The Great Betrayal, Part 2

By James W. Carden

When John Kennedy got back from Indochina, he kept his promise to Seymour Topping. He began talking about the evils of European colonialism in the Third World. He also began to declare that the rebellions that were taking place, and were about to begin there, were not necessarily about the ideological factors that Democratic and Republican politicians assumed they were about. These conflicts were mainly about the desire for national independence. Consider the following:

…the Afro-American revolution of nationalism, the revolt against colonialism, the determination of people to control their national destinies….In my opinion, the tragic failure of both Republican and Democratic administrations since World War II to comprehend the nature of this revolution, and its potentialities for good and evil, has reaped a bitter harvest today—and it is by rights and by necessity a major foreign policy campaign issue that has nothing to do with anti-Communism. (Richard Mahoney; JFK: Ordeal in Africa, p. 18)

Richard Nixon used to say in his post-resignation days that he and JFK shared the same views in foreign policy. Which, even for Nixon, was a whopper. For instance, in 1954 Vice President Nixon was trying to get bipartisan support for Operation Vulture—the lifting of the siege at Dien Bien Phu with the probable use of atomic weapons. Kennedy took the floor of the Senate, and in clear terms, said that this was no way to counter a guerrilla operation where the enemy is everywhere and nowhere, an enemy of the people that “has the sympathy and covert support of the people.” (ibid., p. 16)

Kennedy kept on making speeches like this at every opportunity. He was also biding his time to make a broadside assault on the Achesonian orthodoxies that had subsumed both parties. For 13 months he studied up on the subject of American foreign policy since the beginning of World War II, which included FDR’s speeches. He had his wife translate articles from French and Spanish. Then, as Carden mentions, he unleashed an all-out, both houses be damned attack that spared no one. This was the famous July 2, 1957 Algeria speech. The French were trying to stop a rebellion in their colony on the north coast of Africa. Kennedy again assailed any American support for what the French were doing there, actions which produced torture and atrocities on both sides. He reminded everyone how quickly they had forgotten the lessons of Dien Bien Phu just three years before. He predicted that the current French effort would fail just as the previous one did. And America should not in any way be supporting it. America should be pushing Paris to the negotiating table, which would help save the French nation, which was splitting apart over the conflict. Once that was done, we should then begin to free Africa. (The entire address is in The Strategy of Peace, edited by Allan Nevins, pp. 66-80)

II

This remarkable speech was a shock to the system, one which Acheson attacked. He was later berated by Jackie Kennedy at Union Station for doing so. (Mahoney, pp. 20-21) But what the speech indicated is that Kennedy was trying to get back to a Rooseveltian foreign policy. That was going to be harder to do since President Eisenhower had soundly defeated Adlai Stevenson in two elections. Eisenhower’s Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles, was perhaps even worse than Dean Acheson. That tendency was accentuated by the fact that, through Foster Dulles, Eisenhower had appointed his brother Allen as CIA Director. Far from advocating independence in the Third World, this team practiced covert action there to overthrow and even assassinate foreign leaders, e.g., Iran, Guatemala, Indonesia, Congo. The problem was that all these foreign leaders had been democratically elected.

In Kennedy’s brief presidency, he tried to correct some of these brutal tendencies. For instance, in Robert Dreyfuss’ book Devil’s Game, he shows that Kennedy seriously thought of replacing the Shah of Iran. Arthur Schlesinger advised him to go beyond Roosevelt’s Good Neighbor Policy and set up an Alliance for Progress system to aid democratic countries in Latin America through low-cost loans and outright grants. As scholars like Bradley Simpson and Greg Poulgrain have demonstrated, Kennedy deliberately reversed previous policy in Indonesia and tried to attain a positive relationship with Sukarno. In Congo, as Richard Mahoney has written, Kennedy was preparing to back the democratically elected Patrice Lumumba, not knowing that the CIA was working on assassinating him before JFK took office. John Newman has proven that Kennedy was never going to commit combat troops to Vietnam and was planning on withdrawing from Indochina. And many scholars have shown that Kennedy was working on a détente with both the Soviets and Cuba at the time of his assassination. His death shocked and saddened Fidel Castro and Nikita Khrushchev. These actions were all Rooseveltian in nature.

As Carden observes, Kennedy’s cabinet did not always align with his views. As Arthur Schlesinger showed in his book, A Thousand Days, Kennedy did not always get his first choice, e.g., Robert Lovett, Bill Fulbright and Abe Ribicoff. But Kennedy became aware of the problem rather soon. Before approving the Bay of Pigs invasion, he called in his cabinet plus some of the Joint Chiefs, and Fulbright. They were briefed on the operation. Except for Fulbright, they voted for it. (Robert McNamara, In Retrospect, p. 26) The disastrous result shocked Kennedy. He deeply resented the advice and consent he was given. After this, he turned to his brother Robert as his closest foreign policy advisor.

Kennedy’s big mistake was, of course, in choosing Lyndon Johnson as his Vice President. Not only did Bobby Kennedy despise the man, but Johnson was very much closer to Harry Truman and Dean Acheson in his view of the Cold War and America’s role in the Third World. Kennedy’s relatively brief respite was now all but forgotten. Johnson tried to say that he was simply continuing in Kennedy’s footsteps, which he was not. With Dean Rusk, who was now acting as a real Secretary of State, Johnson escalated the Vietnam War to heights that were almost beyond imagining. They were even too much for National Security Advisor McGeorge Bundy, who decided to leave. The only real dissident was Under Secretary George Ball. Carden states that Rusk was, at heart, a real follower of Acheson. And Acheson was now saying that Roosevelt was gulled at Yalta and the Cold War was inevitable. (Carden, p. 46). Which, of course, ignores Kennedy’s Peace Speech at American University.

III

The next Democratic president, Jimmy Carter, had two serious problems. One was his choice of Zbigniew Brzezinski as National Security Advisor. Secretary of State Cy Vance and Brzezinski feuded a lot in Carter’s administration. As Carden notes, Vance was of the Rooseveltian school and Brzezinski was an Achesonian. The latter turned out to be a much more skilled bureaucratic infighter than Vance. And he ended up having more face time with Carter, and gradually more influence. Brezinski had been an early supporter of the Vietnam War and was in the totalitarian school about the USSR. In other words, there was no hope of reform there. (Carden, p. 112)

The second problem for Carter was the formation of the Committee on the Present Danger (CPD). Paul Nitze was the foundational leader of that body. Nitze did not like the Richard Nixon/Henry Kissinger attempt at détente with Moscow. And he wanted no part of Carter’s attempts at arms control. So the CPD, which got a lot of publicity at the time, began trumpeting just how powerful the Soviet threat really was and how this was being discounted. Needless to say, once the USSR invaded Afghanistan, this was the icing on the cake for them. But as Carden notes, it was really Brzezinski who had precipitated this by giving Carter advice to aid the Mujahideen in Afghanistan through the CIA. This was meant to upset the Soviet regime there, knowing it would elicit a reaction from Moscow. (Carden, p. 115)

It was also Brzezinski who advised Carter to stand by the Shah of Iran, as opposed to advice by George Ball that his position was untenable. (ibid., p. 117) Carden writes about the terrible advice given to Carter in letting the Shah into the USA for medical treatment. But I wish he had included the role of John McCloy in all this. Kai Bird, in his biography of McCloy, described what he did to influence Carter’s advisors on the issue and eventually corner Carter. Cy Vance then resigned over the decision to approve Operation Iron Claw, the rescue mission for the hostages in the American embassy. (Carden, p. 118) He predicted it would backfire, and it did.

This disaster cinched the victory of Ronald Reagan in 1980. And now 32 members of the CPD joined the new administration. (Carden, p. 107) Many of them were former Democrats, like Jeane Kirkpatrick, Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz and Elliot Abrams. All four of these came from the office of Democratic Senator Henry Jackson, who was the prototypical Achesonian.

After Carter’s blowout loss, many Democrats decided it was time to move rightward. This movement was led by people like Al From, who formed the Democratic Leadership Council, a member of which was Governor Bill Clinton. Another leader of the move to the right was Martin Peretz, who owned The New Republic and was a rabid Zionist.

IV

Carden sees the Clintons as pure Achesonians. And, in fact, there can be no argument that Madeleine Albright, who came into that administration on Hillary’s request, was a dyed-in-the-wool Acheson acolyte. She was first the ambassador to the UN and then was Secretary of State. As she once said, her mindset was Munich, where Neville Chamberlain gave in to Adolf Hitler on the Sudetenland. (Carden, p. 132) She had a powerful influence on President Clinton’s decisions to intervene in Bosnia and Kosovo. She was also part of the movement to try and declare that the rise of Boris Yeltsin in Russia was a triumphal moment for the USA and we should take advantage of it. Therefore, this was the beginning of the encroachment into Eastern Europe.

In particular, with Albright’s expansion of NATO eastward. Under her influence, Bill Clinton brought into NATO Albright’s native Czech Republic, Hungary and then Poland. What is amazing about this is that the Warsaw Pact had been dissolved in the summer of 1991. So who could this eastward advance be aimed at, except the USSR? In fact, President George H. W. Bush had been advised by George Kennan not to take advantage of German unification and not to march forward or intervene in Ukraine. (Carden, p. 146)

President Clinton altered that policy. Diplomats like Strobe Talbott and Victoria Nuland were given permission to inform the breakaway republics that they would gain American support and America would aid them in their disputes with Moscow and each other. This began in 1993. In other words. Clinton was now going more Achesonian than George H. W. Bush. And he did so in less than a year. (Carden, p. 147) Even though Yeltsin had collapsed the Russian economy and was literally shelling his opponents, the Clinton administration did all it could to keep him in power. And Nuland ended up spending five billion in Ukraine and Moldova. (pp. 152-53) This kind of faulty vision led to two things in the long run. First, the rise of Vladimir Putin, and second, the war in Ukraine. Both of these events could and should have been foreseen.

There was really no change in this under President Barack Obama. Because he appointed Hillary Clinton as his Secretary of State. And she, along with his Vice President Joe Biden, had voted for the war in Iraq. Unlike, for example, Senator Ted Kennedy, who declined. In a speech at Johns Hopkins, Kennedy had said he had not seen evidence that Saddam was “…on the threshold of acquiring nuclear weapons.” Kennedy was also bothered by the fact that this would be a preemptive war, and the grounds for preemption were not solid. (Carden, p. 173) George Kennan said about the votes of Clinton and Biden in this regard that the failure of the Democrats to stand up to George W. Bush was a “…shabby and shameful reaction.” (Carden, p. 174)

But yet, by appointing Clinton as his Secretary of State, Obama allowed just about the same thing to happen in Libya. When, in fact, there were other options available. After all, the Libyan leader, Moammar Gaddafi, was willing to negotiate. (Middle East Forum, 11/17/16 story by Gary Gambill) His son tried to talk to Hillary Clinton, who declined to take his call. (Carden, p. 196) Atrocity stories were created. In spite of all this, Obama sided with Clinton, NSC aide Samantha Power and UN Ambassador Susan Rice. Therefore, NATO bombing proceeded with frequency and ferocity over, of all places, an African nation. And this ended up in another debacle. Libya descended into an anarchic state; an operational hub for ISIS where slave trading was now practiced. (ibid)

To be fair to Obama, he did arrange the Iranian nuclear energy deal which foreclosed them from creating an atomic weapon. And he did try to restart relations with Cuba, and arms negotiations with Russia. (Carden, p. 207) But a big problem with Obama’s Hope and Change pledge is that he enlisted many people from Bill Clinton’s presidency. In addition to Hillary, there was Leon Panetta, Susan Rice, Tom Donilon, and Rahm Emanuel. (Carden, p. 182) Hillary Clinton, who, for all intents and purposes, was a foreign policy neoconservative, also recommended military intervention in Syria. Obama liked to boast about how he had not done so. But he did approve the giant CIA operation against Bashar al-Assad. During which America sided with radical Islamic fundamentalists. Eventually, in 2024, Assad was overthrown by a former Al Qaeda operative. One year later, the massacre of Syrian Alawites began. Also, Obama failed to end American involvement in Afghanistan. (p. 184)

To his credit, Joe Biden did end it. But Biden brought in Jake Sullivan, who was Deputy Chief of Staff to Hillary Clinton, as his National Security Advisor. Biden’s Secretary of State, Antony Blinken, was in the State Department and on the NSC during Bill Clinton’s presidency. Blinken was a staffer on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and while there, advocated for the invasion of Iraq. President Biden met with Putin exactly one time. According to the Inspector General report on Operation Atlantic Resolve, under Biden, the USA sent Ukraine 127 billion dollars in aid. Before leaving office, the Biden administration also granted Ukraine a 20 billion-dollar loan.

As Carden notes, Biden was converted to being an all-out backer of Israel by Henry Jackson. (p. 109). Therefore, Biden barely complained at all about the atrocity going on in Gaza. Although he did give pause over the destructive power of 2000 pound bombs the US transferred to Tel Aviv. (The Guardian, AP report of 9/15/2026)

What makes this so notable is that Biden moved a bust of Robert Kennedy into the Oval Office and a portrait of John Kennedy into his study. As many have commented, JFK was really the last president to try to stand up to Israel. Carden’s point is that these remnants are a part of the Democratic Party’s great betrayal of him and Franklin Roosevelt. This is a pungent and ultimately sad book about what has happened to turn Roosevelt’s vision and Kennedy’s Peace Speech into nothing but distant memories.

Dean Acheson, who had no great love for JFK, must be smiling.