[Peace-discuss] Straining at a gnat...

[C. G. Estabrook]

Nick--

We've differed about Kennedy before.  The conventional view, which you defend,
was consciously crafted by his epigoni -- notably the court jester/historian
Arthur Schlesinger -- beginning while he was in office.  American liberals have
continued it for the wearisome years since.

(We recently discussed on this list some notions of an early president of SDS,
Carl Oglesby -- no dunce -- who for a long time bought some version of the myth.
  He refers in autobiographical writings to what was called his "bad politics" at
the time and meant his hankering for Kennedy.  It led him to spend far too much
time writing about the assassination.)

After all US wars from the Revolution to the present there has been a demand for
social progress ("What were we fighting for?") that had to be put down by a
reaction of organized privilege.  Thus Shays' Rebellion (et al.) gave us the
(reactionary) 1787 Constitution; Radical Republicanism was countered by the
socially reactionary "Compromise" of 1877; the liberal Wilson administration
scotched American socialism with the Palmer Raids; and the post-WWII demand for
a real solution to the Depression was stopped by the Democratic party's loyalty
campaign ("If you want socialism, you're a Communist") that goes by the highly
misleading name of McCarthyism.

Note that it was the Democratic party (and its predecessors) that was usually
the  perpetrator of this reaction (cf. Clinton's welfare "reform").  That was
certainly the case in what may have been the most severe of these crises, the
one that followed WWII, beginning in the Truman administration.  Eisenhower (who
considered running as a Democrat) defeated the more authentic (and
anti-interventionist) Republicanism of Robert Taft on his way to the presidency;
and Kennedy completed the reaction, which he bequeathed to Johnson.  For that
reason the most liberal administration of the second half of the 20th century
was Nixon's (which didn't depend on Nixon's own views).

You mention some examples. Others include the fact that Nixon was a critic of
government intervention in the economy, but no 20th century administration
intervened more, and their successors had to invent a theory of the "free
market" in order to counter it. "Now I am a Keynesian," Nixon declared in
January 1971, when he introduced a Keynesian "full employment" budget, which
provided for deficit spending to reduce unemployment.  He imposed wage and price
controls and proposed the most progressive single economic suggestion of the
century, a guaranteed annual income (with predictable results). OSHA, EPA, and
the Clean Air Act all came out of his administration.  Elected in 1968 because
of his "secret plan to end the war," Nixon increased federal social spending
more than Johnson’s "Great Society" had.  It was under Nixon that social
spending came to exceed "defense" spending for the first time.  Even federal
spending for the arts, which went mostly to cultural elites who hated Nixon,
quadrupled from Johnson's time.  And Nixon's work on reconciliation with Native
Americans may have been even more radical than his detente with China.  Nixon
consolidated the administrative state of the Great Society in much the same way
that Eisenhower consolidated the New Deal.

Stephen Hayward wrote, it seems to me accurately, "Ronald Reagan would run and
govern as much against the legacy of Nixon as he would the legacy of the Great
Society, and it was a number of Nixon’s administrative creations that would
cause Reagan the most difficulty during his White House years. Yet at the same
time Nixon deserves the credit for assembling the new political coalition of
working class and ethnic voters who would later become known as 'Reagan
Democrats' [a group otherwise difficult to explain: they confused Tom Franks].
Nixon was the first Republican to win a majority of working class, Catholic, and
labor union voters, as well as voters with only a grade school education. In the
political sense Nixon played Moses to Reagan’s Joshua."

Kennedy was no "pragmatist," except in the sense that he did the bidding of the
criminal capitalists like his father (whom FDR made head of the SEC because he
knew he was a crook: set a thief to catch thieves).  Kennedy's political
reaction was illustrated in his establishment of death squads in Latin America
and his turning of LA militaries from hemispheric defense to the suppression of
"internal subversion" -- i.e., the demand for social justice in LA. His mad
terrorism against the Cuban revolution led him to his willingness to blow up the
world in the "Cuban Missile Criss." The world was saved by the good sense of
Khrushchev and a Soviet naval officer.

Kennedy had no plan to ed-escalate the Vietnam war without the establishment of
a biddable government in South Vietnam. Johnson continued the war, with
Kennedy's plans and Kennedy's advisers.  In refutation of Newman's JFK and
Vietnam, see Rethinking Camelot: JFK, the Vietnam War, and U.S. Political
Culture (1993) by Noam Chomsky.  --CGE


n.dahlheim at mchsi.com wrote:
> Carl, JFK was not a statist reactionary, but a statist pragmatist in line
> with the consensus liberal politics of the age---JFK was no reactionary, but
> he was cool and calculating in his management of the Cuban Missile Crisis and
> his political maneuvering behind the scenes masked by his hawkish rhetoric
> covered up his plan to remove combat personnel from Indochina by
> 1965------see the excellent and copiously researched book by military
> historian John Newman entitled "JFK and Vietnam."
> 
> Don't get me wrong---JFK had little to no progressive credentials---but, then
> except for a few moments by Teddy Roosevelt, FDR's New Deal, Johnson's Great
> Society (nearly nullified by the Administration's poor reaction to race riots
> in 1965 and 1968), and Richard Nixon's domestic programs such as price
> controls, NIH Cancer Research, marijuana decriminalization, and environmental
>  regulations---- there have been almost no progressive moments in the U.S.
> Presidency....
> 
> Nick
> 
> 
> ----------------------  Original Message:  --------------------- From:    "C.
> G. Estabrook" <galliher at uiuc.edu> To:      Peace-discuss
> <peace-discuss at anti-war.net> Subject: [Peace-discuss] Straining at a gnat... 
> Date:    Mon, 19 May 2008 21:02:29 +0000
> 
>> [Kennedy was a statist reactionary, proclaiming in this speech a new
>> American fascism, in pursuit of which he spread murder and destruction from
>> Latin America to SE Asia -- resulting in the deaths of, among others, some
>> four million people in Asia.  Now he's a liberal paragon ("Obama's just
>> like JFK!"), so all this popular historian can find to deplore is
>> interference with his syntactical structures...  --CGE]
>> 
>> David McCullough urges BC grads to speak properly May 19, 3:33 PM (ET)
>> 
>> NEWTON, Mass. (AP) - Pulitzer Prize winning author David McCullough has a 
>> suggestion for what young people can do for their country. "Please, please
>> do what you can to cure the verbal virus that seems increasingly rampant
>> among your generation," McCullough implored Boston College's class of 2008
>> at commencement ceremonies Monday. He said he's particularly troubled by
>> the "relentless, wearisome use of words" such as like, awesome and
>> actually. "Just imagine if in his inaugural address John F. Kennedy had
>> said, 'Ask not what your country can, you know, do for you, but what you
>> can, like, do for your country actually," he said. Graduates apparently
>> thought his speech was, like, awesome. They gave him a standing ovation.
>> 
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