If testimony is inadmissible unless it is sworn to in a court of law under penalty of perjury, then Hersh does not prove most of his charges. But the same applies to most journalism.
But I didn’t ask if Hersh proved his charges; I asked if anyone had disproved them. If we stipulate that Hersh uses unsworn testimony and conjecture, the cited review suffers the same flaws, but worse!
There are other anti-Hersh reviews which stipulate the womanizing charges to be true but unimportant, and cast doubt on the more important charges. If anyone wants to understand the validity of Hersh’s book (and I certainly do) we should focus on those charges, not the silly claims about Marilyn Monroe.
This really puzzles me. American servicemen were in Vietnam in 1956. The first servicemen were killed in a gorilla attack in 1959. John Kennedy did not take office until 1961.
I grew into young adulthood while Kennedy was the President. He was extraordinarily popular. The presidential race was very tight. If his father bought him the presidency, he was a very clever man indeed. The popular vote margin was around 100,000 votes. Just one vote change in each precinct would have given Nixon at least the popular vote. As for the electorial vote, no one knew until the next morning who had won. That would have been a very difficult race to have “bought.” And I don’t believe it.
People were very, very concerned about whether or not the Pope was going to take over the country if Kennedy were elected. Strange but true.
There wasn’t a hint of scandal at the time. We thought that Jack and Jackie were the most beautiful couple. They were refined in their tastes and yet Jack was rugged in that New England coastal sort of way. He loved to sail. Suddenly everyone wanted to learn how to sail. Everyone wanted to dress like Jackie and learn to speak French and redecorate their houses. Cassini was the designer of choice. Together the two of them inspired us and made us feel good.
The Bay of Pigs was a setback. We were all scared to death of Fidel Castro and the Communists at our door back then. That made the Cuban Missile Crisis unbelievably frightening. People quickly stocked up on supplies and said their goodbyes to loved ones. We thought we were going to die. You have to understand that we were the kids who had been taught to duck and cover. We wore dog tags in high school to identify our bodies. We believed that nuclear war was upon us. So when Kennedy saved us, can you imagine what we thought of him? That was in October of 1962.
Was JFK overrated as a President? Probably. I certainly held him on a pedestal. I credited him for more of the progress in civil rights than I should have and gave him more credit for wanting to end our involvment in Vietnam. I think I projected Robert’s and Teddy’s ideas back onto him. I do remember that he got the country started on a physical fitness craze that is still with us. (Okay. Some of us are a little lax.)
But I don’t blame him for wanting to get rid of Castro anymore than I blame Bush and Obama for wanting to hunt down Bin Laden. It was the perspective of the time, I think. (And I say that as a very left-thinking person who would love to visit Cuba now.)
I object to statements about the whole Kennedy Clan being womanizers. Most of them were women: Rose, Kathleen (I believe she also died in a plane crash), Rosemary, Pat, Eunice, and Jean. And for any mistakes their father made, he also inspired them. And Mrs. Kennedy, their mother, was just awesome. She taught them a responsibility to those who were not as fortunate as they.
So while I think that JFK did not accomplish as much as a President as I thought, his family accomplished even more than I dreamed that they would.
I thought I read once where Gerald Ford had said very late in life that JFK was overrated.
I couldn’t find that quote, but I did find this interesting comparison online. Virtually, it compares the achievements of both Kennedy and Ford in their 1000 days as President.
I’d like you to explain this, please. My comments were specific to JFK, and specific to the issue of what might be needed to disbelieve Hersh’s book. This last by you seems like snark.
To be blunt, your own self-knowledge about your various ignorances is … uneven. Maybe we should discuss each other in BBQ Pit.
The last thing by me was snark. I was commented on how much you needed to say in order to explain what it was you had already said. Especially the post where you quoted yourself and then explained what you meant.
Self-knowledge isn’t an issue here. This thread is about John F Kennedy, not you or me.
There were Americans in Vietnam in the fifties and there were crucial mistakes made before Kennedy became President. But Kennedy significantly escalated American involvement in Vietnam during his Presidency. There were about 1500 Americans in Vietnam when Kennedy became President and over 16,000 when he died three years later.
I find that very interesting. Ford was not flamboyant or visionary, and some thought he wasn’t even particularly intelligent. (There was a joke while he was President that he couldn’t talk and chew gum at the same time.) He was a pragmatic man who did not hold extreme positions. He seemed to be an honest man who wanted to serve his country. He probably lacked the charisma and ambition to have won the Presidency, without first being appointed V.P. In most of these ways, he is similar to Harry S Truman.
I’m reminded of a saying frequently heard in tournament bridge: The path to success doesn’t require extreme brilliance; it’s all about not making mistakes.
An excerpt from Paul O’Neill’s book brought Ford and his superior style to my attention. O’Neill was a key economic adviser to both Ford and GWB. He describes long White House meetings where he and Greenspan debated while Ford listened, occasionally asking questions – they weren’t even particularly enlightened questions but they helped Ford learn and make decisions.
Serving under GWB, O’Neill learned to say anything important at the beginning, as GWB’s eyes glazed after a few minutes. GWB asked no questions.
While the Ford - Kennedy comparison is interesting, I apologize for going off-topic with the Ford - Bush comparison. I conflated this thread with the GWB thread.
As summary of JFK, IMHO: He had severe personal failings (corruption, arrogance, selfishness, sex-addiction), but with few if any exceptions they did not impact the country. To the contrary, the idolization of JFK promoted optimism in America and the World, the Moon landings, Peace Corps, Civil Rights & Great Society(*), etc. However else you rank him, he must be regarded in some sense as the #1Jekyll-and-Hyde President.
Others, e.g. LBJ, might get more blame for Vietnam. JFK’s cynicism, however, was reprehensible. One of Hersh’s charges is that JFK planned on an early exit from Vietnam, but wanted to wait till after the 1964 election. (*LBJ deserves credit for Great Society; but it [del]wanted[/del] wouldn’t have happened without JFK and the Assassination.)
Kennedy may very well have set up the Cuban Missile Crisis by not stopping the Bay of Pigs fiasco, which was the pet project of his predecessor’s CIA. Studies and interviews indicated that they deferred to the more experienced CIA people who had something started that they were not interested in stopping. Kennedy learned from this fiasco, and he and his brother the Attorney General Robert Kennedy personally handled every detail of the Cuban Missile Crisis with the President making the final decisions, usually on the side of caution, and many times against advice, including his brother’s. As a case study it is taught at business schools and for crisis management and compared and contrasted to the Bay of Pigs. This was truly brilliant crisis handling and saved the world from a truly nasty nuclear war. The Soviets had missiles in Cuba already, which the US did not know. Castro wanted to use them, Kruschnev did not. The missiles that were in Cuba might have been vulnerable to air attack because they were at the sites we had spotted (but not the missiles). However the missiles themselves were not in hardened sites, making them vulnerable. Kruschnev did not know they were vulnerable or not, as none of the sites in the USSR were hardened because it wasn’t standard operating procedure.
As brilliant as Kennedy’s personal leadership was throughout the crisis, one such handling does not put a stamp of “really good” on an entire presidency. Had Kennedy applied the same approach to Vietnam, he might have avoided the debacle and quagmire there. He had the confidence, experience and restraint to go the other way in Vietnam, but I don’t see the evidence that it was applied. Johnson, in succeeding Kennedy and being the creature of the winds of politics as he was obviously blew it big time. Johnson or Goldwater (or Nixon in 1960) would have followed the political climate of the US to do everything to avoid “losing another country to communism”.
So while Kennedy might have reversed course in Vietnam, he didn’t.