Hitchens on JFK

[Boris]

Here's another article ripped off from the WSJ Op-Ed page.

I have to say that IMO and as usual Hitchens is right on.

Where's the Aura?

By CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS

A short while ago, I chanced to be in Dallas, Texas, making a documentary film. One of the shots involved a camera angle from a big commercial tower overlooking Dealey Plaza and the former "book depository," and it was later necessary for us to take the road through the celebrated underpass. The crew I worked with was younger than I am (you may as well make that much younger) and consisted of a Chinese-Australian, an English girl brought up in Africa, a Jewish guy from Brooklyn and other elements of a cross-section. As we passed the "Grassy Knoll," and looked up at the window, and saw the cross incised in the tarmac, I was interested by their lack of much interest. The event of Nov. 22, 1963 isn't half as real to them as the moment, say, when the planes commandeered by suicide-murderers flew into the New York skyline. Nor, as I realized, is it half as real or poignant to me as the site of Ford's Theater in Washington D.C. Time has a way of assigning value.

I may still be in a minority in this, and don't care if I am, but I am glad to find that the Kennedy drama and the Kennedy cult is falling away into nothingness. The effort of keeping it up is too much trouble. It has been a long time since anyone rang me, or wrote to me, with hectic new information about the real scoop on the assassination. It has been a very long time since I heard anyone argue with conviction (let alone with evidence) that if the president had been spared that day we would not be referring to the Vietnam calamity as "Kennedy's War."

The last thought is also, paradoxically, the kernel of the illusion that still keeps the JFK cult green. In a recent ill-phrased speech, Sen. Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts referred with contempt to the combat in Iraq as something cooked up "in Texas." He thereby gave vent to a facile liberal prejudice that still sees the Galahad of Camelot as having been somehow slain by Dallas itself, or by Texas at any rate. And what do we think of, or what are we supposed to think of, when the word "Texas" is invoked? Why, cowboys and gunplay and irresponsible capitalist dynasties.

For those reasons (if not for those reasons alone) Sen. Kennedy might have done better to keep a guard on his tongue. The biographers and archivists have done most of the relevant job of reporting and disclosing, and what they have reported and disclosed is a president frantically "high" on pills of all kinds (that's when he was not alarmingly "low" for the same reason); a president quick on the draw and willing to solicit Mafia hit-men for his foreign policy; a president willing to risk nuclear war to save his own face; a president who bugged his own Oval Office; a president who used the Executive Mansion as a bordello and a president whose name we might never have learned if not for the fanatical determination of his father to purchase him a political career. If a tithe of these things were really true of George Bush, Howard Dean might claim he was onto something. As it is, "the mantle of JFK" is a garment that no serious Democrat can apparently afford to discard. The last time it was plucked from the wardrobe of central casting, it made Bill Clinton look -- at least to the credulous -- like a potential statesman. Which turned out to be about right.

Had Napoleon Bonaparte been fatally hit by a musket ball as he entered Moscow, it was once pointed out, he would have been remembered by history as one of the greatest generals who ever lived. It would be cruel and unfeeling to say that Kennedy's luck and "charisma" did not desert him even in death, and in any case I prefer to blame this callous opinion on those who actually hold it -- namely his hagiographers and mythologists. Who now seriously believes that Kennedy intended to undo his own rash commitment in South Vietnam? Can we not at least agree that his zeal for the assassination of President Diem -- whom he had installed at some price in blood -- was a somewhat contradictory indicator of any intention to disengage?

That would make a point, as it were, for the "Left." But what of the pugnacious anti-communism that Kennedy also maintained when he thought it suited him? Having tried assassination and "deniable" invasion in Cuba, and having helped provoke a missile crisis on which he gambled all of us, he meekly acceded to the removal of American missiles from Turkey and to a pledge that Fidel Castro's regime would be considered permanent. He and his brother did not completely hold to the terms of the latter agreement, it is true, but as a result the United States became indelibly associated with Mob tactics in the Caribbean, and Castro became in effect the President for Life. In this sense, we may say that the legacy of JFK is with us still.

Another inheritance from that period, the Berlin Wall -- which he did not oppose until well after it had been built (having again risked war on the proposition but not felt able to follow up on his punchy short-term rhetoric) -- did not disappear from our lives until a quarter-century later. His was the worst hard-cop/soft-cop routine ever to be attempted, and it suffered from the worst disadvantages of both styles. On the civil rights front at home, by contrast, even the most flattering historians have a hard time explaining how the Kennedy brothers preferred the millimetrical, snail's pace, grudging-and-trudging strategy. But at least this serves to demonstrate that they knew there was such a thing as prudence, or caution.

Every smart liberal of today knows just how to deplore "spin" and "image-building" and media strategy in general. Quite right too, but does anyone ever pause to ask when this manner of politics became regnant? Which Kennedy fan wants to disown the idea that the smoothest guy wins? Yet this awkward thought is gone into the memory hole, along with the fictitious "missile gap" that the boy-wonder employed to attack Eisenhower and Nixon from the Right. As I said at the beginning, I am glad that this spell is fading at last. But I wish its departure would be less mourned. The Kennedy interlude was a flight from responsibility, and ought to be openly criticized and exorcised rather than be left to die the death that sentimentality brings upon itself.

[Utah]

I like Hitchens a lot, but what the hell was the point of this whole article? How is it important? It seems like a tricky slash job aimed at the foundation and heritage of the democratic party. Also, Hitchens makes a lot of statements where he offers zero arguments to support them.

Worthless article in my opinion (other than to learn the word millimetrical)

[hetron]

Of course, part of the Kennedy mystique will always be more fantasy in reality...the whole Camelot thing and whatnot. And it is true that he was a philanderer who got involved with a lot of shady stuff he had no business being in.

But Kennedy was nowhere near the punk this article portrays him. And to try to play the whole liberal/conservative game here is stupid. You know damn well that if JFK was a conservative he would have played up his bravery in the Cuban missile crisis.

[andyfox]

Hitchens is moving right and part of that move must be to slash and burn the icons of the Democratic Party in the Wall Street Journal.

Having said that, though, John Kennedy was indeed a horrible person. We may have deplored the choice of Bush/Gore, but they didn't come close to the truly horrific decision Americans had to make in 1960 between JFK and Richard Nixon.

[Cyrus]

I like Chris Hitchens. He has great moments, eg Al Gore, Bill Clinton, Hillary, Mother Teresa.

But some traits of Old Left "thinking", such as the dreaded determinist workings of History, are aparently impossible to shake off!

Yes, Joseph Kennedy was a despicable anti-semite, Nazi-loving right winger with many ties to criminals and crime. Yes, he financed and propelled his son's political career in Congress, big time. But this is where it gets complicated, too complicated for Hitchens' facile notion of human nature and History : JFK, as the record shows, was able to go beyond the familial roadmap laid out for him and to grow into one of the most able politicians of America.

JFK's ability in command was demonstrated conclusively during the Cuban missile crisis. (Hitchens makes the absurd notion that JFK "caused it" to happen!) During the crisis and in trying to find the right path out of it, JFK demonstrated high intelligence and examplary leadership. Those of you who have read the White House tape transcripts of that era, will easily acknowledge the ability of JFK to allow different viewpoints to be heard, to marshall meeings of creative anarchy and to identify opportunities and correct action plans (and then to lead his administration and the whole country in following them through). Note that this is opposite to the autocratic way Joseph Kennedy managed his family and his affairs and the way JFK was raised.

Someone else, in this thread, very astutely, identified the way exceptional political leaders operate, ie more subtly and in more ways than they allow. JFK was going into Vietnam and appeasing the Cold Warriors on one hand, in his dealing with the Soviets, while he was also trying to work out co-existence with them, like a good realist. (Anyone who has led a large number of people in any kind of organisation knows this.) Note that this was in gross deviation from his father's ideologically unbending anti-communism.

Yes, I believe we would all have been better off if JFK hadn't been murdered. Hitchens is all wrong in this.

Tha aura of Camelot was nurtured by the JFK camp and was indeed the work of the media but not because of some impossible conspiracy! The JFK presidency touched a nerve because the people correctly identified a hope in JFK's leadership of leaving behind the World War II's and the Cold War's legacies and closedmindedness and to move, like that young President, towards a new era.

--Cyrus

PS : For an example of how an otherwsie able politician can fuck up his cause by going after it full throttle wnd without manoevering or playing all sides, look no furter than Clinton's handling of the issue of gays in the U.S. military.

[Cyrus]

"John Kennedy was indeed a horrible person."

Politically? I doubt it very much, to put it mildly. As an individual? Maybe. He was an incorrigible philanderer and I'm sure all the 2+2 posters dislike womanisers!

But as to the "pills" and that JFK was "high" half the time and "low" the other half? That's just nonsense from Hitchens. JFK's public appearances show him to be witty, articulate and at ease. Same goes for his private life and his work in government, as evidenced by his associates' memoirs (no indication of unstable behavior) and the tapes.

I am extremely suspicious of every effort to make a saint out of any politician, and I do know that the whole Camelot thing was over-rated, to say the least, but to dismiss it as cavalierly (excuse the pun) as Hitchens does and to try to paint JFK as some incompetent rich kid is to ignore the zeitgeist of the era. And the potentials in human nature.

"Hitchens is moving to the Right."

Which is always a sad sight.

[brad]

'
Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts referred with contempt to the combat in Iraq as something cooked up "in Texas."
'

if you look at all the facts you have to conclude that it was at least half baked 'in israel'. no joke. half the hawks in the administration have israeli citizenship (eg, richard 'prince of darkness' perle)

[andyfox]

Kennedy was a poor senator, mostly to the right of the mainstream Democratic party in the 1950s. The first bunch of chapters of The Best and The Brightest convey a good sense of Kennedy's politics and there's some disturbing information in Gore Vidal's Palimpsest on Kennedy's personal behavior, this despite Vidal's evident fondness for his friend Jack.

[andyfox]

Perle has Israeli citizenship? Which others do?

It was rumored that Ari Fleischer did, but this was anti-semitism, pure and simple. The charge was made by, among others, Edward Said, in a statement that Said's admirers cannot be proud of.

[Chris Alger]

If "the Kennedy drama and the Kennedy cult is falling away into nothingness," one wonders why Hitchens bothered? Nowadays, the truth of this judgment seems banal, underscored most recently by the absence, during the recent media flaggellation over our Great Unspeakable Sorrow, of of any tribute to anything Kennedy did except die. The laundry list of Kennedy faults reminds me of Hitchens similar outrage about the Royals, so maybe his next piece will be the stupidity of television entertainment. What's new about this and what thinking people really care? He even takes the bible-thumper tack: Kennedy turned the White House into an actual "bordello" in addition to the political bordello it always has been. Big deal. Even Clinton, with his stupid "and I say to you" impression of Kennedy learned the hard way that the President can no longer get blown on the phone, at least not without looking like a dumbass instead of James Bond.

It seems that Hitchens and his new friends at the WSJ op-ed were using a lot of tired filler to bundle another salvo at the war critics, in this case brother Ted. Hitchens finds Kennedy's dig about the war being "cooked up" in Texas "ill-phrased" and unfairly evocative of "cowboys and gunplay and irresponsible capitalist dynasties."

Set aside the "capitalist dynasties" clumsily thrown in so that Hitchens can reach for a kind of accusation of hypocrisy. Kennedy's point is apt. Whereas his brother inherited (and escalated and undoubtedly would have continued) a war forced on him and the country by the foreign policy intelligentsia, and about which there was virtually no visible dissent during Kennedy's life, Bush's war -- the most protested in the history of the world before it even started -- was in fact "cooked up" by Bush at the behest of a handful of revanchist chickenhawks. In the weeks and months after 9/11 gave them their opening, they probably did work over the poor dumb President while was trying to count cows at Crawford. And "cooked up" fairly evokes the slipshod planning that went into it. It now seems obvious that they feared doing even their simpler homework, probably to prevent a dire prognosis from being leaked before we became irrevocably "committed" to the bitter end.

Further, Hitchens is particularly off in defending the Texas image. If Texas elites have been working to correct it, it must have been in between their contest to execute the most people and loosing the bloodhounds to bring back the legislature. I forget: is it still legal to drive down the street drinking a beer, as it was when I grew up there? Did Houston ever fix an additction to laissez-faire so extreme that it was the only major city in the country without zoning laws? Did anyone catch Crile's book about how the monster U.S. aid program to the Afghani mujahideen that worked oh so well was cooked up by a living caricature an East Texas Congressman, the "virtual public outlaw" Charlie Wilson?

If Hitchens thinks that "cowboys" are an unfair image for Texas, he might want to consider all the photo-op pictures of Bush as sqaure-hawed Marlboro man in cowboy boots and shirts at his ranch, milking the image for all its worth. Since the White House is using Southwestern swaggering to sell a war, it seems only too fair to use the same imagery to ridicule it and its chief sponsor, one who doesn't even have the lame excuses of JFK's apologists.