President Kennedy's Foreign Policy
I cringe whenever I hear progressives ding Kennedy's foreign policy record. They do so out of an ignorance not of their own making, but of one studiously foisted upon them.
It is important to remember, especially with President John Kennedy, that history is written by the victor. Kennedy wasn't just killed once. He was killed posthumously so that all he was trying to do, and stood for, would be washed away. By making him less than who he was, his assassination would seem less necessary. By painting him as a rabid cold warrior, no one would suspect cold warriors of having killed him.
Sadly, a whole set of generations are now growing up with false history about John Kennedy (and Bobby, albeit less so). I felt the need to correct a bit of that record.
Kennedy was inaugurated three days after Lumumba was killed in the Congo. Kennedy was known to be a supporter of Lumumba, and was devastated when he learned of his assassination.
As Gerard Colby so brilliantly noted in "Thy Will Be Done":
Within a month of Kennedy's election, some of Nelson [Rockefeller]'s closest allies ... were meeting in the White House's Cabinet Room or heading key offices in the new administration. Swiftly and quietly, they began implementing many of the changes in government structure and policy that Nelson advocated.
This secret victory [for Rockefeller] was the outcome of Kennedy's inexperience. Kennedy had spent the past five years running for office. He knew politicians, but not men who could run the government of a world power.
Kennedy turned to Robert Lovett, a former Truman administration veteran. Lovett was also a trustee of the Rockefeller Foundation.
So right from the start, without realizing it, Kennedy had brought the empire builders right into the top places in his administration. He'd be fighting them for the rest of his short term.
In his second full month in office, he ended support for the anti-communist dictator in Laos that the CIA-Pentagon forces had installed during Eisenhower's term. Kennedy said at a news conference that the US "strongly and unreservedly" supported a goal of a "neutral and independent Laos."
He inherited an already-in-motion operation in the Bay of Pigs when he stepped into the White House. In April, he gave a green light based strictly on the information the CIA had provided, which was that the CIA was simply supporting a native revolution, and was going to offer limited support.
That wasn't true, but Kennedy didn't know then that the CIA would deliberately mislead a president. During the mission, the CIA and Navy pressured Kennedy hard to send in the Marines, stationed offshore, in a full-scale invasion. Kennedy resisted, angering the forces hell-bent on overthrowing Castro.
When Kennedy saw the mission was not going as planned, the CIA figured he would not opt to lose, but would throw more forces at it for victory. But they guessed wrong. Kennedy took the hit, and then forced Allen Dulles, the Godfather of the CIA, from the Agency. Many in the Agency hated Kennedy from that point forward, and the feeling was mutual.
That's when Kennedy made the famous vow to splinter the CIA into 1000 pieces and scatter it to winds. He explicitly set up the Defense Intelligence Agency to corral the CIA's covert operations under strict military control. The DIA opened October 1, 1961, a move which made CIA operatives' blood boil even further.
In July of 1961, Allen Dulles and the Joint Chiefs of Staff present Kennedy with a preemptive nuclear strike plan to be launched against the USSR in late 1963, to be preceded by a period of escalating (and manufactured) events. Kennedy walks out, saying to Dean Rusk, "and they call us the human race."
In September of 1961, Khrushchev initiates a backchannel correspondence with Kennedy. He slips a letter into a newspaper carried to a Kennedy aide. Kennedy writes back. They agree to disagree on many things, but both agree keeping the forces surrounding them from launching a nuclear weapon is of paramount concern. Publicly, Khrushchev shakes a fist at Kennedy, refusing nuclear disarmament.
In October, Khrushchev escalates the Cold War by erecting the Berlin Wall.
In November of 1961, Kennedy resists pressure from the Joint Chiefs to send combat troops to Vietnam. Under intense pressure, he compromises - allows military advisors and support personnel.
Also in November, Kennedy authorizes "Operation Mongoose," which did not include plans to kill Castro. (The CIA, by their own admission in their IG report, kept the Castro plots from Kennedy.) Mongoose was designed to "help Cuba overthrow Castro" - meaning, aid them in a native revolution, the same thing Kennedy thought he was authorizing with the Bay of Pigs. But this time, he appointed an Army man, General Ed Lansdale, to keep the CIA in check. Kennedy would later say he wasted his brother in the AG position, and should have given him control over the CIA.
Also in 1961, Kennedy reaches out to Sukarno in Indonesia. His nationalism leans in a communist direction. Under the Eisenhower administration, the CIA tried to kill Sukarno. But Kennedy wanted to work with him, and to offer him not arms, but aid of a more productive kind. He appointed a team of economic advisors to study the problem.
Meanwhile, Indonesia was having a crisis in what is now called West Papua, but then called West Irian or Irian Jaya. This site contained a mountain so rich in ore it was called "Copper Mountain". The mountain is long gone, but the area is now home to the world's largest gold mine (operated by Freeport McMoRan).
The Dutch had conceded their entire former colony of Indonesia independence except this region of riches. And Sukarno wanted to keep Indonesia whole. The US, allies to both, was caught in the middle. Kennedy asked Ellsworth Bunker to broker an agreement, which led to a promise of West Irian independence. To soothe Sukarno, Kennedy issued a national security memorandum in which he included these instructions:
To seize this opportunity, will all agencies concerned please review their programs for Indonesia and assess what further measures might be useful. I have in mind the possibility of expanded civic action, military aid, and economic stabilization and development programs as well as diplomatic initiatives.
Where the Cold Warriors tried to destroy Sukarno, Kennedy tried to help him. Sukarno was particularly affected when Kennedy was killed. Separately, the Rockefellers were involved in Freeport McMoRan's predecessor, Freeport Sculpture in Indonesia, which benefited when a coup overthrew Sukarno and brought Suharto to power. (For the tangled story there - see JFK, Indonesia, CIA and Freeport Sulphur.)
Meanwhile, back in the states, on April 11, 1962, Kennedy took on the steel industry with words stronger than anything John Edwards ever said:
Simultaneous and identical actions of United States Steel and other leading steal corporations increasing steel prices by some $6 a ton constitute a wholly unjustifiable and irresponsible defiance of the public interest. In this serious hour in our Nation's history when we are confronted with grave crises in Berlin and Southeast Asia, when we are devoting our energies to economic recovery and stability, when we are asking reservists to leave their homes and their families for months on end and servicemen to risk their lives--and four were killed in the last two days in Viet Nam and asking union members to hold down their wage requests at a time when restraint and sacrifice are being asked of every citizen, the American people will find it hard, as I do, to accept a situation in which a tiny handful of steel executives whose pursuit of private power and profit exceeds their sense of public responsibility can show such utter contempt for the interests of 185 million Americans.
In May of 1962, Kennedy instructed McNamara to find a way out of Vietnam. McNamara turns to General Paul Harkins and orders him to "devise a plan for turning full responsibility over to South Vietnam and reducing the size of our military command, and to submit this plan at the next conference." Harkins ignores this order, but McNamara won't learn this for several months.
In July of 1962, the US becomes one of fourteen nations signing the "Declaration on the Neutrality of Laos" in Geneva. The CIA and Pentagon see this as treason, capitulation to the communists.
I could go on all night, but I won't. I'll summarize with a quote from Don Gibson's book "Battling Wall Street":
When Kennedy went against his advisors on foreign policy, it was because he rejected the idea that the US had a right to control economic and political event sin other nations. In quite sharp contrast to his strong military stand against the powerful Soviet Union, Kennedy was reluctant to employ military force against smaller and weaker nations. This reluctance was completely consistent with his comments in 1959 ... where he rejected "the pageantry of imperialism."
Chester Bowles cited the following decisions made by Kennedy against a majority of his advisors: refusing to invade Cuba during the Bay of Pigs disaster; refusing to intervene in the Dominican Republic following the assassination of Trujillo; refusing to introduce ground forces into Laos; refusing to escalate our involvement in Vietnam; backing U.N. policy in the Congo, and backing India in a dispute with China and Pakistan. In making these decisions, Kennedy was repeatedly affirming his idea of a US foreign policy against those who either shared the neo-colonialist attitudes of various economic interests in Europe and the US or viewed all interests of the Third World nations as unimportant compared to the ongoing conflict with communism.
Considering the multitude of factors involved in any significant foreign policy decision, it is reasonable to conclude that consistency across a series of such decisions indicates underlying principles.
On June 10 in the last year of his life, Kennedy spoke these words:
I have, therefore, chosen this time and place to discuss a topic on which ignorance too often abounds and the truth too rarely perceived. And that is the most important topic on earth: peace. What kind of peace do I mean and what kind of a peace do we seek? Not a Pax Americana enforced on the world by American weapons of war. Not the peace of the grave or the security of the slave. I am talking about genuine peace, the kind of peace that makes life on earth worth living, and the kind that enables men and nations to grow, and to hope, and build a better life for their children -- not merely peace for Americans but peace for all men and women, not merely peace in our time but peace in all time.
Show me a better foreign policy than that.
http://realhistoryarchives.blogspot.com ... olicy.html
President Kennedy's Foreign Policy
Re: President Kennedy's Foreign Policy
Kennedy Doctrine
The Kennedy Doctrine refers to foreign policy initiatives of the 35th President of the United States, John Fitzgerald Kennedy, towards Latin America during his term in office between 1961 and 1963. Kennedy voiced support for the containment of Communism and the reversal of Communist progress in the Western Hemisphere.
Inaugural address: "Pay any price, bear any burden"
In his Inaugural address on January 20, 1961, President Kennedy presented the American public with a blueprint upon which the future foreign policy initiatives of his administration would later follow and come to represent. In this Address, Kennedy warned “Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, in order to assure the survival and the success of liberty.”1 He also called upon the public to assist in “a struggle against the common enemies of man: tyranny, poverty, disease, and war itself.”1 It is in this address that one begins to see the Cold War, us-versus-them mentality that came to dominate the Kennedy administration.
Cold War containment
A dominant premise during the Kennedy years was the need to contain communism at any cost. In this Cold War environment, Kennedy’s “call for military strength and unision in the struggle against communism were balanced with... [hopes] for disarmament and global cooperation.”2 Another common theme in Kennedy’s foreign policy was the belief that because the United States had the ability and power to control events in the international system, they should. Kennedy expressed this idea in his address when he stated, “In the long history of the world only a few generations have been granted the role of defending freedom from its hour of maximum danger. I do not shrink from this responsibility – I welcome it.” It has also brought up the licking from the head to the toes effect.'1
Historical background
The Kennedy Doctrine was essentially an expansion of the foreign policy prerogatives of the previous administrations of Dwight D. Eisenhower and Harry S. Truman. The foreign policies of these presidents all revolved around the threat of communism and the means by which the United States would attempt to contain the spread of it. The Truman Doctrine focused on the containment of communism by providing assistance to countries resisting communism in Europe while the Eisenhower Doctrine was focused upon providing both military and economic assistance to nations resisting communism in the Middle East and by increasing the flow of trade from the United States into Latin America. The Kennedy Doctrine was based on these same objectives but was more concerned with the spread of communism and Soviet influence in Latin America following the Cuban revolution that brought Fidel Castro to power under Eisenhower during the 1950s.
Alliance for Progress
In his inaugural address, Kennedy talks of an alliance for progress with countries in Latin America. In his Alliance for Progress address for Latin American Diplomats and Members of Congress on March 13th 1961 he expanded on his promises from his inaugural speech. “I have called on all the people of the hemisphere to join in a new Alliance for Progress – alianza para el Progreso – a vast cooperative effort, unparalleled in magnitude and nobility of purpose, to satisfy the basic needs of the American people for homes, work and land, health and schools – techo, trabajo y tierra, salud y escuela.”
In the address, Kennedy reaffirmed the United State’s pledge of coming to the defence of any nation whose independence was endangered, promised to increase the food-for-peace emergency program and to provide economic aid to nations in need. He requested that Latin American countries promote social change within their borders and called upon all American nations to move towards increased economic integration. “To achieve this goal political freedom must accompany material progress. Our Alliance for Progress is an alliance of free governments – and it must work to eliminate tyranny from a hemisphere in which it has no rightful place. Therefore let us express our special friendship to the people of Cuba and the Dominican Republic – and the hope they will soon rejoin the society of free men, uniting with us in our common effort.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kennedy_Doctrine
The Kennedy Doctrine refers to foreign policy initiatives of the 35th President of the United States, John Fitzgerald Kennedy, towards Latin America during his term in office between 1961 and 1963. Kennedy voiced support for the containment of Communism and the reversal of Communist progress in the Western Hemisphere.
Inaugural address: "Pay any price, bear any burden"
In his Inaugural address on January 20, 1961, President Kennedy presented the American public with a blueprint upon which the future foreign policy initiatives of his administration would later follow and come to represent. In this Address, Kennedy warned “Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, in order to assure the survival and the success of liberty.”1 He also called upon the public to assist in “a struggle against the common enemies of man: tyranny, poverty, disease, and war itself.”1 It is in this address that one begins to see the Cold War, us-versus-them mentality that came to dominate the Kennedy administration.
Cold War containment
A dominant premise during the Kennedy years was the need to contain communism at any cost. In this Cold War environment, Kennedy’s “call for military strength and unision in the struggle against communism were balanced with... [hopes] for disarmament and global cooperation.”2 Another common theme in Kennedy’s foreign policy was the belief that because the United States had the ability and power to control events in the international system, they should. Kennedy expressed this idea in his address when he stated, “In the long history of the world only a few generations have been granted the role of defending freedom from its hour of maximum danger. I do not shrink from this responsibility – I welcome it.” It has also brought up the licking from the head to the toes effect.'1
Historical background
The Kennedy Doctrine was essentially an expansion of the foreign policy prerogatives of the previous administrations of Dwight D. Eisenhower and Harry S. Truman. The foreign policies of these presidents all revolved around the threat of communism and the means by which the United States would attempt to contain the spread of it. The Truman Doctrine focused on the containment of communism by providing assistance to countries resisting communism in Europe while the Eisenhower Doctrine was focused upon providing both military and economic assistance to nations resisting communism in the Middle East and by increasing the flow of trade from the United States into Latin America. The Kennedy Doctrine was based on these same objectives but was more concerned with the spread of communism and Soviet influence in Latin America following the Cuban revolution that brought Fidel Castro to power under Eisenhower during the 1950s.
Alliance for Progress
In his inaugural address, Kennedy talks of an alliance for progress with countries in Latin America. In his Alliance for Progress address for Latin American Diplomats and Members of Congress on March 13th 1961 he expanded on his promises from his inaugural speech. “I have called on all the people of the hemisphere to join in a new Alliance for Progress – alianza para el Progreso – a vast cooperative effort, unparalleled in magnitude and nobility of purpose, to satisfy the basic needs of the American people for homes, work and land, health and schools – techo, trabajo y tierra, salud y escuela.”
In the address, Kennedy reaffirmed the United State’s pledge of coming to the defence of any nation whose independence was endangered, promised to increase the food-for-peace emergency program and to provide economic aid to nations in need. He requested that Latin American countries promote social change within their borders and called upon all American nations to move towards increased economic integration. “To achieve this goal political freedom must accompany material progress. Our Alliance for Progress is an alliance of free governments – and it must work to eliminate tyranny from a hemisphere in which it has no rightful place. Therefore let us express our special friendship to the people of Cuba and the Dominican Republic – and the hope they will soon rejoin the society of free men, uniting with us in our common effort.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kennedy_Doctrine
Re: President Kennedy's Foreign Policy
There is a lot more here...
Check out Joseph Kennedy's support of McCarthy and JFK's support of Nixon (ironically). RFK was counsel for HUAC. Both RFK and JFK were huge red-baiting union busters in Massachusetts. Thus Camelot...
- Anaxarchos
Check out Joseph Kennedy's support of McCarthy and JFK's support of Nixon (ironically). RFK was counsel for HUAC. Both RFK and JFK were huge red-baiting union busters in Massachusetts. Thus Camelot...
- Anaxarchos
Re: President Kennedy's Foreign Policy
The Kennedys and McCarthyism
Joseph Kennedy had befriended McCarthy because he found him to be a likable fellow Irish-Catholic who had all the right ideas on the domestic communist menace. These warm feelings were quickly transferred to the entire Kennedy family. JFK liked the fact that McCarthy went after the "elites" in the State Department whom JFK regarded with contempt. (13) Even before McCarthy made accusations against the State Department of subversion, JFK had already aligned himself with the militant anti-communists who blamed the Truman State Department for the "loss" of China. So JFK declared on the House floor in January 1949.
"The responsibility for the failure of our foreign policy in the Far East rests squarely with the White House and the Department of State." (14)
Small wonder then, that at the same Harvard seminar where he cheered Nixon's victory to the Senate, that JFK expressed the view that McCarthy "may have something" to his charges of domestic subversion that had by then become vocal. (15)
There were also other deep personal bonds between JFK and McCarthy by the time McCarthy reached the peak of his power in 1952 and 1953. Not only had McCarthy been a frequent guest at the Kennedy compound in Hyannis, but McCarthy had also dated two Kenendy sisters, first Eunice (the mother of Maria Shriver) and then Pat (who later married actor Peter Lawford). McCarthy was invited to the wedding reception for Eunice and Sargent Shriver, and even presented Eunice with a silver cigarette case inscribed "To Eunice and Bob from one who lost." (16)
The ties with Bobby were forged when he gave RFK a job as minority counsel to his Senate committee investigating domestic communism. Though RFK would later have an intense falling out with McCarthy's other counsel Roy Cohn, the younger Kennedy brother would maintain a deep loyalty to a man he loved enough to make the godfather of his first child. In 1955, Bobby displayed his residual feelings of loyalty for McCarthy even after the Senator's fall into disgrace at a dinner meeting described by the court historian of Camelot himself, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.
"Still his Irish conception of loyalty turned him against some he felt had treated McCarthy unfairly. In January 1955, Edward R. Murrow [who had issued a famous anti-McCarthy telecast the previous year] spoke at the banquet honoring those, Kennedy among them, who had been selected by the Junior Chamber of Commerce as the Ten Outstanding Young Men of 1954. Kennedy grimly walked out." (17)
JFK's warmth for McCarthy was not as great as Bobby's, but he still felt enough of McCarthy to have performed a similar act three years earlier at the 100th Anniversary of the Harvard Spree Club dinner. Robert Armory, who had been at the dinner and who later worked in the Kennedy Administration recalled in an oral history at the JFK Library that when a speaker had likened McCarthy to the convicted Soviet spy Alger Hiss, JFK rose to his feet and declared "How dare you couple the name of a great American patriot with that of a traitor!" and walked out. The incident has never been denied by anyone who was there, and is accepted by JFK biographers Herbert Parmet, Thomas Reeves and Chris Matthews.
McCarthy, likewise considered JFK a supporter. So much so that in 1952, as JFK took on Henry Cabot Lodge for the Senate, McCarthy privately supported JFK. McCarthy already had an intense dislike of Lodge, and had such a good rapport with the Kennedys that the decision was easy for him. Lodge would be the *only* Republican Senate candidate that McCarthy made no active campaign for, and William F. Buckley, Jr. was present when McCarthy received from a phone call from the RNC asking McCarthy to make an appearance for Lodge. But when McCarthy hung up, he told Buckley that his preference was for Kennedy. (18)
Two years later, when McCarthy's support collapsed and the Senate took up a resolution of censure, JFK was absent from the debate, recuperating from back surgery. He would be the only Democratic Senator not to publicly declare support for McCarthy's censure, even though he could easily have declared his feelings for the public record. As it was, he had instructed Ted Sorenson to draft a statement of support for censure on very narrow grounds, in which, as Schlesinger and Reeves note, made no mention whatsoever of civil liberties, and had more to do with McCarthy's employment of Roy Cohn. In the undelivered statement, JFK was quick to distance himself from the resolution's assertion that McCarthy's actions had harmed America's image abroad, and also stressed the long period of support he had given to McCarthy and his cause.
"This issue involves neither the motives nor the sincerity of the Junior Senator from Wisconsin. Many times I have voted with Senator McCarthy for the full appropriation of funds for his committee, for his amendment to reduce our assistance to nations trading with communists, and on other matters. I have not sought to end his investigations of communist subversion, nor is the pending measure related to either the desirability or continutation of those investigations." (19)
JFK could easily have delivered this statement from his hospital bed, but in the end, he couldn't bring himself to do it. Ted Sorenson admitted in 1971 that he felt that JFK deliberately ducked him on that matter. And JFK admitted it to another friend, Charles Spalding just prior to his release. Here is Spalding's recollection of what JFK said.
"You know, when I get downstairs I know exactly what's going to happen. Those reporters are going to lean over my stretcher. There's going to be about ninety-five faces bent over me with great concern, and everyone of those guys is going to say, 'Now Senator, what about McCarthy?' Do you know what I'm going to do? I'm going to reach back for my back and I'm just going to yell 'Oow' and then I'm going to pull the sheet over my head and hope we can get out of there." (20)
Not until 1956, would JFK issue a public statement supporting McCarthy's censure, and even then it was only because his political future dictated it. "Even my Dad is against McCarthy now," he remarked in private, "And if he is, then McCarthy has nobody left." (21)
JFK's after-the-fact conversion to anti-McCarthyism did not impress the party liberals. Eleanor Roosevelt, the beloved symbol of the liberals openly berated JFK in 1956 at the Democratic Convention for not having taken a stand against McCarthy, and repeated her mistrust of JFK in an interview for Look magazine in 1958. The lingering image of JFK and the McCarthy connections was another reason why JFK was challenged from the left in 1960. (22)
JFK may have regretted the McCarthy connection in later years, but the assertion of the JFK-As-Progressive advocates that he was never close to, nor sympathetic to McCarthy during the critical years prior to 1954 is totally contradicted by JFK's own words and deeds. As with the friendship with Nixon, the confirmation comes not from conservatives spreading rumors, but from JFK's own friends.
(13) Matthews, 74-75.
(14) Congressional Record, January 29, 1949.
(15) op. cit. Mallan, 10-11.
(16) Thomas Reeves, The Life and Times of Joe McCarthy (New York, 1982), 203.
(17) Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. Robert Kennedy and His Times (New York, 1978), 119.
(18) William F. Buckley Jr., column. September 30, 1962.
(19) Ted Sorenson Papers, JFK Library.
(20) Thomas Reeves, A Question of Character (New York, 1991), 123. Based on author's interview with Spalding.
(21) Reeves, A Question of Character, 12
http://mcadams.posc.mu.edu/progjfk2.htm
- Eattherich
Joseph Kennedy had befriended McCarthy because he found him to be a likable fellow Irish-Catholic who had all the right ideas on the domestic communist menace. These warm feelings were quickly transferred to the entire Kennedy family. JFK liked the fact that McCarthy went after the "elites" in the State Department whom JFK regarded with contempt. (13) Even before McCarthy made accusations against the State Department of subversion, JFK had already aligned himself with the militant anti-communists who blamed the Truman State Department for the "loss" of China. So JFK declared on the House floor in January 1949.
"The responsibility for the failure of our foreign policy in the Far East rests squarely with the White House and the Department of State." (14)
Small wonder then, that at the same Harvard seminar where he cheered Nixon's victory to the Senate, that JFK expressed the view that McCarthy "may have something" to his charges of domestic subversion that had by then become vocal. (15)
There were also other deep personal bonds between JFK and McCarthy by the time McCarthy reached the peak of his power in 1952 and 1953. Not only had McCarthy been a frequent guest at the Kennedy compound in Hyannis, but McCarthy had also dated two Kenendy sisters, first Eunice (the mother of Maria Shriver) and then Pat (who later married actor Peter Lawford). McCarthy was invited to the wedding reception for Eunice and Sargent Shriver, and even presented Eunice with a silver cigarette case inscribed "To Eunice and Bob from one who lost." (16)
The ties with Bobby were forged when he gave RFK a job as minority counsel to his Senate committee investigating domestic communism. Though RFK would later have an intense falling out with McCarthy's other counsel Roy Cohn, the younger Kennedy brother would maintain a deep loyalty to a man he loved enough to make the godfather of his first child. In 1955, Bobby displayed his residual feelings of loyalty for McCarthy even after the Senator's fall into disgrace at a dinner meeting described by the court historian of Camelot himself, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.
"Still his Irish conception of loyalty turned him against some he felt had treated McCarthy unfairly. In January 1955, Edward R. Murrow [who had issued a famous anti-McCarthy telecast the previous year] spoke at the banquet honoring those, Kennedy among them, who had been selected by the Junior Chamber of Commerce as the Ten Outstanding Young Men of 1954. Kennedy grimly walked out." (17)
JFK's warmth for McCarthy was not as great as Bobby's, but he still felt enough of McCarthy to have performed a similar act three years earlier at the 100th Anniversary of the Harvard Spree Club dinner. Robert Armory, who had been at the dinner and who later worked in the Kennedy Administration recalled in an oral history at the JFK Library that when a speaker had likened McCarthy to the convicted Soviet spy Alger Hiss, JFK rose to his feet and declared "How dare you couple the name of a great American patriot with that of a traitor!" and walked out. The incident has never been denied by anyone who was there, and is accepted by JFK biographers Herbert Parmet, Thomas Reeves and Chris Matthews.
McCarthy, likewise considered JFK a supporter. So much so that in 1952, as JFK took on Henry Cabot Lodge for the Senate, McCarthy privately supported JFK. McCarthy already had an intense dislike of Lodge, and had such a good rapport with the Kennedys that the decision was easy for him. Lodge would be the *only* Republican Senate candidate that McCarthy made no active campaign for, and William F. Buckley, Jr. was present when McCarthy received from a phone call from the RNC asking McCarthy to make an appearance for Lodge. But when McCarthy hung up, he told Buckley that his preference was for Kennedy. (18)
Two years later, when McCarthy's support collapsed and the Senate took up a resolution of censure, JFK was absent from the debate, recuperating from back surgery. He would be the only Democratic Senator not to publicly declare support for McCarthy's censure, even though he could easily have declared his feelings for the public record. As it was, he had instructed Ted Sorenson to draft a statement of support for censure on very narrow grounds, in which, as Schlesinger and Reeves note, made no mention whatsoever of civil liberties, and had more to do with McCarthy's employment of Roy Cohn. In the undelivered statement, JFK was quick to distance himself from the resolution's assertion that McCarthy's actions had harmed America's image abroad, and also stressed the long period of support he had given to McCarthy and his cause.
"This issue involves neither the motives nor the sincerity of the Junior Senator from Wisconsin. Many times I have voted with Senator McCarthy for the full appropriation of funds for his committee, for his amendment to reduce our assistance to nations trading with communists, and on other matters. I have not sought to end his investigations of communist subversion, nor is the pending measure related to either the desirability or continutation of those investigations." (19)
JFK could easily have delivered this statement from his hospital bed, but in the end, he couldn't bring himself to do it. Ted Sorenson admitted in 1971 that he felt that JFK deliberately ducked him on that matter. And JFK admitted it to another friend, Charles Spalding just prior to his release. Here is Spalding's recollection of what JFK said.
"You know, when I get downstairs I know exactly what's going to happen. Those reporters are going to lean over my stretcher. There's going to be about ninety-five faces bent over me with great concern, and everyone of those guys is going to say, 'Now Senator, what about McCarthy?' Do you know what I'm going to do? I'm going to reach back for my back and I'm just going to yell 'Oow' and then I'm going to pull the sheet over my head and hope we can get out of there." (20)
Not until 1956, would JFK issue a public statement supporting McCarthy's censure, and even then it was only because his political future dictated it. "Even my Dad is against McCarthy now," he remarked in private, "And if he is, then McCarthy has nobody left." (21)
JFK's after-the-fact conversion to anti-McCarthyism did not impress the party liberals. Eleanor Roosevelt, the beloved symbol of the liberals openly berated JFK in 1956 at the Democratic Convention for not having taken a stand against McCarthy, and repeated her mistrust of JFK in an interview for Look magazine in 1958. The lingering image of JFK and the McCarthy connections was another reason why JFK was challenged from the left in 1960. (22)
JFK may have regretted the McCarthy connection in later years, but the assertion of the JFK-As-Progressive advocates that he was never close to, nor sympathetic to McCarthy during the critical years prior to 1954 is totally contradicted by JFK's own words and deeds. As with the friendship with Nixon, the confirmation comes not from conservatives spreading rumors, but from JFK's own friends.
(13) Matthews, 74-75.
(14) Congressional Record, January 29, 1949.
(15) op. cit. Mallan, 10-11.
(16) Thomas Reeves, The Life and Times of Joe McCarthy (New York, 1982), 203.
(17) Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. Robert Kennedy and His Times (New York, 1978), 119.
(18) William F. Buckley Jr., column. September 30, 1962.
(19) Ted Sorenson Papers, JFK Library.
(20) Thomas Reeves, A Question of Character (New York, 1991), 123. Based on author's interview with Spalding.
(21) Reeves, A Question of Character, 12
http://mcadams.posc.mu.edu/progjfk2.htm
- Eattherich
Re: President Kennedy's Foreign Policy
The Red-Baiter's Right Hand Man
In January 1953, Bobby went to work as a lawyer on the staff of the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations under its chairman, Senator Joseph McCarthy. His father got him the job by picking up the phone and calling McCarthy. (The senator from Wisconsin was soon joking to an aide that he wasn't sure Joe's campaign contribution was worth it.) In later years, the Kennedys would struggle to explain how RFK could have worked for the most reckless red-baiter in history. McCarthy's reputation for smears was well established by 1953. "I just cannot understand how you could ever have had anything to do with Joe McCarthy," the writer Peter Maas said to Bobby Kennedy in the mid-1960s. "Well, at the time, I thought there was a serious internal security threat to the United States," Kennedy responded, "... and Joe McCarthy seemed to be the only one who was doing anything about it." After a pause, Kennedy added, "I was wrong." Some Kennedy true believers were so incredulous that by the liberal late 1960s they were engaging in outright denial. Bobby Kennedy "didn't know Joe McCarthy from a cord of wood," Kenny O'Donnell told an interviewer shortly after Kennedy's death in 1968.
Actually, McCarthy was reasonably close to the family. An affable, hard-drinking Irishman, he took Pat and Jean out on dates. He warmed up by discussing communists for a half hour or so, then "kissed very hard," Jean remembered He was invited up to Hyannis, where he joined, or rather became, the fun. A family friend recalled watching the Kennedy kids hushing and taking home movies as they threw McCarthy, who couldn't swim, off the dock. Bobby invited McCarthy to speak to the law students at the University of Virginia. At dinner at Bobby's house, McCarthy became sodden with drink and pawed a woman. Bobby helped him to bed, but he refused to be embarrassed for him. It is likely that Bobby Kennedy sympathized and identified with McCarthy. Black Irish, and beneath the bluster, vulnerable and eager to please, McCarthy may have been a bully, but to Bobby he was at the same time an underdog who enjoyed provoking the establishment. McCarthy's Catholicism strengthened the bond. The Wisconsin senator had been a lazy and directionless first termer when a group of Catholic priests from Catholic and Georgetown Universities suggested to him that chasing communists would be a worthy cause, as well as politically profitable. The church's ferocious anti-communism appealed to RFK's black-and-white moralism.
Kennedy did not like McCarthy's chief aide Roy Cohn. Joe Kennedy had asked McCarthy to appoint his son as staff director of the Investigations Subcommittee, but McCarthy had instead chosen Cohn, a young Red-chaser who as an assistant U.S. attorney had helped convict atomic bomb spies Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. Francis "Frip" Flanagan, a Senate staffer close to both the Kennedys and McCarthy, warned Cohn that Robert Kennedy was "disturbed" that he had lost out to Cohn as chief counsel. At their first meeting, Kennedy sullenly looked over his rival. According to Cohn, Kennedy belligerently began, "You puzzle me very much. Mort Downey [a famous entertainer and friend of Joseph Kennedy] thinks you're a great guy. But a lot of people think you're no good. I don't know which side to believe." RFK quickly joined Cohn's detractors. There was much to fault in Cohn: McCarthy's chief henchman was a bully and a smear artist. But Kennedy's loathing may have been more personal. He would from time to time display deep homophobia, and Cohn's homosexuality was unacknowledged but obvious. Cohn, heavy lidded and malevolent, returned the antipathy. He called Kennedy a "rich bitch" and gave him menial work. When Cohn and his fellow investigator and love object, David Schine, took a much-ridiculed inspection tour of American embassies in Europe, weeding out subversive literature and peering under beds for Reds, Kennedy seethed with disapproval. He later said that he complained to McCarthy about the way McCarthy and Cohn were running the committee. "I thought it was headed for disaster.... I told him I thought he was out of his mind and was going to destroy himself." Then, Kennedy said, he quit.
Kennedy's account may be only part of the story. The full explanation for his departure from McCarthy's committee in July 1953, only five months after he signed on, is probably more complex. FBI documents show that McCarthy actually considered making Kennedy staff director in May, but that other staffers were opposed and FBI director J. Edgar Hoover--with whom McCarthy checked every move--was at best indifferent. The FBI's Hoover was beginning to cool on McCarthy, sensing that the senator was about to overplay his hand and become a liability to the anti-communist crusade. It is likely that Hoover shared his concerns with Joseph Kennedy. Kennedy Sr. was in close contact with Hoover--at one time in the 1950s he had tried to hire Hoover away from the FBI as his own personal "director of security." Father would have warned son, expediting his resignation.
Out of work, Kennedy settled for yet another job arranged by his father, as his father's assistant on a presidential committee on government reform, headed by former president Herbert Hoover. Bobby spent his time impatiently listening to old men argue about reorganizing the Department of Agriculture. He quit after a couple of months and went back to work on the Investigations Subcommittee, this time as a counsel for the minority Democrats, who by now had turned on McCarthy. RFK's seat on the committee dais gave him a shot at Roy Cohn as McCarthy was self-destructing during the Army-McCarthy hearings in the spring and early summer of 1954. RFK stayed in close touch with Joe Sr.: "Bobby telephones his father regularly and, of course, everybody is listening to the McCarthy hearings," Rose wrote her daughter Pat on June 2.
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m ... 95287/pg_3
In January 1953, Bobby went to work as a lawyer on the staff of the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations under its chairman, Senator Joseph McCarthy. His father got him the job by picking up the phone and calling McCarthy. (The senator from Wisconsin was soon joking to an aide that he wasn't sure Joe's campaign contribution was worth it.) In later years, the Kennedys would struggle to explain how RFK could have worked for the most reckless red-baiter in history. McCarthy's reputation for smears was well established by 1953. "I just cannot understand how you could ever have had anything to do with Joe McCarthy," the writer Peter Maas said to Bobby Kennedy in the mid-1960s. "Well, at the time, I thought there was a serious internal security threat to the United States," Kennedy responded, "... and Joe McCarthy seemed to be the only one who was doing anything about it." After a pause, Kennedy added, "I was wrong." Some Kennedy true believers were so incredulous that by the liberal late 1960s they were engaging in outright denial. Bobby Kennedy "didn't know Joe McCarthy from a cord of wood," Kenny O'Donnell told an interviewer shortly after Kennedy's death in 1968.
Actually, McCarthy was reasonably close to the family. An affable, hard-drinking Irishman, he took Pat and Jean out on dates. He warmed up by discussing communists for a half hour or so, then "kissed very hard," Jean remembered He was invited up to Hyannis, where he joined, or rather became, the fun. A family friend recalled watching the Kennedy kids hushing and taking home movies as they threw McCarthy, who couldn't swim, off the dock. Bobby invited McCarthy to speak to the law students at the University of Virginia. At dinner at Bobby's house, McCarthy became sodden with drink and pawed a woman. Bobby helped him to bed, but he refused to be embarrassed for him. It is likely that Bobby Kennedy sympathized and identified with McCarthy. Black Irish, and beneath the bluster, vulnerable and eager to please, McCarthy may have been a bully, but to Bobby he was at the same time an underdog who enjoyed provoking the establishment. McCarthy's Catholicism strengthened the bond. The Wisconsin senator had been a lazy and directionless first termer when a group of Catholic priests from Catholic and Georgetown Universities suggested to him that chasing communists would be a worthy cause, as well as politically profitable. The church's ferocious anti-communism appealed to RFK's black-and-white moralism.
Kennedy did not like McCarthy's chief aide Roy Cohn. Joe Kennedy had asked McCarthy to appoint his son as staff director of the Investigations Subcommittee, but McCarthy had instead chosen Cohn, a young Red-chaser who as an assistant U.S. attorney had helped convict atomic bomb spies Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. Francis "Frip" Flanagan, a Senate staffer close to both the Kennedys and McCarthy, warned Cohn that Robert Kennedy was "disturbed" that he had lost out to Cohn as chief counsel. At their first meeting, Kennedy sullenly looked over his rival. According to Cohn, Kennedy belligerently began, "You puzzle me very much. Mort Downey [a famous entertainer and friend of Joseph Kennedy] thinks you're a great guy. But a lot of people think you're no good. I don't know which side to believe." RFK quickly joined Cohn's detractors. There was much to fault in Cohn: McCarthy's chief henchman was a bully and a smear artist. But Kennedy's loathing may have been more personal. He would from time to time display deep homophobia, and Cohn's homosexuality was unacknowledged but obvious. Cohn, heavy lidded and malevolent, returned the antipathy. He called Kennedy a "rich bitch" and gave him menial work. When Cohn and his fellow investigator and love object, David Schine, took a much-ridiculed inspection tour of American embassies in Europe, weeding out subversive literature and peering under beds for Reds, Kennedy seethed with disapproval. He later said that he complained to McCarthy about the way McCarthy and Cohn were running the committee. "I thought it was headed for disaster.... I told him I thought he was out of his mind and was going to destroy himself." Then, Kennedy said, he quit.
Kennedy's account may be only part of the story. The full explanation for his departure from McCarthy's committee in July 1953, only five months after he signed on, is probably more complex. FBI documents show that McCarthy actually considered making Kennedy staff director in May, but that other staffers were opposed and FBI director J. Edgar Hoover--with whom McCarthy checked every move--was at best indifferent. The FBI's Hoover was beginning to cool on McCarthy, sensing that the senator was about to overplay his hand and become a liability to the anti-communist crusade. It is likely that Hoover shared his concerns with Joseph Kennedy. Kennedy Sr. was in close contact with Hoover--at one time in the 1950s he had tried to hire Hoover away from the FBI as his own personal "director of security." Father would have warned son, expediting his resignation.
Out of work, Kennedy settled for yet another job arranged by his father, as his father's assistant on a presidential committee on government reform, headed by former president Herbert Hoover. Bobby spent his time impatiently listening to old men argue about reorganizing the Department of Agriculture. He quit after a couple of months and went back to work on the Investigations Subcommittee, this time as a counsel for the minority Democrats, who by now had turned on McCarthy. RFK's seat on the committee dais gave him a shot at Roy Cohn as McCarthy was self-destructing during the Army-McCarthy hearings in the spring and early summer of 1954. RFK stayed in close touch with Joe Sr.: "Bobby telephones his father regularly and, of course, everybody is listening to the McCarthy hearings," Rose wrote her daughter Pat on June 2.
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m ... 95287/pg_3
Re: President Kennedy's Foreign Policy
When Senator Joe McCarthy was conducting the hearings on Communists in the
government, his assistant, seated at the same desk beside him, was Robert
Kennedy. The Senator at the desk beside McCarthy was Senator John F.
Kennedy. JFK was an *insider* who KNEW the source of the problems. When he
became President, he fired the CIA heads, installed his brother as Attorney
General, and said he was going to put the United States back on the silver
standard, stop the Vietnam War, eliminate government involvement with the
Mafia, and eliminate the Federal Reserve problem. It has also been reported
that he was going to tell the truth about UFOs. Ten days after he gave a
speech at Columbia University making these statements, he was murdered.
http://www.beyondweird.com/ufos/One_Who ... _30.htmlOn December 2, 1954, the Senate voted to "condemn" and censure Senator Joseph McCarthy by a vote of 67 to 22.
Sen. Joseph McCarthy was a friend of the Kennedy family: Joe Kennedy was a leading McCarthy supporter; Robert F. Kennedy worked for McCarthy's subcommittee, and McCarthy dated Patricia Kennedy. In 1954, when the Senate was poised to condemn McCarthy, John Kennedy drafted a speech calling for McCarthy censure but never delivered it. When on December 2, 1954, the Senate rendered its highly publicized decision to censure McCarthy, Senator Kennedy was in the hospital. Though absent, Kennedy could have "paired" his vote against that of another senator, but chose not to; neither did he ever indicate then or later how he would have voted. The episode seriously damaged Kennedy's support in the liberal community, especially with Eleanor Roosevelt, as late as the 1960 election.
government, his assistant, seated at the same desk beside him, was Robert
Kennedy. The Senator at the desk beside McCarthy was Senator John F.
Kennedy. JFK was an *insider* who KNEW the source of the problems. When he
became President, he fired the CIA heads, installed his brother as Attorney
General, and said he was going to put the United States back on the silver
standard, stop the Vietnam War, eliminate government involvement with the
Mafia, and eliminate the Federal Reserve problem. It has also been reported
that he was going to tell the truth about UFOs. Ten days after he gave a
speech at Columbia University making these statements, he was murdered.
http://www.beyondweird.com/ufos/One_Who ... _30.htmlOn December 2, 1954, the Senate voted to "condemn" and censure Senator Joseph McCarthy by a vote of 67 to 22.
Sen. Joseph McCarthy was a friend of the Kennedy family: Joe Kennedy was a leading McCarthy supporter; Robert F. Kennedy worked for McCarthy's subcommittee, and McCarthy dated Patricia Kennedy. In 1954, when the Senate was poised to condemn McCarthy, John Kennedy drafted a speech calling for McCarthy censure but never delivered it. When on December 2, 1954, the Senate rendered its highly publicized decision to censure McCarthy, Senator Kennedy was in the hospital. Though absent, Kennedy could have "paired" his vote against that of another senator, but chose not to; neither did he ever indicate then or later how he would have voted. The episode seriously damaged Kennedy's support in the liberal community, especially with Eleanor Roosevelt, as late as the 1960 election.
Re: President Kennedy's Foreign Policy
Eats beat me to it but this is part of what I put up on PI:
For those who refer to the Democrats and Republicans as two sides of the same coin, Helen Gahagan Douglas' campaign is illustrative of how the extreme right-wing of the Democratic Party (the anti-New Deal faction) purged the Left and became the new "Liberal-Left". While Nixon lambasted Gahagan/Douglas from outside the Democratic Party, the attack from the inside was launched by none other than John F. Kennedy, Nixon's opponent in 1960 for the presidency.
Kennedy was on record as early as 1945 against FDR: "Mr. Roosevelt has contributed to the end of capitalism in our own country, although he would probably argue the point at some length. He has done this not through the laws which he sponsored or were passed during his presidency, but rather through the emphasis he put on rights rather than responsibilites."
During the 1950 Nixon campaign against Gahagan/Douglas, Kennedy extensively red-baited Douglas ("the Pink Lady") for her support for Henry Wallce (FDR's V.P. before Truman) in his Progressive Party run for the presidency in 1948.
Kennedy's father, Joseph P. Kennedy, made a significant contribution to Nixon's campaign (as he did later for Joseph McCarthy) and the check was hand delivered by JFK:
"He explained that the check should be used in Nixon's campaign for senator, that it's intention was due partly to admiration for Nixon and partly to a preference for Congressman Nixon over Congresswoman Douglas." (6)
Nixon, despite the closeness he felt to JFK was nonetheless startled by the gesture. For a Democrat to come over and offer that kind of encouragement to help a Republican was literally unprecedented. Nixon aide Pat Hillings recalled how Nixon repeatedly said in amazement, "Isn't this something!" (7)
http://mcadams.posc.mu.edu/progjfk1.htm
Just a few more items for the resume...
One of Sen. Joe McCarthy's biggest financial backers and friends was Joe Kennedy, the dad, despite the fact that McCarthy was a Republican. McCarthy actually dated JFK's sister. In 1953, RFK was a senior staffer for McCarthy at the height of McCarthyism. JFK was an ardent supporter... Take a look at how he voted in the vote to censure McCarthy in 1954. In fact, take a look at JFK's entire voting record as a Congressman and as a Senator (short as both those tenures were).
The largest and most radical of the CIO unions at the time was UE, the United Electrical Workers, primarily concentrated at GE and Westinghouse among other major employers. The union was particularly powerful in Massachusetts with perhaps its most important local being at Lynn/GE (the aircraft engine plant). After the war, the government decided that UE had to be destroyed. The entire spectrum of what was thrown at UE is a history unto itself, starting with HUAC and reaching past McCarthy. The campaign included jailings, shootings, arbitrary decertifications of locals, a "counter-union" funded by the government, FBI and Congressional committee intimidation, open collusion between the cops, the government, the employers, and the counter-union... you name it.
In Massachusetts, the Kennedys led the effort. They toured the state, lending their considerable power and "charisma" to destroying the union. The union was devastated.
I knew the guy who debated Kennedy at Lynn/GE. His name was Don Tormey and he was perhaps the greatest human being I have ever met... an unsung hero in the hidden history of America.
As for Kennedy? He was just another red-baiter... just another cop.
- Anaxarchos
For those who refer to the Democrats and Republicans as two sides of the same coin, Helen Gahagan Douglas' campaign is illustrative of how the extreme right-wing of the Democratic Party (the anti-New Deal faction) purged the Left and became the new "Liberal-Left". While Nixon lambasted Gahagan/Douglas from outside the Democratic Party, the attack from the inside was launched by none other than John F. Kennedy, Nixon's opponent in 1960 for the presidency.
Kennedy was on record as early as 1945 against FDR: "Mr. Roosevelt has contributed to the end of capitalism in our own country, although he would probably argue the point at some length. He has done this not through the laws which he sponsored or were passed during his presidency, but rather through the emphasis he put on rights rather than responsibilites."
During the 1950 Nixon campaign against Gahagan/Douglas, Kennedy extensively red-baited Douglas ("the Pink Lady") for her support for Henry Wallce (FDR's V.P. before Truman) in his Progressive Party run for the presidency in 1948.
Kennedy's father, Joseph P. Kennedy, made a significant contribution to Nixon's campaign (as he did later for Joseph McCarthy) and the check was hand delivered by JFK:
"He explained that the check should be used in Nixon's campaign for senator, that it's intention was due partly to admiration for Nixon and partly to a preference for Congressman Nixon over Congresswoman Douglas." (6)
Nixon, despite the closeness he felt to JFK was nonetheless startled by the gesture. For a Democrat to come over and offer that kind of encouragement to help a Republican was literally unprecedented. Nixon aide Pat Hillings recalled how Nixon repeatedly said in amazement, "Isn't this something!" (7)
http://mcadams.posc.mu.edu/progjfk1.htm
Just a few more items for the resume...
One of Sen. Joe McCarthy's biggest financial backers and friends was Joe Kennedy, the dad, despite the fact that McCarthy was a Republican. McCarthy actually dated JFK's sister. In 1953, RFK was a senior staffer for McCarthy at the height of McCarthyism. JFK was an ardent supporter... Take a look at how he voted in the vote to censure McCarthy in 1954. In fact, take a look at JFK's entire voting record as a Congressman and as a Senator (short as both those tenures were).
The largest and most radical of the CIO unions at the time was UE, the United Electrical Workers, primarily concentrated at GE and Westinghouse among other major employers. The union was particularly powerful in Massachusetts with perhaps its most important local being at Lynn/GE (the aircraft engine plant). After the war, the government decided that UE had to be destroyed. The entire spectrum of what was thrown at UE is a history unto itself, starting with HUAC and reaching past McCarthy. The campaign included jailings, shootings, arbitrary decertifications of locals, a "counter-union" funded by the government, FBI and Congressional committee intimidation, open collusion between the cops, the government, the employers, and the counter-union... you name it.
In Massachusetts, the Kennedys led the effort. They toured the state, lending their considerable power and "charisma" to destroying the union. The union was devastated.
I knew the guy who debated Kennedy at Lynn/GE. His name was Don Tormey and he was perhaps the greatest human being I have ever met... an unsung hero in the hidden history of America.
As for Kennedy? He was just another red-baiter... just another cop.
- Anaxarchos
Re: President Kennedy's Foreign Policy
Modernization as Ideology:
American Social Science and "Nation Building" in the Kennedy Era
by Michael E. Latham
Foreword by John Lewis Gaddis
Providing new insight on the intellectual and cultural dimensions of the Cold War, Michael Latham reveals how social science theory helped shape American foreign policy during the Kennedy administration. He shows how, in the midst of America's protracted struggle to contain communism in the developing world, the concept of global modernization moved beyond its beginnings in academia to become a motivating ideology behind policy decisions.
After tracing the rise of modernization theory in American social science, Latham analyzes the way its core assumptions influenced the Kennedy administration's Alliance for Progress with Latin America, the creation of the Peace Corps, and the strategic hamlet program in Vietnam. But as he demonstrates, modernizers went beyond insisting on the relevance of America's experience to the dilemmas faced by impoverished countries. Seeking to accelerate the movement of foreign societies toward a liberal, democratic, and capitalist modernity, Kennedy and his advisers also reiterated a much deeper sense of their own nation's vital strengths and essential benevolence. At the height of the Cold War, Latham argues, modernization recast older ideologies of Manifest Destiny and imperialism.
LINK
Chapter 1
Modernization as Ideology
Approaching the Problem
In June 1961, as colleges and universities across the United States conferred degrees and charged their graduates to go out and improve the world they lived in, Walt Whitman Rostow delivered his own unique commencement address. The ceremony, held at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, must have looked very different from the ones the economist had participated in back at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Staring out at the crowd assembled before him, the newly appointed White House deputy national security adviser did not see students, faculty, administrators, and trustees dressed in academic regalia. In their place were eighty military officers wearing the uniforms of twenty different national armed forces, all of them graduates of the U.S. Army Special Warfare Center course in counterguerrilla strategy.
As different as the setting may have been, however, Rostow probably found himself at home. His social scientific model, he believed, had even more relevance for this audience than the ones he had taught at MIT. Dispensing with the usual greetings and congratulations, Rostow cut right to the point. The world, he warned, had become a most dangerous place. In Cuba, the Congo, Laos, and Vietnam, the Kennedy administration faced crises. Each of them "represented a successful Communist breaching—over previous years—of the Cold War truce lines which had emerged from the Second World War and its aftermath. In different ways each had arisen from the efforts of the international Communist movement to exploit the inherent instabilities of the underdeveloped areas." The United States and its allies now had to meet that challenge in ways that went well beyond the limited foreign aid programs and military assistance of the past. They had to find the means to win a battle "fought not merely with weapons but fought in the minds of the men who live in the villages and the hills; fought by the spirit and policy of those who run the local government." They had to intervene directly and engage themselves actively in "the whole creative process of modernization."[1]
For Rostow, his intellectual cohort, and the policymakers they advised, the concept of modernization was much more than an academic model. It was also a means of understanding the process of global change and identifying ways the United States could accelerate, channel, and direct it. The unprecedented power America had enjoyed at the end of World War II, they feared, had eroded. The collapse of European empire and the formation of "new states" posed dire challenges for a nation determined to contain the spread of Soviet communism. Within five years after the Second World War, India, Pakistan, Ceylon, Burma, the Philippines, Indonesia, Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, and Israel all gained independence. Following the Geneva Accords of 1954, Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam left France's empire. Within a few more years, Malaya, Libya, Sudan, Morocco, and Tunisia gained official freedom from imperial control, and Ghana, Togoland, the Cameroons, and Guinea soon followed. By 1960, there were approximately forty newly independent states with a population of about 800 million.[2] As these "emerging" countries combined with older nations of Latin America, Africa, and Asia to call for international assistance in meeting their economic and social needs, the Cold War became a global confrontation. Unstable regimes and impoverished, discontented populations, many American policymakers argued, could only provide fertile ground for Marxist revolutionaries. As Truman administration strategist Paul Nitze and his associates put it in the striking document known as NSC-68, "the defeat of Germany and Japan and the decline of the British and French Empires" had led to a dangerous contest between the United States and a relentless Soviet adversary determined "to impose its absolute authority over the rest of the world." Amid the instability produced by decolonization, the potential for revolutionary advance only seemed to grow.[3]
Though most American strategists did not believe that the Soviets would risk a direct military confrontation during the 1950s, they were certain that the Kremlin was determined to chip away at the "underdeveloped periphery," destroy America's international credibility, and steadily undermine the system of political and economic alliances the United States had attempted to construct. In the aftermath of the Soviet Union's successful detonation of an atomic bomb, the stunning Communist revolution in China, and the shock and sacrifice of the Korean War, American officials became increasingly concerned with the course of global social change. In the Philippines and South Vietnam, the United States intervened in attempts to defeat armed challenges to its allies. In Guatemala and Iran, the Eisenhower administration used covert operations to support coups against left-leaning governments and tried to do so in Indonesia. Troubled by Middle Eastern instability and worried about Russian links to Egypt and Syria, Eisenhower also deployed the U.S. Marines to defend a pro-American elite in Lebanon. Around the world, the United States channeled large quantities of military aid to foreign leaders promising an unyielding anti-Communist stance.
Committed to halting what they perceived as Soviet-promoted aggression, determined to display resolution and determination, and worried that revolutionaries might capture the force of nationalist aspirations, Kennedy planners inherited the containment framework and searched for more effective ways to implement it. The Cuban revolution, Ngo Dinh Diem's increasingly fragile regime in South Vietnam, and an escalating civil war in the newly independent Congo only intensified their concerns. When Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev used a January 1961 speech to pledge support for the "sacred" struggles of colonial peoples and promised to defend "wars of national liberation," the new administration's worst fears seemed confirmed. From the Senate floor, Kennedy himself had previously warned of the vulnerability of the developing countries. Now, as he moved into the Oval Office, he urged his advisers to study Khrushchev's address and mark his words. "You've got to understand it," he told them; "this is our clue to the Soviet Union."[4]
In that context of heightened anxiety, theories of "modernization" proved particularly appealing to policymakers hoping to contain revolutionary expansion.[5] Products of the early Cold War, they were built on a set of fundamental assumptions about the nature of global change and America's relationship to it. By the time the Kennedy administration came to power, a broad range of scholars working across disciplines at many different academic centers had started to translate their ideas into policy recommendations. Armed with the tools of social science and confident in their rational, analytical powers, representative thinkers such as Rostow, Lucian Pye, Daniel Lerner, Gabriel Almond, and James Coleman called for a comparative evaluation of the differences between what they termed "traditional" and "modern" societies and made use of a dramatic increase in federal government funding to define the requirements for movement from one condition to another.[6] In their emerging synthesis, "modernization" involved a series of integrally related changes in economic organization, political structures, and systems of social values. The research problem at hand was nothing less than creating a set of universal, empirical benchmarks to describe the overall patterns of global transformation. As Princeton University's C. E. Black broadly defined it, "modernization" was the "process by which historically evolved institutions are adapted to the rapidly changing functions that reflect the unprecedented increase in man's knowledge, permitting control over his environment."[7]
<snip>
In the Cold War context, the scientism of modernization theory also allowed for a necessary and politically desirable reformulation of the older ideologies on which it was based. As they described America's world role in terms of an objectively determined, scientifically verified process of universal development, theorists and officials used the ideology of modernization to project an appealing image of expanding power during a period of decolonization. Modernization, Rostow explained to another Kennedy adviser, would replace colonialism. It would create "a new post-colonial relationship between the northern and southern halves of the Free World… . As the colonial ties are liquidated, new and most constructive relationships can be built … a new partnership among free men—rich and poor alike."[42] Articulated in this way, modernization was a means for the continued assertion of the privileges and rights of a dominant power during an era in which the nations of Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East increasingly demanded independence. By describing modernization as a benevolent, universally valid, scientifically and historically documented process, social scientists, policymakers, and the nation's media also elided America's own imperial past.[43] Rather than the nation that expanded across the continent, waged imperial war in 1898, fought for possession of the Philippines, and remained ambivalent on the subject of European empire after World War II, the United States was presented as a force capable of guiding a destitute world along the transformative path it once traveled. The American Revolution and New Deal, in this sense, became historical blueprints for the kind of anticolonial, democratic progress and reform that struggling states might emulate. Modernizers invoked older conceptions of America's destined role as world leader and redefined them through a supposedly objective developmental schema. They did so, moreover, at a moment when the forces of nationalism and Marxist social revolution called American assertions sharply into question.
Having explained what I aim to demonstrate through an ideological analysis, I would also like to clarify some additional issues regarding the scope of this book and its argument. The reader should recognize, first, that I am not seeking to produce a comprehensive or exhaustive account of either the history of development theory or each of the three Kennedy programs in which I argue it became institutionalized. As mentioned previously, other scholars have undertaken those specific and separate tasks in far greater detail than space will permit me to here. My goal, in this work, is to open new areas for inquiry by illustrating the power of relationships cutting across social science, national identity, and Cold War foreign relations. I also disavow any claim that concepts of modernization were solely responsible for the Kennedy-era initiatives. As later chapters show, modernization certainly did play a major role. But it did so in the midst of an interaction of personalities, historical forces, human experiences, and even haphazard, contingent occurrences. Modernization theory alone was incapable of "causing" anything. As an ideology in specific institutional settings, however, it was one of the significant factors that gave meaning to complex events and shaped thinking in consequential ways. I would like to point out as well that this ideological analysis, critical as it is, does not necessarily depend on an accusation of conspiracy, deception, or "bad faith" on the part of Kennedy policymakers and the intellectuals who advised them. They were convinced that modernization would benefit both the "developing" world and the industrialized West, and few of them perceived much conflict between the American objectives they defined and what they understood as a kind of internationalist idealism and altruism. By the end of the 1960s, however, their largely unquestioned assumptions and supreme self-confidence would be much harder to maintain.
One should also bear in mind that those on the "receiving end" of modernization responded in diverse ways to Western efforts to transform them in cultural and political terms. The chapters on the Alliance for Progress and the Strategic Hamlet Program, in particular, reveal that responses to modernization came from different political perspectives and varied widely. Although liberal Latin Americans were among the strongest advocates of the Alliance for Progress and supported its efforts, Castro's Cuba rejected its goals and ideology directly. In South Vietnam, Ngo Dinh Diem sought to use American aid to bolster his repressive regime while the National Liberation Front mobilized in revolutionary opposition to the U.S. nation-building campaign. The analyses produced by scholars such as Albert Memmi, Eduardo Galeano, Walter Rodney, and, more recently, Gyan Prakash and Arjun Appadurai also reveal that the ideology of modernization has certainly not escaped critical examination by those it proposed to reform and enlighten. Far from breaking down "traditional" cultures and producing a convergence of uniformly "modern" ones, contemporary forces of mass communication and human migration have fostered the formation of diverse, unpredictable, and overlapping religious, ethnic, and group identities in transnational settings.[44] Modernization, in practice, rarely produced the kind of effects its advocates anticipated on paper.
Finally, it is important to acknowledge that, even in the late 1950s and early 1960s, not all Americans shared the vision of their nation presented by modernization in scholarly work and public policy. Although I do maintain that most of the limited criticism of Kennedy "development" policies did not challenge the dominant assumptions, it is certainly true that radicals such as C. Wright Mills, Paul Goodman, and William Appleman Williams produced early and thoroughgoing attacks on the idea of a modern and modernizing America. Many returning Peace Corps volunteers, especially African American ones, also came to reject Washington's description of their ability to produce dramatic, sweeping, and transformative progress abroad.[45] In time, broad-based social movements challenged the way "modernization" was articulated in the domestic context of the "Great Society" and criticized the definition of a "culture of poverty" to be redeemed by federal programs. Later in the decade, a more radical civil rights movement and the rise of the New Left gave such comprehensive dissent a more forceful, public voice. During the early 1960s, however, those arguments remained comparatively rare in an America that had not yet begun to ask the fundamental questions that the Vietnam War would eventually push to the center of national debate.
During the Kennedy era, the promotion of liberal democracy and the acceleration of economic development were mutually reinforcing parts of an ideology that contributed to the definition of strategic goals and projected a national identity suited to the Cold War context. In the midst of a collapsing European colonial order, the Kennedy administration conceived of modernization as part of a comprehensive response to a dangerous Communist threat. As they identified the United States as an altruistic, benevolent nation positioned at the apex of a modernity defined by democratic politics, high living standards, and individual freedom, theorists and officials also reconstructed much older, imperial visions of America's global power. Modernization theory alone did not cause the Peace Corps, the Alliance for Progress, or the Strategic Hamlet Program. It did, however, function as a conceptual framework through which the assumptions of social scientists and policymakers about America's character and international role became embedded in both foreign policy and public, cultural representation. Rather than substituting an ideological determinism for that of "national security" or "capitalist demands," my goal for this analysis is to complement the best of previous historical interpretations. Instead of replacing "power" and "interests" with "culture," I explore the ways in which they are integrally related. American empire, as William Appleman Williams argued, certainly was about political containment and market dominance. But it was also a "way of life."[46]
https://www.researchgate.net/publicatio ... 88_pp_1895
American Social Science and "Nation Building" in the Kennedy Era
by Michael E. Latham
Foreword by John Lewis Gaddis
Providing new insight on the intellectual and cultural dimensions of the Cold War, Michael Latham reveals how social science theory helped shape American foreign policy during the Kennedy administration. He shows how, in the midst of America's protracted struggle to contain communism in the developing world, the concept of global modernization moved beyond its beginnings in academia to become a motivating ideology behind policy decisions.
After tracing the rise of modernization theory in American social science, Latham analyzes the way its core assumptions influenced the Kennedy administration's Alliance for Progress with Latin America, the creation of the Peace Corps, and the strategic hamlet program in Vietnam. But as he demonstrates, modernizers went beyond insisting on the relevance of America's experience to the dilemmas faced by impoverished countries. Seeking to accelerate the movement of foreign societies toward a liberal, democratic, and capitalist modernity, Kennedy and his advisers also reiterated a much deeper sense of their own nation's vital strengths and essential benevolence. At the height of the Cold War, Latham argues, modernization recast older ideologies of Manifest Destiny and imperialism.
LINK
Chapter 1
Modernization as Ideology
Approaching the Problem
In June 1961, as colleges and universities across the United States conferred degrees and charged their graduates to go out and improve the world they lived in, Walt Whitman Rostow delivered his own unique commencement address. The ceremony, held at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, must have looked very different from the ones the economist had participated in back at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Staring out at the crowd assembled before him, the newly appointed White House deputy national security adviser did not see students, faculty, administrators, and trustees dressed in academic regalia. In their place were eighty military officers wearing the uniforms of twenty different national armed forces, all of them graduates of the U.S. Army Special Warfare Center course in counterguerrilla strategy.
As different as the setting may have been, however, Rostow probably found himself at home. His social scientific model, he believed, had even more relevance for this audience than the ones he had taught at MIT. Dispensing with the usual greetings and congratulations, Rostow cut right to the point. The world, he warned, had become a most dangerous place. In Cuba, the Congo, Laos, and Vietnam, the Kennedy administration faced crises. Each of them "represented a successful Communist breaching—over previous years—of the Cold War truce lines which had emerged from the Second World War and its aftermath. In different ways each had arisen from the efforts of the international Communist movement to exploit the inherent instabilities of the underdeveloped areas." The United States and its allies now had to meet that challenge in ways that went well beyond the limited foreign aid programs and military assistance of the past. They had to find the means to win a battle "fought not merely with weapons but fought in the minds of the men who live in the villages and the hills; fought by the spirit and policy of those who run the local government." They had to intervene directly and engage themselves actively in "the whole creative process of modernization."[1]
For Rostow, his intellectual cohort, and the policymakers they advised, the concept of modernization was much more than an academic model. It was also a means of understanding the process of global change and identifying ways the United States could accelerate, channel, and direct it. The unprecedented power America had enjoyed at the end of World War II, they feared, had eroded. The collapse of European empire and the formation of "new states" posed dire challenges for a nation determined to contain the spread of Soviet communism. Within five years after the Second World War, India, Pakistan, Ceylon, Burma, the Philippines, Indonesia, Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, and Israel all gained independence. Following the Geneva Accords of 1954, Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam left France's empire. Within a few more years, Malaya, Libya, Sudan, Morocco, and Tunisia gained official freedom from imperial control, and Ghana, Togoland, the Cameroons, and Guinea soon followed. By 1960, there were approximately forty newly independent states with a population of about 800 million.[2] As these "emerging" countries combined with older nations of Latin America, Africa, and Asia to call for international assistance in meeting their economic and social needs, the Cold War became a global confrontation. Unstable regimes and impoverished, discontented populations, many American policymakers argued, could only provide fertile ground for Marxist revolutionaries. As Truman administration strategist Paul Nitze and his associates put it in the striking document known as NSC-68, "the defeat of Germany and Japan and the decline of the British and French Empires" had led to a dangerous contest between the United States and a relentless Soviet adversary determined "to impose its absolute authority over the rest of the world." Amid the instability produced by decolonization, the potential for revolutionary advance only seemed to grow.[3]
Though most American strategists did not believe that the Soviets would risk a direct military confrontation during the 1950s, they were certain that the Kremlin was determined to chip away at the "underdeveloped periphery," destroy America's international credibility, and steadily undermine the system of political and economic alliances the United States had attempted to construct. In the aftermath of the Soviet Union's successful detonation of an atomic bomb, the stunning Communist revolution in China, and the shock and sacrifice of the Korean War, American officials became increasingly concerned with the course of global social change. In the Philippines and South Vietnam, the United States intervened in attempts to defeat armed challenges to its allies. In Guatemala and Iran, the Eisenhower administration used covert operations to support coups against left-leaning governments and tried to do so in Indonesia. Troubled by Middle Eastern instability and worried about Russian links to Egypt and Syria, Eisenhower also deployed the U.S. Marines to defend a pro-American elite in Lebanon. Around the world, the United States channeled large quantities of military aid to foreign leaders promising an unyielding anti-Communist stance.
Committed to halting what they perceived as Soviet-promoted aggression, determined to display resolution and determination, and worried that revolutionaries might capture the force of nationalist aspirations, Kennedy planners inherited the containment framework and searched for more effective ways to implement it. The Cuban revolution, Ngo Dinh Diem's increasingly fragile regime in South Vietnam, and an escalating civil war in the newly independent Congo only intensified their concerns. When Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev used a January 1961 speech to pledge support for the "sacred" struggles of colonial peoples and promised to defend "wars of national liberation," the new administration's worst fears seemed confirmed. From the Senate floor, Kennedy himself had previously warned of the vulnerability of the developing countries. Now, as he moved into the Oval Office, he urged his advisers to study Khrushchev's address and mark his words. "You've got to understand it," he told them; "this is our clue to the Soviet Union."[4]
In that context of heightened anxiety, theories of "modernization" proved particularly appealing to policymakers hoping to contain revolutionary expansion.[5] Products of the early Cold War, they were built on a set of fundamental assumptions about the nature of global change and America's relationship to it. By the time the Kennedy administration came to power, a broad range of scholars working across disciplines at many different academic centers had started to translate their ideas into policy recommendations. Armed with the tools of social science and confident in their rational, analytical powers, representative thinkers such as Rostow, Lucian Pye, Daniel Lerner, Gabriel Almond, and James Coleman called for a comparative evaluation of the differences between what they termed "traditional" and "modern" societies and made use of a dramatic increase in federal government funding to define the requirements for movement from one condition to another.[6] In their emerging synthesis, "modernization" involved a series of integrally related changes in economic organization, political structures, and systems of social values. The research problem at hand was nothing less than creating a set of universal, empirical benchmarks to describe the overall patterns of global transformation. As Princeton University's C. E. Black broadly defined it, "modernization" was the "process by which historically evolved institutions are adapted to the rapidly changing functions that reflect the unprecedented increase in man's knowledge, permitting control over his environment."[7]
<snip>
In the Cold War context, the scientism of modernization theory also allowed for a necessary and politically desirable reformulation of the older ideologies on which it was based. As they described America's world role in terms of an objectively determined, scientifically verified process of universal development, theorists and officials used the ideology of modernization to project an appealing image of expanding power during a period of decolonization. Modernization, Rostow explained to another Kennedy adviser, would replace colonialism. It would create "a new post-colonial relationship between the northern and southern halves of the Free World… . As the colonial ties are liquidated, new and most constructive relationships can be built … a new partnership among free men—rich and poor alike."[42] Articulated in this way, modernization was a means for the continued assertion of the privileges and rights of a dominant power during an era in which the nations of Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East increasingly demanded independence. By describing modernization as a benevolent, universally valid, scientifically and historically documented process, social scientists, policymakers, and the nation's media also elided America's own imperial past.[43] Rather than the nation that expanded across the continent, waged imperial war in 1898, fought for possession of the Philippines, and remained ambivalent on the subject of European empire after World War II, the United States was presented as a force capable of guiding a destitute world along the transformative path it once traveled. The American Revolution and New Deal, in this sense, became historical blueprints for the kind of anticolonial, democratic progress and reform that struggling states might emulate. Modernizers invoked older conceptions of America's destined role as world leader and redefined them through a supposedly objective developmental schema. They did so, moreover, at a moment when the forces of nationalism and Marxist social revolution called American assertions sharply into question.
Having explained what I aim to demonstrate through an ideological analysis, I would also like to clarify some additional issues regarding the scope of this book and its argument. The reader should recognize, first, that I am not seeking to produce a comprehensive or exhaustive account of either the history of development theory or each of the three Kennedy programs in which I argue it became institutionalized. As mentioned previously, other scholars have undertaken those specific and separate tasks in far greater detail than space will permit me to here. My goal, in this work, is to open new areas for inquiry by illustrating the power of relationships cutting across social science, national identity, and Cold War foreign relations. I also disavow any claim that concepts of modernization were solely responsible for the Kennedy-era initiatives. As later chapters show, modernization certainly did play a major role. But it did so in the midst of an interaction of personalities, historical forces, human experiences, and even haphazard, contingent occurrences. Modernization theory alone was incapable of "causing" anything. As an ideology in specific institutional settings, however, it was one of the significant factors that gave meaning to complex events and shaped thinking in consequential ways. I would like to point out as well that this ideological analysis, critical as it is, does not necessarily depend on an accusation of conspiracy, deception, or "bad faith" on the part of Kennedy policymakers and the intellectuals who advised them. They were convinced that modernization would benefit both the "developing" world and the industrialized West, and few of them perceived much conflict between the American objectives they defined and what they understood as a kind of internationalist idealism and altruism. By the end of the 1960s, however, their largely unquestioned assumptions and supreme self-confidence would be much harder to maintain.
One should also bear in mind that those on the "receiving end" of modernization responded in diverse ways to Western efforts to transform them in cultural and political terms. The chapters on the Alliance for Progress and the Strategic Hamlet Program, in particular, reveal that responses to modernization came from different political perspectives and varied widely. Although liberal Latin Americans were among the strongest advocates of the Alliance for Progress and supported its efforts, Castro's Cuba rejected its goals and ideology directly. In South Vietnam, Ngo Dinh Diem sought to use American aid to bolster his repressive regime while the National Liberation Front mobilized in revolutionary opposition to the U.S. nation-building campaign. The analyses produced by scholars such as Albert Memmi, Eduardo Galeano, Walter Rodney, and, more recently, Gyan Prakash and Arjun Appadurai also reveal that the ideology of modernization has certainly not escaped critical examination by those it proposed to reform and enlighten. Far from breaking down "traditional" cultures and producing a convergence of uniformly "modern" ones, contemporary forces of mass communication and human migration have fostered the formation of diverse, unpredictable, and overlapping religious, ethnic, and group identities in transnational settings.[44] Modernization, in practice, rarely produced the kind of effects its advocates anticipated on paper.
Finally, it is important to acknowledge that, even in the late 1950s and early 1960s, not all Americans shared the vision of their nation presented by modernization in scholarly work and public policy. Although I do maintain that most of the limited criticism of Kennedy "development" policies did not challenge the dominant assumptions, it is certainly true that radicals such as C. Wright Mills, Paul Goodman, and William Appleman Williams produced early and thoroughgoing attacks on the idea of a modern and modernizing America. Many returning Peace Corps volunteers, especially African American ones, also came to reject Washington's description of their ability to produce dramatic, sweeping, and transformative progress abroad.[45] In time, broad-based social movements challenged the way "modernization" was articulated in the domestic context of the "Great Society" and criticized the definition of a "culture of poverty" to be redeemed by federal programs. Later in the decade, a more radical civil rights movement and the rise of the New Left gave such comprehensive dissent a more forceful, public voice. During the early 1960s, however, those arguments remained comparatively rare in an America that had not yet begun to ask the fundamental questions that the Vietnam War would eventually push to the center of national debate.
During the Kennedy era, the promotion of liberal democracy and the acceleration of economic development were mutually reinforcing parts of an ideology that contributed to the definition of strategic goals and projected a national identity suited to the Cold War context. In the midst of a collapsing European colonial order, the Kennedy administration conceived of modernization as part of a comprehensive response to a dangerous Communist threat. As they identified the United States as an altruistic, benevolent nation positioned at the apex of a modernity defined by democratic politics, high living standards, and individual freedom, theorists and officials also reconstructed much older, imperial visions of America's global power. Modernization theory alone did not cause the Peace Corps, the Alliance for Progress, or the Strategic Hamlet Program. It did, however, function as a conceptual framework through which the assumptions of social scientists and policymakers about America's character and international role became embedded in both foreign policy and public, cultural representation. Rather than substituting an ideological determinism for that of "national security" or "capitalist demands," my goal for this analysis is to complement the best of previous historical interpretations. Instead of replacing "power" and "interests" with "culture," I explore the ways in which they are integrally related. American empire, as William Appleman Williams argued, certainly was about political containment and market dominance. But it was also a "way of life."[46]
https://www.researchgate.net/publicatio ... 88_pp_1895
Re: President Kennedy's Foreign Policy
Rabe frames his exploration of Kennedy's approach to U.S.-Latin American relations around the same set of contradictions that bedeviled U.S. policies toward Latin America under Wilson. Why was it that a president who specifically set out to redress longstanding grievances on the part of Latin American countries ended up not only failing to achieve his economic and social reform goals in the region, but actually expanding destructive U.S. activities there? Rabe provides a carefully documented account of the process by which the United States reintroduced "gunboat" diplomacy into the Dominican Republic and Haiti, and further extended U.S. meddling into Brazil, Argentina, and Chile. In 1962, the CIA spent $5 million on political campaigns in Brazil, funneled Alliance for Progress aid to friendly state governors, and undercut social reform programs in the drought-ridden Northeast by "assisting anti-Goulart oligarchs." (p. 69). The result was the rise of even more demands for reform, a U.S.-supported military coup, and 20 years of dictatorship. At the same time, the CIA authorized more than $3 million of covert aid to campaigns of the Christian Democratic Party in Chile, resulting in the rise of a stronger reform movement, a U.S.-supported military coup, and 16 years of dictatorship. "The covert intervention [in Chile]," Rabe argues, "may have...weakened the democratic process by urging Chileans to view political opponents as mortal enemies." (p. 115). At a moment in which the U.S. foreign policy team once again argues the urgency and efficacy of using covert means to support "democracy" abroad, Rabe's conclusions warrant some attention.
During the very short Kennedy administration, military leaders in Latin America, most of whom had received newly available U.S. training, overthrew six popularly elected presidents. Kennedy's administration dedicated 55% of its military aid in Latin America to the bolstering of internal security in the region, but a report from the Office of the Assistant secretary of Defense in 1965 recommended that "unless repressive military measures are an acceptable solution," (p. 146), the U.S. should refrain from augmenting the political and military capabilities of the region's soldiers. Two decades of intense military intervention confirmed the prophetic nature ofthat observation.
While much of the literature on U.S. intervention during the Kennedy era has appeared before, Rabe strengthens these arguments through new documentary sources (always contending against the government's continued unwillingness to release critical records). Some cases, particularly that of the administration's program to undermine the government of Prime Minister Cheddi Jagan in British Guiana (Guyana), are significant additions. Kennedy browbeat the British into reversing their Guyanese policy by arguing, with a huge leap of convoluted logic, that to move towards an independent Guiana under Jagan would result in the "election of a belligerent, rash person in the 1964 American presidential race," (p. 91). This move ultimately aided the rise to power of an authoritarian demagogue (Forbes Burnham) who left behind a legacy of race hatred and political corruption in the small nation.
If Rabe's study provides highly valuable insights into this period of intensified U.S. operations in Latin America, much less clear is the question of why Kennedy followed a program that seemed to undercut his own beliefs in the importance of social, economic and political reforms. Was the Alliance for Progress, Kennedy's main policy instrument in the hemisphere, a new approach to inter-American relations or part of a long-term U.S. demand for hegemony in its sphere of interests? Did Kennedy care about Latin America, or was the region a Cold War stand in for his "real" concerns? Rabe provides a convincing argument that Kennedy was personally devoted to Latin America, spending "extraordinary amounts of time and energy" on the region (p. 195). Ultimately, however, "Kennedy's absolute determination to prevent a second Communist outpost in the Western Hemisphere" (p. 19) was so all-consuming that any movement that sponsored some degree of internal reform or independence from the United States was immediately read as threatening. Yet the question still remains whether Kennedy's policy was an inevitable artifact of the Cold War. A longer historical perspective would link Kennedy to Wilson, Cleveland, or earlier administrations, for in the past 200 years there always seems to have been a greater "threat" available that has prevented the United States from supporting ostensible reform goals in the region. In the end, we have preferred familiar military allies in the region, with disastrous consequences for Latin Americans. Maybe we can learn from Rabe's fine study before the same mistakes are repeated yet again.
During the very short Kennedy administration, military leaders in Latin America, most of whom had received newly available U.S. training, overthrew six popularly elected presidents. Kennedy's administration dedicated 55% of its military aid in Latin America to the bolstering of internal security in the region, but a report from the Office of the Assistant secretary of Defense in 1965 recommended that "unless repressive military measures are an acceptable solution," (p. 146), the U.S. should refrain from augmenting the political and military capabilities of the region's soldiers. Two decades of intense military intervention confirmed the prophetic nature ofthat observation.
While much of the literature on U.S. intervention during the Kennedy era has appeared before, Rabe strengthens these arguments through new documentary sources (always contending against the government's continued unwillingness to release critical records). Some cases, particularly that of the administration's program to undermine the government of Prime Minister Cheddi Jagan in British Guiana (Guyana), are significant additions. Kennedy browbeat the British into reversing their Guyanese policy by arguing, with a huge leap of convoluted logic, that to move towards an independent Guiana under Jagan would result in the "election of a belligerent, rash person in the 1964 American presidential race," (p. 91). This move ultimately aided the rise to power of an authoritarian demagogue (Forbes Burnham) who left behind a legacy of race hatred and political corruption in the small nation.
If Rabe's study provides highly valuable insights into this period of intensified U.S. operations in Latin America, much less clear is the question of why Kennedy followed a program that seemed to undercut his own beliefs in the importance of social, economic and political reforms. Was the Alliance for Progress, Kennedy's main policy instrument in the hemisphere, a new approach to inter-American relations or part of a long-term U.S. demand for hegemony in its sphere of interests? Did Kennedy care about Latin America, or was the region a Cold War stand in for his "real" concerns? Rabe provides a convincing argument that Kennedy was personally devoted to Latin America, spending "extraordinary amounts of time and energy" on the region (p. 195). Ultimately, however, "Kennedy's absolute determination to prevent a second Communist outpost in the Western Hemisphere" (p. 19) was so all-consuming that any movement that sponsored some degree of internal reform or independence from the United States was immediately read as threatening. Yet the question still remains whether Kennedy's policy was an inevitable artifact of the Cold War. A longer historical perspective would link Kennedy to Wilson, Cleveland, or earlier administrations, for in the past 200 years there always seems to have been a greater "threat" available that has prevented the United States from supporting ostensible reform goals in the region. In the end, we have preferred familiar military allies in the region, with disastrous consequences for Latin Americans. Maybe we can learn from Rabe's fine study before the same mistakes are repeated yet again.
Re: President Kennedy's Foreign Policy
Gradually, however, a new reversal began to take place. The new African policy adopted by the Kennedy Administration was short-lived and eventually abandoned, at least in the case of Angola. The major reasons for this new reversal, analyzed in this text, were the importance of the Azores base for US national security and Cold War objectives, Congressional reluctance regarding anti-colonial policies of the Kennedy administration and the support Portugal received from other European countries. These factors forced the White House and the Department of State to review the basic principles that guided its policy towards Africa since early 1961. From mid-1962 onwards a gradual reversal in the behavior of the American administration took place.In the UN Committee on Decolonization, the USUN voted against two resolutions regarding Portuguese territories in the summer of 1962 and against a 4th Committee(and then plenary) UNGA resolution in late 1962. It also abstained on the Committee of 24 resolution of April 1963 and on the Security Council resolution of July 1963.Finally, it abstained on a 4th Committee (and then plenary) UNGA resolution in late 1963. During this period, the only favorable vote on a resolution concerning Portuguese colonialism came in December 1963, on the most moderate Security Council resolution since March 1961.The administration also reversed its policy on the sale of military equipment to Portugal. Despite the official embargo, in 1962 and 1963 there were several sales of military equipment to Portugal and a significant quantity of this equipment ended up in Africa, being used in the Portuguese colonial wars.
Finally, in April 1962, the United States made a major financial contribution to Portugal allowing the Export-Import Bank to provide $55 million “to finance the export of United States steel” for the construction of a bridge across the Tagus river in Lisbon.
Reporting the impact of this loan in Portugal, Ambassador Elbrick noted the“excellent coverage” given by Portuguese press, radio and TV. The coverage represented “a rare event and a gratifying deviation from what has become almost customary treatment of United States news.”
The narrative of US-Portuguese relations seems to demonstrate that, despite the growing interest in African affairs, Europe was still the center of the Cold War. The fear of losing the strategically located Azores base in a period of several important Cold War episodes outweighed the rhetoric of anti-colonialism. Regarded as a whole,the new African policy announced by the Kennedy administration had few durable consequences. As one scholar has already noted: “A seemingly bold policy, which gave African affairs a high profile, tolerated ideological diversity and blazed an independent path, was soon rejected. It was replaced by a policy which largely treated African affairs as a peripheral concern, promoted ideological rigidity, and adapted to Western European sensitivities.”
- A New African Policy? JFK and the crisis in Portuguese Africa, Luis Rodriguez
==============
From 1962 to 1965 the US was dedicated to try to prevent the independence of South Vietnam, the reason was of course that Kennedy and Johnson knew that if any political solution was permitted in the south, the National Liberation Front would effectively come to power, so strong was its political support in comparison with the political support of the so-called South Vietnamese government.
And in fact Kennedy and later Johnson tried to block every attempt at neutralization, every attempt at political settlement. This is all documented. There’s just no doubt about it. I mean, it’s wiped out of history, but the documentation is just unquestionable — in the internal government sources and everywhere else.
https://chomsky.info/198210__/
"Kennedy is not even worth discussing. The invasion in South Vietnam - Kennedy attacked South Vietnam, outright. In 1961-1962 he sent Air Force to start bombing villages, authorized napalm. Also laid the basis for the huge wave of repression that spread over Latin America with the installation of Neo-Nazi gangsters that were always supported directly by the United States. That went on and in fact picked up under Johnson.
Worship of leaders is a technique of indoctrination that goes back to the crazed George Washington cult of the 18th century and on to the truly lunatic Reagan cult of today, both of which would impress Kim Il-sung. The JFK cult is similar.
==================
He lined up consistently on the conservative, that is, power-friendly side of each of what Dr. King called “the triple evils that are interrelated”: racism (deeply and institutionally understood), economic exploitation (capitalism), and U.S. militarism.
More than a decade before neoliberal Democrats emerged to explicitly steer the Democratic Party to the corporate center, JFK’s frequently declared sympathies for the poor and working class took a back seat in his White house to “the real determinants of policy: political calculation and economic doctrine.” As Mirroff explained, political calculation “led Kennedy to appease the corporate giants and their allies in government.” Economic doctrine “told him that the key to the expansion and health of the economy was the health and expansion of those same corporate giants. The architects of Kennedy’s ‘New Economics’ liked to portray it as the technically sophisticated and politically neutral management of a modern industrial economy. It is more accurately portrayed as a pragmatic liberalism in the service of corporate capitalism” (Miroff, 1976) Further:
“His wage guidelines, and other efforts at terminating labor-management conflict over the distribution of income, fit neatly with business’s longstanding objective of holding wage costs steady. His liberalization of depreciation allowances furnished business with a tax break which it had sought unsuccessfully from the Eisenhower administration. His proposed reduction in corporate income and personal income taxes in the higher brackets approached tax reductions earlier proposed by the National Association of Manufacturers and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. Corporate executives may not have had Kennedy’s ear, but the functional result was not so different than if they had. Economic doctrine and political calculation were enough to make him respond more often to business desires than to those of the economic constituencies that actually supported him” (Miroff, 1976).
The regressive nature of JFK’s “New Economics’ was cloaked by his recurrent, much-publicized spats with certain members of the business community (the executives of U.S. Steel above all), his repeated statements of concern for labor and the poor, and his claim to advance a purely “technical” and “pragmatic” economic agenda that elevated “practical management” and administrative expertise above the “grand warfare of ideologies” (Miroff, 1976).
http://www.paulstreet.org/?p=1062
==========================
It is also striking that the withdrawal thesis, which is at the heart of the Camelot revival of 1991-2, gained its prominence just on the 30th anniversary of Kennedy’s steps to escalate the Indochina conflict from international terrorism to outright aggression. <b>The anniversary of Kennedy’s war against the rural society of South Vietnam passed virtually without notice,</b> as the country mused over the evil nature of the Japanese, who had so signally failed to plead for forgiveness on the 50th anniversary of their attack on a military base in a US colony that had been stolen from its inhabitants, by force and guile, just 50 years earlier.
<i>There are several sources of evidence that bear on the withdrawal thesis: (1) The historical facts; (2) the record of public statements; (3) the internal planning record; (4) the memoirs and other reports of Kennedy insiders.</i> In each category, the material is substantial. The record of internal deliberations, in particular, has been available far beyond the norm since the release of two editions of the Pentagon Papers (PP). The recent publication of thousands of pages of documents in the official State Department history provides a wealth of additional material on the years of the presidential transition, 1963-4, which are of crucial significance for evaluating the thesis that many have found so compelling. What follows is an excerpt from a much longer review of the four categories of evidence in a broader context (Year 501, South End, forthcoming).
<b>While history never permits anything like definitive conclusions, in this case, the richness of the record, and its consistency, permit some unusually confident judgments. In my opinion, the record is inconsistent with the withdrawal thesis throughout, and supports a different conclusion.</b> In brief, basic policy towards Indochina developed <b>within a framework of North-South/East-West relations that Kennedy did not challenge,</b> and remained constant in essentials: disentanglement from an unpopular and costly venture as soon as possible, <b>but after victory was assured</b> (by the end, with increasing doubt that US client regimes could be sustained). Tactics were modified with changing circumstances and perceptions. Changes of Administration, including the Kennedy assassination, had no large-scale effect on policy, and not even any great effect on tactics, when account is taken of the objective situation and how it was perceived.
The question to be considered, then, is whether JFK, despite his 1961-2 escalation and his militant public stand, planned to withdraw <i>without victory</i>, a plan aborted by the assassination, which cleared the way for Lyndon Johnson and his fellow-warmongers to bring on a major war. If so, one may inquire further into whether this was a factor in the assassination.
...
We thus learn that in early 1963, in an atmosphere of considerable to great optimism, the military initiatives for withdrawal went hand-in-hand with plans for escalation of the war within South Vietnam and possibly intensified actions against North Vietnam. We learn further that such “intelligence and sabotage forays” into North Vietnam were already underway — since mid-1962 according to McGeorge Bundy. On December 11, 1963, as the new Administration took over, Michael Forrestal (another leading Kennedy dove) confirmed that “For some time the Central Intelligence Agency has been engaged in joint clandestine operations with ARVN against North Vietnam.”
...
On September 17, President Kennedy instructed Ambassador Lodge to pressure Diem to “get everyone back to work and get them to focus on winning the war,” repeating his regular emphasis on victory. It was particularly important to show military progress because “of need to make effective case with Congress for continued prosecution of the effort,” the President added, expressing his constant concern that domestic support for his commitment to military victory was weak. “To meet these needs,” he informed Lodge, he was sending his top aides McNamara and Taylor to Vietnam. He emphasized to them that the goal remains “winning the war,” adding that “The way to confound the press is to win the war.” Like Congress, the press was an enemy because of its lack of enthusiasm for a war to victory and its occasional calls for diplomacy.
https://chomsky.info/199209__/
========================
Here are some more pieces and a book to read on the myth that is JFK:
John Kennedy, Barack Obama and the ‘Triple Evils That Are Interrelated’
https://blackagendareport.com/content/j ... C%E2%84%A2
Rethinking Camelot: JFK, the Vietnam War, and U.S. Political Culture
https://zcomm.org/wp-content/uploads/zb ... tents.html
Obama as the “New JFK”: “Pragmatic Liberalism in the Service of Corporate Capitalism”
https://www.globalresearch.ca/obama-as- ... sm/5358036
Deadly Imperial Arrogance
JFK’s foreign policy record is militantly imperial and militarist, contrary to subsequent liberal hagiographers’ curious effort to re-invent him as a peacenik. That record includes the Kennedy administration’s decision to dramatically and dangerously escalate the international arms race after Kennedy campaigned on the deceptive claim that the U.S. was on the wrong side of a mythical Soviet-American “missile gap.” Kennedy’s nuclear machismo helped bring the world to the literal brink of annihilation on at least one occasion, to be examined in some detail in the next section of this essay.
Referring to the U.S. as “watchtower on the walls of [global] freedom,” JFK undertook numerous provocative actions meant to overthrow the popular revolutionary government of Cuba. He imposed, equipped, and otherwise supported numerous Latin-American dictatorships and oligarchies in the name of “democracy.” As Noam Chomsky noted in his important 1993 study Rethinking Camelot: JFK, the Vietnam War and US Political Culture, “One of the most significant legacies left by the [Kennedy] Administration was its 1962 decision to shift the mission of the [U.S.-funded, equipped, and trained] Latin American military from ‘hemispheric defense’ to ‘internal security,’” leading, in the words of Kennedy’s top Latin American counter-insurgency planer (Charles Maechling) to “direct [U.S.] complicity” in “the methods of Heinrich Himmler’s extermination squads.” The shift to deadly internal repression was a natural corollary to Kennedy’s export-promoting” Alliance for Progress “development program,” which primarily benefited Latin American elites while drastically increasing Latin American unemployment. (Chomsky, 1993).
When he was assassinated, the CIA and JFK’s advisers were working with his approval to overthrow a democratically elected government and install a fascist military dictatorship in Brazil. The plan was carried out months later. As Chomsky notes, “Brazil had a moderately populist-democratic government in the early 1960s. The Kennedy administration organized a military coup that imposed a neo-Nazi national security state that was the first of the plague that then spread throughout the continent to Chile, Argentina, Central America and then became one big massacre” (Chomsky, 2007).
A U.S.-sponsored coup in Chile (overthrowing the democratically elected government of Salvador Allende on September 11, 1973) was left to Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger. It might well have occurred under Kennedy’s successor Lyndon Johnson but for the Kennedy CIA’s effort to subvert the 1964 Chilean elections since, as Kennedy’s National Security Council (NSC) explained, “We are not prepared to risk a Socialist or FRAP [Allende] victory, for fear of nationalization of U.S. investments.”(Chomsky, 1993)
Kennedy epitomized the conditional nature of “democracy” as a U.S. foreign policy objective when he remarked that while the U.S. would prefer democratic regimes abroad, it will choose “a [pro-American dictator] Trujillo” over “a [“anti-American” dictator] Castro” if those were the only choices. “It is necessary only to add,” Noam Chomsky noted in 1991, that Kennedy’s “concept of ‘a Castro’ was very broad, extending to anyone who raises problems for the ‘rich men dwelling at peace with their habitations,’ who are to rule the world according to [Winston] Churchill’s aphorism, while enjoying the benefits of its human and material resources.” (Chomsky, 1991).
======================
“If Mr. Kennedy does not like socialism, well we do not like imperialism! We do not like capitalism! We have as much right to protest over the existence of an imperialist-capitalist regime 90 miles from our coast as he feels he has to protest over the existence of a socialist regime 90 miles from his coast…
"Rights do not come from size. Right does not come from one country being bigger than another. That does not matter. We have only limited territory, a small nation, but our right is as respectable as that of any country, regardless of its size. It does not occur to us to tell the people of the United States what system of government they must have. Therefore it is absurd for Mr. Kennedy to take it into his head to tell us what kind of government he wants us to have here. That is absurd. It occurs to Mr. Kennedy to do that only because he does not have a clear concept of international law or sovereignty. Who had those notions before Kennedy? Hitler and Mussolini!…
"The U.S. Government says that a socialist regime here threatens U.S. security. But what threatens the security of the North American people is the aggressive policy of the warmongers of the United States. What threatens the security of the North American family and people is that violence, that aggressive policy, that ignores the sovereignty and the rights of other peoples.
"The one who is threatening the security of the United States is Kennedy, with that aggressive policy. That aggressive policy can give rise to a world war; and that world war can cost the lives of tens of millions of North Americans. Therefore, the one who threatens the security of the United States is not the Cuban evolutionary Government but the aggressor and aggressive government of the United States.”
—Fidel Castro, May 1, 1961
"John F. Kennedy was the last president who was able to link his administration, in the public mind, with the democratic traditions of the United States. But the political and moral foundations of his presidency had already been fatally eroded by the evolution of American imperialism. However sincere the democratic ideals and aspirations of the great mass of people, the United States had entered World War II to secure the global interests of American capitalism. In the years that followed the war, its policies assumed an ever more criminal character. The chasm between the rhetorical invocations of democracy and the brutal reality of American policies became impossible to conceal, either internationally or within the United States. Kennedy enthusiasts, especially after the president’s death, referred to his administration as “Camelot.” It could be better described as “a bright and shining lie.”
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2013/1 ... s-n22.html
JFK’s Corporatist and Imperialist Presidency
Part 3: Assassinations, Anti-communism, Interventionism and Right-wing Dictators
by Burkely Hermann / November 2nd, 2013
Part One of this series discussed how power and privilege are integral to JFK’s presidential cabinet. Part Two addressed the Kennedy Tax Cuts, the influence of international capital and how Kennedy pushed forward ‘free trade’ through increased negotiations at GATT. Part Three will talk about JFK’s foreign policy specifically relating to assassinations, support for right-wing dictators, how all revolved around his quest to fight communism or what he thought was communism.
https://dissidentvoice.org/2013/11/jfks ... sidency-2/
https://dissidentvoice.org/2013/10/jfk- ... entionist/
https://www.blackagendareport.com/again ... iple-evils
Finally, in April 1962, the United States made a major financial contribution to Portugal allowing the Export-Import Bank to provide $55 million “to finance the export of United States steel” for the construction of a bridge across the Tagus river in Lisbon.
Reporting the impact of this loan in Portugal, Ambassador Elbrick noted the“excellent coverage” given by Portuguese press, radio and TV. The coverage represented “a rare event and a gratifying deviation from what has become almost customary treatment of United States news.”
The narrative of US-Portuguese relations seems to demonstrate that, despite the growing interest in African affairs, Europe was still the center of the Cold War. The fear of losing the strategically located Azores base in a period of several important Cold War episodes outweighed the rhetoric of anti-colonialism. Regarded as a whole,the new African policy announced by the Kennedy administration had few durable consequences. As one scholar has already noted: “A seemingly bold policy, which gave African affairs a high profile, tolerated ideological diversity and blazed an independent path, was soon rejected. It was replaced by a policy which largely treated African affairs as a peripheral concern, promoted ideological rigidity, and adapted to Western European sensitivities.”
- A New African Policy? JFK and the crisis in Portuguese Africa, Luis Rodriguez
==============
From 1962 to 1965 the US was dedicated to try to prevent the independence of South Vietnam, the reason was of course that Kennedy and Johnson knew that if any political solution was permitted in the south, the National Liberation Front would effectively come to power, so strong was its political support in comparison with the political support of the so-called South Vietnamese government.
And in fact Kennedy and later Johnson tried to block every attempt at neutralization, every attempt at political settlement. This is all documented. There’s just no doubt about it. I mean, it’s wiped out of history, but the documentation is just unquestionable — in the internal government sources and everywhere else.
https://chomsky.info/198210__/
"Kennedy is not even worth discussing. The invasion in South Vietnam - Kennedy attacked South Vietnam, outright. In 1961-1962 he sent Air Force to start bombing villages, authorized napalm. Also laid the basis for the huge wave of repression that spread over Latin America with the installation of Neo-Nazi gangsters that were always supported directly by the United States. That went on and in fact picked up under Johnson.
Worship of leaders is a technique of indoctrination that goes back to the crazed George Washington cult of the 18th century and on to the truly lunatic Reagan cult of today, both of which would impress Kim Il-sung. The JFK cult is similar.
==================
He lined up consistently on the conservative, that is, power-friendly side of each of what Dr. King called “the triple evils that are interrelated”: racism (deeply and institutionally understood), economic exploitation (capitalism), and U.S. militarism.
More than a decade before neoliberal Democrats emerged to explicitly steer the Democratic Party to the corporate center, JFK’s frequently declared sympathies for the poor and working class took a back seat in his White house to “the real determinants of policy: political calculation and economic doctrine.” As Mirroff explained, political calculation “led Kennedy to appease the corporate giants and their allies in government.” Economic doctrine “told him that the key to the expansion and health of the economy was the health and expansion of those same corporate giants. The architects of Kennedy’s ‘New Economics’ liked to portray it as the technically sophisticated and politically neutral management of a modern industrial economy. It is more accurately portrayed as a pragmatic liberalism in the service of corporate capitalism” (Miroff, 1976) Further:
“His wage guidelines, and other efforts at terminating labor-management conflict over the distribution of income, fit neatly with business’s longstanding objective of holding wage costs steady. His liberalization of depreciation allowances furnished business with a tax break which it had sought unsuccessfully from the Eisenhower administration. His proposed reduction in corporate income and personal income taxes in the higher brackets approached tax reductions earlier proposed by the National Association of Manufacturers and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. Corporate executives may not have had Kennedy’s ear, but the functional result was not so different than if they had. Economic doctrine and political calculation were enough to make him respond more often to business desires than to those of the economic constituencies that actually supported him” (Miroff, 1976).
The regressive nature of JFK’s “New Economics’ was cloaked by his recurrent, much-publicized spats with certain members of the business community (the executives of U.S. Steel above all), his repeated statements of concern for labor and the poor, and his claim to advance a purely “technical” and “pragmatic” economic agenda that elevated “practical management” and administrative expertise above the “grand warfare of ideologies” (Miroff, 1976).
http://www.paulstreet.org/?p=1062
==========================
It is also striking that the withdrawal thesis, which is at the heart of the Camelot revival of 1991-2, gained its prominence just on the 30th anniversary of Kennedy’s steps to escalate the Indochina conflict from international terrorism to outright aggression. <b>The anniversary of Kennedy’s war against the rural society of South Vietnam passed virtually without notice,</b> as the country mused over the evil nature of the Japanese, who had so signally failed to plead for forgiveness on the 50th anniversary of their attack on a military base in a US colony that had been stolen from its inhabitants, by force and guile, just 50 years earlier.
<i>There are several sources of evidence that bear on the withdrawal thesis: (1) The historical facts; (2) the record of public statements; (3) the internal planning record; (4) the memoirs and other reports of Kennedy insiders.</i> In each category, the material is substantial. The record of internal deliberations, in particular, has been available far beyond the norm since the release of two editions of the Pentagon Papers (PP). The recent publication of thousands of pages of documents in the official State Department history provides a wealth of additional material on the years of the presidential transition, 1963-4, which are of crucial significance for evaluating the thesis that many have found so compelling. What follows is an excerpt from a much longer review of the four categories of evidence in a broader context (Year 501, South End, forthcoming).
<b>While history never permits anything like definitive conclusions, in this case, the richness of the record, and its consistency, permit some unusually confident judgments. In my opinion, the record is inconsistent with the withdrawal thesis throughout, and supports a different conclusion.</b> In brief, basic policy towards Indochina developed <b>within a framework of North-South/East-West relations that Kennedy did not challenge,</b> and remained constant in essentials: disentanglement from an unpopular and costly venture as soon as possible, <b>but after victory was assured</b> (by the end, with increasing doubt that US client regimes could be sustained). Tactics were modified with changing circumstances and perceptions. Changes of Administration, including the Kennedy assassination, had no large-scale effect on policy, and not even any great effect on tactics, when account is taken of the objective situation and how it was perceived.
The question to be considered, then, is whether JFK, despite his 1961-2 escalation and his militant public stand, planned to withdraw <i>without victory</i>, a plan aborted by the assassination, which cleared the way for Lyndon Johnson and his fellow-warmongers to bring on a major war. If so, one may inquire further into whether this was a factor in the assassination.
...
We thus learn that in early 1963, in an atmosphere of considerable to great optimism, the military initiatives for withdrawal went hand-in-hand with plans for escalation of the war within South Vietnam and possibly intensified actions against North Vietnam. We learn further that such “intelligence and sabotage forays” into North Vietnam were already underway — since mid-1962 according to McGeorge Bundy. On December 11, 1963, as the new Administration took over, Michael Forrestal (another leading Kennedy dove) confirmed that “For some time the Central Intelligence Agency has been engaged in joint clandestine operations with ARVN against North Vietnam.”
...
On September 17, President Kennedy instructed Ambassador Lodge to pressure Diem to “get everyone back to work and get them to focus on winning the war,” repeating his regular emphasis on victory. It was particularly important to show military progress because “of need to make effective case with Congress for continued prosecution of the effort,” the President added, expressing his constant concern that domestic support for his commitment to military victory was weak. “To meet these needs,” he informed Lodge, he was sending his top aides McNamara and Taylor to Vietnam. He emphasized to them that the goal remains “winning the war,” adding that “The way to confound the press is to win the war.” Like Congress, the press was an enemy because of its lack of enthusiasm for a war to victory and its occasional calls for diplomacy.
https://chomsky.info/199209__/
========================
Here are some more pieces and a book to read on the myth that is JFK:
John Kennedy, Barack Obama and the ‘Triple Evils That Are Interrelated’
https://blackagendareport.com/content/j ... C%E2%84%A2
Rethinking Camelot: JFK, the Vietnam War, and U.S. Political Culture
https://zcomm.org/wp-content/uploads/zb ... tents.html
Obama as the “New JFK”: “Pragmatic Liberalism in the Service of Corporate Capitalism”
https://www.globalresearch.ca/obama-as- ... sm/5358036
Deadly Imperial Arrogance
JFK’s foreign policy record is militantly imperial and militarist, contrary to subsequent liberal hagiographers’ curious effort to re-invent him as a peacenik. That record includes the Kennedy administration’s decision to dramatically and dangerously escalate the international arms race after Kennedy campaigned on the deceptive claim that the U.S. was on the wrong side of a mythical Soviet-American “missile gap.” Kennedy’s nuclear machismo helped bring the world to the literal brink of annihilation on at least one occasion, to be examined in some detail in the next section of this essay.
Referring to the U.S. as “watchtower on the walls of [global] freedom,” JFK undertook numerous provocative actions meant to overthrow the popular revolutionary government of Cuba. He imposed, equipped, and otherwise supported numerous Latin-American dictatorships and oligarchies in the name of “democracy.” As Noam Chomsky noted in his important 1993 study Rethinking Camelot: JFK, the Vietnam War and US Political Culture, “One of the most significant legacies left by the [Kennedy] Administration was its 1962 decision to shift the mission of the [U.S.-funded, equipped, and trained] Latin American military from ‘hemispheric defense’ to ‘internal security,’” leading, in the words of Kennedy’s top Latin American counter-insurgency planer (Charles Maechling) to “direct [U.S.] complicity” in “the methods of Heinrich Himmler’s extermination squads.” The shift to deadly internal repression was a natural corollary to Kennedy’s export-promoting” Alliance for Progress “development program,” which primarily benefited Latin American elites while drastically increasing Latin American unemployment. (Chomsky, 1993).
When he was assassinated, the CIA and JFK’s advisers were working with his approval to overthrow a democratically elected government and install a fascist military dictatorship in Brazil. The plan was carried out months later. As Chomsky notes, “Brazil had a moderately populist-democratic government in the early 1960s. The Kennedy administration organized a military coup that imposed a neo-Nazi national security state that was the first of the plague that then spread throughout the continent to Chile, Argentina, Central America and then became one big massacre” (Chomsky, 2007).
A U.S.-sponsored coup in Chile (overthrowing the democratically elected government of Salvador Allende on September 11, 1973) was left to Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger. It might well have occurred under Kennedy’s successor Lyndon Johnson but for the Kennedy CIA’s effort to subvert the 1964 Chilean elections since, as Kennedy’s National Security Council (NSC) explained, “We are not prepared to risk a Socialist or FRAP [Allende] victory, for fear of nationalization of U.S. investments.”(Chomsky, 1993)
Kennedy epitomized the conditional nature of “democracy” as a U.S. foreign policy objective when he remarked that while the U.S. would prefer democratic regimes abroad, it will choose “a [pro-American dictator] Trujillo” over “a [“anti-American” dictator] Castro” if those were the only choices. “It is necessary only to add,” Noam Chomsky noted in 1991, that Kennedy’s “concept of ‘a Castro’ was very broad, extending to anyone who raises problems for the ‘rich men dwelling at peace with their habitations,’ who are to rule the world according to [Winston] Churchill’s aphorism, while enjoying the benefits of its human and material resources.” (Chomsky, 1991).
======================
“If Mr. Kennedy does not like socialism, well we do not like imperialism! We do not like capitalism! We have as much right to protest over the existence of an imperialist-capitalist regime 90 miles from our coast as he feels he has to protest over the existence of a socialist regime 90 miles from his coast…
"Rights do not come from size. Right does not come from one country being bigger than another. That does not matter. We have only limited territory, a small nation, but our right is as respectable as that of any country, regardless of its size. It does not occur to us to tell the people of the United States what system of government they must have. Therefore it is absurd for Mr. Kennedy to take it into his head to tell us what kind of government he wants us to have here. That is absurd. It occurs to Mr. Kennedy to do that only because he does not have a clear concept of international law or sovereignty. Who had those notions before Kennedy? Hitler and Mussolini!…
"The U.S. Government says that a socialist regime here threatens U.S. security. But what threatens the security of the North American people is the aggressive policy of the warmongers of the United States. What threatens the security of the North American family and people is that violence, that aggressive policy, that ignores the sovereignty and the rights of other peoples.
"The one who is threatening the security of the United States is Kennedy, with that aggressive policy. That aggressive policy can give rise to a world war; and that world war can cost the lives of tens of millions of North Americans. Therefore, the one who threatens the security of the United States is not the Cuban evolutionary Government but the aggressor and aggressive government of the United States.”
—Fidel Castro, May 1, 1961
"John F. Kennedy was the last president who was able to link his administration, in the public mind, with the democratic traditions of the United States. But the political and moral foundations of his presidency had already been fatally eroded by the evolution of American imperialism. However sincere the democratic ideals and aspirations of the great mass of people, the United States had entered World War II to secure the global interests of American capitalism. In the years that followed the war, its policies assumed an ever more criminal character. The chasm between the rhetorical invocations of democracy and the brutal reality of American policies became impossible to conceal, either internationally or within the United States. Kennedy enthusiasts, especially after the president’s death, referred to his administration as “Camelot.” It could be better described as “a bright and shining lie.”
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2013/1 ... s-n22.html
JFK’s Corporatist and Imperialist Presidency
Part 3: Assassinations, Anti-communism, Interventionism and Right-wing Dictators
by Burkely Hermann / November 2nd, 2013
Part One of this series discussed how power and privilege are integral to JFK’s presidential cabinet. Part Two addressed the Kennedy Tax Cuts, the influence of international capital and how Kennedy pushed forward ‘free trade’ through increased negotiations at GATT. Part Three will talk about JFK’s foreign policy specifically relating to assassinations, support for right-wing dictators, how all revolved around his quest to fight communism or what he thought was communism.
https://dissidentvoice.org/2013/11/jfks ... sidency-2/
https://dissidentvoice.org/2013/10/jfk- ... entionist/
https://www.blackagendareport.com/again ... iple-evils