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JFK v. djt

Irwin Corey said:
We're reading different history books, I've read the generals disobeyed his orders which caused the invasion to fail.
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Here is what happened.

The background has a number of elements. First of all, when the corrupt leadership of China, then our ally, was defeated by a communist revolution a few years after World War II, just as America was reaching peak 'red scare', it was a huge political issue in the US who to blame for "Who lost China?", as if it was someone in the US's 'fault' for not defeating the Chinese revolution. We were in strong denial about it, not recognizing the new government in mainland China.

This was still very strong as JFK became president. Eisenhower and Nixon told Kennedy that the one issue that they would attack him for publicly would be if he recognized China - ironic considering how that was seen as Nixon's top foreign policy achievement later.

There was an element of a feeling of betrayal regarding Castro. From Castro's view, he tried to 'work with the US' as a leftist leader, but was completely rebuffed by an administration who had been overthrowing democracies to install corrupt right-wing dictators. They slammed the door in his face. Then for the survival of his government he turned to the other alternative, the Soviets, who were glad to get an ally close to the US, after the US had been recruiting allies near them.

The CIA had actually supported Castro at first; the American people saw Castro as someone who had hidden his plan to become a Soviet ally and communist once in power, and they felt betrayed.

At the same time, the Soviets had recently been the first to launch a satellite. There was a myth that the Soviets had many more nuclear missiles than we did (actually, they had four to our thousands). the American people were scared. "Who lost Cuba" echoed the "Who lost China" politics, and there was a great demand to undo Castro.

The Eisenhower administration had made the CIA a covert operations agency; the first was Iran in 1953, next Guatemala in 1954 that became the model. They were used to designing plots. As Kennedy won the election, Eisenhower ordered the assassination of the first elected president of the Congo, Patrice Lumumba, who Kennedy had planned to make his key ally in Africa.

So, it was natural for the administration to make a plan for Cuba, which involved a secret support for Cuban exiles to be trained and invade. Nixon badly wanted the operation launched before the election to help him win, but they were unable to complete the preparations, including training the Cubans in Guatemala, in time.

During the window while Kennedy was president-elect, the operation greatly expanded. Nixon had been the political leader; the operation's designer was Richard Bissell, head of covert operations, the man who had run the U-2 program.

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They had designed the operation planning for the Cubans to just be a spearhead, quickly calling for help from the US, who would come and save the day and defeat Castro. Kennedy was the youngest president ever, following the oldest ever and the man who led D-Day, so his credibility to question Eisenhower was very low.

However, Kennedy felt that it would be a mistake for the US to invade Cuba - both in terms of wanting to change the direction of the relations with Latin America where we had done so much against their independence and democracy, as well as his feeling that such an invasion would lead the Soviets to attack Berlin to drive the allies out, as they had promised to do, which could lead to great conflict, even nuclear war.

So, Kennedy put limits. The operation had to be all Cuban, no visible American involvement, no American air strikes would be allowed. If it could be done on that basis, with those limits, it could proceed, and Kennedy would be happy to have Castro defeated.

Here is the key. Kennedy had kept on the Eisenhower men - Dulles and Bissell in the CIA, the Joint Chiefs, etc. They felt they knew best. And the decided to trick JFK to get what they wanted.

They designed things they kept from Kennedy, such as a plan for a unit of Cubans to be given Castro uniforms and ordered to attack the American base at Guantanamo, in a false flag operation, forcing Kennedy to respond.

They gave Kennedy assurances that the mission was a guaranteed success with his limits, even as they knew it would fail, but they expected when it began to fail, he would be forced to reverse his decision and order American involvement to avoid the embarrassment of a defeat. They assured Kennedy that the Cuban people would rise up and join the rebels and overthrow Castro. How much of that wrong estimate was intentional and how much blind wishful thinking I'm not sure.

Of course, as expected, it failed. When the Cubans were told of the false flag operation, they refused to attack Americans.

As Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. wrote: "When the invasion failed, JFK refused to order airstrikes against Castro. Realizing he had been drawn into a trap, he told his top aides, David Powers and Kenneth O’Donnell, “They were sure I’d give in to them and send the go-ahead order to the [U.S. Navy aircraft carrier] Essex. They couldn’t believe that a new president like me wouldn’t panic and try to save his own face. Well, they had me figured all wrong.” JFK was realizing that the CIA posed a monumental threat to American democracy. As the brigade faltered, he told Arthur Schlesinger that he wanted to “splinter the CIA into a thousand pieces and scatter it to the winds.”"

The right immediately created a narrative that fit their politics - that Kennedy had had a failure of nerve, and had acted in a cowardly manner afraid to send the US planes that would have saved the invasion and overthrown Castro. He was weak. When the situation was pretty much the opposite.

Like trump's lies fool many today, many fell for that narrative. Talking to friends, Kennedy told them that he could survive one such disaster, but another would create a real risk of a military coup. He felt the danger was strong enough that he asked a director friend to make a movie out of a book with a similar plot, "Seven Days in May", as a cautionary message to the public, and he allowed filming in the White House.

It was probably the single largest turning point in the Kennedy presidency. He said privately that he couldn't believe how badly he had decided, that he had allowed the medals on the chests and the experience to lead him to trust the judgment of the officials, but then recognized their expertise was greatly overrated.

He was then practically at war with his own security government the rest of his presidency. He created a position of liaison to the Joint Chiefs just to create some distance. He fired Richard Bissell and Allen Dulles resigned later in the year. He took a very different approach to policy, which had a direct effect on the Cuban Missile Crisis.

There are things about the Kennedy presidency that provide incredible, sometimes unique, windows into the presidency. One is his recording system, never intended for public consumption, of meetings and his own comments. Another is the official, secret investigation into the story of the Bay of Pigs, now declassified.

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less right said:
He might have early on. He wouldn't leave the democrats for Trump though. Trump can't even hold on to all the Republicans.
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Ted stayed. I suspect JFK would have also. Plus the Republican party started to rot decades ago. Trump is just the result of all those years of collapse.
 

All that proves is your hero JFK was a complete idiot.
 
dave8383 said:
Ted stayed. I suspect JFK would have also. Plus the Republican party started to rot decades ago. Trump is just the result of all those years of collapse.
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Yep, over 1/2 a century of the Republican party using the racist Southern Strategy has gathered all the racists and most of the idiots under their banner. Who could have seen that coming?

Is Racism Just a Form of Stupidity?
 
Irwin Corey said:
Never heard that before, I don't believe it.
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Well the story is a lot more complicated, unsurprisingly. There are a couple of great bits of the history, meetings between JFK and NASA's head James Webb and others, one in 1962 and one in 1963.

https://www.history.nasa.gov/JFK-Webbconv/pages/transcript.pdf

JFK Library Releases Recording of President Kennedy Discussing Race to the Moon | JFK Library

Some of it is very funny to read. The 1962 meeting had a lot to do with JFK demanding that the moon landing be the top priority for NASA while James Webb had opposition to parts of that.

"President Kennedy: Do you put…. Do you put this program…. Do you think this program is the top-priority program of the Agency?

James Webb: No, sir, I do not. I think it is one of the top-priority programs, but I think it’s very important to recognize here…and that you have found what you could do with a rocket as you could find how you could get out beyond the Earth’s atmosphere and into space and make measurements. Several scientific disciplines that are the very powerful and begin to converge on this area.

President Kennedy: Jim, I think it is the top priority. I think we ought to have that very clear. Some of these other programs can slip six months, or nine months, and nothing strategic is gonna happen, it’s gonna…. But this is important for political reasons, international political reasons. This is, whether we like it or not, in a sense a race. If we get second to the Moon, it’s nice, but it’s like being second any time. So that if we’re second by six months, because we didn’t give it the kind of priority, then of course that would be very serious. So I think we have to take the view that this is the top priority with us.

James Webb: But the environment of space is where you are going to operate the Apollo and where you are going to do the landing."

"President Kennedy: Look, I know all these other things and the satellite and the communications and weather and all, they’re all desirable, but they can wait.

James Webb: I’m not putting those…. I am talking now about the scientific program to understand the space environment within which you got to fly Apollo and make a landing on the Moon.

President Kennedy: Wait a minute—is that saying that the lunar program to land the man on the Moon is the top priority of the Agency, is it?

Unknown speaker: And the science that goes with it….

Robert Seamans: Well, yes, if you add that, the science that is necessary….

President Kennedy: The science…. Going to the Moon is the top-priority project. Now, there are a lot of related scientific information and developments that will come from that which are important. But the whole thrust of the Agency, in my opinion, is the lunar program. The rest of it can wait six or nine months."

"President Kennedy: The other thing is I would certainly not favor spending six or seven billion dollars to find out about space no matter how on the schedule we’re doing. I would spread it out over a five- or ten-year period. But we can spend it on…. Why are we spending seven million dollars on getting fresh water from saltwater, when we’re spending seven billion dollars to find out about space? Obviously, you wouldn’t put it on that priority except for the defense implications. And the second point is the fact that the Soviet Union has made this a test of the system. So that’s why we’re doing it. So I think we’ve got to take the view that this is the key program. The rest of this…we can find out all about it, but there’s a lot of things we can find out about; we need to find out about cancer and everything else.

James Webb: But you see, when you talk about this, it’s very hard to draw a line between what….

President Kennedy: Everything that we do ought to really be tied into getting onto the Moon ahead of the Russians.

James Webb: Why can’t it be tied to preeminence in space, which are your own….

President Kennedy: Because, by God, we keep, we’ve been telling everybody we’re preeminent in space for five years and nobody believes it because they have the booster and the satellite. We know all about the number of satellites we put up, two or three times the number of the Soviet Union…we’re ahead scientifically. It’s like that instrument you got up at Stanford which is costing us a hundred and twenty-five million dollars and everybody tells me that we’re the number one in the world. And what is it? I can’t think what it is.

Interruption from multiple unknown speakers: The linear accelerator.

President Kennedy: I’m sorry, that’s wonderful, but nobody knows anything about it!"
 
JFK - Hookers and blow. Trump - Only hookers.
 
In the 1963 meeting, Kennedy was talking about the lack of political support for the program and the need to use military benefit from the program to justify the cost.

"this looks like a hell of a lot of dough to go to the moon when you can go - you can learn most of that you want scientifically through instruments and putting a man on the moon really is a stunt and it isn’t worth that many billions. Therefore the heats going to go on unless we can say this has got some military justification and not just prestige. Otherwise Eisenhower is going to be kicking us around and we’re going to look like he’s probably right – they don’t want to spend that kind of dough. Why should we spend that kind of dough to put a man on the moon? (break) But it seems to me what we’ve got to try and do, is for the reasons you suggested: we’ve got to wrap around in this country, a military use for what we’re doing and spending in space. If we don’t, it does look like a stunt and too much money – some people – Christ, we can’t get money for some ( ) and all the rest and people saying we’re spending billions in going to the moon. If we can show that that’s true but there’s also a very significant military use. Now how are we going to do that."
 
Tigerace117 said:
Technically Hitler is “significant”....just as the man who wrecked Germany and murdered millions of innocent people.
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Yeah I didn't really have a point here. But it's fun to consternate left-manichees like the OP.
 

Well good decision making is a lot harder when you are taking the amounts of drugs that JFK was.

Could you imagine what would have happened to him with today's type of Media
 
Dayton3 said:
Your slavish adoration of an at best mediocre president JFK is noted.
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Trump is an asshole. JFK was assassinated. Normal people understand the difference between those to asses.
 
haymarket said:
Had JFK served for two terms - who knows what was possible?
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That is a big topic, but I'll note that ironically, it might have HURT JFK's reputation as he did great things.

I'll explain, with at least two examples.

This country had a century of slavery followed by a century of racism. JFK was an 'extremist' relatively speaking by supporting what until recently was almost universally approved civil rights. But at the time, he faced his entire agenda being blocked in retaliation for him pushing the civil rights bill, which was a very uphill battle to pass. Imagine had it not passed - and his agenda had been blocked.

Second, he was planning to withdraw from Vietnam in 1965 - and in his own words, "In 1965, I’ll become one of the most unpopular presidents in history. I’ll be damned everywhere as a Communist appeaser. But I don’t care. " It would be a very different history how JFK was so weak he lost surrendered the easily winnable Vietnam war. Of course, no one would know he prevented the disastrous Vietnam war.

He was also pursuing peace with the Soviet Union at a time the country wanted a cold warrior. Now imagine his affairs came out...
 
I'd forgotten about this thread, but it complements well my recent 'trump as the anti-JFK' thread.
 
Dayton3 said:
Your slavish adoration of an at best mediocre president JFK is noted.
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IMO, JFK is the most overrated president.
And Joe Kennedy was a Nazi appeaser, if not an outright sympathizer, and is alleged to have been an anti-Semite.

Mark
 
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