Kennedy- so unfamiliar with communist theory?...the same Kennedy who first sent troops into Vietnam to counter the communist insurgency?..who started to back an effort to topple a Communist leader in Cuba?...whose brother Bobby, the AG went after the communist backed unions ?...
And Richard Reeves wrote this?...hard to believe...easier to believe that Kennedy did not want to stir up the democratic left in this country so as not to upset his voting base so early in his Presidency...Remember Kennedy eventually made Kruschev reverse the boats that were carrying nuclear missiles to Cuba ...
But just as Kennedy was playing the politician’s part- not the misunderstanding President’s part, so too is Putin playing the chess game of RealPolitik, sly old KGB apparatchik that he still is...He is a thief,a murderer and an overall thug.
Richard Reeves wrote an excellent book and he details how Kennedy was clobbered by Krushchev. In Vienna in 1961, yes he was unfamiliar with communist theory.
He came into office, wanting to do something and got off into the Bay of Pigs. Even when Dean Rusk told him he was incredulous that Kennedy wanted to send 1500 Cubans to face 20000 Castro troops, Kennedy didn’t bat an eye. When William Fulbright brought reporting in that contradicted the reports from the CIA, Kennedy was disturbed but he went ahead with it anyway.
Afterwards, he talked to Eisenhower who clobbered him on the bad decisions made. Yet Kennedy blamed Eisenhower (probably because an aide mentioned him and that was the magic voter button).
Subsequently, he pulled out of Laos. Hating defeat, he made the point that he’d had two defeats in the first year of his Presidency, he could not afford a third.
Then Kennedy was confronted by the Berlin crisis. Khruschev was sealing off West Berlin to stop the educated from fleeing East Germany. Kennedy was at a loss of what to do. When the tanks were in Berlin, there was a banner with a message to Kennedy. “Kennedy: words don’t stop tanks”. Kennedy did send in the tanks and that was the resolution of the crisis.
So in this period of two failures, Kennedy reviewed VietNam and decided this would be his victory.
He was not someone who understood theory or the big picture all that well. He was into details and control.
The author substantiates all this, methodically.