-Caveat Lector- from: http://www.zolatimes.com/V3.30/pageone.html <A HREF="http://www.zolatimes.com/V3.30/pageone.html">Laissez Faire City Times - Volume 3 Issue 30 </A> ----- Laissez Faire City Times July 26, 1999 - Volume 3, Issue 30 Editor & Chief: Emile Zola ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Viet Nam - John Kennedy, Playing in the Sandbox (-cont-) Back to School The Reeves essay borders on the hilarious, and yet is very serious. It could have been made into a movie. There was a Rodney Dangerfield movie comedy called Back to School (1986). In it, Dangerfield plays a middle-aged millionaire who goes to college to get the education he missed. He doesn't want to get involved with the classwork, so he hires people from the Rand Corporation and dozens of others to do his papers and classwork for him. In the end, Dangerfield gets caught at it, and is made to pass a tough oral examination before an academic panel of several deans or whatever to graduate, but passes after an intense period of study. The Kennedy story is similar, except for the ending, but is real. A 23 year-old kid with a history of getting C grades in easy courses during his earlier years at Harvard writes, with considerable help, a paper which is judged to have serious deficiencies. Professionals are brought in to make the thing into a book. People are bought and sold with whatever money it takes. It still isn't worth a damn. The kid's father buys 35,000 copies the first week of publication to make it a best seller. The kid is awarded Magna Cum Laude and graduates from Harvard. He never gets caught, and the kid's father spreads enough money around to see that nobody looks too hard. Unlike Dangerfield in the movie, Kennedy slides by without the necessity of ever really passing on his own merit, then goes on to con his way into the presidency. The entire project is an exercise in massive dishonesty and fraud by everybody�the kid, the kid's father, university faculty, and anybody else that can be bought, cajoled, or pressured. Without a trace of embarrassment John Kennedy claimed the work to be entirely his own, and was warped and spoiled enough to have believed it. At this point, John Kennedy, a kid from a political family that had eventual designs on the presidency had positioned himself as a political aspirant who was a graduate with high honors from a prestigious school, a certified intellectual, and a best-selling author. Harvard degree with great praise, an author, an intellectual; it looked good on paper, but the reality is that there was no substance to any of it. It was entirely fraudulent. The truth is, the kid was not very bright and was barely literate. As reported in the Reeves book, his tutors at Harvard evaluated him as someone who would never show much originality. Kennedy would always take pride in the intellectual content of his book. The basic reason he could do so is that he didn't have the intellect to realize how poor it was. There are four elements here that would become a pattern throughout Kennedy's life, including his presidency. First, no morality or ethics would ever be evidenced by Kennedy in his life. He could do anything, say anything, or lie about anything without a trace of concern. Second, he exhibited a pattern of a basically deficient man who would buy (or attempt to buy) his way out of responsibility. Third, is the point Harold Laski partially made to Kennedy's father. Close examination of Kennedy would show superficiality and vacancies of mentality for the remainder of his life. There was an absence of content. Any person of intellectual stature would perceive it immediately, as did Laski, as did Eisenhower, as did Khrushchev two decades later. In ordinary interactions with men of stature, Kennedy would be dismissed as a slick kid trying to work a confidence game, even at the age of thirty or forty. He would never be taken seriously by men of depth and perception throughout his life. Kennedy's performance in the presidential debates would require large doses of Dramamine to suppress the nausea felt by any intelligent listener. Fourth, and importantly to the point, there comes a point when money and deception won't work, and substance is required. It is possible to buy elections, to get through school by cheating, or to get into positions by deception and image manipulation. However, if the time comes when a person needs to actually function with intelligence, needs judgment, needs depth, and needs education, needs grit, and needs experience, then having faked it in the past won't get that person through. That means trouble. The bigger the position of responsibility the person has manipulated and cheated himself into, the bigger the trouble, for everybody. In Over His Head Kennedy cheated and manipulated himself into the presidency while having faked the qualifications. He was in far over his head. Khrushchev would, in an indirect way, tell him that. Shallowness and lack of content are not always a liability. Part of Kennedy's attraction was that he represented a comfortable way of life for those who didn't look too deeply, who couldn't look deeply, and who didn't look for or couldn't understand substance. For narcissists in the media and performing arts, and elsewhere, who identified with his superficiality and recognized him as one of their own, Kennedy was the god of deliverance from the evil requirement of substance and discipline. John Kennedy was not particularly intelligent. He lacked the patience or capacity to think. He did not develop ideas of originality and depth. He could repeat the ideas of others or ideas floating around if they would attract attention or further his ambitions. Kennedy was born with sagging serious-looking eyes that made him look like he was thinking, even if he wasn't thinking or was incapable of thinking. That was a purely cosmetic genetic accident. In the computer age a sequence of adjectives, nouns, and verbs can be analyzed much as voice patterns, DNA sequences, or fingerprints. Jack Kennedy's books, including Profiles in Courage, for which he was awarded a Pulitzer, were ghost-written preparations, probably commissioned by his father, to which he affixed his name at the last minute to give himself a veneer of intellect. One of the real authors no longer denies it and has come close to admitting it. Kennedy was apolitical in the sense of having any deeply developed political philosophy. He needed issues, attention, and promises to use in buying votes. Promises at the expense of the affluent would take him to the political left. On the political left he could generate dissatisfaction and then exploit it. Kennedy was dependent upon others for mentality. Not having much intellectual capacity himself, he had no sound basis from which to choose those on which he was dependent. They were chosen on superficial impressiveness and credentials rather than on depth. Kennedy was an unimpressive and unknown congressman and senator who arose out of nowhere to run for president. He showed no evidence of having taken anything seriously or having thought about anything with depth or seriousness in his life. Upon declaring his candidacy for president, he would be prepped by teams in cramming sessions to provide him with enough superficial answers to slide through the campaign. Kennedy's campaign was largely empty dynamism with finger-pointing staccato delivery without content. His approach to political thought had about the same depth as a cosmetics ad in a woman's magazine and it sold for the same reasons. It was strictly fluff and what those in the business call advertising copy. The Brain Trust As far as Kennedy was concerned, content was not a necessity. It had never been a requirement in the past. Personal substance wasn't a necessity in order to win, or steal, an election. After the election Kennedy would put together a left-wing brain trust (modeled after FDR's brain trust) who would do the thinking--and on which Kennedy was dependent. Kennedy gathered a brain trust of sixteen Phi Beta Kappas and four Rhodes showpieces in the top echelons of his administration. They were to be known as "the best and the brightest." This generated several serious problems. Neither Jack Kennedy nor Lyndon Johnson were prepared for the presidency. They were well-prepared for American politics, but not prepared for the presidency. They were graduates of political show business. They could act when put on stage before a political gathering. They were knowledgeable about tilling crowds and about political maneuvering, but it is a quantum leap from the political life they had lived to the capacity to be president. Eisenhower, an experienced and shrewd judge of character, described Kennedy as having no idea of the complexity of the job of being president. Some years ago there was a film entitled The Candidate (1972), starring Robert Redford. In it, Robert Redford plays a political candidate who is guided and created by public relations teams, handlers, pollsters, and whatever. At the end of the movie the managers tell him, hooray, we won. Redford looked into the camera and said, "What do I do now?" Movies are not the most valid evidence in the world, but they occasionally dramatize a point or process. After John Kennedy took office, there was nobody at the White House able or at all qualified to be president, immediately, or in the near future. There was a vacuum of leadership. There had been money and organization enough to build a machine and create an illusion around an attractive-looking man who at best had the intellect and barely the maturity of a high school kid, and that is all John Kennedy ever was. But there was nobody with the ability to be president. What existed was a collection of sixteen Phi Beta Kappas and four Rhodes showpieces who, as we shall see, would turn out to be incompetent and divided among themselves as they tried to impress each other, with nobody in charge. Sixteen Phi Beta Kappas and four Rhodes scholars. While this looks good at first glance, it can carry serious dangers. Intellectuals are self-defined according to the entirely arbitrary standards developed within their subculture. The validity of those standards has not been thoroughly examined. Personal maturity and absence of self-infatuation are not part of those standards. What occurred was an celebration by the intellectually self-infatuated who after years of resented waiting and being dismissed as vacuous, were now anointed to play at everything. Intellectuals and Their Toys Many so-called intellectuals are problem children who live in a toy world. Intellectuality bears a commonality with religion. There are people who go into religion because of sincere healthy belief. There are other people who seek religion as an escape or a defense or a substitute for a personality. There are people who are intellectuals because of innate curiosity and creativity. There are other people who seek the mushy artificial world and secure confines of intellectuality as an escape from, or defense against, reality. The latter outnumber the former by a ratio of about three to one. They may do quite well in school and can accumulate a highly gratifying record of escapist achievement in an artificial world which becomes a substitute for life. They continue to attempt to escape from reality. One of the problems with intellectuals is that they are often too good at rationalizing. Within the subculture, rejection of reality with substitution of counter-reality has become more important than quality of thought. Intellectualized denial becomes a way of life. What has become lost is an understanding of the difference between denial and critical thought or creativity. That, and a generalized antagonism toward an outside world that may threaten the security of their escape, have tended to become characteristic of the subculture and the definition of intellectual. Adopting politically and socially left positions satisfies that antagonism. The turmoil they create in their antagonism gives them a feeling of importance. Coupled with this is the feeling of power and superiority conferred by having a mind that can manipulate, confuse, intimidate, and belittle others in an atmosphere of physical safety. It's an ideal medium for sublimation of hostility. The ultimate test of mental power is to have a mind so strong as to be able to argue successfully against basic reality. That has become the name of the game. time after time when dealing with intellectuals, you will find they argue against basic reality as an unconscious compulsion. The social reinforcement system for all this within the subculture can channelize elements within that subcul-ture toward a progressively pathological mental functioning. Intellectuals tend often to be narcissistic antagonistic children. I find many intellectuals are subconsciously playing a sadistic chess game against the American people, and particularly against those other people who are competent and incisively intelligent, in which intellectuals both hide their inferiority and prove their superiority by checkmating other people, or the nation, into a state of helpless self-destruction. There is a type of negative attention-seeking and feeling of self-importance associated with this. In their work and other habits, if there is a correct way to do something, they'll often sabotage or do it in such a way that it doesn't work it to prove they were brilliant enough to have found the flaw in what had been previously presumed reasonable. Some of it may be rewarded in graduate school as a sign of creativity, but it doesn't work in life. The Bay of Pigs One of the very serious reservations I have had with intellectuals over the years is that they often don't understand themselves and their own motivation. These motivations cause them to mess things up without understanding, or with denial of the motivations that cause the problem. They often have a deep-seated fear and hostility. They are able to misrepresent themselves to themselves to the point of losing track of who or what they are. This often further causes them to lose track of what they are doing, and why they are doing it. They are too unstable. I have found too many of them to be confused in motivation, undermining, destructive, and dangerous. This limits their utilization in critical situations except in a minority of cases. This is not an absolute, but is a statistical source of great concern. Simply being super smart ain't enough to get you accepted as being an intellectual. Constantly parading the quirks and twisted-up stuff is what counts. Degrees and academic accolades are too often awarded on the basis of having a good memory and having accepted the word of authorities within the academic world uncritically. Many intellectuals affect a perverse reality-opposition exhibitionism to show they are powerful enough and complex enough of mind to go beyond, and eventually deny, the most obvious truth. Put several of them in a room and what often quickly develops is a competitive system of absurd analysis made up from a recipe one part denial, cutely defended by one part word salad in a smug atmosphere of mutual congratulation for being able to participate in an assemblage of such cleverness and superiority. That may impress pseudo-intellectual fops, but it is no way to run a government. One result was the Bay of Pigs debacle, which by itself would probably have been enough to lose Kennedy the next election--especially if the people in this country found out what happened. Fidel Castro, although temporarily a hero for leading the overthrow of the previous Cuban dictator, had then imposed his own communist dictatorship which wasn't part of the original plan disclosed to the Cubans, and he had worn out his welcome with the Cuban people. He was further determined to make Cuba a centralized base of operations for exporting communist revolution everywhere. President Eisenhower was determined to prevent it. Eisenhower had been training a group of Cubans to depose Castro. Eisenhower, a former army general, and his military staff, expected an initial short period of resistance from Castro's military after the Free Cubans landed. The Free Cubans would be vulnerable as they hit the beach and for a small distance inland. Several very critical support air strikes would buckle the resistance of Castro's military units, who were not overly enthusiastic about Castro anyway. The rest of Cuba would be taken as those disli king Castro had secure opportunity to give support to the Free Cuban movement. Opposition would crumble. The critical necessities were tactical support of the initial strike, and a secure enough belief in the seriousness and success of the operation so that indigenous opposition to Castro would have confidence that they wouldn't be picked up by the secret police the next day if they showed support for deposing Castro. Deliberate Betrayal After 35 years, I can not be certain of the condition of the tapes in the university archives that would be necessary to defend against a law suit. Thus, I'll delete the name of the person in question. But this was a high level Kennedy advisor and one of several authors of definitive authorized biographies of the Kennedy administration. In the middle 60s I attended a lecture given by this person before a university audience. He laughed as he called the Cubans Eisenhower had been training an "embarrassment"�presumably to the politics of the Kennedy administration and to the previously mentioned self-defined political sophistication of the time. (They hadn't been an embarrassment to Eisenhower.) The Kennedy administration�s decision was to let them land at the Bay of Pigs and then to withhold promised tactical support, whereupon they would be mauled and captured so as to be rid of them. The Kennedy advisor and the audience of left-wing university intellectuals thought this was highly amusing. Those Cubans who had received assurances from the previous President of the United States were deliberately betrayed and the operation was sabotaged at top levels of the Kennedy administration�for some kind of distorted sophisticated intellectual amusement and satisfaction by kooks running the Kennedy administration. There were a number of Latin American teachers who happened to be present that night who left shaking their heads in disbelief and disgust. The older Cuban community in Florida is still hot about it to this day and refer to the "pinkos" who betrayed them. The Bay of Pigs was nothing compared to what was later to happen, which will be discussed later. That wasn't what the American people were told they were voting for. It wasn't what they were told was decided at the time. It was barely believable. It left any sane listener wondering what kind of left-wing kooks had crept in and were subverting the government from the inside. Listening to the reaction of the audience made one wonder what kind of people were cheering them on and how many of them existed. There is an important difference between subversion and latitude of executive discretion. In executive discretion, the president runs on a broad framework or platform which is understood and accepted by the voters, and he is given broad power or authority to implement that platform in the most workable manner under changing circumstances. The exact details are not specified. This may include necessary elements of governmental or executive secrecy in areas of national security. But, he is expected to stay within rationally interpreted, generally understood boundaries of agreed-upon declared general direction. It may be looked upon as a contract between a president or other officials and the people within constitutional confines. It is a far different matter to receive authority from the people for a declared direction, but then deliberately and surreptitiously redirect or subvert the country into areas clearly the opposite of that declared direction. This exceeds executive discretion and becomes subversion, and fraud. This group of people deliberately overthrew the election and the government, as defined in terms of the intent of the people--including the legitimately mandated direction being executed by the previous president. This was an act of criminality against the people of the United States. The presentation concerning the Bay of Pigs was given before a audience of about five hundred university faculty intellectuals who were correctly presumed to be sympathetic and it took on the aspects of a private celebration. There was no reporting by the media (who probably would have been equally sympathetic, anyway). If the advisor or Kennedy had declared that intent and given that presentation openly before the general public during the Cuban crisis, there would have been rioting in the streets and a demand for Kennedy's impeachment. The embittering aspect of this was, you could walk out of that presentation and tell somebody who hadn't been there what you had heard, and you would be told it couldn't be true and that you were some kind of paranoid right-wing nut. If one of the audience members who had cheered the revelation were standing near, he or she would smile and agree that you were a paranoid right-wing nut. Knowing and telling the truth would nearly get you committed to an institution. At the time the Bay of Pigs disaster happened, it was obvious to many people that what the advisor later gloated over was exactly what had been pulled off. Those who voiced the observation were labeled right-wing extremists and nut cases. It was part of what became a long term pattern in which those people who realized and voiced the obvious observable truth were labeled crazy. It got to the point where knowing the truth was driving people crazy with exasperation. Years later, in his autobiography [2], a characteristically overly kind President Reagan would write his puzzlement and disapproval: I've always thought it was a tragic error for President Kennedy to abandon the Cuban freedom fighters during the 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion. If he hadn't done so, perhaps history would have been much different in Central America. Training of the invasion force, all Cuban refugees, had started under President Eisenhower. The master plan he had approved called for covert American forces to provide air support for the refugees against Castro's tanks, aircraft, and heavy weapons, and to bomb the airport where his military aircraft were based, while the refugees invaded Cuba. Everything was going according to schedule--the Cuban fighting force had landed and our carriers were waiting offshore with the support aircraft--when Adlai Stevenson, our UN representative, came storming down from New York and told President Kennedy; "I have promised the United Nations that we are not going to in any way interfere in Cuba..." After the Cuban freedom fighters had already landed, an order went out to the carriers: Don't send the planes. President Kennedy had been talked into stranding those courageous men on the beach. The least he could have done was to let the planes come in and rescue them. Reagan had never heard the presentation that I heard nearly 20 years before. Stevenson wasn't the only one who was doing the talking. If I can believe what I was told, and the correlative pattern and evidence, Stevenson's move only gave support or rationalization for a destructive plan that was already in place. Next Toy: Viet Nam Kennedy converted the country into a playground for left-wing fops and pseudo-intellectuals. That was one of the worst legacies of the Kennedy presidency. Most of them more properly belonged in the fever swamps rather than in the directing levels of government to be cheered on by kooks of similar pathological mentality. The story behind the Bay of Pigs is basically also close to the story behind the Viet Nam War, which cost more than 56,000 lives and tens of thousands more in wheelchairs. Tens of thousands of parents lost their sons. Thousands of wives lost husbands. Thousands of children lost fathers. Much of it was the result of having given childish self-infatuated pseudo-intellectual fops a playground to demonstrate how antagonistically brilliant and clever they were, to the cheers of the same crowd I heard that night, and, after all the years of being properly ignored and ridiculed, the chance to glory in showing their oppositional-defiant behinds. The Bay of Pigs set the stage for Viet Nam and more to come. The Bay of Pigs established the fact that Americans were incompetent, politically-infiltrated weaklings who could be taken advantage of, and now was the time to do it�in Viet Nam or any place else. It also established the fact that any group attempting to free themselves from a communist dictator would be damned fools to trust the left-wing kooks and so-called brightest and best intellectuals in Washington. It would get you betrayed, stranded on the beach, and killed. President Diem, the president of South Viet Nam, an ally who was assassinated with Kennedy White House approval, also found that to be true. (The details of Diem's betrayal will be examined later in this series.) Working with Americans, or the American government, would get you betrayed and killed, whether you were an American soldier, a Cuban, or a South Vietnamese. It began to appear that the American government had switched sides and was becoming anti-American, turning against its supporters. This is not as crazy as it first sounds. Anti-Americanism, called anti-chauvinism or willingness to accept self-criticism, was endemic among self-professed intellectuals and was argued to be instrumental to world peace. In an ultimate undifferentiated world where there was no emotional investment in separate cultures or governments, arguments would become bland instead of developing into wars. Any American resistance to communism was argued to be provocative and an impediment to world peace. Dissolution of America was part of the big picture. Destruction of America was interpreted as a small price in a step toward a peaceful world or in avoiding nuclear incineration. Self-destructive masochism in America would supposedly be recognized by the communists as certain evidence of the cooperative intent of Ame rica, thereby diffusing all suspicion. Any naive self-serving protests from American peasants incapable of understanding the long term greatness of this view would eventually be recorded as an insignificant footnote in the record of world history. But what do you do when you're being betrayed, killed, or enslaved for this cute bit of fatuous intellectual exhibitionism? It's irritating to participate in a government operation and find out some college professors and intellectuals are trying to kill you off in the name of world peace, or their version of social justice, and are laughing about it. To be shipped off to an Asian war to be killed or to end up in a wheelchair, while crackpots are deliberately betraying you as evidence of their cleverness or intellectual delusions and creativity, makes you want to kill them�so as to enable them, as they say in California, to share the experience and make it a little more real. This rarefied intellectual position is hard on the supposed uncomprehending intellectual inferiors who are required to pay the price. Freedom as Provocation The overall position pushed by the left was in fact an intellectualized form of exquisite sadism. That sadism is part of a broad spectrum of serious psychopathology exhibited by the liberal/left mentality. That sadism was being felt and understood by many American people. It was infuriating. In the leftist mind, resisting forced export and imposition of political systems that required electrified fences and guard towers around them to prevent people from escaping was interpreted as provocation. In a healthy mind it was not provocation, but survival. In college and elsewhere, I spent years in discussions with, and study of, these people. Viewing freedom as provocation was a popular position, nearly a prerequisite to membership certification, in the intellectual community. Self defense or wanting to preserve your freedom became justifiable provocation. I recognized the thinking process in the Kennedy intellectuals. It would require the election of Ronald Reagan nearly twenty years later to begin to confront these people and turn the situation around. Reagan implicitly understood that any political system which inevitably produced conditions so unendurable upon people living under it, and was so easily provoked, would view American weakness not as an offer of sincerity, but as a opportunity to kill. Within the system of analysis I employ, I begin with the premise that those leaders or systems who kill or imprison their own people should reasonably be expected to have no less reservation about killing or imprisoning me, or us. Was Kennedy of the same politics or mentality as the people he had gathered around him? Analysis of Kennedy's personality indicates he was a shallow man of personal attractiveness which allowed him to win elections, but who had little idea what was happening once he was in office. Lacking competency to make decisions himself, he relied on people around him that were incompetent or antagonistic to America and he thought he was in the big leagues by listening to them. The country was falling into chaos while a over-aged high school kid who could manipulate people by charm and glamor was in turn dependent upon incompetents, subversives, and left-wing kooks. Who decided what is anybody's guess and would change from week to week. In years to come, CIA director William Colby was to voice his serious doubts about Kennedy's vacillation on serious issues. Kennedy had functional problems when he was with his advisors. Without them, he was lost. In direct discussions with someone like Khrushchev, Kennedy would get torn to pieces. Kennedy Gives Krushchev the Keys to the Store The Cuban missile crisis was set up because of the betrayal of the Cubans at the Bay of Pigs. The conventional belief is that Kennedy backed Khrushchev down in the Cuban missile crisis. In fact, Khrushchev was given the keys to the store. Khrushchev demanded dissolution of strategic military bases and obtained other assurances. A September 28, 1997 Baltimore Sun book review by Craig Eisendrath of the book, The Kennedy Tapes: Inside the White House During the Cuban Missile Crisis, edited by Earnest May and Philip Zelikow, discussed apparently recently released secretly recorded tapes at the White House during the missile crisis. What is described as "a major revelation." was that Kennedy secretly agreed to give up American missile bases in Turkey. "Secrecy was maintained to protect the credibility of the NATO alliance." What is meant by "credibility"? It means there was serious enough loss of military strength and commitment, so as to cause substantial re-evaluation of American and NATO capability which had to be concealed. It means something took place which was destructive enough that it had to be hidden. If you are proud of something, and it's to the country's advantage, you don't need to keep it secret to preserve credibility. It is argued by apologists that the missiles were obsolete, anyway. If they were so ineffectual, Khrushchev wouldn't have demanded they be removed. Protect credibility with whom? Khrushchev knew about it because he arranged it. It was to fabricate a credibility for Kennedy as President. Kennedy had to be made to look good. Khrushchev needed Kennedy as president and those around him as advisors. With a charismatic weakling high school kid who looked like a fashion model captivating people by reading speeches in the White House, surrounded by incompetents and left-wing hacks for advisors, Khrushchev, who had started with nothing, now had things going his way. He was free of Eisenhower's threat to Castro. In addition to destroying a highly-motivated counterrevolutionary force, the Bay of Pigs had destroyed American policy credibility. The faith of the American people in their government, and whether it even was the elected government, was beginning to falter. Khrushchev had dismantled important American military bases in secret and compromised the President of the United States' truthfulness with allies and the American people in the process. He had weakened NATO. When the truth was eventually found, NATO allies could no longer trust the United States. A previously precariously positioned Castro was now firmly in charge and there would be no more threat of invasions. While temporarily on reserve, Cuba could be used at a future time and would continue to be a threatening presence that needed to be watched and countered. What had been done in Cuba could be done elsewhere. Che Guevara could begin attempts to export revolution into Latin America with little opposition from a confused and cowed United States. Any intelligent potential ally had to re-think an alliance with the United States because it was established that an agreement with the United States could result in betrayal or assassination. An alliance with the Soviet Union could be considered smarter than an alliance with the United States, because the Soviets could protect you from the wrath of Soviets, at least temporarily, while the United States was beginning to look like an infiltrated diseased weakling and the eventual loser�and there was no protection in that. It wouldn't be wise to align yourself with the United States at the expense of irritating the Soviets, then find yourself without support. Viet Nam would be conducted with the same incompetence as had been seen thus far in the Kennedy administration, and with a little luck the U.S. Army could be slowly demoralized and destroyed. That's what Khrushchev wanted. It's as if he had died and awakened to find himself in heaven. For practical purposes Khrushchev patted Kennedy on the head and knew that in the future he had what he wanted. What difference did it make if Kennedy went to Germany and shouted "Ich bin ein Berliner!" [3], while the gullible and hysterically starstruck swooned. If it contributed to the delusion, it was useful, and probably amusing to Khrushchev. Germany would not be freed until decades later in the era of Gorbachev and Reagan. Kennedy had been diddled. The American people had been diddled. NATO had been diddled. In protecting himself and his political ambitions, Kennedy, with the help of the media, was covering up and selling the entire thing for Khrushchev while Khrushchev pretended anger over the confrontation. But Khrushchev and the communists were in far better position than they were on the day Kennedy took office, while America was in a weaker defensive position. That is the name of the game. People who examined the situation seriously, and came to this obvious conclusion, were dismissed as right-wing kooks. With three more such confrontations in which Khrushchev backed down, the Soviets could acquire rights to Alaska and Oregon. The same Time issue referred to earlier contains a short essay by Hugh Sidney, "Busy in Bed, but also in Berlin." The piece discusses the various aspects of the Kennedy presidency, the Hersh book, Kennedy's extramarital affairs, and the morals of investigative writers. The piece ends with the sentence, "Women or not, Kennedy dealt pretty well with Khrushchev, and that may be the larger reason why Camelot will not fade away." Right? Not quite. It's time to put this childishness away. Grow up. Let it go and accept the truth. Camelot never happened that way. Camelot was no Camelot. The Russians are great chess players. During the Kennedy presidency, the pieces were becoming positioned for midgame. To the advanced player, it was clear Viet Nam would be lost. The Soviets had just won a rook. American policy had lost control of the board�s center, was four moves behind, and there were a loose opponent knight and bishop behind the American pawns. In Viet Nam, hundreds of thousands of men would be deployed in senseless tactics dictated by fear of Soviet missile-thumping and by administrative incompetence. America would lose close to 60,000 men, Viet Nam and Cambodia would fall to the communists, America would be on the brink of an internal leftist revolution, and Latin America would be hit by communist insurgencies. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Notes [1] Here is a trivial example of this unexamined proposition: "To a reader like John F. Kennedy, one of his greatest problems was to turn pages fast enough to maintain his fantastic reading speed of 6,000 - 7,000 words per minute" ( http://www.ci.west-valley.ut.us/mayor/wrighton/wo040497.html). [2] Ronald Reagan, An American Life, Pocket Books, New York, 1992, p. 452. [3] [Note added by Zola]: A "Berliner" in German refers to a jelly donut. So what Kennedy literally said was, "I am a jelly donut." The German audience, however, chose to overlook the misuse of the language, and went on to cheer his intended meaning, which was that he was a citizen of Berlin. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Robert L. Kocher is the author of "The American Mind in Denial," as well as many other articles. He is an engineer working in the area of solid-state physics, and has done graduate study in clinical psychology. His email address is [EMAIL PROTECTED] -30- from The Laissez Faire City Times, Vol 3, No 30, July 26, 1999 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Published by Laissez Faire City Netcasting Group, Inc. Copyright 1998 - Trademark Registered with LFC Public Registrar All Rights Reserved ----- Aloha, He'Ping, Om, Shalom, Salaam. Em Hotep, Peace Be, Omnia Bona Bonis, All My Relations. Adieu, Adios, Aloha. Amen. Roads End Kris DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER ========== CTRL is a discussion and informational exchange list. 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