John Kennedy

Dallek, Election of 1944, John Kennedy, Johnson

JFK…What If

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Said Death Would Protect Legacy

John Kennedy’s best biographer made a startling revelation recently that was both ominous and eerie and says a good deal about Kennedy’s appreciation of how history works.

Robert Dallak, author of An Unfinished Life, the best book on the 35th president, gave a speech recently in Ireland where he said Jackie Kennedy was told by her husband a year before his death that his assassination would protect his legacy. “If someone is going to kill me,” Kennedy told his wife, “it should happen now.”

The Kennedy comment is contained in an oral history interview that Mrs. Kennedy did in 1964 with historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.  The comment came shortly after Kennedy’s success defusing the Cuban Missile Crisis. Jackie Kennedy sat for a series of seven interviews that have been held all these years under lock and key. The material will finally be made public in September and will be featured in an ABC broadcast.

According to Dallek, Kennedy had one of Abraham Lincoln’s great biographers, David Herbert Donald, to the White House for a lecture. Kennedy asked the distinguished historian whether Lincoln would be as fondly remembered today if he had not been shot and killed by John Wilkes Booth as his second term was just beginning.

Donald said no. In all likelihood, Donald said, had he lived, Lincoln would have become caught up in the messy and protracted fights over Reconstruction, the post-Civil War period where southern states were brought back into the Union and bitter battles raged over civil rights. As a result, Lincoln’s reputation as a great war leader may well have suffered. Kennedy, reflecting on that “what if” of history, then told his wife if someone was going to kill him, they best do it soon as his legacy would be more secure.

A few months later, Kennedy died at the hands of Lee Harvey Oswald in Dallas, Texas. Kennedy, therefore, is remembered as the glamorous and martyred young president who blundered into the Bay of Pigs, but took responsibility for the mess, who served as the cool head in the room during the Cuban Missile Crisis and expressed grave doubts about American involvement in Vietnam even as he sent U.S. advisers there.

So, what if? How would we think about JFK today had he lived to defeat Barry Goldwater in 1964 and serve out a second term? Would he have avoided the quagmire in southeast Asia? Liberated from re-election pressures, would Kennedy have stood up to the “domino theorists” who argued, mostly successfully, that the U.S. had to make a stand against Communist expansion in Indochina or the entire region would fall under influence of Moscow?

Would Kennedy have been as successful – or as committed – as Lyndon Johnson was in passing civil rights legislation? Would Kennedy have found a way to rapprochement with Castro? He loved his cigars, after all. And what of the Soviet Union? After taking the measure of Khrushchev during the Cuban crisis, would JFK have been able to cut a nuclear arms deal with the blustery, but very smart, Soviet leader?

And there is the second term factor. Generally second terms in the White House are susceptible to fatigue, drift and an almost inevitable diminishment of presidential power, no matter who is in the office. Would JFK have had a successful second term? He might well have beaten Goldwater badly, as Johnson eventually did in ’64, and had a mandate to act on a broad range of issues, or he might have squandered a big mandate and his popularity, as Franklin Roosevelt did after his big re-election victory in 1936.

This much is known. John Kennedy had a deep appreciation of history. We now know his Pulitzer Prize winning Profiles in Courage benefited greatly from the deft wordsmithing of the late Ted Sorensen, but that hardly diminishes the reality of Kennedy’s understanding and insight into the wonderful political stories contained in his book. I’ve also always thought it interesting and telling that JFK had Schlesinger, a historian of the presidency, as a White House insider.

In surveys done in 2010, a third of Americans rank Kennedy as a “great president” and the vast majority says he was above average. The professional historians ranked him sixth in presidential leadership just ahead of Jefferson. Interestingly, Kennedy was the only president in the Top 10 ranked by historians who was elected only once.

As Bob Dallek has said: “For style and for creating a mood of optimism and hope — Kennedy on that count is as effective as any president the country has had in its history. The question for me is, 100 years from now, will he be remembered? … “

“At the moment, he does have this astonishing hold on the public mind.”

 Kennedy, it seems, also had an ability to visualize his own legacy.

 

Foreign Policy, John Kennedy, Libya, Limbaugh

Another War

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PhotoThe No Debate No Fly Zone

The truly amazing thing about the “no fly zone” policy adopted over the last few days by the United States and the United Nations is not that it will be imposed on Gaddafi’s Libya, but rather that it was done with virtually no domestic debate, no Congressional action and little effort to bring the American public along.

I know it has become a political non-issue, a quaint detail of American history, but Article 1, Section 8 of the U.S. Constitution says: “Congress shall have the power…to declare war…”

Make no mistake we are going to war with Libya. The American policeman is walking the Middle East beat, again.

Moreover we are headed into another open-ended, frightfully expensive engagement with scarcely any attempt to define the short, let alone long-term objectives. Set aside for the moment the legitimate debate over whether the “no fly zone” strategy actually works. Might it be appropriate for the president and the Congress to define, in a good deal more detail, just what we hope to accomplish by engaging in a shooting war in Libya.

American anti-terrorism experts are already warning that Gaddafi is entirely capable of retaliating with some non-conventional response – read terror attack – while we spend an estimated $100 to $300 million a week to try and use air power to enforce order on the ground in Libya. It’s estimated that the initial attack on Libya’s command and control capabilities could cost a billion dollars.

Meanwhile, the Congress is virtually paralyzed in a budget debate that may well shut down the federal government in three weeks. We’ll spend millions to enforce a UN resolution on Libya with no debate, while the Congress runs the government by continuing resolution and bogs down in a completely partisan argument over funding laughably small budget lines for National Public Radio and the National Weather Service.

While the Obama Administration can claim an international consensus to use force against Gaddafi’s military, only one guess is required in the game who will pay most of the cost. The world’s greatest deliberative body – the U.S. Senate, where foreign policy used to be a regular concern – can find plenty of time for posturing over who is responsible for the budget deadlock, but couldn’t find even 15 minutes to debate whether the country ought to send more brave, young Americans into another desert war.

We can all lament the disaster of the Libyan nut job waging war on his own people, but since we’ve equipped Arab air forces from Saudi Arabia to Egypt to Jordan, why not let the vaunted Arab League deal with one of their own? Have we no leverage over the King of Jordan or the princes of Arabia? The most sensible voice in the administration, soon to be gone Defense Secretary Robert Gates, may have made his concerns about the “no fly” strategy know too early, while the rest of the administration struggled to figure out a response.

“Let’s call a spade a spade,” Gates said earlier in March, “a no fly zone begins with an attack on Libya.” He called it a “big operation in a big country” and warned of the unknown unintended consequences of yet more American military engagement in a Middle Eastern country.

We are left to hope that in a week or two no American carrier pilot is sitting in Gaddafi’s custody after being shot down attempting to enforce a no fly zone with no defined objective, no end date and no obvious concern about the human and financial cost…to the United States.

The United States time and again undertakes military action with the expectation that it will be short, painless and sanitary and that the outcome will be entirely to our liking. Funny thing: our wars never seems to work out the way we envision them.

Egypt, Foreign Policy, John Kennedy, Judiciary

Stuff Happens

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imagesCAOS34K3Exceptionalism, Hubris, Cluelessness

The protesters in the streets of Cairo could most likely care less about American domestic political debate. They have bigger issues. Still, while the chaos continues to unfold in the streets of our erstwhile ally, it might be worthwhile for those of us watching to undertake some sober reflection of what the likely fall of Mubarak says about American foreign policy.

Two seemingly disconnected data points – the latest silly debate over American “exceptionalism” and former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld’s new memoir – are informative launching pads for some of the reflection we need.

For a few days after President Obama’s State of the Union speech, cable’s talking heads were popping off about why the president refused to use the word “exceptionalism.” Exceptionalism is the notion that American ideals, ambitions, and commitment to liberty are so unique and so special that naturally the United States has not only the moral authority to lead the world, but the moral responsibility to export those ideals, ambitions and commitments.

The president did say that America is “the first nation to be founded for the sake of an idea — the idea that each of us deserves the chance to shape our own destiny.” And that “America’s moral example must always shine for all who yearn for freedom and justice and dignity.”

Some conservatives, aware that Obama’s still greatest political vulnerability is his “differentness,” have seized on his allegedly tepid embrace of the exceptionalism notion to bash him. Columnist Kathleen Parker captured the essence of the argument in a recent piece when she said: “On the right, the word ‘exceptional’ – or ‘exceptionalism’ – lately has become a litmus test for patriotism. It’s the new flag lapel pin, the one-word pocket edition of the U.S. Constitution. To many on the left, it has become birther code for ‘he’s not one of us.’

“Between left and right, however, are those who merely want affirmation that all is right with the world. Most important, they want assurance that the president shares their values. So why won’t Obama just deliver the one word that would prompt arias from his doubters?”

My answer, all is not right with the world and the president, while embracing the moral leadership role that should go with the office he holds, tends to have a nuanced view of the world – not black/white, neither uniquely exceptional or standard run of the mill. The president is trying hard, against the last 100 years of history, to pull us back from the kind of exceptional arrogance that once led us into Vietnam and more recently into Iraq. For the exceptional crowd, its impossible to believe that the rest of the world just doesn’t get on the with the notion that it is American manifest destiny to lead the world and, when necessary, reshape it our liking.

Which brings us to Donald Rumsfeld. The advance press on his new book – it sounds like a standard score settler sure to get him on TV a great deal – seems sure to remind his detractors, including John McCain, of Rummy’s fundamental arrogance. The man who brought us such memorable lines as “stuff happens” in response to widespread Iraqi looting after the invasion and “known unknowns” about the non-existing weapons of mass destruction, says he has few regrets about Iraq.

Rumsfeld is a metaphor for American foreign policy cluelessness. Not only did he get almost everything wrong about the American invasion of Iraq, he clearly doesn’t possess the self reflection gene necessary to learn some of the all-too-obvious lessons. The real known unknown is what America doesn’t know – and usually refuses to learn – about the rest of the great world. We never seem to learn the limits to which others in the world are willing to embrace our ideals and follow our lead. We may be repeating this time tested mistake now in Egypt, Yemen and the rest of the volatile Middle East.

“We evidently think,” Idaho Sen. Frank Church once said, “that everything which happens abroad is our business…we have plunged into these former colonial regions as though we have been designated on high to act as trustee in bankruptcy for broken empires.”

The Middle East is ancient ground. The yoke of British, Ottoman, French and other colonial empires – and what must look to many young Arabs like the new American Empire – hangs uneasily over the region. Young people in Tunisia and Egypt, empowered by access to the Internet and ideas – not always ideas we like, for sure – are demanding change. It is hubris to think that our notions of what makes America exceptional is necessarily going to appeal, or be right, for them.

One Middle Eastern analyst, Shadi Hamid, director of research at the Brookings Doha Center in Qatar, says it bluntly: “No one in the region is pro-American anymore. The only hope is if Obama uses this opportunity to re-orientate U.S. policy in a fundamental way,” he said. “Otherwise, I think we’re losing the Arab world.”

With thousands of our troops spread across the region, with billions lavished on Mubarak for more than 30 years – by one estimate the old boy is worth as much as $70 billion – we’re down to being an after thought to the people in the street.

Writing for the New York Times, the sagacious Tim Egan, offers some of the best sober reflection: “…in the Internet age, no authoritarian can keep his own people from knowing the truth,” Egan writes. “Millions of Egyptians are disgusted with their leadership. They have hope. They want change. And we should stand with them with the tools of an open society: ideas and technology, and maybe a deft diplomatic nudge. Beyond that, it’s out of American hands.”

As we cast a very wary eye toward Cairo and beyond, a real question for Americans is whether we can be exceptional enough to understand the limits of our power; whether we can’t learn the humbling lesson that our ability to cause other cultures, with different histories, religions and traditions, to embrace our way is exceptionally limited.

Andrus Center, Baseball, John Kennedy, Johnson, Politics

Odds and Ends

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catchersOf No Particular Importance…

Most major league baseball teams have pitchers and catchers report to spring training round about Feb. 14. It doesn’t mark the end of winter, but perhaps the beginning of the end and that is something.

Boston has had 50 inches of snow this winter. Do you think Red Sox fans are anxious for spring?

I’m still nursing the hurt over the Diamondbacks and Rockies abandoning Tucson in favor of another spring training outpost in the Phoenix suburbs. So much for old school. Baseball in the spring has been a fixture in Tucson since 1946. Not this year. The D-backs and Colorado will share a spanking new ballpark – Salt River Fields. I’m boycotting and plan on seeing the hapless Cubs in Mesa, the A’s in their venerable little band box in Phoenix and the World Champions in downtown Scottsdale.

Hope springs eternal in the spring. Everyone is in first place on opening day.

Kennedy Memories

My old friend Joel Connelly had a nice piece recently at the Seattle P-I’s online site on memories of John Kennedy in the Northwest. Joel, a great recorder of the region’s political lore, relates a wonderful story about JFK and legendary Washington Sen. Warren Magnuson.

The Times on the Times

I’ve long believed the single most difficult thing for “the media” to do is to report on itself. Most reporters and editors are generally loathe to criticize each other, unless its someone like Bill O’Reilly tweaking Keith Olbermann. That makes this story in the New York Times reporting on dissatisfaction in Los Angeles with the L.A. Times so interesting.

Here’s the money quote. The NYT’s media critic quotes a long-time LA Times reader as saying: “We need a paper that’s more, and this is less. I think it’s just not a world-class paper, no matter how you cut it. It used to be a world-class paper.”

Analysis and comment at the Columbia Journalism Review site further dissects the Times coverage of the Times. My take: I have long admired both papers and have had my gripes with each, but the LA Times is today a far cry from what it was when Otis Chandler was in charge.

Sargent Shriver

Lots of memorials, appropriately, to the first man JFK put in charge of the Peace Corps – Sargent Shriver. The wake for the very Catholic Shriver was a classic sad and hilarious recalling of his quite remarkable life.

The serious side of Shriver is well summarized in a nice piece by Richard Reeves and the funniest story was told in Adam Clymer’s tribute at the Daily Beast.

Clymer told a story he attributed to Democratic consultant Bob Shrum, a longtime friend of Shriver’s. “One afternoon [Shrum] and Shriver arrived at the Shriver home as Eunice was running a Special Olympics event. She had put out a wine punch for the athletes’ parents. Sarge sampled it and asked what wine was used. A servant said Eunice had told them to just take anything handy. They had opened a case of Chateau Lafite Rothschild ’48, a gift from Giscard d’Estaing, president of France when Shriver served as ambassador. Shrum reports that Shriver was momentarily nonplussed, but then smiled and said, ‘Then we’d better drink a lot of it.'”

I have no idea what a bottle of Chateau Lafite Rothschild ’48 is worth, but a bottle of ’82 sold at a wine auction in 2009 for $3,300. The 1948 vintage is rated as a “moderate to good vintage.”

That was some wine punch.

John Kennedy, Johnson

Fifty Years Ago…

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kennedyKennedy Library Launches Website

The Kennedy Presidential Library has launched a fabulous new website – http://www.jfk50.org/ – to mark the 50th anniversary of the inauguration of our 35th president – a half century ago this very day.

The site is organized by both subject matter and by a timeline of the Kennedy presidency. Take a minute to visit and walk through the historic events of 50 years ago. This is a great presentation of history and a remarkable use of the tools of modern communication.

Two words: great stuff.

And more…

Kennedy’s best biographer, Robert Dallek, has a great piece at the Salon website today. Dallek asks “why do we admire a president who did so little?”

His answer, in part, is to compare Kennedy and Ronald Reagan, two masters of communication.

Says Dallek: “Like T.R.’s bully pulpit and FDR’s fireside chats, Kennedy’s press conferences, which underscored his personal charm, wit, youth and intelligence, and Reagan’s talents as the ‘great communicator’ are enduring parts of their legacies.

“Unlike Washington and Lincoln, whose reputations rest respectively on building and preserving the nation, Kennedy and Reagan, to borrow a phrase from the historian Richard Hofstadter, were and remain the master psychologists of the middle classes.”

 

Eisenhower, Federal Budget, Idaho Statehouse, John Kennedy, Johnson, Martin Luther King

Great Speeches Week

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JFKEisenhower, Kennedy and King

It is Martin Luther King, Jr, Day, a good day to remember Dr. King’s remarkable impact on the evolution of American notions about civil rights and to acknowledge the work that remains.

And, even though King made his most famous speech in August, no MLK Day is complete without remembering one of the great speeches ever delivered in the English language, his “I Have a Dream Speech” from 1963.

This week also marks the 50th anniversary of two other truly memorable speeches – Dwight Eisenhower’s farewell were he warned of the rise of the “unwarranted influence” of the “military-industrial complex” and John F. Kennedy’s inaugural where he summoned the nation to “ask not” what the country can do for us.

Remarkably these two speeches – delivered just three days apart in January 1961 – speak to us still across half a century.

Eisenhower, the popular president and former five star general, it is now clear, labored at length over his final speech from the White House considering it, as his grandson says, a significant part of his legacy of public service. Fifty years later, with the American military engaged in two wars and the nation’s enormous power projected in every corner of the world, Eisenhower’s words speak an enduring truth and, like Kennedy, he called the country to informed, engaged citizenship.

As David Eisenhower told NPR over the weekend, his grandfather’s “farewell address, in the final analysis, is about internal threats posed by vested interests to the democratic process. But above all, it is addressed to citizens — and about citizenship.”

Kennedy’s great speech, delivered on January 20, 1961, can be read as a companion piece to the speech of his predecessor and it was also about citizenship and responsibility. Speaking in the context of the nuclear arms race with the then-Soviet Union, Kennedy said: “So let us begin anew — remembering on both sides that civility is not a sign of weakness, and sincerity is always subject to proof. Let us never negotiate out of fear, but let us never fear to negotiate.”

Those words, in the context of our domestic politics today, certainly ring true.

In the age of Twitter and text messages some might argue that the spoken word or political rhetoric has lost its power to inform and stimulate. Three classic speeches we remember this week leave us with an entirely different message. Enduring truth, delivered with genuine conviction and deeply imbuded with knowledge, is always powerful.

As Dr. King so powerfully said: “The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy.”

All three great Americans spoke in their most famous speeches to “the ultimate measure of a man” and their words live on.

Andrus, FDR, Foreign Policy, John Kennedy

On This Day

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FDRFDR’s Arsenal of Democracy Speech

Seventy years ago this evening – December 29, 1940 – Franklin D. Roosevelt delivered one of the most important speeches of his presidency and helped set in motion a vast expansion of presidential power in the realm of foreign affairs.

Fresh from re-election a month earlier to an unprecedented third term, Roosevelt used one of his tremendously effective “fireside chats” via radio to proclaim America “an arsenal of democracy” determined to aid a beleaguered Great Britain that seemed to be on its last legs against Hitler’s powerful army and air force.

Speaking from the Diplomatic Reception Room in the White House, Roosevelt said this would not be “a fireside chat on war,” but rather “a talk on national security.” He proceeded to lay out what he saw as the threats to the United States if the British, blockaded and bombed, were forced to capitulate to the Germans. While the speech was widely praised and well accepted, not everyone, to say the least, agreed. [You can hear the full speech, including the fascinating CBS announcer’s introduction here.]

The non-interventionist bloc in Congress remained very strong in 1940 and 1941. Roosevelt was concerned enough about the anti-war sentiment in the country that he made comments near the end of his 1940 campaign against Republican Wendell Willkie that he would have to eat. He famously said “our boys are not going to be sent into a foreign war.”

Montana’s progressive Democratic Sen. Burton K. Wheeler condemned Roosevelt and his advisers as “warmongers” and Wheeler urged the president to utilize his position and leverage to seek a negotiated end to the fighting in Europe. (Idaho’s William E. Borah, a Republican, who had died in January 1940, surely would have agreed with Wheeler and other leading non-interventionist like Ohio’s Robert Taft and California’s Hiram Johnson, both Republicans.)

Roosevelt followed up his “arsenal of democracy” speech with legislation – forever known as Lend-Lease – that gave the president, in Wheeler’s view and it was a credible view, vast new powers – even dictatorial powers – to aid those countries, debt free, that the president deemed vital to America’s national security. By the end of the war in 1945, Lend-Lease had supplied $50 billion (more than $750 billion in today’s dollars) in material to Britain, the Soviet Union, France and China.

There is little debate that the aid was essential to the war effort. No less an authority than Josef Stalin confirmed that when he told FDR that American equipment had allowed the Allies to win the war. There is also little debate around the fact that Lend-Lease, and Roosevelt’s administration of the program, finally and forever shed the American foreign policy cloak of non-intervention or isolationism. With Lend-Lease, the country was committed to full and unrelenting international engagement and the country has seldom looked back since the act was signed into law in March 1941.

Fundamentally, what Montana’s Wheeler and Idaho’s Borah, among others, were objecting to was the inherent expansion of presidential power in the realm of foreign policy. Wheeler repeatedly warned of the rise of “an American dictator” who would run over the top of the Congress in the establishment of foreign policy.

History has recorded that FDR, while not always candid or even completely honest about his intentions, used his vast foreign policy power with restraint and with a deep commitment to democracy. But those who opposed Roosevelt, even if now mostly forgotten, have also been validated by history. The steady expansion of presidential power in the area of foreign policy that, in many ways, began on a December evening 70 years ago continues to this very day.

The United States has spawned no dictator as Sen. Wheeler feared, but we do have a commander in chief whose power to involve the country militarily in every corner of the globe is routinely unchecked and often not even really debated by the Congress. Franklin Roosevelt’s legacy is well recognized for its sweeping impact on domestic policy, but the 32nd president’s legacy in foreign policy is just has profound and it began with a speech on this day seven decades ago.