On JFK
by Malooga
lifted from a comment
As the popular chestnut, often attributed to Emma Goldman, goes, "If voting could change anything, they would have made it illegal."
Kudos to r'giap, b real, and monolycus for rescuing this conversation from the cob-webbed corridors of the Camelot Memorial Hair Salon For Upper Class White Men.
While candidates like TR and Wilson were the first to employ modern propaganda techniques in a national candidacy, and Harding was the first to appear on mass media, Kennedy took image manipulation techniques to a new level. After the buck-stopping, bomb-dropping haberdasher from Kansas City and poor Bess, and the avuncular General assassin and dowdy Mamie, the media, particularly the newest media, TV, were positively starving for a way to increase their ratings. One could argue that the media sold itself (to advertisers) during the campaign of 1960, as much as Kennedy sold himself to the public, and that Kennedy was the perfect acutrement to enhance and clinch that sale.
Kennedy was ever-aware of the importance of image. (November's Vanity Fair carries reprints of the famous Avedon pre-inaugural photos of the publicly loving and glamorous family.) Kennedy, at 43, cut a fine figure despite the fact that he clearly looked gravely ill and ten years beyond the sticker date, and Jackie, at a mere 31 (imagine!), was more interested in veneer than machivellian machinations. If today the media talks about which candidate you would rather have a beer with, back then the electorate, male and female, secretly thought (and voted) for the candidate they would rather end up in the sack with. And with poverty rates hovering at 22.5% in 1960, perhaps a little fantasy was just what the ruling elite needed to burnish the charade for those who had not benefitted from the US's unparalleled post-war economic expansion.
(Even the doting VF article is bold enough to note that "given Kennedy's history of womanizing, was this -- the photo shoot -- also a way to insulate himself from public speculation?) Slick Willie should have paid better attention. Discussions of morals aside, Kennedy's endless womanizing, particularly with mob women, put himself at extraordinary risk of blackmail.
Looking back on Camelot, one finds the issues, the spectacle, the challenges, and the image projected, remarkably relevant to today.
Yes, as noted, the Kennedy's were a family a fascist thugs. Joe P. was a Nazi sympathizer, as most of corporate America was in those days right after the attempted US fascist coup was thwarted by Smedley Butler; but more to the point the entire family was close as crack with Senator McCarthy, who, of course, was Bobby's original mentor. But, it is well to remember that in the spectacle of politics, for the ruling elite, labels like conservative and liberal, are no more than clothing to be fitted to the candidate so that they should cut an appropriate sharp image, and to be discarded when no longer necessary. In any event, the Kennedy's, even then, with Joe's bootlegging, were small peanuts compared to the Bush crime clan, who as the actual bankers, along with Harriman, to Thyssen, the industrial muscle and money behind Hitler, tried to rip off their European shareholders when the German war effort went south -- a fitting start to an unparalleled stretch of financial chicanery. And the Kennedy's did put on the cloak of aristocratic social service that the Bush's never even bothered to pay lip service to. (The current generation -- Joe, Robert Jr. -- is pretty convincing, too.)
I remember a Time magazine cover in 1962, portraying the three brothers, with the dates of their respective eight year Presidencies encompassing an unbroken span, a 24 year Golden Era for America. It seemed so inevitable at that point in time... Well, Peter Phillips of Project Censored says that no more than 500 people rule the country, and hence, the world. Joe P. might have thought that he was one of them, but it seems like he was more like a number 6 or 700, a mere parvenue, and not to be welcomed to the feted table.
I was 6 1/2 at the time of the assassination, and like all others of my generation I still remember the defining day vividly. It was a grey, windy November afternoon in NYC, and I was playing on my fromt lawn with a friend. I saw the father across the street come home from work early and he was crying. I had never seen an adult cry before. He looked at me and said, "The President's been killed. Go home now!" I saw a lot of adults cry the next few days, and I remember being very scared that we had no one to run the country, and what would happen? At that point in time, I could not yet distinguished between the puppet and the puppeteer, nor had I learned to see and follow the almost invisible strings.
Yes, I too remember the unprecedented State funeral: long, slow, and oh-so-solemn, the close-ups of the family, and every footfall and teardrop dramatically revealed to us by the empathic camera eye of the media, who had not yet aquired the ill-manners of chattering and analyzing incessantly. But when I think back upon those events now, I think immmediately of 9/11. For even the day after the asassination, the storyline we were being fed had begun to stink worse than week-old fish -- and all of the adults I knew, knew it. That funeral provided the narrative which guided and beguiled the public, as surely as the instant attribution to Usama (in those days), and the miraculous identification of the nineteen hijackers less than 24 hours after the WTC was hit did for our generation.
Why he was killed and by who, I cannot say for sure. I have read the claims that he had signed an Executive Order empowering the government to print its own money, and taking the power away from the Fed. Whether that is a canard, or not, I cannot say. I can say is that he who controls the money supply, surely controls everything else.
In any event, if one dispenses with commentary on hairstyles and lifestyles, and examines the actual record, one finds, as Chomsky points out, a remarkable continuity of policy between our regnates. As George Kennan wrote in a Policy Planning Study of 1948, "We have about 50 percent of the world's wealth but only 6.3 percent of its population. In this situation, we cannot fail to be the object of envy and resentment. Our real task in the coming period is to devise a pattern of relationships which will permit us to maintain this position of disparity."
That has always been the task -- to this day -- and analyzing whether a Presidency is "sucessful" or not, one must identify just who it was successful for: Cui bono.
It wasn't until 1969 that Isiah Berlin delivered his influential lecture, "Two Concepts of Liberty," but as noted in comments above, Kennedy's inaugural dictum, "Think not what your country..." was as clear an enunciation of the concept of positive liberty as could be, and despite Adam Curtis's adomitions in "The Trap," Berlin felt that such expressions always gave rise to abuses of power. A few short years later, those forced to go to Indochine found the once heroic exhortation bitter "draft" to swallow indeed. And of course, Neo-Conservatism can find no more direct expression: Look not to government to solve your problems, but you, yourself, are obligated to serve the state. Nothing noble there for me. Additionally, in his inaugural address, Kennedy made the ambitious pledge to "pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, in order to assure the survival and success of liberty." In other words, we refuse to take any military option off the table in the pursuit of what we call free-trade (liberty) for our corporations. Sounds positively Obamaesque!
Kennedy -- the sixties, really -- represented the high point of American hegemony: The government was able to ease up the yoke on the governed a little. Kennedy, anxious to deflect attention from his Catholicism, and other divisive cultural issues, promoted a new concept: Government, not by craven ideologues, but by technocrats, "The best and the brightest," a government we can all agree with. Nixon countered by developing his "Southern Strategy" and forever altering the course of American electioneering, where irrelevant "wedge" issues would hold center stage, allowing the South to return to its traditional role of selector of the Chief Executive.
In any event, we soon found out how nice it was not having ideologues in office: instead we got Dean Rusk and Robert McNamara, men any bombardier could agree with. And of course that stuck-up bow-tied Harvard prig, Schlesinger, who never found an imperialism that he couldn't critique, couldn't execute better. What a loveable gang of murderers!
Well, let's go to the record:
Foreign affairs: If one attempts to argue that there was a slight lull in imperial adventures, one must concede that it is only because his predecessor had been so thorough in the preceeding year: Lebanon (Same as it ever was), Guatemala, El Salvador, Cuba, and the canal zone, too. Nevertheless, Kennedy did not shy away from American adventurism, either. In addition to the case of Cuba, which we are all familiar with and hence does not bear repeating, there is Brazil, where in 1962 the CIA engaged in campaign to keep João Goulart from achieving control of Congress, leading to a full blown coup, and the beginning of the miltary dictators' reign of terror in South America in 1964. In 1963, a CIA-backed coup overthrew elected social democrat Juan Bosch in the Dominican Republic, and a far-right-wing coup in Guatemala, apparently U.S.-supported, forestalled elections in which "extreme leftist" Juan José Arévalo was favored to win. Also in 1963, CIA backed the military overthrow of President Jose Maria Valesco Ibarra in Ecuador. (Got to keep the backyard in shape!) Oh yes, and then there was British Guiana/Guyana where as William Blum reminds us, "Great Britain and the United States, went to great lengths to prevent a democratically elected leader from occupying his office. Cheddi Jagan was another Third World leader who tried to remain neutral and independent. He was elected three times. Although a leftist -- more so than Sukarno or Arbenz -- his policies in office were not revolutionary. But he was still a marked man, for he represented Washington's greatest fear: building a society that might be a successful example of an alternative to the capitalist model. Using a wide variety of tactics -- from general strikes and disinformation to terrorism and British legalisms, the U.S. and Britain finally forced Jagan out in 1964. John F. Kennedy had given a direct order for his ouster, as, presumably, had Eisenhower. One of the better-off countries in the region under Jagan, Guyana, by the 1980s, was one of the poorest. Its principal export became people." So much for our own hemisphere.
In Africa there was the 1960-65 destabilization and rape of Congo/Zaire, the Eisenhower ordered 1961 assassination of Patrice Lumumba resulting in several more years of US-supported civil conflict and chaos, leading to the rise to power of kleptocrat Mobutu Sese Seko, a man not a stranger to the CIA.
On the other side of the world there was the 1962 CIA-backed military coup in Laos resulting finally in a negotiated settlement between the pro-Western government of Laos and the Pathet Lao communist movement, the destabilization of Cambodia, The Third Marine Expeditionary Unit landing with 5,000 troops in Thailand on May 17, 1962 to support that country during the "threat of Communist pressure from outside," and of course, Vietnam.
Kennedy was determined to 'draw a line in the sand' and prevent a communist victory in Vietnam saying to James Reston of the New York Times, "Now we have a problem making our power credible and Vietnam looks like the place." There, Kennedy increased the number of U.S. military advisers from 800 to 16,300 to cope with rising guerrilla activity. The advisers were embedded at every level of the South Vietnamese armed forces. The Kennedy administration sought to refocus U.S. efforts on pacification (now called counter-insurgency) and "winning over the hearts and minds" of the population. The Strategic Hamlet Program had been initiated in 1961. This joint U.S.-South Vietnamese program attempted to resettle the rural population into fortified camps (ethnic cleansing and ghettos). The aim was to isolate the population from the insurgents (sic), and strengthen the government's hold over the countryside. The Strategic Hamlets, however, were quickly infiltrated by the guerrillas. The peasants resented being uprooted from their ancestral villages (who knew?). The government refused to undertake land reform, which left farmers paying high rents to a few wealthy landlords (that's called free enterprise). Corruption dogged the program and intensified opposition. It seems that, despite his dying before Johnson's full-blown escalation, Kennedy, in Vietnam, was at least able to "make our power credible," a fact the Vietnamese were unable to ignore, and doubtless endeared him to them. During the summer of 1963 U.S. officials began discussing the possibility of a regime change. President Diem was overthrown and executed, along with his brother, on November 2, 1963, less than three weeks before Kennedy himself (what goes around...). South Vietnam entered a period of extreme political instability, as one military government toppled another in quick succession. Increasingly, each new regime was viewed as a puppet of the Americans. Quite a record of accomplishment!
In the Middle East, the 1957 Eisenhower Doctrine declared that the United States was "prepared to use armed forces to assist" any Middle Eastern country "requesting assistance against armed aggression from any country controlled by international communism." U.S. officials feared that the new Iraqi regime might reassert its historical claim on Kuwait (sound familiar?), a tiny country created by British fiat in order to prevent any larger state from controlling what was then the biggest oil-producing area in the Gulf. A memorandum based on an emergency meeting between Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, Chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Nathan Twining, and CIA director Allen Dulles asserted that unless the United States intervened, "the U.S. would lose influence," its "bases" would be "threatened," and U.S. credibility would be "brought into question throughout the world." The U.S. was also concerned about the nationalist threat to what were very profitable oil concessions in Kuwait and Iraq.
Kennedy worked to covertly undermine the new government of Iraq by supporting anti-government Kurdish rebels (sounds familiar) and by attempting, unsuccessfully, to assassinate Iraq's leader, Abdul Karim Qassim (Kassem), an army general who had restored relations with the Soviet Union and lifted the ban on Iraq's Communist Party. Iraq’s formal withdrawal from the Baghdad Pact and simultaneous economic and technical aid agreement with the Soviet Union was in 1959. In quick succession Iraq withdrew from the sterling bloc, ordered British air force units out of the Habbaniya base, and cancelled the Point Four Agreement with the United States. Then in 1963, the U.S. supported a coup by the Ba'ath party (soon to be headed by Saddam Hussein) to overthrow the Qassim regime, including by giving the Ba'ath names of communists to murder. "Armed with the names and whereabouts of individual communists, the national guards carried out summary executions. Communists held in detention...were dragged out of prison and shot without a hearing... [B]y the end of the rule of the Ba'ath, its terror campaign had claimed the lives of an estimated 3,000 to 5,000 communists." Qasim was then killed after a show trial.
Not bad for less than three years in office.
Meanwhile, in Europe Operation Gladio’s strategy of tension, begun after World War II, when the UK and the US decided to create "stay-behind" paramilitary organizations, intending to counter communists coming to power, and employing means such as internal subversion, the use of "false flag operations" (terror attacks attributed to the opposite side) continued without a hitch. "A briefing minute of June 1, 1959, reveals Gladio was built around 'internal subversion'. It was to play 'a determining role… not only on the general policy level of warfare, but also in the politics of emergency'. Secret cells and operations were conducted in practically every country in Europe, conducting assassinations as needed.
One should note, at this point, that America's only Irish Catholic President did nothing about the "Troubles" in Ireland, besides shaking a few hands and posing for a few photo ops. During President Kennedy’s historic visit to Ireland in June 1963, he remarked to the people of New Ross (nice town, been there), Ireland:
“When my great grandfather left here to become a cooper in East Boston, he carried nothing with him except two things: a strong religious faith and a strong desire for liberty. I am glad to say that all of his great-grandchildren have valued that inheritance.”
Perhaps it is crass of me, but I can't help but imagine that John Jr.s inheritance on more then $10 Million was something he valued more. I could be wrong there, though....
The lunar program, as others have mentioned, was an audaciously conceived piece of propaganda, sheer "lunacy," one might say, convincing multitudes in the possibility of life on another planet, or the potential to mine the moon for minerals, or some such crap, while deflecting attention and concern for domestic problems like poverty, and concern for the limited resources of our own environment. Yes, it was over a decade before the Club of Rome produced "Limits to Growth" and accorded official recognication to the fragileness and finiteness of our environment, but books like "Silent Spring" (1962), and others, had been trying to get the message out to the general public for a decade by the early sixties. That money, billions upon billions of dollars, properly spent, could have saved millions of lives, changed humanity's expectations, and eased the way for the momentous transition mankind now faces. But of course it couldn't, since Kennedy, like Bush, ran on the "Big Lie," in his case, that there was a "missle gap" between the US and the Soviet Union, imperiling all of our lives. Kennedy, and the entire establishment knew that was a false claim, but money was wanted for missles and to militarize space. As Chomsky often notes, that bravado brought the planet to within five minutes of complete doomsday, only saved because a Soviet officer refused to follow orders and authorize a strike. (True story.)
Kennedy's signature international program was The Alliance for
Progress initiated in 1961 to establish economic cooperation between
North and South America in order to counter the perceived emerging
communist threat from Cuba to U.S. interests and dominance in the
region. It was chock full of arrays of handsome benchmarks and reams of
fine prose and noble goals, in the best Kennedy fashion:
...we propose to complete the revolution of the Americas, to build a hemisphere where all men can hope for a suitable standard of living and all can live out their lives in dignity and in freedom. To achieve this goal political freedom must accompany material progress...(Watch out, you might get neither!) Let us once again transform the American Continent into a vast crucible of revolutionary ideas and efforts, a tribute to the power of the creative energies of free men and women, an example to all the world that liberty and progress walk hand in hand. Let us once again awaken our American revolution until it guides the struggles of people everywhere-not with an imperialism of force or fear but the rule of courage and freedom and hope for the future of man.
In small print were the small demand clauses of the business lobby, which committed the Latin American governments to the promotion "of conditions that will encourage the flow of foreign investments" to the region. U.S. industries lobbied Congress to amend the Foreign Assistance Act of 1961 to ensure that US aid would not be furnished to any foreign business that could compete with US business "unless the country concerned agrees to limit the export of the product to the US to 20 percent of output". In addition the industries lobbied Congress to limit all purchases of AID machinery and vehicles in the US. A 1967 study of AID showed that 90 percent of all AID commodity expenditures went to US corporations. (It's called doing good by maintaining an industrial and developmental edge.) Sadly, the Alliance was a boat without a sail, alas...
And then there's the Peace Corps, established by Executive Order 10924 on March 1, 1961, and authorized by Congress on September 22, 1961, with passage of the Peace Corps Act (Public Law 87-293). which declares the purpose of the Peace Corps to be:
“to promote world peace and friendship through a Peace Corps, which shall make available to interested countries and areas men and women of the United States qualified for service abroad and willing to serve, under conditions of hardship if necessary, to help the peoples of such countries and areas in meeting their needs for trained manpower.”
In reality, this small twig hiding behind the US's "Big Stick" was the nice face of American imperialism, with programs designed to keep "them" on the farm, dissuade them from industrializing, and introduce the "Green Revolution," precursor to today's GMO crops. It functions as a sort of prep school for the CIA -- learn the language and the culture -- before you earn. All one needs to do is place a map of the mineral resources of the world over Peace Corps postings and you get more of the idea of what "service" really means.
Kennedy's legacy in space is twofold: One, the increasing pollution of the atmosphere with all manner of astro-debris, which will one day make any type of atmospheric launch impossible. And secondly, the PNAC's goal of dominating all of space militarily. The US government, as Amy Worthington documents, is busy concoting all manner of energy rays and beams, and sprays -- Aerosol and Electromagnetic Weapons In The Age Of Nuclear War -- all of them lethal, in its quest for full spectrum dominance. Of course, they are all being experimented upon unwittingly, people both domestically and globally without our knowledge, because of the essential "national security" implications.
As far as the environment is concerned, The U.S. had conducted the equivalent of one nuclear weapons test every 17 days since its first test; far more than any other country. It is estimated that the total yield of all the atmospheric nuclear weapons tests conducted is 438 megatons. That's equivalent to 29,200 Hiroshima size bombs. In the 36 years between 1945 and 1980 when atmospheric testing was being conducted this would have been equivalent to exploding a Hiroshima size bomb in the atmosphere every 11 hours. Approximately 3,830 kilograms of plutonium has been left in the ground as a result of all underground nuclear testing and some 4,200 kilograms of plutonium has been discharged into the atmosphere as a result of atmospheric nuclear testing. There has also been a program of 'Peaceful Nuclear Explosions' conducted over the years by two of the five declared nuclear powers. The Soviet Union carried out the most extensive PNE program. Some 116 PNE's were conducted between 1965 and 1988. The U.S. carried out 27 PNE's between 1961 and 1973: one in Carlsbad, Colorado, one in Grand Valley, Colorado, one in Rifle, Colorado, one in Farmington, New Mexico, and 23 at the National Test Site in Nevada. Wherever nuclear weapons testing has occurred for whatever reasons there have been environmental problems. Radioactivity has leaked into the environment from underground nuclear tests, large areas of land are uninhabitable as a result of atmospheric and underground nuclear testing, and indigenous people, their children and their children's children's health and livelihoods have been affected by nuclear weapons tests. A visit to a map of US nuclear contamination is well worth one's time.
And finally, at home, the Kennedy administration showed its concern for its domestic populace by continuing the ongoing Project MKULTRA, or MK-ULTRA, the code name for a CIA mind-control research program that began in 1950, run by the Office of Scientific Intelligence, and which involved the use of many types of drugs, as well as other methodology, to manipulate individual mental states and to alter brain function. CIA documents suggest that "chemical, biological and radiological" means were investigated for the purpose of mind control as part of MKULTRA, a violation of the Nuremberg Code that the U.S. agreed to follow after WWII.
All in all, not a bad record for less than three years. But I prefer to remember the real Camelot: you know, all those touch football games on the lawn, sort of like Gore once did....
I guess it is all how you judge Presidents. If you look for something good to come from power, there is the White House redecoration, the interest in sailing, the pictures of John-John under the desk... I just don't happen to believe that power ever serves the ordinary person, so I take my sunglasses off, clear away the mythification, and see power as it really is, stark, implacable, and evil. It's easier to oppose that way.
Posted by b on January 30, 2008 at 08:43 AM | Permalink
No recollections of either his tenure nor his assassination to share; I hadn't been born yet. I do cringe at all the Camelot talk, though, since it was the shaking off of a monarch (named George, oddly enough) that gave rise to my country in the first place. It doesn't surprise me that people look for "heroes" for inspiration, it just astounds me that Americans are so quick to embrace the archetype of the benevolent monarch given our history.
I don't look for heroes, personally. Like $cam, I enjoy the flavor of a medium-well cooked sacred cow. This reminiscing about those romantic days of Camelot are bringing me back to a German literature class I took in college. In Bertolt's Brecht's Galileo, the character of Andrea laments that "Unhappy the land that has no heroes!", to which the title character responds "No! Unhappy is the land that needs them!"
Thanks for your perspective, Malooga. Good to see you as always.
Posted by: Monolycus | Jan 30, 2008 9:52:18 AM | 2
I enjoy the flavor of a medium-well cooked sacred cow.
lol, spitting funny.
great post malooga, good to see you're alive n kickin'
Posted by: annie | Jan 30, 2008 9:57:54 AM | 3
monolycus
understanding that brecht quote well - i can understand why we need exemplars, who are nearly always flawed - because it is their presence that makes the possibilities of struggle a little easier to live with
(another brecht dictum - between holding up a bank & founding one - which is the more criminal? - seems particularly apt today)
it would seem from my vantage that my history has been so full of violence & the menace of violence - that i never possessed any form of attraction to leaders - that violence made me want to believe & that was only possible in witnessing ordinary people live out extraordinary destinies
i suppose i was touched by an uncle ho - more because he seemed to synthesise all that is good in humanity - more than his leadership which was in reality - collective
the cold war - of which the kennedy's were an integral mechanism - was so full of monsters - all over the world - certainly in the culture of its origin - even then you had the dull melodramas of fake defection (the petrovs in australia), the murder of innocents( rosenbergs in america - contrary to the much vaunted verona encryption) & it must never be forgotten that afroamerican were dying in unprecedented numbers well into the sixties according to whatever u n indice you want to use
we were children one - the cold war made monsters of us all - being able to live in a world of such profound inequality was not an incidental cursus of kennedy's politics
Posted by: remembereringgiap | Jan 30, 2008 10:12:30 AM | 4
thanks mono (and uncle), i saw that right after i posted when i went to review the rest of the original thread.
Posted by: annie | Jan 30, 2008 10:25:55 AM | 6
thank you, malooga. always great to have your impressive contributions here.
Posted by: b real | Jan 30, 2008 12:17:34 PM | 7
Kennedy was an image innovator, as Malooga details, following other posts in another thread.
His legacy is incredibile (sic). Look at Sarkozy, for example. Before the election, he promised ‘change’, ‘clean up’, ‘better buying power’ and remained rather restrained, that is married, forcing his wife to appear at his side and play some role, and was not over the top flamboyant. Just enough to appeal as ‘modern’ - enjoying the good life as all dream - as opposed to ‘stuffy’ and ‘old fashioned’ and ‘hypocritical’, with the implicit comparison to Mitterand (with a mistress and illegitimate daughter paid for by the tax payer) and Chirac (a crook and a rather sincere and appealing compulsive skirt chaser, who ran the state with lackadaisical distance.) These things count, believe me. I read the women’s mags - probably the only person here who does. Many men read them too - it is 60% of the vote.
Second, he stole from the left, or rather from a certain version of it, that is French left social corporatism, gussied up in despair by Segolène Royal, with her ‘citizen meets’ - her ‘listening to the people’s problems’ etc., none of it with any legitimacy or institutional grounding.
France has always suffered a representational deficit (much like the US), with its ruling class, its extreme centralization, its powerful, either gvmt. run or private (it makes little difference even if the Economist likes to vomit about all that) corps - they can be State Régies or private, but are always intimately tied to the State. The Unions are the weakest in Europe (yes.) Sarkozy managed that sleight of hand well, as he cleverly avoided the vague legitimization moves of Sego, and just went with personal contacts, the setting up of groups and committees that have no real role, future impact, etc.
Both Sego and Sarko acted in, and made appeals to, a system one might call a Populist Democracy. Blatantly modeled on the US. Perhaps not consciously so. The model? The original template? Transformed over time, imported, modulated? Kennedy.
Posted by: Tangerine | Jan 30, 2008 1:00:13 PM | 8
Nice post.
The big question though, would be how much power the CIA, State Dept, and Pentagon use of their own volition in doing many of these things. The foriegn policy elite are constant over long periods of time.
For example, GATT and NAFTA were the ideas of David Rockefeller and his foriegn policy cronies. Clinton played the game and helped implement them. It was negotiated under Bush 1, passed by Clinton and Bush 2 wants more even though its obvious its not working for the masses.
In other words, many parts of the government run on their own with input from outside elites calling the shots. Look at that dumb ass Bush 2. You really don't believe he runs things do you. That would like Jethro Bodeen running things.
Kennedy and RFK might have got cocky and thought they were really in power, and you saw the result.
Posted by: jdp | Jan 30, 2008 1:03:26 PM | 9
So what didn't you like about Kennedy? [kidding]
Great work (as always) Malooga. Thanks and don't be such a stranger.
Thinking back on what r'giap said on the other thread, I wondered about the effect of the media at that time. But living there while this was going on, well, the city was different then in that it was...hard to explain, but, you could feel part of it. It wasn't so sealed off as now.
My mother came home from work one day and told me that Robert Kennedy had passed her in a big convertible and slobber from the Newfoundland dog that was in the car with him blew onto her windshield.
In school (public) I befriended a quiet girl who was new (lots of transient families with the government and military) and it turned out her father was working on Nixon's campaign. He took us to National airport one day to meet him. A couple of little kids standing at the bottom of the steps up to the plane. He stopped and said hello and gave us each little metal clickers, "Click with Dick".
Relevant? Probably not. Just part of my experience in a different time.
Posted by: beq | Jan 30, 2008 1:04:56 PM | 10
I neglected to mention Civil Rights because, quite frankly -- three short years -- there simply wasn't time to achieve anything (especially with everything going on above)! Kennedy's largest contribution in that arena was selecting -- under duress -- his primary oppenent, Johnson, as his running mate. Although it should be noted that during the election, Kennedy was helpful in aiding King, an act far less cynical than that of his Democratic successor, Clinton ("Our first black president!!!," thanks Toni, I'm no longer waiting to exhale, but now I need to clean my computer monitor.), who felt contemptuously compelled to attack Sista Souljah by taking a quote out of context, in order to sow fear and garner rascist votes.
Yes, its true that Kennedy gave his famous Civil Rights speech in June of '63, standing up to Wallace, but he simply could not have ignored events any longer and remained a creditable Democratic candidate in the next election. A few choice quotes from that speech:
"And when Americans are sent to Vietnam or West Berlin, we do not ask for whites only."
"It cannot be met by repressive police action. It cannot be left to increased demonstrations in the streets....I have recently met with scores of business leaders urging them to take voluntary action to end this discrimination and I have been encouraged by their response..."
"The Negro baby born in America today, regardless of the section of the nation in which he is born, has about one-half as much chance of completing high school as a white baby born in the same place on the same day, one-third as much chance of completing college, one-third as much chance of becoming a professional man, twice as much chance of becoming unemployed, about one-seventh as much chance of earning $10,000 a year, a life expectancy which is seven years shorter, and the prospects of earning only half as much." Quoting facts as a substitute for action: A popular political ploy meant to "indicate" sympathy for a cause. But where's the beef?
Any close reading of history would show that Nixon would have done (and did), far better.
Posted by: Malooga | Jan 30, 2008 1:16:35 PM | 11
Quoting facts as a substitute for action: A popular political ploy meant to "indicate" sympathy for a cause.
so true, nonetheless his words softened the target.
Posted by: annie | Jan 30, 2008 2:50:24 PM | 12
jdp wrote:
The big question though, would be how much power the CIA, State Dept, and Pentagon use of their own volition in doing many of these things. The foreign policy elite are constant over long periods of time.
For example, GATT and NAFTA were the ideas of David Rockefeller and his foriegn policy cronies. Clinton played the game and helped implement them...
Top elected representatives have become flunkey CEOs, subservient. They come and go. The masters are a mix of innovators, corp directors, academics, think-tankers, sunday strategists, striving spokesmen, personal interest bribers (see US electoral system, in other ways the same applies in other countries), lobbyists for causes (eg. Israel lobby), and so on. The elected are second tier, under others.
Rockefellers and others imagine that they can drive social policy - as they have done - their justification is always a mix of personal advantage and adherence to a particular ideology, a confused stew of old ideas, Nietzsche, Hobbes, Spengler, etc. It is basically a creed of advancement, of renewal, of puritan ethics (hard work and no free sex for others), of strides forward, which requires control of the slave class, supposedly in their interest natch, based on the astounding achievements of human invention, technology, control. And, of course, skimming about 7 to 20% off the top.
That system is now breaking down.
Posted by: Tangerine | Jan 30, 2008 3:48:21 PM | 13
Until recently, most have accepted that system. From 1950 on, in the West, people, even the poor or stigmatized, got bigger houses, indoor toilets and showers, electrical appliances, household machines, sketchy social security, some say, ‘democracy’, medical services, public health, transport (rail, bus, then car), radio and tv, music for all, toys for their children, degrees for them, hope they would be big earners, snazzy movers, respected people in suits, up there with the nobility, the elite. Wars (cough cough, at home) were finished, peace would prevail. Art and love could flourish. (see 68.) Money would clink ‘n clank, everyone would get some.
Kinda hard to give up.
Posted by: Tangerine | Jan 30, 2008 3:52:26 PM | 14
There was a quote from Oliver Stone's Nixon biography that summed it up: Nixon was watching the American public celebrate JFK and asked "Why is it that people look at him and see what they want to be, while when they look at me they see what they really are?"
Posted by: ralphieboy | Jan 30, 2008 4:22:06 PM | 15
Tagerine,
JFK inherited the Bay of Pigs project from Eisenhower, but if the operation went pigshit he wanted plausible denial. Then Kruschev challenged JFK with the Cuban Missile Crisis. The young bucks were green, JFK and RFK. He broke the foriegn policy continuity of policy from President to President that was set up after WW2.
The only way to get back to where elites wanted to go, was to off JFK. Thus put Johnson in place, Johnson gave elites the Vietnam war in exchange for the great society (guns and butter).
Do I believe JFK was part of the system, of course, but he had his own ideas and that was taboo. The system overthrew him. The black budget guys, (and I still believe the CIA basically ran the country at the time), had their own ways, which Eisenhower called the military industrial complex(MIC). When Eisenhower made his last speech about the MIC, I believe he felt civil control over the military, CIA and some state department agencies had been lost and were moving in directions they wanted with or without civil government backing. JFK actually believed he should run the country.
Malooga is right about the things that happened, but JFK wanted some control and direction change, thats a no,no. Especially after the CFR had already made the decision.
Posted by: jdp | Jan 30, 2008 6:45:38 PM | 16
As Chomsky often notes, that bravado brought the planet to within five minutes of complete doomsday, only saved because a Soviet officer refused to follow orders and authorize a strike. (True story.)
Where can I find out more about this?
Posted by: a swedish kind of death | Jan 30, 2008 7:55:52 PM | 17
Learn from the past. Vote for Obama, but don't expect too much.
My vote was for Canada and I've never regretted.
Posted by: Allen/Vancouver | Jan 30, 2008 10:59:26 PM | 18
jdp makes a good point regarding who actually runs various policy, under whatever administration. Thinking of course along the likes of a J.Edgar Hoover, unelected entrenched unimpeachable officials directing policy through the threat of blackmail and extortion. Along with all the underling self starters, go getters, players and retires gaming the system and looking for some takers. A change of captains doesn't mean those in the engine room are going to do anything different.
Or often enough its just a "mentality". I live on an island with a finite supply (aquifer) of water served by a small public utility. The water supply had maxed out, and for years the elected commissioners kept spending more and more money drilling for more water, at the cost of neglecting the system in place, but never finding a new source (because there was none). Everybody thought the commissioners were in some land owners or developers pocket and we (organized &)voted them all out. Afterwards we found out that no, they weren't secretly working for anyone but simply thought it was their god given and patriotic duty to find new water, because we had to keep growing or all die, and they couldn't think of any good reason not to do it.
Until they found out their constituency were mostly no-growther pinko commies, but by then it was to late and they were out of a job.
Posted by: anna missed | Jan 30, 2008 11:20:21 PM | 19
askod - the person was named Petrov, he did not relay up the chain of command that some satellites had detected the launch of five missiles. It was actually just sun glinting off clouds happening to align with expected launch places from a satellite's angle. He figured that the US would use thousands of missiles, not 5, so it must be a malfunction.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanislav_Petrov
it occurred near the Able Archer 83 scare
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Able_Archer_83
when some in the Kremlin thought that the bolt from the blue was coming, concealed as an exercise
Posted by: boxcar mike | Jan 31, 2008 12:40:23 AM | 20
Excellent article. If anyone's interested in a thorough investigation into the Kennedy administration, I strongly recommend Seymour Hersh's "The Dark Side of Camelot." Many fascinating revelations about the extent of their corruption and dishonesty, all very well researched and throughly documented. One of the most important works on American politics to come out in recent decades. It's a pity it's not better known.
"Discussions of morals aside, Kennedy's endless womanizing, particularly with mob women, put himself at extraordinary risk of blackmail." Hersh goes into a lot of detail about this, especially about Marilyn Monroe and how frightened the Kennedys were that she would start talking to the press about JFK. Lots of other juicy revelations too.
Posted by: | Jan 31, 2008 2:10:09 PM | 21
I was 6 1/2 at the time of the assassination, and like all others of my generation I still remember the defining day vividly.
Well, I was 24 1/2 at the time, and I also remember "the defining day" vividly (let's skip the vivid details--they are just as ordinary as everyone else's).
I was not a great fan of JFK; I always thought he wasn't much suited, or ready, for the job. My first verbal responses were: "What did he expect?", and/or "this man was running on empty, he was in over his head". Then, as now, I was against those military adventures, and I thought JFK showed no real judgment, ever, on that score. That he was beholden to all sorts of bad people had been an ongoing message of his various opponents beginning a good ten years earlier.
So why does that day remain "the defining day"? Why does no day thereafter go unshadowed and unmarked by that one? This isn't easy to answer at all, especially for those of us who maintained a certain skeptical distance, if not distaste and foreboding. for JFK during his time in office. Indeed, the strangest feature, in my own case, is that "the day" became even "more defining" as the years went by: not in the sense that my reservations were merely confirmed or modified, but as a simple, psychic fact--a "defining" one.
Malooga seeks, I think, to "define" what made the day "defining". He does so by taking stock of Kennedy's political realities--with which I largely agree--and you might suppose that "demythifications" of this kind would tame down that "defining" experience, helping us to put it into perspective (as if to ask, "did JFK really matter""?, and to which I would like to say "no").
But this is what doesn't happen. We remain bedeviled and obsessed by something that resists our reckoning. Because the unalterable fact remains: when JFK died in Dallas, a not-so-small part of us died with him as well. A good part? A bad part? I don't think it matters in that way: when a part of us dies, we are unalterably weaker thereafter. Of course we carry on, but we lost something of our force on that day. It "defined" us to ourselves in ways that resist the recuperation of that force.
Some philosophers would call it "an event", and events resist accounting (when we can account for them, they cease to be "eventful").
Posted by: alabama | Feb 1, 2008 7:13:53 AM | 23
Because the unalterable fact remains: when JFK died in Dallas, a not-so-small part of us died with him as well.
I would hardly call this a fact.
I was 3-1/2. How exactly did "a not so small part of myself" die that day too? Good part or bad part, which part of me died that day?
Posted by: jcairo | Feb 1, 2008 8:38:47 AM | 24
Good question, jcairo.
Freud (and others) regard our interaction with the world around us from ages 0-5 as absolutely decisive--determinant--for the formation of character. He (and others) also agree that something like a process of amnesia (or repression) occurs between ages 3 and 5--meaning that we don't recall much of what we went through during those first five years. The analytical practice of reconstructing our formative years is therefore, as they say, a "speculative" undertaking (detective work based on what we know from the ages of 5 onwards).
With this in mind--and I'm certainly not an analyst!--I'd approach the question this way: did the "event" have any effect on the important people in your life--chiefly your parents? If not, then the "event" may not have happened to you in any direct way. But there may well be an indirect effect--ways that you may have been affected by a world that itself was so affected.
But who knows? Events are hard to pin down. The fact remains that this one caused a lot of folks to enter a mourning-process for which they were hardly prepared, and which took them largely by surprise. I know I was one of these.
Posted by: alabama | Feb 1, 2008 11:39:11 AM | 25
Excellent article - thanks. This is an aside, but there is one aspect of RFK Jr.'s "social service" that the public health blogger cervantes criticizes, and I believe justly - his support for the idea that autism is caused by vaccination.
Posted by: mistah charley, ph.d. | Feb 1, 2008 1:57:33 PM | 26
my tangent is different than alabama's but i think yes you too - jcairo was marked on that day.
what it told you even in infancy - is that you do no matter. you do not matter at all.
if the right has been succesful - it has been so in hiding the reality of marx's dictum that men make their own history but not of their own accord
it was not a coincidental aspect of the cold war - to emasculate the political power of the mass - in what was once called the first, second & third worlds. the so called social democracies have been worst in this apspect - of destroying the activity of people at a local & a branch level & of turning the political process into an entertainment & when they cannot do that - a sport. the politicisation (superfinancing) of sport merely serves to underline thzy
for the elites we do not matter. the audacity of the cheney bush junta & their cabal was that they said it openly. they never pretended any affinity with the people
since they had to confront the wonder of yuri gagarin - fear has been the prinicpal intrument in their ams against us & one could say that the history of most modern social democracy is the accesion to that fear
jcairo it was your brains splattered all over jackie's dress & mine too & everyone else here - but i want to remind you that when they took the life of particia lumumba, they took ours also
Posted by: remembereringgiap | Feb 1, 2008 2:04:19 PM | 27
re the MIC - military industrial complex - see the Wikipedia article for some good historical background on the phrase (it goes back to 1914). I've tried to update it a bit with a catchy rhyming acronym
M ilitary
I ndustrial
C ongressional
Fi nancial
C orporate Media Complex -
the MICFiC is a conspiracy to use, abuse, and confuse the people, to "milk, shear, and slaughter the sheeple", figuratively speaking - except the slaughter is literal.
Posted by: mistah charley, ph.d. | Feb 1, 2008 2:12:59 PM | 28
Well said alabama. Latent in our discussion is the difference between the Kennedy reality and the Kennedy myth, the question being, how does the reality justify, or even account for the myth. Because there is no denying that 40+ years of such accounting, the Kennedy myth remains intact, albeit diminished mostly by the unseemly personal disclosures (as opposed to his policy decisions). The fact that the myth still exists after all the tabloid examination of his foibles is testament to the largess of the myth at the time. I remember (age 13) my parents being devastated when he was assassinated, they closed school early that day. Like my parents, people of all ages were weeping openly all over the place, and most significantly weeping openly and in public, something I had never seen either before or since that time. I think alabama is quite correct in saying "a not so small part of us died with him as well". Whats not so clear is; exactly what part of us, did the dying that day. It was a lot more than our sense of "hope".
Posted by: anna missed | Feb 1, 2008 2:38:16 PM | 29
The JFK killing was one of my most vivid early memories. I was four nearly five and I can still remember my mother in front of the TV crying over his death. The post WW 2 era was an age of American idealism, the Ozzi and Harriet and Leave it to Beaver era. The US had just won WW 2, an era of prosperity unparalleled in US history was at hand and JFK was the WW 2 generations man. After his death, Johnson escalated Vietnam and the working man has taken it on the chin since. That is why politicians use JFK to try and harkin back to that American idealism. The country has been ran by right leanings idiots that has trashed the country since Johnson.
Whatever was happening behind the scenes, coups, assassinations etc, many considered it a golden era. That is very naive but that was the feelings then.
Thats my take anyway.
Posted by: jdp | Feb 1, 2008 4:07:33 PM | 30
mistah charley,
I just went to Wiki and then clicked through to other pages. As I've been saying for a while here, David Rockefeller has had the most influence over US policy in the last 50 years.
You can be sure, he wasn't looking out for you and I. Look at his Wiki description.
Posted by: jdp | Feb 1, 2008 4:23:47 PM | 31
mistah charley,
I just went to Wiki and then clicked through to other pages. As I've been saying for a while here, David Rockefeller has had the most influence over US policy in the last 50 years.
You can be sure, he wasn't looking out for you and I. Look at his Wiki description.
Posted by: jdp | Feb 1, 2008 4:26:22 PM | 32
Great reminder of the fear which held all by the throat back then. The danger of nuclear war,(size optional), is worse today than then. We are so accustomed to the radiation background, it now seems a normal part of the landscape.
This article served to remind me of the fantasy which is created by the elites. By chance, I have recently been attacked by "liberals" offended by my rather caustic view of St. John.
Thanks for the solid work.
Posted by: Don Smith | Feb 1, 2008 5:10:25 PM | 33
Whats not so clear is; exactly what part of us, did the dying that day. It was a lot more than our sense of "hope".
This is the hard one, Anna Missed. Each of us has to speak for himself or herself, if only because, as someone once said so wisely, one can only die one's own death (or did he call it "life"?).
First, let me acknowledge that I met the man on two occasions, and I came away from both encounters feeling very, very happy (not my usual response to authority figures). He knew how to be happy himself, and could pass it on to others (and you didn't have to meet him to have this response). And so I felt sad when he died--an absolutely ordinary response that happens rather a lot, except that here the sadness stayed on, something I've otherwise only ever felt with family and really close friends. Why this time?
JFK was young, and I was also young. And since the only other Presidents I'd ever known--Truman and Eisenhower--seemed so very old, I was bound to identify with JFK in ways that I never expected. Something youthful within me went to his grave, and I didn't even know it at the time. I know I wasn't expecting to age so fast.
This is a curious topic, and oddly rather powerful. If we allow for a paradox, I'd call it a "lasting episode"--something we always get over that doesn't go away. Falling in love--and I mean really, really falling--is an experience of this kind (and disastrous, might I add!)
Posted by: alabama | Feb 1, 2008 6:24:07 PM | 34
alabama & r'giap
I have no memory of thst event, plenty of other things around that time, but the JFK offing? Nada. No memory of any family member being overly distressed, but then he wasn't our prime minister. (Beatle-mania? Different story. Trudeau-mania - creepy)
I much prefer RAW's take on it. Wee Iain was in quite a crossfire that day according to Mr. Wilson. RIP.
Yes, that phenomena of unexpected emotional outpouring for public figures, that is a fact.
I don't particularly understand it, but then I haven't hero-worshipped - to keep in the mythic vein - for a long time and I would hold malooga's finely considered post as an example of why I would think so. To me it shows exactly the relationship twixt the man and the mythos.
A marketing campaign.
I feel no affinity to JFK. My forebears earned honest wages in mines, manors and factories, not born into money acquired via gangsterism and other nefarious means. Sad and terrible way to go, but he is a victim of circumstances of his own choosing and that end is quite common for any politician.
I find this kind of thing - identifying so closely with public "heroes" - dangerous in a way as well. It's what drives those true believers in Bush
Imagine the outpouring if Time's Person of the Year for '38, had been gunned down in a similar fashion not long after the cover hit the stands. I doubt a ruse aboot poland would have been on the table for the High Command. Real men go to Moscow and in '39 they might have done it with all kinds of international emotional support (in addition to the extant financial) resulting in a single front, but anyhoo the Leafs suck
Posted by: jcairo | Feb 1, 2008 6:37:13 PM | 35
The comments to this entry are closed.
wonderful work malooga. tough & human
living by writing i am continually astonished when a post such as these or b's or a whole number of people - who write quicky & with a fluidity while not succumbing to the corruptions of narrative or the errance a 'style'
so solid. fundamental
thank you
you make a dark day - less pained with obscurity
Posted by: remembereringgiap | Jan 30, 2008 9:28:42 AM | 1