[Peace-discuss] Not voting and the Kennedy aura

Tue Jan 29 21:48:11 CST 2008

I lived through the Kennedy era, and I must say that the world looked  
at him, at first,  through rose colored glasses; he was handsome, had  
a glamorous wife, a gift for speech and humor. And he was supposedly  
a war hero. Couldn't miss. Many were taken in.

But his reputation foundered with what he did and did not accomplish.  
It is stained by his cold war policies: The Bay of Pigs and  
assassination attempts against Fidel Casto, the so-called missile gap  
between us and the Soviets, subsequently proven phony and simply a  
campaign issue, the Cuban missile crisis which almost led to nuclear  
war (We had missiles in Turkey, at the USSR's borders, and were  
constantly threatening Cuba), Vietnam---yes he got us into it and  
manipulated events there such as the assassination of Diem---all  
these events are not quite what I would call liberal, except in the  
present contorted context.  Kennedy steadily increased our forces and  
their murderous actions in Vietnam. Whether he was on the point of  
pulling out when he was assassinated, we might never know, but it  
seems unlikely with Secretary of State Dean Rusk at his side, not to  
speak of McNamara. One might also cite his CIA inspired overthrow of  
the regime in Iraq in which Saddam Hussein was involved. Not a pretty  
picture of this man of Camelot.

On the domestic front, he talked big, but didn't get much  
accomplished. He compromised with the Dixiecrats in Congress on civil  
rights issues for the South. His brother Robert worked for Senator  
McCarthy, finding communists all over the place, and was a hard nosed  
cold warrior, only later softening up.

Eleanor Roosevelt thought Kennedy was more show than substance, and  
I'd go along with her.
Having said all this, he did a few commendable things too, such as  
coming to some modus vivendi with the Soviets on nuclear weaponry and  
missiles. He did finally send troops into Alabama to open the  
University to blacks there, and then there was the Peace Corps-- 
although that could be interpreted as part of the cold war.

Just a few reactions to your view.  A fairly decent review of Kennedy  
may be found at Wikipedia.

--mkb

On Jan 29, 2008, at 8:00 PM, n.dahlheim at mchsi.com wrote:

> I really have loved this discussion about the costs and benefits of  
> not voting in national American
> elections, especially the Presidential pseudo contests trumped by  
> our tabloid, right-wing media.
>
> I would like to make an addendum to thinking about the Kennedys.  I  
> don't think for a second that they
> were some great liberals or progressives, though quite unwittingly  
> they oversaw the height of the last
> truly progressive era in American politics.  Indeed, during the  
> 1960s the Kennedys were pinkos
> compared to any liberals today in the national spotlight.  The  
> deaths of JFK and then the even more
> tragic death of his brother RFK (who was much tougher, more  
> independent, and by 1968 a genuine
> progressive) also removed the Kennedy family from much in the way  
> of any hope of dominating
> national politics again.  They were new money, and they were not  
> blue bloods in the fashion that the
> upper class would describe themselves b/c they made their money  
> through bootlegging and stock
> fraud.  However, they symbolized the potential for immigrants and  
> some of America's marginalized
> groups to acquire something of a say in the direction of American  
> life.  Remarkably, and especially with
> JFK, they were also the last truly pragmatic politicians in  
> American life who measured their politics
> against a genuine concern for the common good and a somewhat noble  
> vision of American leadership.
> Future pragmatists, such as Nixon, carried ideological and/or  
> special interest baggage in a way that the
> self-made Kennedys did not.  Chomsky's incites into American  
> history in the latter half of the 20th
> century are generally quite good, but he misinterprets the Kennedy  
> Presidency quite profoundly.  The
> only real resistance to escalation in Vietnam----and the pressures  
> for Vietnam escalation were
> unbelievale---was Kennedy himself (and at times McNamara in his  
> wiser moments along with others in
> Kennedys personal circle).  As Peter Dale Scott's excellent work  
> into the history of the international drug
> trade (he is probably the #1 expert on the organized crime and  
> geopolitical history of Iran-Contra) and
> the "deep politics" of the American system demonstrate; the whole  
> network of power interests behind
> the Vietnam War serendipitously coalesced around promoting the war  
> despite the harm it would do to
> domestic order, international image, and the health of the armed  
> forces.  Kennedy worked tirelessly to
> slow and even reverse this escalation out of a concern for just  
> these types of pragmatic concerns; and
> Chomsky totally misses the boat on this particular matter by just  
> getting the facts wrong.  According to
> the work of military historian and Vietnam expert John H. Newman,  
> who has published the authoritative
> text on JFK's involvement entitled JFK and Vietnam; the Kennedy  
> record displays an adriot executive
> intensely moved by pragmatic concerns for balancing interests and  
> defending a vision of the common
> good that since has not been articulated in any meaningful way  
> (Reagan's sloganeering doesn't
> count!!!).  Kennedy arguably was the last President to surround  
> himself with a number of people who
> weren't totally concerned with advancing Wall Street, Pentagon,  
> CIA, or other financial/corporate
> skullduggery without at least balancing other factors---not for  
> ideological reasons but for practical
> reasons that interests must be balanced and power grabbing  
> restrained to safeguard the functioning of
> government and the world order.   The shots fired on 11/22/1963 in  
> Dallas ended that period of liberal
> pragmatism and a genuinely moderate government----since that time  
> the U.S. government has
> increasingly become corporate and rightist and the only type of  
> opposition based upon the pragmatic
> internationalism and liberalism of the Kennedy years has withered  
> to nothing.  The eternal flame at the
> Kennedy Memorial is in juxtaposition to the extinguished flame of  
> national American liberalism that
> died with him.  Kennedy was probably the last President who would  
> ever have considered surrounding
> himself with great liberal public intellectuals like Walter  
> Lippmann and giving at least some progressive
> ethos to the discourse of American political life.  His brother,  
> however, had become radicalized in the
> years following his brother's death--- but alas he was surely to be  
> murdered for daring to move to the
> Left of his very midly liberal older brother.  At work in both of  
> those murders was the ruthless ruling
> class we have today----the people behind Operation Phoenix (Secord,  
> Shackley, Rumsfeld, et. al), the
> Penatgon Papers/Watergate mess, Iran-Contra, Middle East intrigue,  
> the Bush family, and now 9/11 and
> the cimes associated with it and similar successive events.
>
>      American liberalism in the political establishment died  
> then----the ruling classes and the predatory
> Wall Street/Pentagon complex ruling our nation couldn't handle  
> pragmatism and a generic concern for
> the common good; do you really expect them to support a full- 
> fledged move to economic and
> democratic socialism at the root of an ethical and inclusive  
> politics?  No, I don't think so.  And Chomsky
> is right that our voting merely ratifies this pervasive  
> skullduggery, we become complicit.  We need the
> right frame, which in the case of JFK even Chomsky failes to  
> provide.  Political assassinations are not
> acts of God or acts of nuts (isn't it interesting that John  
> Hinckley just happened to be the son of George
> HW Bush's longtime oilman buddy and business comrade Michael  
> Hinckley who also happened to live a
> couple of houses down from Bush in an exclusive Houston  
> neighborhood?) or examples of deus ex
> machina.  They are always political acts, usually from witihn the  
> ruling classes themselves----histories
> of the Arab world, China, Rome, and medieval Europe are replete  
> with documentations of this.  In
> America, the murders of the Kennedys clearly fit this pattern--- 
> (where was George HW Bush on
> 11/22/63 and why did Hoover mention him in a very important FBI  
> memo entitled "JFK Assassination"?).
> Elected people shot dead with narry a serious investigation for  
> decades----sounds to me like this
> represents a serious problem to the legitimacy of elections as  
> valid vehicles for the expression of
> progressive politics or the common good.
>
> If the ruling class will succeed in killing a President with so  
> little protest from the public at large, how
> can we expect any officeholder to do anything but merge his  
> political actions with the most extreme
> and malicious elements of a power hungry government dominated by a  
> rapacious business elite?
>
> So, I devote my energies to thinking about other alternatives---- 
> local power in an area where I do have
> some say, where the ripple effects of local democracy can gradually  
> change and debase the power of a
> corrupt oligarchical ruling class....
>
> Ted Kennedys support for Obama, then, becomes something of a  
> subtextual comedy of a once-
> ascendant political family that ceased to be important when its two  
> most important political personages
> met fateful deaths at the hands of a ruling class that met with no  
> opposition from a deluded and
> impotent public.
>
> Nick
>
>
> ----------------------  Original Message:  ---------------------
> From:    "John W." <jbw292002 at gmail.com>
> To:      "Laurie at advancenet.net" <laurie at advancenet.net>, <peace- 
> discuss at lists.chambana.net>
> Subject: RE: [Peace-discuss] Not voting
> Date:    Tue, 29 Jan 2008 23:05:40 +0000
>
>> At 12:13 PM 1/29/2008, Laurie at advancenet.net wrote:
>>
>>> While on the subject of "not voting", I happened to be noticing  
>>> all those
>>> headlines about how the Kennedy's have passed the torch to  
>>> Obama.  It made
>>> me wonder why on earth anyone would want to give someone else a  
>>> flashlight
>>> that is burnt out and has no batteries.  Is that the new "kiss of
>>> death"?  In this election, it appears to be the equivalent of  
>>> Bill Clinton
>>> passing the Hillary Clinton the mantle of Monica L.
>>
>>
>> We shall see.  While certainly not everyone respects Teddy  
>> Kennedy, not
>> everyone respects ANYONE.  I give Teddy credit for at least  
>> retaining a
>> fair degree of "liberal integrity" throughout his roughly 40 years  
>> in the
>> Senate.  And while Teddy has not proven to be America's savior, or  
>> even a
>> close approximation thereof, there's still an aura around John F.  
>> and Bobby
>> Kennedy, even after all these years.  It's that aura as much as  
>> anything
>> that Teddy and Caroline are trying to pass on.
>>
>> John Wason
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> Peace-discuss mailing list
>> Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net
>> http://lists.chambana.net/cgi-bin/listinfo/peace-discuss
> _______________________________________________
> Peace-discuss mailing list
> Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net
> http://lists.chambana.net/cgi-bin/listinfo/peace-discuss