I agree with Chris Mathews on JFK

[Skull Pilot]

What ifs are a waste time.

 

[Bfgrn]

in his book.

Larger than life.

What if? Jfk had lived??

Probably would have been no Vietnam War quagmire.

My generations FDR .........

That is utter bullshit. Bay of Pigs happened under JFK. JFK STARTED the escalation of the Vietnam war and LBJ just continued his plan. If JFK would have not been assassinated then we would have been in Vietnam full force earlier!

Another exampple of Chris Mathews being a dishonest media hack!

You clearly don't know what you are talking about. The Bay of Pigs was a CIA plan created under Eisenhower. Kennedy learned a valuable lesson early in his administration that paid off for ALL of us during the Cuban Missile Crisis. He trusted the CIA and the Joint Chiefs of Staff, a huge mistake.

Washington's national-security apparatus had decided there was no living with Castro. During the final months of the Eisenhower Administration, the CIA started planning an invasion of the island, recruiting Cuban exiles who had fled the new regime. Agency officials assured the young President who inherited the invasion plan that it was a "slam dunk," in the words of a future CIA director contemplating another ill-fated U.S. invasion. J.F.K. had deep misgivings, but unwilling to overrule his senior intelligence officials so early in his Administration, he went fatefully ahead with the plan. The doomed Bay of Pigs invasion in April 1961 became the Kennedy Administration's first great trauma.

We now know—from the CIA's internal history of the Bay of Pigs, which was declassified in 2005—that agency officials realized their motley crew of invaders had no chance of victory unless they were reinforced by the U.S. military. But Allen Dulles and Richard Bissell, the top CIA officials, never disclosed this to J.F.K. They clearly thought the young President would cave in the heat of battle, that he would be forced to send in the Marines and Air Force to rescue the beleaguered exiles brigade after it was pinned down on the beaches by Castro's forces. But Kennedy—who was concerned about aggravating the U.S. image in Latin America as a Yanqui bully and also feared a Soviet countermove against West Berlin—had warned agency officials that he would not fully intervene. As the invasion quickly bogged down at the swampy landing site, J.F.K. stunned Dulles and Bissell by standing his ground and refusing to escalate the assault.

From that point on, the Kennedy presidency became a government at war with itself.

A bitter Dulles thought Kennedy had suffered a failure of nerve and observed that he was "surrounded by doubting Thomases and admirers of Castro." The Joint Chiefs also muttered darkly about the new President. General Lyman Lemnitzer, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, said "pulling out the rug [on the invaders ]was... absolutely reprehensible, almost criminal." Admiral Arleigh Burke, the Navy chief, later fumed, "Mr. Kennedy was a very bad President... He permitted himself to jeopardize the nation."

Kennedy was equally outraged at his national-security advisers. While he famously took responsibility for the Bay of Pigs debacle in public, privately he lashed out at the Joint Chiefs and especially at the cia, threatening to "shatter [the agency] into a thousand pieces and scatter it to the winds." J.F.K. never followed through on this threat, but he did eventually fire Dulles, despite his stature as a legendary spymaster, as well as Bissell.

Weeks after the Cuba fiasco, J.F.K. was still steaming, recalled his friend Assistant Navy Secretary Paul (Red) Fay years later in his memoir, The Pleasure of His Company. "Nobody is going to force me to do anything I don't think is in the best interest of the country," the President told his friend, over a game of checkers at the Kennedy-family compound in Hyannis Port, Mass. "We're not going to plunge into an irresponsible action just because a fanatical fringe in this country puts so-called national pride above national reason. Do you think I'm going to carry on my conscience the responsibility for the wanton maiming and killing of children like our children we saw [playing] here this evening? Do you think I'm going to cause a nuclear exchange—for what? Because I was forced into doing something that I didn't think was proper and right? Well, if you or anybody else thinks I am, he's crazy."

This would become the major theme of the Kennedy presidency—J.F.K.'s strenuous efforts to keep the country at peace in the face of equally ardent pressures from Washington's warrior caste to go to war. Caught between the communist challenges in Laos, Berlin, Vietnam and Latin America and the bellicosity of his national-security élite, Kennedy again and again found a way to sidestep war. In each crisis, he improvised a strategy—combining rhetoric that was alternately tough and conciliatory with aggressive backdoor diplomacy—that found the way to a peaceful resolution.

Read more: Warrior For Peace - The Lessons of J.F.K. - TIME

 

[Bfgrn]

in his book.

Larger than life.

What if? Jfk had lived??

Probably would have been no Vietnam War quagmire.

My generations FDR .........

On what do you or Chris Matthews base that theory? Kennedy believed in the "domino theory" and was committed to fighting communism. He OK'd the Bay of Pigs fiasco. He sent 1,200 "advisers" and increased the aid to South Vietnam's military in the form of more money and hardware. He OK'd the CIA's removal of Diem.

If you really knew the history of FDR by the way, you'd know that he was working behind the scenes to involve the US in World War II long before we actually joined the conflict. It appears that Kennedy was taking the same road in Vietnam as FDR did with Germany and Japan.

Except that you are wrong, he was actively reducing military presence in Vietnam before he was assassinated. Almost as soon as he was dead, the new president (Known as Asshat Mcfuckface) OK'ed full military presence in Vietnam, pretty much jump starting the war JFK was attempting to avoid.

NATIONAL SECURITY ACTION MEMORANDUM NO. 263

TO: Secretary of State
Secretary of Defense Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff

SUBJECT: South Vietnam"

However only 10 lines of this long "Trip report" are published under the "NSAM 263" heading and they simply list the fact that:

"the President approved the military recommendations contained in Section 1, B (1-3)* of the Report" and that, "no formal announcement be made of the implementation of plans to withdraw 1,000 U.S. military personnel by the end of 1963. "

 

[Oldstyle]

in his book.

Larger than life.

What if? Jfk had lived??

Probably would have been no Vietnam War quagmire.

My generations FDR .........

On what do you or Chris Matthews base that theory? Kennedy believed in the "domino theory" and was committed to fighting communism. He OK'd the Bay of Pigs fiasco. He sent 1,200 "advisers" and increased the aid to South Vietnam's military in the form of more money and hardware. He OK'd the CIA's removal of Diem.

If you really knew the history of FDR by the way, you'd know that he was working behind the scenes to involve the US in World War II long before we actually joined the conflict. It appears that Kennedy was taking the same road in Vietnam as FDR did with Germany and Japan.

Except that you are wrong, he was actively reducing military presence in Vietnam before he was assassinated. Almost as soon as he was dead, the new president (Known as Asshat Mcfuckface) OK'ed full military presence in Vietnam, pretty much jump starting the war JFK was attempting to avoid.

Actually, I'm not wrong. The following quote was from Kennedy shortly before he was assassinated. Does it sound like a man actively reducing the US military presence in Vietnam?

"I don't agree with those who say we should withdraw. That would be a great mistake. . . . [The United States] made this effort to defend Europe. Now Europe is quite secure. We also have to participate—we may not like it—in the defense of Asia."

The attempt to posthumously "rehabilitate" Kennedy's stance on Vietnam has been going on for the past 40 years and it's no more accurate now than it was then.

 

[Bfgrn]

On what do you or Chris Matthews base that theory? Kennedy believed in the "domino theory" and was committed to fighting communism. He OK'd the Bay of Pigs fiasco. He sent 1,200 "advisers" and increased the aid to South Vietnam's military in the form of more money and hardware. He OK'd the CIA's removal of Diem.

If you really knew the history of FDR by the way, you'd know that he was working behind the scenes to involve the US in World War II long before we actually joined the conflict. It appears that Kennedy was taking the same road in Vietnam as FDR did with Germany and Japan.

Except that you are wrong, he was actively reducing military presence in Vietnam before he was assassinated. Almost as soon as he was dead, the new president (Known as Asshat Mcfuckface) OK'ed full military presence in Vietnam, pretty much jump starting the war JFK was attempting to avoid.

Actually, I'm not wrong. The following quote was from Kennedy shortly before he was assassinated. Does it sound like a man actively reducing the US military presence in Vietnam?

"I don't agree with those who say we should withdraw. That would be a great mistake. . . . [The United States] made this effort to defend Europe. Now Europe is quite secure. We also have to participate—we may not like it—in the defense of Asia."

The attempt to posthumously "rehabilitate" Kennedy's stance on Vietnam has been going on for the past 40 years and it's no more accurate now than it was then.

There is no attempt to posthumously "rehabilitate" Kennedy's stance on Vietnam. He ordered the withdrawal of 1,000 troops by the end of 1963 and planned to pull out all troops by 1965. BUT, he was not going to make that public, because he didn't want to give the right wing hawks in the GOP any ammo for the 1964 election, AND, he didn't survive to the end on 1963.

Young Jack Kennedy developed a deep, visceral disgust for war because of his—and his family's—experiences in it. "All war is stupid," he wrote home from his PT boat in the Pacific battleground of World War II. That war destroyed the family's sense of godlike invincibility. His older brother Joe—a Navy pilot—died in a fiery explosion over the English Channel after volunteering for a high-risk mission, and the young husband of "Kick" Kennedy, J.F.K.'s beloved sister, was also killed. As Jack wrote to Claiborne Pell in 1947, the war had simply "savaged" his family. "It turned my father and brothers and sisters and I upside down and sucked all the oxygen out of our smug and comfortable assumptions... Now, after all that we experienced and lost in the war, we finally understand that there is nothing inevitable about us."

But Kennedy and his brothers were also bred to be winners by their father—to never accept defeat. And when he entered the 1960 presidential campaign against Richard Nixon, one of the dirtiest fighters in the American political arena, he was prepared to do whatever it took to prevail. At the height of the cold war, that meant positioning himself as even more of a hawk than his Republican opponent. Kennedy had no interest in becoming another Adlai Stevenson—the high-minded liberal who was easily defeated in back-to-back elections by war hero Dwight Eisenhower. J.F.K. was determined not to be turned into a weakling on defense, a punching bag for two-fisted GOP rhetoric. So he outflanked Nixon, warning that the country was falling behind Russia in the nuclear arms race and turning "the missile gap" into a major campaign theme. Kennedy also championed the cause of Cuban "freedom fighters" in their crusade to take back the island from Fidel Castro's newly victorious regime. Liberal Kennedy supporters, such as Harvard economist John Kenneth Galbraith, were worried that J.F.K. would later pay a price for this bellicose campaign rhetoric. But Kennedy's tough posture helped secure him a wafer-thin victory on Election Day.

Read more: Warrior For Peace - The Lessons of J.F.K. - TIME

 

[boilermaker55]

I'm only surprised someone actually read a book that assclown wrote.

Your comments are so thought provoking and so insightfull.

 

[boilermaker55]

LBJ fell into the trap of "if we only had a few more troops on the ground we could win this thing". Over and over he authorized more troops thinking victory was achievable.

Would JFK have done the same? We don't know. The military advisors would have been the same. The advice would have been the same

Would he have walked away and taken the taunts that he was soft on Communism?

I don't think so

If one remembers the October missile crisis and how those events transpired, it became quite evident that JFK did not rely on his military advisors. What happened in the Bay of Pigs when he listened to them became a national disaster. It seems he learned a valuable lesson when the next issue, October missile situation arose.
And as they say, history seems to repeat itself. Look at the Iraq problem we have by and administration not fully understanding all the evidence and ramifications.

 

[boilermaker55]

My generations FDR .........

Not with regard to tax policy he wasn't. FDR steadily increase federal tax rates. JFK lowered them dramatically.

Different time in history, different economic situations. Both needed a different ideology.

 

[Dr.Traveler]

An even bigger what if is the space race. It came out after the fall of the Soviet Union that JFK had offered the Kremlin the opportunity for the Moon Landing to be a cooperative event between the USA and the USSR. It turned out while Khrushchev was publicly saying no, privately he was putting together a coalition that would have let him say yes.

Story goes that he'd put together a proposal for Kennedy, together with the start of an arms reduction deal, just about the time JFK got killed. Seeing as the USSR didn't trust LBJ, the whole thing fell apart.

So there's the big what if. Imagine the Cold War over a generation early. Imagine a joint USSR and USA mission to the moon. Good God.

Soviets Planned To Take Up JFK on His Offer

 

[Wry Catcher]

in his book.

Larger than life.

What if? Jfk had lived??

Probably would have been no Vietnam War quagmire.

My generations FDR .........

And no Nixon (Bobby in '68).

 

[Bfgrn]

LBJ fell into the trap of "if we only had a few more troops on the ground we could win this thing". Over and over he authorized more troops thinking victory was achievable.

Would JFK have done the same? We don't know. The military advisors would have been the same. The advice would have been the same

Would he have walked away and taken the taunts that he was soft on Communism?

I don't think so

If one remembers the October missile crisis and how those events transpired, it became quite evident that JFK did not rely on his military advisors. What happened in the Bay of Pigs when he listened to them became a national disaster. It seems he learned a valuable lesson when the next issue, October missile situation arose.
And as they say, history seems to repeat itself. Look at the Iraq problem we have by and administration not fully understanding all the evidence and ramifications.

Thank God President Kennedy learned that valuable lesson...read this chilling information:

Arthur Schlesinger Jr., former White House aide revealed that J.F.K. was less afraid of Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev's ordering a surprise attack than he was "that something would go wrong in a Dr. Strangelove kind of way"—with a politically unstable U.S. general snapping and launching World War III.

Kennedy was particularly alarmed by his trigger-happy Air Force chief, cigar-chomping General Curtis LeMay, who firmly believed the U.S. should unleash a pre-emptive nuclear broadside against Russia while America still enjoyed massive arms superiority. Throughout the 13-day Cuban missile crisis, Kennedy was under relentless pressure from LeMay and nearly his entire national-security circle to "fry" Cuba, in the Air Force chief's memorable language. But J.F.K., whose only key support in the increasingly tense Cabinet Room meetings came from his brother Bobby and Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, kept searching for a nonmilitary solution. When Kennedy, assiduously working the back channels to the Kremlin, finally succeeded in cutting a deal with Khrushchev, the world survived "the most dangerous moment in human history," in Schlesinger's words. But no one at the time knew just how dangerous. Years later, attending the 40th anniversary of the crisis at a conference in Havana, Schlesinger, Sorensen and McNamara were stunned to learn that if U.S. forces had attacked Cuba, Russian commanders on the island were authorized to respond with tactical and strategic nuclear missiles. The Joint Chiefs had assured Kennedy during the crisis that "no nuclear warheads were in Cuba at the time," Sorensen grimly noted. "They were wrong." If Kennedy had bowed to his military advisers' pressure, a vast swath of the urban U.S. within missile range of the Soviet installations in Cuba could have been reduced to radioactive rubble.

Read more: Warrior For Peace - The Lessons of J.F.K. - TIME

Other interesting snippets:

Kennedy often said he wanted his epitaph to be "He kept the peace." Even Khrushchev and Castro, Kennedy's toughest foreign adversaries, came to appreciate J.F.K.'s commitment to that goal. The roly-poly Soviet leader, clowning and growling, had thrown the young President off his game when they met at the Vienna summit in 1961. But after weathering storms like the Cuban missile crisis, the two leaders had settled into a mutually respectful quest for détente. When Khrushchev got the news from Dallas in November 1963, he broke down and sobbed in the Kremlin, unable to perform his duties for days. Despite his youth, Kennedy was a "real statesman," Khrushchev later wrote in his memoir, after he was pushed from power less than a year following J.F.K.'s death. If Kennedy had lived, he wrote, the two men could have brought peace to the world.

Castro too had come to see J.F.K. as an agent of change, despite their long and bitter jousting, declaring that Kennedy had the potential to become "the greatest President" in U.S. history. Tellingly, the Cuban leader never blamed the Kennedys for the numerous assassination attempts on him. Years later, when Bobby Kennedy's widow Ethel made a trip to Havana, she assured Castro that "Jack and Bobby had nothing to do with the plots to kill you." The tall, graying leader—who had survived so long in part because of his network of informers in the U.S.—looked down at her and said, "I know."

 

[ginscpy]

LBJ was the pits

 

[boilermaker55]

LBJ fell into the trap of "if we only had a few more troops on the ground we could win this thing". Over and over he authorized more troops thinking victory was achievable.

Would JFK have done the same? We don't know. The military advisors would have been the same. The advice would have been the same

Would he have walked away and taken the taunts that he was soft on Communism?

I don't think so

If one remembers the October missile crisis and how those events transpired, it became quite evident that JFK did not rely on his military advisors. What happened in the Bay of Pigs when he listened to them became a national disaster. It seems he learned a valuable lesson when the next issue, October missile situation arose.
And as they say, history seems to repeat itself. Look at the Iraq problem we have by and administration not fully understanding all the evidence and ramifications.

Thank God President Kennedy learned that valuable lesson...read this chilling information:

Arthur Schlesinger Jr., former White House aide revealed that J.F.K. was less afraid of Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev's ordering a surprise attack than he was "that something would go wrong in a Dr. Strangelove kind of way"—with a politically unstable U.S. general snapping and launching World War III.

Kennedy was particularly alarmed by his trigger-happy Air Force chief, cigar-chomping General Curtis LeMay, who firmly believed the U.S. should unleash a pre-emptive nuclear broadside against Russia while America still enjoyed massive arms superiority. Throughout the 13-day Cuban missile crisis, Kennedy was under relentless pressure from LeMay and nearly his entire national-security circle to "fry" Cuba, in the Air Force chief's memorable language. But J.F.K., whose only key support in the increasingly tense Cabinet Room meetings came from his brother Bobby and Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, kept searching for a nonmilitary solution. When Kennedy, assiduously working the back channels to the Kremlin, finally succeeded in cutting a deal with Khrushchev, the world survived "the most dangerous moment in human history," in Schlesinger's words. But no one at the time knew just how dangerous. Years later, attending the 40th anniversary of the crisis at a conference in Havana, Schlesinger, Sorensen and McNamara were stunned to learn that if U.S. forces had attacked Cuba, Russian commanders on the island were authorized to respond with tactical and strategic nuclear missiles. The Joint Chiefs had assured Kennedy during the crisis that "no nuclear warheads were in Cuba at the time," Sorensen grimly noted. "They were wrong." If Kennedy had bowed to his military advisers' pressure, a vast swath of the urban U.S. within missile range of the Soviet installations in Cuba could have been reduced to radioactive rubble.

Read more: Warrior For Peace - The Lessons of J.F.K. - TIME

Other interesting snippets:

Kennedy often said he wanted his epitaph to be "He kept the peace." Even Khrushchev and Castro, Kennedy's toughest foreign adversaries, came to appreciate J.F.K.'s commitment to that goal. The roly-poly Soviet leader, clowning and growling, had thrown the young President off his game when they met at the Vienna summit in 1961. But after weathering storms like the Cuban missile crisis, the two leaders had settled into a mutually respectful quest for détente. When Khrushchev got the news from Dallas in November 1963, he broke down and sobbed in the Kremlin, unable to perform his duties for days. Despite his youth, Kennedy was a "real statesman," Khrushchev later wrote in his memoir, after he was pushed from power less than a year following J.F.K.'s death. If Kennedy had lived, he wrote, the two men could have brought peace to the world.

Castro too had come to see J.F.K. as an agent of change, despite their long and bitter jousting, declaring that Kennedy had the potential to become "the greatest President" in U.S. history. Tellingly, the Cuban leader never blamed the Kennedys for the numerous assassination attempts on him. Years later, when Bobby Kennedy's widow Ethel made a trip to Havana, she assured Castro that "Jack and Bobby had nothing to do with the plots to kill you." The tall, graying leader—who had survived so long in part because of his network of informers in the U.S.—looked down at her and said, "I know."

This is exactly what I was referring too. Thank you for posting the statements made by some of those directly invovled.
I had watched a documentary on this awhile back and it paid strict attention to the warhawking of the top brass that were Kennedy's advisors at the time.
Nice work.

 

[boilermaker55]

Today the Dim mantra is..."Ask not what your country can do for you. Ask that it do even more because, hell, it's free!!!

Yes it is, from both ends of the spectrum. The ultra rich get what they want for free and the extremely poor get what they need.
Let us touch the dying, the poor, the lonely and the unwanted according to the graces we have received and let us not be ashamed or slow to do the humble work.
Mother Teresa

 

[Bfgrn]

Today the Dim mantra is..."Ask not what your country can do for you. Ask that it do even more because, hell, it's free!!!

Yes it is, from both ends of the spectrum. The ultra rich get what they want for free and the extremely poor get what they need.
Let us touch the dying, the poor, the lonely and the unwanted according to the graces we have received and let us not be ashamed or slow to do the humble work.
Mother Teresa

Staying with the subject of the thread:

"If a free society cannot help the many who are poor, it cannot save the few who are rich."
President John F. Kennedy

 

[Oldstyle]

Except that you are wrong, he was actively reducing military presence in Vietnam before he was assassinated. Almost as soon as he was dead, the new president (Known as Asshat Mcfuckface) OK'ed full military presence in Vietnam, pretty much jump starting the war JFK was attempting to avoid.

Actually, I'm not wrong. The following quote was from Kennedy shortly before he was assassinated. Does it sound like a man actively reducing the US military presence in Vietnam?

"I don't agree with those who say we should withdraw. That would be a great mistake. . . . [The United States] made this effort to defend Europe. Now Europe is quite secure. We also have to participate—we may not like it—in the defense of Asia."

The attempt to posthumously "rehabilitate" Kennedy's stance on Vietnam has been going on for the past 40 years and it's no more accurate now than it was then.

There is no attempt to posthumously "rehabilitate" Kennedy's stance on Vietnam. He ordered the withdrawal of 1,000 troops by the end of 1963 and planned to pull out all troops by 1965. BUT, he was not going to make that public, because he didn't want to give the right wing hawks in the GOP any ammo for the 1964 election, AND, he didn't survive to the end on 1963.

Young Jack Kennedy developed a deep, visceral disgust for war because of his—and his family's—experiences in it. "All war is stupid," he wrote home from his PT boat in the Pacific battleground of World War II. That war destroyed the family's sense of godlike invincibility. His older brother Joe—a Navy pilot—died in a fiery explosion over the English Channel after volunteering for a high-risk mission, and the young husband of "Kick" Kennedy, J.F.K.'s beloved sister, was also killed. As Jack wrote to Claiborne Pell in 1947, the war had simply "savaged" his family. "It turned my father and brothers and sisters and I upside down and sucked all the oxygen out of our smug and comfortable assumptions... Now, after all that we experienced and lost in the war, we finally understand that there is nothing inevitable about us."

But Kennedy and his brothers were also bred to be winners by their father—to never accept defeat. And when he entered the 1960 presidential campaign against Richard Nixon, one of the dirtiest fighters in the American political arena, he was prepared to do whatever it took to prevail. At the height of the cold war, that meant positioning himself as even more of a hawk than his Republican opponent. Kennedy had no interest in becoming another Adlai Stevenson—the high-minded liberal who was easily defeated in back-to-back elections by war hero Dwight Eisenhower. J.F.K. was determined not to be turned into a weakling on defense, a punching bag for two-fisted GOP rhetoric. So he outflanked Nixon, warning that the country was falling behind Russia in the nuclear arms race and turning "the missile gap" into a major campaign theme. Kennedy also championed the cause of Cuban "freedom fighters" in their crusade to take back the island from Fidel Castro's newly victorious regime. Liberal Kennedy supporters, such as Harvard economist John Kenneth Galbraith, were worried that J.F.K. would later pay a price for this bellicose campaign rhetoric. But Kennedy's tough posture helped secure him a wafer-thin victory on Election Day.

Read more: Warrior For Peace - The Lessons of J.F.K. - TIME

Wow, you view the Kennedys through quite a prism there, my liberal friend. To say that Kennedy won a wafer-thin victory on election day because of the stances he took against a "dirty" Richard Nixon ignores what went on in Cook County that day in order for Kennedy to win Illinois and take the Presidency. One could make the point that Nixon's later problems with paranoia about election rigging that led to Watergate could be traced directly to what Joe Kennedy and Richard Daly pulled off in Chicago in 1960.

 

[freedombecki]

I bawled like a baby when I firstheard of JFKs shooting in a 3rd grade classrom

Bigger than 9/11

I know whatcha mean. I was with 5 other cheerleaders in a station wagon headed for our rival's school where we were to lead cheers for their team in a show of good sportsmanship, which was done every year between the two schools.

We were told to say nothing about what we heard on the radio about the President's shooting as our sponsor turned down a reporter saying no way could the President have survived the shot.

We were crying like crazy, but when the car stopped, we did our best to be good actresses. We had to lead yells to less-than-enthusiastic students, but sportsmanship held us together for that 20 minutes, when we were done, we went back to the car and started crying again. On the way back to our school, they announced he definitely had died.

We were the most lugubrious lot of little ladies you ever saw all the way home.

It was a sad day for America.

 

[Bfgrn]

Actually, I'm not wrong. The following quote was from Kennedy shortly before he was assassinated. Does it sound like a man actively reducing the US military presence in Vietnam?

"I don't agree with those who say we should withdraw. That would be a great mistake. . . . [The United States] made this effort to defend Europe. Now Europe is quite secure. We also have to participate—we may not like it—in the defense of Asia."

The attempt to posthumously "rehabilitate" Kennedy's stance on Vietnam has been going on for the past 40 years and it's no more accurate now than it was then.

There is no attempt to posthumously "rehabilitate" Kennedy's stance on Vietnam. He ordered the withdrawal of 1,000 troops by the end of 1963 and planned to pull out all troops by 1965. BUT, he was not going to make that public, because he didn't want to give the right wing hawks in the GOP any ammo for the 1964 election, AND, he didn't survive to the end on 1963.

Young Jack Kennedy developed a deep, visceral disgust for war because of his—and his family's—experiences in it. "All war is stupid," he wrote home from his PT boat in the Pacific battleground of World War II. That war destroyed the family's sense of godlike invincibility. His older brother Joe—a Navy pilot—died in a fiery explosion over the English Channel after volunteering for a high-risk mission, and the young husband of "Kick" Kennedy, J.F.K.'s beloved sister, was also killed. As Jack wrote to Claiborne Pell in 1947, the war had simply "savaged" his family. "It turned my father and brothers and sisters and I upside down and sucked all the oxygen out of our smug and comfortable assumptions... Now, after all that we experienced and lost in the war, we finally understand that there is nothing inevitable about us."

But Kennedy and his brothers were also bred to be winners by their father—to never accept defeat. And when he entered the 1960 presidential campaign against Richard Nixon, one of the dirtiest fighters in the American political arena, he was prepared to do whatever it took to prevail. At the height of the cold war, that meant positioning himself as even more of a hawk than his Republican opponent. Kennedy had no interest in becoming another Adlai Stevenson—the high-minded liberal who was easily defeated in back-to-back elections by war hero Dwight Eisenhower. J.F.K. was determined not to be turned into a weakling on defense, a punching bag for two-fisted GOP rhetoric. So he outflanked Nixon, warning that the country was falling behind Russia in the nuclear arms race and turning "the missile gap" into a major campaign theme. Kennedy also championed the cause of Cuban "freedom fighters" in their crusade to take back the island from Fidel Castro's newly victorious regime. Liberal Kennedy supporters, such as Harvard economist John Kenneth Galbraith, were worried that J.F.K. would later pay a price for this bellicose campaign rhetoric. But Kennedy's tough posture helped secure him a wafer-thin victory on Election Day.

Read more: Warrior For Peace - The Lessons of J.F.K. - TIME

Wow, you view the Kennedys through quite a prism there, my liberal friend. To say that Kennedy won a wafer-thin victory on election day because of the stances he took against a "dirty" Richard Nixon ignores what went on in Cook County that day in order for Kennedy to win Illinois and take the Presidency. One could make the point that Nixon's later problems with paranoia about election rigging that led to Watergate could be traced directly to what Joe Kennedy and Richard Daly pulled off in Chicago in 1960.

I've heard the stories, but never seen any real proof. It would have never come down to Illinois if Nixon had the courage Kennedy showed.

In October of 1960, less then three weeks before the presidential election, Martin Luther King Jr., already recognized as Black America’s most prominent civil rights leader, had been arrested in Georgia on a traffic technicality: he was still using his Alabama license, although by then he had lived in Georgia for three months.

A swift series of moves by the state’s segregationist power structure resulted in King being sentenced to four months of hard labor on a Georgia chain gang. He was quickly spirited away to the state’s maximum security prison, and many of his supporters, fearing for his life, urgently called both the Nixon and Kennedy camps for help.

Nixon, about to campaign in South Carolina in hopes of capturing the state’s normally solid Democratic vote, took no action. Kennedy took swift action. He made a brief telephone call to a frantic Coretta Scott King, speaking in soothing generalities and telling her, “If there’s anything I can do to help, please feel free to call on me.”

On 26 October, Massachusetts senator and presidential candidate John F. Kennedy telephoned Coretta King from Chicago and expressed his concern about the jail sentence handed down to her husband. Kennedy’s brother and campaign manager Robert called Judge J. Oscar Mitchell from New York the following day, reportedly to inquire into King’s right to bail. Later that same day, King was released on a $2,000 appeal bond after nine days imprisonment. In this interview, King concedes that Kennedy “served as a great force in making my release possible.” While King maintained a nonpartisan stance in the presidential race, his father publicly announced he was switching his support from Nixon to Kennedy in light of the Democratic candidate’s call to his daughter-in-law.

King’s father, Martin Luther King Sr., a dominating, fire-and-brimstone preacher with wide influence throughout Black America, had, like many black Southerners, always been a Republican and until that moment had said he couldn’t vote for Kennedy because he was a Catholic.

(But) the day his son was released from prison, the elder King thundered from the pulpit of his famed Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta: “I had expected to vote against Senator Kennedy because of his religion. But now he can be my president, Catholic or whatever he is… He has the moral courage to stand up for what he knows is right. I’ve got all my votes and I’ve got a suitcase, and I’m going to take them up there and dump them in his lap.”

Following reports of Kennedy’s role in King’s release, Republican nominee Richard Nixon was criticized in some circles for his silence. Gloster B. Current, an NAACP official, commented at a conference that “Vice President Nixon may have thrown away a large segment of the Negro vote by his failure to speak out on the King arrest” (“NAACP Says Nixon Hurt in King Case,” Atlanta Constitution, 31 October 1960). E. Frederic Morrow, the first African-American appointed to an executive position in the White House, similarly recalled that Kennedy’s phone call “won the election” and that the newly elected president “had keen, intelligent Negro advisers” that “he obviously listened to”.

Interview after Release from Georgia State Prison at Reidsville Why Do Blacks Vote for Democrats? MLK, JFK, and LBJ

BTW, that intelligent Negro adviser was Sargent Shriver.

 

[amrchaos]

I thought JFK started Vietnam? I mean he did send "peacekeepers" there, right?

 

[Bfgrn]

I thought JFK started Vietnam? I mean he did send "peacekeepers" there, right?

Our involvement in Vietnam started with Truman. Kennedy sent 400 United States Army Special Forces personnel to South Vietnam to train South Vietnamese soldiers and sent military advisers, but no combat troops. LBJ is the one who Americanized the Vietnam War.

USA
Year of Death Number Killed

1956–1964 401
1965 1,863
1966 6,143
1967 11,153
1968 16,592
1969 11,616
1970 6,081
1971 2,357
1972 641
1973 168
1974–1998 1,178
wiki