Originally posted by: ProfJohn
He was no JFK, who was able to bring the agenda of peace into a cold war culture.
Craig you need to get away from your liberal fantasy land view of JFK.
JFK approved the invasion of another country, Cuba.
He nearly started WW 3 with the Cuban Missile Crisis.
He increased the number of US troops in Vietnam from 800 to 16,300.
His administration backed a coup in Iraq.
He made a speech at the Berlin wall that was very similar to the one made by Reagan 25+ years later.
There are many people in the world who really don't understand, or say they don't, what is the great issue between the free world and the Communist world. Let them come to Berlin. There are some who say that communism is the wave of the future. Let them come to Berlin. And there are some who say in Europe and elsewhere we can work with the Communists. Let them come to Berlin. And there are even a few who say that it is true that communism is an evil system, but it permits us to make economic progress. Lasst sie nach Berlin kommen. Let them come to Berlin.
He spoke about the need for a strong military at his inauguration and against weakness.
We dare not tempt them with weakness. For only when our arms are sufficient beyond doubt can we be certain beyond doubt that they will never be employed.
He also cut taxes and spoke of tax cuts as a way to "stimulate economic growth"
The elimination of certain defects and inequities as proposed below will provide revenue gains to offset the tax reductions offered to stimulate the economy. Thus no net loss of revenue is involved in this set of proposals.
Finally, James Piereson, author of "Camelot and the Cultural Revolution: How the Assassination of John F. Kennedy Shattered American Liberalism" said something really interesting:
Democrats and the liberals have been looking now for 45 years for someone to pick up the mantle of John F. Kennedy?someone who is optimistic about America and an attractive figure whom they can be proud of. But I?d suggest that the person who really picked up the mantle from John Kennedy was Ronald Reagan. It was Ronald Reagan who began to re-moralize the Cold War. It was Reagan who said, as JFK had said, that this was a struggle between freedom and tyranny
PJ, for all the flaws of your post, it's an opportunity to clear the air on some JFK issues, so it's at least got that.
As I've said, I've studied the JFK administration since over 20 years ago, so you are going to need to recognize that the one-sided cherry-picking you do isn't going to get you a lot.
I've long suggested to you that you have the very poor habit of a 'debater's points' approach to the message board, where you look for cherry-picked things that appear to agree with your opinion, and by throwing up as many as you can find, you try to 'win' the point. This is quite unhelpful and even destructive to any sincere discussion about the issues. Benjamin Franklin had a group of friend he discussed issues with and the one rule for joining was to not bring pre-determined conclusions but rather to be willing to follow the facts and logic wherever. You would not be invited, sadly. I'd like to see you listen to this constructive feedback I've given to you and try to listen more and be open to the idea you might be wrong. You would learn, and grow, and have more unassailable positions.
Now, for JFK. Your points are actually pretty fair as far as they go. Their problem isn't being false, but rather the error of omission of the larger picture with JFK.
You need to try to understand from the evidence how much he was for war and why, how much he was for peace and how and why, how much he was for various polices not neatly fitting into either; and unfortunately for you in sorting it out, unlike many simpler presidents and policies, he was not simple and his times were not simple, and the information you have to sort out is often superficially contradictory, leaving you with a difficult question - and one for which a cherry-picking approach is particularly harmful.
A post does not allow the time for really explaining a lot about Kennedy as is needed to rebut the points made briefly above (if you want a short version, try 'you're wrong').
But I'll make some points that I think are more than adequate for addressing the claims.
Things to recognize are that Kennedy took power at the height of the cold war, a time when the public was heady from having won WWII and become the world's leading power just within the last 15 years, and one in which the fear of the USSR was huge, with no shortage of crazy and paranoid right-wing groups, just barely after the era of McCarthyism, and the US wanted a 'strong' leader. Kennedy knew his political capital rested on that issue.
Kennedy, like many good politicians, knew how to 'act' as needed. FDR once told a leading actor of his time that he didn't know who the better actor was between the two of them, and expressed how he didn't see how anyone who was not good at acting could be president (a view agreed with later by Ronald Reagan, unsurprisingly). So am I just throwing out yet another complication and a device that allows any statement by Kennedy to be 're-interpreted' as acting? Not at all. But it is part of the picture that Kennedy as a great politician was well aware of the need to 'project an image' that may not always quite reflect his personal views, for political needs. And the image needed at that time in history for a US politician was 'strength against the communists'.
In fact, Kennedy's analysis of what was needed against the communists was far more complex than 'strength'. He was influenced, for example, by the book "The Guns of August" which painted a picture of WWI started unintentionally by miscalculation, and one of his greatest fears was of the same happening on his watch with nuclear consequences. He made such a point of it that Kruschev once bellowed at him, "Miscalculation! Miscalculation! Miscalculation! All I ever hear from your people and your news correspondents and your friends in Europe and every place else is that damned word, miscalculation!" Kennedy and Kruschev learning to dance with one another was done during their early years in office, with each misjudging the other at first, with great risks as a result, but growing to an understanding. There's a reason why the bellicose Kruschev who 'could not be worked with', the man of the shoe pounding in the UN and missile placement in Cuba, came to refer to Kennedy's historic American University address on peace as the greatest speech by a president in decades and to take the unprecedented act of playing it uncensored across the USSR.
Kennedy, as a man of peace in a culture of war, knew how to put peace as the agenda in ways that fit the expectation for 'strength'. Typical is his use of a favorite phrase, "The Strategy of Peace" - the word strategy being hawkish and 'strong', used for cover for the topic of peace. Again and again you will see this playing off of hawkish as cover for peaceful topics in his speeches, with growth as his political standing became more solid to where he could speak more directly about peace, as he did in the American University speech.
Read that speech, if you haven't, or better yet watch it,and get a sense of his thinking, how at odds it was with the cold war culture.
Kennedy was consistently at odds with his own advisers on issues of peace. Bobby Kennedy once later remarked that there were 13 people in the Cuban Missile Crisis team, and if 8 of them had been president there would have been nuclear war. They were often having to struggle against the militaristic people in power while preserving their own political capital.
Look at who they worked with, from Allen Dulles as the founder of the CIA and his people such as Dick Bissell head of the operational side of the CIA, to the Joint Chiefs of Staff who Kennedy called 'crazy sons of bitches' IIRC (the disrespect was mutual), to J. Edgar Hoover and others. Think about it. How abnormal was it to have a President with huge tensions with the Joint Chiefs of Staff to where he couldn't stand to talk to one, where he created a new 'liason' position for Maxwell Taylor to buffer him from them and reduce their influence, where he created the Defense Intelligence Agency to help him gain control over the Pentagon by abolishing the service intelligence forces (read the history of this in "House of War" by the son of the founder of the DIA), where the disrespect was strong and mutual as evidenced by secret recordings of each after they'd meet?
How abnormal was it for the President to say he'd like to cut the CIA into a thousand pieces and scatter them into the wind, not a moment of frustration but an ongoing difference, after he'd gotten rid of the top people including founder Dulles and made no few enemies in the process, and him planning a major redesign of US intelligence agencies his second term led by brother Bobby? How abnormal was it to have the Attorney General and president's brother at war with the Founding Director of the FBI, powerful enough to blackmail the president, with the AG ordering the installation of a direct phone line to Hoover's desk to dominate him, infuriating Hoover who had the line yanked out without permission the day JFK was shot, and who Bobby described as sounding gleeful when he was the first to call and inform Bobby of the news?
How abnormal was it for the president to be using "back door" diplomacy for critical communications with leaders such as Kruschev (confusing the Soviets who tried to decipher the meaning), avoiding the bureaucracy, for the President to be sending secondary representatives, such as his trusted friend Sentate Majority Leader Mike Mansfield to Vietnam to tell him what's 'really going on' because he couldn't trust the information he was receiving (and responding warmly to Mansfield's messages wehad to get out)?
It was a complicated time and situation requiring a lot more careful review than the cherry-picking anecdotes approach.
But let's look at your anecdotes for a moment.
He 'invaded Cuba'. You are a master at putting layers of misleading into few words. You leave out the fact that he didn't wake up one morning and order Cuba invaded, rather he inherited the plan to invade Cuba from the Eisenhower administration. Let's review the facts for a moment of his situation.
Here he is, the 'new kid' in the White House, the youngest president ever following the widely revered Supreme Commander of WWII. Trying to build his image with the nation as 'strong', he's going to say 'no' to the plan from Eisenhower to liberate Cuba using Cuban forces? The Joint Chiefs of Staff unanimously, the CIA, everyone told him that the mission was 'foolproof'. Had he said no, it'd have been leaked in no time that this new kid had rejected the plan by Eisenhower that was 'foolproof' - destroying his presidency early on.
How much did the nation care? The Gallup polls I've read from the period put Castro as the US public's #1 security concern. They were nuts about him at the time.
Kennedy was all but forced to allow the plan to proceed - and he paid. As it turns out, the CIA and others took a gamble that Kennedy, who had drawn firm lines against the invasion becoming a US operation if it went badly, that he'd have no choice but to give in and do just that, and so they exaggerated the likelihood the mission would work, expecting the President to be forced to use US forces to save it and do what they wanted, invade Cuba. He was quite right to get rid of them over that insubordination, and to stand strong.
That wasn't evidence of Kennedy being a hawk - it was evidence of him cautiously allowing a plan for Cubans to overthrow Castro.
Next, you say he nearly started WWIII over the Cuban Missile Crisis.
Again, you put huge misleading into few words. First, one major and direct cause of the Cuban Missile Crisis was Kruschev's misjudging Kennedy as 'weak', largely because of his youth and inexperience. So, he took a bold gamble. Now, there's a heck of a case to be made for the USSR in this. The US had nuclear Jupiter missiles - missiles JFK had reportedly ordered removed but which hadn't been - on the border of the USSR in Turkey. So, what was our justification for saying we can have them, but the USSR can't?
It was quite a political coup for Kennedy to use Kruschev's doing it secretly and lying about it to turn the world opinion against the USSR, instead of their defending themselves.
But the topic here is Kennedy's hawkishness, and Kennedy, led by his brother, was the dove in the process, dealing with a room of advisers almost entirely saying invasion was the only option. That was indeed the early decision, but Bobby began to question it and John began to switch as well, and it was their actions that avoided the invasion. What we learned later is that it also incaded nuclear war, because while the US was planning based on there not being any operational nukes, we learned decades later that the USSR had given dozens of tactical nukes to the local Soviet commanders for use against an invasion, with authorization to use them without any approval from Moscow.
It was a dangerous time, but you distort the message that most leaders would have led us to nuclear war while Kennedy didn't into a claim of JFK's hawkishness.
You refer to his increase in the number of military advisers in Vietnam (you misleadingly, call them 'troops' implying combat troops, when while they could get involved in combat at times, were explicitly not combat troops, a firm line Kennedy had drawn the military was not allowed to cross). If you would get informed on the topic of JFK and Vietnam - say, read the book "JFK and Vietnam" - you would understand how much he was a force against war there, constantly battling others trying to pressure him into war.
I won't try to cover the topic here, history says it's a waste and the book is there if you have any interest in the actual facts, not just your ideology.
In fact, that's probably enough on your specific points. Needless to say, you don't cover countless initiatives of Kennedy better reflecting his policies, from the peace corps to use peaceful means to expand US influence and reduce the risk of war, his strong support of diplomatic means (today attacked far and wide by the militaristic Republicans), his politically courageous efforts to support real moderate leaders in nations without being US puppets over the worst sorts of pro-US right-wing tyrants, to build support for the US by making us a nation actually in favor of independence for other nations, his bold reversal of the US's historic support of European colonization of third world nations, in particular creating a huge conflict with Portugal (and creating problems with other European nations) by opposing them in their war with a colony.
To that world assembly of sovereign states, the United Nations, our last best hope in an age where the instruments of war have far outpaced the instruments of peace, we renew our pledge of support -- to prevent it from becoming merely a forum for invective, to strengthen its shield of the new and the weak, and to enlarge the area in which its writ may run.
- John Kennedy's Inagural Speech
Kennedy felt his greatest accomplishment had been the limited nuclear test ban treaty - a treaty as a first step towards peace, away from war, at a time when few were pursuing that.
No, *you* are the one who needs to revise your idea of Kennedy, where unable to paint him too badly and smear him, unwilling to deal with the truth, you try to co-opt him.
Kennedy was a strong case against your ideology, and you don't like that. Too bad. You should learn from the history, not play petty politics with it and deceive.
Kennedy was indeed a strong anti-communist - yet he was able to understand the revolutionaries among the poor around the world. Robert Kennedy spoke admiringly of Che Guevera and of the importance of being a revolutionary for the poor. Right-wingers would smear Obama today as weak on terrorism if he had said instead of Kennedy:
"If a free society cannot save the many who are poor, it cannot save the few who are rich."
- John Kennedy Inagural Speech
In the world he dealt with, Kennedy supported a strong military to deter our enemies who would take advantage of 'weakness'. And yet he constantly insisted that peace be pursued as well in ways you have not seen in any Republican leader since, and he was a president who was interested in eventually abolishing nuclear weapons in the world, hardly the policy of modern Republicans who I suspect would disagree 98% or more.
What's more important is not Kennedy's sharing in common with Republicans the policy of a strong deterrent, but his loneliness from them in alone pursuing peace.