Looking Back: All His Bright Light Gone - Part 2
Author Peter McKenna notes that in preparation for his race for the Senate in 1952, Kennedy visited each of the 39 cities and 312 towns in Massachusetts, something that no other politician had done before. He would visit 2 or 3 of them per day. He never turned down an invitation, and he did not charge, even for expenses. He would stay in motels, shave in bowling alleys, and gulp down cheeseburgers and milkshakes between stops. This was done just for exposure, but also to build a state network of volunteers. (p. 106). Kennedy realized that trying to defeat GOP incumbent Henry Cabot Lodge would be a tall order. Lodge had been in that office since 1936.
But Lodge underestimated Kennedy. Part of this was because the Democratic presidential candidate, Harry Truman, was retiring. Therefore, in these kinds of elections, the out-of-power candidate’s party usually benefits. But also, Lodge decided to be a manager of Dwight Eisenhower’s campaign for the White House. A third factor was that Bobby Kennedy became JFK’s campaign manager, and he developed extensive files on local leaders. Eventually appointing almost 300 people as campaign secretaries.
McKenna does an adequate job of covering this 1952 campaign. But I think he missed, or misplaced, an important point. In order to raise his international profile, JFK took a journey to Asia in 1951, most importantly to French Indochina. Later on, McKenna deals with this briefly in his chapter on Vietnam. But there he writes that it took place in 1954. To my knowledge, I could not locate any information that placed Senator Kennedy in Indochina that year. So he must be referring to the 1951 journey there with his brother Robert.
McKenna should have made much more of this trip. In his milestone book JFK:Ordeal In Africa, Richard Mahoney spends several pages on this subject as part of the run-up to the senatorial campaign against Lodge. He does that because it formed a watershed in Kennedy’s views on foreign policy. In two important interviews that Kennedy had in Saigon, with journalist Seymour Topping and diplomat Edmund Gullion, Kennedy came away rather unglued. They both told him that France would not win the war under any circumstances, with or without American aid. And if America tried to take over that effort, America would lose also. So he now began to think that America should not be backing the attempt by France to maintain a colonial empire in Indochina. But beyond that, he now began to see the whole issue of Third World conflicts as nationalistic in nature and therefore fundamentally anti-colonialist. (Mahoney, pp. 14-17)
Kennedy won the 1952 election by 70,000 votes of 2.4 million cast. (McKenna, p. 109) But by not accenting this subject, McKenna loses the origin point of what led JFK to become a leading light on the Democratic side in foreign policy. (John T. Shaw, JFK in the Senate, p. 110) That 1951 event also likely influenced Kennedy to hire Ted Sorenson in early 1953 as a speech writer. After all, Ted was a pacifist and had registered with his draft board as a conscientious objector. (p. 112).
II
The Topping/Gullion meetings also led to Kennedy railing against the John Foster Dulles/Nixon scheme to save the siege of Dien Bien Phu with Operation Vulture in 1954. (Mahoney, p. 16). And it clearly led to Kennedy’s landmark speech on Algeria in 1957. McKenna does not mention Dien Bien Phu or Vulture, and he only mentions Algeria in passing. (p. 156)
In my view, Kennedy’s Algeria speech cannot be underestimated or slighted. Senator Kennedy worked on the speech for over a year and had his wife translate articles from the French. JFK directly went after Vice-President Nixon, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles and President Eisenhower for backing the French effort in North Africa to stop an anti-colonial rebellion. He even said that what we were seeing in Algeria was a rerun of the French collapse in Vietnam just three years prior. We were on the wrong side then, and we were doing the same now.
That bold and powerful address created a firestorm of controversy. The Establishment rose up in arms. There were 138 editorials clipped by Kennedy’s staff, and 90 opposed the speech. (Mahoney, p. 21) Even leading Democrats lined up in opposition, e.g., former Secretary of State Dean Acheson.
Kennedy was so chagrined by the reaction that he called up his father and asked him if he had made a mistake. Joe Kennedy told his son he didn’t know how lucky he was. Because this strife was going to continue, and a few months from now, everyone was going to acknowledge how right he was. Which is what happened. Five months later, Kennedy was on the cover of Time magazine. The story inside was titled “Man out Front”.
Kennedy was not just correct in his analysis of both Vietnam and Algeria. Either wittingly or unwittingly, he was doing something astutely political. As British commentator Alistair Cooke wrote, Kennedy:
… has made himself the Democrat whom the President must ‘do something about,’ the one presidential hopeful the Republicans will delight to scorn. It is a form of running martyrdom that Senators Humphrey and Johnson may come to envy. (Mahoney, p. 29)
In October of 1957, Kennedy wrote a long essay along similar lines for Foreign Affairs magazine. That story was titled “A Democrat Looks at Foreign Policy”. By that very title, Kennedy was outlining an alternative view of foreign policy and the Cold War for his own party. One which was opposed to the Manichean world view of Foster Dulles. He argued that America should engage itself more with the nationalist movements of Africa and Asia.
But yet Nixon and Eisenhower only paid lip service to this. As writers like Ronald Rakove and Philip Muehlenbeck have written, they opposed nationalists Gamel Abdel Nasser in Egypt, Achmed Sukarno in Indonesia, and Patrice Lumumba in Congo. They attempted to overthrow Sukarno in 1958 and, in 1960, they did the same with Lumumba. None of the three men was a communist, which was the excuse used by them and the CIA for their subterfuge.
This is all very important. One reason being that the MSM has attempted to cover all this up with a rigidity that is both systematic and categorical. I have often said that this is even more extreme than the attempts to conceal the true circumstances of Kennedy’s assassination. But, as we shall see, McKenna would not agree with that. Since he ends up being in the Warren Commission camp on that issue.
III
About the 1960 election, McKenna writes that the editorial boards across America favored Nixon by a 6-1 margin. (p. 118) In trying to explain how Kennedy eked out a victory, he chalks it up to the phone call he made to Coretta Scott King when her husband was in prison in Georgia, and secondly, Kennedy’s performance in the televised debates. He also mentions the usefulness of Lyndon Johnson in winning Texas.
In keeping with his overall theme, McKenna also quotes one of the first things Kennedy said in his first debate against VP Nixon:
I know that there are those who say that we want to turn everything over to the government. I don’t at all. I want the individuals to meet their responsibilities and I want the States to meet their responsibilities. But I think there is also a national responsibility. The argument against government has been used against every piece of social legislation in the last 25 years….I don’t believe in big government, but I believe in effective governmental action, and I think that’s the only way that the United States is going to maintain its freedom; it’s the only way that we’re going to move ahead. (p. 121)
That message, plus Kennedy’s appealing demeanor, and Nixon’s underestimation of the pull of television, were all instrumental in Kennedy’s very narrow win. He won by a much more comfortable margin, though, in the electoral college: 303 to 219 votes.
McKenna spends a chapter describing the origins of the Cold War, tracing it back to the Russian Revolution of 1917. He then uses an Eisenhower speech from April 1954, showing how he brought to prominence the domino theory. I wish that McKenna had noted something rather important about the timing of Ike’s speech. He made it the day after Kennedy made a long speech about Indochina in the Senate. Among Kennedy’s remarks were the following:
To pour money, material, and men into the jungles of Indochina without at least a remote prospect of victory would be dangerously futile….No amount of American military assistance in Indochina can conquer an enemy which is everywhere and at the same time nowhere, ‘an enemy of the people’ which has the sympathy and covert support of the people. (Mahoney, p. 16)
This challenged the basis of the establishment view of the Cold War. Kennedy was saying that in the Third World, the battles were really about nationalism and independence, and not about free enterprise vs communism.
In his youthful studies of how government should work, Kennedy had concluded that there were three main guidelines he needed to follow:
- He had to find a way to rise above the Cold War
- He had to revitalize the economy
- He would honor the civil rights of all citizens
Two things stymied him from getting off on the right foot with the first issue: 1) the Bay of Pigs, and 2) the Berlin Crisis. (pp. 144-51) In the latter, Kennedy directly intervened as the wall was being built in order to stop a shooting tank battle from breaking out at the Brandenburg Gate. (James Douglass, JFK and the Unspeakable, pp. 110-13) The Bay of Pigs was much more nefarious.
First, unlike what McKenna writes, Kennedy did not deceive about direct American intervention in Cuba on April 12, 1961. (p. 150) Kennedy saw the mission as one of American support and training for a Cuban exile mission. There was to be no direct American involvement in the combat mission. McKenna then writes that everything went wrong. As most revisionist summaries of the action now conclude, that was the hidden agenda of both CIA Director Allen Dulles and Director of Plans Dick Bissell. (Douglass, pp. 14-17). They knew the invasion would fail and were counting on Kennedy sending in the Navy to save it.
To give McKenna his due, he does say that it was possible the CIA “purposely provided Kennedy with a flawed battle plan.” (McKenna, p. 151) To me, the evidence is clear and convincing that such was the case.
IV
McKenna titles Chapter 19 “Getting out of Vietnam”. He now brings up one of the anti-colonialist speeches that Kennedy made in the Senate in 1954 against any kind of direct American involvement in Indochina to bail out France. (p. 167) He then notes some of the things Kennedy tried to do to help boost Ngo Dinh Diem, the American chosen stand-in as the leader of the manufactured country of South Vietnam. He also notes the role of Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge in the ARVN plot to assassinate Diem and his brother Nhu in 1963. (p. 169)
At this point, more than halfway through the chapter, he brings in Kennedy’s intent to withdraw through John Newman’s book JFK and Vietnam. He refers to NSAM 263, which McKenna says called for a withdrawal of a thousand advisors by the end of 1963--to be followed by a complete withdrawal of advisers by the end of 1965.
NSAM 263 is based upon the Taylor/McNamara Report, which, as some have noted, was actually written in Washington, not Saigon. (Douglass, p. 187) It is really the report that calls for the eventual withdrawal of all advisors. Oddly, since he largely relies on Newman, I wonder why he left out the importance of NSAM 111, which halted any talk of the insertion of combat troops, and the key role of John Kenneth Galbraith in initiating the withdrawal plan through Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara. (Newman, Second Edition, p. 140, p.235)
The next three chapters of the book deal with Kennedy’s economic planning and his civil rights program. In the former, the author relies largely on the work of Donald Gibson, who wrote what I think is the best volume on the subject, Battling Wall Street. Like Gibson, he begins with Kennedy’s now-famous showdown with the steel companies in April of 1962. He does a decent enough job in summarizing that very important face-off between Kennedy and big business. (pp. 176-83)
In the following chapter, he uses a quote by Gibson, which is a good synopsis of what Kennedy’s belief about economic growth should be based upon:
…that wealth should be acquired through productive and generally beneficial investments. He took a dim view of profits accruing from speculation, purely financial transactions, and inheritance. …What he did try to do with everything from global investment patterns to tax breaks for individuals was to reshape laws and policies so that the power of property and the search for wealth would not end up destroying rather than creating economic prosperity for the country. In this, he was very clear, consistent and coherent. (p. 189)
McKenna mentions two of Kennedy’s most important economic advisors, James Tobin and Walter Heller. He does not mention a key figure in JFK’s banking program, namely James Saxon, Comptroller of the Currency. (Jim Marrs, Crossfire, p. 255)
In his chapter on civil rights, he begins with the ersatz adage that Kennedy came later to civil rights. In 1957, JFK made a speech in Mississippi where he said that the Brown vs Board decision must be obeyed. (Harry Golden, Mr. Kennedy and the Negroes, p. 95) Try to find such a statement by either President Eisenhower or Vice-President Nixon. In fact, most authors on the issue –Jack Bass, Carl Brauer--consider Eisenhower a complete failure on the civil rights issue.
Right out of the gate, the Kennedys attacked two problems that Eisenhower had allowed to fester, in defiance of Brown v. Board. This was the abandonment of public education in Prince Edward County, Virginia; and the failure of the New Orleans schools to follow a judge’s order for desegregation. Attorney General Robert Kennedy immediately faced both problems, going as far as indicting the Secretary of Education in Louisiana. (Jack Bass, Unlikely. Heroes, p. 135) At the same time, President Kennedy signed the first of two affirmative action bills—the first of their kind in American history. (Irving Bernstein, Promises Kept, p. 52)
I won’t go through all the epochal achievements the Kennedys made in civil rights. Many of them before 1963. I will just repeat what I said about the adduced record: President Kennedy did more in three years on that issue than FDR, Truman, and Eisenhower did in three decades. (Click here https://www.kennedysandking.com/reviews/the-kennedys-and-civil-rights-how-the-msm-continues-to-distort-history-part-3)
V
In my view, the most interesting part of McKenna’s book is in the closing chapters. It is here that he describes the right-wing forces that were opposed to Kennedy, like publisher Ted Dealey of the Dallas Morning News. (p. 210) He then shows how these kinds of forces took hold of many presidencies that followed: Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan, particularly. That, as a result, Kennedy’s idea of a democratic republic guided by the common good now became more or less an oligarchical model that would go to war at the drop of a hat.
He correctly states that for Nixon, the Vietnam War was a personal issue, and:
Those who wanted to end the fighting became his enemy. He deluded himself into thinking that ending the war would be a sign of weakness, a stain on the nation’s honor. And he added anti-war activists to the list of enemies that were out to get him. (p. 236)
Nixon was willing to polarize the country over Vietnam. McKenna points out the use of his ‘Silent Majority’ speech against the protestors as an example of this. He also adds the shootings at Kent State, which Nixon refused to condemn, and his action after the My Lai Massacre, where he had Lt. Calley--originally sentenced to life in prison--placed under house arrest. (p. 239) Nixon then expanded the war into Cambodia and Laos.
McKenna terms Ronald Reagan’s economic plan as the final blow against what Kennedy was trying to build and shape. Reagan castigated the poor by promoting myths of Chicago Welfare Queens and cutting taxes through his supply-side economics on those who could most afford to pay them. (McKenna should have sourced Timothy Noah’s comparison article in The New Republic, October 11, 212)
McKenna then speculates that it was these kinds of economic policies that resulted in the demonization of government. And the near collapse of the American economy in 2007. They have also resulted in the shrinkage of unions and the middle class. While special interests control and dominate the economy. He contrasts this with a rally Kennedy had in New York in 1962. There, he talked about the need for his plan for senior citizens’ health insurance.
McKenna ends the book by saying that it is a sure thing that all three shots fired at Kennedy came from the 6th floor of the Texas School Book Depository. And that both JFK and Connally were hit by the same bullet. He then quotes William Manchester about conspiracy: “…unfortunately, there is no evidence whatever that there was one.” (pp. 280-81)
If the reader can excuse those last two pieces of nonsense, this is not a bad book. It is at least an honest attempt to assess the achievements of President Kennedy, which were manifold. Especially in light of the fact that he was only in office for three years. But in my view, the truly comprehensive and detailed volume, or volumes, on the subject have yet to be written.
