JFK: Bush, Wars and the Web
If he were still alive, John F. Kennedy would be turning 90 tomorrow. As an elder statesman, what would he think about our world?
For a start, he would be puzzled by George Bush’s bubbled White House. Kennedy’s own curiosity was insatiable. He devoured books, took a speed-reading course to absorb more, wanted to know everything. During the Cuban Missile Crisis, he held a running seminar at the White House to consider every possible way to avoid a nuclear showdown. Only then did he act.
With hard evidence of missiles 90 miles away, he rejected military advice for an air strike or invasion, lined up support from the United Nations, gave the Russians every chance to back down and, when they did, ordered that there be no gloating about victory. No “slam dunk,†“Mission Accomplished†or “Bring it on!â€
Afterward, in an interview, he told me, “Too many people want to the blow up the world.†He felt his response was “just right.â€
You can imagine what he would have thought of toy soldiers like Cheney, Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz playing war games with the lives of other people’s children.
The Justice Department scandal would have revolted him. JFK appointed his brother Bobby Attorney General, and they played hardball against opponents when necessary. But the nutball antics of Alberto Gonzales and his crew would have made no sense to them. The Kennedys could never abide amateurs.
When JFK was wrong, he said so. After the Bay of Pigs, he took “sole responsibility†for the fiasco. After four disastrous years in Iraq, Bush the Decider will only admit “mistakes were made.â€
This could go on like one of those montages on the Daily Show, but the difference between the President we lost too soon and the one we have had in office too long is as simple and as complicated as poetry.
After JFK’s death, the world’s poets filled a volume with elegies and anguish. That won’t be happening again any time soon.
Kennedy was political to his bones, but his vision went beyond winning elections. At the dawn of the nuclear age, he realized politics was no longer a game for insiders, pointing out that an exchange “would produce over 300 million deaths. That means everybody is involved in this debate.â€
He would have been bemused by the Internet, watching millions mix it up, but he had a tragic sense of life unlike Bush, who has only a tragic insensitivity. Kennedy would have looked on all of today’s ardent opinionating with approval, some humor and certainly without rancor.
Not long before Dallas, he talked about the brutal and violent instincts of human beings that, in his words, “have been implanted in us growing out of the dust.â€
In controlling those destructive impulses, JFK said sadly, “We have done reasonably well——but only reasonably well.“
We’re still trying. Happy Birthday, Mr. President.
Cross posted on my own blog.
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7 Responses to “JFK: Bush, Wars and the Web”
One of my favorite stories about JFK was that though he was partisan, he was also good friends with Barry Goldwater. The two even contemplated travelling together to make campaign appearances for the ’64 presidential race. Such comraderie would be unheard of today, and, imo, it is our loss.
JFK assembled the best minds in the business- putting competence ahead of loyalty in making big policy decisions. He would assemble everyone and go around the room asking each one “What do you think?” That was what he did during the Cuban Missile Crisis.
His small inner circle was confined to making political decisions. Bush has let himself be informed by a very small circle of loyalists- Condi, Cheney, Rove and formerly Rumsfeld. This has not served him or the country well.
Given what we now know about JFK’s extracurricular activities, e.g., Judith Exner, his reaction to Internet sites like the Drudge Report might have been considerably less sanguine than your speculations. But as long as you’re playing “what ifâ€, how about a post on Millard Fillmore’s introduction to the iPod or Uncle Joe Cannon’s legislative response to nanotechnology?
I wonder if W even has a clue to the new science of nanotechnology. No, it has nothing to do with his mother.
JFK is lucky that he came along before cable news and the papparazzi. Otherwise he could have been another Clinton. He was a good president but had a sex addiction and had women snuck in and out of the WH at all hours by the Secret Service, who helped him hide the evidence from Jackie and the press.
One question is whether or not JFK, actually set in this time would have been able to control those impulses because he most definitely would have realized the likelihood of discovery.
His whole life was formed around taking chances, living on the edge. I’m not sure he could have made that big of a change. I almost would prefer to go back to those days, when what mattered was the president’s decisions about running the country, not his sex life. Almost every great public figure has some fatal flaw. Isn’t it unrealistic to expect perfect personal behavior as well as great political skill and judgement?
After all, couldn’t a Rudy Giuliani keep us as safe as a Mitt Romney? Was MLK any less of a great figure because he cheated on his wife?
> he could have been another Clinton
No, K. He could never have been elected, seen by liberals in and out of the media as too conservative. The media were (prior to Cuomo’s failure to run in 1992) suspicious of Clinton; they would have been worse toward Mr. “Missile Gap.”