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.