Kennedy was an incompetent and foolish cold warrior.
"Bear any burden, pay any price," after all, is the same in spirit as "extremism in defense of liberty is no vice."
He ran against Nixon from the right on foreign policy, yelling about a fatal "missile gap" that did not exist.
Reputedly, he stole the election and Nixon chose to let it pass.
We might have done better with Nixon, both then and since.
Bay of Pigs?
Missiles of October?
Vietnam?
America forced to choose between a lunatic policy of roll-back and the only less crazy policy of containment?
No Goldwater nomination in 64, anyway, I think.
No crackpot conservative ascendancy in the GOP?
Not that they weren't already a force, doing their best to take over, what with tail-gunner Joe in the senate, cheered on by his red-baiting, red-hunting family friends, Bill Buckley and the "respectable" movement conservatives at The National Review.
No Reagan in 80?
No war on the government in the new century?
The Republicans of that time had already used federal power to support the civil rights movement, Eisenhower and his VP, Nixon, in the lead, supporting the Brown decision of the Supreme Court headed by Eisenhower's appointee, Republican Earl Warren.
Nixon would have been better for the movement than JFK, inhibited by his dixiecrats, as some of its supporters, black and white, understood.
Sure, he used Whittaker Chambers against Alger Hiss to embarrass the Democrats and in particular Truman, Acheson, and retrospectively FDR.
But Hiss was guilty and FDR was a fool about Stalin.
There was no way his anti-fascist war was ever going to do America any good, anyway.
Nixon proved in China his anti-communism was not that of the conservatives, and his policies regarding the Vietnam War, inherited from the Democrat LBJ, were no worse than we could have expected from Humphrey.
Would America have done better in 1960 with Nixon?
We'll never know.
And, no, refusing to fight a vast, global war to save the Jews of Europe would not have been per se anti-Semitic, though anti-Semites would have applauded.
Not even if many American Jews and their allies of the thought police say so.
No more than refusing such a war to save Russia from Germany would have been anti-communist, slavophobic, or pro-Nazi, though anti-communists, slavophobes, and pro-Nazis would have been pleased.
No more than refusing a much lesser war to save the Tutsis in Rwanda was racist.
Oh, one more thing.
Had Nixon won Kennedy would not have been shot.
Even he would have been better off.
Well, not that America had much choice as to whether or not to go to war to "save the Jews" since it was Hitler who declared war on the USA. Even so, the history of Jewish influence on US policy, about which I know nothing, might be interesting, not so much for how powerful it was (or wasn't?) in the first half of the 20th c. but how it has declined ever since. The proof of that particular pudding can be seen today as Netanyahu fulminates at Obama's 'treachery'.
ReplyDeleteActually, we could and should have ignored Hitler, who declared war only because of his alliance with Japan and expected us to make trouble in Europe because FDR wanted to save Uncle Joe, and everybody knew it.
ReplyDeleteAnd we pretty much pushed Japan into war by mucking about in the Far East where we had no more business being than in the Philippines.
And you guys should be really pissed at Churchill. All that trouble and not only did you not save Poland but the empire went away
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