Tag Archives: JFK

JFK and the Cuban Missile Crisis

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Speaking of JFK, as I do tangentially in the preceding post, I am reminded by Humberto Fontava, writing at FrontPage Mag, that the Cuban Missile Crisis was drawing to an inglorious end 56 years ago:

Those who think “Fake News” started with Trump’s term and the media’s “slobbering love affair” with a U.S. president started during Obama’s should have seen John F. Kennedy’s term.

Imagine Obama’s term with no Fox News, internet or talk radio. That’s about what JFK enjoyed. And tragically, the fairy tales Kennedy’s court scribes (with their media cohorts of the time) concocted about JFK’s Pattonesque handling of the Cuban Missile Crisis prevail in media/academic circles even today.

In fact, that Khrushchev swept the floor with cowed Kennedy during the Cuban Missile Crisis was mainstream conservative conclusion throughout much of the Cold War. Richard Nixon and Barry Goldwater, for instance, represented opposite poles of the Republican establishment of their time.

“We locked Castro’s communism into Latin America and threw away the key to its removal,” growled Barry Goldwater about the JFK’s Missile Crisis “solution.”

“Kennedy pulled defeat out of the jaws of victory,” complained Richard Nixon. “Then gave the Soviets squatters rights in our backyard.”

Generals Curtis Le May and Maxwell Taylor represented opposite poles of the military establishment.

“The biggest defeat in our nation’s history!” bellowed Air Force chief Curtis Lemay while whacking his fist on his desk upon learning the details of the deal.

“We missed the big boat,” complained Gen. Maxwell Taylor after learning of same.

“We’ve been had!” yelled then Navy chief George Anderson upon hearing on October 28, 1962, how JFK “solved” the missile crisis. Adm. Anderson was the man in charge of the very “blockade” against Cuba.

“It’s a public relations fable that Khrushchev quailed before Kennedy,” wrote Alexander Haig. “The legend of the eyeball to eyeball confrontation invented by Kennedy’s men paid a handsome political dividend. But the Kennedy-Khrushchev deal was a deplorable error resulting in political havoc and human suffering through the America’s.”

William Buckley’s National Review devoted several issues to exposing and denouncing Kennedy’s appeasement. The magazine’s popular “The Third World War” column by James Burnham roundly condemned Kennedy’s Missile Crisis solution as “America’s Defeat.”

Even Democratic luminary Dean Acheson despaired: “This nation lacks leadership,” he grumbled about the famous “Ex-Comm meetings” so glorified in the movie Thirteen Days. “The meetings were repetitive and without direction. Most members of Kennedy’s team had no military or diplomatic experience whatsoever. The sessions were a waste of time.”

But not for the Soviets. “We ended up getting exactly what we’d wanted all along,” snickered Nikita Khrushchev in his diaries, “security for Fidel Castro’s regime and American missiles removed from Turkey and Italy. Until today the U.S. has complied with her promise not to interfere with Castro and not to allow anyone else to interfere with Castro. After Kennedy’s death, his successor Lyndon Johnson assured us that he would keep the promise not to invade Cuba.”

There’s much more. Read the whole thing.

My own views, which span several posts, are gathered here:

The botched [Bay of Pigs] invasion pushed Castro closer to the USSR, which led to the Cuban missile crisis.

JFK’s inner circle was unwilling to believe that Soviet missile facilities were enroute to Cuba, and therefore unable to act before the facilities were installed. JFK’s subsequent unwillingness to attack the missile facilities made it plain to Kruschev that the the Berlin Wall (erected in 1961) would not fall and that the U.S. would not risk armed confrontation with the USSR (conventional or nuclear) for the sake of the peoples behind the Iron Curtain. Thus the costly and tension-ridden Cold War persisted for almost another three decades. (“Whose Incompetence Do You Trust?“)

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I should add that Kennedy’s willingness to withdraw missiles from Turkey — a key element of the settlement with the USSR — played into Nikita Krushchev‘s hands, further emboldening the Soviet regime. (“Presidential Legacies“)

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JFK succeeded Eisenhower before the [Bay of Pigs] invasion took place, in April 1961. JFK approved changes in the invasion plan that resulted in the failure of the invasion. The most important change was to discontinue air support for the invading forces. The exiles were defeated, and Castro has remained firmly in control of Cuba.

The failed invasion caused Castro to turn to the USSR for military and economic assistance. In exchange for that assistance, Castro agreed to allow the USSR to install medium-range ballistic missiles in Cuba. That led to the so-called Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962. Many historians give Kennedy credit for resolving the crisis and avoiding a nuclear war with the USSR. The Russians withdrew their missiles from Cuba, but JFK had to agree to withdraw American missiles from bases in Turkey. (“The Modern Presidency: A Tour of American History since 1900“)

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The Cold War had some “hot” moments and points of high drama. Perhaps the most notable of them was the so-called Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, which was not the great victory proclaimed by the Kennedy administration and its political and academic sycophants… That the U.S. won the Cold War because the USSR’s essential bankruptcy was exposed by Ronald Reagan’s defense buildup is a fact that only left-wingers and dupes will deny. They continue to betray their doomed love of communism by praising the hapless Mikhail Gorbachev for doing the only thing he could do in the face of U.S. superiority: surrender and sunder the Soviet empire. America’s Cold War victory owes nothing to LBJ (who wasted blood and treasure in Vietnam), Richard Nixon (who would have sold his mother for 30 pieces of silver), or Jimmy Carter (whose love for anti-American regimes and rebels knows no bounds). (“Rating America’s Wars“)

How does JFK stack up against other presidents? I still like my 14-year-old debunking of historians’ perennial ranking of presidents. Here’s my pithy commentary about JFK, who was placed in the “above average” category

Spent most of his time in bed (sick or with mistresses), so how can he be ranked?

Nothing became JFK’s presidency like the pomp and undeserved encomiums that ensued his leaving of it.

Who Shot JFK, and Why?

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ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED 11/22/13; UPDATED 09/25/14 AND 06/26/15; REVISED 06/27/15

On this, the 50th anniversary of the murder of John F. Kennedy, I refer you to my recollections of the day (posted two years ago), and offer the following thoughts about the killing.

I recently watched the NOVA production, Cold Case JFK, which documents the application of current forensic technology to the 50-year-old case. The investigators’ give a convincing explanation of the shooting in Dallas. The explanation supports the original “verdict” of the Warren Report: Lee Harvey Oswald was the lone shooter. He, and only he, fired the shots that killed JFK and wounded John Connally, then governor of Texas. The NOVA program moves me from “reasonable doubt” to “beyond a reasonable doubt,” with respect to who shot JFK and how.

What about the thesis advanced by James B. Reston Jr. that Oswald’s real target was Connally? Possibly, inasmuch as Oswald wasn’t a sniper-class shooter. Here’s a scenario that’s consistent with the timing of events in Dealey Plaza: Oswald can tell that his first shot missed his target. He got off a quick second shot, which hit JFK, who’s in line with Connally, passed through JFK and hit Connally. There was no obvious, dramatic reaction from Connally, even though he was hit. So Oswald fired a quick third shot, which hit Kennedy in the back of the head instead of hitting Connally, who by that time had slumped into his wife’s lap. (Go here for the Warren Commission’s chronology of the shots and their effects.)

Reston’s thesis is that Oswald went after Connally because Oswald’s discharge from the Marine Corps was downgraded from “honorable” to “undesirable” while Connally was Secretary of the Navy. The downgrading hurt Oswald’s pride and his ability to get a good job in those days when employers were allowed to hire whom they pleased. I have read Reston’s book and can tell you that it is a piece of padded fluff. Padded as it is, the book consists of only 183 pages of text, set in large type on small pages. Reston offers no evidence other than Oswald’s grudge against Connally and (supposed) lack of of grudge against JFK. Reston harms his case by ascribing unsourced and obviously fabricated words and thoughts to his characters. I say “characters” because Reston has fashioned something that reads more like a novel than a history.

Reston could be right, but we’ll never know if he is or isn’t. The truth of the matter died with Oswald on November 24, 1963. In any event, if Reston is right, it would mean that there was no conspiracy to murder JFK.

The only conspiracy theory that might still be worth considering is the idea that Oswald was gunning for JFK because he was somehow maneuvered into doing so by LBJ, the CIA, Fidel Castro, the Mafia, or the Russians. (See, for example, Philip Shenon’s “‘Maybe We Missed Something’: Warren Commission Insider Publicly Concedes That JFK Assassination Was Likely a Conspiracy,” The Washington Post, September 22, 2014, republished in The National Post.) The murder of Oswald by Ruby conveniently plays into that theory. But I say that the burden of proof is on conspiracy theorists, for whom the obvious is not titillating enough. The obvious is Oswald — a leftist loser and less-than-honorably discharged Marine with a chip on his shoulder, a domineering mother, an unhappy home life, and a menial job. In other words, the kind of loser with a gun who now appears almost daily in the news, having slaughtered family members, former co-workers, or random strangers. (This ubiquity is, of course, a manifestation of the media’s anti-gun bias, but that’s another story.)

Finally, after 50 years as a moderate skeptic of the Warren Report, I am satisfied that Lee Harvey Oswald was the only shooter in Dallas, and that he wasn’t part of a conspiracy.  Given that, it is immaterial whether Oswald was gunning for JFK or Connally. He killed JFK, and the rest — for good or ill — is history.

That history still resounds with absurd claims that an “atmosphere of hate in Dallas” (right-wing, of course) was somehow responsible for the murder of JFK. How did this “atmosphere” — invented by the media to deflect blame from a leftist killer — cause Oswald to take aim at JFK or Connally? By “atmospheric” induction? There’s a conspiracy theory for you.