26 thoughts on “JFK”

  1. I was looking for a quote by Churchill regarding hitler when I found this…

    “In fifteen years that have followed this resolve, he has succeeded in restoring
    Germany to the most powerful position in Europe, and not only has he restored the
    position of his country, but he has even, to a very great extent, reversed the results
    of the Great War…. the vanquished are in the process of becoming the victors and
    the victors the vanquished…. whatever else might be thought about these exploits
    they are certainly among the most remarkable in the whole history of the world.”     –
    Winston J.Churchill, 1935.

    What I was looking for was his quote about history making a mistake in thinking he was only a madman and that a valuable lesson would be lost.

    Before Hitler revealed his evil, he could be mistaken for any modern charismatic leader. Apparently, he was great fun at parties. What this tells me is any modern charismatic leader could be Hitler if given the chance.

  2. It’s important to remember how positively the world at large and the ‘intelligensia’ in specific viewed fascism and National Socialism. They made the trains run on time, they revitalized Germany, they put down individualistic tendencies in favor of more state- and group-oriented behavior…

    2. You can always know a totalitarian by asking, “Once you have perfected the government, what then?”

      The answer is invariably some version of, “Then, we set about perfecting the people.”

    3. I have an issue of National Geographic from 1938 that has an article called “The New Germany” or something like that. It painted the Nazi government in pretty optimistic terms.

  3. “Many a university teacher during the 1930’s has seen English and American students return from the Continent uncertain whether they were communists or Nazis and certain only that they hated Western liberal civilization.” – F. A. Hayek, The Road to Serfdom

    1. Saturday’s Wall Street Journal had an article about the a Chinese guy who’s read Hayek. He said that 40 years ago he’d have been shot, and 30 years ago he’d have been jailed, but now the government tolerates him because he can give them advice on what ideas will never work.

    2. To be fair, early 1930’s America wasn’t liberal or civilization. It didn’t even have booze.

  5. It is the progressivist’s nature to suck up to bullies, rather than make the hard choices required to face up to them.

      2. Bob-1 is correct. The JFK of October 1962 was not the JFK of August 1937. The “Greatest Generation” of the 1940s and later were not merely the communist and fascist sympathizers they had been earlier. And the Millennials will someday transcend their current idiotic hipster politics and learn to meaningfully defend freedom.

        1. Generally agree with Mr. Manifold on this. Many people have stupid ideas when they’re young, then they wise up. Of course, some don’t. Take Obama. (Please.) Possibly Bob-1 will enter codgerhood and think, “Wow, liberty is the bee’s knees! I can’t believe the number of stupid comments I used to post online when I was a naïve young State-humper!”

        2. We’ll defend the freedom we stole back from the selfish degenerate boomers we shot.

      3. Ah, the Kennedy family.

        My parents, refugee immigrants to this great country of ours in the aftermath of WW-II, and Mom, especially, had this fascination with the Kennedys — all of them.

        When a certain Caroline Kennedy was advanced for that New York Senate seat vacated by Hillary Clinton, and after Kirsten Gillibrand got the nod from Governor Paterson, it was suggested among Liberals who worry about such things that Ms. Kennedy be appointed Ambassador to Great Britain as something fitting to “who she is.”

        Too bad Mom didn’t hang on long enough in the nursing home to hear of this suggestion. She would have done a “spit take” of her Ensure drink.

        Maybe it is largely forgetten on this side of the pond regarding “the old man” Joseph Kennedy’s writing off England as being lost to the Nazi war machine. I am almost certain it had not been forgetten on “the other side of the pond.” Appointing ol’ Joe Kennedy’s granddaughter as Ambassador. Come to think of it, it may have been just the gesture in Mr. Obama’s repertoire . . .

      4. That’s the same “standing up to bullies” that ended up with NATO pulling its Jupiter IRBMs from Turkey, right? Thereby taking Moscow back out of range of our own ground-based nukes, and handing momentum in the diplomatic sphere of the cold war back to the Kremlin for almost 20 years (welcome to the “era of detente!”). All because Kruschev thought, having met Kennedy in Iceland the previous year, that old Hopenchange 1.0 was a pushover.

        Pardon my skepticism about calling a strategic setback in the form of a direct retreat, “standing up to” something. Kick the tires of the Camelot myth, and you learn very quickly that Jack Kennedy was a sick joke, his image was a media parlor trick, and that the country was very lucky indeed that he didn’t make October of ’62 much worse than it turned out.

        1. Paul is correct below, it was Vienna, not Iceland. An error of detail that does not detract from the overall thesis.

  6. JFK and his father were limitedly sympathetic to Hitler in the Thirties *because* he beat up on Communists, at least in an “enemy of my enemy is at least of some virtue” fashion. They were Democrats, yes, but they were old-fashioned *Catholic* Democrats, fundamentally and religiously hostile to godless Communism, and very much part of the right wing of the Democratic Party. People forget that JFK was close to Joe McCarthy in the Senate – RFK worked for McCarthy as an assistant counsel – and both brothers stuck by Joe pretty much to the end.

    1. Everything you say is common knowledge to anyone from “The Greatest Generation” of all political ends of the spectrum. And there is so much silly stuff like “You mean, to face up to them like JFK did as President, right?” written by latter-day pundits who never heard of the disasterous meeting of JFK with Krushchev in Vienna.

      There are various accounts of Ambassador Kennedy’s open defeatism regarding Great Britain resisting Germany, ranging from the old man Joe Kennedy being a “realist” to the “Irish in him” hating the English.

      And then there is the Harvard honors thesis “Why England Slept” written by Ted Soren . . . er I mean JFK establishing President Kennedy’s street cred as a Nazi Sympathizer . . .(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Why_England_Slept).

  7. Paul,

    When I google “Mr. Chairman, there will be a war. It will be a cold, long winter” the first link is to wikipedia’s article on the Vienna summit. I give you four options:

    1) Explain why the article is wrong.

    2) Admit that Kennedy did stand up to a bully in Vienna, and apologize to me.

    3) If you will do neither, then there will be a war between us, and it will be a long hot summer.

    1. According to some accounts such as this one, Krushchev formed an opinion of JFK at the Vienna summit. He believed JFK was weak and over his head. That’s why the Cuban Missile Crisis happened. Perceived weakness (whether it’s an accurate perception or not) often leads to aggression.

      Immediately following the final session on June 4 Kennedy sat for a previously scheduled interview with New York Times columnist James Reston at the American embassy. Kennedy was reeling from his meetings with Khrushchev, famously describing the meetings as the “roughest thing in my life.” Reston reported that Kennedy said just enough for Reston to conclude that Khrushchev “had studied the events of the Bay of Pigs” and that he had “decided that he was dealing with an inexperienced young leader who could be intimidated and blackmailed.” Kennedy said to Reston that Khrushchev had “just beat [the] hell out of me” and that he had presented Kennedy with a terrible problem: “If he thinks I’m inexperienced and have no guts, until we remove those ideas we won’t get anywhere with him. So we have to act.”

      Seeking the advice of former Secretary of State Dean Acheson and others, Kennedy pondered his options for the following seven weeks. On July 25 he gave a televised speech to the American people reflecting on the Vienna meeting. In the speech he announced that he was seeking congressional approval for an additional $3.25 billion in defense spending, the doubling and tripling of draft calls, calling up reserves, raising the Army’s total authorized strength, increasing active duty numbers in the Navy and Air Force, reconditioning planes and ships in mothballs, and a civil defense program to minimize the number of Americans that would be killed in a nuclear attack. In August, Khrushchev responded in his own fashion, erecting the Berlin wall and resuming above ground nuclear testing. Kennedy showed his commitment to maintain Western access to Berlin by sending a battle group of 1,500 men together with Vice President Johnson and General Lucius Clay in from West Germany.

      The following year brought the Cuban missile crisis, another sequel to Khrushchev’s reading of Kennedy’s weakness. Close as the Cuban missile crisis brought the two sides to war, however, it was perhaps not the most consequential effect of Khrushchev’s reading of Kennedy’s weakness. Persuaded that he needed further to demonstrate “fearlessness and backbone,” in the words of William Manchester, Kennedy observed to Reston that the only place where the Communists were challenging the West in a shooting war was in Southeast Asia. Summarizing Kennedy’s own evaluation of the aftermath of the Vienna conference in his 2003 biography of Kennedy, Robert Dallek writes that Kennedy “now needed to convince Khrushchev that he could not be pushed around, and the best place currently to make U.S. power credible seemed to be in Vietnam.”

        1. He only realized that after the fact. He was perceived as weak and that made the world a much more dangerous place. The Cuban Missile Crisis took us to the brink of nuclear war and that was precipitated in large part due to Krushchev’s opinion that JFK was a lightweight in over his head. The article also suggests that perception led to JFK increasing our role in Vietnam, a war that led to over 58,000 American deaths and likely millions of Vietnamese deaths.

          1. I agree that he was perceived as weak, but that was a miscalculation by Khrushchev – typical of bullies. I don’t see any evidence that Kennedy wasn’t concerned about how he would look during the event. On the contrary, I think his behavior during the summit – threatening war as a consequence for the USSR signing a treaty with East Germany, rather than looking for a compromise, indicates that he wanted to be perceived as tough, and indicates that he was tough, as you’d expect given his prior history (such as his PT boat experience, and his ambition despite chronic pain)

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