Moon of Alabama Brecht quote
January 29, 2008
Kennedy Endorsement

A democracy should not cling to dynasty rule as a Bush-Clinton-Bush-Clinton row would represent.

So there is Obama promissing Change.

But now he is endorsed by some Kennedys, Ted, Patrick and Caroline (other Kennedys, Cathleen, Robert F. and Kerry endorse Clinton) and Obama is even compared to JFK.

That is a big minus in my view.

John F. Kennedy was a mediocre President. His foreign policy record is a list of failures. He

  • ordered the CIA to proceed with the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba but denied the nessessary air and naval support that would have given the project a slight chance of success.
  • was outgamed by Khrushchev when he retracted U.S. missiles from Turkey in an exchange for Russian missiles retraction from Cuba.
  • didn’t response but with polite protest when the Sowjets build the wall around West Berlin in violation of the postwar Potsdam Agreements.
  • escalated the U.S. involvement in Vietnam and assisted in the overthrow of Ngo Dinh Diem in a military coup.
  • backed the Baathist coup against the anti-imperialist Iraqi government.

In domestic policies there was much hopeful talk but little done in the two years of Kennedy’s rule. He endorsed civil rights but was reluctant to act against Southern Democrats. He launched the program to put a man on the moon. A project that cost some $25 billion and had little scientific and strategic value.

So what did he achieve?

Do the U.S. people really want a president that will continue in that tradition?

Comments

scamelot & then dude got shot

Posted by: b real | Jan 29 2008 15:08 utc | 1

“Fifty men have run America and that’s a high figure” : Joseph P. Kennedy, bootlegger, Hitler supporter, horndog. (met with Goering and contributed $ums, according to 5/3/41 Hoover report to FDR.The horndog aspect is well attested, including tales that his sons told their weekend dates brought to Hyannis to look their bedroom doors as Dad got frisky at night.)
“The answer to the Kennedy assassination is with the Federal Reserve Bank. Don’t underestimate that. It’s wrong to blame it on [CIA official James] Angleton and the CIA per se only. This is only one finger of the same hand. The people who supply the money are above the CIA.” Marina Oswald in 1994.
In June ’63 JFK authorized issuing of over $4 billion in “United States Notes” through the U.S. Treasury, not the Federal Reserve.
In 1862 Lincoln authorized about $450 million “greenbacks” (because of green ink), legalized by an act of Congress. He wrote: “Government, possessing power to create and issue currency … need not and should not borrow capital at interest….The privilege of creating and issuing money is not only the supreme prerogative of the government but it is the government’s greatest creative opportunity.”
How much one gets done is determined when the bullets hit.

Posted by: plushtown | Jan 29 2008 16:05 utc | 2

Berhard,
please don’t rag on JFK, although he was reviled by some Americans and perhaps not the sharpest tool in the shed when it came to international politics, he represented the last time that America had a Dream and a Vision that it was willing to work towards. Ever since then it has all been self-serving political stewards.
And don’t forget: hHe was ein Berliner!!!

Posted by: ralphieboy | Jan 29 2008 16:16 utc | 3

I appreciate your point of view on a number of subjects; but on JFK you have a carelessly narrow and pinched perspective.

Posted by: kspena | Jan 29 2008 16:39 utc | 4

Years ago I read (and of course Bernhard would know) that a human resident of Berlin would not use the article, ein, to refer to self but only to a local sausage, i.e. JFK, before the world, said “I am a hotdog” (though I suspect of better quality), appropriately enough.

Posted by: plushtown | Jan 29 2008 16:50 utc | 5

Proper usage, I read, is “Ich bin Berliner”, but in any case he wasn’t allowed to cut the mustard, only lots of quim.

Posted by: plushtown | Jan 29 2008 16:59 utc | 6

@Kspena – on JFK you have a carelessly narrow and pinched perspective.
Well – I admit I don’t know much about him – but there is a lot of fuzz about him and I wonder how that is justified. Please let me know.
@ralphieboy
“Dream” and “Vision” – oh well – “If you have visions go see a doctor” (Helmut Schmidt)
@plushtown – I have the ‘Berlin Speech’ on a 45rpm record. I used JFKs “therefore, as a free man, I am proud to say ..” line on my voicemail adding “.. I don’t have to stick at my home”
A “Berliner” is not a sausage but a dkind of donut without the hole but filled with cream or jam (or mustard as a party joke). “Ich bin ein Berliner” translates to “I am a donut”.
Willy Brandt, the mayor of Berlin, despised Kennedy for doing nothing when the wall was build. Later as chancellor Brandt introduced “Ostpolitik”, i.e. dialog with the East, which led to some angry noise from Washington. But his argument was sound – West-Germany could not depend on the U.S. in a crisis and had to take care of alternatives.

Posted by: b | Jan 29 2008 17:26 utc | 7

..and Bernhard knows where to get the best Berliners in Hamburg. Our first stop after arriving at the airport very early in the morning of New Year’s Eve.
a big fat 🙂

Posted by: beq | Jan 29 2008 17:56 utc | 8

A jelly doughnut at that. With a blood-red filling. They’re reakky big this time of year, what with Karneval comiing up.
Carter tried the Vision Thing, but it fell on deaf and cynical post-Watergate ears. Reagan tried his own conservative version of the Vision Thing, it inspired a generation of MBA’s to convince themselves that if we simply loan them all the money the nation has, they can afford to buy up everything the nation owns.

Posted by: ralphieboy | Jan 29 2008 18:42 utc | 9

While I’m all for the slaying of sacred cows, your contention the NASA moon landings provided “…little scientific and strategic value…” is so far off-base as to strain credulity.
I’m not sure it even deserves the dignity of a refutation.
Much of your daily life is enabled by technologies and processes developed during that era.
Strategically, a strong case has been made the moon landings alone secured America’s position as the preeminent producer of scientific progress (for 20 years or so following the event).

Posted by: Jeremiah | Jan 29 2008 18:43 utc | 10

Bernhard,
On the other hand, you can pick on Ted Kennedy all you want: he is a reeking hulk of an opportunist politician thriving of the undserved afterglow of a family political legacy. He is enough to make one ashamed to call oneself a liberal.

Posted by: ralphieboy | Jan 29 2008 18:44 utc | 11

He was sexy, he was elegant, young, had a stunningly lovely wife, he played the frank change card hot and strong, he was a seasoned pol … look at some of the Kennedys supporting a pale black watered down version of the same. He was inept, arrogant, and it cost him his life.
(Don’t shoot me. It is a common opinion in Europe. Not that it makes it right.)
And possibly the life of many of his family members, that includes his son John-John, killed in a mysterious plane crash.
Report from division 4 via Tom Flocco on that plane crash:
link

Posted by: Tangerine | Jan 29 2008 18:48 utc | 12

at that time it was the execution of the heroic nguyễn văn trỗi which touched me more profoundly than that of j f kennedy

Posted by: remembereringgiap | Jan 29 2008 18:52 utc | 13

Following a long line of elder statesmen presidents, JFK was our youngest president to date, and he brought with him a young, attractive, cultured wife and two cute little kids. The entire country mourned together when Jackie lost a premature baby. To the public, they seemed so normal and relaxed and the epitome of the American dream — although both came from wealth — and it was easy to relate to them on a human level. They were friendly — genuinely so — and open, and people responded to that. That’s the origin of Camelot. He was also a gifted author and war hero.
On political matters, JFK was relatively ineffective. He surrounded himself with family members and family in-laws appointed during his presidency. I have never forgiven him for leaving the freedom fighters to die on that Cuban beach with their eyes glued to the sky for the air support that had been promised, but not sent. What a dastardly thing to do!
I don’t blame him for Vietnam, he merely sent training ‘advisors’ just like America was doing with many other countries during that time period and today as well. It was Johnson who first sent combat troops.
All in all charming, but mediocre as a president.

Posted by: Ensley | Jan 29 2008 19:00 utc | 14

john was gong to run for the NY senate, not for pres, afaik from the women’s mags at the time, ?
yes that is understandable r giap and john K junior was a stumbling uncertain semi educated socialite drawing on his legacy and ostensibly refusing it, what self serving fakery, so doing nothing real, nothing of any import or consequence, his main problem was in his personal life as he really had no other, of course the womens mags magnify that, it may have even contributed to his death, as weakness is pitilessly punished, and easy marks are just that

Posted by: Tangerine | Jan 29 2008 19:07 utc | 15

@Jeremia Much of your daily life is enabled by technologies and processes developed during that era.
Strategically, a strong case has been made the moon landings alone secured America’s position as the preeminent producer of scientific progress (for 20 years or so following the event).

The same argument is made by weapon developers. I am certainly not against spending money on science. But I am against spending large amounts of money for unproductive tools. The Apollo program was not productive. Instead of $25 billion to shot someone to the moon, less invested in earth and sea research would likely have been more valuable fro mankind. (The NASA page lists only few spinoffs from that era)

Posted by: b | Jan 29 2008 19:13 utc | 16

john f was not a naive man, ensley – how could you be with a father who was an associate of lucky luciano – joseph kennedy was really a piece of work – crooked as the day was long – but the bodypolitic of those united states has not had a lot of honourable men or women. i have a soft spot for fdr tho he was far from perfect – there was eugene debs, george mcgovern – bernie sanders now but clearly in 100 years you could count those who entered politics with honorable intentions with one hand
i would hope at a local level – there have been men & women who have fought for the people, really & that must be so

Posted by: remembereringgiap | Jan 29 2008 19:18 utc | 17

The Apollo program was not productive
Putting a man on the moon was not done for research, it was done because the Russians beat the US into space, first satellite and first man into space. The US had to be first at something and it needed to be spectacular, that is why .
Of course it was a waste of money but you gotta admit, it was pretty cool.

Posted by: dan of steele | Jan 29 2008 19:26 utc | 18

Indeed, dos, it was more than cool — the Moon adventure was iconic.
It was also, quite possibly, a high water mark — this idea of returning to the Moon, perhaps, but I don’t recommend holding one’s breath until it happens. A human landing on Mars? HA!!!
But still, it gave us that fantastic shot of the full Earth taken from half-way to the Moon. I’ve read that it is the most copied picture ever taken — in a way, that kind of puts it along with the Bible “most sold book ever written…”
Yeah, JFK was a very human person and, yes, a lot of shit can be placed at his door. Still, it was but 1½ years — my feeling is that he was also a person who could change course.
The bottom line is that he was an iconic figure as president. Whether he could have been a great president we will never know. I never liked Jackie, by the way.

Posted by: Chuck Cliff | Jan 29 2008 20:10 utc | 19

I agree, rg. Kennedy was not naive by a long shot, especially not with a father like Joseph Kennedy,as you bring up. But we have to remember that John’s older brother, Joe Jr, was the crown prince of the family and the chosen one most closely instructed by the father. Joe Jr’s death during WWII threw a monkey wrench into the Kennedy clan’s aspirations and John was rushed through daddy’s training course. I don’t believe he got the full dose of wickedness he would have gotten had he been the firstborn son.
Joe Kennedy Sr and FDR absolutely hated each other. I don’t think any of the Kennedys has ever totally gotten over the humiliation of Poppa Joe being recalled from his ambassadorship to England during WWII by FDR when Joe’s support for Hitler became overwhelmingly obvious and embarassing to the US.

Posted by: Ensley | Jan 29 2008 20:50 utc | 20

Grandpa Walker Bush didn’t just support Hitler, he did business with the Nazis.

Posted by: ralphieboy | Jan 29 2008 21:08 utc | 21

well, being endorsed by the Kennedy children and by Uncle Ted has a completely different meaning than “continue in that tradition, the way you described that tradition.”
What you see in JFK and what average Americans remember about him and what more astute Americans know anyhow, and what they all feel about them is something very different from your view points, I think.
I think that’s something which has a lot to do with feelings and emotions and memories and little to do with hard facts, the way you list them.
Elderly Americans, who lived through these times as adults and their grandchildren, who for the first time got an endorsement by Uncle Ted that it is ok to hope and be inspired, is like reviving an activism and idealism of the young out of a five decade long deep winter sleep. The torch went from grandpa to grandchild, telling the generation in between that they were lousy parents, so to speak.
I think your judgement is off-the-point and I guess many Americans would feel hurt by your judgement.
I don’t see anything negative in the endorsement. Today’s young have the same right to feel hopeful, inspired by a candidate as you and we had, when we were young. If you would live here, you would know how important that is.
And don’t think the young are naive, it doesn’t take long and many here will admit they fear for Obama’s life, when he gets nominated. So any comparison with JFK and RK isn’t even seen in the same light as you believe it is. So far in this country good people got assassinated and bad people got power. To make it real simple.
Nichts fuer Ungut.

Posted by: mimi | Jan 29 2008 21:09 utc | 22

well, being endorsed by the Kennedy children and by Uncle Ted has a completely different meaning than “continue in that tradition, the way you described that tradition.”
What you see in JFK and what average Americans remember about him and what more astute Americans know anyhow, and what they all feel about them is something very different from your view points, I think.
I think that’s something which has a lot to do with feelings and emotions and memories and little to do with hard facts, the way you list them.
Elderly Americans, who lived through these times as adults and their grandchildren, who for the first time got an endorsement by Uncle Ted that it is ok to hope and be inspired, is like reviving an activism and idealism of the young out of a five decade long deep winter sleep. The torch went from grandpa to grandchild, telling the generation in between that they were lousy parents, so to speak.
I think your judgement is off-the-point and I guess many Americans would feel hurt by your judgement.
I don’t see anything negative in the endorsement. Today’s young have the same right to feel hopeful, inspired by a candidate as you and we had, when we were young. If you would live here, you would know how important that is.
And don’t think the young are naive, it doesn’t take long and many here will admit they fear for Obama’s life, when he gets nominated. So any comparison with JFK and RK isn’t even seen in the same light as you believe it is. So far in this country good people got assassinated and bad people got power. To make it real simple.
Nichts fuer Ungut.

Posted by: mimi | Jan 29 2008 21:12 utc | 23

I watched the Ted & Caroline anointment ceremony on TV last night, and by god, I have to admit, I too felt that long dormant tear jerk of hope well up inside. Especially during Caroline’s recollection of the promise her dad represented, cut short by assassination. I’m surprised such an emotion could so easily penetrate through my 6 inch armor plates of objective sarcasm, like an EFP.
So, I suppose thats what makes it interesting, because it transcends both his (JFK) policies and the historical perspective of how they played out – which were, as pointed out, nothing much to brag about. Its not unlike the Reagan myth. Both represent personality cults that consume the peoples dreams of either self reliance or enlightened government and leave them with neither. Feeding on their desire for hope, the people, like birds in flight, will forever fly into glass windows.

Posted by: anna missed | Jan 29 2008 21:23 utc | 24

Who’s clinging?
The Kennedy cult was disturbing: infatuation with a glamorous and charismatic leader seemed more a Latin American than an American thing.
Same goes for Obama.
When I hear of an Obama-Kennedy connection, I automatically think of their unmentionable common denominator, Chicago politics [the irony – not dark suspicions about “connected roots]).
Anybody ever read Doris Lessing’s sendup of political enthusiasts, The Sentimental Agents in the Volyen Empire?

SUMMARY FROM THE BOOK JACKET
This fifth book brings us to the Volyen Empire – small, in rapid decline, and a vortex of chaos – as the empires of Sirius and Shammat vie for its control with their favorite weapons, rhetoric and false sentiment.
THE PLOT
On duty in the Volyen Empire, planetary hotbed of unchecked emotion,Canopean Agent Incent, despite his training, has found himself deeply moved – and succumbs to one of the local afflictions, undulant Rhetoric. Incent’s Canopean colleague Klorathy goes to assess his condition at the Hospital for Rhetorical Diseases, sometimes known as the Institute for Historical Studies. It look bad.
Tear flood down Incents face as he broods in self-accusation and a predisposition to heroism, yearning for a perfect world. With talk of a coming Sirian invasion, Volyendestans are falling into the declamatory mode: We will fight them on the beaches, we will … mutters Ormarin, popular revolutionary spokesman and foe of tyranny for the oppressed multi-racial population. Klorathy has his work cut out for him as the eager victims of words are inflamed to the justice of their cause.

Posted by: rjj | Jan 29 2008 21:40 utc | 25

Obviously, where I live, Kennedy was the iconic/virgin mary type for my parents in his native Ireland/catholic roots. etc etc. Will Chapaquidic Ted swing the Irish vote?

Posted by: Cloned Poster | Jan 29 2008 22:24 utc | 26

@mimi – What you see in JFK and what average Americans remember about him and what more astute Americans know anyhow, and what they all feel about them is something very different from your view points, I think.
As I stated in comments above: I do not know much of JF Kennedy and would like to know more. What do “astute Americans know anyhow” about him? Where can I read that?
The facts of the policy decisions I currently know he took are certainly not raising any symphathies in me.
Why did the U.S. people vote for him (a very tight decision btw) and why all the myth around him? Yes, he was assassinated, but he had a 22 month record with, as far as I can tell, quite terrible consequences for a lot of humans.
Sorry, I don’t get the “thing” about him – please explain.

Posted by: b | Jan 29 2008 22:39 utc | 27

Battle of the Myths: Pre-911 vs Pre-Grassy Knoll
Oh, to return to the ages of innocents, knights, and heroic crusaders! As if the US was ever innocent.
Bill Clinton fucked up in the last two weeks by stepping out of the vaguaries of his myth. People started to remember what a dickhead he really is.

Posted by: biklett | Jan 29 2008 23:16 utc | 28

b, you ask why did the people vote for him. Part of the reason is that Nixon came off as a sleazy sweating shyster lawyer in the televised debates (the first debates ever televised) with Kennedy, who came off as a nice guy with a funny accent. It started as a personality cult, and after the assassination, no one was permitted to speak ill of the dead president. JFK dead was a much greater president than when he was alive. And from there, the legend grew exponentially. As they say, the definition of a legend is a lie which has attained the dignity of age. Kennedy is much greater now than he ever was back then.
But all in all, he was human and approachable and had a sense of humor and wasn’t all eaten up with his own importance. How can any of us forget Marilyn Monroe singing ‘Happy Birthday’ to him at a huge party in Madison Square Garden in NY, or his amusement at those very popular record albums (not music) parodying him, Jackie and the rest of the family at the White House.

Posted by: Ensley | Jan 29 2008 23:26 utc | 29

The big thing about the Kennedy myth is that he iconified the hope that government can be a force of good for the people. That people might believe in government as kind of extension of the family. Liberals need government to fill needs that are created when they leave what Lakoff called “the inherited family obligation” of traditional family structure. His famous “ask not what you’re country can do for you, but what you can do for your country” is an interesting turn of phrases in that it appears he is criticizing “taking from” the welfare state, but then asks people to contribute to it selflessly. It’s his way of transferring traditional family obligation onto the government without a reciprical expectation. He’s asking for strong (big) liberal government without seeming so. the success of beating the Russians to the moon proved big government with the full support of the people can work miracles .
Because its mirror image Reagan myth argues the reverse. That big government destroys the family when it replaces and fulfills the needs of those that leave its obligation. And as a result big government, destroys individual initiative, and innovation.
Of course both these guys are only important because they managed to reformulate and modernize the age old yin yang of American identity into the appearance of a dialectic narrative- while policy wise they were both garden variety imperialists, without about as much difference as a change of clothes.

Posted by: anna missed | Jan 30 2008 0:07 utc | 30

Interesting conversation.
JFK was not a real good president at the time of his death. Its the vision thing and his possibilities that were lost. JFK did not want war in Vietnam if my memory is right. Harry Truman came out against him because he was Catholic. But he was a young president from the WW II generation and they liked that. It was a kick in the teeth for WW II soldiers. As far as the moon shot, I do believe some technology came from it, but the cold war drove it.
From my perspective, RFK had the most promise of all the Kennedys. He had learned greatly from being in JFKs white house. As JFKs right hand man he was absolutely ruthless and was not afraid to weld power. After JFKs death, I think it took the wind out of him, and he went on a crusade to create a better US. But the CIA was still pissed about the Bay of Pigs and likely killed him or the mafia, who knows for sure.
Ted never had a chance after his “incident” and the name was wrote off as to damaged because of the deaths of JFK, RFK and Teds scandle.
Joe Kennedy was a crook plan and simple making his money off boot legging. One could argue if prohibition was right, but it was the law and Joe thwarted the law.
This family makes “Day of Our Lives” (the soap opera) look tame.

Posted by: jdp | Jan 30 2008 0:20 utc | 31

Why did people vote for him?
They remembered Nixon from the televised HUAC hearings.

Posted by: rjj | Jan 30 2008 0:22 utc | 32

Excellent anna missed, couldn’a sd it better…
also ding ding ding! rij, has it right too:
lets remember…
Historical footage of Richard Nixon vs John F. Kennedy for the presideny of the United States.

Posted by: Uncle $cam | Jan 30 2008 0:49 utc | 33

lol, that is a funny video uncle but i see neither kennedy or nixon. is this what you watch in your spare time? lol!!!

Posted by: annie | Jan 30 2008 0:59 utc | 34

anna missed nailed it, it is about the narrative. Kennedy is just an icon. Being shot down like that creates a canvas to project your hopes of what could have been.
Another contemporary icon that comes to mind is Che.

Posted by: a swedish kind of death | Jan 30 2008 1:14 utc | 35

And I always fancy some wholesome good Morris dancer entertainment!
Jolly good, chaps!

Posted by: a swedish kind of death | Jan 30 2008 1:21 utc | 36

One amusing thing about the Kennedy endorsement is that it does fit Obamas rhetoric in a novel way, in that it tweaks Kennedys message with a racial component that many here seem ready to embrace – if at least only symbolically (which the big dog is trying to exploit to his disgrace). I’d say the Kennedy crown fits Obama rather well, and is likely to make a significant difference against Clinton(s) (whom I think people are tired of).
At least compared to the republicans, who are flailing like drunken sailors trying to force Reagans glass slipper on their fat feet. But to no avail, not even close. I wonder why.

Posted by: anna missed | Jan 30 2008 1:28 utc | 37

skod
there is absololutely no parallel
jfk risked nothing except participating in the war of elites
che on other hand, risked everything, all the time, at great personal risk. che’s life was full of love & compassion (& i know well his role in the elimination of opponents after batista fell) while jf k’s was a sordid version of the great gatsby & the continuing histories of that family only help to underline it
che was an exemplar that is hard for modern man to measure themselves against because even though his practice in africa & latin america may have been foolish but they were indicators that humans make their own history
che deliberately walked towards the dangers of anti imperialism & in that sense it was not a short life but one that resonates still profoundly 40 years after
the kennedys were interesting contextually in american political life but they were no more & no less than gangsters sons & both jfk & rfk operated like gangsters – & as ensley points out that is not so strange – joseph was a living force in them. they understood deeply that dictum of malcolm x that violence was as american as apple pie

Posted by: remembereringgiap | Jan 30 2008 1:29 utc | 38

all in all, he was human and approachable and had a sense of humor and wasn’t all eaten up with his own importance. How can any of us forget Marilyn Monroe singing ‘Happy Birthday’ to him at a huge party in Madison Square Garden
he had panache. i was a little girl then, my memory reflects that. life was a fairy tale. he was young for a president. jackie was posh. little children in the WH and back then a catholic president was almost as radical as obama. he wasn’t wasp.
america was hankerin for an updated image and they provided in spades.. camelot. pre whitewater, pre acknowledged corruption, comin off of ww2, we were ridin high baby!

Posted by: annie | Jan 30 2008 1:30 utc | 39

To b at 27
What I meant to say (by what most astute Americans know anyhow) was that I believe 80 % of Americans don’t even know any of the foreign policy decisions JFK took and the rest knows them vaguely if at all.
The ones, who look at his Presidency in detail, know and may judge the same way you did, but these people are old. I am sixty. When Kennedy came to Berlin in 1963, I was fifteen. So the Americans, who voted for JFK consciously, are today at least 65 and older. They are an important voting constituency for the Democrats, but the younger voters are as well and it’s the group Obama is targetting with more emphasis than any other candidate.
The elderly might judge the Kennedy Presidency on the basis of facts and without a halo around him. But because of his, RK’s and MLK’s assassination nobody really wants to scrutinize his policy decisions. They wanted to know why and how he died, but not what was wrong with his policies.
Most of the voters Obama would attract belong to the younger generation. They have no idea what it means to live in a communist regime. On the hand many of the first and second immigrants generations from Asian and African or ME countries know, what it means to live under authoritarian regimes with tribal, religious and racial conflicts. I guess that Obama creates in them the hope that he might be more sensitive and knowledgable of those problems and hope they have a positive impact on his foreign policy decisions. If that kind of hope is justified or not remains to be seen, but all of these current issues have nothing to do with the JFK era and that era’s foreign policy issues.
Ted Kennedy endorsed Obama for simple reasons of lashing out against Bill Clinton, who showed his true colors lately in marginalizing and mocking Obama. Invoking JFK myths and Camelot is a rhetorical and emotional campaign tool. Obama knows it, Ted Kennedy knows it and the Kennedy children have all the right to believe in their father’s good political intentions and efforts, especially for their efforts to promote social justice for all American people. Do you want to take that away from them?
The Kennedy era is history, cold war over. There is no foreign policy tradition on which Obama could or would build, nor do I think he would launch a “man on the moon program”-style program, just for political gain.
At least so far Obama has not shown that he is a dreamer or a liar. The most one could say is that he might know what not to talk about at this point in time. That doesn’t necessarily mean, he does not understand foreign policy and national security issues.
To me it seems as if political campaigns in the US are a mixture of Hollywood and Gospel. Both are designed to make you feel good and give you strength. They are designed to make you believe that a happy end awaits you. When the movie is over, it’s over. Everybody knows it and can distinguish between fact and fiction. That doesn’t mean that much of what is said during the campaigns (or movies) isn’t inspiring and true.
The moment any of the candidates is in the White House, nobody expects them to miraculously deliver all of what everybody is just hoping for. Americans just like to forget the realities during their primary season and in the campaigns. This is the time for drama, emotions, despair and high hopes, really expensive and good entertainment. It’s also fun. They abuse their actors, ie. the presidential candidates, quite a bit, I would say.
So, the “thing” about Kennedy is that everybody can read into his life whatever he wants (he inspires your imagination). The myth around the Kennedy family is like the a local, beloved famaily saga, the stuff movies are made of, real good theater, war, love, spies, beauty, betrayals, conspiracies etc. … just that people actually died for all the wrong reasons, something nobody forgets here.

Posted by: mimi | Jan 30 2008 1:31 utc | 40

anni when i was a child the only american who was universally adored & i mean adored – in a way so sublime – that it is still difficult to apprehend was muhummed ali
australia, a deeply, deeply racist country bowed down before this man in a way they have never done for any other & australia is a deply anti communist country yet they adored openly paul robeson when he sang at the building of their opera house
because deep in all of us we respect fundamentally people who are exemplars of extraordianry college & whom have never bowed down to any man
the so called best & brightest were amongst the most bloodthrist thinkers who were in fact the papamamas of neoconservatism

Posted by: remembereringgiap | Jan 30 2008 1:41 utc | 41

I was 12 or 13. Born and grew up in d.c. I stood in line with my mother all night, 5 or 6 abreast and miles long to walk through the capitol rotunda to see his coffin. I’ll never forget it. The cold and the silence. My family went downtown to watch the funeral procession. I also remember watching Oswald’s shooting as it happened on tv.
I was touched by so much I didn’t begin to understand.

Posted by: beq | Jan 30 2008 1:52 utc | 42

mmmm
uncle, sorry…
couldn’t get it, either the message is heavyly hardcoded or that’s a wrong link
:
:.i found this bit of that debate at daily motion

¿maybe hillary is playing nixon’s “vice-president” role in this turn of the clock?

Posted by: rudolf | Jan 30 2008 2:03 utc | 43

beq
its quite strange. i was not moved at all. i remember it, well but i remember even a little younger – an infant being aware of the cuban missile crisis was a moment that meade clear what our world was. i remember the moment even. my mother holding a newspaper with ships in the ocean & her telling the woman next door about the world ending & she was a very detached woman usually not given to hysteria
no there are other names full of force & pride – medgar evans, rosa parks, the scottboro boys, fred hampton, norman morrison & you & i beq were born into an era where it was us the small people, the mass who really made history
& it was these extraordianry people that taught a real morality, the necessity of courage & the refusal to bow down. all paradoxically or not so paradoxically more important today than it ever was

Posted by: remembereringgiap | Jan 30 2008 2:06 utc | 44

The kennedy association is about being a (potential) first of a minority to get to the white (paint it black!) house, liked and middle of the road. The endorsement means quid pro quo, gravy. These dems are going to need a sustained push to their roots as the purple people policy party after the election; that is, if they don’t lose the left to an independent candidate and split the vote.
I am more anti- his pro-nuclear power stance than her name. The savage media stance on Gore and Clintons I and II is too powerful a reminder that not even a moderate is long to stay in the oval office. Bill said fairy tale, and I think it is right – the media push came a good while back and is not based on policy or the ability to raise a voice above the noise machine, but on something else. Beatability. Hillary was ahead as the bet was she would get hated. When she sounded too presidential in the debates, the media bet swang Obama’s way, who at least has a funny name. Polls and coverage brought him to the fore, and they will be there to try to push president McEmpire up to a semi-credible vote fraud winnable level.
We need 60% of the vote to win, and getting no fu**ing new nuclear reactors as a result would. thankfully. lack. irony.
🙂

Posted by: bellgong | Jan 30 2008 2:18 utc | 45

r’giap, as a child i didn’t follow boxing. Ali’s conversion became public in 64, after kennedy was dead. in junior high we read malcolm x, at that time i became familiar w/the black panthers. living in the bay area.. the music, politics, culture.. my plate was full. i knew who Ali was but he didn’t rise above angela and local heros like cesar chavez or george jackson. local politics were overwhelming and a bit confusing to me. the hearst kidnapping alerted me to the power of the elite (i had never heard of a ‘liberation army’). there was so much going on in the bay area it is hard to assimilate who my heros were. i was massively into dancing/choreography .. miriam makeba. Ali was off my radar. probably if someone had ask me at that time i would have named lennon and herman hesse.

Posted by: annie | Jan 30 2008 2:22 utc | 46

r’giap,
I did not mean any similarities in their lifes, I meant similarities as icons after their death. The icons are not filled with what the persons was, but what we wish they could have become.
Olof Palme has the same kind of iconic status in Sweden, filled with dreams of a better today, through a different yesterday. If only is a powerful start of a story. Of course had he lived, he would probably have fallen from power in one scandal or another as politicians usually do.

Posted by: a swedish kind of death | Jan 30 2008 2:46 utc | 47

I feel you underestimate the value of symbol.
It’s difficult, if not impossible, to find American foreign policy successes in the past 60 years … JFK added to the list of failures on paper, but was and is a powerful symbol as an advocate to personally make a contribution for the betterment of mankind.
His founding of the Peace Corps and his “Ask Not” speech speak t o that. As does the push towards the symbolic collective effort of placing a man on the moon.
I will say that it’s rare to energize a populace collectively toward an effort that isn’t a war. JFK managed to do that. And I’d call that success.

Posted by: jackifus | Jan 30 2008 3:19 utc | 48

Bent on crushing the Castroite challenge, the Kennedy administration paid unprecedented attention to Latin America. It rewarded those Latin leaders it judged reliable allies in the anti-Communist crusade, be they democrats or autocrats, with economic aid and political support; and it undermined constitutional government whenever necessary to uphold pro-American stability – in Argentina, in Brazil, in British Guyana, in Guatemala. “The Kennedy administration … did not really distinguish between political radicals loyal to Moscow and Havana and nationalist reformers,” writes Stephen Rube, author of the best study of Kennedy’s Latin American policy. “Like Dwight Eisenhower and John Foster Dulles, the president and his advisers opted for the short-term security that anti-Communist elites, especially military officers, could provide over the benefits of long-term political and social democracy.”
— piero gleijeses, conflicting misssions: havana, washington, and africa, 1959-1976

Kennedy, who campaigned in the 1960 presidential election as a committed militarist, entered the White House promising to establish a new foundation on which to ensure the continuance of American power in such changing times. His inaugural call that America was ready to “pay any price, bear any burden” revived a muscular internationalism that had atrophied. In addition to bringing in Robert McNamara from the Ford Motor Company to rationalize the Department of Defense, Kennedy and his civilian advisers looked to counterinsurgency and covert operations as a way of both breaking the nuclear deadlock and controlling the rise of third-world nationalism. Kennedy ordered the military to create a branch of the Special Forces that could operate with more flexibility in the third world and set up a “Special Group” in the White House, headed by General Maxwell Taylor, to coordinate special-warfare policy at the highest echelons of government – with the result that superpower conflict was detoured outside of Europe, particularly into Southeast Asia.

..while Kennedy’s revolutionary rhetoric committed the United States to strengthening the internal security capabilities of Latin American nations to protect against subversion, turning the region into a counterinsurgent laboratory. Advisers from the State and Defense Departments and the CIA worked to reinforce local intelligence operations, schooling security forces in interrogation and guerrilla warfare techniques, providing technology and equipment, and, when necessary, conducting preemptive coups. It was during this period that national intelligence agencies fortified and, in some cases, created by the United States – Argentina’s Secretaria de Inteligencia del Estado, Chile’s Direccion Nacional de Inteligencia, Brazil’s Sistema Nacional de Informacoes, El Salvador’s Agencia Nacional de Servicios Especiales – began to transform themselves into command centers of the region’s death-squad system, which throughout the 1970s and 1980s executed hundreds of thousands of Latin Americans and tortured tens of thousands more…
— greg grandin, empire’s workshop: latin america, the united states, and the rise of the new imperialism

Posted by: b real | Jan 30 2008 4:21 utc | 49

b real – great excerpts. makes King Arthur of the ‘real’ Camelot look like an inspirational saint by comparison, no? But as long as Obama has Merlin we can expect a water into wine show.

Posted by: BenIAM | Jan 30 2008 4:36 utc | 50

@jackifus #48
The 1961 inaugural address encapsulates in the space of its most memorable quote everything I despise and stand against in a state. The crux (viz. “…ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country.”) proposes that a state has no obligation to its constituents. It must be supported merely because it is.
I say emphatically that a state that does not provide for its constituents, no matter how iconic or powerful that state may be, has no legitimacy and needs to be replaced. Foremost on the minds of everyone, everywhere should be the question “What can my country do for me; and how can it do so more efficiently?”
Some will argue that Kennedy’s iconic status must be protected and remain sacrosanct as an inspiration for Americans. I say that it is a symbol of Empire at its worst and inspires nothing except elitism and dynastic succession. Some will say that this quote does not truly represent the sentiments held by the man to whom it is attributed. There’s no doubt to me that it does.
Your mileage may vary.

Posted by: Monolycus | Jan 30 2008 4:57 utc | 51

Some will argue that Kennedy’s iconic status must be protected and remain sacrosanct as an inspiration for Americans .
I love eating sacred cow! Of course, most of you already knew that…lol

Posted by: Uncle $cam | Jan 30 2008 5:29 utc | 52

maybe somewhere in the Kennedy DNA, there’s a dominant gene that drives the effort to be measured as a family. If any families have the gene, the Kennedy’s probably do more than most. And its pretty admirable.

Posted by: jony_b_cool | Jan 30 2008 6:03 utc | 53

Decoding Obamination’s apeal – aside from the obvious that he’s first mulatto guy so he’s virtually guaranteed to turn out black vote, then can guilt trip whites into voting for him…….Aside from that……his appeal is sheep saying – O JackAss Party, you offer us Nothing…Zip…Nada…At least offer us pretty words in a shiny new package that we can project our shit onto…
Onto Meaning of JFK Comparison – Most Impt. Aspect of that is what is Not Being Said…He is NOT being compared to FDR…in fact no mention of FDR…you don’t suppose it’s ‘cuz they’re complicit in the destruction of his legacy do you….so what does that leave them by way of traditions???
B- is right to ask just what the hell JFK was all about?? But he’s looking to substance. The meaning is the opposite. Recall they did the same thing w/Clinton, complete w/picture of young Billy waiting in line to shake JFK’s hand…And Clinton is famous for saying that the way to defeat the Repugs is to become like them…hence it’s better not to dig too deeply. Which is precisely the meaning – once you’ve turned your party on its head, all that’s left is to call “tradition” another pretty boy face who plays well on tv — so the comparison means all you are offering is another Raging Narcissist w/exc. speechwriter. So, let ’em eat cake has morphed into let ’em eat words, suckahs 🙂

Posted by: jj | Jan 30 2008 7:56 utc | 54

It’s not a bad idea to keep in mind why Teddy got so pissed off he broke w/Billy & Co. Prob. a load ‘o’ shit built up over the years, but this might have been the last straw – w/thanks to the Brit. press – He felt slighted that Clintons gave credit to LBJ – detested by Teddy/the Kennedy’s(was he part of the “deal”??) for passage of the Civil Rights Legislation. link
(I heard a black guy call Air America yesterday & give a complete deconstruction of Clinton’s supposed racist putdown of Obamination. He insisted it was nothing of the sort, when not taken out of context, but was manipulated by the latter, to play victim & crank up black fury, hence support. Narcissists as master manipulators – so, what else is new…dat’s why they win so easily…)

Posted by: jj | Jan 30 2008 8:04 utc | 55

rg,
all I remember of the Kennedy assasination was that I was annoyed because the television coverage pre-empted all my favorite kiddie shows.

Posted by: ralphieboy | Jan 30 2008 8:26 utc | 56

@55(I heard a black guy call Air America yesterday & give a complete deconstruction of Clinton’s supposed racist putdown of Obamination. He insisted it was nothing of the sort, when not taken out of context, but was manipulated by the latter, to play victim & crank up black fury, hence support. Narcissists as master manipulators – so, what else is new…dat’s why they win so easily…)
actually, it should be noted that the “black-fury” was spontaneous and across the board as it built up from the Clinton’s saying more & more crap. And initially, I think Obama tried to play it off. And I haven’t seen anything he’s said **personally** so far to exploit it.
The Clintons came across as oafish, grace-less & frightened.

Posted by: jony_b_cool | Jan 30 2008 12:16 utc | 57

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 when 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 Execuive 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 Patricde 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.” Kassem was then killed by a new coup.
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.) SSadly, 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. Its easier to oppose that way.

Posted by: Malooga | Jan 30 2008 12:30 utc | 58

B writes: The Apollo program was not productive.
If I could somehow tap the inertial energy from Carl Sagan’s body spinning in his proverbial grave, I’d probably be able to power large swathes of Europe rather economically.

Posted by: Jeremiah | Jan 30 2008 21:58 utc | 59

@meta thought – interesting that a thread challenging some acient assumed Amercian history generates 50+ comments in 24 hours here and even gets Malooga to make a point.
Touched some deep illusional issues?

Posted by: Anonymous | Jan 30 2008 23:00 utc | 60

I appreciate NASA for pile, polypro (later developments less stinky) and goretex. All of these made 20 years of whitewater kayaking more comfortable and safer.

Posted by: Susan | Jan 31 2008 8:01 utc | 61

its about time we get some deadpan humor around here.

Posted by: anna missed | Jan 31 2008 8:39 utc | 62

We indeed need some humor around here, but what comes to mind after reading the following very well could have you needing something much more serious, like Prozac and MORPHINE…
It’s not the hysterical laughter that bothers me, it’s the inability to stop…
The Blood Queen of Hungary America. The Countess Elizabeth Báthory Babs Busch speaks…

WASHINGTON (AP) — It hurts far more to hear criticism of your son than of your husband, President Bush’s mother, former first lady Barbara Bush, said Friday during a wide-ranging discussion.
She was interviewed in front of an audience of nearly 300 by Allen Weinstein, Archivist of the United States, as part of the American Conversations series at the National Archives.
Here is some of what she said:
On the difference between being wife of President George H.W. Bush and mother of President George W. Bush: “It hurts much more if your son’s president. My husband … he’s in agony half the time.”
“You hear people say things that are untrue and unfair. It really hurts. George W. doesn’t watch the press. He’ll call us … (and say) ‘I hear the TV, turn it off.'”
=====
On Tony Blair: “I like Tony Blair very, very much, and I think he suffered a lot because of his support of the United Sates, but till this day he feels he did the right thing and I think he did too.”
=====
On her son, President Bush: “I’m very, very proud of him and he’s the most disciplined person I know. I got there yesterday afternoon, … we had dinner with friends and then he went to bed early and he was up and gone by the time I got up at 8 o’clock.”
=====
On former leaders in other countries: “We treat our former presidents much better than other countries. Half of them kill them. The other half put them in jail. … It’s astonishing to me, the British, the day of the election, they’re out and they don’t have help. They’re just gone. … We’re so generous in our country.”

Posted by: Uncle $cam | Jan 31 2008 9:49 utc | 63

b, I’m with Jeremiah @10
The problem isn’t science or the space program, the problem is the talking monkey likes to turn everything it learns into a weapon
The $25b pales compared to weapons spending
lets assume, for the sake of discussion, that the talking monkey had learned to just obey religious principles and loved it’s neighbour (despite the one I can’t stand) rather than suspecting and killing their fellow yapping monkeys at every turn
lets also assume this great peace dividend happened at the end of WW2 – as it would have for any truly sentient species
given the above, is space travel still pointless, aimless and devoid of anything worth learning? Is there no benefit to be gleaned, despite the number of large impact craters scattered aboot the yard?
in a world without weapons developers, we might be mining space by now. that would be a good thing too, because the beautiful blue marble is only so big and therefore only has so much stuff to offer for us to use flagrantly, or not.
Either way stuff will run out for some future generation and I’d rather robots in space chewing up asteroids for gold than Munk “enhancing” a couple of glaciers in the Andes to get at it
in a world without weapons developers, a Canadian satellite that would give plushtown a heads-up on when to sell all his ocean-front condos because it can examine crucial environmental factors wouldn’t have recently been given to a US arms company (thanks taxpayers)
in a world without weapons developers…,n
we don’t live in that world and so Mercury to Appollo makes perfect sense strategically in consideration of Full Spectrum Dominance for any nation to embark on
even if we did live in a world without weapons developers, Mercury to Appollo still makes perfect sense because the universe is still a dangerous place – even if the talking monkey is the only game in town at this point
b said – “But I am against spending large amounts of money for unproductive tools.”
I would say – “But I am against spending large amounts of money resources for unproductive tools.”
Advancing our knowledge of the universe as the space program certainly has provided in spades, isn’t unproductive.
Weapons development most certainly is, homeopathy, many examples from many industries (Vista), etc. all chewing up vital limited resources
But mostly, it’s our love of putting nails in boards

Posted by: jcairo | Jan 31 2008 15:47 utc | 64