A Second Look At JFK
And I'm still not impressed
Trump just ordered the release of the Kennedy assassination documents, and from what I’ve seen, it’s nothing earth-shattering. I believe that every US president of my lifetime has been a scoundrel, and there has been precious little in the way of evidence to convince me otherwise. I’ve hated them all. In fact, as the years pass and I grow older, I’ve come to find there’s a treasure trove of executive bullshit and malfeasance far beyond what I had ever imagined, and iceberg whose tip has barely popped past the water line.
Just look at our checkered past: Johnson talking out of both sides of mouth every time he addressed Vietnam; Nixon and Kissinger having virtual wet dreams on tape, pondering the best possible means of getting away with genocide in Southeast Asia without destroying Nixon’s historical reputation; Carter turning a blind eye to East Timor; Reagan starting the process of selling out to the oligarchy and Wall Street, the end of the New Deal; Clinton making sure the Dems followed the Reagan/Thatcher model of global neoliberal finance capitalism that crippled the American economy and bankrupted working people; Bush and Obama starting a cycle of forever war and stripping us of our civil liberties. Over this last decade, we saw the whole thing pancake in on itself: recently delivered from Genocide Joe, a demented war criminal and grifter now in the land of dribble bibs and reruns of Matlock, we saw confused Dems and Republicans get together and say “Yes, please!” to an onslaught of propaganda, unchecked sources, false flags, screwball logic, ahistorical reasoning, and the censoring of any individual and any platform that stepped out of line. Our willingness to continue to be the world’s most educated political class more or less guaranteed the second coming of PT Barnum Jr. — the bloviating Mango Caesar, the Fred Flintstone version of Mussolini, Ubu-Trump, fueled on rage from years of banana republic show trials and hell bent enriching his oligarch buddies and demolishing the country as payback. All while the state of his gray matter inches closer to that of Genocide Joe’s.
As I said, little has changed…
Except when it comes to Kennedy, maybe ??? It’s worth three question marks.
Let’s be honest: a lot of what Gore Vidal pointed out was true. Kennedy was the scion of a wealthy and corrupt American family, and like most dynasties, the Kennedys got rich through crime or the legalized expropriation of other people’s wealth. Then they bought political influence. It turns out that patriarch Joe Kennedy was probably not a bootlegger, but he was crooked, and in addition to engaging in activities such as insider trading and artificially inflating alcohol prices, he did a host of things that should have landed him in jail for SEC violations. The only problem is that there was no SEC then. Instead (just to show you how ironically and absurdly deep the rot has always gone), FDR named Joe Kennedy the first Chair of the Securities and Exchange Commission in 1934. Liberal Joe Frank compared it to having a wolf watch the sheep.
That’s how politics really works, and Kennedy’s family had always swum with fellow sharks in the cut-throat world of money and power. That’s the first reason I have for doubting JFK’s character. I’m not talking about policy or stating facts here, but people from these kinds of families often have questionable/non-existent moral and ethical centers. The Hill just did a piece reminding its readers of the screwed up men that this family has released on the world. Case in point: Michael Skakel, who was immediately protected by the family as each Kennedy remained schtum and closed ranks around him during the rape and murder charges. Creepy, privileged behavior from Kennedy men is a running joke in this country, almost mythic in proportion.
Individuals from these environments — especially those who aspire to positions of immense institutionalized power — are often insincere, narcissistic, and crave authority for all the wrong reasons. They tend to be indoctrinated and reactionary when it comes to their views concerning what America should aspire to and the role it should play in the world.
Vidal goes hard at JFK over what the writer perceived to be the former president’s romantic and heroic notions of warfare, and he is especially harsh with Kennedy over his handling of the Bay of Pigs debacle. Plus, a lot of people make a big deal about Kennedy wanting to push for peace and eventually and eventually pull out of the Vietnam War just before the assassination, but the only action he ever took in Vietnam was to increase our presence by 700 troops during his presidency. It’s hard for me, still, to see JFK as a martyr, some anti-imperialist hero cut down before he could get the job done.
But that’s not to say things haven’t surfaced that have obliged me to take another look. Most recently, a little over a decade ago, there was a claim made by French Journalist Jean Daniel, who said that Kennedy used him to convey a message to Fidel Castro in 1963. Apparently, it had to be kept secret because JFK knew there was strong opposition to his opting for peaceful coexistence with Cuba and the Soviet Union.
Daniel claims that JFK said: "The US can coexist with a nation in its hemisphere that espouses a different economic system. It is the subservient relationship with the Soviet Union that creates the problem."
In return for Cuba ending its connections with the Soviet Union, JFK was supposedly going to end the US embargo on Cuba. Castro agreed, and Daniel says he told him, "He has the possibility of being the greatest president of the US."
Now, I have no reason to impugn the credibility of Jean Daniel, but he is the only source for these statements by Kennedy and Castro. In fact, I don’t believe it’s out of the realm of possibility that Kennedy said those things to him. But given all the other terrible things we know about him, how much of this should we really believe? Did Kennedy all of a sudden become an anti-imperialist? Look at his career in the Senate. He was a hawk through and through, constantly criticizing Eisenhower for being soft with the Soviet Union and telling America how we needed to be able to fight wars on multiple fronts. He was one of the first to start with the alarmist and hyperbolic warnings of imminent doom from Soviet missiles in Cuba, when in reality, no functional Soviet warheads ever made it to the island, and Kennedy himself exagerrated the number of Soviet nuclear missiles and often gave passionate speeches about nuclear annihilation, fanning the flames of cold war hysteria.
I don’t care about any politician’s personal life as long as they do their job. I won’t waste my time talking about all the sex, drugs, and rock and roll stuff, all the Kennedy debauchery. I’ve strayed from the path of righteousness myself, on many an occasion, and I don’t stand in moral judgment when it comes to people’s personal lives unless it directly influences policy. But now, in the midst of more redacted pages from Mango Caesar that only obscure the CIA’s true role in the assassination, why do we have to create an accompanying hagiography around Kennedy? I’m almost 100% sure the CIA had a hand in the assassination because they did hate him, but I doubt seriously it was because Kennedy was planning on curtailing US military activity and shutting down our foreign bases so that South Americans could elect Marxist presidents. This was a pissing contest between Kennedy and the intelligence agencies, and both were beholden to US Hegemony and Empire. Furthermore, Kennedy had always been devoted to fighting communism in Vietnam, said it was a vital conflict to win, and it was his administration that began using Agent Orange, with devastating consequences for US soldiers and thousands of Vietnamese children, who were born with horrific birth defects.
Kennedy was involved in way too many violent imperial projects for me to seriously consider any of this. He was smart, charming, and a great politician, and I assume that he was simply telling Castro what Castro wanted to hear. He was playing politics. After looking at everything, I have to say, it hasn’t changed my mind about Kennedy, and it will probably be a good long while before anyone convinces me of the righteousness of any of the presidents I have lived under. So why the fabulation? In the end, I have to believe that this is exactly what it looks like: Liberal Dems continuing to push the Kennedy myth, keeping their constituency hanging onto a fantasy, exactly like the Republicans’ mythologizing of Reagan.
They have little else to say, about anything, so it’s important to milk the myth-making process for every sound bite it’s worth.
It’s our job to remind them that party politics is over, that there was never a “good old days,” and that we have no intention of building a golden idol for a man who is nothing but another servant of empire and capital, regardless of the hype that the Blue Dog propaganda machine or Oliver Stone movies help circulate.
It’s just more of the same:
