windshield decal that was stuck inside page 96. They are both shown below;
The owner left his personal stamp on the book.
The windshield decal stuck in page 96-7
Six Seconds in Dallas – by Josiah Thompson – c ) 1967 – This one gets rave reviews from nearly everyone who read it, but its hard to find and long out of print. My hardcover is worth about $50. Thompson pays no attention to who the conspirators were, but he definitely breaks down all the film and concludes that the bullets that hit Kennedy and Connally were two different bullets, so Oswald couldn't have shot them both in a split second. Josiah thinks there were three gunman, and that one was probably shooting from the roof of the Records Building, the white building.
A Thousand Days, by James Schlesinger. This one's about 1,100 pages so roll up your sleeves and bury that nose. I read the first 600 pages about 12 years ago and have only tacked on another 50 since. He's a famous historian and a player, but I find him dull.
Waging Peace and War, Dean Rusk in the Truman. Kennedy, and Johnson Years – by Thomas J. Schoenbaum – c) 1988 -
How biased is this book about Kennedy's Secretary of State? The author is a Dean Rusk professor at the Dean Rusk Institute. Now that's bias. Tommy is locked in on giving credit to Rusk for everything that went right with the Kennedy Administration.
That being said, this is a very solid book by a good writer. It adds plenty of information to the Kennedy story that I did not find in any other books.
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