Friends, today we mark the 60th anniversary of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, and, in retrospect, it seems to mark a turning point in so many ways. I have a few articles to share with you: an interview with JFK's mother about the family's reaction to his death, a piece that speculates on how different history might have been had Kennedy avoided the assassin's bullet in November 1963, and an article about RFK, Jr.'s reminisences on his uncle's passing, and his desire for greater transparency from the government about what happened on that fateful day. I hope you find all this analysis interesting. I would love to hear your thoughts!
https://themessenger.com/politics/robert-f-kennedy-jfk-files-biden
Yet another poll shows Trump ahead, and it also shows Trump more ahead when one adds in Kennedy, West, and Stein. It's looking ominous for your side, Sleepy Joe! You might want to call up the DOJ and arrange for a few dozen more indictments?
https://emersoncollegepolling.com/november-2023-national-poll-trump-maintains-lead-over-biden/
Congrats to anti-immigrant conservative Geert Wilders, whose party has emerged as the big winner in Holland's parliamentary election. The most likely outcome, therefore, is that the establishment parties will band together to give him, and the voters, the finger. What else is new?
Finally, are misinformation watchdogs fatally compromised by their financial ties to corporations that are pushing an establishment-approved agenda (and, of course, their own products on consumers)? That is, are the news-checkers essentially corrupt? It may be so, but then again leftists don't need any monetary incentive to trash those who dare to disagree with them, do they? It comes naturally!
https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2023/nov/18/big-pharma-financing-newsguards-for-profit-busines/
Dr. Waddy from Jack: My view, from having lived and observed throughout the JFK months: if you want to experience the ambience of his early tenure in office, listen to the Kingston Trio's original recording of the song New Frontier. It faithfully depicts the crew cut, gung ho attitude he fostered. Regretably vital in this perception also was that of Ike as unglamorous and an atvistic do nothing. Ike was a very great American; as a wartime commander his recognition of the necessity of getting along with a wide variety of very willful folk and being willing to bear politically powerful mediocrities bears comparison with Washington. He was a competent steward of the Presidency government and in retrospect can be termed plausibly a better President than JFK.
ReplyDeleteRAY TO JACK
DeleteNothing like a president who is also a serial fornicator and adulterer, is there?
Dr. Waddy from Jack: JFK's death, together with the advent of always bleak winter cast a pall, though I do not know many, including myself, who felt intense grief. Then in February along came the Beatles; they brightened things up considerably and, amazingly, became the harbingers, perhaps even the catalyst for the astonishing cultural upheaval of the mid and late '60s. As we boomers flocked to college in 1965, the Beatles commenced their intellectual transformation and gained continued purchase with our newly "opened"minds. The Beatles, as good as they were, might not have had the initial impact they had had their American debut not presented deliverance from the dolorous aftermath of the assassination.
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ReplyDeleteI am not implying that the assassination was some sort of punishment. In fact, the entire event was a disgrace to our nation, period. It was also a conspiracy. If it was not, certainly most Americans never believed The Warren Report, in my opinion. Of course RFK was also assassinated, which of course was another disgrace to our nation.
In any event, the 1960s was the beginning of all the bullshit that besets us now. That baby boomer generation of spoiled brat, middle class, white kids has come home to roost, with a vengeance. And don't forget the Vietnam War, where a lot of poor white baby boomers, who could not afford to evade the draft died in that "tropical paradise". As far as the Beatles do, fuck every one of those asshole degenerates from Liverpool, and you can throw in Elvis from Memphis and his brand of musical bullshit. However, I still have a weakness for "Saturday Night Fever" and those kids over in Brooklyn who frequented a real night club in a real place.
Dr. Waddy from Jack: Had JFK not been killed: would the Beatles have been as culturally significant?Perhaps not; Sinatra and Elvis were not. Had he pulled us out of Vietnam, N.Vietnam would have been quick to take advantage. Nixonization of the war was well under way when they launched the big May'72 offensive. Alot of American carriers were still off their coast. JFK ization would almost certainly have led to the conquest of the South and maybe more since the North would not have been bled by a long conflict with us. JFK would have been blamed for the loss of S.E. Asia but it might not have caused him much political damage (I mean, who knew from Cambodia, Laos Thailand etc)
ReplyDeleteDr. Waddy from Jack: I don't think his Civil Rights Bill would have cost him much. He would have had LBJ to shepherd a necessarily compromised version through. It didn't stop LBJ's '64 landslide. With JFK in office and the war perhaps not a factor would so many of the boomers have revolted? We were the biggest generation and even a faction of us was big enough to make an unprecedented difference if we had been so
ReplyDeletemotivated. But would we have been? We were also the most naive and credulous generation and the Depression made radical faculty we met in our massive mid '60s onslaught on academia might have seen in us a last chance. WWII combat hero and still relatively youthful JFK might have been able to convince much more of my generation that the domestic commies were the rank traitors they certainly were in fact.
Ray from Jack: Well, the Kennedy brothers thought themselves free of normal personal standards for the time. But their incredibly reckless amorous conduct ( which had to be known to the Soviets) may, along with the Bay of Pigs debacle and Khruschev's face to face size up of JFK at the Vienna summit, have convinced the earthy K. that JFK was a silly ,voluptuary, libertine weakling. That perception, shared by his hawkish military which was incensed by continued Allied presence in the Berlin they had struggled for, may have led K. to put those missiles in Cuba and bring us to the nuclear brink. It also terribly wronged the only true noble in the Kennedy family, Jacqueline Kennedy. She had to have known of his casual betrayals and her dignity both during his tenure and in the days after the assassination was magnificent. I do think the Beatles made some very good popular music, for whatever that genre might be worth.
ReplyDeleteDr. Waddy from Jack: Political indictments: a prototype of the role of the judiciary in a totalitarian America obtains in our country now. As it is for DJT it will be for ALL of us then. The complete subjugation of a legal structure established by historical trial and accumulated wisdom would be forced and celebrated by the Critical Legal Studies school which now sits even in Scotus! Arbitrary and incidental conceptions of justice, dictated by an unassailable elite, would be the central "principle".
ReplyDeleteDr. Waddy from Jack The radical left, both in its early 20th century emergence after the 100 year hiatus of its French prototype, and its "New Left" explosion in the '60s, carried on to this day, manifests this consistent conviction: " the evil we confront is as profound as to justify 'any means necessary'to destroy it - ANY means."So it is appropriate to term their misuse of information and its deceitful dissemination as "natural" to them and by now a tactic reflexive to them.
ReplyDeleteJack/Ray, unforgivably, I don't know much about Eisenhower. I shall have to rectify that, especially given the fact that the 50s were arguably America's high point. But I wouldn't doubt that he was fundamentally better at the job than JFK.
ReplyDeleteInteresting! I didn't know that JFK's demise and the Beatles' ascension were juxtaposed so closely...
Ray, I've always been shocked that more political leaders don't get assassinated... Talk about an effective shortcut for anyone who wants to effect transformative change! But I agree: the moral effects of "rock and roll" have been almost entirely negative. Those who preached against it as the music of the Devil definitely had a point.
I personally doubt that JFK could have disengaged from South Vietnam. No one knew how draining the commitment of U.S. ground forces would be, and so, politically, it was an easy choice to make. LBJ certainly thought so, and Congress agreed. Only 2 Senators and zero House members opposed the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution. Could JFK have stood against that kind of unanimity? Would it even have crossed his mind to do so?
True: had we disengaged from Vietnam, the youth revolt of the late 60s might have been forestalled. Now THAT would be an interesting counterfactual version of history to play out...
Jack, I suppose "justice" was never blind, in this country or any other, but the abuse of the legal system to pursue political vendettas is a very sad thing to see in what most still regard as the nexus of democracy and constitutionalism.
Dr. Waddy from Jack: In having lauded Jacqueline Kennedy as I did I did not mean to detract from JFK's heroic service in WWII. He was a hell of man to do what he did after his boat was sunk. And he acted wisely in the Cuban Missile Crisis but it might not have occured at all had JFK not have displayed a lack of resolve in the Bay of Pigs defeat and had he not displayed a casually goatish demeanor (reportedly he actually admitted it to PM Macmillan)which looked like aristocratic degradation to Khruschev. I think K. would not have ventured to test Nixon so.
ReplyDeleteDr. Waddy from Jack: The MSN article appears to hold it most likely that JFK would not have escalated in Vietnam and you have expressed doubt that he would have withdrawn. But what then could he have done ? A contingent of advisers could not have given S. Vietnam the vital will to fight which it lacked from beginning to end and more of them would have been picked off apace.The advisers alone could not have engaged N.Vietnam.He wanted to end the Cold War (probably especially so after the Cuban Missile Crisis) but proposed better relations withRussia did not necessarily mean an end to communist expansionism and China was implacably hostile (hostility between Vietnam and China was probably then perceived only by some scholars and China scholarship was probably a risky pursuit after the academic "China Lobby" was excoriated for the Maoist triumph). N.Vietnam was determined to conquer the South so: I think Kennedy would have had escalate or leave. The early support for escalation after the Tonkin Gulf Incident or something similar would probably have constrained him to make a war of it. "The torch has been passed to new generation" which had fought WWII in the trenches as it were and it had not forgotten the hard lesson taught by Hitler's cynical incipient expansion.
ReplyDeleteDr. Waddy fromJack: I think you are right in that few expected 500,000 + troops to be engaged at one time. The draft had continued since WWII and had not generated any resistance so the shocking revolt against it generated by some in my boomer generation was not anticipated. I don't remember at the time anyone publicly directing this question to those boomers who (mostly for self serving reasons I think) bucked the draft: "Uhh, what ARE you willing to fight for. . .?"
ReplyDeleteJack, to JFK's failures you can add a series of ham-fisted attempts to assassinate Castro, which probably did more to bring the world to the brink than anything else.
ReplyDeleteI remain skeptical that Kennedy would have managed to extricate us from Vietnam, even had that been his preference. I agree with the article that he would not have done so prior to the '64 election. Who can say whether he would have been around after that...
Yes, no one saw the need for close to 600,000 American troops in Vietnam, until -- bam! -- there we were. it's an open question whether that scale of a commitment was ever advisable or necessary. You're right that the South needed stiffening, but in truth there was no need to beat the Viet Cong -- just to hold it at bay. An alternative to a massive commitment to fighting on the ground would have been, a la Nixon, a more aggressive bombing campaign...
Dr. Waddy from Jack: The article said in 1963 polling showed Goldwater beating JFK 59 to 41 % in the former Confederate states. But even had that margin lasted, it might well not have garnered Goldwater all the electoral votes of even those states. As I remember,In '63 and 4 Goldwater's brand of conservativism was new and largely unknown in much of the country . The early GOP '64 leading contender was Henry Cabot Lodge; now there was a New England brahmin for you. Rockefeller was involved too until he was almost run off the stage by Goldwater partisans at the '64 Convention in an early Rino setback though. But Goldwater was perceived as too far out of the mainstream to have been a threat to JFK in '64.JFK was admired for his conduct during the Cuban Missile Crisis. He probably would not have had the landslide LBJ had - that was in part due to his martyrdom - but he would not have been at hazard from a Goldwater who was then too much of a novelty. The then Democrat party had not yet commenced its disgraceful surrender to the far left which has motivated so many conservatives.
ReplyDeleteJack, we can only speculate on how the '64 election would have gone, had JFK survived beyond November '63, but I agree that we can't assume that Goldwater would have been the GOP candidate. I'm not sure WHY precisely Southerners would have been so enraged at Kennedy in '63, since he hadn't actually done anything substantial on civil rights yet (and maybe never would). In any case, had Vietnam played out in the same way, then Kennedy would have sailed into the '64 election looking like a tough guy because of the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, and maybe that would have made him harder to beat? We all know that LBJ won in a landslide in '64, but the question is...why? And would Kennedy have had any chance of replicating that performance?
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