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 hisand his family'sexperiences 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 Joea Navy pilotdied 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 fatherto 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 Stevensonthe 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 Americas 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 states 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 states 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 states 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 theres 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. Kennedys brother and campaign manager Robert called Judge J. Oscar Mitchell from New York the following day, reportedly to inquire into Kings 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 candidates call to his daughter-in-law.
Kings 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 couldnt 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. Ive got all my votes and Ive got a suitcase, and Im going to take them up there and dump them in his lap.
Following reports of Kennedys role in Kings 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 Kennedys 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.
You've heard the stories but never seen any real proof? Well of course you've heard the stories. It's not like it's some great secret. Chicago was about as corrupt a city as they come and Richard Daley ran it like his own little fiefdom. I don't think there was ever any real doubt about what happened in Cook County in 1960. Look, if you want to idolize JFK there is much about the man to do so with but please don't pretend that vote fixing didn't go on in Chicago that year because it quite obviously did.