I don’t think I’d ever heard of the Sullivan Castro interview.
Wow, that’s a real blast from the past.
Didn’t we support Castro at first? I thought he turned on us after a while.
It wasn’t Sullivan going there to chum it up with a leading commie was it? I tend to doubt it in those days. Gosh, chumming it up with a commie in those days would have just about ruined your career. It did end many a career for that matter.
Castro had that swingin’ single vibe, and romantic Latin vibe, and that postwar commie vibe, and all of that resonated with at least part of the population. By the time Ed went to Cuba, Joseph McCarthy was toast.
McC’s across-the-aisle friend and colleague JFK took up the anti-commie mantle during his Senate career and in his Presidency, and yet also, during his Senate days, scrutinized and apparently opposed the fairly low-level US military assistance in “Lay-OS” and the rest of IndoChina.
JFK campaigned in 1960 on the Missile Gap, wanted (and got) the same kinds of federal tax cuts that Reagan got 20 years later, and spoke of “brushfire wars” to stop commie expansion. It’s tough to argue, knowing what we now know, that Nixon would have made a better president from ‘61-’63, but we also know that LBJ was a disaster, and Nixon would have been better from ‘63-’69, and obviously wouldn’t have turned into a train wreck in the early 1970s.