46 years later: what does Kennedy's assasination mean?

by: Paul Rosenberg

Sun Nov 22, 2009 at 14:00


I'm old enough that I can remember where I was when I heard that President Kennedy was shot.  I can remember where, but that's about all.  There's a blurriness surrounding the memory, and to make matters worse, it's jumbled together with another, more vivid memory associated with the same location--just outside a classroom I was about to enter.

Most folks here aren't old enough to remember, even if they were born then.  But remember that moment or not, it's a moment that marks our history still--indeed, that will mark it forever.  Different people remember it in vastly different ways, attributing vastly different meanings and significance, both to Kennedy and Johnson, and to the assassination itself. The multitude of diverse conspiracy theories still swirling around the assassination is a manifestation of how diverse our views are.  Although people are capable of considerable nuance and complexity, as a general rule who killed Kennedy, and why is, at some level, a representation of how we see the world.

For me, who killed Kennedy doesn't matter.  I think that most of the conspiracy theories are absurd.  But I also think some anomalies haven't been explained, and probably never will. But what interests me much more is the ways his assassination has been construed by different people over the years, and what that says about us, as individuals, as groups, as a nation.

One thing I think is true: his assassination cut off a world of possibility.  Some thought of that possibility as immense--the "New Frontier", going to the Moon, "Camelot".  I think this is quite debatable, at least.  But at a deeper level, the fact that his assassination introduced an era of high-level political violence is a matter of significance too often overlooked.  There can be no doubt that collectively the assassinations of John and Robert Kennedy along with Malcolm X and Martin Luther King swept a pantheon of progressive leaders off the stage of history, with devastating results.  I've always felt much closer to Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, and most distant from JFK.  But for all his flaws, the presidents we've had since his brother's assassination almost five years later have fallen far, far short of level of promise he offered us.

For all his flaws, I had hoped that Barack Obama might offer some sort of repetition of what JFK offered--an inspiration to go much farther than he himself was willing to go.  That, at least, is how I saw both JFK and Barack Obama.

But that's just me.  This day of remembrance, I'd like to know.... What do you remember?  What do you see?

Paul Rosenberg :: 46 years later: what does Kennedy's assasination mean?

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46 years later: what does Kennedy's assasination mean? | 35 comments
Where (4.00 / 2)
I heard the news right after school ended, a similar memory.  I was in grade school and looking forward to hearing the current Beatles' hit "Listen, do you wanna know a secret."  Some secret.  The song and the event are intertwined.  

It is also the last memory of a major event that links for me to black and white TV.  

It was sad, shocking, a jolt to the system.  The whole weekend was one long downer.  Lee Harvey Oswald's assassination in the Dallas jail just added to the whole violent atmosphere and the notion that anything could happen.

Bobby's was different.  I woke up and checked the TV to see who won the Californis primary and saw the assassination on live TV.  Then I woke up everybody in the house.

I think I agree with you.  Bobby and John were mega events but Martin Luther King hit home the hardest.  

Two huge differences are obvious between JFK and Obama.  JFK was planning to pull out of Vietnam while Obama is gearing up in Afghanistan.  The economy was doing well in the 60s;  this is the worst economy in 70 years.

On a different continent (4.00 / 2)
I was the child of an NCO stationed in Frankfurt Germany at the time.  We heard at dinner time, and my mother burst into tears.  I don't have the same television images/memories of my peers because we didn't have a television and the moment-to-moment coverage wasn't aired in Germany in any event.  I, too, felt the same way about the promise of Obama; it's his youth more than anything else, I think.  He's the first president I've lived with who is younger than I am.  He's squandered so much of that promise it hurts: Wall Street before Main Street and for me, crucially, his DOJ continuing the same morally bankrupt state secrets arguments, his position on FISA, and a general unwillingness to "preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States."  It would be one thing if he did his best and failed.  But he's not even trying, and I grieve for the possibility of a return to law, which is why I voted for him.
Kennedy Dodged Some Hard Stuff (4.00 / 1)
I was old enough to be keenly aware of how he was failing the Civil Rights Movment. But when they raised the pressure enough, he moved in the right direction.  As I grew older, I gained a better understanding of what he was up against, but it didn't change my initial assessment.

Obama, however, is not just ducking hard fights, he's taking the wrong side on things that wouldn't even be a fight.

"You know what they say -- those of us who fail history... doomed to repeat it in summer school." -- Buffy The Vampire Slayer, Season 6, Episode 3

[ Parent ]
I was in freshman year of college (4.00 / 3)
and had just turned 18. I remember coming out of a class and suddenly the normal, vibrant noises of a campus in the fall seemed odd.  Clusters of students were standing quietly, almost whispering.  No one was on the field where male students usually were having pick up football games in between classes.  The student center was quiet and near empty.

  I was walking alone toward my dorm when suddenly my roomate came running up to me, and said, "You won't believe it.  Someone has shot the president."  
  I remember first thinking "Who'd want to shoot (name of our college president)?" as I was thinking of our college president?  
  My roomate looked at me weirdly and said, "No, President Kennedy."  I still remember how stunned I felt.  It did not compute for me.  We walked silently back to the room. I put down my stuff and we went to the television room (back then, students did not have televisions of their own, there was one for the whole dorm).  No one said much.  Students were silently watching while others waited in line to get the phone to call home.

 I had come of age during Kennedy's run. It was a huge part of my life, having gone to Catholic schools.  Our huge family, even the republican ones, were more political than I ever knew.  Suddenly, the talk was of a catholic actually having a chance.  JFK even came to our town, the only democratic town in a largely republican county.  We were the steel town of immigrants and minorities surrounded by the main line of Philadelphia.  
 I remember the excitement of my aunts and my mother who got to see him as he rode through.  I remember my mother was particularly excited.  She got out a newspaper clipping to show my sister and I, where JFK wrote a letter to the editor and mentioned my father's name.  A few years before my father, a cop, had helped two Kennedy aides whose car broke down about 1 AM on their way back to Boston from DC.  My dad was working the graveyard shift.   In those days, gas stations were not open 24/7 and so the men went to the police station for help. My dad called one of his buddies who owned the station across from the station and he came and fixed their car.  

  Anyway, now here I was four years later, in a college in the middle of PA, a mostly republican, white anglo saxon protestant area, somewhat different from the usual students, with my darker, Italian looks and catholicism.  I remember the talks there.  Kids saying how they were republican but still to shoot the president because he was catholic was wrong. I remember thinking "Is that really why he was shot?"  
   My roomate and I talked about it.  She believed it was the mafia who did it.  She told me that she read that Jimmy Hoffa hated him because of his brother.  I just listened.
Finally I got a chance to call home.   We had two days, Monday and Tuesday to go before, Thanksgiving break. Yet the campus was starting to empty.  Kids were going home early because parents feared what it meant.  
   I had told my Dad I was going to stay.  By Saturday afternoon, though, I felt alone and scared.  So I called my dad and for whatever reason, I cried. "I want to come home, Daddy."  He hopped in the car and was there within two hours.  By the time he got there, I had four more kids from the area wanting to go home.  We took them.  The entire week was very eerie and sad and unreal.  My mother cried a lot.  Every time she saw pictures of Jackie or the kids she cried.  My dad was fearful of riots because so many poor people (in his mind, it meant the immigrant families), in his mind, felt it was a sign of their first chance for moving forward was gone, and that African Americans would fear the loss of a chance at Civil Rights.

We all cried together watching the funeral.  It is still so vivid, the emotions, the questions, the fears.
Hard for me to believe how many years have passed.  Still the memories are strong.

I was 10 years old, in fifth grade, (4.00 / 1)
in Catholic school. It was a big deal because Kennedy was the first Catholic president. Our school principal announced the event over the loudspeaker system. We were let out of school.

The biggest associated memory I have though is very strange. I remember vividly a classmate becoming hysterical because of how this would affect Mrs. Jackie Kennedy!

There was no talk about civil rights that I recall. I remember Oswald being shot by Jack Ruby on live television and my mother talking about how the mafia killed Kennedy.

I recall watching the post MLK assassination riots on television with my father. I asked him what's going on. He said, it's the blacks. We didn't talk too much about politics in our family. I don't think I had any sense that these events (race riots) were associated with JFK.

I think one of the most important lines in Oliver Stone's JFK movie, a line that totally jumped out for me, was when the New Orleans district attorney Garrison said that most of America was watching Laugh-In on television when the world changed. I think he's right. That was my experience.

Aside from winning the Iowa Caucuses, I think the turning point in Barack Obama's campaign was his endorsement by RFK's daughter Caroline Kennedy and, of course, Ted Kennedy. I happened to watch that endorsement on live television and felt the history of the moment. Too bad it doesn't seem to be panning out. I wonder what Caroline Kennedy thinks of Obama now; at the time she said her children convinced her to get involved politically.  

My memories (0.00 / 0)
I was 14 at the time.  We were off from school that day for some reason.  I had come home from a sleepover and was taking a bath when someone yelled through the bathroom door that the president had been shot.  My mom, grandmother, sister, baby brother, and friend had been watching the soap opera "As the World Turns" when they broke in with the news.  

What I remember from there is that we didn't leave the televsion set for days.  We were all in shock and in mourning.  

That Friday (0.00 / 0)
was a beautiful, crystal clear fall day in SC. There was a fire near my school which filled the yard with smoke. I was in third grade and excitedly rode my bike home to tell my mother about it. She met me in the yard to tell me the President was dead. My memory is that she was following the news on the radio. I immediately turned the TV on. We sat in front of the TV watching CBS news for three straight days. A memory I have of Oswald's death is that a Dallas cop announced, 'Lee Harvey Oswald is deceased.' The first reporter's question was, 'Is he dead?' I wasn't even 8 years old but knew he was dead. My skepticism about the media began at that moment.  

My family had moved from Hattiesburg, Mississippi, the day Medger Evers was gunned down. A year later I was frightened when I heard Cheney, Goodman and Schwerner went missing. My parents were Goldwater Republicans and hostile to civil rights but at 8 years old I didn't want to live in country where those sorts of things happened. Malcolm, MLK and RFK taught me that was the way things were done here. It was a decade of shocks.

I have come to view JFK more favorably over the years. He had the good sense not to start a nuclear war over Laos of all places. He and Khrushchev loved their children enough not to destroy life on earth in October '62. I'm not convinced he would have withdrawn from Vietnam. I don't believe JFK and RFK had the visceral understanding of civil rights LBJ had. I was neither old nor mature enough to experience RFK's campaign at the time. His disastrous meeting with civil rights leaders in Belafonte's NYC apartment revealed him to be a callow punk in '61 or '62. I am probably being unfair to him as people can grow but my doubts about him linger.            

I Think (4.00 / 1)
that John's assassination caused Robert to transform. Even so, I think people had an exaggerated sense of him. But he was a very different person in the mid-late 60s than he had been before.

I agree 100% re LBJ and civil rights.  That goes for the whole War on Poverty agenda as well.

As for Kennedy & Vietnam, I think it's ambiguous, but the most probable thing is that he would have gotten out after the '64 elections.  Simply because he knew it was a losing proposition.

His big mistake was, IMHO, was in not replacing all the hawkish advisers he had around him, not just his own folks, but those in the Pentagon left over from Eisenhower.  He and Eisenhower both had the self-confidence to ignore them when they were wrong--that is, most of the time.  But Johnson did not.  So essentially, Kennedy left Johnson a ticking time bomb.

So, in short, we really had no idea what was going on at the time. Amazing.

"You know what they say -- those of us who fail history... doomed to repeat it in summer school." -- Buffy The Vampire Slayer, Season 6, Episode 3

[ Parent ]
RFK (4.00 / 1)
reminds me of T. Roosevelt. They were both self-righteous and personalized politics. Bobby wasn't insane as TR was. Both had admirable qualities.

We will never know about JFK and Vietnam. Rusk was an abomination at State but was representative of the Cold War wing of the party. The brass hats JFK dealt with were dangerous. Lemay and Lemnitzer were ready to drop the big one and see what happens.    

[ Parent ]
hoppin, RFK was the AG (0.00 / 0)
who tried to enforce CR for blacks in the early 60s, under trying circumstances and with the dangerous Edgar Hoover always lurking in the shadows and otherwise not being helpful.  

RFK also, in mid-63, was the person who testified in Congress on behalf of JFK's civil rights bill then, in early 64 at LBJ's request, became the admin's liaison to Congress and, in Johnson's private view one suspects, became the public face of the bill, for better or worse (LBJ actually thought the bill might not make it, and wanted RFK there to at least share some or most of the blame when it failed).

Bobby also worked closely with MLK and the marchers in the summer of 63 to ensure that the March on Washington -- which the Kennedys both believed had to be successful in order to help push along the just-delivered CR bill -- went smoothly and w/o violent incident.  Mission accomplished on that.

As for your mention of the RFK meeting at Belafonte's apt, my reading of that event was that it was an ugly ugly confrontation by one loud-mouthed purist writer Baldwin, and a few others who then chimed in courageously to pile on Bobby.  It wasn't RFK who came out looking bad -- he stayed, tried to listen amidst the raised voices, the shouting and personal denunciations.  Instead, in RFK's later view, it was the other liberals (Belafonte, one black academic, one or two others), thought to be friends of the admin, who sat there quietly like good liberals and said nothing as the rhetoric from some of the screamers got out of hand.

Btw, it's likely that MLK would have formally endorsed Bobby's 1968 candidacy.  That was something he brought up with, iirc, aide Marian Wright just before he himself was killed.

[ Parent ]
For a privileged Irish-American (4.00 / 2)
to tell African-Americans in the early 1960's to be patient because the Irish had overcome discrimination was profoundly ignorant and offensive. African-Americans had only been on this continent two and a half centuries longer than most of the Irish. Successive waves of Eastern and Southern European immigrants had been promoted to whiteness since the 1850s. And African-Americans couldn't sit in restaurants in the South and couldn't buy a home in Levittown, USA, in the North.

It is fine for you to go beyond Caro and see evil intentions in everything LBJ did. I look at results. He was the last Democratic president who built institutions which could not be overturned by executive orders of the next Republican president. He was a deeply flawed, complicated man. But he attempted to complete the social democratic experiment FDR began.      

[ Parent ]
Re the advisers, (0.00 / 0)
JFK did replace the extreme cold warrior Chair of the JCS that Ike had appointed, one Lyman Lemnitzer, proponent of the insane Operation Northwoods scheme to falsely create circumstances to force the US to attack Cuba and thus probably the USSR.  Kennedy also fired the DCI, another Ike appointee, Allan Dulles, who'd badly counseled and misled the president on the BoP.

As for some of the other FP hawks, Kennedy saw fairly quickly that SoS Rusk not only was a reflexive cold warrior hawk, but he just wasn't competent in most of his State duties.  He was definitely on his way out in a 2d Kennedy term -- as were a few of the other hawkish people in the nat'l security chain of command -- but alas JFK never got the chance to further clean house.

As for those who stayed on with LBJ, most by Johnson's personal request btw, you're deceiving yourself if you think LBJ would have decided differently on Nam had he heard from a hypothetical large group of Kennedy holdover doves.  Johnson, it's clear from his statements as VP then in the first days of taking over in the WH, was not about -- his words -- to be the first president to lose a war.  This is what he told the JCS and the US Amb to VN in Johnson's first meeting on Nam a few days after Dallas.

"A Texas Texan with an Alamo attitude" was antiwar Majority Leader Mike Mansfield's description of LBJ's posture w/r/t Vietnam.  Such a person was not about to "cut and run", as he liked to put it often, "with his head between his legs" from VN -- it was in his nature from the beginning to escalate, to not "back down from a fight".  

Johnson, imo, had a firm plan in mind from the beginning -- go hard right in Nam, placate the liberals with some feel-good legislation at home, and don't tolerate any disloyalty --even from high-powered hawks like McNamara and Mac Bundy, both Kennedy holdovers at Johnson's request, both generally supportive at the outset of Lyndon's escalation, and both fired by LBJ for disloyalty.  And most here probably know Lyndon's colorful hard line in the sand description about what he meant by "loyalty" ...

[ Parent ]
Placate The Liberals? (4.00 / 3)
I'm sorry, but this picture of LBJ is just wildly out of joint.  See the tapes of his conversations with Richard Russell.  The domestic agenda was what he deeply believed in--even loved.  The Vietnam War was to placate the hard right, so that he wouldn't end up like Truman.

Didn't exactly work out the way he had planned.  But he was a tragic heroic figure, not a monster.  It would have been easier had he been.

"You know what they say -- those of us who fail history... doomed to repeat it in summer school." -- Buffy The Vampire Slayer, Season 6, Episode 3

[ Parent ]
Paul, we disagree about (0.00 / 0)
the extent to which Lyndon was truly committed to his GS programs, and probably the extent to which he was some true domestic liberal.  Lyndon acted from what the political circumstances dictated/permitted and what served Lyndon's interests -- and not necessarily in that order -- and not from some strong inner do-good liberal impulse.  

If he had even half the fervent commitment towards strong liberal legislation that you see in your "heroic" view of him, he would not have so quickly thrown it aside for the massive and unnecessary escalation in Nam.  He would have just taken Kennedy's policy -- get out after the 64 election -- taken a few temporary political hits, and gone about doing good domestically with some popular programs.

But apparently hero Lyndon loved war more than his Great Society ...

[ Parent ]
This Is Not Just A Matter Of Opinion (4.00 / 2)
I'm sorry, but a lot of new historical material came to light in published form about a decade ago that has rendered a lot of earlier debates obsolete.  In particular, Robert Mann's book on the Vietnam War in light of Senatorial foreign policy and politics, A Grand Delusion:  America's Descent Into Vietnam, provides insight into the reasoning, motivation and actions of Kennedy, Johnson, Mansfield, Fulbirght, and McGovern, just for starters, that can't be gotten anywhere else.  It's not simply a matter of psychology or character, as you are talking about.  It's a matter of institutional history and culture as well, that's far more nuanced than character- and psychology-based explanations are capable of by themselves, even at their best.

From Publishers Weekly:

Mann, a former Senate aide, puts Senate-president politics at the center of this masterful political history of America's involvement in Vietnam, which began with Truman's commitment to support the French in the wake of charges of "losing" China to the Communists. Many of the senators who attacked the Truman administration were isolationists who voted against the realistic anti-Communist institutions such as NATO and the Marshall Plan. Yet such contradictions mattered little, as the Democrats' disastrous political defeat in 1950 and 1952 convinced them to never let another "loss" be blamed on them.

The twin strands of ideological surrealism and political realism interweave throughout Mann's account in various forms, illuminating the persistent patterns and underlying motivational logic of presidential lies and congressional acquiescence. Eisenhower promised to end Truman's containment policy, but he delivered the Korean armistice and refused to fight in Vietnam. Two major congressional resolutions authorizing use of force led to the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution. Johnson promised "no wider war" while escalating for fear of "losing" Vietnam. Mike Mansfield - the Senate's foremost Asia authority, as well as majority leader - opposed America's deepening involvement, but his concept of his institutional role made him publicly loyal to Johnson's policies, which in private he strove mightily to change.

Each participant responded distinctively to fundamental contradictions, brilliantly elucidated by Mann's highly nuanced account of presidential policy and the tortured evolution of Senate opposition. This book's unique perspective in illuminating Congress's role in the Vietnam War should permanently alter and deepen our understanding of that conflict.

Then there's the taped conversations with Senator Russell, which include passages like this: (May 27, 1964)

Johnson: What do you think about this Vietnam thing? I'd like to hear you talk a little bit.

Russell: Well, frankly, Mr. President, if you were to tell me that I was authorized to settle as I saw fit, I would respectfully decline to undertake it. It's the damn worse mess that I ever saw, and I don't like to brag and I never have been right many times in my life, but I knew that we were gone to get into this sort of mess when we went in there. And I don't see how we're ever going to get out of it without fighting a major war with the Chinese and all of them down there in those rice paddies and jungles. I just don't see it. I just don't know what to do.

Johnson: Well, that's the way I have been feeling for six months....

Johnson: The Republicans going to make a political issue out of it, every one of them, even Dirksen.

Russell: It's the only issue they've got.

Johnson: I talked to Dirksen the other day, Friday, and he suggested that I have three of Armed Services, three from Appropriations, and all of them from Foreign Relations down. So I told him all right and invited them. And yesterday before they came he gave out a big statement that we had to get us a program and go after them. And Hickenlooper said that they just had to stand and show our force and put our men in there and let come what may come, and nobody disagreed with him. Now Mansfield, he just wants to pull up and get out, and Morse wants to get out, and Gruening wants to get out. And that's about where it stops. I don't know.

If you think that's a man eager for war, then do I have a deal on a bridge for you!



"You know what they say -- those of us who fail history... doomed to repeat it in summer school." -- Buffy The Vampire Slayer, Season 6, Episode 3

[ Parent ]
LBJ (4.00 / 1)
deserves every bit of blame and condemnation he receives for Vietnam. Still, in my almost 54 years, the finest moment of the American Presidency was when he stood in the House chamber after Selma and said, 'We shall overcome.'  
[ Parent ]
And two years later, LBJ (0.00 / 0)
was privately considering MLK to be one of the most dangerous men in America -- dangerous especially to Lyndon Johnson and the survival of his administration.

Yes, Johnson (finally) did the right thing on voting rights, after all the bloody demonstrations in Selma and other horrors.  

But he soon enough joined with his friend J. Edgar Hoover in going after Dr King.

[ Parent ]
School was over and I was getting on the bus (4.00 / 2)
The bus driver told us.  We were in a state of suspended astonishment. I didn't believe until I got home and turned on the the TV. I then watched all day for 4 days until the TV signals went off at night.  

To this day I remember the look on Walter Cronkite's face and the small swallow he made before he announced Kennedy's death.

Years later I read the transcripts of the Cabinet deliberations of the Cuban missile crisis and realized that George Bush was absolutely incapable of such thinking against all the advice of his hawkish counsellors.  In those deliberations it was only JFK and RFK who seemed to have the sense, the calm and the vision to see past their scenarios.

I think Bill Clinton could have acted the same, the same presecence of mind.  About Barack I am willing to suspend judgement for now. We will have to see how he does in terms of Afghanistan and really getting us out of Iraq.

Unlike most people I can hardly be disillusioned about the Democrat we chose to be president. Since the Barack Obama others are disappointed with, is the Barack Obama I expected him to be....at least in terms of his progressive domestic vision.

Foreign policy I never thought there was a hair's breadth of difference between him and Hillary Clinton. If he's less of a hawk on Afghanisitan, or at least comes up with an effective policy...than I will be happily surprised.



"Incrementalism isn't a different path to the same place, it could be a different path to a different place"
Stoller

[ Parent ]
I was a young mother (4.00 / 2)
My first child was a year old, I was living in Cleveland, and I was very scared.  I was friends and neighbors with the first liberals I had known in my life, and I remember them telling me that the left might be blamed for his death.  My first daughter is now the same age as Obama, something she finds amazing.  

My political education began then.  I was born during WWII, my father was a MA Republican, the old kind, and my mother I never talked to about politics, except that I found out that the whole Watergate thing bothered her a lot.  When I married and moved to Cleveland, I met people who introduced me to a whole new way of looking at the world, and I grabbed on.  I can't really remember why, except it made sense and began to answer some questions I had about why things worked the way they did, in a way that didn't seem to do much for me, as a young woman before the woman's movement.  

It all seems a long time ago.  My second daughter was a baby when the first moon landing took place.  Both are liberals/progressives.  We are all pretty intellectual, which may explain some of it.  Both my daughters are librarians by training, information junkies.  We like science, and logic, and looking hard at reality.  

TWO Librarians! (4.00 / 1)
You must have done something right!

"You know what they say -- those of us who fail history... doomed to repeat it in summer school." -- Buffy The Vampire Slayer, Season 6, Episode 3
[ Parent ]
Obama is still his own man...as Kennedy was. (0.00 / 0)
President Kennedy was a Democrat in the truest sense of the word.  
Unlike those of today he showed no fear, stuck by his beliefs and even bucked his own intelligence and military officials advice, trusting instead his own well schooled instincts.
For that he increased his majorities in the next election, but his fearlessness also made many enemies:

From "Memories of John Fitzgerald Kennedy",(1983) by Kenneth O'Donnell:

"At a White House reception on Christmas eve, a month after he succeeded to the presidency, Lyndon Johnson told the Joint Chiefs: "Just get me elected, and then you can have your war."

There's nothing more dangerous to the eyes of the greedy, than a man not willing to accept their price..

 

Nationalism is not the same thing as terrorism, and an adversary is not the same thing as an enemy.

Huh? (0.00 / 0)
Kennedy "showed no fear" and "stuck by his beliefs"?

It surely would have surprised Martin Luther King to hear that!

"You know what they say -- those of us who fail history... doomed to repeat it in summer school." -- Buffy The Vampire Slayer, Season 6, Episode 3

[ Parent ]
Well,on JFK and MLK, (0.00 / 0)
I seem to recall that when he heard the news from Dallas, MLK turned to an aide and said, That's what they're going to do to me.  

Sounds like he was identifying himself, and the CR cause generally, with Kennedy.

Kennedy and his brother sure showed courage in bringing that CR bill to Congress in June 63 -- and at a time when Kennedy's VP Lyndon Johnson advised to delay it a little longer.

JFK consistently showed more personal and political courage than Johnson (who rarely said no either to the Joint Chiefs or to his friend J. Edgar Hoover or to the CIA).  So too did MLK show tremendous personal and political courage ...

[ Parent ]
You underestimate the challenges faced by both Presidents.. (0.00 / 0)
Just as Kennedy had several serious issues to contend with overseas and at home, Obama too has to multi-task.  But I can can hardly fault either as you so easily do- for giving their priorities over to issues of war and nuclear disarmament.

 

Nationalism is not the same thing as terrorism, and an adversary is not the same thing as an enemy.

[ Parent ]
JFK was not a saint (0.00 / 0)
JFK was a hawk, a man who did not hesitate to use "missile gap" rhetoric to attack Eisenhower and Nixon with.  He expressed major reservations about escalation in Vietnam in internal discussions.  However, LBJ did the same, and many of the cabinet officers who pushed escalation were holders from the JFK era.  I don't think that JFK would have resisted the massive pressures to go all-in in Vietnam.  I also think that JFK would have been less effective than LBJ in getting civil rights legislation through.  LBJ was a southerner and former Majority Leader in the Senate, a man who knew how to twist arms.

By the way, my favorite "Red Dwarf" episode was the the one that explained the JFK assassination.


Yes And No (0.00 / 0)
There really is a very good case that Kennedy wanted out of Vietnam, and felt less constrained than Johnson did. The fact that he negotiated a peace agreement in Laos early in his term was indicative of his outlook. Not that he wasn't hawkish, but he knew a bad bet in terms of supply chain lengths when he saw one.

But you're absolutely right about Johnson's superior effectiveness in passing civil rights legislation.  After all, he had already done in 1957, when as Majority Leader he passed the first Civil Rights legislation since Reconstruction.

"You know what they say -- those of us who fail history... doomed to repeat it in summer school." -- Buffy The Vampire Slayer, Season 6, Episode 3

[ Parent ]
Kennedy was burned by bad CIA advice on Cuba.. (0.00 / 0)
And so later tried to act cautiously in the best interests of the US, but fell into the same trap similar to Bush/Cheney in thinking civilian populations - especially the poorest of them - would take orders from a foreign power.

Fiery nationalists were, and are still, born out of such lunacy.

Nationalism is not the same thing as terrorism, and an adversary is not the same thing as an enemy.

[ Parent ]
A few last points.. (0.00 / 0)
It's been reported that Kennedy told several people he wanted out of VietNam and intended to withdraw after the election.  

I also think it's unfair to claim Johnson was the "superior" of the two on civil rights.
Kennedy and Obama's visions of human rights there again were and are vastly more global than Johnson, who had a taste for supporting authoritarian regimes.

 

Nationalism is not the same thing as terrorism, and an adversary is not the same thing as an enemy.

[ Parent ]
Just Because Kennedy & Obama Are More Handsome (4.00 / 1)
doesn't mean they are more moral.

And emphatically repeating claims without evidence does not make them true.

Johnson had plenty of flaws, but he also had a deep-seated concern with social justice.

It's not just that he has the legislative record to prove it, but how is that suddenly chopped liver?

"You know what they say -- those of us who fail history... doomed to repeat it in summer school." -- Buffy The Vampire Slayer, Season 6, Episode 3

[ Parent ]
Gotta disagree on one thing, worldly. (0.00 / 0)
Kennedy was quite concerned about local populations and the foreign "invader" situation, or colonial power problem, and had stated such concerns since his time in the senate.  

Jack and Bobby had visited VN in 1951 and came away rather immediately and sharply with the impression that the locals hated the French oppressor troops.  As president he was under no illusions that white US troops would be ultimately treated any differently by the Vietnamese, however much they might have also hated the prospect of communist rule.  But he sensed, rightly, that nationalist sentiment would probably trump political ideology.

After that visit in 1951, after the disastrous advice he got from the JCS and CIA after the BoP, Kennedy was seriously disinclined to accept more of their really great advice on a tiny country many thousands of miles away which had little or nothing to do with our country's security.

[ Parent ]
Joe Buck, you say (0.00 / 0)
I don't think that JFK would have resisted the massive pressures to go all-in in Vietnam.  

but you are apparently unaware that JFK repeatedly, starting in 1961, refused requests by his Joints Chiefs and the vast majority of his nat'l security staff and State to send in combat troops to Nam.  By Oct 1963, he had formally put the US on a path of withdrawing all US military personnel over there by the end of '65, with NSAM 263, something he discussed with Mike Mansfield, who agreed with Kennedy that he wouldn't be able to pull out until after the 64 election.

Vietnam, Laos, Berlin, Cuba, the USSR and the missile crisis -- on these dicey matters, Kennedy repeatedly "resisted massive pressures" from his hawkish advisers, and took the non-war path.

I also think that JFK would have been less effective than LBJ in getting civil rights legislation through.

Mebbe.  But if JFK had lived and gotten a solid landslide against hapless far right-winger Goldwater in 64, along with good gains in Congress, he too, like Lyndon, would have finally enjoyed that working progressive majority he just barely lacked in 62-3.  Kennedy predicted in the fall of 63 that his domestic bills would probably take up to 18 months to pass through Congress.  That's roughly about what happened as it turned out.

Btw, all major Cong'l leaders in 63-4 said on the subject of Civil Rights that Kennedy's bill would have passed, had he lived, in roughly the same time period as transpired under his successor.   Mansfield, Humphrey and Repub Leader Dirksen all espoused this view publicly.

[ Parent ]
Sixth grade in Washington, D.C. (0.00 / 0)
We were on an outdoor basketball court, after Ben W. Murch Elementary let out for the day, and someone said 'Kennedy got shot.' We didn't believe it, but also we really did. No one would say that if it weren't true. One of the kids said 'good riddance' (we figured it must have come from his dad), but I don't remember it having any emotional impact, the blood pounding in my head was so loud.

I went over to my friend's house and we watched tv. I remember the reports from Parkland Memorial Hospital, and the image of the hospital from the road leading in. I'm sure I'll never forget that image.

On Monday I watched the funeral procession from an office building along the route of the funeral, in the office of a family friend.

I was the Junior Red Cross representative from my school, and I remember giving a short speech (from index cards, I can see the index cards) at a school assembly that fall. All the representatives from DC schools were going to go to an event at the White House before Christmas, and I remember wondering how cold it would feel sitting in temporary bleachers outside. That never happened.

Doug Kahn

JFK and LBJ (0.00 / 0)
Some general comments...

If LBJ was such a great president, then why, at the end of the 60's, was America still not a universal welfare state?  One cannot say congressional obstruction, because virtually all his proposals were passed.  In fact not a single universal social service was even proposed, let alone passed.  Nor was there any pro-labor, anti-business legislation.  Nor was there any structural economic change.  The anti big-business crusade, which was pushing America into it's own type of social democracy, was completely forgotten in the period 1960-80.  All that you had were a hodgepodge of programs, designed to generally to benefit (1) the very poor-not the working class, not the proletariat, but those below them, the lumpen-proletariat-and (2) the victims of discrimination-actually mostly African-Americans, other groups-women, Native Americans, etc.-were not paid so much attention.

This is no doubt gratifying to the groups above, but at the same time it was bitterly disappointing to the working class and other groups, some of whom were not that much better off than the poor and minorities.  The programs were also hopelessly inadequate for the mounting problems of a modern urban society.

It is for those reasons that LBJ does not come off too much from the long view of history. He did bring about the civil rights breakthrough, but he did really nothing much else.  He was a man of great talents, in a sense the last able person to be president, he could have been the second FDR and completed the New Deal, but he simply did not do this.  To be sure, JFK was not much different; his programs were already markedly more conservative or centrist than FDR and Truman immediately beforehand; indeed, the Great Society was the New Frontier realized.  But still the programs of the 60's do not come off very well in the long run.  If you want to have radical programs, go back to the 40's rather than the 60's. Revive the Economic Bill Of Rights and the Fair Deal.

Personally, the real reason why some people here-some "radical" people-seem to have soft words for LBJ is that they don't mind ignoring the mass of the population, even the workers and farmers.  They want save only parts of the human race, rather than the whole of it, which used to be the goal of the left.  Out of hatred for the mass of the population-for being too bigoted, etc.-they would rather advocate only "targeted" programs, which incidentally align them with centrist politics, and even deny themselves social benefits.      

INCREDIBLE Ignorance! (0.00 / 0)
Johnson was surely a deeply flawed man--the Vietnam War proves that beyond all doubt. But it seems that Johnson critics are constitutionally allergic to facts.

In fact not a single universal social service was even proposed, let alone passed.

MEDICARE was and is a universal program that helped cut poverty among seniors in half almost overnight in historical terms.

Of course it wasn't fully universal, since it didn't cover those under 65.  But it was universal in the sense of not being a targeted means-tested program--which is what you attacking Johnson for.

What's more, it greatly benefited younger people as well, by eliminating the burden of financial care for their elders that Medicare assumed.

The Great Society could have done much more if one thinks abstractly, and makes comparisons to European welfare states.  But if one looks at how historically different the US has always been, then it's quickly apparent how utterly ludicrous your criticism is.

"You know what they say -- those of us who fail history... doomed to repeat it in summer school." -- Buffy The Vampire Slayer, Season 6, Episode 3

[ Parent ]
JFK and LBJ (Cont.). (0.00 / 0)
America always different?  Then how do you explain Social Security, which rivals anything Europe has got?  

Again, at the end of the 60's we did not have national health insurance-Medicare and Medicaid are watered-down versions of Truman's original proposals-, a guaranteed annual income, guaranteed full employment, universal housing, etc.  

One gets the uneasy impression that people here do not want to break with the tradition of blaming the lack of change upon America-the people, the political system, even something that is innately of the essence of the country-rather than attempt to look at oneself and the ideological mindset that has governed the Left and the Intelligentsia all these years.  The cult of alienation has taken such a toll upon the Left.

Again, do people here wish to deny themselves a cradle-to-grave welfare state?  Then just continue to do what you have been doing all these years-limit porgrams as much as possible, instead of making them universal.  

46 years later: what does Kennedy's assasination mean? | 35 comments
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