[Peace-discuss] JFK Lies, JFK Truths

[David Green]

1. An editorial from today’s Tribune. Robert Dallek is
the biggest perpetrator of the myth that JFK would
have gotten us out of Vietnam, addressed by Chomsky
below. Our own Mark Leff contributes his share to the
obscene mythology about Cuba, also addressed by
Chomsky.

2. Chomsky: Cuba in Cross-hairs

3. Chomsky: Rethinking Camelot

JFK's 1,000 days
Chicago Tribune Editorial

November 21, 2003

He would be 86 now and, judging by the physical
evolution of his brother Ted, more round and
full-faced than the trim, tailored figure that
millions of Americans recall. Instead, John F. Kennedy
survives only as that memory, a youthful image extant
solely on film, with warm eyes dancing and jutting jaw
set. That image was forever locked in place 40 years
ago this Saturday when shots from an assassin's rifle
ended a young president's captivating, turbulent life
at the age of 46.

Having died with his agenda unfulfilled, the nation's
35th president is recalled more vividly today for the
manner of his death than for the 1,000-plus days he
served in the White House.

Even with the advantage of hindsight, it is difficult
to measure the man against the myth. History still is
mulling his record, uncertain whether to declare him a
president of great accomplishments--or a sentimental
favorite whose accomplishments add up to . . . not
much.

That is an unfair fate. It is driven by Americans'
overweening focus on issues domestic rather than
foreign--and by our collective ability, even
eagerness, to forget what was arguably the most
dangerous era this nation ever faced.

By some measures, Kennedy's truncated term did possess
the gossamer, seemingly unsubstantial sheen of Camelot
incarnate. In truth, though, his short presidency was
shaped by confrontations that, none of us should ever
forget, threatened to tear apart the world. More,
probably, than any president before or since, JFK was
forced to peer deep into the very real prospect of a
nuclear holocaust. He foresaw a brief and devastating
war that would have joined the United States and the
Soviet Union in history's most tragic duel.

It is to Kennedy's credit, although not to his credit
alone--oddly enough, Soviet leader Nikita Krushchev
also played a role--that just such a debacle didn't
occur.

What's also remarkable is that Kennedy was able to
cope with his era's international crises despite the
serious physical maladies--not to mention his reckless
penchant for womanizing--that plagued his years of
public life. He must have wondered privately what
would happen if his medical afflictions--or a scandal
of his own making--had debilitated him during one of
the hothouse moments he faced. "Kennedy made a bet
that he could be an effective president [despite his
problems]," presidential scholar Robert Dallek, author
of the Kennedy biography "An Unfinished Life," said
last month during an appearance at Elmhurst College.
"He won the bet. He carried it off."

- - -

To almost no one's surprise.

John F. Kennedy had a way of prevailing. His heroic
efforts in 1943 to rally and rescue men who served
under him on a naval patrol torpedo boat after it was
rammed by a Japanese destroyer in the Solomon Islands
came only after the Army rejected his effort to join
that service because of his weak back.

After graduating from Harvard, he worked briefly as a
reporter in San Francisco covering the creation of the
United Nations. But he soon headed home to Boston to
start the political career that had been planned for
his older brother Joseph, a casualty of World War II.

JFK was elected three times to the U.S. House and
twice to the Senate. In 1960 he became the youngest
man ever elected president. This despite fears among
anti-Catholic bigots that if Kennedy reached the White
House, the pope would have an office in the basement.

Kennedy is remembered best for urging Americans to ask
not what their country could do for them, but what
they could do for their country. Yet his inaugural
address, warning Americans of "a long, twilight
struggle" against tyranny, focused almost exclusively
on foreign affairs--the realm in which his four most
dangerous challenges erupted.

First, shortly after he took office in 1961, was the
Bay of Pigs, a failed, CIA-backed invasion by
anti-Castro Cuban exiles that became an instant
international embarrassment. Next came a crisis over
Western access to free West Berlin, a dispute with the
Soviets that precipitated their construction of the
infamous Wall to keep East Berliners from fleeing
communist rule.

A year later, Kennedy was shown aerial reconnaissance
photos demonstrating that the Soviets had constructed
missile bases in Cuba--the better to launch nuclear
warheads against the U.S. Kennedy feared that if he
authorized an invasion of Cuba to take out the
missiles, the Soviets might well fire them at the
eastern U.S.--and also sweep from East Germany through
West Berlin. He instead slapped a quarantine on the
shipment of offensive weapons to Cuba. For a week the
world waited to see if war would follow. In the end,
Krushchev blinked.

Perhaps Kennedy's most enduring (if, today, least
celebrated) success came in 1963, when the U.S., the
Soviet Union and Great Britain signed a treaty to
block atmospheric nuclear tests. It was a triumph of
diplomacy after years of U.S. wrangling with the
Soviets over nuclear tests; it was also the first
major restraint on nuclear expansionism since the rise
of the Cold War. In brutally frank terms it was, as
Kennedy told the nation in a televised address, a
seminal effort "to check the world's slide toward
final annihilation."

But his successes in the international realm remain
eclipsed today by the more heartwarming uplift he gave
to the psyche of a nation weary of those same world
tensions. Kennedy summoned his fellow citizens to a
"New Frontier." It was a frontier in which Peace Corps
volunteers would carry American values and kindness to
the poorest corners of the Earth, and in which space
exploration would affirm U.S. resolve not to cede
technical superiority to the Soviets.

A torch had been passed to a new generation--and it
was JFK who now wielded that torch, a leader
thoroughly mesmerizing those he led. The president and
his photogenic family so dominated the nation's
popular culture that a grumpy California woman
complained to Life magazine about one such portrayal:
"It is the picture of a happy family with a new
toy--us." This was, in short, a time when a camera
captured young children dancing lightly on the carpet
of the Oval Office as their daddy clapped in delight.

This is the president Americans of a certain age
recall: affable, beloved by the camera, eager to build
both world peace and a better life for the poor and
the downtrodden among his countrymen. "Kennedy is
remembered for having given the country a hope, a
vision, a better time, a better day," biographer
Dallek said at Elmhurst College. "He spoke to our
better angels."

- - -

Dallek's generous view goes against the grain of other
historians who acknowledge the appeal of JFK but don't
think his record as president marks him as more than
mediocre. The trend through the last decades of the
20th Century was for historians to criticize Kennedy
as a beloved figure to whom Americans tend to give
more credit than is due.

That argument isn't entirely unfounded. From a war on
poverty to education to the creation of Medicare and
certainly in the realm of civil rights, initiatives
Kennedy discussed with ardor and optimism didn't
actually come to be until his successor, Lyndon
Johnson, pushed them through Congress.

Johnson, the consummate insider, knew how to browbeat
the Congress--how, for example, to invoke the popular
memory of Kennedy as a cudgel against southern
senators who sought to block civil rights legislation
in particular.

Kennedy had spoken passionately about civil
rights--most memorably in June of 1963 after he
watched television footage of dogs loosed against
African-Americans rallying in the streets of
Birmingham, Ala. But he also worried that too rapid an
assault against segregation would alienate not just
the South, but its representatives in Congress whom he
needed to help pass a wide array of legislation. As a
result, Kennedy is remembered--probably accurately--as
a president who simply didn't do enough to resolve
what he clearly understood to be a moral crisis facing
his country.

That said, this focus on domestic priorities that
Kennedy did or didn't master misses a larger point
that is beginning to get more attention from
historians, says Mark Leff, a professor who teaches
modern American history at the University of Illinois.
That emerging analysis can be boiled down to one
sentence: In a world fraught with genuine peril,
Kennedy did manage to stave off nuclear Armageddon.

He did that, unlike his predecessor, by confronting
rather than soothing the Soviet bear. "Kennedy was
more willing than Dwight Eisenhower to court crises,"
Leff says. "He was willing to take on these crises in
an activist way. So it's not a coincidence that so
many crises occurred during his presidency. He saw
himself as calibrated, measured, so able to manage the
crises that he would never have to shrink from one."

So we can argue, 40 years after his death, about
whether future generations will view JFK as a domestic
underachiever or as a maestro of Cold War showdowns
with the Soviets.

Leff thinks history ultimately will reward Kennedy for
both his diplomacy and his spirit. "Here, before so
many things fell apart later in the 1960s, was a
president with this confidence, this sense of
promise," he says. "That's how we Americans like to
see ourselves and our leaders. Kennedy avoided nuclear
war but he also spoke of sacrifice, of activism. He
inflated our expectations of what we could do. Here
was a resolute, glamorous, articulate, humorous leader
who gave us a vision of what we can become."

That is an assessment Leff expects to survive the
generation of Americans--essentially those over age 50
today--who have first-hand recollections of the magic
that Kennedy worked and the world peace he helped
preserve.

Forty years after an assassin broke a nation's heart,
the story of that magic, and that heartbreak, is so
entrenched in American culture that it is likely to
transcend time. But the 86-year-old John F. Kennedy,
having had 40 more years to work the magic, is but an
opportunity missed.


Cuba in the cross-hairs:
A near half-century of terror  (excerpt)
Noam Chomsky

Operation Mongoose was "the centerpiece of American
policy toward Cuba from late 1961 until the onset of
the 1962 missile crisis," Mark White reports, the
program on which the Kennedy brothers "came to pin
their hopes." Robert Kennedy informed the CIA that the
Cuban problem carries "the top priority in the United
States Government -- all else is secondary -- no time,
no effort, or manpower is to be spared" in the effort
to overthrow the Castro regime. The chief of Mongoose
operations, Edward Lansdale, provided a timetable
leading to "open revolt and overthrow of the Communist
regime" in October 1962. The "final definition" of the
program recognized that "final success will require
decisive U.S. military intervention," after terrorism
and subversion had laid the basis. The implication is
that US military intervention would take place in
October 1962 -- when the missile crisis erupted. 
 
In February 1962, the Joint Chiefs of Staff approved a
plan more extreme than Schlesinger's: to use "covert
means . . . to lure or provoke Castro, or an
uncontrollable subordinate, into an overt hostile
reaction against the United States; a reaction which
would in turn create the justification for the US to
not only retaliate but destroy Castro with speed,
force and determination." In March, at the request of
the DOD Cuba Project, the Joint Chiefs of Staff
submitted a memorandum to Defense Secretary Robert
McNamara outlining "pretexts which they would consider
would provide justification for US military
intervention in Cuba." The plan would be undertaken if
"a credible internal revolt is impossible of
attainment during the next 9-10 months," but before
Cuba could establish relations with Russia that might
"directly involve the Soviet Union." 

A prudent resort to terror should avoid risk to the
perpetrator. 

The March plan was to construct "seemingly unrelated
events to camouflage the ultimate objective and create
the necessary impression of Cuban rashness and
responsibility on a large scale, directed at other
countries as well as the United States," placing the
US "in the apparent position of suffering defensible
grievances [and developing] an international image of
Cuban threat to peace in the Western Hemisphere."
Proposed measures included blowing up a US ship in
Guantanamo Bay to create "a 'Remember the Maine'
incident," publishing casualty lists in US newspapers
to "cause a helpful wave of national indignation,"
portraying Cuban investigations as "fairly compelling
evidence that the ship was taken under attack,"
developing a "Communist Cuban terror campaign [in
Florida] and even in Washington," using Soviet bloc
incendiaries for cane-burning raids in neighboring
countries, shooting down a drone aircraft with a
pretense that it was a charter flight carrying college
students on a holiday, and other similarly ingenious
schemes -- not implemented, but another sign of the
"frantic" and "savage" atmosphere that prevailed. 

On August 23 the president issued National Security
Memorandum No. 181, "a directive to engineer an
internal revolt that would be followed by U.S.
military intervention," involving "significant U.S.
military plans, maneuvers, and movement of forces and
equipment" that were surely known to Cuba and Russia.
Also in August, terrorist attacks were intensified,
including speedboat strafing attacks on a Cuban
seaside hotel "where Soviet military technicians were
known to congregate, killing a score of Russians and
Cubans"; attacks on British and Cuban cargo ships; the
contamination of sugar shipments; and other atrocities
and sabotage, mostly carried out by Cuban exile
organizations permitted to operate freely in Florida.
A few weeks later came "the most dangerous moment in
human history." 

"A bad press in some friendly countries" 

Terrorist operations continued through the tensest
moments of the missile crisis. They were formally
canceled on October 30, several days after the Kennedy
and Khrushchev agreement, but went on nonetheless. On
November 8, "a Cuban covert action sabotage team
dispatched from the United States successfully blew up
a Cuban industrial facility," killing 400 workers,
according to the Cuban government. Raymond Garthoff
writes that "the Soviets could only see [the attack]
as an effort to backpedal on what was, for them, the
key question remaining: American assurances not to
attack Cuba." These and other actions reveal again, he
concludes, "that the risk and danger to both sides
could have been extreme, and catastrophe not
excluded." 

After the crisis ended, Kennedy renewed the terrorist
campaign. Ten days before his assassination he
approved a CIA plan for "destruction operations" by US
proxy forces "against a large oil refinery and storage
facilities, a large electric plant, sugar refineries,
railroad bridges, harbor facilities, and underwater
demolition of docks and ships." A plot to kill Castro
was initiated on the day of the Kennedy assassination.
The campaign was called off in 1965, but "one of
Nixon's first acts in office in 1969 was to direct the
CIA to intensify covert operations against Cuba." 

Of particular interest are the perceptions of the
planners. In his review of recently released documents
on Kennedy-era terror, Dominguez observes that "only
once in these nearly thousand pages of documentation
did a U.S. official raise something that resembled a
faint moral objection to U.S.-government sponsored
terrorism": a member of the NSC staff suggested that
it might lead to some Russian reaction, and raids that
are "haphazard and kill innocents . . . might mean a
bad press in some friendly countries." The same
attitudes prevail throughout the internal discussions,
as when Robert Kennedy warned that a full-scale
invasion of Cuba would "kill an awful lot of people,
and we're going to take an awful lot of heat on it."