"John F. Kennedy's Vision of Peace" by RFK, Jr.

[grahamhgreen]

A few months old, but a great read from RFK, Jr.:

On November 22nd, 1963, my uncle, president John F. Kennedy, went to Dallas intending to condemn as "nonsense" the right-wing notion that "peace is a sign of weakness." He meant to argue that the best way to demonstrate American strength was not by using destructive weapons and threats but by being a nation that "practices what it preaches about equal rights and social justice," striving toward peace instead of "aggressive ambitions."

Despite the Cold War rhetoric of his campaign, JFK's greatest ambition as president was to break the militaristic ideology that has dominated our country since World War II. He told his close friend Ben Bradlee that he wanted the epitaph "He kept the peace," and said to another friend, William Walton, "I am almost a 'peace at any price' president." Hugh Sidey, a journalist and friend, wrote that the governing aspect of JFK's leadership was "a total revulsion" of war.

Nevertheless, as James W. Douglass argues in his book JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters, JFK's presidency would be a continuous struggle with his own military and intelligence agencies, which engaged in incessant schemes to trap him into escalating the Cold War into a hot one. His first major confrontation with the Pentagon, the Bay of Pigs catastrophe, came only three months into his presidency and would set the course for the next 1,000 days.

JFK's predecessor, Dwight D. Eisenhower, had finalized support on March 17th, 1960, for a Cuban invasion by anti-Castro insurgents, but the wily general left its execution to the incoming Kennedy team. From the start, JFK recoiled at the caper's stench, as CIA Director Allen Dulles has acknowledged, demanding assurances from CIA and Pentagon brass that there was no chance of failure and that there would be no need for U.S. military involvement. Dulles and the generals knowingly lied and gave him those guarantees.

When the invasion failed, JFK refused to order airstrikes against Castro. Realizing he had been drawn into a trap, he told his top aides, David Powers and Kenneth O'Donnell, "They were sure I'd give in to them and send the go-ahead order to the [U.S. Navy aircraft carrier] Essex. They couldn't believe that a new president like me wouldn't panic and try to save his own face. Well, they had me figured all wrong." JFK was realizing that the CIA posed a monumental threat to American democracy. As the brigade faltered, he told Arthur Schlesinger that he wanted to "splinter the CIA into a thousand pieces and scatter it to the winds."

Read more: http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/john-f-kennedys-vision-of-peace-20131120#ixzz2sPPyCwVx
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The thought that our President and elected representatives would play into the hands of the military and spy apparatus was as disturbing to JFK then as it is to the majority of Americans now.

[Wilms]

1. ^

[Spider Jerusalem]

2. JFK presided over the largest peacetime expansion of the US military in history.

He ran to the right of Nixon in '60, fearmongering about a nonexistent "missile gap". He fucked up big by letting the Bay of Pigs invasion go ahead, and fucked up worse by not providing air cover when it went bad. The Bay of Pigs, and the failure of the US to support the invasion with air strikes, led directly to the Cuban Missile Crisis, because a) it was obvious that there was a potential future US invasion, therefore defensive missiles made sense and b) the lack of air cover led the Soviets to perceive Kennedy as too craven to actually do anything. In the event? He led the world to the brink of nuclear war to prove he had balls. (Despite the USA having Jupiter missiles just over the Soviet border in Turkey, about as far from targets on the Black Sea as Cuba was from Miami and Atlanta.)

JFK also presided over an expansion of US troops in Vietnam from 900 when Ike left office to 16,000 on 22 November '63. And in interviews for the Kennedy library? RFK said that there was never any question of pulling out of Vietnam.

I'll be really glad when we have done with this ahistorical Camelot mythologising.