Reckoning With JFK
4th November 2011
Steve Hayward at Power Line takes on the Myth of Camelot.
JFK’s supposed “cool handling” of the missile crisis is probably the greatest enduring myth of JFK’s presidency. Yes, it was good that we avoided World War III, but aside from that just about every common judgment about the missile crisis is wrong. It was both a political and military defeat for the United States, but the great Kennedy spin machine managed from the first moments to convey the exact opposite impression. And the whole matter arose precisely because the Soviet Union perceived JFK’s weakness.
This fact was not generally recognized because key concessions from Kennedy were kept secret from the American people and even from most of Kennedy’s top advisers at the time. Kennedy secretly agreed to withdraw American missiles from Greece and Turkey, something he had publicly stated he would not do when the Soviets demanded it. (When this concession leaked out years later, it was said the missiles were “obsolete” and unimportant, though the Soviets did not share this view.) The biggest public concession was Kennedy’s pledge that the U.S. would cease attempting to overthrow the Castro regime in Cuba.
Kennedy was in many respects the proto-Obama … and the proto-Clinton.