Four Died Trying: Jack Joins the Revolution
I have had the opportunity to see the second part of the bold, ambitious documentary series, Four Died Trying. Entitled “Jack Joins the Revolution”, it seems to me to be a notable achievement over which director John Kirby and producer Libby Handros should take a bow.
It begins with Oliver Stone noting the difference in age and appearance between John Kennedy and his predecessors, Harry Truman and Dwight Eisenhower. We then cut to Robert Kennedy Jr. and he supplies an even more direct context, namely the Irish background of the Kennedy family. After all, the Irish had been colonized for 800 years. And this is something that the Kennedy family never forgot since the British control deprived the Irish of true suffrage and political office, among other rights-- including that of property. This domination was particularly aimed at Catholics, which was the religion of the Kennedys. There had been rebellions and, to say the least, the Great Famine of 1845-52 was a controversial event. Ireland did not become a formal and recognized republic until 1949, and Northern Ireland remains a part of the United Kingdom.
As Kennedy Jr. notes this is likely why, when the family migrated to America, they decided to get into state and local politics. This included both sides of the family, the Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys. Which brought them into conflict with the Boston Brahmins, represented by the union of the Lodges and Cabots from Beacon Hill.
Joseph Kennedy, Rose Fitzgerald’s husband and JFK’s father, was a wealthy businessman who served in several appointed national positions, including as Franklin Roosevelt’s chair of the Security and Exchange Commission. But, as author Monica Wiesak—America’s Last President—illuminates, although the father was a rich capitalist he wanted his children to have a wide ranging education. For instance the brothers Joe and Jack studied under the illustrious Harold Laski at the London School of Economics. Laski was a radical Labor Party leader who was sympathetic to Marxism. What Laski did was to encourage independent thinking, not bordered by orthodoxies. Monica also describes Jack’s rather sickly childhood which allowed him much time to read and also to empathize with those who were suffering.
Joe Kennedy was appointed ambassador to England by FDR. He wanted the US to stay out of the continental war brewing between Germany on one side and England and France. Since Roosevelt wanted to get America into the war, and Kennedy was perceived as an isolationist, Joe was removed from office in 1940. Then Pearl Harbor happened and both Jack and his brother Joe joined the service. As brother-in-law Stephen Smith observes, they were both war heroes. Joe died on a dangerous air mission, and Jack saved his men after a Japanese destroyer cut their PT boat in half. JFK never forgot the natives on the island who helped him: he invited them to the White House.
This war service helps shoehorn the film into its main theme. Kennedy served as a journalist and was at the San Francisco Conference which ushered in the United Nations. He could have continued in that vocation. But he decided that he wanted to actually be in a position where he could take action. So he ran for congress and was elected at age 29. As Wiesak states, on the domestic side he was anti-monopolist and advocated for low cost housing for veterans.
By the mid-fifties, he had begun to evolve into an anti-imperialist and nationalist in foreign policy. And, I must say, the research team on this project dug up films and articles that even I had not seen before in this vein. And I have spent around ten years focusing on this very topic.
In one instance, Kennedy states that America had now stopped being a model for the Third World. So much so that we had given an opening on this to the USSR, which we should not have done. In another instance, he says that France was wrong not to cede any control in Indochina to the Vietnamese. He then adds that nationalism was more powerful than anti-communism. Kennedy had the same attitude toward the countries of the Middle East.
Appropriately, the film then cuts to David Talbot speaking about how the Dulles brothers, since they were partners at Sullivan and Cromwell, had a rather dramatically different point of view on the subject. Talbot speaks about their apogee of power under President Eisenhower. Through an NBC special from the sixties, we see Dulles being interviewed and saying that the CIA was asked to help in Vietnam. (Whatever that was supposed to mean.). The film then contrasts Dulles with young John Kennedy. And JFK speaks about how America should have followed the example of Indonesia, where the Dutch allowed for independence. JFK expands on this by saying we can avoid both imperialism and communism--but only by allowing for some kind of freedom.
Wiesak now talks about Kennedy’s landmark 1957 Algeria speech, which shocked the leaders of both political parties. And the film shows examples of the editorials which appeared, and the almost violent repercussions in newspapers like the Boston Globe and the New York Times. In fact, the latter printed direct criticism from the French about Kennedy. Jim Douglass insightfully comments that this contest between Kennedy and the Establishment has either been forgotten or covered up by historians and the media. Unlike Foster Dulles, Kennedy did not think you could bind the world together through treaties or by selling free enterprise in the Third World.
Adroitly, since Algeria was in Africa, the film now pivots to how that continent was greatly moved by Kennedy’s speech. Including how the African diplomats underwent segregation in the USA, even the ones who were in Washington to visit with him. In a real find, the film shows clips of Kennedy mentioning Africa during the campaign of 1960. Former Secret Service agent Abraham Bolden makes an appearance and states how much this appealed to African Americans.
We now turn to Cuba and Castro. Wiesak comments on how Kennedy understood that America was wrong to have backed dictator Fulgencio Batista for as long and as fully as we did. In fact, the American ambassador there was the second most powerful man on the island. This strong man syndrome in American foreign policy is commented on by author Stephen Schlesinger who co-wrote the fine book, Bitter Fruit, on the 1954 CIA overthrow in Guatemala. The pretext that Foster Dulles used, that Guatemalans now had the freedom to choose, was utterly false. It was the CIA which had now overthrown a democratically elected leader in Jacobo Arbenz and installed a dictator in Castillo Armas. The difference being that Armas would now protect the holdings of United Fruit, a client of Sullivan and Cromwell. That overthrow was followed by decades of oppression, terror and murder-- which eventually took the lives of approximately 100,000 citizens.
In a classic vignette, CBS reporter Eric Sevareid asks Allen Dulles if he has ever engaged in acts of violence, a charge which he denies. Dulles then jests about the tales in the media about the CIA using murder tactics and usurping power abroad. This segues to Joseph Kennedy’s service on the Hoover Commission. That led to the legendary Bruce/Lovett report which called for reforms to the CIA, and what Dulles had done to it.
This could not make for a better bridge to the ending. Before Kennedy could take office in 1961, the CIA was working to overthrow the democratically elected government of Patrice Lumumba in Congo. Dulles knew that Kennedy favored him over the Belgian colonialists. Lumumba was dead three days before Kennedy was inaugurated.
All in all, this is an impressive achievement in both research and execution. I was privileged to see a sneak preview. And hopefully it will be released to the public soon. It’s the kind of history that the masses should know about, and MSM hacks like Chris Wallace wish to hide.
