Posted on 11/19/2013 9:12:32 AM PST by Kaslin
Had there been no Dallas, there would been no Camelot.
There would have been no John F. Kennedy as brilliant statesman cut off in his prime, had it not been for those riveting days from Dealey Plaza to Arlington and the lighting of the Eternal Flame.
Along with the unsleeping labors of an idolatrous press and the propagandists who control America's popular culture, those four days created and sustained the Kennedy Myth.
But, over 50 years, the effect has begun to wear off.
The New York Times reports that in the ranking of presidents, Kennedy has fallen further and faster than any. Ronald Reagan has replaced him as No. 1, and JFK is a fading fourth.
Kennedy is increasingly perceived today as he was 50 years ago, before word came that shots had been fired in Dallas.
That he was popular, inspirational, charismatic, no one denied. But no one would then have called him great or near great. His report card had too many C's, F's and Incompletes.
His great legislative victory had been the passage of the Trade Expansion Act of 1962. His tax cut bill was buried on the Hill.
His triumph had been forcing a withdrawal of Soviet missiles from Cuba. But we would learn this was done by a secret deal for the withdrawal of U.S. missiles from Turkey and a secret pledge not to invade Cuba.
And after the missile crisis, Bobby Kennedy pushed the CIA to eliminate Castro, eliciting a warning from Fidel that two could play this game. Lyndon Johnson said that under the Kennedys, the CIA had been running "a damned Murder Inc. in the Caribbean."
What caused Nikita Khrushchev to think he could get away with putting rockets in Cuba? His perception that JFK was a weak president.
Kennedy had denied air cover for the Cuban patriots at the Bay of Pigs, resulting in the worst debacle of the Cold War. He was then berated and humiliated by Khrushchev at the Vienna Summit in June 1961.
In August, Khrushchev built the Berlin Wall. Kennedy sat paralyzed.
In September, Khrushchev smashed the three-year-old nuclear test-ban moratorium with a series of explosions featuring, at Novaya Zemlya, a 57-megaton "Tsar Bomba," the largest man-made blast ever.
"Less profile, more courage," the placards read.
In Southeast Asia, JFK had Averell Harriman negotiate a treaty for neutralizing Laos, resulting in Hanoi's virtual annexation of the Ho Chi Minh trail through Laos into South Vietnam.
Where Eisenhower had 600 advisers in Vietnam, JFK increased it to 16,000 and gave his blessing to a generals' coup in which our ally, President Ngo Dinh Diem, was assassinated.
Then and there, Vietnam became America's war.
Kennedy had made a famous phone call to Mrs. Martin Luther King during the 1960 campaign when her husband had been arrested. Yet, he kept his administration away from the March on Washington and directed J. Edgar Hoover to wiretap Dr. King to learn of his associations with Communists.
Since his death, Kennedy's reputation has been ravaged by revelations of assignations and mistresses from Marilyn Monroe to Mafia molls to White House interns from Miss Porter's School.
All of this was covered up by his courtier journalists who would collaborate in perpetuating the Kennedy myth and collude in destroying their great hate object, Richard Nixon.
Yet, contrast what Nixon did, with what JFK failed to do.
Where Kennedy managed to get Gov. George Wallace to admit two black students to the University of Alabama, Nixon desegregated 70 percent of all Southern public schools.
Where the JFK-LBJ administration spent eight years putting 535,000 U.S. troops into a war they could neither end nor win, Nixon withdrew all U.S. troops in four years, brought home the POWs, and left every provincial capital in South Vietnamese hands.
Where Kennedy had the Peace Corps, Nixon ended the draft, gave 18-year-olds the right to vote, created an Environmental Protection Agency and a Cancer Institute and an Occupational Health and Safety Administration.
Where Kennedy gave speeches about detente, Nixon negotiated the greatest arms treaties since the Washington Naval Agreement -- SALT I and the ABM treaty -- ended decades of hostility between the U.S. and the People's Republic of China, rescued Israel in the Yom Kippur War, and pulled Egypt out of the Soviet bloc into the U.S. camp.
Creating a new majority that would dominate presidential politics until 1992, Nixon was rewarded with a 49-state landslide in 1972.
Whereupon a press elite that had maintained a conspiracy of silence on Kennedy's misconduct, seized on Nixon's failure to deal decisively with misconduct in his campaign to bring him down in the first successful coup d'etat in U.S. political history.
The mythologizing of JFK and demonization of Nixon tell us less about respective accomplishments than the moral character of an establishment, which, though it had lost America by '72, still controlled the culture, media, bureaucracy and Congress.
And as they brought down Nixon with Watergate, they would seek to bring down Reagan with Iran-Contra. But that coup failed.
My husband always thought it was Lady Bird, who had Kennedy killed. I never liked LBJ especially after the war on poverty reform
...and he would have been correct!
I am sorry, but you are incorrect. Nixon did, in fact, end the Vietnam war, and left the country in control of the South Vietnamese.
Most of us Vietnam vets who were in the Army in 1972 voted for Nixon. You are correct.
Somebody has talked.
The point is no one died in Watergate, unlike Fast and Furious and Benghazi
Anyone who questions the official account given to us by our betters in authority is a flaming nutter and you must angrily denounce and mock them. Never, ever question authority. Only ‘murka hating hating commie nazis question authority. You’re not a ‘murka hating commie nazi, are ya?!
You are comparing the post JFK/post 1960s Nixon to the old Nixon.
JFK changed America forever, and irreversibly, shortly after his death the democrats implemented his immigration goal to replace the American voters.
Congress passed a law lowering the voting age to 18 in federal elections. That would have created a headache for the states if citizens older than 18 but not yet 21 could vote in federal elections but not in state or local elections, so Congress quickly passed an amendment lowering the voting age to 18--it was approved by Congress on March 23, 1971, and was ratified by 3/4 of the states by July 1, 1971, becoming the 26th amendment. The President has no role in a constitutional amendment.
I'm not suggesting the leftists did not precipitate all of this or are not at fault, or that we might have won, but the idea that we did win is a fable as is the idea that this was somehow a Nixonian triumph. There is no reason for us to pretend something happened that didn't.
Was Kennedy a great president? Not likely. Was he the last democrat president that wasn't an American hating socialist tool? Yes. Was Nixon actually any better considering what he did and enacted? I'm not certain.
I’ve always believed G. Gordon Liddy’s account: that it was nothing more than an attempt to recover compromising photos of a prostitute.
I agree. He was a Rockefeller republican who just happened to be from California. He’s also the first president to spend more than we brought in.
Yes. And I won’t even look at anything having to do with the Birth Certificate because I know that no one could get away with a forgery, because if anyone tried such a thing, everyone would see the evidence and rise up in outrage.
“He’s also the first president to spend more than we brought in”
I find that hard to believe.
It was over a year... August 1974 to April, 1975, and when Nixon was in office, the South Vietmanese held their own. It was after the 1974 Congressional Elections and all aid to South Vietnam was stopped by a hard left Democrat Congress that South Vietnam fell, and the choppers lifted off, a holocause began, and the boat people suffered and died.
Click here for the "Watergate Babies" who cheered for that holocaust. Many of those bastards are still in congress.
I can criticize Nixon for a lot of things. But I can't blame him for the fall of Vietnam. He lived up to his promises as long as he was in office.
I also am not sure that Kennedy would have done more harm than Nixon did with his other policies.
I never said we "Won" the war. What I said is that while Nixon was in office, after the Paris Peace Accords of 1973, South Vietnam was a functioning country albeit with a lot of financial and strategic support from us and more than holding their own against an aggressive enemy who had massive support from the Soviet Union.
When the new decidedly 'leftist' Congress after Watergate cut that aid and support, South Vietnam was alone and isolated with no hope of survival.
It was a crime in my opinion and yet there are still members of congress who are proud they allowed a holocaust in Vietnam and across S.E. Asia.
I still hate those bastards. I will till my dying breath.
As to what I would have done...
JFK... who knows, but my best guess is he would have screwed up as bad as Johnson because neither had a clue outside of domestic politics and both relied on the same incompetent foreign policy team.
LBJ... after the NVA violated the TET cease fire, I would have pulled all of our diplomats away from the phony Paris peace talks, sent another 100,000 ground troops in to wipe out the remaining NVA troops in S. Vietnam and Cambodia, bombed Hanoi into the stone ages and mined Haiphong harbor just as Nixon finally did 4 years later.
Nixon in 1969... see above.
We saw that incrementalism and Robert Strange McNamara's 'gradual' escalation are folly when it comes to war. You either fight to win, or you don't fight at all. (See Goldwater in 1964.)
Like I said, I do have issues with Pat's use of this example, it should never have been used.
Nixon in his eyes is somehow absolved of the wrong (and VERY unconservative) things he did, and Kennedy is his fall guy.
I have read that Kennnedy relied on Nixon about foreign policy issues, he was a counselor for him, and they were decent friends all things considered. They weren't that far apart in many ways. Kennedy was not the kind of democrat we have today, there is simply no way of knowing what he would have done. It's all conjecture, and guessing he would have been like Johnson is not helpful in the slightest.
Nixon had his good side, Kennedy had his bad side, it was a different era, both of them would be gagging just watching what the left has gotten away with since their time.
“Somebody has talked.”
I meant that it would have been a topic of conversation relatively soon after the event, as was Jackie O’s panicked attempt to climb out of the convertible over the trunk.
The media kept droning on about how brave she was, but there she was on film, her actions giving them the lie.
It seems to me that if LBJ had hit the deck, people would have seen it, and it would have gone viral, 1963 style.
I don’t remember that happening.
I believe Nixon was the first president to have a budget deficit. He spent a lot of money on EPA, OSHA and give away programs.
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