Joe Kennedy III, Just Another False Progressive Idol Like JFK
By Paul Street
Rep. Joseph P. Kennedy III, D-Mass., at the February 2017 dedication
ceremony for the John F. Kennedy Centennial Stamp at the John F. Kennedy
Library in Boston. (Michael Dwyer / AP)
My first political memory is the assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy
(JFK). I was 5 years old, home from kindergarten on the afternoon of Nov.
22, 1963. I was in the living room in a small apartment in the liberal,
racially integrated neighborhood of Hyde Park on the South Side of Chicago.
The television was on because my mother had been watching soap operas on
CBS.
After Walter Cronkite announced that Kennedy had been proclaimed dead, I
relayed the news to my mother, who was ironing sheets in an adjacent
hallway. She burst into tears. My recollection of Kennedy's death is forever
linked to an image of my mother quietly sobbing in a haze of white steam. At
my age, I of course had no idea why anyone would weep over Jack Kennedy's
death.
Later it came into focus. My parents were postwar liberal Democrats. Kennedy
was something of a hero in my household. My father was a young
jazz-piano-playing academic, a sociologist encouraged by Kennedy's purported
cultivation of intellectuals and the arts-a break from the official
suspicion in which thinkers and artists had been held during the bleak
McCarthy years.
Kennedy was the nation's first Catholic president, no small matter for my
half Irish-Catholic mother. He was identified to some degree with black
civil rights, a cause my parents supported. Kennedy had Ivy League
credentials, something that appealed to the professional class ideology my
parents had absorbed from their middle-class upbringings and higher
education.
To complete this mythic picture, the dashing young president and his
glamorous wife had telegenic, movie-star charisma and charm, and small
children of their own.
That is why my mother broke into tears the afternoon of Nov. 22, 1963.
Sadly, however, my young parents and their generation of smart young liberal
Democrats granted JFK far more love and respect than he deserved.
Five and a half decades later, so do liberal Democrats who pine for a new
Jack Kennedy in the White House.
But JFK spent the lion's share of his presidency on the wrong side of each
of what Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.-another assassinated 1960s icon with whom
Kennedy is often absurdly conflated-called "the triple evils that are
interrelated": racism, economic injustice (capitalism) and militarism.
Kennedy is a false progressive idol of the highest order, something you
won't learn about on MSNBC ("MSDNC"), where Democratic Party commentator
Chris Matthews lives in a seemingly permanent state of Kennedy family
worship.
Let's start with the second of King's "triple evils"-class rule. "The role
played by twentieth-century Presidents," political scientist Bruce Miroff
noted 42 years ago, "has been characteristically conservative. 'Liberal' as
well as 'conservative' Presidents . have bent their strongest efforts, not
to alter, but to preserve America's dominant institutions. Whatever their
professed sympathies, their actions have served, not to redistribute wealth
and power, but to perpetuate existing inequalities . [serving as] central
figures in the maintenance of established [hierarchical] socioeconomic
arrangements."
As Miroff demonstrated in his forgotten 1976 classic "Pragmatic Illusions:
The Presidential Politics of John F. Kennedy," JFK was no exception to the
rule. More than a decade before neoliberal Democrats emerged to explicitly
steer the Democratic Party further to the corporate right, JFK's
superficially declared sympathies for the poor and working-class took a back
seat in his White House to "the real determinants of policy: political
calculation and economic doctrine."
As Miroff explained, political cunning "led Kennedy to appease the corporate
giants and their allies in government." Economic doctrine "told him that the
key to the expansion and health of the economy was the health and expansion
of those same corporate giants. The architects of Kennedy's 'New Economics'
liked to portray it as the technically sophisticated and politically neutral
management of a modern industrial economy. It is more accurately portrayed
as a pragmatic liberalism in the service of corporate capitalism."
The regressive nature of JFK's "New Economics" was cloaked by his recurrent,
much-publicized spats with certain members of the business community (the
executives of U.S. Steel above all), his repeated statements of concern for
labor and the poor, and his claim to advance a purely "technical" and
"pragmatic" economic agenda that elevated "practical management" and
administrative expertise above the "grand warfare of ideologies."
JFK inhabited the same centrist, cautious, cunning and "pragmatic" place on
the first of King's "triple evils"-racism. Kennedy might have found it
politically useful to intervene on King's behalf during the latter's jailing
in the election year of 1960 and, later, to wrap himself in the aura of
racial progress and equality by offering some partial and belated federal
protections to the civil rights movement (CRM). But the Kennedy
administration worked hard to divide and dilute the CRM, seeking to channel
it into staid and narrow legal and electoral grooves. The JFK White House
gave some elementary shelter to activists and Southern blacks only when the
president and his practically co-presidential brother and Attorney General
Bobby Kennedy calculated that rabid white Southern reaction was undermining
their ability to sell the United States as a model of enlightened
"democracy" in its Cold War contest with the Soviet Union for the
allegiances of the nonwhite Third World.
Subsequent elitist "Mississippi Burning" revisionism notwithstanding, the
Kennedy administration was no great friend of the struggle for black
equality. Its response to the black freedom movement was dominated by the
tension between two competing political calculations: (1) the threat of
politically alienating white Americans, above all traditionally Democratic
and white Southerners, and (2) the risk of losing Third World hearts and
minds in the supposed U.S. struggle to advance "freedom and democracy."
Kennedy and his brother bent over backward to accommodate Southern racists,
leaving them feeling free to kill and maim civil rights activists in the
deep South. When the federal Civil Rights Commission announced that it would
investigate racist violence in Mississippi, the younger Kennedy denounced
the commission as being like the House Un-American Activities Committee
"investigating Communism." When NAACP leader Medgar Evers was shot down in
his own driveway, Bobby Kennedy said that it was not the federal
government's job to protect black activists. It was up the state of
Mississippi.
The real experience and struggles of black Americans were not an especially
relevant concern to the Kennedys. When Southern racist authorities managed
to defeat the CRM without politically problematic and embarrassing violence
(as in Albany, Ga., in 1962), the Kennedy administration was happy to
withhold protection from King and his fellow activists. When racist police
commissioner Bull Connor attacked black protesters in Birmingham, Ala., with
high-pressure water hoses, dogs and batons in May 1963, JFK complained that
the demonstrations were making the U.S. "look bad in the world" and Bobby
Kennedy claimed that 90 percent of the protesters had no idea why they were
in the streets. Along the way, Kennedy appointed at least five
segregationists to the federal judiciary, turning to the racist Mississippi
senator, James Eastland, for advice on appointments. The Kennedy brothers
were inordinately obsessed with alleged Communist connections to King and
the CRM. They approved racist FBI director J. Edgar Hoover's regular and
relentless police state surveillance, smearing and infiltration of the
movement.
This ugly Kennedy history would be less surprising to liberal progressives,
perhaps, if they would carefully read JFK's bestselling, Pulitzer
Prize-winning 1957 book "Profiles in Courage." There, Kennedy foretold his
coming weak civil rights record, purveying Southern white historical
mythology by referring to the Reconstruction era after the Civil War as a
"black nightmare . nourished by Federal bayonets."
(For useful historical accounts of JFK's less-than-progressive civil rights
record, see Harvard Sitkoff's 2008 book, "The Struggle for Black Equality";
David Garrow's 2004 book, "Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King, Jr. and
the Southern Christian Leadership Conference"; and Kenneth O'Reilly's 1995
book, "Nixon's Piano: Presidents and Racial Politics from Washington to
Clinton").
Turning to King's third evil, JFK's foreign policy record was militantly
imperial and militarist, contrary to subsequent liberal and left
hagiographers' weird determination to reinvent him as a man of the left. As
Noam Chomsky noted in his 1993 study "Rethinking Camelot: JFK, the Vietnam
War, and U.S. Political Culture," "One of the most significant legacies left
by the [Kennedy] Administration was its 1962 decision to shift the mission
of the [U.S.-funded, equipped, and trained] Latin American military from
'hemispheric defense' to 'internal security'," leading, in the words of
Kennedy's top Latin American counter-insurgency planner (Charles Maechling)
to "direct [U.S.] complicity" in "the methods of Heinrich Himmler's
extermination squads. The shift to deadly internal repression was a natural
corollary to Kennedy's "export-promoting" Alliance for Progress "development
program," which benefited Latin American elites while drastically increasing
Latin American unemployment.
When Kennedy was assassinated, the CIA and JFK's advisers were working with
his approval to overthrow a democratically elected government and install a
fascist military dictatorship in Brazil. The plan was carried out months
later. "Brazil," Chomsky observed 11 years ago, "had a moderately
populist-democratic government in the early 1960s. The Kennedy
administration organized a military coup that imposed a neo-Nazi national
security state that was the first of the plague that then spread throughout
the continent to Chile, Argentina, Central America and then became one big
massacre."
In Cuba, where Washington's Third World fascist allies had been overthrown
and forced to flee after Fidel Castro and Che Guevara led a popular
socialist revolution in 1959, the Kennedy administration made repeated
attempts to assassinate the nations' leaders and launched an ongoing
campaign of terror and sabotage. After the U.S.-run Bay of Pigs invasion
operation that Kennedy inherited from Dwight Eisenhower failed spectacularly
in its efforts to spark a rebellion against Castro in April 1961, Kennedy
"asked his brother, Attorney General Robert Kennedy," writes historian Piero
Gleijeses, "to lead the top-level interagency group that oversaw Operation
Mongoose, a program of paramilitary operations, economic warfare, and
sabotage he launched in late 1961 to visit the 'terrors of the earth' on
Fidel Castro and, more prosaically, to topple him." This explicit terror
campaign included the murder of 400 Cuban factory workers in early November
1962, less than two weeks after the Cuban missile crisis.
Kennedy understood the thoroughly conditional nature of "democracy" as a
U.S. foreign policy objective when he remarked that while the U.S. would
prefer democratic regimes abroad, it will choose "a [pro-American dictator]
Trujillo" over "a ["anti-American" dictator] Castro" if those were the only
choices. "It is necessary only to add," Chomsky observed in 1991, that
Kennedy's "concept of 'a Castro' was very broad," including anyone who
challenged U.S. power and global capitalism.
Then there's Vietnam. Kennedy "raised the level of [U.S.] attack [on
Indochina] from international terrorism to outright aggression in 1961-62,"
Chomsky said, justifying the use of U.S. airpower to napalm social
revolutionaries, defoliate Vietnamese countrysides and slaughter innocent
peasants with the false claims that "we are opposed around the world by a
monolithic and ruthless [Soviet-Marxist] conspiracy" and that failure to
stop "Communism" in Vietnam would open the gates to Soviet world domination.
After the epic failure of the CIA's Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba and the
erection of the Berlin Wall in East Germany, Kennedy told The New York
Times' James Reston in late 1961 that "[n]ow we have a problem in making our
[anti-Communist Cold War] power credible, and Vietnam is the place."
Would Kennedy, as some of his liberal and left fans like Oliver Stone and
James K. Galbraith (son of JFK assistant John Kenneth Galbraith) claim, have
withdrawn U.S. forces from Vietnam had he not been assassinated in late
November of 1963? (Stone even made a blockbuster movie to claim that the
supposed peace advocate JFK was murdered by the CIA to permit U.S.
escalation in Vietnam under the leadership of Lyndon Johnson, portrayed as
an agent of the defense industry and right-wing military officers.). This
has been a topic of dispute between and among left and liberal historians
and researchers, including Rick Perlstein, Galbraith, Stone and Chomsky.
They dispute the significance and meaning of JFK's apparent October 1963
"decision" and plan to remove U.S. troops from Vietnam by the end of 1965.
The winners in the debate are Perlstein and Chomsky, who correctly observe
that that Kennedy's "withdrawal plan" was conditional on full U.S. victory
over the Vietnamese revolution and independence movement. It would not have
been carried out, given harsh realities on the ground. As Perlstein noted
five years ago:
"
[W]hether John F. Kennedy's formal decision would be carried through in the
interim between October 1963 and January 1966 was contingent on what
happened in the future. One day this summer I issued a formal decision to go
the beach. Then it rained. And so I did not go to the beach. . And as anyone
who knows anything about the Vietnam War knows, the people funneling
intelligence to the president were alarmingly adept ('the military phase of
the war can be virtually won in 1963') at claiming the sun was shining when
it actually was pouring down rain. In fact, when it came to America's
military prospects there, it was winter in Seattle just about all the time.
JFK's late-in-life public statements were consistent with Chomsky and
Perlstein's sense that the doomed young president had no intention of
pulling back from his mass-murderous assault on Vietnam until U.S "victory"
was attained. In Fort Worth, just hours before the assassination, for
example, Kennedy said that "without the United States, South Vietnam would
collapse overnight." In the speech he would have delivered in Dallas,
Kennedy was going to say that the U.S., in its role as "watchman on the
walls of world freedom," had to carry out duties that were "painful, risky
and costly, as is true in Southeast Asia today. But we dare not weary of the
task." In repeated public statements in the summer and early fall of 1963,
Kennedy left no doubt that for him, withdrawal without "victory" was
unthinkable.
Even if Kennedy had survived and removed U.S. forces from Vietnam, this
would have meant only that JFK had decided that U.S.-trained and
U.S.-equipped South Vietnamese troops and the U.S.-funded regime of South
Vietnam were capable of defeating the Vietnamese revolution without the
further engagement of U.S. troops-on the model, say, of the mass-murderous
U.S.-backed Suharto government in Indonesia.
The most nauseating claim made by members of the liberal Jack Kennedy cult
holds that JFK heroically saved humanity from nuclear annihilation during
the Cuban missile crisis of October 1962. I have already shown in previous
Truthdig columns (see my essay "The Cuban Missile Crisis vs. the Korean
Missile Crisis" from August 2017) that the truth is precisely the opposite.
"In effect," the British journalist Joseph Richardson noted five years ago
in an article properly titled "JFK's Lunatic Priorities During the Cuban
Missile Crisis," "Kennedy's government was prepared to risk a nuclear
conflagration to safeguard US prestige. [Kennedy's] Secretary of State Dean
Rusk jubilantly exclaimed after the first Soviet ships opted not to run the
American blockade that 'we're eye ball to eye ball and I think the other
fellow just blinked.'
Had the Soviets not blinked, it is likely Rusk would not have been around to
give his reaction." But for Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev's determination
to let humanity survive and the heroic intervention of a Soviet submarine
commander named Vasili Arkhipov beneath the Western Atlantic in the early
evening of Oct. 27, 1962, it seems likely that Kennedy's reckless naval
blockade and nuclear machismo would have set off World War III. At the same
time, Kennedy set the stage for the Strangelovian "one minute to midnight"
moment by dramatically escalating the international arms race and with his
incursions into Cuba, which provoked Castro into seeking a Soviet nuclear
shield against U.S. invasion.
Despite all this and more, JFK still maintains a strange reputation as an
agent of peace and social justice among certain persistently star-struck
people of "the left." I get emails from readers who see the assassination of
JFK in the same light as they see the murder of Dr. King-as if both martyrs
were great people's leaders fighting heroically for racial equality, social
justice and peace. They speak of Kennedy's assassination as his "martyrdom
for peace."
Just three days ago, an anti-war peace environmentalist wrote me via social
media to protest the "eras[ure] of" what she called "the real legacy of JFK
. which was that he may have saved the world from nuclear annihilation
during the Cuban Missile Crisis-and he wanted PEACE." She insists that I
read Catholic Worker James Douglass' 2008 book "JFK and the Unspeakable,"
which purports to show that Kennedy was killed by the CIA and its
military-industrial allies because he had decided to switch from being a man
of empire to being a man of peace. As the "Unrepentant Marxist" Louis
Proyect noted in a sharp 2005 reflection on JFK's undeserved progressive
standing, "Despite its obvious futility, the search for enlightened
bourgeois leadership seems never-ending."
The real history that makes the equation of Jack Kennedy and Dr. King
preposterous and indeed Orwellian is worth keeping in mind in light of the
Democratic Party's recent ham-fisted attempt to rewrap itself in the flag of
the Kennedy mystique by having Bobby Kennedy's 37-year-old grandson (and
JFK's grandnephew), Congressman Joseph Kennedy III, D-Mass., give the
neoliberal Democrats' televised response to Donald Trump's first State of
the Union Address. As Politico explained before the address, "Tapping [Joe]
Kennedy [III] is . notable because he represents a younger wave of Democrats
in a party that is sometimes criticized for its cadre of older leaders and
potential 2020 presidential candidates, all in their 70s."
It was about more than age alone. The Democratic Party's neoliberal
corporate and imperial "elite" is concerned about the attraction that the
anti-plutocratic and social-democratish Scandinavia-praising progressivism
of Bernie Sanders has understandably had for younger Democratic voters.
Could the young Kennedy be a new outwardly progressive-seeming but in fact
corporate and Wall Street-friendly knight in shining dynastic armor? Is his
job to keep excessively left-leaning young voters on board with the dismal,
dollar-drenched inauthentic opposition party of wealth- and power-serving
Wall Street- and Silicon Valley- and "defense" industry-captive Democrats
like Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, Charles Schumer and Nancy "we're
capitalist and that's just the way it is" Pelosi?
The young and obscenely wealthy young congressman (with a net worth of $43.2
million) is a single-payer opponent whose top donors include the global
investment firm Crescent Capital, Bank of America, Raytheon, and Bain
Capital. Glenn Greenwald tweeted with dark irony about the Joe Kennedy
speaking assignment: "Good to see Democrats trying something new: it's been
13 whole months since they ran a very rich candidate with deep Wall Street
and corporate ties from a famous political family. Maybe it'll work this
time."
Thankfully, perhaps, the only thing that shined in Congressman Kennedy's
badly delivered, high-school-level speech-a transparent and botched attempt
to mimic Barack Obama's keynote address at the 2004 Democratic National
Convention-was the glaring lip balm that gleamed at the corners of his
mouth, earning him designation as the victim and perpetrator of
"#Chapstickaquiddick."
We don't need another hyper-opulent, outwardly liberal pseudo-progressive,
Harvard-minted Kennedy to pretend to lead us out of the darkness of
authoritarian capitalism, racism, militarism, empire, patriarchy and
ecocide. We could, however, use another Dr. King and another great social
justice and peace moment like the one King and his cohorts formed and led
beneath and beyond the U.S. election cycle in the 1950s and 1960s.
