Replies

Castro had that swingin’ single vibe, and romantic Latin vibe, and that postwar commie vibe, and all of that resonated with at least part of the population. By the time Ed went to Cuba, Joseph McCarthy was toast.

Oh, okay McCarthy had run his course. Then this does make the door open more for Sullivan.

McC’s across-the-aisle friend and colleague JFK took up the anti-commie mantle during his Senate career and in his Presidency, and yet also, during his Senate days, scrutinized and apparently opposed the fairly low-level US military assistance in “Lay-OS” and the rest of IndoChina.

Kennedy wasn't the only guy to go McCarthy. Reagan testified before the House and was pretty frank about some things he seemed to know about people in the industry. I think the guy was an anti-Communist through and through. Can't say as I am any different. I loathe the marxist influences on the entertainment industry.

But he did send in advisors to Vietnam. By the end of 1963, Kennedy had 16,000 military advisors there. I'm thinking they were more than advisors, but that's my impression. LINK

JFK campaigned in 1960 on the Missile Gap, wanted (and got) the same kinds of federal tax cuts that Reagan got 20 years later, and spoke of “brushfire wars” to stop commie expansion. It’s tough to argue, knowing what we now know, that Nixon would have made a better president from ‘61-’63, but we also know that LBJ was a disaster, and Nixon would have been better from ‘63-’69, and obviously wouldn’t have turned into a train wreck in the early 1970s.

Say what we want about John Kennedy, he did serve with honor in the war. He didn't get a big perk job. He was in the trenches. He was injured. Some will say because he wasn't much of a leader, but I'm not convinced of that.

I think he really screwed up the Bay of Pigs incident. He owned up to it. He didn't blame it off on someone else. He took his lumps for it, as well he should. As you have mentioned here, he was doing things we would champion today. I'm sure he did somethings we wouldn't too. Like dating and East German spy and Judth Exner. His skirt chasing was as notorious as his father's. I submit he heavily influenced another young man who was convinced real men treated women like disposable pleasure devices, namely Bill Clinton.

I do think you may have a decent point about Kennedy vs Nixon in that time frame. LBJ was a disaster. He was an effective leader of the house, but his White House years were terrible. Great society, managing the Vietham war from the Oval Office, McNamerra... good grief.

I don't know about the train wreck part of it. The media couldn't stand the idea that a Republican could be presidential, when LBJ just wasn't. I think they would have tried to take Nixon down some way, anyhow. You know, compared to Clinton and Obama, Nixon was a choir boy. Our schools have been teaching kids for decades that Nixon WAS a crook, but he didn't have dead bodies. He wasn't giving state secrets to the Chinese. He didn't have a know Chineses spy in the White House, then transfer them to anther top level agency with top level briefings.

Some of the idiocy of Johnson is just hard to fathom. Calling people in and taking a whiz in front of them to let them know who was boss? Who acts like that? What an ass.

Ramirez's latest political cartoon LARGE VERSION 08/01/2013: LINK LINK to regular sized version of Ramirez's latest, and an archive of his political cartoons.

FOLKS, THOSE OF YOU WHO CAN, PLEASE CLICK HERE AND PENCIL IN YOUR DONATION TO HELP END THIS FREEPATHON. THANK YOU!
...this is a general all purpose message, and should not be seen as targeting any individual I am responding to...

Yeah, he screwed up the Bay of Pigs. JFK took public responsibility, even coined a phrase that he claimed was an old saying — “victory has a thousand fathers, defeat is an orphan”. To free the captured Brigade, he had diplomats negotiate an aid package for Castro, “Tractors for Peace” — perhaps thinking that Castro would then reject the USSR. Didn’t work. The Brigade was freed, and they presented their flag to JFK in a public ceremony, where he stated that it would be returned to them “in a free Cuba”.

JFK wasn’t literally in the trenches, he was a PT boat veteran. When the boat was blasted to splinters, and he’d injured his back, he swam around getting his unconscious buddies face up in the water. He served with honor, as millions did and still do.

Because of that injury, he went on crutches during his early Senate career, and scheduled his back surgery to coincide with the vote to condemn — it wasn’t technically a censure — Joe McCarthy, because he couldn’t be on record voting on either side of that one; his voters in Mass wouldn’t have accepted a vote to condemn, and his fellow Demwits wouldn’t have accepted the other.

Miiltary advisers shoot back when they’re shot at, nothing odd about that. And 16,000 was a drop in the bucket compared with the peak months of LBJ’s escalation.

His philandering was revolting, and naturally the media shills clammed up about it. I think it was Bernard Kalb who 20 or 25 years later mentioned seeing JFK chasing some laughing female staffer into an office in the evening hours, and claiming that kind off thing was never considered anything but off-limits.

It’s probably safe to say that JFK wasn’t the first — even boring old Warren G Harding was a womanizer while in office, but managed to keep that secret, and it probably wasn’t at the level of JFK and his fellow lanceman RFK. It’s difficult to believe that their wives remained blissfully unaware.

We’d better be careful about defending Nixon around here. :’)

Nixon was easily in the upper tier of US presidents, and that’s impressive considering the fact that he was impeached but not convicted because he resigned in disgrace. During the Frost interviews Nixon was answering a question about his political roots as it were, and even his eyes widened when he said the name “Adlai Stevenson” — the fact is, Nixon wasn’t a finishing school elite prig, but he was brilliant.

The media was against him in general because of his 1962 “won’t have Dick Nixon to kick around any more” farewell speech. He spent a few years as the attorney for Pepsico, even travelled to the USSR on that gig, and tried to visit his “Kitchen Debates” adversary Khruschev, still living as a non-person under house arrest. Nixon described the burly female armed guard who stood in his way as he tried to knock on the door.

I recall that he was one of the footstompers cheering Goldwater during the 1964 Pubbie convention; and of course, his 1968 return was one of the all-time political success stories, and should be remembered and taught as such. Humphrey lost by a slightly wider margin in 1968 than Nixon had lost in 1960, but Nixon was reelected in a massive landslide in 1972; the only President who won all of the Electoral College votes was Washington, in a much smaller nation, and Nixon (as of 1972) was in the number two slot (maybe still is).

He ended Johnson’s war in Vietnam by bombing Hanoi to the peace table; he engineered the Shanghai Communique and opened China; he tried to get Congress to balance the budget and got one year’s worth of surplus instead; when the national debt exceeded the value of the federal stockpile of bullion, he initiated the modern currency system (and boy, are some people still sore about that). And he managed to do this with Demwit majorities in both houses of Congress.