Posted on 10/31/2015 10:21:23 AM PDT by Kaslin
"Fairy tales can come true, it can happen to you." (Frank Sinatra)
Fairy tales certainly came true for Sinatra's chum John F. Kennedy. I refer to the Cuban Missile Crisis, 53 years ago this week. More specifically, I refer to the media/academia/Hollywood spin of the crisis, especially its outcome.
Surely you know the tune: "JFK stood up to the Russians in Cuba! Khrushchevblinked, cowered, and took his missiles home with his tail between his legs! Ha-ha! Take THAT Russkies! That’s the kind of gumption we need today with Iran and Putin!"
In fact, here was the consensus at the time from America's military chiefs and most prominent Republicans:
"The biggest defeat in our nation’s history!"(Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. Curtis Lemay)
"We missed the big boat,"(Gen. Maxwell Taylor, Chairman Joint Chiefs of Staff.)
"We’ve been had!"(Navy Chief of Staff George Anderson.)
It's a public relations fable that Khrushchev quailed before Kennedy. The Kennedy-Khrushchev deal was a deplorable error resulting in political havoc and human suffering through the America's." (Gen. Alexander Haig.)
"We locked Castro’s communism into Latin America and threw away the key to its removal!" (Barry Goldwater.)
"Kennedy pulled defeat out of the jaws of victory,"(Richard Nixon.)
Alas, the astounding success of the (usual) con-job by the Democratic/Media complex is best shown by the reaction of current conservative pundits, some of whom held-up the "Pattonesque" Kennedy as a shining antithesis to the sniveling wimp George W. Bush. Let's fast-reverse to 2006 when North Korea first startled rattling its nuclear missiles:
"Follow Kennedy's Lead to Deter North Korea," wrote Charles Krauthammer at the time hailing JFK's handling of the Cuban Missile Crisis. "Now that's deterrence," the column claimed, calling for "Kennedy-esque clarity" from the wimpy President Bush.
National Review's Andrew McCarthy agreed with Krauthammer: "It would be better for President Bush to emulate the Kennedy strategy," writes McCarthy, a senior fellow at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies. The U.S. message to Kim, he stresses should be no-nonsense and "Kennedy-Clear."
So let's hand it to Fidel Castro and his KGB-founded and mentored regime. Their cultivation and employment of "useful idiots" can only be described as an art. Lenin coined the term, but Castro became the virtuoso at sniffing them out, flattering them, then flummoxing them.
Not that Krauthammer and McCarthy qualify as useful idiots. Far from it. It would be hard to find other pundits as clear-headed on foreign policy issues as these. And that's precisely the impressive part. Castro and his U.S. media/ academia/Hollywood acolytes, by sheer repetition (as Joseph Goebbels famously prescribed), have planted and nurtured so many myths about the Cuban Revolution and its illustrious leader that these monopolize the discussions and literature on the subject.
The above-named conservative pundits, I'd imagine, scoff at the usual humbug regarding Cuba: the "exquisite health care and education," the “cruelty of the U.S. embargoo9…blah, blah. But they swallowed the Missile Crisis spin. The reason is not hard to find. To wit:
Imagine an Obama Presidency--but with only Chris Matthews, Chuck Todd and John Harwood "reporting" on TV and only Paul Krugman and Nicholas Kristof scribbling. No FoxNews. No Rush. No Mark Levin. No Townhall. No internet. That’s what John F. Kennedy enjoyed.
Hard as it might be for those who weren"t around at the time (or those with short memories) to imagine, only in his sweetest dreams can President Obama envision the slobbering love affair the media carried on with President Kennedy. That Khrushchev swept the floor with Kennedy during the Cuban Missile Crisis was the mainstream conservative conclusion throughout much of the Cold War.
In fact, even Democratic luminary Dean Acheson despaired: "This nation lacks leadership," he grumbled about the famous "Ex-Comm meetings" so glorified in Thirteen Days. "The meetings were repetitive and without direction. Most members of Kennedy's team had no military or diplomatic experience whatsoever. The sessions were a waste of time."
But not for the Soviets. "We ended up getting exactly what we'd wanted all along," snickered Nikita Khrushchev in his diaries, "security for Fidel Castro's regime and American missiles removed from Turkey and Italy. Until today the U.S. has complied with her promise not to interfere with Castro and not to allow anyone else to interfere with Castro. After Kennedy's death, his successor Lyndon Johnson assured us that he would keep the promise not to invade Cuba."
In his diaries Khrushchev snickers further: "it would have been ridiculous for us to go to war over Cuba–for a country 8,000 miles away. For us, war was unthinkable." So much for the threat that so rattled the Knights of Camelot and inspired such cinematic and literary epics of drama and derring-do by their court scribes and court cinematographers.
Considering the U.S. nuclear superiority over the Soviets at the time of the (so-called) Missile Crisis (five thousand nuclear warheads for us, three hundred for them) it's hard to imagine a President Nixon — much less Reagan — quaking in front of Khrushchev's transparent ruse a la Kennedy.
The genuine threat came --not from Moscow—but from the Castros and Che. “If the missiles had remained, we would have fired them against the very heart of the U.S., including New York. The victory of socialism is well worth millions of atomic victims.†(Che Guevara to Sam Russell of the London Daily Worker, Nov. 1962.)
Castro's regime's was granted new status. Let's call it MAP, or Mutually-Assured-Protection. Cuban freedom-fighters working from south Florida were suddenly rounded up for "violating U.S. Neutrality laws." Some of these bewildered men were jailed, others "quarantined," prevented from leaving Dade County. The Coast Guard in Florida got 12 new boats and seven new planes to make sure Castro remained unmolested.
It's a tribute to the power of Castroite mythology that, even with all this information a matter of public record for almost half a century the academic/media mantra (gloat, actually) still has Castro, "defying
ten U.S. Presidents!" Instead he's been protected by them.
Then, I woke up and the dream was just a dream.........
The truth is, JFK was an incompetent jerk. He started off by screwing up at the Bay of Pigs. Then he screwed up the Cuban Missile Crisis. And before he left office, he made sure that we could not win in Vietnam without blood, sweat, and tears, by assassinating the President of South Vietnam, our good ally, because he wanted to prove he was a good Buddhist.
Ping
This article is an example of the potentially catastrophic consequences of unclear thinking about foreign policy.
In every crisis of foreign policy the first question must be, wherein lie the national interests of the United States? This article conflates how journalism treated the Cuban missile crisis with our national interests. Kennedy had one single responsibility above all others in those tense days in October 1962 which I lived through and watched on television and that was to keep America from being struck by nuclear bombs.
The national interest United States was not to unseat Castro at the cost of New York City, it was not to keep missiles in Turkey at the cost of keeping missiles in Cuba, it was not to win a propaganda victory which could only have been celebrated in ashes and rubble. The over whelming national interest of the United States was to keep free of a nuclear war. When that condition is assured, other interests can be attended to but not at the cost of nuclear war.
I have highlighted the portion of the quotation above which tells us that the Castros were probably crazy enough to blow up the world. The lesson I take from this is that when the adversary cannot be deterred it is madness to let him have the bomb. Kennedy successfully negotiated the conditions under which the Soviet Union deprived Castro of the bomb. We might note that Obama has negotiated the conditions under which the Iranians are going to get the bomb and God help us if they cannot be deterred .
I certainly no Kennedy lover, I believe he was perhaps the most overrated president in American history and he was a psychological mess, a sex addict and a drug addict. It is a wonder that he was able to function as he did during the Cuban missile crisis but perhaps the real credit goes to brother Bobby. I do not accept the deification of Kennedy or his role in the Cuban missile crisis in particular. I simply say he got us out of the worst jam in American history with our world intact and the chance 27 years later to see the Berlin wall come down peacefully.
Kennedy also deserves the blame for the existence of the crisis because of his handling of the bay of pigs and because he invited the crisis by his ineptness and amateurish composure in his meeting with Nikita Khrushchev during their walk in the Vienna Woods. Was he on drugs in Vienna? Khrushchev took his measure and figured he could get away with the Cuban missile crisis. Perhaps he did but I am here to tell about it and the Soviet Union is in the dustbin of history.
I beg to differ.
The Bay of Pigs.
The Cuban Missile Crisis.
The American Press was covering up for their boy JFK.
But, JFK was having an affair with a communist spy.
The American Press finally got tired of covering up for JFK.
They were going to release that story and destroy him and the Democrats.
Then, JFK went to Dallas.
The Democrats made him a martyr instead.
And the Press saw how ruthless the Democrats could be.
My dad was of the opinion that being assassinated was the best thing that ever happened to JFK.
As you point out, everything he touched fell apart; but getting plugged made it easy for the media to cast him as a martyr whose vision of Camelot we are still trying to fulfill.
[Retch!]
Of course Gen. LeMay would say that. He was of the opinion that a nuclear war wasn’t only survivable, but winnable.
He wanted nothing more than to launch a first strike against the Soviets.
I am wondering if Stanley Kubrick had LeMay in mind in the charcater of crazed General Turgidson in “Dr. Strangelove”.
As I pointed out in my book A FIGHTING CHANCE, the US missiles in Italy and Turkey were useless as a deterrent. They were intended to be used in the "US-preferred" scenario in which Soviet tanks started rolling west, and those missiles would be launched to stop them.
However, the US missiles were liquid-fueled. They had to be fueled immediately before launch. They were located on unprotected pads rather than in silos. The Soviets would have destroyed them before they could be fueled and launched, using either their own missiles or bombers.
Far from being a deterrent, to be used as second-strike weapons, it was obvious from the Soviet viewpoint that they were intended as first-strike weapons, because they couldn't survive a Soviet first strike.
Far from being a deterrent, they were a provocation. They illustrate the lack of serious thinking that then pervaded US nuclear doctrine.
In 1962 we did not know how many nukes the Soviet’s had.I spent time in the military (intel)and though not specifically in ths area I knew enough to know the belief then was their arsenal was on a par with ours.
Yes
A more immediate consequence of the meeting in Vienna was the building of the Berlin Wall.
Before he “left office”? That’s an odd phrasing choice.
I did not realize he had a choice in the matter.
He left the room.
He won’t be down for breakfast....
.YES
Agreed and in recent history we had Pershing Missiles in Europe, now removed.
They were deployed in response to the Soviets SS20. Both were would give their advesary little time to respond. Eleven minutes from launch a Pershing could be on target. Both the Pershing and SS20, also now removed, were very destabilizing weapons. They gave the enemy very little time to determine if an attack was real or an error in interpreting radar data. It made the concept of use or lose your missiles a decision of 5 to 10 minutes. This made the chance of accidental nuclear warfare much higher. I am glad they are both gone. Both the Soviets and the USA have enough weapons to destroy each other without the Pershing and SS20.
However, if you wanted a first strike weapon, none were better than the Pershing.
John Kennedy didn’t really want the job but his older brother Joe Jr., Pa Kennedy’s first choice, blew up in a suicide mission
http://www.b-29s-over-korea.com/kennedy_story/kennedy_story02.html
so younger bro’ John’s number came up.
Kennedy patriarch Joe didn’t take `No’ for an answer and he was one mean bast**d. He had one of his daughters lobotomized and also made sure John’s hasty marriage to a Scandinavian beauty was annulled because she didn’t suit the old man. (Something about old Nazi boyfriends and not a political blue-blood; Joe never seemed to have any problems with Nazis b-4 the war ... )
After John Kennedy and his crew both crapped out in the Pacific allowing a Japanese destroyer to cut their patrol boat in half in broad daylight, and with its bow, it was either court martial JFK, as his commander wanted, or give him a medal.
So both of the brothers received the Navy Cross for ... for blowing up real good and losing a PT boat.
Obama loves comparing himself to those he admires or thinks others admire, and he may be close here with JFK: Lots of political suck and money, but feckless, irresponsible, unqualified and perhaps most important—reluctant.
So now let’s bring in the Happy Turtle.
Throw in Jeb, who would apparently much rather be doing cool things than annoying the rest of us, to the Jack and Barry mix—and a dash of McCain III flavor as well, and ... I don’t care who ya are, with Jebediah what we got here is a real Bermuda Triangle of Dynastic Incompetence.
Kennedy deliberately betrayed those Cuban Freedom Fighters we sent to invade Cuba. He left them dying on the beaches.
Kennedy was a terrible President.
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