Originally posted by: chess9
Originally posted by: Craig234
Originally posted by: chess9
Also, Mani, read Hoffer's "The True Believer". Unfortunately, Dems tend to be easily attracted to charismatic leaders. FDR, JFK, Obama. They will swallow the most banal tripe imaginable. I really wish you were right though. Being a liberal in America is a lonely job, but I'm the last one available, or at least it feels that way.
Liberals who view supporting FDR and JFK as being irrational cult members falling for "the most banal tripe". With liberals like you, who needs an opposition party? "The True Believer" is a good source of info, but simply having a strong following for a leader doesn't make the leader a spewer of "the most banal tripe" instead of a good leader.
If your summary of JFK's presidency, to select it for discussion, is one of "the most banal tripe", I'd like to hear you try to make the case, and to educate you.
To get ready for my response, though, review the following two speeches given on consecutive days.
JFK tells a largely racist nation it needs to change
JFK tells the nation to turn away from the cold war
You appreciate Kennedy on a whole different level, but for many people the whole "Camelot" schtick was their reason for voting for him. He was their savior.
I liked Kennedy, warts and all. I don't disagree he was a pretty good President, but you are missing the point. What you think is great about him isn't what many Dems liked about him. He led with his charisma. People would have followed him to the beaches of Guantanamo Bay! He secretly pushed our CIA advisors into Vietnam, following in Ike's footsteps. The man made a lot of mistakes, besides going to Dallas in November of 1963.
-Robert
I'll agree with you, as I already implied, that a lot of followers of a great leader have pretty ignorant reasons that fir 'the True Believer'.
It's a fary cry from noting that to the implication in your post that the leaders are about nothing more than 'the most banal tripe", which is about the leader and terribly wrong, instead of accurately pointing the finger as you did in your response at the followers who have the wrong reasons. As for Camelot, besides the fact it was not used as the name for his administration during the administration (there may have been some obscure use), is that it's both a fitting metaphor for the real idealism, and also can describe the people who supported it as a 'pop culture' phenamenon, linking things like the celebrity of King Arthur and Kennedy's 'good looks'.
We should really talk further to sort through the confusion I'm seeing. You refer to many people having as their 'whole reason for voting for Kennedy something - the link between him and Camelot - that didn't exist when the election was held, and to his being the 'savior' of the voters. I'd like to see more evidence of that latter claim. I'll do you the favor of interpreting your first comment not literally as about Camelot but simply as about a certain celebritization of the candidate, because you start to have a point then.
But you miss the fact about how that's simply the fact of who Americans are - a large portion of whom decide who to vote for on such things. That's why winning candidates have those nice songs and wear cowboy hats and pose for pictures with their kids or whatever will create the marketing needed. But you are off base to claim that the need to market that way represents the president's policies - your 'most banal tripe' comment.
I'm actually agreeing with the very high level issue you seem to be trying to raise about the 'true believer' issue, but I have to dramatically change what you sais in trying to make the point to agree. More importantly, I'm going to mention an issue I've long run across about Kennedy - which may or may not apply to you.
IMO, Kennedy *legitimately* inspired a lot of the more rabid praise some had for him, just as Shakespeare is legitimately raved about.
I see a lot of people who dismiss that praise by *assuming* it's just misguided 'true beleiver' ignorant hero worship, when they're actually the ones who are ignorant.
I won't spend the time here to make the case for my opinion again, but I will respond to the specifics you brought up.
It's hard to say much about your 'Guantanamo Bay' speculation because it's a hypothetical and very out of character for Kennedy - a man who believed strongly in freedom.
It's like asking whether the rabid Martin Luther King, Jr. followers thought so well of him that they'd follow him to a return to slavery.
On Vietnam, it was a very complex situation - it was the height of the cold war, the global culture was largely about the two sides in the cold war each using 'proxy nations' against one another; every major policy seemed heavily influeced by the cold war (including, for Kennedy, measures from the Peace Corps to the Moon landing). Kennedy was in that cold war environment to the point that he believed he was 'one more Bay of Pigs mistake' from a possible military coup removing him from office - and the security establishment - the same types in the CIA and Joint Chiefs who had manipulated him into the Bay of Pigs in the first place - were placing very strong pressure on him to send combat troops into Vietnam. His own advisors were doing the same.
It takes a lot of research and effort to understand Kennedy's views on Vietnam in context - but the end result in my view paints his picture as an incredible leader for peace there. Contrast his Vietnam policies with the relatively minor escalations and his paving the way for withdrawal in his second term, with the Johnson and Nixon policies for a sense of how he avoided such disaster.
Indeed, in his first major foreign policy commentary running for the Senate in 1951, he said that no military solution could work in Vietnam that did not include freedom from colonization for the Vietnamese; he said that the conflict was widely misunderstood by the West. He was right on target 14 years before the war started.
He did hedge his bets with some aid for South Vietnam that was needed for the times. What if Diem had followed his guidance and turned into a better leader? He had to try. That didn't work out too well, and things were moving towards withdrawal - you can see this in his internal policies, as documented well in John Newman's "JFK and Vietnam". Here are two reviews of that book:
From Publishers Weekly
Had he lived, would President Kennedy have committed U.S. troops to Vietnam? According to the evidence marshalled here, the answer is a resounding no. Newman, who teaches international politics at the University of Maryland, argues that when JFK went to Dallas he already intended to withdraw U.S. advisers from Vietnam, but held off to ensure his reelection in 1964. The book traces the president's pullout plan back to April '62, when he stated that the U.S. should seize every opportunity to reduce its commitment to Vietnam. A month later Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara asked U.S. generals in Saigon how soon the South Vietnamese would be ready to take over the war effort. This well-documented study shows that JFK was for a time deceived by Gen. Maxwell Taylor, head of the joint chiefs, and others in a blizzard of briefings that claimed unadulterated progress and success. Newman maintains that although the president paid public lip service to a continued commitment to appease the right, his goal was to abandon a venture that he early recognized as a lost cause. No other study has revealed so clearly how the tragedy in Dallas affected the course of the war in Vietnam, since two days after the assassination Lyndon Johnson signed a National Security Action Memo that opened the way for the fateful escalation of the war. Photos.
From Kirkus Reviews
Bold and authoritative revisionist analysis of Kennedy's Vietnam policy, by a US Army major who teaches history at the Univ. of Maryland. What was JFK's real agenda regarding Vietnam? Newman claims that the young President planned to withdraw American forces from that war-torn country--and his case is strong. The author pictures an isolated Kennedy battling both cold war jingoism and a military- industrial lobby avid for a war that would make tens of billions of dollars. Conventional wisdom generally sees JFK's early attacks on Eisenhower's covert liaison with France regarding Vietnam as simple political expediency, and Kennedy as another adherent to the domino theory. JFK's speeches buttress that position, but Newman, working with newly declassified material, argues that these speeches were simply requisite political twistings and turnings--and that Kennedy planned to get the US out of Vietnam despite a hawkish palace clique (led by Lyndon Johnson) that fed him disinformation on this most crucial foreign-policy issue. Document by document, incident by incident, the author reveals Kennedy as stranded within his own Administration, alienated by his desire to avoid this ultimate wrong-time, wrong-place war. Newman's research culminates in two crucial National Security Action Memos. In one, authored several weeks before Kennedy's death, the President formally endorsed withdrawal from Vietnam of a thousand advisors by the end of 1963 (to be followed by complete withdrawal by the end of 1965). In the second, written six days after the assassination, LBJ reversed the withdrawal policy and planned in some detail the escalation to follow. Crucial to any reevaluation of JFK as President and statesman, this electrifying report portrays a wily, stubborn, conflicted leader who grasped realities that eluded virtually everyone else in the US establishment.
For just one example supporting what I'm saying, JFK realized he was not being given good information on the situation in Vietnam and he sent his trusted friend, Senate Majority Leader Mike Mansfield on a mission in addition to his own staff to give him some honest feedback. As documented in "One Brief Shining Monent" based on an interview with Mansfield, he returned and told Kennedy the only option was to withdraw and he could support no other policy; Kennedy said he agreed but would withdraw after the election.
The fact Kennedy had to use such an extraordinary measure and have his policy concealed even from much of his own staff says a lot about the situation.
Your casual use of his sending CIA advisors as if that made him a Vietnam hawk is just incorrect in its use of one tidbit out of context.
He did make mistakes - but I suspect that many of what you think they were are not correct. I'd be happy to respond to others you care to suggest.
If I were to select a few, I'd pick Bay of Pigs decision - though ironically it led him to great improvement; his womaniing, in terms of his presidency because of the irresponsible risks it caused his presidency; and IMO, his handling of the Cuban Missile Crisis was overall excellent, but too obstinate. He was defending a hypocrisy of our missiles in Turkey while not allowing the Soviets the same action - and risking nuclear war to defend it.
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